Stalking Tender Prey

by Constantine, Storm

  She realised the pressure she’d thought was Nick’s thigh against her own was actually his hand. She flicked a discrete glance down at her lap, prompting Nick to squeeze her flesh, just below the groin. She stared at his fingers. There was no impulse to push him away. Encouraged, he pressed his hand against her crotch. Aninka looked him in the eye. He appeared to be very drunk. She wondered, vaguely, why she didn’t feel angry or disgusted at his importunity. Nick’s tongue shot out to lick his lips in a suggestive manner. Aninka felt herself grow hot and recognised the undeniable stab of lust that pushed through her belly.

  By the end of the main course, the group were all laughing and talking loudly. Inhibitions were clearly lowered, if not cast away. Aninka sat in a daze, an observer, while Nick Emmett continued to caress her thigh. Wendy looked as if she was about to slip off her chair and disappear beneath the table. Serafina’s black eye makeup had begun to slide down her face, and her red lipstick was smeared around her mouth, giving her a totally dissipated appearance. Once Othman’s wine was finished, Ivan had produced some bottle of his own: a young, dry red. Aninka noticed that Othman continually filled Serafina’s glass with wine for her. It looked as if the girl might be sick at any moment. Down the table, Misty was inserting lettuce fragments down the front of her dress, and Ivan, cheered on by the other men, was retrieving them with his mouth. Wendy watched with a passive smile as her husband came up for air and then plunged his face into Misty’s bosom again. Aninka could not speak. She felt apart from the proceedings, yet tranquil.

  There was no carefully produced dessert to end the meal that night.

  Othman got to his feet, and cried, ‘Let the rite begin!’ He looked feral, powerful, the very image of a Fallen One, his hair tumbling over his shoulders, his eyes wide and dark, yet shining with an inner light.

  The group all cheered and followed Othman in a shambling, giggling line to the garage. Aninka and Nick came last. Before they left the dining room, Nick virtually threw Aninka up against the wall. Her body felt liquid; she did not resist, nor did she want to. She felt his hand slide beneath the silk of her underwear, a sudden invasion of her body. His fingers rubbed her furiously for a few seconds, further igniting her desire. She realised, dimly, she must be affected by Othman’s wine, yet was so intoxicated, she did not care. Someone called her name from the corridor that led to the garage, and Nick released her. They stared at one another for a couple of seconds, each aware that soon they would be slaking their lust with one another.

  Nick smiled. ‘Come on.’ Aninka followed him to the garage.

  The candles and incense were already lit, and Ivan had put a tape on the hi-fi system, which was concealed behind one of the wall hangings. The sound of rhythmic chanting pumped softly in the background. The group arranged themselves in a circle. Aninka realised none of them had bothered getting changed into regalia tonight. Was that an oversight because of their drunkenness? Othman stood with his back to the group, before the altar. He had stripped to the waist, his hair hanging down like a flag of dusty, pale rags, its longest locks brushing the waistband of his leather trousers. Aninka’s heart turned over in her chest at the sight of him, then Nick Emmett took her hand in his own. She knew that Othman would not be with her this night, and that he would not care that another man was claiming the privilege.

  After a few moments of shuffling and whispering, the group fell silent. Othman raised his arms. He began to speak in a tongue unfamiliar to the group, but which Aninka recognised as a dialect of ancient Persia. She herself was not fluent in it, because it was used only in high ceremonial rites among her people, but she had heard it occasionally at weddings and funerals. Even then, it was used only sparingly, to describe the inner secrets of love and death. Now Othman began the elemental invocations to create the inner temple. At each of the four quarters around the circle, he paused and uttered an incantation, his long fingers describing intricate gestures through the smoke of incense. In the east, he cried ‘Yazatas Vayu!’ Aninka experienced a feeling of mild shock. He was uttering the hidden names, which were kept secret from the majority of humans, other than those who had miraculously held onto vestiges of the old ways, and who had their own esoteric societies. The names themselves possessed great power. As Othman called to the angel of the wind, a ghost of a breeze lifted the hangings around the temple. In the south, he cried ‘Yazatas Anam Nanat!’ and the air became moist with the presence of water. In the west, he called, ‘Yazatas Atar Neryosang!’ and the candles blazed more brightly. In the north, Othman called, ‘Yazatas Zam!’ and a smell of ripe earth filled the air.

