by Chris Ward
He could hear nothing but her moans, her cries as her thrusts got harder and harder, faster and faster, and he thrust his own hips upwards to meet hers, jolting them together, desperate to fuck this woman until they became nothing more than one single, writhing beast, lost in its own ecstasy.
(He no longer remembers how long he had watched, only that he had stood frozen in that doorway watching as they kissed and touched each other, hands moving over each other’s breasts, between each other’s legs, over each other’s skin. Somewhere inside he knew they were sisters, that their coupling couldn’t in any way be remotely natural, but he was transfixed. Only when he felt a sudden rush in his groin, a hot stickiness down in his pants, did he feel anything other than a deep, unnatural desire.)
‘Come on, Matthew, come on . . .’ she moaned, her body moist with sweat, fingernails driving into the skin of his shoulders. Instead of hurting him as he would have expected, the cuts her nails opened only seemed to add more to him, make him harder, make his lust stronger. He felt an incredible power growing within him, carnal, volcanic.
(Their moaning seemed to reach a pinnacle at about the same time as the young Matthew’s own, and their writhing wound down, their lust satiated. For the first few seconds afterwards they simply held each other, comforting each other just like normal sisters. Then – the moment he would never forget – they turned towards the door. He still stood there, transfixed, a cooling fire in his belly, sweat on his forehead, his armpits, around his groin. One of them smiled, the other looked shocked. ‘Would you like to join us?’ the smiling one asked, lifting a finger and indicating him forward. ‘Come on, don’t be shy. It obviously does something for you.’ Her hand rolled over and her finger pointed down towards his groin. He looked down, seeing that silvery wet patch for the first time. He heard the woman’s laugh, his own cry of despair, and then his feet were turning him, propelling him out of that place in shame as her laugh echoed in the room behind him.)
And now, looking up into the ecstasy of her face, he sees her again, Elaina Meredith, her body as perfect as the day he watched her lie with her sister. Only his own has changed, and suddenly he knows this is wrong, that something about her is wrong, is twisted, is out of control, is taking over him. And he sees images of Rachel in his mind, and his children, Luke and Sarah, his beautiful children; knows this is wrong even as orgasm rises up inside.
‘No –’ he starts to moan, his words slurred, his mind drunken, and he feels her nails digging into his shoulders, holding him down, feels a strength there beyond strength, beyond . . . him. Cries out, broken: ‘No . . .’
His body jolts and his come bursts out of him, filling her; at the same time she arches her back and screams her own ecstasy with one final downward thrust. Her nails rake his chest and she grins down at him, triumphant.
And then her smile and her eyes are gone, the ecstasy on her face blown apart, and Matthew becomes aware of a roaring all around him, like waves, like an avalanche, like the groan of an iceberg rolling over in a boiling sea. Elaina’s face is gone, destroyed, and what is left of her showers down on him like a bitter sweet blood rain.
Matthew screams too as light fills the room, regular, normal light, and shadows rush away from him like a spring tide drawing back from a beach.
A big hand lands on Elaina’s bloody shoulder and pulls her body off him. He feels his penis, still hard, slide out of her body as what remains of her falls to the floor to land with a hollow, resonant thud.
Matthew lifts one hand and wipes gore out of his eyes, still unable to comprehend what is happening, what is real and what is not. He feels party to some fucked-up dream the like of which he wouldn’t even find in one of his own novels.
His penis begins to shrink rapidly, flinching back in terror as he looks up into the crazy eyes of the man who comes to stand over him.
Matt feels like Death is staring him in the face, and maybe it is.
Red, his face set like a monolith, eyes hollow and as empty as a dark cavern, lifts the shotgun to Matthew’s face, sighs and shakes his head once, as though to say, look how pathetic you are, and pulls the trigger.
###
Bethany’s Diary, November 12th, 1999
I’ll be going now. I’ve taken fourteen of them, Microcodamol, something I got behind the counter at the post office with a note I wrote myself and signed with my father’s name. For migraines, funnily enough. My headache is almost over.
Mother, I’m coming. Father, goodbye for now.
I have to go. I want to be back in the house before they take me away. I don’t want them to find me out here in the woods. Call it dignity, I guess.
Goodbye, diary. You’ve been kind to me.
12
The initial pain was like being punched in the face from the inside out, as though the fist came from inside her own brain. Hard, like something bursting out of her, a fish breaking the surface of a winter lake. Liana fell backwards, away from Rachel’s still form, clutching at her face with clawed fingers, wanting to tear out the agony that had invaded her body.
The pain grew like a spreading fire, moving down her neck and across her chest, seeping through her tissues and her organs and drilling into her bones. She rolled across the floor as pain surged through her, fingers tearing at her hair, her face, trying to gain a grip of her senses and understand what was happening.
When the pain finally subsided, leaving behind a numb, tingling sensation as though her entire body had been oxygen starved, she understood.
Elaina was dead.
Liana had often wondered how she would feel if, or when, this moment ever came. She had never thought it would be like this. She had tried to imagine how losing part of herself might feel. Would her legs go, her arms, would she just feel light-headed, like waking up with dehydration after a night of too much wine? Most of all, would it hurt?
