“Gnrl!” Rose replied, her face filled with pale fright. She had found her voice, but had yet to relearn the trick of getting it to say what it was told.
The demon smiled a bit. He had a beautiful smile. The sort of smile you could drown in, although she decided that it would be best not to. There were far too many teeth in it.
“Come here.” It wasn’t a command, not exactly, as her body was frozen stiff and there was nothing she could do to either obey or disobey. He stood so near her that she could feel the faint heat that radiated from his body, passing through his coat and through the cold night. She’d expected him to burn like hellfire, so the much-too-human intimacy of it was a disgruntling surprise. He tilted her chin up and murmured appreciatively. “You have beautiful eyes. Such a lovely shade of green. Let me just take a peek at how long . . .”
Rose tried to turn her face away, but her neck forced itself back into its initial position of its own accord. Or somebody’s accord, as it certainly wasn’t hers. She was forced to meet his gaze — he was examining her carefully, as if he were searching for brown spots on an apple he intended to eat — and was suddenly uncertain of what she was looking at.
She was staring into his eyes. She had to be. Her stare was meeting the space between his brow and cheekbones that should be occupied by eyes, and the strange trepidation she experienced was consistent with the feeling of holding someone’s gaze for longer than comfortable. If there were anything else there, she would have noticed it instantly; empty sockets or balls of glowing fire were bound to catch her attention. Therefore, the killer, demon or human or whatever else he was, had to have eyes. She just couldn’t read them, or say what color they were, or shake the disconcerting feeling that they weren’t there at all.
Her head was starting to hurt.
“Ah,” the demon said a moment later. “You are a lucky young woman, Miss Wright. Or rather, a very unlucky one, which in our present situation means that you are very lucky indeed. My apologies for keeping you.”
He made a small, elegant bow, tipped his hat and strode out of the alley without glancing back.
As soon as he was out of sight, a painful burn went up Rose’s legs, causing her to almost fall over. Once she got her balance back, she found that she was able to move on her own again. She took two awkward, stumbling steps forward, ran a shaking hand over her mouth and realized, to her relieved delight, that she was able to open it.
After that she spent ten seconds shrieking hard enough to break a shipment of crystal glasses, raised a hand to her forehead, and pivoted down to the ground in a dead faint.
“Was it really a demon, then?” Millie whispered through her teeth. Rose shot her a look, made a small, urgent gesture with her head and continued to knead the ball of dough in front of her. Millie took the hint, and only pressed on once Mrs. Cross was safely away from the kitchen and out of earshot. “You said it was a demon, I heard you tell the police last night! I was sent to bed, but you were raving about it so loud I could hear you from upstairs. Was he red with a tail and horns and sharp talons dripping blood?”
“No, Millie.” Rose had been forbidden from discussing the matter, but she was aware that there was only one way to make the questions stop. “He didn’t have a tail or horns or anything of the like. In fact, he looked . . . he looked Moorish. You know, like that actor in that play they were putting on at Milton’s square. The one who kills his lover in the end.”
“So he was handsome?”
Rose turned so fast she let a handful of flour fly onto the ground.
“Handsome? When did I imply he was handsome?”
“You said he looked like that man in the play. And, well, I happen to know for a fact that all the girls from here to Upton, and even some of the old married biddies, would fall over themselves to take a ride on his—”
“Millie!”
“—horse. What did you think I was going to say, Rosie?”
Rose shook her head to herself and pretended not to hear the mischievousness in the younger girl’s voice. Millie was the kind of person who simply couldn’t be made decent. Rose liked to think about herself as someone who wasn’t quick to make judgments of character without adequate evidence, but she suspected that her friend wasn’t even a virgin anymore. Anywhere.
“Do you know if they found out who the man was yet? The one he killed?” she asked, eager to change the subject. She didn’t think they would have, as his face had been butchered beyond recognition and she seemed to recall that with the others, it had taken weeks.
Still, the question made Millie close her mouth while she mulled over an answer.
“It’s the butcher’s son, you mark my words,” she ended up saying, very decisively. Millie tended to sound decisive when she had no idea what she was talking about. “He sneaks through that alley every third Friday of the month to visit his lady love down at the tannery. Though it could be anyone, really, what with the job your demon did on his face. Didn’t you think to ask him what he does with the eyes?”
“It . . . slipped my mind somehow.”
“I’ll bet you he eats them.”
Rose cringed.
“Well,” she replied, as diplomatically as possible, “I’m glad I was spared the chance to find out if you are right.”
Over the next few nights, Rose barely slept. On the rare occasions she did manage to doze off, it would only last for as long as it took to drop her into a nightmare. It was as if some twisted part of her had spent a lifetime collecting seeds of every dreadful thing she had witnessed or heard about, and was now taking the chance to throw them back at her, fully germinated and ready to do gleeful, terrible damage.
By the second week she slept better. It wasn’t that the nightmares were gone, it was that they perturbed her less as she became jaded to them. Her unconscious mind would attempt to attack her with visions of spilled guts and roasted babies and disembodied eyes, and she would wave them all away and get on with her life, as if they were no more than trivial annoyances.
