by Grace Draven
Over.
And he was still not sure he’d seen the trailing edges of the wings, that snowy sweep of feathers. He cued up the camera’s video, his mouth tightening as he saw nothing helpful, hardly even a decent view of the birds against the last of the light. He’d have to watch the video on his computer at home, where he could slow it down and zoom in.
Jenny looked up at him. “That was them, the Lord God Birds.”
“I can’t be sure. I need to see them in the daylight. Get a better image on the camera, see their wings.” His jaw clenched.
“They’s shy. Like me.” Her chuckle was rich. “If you ain’t gonna eat one a these crabs, I’m turnin’ the last two a-loose.”
Napier shook his head, staring back at the snag. The birds had vanished as if they’d never been. He looked down at Jenny, who set the two crabs in the edge of the spring. They scuttled away from her hands, strange stars sinking out of sight, white carapaces wavering, glimmering, gone. As if their vanishing had been a cue, the noise of cicadas and crickets rose, filling the hot summer night with monotonous sound. With the assault of sound, he realized that the dusk had been truly silent here at Jenny’s spring. He wiped sweat from his face with his sleeved arm, and saw that he’d dragged his shirt over a blood-glutted mosquito and smeared it, dead.
“Hot, ain’t it?”
Napier barked a laugh. “What I don’t understand is why you’re not eaten alive by mosquitoes.”
Jenny extended a pale arm and examined it critically, then shrugged. “They don’t like how I taste, I guess.”
“I have to go.” Napier bent and slung his go-bag over his shoulder. “Maybe in the morning I’ll paddle up the channel of the spring. Do you think if I try before good light I’ll get a chance to see the birds?”
Jenny rose. Napier noticed she didn’t brush away the sand from her flanks and legs, but none seemed to have clung to her anyway. Another thing that was too strange about Miss Jenny No-name. She ran her fingers over the strap of his bag, watching as her hands trailed from the strap to the cloth of Napier’s shirt.
“Like I said, you ain’t gotta go. I got a bed in there you could use.” Her chin indicated the shack. Napier thought of the mound of cloth and plant fuzz he’d seen in the corner.
“I don’t want to abuse your hospitality. You’ve been more than kind.”
“It’s a nice bed. Soft.” Her fingers brushed by a button, lingered to touch the spot in the center where the threads crossed.
Napier had no doubt where her words would lead if he let them. He drew a long, quiet breath. Leaving now. He lifted a hand in farewell. “Gotta go.” He unzipped a pocket on the side of the go-bag and pulled out a flashlight. “Trail’s that way, right?” He turned, shining the light toward the encroaching trees. There was still no opening to be seen. He played the light back and forth. His internal compass told him the trail should be—right there, yes, there—but the light revealed nothing.
“Stay.” Her voice was soft. She pressed against him from behind, breasts cool and flattened on his back, her arms coming around him, fingers slipping between buttons to touch his chest, tease a nipple. “It’s awful lonely here.”
“Jenny.” Napier’s dick stirred again, waking as her touch drifted downward to the buckle of his belt. And below. “Christ, don’t.”
“Don’t.” Her word echoed his, but she meant something entirely different.
“Come on now. I didn’t come here for—”
“Yes you did.” Her fingers worked at the tongue of his belt and his body jolted, tightened everywhere.
He forced a laugh and heard the mix of nerves and desire in it. She was…she was sexy, desirable. But there was something strange about her, something that wasn’t innocent, not exactly, but something unworldly and unaware. He’d bet his salary she’d never been inside a schoolroom in her life. And if he stayed, it would be taking advantage of her.
“You’s warm,” she told him. She turned him to face her, looking up at him. “Hot, even. You already got your shoes off. Come swimmin’ with me, Charles Napier.”
“I gotta go.”
She laughed and slipped the belt out of the buckle, her fingers deft and swift, stripping the leather from the loops of his pants. His belt knife fell free and he flinched. “I keep tellin’ you, you ain’t got to. What you in such a all-fired hurry for? Why you all the way out here, if you in such a rush?” Her fingers, as cool as her breasts, worked at his clothing, opening his shirt, peeling apart his pants zipper without touching the tab. Her index finger traced the front seam of his briefs, and explored for the briefest second the small gap at the top of his briefs where his erect cock strained the elastic.
