Angler In Darkness

by Edward M. Erdelac

  The first thing she noticed was the size of the cockroaches that scurried in erratic curly cue patterns before retreating into the dark.

  They were deep in the culvert, but there was no antechamber or hidden stair. The pipe had apparently collapsed in the middle. She could see they were at a dead end, and a wall of broken concrete segments lay before them, through which only the water could hope to pass. It trickled in rivulets from dozens of cracks.

  The lantern sat on a rock, evidently brought in from the creek bed, and a dingy, filthy blue and white striped mattress was propped in the muddy corner. She could smell the rotten fabric.

  There were tied garbage bags of clothes in the opposite corner.

  She looked around, nervous.

  “Brendan?” was all she could manage.

  “This is where I sleep,” said Brendan, hunkering on his heels and resting his elbows on his knees, back against the wall. He motioned to the disgusting mattress. “Have a seat.”

  Gwendolyn looked at the mattress dubiously, then back at him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Vampires have to sleep in the same earth where they were made. Didn’t you know that?”

  She shook her head.

  “But...you were made a vampire in Italy.”

  “Oh,” Brendan snickered. “That. Listen. Have you ever seen a movie made before nineteen eighty nine?”

  She frowned, her eyebrows knitting together. She felt strange, and hugged herself. Why did he ask her that?

  “I don’t like black and white movies,” she said lamely. “What are you talking about? Weren’t you turned into a vampire in bible times? In Italy?”

  He reached across the pipe to her and slipped her purse off her shoulder. She was too amazed to say anything when he unclasped it and began to paw through it with one hand.

  “I can’t really remember when it happened. Not before I wound up in this pipe. I think there used to be a drive in where the truck stop is. I used to watch the movies.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Can you remember when you were three or four years old?”

  “I think so.”

  “What happened on the first Thursday you can ever remember?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t remember ever not being a vampire. I don’t remember who made me into this. I think it was a man. A fat man. I think my earliest memory is of kneeling in front of him in this place. I don’t even know if that was him. It could’ve been anybody. That’s what I do here. I come here with people from the truck stop. Usually men.”

  He pulled out the pack of condoms and looked at her, smirking.

  She felt her face color. Her cheeks were so hot her eyes felt like they were sweating.

  “What were you gonna do with these?” he asked.

  “I thought....I thought tonight would be....special.”

  “Well you wouldn’t have any use for these, honey,” he said, tossing the condoms into the muddy water at their feet. “I haven’t had a hard-on since I became like this.”

  “Why are you talking like this?” she gasped, tears blurring her vision, making him run in the lantern light like a spoiled painting.

  “Vampires don’t drink, we don’t eat. We don’t piss or shit or fuck. You humans find us so attractive though. I dunno. I guess it’s like the light on one of those lantern fish. Have you ever seen those?”

  She stared at him, huffing in her misery, her eye makeup spilling down her face now in oily black cascades.

  “Of course you haven’t,” said Brendan.

  He stood up slowly.

  She backed away, but only a little. She still couldn’t believe. Didn’t want to.

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “Oh no,” Brendan said, pursing his lips.

  She shook now, trying hard to keep the sobs from bursting wholly from her grimacing lips. She felt like a bullet was already spinning in her heart trying to work its way slowly out of her chest.

  “There it is,” said Brendan, reaching out to her, his hand on her chest, cold skin to hers. She sucked in her breath sharply at his touch.

  He moved very close to her now, embracing her. He ran the side of his face against hers. They rubbed noses. He kissed her and inhaled her. She trembled. She was so confused.

  He moaned.

  “So sweet. You’re so sweet,” he whispered in her ear.

  He pulled her slowly down to the rotten mattress. She felt her jeans soak through from without and within. She cried and sighed at the same time. She tried to push him away, but he was iron strong. His kisses were hard and loveless. He was just tasting her, lapping at her skin, nibbling at her with his sharp teeth. They were like the bites of a cat.

  His hands moved over her breasts and shoulders and back and his nostrils sucked at the skin of her neck.

