The rustling in the undergrowth outside was barely audible, but it was enough to wake Rachel. She sat up, immediately alert, and strained her ears. She heard a muffled snort. It was one of the wild bush pigs, snuffling around outside her hut.
Rachel reached for her bow, quiver, and knife, always close at hand. She knew there wasn’t time to dress properly if she was to catch her prey, but on this warm night the rough smock in which she’d slept would be sufficient protection. The pig snuffled again, and Rachel drew aside the curtain that hung across the doorway.
She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should wake her brother. No-one was supposed to go anywhere alone. For the last few days, the village had been agog with stories of a boy named Isaac from the next village, who had gone into the forest the week before and hadn’t returned. There were plenty of things that could have happened to him, none of them pleasant, but without a corpse, or at least some scattered remains, the villagers were free to let their imaginations run wild. The forest was full of monsters, some mythical, others real, any of which could have done away with the boy. Rachel had felt a personal pang of sorrow: she and Isaac had fucked several times, in several interesting ways, and he knew how to use his large dick to good effect, but that was all in the past now.
But no, there wasn’t time for that, and it was much easier to track solo anyway. She quickly tied up her blond hair to make sure it didn’t get snagged in any branches and slipped out of the hut. Even on such a calm night the pig must have caught a whiff of her scent, because it looked up and trotted quickly away into the forest. But the darkness couldn’t mask the sound of it moving through the bushes, and Rachel followed, confident that she could keep up with it for as long as necessary.
But the pig was quicker and more devious than she’d thought, and more than once she almost lost it. She was so intent on tracking the signs of its movements that she didn’t notice when she went past the notches scratched in the bark of certain trees, warning people that the land ahead was forbidden territory and therefore particularly dangerous.
But eventually the pig got careless. It came to a clearing in the forest, open enough to allow the moonlight to cast an eerie glow. It paused to explore the ground with its snout, and this allowed Rachel to take aim with her bow, and unerringly bury an arrow in its neck.
The pig squealed and fell to the ground, thrashing around wildly. Rachel was quickly on it, and with one slash of her knife cut its throat. The blood spurted over her muscular thighs as she grasped the creature tightly until it grunted its last.
She was just about to pick up the corpse when she felt something brush against her left ankle. She glanced down and saw a thin loop of pale green vegetation wrapped around her ankle. Irritated, she shook her leg to dislodge it, but to her surprise the creeper instantly tightened, so tight in fact that she gasped with pain. Instinctively she tugged her leg away, which only caused the loop to contract even more.
Shit, she thought, the more I pull, the tighter it’s going to get.
As she looked, the creeper seemed to swell and lengthen, the tip starting to encircle her leg, climbing upwards surprisingly quickly. Then Rachel’s blood ran cold. It wasn’t a creeper at all, it was a tentacle, warm and pulsating, and by now it had wrapped itself around her calf.
She realised she had to act quickly before it crept any higher. She drew her knife from her belt, and raised her arm high, preparing to lunge forward and sever the tentacle at its base. But in an instant, she felt something warm and slimy wrap itself around her forearm, anchoring it in the air. She looked up and saw another tentacle looped down out of the trees, its tip curled tightly around her bare arm.
She tried to reach up with her other hand to snatch the knife free, but, quicker than she could move, that arm too was dragged aloft by a slimy rope. While she was trying desperately to think of a plan, her remaining leg was secured in similar fashion.
With all her strength, Rachel struggled to free herself, but all that happened was that the tentacles gripped even tighter, and to make matters worse the ones dangling from the trees began to draw themselves upwards, pulling her arms with them. Suddenly she felt her shoulder sockets start to strain, and she realised with horror that if they didn’t stop, her arms were in danger of being torn from her body, unless of course her legs were pulled off first. Either way, dismemberment seemed imminent, and she stopped struggling, waiting for the pain. The sooner it was all over the better.
But as soon as she relaxed, the tentacles stopped pulling, and although she was still suspended in mid-air, a slimy rope round each limb, she wasn’t about to be torn apart, not yet anyway. Breathing heavily, she looked around, assessing the situation.
