She needs ... sacrifices!
Steve struggled through the rest of the day, suffering from an intense headache and the ever-present fear that he would black out again any second. He couldn't stop thinking about what had happened and wondered how his body had just gone on with its business, as if it had a mind of its own. Or someone else's. That thought pressed upon him, bringing with it the feeling that there was something he should be remembering, but the harder he tried to recall it, the further it receded.
After Jeremy told Jen of his unsteadiness upstairs, she transferred him to trash detail, carrying out bags and boxes filled with detritus from the remodeling and renovations and throwing it in the large metal Dumpster that looked like a rail car and was parked to the left of the house at the end of the road. A truck came once a week to empty it. Around 4:00, his mother showed up, saying Jen had invited her to dinner, which Steve was sure was true, but which wasn't the real reason she was there. He felt she was checking up on him, and it annoyed him even as he was grateful for it and wished he could tell her what was happening and have her fix it like she always fixed things.
He had a sinking feeling she would not be able to fix this; no one would.
The tumult of conflicting thought, desire, and emotion combined with his headache wearied him. By the time dinner was served, he had no stomach for food and could barely keep his eyes open. Diane noticed and felt his forehead. She proclaimed he was running a fever and announced she was taking him home immediately.
Steve was surprised at the raging turmoil he felt over leaving; part of him angry at the thought, part of him glad to get away from the house, secretly coddling the idea that it was the house that had somehow caused his blackouts. This internal argument would drag on until Christmas, always ending in a standoff as it did now. And, as he always did with his mother, he gave in and let her take over. She bundled him up with a blanket borrowed from Jen and drove him back to the house in Sunderland where she gave him aspirin, tucked him in, and told him not to worry. He fell into a fitful sleep wishing he could obey her command.
No!
Don't leave!
She tries to reassert herself, but it is too late, and she is too weakened from earlier efforts.
The farther she gets from home, the weaker she gets.
It's not supposed to be like this....
Debbie Watson moped around the living room and kitchen after dinner until her brother noticed.
"What's up with you, Debbie-do?" he asked, using his pet name for her; it always brought a smile to her lips and didn't fail now.
"Nothin'. I wasjust thinkin', it was kinda nice to have another kid around here, ya know? Another teenager?"
Jen came in from outside.
"Jen, why don't you ask your mom and Steve to move in here with us and help with the bed-andbreakfast? Wouldn't that be cool?" Debbie asked.
Jen arched her eyebrows, stuck out her bottom lip, and nodded slowly. "Actually, I've been planning on doing that."
"See, Jen? I told you my sister is brilliant!" Jeremy said proudly. "She thinks like you."
Debbie beamed.
The conversation between the adults turned to planning the budget for renovating the barn into Jeremy's art studio. Debbie tried to follow alongusually she loved these kinds of talks and would try to contribute ideas-but she couldn't get Steve Nailer out of her head. She had met him a couple of times before when Jen and Jeremy had gotten married, and she hadn't thought twice about him, had barely noticed him. But when he walked in on Thanksgiving and she laid eyes on him again, she'd nearly creamed her jeans right then and there.
He was gorgeous! She didn't know why she had never noticed before. And sexy? He exuded such a heady, almost physical sensuality and sexiness. But there was more to him than just physical attractiveness. There was something about him, about the way he looked at her that brought such evil thoughts to her head-thoughts that she discovered she liked! They were thoughts that made her horny, that were making her horny at that very moment as she remembered watching him through the keyhole. She excused herself to bed even though it was before 9:00 and ran up the back stairs. In her room, she stripped and, reaching under her mattress, pulled out a long thick stick of pepperoni she had stolen from the kitchen earlier. She lay on the bed, and practiced fellatio and intercourse with the Italian sausage just as she'd been doing since she was ten, a victim of early puberty. The difference now was that instead of fantasizing that the pepperoni was Brad Pitt's sausage, she imagined it was Steve Nailer's.
