He thought that maybe it had been the boy’s plan all along to shake him up, to rattle him enough that he’d make a mistake, and let them get away. Matthew was resolved. He wasn’t going to let that happen. He owed it to both of these kids to get them out of this mess, this nightmare, and give them a chance at a normal life.
Matthew stood at the top of the stairs looking toward the front door. His eyes darted from corner to corner of the scarcely lit room that spread out below him. He was convinced that there was something moving in the shadows down there, he just couldn’t ever get a look at what it was. Finally, unable to take any more of it, he turned away and headed back down the hallway. It was completely black outside now, and the lights inside all seemed dimmer. He had to get them all out of this place before he lost his mind.
The little girl was standing by the door when he got to her room. She had the bag closed up beside her. His gaze met hers and in answer she looked down at her feet again. He could tell that she was resigned to leaving, but she was still shaking. He didn’t know if it was due to the cold or her fear. He guessed it was a little of both.
***
Matthew opened the door and was completely unsurprised to find the boy sitting instead of packing. He brought the girl into the room with him this time, her packed bag slung over his shoulder. He looked into the boy’s bag and took it in the same hand as the girl’s, and slung them both onto his back. He motioned for the boy to stand and join him in the hall.
“For the last time, Deputy, please…just go. Leave us alone. Forget you ever saw us.” The boy sounded sad, almost broken now.
“I can’t just leave you here alone. This is about what’s best for you, not what you think you want,” Matthew said, exasperation ringing clearly in his words.
“But what about what’s best for you?” The kid seemed at his wit’s end with Matthew. “Just leave. Just go,” he pleaded.
Matthew stood up straighter and puffed out his chest as he shifted his voice back to the one Holly hated. He was no long speaking to the boy, as much as he was commanding him. “That’s enough, kid. You’re going with me. You can walk out of here on your own, or I can cuff and carry you. Your call.”
The boy didn’t back down. He simply stood in place staring at Matthew, daring him to do something. As he stepped into the room and took him by the arm, the boy piped up to continue his story. “One night in St. Charles, Missouri, Father…he came across a child being abused…”
“Aren’t we done with all that now?” Matthew asked, as he tugged him out into the hall.
“I haven’t told you everything! I’m not done! Deputy, you said you’d hear me out if I packed my things. I did what you asked, let me finish.” He almost yelled.
There was almost a sense of panic in his voice, and it showed in his eyes. Matthew decided to let him keep talking, but he wasn’t going to stop to listen anymore.
“Fine. But walk while you talk.” He said to the boy, as he pushed him toward the stairs at the end of the hall.
“Okay!” He said as he began to walk slowly down the hallway. “Father accidently came across a child being abused by his parents. He wasn’t sure he was going to do anything, but he watched them. He watched and he waited, and once they were asleep that night, he decided to act. He broke into their house. He woke the sleeping boy up, and carried him into his parents’ room. He took knives and…and he…he killed them. He killed the parents and he made him…the boy…he made the boy help.”
As they reached the end of the hallway and turned down onto the stairs, the girl began crying aloud. Matthew put his hand on her shoulder to comfort her, but she wouldn’t look up from her feet. Thankfully, she was still walking dutifully with them.
“He chops up the parents’ bodies and makes a big mess.” The boy tried to stop to emphasize the point, but Matthew continued to gently push him forward. “Then he lights the house on fire, and stands outside in the backyard, ya know, just watching it burn. When he left, he took the boy with him. He didn’t really force him to go, but where else was the boy going to go, really? He called him ‘boy,’ like he was called ‘boy’ by the man in Virginia.”
The boy looked up, to verify that he was still being listened to as they continued down the stairs. He searched Matthew’s face for a response, but didn’t find one.
“Again, kinda like you. Just called ‘boy,’ huh?” Matthew said, almost flippantly.
“This time, Deputy, yes. Exactly like me.”
