Howling Groans in a Church's Walls

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#2 of Paranormal Hunters Society Files

This is for a writing challenge in a Telegram group I joined (link here if you're interested: https://t.me/joinchat/TXMB1RU1ETeKOakg). At just over a thousand words, we would write a short story fitting a chosen theme. The new theme for this week is, "I can't bear to see you cry."

This is it: my first official story following Bram Heathcliff and his friends in the Paranormal Hunters Society! Also, I'm sorry if I missed a typo or two. Be gentle.


Being pansexual made my relationship with God...rather complicated. So did my role as a part-time paranormal investigator.

As an avid believer in the unknown, but also a freelance detective, I needed to be professional within my line of work. Not only did I need to keep a skeptical mind when on a case, but I also needed to maintain neutrality when speaking to those affected. Not all mammals who witnessed ghosts, cryptids, or alien spacecraft happened to be tolerant regarding sexual orientations other than being straight. It was one of the biggest reasons the P.H.S. struggled with constantly finding an exorcist willing to work with us should we ever did encounter a real case of demonic possession. Not many certified priests were willing to be contracted with a supernatural investigation agency decked with an LGBTQAI+ pride sticker on the front door.

Didn't help either that a certain lead investigator had gotten himself blacklisted because a certain lion priest tricked me into wrecking his own perfect home.

(Hey, I didn't know the guy was married with cubs, sue me.)

Thankfully, we got a good word in during a slow week in early Spring. Several miles outside Nueva Fe in a gated suburban community named Golden Sands, the Zephaniah New Hope Church contacted us on the phone. They wanted the Paranormal Hunters Society to investigate a strange haunting within the main building and would be willing to pay upfront.

"How do you think they came up with the name?" Laurie asked me in the passenger seat as I drove. "You think this 'Zephaniah' was a big fan of 'Star Wars'?"

"Maybe," I shrugged at the puma without letting go of the wheel. "I've heard way stranger names.

"Didn't you once date a guy named like that?" My puma co-lead investigator asked.

"We were boyfriend, actually," I corrected her. "And it was 'Zachariah', not 'Zeph'."

"Ah," she awkwardly glanced out the sideview window. "Never mind then..."

Shaking my perked lagomorph ears, I refocused on getting us to the church in one piece, rather than reminisce about loves since passed. By the time we arrived at Zephaniah New Hope, parking in the adjacent lot to the main church, a tall figure had already emerged from the front entrance. Dressed conservatively yet looking stunningly youthful in her mid-forties, the she-bear approached us as we exited our truck.

"Are you Laurie?" She spoke in a Southern dialect, adding, "From on the phone?"

"Sure am," Laurie cordially greeted her. "You must be Mrs. Charlton."

She held a mighty bear paw out for me. "And you must be Abraham."

"Call me 'Bram', everyone does," I shook the grizzly she-bear's paw, grinning as I used my Heathcliff charm. "It's nice to meet you in-person, ma'am. Lovely dress you're wearing."

Laurie momentarily shot me a death glare at my words, but it appeared Mrs. Charlton didn't mind at all. "Oh, this old thing?" She beamed ear to ear while presenting the tails of her skirt and giggled like a bashful schoolgirl. "Let's head inside, since it's positively sweltering! I'll make you two some lemonade, and me and my husband will explain what has been...unfortunately occurring..."

Laurie and I were led through some engraved oak doors and down a wide nave. One or two elderly mammals were in the pews with their head and ears downcast, praying in silent contemplation. The she-bear brought us into her husband's main office in the back-right of the church, where I'd noticed him hastily walking away from a filing cabinet. I made note of it later.

Ted and Diane Charlton considered themselves 'honest Christian folk'. At least, that was what Diane said, while Ted mostly let her do all the talking, and explained to us their situation involving ghosts. The most basic included supposed groaning and soft voices being heard during off-hours, seemingly out of nowhere. Most of it could be heard from the church's nave and atop the altar. The building was neither built on sacred ground nor old, considering it had been built by the Charltons after Ted's parents left him a sizable inheritance.

It seemed like a simple 'put audio tapes and microphones' in the nave. Which we did.

