by Edward Lee
A third giggled, “It’s the Nuh-Nuh-New Mother’s time. She’s almost fluh-fluh-fluh-fluh-flesh!”
“Look now,” said the one with the glasses, and she shoved Britt’s head to the right, where Jess lay asleep.
But he was more than asleep, she saw. His skin was pale bluish white, and he lay drained, fang marks pocking both sides of his throat.
“We have the power now,” said the one between her legs, “just like she promised.”
“We-we-we-sucked him dry!”
“Just like we’re gonna do to you,” whispered Glasses, and then all three of them converged, their fanged mouths gnawing Britt’s throat like a dog chewie. She convulsed as she felt her blood being sucked straight into their bellies, and as her vision dimmed, she noticed the figure standing in the doorway.
A nun. A grinning nun.
(IV)
Paul woke in a lurch. Had there been a noise? He sat upright a full minute before his eyes could acclimate. Jesus…His heart was hammering, but…why? Must’ve had a nightmare. Moonlight leaking through the blinds showed him that Cristina wasn’t in bed.
She was acting weird again to night. With my luck she’s going off the deep end. All that crap from her childhood? Who knew what effect that could have on someone years later? He pulled on his robe and went out to the kitchen.
“Cristina?”
He’d half-expected to find her out here with Britt, doing their girl-talk. But the kitchen stood dark save for the light over the stove. Something’s not right, he thought without knowing why the notion came to him. He padded to the guest room, where the door stood open. Jess snores like a polar bear, he realized, but the hall was dead silent. Paul stuck his head in…
He stared for a while at the motionless shapes atop the bed. They’re sleeping, he told himself. Right? But something seemed to drag him in. He felt colder with each step toward the bed, until he was staring down, mouth agape.
“Jess? Britt?”
He nudged Britt’s shoulder in the near-pitch dark, then turned on the light.
What he saw there shoved him out of the room where he collapsed in the hall, but the image followed him: Jess and Britt both naked and pale, their eyes and mouths locked open. Both of their throats had been gnawed deep.
Instinct more than reason shot him back to the kitchen. “Cristina!” he yelled. “Get out of the house!” He picked up the phone to call the police but—
“Shit!”
No dial tone.
The next series of minutes proceeded as a mad blur. His cell phone wasn’t to be found, and neither was Cristina’s. Get out, came the next impulse. Whoever killed them could still be here …But as he raced for the front door, he stopped in his tracks.
I can’t leave without Cristina …
“Where are you?” he bellowed. His mind was a tumult; he couldn’t fix on a single thought. Next, he was staring up the stairs.
A light was on.
The studio…Had she fallen asleep, or had another blackout?
Is she even still alive?
He ran up the stairs, however terrified, and bolted into the room.
Cristina stood in front of the windows, nude. She didn’t move.
“Cristina! Come on! Someone broke into the house and killed Jess and Britt!”
Lying on the floor were several broom handles whose ends had been sharpened to points.
“What the hell is that? Cristina?”
She remained standing utterly still. She didn’t seem to hear him. Paul simply stared as she turned and walked toward her work desks. Her eyes looked glazed.
“What’s wrong with you!”
Paul’s stare was drawn deeper when Cristina opened a drawer. She pulled out a yellowed dog’s skull, kissed it, and set it down.
What on earth …
Her blonde hair dangled when she leaned over again, this time removing a strange stoppered bottle that looked old. She clutched it to her bare bosom, then walked slowly out of the room, never once noticing Paul.
I don’t know what the hell’s happening but …
He had to get out.
Then his eyes widened more. Had it been Cristina who’d killed Britt and Jess? A psychotic episode or something. A schizophrenic break …He went out to the dark hall, and saw Cristina’s white body moving slowly up the stairs, to the unfinished rooms.
Paul screamed when he turned, almost fell over.
