by Hixon, Wayne
Once over the rise, Zack’s hands guided her to the left. Then he forced her down onto a plot with a moderately sized tombstone. She hadn’t really thought they would be fucking on an actual grave but with the little knowledge she had gained from Zack she now realized he probably wouldn’t have had it any other way. The name on the tombstone was “Gordon Turner.” She briefly wondered why that name sounded familiar to her but her thoughts were cut off when Zack whispered harshly in her ear. “Not one mutter until we are out of this graveyard. Understand?”
She nodded her head, her eyes burning into him, eager and nervous for what was about to happen.
He unbuttoned her jeans and yanked them down her legs. He kissed the inside of her thigh, working his mouth up to where her leg joined her groin. There he bit down. She wanted to shout at him to stop—it was so shocking and painful—but she knew he was serious about what he said and she didn’t think she could live with the knowledge that her protestation had cost her everything. She bit down on her lip and his teeth worked their way into her skin. She closed her legs around his ears, dug her fingertips into the back of his head. She could swear she heard the soft pop of her skin as his teeth found admittance. Once opened, he drank of her. She arched her back into the moist, cool grass, her muscles straining against his mouth. Tears streamed from her eyes. But, at the same time, she found this as pleasurable as if his mouth were clasped over her sex. She orgasmed before he had her underwear pulled from her hips.
He rose to his knees, blood-stained around his mouth. With his left hand, he shoved her shirt up over her breasts and went to work on the nipples—flicking them, twisting them, pulling them until she thought they would tear. With his right hand he unbuttoned his black pants and pushed them down. He stroked himself, moving his left hand down to brutally pinch her clitoris between thumb and forefinger.
When she thought she couldn’t take it any more, he took his hand away. For just a few moments, there was no contact at all and she felt her body reaching for his.
Then he was in her, all the way in, all at once, and she wondered how someone with such cold hands could be so warm inside her. Raking his shirt out of the way, she closed her mouth around his shoulder and, remembering how he bit her, let her teeth bite into him. She heard him grunt and, at the same time, felt him grow impossibly large within her, thrusting even more brutally until he spasmed, pulling his cock out and rubbing it against the lips of her cunt.
Clutching himself tightly in his right hand, he scrambled out from between her legs and came to rest on his knees, feeding his cock into her mouth. She didn’t want it there but she couldn’t say anything now. He filled her mouth, his left hand keeping her from backing away. She tasted herself, gagged as the tip of his penis pushed against the back of her throat before exploding in warm ropes of come.
He pulled it out. She coughed, thinking it wasn’t nearly as bad as she thought it would be.
He looked into her eyes and, in that second, everything was washed away from her. All the pain, all the pleasure dissipated, leaving her with an eerie sense of complete and total calm. Complete and total satisfaction.
He stood up and pulled up his pants. She stayed on the ground, collecting her underwear, damp with her own come. She pulled them on before reaching for her jeans she just knew were grass stained. She stood up and pulled them on, watching him as he stared out toward the woods at the foot of the cemetery’s hill. She shook, unable to control her muscles.
A thin fog had developed. There was something strange about the fog. There were parts where it seemed to be thicker than others and these parts, maybe it was just her imagination, resembled human forms. She looked all around and noticed these were everywhere. She thought she could even see them rising from the graves. Not zombies, but some blue essence. She didn’t think she would ever be able to explain it and would probably have forgotten all about it in the morning. Maybe Zack’s come was a hallucinogen.
Before zipping and buttoning her pants, she reached her hand inside to rub the bite on her thigh. It stung greatly but it didn’t seem to be bleeding. The welts felt hot on her hands and for the first time she wondered not who Zack was, but what he was.
He started down the walk to the cemetery gates and she followed him.
When he had first bitten her, she had grand plans of reaming him as soon as they were outside of the cemetery. She was going to tell him he needed to give her a little warning if he was going to pull shit like that. He had trumped that with his finale, however. And once they were back on the streets of Lynchville, she realized she didn’t really care about any of it anyway. In fact, as they walked silently back to her house, she was almost certain she wanted him to do it again.
They didn’t say a word until they were in front of her house.
She threw her arms around him and kissed him deeply, thinking of what she could say that would bring him back.
“That was great,” she said, feeling lame.
“Yes. It was. You were great. You tasted good.”
“I got a little taste of myself.”
“Mmmm, that.”
“When will I see you again?”
“When I’m standing in front of you.”
“Jesus, that’s so cryptic.”
“I can’t make promises I might not be able to keep.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’ll see me again if I’m able to come to you.”
“I’m still not sure I understand. Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“We’re all in some kind of trouble, if you stop to think about it.”
“Maybe I don’t think about it that much.”
“I want to see you again. Is that what you want to hear? I very very much want to see you again.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
She gave him another hug, pressing his bones into her bones, before turning to go back into the house. She felt his eyes watching her as she walked across the side yard. She even thought she felt his eyes watching her as she lay in her bed, drifting off in the narcotic smell of his sweat and the taste of his come on the back of her tongue.