The first night, we got nothing. However, I did notice that Pastor Charlton did like spending an awful long time inside his main office. Around this period, then I heard what seemed like groaning in intermediate periods of time. It happened in the dead of night long after a decent bedtime. Anyway, to make a long story short, without informing Laurie or Mrs. Charlton, I'd used the spare key they'd given us in case of emergencies, then sneaked into the church on the second night, under potential guise as wanting to figure out where the groaning came from. Which I did figure out.

See, I went inside the main office for myself. It occurred to me why the filing cabinet stuck out so much; most didn't have a mat placed underneath them, let alone on an old floor that proudly showed off its damage, scars, scratches, and indents from years of abuse.

Turns out, it had been to block a hole.

The secret passageway didn't lead me too far, right into a small room. If I could, I predicted to be behind the wall separating it from the church's altar. I could tell based on where the narrow passageway had led me from the main office. It wasn't until I surveyed everything that I understood; stacked against all three walls of the sizable alcove rest tall bookshelves, and while I did temporarily stare at the large towel, king-sized pillow, and opened tissue box in the center of the room, what caught my attention were what lay on the bookshelves. Ignoring the pungent, unmistakable smell of ursine seed lingering here and there, my jaw dropped.

"Sweet Gay Jesus," I chuckled with ears perked high. "You dirty boy."

Ted Charlton possessed a hidden treasure trove of homosexual debauchery. Vintage pulp novels and five-year-old muscle magazines the likes of which could only be described as gay pornography at its finest. Some titles I didn't even recognize. It all lay within the crawlspace within the walls of an evangelical church in the suburbs of Nueva Fe, New Mexico.

A few novels caught my eye, especially one simply lying on the floor itself with a bookmark carefully placed between the pages. An adult comic book! Its front displayed a dashing cougar in his mid-twenties, an arm each wrapped around a beautiful college-aged boy in tight, sultry clothes from the 1970s, with the title 'The Sexy Adventures of Rebel' printed in neon bold above their ears.

Picking it up and opening a page, I eagerly murmured softly, "Note to self: look up works by 'Oliver Fray' on the Internet later."

Suddenly, my ears caught the sound of movement from down the secret passageway. Setting the comic book on a shelf, I turned around fast and froze at the same time I locked eyes with a familiar grizzly bear I'd spoken to not several hours ago. His belt buckle had been unfastened and he'd been in the middle of pulling his pants down before he stood there, almost catatonic. More like utterly horrified, honestly.

"Oh, Lord...please no...not like this!" Pastor Ted Charlton hastily pulled his pants back up, but didn't buckle them.

"Well, I guess this explains the groaning, huh?" I glanced around the room with a wry but reassuring smile. It remained until it occurred to me that Ted seemed on the verge of tears. "Shit, uh...ehehe, sorry for swearing in church, Pastor?"

He blinked once, then twice, before sighing with a defeated laugh. Shuffling to the nearest wall without a bookshelf, he kneeled down and rested his legs. I felt the need to sit down beside him too, my back to one of the shelves. There, we sat in relative silence for what felt like minutes, the grizzly's downcast eyes searching for something to say.

"So, why did you go along with hiring us?" I asked after a moment.

"I...I couldn't refuse...without Diane being suspicious," he grumbled, then mulled deeply on a thought or two. He reluctantly looked at me with such fear, such self-resentment in his eyes. "I'll...I'll pay you double--triple even, if you don't say anything, please. What's been happening in this here room...I want to stay in this room."

I immediately raised my paws up. "No need, no need, I'm not going to say anything about this place," my words did little to calm the bear. Not standing to see my own client be on the verge of tears, I told him, "Listen, I'm pansexual. I'm not gay, but I mostly like gay men. I would never do anything like betray my own client."

My reassurances helped calm down the understandably conflicted pastor. However, it didn't prevent a small tear from crawling down Ted's graying cheek. It plucked at my heartstrings.

"So, uh...this is a neat collection you've got," I couldn't help but mention. "Mind telling me where you got all these books? I doubt they're available at the nearest Noble Barn."

Luckily for me, that managed to get a small laugh out of the bear. His weeping turned into chuckling, though weak as it sounded. "No, you cannot," he said. "I...I have been...collecting all this personally since...since before I became a pastor..."

