Sposalizio del Mare

The scene dissolved in swirling yellow-greyness, the colour of the sand in Mongibello. Tom saw Dickie smiling at him, dressed in the corduroy suit that he had worn in San Remo. The suit was soaking wet, the tie a dripping string. Dickie bent over him, shaking him. `I swam!' he said. `Tom, wake up! I'm all right! I swam! I'm alive!' Tom squirmed away from his touch. He heard Dickie laugh at him, Dickie's happy, deep laugh. `Tom!' The timbre of the voice was deeper, richer, better than Tom had even been able to make it in his imitations. Tom pushed himself up. His body felt leaden and slow, as if he were trying to raise himself out of deep water.

`I swam!' Dickie's voice shouted, ringing and ringing in Tom's ears as if he heard it through a long tunnel.

Tom looked around the room, looking for Dickie in the yellow light under the bridge lamp, in the dark corner by the tall wardrobe. Tom felt his own eyes stretched wide, terrified, and though he knew his fear was senseless, he kept looking everywhere for Dickie, below the half-drawn shades at the window, and on the floor on the other side of the bed. He hauled himself up from the bed, staggered across the room, and opened a window. Then the other window. He felt drugged. Somebody put something in my wine, he thought suddenly. He knelt below the window, breathing the cold air in, fighting the grogginess as if it were something that was going to overcome him if he didn't exert himself to the utmost. Finally he went into the bathroom and wet his face at the basin. The grogginess was going away. He knew he hadn't been drugged. He had let his imagination run away with him. He had been out of control. He drew himself up and calmly took off his tie. He moved as Dickie would have done, undressed himself, bathed, put his pyjamas on and lay down in bed.

He lay with one arm under his head, the other hand slinking down by instinct toward his crotch, where his johnson was perking up in expectation of its nightly orgasm. Dickie masturbated once in the morning when he woke up and once in the evening before he went to sleep. Tom knew that from listening at his door and sometimes, when he dared, peering through his keyhole. Sometimes in the afternoon when he took a short riposo he would bang one out, but always at least twice a day, an admirably regular routine.

Tonight, Tom was tired and really not in the mood, but he hated to break a habit, even, or especially, an acquired one. And it did help him drop off.

He shuffled his pyjama pants down under his ass and started wearily, automatically to touch himself. He thought about Dickie. He always thought about Dickie when he masturbated. At first he thought of himself as Dickie, which was only proper (the cool slide of the silk pyjamas and the bite of Dickie's gold rings on Tom's cock invigorated the illusion). But then, inevitably he would find himself outside Dickie, watching him. He pictured Dickie's beautiful bronzed body, his firm, fat prick, his deep, manly grunts, his powerful, vigorous motions, controlled yet animalistic: a prime specimen of the American male demonstrating his redoubtable virility for the movie camera of Tom's mind.

And then, no matter how he tried to coral his thoughts toward an at least somewhat accepted end, they would go yet further astray, and he would find he was imagining himself not as Dickie or even observing him, but with him and under him, smothered by his weight and heat and taking his cock, being claimed and bred by him, filled and owned to the core of his being. Afterwards there was the sharp, acrid shame and self-recrimination, but in the moment these thoughts excited him as nothing else ever had or any longer could, sent him careening toward a cataclysmic orgasm, which him breathless and soaked, sated get yearning.

Tom was at the brink, snorting, hand jerking furiously, when a wet kiss, cold as death, fell heavily on his lips. Tom gasped and came and opened his eyes.

He'd found Dickie. He'd looked everywhere, but hadn't thought to look up.

'Hello, Tom.'

What? Dickie? How?

`I swam', Dickie said, and smiled wide like the jaws of death, wet like the abyss of a watery grave, smiled like every one of Tom's fears and half-hopes brought to terrible reality.

Tom felt the familiar mounting panic, crawling up his throat like a living thing, but worse than it ever had been.

`How in the hell—'

`Not anymore. I told you, Tom, I swam.'

He tried abruptly to sit up, but Dickie put a hand on his chest, lightly, yet all at once it felt like he had the whole of the Atlantic balanced in a funnel over his heart.

