Girl on the Net

It’s that time of year again, in which I get to let my inner creepy goth out and write some Halloween erotica. Last year I did sex with zombies, the previous year it was a succubus (sort of), and this year – thanks to suggestions and ideas from some lovely people on Twitter – I’m tackling a creature from the deep. If you’d prefer to listen rather than read, it’s also available as audio – click ‘listen now’ above, or head to the audio porn page if you’d like to hear more sexy stories read aloud. I’m always a bit nervous and uncertain about writing fiction, but these Halloween erotica pieces are always a genuine pleasure to write, so I hope I can manage to give you a creepy shiver or two.

Content note: this story is written for Halloween, and is designed to be a tale of creepiness with a bit of sex thrown in. As a result it contains some themes that you might find disturbing: references to drowning, self-harm and suicidal ideation.

Truly, madly, deeply

It’s funny the paths life nudges you down. Six months ago I would never have seen myself enjoying this isolated life: spending my days relishing the hug of the cold in my bones, and my nights inhaling the freezing wind that blows off the loch. Three months ago I’d have said I would die without laughter, but today I prefer the cold, muffled echoes that you only find in deep water. One month ago I’d never have found myself pondering the question: how long does it take for a human being to drown?

It’s cliché, this getaway, that’s what everyone told me. Failed artist leaves the city after a bad breakup and goes to live in the wilds. No internet. No phone. No shops. No one to call if you go mad and feel like screaming. It will either make or break you, they said, and I believed them. Good job, too, because it turns out they were right.

I like to have the windows open here. Visitors used to complain about it – The loch’s so cold, Vivian! You’ll catch your death! – and it annoyed me. I like to sit in the armchair by the living room window and submerge myself in the atmosphere of the loch at dusk. Why wouldn’t I want to hear the wind whipping down from the mountains? Smell the loch as it changes throughout the seasons?

My open windows were a problem for them, but it’s funny how some problems disappear when you change your perspective: the visitors don’t come any more. Problem solved.

I don’t mind. I’m not lonely: I’ve fallen in love. I’m in love, and she has the most beautiful voice. If I could paint her, I wouldn’t paint her face but the cadence of her voice. In strokes of silver on dark, dark green, almost black. I would cast a melody across the canvas, because her voice was the first I knew of her.

Let’s back up a bit, before I introduce you. There’s someone else you need to meet. Nick. Say his name aloud, and you’ll know him as well as you need to. Nick: solid and steadfast. Practical and abrupt. Nick. Short for Nicholas, but he’d never respond to that. Never want you to waste more than a single syllable in summoning him, he’d want nothing to delay him in rushing to your side. Like a faithful sidekick. Like Lassie.

I loved Nick for a while, even if it’s hard to remember why. I know he used to praise my work – look at me with this kind of slack-jawed awe, as if what I did was more important than just slopping paint around on canvas. He used to stand behind me while I was working, wrapping one arm around my waist like a cat weaving between my calves, nuzzling and purring in the crook of my neck. He used to call me ‘genius’ and I don’t think he was joking, just thick. Dull. Dry in exactly the way a good man should be: caring and kind and considerate and wildly in love with me. I remember one night when I told him I looked forward to death, and he cried. Great, heaving sobs as if it would matter. As if I were someone.

It was deceptive, when you think about it. And certainly smothering. He used to fuck me with such gentleness, such delicacy, that the heat from his body above mine – close and humid and sickly – occasionally made me choke. The night that I left he just stared at me in wide-eyed shock. I remember thinking at the time: “I love him, why am I leaving?” But left I did, and now I can’t remember what I loved.

I know now why I left. Something was pulling me away. Someone. Her.

The first night in this cottage I sat with the windows open, and I heard her voice. Silver on green. Spilling over the calm night air like water pouring into my lungs. I remember wondering if she lived nearby, or if the night was just so clear it could carry sound from way across the loch.

It took a long time before I heard that voice again, and in the meantime I worried that I’d be driven mad by searching. Each day I walked out onto the path that cuts through the low-lying land around the loch. Staring across the black waters and taking note of where the lights dotted the bank on the far side. Where is she? Who is she?

On day twenty-seven she was back: singing wordlessly but beautifully. Almost keening. It’s a cliché to say that her voice ‘sounds like water’, but if you’ve ever heard water – I mean really listened – you’ll know exactly what I mean. I was drawn to her. Dragged to her. As if her voice could penetrate the centre of my chest, stick a fat silver hook inside and just yank me towards the water.

Once I’d heard her again I sketched a picture of the colours of her song and sent it to Nick, but it was imperfect. It couldn’t capture the ache of longing that resonated in the air. When he replied to tell me he loved it, I was disappointed. Tore up his words into tiny pieces, then cast them into the water.

Meanwhile I waited for her to return. I marked the days off on my calendar, and if I’m honest I marked the nights too. In the same way each evening: sitting by the open window, gorging myself on the scent of the loch, running my fingers through the wet slit of my cunt and keening – just like she did – as I came.

When she sang for the third time I lay naked on the bank. Skin blushing red with the cold, and stones beneath my buttocks. I sang with her and I cried with her, and I rubbed myself in time to the ebb and flow of her music. I had never felt so frightened, or so calm.

I wrote to Nick again: why not? He’d told me ‘don’t be a stranger’ so I wrote like a friend: telling him about the precious woman with the rippling voice. I didn’t tell him that I loved her. That when I heard her for the third time it had confirmed what I already knew: I would do anything, even die, to get a single glimpse of her face. I just told him I heard the woman from my sketch, and she sounded compelling and beautiful and dangerous like the loch. He replied asking if I wanted him to visit. Telling me to take care. Reminding me I was loved. See what I mean about Nick? Dry.

