Please Don't Go (41 page)

“
I’m only on my dinner break, but that’s plenty of time!” she called from behind the door.

Rattup scuttled across the room, his heart pounding as he imagined her in various sexual positions that he had not yet attempted, both since his escape and since his birth. So bold he had become- once again- his youth resurrected with a stroke of good luck and a beautiful young lady. Tonya. He decided that her name would be Tonya, no matter if that was the truth of the matter or not. She looked like a Tonya, smelled like a Tonya, ravaged him beneath the sheets like a Tonya.

Swinging open the door, he threw his arms out in front of him in a greeting. “All the time I need, my darling. I’m so glad you thought of me.” Charles winked at her and noticed that her expression did not match her previously playful tone. Her gaunt white face looked as though it had been run through three or four cycles in a dishwasher. She was still quite the beauty, with elegant blonde hair draped down her shoulder in a long free-flowing ponytail. Her deep blue eyes were as vibrant as when they had first met (“Quite the taste and style for such a young man,” she had quipped as he tried on loafers). But still, she looked... beaten. Used up and spit out. The oldest bag in the pile on trash day. “Are you okay?”

“
I’m excellent. Take your shorts off,” she stated, stepping through the door, past him without a smile or greeting gesture of any sort. “We’ll be quick with this, so as to not waste our time.”

With a slow hesitance, he followed behind her, dropping his boxers down around his ankles as he walked. His swollen exuberance had fallen back into a middle of the road state, but he was still grinning, hoping to infect her with his cheer. “What’s gotten into you? Haven’t seen you in two days, and
this
is the warm welcome I get? How about a kiss on the cheek, at the very least?” he begged, touching her waist from behind, caressing her with just a hint of tenderness, but not so much that it would frighten her away. This was no commitment beyond their upcoming romp, but he wanted to let her know that his seduction was a coordinated one.

She turned to him, her eyes looking right through him, beyond him, past him. Leaning in close to his cheek, she planted her lips upon it as a mimicking robot may have done. “There,” she stated with frigid disgust. “Lay on the bed.”

Rattup, shaking his head in confusion, crawled up on to his sadly non-shaking bed, pulling his t-shirt up over his head to become fully naked. He said nothing, but grinned at Tonya (or whoever she was), much in the way he had when they had first encountered each other in that Muzak-piped department store only a few days earlier. He had not stopped thinking of her since then, but things seemed different this time around. Less emotional, more logical. Perhaps she was testing him. Modern women were a strange breed of beast, or so he had discovered in his new investigations.

“
We just need to tie up some loose ends,” she noted, her drab expression sending jolts of icy disregard through Rattup’s chest. The woman bent over, reaching beneath her long flower-patterned dress and pulling her underwear out from its hiding spot. When she was in that bent position, Rattup glared at her pendulous breasts, imagining them beneath her thick gray sweater. This display sent Rattup back to the erectile moon once again, as hostile and uncaring as she appeared to be. So she had an awful day at work, or possibly at home, or possibly
both
. That certainly didn’t take away from the fact that she was a seasoned vixen at her very core, a sloppy reckless woman that could punish his very senses in all the right juvenile ways. “Stay still while I do this,” she mumbled, climbing up on to the bed, still fully clothed except for her missing panties.

“
Yes, ma’am,” Rattup replied with a little half salute, the drool forming a clear sheen on the edges of his lips.

“
This will only take a moment or two. And then you’ll be free.”

“
Free me. Free me like a bird, sweet child.”

When Rattup reached for her chest, she slapped his hand away with a scowl dripping from her melting pale face. “Stay still. Close your eyes.” He complied, clutching his eyelids shut as she thrust about on top of him, just enough to invigorate him further. “That’s right. Only a few more minutes.”

