Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

MOONLIGHT RIDE Kenneth E. Olson

He’d never planned anything in his life. He never thought you could, really. Shit had a way of happening whether you wanted it to or not, and the best way to deal with that, he found, was to go with the flow. Let it ride. It got bumpy for a little while, but eventually the road smoothed out again. And for the most part, it had gone well—much better than he’d hoped, actually. But lately, things

had become just a little too fucked up. People were on him like flies on shit, and the move to Paris hadn’t changed that.

So, for the first time in his life, he’d had to plan.

“Voulez-vous vivre toujours?” Do you want to live forever?

She poked one slender finger through a loose curl in his long, shaggy, dark hair. He shook impatiently loose from the probing digit.

“Non. J’ai besoin de mourir.” No. I need to die.

“Good.” Her thick French accent whispered in his ear and he felt her hot breath on his neck; smelled the rich, salty scent of her lips. Her firm breasts pressed into his back as she drew her arms around him and pulled him against her. His first impulse was to pull away, roll out of the bed and run back to his apartment. Back to safety. He fought it. He’d worked too hard—planned too well—for this moment to run from it now. If he wanted what she could give him, he had to play the game.

“Zat is very good,” she repeated. The tip of her tongue probed his ear. “We will have ze good time, you and I, non?”

He didn’t reply; just lay on his side with his back to her—this divine, unnamed creature he’d met only a week ago in one of the many darker bars he frequented—watching the neon lights of Le Hôtel Coucher du Soleil spill through the open window and bathe the room in red. A slight breeze stirred the satin curtains. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath through his nose, wondering if he’d be able to smell the cool evening breezes any more after tonight. Wondering if he’d care.

“A quiet lover, eh?” she said, lover coming out as the French-twanged lovaire. She drew her bare right leg up and over his, letting her foot slide over his outer thigh and move teasingly down to his own foot. He could feel her pubic hairs tickle the small of his back as she drew herself even closer. His skin broke in gooseflesh as her fingers lightly traced his ribcage, then followed the curve of his hip to his stiffening penis. She wrapped her long fingers around it and he shuddered. He squeezed his eyes tighter.

“It is a surprise,” she continued, “I thought you would be ze wild man, like in your shows, no? And ze stories I have heard. Well, let us just say you are not quite what I expected.”

“Nothing ever is,” he replied smoothly.

“Oui. Zat is true. But,” she said, following the path her fingers had traced out with slow kisses, “I knew from ze first time I saw you, you would be one of us. I never dared dream zat I would be ze one to perform ze… transformation?”

Transformation. He guessed that was as good a word as any. He’d been through a lot of ‘transformations’ in his long brief life. From child to adult, from poor to rich, from man to god. But being a god hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be. Too many eyes always watching you. Too many fingers always pointing at you. Too many people who always wanted you to be who they expected you to be, and not who you were. He longed to go backward, to become a man again. But that was impossible. He’d spent most of his months in Paris meditating on this fact and had finally come to this conclusion: Once a god, all you could really do next was become a demon. Or die.

Or both.

“You are ready?” she asked, squeezing his penis once—hard—breaking his train of thought. He opened his eyes and turned onto his back, looking down the length of his body at her. She lay on her stomach at a ninety degree angle to his own body, her mouth just above his hip. The red neon from outside washed over her pale skin, dying it crimson. Her eyes and lips were dark coals in the light, and her long black hair hung in satin strings down her face and across her back. A demon hiding in the skin of an angel.

“You have made ze necessary arrangements?”

“I faked a heart condition three days ago,” he said, and nodded to her, “and I’ve chosen my grave site in Père-Lachaise.”

“And a death certificate?”

“I’ll get that tonight.”

She smiled then, and he thought he could see, for the first time, the sharp edges of her canine teeth. She turned away and examined his throbbing member in her left hand. She drew her right hand up his inner thigh and ran one finger up the bulging vein of his hard-on. He shuddered but kept his eyes on the activity.

She must’ve felt the shudder, or perhaps he made a noise of some sort, because she looked up at him and smiled once more. Her tongue came out and licked her upper lip—black against black. She said nothing, but raised the first two fingers of her right hand so he could see the long nails. Then she turned back to her work, bringing the nails down quickly and opening the vein she’d just caressed.