  “Oh baby,” he groaned. “Nothing’s sweeter....to me...than....a breaking heart.”

  She pulled him to her. She put her legs around his waist. Maybe it was a lie. Maybe he had been alone so long he didn’t know how to joke around the right way anymore. Maybe...maybe they could still...

  She reached for his belt and fumbled with trembling hands to undo his pants.

  He laughed in her ear.

  “Still trying, huh?”

  She nodded.

  “Uh huh,” she said hotly as he kissed and licked at her neck.

  Her heart was hammering. She yanked apart his jeans and slid her shaking hands behind the band of his underwear, felt down his hard stomach, fingers moving through the bristling, weedy pubic hair to the loose lump of dead flesh that nestled there, cool as a sleeping viper. She stroked and rubbed as if trying to start a fire, but he did not respond.

  She worked at him furiously in her confusion and frustration. She desperately wanted him to share in her own passion, which despite all that he had said, was still waxing below her navel, fluttering like a maddened bird beating its wings against a window.

  She still wanted him. She wanted him more than anything.

  He said something muffled in her neck.

  “What?” she whispered.

  He pulled his head back. His face in her eyes, she stared in disbelief at the blood broadly painted across his face, dripping from his long teeth, spilling down his chin.

  She hadn’t felt the bite.

  “I said ‘this’,” and he flicked one of his protruding canine teeth with his finger, “is what you’re looking for. On a vampire, it’s these.”

  She understood. She darted her face forward and kissed him, tasting her own blood, like a mouthful of batteries. She thrust her tongue between his lips, lapping at his teeth. He nearly pulled back in shock, but she clasped her hands behind the nape of his neck and ground her heaving body against him, seeking his sharp teeth flicking at them with the tip of her tongue.

  Brendan gasped and bit her.

  The pain was unimaginable. She shrieked into his gulping mouth, eyes bugging in her skull.

  Her tongue pierced, instantly both their mouths filled with a gush of hot blood, so copious it jetted directly to the back of Brendan’s throat, warm as fresh milk. He gagged at first, but fought past it, letting her life seep down hot as whiskey to his eager, hungry belly. He sucked at her bleeding tongue, gripped the sides of her head.

  Her body moved furiously against him, but he was utterly unaware of it. All his concentration was on draining her through her tongue, like a thirsty boy on a hot summer day sucking from the garden spigot.

  Gwendolyn’s eyes fluttered and something burst deep within her. Something that spurted fire like a Roman candle up and outwards into her whole body. Her stomach and legs locked and she fell back quivering against the grimy mattress, blood leaking from her lips, her mouth full of rust.

  Tears ran down from the far corners of her eyes as she looked up at Brendan, straddling her. Blood, her blood, all down his chin.

  He was heaving too, though no breath came from his lips, only flecks of her
own blood dropping on her staring face. He smiled down at her with his sharp, animal teeth. The edges of her sight blurred and darkened. Maybe the lantern was going out. Maybe she was dying. Maybe it was only her mortality dying. Maybe all of this had been some rite of initiation into immortality. A lesson in letting go.

  But she wouldn’t let Brendan go. She strained to see him, until he became a tiny picture in a pinhole.

  Her dark angel.

  Her Peter Pan.

  No.

  No, he wasn’t Peter Pan.

  He wasn’t Captain Hook.

  He was the crocodile.

  I originally wrote this one in high school, but I lost the story in a computer crash and never thought of it again until editor Brian Sammons put out a call for lycanthropy stories. The original setting was a Chicago parking garage and involved a chase through the subterranean pedway between the hitman and his client. I don’t know what made me switch the setting to Boston, but I’m much happier with this iteration, and one of these days I may expand on the St. Philopater fraternity.

  I guess you can lose a fish and catch it again in the fullness of time.

  O’Malley’s bar is a reference to the Nick Cave song.

