The Neverloving Dead, page 12
It meant a lot of jostling with their tongues, licking each other’s lips as much as Stuart’s cockhead, pressing gradually closer, Patrick’s free hand on the back of Gethin’s head as Gethin lit with the first fresh sperm he’d drunk since he’d died. Stuart’s cock slipped away beneath them and Patrick licked deeper, wiping Stuart’s come over the roof of Gethin’s mouth, starting to lap at it.
Gethin found his own hand on the back of Patrick’s neck, pulling him nearer over the top of Stuart’s dick, pushing his tongue around Patrick’s, wanting suddenly to explore every bit of the space, to discover everything about it, to lose himself in it. It felt incredible. Stuart’s energy seemed to flow between them – trapped, bouncing around, slowly absorbing.
Patrick pulled his fingers from Stuart’s arse and fed them into Gethin’s mouth. Even those seemed to carry some of the energy. Gethin supposed it had been a prostate orgasm.
Patrick broke off, watching him suck his fingers.
Gethin really went for it – since Patrick looked hotter than he’d ever looked: not priestly at all, but dirty as a farmhand. A tall, pale, serious-looking farmhand in a robe. Feeding him arse-fingers.
It was thrilling. The energy just seemed to spread and spread, filling every bit of him: Patrick’s descriptions hadn’t done it justice.
Stuart laughed incredulously, as if it had been easily that good for him too. The laugh was a gorgeous rumble.
Patrick removed his fingers from Gethin’s mouth, blinking down at Stuart.
After a few seconds, he said, “Well, I think that’s given us both the meal we needed.” The tone was quite offhand, considering they’d just been licking that ‘meal’ out of each other’s mouths. “An orgasm that strong...” He didn’t finish. He just drifted upright, looking all cut-off and superior again.
Gethin stared. “What?” Even by Patrick’s standards, it was baffling. Like he wasn’t just averse to enjoyment – he was afraid of it. Either that or he felt he’d really lowered himself by doing this with Gethin.
“I’m impressed Stuart was able to manage twice in one night at his age, but I think that’s more than enough,” the priest added. Gethin couldn’t help noticing, with a certain amount of satisfaction, the huge boner tenting his cassock.
He was about to mention it when Stuart pulled himself up to a sitting position. “Thank you,” he said. “I mean, I hope that helped you both.”
He wasn’t looking at anything, of course. Just around. His hand went around his cock, hugging it – he looked like he was either reassuring it or congratulating it. Despite his previous enthusiasm and the laughter, some uncertainty had crept into his expression. “But just so you know, that was...” He cleared his throat. “Well, it sounds a bit... That was the best sex I’ve ever had.”
Gethin might not have worried if it hadn’t been for the uncertainty. He’d enjoyed it after all, even if Patrick hadn’t; and he’d proven he could do it, with Stuart of all people, who even Patrick had said was the best possible person for it, since the man lived here. He’d do it again, if he got the chance – he could feel how much Stuart had given him: he felt absolutely amazing.
Amazing, except for whatever was now crossing Stuart’s face...
“Eye-opening,” the man added, nodding at his own words. Gethin didn’t think he meant because they were all men.
“Move back,” Patrick said. The coldness had gone.
Gethin looked hard at Stuart: at the faintly uncomfortable look on the man’s face. As if it were only now occurring to him that he’d just had sex with– irritably, Gethin pushed the thought away.
He’d had sex with Gethin and Patrick. That was all.
He couldn’t hold the thought back, though.
Stuart had had sex with dead men.
Horror pulsed through Gethin. Nausea.
Not at Stuart. At himself. Again, he tried to squash it.
Stuart chuckled tensely.
“Gethin,” Patrick said.
This had nothing to do with what had happened to him, he told himself. It was totally different. The opposite, in fact: Stuart had wanted what was alive about Gethin and Patrick, and he’d asked and said bloody ‘thank you’ after, hadn’t he? Panic seemed to solidify Gethin’s form more – nothing Stuart would see, but enough that Gethin knew he’d begin to drain if he didn’t calm down.
