Hi again, kids. This right here is a story I started working on a few months ago, but for some reason haven’t got around to finishing yet. I probably will finish it at some point, and eventually I’d like to feature it in another short story collection I want to have put together this year, but in the meantime, read the excerpt and tell me what you think! Suggestions for plot twists and titles are also welcome.

Also, kindly remember I have an ongoing Patreon campaign to raise funds for this writing thang I do. Even pledging just a couple bucks a month will be a big help, so if you like what I do, then consider contributing! Please and thank you. And now, the main feature.

It all came out through the holes, wet and glistening silver like strands of spider silk. It’s her again. How could that be? James began to pull more quickly, his heartbeat accelerating. In moments the palm of his hand was crisscrossed with the stuff, metallic yet somehow soft at the same time, its shafts clotted with black. James brought his hand up to his nose and took a heady sniff. He could smell the secretive tang of the below, that organic stench. He closed his eyes.

He didn’t know how long he sat that way, hunched over the bathtub, but he was suddenly brought out of his reverie by a banging on the door. “Hey, are you all right in there?”

He turned toward the voice. Shit. He’d almost forgotten. “I’m almost done. Be out in a minute.” He fumbled a plastic baggie out of the pocket of his sport coat and gently slipped a handful of the hair into it, giving it a final caress as he did so. He kept back a few fine strands that he rubbed between his fingers, relishing the feel of the drain-slime sloughing off in his hands. He then pursed his lips and drew the strands slowly into his mouth, using his tongue to swirl them around his teeth. Angel hair. He smiled.

With another glance at the bathroom door, he swallowed and stepped to the sink to wash his hands. His face in the mirror looked mostly normal to him, with just a hint of a devilish curl at the corner of his lips. He wiped his hands and opened the door. “Sorry about that,” he said.

“Oh, that’s all right.” The woman by the bathroom door was short and rotund, not at all the way he imagined the possessor of the hair would look. “I just got a little worried. Thought you were sick or something.”

“No, no. Just a little…something I ate. Would you like to see the upstairs now? I think you’ll really like the layout up there. Lots of natural light.”

The woman nodded and followed him as he mounted the steps and continued his seller’s spiel. As he spoke, his mind wandered to the hair in the drain, to the sensuous, glimmering impossibility of it. He patted his pocket to make sure the baggie was still there, the bag that he would add to the two other identical ones he had stashed away in the drawer of his bedside table at home. He asked himself again, How was it possible? Three different houses in different parts of town, and yet he had pulled the same woman’s hair from the three drains: same unusual silver-silk color and texture, same loamy scent of promise lurking beneath the pungent sewer-odor. Extraordinary.

****

That evening, he sat in his dim, cramped office, his sport coat hung over the back of his chair, a forgotten cup of coffee beside him. Plastic baggies made a milky-slick grid before him on the faux wood desktop, and his hands trembled slightly as he held them there, inches above the expanse, quivering in anticipation of the first touch.

The bags were ordered along a spectrum, with the palest blondes at the upper left positions gradually shading toward the severest blacks at the lower right. The three strange silvers occupied their own place at the very top of the grid, and it was these that James gravitated toward with his shaking fingers, prolonging his delicious agony by stroking the plastic of the baggie briefly, so briefly, then pulling away.

At last he could stand it no longer, and snatched up the baggie containing today’s acquisition. He pulled apart the seal and plunged his hand greedily inside. The hair had dried since this afternoon, and its texture was so delicate that he could barely feel it on the skin of his palm. He brought it out and held the strands under the desk lamp, watching the light play across the shaft of the hair like a prism, like fiber optics. He held it there for a long time, staring, transfixed. He itched to bring it toward his lips, to feel it coiling its way down his throat to nest in his stomach, but…

Something was wrong. He forced his gaze away from the silver hair and scanned the plastic grid, the neat squares containing their multi-hued filaments. There was still that charge, that longing, but it was different than before, less intense. He frowned. Carefully, he placed the silver hair back into its bag and placed it at the top of the grid. It wouldn’t do. This was something special, something that couldn’t be treated with the same ritual. The three baggies lay there, taunting him deliciously, marriageable women amidst a sea of cheap whores.

