LAST WEEK: Hephaestus, Greek god of fire, gave Pamela a silver bullet.
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Chapter 106
Gabriel
San Francisco — 1985
Stained Glass Soul
Gabriel dreams he is floating inside the chapel where he’d been baptized. He is drifting between the stained-glass windows, dancing over the flesh of a star-white baby, insubstantial as a light ray. No more solid than loss or memory, he drifts between the colors, surveying his younger self like an undiscovered country.
The chapel is dark yet awash with color. Leaded lines separate the pigments. Gabriel does not know, has no reason to know, that the world is not always divided. He has never seen the moon turning the dark sea silver, or blue sky and yellow sun bringing forth green leaves. He watches, an outsider even in his dreams, observing how the color and light playing over the pale baby imbuing it with life. Like faith made visible, the fragments of color and belief do not combine.
Gabriel shifts in slumber. His dreaming self casts a rock through the arching window, smiling as colored fragments fall like needle-sharp tears on his infant’s body. He is only sorry that he wakes before his blood begins to flow.
Chapter 107
Mike
Napa — 1979
Shadow in the Night
Ryo watches as Mike finishes laying the foundation for a large house a few miles away from his home. After the last bucket of cement is poured and smoothed into the semblance of a Brobdingnagian sponge cake, he and his buddies stop by O’Malley’s for a celebratory glass, or four, of dark bitter ale. At 11:30 pm, he stumbles out into the cool night air.
“Wanna ride, Mike?”
“Naw, it’s a short walk. Be good to clear my head a bit before I get home.” He giggles.
He wanders down the empty road that leads home. The trees and hills are illuminated by stardust. His thoughts are happily fuzzy. Life is gentle, pleasant, amusing.
Something large hits him from behind, knocking all the breath from his body. He pitches into the dust. All is darkness.
Sometime later, he awakens, face-down in a ditch by the side of the road. He has no idea how long he has laid there, but it’s still night. Slowly he turns onto his back. Gingerly he rises to his knees. Gradually he wobbles to his feet. He moves his head, his legs, his arms. He stretches his fingers, wiggles his toes. He seems unhurt, just bruised, and uncomfortable. His stomach is unsettled, churning with desire and pain. He rubs his neck. Under the starlight, his hand is bloody.
He feels for his wallet. It’s in his pocket, cash, credit cards, and ID inside. He shakes his head, trying to clear the miasma of confusion and fear. Placing one foot carefully, methodically, in front of the other he begins to weave his way home. It’s amazing how difficult that is. He’s nauseated, his brain clouded by fog. His stomach revolves, sickness turning into want, into hunger, into need.
At home, Celeste and Ashley are asleep on the porch, the sky awash with stars.
Mike grabs Ashley from her quilted comfort. Her head droops back like a wilted flower. Her neck shows white in the night. Mike’s canines grow long with desire and need. They sink into her as if she were ice-cream. He sucks furiously till all her blood is gone. Over her neck, his eyes meet Celeste’s eyes, wide and brown. He opens his mouth. His teeth are red.
“Such a little body,” he says. He grabs Celeste. One tiny wail escapes her throat before Mike bites into her soft, young neck. In just three minutes, she too is dry, a small, hollow doll.
Mike looks up into the shocked, frightened face of Jennifer.
“Hardly a nibble,” he says. He leaps at Jennifer, propelling her down onto the porch as he had many years ago when they were newlyweds. She flails wildly. As his teeth puncture her doughy flesh, she moans. It’s much the sound she had made years before, when they were young and wrestling with desire. Afterward, he sleeps.
Mike wakes in the soft gray before day. Dazed, he looks around. He struggles upright. The door stands open. Mike looks into the full-length mirror at the end of the hall. In the mirror, Mike sees the empty yard and wooden porch. On the porch lie three figures, bloodless and white. He stumbles toward the mirror. As the sun emerges from below the horizon, the door slams shut. Mike howls a cry of knowledge, loss, and understanding. Exhausted, he collapses to the floor.
He awakens at dusk. Slowly he stands. He looks into the mirror. No one looks back. Opening the door, he stares out onto the porch. The three figures are still there. They look like stiff dolls, waxwork replicas of Jennifer, Ashley, and Celeste. The air smells slightly dense, wet, and almost shockingly sweet, like the vomit of a drunk. It coats the skin and settles in the air.
