three seconds of hell
Once, you fasted for a week. I think you had located a grimoire, or finally had an epiphany. It’s a bit of a blur. Here’s what I remember.
“Hunger will help,” you explain, stroking your fingers through my hair. I lie with my head in your lap listening to your tummy gurgle around an amount of blood that was life-threatening to me, a pleasant lunch for you. “The entities I will be dealing with are bound and starving, but still very powerful. Having hunger in common will make them more likely to do as I ask.”
Your stomach is so rhythmic. I feel like it’s massaging my blood in there, ~glork, glrrrrk, glork~, peacefully guiding it to sleep. Or perhaps it’s me who’s being guided to sleep. I’m just getting confused. It feels like a hole opened in my chest and all my strength fell out. “…Safe?”
Your voice takes on the slant of someone dealing with an unpleasant fact of life. “Mmh. No. But I want to go home. There’s no way to acquire power without risk.”
You raise a fist to your lips and belch absent-mindedly into it. My eyes crease into a tired smile you don’t notice. I watch your throat bob as your larynx articulates the sound: ~huoourp~. Like a word you utter, with the meaning, “satisfaction”.
“Anyway, since I won’t see you for a week—” A furrow appears between my eyebrows and you give me a smile that shows the tips of your fangs, sucked clean to whiteness— “we both know you have even less self-control than I do when it comes to feeding me… Since I won’t see you, I thought you’d like to be my last meal for a while.”
You stroke my pale cheek and lean down to give me a peck. Your breath is warm copper.
I do. I do like being your last meal. Though my lungs feel like old leather and the strength of my muscles is currently trickling through sweetly contracting tubes in your toned abdomen, I heft my arm up to clasp your hand in mine.
You give it a squeeze, and then look out the window. It’s getting late. You have work to do. “I’m so tired of being trapped,” you murmur, mostly to yourself. “When I hunt, a part of me remembers where I’m meant to be…” You look down at me with a twisted smile. “These chained-up old spirits probably can’t help me, but it’s worth it for even a chance. Even a clue how to break out…”
You don’t stay long. Just check that the heating is on and that I have water. And then you’re gone, leaving me to heal, and to wonder, and to hope.
You meditate. To pass the time. Projecting yourself elsewhere is too much temptation, as unsuspecting souls would slip beneath the surface of you too easily and drown. Hunger starts as painful, then excruciating, and then goes deeper. It’s like a negation of your self. You ache in your soul to reaffirm your nature by seizing and consuming a life.
You have no phone, having put it in storage, so you can’t call me or any of your other prey. The barrier you wove around your house would be simple to unpick as it’s your magic, but it would force you to hesitate if the feral desire for blood takes hold of you.
Your hunger is like a caged animal. Good, you think, even while enduring its wrath. It scrapes the insides of your veins and fills your diminishing guts with hot lead. Let it speak for you. The spirits you will meet will recognise you for bound and starving, just like them.
Dust. Pollution. Ancient, ancient bones, grinding together with every movement. Power faded, only the banked light of knowledge, hoarded secrets.
You stagger out of the circle and immediately retch. There is nothing to come up
The deal you struck is fulfilled. One spirit, fearsome and ancient but also sunken and pathetic, offered you a deal, and you took it. In exchange for knowledge of your prison, you would bear the being’s curse for five of your heartbeats.
You were of course not stupid enough to take those terms. Freed for even a moment it would have set upon you and devoured you.
Your counter-offer: for two heartbeats you would bear the spirit’s suffering. It rejected. But then when you turned to go, the dust-dry whisper broke in, urgently. “Three.”
Fearsome, and pathetic.
You stagger through the 3am streets on legs like bundles of twigs, wheezing air into a wickerwork chest. Your heart is a hummingbird kept barely captive. Even your teeth feel frail.
Dust. Pollution. You feel the stink of the being still cling to you. In addition to starvation, you wish to become clean. To find purity.
God, where are the people? A mirror-black bay window reveals just how sunken your eyes are, how the hollows of your cheeks carve great shadows in your face from the light of a street lamp. You touch your skin. It feels paper thin.
