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"It's there."
Daniel's dream pointed to the fresh grave. Beside the heap of dirt was a shovel stuck into the ground. The only light by which to see was the moon and it illuminated just enough.
Daniel glanced back over his shoulder and saw that Armand's features were softened with patience. He didn't have work in the morning. He didn't have a painful hitch in his side from digging down and down.
The sky never grew lighter despite the way he was hurried along, warned of its approach.
"You're close, now."
"Am I?"
And just like that, the shovel's spade hit something hard and hollow sounding.
"Yes, yes…"
Daniel dropped into the grave and cleared away the dirt. Somehow he could still see despite the depth, the should-be-shadow. The shadow his own body should have cast. He pried up the nails with his own and they slid out of the old moist wood like butter. Where legs had dangled into the grave in front of him, now there were none. No one there.
"Armand?"
He received no answer and for the first time in this desolate graveyard, he felt a shiver of loneliness. He was frightened. A scratching from the other side of the wooden lid of the coffin drew him back.
"Armand?" he asked again, this time to the box below him rather than the snow-globe graveyard behind him.
The scratching turned to pounding and Daniel threw the lid back as if it weighed nothing. For a moment, the dirt in the air obscured his view. It broke the laws of gravity, the way it settled down like a finer dust, but it did settle, and at last Daniel could see him.
Arranged in the box, hands folded over his chest, eyes shuttered to the world of the living, was his dream's tour guide.
"This?" Daniel asked. "That's all? This is what you wanted to show me?"
But Armand did not move. Did not do that clever trick of speaking behind Daniel's skull without moving his lips. He laid there in the coffin, glowing under the dream magic moon.
"Alright, good. Funny." Daniel lifted the shovel and tossed it up out of the grave. "You've missed your opportunity to say 'boo'. I know it's coming, now."
The silence followed. Eerie to be in a graveyard at night without the noise of cars beyond the gate. Without crickets or even wind through trees. It was Spring. Even the dirt came alive in Spring, but the worms were not wriggling. The grass was not rustling.
It was dead silent. So when thunder clapped above him, it brought him to his knees in the narrow wooden box. He was on top of Armand, now, bent over him.
"Okay," he whispered through his shaking lips. "You got me."
Armand's face was pallid gray. The skin beneath his eyes looked thin and the structure beneath them hollow. His cheeks were sunken and his funeral suit dusted with dirt. The carnation pinned to his left breast was dried to the color of tea.
Daniel brought his fingers close to Armand's stiff lips, driven by a curiosity to see if his eyeteeth were pointed in this dream as they oftentimes were. He'd remember this detail the next time he dreamed. He always forgot in his waking days. He'd forget Armand altogether when he woke.
There they were. Two sharp points like the teeth of a cat, bigger than ever now that his gums were shrunk back and bloodless.
"And here's the part where you chomp down on my finger and nearly make me piss myself…"
The anticipation was building despite all Daniel's attempts to prick the bladder. Armand was cold. He was often cold, but he was withered, now, too. Daniel pulled his fingers back from his mouth and pressed a knuckle into the hollow of his cheek.
"C'mon," he prodded. "I'm sufficiently spooked here if that's what you wanted."
Thunder cracked behind him again, and he felt a fat raindrop splash down against the skin on the back of his neck. He turned to look behind him, above him, and the next splash hit his brow. Armand was making rain without clouds, thunder without a storm.
"Alright, you freak. Game's over. C'mon."
He grabbed for the starched cuff of Armand's charcoal death-suit and lifted his limp arm. It dropped back onto his chest without ceremony. The rain picked up.
"Look, I'm serious! It's getting cold and I wanna get out."
He'd dug himself down so deep resting assured that Armand would help lift him out of the grave when all this was finished. But now with the rain making a mud-slick at the hole's edges he'd be stuck.
His white t-shirt clung to his back and made his skin shrink around his bones. Muddy water was gathering around his knees. He thought, in that way that dreams often made one think, that maybe the water would rise quickly in the grave and it would lift the wooden box up like a boat.
But the coffin was filling up, too.
He began to panic.
"Wake up! This isn't funny, Armand! WAKE UP!"
