by Ken Preston
Jacob’s torchlight strayed across the table, its surface dark with stains.
Jacob stared at the table like it was something completely alien to him. His lips had gone dry, and his tongue suddenly seemed too big for his mouth.
Jacob pointed his torch up. Hanging from the high ceiling, above the table, were rows of meat hooks. He shuddered a little at the sight.
The two boys left the kitchen and walked down the narrow passage and through another door. Now they were in the reception hall. In the silence of the house, Jacob could hear a lorry thundering by on the main road. But it sounded distant, as though the lorry was on the other side of town, or an echo from a different time.
In the weak light struggling through the filthy windows, they could see a broad staircase sweeping up to a galleried landing.
“Let’s have a look upstairs,” Peter whispered.
All Jacob wanted to do was make a run for it out of the front door.
He followed Peter up the stairs.
There were several doors on the landing, all closed apart from one at the rear of the house. It was open just a crack, and Peter headed straight for it. Jacob could see the beam of his torch shaking as he walked.
It was no surprise when he heard Peter whisper, “Let’s just look in here and then get out, yeah?”
“Yeah, I’ve got to get back,” Jacob said.
“Me too,” Peter replied. “Mum will be wondering where I am.”
They were both lying, and they both knew it. It didn’t matter anymore. They had crossed a threshold together, and neither one of them would grass on the other one for being scared.
Peter pushed at the door, and it opened easily and silently. Jacob was standing right behind him. Heavy curtains, hanging over the window, blocked out the last of the daylight. There was a big, old wardrobe standing in the corner, and a chest of drawers with ornate handles. Fat church candles sputtered and flared, puddles of wax gathering around them, where they sat on the floor. Greasy, black smoke curved upwards from the orange flames.
Jacob and Peter stood in silent terror, watching the man and woman on the bed in the flickering light of the candles. They were naked; the man lying on his back, his cock swollen and stiff. The woman was straddled across his chest. She had wrapped both her hands around his head, and she was thrusting her hips against his face, buried in her groin.
Her flame red hair cascaded in curls over her shoulders and down her back as she arched her head, her mouth open, as though she was about to scream.
Peter dropped his torch. It landed with a dull thud on the carpet.
The woman snapped her head around, tendrils of her hair falling across her face. She stared at the boys as she continued gyrating her hips against the man beneath her, pinning his head between her legs. His hands were on her buttocks, his fingers digging deep into her flesh.
The woman stared at Jacob, smiling slyly as she rocked back and forth. Jacob felt as though he was retreating deeper and deeper into his own mind, searching out the recesses and the hidden places, somewhere he could hide from this hypnotic, terrifying spectacle. But whatever he tried, her eyes followed him, penetrating into his most secret places and laying them bare.
A pink, pointed tongue flitted out of the woman’s mouth, and she licked her upper lip, all the while still staring at the boys.
Peter screamed.
The spell was broken. Shocked out of their torpor, the two boys turned to run. Peter tripped and stumbled against the door, and it slammed shut. Jacob grabbed the handle, but the door wouldn’t move, as though it was now part of the wall, as though it had never been opened at all.
Jacob heard movement behind them. Peter had already turned around, putting his back against the door. His eyes were wide and round, tears brimming over his lower lids, and he was mouthing words that Jacob could not hear.
He turned around. The woman had climbed off the bed. She was staring at them as she walked towards them, her movements slow and languid, like she had all the time in the world.
Her red curls, flowing over her shoulders, and the red triangle of hair between her legs, were a shocking contrast to her white, unblemished skin.
As was the dark red blood, running down the insides of her thighs.
Peter was sobbing, his face a blotchy mess of tears and snot. Jacob pushed at the door again, but still it refused to budge. The woman slowly licked her top lip again as she drew closer. Hoarse, throaty laughter filled the room. In the candlelight, shadows flickered over the walls, seeming to dance along with the mad cackling.
