beast (wip)

"It was August when it took me. It was hot and dry, and there hadn't been rain in weeks, but we lived on the coast, so it wasn't so bad, I guess. I went to the docks a lot, on the bus. Mum didn't like when I went alone, but I was 14 and reckless, so I did what I wanted. It was a way to escape that house for a while, anyway, get away from the suffocatingly uptight way my father treated me. So, I took the bus. I went to Green Lake this time, and it was full of tourists like it always was in August, but I stayed anyway, hanging around the kayak club until they kicked me out, then I walked the bike path.

I was there until it got dark, a lot later than I should of.  The tourists were mostly gone, so I decided to swim. I didn't have my swimsuit, but I was alone, so I just took off all my clothes and went in the lake. It was getting cold but I didn't care, I was more thrilled by doing something bad, swimming naked in the lake after dark. Teenagers are stupid.

After a while I ended up in the bulrushes, chasing ducks and loons, sending them screeching into the sky in fear. This part of the lake was marshy, and the reeds were tall and thick, but I eventually came out in a more clear area, which was free of the ducks I had been bothering. I quickly saw why - there was a swan, floating serene and graceful on the glassy lake.

It wasn't white, though, like the ones I was used to seeing from a distance. It was black, its beak a bloody red and its huge form nearly invisible on the darkened lake. I was frozen there for a moment when I saw it, having heard stories about how vicious these birds could be. I had never seen a black one before, either.

It saw me after a moment, turning its long neck and gliding over the water like it was hovering, sliding over ice. It was then I realized just how big it was, nearly as large as I was, and I couldn't swim fast enough to escape. It lifted its huge wings, each one must have been at least six feet long, pure onyx black and glistening in the quickly-fading light, and descended on me. I must have screamed, but I didn't hear a thing. Everything was dark.

I woke up god knows how long after, laying on my back in damp grass, still wet and still naked. The swan was nowhere to be seen. I sat up and tried to look around, but it was too dark to see far, all I could make out was the grass around me, stomped flat and drenched with water, like I had been just dumped here along with the water I had been in. There were no stars, no moon, no glow of the city at the edges of the park, like there should of been. It was just blackness beyond me and the ring of grass, the kind of darkness blind people must see, suffocatingly black and silent. I was left with only the sounds of my breathing.

I sat there for a while, knees against my chest and shivering in the void I had found myself in, and soon I was very aware of the sound of my own breathing, of my stomach slowly churning, of my heart and of every little movement of my joints, the creak of tendons and the sound my throat made when I swallowed. After what must have been a long, long, time, I realized the thumping of my heart was not alone. There was another steady pumping alongside it, twin sounds pounding in my skull. I focused on it, something aside from my own body to listen to. I got up, then, and started to walk, looking for where it must be coming from.

After a little while of that, I started to feel things around me. They were like the bulrushes from before, but softer somehow. They were soon all around me. Feathers?

I burst out into the blinding bright, and I felt lighter. There were feathers all around me, tight around my body like a shroud of white. I turned my head and it turned too far, supported on a graceful, thin neck, and I saw what must have been my back, white and sleek and supported by two massive wings. I was a bird! A swan, gliding over a glassy lake, ringed with strange trees. I spiraled down to the water's surface, never once questioning this. It must be a dream. I must have fallen asleep in the grass after my swim. I touched down on the calm surface, wings furling at my side and neck curling into an S shape.

I heard a voice behind me, and I turned my head. The black swan was there, and she was gliding toward me, her head lifted.

'There you are, my love,' she had said to me. I just stared at her, confused. What was happening? Who was this? She was just a swan, but her voice was human, a woman's voice that sounded somehow familiar, but I couldn't place it. Vague memories of warmth went through me, of safety and happiness, when I heard her talk. This must be alright, then.

'It took you so long to come to me, I was so lonely, my love, my darling,' she said. Not waiting for me to answer, she continued.

'I changed your form to match mine, isn't it lovely, my little king?'

