“Front Porch Thing”
Something about being a passenger always made Kate drowsy. She tried to stay awake, but there was nothing to see this late at night and nothing to do this far away from a wifi signal, and she felt herself nodding off for long stretches of the drive home as her parents chatted away about all the things she’d missed since she went away to college. She tried to listen, but the more attention she paid, the less it seemed like anything was actually happening back in Hickory Springs, Wyoming. After a year in New York City, the routine of small-town life seemed even slower than ever, whatever her mother might think.
“...and did you know, they are doing more construction out on I-25? They’ve routed everything along Highway 196 again, and you know the Millers, well, they’ve got a whole five acres along that route and a herd of cows that Jake Miller swears are trying to kill themselves. He’s had to repair his fence three times in the last month, and every single time, where do you think he finds those cows? Out on 196 blocking traffic. The DOT says...”
The words dissolved into a stream of sleepy images, the cows floating past like balloons as Kate struggled to keep her dark brown eyes open and failed. The smooth motion of the car lulled her into sleep, badly-needed after a full day of travel, and Kate knew that when she woke up, it would just be to another story about the Millers’ fence or the property-line dispute between Caleb Henderson and Miles Turley that was entering its third decade or the continuing health issues of Widow Simpkins and her ongoing battle with hypochondria. The details changed from day to day, year to year, but Hickory Springs didn’t. When a new restaurant opened, it was practically a calendar event.
She surfaced briefly, but her dad was practically telling her a bedtime story with his tale of home improvements. “...so I said, ‘Do you have those boards in green?’, and well, damn if old Chet at the lumber yard didn’t stare at me like I had two heads. It took me a week to get Jim to order me some stain in the right color, but you’ll see it was worth it when you look at that toolshed, it’s about the prettiest damn thing I made, if I do say so myself...”
Kate fell back into a doze, hoping she wasn’t snoring but knowing her parents wouldn’t really care if she was. They were just happy to have her back, and she was happy to be back. Even if Hickory Springs was probably the dullest place to be from in the history of little tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, and even if she didn’t even bother telling most of her undergrads where she was from because they wouldn’t be able to find it on a map, Kate loved to come back every year and take a break from the hectic pace of going to grad school in the busiest city in the world. No matter what kinds of craziness New York had to offer, Kate always knew that she could come back to Hickory Springs, curl up in the exact same bed in the exact same room in the exact same house she’d lived in since she was born, and know that there was at least one thing she could rely on to stay exactly the same.
“Wake up, honey, we’re home!” Kate had a momentary sense of dislocation, unsure for a moment whether she was dreaming about growing up and she was really just getting home from a trip to see her grandmother, but she blinked it away and came back to herself just in time to see them pulling into the driveway. Sure enough, the house looked exactly like it always did. It had the same rustic cedar siding, the same bright red trim, the same old garage too full of stuff to park a car in, the same covered porch—
Kate stared in confusion for a moment, sure she was still dreaming. She got out of the stopped car, scarcely even noticing the stiffness in her legs or the weariness in her body. She walked up to the front porch in a wide-eyed daze, barely able to believe her eyes. “What...what is that?” she asked, her voice suffused with an incredulity that shaded into horror. “What is that?” she repeated, unable to stop herself.
Her dad merely shrugged and went around to the trunk to grab her luggage. “It’s our front porch thing,” he said, somehow managing to sound more indifferent than he had about pre-treated lumber. He hauled out Kate’s bags and set them in the driveway expectantly, but Kate didn’t even begin to pick up on the hint. She was too busy staring at the thing on the porch.
It was big, bigger than she was tall even though she’d inherited her father’s lanky frame. She didn’t think she could reach all the way around it, either, not that she had any intention of getting close enough to try. Something about the size, the mottled greenish-brown color, the thick veins that ran from its base all the way up to the tip and pulsed so faintly that Kate could almost convince herself she was imagining the motion...it all combined to freak her right the fuck out. It looked like something out of a horror movie, the kind of thing the hero burned in the third act only to find out in the last five minutes that there was a whole field of the damn things out back of the house. It looked like any second it would split open to disgorge a host of facehuggers the size of small ponies. It looked terrifying.
