by Brian Bowyer
“Nice socks,” Sydney said.
Dr. Odd’s socks were black with white skulls and crossbones on them. “Thanks. They were a gift from a friend of mine who no longer walks the planet.”
Time passed. Dr. Odd drank liquor. Sydney ate candy. The water in the bathroom continued to run.
Dr. Odd said, “Your brother likes long showers.”
Sydney nodded. “Yes. He’s probably waiting for you to join him.”
“You think so?”
“Yes.”
Dr. Odd took a drink. Then he got up and headed toward the bathroom.
“Wait,” Sydney said.
Dr. Odd turned around.
“Take your clothes off,” she said. “I want to see you naked.”
Dr. Odd stripped naked. “Do you like what you see?”
“Yes. And I’m sure my brother will like what he sees, too.”
Dr. Odd smiled. Then he opened the bathroom door and stepped inside.
“Close the door,” Sydney said. “My brother likes his privacy.”
Dr. Odd closed the bathroom door.
Sydney heard the water shut off, followed by the shower curtain swishing open. Then she heard Dr. Odd yell: “Jesus Christ! What the—”
She heard a brief struggle, a choked scream, some gurgling sounds, and then there was silence.
Sydney resumed eating her candy. She heard breaking, grinding, ripping, and slurping noises coming from the bathroom over the next several minutes, and then she heard the shower start again.
Sydney got up. She took the money out of Dr. Odd’s wallet and put it in her pocket. She put his car keys in her pocket, too. She took a trash bag out of the box and put Dr. Odd’s clothes and his bottle of liquor in it. Then she stretched out on the bed and finished eating her candy.
• • •
Sydney emerged from the motel room around four o’clock in the morning, holding her brother’s hand. He towered above her in the raincoat and the motorcycle helmet.
Her brother carried the trash bag. Sydney carried the two pillows she had stolen from the motel room. Her brother put the trash bag in the back of Dr. Odd’s car and got in on the passenger’s side. Sydney put the two pillows on the driver’s seat and got in. Then she started the car and drove them away.
FEAR OF INFINITY
Slashes of moonlight knifed through the room from the cracks between the blinds over the window. They caressed Alexa’s naked body as she stood by John’s writing desk and drank from his bottle of whiskey. “Do you know your house is haunted?” she said.
John, lying naked on the bed, lit a customary after-sex cigarette. “Of course. I live here.”
“And it doesn’t bother you?”
He blew a smoke ring. “No. I grew up in a haunted house. Although I didn’t know this place was haunted when I bought it.”
“I bet you found out pretty quickly, huh?”
“Yes. The very first night.”
Alexa took another drink of whiskey. “Let’s get out of here. These ghosts are creeping me out.”
John shrugged. “Okay.”
They got dressed and left.
• • •
Beyond the train’s windows, streams of graffiti on the walls of the subway tunnel flowed by. It was almost two a.m., but they were not alone in the third car. Down by the door to their left, a young woman was sitting next to one of the metal holding posts. The woman was drawing in a sketchbook.
“I wonder what she’s drawing,” Alexa said.
John shrugged. “I don’t know, but I want to kill her.”
Alexa smiled. “Let me guess: book research?”
John nodded. “Something like that.”
After the woman got off the train at her stop, John and Alexa left the train also. They followed her up a set of stairs. Then they followed her to a car parked at the edge of an otherwise empty parking lot. Her sketchbook was tucked beneath her left arm; a black purse was slung over her opposite shoulder. She fetched her keys and unlocked the car. When she reached to open the door, John attacked her.
He pulled a long silver knife from his jacket. He wrapped an arm around her body and placed the knife against her throat. “Don’t scream,” he said, “or I will cut your eyes out of your skull and make you eat them.”
The woman laughed.
“You think it’s funny, bitch?” John dragged her into the woods that bordered the parking lot. Alexa followed. John tossed the woman onto the ground. She dropped her sketchbook. Alexa picked it up.