From somewhere inside the house you hear a baby cry. The pure note, rising and falling, cuts through the miasma surrounding you. Every sense is lit. You freeze, scared that if you move the excitement will cause your limbs to break and your heart to flutter away.
A floor board creaks upstairs. There is a murmur of a mother’s voice.
So slow, the tendril. But the blade is sharp. Enough to sever the lock.
The child is asleep. You watch the mother, gauzy nightdress cinched at her waist, walk in perfect darkness across the landing. She’s walking towards you, though she doesn’t know it, as you stand in front of the bedroom door.
Food. It feels like years. See its pink skin, hear the lub-dub of its strong, sleepy heart. Meat! She’s chubby, belly hanging a little loose. Perhaps she gave birth fairly recently. Her long, curly hair cascades over one shoulder.
You don’t think you could eat a whole person just yet.
She has almost walked into your open arms when your traitor belly gives you away.
~gll-grrlk~
Eyes widen Her heart pounds. Her mouth opens up call out something.
She gets three heartbeats before you’re upon her.
It’s a bite so violent it’s almost a headbutt. Your fangs ache from the pressure of piercing her flesh and biting down. Your aim was off so you tear a fatal wound, her flesh parting for your mouth like a crushed tomato.
The split second your tongue was on her skin was already good but oh my God the blood. It actually hurts to taste it: salivary glands spasm uncomfortably into life, the salt burns the sensitive walls of your mouth, and your entire body aches like it has remembered what succour is and cannot wait any longer. Your mouth is nearly full before you remember how to swallow. The little ~glch~ is like a long-forgotten song. You sing it again: ~glk, glp, glp~
Absently you crush her larynx with a thumb to keep her from screaming. All the while you’re feeling the blood sink deeper down your throat like her life is formed into a fist that’s punching deeper and deeper and…
Hormones flood your system. You remember what it’s like to live as something other than paper. Tears stream down your face—and hers—as you fill yourself up with her.
It’s moments before you feel the glorious scarlet pain in your midsection. Your atrophied stomach stretches to hold her and screams as you pump pint after pint of streaming hot blood down your ravenous gullet. You don’t care. Let it split you in half.
You love this woman.
She dies while you’re still sucking her like a juice box. Too soon: you must have starved her brain. Now your poor tongue and jaw have to work to pull out her blood. You latch your lips against her torn skin and suck.
Each silky mouthful is like a lover’s kiss. A comparison that becomes more apt as your demonic lips start to work on her terrified soul. To her your mouth is like a cathedral bathed in blood, your tongue a great dragon that pulls her irresistibly towards the disgusting darkness. Her awareness of your mouth and, latterly, your throat, is absolute. She feels the hard lines of every tooth, the slick glide of the roof your mouth, every taste bud on your tongue that squishes against her. Her perfect spirit cosies up against your tonsils and smooths the mucus on the back of your throat. Your epiglottis thrums with excited tension as it funnels her into your oesophagus. She feels it all.
So do you. Your body comes to life and all your appetites are inflamed. You allow the body to fold to the ground, drinking all the while. On all fours you raise your backside in the air and fumble with a hurried hand to find a path through your clothes.
You find it. Your wickerwork body has remembered it is a woman’s, and heat and stolen life are flooding into you. Your womanhood yields to your touch and you almost scream with the intensity of the desire that rages suddenly through you. A mouthful of blood trickles free and her soul wriggles an inch towards freedom before you plunge your fingers into your pussy and suck her right back down.
It’s not much of a eulogy for the soul now slipping finally into your stomach, but it’s the only one she’ll get. The last thing outside of you she hears is the rustling of your clothes and the rhythmic ~schlk, schlk, schlk~. Then her perfect awareness leaves your teeth, your tongue your tonsils and finally your throat. Your cardia closes and all she knows is the drowning wet heat of your stomach.
Your spirit brutalises hers as you fuck yourself. You tear her in half and fold her into you again and again so she can’t tell where she ends and you begin. When the blood is gone you cum, and the violence of your pleasure crushes her finally from existence. She flows into you and is soaked up. You lick your lips and release a long, low belch as quietly as you can.
You wipe your face on her nightgown and look at the bedroom door. The baby is crying in its room behind you, but your hunger is far too great for such fare.
You heard someone roll over in the bedroom.