His heart couldn’t pound. His skin couldn’t sweat. He couldn’t hyperventilate. He couldn’t faint or soil himself or jump to his death. But he felt like all those things were happening.
He stood up straight, walking himself backwards as Patrick had instructed. Away.
“Gethin?”
What more did the priest want? He’d moved off, hadn’t he?
Willing the horrible sodding nausea away, he backed off further, towards the cwtch wall. Patrick was right: he had to get away, he decided. Fully away. Put himself somewhere quiet and... actually that was the last thing he needed: the space behind the wall was death, wasn’t it? Or his death, anyway. Total fucking silence and emptiness. No one anywhere. He turned in the opposite direction, towards the bookshelves and Stuart’s door. His old door. What he needed was to be around people, somewhere like Gayles, where the atmosphere felt free and alive. It was exactly why he’d loved the place before his death – why he’d taken the job there when Jonno had offered it.
“Gethin?” Patrick again. He was standing by the door, like he’d anticipated Gethin might leave. “You need to calm down. Stuart’s fine. He’s smiling again. Look.”
And he especially needed to be away from Patrick, he thought. The man was bewildering. They’d just been licking jizz out of each other’s mouths and now – well now he didn’t have a clue what. He lunged for the bookshelf wall beside him, forgetting he was still solid, careening into the shelves. Books tumbled everywhere.
“Gethin, calm down.” Patrick was holding up his hands in that same way he had the first night they’d met – the way that had bothered Gethin for some reason...
Just as it had bothered him when Patrick had treated him like he didn’t matter just now. Afterwards. Again.
His form flickered. “Sodding, fucking...” he mumbled, fumbling automatically to pick up the books and put them back. It didn’t work – he half-lifted a couple, then they fell straight through his hands, thumping on Stuart’s posh wooden floor, some landing shut, others open, probably with their bloody pages bent. God in Hell, he was fucking everything up.
He focused on trying to shut the books, while Patrick hovered, apparently unsure whether to touch Gethin or not. Gethin managed to close Font Valuation and History of Catholic Paraphernalia, but the reams of auction legislation were too heavy, as was another book which seemed to just be photos of church furniture. Honestly, Stuart was a good-looking guy, but his taste in books was dreadful.
Fuck it, he thought. He couldn’t pick them up. Patrick could do it, or Stuart could, later. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “Get some fresh air, catch my breath.”
He realised how stupid the words were, even as he said them.
With a sob of frustration, he tried one last time with the books, succeeding in wafting a single page in the furniture book.
“Gethin, if you’re worried about Stuart, look at him.”
Stuart was walking over, calling apologies out, hands held up in surrender as he stared at the books, looking a bit concerned actually – probably worried his ‘friendly’ sex ghosts might in fact be violent poltergeists.
Patrick tutted, putting a hand in front of Gethin like he could stop Stuart walking straight through both of them. “Gethin, go to the cwtch. You’re too upset to be near a living person.”
Gethin this, Gethin that. Like, he did need to calm down – he got that. His heart wasn’t even there and it was banging like a bag of rabbits. His throat was so painful it felt like it might start bleeding all over again. He huffed, rubbing it, staring down at the mess of open pages he’d left. The five hundred quid appeared on the book of church furniture. A black spot of blood dripped from his throat, landing on one of the twenties with a loud, papery splat probably only he could hear.
Stuart crouched, beginning to gather the books, to close the remaining ones, reaching...
His hand landed on the book of furniture, Passing through the wad of twenties.
And Gethin saw it.
Not the hand. Not the money. Not even the blood.
Without so much as a thought, his foot shot forwards, pinning the page. Stopping Stuart.
Stuart wiggled the book a bit. To no avail. Gethin couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
He leaned closer, though he hardly needed to. The photo was as ambiguous as his own mother.
A wooden confessional booth.
Just that, opposite a page of information about booth history.
Gethin didn’t recognise the booth. The booth itself hadn’t been what had stopped him. It was what was carved above the booth – in bold letters that formed a heading along its entire side:
Whatever through the frailty of flesh be committed through human interaction...