Dickie held Tom there for a moment, as if just to prove he could, then moved back to give Tom space. Sleep paralysis, Tom thought, but he wasn't asleep. He blinked and slapped himself to make sure. Before he opened his eyes again he heard Dickie laugh.

For the first time since a very long time ago, Tom had the urge to piss himself.

He had to get out, had to get away, get—anywhere, it didn't matter where. He fumbled his way off the bed, and Dickie let him go.

He took three paces across the room then came to a halt, clenching his fists. Where was he running to? What was he running from? His own overactive imagination?

He'd fallen asleep without realising, that was it. No, he was still asleep, somehow, and this was a continuation of that earlier dream.

'How could I sleep, with my death unavenged?'

Tom slowly turned his head, and made himself look at the thing in his room. Dickie was sitting on the bed now. His soaked hair was a shade darker than it was when dry, and his skin was paler too, as if he hadn't had much sun lately.

`You look like me', Dickie said.

He stood up and walked toward Tom and his feet squelched against the floor. His eyes were bluer than they had ever been in life, blue like the bottomless depths of the ocean. Blue as the sky the day Tom saw him on the beach at Mongibello.

As he approached his clothes sloughed off him, simply splitting down the centre and peeling apart like the skin of some rancid fruit, landing on the floor in a dark sodden mass that reminded Tom of a pile of seaweed. Tom half-closed his eyes, afraid of what would be underneath, but it was only Dickie's body, naked and white and wet as if he'd just been dragged out of San Remo harbour.

He dragged the weight of his drowning behind him like a tide, or a thousand rotted chains and Tom found himself flattened against the floor, on his back, arms pinned, heart crushed, almost blacking out, gasping for breath.

Dickie stood over Tom, cock hanging between his thighs with a weight all its own, dripping bullet-holes in Tom's shirt. `Pathetic.'

`I don't understand', Tom whispered. `Please go away. Please.'

`You've hurt a lot of people, Tom. You should be thankful it was me you got given to.'

`Given?'

Given by whom? He was unnerved by the thought of being awarded like a prize, like the spoils of some contest, dice rattled by ragged claws under the surface of a slimy sea.

`Until eternity or repentance. And we both know which'll come first.'

`I'm sorry. Dickie, I'm so sorry.'

`You're not, Tom.' Dickie sounded weary, resigned, though there was something else in his voice as well. Not anger, but perhaps the ghost of it. 'But I haven't started yet.'

Dickie reached down for Tom and the pressure momentarily relented. Without even thinking, Tom swung for him.

His fist connected with a horrible dull, wet, noise, not at all what living flesh sounded like. Yet there was a bright bloom of pain under his knuckles, as if he'd smacked into iron. Dickie paused and just looked at him.

`What are you trying to do, Tom?' he said, calmly, almost intimately. He grabbed Tom's arms and held them in such a vicelike grip Tom thought they might snap off at the elbows. Then he yanked Tom up off the floor.

Tom struggled; Dickie ignored him. It terrified Tom more than if he'd fought back, or been angry. Dickie had always been stronger than him, but this was something more. There was a slow inexorability to his strength that was terrifyingly inhuman. He might as well have tried to fight the tide.

Dickie methodically stripped him, stripped way all the spoils of Tom's stolen life: Dickie's scarlet pyjamas, the silver bracelet Dickie had never worn, the silver tie-pin he had never owned, and Dickie's rings, which Tom never took off, not even in bed.

His hands closed like tyre clamps on either side of Tom's torso, and Tom heard and felt at least two of his ribs snap under Dickie's thumb. For a long moment he was in agony, but then the pain was washed away, leaving behind a hideous numb nausea that was worse.

`You break so beautifully', Dickie murmured. `God.' He kissed Tom again, leaving his lips tasting of salt, then dropped him on the bed.

What are you trying to do, Tom thought, though he knew (he'd thought about it often enough) and was about to receive confirmation.

`Want to see a magic trick?' Dickie said. He sort of grunted and seemed to force the thick weapon between his legs to rise. It moved like something you operated by a lever, something he could manipulate at will, not a natural human process at all. Tom had never seen a guy get an erection that fast—or one that big.

