The deadbolt burst off the wall as the door slammed open.
“No,” he somehow managed to say as he stared at the—thing that stood in the doorway. The greenish-gray scales glistened wetly in the light from the overhead lamp. But it was man-shaped—and naked.
And aroused.
But the head—
It started walking towards him.
He fired the gun, but the bullets didn’t stop the thing.
All he could hear was the pounding of his heart as the creature drew nearer. The glowing yellow eyes met his, and he felt its scaly hands grab onto his shirt.
He closed his eyes and prayed to a deity he no longer believed in.
He could feel hot breath on his face that stank of stagnant water and rotted flesh.
Please God….
He felt like weeping.
His gun dropped as the thing lifted him up in the air.
A cold wet hand grasped his cock through his pants.
It carried him across the cabin, and through the doorway into the bedroom. It placed him gently on the bed, unsnapping his pants, running the zipper down. He kept his eyes closed as he felt his underwear and pants being tugged down his legs.
His legs were pushed apart, lifted.
And something was pressing against his asshole, pressing hard, anxiously.
He bit his lower lip as the enormous cock entered him.
He screamed.
Pain turned into pleasure.
And everything faded to black.
*
“Tom?”
He opened his eyes.
“Man, you were dead to the world.” Rafe’s face hovered into his view. He sat down on the edge of the bed and yawned. “Man, what a night.”
Tom sat up in the bed, his mind slowly adjusting to where he was. The wind-up clock on the nightstand read 3:35. His pants, shirt, and underwear were neatly folded in the far corner of the room. It was still raining—he could hear it pattering on the roof of the houseboat. He rubbed his eyes. “What—was—“ he couldn’t find the words. “What happened?”
“It was a rougarou, all right.” Rafe shook his head. “Mom took him out with one shot. It was one of the Robideaus—Davey. He was only sixteen.” Rafe sighed, and lit a cigarette with a shaking hand. He inhaled, blowing out smoke at the ceiling. He smelled of sour alcohol. “Mom thought we should stake out the Robideau place…and sure enough, Davey came out into the storm and changed…he almost got Billy Breaux, but Mom shot him.” He gave Tom a sad smile. “We went back to Mom’s and had some drinks.” He held out his shaking hand and barked out a harsh laugh. “Seeing someone turn—that’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get used to.”
Tom closed his eyes, and could see the beautiful young man changing again in front of him on the other bank of the bayou. “You,” he managed to get out after a moment, “saw him change, you said?”
Rafe nodded, flicking ash into his hand. “Be glad you didn’t see it.”
Tom bit his lip. Did I dream the whole thing?
“We need to figure out what to write in our report.” Rafe sighed. “The Robideaus aren’t going to contradict anything we say. And the sheriff— “
“Does he know now?” Tom asked, reaching for the pack of cigarettes on the bedside table.
Rafe nodded. “I think it’s best to give the sheriff credit, don’t you think?”
Tom lit the cigarette. The smoke felt great, and he could feel himself calming somewhat. He sighed. Just a dream—that’s all it was. But it seemed so real… “I think that’s probably the best idea, don’t you?”
Rafe got up and walked over to the door. “Yeah.” He paused in the doorway and smiled back at his partner. “Get some sleep, buddy. We got to drive back to New Orleans early in the morning.”
He shut the door behind him. Tom took another hit from the cigarette and put it out in the ashtray. He scooted across the bed and winced.
He was sore.
That was some vivid dream, he thought as he glanced out the porthole window. There was the big live oak the boy had appeared under in the dream.
When we get back to New Orleans, I’m turning in my resignation, he decided as he watched the rain spatter and run down the window. Enough of this shit.
He glanced at the neat pile of his clothes in the corner, which he didn’t remember folding. He sat back down on the edge of the bed.
There were two angry red scratches on his inner thighs.
You can be infected, he heard Cammie’s voice in his head again.
“It was just a dream,” he said out loud. “There couldn’t have been two of them, could there?”
No, that was crazy.
I must have scratched myself in my dream, he thought as he got back into the bed, pulling the blanket up to his chin.
