The Spinetinglers Anthology 2011

by Nolene-Patricia Dougan

  He stood in the open doorway, stunned at the guests seated around his table. His questioning eyes met Tracy while an ingratiating smile appeared on his face.

  “Hello Kevin. This was the surprise I mentioned. I invited some friends over to meet you.”

  “Oh, how pleasant. I wasn’t aware you had friends. Oh, sorry, that sounded wrong,” Kevin said, “it’s just that Tracy hadn’t mentioned you.”

  “Of course. This must be a little of a shock to you. These friends only show up in times of need,” Tracy replied with cold, piercing eyes in direct contrast to the smile on her face.

  “Is this one of those times?” Kevin asked light of tone while a heavy feeling had crashed in his stomach.

  “Come and have a seat dear and I’ll introduce you.”

  The introductions were made and Kevin backed into a chair while eyeing the room through tight eyes. He shuddered, chilled, as he met their reptilian gazes. He forced a genial look on his face and gazed around the room until his eyes settled on Tracy.

  “When did everyone get here?” Kevin asked to distract himself from the dread growing in him.

  Tracy stared at him with cold menace emanating from her in waves. The silence stretched. Sweat trickled along Kevin’s hairline. Tracy placed the digital recorder on the table and pressed play, eyes fixated on Kevin. To his horror, the room filled with his voice and his lover’s. Tracy stopped it before the corpse comment and relaxed into her chair.

  Kevin’s mind ran over and rejected every possible excuse in the book, even ones he had rehearsed for this moment or one similar to it. He decided to take responsibility for it and move on. He was a little annoyed at his audience but realized this is what Tracy had planned to do; to humiliate him in front of strangers. He gathered his reserves and tried to project a calm facade but his shaking hands and faltering voice unmasked him.

  “I have no excuse for my behaviour. I knew that what I was doing was wrong. It was a wrongness perpetrated onto you by my cowardice. I was too afraid to tell you the truth because of the guilt I would feel. I don’t know if you could truly be hurt by anyone but that does not diminish the wrongness of my actions. I am sorry for my betrayal. You did not deserve it. I will leave now and I understand if you hate me and I know that I deserve it.”

  As he rose, Tracy said, “immobilize,” and Kevin could no longer move. He felt like a large ephemeral hand was pressing him into the chair. His limbs locked and he could no longer exercise any control over his own body. He could move his eyes and mouth, his chest rose and fell, but his back, buttocks, legs, forearms, arms, shoulders and feet burning, tight, like they had been super glued to whatever they were touching while that spectral pressure exerted from the front.

  “There is no leaving here. Not for you.”

  Kevin strained to hear Tracy’s whisper over the subdued muttering from Tracy’s friends. He didn’t understand how, wouldn’t have believed it possible, but he knew they were keeping him in the chair. He looked at his drink, thinking it may have been drugged but he dismissed that theory because he knew he had not even taken a sip. The sweat began to accumulate all over his body as he tried to release himself from this bondage while the incantation proceeded in the background, a soft musical murmuring, a choir of malice.

  “How are you doing this?” Kevin asked, fear hitching his breath.

  “We are doing this. We are a coven. A coven of seven.” Tracy said.

  “What? Witches?” Kevin asked in disbelief, “this is magic or something?”

  “More like a collection of wills. Our wills together made tangible.”

  “What are you going to do to me?” Kevin asked fearing the answer but even more afraid not to know.

  “We are going to collect your soul by devouring your flesh.” Tracy said, enjoying this torture.

  “All this because I cheated on you? Gimme a break!”

  “That is the key Kevin. We are not allowed to kill those that have not wronged us. It is one of the rules of balance. The more souls we harvest the more powerful we become, and the wealthier we become, so that is one of the rules to prevent those of us with the gift to go on a murdering spree. When you think about it, your death is only possible because of your inability to remain true to me. If only you knew before you cheated huh?”

  “You wanted me to cheat on you?”

  “Yes. No. A bit of both really. It does damage one’s self esteem to be cheated on but the rewards are quite substantial if I do get betrayed. Kind of a win-win.”

