It was a boy from one such family, Benjamin Henderson, eleven years old, 54 inches and about 80 pounds, who went missing in early May. He and his two brothers were seen running around the block on the first sunny, spring day of the year (April was a month that flooded a great number of Northern Ohio basements), trying to catch birds with a fishing net. Their sister, Toby, was cutting a circle into the earth with a kitchen knife, as deep as its circumference could be transcribed. When she could cut no deeper, she left it be and went inside. The parents were nowhere to be found that day.
After Benjamin’s two brothers reported in a panic to a neighbor that their brother had gone missing, there was no answer to a neighbor’s knocks on the Henderson family door. That neighbor was Suze, and she returned to her house to ask the Henderson boys, who she had supplied with some cookies and carrots, if their parents were home. The older one shrugged, divulging that the parents don’t take kindly to knocking since only policemen knock. When Suze tried calling, the youngest warned that “Mom only picks up during emergencies. She don’t like talking on her phone because it’s tapped.” By this point, the police had arrived and indeed they were knocking on the Henderson’s door, trying desperately to gain some insight from the meth heads as to where their boy might be.
Benjamin did not return. A body of about 54 inches and 65 pounds was found in one of the Metroparks near a more industrial zone. Its stomach was blown open, as is typical of corpses after more than 10 days. Gas accumulates in the abdomen, and liquid flows from the body cavity out of that rupture.
What chilled Suze and Nate the most was the fact that the Hendersons were barely affected. They buried the boy in a cheap plastic coffin, and once he was in the ground, life down the block seemed to go on as usual. Toby continued carving shapes into the family’s destitute property, the boys continued running around wreaking havoc. The only discernible change was that the Henderson parents became more paranoid, and that their early morning meth sessions would culminate with wailing, wallpaper shivering wailing every few days. Horror metathesizes in a manner so subtle yet profound in those who deny it.
“How would you protect Luke from something like that?” Shana was doing her best to keep up with Suze, who was admittedly one hell of a power walker.
Suze’s arms swung like motorized pendulums with one-pound dumbbells in each of her hands. “Well, you can live in fear or you can feel secure with the knowledge that you do the best you can to keep you and your family safe. You’ve gotta expect the unexpected and account for what you can expect. Can’t live your life wondering about what may be.”
“Shit Suze. You get that from the Bible? Sounds a little Eastern to me.”
“Eastern? Hindu and Buddhism, those are cults of Lucifer! Don’t you dare.” The dumbbells were swinging with more determination, and Shana speculated that Suze’s veins were not bulging from the intense workout alone.
They walked until they reached the corner that the abandoned Chad’s Chug Pub sits on. They took a breather.
“Been thinking about Tom.” Shana’s sheepish tone betrayed precisely what she had been thinking. Suze remained silent while stretching her quads, letting her sister take whatever moments she needed to think.
“He hasn’t called or texted once since I’ve been here.” Shana let herself be distracted by the old fashioned neon signs affixed to the shuttered tavern’s windows. “Called him once and it sounded like there were people over. Said he’d call back and...”
Suze continued her silence, listening.
“I don’t think this is me being needy, right?”
Suze hugged her sister, an especially warm hug given the physical activity. “You know why you feel, and you’ll know what’s right when you figure it out.” When she pulled away, Shana wiped a tear with her sleeve. They continued their walk, and by chance, destiny, our other, they passed there hallowed graveyard.
Shana stared into it the entire time, and when Suze shouted, “Shana!” after realizing she had not been listening to her tale of consumer injustice at the frozen yogurt store, Shana returned a vacant look with eyes wide open. Not a blink even tickled her lids.
“You’re not thinking of that vampire are you?”
Shana resumed her gaze at the graveyard.
“He is undead! Leave your teenage infatuations with anti-Christiandom to the past! That creature just wanted to drink your blood and drag you into his purgatorial eternity.” Suze started mumbling prayers and performing the stations of the cross with a dumbbell. The second they stepped a block away from the cemetery, Shana’s trance was broken. All of her energy was sapped, and she dragged behind a fury-fueled Suze the entire way home.
