Suspended In Dusk (6 page)

There was blood everywhere. I couldn’t get past that. So much of it, smeared across the windows from the inside… and not just blood. Flesh, bone, maybe brain matter? I didn’t know. I was no doctor, no mortician, no fucking psychopath who looked at the carnage we saw in there and thought it could have been wrought by human hands. Bodies lay on the beige carpet, the pale couches spattered red and the faded wallpaper redesigned with arcing spots and streaks of blood.

“Fuck,
mec
…” Antoine shook his head as we surveyed the mess inside.

The front door was unlocked, and nothing halted our progress as we moved through the gîte, encountering corpse after corpse. Men in black leather and gold, women with their bare breasts bloodied. It was a mess, a degeneration of flesh torn apart, laid out wet and glistening, and the stultifying air was thick with the smell of meat and copper.

Shots had been fired. At least three of the men in the main room still held their guns—Glocks, like Antoine’s, and he laughed at that, motherfucking
laughed
—but no bullets could do the extent of what had been done here. I wanted to puke, to get out, to run away, but Antoine gravitated to the low coffee table in the centre of the room, smiling at the plastic-wrapped kilos streaked with red and brown. His head moved from side to side—that snake-strike dance—and he laughed to himself as he looked down at the body of the man slumped against the couch.

“Ah, Radouane,” he murmured, unclasping the watch from the dead man’s wrist. “I always said you’d get yourself in trouble,
mec
. Too much for you, the big boys’ game, no?”

“Antoine, are you crazy? Whoever did this––”

“Relax, Michele.” He turned to me with his false smile and his dead, dangerous eyes, the Glock held in one hand and the watch dangling from his fingers. “They just fucked each other over before we got here. It’s fate,
mec
. Providence. Life is making it easy for me, huh?”

It was then that I saw how crazy Antoine really was. In my sweat-stained panic, my fear that made that hot, stinking room feel cold, I could see the edges of his madness, and the bare, hard face of the monster staring back at me.

A movement near one of the bedroom doors caught my eye, and we turned. I thought at once of the girl at the window and, at first glance, it could have been her. She was young, her black hair pinned back high and tight, but her pink leather jacket was riddled with bullet holes, and she was misshapen, miscast; a creature made to look human but wrought from different proportions.

Oddly elongated wrists forced her hands into a loose-jointed pose, blood-dipped fingers splayed and reaching out. Hips, back, neck… everything seemed shifted somehow, angled wrongly, and her chin, cheeks, forehead, and nose all hung crooked, swelling and moving beneath the skin. Lips peeled back from a raw, red mouth, that whole inhuman face rippling like water breaking beneath a stone.

Only her eyes seemed real: dark and wide, but more full of life than any I had ever seen. Unafraid, yet not brave through anger or blind fury. The stare that met mine was that of another creature entirely, and with it she looked straight into my soul.

I heard Antoine speak as he raised the gun. He called her a stupid whore, and I barely saw my hand move. I struck him, pushed him as hard as I could, sending the shot off-balance and him stumbling to the floor, falling among the dead.

He rose angry, angry like a wild dog, and yet his eyes still held that same dullness, that lie of life. I saw the Glock’s flat muzzle swing toward me, heard the noise and saw the flash, but felt only the concussive force of the blow. No pain. I was aware of falling, of the preternatural movement of the girl as she sprang at Antoine and split his throat apart. His blood spattered my face with wet heat.

I tasted salt. How strange that she seemed more real than him… more honest, if not more human. Antoine gave one last gurgle, and the soft growl of the girl’s breath scraped the air as she left him and moved closer to me. It brought with it the scent of blood, a heat that washed over me in bitter sourness.

Her teeth closed on my throat, and I knew nothing more.

* * *

Esther

She didn’t know why she did it. She didn’t know why
he
had done it, come to that. What human was moved to save a monster? But he had. He had walked into that theatre of death—the scene of all that rage and mistrust—and he had tried to save her… and now he was dying on the threadbare carpet.

Radouane had shot first, killing one of the Slavs. That had been his plan from the start, though he’d over-reached himself, as usual. Always thinking he could have it all: keep the product, knock out the competition, kill the dime-bag boy—when he arrived—and be the big man left holding all the goodies. He always had been an idiot. Of course, it had ended poorly, ended in a firestorm that grew frenzied after the first bullets passed harmlessly through her. Suddenly, it had stopped being about the men, their money, and their macho pissing contest… it was almost funny to watch the ones who hadn’t already shot each other come together in panic, firing blindly at the monster.

Silly, silly boys. Esther was not sure which she had killed and which were down to the number of bullets flying. After a while, between the feeding and chaos, it grew hard to tell which bits belonged to which body anyway. Perhaps it didn’t matter. She ate herself sluggish, resting in the sunlit hours until the sound of tyres on gravel woke her.

She had been foolish, perhaps. She had certainly surprised herself.

Perhaps it had been something in his face, in his eyes… that moment of complete serenity as he turned on his companion, pushing the gun aside. He wasn’t to know bullets couldn’t hurt the dead. He had made a choice, allied himself with her against the other, even though she was clearly not his kind.

Esther hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t believed it was possible.

It had happened all the same, and she had seen the shadow-petals inside the other: dark flames that had long since burned out his core. She had seen it in the way he smiled as he’d fought back, raising the gun and then blowing a hole through her would-be saviour’s chest. A callous, easy cruelty; a pleasure found in blood that was familiar to her, and yet which she wanted nothing more than to deny him.

