Feature Writer: ShinyCrazyDi
Feature Title: THE LIFE CYCLE OF ARCHAMBEAU
Published: 16.01.2025
Story Codes: Erotic Fiction, Demonic
Synopsis: A Lovecraftian tale beginning in 15C France
Author’s Notes: The members of the Archambeau family also appear in Gallows & Galleries
The Life Cycle of Archambeau
Phillipe had been entertaining him with miniature reproductions of certain saucy artworks almost all evening. Raphael had been mostly unimpressed & distracted. Although, he HAD felt drawn to the small oil painting titled Le Concert Champêtre which had been copied from the original painting from the master ‘da Cadore,’ Tiziano Vecellio.
The image, which was set in a pastoral landscape, was of a pair of women, completely nude, keeping company with a pair of seated, fully-dressed musicians. It intrigued him. The men were seemingly ignoring the luscious, ripe flesh of the women, who appeared to be entirely at ease regardless of their public nudity. He knew that had he been a young man between such lovely, warm, voluptuous morsels he would have fallen upon them like a hungry wolf.
His cock had twitched once, lacklusterly, as he gazed at the painting, & he crossed his legs. As boys, Phillipe & he had dabbled in a tender, exploratory & mutually enjoyable experiment with each other. Mostly they touched each other but sometimes, Phillipe would even allow Raphael to take his cock in his lips.
He still remembered the taste of his oldest friend’s member in his mouth, & still remembered the look on Phillipe’s face as he’d held his seed on his tongue before spitting & wiping it out. It was the simple, innocent foray into lust that many a young man quietly participated in as their bodies approached adulthood. It was common, though almost never spoken about.
Phillipe had outgrown that desire when he’d been able to satisfy himself with the softer pleasures of women & Raphael had felt cast aside for a while. Returned to the cage of platonic friendship. Not that Raphael didn’t also enjoy the wet, deep suffocation of a woman’s quim, her breasts & mouth. Even now his desires burned as those of a younger man. It’s just that his desires weren’t always limited only to the fairer sex & his aged body no longer cooperated.
In their middle years his favourite nights had been when he & Phillipe had shared a whore, he’d always allowed his friend to take the first ride & had enjoyed the sight of the man’s naked body, his member firm & proud as he rocked himself back & forth into the soft offering. He had revelled in the taste, smell & sensation of the man’s slippery discharge coating the interior of the whore’s cunt as he took her afterwards. His first thrusts would be slow as he tried to draw out that secret pleasure.
When he sought out the discrete boy whores (alone, never with Phillipe) he’d often imagined himself sodomising his old friend when he thrust his cock in their skinny asses, it had been something they’d never tried & now he felt grief over the missed chance. He sighed, remembering the first time he himself had enjoyed receiving a dick in that hole behind him. It had been fairly late in life, when in his early 30s his father had sent him abroad to England, where he’d suffered dreadfully at the vulgarity of the English people, the filth of their streets & general ignorance.
Finally, after several days travelling through the hellish isle, he’d delivered the missives he’d been charged with to the overstuffed acquaintance of his father. Sir Nicholas Bacon’s home however was a welcome, clean & quiet reprieve from the uncouth rabble he’d travelled amongst & he was especially delighted, when he was introduced to Bacon’s youngest, Francis. He more than made up for the inedibility of the local cooking, their harsh accents, the insufferable weather.
Francis was rumoured to be physically weakened, even frail, but intellectually, Raphael found the pale, thoughtful boy both stimulating & erudite. He’d seduced the boy, or so he thought, into meeting with him late that night within the guest chambers where he’d been roomed. The boy had tiptoed by candlelight to him & they’d devoured each other with wet kisses & grasping hands.
He was to learn that the 19 year old had in fact seduced HIM & whatever the truth of his state of health, Francis had easily bent the older man over & taken him like a woman. Raphael had found himself biting his pillow in ecstasy as the young man pumped him full several times over the same late night. The next morning he’d sat gingerly upon the padded chair for breakfast, his asshole feeling loosened & sore by the night’s exercise. He’d happily continued to secretly accept the boy’s firm member until he was regrettably, tragically, called back to France by his father & wife.
His rut upon his wife had been frenzied when he returned to France, still aflame from the newly discovered pleasures of his diversion to England. Even Nicole had commented on her husband’s passionate reclaiming of her body, he had been hornier than usual, which was saying a lot, as the fires always burned hot in his humours. He was known to be insatiable to his wife, & even by the mistresses whom his wife had accepted to assist in handling his manly & unquenchable needs. Although neither knew how frequently he visited the whores & harlots in the city.
Nor did they know of his activities with the men who worked their fields, or attended to their animals. Or his father’s accountant who would often suck his engorged pin when they could find a stolen moment alone in the family estate or offices. Or his secret yearning for Phillipe, his oldest friend, his second cousin, close as a brother who had seemed to spark that forbidden lust in his heart.
Despite his untamable virility in bed, his wife, Nicole had struggled to bear a child to full term. They’d all but given up until she’d finally borne a daughter who survived, small & purple, a caul covering her face. She hadn’t breathed when she was extracted from his wife’s womb. Hadn’t cried for several minutes until the midwife had slapped her three times. Her mother had doted upon the girl, & Christened her ‘Delphine’.
As she grew it became obvious the girl was touched, mentally deficient, almost entirely dumb, & unable to take her place in polite society, even with all the wealth & status of the Archambeau family name. The child masturbated herself almost constantly, even after being strapped & beaten to try & train her out of it. She rubbed her cunt against furniture, always with her hand in her undergarments.
