**********

4.

**********

 

As sunlight cascaded in through the undrawn curtains of his bedroom window Chelsea Rice woke up from the deepest sleep of his life. He groaned groggily and slowly leaned up. What a crazy fucking dream, he thought. And then Chelsea saw himself. He was naked. Just like five nights ago his crotch and cock were covered in cum crust. There was light bruising where his wrists and ankles were held, his bed sheets were soggy with sweat and semen, his pyjama bottoms were still hanging from the computer and his shredded pyjama tops were in two places at once. Worst of all was the burning ache inside his butt.

 

It wasn't a dream, he thought in horror. Oh God, it wasn't a dream.

 

Right there and then Chelsea didn't give one earthly damn if he was naked or not, he bolted for the door. His legs buckled beneath him for a moment (him not realizing how weak they still were after his ordeal) but he flung open the door and ran down the landing into Tom and Margaret's room and slammed that door shut behind him.

 

He breathed in gasps.

 

What the hell? Chelsea looked at his hands. They were shaking. What the hell is going on here?

 

The boy slumped against the door as his mind raced to try to come to grips with whatever it was that was going on. It wasn't a dream (he knew that much by his fucked up clothes). Whatever happened last night actually happened. So did someone break into his room? But how? He made sure all the doors were locked and all the windows were closed when Tom and Margaret left for Nottingham. But someone fucked me. That fiery pain in his arsehole was proof enough. Chelsea tried picturing the man who did this to him and saw nothing. But it had to be a man, he thought. Some person. But there was no one. No face, no torso, no arms, no legs, not even a cock. He remembered nothing of his attacker. He knew why though. His conscious mind couldn't fathom it but he knew why. It wasn't Jonno come to ravish him in his dreams again. It was someone one else. Or rather... something else.

 

There was something in his room.

 

Tom was the first person that came to mind. But even if Chelsea called him, what would he say? `Dad, please come home, something attacked me in the middle of the night?' He automatically pictured Margaret in the background of that conversation warning him not to fall for a practical joke. `Now that we're gone he's just looking for attention, Thomas! I've warned you to stop coddling him, this is why!' His parents were no help to him. Even so he felt safer in their room than he did in his own. Chelsea exhaled. Have to calm down, he told himself. Have to think clearly. First things first – getting cleaned up. His parent's bedroom also had a bathroom attachment so he quickly went inside and took a shower. He felt so dirty he just had to get clean. Shaking, Chelsea used some of Tom's shower gel (even though he hated the smell) and Margaret's coconut and lychee shampoo. There was some Body Shop soap lying around. With that and a sponge he scrubbed his skin clean then dried himself up with a towel. Then he turned to the mirror.

DON'T BE AFRAID, CHELSEA.

Another message in the steam! The boy screamed and ran out of both the bathroom and the bedroom until he was outside on the landing again. He grabbed the bannister and whimpered. "It's not just my room," he said aloud. "It's the whole house."

 

Then it took his hand.

 

He looked down. His hand was just there holding onto the railing. Nothing was there! But he felt it. A hand holding his hand; the cold touch of a palm brushing his knuckles, thicker fingers lacing with his thinner ones. Chelsea's body shivered when a second hand brushed his hip and slowly traced its way up his still wet skin.

 

It's behind me, thought Chelsea. It's...

 

He had to get out of there! Chelsea ran back into his bedroom. He didn't care that none of his shirts or trousers had been ironed yet he just grabbed the first ones he saw, a pair of socks, some briefs, his shoes, his school bag and his phone. He ran back out and down the stairs and got changed as soon as possible – then he ran out and locked the door behind him.

 

**********

 

College passed him by as a dull haze that day.

 

He arrived into a school full of black shadows whizzing around him at speed. Their words were tinnitus. Chelsea tried to pay attention during class but when he looked at his textbooks all the letters were scrambled. A was X and E was Z and I was Q and O was P and U was V. If he stared too hard at them the letters leapt upright and marched across the page for him. It hurt to sit down and his wrists were still sore. At some point that morning, a teacher asked him if he was `alright'. Chelsea couldn't even recall who it was (it might have been Mrs. O'Neil for all he knew) but he remembered telling them "yes" and walking away.

 

None of it stopped until he snuck into the toilets and took a few co-codamol. After that his head cleared (even if only a little bit) and he decided to spend his lunchbreak in the library.

