“Strip,” he said.
Patricia stepped out of her shoes and inhaled sharply. Standing barefoot on the cool wooden floor made her feel naked. She couldn’t do this, but before she could stop herself her hands were already moving to her back.
She unzipped the dress and let it fall to the floor and stepped out of it. Blood rushed and flowed to parts of her body that were dry, leaving her light-headed. Her head spun and she wondered if she would faint. The darkness seemed very close around her and the walls seemed very far away. A fever seized her as she unsnapped her bra and shucked it off, then kicked her clothes into one corner and threw her brassiere on top.
She felt the cool air of a stranger’s house on her bare breasts and hips and belly. Through the window she heard some family let out a mindless cheer, barely audible, like the shore roaring in a seashell or something half imagined carried on the wind.
He pointed to the bed, and she walked over to it and sat down. He stood before her, outlined dark in the moonlight. His broad shoulders and narrow waist, his thick thighs and long legs, the strong jaw, the full head of hair. She found where his eyes would be and saw a faint shimmer of white in the darkness. She maintained eye contact with him as she leaned back on his bed, feet still on the floor, and spread her legs for him and felt the cool air of his house kiss her sex. The air caressed her curls and made them unkink. He knelt between her legs.
Everything in her life funneled down to this moment.
She watched as his jaw moved in a way she’d never seen before. He looked up from between her legs and put his hand over the bottom of his face.
“Don’t look,” he said.
“But…,” she said.
“You don’t want to see this,” he said.
She reached out and gently moved his hand away. She wanted to see everything. Their eyes met and it felt like the first honest moment they’d ever shared. Then he dipped his head down, and his face opened all the way, and she saw darkness come crawling from his mouth.
He was right. She didn’t want to see this. She leaned back and looked up at the smooth, white painted ceiling, and his breath tickled her pubic hair and then she felt the worst pain she’d ever experienced. Followed by the greatest pleasure.
CHAPTER 38
“Do you think Patricia’s all right?” Kitty asked, looking in the rearview mirror.
They were parked in Maryellen’s minivan at the far end of the Alhambra Hall parking lot. Maryellen sat in the driver’s seat with Kitty riding shotgun. Mrs. Greene sat in the back.
“She’s fine,” Maryellen said. “You’re fine. I’m fine. Mrs. Greene, are you fine?”
“I’m fine,” Mrs. Greene said.
“We’re all fine,” Maryellen said. “Everyone’s fine.”
Kitty let the silence last a full five seconds this time.
“Except Patricia,” she said.
No one had an answer to that.
“It’s seven,” Mrs. Greene said in the dark. No one moved. “Either Mrs. Campbell has done it by now, or it’s too late.”
Clothes rustled, and the back door thunked open.
“Come on,” she said.
She got out of the minivan and the other two followed. Mrs. Greene took the red-and-white Igloo cooler out of the back, and Kitty carried the Bi-Lo grocery bag. The cooler clanked softly as their tools slid around inside. They wore dark clothes and walked quickly, turning onto Middle Street, preferring to take the risk of someone spotting them walking rather than have an extra car parked outside James Harris’s house for three hours. People in the Old Village had a habit of writing down license plate numbers, after all.
Middle Street was a long, black tunnel leading straight to his house, lined with cars spilling out of driveways. The cold wind tugged at their coats. They put their heads down and forged forward, walking fast beneath the leafless trees and dead palmettos rattling in the wind.
“Have you bought your Christmas presents yet?” Kitty asked.
Mrs. Greene perked up at the mention of Christmas. Maryellen gave Kitty a sideways look.
“I get the big things during the after-Thanksgiving sales,” Kitty said. “But I start planning people’s gifts in August. This year I’ve still got more blanks than I normally do. Honey is easy, she needs a briefcase for job interviews. I mean, it’s not that she needs it but I thought it would be the kind of thing she’d want. And Parish wants a tractor and Horse says we need a new one anyway, so that’s taken care of. Lacy, I’m going to take to Italy as a graduation present next year so she’ll get something small for now and she’s fun to shop for anyhow, and as long as whatever I give Merit is bigger than what I get for Lacy she’s thrilled. But I do not know what to buy for Pony. It’s different to shop for a man, and he’s got this new girl he’s seeing, and I don’t know if I have to get her a present or not. I mean, I want to, but does that make me seem overbearing?”