Even with her hands bound behind her, servants would find her rubbing herself against the corner of chairs, or on the bannisters of staircases. Raphael had been bitterly disappointed that he had (as far as he knew) no male heir & only an unmarriageable & ruined daughter. His favourite mistress, Guillemette, was also rumoured to destroy his seed with unguents & douches of acidic tinctures.
Now he was old, & he was left with naught but memories of his days as a lover. He struggled to maintain even a temporary firmness over his withered organ which lay shrunken & useless against his leg. For years he’d been frustrated, ill-tempered & resentful of the young men around him who could still plow the fields of women & men to their heart’s desires should they wish it. It had been worse, of late, due to the arrival of the fascinating stranger in his province.
The man, he learned, was called James Harris, was thought to be English perhaps, although when he’d spoken to him, Raphael had been less certain of his provenance. His accent was unplaceable. & he had something of the arab about him, or the moor, or the mysterious Oriental, but also the Frenchman, the Englishman, the noble. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Even alone, when he tried to sketch the stranger’s features from memory he struggled to recall his details.
His skin had been the colour of caramel, had it not? Or was he as pale as the flesh of a fish? No, that wasn’t it, was it rich, bronzed, like the copper of a pipe? Pink like a girl’s cheeks? & his eyes? What colour were the man’s eyes? He seemed both incredibly unusually rare, exotic, eerie & unnatural, & yet, whenever they spoke he seemed ordinary, almost mundane in his commonplace. He was an enigma.
Regardless of his slippery appearance, something about him both attracted & unnerved Raphael. He was obsessed with the young man. & WAS he young? He could never recall. When he was standing, talking to the man, he’d felt the remnants of his long lost lust, felt ghostly twists & twitches in his gut & balls.
He dreamed of the man kneeling in front of him, taking his member deeply into his mouth, looking up at him with his stormy eyes, grinning at him with needle-sharp teeth, with ancient goat-eyes. He’d wake, shivering & covered in his own spent seed. Infuriated that his only erection had been wasted in his sleep, his orgasm on his bed covers & not within a soft, warm lover. Frustrated that he only had a vague, uneasy memory of the dream that raised his member from its death-like slumber.
Even now, idly rubbing his lips with a blade of grass he’d plucked as he sat on the stone steps of the family castle, thinking about the strange man, he found himself feeling that leftover tickle as his prick reminded him of his lost days as a lothario. There was something so magnetic, so sexual about the man Harris, that even imagining him he felt he could almost smell his pungent sweat, & the smell of his dick.
It felt to Raphael, that the WORLD was heaving with sex that morning. As if all of nature was pulsing & wet with a furious & unchecked madness, a perversity, a need. The crickets seemed to be singing triumphantly of fucking, the boughs of trees, swaying in the wind like phalluses, like hanging breasts or dangling labia, the earth full of moisture, ready for plumbing, ready for a hard & fearless dicking.
He imagined the foxes, the marmots & voles of the forest, entwined in ecstasy, knotted together in a pulsating pile, an orgy of creatures as they dipped their genitals into each other & bit each other’s necks, the flowers of plants spewing pollen, the streams of water around them. Even the cold, old castle seemed to stretch itself open, like fingers in a cunt, like the gaping moistened receptacle of a male whore. A dragonfly landed on his arm & he observed it for a moment before it flew away.
He’d watched, jealously, enviously, as Harris had taken every man & woman at the auberges & lodging houses in the area to his room, wherever that was. He’d taken them one at a time, sometimes two or three at a time. He’d watched the next morning as those men & women stumbled out from the corners & walls of edifices & gardens, a glazed, entranced look on their face as they reacclimated to their lives, their wives & husbands, their duties.
He’d questioned them all, at first discreetly, delicately, but soon angrily, demandingly, to explain where they had gone with Harris, what they had done with him. He’d felt mocked by their recalcitrance but soon realised it wasn’t from unwillingness but from genuine confusion. They seemed to neither remember their time away, nor, in fact, the man Harris, at all. Nevertheless, Raphael felt deep within his bones that each of them had been made love to by the man. He smelled Harris on them, as if they were clothed in the damp sheets of their tussle.
Their eyes shone for days following their trip to God-knows-where, their mouths teased by subconscious smiles as they drifted, blank & humming around town until they finally sobered up from the mysterious experience. He’d tried to follow Harris & his prey but had always seemed to lose their direction, to find himself turned around, back at the table, or in the dead end of an alleyway, once he came to, sitting, leaning, against a spruce, half a mile away, being examined by curious sheep. He couldn’t remember how he’d found his way there or how long he’d been outside his senses.
Today Harris was to visit him. Who knew who had levied the invitation, how it had been arranged? He couldn’t even clearly recall their conversation, had they ever even had a conversation? He always felt a sense of drunkenness, of disorientation, when he tried to fix his mind on the man. He watched, as Harris sauntered, perhaps flit, along the driveway, through the walls to the grand entrance where he perched waiting.
“Bonjour old man,” Harris greeted him. His voice rumbled like the crashing of waves, boomed like thunder & sang like the whisper of a spring breeze. An impossible voice, in harmony with itself. A voice that vibrated through Raphael’s body & landed like the piercing of an arrow.
Raphael inwardly rankled at the familiarity & impudence of the salutation but didn’t respond.
Harris appeared relaxed, at home. He sat beside Raphael without being invited, as if he owned the place. He was uncaring of decorum or the informal nature of their visit.
