by Casey Lane
Her mother remained invested in her own cigarette, her eyes closed in feigned ecstasy. Or maybe she’d dropped off to sleep like that. It happened. Quite a bit, now that the number of drugs pumped into her night and day were more than she could count on one hand.
You want her to know she’s made you suffer, and if you leave, how will she know? I whispered into her mind. My voice was strong again. My burning limbs cool and hollow. She needs to know how much pain she’s caused you, always siding with Merek, always expecting too much, demanding too much. You’ve made no more mistakes than the rest of them, yet you’ve been beaten twice as hard. Go on! Tell her! Tell her what she’s done to you! Remind her at every chance you get just how much she fucked you up.
I thought I could get her to wrap her hands around the woman’s neck.
No, she thought. Because that would make me just like her. And as tempting as it was to sink her teeth into her mother, the idea of being like her scared her more.
“I’m not like her,” Lettie said, snapping the silver cigarette case closed, and I knew she was talking to me.
Her mother jerked awake. “What’d you say?”
I’m not like you. I’ll never be like you.
“Here’s your cigarettes, Momma. Let’s see what’s on the television.”
Chapter Eight
You need to understand that, at this point, I was still trying not to kill Lettie. Not outright, at least. When the sun finally gave up the ghost and the moon shone bright in early twilight, I crawled from my makeshift grave under Lettie’s house and walked west into the woods. Small game was plentiful. Rabbits loved dusk almost as much as I did, and I couldn’t take three or four steps without seeing the white twitch of a tail.
I took two right away. But once I’d thrown a fourth carcass into the trees, I knew this would not work. If I hoped to prolong this, I would have to take a human life.
I didn’t always stand outside Lettie’s house. Sometimes, I watched other women. The woman I killed before killing Lettie, for instance. I took her life the January before, when the skin on the back of my hands was as cold as a pallbearer’s handle, and as smooth and unyielding, too. Rigid fingers fussed over the blood-red cloth covering my face and neck, wrapped over and over around me in its dual purpose to hide my face and keep me warm.
The old woman inside 1818 Larch Park was probably the reason I was able to resist taking Lettie’s life for as long as I did.
I’d watched this woman stand from the worn wingback where she sat reading. She yanked the golden chain hanging from beneath a fringed lampshade, and my little glimpse of her world went as black as the underbelly of the tree where I stood. I was at one with the fir’s shadow, balanced precariously on an exposed root.
Her workaholic neighbor had returned home with puffy eyes and a red nose three hours ago. A demanding dog led its master down the moonlit street and paused only once to shit on the freshly cut grass. Apart from these two interruptions, the street was deserted. The night quiet.
The Larch Park woman had an orange tabby which sat in the window sill and flattened its ears against its head every time my toe so much as twitched in my boot. As hellish as cats could be, I wasn’t afraid. I was only waiting for the right moment. And that moment had come at last, filling the night with its crescendo, a song, mounting and urgent.
I reached out and twisted the silver handle of the outer door. The porch light sparked and extinguished itself. The orange tabby hissed and leapt down from the window. So dramatic. Death came in a thousand ways, if not me then another. There was no reason for my arrival to be so disturbing.
Clomping footsteps, the product of small feet shuffling in large shoes, stopped just on the other side of the door. I imagined pressing my ear to the weathered wood and listening to her breath.
The door creaked open, revealing a thin sliver of lamplight.
“Hello?”
I was so much taller than her that I saw only a swath of gray hair, fluffed and filthy, until she lifted her chin and met my eyes.
I waited.
There was always a moment of incoherency, a heartbeat in which I was still the stranger. Sometimes, I didn’t so much as breathe in these moments. After my failed attempts to connect with Lettie, I half expected to find my power worthless again. To have confirmed at last that my magic was really and truly gone.
But then her eyes widened, her breath caught, and her mouth opened in recognition. “Franklin?”
I was so relieved to see that Lettie was the anomaly, the exception. I smiled.
