The Lurid Sea Read online

  The Lurid Sea

  A steamy bacchanal bending through time and space, replete with the occasional God, mythic creatures, and oh-so-many men. For centuries the godling Nerites luxuriated in a shifting sexual paradise, hopping from one bathhouse to another—from disco-era Manhattan to Feudal Japan and back to where it all started: ancient Rome. When the dark shadow of his half-brother, the sinister Obsidio, descends, his deadly kiss leaves bodies cooling in steam room corners. Nerites must adopt a new role: as defender of these hidden havens, his eternal orgy becomes a race across history itself.

  The Lurid Sea

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  eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com

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  The Lurid Sea

  © 2018 By Tom Cardamone. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13:978-1-62639-912-9

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, NY 12185

  First Edition: March 2018

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Jerry L. Wheeler

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Image, Youth and the Dolphin, by Félix Frédéric d’Eon

  Cover Design by Melody Pond

  By the Author

  Night Sweats: Tales of Homosexual Wonder and Woe

  The Lurid Sea

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to my love, my light: Leo, and especially to Len Barot, Cindy Cresap, Craig Gidney, Michael Graves, Trebor Healey, Wayne Hoffman, Sandy Lowe, Melody Pond, Stacia Seaman, Carsen Taite, Ian Titus, Jerry L. Wheeler, and all of the folks at Bold Strokes Books.

  Deepest gratitude to Félix Frédéric d’Eon for the use of his fantastic artwork for the cover of this book.

  To Boyd McDonald

  No rays from the holy heaven come down

  On the long night-time of that town:

  But light from out the lurid sea

  Streams up the turrets silently—

  The City in the Sea

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Chapter One

  A Chariot in the Rain

  The hot tub was a frothy mix of foam flecked with miniscule bits of fecal matter, white ribbons of semen and filmy sweat. I basked in this heady broth of hunger and lassitude. Curious feet found mine, quickly recoiled, and returned to tentatively test the ever-so-slight webbing between my toes. All faces were blank. Perspiration coated red brows. A large man edged closer. Dark complexion, black eyes, his thick temple strung with aqueous pearls. Knee to knee, his fingers parted the water toward my erection. I leaned back, head against the slick concrete ledge; I let him trace my silky shaft with the puckered ridges of his waterlogged fingertips. He squeezed and grunted as I exhaled. I dipped my face into the swirling water and thought of the dark currents between the Pillars of Hercules, of the mermen and porpoises cavorting within the deep whorls of the Aegean. I wasn’t ready yet to spend my seed, for my hunger bends in a different direction, so I gently backed out of the man’s grip. He relented without a word and turned his attention to the young, shallow-chested boy pressed between two older gentlemen. I pivoted, made tiny waves, and rose slowly so that all eyes would be on my supple buttocks as water poured down my back and funneled like a spigot off the curlicue of matted black hair between my legs.

  I grabbed one of the damp towels from the nearby rack, wrapped it loosely around my waist, and sauntered down the dim hall. I was in no hurry to discern my whereabouts. What town, what country, even what era, meant little to me. After all, what would I converse with these men about, politics? Here, in the bathhouses across the world, men spoke with their eyes and then their hands, following with silent mouths and other points of entry and egress. And I’m not looking for exits. I live to suck the salt from as many men as possible, giving only a little, to submerge again, in whatever body of water that particular palace holds. Sometimes I part thick cords of pulsing vapor to emerge in another place, as naked as the day I was born. Or at least as naked as the day Neptune cursed me to travel down this road of excess within the aquatic underworld of men who sup on men.

  * * *

  I opened my mouth wantonly and let the towel drop just a bit for a large man within the shadow of a cavernous brick archway. His gaze drilled my form. He beckoned with his chin and turned; I let the towel fall and follow. His shoulders were tense from the hunt, the crevices of his back rolled into a dark gorge of distressed muscle. The threadbare towel cupped his hard buttocks and slapped his thighs. My hunger was a wolf that burrowed into the cave of my throat and dropped a moist litter into my bowels. I must feed these squirming pups. His towel dropped. Hands on my shoulders guided me down. His cock wavered before my mouth and, kneeling, my fingers combed the wide swath of pubic hair that swarms his pelvis. My tongue hung out of my mouth in unquestioning gratitude, and he rubbed the head of his cock across my lips. I whimpered with delight, a godling that grovels at the bony feet of men, one who sucks stringy loops of ambrosia from their warm laps and rolls in ecstasy on cold semen-stained cement floors. Invert Mount Olympus into heavenly basements of captured clouds of white roiling steam, disembodied sounds of panting, rough hands and dark corners, and you will find me on the ground, wet pinions of delight smeared across my cheeks. Heaven in Hades, I feasted on his length. I placed his palm on the back of my neck, the better for him to know he was my driver. I was a chariot in the rain, his to ride. I held him in my mouth and throat with an applied rhythm. The man widened his stance. The weak light still somehow reached his blanched toenails. I liked how his toes reflexively pulled at the slimy ground as I increased my speed.

  “You’re pretty good at this.”