They watched as servants bustled, as washer women took linens & clothes toward the lines where they’d catch the sun & bleach them clean, a footman brushed a horse. Bees hummed & zipped busily, flowers opening & filling the air with perfumes & scent. Raphael felt he could almost hear the coiling of worms in the earth, felt he could sense the gaze of birds on them, could feel the heat radiating from the man’s body, warmer than the sun. Again his ancient, dried up cock twitched a little, a phantom pang of what it once was.
“How would you like to be young again?” Harris asked from that hot, shining spot.
Raphael felt impatient. He’d called him an old man. Of course he wanted to be young again. Did he have time for such a nonsense conversation? & yet… he found himself unable to move, unable to dismiss the man, unable to speak without a sense of permission from the stranger. He felt as though the man beside him could read every thought, was peeling his mind open & flipping his way through invisible scrolls that held the essence of his very soul. He shifted uncomfortably.
“I will make it so you can be young again, should you wish it,” Harris spoke. “You can be allowed to live in the spring of youth over & over. I will even make sure that your flaccid thing will be hardened again, even in the winter of your cycles. You’ll be renewed, perhaps undying, you may carry your knowledge between centuries as you explore the wet, dark, fungal hunger of your cock. You’ll be a sorcerer of a kind, your staff a wand of magic, you’ll have power over others, you’ll have wealth & longevity & familiars from your father’s loins. Should you wish.”
Raphael was spellbound, perplexed but wildly tempted. For some reason, despite the ludicrous & absurd proposal, he didn’t doubt for a single moment that Harris could deliver on his promises if he chose to.
“What would it cost me?”
“What would you give?”
“Almost anything.”
“Almost anything is what it costs.”
There, in the bright light & scorching heat of the summer day, the nobleman Raphael Archambeau bent over, rolling his hose to his ankles, flipping the doublet up to expose his elderly asshole & was fucked like a woman by James Harris on the steps to his family’s castle.
There had been no conversation, no negotiation for the act, or the publicity of it. He’d simply known that for the granted wish, the contract would be signed not with ink but with semen & submission. Harris had been quiet as he rutted him but for Raphael, it had felt like a nirvanic ecstasy, the pleasure was so overwhelming that he was unable to quiet his moaning & could only smile, beatifically, like a child being blessed by a saint as he felt a fullness he’d only dreamed of. His member, engorged, waved triumphantly in the warm air, a glistening white drop trembling on its tip. A bee landed on it, he felt the tiny legs fluttering as it rested on the shaft before it flew away.
His face was glazed, coated in a strange, thin sweat, a bead of drool dangled from his mouth as he was plowed, his hands hung limply at his sides as he rocked with every thrust from Harris. He had never felt such euphoria, never imagined it even possible. Harris mounted him as the sun crossed the sky, but had the world turned a thousand times it would have been too short. His cock pulsed with sensation, it twitched in the air like a serpent. The man behind him, the creature, whatever Harris was, was deep within him, stirring every part of him with confident, smooth thrusts.
The members of his serving staff who gardened & swept around them appeared, if not to notice, then not to concern themselves with the public buggery of their lord. Did they see him? Or did their minds not understand what their eyes perceived anymore? Raphael would never know, would never ask. When Harris had finally ejaculated into Raphael, after what had seemed hours upon hours of drilling, his seed had been as cold as ice.
When Harris extracted his phallus from him, Raphael’s cock twitched eleven times, releasing a ludicrous amount of seed, a thick, opaque puddle on the steps that ran into the gravel of the driveway like a river. He trembled all over & almost fell over from the force but felt Harris steady him with an iron grip on his arm. The climax was so startling, so otherworldly, he almost expected the man to vanish like a spirit upon completion of the act.
Yet Harris had strolled around to face him, Raphael bent over still, as if to allow Harris’s seed to dry within him, as if genuflecting before the man who’d just fucked him. Harris had leaned down & kissed the lord gently upon the lips & when he stood, Raphael had been amazed to see the man was completely naked. Had he always been? Had he walked the road to him entirely unclothed & nobody had stopped or been startled? Between his legs swung a penis of ridiculous girth & length, it dwarfed that of a horse, made miniature an oxen’s cock.
It nearly touched the ground beneath him as he stood straight-legged, nude, in the midday sunlight, it would have brushed the short grass of his lawns. The man without a clear face was tall, nearly eight feet tall, & the tip of his organ reached his ankles. It was thicker than Raphael’s thigh. His scrotum hung like buoys behind it, under a pungent, massive bush.
The pubic hair was thick, dark, mossy, & there were spider’s webs & fungi growing from it, centipedes twisting at the roots, whenever he moved, leaves or dirt drifted from it. It was entirely unhuman. Unlike any other genitals on a natural creature. How had the monster fit the tower inside him? How had he not cried & struggled at its penetration of him? How had it not split him apart in violation? Like all things about Harris, he could neither understand nor fix his thoughts on the questions. Regardless of how the magic had been worked, he wanted Harris to put it back inside him. It had been delicious.
The man, the creature, spoke to him, “your father died this morning. I tell you, today there are only two living, aside from you, in your direct line. You’ll know what to do. Farewell, Raphael.” He turned & walked away, moved away, perhaps glided or faded into the sunbeams. Raphael was too confused, too stunned, too changed to even wonder.
Was it true his father had died? He didn’t feel anything about it. Wasn’t even curious. He sat down, his hose still around his ankles, his ass still bare, on the stone steps & sat there, like a statue, until the sun began to set.
