The Weeping Thing Ch. 02

Whatever this weeping thing was, it had Robert's face and body. It breathed and sounded like Robert. It groaned like Robert did when he used to make love to her. It even fucked her like Robert would back when he was still alive.

Undoubtedly, it was some sort of demon. Margaret realized this after a few nights of sleeping with that thing that sometimes wept and sometimes took the shape of her dead husband. After one too many thoughts of the supernatural, she became so frightened that one night she'd taken a cook's knife to bed with her. When the impostor had shown up, she screamed at it and told it to go back to whatever hell it had come from.

Robert's face had looked disappointed. Like a big kid, he lowered his head and moped out of her bedroom. Margaret followed her husband's sulking form out of the bedroom. Instead of walking somewhere out of the house, the impostor had gone into her second bedroom.

The ghost went into Donald's old bedroom, of all places. Why the hell would it go there?

This is when Margaret began to wonder if that weeping thing might have been the reason that her weird renter had disappeared. Perhaps it had a similar, sinister fate in store for her as well. Refusing to enter the abandoned room, Margaret shuddered and quietly made her way back into her own bedroom.

The woman kept wondering if she'd made the wrong decision by not calling the police that night. But what if they had come out and the weeping thing had been gone by then? It had to have some way of hiding itself, since it was nowhere to be found whenever she had looked for it in the daytime. What if the cops came into her house and she caught them all rolling their eyes at each other, when they thought she wasn't paying attention to them? What if she got angry and attacked them with her cook's knife, instead of the weeping thing?

Margaret kept the knife close to her, as she worriedly went to bed. She didn't know how she managed it, but somehow, she was able to get her body to go to sleep.

That night, she didn't dream of her deceased husband. Of all the people in the world that she could have chosen, her brain had singled out her old renter Donald. She had a dream about him! Margaret found herself in the woods behind her house, walking deeper and deeper into them. She saw the various kinds of trees back there. She didn't know what any of them were called, but she did remember that Donald could stand out there and name them when he'd been around.

The ground was a little mushy, as if it had rained lightly earlier that morning, or perhaps the night before. Margaret found herself stepping on moist leaves and twigs, when she noticed the dozens and dozens of snails slowly slithering their way about on the ground. It looked like a super-highway of snails, she thought. The woman had half a mind to start back toward the house and retrieve her box of snail poison. Undoubtedly, some of those pests were going to crawl their way back to her yard and into her potted plants.

This was when she noticed that she wasn't Old Margaret anymore, but the younger version that she kept seeing whenever she made love to Robert's ghost. Instead of her blue pajamas, Margaret was wearing some sort of nearly transparent white cloth. It barely covered any of her privates anyway, so what was the point of even wearing it?

Out of the corner of her eye, Margaret saw movement. She was too slow in turning to catch a glimpse of what had caused it. The woman took a few steps in that direction, only to hear another scurry behind her about a minute later. Margaret gasped, for this time she saw a large and fleeting shadow blur by between the trees. It was as large as a man, she calculated, as a strong fear began to grip her body.

Margaret may have been about to hurry back home, when she heard Donald's goofy laugh ebbing out from the trees. It was that same annoying chuckle he sometimes made back when he'd been sitting on the couch at her house. When they'd been watching some TV show that was funny enough to prompt a laugh from him.

Margaret saw Donald's grinning face emerge from behind a thick tree trunk; he looked as loony as ever. She studied his face a moment, discovering that Donald didn't look as fed up and wasted as he had before. His features appeared younger, happier. His head was covered with dark brown hair. Surprisingly, the usually clean-cut man was now sporting a full beard. She'd never known Donald to have even a mustache in the whole time he rented from her.

Donald seemed to be caught off guard for a moment, as he took in Margaret's youthful face and body. He scanned her curvy frame from top to bottom, like some kind of pervert. A moment after, Donald jumped out from behind his tree and started running through the woods away from her. He was laughing like a madman as he went.

Margaret was appalled, when she saw Donald's entire body out in the open. From the waist up, she observed his lean and pale back. The woman had seen this part of her renter every so often, when he'd stepped out of the shower with only a towel wrapped around his waist, or on decidedly hot days when Donald had opted to walk out of his room without a shirt on. From the waist down, however, Donald was something else. His butt and legs were covered with a thick, brown fur, like an animal. There was even a tail coming out of his ass, the same color as the rest of him. It reminded her a lot of a large bunny tail.