 

Pimlico Manor College's library was dissected into three portions. One was the library proper which contained row after row of lockable glass bookcases for its hundreds and hundreds of books. The second was a reading area with six long reading tables for group projects and a separate thirty smaller ones for private reading. The third section was the computer room. Fifteen Windows 7 equipped Compaq PCs arrayed in three columns of five with a shared printer between them at the front desk. There was some (severely restricted) internet access. After reluctantly eating the remaining half of a cold steak bake he bought from Greggs that morning, Chelsea asked the librarian, Ms. Whitley, for some time on a computer.

 

"You can take No. 7," she said.

 

So the boy sat down, shrugged off his satchel and blazer, then opened up Firefox on the desktop and Googled the term `Poltergeists'. Un-ironically the first link he clicked on was the Wikipedia one.

"In folklore and parapsychology, a poltergeist (German for "noisy ghost") is a type of ghost or other supernatural entity which is responsible for physical disturbances, such as loud noises and objects being moved or destroyed. They are purportedly capable of pinching, biting, hitting, and tripping people. Most accounts of poltergeists describe the movement or levitation of objects such as furniture and cutlery, or noises such as knocking on doors. They have traditionally been described as troublesome spirits who haunt a particular person instead of a specific location. Such alleged poltergeist manifestations have been reported in many cultures and countries including the United States, India‚ Japan, Brazil, Australia, and most European nations. Early accounts date back to the 1st century."

 

Chelsea was born in the late nineties. He was a millennial. He didn't believe in God. He didn't pray (not even when Nancy disappeared). He had probably spent less time in a church than he had watching YouTube videos of Christopher Hitchens eviscerating religious belief. For Chelsea the supernatural was what it was -- a thing of fiction.

 

But how else to explain last night's events? Or this morning?

 

No matter how hard he tried to think rationally of the whole thing his explanations fell flat. He had to be alone in the house last night – but for the sake of self-argument, or of contrarianism, he reasoned what if I wasn't? What if his invisible incubus was actually a burglar in the night and it was too dark to see him properly – how did he get inside when all the doors were locked and none of the windows were broken? Why was nothing stolen? And if he wasn't a burglar (just a horny predator) why bother fingering messages into foggy mirrors? Why bother playing mind games when your only intention is to fuck someone? And if the man who wrote the message in the evening also wrote the one in the morning, that meant he probably spent the night inside the house. Where was he hiding the whole time? Under the bed?

 

Every time Chelsea tried to picture what happened last night his memory fogged. But he recalled some things quite well. He recalled seeing a message in his bathroom mirror and then running for his bedroom door – that shut itself from the outside. How could anyone shut the door from the outside and get back inside seconds later? Why didn't he remember anything about his attacker? Suppose it was just difficult to see in the darkness – surely Chelsea might remember hearing or smelling something off the guy? There were no hard grunts or strangled orgasmic cries, no beer and cigarettes on a horny breath, no growling voice warning him to `keep his mouth shut or else', no nothing. That just didn't make sense. Thinking this was rational was irrational. Chelsea Rice had been fucked last night -- and there was no doubt in his mind that he was fucked by a `what' not a `who'.

 

Those were the things he thought about in the library. Later on in the day, and even later on his way home, he wondered about other things. Like what did it mean when it said "DON'T I DESERVE A REWARD?"

 

A reward for what? Chelsea thought.

 

And then it hit him.

 

All the weird things that had been happening recently – Jonno and Riya getting slapped in paint, Mrs. O'Neil getting sick, that stupid burnt book and the nonsense addresses, his parents suddenly called away to Nottingham – what if that was all down to it?

 

**********

 

Chelsea came home to an empty house. When he fished his keys out of his satchel and unlocked the door (half surprised that he remembered to lock it this morning) the silence was louder than anything he had ever heard. Everything was in order. No signs of entry, nothing broken, nothing stolen. The boiler was on timer so it was warm. Everything was the way he left it. Even so, Chelsea was nervous. He did a good chunk of his growing up in that house and knew the history behind each of its little quirks; the dent in the bannister, the slight crack in the garden window, the stains on his Mom's leather chair and so on; but for the first time in his life Chelsea felt scared in his own home.

 

It was here.

