by Casey Lane
She saw the bright splotch of red in the white fur.
The rabbit, her mind bleated. My God, he brought the rabbit and left it here behind the shed for me to find.
“Awful, I know. You got dogs, Miss Cole?”
“No,” she said.
“Ah, well, I thought maybe a dog got a hold of these and tore ‘em up. They don’t look eaten. Most of the meat is still there, so I’m not thinking it’s a raccoon or anything.”
She immediately recalled the raccoons scampering across the road.
“They’ll eat anything they can get their little paws on. My sister had a whole coop of chickens torn apart by a pack of them raccoons. Heads bit right off.”
Lettie’s stomach turned.
“Sorry. I’m not trying to be graphic.”
“It’s okay,” Lettie said, but her voice broke. She was trying not to vomit her breakfast—two biscuits with strawberry jam—onto the grass. “So you think it’s something from the woods?”
“Got to be,” he said. “I found four more just like it.”
Five dead rabbits in the yard. It’s an omen. Like that old song daddy used to sing. One crow silver, two crows gold… was that how it went? Or am I confusing it with the story about a king and his pies?
“I just wanted you to know, in case you’ve got a little dog. You don’t want to let it run loose in the yard if you’ve coons around. They’ll tear it to bits.”
I’ve been watching you for a long time, the vampire had said. Had he? Right here at the edge of the woods, looking into my house at night while the lights were on, straight into my world.
Lettie turned toward the house and looked at her open bedroom window. Anyone standing in the dark shadows between the shed and the trees—well, they could see in just fine.
I should know.
Chapter Ten
Just past nine that night, her mother fell asleep in the battered white recliner with a cigarette still smoldering between her index and middle finger. The minute Lettie plucked the cigarette from her fingers, the woman’s eyes snapped open, rolling in their sockets and locking on hers. The pupils narrowed, and that hateful grin twisted up her face, aging her ten years in an instance.
“Quit stealing my cigarettes, damnit,” her mother rasped, her throat dry from sleep.
“I’m not stealing it,” Lettie said and rubbed the red-hot end of the cigarette into the ashtray gingerly, so as not to crush it. Then she lay the remainder against the glass rim. “Come on, let’s get you in bed.”
“But I’m watching that,” her mother complained, pressing herself back into the recliner the way Kai used to, stiff as a board to make getting her into her car seat harder, a final act of protest.
Lettie moved so that her mother could see the riveting infomercial about a toilet brush that swiveled. “This? Shopping for toilet brushes, are you? Come on.”
Her mother frowned at the bejeweled woman in the infomercial with her perfect plastered face and perfect coif of hair and relented. You’ve never scrubbed a toilet in your life, Lettie thought, remarking the ginger, almost disgusted way the woman held the plastic wand, as if the idea of even touching something that might touch a toilet was unacceptable.
Lettie got her mother into the rickety wheelchair with its big silver wheels and pushed her out of the living room, down the hall, and into her dark bedroom.
It smelled of grass and Lysol.
Lettie had given the room a rub down after dinner. Once the sun had gone down, she’d felt marvelously better.
I supposed I was to blame for that. Spending as much time in her mind as I did was likely draining her.
“There you go,” Lettie said, hefting the woman from her chair and easing her back onto the fluffed pillows. “Fresh clean sheets. Doesn’t that feel nice?”
Her mother grunted something that could have been mistaken for gratitude and scooted between the sheets that Lettie held open for her. White with gray triangles in alternating patterns to match the gray comforter on top. Lettie had rolled the comforter down past the old woman’s knees, because even with the overhead fan going, swinging wildly as it’d always done, and both of the windows open, the room was warm.
Once her mother scooted over to the center of the mattress, Lettie sat on the bed beside her. She pulled the key from her pocket and opened the lockbox beside her bed. Eight orange prescription bottles sat inside the lockbox, alternating from white cap up, to white cap down for a better fit.
Lettie doled out the correct number of pills for the time of day, careful to double-check the labels, and passed them over. They fell into a trembling hand.
“Here you go, Momma,” Lettie said, handing over a diet coke in a tall glass full of ice. “Now sit up and drink this.”
Her mother obeyed. It was the one time of day when she wasn’t full of vitriol and was almost obedient. As much as she might look down her nose at her children and her dead husband for their alcohol abuse and various addictions that seemed to come and wane like seasons, she sure did swallow those pills quick enough.
She took little sips from the glass like the robins and finches did in the granite bath outside.
Not so much as a thank you, Lettie noted as the woman handed over the glass and sank back into the pillows, but that was all right. That was better than the alternative.
Her mother rolled over, giving her middle child, her youngest daughter, her back. Lettie stood there for a moment and watched the bowed spine rise and fall in a steady rhythm.
Tenderness welled up in her, not unlike the tenderness she felt when she’d watched Kai sleep as a baby. When Kai lay curled in her crib, one thumb in her mouth, a swath of blond curls spilling over fat cheeks and a baby-soft forehead.
