Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions

by John Everson

  “Let me,” he breathed, and knelt to lick her leg. His tongue was hot, but felt sandpaper-y, like a cat’s. She shivered at his attentions, tousled his hair with her free hand. “Come have a drink, baby,” she said, stepping back to break their contact. A few more minutes of this and they’d be fucking right there on the floor, and she wanted this night to be slow, thick – a steady building to perfect passion.

  He stood, and flashing a row of gleaming white teeth, fingered her nipples, which poked like nails through the thin material.

  “Whatever you say, lover.”

  She trembled at his voice. So much power there. A quick look at him would not give this impression. A thin nose, deep set eyes, smooth white face on a fit but not obviously muscled body. He was Joe Average, but she could sense the strangeness, the exotic reeking from his pores. Maybe that’s what had attracted her to him in the first place.

  They clinked glasses of heavy Bordeaux together, and Margaret felt the sweat begin seeping from her body as he rumbled in his sexiest deep tone: “to us.”

  She drank deeply, closing her eyes to feel the fuel of the wine mixing with the fire of her lust. God, it was so hard to wait. The days between grew longer and longer and once he was here, she struggled every moment to stop herself from ripping his clothes off and mounting him without a word. But at the same time, she wanted these moments before, when they could talk and just be together as the musk of their mutual lusts rose around them like a fog.

  When she poured the last drops of the bottle into his open mouth, Margaret could wait no longer. His features were wild with the pull of the moon, his movements jerky as a palsied man. He licked his lips and husked the word as she pounced.

  “Now.”

  His hands wrapped around her body in a bear hug, drawing her close. “You smell divine,” he growled and proceeded to lick her arms and legs, his nose chasing cool trails across her skin. Leaping from his lap, she dragged him to his feet and in fumbling haste undid his belt and pants as he unbuttoned and shed his shirt. He stood before her then, naked, yet covered with a manly down. His pubic thatch was thick and long, almost braid-able. But its wildness couldn’t hide the scope of the tool that hung hungry there. With a rough finger he traced a red line up her thigh.

  “So, have you missed me this month?” he said from between gritted teeth.

  She smiled at the ritual, and nodded affirmatively.

  Tucking his finger inside the cotton panties,” his voice dipped even lower. “So I feel.” His hand cupped her, made her tingle, his head dipped to inhale her smell. “So I smell.”

  She scratched the thickening hair on his chest, her hand resting on his engorged cock. “You’re the only meat for me, Charles. Let me eat you.”

  Acceding to her request, he dropped to the floor. Her tongue lashed him then, her teeth threatening to chew him to a bleeding pulp. But he only scraped his nails deeply into her back, shredding the cotton shirt and staining it in spots with drawn blood.

  He was panting then in the thick of the moon’s pull, and she knew the change would soon be complete. Moving from his crotch, she posed on hands and knees beside him. He was quick to rise. With an excited tear of cotton he freed her breasts from the remains of the t-shirt, and at the same time shredded her panties, leaving a waistband dangling around her middle and swollen trails of blood on her behind. Her sex only ached more at his rough violations, and then, at last, he was mounting her doggy style there on the floor. She could feel him changing faster now, as he pounded his cock between her thighs. The nails gouging her shoulders grew sharper, the flesh meeting her butt grew prickly, as if she were being slapped by a bristled broom. And within her too, his cock altered, grew, until she screamed in spasms of ecstasy and collapsed on the floor as his frenzied motions peaked in a warm, wet rush.

  “God,” she huffed, “God, God, God.”

  A strangled “No,” answered her, before turning into a howl. She felt his teeth gripping her leg, breaking the skin, sinking into the soft flesh of her calf. She had to get up, she thought, or he’d devour her. In this state, his desire overruled his mind and it didn’t matter who she was.

  Kicking out with her free foot, she slammed his head from her leg and launched herself down the stairs, a trail of blood marking her passage. He followed, raking claws at her thighs, tearing skin from her back as he tried to bring her down. She knew some part of him was fighting for restraint – or else she would not make it down the stairs.

