Silence. Darkness. The only sound he could hear was the high-pitched buzzing inside his head that comes from being in complete silence.

Then he heard the drum.

Steady, regular beat; a perfect sound in a place bereft of noise. Comforting and calming in his unknown captivity.

There were no signs of other life around him, no footfalls, no distant voices filtering in from another room, none of the every day noises one would expect to hear of doors opening and closing, of children giggling and laughing and dogs barking and TVs droning, radios whining. Nothing. Silence. Except for the drum.

He was sure there was nobody else in or around this place – wherever it was.

It suddenly occurred to him, as sleep fled and was replaced by glaring lucidity, that he had no idea where he was or how he got there, who had taken him to this place or why.

He at first thought he was in the chilly cargo hold of a big boat because he could feel the pitch and yaw of immense waves battering the side of what must be an enormous seagoing liner. He felt the drumming through the soles of his feet when he rose from the floor where he had been lying. His naked feet ... he touched his penis. He put his hands to his chest, his back, his buttock. Felt up and down his naked body. His head swam like a real bad hangover. Then the door of tight white light opened. It was very far away, across the cargo hold, as his mind gripped onto the only reality it could concoct.

They came at him so fast and knocked him so unconscious that when he awoke again, he was on his back being pushed past a large picture of the Crab Nebula. Only later would he realize that he was actually on an alien spaceship – headed out to the stars. Destination unknown. Motivation of his captors unknown.

He tried to look directly at them but his body refused to understand their enigma. He went into body shock, unable to move but needing to flee. They took him to a room that smelled of cheese mixed with petrol fumes and there was a slight hint of some sweet flowery scent.

Despite his terror, the smooth, tender hands that anointed his body with exotically scented oils made him relax; his heartbeat slowed and the fear left his eyes. The muscles in his gut and his face relaxed. Every inch of his body was being rubbed and fingered and kneaded by the tiny fingers on their hands. He looked at them and noticed that there were only three of them there caressing him, but each of them had dozens, perhaps even a hundred fingers on each hand.

The appendages looked more like tentacles than fingers and seemed to sway, bonelessly, moving unlike his own jointed, stiff, hard fingers. Their fingers, or handy octopusses as he thought of them, were soft, squishy, like jelly.

One of them began to hum and was joined by the other two in its song. He felt the vibration in his nipples and his cock. His member immediately responded, the vibrations around it like soft, silky hot lips fellating him. He arched his back and tilted his pelvis forward as if to go deeper into the unseen orifice. The aliens tasted his need with their sensory organs he thought were there fingers and their song rose, increasing the vibration three-fold. All tentacular ‘fingers’ pointed in his direction, following some unseen-by-him rat that scurried around under his skin – that was the ‘wrong’ feeling he got – that these three singing things – he still couldn’t focus on them, just felt the fingers and heard the song. He was sure though that eyes were on him. And they were watching this ‘thing’ scurry about under his skin as they sang their song.

They folded round his paralysed body like Clingfilm – an injection of colour in the subsurface of his skin, he actually felt the colour flowing under his skin, about rat sized, as he felt it, leaving a wake of rat colour behind it until his entire subcutaneous layer of manfat was lifted free by the force of their song. The bodies of the aliens melded with his and it was only then that he realized they were not to be his ‘love partner’. That had just come into his peripheral vision and he felt it from across the scented room, felt it’s drumming but couldn’t ascertain what mechanical, moving part of it was causing the rhythmic drumming or the threat it held to his human existence.

His skin split from sternum to pubis and they peeled it off him from the inside. They were all around him, on top of him, melting over each curve and bulb of muscle and flesh, coating him with a new skin that was as good as his own except colourless. It seemed to be organic too, but not natural. They had made this skin to cover him with. They were just keeping it warm for him. They didn’t need bodies or organs or skin, he could see that. They were made up of light and energy and thought; they had transcended the need for physicality.

His first thought was whether his wife would still want to fuck him or not, looking like this, her being able to see right inside him like a medical student’s model. She’d be scared of him, he knew it; she’d probably leave him if he tried to mount her.

They whispered things in his ears as they left his body, words that sounded like gratitude to him. He watched in fascination as his entire skin, still shaped like his body and looking like him, still recognisable as his face, his torso with an appendectomy scar, the slight gouge on his left ass cheek where a dog bit him when he was eight, floated across the room.

The sound of the drum grew fainter and the humming became louder and louder, anxiety in the tone now.

They played him a home movie of where his skin had gone and why it would never come back. Cut to a vast anteroom, that had a pyramidal domed roof. Through the glass cast the rays of a binary sun system, from the left the red, from the right the white, these parallel beams of light refracting through the metre-thick medium of the pyramidal domed roof illuminated a strung up corpse with skin all torn and ripped and wrinkled and grey. He saw it flutter away into flagging shards that gave off a grey streamer of dust that littered the far end of the anteroom like a sugar blast of domestic memory, all the sins of the home, sung away in on dark wedge, his shadow burned into the back wall some 400 metres away.

They brought in another corpse, flattened as if with an iron. They pegged this new skin between rusty iron cables and the whole contraption pulled taught. He saw something familiar about the face instantly. He only later realised it was his own face. His own skin glowed under the influence of the twin rays of the binary suns. The glow flowed down the iron cables and penetrated the marble floor.

The home movie they played him, sang in his head like a drum beat, like a heart beat but more bassy, more deliberately rhythmic, as if life itself depended on it, pure notation, perfect pitch. The rusty cables led off deep into the tectonic plates of this planet and held it all together.

On the surface, the ghostly alien children communed in vast shoals of tentacular sex, fingerings and fistings and lickings and erotogallons of ghost-fuck shone all about them like mating shrimps stripped of their di-hydrogen-oxide lagoon medium.

Stood among them, his cock still helpless in their presence, his muscles still covered in the gossamer layer of synthetic skin they had slurped onto him in their ship. He was a pivotal entity in their lives, no hierarchic responsibility, no meaning beyond the merely pleasurable. Does he think of his family as the succubi laid to rest the incubus urge? You work it out.