by _Anthology
I came, hitting the wall with streaks of spunk. It all went within the design. I zipped up to go. A pale flash from the room behind me startled me as I left. When I turned back, the sigil was gone. Mission accomplished. I went to Rhodes anyway, just to make sure he wouldn't show up. It was about five and all the day students were going home. The security guard waved me through when I showed him my camera. The evening students walked past the bench where I sat, watching a spectacularly red sunset.
The buildings of native stone were done in a gothic style, all pointed with high sloping roofs. I once paid a girl to dress in a Hogwarts uniform and shot pictures of her on the campus. The pictures were very profitable and she let me flip up that school-girl skirt and fuck her while yanking on the necktie. It was a little creepy, but more like a monster in a rubber suit than the "Oh shit it's after me" feeling that the hospital inspired. It was still damn cold.
"Hello, Michael." He sat down beside me, looking more human than usual. No wings, no horns. Just a hot blond with a body made for sex.
"Hello yourself. Thought you couldn't come if I destroyed the summoning sigil"
"Can't trust everything you read on the net." "I know. So now what?" I wished I could think. The smell of lavender and sulphur was fogging my head. And I was still wiped out.
"You're the one who invited me to your reality. What did you have in mind? Fisticuffs? Beautiful one, do you think you could take me?"
"Not really." Definitely not in the shape I was in. "I don't know. How in the fucking hell do I get rid of you?"
He looked around the courtyard. It was empty and darkness had fallen. The lights went out and he changed. I was on my feet and running, but he caught me easily. "You don't." A chasm yawned in the turf and he dragged me to it. "Fucking Hell is right, lovely mortal. You didn't banish me. You bound yourself to me eternally." As we fell, the last thing my human ears heard was, "After all, even demons can code HTML. The website was a simple matter."
*** Aren't you lovely, my own? I have enough power to keep you looking human. You are a demon now, subordinate to me, forever and ever. No power, save that which I allow you. No pleasure save that which I give you. There will be much of that. Time is infinite in Hell. Mine, and only mine. Now come. We're just going to that lovely basalt tower over by the lava fountains. Mother Lilith wants to meet you.
Under the Bed
By Julia Talbot When you're a kid you believe in the monsters under the bed. Usually by the time you get to be my age you've forgotten about them, or at least convinced yourself you've stopped believing in them unless you've just watched a horror movie or something.
They say intense trauma makes your childhood nightmares come back to life. Makes you relive the fears that seemed so vivid then. I wonder if the therapist my sister Angie wants me to go to would consider losing Hal intense enough. That would explain why I'm awake at three in the morning, heart pounding and covered in sweat, afraid to get up to piss because the monster under the bed will surely grab my ankles and pull me under.
I wasn't dreaming about the boogeyman. That much I know. My dreams were full of screaming brakes and twisted metal and blood on the windshield. Those are my demons, for sure, but they've got nothing to do with the supernatural.
The first thing I do after I reach out to switch the bedside lamp on is rub my knee, the action ingrained habit after months of physical therapy, that after weeks in traction. Every time I touch it I remember being trapped under the damned dashboard and listening to Hal gurgle and wheeze, what sounded like my name coming out in wet syllables.
Yeah. Trauma I got, so maybe that explains why I want to jump out of bed and land in the bathroom, never touching the floor in between. Fuck, I'm a grown man, with thirty some-odd years on the three year old who believed some boogabooga would pop out of the closet and eat him if he didn't cover his feet when he fell asleep. Determined, I push back the covers and step out on the floor and if I feel a breeze on my ankles that sounds like Hal whispering my name? It's my own fucking overactive imagination.
*** Seems like three am is haunting me. Isn't there a song about that? The numbers on my little alarm clock are red. They glow in the dark like the eyes of some sawed off midget monster. I sigh. Again with the monsters. Hell, I'm lying here with the covers pulled up to my chin and tucked over my feet like some kind of demented modern day mummy. And I swear I heard someone calling my name. That's what woke me.
Not Hal. It wasn't Hal's drowning voice this time. I strain my ears, trying to hear it again, but like it is when some sound jolts me awake in the wee hours, all I can hear is my heartbeat, which gets louder and louder as I try to get it to shut up. My armpits and crotch are wet and that tingling in my face and neck, the one that signals flight or fight response? Oh yeah. It's there.
