Goob
By Musuko

Everybody knows what demons are. Okay, maybe that's not exactly true. The truth is, everyone can know what demons are; they teach us about them in school. Buuuuut, if you're like me, maybe you get a boring as fuck teacher like Mrs Whitherton and you drift off into daydreams. Like how not everyone knows how to do a quadratic equation, but we don't think of them as mysteries. We can go look it up if we wanna know.
	Same with demons. Once upon a time, sure, they were mysterious, and we weren't even sure they were real. We sort of half-explained them with tales of one kind or another. Ghosts, for example; yup, those were demons. Or vampires. Or werewolves. Yup, those were all demons. Not aliens though. Those were actually aliens. That's...a topic for another day.
	Suffice to say, we worked them out. Scientists scienced. Fancy people with “ologist” at the end of their name communicated with them. Hypotheses were tested and became theories. It all got boring and mundane, like how mermaids just turned out to be manatees, and how giant squid were just another animal when we found them for real. Demons were just a thing, explainable and normal. No para involved. There was probably the word “quantum” involved somewhere.
	So, when my new house turned out to have a demon in it, I wasn't too distressed. I set down my box, straightened back up, and gave it the kind of look you give after half a day of packing all your shit and carting across town only to have a spectral apparition pop out from the wall in front of you to scream “boo!”
	“Boo? Really?” I said. “Boo?!”
	The demon floated back about a foot. I could describe its appearance at this point, but it wouldn't really mean anything. They can change their appearance however they like. The only real constant is their personality, and all I knew about this one is that it thought making themselves look like a spook from a cheap theatre production of A Christmas Carol, chains and all, and going “boo!” was a sensible way to go about scaring a cynical, world-wise guy in his early 20s who, I'll reiterate here, knows demons exist. If demons go to demon school, this one was telling me he spent a lot of time in the classes with the colourful walls and the blunt scissors.
	He explained to me later (I started thinking of it as 'he', for no other reason than 'it' sounded weird. I gave him a name too; they tend not to have them themselves. I called him 'Goob'. He seemed happy with it). See, the demons know full well that we've got them worked out. So, if they want to spook anyone, they go for the approach that will only work on the really stupid, naïve, or uninformed. Same tactic that internet scammers use with their badly-spelled appeals to help some prince get his fortune. In the end, he helped me carry my stuff in. The lightweight stuff, anyway. Heavy stuff fell through his fingers.
	Still, though, he tried it on sometimes. Like trying to tell me that my oranges were cursed because there were three of them, and if you eat fruit when there's three of them you get cursed. Yeah. Goob wasn't top-shelf. But he seemed nice enough. And he told me all about the portal.
	Ah yes, the portal. It just so happened to be on the wall in my bedroom. Lovely. I did a bit of reading online to confirm what he was saying. Demons come from another dimension, blah blah blah, they break through at points in our universe. Those points are sometimes called portals. They're all to do with some fold in the jibbly jobbly blah blah, and there's some equations. I scrolled a bit. They can be two-dimensional on our side because some more equations and long words. With some satisfaction I spotted 'quantum' in there. I knew it.
	“So only one of you can come out at a time?” I asked. Goob was curled around my feet, looking and acting like a pet cat. It wouldn't have bothered me so much if I hadn't been trying to masturbate at the time. I'd gotten used to the idea that I had no real privacy while he was floating around, but there's a limit to how 'on show' I wanted to be.
	“Yeah,” said Goob, sounding like the cat from Alice In Wonderland. “It takes energy to push through. The hole's only big enough for one.”
	“So how come I've only seen you?” A thought occurred to me. “It has only been you this whole time, right? You haven't been swapping and taking shifts?”
	“Just me,” he mewled. “I drew the short straw.”
	“Oh thanks,” I muttered. I wasn't too sure I could believe him. I mean, the only way I could tell it was him instead of some other hypothetical demon is that he acted like him. And maybe demons are good actors. Or all kinda similar in personality. Eh, it wasn't worth worrying about it too much. I shifted a foot and nudged it against his furry side. He had some substance. It felt like pushing into cool cotton wool.
	“Is that why you fade when you get further from the portal?”
	“Yeah,” he said. “I can go as far as I want, but I go invisible and can't touch anything.” He sighed. “Some lucky demons get a nice big hole. We got stuck with a tight little...why are you laughing?”
	I snorted, trying to suppress it. “J-just thinking about something at work today. Go on...”
	He sighed. “If only you'd got scared. Then the hole'd grow, and more of us could come out.”
	“I thought you didn't want to come out? You had to come out because you drew the short straw, didn't you?”
	“I drew the short straw to try and scare you. None of us really thought it'd work.”
	Ah, I thought. Because of the whole 'we've got demons figured out' thing. I lifted my foot up and gave his head a pat with my toes. He shot me a very cat-like glare, but he also purred, even while my toes squished his soft and ethereal head in ways that wouldn't really happen if there was a skull in there. Even when he's solid, Goob is pretty soft and squishy. I accidentally sat on Goob once. He looked like an angry pancake.
