CHAPTER 33
Simon Grove shut off the engine of Brenda Jorden’s brown Ford in the parking lot of the shiny new high-rise next to the LaCroix and settled in to wait.
The rain on the car’s roof lulled him. Made him sleepy. Drew him back....
After the night with Michelle, after he grew convinced that every last person he knew despised him, Simon Grove left his Louisiana home and went for a walk.
Temperatures were down in the forties, and Simon decided to wear his favorite fleece-lined denim jacket. He knew his mother wouldn’t have wanted him out this late alone. He couldn’t really talk to her anymore. Not that they’d ever shared secrets with each other...but over just the last few years he’d found that he could hardly talk to her about anything.
Since his teeth got straighter. He thought that was when she stopped wanting to talk to him. They’d been crooked, and she told him maybe they’d straighten out as he got older, but they didn’t. The canines punched forward, and the upper incisors turned at odd angles. “We’ll have to get you some braces,” she said.
He didn’t want braces. The other kids made fun of him enough already.
But his mother took him to the orthodontist, and they made plans to put the braces on, and that night he came home and stared into the mirror for a very long time. He wanted his teeth to straighten out, focused on it, concentrated as hard as he could.
And they did.
While he watched.
He was afraid to show his mother for several days. He thought he knew what she’d say. It turned out he was right.
She hadn’t really talked to him much since then.
He kept it up, though, and not just with his teeth. Sometimes he’d will his muscles to grow, and they would. He’d make his hair get longer, or change the color of his eyes, or turn his skin a darker shade. It felt nice.
Of course he didn’t tell anybody else about it, not even Paul next door, since he knew nobody else would understand. And even if they did, they’d probably still stop talking to him, just like his mother. So except for his teeth, which he kept straight, he didn’t let anyone else see any of his changes. That was private. That was his.
Simon pulled the jacket tighter around him and walked into the trees behind the house. They paid people to come in and keep the undergrowth cleared out, so it was easy walking. And so quiet, in the cold of the winter. No birds. Not even any katydids. Just him and the fallen, decaying leaves and the light from the moon.
Restless. Was that the right word? He’d surely been feeling something lately, more and more. A little more each time he changed, in fact. What was it? He felt as if he needed...something. What?
Just then he heard a noise behind him and whirled around, frightened, ready to run – but it was only Ruby. She came trotting toward him through the carpet of leaves, tongue wagging out, her breath hanging in the air around her. He knelt down to pet her and she whined as if in pain.
“Whatcha doin’ out here, girl? Huh? Whatcha doin’ out here?” Simon knew she was supposed to be leashed behind Paul’s house. He noticed a few dark streaks on her fur.
Was that...blood?
She whined again.
He smoothed the fur away from a deep abrasion around her neck, where the collar had been. “Did you break your leash?” He kept his voice soft and comforting. “Did something make you run away?” He remembered hearing a dog barking earlier in the evening, but he hadn’t connected it with Ruby. Again she whined. Simon parted more of her thick gray fur, tried to get a better look at her wound in the moonlight.
Then...he suddenly felt funny. He looked up, through the trees, and saw a star right above him suddenly grow very bright, and a wave of something thick and dark crashed through his mind and along his limbs, and he fell backward into the leaves.
Ruby danced away a few steps, but came back, concerned. Simon’s stomach knotted, and his jaw and hands both blazed with pain as if they’d been smashed with hammers.
“What...oh God...” Pain. More pain. The cool blacks and grays of the woods flip-flopped, and his eyes burned in green and yellow. “Ruby...” he whispered, gasping. “Get...somebody. Bring somebody.” He rolled onto his side and gasped again as the agony ripped into his lungs, his heart. Ruby whined and chuffed, hovered over him. He reached out to her—
—and his fingers twisted, stretched and attenuated. They circled Ruby’s neck as he tried to haul himself up off the ground, and the tips found the leash abrasion and dipped into fresh-flowing blood.
Simon blacked out.
# # #
Later. Hours? Minutes?
White skin glistened red, and tendrils like steel cables flung away the dry, spent carcass. Jaws bristling with ivory spines caught the moonlight, a cluster of narrow blades, and eyes filled with silver fire scraped across the yellowgreengold woods. Acid sweet as cider filled his veins, set him alight, more powerful than a hundred orgasms, and Simon Grove wanted more.
His joints clicked and ratcheted free of their restrictive shapes, and he leaped into the branches of the nearest tree, moving like a bloody golem built of red-smeared pipe cleaners and knives. Within seconds he reached Paul’s house.