Her dad didn’t seem to notice her terror, though. He just grabbed the bags after a minute or two and walked up the front steps to the unlocked door. Kate tensed up as he passed by the thing, half-expecting it to lash out with a host of tentacles and pull him inside it, but he went inside as though it was no big deal that they had a giant pod on their front steps.
“Mom, seriously,” Kate whispered, grabbing her mother’s arm, “what is that? Is it something you’re growing? It looks...God, it looks like a lettuce and a stinkmelon had babies with an okra pod the size of a horse.” Kate didn’t think there was actually any such plant as a ‘stinkmelon’, but she knew what one would look like if it existed, and it would look a lot like that. It looked wilted and fungal in places, but the veins seemed almost luminescent in the shadows the porch light didn’t banish. And the curled vines and leaves at the base looked downright rotten, even though Kate couldn’t smell any decay.
Kate’s mother patted her on the shoulder and gently disengaged from Kate’s grip. It took her a few seconds. “It’s just our front porch thing, dear,” she said dismissively. “Everyone’s got one these days. Now let’s get you off to bed—we’re going into town bright and early tomorrow, and I’m sure you’ll want to come along and see how Emma’s getting on.” And with that, she walked up the steps and past the terrifying mutant pod-thing and into the house.
Which meant Kate had two choices. Walk past the thing, or stand out here all night. And while June wasn’t the worst time of year to spend an evening outside, Kate knew she’d face an awkward conversation with her parents if she had to explain that she slept in the car instead of facing their hideous plant monster. Which...plant monsters were plant monsters, but nothing was worse than having to have an argument with your parents over which one of you was acting weird. Kate took the stairs at a sprint and darted inside.
With the door closed (okay, slammed shut) the house looked reassuringly normal. Kate’s parents hadn’t redecorated, the furniture was the same lovingly well-worn couches and chairs she remembered from her childhood, and there wasn’t a ‘living room thing’ and a ‘kitchen thing’ and a ‘dining room thing’ there waiting for her. Kate relaxed a little, thanking her parents for the ride and begging off from a late-night snack. She hauled her bags upstairs and closed the bedroom door, taking comfort in the familiar posters from her childhood and the shelves of old books that she left behind when she heard about the size of her dorm room. She changed into her pajamas and flopped out on her old bed, determined to put the momentary spasm of inexplicable weirdness out of her mind and get a good night’s sleep.
Of course she dreamed about the front porch thing.
In her dream, the tendrils at the base of the pod crept up the outside of the house like kudzu, sprouting with incredible speed and defying gravity as they dug into the siding and moved with sinister purpose toward her bedroom window. They pried it open while she slept, working away at the tiny crack with vegetable patience until they had shifted the sash up a mere inch or two before snaking into her room and onto her bed. Kate didn’t notice, but she noticed that she wasn’t noticing. She could see the whole thing like an out-of-body experience, and she tried to make herself wake up before the tendrils curled around her wrists and ankles.
She failed. The vines tightened around her flesh, not painful but tugging at her with impossible strength, binding her wrists together over her head and pulling her legs until they were almost touching the corners of the footboard. She writhed and wriggled, but she was pinned in place at those three points so helplessly that she knew instinctively there was no way of getting off the bed. She screamed, but she was already certain that nobody would come to help her. It was a nightmare. People didn’t come to help you in nightmares.
The vines snaked around her head, wrapping around and around her mouth to muffle the sound. She opened wide, trying to bite down and chew through the plant, but it was tough and fibrous and there was just too much of it. Kate tasted the sharp flavor of chlorophyll on her tongue, and she screamed again but this time it came out only as a grunt.
