Blood Fugue (19 page)

I will be beautiful. I will be desirable. I will be happy.

She said the words to herself over and over. In the morning when she woke up and again at night before she fell asleep, changing the ocean of her subconscious a droplet at a time from negative to positive. When she ran, the affirmations became her mantra. And there she was, curvaceous but strong; flat stomached, full breasted and with no sign of fat in her face.

It was easy to run faster when she thought of all the good things that had happened since she began to change her thoughts. It was so simple, and yet she seemed to be the only one who knew the secret.

Boys asked her for dates all the time now and she agreed often. Usually she only went once, sampled a little of what popularity and beauty tasted like and left it at that. But her desires were flowering and she wanted more of everything.

Her ponytail bounced from side to side behind her head. She wore black leggings and a sleeveless black spandex top that showed the strength of her shoulders. A support bra, essential because of her build, kept her breasts from moving too much.

Her rhythm settled and she repeated the words in time with her steps and her breaths. The mantra had changed, of course

I am beautiful, I am desirable, I am happy

The buzz it created was sublime. The physical effort of running began to recede from her awareness the way the sensation of clothing against the skin disappears seconds after dressing

She was about ten minutes along the Eastern path, reflecting as she often did on what a shame it was that there were no circular trails, when she noticed a figure coming towards her far ahead on the broad track. It looked like an old man. She thought she could make out his white hair and gaunt frame but that was all.

Her speed meant she approached him quickly. He wasn’t merely skinny; he was painfully thin, something she never wanted to be, and his clothes were ancient and tattered. She figured he must be some kind of hobo living wild, but how he could survive out there with so little protection she couldn’t imagine. She saw his bare feet and her curiosity grew. Should she stop and lose the rhythm of her run for that day? Getting back into it would be hard. As she approached she saw his eyes, bright, intelligent, furtive. She slowed and stopped a few feet ahead of him on the path.

He backed away from her.

‘Hi.’ she said. ‘You from around here?’ She gestured into the forest. The man followed the movement of her hand. She thought he nodded but she couldn’t be sure if she’d imagined it or not.

‘Uh, you look like you could use a decent meal and some clothes. I could maybe get some stuff for you. Would you want me to do that?’

For a long moment they stared at each other. Gina looked away first, noticing that the light really was beginning to leave the valley

‘Okay, well . . . I gotta go now.’

She didn’t wait for a response this time. She turned away and she ran.

She was three or four miles from home and the twilight was taking hold. Mist seeped from between the trees like violet-tinged dry ice. Everything was cast in shadow. She risked a look back. The old man was where she’d left him, but as she watched, running backwards for a few steps, she saw the man fall to his hands and knees. She thought he was sick until he pursued her on all fours. He covered the ground between them like a cheetah. Disgust and fear rose in her, adrenaline flooded her bloodstream and she broke into a sprint. Behind her there was laughter; too soon the sound of hands and feet against the earth and the panted breaths of a predator. She wanted to scream but she knew it would be better to conserve her breath.

The laughter came again, right at her heels. She pumped her arms and legs in a furious attempt to shake him but as she did so, he drew alongside, loping in huge, easy bounds, his ragged trousers and soiled shirt flapping. His elbows and knees were visible, their boniness made her think of whippets. He turned his head towards her and she saw the purple in his irises, the mania in his wrinkled face. He shook his head like a lunatic, spraying spittle into the trees and cackling.

Her legs started to hurt badly, filling with extra weight as though her blood were wet sand. Her head wobbled from side to side like an athlete trying to claw back the finish from a better competitor. She grunted in frustration. Her legs were no longer springing over the ground. Now they were thumping it, her feet landing heavily, her arms still grasping for momentum.

She allowed herself to glance at the old man for a moment, hoping the fear it caused her would squeeze a little extra speed from her protesting muscles. It didn’t. She turned back to the track ahead of her and saw how far she was from home. She still believed she could save herself right up until the moment she tripped. It felt like she’d snagged her foot on a root, but it could just as easily have been the old man reaching out a limb to bring her down.

She did scream then but not loudly. It was more a screech of thwarted fury. How could she have been so stupid as to think she could outrun him?

When she hit the dirt, what little breath she had left went out of her in a bruising rush. She tried to stand and couldn’t. But there were no cold hands around her throat in the next instant. No blade tip pressed between her ribs. When she could move again she rolled onto her side and saw him standing over her. He was neither sweating nor breathless.

‘What do you want?’ she asked him.

The old man’s eyes defocused as he looked into the trees. His voice was low, almost a growl.

‘It is impossible to say.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I am a sallow man who once was dark.’

Gina sat up and backed away, paddling with her hands and feet. Everything in her body felt leaden and uncoordinated. She backed into a pine trunk. The sallow man approached her.

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ she said, breathless.

‘I want to taste you.’ he said. ‘Your sweat. Your saliva. Your milk. Your vitreous humour. The juice within your marrow. The fluid in your spine and joints. The wetness of your sex. The fecund jelly within your ova. Your blood, my dear. I want it. All of it. I wish to enter you and draw you into me. It has been so long and I am STARVING!’

He screamed the last word and her eardrums overloaded, continuing to ring long afterwards. As the cry receded she saw his face pulsate and a lucence pass across his ancient skin. A silvery thread of saliva leaked from one corner of his open mouth lengthening impossibly and touching the ground before breaking away.

‘Come now. For my mind is verminous with hungers and I do not wish to hurt you.’

He held out his elongated hand. Tears spilled from her.