When he stood, it was as if he appeared back into the world, apparated like the lovers Harris had taken from the lower classes, the ones who’d materialised from shadows & corners. He was returned. A servant ran towards him, out of breath, they’d been looking for him, his father, his father had died sir, his father had died in his sleep. He was sorry, they’d been looking for him, none had found him until now or they would have advised him earlier.
He ignored the implied pleading of the young man, he pulled up his britches as the boy blushed at his exposure, at seeing his master’s long penis, he asked to see his father’s body & was told it had been taken by the religious men to be prepared for burial in the family crypt. Very well. He visited it there & sat with it. He expected to cry, as he had when his mother had died. His father was an old man, older than any other had ever been in the province, nearly a hundred. Even so, he had expected to feel grief. He felt nothing.
When he returned to the castle, by horse, he knew he was changed, fundamentally less human than he’d been before Harris. Seated at the large table, Nicole urged him to eat, to ‘replenish his strength’. He hadn’t felt hungry or weak. He pushed the food around on the plate but couldn’t bring himself to place even a morsel in his mouth. Likewise, he ignored the wine in his goblet. The smell was distasteful to him, he wondered, had the alcohol gone bad? But realised it was simply unappetising to him now.
When they entered their bed chambers for the night he had considered whether Harris had tricked him, didn’t the strange Alberich tell him he’d be hard ‘even in the winter of his life’ or something? No sooner did the thought of sex flit through his mind than his penis sprang to life. It was firmer than he remembered it ever being, even in his youth, it was hot with the throb of desire.
He burst through the doors of Nicole’s chambers & ravaged her, her maid had barely time to drop her hairbrush before he’d been upon her too & inside her like a demon. She had screamed & fought him, an instinctive reaction to the wild & unexpected fervour with which the husband took both wife & maid. They were both skewered on him, held down to the carpet as he switched between their holes. He fucked with a drunken, frenzied abandon. Their screams had turned to those of pleasure & his wife had rolled onto her back, had gripped him as he plunged inside her, in & out, in & out, without sign of slowing or softening.
Even in the prime of his youth he hadn’t had the stamina, the power that his phallus held in that moment. Nicole would usually have been outraged to have been used as such, to have had her own attendant used beside her, but something of Harris seemed to have infused him with a hypnotic, sensual magnetism. The women hungered for him, they found themselves working together to pleasure him, to lick & suck & stroke.
On the bed the women lay together, face down, wife on the bottom, young maid on top of her & spread their legs for him. He took turns inside each & all three moaned at the overwhelming & sensuous pleasure. He filled their holes until the sun rose the next day & his valet, looking for him, came upon them in a twisted frenzy of sex.
The sexual power of Raphael, of Harris, filled the bedchambers & he could feel the crazed desire radiating from the man as well, so he told the valet to take his ass. However, when the man greedily searched with his fingers between his buttcheeks he’d found no entrance. A strange deformity had transformed Raphael. His anus was gone. Not simply grown over, smooth, hairless, as though it had never existed at all. Between his cheeks was a bald, flattened seal. It seemed to be the mark of Cain from his deal with the Erlking, where Harris had entered, none would enter afterwards.
Raphael had felt himself, had bent in front of a mirrored glass. It explained, he felt, why he had no desire for food or drink. He examined his cock, which appeared to be unchanged, the hole at the tip still where it had been, although it was now powerful, now hard with the barest thought, now longer, stronger, hotter than it had ever been & seemingly would fill with his seed whenever he desired it. It was the only part of him that felt warm now, although nothing felt wrong or uncomfortable, he was calmly insane.
He remembered being fucked by the man with the enormous, inhuman penis. The penis of a God. The penis of a Satyr. The penis of an incubus, a fey. The man who fucked him had been ancient, older than his country, older than the images drawn on the walls of the caves, older than the bones that turned as if to stone within the ground. He had not been a man, & yet, he had been the most like a man of any man. He was a warlock, a deity, a phantasm, an elf, a jinn, a mirage, a creature of nature itself, a creature unnatural, a monster, an angel, a giant.
The three, his wife, the maid, the valet had each marvelled at the change, seemingly still drunk & mesmerised by the erotic spell of his sexuality. The valet was given the maid’s ass instead, while Raphael took his, & his wife knelt beside the tangle of limbs that screwed each other, & pressed her breasts into her husband’s mouth. Strangely, Raphael could feel himself in all three, he felt as if he was a passenger in the valet’s cock as it penetrated the young woman, he could feel his own lips on breasts that weren’t his own, he could even feel the phantom of a cock where his ass had been… although it felt unlike his own phallus, but the phallus of Harris, being wielded by him. From then on, every time Raphael fucked, he would feel the ghost of Harris fucking him, he would feel the delicious dick of that creature in the memory of his asshole, it seemed to power his own erection.
When he crested to climax, he spilled his ejaculate between the three mouths, onto the pink faces of the women, his sperm dripping from the ginger moustache of the manservant. They lay panting & grateful in the twisted linen of his wife’s bed, even as Raphael wiped himself & dressed. The valet had never had sex with a man before, had never desired it, but from that moment on, all three would visit his wife’s bedchambers & beg for his attention together. The valet’s wife complained to the church that Raphael bewitched her husband, as he no longer lay with her at night but went to him, but the church, funded by Archambeau wealth, only deferred her concerns.
Whenever he desired them, they’d come to him, as if entranced. An invisible & silent thread connected them to his whims. During the day, if he asked, they were able to describe their activities, to recall their actions, but it was as if the event had occurred within a dream. Each night he would enter the room to find all three naked & spread-legged on the bed, bent over, side by side, holes open to gratefully & hungrily & desperately receive his cock.