She grunted again, this time in surprise, when another tendril pushed its way through the window and began to slither along the bedclothes. This one was thicker than the others, almost as big around as a cucumber, and it pushed its way up and over to her body blindly as if nosing for her scent. When it touched her body, it pushed along her belly, insinuating itself into the waistband of her pajamas and pressing itself against the entrance to her cunt. It felt different than the others, slick and slimy against her skin from some unknown secretion, and it slid into her pussy with almost no effort at all despite Kate’s thrashing.
It didn’t fuck her, exactly. She could feel it pushing into her, deeper and deeper, so thick inside her cunt that its every motion seemed to hit all of her erogenous zones at once. But it wasn’t thrusting. It just filled her up and throbbed, ever so gently, teasing her with the slight pulses along its girth until Kate could feel her arousal mingling with the slime that covered its length. She didn’t want to enjoy it; even if it was a dream, especially if it was a dream, she did not want to find out that she had a weird sexual thing for horrific alien seed pods. But fuck if she wasn’t getting turned on despite her best efforts to lucid-dream away the nightmarish tentacle sex.
Involuntarily, Kate felt herself clenching around the thickness of the intruding vine, a wave of pleasure hitting her with every squeezing motion. She could feel a tiny rough nub right on her clit, one she knew wasn’t there when it first pushed its way into her, and it drove her quietly crazy with bliss every time her hips moved. She caught herself rolling her body in a slow, lazy rhythm, fucking the plant very slowly, and her breath came quicker and quicker as her climax approached. When it hit, she let out a muffled squeal of ecstasy as the vine discharged some thick and sticky fluid deep into her pussy before finally withdrawing. She didn’t know what it was, but somehow she felt certain that she would come downstairs tomorrow thrilled to worship the front porch thing...
Kate woke to find her pajama bottoms down around her ankles, and a corner of the pillow wet with saliva like she’d been chewing on it. Her pussy felt slick and sated, and there was a damp spot on the bedding that she really hoped would dry by morning. She sat up and looked out the window, absolutely sure that she would see the last few vines retreating down the wall. But there was nothing. Only the porch light, casting the shadow of the thing onto the lawn.
Kate shuddered in revulsion so profound it was almost comforting. She double-checked the window to make sure it was tightly shut. Then she rolled over and went back to sleep.
Thankfully, the rest of the night passed without any disturbing plant-sex dreams, and Kate could more or less convince herself that the whole thing was an after-effect of travel stress and the weirdness of coming home to find out that her parents had adopted the ginormous love child of a corpse flower and a butternut squash. (Okay. It didn’t stink. It didn’t really smell like anything. It just looked like something that should stink.) She rinsed herself clean in the shower, grateful to find that her mom had remembered to buy the one brand of shampoo that didn’t leave her long black hair feeling lank and greasy, and went down for breakfast.
And managed to avoid talking about the thing on the front porch. It wasn’t easy; even though Kate’s mom and dad conversed about pretty much everything but the front porch thing (and politics, a subject that had been taboo in their conversations since November of 2011), Kate found herself itching to bring it up. “Where did you get the giant prop from an ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ remake, Dad?” she didn’t ask. “So, when you said ‘everyone’s got one these days,’ Mom, did you mean all the members of the mutant seed-pod cult you’ve apparently joined, or actually everyone?” she managed not to say. The awkward tip-toeing around the topic actually felt worse than the time she came home to see the Trump signs in the yard.
It was a relief when they finished up the dishes and got in the car to go to town. It was even more of a relief when they all split up so that Kate’s dad could stop at the hardware store and her mom could spend a little time browsing at the local antiques store. (It always amazed Kate that a town with a population of 647 could support an antiques store, but her mom always said that people would travel a long way for good taste. Kate suspected the owner did all his business online and just had his storefront here for tax purposes. Either that, or it was a front for a meth lab.) And Kate got to go see Emma.