Like a lithe cat suddenly tiring of its game, the woman pounced on Peter. She dragged him to the floor, straddling him like she had the man on the bed. Peter screamed, pounding at her naked chest, sobbing helplessly. The woman gazed at him, her tongue running along her top lip.
She grabbed his hair and yanked his head back, exposing the soft flesh of his throat.
Jacob looked away as she fastened her teeth on his friend’s neck. Jacob wished he could block out the other boy’s sobs, the sound of teeth tearing at flesh, and then he flinched as heard something snap, and Peter’s screams turned into a wet gurgling and sucking gasp.
When Jacob looked back, he saw the naked man sitting up on the bed. His lips and teeth were smeared with the woman’s blood, and it dribbled from his mouth, as he watched the woman huddled over Peter’s limp body.
Jacob, realising he had been pushing at the door, pulled instead, and yanked it open. He tumbled outside and sprawled across the landing. As he scrambled to his feet, he glanced back and saw through the open door the woman feeding on his friend, sucking at the wound in his throat. The man crouched beside the woman, lapping like a dog at a gathering pool of blood on the floor.
Jacob ran for the stairs, his legs trembling and threatening to fold up beneath him with every step. Half running, half falling, he made it to the ground floor and ran for the cellar. The light was fading fast now, and he had left his torch upstairs where he had dropped it in his terror.
He stumbled down the passage, not daring to look back, even for an instant, and plunged headlong into the pitch black of the cellar. His feet slipped on the steps and he fell out of control. His shoulder hit the stairs midway down, and then his head cracked against a step as he tumbled to the cellar floor.
Struggling to his feet, Jacob blinked warm blood out of his eyes. His hands were dripping with mud where they had landed in a puddle, and his head felt like someone had plunged a knife into it. But, even in his pain and terror, a small, rational part of his mind warned him to be careful of the large hole in the ground, and the mantrap.
Holding his hands out in front, Jacob shuffled cautiously forward in the dark.
Up ahead he saw a faint glow of grey against the total dark of the cellar. It was the open cellar door, leading outside, to freedom. Forcing himself to walk slowly and carefully, he headed for it. Once outside he could dash through the overgrown garden and leap over the fence, and then he would be safe. The first house he got to, he would pound on the door, beg for help. Maybe Peter was still alive, maybe it wasn’t too late if the police came now.
Jacob got to the trapdoor and scrambled up the steps and into the garden. In the late afternoon darkness, he could just about pick out the massive ash tree, and the fence behind it.
Stumbling towards freedom, long tendrils of grass grasping at his ankles, Jacob struggled not to burst into tears. If he started crying now, he knew he would collapse, and the monsters inside the house would have him.
He paused by the tree, leaning against the trunk, and steeled himself for the run across the last few yards, and then the scramble over the fence. He took several deep breaths, trying to calm himself.
A sudden blow from behind shoved him face down on the ground. Before he could scream, he had been flipped over on his back and a bloody hand clamped over his mouth. The woman’s long tendrils of hair tickled his face as she leaned over him, her mouth smeared with blood.
Jacob tried bitin
g her hand, struggling beneath her weight, but it was no good.
She leaned closer, her tongue slithering out of her sticky mouth, strings of red saliva hanging from her sharp teeth.
The terrified boy snapped his eyes shut, waiting for the sharp bite of her teeth in his neck.
skinny kids with tattoos
Joe Coffin looked at the tower block through the rain-spotted windscreen. The car’s suspension groaned a little as he shifted his bulk, trying to find a comfortable position. He hated riding in Tom’s car, his head pressed against the roof, despite his best efforts to slouch in the seat. But then there was no room for his legs, either. He’d racked the seat back as far as it would go, but his knees were still up under his chin.
It was a big joke amongst the guys. Coffin didn’t drive, never had. That was because, from about the age of eighteen, he’d grown too big to comfortably fit in most cars. It wasn’t just his height, but his build, too. The others, they called him ‘King Kong’, or sometimes just ‘Kong’, but never to his face.
You didn’t joke around calling Joe Coffin names. Not if you knew what was good for you.
