Her week had been hectic to say the least, non-stop work till late every night, and tomorrow she was planning to spend all day with her mother preparing her for the imminent move into a nursing home.
Now she stood in front of the full-length mirror set into the wardrobe door. Her fancy dress costume looked okay, not as good as it did when she’d seen it on her computer screen but then shopping online always led to disappointingly high expectations she thought to herself.
She was dressed in a black catsuit decorated in fluorescent bones making her look like a glowing skeleton in the dark. However under the bright room lights it was very figure-hugging and left her feeling a little exposed. At 37 she still had an enviable figure but felt it was better to dress to suggest than be too blatant. If only she had a black cloak she could wrap around herself, Marie thought, she’d look mysterious, spooky and quite possibly sexy as well.
Once again she considered not going; she could call or even text Joanne and tell her she wasn’t feeling too well. No, she decided she would go and even try to enjoy herself.
“Marie! Lovely to see you, come in,” exclaimed what looked like a half-drunk Joanne leaning perilously out of the front door of the large town house where she lived with her husband Greg. Marie gave her friend a quick hug and the obligatory peck on the cheek and moved past the pile of discarded coats just inside.
Music was playing, a slow heavy beat, almost tribal, not something she recognised but it sounded good all the same. The house was heaving with people; far more than she’d expected to be here. It was good to see nearly everyone had taken the trouble to dress up. There was a smattering of ghosts – white sheets with eyeholes – for those who’d been too busy or too lazy to make a lot of effort, quite a few zombies in various stages of decomposition, various vampires, a couple of deaths complete with scythes, bandage-covered mummies, Joanne’s boss Wanda dressed as an evil queen, some guy as the Penguin from Batman, an evil jester, even a tall handsome man as the devil complete with red face, horns and a tail!
Issuing a succession of greetings to friends and strangers alike Marie slowly weaved her way through the noisy crowd towards a table in the corner laden with drinks. Greg danced over in time with the music, hips swaying suggestively he slid his body against Marie’s, winked at her and said, “What can I get you to drink, bone girl?”
Marie laughed and batted Greg in an affectionate manner, ”Get away with you! Hmmm… What shall I have?”
She looked at the soft drinks, thinking of how she really should stay sober and drive home. But there was a bottle of her favourite vodka sitting there, just begging to be drunk.
“Okay, maybe a small vodka and orange juice please.”
“One vodka and orange juice for the sexy skeleton lady, coming right up!” Replied Greg and proceeded to play the part of a flamboyant cocktail waiter, preparing her drink with theatrical flourishes.
Marie accepted the proffered glass with a small curtsey, laughing at Greg’s antics. She turned and made her way back into the crowd, moving slowly, mingling, stopping to chat with people she’d not seen in a while. It wasn’t easy as many were so well disguised it could be difficult to make out who it was under the zombie make-up or bandages.
The red devil guy appeared in front of her; moving slowly to the beat of the music, putting her in mind of a snake. He was taller than she’d first thought, thin but not to the point of emaciation, there was a lot of sinewy muscle under there she thought. He gave her a slow, lazy smile revealing very white teeth. Marie smiled back, looked closely at him to see if she recognised who he was and found herself drawn to his dark and mischievous eyes which gleamed in the low light with a hint of sexual devilment. He spoke to her in a deep voice which echoed low in her body somehow, letting her hear his words perfectly despite the hubbub of noise.
“Hi Marie, lovely to meet you. I’m Nick.”
She was momentarily speechless, how did he know her name? Who was he? Quickly recovering she said, ”Hi Nick, lovely to meet you too. Do we know each other?”
“Not yet Marie, but we will, intimately,” he replied enigmatically before sliding back into the crowd and disappearing.
She was shocked by his words, but she could also feel how they’d excited her and started a fire burning slowly inside her. Half repelled and half attracted to him, Marie didn’t know what to do so simply stood there, motionless in the middle of the room as if she were a statue on the dance floor. Joanne bumped into her, rousing her from her reverie.
“Hey babe, you enjoying yourself?”
“Of course, you and Greg always put on a great party,” Marie replied, “Who’s the tall guy dressed up as a devil, name of Nick?”
Joanne looked confused for a moment before realisation dawned, ”Oh Nick, yes he works with Greg, very high up, very secretive stuff,“ she slurred, “Shhhhh!” She waggled a finger in front of her lips before laughing loudly and staggering off in the other direction.