“Yes, it’s me, Franklin. How have you been?” I asked. I was jovial, perhaps even gleeful. I strained to hide my relief and excitement. Magic or no magic, I would ruin this if I didn’t control myself.
“My God, Franklin, come in. Come in,” she said.
She shuffled back, opening the door wider so that I could enter.
The cat went wild. Its back arched and a low wail, not unlike a siren’s pitch, issued forth from its throat.
“Franklin, stop that! Stop that right this instant!”
I froze, one black boot mid-stride.
“Oh, not you.” She looked from the furred demon to me. “This is Franklin. I was so lonely when you left that I adopted Little Frankie.”
The woman tried to lift the little devil from its armchair perch, but it twisted in her arms, writhing furiously, hooked claws out. It scratched her without mercy. The old woman cried out and dropped the beast. It scampered off into the dark part of the house. The kitchen, I supposed. I decided that I would walk through all the rooms after I’d fed on its owner and seek it out. But I almost never catch a cat. They’re smart enough to stay away.
“He takes some getting used to, but he’ll warm up to you just fine,” the woman said, inspecting the welts up and down her arms. The scent of blood bloomed, and I felt my teeth extend from my jaw, that sweet relief of their release, not unlike urinating.
I turned my back on her so she wouldn’t see. Shadows can only do so much for a monster.
“Don’t turn away. Come here, Franklin, please. Come sit beside me. Let me look at you. God, how long has it been?”
“Forever,” I said, because it was both appropriate and true. I’d never spoken to this woman before, and the earnestness of a word like forever was so well received most of the time.
“Forever, yes.” I heard her shriveled hand pat the cushion beside her. “Please sit down.”
I crossed to a sofa the color of robins’ eggs and sat beside her. I looked deep into her eyes and face, ensuring that she was still satisfied with what she saw. A frown creased her brow, hardening her mouth.
“You haven’t aged a day. You look just like you did the day you left,” she said and touched her long gray braid as self-consciously as a school girl. “I must look so old to you.”
I said, “You’ve never been more beautiful.”
Her desperation surfaced, and I accepted it. I relished it. I drank her down—her expectations, her desire, her longing for another world. For escape. All the nights where she hoped this would happen, all that wishing for this man, Franklin, whoever the hell he was, and at last he was here. I took it all from her, every part she was willing to give. I crushed her frail body to mine, felt her orgasm.
The ecstasy was shared. She wanted to be consumed, and I wanted to consume her.
Perhaps that was why I was so taken with Lettie. She, too, wanted the world to tear her apart.
Chapter Nine
I didn’t visit Lettie that night. I watched her, but from a distance that kept her scent dull enough to be nothing more than a mild tickle in the back of my throat. When the sun returned, I clawed a grave from the earth beside an aged and broken air conditioning unit.
Beneath the house, I’d begun to trick myself into believing this would be a long courtship. Perhaps I didn’t have to kill her. The little blood I’d fed her during our first night together had established our connection. I could continue it. It had been a long time since I
’d had a daytime servant, one who served as my eyes and ears, one to whom I could lend my wit and strength—Lettie could be that for me.
And yet, daytime servants were chosen for their usefulness, for their strength, and it was almost always a logical choice. The last daytime servant I'd had, my beloved Velena, was a skilled marksman and hunter. She was as fierce as a berserker in battle and hadn’t needed any of the powers my blood had bestowed upon her. Most importantly, Velena did not have a scent that drove me mad.
I drank from Velena when food was scarce, true enough, but I didn’t need to eat a colony of rabbits to control my appetite. I was much younger then, weaker to be sure.
This servant connection that I’d barely established with Lettie would not last. I knew this, because why else did I choose to sleep beneath her house? I could have made my grave anywhere. In the woods. Beneath the shed. At the lake I favored, weed-choked and forgotten for another three weeks until the Fourth of July. But I’d burrowed under her house, because I wanted my bed to lie under hers, and that was the truth of it.