At the base of the stairs, the boy turned to face Matthew. He kept moving, walking backward as he continued to talk. Matthew thought that this would be the point where the boy got desperate. Now he had to know he wasn’t going to get his opening to run, and he would likely try anything he could come up with to get away.
“He starts an orphanage with that boy, then he goes around and collects ‘his children.’ He’s collected over thirty children now. Each of us is ‘boy’ or ‘girl.’ But I’m the first. I’m the first boy. Do you understand yet, Deputy?”
The boy stopped in the middle of the room and stared wild-eyed at Matthew.
“You’re finally admitting that some of the story is about you?” He asked the boy with some concern, as he tried to keep him moving.
“This is the part of the story where Father comes close to getting found out by a stupid, backwoods, hick deputy! A deputy that tries to take a couple of his kids! But his children would never let that happen, Deputy. Do you understand? They’d never let that happen!” The boy screamed at Matthew as he jerked the girl away from him.
Lightning ripped across the sky outside and for a moment the room was lit in an electric blue glow. Matthew could’ve sworn that he saw children everywhere – lots of them, surrounding the three of them. Then all went dark again, but now there was a depth to the blackness, and it was crawling with movement. Matthew thought the boy’s story was really getting to him, and he tried to simply shake it off again, but then he began to actually see the children inching forward into the yellow light of that single bulb.
They moved inhumanly fast, and were on him in a flash – a flurry of fists and feet and teeth. Then there was only pain and noise, and finally, darkness.
***
Matthew’s head throbbed and the vision in his right eye was blurry when he opened it. Everything in the room seemed to spin. He was bloody, naked, and handcuffed on a dirt floor. This was a living, waking nightmare. Who would have ever have expected, or believed this could happen. This must be the basement, he told himself.
There was only one light here - a giant floodlight, which was right over his head. The basement looked to be about the same size as the whole first floor, with no walls. It was huge, wet, and disgusting, and he was laying down in it naked and covered in blood. He could only hope the blood was his own, and not the children’s. Holly could never find out about this.
He could see something moving near the edge of the light beyond his right foot. It lingered there in the dark for a moment before moving forward. The boy finally came into the light and walked over to check on Matthew’s wounds.
“What’s going on here? Where are my clothes?” Matthew demanded. The boy continued to look him over, saying nothing. “You lied to me. What’s your name? Who are all those kids?”
“No! I warned you. I mocked you… I was rude to you… But I never lied to you.” The boy said it smugly, but Matthew thought he could see a hint of sadness in his eyes.
“You said that you weren’t the person in the story. You said that monster was ‘Father,’ or whatever. You lied.”
“No, Deputy Burroughs, he didn’t,” a man’s voice said. Matthew strained to look in the direction he thought the voice had come from and was instantly on fire with the pain of his broken limbs. A man’s form seemed to appear from the shadows, waving a finger in a disapproving gesture at Matthew. “My boys and girls don’t lie. I make it a point to punish dishonesty swiftly and with a kind of finality I doubt you’d be comfortable with.”
; The man was huge. He wasn’t fat, or even well muscled. While he was extremely thin, he was easily over seven feet tall. His skin was pale almost to the point of being translucent, and his short, dark hair sat perfectly atop his head, not a single strand out of place. He wore a black, finely tailored suit that he began to slowly remove as he approached Matthew.
“I must make preparations to relocate again. The children knew they’d be packing as soon as they saw you, so you really haven’t upset things too badly. People will come looking for you in time. A new location, a new orphanage with the children. Life will go on…for us.” The man finished his statement as he folded his coat and pants, placing them on a wooden table just outside of the light’s comfortable reach.
“Who are you?”
“The children call me ‘Father.’”
“But who are you really? What’s your name? We both know the story the boy told about you being born in Germany in the 1600s is crap.”
“Do we?” The man looked down at Matthew with a blank face as he removed his shirt and placed it with his vest on the table. “How little you really know, Deputy.”