  Tracy stood. The butcher knife that had been concealed in her lap was now visible to Kevin and his eyes widened while he tried to fight free of his invisible restraints.

  Tracy looked at her friends and said, “float him upside down so I can drain him.”

  The incantations changed and Kevin levitated and turned upside down. His arms and legs stiffened. Tracy placed a large, white plastic bucket underneath his head. She bent to look into his eyes.

  “This is what they used to do to pigs back in the day. Cut the throats and let the blood drain out into a bucket. Fitting don’t you think? A man who acts like a gluttonous pig gets treated like one.”

  Tracy straightened and lifted the knife past his eyes.

  “Tracy! Wait!” Kevin said before the cold steel blade sawed into his throat and filled his mouth with the warm, salty taste of his own blood. He watched the dark red of his blood fall into the white bucket, a stark contrast of colours. His blood began to flow into his eyes and he closed them. Even though cognizant of his own impending death, peace emanated from within, along with relief that the pain and terror was almost over. Before he died he thought, ‘Cheaters really never win.’

  Blood

  By Jaki McCarrick

  Fred Plunkett walked around her in his mind like an invisible wolf. She was thin and gazelle-like, had a creamy retroussé nose, and wore a brash perfume that tingled the back of his throat. There was also an arrogance to her, as if she were accustomed to other people’s easy submission and was rattled now by having to explain herself.

  “Didn’t Louise say? I’m Lara. I’ve come to use the Library. I’m researching a book. I’ve come especially.” As she went towards a bulging black satchel resting by the pillar, Fred thought, damn, she’s got some sort of letter. Proof. From Louise herself. Now I shall have to say:

  “Ah yes. The friend from London.”

  “Yes!” The girl replied.

  “Come in, come in,” Fred said.

  The girl entered the hallway, removed her sunglasses, hooked them over the lapels of her military-fit coat. She refused Fred’s offer of Nescafe, but accepted his offer to take her coat. On her way towards the stairwell Tomas welcomed her with a leg rub from his moulting ginger torso. Fred watched her look down at the cat and smile.

  “Louise has such a wonderful home,” she said, stopping to view the artwork on the stairwell wall.

  “How do you know her, exactly?” Fred said.

  “Oh. From University. She was my Professor,” the girl replied.

  Fred’s aunt had taught at University College, London for almost twenty years. An authority on the Archaeology of the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Louise Foster had turned thousands of students on to the poetic and imaginative brilliance of the Koran (mostly via NJ Dawood’s 1956 translation). Despite her retirement, due to recent world events (and her expertise) she was regularly asked to advise political organisations, think-tanks and journalists the world over. Hence, she was often away, and this is how Fred, who hoped to complete his thesis in his aunt’s spacious Victorian house (with its substantial collection of rare books, local newspapers, archaeological journals, and tranquil setting between the Cooley Mountains and Irish Sea), found himself caretaker of it, and of his aunt’s cat, a role that had not come without its complications.

  “Here we are,” he said, once inside the library, “a good view of the hills,” and placed the girl’s bag down on the desk opposite his. The small cemetery at Faughart could be seen
from the window. Here, the remains of Edward the Bruce had lain interred in a sunken vault marked by an iron Celtic cross since 1318. When she got to the chair the girl angled it away from the window towards the large echoing heart of the room. She then turned, reached over and closed the shutters.

  “The light,” she said, “it bothers me. I’m somewhat photo-sensitive.”

  He noticed that indeed the girl’s eyes were watering in the sun’s glare. Not until both shutters were closed did he get the full impact of her eyes: sensitive and transparent like a calm June day in Greenore.

  ***

  “I'll be taking a break soon,” Fred said, quietly, his head bowed over his book-burdened table. “I’ve a bit of a job to do downstairs.”

  “Oh yes,” the girl responded, sniffily. Fred immediately felt a pang in his chest and wondered if she knew the full extent of his arrangement with Louise. He blushed and pretended to work. Furtively, he watched her lay out two large leather-bound books on a reading table.

  “What are you researching, Lara?” He asked at length.

  “Oh. Settlers to this area in the fifteenth century.”

  “From Britain?”