	A week or so later, I learned that being scared wasn't the only reaction that'd help the hole get bigger (hehe). Any kind of response would work. Sort of like Peter Pan's fairies; the more you believe in them, the more real they become. My oranges may indeed have been cursed if I believed Goob's curse was true. It's probably more complicated than all that, but then I'd be back to looking at the big words and equations on the internet again. But I did know that I woke up in the middle of the night and felt, in my groggy half-awake state, someone sucking my cock. Someone with a mouth that had that same cold cotton-wool feel. Someone who had watched me masturbate nearly every day in the few weeks I'd been living there, and who had learned exactly how I liked to get off; nice slow, firm strokes, lingering at the tip before plunging back down to the base, only speeding up right towards the end. I probably should have done something to stop it, and maybe I would have if I wasn't so sleepy and if it didn't feel so good. What I did do was moan in pleasure, and shoot my load (which I found dried on the bedsheets in the morning; seems Goob didn't want to be tangible for that bit), and fall back to sleep.
	And in the morning, Goob was just slightly more opaque, and was able to remain just a little bit visible as far as the street outside, when before he'd disappear before reaching the front door. I fixed him with a firm look over my cereal bowl while he floated around the kitchen, aimlessly and annoyingly rearranging things. Today he was an anthropomorphic mouse, of indeterminate gender, fuzzy and indistinct and with a disconcerting habit of just floating through the furniture.
	“I should probably be angry,” I said. “After all, you did rape me last night.”
	He affected an theatrically-offended air, hand on chest. “I asked you if I should continue and you said yes.”
	“Was I awake at the time?”
	He paused. “Ah.”
	“Ah is right,” I said. I ate for a while, while he squirmed. “Like I said, I should be angry, but I'm not.”
	He went back to messing up my cutlery drawer, but I could tell that he was watching me out of the corner of his eyes. Or at least, the fuzzy bit where his eyes should be.
	“What's it like on the other side of the portal,” I asked.
	He thought about that for a few moments. “Kinda like twenty-eight people all stuffed together in a phone booth.”
	“There's twenty-eight of you in there? I thought there were millions of demons.”
	“There are. But there's only twenty-eight in this pocket.”
	I got the impression that the explanation for this would probably be in amongst the equations. Blegh.
	“So, not very nice in there I take it? You want out?”
	“Yeah.” He turned and gave me a funny look, as much as was possible with that blank ghostly face anyway, with his head tilted to the side. Slowly, I saw a mouth form into a smile. It was just a black void in the face, of the kind that would normally split super wide in scary movies, the jaw unhinging to make you instinctively think of snakes. But his just stopped at that smile. A coy smile. “Why, do you want to help us get out?” He drifted towards the table, sinking downwards. I felt his cold fingers stroke up my thighs. I froze with the spoon halfway to my mouth.
	“And what happens if I help you get out?” I said, with the vague distraction of someone who now has fingers closing around his cock. That the fingers were managing to do this while phasing through my clothes was a minor detail that wasn't forefront on my mind.
	“We'd spook people,” he said. “Curse them too. Generally mess with them.” His whole form was under the table now. I could feel his breath on my cock. And I knew that was deliberate; he didn't have breath. But he could manifest the sensation of it if he wanted. Usually to breathe down the back of someone's neck to fill them with dread, though. Not to tickle some guy's cock through his clothes.
	“Mess with them,” I breathed. “Like you're doing with me now?”
	“Maybe,” he said. “Depends on the person.”
	“I'm not sure I should help you do...ah...that.” His mouth was on it now. It felt just like it did  before, except maybe a little firmer this time. I tensed up, stifling a groan, as my hardening cock slid upwards between my clothes and my fur. I tried not to think about where his head must be if he was able to give me a blowjob in this position; half of it must be inside my belly. He squeezed, and I couldn't stifle the groan this time.
	“I mean...releasing twenty-eight demons to torment and curse innocent people,” I gasped. “P-probably not the most socially responsible thing to...to...do.” I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. I was mustering up the strength to stop him. Honestly, I was. Any moment now I would have stopped him. If he hadn't stopped first.
	One moment he was giving me a wonderful blowjob. The next, he was gone. I looked under the table to be sure. Yup, no Goob there. Just the bulge of my raging erection under my jeans. I pushed at it, grumbling. I could finish what he started, but that'd mean washing off again, and my breakfast would get mushy.
	“Jerk,” I muttered, figuring he could probably hear me from somewhere. Fine, I thought. Finish breakfast first, then deal with my blue balls. I spooned some milk and sugary unhealthiness into my mouth, chewed absent-mindedly for a moment...then sprayed the contents of my mouth all over the table in front of my.
	“Yeuch! Goob! Did you make my milk go sour?!”
	Faintly, as if from another room, came Goob's attempt at a menacing laugh. And, unlike previous attempts, this time it sorta worked a tiny bit.
	He was absent for the rest of the day. This wasn't too unusual. Sometimes he just wasn't around. Maybe he had important demon paperwork to do, who knows. I spent the day like any other Saturday. I masturbated (earlier than usual, thanks to Goob's mischief at breakfast), played video games, watched a couple of movies, and generally mooched around like the lazy waste of space I always tried to be on weekends. I mean, otherwise, what's the point of having weekends?
	That night, I was pretty sure I saw Goob hanging around by my laptop. But I might have just been dreaming it. I didn't get woken up with a blowjob again. I was only slightly disappointed by that. Goob's laughter lingered in my thoughts. And what was he doing at the laptop, if that was real? And why did it feel like I had underwear on, even though I sleep in the nude? I lifted the bedsheets to have a look...and froze.
	The noise I made was probably not very dignified. And the shouting that followed probably raised questions amongst the neighbours. Goob didn't show his face, no matter how blue I turned the air. But in the distance, I heard his mischievous laughter.

To be continued...