There's nothing else there, damn it. Nothing and I'm getting tired of it. Tired of the fear and tired of Angie coming over with lasagna and telling me I look like I'm not sleeping and I should be getting better by now. Like there's a time limit on grief or something. Like I should just find a trunk somewhere to shove the memories in and lock it up.
It's only been six months, for fuck's sake.
I roll over, deliberately letting the covers slide down to my waist, eyes closed way too tight, but I'm determined as Hell to get back to sleep. And eventually, I do. ***
"You have dark circles under your eyes. Are you sleeping? And what did you do to your arm? You have to be careful, Jonah. You're just now all healed up."
All healed up. Sure. I stare blankly at the bruise on my arm that looks for all the world like a hickey. Angie bustles around changing my sheets and getting the crock pot turned on and filled with all of the fixings for chili. Like I'm an invalid.
Maybe I am.
"I have no idea. Must have run into something."
"Well, watch where you're going." She sounds so much like our mother that I smile. "Yes, ma'am."
*** I actually sleep through the night the next night. Okay, so I wake up feeling wrung out and hung up to dry, the sheets wrapped around me, with some rather gross evidence that I had a very different kind of dream than my nightmares on my thighs. But that's a good thing, right?
Right. Doesn't stop me from getting down on my hands and knees with the broom in hand while I'm cleaning later on to look under the bed. Just to be sure. Nothing there but of a baggie of extra sheets and a ton of dust. What the Hell else did I expect?
***
I'm early tonight. Two thirty-eight. It's all the same. Pulse going crazy, hands shaking, turn on the light don't move otherwise fear making it impossible to move. What's fucked up? My cock is hard. As hard as... well, more so than I can remember in at least six months. My palms actually itch with the need to touch, making my fingers curl, and I finally release the fear enough to breathe, and tunnel under the wrapped tight covers.
Oh, yeah. That's. Oh, that's good. It's been so long since my body acted like anything but the enemy and as soon as my fingers touch the head of my cock it's like an electric shock. My whole body bucks and the covers slide away, leaving me free to stroke and moan and shake. Takes all of two minutes for me to come, all over my hand and chest and belly. It's only after I come down that I start crying and cursing Hal for leaving me like he did.
The storm ends eventually and I get up to go to the bathroom. In the harsh light of the fluorescent bulb over the mirror I look gross. My hair is a mess, I'm covered in spunk and, oddly enough, a scattering of fingertip shaped marks spread right across my lower belly.
Weird. Now I'm beating myself up in my dreams, too. That's just what I need. *** The doors are all locked, the windows are all shut and I'm ready for bed. But man, the minute I walk into my bedroom the hair stands up on the back of my neck, goosebumps rising on my arms. Damn it, this is getting old.
I contemplate sleeping on the couch, but that would be giving in. As it is I don't want to walk over to the bed to turn the lamp on, so I flip the overhead light off and make a running leap, launching myse
lf onto the bed from about three feet away. Laughing at myself, I cover up, making sure no bit of skin hangs out, and close my eyes, trying to fight the feeling that I'm being watched.
Because that's stupid. There's nobody there, especially not Hal. He left me. I wake up sometime just before dawn, tears on my cheeks. I dreamed of a strong body and green eyes that glowed in the dark and my balls ache, they're drawn up so tight. My cock actually hurts, like I've been rubbing it raw with no lotion, and my lips feel swollen.
Turning over, I hump the mattress desperately until I come, stifling my cry in the pillow. Hal had blue eyes. Not green.
*** It's been weeks since I got home from the hospital. I feel worse, not better, and Angie keeps trying to get me to go to the doctor. She says I look skinnier. I tell her to fuck off. I know I'm rotten, but she knows why I do it, and she just keeps coming back.
Most of the time I'm afraid to go to bed, but I'm afraid to wake up, too, so I spend a lot of time sleeping. I ought to be finding a new job instead of living off the insurance settlement, but it's just too hard to think. My dreams. Man. They're less about blood and screams and more about. Well. They're damned erotic. Maybe I just need to get out more and meet someone, but damn. And the medicine they have me on must be affecting my skin or something the way I'm bruising. My hipbones were both black the other morning and today it was one of my nipples.