John put the blade of the knife between his teeth, slapped the woman across the face, and then stripped her naked. He unzipped his own pants, released his penis to the night, and stood above her body in the moonlight.
The woman smiled. Furious, John spread her legs apart and lowered himself. She reached up for him eagerly and pulled him down to meet her. Alarmed, he tried to pull back, but she wouldn’t release him. He opened his mouth to protest, and the knife fell out. The blade nicked his penis, making him bleed. The knife landed on the ground beside them. Drops of blood dripped from his penis onto the woman’s stomach.
The woman smiled, and then let out a growl. She clamped her fingers around his bleeding penis and pulled it to her mouth. Her tongue darted out and she began licking his blood.
John leaned forward, transfixed. He wanted her to stop, and yet he didn’t. The woman was slurping his blood (which couldn’t be good for him), and yet it felt amazing.
He saw moonlight reflecting off his knife from the corner of an eye. He pulled his penis out of her mouth. Then he picked the knife up and stabbed her in the chest. Blood erupted in thick scarlet ropes and the woman screamed.
Her screams drove him into a frenzy. He stabbed the woman repeatedly. He was still hacking at the body long after the woman’s screams had ceased. The gushing blood had become a trickle that seeped through the ruins of her skin by the time he finally stopped.
Soon thereafter, the woman’s corpse rapidly began to change. The skin wrinkled. The eyes sunk into their sockets. The hair became brittle and white. The body withered until what lay before them was no longer recognizable as the young woman from the subway train, but something ancient. The corpse continued to deteriorate. Soon it was just a pile of dust that blew away on a sudden breeze.
John stood up and wiped drying blood off himself with the woman’s clothes.
Alexa, still holding the sketchbook, picked up the woman’s purse and found her driver’s license. “Kora Van Buren,” Alexa said, “was obviously a goddamn vampire. I have her address right here. You want to go check out where she lived?”
John shook his head. “Not right now. I want to go home and take a few shots of whiskey. Also, I need to take a shower. We can go check it out tomorrow night.”
Alexa shrugged. “Okay.” She bent over and picked up Kora’s keys.
They left.
• • •
The next day, while John slept, Alexa studied the pencil drawings in Kora Van Buren’s sketchbook. The portraits and landscapes revealed that the vampire had drawn with the skill of a master.
After John woke up that night, Alexa showed him the drawings in the sketchbook.
John took a drink of whiskey. “You want to go check out where she lived?”
“Yes,” Alexa said, still holding the sketchbook. She already had Kora’s keys in her pocket.
John took the bottle of whiskey when they left.
Alexa drove. John rode shotgun.
The address on Kora’s driver’s license turned out to be an old, abandoned-looking warehouse on the western edge of the city. A light rain fell as they stood outside the building. Alexa opened the steel entrance door with one of Kora’s keys and they went inside.
The interior was dark. Alexa took her phone out, turned on a flashlight, and located a light switch. She flipped the switch and lights came on overhead.
The place was packed with art. Paintings were stacked in rows two and three deep along the walls—paintings numbering
in the thousands. And every one they looked at was just as masterful as the drawings in Kora’s sketchbook. Kora Van Buren’s signature was not on any of the paintings they saw, however. Every canvas they examined bore the signature of someone named Draven Saint James.
Stairs along the back wall of the warehouse led to a second floor. They went upstairs.
On the second floor, in a sparsely furnished living area, they saw a naked man lying on the floor in front of a canvas. He was wide awake. He had long black hair and bright blue eyes. He was pale and thin. He appeared to be maybe twenty or twenty-five. His chest, arms, and hands were covered in paint. “Who are you?” he said.
Alexa took a step forward. “I’m Alexa. And you must be Draven Saint James. Are you okay?”
“I’m starving. I get so caught up in my work, I forget to feed myself. Kora feeds me. Where the hell is Kora, anyway? And why do you have her sketchbook?”