  “No,” Lara replied, scanning the huge ivory pages. As she did not elaborate, and as he was afraid to enquire further, Fred turned to his wastepaper basket and began to sharpen his pencils. The room seemed suddenly to fill with small, intrusive noises: the chalky sound of the stiff pages being turned, the pencil shavings hitting the screwed-up balls of paper like rain, the swish of the girl’s dress, her assured slow breathing. Fred longed to speak - if only to divest all of these increasingly troubling, arousing sounds of their unwarranted power.

  Slyly, he watched her remove a small cardigan and wrap it around the chair at the reading table. He took in her tight lampblack dress, the tiny buttons down the front, the sheer chocolate-brown tights with a seam, and shoes that had high plastic heels. Christ. How had he not noticed those before? At first he thought she looked like a Forties film star. And then decided that, no, that wasn’t quite right: she looked like a Goth, but a much more glamorous Goth than the Goths he was used to seeing in Belfast. Her lips were a matt dark-red, her skin white as jasmine, her hands adorned with silver skull-decked rings. And there was something else about her that he liked, though he could not decide what it was. Was it this style of hers? (Though what did he know about women’s styles? He hadn’t so much as touched a woman in six years. It was far too complicated: women, sex, relationships. It was rocket science. Fred had immersed himself in the much more certain world of academia, and had for the past six years, been utterly, inescapably celibate.) Or was it some more hidden quality she had that impressed him?

  At Queens, Fred liked the Goths. They intrigued him with their Marilyn Manson T-shirts, dyed black hair and black lipstick. They formed an underwelt: the girls with their white faces and sleek hair, the men in their high-heeled rubber shoes. In a feeble attempt to ally himself with them Fred had had his mother sew PVC patches onto his tweed jackets and cardigans, and though he fantasized about wearing substantially larger amounts of PVC than that (like a gimp suit), he never did. Between seminars and symposia he would sometimes visit Gresham Street with its seedy hotels and flyblown glamour, or linger in the Arcade on North Queens Street delighting in the wares of Gemini, MissTique and Private Lines. He loved to stroke the PVC tops with their chains and cut-away breasts, smell the rubber T-shirts, cast his eyes around at the exotic, shiny blackness of it all and lose himself in this slightly seditious but alluring world. A world that far from belonging to the realm of ‘fantasy’, was a hard reality in Belfast. For Fred had found the city to be full of S&M clubs, fetish clubs, groups such as Transsexuals United Against Sectarianism, not to mention the bondage parties he had heard so much about but to which he had never been invited.

  “I do hope you won’t mind, but I’m intrigued. What is your book about, Lara?” He asked. “I mean, what is it that interests you about these ‘settlers’?”

  “Well, it’s sort of about vampires,” she replied, pronouncing the ‘v’ softly, and the second half of the word as one syllable, so that in her cut-glass accent it rhymed with ‘far’. Seconds later the ridiculousness of what she said hit him with particular force.

  “But there’s no such thing, surely. I mean there’s no such thing as vampires!” He said. “Vampires! Children of the night!” He added, in mock-Transylvanian.

  “Have you read Dracula?” She asked. Fred glared.

  “Then you know that while Mina is saved the Count is destroyed. But this is Stoker’s fiction. In reality, Dracula’s body was never found. I have reason to believe he escaped Romania and came here to the Irish borderlands in the fifteenth century.”

  Here? Dracula? To the Cooley Mountains?

  It immediately occurred to Fred, then, that a flake, albeit an extremely good-looking one, had interrupted a crucial day of study. “So how did Dracula get here, then?” He asked, sarcastically.

  “Probably through the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus and Sea of Marmara, then into Istanbul and around the Mediterranean. It would have been a terrifically tough journey and must have taken months. Oh, and I’ve just found here a number of references to a family with exotic origins that arrived in these parts at exactly the right time. Just think – there could actually be people living here in this area directly descended from the Count.”

  Fred Plunkett sat back in his chair and laughed. It was rude he knew, but he couldn’t help it. In fact, rather like his feline charge, he could hardly contain himself. As he guffawed (and guffawed) he could see the girl sitting composed on the edge of her chair, but she was not looking at him; she had opened one shutter and was gazing out the window toward a darkened Faughart cemetery and Edward the Bruce. Fred stopped laughing and cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been terribly rude. Perhaps I should leave you to it.” He gathered up his papers, neatly re-piled his books, plugged the chair into the desk, and walked towards the door.

