Old School (11 page)

BOOK: Old School

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Lorna stood in the door of the barn. She could see the wall of greenish black building along the horizon, hear the rain turning to hail on the roof of the barn, smell the electric in the air. And she was unafraid. His rod, His staff . . .

The truck crunched to a stop only a few yards away, and a man in fresh jeans and a pressed shirt hopped out. Clean boats, a new Stetson. City clothes. The devil’s clothes.

“Howdy Ma’am,” he half-shouted over the building roar of the storm. “Got quite a storm coming in. I think you better get down in your cellar. And I’m hoping you’ll let me join you.”

She smiled, it being just fine to mislead the devil. “Of course, friend. I’m Lorna Beale. What’s your name?”

“Isaac,” he said. “Isaac Lamb.”

He never heard Dell, never felt the ax fall.

And they bathed.

What Love Is

Depravity is the virtue that saved me. Before I was called to the challenge of my new condition, I had long since eroded away the impediment of conscience that has proven fatal to so many of my kind, those tortured creatures I have seen shrivel away, never able to make their first kill while being driven to madness by the desire to do so. But I had already made my first kill, long ago. And my second. And my third. Had bedded my first whore. Broken my first vow. Abandoned my first god. Betrayed my first friend. Sated every perverse appetite. Had clasped hard to my bosom all those deadly sins with which most mortals only flirt. So, in slipping into this eternal dusk in which, to survive, one must first surrender any pretense to one’s humanity, I shed humanity like a useless skin; the fetid breath of evil flowing over my new flesh like the first zephyr of spring. I was not born to this life so much as resurrected to it, finding in this release from pretended allegiance to the cobweb of morals owed to the imagined ramblings of never living gods the full flower of my own status, awakened from my trivial and pitiful mortal slumbers to find that I was now and always had been my own god, finally alive in an authentic world in which I had no longer to excuse my nature, but instead in which I fully inherited the grandeur I had, in my heart, always known myself to possess.

She walked alone away from the theater into the darkness, one of those phones the young now especially are never without held to her ear. I prefer the young. I prefer the female. But those are, at this stage, just tastes. I only need to feed five or six times a year now, so I can be particular, not like those early years when, as it is with any growing child, the hunger was always upon me and I would empty any convenient throat. As one ages, one’s tastes emerge. I know one of our kind who has fed on blood since 5,000 years before the birth of your Christ who is so insulted by the superstition that we might somehow be held at bay by totems to your imagined gods that he dines now only on Catholic popes, but at his age, he feeds only every decade or so. De gustibus non est desputandum, I suppose. I will certainly kill the insolent, but I only feed on the comely.

“Oh my god, I know!” The child into her phone. “I mean I would like totally let Edward suck on my neck.”

How delicious. How perfect. She was tallish for a female, willowy in that way that only the pubescent can be, her breasts nearly full, still firm, her legs coltish, her red hair long in an artful cascade of loose curls that gave the illusion of carelessness that can only be achieved through careful effort, her bare legs flaring the short skirt that she wore beneath the thin, tight top. So much flesh, so little fear. In my mortal days, no woman would dream of walking alone in the night even in the cumbersome costume of the time, let alone so nearly naked.

“Would you?” I asked, an arm’s length in front of her before she even noticed. I held her eyes.

One hears about our imagined powers, but they are perfections, really – improvements on our previous human capabilities earned through decades and even centuries of inhuman practice. The eyes truly are the windows to the soul, and there is a reason why you are so uncomfortable when someone gazes too long into yours. For you can connect. You can reach inside beyond consciousness and inhibition, past the inchoate limitations of language to the caged instincts humans are trained from the moment of birth to blunt with manners, to deny with religion, to domesticate with societal nicety until the noble beast each was born to be is diluted into a pathetic lap dog scrounging at the heels of the milieu that castrated it for the scraps that it should by rights tear from the throats of the timid fear mongers that hold its leash. I have learned to make that connection, and quickly; have learned how to open that cage so that for the first time in their wasted lives my victims truly feel their magnificent and terrible beauty, understand the privilege of offering their blood on the altar of my tongue, and know that in their final moments they are achieving a kind of fulfillment that whatever arc of years they might otherwise have experienced could never have offered, for their heavens and their hells are fairylands, and in this savage ritual some part of them touches for the first time the eternal.