I was there before dawn, knowing if I stretched my arms up it was as if I were reaching for her, the sleeping woman still warm in her sheets, and dreaming of me.
Once the sun rose and all but my mental powers faded, I cast my mind out to hers and felt that initial stir of desire almost immediately. A long courtship…a daytime servant…who was I kidding? I’d be lucky to last the week without tearing out her throat.
But I tried to enjoy myself. Tried to play patient passenger as I rode her mind and followed her through the day as one would treat their daytime servant.
I watched, and I listened. I tried to appreciate how she enjoyed her coffee—with too much sugar and cream. How she liked her cigarettes…with an extra bit of tobacco at the end, so the last puffs were the strongest—I’ve always been amused by human taste. How she preferred to cut the collar of her shirts, just one vertical snip would do, because she felt choked by anything that touched her throat. The realization that she never sat for long before a restlessness seized her and she rose to find a task to distract her.
When a rough knock on the door made Lettie turn, her heart went off like a rabbit’s, high and frightened. She was in dishwater up to her elbows, and her mother wasn’t getting up from the chair where she sat watching a young man with pouty lips promise the teary-eyed girl in front of him that he would leave his wife, he promised, he just needed more time. They kissed.
Pounding rattled the door again. I cast my mind that direction, pulling out of Lettie’s long enough to catch Yancy Thomas and the glimpse of a uniform.
“Just a minute,” Lettie called, hoping her voice carried over the blaring vows of the young couple on television.
“Do you have to listen to it so loud?” Lettie asked. Her pounding head made her mood sour, and I supposed I was to blame for that. “Turn it down. Can’t you hear someone at the door?”
“Your boyfriend,” her mother said, without taking her eyes off the man squeezing the young woman’s upper arms, testing them as if they were fruit to purchase from the market. “He looks like your daddy.”
“Who?” she asked, wondering if whoever was on the stoop could be seen from her mother’s recliner, the twin and less abused sibling to Merek’s chair with its ripped out stuffing and gleaming duct tape.
Lettie hoped it wasn’t her dead father on the porch. I’ve had enough of weird men coming to the house, she thought. I tried not to be offended by this.
Her mother pointed at the screen with the two fingers, balancing a cigarette between them. Gray smoke curled and rose toward the ceiling. “This actor. He looks like your daddy.”
Lettie didn’t see the resemblance. In the abundance of greasy hair slicked back maybe.
The hands rapped at the door once more. “For fuck’s sake, I’m coming!”
She swore and swatted at her jeans with her dripping hands, trying to get the majority of the moisture off.
When she pulled the door open she found what she expected. A man, on the porch. But it wasn’t a police officer. As nervous as the police made Lettie, she’d welcome them right in, feed them a biscuit and coffee, and maybe even the last of the chocolate ice cream, but only if they were arriving to tell her, I’m so sorry Miss Cole. I hate to inform you that your brother is dead. We found him in a drug den with a needle sticking out of his arm.
She knew they wouldn’t use the word drug den, but frankly, she didn’t care. A drug den, a ditch, or even in their mother’s rusted-out van. It didn’t matter. It was the dead part that she cared about.
“Hello Ma’am, good day,” the man said.
“Hello.” Lettie gave his white polo and clipboard a wary glance. It was an election year. If he wanted signatures, he’d come to the wrong house.
“I’m with the city department. I wanted to let you know I’m going to be around back checking your meter. Just wanted to introduce myself so you wouldn’t see me back there and call the police. Do I have your permission to open the back gate and enter?”
She leaned out the front door and surveyed the shiny white utility truck in the driveway with the green city logo on the side. “That’s fine.”
She shut the door before the sound of melodramatic sobbing swelled again. “Please turn that down, Momma.”
“What’d he want?”
“To marry you and take you away to the Bahamas,” Lettie said. “Should I have invited him in?”
