October

by Michael Rowe

  “My room is upstairs,” Mikey breathed. “Come up. It’s this way.”

  [30]

  “Leave the lights off,” Mikey whispered. “Please?”

  “No,” Adrian said, switching on the bedside lamp. “I want you to see me. I want your eyes on my body.” He shrugged off the leather jacket, letting it drop to the floor. Slowly, Adrian pulled the red t-shirt over his head, exposing the flat stomach and broad, compact chest. Tufts of gold hair nestled beneath Adrian’s muscle-corded arms. A mat of the same dense, dark-blond hair bisected his pectoral muscles, trailing down in a column that vanished beneath the waistband of his jeans. The outline of Adrian’s thick, trapped penis, slanting upward, was clearly visible against the faded denim. Adrian locked eyes with Mikey. Never breaking contact, he unhooked his belt and unbuttoned his jeans, sliding them down across his narrow hips. He kicked them off and stood there, unsmiling, naked and silent.

  Mikey reverenced what he saw before him. Adrian’s erection, free of the confines of his jeans speared away from his body. To Mikey it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. In the soft, warm light of the lamp, Adrian’s skin glowed like phosphorus.

  Mikey blushed at the perfection. He looked up into Adrian’s face, searching for reassurance. Adrian’s smile was tender as he opened his arms. Mikey noticed the tattoo just above the left triceps, but in the shadows of the bedroom he couldn’t make it out.

  “Take your clothes off and come here,” Adrian said. “Come to me.”

  Mikey hesitated only a moment, then began to undress. When Mikey was naked, Adrian stepped forward and took him into his arms. Adrian lowered him gently onto the bed, spreading Mikey’s legs with his own knees. Adrian balanced his weight on his knees, lowering his pelvis so that his erection brushed against Mikey’s. Supine beneath Adrian’s body, he gasped at the erotic shock of the contact. His arms extended and striated, palms flat on the bed. Adrian began to kiss Mikey’s face and body. He traced his tongue down Mikey’s chest, pausing to flick his nipples with the tip of it.

  Mikey’s body was alive with sensations he had never dreamed of, with pleasure both unimaginable and, he felt, nearly beyond endurance. Tentatively at first, and then with more boldness, his hands explored Adrian’s broad, scalloped back. His fingers traced the outline of Adrian’s ass, feeling the hard indentations of muscle beneath skin that was surprisingly soft. He probed farther with his fingers, exploring the thicker, longer hair lining the cleft between the cheeks of his ass. Mikey swam in abasing, submissive lust. He longed to show Adrian that there was nothing he wouldn’t do for him. He guided Adrian’s hips upward, toward his head. Then he took Adrian in his mouth, wondering at the taste of heat and salty wetness. Adrian groaned in pleasure, a deep, guttural sound that came from low in his throat. As Mikey sucked, he thrilled at the power he felt. Adrian thrust his hips harder and Mikey gagged, then relaxed, the rhythm of his own ministrations matching that of Adrian’s thrusts.

  Above him, Adrian gracefully rotated his body and lowered his own mouth to Mikey’s cock.

  The sensation was immediate. Mikey arched his back as Adrian expertly teased along the shaft, tonguing the head. Mikey closed his eyes and felt a boiling tension that seemed to come out of nowhere and everywhere. He felt his groin clench, then suddenly, he erupted in a shattering climax. His body jerked as though he were being electrocuted, and spasm after spasm wracked his frame. Adrian’s mouth fastened on Mikey’s cock, refusing to release it. Mikey thrashed against the sheets, his fingernails raking Adrian’s back and ass as though Mikey were drowning and Adrian were the only one who could offer succor. Then slowly the thrashing subsided. Adrian released him, then rolled over on the bed, taking Mikey in his arms and holding him close to his chest as the spasms wracking his body dwindled, then ceased altogether. Adrian threw one leg possessively across both of Mikey’s.

  Gently, Adrian asked, “How was that? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Mikey said. “I’m more than okay. I’m great. You?”

  “I’m great, too,” Adrian whispered into Mikey’s ear. “Have you ever done that before? I mean, with a guy?”

  “No, not with a guy. Not with anyone.”

