by Lee McGeorge
For at least a minute he watched as they receded to the distance. Before vanishing entirely from view, Big Man turned Boy to face him and lifted the kid’s chin with one of his meat hook hands. Even at such a distance Paul could tell that the boy was crying. Big Man squat down like a parent about to button up the coat of their child. Then he kissed Boy on the lips, a kiss of reassurance, but...
But...
What the hell?
No grown man would kiss a boy like that, unless they were family, perhaps? Maybe they were brothers? It would be easy to think that if in a forgiving mood.
“There’s something very wrong in that story,” Paul said aloud. “Something very, very wrong.”
----- X -----
Reaching the shrine was easy now he knew the route. His enthusiasm was building and he found himself striding, he practically ran down and back up the big V shaped gully, he grinned on seeing the long fallen tree alongside the path. Such strange feelings and emotions for this place.
Thoughts, feelings, images.
Arousal of the senses.
He detoured from the route to find the gully he’d traversed the day he’d fallen into the stream, the one that had made him feverish. He stood at the base to look along its length. The water was hidden beneath a layer of ice and snow but he could still hear it. He listened closely, staring along the trench, mesmerized, almost hypnotised by the sound of water.
His imagination felt close by.
He was back in time, running away from the person in the camouflaged clothing. He looked along the length of the gully and remembered the emotion, relived it, sensing the stress and panic as he’d fled. His heart quickened and he physically felt his veins and arteries widening to allow blood to flow easier. He felt his iris tighten to sharpen his vision. He felt as his eardrums attuned to absorb the acoustics of the forest in highest fidelity.
Then it happened.
He saw the vampire.
At the very far end of the gully was the naked white figure, skin like marble, eyes of coloured red glass. It was walking towards him. The snow and ice didn’t matter, the cold didn’t matter. This powerful naked man was impervious to cold. He walked in slow but deliberate steps staring straight at Paul. Tree branches arched overhead from either side of the gully to form a tunnel through the forest. Snow began falling in large cotton candy flakes; falling in slow motion, obscuring the creature slightly.
“You are the one who chased me that day, aren’t you. I wasn’t chased by a hunter or a crazy person. It was you.”
Paul watched it get closer admiring its features. The muscle tone was sublime, but it was the eyes, those lifeless yet beautiful eyes that made it special.
Then it was gone.
When Paul reached the shrine he was breathing hard but enjoying the exertion. Long streams of breath poured from his mouth and he rested with hands on hips at the entrance to the grave. He spent a few moments admiring the cruciform of Christ. He reached up to touch it, to feel how cold the metal figure of Jesus was to his fingertips. Briefly in his imagination he saw the cruciform being placed, as though he was looking through the eyes of whomever had originally hung it; he was looking at his outstretched arm with his fingers hooked around the crucifix and his thumb resting on the figurine of Jesus. He felt it in his hand. It was real. He had hold of it. In his mind he mentally took a photograph of his outstretched arm holding the cruciform.
The damaged cross inside the shrine was still damaged. The mysterious person or persons who maintained the site had not been here since. It was still broken and still in exactly the position he’d left it. There was no negative emotion at the thought of breaking it. No guilt for spoiling the site. The damage didn’t really matter. It would probably have fallen of its own accord given a little more time.
As he left the shrine he spotted a tree which took on an odd fascination and he stared at it, fixated, eyes glued. He suspected it was the tree from his imagination where he had seen the vampire feeding from Ildico. It was a very powerful reminiscence, like déjà vu or a mysterious sense that told him this was the place, that here was where it had happened. In a forest of a million trees he would have expected one tree to look like the next yet this one held a magnetic fascination.
Ildico.
