Margaret Lynne should have known better, Henry thought. Dad didn’t want to see them, not really. He had a new wife and three new kids and he didn’t want to be reminded of the hard years with Mom. Dad had left and that was all there was to it. He went into the kitchen and took a liter of soda from the fridge and got ready to go down to the basement. It was better to keep away from the conflicts between his sister and mother. He longed for something good to eat, something with life in it that would strengthen him for the next couple of days. His trap in the park had remained disappointingly empty, and his appetite was sharpening with every passing hour.
“Hey, Mom!” Margaret Lynne shouted as Henry began his descent. “Mom! I’m going out!”
“Be back by nine tonight, missy. It’s a school night and your grades—” Her words were cut off as the front door slammed.
The basement was cool and dark, friendly to Henry. He found a mouse in one of his traps, and after a brief hesitation, he got out his pocket-knife and began his snack, finding the little life more sustaining than he had hoped at first. When his meal was done, he sat down at his old laptop—the last gift from his father, some three years ago—and began to record his meal and response. He read back through the files, finding solace in the information he had gathered about all he had eaten, and realized that it still wasn’t enough. Gradually he began to think about larger meals, anticipating the thrill he would have from them, and the power that would possess him.
“Almost like a super-hero,” he said aloud, and put his hand over his mouth, as if the sound of the words would compromise his potency. Carefully he turned off the laptop and sat in the dim basement, contemplating the problems of catching bigger prey.
* * * *
The puppy had a bloody paw, and its coat was dirty—it was little more than two months old, clearly abandoned and beginning to fail. It whimpered with hunger, a mongrel with no promise of handsomeness or charm. Henry bent and picked it up, looking around to be sure no one saw him do it, and slipped the puppy into his jacket pocket. He had a half-formed plan to eat the pathetic little animal, but as he walked home, he could tell that the animal had little energy to offer him. He decided to stop and get some milk for the puppy, and something to eat, to fatten him up a bit; the way he was now, there wasn’t much vitality in him. He’d have to bring down his old jacket for the animal to sleep on, too, and find some way to make sure he didn’t make too much of a stink: Mom might be drunk some evenings, but her nose still worked.
He continued to plan as he made his way along the sidewalk, his mind only on the puppy squirming in his pocket. He wished he had more than two dollars with him, but he decided he’d manage somehow.
In the market he saw his mother—she was buying some stuff for dinner and, of course, another bottle of vodka. He was careful to avoid her, not wanting her to find out about the puppy, so he hid out behind the onions and potatoes until he saw her leave. Then he bought a pint of milk and a small sample-size packet of dog-kibble. When he finished paying for it, he had thirty-four cents left, and he had no idea what he’d buy lunch with the next day. All the more reason to get the puppy ready to eat. It was going to be a hard few days.
When he arrived home, he headed for the basement at once, his nerves strained just the way Mom said hers were at the end of the day. He could hear Margaret Lynne’s CD player blaring out an electric-guitar-and-drum with three voices wailing about disappointed desire and the general unfairness of societal pressures on young lovers. Most of the time he was pissed off at her for causing such a rumpus, but now he was glad for her defiance, for it assured him more privacy than he had expected.
“Okay,” he said to the puppy as he took the little mutt out of his pocket and set him down on the floor. The little dog began to sniff out his surroundings, then found an upright pillar and urinated on it.
“Hey!” Henry cried out. “Don’t do that. I’ll bring some papers for you. But you can’t go around doing that. Mom’ll notice.”
The puppy looked up at him and whined.
This was going to be difficult, Henry realized, but he was determined to carry on; he had so much to gain and he’d waited for so long for such splendid opportunity. The puppy was everything he had been hoping for.
“Henry!” his mother called from upstairs. “Are you down there?”
“Yeah, Mom,” Henry called back. “I’m on the computer.”
“What?” She was shouting now to be heard over the clamor of the boombox. “What are you doing?”