He gripped his cold jaw and shook his skull on his neck. It rattled, like what was concealed inside it was shrunken and dried, shaking around like the seeds of a desiccated gourd. Jawbone clicking against skull.
"FUCK!"
He grabbed the funeral suit's lapels and shook harder. When he let go, Armand's head lulled back on its satin pillow, his mouth slack and a sludgy trickle of dark colored liquid leaked from its corner. Daniel's frustration grew to a head and he slammed his fists down onto Armand's chest. The liquid gurgled, sputtered out, spattering Daniel's t-shirt and the skin of his throat. A fleck or two hit the skin of his cheek. He turned it to the rain before wiping it on his shoulder and slumping in defeat.
"I'm sorry," he said, smoothing his palm over Armand's head, his pomaded down hair. The rain was letting up. "Sorry. I'm just dense, you know? You always give me these little puzzles and I just… I can't figure this one out, is all. You gotta give me a hint."
Armand gave him nothing. He smelled like dried flowers and decayed wood. Old books, root cellar damp, a clean rot. The way corpses smelled in Daniel's dreams. But he hadn't had one of those dreams in years.
Not since Armand had begun visiting and filling that role for him. The dead thing which snuggled back. Warm sometimes, cold others. A receptacle for his dark desires who did not judge him, did not sneer, or ridicule, but not because he was not there. It wasn't all the time that Daniel's dreams of Armand led to sex, but when they did…
"C'mon," he whispered weakly into Armand's dead ear. "I like it when you're with me…"
His lips came away wet. Had he gotten that close? He supposed he had. Without disgust — because this was a dream, like all the other times — he licked them clean and the zipper-slide zapping up and down his spinal cord came like it always did despite the blood's blackness — despite the texture and taste being wrong. The taste, like stale black tea but thick. The dream-death taste. The kissing taste. The mouths that he'd conquered with no consequence, least of all acknowledgment or rejection. Eyes that did not see, nerves that did not feel. He could bully those kinds of lovers into any shape he pleased. He could collapse his full weight onto them after and not have to hear a single complaint.
There was no performing for the dead. Not until the dead had begun to perform for him. And that eagerness in his dream lover to please, that desperation not to be rejected himself, had put to bed all of Daniel's own anxieties and he'd grown to appreciate it more than he could ever say.
He didn't want to go back.
"Armand," he pleaded, a choke swelling in his throat. "Please."
He got to his feet in the wet box and stepped out. His boot sunk to the ankle in the earth and it sucked to keep him when he pulled it out. The edge of the grave would be impossible to climb. It was all mud without even a root to get purchase of. He was truly stuck. He took another look at the body at his feet, composed again as it'd been when he first opened the coffin save for the inky black trickles.
"You moved," Daniel muttered.
If so, he wasn't moving now. Daniel clambered back down into the box and perched over his thighs. He took him in.
"It does look peaceful," he said. One thing about Daniel's dreams was that every thought that composed itself in English passed through his lips. He couldn't help it. It frightened him, sometimes, to hear himself. It forced some confrontation. "You're beautiful, you know?"
Of course he did. And didn't. Corpses didn't know anything.
"What now, Boss?"
Curiously, he lifted Armand's upper lip again, and there was the pointed fang, gleaming white like a pearl and inviting him to press the pad of his thumb against it. He pushed until he felt it pop past his skin, sink in. The blood rose up around it as he slid it back out, and dripped into the black cavern of the corpse's dry mouth.
There was a movement. A soft clicking sound beneath the skin stretched taught over Armand's throat. A blind, deaf swallow. He made a fist and then positioned his thumb over Armand's lips again to let the blood flow over them. Just like that, they parted. Daniel could see the tip of his gray tongue resting behind his teeth, waiting. Again, his throat clicked. Daniel could see it constricting.
"Would you look at that," he muttered. And quickly he pulled his thumb away to observe the changes it may have made.
It wasn't much. Same dull color, same stillness once the blood no longer flowed. Like it'd been mechanical. Like Armand hadn't been waking up after all. Maybe there was a little less of a hollow look to him. Maybe.
Daniel bent to lick his still wet and shining blood from Armand's cold lips. While he was at it, he licked up the trace of black at the corner and let it rack him with a delicious shiver.
