Steamy Screams: Anthology of Erotic Horror

“Oui.  Zat is true. But,” she said, following the path her fingers had traced out with slow kisses, “I knew from ze first time I saw you, you would be one of us. I never dared dream zat I would be ze one to perform ze… transformation?”

Transformation. He guessed that was as good a word as any.  He’d been through a lot of ‘transformations’ in his long brief life. From child to adult, from poor to rich, from man to god.  But being a god hadn’t been all it was cracked up to be. Too many eyes always watching you. Too many fingers always pointing at you. Too many people who always wanted you to be who they expected you to be, and not who you were. He longed to go backward, to become a man again. But that was impossible. He’d spent most of his months in Paris meditating on this fact and had finally come to this conclusion: Once a god, all you could really do next was become a demon. Or die.

Or both.

“You are ready?” she asked, squeezing his penis once—hard—breaking his train of thought. He opened his eyes and turned onto his back, looking down the length of his body at her. She lay on her stomach at a ninety degree angle to his own body, her mouth just above his hip. The red neon from outside washed over her pale skin, dying it crimson. Her eyes and lips were dark coals in the light, and her long black hair hung in satin strings down her face and across her back. A demon hiding in the skin of an angel.

“You have made ze necessary arrangements?”

“I faked a heart condition three days ago,” he said, and nodded to her, “and I’ve chosen my grave site in Pere-Lachaise.”

“And a death certificate?”

“I’ll get that tonight.”

She smiled then, and he thought he could see, for the first time, the sharp edges of her canine teeth. She turned away and examined his throbbing member in her left hand. She drew her right hand up his inner thigh and ran one finger up the bulging vein of his hard-on. He shuddered but kept his eyes on the activity.

She must’ve felt the shudder, or perhaps he made a noise of some sort, because she looked up at him and smiled once more. Her tongue came out and licked her upper lip—black against black. She said nothing, but raised the first two fingers of her right hand so he could see the long nails. Then she turned back to her work, bringing the nails down quickly and opening the vein she’d just caressed.

He jerked, arching his back and grabbing the headboard of the bed with both hands, hanging on hard enough to feel the wood press against the bones of his fingertips. The pain was not as bad as he thought it would be, more like the stinging cut of a sharp knife, but the amount of blood he felt flow out and over his balls was still surprising. The sharp coppery smell of his own blood filled his nostrils.

She was on it quickly, though, her mouth covering the wound and sucking, drawing his life into hers. He could feel the blood leaving, like an intense orgasm, only lower and unending.  Settling into the bed, he leaned his head back, eyes closed, and thrust his hips upward. She responded by taking the whole of him in her mouth, still sucking hard enough to keep any blood from spilling. He wasn’t quite sure how he knew this, but he did; just as he knew that, despite all reasons saying otherwise, he would continue to have his erection until the whole affair was over. He’d often heard of the magiks of blood and tantric sex—even experimented with it before—but it was never like this.

 It was a long time before she finally lifted her head. When she did, she wiped blood from her mouth and smeared it over his penis. She turned her whole body even with his, placed both hands flat on his stomach and straddled him, poised just above the object of her desire. In the light, she was nothing but a shadow outlined in red.

“Are you ready zen, mon cher?”

He said nothing, but reached out with his hands and placed them on her ample hips, easing her onto himself, his own blood the lubricant. He gasped, startled at the dry cold that surrounded him.

“Is something ze matter?” Her head tilted to the right.

He bit his lower lip, as much to keep himself from saying something as it was from ecstasy. She continued to stare at him until he was able to speak again.

“No,” he said, “Let’s do this.”

There was a brief nod from the dark figure above him, and she slid forward like a snake, hands sliding wetly up his body, leaving oily smears of blood tracking behind. His own hands caressed the fine curve of her back and then moved to the front. He cupped her breasts, firm but yeilding.

“Tell me when,” she said, and began moving her hips back and forth. He countered her moves with his own, slowly at first, then with more and more urgency, gasping with each thrust. He closed his eyes hard enough to make lights dance behind his lids and he felt drunk, and high, like every drink and every drug he’d ever taken was taking control of his body once again. He laid back and let it, losing himself in the moment. There was no life. There was no death. There was only now. Only now.

“Now,” he screamed in pure pleasure. Pressure was building in his loins and he knew that it would soon be all over.

He opened his eyes, wanting to watch, to be part of this, his final moment. He saw her head snap back and turn to the side, her face outlined in the neon light. Her mouth stretched wide—wider than any human’s possibly could—and he could see the fangs glitter red. Then she turned to him again and bowed over his neck. He stretched it willingly for her. Her fangs sank deep, and he felt the pressure explode into her, a small orgasm that grew and spread throughout his body, first warm, then turning cold. Ice cold. Like dead fingers stretching simultaneously down his legs and up over his belly, scratching further upward until it encompassed his heart and stopped it in mid-beat. He laughed, then, long and loud.

“So this is what it is to die!” he cried out just before the iciness gripped his throat and froze him in position, his hands still on her breasts.

He could see, but couldn’t react to, her climbing off him, pulling her breasts free and leaving red streaks on them where his fingers had tightened. She sat on the side of the bed, grabbed a cigarette from the pack he had on the nightstand nearest him and lit up. Smoke rose slowly up from the cherry and circled the air above her.

“Eet will be a moment,” he dimly heard her say. “You are now dead and all ze muscles in your body ‘ave locked up. Rigor mortis is what you call it, no? That will release soon, but eet will be painful. Probably ze most pain you ‘ave evair felt. Eet is also ze last pain you will evair feel.”

She fell silent then, the only sound her soft exhale of smoke. He wondered at the peacefulness of this quiet moment: how many others had died and missed this? How many had wasted Death without tasting her true beauty, without really appreciating what was happening. Most, he figured. Except for people like him and her.

There were more sounds in the room now, he realized. He could pick out the crackle of dried tobacco igniting as she dragged on her cigarette. There was a roach under the bed, its legs ticking away on the hardwood floor, its mandibles clacking in anticipation of food. He didn’t know exactly how he knew this, but he did. Voices filtered in through the window on the wind.  Horns honked as cars barely missed each other on the Rue de Misere below. Somewhere, music was playing one of his songs and he turned his attention away from it. That was the past. That was over.

Beyond the music was something else; a sound he recognized but couldn’t yet place. It was coming not from a specific place outside but from everywhere outside, and it was getting louder. A tumult of inharmonious thuds and thumps, like a thousand thousand low drumbeats.

Or heartbeats.

The realization dawned on him just as his body released with a sudden surge of pain, as if every molecule in his body had been singly yet simultaneously hit with sledgehammers. He threw his head back and howled, an unearthly sound never heard in any stage performance, but still not loud enough to drown out the sounds of the thousands of heartbeats assaulting his ears from beyond the window. His hands shot above him, grasping the headboard in a grip that splintered the wood in huge chunks and rained them down around his thin face. With nothing else to provide purchase against the pain, he pulled himself into a fetal ball on the bed, unaware that he was still holding a large chunk of the headboard in his right hand. He lay in that position for perhaps five minutes, perhaps an hour, until the pain subsided. Still, there was a low constant throb throughout his body and the sound of beating hearts thudded in his ears.

And he could smell them. Beneath the acrid scent of the cigarette smoke, beneath the pungent exhaust fumes and the aromas from the French bistros. Beneath it all. And much stronger. The horrifyingly sweet smell of