Dark Avenues Read online

  “I was just trying to save that cat.”

  "It doesn't matter now," Paul said, kneeling down beside of Teagan. "The damage has already been done."

  Teagan muttered under her breath, her lips twisting into a sad lopsided grimace; tears brimmed in her eyes. The shadows of the townspeople lengthened across the street, stretching toward him as if clawing for the fabric of his very soul. The air around him, although sharper and colder than before, grew thick and suffocating.

  “You’ve doomed all of us, you stupid son of a bitch.” Lacey hissed between her teeth. “You shouldn’t even be here right now.”

  “What do we do now?” Someone from the crowd replied in a worried tone. “It’ll be worse than last year.”

  “We’ll have to do our best,” A voice said from behind him. “won’t we?”

  Chad tried to speak but all he could do was muster a few incoherent words. A blunt object rapped against the back of his head, slamming his chin onto his chest; stars burst across his vision. He hissed through clenched teeth, his skull throbbing with pain and slumped onto a sea of broken pumpkin shells, dark angry faces and the pitiless black void of unconsciousness.

  *****

  AFTER what seemed like a long time, Chad’s eyes opened on sleep-crusted lids. His head slumped, chin resting on his chest, he groaned against the river of pain still flooding his skull. He blinked until his vision cleared but even that was a mistake he wouldn’t make again; tears slid down his cheeks.

  He took a risk and raised his head. He peered across a large grassy meadow surrounded by an archway of naked oak trees whose gnarled gray branches jutted toward the moonlit sky; frail autumn leaves were strewn about like expired confetti. He saw a large bright-orange bonfire on his right, casting a soft radiant orange glow across the meadow.

  Four unlit pumpkins were sitting a few feet from the fire in a neat box-like pattern. A harsh bitter aftertaste collected in the back of his throat and his thick cottony tongue clung to the roof of his mouth, his lips dry and cracked.

  A thick coarse object poked him in the back, spreading a new river of pain across the bottom of his spine and down his legs. He tried to raise his arms to scratch his cheek but they refused to budge, limiting him to a minimal shrug. He stopped tugging and peered over his shoulder to find that his arms had been twisted behind his back and his hands were bound together by thick strands of braided white rope.

  Instinct kicked in and he reacted.

  He rubbed his hands against the thick twisted knot on the other side of the tree to free himself but the rope dug harshly against his wrists, etching painful trellises across his skin. He scanned the meadow spread out on his left, at the lush dark-green hills rolling toward the dark heavy forest looming in the distance. He moved as fast as he could, his body racked by a mixture of fear for the unknown and for his own safety.

  A thin roiling cloud cover inched its way across the sky, eclipsing the bright alabaster moon. The mingled fragrances of wood smoke and pine sap permeated around the forest and stung his nostrils. Dry kindling crackled and popped like an insane mind; tiny orange coals floated and twirled in the breeze.

  A series of brittle cracks echoed from somewhere deep inside the forest. Chad gasped and, his heart thudding with timid curiosity, cocked his head toward the trees. Teagan appeared from the dense network of naked tree branches and stood beside the fire, her thin pink lips drawn up into a wide toothy grin; she wore a sleek black dress with a plunging neckline that exposed the sides of her pale sloping breasts whilst her right leg jutted out from a pencil-thin slit scored along the right hem.

  The firelight caught the halo of black mascara hugging her eyes and threw it back against the night. When their eyes met, his body ached with a mixture of fear and arousal. His cock twitched, pressing against the jagged gold teeth of his zipper.

  A second twig snapped, then another and then another and then soon one resident after the other stepped into view, their shadows stretching across the meadow in the same soul-hungry fascination in their eyes that he’d seen before. The children stood in front of them wearing the same costumes, their bright energetic faces beaming in the firelight. He heard more movement on his left, flinched and tried to peer over his shoulder, his left boot planted into the cold damp grass.