For the next few years he had all his servants, both men & women, he had his new, younger mistresses (the oldest a mere 40 years old), he visited the brothels & had every whore that Paris offered & some it didn’t. He screwed aristocrats, husbands & wives together. He even considered having his simple daughter but decided not to. Every person he fucked was shocked by the violence of his thrusting, was incredulous at the pounding dished out by the ancient, creaking old man, overcoming their surprise they crested into orgasm, becoming giddy with the overload of sensation. The whores offered his silver back to him, he’d laughed, there would be more silver & gold, he was confident of it, his God had promised it to him.
After a decade, Raphael began to feel something else, more than just the inescapable draw of his lust. He began to feel a strange & pushing hunger. Not for food, for something else. He examined himself in the mirror-glass. He was still an old man, his eyes still rheumy & tired, his hair still sketchy & white, his skin as dry as dead leaves, his mouth a bloodless, lipless pucker. His body was skinny & liver spotted, a sagging gut, his skin hanging from his bones. He looked to himself like a faded skeleton, a ghoulish apparition, a watermark.
That night he visited his friend Phillipe. He sat at the man’s table, he was nearly as old as himself, he was a widower of several years but had 12 healthy children, had many more grandchildren & great grandchildren yet. Raphael remembered sitting at the table years earlier, as Phillipe had shown him miniature representations of artworks he wished to commission full-sized copies of, around the dining room there were many completed works from years gone by.
Art would become the only other thing to really interest Raphael across the years of his life. The only other distraction from the boredom of human society. Artists seemed to strive to describe the hypocrisy & madness of the customs of human beings, seemed to observe, even obliquely the repetition of superstition & contradiction & the follies of religion & the status quo. In all his years, the only thing that would come close to matching his lust for flesh would be an interest in the arts. Including music, dance, writing, but mostly, mostly paintings, sculptures.
Phillipe had cheese & fruit on the table, trying to coerce his friend into eating & drinking with him. Raphael had been unmoved, he had no hunger or thirst for sustenance of that nature. So his friend had become ever-drunker, alone as he was, in drinking the wine. His voice slurred, his eyes lost focus, his jokes became bawdier. The men reminisced about the ‘good old days’ when they had been boys, when their wives had been young & ripe, when they’d been able to sprint & leap without the fear of bone-break, when they’d had the energy for young men’s pleasures.
Raphael had kept his friend’s glass full, had poured the wine, & had enjoyed revisiting the old memories. He was about to leave when his friend had started to cry, had bemoaned to him about the loss of sexual satisfaction, his isolation & lack of relief from the pressure that built still in his old dick. How he had started to resent the young women he saw in town, even his own daughters for being disinterested in his sexual advances, how he hated how much he would have to pay for a decent whore to suck him, even once before he died.
A tiny flicker of envy seemed to flash upon Raphael’s cold heart as he heard this, envy that despite being widowered, his friend had still been able to achieve erections in his old age, while prior to his deal with Harris, he’d had access to his wife but couldn’t access the hardness to do anything with her. But it was just a flicker, a shadow rather than real emotion.
He knew he could have Phillipe in the same way as he’d had the valet. He knew that if he thought it, Phillipe would bend over & spread his cheeks to receive him. But instead he reminded his drunk friend of the experimentation they’d conducted in their youth, their childhoods. Reminded him that as boys they’d sucked the semen from each other, not as lovers, but as friends. Not as deviant offenders, but just to give each other physical relief. As a doctor might. As a maid might. At first Phillipe pretended not to remember but soon Raphael had his friend naked, sitting in his armchair, his cock in Raphael’s mouth.
He had convinced the intoxicated old man to close his eyes & allow his childhood friend to ease his frustrations, to imagine he was being sucked by a woman, & that they would never speak of it again, if he wished. He sucked Phillipe’s dick, it filled his mouth, it all came back to him, the taste of his dick, the taste of his dear friend’s seed, the memory of feelings he’d had for him, that had persisted for many years despite the clear rejection of his desires. Phillipe was moaning, his dick was filling & swelling inside the man’s mouth who kneeled before him. When Phillipe orgasmed Raphael drank his seed & quietly left, as he had promised.
The next morning he returned to Phillipe’s home. He found his friend had died overnight. In his sleep, peacefully, still naked in his chair. He was an old man after all. An old man like Raphael & had simply died of old age.
Raphael sat for a while with the corpse. The strange, pushing hunger he’d been feeling was stronger than ever. Insistent & unignorable. Rigor mortis had settled Phillipe’s body into the shape of the chair. He tried to hold the dead man’s hand although Phillipe’s fingers were as stiff as carrots.
_Young again_
Raphael stirred. It was Harris’s voice, he almost felt the creature’s breath as it whispered into his ear.
_Put it in him_
How to describe the events that then occurred? Simply, Raphael was finally able to experience the act he’d yearned for. He turned the stiff cadaver over & entered the cold, unliving hole that had never been entered before. He fucked it. For several minutes nothing happened, no sound in the house except for his own slow breaths as he penetrated the husk of what had been his friend.
Then, Phillipe’s hand twitched, his fingers clenched. His body softened, loosened. Warmth returned & wetness, Raphael could feel the body responding to his thrusts. He heard his friend breathe again, a long sigh escaping the revived body that had been so still & stiff before.
“Phillipe?” Raphael asked as he pushed in & out.
“Is that me? Am I Phillipe?” Came the response.
“My friend, do you remember anything?”
