Shifters (39 page)

Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Shifters

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Byers’ decomposed eyes squinted. “Charles Marconi, a subcontractor from Detroit, working for the Dallas mob. Shit, Locke, I even know when the world’s going to end…but I’m not allowed to tell you that one.”

“Wow,” Locke said.

“We’re wasting time. The energy thing, you know? I’m not strong enough. I keep slipping in and out. You know what he’s doing, don’t you?”

“Who? Vince Foster or Lethe?”

The rotten cadaver frowned at the jest. Black bilge spilled from his ear when he cocked his head. “Don’t you realize why I’m here? It’s one of the only things Lethe can’t control!”

“What?” Locke dared to ask.

“I failed, sure. But—goddamn it—I tried. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. But I didn’t cut the rest of the muster,” Byers said. “You did. You want to know why?”

“Yeah, but answer me this first. Why you and not Lehrling? I never knew you, but Lehrling was my best friend. Wouldn’t he be a bit more effective in convincing me of…whatever it is you’re trying to convince me of?”

“Lehrling’s in hell, so forget him. I can’t just
say
it, Locke. It’s one of the rules. I’m not allowed to lay it out for you. You have to put the pieces together on your own.”

“Okay, give me some pieces.”

“Aw, damn-it!”

“What?”

“I’m all out,” Byers said.

Then Byers disintegrated like a gritty lapse-dissolve. But when he disappeared, his form was replaced by two other far more corporeal figures.

“Ich durstig, mein schotz…”

It was a maid who stood there looking at him—shapely, tight, finely curved in her traditional black, puff-sleeved bodice and short black gathered skirt. A white serving cap with a blue bow adorned her head, pinned to short strawberry blonde hair. Locke remembered the full-tilt coltish legs from his first round of window peeping. The gilt, frilly eyemask concealed most of her face, but not the mouth, of course. She held a dark grin spiked by two petite cuspids.
Pretty cute fangs,
Locke noticed, if, of course, vampire fangs could be cute.

“How’s the wine?” Jason asked, standing at her side.

“Uh, spare yet fragrant, a tempered bouquet,” Locke answered.

Jason wore his full-tilt manservant get-up, the striped trousers, the white gloves, morning jacket, and waistcoat, and the silver-piped eyemask. But unlike his lover’s diminutive fangs, Jason sported a pair of front teeth long and sharp as masonry nails.

“Mr. Locke, this is Anna,” he introduced. “Don’t you remember her?”

“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact I do. Unless I’m mistaken, you, uh, jerked off on her last night, after slapping her around and choking her and—oh—sucking blood out of her tits and throwing up in her face.”

“No, no, I mean before that. You’ve never seen her before?”

“No.”

When Jason removed the woman’s eyemask, and when her face registered, Locke felt something like eels swimming in his belly.

The girl Lehrling picked up in the bar. The night he—

“Anna’s got something for you,” Jason said, then—
snap!—
he flicked open a switchblade. With the same tenderness that one lover might caress another, he began to slowly cut the clothes off of the German murderess. The blade’s tip ran down every seam of her garments, severed every individual thread of every stitch. Segment by segment, the housemaid uniform fell off until she was nude save for black-velvet Balli pumps.

“Think she’s hot?” Jason asked. He stood behind her, running an open hand from her pubis to her breasts.

“Well,” Locke admitted, “I wouldn’t exactly call her Lassie.”

“Yeah, she’s hot stuff,” Jason said, eyeing Locke from the crook of her sleek, white throat. “A cute little German dumpling. Well, you know something? She’s got a present for you.”

“I appreciate the excess of generosity,” Locke said, “but I don’t accept gifts unless it’s Christmas.”

“Check it out.” Jason pinched one of Anna’s nipples, and the finest mist of blood sprayed out. “Cool, huh?”

Locke took a slug from his bottle of wine, expecting it to be his last. “I’m impressed.
Time
should give her Woman of the Year.”

The blood mist hovered; Anna gasped, excited. Then Locke took note of her slightly protuberant belly, which he’d similarly noted when he’d seen her in the window of the third cottage.
Like early pregnancy,
Locke thought.

“Naw, she ain’t knocked up—she’s dead,” Jason made a reminder. “But she’s still got something for you. Give it to him, bitch.”

Jason gave her a hard choke. Her breasts sprayed more blood, and the gasp that leaked from her throat was one of ecstasy, not distress.

After which she lurched forward, her fanged mouth jacked open inhumanly wide, and—

Aw, fuck!

—fired a cold gust of vomit right into Locke’s face. He reeled back, drenched, face dripping. Chunks of things seemed to slide off his ruined shirt and
plap!
to the floor. Gagging, Locke foundered back a few more steps, wiping cool digestive slime from his eyes. When he could see again, he saw this.