Marie knew Greg worked for a defence company who often dealt with the military and the security services, involved in top secret work he wasn’t allowed to talk about. So Nick was one of those, possibly a scientist – or boffin as she liked to call them – or was he something else, a secret agent maybe? She felt a frisson of excitement run through her at the thought of a torrid affair with a real life James Bond.
Casting herself in the role of a latter day Mata Hari, Marie decided to track down the tall handsome spy and see what more she could find out about him. It wasn’t difficult; as soon as she started looking there he was a few feet away, smiling at her, as if he knew what she was thinking. Marie smiled back and made her way towards him, he said something as she approached which she didn’t understand but it made some form of connection to her hindbrain and from that point on they were inseparable for the rest of the evening.
Much later it seemed natural to Marie that Nick should take her back to his place. If you’d asked her a few hours ago if she’d leave a party with a stranger she’d have looked at you as if you were crazy. But Nick wasn’t a stranger, it was as if she’d known him all her life, or even longer, back through the ages in an unbroken chain from a distant ancestor lost in the past. It was as if she belonged to him in some way and always had, as if without him she was nothing and nobody, didn’t even exist.
With an unspoken agreement they left together, not pausing to say goodbye to their hosts who were unlikely to be found anyway. Arm in arm they stepped out onto the street and strode towards his red Ferrari F430 parked a few yards away as her stiletto heels clacked out a staccato rhythm on the pavement. He opened the passenger door for her and she ducked down into the cream leather sports seat. Within moments he was beside her, starting the V8 engine which quickly settled into its raspy rumble. They didn’t need any further words, thoughts flowed between them like electricity. She felt herself to be in a world of near infinite power where she was safe, cocooned from harm, her whole being under the control of his commanding presence.
Marie didn’t take note of where they were going, all she knew was he filled her mind and soul; this devilish guy who’d appeared from nowhere and captured her heart. All thoughts of work, of her mother, of everything other than him had been completely banished from her mind.
The headlights picked out a pair of tall wrought iron gates ahead as they turned off the road; these opened automatically at their approach, swinging shut behind them as they drove on up the private lane. Just across the brow of a low hill a large mansion appeared. Nick pulled the car around a circular driveway coming to a stop directly outside the imposing front door. Marie had questions she wanted to ask about the house but they seemed unimportant to her the moment he looked across to her in the moonlight. She heard his unspoken command to be quiet and wait, she gladly obeyed knowing he would make everything clear when the time was right for her. He ushered her out of the car and into the house.
As soon as they were inside they were in each other’s arms. She kissed him hungrily, desperate to feel his lips on hers, to taste him, to immerse herself in his scent, in his power. Closing her eyes she felt somewhere at the back of her mind the knowledge that she couldn’t believe how wanton she was behaving; she craved to feel him inside her, to have his body pressing on hers, to become one with him. Her passion was animalistic, mouths together, tongues entwined she started to rip at his clothes to get to his body underneath. His actions reciprocated hers but he was much stronger, able to hold her while he ripped at the flimsy fabric of the catsuit. As her body responded to the freedom of nakedness she felt a sharp pain on her thigh, as if she’d scratched herself on a sharp nail. Marie opened her eyes and couldn’t understand what she was seeing. Nick, the tall, sinewy very handsome devil who sent her crazy with desire had metamorphosed into Nick, the tall, lizard-like creature with what looked to be scales covering his body and sharp talons at the end of his fingers. She froze, then struggled to escape his clutches but he was far stronger than her and held her in a vice-like grip, talons now digging into her naked flesh. She felt his tongue in her mouth unfurl and flicker around, over her teeth and gums, down her throat making her gag. He pulled back from her and she saw a long forked tongue linking them for a moment before it was sucked back into the dark maw at the centre of his face.
She shuddered, wanting to scream, but before she could even draw breath his hand was clamped over her mouth, his talons digging painfully into the soft flesh of her cheeks.
“Hush Marie,” he spoke to her in the same deep voice but now it had a sibilant quality that sent shivers of terror down her spine. “You will continue to obey me, it’s for your own good,” he continued.
She looked at him, at what he’d become, and for a split second she saw the man under the horrendous veneer. Again she was mesmerised by him, but this time like a rabbit in the headlights; frozen into immobility. She couldn’t even nod her head but he read her mind and knew she would be a good girl for him.
