“Only seven more courses to go,” Peter said, a wide, wicked grin spreading across his face. He seemed to take great joy in Irene’s dramatic eye-rolling.
“No time to cop out on us,” Noel said.
He had spent several days consuming an enormous amount of water to stretch his stomach and limited his food intake to a few low-calorie dishes. His wife thought he’d gone vegetarian based on the number of salads and celery stalks he’d eaten.
His lie was only slightly less than the truth: telling her he would be dining with multiple potential business partners in Asia and that they enjoyed their large, multi-course meals. Copping out early would be a sign of weakness. She’d grudgingly accepted the excuse. On the drive here, he’d removed his wedding band and tucked it into the pocket of his sport coat, disconnecting himself from that life in accordance to Schauer’s demands of complete anonymity. Ditching the ring felt good, and he allowed himself to slip into the role of some other, better version of himself.
Unfortunately, all that water had expanded more than just his stomach. “If you’ll excuse me,” he said, pushing his chair away.
The waitress approached as he was halfway out of the dining room, asking him if he needed any assistance and then providing him with detailed directions to the bathroom. The interior of the manor was expansive, and appeared far larger once inside than it had from outside.
Clearly Schauer had not inhabited the manor for long, and seemed to have little intention of staying. As he wound his way through the long stretches of corridor, he peeked inside the rooms he passed and noted that the pieces of furniture in the dining room, sitting room, and foyer were the only ones not covered in white drop sheets.
The noisy clacking of high heels stamping against the wooden floor drew his attention. Turning, he watched Coraline approach. Her figure was even more gracious than he had surmised. She appeared pleasant enough while sitting across from him and largely hidden by the massive slab of oak as they dined. But standing, her long, toned legs stretching the hem of her svelte black dress as she strode toward him…she was magnificent. While he’d certainly noticed her finely-muscled arms and long, elegant neck, and a rather eye-catching bust line, he hadn’t realized until now how incredible her figure really was.
“The waitress said the bathrooms were this way,” she said, slipping up beside him with an endearing amount of familiarity.
It took him a moment to remember how to form words, the shape of them clumsy in his mouth. He managed to creak out a, “Right. Yeah,” before mentally kicking himself.
She smiled, her brilliant teeth shining in the dim accent lighting. Somehow – neither of them was quite sure how – their hands found one another as they slowly walked to the corridor’s end.
By the time they reached the bathroom door, a heat had generated between them, and Noel’s concerns for his bladder were replaced with a sudden impulse and an utter lack of control.
He pulled her to him, finding her lips with his own, his hands urgently exploring and taking note of the garments beneath her dress. Fingers roamed over a thin line of fabric across her hips, tracing along the warm skin beneath, neatly plucking at the thread and mentally cataloging it as a thong.
Coraline could hardly believe what was happening, but she lost herself to the sudden rapture. Her earlier fantasies crumbled under this new reality as she reached between his legs and cupped him through his slacks, measuring his hardness. A throaty purr escaped her as he gasped in her ear, and she twisted her mouth away from his, finding his neck. She could feel his plasma coursing through the thick cord of subtle blue beneath his flesh as she sucked and licked, wending her way down to the crook of his shoulder, lapping at the hollow of his collarbone as his buttons pulled away.
She was intensely aware of the hand pressing between her legs, reaching fingers brushing at the smooth hint of cotton that covered her mound, tugging the cloth to the side. She moaned, “Yes,” encouraging him deeper, her hips rocking against his palm as she rode his strong fingers.
“I’ve been thinking of this all through dinner,” she whispered, tasting the salt of his skin against her lips.
She nuzzled back up the opposite side of his neck, feeling the veins pulsing in his throat as she bit.
Surprised by the sharp, piercing pain, he clenched her hair in his fist. Rather than try to pull her away, he pressed her mouth harder against his neck, her tongue sliding against his skin as his blood ran over her lips.
