Old Flames, Burned Hands Read online

  Tilda wandered, taking in the place but the candlelight only travelled so far and the space remained dim and obscure. She clocked a lumpy sofa but no bed or kitchen of any kind. “Where do you sleep?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t really sleep much.”

  Her knees bumped into things she couldn’t see. The adrenaline had burned off, leaving her hands shaky and guts a little queasy. Her wrist was aching and she wondered if she’d knocked it against something during the run. “Do you think that guy’s okay?”

  “Who?”

  She stopped and looked at him. Was he joking? “The guy you put through the window. He was cut pretty bad.”

  “He got off easy.”

  The coldness of that startled her. “I don’t remember you being so violent.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Let that asshole run his mouth?” He looked away, shaking his head. “He isn’t worth worrying about.”

  Tilda regarded him from across the room. Back at the club, it had felt like nothing had changed as she held his hand but now, everything had changed. It had been almost two decades. Maybe she really didn’t know him at all anymore. She slid a book down from a stack and tilted it towards the candle but the spine was frayed raw, the title lost. Cracking it open, she found the book was in a foreign language, its pages mouldy. “What happened back there? All those women kept looking at you. Some of the men too, like they couldn’t keep their eyes off of you.”

  His eyes narrowed but he said nothing.

  The silence was maddening. “I mean, I can’t keep my eyes off you but that’s me. Those other women, they were so bold, practically coming on to you right in front of their boyfriends.”

  He watched her knead her wrist. “Did you hurt your hand?”

  “No. It’s just the old injury.”

  “From the accident?”

  “It’s never been the same since.”

  Closing the distance between them, he reached for her hand but Tilda hesitated, almost retreated. She didn’t know why. He frowned then took her hand, wrapping his fingers around her wrist.

  “Does it always hurt?”

  “Not always.”

  He studied her forearm, as if he could see through the tissue and determine what was wrong with the bones. The flesh on the back of her neck bristled as this backdrop bore down around her. They weren’t skulking around in her backyard anymore, whispering against the rustle of the weeping willow. This was his turf. They were here alone and no one knew where they were.

  Even she couldn’t pinpoint exactly where they were.

  He was close enough that she could smell him and her heart was clanging. Her entire being existed only in that slender patch of skin where his hand touched hers.

  Unbidden and unwanted, a wheezy nag of a voice crawled inside her ear. What now? You knew where this was going all along. What are you thinking?

  Shut up.

  You know what they call it, the voice ragged on. You know the wreckage that follows. There’s a name for women like you.

  I don’t care.

  All it takes is a match. But know this, the fire takes all. Everything burns and nothing will be left. Cinders. Less than ash.

  What was she supposed to do? Stop? Now, after all this time?

  “Gil,” she said, partly to squelch that awful voice. His grip tightened on her wrist as she spoke his name.

  “Tilda,” he said, and his eyes lifted to meet hers. She felt his hand slide over the small of her back and pull her in. “I think we’re in trouble.”

  She let go and fell into him, like a daydream or a fever. All or nothing. She felt his hands on her, greedy and demanding, and she pushed into him, wanting to swallow him up. Eat him alive and in turn let herself be gorged on. Torn apart and rent asunder. Burned to nothing.

  She felt her clothes pushed down and pulled off, her own hands ripping at his. A tug at the back of her head as he pulled her hair to tilt her chin up. His mouth scraped down her neck to her collarbone. To her breast, his teeth clamping onto the nipple so hard she jerked and flinched. His hand tightened on her hair to keep her still as his teeth tugged her raw.

  Then a sharp prick of precise pain. Another and another, like stings, until it crossed wires and she reared back. She pushed him away but he wouldn’t let go, his teeth clamped over her nipple.

  “Stop. You’re hurting me.”

  Another, sharper sting. She pushed his face from her breast and Gil stumbled back like he was drunk, his gaze walleyed and unfocused. There was blood on his lips, more of it smeared over his chin.