  Philopatry

  Nobody at O’Malley’s Bar took much notice of the old priest who came in from the stone cold November night, brushing the rain from his black hat and his dripping beige topcoat. It was a Tuesday, so there weren’t too many people there to take notice. The men were in their drink. The local stylenes, cackling their lipstick stained cigarette laughs crossed and uncrossed their cheetah print legs and paid him no more than a glance. Priests were like a fourth class of male, more unavailable than a married man or a queer even. O’Malley himself would only raise his eyebrows at the entrance of some colored guy from Roxbury. As long as this baby sprinkler paid for his drinks he didn’t care.

  Terry Dunne knew priests drank. He had carried 30-racks of PBR over to the rectory at St. Brigid’s on Broadway as an altar boy that one of the packies down the block donated every other week. His whole life he had thanked God he’d been born a Catholic in a two toilet Irish battleship on the corner of Dorchester and East 9th and not some dry mouthed, button down door to door bible thumper from a dirt farm in Alabama dancing with snakes instead of girls.

  Of course in recent years the Church had had that whole goddamned pervert priest thing they had tried to cover up. Now he was thankful he had never heard the call to wear the turned around collar. He wouldn’t have been able to hold his head up let alone dish out a communion wafer with that shit going on around him.

  He was now what his mother had called ‘a lazy Cat’lick,’ only going to church on Christmas and Easter, maybe eating scrod on Fridays during Lent instead of a cheeseburger if he remembered.

  So when the white-haired priest sat down next to him at the bar and said, ‘Hello, Terry,’ in a tired, rattling voice, he sighed inwardly and feared he was in for it from one of these old schoolers who still thought calling a man out on his shit was the way to bring him to God.

  This one looked like somebody had put him through the ringer. He was shivering, the white around his dime blue eyes shot through with blood like broken windshields in a bad car accident, his spotted skin as pale as something fished out of the Chuck River.

  “You remember me?” he asked.

  And just like that, dawn broke on Marblehead. Like an old toy you found covered in dust and cobwebs in the attic, Terry realized he did remember this old priest, and the memory of it brought a smile to his face. Damn, if it wasn’t the very same father who used to take the beer cases from him at the back door of the rectory.

  ”I’ll be goddamned! Hey, Fadder Mike. Yeah sure I remember you.”

  He reached over and pumped Father Mike’s hand. It was like a fish with fingers.

  The old man’s face cracked into a thin smile.

  O’Malley glanced over at the ruckus they were making and Terry held up his hand for him to come over.

  “Hey whatta you havin,’ Fadder?” To O’Malley he said, “This is my ma’s favorite priest from back in the day at St. Brig’s.”

  O’Malley nodded, disinterested, and looked at the priest expectantly.

  “Nothing for me,” said the old man.

  O’Malley’s eyebrows registered disapproval.

  “Ah, gimme two shots of Jameson,” said Terry. When the priest opened his mouth to protest, he slapped him on the shoulder. “Not to worry, Fadder. I’ll drink yours.”

  While O’Malley fished out the glasses, Terry turned on his stool and leaned on the bar.

  “When’d you get back to Southie, Fadder? Last I heard you left for what, Ireland somewheres in like ’98.”

  “I’ve been back three weeks,” said Father Mike, watching the caramel colored liquor trickle from the silver pour spout into the glass.

  Terry took the glass and downed it almost before O’Malley had moved to the other. They used to have Father Mike over to the house for coffee once a week. His ma had always put out the doilies and the blue willow cups for him.

  “How is your dear ma, Terry?”

  Terry slapped the glass on the bar and gasped back the hot aftertaste.

  “Up Mt. Auburn under the tree.”

  “I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.”

  “Eh, how could you? Happened ‘tree years ago. I was doin’ a stretch in South Bay.”

  “That I had heard. Was it as rough as they say?”

  Terry chuckled and took the priest’s drink. He paused as the glass touched his lips.

  “It was no picnic. They got all these cameras all over the place, s’posed to make it a model facility, all the guards on their best behavior; but there ain’t any in the elevators. The bulls’d pull you in there and play knick knack paddy whack on your friggin’ skull up and down for six or seven floors. You’d be lucky if your brains weren’t runnin’ out your ears time the doors opened again.”