With her name uttered in his subconscious came a surge of sexual excitement. A dreamy fantasy. He was looking at a tree but It felt like watching porn. Ildico. She had become so frustratingly desirable. He pictured the fantasy precisely, his imagination returning. He had hold of her against that tree. She was naked, she was weakened to the point she could barely stand without leaning against the trunk for support. Her skin was as cold to touch as the snow her bare feet stood upon, but the blood coming from her throat was warm, viscous and flowing. In his trousers his penis was hard within seconds of forming the picture in his head, his testicles felt like they were ready to unload. In his mind’s eye he was holding her neck and chin and tilted her head so that he could gaze into her eyes as she died. He saw her eyes up close, her beautiful hazel brown irises, the darkest black pupils. He saw this and felt the blood running over his hand and between her tits and it was almost enough to make him orgasm. The only reason he didn’t was he turned away from the tree and forcibly broke off the imagination. He instantly regretted it.
Why shouldn’t he enjoy a sexual fantasy of Ildico? That fantasy was so powerful his lucid dreaming of her slit throat would have been enough to make him cum. It’s not wrong to enjoy those fantasies, in fact it was stupid of him to turn away. He should have stayed looking at her, and fucked her and killed her and cum in his pants from thinking about it and loved every fucking second.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
There’s nothing at all wrong with that!
----- X -----
Paul crossed the courtyard towards the block in a contented frame of mind. The loss and subsequent return of his imagination was of no greater worry than losing and finding a bunch of keys but the affair had felt odd. He couldn’t ever remember a time when his creative ability had failed him. He’d had it from childhood and it was as natural as breathing. Strange it had suddenly stopped.
Nothing to worry about.
The walk back had been filled with thoughts of Ildico and occasional ruminations on Nisha. Why she should be intrusively invading his thoughts was a real mystery. It should be in the past, done and dusted, all forgotten about. It was months ago, half a world from here, yet she had becoming a slowly creeping obsession?
As he approached the communal bins he looked at the steel frame for beating rugs and this time pictured Ildico’s naked form suspended from it. Poor Ildico. What villain had trussed her up outdoors in the cold? Snow was falling, she was shivering. He had to rescue her, he had to be the hero. He would cut her down and rescue her and be the strong man that his ego desired him to be. He would rescue her and she would fall in love with him. It wasn’t right to see her in pain, only Nisha should...
His imagination transposed Ildico into Nisha and his thoughts reversed with the ease of flipping a switch.
Thoughts of chivalrous rescue became a surging and overpowering desire to abuse. Nisha was where she deserved to be. She was stripped naked and exposed, hanging by her wrists from the frame. She was already in pain, her body stretched under it’s own weight as her bare feet tried to stand on tip-toes against the sharp ice and gravel of the floor. Nisha was in the helpless position his ego desired. Her dusky skin bristled with goose-pimples, her teeth chattered with the cold and her little heart was beating so fast with terror that he could almost see the throbbing of a pulse in her delicate little neck. The image exploded in his mind, intensifying, dressing him in the uniform of an SS officer at a concentration camp. His shiny polished boots crunched the snow underfoot. He had absolute power over her, the absolute power that corrupts absolutely and he was pleased it had corrupted him so. He was pleased he could torment and torture her without guilt or shame or fear of reprisal. She had hurt him and now was th
e time she would pay the price for it. He took hold of his officers dagger and pulled it from the sheath slowly, hearing the scrape of sharpened steel as it withdrew; black handle, embossed with the deaths head skull and SS runes, the blade inscribed ‘Meine Ehre heist Treue’. My Honour is True.
He could toy with her the way a cat toys with an injured bird.
“I’m going to peel the skin off your face, Nisha.”
She cried.
Sobbing.
Paul was shaken out of his fantasy world and back to reality. There really was sobbing. He wasn’t imagining it, someone was crying inside the communal bins enclosure. With some trepidation he looked inside and noticed someone hidden in the corner. The big wheelie bins were full of garbage but had a fresh coating of snow. The smell was subdued under the cold, more like the smell of wet cardboard than household waste but it was still no place to be crying.
He looked around the furthest wheelie bin to make the discovery and instantly wished he’d walked on by.