He turned off the light and closed his eyes.
But it was a long time before Tom was finally able to fall asleep.
Bargain Books
Vince A. Liaguno and Chad Helder
Sometimes the best reads can be found in the bins of bargain bookstores, those treasure troves of literary outcasts whose dusty shelves are swollen with gems of manhandled prose and glossy bundles of publisher’s overstocks. Lucas Ridgeway found just such a treasure on the first day of summer vacation while perusing the seemingly endless systematic rows of books at Canterbury Tales, the small town’s only bookstore whose name both belied its minimalism and stood defiant in a conspicuous absence of bestsellers and mocha lattes.
The tome had been nestled in the corner of the tallest shelf, its cracked spine and barely legible title bespeaking the antiquity of the book. Curious, Lucas had hoisted himself up on one of the lower shelves, confident in the sturdiness of the massive oaken bookshelf. His fingers grazed the book, flecks of aged bookbinding coming loose at his touch. It had taken a few moments of concentrated struggle to dislodge the book from its mooring, as if the book itself resisted his pull. Finally, the book came free amidst a puff of antediluvian dust, and Lucas hopped off the bookshelf and landed with a heavy thud on the wooden floor. He gazed down at the cover of his hard-won prize, marveled at the scholarly-looking artifact as if it were a rare archeological find.
The Art of Invisibility.
Lucas opened the book in the middle. Before his eyes recorded the strange words on the yellowing page, his nose detected something vaguely unpleasant beneath the normal musty pungency of an old book – something unpleasant, but familiar. Unable to place the familiar odor, Lucas’s eyes settled upon the page and discovered the instructions for the beginning of a ritual. The more he read the bizarre instructions, the more a distinct voice slowly materialized on the periphery of his mind, a voice that recited the book along with Lucas. Wanting to know how long the passage would continue before something interesting happened, he turned the page. The next page was identical to the one he had just been reading. This was a very rare find indeed, not only was the book old, but a defective printing. Lucas kept turning the pages. All of them the same – all depicting the strange ritual.
Lucas closed the book excitedly and hurried to the cash register to pay for his newfound prize. The shopkeeper, an elderly woman dressed in billowy layers of caftan with enough beads and bangles around her neck and wrists to single-handedly keep Mardi Gras afloat, glanced down at the book skeptically, furrowed her eyebrows at Lucas, and then shrugged, dismissing the strange subject matter as the innocuous follies of an adolescent mind.
As Lucas left the bookshop, he was vaguely cognizant of the new voice in his head continuing to read the passage. The voice was neither male nor female, but rather a gender ambiguous intonation of almost mechanically precise elocution. The narrator’s voice, mellifluous and resonant, continued to describe the ritual. When the voice passed the point in the text where Lucas had closed the cover, a growing sense of unease escalated with the volume of the voice. Once the voice finished the bizarre passage, it started over again.
Lucas headed for his house, crossing the old railroad bridge ove
r the irrigation ditch; first, Lucas would need to dig a hole, the voice told him. It was strange idea that kept repeating over and over in his mind, as if the words were stuck in a looping reel. Although the entire passage continued to be recited, the words dig a hole seemed to grow in emphasis. Lucas could almost see the words now, a glowing triumvirate of tangible vocabulary visualized against a scrolling, fuzzy backdrop of handwritten text. It was as if the strange font of the page he had merely scanned in the bookstore was now imprinted upon the canvas of his mind.
He turned right onto Sycamore Drive, the block that served as destination to the modest home of the Ridgeway clan. Halfway up the block, the insistent intonation still repeating its mysterious instructions, Lucas stopped and stared ahead at the Shaughnessy house. He felt a familiar stirring in his midsection. In the driveway, amidst a spray of garden hose and soapsuds, was the Shaughnessy’s eldest son, Drew.