Oh, it hurt all right. It hurt real bad. But she would never have imagined this.
She felt thin. Not of waist or hips, in the conventional sense, but thin, of substance, of her very being. She tried to crawl back across the floor towards Rachel, some part of her still aware that she needed to cover the other woman’s wound, stem the flow of blood until the ambulance arrived. Her hands had become translucent, and with each movement she seemed to sink down into the floor, as though her substance were too thin to support itself on any surface. She looked down, thinking of those cartoons where the cat or the dog would peel off their skin like a coat, leaving them a naked mess of veins and muscle tissue. But she had lost no layers as such, merely thinned out, as though every other particle of her being had been sucked into a void.
As her last strength took her to Rachel’s side she understood where that void was.
It wanted to take her home; she was finished here. The doorway that together herself and Elaina made the frame of, had collapsed. Only while she hung to life would it remain open.
She tried to think clearly, tried to structure in her mind the implications of shutting down that gateway. Gabrielle’s soul would be trapped here, unable to leave, and what would that mean? And what about his soul, now his sickness had revealed itself? How many people might die? How long would it last?
Finally Liana thought she understood the truth.
That she really didn’t know.
There were some things beyond the knowledge and comprehension of any of them, of herself, of her sister, of Ian, Red, poor dying Rachel, Matthew even. They were all just pieces of the same jigsaw, assembled by some overbearing presence that held power over them all.
The man who built the world.
Only when it happened would they know. And in this case Liana knew she would never find out, she would be dead and gone before the implications of her death could be understood. As her vision began to waver she realised her time for understanding was drawing to a close. The only question for her was what to do now.
Here and now. The only time that mattered to Liana. Yesterday was gone, tomorrow would never come
, not in the sense she had begun to understand. The sun would never again rise up over the moors for her, peering in through the bedroom window like a nosey neighbour, its lazy fingers caressing the folds of the unmade bed upon which she and her sister slept. Maybe in another place, another world, Liana would start again.
She felt herself drift. What could she do with her last moments to make any sort of difference to the carnage which had finished her?
She thought about giving in, just closing her eyes, and letting death wash over her. But she was the good side of the doorway, the light, the love, the tenderness. Elaina was the dark, the hatred, the anger. And Elaina was dead.
She looked down at Rachel, who suddenly choked, spraying bloody spittle across the carpet, and wondered. Maybe.
Liana’s translucent fingers reached out to touch a form that felt unnaturally soft, like a sponge, its own life ebbing slowly away. As though kneading dough, Liana let her fingers sink into Rachel’s skin, pulling the dying woman close to her own failing body. Liana could feel Rachel’s weak pulse reverberating throughout her body, could feel the woman’s life fading. Not much time left. For either of us.
This time she did close her eyes, but not to rest. Even as she felt her own life flooding out of her, she focused her mind, and concentrated.
13
Click.
No sound had ever sounded sweeter. Matt peered up through a dull haze, the warm afterglow of copulation oozing through his body, and tried to focus his eyes on the man standing over him.
‘Fucking thing.’
Red stepped away from Matt, who felt as though he watched the other man through binoculars, the image slipping in and out of focus as his mind adjusted the lens. In one step Red went from monstrous, overpowering, to man–sized, to human again.
She had seduced him finally, after all these years. Elaina Meredith. Matt didn’t know what sickened him more, the sex or seeing her head explode as she came to orgasm atop him. All he could see in his mind were images of Rachel and the children, interspersed with a flickering image of her, his seducer, Elaina’s naked body over his, her breasts and stomach slick with sweat, her eyes squeezed shut and her face contorted into a grimace of pleasure.
What have I done?
He opened his eyes, unaware that he had even closed them. Red had come back into focus.
The butt of the gun slammed down into Matt’s stomach, bending him double. He cried out in agony, his naked body rolling from the couch on to the floor.
‘You sick bastard. You’re all in this together. You and those witches. I should have fucking known, I should have fucking done for you while I had the chance . . .’
The gun swung down across Matt’s shoulders, and he tried to roll out of the way, but it caught him a glancing blow across his upper back. Again he cried out in pain.
‘You knew about him . . . you knew about him!’ Red’s foot struck Matt’s chest. ‘You knew about my baby!’
‘I didn’t know . . . anything . . . I didn’t . . . huh?’
Matt couldn’t talk anymore. His eyes fell on the space where Elaina’s broken body should have been.
Elaina’s body had gone. In the space she should have been was just . . . nothing, as though she had vanished into the air. Matt stared, disbelieving. But no, perhaps she hadn’t vanished completely after all. Was that still a residue of her, a glowing, ephemeral essence, which still seemed to drift in her place, or just the stars wavering in his vision?
Another kick ripped his thoughts out of him.
Oh my god, where’s my focus, where’s my fucking mind?
‘You’re done, Matthew. You’re done.’
The butt of the shotgun slammed down again, striking Matt across the back. He heard a rubbery squelching sound and imagined his muscles being compressed like a sponge, followed by a sharp crack and a jolt of pain up his left side. He tried to crawl away, but another kick to the ribs forced him into a roll across the floor that brought him up in a crouch with the room’s end wall at his back. He felt a hot stickiness on his shoulders, and knew he was hurt badly there. His back screamed at him, a choking pain around his left kidney so strong he felt faint. Glancing down, he saw the front of his naked body was slick with a composite of sweat and blood, his stomach a horrifying assortment of cuts and grazes.
