V.I.L.E: Readers of Violent Indefensible Lust and Evil

by Carole Lanham

  Hadley swallowed. He could well see the appeal of garters, yet he remained convinced that his was the better book.

  It was a stormy day so he reached over and tugged the curtain pull, casting the room in darkness. He switched on the torch he’d brought along and narrowed it on the words:

  I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited, waited with beating heart.

  When he was done, he levelled the beam on Lucinda’s face. She popped her monocle. “Give me that,” she said, grabbing the book. “What does it mean, Hadley?”

  “It means that this girl with sharp teeth is about to drink this fellow’s blood. And I think he wants her to do it.”

  “Hadley,” she murmured in a shivery voice. “Where did you get this book?”

  “Pringles. Should I read another passage?”

  “No!” she cried. “I might swoon if you do.”

  “Really?” he said hopefully.

  “The floorboards aren’t safe for a book like this.”

  Not in all his days had Hadley ever been so proud of himself.

  Next meeting, Lucinda confessed she could hardly read the words they left her so breathless. “You’ll have to read them to me, Hadley. But . . . ” she said, hugging Dracula against herself. “I’m afraid of what will happen between us if we share such words out loud.”

  Hadley knew Lucinda might only be teasing. He gulped anyway. Surely it was high time one of their wicked books inspired something wicked.

  From then on, when it was dark enough, Hadley would read Dracula by torchlight. When it wasn’t dark enough, he’d speak in a gravelly whisper, so as to keep the whole thing sinister.

  On the day Harker drove his Kukri knife into the Count’s throat, Hadley grew so excited he kissed Lucinda.

  For years, he’d dreamed of kissing her. He could imagine himself doing it any number of ways but always in the end, Lucinda kissed him back. Now that it was real, his lips travelled no further than the soft slope of her cheek, but Hadley kissed that cheek as though it were a fiery pair of open lips.

  When it was done, Lucinda dried her face on her sleeve.

  “I thought you liked this story,” he said.

  “I’ve other things in mind for us, Hadley.”

  “Like what?” he asked, leaning his shoulder against hers.

  “Hold your horses, will you. This is only our first time through the book.”

  That night, Hadley didn’t get a wink of sleep. He couldn’t wait to read the book again.

  Hadley’s favorite character was the slang-talking American, Quincey P. Morris, and he thought the hunt for Dracula was the most exciting part of the novel. Lucinda, however, wanted to read over and over again about Jonathan Harker’s encounter with the vampire brides.

  “Do you suppose he likes those women, Hadley? Or is he only afraid of them?”

  “Both,” Hadley said.

  Lucinda fanned her face. “Fear and passion? At the same time?”

  “And don’t forget shame,” Hadley reminded. “If you ask me, Harker doesn’t seem very proud of himself for liking those brides.”

  “No wonder he goes mad.”

  “No wonder,” Hadley agreed. “I’d rather be Quincey.”

  “Quincey?” Lucinda said. “No one runs their teeth languorously over Quincey’s skin.”

  “Yeah, but Quincey has a bowie knife.”

  “Oh Hadley,” Lucinda sighed. “You are a baby, aren’t you? I’m afraid I’m going to have to show you what’s really important.”

  That next afternoon, Lucinda stroked the back of his neck as he read. Hadley wished he could sit there until the end of time and read her every book ever written so he could feel her hand on his skin forever. When he finished the last page, he closed the book, bent forward, and pressed his lips to the toe of her shoe. Slowly, fearfully, he turned his face and looked up at Lucinda.

  “Read it again,” she said.

  Hadley celebrated his seventeenth birthday with a smooch from the new upstairs maid, a girl by the promising name of Ethel Lewse. When Lucinda spied the two locking lips, she gave Hadley a birthday card. It read:

  Come to the attic at three a.m. to receive your special gift.

  Hadley tiptoed up the butler’s stairs at exactly five till three. He planned to act like a sleepwalker, should anyone catch him prowling about.

  The attic was reached by a door with a glass knob at the end of the hall. That night, the knob glowed moon-green and seemed to pulse, as did the floor and the walls and the bedroom doors. Really, it must have been his own pulse though, because Hadley had never felt so out of his depths. With a quivery hand, he reached out and turned the knob, wondering if he was about to find a violet note telling him he was too witless to be in Lucinda’s club.

  Indeed, the attic looked empty. A small octagon beam of moonlight streamed across the floor. In that beam sat an old velvet lounge like the one Harker described in his journal.

  “Lucinda? Are you here?”

  Nothing spoke.

  He went to the lounge and ran his hand over the spikes of ancient velvet. Dust puffed around his fingers.

  Hadley took out his father’s pocket watch. It was a few minutes after three. He sat on the lounge and swung his feet up, worrying all the while that Lucinda had been caught trying to sneak upstairs, and that he was soon to be caught too. There were creaks and bumps and little scratching sounds, but nothing came of them. He watched the dust motes suspiciously to see if brides would appear. Eventually, Hadley nodded off. He was lost in a dark, uneasy dream when something touched his leg.

  At first, he thought it was a mouse. Then, he was sure it was Mr Browning. Then he was sure it was Dracula.

