Dark Screams, Volume 5 Read online

  Don’t worry; this isn’t a vampire story. I hate vampire stories. We all know there’s no such thing as vampires.

  But the taste of blood changed everything. I could feel the orgasm start to ripple through her body, and as the deep-throated growl worked its way up into a scream, I felt the power of Vesuvius building from within me, and I screamed with her as we both soaked the bed in the juices of our lust. I saw stars as my synaptic receptors blew organic fuses and I detonated into the greatest orgasm I’d ever known. And from all evidence, she did, too.

  I was raw, my lust subsiding in weakening throbs of completion, and the world spun in a balletic, spidery dance and everything around me went dark and quiet. The last thing I remember was the sound of my heartbeat slowing in my ears.

  And then came the darkness…

  —

  The noon sun poured a box of light through the window and onto the bed, baking me awake. My head throbbed, and I could feel my pulse pounding throughout my body. Every inch of my skin was wide awake before my mind reached full consciousness. It took a few tries to lift the baggage of my eyelids over the sandy surface of my eyes. The sunlight screamed, and I squinted against its invasion. I lifted my pounding head to find myself alone in my bed, the sheets thrashed and clotted with bloodstains all around me. Every part of me hurt; I had exercised muscles I didn’t know I possessed in the course of our Olympian sexcapades last night, and every one of them shouted out in protest. I reached up to touch the fire at the base of my neck, and felt the drying blood that crusted the puckered wounds there. I lay there, my rasping eyes at half-mast, taking inventory of my body from the inside out. It wasn’t agony, not entirely, anyway. I was spent, but it was kind of a good spent, despite the pain. I felt fully evacuated—though I had to pee like a racehorse—spent and expended, the reservoir of my sexuality used up…but in a way it was meant for. The pain was matched by an unprecedented physical satisfaction, a complete fulfillment of need. Every bit of my desire had been put to use, a fire that had burned beyond its embers. Now all that was left was the smoldering stuff that hurt. And it was worth it.

  Despite the ache, I summoned all of the strength I could and sat up, finding myself staring at a naked, scabbing, used-up version of me looking back from the mirror, alone and abandoned. I looked thrashed, but with a stupid fucking smile on my face. That had been the wildest, most exciting, draining, exhilarating, crazy night of passion I’ve ever known. Yeah, I know, it was strictly physical, but Jesus! It ate me alive. I felt like I never needed to fuck again. Which was a good thing, because nobody would want to bed the guy that stared back at me from that hotel mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, but so was my body. My paunch was embarrassing, but the road map of rusty dried blood on my neck and chest was repulsive, pulling at the matted hair of my chest and crinkling my flaccid flesh into reptilian scales. Wow, I needed a shower. And housekeeping had their work cut out for them today.

  Marion was long gone, and though I couldn’t blame her, I was hoping to see her later. This was quite a welcome to the wonders of Indianapolis. I stood, but immediately lost my balance, not realizing how deeply ingrained my wooziness was. I put my hand out to balance myself on the credenza, and I was okay in a minute or so. I looked down at the DVD player, and out of curiosity, popped it open. Marion’s disc was still in the tray, unmarked except for the title, no contact information. My head reeled again, and a waft of that terrible smell sneaked into my nose.

  What was that? It was horrible, it was rank, it smelled like death.

  Regaining my balance, I looked around the room to see where that atrocious aroma was coming from. The smell of sex covered the bed, mingling with the rusty iron-filing tang of drying blood. But that was far from repellent to me. I don’t know about you, but the heady blend of man/woman juices and natural flow did not disgust me. Bloody sheets, yes, not attractive, and I wasn’t sure how I’d explain them to the housekeeper, but I’m sure they come across that all the time. But that smell. That stench. It seemed not to have a source. I smelled under the pillow. I took a whiff of the wastebasket. I found my shoes under the detritus of the night’s adventure, and sniffed them inside and out. Ripe, yes, but not the horrid stink of death.

