by Sara Reinke
He’d laughed and followed, moving as gingerly as possible and grimacing at every unsettling creak and moan. When he’d reached the top, he’d found her standing treacherously close to the edge. The wind pushed her hair back from her face, molding her shirt against her torso, her nipples outlined in discernablediscernible bullet points through the thin fabric cups of her bra.
“Hey, no fair jumping,” he’d said. “I’m the one who’d have to clean up the sidewalk.”
“I’m not going to jump,” she’d replied with a laugh. “I have a really good sense of balance. And I’m not afraid of falling.”
She’d said this last with a pointed look in his direction that had let him know she didn’t necessarily mean taking a tumble off the edge of the roof. He’d kissed her because in that moment, he hadn’t been afraid of falling either. It’s the landing you have to watch out for, his father had told him once, and Jason supposed he’d landed hard from the moment his mouth had touched hers. Her lips had been cold, dry from the wind, somewhat sweet with the lingering flavor of strawberry lip gloss, and it had been all over.
Jason limped out of the bedroom, following the dark corridor toward the living room. A lamp was still aglow here and he saw Sam asleep on the couch, burrowed beneath a blanket. Bear was sleeping nearby, slumped between two chairs. Half seated, half slouched in one, with his feet propped on the other and a blanket draped over his bulky form. The dog had been lying between them, but at the sound of Jason’s bare feet against the wooden floor, it raised its head, its dark brown eyes spearing him as he stood in the doorway. Again it showed him its front teeth as it growled.
At this, Sam groaned. “Shut up, Barton,” she mumbled, rolling over and shrugging her shoulder, tugging the blanket into comfortable position around her.
Jason stood there for a long, uncertain moment. He wanted to go to her. Nothing else in that crazy, terrifying day had made any sense to him and he was lonely. At last, though, he turned, then walked back into the bedroom. He sat against the side of the bed and picked up the scrapbook Sam had brought him earlier.
Rather than read through the newspaper articles at the end about his murder, however, this time he flipped to the front of the book and began to look at photographs she’d pasted inside for safekeeping, poignant reminders of the life he and Sam had shared—a life that, for him at least, had ended less than twenty-four hours earlier. Each one brought with it a flood of memories and emotions. Here was a Halloween party when they’d dressed up as a nun and a priest, her in a full, dowdy habit and him in the old-fashioned floor-length black robe and starched white collar. Here was one of Sam in her chef’s toque and white jacket, her uniform in culinary school, while another showed Jason behind the bar, standing in front of the diamond-dust mirror, a stainless-steel cocktail shaker between his hands.
He paused at one in particular in which he stood, dressed in a suit and tie, with his arm around Sam and holding a certificate in the other. He was laughing as she stood on her tiptoes, planting a kiss on his cheek.
The day I got my GED, he thought. Something I never would have done without Sam.
“That was a good day,” she said from the bedroom doorway, and he jerked in surprise, startled and embarrassed by her discovery.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he began clumsily, but she shook her head as she walked over to join him.
“You didn’t.” She tucked her disheveled hair behind her ears and sat beside him. “Bear’s snoring. Sounds like a freight train rattling through the living room.”
She was so close, he could breathe in and smell the light, familiar fragrance of her shampoo. “Do you remember that?” she asked, looking down at the picture.
“Of course,” he replied with a nod, following her gaze. Diagnosed as dyslexic when he was in second grade, Jason had always been competent in mathematics and science but had consistently failed English subjects like spelling and reading comprehension. He’d fallen behind in his studies by third grade, then been held back to repeat fourth grade. The special education classes his teachers had enrolled him in had only compounded his humiliation and shame. While other children his age had been reading Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H.NIMH, he’d still struggled to make it through Curious George and Go, Dog, Go! By high school, he’d simply given up altogether and dropped out.
“I felt smart that day,” Jason remarked, looking down at the photograph of his graduation day. “Like I’d accomplished something.” He smiled somewhat sadly. “For once in my life.”
“You are smart,” she said, and when he laughed she frowned. “What? You ran your own business, for crying out loud. That takes some brains, right?”