Coffin was all muscle, looked like he’d been popping steroids all his life, and bench pressed car engines before breakfast. But it hadn’t always been that way. When Coffin was a kid, he had been a tall, gangly piece of string. His father had owned a gym, was pretty big himself, and it seemed to Coffin that he was a source of shame to his father he hadn’t been born looking like a pro wrestler.
The gym wasn’t one of those fancy places you get nowadays, all crappy pop music and water fountains and exercise machines. This was a scuzzy, sweaty gym, in that part of town you wouldn’t visit unless you absolutely had to. You walked in Jim’s gym, you’d better be ready to do some serious lifting. The membership was exclusively male, all huge, shaven headed, tattooed guys, with biceps thicker than a pretty girl’s waistline.
That’s where Joe Coffin had grown up, training with his dad, sparring with the other guys in the boxing ring, them all laughing at this scrawny, skinny kid, who was taller than some of his teachers at school, never mind the other kids in the class. He’d try to throw punches at them, or lift a puny little dumbbell, his face burning with shame, while the men sniggered, and humiliated him with their stupid taunts.
Looking back, he supposed he’d been trying to prove something to his father, trying to be the man he expected. Not that Coffin’s father ever paid that much attention to him. Except sometimes with his fists.
But when he was sixteen, Coffin started packing on the muscle, and by the time he was eighteen, nobody was laughing at him anymore. Especially not the guys at the gym.
Tom Mills wiped furiously at the windscreen with an oily rag, replacing the mist from their breath with smeared streaks of grease and muck. In contrast to Coffin, Tom was small and wiry. He appeared to be older than his thirty-seven years, his skin flaky and blotchy, and his pinched cheeks making him look as though he was constantly sucking on a lemon.
“You ready?” Tom said.
“You sure this is the place?” Coffin said, still staring up at the tower block.
“Yeah, I told you, these are the guys.” Tom stuck a cigarette in his mouth, struck a match against the zipper on his boot, and lit up.
“You sure?” Coffin said.
“Fuck, Joe, yeah I’m sure. One thousand and fucking ten percent sure, all right?”
Tom held out the open packet of cigarettes, and Coffin took one.
Tom lit it for him.
The cigarette smoke wafted across Coffin’s field of vision. The tip tap of raindrops against the car roof started up again, rivulets of water running down the windscreen. Coffin watched as a young girl pushing a pram hurried past, her head down. Even inside the car he could hear the child screaming.
This was no place to bring up a kid.
“Tell me again about these guys,” Coffin growled.
Tom sighed, the smoke streaming from his mouth. “Come on, Joe, how many times do you want to hear this shit?”
“Quit whining and tell me about them again.”
“Okay, okay, like I said, these two guys, Shank and Ratface, they’re metalheads, into this crazy vampire cult, called Midnight Deathskulls. They’ve got a little secret society going, like the Famous Five, or the Secret Seven, only instead of getting into jolly scrapes and drinking ginger beer, they get together every night, and snort shit, tattoo each other, and fuck each other’s brains out. Who knows, maybe the guys suck each other’s dicks too. Whatever, like, you know, I’m a live and let live kind of guy, right? They can do whatever the fuck they want as long as they don’t do it in front of me. But these two guys, Ratshank and Fuckface, or whatever the hell they’re called, they think they’re a pair of fucking vampires.”
“Vampires.”
“Yeah, I mean, what the fuck, right? I’ve seen them in town, wandering around wearing their pissy Goth clothes, faces covered in tattoos. And their teeth, man, they fucking file their teeth to points.”
Coffin shifted uncomfortably in the car seat. His clothes, still smelling of prison starch and stiff like cardboard, rustled as he moved. He’d got out of prison half an hour ago, picked up by Tom, and driven straight here. Six months for assault, let out early due to ‘extenuating circumstances’, and now, less than an hour into his freedom, and he was about to commit a much worse crime than the one he’d served time for.
Didn’t matter to Coffin. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d killed anyone.
“And they’re the ones murdered Steffanie and Michael.”