 

The boy couldn't say how he knew. He merely did. He knew. It was almost like a sense, like a tingling in the air; unobservable but present and alarmingly so. Sighing, he went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of orange juice. There was some left over beef casserole (and some potatoes and a side salad to go with it) so Chelsea put some in a Pyrex dish and left it in the oven to slow cook. Halfway between that and checking to make sure all the downstairs windows and doors were still locked he realized he was just avoiding the inevitable.

 

Come on, Chelsea, he thought to himself. You can do it.

 

He dragged himself up the stairs to his bedroom. But before he opened the door he took his phone out and set the camera to record. Then he left the lens facing his bedroom door and went inside.

 

Everything here was as he left it – a mess. His red chequered pyjama top was in two pieces and the bottoms were hanging off his monitor. His white fronts were in a soggy wad below his coffee table and his bed was in a right state. The duvet was in a misshapen bundle on the floor and his now malformed bedding was stained with semen in at least two places. Compared to other kid's bedrooms it probably wasn't that untidy but to Chelsea it was an absolute mess. Nothing told the last night's tale better than the state of his room then.

 

Scared yet somehow resilient, he tidied it up. He took off his satchel and blazer and went to work. First he binned his pyjamas (one was useless without the other) then he pulled off his sheets and made the bed up with some fresh ones. After that he put the bedding and his boxers in his clothes hamper with the intention of washing them later on. He turned on his PC then went through his emails. There was a few about The Seventeen Man-Brides of Agaroth so Chelsea made a note to proof read and post the new chapter as soon as possible. Once that was done he unpacked his satchel and opened the window for a little bit of fresh air.

 

Come on, thought Chelsea to himself. You can do it.

 

He had a plan, you see.

 

The door was still open. The boy walked over, shut it, then sat down in front of it. He must have looked like a punished schoolboy forced to face the wall after talking back to the teacher. Instead he wanted to talk to the being that stole his virginity.

 

Chelsea swallowed the lump in his throat and said, "Are you there? I want to ask you some questions. Please knock the door once for yes and twice for no. Okay?"

 

From the outside – it knocked the door once.

 

Chelsea jumped.

 

His morbidly quiet room made the sound thrice as loud. He had no television and there was no traffic outside. There was nothing to confuse it with. It was definitely a knock. Somewhere in the back of his mind Chelsea asked himself if he was finally going insane, if life had finally pushed too many buttons and just decided to shove him on the crazy train once and for all. Was he really about to have a conversation with a supernatural being? But how could there be any peace for him if he didn't?

 

"Are you human?" He asked.

 

Two knocks.

 

A chill went down Chelsea's spine. "Have you ever been human?"

 

One knock.

 

Poltergeist, thought Chelsea. "Do you have a name?"

 

One knock.

 

If they were ever to have further `conversations' Chelsea decided they would have to find a way to have it communicate that name to him. "How long have you been here? One day?"

 

Two knocks.

 

"One week?"

 

Two knocks.

 

"...One year...?"

 

Two knocks.

 

"More than one year?"

 

One knock.

 

His chills became shivers. More than a year? How long had it had been lurking in his bedroom? Chelsea thought back on all the things he'd done inside there that no one else in the world knew. His first kiss. The first time he smoked a cigarette. The first time he smoked weed. The first time he posed nude as `Taffy Trap' for Tumblr. Masturbating for the umpteenth time to the Jonny Ryder scene in Chavs Vs Skaters and crying himself to sleep the night Jonno first beat him up. The night he took out a razor and genuinely thought about ending it. Something was watching him the entire time?

 

"Have you been... watching me?"

 

One knock.

 

But then why now? Chelsea thought. Why finally start making contact NOW of all times?

 

"Do you... do you like me?"

 

One knock – somehow slower and harder than the others.

 

The room grew cold.

 

Chelsea bit his lip. He knew the answer to his next question before he even worked up the nerve to ask it; "What you did to me last night... are you going to do it again...?"

 

One knock.

 

It was in Chelsea's mind to ask it "when?" (knowing full well it could not reply) but it was sooner than he thought. Much sooner. Once again the air around him went cold. It wasn't like a breeze – more like a sudden temperature drop around his body rather than in it. He remembered the sensation well. That meant it was here. Chelsea's lips were still sore from last night, from when it pulled off his white fronts and shoved them into his mouth to silence his screams. He didn't mean to close his eyes. Half the point of making contact with it was to prove that he could not see what he ought to have seen, that this was beyond reality as he knew it. Yet he closed his eyes all the same. And then he felt himself being kissed. It kissed himself softly at first, a tiny little peck on the lips just gently nudging Chelsea's head back, just to see if he would run away again. He didn't.