  Gary and Robert appeared from the other side of the forest and flanked Teagan’s shoulders. Lacey appeared from behind her, wearing a long flowing white dress with a smaller neckline that exposed the tops of her supple white breasts; a thin brown strap was slung across her chest attached to a small hemp-sewn bag resting against her right hip.

  Paul sauntered over and placed a firm hand on Chad’s left shoulder, his face heavy with remorse. Chad stiffened, eyes wide and braced himself for the man’s next move.

  "Look son." He said in a gentle grandfatherly voice. "We know you didn't mean to do what you did and if I had my way about it I'd just let you go but this here is a different matter altogether."

  Chad exhaled, spewing thin white ghosts around his face. His shirt clung to his back as large pools of perspiration spread under his arms. He would’ve given anything for them to let it go but there was something about those damn pumpkins that seemed more important to them than the preservation of life.

  "This here is a matter you're gonna have to take up with Jack," Paul said, backing away. "Jack didn't take too kindly to you knocking over that pumpkin and he’s gonna be pretty angry for sure. Since we can't have old Jacky Boy taking it out on us, we’re sure you’ll understand why you’re tied to this here tree.”

  Chad jerked on his restraints again, chipping a few shards of bark from the tree and sent them clattering to the ground in a cloud of swirling black dust.

  "Traditions are meant to be continued, young man," Paul said, with a wide pleasing grin. "Halloween isn't just a holiday, you know? We wait all year for this day and we want everything to go perfect. The more we celebrate it, the happier he is."

  "‘Jack in Laudamus'," Teagan said, in a smoky seductive voice.

  Chad’s mind flashed back to the phrase chiseled on the sign posted outside of town. He’d been so quick to look away from it that he hadn’t put much thought into it. In Jack We Praise, he thought.

  They repeated the phrase one at a time, first Paul and then Gary and then Lacey and then back to Teagan. Lacey reached into her bag, produced a long bamboo-brown flute and began to play, her fingers dancing expertly across the holes. The children grinned at one another and began to walk hand-in-hand toward the edge of the fire before suddenly leaping into a sideways dance that was reminiscent of Ring-Around-The-Rosy; amongst the music and the dancing, he heard a word that one of them had said before.

  Chad glanced away from “The Big Dance” and failed to hold back the knot of sadness twisting his chest. He bowed his head, watching the necklace of childish shadows float across the grass, moving in tandem to the sweet melodious music like animatronic stick figures, and stared down at the four pumpkins still sitting on the ground.

  The pool of shadows congealed between the four pumpkins, forming a small puddle of black water that glistened in the light. A bright green stem rose up from the surface of the slick obsidian liquid, followed by the large ribbed cranium of a...

  –a pumpkin, Chad thought, his voice strangled by fear.

  After the head broke through, it gazed across the meadow with bright luminous orange pupils fitted inside of its slanted dark eye sockets. Once the figure fully rose, its thin withered body hovered three inches above the pumpkins and spread its arms out from its sides; its long black fingers were fitted with long curved white talons. It inhaled, puffing its chest like a penguin, and drew a great ball of smoky pine-scented air deep into its lungs as if it were feasting on the aura of the townspeople’s undying dedication.

  It cocked its head to the side and glared at Chad like a teacher catching a student passing notes during class, its bright orange gaze rooting his feet to the ground and drew back another deep breath. Chad’s crying incre
ased from a strangled cry to a gut-wrenching sob broken up by small peals of maniacal laughter; a thread of snot dripped off the end of his nose; hot lucid tears brimmed in his eyes before sliding down his cheeks.

  Paul, Gary, Tegan and the rest of the townspeople gazed up with wonder and sent a chorus of ceremonious applause into the night. The children stopped dancing and gazed upward to meet his menacing orange stare as if he were a mall Santa and not a being from another world.

  “Hi, Jack.” Everyone roared in loud fluctuating voices.

  Teagan bowed, then said. “We have a fresh one for you. He killed your kin but we insist that you accept his soul in return for ours.”

  His presence was their weakness; his words sweet as sugar.

