by Lee McGeorge
“No. The strigoi won’t get you.”
“But it might Ildico. I went to that grave when you told me not to. I saw something there that was like a strigoi...”
“You can’t see the strigoi,” Ildico said over the top of him.
“Someone chased me in the forest and I fell in a stream. As far as I could tell it was a man but to a stupid believer it was a strigoi...”
“Who was chasing you?” Ildico asked.
“...and then it made me sick and since then I’ve been dreaming of vampires and having violent thoughts. Now if I believed this bullshit I would be thinking that the strigoi has got me? But I know what has really happened. I got sick because I fell in a stream; I got wet and cold. And the violent thoughts I’m having is because I’m working on a violent book and I keep getting threatened with violence just by living here.”
“But who is threaten with violence?”
Paul looked at her, incredulous. “Nealla, Nealla has threatened me.”
Ildico sat silent.
“Me, I believe in the rational. Everything I believe is observable, measurable and repeatable. You... you believe in strigoi and vampires and devil forests and God and an afterlife and that makes you fucking stupid.”
Ildico stood up and set her wine glass down by the laptop. She looked ready to leave but hovered for a second.
Then it hit him. What the hell was he doing?
Oh Jesus Christ. I spend all day stressing that I’m going to get a pretty girl to come here and then I behave like a psycho.
Ildico walked out of the room.
“Ildico... Ildico, I’m sorry. I’m...”
A moment later she stepped back in. “Where did you put my coat?”
From the hallway she should have seen it hanging from the back of the chair in the kitchen, but with the power still out it would be pitch black there. Paul picked up the candle and carefully walked through. “I’m really sorry Ildico. I don’t have any excuse. I don’t know what came over me.”
He wanted to hammer his head off the wall.
This was a nice girl, a pretty girl, a lovely girl. What the hell? Why call her stupid? Are you insane?
He set the candle on the kitchen table and lifted her coat from the back of the chair. Suddenly, he was hit by a wave of panic. If she walks out now, she would never come back. If he didn’t salvage the situation in the next sixty seconds, there wouldn’t be a second chance. His breathing strained, his heart jumped in his chest.
Don’t let her go.
“I put some pins in your coat,” he said pointing out the safety-pin repair work. “I thought it might last until you can sew it or... or...”
Don’t lose this girl. Don’t let her leave.
The vertigo started to rise, dizziness, a spinning room. He looked at Ildico seeing her face. Tears ran over her cheeks; he had made her cry.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never want to make you cry.”
Then it happened.
It came with the vertigo.
A sensation like he was falling backwards through space. But he wasn’t falling. He was kissing her; pressing her against the wall of the hallway in darkness. He felt a throb in his trousers as her tongue swirled around his. Who was kissing who? Who had started it? Who initiated it?
Did it matter?
They were walking to the bedroom, him carrying the candle with one hand and shielding the flame with the other. Ildico clung to his elbow.
Without expectation, things were back on track.
She didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to go back outside.
On the bed. He unbuttoned her blouse. His fingers trembled. She was so thin and slender. Her breasts were flat and firm against her chest but as he peeled off her bra he saw juicy, fat nipples like push-buttons; gorgeous, begging to be sucked and teased with his tongue.
He was sitting on the bed with Ildico straddling him. They kissed. It was passionate. She was topless and working at the buttons of his own shirt. He felt somehow disempowered in the exchange. Weak. Lacking strength.
Oh God, this girl is crazy for it.
The vertigo assaulted him as much as his lust. Dizziness as Ildico peeled off her clothes and his. His hands swept over her skin, fingertips brushing over her flanks and around her back. He could feel her ribs, her spine. With what felt a considerable effort he pulled her forward to get one of her nipples in his mouth and it was greeted by a wave of light-headed ecstasy. It was like being drunk, everything was slurring.
He felt a sudden moment of clarity and saw the world as it really was. Ildico had got off him to slip out of her skin tight jeans. Her legs were sticks she was so thin. Paul reached behind him, he was sitting on the pillow and struggled to get his hand underneath and take the condoms. He placed them beside the candle.
Ildico came back to him and helped pull off his own jeans. Her head lowered to kiss his chest and he felt her ponytail tickle across his abdomen as her hands went under his shorts to hold his penis. Cold, bony fingers wrapped around his cock as her tongue flicked over his own nipples.
She pulled off his shorts and he struggled to take off his socks. It felt slow and difficult, like he was drugged. The world seemed to spin as he endeavoured, vertigo feelings whooshed around his head. He was sitting with his back to the headboard, wanting a breather, wanting a moment to let the wooziness pass but Ildico climbed back on top to straddle him. She still wore underwear, a black cotton thong. As she leant forward the tang drew a clean black line through the crack of her ass and he felt his cock stiffen into steel.
Paul lifted her upright and took hold of her pants to pull them down.
“No!” she said boldly. “No, not now.”
The moment she said ‘no’ sent a surge of rage into his system. He wanted to touch her pussy. He wanted to hold her down and grip her wrists above her head with one hand whilst he fingered her with the other. He wanted to make her slowly writhe by teasing her clit, he wanted to feel her squirming with his fingers inside of her.