  With a twist she turned the knob of the door as his teeth sank into her arm. She felt a rush of wetness between her legs in answer to the pain and laughed out loud. If she let him, she’d cum again as he ripped the flesh from her bones. One day, she thought, that’s exactly what would happen.

  But… not… now, she grimaced, and pushed the door open.

  “So you came back, finally,” Bill’s voice trembled from within the pitch black room.

  Margaret felt Charles’ weight shift as he heard the voice. She could see his ears pricking up, feel his paw leave her back as, for a second, he pointed, and then sprang.

  Bill screamed his loudest then, because Charles generally went for the throat when he was really hungry.

  She remembered hers’ and Charles’ first time, when, as she watched the hair growing from his limbs like cheese from a grater, she’d realized how it had to end. And as his wolfen cock had spurted its seed within her, she’d called out to her roommate.

  “Cathy,” she’d bellowed, in the midst of an orgasm herself, “I want you to come down and meet somebody.”

  Charles had flipped her over with a huge hairy paw and was going for her jugular when Cathy had cautiously peeked into the room, mere seconds later. “Bitch was probably listening to us,” Margaret had thought, and with all her strength she’d pushed Charles’ muzzle in Cathy’s direction.

  “Get HER,” she’d screeched, and somehow, even that early in their relationship, Charles had been trying to hold back the beast he was. He’d sprang and ripped out Cathy’s throat in seconds. And so, their monthly routine had been born.

  Behind her, Charles’ growls and Bill’s wails were fading.

  “Shoulda stuck with the noose you knew, Bill,” Margaret thought as she limped up the stairs to the kitchen. The gurgled “helps,” “stops” and “oh Gooooods,” quit before she’d even pulled her salad from the fridge.

  She went back down to eat with him, flicking on the light and sitting naked on the floor. Feral eyes looked up at her from the disemboweled carcass on the couch. She didn’t share his meal. She trapped his food out of necessity, but she herself was a vegetarian.

  Across the room, he slurped and chewed, wolfen head disappearing in and out of the gory chest cavity. She wished she didn’t have to handle his food so much beforehand, but Charles said the scent of the other man on her was what ultimately, kept him from killing her. It got in his nose as he made love to her, and when that wolfen olfactory sense picked out the origin of the smell, his instincts took over and he was after it instead of her.

  Crunching a carrot between her teeth, Margaret melted inside at the sight of her werewolf. Five feet of iron bone and sinewy strength, his paws shredded and picked apart the man on the couch as if he were butter. Her body warmed again in anticipation as she thought of him returning to her at the end of his meal. Before she uncovered the drain beneath the vinyl couch and hosed down the slaughter room (and herself), Charles would pad across the tiles to her, green eyes filled with lust. Then he’d hold her down with a vaguely human paw, and lick her clean with that rough and tumble tongue. He’d mount her again, fast and hard, before disappearing up the stairs and into the night.

  She didn’t have to cuff him to the couch and he didn’t wear a collar, but she knew he’d be back. Real men didn’t fight their chains. Sated and relaxed, she propped herself up off the cold floor with one arm, and watched protectively as Charles enjoyed his meal.

  She lived for the nights of the full moon.

  A dozen years
ago my college literature professor wrote on the top of this story that my writing showed promise, but that I should expand my literary horizons and stop writing stories like Stephen King. I’ve never had better praise.

  The Last Plague

  hy?”

  Silence greeted his vocalized query, but he expected little else. Silence and he were brothers – Siamese twins joined at the lips, he thought, twisting his own into a grin. He felt terribly alone tonight, more so than usual, but the clammy wind and the sterile world around him could not hold back his witticisms. He thought perhaps that was why he still lived. He laughed while everyone else went comatose.

  “And Gram cries,” he thought.

  His name was Dave Rogers, but for all practical purposes this identification was unimportant – no one called him any name at all.

  “Names don’t amount to much when there’s no one around to call them,” he sometimes thought.