Chapter 21

The sallow man watched as the girl reached her hand towards him. Her whole body shook and she appeared crushed by the effort of running. Seeing him, she withdrew her hand and turned her face away.

‘Look at me,’ he said.

She resisted.

He drew her, pressurising the fluid in her eyes. Her orbs swivelled towards him, the tiny muscles that controlled them no match for his gravity. Her head followed her eyes. The sallow man grinned and pulled harder. He was a desert seeking the rain in her. The girl’s eyes bulged forward in their sockets and she squeezed them closed. He watched in delight as her eyelids parted, the swollen whites, marbled with broken capillaries peeping out.

‘No!’ she screamed.

‘Then look at me.’

She opened her eyes and looked. He let her go and she sank back against the tree, touching her eyes with her fingertips, pressing them in with her palms.

‘You have only one choice. Come willingly or by other means. But come you will.’

‘How can I come willingly when you’re going to kill me?’

‘I will not kill you. I will show you true power. I will give you freedom.’

He saw how she responded to his promises. There was a flicker of true eagerness there, a desire that existed without the need for threats. He knew he’d judged her well. He took her hand and swung her onto his back like an infant, before dropping to all fours once more.

‘Do not let go.’

The journey began. The girl was silent but the sallow man felt her thighs tighten against him as he increased his speed to a gallop. She rested her head against his bony back and squeezed her arms around his skeletal chest. The last of the light wasted from the sky and the trees and the darkness nuzzled them as they skimmed across the soft earth, moving away from the town and far along the Eastern Path.

The sallow man felt the girl’s tears against his neck and in the purple blackness he sent back his tongue to catch her brine. His needs deepened with each day now. In the past there had sometimes been several years between feeds. Now they were becoming more frequent. The more he secluded himself, the more he concentrated on the simple life of a forest gatherer, the more the need for other nourishment grew within. No matter how he tried to avoid the pangs, the desires grew stronger and stronger, threatening to destroy his sanity. He was Fugue now and he would stay that way until satisfied. He did not know if he could keep the promise he’d made her. He wanted nothing more than to leave her skin and bones dry and desiccated; to return her to dust.

He left the trail and raced into the trees following a run he knew well. Even though they were close to his dark home, he didn’t know if he could wait. A second tongue split from the skin of his belly and thrashed against him as he ran. Spikes grew from his shoulders and he could not control it. All he could do was run. The girl tightened her grip on him as she felt his pace increase to recklessness and she cried out as thin branches whipped at her flanks and legs. As they reached the broad expanse that was the tree’s enclosure, he smelled blood leaking from a small cut she’d sustained.

He howled, but by then they’d reached the tree, his haven and sanctuary. This was where he would take from her what he needed. He stood upright and she slipped to the ground, too weak to rise.

Gina looked up at the creature the sallow man was becoming. She wanted to run but she was exhausted and his transformation was the most fascinating and terrifying thing she’d ever seen. He was growing taller. He removed his clothes with hands too long and bony by then to work efficiently. When he was naked she saw it all.

The clearing was filled with the same purple half light that hung over Hobson’s Valley every night, but here it was brighter. The light emanated from the enormous tree at whose roots she lay. The clearing was a vast arena, enclosed by thick forest and impenetrable brush. At its heart, the tree pulsed with an inner light that shone in veinlike pathways ascending from the roots along the trunk and out to every branch and leaf. There were blossoms on the branches of the tree and they shone brightest.

The sallow man looked down at her and she watched his jawbone extend into an under-slung hook. More spines erupted from the skin at his hips and shoulders and purple tongues unfurled and swayed towards her from his stomach and beneath his arms. The smell of decaying leaves and forest fungus was strong on him.

He reached out with one slender arm and lifted her by the waist. She put her hands to his grip, trying to prise the fingers away but it was impossible. With his other talon-tipped hand he tore at her running gear, stripping the vest and bra from her in a couple of frantic slashes and doing the same to her leggings and underwear. She tried to scream, knowing it was his will that prevented her.

He swung her towards the tree and pressed her back against it. She felt the slow rhythm of warm, luminous sap flowing beneath the skin-like bark. She kicked at the sallow man with her running shoes and tried to cover her nakedness with her arms. Many tongues extended towards her, each diverging into two or more tips. They snaked across her bare skin, seeking the cuts she sustained as they came through the forest and licking the blood away. Spikes protruded from every part of him by then and she knew that when he approached, the points would kill her. He had lied.

That lie was not the worst of it. Below the tongues in his belly, his penis jutted upward, pumping in time with the sap of the tree behind her. It was glowing slightly, lit from within like the rest of his body, but what appalled her most about the penis were the backward pointing barbs that lined it above and below.

He spoke to her but she no longer understood his language.

Though it was night the sallow man could see her perfectly.

Her skin was so smooth, so pale and delicate that he wanted to tear it open. He allowed her to struggle but let no sound escape her. Her jet-black hair was still pulled back into a tight ponytail and he released it with one hooked talon. It fell down around her shoulders like a spill of black ink. She was like fluid in every sense. Even her breasts moved with a liquid rolling motion. Her skin was tight over her frame, her blood vessels, ducts and sphincters tight around her juices. He wanted all of it for himself.

She promised a sea of tears for him alone, and he had the whole night in which to absorb them. His thirst was great, years in the making. He moved in towards her, his tongues stretching further and further from him. They twined themselves far beyond her, slithering around the gargantuan trunk of the tree and coming back around to meet each other over her now trapped body. The creature let go with his hand and she hung, pressed to the tree by four vine-like tongues. They clamped her body, wrists and ankles against the living bark.