Four
Zack wandered down out of the hills into the clearing of the hollow. It was too small to be called a valley. It was a place of secrets. A dark place. Hills rose on all sides, nearly obliterating the sky. Even with the moon hanging swollen and full overhead this was a place too dark for shadows.
Coming into the clearing, the same fear gripped him that gripped him every night.
What if he didn’t see the house?
Zack knew, in order to see the house, the owners of the house had to want you to see it. That was the first step. The house was a place of great power. Or, maybe, the people living in the house contained the power. Part of this power was the giving and taking of the house. Ever since seeing those people from his bedroom, months ago in a California suburb, Zack had desperately strove to be in their favor. Ilya and Ernst. Zack had yet to find out their last names, if they even had last names. It had taken him quite some time to figure out their first names. They had seduced him in much the same way he was seducing Charlotte. After seeing them for the first time, he wanted to be with them. They made him feel powerful. They promised him some of their power. They said he was chosen.
Zack stood at the edge of the clearing, marveling at the way the hollow seemed to absorb the moonlight, and waited for the house to appear. Standing on a gravel road running along a ridge traversing the hollow, Zack strained his eyes into the darkness. Since meeting Ilya and Ernst, he had become something of a nocturnal creature. His eyes had adjusted well to the dark. Still, he could not see the house.
Longing for the sight of the house, desperation scrabbled around in his head. He knew this was part of it. It was all just part of their game. Part of his training. The panic. The anxiety. So far, the house had not failed to appear to him.
All of a sudden it was there, standing in front of him in its sad and dark glory.<
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It did not slowly appear as Zack had at first assumed it would, as it usually did. Most times he watched it carve itself out of the mist and darkness hanging in the air, like a ghost putting on substance for a haunting. This time was different. One second he stood there staring at nothing and then when he got tired of staring he blinked his eyes and when he opened them again the house was there with all the blinking suddenness of a light bulb. Waiting for him. Begging him to come in.
He walked down the hill from the ridge, across the clearing, deeper into the hollow, his insides tingling with some dark revelation.
Since coming to Lynchville, he had familiarized himself with many of the legends surrounding the town. Some of them were simply mundane—haunting, disappearances, insanity—common rumors surrounding any small town. Others were terrifying. Some of them were merely disgusting. He didn’t know how many of them were true and he didn’t know how many of them were attributable to Ernst and Ilya and, in truth, he didn’t really care. There was a time when he would have cared. There was a time when what he was doing would have appalled him, but that time had passed. It passed the second he had looked out the window and saw Ilya standing curiously beneath an oak tree in his front yard. There had been a light radiating from her eyes. A milky bluish white that reached through the darkness of the night and wrapped itself around his very being. There was magic in those eyes and he would spend the rest of his life searching for that magic, if necessary.
That was the last night he had spent in his house, the last night he had seen his parents or any of his friends. The last night he had felt anything resembling a childhood.
Over the past several months, Ernst and Ilya had trained him. Trained him to be like them. And all the while, they had regaled him with tales of power. Power was something he had never had. Power was only something his lawyer father and advertising exec mother wielded over him. Power was something he craved. And now there were these people, strange though they had seemed to him at first, who promised him unlimited power. Freedom from death. Freedom from money. Freedom from society. Freedom was power. And all he had to do was die first.
This was what his training built toward. Death. Followed by life. It didn’t make any sense but he had seen it work. It wasn’t like a Christian afterlife, something built solely on faith. This other death, this other afterlife, was something he had seen firsthand. It was something he could believe in. He had seen both Ilya and Ernst drink from the jugular of countless people. He had seen those people walk after death. So he believed and belief, like freedom, was also power.
Like tonight in the graveyard. He knew Charlotte did not understand what they had seen—the shapes in the fog—but he did. They had seen the Devils. These were not the powerful Devils, people like Ilya and Ernst, but they were people who lived a life after death, free to roam the dark countryside. The shapes in the graveyard were what anyone living outside Lynchville would call ghosts. Here, they were not ghosts, they were the Devils, harmless Devils, unwilling to take human life. Just like Ilya and Ernst were not vampires or serial killers. Here, they were also the Devils. Perhaps Zack was beginning to understand why they had wanted to come here. Why they had brought their house here.
The house was an old Victorian farmhouse. The whole structure sagged into the earth, decomposing into its original elements. Whatever paint covered it at one time was long gone and now the wood was gray and warped and smelled faintly of decay, better years buried deep within its pulp.
Its porch had completely collapsed on the right side, the porch’s roof threatening to go next. Four large windows lined the second floor of the house. Once upon a time, he supposed, these windows used to be ornate. Now they were without glass, little more than holes in the side of the house. The two windows on the end were larger than the two in the middle and made him think of eyes. Two large windows stood empty on the first floor, a door in the middle. The door used to be fairly elaborate also. Now the carvings had been worn away and the door looked like it could be kicked in easier than it could be opened.