  “So I’m your first?” Mikey sensed rather than saw Adrian’s smile. “Cool.” He hugged Mikey tightly. “What an honour.”

  “Hey,” Mikey said. “What’s that tattoo on your arm? I like it. It looks like a scarab or something, right? It’s sexy.”

  Adrian propped himself up on one elbow and leaned into the aureole of the bedside lamp so Mikey could see his left triceps clearly.

  “It tells a story, see?” Adrian said. “My story. It’s a broken heart with an eye at the centre, with a tear coming out of it. Above it, there’s an eternal flame.” Mikey stared at the tattoo in wonder. Adrian leaned his arm close to Mikey’s face so that Mikey could see it more clearly. “The sides of it have spikes, like legs. Five on each side, ten in total. It’s a bastardized version of the sacred heart from Catholic mythology. I based it on having my heart broken in love so many times and having cried so much. The eternal flame is for the fire that will never go out inside me, no matter how much pain the heart can take. The spiky legs,” he said, pointing, “are to keep others away from the vulnerable heart. Plus,” he added, flexing his biceps, “it makes me look mean and tough.”

  “Wow. That’s incredible. I’ve never heard anything so beautiful.”

  “I thought you might be able to relate,” Adrian said. He caressed Mikey’s hair. “I knew you’d understand. Let’s just keep it a secret, though. Okay? I mean, all of this. Let’s just have it be you and me. That way we can do this whenever we want to. I have other stuff to show you.”

  “Yes.” His joy was all-encompassing. “We should keep it between us. We won’t tell anyone,” he said, thinking of Wroxy. “It’ll be our secret.”

  “I love you, Mikey.” Adrian kissed Mikey’s chest and ran his tongue along Mikey’s nipples. “I want you to love me, too. I want to be your boyfriend. You know you want one, and I want to be him.”

  Mikey, too transported with joy and unprecedented completion to even think beyond the immediacy of Adrian’s words, merely sighed and nodded. Then Adrian’s ascendant mouth was on his, and he felt himself stirring to life beneath the driving weight of Adrian’s body.

  [31]

  Jim Fields heard the stones against his windowpane but, still half asleep, didn’t identify the sound right away. He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes. The scattershot of pebbles came again, and he swung his legs over the side of the bed, padded naked to the window and looked outside.

  In the yard, standing in a circle of light from the back porch, was his best friend, Dewey Verbinski. He mimed opening a window, gesturing to Jim that he should open his own.

  As always Jim obeyed, nearly by instinct.

  “Hey,” Dewey called out from the front yard. He sounded distraught. “Come on down. I want to talk to you.”

  Jim looked at the clock on his dresser. It was three a.m. He looked out the window. Dewey waved again. “Come on, Fields. Come down here. We have to talk.”

  “Shhhhh!” Jim whispered loudly. “You’re gonna wake my fucking parents! It’s three in the morning. Are you high? What’s wrong with you?

  “Jim, please.” Dewey’s voice was pleading. “It’s an emergency. I’ve done something terrible, man. I’m really freaked out and I have to talk to you. Come on, man. Be a friend. Please? Come down. I’m begging you. I need your help.”

  “All right, hold on. But keep quiet. If my parents know you’re out there, I’m going to be up shit creek. Just stay there, okay? Don’t come near the house.”

  Jim dressed quickly from the jumble of clothes on the floor at the foot of his bed, a sweater and a pair of nylon track pants. He hurried down the stairs in to the kitchen. He unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out into the backyard. The cold was biting. Jim wished he’d grabbed a jacket.

  “What is it, Dewey?
” Jim whispered. “I’m serious. Are you on drugs? You’re going to get me grounded again.”

  “Oh, man, I’ve really done it this time. I think I’ve killed an actual person.”

  Jim peered into Dewey’s face. Tears glinted at the corners of Dewey’s eyes, a surreal enough image to Jim, who had never seen Dewey shed a tear under any circumstances.

  “Who?” Jim asked dumbly. “Who did you kill?”

  “Oh, man.” Dewey was moaning now. “The Childress faggot. I couldn’t help myself. He came on to me. Can you believe it? After everything we did? I hit him so hard. I think he’s dead. He’s not moving.”

