He started to turn. No, the tub started to turn him. He struggled, twisted, strained his already-strained muscles until he ached from head to toe. The tub turned him facedown in the water and held him there. Bruce fought it, broke the water’s surface and sucked in a long, gasping breath. The tub jerked him back into its depths.
This is ridiculous, not real, just your imagination.
Ridiculous: yes. Reaclass="underline" yes. Imagination: no.
He wrenched his head back and managed to suck in another partial breath. In his struggle for air, Bruce almost didn’t feel the tub’s floor reconstituting around his still-hard cock.
If anything was impossible, surely that was it. That he could still have an erection, that he hadn’t wilted like a drowned flower.
Now he was pulling back both his head and his groin. The tub let him get his face above water but wouldn’t let go of his other head. It gripped him tight, jerked him furiously, an overeager lover. Bruce spit out soapy water and screamed. The tub continued jerking, rubbing him raw. Bruce saw some of the bubbles begin to pinken and realized he must be bleeding. His screaming intensified. Water splashed over the edge of the tub, mixed with the puddled beer and pooled near the sink where the floor dipped down a little.
He thrashed. He continued yelping, groaning. And yet, he felt himself approaching climax. Disgusting. Incomprehensible. But true.
The tub stroked for another few seconds, and Bruce spilled his seed despite himself. His hips bucked, and his mind went fuzzy, just as it had when he’d pleasured himself the night before, just as it always had when he’d come inside Eileen with her breathing in his ear and scratching his back.
The tub let go as unceremoniously as it had grabbed on. Bruce swung his legs over the tub’s edge and backed out of the water, reaching for his sore penis and breathing so irregularly he was almost hyperventilating. Through the bubbles, he watched the drain slide from the middle of the tub to its usual spot at the end. The bathmat was gone. Maybe sucked into the drain, maybe melded with the tub’s surface during its...what? Morphing? Yes, he supposed that was as good a word as any.
He took another step back, afraid the tub would reach out and grab him again, molest him again. Water, bubbles, and blood streamed down his body. A pink thread of semen dangled from the tip of his now-flaccid penis for a second before detaching and landing in the hair on his lower leg. In the tub, the band-aid he’d applied the night before floated to the surface. It had a single bloody streak down the middle.
Bruce grabbed a towel and wrapped it around his waist. Crazy as it was, he didn’t want the tub to see him naked any longer than it had already. Not that it seemed to be able to see anything at all.
Are you serious? he thought. Of course it can’t see you. It can’t do anything. It’s a goddam bathtub. You’re still sleeping, and none of this is real. Open your fucking eyes already.
Except there was no chance this was a dream. He’d never had dreams this lifelike. Or this freaky.
A huge air bubble escaped the tub’s drain and blurped when it reached the soapy surface. And then the water level started dropping. Bruce could hear the liquid surging through the pipes beneath the floor. He continued backing away from the tub, watching where he stepped to avoid shards of the broken beer bottle. His crotch throbbed, and his legs shook. He thought he might not be able to make it out of the bathroom, that his body would betray him, buckle beneath him, and he’d fall within striking distance of the tub.
Striking distance?
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes; then he slammed his palm into his forehead. As if he might be able to bludgeon the last five minutes out of his memory. Again: smack. Harder: SMACK.
Pinpoint bursts of light flickered across his inner eyelids. The last of the bathwater swirled down the drain with a sound that almost reminded him of chuckling. He peeked out between his fingers like a scared little kid and finished backing out of the room.
In the hall, he closed the bathroom door and sat down with his bare back against it. For what seemed a very long time, he tried to regain control of his breathing. His chest hitched, his throat trembled, tears leaked from the corners of his eyes.
Not real, he kept thinking. There’s just no way any of that could have been real.
His oozing wiener begged to differ.
You have to destroy it. Whether it really happened or not, for your own sanity, you need to get the sledgehammer from the shed and bust the thing into a million little pieces.
Could you solve crazy with even more crazy? Bruce didn’t think so, but he also didn’t think he could get past what had just happened without doing something. Destroying the tub seemed liked as good an idea as any.
He pushed himself up and hurried through the house. He grabbed his keys from the side table by the front door and stepped outside. On the porch, the wind got hold of his towel and whisked it off his body. It was too wet and heavy to go far. It fell in a heap on the ground just beside the porch. Bruce let it go and hurried to the shed wearing nothing but a little blood on his inner thighs.
The keys jangled when he poked them at the shed’s locked door. He glanced over his shoulder.
Someone might drive by.
No one’s going to drive by.
Someone might see.
The only way anyone’s going to see you is if you keep dawdling out here on the lawn all night. Get inside. Now.
He found the right key, unlocked the door, and hurried in.
The sledge hung from a rack on the wall to his right. A pair of shovels flanked it, one square-headed and the other round. Bruce ignored the rest of the tools, although there were enough of them in the small place to start a hardware store. He needed only the hammer for now. He pulled it off the rack and hefted it. The wooden handle slid through his hands and felt as smooth as plastic. Years of sweaty use had worked like polish on the tool.
Brownish gunk caked the sledge’s head.
Blood.
No, not blood, just mud with plenty of red clay mixed in, but it gave him a chill nonetheless.
He slung the hammer over his shoulder and backed out of the shed.
You better hope nobody drives by. If ever a person looked like an all-out psychopath, it’s you right now.
Was he a psychopath? Could you set out on a mission to slay a bathtub monster and still call yourself sane?
He scurried across the side yard, his penis flapping against his legs, his bare feet getting stuck in the mud and making sucking sounds when he pulled them free that reminded him of the noise his manhood had made when the tub had finally let him yank it out of its drainhole.
He left muddy footprints on the floor inside the front door but ignored them and strode across the house. Now that he was safe from prying eyes, he didn’t have to worry about things like modesty and decency. Or even sanity.
He stopped at the closed bathroom door and allowed himself a little time to build up his courage before wrapping his fingers around the knob and letting himself in.
If not for the spilled beer, you never would have known anything had happened here. The water had finished draining from the tub, leaving behind only a few sudsy remains; towels and dirty clothes lay heaped on the floor where they'd been when he left; and the array of toiletries spread across the vanity hadn’t moved an inch.
See? Just a dream. Or maybe a brain tumor. It didn’t happen. No, sir.