Britt and Jess stood before him, both smiling with drawn, white faces. They looked skinny now, sapped. Their gnawed throats had clotted up, and both of them had been scrawled on: wavy lines of black, green, and red trailing up and down their nude bodies.
“She’s getting ready, Paul,” Jess said. “You don’t understand.”
Britt stepped forward. “We didn’t either, until we were brought over by the New Mother.”
Paul’s mouth fell open.
“It’s going to happen tonight…” Britt’s nipples and lips were blue. “But it’s something that was planned a long time ago. All we needed were the chalice and the flagon, and we’ve got them both now.” And finally she grinned openly, showing two long white fangs.
Jess bared fangs as well. “It’s the flagon, Paul, don’t you see? It contains the blood of the Prince, and when Cristina drinks it, the Prince will live again, in her body…”
“It’s miraculous, and we all get to be a part.” Britt’s eyes seemed to burn. “You do, too…sort of.”
Britt and Jess stepped closer.
Britt lifted something off the floor and passed it to Jess. “Submit willingly, and you’ll be held in a higher favor.”
The object she’d given Jess was a sharpened broom handle.
Paul backpedaled, then fell down again. Britt lunged on him, her hands pinning him to the floor; he couldn’t budge against her impossible strength. “Let us take your blood first, then we’ll mount you as a homage to the Prince.”
“You’ll get to live forever, Paul, with us. We’ll all live forever in hell…”
Britt’s mouth opened so wide it seemed as though her jaw came unhinged.
“It only hurts for a minute,” Jess promised.
Paul pushed up, squeezing Britt’s throat as hard as he could, his legs kicking wildly. All the while, though, Britt’s mouth continued to lower. He tried to squirm out from under her, but to no avail. A desperate glance behind him showed him a figure standing in the darkness, as if watching in approval.
The figure looked like a nun…
The tips of two fangs touched Paul’s throat—
“Save some for me,” Jess chuckled.
A voice boomed up the stairs: “O quam magnificum, o domnul …”
Britt hissed, her pale dead face suddenly stamped with disgust. She rolled off Paul and looked up. Jess dropped the broom handle, gagging.
Another hiss sounded from the dark end of the hall.
A thin guy in slacks and a tacky sports jacket came first up the steps, holding a pistol. Behind him came a grayhaired priest.
“Strigoi,” said the priest. “Get thee hence.”
Jess and Britt looked sickened, and when the priest raised a circular pendant of some kind, they both vomited blood, then scurried into the studio. The priest hung the pendant on the inside doorknob, then closed the door.
Paul didn’t know which end was up. “Who are…you?”
“Never mind,” snapped the guy with the gun. “I’m a cop. Where’s Cristina Nichols?”
“I—Upstairs…”
“What did those two tell you?” the priest asked in a faint accent. He pointed to the studio door.
Paul shook the terror out of his head and got up. “Something about…a chalice and—”
“Where is it? It doesn’t look like a regular chalice—it’s just a bowl, a clay bowl.”
The recollection bloomed. “We found it in the basement, then—”
“Then what?” the priest snapped.
“Some woman stole it.”
The cop looked bewil
dered while the priest looked grim.
“They also said something about a flagon,” Paul added. “They said it had blood in it that they wanted Cristina to
drink.”
“Where is it?”
“She took an old bottle upstairs a few minutes ago.”
“That’s it.” The cop looked up the stairs. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Wait,” the priest advised. Were his hands shaking? “We have to…think about this.”
The cop raised his gun. “Let me do the thinking.”
“That will do you little good, Officer.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it…”
“Listen to me,” the priest insisted. “We can’t let Cristina consume the contents of that flagon. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise what?” Paul asked.
“We’ll have no choice but to kill her.”
“Why!”
“Because it won’t be Cristina anymore.” The priest stared off. “It’ll be someone else.”
And that’s when they heard a voice calling them from downstairs…
(V)
Cristina felt jubilant, eyes wide open as the dark colors swirled. Black. Green. Red. She’d set the flagon down in the first empty room. The figure waited for her.