  “What the fuck?” Jim was now fully awake and dreadfully aware that this was no joke. Whatever had upset Dewey was real. For the first time he entertained the possibility that Dewey had actually snapped and gone over the edge. This was nothing like their baiting of the Childress faggot, and what Jim thought of as mere teasing. “What are you telling me, Dewey? Are you fucking serious?”

  “You have to come. Please, Jimbo. You need to help me. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Where did you leave him? You know, the body?”

  “The field,” Dewey said. He gestured toward the dark sprawl of mutilated farmland on the other side of the street upon which Jim’s subdivision had been built. “Over there—see?”

  Jim peered into the night. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Come on, it’s over there.”

  “You killed him next to my house? Are you nuts?”

  “Come on!” Dewey dashed ahead into the darkness. “We need to hurry!”

  Jim scrambled after him, trying to keep up. His feet, naked inside the boots he’d shoved on, chafed against the stiff leather. Dewey was moving with an agility that Jim had never seen, nimbly skipping across the frozen earth in a way that seemed incongruous given his bulk.

  This better be serious, Jim thought irritably as he tried to follow Dewey’s sprinting shape. This had better not be some kind of pathetic practical joke.

  “Over here,” Dewey called out. He’d stopped running and was standing twenty-five yards in front of Jim. The night was very black, and Jim could barely make out Dewey’s shape. He turned to look at the subdivision behind him, which now seemed very far away. Then he jogged over to where Dewey was standing motionless.

  “All right, where’s Childress?” Jim demanded. He looked down at the ground but saw nothing,

  Dewey covered his mouth with his right hand. He giggled. “He must have left,” Dewey said. “I could have sworn he was right here.”

  “Fuck, Dewey, this is bullshit! You dragged me all the way out here at three in the morning for some stupid joke? I was sleeping, man!” Jim turned his back on Dewey and began to walk back toward his house.

  “Jim?” Dewey called. “Jim, turn around. There’s something I want to show you. Come here.”

  Jim turned around. “What?”

  Dewey cocked an index finger, beckoning him over. “Just come here, Jim. Please? It’ll only take a second. I’m sorry, dude. I need to explain why I brought you out here.”

  “I think that punch you took to the nose this afternoon rattled your brains,” Jim grumbled.

  Then he stopped, confused. Jim peered more closely at Dewey’s face. Something was wrong. He shook his head, trying to rid it of the last vestiges of sleep. When he’d left Dewey after school, his nose had been swollen to the size of a tennis ball, and both of his eyes had been scored with black bruises from the new kid’s punch.

  But now Dewey’s face was unblemished. His nose was unbroken, and there were no bruises beneath the glittering eyes. Jim took a few stumbling steps backward and whispered, “You’re not Dewey.”

  Dewey took two steps toward Jim and placed both of his hands on Jim’s shoulders. Jim felt impossibly strong fingers dig into the soft flesh of his upper arms. They pulled Jim close.

  “No. I’m not,” Dewey said in a cold, dry voice that sounded nothing like Dewey’s.

  Jim gasped as the thing in Dewey’s shape lowered its mouth down on his and kissed him full and hard. Jim felt it sucking at his tongue, probing. He struggled against its viselike grip, but he was implacably held. He felt a blinding sheet of pain and an explosion of hot blood flooding his mouth. He choked as a torrent of hot, salty copper ran down his throat. Jim gagged and stumbled backward.

  The thing in Dewey’s shape spit Jim’s severed tongue onto the dark earth. The lower half of its face was bathed in Jim’s blood. It licked its gleaming red teeth and Jim realized it was smiling. Jim tried to scream, but nothing would come from his throat except an agonized, frog-like croak. He fell and hit his head against what felt to him like a sharp rock on the ground. Through eyes crazed with pain, Jim tried to focus as Dewey’s body shimmered and rippled, running like wax, forming and reforming into shapes that were alternately human and bestial. For a moment Jim was staring at Mikey Childress. Then he had a vivid, oddly familiar impression of blond hair and blue eyes, and the flash of something dark and oily, like a leather jacket.

  And suddenly it was Dewey again. Or rather, Dewey with skin gone leathery and dark, with fur-covered hands that had become claws ending in long yellow nails.