A greater puddle of bile on the floor. Amid the puddle were the things she’d previously exacted from Lehrling: a part of a liver, a scrap of spleen, a ruptured gall bladder, a tongue.

And something else:

Pieces of a penis that had been bitten into chunks.

“Check it out,” Jason advised. “Dick nuggets. They oughta serve ’em at McDonalds.”

With reflexes too fast to see, Jason clotheslined Locke; he fell flat on his back, inch-thick dust puffing around him. The wine bottle clunked to the floor and rolled, leaving a trail of bitter wine. Locke couldn’t breathe momentarily, his hands crabbed to his throat. Before his senses gathered, Anna’s taut legs were straddling his face, her dead sex just inches from his eyes. Locke pressed up but couldn’t budge her, as if a forklift had lowered a pallet of mason blocks onto his chest. Jason’s silhouette hovered just behind her shoulders, chuckling. Something small dripped from his fingers.

“Listen up, poet. Anna’s gonna do to you what she did to that pulp-novelist asshole, unless—”

Locke’s eyes felt skinned. Jason’s hand lowered, down, down—

“—unless you eat this.”

What Jason’s thumb and index finger held was Lehrling’s glans.

“You’re gonna eat each piece one at a time, starting with the knob.”

Then he ran the severed glans wetly across Locke’s lips.

“Open.”

Locke’s lips seamed closed.

“Be a good poet and open wide…”

No, no, go ahead and kill me. I’m not gonna eat my best friend’s dick!

“Open, open…”

Then came a sound like a strong breeze, or rushing water, and in that sound was a voice.

Lush, dark, erotic…

A woman’s voice.

The wine,
the voice told him.
The wine!

Locke’s hand patted outward toward where the 288-year-old bottle had dropped.

“Guess he’s not going to cooperate,” Jason assumed. “Anna? Let her rip.”

Her slim hips slithered down, all the while Locke’s hand groped for the wine bottle but grabbed air. The murderess’s lips parted, drawing up into a slime-filmed grin. Her nipples distended as if pushed by thumbs from within, more blood leaking.

Her fangs lengthened as he watched, to pearly spikes inches long.

“Suck him out,” Jason ordered.

Locke’s hand found the bottle, and without even understanding why, he whipped its long, nearly black neck back and forth across her face, each swipe sending a spray of the strong wine into her eyes. A sound followed, like bacon frying in a hot cast-iron skillet. Anna rolled over, screaming, smoking.

New power. The wine wasn’t that good but—shit—
It wasn’t that bad either,
Locke thought, and got back up. Jason hissed at him, taking backsteps, scared, animalistic. A series of overarms with the bottle sent more plumes of wine into Jason’s cringing face, after which he back-landed on the floor, sizzling like microwaved meat, and died.

Locke, stupefied, stood above his work, gazing down. Both of them lay dead, their faces so corroded the wine had actually melted through their heads after a time, like carbolic acid.

Locke looked at the yellowed label on the bottle, mystified.

“You French guys really now how to make some vino…”

Then the exotic woman’s voice returned to his head, a rushing whisper.
The Chateau Epernon was a seminary from 1695 to 1731. All wines made there during that time were blessed…

More tradition, more cliché. Blessed water, blessed wine. The vampire, in his or her impure state of existence, could not sustain the presence of anything blessed.

Locke was grateful, but…

Who?
he wondered.

Who had whispered those instructions into his head?

I did,
the voice fluttered.

“Who—”

“Moira—”

EIGHTTEEN

Sciftan

(i)

I’m bleeding my soul into his brain. I’ve never done that before, I’ve sensed an impulse that is true. But I can’t show myself—the malefactor knows too much, he sees and senses.

I guess I’m too afraid.

I’m been afraid to face my fear since before man crawled out of the caves. If you knew my enemy, you’d probably feel the same way. But—

Shit! I guess that’s just an excuse.

I guess I’m just a coward…

(ii)

Locke ran through the nether-manse, which had reverted, by now, into a labyrinthine
mass
—a meld of decayed, worm-riddled walls and putrid organa. Some walls bled, others sweated, while still others exuded pus from crusted sores. The dust on the floor now more resembled the ichorish ground-fog outside, different only in that it gleamed dully as a pool of congealing blood. The manse was gradually turning into something formed of flesh—a meat-house…

White light like the moon lined the dark warrens, though no source was evident. Eventually Locke’s manic steps forward
squished,
as though he were tromping over an endless carpeting of pustulent epidermis.

Each corridor led to nowhere, hallways and passages climbing and rising and twisting into more of the same. Locke was lost.

I’m lost forever,
he thought.

He turned, winded, and the next corridor unreeled as a long line of closed, grime-sheened doors.

Then one door clicked open.

Not much I can do about it…

Locke figured he had no choice. He entered the room, stepped into—

An
endless
room.

The walls and ceiling were blue sky, the floor was a bank of clouds.

Locke stood amid the heavens.