He looked up. Red, for the first time, seemed to have noticed Elaina’s disappearance. He stared down at the empty space on the floor that began by Matt’s feet, the gun held loosely by the barrel in his right hand, the other rubbing his head.
‘Not even blood,’ he said, head shaking from side to side. ‘Witches. I always knew. I always fucking knew.’
Suddenly Red slumped to his knees as though punched in the stomach. He cried out, and the gun clattered to the floor. Matt eyed it, tensed himself to make a grab for it, but it was no use, his back screamed at him and he leaned back, feeling the pain swim through his body. Was he bleeding inside? Had Red’s blows done something worse than bruise his skin? He felt too numb to know how hard he had been hit.
Red rolled backwards across the floor, face contorted in agony, hands clutching at his stomach. ‘You fucking . . . bitch, no, no, no!’
Matt, his own insides churning, tried to understand. Bethany’s words came back to him, haunting, echoing whispers in the dark caverns of his mind.
She is an angel.
He felt a cramping pain knife through him, saw a light suddenly grow behind him, and the beginning wind of what felt like forming whispers in his memory.
I can go where she goes. I am pure blood.
He stared at Red as words began to take shape in his mind, as bodies began to take shape in the light.
Mortal corruption. Men handle it in different ways. Women corrode. Men . . . destroy.
He shook his head in disbelief, understanding.
‘You’re one of them. You’re one of them, like my mother!’
‘This isn’t over, Cassidy!’ Red screamed, his gravelly voice pained, stricken.
Matthew. He is one of us. You must save him too.
He saw them now, taking shape out of the blinding light that lit up the world behind Red’s writhing body. His mother, and beside her: his sister.
Gabrielle and Bethany. Angels.
We have to go soon. The door is closing.
His mother seemed to glance down to where Elaina had fallen, her form wavering like an unsteady projection.
Hurry, Matthew, save him.
‘What . . . what the hell do you want me to do?’
Red screamed violently, clutching first at his stomach and then his throat, clawing himself, leaving bloody scratches on his skin.
The cord that holds him here is faltering. You must save him. His mortality means it is not strong enough to pull him back. You must give him back to us, otherwise it will tear his soul in two.
‘What the hell do you mean?’
Save him. Please.
What did they mean, save him? How?
Movement caught his eye. He looked towards the door, saw it flung open, a figure, at first silhouetted, rushing in. Holding something in his arms.
‘Red!’ Ian Cassidy’s eyes fell on the writhing figure of his fallen friend, then rose to his bloodied, naked son. ‘Matthew, oh my god.’ In his arms he held a tiny, moving bundle.
‘Dad!’
‘Matthew, what happened? What’s going on? I found the baby on the passenger seat of the truck. The engine was still running! How did you get here –’
Matthew hadn’t realised his father could see them, but as he watched Ian seemed to move in slow motion, turning back toward the end of the room, where the two women stood in the blinding brightness of what Matt could only describe as the light of Heaven itself.
‘Oh . . . my. My Gabrielle, and . . . and . . . my Bethany.’
There is not much time. Save him. The doorway is closing.
The words had been meant for Ian, Matthew knew, but they both heard. Ian turned toward his former friend, lying almost r
igid on the floor between himself and Matthew. Red’s back was horribly arched, his eyes bulging, one hand reaching out, the fingers straining for something only he could see.
Realisation dawned in Ian’s eyes. ‘I don’t believe it. All these years, I never realised.’ Ian looked back toward the two women. ‘He’s one of you, isn’t he?’
You must save him.
Ian ignored her, face wistful. ‘Why, Gabrielle? Why did you come to me? Of all people?’
The wavering form of Matthew’s mother seemed to smile.
Because I watched you. From up there. I loved you. So pure of heart. I will watch you still. I will watch you always, my angel.
Ian’s eyes filled with tears. He fell to his knees, his face cracking up. ‘Don’t leave me!’
I’ll always be with you.
‘I miss you so much!’ His eyes slipped from hers for a second. ‘And you, my Bethany . . .’
Matthew was sure her eyes filled with tears, but in the glittering light they looked like diamonds cascading down her face.
I love you. My Daddy.
‘Huh . . . I love you too, my beautiful, beautiful girl.’
My baby. Please give him to me. He will be safe with us, always. He will grow up to be a wonderful man. Like you are. Please, Father.
Ian looked from his daughter to the bundle in his hands. His eyes lingered a moment, then slowly he rose to his feet.
‘Here. If you can, take him.’ He held the bundle out.
The room seemed to explode with light, causing Matt to squeeze his eyes shut against it, one weak hand rising to shield him. When he opened them his father no longer held the baby. He squinted, the light hurting his eyes.
There it was, in her arms. One of them now.
He is beautiful. He will always be beautiful now.
Red screamed, rolling over, face pressed into the floor, hands gripping chunks of his matted hair.