His heart thumped hard and slow.
Jenny pushed his shirt off his shoulders, easing it down his arms with the go-bag.
Stupid, this is stupid, you don’t know who she is—hell, what she is—this is—this is—this is—
His cargo pants hit the ground, weighted by the few items in his pockets. Napier stared at her, at her wide eyes full of a strange light, her curved lips, her wet hair clinging to her long neck.
“These too,” she breathed, fingertips pulling at the elastic of his briefs.
Now he did stop her, some drilled-in tendency towards propriety getting the upper hand at last. Don’t need to scare her with your woody, Chuck. And yet.
And yet.
“Come on,” she said. “A swim is jus’ what you need.” She walked backwards toward the spring, breasts bobbing, her naked body so pale she almost seemed to glow, greenish in the dimness. As she walked, she lifted her arms, and in the underbrush yards away, the fireflies rose into the air, swarming as they had done when Napier opened the cooler in her shack.
Napier stepped out of his cargo pants and followed her like a sleepwalker. When he was ankle-deep in the spring, he halted, staring after her where she trod water and then lay back to float, breasts pointed upwards, peaks crested and taut, wrinkled with the water’s coolness. He shucked his briefs and flung them behind before entering the spring in a shallow dive.
Fuck that’s cold, he thought, then the coolness sapped the heat from his body and he felt instantly refreshed and clean. He surfaced a few feet from Jenny, treading water also. The bottom of the spring shelved quickly here, and he could sense the immensity of the spring’s flow in the current that moved past and around him, buoying him, pushing him toward the channel. His balls drew up tight. His cock wilted, which was a relief.
Jenny flipped to her front, smiling, and breast-stroked towards him. “Ain’t this nice, Charles Napier?” She sent a small splash his direction.
“Nice, yes,” he agreed. “As long as the gators stay away.”
“They don’t come when I’m around.”
Somehow he didn’t doubt that.
Jenny swam directly to him, linking her arms around his neck and wrapping her legs around his waist. What had wilted only a moment ago now revived with a vengeance, but with her clinging to him for support, he had to tread water for them both.
Jenny laughed, reaching between them to grasp his cock and guide it into the entrance of her body. “There,” she whispered, putting both hands on his cheeks, her hips rocking close to settle him deeper inside her, and her ankles locking behind his waist. “There, is that what you was so afraid of, Charles Napier?” Her mouth fastened on his, a hard, drawing kiss that pulled his tongue into her mouth, where the sensation of slippery warmth edged by teeth warred with the cool, frictionless sheath beneath the water.
“Wait,” he said, pulling away from the delicious suction of her lips and tongue. He swept his arms, trying to propel the two of them back to shore, or at least to where his feet could touch. Jenny held to him with a stranglehold, her mouth seeking his again, her pelvis grinding against him. In the water, he could hardly feel his body inside hers. Except for the warmth of her, which was rapidly dissipating in the spring’s coolness, he might not even have been inside her. Despite the chill and lack of frictio
n, he could feel himself swollen thick, harder than he’d ever been in his life. The urge to mate, to copulate in a mindless, driven surge like joined dragonflies, like a tangle of snakes, like alligators churning together in shallow water—
Water rushed over his face as Jenny’s kiss pushed him under. Napier flailed, eyes opening, filling with water and a green light that made him think of mating fireflies, taillights glowing brighter and brighter until it seemed they must explode with the brilliance. He coughed, gulping half a lungful of water.
Land. He had to reach land, or she would drown him in her urgency to couple. He put one hand on her thigh to unlock her legs, but she was slick as a fresh-caught fish. His hand found no purchase. Panic sent a flash of adrenaline heat through him, and incredibly his dick hardened even more, so hard he felt he must thrust or die. He got his face above water, took a long breath, and coughed again. Jenny’s mouth fastened on his afresh, sucking as if she had caught the shirttail of his soul and meant to swallow it whole.
His flailing hand struck something hard, something almost as slippery as Jenny’s body, but it was above the water and he latched on, flexing, pulling himself up, out.