Maryellen turned to her.
“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked.
“I don’t know!” Kitty said.
“Hush,” Mrs. Greene said, and they passed the last house before James Harris’s and they all fell silent.
The huge white house loomed over them, dark and still. The only light came from the living room window. They stepped off the street into his driveway then sat on the bottom step of his front stairs, took off their shoes, and hid them underneath. With Mrs. Greene leading the way, they stepped onto the cold boards and quietly climbed up to his porch.
He’d left his porch lights off so they were concealed by darkness, but Kitty still looked around nervously, trying to see if anyone was watching them from their windows. A cheer drifted to them on the wind, and they all froze for a moment. Then Kitty put down the paper Bi-Lo bag around the corner of the porch away from the living room light, and Mrs. Greene carefully placed the cooler in the shadows next to it. Kitty pulled an aluminum baseball bat out of the grocery bag and gave the sheathed hunting knife to Maryellen, who didn’t know how to hold it. She decided it was just like a kitchen knife and that made it easier.
“My feet are freezing,” Kitty whispered.
“Shhh,” Mrs. Greene said.
The rushing wind helped hide the sounds they made as Maryellen carefully opened the screen door then tried the door handle while Kitty held the bat down by her leg, just in case. Mrs. Greene stood on Kitty’s other side, holding a hammer.
The door popped open, silently and easily.
They stepped inside fast. The wind wanted to slam the door shut, but Maryellen eased it gently into its frame. They stood in the quiet downstairs hall, listening, worried that the howling wind rushing through the door had alerted James Harris. Nothing moved. All they heard was a piano concerto surging softly from a radio in the living room to their left.
Mrs. Greene pointed to the stairs leading up into darkness, and Kitty took the lead, palms sweating on the rubberized grip of her baseball bat. She held it straight up by her right shoulder and walked sideways, left foot first, right foot coming behind, one carpeted step at a time. Mrs. Greene walked in the middle, Maryellen in the rear. They needed to get him down before she could use the knife.
Every footstep was soft, soundless. Mrs. Greene jumped when a plummy man’s voice started announcing the next selection from WSCI’s Classical Twilight down below them in the living room. Every step took an hour, and any second they expected to hear James Harris’s voice from the top of the dark stairs.
They regrouped in the darkness of the upstairs hall. All around them were closed doors. A CRACK echoed through every room in the house and Maryellen almost screamed before realizing it was the wind shifting the window frames.
The master bedroom doorway stood dark in front of them and from it they heard a soft, wet suckling sound. They crept toward it, until they stood full in the doorway and the bright moonlight showed what lay on the bed.<
br />
Patricia lay back, arms flung over her head, a carnal half-smile on her lips, naked, her legs spread, and between them, blocking their view, crouched a shirtless James Harris, back muscles pulsing. His shoulder blades spread and retracted like wings as he fed on Patricia, his head by the join of her thighs, one large hand on her left thigh, gently pushing it open, the other on her stomach, fingers squirming on her pale flesh.
The sheer ravenous hunger of the sight paralyzed them. They could smell it, thick and carnal, filling the cramped room.
Kitty recovered before either of the other two women. She adjusted her grip, took three steps forward, ending with her left foot almost on James Harris’s right ankle, and brought the bat straight off her shoulder, swinging hard in a powerful line drive.
The bat caught him in the side of the head with a metallic TONK, like a sledgehammer hitting stone, and Kitty let go with her lead hand and let the bat come around in a full arc, almost popping Mrs. Greene in the chin. A gout of regurgitated blood pulsed once out of James Harris’s mouth and splattered across Patricia’s pubic hair and belly, but otherwise he kept sucking, uninterrupted.
