Stories: All-New Tales

As hours went past I thrashed and called out, but the chains were strong and the walls thick. There was a columnlike yellow candle burning for the little light Julia had left me, and I wondered if I was meant to die in that underground tomb.

At times I worried that this was some white supremacist plot against the BSU of New York. Had they captured me to make a statement? Were they going to lynch me or burn me? Would I be a martyr for the cause?

It was many hours later when the door came open and Julia walked in. I yelled for all I was worth before she could close the door, but she wasn’t bothered. She smiled and came to sit next to me on the bed.

She was wearing a red velvet robe that flowed all the way down to her bare feet. There was a hood, but it hung down behind her head.

“This is a room within a room that is itself within a larger room,” she said. “We are far underground and no one can hear you.”

“Why you got me chained down like this?” I asked, trying to keep the fear out of my voice.

In answer, she stood up, letting the sumptuous robe fall to the floor. She was as naked as I. The breath left my lungs, but I don’t know if it was her nakedness or those eyes that left me stunned.

She smiled again and knelt down at my side. She moved her head quickly and bit into my left forearm.

I have spent many days over the next few paragraphs of description.

How can I explain a feeling completely foreign, a feeling that pushed every emotion I could possibly experience past the threshold of my ability to bear it? The pain was a song that I cried out to in cracked harmony. The flow of blood was not only my life but the lives of all who came before me. Her quivering joy was a wild animal in my chest clawing and ripping to escape my silly so-called civilized existence.

My back arched upward and I cried out for release—and for the pain to continue. I wanted to bleed into Julia more than I had craved sex. I was an infant again—so excited by the new sensations of life that I needed the chains to contain my ecstasy.

When I slumped back to the mattress, I no longer existed. I was the husk of the cocoon of a moth that had transformed itself from worm to flight. I was filled with nothing, surrounded by nothing. I was not dead because I had never truly lived. The flailing larvae and the fluttering bug had used my inert being merely for the transition, leaving me nothing but emptiness, like the transient aftermath of a weak smile.

“Juvenal Nyx,” a voice whispered.

“What?” I rasped.

“That is your name.”

I drifted for many hours that seemed like weeks or months. I was not unconscious or asleep but neither was I aware of the world around me. In this limbolike ether I was approached by various entities representing sentients that claimed no race, sex, or species.

“You are in danger of knowledge,” one such being, who seemed to be a yellow nimbus with no origin, said.

“Of being found out?” I asked in some fashion other than speech.

“Of knowing,” the empty halo of light replied.

“I don’t understand.”

“Then there is still hope.”

“JUVENAL,” A HUMAN VOICE SAID.

I opened my eyes and saw Julia, again in jeans and T-shirt, sitting at the foot of the bed. She was staring at me in a way that I can only describe as hungry.

“Julia.”

The smile did not leaven her rapacious eyes.

“You are a sweet man.” Though she whispered these words I heard them as a shout down a long, echoing hallway. “I scented your sweetness before I entered the bookstore. I came there for you.”

“You let Martin go after biting his arm,” I said, “didn’t you?”

“I let them all go after the first bite,” she said. “Hundreds of them…thousands.”

I, the old me, sighed in relief.

“And I want to let you go too,” she said, “but your blood sings to me.”

She touched my inner right thigh halfway between knee and groin. Her cold fingers rubbed that spot. Just the touch caused an echo of dark delight.

She bent over me and hovered an inch away from the place she’d touched, her lunar eyes gazing into mine.

“Bite it,” I said in spite of the panic in my chest.

OVER THE NEXT FOUR days she drank from my other arm and leg, and finally from my abdomen just above the naval. I was in constant ecstasy and dread. I didn’t eat, sleep, or feel the need to relieve myself. My body was in a state of total repose except when she fed on my blood.

“We never drink much,” she told me one evening after having feasted. She was lying back with her head against my thigh, savoring her perversion. “It doesn’t take much to keep us alive. We aren’t like your people who need to kill and squander to keep themselves going. Just a cupful of fresh blood and we can live for many days.”

“Then why do you bite me every day?” I asked. There was no fear in my question. Just after the bite I felt drugged, yielding. I simply wanted to understand what she was saying.

She sat up. Her once-black eyes were now white with that strange light.