All was quiet for a while, except for the sound of sex.
“I… I’m not certain.” Phillipe sighed. “Who are you?”
“I’m your friend, Raphael.”
“Raphael…”
Phillipe was rocking his hips back & forth deliciously. His old, soft ass was pressing hard against Raphael’s hips as they were joined together.
“Raphael… please… this feels… so good.” He whispered in reverence.
Raphael was close to orgasm, he felt something deep inside him swirling, twisting. It was like butterflies, or larvae rioting in his abdomen. Something stretched & crawled & wove its way through his veins, through the throbbing shaft of his member. As he came, he felt tendrils leaking from the tip of his penis, tendrils, like tentacles, that stretched within Phillipe’s body, like hungry snakes, but so fine, like threads, that attached themselves to the soft tissue of the wet cavern.
Were they the result of Harris’s cold ejaculate? Were they what Harris had left inside him before sealing the hole where he’d entered him? The orgasm seemed to stretch time outwards, his climax suspended for several hours, & no longer moving, he rested within Phillipe’s body as the tendrils snaked & latched, as the pleasure washed over him.
Finally, it seemed to be over, the tendrils retreated back inside him & his cock wilted inside Phillipe. He pulled himself out & it was then that Phillipe orgasmed too, ejaculating into the pillows of the chair. “So… good,” Phillipe whispered as he came, “thank you, Raphael. Thank you.” & Phillipe was dead again, & even more so than before it seemed, his body crumbled into pale dust, like ash, which wafted around the room with the breeze from the window. His ejaculate lay sticky on the armchair.
Phillipe’s youngest daughter, middle-aged, was coming up the path to her father’s door at that moment. She didn’t recognise the tall young man who was leaving the house. She inquired his name & giggled when she was told. Surely not Raphael Archambeau, Monsieur Archambeau was an ancient, withered old man. He was, he told her, the elder Archambeau’s grandson.
She had not known he had a grandson? Yes, he told her, a well-kept secret. She had looked for her father, had searched the house with the dark-haired youth but been unable to find him. Had the old man somehow journeyed to town? The carriage was still in its place with the horses, which she fed. Perhaps he had travelled with a friend? Perhaps even the elder Archambeau? Nobody was able to answer the question, nobody was able to find a trace of the man.
Phillipe was declared dead in absentia & it was presumed he’d either died by accident or misadventure, perhaps in the forest, & his body remained yet undiscovered & colonised by mushrooms, eaten by wildlife, or he had befallen the prey of unsavory characters, the highwaymen or travellers that lurked in the stories & rumours about their province.
She was temporarily distracted from those concerns when the young gentleman had taken her against the stall in the stables that day, & she had been left shuddering with rapture, her skirts billowing around her on the hay-covered floor. Her husband had never learned to pleasure her & he never needed to learn that she’d spread her legs for the stranger.
Upon returning to the castle, the newly young Raphael had examined himself again. He was a young man, perhaps 20. He looked as he had in his youth, not more handsome, not ethereal, just the same as he did when he had been a young man, when he had courted Nicole. Dark curly hair, a slightly hooked nose, a frog-like mouth & skinny chest.
He’d debated how to explain the change, how to retain a hold on his inheritance, his wealth, his property & status. How to slip back into his life as the younger version of himself? There were two paintings of himself at that age, one to commemorate his marriage, that undoubtedly confirmed the ‘family resemblance’ but even that would not be entirely sufficient.
‘Familiars’ he thought, ‘familiars from your father’s loins’ Harris had said. He felt it as though he could hear Harris’ voice in his head again. His unmistakable, entirely forgettable, strange & ordinary & ephemeral voice. But familiars… how to use this information as subtle & limited as it was.
His second cousin had not come from his father’s loins, which only left Delphine, his spinster half-mute & mentally disabled daughter. She was in her 50s by that point, a stocky, strange woman with the intelligence of a child. In any other home she may have already been confined to an asylum, or a nunnery, or simply gone missing. Instead, her mother had insisted she remain under her own roof, looked after by a series of nurses & servants. Sometimes fallen nobles had suggested marrying her, to take her off her father’s hands, to give him male heirs, to restore their own family’s lost fortunes. Nicole had always refused to part with her only child, condemned it had seemed, to be a toddler in the body of a crone.
He was drawn, as if his feet were attached to an invisible pathway, to his daughter’s room. There he asked the middle aged woman, fast approaching her own winter, should she like to play a game with him? Of course, she told the familiar young man, she loved games. When he asked her to sit herself on his cock she’d been delighted, she had never outgrown that inappropriate hobby of hers to touch herself.
She had bounced violently upon his erection squealing “Pénis! Pénis! Pénis!” as she impaled herself. Had Raphael still been a person, he would have felt revolted (as much by himself as the situation) but Raphael would never really be a person again. He had stopped being human. Instead, they both shared the pleasure, she was another warm, wet cunt around his dick & for her, she was in profound joy.
From his cock crept the tendrils, those searching eldritch tentacles from Harris’s deposit. They affixed themselves to the walls of Delphine’s vagina. It felt different, as if their secretions drew from a different gland than before. He felt drained, as if his own life leaked from him into the woman who rode him. He blacked out. Fainting into a dark, dreamless unconsciousness.
When he came to, three days later, Delphine was a young woman again, as he had been a young man, perhaps 20. She was holding a damp cloth to his forehead & he had been put in his own bed. “What do you need from me, Raphael?” She asked, never calling him papa again. Her mind had been transformed, rewritten. She was both the daughter she would have been had she not been deprived of oxygen at birth, & no longer anyone’s daughter at all. She was a new creature, like him, but unlike him.
