Eight in the morning approached, a morning drizzle sifted from the sky, and a naked overweight cook named Harry Porter—who had left work just an hour earlier—propelled himself head first at a rat scuttling across the alley floor.
He seized it with both hands just as it made its desperate attempt to disappear beneath a heap of sodden cardboard. The rodent wriggled wildly in his grasp, its whiskered mouth blurting frantic squeals, almost in syncopation to the beat of the music emanating from his walkman headphones.
Harry wailed triumphantly, then opened his mouth and crammed the rat in, tail first, pushing it as far as it would go until only its little vermin face emerged fidgeting from his jaws.
Harry bit down, his front teeth incising the rat's neck. The rat shuddered, its black-bead eyes popping from their sockets like tiny yo-yo's. He then pressed the head in with his fingers and chewed and chewed with great pleasure, buoyantly pressing his jaws up and down on the rodent's tiny bones. It tasted wonderful: as succulent and as appetizing as anything he'd ever prepared in his days as head cook at Frankie's all night diner.
When the rat's bulk finally slipped down into his stomach, he scooted to the back of the alley and leaned against a dumpster. He surprisingly found an erection protruding from somewhere beneath his fat stomach. Feverishly, he gripped it, stroking it in a wild fit, the gristle on his hands lubricating his efforts and bringing him to a state of shivering orgasm in mere moments. Missiles of adrenaline spurted from his nerves, like the semen had from his penis, and he slumped like a discarded hand-puppet, lethargy consuming his mind and muscles in a river of release.
He stayed in this quiet state, licking the blood and semen from his fingers with feline-like consideration. Tears of joy coated his eyes, dampening his vision as he gazed at the strip of rainy night sky between the buildings that formed the alley. A cloaked sun forced its darkened beams upon him as he pondered the simplicity of his old life, and the thrill of his new.
Things were so much better, now that he found the Atmosphere.
Mosquitoes and flies tickled his skin to the point where he again felt himself getting hard. Rejuvenation seeping in, he crouched up, scurried on all fours with animal-like finesse to the spot in the alley where he hid the Atmosphere—behind a wooden crate filled with rotting vegetables. He retrieved it and gazed at it, fascinated, garnering the same impassioned feelings as when he found it on his way home from work, under the el on 190th Street.
Curiosity had been his only stimulus when he first beheld the Atmosphere, and he wondered if it had anything to do with all the police activity on the train platform thirty feet above his head. But in mere seconds he had become instantly fixated with the oddly shaped black object, and he cradled it like a newborn, pacing the empty streets like a mouse in a maze, a man with no direction in mind other than to draw himself nearer to the heart of the intriguing object. It had felt so erotic, so stimulating to run his fingers across the six hollowed prongs that ascended from it like thick black straws. It had felt so warm and soft at his touch, and made the music sound so damn good.
Atmosphere...
The deep voice resounded in his head like an echo shouted from a distant hilltop, and with unexplained urgency he at once needed to be alone with it, to be the only one to experience its special purpose. The alley had been the nearest place.
In just five minutes he was naked and feeding on the rat, food being his sole passion in life, the object, the Atmosphere, stimulating his devotion to levels previously unfelt in his years as a cook.
Harry scurried to the rear of the alley, crouched in the left corner, next to the dumpster. Working his index finger around the lip of one of the prongs, he explored its smoothness with newfound investigation, allowing his instincts to take over. Abstract colors and shapes formed within his mind, their orgiastic flow sending out signals hinting as to its further intentions. Yes, so much more was to be had from this thing called the Atmosphere, and he shivered with wild anticipation as all its other propensities began to emerge. He moved his fingers quicker and harder across the ebony surface with unprecedented inspiration. He rocked his head to the pulse within his head. He had to—needed to—seek out the source of its desires for him.
One of the prongs on the Atmosphere suddenly widened, its end stretching open like a tiny mouth, a nozzle. It gently embraced the tip of his index finger, like a tiny mouth suckling a nipple. Harry's heart slammed against his ribs at this sudden engagement and he again became erect.
As if the Atmosphere had somehow noticed this, a second prong protracted from its surface, reaching down to his penis.
The pounding force of his heart reached the music in his ears and instantly a unique feeling surged to all points in his body like bolts of lightning: fear, pleasure, lethargy, pain, hunger, all intertwined, collectively tempting his mind at one intense moment. Harry shivered with joy. Yes, it was time.
The Atmosphere. It was going to reveal its true purpose to him.
The entire surface of the object began to pulse in his grip, like a heart freshly ripped from a body. It sweated a warm jelly-like substance that lubricated Harry's delirious hands-on orgy with the growing black tubes. A faint light ignited from the heart of its body, and then it splayed out an incredible array of tints that danced gleefully over his hands like a blanket of fireflies. The flesh of his arms and hands turned lucid and he could see his veins and nerve endings glowing beneath his skin. Quickly and abruptly, the elongating tendrils ensconcing his finger and penis shifted into flat shapeless forms. They swallowed the glowing ambience that irradiated his hands, and the light, that mesmerizing firefly light, was gone.
In its place: a pitch-black shadow.
And then there was pain.
The ecstatic entrancement that had held Harry for so long quickly gave way to a blinding agony of sharp light. The hammering in his head turned pleasure into pain, doubling, tripling, and then his lucidity returned to acquaint him with the harsh real world where he was simply Harry Porter, head cook at Frankie's all night diner.
Naked, bloody, filthy and quite confused Harry Porter.
The tube swallowing his penis stretched wide and ensconced his testicles like a hungry snake. Agonized, Harry fought back, trying to rip himself from the grasp of the alien object—the frothing amorphous lump of tar that was spreading over his wrists and groin like an oil slick on a rushing tide.
Grape-sized lumps swelled up on the surface of the growing object, each one pulsating with an apparent life of its own. It slithered over his forearms to his biceps, webbing across his lap like a blanket. Phosphorescent patches of purple and green glowed atop its gelatinous cover as if those fireflies had been trapped beneath its surface. It seemed enraged, or ravenous, or simply savage, but regardless it grew larger and larger and convulsively thrust itself around his torso with alarming will.
Harry finally found the wits to cry out, but his plea was short lived, and he realized with great horror as he lost his voice and breath that the thing had ripped through his chest and filled the branches of his lungs.
The final sensation twenty-one year old head cook Harry Porter felt was darkness. Complete and utter darkness.