Patricia moaned once in sexual ecstasy, in heat, in pain, and Kitty brought the bat around again, even though her left shoulder ached. This time she swung for the fences.
The second blow got his attention, too much of it, in fact, and he whirled in a crouch, eyes feral, blood pouring down his face and dripping off something that hung from his chin. Blood poured from the wound in Patricia’s thigh. Kitty saw the muscles in James Harris’s stomach and shoulders tense and the planes of his face moved impossibly, and the thing hanging there disappeared, and Kitty thought, He’s going to, and even though she wasn’t a left-handed hitter she didn’t have a choice—that was the side the bat was on and he wasn’t going to give her time to get her stance back or even finish her thought. She brought the bat back at him as hard as she could but she knew it wasn’t hard enough.
James Harris caught the bat on his ribs with a meaty THWACK. He brought his arm down and clamped it against his body, then spun and sent it clattering into the corner. Patricia moaned in pleasure, mindlessly grinding her thighs together, and James Harris was up, both hands grabbing Kitty’s shoulders so hard she felt bone grind against bone. He drove her backward into the open bedroom door, brushing past Mrs. Greene and Maryellen, sending them spinning aside, slamming Kitty into the door so hard the knob embedded itself in the wall. Then he hurled her across the bedroom, sending her staggering toward the corner by the window, sprawling over an armchair on her way, tipping it over backward, as Mrs. Greene brought the hammer down on his head.
It glanced off his skull, and he plucked it easily out of her hand. She screamed and stepped backward, panicking, getting out of the room, wanting to get away from him as fast as possible, shoulder-checking Maryellen, getting turned around and winding up standing in the open doorway to the master bath instead.
Maryellen stood between James Harris and Mrs. Greene. She met his eyes and wet her pants. Her numb hands seemed to belong to someone else, someone far away, and her urine and the sheathed hunting knife hit the floorboards at the same time.
James Harris shoved Maryellen out of the way and advanced on Mrs. Greene. His powerful chest muscles stood out against his body like white armor, his thick forearms flexing as his fingers formed claws, and Mrs. Greene turned fast and tried to get into the bathroom. If she could get the heavy porcelain lid off the toilet tank she stood a chance. Instead, she tripped over the threshold where the tile began and sprawled forward, cracking both knees on the floor.
Blood drooled from James Harris’s mouth and formed patterns on his chest and flat belly, and Mrs. Greene scrabbled onto tile so cold it burned, and then he had her right ankle in what felt like an iron band. With no effort at all, he pulled her back into the bedroom. Mrs. Greene rolled onto her back and brought her arms up to defend herself. When he got close she’d go for his eyes, but then she saw the fury in his face and knew that her arms were twigs in the face of this hurricane with teeth.
He leaned down, clawed fingers outstretched, and Kitty hit him from behind like a freight train, plowing into the small of his back, legs pumping, pushing him ahead of her all the way into the bathroom, both of them stepping on Mrs. Greene, feet bruising her stomach, one of them kicking her in the chin.
There was a loud SMASH and an oomph as James Harris took the edge of the sink in his stomach and went face-first into the tile wall. Kitty rode his back all the way to the floor. He landed with his arms beneath him. He was stronger but she outweighed him by fifty pounds.
He tried to flip over but she rolled her hips and pressed him into the floor. She grabbed his ears and smeared his face into the tiles. He tried to get an arm beneath him but she slapped it away.
“The knife! The knife!” she screamed, but Maryellen just stood numbly in the bedroom over a puddle of her cooling urine.
Mrs. Greene dragged herself out of the bathroom and into the safety of the bedroom. She watched as James Harris and Kitty wrestled, dark shapes on cold tiles. James Harris got both legs under him, lifting Kitty up on his hunched back as he stood.
“The knife, Maryellen! The knife!” Kitty shrieked, her voice hysterical.
Mrs. Greene looked and saw Maryellen staring down at the knife by her feet and realized she was too far away to grab it and James Harris was too close to standing up.