  It was Lucinda.

  Her hair hung in waves around her face and her lips looked red as red can be. He was about to ask what she put on them to make them so red when he realized that she was wearing a dressing gown with nothing underneath. Her hand was on his knee.

  Something hung around her neck. It twirled and caught the moon, aiming a soft ray of powdery light smack dab in his eyes. Hadley squinted. Beneath the dreamy trail of her hand, his muscles tensed like two-by-fours.

  “Lay back,” she said.

  Hadley couldn’t stop looking at Lucinda. She seemed so different.

  “Don’t you like me like this?” she asked.

  “I like you,” he said, and when she touched her mouth to his, Hadley almost wept.

  “You’re shaking, Hadley. Are you scared?”

  Hadley wasn’t scared. He longed to grab Lucinda and pull her down on the lounge with him.

  “Such wicked passion,” she scolded. “You ought to be ashamed.”

  Hadley wasn’t ashamed, either. He would have married Lucinda in an instant, if that was what she wanted. But she only wanted him to want her.

  Her hair tumbled down his face like tears. She twirled the tip of her tongue in the hollow of his throat. “Hadley,” she said, between twirls. “You look good enough to eat . . . ”

  There was something in the bright blue lamp of her eyes that did, at last, put the fear of God in him. Quick as you please, the necklace arced past his face and tore into his neck. It was the tiger tooth.

  Jesus God! he thought. She means to kill me for kissing Ethel.

  Lucinda’s mouth slid in the blood as she tried to seal the gash with her lips. Before Hadley understood what was happening, she drew his blood in her mouth, sucking hard and painfully.

  “Stop that,” he said, pushing on her shoulder. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.”

  Lucinda sucked harder, as if she knew differently. “I know you,” she hissed, scrapping his hair up in her fist. “You matched me breath for breath when they put their teeth on him.”

  “It wasn’t real,” he said.

  “It is now.”

  “You’re hurting m
e, Lucinda.” His body arched against the fire, until—with one great suck—he reached the other side of Hell.

  And that place wasn’t Hell at all, but it’s very opposite.

  Hadley was in bad shape. No matter how tightly they bandaged his throat, it split open if he moved at all.

  “I might die,” he told her testily. It was the next day and they had gone into the smokehouse so Lucinda could try to stop the bleeding.

  “Don’t be so dramatic, Hadley.”

  “I’m being dramatic? You know, most people make love differently.”

  “How would you know? Anyway, we aren’t most people. Oh, Hadley, just thinking about it . . . Have you been thinking about it?”

  Heck if he could think of anything else.

  A slant of sunlight squeezed in through the door, and Hadley watched Lucinda’s tongue flicker along her lip.

  “All this blood is making me want to do it again,” she said.

  “We better not,” he said, but he leaned forward and kissed the spot her tongue had just wet.

  Lucinda peeled back the bandage and started running her teeth up and down his neck. Hadley shook. She barely needed to pull but a few sips in her mouth before he fell on his knees and dropped once more into Black Heaven’s great abyss.

  That was how he thought of it, for surely the place she brought him to could not be the Pearly Gates. God did not dwell behind such a soul-wrecking act. No, Lucinda was sending him to an eviler side of Hell. And Hadley was discovering that he liked it too much to stop her.

  In the following days, his neck failed to heal because neither of them could leave it be. Lucinda said she craved him, and Hadley couldn’t help but respond to her with a mix of dread and ecstasy.

  Eventually, things got so bad he was forced to tell his momma a complex lie about how he had fallen on a pair of garden sheers. Momma told Mr Browning and Mr Browning summoned Mangrove.

  “The blood’s got to be going somewhere,” the baffled doctor mussed. He was right. It was going into Lucinda’s mouth while everyone else was asleep.

  Hadley watched the little violet note spark and disappear in the grate.

  Lucinda said, “I’ll keep an eye on him, Mrs. Crump, and fetch you if there’s trouble.”

  Hadley let his mother leave. He turned his cheek on the pillow and prepared to die the heady and listless death of an addict.

  “No,” Lucinda said. “We mustn’t do it, Hadley. I will not let you die.”

  Hadley couldn’t believe his ears. “But, if you don’t want me, Lucinda, I think I’d rather be dead.”

  “Don’t be silly, Hadley. Of course, I want you. You’re the only one like me.” She tucked the blanket up under his chin. “You just rest and do as the doctor says. So long as I don’t drink anymore, you’re sure to make a full recovery.”

  Hadley was weak as a noodle but managed to smile anyway. “Do you like me then, Lucinda?”

  “You know I do, Hadley.”

  It was then that he noticed she had something hidden behind her back. She said, “Look here, I’ve brought you a new book, darling. When you’re feeling better, we’ll read it together. Just like Dracula.”

  She twisted her monocle into place and sighed against his ear, “It’s called The Pit and Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe.”

  Want More?

  A nominee on the preliminary ballot for a Bram Stoker Award, this critically acclaimed short story is the basis for the Amazon bestseller The Reading Lessons, which can be purchased HERE.

  Please consider leaving a review of this short story on Amazon as well. Thank you for reading!