It was moments like this, watching the old woman tumble into sleep, that Lettie’s shame seized her. All the hateful thoughts she had about leaving would kick her then, and she’d count all the reasons she couldn’t go. Who would cook for Momma? She couldn’t stand at the stove, let alone use it. She couldn’t do her own shopping, not when Merek had the van on most days and getting to the store required begging neighbors. And what about the prescriptions? Who would call the doctors and make sure she got to the appointments? The idea that Merek would take her was ridiculous. Merek would pick the lock on the pill box and hock every last capsule for drug money. He’d show up once a month, right when the government check arrived, and seize it. She would starve or fall ill in no time.
And that was if her mother didn’t have an accident first. The woman’s balance was awful. If she tried to walk across the floor, she would fall.
I should let him take you, Lettie thought. Let him take you so you don’t suffer no more.
My ears perked at my mention. Was Lettie ready to make her choice? Was our game to end so soon?
Lettie’s heart flopped, filling with guilt just at the thought of turning her mother over into my cold embrace. She bent down and planted a kiss on the side of the woman’s head.
I paced the darkness outside the house, watching Lettie close the pill box and lock it up. I watched her stare at the box, and pass a look at her sleeping mother. Then she opened it again and shook out two white pills into the palm of her hand before she replaced the cap.
When she turned, she found the old woman staring at her. Those flat black eyes cold and assessing. Without breaking the stare, pretended to return the pills to the box and the box to the safe.
Then Lettie stood there unmoving, frozen. Finally, she wet her lips and said, “Goodnight, Momma. Sleep tight.”
Her mother said nothing.
With two white pills warming in her palm, Lettie stepped out and closed the door.
She dry-swallowed them in the hallway, both at one time, before the door even clicked shut.
In her bedroom, she turned on the light and began to undress for bed. She couldn’t bring herself to brush her teeth, to wash her face, to do much of anything. She just wanted to lie down, stumble through a chapter or two of the mystery novel
she’d been working on, until the pills succeeded in their job.
The wind through the open window licked her bare breasts and stomach. And as she bent down to pull out an oversized T-shirt—one that said Maui in an arrangement of tropical flora across the front—it hit her.
The shed. The wide-open view of her bedroom to the dark tree line.
She froze. Heart racing, she remained bent over the drawer, the t-shirt crushed in her hand. Without standing, she pulled it over her head and wiggled her arms through.
I was amused by all of this, seeing Lettie just fine in the adjacent looking glass. She must have sensed my amusement.
I’m being stupid, she thought. If he’s been looking through my window he’s seen my tits already.
Yet, she found herself turning, giving her back to the open window as she pulled the shirt down around the rest of her head.
A sudden wild and panicked certainty overtook her then. She was certain, absolutely certain that when she turned around she would see me—his white and horrifyingly beautiful face— in her bedroom window. She imagined my eyes dilated and flat black, my face smeared with rabbit blood.
Chest heaving, heart racing, she turned, slowly.
I admit, I was tempted to play the part of boogeyman, to fuel this fear for my own fiendish purposes.
But when she turned, she found the window dark.
You’re losing your damn mind, she told herself. You’re too old for this shit.
She took a deep breath, straightened her spine the best she could, and walked calmly to her bed. She climbed between the sheets, and only then realized she still wore her jeans. Just as well. She took them off under the covers. She dropped them beside the bed and listened…listened as if she expected some monster to scurry out from under her bed and seize them while they still held her body heat.
Then she realized her bedroom light was on and the switch was across the room.
“That’s fine,” she told no one in particular. “That’s just fine, because I’m going to read anyway.”
So she did. She pulled the coverless paperback off the 3-legged side table and opened it to the dog-eared page she last read. Heart racing, she continued where she left off, where the widow discovered her husband had quit his job the year before his death and hadn’t told her. Where all the appointments in his book turned out to be bogus, and here she was trying to piece together what he’d been doing with the last twelve months of his life before he died suddenly in a car wreck.
It wasn’t long before Lettie’s racing heart finally slowed and her breathing with it.
The paperback sagged onto her chest, her eyes closed, and it made no difference at all to her that the light was still on, that the bedroom window was still open, and that someone like myself may or may not be watching from the dark shadow of a dilapidated shed at the edge of the tree line.
None of it mattered, because the oxy did its work, pulling Lettie down into a deep, dreamless sleep.
None of it mattered because there was no reason for Lettie to worry about a man outside.
If Lettie hadn’t been so frightened of the idea that a voyeur stood out in the night, watching her, enjoying the sight of her bare breasts, she may have noticed the closet door ajar.
Chapter Eleven
I took her to the lake again. Two ducks cut across the water, swimming away from us, following the trail of moonlight across the shimmering surface. Somewhere a loon cried. And just above our heads, the bats’ high-pitched whine circled as they dipped and bobbed, picking off the mosquitoes moving in, attracted to her warmth.
She stood there without pants, her legs gleaming beneath the long Maui shirt that fell across her upper thighs.
A deer on the other edge of the lake dipped its long graceful neck toward the water.
Do you have another for me? I asked. Confronted with her confusion I added, have you chosen another?
“You said I had time,” she said, which was another way of saying no. No, she hadn’t decided who she would lure, only that it wouldn’t be a stranger, which left three choices as she had only three people left in the world: her mother, her brother, and Kai.