  Aninka felt as if her hair was crackling with static; her heart was beating hard. This was Grigori magic, performed here in this suburban house, among people whom she could not imagine possessed the spiritual strength to cope with it. She hoped they would be safe, and spoke a brief prayer to Anahita, a benign goddess-form: ‘Protect them!’

  Othman turned to face the group. His countenance looked sensuously demonic. Aninka doubted he would recognise her now if she spoke to him. Why Pev? she asked silently. Why this? What is it you’re looking for? She felt immeasurably sorrowful.

  He began a whispered chant and presently the rest of the group joined in: ‘Armaity, druj, marezehdika.’

  Aninka would not speak the words. They would, she felt, turn her tongue black: words of hatred and falsehood. An insistent, gentle voice in her mind, perhaps even the presence of Anahita herself, urged Aninka to break away from the group and run from the house without looking back once. The voice was not strong enough. Aninka was held immobile in the web of the chanted words.

  She turned to Nick to say something, utter some warning if she could, but found she could not make herself understood. She was speaking the same language as Othman. Nick laughed at her, clearly delighted. Aninka shut her mouth, tried to begin again, her lips twisting around the words. She had lost the ability to speak in English. It felt as if she’d split into two people: one was the silent Aninka, who was appalled by what was happening, the other was a woman who could speak in an ancient tongue and who welcomed the ceremony to come. This woman beat the silent Aninka back, and soon there was only She, a creature stripped of contemporary restraints, an archetype of her people.

  The other members of the group were still swaying and chanting the words. They turned to one another and began to remove each other’s clothes. Othman presided over them like a flame, approving their actions. Aninka caught his eye, and dropped her jaw to hiss and snarl at him. His eyes burned back at her. She dropped to all fours, and Nick Emmett was tearing her clothes from her back. Turning round, she lashed out at him, her clawed fingers ripping his shirt. She lunged up to rend the fabric with her teeth. Nick laughed, holding onto her wrists to keep her from mauling him. There was no sense whatever that what they were doing was either irregular or debauched. The rest of the group, now whispering their chant, had gathered round Aninka and Nick in a tight circle. Their hot breath misted on the air. Aninka lay naked upon the richly coloured rugs. Nick removed the rest of his clothes. He knelt between Aninka’s parted thighs and entered her slowly. No detail was spared for the on-lookers, yet it did not disturb Aninka that people were watching. No part of herself was aghast or ashamed.

  What followed was a surreal spectacle of heaving bodies and bizarre cries. At one point, Aninka closed her eyes, and opened them to find Ernie Brock’s scarlet face behind Nick’s shoulder. The weight of two men was upon her. She wrapped her legs around both of them, as if her limbs were suddenly twice their normal length. The pleasure experienced by her body was intense, unlike anything she’d felt before. It was sex without emotion, purely physical, as if the commerce of bodies was delicious food and she was starving for it.

  There came a moment of stillness, when she realised she was alone within the group. Rising unsteadily to her feet, she picked a weaving path among the writhing shapes around her. Othman had Serafina spreadeagled on the altar, and was fucking her with an expressionless face, sta
nding between her dangling legs, staring at the wall. He noticed Aninka approaching and withdrew. ‘You want her? It’s good. Taste.’ The girl’s skinny, white body looked like something made from icing sugar, friable and sweet. Aninka licked the concave belly, then let Othman drag her by her hair to sample more secret flavours. There was a candle of pain inside her as he pierced her body from behind. His fingers dug into her breast like claws. She bit the girl, and the resulting scream sounded like a heavenly choir. Lifting her head, she bayed out a string of words. It was a guttural croak, like vomiting sound. ‘Dushmata, Dushhakta, Dush Ahu!’. And there was a greater foreign presence in the room with them, enveloping them all in a mist of ancient hungry lust and excitement.