Drawing closer to the house, he could feel its power, like a vacuum, sucking him in. Carefully treading the warped steps of the porch, he pulled the front door open onto a sparsely furnished living room. The only thing in the room was a Tiffany blue couch pushed back against the far wall. It was an odd, vibrant color, clashing with the decay of the house’s interior.
Ernst and Ilya sat on the couch, waiting for him.
“Zack,” Ernst said.
He stood up, unfolding his tall, thin figure. He wore a suit that looked like it had once belonged to an undertaker, formfitting, filthy and moth eaten. His skin was very pale and his knotty black hair hung down to his shoulders. His golden eyes gleamed at Zack.
“Have you brought anything for us today?”
“No.”
“Of course,” he said, almost sadly. “Ilya and I are hungry, Zack.”
“I know you are. I will bring something, I promise.”
“Why do you wait so long?”
“Because I want it to be something you enjoy. I brought you a taste.”
Zack approached the daunting height of Ernst. The man reached toward his face and, with the chipped fingernail of his index finger, flaked away a piece of dried blood from the corner of Zack’s mouth. Then he leaned down and placed his mouth over Zack’s, his tongue rubbing against Zack’s teeth, scraping away whatever essence remained of Charlotte’s blood.
“Mmmm,” he said, a disturbing smile curving the corners of his mouth. “That is good. Ilya, come and taste this.”
The woman stood up from the couch. She smoothed her long black skirt, brushed her blond, almost-white hair from her shoulders and approached Zack. She was as short as Ernst was tall. She stood in front of Zack and plaintively extended her head toward him. He bent down and let her kiss him. With Ilya, he kissed back, putting his tongue in her mouth, tasting the murky bitterness of death. She never protested, so absorbed in sucking this flavor from Zack.
“Mmmmm. That is nice. When will you bring her to us?”
“Soon.”
“‘Soon’ will not do,” Ernst said. “We are starving. All of our captives are going just to feed the Fire. We watch as their blood is boiled away inside their bodies. And I don’t know how long that idiot is going to last before he gets caught. He can’t be expected to feed both us and the Fire. That would get him caught for sure.”
“Yes, I know.”
“So when are you going to bring us this girl?” Ernst said. “It is a girl, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I will bring her to you when you are ready to make me one of you.”
“I’m afraid it is not that easy.”
“So you’ve been lying to me.”
“No. Not at all. We can turn you into a Devil. That is not hard. I could kill you right now and, just by dying at my hand, you would become a Devil. But only time can make you what Ilya and I are. Time and training.”
“I know I have to start somewhere.”
“So why don’t you start with this girl? Bring her to us and we can all share and you can feel death and when you wake up she will be the first thing you taste. You will feel, in death, her blood come alive on your tongue and dance in your mouth. Is that what you want?”
“Very much so. That is the only thing I want.”
“Then you shall have it. Tomorrow. We cannot go another night without sustenance. If you can’t do it then we will have to find someone who can. The Idiot is working on his own project or I’d have him bring us some meat and leave the fire to suffer.”
Zack nodded his head. “It will be done.”
“We have to leave you now,” Ernst said.
“Until tomorrow,” Ilya said, her lips curling up in the same creepy smile as Ernst’s.
They walked to one of the back rooms of the house and Zack knew they were going below. While he had been allowed below the house, he had never been farther than the first room. He had never been allowed into the Low Church, w
here the Dark Fire burned. He had been tempted to go down several times when he knew Ernst and Ilya would either be asleep or away but he knew they would still be able to see him, to see what he was doing. Sometimes he could feel them in his head, behind his eyes, processing the information he took in. He knew they already knew Charlotte’s name, what she looked like, what she felt like and, after tonight, they now knew what she tasted like.
He went back out onto the porch, sitting on the top step and watching the faint blue shimmers of the harmless Devils flicker in the woods.
He had plans of his own but he couldn’t think about them at length, afraid Ilya or Ernst would know what he was thinking. If they knew about his plans then he would be dead and, knowing life after death was exactly what he wanted, they would prevent him from ever achieving that.
Five
Rachel thought her eyes were open but she couldn’t be sure. If they were then, wherever she was, it was seriously dark. She lay in the cold muck, listening to the splashing sounds around her head that now felt oddly swollen and tried to figure out how many people surrounded her. It didn’t really matter how many of them there were. The more important thing was what they planned on doing to her. Something inside of her wanted this to be some dark nightmare but she knew that wasn’t the case. Whatever was happening to her was real and she had to treat it as such. She could not allow herself any of the passivity her nightmares had afforded her.
Footsteps sloshed around her.
“How do you want to do this?” a woman’s voice asked. Or maybe it was a girl’s. She didn’t sound very old.
“I don’t know,” another voice said. This one belonged to a man. A young man. Possibly a teenager. “Why don’t you grab hold of her ankles. I’ll get her under the arms.”
Were there only two of them? If so, this came as a comfort to Rachel, although she didn’t know if she stood any chance of escaping at all. She hadn’t moved since hearing them come down, playing dead or at least seriously injured. And she wasn’t sure she would be able to move appropriately when the time came.