  The road he traveled groped its way down a rugged slope, chasing the twilight. His bare, dusty feet plodded slowly, carefully, avoiding the shards of broken windshield and bottle glass, thistles, rusted metal, and rotting garbage heaps which overran what had been the rural town’s main thoroughfare. Flies buzzed their healthy appreciation of the unburied, unmolested decay. The air teemed with insects unscourged by lethal sprays and blue electric arcs couched in cozy backyards. Lately, backyards had taken on the appearance of untamed jungle. The pavement was crisscrossed in cracks and reflected a dull, peeling, crumbling gray, rather than a healthy, sticky black. The roadside vegetation had not missed entropy’s siege signal, and encroached with increasing vigor upon the concrete surface with the abandonment of ice salting and roadside tractor mowers. Grass has always been nature’s first and best re-possessors.

  “A funeral song,” Dave murmured in response to the call of a wild dog. “But what a quiet funeral when the dogs have to sing in the chorus! Hardly a sob from the three or four relatives attending. Fitting, since the deceased went down without a fight. Kind of like Oedipus doing his mother,” Dave laughed again. “Took the pleasure without investigating its source. Afterward it was too late; too final.”

  A brown and cream mottled Labrador suddenly darted between his legs and performed a quick 180-degree turn. The tail writhed like a wounded serpent as Dave wrestled the playful dog to the ground, rolled him over, and scratched his ears and chest. Then in a fluid motion the puppy-like exterior was gone, replaced by a fanged carnivore which disappeared into the tall grass, chasing a scent.

  Reagan had been Jack Crepin’s dog; now he came with Dave on his nightly walks. When Dave and Jack had been kids, Reagan went on family picnics with them, exploring creek beds and bramble-infested forests searching for hidden treasure and forgotten graveyards. Jack’s mother always brought a stupid-looking red checkered tablecloth, but Dave’s low opinion of the design never held him away from the plates of food she pulled out of the cooler and placed on it. But sunny family picnics were part of an almost forgotten past now. Dave couldn’t even remember when he had last seen Jack.

  Since the last plague, Dave had befriended a wide assortment of animal friends. They were former pets, forced to fend for themselves when they found their owners staring fixedly ahead on couches, chairs or beds, ignoring every and all screeches for food. Most perished, after the generations-long shelter was ripped away, but some succeeded in returning to the instinctual world of their ancestors. A dog pack now holed up somewhere to the north, and occasionally came to the town on foraging missions. Dave knew later in the evening they would probably hurl their frustrations at the moon – as countless canines over the centuries had seen fit to do. “This generation sure has a lot more to complain about though,” he thought.

  Reagan returned the dismal howl coming from the town while romping through the weeds. He had adjusted well to the change. Dave didn’t mind the company on his nightly walks, and Reagan showed up at his doorstep every evening at sunset.

  “That mutt’s here again to take you for a walk,” Gram’d grumble sarcastically. “Better hurry or he won’t take you out.”

  Gram hated the idea of him being out in “that savage world” on these walks. But he had to go. It was an exercise of freedom which gave him time to reflect and relax, and sometimes, for a little while, to forget.

  If he sat at home every night he’d lose his grip on sanity listening to the old wind-up mantel clock tick away an endless benediction. He couldn’t understand how Gram could just sit there, night after night, feeling the cold gray shadows creep in around her until all that remained of the once warm and glowing sitting room was the icy arms of the leaching moon. Dave imagined the moon sometimes as an entity to itself: “A heavenly carnivore, sucking the energy and life from every sphere its chilling light could reach.” He imagined lifeless Mercury and Mars its past victims, and wondered where the moon would go when Earth too was just another lifeless empty orb. He shook his head. “No, the only predator to man is man himself. And time. Gram and I just observe it in different ways. I walk the nights searching, and she stays at home waiting. It’s all the same in the end, though. I wonder if anyone will be able to find this road at all in another hundred years.”

  He walked on, tossing the shoulder length curls behind his ears. Gram still held the old maternal worries. Once she had attempted to dissuade him from his jaunts, filling him with horror stories of unarmed travelers accosted by thugs, rapists and murderers. He had absorbed all of these reasons and after some thought calmly answered her.

