Black Ambrosia

by Elizabeth Engstrom

  I quieted my heart for a moment, not believing my luck. Then I reached up and pushed on the lid. It swung open on silent hinges, and there she stood, like an angel.

  I climbed out and knelt before her, promising her a child-­delight journey into the land of her heart’s desire later this evening. I played a light melody for her as I watched blood-tinged saliva, golden green in the darkness, appear at the corners of her mouth. Very gently, I removed her fingers and examined the cuts, then put her fingers in my mouth, tasted the delect­able fruit, the plump little knuckles weeping delicately onto my tongue, whetting my appetite.

  I looked into her eyes, the eyes of my rescuer, and I wanted to sweep her up and dance her around the floor, sinking my teeth deeply into her neck and enjoying the golden flow of this most glorious child. But I dared not. Slowly, reluctantly, resisting temptation, I pulled her tender fingers from my tongue and patted her gently on the head.

  “Go to bed now, my sweet, and I will be along later to tuck you in.” She turned and ran toward the stairs. I halted her with a clashing of cymbals, a storm warning only she could hear. “Tell no one of this.” She looked at me, innocent eyes questioning. “Our secret,” I said. She nodded solemnly and went quietly to the world above.

  I smiled to myself, then resealed the box and sat in the corner.

  Boyd and the boy would be along presently.

  I would meet them on equal terms.

  “Even though I believed Will’s story, I didn’t let the mayor or the police know. I had several reasons. First, because they might go and blow her to pieces, or worse, let her escape in the confusion. Second, it might not be her at all, or she might have already gotten out and left. And third, which is probably the only real reason I kept it to myself, is that I wanted her all to myself. I didn’t want to share the confrontation with anyone else—especially not with a crowd. This had been my hunt all along, and it was only fair that I bring her down myself.

  “I probably should have gone with Will the moment he told me she was in his basement. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. It felt as though the appointment had been made, and I needed to sit and think, prepare for the moment. The moment I had been rushing toward in impotent frustration for years was suddenly here and I needed to consider it for a while. I needed to think of what to say to her, how to act, how to feel.

  “Anyway, I was busy in meetings all day, talking to the people who were trying to control the town. Everybody had gone back home, like I said, but a handful of us knew the danger wasn’t over, so we were trying out new strategies for search as well as for keeping the townspeople from being killed and the media from turning Wilton into a carnival.

  “All day long, through all the meetings, I knew where Angelina was, and I didn’t tell anyone.

  “I finally met Will at the mayor’s house just before ten that night, and we walked over to his place. There was not a doubt in my mind that Angelina was in that house. I knew it when we were more than three blocks away. I could feel her.

  “Will’s parents were watching the news. He introduced us and told them he was going to show me his collection of books on the occult. They were quite preoccupied and didn’t pay much attention. We went into Will’s room to wait for his folks to go to bed before we went downstairs.

  “He had all kinds of books on the occult and witches and things, and he was all fired up about showing them to me. I tried to talk to him, tried to tell him that what we were dealing with here was a very sick young woman. Compulsive, obsessive, self-destructive, and homicidal, true, but sick nevertheless. There was no supernatural here. It was just Angelina. Just Angelina. A misdirected, sad, psychopathic case.

  “But he would have none of it. He just looked at me with eyes that had somehow seen beyond my experience, and he patiently told me again about stakes through the heart and rituals that were ghastly to say the least.

  “I heard the television go off, and his parents called a soft good night to us, then their bedroom door closed.

  “Will got very quiet, and so did I, and we just sat there on the lower bunk, with only one lamp on, and we listened to the sounds of the house around us.

  “The time seemed to pass without our awareness. I looked at the clock at ten-forty-five and a minute later it was eleven-thirty. Neither of us had spoken or moved for forty-five minutes. We were listening, I believe, to the evil in the walls.