  “Gil.” She looked down, saw her breast slathered with blood. Pulsing out in a sluice from thin cuts. “What did you do?”

  Staggering back, he knocked hard into the wall of aquariums. His mouth twisted up and his eyes flickered between regret and horror. “Tilda. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Her palm slapped wet as she cupped the wound. “I’m bleeding.”

  She moved towards him but he scrambled backwards like a magnet on the reverse pole. “Wait,” he said.

  “It won’t stop.” She watched the blood dribble through her clenched fingers. “Oh shit, Gil. It won’t stop.”

  He came back to her, a length of cloth in his hand from God knew where, clamping it against the wound. Enough pressure to snap a rib. “It’s okay. It’ll stop.”

  “I think you nicked an artery.” She clutched his wrist. “Why did you do that?”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I thought I could keep it clenched.” He hovered over her, keeping the pressure on the wound. “Bad call.”

  “Keep what clenched? What are you talking about?”

  “You haven’t figured it out yet?”

  “What am I supposed to figure out?” The anger flashed up hot and quick. She slammed her palm into his sternum and turned away. “I can’t figure out anything about you!”

  He stayed where he was, watching her gather up the cloth to reapply the pressure over the lacerated nipple. “Do you remember the night before I died?”

  She wanted to scream that she remembered everything but, recalling the last time she’d made that claim, she held her tongue.

  The hum from the street below leaked into the room.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me all of it.”

  GIL WIPED THE BACK of his hand across his blood spackled chin. “Do you remember my old hobby? The one you hated.”

  Tilda kept her distance. “Creeping around abandoned buildings?”

  “That’s how it started.”

  There was a name for it, Tilda recalled. Urban exploration. Infiltration. Breaking into abandoned or forbidden sites, trespassing where you weren’t supposed to go. A subculture of crawling through condemned buildings, closed down properties and urban ruins. There was even a zine, published irregularly by one of the movements founders in the city. Ninjalicious? Something cute like that. The mysterious author would go off exploring these verboten spaces and take photographs and write up each adventure in his zine. Gil devoured every issue he could find.

  They were both avid zine readers at the time. These crudely laid-out, hand-stapled, missives were the primary modes of communication for a dizzying array of subcultures. Where Tilda read zines about music, Gil’s tastes ran a gamut of body modification to confessional sexcapades, Nordic Satan worshippers to the prison art of convicted serial killers.

  He had taken to urban exploration with the same passion brought to his painting. Breaking into shuttered factories near the old stockyards or the tomb-like silos along the waterfront. Gil would come home at dawn with his clothes filthy and torn, his hands and arms scraped raw with the threat of tetanus. Exhilarated and triumphant after each dive-bomb into these forbidden zones, he’d regale her with what he’d seen. Tilda begged him to be careful but never tried to stop him. Only once did she tell him to quit these dangerous outings, and that was the night he’d stumbled upon a corpse in a vacated warehouse near the railyards. An intransigent who, as far as Gil could tell, had taken s
helter in the building only to freeze to death during a frigid winter night. He’d placed an anonymous call to the police about the remains but never learned anything more about the lost soul.

  She suggested he find a new hobby but Gil wouldn’t listen. Said he was just getting to the good stuff now, the hidden secrets sealed up behind every ‘Do Not Enter’ sign. Tilda suspected that he continued his adventuring because he wanted to make her sick with worry and, in retrospect, he admitted that there was some truth to that. But it was so much more. Infiltrating verboten ground was a high that made his pulse spike like nothing before.

  “It was like a drug,” Gil said. “The more I indulged, the more I craved it. Until I went too far.” He leaned back against the table and folded his arms. Looking up at the smoggy sky in the high windows, Gil told Tilda his story.

  Two nights before the accident is when it began.