Dinner was fairly quiet, aside from chatter between Luke and Nate over whether red cars were cooler than green cars. Luke choose green and Nate could not disagree more. “You’ll see when you’re older, kiddo, the girls love red cars.”
“But green is the color of slime!”
Suze glared at Shana from time to time.
That night, Shana awoke in some patch of grass between “Franklin Hale, 1833—1900” and “Mamie Hale, 1841—1900.”
In the distance, through the space in the wrought iron fence, she could make out what looked like Suze’s sedan. Something about it was not right though, and in her hypnopompic daze she could not pinpoint exactly what was off. Like little Luke in search of his Guava Pops, Shana found her body moving towards Baker’s mausoleum. Even if she had heard that stranger’s shuffling behind her, that repeated stomp of one foot and drag of the other, it would have filled her with no dread. Perhaps her internal compass aligned to the globe’s magnetic poles, as her orientation to the cemetery’s geography was nearly instant.
Keen navigation made for a short trek, and she stood within feet of Baker’s stone abode. This was the first time that hesitation braced her, and her abdomen started to churn steadily. With studied steps she moved towards the mausoleum, peering around with slow rotations of her neck. There was nothing in the graveyard that night but many corpses and her own live body.
A slab of stone sealed the mausoleum shut. The sight of it made Shana feel puny. A size 6 girl pushing against a slab of rich like that, it seemed impossible she’d make a dent. But driven by some deep determination welling up from a mysterious place within herself, she gave it a push. Nothing. Immediately she tried again, this time with more resolve, and got it to budge.
Adjusting her body in various positions, using everything from her hands to her shoulder to her back to push, she made it budge more and more. The mechanical howl in the distance fell deaf on her ears. The short scrapes that the slab made against its frame were the sole sound that Shana cared about. When that revving grumble grew closer, ever closer, she thought it some creation of her own mind, the great energy that flowed out of her and into this door made sonic.
As the slab popped open, light enveloped her and Shana froze. A figure practically fell out of the pickup truck which currently had its nose pointed directly at the mausoleum, and Shana, for lack of better impulse, ran inside. She tried to push the slab shut, but it required that same energy and time as when she opened it. The figure slipped through with ease, agility. Panic blinded the prey to her pursuant’s face and form. She found herself grabbed, pinned to the wall.
And then nothing. The cold, bony hands left her shoulders, but she felt the imprint of long, thin fingers. She saw battered work boots, jeans smeared with black grease. She saw flannel weathered by years of wear, under it the outline of a barrel chest and gently bulging arms. The neck was sinewy, the jaw stubbly as if not shaved in ten days. His eyes peered into hers and Shana felt bony, freezing fingers touch her cheek, guiding with the lightest suggestion his head towards hers.
Baker kissed the outside of her lips. Shana froze, breathing in short spurts. She looked up at him, his ageless face, trying to comprehend his timeless being, his soft kiss. He did it again, and this time Shana opened her mouth a bit. They touched the most part of their lips together, and
licked them away slowly.
Baker guided her to the slab, on top of which he slept, and laid her down. Some incantation was muttered under his breath, and he began to undo his flannel shirt. Pale skin was pulled taught against his quietly defined musculature. Shana was entranced by the way his biceps moved up and down over the bend inside his elbow as he wrangled the opened shirt off his body. She pulled him down onto his stone podium, and their maws merged into one wet form inside of which tongues lanced like puppies playing in the grass.
The cold fingers against the lower side of her breasts, and quickly get nipple, made Shana gasp, then exhale all that her lungs contained. She could feel the corpse-stiff phallus against the inside of her leg and was taken by a craving that left her dumb.
“I want you to reach up and slip my panties off me.” The long, chilly fingers found the waist of the cotton drawers, the types that Shana would slip into four comfortable sleep. He slowly pulled down the front, making sure to stimulate that sacred spot at the top of her vagina’s crest before he grabbed the panties from each hip and dragged them down as she raised her hips to assist. When she rested her butt against the sleeping pedestal, it was engulfed by that same sense-robbing chill. In this moment, Shana felt fully taken.