He jerked, arching his back and grabbing the headboard of the bed with both hands, hanging on hard enough to feel the wood press against the bones of his fingertips. The pain was not as bad as he thought it would be, more like the stinging cut of a sharp knife, but the amount of blood he felt flow out and over his balls was still surprising. The sharp coppery smell of his own blood filled his nostrils.

She was on it quickly, though, her mouth covering the wound and sucking, drawing his life into hers. He could feel the blood leaving, like an intense orgasm, only lower and unending. Settling into the bed, he leaned his head back, eyes closed, and thrust his hips upward. She responded by taking the whole of him in her mouth, still sucking hard enough to keep any blood from spilling. He wasn’t quite sure how he knew this, but he did; just as he knew that, despite all reasons saying otherwise, he would continue to have his erection until the whole affair was over. He’d often heard of the magiks of blood and tantric sex—even experimented with it before—but it was never like this.

It was a long time before she finally lifted her head. When she did, she wiped blood from her mouth and smeared it over his penis. She turned her whole body even with his, placed both hands flat on his stomach and straddled him, poised just above the object of her desire. In the light, she was nothing but a shadow outlined in red.

“Are you ready zen, mon cher?”

He said nothing, but reached out with his hands and placed them on her ample hips, easing her onto himself, his own blood the lubricant. He gasped, startled at the dry cold that surrounded him.

“Is something ze matter?” Her head tilted to the right.

He bit his lower lip, as much to keep himself from saying something as it was from ecstasy. She continued to stare at him until he was able to speak again.

“No,” he said, “Let’s do this.”

There was a brief nod from the dark figure above him, and she slid forward like a snake, hands sliding wetly up his body, leaving oily smears of blood tracking behind. His own hands caressed the fine curve of her back and then moved to the front. He cupped her breasts, firm but yeilding.

“Tell me when,” she said, and began moving her hips back and forth. He countered her moves with his own, slowly at first, then with more and more urgency, gasping with each thrust. He closed his eyes hard enough to make lights dance behind his lids and he felt drunk, and high, like every drink and every drug he’d ever taken was taking control of his body once again. He laid back and let it, losing himself in the moment. There was no life. There was no death. There was only now. Only now.

“Now,” he screamed in pure pleasure. Pressure was building in his loins and he knew that it would soon be all over.

He opened his eyes, wanting to watch, to be part of this, his final moment. He saw her head snap back and turn to the side, her face outlined in the neon light. Her mouth stretched wide—wider than any human’s possibly could—and he could see the fangs glitter red. Then she turned to him again and bowed over his neck. He stretched it willingly for her. Her fangs sank deep, and he felt the pressure explode into her, a small orgasm that grew and spread throughout his body, first warm, then turning cold. Ice cold. Like dead fingers stretching simultaneously down his legs and up over his belly, scratching further upward until it encompassed his heart and stopped it in mid-beat. He laughed, then, long and loud.

“So this is what it is to die!” he cried out just before the iciness gripped his throat and froze him in position, his hands still on her breasts.

He could see, but couldn’t react to, her climbing off him, pulling her breasts free and leaving red streaks on them where his fingers had tightened. She sat on the side of the bed, grabbed a cigarette from the pack he had on the nightstand nearest him and lit up. Smoke rose slowly up from the cherry and circled the air above her.

“Eet will be a moment,” he dimly heard her say. “You are now dead and all ze muscles in your body ‘ave locked up. Rigor mortis is what you call it, no? That will release soon, but eet will be painful. Probably ze most pain you ‘ave evair felt. Eet is also ze last pain you will evair feel.”

She fell silent then, the only sound her soft exhale of smoke. He wondered at the peacefulness of this quiet moment: how many others had died and missed this? How many had wasted Death without tasting her true beauty, without really appreciating what was happening. Most, he figured. Except for people like him and her.

There were more sounds in the room now, he realized. He could pick out the crackle of dried tobacco igniting as she dragged on her cigarette. There was a roach under the bed, its legs ticking away on the hardwood floor, its mandibles clacking in anticipation of food. He didn’t know exactly how he knew this, but he did. Voices filtered in through the window on the wind. Horns honked as cars barely missed each other on the Rue de Misère below. Somewhere, music was playing one of his songs and he turned his attention away from it. That was the past. That was over.

Beyond the music was something else; a sound he recognized but couldn’t yet place. It was coming not from a specific place outside but from everywhere outside, and it was getting louder. A tumult of inharmonious thuds and thumps, like a thousand thousand low drumbeats.