His first familiar, an eternal servant & constant companion who’d have a similar new life cycle to his. Growing from young woman to the age she’d just been, as if that day had been the natural conclusion of her life, as his had seemed to be when he consumed his loyal friend. Then he would need to enter her again, to give her some of his life, some of his power, to return her to the youthful woman she was at the start of her own cycle.
He wasn’t surprised to find himself older again. He’d felt something leaving him as he fucked his daughter, but he wasn’t as old as he had been. Instead of 80, (or 20), he’d guess he was closer to 55, maybe even 50. The midpoint allowed him to be recognised as himself, although he drew puzzled, amazed & wary looks from his servants & the people of town. But, at least it allowed him the opportunity to put his affairs in order. He dusted his hair with flour for the meantime, & moved to their property in Paris, & had all of his servants replaced with new ones.
Nicole was mildly confused by Delphine’s change & improvement, but by that point, she was older than Raphael & her mind was wandering, her eyes were nearly blind, her hearing nearly gone. She spent most days in bed, although would still beg for her husband’s cock. Most nights he would enter her, the pleasure seemed to assist her sleep. Finally, one night, she died in her sleep at the age of 78.
Raphael had sex with her body but the tendrils hadn’t come, regardless of the different ways he tried to summon them. She had remained a dry, dead husk. She was buried at their castle, where she had lived for most of her life.
The improved Delphine was introduced to Paris society. People were informed she was a distant cousin, from relatives in the South. She had charmed the gentry as well as the servants, had been strange, but educated, well-spoken (for she had been imbued with everything her father had known, every book he’d read, every subject he’d learned, she knew his opinions, his desires without asking). There was no scandal when he’d announced he was to marry the young lady. After all, he looked younger than his years, how old was he again? & at 20, it was high time she married & how better to keep the family wealth secure than with a cousin?
She had retained her entire human body, no smooth cap between her asscheeks, no tendrils that writhed inside her, she consumed ordinary food & drink, her body behaved as normal, but her mind was changed, her life a repeating cycle of rebirth, reincarnation. She was as human as Raphael, as non-human as he. She was connected to him, their minds linked eternally.
He spent most nights inside her. Since Harris, he’d been strangely devoid of normal emotion. It was as if all the highs & lows were flattened, he was an observer of humanity rather than a participant. He walked the streets & halls of his home without strong feeling, like a spectre. He wandered, only half-there. But whenever he combined his sexual activity, which was insatiable, with Delphine, he felt refreshed.
Even if he only watched her as she rubbed herself, or had sex with one of their servants (of either gender, she was like her father in that way). Their connection made him feel not just the ecstasy of climax, the pleasure of sex that he was almost constantly feeling throbbing within him, but an echo of the human closeness he’d felt before he’d been changed. He was more ‘there’ more real, it seemed, when their sexuality was combined.
Sometimes he’d have her with another, her presence would increase not only the physical pleasure but the sensation of emotion. Sometimes she’d watch him take his pleasure with others. It seemed that having her in the room amplified the euphoria he was able to achieve, that either was able to achieve, & so they rarely left each other’s side, or bed.
During their first ‘marriage’ they celebrated 20 anniversaries. By then he looked elderly & thin again, & she was a squat 40 year old. Raphael planned his ‘death’. He visited the local morgue & paid the mortician for the corpse of a young woman who’d died from consumption. Her pale face delighted him. The body was delivered to his home but like his wife, no amount of rutting in her body seemed to draw the tendrils. She was returned to the morgue & he took another one. Again, nothing happened despite his attempts.
He was angry & frightened, would he be unable to become young again? Would he & Delphine rot away in decaying bodies? But then, months later, a drunk had been found dead in his stables. Perhaps by over-intoxication, perhaps he’d frozen to death, it was unknown. The man was a stranger, a vagabond. In his ragged clothing, with the staggering behaviour of drink, he’d looked older but in death Raphael realised he was in his middle age, perhaps as young as 40.
Raphael’s new valet was the one who found him, & when Raphael was informed he felt at once the strange churning within his abdomen, the hungry growl of his cock as it erected itself. Moments after he’d entered the body, the man re-lived. His body filled with warmth, his joints & muscles softened & flexed. The man gasped as Raphael fucked steadily inside him, he arched his back & leaned into his body with a tender longing that felt surprisingly intimate. The horses neighed & observed passively as the men joined themselves together.
“It feels… so good, so good,” the man’s unfamiliar voice breathed.
“Do you know your name?”
“It’s…I… no sir, I do not seem to be able to recall it.”
But the man had tenderly stroked Raphael’s arms as he rocked on his hands & knees in the hay. His moans of pleasure were soft & relaxed as Raphael daggered in & out of his ass. At one point, he wrapped his right hand around the man’s chin & the man had gently kissed each finger; had gently sucked them. “So… good,” the man moaned, “you’re an angel, you feel so good.”
Impulsively, Raphael turned the man to face himself. For a moment his cock bobbed in the air between them, & tendrils as fine as spider webs floated from the tip like dust motes or seaweed. The man seemed not to notice, perhaps they were invisible, perhaps awakening from death to feel a man making love to you was surprising enough. Regardless, when Raphael entered him again, this time facing him, the tendrils had settled easily back inside & stretched within the wet interior. Raphael & the man kissed each other as they made love, kissed each other as he reached that blessed climax.