By the third week, it was almost as if everything was back to normal.
It wasn’t, of course. But it felt nice to pretend.
Few people had believed her about the killer being demonic in nature, police included. Her most compelling argument, the fact that he had known her name without her telling him, had made them assume that the killer knew her because he lived nearby, perhaps in that very same neighborhood. The ensuing witch-hunt hadn’t brought anyone closer to capturing him, and almost killed business for every shop in the street. Things had calmed down since then, but there would still be a large cloud of tension hanging over every customer who came in.
The one person who bought her story hook, line and sinker was, oddly enough, Mrs. Cross. Mrs. Cross had grabbed her from the kitchen on the afternoon after the incident and dragged her to the nearest church, where she had harassed an altar boy — the priest being out to administer someone’s last rites — until he agreed to take a look at Rose and exorcize her if necessary. It had turned out not to be, or perhaps he’d only said it to hurry them out of the church before the priest returned, but Mrs. Cross had grudgingly taken him at his word and dragged her back to the bakery.
A month later, another murder was recorded on the other side of town. The hunt for the mysterious killer moved elsewhere, and everyone seemed to forget about Rose’s connection to the previous one, whose victim turned out to be, to her consternation and Millie’s smug satisfaction, the butcher’s son after all. After that, the nightmares stopped.
Rose felt relieved. She felt as if divine providence had ensured that everything would fall back into its proper place, allowing life to move forward. She felt as if the whole mess had at last come to an end. She spent five days immersed in that blissful, wishful conviction.
Then she started to have another kind of dream altogether.
Rose and Millie had shared the attic for as long as they’d lived at the bakery. Rose used to have the bed against the wall and Millie the o
ne beside the window. However, in the aftermath of the murder, Millie had complained and asked to switch, her reasoning being that if the killer came back to finish his work on Rose, she didn’t want to be gutted just because she was in the way.
Rose had obliged, although she secretly believed that Millie wanted her bed less out of concern for her own safety, and more because it was winter, and it was cold, and it got colder the closer you were to the window. Now she lay, shivering and half-awake, under a blanket that barely covered her. A while later her eyes gave up their struggle to remain open, and she dreamed.
She was used to not knowing how her dreams started — or how they ended, unless it was with her waking suddenly. Therefore, she didn’t find anything unnatural about gaining awareness within a scene that appeared to have been playing itself out for quite some time. She was merely pleased that nothing about her surroundings felt particularly nightmarish.
The scenery was, in fact, rather nice, in a patchwork-of-familiar-places kind of way. She recognized parts of the cleaner, posher side of town, which she had visited on occasion and been properly impressed by. They’d been seamlessly fused with the more common and more familiar slice of neighborhoods beside the river. Behind those buildings lay sprawling hills and countryside and homey-looking cottages. There weren’t any roads. The space between the constructions was a mantle of mint-green grass dotted with flowers as small as pinheads.
She was walking — aimlessly, it seemed to her, although she was certain that her dream-self had some sort of aim in mind — towards the clock tower that jutted from atop one of the higher hills. Then she was right in front of it, with a suddenness that almost didn’t register. It seemed only proper that dreams would cut corners.
Rose walked up to the steps. The skirts of her dress — a dress much more beautiful than anything she could hope to own in real life — fell into a perfect arrangement as she sat down to wait.
A figure soon appeared in the distance, small but still instantly recognizable. The sureness of his walk, the well-trimmed coat, the tall, black hat, the white smile, left no room for mistaken identities.
Her breath caught. She should have guessed that the prettiness of the environment was a trick.
The killer approached, took off his hat and bowed, as he had done when they’d parted in reality. Rose dropped her eyes to her lap, intent on avoiding him as much as the dream’s script allowed, and tried to figure out why she didn’t feel afraid. Fear and concern for her own life had, after all, been permanent fixtures in all of her previous nightmares. His presence meant that this had to be another one, but it didn’t feel as such. Not yet.
She was aware of every subtle movement of his body as he sat down next to her.
“Good evening, Miss Wright. Or is it afternoon?”
“Good evening,” Rose replied. Her dream-self appeared to be under the impression that good manners were appropriate for the situation. Her more lucid self heartily disagreed, but her mouth didn’t belong to it for the time being. “And how do you do, sir?”
“I like what you did with the place.” It took her a while to understand it as a compliment, and another to realize that it was directed at their surroundings. He seemed to consider her responsible for them. She supposed he wasn’t wrong. “Most people who dream about what they know try to leave it the way it is, even if all they can manage is an imperfect shadow. You take the world you know and make it better. Sunnier. Greener. Even if it’s just in dreams.”
“This is a dream, then?” she had no idea why she said it like a question, let alone what had possessed her to seek confirmation. “I hoped I had stopped dreaming about you.”
“Do you dream about me often?”
