9. Chapter Nine
Chapter Nine
Beatrice
At first, it seemed as though Noah was having a seizure. Panic cracked through me like gunfire. “Are you okay?”
I couldn’t see his eyes, or any other part of his face for that matter, which made reading his expression impossible. Going off body language alone, something was wrong.
The sound of creaking wood sawed through the fog of dread encasing my head. “Captain? Noah?”
My stomach flipped with fear when it dawned on me that it wasn’t wood making that sound.
It was his bones.
Noah’s body shifted horribly inside of his skin as it began to stretch and elongate.
His skeleton seemed to be breaking and reshaping itself as his body grew.
Taller. More muscular. Noah wasn’t a hairy man, but he wasn’t baby smooth either.
His dark hair vanished in a blink, and his skin changed hue—becoming green and velvet soft.
And the mask, oh fuck, the mask. It fused with his face, becoming one with him like a parasitic creature who’d finally found a host to latch onto. As I watched the horror unfold, I wondered if that wasn’t exactly what was happening.
The mass of tendrils attached to his jaws came to life, lengthening and writhing with alien coordination.
All the breath disintegrated in my lungs.
The suckers. Countless nubs of flesh all puckered and twitching, each little suction cup desperate for something to grasp on to.
Noah’s mouth, if it was still there, disappeared under the mass of writhing tendrils that stretched down to his belt-line, and his nose was nothing more than a skeletal hole at the center of his monstrous physiognomy.
His eyes were the most striking thing of all. No longer amber, but gold—five of them, all gleaming with alien intelligence through the murk of the cabin.
The beast before me was easily eight feet tall now, and he had to stand at a hunch to fit inside the cabin.
So much muscle. He could easily weigh three times what he used to.
An intense combination of terror and fascination washed over me in a cold sweat. This was the mask’s doing.
It occurred to me that he must have felt something was off with the mask. When we were drinking in the galley, he’d turned it so the eyes were facing away from me.
I’d spotted the hesitance behind his expression, and he still put it on, all because I’d asked.
Guilt swallowed me whole.
There was no way either of us could have known this would happen. Still. It was stupid not to secure the artifact until it was back home in a lab where we could study it in a secure location.
But I’d been drunk with rum and lust.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Tamping down on my nerves, I forced my breathing steady and spoke to the beast in as calm a tone as I could muster. “N-Noah? Are you in there?”
No answer. It only blinked at me. None of its eyelids moved in sync with each other, making for an eerie toad-like effect that left my mouth dry, and—to my horror—my pussy wet.
This is not the time to be thirsty for tentacles, Beatrice! Pull yourself together, for Noah!
Despite my internal pep talk, my eyes roved down the creature's naked body.
He still had all of his tattoos. The band of eldritch symbols around his throat were just as illuminant as his eyes, gold and burning.
His nautical tattoos, while not glowing, seemed to ripple and move as if they were alive.
The ship on his chest and stomach sailed on malevolent tides, against a night sky of twinkling eldritch runes.
He wriggled his fingers, as if testing out his new body, which drew my attention to his knuckle tattoos reading HOLD FAST.
My attention dipped lower.
Washboard abdominal muscles and corded hips flowed down to a chiseled adonis belt.
Unlike the book Noah had been reading to me moments ago, there were no tentacles in place of legs.
By the familiar patchwork sleeve of ink covering his right leg, it was still very much his body. It was just warped by the mask.
The only thing—other than his face—that had been intensely altered was his cock.
Unholy.
Fucking.
Cthulhu.
Where his thick dick had been seconds ago was now a tapered green appendage. It wasn’t until the creature noticed where my gaze had wandered, that the flesh quivered and began to peel back.
It split in four sections, reminiscent of a banana peel. Ropes of clear fluid oozed between each portion, stretching and snapping as they opened up like a blooming flower to reveal the bud at the center.
No, not a bud. A beak. Like that of an octopus. It was the largest one I’d ever seen in person. Big enough to—
The beak opened and yet another appendage slowly emerged.
This one I recognized. A human cock, pink at the tip and dribbling copious amounts of pre-cum.
The chain tattoo wrapping his shaft confirmed my original suspicions.
It was Noah’s cock alright, just swollen by the mutation, with more pronounced veins.
My heart twisted into tight sailor knots.
Was he literally trapped inside this symbiote-esque creature?
“Noah!” I tried to call him again, hoping he was somewhere in there listening. “Can you hear me?”
Tentacles undulated in response, and the voice that came forth was nothing I could have prepared for.
I was less certain he had a mouth under the green feelers.
His voice didn't seem to come from any part of his body for that matter.
