“Are you ready to join me for all eternity?” Gunther asked. “Our love will never die, mein Liebe. All I want is to spend all eternity loving you.”
“Anything for you, my lord,” he replied, raising Gunther’s hand to his mouth and kissing it. “I will do anything you ask, my lord, my master.”
And Gunther rose to his knees, a smile on his face, raising his right wrist to his mouth.
For a moment he saw Gunther’s teeth—long, sharp, pointed, tearing at his wrist. And then the blood was flowing from the wound he’d made—bright red blood, trickling down over Gunther’s hand, and the bleeding wrist was offered to him.
“Drink from me and join me for eternity.”
He looked up into Gunther’s smiling face, and saw—
The teeth.
Long. Sharp. Pointed.
Not human, oh sweet Jesu, not human.
He’s a demon. The priest was right.
Philip moved away from him.
Don’t be afraid, mein Liebchen.
Philip got to his feet, backing away from the bed, from the bed where he’d committed sin in the eyes of God, where he’d allowed a demon to take him the way a man takes a woman.
Gunther held out the wrist.
“Join me for eternity.”
And Philip backed away from the bed, shaking his head, his body trembling with fear as he crossed himself, then turned and ran to the window, not thinking in his terror, fervent prayers rushing through his head, driven by terror.
“No, Maxi, no!” Gunther screamed, and sprang after him.
And he backed away and felt the back of his legs against the window frame, and he felt himself falling backward just as Gunther lunged toward him, his arms outstretched; and he was back and through the window, praying as he fell, fell, fell…
And then he hit the cobblestones…and as he felt his life leaving him, he kept praying, Forgive me, Jesus, for turning my back on you and committing a sin; forgive me; don’t cast me down into Hell with creatures like this one….
And everything faded to black.
He opened his eyes.
Gunther threw his head back and howled as his body convulsed with his explosion, and Philip’s own long-delayed orgasm went, his seed splashing and spraying into his face, over his chest, his entire body rocking as his balls emptied. Then, both bodies spent, Gunther slowly removed himself from inside Philip. He smiled down at him. “Mein Liebe…” he whispered.
Philip slowly pulled away from him. “What—what are you?” he whispered. He slid off the bed and found his feet, wondering what he was going to wear, knowing his clothes had been ripped to shreds, just knowing it didn’t matter—he had to get out of here.
Gunther reached over and stroked his cheek. “I offer you an eternity of love, my beautiful little one.” His wrist rose to his mouth. “I offer you eternal life as my companion, my love, my life.” Then he tore at his wrist, until the blood was flowing over his fingers again—dark red and rich, thick blood. “All you have to do is drink, mein Liebe, and then we will be together for all eternity.”
“N-no.” Philip backed away from him, away from the bed of nightmares, aware of his nakedness, aware of the bloody wrist being offered to him.
“DRINK!” Gunther shouted, leaping off the bed and pinning him against the wall, shoving the wrist into Philip’s mouth.
Philip’s eyes went to the balcony doors. Heaven help me, he thought as he struggled, as the blood filled his mouth.
It was strangely sweet.
“There.” Rachel pointed to a balcony across the street. They were standing under a streetlight in the thick mist. She shivered. The street was completely deserted, lifeless. Flickering shadows danced on the curtains. The balcony doors were open. “That’s where they are.”
Nigel smiled at her. “Thank you.” He kissed her hand.
“I’m going with you,” she insisted, grabbing hold of his hand and squeezing. “You need me.”
“No.” He shook his head, effortlessly pulling his arm free from her grasp. “Too dangerous, my dear.” He gathered himself and leaped gracefully up to the balcony in one motion.
Rachel stood for a moment and then crossed the street. The gate to the wide carriageway was open, and she ran inside, her shoes clicking on the pavement as she looked through the mist for the door that led inside the building. It was locked. She tugged on it, then pushed before giving it up. I have to get inside. She removed her shoe and smashed a windowpane, reaching in and unlocking the door from the inside, then opened it and ran up the stairs and into the apartment. She heard a scream from the end of the hall and headed that way, toward an open door. Flickering light came through it.
“There’s no sense in sacrificing this young man, Gunther,” Nigel was saying as she reached the door. He was standing in the balcony door. “This is between us, maker and creation. Let the boy go.”
She glanced quickly into the corner Nigel was facing. The blond man was holding Philip in front of him. Philip was naked, eyes closed. His mouth was smeared with blood. He looked barely conscious.
“Leave me in peace, old man,” Gunther sneered. “This is now between me and the boy. He drank willingly.”
“Let the boy go.”
“Never.”
Rachel reached for a candle.
Philip swam in and out of consciousness.
He was vaguely aware of being held from behind, that he was standing and voices were swimming around him, but it was all just noise; nothing made sense; the noise wasn’t being shaped into any words he could understand; his brain felt like it was short-circuiting. Images flashed through his mind…images that made no sense to him…He saw a woman, naked to the waist, snakes wrapped around her forearms, standing before an altar, her arms outstretched to the heavens. He saw a young man, wearing a loincloth and dirty, grimy, covered with welts and bleeding cuts, on his knees, his eyes swimming with tears.