If this blood wasn't warming Armand any longer, at least it could warm him. He let the pleasure course around inside him and pressed his cheek to Armand's damp chest. It was so pleasant, he thought he might be alright here. He'd rattle the corpse so that the dead blood leaked and he'd lick it up when his nerves began to get the better of him again. When he got scared or too cold. He could stay down here forever as long as the blood lasted.
He wondered how much a corpse could hold. Enough to last him the night? Until his own body gave out? He was hanging in that in-between, now, no longer conscious of his own dreaming. Everything felt real. Might as well be. And like all of Daniel's worst habits, this dormant impulse crept in on him. It began with his lips. Already, he tasted Armand's. Now, he kissed the frigid skin under his jaw. Damp hair, damp suit. If the dead could feel, they'd shiver too. He ghosted close to Armand's neck and huffed his own heat out in an attempt to warm him.
"I'm sorry that you died," he whispered. Not the sort of sentiment he'd ordinarily share with a corpse. Not because they wouldn't hear it, but because you didn't have to lie to one in order to lie with one.
But he meant it this time. He preferred the strange creature who only seemed to live at night when Daniel dreamed him to life.
"And ordinarily, I wouldn't ask. But is it all right if I…?"
He rose up, tugged Armand's limp folded hands out from between them and dropped them to rest along the sides of the box. Armand made no protest, the green light of consent. Whatever the alternative could be, Daniel had never found out. His dreams were never nightmares. No Romero flick scares, no true love's kiss tropes. So Daniel went ahead and plucked the carnation from Armand's breast. He kissed it before brushing it gently over the gray skin of his cheek, just under his eye and did not receive even a flinch in return.
"This is what you wanted?" Daniel asked. "A demonstration?"
It was hazy, now, but Daniel could recall a night where his dreaming had been a frustrating onslaught of interrogations. "How can you possibly get aroused? What of the taste? The smell?" Question after question as though Armand could not just reach inside him and pull the answers out like he always did with any other transgressive thought or feeling Daniel had.
How did he stay aroused? With ease. The taste and smell? Well, that was simple; none of it was real. "Just like you, Armand. They're just dreams."
"But how can you know?"
How could it rain when there wasn't a single cloud in the sky?
He just knew. He wasn't a necrophiliac. He just had this… pathology. That's all it was. He knew where the lines were and he was pretty damn sure he wouldn't even be tempted to cross them in his waking life. He was just a guy. Afraid of the possibility of disappointing, afraid of failure, afraid of disgust. Like every other warm-blooded male in this century's strange new sex economy.
"You're really just gonna lie there, huh?"
He dropped the carnation into the muddy water collected around his knee and began work loosening the silk tie. "I mean, they all do, as I'm sure you already know. But peeking into my head isn't enough, is it? You just have to experience it yourself. Jealous of dead people who aren't even real. You're not real, Armand. What even gives you the right?" He slipped the tie off and sunk it, too, into the brownish gray water. "But I guess you're mine, right? I dreamed you up, so really, you're like a part of me. My subconscious."
The first mother of pearl button undone. The second. He didn't want to jostle him out of his clothes in a frenzy, he wanted to go about it as elegantly as he could. Not because he was some sort of pompous aesthete, himself, but because he knew Armand to be one and despite the point he was attempting to drive home to himself out loud right this moment, he didn't have a single doubt in his mind that Armand was his own creature. Daniel had crafted him as much as he'd crafted his own junk habit. Outside forces. Civil Rights, Vietnam, Society. There'd been a lot going on while Daniel was coming up and those were the circumstances to blame for this shape he took now. Not him. His circumstances.
"It's a nice suit. I mean, it's drab, but the suit you're buried in is always meant to be a little somber, I guess." He shoved a hand over Armand's shoulder, behind his upper back, and pulled him upwards so that their chests pressed. With his other hand, he slipped the suit jacket off on one side. Then he hauled him up again with the other arm, down the other side of his back, and slipped it off the other shoulder. Practiced and patient. Not his first rodeo.
"Me? I don't wanna get buried in anything extravagant. It'd be inauthentic. Just plant me in my blue jeans and a t-shirt. I haven't worn a suit since prom."