  Shimmying through a gap in a boarded-up window, Gil dropped to the floor of a dryrot warehouse near the butt end of Parliament Street. One of the oldest structures he had ever broken into, some last vestige of old Corktown. Scavenging through the debris, the floorboards snapping under his feet, he picked through bottles and awls and hammers from over a century ago. Down a flight of stone steps, into the cold cellar, was where he stumbled across the blood.

  At first glance it looked like oil, splashed so dark and thick over the flagstones. More of it spattered against the walls, dried to a blackened skin that flaked away into sand against his fingers. Handprints of the stuff on the cool wall and footprints tracked through the pool on the floor. Sitting smack in the center of that mass of blood was a single running shoe, the inside sole strangely free of the red stuff as if its owner had kicked it off to tramp barefoot through the gore.

  A chill passed through him as he realized that the blood and the stray sneaker must have belonged to the same person. There was so much blood it was hard to conceive of it coming from one person. Throwing the beam of his flashlight over the gore, Gil could pick out older stains of blood speckled amongst the new stuff. A killing floor. Roaming the light across the bloodied handprints stirred images of some satanic cult to his mind. The stuff he’d read about, the weird rituals and blood ceremonies. The thrill of discovery vaporised and cold fear took its place, shrivelling his balls back to reality.

  This is fucking freaky, he thought. Don’t panic. Just the get the hell out of here.

  Gil halted his story, shaking his head as if he didn’t believe his own tale. Tilda didn’t move, waiting for him to continue.

  Gil took a breath. “When I turned for the stairs, I realized I wasn’t alone. I couldn’t see anyone but I could hear them. I thought maybe it was rats or something but it wasn’t. The sound was weird, like a hissing noise. But more than that, I could feel them in the room with me. I’d never felt so scared in my life.”

  “Them?” Tilda didn’t want to interrupt but couldn’t help herself. “There was more than one?”

  He bobbed his head. “I got a look at one of them. That’s when I ran. Like I’d never run before.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Not who. What. I got no more than a glimpse of it, Til, but it wasn’t…” His voice withered and he looked away.

  Tilda stifled her questions. This clearly wasn’t easy for him to get out and he needed room to unpack it all. So she waited.

  “I cut my hands to shit crawling back out of that window. I could hear them coming up behind me, hissing and making all kinds of awful sounds. One of them caught my boot and I panicked and kicked like a son-of-a-bitch. Left the boot behind. Do you know how hard it is to run for your life with only one boot? The car wasn’t that far away. I jumped in and booked it out of there, laying on the horn the whole time.”

  “Hold on. When did this happen?” The question just blurted out and she scolded herself to shut up and let him speak.

  “Two nights before the accident,” he said. “I called you when I got home. Do you remember?”

  “I do. You weren’t making much sense. You just kept saying that you loved me, over and over.” She bit her lip, not wanting to confess something but felt the need to. “I had no idea, Gil. I thought you were high.”

  “That’s okay. I must have sounded like a babbling idiot.”

  “That’s why you were in such a weird mood that day,” she muttered, thinking back to the eve of the accident. He’d been so moody and erratic with her, snapping at any perceived slight, acting paranoid. “I just assumed you were coming down off a bad night. I’m sorry.”

  “I kept telling myself that I’d imagined it. That they were just vagrants squatting in an empty building. I should have called the cops, about the blood at least, but I didn’t. I didn’t do anything. If I had, maybe none of this would have happened.”

  “What wouldn’t have happened?”

  He wiped his hand across his mouth again. Looked up at her. “That was what stepped out onto the road that night. They caused the accident. They came looking for me.”

  She still didn’t remember that part, someone running out in front of the car. Or the fact that she was driving. None of this made sense. She held up a hand to slow him down. “How did they know where to find you?”

  “They were following me. Waiting for the right moment. The minute we hit Cherry, it was a done deal. They caused the car to flip and then they dragged me away.”

  The wail of a police siren leeched through the window, growing louder until it crested and faded.