Admittedly, it didn’t look good. She was hanging helpless several feet above the forest floor, and unless one or more of the tentacles released its grip, she couldn’t see how she was going to get free. On the other hand, why would the tentacles just leave her hanging here?
Then she saw, emerging from the dense undergrowth, two further tentacles, writhing their way up towards her helpless body. As they hovered in front of her face, the tip of one of them began to bulge, before seeming to turn itself inside out to reveal a large globular eye which stared at her, unblinking. The other split itself in two to reveal a sharp knife-like projection.
This is it, thought Rachel. It’s going to gut me and suck out my insides. What a messy way to go.
But instead of eviscerating her on the spot, the knife-tentacle ever so carefully slipped its razor-sharp tip down the front of her thin smock, and with a series of smooth, precise movements sliced through the shoulder-loops, then slit it open from neck to thigh. The smock fell away from her body and dropped to the forest floor, leaving her naked and exposed. Her little breasts heaved gently, and she felt the warm air circulating round her cunt. Despite herself, she felt a brief sexual thrill course through her body.
“Okay, either it’s just a sex-starved perverted tentacle beast, or it can’t digest cloth,” mused Rachel. “Or maybe both.”
Then her attention was caught by something else moving in the undergrowth. Something big. No, forget that, something extremely big. Something that was coming closer.
Then it emerged from the bushes. It was another tentacle, but much, much larger and thicker. It was huge and gross and bulbous, and as it reared up towards her she watched as the end unfurled itself like a flower-bud opening, revealing an open maw: not red like an animal’s, but pale green and slimy. She looked in terror for teeth, but there weren’t any, just endless diminishing rings of small writhing tentacles that lined the whole of the insides of the gaping mouth. They seemed to be beckoning to her, welcoming her inwards.
Rachel pissed herself in fear, and she heard her urine splatter onto the forest floor below, as the tentacles that held her tight drew her towards the monstrous green pit. Weirdly, the scent that emanated from it wasn’t exactly unpleasant, but rather fresh and moist like the forest after a cleansing rainstorm. As she was lowered down into the mouth, the little tentacles slimed round her bare feet, then up her calves and thighs. They tickled round her sensitive pussy, and Rachel felt an involuntary sexual thrill as they wriggled round her labia and between the lips, even seemed to linger over the little bud of her clitoris.
Then her sex was gone, swallowed up, followed by her flat, toned tummy and her firm round breasts. To her surprise she could still feel her body, enclosed in a warm, moist, writhing sheath. As the little tentacles wriggled around her throat, she mercifully fainted, before the circular mouth closed over the top of her head and she was gone.
*~*~*~*~*
Rachel opened her eyes. Was this the afterlife? If so, it wasn’t as she’d imagined it would be. For a start, she was naked, her body coated in some form of slick, oily secretion that made her skin shine in what would, in other circumstances, be a rather sensual fashion. She was lying on her back on ground that was warm, soft, and rather slippery. As she put her hands down to pull herself up, the ground gave way slightly, like the surface of a fleshy belly.
She cast her mind back. Her memories were not very encouraging, since her final recollection was of being swallowed alive by a gigantic writhing tentacle beast. That said, where was she now? As far as she could tell, she was in a large chamber of some sort, though she couldn’t quite work out where the walls, floor and ceiling began and ended. There weren’t any discernible windows, though it wasn’t dark inside at all. There was sufficient light to see, though it seemed to be coming from inside the walls themselves, a pulsating ever-moving sequence. In fact, the whole room seemed to be pulsating slightly.
Ah crap, she thought, I’m inside it. I’m in its stomach.
She looked around, trying to work out where she’d come in; there must be some sort of entrance hole somewhere, but the surface seemed unbroken. Perhaps it had closed up once she’d been ingested, which would make escape even more problematic.
As she began to explore her strange prison in more detail, she realised that the reason it seemed to be pulsating was because the entire surface consisted of countless tiny tentacles, all writhing continuously. She could even feel them under her feet.