Bentley Little - The Summoning

And stopped. John was naked and kneeling before her bed. He had thrown the bedspread and the blankets onto the floor, and on the flat sheet in front of him were four or five used maxi-pads. Her maxi-pads.

He turned toward her, and she saw weak red smears on his chest and cheeks and forehead, blood on his lips and nostrils.

"What are you doing?" She stared at him, shocked, frightened, and filled with a deep humiliating shame. Influenced.

He grinned, and there was red on his teeth, on his tongue. "I love your blood," he said.

She grimaced in disgust, overcome with revulsion. The saliva in her mouth suddenly tasted putrid, and she felt like throwing up.

He picked up a maxi-pad, pressed it against his mouth and nose like a surgical mask, breathed deeply. He turned toward her, grinning. "I can smell you in the blood," he said. "I can smell your ripe pussy."

She backed away. "I'm telling Father. I'm telling Grandmother."

"Have you ever been fucked? I could do it to you if you let me in your bed tonight."

She turned, ran down the hall. "FatherI" she called. "Father!"

There was the sound of shattering glass from behind her, from within her room. She stopped running. Her parents and grandmother were already emerging from their respective rooms, her father tying the belt on his bathrobe, her mother and grandmother holding shut the tops of their nightgowns as they ran.

She hurried back to her room, reached it the same time as her father.

John had punched a hole through the window and was now trying to clear out the shards of broker glass still embedded in the window frame.

Blood was flowing down his arm in huge streams, and the remaining pieces of window looked like a pop art project, drops and droplets of red spread out centrifugally.

Her father ran past her, into the room, and grabbed John's shoulders, spinning him around, away from the window. John hit him across the face, a wet, sickening slap, and then her grandmother was in the room.

The old woman held her hands in the air and began chanting in a strange musical dialect with which Sue was not familiar.

Yet, already the chanting was having an effect on John. His arms were falling to his sides, the tension and aggre sive ness leaving his muscles. Sue looked over at her mother, who seemed as confused as she herself felt. Her grandmother wasn't a witch? Then what was this?

John's eyes were fluttering, starting to close, his body beginning to go limp. Sue tried to listen to the low words her grandmother was speaking and thought she made out the Cantonese phrases for "evil" and

"mother" and

John collapsed into his father's arms, and her grand mother stopped chanting. "Get him into the bathroom," she said. "I will treat his wounds."

"Will he be all right?" her mother asked worriedly.

"He will be fine. He will sleep for a day, and then it will be as if this never happened."

Her mother hurried across the room to help her father with John.

"Can you do that to the cup hugirngsi?" Sue asked. "Talk to it and put it to sleep?"

Her grandmother smiled. "I wish I could. But I can noL"

"Sue," her father said, as he pushed past her, John's bleeding body in his arms, "you sleep in our room tonight."

"No," her grandmother said firmly. "She will sleep with

Sue stood in place as they moved into the hall behind her, took John into the bathroom. She faced the broken window, a cold breeze ruffling her hair, and stared unblinkingly into the darkness of the night.

Pastor Wheeler knelt in the empty church and prayed, his elbows resting on the soft rise of Bill Covey's stomach. The old fuck had died happily, voluntarily, and though he'd thought that would admit him to the kingdom of Heaven, it would not. Oh, no. Wheeler knew that now.

There was room in Heaven for only forty more, and Jesus had come to earth to personally select those forty. He was separating not only the wheat from the chaff, but the good wheat from the bad wheat.

Wheeler heard the sound of muffled hammering from far away.

Tomorrow.

The Second Coming was tomorrow.

An electric tingle coursed through his body, causing his penis to stiffen. It would not be long now.

Wheeler closed his eyes. "Now I lay me down to sleep, with the girl across the street. If I should die before I wake, please, dear Lord, don't let me bake." He squeezed his hands more tightly together, prepared for the big sen doff. "Amen."

He opened his eyes, unclasped his hands. He pressed his fingers against Covey's naked body, felt the cold, bloated stomach, the white-haired chest. His mouth felt dry, and he knew what Jesus wanted him to do.

He took a deep breath, bent over, bit into Covey's neck, and as the cool blood spilled, pooled, he began to lick.

Mor Tillis was cold. He had wrapped himself up like a mummy while asleep, rolling around in his blankets until every square inch of his body was covered, but the freezing air had penetrated his defenses, and now he lay shivering beneath his comforter. His breath was visible, white in the darkened room.

The darkened room?

He had faJlen asleep with the light on.

The mayor sat up in bed, the movement awkward due to the bulky and closely wrapped blankets. He twisted his arms free, and reached to the left, his fingers finding and turning the black plastic knob just below the bulb on the nightstand lamp. Nothing. The light did not go on.

Then he remembered. He had been watching TV when he fell asleep also, a rerun of Mash.

Blackout. It had to be a blackout. He felt around the top of the nightstand for his glasses, found them, and put them on. The fuzzy monochromatic blackness was differentiated into shades and gradations, and he saw the outline of his dresser, desk, file cabinet. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the room, nothing there that shouldn't be, no unaccounted-for pools of shadow, but he still felt nervous.

As though there was someone in the room with him.

Or something.

Through the top of his pajamas, his fingers found the silver crucifm on the thin chain around his neck. He felt reassured just touching it, but the feeling that he was not alone did not go away. He extracted the rest of his body from the tangled blanket and swung his legs off the mattress.

A cold breeze blew against the skin of his feet from underneath the bed.

Instinctively, without thinking, he jumped, pushing off from the floor, leaping away from the bed. He sprang toward the bathroom and caught himself, his fingers grabbing both sides of the doorjamb.

Something moved within the bathroom, doubled by the mirror

The vampire!

The monster loomed out of the darkness before him. He was tall and aristocratic, vaguely European. In life, he must have cut an impressive figure.. In death, he was truly terrifying. His skin was the bluish white of an untouched corpse, and a palpable sense of coldness radiated outward from his form. There was no expression on the impassive face, only an all-consuming hunger in the red rimmed eyes and a glimpse of white fang between partially parted lips.

The mayor wanted to run but could not, wanted to scream but was unable.

The vampire smiled. Blood filled the thin, gummed spaces between his teeth.

No! The mayor fumbled with the top of his pajamas, then tore the top open and held forth his crucifix. The vampire chuckled, an evil inhuman sound that seemed more like an expression of disdain than mirth, and snatched the crucifix from the mayor's fingers. The mayor's skin burned where the vampire touched it, as though it had been seared with a branding iron, and he watched as the white fist clenched, grinding the silver crusefix to powder that slipped through the long, tapered fingers.

The burning pain awakened him, enabling him to throw off the shocked lethargy that had settled over his mind, and he quickly backed away from the bathroom. Taking a chance, knowing he had nothing to lose, that this was the only way he could even hope to escape, he turned his back on the vampire and ran out of the bedroom into the hallway. He raced down the hall to the front door, running as fast as he could, his heart pounding painfully in his chest. As he fumbled with the doorknob, he turned to look behind him and saw the vampire gliding smoothly and effortlessly in his direction. The monster was grinning, and his fangs glinted in the weak moonlight that shone through the open doorways of the den and bedrooms.