Michael Prescott - Shiver

“Can’t,” she gasped. “Can’t do it.”

He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to. That’s what you get for being such a naughtykins. Now, come on, eat some more of your sandwich.”

She looked at the jars again. The pale dead faces. The bloodless flesh.

“I guess I don’t have much of an appetite right now,” she said softly.

The Gryphon brushed aside the comment with an irritated wave of his hand. “Not long ago you told me you were starved. Anyway, I went to all the trouble of fixing you a nice lunch, and you wouldn’t want me to think of you as ungrateful. Would you?”

“No.” She sighed. “No, of course not.”

“All right, then. So let’s stop being stubborn and eat our nice lunch. Here, I’ll show you the way.” He lifted her sandwich. “This is the train.” With his other hand he gently pried her lips apart. “And this is the tunnel.” Slowly he guided the sandwich toward her mouth. “Choo-choo. Choo-choo.”

Somehow she managed to consume the rest of the sandwich. When she was done, the Gryphon set to work on his own lunch. He ate quickly and sloppily, smacking his lips, gulping when he swallowed, draining his cup of Pepsi in a series of slurps and gasps. Bread crumbs and droplets of soda spotted the blue uniform. He didn’t notice.

“You know,” he said suddenly, speaking through a last mouthful of Wonder Bread, “this is nice, Wendy. It’s a genuine pleasure sharing a meal with a beautiful woman. I could get used to it.”

I couldn’t, she thought. She said nothing.

“You’ve still got a little soda left. Want it?”

She didn’t dare refuse. “Sure.”

Again he tipped the cup to her mouth, but he was clumsy this time; Pepsi spilled down her chin, splashing the front of her blouse.

His tongue clucked. “Oh, dear.”

He grabbed one of the paper napkins and began mopping up the mess. His hand moved over her chest, scrubbing briskly, then reached her left breast and stopped there, motionless, like some pale scorpion frozen in the instant before its strike. Wendy sat rigid in her chair, watching as his thick, meaty fingers slowly curled into a half-fist. Through the blouse’s thin fabric, he gripped the cup of her bra.

She felt a scream welling at the bottom of her throat. Her heart pounded in her ears, its beat so loud and insistent she was certain he could hear it too.

His fingers twitched. She thought of a corpse’s hand, jolted by an electric shock. He began squeezing her breast with a slow, mechanical motion that was not a caress.

“I want you, Wendy,” he breathed, his voice blurred.

The scream tugged at her vocal cords, fighting for release. She let out a long shuddering breath and tried to stay in control. Somehow she had to stay in control.

His hand went on contracting rhythmically, the fingers digging in, then relaxing, then digging in again. A farmer milking a cow.

“I told you we’d be lovers. Now we will be. And it will be good. So good.”

Say something, she ordered herself. Say something now, dammit, or else he’s going to do it-oh, my God-he’s really going to do it.

When she spoke, her voice was flat and almost normal.

“Before we… go any further, don’t you think we ought to… get to know each other better?”

“I already know everything I need to know about you.”

“But I hardly know anything about you.”

“There’ll be time for that. Later.”

The binding on her wrists seemed tighter than before. She couldn’t feel her hands at all. Her head hummed. The sticky sweet residue of the peanut butter rose in her throat. She was going to be sick.

“But I wasn’t expecting this to happen so soon,” she said desperately. “You said… tonight.”

“It’s night somewhere in the world. I don’t want to wait any longer, not another second. And deep down, neither do you.”

She whimpered and tried not to lose her mind.

His hand released her breast. He gazed at her for a long moment, his expression blank and unreadable, and she looked back at him, past the two jars with their white staring faces.

Then slowly he smiled. An ugly humorless smile.

He rose from his chair and circled the table, closing in on her.

Help me, she thought. Help me, somebody. Don’t let him do this. I’d rather be dead. Oh, God, I’d rather be dead.

He reached her side. His right hand snaked under her buttocks; his left hand crawled up her back, spider-quick. The chair dropped away as he lifted her in his arms.

She shut her eyes, not to see him leering down at her, breathing hard, his nostrils flaring, his tongue gliding over the tips of his teeth like an eel. But even in the darkness behind her closed eyelids, she could smell him, the cloying greasy smells of sweat and peanut butter.

He was walking. Carrying her across the trailer like a groom delivering his bride to their nuptial bed. Above the roar of blood in her ears, she heard the thumps of his footsteps on the thin carpet, the staccato hiss of his breath. They were sounds that might be made by some large, antique machine, the kind with steam-driven pistons. Thump. Hiss. Thump. Hiss.

She felt herself descending, felt a soft foam pad yielding under her. The futon. He was putting her on the futon. Laying her supine with her bound hands pinned under her. Helpless. His toy to play with. His masturbatory fantasy, his life-size doll.

The scream rose a notch in her throat. She gritted her teeth and held it in.

When she opened her eyes, she saw him leaning over her, looking down from inches away. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His face was grave, the muscles drawn taut with what might have been passion.

“I love you, Wendy.” His voice was ash, was dust. “And you love me. I know you do.”

Then his mouth was devouring hers. She tried to break free, could not. His tongue, so wet and soft and cold, probed her with the urgency of hunger. She tasted the gritty, food-flecked pickets of his teeth. Blasts of hot air from his nostrils singed her cheeks, her eyelashes.

The kiss went on and on. It was like drowning in stagnant water, like sinking into a quicksand pool, like going insane.

Hours later he released her mouth. He lowered his head and kissed her neck, his lips like leeches on her skin. Then he was tugging at her blouse, unbuttoning it with the clumsy eagerness of a child unwrapping a birthday present. The flaps parted, and the clay statue tumbled out of her pocket and fell to the floor. His hands fumbled with the strap of her bra, and then she lay half-naked before him, the small white cones of her breasts rising like snow hills against the looming backdrop of his face.

He planted moist sucking kisses on her cleavage, licking the smooth freckled skin, his tongue as rough and sandpapery as a dog’s. He was making noises, gulping, gasping noises, feeding-animal sounds. His glasses slid down his sweat-slick nose. She squirmed beneath him, twisting her wrists, trying frantically to free her hands.

Then his mouth stretched wide and swallowed half her breast, and she flashed on a crazy moment of panic at the thought that his jaws would snap shut and rip the breast from her body like a chunk of butchered meat.

The last of her control deserted her. The scream she’d been struggling to contain surged forward, no longer to be denied; it climbed up her throat and escaped into the open, a long ululant wail of terror and protest. He didn’t seem to hear it. He went on chewing, sucking, biting.

Finally his mouth pulled free. Her breast was streaked with saliva and measled with red tooth marks. It looked like something an animal had gnawed.

He raised his head. His face came into the light. With a small shock, Wendy saw the furious anger printed there. His teeth were grinding, the tendons of his jaws standing out like strands of piano wire. He knocked his glasses back into place with a swipe of his hand.