Four Past Midnight - Stephen King [305]
He threw himself down on the far side and saw a white, hellishly misshapen creature pulling itself from beneath a jackstraw tumble of atlases and travel volumes. It had blonde hair and blue eyes, but any resemblance to humanity ceased there. Its illusions were gone. The creature was a fat, naked thing with arms and legs that appeared to end in jointed claws. A sac of flesh hung below its neck like a deflated goiter. Thin white fibers stormed around its body. There was something horridly beetlelike about it, and Sam was suddenly screaming inside - silent, atavistic screams which seemed to radiate out along his bones. This is it. God help me, this is it. He felt revulsion, but suddenly his terror was gone; now that he could actually see the thing, it was not so bad.
Then it began to change again, and Sam's feeling of relief faded. It did not have a face, exactly, but below the bulging blue eyes, a horn shape began to extrude itself, pushing out of the horror-show face like a stubby elephant's trunk. The eyes stretched away to either side, becoming first Chinese and then insectile. Sam could hear it sniffing as it stretched toward him.
It was covered with wavering, dusty threads.
Part of him wanted to pull back - was screaming at him to pull back - but most of him wanted to stand his ground. And as the thing's fleshy proboscis touched him, Sam felt its deep power. A sense of lethargy filled him, a feeling that it would be better if he just stood still and let it happen. The wind had become a distant, dreamy howl. It was soothing, in a way, as the sound of the vacuum cleaner had been soothing when he was very small.
'Sam?' Naomi called, but her voice was distant, unimportant. 'Sam, are you all right?'
Had he thought he loved her? That was silly. Quite ridiculous, when you thought about it ... when you got right down to it, this was much better.
This creature had ... stories to tell.
Very interesting stories.
The white thing's entire plastic body now yearned toward the proboscis; it fed itself into itself, and the proboscis elongated. The creature became a single tube-shaped thing, the rest of its body hanging as useless and forgotten as that sac below its neck had hung. All its vitality was invested in the horn of flesh, the conduit through which it would suck Sam's vitality and essence into itself.
And it was nice.
The proboscis slipped gently up Sam's legs, pressed briefly against his groin, then rose higher, caressing his belly.
Sam fell on his knees to give it access to his face. He felt his eyes sting briefly and pleasantly as some fluid - not tears, this was thicker than tears - began to ooze from them.
The proboscis closed in on his eyes; he could see a pink petal of flesh opening and closing hungrily inside there. Each time it opened, it revealed a deeper darkness beyond. Then it clenched, forming a hole in the petal, a tube within a tube, and it slipped with sensual slowness across his lips and cheek toward that sticky outflow. Misshapen dark-blue eyes gazed at him hungrily.
But the fine was paid.
Summoning every last bit of his strength, Sam clamped his right hand over the proboscis. It was hot and noxious. The tiny threads of flesh which covered it stung his palm.
It jerked and tried to draw back. For a moment Sam almost lost it and then he closed his hand in a fist, digging his fingernails into the meat of the thing.
'Here!' he shouted. 'Here, I've got something for you, bitch! I brought it all the way from East St Louis!'
He brought his left hand around and slammed the sticky ball of red licorice