Steve Nailer tossed and turned in bed, moaning painfully several times in his sleep. Throughout the night dreams raced by like leaves on an autumn wind, but each left him with the same scared, anxious feeling. In each one he was either trying to get into something or keep something out. In both, he did a lot of running, to and from, some shadowy thing that kept its real form hidden....
He woke, sweating and horny, in the gray light of Saturday morning and began masturbating without even thinking about it. Abruptly, as though he had been unaware of what his hand was doing and had just now noticed, he pulled his hand away and got out of bed. Keeping quiet so as not to wake his mother, he went into the bathroom and took a cold shower.
There is more wrong than she thought.
She cannot get back in.
She tries, while he sleeps, and again when he pleasures himself . . . almost! Something is preventing her-the boy's will, stronger than she would have given him credit for, and her own lack of power.
"The old gray mare she ain't what she used to be! "
Was that her father singing from the shadows of her mangled memory? OrEdmund?
Whoever- he sings the truth.
Why can't I get back in now? she wonders.
The answer is obvious: I'm not home-the seat and source of my power, of the Machine.
Yet, all is not lost. Slowly, much slower than when she was home, her powers return and grow and the boy's mind once again opens to her.
Less than a week after Thanksgiving, in the middle of the night, Steve Nailer sat up in bed, his right hand clutching his erect penis, his eyes open but glazed. Moving awkwardly, as if he had arthritic joints, he swung his legs out of bed and stood. His pajama bottoms fell to the floor, puddling around his ankles. He stepped out of them and walked to the door, still clutching his hard-on in his right hand and opening the bedroom door with his left.
He went across the hall to his mother's open bedroom door. Her loud snores-she suffered from sleep apthnea-filled the house, growing louder as he entered the room. She stopped breathing. In the silence, Steve crossed to the edge of her bed and stood over her, looking down at her, his head tilted curiously as if he'd never seen her before.
With a loud snort and gasp, she suddenly started breathing again. Steve remained unstartled, unmoving beside the bed. Slowly, methodically, he began to masturbate. Within moments he was climaxing. Without missing a beat, he grabbed his mother's water glass, which she kept by the bedside at night, and ejaculated into it. After he'd squeezed the last drops of semen into the water, he held the glass up and watched the milky globs floating in the clear liquid.
He smiled, put the glass back, and returned to his room. He climbed in bed and immediately went back to sleep. The next morning he woke with no memory of his somnambulism. Two nights later, a repeat performance, only this time he masturbated in the bathroom, taking special care to leave sperm on his mother's toothbrush and in her bottle of mouthwash. Giggling hoarsely, he opened her favorite tube of red lipstick and carefully inserted it into his anus, removed it, and placed it back in the medicine cabinet.
The sound of his mother getting up woke him. Frantic not to get caught naked in the bathroom by her, he ran back to his room, ducking inside just as his mother stumbled sleepily out of hers, heading for the john. After the flush, he heard her gargle and couldn't help but start sniggering like some kind of pervert and didn't know why. He scared himself so, the sniggering soon turned to tears and he fell asleep awas
h in them. The next morning, after moving his bowels, he mistook the lipstick on the toilet paper for blood and was seized by a fierce panic attack.
By the middle of December, Steve seriously doubted his sanity and was helpless to do anything about the long dark hole he seemed to be slipping into. He waged a daily inner battle, torn between longing to return to Jen's house and fear at the prospect of doing so. His troubles had all started there, yet sometimes the urge to go there was almost overwhelming,
He knew he was sleepwalking almost every nightcertain he was even getting dressed and leaving the house at night. What he did on those nights he had only fleeting glimpses, but they involved voyeurism and snooping around dark, sleeping houses, looking for a way in.