  Othman thrust Aninka away, and raising his arms, began to shout out the words of an invocation. ‘Angra Mainyu! Dushhavarshta!’

  Serafina’s thin body wriggled and jerked upon the altar.

  It’s coming down, Aninka thought, the first coherent thought she’d had for what seemed like hours. She sensed something forming around them, enveloping the house. It was like a swirling black hole, a void, the gateway to the abyss.

  ‘Why, Pev? she thought sadly, and his voice answered her, the voice she knew, from before this terrible night.

  The gate. I have to go beyond the gate. Cannot stop. Have to... The pain, the sorrow of grief, the love, my love,

  There was more, but a sudden movement eclipsed the words from Aninka’s mind.

  Wendy had leapt to her feet, and was bursting out of the melee of struggling bodies, her body shaking with hysterical laughter. She began to extinguish all the candles in the room, her voluptuous body an amorphous white shape flitting in slow motion from quarter to quarter. Soon, everything was in darkness, but for the muted glow of the incense bowls. Serafina began to howl, to sing, to chatter. She squeaked like a rodent, barked like a bitch. Aninka’s head was suffused with an excruciating pain. I have to get out! She sensed then, in a shining moment of clarity, exactly what was happening. Othman was about to sacrifice Serafina to the being whose essence was beginning to envelop the temple. Was he truly so greedy for power?

  ‘Why, Pev, why?’ Aninka’s voice was a hoarse scream.

  ‘It is the only way,’ he answered, his voice like a coil of thick smoke through the dark. ‘The gate is closed to me, but there are others who are stronger, who can open it for me.’

  ‘But not this! You can’t summon this..!’ Aninka’s voice tailed off. She had no idea what Othman meant about gates. All she knew was that something terrible was about to happen. A string of words whispered through her mind, felt rather than thought. The False One, he’s coming... Deep within her, an instinct screamed out in a desperate voice: ‘Flee, or it will suck in your soul!’

  Somehow, she found the strength to pull herself away from Othman and the binding power he was creating. She fell heavily to the floor, uttering a cry of pain as she twisted her ankle. Crawling, she hauled her body, which suddenly felt too heavy to move, towards the door of the garage, visible only as a darker rectangle in the dim light. It seemed a thousand clawing fingers sought to hold her back, snagging her hair, raking the skin of her back and buttocks. The door didn’t seem to be getting any closer, and Aninka began to weep in fear and frustration. ‘Oh Great Shem, help me! Help me!’ Then, the door was in front of her and with stiff, unwieldy fingers, she managed to turn the handle and push it open. With a final burst of effort, she threw herself across the threshold. She wanted to curl up and sleep, cover her head, but knew she needed more distance between herself and what was happening behind her. With her limbs shrieking in agony, she dragged herself up the short corridor that led back to the main body of the house. She could see a light ahead, too bright. She could hear the hum of kitchen appliances. Eventually, she reached the sanctuary of the kitchen, which was filled with the comforting aromas of cooking. Here, Aninka lay down, gibbering, upon the tiled floor, curling into a foetal position in an attempt to protect herself from what she knew was coming down to the house. Her throat was dry, and it hurt her to sob. She put her hands hard against her ears, screwed up her eyes. No sound. No light. Only darkness.

  She must have awoken only a couple of hours later. Her head was astoundingly clear. For a brief moment, memories came hurtling back, but she dismissed them. With utter calm, she stood up and went naked to Wendy’s bedroom, where she took a skirt and jumper from the wardrobe. Pausing only to retrieve her handbag from the dining room, she walked out of the house barefoot, closing the front door gently behind her, and went to her car. The clock on the dashboard told her it was three a.m. Her mind blank, Aninka drove carefully home. She turned on the radio, hummed along to vacuous pop songs.

  Back at her flat, she took a long shower, then dried her hair and went to bed. It was impossible to sleep. Revolting images of what had happened assailed her mind, memories she had to banish with force. She did not want to think about it. At five o’clock, she glanced at her bedside alarm. Pev, where are you? She chided herself for the thought even as it formed in her brain. He had revealed himself as false, yet still some part of her felt it was something from the past, something too dreadful to be articulated, which impelled him to do the things he did. She loved him. She could not help it. There must be an explanation for why he needed to call upon the False One. She would listen without judging him, if he’d only come to her. Now!