“I do.” She dared to look up. He was handsome, here, or at least handsomer than he had been in that alley, although in all fairness, at the time it had been far too dark to get a look at anything but the essentials. Inwardly, she blamed Millie. If the other girl hadn’t started talking about the actor and his many conquests, her dreams wouldn’t have reached for beauty to fill in the gaps her memory had left in his face. “For a while it was almost every night.”
“Ah. Pleasant dreams, I hope.”
“Not at all.” In her nightmares she had wandered through a bleak, apocalyptic wasteland, while he stalked her with merciless persistence, knife in hand, ready to strike. Sometimes he dragged her against a wall and carved her face out before drawing a red smile on her throat. Sometimes he remained a figure in the background, where he gorged himself on freshly-reaped eyes. Sometimes he blinded her, and she would hear his maniacal laughter as she tried to fruitlessly hold on to the memory of light. “They are vile. I wish I knew how to put a stop to them.”
“That should be simple enough.” He yawned and stretched against the wall, which bent to accommodate the curve of his back and for a brief instant, went all the colors of the rainbow. Rose cherished that little bit of surrealism, for nothing if not for the reminder that truly, she was not in a place where things were meant to make sense. “You just need to replace them with dreams you can enjoy. Would you like me to show you how?”
She struggled with her curiosity, but it didn’t take long for it to get the better of her.
“Yes.”
He smiled, stood up and extended a hand, which she accepted with only the barest, most stifled hint of a second thought. His skin was warm, and oddly smooth — oddly because when she looked down, she saw that there were scars running all over it, from his fingertips to his wrists and probably beyond, creating a light spider web pattern on his darker skin. She wondered where he had gotten them from.
“As I said . . .” He brought her closer. Rose followed his lead, dazed. She was trembling. There were obvious, serviceable reasons why she would be, so that wasn’t strange, but it worried her that none of them felt like they applied. “Simple. All you need to do is allow things to happen the way they wish to happen.”
“What things?” Rose asked. She stared fixedly into the killer’s eyes — she still couldn’t tell what color they were, but now she was at least able to meet them without feeling dizzy or sick —, while also feeling imminently aware that the landscape was sliding from green, sunny outdoors into something . . . else. Something, someplace, darker. The lights dimmed, leaving behind a halo of brightness that wavered between them as if she were lifting an invisible candle.
“I’ll show you.”
He stretched out his hand and brought it to the top of her head, where he started untying the knot in her hair. Rose didn’t try to stop him. It was better to have his hands there than on her throat. Even so, the way he was handling her disconcerted her. True, she had good hair — thick, hard to pull out and reasonably well-behaved — but he seemed fascinated by it to an unreasonable, eyebrow-raising degree.
He started arranging it over her shoulders, twisting his head this way and that to appreciate his work. A hint of fear crept inside her, and failed to leave even when she tried to evacuate it with the reminder that here, he could do her no permanent harm.
This dream was different, she decided. Not just because it was light on red coals and dungeons, but because unlike the others, it allowed her a measure of awareness. Rather than having her personhood stripped off so that she could fill the role of hapless victim, she was allowed to think for herself and know what was happening. Which, bizarrely enough, made it all seem so much more tangible, so much more . . .
Real.
“Are you going to kill me?” she asked quietly.
He froze. His hands left her hair alone and moved down to her upper arms, where they exerted a gentle but firm pressure. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been enough to keep her from moving, but some twisted dream-logic had decided it should feel just as constricting as a length of chain.
“Of course not, Rose — may I call you Rose? Why would you expect me to do that?”
She almost laughed out loud. It was a ridiculous question, coming from where it came. Like having a physician act affronted
and surprised when a sick person was brought to their door.
“You had just slaughtered a man when we met.”
“Yes. And I spared you then, because I had nothing to gain from your death. Which I still don’t. Furthermore, killing you here would be . . . ineffective. It would only frighten you and make you less receptive to my attentions.”
“Attentions?”
“Yes.” He smiled brightly. “It’s what I came here for. You should know better than to lock eyes with strangers, my dear. They are, after all, the mirrors of the soul. And once you’ve let someone take a look at that, well . . . you never know if they won’t be able to carve a way back.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I didn’t expect you to.”
“What do you want from me?”
He drew closer, until the tip of his nose was brushing her cheek, leaving his mouth angled in such a way that it almost caught the corner of her lips. Her earlier hint of fear grew into a beast of its own, voracious, all-consuming.
She knew this part. His hands would soon slide away, one to her wrists, to pull them together behind her back, one to the nape of her neck, to run along the salient bones there and rest just above her vocal chords. After that he’d whisper terrible things — or perhaps not, since this seemed like a polite dream so far — and follow them up with the sharp, damning kiss of a blade.
And then she’d wake.
But that was not how things went.
One of his hands went to her wrist, yes, but it didn’t stop there and it didn’t try to catch hold of it. It continued down, until he was able to enlace his fingers with hers. The other travelled up her spine, its touch more sinuous, more seductive than the detached, matter-of-fact manipulation of flesh of a murderer at work.
The Darker Side of Love (A Dark Erotica Boxed Set) Page 41