No...
She had said ‘no’?
Bitch.
It was a short lived feeling. Ildico pushed his legs apart and knelt between them with her knees apart. Her head went down and her ass went high in the air as she took him in her mouth.
The vertigo hit like a tsunami that sent his body weakly juddering in submission. His head rocked back as he felt her tongue drawing circles. The sensation stopped and he heard her voice speaking. It was an effort but he brought his head back up to see, feeling as if all the strength of his body drained.
“What?” he whispered.
“Watch me do it,” she said, repeating the indecipherable words of a moment ago. As she whispered the words he could feel her breath against his cock. In the candlelight she looked gorgeous. Naked, holding his sex in her hands with moist lips poised just over the tip. “Watch me do it,” she said again. Then her lips were wrapping around him, her hand was stroking the shaft, her tongue was writing out the alphabet and her wide open puppy-dog eyes were staring up lovingly.
The vertigo was overpowering. It wasn’t a sensation like dizziness, more like one of falling. Falling forever, away from the scene into an eternal blackness. He was falling into the deepest of nights.
The light from the candle exploded in intensity.
The sun was shining.
Forest.
Lush forest, not the winter stripped trees but rich with green leaves and a summer sun making everything warm, glowing all across his body. Ildico stood before him with a hand on her hip as his body flushed with exquisite sexual pleasure like he’d never felt before. They were fully clothed in this fantasy; a fantasy that played out in real time against what was happening naked in the bedroom.
Ildico was smiling as she peeled off a pullover and dropped it aside. She slipped out of her jeans to stand in her underwear. She was toying with him, teasing with smiles. She touched a finger to her teeth and bit the end gently as a show. Then she turned and ran, s
quealing a laugh, a girly little giggle. Paul tried to follow but felt slow and sluggish. His body wasn’t responding the way it ought to.
“Ildico,” he called out with a smile. “I’m coming for you Ildico.”
Even though fully dressed, he felt naked somehow. Tickled, enticed, as though his entire body were being kissed and licked and soothed. From behind a bush he heard Ildico giggle but by the time he’d got there she was gone. She’d been there. Her bra was hooked to a branch.
Paul scanned the forest for clues, listening, but it was hard to pick anything out. He felt overwhelmed with joy, with emotion, as though parties with friends and the joys of life were exploding around him like fireworks.
On the ground he spotted Ildico’s thong. She must be fully nude now, somewhere in this forest, running naked in the glorious sunshine. She was hiding, waiting for him to find her. He would find her... he would find her and teach her a beautiful lesson for running. What a lesson it would be to hold her down and spread her legs and slip inside her and...
There was a muffled scream. Paul froze and at the same moment felt a powerful surging in his groin. The sexual ecstasy was still enveloping his physical body but something about this was wrong. Perhaps wrong wasn’t the word, it was bizarre, it was surreal, but that only added to the excitement.
He picked up her thong and turned it inside out to lick the gusset. He wanted to taste her sex and bring back the fantasy, but all that came was mild vertigo and a sensation that he should be fighting this. He should resist. He should turn and run.
“Ildico?” he called.
There was nothing for a moment.
Then from behind, came that awful exhaled breath. He knew what it was behind him... he couldn’t bring himself to say it...
He wanted to turn, needed to, but his body wasn’t prepared to respond. He could feel something rising inside him, an explosion of power that was overwhelming, a growing power that when unleashed would tear him apart. It was making his body lock, his muscles go rigid, his breathing stop.
I must break this... I must break this... Oh God.
“ILDICO!”
He screamed her name as he spun around and saw it.
The vampire.
Its skin was marble, pure white. It was naked, its muscles powerful. It held Ildico against a tree, gripping her vagina with one hand and holding her head with the other. Her legs were splayed, lifeless, as the vampire kissed her. Except it wasn’t kissing her. It was...
“Oh, God, no... Ildico...”
The vampire turned to him. Its body was splashed in blood from the gaping hole in Ildico’s throat. It was eating her, ripping her apart with its teeth. She was already dead. It held her thin naked body upright with its powerful fingers hooked around her crotch. Blood covered her tits, her torso.
The vampire didn’t show emotion, but if it could, then in those red glassy eyes it was smiling. It was the horror. The horror. And at the same moment that Paul watched this thing drinking from the poor naive Romanian girl he was feeling the most exquisite sexual feeling of his life. Somewhere else, in a bedroom lit by a single candle, Ildico was tasting his cum. In the real world semen was pumping from his balls into her mouth, but here in his head he was watching her murdered and feeling it as the most gratifying sexual experience of his life. In the forest he felt the warmth happening inside his clothing. He was cumming in his own pants just from seeing the vampire kill the naked girl. It was gorgeous. It was exquisite. An orgasm more powerful and gratifying than any he had ever felt before simply from looking at her bloody corpse.
Although he would never be aware of it consciously, for the rest of his life, he would forever be in pursuit of this feeling. No matter what it would cost. He had to. He had to have it. He would have to experience this feeling again. No matter what the cost, he would have to feel this again...
...and again.
...and again.
