FEEDING THE BEAST
Bruce Jones
Trisha was killing her mother again—this time in the farmhouse kitchen with the old broken-handled steak knife—and in a little while killing her sister Dolce, who grunted like a pig and bled liberally. …
Then, free of them, free of the knife, free as the wind lashing her tawny locks, Trisha came running fierce and proud, heedless and grinning, over the rolling meadow, Shep nipping and barking delight at her bare heels—the fair-skinned girl with the banner of summer hair and the bounding, yelping German sheperd—alive and free and safe at last among fields and endless fields of undulant, sweetly perfumed yellow grass….
Until the warm breeze shifted sour, grinning Mojo abruptly there, gold-tooth contrasting midnight skin, glistening now with the sweat of death, rough, callused hand sharp and shocking across her tender face, starting blood there at her lip … and Shep—brave Shep, try as he might—could not sink eager teeth intothe skinny black legs because they kept disappearing which meant they weren’t real and neither was Shep, Shep long dead now like this half-forgotten meadow … and this was now, not then, and Mojo was her pimp, and she—Trisha—was a hooker, and these peeling walls could never be the lovely yellow field … as she came up, up, and finally out of the dream to the dreary little room and the man sleeping beside her.
Amazing, she thought, yawning.
Not that she had dreamed of killing—this was old hat. Amazing that she had fallen asleep at all here on the job next to her john. They did that sometimes—the johns—passed out and snored blissfully if she gave them an extra good ride, especially the fat ones, the smelly ones, though this one had been neither. This one had been quiet and gentle, tender—even nice-looking in a dark way.
Which is why Trisha was so startled, there on the tired hotel sheets, turning in shafts of brassy afternoon sun, to find what her john had become … to find the far darker, more terrifying thing that had replaced him while she slept….
Not a man at all, this misshapen shadow that shared her bed, but a thing of black hair, cruel pointed muzzle, pink lolling tongue guarding bone-white incisors as deadly sharp and long—longer than Shep’s … so that for a moment Trisha actually thought the dream was real and it was her long dead pet there beside her on the pillow come to comfort and sleep with her while Momma was busy with the men.
But no. This creature was far bigger, far more terrifying than anything strictly canine, or strictlyhuman either—a savagely insane juncture of the two, a great, dark sleeping beast from childhood nightmares, midnight matinees, but all too real, all too here and close, its hot breath against her bare arm, its great shaggy head so near she could see the corona of coarse hairs along the sleek, swept-back ears.
The eyes, mercifully, were closed; had they been open, red (Trisha was sure they must be red), and full of blood lust, Trisha Kincaid would doubtless be a dead whore, not a recently dreaming one.
Carefully then, not breathing, moving in a slow-motion haze of terror, she pushed herself up gently, hitching breath as the ancient bed sagged creaking resentment, lowered her legs over the edge of the mattress, found the cold floor, turned to see if the thing had awakened, was watching. It was not. Though now, at this angle, she could glimpse more of it in the dying ochre light—the broad matted chest, the massive arms, muscular sweep of thigh, placid but fearsome phallus. This too was swathed in hair, as were the testes, fat and shiny as a seed bull’s. It was the power there, between the thing’s legs, that was perhaps the most fearfully awesome of all.
Heart and knees knocking, Trisha just made it to the lump of her skirt and blouse, just made it to the old glass doorknob, twisting it silently … the voice behind her spinning her, gasping.
“You’re leaving?”
Back against the door, throat constricted, heart slamming painful ripples to her fingertips, Trisha faced not the terrible dark beast, but the pale naked man of before; only his eyes and the hair of his head were dark now, as a sad wistful smile tugged tender, remembered lips. He caught her look, returned a knowing one of his own, nodding. “You saw …”
Trisha, trembling against the door, could but nod terror.
He came to her, reproachful, but for himself. “I’m sorry. It happens sometimes, when I sleep. You’ve nothing to fear from me. I’m sorry.”
And twice amazed this day, Trisha found herself wholly unafraid … so much that she wondered absently if it was the creature itself she had truly feared, or something else. “You won’t… kill me?”
His smile was as disarming as his winsome, weary expression. “Never. Never in daylight.” Young eyes hollow, haunted by dark memories, perhaps decades of them.