Afterwards, when Raphael pulled out, the man had groaned in happiness & his seed had gushed upon Raphel’s stomach. Then his eyes had closed, he’d whispered “thank you kind sir” & his body blew away like thin ash, swirling around the horses hooves in the stables.
Raphael realised that the tendrils would not be drawn by the bodies of women. Perhaps the reason was simply that James Harris had transformed him, that it was a masculine spell & required masculine sex. He walked out of the stables a young man again.
The elder Archambeau’s ‘death’ was publicised, it was so easy to pay off anybody who would have raised questions, although it seemed entirely unnecessary. Even the Church happily deferred to him, to Delphine’s offer of patronage. Raphael was reintroduced to society, as his own son, having been ‘cloistered as a child within the safe walls of their country castle before being brought to Paris’.
As usual, few questions were asked. He inherited the wealth from his ‘father’, taking care of his dear ‘mother’ who he appeared to love dearly. Within the private walls of their home they spent their nights together, they explored dark fantasies, they held orgies.
This, more or less, was how the cycle continued, Raphael was unconcerned with the changes time wrought on his body, unconcerned about advancing years, only in the abstract way that it was easier to allow himself to near 80 before restarting the cycle, sometimes as his own grandson, his great grandson, & finding it easier & easier to plan ahead, to set up paperwork & support for the replacement identity in advance of the feast & rebirth.
His unusual hunger, that preceded the tendrils, only seemed to return as he reached his physical 80s, & if he needed to feed before that time, for any convenience, he would find himself having to concentrate hard to raise the tendrils from his cock. To renew Delphine he would have to focus his intention on giving her some of his life, it would always take three days to wake after he did so.
One such time was during the Revolution, when they heard the cacophony of the riots, the aristocracy & gentry being forced from their homes. At the time, he & Delphine had both appeared to be in their late 40s. They’d retreated through their cellar to the Madeleine Cemetery, where in the cover of darkness he made love to a pair of bodies resting in old crypts.
The first man was decomposing, his eyes were blind, his flesh hung from his body like rags, but even so, as soon as Raphael’s phallus entered & explored him he softened & lived again, as he had been on the day he’d died. He whispered his pleasure & gratitude as he ejaculated on the stone altar of his own tomb before disintegrating.
On that dust covered altar Raphael had renewed his daughter, then slept for three days.
The second body they found, had been dead for less time, & had also, sadly, died young. In fact, Raphael recognised him as one of the prostitutes from the city. He’d felt a lingering sympathy for the young man, who had only lived to his mid-twenties, & when his cock revived him he’d told the man, gently, that his name was Alain. The boy repeated it softly & thanked him dreamily. The sex had been rather exquisite Raphael had felt, even more so than was usual.
Delphine, connected as she was to Raphael’s own desires, had kissed the boy warmly, had reached underneath & handled Alain’s cock as her father took his ass. When Raphael had extracted himself, the young man had ejaculated into Delphine’s hand, his sigh, his face had been of extraordinary contentment. His second death, a peaceful echo.
Afterwards, he & his daughter emerged, both unrecognisable after the revenants had reduced the years of his face & he’d shared the renewal with her. They disguised themselves as distant relatives of the nobility of Archambeau, but from a poorer wing of the family. They’d been able to stand amongst the people in the Place de la Concorde & hold hands & watch as the queen was beheaded. They weathered the changes, adapted to each change in power & society.
In the early 1900s, Raphael found his feet leading him to the 8th arrondissement, as if he were walking a predestined path. He had a vague recollection of the same sensation a long time ago, in his ancient family castle. He didn’t fight the urge, had learned to trust his instincts, had learned to trust the strange workings of his inhuman body.
If the creature that had been Raphael had any real human emotions left, aside from a deep, enduring lust for occasional sexual intercourse, the strongest feeling would be ‘curiosity’. It had been the thing that had continued to spark that interest in art & artists. Especially the wordless arts, where people tried to explain what words couldn’t. The unique mystery of sentient life.
He found himself watching a broad, beefy worker who’d disembarked, sweating heavily, from a steam engine at Gare Saint-Lazare. The man’s hands were covered in grease & soot, his grimy clothes thick with odour & filth. Raphael was only mid-cycle at the time, perhaps his 50s, so he didn’t feel the twitching pang of hunger that signified an urgency to renew. Intrigued, he shadowed the man until he caught up to him buying brioche. When the man looked into his face Raphael immediately sensed an ancestral recognition. Benoît’s was descended from an encounter Raphael had enjoyed with a black-haired prostitute in Bretagne centuries before.
He was amused, not only that he hadn’t sired MORE bastards during his days as a lothario before he’d been transformed, but that his strange senses appeared to be able to identify & locate direct descendants when they were in close enough proximity to him. Every now & then he wondered if there were more out there. Every now & then he wondered what other eerie abilities he’d been yet to discover within himself.
But for the moment, he enjoyed inviting Benoît to his estate, where he was plied with wine by his ‘wife’ Delphine & convinced to remove his clothing, to receive a sucking from her, revealing a torso covered in blue illustrations. Benoît, like his ancestors Raphael & Delphine, was also sexually adventurous & his proclivities ran to the submissive.
He enjoyed locking the guest, naked, into an old pillory, sliding his cock into Benoît’s asshole, & letting the tendrils convert the strong man into a second familiar. Like Delphine, Benoît retained most of his physical humanity after his transformation. It was a delight to find another, to share his knowledge, his libido, his body, his long years, to share the carnal pleasures afforded to the line of Archambeau by James Harris. Carnal pleasures which were then experienced jointly between three.
THE END