Twenty-seven days after her last appearance I thought “why not?” and hired a boat. By now I knew I wouldn’t find her on foot, and I wanted a chance – just one! – to see her with my eyes as well as my mind: the owner of the silvergreen voice, who called to me so beautifully. I rowed until my arms were sore, following the insistent timbre of her song until I was no longer chasing it, but feeling the music roil and swell in the air itself surrounding me. I still couldn’t see her – just the odd flash of silver as a fish neared the surface, and the deep black water all around. The water looked comforting. It looked like home.

I took off every stitch of clothing and slipped naked into the loch.

As I floated within reach of the boat, I sensed her nearby. A powerful presence cutting through the water, with a speed that was far beyond human. I felt the water parting around me as somewhere deep, deep below she twisted and propelled herself, closing the icy distance between our bodies. I wasn’t afraid. By the time she was close all I felt was an overwhelming sense of calm. My limbs felt too heavy to move, but that didn’t seem to matter: they were exactly where they needed to be. In the water. Within her reach.

She caressed me with slippery fingers. So gently at first that it could just have been nighttime ripples on the surface of the loch. She nudged at the soles of my feet and the backs of my calves, giving shivery little kisses to the pale spaces between each one of my toes. Tendrils of her hair snaked beneath me like pondweed, cushioning me. Preventing me from sinking down into the blackness.

That’s when I knew she loved me back.

Her voice, her hair, her touch, was all around me. The swell of her wordless singing gave as much pleasure as her fingers did – coiling around my calves and thighs, etching silver trails along my back and buttocks and the soft white skin on the inside of my arms. My breathing slowed along with my heart – drawn-out, shallow breaths that gave me space to truly feel her song. I moaned, and in that moment I could have sworn her song changed – adding a bass note of urgent lust to the ethereal swell of her music. As if she were not just drawing out my pleasure, but consuming it.

Her hands, by now, were no longer gentle. They were greedy, insistent – rushing over my wet skin, scrabbling with slick fingertips to find purchase on my shivering body. I tried to push against the current, nudging myself in the right directions so her hands and fingers would land where I needed: at the curve on the side of my breasts and the slit at the top of my thighs. Above all I wanted her touch on my wet, eager clit – the epicentre of my now-languid pulse. But I still couldn’t move. I had to just sink into pleasure as she expertly manoeuvred me in the water – stroking my breasts, grabbing at my thighs, running her hands and hair and voice around my waist and chest. As if she was binding me in the water, gaining sustenance from my presence. As if she were hungry and only my body could sate her. She ran her tongue up my body to the base of my neck, leaving shivers of pleasure that thrummed within my skull, then kissed firmly down my spine before slipping her tongue, gently and coldly, into the pulsing centre of my cunt.

The thump of my heart slowed further in response, as if it wanted to suspend time so I could spend more of it with her. Frozen with fear and love, twisted by her own hands as I lay suspended in the water, I cried out once more in pleasure at the insistent sucking kisses of her lips against my clit, before she drew me below the surface into her embrace. Pressing her mouth against mine in the murky darkness, surrounding me with tendrils of hair that caressed every inch of my skin. Filling me with water and her fingers and her song. I have never felt as full – as fulfilled – as the night that she fucked me.

I didn’t tell Nick this, of course, though I think I did write to him again. I must have. My memory fades in and out these days, as it always does when one’s in love. I remember the feeling of her fingers in my cunt, and the slippery, silver kisses down my spine, but I can’t remember what I wrote that prompted Nick to find me. Perhaps I told him “I love her”, or explained how I conjure her voice to soothe me to sleep. Perhaps I told him my plans to be with her again. Or asked him how long it takes: for a human being to drown.

But I cannot remember, and I’m worried I may have betrayed myself. Three weeks ago, when I heard her song again, it struck a different note in my skull. One that rang like an alarm. It resonated for too long, shaking out a different memory: the words “help me” scrawled in blue ink on a postcard. The word “dying” scratched deep in icy skin. When I breathe in, the air gushes down into my lungs like water, and sometimes when I breathe out, I find myself gargling nonsense. Whispering “Nick” in a voice that’s weak like drowning… “Nick, I need you. Please come.”

They were right when they said that this trip would make or break me: I am made. I am made whole, with purpose and love. I don’t need Nick’s warmth or his purrs of adoration – I just need her cold fingers and green-silver song. She needs me to join her – to nourish her – in the loch. And I will not let her down.

Nick responded to my call, as I knew he would. Blew right in from the past like nothing had changed. Kind, warm, trusting Nick, who never stopped offering help or begging me to take care, even as he started to slur his own words. Even as he slumped in his chair, succumbing to inky unconsciousness. Even now he’s bound and helpless, he still offers comfort – dark eyes brimming with tears of love, gagged lips ever ready to forgive me. I’m lucky that he’s my first: I suspect the next Nick will be far less understanding.

As I haul his bound body to the boat and cover it with blankets to keep his faithful heart beating, I wonder how he will taste to her. Whether he will be hot and dry, the way I imagine. Humid and choking like a sauna. I wonder, too, whether each will taste different to the one before – how her song will change as she consumes them. Healing, at first, then growing stronger and more beautiful with each soul that is plunged into the loch. I no longer wonder how long it takes for a human to drown, but I do wonder how she’ll reward me.

We’ll meet her tonight – together. I will row him out to the centre of the loch, and summon her with deep ripples as I tip him gently over the edge. Then I’ll slip naked into the water and succumb to her song. Let her reward me with her hands and lips and voice. Let her love me, as I know she must love me: as we always love those who respond to our cries for help.

 

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