He tugged from the sleeves down, one side and then the other so it wouldn't bunch up under the body's weight and prolong things. The water slowed matters a bit, wet fabric cleaved to itself more than was ideal, but once he'd gotten it about halfway down, he was able to bend forward and lift Armand again, enough to pull his limp arms from the jacket. Good enough. His shirt didn't have to come off. Daniel was satisfied just to lay it open.
"Well, would you look at that?"
Armand bore the evidence of an autopsy. The stitching was thick black catgut. Not a modern choice. There were no other marks on his torso that Daniel could see in the impossibly helpful moonlight. No contusions, no lacerations. Just dark skin made dull by death pallor. Glamour. If Armand wanted to be convincing, he'd have some mottling, some livor mortis creeping up his sides. He had none of that, and Daniel laughed to himself at this discovery because he knew that the reason was vanity. Armand was a very vain creature.
"So you met with an untimely end. Tough break." Daniel ran a finger over the raised stitches, felt the blunt, tied off ends which stuck up like two errant blades of grass or a missed spot after an otherwise close shave. "But at least you died pretty, yeah?"
He let the compliment settle and absorb which was all you could ever really do with the dead before he covered Armand with himself.
"This is how I start," he spoke just above a whisper into Armand's cold neck. He kissed, nipped, played with the more malleable texture between his teeth, gently rolling the skin this way and that. No blood pumping to make the glide inside easy. Dead skin and tissue dragged on itself. He couldn't explain how his dreaming knew this like an instinct, but it did. Armand was able to put on this guise for him. But not the blood pooling, Daniel thought. Shallow thing.
He kissed Armand's lips again, parting them with his own before pushing the gentle tip of his tongue past the teeth and into his mouth. Wetter, now. Perhaps for the taste of Daniel's blood. But the cavern, itself, was earthy under that iron tang. A mouth that received but did not give. Cold with nothing to offer but passivity and passage, should Daniel take it.
He wouldn't. He never did. Some things felt too crude, even for dreams.
Sliding out was sinful. Made him shudder with pleasure all over the way Armand's teeth gently grazed over his tongue. One more peck for the road and then he'd get this show started.
He stripped off his own shirt, over his head, tossed away into the dirt above. He covered Armand's body again, writhing, getting himself worked up with the feel of it, the smell of him. Tea and dirt and dried petals and moth balls… Aunt Delia's old perfume. That muskrat smell, furry and filthy and warm. The way it filled up his head when his mother pushed him from behind, gently guiding him to kiss her lifeless, powdery lips in the casket. Elvis singing gospel over the speakers behind him.
Nipples that did not pique when he ran his tongue over them, when he sucked. He salivated and swallowed. Yard clippings, steeped in rain. Armand was delicious. He pinched the end of the catgut between his teeth and rolled it around the tip of his tongue. What would happen if he tugged it? If he did it hard enough? He was tempted to try it, but he didn't want to be rough with dead. It was never about that. Getting rough was for getting a response. When there was nothing to expect, what was the point? He'd gotten rough with Armand in his dreams plenty, but now wasn't the time.
Rising up again, he lifted Armand's arms by the wrists and ran his cool, scratching fingers down his own chest. He dragged them slow, over his belly, to the top of his jeans.
"This part always feels a little sloppy," he explained. "Nothing to be done about it." He let Armand's wrists go and shuffled back enough to unhook his suit trousers. Shucking a body out of its pants never did much to serve the mood. Daniel preferred dresses for this reason. Most of his partners in dreams like these were women and he liked to imagine that convenience was the only reason. He preserved himself by imagining so. "I'll try to make it quick."
Shoes first, then wet fabric and dead skin. It was not as quick as he'd hoped, but when it was done, Armand was in nothing but his garters and socks. The first time Daniel had discovered them, he'd been delighted. It was so old fashioned. It was like undressing a bird to discover she'd been wearing lingerie under her clothes throughout the date. She'd been playing hard to get, but she'd been in heat for it all along.
"Mind if I leave these on?"
He had to assume Armand wouldn't. Still, he'd amused himself asking. He went for the button of his jeans.