It was Boy.
Instinct... get out of here.
The kid was in pain, holding his stomach with both hands, bent forward crying.
Get out of here.
Just because he was away from Nealla and Big Man didn’t mean they weren’t close. The kid was wearing a filthy brown suede jacket, the cuffs almost black from worn in grime. It was the first time Paul had really looked at him. His clothes, his hair, his skin; every part of him was dirty. He looked homeless, almost feral.
“Hey,” Paul called to him. “Hey, Kid.”
Boy looked up to him and his face screwed in a grimace, he wailed on sight, seemingly in anguish at being discovered, but then gasped sharply as some abdominal pain took over causing him to jolt and squeeze his hands against his stomach even tighter.
How to talk to him? He was in pain. This wasn’t emotional upset, the kid was in genuine physical pain.
“Hey, Kid... do you need doctor... doctor...” Language barrier was one thing, but Boy looked harder to reach than that. It was the first time Paul had looked at his face close up and he was struck by the same thought he’d had the first time he’d seen him; this child was autistic or had some mental impairment.
“Lasa-ma in pace,” Boy said. As he spoke he gripped his stomach tighter as though trying to stem the bleeding from an invisible stab wound. His face screwed in a tight grimace; the pain he felt was undeniable.
“Are you... You is OK?” Paul tried logically to think of what to say, some universal language. Under normal conditions he would help the kid walk out of here, bring him outside, sit him down, call an ambulance. You don’t leave kids in bins in pain. What if he was in too much pain to move? What if he died here? What if they found his frozen snow covered body here in the morning? How could he explain to people that he could have helped but didn’t?
“Hospital?” Paul hoped the Romanian word was similar. “Hospital... Doctor... Ambulance?”
“Du te dracu, lasa-ma in pace.”
The kid could speak, but what he was saying didn’t sound friendly.
“Du te dracu. Du te dracu,” he spat. Each time he said it made it sound more like he was saying ‘Fuck off!’
“I don’t understand... Do you need help? Hospital?”
“Du te dracu!” he yelled, drooling spittle on to his coat. As he said it he slid down the wall to a crouch, tipping his head back and gripping his stomach for dear life. Tears cut rivers into his cheeks, washing some of the dirt from his skin.
Whatever ‘du te dracu’ meant was of little consequence. The intention was clear. The Boy didn’t want help. Did he not realise how bad his situation was? Fucking ungrateful little shit. Paul was risking a confrontation with Nealla or Big Man. He was showing compassion knowing full well that if either of the kid’s compatriots arrived they would show nothing but threats and violence. Paul wanted to tell Boy that, he wanted him to know that he was putting himself at risk in order to offer help. He wanted Boy to acknowledge that he was trying. But he wasn’t acknowledging it because he was a retarded little cunt.
“Du te dracu, lasa-ma in pace.”
And now the little shit had the audacity to say ‘Fuck off’ in a foreign language?
Rage built. Fierce, swelling. Just kick the little cunt in his head. Smash the sole of your foot against his face and break his skull off the wall.
Then he thought of Nealla and Big Man. The kid would speak. They would listen. they would come and find him. Better to leave the kid here and let him freeze to death.
Paul walked backwards, blowing the air from his lungs between clenched teeth. When Boy was out of sight he turned and walked away, hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. For a little while he was angry and raging, arguing in his head, wanting to go back and smash the living fuck out of that child. Over a few minutes he calmed and allowed his anger to evaporate, allowing himself to drift back to the state of neutrality he had been in. He thought about that kid, thought about how retarded he was. Autism or something. Definitely not right. He was in pain too. Perhaps he was homeless. Perhaps he was feral, living like an animal. Perhaps he’d eaten something from the bins that had poisoned him. He was definitely injured or in pain and he was definitely mentally vacant.
Paul suddenly stopped walking as the situation replayed in his head as a presentation to his more compassionate personality. It jolted him like an electric shock.