“It was my dad’s business,” he said to Sam. “One I grew up with. It’s not hard to figure out how to do things when you see your old man doing them every day of your life.”
It had Sam who had coaxed him into pursuing his GED, and from there, enrolling in community college to pursue an associate’s degree in business. He hadn’t earned it yet, and he supposed if five years really had passed, then he likely never would, but since college and Jason Sullivan had, at one time, been mutually exclusive terms, he still felt like he’d accomplished something nonetheless.
“I wish Dad could have been there to see,” he said, looking down at the photograph again. “I think he would have been proud of me.”
“I know he would have been,” Sam said. “I sure was.” She looked at him for a long moment, her dark eyes searching his face. “It is you,” she whispered. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said. Please believe me, Sam, he wanted to say. He wanted to fall on his knees and bury his face in her lap, begging her. Please, Sam, you’ve got to believe me.
Whether she did or not, he couldn’t tell. But when he leaned toward her to kiss her, she tilted her face to meet him, let his lips draw within millimeters of hers, close enough to feel the warmth of her breath, and the abrupt chill as she drew away.
“Electricians are coming in tomorrow to take a look downstairs.” She cleared her throat as she stood. “I have to get up early to let them in. And Bear’s heading out then too. We’ll try not to wake you.”
As she walked away, he looked down again at the photographs in her scrapbook, remembering the smell of her skin after she’d been sunbathing, the way she’d liked to sleep spooned against him, her buttocks nestled against his groin so that she could wriggle back in unspoken invitation. He remembered how she liked her eggs—hard-scrambled, with sharp cheddar cheese, served for dinner, not breakfast—and how she’d liked her margaritas—lime, on the rocks, no salt. He knew her favorite candy—lemon drops; her favorite soft drink—Coca-Cola from a soda fountain, not a bottle or a can; he knew she always ordered her movie popcorn layered, with butter added in the middle of the tub, then again on top, and always bought a box of Swedish Fish too, which she’d never eat during the show but would instead carry around in her purse for the next week and a half or so, snacking on them at random. He knew all these things, remembered it all like it had only happened yesterday because to him, at least, it had.
Whatever happened to me, wherever I’ve been, I wish I’d never woke up, he thought in dismay as she left him alone. I wish I’d just stayed dead, because this is killing me. It’s breaking my heart.
CHAPTER SIX
Jason dreamed of some kind of medieval banquet hall, a dark, dank place with rough-hewn stone walls that vaulted at least three stories overhead, converging in a peaked dome. Torches had been mounted in heavy steel frames, spilling orange light in broad circumferences, interlaced with heavy shadows that danced and bobbed with the fluttering flames. The room was lined from end to end with long wooden tables and corresponding benches. These were jammed to overflowing capacity with a boisterous throng of men and women, their bodies marked and disfigured with bizarre and intricate tattoos and piercings. The tables were covered with trays of food—meat, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, breads—all of it rotten and molde
ring, festering with maggots and worms. This didn’t seem to deter the guests in the least. They gorged themselves on the putrescent fare, drowning wolfish mouthfuls with cups of wine.
They were attended to by the strange, mummified creatures Sitri had called Hounds, which scurried and scampered about, hefting enormous jugs of wine that they slopped and spilled all over the table and floor as they offered refills, or more of the platters of spoiled food, which they dropped or shoved onto tables wherever they could find or make room.
Whatever this place was, the Eidolon hated it. Jason could feel it inside him, writhing through his veins. It wanted to escape. Like a wild horse caught by a lasso for the first time, it strained to find a way to flee, and in struggling to control it, the Wyrm inside Jason’s skull had let its hold on his mind slip. In those few fleeting moments, Jason found himself fully conscious and aware, cognizant of his surroundings, if not utterly bewildered and terrified by them.
