Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Teaser Tuesday

Something old, something new, something borrowed...nah, just something old.
Please read and comment:


P r o l o g u e

PĂ©rigueux, France 1765

The blood dipped into the hollow of his throat, spilling along his chest so that the ruffle torn from his collar look like a tulip— red bleeding from the center onto the white tips. He could smell the bitter stench, the curdled thickness of his own blood drying on his cooling skin, his breath fading into shallow pants. It would soon end, he knew that, felt it as surely as the cool air whipping through the stone windows and fractured crevices of the castle. Yet his path was certain, his intent sure. He must protect the final Seal, settle his secret, keep it secluded.

He reached the Keep and fell to his knees in front of the statue, its looming height wide and penetrating in white marble. Diana stared down at him, frozen in a cast of etched perfection, as though she knew he were the prey in an unmatched hunt. His eyes lifted through the arch of the windows, toward the horizon and he garnered no joy from the waning moon, no comfort from the dead stillness of the night. He knew his pursuers were close. He could hear the clamor of their voices lifted in anger, rage.

“I smell him,” he heard, the voice thick in its French inflection, drawing nearer. He heard their thunderous approach and he managed to overcome his pain, his impending end, long enough to crawl closer to Diana’s stone feet. His fingers slid across the granite mount and he felt the burning trickle of power, of anointed blessing, shifting through his knuckles.

“So that they never know,” he said, recalling the incantation his mother taught him when he was nothing more than an impressionable child. He watched the blue light encircle the mount, flickering so that the stone melted like wax, the Seal within glowed like tallow ignited in wick and flame. He pressed his bloodied palm against its surface, his pledge preventing approach to its power. “So it remains balanced.”

He allowed himself one small smile only when the soft stone fused and the surface became solid once more. His head pulsed with pain and a small fleck of gray crowded across his vision, unfocused and blurred, jumping like a louse. He smelt them, could taste the sweat from their bodies as they approached, their pallid faces staring down at him, the stern edges of their features exaggerated by their fury. He heard their voices, the bickering internal strife, as conscious thought became dim, as the sounds of the castle beneath him dulled to muffled hums. Just as he lost all notion of thought, all impression of awareness, her narrowed eyes entered his vision. She was beautiful. Beautiful and treacherous and he closed his eyes against the sight of her. He laughed at her anger. He felt the dent of his dimple in his left cheek at his smile as she crouched on top of him, the tip of her tongue a breath from his wet skin.

“Enough,” he heard. The man’s familiar tone almost unrecognizable; it was the sound of friendship, of salvation. “Leave him be.” The words echoed in his mind, cementing into his fading consciousness. He carried them through time, through departure, into infinity.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Teaser Tuesday

From a horror short I've been working on for some time now...

“Vincent?” she said, uncertain. He didn’t respond. She brought a chair to his side and sat in it, far enough away that he could not reach her if he tried. “Vincent, it’s me, Lisette. Lisette Richard.”

Vincent St. Germaine sat in a wheelchair in front of a window overlooking the courtyard below. Beyond the hospital grounds, the Sister could see the New Orleans’ skyline— the wide expanse of tall buildings clustered around long streetcar cables, roads weaving in and away like blue vessels on pale skin. People walked, ran and careened around each other like ants, intent and purpose obvious in their steps. None of them, the Sister thought, had any notion what a beast the city could be, what monsters lay dormant in the shadows surrounding them— waiting to strike, eager to devour them at the first sign of inattention.


For a moment, the Sister closed her eyes, taking in the last bit of calm she could muster, trying to ignore the fear that settled in her chest the moment she’d touched feet off the tarmac. New Orleans was the violent lover she’d escaped as a girl, one she’d promised herself she’d never see again. The nightmares, the terror of them, however, had made it necessary, had forced confrontation, closure. The only person on earth who understood that terror, sat staring feet from her, numbed by medicine, drugged by chemicals that would force the memories away. She tried to ignore the disgust she felt staring at his bald, raw head, remembering the newspaper article, remembering what Vincent’s father had done to him. A few horrifying phrases stuck in her mind like a horse needle— “multiple arrests for aggravated battery of a child…use of a deadly weapon” and “eyes gouged,” “father arrested… ‘my son was a monster.’”


From what the Sister saw now, his father’s attack had done nothing but give Vincent the cast that befit his actions. His son was truly a monster. His skin was red, with a slight sheen over the surface, as though he’d been newly burned. Vincent’s ears were missing as were three of his fingers, but his eyes, though dulled and vacant, remained as she remembered them
green with hazel flecks and round with the beginnings of wrinkles on the edges. As a girl, she'd been taken by his smile. She remembered how confident and encouraging it had been, how the teeth were wide with a small gap between the front teeth. He’d called her Cher. Vincent had been the only other victim she’d talked to during that week, the only one lucid enough to speak. She’d told him her name, but he’d only ever called her Cher.