She sucked at the wound, the fluid salty and coppery, his cologne providing a sandalwood aromatic. He shuddered, the fingers of one hand weaving through her thick black hair, the fingers of the other folding into a pleasant hook as he penetrated her deeper. A flash of warmth rocketed through her core.
A chill brushed her skin as he found the zipper of her dress, the rending of metal teeth loud in the hallway. He fumbled at the door, then finally opened it and pulled her through, pressing her against the sink counter. She twisted free of the top half of her dress, hiking the hem over her hips, and he tore her bra loose.
Another moan ripped out of her as his hands grabbed at her breasts, and she watched the slow, dark trickle of red sliding down the open front of his shirt, a lazy river wending down his chest. Fumbling with the buttons of his pants, she freed him, pulling him inside her.
She lapped at the minor pool of fluid collected in the hollow of his collarbone and at the base of his throat, feeling the first faint tremors of orgasm approaching. She pulled at his hair, roughly, tearing small clumps free.
His tongue circled her nipple, and she demanded, “Bite me.”
He took the raised nub of flesh between his teeth and bit down, gently at first, but her grunts demanded more, and he knew that she needed to bleed. He needed to taste her fully.
Grabbing the fleshy bulb of her breast between his fingers, he squeezed and bit down, the nipple almost chewy as his front teeth punched through skin, a bloody welt raising against his tongue. He bit harder and pulled, the pink tip popping free.
She screamed in pain, a delightful howl in his ears. Her nails raked away strips of flesh from his back as their mouths rediscovered one another, blood pooling between their half-naked bodies, gluing them together.
He took a fistful of her hair and rammed her head back against the mirror, his reflection cracking into a hundred new dimensions.
Reaching for a shard of glass, she dug the pointy area into his cheek, stabbing the mirror clean through, into his mouth. He spat in her face, and her tongue darted out in reflex, tasting the coppery, red emulsion against her lips. Tearing the dagger loose, the skin of her own hand sliced open around it, she stabbed him in the chest, again and again and again.
He grunted loudly in her ear, his hips bucking. She peppered his bleeding cheek with kisses, working her way down to the rhythmic pulsing in his neck, to the slow trickle she had begun. Her lips clamped over the bite marks, her teeth making fresh ruptures, and she bit down, hard and deep, opening his throat wide. He couldn’t contain himself against the spasm of contractions as she came, and he drove himself deeper, gasping, until he was spent.
Emptied, he fell free of her grasp and crashed to the floor, lightheaded. The pain was beginning to register, and he noticed for the first time the odd reflection of himself at his chest. Dazed, Noel pulled the shard free, minor glints and reflections surrounding him on the floor. Coraline was sitting on the counter, licking the gore off her fingers from her ruined breast.
He watched as her rosy tongue curled around her slender index finger, their eyes meeting briefly before he fell into a pit of darkness.
Coraline pushed herself off the counter, her hand sliding across more broken glass, her palm opening with an acute pain as tendons in her fingers were destroyed. She studied herself in the mirror, a length of glass in hand, suddenly starved. The blade at her throat, cool against her skin, she pressed against the vein and opened it, drawing it full across. A smile bloomed below her chin, breaking open wide with a shower of red.
“THIS NEXT COURSE IS a vegetable dish. Chef Schauer has prepared a kale casserole, roasted cauliflower with grapes, and Brussels sprout gratin. Enjoy.”
Four dishes were plated as eyes turned toward the empty seats.
“Where are Noel and Coraline?” Peter asked.
“Bathroom, I thought,” Joseph said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if Coraline is purging herself,” Irene said, spearing a Brussels sprout. The dish was creamy and she nodded appreciatively at the taste of nutmeg and butter.
“Well, their loss,” Joseph said, enjoying the cauliflower. The grapes added a nice, springy bite of freshness, the capers and lemon balancing the dish with a hint of tartness and acidity.
Although Peter avoided green bean casserole, he found the substitution of kale to be a particularly wonderful modification of such a tired and trite standby.