"So, uh… I usually just use my own spit. Everything is more relaxed in death. I know going in dry sounds like an awful time, and it probably would be if they could feel anything, but uh… y'know… they can't." What was he trying to get at here? Was this a warning? Warning the creature who'd begged him to make it hurt on a handful of occasions past seemed a little unnecessary. "You really bring out the worst in me, you know that? I think you do know it." It was probably the point.
Well, if Armand wanted this part of him, too, he'd have it. Daniel took his cock out, bent his head and spat on it before giving it a few tugs to flush it out full.
"Suppose you'll be wanting to hear that you're the prettiest one I've done."
Armand's hips popped a little as Daniel drew his legs up and left them to rest against the sides of the coffin. He lowered his body between them and sucked his fingers into his mouth before reaching down to find the cavity. He met more resistance than he ordinarily did.
"Did you hear what I said before?"
And then he wondered to himself if it mattered that he did. What probably mattered most to Armand was being the best. The tightest stiff he'd ever slip it to. It was alright. Daniel could pivot.
"Found the rigor mortis," he said with a chuckle. "You know how that works, don't you? Well… I guess you do now."
He wriggled his finger in. Pointless. He was too tight for Daniel to really make him slick enough. If Armand was a corpse who could feel then boy was he going to feel it.
"You in there Boss?"
He got it in his head to check Armand's eyes. Peel back and peep. The thing, though, was that the eyes were always closed. Gave him the heebie jeebies to even consider meeting the eyes of any of his pale lovers and they were his dreams, so he simply never did.
"Just checkin'," he said under his breath, taking a moment to place the gentle pad of his right thumb against Armand's left eyelid. It did not want to slide, and when it finally did, the feel of it and the sucking sound it made nearly made Daniel deflate. But Armand's eye was vacant, milky, dead. All the otherworldly vibrance was drained from it and it appeared slightly smaller than it should be. Shriveled.
Daniel could bear to look at it any longer. Shuttered and shuddered.
"Anyway…"
He spat into his palm, applied it to his cock which had already begun to dry and bit his lip in concentration as he maneuvered his other hand around Armand, down into the coffin soup. He wedged it under his behind and lifted, pushing into him in one fell swoop. It tugged uncomfortably at the skin around his urethra with how he pushed and pushed, but he was determined to find himself seated as deep inside Armand as he could be, and then he was.pushing into him in one fell swoop. It tugged uncomfortably at the skin around his urethra with how he pushed and pushed. But he was seated, finally, surrounded by a tight, cold density.
He was biding his time, imagining he could feel Armand loosening around him. That was how the professionals did it. How they loosened a stiff. You could actually massage it away if you needed to. Of course, a body which had been buried would not be suffering from rigor mortis. Suffering wasn't the word. Again, a corpse couldn't suffer. Anyway. Rigor mortis was for the freshly dead and it came and it went as the body settled into its new post-life state. Perhaps Armand did not know this, but it tickled Daniel to think that he was massaging it out of him from the inside.
It tickled him and it turned him on. It made his hips push again and his head bow. He grabbed Armand's hand and tugged it across his belly, laced his fingers between and gripped. He anchored his right arm under the bend of Armand's knee and lifted his leg higher. He listened to the grating of bone on bone, the tearing apart of fixed and decaying fascia, dampened by flesh at rest, but loud in the box, in the grave, in the nothing nowhere night. Daniel listened as he drove himself in deep and a gurgle rose up out of Armand's throat. More of that dark liquid, more for Daniel to eat up, like swallowing concentrated pleasure.
He lapped over Armand's mouth like he was starved while he fucked him, so carried away that he almost didn't realize when Armand's fingers begun to grip him back.
"Getting less cold," he panted. "That's another part. The way they absorb your heat and… ah… radiate it back…"
But Armand was getting warmer and warmer. Cradling Daniel in a heat that was not his own. He wasn't simply climbing to Daniel's body temperature, he was surpassing it and Daniel could feel the stir of his cock between them. When he glanced down, he saw that it was filling out, its color returning to what Daniel had grown used to. Still, he fucked him, like his hips hadn't gotten the memo that there was something very curious going on, and when Daniel looked up to Armand's face, he saw that the skin between his brows was pinched, his mouth open but no longer slack.