Mike throws his head back and howls. His tool belt is still fastened around his waist. He wrenches a chisel out, and hits his mouth over, and over, and over again. It runs with blood. It tastes like warm stew, hot spiced cider, party dresses, and shooting stars. He continues beating himself until his two canines fall out. They drop onto the floor, two shining fangs. Mike falls after them. He lies on the floor sick with pain, sorrow, hunger, and craving. The deadly hands of dawn stretch rose-pink fingers across the yard, tapping at the door. Mike sleeps on.
He awakes hungry, starving. He leaves that night, walking for weeks through empty fields, along cold dark streets. He barely survives. He can no longer bite, but nor can he drink the blood of something dead.
Chapter 108
Gabriel
San Francisco — 1985
The Space Between the Music
Dreams wash over Gabriel like water drenching him in color and bird song, expanding his being and perhaps his soul. Life offers a feast of hue and harmony, yet denies him a seat at the banquet. Gabriel, who has never felt anything, feels rage. He is a starving man who smells food. He wants to stretch out the space between the notes until there is nothing but silence, silence and black and white.
Chapter 109
Mike
Napa —1979
Intoxication
Surveying the past unfold is both beautiful and terrible, Ryo thinks. It’s watching the flower bud blossom and fade in a single instant. It’s seeing the skull beneath the skin. It’s knowing the accident will happen, as it does, as it must, and being unable to prevent it. Perhaps that is why the living can only view the present. If they saw the end, they couldn’t bear it. But now that I’m free of the slow pace of existence, watching the past, observing the future divide and multiply and begin again, I begin to understand its terrible beauty and its glorious symmetry.
Keith is drunk with the joy of being seventeen and having a car. He celebrates by downing a six-pack, chasing them with a few tequila shots. Then he wraps his car around a large oak.
The tree has stood at the bend of the road for over two hundred years, its leaves, large, evergreen, and shiny, shading the street, providing homes for countless woodpeckers, squirrels, beetles, birds, and wasps. The oak is sturdy, hardly dented by the turquoise Buick swathed around it.
Keith is unconscious, his head and wrists slashed by shards of glass. Cindy, his girlfriend, is trapped in the wreckage, her legs crushed and useless.
Mike stumbles toward the scene, half delirious from the smell of so much blood.
“Help,” Cindy calls. “Oh, thank God!” she sobs. “Call an ambulance. Thank God you came.”
Mike reaches toward Keith, bending down like a lover to suck at his open wrists.
Cindy’s screams pierce the night. Mike continues until Keith is white and dry, then he moves toward Cindy.
Mike is sated, but he finds a large water bottle and a half-empty bourbon bottle unbroken in the wreckage. Emptying the contents, Mike pulls Cindy’s arm over the mouth of the bottle. Slashing it with a shard of glass, he firmly, surely, twists her forearm and wrings her blood into the empty vessels. She thrashes wildly. The night echoes with her screeching, but as the blood drains, she quiets.
When the bottles are full, Mike departs, continuing along the empty road until dawn. Before first light, he covers himself with fallen leaves and slumbers until nightfall.
Within a week, he reaches San Francisco. The bottles have been empty for two days. He can barely creep past the sun’s rising fire into a vacant basement of an empty shop. He lies on the dusty, hard floor, neither dead nor undead, dwelling in a half-life, between worlds, haunted by visions. Hunger gnaws at his innards like a starving beast.
On the evening of the third day, the door creaks open. Mike blinks up at a tall, gaunt figure, long as a noonday shadow in the doorway. The shadow advances, cradling Mike’s face between skeletal hands and tipping back his head. Taking a bottle from inside his coat, the tall man uncaps it and pours warm, life-giving blood down Mike’s throat.
“Thanatos,” the tall man says, extending his hand to Mike. Mike takes it. He can feel every bone in Thanatos’ hand. If he’d been human, he would’ve been afraid, but he is long past fear. A second man looms out of the glooming.
“My friend,” Thanatos says, “He has many names, but family and friends call him Ploutos.”
Ploutos is as tall as Thanatos, but there the resemblance ceases. Ploutos is tanned and toned. He has dark, curling hair and a full beard. He wears heavily rimmed shades, the glass tinted a green so dark they seem almost black. In contrast to Thanatos’ somber clothes, Ploutos wears a wild Hawaiian shirt, decorated with brightly colored birds soaring and pecking at cornucopias overflowing with an abundance of vivid fruit.