Henry raised his voice and repeated himself, holding his breath, hoping she wouldn’t try to investigate.
“Make sure you do your homework!” his mother yelled.
“Yes, Mom,” Henry told her and looked over at the puppy. “I’ll do it.”
“You’re a good boy, Henry,” she told him, her voice lowered but still loud enough to be heard.
“Thanks, Mom,” he said, mistrusting her praise. He waited for the greater part of a minute, as if there was a possible hazard in her good opinion.
When nothing more happened, Henry went to put out food and milk for the puppy, selecting a styrofoam burger container from among his collection on a rough basement shelf for the kibble. “You can start out with this.” He was careful to move quietly, making an effort to keep the puppy from romping around too much, and hoping he wouldn’t howl or whimper or bark or anything like that.
“You gotta be quiet,” he admonished the little dog. “You’re not supposed to be here.” He wondered briefly if he had made a mistake in bringing the puppy home, then decided that he needed to learn how to catch and fatten prey. “You eat your food. I’ll bring down paper for your piss and poop. Just be quiet. It’s important that you—” He reached out and took the puppy’s little muzzle in his hand, closing the puppy’s mouth.
The puppy whimpered and gave a tentative wave of his tail.
Henry shook his head and went to get one of the old deli pint containers. He put this on the floor next to the kibble and poured half the milk into it. “You can drink this. I’ll bring you more water.”
The puppy began to devour the food, only interrupting himself to lap the milk. He was clearly famished and wanted to stuff himself. It was good to see him eat so eagerly—he would be fat and sassy soon, and he would be full of life. Henry patted the puppy’s head, anticipating the day he would reap the harvest he was sowing now. How great he would taste! And the energy he would provide!
Henry thought he might not be able to contain it all, and that made him feel sick and excited at once. He went over to his rickety old chair and sat down, already thinking about what he could eat tonight that would sustain him while the puppy improved. He was getting hungry for life and he wasn’t sure he could wait for the puppy to reach a size and vigor that he longed for.
By the time Henry left the basement he had taken up the first layer of old papers. The house was silent, Margaret Lynne having gone out an hour ago. He stopped in the kitchen and took a half-finished Whopper with everything from the fridge as a stopgap meal. It wasn’t enough to give him what he sought most, but it was better than nothing.
He went off toward his room, pausing in the living room where his mother was asleep in front of the television, which had the late news on. He washed up in the bathroom, doing his best to keep quiet. He decided not to wake his mother, for that would mean helping her into bed, and that was more than he wanted to do. It would be at least a week before the puppy would be ready, and he would have to be very careful in the meantime. If only school weren’t still in session, he could spend the time making sure the puppy wasn’t discovered.
He noticed that Margaret Lynne wasn’t home yet. This meant trouble tomorrow, he knew, so he would have to get up early and take care of the puppy before things exploded at breakfast. All these possibilities kept him unpleasant company as he got into bed.
* * * *
“Oh my God!” Henry’s mother exclaimed from the top of the basement steps. She swayed a little and bl
inked against the darkness. “How can you? What are you doing?”
Henry looked up from his half-consumed meal. There was blood on his chin and shirt, and the skin and guts of the puppy lay at his feet on the last of the papers. He was so elated by what he had been eating that he was unable to conceal anything he had done or to comprehend what his mother was staring at.
“Mom?”
“Henry. What…you…you’re eating…” She started down the stairs, her face fixed in shock. “That looks like—”
“Just leave me alone, Mom,” Henry pleaded, alarmed by the shock he saw in her face. “I’m not doing anything wrong.”
“Not wrong?” Her distress was increasing as she was increasingly aware of what he was doing. “It’s raw!”
“It’s good,” said Henry, not even her outrage enough to stop the power from the puppy’s life surging through him, making him feel strong, almost invincible. “It’s not important.”