What the hell was going on here? Margaret thought to herself.

Almost as if he'd sensed her words, Donald turned around to face her. From about fifteen yards away, he called out, "Come on! I have something to show you!"

She couldn't begin to explain why she followed, but she did.

Donald led her deep, deep into the woods. Margaret felt as if she'd been walking for half an hour before the half-man, half-animal stopped. At first, she didn't see anything remarkable about the small clearing they'd stepped into.

Instead, she addressed her old renter. "What the hell happened to you?"

"What do you mean?" Donald asked.

"Well, look at you!" Margaret pointed out. "You've... you've gone all wrong!"

Donald glanced down at his hairy bottom half, briefly, before he looked at her again and started giggling.

"I really have gone wrong, haven't I?" He laughed long and hard, his upper half shaking from the effort.

He'd gone crazy, Margaret thought, as well as wrong.

Donald eventually calmed down, although he kept his eyes staring up at the tops of the tall trees they were surrounded by. Margaret dared to switch her attention away from the lunatic. She raised her own head to see what Donald was staring at. There in the broken canopy of the woods, and in the highest branches, sat a great multitude of crows. It was called a murder of crows, wasn't it? And all they were doing was staring back down at them.

"They can't harm us here, not in this place." Donald said, sounding angry and spiteful at the great number of dark birds. He said this right after he noticed that Margaret was looking at them as well. "As to what happened to me, well, I've simply become something different than what I used to be. Here, look at this."

Donald took a few steps closer to her and leaned his head down. He began sorting his hair aside. A moment later, he revealed two short little horns growing out near the top edges of his forehead, which she hadn't noticed before. Donald turned his head aside and moved the hair around there too, to show her that his ears were nothing like a normal person's. They were slightly longer and folded over to protect their insides. The reason she hadn't noticed them was because they were covered with the same bushy hair that covered the rest of Donald's head.

"You're a devil." Margaret firmly decided.

Although the woman was repulsed by her renter's bizarre appearance, she was not afraid of him. Margaret had never been afraid of Donald, because he'd always been a mere weasel of a man. If it came down to it, she could probably whip the shit out of him, and this was when she'd been some fifteen years older than him. No, it would take a lot more than a pair of stubby little horns and a bunny tail to make her afraid of Donald.

"That's what those stupid Bible-thumpers will say." Donald replied thoughtfully, before he scowled in anger. "I don't give a shit what they think anymore! They said that the heavy metal music I listened to came from the devil and that the pot I smoked came from the devil. The chicks I used to go out with came from the devil, because we were fornicating in the back seat of my dad's car! Well, I've got some news for all those fucking Bible-thumpers! I'm fornicating all the time now and I don't give a shit what those people think!"

As Margaret watched, Donald began pacing before her.

"The Greeks knew me as the satyr, and the Romans knew me as the faun." He explained. "I'm not Donald anymore, I'm Pan. I'm the god of nature and the god of the mountains," He turned to gaze at Margaret then. "I'm also the god of sex! I was worshipped in the fields, and in the groves, and in the caves. It was the Christians who came along and killed me! But you know what, Margie-girl, I'm about to come out of retirement! I'm about to make a big-time comeback! The world will know who I am once again!"

"You really have gone off the deep end, haven't you?" Margaret asked.

Donald started laughing. "I fucked the moon once! Did you know that? That's right! I put on a sheepskin so the moon goddess wouldn't know who I was. Then I started singing sweet lullabies and love songs to her. Well, she came down from the night sky to see who it was that sang such sweet poetry to her, I removed my sheepskin to show her who I was, and I fucked her! This was Selene, one of the most beautiful of all the goddesses. She was one of the most favored mistresses of Zeus! But that's not why I brought you out here. I wanted to show you something. Look!"

He pointed down at an empty, black patch of ground.

"Do you see that?" Donald persisted.

"Yes." Margaret replied. "What about it?"