Something splashed into the water behind me. I, too, splashed into her mind.
Kai is out of the question. I haven’t spoken to her in months, haven’t seen her in years, since she left with a tear-stained face and a black garbage bag with her clothes over one shoulder and a backpack on the other. I shouldn’t have let her walk away like that, but I couldn’t bring myself to shout after her. All the hurtful things she’d said had been true. Every accusation of neglect had been true—what could I have said? What could I have possibly said?
With a quivering lip, Kai had laid their long and tangled history bare, and what had Lettie said? You wear too much eyeliner.
And that wasn’t even what she’d meant to say. She’d meant to say, You’re too pretty, Kai. A thousand times prettier than I ever was. You don’t need all that to make someone look at you. You don’t need them to think you’re hard. You’re not hard, and that’s the most beautiful thing about you.
But she’d said You wear too much makeup, in a cold flat voice. It was her own mother’s flat and unforgiving voice.
Regret welled inside her like cold, dark water, so much regret that she began to choke on it.
Shhhhh, I whispered through her mind. Don’t think of such things.
She turned and looked up into my moonlit face.
She found me handsome, my skin without blemish or scar. But she also thought my lips were too red. She had only an instance to think that’s my blood before I lowered my mouth onto hers. It was like kissing someone who’d been eating soup. Her tongue was hot.
I kissed the corner of her mouth, then her cheek. I pulled her against me until I could feel the full length of her body against mine. I was working magic on her, letting the glamour slide along her skin. The most beautiful part—she knew exactly what I was doing.
She thought one of her Salvation Army paperbacks had been about a perfumer who moonlighted as a serial killer. How the perfumer had taken a special extract from a plant that lured insects to it. He’d worn this himself, and watched as the girls came to him, doe-eyed and soft. Lured by a scent they couldn’t even detect.
Pheromones the science magazines called it. He is cloaked in some sort of pheromones.
She reached down and touched my erection through my pants.
You want me too, she thought, pleased that it wasn’t a one-way street. She’d been down those with men before and hadn’t liked how it felt. But this felt good. This felt so good.
“Yes,” I said into the soft nape of her neck. “I do.”
I kissed her on top of the thrumming artery that ran straight to her heart. Desire pulsed in my temples so great that I stumbled back. But she had one arm around my waist. She held me to her.
Let me go or I will kill you, I said. Or I think I said it. But I didn’t hear the words. I heard only my breathing, labored and loud as I hovered over the drumbeat of her heart. Her heart beat faster, and I breathed faster, as if I had become one with its terrible rhythm.
“Please,” she said, feeling as locked into that hypnotic rhythm as I was. She hooked her fingers into the top of my pants and pulled, searching for a button, a clasp, anything. “Please.”
Yes, I thought. I would fuck the hell out of her, and who knew, maybe it would prolong her life for a day or two. Satisfying one desire might in turn slake another, no?
She hit the earth. One moment she was looking at the curve of my ear, wanting to reach up and touch my curls, and the next, she was staring at a sky full of stars.
I settled my weight against her, pinning her as my cold hand lifted the shirt and found her bare underneath.
I slipped my hand between her legs, parting them, and found that sweet spot that made her moan. Before the sound fully passed her lips, I seized her throat with my teeth.
I didn’t break the skin, but held her there all the same as I sl
id my fingers inside her and began pumping them to the rhythm of her heart. Her heart sped up and so did my hand.
She writhed.
But it wasn’t what she really wanted. Fuck, it wasn’t what I really wanted. We were like teenagers at the threshold, fearful of the consequences of that first fuck, but unable to lessen our need with all the dry humping in the world. Only this time, cherry popping meant death—to at least one of us.
She reached down and fumbled with the button of my pants. I was more than happy to help her, and in one lightning fast movement they were gone.
She shivered as I slid inside her. Stars sparked behind my closed eyes as I plunged deep, going as far as I could go.
And I continued like that, thrusting into her with a deft and relentless rhythm, while I kept her pinned at the throat like some jungle cat. Her heartbeat throbbed against my lips, teasing me with each beat: take her, take her, take her, take her…
She crested a hill and cried out. Her back arching.
I bit down and entered her mind.
The flush of burning blood hit the back of my throat at the same moment white-hot fangs pieced my throat—no, not my throat—hers. She writhed, squirming against me, and I rode that wave of pleasure. I drank her down as her legs wrapped around me, pinning me against her.
I kept thrusting. She hoped it would never end. I was very aware that it would end all too soon if I didn’t pull back. I tried, and she whimpered beneath me. She clung harder.
I withdrew my teeth with great effort.
“Please,” she begged. “Please don’t stop.” She slid onto my erection, burying it inside her to the hilt. It left me breathless.
See? I caressed the inside of her mind, unable to bring myself to use a tongue coated with her blood. I was certain if I opened my mouth again, it would be to finish her. You’re not as ready to give up as you thought, Lettie Cole. Remember that when you wake up.
“I don’t want to wake up,” she said. Her lip trembled. “Please, I don’t want to wake up.”