There's something to be said for the dreams, though. They make me less lonely, less focused on what I don't have anymore. Not peaceful by a long shot, especially not with the fucking copper wire taste of fear in my mouth every night when I wake up. But they are somehow comforting for all that.
Tonight I decide to sleep on the couch, just to see if it's different, but after an hour of trying to bend my bad knee all sorts of directions it won't go I give up and head for the bedroom. God, I need to wash the fucking sheets. My leg muscles twitch as I near the bed, screaming at me that there's something there, but my cock is rising, too. The fear is becoming addictive.
I hop into bed and resist the urge to pull the sheets up. Barely. It's like a challenge to whatever it is: my psyche, the thing that goes bump in the night, whoever or whatever is doing this to me.
Come and get me.
I leave the lamp on. When I wake the light is still on and my heart pounds so hard I might just have a fucking heart attack. The second my eyes open my mouth opens, too, but nothing comes out save for a squeak. I'm fucking paralyzed by the body kneeling between my spread legs, the thing working my nipples, licking my belly.
It's lean and black and kinda scaly and I think for a moment that it's Hal, come back from whatever fiery Hell they reserve for cheating bastards who get themselves killed driving drunk and leave their partners broken.
But then he (it?) looks up at me, eyes glowing green just like my dream, and smiles, terrifying in its otherness, this unknown thing.
"He left you, Jonah," it says. "But you brought me back from the limbo I have known since your childhood."
My chest hurts; I think I might just pop a vein. He's licking me, up and down, and I know it's going to kill me, either with pleasure, or with its mouthful of the sharpest teeth I've ever seen.
"I love you, Jonah. I'll never leave you." And the world grays out as he sucks me down.
Silver
By T. J. Pennington
Silver burns.
Like memory.
Like desire. Hollywood talks a lot about how silver kills us. They always get it wrong. They blather on about silver bullets to the heart. No one ever mentions how soft a silver bullet would be, or that, until recently, a bullet of any kind piercing the heart was an almost certain cause of death.
Even for those of us who can't die.
There isn't much that can kill my kind. Silver, allegedly, but honestly, that's tripe. It hurts, but it doesn't kill.
Beheading and fire. Those work. It's hard to survive without a head, or with a body burned to ashes.
Silver doesn't kill. It just makes you wish it did.
It's not unpleasant to the touch. Not at first. It's smooth and cool, like a mountain stream of icily flowing metal. I can almost forget, at that moment, what will happen if I hold the silver for more than a few seconds.
What happens is pain. Abruptly, the sensation changes from that of a cool metal mountain stream to a fire whose flames are coated with acid. Second-degree burns appear where my skin touches the silver; weeping blisters break out around the burns themselves. The flesh swells swiftly, making it almost impossible to remove something like a silver ring or neck chain. I start to itch all over, even in places where the silver hasn't touched me. If my hands have touched silver, I have to be careful not to scratch my face or rub my eyes, or else I'll suffer burns and blisters there as well. If I still haven't let go, a glacial wind sweeps through my bones, burning and freezing me simultaneously.
If the symptoms progress that far, I know I won't be able to walk for at least three days. And if I don't let go after that, I become disoriented. Everything I hate and fear comes to life in front of my eyes and I can't banish it.
This, by the way, is what my allergist -- who knows more about my kind than most would suspect -- deems a "medium reaction" to silver. Some werewolves have milder reactions. Some suffer more. I'm better off than some of us. I try to remember that.
The real danger of silver isn't the physical damage it does. Werewolves are peculiarly designed to endure the worst. Our rapid healing abilities mend the worst of the damage fairly quickly.
The peril lies in the pain. The searing, unholy, endless pain. We'll do anything to escape it. That's the danger. As I said, werewolves are built for survival. We heal swiftly. Our hearts beat at a constant rhythm that can't be broken. We have greater stamina than humans. Even in human form, we're ten times stronger than the strongest human living. We don't get sick, as a rule. The disease of lycanthropy defeats all lesser viruses.