“My God... I wanted to kick an injured autistic child in the face!”
----- X -----
It was dark outside. The windows of the lounge were double paned which silenced the barking dogs that were all too audible from the kitchen; here it was peaceful. He was sitting comfortably, laid back in the chair with one leg crossing the other to hold the notepad. The candles were lit and the lights were out. The wall had long since dissolved into pictures of imagination, a private cinema screen for an audience of one. Several movies had already played but the one unfolding seemed to hold the promise of eroticism. He was looking at a log cabin tucked away deep in the forests. There was a man with a beard, wearing traditional Romanian clothing of a white smock covered by an embroidered black waistcoat. He was using an axe to chop pieces of firewood. The man was on one side of the building, whilst around the other side was a woman preparing vegetables for cooking. The woman was in a similar smock but it was tight fitting against an ample bosom. She didn’t look like the traditional wife, instead she had a sexy fairytale quality, like seeing a soft porn actress dressed as Snow White or some other adult play fantasy. Long flowing black hair. She was sitting on a little stool with her legs apart, her skirt hitched all the way above the knee to show some inner thigh. This woman need to be ripped out of that outfit. It was going to happen.
Stalking its way through the forest, was a marble skinned naked man. Paul walked with the vampire, sometimes standing behind to look over its shoulder, sometimes looking through its eyes to see what it could see.
The woman.
Paul watched her with a sense that this was the onset of an erotic fantasy. She was ripe, with heavy swollen breasts, voluptuous, wide hips with nice legs. He licked his lips feeling his heart flutter at the thought of what he could do to her.
He watched her through foliage. The forest was thick with fresh green leaves and the smell of woodland was uncommonly clear in his nostrils.
Alina.
The woman was called Alina. From nowhere the name came to him along with the sensation that he knew her, or rather the vampire had known her. He’d seen her before, he’d watched her, he’d grown up with her and spent his whole childhood watching her. She was older, slightly. She had always used her age advantage in condescension and put down. She was the teenaged girl who treated the skinny young boy with derision, presenting herself as a woman to make him feel like a little boy. Alina, definitely Alina. He had known this girl. A powerful memory came of him as a boy, swimming in a river whilst Alina walked past with girlfriends. They wore bikini tops to show off freshly grown breas
ts and spoke a few words to laugh at his thin little chest with ribs showing through skin. Deliberate and calculated humiliation. She was horrible, flaunting herself, parading as the queen bee and treating him with derision.
It would be different now. She’d hurt a boy who had never forgotten. She had grown up and filled out, a trophy wife for the bearded man chopping wood. Meanwhile, he had grown into a monster.
It would be very different this time.
Sitting in the living room chair, Paul scribbled notes as fast as they came to him. His imagination normally outpaced his writing but this encounter was going crazy fast. Details to everything, super-precise memories. This vampire was a person, a living breathing entity that he was practically experiencing from the inside out. Never had his creative thinking moved with such fluidity or such realism. It wasn’t even like imagining, more like he was in the moment, living it all.
The woman adjusted her sitting position on the stool, hitching up her dress further to reveal a little more inner thigh to each leg. No proper woman would sit like that. No decent woman would tease like that.
I see you.
Alina.
The vampire didn’t have cognizant thoughts to be read but Paul was so deep inside its psyche he could practically feel the bond of their empathic link as though they were two magnets desperate to clamp together. This woman, Alina, had hurt the vampire when they were children. She had caused pain and distress beyond compare. She’d forgotten her torment with casual ease and grown up, but that little boy had never forgotten it. He had stewed and twisted and cried himself to sleep from boy to adulthood. The pain was so deep he would never rest until she knew just how fiercely he despised her.
And there she was, sitting blanching vegetables. Carrots and potatoes. The only sound was the infrequent chopping of wood from the other side of the home.
She stood and walked around the cabin, out of view. Somehow Paul knew she would return in a few seconds but without being able to control it, his body was moving from cover and crossing to the cabin.