“Maryellen!” Mrs. Greene shouted, using her first name. “Throw me the knife!”
Maryellen looked up, saw her, looked down, saw the knife, and suddenly squatted. She tossed it underhanded to Mrs. Greene, who, for the first time in her life, caught something thrown to her. She unsnapped the button of the strap that held it in its sheath.
In the bathroom, Kitty wrapped a leg around James Harris’s right leg, hooked his ankle, and kicked out. He went down on one knee, cracking it hard against the tile with Kitty’s full weight on top of him. She bore down on her hips, pressing them into his buttocks. He had his left arm beneath him now, elbow braced against his ribs, so she used her left hand to try to pull it out of position, but it was like stone. In a desperate move, she drove her fingertips up hard into his wide-open left armpit and the shock made him lose his hold and drop to the floor with the sound of a side of beef hitting the slab.
She couldn’t do this for much longer.
Kitty wriggled from side to side up his body, trying to keep her center of gravity over his as he thrashed, and she reached out for anything that might give her an advantage. She felt him mustering his strength again and suddenly she was a piece of paper riding a wave that was about to break and she knew this time it would take her under.
Something hard knocked the back of her hand and she understood what it was without the thought even consciously entering her mind. She grabbed it and turned it around, and there was one still, perfect moment when she saw the bowed back of James Harris’s white neck and the ridges of his spine sticking out through his skin, perfectly outlined in the moonlight coming through the master bathroom skylight. She held the hunting knife with both hands and pushed the tip down.
He screamed, a sound so loud in the tiny, echoing bathroom that her right eardrum vibrated. She felt the knife grind bone. She dragged the point up and felt tissue give and she pressed down on the handle again. He threw his head back and trapped the blade between his vertebrae but she raised up her body so all her weight came down on her wrists, pushing the hilt down, and the steel tip of the blade gritted and squealed and crunched slowly, inch by inch, as she forced it deeper and deeper through his spine.
He tried to throw her off but his legs weren’t kicking as hard as before, and he began squirming on the floor as she rode the handle, bearing down on the blade, and then his screams turned to gurgles, and he renewed his wriggling. She used her elbows to force his shoulders down and she slammed her chest down into the center of his back, and the knife
took a sick crunching drop, and hit tile on the other side, and his body went slack.
She had done it.
In the silence she only heard him gargling and herself breathing as she rolled off and looked behind her. Mrs. Greene had one of his feet and Maryellen held the other, both of them pressing his legs to the floor. From downstairs drifted the jaunty sound of a symphony orchestra.
“You bitches haven’t even slowed me down,” James Harris gurgled.
Why is it always bitches, Kitty thought. As if men believed that word had some kind of magic power. She tried to stand but it was Maryellen who helped her to her feet, while Mrs. Greene kept kneeling on James Harris’s legs in case he fought back. Kitty snapped on the bathroom light to make things feel more real.
All their pupils dilated at once and then adjusted to the brightness. They looked down at the vampire, facedown, lungs pumping, helpless on the bathroom floor.
Now came the hard part.
CHAPTER 39
“We should get the cooler,” Kitty said from the bathroom door.
What she wanted was for Grace to be there, giving orders in her cool, condescending way. If Grace were in charge, things would be getting done the right way. But Grace had abandoned them, and they had to get moving. Maryellen pushed past her into the bedroom, snapping on the lights.
“She’s not breathing,” she called.
Kitty didn’t know who she was talking about. Now that her adrenaline was beginning to fade, bruises were blossoming all over her body. Her neck hurt. She felt like she had a black eye.
“Who?” she asked, stupidly, then realized that of course Maryellen was talking about Patricia.
She turned and limped into the bedroom, leaving Mrs. Greene alone with the thing on the bathroom floor. The only sign that something had happened was the easy chair tipped over on its back in the corner, and Patricia, naked, blood soaking through the duvet beneath her thighs.
The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires Page 34