He grinned at Tom's wide-eyed, horror-struck face, and his cock rippled. `Now watch me make it disappear.'

`God, D—'

Dickie crashed down on him like a tidal wave breaking, the evil monstrosity of his prick slapping against Tom's stomach.

There was no blood in that pale, lifeless organ. It was swelled and bloated like a corpse after weeks under the sea, but when he put the head at Tom's hole it was hard—not springy like a normal, living penis (not that Tom had touched any but his own), but stiff, solid like necrotised tissue.

Which was what it was, Tom thought, feeling his gorge rising. He was about to be raped by a dead man's dick.

Tom's sphincter puckered up as tight as it could; despite the desire that was clouding his brain, Tom's body seemed to shrink away from that stupefying slab of frozen meat. But Dickie held him fast. He started to push in.

`Dickie, wait—' Tom put a hand up on Dickie, stroking his chest and shoulder, caressing his neck, pleading for anything but this.

`Get your hand off me, you pervert', Dickie said, and pulled Tom all the way down on his cock.

Tom opened his mouth in a singled anguished moan.

`Yeah. God, that's tight. You're disgusting for wanting this', he told Tom as he picked up his hips and started to ram into him, with an instant remorseless speed that was, again, more mechanical than human. `I hope you know that, Tom. I hope you know how sick you are that this is what you killed me for. You make me sick. Urrhnn, fuck, I could fucking die in this ass.'

The pain was as bad as his broken ribs, but it didn't wash away. Rather it held, sustained like a single vivid note, never dropping in intensity, but spiking whenever Dickie slammed into him. It was nothing like what he had imagined. His eyes smarted in the warm tide-pools of his tears. It hurt so much it was hard to breathe.

And that was before Dickie put his hands around his throat. There was definitely something there now, in his narrowed eyes, the twist of his mouth. Everything Tom had ever imagined he could hear in the disdainful glances of other guys, that they only most of the time took the care to conceal.

`Fucking queer. Fucking fag. Sissy, cocksucker, bitchboy, slut.' The words hit Tom like slaps; they were sharp, cut short, as if Dickie hated wasting even that much breath on him. Yet even as he poured out an acidic shower of scorn, he fucked into Tom faster and faster, grunting with whatever satisfaction his unliving form could take from Tom's warm, quivering flesh. `You live how many months under my roof, and I bet you never saw a dick you didn't want to lick. How many boys did you fuck in my bed, huh? In my clothes? How many of your little fairy friends are skipping around thinking Dickie Greenleaf sucked them off in some fruit bar?'

Tom shook his head, reduced again to impotent tears, staggered by the cruelty, the unfairness of what Dickie was saying. It was almost worse than what Dickie was doing to him—certainly worse than anything Tom had ever done, or even thought of doing, before he met Dickie. The most moral, innocent, pure-minded person he knew, and this was what he got in reward? A bunch of obscene, vile accusations. But somehow he had no words to refute them. His groin felt inflated with an uncomfortable pressure, that might have been mistaken for pleasure, but for the bitter stretching pain that surrounded and suffused it. His prick was still soft, but Dickie didn't seem to care about that, or the vicious hypocrisy of what he was saying.

Eventually he ran out of epithets. Then there was only the dull, moist sound of Dickie moving inside him, steady as the strokes of an oar. It was as wrong as violating a corpse, only this corpse was violating him, so it was even worse.

Tom stared straight ahead, the panic washing over him in waves that swelled and swelled and swelled but never seemed to break. He could feel his face breaking up, but Dickie's eyes held everything but pity.

`Dickie, please. Please don't do this.'

Dickie laughed, a harsh, splintery sound like cracking ice, and Tom knew why, imagining Dickie saying those same words, on his knees before him in the boat. But it wasn't the same. Tom had only wanted to kill Dickie.

He opened his mouth to beg again, feeling something inside him teetering on the edge of sanity, but then Dickie kissed him, and Tom felt something mobile and icy and thick fill his mouth and scrape against the back of his throat. As Dickie worked his cock up into Tom's bowels it seemed to work its way halfway down to his stomach, like they planned to meet in the middle. It hurt and even though he could breathe through his nose, with effort, he felt like he was dying. In that moment he wanted to.