Casserole dishes reminded him of shitty Thanksgiving dinners with many of the same family members he diligently avoided the rest of the year. The noticeably canned flavors of gloppy mushroom soup always recalled past arguments over gay rights and liberal politics as he was dragged into the fray of heated shouting matches from the older, far-right religious conservatives of his clan. Most of the men he found himself annually surrounded by were dolts who considered him an abomination.
Biting into a crispy leaf of kale, he vowed to never attend another Thanksgiving dinner with his family ever again. The news would break his mother’s heart, but heartache was a constant in life. He saw no reason to willingly inflict that…that bullshit…upon himself yet again. Truthfully, he’d let that annual charade play out for far too long.
Anyway, Aunt Muriel’s casserole didn’t stand a chance against Schauer’s dish. The mushrooms were fresh and buttery, and the notes of garlic, salt, and allspice wove through the greens in symphonic harmony. Even the fried onions, battered with buttermilk and yogurt, seasoned with ancho chile powder, were crafted with precision, not that premade, store-bought crap in a plastic box.
Muriel’s husband, Frank, was an especially atrocious sort. Rotund and big-mouthed, a bigot to the core. For the last six years, he’d begun every Thanksgiving dinner by praying to God that Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate would be found and that the Good Lord would strike down that antichrist in a hail of brimstone and restore America’s glory. Rather than bow his head as he delivered his micro-sermon, he would glare directly at Peter, an outspoken and registered Democrat, locking eyes with him, as if he were taunting him. He knew that Frank would love it just as much, if not more, if God would strike down Peter with a rain of fire and ash. The man was rotten with hate.
As he ate, Peter daydreamed of carving up Frank, as if he were one of Mom’s predictably dry, dull turkeys. He would take a large butcher’s knife to each of his joints, removing his legs and slicing open the flesh on either side of his breastbone, peeling away the meat.
He simmered in his rage, his face reddening.
“You all right?” Joseph asked him.
Peter blinked, as if he were awakening from a long, troubled sleep. He hadn’t realized he was slouching and scooted himself up in the chair.
“Distracted, I guess.”
“You were shaking,” Irene said.
Laura leaned across the table, pressing the back of her hand against his forehead. “Shit, you’re burning up. You sure you’re OK?”
“No. I mean, yeah, I’m fine.”
Joseph nodded, letting it rest. Each of them knew the false bravado was a lie, recognizing their own burgeoning wickedness with each passing course, a hidden undercurrent of rage that the food helped to fuel. But they pressed on in feeding their inner demons, and let the matter drop.
SCHAUER WATCHED THE SAVAGE copulation, marveling at the gruesome affirmation of life as it bled out into death.
Noel and Coraline were fine dining companions, and he was struck by their loss. This he brushed aside, with the knowledge that they would be immortal soon. Their deaths would give way to ancient life, and their souls would be enraptured in a higher plane. The Old Gods would see to that.
Towering over the still-breathing, diminished husk of Baen’sollogotgartha, he squeezed the being’s fleshy chest and promised him the world.
The Old God had been lost to antiquity, nearly entirely forgotten by mankind, but Earth would soon be reminded.
Rumors had persisted, as they often do. Back-alley gossip amongst certain types of collectors, the believers of the outlandish, hunters of the unknown. Mysticists, occultists, cult members, fetishists of paranormal Nazi experiments, whispering and wondering, each of them.
The seizure of this beast had not been cheap. Most of the rumors he’d followed had led to dead-ends. After an arctic research team met a mysterious and violent end, he had begun to wonder. With that wonder came an enormous amount of private funding for further explorations and excavations. Of the one hundred and twenty-seven people he had hired, all but four had lived to bring him this beast. The greatest hunt of mankind, conducted entirely in secret.
And this evening, a meal unlike anything ever known in the history of human consumption.
This was his sacrifice.
AFTER CLEARING AWAY THEIR vegetable dishes, the waitress returned with four overly large saucer plates garnished with chopped mint. Standing in the center of the plate was a large, heavy, metal tumbler filled with a slushy white liquid. Beside the glass of frozen punch was a chilled coffee spoon.