He woke twice outside strange houses in the middle of the night when he should have been home in bed. The first time he was only a few streets from his own in Sunderland, trying to pry open a basement window with a broken tree branch. A large Doberman in the house set up a furious barking and he had to flee, as terrified by the question of why he had wanted to get in the house as he was by the threat of the dog or of getting caught. The second time, he woke freezing, sitting on his bike outside a house in Northwood, just off Route 116, not far from Jen's. He woke to the thought: Sleep well, Rachel. Next time. He rode home through the frigid December night air, frightened and weeping the entire way.
Before long the physical affects of his nightly excursions began to take their toll. He became constantly cranky. His relationship with his mother deteriorated and he found himself snapping at her every time she spoke to him. He was exhausted. Waking reality began to feel like more of a dream than dreams. Throughout it all, he couldn't shake the feeling that he knew why this was happening to him, if he could just nudge the knowledge off the proverbial tip of his tongue and remember it, but every time he tried, it brought a fierce headache and depression.
I need help, he thought more than once in the weeks leading up to Christmas, but couldn't bring himself to act on it.
Either Fin very sick, or Fin going crazy, he thought, but knew, for reasons beyond his comprehension, that neither was true.
She is ecstatic. She did it! She suddenly finds herself able to sit in the driver's seat, controlling the boy's body at will, night after night while he sleeps. Like a customer test-driving the latest model from Detroit, she puts her host through the paces, seeing what she can make him do, seeing how far she can go.
Oh, what fun! What nasty, delicious fun! At last she can put her host's feeble male orgasms to some use!
It is wonderful. It is exhilarating, but each night, it is over too soon. The efforts exhaust her and each day she must sink into the darkness of the boy's subconscious, where she reviews, rests, and plans.
Home.
She was stronger there; found it easier to exercise her will and use the Machine. She knows she has to return there to stay. And the Machine ... she could feel its thrum constantly at the house-hears it still, but cannot tap into it as easily as she had while home. But what she hears, pleases her, the Machine is working off the seed she planted in the angel faced girl, planning for her permanent return while setting up possibilities and potentialities that she hasn't even thought of yet, consciously that is. She senses that the Machine is working as well as ever, which is strange given her missing parts and powers. The Machine has been working, planning revenge. She is sure of it. It is her innermost desire and the Machine always acts best off raw desire, instinct, and emotion.
Not to mention ... sustenance.
Its time to go all out-take it to the limit.
It's time to feed.
Jackie Nailer took another gulp from his extra-large Dunkin Donuts coffee, spiked with two shots of espresso, and looked at his watch. One-thirty a.m. He frowned and looked longingly toward his bed, but sleep was not a luxury he could afford this night; he was in the midst of finals, with his hardest one, in zoology, less than eight hours away. He'd been cramming for it since 9:00 p.m. when he'd left Chalice's dorm to return to his own. They had planned on studying together, but, as usual, when they found themselves alone they weren't able to keep their hands off each other. They had quickly given in to their lust with the promise to each other that immediately after Jackie would leave so they could get some work doneChalice had a psychology final at 8:00.
Jackie slouched in his chair and stared at his cell phone, open on the desk. He thought about calling her, sure that she was still up, but then thought better of it. He was just trying to waste time, he knew, and time was something he was short of right now. He made a deal with himself: another hour of work and then sleep. He tried to return his nose to the grindstone, but it was no good. He found himself reading the same few sentences over and over, and each time the words made less sense. It wasn't just that he was tired either, though that was the major factor, but he just couldn't seem to concentrate lately, or maintain any kind of focus or attention on things. Even Chalice had commented on his distracted manner.
He couldn't put his finger on a cause-seeing many instead: the coming holidays; the fact that his newfound celebrity status had not yet worn off, and he was still occasionally being accosted by strangers; and his deepening love for Chalice. Thrown into the mix-a recent phone call from a john Skinnymiller, who was an editor with Hark Books. He had been intrigued by the Waters show and offered Jackie a book deal for his story, including a ghostwriter to help pen it if Jackie felt incapable of the task. With an advance of ten thousand dollars if he worked with a ghostwriter, or fifteen thousand if he wrote it himself, it was not something he could ignore. The money wasn't that important-his mother was paying for his college, as she'd paid forJen to go to chef's school, with Steve's money from the Grimm estate-it was what the money represented: He'd be a professionalwriter once he had been paid!