Cypress knee. He got his feet down in the sand, rose up and all but fell backward, but he was on shore, he was there, and safe, and he turned Jenny beneath him in the lapping cool shallows of the spring and he fucked her, and fucked her, and when the end came it was cool and wet and dark and bright and hot and there were fireflies everywhere and maybe he was drowning after all, maybe he hadn’t made it to shore, maybe this was what he’d always heard about, the body’s last big joke, that final mind- and body-fuck before death, and the light he went toward was not white but green, and everything he was went into Jenny in a boiling rush.
Napier woke in a glare of hot light and stifling humidity. His head ached as if he’d spent a week drunk on head-buster booze. The accompanying dizziness brought nausea. Napier scrabbled to the edge of the bed and vomited onto the floor.
Bed.
Bed?
In trying to avoid both his own mess and making even more of a mess, he recognized his surroundings. The vomit was watery—huge quantities of water, and if he wasn’t mistaken, something that looked like partially digested, half-gnawed crab claws. The vomit was draining away between gaps in the floorboards and down a nearby knothole.
The bed was Jenny’s nest of old sheets and moss. He was naked, and he hurt in too many places to count. His skin felt raw and scraped. His muscles ached, and his joints felt oddly stretched and strained.
He had a sudden fear that if he turned his head toward the pallet, he would find Jenny there, but not the eldritch, naked Jenny who had so bemused him. He would find a monster, hungry green eyes bright with a firefly glow, and a mouth full of needle teeth tipped with bright red blood.
He turned his head anyway, sick with dread and the smell of his own vomit.
He was the only person in the cabin.
Unaccountably relieved, he drew up his knees and rested his head on them, waiting for the waves of sickness to pass. He threw up once more, another rush of water. Had he swallowed half the spring last night? When had he eaten a crab? He remembered nothing after the drowning climax in the shallows of the spring.
Talk about the little death. It frightened him to have no knowledge of what had happened afterward, yet something clearly had.
As his eyes grew accustomed to the brilliant light from outdoors, he noticed marks on his arms and legs. Where his skin felt most raw, he saw circles with dozens of tiny scratches in them. The skin was red, as if he were covered in love-bites the diameter of a softball. They were all over his arms and legs, his torso. He could feel them on his back when he moved.
He looked down, with rising trepidation and rapid breathing, at his dick and balls.
They had suffered the same fate. The skin was abraded and red, and now that he was paying attention, stung as if he had terrible sunburn, localized and unnerving. His twig and berries were still present, but he wondered if he was suffering from an allergy, or perhaps a terrible case of poison ivy. He looked at his fingernails, half expecting to see his own clawed-off skin beneath them, but instead he saw a translucent, dried slime clogging the space between nail and flesh. His gorge rose again, but he fought it down. There was nothing left in his belly but bile.
The slime on his fingers smelled both female and aquatic, and abruptly he knew what it must be.
“Jesus,” he panted. “What the fuck, Chuck?”
He struggled to his feet, staggered a moment, then got his balance. He turned to look at the bed. The nest. That same dried slime crusted here and there, accompanied by whitish, still-moist smears.
Napier had to get out of the cabin. He couldn’t stay a second longer. He knew what those smears were. He knew what must have happened. But he couldn’t remember it, and nothing explained the circular, raw scrapes on his body.
Those are hickeys. A monster gave them to you. That river, it’s haunted. This spring is too. Catfish the size of your boat. Gotta go. Gotta get out of here.
He glanced wildly around the cabin for his clothing, but he knew it wasn’t here. None of his stuff was here. If he was lucky, it was all still next to the spring, where he’d shed it before wading into the water and fucking Jenny. He had to call it fucking, because what else was it? It certainly wasn’t making love, or anything so polite and flowery. It hadn’t even been sex—it had been something infinitely more base than that, copulation. Mating. The senseless, thoughtless rutting of insects, the mechanical scratching of an itch.
Except it had been huger than any itch could ever be, even one that was so bone-deep he might claw away skin and flesh to satisfy it. An urge that blotted everything before it, even the fear of death by drowning, because when the end came, there in the shallows of the spring, he hadn’t been sure whether or not he was coming or dying, and it hadn’t mattered.