Even amid the Italian heat and the friction of their fucking, Dickie's embrace was Arctic cold. But somehow Tom didn't feel it so much because now the cold was inside him, too, spreading up from his gut where Dickie was still coming, sliding through his veins and settling into his bones, until Tom felt he would never be warm again.

Dickie's tongue, if that was what it was, suddenly slid out of his throat, rasping out like wet sandpaper, leaving it stinging and raw. His cold, briny breath wafted over Tom's face in an exhalation of pleasure. He picked up the pace, driving into Tom so violently he would have been pushed off the bed, if Dickie hadn't held him fast in his deathly strong arms, pounding his huge dead girth up inside him with the speed of a jackhammer, rattling Tom's teeth inside his skull. The room echoed like a cave with the noisome music of their coupling: wet, sickening squelches, and a sloshing more like some poor creature being disembowelled or devoured than anything that could be called sex.

`Listen to you', he said, exultant. `Wet like a damn whore.'

The weight of a thousand dead seas fell on Tom again, squeezing him as in a vice, or like a giant hand, milking him around Dickie's giant prick.

`Where're your fucking plans now? Huh? Tell me how you're gonna squirm your way out of this one.'

`Dickie, you're crushing me,' Tom sobbed.

`Kiss me, Tommy. Kiss me and tell me you like it, and I'll let you have my come.'

`I hate you', Tom wailed, and Dickie groaned, burying himself up to the balls in Tom's ass while he loudly, triumphantly disgorged his load.

It was cold. Dickie came for a long time. There was so much of it squeezed itself out even his tightly-packed hole and down Dickie's swollen shaft. Tom was cold, so could know he had forgotten warmth. So cold Dickie's chill seed brought a kind of hypothermic warmth. Tom could smell it even from down there—the stink of the ocean at its most polluted. Dickie did not withdraw till it felt like every inch of his insides was slathered in it. He had never been more deeply defiled.

When Dickie finally rolled off him, Tom found he was so close to the edge of the bed he simply slipped off it, falling to the floor with a limp thud. Dickie didn't try to catch him.

For several minutes he lay in a boneless heap, so utterly exhausted even thinking was a strain. But Dickie was still on the bed, only a few inches above him, and the hideous weight of that presence made him claw his trembling body across the carpet into the bathroom.

He rested his cheek against the cool, clean tiles and tried to order his breathing. He coughed up something that smelt and tasted like seawater but felt like tar moving through his lungs and throat. After a while he could breathe without too much difficulty. He wanted to lie on the bathroom floor and pass out, but he made himself climb to his feet, still impelled by the terror of the thing that was in the room behind him.

His legs wobbled and his ass ached, but he told himself, as he clung to the basin for support, that it was his imagination, just the same grogginess that had come over him before. It would pass. He would make it pass.

He looked at the pale, wet-eyed face in the mirror with its light hair dishevelled and damp—with sweat, he told himself. Just the heat and the stress of recent events.

I am Dickie Greenleaf, he thought, but it sounded hollow even in his mind.

I am Tom Ripley, he thought, and that was hardly more convincing.

But at least he could think. He splashed his face with water—fresh water, scentless and warm from the tap. Then he rinsed his mouth and spat till he could convince himself that the briny taste was gone, or rather, had never been. That Dickie Greenleaf's body was somewhere on the seabed of the Mediterranean. What had just happened hadn't. It was all in his head.

He found even his ass didn't hurt, as long as he actively avoided thinking about it, and didn't move.

When he came back into the bedroom it was dark and he could see nothing. He counted to ten, dragging out the numbers, and when he got to six, annoyed with himself for being such a wimp, he flicked on the light.

Dickie was still there, sitting in the edge of the bed, facing Tom. Making a damp spot on the mattress. Tom felt between his buttocks and his hand came away sticky and smelling of salt. He wanted to throw up.

`How can you be here', he asked.

`I rowed from Hell in an iron coffin with a crowbar.'