 

Chelsea opened his eyes again.

 

They saw nothing.

 

But it was there.

 

And it kissed him again.

 

Harder this time. More firmly. Something like a tongue pierced open Chelsea's lips and pushed its way into his mouth, making him moan. He had only ever been kissed twice before that. Once was by a girl called Abby Danemouth, a brief friend he made (accidentally) in college last year. Back then he was in an afterschool film club with her. After a viewing of The Ring (1998) they got to talking and texting. They had some stuff in common. Weeks later she invited herself back to Chelsea's place to admit that she fancied him. And she kissed him. Most boys would've turned that into their first time but Chelsea felt nothing. They didn't speak to each other again after that night.

 

That was his second kiss.

 

His first (and up until that moment his best) was back in secondary school. At the time it all happened so fast and time had muddled his memory of it all (especially since Nancy's disappearance was so fresh on his mind at the time) but what he remembered clearly was being given a detention that day for talking back to his science teacher. It was late (and dark out) and around 6pm maybe, but at the time they still lived in North London so home was just a ten-minute walk away. All he wanted was go for a quick pee before he left school. But when he went to the toilets, without any kind of warning what so ever, a Year 11 boy followed him inside and pushed him into one of the stalls. Chelsea was so utterly scared that he didn't even fight back. He remembered the boy saying something like, "Stop fucking ignoring me," as he shoved Chelsea against the wall, grabbed his face and then shoved his tongue down his throat. Up until last night it was simultaneously one of the most frightening and sexy moments of his life -- he remembered them moaning together and how the boy's hard on poked at his little belly. It was a moment that could have gone on forever – but then all of a sudden it didn't. It ended. And the boy glared -- not at Chelsea but through him -- like some traumatized soldier. Then he ran out of stall in disgust with himself.

 

Chelsea didn't remember much about that boy. He was tall (but then everyone in Year 11 seems tall when you're in Year 8) and black. That was all he knew. He didn't even know his name. Chelsea saw him again a few times after that but they never spoke, both of them too scared to acknowledge what had happened, and a year later he was gone, off to college, leaving Chelsea to deal with the fallout from the nuke that that kiss set off in him – that he was gay.

 

Chelsea didn't know what to think about this kiss.

 

How could you be kissed by something that was invisible? How could something so lacking in form and shape suddenly push him by his shoulders into his own carpet? How could a `man' without the weight and scent of a man press against his lips so hard they were bruising? Never in his life had Chelsea Rice felt such a stark disconnect between what he was feeling and what he was seeing and it was enough to drive him bananas. To simply prevent himself from going crazy he was forced to close his eyes and imagine that the poltergeist was a person, a construct of flesh and blood and bone (however faceless and nameless it may have been) to make sense of this.

 

So Chelsea shut his gin-bottle eyes and imagined it as a person. And then that `person' suddenly pinched his nose. With their lips so tightly locked the boy couldn't breathe. He held out for a few seconds before breaking the kiss, gasping. And like some sneaky fuck boy teasing more and more sexual favours out of his cornered little drunk girl, it slipped its fucking tongue inside his mouth. Chelsea gasped. Its tongue was so thick and coarse down his throat (and so sudden) that he accidently opened his eyes again – and all he saw was the light fixture and some cracks in the ceiling. He quickly shut them. And as its tongue so hungrily played with Chelsea's (and with his confused mind so occupied with how terrifyingly good that felt), Chelsea didn't notice the buttons on his shirt being popped open one after the other. It was only when his shirt flew open and he felt the cold chill upon his hot flushed chest that he realised it.

 

Chelsea broke the kiss, opened his eyes.

 

He leaned up on his elbows and asked, perhaps a bit stupidly, "W-what's going on?" only to have his arms yanked up behind him and his school shirt pulled off of him. When it pushed Chelsea back down into the carpet the boy quickly closed his eyes again lest he frighten himself. He felt two strong hands grip his wrists. They were stronger than anyone or anything he had ever felt before. Stronger than even Jonno was that distant April day when he shoved Chelsea through the bushes into a puddle of mud and posted the sight on Facebook. It pressed his wrists down either side of him and left him spread-eagled. With his arms apart and his bushy mane of curly brown hair all askew he looked very much like a younger and more sinful version of that dear old carpenter's son as they nailed him to the cross.