Trisha, marveling, dropped her eyes to find further changes. The naked man stepped back, his smile rueful now, regretful? “Yes … that goes back to normal too. All of me back to quite ordinary and normal. Will you keep my secret?”
Trisha, her mind on other things, slipped thoughtfully into the Wal-Mart blouse, her trembling gone. “Have you ever … while you’re that way, I mean?”
This made him assess her with new eyes, searching eyes. “No. That would bring death. I change to feed, not for love.”
Then he turned, showing her his pale buttocks, and retreated to the bed, to his own clothes. Retrieving the little automatic she thought she’d hidden beneath her pillow, he placed it to his own chest, smiled into her eyes, and fired, the slug knocking him back but not entering, falling flat to threadbare rug. “I can’t be harmed in the normal way, you see.” He smiled that sad smile again, then said reflectively: “Will you betray me, Trisha?”
An anxious pounding at the door. Worried, muffled cries.
The tall figure strode to the ancient knob, twisted it, opened the door.
A beefy red face peered in anxiously. “Is everything all right, sir? We heard a shot.”
“Yes, we were wondering about that too. Perhaps down the hall…”
The beefy face glanced once Trisha’s way and retreated apologetically.
The tall figure closed the door, turned back to Trisha.
“How did you know my name?” she whispered.
“Will you? Betray me?”
She turned, ran a hand absently across the still warm sheets. “Will I see you again?”
Which made the smile falter curiously. “Whatever for?”
At home—a refurbished Ninth Street penthouse—Mojo slapped her hard for falling asleep on the job, slapped her again for forgetting the money, took her silver automatic—Trisha on her knees—stuck it in her mouth, and made her suck, suck hard until she’d summoned the weapon’s load, the slug crashing through the back of her skull… except Mojo, laughing and gold-toothed, jerked free before this last, making her only imagine it, warning that the next whore who showed up without money was a whore who was dead. He and Angela—Mojo’s current pump, a pretty Mexican who had recently usurped Trisha’s position—both getting a good laugh from this.
Trisha killed her mother again that morning—threw her from a cliff—forgot about sister Dolce and ran once more wild and free with Shep, yellow grass whipping her ankles.
That night, having made up her mind, she hit the streets searching, found his big dark car, and leaned close to his window. “Hello again. You forgot to pay me.”
“Yes, I’ve been looking for you. Here …” He paid her double—paid her triple, counting the warm smile.
Which Trisha returned, then stayed his hand before he could pull away from the curb. “What’s your name?”
“Franklyn.”
“That’s a nice name. Old-fashioned. I’m Trisha.”
They shook hands.
“Franklyn, I have a … well, a proposition. Will you be in town for a while?”
“I sort of have to keep moving, Trisha.”
“Stay another night. One more night…”
Trisha had read little in her life; movies had been her education, and these were enough.
She had exercised caution all her life, had come this far because of it. She exercised it now: melted down the silver crucifix at her neck, took the glistening lump to Fast Freddie who owned a gun shop on Third Street. Freddie smiled, flashing gold teeth at her, and asked: “What you up to now, woman?” but asked no more; he nodded and told her to come back on Thursday. When she did, with fifty bucks, he had the silver rounds all ready for her. “They soft, but they work,” he said. Trisha loaded them into the shiny automatic, just in case, and sought out Angela.
Told Angela she’d scored a date, a “doubles,” and for a lot of money, more than she’d ever seen. Then led her up to the little hotel room, let Angela—who looked not unlike her sister Dolce—enter first into the little room, the darkened room, quickly shutting and locking the door behind her.
“What—” from Angela inside. Alone with shadow and full moonlight and something else … then a quick, sharp scream—the kicking sound an antelope might make—and quiet.
Give me fifteen minutes, he’d said, and Trisha did, before unlocking the door, pushing into a room full of streaming moonlight, the silvery gun weighting her small purse.
He awaited her on the bed, muzzle yet dripping, eyes glowing red, as she’d guessed, so powerful, so dreadful an apparition that Trisha thought at first she must flee, though she did not. She undressed quickly instead, temples pounding, purse close at hand, came to the bed, and, unable to face eyes so soul-piercingly bright, presented him her pale buttocks.
It was the words she wanted most, had never known. Her johns had spoken them—shouted them—many times, accompanying their too-eager discharge, words usually curiously religious in nature—words like “Jesus!” “Oh, Christ!” or sometimes merely “Fuck, fuck!”—hissed sometimes vengeful, sometimes oddly tender, vaguely forlorn, more prayer than epithet.