Still holding tight to her face he led her further into the house, past dark empty rooms where she could glimpse a thick layer of dust over the floor. They turned a corner and he led her down a set of stone stairs. She noticed his tail – the fake and slightly humorous forked tail of the party so long ago – was alive, swishing back and forth in an angry horizontal arc. She stumbled on the steps and felt his grip tighten, his talons driving into her face. Her jaws felt as if they were being crushed and there was now throbbing points of torment where he’d stabbed through her cheeks, leaking the metallic taste of blood into her mouth and dripping down to her throat.
The room, or cellar she supposed, was circular with stone walls arching over into a dome above. It was lit by thousands of fat candles, all seemingly giving off a stench of death and decay. She gagged, feeling bile rise up to fill her mouth and throat with a bitter, acidic taste. It burned where it touched the wounds in her face. In the exact centre was a huge stone block, around four feet high, two feet wide and 6 feet long. Nick, or whatever he’d become, took his hand away from over her mouth. Marie felt as if she’d not drawn breath in hours and tried to take gasping lungfuls of air while coughing and swallowing back the taste of bile.
She took her first proper look at where she was and her eyes were drawn to the stone. It was difficult to see by the candle light which flickered as if brushed by a multitude of spirit breezes but there appeared to be a shallow shape set into the top, a human shape in the stone, as if worn down over countless centuries by innumerable bodies placed there and thrashing in their death throes. Words arose unbidden in her mind, “slaughter stone”. She had a momentary vision of this stone, used for human sacrifice, since the dawn of time as an unbroken succession of priests mired in evil performed horrors upon the innocent, holding aloft the cut out hearts of the slaughtered, dripping blood, in order to satisfy the demands of a nameless terror which had existed as long as man.
The creature Nick looked at her quizzically, head cocked slightly, before nodding to itself. “I see you’ve glimpsed the truth the second use of the high alter, we were correct when we said you were one of the descendents.”
Marie had no idea what he meant. Again he seemed to read her mind. “Your family have always been one of us; you’re bound to us throughout time. It took a little while to find you, after all most of your ancestors have been gathered at a much earlier age, but now you’re here and very soon you’ll be one of us too.”
She shook her head in confusion, then one thing he’d said registered in her mind, “You said “us”? You mean there’s another one of you?”
The thing laughed at her, “Much more than just one other, we are many, we are legion.”
She had been crouched on the floor, breathing hard, conserving her strength. This was a nightmare and she knew she had to get out, shake off her terror and just move. Gauging the moment Marie leapt up when the thing was half turned from her and made a run back towards the steps. She didn’t get more than a couple of yards before it had her again in its grasp. This time the talons dug deep into her arms, cutting through the skin into the flesh beneath. She shrieked in pain and terror, thrashing her legs in a futile gesture to keep moving as it effortlessly lifted her into the air and threw her down hard on the top of the stone. She felt bones breaking, piling more pain on top of pain. She couldn’t move; every attempt left her in screaming agony.
The thing arranged her limbs so she lay spread-eagled. It climbed onto the stone and straddled her. Marie shut her eyes and whimpered as she felt it enter her, forcing itself inside her, stretching her, pushing deep into her as if boring a tunnel up through her body. She cried out in fear and panic, telling herself this couldn’t be happening but knowing with an icy certainty it was. The pain was indescribable; her whole body was in torment, every nerve on fire. Her eyes flickered open to see the giant lizard-human hybrid thrusting deep and hard into her very core. Dimly she perceived others around her, staring hungrily at her. Then her vision narrowed until it was the face of Nick she focused on, set amid the darkness until mercifully she blacked out.
All this had happened almost exactly three years ago. When Marie had woken up she was in her own bed, in her own home. A feeling of great calmness and satisfaction filled her; the horror of the night before was almost gone, she could just about feel it at the edge of consciousness as if it had been no more than a bad dream. To her friends and colleagues her life continued just like it always had, working hard and steadily gaining recognition followed by promotion. She was highly successful now with a much bigger house and a brand new car. She still visited her mother every Saturday in the nursing home but today she’d be leaving early; there was a party to attend.
She’d considered herself in the mirror, a svelte sexy demon complete with horns and a tail; all ready to go. As she parked her red Ferrari outside the venue she knew she’d catch the eye of at least one young lonely man tonight. Who would be the lucky one, she thought. He would go willingly with her when she left, captivated by her, in total awe of her and thinking he’d found the one person in the world he was destined to serve for eternity. Who would be her prey this time? Who would she take back to be sacrificed and consumed by them all?
1 comment:
Thanks...loved it
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