“It’s terrible,” said his mother, coming down another two steps. “Eating raw meat!” She peered at the mess around him. “What’s that at your feet?” The color drained from her face. “I thought you were doing fine, that it was Margaret Lynne who was causing all the trouble.” Her indignation was marred by a slight slurring of the words.
For once Henry didn’t want to be compliant. He got to his feet, spilling the sections of the butchered puppy onto the floor.
“Now look what you made me do.” He lowered his head, staring up at her from under his brows.
“Henry!” His mother wailed out his name, her face set into a mask of anguish. She reached out, shaking her fist at the boy.
“Leave it alone, Mom—I know what I’m doing,” Henry warned her, convinced that he could persuade her to see him point of view if he only had the chance. “It’s nothing to bother about.”
“You’re sick! God, you’re sick!” she muttered. “You need help.”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Henry said, more sharply than before.
“And you’re dangerous,” she went on as if to yourself. “Bachman isn’t anything compared to you.”
The mention of the brain-damaged patient at the clinic was too much for Henry, who stood up straight. “It’s nothing like that!” The puppy’s vitality made him brave, and he faced his mother without feeling the need to appease her.
“It’s disgusting—disgusting!” She reached for the flimsy bannister and almost had it when she lost her footing, tumbling down the stairs to the concrete. Henry could hear her bones break, and saw that she was still breathing though her eyes were glazed and there was blood around her head.
“Mom!” Henry shouted, and hurried toward her.
She was trying to talk, but failing. Only her hands fluttered a bit, but there was no control to the movement. Henry knelt beside her, helplessness washing through him in a debilitating tide. Her eyelids flickered but then they stopped; she was still breathing a little.
“Oh, oh, Mom!” Henry started to cry, but then he sighed as he realized what he would have to do. He went back and found his pocket-knife, hoping it would be up to the task ahead of him. She still had life in her, and that life would endure in him; it would cancel her dying—for she had to be dying—if he could get some of her into him before her heart gave out. He couldn’t do anything else to save her. “It’s for the best, Mom. Let me take your life into me. You’ll see: it’ll make us both strong.”
He sliced at her arm; the limb flopped once, like a beached fish, and he continued to cut until he had a strip of skin and muscle. He began to chew on it, finding it salty and a bit stringy at first. The wonderful energy began to well in him, making him light-headed. There was blood everywhere, and he was afraid she would bleed to death before he could take her life into him.
“Hey, Mom. You’re the best!”
The puppy was nothing compared to his mother. He didn’t know how much more he could eat, there was such vitality in his mother’s body, and it filled him as nothing ever had before. He continued to eat as the life ran out of her, and left her an empty corpse.
* * * *
By the time Henry had packed his mother’s body into a large plastic trash bag, he was already making plans, anticipating the hour when Margaret Lynne would be home. She was so full of life, he thought, and it would sustain him much longer than poor, exhausted mom would do. School was out tomorrow, and no one would miss Margaret Lynne—they’d think she was with their father. He began to hum as he neatened up the basement, contemplating the hour when Margaret Lynne would arrive and he could once again embrace life to its fullest.
THE PIMP, by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Skin like white silk, pale as the sheets on which she lies, is marred by two deep-red scabs; beneath the skin blood is pulsing, hot and rich.
For long minutes she stares down at that pulsing, caught between hunger and repulsion, between lust and fascination.
“She could die,” she says, not looking up. She doesn’t see whether the observer shrugs; she doesn’t really care. At any rate, he says nothing in reply.
The white silk skin draws nearer, hunger overcoming repulsion, and she opens her jaws so far the dead muscles strain. She can feel her venom flowing, knows it’s running down her fangs like water down stalactites, slow and thick.
Her vision is forced away from the girl’s neck as her teeth set, sight lost in clouds of fine, tangled golden hair, and she closes her eyes.