Lettie washed and rinsed their mismatched dishes and put them in the strainer to the left of the sink. After toweling her hands dry this time, she fished out her own refilled cigarette case and snapped it open. She put the soft spongy filter between her lips and dug for a lighter.
She found one in a drawer that also held garbage ties and dollar-store sandwich bags. She had her hand cupped around the cigarette when she saw the meter reader in the back yard. His hands on his hips, frowning.
Shit, she thought and my own mental alarm rose. Seeing him through her eyes made me aware of how close he was to my resting place. Did the earth look disturbed? Would he investigate further?
He’s gonna see the rigged A/C and cite us for some code violation. He’s going to write some exorbitant—another paperback word—ticket we can’t afford and then give us thirty days to get it fixed—something else we can’t afford.
I hoped Lettie was right. But now that I felt the boots echoing overhead, my whole body tensed. I could not protect myself while the sun was high. I would have to seize and use Lettie if it came to that.
Shouldn’t you steer him away? I asked her, planting the doubt in her mind. Don’t want him looking too close, do we?
Cursing, Lettie tucked the lighter into her front pocket and hurried out the sliding back door. She made it halfway across the stretch of lawn before he turned. She noted the sweat. Large beads sat at the base of his soaked hairline, and his neck was red with the sun. I knew nothing of the heat as far into the earth as I was, but I still felt the way the heat made Lettie’s head swim. The sunlight hurt her eyes, too. I'd definitely taken too much blood from her.
“Is there a problem?” she asked, coming to stand beside him. The grass was longer here, tickling the back of her knees. She blamed the fact that she’d been too scared to get close to the old A/C with either the push mower or with the weed eater. She had a horrible image of running over something electrical and killing herself dead.
Oh, Lettie, I thought. There are worse ways to go. If you knew what I have planned for you, perhaps you’d run the mower right over a live wire…
“Your meter stopped,” he said. He gave her an apologetic smile as if this was his fault. His eyes slid down the side of her throat before looking away. “Maybe rabbits chewed through the wire or the equipment failed.”
A stone sank in her stomach. “How much does that cost?”
“Not a thing,” he said. “The city pays for the replacement and maintenance of the meters. It was likely damaged in a storm. He gestured at the heap of r
usted metal serving as their busted, sometime functional A/C. “Or this blew it. I can’t be sure.”
Or a demon crawled under the house and severed a line, I thought. Because wasn’t that what Lettie thought of me? Her demon? And she didn’t know the half of it. She had no idea I could enter her, possess her, feel what she felt, know what she knew, and use her to any end I desired.
Through her eyes, I saw the man run a foot over the churned earth.
Steer him away from here.
“Is this all you found?” she asked him. “I’m sure you have better things to do than stare at dead meters.”
“One more thing.” His eyes slid to her wounded neck. “You aren’t the squeamish type, are you?”
Her stomach tightened. “No.”
“Good. I need to show you something.”
He waved her toward the shed sitting at the edge of the yard, which sloped upward toward a dense tree line. The woods stretched on for a mile before bordering the back of a shopping center. From Lettie’s mind, I learned that as children they used to walk through these woods and come out on the other side where they traded their dimes for soda and penny candy at a small grocer that no longer existed. It had been torn down and replaced with a gas station. But Lettie hadn’t been in those woods since she came back to Georgia with a baby.
“It’s just back here,” the man reeking of sweat and too much cologne said. He led her to the space behind the white garden shed, where the trees began.
If he is going to rape me, kill me, and leave me for dead, this would be the place to do it, she thought. I had to agree. I imagined him trying it and knew I would snap his neck before his belt was undone.
“When I was tracing the lines looking for storm damage, I came across this,” the man said, crouching down in the weeds.
This is it, Lettie thought. I’ll kneel down beside him and he’ll attack me. I chuckled in my grave.
Her knees hit the dirt beside his. But the man didn’t launch himself at her, his hands hooked like a monster’s. Instead, he pointed at the patch of dirt four or five feet ahead of them.