It echoed in my skull, in my chest, and from beneath the boat like a whale's song.
The words were ancient and nonsensical to me. Unlike Noah, I only knew a few key phrases. Just enough to understand it was indeed ancient Eldritch, or more recently coined, Aklo.
"I don't understand," I cried weakly as I tugged at the ziptie keeping me anchored to Noah's headboard. "Please, just let me go. I can help you get that mask off."
The monster moved closer, until its shins knocked against the bunk, and it hissed in frustration.
Bile scorched the back of my throat seeing the monster fumble, unfamiliar with this space.
The way those tendrils under his flesh moved was unnatural, like it didn’t understand human anatomy.
If Noah was in there, he didn't appear to be in control.
My pulse accelerated as the beast's attention moved to me. Its voice turned to a guttural hum that sunk straight to my core.
It crawled up onto the bed, moving its body so that it was on its hands and knees on Noah's mattress, with my body caged beneath it.
I was so much smaller in comparison. Noah's cock had emerged from the tentacle sheath, making it clear that it was aroused.
This couldn’t be happening.
A dream. A weird, horny, fucked up dream.
That's what this was. The spicy-sweet rum had gone straight to my head.
I'd probably passed out and was not having a freaky little dream about the man I'd been in love with for years turning into a tentacle monster. I probably fell asleep while Noah was reading to me. Wasn’t the book about this, too?
A fun notion in theory, but literal practice? Intimidating and frightening as hell.
I squeezed my eyes shut. "Wake up, wake up. Wake up!"
Its breath fanned my face, and my eyes shot open when tentacles prodded my lips, threaded through my hair and poked at my nipples.
It murmured something incomprehensible as it watched my nipples harden from the stimulation.
Nope. This wasn't a dream. Who was I fooling? Not me. This was too real to be fiction.
"Noah..." My voice came out as a rasp, barely recognizable as my own. "Please. I'm scared."
The creature's head canted, it's five eyeballs peering at me, though each one seemed to be focused on a different part of my body. Then, another sound rattled all around.
This time, I understood.
It was laughing at me. Like it found my predicament amusing. Maybe Noah was in there after all.
“T-this isn’t funny. You’re freaking me out…” My brain was pudding the moment his tentacles encircled both my breasts and squeezed them so tight they turned red, then a concerning shade of purple. “Ungh—Ow! That fucking hurts!”
Again, my protests went ignored.
His knee nudged my legs apart, just as Noah’s had before he’d put on the mask. This version of him wasn't so gentle.
While his tentacles prodded my breasts and face, his hands skimmed lower between my legs.
No. I wasn’t ready. Not yet. I needed to know Noah was in there. I needed to know he was watching over me, keeping me safe from whatever it was holding.
"Fhtagn," I sputtered, remembering my safe word. It was stupid, thinking it would work.
This creature hadn't shown any sign of caring about what I said, whether he understood or not.
So when all five of his eyes flashed with recognition at the Akloword Noah had given me for a safe word, I froze.
He grumbled something back to me, words I couldn't grasp. His voice came out disembodied and rife with annoyance. It was almost like he wasn't having a conversation with me. But a voice in his own head.
Maybe it was. Maybe Noah was inside it. Begging, threatening, pleading. Whatever it was he had to say to keep this thing from hurting me. After what was now clearly an internal debate, a scathing growl sounded in my skull, making my bones rattle.
He climbed off the bed, and the eye over the gaping hole where a nose should have been flicked to the abandoned tentacle toy. Vague disdain emanated from the creature. He picked it up, turned it over and…
Sniffed it… Why did everyone keep doing that?
The nose cavity twitched with a deep inhale. His tentacles coiled around the silicone, annoyance turning to curiosity, morphing quickly to pleasure. The scent from the toy had him muttering in my head again, the deep pleasure of his roiling voice coming forth as a chant. Ancient and unholy.
I swallowed as it seemed to taste the toy. His eyes fluttered and rolled back into his head for a moment. All five of them.
"If you like the taste of that, you can just go ahead and keep that. Suck on it like a lollipop and then let my captain go. Okay?"
My attempt at diplomacy failed miserably as it laughed again.
He spoke once more, and this time I picked up on one of the words uttered. Quiet, or more accurately, silence.
It was a command. Telling me to be quiet.
Had this only been my captain issuing the order, I would have launched into my usual bratty routine.
Not this time. Survival instincts told me to obey, because there was no telling just how much of Noah was left inside this thing.
When he spoke again, it uttered a single, barely-convievable word in English, in an accent I could barely comprehend, it was so thick.
“Mate.”