Not that she hadn’t been keeping up with her friend—they emailed each other daily, and even if Hickory Springs was The Town That Broadband Forgot, they still made the effort to video chat once a week and giggle at the way that their lips didn’t match their voices. But that wasn’t really the same thing as hanging out together. Kate always made sure to stop by Emma’s little house in town first thing after she got in, walking down Main Street past the post office and the Sunshine Café and the general store that had all been there long before Kate was born and would be there long after she left. As she walked, Kate remembered a lifetime of taking the exact same route past the exact same places and turning the corner to head down a little tree-lined street with little...identical...houses...
Oh shit. Her mother hadn’t been kidding.
There was a giant fucking pod outside every single home. Some of them were on the porch, some of them just sitting next to the front steps, but they all looked like the thing that Kate’s parents had. Some were a little taller, others a bit wider, but they all had the same mottled colors and monstrous veins. There was no mistaking them for anything else in the vegetable kingdom. Kate felt like they were staring at her as she passed.
When she got to Emma’s house, the same house that they played in together as children, the house Emma inherited from her parents and swore she would live in until she was ninety-seven and had a dozen grandchildren to spoil, Emma was sitting outside on the porch waiting for her. And so was the thing. That was when Kate absolutely knew, on a gut-deep and instinctive level, that something was very wrong. She didn’t know what, but she knew that Emma loved that old house more than anything in the entire world. It was why she never went to college even though she had a scholarship waiting for her, it was why she didn’t follow Ethan O’Reilly to California despite a close call that just about saw them married while still in high school. She made her living keeping houses just like hers as perfect as they were the day they were built 100 years ago when Hickory Springs was founded. There was no way in Heaven or Earth Emma would put up with something that damn ugly on her front porch.
So Kate decided to just ask. “Ems!” she cried out, giving her friend a big hug as she skipped up the front steps, making sure to put the chair between her and the plant. “How have you been? How’s the carpentry business? What the everloving fuck is that thing behind you?”
Emma giggled. It was the same giggle Kate remembered hearing for years and years—no pod person could fake that laugh. But the response, frustrating as it was, came back just the same as her mom and dad’s. “It’s my front porch thing,” she said nonchalantly. “What, they don’t have them in the big city? Don’t tell me that Hickory Springs has finally become a trendsetter!”
“No,” Kate said, glad to be around someone she could at least argue with about it. “They do not have them in New York City. They don’t have them anywhere. They didn’t have them in Hickory Springs last Christmas, Ems. Seriously, what the fuck is going on? How the fuck did everyone in town decide to start growing their own goddamned Audrey II on the front porch this year?”
Emma reached out to stroke the waxy surface of the pod, tracing its veins with her fingertips. “Well, I think it was Al Henderson out on Route 192 that got one before anyone else, but I first saw one when I was out doing some work for Jake Stibbons. The big Victorian farmhouse over by Lemon Creek?” Kate nodded, impatient to get to the explanation, but that wasn’t how things worked in Hickory Springs, even post alien-invasion Hickory Springs. Instead, Emma said, “You know he tried to do that whole damn garage of his in vinyl siding? Neon green vinyl siding! I just about cussed him a blue streak over that, I said that if he wanted his house to look like ‘Miami Vice’ he could go ahead and give it some stubble and it would look just as stupid—”
Kate sighed, and gave her friend her best ‘put-upon’ face. “But you didn’t react to his giant hell-gourd.”
Emma shrugged. “Well, it kind of surprised me a little at the time, sure. But you know, after a while you just kind of get so you don’t notice them. It’s like satellite dishes, kind of. The first time you see one, you wonder what the hell it’s doing on the side of a house, but after a couple of months you don’t even think about it anymore. It’s just part of the scenery. It does its job and you do yours.”
Kate goggled wide-eyed at Emma. “Its job? What the fuck is its job? Does it do chores around the yard at night or something?”
Emma got a strange look on her face, almost forgetful. Like she was trying to remember where her car keys were, or explain a concept that she wasn’t exactly clear on herself. “Well, I...it’s kind of a...you know, I...” She trailed off into silence, her expression slightly dazed. “Um. Hang on a sec.”
