Free Cthulhurotica by Cody Goodfellow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jennifer Brozek, Ahimsa Kerp, Carrie Cuinn, Gabrielle Harbowy, Don Pizarro, Madison Woods, Richard Baron, Juan Miguel Marin, Maria Mitchell, Mae Empson, Nathan Crowder, KV Taylor, Andrew Scearce, Constella Espj, Leon J. West, Travis King, Steven J. Searce, Clint Collins, Matthew Marovich, Gary Mark Bernstein, Kirsten Brown, Kenneth Hite, Justin Everett

with his “mining” and “buzzing sounds?” I should remain lucid and investigate. We know testosterone levels are higher at night; that is why I succumb so easily to these creatures’ powers. I’ll masturbate before going to sleep in order to regain my strength. Still, I should remain naked so as to remain slightly aroused. Only when I am aroused do these creatures appear. Perhaps medieval monks were right, retention of semen attracts “demonic spirits,” not because they detect a virtuous monk but because, because why? Certainly my dreams’ fantastic beings are not demons from hell attracted to my celibate life. But what are they?
    Falling asleep.
    Lucid. In the midst of the foamy mist generated by the cascading water I glimpse both of beautiful beings. Just then, the steam turns cloudy and obscures them from my view. I see nothing but white! Ah… I may be blind but I can feel their pale fingers touching my face, my lips. I try to do the same but almost stumble upon them. My hands find their soft cheeks, their lips. Still blind, my own lips find theirs, three faces kissing each other until one of them, the woman’s, says…
    “Something’s different!”
    Her face frowns, the cloud disperses.
    “Yes,” says her brother. He adds, ”There is not enough energetic material in the human’s body.”
    I respond looking at each in turn. “Of course there’s something different. I now know who you are. At first I didn’t believe it, dismissing it as some crazy idea from a lunatic from Arkham, MA. But it’s all there! Your whispering voices, the phonograph, the sound waves, the mining of energy. The lunatic erred only when he imagined things such as monstrous wings.”
    Immediately both smile and a monstrous metamorphosis begins. The pale red of their lips and cheeks spreads, flushing their entire bodies and beyond, stretching their flesh into pinkish membranous wings. The vibrations generated by their wings, intensified by those of their buzzing whispers, energize the air. Both beings start floating in the heated atmosphere as if they were still in the water. Now I see two ageless, pale white-gray-pinkish things that remind me of something existing in a spectrum between the insects I keep in the sciences laboratory entomology cabinets and the fungi I keep in the biology refrigerators. Their stretching skin resembles fermenting yeast; their vast pairs of articulated wings mimic the articulated appendages of a giant wasp or some sort of huge albino bat. Whatever growth has obliterated their faces now sprouts multitudes of very short inward antennae and long outward feelers, feelers reaching towards me.
    They both ask: “Do you find us more attractive like this?”
    I ignore their remark and ask, “Are you some kind of parasite stealing my body energy?”
    One of them answers: “Close. We are not organic but composed of a different kind of organic atoms. You are right that in all organic atoms permanent material enters the psychical world from the corporeal. Alas, there’s our problem. We are mostly corporeal, barely psychical, and not intuitive in the way you are. Our psyches are entirely logical and rational. We feed our bodies and psyches with that which we seek: diverse energetic materials not available in our planet.
    “We spent so much temporal and spatial energy harvesting your planet’s atomic energy until we realized that what we need is the greatest force in the cosmos, your erotic energy. Like the fungi in your lab, we reproduce by parthenogenesis, our spores detach from our bodies and create an identical copy of ourselves. Not even like insects, but like self-reproducing worms, we have no concept of the Other.
    “We attempted to reproduce a human erotic-other as an information set of light waves, sound waves, and touch waves, so that we could bring a sample to our planet. At first it only required carrying a brain and a one of the phonographs your colleague Edison invented for us. Now we do not