Dance Of Desire (7 page)

Her entire apartment was bathed in bright light. Cassie’s eyes darted to every corner and minutely swept every inch of the floor and wall and ceiling before she fully stepped inside and reluctantly shut the door behind her.

It felt like she was shutting herself within.

She swallowed hard. The air in here felt heavy, humid, thick with… something.

My imagination is running away from me again,
she told herself. Stop it!

That did not stop her from straining her ears to check for anything. But nothing was out of the ordinary. She justified that the air felt heavy because the apartment had been closed all day, with the windows locked and the air conditioner off so the air inside had had no circulation.

The phone suddenly rang. Cassie started at the sound, jumping clear off the ground like a frightened cat, her heart pounding. Then she laughed at herself.

“Calm down, stupid, it’s just the phone. Ugh, stop ringing like that!” She grabbed up the receiver. “Hello!” she practically shouted.

A pregnant pause answered her query.

And then, “Cassie? It’s Mom.”

Cassie almost slumped to the floor in relief. And then she felt her eyes getting rapidly warm. It felt so great to hear her mom’s voice!

“Hi, Mom! How are you?” She walked to the windows then unlocked and opened them. The gush of cool night air was refreshing and seemed to lighten up the place, giving Cassie some comfort and assurance. She shook her head and relaxed even more.

“I’m fine, baby. Missing my little girl, though.”

“I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m grown up, remember.”

“Well—”

“I know. I’ll always be your little girl. Always.”

Light, bubbly laughter warmed Cassie’s heart through the phone. “Exactly, young lady. I’m so glad you’re finally out of that transients’ motel, though. How’s your first apartment?”

Different parts of Cassie’s inner person were screaming.

“It’s… remarkable,” she answered. That seemed a neutral statement from a grown woman on her own who wasn’t going to cry to her mother at every mysterious creaky sound. Or nightmare. Even mega-nightmares she couldn’t even remember. “I haven’t been sleeping too well here, though,” she ventured, not too childishly, she hoped.

“You’ve stayed in hotels with us and yeah, you have always been very listless when you are not sleeping in your own bed here. I guess you’ve never outgrown that, huh? But it will pass. You’re just adjusting to grown-up life on your own.” Her mother sounded wistful, and also like she was trying to convince herself to be calm and let her daughter be a full-fledged adult.

A part of Cassie wanted to sob in hysterics and asked them if they could come and get her right now? That it wasn’t working out and she wanted to leave this place, board the bus, and just come back later for her stuff—with them.

But grownups should not bitch about being on their own when they had been bitching about wanting to grow up and be out on their own as soon as possible.

So they talked a little longer about classes and her new friends. She skipped the details of what happened—not that she fully knew what had happened—when she and her friends had gone out to their first classy nightclub together.

“No, I didn’t drink much.” Not much as the other girls, she was sure. But her mom did not know that, and she did not want her to worry. It wasn’t’ going to happen again. Not if she could help it. Especially since everything started since that night.

Again, could the drink be the culprit? Maybe, that magic man slid a powerful drug on it and she was suffering from withdrawal ever since?

She also didn’t mention the “magic man” with his possibly too magical drinks to her mother because that might lead to her blurting, without anything to support her theory that,
I think we’ve fucked, Mom, but I can’t figure out how he could have gotten in and out of my place. And I’m sore, bruised, and am having a hard time pissing.
She could not prove that. Or maybe she was just going crazy? “How’s Dad?” she asked instead. And her mom transferred her to her father.

“Hey, Dad. Yeah, I don’t stay out too late and I walk strong, not timid, like you taught me.”

Before long, she’d said goodbye to Mom and Dad. They reminded Cassie to always have cab fare. Her Dad said that he didn’t care what she said; he was going to buy her a new car to make certain she didn’t ride with any oddballs on the bus, dangerous men with cars or motorcycles, or evil cabbies.

That made her smile. She knew her Daddy. He was serious.

After her call, she prepared a healthy meal and sat to eat it in front of her internet-linked TV monitor. There was a new episode of a show she liked that she’d wanted to see. But Cassie didn’t absorb any of it. It proved to be a distraction, though, something to keep her from thinking about what lurked in the back of her mind. She was merely whiling the hours away until bedtime.

After the show, she did some homework. Then she decided she could not put off going to bed. All the lights were left on, no matter how bright.

She slipped into her pajamas, closed her bedroom door, and locked it behind her. Not that she had any concerns that someone might get in. Of course not. She laid down in her bed, pulled her blanket up to her chin, and tried to relax, to drift into sleep. She normally would do so within five-to-ten minutes, tops.

Not tonight.

The bedroom light was directly above her and despite her self-assurance, she was still terribly afraid. Could anyone come inside a locked door? It’s hard to sleep when you’re too afraid to even close your eyes, or that you’re used to sleeping in a nearly pitch black room. But the lights were all on and it was so damn bright.

Cassie opted instead to place a pillow above her head to get a little relief from the relentless light shining into every corner of her room. It seemed better, instead of lying on her side or turning off the light altogether. This was just some adjustment her inner little kid had to go through, she assured herself. A night or two of this and she’d be fine.

But she tossed and turned and became more tensed. In fact, her body was more at full alert lying tensely curled up in her bed than she’d been all day on the street or in class. Her heart would not stop racing and her thoughts would not stop chasing her heart’s racing beat.

So she took several slow and deep breaths. She opened her eyes wide. Maybe keeping her eyes open until they’d close on their own would work. She stared into the dimness under her pillow that was blocking the bright light. And, for a long time nothing happened.

Finally, as she stared at her fluffy pillow, her tension slipped, and dropped little by little.