He shook his head, both aroused and disturbed. He snatched up one of the other baggies from the center of the grid without really looking at it. What did it matter? He drew the mouse-brown strands from the bag and let them hang between his fingers. With his other hand, he unzipped his jeans. His erection was tentative, his confusion over having to settle for a cheap whore for tonight stymieing the usual hard throb. He took his cock in his hand and stroked, the fingers of his other hand caressing the substandard hair. His thoughts raced. The silver hair, there on the desk. Perhaps he should look at that, think of that while he dallied with the inferior specimen. His cock immediately responded as his eyes focused on those three baggies, and he groaned as the motions of his hand grew faster. As the inevitable explosion drew near, he stuffed the brown hair in his mouth and barely even bothered to move it around with his tongue before swallowing it just as he released his seed across his pants, the desktop, the array of baggies. The hair tickled as it made its way down his esophagus, and he sat back in his chair, breathing hard, watching his erection wilt, feeling the pleasant tinge of the air conditioning on his damp flesh.

****

The house had been empty for several months, and James had shown it to four prospective buyers so far. None had made an offer. James wasn’t sure exactly why; he didn’t see anything particularly wrong with the place that a little elbow grease couldn’t fix. The plumbing was old, and gave the rooms a vaguely dank odor, but James found the smell strangely comforting, and was always bothered when his clients wrinkled their noses at it as they toured around. It was a perfectly lovely house otherwise, small but pleasantly secretive, painted in cool watery hues.

He unlocked the door and went inside, setting his phone and all his papers on the kitchen bar just off the living room. He was meeting a new client today who had seemed intensely interested in buying, and he was determined to get at least an offer, even if he had to force the woman to sign on the dotted line.

He made a quick survey of the place, dusting off surfaces with his hand and picking up dead bugs and stray leaves. He paused on the threshold of the master bathroom, where the wet smell was the strongest, and breathed deeply. He could go in and check the drain, it would only take a moment…he had been in this house before and collected specimens, but there were always a few strands he’d missed. His memory drifted back to the silver hair in the baggies at home, and his fingers twitched. Only a moment…

There was a gentle knock on the front door. James straightened his back. His cock was stirring against his thigh, straining against the front of his khakis, and James quickly tried to calm himself, glancing down to ensure that the bulge was not as obvious as it felt. The knock came again, and James waited another few beats before heading purposefully down the hall, hoping he looked presentable.

“Ms. Dell?” he said as he opened the door. It occurred to him much later that he had known, seconds before he saw who was standing on the doorstep, that it would be her.

“James,” she said, immediately familiar. She was framed like a portrait against a late autumn landscape, the black tree branches in the yard seeming to spread out behind her like the clawed hands of a giant, presenting her to him. The afternoon sun on her silvery hair made it ripple like liquid fire.

He stared. She seemed content to stand and be stared at.

After an age, he wordlessly stepped aside and let her enter the house. She brought the silver glow of the outside in with her, and she also brought a scent that seemed to mesh with the clammy tang of the house, and the two scents combined into a dark perfume of dirt and sweat and marshland that made James dizzy.

Ms. Dell smiled at him, a deceptively distracted smile that nonetheless made him feel as though he had been penetrated by a laser. She began to amble about the living room, looking idly up and down, her black silk dress clinging to her flesh as she moved. He wanted to speak to her, but he was afraid of breaking the spell.

She disappeared into the shadows of the hallway, and James stood there stupidly watching the place where she had been, as if her aura and underground scent had left a ghost of her behind, and then came her throaty voice thrumming from the very walls. “Are you coming?” she asked.

He stumbled down the hall, his heart clenching. He didn’t see her at first; there was only the shifting diffused light from the windows making dancing patterns on the water-blue walls, but then there was a hint of movement off to his right, and of course there she was, standing before the bathroom sink and gazing intently at her reflection. She turned her head slightly as he entered. His mouth was dry. She was so very close, and the smell of her was heady, mingling with the stench from the plumbing, the stench that always clung to the hair she had left for him to find in the drains.