  Gil stared at the window long after the siren had dissipated. “There was five or six of them, dragging me down to the water’s edge. Where it was dark. Too dark for me to see them. Small mercies. They tore into me, like I just did to you. All of them, ripping me with their teeth. I never thought anything could hurt so bad. When the pain faded I knew I was going into shock. I knew I was going to die. At that point, I didn’t care anymore, if it meant the pain would stop.

  “But then one of them withdrew, losing interest in me, and it crawled up the embankment. It was looking for the car. Looking for you. I panicked. I begged them not to touch you. I swore I would do anything if they left you alone. I didn’t know if they even understood what I was saying.”

  His voice trailed off again. Tilda felt her fingernails cutting into her palms. “What happened?”

  “I died,” he shrugged, as if the point was obvious. “Then I came back.”

  She tried to let that sink in but it refused to settle anywhere. How could it? It made no sense. She reached out for his hand. “Gil, who were these people?”

  “They weren’t people, Tilda. They bled me dry with their teeth. They hide in the darkness. A long time ago they were people but not anymore. They’re not even human.”

  Tilda exhaled, she had been holding her breath the whole time. Had she expected some other answer? Was she disappointed? Was there a response to this story that didn’t sound absolutely fucking crazy?

  “Vampires? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “I know. Insane, right? But there it is.” His eyes dropped to the bloodied cloth cupped to her breast. “Has the bleeding stopped?”

  “I think so.” She tilted the makeshift bandage away to find the blood congealed into dark lumps. Taking in another deep breath, she tried to organize her thoughts. “So you’re one of them now? That’s where you’ve been all this time?”

  “Yes. They understood what I pleaded for that night. A bargain was struck. They left you alone.” He watched her eyes cast about the room, as if looking for something to latch onto and hold steady. “You’re not buying anything of this, are you?”

  “I’m trying to. I am. But Jesus, Gil… it sounds absolutely insane.” She almost laughed. “Vampires? Sleeping in coffins and turning into bats and all that?”

  “It’s not like that. These things are monsters. And they hold to one sacred abiding law, which is to be unseen. They hide in the darkness. They don’t mingle or associate with people in any way. They hide their tracks. That’s why th
ey came after me. I’d stumbled into their nest and gotten away. A loose end. And they would have taken you too but they needed something from me.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Someone new. The coven is kept small, which is one of the ways they manage to stay hidden. They hadn’t allowed an initiate in a long long time but they needed someone new to keep them safe. Someone who understood the outside world.

  “You gotta understand, they’re not human. They don’t even speak English anymore. The world moves on and changes while they keep to the shadows but they need someone new from time to time to help the coven stay hidden. Someone who understands the current world. That’s what they needed from me.”

  “They don’t speak English?” she asked.

  “They barely speak at all. It’s hard to explain but they communicate with sounds or body language. Smells even. It’s almost telepathic. It took a while to understand what they wanted from me.”

  It was too much to absorb. Too fast and too fucking insane. She felt her chest pounding. “What happened when you… you know, woke up?”

  “You don’t just wake up. You scream your way back from death. It’s like being born again but you’re conscious the whole time, and the birth canal is made of sharp teeth. When I stopped screaming and when the pain levelled off, they were standing over me. Watching me come through. It was terrifying. To go through that and then to open your eyes to those awful faces.

  “Only one of them could still speak. Barely. He told me what they were. What I was now. That I was part of them and my place was to help them. If I refused, they would hunt down the woman in the car.”

  The weight of it settled like ash, covering Tilda whole. “So you agreed.”

  “It’s a rare event when they turn someone,” he went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “They just kill and feed and dispose of the body. Even when they do turn someone, it rarely takes.”

  “Why?”

  “Most people can’t take it, the change. Coming back from the dead, understanding what they’ve become. Most people go insane, and I mean completely apeshit. They’re destroyed on the spot. But the ones that make it through and join the coven? For them, the real test is still to come. The true test is to cut off all ties to humanity, and more importantly, to everyone you ever knew.