"Don't you get it?" Donald asked. "I was trying to come back into this world, and this is where the Christians killed me again! I was nearly complete then, but they came along and destroyed me!" He looked directly at Margaret, and the lust was wild in his eyes. "I'm nearly complete now, Margie!"

Whatever ebbed from Donald's form was enough to make the woman shudder.

Donald ran at her. Brutally, he shoved her to the ground. A moment later, his rough hands were at her throat and he was squeezing the life out of her. Margaret tried to stop him, but he was much stronger than she'd expected. After a few moments of her futile struggling, Donald's face softened into a look of pained sadness and he stopped trying to hurt her. He dropped down on top of her and started to cry.

"I should kill you." He said tearfully. "You were always a bitch to me, ever since I moved in with you. You were always spying on me and trying to catch me doing something. You never let me have a moment's peace! You knew I didn't have any real friends, and you always made it such a pain for me whenever I tried to bring a girl home. I should kill you right now, but I can't do it." His head came down to rest onto Margaret's shoulder. "Do you know why I can't? It's because I can feel your pain. Every bit of sadness that you've had, ever since your husband died, I can feel it. It's still there, isn't it? After all those years, that pain is still as strong as it was when you first found out he was gone."

"Don't you talk about my Robert!" Margaret threatened, as she labored to push Donald away. Unexpectedly, she found him too damned heavy.

"There's another reason, why I can't kill you." Donald sniffed and wiped the tears from his eyes. He lifted his chest and head enough to look into the eyes of the woman he'd pinned down beneath him. "You look too much like last girlfriend, Sallie. Your hair reminds me of her and you're only a little heavier than she was." He glanced down at the loose wrapping around her chest, and he laughed. "Your tits are a little bigger, but I don't mind that part!" His eyes looked to start misting over again. "I loved Sallie. I really did. Why couldn't she love me back the same way you loved your Robert?"

Margaret could feel Donald's cock, pressed between his furry body and her thigh. It was beginning to harden against her.

"Is this a dream or is this really happening?" She asked. This time, she felt more than a little horror coursing through her body.

"It's both, as far as I can tell." Donald truthfully answered. "When people used to say that they saw the gods or that they talked to the gods, I think they were in this place. It doesn't exist in the real world, but it doesn't go away when you're not thinking about it, either. This place is always here, no matter what." He began to caress Margaret's hair. "You shouldn't have been so mean to me, Margie. I never did anything bad to you."

Donald's cock was rigid against her now.

"What are you going to do to me?" The frightened woman asked.

Donald smiled. "What do you think? I know you're a little scared right now. I can feel it. That'll go away, because the ladies do say I have a certain charisma about me." He laughed. "I can be whoever you want me to be, Margie, while I'm in this place. I can be your Robert or I can be the god Pan, like I am now. But you know what? I think I want to be me this time. I want to be the way I was when you knew me, because it will make me feel a whole lot better about you and I won't want to kill you anymore. It's important that I don't want to kill you any more, because Pan told me that he needs you."

The man slipped away from her and he got up to his feet. He motioned at his nude body. It looked like it had in the past, without all that extra hair on his lower hair and with a lot less hair on the top of his head. His horns and goat ears were gone as well.

"See?" He asked. "It's just me now. The old, worthless, pathetic loser Donald who you went out of your way to make feel even more miserable."

Margaret hurriedly got to her feet. "That's because you were always trying to get away with something! You were always trying to sneak women into my house, and listening to your music too loud, and..."

"You know that's not true." Donald countered. "The reason you were always giving me such a hard time, is because you were trying to make me feel as bad as you've felt ever since you lost your husband! Well, I've got news for you, Margie. I was already miserable on my own, and you made it ten times worse!"

"I'm going back home." Margaret resolved. She turned and began to trudge away.

"You'll never see Robert again, if you do that."

The words halted her in her tracks.

"It was never the real Robert, anyway." Margaret replied, already feeling the angst of loss in her stomach. The love she'd felt for Robert had never really gone away, had it? And now, thanks to that demon-thing, it was resurfacing every time she made love to his ghost.

"No, it wasn't the real Robert." Donald admitted. "But it was pretty damned close, wasn't it? All of that came from your memories. It became a real thing thanks to the power of this place, and thanks to the power of Pan. And now, I'm part of Pan, so I can become Robert any time that I want to."