The rest continued onto a new side, illegible in the photo.
Patrick was following his gaze. Stuart stopped trying to wiggle the book free and began frowning at it.
They were all looking at it.
“That’s what the bloody killer said to Matt,” Gethin breathed. “Those words... ‘The frailty of flesh’.”
Patrick stared down at it. After a bit, he said, “Well, fuck.”
Gethin looked at him instead. For once the grey eyes weren’t cold or distant. They were wide, horrified. And angry. That was a surprise. Patrick looked irritable a lot. But never angry. Not like this.
Gethin took his foot off the book. Stuart set it to one side, still frowning at it, probably thinking his ghost housemates had been trying to send him a message. That it was all to do with how he was meant to ‘help’ them. He began setting the rest of the books back on the shelf. Patrick pulled Gethin away.
“Absolve, we ask, O Lord, the soul of your servant,” he said, “so that dead to the world he may live for You. And whatever through the frailty of flesh he committed through human interaction, wipe away by the forgiveness of Your most merciful piety. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
Gethin swallowed, trying to dislodge the feeling of the car key in his gullet. “And what the sodding heck is that?”
“The Prayer of Absolution for the departed.” He looked no less angry. He lifted his eyebrows. “It absolves people of sin when they die. So they don’t end up like me. Damned for eternity.”
“You’ve been here two hundred years because a prayer wasn’t said?” And more to the point, “Why would Matt... He hadn’t done a bloody thing wrong, Patrick, you didn’t meet–.”
“Gethin,” Patrick interrupted, looking at Gethin really intensely. “Your murderer is a priest.”
“He’s... But why would a...?” Slowly, though, Patrick’s words seemed to creep in – to form themselves into some sort of sense. He stared back at the book. It was closed now, stacked atop the other books Stuart was returning to their shelf. It wasn’t just what the killer had said to Matt, but the smell of damp stone, Gethin’s own recurring sense of the killer punishing himself somehow, even the fact Patrick had never seen him: Patrick had told him the first time they’d ever met: he avoided churches.
And if that’s where the killer was...
“Gethin.” Patrick’s hand landed on his arm. “That means we can find him.”
His expression was really weird again.
Almost like he didn’t want to.
CHAPTER 9
RULE 5: THERE CAN NEVER BE ABSOLUTION
PATRICK
Finding the priest was harder than Patrick had thought.
And he had tried, regardless of the occasional doubtful hint from Gethin. What had happened with the Welshman had been... unsettling. Patrick had meant to wean him that night: to steer Gethin away from him and to steer himself away from Gethin. And look what had happened. He couldn’t even think about it. If anything, it was now twice as important to make sure Gethin left. If he didn’t, if Patrick didn’t get control of his own ridiculous, perilous emotions, it could be another hundred years before he had his body. His senses. His life.
All of that rested upon finding Gethin’s killer. That was what he should focus on.
As he left St Michael’s Church in Cornhill, retreating through the gathering dusk to Gayles, a mile and a half south, he imagined how it would be to feel the cooler evening air on his skin again. To smell the homes and restaurants he passed, instead of just watching steam billow from windows and vents, or hearing things bubble and sizzle emptily on stoves. A couple walked past, bumping hips as they went, laughing and falling into each other.
He shrank into the bushes, so as not to lose any energy.
He wished he and Gethin had more to go on. Priests these days didn’t necessarily live in church chambers or adjacent parish houses, and their work could take them all over their parish. Sundays were the only day they stood in their pulpits, conveniently awaiting visitors.
As such, Patrick had spent the week doing research. Neither he nor Gethin believed the man was called Mike, but Patrick had nevertheless memorised churches headed by anyone called Father Michael or Michaels, or churches named St Michael’s or on St Michael’s Roads. It was now Sunday, so Patrick had endured a ten-hour ordeal of Matins, Lauds, Vespers and Evensong: some two dozen sermons in all. There’d been no flair of fondness for what he’d heard. For someone who’d been cast from the church then hanged and damned, listening to long strictures about forgiveness and compassion had felt akin to swallowing glass. Patrick knew official views had changed. He also knew many there – priests and ‘flock’ alike – still saw homosexual acts as a sin. A reason for their merciful forgiveness and ‘unconditional’ love.