 

He thought it was going to kiss him again.

 

But it did something else.

 

It pinched his nose. The boy let off a warped giggle, like laughing into a megaphone, and opened his mouth to breathe. Why is it teasing me? He thought. It was as though it was being playful with him! And then moments later a thick cock-shaped protrusion jutted through his lips, into his mouth and all the way down his gasping throat. Chelsea spluttered. But it didn't stop. Even as the boy beneath it kicked his long legs and gagged on its cock.

 

If Chelsea had a tenner for every blowjob he'd ever fantasized himself giving he'd be a millionaire. Hell, he'd seen Kyler Moss and Kai Alexander and Jesse Starr do it dozens and dozens of times and flogged himself raw dreaming of the day Jonno finally let him do it. But in reality he'd never even touched someone else's penis, much less deep throat it. There was no preparation for him. He didn't know how to relax his muscles or breathe naturally through his nose. There was no warning. So when it just jammed its cock down his throat what else could he do but gag on it, helplessly?

 

It pulled its cock out of his throat only slightly, just until the bulbous `head' bristled his taste buds, then shoved it back down again. Chelsea jerked. He whimpered too but the sound was like a sucking wet wheeze up its cock shaft. But even he could have talked then, even if Chelsea had the breath to splutter out "stop" or "go more slowly, it's my first time" he knew it wouldn't have listened to him. Suddenly Chelsea was aware of how little control he had over this situation. Worse still, how much this thing really wanted him. He had no idea why the poltergeist waited years to finally take him but its frustration, wanton desire, rough passion and its uncontrollable need to control was evident.

 

Chelsea was at its mercy.

 

To keep from choking or throwing up he had to train himself how to accept its force down his throat. It slid in and then out again, in and then out again; in and out, in and out, in and out in a steady rhythm as Chelsea slowly taught himself how to give this being what it wanted. He kept himself as still as possible and relaxed his throat until it was another perfect hole for it to fuck. And as Chelsea got used to it the speed of its thrusts carefully picked up -- in-out, in-out, in-out, in-out -- until it grabbed the boy by his hair and gave it one last hard shove.

 

Had it been a human being that had so ruthlessly throat-fucked him, his mouth would have overflowed with cum. But the poltergeist was not human anymore. Its orgasm hit Chelsea like something else, not a torrent of semen and a stream of lusty grunts but rather a surge of waves of unmistakably pleasurable delirium passing throughout his body and mind. It was like a drug high. All of a sudden his mind exploded with psychedelic images and sensations bending his mind, streaming ecstasy into every receptor for pleasure that existed in his nervous system and dialling up its potency to 11. Its orgasm was the single greatest sensation he had ever felt – far more powerful than any he had ever given to himself. It was all so much. Too much.

 

And so Chelsea passed out.

**********

 

The alarm buzzed its annoying 8am wakeup call. Yawning, Chelsea rolled onto his face, reached up, and slapped the alarm off. He felt groggy. Not a just-woken-up-from-a-nap-groggy but a morning-after-having-your-stomach-pumped-in-A&E groggy. His jaw was killing him. It felt like he'd passed a cantaloupe through it. Then when he tried to get up onto his feet he buckled – his legs were so weak they almost gave out on him. He grabbed the coffee table to steady himself then carefully padded into his bathroom on tired feet.

 

What his mirror showed him was a mangled post-modernist reinterpretation of what Chelsea ought to have looked like. His hair was a bushy mess. His shirt was half open and wrinkled. His slackened red and black striped tie hung like a noose from his collar like the dried tracks of saliva and phlegm tracing traced downwards from the corners of his mouth to his jaw. Although he didn't realize it when he woke up, Chelsea was naked from his abdomen down. His flaccid penis and light peach fuzz of pubic hair were covered in crusted semen (again) and his pale neck was smattered with bright red hickeys. Clearly, after Chelsea passed out, it decided to have some more fun with his body.

 

Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck! He thought repeatedly. OH FUCK!

 

Downstairs a key twisted inside a lock to open a door. Then he heard his mother's voice call out to him; "Chelsea! Your father and I are home!"