Pain -- be it physical or mental -- isn't a disease. Our bodies can't triumph over pain.
And the longer the exposure to the cause of pain, the worse it grows. And we have to endure it. Have to. Death is not an option, even assuming that a werewolf could find a way to commit suicide.
I don't say that because I'm against the idea of suicide. I say it because of the terms of my... condition. A werewolf who never takes a human life has a chance of escaping the second part of the curse, assuming his body is burned at sunrise the day after his death. If the body isn't burned, he becomes a vampire.
If the werewolf does take a human life -- including his own, and it doesn't matter what the reason is -- he's damned. His soul dies.
Only once in my life did I ever admit to a human being what I am, and the rules, created by who knows what merciless demon or deity, that bind me more surely than any harness, shackles or chains. Thomas listened and did not laugh. Nor did he recommend that I book a room at the local mental health hospital. Best of all, he didn't leave me abruptly after he heard what I had to say -- and I fully expected him to flee a man he must have seen as a lunatic, if not a lycanthrope.
That first month after I told him the truth, he ran... tests. Small things, like buying rare and bloody meat and enclosing it in what was supposed to be an airtight container to see if I could smell it. One time he brought home, as a centerpiece, a tall, slim plant with blossoms resembling blue butterflies. Friar's cap, he called it. My skin began to tingle; my tongue, throat and face started to go numb. And I asked him -- quite civilly, I thought, under the circumstances -- to take the wolfsbane away.
After our first full moon together -- and that was a strain, for I not only needed a private place in which to transform, but he had to be able to watch every minute of the Change, in order to be convinced of what I was
- well. I was sure he would be revolted, that he would never want to touch me again.
He surprised me with his matter-of-fact acceptance of my condition. This could best be summed up in one sentence: "I'm sorry that you suffer from t
his curse -- but is there any way that we can transform the curse into a source of pleasure?"
There was, indeed, a way, though it took us a while to discover it.
Silver.
Most frequently, a miniature silver relish spoon. I know. It sounds absurd. But he was quite gentle, holding me with one hand and the tiny spoon with the other as he lightly brushed the tip of the spoon on my nipples or drew a line with the spoon's bowl across my torso, stomach and inner thighs. Then, just as I gasped at the sudden onrush of heat and the just-about-to-be pain, he would smile, would place the spoon on the nightstand beside him, and would start oh kissing and oh yes licking and oh more please sucking away every trace of silver.
I think now that he had some notion of gradually immunizing me to silver, perhaps even curing me. I told him this would never happen, but he, eternal optimist, refused to believe that, just as he refused to believe in the restrictions of my curse. He understood, or claimed to, that killing was wrong, but he could not see why I would lose my soul whether I murdered a man in my human form or devoured a child when I was a mindless wolf. Thomas, a thoroughly modern man, did not, could not grasp the concepts of "souls" and "damnation." Trying to explain the ramifications of lycanthropy to him was like trying to explain radar to a goldfish.
He never understood that my fears of soullessness were far more than rank superstition. Nevertheless, I'm grateful to him for his persistent and willful blindness. For thinking of me as a man even after he'd seen me by moonlight, my arm and leg bones melting into lupine forelegs and hind legs, my human skull cracking and re-shaping itself into a wolf's. For touching my accursed body, not in anger or contempt, but with roving hands and sensitive lips, with caressing tongue and eager cock. For daring to love a werewolf -- not only with his body, but also with his heart, mind and soul -- and for being overjoyed at being loved in return. For these mercies alone, I owe him for eternity.
And now he's gone. Abruptly, pointlessly, stupidly gone. And the same old issues of danger, pain, soullessness and death are cropping up again. Both my co-workers and most of our friends -- none of whom know my secret -- seem to feel that any slaughter I visited on the bank robber who shot him would be wholly justified. Several of them, who really should know better, have hinted that should I lose control and tear the young robber limb from limb (a most satisfying image, and one on which I dare not dwell for long), they would understand and forgive me. It's true -- the thief who shot Thomas is little more than a waste of space, a cruel and vicious sewer-spawn who has been destroying minds and lives since he hit puberty. If he should die, the world would be vastly improved. Everything I've learned about him tells me that.