Napier half expected to find that the door wouldn’t open, but of course it did. This wasn’t a horror movie. Nevertheless, he eased the door open a small crack and peered through. Jenny’s buzzard was not perched on the porch railing, and the porch itself was empty. Only the skulls guarded the steps. He slipped through the door and closed it silently.
Still no Jenny, for which he was grateful. Sorry, Jen, just like a jerk to fuck and run without a kiss goodbye but I guess I’m gonna be that guy.
His clothes were where he had left them. He hurried to them. He looked around like a thief on the run as he dressed in the sun-heated clothing. He had to shake that uncanny white sand out of everything. It was everywhere, in every seam and fold and wrinkle. It had filled his pockets to bursting. He sifted his belt knife and coins out of the sand, turned the pockets inside out, but there was no way he was getting all the sand out.
He was just stepping into his jockeys when he paused. The spring was right there, and maybe the water would help cool his raw skin. Certainly it would wash away the mucus beneath his fingernails. If the rash was some sort of contact dermatitis—you know it’s monster hickeys, something nasty kissed you, it’s monster hickeys—the water might help. Maybe it was some new and strange shellfish allergy.
He thought of the crab claws he’d vomited up. More things he didn’t remember. Things he wouldn’t do, when he was sane and sober. Hell, even back in the days when he’d gotten that drunk, he wouldn’t have eaten raw crab, shell and all.
He hyperventilated, struggling with the thrashing fear that threatened to turn his stomach inside out again. Napier dropped the jockeys and ran for the spring, running until the water was at his knees and fighting him, then he did a shallow dive that was more like a flop, and screamed under water when the cool water stung every inch of his raw skin. His balls tried to crawl up inside him. He saw the bubbles of his own yells, brilliant silver Christmas balls, escaping to the surface. He looked wildly around under the water, through the clear blue, looking for alligators, snakes. Jenny.
But there was nothing, and a moment lat
er his body’s buoyancy took him to the surface and he burst into the sunlight like one of his own breaths. His feet found the sandy bottom and walked him back into the shallows without the direction of his brain.
Bending, he scooped gritty sand into his palms and rubbed it over his hands, driving it beneath his nails, scouring away every trace of the mucus, which was slippery again now that it was wet.
Right here. It was here. We did it right here. How many times? Why don’t I remember? Did she drown? Is she dead? Did I kill her?
But of course he hadn’t, had he, he hadn’t killed her. Couldn’t have. That same mucus was all over the nest.
That might have been on you. You were on that bed, but maybe Jenny wasn’t. Maybe it just rubbed off you onto the bedding. She’s out there in the spring somewhere, you fucked her to death and she floated out there and a gator found her and took her down and rolled her and stuffed her under a log to sweeten for a day or two.
“Bullshit,” he gasped. “That’s bullshit, Chuck, and you know it.”
It was bullshit. Charles Napier was a killer, sure, but on behalf of the good old U. S. of A., not his own brain-dead dick. Jenny had been in that bed with him, they’d fucked a few more times, given the various smears of his spunk he’d seen. He just…didn’t remember it. And now she was off somewhere finding herself some creepy breakfast—some raw fish, or maybe more of those green hickory nuts with milky, bitter meats.
“Time to go,” he hissed to himself, shakily. “Pull yourself together, Chuck.”
Smothered by frogs, and no Joan Van Ark to sweeten the deal.
In the time he’d been in the spring, his clothes had managed to worm themselves halfway into the sand, as if something there was pulling them under the surface the way an ant lion at the bottom of a doodlebug den pulls the sand from under a desperate, scrambling bug. He shook the sand out again, even more hurriedly, and dragged the clothes on over his wet body, scraping his raw skin on the rough, sandy cloth, and hissing with pain. Hardest of all were the socks, which he pulled on while half-hopping in place. He was reluctant to sit down on that pristine, clothes-eating white sand. In fact, he wanted to get off the sand altogether. He skittered to where a little sparse love grass grew in clumps, and put his shoes on there amidst the dry, prickly stems.