  “But Gram, we don’t have those anymore to worry about.”

  He hadn’t understood then why she had slumped at his words, and retreated to her room sobbing.

  On impulse, in the middle of the weed-wrecked road, he threw his arms up and settled into a pitching stance.

  “All right buddy, ya want the old screwball, do ya? Well, try and find this baby when she crosses the strike zone.”

  The invisible ball left his hand and he shouted, “Ha, strike three! Yer outta there!”

  The silence was only more palpable.

  “Looking pretty stupid aren’t I,” he asked the street. “Well I’ve seen worse – I’m not nuts yet. Maybe next week. For now I’m the best philosopher, pitcher, lawyer – you name it, I’m it.”

  He glanced at his watch. Really a useless object at this point, but he was slowly becoming obsessed with time. It was always slipping away, bit by bit, until nothing outside of its flow remained. Especially life. He inhaled a deep breath, trying to clear the cobwebs of pessimism from his brain.

  “It’s better this way,” he told himself without conviction. He’d been over this subject countless times before. “No more wars, murders, noise – and God, the clamor there used to be. Freeways packed with screeching cars, blaring stereos, and bellowing drivers. Everywhere, masses of irritable people yelled and cursed, laughed and gossiped, always talking, talking, talking…”

  Now the cacophony of man was still; the jets, and radios, and shrill voices, gone. And the smells,” he thought. “The stale choking odors of cigarettes and sweat, and auto exhaust, and smog, and air fresheners, and public bathrooms. . .” His nose wrinkled in remembered disgust.

  “Justice works cruelly,” he mused. “Yet what better, more effective punishment, than to unseat man from his despotism over nature – his creator – and place him at the mercy of that which he created. The irony is devastating. And if I keep up this line of thought much longer, I’ll go nuts… or become a philosopher. Same difference, Gram would say… I hope she’s OK.”

  Tonight he had tried not to leave her, but she had insisted.

  “Look,” she said. “Your faithful mutt from hell is out there waiting for you. Don’t disappoint him. You can’t do anything around here – unless you’ve discovered a new way of pressuring the crops to grow overnight.” She smiled that weary smile which meant don’t fight with me about this, or I’ll have to use the rest of my strength to win, and you don’t want to live with the consequences of that
. “I’ll be alright. I’d like some time alone right now anyway.”

  That afternoon Gram’s old school friend Becky McClinger hadn’t shown up for their game of penny ante poker.

  “Stupid old coot probably forgot to wind her clock up again,” Gram had said as she stormed out of the house to find her. Becky was at home when Gram stomped into the house, pausing in her flow of caustic rhetoric only on seeing her friend, sitting on the couch, eyes glazed, lower lip drooling, a disorienting rainbow in the background. Gram tried to break the trance, but it was too late, impossible. Dave found Gram crying in the den that afternoon when he returned from his scavenger run. He pushed the door open and approached her slowly, not sure what to do. She was a proud woman, and didn’t admit tears often.

  Bent and gray, and her head barely reached his shoulder. “What is it Gram?” he whispered.

  “We used to joke about being matriarchs,” she said, her voice rising in an unnatural cadence. Dave knew at once something had happened to Becky.

  “We were so proud. The town, the world, everything was ours. We played cards and bought Tupperware and gossiped, and compared our men and our,” she shuddered, “our children. And then it was all gone: our kids, our husbands, the town, our entire world. But still we had each other. And our card games. Those damn, endless card games…” She stared in bitter longing at the deck on the table in front of her.

  “We were… lifelines to each other. Like a tightrope connection to another world, a ruined, past reality. And now,” her voice quavered, “now she’s not real anymore. That damn thing has robbed me of everything I ever loved.” She slammed the deck of cards into a drawer and collapsed into her grandson’s embrace, her tears soaking into his shirt. He felt awkward, unsure of how to comfort her.

  “I’m here for you Gram, I won’t leave,” he told her. But she only cried louder.