The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [49]
...her own blood....
...but it was then, that her eyes came into focus with the twisting, contorted mass of what she knew to be her boyfriend, his throat severed and gaping, spewing a black formlessness.
Still, Alice could not scream.
Though she knew she was about to die.
A gripping force overtook her from behind, lifting her from the kitchenette tile floor suddenly, her vision clearing further as the gripping hands flung her around to a full view of her assailant’s figure.
She caught the gleam of a knife, a razor and the sight of the lurid shape behind it, the shabby grey shape shrouded in silhouette by the moonlight streaming through the curtains beyond.
She could not move.
She could not struggle.
And there came a whisper... harsh, sunken...
“I need you. I need you reeeeeeal bad.”
It lowered the blade closer, almost until it reached the skin below her line of vision.
“Not for love, not for sex, not for death. My needs are beyond these trivialities. My needs are for a more important cause...a more noble cause.”
He lowered his face and the rugged bristles of his beard brushed against Alice’s nostrils and across the smoothness of her cheek.
“I’ve been watching you for...oh, I’d say for some time now. Ever since your father took me in and gave me a job, which was very nice of him, by the way, I don’t think I ever showed the gratitude he deserved. I’ve been wanting you, Alice Bradshaw. But things are different now. Now, I need you. Reeeeeal bad....”
And that was when she noticed, in the midst of horrid disarray...
...the scars.
His words fell into place upon the nightmare bed of her conscious understanding. Her eyes widened in gradual realization.
“Good girl,” he breathed. “It’s Simon. It’s me, Simon. Simon BoLeve. That bearded behemoth you see seated in the back left row of each one of your daddy’s Sunday social services. The one who jerks off toilet plunger handles and scrubs graffiti-smeared pussie drawings from the parking lot brick walls. The one who scares away the pussies that put them there. The one who roosts up in the church attic. Not that I’m complaining; it’s comfortable up there. Comfortable...but also lonely. So lonely. But not anymore. Something better has come along. Something special is going to happen. Something reeeeeeal special. Reeeeally special. Soon, lovely Alice Bradshaw. Soon. And until then, I’m not Simon anymore. Until then, you can call me....
....a flicker, a radiant gleam and the razor sliced cleanly into her right cheek. Blood seeped outwards and trailed beneath the inside crevice of her earlobe, downward, beading across her flailed hair....
“....until then, you can call me Scratch.”
Slowly, his free hand skimmed down the length of her side and found the base of her blouse.
As she felt the distant numbness of his fingers fumbling with the top button fly of her jeans, one and then the next and then the next, as her panties soon slid with the jeans to her ankles and his coldness pressed hard against the exposed skin of her inner thighs, she allowed the evening’s realities to slip into a detestable emptiness where, compared to reality, she found a better and brighter place in which to hide....
12.
A Departing Exchange
Andrew hadn’t been forced to pay as much attention to Ralston’s music nor the worshipping Ralston fans as he had first dreaded. Instead, he payed far more attention to the woman who asked him to dance and who offered him a seat at her table.
Who would ever think.
Melony hadn’t forced herself to pay as much attention to the investigative business of unknown truth-seeking as she had planned. Instead, she ended up clubbing and drinking and dancing with the investigation’s priority subject of the evening.
Who would ever think that, either.
They both ducked out from the show just beyond one a.m., allowing enough time for themselves to avoid the exiting onrush at the advent of the show’s climax and the last call for alcohol.
Squid Friction had been well received and neither Andrew nor Melony