Chapter 1: The Ghostly Bimbo's Summons
The air in Kyle’s bedroom was thick with the smell of microwaved pizza and unwashed laundry. Blue light from his laptop screen—paused on a frame of Captain Picard mid-speech—flickered across the walls papered with Transformers decals. A half-eaten protein bar sat fossilizing on his nightstand.
He adjusted his glasses, which immediately began to fog from the sheer warmth of his own focused boredom.
Then the screen dissolved into violent static.
A sharp, electric smell, like ozone and burnt hair, flooded the room. The static wasn’t gray and white. It was the color of a bruise, pulsing purple and green. Kyle jerked back, his spine pressing into the headboard. “What the—”
The center of the screen bulged. Not the plastic, but the light itself, swelling outward like a blister. A shape pushed through, a silhouette that gained substance and color as it flowed into his room, dripping luminescence onto the carpet.
She knelt on the end of his bed, the mattress groaning under a weight that seemed impossible for something made of light and memory.
“Hi,” she said, her voice a raspy whisper that sounded like dry leaves skittering over stone.
Kyle’s mouth hung open. His glasses were completely fogged now. He whipped them off, scrubbed them on his shirt, and put them back on.
She was still there.
She looked like she’d walked out of a historical painting and then fallen into a vat of radioactive syrup. Her gown, or what was left of it, was a tattered, shimmering 18th-century thing, low-cut and strained across a chest that defied any century’s sense of anatomy. Her breasts glowed with a soft, internal light, like twin moons under silk. Her hair was a wild, curly mane floating around a face that was both pretty and deeply unwell—her eyes were wide, pitch-black pools, and a thin line of glowing saliva dripped from her plump lower lip onto his Starfleet-themed comforter.
It sizzled faintly.
“You,” she whispered, crawling toward him. The bed rocked. Her movements were unnervingly fluid, like a snake uncoiling. She smelled of damp earth, honey, and something profoundly hormonal. “You’ll do.”
“Who—what—” Kyle stammered, pressing himself harder against the headboard. He could feel the vibrations of her approach through the mattress springs.
“Hush, lad,” she crooned, her black eyes fixed on the tent now forming in his sweatpants, a purely autonomic response to overwhelming stimulus. She settled her weight atop him, cold and shockingly solid. The air left his lungs in a whoosh. “I have a story for you. A true story. About my boy.”
Her bony, glowing fingers traced the line of his jaw. Her touch was like ice and static electricity.
“My sweet William,” she began, her voice taking on a rhythmic, storytelling cadence. “A plague came to our village. Not of boils or fever. A plight of the flesh. It took my boy. One morning he awoke, his manhood… transformed.” Her eyes rolled back in ecstatic memory. “Thick as a birch log. Veins like ropes. And it wept, Kyle. It wept a nectar that drove reason from the mind. The scent of it… like storm air and desire.”
Kyle tried to speak, to protest, but only a squeak emerged. She was grinding slowly against him, her historic gown disintegrating at the edges where it touched his sweatpants.
“He bred me first,” she sighed, as if recalling a lovely picnic. “Right in the kitchen, up against the butter churn. Then the baker’s wife. The blacksmith’s daughters. The widows. The maidens. The tavern wench with the lazy eye. He planted his seed in every womb and womb-adjacent hole in the parish.” She leaned close, her dripping lips hovering an inch from his. “It was glorious. The moaning. The begging. The squelching. We became a village of round, ripe bellies, all from my William.”
Her narrative seemed to excite her. A pool of that glowing spittle was collecting in the hollow of his throat, warm and strangely viscous.
“They drove us out, the jealous, limp men. We crossed an ocean. We came here. To this very land where your… dwelling sits.” She gestured vaguely at the Transformers wallpaper. “He built a new house. He filled it with his mothers and his sisters and his sons. We lived in a beautiful, sticky, perpetual state of grace. A cycle of filling and being filled. Until time took us all. Now, I remain.”
She finally looked directly into his eyes, her madness a palpable force.
“I want to see it again. I want to hear the chorus. I want to smell the cunts bloom.” Her icy hand slipped between them, her fingers pressing against the frantic pulse in his groin. “So I will gift you what he had. And you will start with the ripe one. The blonde with the swinging hips and the mind full of pudding who sleeps down the hall.”
“My… mom?” Kyle wheezed, the reality of the situation crashing through the paralyzing shock.
“The vessel is choice,” the ghost hissed, delighted. “She smells of vanilla and readiness. She will be your foundation. Then the neighbors. The post-woman. The yoga instructor with the tight… stretches.” Her fingers clenched. A bolt of pure, arcane energy shot through Kyle’s pelvis.
He arched off the bed with a choked gasp. It wasn’t pain. It was a terrifying, overwhelming sensation of expansion, of tissues straining and reforming under a mandate older than civilization. He looked down, his own breathing the only sound in the room besides the soft, eager drool of the spirit on his chest.
His sweatpants were stretching. A substantial, familiar bulge was morphing into something geological. The fabric darkened, first with sweat, then with a fresh, clear fluid that beaded at the tip. A scent began to permeate the muggy room—musky, sweet, metallic, and impossibly compelling. It cut through the smells of pizza and dust. It smelled like want.
The spirit inhaled deeply, a shudder of pleasure wracking her luminous form. “Yes… It begins. It wakes. Go on, then,” she whispered, her form starting to shimmer and fade, her purpose transferred. “Go and knock on her door. See if she’s… hungry.”
With a final, wet pop, she was gone. The TV screen was black.
Kyle lay prone, trying to process the impossible. The weight between his legs was monumental, a throbbing, hot, and leaking new reality. The smell was everywhere. It filled his head, clouding his panic with a strange, warm calm.
Down the hall, a door creaked open. A soft, sleepy voice floated through the darkness.
“Kyle? Honey, are you awake? I… I had the weirdest dream. And what is that amazing smell?”
He heard her bare feet pad onto the hallway carpet.