Cassie began drifting through pleasant imaginary scenes and happy half-memories, as if escaping from her current plight of nameless fears. And, finally, without noticing it, Cassie slipped into the arms of sleep.

Her last thought after a glance at the time was:
It’s the Witching Hour somewhere.

The clock’s mechanism made a slight swish, which she didn’t hear, just as it struck three a.m.

She opened her eyes in a place that had no pleasure, no sun and fun. This place reeked of blood, both old and new, and of decaying flesh.
Human flesh,
she knew. There was no cold or even cool here.

Dim lightings shone… faint, reddish, and glowing, as if from distant, unseen flames bouncing off the irregularly shaped walls of the cave. Or an underground cavern?

Lava, there is lava here, too, burned through her frantic thoughts when she saw the room lit with the scorching orange-red of lava, like living light somewhere near but out of direct sight. Hot sweat was already pouring from her body, trickling from her brow to chin, down her neck, from her armpits and from her very sides, and below.

It slid down her body from every pore, like salty tears.

Her sweat converged as if drawn together down to her toes before dripping off. The hot ground far below hissed and hungrily consumed every kiss of sweat it received. No visible source of white light was in this place. Only the faint, hellish red glows upon the misshapen walls.

No. She was wrong, she realized, as three hazy moving orbs of dark red with fiery bright accents which had been on the periphery of her vision before, now zoomed in and out of her line of sight.

"Aaaaarrrrggg,"
Cassie screamed as pain struck her body. And she remembered. As if she could truly forget such pain.
"Stop! Please!"
she pleaded.

All she knew for a definite certainty was the pain—it grew sharper, hotter, and more painful. But, she didn’t know why or how.

A mist of multiple grays she hadn’t realized was surrounding her disappeared and reappeared without any apparent pattern until it eventually seemed to linger in front of her, gathering itself together into something more solid.

Not to be forgotten, the three fiery ruby orbs had brightened and now arranged themselves in a downward-pointing triangle to loom near her face. Her impression, between the moments of excruciating pain, was that the orbs were watching her.

She wretched again at the smell of putrid rotting flesh, and much of what she’d retched up – chocolate sprinkles and other chunky stuff she didn’t recall eating – disgustingly slid down her nude body. The only saving grace was her sweat, which was so profuse, ran in torrents down her and rinsed it down and off.

Oddly, Cassie didn’t actually recall that she had puked before, but somehow she knew she had vomited, again and again, for like the hundredth time.

How long could I’ve been here to do that, so many times?
she wondered, her mind fuzzy with exhaustion, heat, and dehydration.
How could I actually still vomit from an empty stomach?

What was it?! The fiery dark red orbs and the multi-layered grayness now abruptly formed a wraith-like figure with tentacled limbs before her. It spoke. To her. Its voice was painfully reverberating through her.

"Your reshishtansh ish foolishhh..."
the tentacle wraith hissed, the sound slithered around painfully inside Cassie’s cunt.
"I willsh break you!"

Cassie thrashed, cutting and bruising her wrists. Her shoulders felt disjointed, completely snapped apart. It was like her arms and shoulders were no longer a part of her abused body. Her battered shoulders were tightly stretched beyond their limits as they took the heavy strain of supporting her entire physical frame from the cave's slick ceiling as she hung suspended, entirely exposed and naked, drenched in her own sweat.

Her head and body again resonated to the monstrous monster’s mouthless voice.
"Shpare yourshelf, foolishhh girrrrl,"
it taunted.
"Giiive yourshelf to me!"

Cassie could hear her ragged panting, also hearing in her head its “voice”, piercing her mind with every syllable. She distinctly heard a slithery "ushhh" instead of "me."

"Giiive yourshelf—to ushhh!"
the voice repeated.

Before her question could fully form in her mind, the mist rapidly lost its solid-like form, dispersing before it completely disappeared. The pointy, nail-like tips of its octopus-like, sucker tentacles the last thing that trailed out of her view. Even its three fiery red orbs disappeared, all in the blink of an eye. Her eyes darted about as best she could in her painful suspended position, trying to see if the monster, demon, or whatever it was reassembled to the side of her.

A sudden pain shot deep into the base of her spine, making her fingers and toes splay out in unbearable pain.

"Giiive yourshelf to meee!"
the creature howled from behind her. Another wave of pain pierced through her and consumed her, from her shoulder blades to her tender ankles.

"N-N-Noooooooooo… never!"
she managed to scream hoarsely, more from the fear of the worst thing she could never imagine happening to her if she gave in. If this was what she got from not giving it, what more when—

She flinched when she heard screams—other screams. A man and a woman, their hysterical screams in counterpoint, from either side of her, like some sadistic musical phrase. They weren’t far away though Cassie couldn’t see them. The place was so large and filled with utter darkness that she wasn’t certain if they were even in the same cavern or just in adjoining cavern “rooms.”

Both of them screamed again.
“Aaaaiiiii—”
And then their tortured voices were cut simultaneously, abruptly. It made her wonder not just who they were. Why they, like she, were here. But also, why had they both stopped screaming at the same damn time? To terrorize her further? As if this wasn’t enough?

Cassie flinched again and shivered when the grey mist abruptly reassembled itself and reformed in front of her. She could feel its cold presence, its “body” taking up space. This time, its triangular dark ruby orbs were brighter and larger. Some sickening feeling inside her decided without any other reasoning that it’s bigger and brighter because it has fed.

The Wraith aggressively pulsed with dark hues of jeweled flames and blood in its ruby red eyes and multiple shades of gray form, as it undulated on its tentacles.

Not understanding clearly what it wanted increased her terror. It poured from her like her sweat, hot and relentless, exhausting her in the oppressive heat. The creature growled. And, finally, she understood what it meant. As if the meaning had been transmitted directly into her mind and flesh.