Joseph dipped the spoon into the glass, taking a small sample. He immediately went back for more with a guilty rush, his endorphins singing.
The frozen drink was made of milk, bourbon, and vanilla, then dusted with freshly ground nutmeg. Heavy, but unabashedly appealing, the milk punch was the perfect cleanser after the earlier meals.
Unbidden, he thought of his mother lying on her deathbed, kept alive by the whiny susurration of a breathing machine. She’d been a violent alcoholic and a large part of the reason why Joseph rarely drank.
One summer day – he must have been seven or eight – he’d gone outside to play following a heavy rain. When he returned, his shoes caked in mud, he’d made one hell of a mess of the carpeting as he ran through the house. She’d been furious, and, at the end of a lengthy sermon that found him on the receiving end of a leather belt, he’d been dutiful in cleaning things as best he could.
That night, when he was sleeping on his belly, his mother came into his room, tottering on shaky, drunk legs, and pressed a hot iron against his left shoulder, ending his pleasant dreams with a painful burning, pressing hard despite his screams and the rubbery stink of searing flesh invading both their nostrils.
Spooning the punch into his mouth, he could almost feel the tight contraction of his scolded skin beneath the hot soleplate.
Pulling the cord on her life support was his fondest memory of dear old mother, watching as her thin chest deflated and stilled. Burning down the home he’d been raised in later that week was a very close second.
He smiled around the spoonful of punch, the bourbon heavy and warm against the back of his palate.
“It’s good, huh?” Laura said, clearly pleased.
“Very,” Joseph said, listening to the wheeze of the breathing machine whispering its last gasp.
What little of Laura’s face that was unhidden by the demon’s mask indicated a pretty woman. She was petite, small-breasted, and he had admired the curve of her shoulders and the line of her spine through the open-backed blouse when she turned away from him. He enjoyed her apparently good-natured and easily amused personality, her vivacious smile. Despite her being half his age, he wondered what it would be like to fuck her, her body writhing beneath his as he held an iron to her belly.
She ran her spoon across the top of the punch, skimming the frozen concoction away from the glass. With the spoon halfway to her mouth, she looked down and, her curiosity plain, asked, “What the hell is that?”
“Let’s see,” Joseph said.
Laura tilted the
cup toward him, and he saw immediately what her concern was. Buried in the punch was a gleaming, black object, perfectly round.
He dug around in his own cup, unburying a similar object, and hoisted it up. Bringing it closer to study, he could make out the features better. The blackness came in varying shades, and he saw the imprint of multiple hexagonal shapes beneath the icy casing.
“I think it’s an eye.”
Laura went pale, her spoon clattering against the plate and table before shaking itself to the floor. She pushed the plate away, unable to hide her disgust.
“It sorta resembles a bug’s eye,” Peter said, having found the decorative eye in his tumbler. “But way too big for that, right?”
“Oh yeah,” Joseph said, “way, way too big.”
“I don’t think I can have any more either,” Irene said, pushing her plate away.
Joseph and Peter looked expectantly at one another, the same playful question in each of their eyes. “Well?”
With a small chuckle, Peter stared directly at Irene as he shoved the spoon in his mouth. Her face scrunched in disgust as she turned away, an audible, liquid pop coming from both men’s mouths as they bit down.
Peter’s mouth screwed up around the taste, his lips curving downward. His throat bobbed as he forced it down.
Joseph spat his out into the cup with a groan. He took the freezing tumbler and twisted to the side, spitting several more times. The taste was similar to bleach, but much saltier, and a thick sheet of the eye’s jelly clung to his taste buds. He spent another minute half-gagging and spitting, then reached for his wine, hoping to drown away the putrescence.
“Maybe you weren’t supposed to eat that,” Laura said, looking for all the world as if she were seasick.
“I think I’ll go join Coraline in her purging efforts,” Peter joked.
“Where are they, anyway?” Laura asked, turning to Irene.
“Probably they discovered some other earthly delights to take part in,” Joseph said, refilling his wine glass.
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