“Yeah,” Tom said. “Best we can figure, they broke into your house to steal money for drugs. They were already high, and when they saw Steffanie and Michael, they lost it. Ripped their fucking throats out, with their teeth. Shit, man, they drank their fucking blood.”
Coffin flinched. He stared at the tower block.
Vampires.
They liked to pretend.
Shit.
Coffin opened the door and climbed out of the car, the suspension creaking and groaning in protest. Tom followed him, locking the car and hurrying to catch up. They walked across a muddy patch of grass, pathetically labelled Play Area. It contained a single rusty swing, and a small slide.
Coffin was wearing his scuffed leather jacket over a sleeveless, white T-shirt. Rainwater ran down his close cropped scalp, and down the back of his neck. In his right hand he carried a cosh, made of a leather handle and a large, lead weight.
Entering the tower block, Coffin took one last drag on his cigarette and flicked it away.
They climbed the dingy concrete stairs; the walls damp with rainwater and the windows grey with dirt.
Tom wrinkled his nose. “Fucking hell, man, it stinks like a fucking blocked toilet in here. Some people are just filthy animals.”
Coffin walked up the stairs without a word. When they reached the fifth floor, Coffin pushed open a door, and they stepped into a dimly lit hall. Out of the six fluorescent strip lights spaced along the ceiling, only two were working, and one of those was flickering and buzzing, like it might give up at any moment.
As the two men walked down the hall, looking for apartment 5F, they could hear the muffled, rhythmic thud of heavy rock music. Coffin passed under the buzzing strip light, and the flickering, yellow glow gave his battered face a hellish appearance.
Coffin stopped outside 5F. The savage, relentless scream of thrash metal was so loud now, that when Coffin placed the flat of his hand against the door, he could feel the vibrations travelling up his arm. Tom stood behind Coffin, waiting for the signal they were going in.
Two apartments down the hall, a door opened, and a young boy stuck his head out. He looked curiously at Coffin, his eyes growing wide at the sight of this enormous beast filling the hallway. The boy’s mother stepped outside, saw Coffin, and immediately dragged her child back inside, slamming the door behind her.
Coffin raised a heavily booted foot and smashed the thin wooden door i
nwards. He stepped inside, swinging the cosh round and round. Tom stood in the doorway, blocking the exit. The room was filthy, littered with empty beer cans, cheap whisky bottles and cardboard pizza trays, with mouldy, half eaten pizzas in them. Crude drawings of vampires had been scrawled across the walls in black, their pointed fangs impossibly large. Satanic symbols had been drawn in the spaces between the vampires.
In the far corner a bare-chested man sat on the floor, his braided hair hanging lankly over his scrawny shoulders, his head lolling forwards on his chest. Across from him, set between two of the biggest speakers that Coffin had ever seen, was a record player, the black vinyl disc spinning round and round.
In the middle of the room, a man lay on top of a woman, on a bare, filthy mattress. They were both naked, and she was raking her fingers down his back, and chewing on his neck, her other hand clutching his skinny backside as it pumped frantically up and down.
None of them noticed that they had visitors.
Coffin walked over to the record player and kicked it over. The music cut dead with a sharp squawk. The sudden silence was like a bucket of icy water in the face, after the unrelenting noise of the savage music.
The naked white kid, his pasty flesh covered in badly inked tattoos, scrambled to his feet. The woman lying on the stained mattress yanked at a threadbare sheet to cover herself. Coffin noticed her teeth, badly filed to sharp, ugly points.
“What the fuck?” the kid yelled, his outraged voice cutting through the silence. His hands were clenched into fists. His neck looked okay, where the girl had been biting him. A few scratches, but she hadn’t drawn much blood.
Just as Tom had said. They liked to pretend.
“Get out,” Coffin snarled at the woman.
She grabbed her pile of clothes and ran for the door, still naked. She stopped when she reached Tom, standing in the doorway, blocking her exit. He smirked at her, before stepping aside to let her out, and smacked her on the arse as she scooted past him.