"Shit…"
Armand's head slid up and down the satin pillow, his casket-ready pomaded style being fucked right out of his hair, and suddenly he gasped, the hand Daniel had left by his side in the coffin flying up and around Daniel's neck, long sharp nails scratching into him.
"Yeah?" Daniel laughed, giddy hysteria whirling around in his belly, his throat. "Couldn't keep it up, could you?"
Daniel Molloy's magic corpse-reviving cock, cum one cum all. Folks were just dying for a ride.
"Well…" He tugged his fingers free and shoved his hand under Armand's head, drawing him up to better see the changes as they came. His cheeks were looking livelier, his eyes finally blinking open, that milkiness washing away with each flutter of his pretty eyelashes. His lips were no longer so blue. "Can't blame you."
"Shut up…"
Armand rocked up against his thrusts, the gathered rainwater sloshing under his backside. He dragged his hand over his belly in a show of seduction before he reached his stitches. He took the point of his index finger and popped them loose just beside the knot before he began to tug them out. One long, slow pull that dragged the thick black catgut through his skin.
"Jesus…"
He pulled the horizontal stitching all the way out, leaving bleeding holes dotted across his chest which Daniel immediately bent to lick up before they closed. Before he knew it, the catgut was garrotted around his neck and Armand was tugging it tight enough to make his pulse throb in his head. His elation escaped him in choked approval and his hips drove and drove. He was close. Closer.
"Yes, beloved, yes," Armand chanted, loosening his grip just as Daniel began pitching into it. Just as he came.
The blood flooded his cranium again, his vision went gray and his cock burst against Armand's pulsing walls. An orgasm so intense he thought he might die and then maybe they could switch roles.
All the fragments of his dream had to come back together like puzzle pieces before he could really see again. Then there was Armand, serene and satisfied underneath him, belly spattered in blood, which Daniel was not at all alarmed by anymore. The vertical stitches were sinking into his skin, absorbing, gone.
"You're magic," Daniel uttered, tracing a finger through the bloody culmination of Armand's release. He sucked it into his mouth and trembled as the catgut slid from his neck.
"And you're a pervert, Daniel."
"Uh-huh." He jerked himself out, acute pain in his balls and bladder, over-sensitive shivers. "So what does that make you?" Recovered just enough, he thumped Armand between the eyes with a flick of his thumb and forefinger.
"A figment of that perversion."
"That can't be all." The coffin was drying, the darkness turning to purple then pink and orange. Armand was bringing the sunshine and Daniel was hardly phased, having grown so accustomed to his ability to manipulate the world in his dreams. "You piss me off too much to be something I just made up."
"You delight in our quarreling."
"That's fucking stupid."
Armand said nothing. Morning sunshine lit him up gold and he raised his eyebrows, satisfied with the point he was making.
They pulled on their clothes, the sun warming Daniel's back, and climbed out of the grave. The cemetery was alive with the sounds of birdsong and a breeze. The hills rolled high, and every which way Daniel turned, they obscured his view beyond. Still the same snow-globe, still just the two of them. He wheeled to see Armand perched on the headstone of the grave they'd just desecrated together.
"The lay of my life and I'm not gonna remember a single moment of it when I wake up, am I?"
Armand seemed to flinch. "Would you want to? Seems the sort of paraphilia that might disrupt one's ability to like themself in the daylight."
"That's only if you have shame," Daniel joked. "I remember the other dreams."
"As nightmares, with disgust."
Was that true? Daniel felt a little unsteady on his feet suddenly as he tried to recall.
"The night is for fantasy, Daniel. It pleases me to facilitate yours."
"Yeah, well…" The ground felt soft, like foam that he could sink through if he didn't keep his weight dispersed just right. He glanced down at his feet, planted in the grass, and then back up to the headstone Armand had just been sitting on.
"Armand…?"
There was the rusty whine of a gate swinging open, metal sliding against itself and clicking closed again.
"Armand!"
His own voice sounded far away in his ears. Consciousness was coming for him, readying him to be born back into his bed. It wrapped its uncaring arms around him and hurtled him into the nicotine-stained room.
When at last he rose from bed the damp coffee grounds left in the percolator from the previous day reminded him of something he couldn't quite put his finger on. When he cut through the cemetery on his walk home, it began to rain.