He walked toward Dickie, half under his own will, and half tugged forward by some outside compulsion, reeled in by a fish-hook in his soul, or maybe his prick. That other force pushed him down when he got to the bed and made him kneel between Dickie's legs. He gazed up at the dead man's face, feeling like he was seeing him from very far away. `Really, what are you doing here?'

He smiled down at Tom, Dickie's happy, terrible smile and water spilled out from between his teeth, spattering over Tom's face. `Shouldn't I be asking you that? What are you doing here, Tom, wearing my clothes and my rings and my name?' When Tom's only reply was a desperate, half-strangled sob, he added, `You and I have unfinished business. A debt that needs accounting for.'

'Isn't there something I can do?', Tom said, the busy backroom of his mind already formulating escape routes, failsafes, fallbacks.

Dickie tilted his chin up, cradling his jaw, and pressed a cold thumb into the corner of Tom's mouth, forcing it open slightly. His cock was a long ivory harpoon between his thighs, the head only a few inches from Tom's neck, dripping a salty brine onto the floor with a steady plink plink plink.

`Perfect contrition and true penitence.'

'I'm sorry', Tom said.

`Being sorry for yourself doesn't count, Tom.' His voice was sad and almost tender. The cold fire in his eyes had gone out, leaving only pity, which made Tom shudder, because he knew it wouldn't stop this demon from defiling him again.

`Dickie, please. I only ever wanted...'

Your clothes. Your money. Your body. Your life.

You.

'It's no good, Tom. You can't help how you're made, I know that now. I should have seen it sooner.'

A hand, cold, wet and strong as a live fish moved over his crotch, squeezing his genitals, which had never been more shrunken, till Tom whimpered from pain, then moved round behind to his ass, sinking deep into his stinging hole—an impossible depth, even for Dickie's long fingers.

`Smile for me, darling.'

Tom took a hideous wheezing breath like that of a dying man.

`Smile for me, Tom', Dickie said again, and this time his voice went into Tom like a knife, and he found his lips stretching against his will in a grisly approximation of a grin.

`That's good. You should be happy. After all, this is what you wanted, wasn't it? For us to be together, for me to never leave you?'

Tom quivered like a leaf doused by a hose, shaking not just his head, but his whole body, shivering and trembling with a chill that would never leave him.

`Not this. I don't want—I didn't—'

Dickie gently stuffed his fingers in Tom's mouth as if to hold down his tongue. `You need to stop lying, Tom. You can't deceive the dead.'

Tom gagged on them as they went down, gagged on their cold slimy slipperiness, cold slimy slippery as the sperm that was smothering his thighs, oozing the inside of his knees.

Dickie picked him up, holding him under his armpits just like a child, with no discernible effort, even though Dickie had only ever had a few pounds on him. Tom gulped, trying to swallow his terror, but however much he swallowed there was more and more and more.

But it didn't relent. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't even do that; his eyes were the only dry part of him.

Dickie threw him down on the bed and lay on him, entering him again, forcing open raw flesh with brusque, efficient strokes.

At first, like before, there was no heat to how Dickie fucked him, no passion; he seemed to perform it almost as a duty, though the cold green satisfaction of vengeance swam in his drowned eyes. But he fucked on and on, all through the evening and deep into the night, sometimes fast and brutal, sometimes slow and suffocating, but never stopping, never once, bloating Tom's belly with his dead sterile seed.

Tom's hair was wet too, now; he was shivering, shaking down to his bones, eyes stewing in his own hot tears, guts stewing in the cold soup of scum Dickie was flooding him with.

It was all he had wanted—the one real thing he had wanted in his life.

But not like this.

He remembered somebody once saying, you always get what you want, but never in the way you wanted.

Something in Tom's rectum lit up on a glancing upward thrust, and his walls spasmed. Dickie gasped and his cock, impossibly, seemed to swell in Tom's gusts, stretching his raw flesh past the point of fraying. His voice as he came was like a hurricane, like the roaring of many waves, like the world before God created it. `You wanted me, Tom you wanted all of me. Everything I had. Now you've got it. All of me. Every last fucking inch. So take it. Take it all. You fucking whore, take it and thank me. Take it and beg for more. I'll break you in two, you bitch. Make you crawl without legs, without eyes—without anything but the tight holes made for me to fuck.'