She placed her bone-pale hands on her hips and slid the fabric of her dress upwards, bending over the sink as she did so that the twin moons of her ass were just visible. James moved behind her, feeling as though his body was no longer anchored to the earth. Ms. Dell was still looking into the mirror, and now her eyes raised to meet his in the silver reflection of the two of them. Her eyes were black and bottomless, pipelines into the eternal. She waited.

James fumbled for a moment, and in the eerie silence the sound of his zipper freeing him was like a rip in spacetime. Then he was inside of her, and as he watched her face in the mirror he saw her lips part and emit a high, gurgling sigh, though her gaze never faltered, her unblinking eyes boring into him as he bore into her with heightening intensity.

As he neared climax, she arched her ass and pushed against him with terrible force. He clenched his teeth, trying to hold on as long as he could. She threw her head back so that her glorious silver hair flew out in a fan, and James snatched fistfuls of it as it cascaded toward him, curling his fingers and pulling her toward him with it, until he felt as though he would rend her in half. She made that startling cry again, that liquid burble, and then he lost it, howling in pleasurable agony, ripping twin skeins of hair from her head with his clenched fists as he came.

He withdrew from her and collapsed against the bathroom door, lowering his head so that he no longer had to stare into those reflected black eyes, which were still unwaveringly watching him even now. He glanced down at his hands, at the knotted silver strands like fine wire festooning his fingers. He longed to taste them one by one, to savor them on his lips and tongue, but he would not do it while she was watching, despite the strange intimacy they had just shared.

Ms. Dell straightened and smoothed her dress. James noticed a single pearl of semen on her inner thigh, and the sight made his head swim.

She turned toward him, and in James’s vision she almost seemed to waver, all blacks and whites like a projection from an old film. Then she spoke, and became solid again. “May I have a minute?”

James looked dumbly at her until she cut her eyes ever so slightly toward the door. Realization dawned, and he ducked his head in embarrassment. “Yes. Please,” he said hoarsely. He shuffled into the hall, chastened, and she closed the door gently after him.

Should he stand there and wait? What would happen now? Everything was surreal and dreamlike, though he was certain he was wide awake. He leaned slightly toward the bathroom door, but couldn’t hear anything at all. Then, suddenly aware that she could open the door at any moment and see him lurking there like a vulture, he wandered back down the hall and went into the kitchen to wait for her.

The light coming through the windows shifted further to the west and took on the sparkling cast of honey as the afternoon went lazily on. James had heard no sound from the bathroom for a long while, and at last he stole into the shadows of the hallway and pecked meekly at the door. “Ms. Dell?” He felt vaguely ridiculous that he did not know her first name.

Silence greeted him, and his skin prickled with cold. He called again, his voice blasphemy-loud. Very faintly, he thought he heard an aqueous echo, a bubble in a drain, but when he turned the knob and entered, the bathroom was empty.

The succulent wet smell of her still remained, and James leaned over the sink, mimicking the posture of Ms. Dell as he had fucked her. He stared into the mirror, almost expecting to see her black eyes looking back at him. But no, it was just his own haggard, bearded face, its blue eyes ringed with red.

Feeling another stirring in his loins, he pressed his face to the bottom of the sink, drawing all the below-stench up into his nostrils like a greedy eater. Frenzied, her pulled the drain stopper up and out into the sink basin, and saw that the shaft of the stopper was wrapped in a shining cocoon of silken silver hair.

****

The following day James had no pressing obligations, and as soon as his eyes opened he was out of bed and hurrying toward his office down the hall.

He would have believed that the entire experience with Ms. Dell had been a dream, if he didn’t have the twisted locks of her hair in a large baggie in his hand. He had slept with it under his pillow, stroking it with one hand while his other played frantically about inside his boxer shorts. Sometime during these pleasurable activities, he had hit upon a brilliant idea with what to do with Ms. Dell’s hair, something that he hoped would be worthy of her magnificence.