He’d tasted rotten when she bit him. No sweetness in his blood, his life a bitter thing that had corroded within him. His death hung on her mouth like a mirror of her future, and it revolted Esther.

Perhaps that was why she spared his friend.

She knelt over the brown-skinned boy bleeding from the chest, and watched the ragged little gulps he made as his life edged away.

What did she hope to gain? She wondered at her reasoning, even as her fingers traced the contours of his clammy face. Perhaps she was just tired of being alone, being adrift… being the outsider. Perhaps she simply wanted to return the favour. He’d tried to save her and, though the gift of life was beyond her, maybe this was enough.

She leaned in and bit his throat with tenderness. The reasons no longer mattered once the act was done. It was irreversible, irreparable: her unliving life, halved and shared with him.

Esther bit him, and laid his head gently down among the corpses, sitting cross-legged in her bullet-pocked jacket to watch as he died, and woke from death. He cried, panicked, ranted. His fear was oddly soothing, because it gave her both time and reason to talk.

For the first time in so long, she poured out words. She told him her tale—her life, her death, and the undying, unliving existence that had followed—and for the first time the words didn’t weigh heavy on her tongue.

He asked why, of course, just as she once had. She told him she didn’t know.

She never had. There were no easy answers, no simple explanations. What was she? What was this body that bent itself around nightmares and became the horror of untold tales? All she could tell him was that it didn’t matter. The words made up to match the monsters were fantasies, fairytales… they were inaccurate, untrue. Who knew how many monsters were out there, or how far they each differed from the other?

The boy—he said his name was Michele, and he was surprisingly cordial for someone in his current circumstances—glanced at the torn body of the man with whom he’d arrived. He rubbed at the bloodstained bullet hole on his T-shirt, and said something about how monsters all wore different faces.

Esther smiled. Perhaps she had been selfish. What did she think she had done here? Created herself a friend, a mate? Perhaps it was simply another form of the drive to feed that swelled within her in the night, or perhaps it was something unseen within
him
, something that had called to her and reached out a dark tendril of shadow, begging to be roused and made anew. Perhaps he was as terrible a creature as she was; perhaps worse. Only time would tell.

They talked out the long hours, furnishing them with questions he wanted to ask, and answers he was ill equipped to receive. Esther talked until the second night she had spent in that house fell, and Michele began to calm.

“Where do we go from here?” he asked her, as they sat among the stiff, ripe bodies, the smell of blood and copper still rich and sickly in the air.

Esther shrugged. There were no rules, no precedents. For all she knew, she had made a terrible mistake and, between them, they would either burn the world down and piss it all to ashes, or tear each other to pieces trying. Or, perhaps she had done him a favour, and bought herself the first slice of peace she had ever known. Perhaps, together, they would found a new world, a refuge for the beasts and the outcasts.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Michele nodded slowly, as if he hadn’t expected anything else.

Outside, the dusk swelled into darkness, and Esther knew that—as it did—he would find his own beast blossoming. The seed that had been there all along would start to grow, and she would nurture it. After all, everyone has something monstrous inside them… and perhaps their kind were not destined to hide away, but to live alongside the world. In every shadow, in every corner, unafraid of the reflections of themselves they found in the eyes of their prey.

Esther looked up, and stared into the dizzying spin of a thousand stars, each one bright against the sky, an untamed jewel in the night.

At Dusk They Come

Armand Rosamilia

They came at dusk the first night, silently from the woods surrounding the trailer park, half a dozen black shapes with glowing yellow eyes and sharp claws, like little dark children. They weren’t trying to be stealthy. It was just natural for them. They’d been doing it for centuries, it seemed.

They came to me as I smoked from my old pipe, sitting in my rocking chair that no longer rocked. I leaned onto the side with the brick tucked underneath when I noticed the shadows parting from the other shadows, and they swarmed at me like bees that’d lost their buzz.

They talked to me that first night without moving their mouths, if they even had any. They were kinda in my head, if that makes any sense. It still doesn’t to me.

They wanted to take someone back into the woods with them… they needed someone each night at dusk, and (just my bad luck) they found me first. Only, they didn’t attack me…

They swore they would let me and my family live as long as I could offer up alternatives in the trailer park. I remember thinking about Becky Palmer at that moment, the bitch two trailers down who let her damn kids run wild while she watched her stories on the boob tube.

They nodded and walked off down the road, leaving me and my pipe to the silence of the night as darkness began to fall.

They never made a sound.

* * *

“Heard about Heffer Palmer?” Chuck Gill asked me the next morning before I’d even sat down in my usual spot at the counter. Boyette’s Diner was only a short drive from the trailer park overlooking the drying river.

“How about a ‘Hello, how’s it going? Where ya been? How’s the family?’ once in a while? If I want to hear the local news I’ll buy a fancy television box,” I said. I waved for Mabel to bring me my coffee but she’d seen me traipsing through the parking lot and was already pouring it.

Chuck waved his hand at me with a smirk. “Man, you are so cranky before coffee. I just wanted to know if you heard anything.”

“If you thought I did you would have come to me last night,” I said.

Chuck was the sheriff, inheriting the job from his old man and his old man before. He was a smart guy and nothing got past him. “Last night? Who said anything about last night?”

I shrugged and sipped my coffee. “I saw the ambulance and one of your cars out there when I rolled out of bed at five. I imagine something happened over night. Am I right?”

“Yep.”

I fixed him with the evilest eye I could muster before a full cup of coffee. “Then get off my back with this stuff so early. If you got something let me know and be done with it.”

“You’re even more ornery than usual this morning.” He scooped up some of his runny eggs with a piece of dry toast and shoved it into his mouth.