Spunk slopped out of his hole and dribbled onto the bed, but Dickie kept on ploughing in, and seemed, impossibly, to hit new depths on each inward lunge. His cock should be poking up somewhere between Tom's lungs by now. But somehow Tom wasn't dead. He knew this only because the pain didn't stop and the tears kept flowing. `That's it, cry for me, bitch. Come on. Fuck, cry harder. Fucking faggot, cry on my cock.'

He lowered his mouth onto Tom's face, lapping at his closed lids, greedy for his pain. Tom felt him licking both of them at the same time, and squeezed his eyes even tighter against this horrid double-sensation. He was battered between torment and humiliation and disbelief and despair, strung between them like the condemned man tied to the four wild horses. And already the seams were starting to rip.

`Open your eyes, sweetheart. I promise I won't eat them. Then you wouldn't be able to see all the terrible things I'm going to do to you. You wouldn't even be able to cry.' He chuckled and moved his mouth over Tom's, as if to inhale his whimpers. `Don't be scared, Tom. Don't be frightened, my little fearslut. I'm only going to rape you for eternity, every fucking day for the rest of your worthless existence, every moment from now till forever. Every day I'm going to find new ways to make you suffer making me come. But don't be scared, Tom, be happy, because I love you, you see. This is love, that fucking thing you always wanted, and now you've got it. You've got me all to your pathetic self—no Marge in the picture—and my love, as much of it as you can take, as much as I can squeeze into this breakable little body of yours, and more and fucking more till it's coming out your pores and you're drowning in it, because my love for you is like the ocean, Tom, it never fucking ends, and like me, because it never. Fucking. Dies.'

On these last words Dickie withdrew all the way and punched all the way back in, three brutal decisive thrusts that sent Tom's pelvis crunching into his spine, and something dislocated or maybe shattered, he couldn't tell because he couldn't feel anything below the waist. Except Dickie's cock. Somehow he could still feel that. It was all he could feel, the inescapable catastrophic hugeness of it, filling him up and pulsing in his chest, squeezed by his lungs each time he breathed. Tom's eyes were torn open, and he stared up helplessly at Dickie, who seemed to be watching him from very far away, like an evil idol of ancient stone, erected by nameless, forgotten things, standing alien and implacable amidst the surges of a sunless sea. As Tom watched, his face, familiar, and desirable even as it gloated over his destruction, became, or perhaps revealed, something he could not truly see, even though his eyes, unable to close, were forced to look at it. His mind refused to process it.

A sound like gulping, or the opposite of gulping, reverberated from inside him, and the cold thick wet washed up, higher and higher, engulfing his organs, filling his lungs, stopping his throat, freezing his brain. There was pain pain pain and panic that could not become madness because that was a relief he did not deserve. His broken back rose in an agonising arc till Dickie's cock was standing almost horizontal, almost wholly separate from Tom's body, only lightly sheathed in blushing, vein-streaked skin. Tom hissed all the horror that could get past his locked jaw and strings of mealy grey muck wormed their burning way out through the corner of his eyes.

`I love you, Tom', Dickie said through a white glitter of teeth. `Won't you say it back?'

Tom had a mouth still, but it could not scream. Could not do anything but swill the festering slime that rose up with his gorge, and was swallowed down, and spat up again, tasting fouler on each regurgitation. He continued to weep tears of come, and some trickled out of his nose. Dickie was as good as his threat; he had filled Tom with more cockspew than he could hold. His ass was stuffed and his belly and bowels were full, and his body simply had nowhere to put it. He dared not speak lest he spit out Dickie's seed. He hadn't been told, but he knew he couldn't do that. He didn't want to find out how much worse Dickie could make it hurt.

Dickie laughed, this time the deep, happy laugh from before, though it rang strangely in Tom's ears, distorted by all the water. He leaned in to nibble tender bloody furrows into Tom's neck, to lick his own sperm off Tom's face and dribble it back into his mouth. Then his sea-bloated bulk fell on him and for a moment Tom was blessedly annihilated, plunged into smothering blackness. Only for a moment. Then Dickie lifted his hips and the nightmare started again.