The phone falls from her hand. She reaches up and pulls her hair back, baring her throat. Her flesh is hot and flushed, her breathing quickened, her pupils wide, her nipples swollen and straining against their thin covering. I can smell her musk as she lays back into my arms and tilts back her head and I lower my face to her neck savoring every sense – the rush of blood I can hear in her veins, the citrus smell in the shampoo she had used that morning, that taut resistance of flesh against the tips of my canines, and then the sudden warm flood as they press through, her erotic gasp, and then the seasoning of hormones that pour into her arteries as I reach up between her legs and stroke her just once, bringing her to ecstasy as I release her finally from this venial life and inherit as my own that vital spirit she had only for these last moments truly inhabited.

I know what love is.

Author’s Note (including a special offer for free stuff!)

I’d never been a short fiction guy – always read novels and, since I never saw much short fiction for sale at the bookstore, that’s what I wrote. Which might seem a little weird since most of the stories in this collection aren’t just short, they’re really short.

Blame Patti Abbott, a fine writer in her own right who’s collection, Monkey Justice, is a must read. I’d never heard of flash fiction, but somebody sent me a link to a challenge she was running on her blog – write a story, 1,000 words or less, set in or around a Walmart.

A thousand words, I thought. Impossible. So I had to try it. And the resulting story, Black Friday, reinforced for me one of writing’s most valuable lessons – strip it to the bones. Or, as the Bard once said, “When words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain.” You can’t read Black Friday here, by the way, because that’s already been published in the
Discount Noir
anthology from Untreed Reads that Patti and her unbalanced co-editor Steve Weddle pulled together.

I was hooked. Short fiction became a major food group in my writing diet. Not just for the stories themselves, but as a kind of training for when I’m in the middle of a novel. When I’m writing a novel, I have a tendency to meander a bit, get a little flabby. A few hours back in the short fiction gym puts an end to that shit. It reminds me that you can lose a reader any time. With this sentence, or with the next one. Strip it to the bones.

So thanks to Patti for the challenge, and to her and Steve for pulling the anthology together. And thanks to the other folk who have previously published some of the stories that appear in Old School.

Crimefactory
, which first published both Thin Mints and Sheepshank.

Scott Philips and Jed Ayres, editors of the
Noir at the Bar anthology
, which also features Thin Mints. Noir at the Bar is available exclusively through Subterranean Books.

Needle magazine
, where The Bard’s Confession on the Matter of the Despoilment of the Fishmonger’s Daughter first appeared.

Shotgun Honey
, which first ran Two-Phones and Pink Cadillac.

Black Heart Magazine
, which published Circle of Life in its noir issue.

Seth Harwood’s
Crimewav
, which ran a podcast of Thin Mints.

Now, about that free stuff.

For anybody who has hung in all the way to the end, here’s a special offer. Drop a comment on the
Old School page at my blog
. Tell me which story you liked best. And, if you leave me an e-mail address, I’ll send you your own personal audio version of Old School, with a reading of the aforementioned Black Friday thrown in. You don’t want to miss out on that.

The ladies do love my pipes.

About the Author

O'Shea is a Chicago-area writer represented by Stacia Decker at the Donald Maass Literary agency. His work has appeared in Crimefactory, Needle Magazine, Shotgun Honey, a couple of anthologies and is otherwise scattered about the internet.

About Snubnose Press

Snubnose Press is the ebook imprint of Spinetingler Magazine.

The snubnose revolver dominated visual crime stories in the 20th century. Every cop, every detective, every criminal in every TV show and movie seemed to carry a snubnose. The snubnose is a classic still used today.