Trisha had never spoken them, never experienced a mind so cleansed white with passion that unbidden words could find voice … never known fulfilled love, sexual or otherwise.
While mounted here, in full glorious moonlight, the beast’s talons at her flanks, hot stench of blood-breath in her ear, the words came … at first a guttural gasp in the seemingly futile attempt to accommodate him, then, in a moment—face red, eyes and mouth bulging like a pond frog’s—Trisha cried out, felt the savage tide catch, lift—let herself go with it at last, be carried away high and higher, screaming now the words …
And he, lost in animal grunts, animal thrusts, emptying his soul in her, filling her—filling the small room—with a high, lovely long-buried howl of completeness….
Afterward—both of them changed into something else—they lay together listening to each other’s breath, marveling that, amid such crimson carnage—Angela’s twisted remains still lay beneath the bed—they could discover such long-sought need, such exhausted relief.
“Stay with me?” he breathed hopefully. “I have plenty of money, lots.” And she nodded, snuggling, having sought long and finally found this treasure no power on earth, she’d make sure, would wrest from her.
“We’ll have to travel,” Franklyn said, “quite a lot, sometimes in hot, lonely places.”
“Not lonely,” she murmured, “never again lonely. But first… one more night…”
“The honky did fucking what!” from an inflamed Mojo.
“Refused to pay me,” Trisha repeated, all innocence and fluster.
“Uh-huh.” Mojo packed his slender stiletto and his Colt Python. “We just see about this shit!”
Knocking at the hotel door ten minutes later, impatient with chest-puffed bravado. “Open the door, motherfucker. Mojo want a word with your white ass!”
“It’s open …” from within moonlit walls.
Opened, then locked a moment later, Mojo’s “What the fuck—?” followed by two quick shots, a frenzied wheezing that exuded bright terror, a clawing at the wooden door that Trisha, from the hall, thought must be Franklyn … then a light popping, like a twig wrapped in wet cloth, snapped—a visceral grunt from Mojo as if he’d just come … and no more.
She faced Franklyn this time, lay beneath him, supine and triumphant, looked up into the vacuous face, the flaming eyes, the dreadful gnashing fangs and reveled … let him mold, pinch, let him scratch tender breasts with great curved talons until she came, yelping… held his fluttering hugeness within her, gripping the black-furred loins until he’d made her come again, shout the lovely Words—rear back his own shaggy head and make the little room echo with his plaintive love-howl … Mojo, trunkless and blood-crusted, watching, canted from shadowed corner with dead, yolky eyes.
“We’re alike,” Franklyn said later, changed and lightly stroking her, “outcasts and hungry. Alike.”
They traveled the desert states, hot clear days, chill, restful nights during which she never again dreamed of Shep, his cool muzzle thrust in her palm, his trusting head against her lap.
In Arizona, in an enormous stucco chalet Franklyn had rented, they knew sweet peace. For a time.
She brought him boys sometimes, but mostly she procured young women.
“They all look like the same girl,” he commented once absently.
She said nothing, and it seemed fine.
Until the emergence of Franklyn’s great rival, his jealousy over the one person he could never exact vengeance upon: himself.
She found him wandering the desert beneath black, moonless night. “What is it, love?”
At first she thought he wasn’t going to respond. Then: “It’s not me, is it? It’s not me. It’s him—the beast—you covet.”
And she took his arm, pressed against his shoulder. “Can’t it be enough?”
He watched the ebon sky, sighed. “I want to hunt alone from now on.”
She searched his face, hugged the arm again. “One more, darling … just one more.”
Some of the young women were lesbians, overtly … some merely lost souls not unlike her former self. Some delicate to shattering, some abrasive with rebellion, steeped in the hatred of family abuse, like this one tonight, this reedy blonde who looked so much like the others.
“And this is the guest room.” Trisha showed her.
The girl, Janice, ever pensive, clearly jealous, shrugged indifference. “Can that window be closed? I can’t sleep with the moonlight in my eyes.”
Franklyn came to see the girl just past midnight. To his shock, Trisha was still there, with no apparent plans to leave. She stood, back to the door, and watched.