I remember someone calling me that before, but who? I kept staring. She was next to me now, hooking her neck around mine. Some part of me screeched that this wasn't right, that I was too small for this, I was nobody's lover. But I was just a swan, wasn't I? But then, why was the way this female pressed up to me making me squirm and fear?

She took me to the shores of the lake, which was when I noticed there was something wrong. The beach wasn't sand, or rocks or dirt, it was made up of millions of tiny glass marbles, cat's eye, ade, aggie, mica, clearie, oillie... I stared at the ground for a little while, my webbed feet having trouble finding a good balance on the glassy beach. When I looked up again, I saw the black swan had moved up to the forest, the trees blown glass and cokebottle, in a dazzling spray of colour and refracted light. A structure stood at the edge of the marble beach, a spiraling seashell-like thing of pink glass, filled with water up to the middle. She led me to it, the door a wall of pure water, tinted pink with the light through glass.

'This is our home, my little king, my lover, my darling. Come inside,' she told me, and vanished into the watery wall.

When she moved inside, she... changed. She was no longer a swan, she looked almost like a woman, her skin a dark obsidian that gave way in places to dark feathers that in turn gave way to fins, some kind of siren creature of swan and fish and woman. She turned to look at me, standing outside stupidly still, and smiled, beckoning to me. That achy fear was back in my chest, like the feeling a child gets when they stare into the black hallway outside their bedroom at night, afraid of the monsters that lurk there. This was wrong, but why?

But I couldn't deny her for much longer, and I dove into the watery doorway, into her waiting arms. I remained a bird, my webbed feet beating franticly against the water. I couldn't breathe! Swans can't breath underwater!

She seemed to know just what I was thinking, though, and she laughed at me, her voice clear as day despite being underwater.

'You'll need another form, my little king,' she said to me, pressing both her hands to the sides of my head. There was a throbbing ache as my beak melted into lips, my face regained its human shape, my neck shortened to its old length again, and I was a boy once again. That didn't last, though, and fins burst forth from my skin, scales rippled over my skin, gills ripped out from my neck and under my arms, allowing me breath once again.

As soon as that was done, her hands were on me, feeling my new body all over, from head to toe. I felt a whimper escape my lips, lost to the water. I wanted to fight her, give in to the aching feeling of wrongness in my chest and protest, but nothing came out when I struggled to speak.

She had sex with me four times that night. Or at least what passes for a night in that place.

Everything after that is a blur of colour and shape, but some things stand out more than others. I remember being many different animals, and being in many different places.

I was a swan again, gliding through the sky among clouds that seemed more solid than the ground did, following the black swan that was my new mate.

I was a timber wolf, running through the glass forest, frosted over with ice and snow, icicles hanging from branches and reaching for the sky, baying at the heels of some creature I was so sure was a man, but when I looked closer, was just an elk.

I was a tiger shark, swimming through the lake with the marbles on the bottom, my body lithe and powerful. I was very sure that sharks did not live in lakes, but then again I guess lakes were not normally filled with glass statues shaped like children huddled in fear.

But most of all, I was a lionfish, swimming in a glass bowl that was floating in the water of my keeper's glassy house, fed on tiny, transparent minnows and cooed over by dozens of leering faces every day.

Sometimes, when she had company over, my keeper took me from the bowl and made me back into that half boy and half fish form, and then everything was even more blurry. All I remember of these times were a whirl of smiling, inhuman faces, and being tugged in many different directions. She told me that all the guests at her little get-togethers were so very fond of me, and that she might just let them play with me again in exchange for things. Every time she said this, my foggy head was filled with fear, but I didn't know why.

Sometimes, she changed too. Sometimes she was the lovely siren creature she had been the first time she had me. But other times, she was a slimy, matted creature that seemed to be made entirely of wet hair, or she was a thing made of glass and crystal with a hundred sharp edges that tore up my skin when she touched me, or she was a thing that was almost human, except for her head which was a bloated, rotten mass of flesh that smelled of dead fish and blood.

No matter what she was, I was expected to love her with everything I had, or she would take me deep into the marble-bottom lake and push my head under the smooth glassy pebbles and hiss dark words into my ears until I wept for people I did not remember.