  Even the blood gone sticky all over the top half of my body smelled sour, but not foul. I went to the windows to let in fresh air, but as in most hotels, the windows did not open. Conditioned air was all I was allowed. I quickly stepped back from the sheets of unbreakable, suicide-free glass when I noticed that the room overlooked the parking lot, which was filling with convention-going horror fans whom I did not wish to see me naked, with or without the adornment of blood.

  Back in the shadows of my loose and unfettered nakedness, I realized that the awful reek had once again taken leave. I bathed merely in the smell of blood and fucking.

  I limped like an octogenarian into the bathroom and over to the tub, overtaken again by the vertiginous weakness of exhaustion. I had to sit down on the toilet, so suddenly did I lose all strength. My eager bladder screamed for attention, and I peed sitting down like a girl for what seemed like minutes.

  I stood and flushed, weak and drained and dizzy. I stepped over to the tub, sat on the edge, and turned it on. I hadn’t taken a bath in years, but I felt a sudden rush of nausea, and knew that if I stood to shower, I might actually throw up. So I ran the water, dumped in the body wash, and stepped into the towering foam, all at once feeling the need to be clean. The sickly sweet smell of lavender steam quickly filled and overpowered the bathroom, and I lay back into the cloud of lather as I sank into the fresh, hot water.

  Ouch!

  Jesus, how my privates stung as they hit the soapy water!

  I looked beyond my new girth to see what was the matter, and my tackle was red and raw and weeping clear fluid. We had really done it last night. My penis looked flayed and shredded, swollen, throbbing with stinging-nettle pain. I stood suddenly out of the water, but I didn’t hover long before dizziness dropped me back into the suds, and I shrieked as I fell back into the tub.

  I choked back a sob, but could not keep the tears from welling in my eyes. I knew the soap and water was good for my battered cock, especially after fucking bareback for hours with a stranger (what was I thinking?), so I kept it submerged and even lathered it up to get it fully clean. It was Saturday, so a visit to a doctor’s office was out of the question for the moment, and besides, I’d been fucked raw before. I was cursed with sensitive skin. Perhaps a little pain was worth the most incendiary sex of my life.

  It would heal. And I’d get checked out as soon as I got home, just to be sure, at the Toluca Lake Health Center, where, because of my Directors Guild membership, I could see the doctor for ten bucks.

  Just to be sure.

  I lay in the cooling tub for half an hour, scrubbing myself scrupulously and pathologically clean. I stepped out of the tub and wrapped myself in a luxurious suite towel, dabbing my nether regions with gentle care. They stung, but they were clean and dry. The phone rang: It was time to face the fans at the autograph tables. I wrapped a clean white washcloth around my tender tackle and stepped into a clean set of clothes, choosing the shirt with the highest collar to cover the wounds I’d received in the bed battle last night.

  —

  Terry chaperoned me from the elevator into the Dealers Room, which was bustling with activity. Lines were forming at the tables at the far end of the hall, and the fans were very orderly and polite; they had been waiting for their heroes for hours, but no one was complaining. These were not your ordinary heroes. In L.A., you’d spot these luminaries in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, scuffling with them for their parking place and wishing death upon them if they beat you to it. They dirtied the boulevard and just got in the way, but here at MonsterThon, here in Indianapolis, they—and they includes me—were royalty.

  So despite the healing throb at my groin, I felt revived, welcomed, appreciated, even—dare I say it?—loved.

  The lines of fans parted for us as
Terry led me through them, and I felt like an Arthurian potentate as they turned to give me their smiles and greetings. I gave them a humble grin, then cursed my luck when I saw where I was to take my seat: at the same table as the Chartreuse Harridan, Mathilda Michaelson.

  She pulled my seat back for me with an eager grin (truth be told, I have yet to see her without a grin, and I suspect this is a perpetual smile in the wake of too many surgeries; I’m guessing she wears it even when furious, or even when she cries), pulling my chair closer to hers and almost causing me to collapse on my tailbone. I righted the seat, pulling it as far from her as I could without bumping into the grumpy Chinese alligator-movie guy. His garlic breath radiated around him in an evil halo.