  “I noticed that going into the cellar was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Fear was collecting in my bowels, and I knew if I stood up to take one step toward her, it would squeeze out, along with everything else. My hands had lost their strength; I couldn’t even make a tight fist. Fear had reduced my nerves to jelly, and with a glance at Will, I knew the same had happened to him.

  “With wide eyes and sweat-slicked forehead, he whispered to me, ‘Just before dawn. We’ll release her just before dawn. It’ll be safer then.’

  “That would have given us a good five hours to sit there, steeped in our acids.

  “But at midnight, we heard his sister’s bedroom door open.”

  39

  I sat on a dusty box of books, waiting, my mind twisting around itself. The taste of Diana’s blood upon my lips was feeding my obsession, endangering my life. I felt myself growing weak and cold in the wake of too much anticipation and too little nourishment. I had wasted too much energy during my imprisonment, and then I had to wait for Boyd and the boy, and as I waited, I grew fainter.

  I would rather hunt. And feed. And be warmed.

  Diana. I tasted her still, I ached for more. Yet I had to wait.

  They came home; I heard their footsteps loud on the boards above my head. I listened to the murmur of their voices, and I knew they fancied themselves superior, believing I lay locked and helpless beneath them.

  Boyd. The years I had spent thinking about him, wondering about him and me, and what could have been. What had he thought of me over the years?

  I knew. I knew what he thought. He had hunted me, tracked me, and had come to leisurely enjoy his kill. He thought I was locked up.

  Well. Our confrontation would occur, but no doubt a little differently than Boyd imagined. I would never become but another trophy in his collection.

  Suddenly it became very clear to me why She had fostered this queer relationship with Boyd. She had left nothing to chance in my development, and this night I would pass my final exam.

  I needed to be clear-headed, swift of reaction, in case he had tricks of his own. Hunger weighed heavily on my mind, the weakness devastating to my faculties.

  Diana. I tasted again her sweetness on my tongue.

  I searched the house with my consciousness. The adults had gone to bed, I lowered their eyelids and put them to sleep with a brief wave of conducive music. My Diana was sleeping, too—lightly. Boyd and the boy were in the boy’s room, both sitting on the bottom bunk. Books rested on their laps, and they talked. They talked of destroying me while in the very room that used to be my own. That room used to be my bedroom, where once I had childhood dreams, thoughts, childish motives and emotions. My room. My place, my sanctuary, my boundaries of life, from birth through age twelve.

  They were arguing about me.

  I sent some music to keep them occupied, and I enjoyed monitoring their reactions to my fine-tuned talent. I wove nets for them, nets of danger, of injury, of pain, and I drew them tighter and tighter about the two, reveling in the stench of fear that fell through the floorboards and into my lap. I wound the nooses tighter around their necks, wrapped them securely with bonds of insecurity, ineptitude, ineffectiveness, and futility.

  I had them secured in their own emotional excretions far tighter than Rosemary ever bound me with her leather and shackles.

  And then I concentrated on Diana.

  Wake up, my darling. Remember my promise? Come to me and I will give you everything.

  S
he remembered. She got up and with very little encouragement opened the door and walked through the house. She never hesitated to turn on a light; she remembered about the symphony of darkness. She was too good, too precious, too wonderful. My saliva glands ached in appreciation.

  Come directly to me, through the kitchen. Open the cellar door. Take the steps, one at a time, oh, my child, oh, yes, come, come to Angelina, she will give you everything. Everything and more.

  My body went limp with hunger as I saw her little pink pajamas pad down the dusty cellar stairs. The precious child, I would soon have her life, her experiences, to hold as my own; I would know her for who she really is; I would, for a short moment, be one with her, two personalities merging into one, and then her identity would flicker and vanish, but I would have her essence; I would have her unspoiled virgin expanse, and I would not squander it as her parents and society eventually would. I would keep it fresh, eternally youthful.

  Or maybe she could become mine, I could introduce her to life as I had known it. My precious Diana could become my legacy to Wilton, Pennsylvania; I could leave behind a little piece of myself, another of my kind.

  Or she could become my companion, and she would call me Mistress.