Pastor Ted Charlton weaved me a tale as old as oppressive religious organizations. It told about a young grizzly boy trapped in a repressed household, held together by deeply homophobic parents who forced him away from a 'sinful lifestyle'. They controlled, pressured, then broke the young boy before molding him into their perfect vision of a follower. He got married, impregnated his wife only two times, raised these healthy cubs into young adulthood, didn't object when the oldest married after high school to a decent young man while the youngest opted to attend a liberal college in California. No matter how hard he tried to live the straight, married life with children, he could not hold back his homosexual desires. So, to help escape into fantasy, he kept a secret collection of pulp novels he'd accumulated since his teenage years, only building a small room for himself after editing the design plans for 'Zephaniah New Hope' before its initial construction.

"I know I'm a coward, but that's what I've been raised to believe," Pastor Charlton confessed between drying his tears, his head still downcast. "Hide it, suppress it, don't acknowledge it, and it'll go away, but it hasn't worked for me yet, has it?"

"It's your life given by God, no one else's," I told him, gently patting his arm. "You're not happy here, obviously. Still, you should only come out when you're ready. If you don't want to spend the rest of your life in agony, being something you're not, then don't wait."

Ted Charlton gave a mighty sigh. The kind one felt after knowing what they had to do.

"It'll be a very difficult conversation for us to eventually have, no doubt," he concluded with what sounded like a heavy heart, his eyes still avoiding mine. "I, uh...I'm jealous of your generation. Going out and dating without fear of jailtime, let alone reprisal. Look at me though...I'm old and fat and ugly--"

"You're neither of those things, Mr. Charlton."

"Please, call me 'Ted'," he laughed shortly. "Can't deny the thought of going to a gay bar in the future doesn't sound...enticing. Still, I uh, I wouldn't really know where to begin with...with dating men...l-let alone h-having, I'm...sex with 'em...you know?"

It wasn't until I'd noticed him trying to secretly adjust his pants that it occurred to me why he didn't want to look a me. Deep shame, as well as lust. The thought of finally having a look at what the pastor had packing down there did intrigue me, but not as much as wanting to help the poor grizzly. He needed experience, or at least an inkling of what to do beyond the pages of old books.

"Dating men's not as hard as you think," I put some gas on the Heathcliff charm, and gave a friendly, buck-toothed smile up at the tall ursine sitting beside me. "I can help you right now, if you want, Pastor?"

He grew immediately silent, staring down at me like a Man who learned about a spectacular offer he never considered possible. His dark eyes were wide, and his slack-jawed expression seemed comical. Similar to a lecherous schoolboy about to take a secretive peek in the locker room.

"H-Help...with what...?"

"With this," my finger traced the visible bulge in those pants he'd been too late to hide. "If you'd like? You told me yourself: 'for now, what's been happening in this room, I want to stay in this room'."

Ted's lower lip quivered in indecision, then stilled as he finally gave a meek nod. Not giving them another chance to reconsider at the last heteronormative second, I promptly yanked his unbuckled pants to his ankles. Underwear included. The bear's neglected cock immediately sprang up from confinement in all its glory as I basked in the thick musk, I thought anyone would admit being a marvelous package. It had everything a slut like me wanted: a wide shaft, bulbous tip peeking through wrinkled but juicy foreskin begging to be played with, plus two perfectly plump balls protected in a grayish-brown pouch dangling against the bear's taint. Ted's wife certainly didn't appreciate good cock when she married its owner.

"Just relax, sit back, don't think too much about it," I told Ted, grinning as my repositioned behind me until I lay on the floor between his thighs, shoes almost touching the wall. "And enjoy."

One single suckle had the grizzly bear shot it right now between my teeth. A lick or two led to him stifling the deepest moan. Some slurping followed by a caressing tongue along the throbbing underside caused him to further release a few squirts of ursine precum. Though not the saltiest or most bitter I'd ever tasted, the sheer amount of it certainly revealed both the need for release and Pastor Ted's inexperience with male-on-male pleasure. Further evidence could be found in the almost instinctual way the bear started hastily whispering a prayer asking for forgiveness, only for it to transform into a rapturous groan.

The technique I used? Having my flat teeth and tongue play with his foreskin, switching between pulling at the taut skin and slithering my appendage underneath until it left him an incoherent mess. Any words he tried to say turned into garbled grunts the faster I bobbed along his thick length, lapping up his pouring dollops of warm pre, wanting to bring him to greater euphoric heights.