  Then Dewey was gone altogether and nothing remained but a monster from beyond Jim’s worst nightmares, a creature with shining red eyes and a maw full of meat-ripping teeth from which issued breath that was foul beyond measure. Jim tried to turn his face away from the stench, but the creature tangled its fingers in Jim’s hair, brutally forcing his head in place, forcing him to see, to hear, to smell.

  “I’ve wanted you since I first saw you,” the creature said. It licked its lips in a horrible parody of lust. “Did you know I have a photo of you with your shirt off tacked up on the wall over my desk at home? I jack off to it all the time. Do you jack off thinking of me, too?”

  Jim shook his head wildly from side to side and tried to scream again, nearly passing out from the agony that came knocking. He heard a sound like massive sails flapping in the wind as two enormous black wings unfurled, almost languorously, from the creature’s back. Jim guessed that each membrane spanned twelve feet from shoulder to tip.

  It reached down, almost lovingly, and picked Jim up in its arms, cradling him like a paramour. “I’m going to fuck you to death,” it said. The creature slipped a long talon down the back of Jim’s track pants, cutting a bloody strip along his tailbone. Jim made a mewling sound and whipped his head back and forth, once again close to blacking out from the pain. Its fingernail rent the nylon fabric of Jim’s track pants as though it were made of wet tissue. It probed Jim’s anus with the razor-sharp tip, finding purchase, teasing the outer ring of his sphincter. When it impaled him, penetrating the tender skin of the rectum, pushing in deeper, shredding the flesh to tatters with two quick sawing motions, Jim finally found the voice to shriek. “And then, I’m going to eat you alive. Or maybe I’ll eat you alive first, then fuck you. We have all night to get to know each other, and we’ve waited a long, long time.”

  Suddenly Jim was airborne. The sound of flapping wings was like a thunderclap in his ears. Looking down, he saw the ground fall away. He caught a glimpse of his dwindling house far below. His last conscious thought before he passed out from pain and loss of blood was that his parents would never know what had happened to him.

  Dimly he wished that he’d been a better son.

  Then Jim yielded to blackness as the blanket of cold stars against the night sky was momentarily shadowed by enormous wings that flapped toward the escarpment.

  In the field, night scavengers had already scented Jim’s freshly spilled blood. By dawn they had eaten his tongue, leaving no trace of him for anyone to find.

  [32]

  Just before dawn, three disparate dreamers tossed fitfully in their sleep, each trapped by nightmares unique to them, or so they would have naturally assumed.

  Dewey Verbinski, breathing with difficulty through his bandages, dream
ed he was being pursued by a large bird. He heard wings flapping, but when he looked up, there was nothing hunting him. Still, he ran through an alien landscape. With the sludgy counter-logic of dreams, the harder he ran, the slower he moved. As the gigantic shadow fell across his path, he tried to look up but found himself unable to. He woke up gasping for air, looking wildly around his dark room, listening for the sound of wings.

  Wroxy Miller dreamed that she and Mikey were fighting. The reason for their anger wasn’t clear, but it seemed to be about—who? A boy? Adrian? Yes, there he was, with his arm around Mikey who looked at her with scalding pity. “Things are going to be different, Wroxy,” he said sadly. “They couldn’t have stayed this way. I don’t need you. I have Adrian now. Friendships weren’t made to last. Ours sure wasn’t.”

  Wroxy woke to a damp pillow. Her eyes were sore, her hair sealed to her wet face. Because she was a pragmatist at heart, she consigned the dream to her subconscious, making a mental note to address this situation with Mikey tomorrow. Wroxy believed that dreams were omens and signs, and this one was a sign that trouble was coming.

  For his part, Mikey had fallen asleep without showering after Adrian had left. He’d run his fingers along his awakened body and had traced the letter A across his sticky-dried belly.

  His dreams were inchoate, but sweet enough to keep him asleep until well after sunrise.

  [33]

  Mikey and Wroxy tried to make reparations to the fissure in their friendship the next morning, but both were withdrawn and vaguely resentful. They walked in silence, each hoping the other would see his or her presence as enough of a gesture. At any other time Mikey would have called her the night before to tell her that he and Adrian had made love, but now he intended to wait until a moment opportune enough to guarantee a warm reception from her.