  Come to me, Diana, my precious.

  And then she was in my arms, soft and cuddly, smelling warm and sweet from sleep, and she rubbed her fists into her eye sockets as I danced her around the floor.

  “Amy!” I heard her brother call, and I shot him with a harpoon of fear that cramped his stomach. She’s mine now, you brat. You just leave her be.

  We sat together at the tea-party table, she so prim and proper in her fuzzy pajamas, with sore little hands in her lap, and I drank in her smell as I smiled and lifted a tiny, empty plastic teacup in a mock toast to her health. She looked down at her hands.

  “Diana, my darling, what is it? Oh, I know. I promised you a journey, and here we are in this ugly, scary cellar.” I stood up and held out my hand to her. She looked up at me with those trusting, loving eyes, and I knew I had to give her that, just that; I had to give to her the child-pleasure dream of a lifetime. Then she put her little hand in mine, and I led her to my hiding place under the stairs and she crawled in with me. I held her warm body close to mine, so close that I could feel her pulse even in her little legs, and I began to gently remove her sleepsuit as I spun her final illusion.

  “Suddenly I could breathe again. It felt like I’d been tied to the chair with thick ropes around my chest, and then suddenly they disappeared.

  “Will was taking great gasps, too, holding his stomach, and I knew by the look on his face that his bowel control was not quite as good as mine.

  “But something had changed; the air felt different. The fear was no longer oppressive. Will tested the strength of his limbs, then took clean clothes to the bathroom to change. On the way out, he looked at me and said, ‘A psychopath did that?’ and left me with a new type of fear and a thought or two about stakes.

  “When he returned, he said, ‘Amy’s gone down there. C’mon. We’ve got to go now.’

  “ ‘Wait a minute, Will,’ I said. ‘Amy can’t get to her, nor she to Amy, right?’

  “ ‘Well . . . Right. I guess . . .’ His answer was not as confident as I would have liked.

  “ ‘Don’t you think we should wait until just before dawn, like we said? She’s secure in the box, right?’

  “ ‘I’ve got to get Amy.’

  “ ‘Wait. Can Amy open the box?’

  “ ‘No.’

  “ ‘But you could.’

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘If Angelina can make you that afraid, maybe she can make you open the box.’

  “Will came back in and sat down on his bunk. His face wore the pain of self-sacrifice in the name of guilt. ‘Boyd,’ he said, ‘she’s my baby sister.’

  “ ‘I know.’ I looked at my watch. ‘It’s just after midnight. Dawn is at five. Let’s at least wait a couple of hours.’

  “Will pulled at his hair. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, then buried his face in his hands, while we sat there, waiting.

  “I believe I did the best I could do under the circumstances. My conscience is as clear as it can be about that night. I truly believed that Will’s box was strong, and that his little sister couldn’t open it. I guess maybe I was a little afraid to go down there—I mean, who wouldn’t be?—but I really, honestly, believed that the little girl would be all right.

  “But it was less than a half hour later that Will cried out, and I knew that I had underestimated everything.”

  40

  Curious, it was, that my enjoyment of the child was heightened by the presence of the two upstairs. It was reminiscent of Joshua and his newspaper stand back in Colorado. Not the circumstances, certainly, but the publicness of it. There in the picture window of his store; here under the feet of the child’s brother and Boyd—humanity’s self-appointed savior.

  I despised them.

  The child was sweet and wonderful, warm and nourishing, and I enjoyed every drop of her, until the very end. At the very end, when life finally winked out and the torrential outpouring of memories and experiences flooded my mental vault, I felt the child cry out for her brother, and I felt his answer. I knew at that moment that I had sucked in a little of this Will person as well. The two of them were close, very close indeed.

  Even so, the kill lacked adventure; it served its purpose, and merely confirmed my instinctive feeling that a greater conquest—an exercise of my supreme talents—yet waited.

  But then the child was dead and I needed to remove the carcass from my presence.