  “I was looking for you last night, honey,” Mathilda said, her smoky Brandy Alexander voice at least an octave lower than my own.

  “I just wanted to go up early,” I replied.

  “Oh, come on, honey, when in Rome…” and then she laughed a dirty laugh. “What happens in Indianapolis stays in Indianapolis.”

  “Good point,” I said, and I meant it.

  “I do know how to party, babe. I could give you lessons.” Every word she spoke seemed to come with a leer.

  Ha, ha. “I’m sure you could,” I replied, defaulting to my standard play-it-dumb strategy.

  “I should give classes.” Another of those winks that never quite met.

  This time the “ha, ha” was aloud.

  The convention people were laying out piles of Sharpies and I had a stack of Taxed and Gigantic one-sheets printed up for the occasion. The crowd chatter was growing in anticipation.

  “I had quite an evening, myself,” the Green Queen confided. “I live on the semen of twenty-one-year-old virgin boys. Makes me young.”

  I was rocked by a wave of revulsion. I did not want to imagine through which orifice that innocent young ejaculate was consumed.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that just makes me a little too old for you. Ha, ha.”

  “On the contrary,” she said. “That makes you just right.”

  The clock clicked over, and, to my overwhelming relief, the fans were unleashed on us.

  I felt bad for them. There was no John Carpenter here, no Jamie Lee Curtis, no George Romero, no Robert Englund, no Bruce Campbell, no Clive Barker. There were a couple faces out of the two dozen or so who offered up their signatures for the hard-earned allowances of these kids that I recognized, but I couldn’t have connected a name or a movie title to any of them. Taxed and I seemed to be the main attraction, and when I saw the midwestern horror polloi trying to choose whose autographs they should spend their limited convention funds on—the alligator guy, the Star Trek grandma, or one of the interchangeable dewy-eyed blondes in their fresh new boob jobs—I just got depressed. I was tempted not to charge to sign their posters and videos…until I remembered that my savings account contained only moths and that the rent was due. And besides, I rationalized, these others counted on this for their living. Mathilda surely had not graced the screen in a new production in at least a couple decades, and this was her chance to shine, to be adored as once Captain Kirk had lusted after her, and pocket a few shekels at the same time. If I didn’t charge, the others would look greedy. Right? I didn’t want them pissed off at me, did I?

  My guilt sublimated for the time being, I was amazed that close to a hundred people actually ponied up twenty bucks a pop for my autograph. Which was fifty more than had bought Ms. Michaelson’s.

  It kept my mind off the pulsing pain that was going on down below. It puffed me up a bit, though I knew that deflation would hit full tilt when I got back to L.A. and settled into my Koreatown hovel to try to figure out the next chapter of my life. So I smiled and grew inches as fans praised the artistic brilliance of Taxed and just said a polite thank-you when they complimented Gigantic, fighting the urge to give a list of excuses for why it sucked.

  I kept scanning the crowd for Marion as all of this transpired, certain that last night was only the first tête-à-tête we would share over the course of this momentous weekend. My equipment might be tattered and wounded, but there were other ways to share and sate our lusts. Surely she, like the other attendees of MonsterThon, wanted more of me.

  Right?

  The crowd began to thin a couple hours later, but still no sign of the most potent lover I had ever coupled with, and I found myself missing her. I was just about ready to close up shop, keeping my back to the Green Genie as I addressed my fans, when the stink hit me again. It curled around my head like a rain cloud of funk, reeking. God, it was awful!

  “What is that smell?” I said to no one in particular.

  “You don’t like my perfume?” Mathilda asked. “It’s Chanel, honey.”

  “It’s not perfume,” I said. “Something awful. You don’t smell that?”

  I looked at the last remaining fans, and they shook their heads, seeming kind of scared, actually.

  “All I smell is the scent of love, baby,” Mathilda leered. “What do you smell?”

  “It’s like shit,” I said. “Or death.”