“It’s not possible. You’re just a monster who kidnaps and frightens children. You don’t scare me!” He lied, more for his own benefit than the man standing in front of him.
“I realize you were just doing your job, Matthew. I don’t hold that against you. If it’s of any consolation, you won’t have to fight with Holly anymore.” The man said all this in the same unflinching monotone.
Matthew’s eyes grew wide. Panic ripped through him. It almost seemed like the man enjoyed that fear, as he now stood completely naked next to the table.
“How dare you! How do you know? Who are you?!” Matthew demanded as his mind swam with all sorts of fearful images.
“You are Matthew Curtis Burroughs, your birthday is July nineteenth, your parents both died in a car wreck when you were twenty-one. Your wife, Holly Marie, is the most important and valuable thing in your little world. You’ve heard my whole life’s story, but I’ve seen yours.” He examined Matthew’s reaction closely as he tapped his temple. “I’ve watched your life play out in its entirety, as though I had lived it personally. I took all your memories – copied them, I should say – out of your mind. I took everything, in fact. I had no choice in doing so, however, if that helps. The die was cast, and my part decided for me, as yours was when you were told to come to this house.”
“What…what are you going to do?” Matthew just couldn’t take it all in, no matter how hard he tried. He struggled again to get to his feet and was painfully reminded that too many of his bones were broken to allow him to stand. He yelped, wincing in agony, as he looked back up at ‘Father.’ “Who are you? I mean, who are you, really?”
The man held up Matthew’s uniform hooked on a single extended finger as his body shifted and contorted, reforming itself to change size and coloration. Matthew watched the man’s face reorder itself until the face looking down at him was his own.
“Why, Deputy Burroughs. I’m you, of course,” the man said as he put on Matthew’s uniform pants. “I have to be you, otherwise people might find it odd that I’m driving your car, and in your house. Like your wife, perhaps?”
“You leave Holly alone! Do you hear me, you sicko? Don’t you lay a hand on my wife!”
The man put the final pieces of the uniform in place and turned again to look down at Matthew. Looking up into his own eyes, Matthew was nearly hysterical, shaking with rage, and barely able to contain his suffering.
“I give you my word, Matthew. She will come to no harm by my hand. My word, Matthew, is solid. Take comfort in that. No harm…by my hand.”
The man turned and started to walk away. It startled Matthew to hear him speak with Matthew’s own voice as he said, “Children, you know the Deputy can’t live, and he can’t be found. Please eat him and powder his bones.”
The children, more than thirty of them, all came forward out of the shadows where they had been lurking and began to encircle Matthew. As an afterthought, the man called back to them, “Bring me those handcuffs when you’re finished.”
***
The knocking on door was a small but persistent sound, the kind one might imagine an indolent, heavyset woodpecker would make.
The raven-haired woman slid the deadbolt over, and opened the door enough to peer out into the ominous black of the night. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, forming angelic coronas around the young boy and girl, dressed in ratty white t-shirts, who stood outside the door in the warm, bright glow of the porch light.
“Can… can I help you?” She asked, puzzled, as she looked around in vain for the adults these children were missing.
As the girl looked down at her feet, the boy stepped forward. pulling the woman’s attention back to him. “I’m really, really sorry to bother you ma’am, but are you Mrs. Matthew Burroughs?”
A Scarlet Night
by
Megan J. Parker
Awakening
Serena opened the door and stepped out of her cabin, sensing a wave of energy. She stood, trying through the blackness beyond the trees in an effort to locate the source. A snapping branch sounded to the left and she turned her head towards it right before a flash of light to the right snapped her attention back.
She sneered, "SHIT!"
She shifted on her heels, bracing herself as the bright-red blast shot at her and lifted her hands. Though the approaching wave was fast, she had more than enough time to complete the fluid cycle with her hands. As the motions came together, her own purple energy began to grow in her palms and she pushed out with it, a wisp of violet smoke swirling in the night air as the two energies collided and violently neutralized one-another.