Nineteen and freshly returned from his first year at college, Drew Shaughnessy was a spectacle of collegiate athleticism and bookish charm. He stood in the center of the driveway hosing the cab of his father’s steel-gray Dodge Ram, his shirtless torso of porcelain and freckles defiant in the scorching sun. With a short crop of fiery red hair and deep set eyes the color of emerald, Drew had been the conflicting object of Lucas’ interest since the eighth grade when he first spied the then-sophomore on the bus to school. Lucas remembered scooting down in his seat, knees braced against the back of seat in front of him, head down as Drew got on the bus each morning. He could still see the image of Drew’s lean musculature from the waist down as he passed, the alluring worn spots on his jeans, the rip of denim on his right thigh revealing a fleeting hint of alabaster skin, the precarious shortage of fabric between t-shirt and waistband that some days gave him an titillating glimpse of belly button and the faintest hint of orange peach fuzz if Drew hoisted his heavy satchel of textbooks at just the right moment.
It was shortly after his confusing preoccupation with Drew Shaughnessy began that Lucas embarked on his own journey of self-discovery. In what Lucas regarded as an eternity on the timeline of adolescence, he could recall those tenuous first touches in the darkness of his bedroom, not understanding where they would lead him and slightly afraid of the strong compulsion to follow them through to their unspecified conclusion. He remembered that images of Drew accompanied him throughout the journey, were ever-present in multiple incarnations – a veritable Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot. Drew at softball practice, long legs ensconced in tight white and black-striped fabric…Drew at swim practice, a vision of sinewy tendons and ripples of lean muscle punctuated by the navy-blue spandex of his Speedo…Drew holding Angie Amato up against the brick wall of their high school with fevered kisses, one hand firmly holding her dainty wrists above her head while the weight of his powerful body pressed urgently into her as his lips sucked hungrily at hers. The images morphed over time, some replayed over and over again, others a one-shot deal. Images lengthened into movie scenes played out behind closed eyes, a game of connect-the-dots between images and actions played out over languid nights surrounded by Batman posters and the watery glow of his fish tank. And as Lucas realized his own abilities and took himself as his first lover, Drew was with him every step of the way.
As Lucas resumed his step and neared closer to the Shaughnessy’s driveway, the voice inside his head grew stronger, more powerful with each footfall. Lucas began to swoon in the harsh midday heat, and his head throbbed from the persistence of the monotonous articulation. As he passed perpendicular to Drew, who now labored with his back to Lucas with long circular motions with a large sponge on the hood of the Dodge Ram that made the muscles on his back jump and pop like snaps from a cap gun, the voice reached deafening crescendo.
DIG A HOLE. DIG A HOLE. DIG A HOLE.
Hands flying to his ears to shelter them from the vociferous sound and nearly falling to his knees directly into the retreating water of Drew’s car wash, Lucas suddenly found himself standing directly in front of the object of his obsession.
“I said are you OK?” Drew asked, still holding the wet sponge that dribbled on the sidewalk.
“Oh yeah, I mean...this is a killer migraine. The only thing to do is hide under the covers in a dark bedroom.”
Drew looked at Lucas a little less like he thought Lucas was a total mental case. “Yeah my mom gets those too. If you want, I could find out the name of the pills she takes.”
“Oh, no...you don’t have to do that. I mean, I really appreciate that, but it’s totally cool. I just need to sleep it off.”
“Suit yourself,” Drew said, immediately turning his back on Lucas and returning to the task of washing the car.
Lucas loitered for a moment in mid-thought as he attempted to think of something to prolong the conversation, but his mind fired a series of blanks. And just as Drew started to notice that Lucas still lingered, the horrible voice resumed.
DIG A HOLE. DIG A HOLE. DIG A HOLE.
Lucas broke into a run for his house. He sprinted up the empty driveway and bolted for the backyard. Only when he needed to unlatch the bolt to his mother’s gardening shed did he remove his hands from his ears, realizing that they had done nothing to ebb the pounding words that were being recited like an otherworldly broken record in his head. He dove into the eight foot by ten-foot enclosure and made great haste in locating the shovel. Panting, desperate to silence the voice, Lucas scanned the yard with frenzied sweeps of his eyes. Locating a neglected patch of grass behind a behemoth maple tree in the southwest corner of the yard, Lucas set to work digging the infernal hole that the equally infernal voice now seemed to command. Within minutes, Lucas shoved the ancient book, regarded only a short time ago with the unmitigated pride of discovery, into its shallow grave and frantically raked dirt across the hole with his fingers.