Of course, for him to receive the higher sum and sole credit for the book, Mr. Skinnymiller had told him he'd need to submit a synopsis and two sample chapters, or the first one hundred pages, to show he was up to it. Having never written anything longer than a short story (and never having been published), Jackie thought that request was reasonable. The editor had put no time restraints on him but had suggested that the sooner he got it in the better. The problem was doing it; it was just another added stress to his life.
He had told himself he could work on it over the semester break, but it kept intruding on his thoughts when he was trying to study. Sometimes a great idea, or a vivid memory, would come to him and he'd scribble a note to himself in the margins of whatever notebook or textbook he had handy at the time. More often than not, he was seized with a sense of terror that he had bitten off more than he could chew-he couldn't write a book; wanting to be a writer and being a writer were two different things; he didn't have the talent; he was a fraud. Those were the worst moments, the self-doubt turning to self-loathing. When he got like that, only Chalice's company could bring him out of it.
She validates me, he thought, smiling. Under her calming influence, he could think rationally about it and was pretty sure he could do it. After all, since his freshman year in high school he had wanted to be a writer-when he wasn't wanting to be a rock star or an actor/director of horror films-and now was his chance. True, it would probably be the hardest thing he would ever do, but this was an opportunity handed to him on the proverbial golden platter. He knew that unpublished writers did not get deals like the one he had been offered. He knew that, normally, an unpublished, unknown writer had to submit a completed, very good, book-length manuscript (through an accepted agent) to even get his work considered by a publishing company. Even then, without a good agent, most writers don't get very far. If, by luck, a writer should sell his/her first book, Jackie also knew the average advance against royalties was between twenty-five hundred and five thousand dollars.
"This is a gift," he repeatedly told himself, a window of opportunity if ever there was one. He had to take advantage of it.
"I'm going to bed, Mom," Steve Nailer said, getting
up from the couch.
His mother looked at the time on the cable box and frowned. "You okay, hon? It's only eighty-thirty," she commented, sitting forward on her recliner.
"Yeah, I'm just tired is all." He wasn't lying. Exhaustion had become a way of life. He flopped on his bed without bothering to change into his pj's and instantly fell into a thick sleep.
At 1:32 a.m., two hours after his mother had retired and was sleeping, a dream flicked on the cinema screen of Steve's mind. As if living the dream, he got out of bed and quietly left his house.
Jackie sighed and closed his book. He clicked off his desk lamp and decided he'd be better off going to bed and getting up early to study before the exam when he was rested and refreshed. He stripped to his boxers and slipped into bed. Hugging his extra pillow as though it were Chalice, he tried to sleep. An hour later he was still trying. Three in the morning and all the caffeine he'd drunk was taking its toll. He tossed and turned as a stream of thoughts and worries ran rampant in his head. At 4:00 and still no relief in sight, he got up and dug through his desk until he found a halffull bottle of blackberry brandy, left over from a late September football game he'd gone to on one of his first dates with Chalice. He downed its contents, hoping the alcohol would help him sleep. The syrupy sweetness of the liquor clung to his palate uncomfortably, so he chased it with a gulp from an open can of soda that had been left on the room's sole windowsill for God only knew how long. Its aftertaste was slightly less offensive than the brandy's.
"Would you go to sleep! " his roommate complained from the top bunk.
Jackie apologized and returned to bed, stared at the clock. Four-thirty. IfI get, to sleep now, he schemed, and get up at seven, I'll have two hours to study before the exam at nine-thirty. He set the alarm and snuggled down to seriously get to sleep.
Five-thirty: still awake.
Six-thirty-tossing and turning.
Six-fifty-five-sound asleep, just in time for the alarm to go off. He rolled over and shut it off without ever waking up.
Grimm Reapings Page 12