Eventually, his trance deepened even as I entered his room. Automatically, his body responded to my presence, which was a delightful turn of events.
And I thought that if he knew me, he loved me.
Night after night I resisted the temptation to waken him; I longed to sit and talk with him, to just be together, in the darkest of night, our secret society of two, just discovering each other and being together.
I should never have succumbed, but the loneliness became too great, this lifestyle of utter isolation. Ultimate control over my victims left me without companionship of any kind. A new feeling was growing in me, a different kind of hunger, a starvation for someone who was like me, or could be like me. I wanted someone I could share with, for even though I was a creature of the night—one whose will had turned toward the dark—I still felt, aspired, wanted.
There were others of the night. I had seen them—moving shadows. Whether there were others like me, I have no idea, for I shunned them all. I wanted nothing of what they had. I wanted only the warmth, and the living ones, the ones with the succulent flesh, were the only ones who could give me the warmth. I doubt companionship with any of the myriad night compulsives would have sated my appetite for conversation.
I knew that the time would come when I would meet someone I could teach, someone who saw in me something of his own aspirations, and I looked at this boy child and wanted it to be him; I wanted so badly to roam the streets with him, to teach him all I had learned, sharing my life. One night, the temptation, the desire for companionship, overturned all my sensibilities, and I wakened him.
I did it slowly. My control was absolute. I could, with a run of a scale, put him back to sleep; I wanted him to become accustomed, perhaps gradually, over several nights, to my being there, with him, in the flesh.
I felt his consciousness rise; my heart pounded in excitement. I was to awaken my lover, I was to actually be with him, converse with him, truly, in real life as I had so often in my fantasies.
I sat next to him, my legs dangling off the edge of his top bunk, and I trailed a finger through the familiar light hairs that grew in a line downward from his navel while I brought his consciousness up, slowly, level by level.
He would be so surprised to see me at last; the girl of his dreams, his nocturnal partner, the one who had spent such erotic moments with him. He would be so pleased. I could hardly wait. The anticipation jittered my internal organs until I thought I would have a seizure. This was him, this was the one, this was my life partner. Surely this child would choose me.
His eyelids fluttered, and then opened, unfocused. They closed again, as I swirled the music at a semi-conscious state. The bedroom was dark; the moon was new, there was little for him to see in the dimness.
He opened his eyes again, and saw me. I relaxed my vigil, waiting for the first sleepy smile, the recognition of a loved one, but his reaction held none of the intimacy I expected. His mouth opened in horror as he saw me; he filled his lungs, ready for a shout; his brown eyes grew huge in terrified madness. In my surprise, I hesitated for a moment, not knowing what to do; my first impulse was to smother the brat with his own pillow, but his bouncing would throw me right off onto the floor.
The music. I brought it up, loud, powerful, and he lost consciousness immediately.
Sweat poured from me and my limbs shook. He would remember this; I could not erase my simple-minded act. What a fool I was.
There were no others like me.
I stayed there, next to him, until I felt the tug of dawn. I stroked his back and played deep, dark tones of restful sleep for him, hoping he would awaken sleep-drugged and mistake my blunder for a simple night terror.
Or I could kill him.
No. This house must be kept sacred, no one must search the cellar for clues in this house.
The dawn drew near and I patted my Daniel on the cheek, then jumped lightly from the bed. I pulled my dark green cloak around me and slunk, feeling lonelier than ever, to the cellar, to crawl into my dirty, makeshift box beneath the stairs and lie, quietly, waiting for the next evening.
When I next awoke, a crucifix hung from the stairs directly over my box.
I had felt the change coming over Wilton. Interesting, a town under siege. First I smelled the paranoia that lay like thick fog over the streets and around the homes. No one walked the streets after nightfall; no children played in the pleasant spring evenings; doors were locked and curtains drawn. The whole town retreated into a private sort of mourning.
Then the police came out, and the vigilantes. I walked the streets without fear of them at first, for they noted my silhouette and deemed me ineffectual. But as my nightly raids continued, as the pitiable victims continued to open their locked doors to their doom, the men began to gather their fear into groups, and some ancient memory in me awakened and began to fear them. I would see them, standing in groups or roaming the streets, silently, unobtrusively armed. Their black silhouettes backlighted by streetlight or starlight reminded me of villagers in torchlight. Through a growing sense of eternity, mixing past with present with future, my eyes saw frantic fathers, brothers, and grandfathers, grief-stricken and worried, but my mind’s eyes saw witch hunters, lynch mobs, and angry, outraged gatherings turning monstrous themselves.
I danced around them, darting behind trees, bushes, around the corners of houses. I danced around their impotency, knowing that my time in Wilton was shortening, yet drawing it out past all limits of good sense. I should have left Wilton a month ago, but I hadn’t. I couldn’t bear to leave my Diana, my Daniel. My home, my soil. I would be more careful.
And then I awakened Daniel, like a fool, and the next evening I found a crucifix dangling over where I slept.