She groaned out, a harsh, unearthly snarl. Mr. Charles Rattup opened his eyes again, to bask in his beautiful mistress. When he looked upon her face though, he saw only a monster, a green-eyed thing with fangs that poked out from her lower jaw, a yellow color to the teeth that matched her jaundiced bloated skin. Boils covered her face, throbbing purple and brown. Shaking her head from side to side, a shower of discolored slobber landed on Charles Rattup’s chest and he yelped for assistance that he knew would not arrive in time. Tonya (or so he had labeled her) threw back her new grimy mane of jet black hair, grinding her spiky pelvis against his own, growling for his acquiescence. She ran her jagged fingersnails along his stomach, observing the swell of his elder gut, sniffing the air for a taste of his fear.

Rattup tried to formulate a suitable barb and spurn her with his words, to let her know that she was not welcome in his realm, that she was better to return to the bowels of Hades where she had been born in the belly of the Beast.

His heart stopped before he could do so.

Charles Rattup ceased.

Part III

In The Flesh

1.

When she walked through the door with padded footsteps and a drifting sense of nonchalance, he could sense with a distinguished jolt through his bones that Jackie was nowhere to be found. Not so much missing, but buried beneath a layer of smoldering blankets, screaming through muffled fabric for his aid, that she was in fact drowning in the Lilith Pool.

In her place was a pod, much like the wayward traveling Vance and the fleshy marionette that had once contained the desperate soul of Karen. Each of that triumvirate had their own physical beings in a three-dimensional sense of the word, but the driving spark that made them human was absent in their wallowing depths. Present, in a sense, but at the very lowest base of the human condition.

Behind and on top of her eyes, of course, was Lilith. Snickering and cackling. Delighted by her trump move, which she had most likely put in play from the moment she knew anything of Zephyr’s more extended life outside of his deliveries to the Rattup household. The scheming bitch had a very sneaky way about her mind games, that much was certain. Had their lives been a game of chess, Zephyr might have applauded the raging cunt for her prowess, and for her triumphant checkmate.

Zephyr, still covered in his mother’s spilled blood, mumbled incoherent disbelief beneath his breath as he stared at the visage of Jackie walking into the kitchen, swimming through a sheen of tears in his eyes, “You can’t do this. You can’t do this.” He repeated this mantra again and again, as if he could reverse the possession of his dearest soon-to-be wife by chanted words alone. It would only serve to delight her, though. “You can’t,” he said louder this time around, clenching his fists at his side as he watched the dead-eyed pod that had once (or currently?) contained his girlfriend, buried deep inside of her physical being. She walked towards him. She leaned down and started to pick figs from the crystal bowl on the kitchen counter, shoving them into her greedy mouth one at a time, grinning at Zephyr with wild instincts. Her eyes were composed of the same milky white and red veins that he had seen in Vance. She was lost at sea, Lilith upon the shore of her mind, like a backwards Siren, coaxing her away from, instead of towards, the shore.

Jackie grabbed a cleaver from the kitchen counter and drove it into the top of Lana’s skull. The sound made Zephyr recoil. With a second cleave, she broke away a chunk of the skull and Zephyr could now see his mother’s brain. He was powerless to stop her.

“
Yes, I can,” she stated. Leaning down closer to his mother’s body, the thing that had once been Jackie announced, “I can do what I see fit, in fact.” She extended her soft fingers, those very same ones which had run through Zephyr’s hair when he had become upset, and danced her fingernails along Lana’s exposed brain matter as a child would, feeling a new texture for the first time. Bits of skull fell away. “The joy of fingers is not lost on me,” Lilith said from the spaces inside, but Zephyr could only see Jackie’s moist pink lips moving. He wanted to reach out and grab her, to tear his personal succubus from her chest, but knew that she was still at least fifty percent Jackie, innocent and presumably unknowing of what had befallen her.

Could Jackie hear what he was saying? Could she see him, like a seasick submariner gazing through a porthole, dreaming of land? Or was she banished to another dimension of existence altogether? Zephyr thought of The Phantom Zone from his childhood Superman comics, to where they had once cast General Zod and his minions.