He wore some kind of mask and could feel it cinched tight against his face, enveloping his entire head. His line of sight was partially obscured by the rims of the eyeholes. A thin slit had been cut beneath his nostrils, with a wider hole at the mouth that had been sealed with steel pins like bars covering a prison window. A metal plate, like a horse’s bit, had been secured in his mouth before the mask had been donned. His back teeth bit into it and he could taste it, bitter and oily, against his tongue. He couldn’t close his mouth all of the way as a result. He could see his breath frosting in the cold, damp air, hanging in front of his face in a moist film with every labored, ragged exhalation, and could feel saliva frothing against his cracked lips, trickling down his chin.
His mind was awake, but his body was immobile, still under the Wyrm’s control. All he could do was move his eyes, crane his gaze from the floor in a narrow arc around him. He was naked and stood on one of the tables, his bare feet surrounded by blackened, greasy, rotten fruit and the carcass of a pig, its flesh rotted away clear down to the bone in places, revealing spongy, maggot-infested panels of underlying flesh.
This has to be a dream, he thought, watching as the people sitting on either side of him, most of them nude or only partially dressed, reached for him, stroking his legs, smearing grease or rotted food on his skin. They were all ghastly pale. Like corpses in various stages of decay, some were bloated, others desiccated, with skin hues ranging from waxy gray to tawny and parchment-like. This has got to be a dream. Please let me wake up now.
“He’s beautiful,” the bloated, mottled remains of a woman said as she leered up at him, her voice drunken and slurred. Her teeth were gray, crooked or missing in places from her plum-colored gums. Her hair was damp and stringy, her eyes sunken, the pupils milky and clouded. As she spoke, water dribbled out of her mouth and down her chin in thin rivulets, as if burbling up and out of her lungs.
“He is, Ceto, yes,” Jason heard Sitri say, and had he been able, he would have moaned aloud in stark fear as he felt the man’s fingers close against something at the base of his skull, the metal ring interconnected through the mask to the bit in his mouth. When he wrenched his head back by this ring, the metal plate sliced into the corners of Jason’s mouth.
He could see Sitri’s face now, his eyes heavily lined with dark cosmetics, his skin alabaster, his thin lips painted black and stretched wide in a smile. “I can make him fuck you, if you’d like.”
Oh, Jesus, no, Jason begged inside his mind, his eyes rolling in helpless horror beneath the mask as the drowned woman, Ceto’s, grin widened at this. He wheezed around the bit plate, trying to summon his voice, to cry out in protest, but the only thing that escaped through the bars suturing the mouth hole in the mask was a peppering spray of spittle.
Ceto scooted far enough back against the bench seat for Jason to see that she was naked, her breasts like two sagging water balloons, her skin blue-green and gray, her nipples purple and the size of silver dollars. These drooped against a series of overlapping flaps of skin, the distended, waterlogged mass of her belly. At the apex of her dimpled, swollen thighs, he caught a disgusting glimpse of pubic hair. She shoved one fat, bloated hand here and began to rub herself obscenely.
“Or perhaps you, Mara?” Sitri asked, jerking against Jason’s mask again, mercifully diverting his gaze toward the head of the great hall, where a line enormous chairs, nearly thronelike in size and structure, stood as the prominent features on a stone dais.
One of the chairs stood empty. In the others sat eight whip-thin people with ashen complexions. Several men wore elaborate headpieces that stretched their lips out wide, baring teeth and gums, their mouths forced open by metal prongs that were also connected to wires bisecting their faces. These wires ran through rings punched through their nasal septums and apparently to the backs of their heads, each short enough in length to force their nostrils up and open wide, nearly piglike. Some of the women wore corsets that cinched their waists down to impossible, torturous circumferences, sometimes no wider than their forearms. Some had piercings in their noses, lips, cheeks, ears and brows while others had tattoos tracing thin lines and tracing intricate patterns along their alabaster flesh.
One woman stood out even among this bizarre lot, if only because, out of all of them, she was the least unusual. No tattoos, no piercings, no visible flaws at all on her pale, nearly translucent flesh. Her flaxen hair fell in fine sheaves over each of her shoulders. She was thin to the point of emaciation, her body all but swallowed in a scarlet-colored velvet dress that hung on her like a funereal shroud. Like Sitri’s, her features were icy and sharply crafted, her fingers like talons as she splayed them against the ends of the arms of her chair, her fingernails digging, clawlike, into the wood.