Kanesae.
“I must show you now. You must see your glorious destiny…”
She was standing in the dream as it whirled around, a dark yet radiant maelstrom. The shimmering lines of black, green, and red churning against the bare walls and her bare skin. When the nun kissed her, Cristina sunk deeper into the evil muse…
“Look. And see…”
Again she’s in the dripping, rock-walled chamber. The man is no longer on the stone slab, and then she remembers that he’d already been dragged out, yet Kanesae remains, bloody-mouthed and enraptured as she carefully pours the blood from the crude chalice into the flagon.
“His blood is alive,” Kanesae whispers.
(VI)
Vernon couldn’t possibly calculate all that he’d seen in the last few minutes, so he gave up trying. We have to find Cristina, he realized, and Cristina was upstairs. But now someone had just called out, from downstairs.
“I should’ve known there’d be detractors in wait,” Rollin muttered and fingered his cross.
“What do we do?” Paul asked without much confidence.
“We go down there,” Vernon said. He thrust his gun forward. “Follow me.”
They crept down the steps, eyes peeled. Most of the lights had been turned out, leaving the foyer and living room plunged in darkness, and from that darkness a thin figure stepped forward after she’d said, “Come down here. I want to make a deal with you…”
One of the homeless girls, Vernon recognized.
Dirty shoulder-length hair looked like black noodles on her head. The farther Vernon proceeded down the stairs, the more details he could make out. She was emaciated and naked, her skin streaked by the multicolored magic markers. In her hand she held a sharpened pole.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You can leave now, just leave. We won’t follow you, we won’t kill you.”
“I’ve got the gun, honey,” Vernon pointed out.
When the woman’s barely visible face smiled, the fangs glittered. “Shoot me, and you’ll see.”
To hell with it. Vernon squeezed the trigger—
BAM!
—and watched a bloodless hole appear between the woman’s sagging breasts.
Then he fired five more shots into a tight group over her heart.
“So just leave. Right now,” she said, and took another step forward. “Don’t interfere. You might even be rewarded someday.”
“In hell, you mean,” Rollin voiced and stepped ahead of Vernon. “We’re not interested.” Then he raised his cross.
The woman only smiled wider. “What I can’t see can’t offend me.” And now she was close enough that Vernon could discern the crucial detail: she’d dug her own eyes out.
“The New Mother says that the most powerful force that exists is faith. Watch me.” The fangs shined in the blinded face. “I’ll show you my faith, but if you go upstairs, this will be done to you.” And then she held the sharpened pole above her head, opened her mouth, and began to slide it slowly down her throat.
“God in Heaven…”
Vernon closed his eyes but could still hear it. The woman stood with her feet apart, and continued to shove the pole down in increments. When it exited her crotch, she continued to shove, until the point hit the floor.
She stood for a moment, in perfect stillness, then fell over.
Fuck this, Vernon thought, reloading his gun.
“She was distracting us,” Rollin said. “Time’s running out if it hasn’t already. We have to go upstairs and prevent Cristina from consuming the contents of the flagon.”
Vernon gulped, looking at the impaled woman. “Uh, well…”
“We have to go upstairs,” the priest said. “We must.”
When Vernon turned back around, he stopped short. The landing was empty.
“Where the hell did Paul Nasher go?” Vernon asked.
(VII)
Was it his lawyer’s morality…or something in the house? Paul thought he understood what was going on here. Power, for one thing. A power timeless and everlasting. Why should I let someone else get it? came his reasoning.
When the priest and the cop had gone downstairs, Paul had slipped up to the third floor. The air felt thicker up here for some reason, as if it were alive with something. Moonlight tinted the dark corners of the hallway and unfinished rooms. Got to find her, he thought. Can’t let her drink the blood …
He froze in the next doorway.