"When I slept with that thing on my bed, were you part of it then?"

"No." Donald shook his head. "I knew what Pan was up to, but I didn't want to be any part of that. I still hated you back then, for the way you treated me back when I was in your world. Besides, I was busy having fun with my girls."

"What girls?"

"We're not the only ones here, Margie." Donald revealed. "I'll introduce you to my ladies later, if you want." He paused. "Well, they're not really my ladies. They're Pan's ladies, to be honest. But since I'm the first guy they've run into in over two hundred years, I've been a pretty lucky guy lately. A lot luckier than I was in real life, anyway."

The two of them simply gazed at one another, for the next few moments.

"Look, you can ask Pan to become Robert for you, whenever you want." Donald sighed, at last. "I'm not going to keep holding that over your head. I know that you're not going to want to admit this, but sometimes at night you wished I would go over to your bedroom to sleep with you, because you were that lonely. As lonely as I was."

"I never wished that!" Margaret snarled back, way too aggressively.

Donald crossed his arms, and gave her that oh, really look that always irritated her.

It was true. Margaret had grown so desperate that even the thought of hitting the sack with a scrawny beanpole like Donald had crossed her mind. Numerous times, even. This was another reason why she had been so cruel to Donald, because he'd never slipped into her bedroom the way she'd hoped for. And why would he? Back in the real world, she'd been a crusty, heartless old hag, and she knew it.

"Did you fuck my best friend Jenny?" Margaret asked.

"Yes." Donald giggled. "That was payback for some of those shitty things she said about me, when she thought I wasn't paying attention. I heard the way she used to talk about me. Sure, I had to use Robert's body to do it, but yes, I did it. I fucked her!"

It was all so strange, Margaret considered, like some twisted episode of The Twilight Zone.

"I thought about getting some payback on you, too." Donald revealed. "When I first saw how hot you looked when you were younger. I could have pretended to be Robert and you would have never known about it. Then I took a real good look at you. I could sense how sad you are, and how sad you've been ever since Robert passed away. We're so much more alike than you think." He winked. "Besides, I already told you how much you remind me of Sallie. I'd rather that you want me willingly and knowing who I am. It would make me feel so much better about myself if I knew I could still get a woman as hot as that."

"You said you had your girls!" Margaret barked back to him.

"If it were a choice between the one Sallie and all six of them, it would be a hard choice for me. Seriously."

"I'm not whoever this Sallie is, so stop comparing me to her!"

"You used to be a lot like her." Donald said. "Back before you lost Robert. Back before you changed. You can make that person come back, you know."

Margaret didn't know what else to say. She turned abruptly and stalked away.

"Leave me alone." She called back.

Donald ran after her. He reached out and snagged her wrist, only to have Margaret yank it away. She did not continue her retreat, however, as she'd turned to see that Donald was becoming aroused again.

"I'm not as hot as you keep telling me, either." She said, glancing at his partial erection. "So I don't know why you keep getting turned on like that."

"I think it has something to do with those big boobies of yours." Donald flirted.

Margaret felt her body flush with her own desire, although she tried vehemently to fight it back. "You're not going to replace Robert and you never will, so you might as well stop trying!"

Impatiently, she turned on her heels and hurried back to her house.

Margaret woke up abruptly. For whatever reason, she felt like leaving her bed right away and strolling around the living room. Groggily, and fully irritated because her sleep had been interrupted yet again, the fifty year-old woman swung her legs from off the mattress. After a long breath, she began her short stroll out. It was still in the dead of night, she knew. The alarm clock told her it was barely two a.m.

"Son of a bitch." Margaret scolded, wishing she could will herself to go back to sleep, but no, she was wide awake now.

Margaret ambled down the short hallway. In her mind, she was going over that doozy of a dream she'd just had, where Donald was some creature that was half-goat and half horn-dog. Where Donald kept wanting to fuck her. That was the craziest dream she'd had in some time, she told herself. Margaret squarely put the blame for her dream on all that medication the doctors were making her take. The problem was that the dream had seemed so vivid. Even now that she was awake, she could still remember all the little details.