Lilith sunk her finger into a fold of Lana’s brain with a squishy sound that Zephyr could not bear to listen to. How dare she touch his mother like that? “Leave her alone,” Zephyr demanded, still unsure if he was actually speaking to Jackie, Lilith, or a conglomerate of both. They had become one in the same and it sent his emotional stability into a tail spin. He started to sob once again, reaching down and pulling Jackie’s hand away from his lost mother’s carcass. “Please, don’t do that,” he managed between breathless bursts of tears. Between vomit and his salty discharges of tears, he had very little substance left inside of him, the exhaustion of the day looming over him like an ominous rain cloud.

Lilith-Jackie spun to face him, her big white eggs for eyes shifting back and forth inside her possessed skull. She snatched at his throat,
a typical Lilith move
, thought Zephyr, and ground into his flesh with her fingernails. Luckily, Jackie kept her nails short and well managed, so the infliction was less severe while inside of this new body. Lilith’s previous claws, fortunately for Zephyr, were nowhere to be found in this hybrid pod-person.

“
This is all your fault, boy. You pressed me like a nagging infant and refused to succumb. And this is where everything changes. Do I have your
full attention
from this moment forward? You behave yourself, and I might let this sweet little bitch inside of me live. I can’t begin to tell you how wonderful it feels to have a body again, so even still, parting would be detrimental to my well-being. That only means you’ll have to work extra long and hard to convince me of your undying love,” Lilith said, releasing her grip a smidge. Zephyr moaned, already feeling the blackened marks blossoming on his throat. Even without the nails, her strength was immeasurable, channeled through Jackie.

“
Let me talk to her,” yelped Zephyr, pulling away from Lilith. He struggled for a firm footing and tumbled on to his knees, into his mother’s blood, as though it were a big red banana peel.

“
Who?” Lilith snapped back with a twisted grin upon Jackie’s vapid face. She played her innocence poorly, and they both knew it.

“
Jackie
. Let me know she’s okay in there.”

“
You assume that she’s still in here. Maybe I killed her.” She paused, mulling over the joy of that outcome, but knowing that it would not serve her long term purposes. “Or perhaps I’ve left her elsewhere for the time being.”

“
If that’s the case, then bring her back so I can talk to her.” Zephyr’s eyes had cleared of his tears, for he needed to assure himself of Jackie’s safety. She was his everything and his uncontrollable emotional pity party would only serve as a roadblock to their reunion. “Or you’ll get jack shit from me.”

Lilith pondered this for a moment, her hand sneaking back towards Lana, sliding beneath her blouse and rubbing at her chest like a raging drunken pervert, attempting to evoke some reaction from her young lover. Zephyr did not notice this vulgar act, for his gaze was locked upon Lilith’s ivory eyeballs. Half of Lilith’s face appeared to smile, while the rest was churning through ancient thoughts and reasoning. Her answers were not as automatic as Zephyr had once believed. Where there was a flipping and flopping of opinion, there was room for error. She was fallible.

“
And what do I receive for this concession? I concede very easily. Quite the embarrassment to me. You can understand that my honor is at stake.”

It was always about her, wasn’t it?

“
I’ll forgive you for my mother, if you only let me speak to Jackie for a minute,” Zephyr lied. He would never forgive her for what she had done to the woman who had raised him. As far as Zephyr could look ahead towards the future, he would have eventually grown apart from his mother, disparaged by her behaviors and their general misunderstanding and political juxtaposition to each other. He had always envisioned himself reconciling with his mother some years later, perhaps giving her more of his heart than the frigid “just for appearances” emotional support that they provided each other. They had never been alike, but she was
still
his mother, and Lilith would never be allowed a free pass on that particular indiscretion.

Lilith gave the idea another go around her cob-webbed brain and replied, “Only for a moment. And I’ll be listening. Watch your words.”

In an instant, Jackie’s eyes returned to normal, her pupils refilling with striking color. She gasped and lunged for Zephyr, hugging him with steadfast arms. “She’s terrible!” Jackie shouted, breaking into a frenzy of sobs and kissing Zephyr on the cheek, pulling herself so close to him that Zephyr felt as if he was wearing her skin as a shawl. “The things she’s said to me. She’s a
monster
.”