Slowly, slowly, she presses her fangs against the white throat, the razor edges tearing through the scabs, cutting through the hard-clotted blood in a brief dry teasing before the new, fresh fluid wells up, blood and her own venom blending, hot and rich and bearing the flood of memories.
Eight years old, Momma’s drunk again, and she’s holding Amy by the blond braids they had plaited three days before, the morning before Momma’s boyfriend had left; she’s holding the braids so tight Amy can’t move her head, can’t turn to watch, but Amy can see from the corner of her eye as Momma pulls the steak knife from the drawer, the steak knife with the shining, serrated edge, and Momma holds it loosely in one hand for a moment while the other hand is clamped tight on the braids. Amy wishes she could pull free, maybe if her hair weren’t braided she could, she could pull the hairs away, let them tear out of her scalp, and it would hurt but it would be over, she could run and hide.
But she can’t pull out entire braids, and the knife is coming closer, Momma runs it across Amy’s throat, very lightly, then a little harder, hard enough to snag and scratch ever so slightly.
“Amy,” she says, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you,” and Amy knows that she doesn’t mean that like the mothers on TV, she really means that she herself doesn’t know what she’s going to do, how far she’ll go this time.
And the knife blade slides across again, stinging this time, and Amy feels something flowing down her neck and she knows it must be blood, she whimpers, she doesn’t mean to but she whimpers, and Momma tells her, “Kneel down, Amy…”
And that’s all; the blood has stopped flowing. The vampire opens her eyes, pulls her fangs free of the wounds, glances down at Amanda’s chest.
It’s not moving.
She peers closely at the silk-white throat, at the small smear of blood she’s just left, looking for the old scars, but even her eyes can’t find them, not for certain; a faint line, so faint she might be imagining it, so faint it might be just a crease in the skin from normal movement of the head, might be there.
But she remembers the feel of the blade across her throat, and shudders with inexplicable pleasure at the stolen memory.
“Sweet,” she says, “but not enough.”
“Take more, then,” he says quietly, his voice a distant whisper.
“There is no more,” she tells him.
He gets to his feet and crosses to the bed, stares down at Amanda’s body. “She’s dead?” he asks.
She nods.
“Damn,” he says.
She smiles to herself. “I do,” sh
e whispers, but he doesn’t hear.
“I don’t know how many more I can explain away,” he says.
“I said she might die,” the vampire reminds him.
“I know,” he says, “I know.”
“I want more,” she tells him. “There wasn’t enough left.”
He glances nervously at her. “I’ll see,” he says.
She waits calmly in the room, beside Amanda’s cooling corpse, as he leaves; she hears the latch click, hears his footsteps retreating down the hallway.
To pass the time until his return, she remembers—not her own life, but the memories she’s drunk from others.
She remembers the raw sexual passion that she felt when she drank the blood of a serial killer, the hideously erotic memories of his crimes, the power and glory of his hands on unwilling flesh, of his knife digging, of reaching into the wound…
And that blends into the memories of a boy trapped in a tornado-shattered home, the weight of a fallen ceiling joist driving his head onto the torn, bloody flesh of his mother, his hands flailing as he struggles to free himself, as he tries to fight free of his mother’s body…
She recalls the sensation of giving birth to a monstrosity, the strain, the tearing, the gasp of relief and then horror as she sees what she’s borne, as she sees, before the doctor can snatch it away, what’s lived for nine months in her belly, sees it still twitching as it dies…
Reviewing them this way is not as good, not as involving, not as rich as drinking them in the blood, but it amuses her.
For the moment.
She remembers the jumbled unbearable love and hatred of a molested child, the feel of a father’s flesh jammed down her throat, the hot sharp pain of torn and abraded tissue, blood spilling, trickling, spurting from a thousand wounds in a hundred different bodies, young and old.
All that wealth of experience, of sensation, lost to her own dead flesh forever, she can only taste through others; she hungers for the memories more than she hungers for the blood itself.
The Vampire Megapack Page 23