He saw Gunther riding on a magnificent black horse.
The images came faster, too fast for him to see them as anything but a blur.
Voices.
Chanting.
His body felt like it was on fire, burning from the inside. The fire was pumping out of his heart, spreading through his veins. Sweat was pouring from him, his skin slick and wet and damp.
Fire—everything was on fire.
His mind, oh, God, his mind…The flames were there, burning through his brain.
What did he do to me?
And he could still taste the sweet blood, the sweet liquid…
God help me, I want more.
Rachel threw the candle and said a quiet prayer for her aim to be true.
It hit the wall behind the blond man, showering sparks onto his skin and hair. He screamed, letting go of Philip, who fell to the floor.
The scream shot through her mind, through her consciousness, into her very soul. It drove her back out of the room and against the wall, slamming her into it, knocking the breath out of her. Her eyes swam in tears, stars dancing outside her vision. She slid to the floor, pressing her hands over her ears to try to blot the scorching sound from her soul.
She smelled it, the burning, and its cloying sweetness gagged her.
She threw up.
Philip was vaguely aware of falling to the floor.
It burns, he thought, his entire body in agony. Will it ever stop?
In the far distance he could hear someone screaming, an unearthly sound that echoed in his brain, curdling his soul with its anguish and anger.
He tried to open his eyes, but the lids wouldn’t obey his command.
The fire in his blood seemed to die down.
Is this, then, death?he wondered as he lay there, unable to move. Am I dying? Is that what this is? Death? What did he do to me?
He smelled scorched skin, the nauseating smell of burnt hair.
His canine teeth began to ache, his gums aflame with raw pain.
He slid his tongue over his canines.
They were
longer, sharper.
Pointed.
Rachel crawled to the bedroom door.
She smelled smoke.
She looked inside.
Nigel was standing, blocking the balcony doors.
The blond man was engulfed in flame. He was screaming as he dashed about the room, trying to smother the flames by rubbing himself against the wall.
Tuck and roll, she thought, how stupid are you?
As though he’d heard her, he dropped to the floor and began rolling, and the flames went out as quickly as they’d begun.
He stood up.
“I will destroy you, old man!” he shrieked.
Nigel just stood, staring at him, his hands in his pockets.
With a cry, the blond man sprang at Nigel.
Nigel ducked to one side. The blond man reached the balcony and turned back to look at Rachel. She covered her mouth with her hands. His face was blackened, his hair burned away. He looked like something out of her worst nightmares. “You will pay, young bitch.” One instant he was there; the next, he was gone.
Nigel began to weep.
“N-Nigel?” she whispered.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said, wiping the tears from his cheek. “For decades, I have tried to kill him, and I can’t do it. I am a failure.”
“Rachel?”
She turned her head as Philip stood up—although he didn’t really seem like Philip anymore. She looked his nakedness up and down, her mind racing, trying to figure what was different, what was wrong with him.
The wall behind him burst into flame.
“We have to get out of here.” Nigel beckoned to them both. When they didn’t move, he said, “Hurry.”
They followed him out onto the balcony. Black smoke followed them out. Nigel placed an arm around each of them. “Close your eyes,” he said softly, and they did. Rachel let out a gasp when her feet left the floor, and then she landed gently on the sidewalk across the street. She opened her eyes.
The building was engulfed with flames. She heard sirens in the distance, the sounds of people shouting and running. “Let’s go back to the apartment,” she heard herself saying, her mind not really working out of anything other than instinct.
The sun rose outside her window, dissipating the fog. On her bed, Philip slept.
“He will sleep for several days while his body completes the change.” Nigel lit a cigar.
“So, what now?” Rachel looked at his peaceful face. It seemed paler but somehow more solid to her than before.
“I can’t leave him.” Nigel shook his head. “He’ll have to come with me.”
Rachel looked at Nigel. “I’m coming with you.”
“No, my dear, that I can’t permit.”
“You don’t have a choice,” she said simply. “You heard Gunther. He threatened me. And do you really think he won’t come back for Philip?”
“There is always a choice.”
“No. Not anymore.” She gestured to Philip. “He wasn’t given a choice. Neither was I. When you came here looking for me, you took away my choices.” Her voice shook. “You have to make me one of you.”
He shook his head. “No.”
“You said yourself, you couldn’t kill Gunther.” She went over to the window and looked out. “He’s out there somewhere, and he wants Philip. You said it yourself: he’s a rogue, who kills. The three of us—together we can stop him.”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Yes, I do.” She remembered the visions, the music in her head. “How do we know Philip will be able to do what you couldn’t? Can you keep him safe?” She looked out the window at the gloomy sunshine. “And can you protect me?”
Tears spilled down Nigel’s face as he bit into his own wrist.
He offered it to her.
And she drank.
Outside, the rain began.
CARNIVAL
Michael Thomas Ford
Chapter One
The kid was doing it all wrong, but Joe didn’t stop him. He just looked on silently as the boy tried uselessly to force the big metal pin into the hole. Frustrated, he was hitting it with the rubber mallet again and again, attempting to beat it into submission. The muscles of his thick arms bulged and relaxed as he swung the hammer over his shoulder and brought it down repeatedly in a rain of anger. His grimy white T-shirt was soaked through with sweat from his exertion, and his face was growing redder by the second.