  The boy’s hand-hewn coffin. A perfect repository. I crawled from my space, pulling the corpse with me. I quickly undid the catches and dropped the body in, then refastened them. I heard the restlessness above. While the child held my total concentration, I had let lapse the music for those above. And now they were aware—free and restless.

  Come, then, and let this be over between us. I sat on the edge of the box, tapping the worn tip of my cane on the concrete floor, waiting. Come, boys. Come to Angelina.

  They came. They walked through the kitchen; I could feel their hearts pounding. They hesitated at the door; then it opened, and a flashlight swung down over the stairs. I was bored with them already. The warmth of the child’s blood flowing through me made me want to stop all this, made me want to rest, to sleep.

  Then the bare bulb flashed to light, momentarily blinding me, but I recovered quickly, and when I could again see, the two were crashing down the stairs.

  I stood, cane in hand, ready to face them both.

  Boyd came toward me first, the boy in his shadow.

  “Angelina?”

  “Hello, Boyd.”

  “Angelina, what’s happened to you?”

  “I’ve grown up. Matured. And you?”

  “Grown up? Look at you. You’re a mess.”

  Insecurity flashed through me, and the music came up automatically to protect my vulnerability. I couldn’t afford to dwell on it. In a moment, I was back in control. “I have what men have searched for throughout the ages.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Eternal life.”

  “Where’s Amy?” The boy spoke from behind Boyd.

  “In the coffin you built for her. Convenient disposal, thank you.”

  “Oh, Angelina, knock it off.” Boyd’s abruptness was inconsistent with the memories I had of him. “Do you like this lifestyle you’ve chosen?”

  Like it? He didn’t understand.

  “You don’t, do you?”

  I looked at him, I watched the boy peer at me from around Boyd’s side. He prodded Boyd, who gritted his teeth and elbowed back at the kid.

  “Come with me, Angelina, and we’ll take care of you. We’ll give you everything you need—”

 
; “No! Kill her!” The boy lunged at me.

  I stabbed him with music and he dropped to his knees. Boyd bent to his aid, then looked back at me. I relaxed my stance, eased the boy’s discomfort, readied myself against Boyd. We stood no more than six feet apart, glaring at each other, antagonism pouring forth, for a long moment. The boy held his stomach and moaned.

  “You all right, Will?”

  “He’s all right,” I answered for him.

  Boyd stepped closer to me. I stood straighter, not flinching from his gaze. He looked softer than I remembered, more . . . human, mortal. Warm. He held his hands out in the gesture of peace, and his eyes, brilliant in their intensity, held me with the little brown spot on one iris. Such depth in that spot.

  “Come with me, Angelina. Stop this.”

  I had always known that Boyd and I would meet again—there was a mysterious bond that held us. I had known it since we first met.

  “Please, Angelina. It’s not good, what you’re doing here.”

  He took another step closer to me, and I was drawn to him, attracted to him by more than his scent; there was something more, something I had once known about Boyd but forgotten, forgotten in the drama of the scenes we had shared since meeting, forgotten in my fantasies, forgotten in the madness of my life . . . forgotten.

  “Angelina, I—Angelina, you don’t have to live like this anymore.” He held his hand out, and I looked at it. Large and warm, open and inviting, soft and safe. I was so tired, so sleepy.

  Then a scuffle from the floor, and “No!” and the boy leaped at me. In surprise, caught off guard, I took one step back and the coffin stopped me. My knees buckled and I sat down hard, bringing the music and my cane up at the same time. His eyes turned glassy in response to the music as I took careful aim for his temple, but as I swung the cane in a mighty arc, his sister, within me, betrayed my aim. She halted my arm midswing. I hesitated for the briefest of moments, just long enough for the music to falter, the boy to recover his trajectory, and my aim to waver. Then I was back in control and I brought the cane down with all my strength, cracking him hard. But I missed his head and broke my cane on his shoulder. The cane flew from my stinging hand, and then the boy was on me, crushing the breath from me against the box.