The voice stopped abruptly, replaced by the suddenly tranquil sounds of birds chirping and a lawnmower humming somewhere in the distance. Lucas heaved a sigh of relief and leaned back against the maple tree, his head settling and mind clearing. The voice was silent, the dirt acting as a hand clamping tightly across the mouth of the book.
*
Lucas picked at his mother’s meatloaf later that evening, his fork absently swirling kernels of school bus yellow corn into a heavy cloud of white mashed potatoes on his plate.
“Luke, you ok, son?” his father asked with characteristic paternal concern.
“Fine, Dad,” he answered. “Just tired. May I be excused?” His mother, whose maternal worry matched his father’s paternalism chin chuck-to-chin chuck, answered by placing the back of her hand against his forehead.
“Cool,” she said to his father, as if communicating a secret weather report. His father shrugged before returning to his own plate, and his mother kissed his forehead.
“Good night, dear,” she said sweetly, and Lucas left the table.
Later that night, somewhere between checking his Facebook page and searching for Internet porn, Lucas’ eyes grew heavy with the unprocessed disorder of the day. His head nodded in front of the glowing computer screen, and when he awoke with a start, he found himself outside in the backyard.
Lucas was drawn to a shadow behind the maple tree. The bulbous moon presided over the hot summer night, and Lucas crossed the yard wearing only the Donald Duck boxer shorts his Aunt Martha had given him last Christmas. The grass felt cool under his feet as he took another step toward the shallow grave of the book, shielded from the bright moonlight by the maple tree. A low, constant noise like a lawnmower attempting to start sounded at once like monstrous weeping and desperate laughter.
When Lucas stepped into the shadow of the maple, he could see the bloated ground above the book’s grave, and he could perceive movement, like a belly squirming with an overripe brood or a blanket thrown over a nest of rats. Lucas knew that the noise did not emanate from the grave, but actually ripped loose from his own throat in deep, exhausting screams as he watched a naked young man emerge from the mois
t earth of the shallow grave – a young man with Lucas’ face, Lucas’ body.
It was just a dream. His screams might have been real, and Lucas hoped he hadn’t awoken his parents, hesitant to share with them the strange events of yesterday. Fortunately, their bedroom was across the house. The moon was real too, and he suddenly felt as if the moon vultured above the window like a pervert. Lucas arose from the tangle of sweaty bed sheets in his Donald Duck boxers. As he grabbed the cord to lower the blinds, he looked below at the back yard in the moonlight, the corner behind the maple concealed in shadow. About to lower the blind, an instinct pricked his brain, and he whipped around, seeing himself in the full-length mirror on the back of his door. As if mesmerized by his own appearance in the mirror, he left the window and walked closer. Then he saw it in the mirror; it stood behind him, next to the window – the naked boy from the grave, all covered with mud. Paralyzed, Lucas watched the double watching him. Lucas turned to face it; there was nothing by the window. Suddenly, the window opened all the way and the screen leapt from its frame as if punched out by invisible fingers. Lucas looked in the mirror again. He could see his muddy double perched on the windowsill like a gargoyle. It seemed to smile at him before jumping from the window ledge.
Lucas went to the window. He could perceive nothing beneath him the yard. Lucas went back to the mirror, gingerly pulling it off the door and positioning it by the open window so he could see the back yard in the reflection. In the reflection, he could see it – the doppelganger danced in a circle around the yard beneath the mirror. Already out-of-breath and in shock, lost in the confusion of waking and sleeping, Lucas felt a new thrill of terror when he recognized that the doppelganger performed the ritual he had read about in the buried book.
Lucas swooned, falling back and hitting his head hard as the mirror crashed against the floor. There were moments of bright flashes of light, random bursts of luminosity that had neither shape nor form. There were voices, too, murmuring faintly, just out of earshot.
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