Baker started to position his cold, dead cock and she said, “No.” She rolled over on a hip facing away from him and started to touch herself. Once her hand was sufficiently wet, she reached behind her and stroked the vampire, moistening the pipe that he would lay. Preparing, he crawled up on the pedestal next to her and positioned her thighs in his benefit. His cock, slick with her juices, rubbed against her buttock and he slid in as slowly as a train pulling out of a station. The sensation reduced her, it felt, to a blob of matter.
He whispered in her ear, “Remember my promise?” as he gave three slow, shallow thrusts. Shana did. She bit her lip during the fourth slow, shallow thrust. She shook her head in feeble protest through the fifth and sixth slow, shallow thrusts. That frozen rod drained her of all intelligent faculties. He opened his mouth and positioned his bite during the seventh and eighth shallow thrusts. The ninth was infinitely deep, which felt to Shana that he was sliding in endlessly, all the way into the pit of her being. She let out a moan which shook the walls of the stone den.
TO BE CONTINUED
Dark Temptation (Book #2)
Chapter One
The boys at Ray Fat's American Auto Fixation and Motors were slammed that day, but Nate went easy on them with his inspections. He gave them plenty of time to make whatever repairs needed with little threat of closing down the shop. Years later, those inspections would come back to haunt them, when the hydraulics on one of the car lifts malfunctioned six months after inspection, letting a Chrysler Town and Country fall onto Santiago, the mechanic working on its front axle. His neck snapped in the wheel well but the coroner noted that the weight of the car would have done him in anyway.
While it is impossible to deduce what was going through Santiago's unconscious the instant his neck snapped and he lost his ability to get air into his brain; that flash of an instant that for all we know lasts an eon to those in the throes of mortality's natural denouement. The coroner couldn't help but note to Ray Fat that the look on Santiago's face was not one of terror, but a one of serene, postcoital bliss. Ray's disgusted look indicated that he would forget what the coroner said, for both their benefits.
Needless to say, that year would not be Nate's easiest year.
Today, they squeezed Nate in as early as they could. Insurance covered the full cost of the repair, but the blood on the upholstery would have to get taken care of elsewhere. The shop only had guys on hand to repair the window.
Nate ran some errands in the rental car, picking up Luke's communion suit from the dry cleaner and stocking back up on some whiskey after he found none in the liquor cabinet. On his way home, he saw a man grilling whole chickens outside of an insurance agency.
Shana was in the front yard playing with a stray cat. It was grey, patchy, emaciated––proof of the fact that no one in the neighborhood had decided to lay it a milk bowl or some table scraps. This was a more bizarre happening than the guy grilling whole chickens on a sidewalk. Truth was, Nate declared, she seemed fucked up ever since he showed her the broken car window. God knows why.
The cat chased after a squirrel which had some fur stripped from its tail, baring a long cord of white, connected vertebrae, no wider than a child’s thumb. With the cat gone, Shana felt Nate's gaze. With their eyes in contact, Shana reached into her purse, producing a mass of tin foil. She unwrapped it and munched on the sandwich. Her body was arranged like a mermaid's, beached onshore. Her jaw chewed mechanically, her eyes remained still, staring into Nate.
“What you got there?”
“Eggs and cheese.”
A curt nod indicated Nate’s full attention. “Where from?”
The full mouth emptied backwards down her gullet. “Jim’s? Is that the one next to the Little Cesar’s?”
“That would be Tim’s Meat.”
“Tim’s Meat.”
“Yes.”
The eye contact broke for the first time, Shana gazed at the sandwich.
“First time you got a sandwich there? They keep the egg runny.”
“Yeah, it’s good.”
“Yeah.”
An idle task would have made this conversation a lot easier to bear, like retrieving Luke’s tiny suit from the hook over the back seat, or examining the window work done by the boys in the shop. Nate did not realize this. Instead he went inside, leaving the suit behind and the window uninspected.