It had been Daniel’s work, I knew it in an instant. He loved me too much to give me away to the mobs who would rip me apart; he knew too much lore. No, it was clear he hoped to immobilize me with his puny effort, so as to talk to me, to control me—his very own succubus that lived in his cellar. His secret. The one secret among many that my Daniel and I shared.
I unhooked the crucifix and examined it while listening to the sounds overhead. It had, no doubt, belonged to his mother. I considered waiting for him, but then I knew that he would never come down while his family was awake; he would wait until they were all asleep. We would rendezvous in the darkest of the night. I had time to leave and return.
I slipped out the door and felt the light misty rain falling around me. The land had turned green in the past few weeks, and the fresh smell of damp earth and the rotting spoils of winter decomposing floated lazily on the air between the raindrops. The town’s paranoia swirled about my feet like a hungry cat, and I smiled to myself, knowing that adrenaline adds spice.
There was a new scent on the air this night, though, and it was fear. One single, sharp, acrid note of fear wafted clearly though the obstacle course of the mist. Someone was outside and afraid. Someone close.
I swung my cloak over my shoulder to keep the rain out and started off.
“At last Angelina and I were in the same town at the same time. She was in Wilton, all right. Murdering children. Murdering defenseless children. God!
“I knew she was in Wilton, but I didn’t know where. We worked with a silent desperation, the mayor and I. I tried to stay in the background until I’d assessed all the information—I couldn’t stand having her slip away again.
“The town was a panic-stricken mess, but at last I felt that my net was closing in on her. I tried to take things methodically, the way one does on a hunt. They were impatient. I had no authority, though, so while I collated information, they set a trap for her.”
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I followed the fear scent for two blocks. The smell sharpened and focused and I became suspicious. No one was out of doors after nightfall in Wilton anymore. No one. Everyone was inside, locked in with their stale air and their fea
r, breathing the fumes of their own desperation.
Why, then, could I smell the hysterical silence of a young girl—outside?
I slid into the shadow of a house and thought. The pull of the child’s humanity was powerful: The scent pulsed in my nostrils, saliva began to flow. But there was something wrong here.
I opened the rest of my senses, I tried to puzzle out my reluctance to this free and easy meal—like a radio antenna, I trained my point of focus around the whole area, and came up with the only conclusion I could make. It was a trap.
Indignation arose in me. How dare they consider me to be such a fool! Let their little bit of bait meat suffer the night through and be tortured by nightmares for the rest of her life—I would not touch her, I would not fall for their pathetic ruse.
I lay my hand on the house whose shadow I enjoyed and felt the vibrations of family within. This house, I thought. This is the house I will claim tonight. And I shall enjoy each of its inhabitants.
I listened more with my hand, and waited until the house quieted. Then with the use of the music, I persuaded the husband to open the door. He, I took in the foyer. The wife went to her damned reward in her marriage bed, and the twins I greedily disposed of and threw on top of her. All the time my indignation rose and fell; I was seriously wounded that the fathers of this community would be such insensitive dolts. Well, this would give them something new to discuss among themselves.
When I finished, I sat quietly in the living room, knowing that I had overreacted, overindulged. My body was terribly uncomfortable. I sat gently, hoping I would not lose it all to the carpeting in front of me. So I stayed there, waiting for the overstuffed feeling to go away, waiting for the peace to come, waiting for the warmth, waiting.
But instead of the peace came sadness, a sadness for this family, a sadness that my only associates were music-drugged victims. A sadness that there was nothing else for me in life, and there was no one to share it with. This was not a new feeling, but the depth of it was frightening. The despair immobilized me as I thought through my life, my weird sense of eternity giving it a continuity beyond any previous bouts with nostalgia. I saw the uncanny inevitability of my station—I saw that even the things I read, dreamed, thought, and did as a child were brought forward to their natural conclusion. The logical conclusion was me sitting, gently, sick again, on the sofa of a family of dead strangers.
My eternal vision of the future was warped; it was like looking through layers and layers of glass, each giving the scene its own particular distortion, the accumulation of each partition becoming almost opaque in the distant future, and I knew that my actions tonight, and each moment of my life, determined the direction my life would take in that bizarre funhouse of the future. Nothing was planned out, nothing was predetermined. Tendencies, habits, and preferences were programmed into the life scenario, but the final decisions lay with me.
This was the saddest cut of all, for I no longer had a choice. I could never go back. I could never again adopt the life of a normal human—not even of a crippled human. I had gone over the edge with Sarah months ago, and now even my physical self had altered. I had been given gifts, powers—
No. I had chosen my path, and I would continue.
My stomach settled a bit as I thought again of the four people whose spirits were reunited in eternity within me. I held their knowledge, their cunning. With each new kill, the previous voices receded, but were still heard in my mind—in the chorus of Hades. This kill had been automatic, there was no sport in it whatsoever. I had done it as retaliation to the trap laid for me by the incompetent vigilantes, one of whom was willing to sacrifice a daughter. How offensive.
Offensive, Angelina? Shooting fish in a barrel is offensive to the sportsman as well.
But I am no sportsman. I kill to survive.