John walked over to Draven and pulled out his long silver blade. “I had to kill Kora,” he said.
“That’s okay,” Draven said. “You can feed me now.”
To Alexa’s surprise, John nodded.
“Of course,” John said. He cut his arm open with the knife and held it out over Draven’s mouth.
Draven drank John’s dripping blood until he was sated.
And then another strange thing happened: John gave the knife to Alexa. Then he walked away and took off down the stairs without a word.
“Thank you,” Draven told Alexa. His blue eyes were shining more brightly than before.
“For what?” Alexa said, still holding the sketchbook and the knife. She saw that John had left the bottle of whiskey by her feet.
Draven smiled, exposing two long fangs. “For feeding me, of course. I was hungry.”
“But I didn’t feed you,” Alexa said. “It was John who fed you.”
“Look at your arm.”
Alexa looked down at her left arm. There was a gash running down the center of it that was still dripping blood.
“There is no John,” Draven said. “John was just a figment of your imagination. I learned a lot about you while you were feeding me. I’m still hungry, but I didn’t want to drain you. Come on. Let’s get you bandaged up.”
• • •
They ended up making love in Draven’s bedroom. Afterward, lying naked on his bed, Alexa said, “So what about all those books that John published?”
“You wrote them.”
“And all the people that he killed?”
“You killed them.”
“And the house that he just moved into?”
“You bought it about a week ago.”
Alexa sat up and took a drink of whiskey. “You learned these things just by drinking my blood?”
“Yes,” Draven said. “When I drink a person’s blood, I absorb some of their memories—even some that they may have forgotten.”
“I’m sorry for killing your friend,” Alexa said.
Draven shrugged. “I saw how it happened when I drank your blood. You’re a predator. I’m not mad at you. But I do want to see your haunted house.”
• • •
Alexa drove him across town to her house on the outskirts of the city.
“This place is massive,” Draven said, after they stepped inside. “It looks very old and creepy. Do you have a caretaker?”
“No, but I suppose I’ll need to hire one.”
They sat down on a sofa in the living room in front of a fireplace. They could hear the sound of the wind outside rushing in through the chimney. There was a lamp on a table by the sofa, and Alexa turned it on.
“Is that bourbon?” Draven said, looking at her bottle.
“Yes,” Alexa said. “Tennessee whiskey.”
“May I have a drink?”
“Sure.” She handed him the bottle.
He took a drink. “Not bad.” Then he took another drink and set the bottle on the coffee table.
Two transparent children (a little boy and a little girl) crawled out of the fireplace, giggling. They were dressed in nightclothes, but Draven and Alexa could see all the way through them to the wall behind them. They looked so similar in age and appearance that they may have been twins.
“Are you twins?” Draven said.
“Yes,” the little girl said. “I’m Zoey, and this is my brother Zack. I’m older than Zack by sixteen minutes. I’m the talkative one. Zack won’t talk to anyone but me.”
“How old are you and Zack?” Draven said.
“Eight,” Zoey said. “Zack and I will be eight years old forever.” Then she turned to her brother and said: “Come on!”
The twins took off running and disappeared.
“Nice ghosts,” Draven said.
Alexa took a drink of whiskey.
“I need to go find blood,” Draven said. “You should let me turn you into a vampire before I leave, and then you can go hunting with me.”
Alexa shook her head. “No thank you. I have no desire to live forever. This universe is a slaughterhouse of infinite doom, and I’m sick of looking at it.”
“Nothing lasts forever,” Draven said. “Not on this side of death’s veil, anyway. Not even galaxies. But those two kids that we just saw, and all the other ghosts in this haunted house, and all the rest of the ghosts on this haunted planet—they’re already dead. And the dead stay dead forever.”
“So what are you saying? That ghosts live forever?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But it’s something to think about.”
Alexa took a drink.
Draven stood up. “Anyway, if you change your mind, you’ll know where to find me.”