  I nodded vigorously and disengaged for a moment, cradling the wet cock in one hand, steadying myself with my other hand on the cold concrete floor.

  “I’ve sucked miles of cock.”

  My momentary partner chortled and, thumb on the glistening head of his dick, impatiently pushed it back down toward my parted lips.

  “Well, c’mon now. You’ve got a million miles to go before you get home.”

  I could only nod in agreement at this bewilderingly ironic statement, and I dove back onto the shaft. The cock in my mouth was now the single most important organ within my own body. As this second cylindrical heart lay heavy on my tongue, I closed my eyes tight, arms back as if I were about to dive, and dive I did, plunging over and over toward the cliff of muscled crotch—granite against my nose, pubic hair up into my nostrils, and the penis in my mouth exploded, and I fed and swallowed and licked the life-giving testicles in abject gratitude. Bliss and more, as by now other men had gathered around us. Towels dropped and I fed like a blind beggar let out of an infernal prison into the daylight for the first time in eons. These men were my collective sun, each strand of semen deposited into my eager mouth a ray of light. With my every gasp, hands holding calves steady, nodding to the next one, each movement and sound conveyed the same message: paint my tongue white.

  This went on forever.

  Eventually, the last man shivered and withdrew to spew ropey strands of cum on my cheeks, grunts and shudders as I groveled, and then he exhaled and leaned back against the
wall as I licked myself clean. The whimpering wolves caged within my gut curled and stretched with satiated glee.

  Chapter Two

  This Grateful Serpent

  Let’s talk about my throat. Once you move past my hospitable lips, that performance called a tongue, there is the throat. I eschew vaginal descriptions. For the most part we are men here, a few glorious creatures are something between a man and a woman and I befriend them, finding their difference a blessing, a relief, proof that we are a flourishing garden and not opposing sides of a duly carved chess board, but I digress. Let’s talk about my brother, Obsidio. My brother was the first to discover the congress of my throat. He was big for his age. His feet came in first, huge, always black-soled for he liked to prowl outside our mansion gates at night, as was his nature, his being sired by the God of Death and all that that entails. Black hair, raven-winged but greased for trickery, not flight. He was as stern and stealthy as our mother, enabling him to sneak up on me whenever he liked which, as he was a few years older and matured early, was often. Those sinewy feet looked as if they were formed to climb walls, to hang from the looming branch of a dead tree over some crumbling tomb beside a barren stretch of the Appian Way.

  Our house was situated in the heart of Viminal Hill, one of the oldest, wealthiest neighborhoods of Rome. Such illustrious households were centered around an open courtyard with a life-giving fountain. I studied my Grecian scrolls here. See? I was always drawn to water. Whenever Mother went out shopping or banqueted at a friend’s mansion, my brother knew where to find me.

  Mother. Obsidio inherited all of her darkness, her mercurial moods. We split her ample carnal desire. I took her small frame, my brother her distant eyes. Her desires were endless, exhausting slaves, gods, senators, centurions, priest and priestess, merchants, and assorted freedmen of dubious trades. She took them all in her chambers, some on the library divan, others on the cool marble floor of the vestibule, our ancestral masks staring straight ahead, stoic, eyelessly censorious over the moaning below. Often in full view of us when we were infants. As we grew she became more circumspect, though it’s more likely her tastes developed intricacies that required more private ministrations. Either way, we were often alone.

  * * *

  Back to Obsidio.

  Just saying his name causes my throat to tighten in the grip of that most wanton of lusts, the familial.

  Obsidio.

  His name is ash on my tongue. A gray ash smoothed and molded into a paste by the very saliva he summons—a new unguent I apply to every cock I fellate that is not his. No matter the man, he is always in my mouth.

  Obsidio.

  He came upon me silently, as always. A flutter of starlings announced his presence as he batted the scroll out of my small hands and pushed me down into the raked pebbles. His knuckles protruded like pulleys working fine, long fingers. Soon after his penis lengthened and the blackest hair slithered out of his pores and gathered around its root, he figured out how to mount my young, hairless body from behind one night in an Athenian graveyard while on family holiday. At home, he used his taloned toes like a second pair of hands to better hold me down. He stuffed his balled tunic in my mouth to silence me, the broth of his odor and sweat arousing my initial appetite, as if the cloth were a cork so my dormant skill could ferment as he worked my backside.

  I marveled at the length and girth of his penis as mine had yet to sprout. Obsidio grimly charted its emerging growth within the crack of my ass, commenting that soon he would be able to root out my internal organs and I would become an empty vessel, that when he was finished pumping me with semen, he would stand me on my head, plant purple amaranths in my cavity and present me as the centerpiece for our next family banquet. Being ignorant of anatomy, such talk terrorized and thrilled me. I cherished the image of my body as a mere unadorned vase to be filled with random things.

  * * *

  A slave stood solemnly on a ladder trimming the date palms above us as Obsidio was slamming his piece into me one afternoon. At some point, my cries and whinnies proved a distraction to my brother, so he hollered in exasperation, “I’ve got an idea on how to shut you up.”