PART III
The cockerel was crowing and Paul was staring at the ceiling. He’d been like that for five or six minutes when it suddenly dawned on him that he was alone. Ildico. Perhaps she was in the kitchen making coffee. What a treat that would be.
Paul slipped out of the covers and pulled on some shorts. “Ildico,” he called moving out of the bedroom. “Ildico?” He looked in the kitchen to find it sadly empty with an unwelcome coldness to the air. She wasn’t in the bathroom either, or the living room or the empty room leading to the balcony.
Her coat was gone.
“What? You leave without saying goodbye?”
It felt rude that she’d just slipped away after last night, but still, there was probably a good reason. He hardly knew anything of her private life. She said that she worked occasionally as a cleaner and perhaps that was where she’d gone. Yes, that sounded plausible.
How nice it would have been to find her here. How nice it would be to kiss her and hug her and say ‘good morning’ to this pretty girl in his home. How nice it would be to eat breakfast with her. Another morning they would do this.
It was her work that had stolen her away so early. Her cleaning job. It made sense, she had a job that started early and she didn’t want to wake him. That was what was nice about her. That was what made her wonderful.
----- X -----
The photograph of the cross at the centre of the shrine was on the laptop screen. He’d stopped the slideshow to stare at this single image hoping it would jump start his imagination at a precise point. The story panels stared down from the walls. Jesus stared down from the other wall.
“Let’s put this into play,” he whispered. “Show me.”
Nothing happened.
The story panels didn’t fade to his personalised cinema screen, they sat there staring back as helpful as the brick wall they were hung from. Paul looked to the painting of Jesus. “And why are you looking so smug?” Jesus remained serene.
He concentrated on the image of the cross, trying to blot out the rest of the world and fill his vision with the single image, waiting for it to trigger his creative process.
Nothing happened.
He set the photographs to slowly loop through a slideshow, hoping something would set him off.
It didn’t.
He made coffee and returned to watch the pictures. He collected the small silver cross with the twine and wrapped it around his wrist. “You know you were around the wrist of a vampire,” he said to the cross. “I pulled you off a dead body. I’m now an accidental grave robber.”
Nothing.
“Come on man, concentrate. Vampires in the basement.”
Nothing.
The photographs faded in and out.
He’d put all of the images he had into the slideshow. Ildico turned up in a few and she made him smile. She was stood on the balcony of Castle Bran. There was a picture of her in the gardens and one by the giant saw. The saw. It was a giant torture device. “Let’s strap somebody to that table.”
Nisha. The voice, his own voice almost shouted her name in his head.
“You think you can fuck me then hold an accusation of rape over me? I will strap you to that table and smile at your begs and screams for mercy as that blade rides between your legs. I’ll laugh when it tears through your guts ending your life, you fucking whore bitch!”
Nothing.
He couldn’t even see the pictures of Nisha’s evisceration in his mind. They were just words he was speaking out loud. Words about killing. Should it be so easy to speak about killing Nisha? Should it feel so good to say it aloud?
Get it off your chest. It’s just play acting.
“I wanted to love you, Nisha. But now I would love to kill you. You fucking hurt me and terrified me and held false accusations over me like a blade to my throat. You inflicted hurt and pain and rejection and stress and I fucking hate you and I want you dead.”
Nothing.
Pointless.
Fuck Nisha. She wasn’t the avenue to regain imagination. Forget her. She’s not important. What wa
s important was his creativity, always so fertile, always so rich and active, had today gone utterly mute.
The photographs rolled back around to the cross in the shrine. He would go back there. He would go back to jumpstart his story mind.
----- X -----
The sky looked like it had a dirty, moth-eaten sheet hanging from it. A blanket of smooth grey clouds pierced by occasional holes of sunlight.
There were a few people sporadically in the street and courtyard. He passed close to a wrinkled woman in a mauve woollen headscarf who was beating a carpet by the communal bins; she had the rug hung over a steel frame that looked like a goalpost, purpose built for beating rugs and shaking off the dust. Vacuum cleaners, it seemed, were still to be introduced to Noua. Despite her advanced years she was whipping the hell out of the rug.
Whipping. He tried to picture Ildico hanging by her wrists from that frame in place of the rug. He tried to see her jeans pulled down to expose her ass and envision a birch in his hand to whip her naked buttocks. He tried, but it was like he was telling himself rather than seeing it for real.
Strange he should want to see Ildico in such painful torture; she was wonderful and it wasn’t right to have that fantasy. Right now he would be happy with any fantasy coming to life just to know his imagination was back at his command. Hopefully the shrine would bring it back. He hoped it would. In fact he felt entirely certain it would. It was a foregone conclusion. He just had to visit the shrine and everything would be back to normal. All he had to do was get to the shrine.
On the way, he saw something he would rather not see.
Big Man and Boy.
They were almost out of view, down a little track between smallholdings on the way to the forest; too distant and facing the wrong way to pay him any mind. Big Man had his arm around the kid and was hugging his shoulders as they walked. Although they were distant, he could see that Boy had his head drooped and tipped away, his feet dragged and his whole body seemed to move through an odd shuffling.