  Father Mike stared at him as he threw back the shot and put the glass next to the first. The ringed wood bar was slashed and chipped away, like generations had cut meat on it. Terry picked at one of the slivers with his thumbnail.

  “I’m sorry, Terry.”

  “Ah, I been doin’ better since. The fuck you doin’ back in Boston?”

  “Philopatry.”

  “Hah?”

  He shrugged.

  “I go where the Church tells me.”

  “Figure’d the next time I saw you, it’d be on TV, you standin’ in a background, wearin’ a little red hat, hangin’ with the Pope.”

  The priest smiled thinly, his throat working behind his collar.

  Truth be told though, the old man looked like hell. Didn’t they put priests out to pasture? Terry expected Father Mike ought to be kicking back on some farm watching the cows and dozing with a Bible open in his lap. Whatever retired priests did.

  “Terry....,” said the old priest, leaning in. “I’ve got somethin’ I want to discuss with you. But not here.”

  Terry looked at the old man and idly fished a couple salty peanuts out of the bowl by his hand.

  “I was thinkin’ about walkin’ down to Dunkie’s, gettin’ a regular an’ a honey dip to settle my guts. You wanna come?”

  “Yeah, that’d be fine, Terry. Let me buy, hah?”

  He reached in his coat pocket. Terry noticed the old ring on his finger. Terry remembered it because Father Mike was the only priest he’d ever seen wearing one. It was a pewter or silver medal on a silver band, a picture of a saint holding two swords over his head, a pair of dogs at his feet.

  An inscription read;

  ‘Deum memento, regressus victor.’

  Terry slapped down money for the drinks.

  “Nah, I got it, Fadder.”

  Outside it was still cold but the rain was dying off. The cars swished through the leavings and the gutters gurgled as they sucked the streets down to a tolerable level.

  Their breath puffed out like fog as they talked.

/>   “What do you know about the murders at Gate of Heaven last week?” Father Mike asked.

  Terry had seen it on the news. A pair of teenaged girls had been found in the alley behind the church on East Fourth Street. The dee-techs were out all over asking questions. You could tell them from the real people by their cheap shoes and neat hair. They looked like wannabe FBI. A little too eager, or a little too old. Kid table feds. Anyway nobody knew enough to tell them.

  “Couple of hoodies out after dark,” said Terry. “News said they got done same as that gook kid over on Washington two weeks ago.”

  “Do you know what happened to that boy?”

  “Somethin’ bad I heard. O’Malley says some sicko cut him up. I don’t know the particulars.”

  They stopped at the traffic light, watching a Honda full of drunk townies swerve into the turn. A beer can rattled and spun in the gutter.

  “He was torn to pieces, Terry,” said Father Mike, his lips trembling, and not just with the cold. “Like a piece of tissue paper somebody wiped their ass with. His liver and his heart were torn out. They were eaten.”

  “Fuck,” said Terry, appreciatively.

  Father Mike turned to him as the light changed, splashing his skin red as the Devil’s.

  “And I know who the skid is that’s doin’ it, Terry. I know!”

  Father Mike looked ready to blow his top. His fists came out of his pockets shaking. One gripped a little brown pill bottle, which he rattled and wrestled with for a minute before Terry reached over.

  “Here lemme get that, Fadder.”

  He twisted the child proof cap. It was a bitch, even for him, let alone an old guy with failing bones in the cold and a weight like he had bearing down on him. He handed it back.

  Father Mike turned the bottle over and shook a pill into his quivering palm. He slapped his hand to his mouth.

  “What’s that, for your blood pressure, or something?”

  “Yeah,” said Father Mike. “I gotta get out of this cold.”

  They double timed it up the block to Dunkie’s. Terry sprang for a pair of regulars and skipped the honey dip, but got a box of munchkins for home. He didn’t think he’d have the appetite for it, but who knew what he’d feel like tomorrow.