He huffed. He groaned. He moaned. He hummed several hymns either praising God or praising me, his paws too occupied with his knees to consider resting them between my heated ears as I lowered down and up like a piston. He didn't want it to end, yet those intoxicated grunts of his became more feral the more my chin lightly tapped against those gargantuan balls churning (which I started absentmindedly fondling) within that fuzzy brown sack, then more desperate as the minutes passed by for us.

My personal record for the longest blowjob went to a German tourist I had the joy of pleasuring a few years back. Our night together left me not only huffing for oxygen afterward but having a beautifully sore throat for a couple days. Not that I complained. The Doberman/Great Dane hybrid been a businessman who wanted to have fun during a series of important video calls but wanted somebody to service him under the desk of his hotel room. I ended up staying there for five hours and made him come three times. Unfortunately for Ted, the lack of attention below the belt after so many years caused the grizzly to shoot down my throat a little less than ten minutes.

He huffed and trembled between deep intakes of breath, and finally, he let out a heavenly chorus of blissful ejaculation. It tasted as good as it sounded, despite how short it felt. However, I admitted surprise at him holding out for long enough, especially against my velvet lips.

After swallowing every drop of him, with a twitch of my rabbit nose, I slowly pulled my short snout off his manhood, which already started to regain life. It caused me to become slack-jawed more so than usual. How he could begin to grow erect again after an intense orgasm, I had no idea.

"Sweet Mary..." Ted panted uncontrollably, his shoulders collapsed firmly against the wall, no doubt adding to another instance of 'a bump in the night'. He required another minute to regain control of his drooling jaw to say, "I...I never k-knew it could feel so...so good. B-By Heaven's Grace, I cannot believe I denied myself for so, so long..."

Another Heathcliff-style grin slowly formed under my whiskers. Ears perked high, I wiped off my chin sat back up, unbuckling my jeans as I proposed, "Why don't we praise God together, Pastor Ted? I've been a naughty, naughty boy lately."

Again, the grizzly bear fell silent. He watched as I shimmied down my tight jeans and boxers in one swoop, then presented him my toned jackrabbit hips that have tempted far 'straighter' men than him.

Ted nervously gulped, then licked his dried nose with that wet ursine tongue I hoped to taste very, very soon. His eyes drifted to the large towel in the middle of the room, which I'd had the pleasure of resting my knees on as I gave the man of God a great blowjob.

"What are your sins, Mr. Heathcliff?"

"Adultery, blasphemy, and sodomy."

Something told me the man of God was about to sing His praises quickly.

***

"You didn't find anything?"

"Sadly, no," I shook my muzzle as a glint of thankful recognition flashed across the pastor's expression.

"I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Charlton," Laurie informed them as we all stood in the main office, her arm holding onto the bag carrying our equipment, "but the footage didn't pick up anything worthwhile that can be considered paranormal. It's probably been old pipework or something, but that's all we can think of."

"Or maybe you and I have been watching too much Ghost Finders, Teddy," Diane Charlton mused to her husband. She then presented us a check. "Anyway, bless you still for making the journey here. We thank you for your services, you two."

"No problem, ma'am," I graciously pocketed the check and shook their paws. "I wish you all a pleasant week. Hopefully, you won't need to call us again for any ghosts in hallways or closets or whatever."

Ted successfully held back a cough. Smirking if only for an instant, I thought back to our post-sex afterglow, when the equally naked bear had cum inside me once before turning into a glowing heap of happy brown fur. Covered with him in sweat, grime, and some semen, I listened to him excitedly whisper about potentially coming out to his family once the youngest bear of his graduated college. He wanted to be honest not just with his wife, but his cubs and God as well. I had wished him the best after agreeing never to see each other again. At least, until after the inevitable divorce proceedings. Hopefully, Mrs. Charlton and the judge would be lenient, given his years of service to the community.

After some more exchanged pleasantries, Diane thanked us again for our time, offered us a prayer for our save drive back into downtown, then welcomed a member of their congregation wanting to talk about an upcoming church picnic. We made our way outside to the parking lot.

"If anything," I chuckled to myself whilst getting back in the truck, "I think there is a ghost in the closet that you'll find out soon enough."

"You owe me one for not telling her the truth, Bram," Laurie informed me.

"As long as you don't tell the others, I'll do anything you want," I told the puma, who purred in realized excitement. "Let me guess, you want me to pay for lunch then?"

She giggled, "You know me so well."

"Of course," I revved up the engine. "Now, let's hope we get a real case next time."