  Chad felt his stomach boiling with nausea. A sense of dread tightened around his throat like an invisible noose. He wasn’t sure what this thing was but all he knew was that it existed amongst the shadows, protecting everyone from the barber to the pumpkins they grew in their backyards; he was just an interloper who’d put a wrench in their plans and now here he was, trapped inside of a cage he couldn’t fight his way out of.

  “We mustn’t eat on an empty stomach?” Jack said in a throaty guttural voice. “Now should we?”

  Jack spun around like a ballerina, his long black smock swirling around him, his eyes glowing with an intense gaze that sliced across Chad’s chest like a bad case of indigestion. Chad gave another eccentric laugh as the town’s ceremonial god hurtled Himself at him like a comet, its crinkled black dress flapping against the wind and shrouded him in a cocoon of darkness from which he would never shake off.

  With the moon breaking through the film of clouds that failed to conceal it, Chad’s agonizing screams were eclipsed by the mingled chorus of sweet lyrical music and childish laughter.

  BIG BROTHER

  This is a story that centers around the connection between big brothers and little sisters and what we’d sacrifice for the other. Our job is to protect them from the dangers of society and from the monsters they’ll meet throughout the rest of their lives, even if the monster is inside of them.

  “ARE we there yet?”

  “No.” I bellowed above the roar of the wind in our ears.

  “How long until we get there?”

  “We’ve still got a ways to go.”

  “I’m hungry, Tyler.” Jan whined. “We’ve been riding this train for a month.”

  “It’s only been three days.”

  Her face silhouetted by the soft alabaster moonlight, Jan’s long black hair fell across the tops of her shoulders framing her cherub-pale face. The only thing we’d come across since we jumped on from Logan was a stinky old bum and miles of wooded farmland backdropped by tree-choked rises and spines of jagged mountains jutting toward the sky. The days faded into nights while time and a lack of resources festered on our minds.

  Her long floral-print dress was stained with faint patches of dirt and dotted with crusts of dried blood. The stench of my skin kept her from getting too close to me, pinning her to an arm’s length on my right. Our legs dangling over the side, the wind tousled our clothes and hair.

  The mixture of old fashioned boxcars and covered hoppers trailed out from behind us like the legs of a drunken caterpillar, shifting this way and that to conform to the tracks. The lights of the city lying along the horizon resembled a string of Christmas lights, distant yet beautiful at the same time.

  I mocked the slanted angle of the moon and peered out ahead, past the front of the train to look for a signpost up ahead; anything that would tell me exactly where we’d been going for the past seventy-two hours.

  “You’re supposed to be nice to me.”

  “What do you think I’ve been doing since you were ten.”

  I used the handle on the sliding door to hoist myself up, slapped the dust off my jeans, blotted my hands on the front of my tee-shirt and sighed.

  I walked over to the other side of the cart, leaned my left elbow against the wall and watched the star-studded sky from between the dark-narrow slats. A loud sniveling sound rose behind me but I sighed and rolled my eyes; my sister had done more crying than any man should ever tolerate.

  Had all of my efforts been for nothing?

  What else did they expect me to do?

  Something twitched in the corner of my left eye. A fist-sized rat scurried across the floor, its little nose and skinny pink tail convulsing with fear and gave one painful shriek before Jan’s hand closed around its big furry body. It squeaked, struggling to free itself from her grasp before she twisted its head like a bottle cap, tore it free from its broken neck.

  She held it above her face and opened her mouth, revealing two rows of jagged pink incisors. She squeezed its head, pouring a stream of warm red blood past her lips and down the front of her dress. Her throat gyrating with each sip, the rat’s dark red juices filled her veins with a sweet sugary nectar that subdued the flames in her nerves.

  She licked her lips, then pressed its spasming body against her lips and sucked it down like a juice box.

  Once she was done, she licked her lips and tossed it into the far-left corner of the train car. I heard that same sniveling sound from before and rolled my eyes; instead of coming from behind me it was coming from beside of me. The bum was slumped over in the far right corner, his face coated with a mixture of sweat, snot and blood; his left arm had been torn off at the elbow, reducing it to a spongy red stub.