  “Everybody check their shoes,” Mathilda said, lifting her own stilettoed boot to the top of the table, opening her suddenly bared vagina to me before I quickly looked away. The fans were lucky to be on the other side of the table. Her labia were open like a mouth, but the breath they breathed was scented like lavender. I did not want to be close enough to know that, but here it was. Mathilda was hygienic, if repulsive.

  Suddenly, I felt movement downstairs.

  My privates, raw and aching, were starting to prickle. They itched, and all I wanted was to scratch…but not surrounded by the fan patrol. The scraped, weepy pain still swelled with every heartbeat, but this was somehow worse. It felt like something was squirming under the skin. Fucking pubic hair. Fucking Mediterranean bloodline.

  I squeezed my thighs together, but there was no relief to be found there. I crossed my legs, but that, too, was of little help. I really needed to hit the bathroom and see what was going on.

  “I’ll be right back,” I told no one in particular, and headed to the men’s room.

  Being a celebrity—at least among this crowd—the last thing I wanted was to relieve myself in a public restroom with pimpled horror fanatics trying to check out my goods and post them on Dread Central or something. So I locked myself into the handicapped stall and dropped my drawers.

  Oh, God, my penis was bright red and swollen to twice its size. All down the sides of my cock the flesh was abraded, wet with clear fluid. The pain was sharp, but the itch was more fierce: I scratched at it like a flea-bitten mongrel, but the sensations would not be relieved. That horrible deathly aroma had followed me into the stall, and seemed to be weeping from the raw, open wounds at the nest of my pubic hair.

  I was terrified, didn’t know what to do. I had to make it through this weekend and get back home to get this taken care of. The screening was tonight, and the flight home wasn’t until tomorrow night. In a state of panic, I considered going home early. Imaginary worms crawled under my genital flesh, and I broke out in a shivery sweat at the creepy-crawly sensation. But I realized I was being silly. I had just really had too much sex. Everything was fine. It would heal. Another day wasn’t going to make a difference. Besides, tonight was going to be the biggest honor of my life, a celebration of the one achievement of which I could be proud, the first sold-out screening of my career. I could stand the discomfort for another day, get the antibiotics and fix it up as soon as I got home.

  I supposed I could have gone to the emergency room at the local hospital, but there’s no way that word would not get out that I was being treated for Shredded Penis; horror fans have big mouths, and the last thing I needed tweeted and repeated was that my manhood had been mangled by a female fan at an Indianapolis MonsterThon. And surely the more ambitious among them would find a way to snap and share some phone photos. I had faced ridicule often enough, but this was more than I could take.

&
nbsp; I peered out of the stall to find the restroom momentarily empty. My pants still around my ankles, I tossed aside the washcloth, now spattered with coarse, yellow stains, waddled across the lavatory to lock the door, then lifted my swollen, throbbing, precious cargo into the sink and bathed them in antibacterial soap. The sting felt medicinal; it didn’t hurt, it healed. I gently swaddled it with rough, institutional paper towels, squeezing all the blood and fluid off of my raggedly rent pubic flesh, wrapped the family jewels in fresh toilet paper, and gently cradled them into the comfort of my Jockeys.

  And then I threw up in the sink.

  —

  When I returned to the hall, the tables were being moved for a panel discussion by the modern scream queens, so my job for the day was done. The other convention guests had cleared off, which allowed me a sigh of relief and a pocketful of cash. Terry was waiting for me, and as I approached him he reacted to my pale, blanched expression.

  “Everything okay, Jack?”

  “Hotel room service doesn’t agree with me, I guess,” I told him.

  “You going to be okay for the screening tonight?”

  “Absolutely. Everything is fine.”

  “Great,” he said, concerned but relieved. “Everybody’s really excited about it.”

  “Including me,” I said truthfully. “I’m just gonna go up to my room and relax for a little bit.”

  “Are you going to be all right for the big dinner?”

  Big dinner. My groin itched and squirmed, and my stomach somersaulted.

  “It’s the awards dinner,” he said, all eager as only a horror fan can be.

  “If I feel up to it, I’ll be there,” I assured him.