For their prayers.
The worst service had been a funeral. Not that common on Sundays, since they cost more – but the Prayer of Absolution had been read, of course. The same prayer Gethin had found. Patrick knew it well: because he’d been a priest, yes, but mostly because it was the one he’d been denied. When he’d first died, before he’d uncovered his pathway back to life, he’d spent two decades seeking a priest to speak it. To release him.
After all the curses, prayers, crosses and bellowing at him to return to Satan, he’d vowed never to set foot inside a church again.
Until now.
For Gethin.
He pushed down a faint stab of discomfort about that. He was aware there wasn’t anyone else he’d have done this for. And he could tell himself that was only so he could get his body back or because Gethin wasn’t strong enough to do it yet or because the killer’s ‘murder-energy’ was rising, but the truth was he’d let the man get under his skin. After two hundred years of regimented tedium, his discipline had slipped. The Welshman just seemed so alive, so full of determination and surprises and principles. And colour: honey, caramel, gold, tan. All the late summer hues he saw around him now. Next to Patrick’s blanched achromatism, he was a light.
Patrick would have wanted to help him anyway.
Even without what had happened.
Again, he tried not to think about it: watching Gethin fellate Stuart. Their ‘kiss’ over Stuart’s cock.
He crossed the Thames, dragging his attention from the pool of arousal that seemed to be constantly fermenting in his lower gut. Licking Stuart’s sperm from Gethin’s mouth might have been the highlight of his death. For those few moments, he hadn’t so much as contemplated functional necessities or energy costs or maximising his returns or how depleted he was from regularly feeding Gethin. He hadn’t even thought about how it was his first threesome with anyone who knew he was there. All he’d thought about was Gethin’s tongue, smothered in semen, their hands on the backs of each other’s heads; their lips, sliding together filthily...
He'd never be interested in you.
He floated away from the Thames into the deepening shadows of the street, annoyed at having to remind himself, yet again, that he didn’t want Gethin either. They were going in opposite directions. Patrick didn’t want to jeopardise his chance at life and Gethin would move on from limbo as soon as he’d stopped his killer. Patrick could see how much both things meant to Gethin – catching his killer and moving on. Of course he should help the man.
It suited both their purposes, in every single way.
In fact, he was glad he’d put himself through the self-harm of today, he told himself mulishly – since it was now the only way he could help Gethin. Gethin had seen for himself how feeble Patrick’s ‘food’ was, compared to Stuart’s; and from the dozen or so yes-no questions Stuart had asked Gethin since that night, Patrick had no doubt a living person’s help would be more useful than his own. Patrick was nothing next to Stuart. Dead and bodiless. Searching churches was all he could do for Gethin, so he’d left the Welshman readying himself to watch Gayles again, and braved the self-harm of sermons.
London was quiet on Sunday evenings, but Patrick had taken an almost deserted route back, down Southwark Bridge Road then London Road to avoid further draining his energy. He’d kept his distance in the church services, but there’d been a lot of people in some of them and he did need to feed. Gethin had suggested trying Stuart again, of course, even admitting he’d enjoyed it last time. The idea had scraped through Patrick more than a little painfully. He blotted it now, imagining Gethin sucking him instead, then himself fucking Gethin – his alluring, shapely arse – since that would be something just for them. Something Stuart hadn’t done with Gethin too. And surely it would retain the energy just as well as fellatio. It wouldn’t cost Patrick any more than feeding Gethin the other way.
You shouldn’t be feeding him at all.
He pushed the objection away. That kind of sex was a pipedream anyway. He’d only done it once before, when he’d still been alive, and it had been so thrilling he’d lasted less than thirty seconds – so he’d probably just humiliate himself. Besides, Patrick had seen the kinds of men Gethin liked and they weren’t ill-favoured, bloodless men like Patrick. That was without the fact that being sodomised, by a priest of all people, would remind Gethin of his rape.