Ploutos looks down at Mike. His glaze, though hidden by his shades, seems to be focused slightly left of Mike’s prone body. In Ploutos’ hand is a red-tipped white cane.
“My friend and I,” Thanatos says, voice deep as a rumble of thunder, “wish to make you an offer. This building has been vacant for a long, long time. It’s ripe for business, and I think that you might be just the man we’ve been waiting for.”
“Yes,” Ploutos grins. From the darkness, a diamond, perfect and brilliant as a star, winks out from the center of a golden front tooth. His voice is low and smooth as an underground river.
When he speaks, Mike sees a grotto. Stalactites hang from the ceiling like chandeliers, precious gems rise up from hard earth, forming a ridged, gleaming throne.
“I am the money man,” Ploutos says. “Thanatos provides catering services. If you agree, I will provide you with the goods, Thanatos with the sustenance you require. You need never leave this basement; never need worry about food nor fear the burning sun. If not…” His sentence trails off. Mike feels the request is merely a formality. His fate has already been chosen as surely as if it had been carved in stone, as absolute as if forged in iron.
Mike leaves the shop only once, to hang his sign “Mike’s Pawn Shop,” on the door. He never sees Ploutos again, but every night, when Mike wakes, there are new objects in his shop, and always, always there are bowls full of the odd, silver-rimmed coins that Thanatos takes as payment for the blood he delivers daily.
Mike never quite understands the necessity of Ploutos delivering and Thanatos collecting, but soon he ceases to wonder, settling into the placid half-life his existence has become.
Chapter 110
Greek Underground — Time Before Time
Blind Abundance
Unlike Thanatos and many of his Greek brethren, Ploutos never moved to the city. He’s happy in his home deep beneath the hard earth in caves formed from jewels and gold.
He’s the god of wealth, both of treasures hidden underground and of the harvest, for seeds need time to sleep in moist darkness before they grow. This is why he favors shirts that scream with color and life even though he cannot see.
When he was just a baby, he was blinded by Zeus so that he would dispense his gifts without prejudice: blind abundance. Although he is lame, he has wings. He might arrive slowly, but he can fly off without a warning, leaving you with obligations and no money. It’s a wonder how a blind man can move so swiftly, but he is, after all, a god, not a man. Butterflies navigate not with eyes, but with antennae. Nearly-blind bats snatch insects from midair guided by sound and vibration. Dolphins, toothed whales, swifts, and screws chart their course by calls and echoes. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that blind gods fly fast as fortune flees.
It’s a good partnership. Ploutos provides the coinage, yet never interferes. He doesn’t mind giving some of his excess to the dead for their final journey.
Chapter 111
San Francisco — 1985
Fear
Another body has been found. It’s a young woman. She’d been returning late from a class, cutting across the campus of San Francisco State University to her dorm. She bears the marks of The Castro Killer: the punctures, the lack of blood, and the indentation of a chain, delicate as a whisper, around her neck.
She is the first victim, except for Jackson, who had not been returning from a bar. The second victim who is not gay. All patterns have been broken. The killings have no logic. There is no way to predict who may be next.
The city panics. Schools shut. Children are kept indoors. Banks close early. Guards are posted everywhere. All along the street, dogs stop barking. Cats refuse to emerge from underneath beds, even when tempted by tuna. Throughout the city, milk curdles and ice cream melts, even though the temperature drops well below freezing. The city has never experienced such temperatures. Normally, ocean breezes keep frost away. But now, hummingbirds stiffen in the air and drop to the ground, feathers heavy with ice. Roses blacken and palm trees topple. Fear hangs in the streets thicker than fog. River searches for recipes that do not use dairy or require refrigeration.
Watch the author read this week’s installment in the video below:
NEXT WEEK: Teresa, drinking almost continually now, spends every night tracking Frank and Mary through the city. She progresses from champagne to gin. She buys a small pearl-handled revolver.
Edited by Mitchelle Lumumba and Sophie Gorjance.
E.E. King is cohost of the MetaStellar YouTube channel's Long Lost Friends segment. She is also a painter, performer, writer, and naturalist. She’ll do anything that won’t pay the bills, especially if it involves animals. Ray Bradbury called her stories “marvelously inventive, wildly funny and deeply thought-provoking. I cannot recommend them highly enough.” She’s been published widely, including Clarkesworld and Flametree. She also co-hosts The Long Lost Friends Show on MetaStellar's YouTube channel. Check out paintings, writing, musings, and books at ElizabethEveKing.com and visit her author page on Amazon.