Or heartbeats.

The realization dawned on him just as his body released with a sudden surge of pain, as if every molecule in his body had been singly yet simultaneously hit with sledgehammers. He threw his head back and howled, an unearthly sound never heard in any stage performance, but still not loud enough to drown out the sounds of the thousands of heartbeats assaulting his ears from beyond the window. His hands shot above him, grasping the headboard in a grip that splintered the wood in huge chunks and rained them down around his thin face. With nothing else to provide purchase against the pain, he pulled himself into a fetal ball on the bed, unaware that he was still holding a large chunk of the headboard in his right hand. He lay in that position for perhaps five minutes, perhaps an hour, until the pain subsided. Still, there was a low constant throb throughout his body and the sound of beating hearts thudded in his ears.

And he could smell them. Beneath the acrid scent of the cigarette smoke, beneath the pungent exhaust fumes and the aromas from the French bistros. Beneath it all. And much stronger. The horrifyingly sweet smell of blood.

“Feeling bettair?” she asked.

He looked up at her, unrolling himself from the ball he was in. She was a crimson shadow, a perfectly formed female shadow, in the neon light. His eyes rolled up the arch of her back and settled on her slender neck.

“Nothing zere for you, mon cher,” she said. She took a final drag off her cigarette and snuffed it out in the ashtray on the bedside table. Was that the same cigarette she’d lit when he’d been locked in place? If so, things went much faster than he thought they had.

“Our ‘earts, they no longer beat,” she turned to him, placing one cold hand on his bare chest. “There ees no blood running through our veins. You are ‘ungry now, oui. But I cannot ‘elp you.”

“My body,” he said, and his voice sounded strange to him. Deeper somehow, but smoother, too. “My body… throbs.”

“Zat is ze hungair,” she said. “Zat is why you hear ze heartbeats in ze rue. Zat is why you smell ze blood. Come. Get dressed. I will teach you to hunt.

“We weel be together forever now,” she said, leaning closer to him. The tip of her tongue flicked his lips. He didn’t respond. He wanted to get away from everyone; to have time to himself again. He’d had too much of too many people hounding him lately. He didn’t want to be with anybody for a long while.

His right fist clenched tightly around something and he glanced down to see the sharp, splintered remnant of the headboard in his hand. He turned his gaze back to her.

“No,” he said simply, and brought the splinter of wood in a high arc and down, plunging it into, and through, her back. He nearly succeeded in skewering the both of them. Unaware of his new strength, the tip of the stake pierced his skin but had lost enough momentum to be stopped by his breastbone. She was not so lucky.

With a piercing howl—similar to the one he’d let loose when he’d regained control of his body—she arched backward and flung herself to the floor. He leaned over to watch her writhing there. She landed on her back, shoving the stake even further through her chest. It protruded at an angle from her left breast. The heart, he knew, had to have been punctured. Even so, there was no blood. Just the raw, dry end of the stake that her hands were flailing at and, despite her strength, finding unable to pull free.

“Apparently, you’re wrong,” he told her. “We can feel pain. Looks like you’re in quite a bit of it right now.”

She didn’t answer, but her eyes turned toward him and her mouth worked like an asphyxiating fish’s. A small clicking sound emanated from the back of her throat.

“How do the dead die?” he asked, more to himself than her. In all the vampire movies he’d ever seen they shriveled to dust when the stake was driven through them. There was also a lot of blood in those movies. Great, gushing gouts of it. So far, it didn’t look like reality had any part in the fiction of movies. Then again, art seldom mirrored reality. That much he’d learned in his twenty-seven years.

She finally stopped moving, her hands falling limply away from the stake to thump heavily to the floor. Her eyes still stared at him, but they were far away and vacant now. Even in the neon light, he could see that. As a matter of fact, as he looked around the room, he noticed he could see quite a few things better now than he could before he’d died. Small cracks in the walls and ceilings stood out in sharp relief, like chasms created by earthquakes. A thin layer of dust clung to every object in the room and across from the foot of the bed on the opposite wall, the cockroach he had heard skittering (and could still hear now, he found, when he concentrated) under the bed was making its way up the stuccoed wall.

Yes, it seemed dead was certainly a better way to live.

“Dead,” he chuckled, vaulting off the foot of the bed and picking up his clothes from the floor. “I suppose I had better tell my wife the bad news.”