"Stop right there!" A loud, male voice called out past the lingering glow.
"Oh? And why would I do that?" Serena asked snidely. As the sound of heavy boots on the forest floor advanced, her lip curled at the familiar energy. "Leave now, vampire!"
The intruder growled at her hostility, "No! You're coming with me!" Then, as an afterthought: "Serena."
"You sound pretty confident there!" she mocked, smiling and licking her parched lips. "Tell me, vampire. . . have you fed from a human? Or do you settle for that disgusting potion?"
"Enough stalling!" A roar bellowed from his chest, "I don't answer YOUR questions!"
He took one final step towards her and she fought her instinctive blush. He was so beautiful. His pale skin was lit under the glow of the moon and his inky mane spilled onto his shoulders; like her own mass of silver hair, a sharply-contrasting streak--like a sliver of moonlight in an otherwise dark sky--hung over his forehead and between his piercing gaze. Each of his eyes was unique; a nearly metallic right and a blue left that shimmered as though electrified. She smirked as his aura, an excited match to the wave of red energy she'd just dispelled, spiked impatiently as she continued to take all of him in.
"Had your fill yet?" He frowned at his own words.
"Not yet." She chuckled, slowly glancing over his form one last time, "But you do seem to be in something of a hurry. Maybe later I'll let you tie me to the train tracks, eh Snidely?"
She thought she saw him blush but passed it off as a glow from his aura and smiled as he stepped toward her, growling.
"Now give up. I don't want to hit you!" He glared.
Her smile widened and she licked a fang, continuing to undress him with her purple eyes, "Oh you are kinky! I only hope you hit better than you throw! Seriously! If you're here to take me you're going to have to do better than an amateur blast. Now, if you'll excuse me"--she smirked and turned her back to him--"you're interrupting my dinner."
She felt his icy gaze narrow and chill her back and his heavy boots followed, daring her to continue. She rolled her eyes and turned back, lunging at him.
"Enough of this!"
"Wai-"
His speech and his advance ceased as he was taken off guard and she took the opportunity to jump
up and shoved both of her high-heeled boots into his chest, rocketing him off the balcony and sending him crashing into a nearby willow tree.
She landed with cat-like grace on her feet and began a cocky swagger towards and then past him. His mismatched and bewildered eyes followed her, taking in her teasing wink as she disappeared.
"Dinner time!" she purred.
***
The city was still several miles south of the cottage she was staying at--or, rather, had been staying at. Now that the vampires knew of that location, she'd have to find a new home.
She sighed, "On the road again. . ." she shook her head as the vampire's shocked face bobbed into her mind. "That bastard!"
"You hurt him pretty bad, you know." Devon chided her.
"So you finally decided to come out, huh?" She smiled, not bothering to glance over at her ghostly companion.
The warmth--an ever-constant reminder of his presence--wrapped around her. She exhaled, enjoying the otherworldly embrace for only a moment before looking over at him. Even as a ghost, he retained his beautiful looks: an eternal mirror of how he was--thankfully--before the accident. He smiled warmly at her. Despite everything she'd done to him, he was still so kind to her.
And that hurt more than he knew.
"I'll find a body for you, Devon. I promise." She said, biting her lip.
"That's not what I said." His voice hardened.
She nodded, "I know what you said. Doesn't change the fact that I'm going to find you a body."
She had been looking--always had been--but, when she drank from every human she thought would fit his soul, Devon would always stop their approaching death and save them at the last minute.
"Serena, you know how I feel about that." Devon said.
She ignored his words. Nothing he'd said or ever could say would sway her. She wanted to feel him again; be able to enjoy his physical embrace and not just some warm air. He was, and always would be, the only one for her. Hell, she'd give up drinking blood and start gagging down that synthetic crap if he asked her to. He was the only one to see her as her true self because she refused to show it to any other.
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