There was an energy in the house, the energy which typically preceded weddings and formal business gatherings. It constricted Nate’s lungs and rang in his ears at a high pitch. Ambient stress secreted from Suze’s pattering feet, rushing from this to that room; secreted from her hands scavenging for this or that drawer; vibrating from her mouth at low frequencies as fragments of obscenities.
On the far end of the living room, Luke sat in one of the living room’s stiffer chairs. His shirt was buttoned to the throat. One half of his hair was parted, the other half unbrushed. Nate nodded at the boy and the boy maintained a stiff face. “What’s next, she’s gonna pick my boogers?”
“I heard that,” belted Suze from a couple rooms over. “This is for a holy ritual!”
“But it's tomorrow! Why can't you take my picture tomorrow?”
“Just cooperate, you little punk.”
Nate, as he tended to do, chuckled.
Luke’s cheeks were weighed down with fishing weights. Consternation bent in his narrow brow. “I’ll never be a punk, Mom,” resolved under his breath. Suze rushed in with a spray bottle and Luke winced on sight, like a dog in training.
“Oh it’s just a little water. You’re full of the stuff.” Percussive triggers doused Luke’s scalp. The comb Suze just retrieved was no better than the one before it, and it tugged at the boy’s hair just as hard.
“I’m not full of water. I’m full of organs and bones, and those are full of juice.”
“Tomorrow is not your day. It is our day. And I swear to the man upstairs that if you–” Suze’s thought halted as Nate drew her attention towards the front door. Some subliminal gesture directed Suze’s gaze to her sister, stumbling in. With Suze's attention shifted away from the boy's head, the hand holding the comb gave its most insistent tug yet. Luke yelped.
“Shana.”
Ravaged by the cosmos, Shana directed her disheveled head towards Suze.
“Shana. You haven’t slept.”
“It’s ok.”
“Shana, you should sleep.”
"Ok, I'll sleep." Yet the way Shana ambled up the stairs, you'd swear she was already mid-dream.
Nate rarely felt awkward. This was one of those times.
"I know sometimes the dynamic between my sister and me perplexes you, sugar. Embrace the thoughts that unsettle you."
Nate always wondered how Suze did it
, how she read him like a shrink studying a psych ward patient through two-way glass.
“You want to know what I think?” It didn't matter if Nate wanted to know. "That Tom, he's no good for her and it's tearing her apart. But she sees a whole life ahead of her. The only thing my intervention would do is sow a rift in blood."
"Su, I don't think this is a plain old hurting heart."
A vibe Suze gave off let Nate know that he knew nothing. Considering himself someone who generally knew nothing, Nate took comfort in the fact that admitting your ignorance is the first step on the road to wisdom. Yet, Nate did not feel wise today. He felt like the whole family had come under some crazy spell. He felt like some hobo's blood was staining the passenger seat of a car he was leasing.
It was due time to head over to the garage and hammer in some beers with his favorite Saturday drinking buddy: himself. While on his way out, he saw Suze line up a fully dressed Luke in front of the fire place for a nice formal photo. Over his shoulder, he caught a flash from her smartphone camera.
Despite the high noon sun, Shana was asleep basically as soon as she hit the bed, maybe even a moment before, slipping straight from waking life into slumber land as if consciousness were a low-level window she just fell out of.
Chapter Two
The Red Rocket Diner was empty except for a waitress. There must have been others inside the restaurant, at least back in the kitchen. Someone had to be preparing the food, someone cleaning the dishes. But there was only one sound Shana heard and that was an insistent clicking, like two clocks keeping unsteady time, falling in and out of sync. A man appeared from nowhere with a plate of food. He was dressed in slacks and a white shirt, tie tucked in between buttons. The leather jacket he wore over this ensemble evoked the image, as Shana would later recount, of a Jehovah's Witness who was converted to the faith through some sort of penitentiary outreach initiative.
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