There she was—Cristina—kneeling naked in the middle of the vacant room. Was she muttering under her breath?
Or praying?
Paul stepped back to conceal himself, and watched.
There was a soft grating sound when Cristina twisted the stopper out of the flagon. Instantly, the moonlight in the room seemed to darken; Paul wasn’t sure, but he thought he could also see churning lines of light in the back of his mind, lines that were black, green, and red. After what he’d seen Jess and Britt become, Paul could believe anything now, even the prospect of immortality. As a lawyer, he’d always gone for the gold and had gotten it every time, via brains, bravado, and ruthlessness. Survival of the fittest. That’s how it’s always been, since men were apes …
Now Cristina was slowly pouring the contents of the flagon into the clay bowl they’d found in the basement. The blood inside was black now—The Prince’s blood, Paul reminded himself—and it dripped as slowly as old motor oil.
Cristina gazed at the filled bowl as though it were a crystal ball. What did she see in it?
Paul bounded into the room.
“What are you doing here?” Cristina screamed, her eyes feral. She reached for the bowl—
THWACK!
—but Paul kicked her in the head.
“Change of plans, Cristina,” he said.
She leaned up, groggy. “Get out! You’ll ruin everything!”
“Depends on your point of view, honey.” And then, as she lunged for the bowl again, Paul easily grabbed her hair and yanked her to the corner. She kicked and shrieked. “Guess we all have a bad side,” he added. “Now you get to see mine.”
Still holding her hair, he hauled her up and began to bang the back of her head against the wall. Five thuds. Ten. When he was done, the wall showed dents. Cristina collapsed to the floor. He hoped she wasn’t dead. She’ll be the first one I feed on…
Paul turned and stared at the bowl. Very slowly, then, he leaned over and picked it up…
(VIII)
On the next landing, Vernon put his gun away and picked up the sharpened broom handle that Britt had dropped outside the studio. This is fucked-up, he thought, when he realized exactly what he was doing. Behind the studio door, he heard a hissing and a gurgling.
“Up the next flight,” Rollin urged. “I’ll go first.”
What ever you say, Vernon thought.
Only moonlight lit the third floor from the unshaded windows. A noise from the first room signaled him.
“She must be in there,” Rollin whispered. “Remember, if she’s consumed the blood, you must kill her—” He looked at the pole. “With that.”
Vernon nodded.
The priest stepped ahead of him and entered the room.
But it wasn’t Cristina who stood there. It was Paul.
“Stop!” Rollin shouted. “You don’t know what you’re doing! You don’t know what you’re bringing back!”
Paul stood poised, with the bowl inches from his lips. “You’re wrong about that, priest. I do know what I’m bringing back. That’s why I’m doing it.”
Paul gulped down the contents of the bowl, and when he tossed the bowl aside, it shattered on the floor, revealing that the clay had been merely a surface, covering what appeared to be a human skullcap.
“Now!” Rollin yelled to Vernon.
Just as Vernon would charge into the room, a thin figure grabbed him from behind. “Yuh-yuh-yuh-you can’t!” exclaimed the emaciated woman suddenly on his back. She, too, was nude and scrawled with the black, green, and red lines. Dirty nails clawed at his face; the pole fell from his hands. “Yuh-you don’t belong here-belong here-belong here!” Vernon yelled when the fanged mouth began to snap open and closed an inch from his face. “I could use some fuckin’ help here, Father!” he bellowed, but the priest was absent. Had he fled? Ninety pounds or not, the pallid woman fought like a gang member. Vernon thrashed on the bare floor; it was all he could do to keep the woman’s snapping mouth off his throat.
“Gonna suck you-suck you-suck you dry…”
Vernon’s strength began to falter; her foaming mouth drew so close he could feel the sour breath gusting on his throat.
He wasn’t thinking when he fired four shots up into the woman’s chest. It hadn’t worked before, so why had he done it now? The woman paused to chuckle, then leaned harder toward his throat.