  “I hope you brought an umbrella, Fred,” Lara said.

  Fred looked to the window by his desk. It wasn’t raining, but yes, she had observed it: the dense black cloud coming in off the sea on its way towards the house.

  “I imagine that will have passed by the time I’m done downstairs,” Fred said.

  “Oh yes,” the girl replied, “Tomas.”

  She knew! The deal with Louise! No doubt, she was on to him about his perving too, his afternoon of languorous looking.

  All the way along the corridor and down the stairwell Fred convinced himself he’d been ousted from his favourite place, from his one place of real privacy, in a most devious manner. Lara had overwhelmed him with strangeness, with some fantastical belief that Dracula, like Edward the Bruce, had come to settle in the Cooley Peninsula. Hold that thought. Dra-cul-a. No. It couldn’t be. The origins of the area were in the Gaelic, in ‘Cualaigne’. It was pointless even to consider the girl’s daft hypothesis. As if a legendary, largely fictitious character, played by both Gary Oldman and the great Klaus Kinski, would come and set up house in this inhospitable hinterland. It was far enough from anywhere now (an hour from both Belfast and Dublin on the train), but surely a lot further five hundred years ago.

  Fred went into the living room and immediately saw the green cloud-shaped stain. He placed his knapsack down, removed his tweed jacket with the PVC elbow patches and placed it on the arm of the divan. He tugged at his aunt’s Persian rug and turned to Tomas, newly awake. Sensing his minder’s displeasure, the cat launched himself over Fred’s right shoulder and scratched the side of Fred’s neck before scuttling off to some dark recess of the hall.

  Blood trickled onto Fred’s collar. He wiped it off with his hand and sat down. “Little bastard,” he shouted after the cat, and returned to the stain. He then rolled up his shirtsleeves, neatly, mechanically, and trudged towards the kitchen for a basin of hot water so that he could clean up the mess on the carpet.

  Halfwa
y there he stopped. What was he doing? Moreover, what was he doing with his bloody life? These kinds of thoughts often hit Fred Plunkett at precisely these kinds of moments. Moments when he caught himself doing mean, odious things like cleaning up cat’s piss. And why was he cleaning up cat’s piss in exchange for using his own aunt’s library - from which he’d just been so subtly ejected? Who said he could do such things, make such deals? At thirty-one he’d been a student forever. He had no girlfriend. He slept in a room, in which, at night, he could hear his own mother breath and sometimes gargle on her own phlegm. It was pitiful. To others, his mother, his lecturers, he was a dedicated student. But what of the real world? (He hated that phrase.) This was the last year of his thesis, and what was he to do when it ended? After Queens, the only road open to him was research - at any institution kind enough to hire him. Other than that, the thought of ‘employment’ terrified him. Cat-sitting was one of the few jobs he’d ever had, that and a brief stint as a bookies clerk. Neither of which he included in his CV.

  He checked the gash on his neck in the mirror above the fireplace, then sat down on his aunt’s swampy leather chair and opened a small gilded box on the coffee table. He took out an all-white Egyptian cigarette, and lit up. This was bad. Very bad. He inhaled, deep and slow. Why had he never listened to the voice? The voice that throbbed inside him at times like this. The voice that said: that black shiny gimp suit is for you, and this tweed garb is so over; the voice that said leave with the books and papers you need, and fuck cleaning the rug. No, he had never listened to that voice, and look where it had got him to date: he was lonely; he’d made a humiliating deal to mind an incontinent cat in order to use his own aunt’s library. But for Fred it was always in such low moments that things made most sense. He would be flooded with understanding, as if before he’d been unconscious. He had respect for him, this rebellious creature, and wished as he sucked pensively on the fat cigarette, he could meet him more often, knowing that to do so would be to spend more time in the bass-register moroseness that had revealed him. For this was the real Fred. The Fred without the constructs. Man of his blood-memory. In such moments, Fred Plunkett would encounter the full force of the manqué rubber-clad deviant buried within him.