Something had happened here. He would’ve known that even without his new eyesight. Ruby’s leash lay frayed and broken, the other end tethered to a stake near the back steps, and the back door stood ajar.
On all fours Simon skittered across the Burneys’ side yard, out of the woods, with his fingers curled up onto the backs of his hands and his feet pointed the wrong way. His distended jaw brushed the grass, and when a fat cricket made sluggish by the cold lodged in the spines of his teeth, a long reddish-purple tongue flicked out of his mouth and dragged the bug inside.
He could hear someone moving around in the house, but he didn’t think it was Paul or either one of Paul’s parents. Simon pushed the door wider and went inside.
He found Paul first.
His friend lay just past the kitchen, in the living room, and his head was flat on one side. The floor all around him was slippery with blood. Simon stepped over him and continued into the house, and where his hands touched it, they soaked up Paul’s blood faster than any sponge. This act of absorption sent tremors out along every nerve, and thin streams of red ran down from Simon’s eyes.
Paul’s father lay sprawled on the stairs. A double-barreled shotgun rested in one out-thrown hand, unfired. Only a few strands of skin and tendons held his head to his body. His neck had been severed by...something big. Something sharp. Simon heard a sound from the second floor, and started up the stairs.
Heavy rhythmic breathing came out of the parents’ bedroom. Simon recognized it from the movies he’d seen late at night on cable, the movies he’d masturbated to with his door closed and locked, but this didn’t sound right. Uneven. One-sided. He peered around the door.
A huge naked fat man knelt on Paul’s parents’ bed. Paul’s mother lay on her back in front of him, and he held her thighs open across his, shoving himself into her, over and over, over and over. Her ribcage had been smashed in, and part of her face was gone, sheared off. All the breathing came from the man.
Outlined in brilliant green, a heavy spade lay beside the bed. Its blade had been sharpened, and both it and the handle were stained dark red.
Simon rose to his feet. He let his fingers uncurl, and they waved around him like the tendrils of a sea anemone. The fat man gasped and arched his back, and Simon’s fingers wrapped around the man’s throat and pulled him off the bed.
The fat man started to scream, so Simon slid two fingers over his head and clamped his mouth shut. Simon’s body hummed with energy, with power, and his muscles felt like steel, and he raised the fat man completely over his head, knelt on the floor, and dropped the man straight down onto his knee.
The killer’s spine crunched apart satisfyingly, and Simon set him on the floor and straddled his chest. The fat man stared up at him through eyes glazing with pain and shock and fear, and Simon curled his fingers around the man’s head and neck and arms and drained him dry.
Up through his fingers the blood came, the sensation so far beyond orgasmic he couldn’t imagine words for it. It built with every drop he took, thrummed inside him, tuned each nerve into a high-tension wire and jangled pleasure down it. His vision darkened, returned, darkened again.
All over his body, from every pore in his skin, the blood emerged. Like a thick, dark red sheen of sweat, the flow accelerated, poured out of him in millions of tiny rivers, collected in pools on the floor around him.
Soft warm tongues licked and caressed inside his shoulders, in the small of his back, in his groin.
Tiny, thrilling touches like eyelashes flickering under his skin traveled the length of him, stroked the bones and ligaments of his feet, massaged the insides of his ribs.
He threw his head back and his mouth gaped wide and his eyes rolled all the way back in his skull, and he crowed the sensation, crowed the rush and the rapture as the fat man’s body withered and dwindled and collapsed on itself, crowed the pleasure, crowed the joy.
When all the blood was gone, Simon rolled off the corpse onto his back on the floor, dripping and sticky and more sated than he’d ever felt in his life. He closed his eyes, breathed in the rich, coppery smell...
...and wanted that feeling again. Needed it.
Soon.
# # #
The town was not as stunned as it could have been by the brutal mass murder because the full details of it were never released to the public. In a way, it was all very neat: victims and killer all right there, all waiting on the police.
In another way, it was grist for screaming nightmares.
The police chief thought it would be an isolated incident, a meteor strike of horror in an otherwise peaceful town.
Until a few months later, when the other bodies started turning up.
AUTHOR’S NOTES FOLLOW IN THE COMMENT SECTION.
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1 comments:
I'm a bit distracted tonight. There's a meeting scheduled for tomorrow (a meeting I won't be attending personally) that could have a lasting and profound effect on my life, and I'm finding it difficult to concentrate.
That being said, I like this chapter a lot. I don't think I'll be changing anything in it.
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