I couldn’t look at the thing anymore, and so I looked at the three men who had been drawn into its teats, watched the tentacles thicken and begin pumping the ichor into their guts, and they…swelled. I could see them writhe in pleasure, their bodies losing shape and expanding. At first I thought they were simply growing fatter, but it was more than that, they were…changing. The thing was warping them into itself, into copies, or perhaps it would simply feed them until they merged with it, drawing it into its mass, growing ever larger. I doubt it even knew what would happen–it was only driven by some singular need, not by any result or consequence. In the center of the room, Jules sat, still tied down, utterly unfazed. Whether he had expected the thing to emerge, or whether he was simply too brain dead to care, the beast seemed uninterested in him either way.

I knew I had to do something. Not because I needed to free the men it was feeding, not because I needed to protect Jules, but because there, in front of me, was the chaos. The insanity I had sensed…it was wrong. It was wrong, and had no place here, it had no place in my reality, under my control, and I felt compelled to right it, not out of a sense of justice, but out of a will to power I had never felt before. This thing…it was of a kind…with me. With me, and with Jules now, and with Ray and Cumster (though not with Bernard and Marcus, they, even then, I knew they were something else). I needed to do something, the thing inside me, the voice, it needed to do something, because this wasn’t the way it should me. I was here to bring order. I was here to control.

I…didn’t know how I did it, to be honest, the first time. I barely realized I had done anything at all. There was just the thought, the thought that something had to be done, and while I didn’t know precisely what that thing was, something in me knew. The thick leather of my right glove peeled around my hand into a strap, hanging loose from my still gloved hand, and I knew I could control it as an extension of myself. The thing noticed me then, and whether it feared me or not, it sensed what was in me, and it flung a tentacle at me, and…and I caught it in my other hand, feeling it squish between my fingers, and I nearly came standing there, the rest of the force around me not knowing what they were looking at.

No…No, let me stop for a second.

I can’t write it like this, this isn’t right. This isn’t what happened.

I write this, and it comes out like some play by play, like a boxing match or the calls of a football game. The thing did this, I did that–it wasn’t like that, in the moment. We weren’t responding to each other. I felt like we were dancing, I felt like I was alive in a way I had never experienced, I was watching myself do this…watching this leather come alive and bind itself around this monstrosity, and I felt the ache to try and contain it, and tame it, and direct it. I wasn’t fighting it, though I’m sure that’s must have been what it looked like, maybe that’s why it isn’t coming out right, why it isn’t making sense to me, reading what I wrote. I’m a man. I’m a man, trying to explain something else, something I have only experienced for a fraction of my life, something inhuman, some surreal logic to a hidden world. It was a dance. It was sex. The straps were as alive to me as my flesh, I could feel them. I wanted to drive them into the thing, I wanted to fuck it, and bind it, all at the same time. It was the same thing, really, the same act, in my mind. So no, this isn’t right. If you’re human still, reading this, if you don’t hear that voice in your mind, the oice I am hearing right now, you’ll never understand. In fact, maybe this just looks like gibberish. You might forget this, in a moment, take in each word without comprehending the entire idea. We weren’t made to see this. You weren’t made to see this, not without something changing you to be able to understand it, and remember it. Even then…even now, I don’t really know why it made sense to me, why I could even remember it.

We fought. We danced. We fucked, or at least, I tried to fuck it. Not literally, pay attention, not with my dick, but with…with these straps. Fuck, how do I even write this? Yes, with straps. Yes, it sounds that dumb, fuck, I…I’d show you, if I could, how it feels. Wrap you in them from head to toe, engulf you in them. In…in my cum too…fuck. You’d understand then, how it feels…you’d beg for more, they all…they all have.

It knew I should be stronger than it was, but that I wasn’t strong enough yet. It fled, somehow. It was too big to leave the building after all, hell, it was too big to have gotten in, looking like that, but…but maybe it hadn’t been like that, when it had been brought here. It squeezed away, out a window, I think, or the back door. It was there, and then it wasn’t, and when it wasn’t there anymore…it was like it had never been there at all.

Not…that there was no damage. Not that there were no consequences. Things were different, but they weren’t wrong. When the thing left, it left all the men it had been feeding. When it pulled the teats or tentacles, or whatever free, they were all…hideous. None of them were men anymore, not really. They had turned into blobs, too large for their uniforms, their arms and legs boneless, their faces dominated by massive, sucking mouths. Then, when it had left, they were human again, even if they weren’t the same humans as before. All of them…were fat, some of them monstrously so. One guy, the first one who had been taken, I think, back in the kitchen, he was…fuck, 500 pounds? He was 500 pounds, but his uniform fit, and we all…remembered him being that large. It was just Officer Biggs, the 500 pound juggernaut of the force, somehow still an officer despite the fact he would have never been able to pass the yearly physical. No, it didn’t make any sense, no more sense than anything I had just seen happen in the restaurant, but it was like I was watching the world’s order trying to catch up and establish control over pure, unadulterated chaos.