Franklyn changed swiftly, with none of the protracted lassitude of the late-night movies. A shadow passed over his face, his smile became ghastly, the clear eyes red and burning—and it was done. He dropped panther-silent to the floor, not a panther, nor any longer a man … something dark and feral that rumbled throatily and urinated pungently in the small room, then advanced….
Janice—imperious demeanor crumbled, face a rictus of disbelief—could but run … in a place where running could not be done.
Thus the chase, across moonlit bed and fallen chairs, was brief, though long enough to remind Trisha of the neighborhood tomcat of her childhood, the one next-door that used to trap and play with fat field mice. Janice, who was not fat, did not turn and fight at the end the way the mice had; she screamed instead and clawed at the wallpaper, leaving brilliant red and most of her fingernails there before the dark thing pulled her down.
Behind the bed, between brass rail and wall, the beast dragged her, kicking, pinned her with a satisfied whuff of black flared nostrils, bent dripping jaws, and ended the screams, the struggles, with a single bite, eliciting a nearly sexual grunt from Janice, a final spastic flutter of limbs as the big incisors broke something deep down, spraying blood and piss.
Trisha listened absently to the feast… came finally to Franklyn’s hunkered form, stroked the shaggy head, and kissed it. Lingered to tongue his still streaming lips, sit atop him in scalloped gore and shout her words—her glory, her vengeance and triumph—to the moon’s mindless eye. She yelped, startled, while coming when Franklyn drew her suddenly down, nipped her throbbing neck, lapped tenderly what trickled there.
Later, on smeared, rumpled sheets, lazily sated, pleasantly logy, Trisha reached for and caressed the huge hairy phallus, felt (with disappointment) it retreat, shrink away with the rest of him to become slender and pale and white as the bone-colored moon. She found, turning to kiss his face, that he was smiling at her.
“You bit me.” She smiled back.
“My gift to you.”
And, a distant chill plucking at her, she ventured: “Gift?”
“What you wanted, have been asking for all these nights. Death.”
She turned a naked, red-streaked hip to appraise him. “Have I asked for death?”
Smile in place, he stroked her slim back. “Asked for it, demanded it, shouted it with every climax. ‘Kill me!’ And now I have.”
“I said that? I said, ‘Kill me’?”
“What did you think you were shouting?”
Trisha, genuinely awed, considered it. “Something more … erotic.”
His smile broadened tenderly. “It isn’t love you’ve been seeking, sweet, it’s peace. Release from your guilt.”
“Guilt?”
“Over your mother. And sister.”
Trisha, abruptly chilled, glanced at the twisted thing on the floor, withdrew a fraction. “How did you know?”
“We know.”
No one was more surprised at the sudden tears than Trisha, nor more relieved. “They … hurt me,” sobbing, “Mother gave me to the men because I was the pretty one. Dolce … Dolce laughed. I hated them.”
“And loved them. They were killing you. You were killing them. I didn’t know what to do. And then I did.” He touched the still tender mark at her neck. “You’re one of us now; the infection has passed. Forever dead, forever living …”
She pushed herself up, heart hammering alarm, finger tracing an invisible line at her carotid.
“You’ll never know guilt,” Franklyn told her. “Guilt is not to be found in us.”
A cloud passed over Trisha’s face. “Will we still be able to … ?” She nodded, imploring, below his belly.
He laughed. “More than ever. More explosively atavistic, lubriciously primitive. And nothing can ever harm us. You’re invulnerable now. Watch … and trust.” He pulled the silvery gun from her pillow, fired casually at her, naked in her surprise.
She would wonder in her last moments why she had left the silver rounds in the gun, why she had kept the gun at all. That old cautionary guard again, fearing the beast even as she trusted the man?
Wondered, too, in the fleeting breath of time between his last words and the white glare of the explosion, if she might somehow have warned him in time … or if, in fact, she had deliberately hesitated … if Franklyn, in his sweet ignorance, had not perhaps done her the greatest favor of all: gifted her—the silver slug tearing her chest, summoning bright blood—with that which she’d sought all along.
Dying there in strangled moonlight, the bed a pool, a lake, the approaching wail of sirens souring the peaceful night, she found no breath to explain with… could only listen in descending darkness to his agonized scream, his tortured, high-pitched howl, wholly human now, of despair, chasing her into the final night.
Hear a moment later the familiar joyful bark, feel Shep’s cold muzzle against her palm, the two of them laughing and truly free, racing through the yellow undulant meadow in the soft summer breeze….