And then she turned and pressed her face directly to the surface of the plant. Not just up against it but into it—the spongy, waxy surface molded itself around Emma’s features like one of those memory foam cushions as she nuzzled it with abject excitement. She leaned further and further in, embracing the thing almost like a lover, and then she began to take deep, shuddering breaths.
Kate didn’t even realize she was backing away until her butt hit the porch railing. She was absolutely transfixed by the sight, staring in naked, horrified astonishment at the spectacle of her oldest friend squeezing the bulbous growth tightly and gasping in the plant’s...aroma? Spores? Kate didn’t know and didn’t want to get close enough to find out. She didn’t even want to get close enough to grab Emma’s ponytail and pull her clear of the nightmarish embrace—as much as it shamed her to admit it, she was too frightened to move. If Emma needed help, Kate couldn’t make herself give it.
But Emma certainly didn’t look like she needed help. She looked like she was shaking with pleasure, quivering in the plant’s embrace. Her breath was coming in panting gasps, and Kate thought she heard tiny subvocal moans coming from the suffocating mat of vegetation. Kate didn’t know what her friend sounded like during sex, for all sorts of really obvious reasons, but she was getting a surprisingly good idea right now and it was wigging her shit out, big time. She stumbled backward down the steps, her head swimming with vertigo but her eyes absolutely refusing to move even a millimeter away from the thing on the front porch lest it somehow sprout limbs and lunge for her.
Emma let out a final squirm, a last groan of uninhibited ecstasy, and pulled herself free of the plant. For a split second, Kate thought she saw vines clinging to Emma’s skin, lacing her with a delicate tracery of mottled green before retracting into the mass of the pod. She turned to Kate as if nothing had happened. “I’m sorry, hon,” she said, smiling as though she was seeing Kate for the first time in months. “I got a little bit distracted. What were we talking about?”
Kate’s throat tightened shut for a long moment. Her legs continued to propel her backwards across the lawn. Finally, she managed to squeak out, “Um, I have to...um, Mom and Dad need me for something.” Then she turned and fled. She waited by the car until her parents had finished their shopping, and met their inquiries about Emma with a series of noncommittal murmurs. When she got back to the house, she went around to the back door.
The rest of the day passed in a haze of terror for Kate; she twitched every time the front door opened or closed, and she kept glancing out of the corner of her eye at her parents as if they were going to grab her at any second and force her to hump the monstrous plant-beast. It had them all under some sort of spell, clearly, something that drugged them up and made them forget that they weren’t always slaves to a freakish mind-controlling pod. And it had everyone, every single person in town in its thrall. Kate didn’t know how long she had, but she felt certain that the quickest way to get assimilated or brainwashed or whatever was to let on that she knew.
So she told her mother that Emma was fine, but that she was feeling weirdly jet-lagged and needed to go to bed early. She only ate the meat out of her dad’s burger, justifying it with a babbling monologue about a new diet that she was certain was going to embarrass her hideously when she looked back on it, and she went up to her room. And then she came up with a plan...okay, first she had a good cry and a nice long panic attack and freaked out for a little while about being in an actual real honest-to-God horror movie, right down to the shitty cell phone reception in Wyoming. But then she came up with a plan.
Her parents still seemed to need sleep. If Kate took a nap now and set her alarm for, say, three in the morning, she could get up and slip downstairs while they were in bed. She could grab the keys from where her dad always left them on the hook by the front door, and drive to Kaycee or Jasper or even Cheyenne, as far as she needed to go until she stopped seeing pods on the front porch of every house. And then she could call the police or the army or the CDC or someone and tell them that everyone in Hickory Springs was acting strange, and she thought they might be sick or something. She didn’t let herself think of what might happen beyond that.
She barricaded the door with her computer chair, and lay down on the bed. She thought at first she might have difficulty getting any rest, but the wild swings of panic and fear had left her so wrung out that she fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Her last waking thought was a prayer; she hadn’t prayed in years, but if there was ever a time when she needed God to hear her it was now.