The location Jules had sent was, for whatever reason, the address of an old, defunct restaurant, standing alone in the parking lot of a struggling strip mall. When I saw the building, I thought of the story Cumster had told me of his own capture and rape. An abandoned garage was not so different from an abandoned restaurant, I supposed, but unless Ray was the rapist himself…why would Ray bring him here? Unless, like Cumster, Ray was working with the rapist in some capacity, perhaps even unwittingly. That satisfied my instinct, at least. There was something similar in the way Ray and Cumster carried themselves, how they seemed to have developed these entire alternate personas…as opposed to Bernard, and opposed to Marcus, who both seemed consumed by failure, or something in them that was incomplete. But who was Jules? Had…Cumster warped me, in the same way Ray had warped Jules around his finger, warped him enough to convince him to walk him out of jail? I would probably walk Cumster out of prison, I supposed (but only so I could keep him in my own, where he really belongs). How was I going to help Jules when I didn’t even think I could help myself?

I arrived after the rest of the force, for the most part, and after what had happened with Ray a few days prior, they were busy setting up a perimeter and scoping out the building. No one wanted to go in without understanding what, exactly, we were dealing with this time around, or at least, no one wanted to go in besides me. I could…feel something in the building. It felt…like how I felt when I was in the middle of a case, when I was looking at the chaos of a mystery and aching to tame it into some understandable order and clarity…but more focused than that. There was something in there, something that ached for me to control it. I thought it must be Jules. After all, what else could be in there beside him, and possibly the rapist, I supposed, but I doubted he would allow himself to be found this easily.

I paced, wringing my gloved hands, waiting for everyone to get into position so we could enter. We got the all clear, and I went in first–and there, sitting in the middle of the restaurant, tied to a chair, was Jules. Or at least, I knew it was Jules from the smell of him, though he didn’t quite look like the same Jules who had left the precinct a few days ago–in the same way that I suppose I don’t look like the same Adam Hoft from a few days ago either. But it was him, nearly naked aside from some filthy jockstrap, reeking of sweat and piss, his muscles…fuck, he was jacked. It looked like he’d been working out for a whole year, and taking steroids to boot. He…looked like how I would expect Ray to make someone look, in the same way I was learning that Cumster wanted his men to look certain ways as well. But as soon as I saw him, I knew he wasn’t the chaos I had felt. There was something else in here, something…worse, not that the thought made any sense, at least, until the first fleshy…tentacle shot out from the window into the kitchen, shoved itself down an officer’s throat, and dragged him back into the kitchen, flailing in terror.

No one moved. No one could even be sure we had just seen what we’d seen. In fact, it felt like my memory was actively trying to wipe and deny it had even happened, trying desperately to explain it in any other way than what I had seen. I looked around at the other cops around me in the restaurant, hoping one of them would at least meet my eyes, confirm that whatever horror had passed in front of us was in fact there, but none of them would meet me. They were all white, and then the thing squeezed its way through the window, the sheetrock cracking and crumbling around it as we did, and I still struggled to make sense of it as a thing existing–at first, all I could see were…pieces.

It had hands. It had four hands, in fact. It was crawling, mostly, or really, dragging itself along, because of its sheer size. It had a face, or rather, it had a body with a face on it. It had a mass, really, I don’t even know if you can call it a body exactly. There was a top and a bottom. The top was covered in these pustules or sacs filled with some dark liquid, pulsing and throbbing as it came through. Somehow, they didn’t pop, they just shook and shuddered. On the bottom, were…these tentacles, or really, what my mind said, was an udder. These massive, prehensile teats hanging from its bloated, hairy, amorphous body, and the face sliding across it, too many eyes, an uncountable number, because everytime one blinked, it disappeared, the skin closing over it, another eye opened…elsewhere, but always that mouth. That massive, frog-like mouth splitting the things entire body, filled with mismatched teeth, and the bright red tongue drooling across the floor. Two more teats and forced their way into the mouths of the officers around me, before someone managed to do something, and fire their gun at it, striking one of the sacs on its back. It ruptured, the filth streaming down the side of its body, where the tongue licked it up. It smelled of burnt butter and bitter black molasses.