Overkill is wasteful. You wasted this night, wasted.
I got up from the couch and began to wander about the room. I went into the woman’s bedroom, saw the children scattered over her like broken puppets. Something drew me to her bathroom, and I went in, cautiously.
I was drawn to the scent of lavender soap. The woman bathed with lavender soap. I had smelled it on her skin; maybe that was the reason for this unconscionable melancholy. Lavender soap. Alice had used lavender soap; so had I, but I had left my last bar of it at Lewis’s, and had not smelled it since.
Slowly I untied my cape and let it fall to the floor. I took off my boots and socks and pants and shirt. My body, lean and white, gleamed in the dimness. I turned on the shower and stepped in, feeling the water wash over me, but gaining no warmth from its heat.
The soap would not lather. It rubbed about my cold skin in a greasy way and would not leave its scent. I scrubbed, with growing desperation, but to no avail. I sank another level into dark depression.
I turned off the water and stepped out, drying off without feeling that I had ever gotten wet. I went through her closet and found fresh black underwear that looked bizarre next to my pure white skin. She also had a black sweater and pair of black silk pants.
I was admiring myself in the mirror when I heard the noise in the kitchen. Automatically I fell to a crouch, the music went up, cloaking me from attention, from view, and as I concentrated on the music, on the pounding of my heart, on scanning the house for intruders, for the cause of the noise, I saw my reflection in the mirror fade.
I was not real.
My subconscious judged the noise to be a natural settling of something, nothing of threat, and I stood in front of the mirror and brought the music up and down and watched my reflection fade in and out. I was no longer a thing of substance. I was no longer real. At some point I had passed over the physical line from life into shadow . . . It was others like me who passed me in the shadows of the night. I must appear to them the very same.
But Daniel—Daniel saw me, didn’t he?
What did Daniel see when he looked at me?
I looked again at the three bodies on the bed.
They were nothing. They were pathetic. Even Daniel was nothing, just a lad, a boy, mortal and afraid. Out there somewhere was my ideal victim. Out there somewhere was the person for whom I would put my existence on the line. Sometime in my future, a contest of wills would take place, and to the winner would go the spoils. That is what life is about now, Angelina, I thought. Survival. Perpetuating the species. Somewhere exists the perfect victim who will, when taken, fight me to the death and that fight will mean his life. Life in eternity. Yes. A companion in eternity.
Hope lightened my attitude for a moment. I was capable now. Ready. Fertile.
Still heavy with my excesses, I wrapped my cape around me and went outside, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets glistening. The scent of fear was still clear on the air, but it was no longer sharp, acrid.
The child in the trap knew, somehow, that the danger was less likely this late.
I longed to go home, to slide quietly into my coffin, yet a curiosity held me, guided me toward the accumulation of men. I believe I had to test my superiority. And the limits of my unreality.
I knew exactly where they were. Their auras redly illuminated the porch of a house down the block. I wrapped my cloak tighter about me and raised the music, feeling solid and competent, and walked down the center of the street toward them. I heard my cane tap and my boot heels scrape. I lifted my head and dared them to see me.
The child, like a lure, was cast out on the edge of the lawn. She was wrapped in a sleeping bag, with only the top of her head showing. She slept, but her sleep was troubled; the knowledge of her father and his large friends watching her was never far from her mind.
I sauntered down the center of the street, stopping in front of the child. I twirled around, scraping my feet on the gritty wet pavement, kicking my cape up around me.
The color of the aura around the por
ch changed. They sensed me.
“Listen,” I heard one man say.
“I don’t hear nothing.”
“Shut up.”
“What did you hear?”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“I saw a shadow.”
“Where?”
“Out there.”
“Will you guys shut up?”
I enjoyed them almost too much; I raised the music and danced in the street. I twirled faster and faster, knowing I was no longer real, knowing and hating the fact that I would never be warm again, knowing that my frigid, bloodless nostrils would never again smell a stew, that my icy fingers would never again feel the texture of anything but living flesh—I had traded the senses of life for the new sensual experiences of the eternal wasteland, and I danced with it, danced with the frenzy of the damned.
Then I stopped, and while they could not see me or hear me or really even know I was there, they knew I was there—and I stopped and thrust my cold finger into the bait-child’s ear.
She rose up screaming hysterically, screaming and screaming, and the men came streaming from the porch, shotguns and flashlights waving in wanton disarray. I looked upon them sadly, gathered my cloak about me and walked softly back home.
I slid quietly into my coffin, completely forgetting Daniel—and his crucifix. I lay awake for many hours, replaying the scene in my mind, fretful and restless, trying to capture an essence that flitted through, something that I had missed, an important element of the evening that was eluding me, had eluded me in my excesses and overindulgences.
I lay on the cold concrete floor, not unhappy, yet not pleased with the revelation of my new nature—just cold and alone, and I waited for the sleep to come and erase my thoughts.
And when I awoke, I smelled Boyd.
“The next day there were funerals. Children’s funerals. There were six children’s caskets lined up at the cemetery, all draped with identical blankets of flowers.
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