At Sitri’s words, a friendly enough challenge, the crowd drew abruptly quiet, as if he’d just committed some kind of monumental faux pas and shown his ass at a completely inopportune moment. The woman, Mara, fixed her gaze on Sitri and her thin mouth curved up in a slow, nearly begrudging smile.
“You misjudge me, darling brother,” she said, her voice ringing out as clearly as a bell toll in the now silent chamber, “if you think I’d ever let that thing stick its repulsive and undersized cock anywhere inside me.”
The thin, ghoulish figures flanking her in the thrones all leaned together at this, smirking and snickering, each of them mirroring Mara’s cool, contemptuous expression as if Sitri, and Jason, guilty by association, were little more than dog shit on their shoe heels.
Unfazed, Sitri continued smiling. “You misjudge me, sweet sister, as it’s not the size of its cock I was thinking of, but yours. I only wanted to offer you the first taste.”
Mara’s face remained aloofly amused. “First taste of your new plaything, a fledgling Wraith. How boring, Sitri…nearly as much as fucking you must be.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd at this, jeers and hoots resounding off the cathedral ceiling at Sitri’s expense. Despite this, his smile didn’t waver.
“A fledgling Wraith? You wound me, sister.” Sitri raised his other hand to the back of Jason’s head, and after a moment of tugging, Jason felt the mask abruptly loosen against his skin. Sitri pulled it away from him, and the air against his sweat-dampened skin was frigid and shocking. With it came the bit in his mouth, and Jason gasped for breath, his jaw aching and stiff from having had his teeth wedged against the metal plate for so long.
“After all, Mara,” Sitri said, “no matter how self-appointed a post it may be, you are the matriarch of us.” He seized Jason by the crown of his hair, jerking his head back while simultaneously revealing his forehead. “And as such, I thought you’d like to be the first among us in all of history to ride the cock of a righteous man.”
Jason didn’t know what this meant or what Sitri had shown the throng, but all at once, a chorus of startled and aghast cries rose in place of the snickering and laughter. People scrambled from their seats, men and women clambering and floundering over top of one another as they crowded around Sitri, staring up at Jason i
n wide-eyed, gaping wonder.
“He’s unmarked,” Jason heard them gasping aloud, words he’d hear again from Nemamiah, words that made no sense to him but overlapped in a breathless, awestruck din. “He’s unmarked…the soul of the righteous.”
He’s unmarked!
“But then again…” Sitri crouched down behind Jason so that he could purr directly into his ear. As he did, Jason felt his hand slip between his buttocks, smearing something greasy—putrefied fat from the pig carcass—against his skin. “Maybe I’ll take him myself.”
No, Jason thought in alarm, realizing what he meant, feeling the obscene press of Sitri’s arousal slide suddenly, suggestively along the cleft of his ass. No, no, he thought as Sitri pushed him forward, face-first onto the table, and God, he struggled to move, to fight back, to break that damnable paralysis that left him vulnerably exposed and helpless.
No, no, goddamn you, please, no! he screamed in his mind, searing pain ripping through him as Sitri shoved into his rectum. The cavernous hall erupted with shrieking cheers and applause, the table beneath them shuddering as Sitri’s fellows beat against it, urging him on, matching his brisk, brutal, merciless rhythm.
****
“No!” Jason jerked himself awake, sitting upright in bed, his body glossed in sweat, his eyes wide. It took him a long moment, looking wildly about the room, before he was able to convince himself that it had been all in his mind.
Not real, not real, not real, he told himself over and over, clapping his hands over his face. God help me, it was just a dream. It wasn’t real.
By this point, sunlight was seeping through the blinds. He could smell the warm, earthy aroma of coffee and heard occasional muffled scrapes and clatters from downstairs in the bar area. He pushed the blankets away from his legs and sucked in a pained gasp as the movement hurt his injured shoulder. Clapping his hand gingerly over his bandaged wound, he stumbled to his feet and went to the window.