Somewhere a radio was playing. The sound of the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra floated through the hot August air. “Tangerine, she is all they claim,” sang Bob Eberly over the sultry voices of the band’s horns and woodwinds. “With her eyes of night and lips as bright as flame.”
The song had been a favorite during that summer of 1942, and Joe found himself idly humming along as he watched the boy. Finally, when the kid looked like he would either explode or pass out, Joe stepped in. “Like this,” he said, giving the pin a gentle turn with his hand and slipping it easily into the hole.
“How the fuck did you do that?” the boy said.
“You just have to know how it works,” Joe said in his slow Texas drawl.
He turned and walked away, wiping the grease from his hands onto his work pants and laughing to himself. He’d been working the carnival for coming on twenty years, and in every new town they stopped in, it was the same. He had to hire a team of local boys to help him set up. Big boys, big enough to lift the heavy machinery and set it upright. He always got a kick out of watching the ham-fisted showoffs trying to force the rods and gears to do what they wanted, when he knew that all they had to do was ask nicely and the motors would be purring like kittens before a fire.
It had been different for him. Even when he was a kid, he’d understood what the machines were saying. He heard them calling to him, singing in their clickety-clackety voices of things no one else saw: worlds where time and motion whirled in an intricate dance, sweeping the stars along with them. And when they called, he was powerless not to answer. One night when he was about four, his mother had come to check on him, only to find his bed empty. After a frantic three-hour search, he’d been discovered in the basement, sitting next to the big old coal furnace with a faraway look in his eyes. They’d had to shake him to snap him out of it, and even then he couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there. All he’d said by way of explanation was, “The box was talking to me, Mama.”
The other kids decided he was crazy. They’d spy him lying next to the railroad tracks, his fingertips touching the steel as he listened to the engines rumbling somewhere down the line, or catch him leaning up against a spinning washing machine, a sweet smile on his face. “Dumb bastard,” they’d say, pushing him into the dirt and laughing.
The worst was Billy James. “Joey’s an idiot,” he told the other kids one day when they found him behind McCane’s Garage, gazing raptly under the hood of an old Ford and caressing the silenced pieces. “See that dent in his forehead? He’s got that there ’cause his daddy fucked his mama while she was pregnant with him, and his dick poked old Joey in the head and made him stupid.”
As he grew up, he moved more and more away from the world of people and deeper into the world of machines. His hands showed him the way, turning over the bits and pieces he found in garbage cans, tool boxes, and junk sales until he could tell just by holding a bit of iron in his hands exactly what it had once done and wanted to do again. He collected discarded motors and gears and took them to his secret place in the shed behind his daddy’s house, where he fashioned them into deceptively simple machines that spun and whirred and surrounded him with their joyful cacophony.
He could have fit in, had he wanted to. He could have used what he knew to help boys like Billy James unlock the secrets of the cars they tried to make their own. But he didn’t. Instead, he watched them try day after day to bend the engines to their will, to force themselves upon a world where they had no control. Sometimes he sat on the rise overlooking the school’s auto body shop
and slowly ate an apple while he observed the boys congratulating one another on some minor success, while in his head he had already figured out exactly what it was the sputtering car was trying to say in its own voice. He himself walked to school.
It had all ended shortly after his sixteenth birthday, when his father, enraged over Joe’s refusal to be interested in football, hunting, or girls, followed him to the shed and spied on him as he sat among the machines he’d constructed. Bursting in, his father grabbed a can of gasoline, splashed it over the walls, and set the shed on fire. As the smoke rose up into the sky, and the voices of the machines turned to screams, Joe ran into the darkness.
When he stopped running, he found himself at the edge of a carnival. It had been in town for a week, but he had avoided it, knowing that Billy James would be there with his friends and the giggling, stupid girls whose tight sweaters and bright lipstick made Joe feel sorry for them. Now it was the last night, and the park was almost empty. Some of the rides were being taken down, and nobody noticed Joe as he walked among the towering machines.
When he came upon a group of men trying to disassemble the complicated gears of a carousel, he stopped to watch. Grunting and straining, they were attempting to pull it apart. The largest man was swearing and beating the nest of machinery as though it were a horse refusing to move. Joe, after listening for a few minutes, walked into the group of men, picked up a wrench, and effortlessly undid the knots of metal as the astonished workers looked on.
No one had ever asked his age, and when the carnival rolled out of town late that night, Joe had been asleep in the back of the truck housing the Ferris wheel, his thin body tucked into one of the gently swaying cars. He had been there ever since, the master mechanic who kept the rides spinning and the people laughing. Night after night, in town after town, he built his city up and tore it down again.
Now he walked through the maze of rides and attractions, surveying the work of his crew and hired hands. The skeleton of the Ferris wheel was nearly complete, its empty cars swaying as the men set another one into the circles of steel and tightened the bolts to hold it in place. Beyond it, the Whirly-Gig was being tested, its five cars spinning around as the men who worked it laughed and congratulated one another on having no leftover pieces. Joe nodded at them and walked on.