And of course she dreamed of the front porch thing again. She dreamed of tiny little spores of pollen, so small as to be almost invisible, wafting off of its skin and drifting on the breeze. In her dream, she knew that was what Emma had been inhaling, the dust getting into her lungs and releasing chemicals into her bloodstream that fogged up her friend’s brain and made everything about the whole situation seem perfectly normal. And now it was just below Kate’s room doing the same thing. If Kate breathed in any of it, she’d be helplessly enslaved.
Within minutes, the pollen was seeping up through the floorboards in a rising mist. There was so much that she could see it now, a thick yellowish haze that was everywhere, and she stood on the bed to keep it from touching her. This was what happened to all the others, she knew it. They all fell asleep and the plant released its spores and took over everyone’s mind, everyone except Kate. She needed to get out. She went to the window, but it was stuck shut, and she remembered that was because she was so afraid of the tentacles that she superglued it shut before she went to bed. She looked around for something to break it with.
She found an old 4H trophy from high school, and she had just enough time to appreciate the irony because she got it for raising giant mind-control pods before she hit the window with it as hard as she could. She heard the smash of broken glass, but somehow when the window shattered a swirl of pollen swarmed into the room like a horde of angry bees and went directly for her face. Kate held her breath as long as she could, thrashing and struggling to try to get her head clear of the spores, but eventually she ran out of oxygen and had to gasp for air and the dust got inside her.
It didn’t feel bad, though. It felt wonderful, warm and mellow on her tongue like buckwheat honey. She found herself sucking in great, deep lungfuls of pollen, a mindless smile spreading across her face like the inexorable march of ivy along a brick wall. She needed this. She didn’t know how she’d lived her whole life without the pollen inside her, puppeteering her body and making her squirm out of her clothing with indecent haste.
It was part of the control process, she realized. The more she masturbated, the more turned on she became. The more turned on she became, the quicker she breathed and the faster her blood flowed through her veins. With every beat of her heart, she was spreading the powerful drug that bound her deeper and deeper into the pollen’s control. And it felt so impossibly good that it only made her touch herself faster and faster and faster as her body responded helplessly to the plant’s desires.
She tried to stop, even just to slow down, but her fingers rubbed her clit with furious intensity as the thing’s power over her deepened. She felt it in her head, a throbbing, pounding pulse that drowned out all her thoughts and left her straining her hips upward to meet her own touch. It was the beat of her heart, she realized, as the dream began to break up into fragments and the fragments began to melt into mist and the mist began to clear. The throb that was so strong was her heartbeat and she could feel it on her clit and she really was masturbating, she woke right into the pleasure and it was so intense that she had to grab for a pillow to muffle her screams as she came.
She didn’t want to enjoy it so much. Even as her climax washed over her, tightening her nipples into stiff buds and flushing her cheeks and making her pussy gush all over her fingers with near-incoherent levels of ecstasy, she was already remembering all the stupid details of the dream that fell apart the second she thought about them with her waking mind. Supergluing the windows? A 4H trophy for growing giant seed pods? Pollen that flew around the room like cartoon bees? But apparently all that shit got her motor running like nobody’s business. Kate hoped she never had to look up anything to do with the pod online. Rule 34 was going to utterly break her fucking brain.
She wiped her hand on her sheets—yeah, her mom was officially going to kill her, but Kate was at a point where she’d gladly take the world’s most awkward conversation about masturbation if it meant that her parents weren’t in the thrall of an alien monster—and checked her phone. The display read 1:30. Close enough. She pulled up her pants, slid her computer chair out of the way, and put her ear to the door for a moment. She didn’t hear anything. She held her breath, just to be sure, but the hallway was perfectly silent. She opened the door.
There was a naked woman on the other side of the threshold.
No. There was a naked Kate on the other side of the threshold.
It was unquestionably her—the same long black hair, the same dark brown eyes, the same long, slender legs. Kate could even pick out little details like the scar on her chin from a childhood bicycle accident and the slightly oblong shape of her left nipple that always bugged her when she looked in the mirror, even though she knew nobody in the world cared but her. It was Kate, in every detail. And she was smiling. She was smiling like she had the biggest, most exciting secret in the world and she couldn’t wait to share it with Kate. Even with everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, Kate still found a way to be terrified by that smile.