  He’ll not come here, a cruel, cold voice whispered in her mind, You are nothing to him. You never were. You’ll never see him again.

  Aninka groaned and turned away from the clock. The voice, for all its cruelty, spoke the truth. She knew it did.

  Aninka didn’t get out of bed until three o’clock in the afternoon. She’d heard her ansaphone take a couple of calls from her agent and Noah. Had Noah somehow picked up on what had happened to her? She hadn’t heard from him for weeks. Her body and mind felt numb, which allowed her to examine the previous night’s events with a certain sang froid. Her people had a name for Othman’s kind: Anakim. Users, berserkers, abusers. He was sick. People like the Marks and their friends were just playthings to such a man. Should she call Wendy? It was perhaps significant that no-one had bothered to get in touch with Aninka herself. Did they scorn her for walking out on their ritual antics, or did they feel ashamed? Was she regarded as Othman’s ally or a traitor? Aninka stared at the phone by her bed. She repeated Othman’s number in her head, but could not force herself to call him and leave a message. Yet still the thought plagued her, despite her earlier conviction she’d never see him again: would he call her soon?

  At half past three, Aninka got out of bed and shrugged herself into the balm of a silk dressing-gown. She inspected her body for bruises, found a mark upon her hip. In the kitchen of her flat, she took a half-empty magnum of champagne from the fridge, found it flat, but drank it anyway, from the bottle. She wandered into her workroom, still swigging, and threw a rag over the painting on the easel. It looked like him. Then, she sat under the floor by the window and spent a few cleansing minutes crying. This, she told herself passionlessly as she wept, was a purge. She had loved him, given him her heart, and he had only disgusted and disappointed her in return.

  After the release of weeping, she phoned Noah back. As the line purred in her ear, she wondered whether she was going to tell him anything. This sort of thing should be reported, but she shrank from mentioning to any authorities her own involvement in the proceedings. Noah was out. His voice drawled out of the machine at the other end of the line.

  ‘Returned your call,’ Aninka said, after the tone. ‘I’m in. Where are you?’

  The living room smelled stale. She opened a window, let in the city sounds. Then came a few minutes’ recrimination. She should have realised Othman was off the rails. His behaviour had provided a casebook of warning signals. How stupid to be glamorised by his beauty. Stupid, stupid. Had she learned nothing from life? Irritated with herself, she flopped down onto the sofa and picked up the TV remote control. Blankly, she watc
hed the news; wars here, famine there, political bickering. Was nothing good happening in the world, nowadays? She called Noah again, said, ‘I need to speak to you,’ to the machine. She would not contact any of her other cousins, because she didn’t feel able to cope with their outbursts, and there was no way she could speak to anyone at the moment without saying something, something, about last night.

  The local news came on the TV. Aninka wasn’t interested. It was all too petty for words. Vandalism at a local church, money for a charity, a celebrity grinning like a mask at the camera. ‘Bollocks!’ Aninka said aloud, and muted the sound on the TV. She picked up a magazine, leafed through it. Articles on orgasms and relationships. This she did not need. Perhaps there was a film on another TV channel. She threw down the magazine and glanced at the screen. Her body froze.

  There was a picture on the screen of a face she knew, an out of focus, bleached image. Serafina. Aninka grabbed the remote and padded up the sound.

  ‘If anyone has any information they think might help the police, please call one of the following numbers...’

  What?

  The piece was finished. Aninka stood up, stared at the TV, energised by a kind of bleak dread. She had to wait until the end of the report for the main headlines to be repeated. There it was. No surprise really. It sickened her it was no surprise. Girl found dead in car park, sexually assaulted. Serafina.

  Aninka picked up the phone, dialled Wendy’s number without thinking. It was answered almost immediately. ‘Wendy?’ Aninka said.

  ‘No, I’m sorry, Wendy’s not here. Who’s calling please?’

  There was something about the voice that Aninka didn’t like. She put down the phone without saying anything more.