He left.
Alexa sat alone with the ghosts in her haunted house.
BLACK-CAT BONES
A day after she turned nine, Alicia woke up and found her dragonfly dead inside the pickle jar. Tears filled her eyes. She was always sad whenever one of her pets died.
Alicia pulled the dragonfly out of the pickle jar and held it up. “Goodbye, Kobalt.” She opened her bedroom window and dropped the dragonfly onto the sidewalk below.
She got dressed. She brushed her teeth in the bathroom across the hall. Then she grabbed the pickle jar and carried it downstairs.
Thankfully, she didn’t see her mother or her mother’s current boyfriend (Alan) while crossing the living room. She opened the front door and went down the steps to the sidewalk in front of the four-story brownstone.
She started up the sidewalk with the pickle jar cradled in one arm, hoping to avoid the attention of the older boys gathered across the street. School would be starting soon, and the boys had a lot of pent-up energy after being away from their studies for so long. She and her mother had only moved to this downtown neighborhood about a month ago, but Alicia already knew that the boys were always looking for an excuse to be mean to her.
Fortunately, she made it to the end of the street without attracting the attention of the mean boys.
A very tall and very thin black man approached her at the crosswalk. He stopped right in front of her and looked down at her. He wore grimy pants and an Army field coat with a hood over his head and gloves on his hands despite the sweltering summer heat. He carried a walking stick that was nearly as tall as he was. “Hi, little girl. Why you carrying that pickle jar around? You looking for black-cat bones?”
Looking up at him, Alicia used the hand not holding the jar to shield her eyes from the sun. “Black-cat bones?”
“Yes. The bones of black cats. Is that what you’re looking for?”
“I’m looking for pets,” Alicia said. “Why would I be looking for the bones of black cats?”
“There’s a lot of dark magic in black-cat bones, little girl. What’s your name?”
“Alicia. And I know who you are.”
“You do?”
“Yes. You’re Darnell Staples.”
“How do you know that?”
“My mother told me.”
“Do I know
your mother?”
“No. We just moved here. But we see you walking around everywhere. My mother says you’re a homeless schizophrenic.”
“Is that right?”
“It’s what she told me.”
“I’m not homeless. This whole city is my home.”
“She says you used to be smart, but you took a white girl to a party a long time ago, and some racists put a bunch of acid in your drink and fried your brain.”
Darnell shrugged. “I don’t remember that. Would you like to see my home?”
“You said the whole city was your home.”
“It is. And since you just moved here, I can give you a tour of the city. Come on.”
They took off walking. They walked around the city for about an hour, talking about a little bit of everything. Alicia liked Darnell immensely. He was definitely crazy, and smelled like an animal, but he was nice and told fascinating stories.
Time passed. They walked around the city. Darnell did most of the talking, and Alicia loved listening to his stories. After a while, she noticed that gulls no longer circled overhead. She also noticed that she could no longer smell the scent of the nearby ocean. She was probably far away from her apartment, but she didn’t care. She was, however, getting hungry.
Alicia said, “Do you have any money?” She was looking at the sign above a donut shop’s front entrance.
“A little bit,” Darnell said. “But I have to save my money for gasoline. I don’t need money to get some donuts, though. Come on.”
Alicia followed him inside the donut shop.
The place was nearly empty. A few fluorescent lightbulbs in the ceiling were flickering. Darnell looked up. “Black-cat bones,” he said. “Up in the light fixtures. Making the lightbulbs flicker.”
A teenage girl behind the cash register looked up at Darnell and smiled. “Hello, Mr. Staples. We have a box of donuts for you, but you’ll have to go around back to get them.”
“Thank you,” Darnell said. “God bless you.”
Alicia followed Darnell outside. They went around the building to the back of the store.
Another employee (a teenage boy) opened the rear entrance and handed Darnell a box of donuts, smiling. “Here you go Mr. Staples. Have a nice day.”