  The knife he’d pressed under Jan’s chin ten minutes ago was still jutting out of his right leg where she’d planted it after she bit a fist-sized hole in his left arm. Tiny dots of blood speckled his face, stained his ragged dirty clothes and pooled across the floor under his legs. I craned my head in her direction, shook my head in disgust and frowned.

  “You’re eating a rat at a time like this when you’ve still got fresh meat sitting right over there.” I said, jabbing my thumb at him.

  “Ple-ple-pleez.” He said through quivering lips. “I’m so-sor-sorr–”

  “Don’t be sorry.” Jan whispered, cowering down on all fours. “Just be food.”

  As much as I’ve complained about her, she’ll always be my little sister.

  *****

  WHAT is it like to have a vampire for a little sister? I have my good days and I have my bad days.

  My parents, Geoff and Marie Matheson, gave birth to my little sister Janice Lee on July fifth two-thousand-five; she weighed in at seven pounds five ounces. On the night of her tenth birthday, a vampire snuck in through her bedroom window and bit her. Neither one of us, including Jan herself, realized what had happened until the next day when she screamed and woke us all out of a dead sleep; when we saw the blood on her bed we knew it was bad.

  “She’s just having her period, that’s all.” Mom had said in an unconvincing voice.

  When we saw the two puncture holes in the side of her neck, her words fell on deaf ears. A few days of long conversation, we insisted that Jan was still a member of the family and decided to assimilate around her, which caused a lot of frustration at first. My gerbil Larry and three out of four of our neighbors cats were just a few of Jan’s first victims; the gerbil’s death was worse than the cats because they were farming cats and usually when they’re not found after a long period of time their owners had assumed they’d gone off somewhere and died.

  To keep her from going on a feeding frenzy, Mom and Dad took her out of public school and kept her home. Luckily for her, Mom worked as a substitute teacher and was able to teach her right there at the house. We had to walk around the house wearing cloves of garlic around our necks to keep her from ripping our throats out; we didn’t like it but it wasn’t like we had a choice.

  It was worse during the night, though. We had to sleep with a net over the top of my bed with crosses and garlic cloves stitched into the fabric to keep her bloodlust at bay. There were a few nights where Mom would sit on the living room couch with half a pint of ice cream and watch home movies chronicling
the first nine years of Jan’s life before she became some blood-sucking fiend’s midnight snack; when Dad would find her lying on the couch in the wee hours of the morning; they’d argue so much it would put a heavy strain on their marriage.

  Not that I was keeping track, but there were some things you just couldn’t ignore.

  My life changed when Mom made me Jan’s “handler” whenever she wanted to go around the woods for one of her nightly feedings. Mostly deer or other types of forest animal but household pets and people (we lived alongside Lake Michelle where most of the good fishing spots were located) were prohibited because it would draw too much attention.

  My life, in its own funny little way, was as unusual as a ham dinner on Hanukkah. I couldn’t even have any of my friends over at my house for dinner because we didn’t want to chance it. It costs me half of my life; I couldn’t even use her to retaliate against the kids at school who called her names and beat me.

  I was the guardian of a monster, a former shadow of the little sister I’d protected since birth. I knew Mom and Dad weren’t going to live forever so someone had to take the reins. There were times where on more days than I could count that Jan felt guilty for being such a burden.

  Of course, not everything stayed honky-dory.

  There was a pounding on our door one night. Mom and Dad got me out of bed and hurried down stairs, slipping on their robes as fast as they could. I went into Jan’s room, my eyes and brain still foggy from sleep, to make sure she stayed in there just in case.

  My heart sunk to my feet when I discovered that her makeshift coffin was empty, its neatly-carved lid propped upright to expose the white-satin bedding inside to the carpet of moonlight flooding through her bedroom window. The sound of footsteps paraded around the living room, followed by a loud petrified scream that sent cold shivers trailing down my spine.