“The calibration is complete,” the double said. Kate involuntarily winced—she hated the way her voice sounded. “We apologize for the inconvenience, but we needed to probe your mind in order to understand how to properly interact with you. The communion was best handled during REM state, when your cerebrospinal fluid was at peak flow. It may have resulted in some dreams that were...disorienting.”
Kate reached down with her left hand and gave her right arm a hearty pinch, just to make sure this wasn’t another dream. “So you’re saying you were trying to read my mind and it accidentally gave me alien sex fantasies?”
Other-Kate’s head tilted to one side slightly. Her smile faded just a little and she looked lost in thought—no, not exactly lost. Just paused, like her brain was transferring a file over dial-up and she was waiting to open it. “Ah,” she said at last, the smile brightening as she spoke again. “We understand you, but you’re not correct. It would be more accurate to say that we were trying to learn about your sex fantasies, and as a side effect you experienced them. We wanted to know what aroused you. Now that we know, we can commune far more effectively.”
With that, the duplicate’s body split open in the middle, unsealing down an invisible line that ran vertically down its chest and around to the inside of its legs. The gap widened, peeling back to reveal a small forest of tiny wiggling vines that took up almost the entire interior of the hollow form. Kate had just enough time to inhale for a scream before they sprang for her.
There was a moment of sickening, disorienting terror as they wrapped around her, binding her so tightly that they practically mummified her body. Kate tried to scream, but her mouth was encircled by so many strands of plant matter that it barely even came out as a murmur. Then they began to retract, dragging Kate right along with it. She wriggled and thrashed, but she was about as strong as a newborn kitten compared to the tendrils that held her.
It somehow disturbed Kate even more when the hollow arms undressed her instead of the tentacles. The vines simply slithered out of the way, allowing her double’s strange, empty limbs to rip Kate’s clothes clean off until she was completely naked. Then they turned her, rotating her body until she was facing away from her doppelgänger, and forced her into the exact same position as the other Kate. She felt herself dragged across the floor until her body was pressed into the opening the vines left behind.
The opening sealed up around Kate, leaving her trapped in darkness that fit her like a second skin. The eyes of her double were opaque, the mouth fit perfectly around her lips, the hands and fingers could be touching anything for all Kate could feel. She was lost in perfect sensory deprivation for a moment...but then the pleasure began. The vines caressed her body, soothing away the fear and leaving only a delicious lassitude that promised an end to all the terror, all the panic, everything that stood between her and drowsy bliss. She couldn’t hear the voice of the plant, but she could feel the way that it stimulated her into dreamy, dazed delight that numbed her mind so that she could listen to her body far more effectively.
She could hear a faint, indescribable sensation in the back of her head, like someone was describing the world around her to her and she was responding on some level with an idea of what she might do given that description...but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore but the pleasure. Her body couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, couldn’t taste or smell and the only feeling she had was the delicious erotic sensation of a thousand tiny tickles against her skin. The shell that surrounded her knew just how to touch her, just how to caress her inside and out to send her drifting into a helpless dream of pure euphoric delight.
She felt her consciousness slipping away, melting into sensual fantasies that came from deep within her own mind. She struggled to stay awake, telling herself that the plant was lulling her into an endless stupor of pure and mindless pleasure, reminding herself that it was using all her desires against her. But the arousal was so strong, and the glamour of the waking dream of bliss tugged at her like a boat on a current until all she could think of was her sex.
She twitched once, her body trying to force her back to consciousness, but there was nothing to see behind the mask of her own face and nothing to do but give into her masturbatory daydreams. She was a passenger in her own body now, and something about being a passenger always made Kate drowsy. She felt herself go limp in the embrace of the plant shell, and wondered if she would be returning to New York with a front porch thing of her very own...and then her mind fell further into pleasure and she thought of nothing at all.