  He flipped me over and spun me round as if I were but a pup, and slapped his steaming cock, greasy from my internal oils, across my lips. Loosening the rag from my mouth, he plunged in.

  You would think there would have been at least a moment’s resistance to this alien act, a new violation of my immature body. Not at all. I pivoted, and, on all fours, I assumed my intended vocation—no, my reason to exist. Mine was a life of eternal supplication.

  Finally, I understood the physical act of prayer.

  He gasped as I swallowed his length, tasting his glans as it passed, swabbing the underbelly of his engorged cock as it rode over my tongue and down the fitted funnel of my throat. I reflexively swallowed to pull him in, nose bent upward on his still-bald stomach. His pubic hair was jackal thick, so coarse my gums bled the first few times I sucked his penis, until I adjusted. He swiftly ejaculated. His semen clung to my tongue like gasping fish to a net. I hooked a globule with my finger and held it aloft. It glistened like highly polished onyx.

  This was the only physical evidence he was the son of Pluto.

  I let the sticky substance swing from my fingertip like a black pendulum. We knew then we were done with the foolish business he was conducting within my ass. My mouth, my throat, was a perfect fit for his cock. It’s where it belonged; a living sheath for his scarab.

  From then on, until we were separated the night my father cursed me with immortality, we shared his bed. And while he slept, I was nestled between his legs, nursing this grateful serpent.

  Chapter Three

  The Echo of My Delirium

  The ocean of my birth was the secret basement within the marble and brick bowels of the Baths of Caracalla. After my brother both divined and elicited my true nature, my hunger grew insatiable. Yet when he was in one of his increasingly sullen moods, I began to frequent the baths to seek additional succor. This was a natural excursion for a bookish lad, as the baths housed one of the most well-stocked libraries in the city of Rome. Our slave, the incongruously named Perseus, was a shy, silly eunuch whose main duty was the care of my mother’s hair, though he was additionally charged with accompanying me whenever I left the house. He enjoyed my trips to the baths, and since he was singularly nearsighted, it was easy to give him the slip.

  Once we had settled in at the baths, I liked to wallow, nearly submerged, in one of the heated pools, eyes level with the water, and observe the size and shape of the various organs floating between the legs of the assorted men lounging in the water. I would tuck my own erection between my thighs and set my sights on the tastiest cock. If the owner was interested, I soon learned, he would give the slightest, nearly imperceptible nod and depart for more private quarters, such as an empty massage room or one of the darkened resting areas. All were circumspect, for such escapades with freeborn youth such as myself were taboo, and thus that much more titillating. After several visits to the baths, I worked up the nerve to follow and learned to hone the skills I practiced daily on my brother. Age, girth, nationality, disposition—all meant nothing to me. What I craved hung between their legs and belonged in my mouth. Some patted my head in approval, but others pushed me away once they were spent. The bitter salt of their disdain did not bother me in the least. I was already peering past their thighs toward the next slippery banquette. That was when I became aware of the competition. Other boys and men forded the same ravenous waters. At first, my thirst seemed so singular, so obsessive, that I did not imagine others could possibly share my predilection, did not notice similar assignations within the steam, couplings in the corners, and so on.

  * * *

  Late one evening, after Mother had departed for a fortnight to join in the bacchanalian banquets of a disgraced senator recently exiled to his Tuscan vineyard, I lingered at the baths. Concerning the senator—faint punishment for a notorious dr
unk, imprisoned within acres of succulent vice. Perseus slept on a bench while I sucked on a centurion for the third time. He had caught my eye in the frigidarium and I followed him to the toilet, where I took him in my mouth while he squatted to release his bowels. His thickness was a challenge, though the fact that the rankness of his pubes could not be scrubbed away no matter how many soaks compelled me forward. After I swallowed his globular seed for the first time, he claimed me like a pet and had me follow him from pool to pool, his massive hand always on my neck. The second feeding took place in one of the dark resting chambers, where he jammed a large, calloused toe in my mouth while massaging himself back into full, towering length. Our third session ended in one of the steam rooms. The breadth of him stretched my lips and worked my throat, my own little divining rod pert and quivering as my knees slid slightly on the tile floor. I steadied myself by gripping his burly calves and realized that what I thought was the echo of my delirium was actually an oral chorus. As the swirling steam momentarily subsided, I saw every man seated on the bench to either side of my centurion had his legs spread with the silhouette of a bobbing, servile head between his knees. I marveled. My sense of specialness and singularity wilted, but rebounded with the thought that I was not alone in my taste, that I was among a brotherhood of service, a priesthood swallowing secret sacrifice. The centurion grunted as he again flooded my mouth. I felt his whole body go lax while his member softened between my lips. I slowed my suction as the boy working a tall, lanky bald man beside me fell away in exhaustion. The initial flurry of a snore emanated from the listing warrior above as I gingerly pivoted to catch the tall man’s flagging erection. He greedily fed me back into his full length. I stopped only to lap his pendulous balls, and then an impatient finger would tap my shoulder, insistent I return to the main task.