Mason Beck Fiction

I had hoped to finish this by the weekend, but the week turned out busier than expected and the holiday wiped me out. Still, I didn’t want the weekend to pass without sharing something, especially after setting that goal for myself.

I’m not sure where the idea came from, but it’s been nagging at me for a little bit and I’ve been adding small notes about it until I felt I just needed to go for it. I also wanted to experiment with a different perspective than what I generally write in.

In any case, I’ve enjoyed working on it, and I hope you enjoy reading it.

Stay tuned for the next parts as I’m able to put them together.

---

I have the faintest inkling, no more than a sliver of a memory, that once I felt the warmth of the sun on flesh I no longer possess. A thin suggestion that I was something else before all this. But my memories bleed together now, centuries tangled into one dark indistinguishable mass. Time rots in my hands and thoughts slip between my fingers. Names dissolve on my tongue and faces blur before my eyes.

Only two truths remain.

The hunger that gnaws at the bones I do not have that will never, ever be sated.

And the sound of daylight above the soil.

Not the sight of it. I have not seen the sun in longer than I can measure. But the sound. The way it hisses and sears through the earth. The way its fury vibrates down into my hollowed shape. Its rage. Its loathing. Its sound. The sound of its screams.

The sound of a world that remembers what I was and has not forgiven me.

But when the sound fades, when the shrieking light retreats and the cold uncaring dark spreads its arms to welcome me, I rise. And I listen.
Thump. Thump.
There it is.
Thump. Thump.

I race between heartbeats.
Not mine, at least not yet.
But the ones that will make the hunger hurt a little less, but for a few moments.

Thump. Thump.
I lurch and I leap, between the beats, between the breaths, and the spaces between.

Thump. Thump.
I am there. Pressed against cold brick and glass. Two hearts beating between these walls.
A woman and…

Thump. Thump.
If I had breath, it would catch in my throat.
A child. An innocent. Untouched by cruelty, not yet jaded by the crushing burdens and inevitability of life.

A feast.

I can scarcely contain the urge. The unnatural desire to lunge, to pounce, to devour.

The mother would have given me a moment. A brief lessening of the agony.

But the boy…

It has been so long since I have taken the essence, the potential, that small and vital spark that shapes the man he might one day become. So long since I have felt it tear loose from a child this young and unspoiled.

I do not remember the name. I do not remember the face. I do not remember the place.

But I remember the taste.

I remember the flood of stillness, the sudden hush in the ache. That single moment of relief. That single moment of clarity.

And the only thing that separates me from it now, the only thing keeping me from my deliverance, that fleeting balm for this unending thirst, is the time it will take his mother to retire to her own bed.

I watch. 

I wait. 

And I shudder with anticipation between the beats of his heart.

She folds the last shirt from the basket and yawns. She carries her burden down the hall and into the closet. She stands in his doorway for a moment, weary but smiling.

I could take them both.
I could do it now.
I could risk it all.
Take it all.

It takes every ounce of strength to hold myself back. I could tear that essence from them, but the taking would spoil it, diminish it. I want it whole. I want it pure.

She stifles another yawn and walks to the bathroom, turning on the shower and closing the door.

This will have to do.

If I am careful, if I am strong, I can make this child last for two, perhaps three more nights. And her perhaps one after. They will live. But he will be cursed with my hunger, cursed with the ache for the innocence and wonder and potential he was robbed of. He will likely die young, with a needle in his arm. Long before that she will wither, and she will break, and he will be sent to the home of others that will never truly be his home.

These memories come easily. These visions come with the hunger.
I am unable to slake this emptiness without the pain, the knowing of what it will do.

I pass through shadow, through the darkness between the small spaces in his bedroom wall. The angry festering void blossoms with each inch forward. Every breath fans the embers of the flames that will consume this child.

It must be slow.
It must be cautious.
It must be… perfect.

I lower the bars of his tiny prison, enough for him to see, enough for him to try and flee.

I whisper in his ear, gently, to awaken.
And to behold.

His eyes flutter open. His baby fat arms rub at his face and he stretches awake. I withdraw to the shadows in the corner and take form. I coalesce from spectre without shape into a nightmare of hoof and claw and horn, the hunger now given body and substance.

I nearly collapse and pounce all at once.

Look at me, child.
Look. At. Me.

His eyes loll about until they land on my corner. I can tell he sees something.

It always starts with confusion. I reach for the cracks, the still intangible tendrils searching for purchase.

His eyes focus.
Then comes recognition.

Those tendrils connect. They take hold.

I could do it now. I am so close.

I close my fist, driving my claws into my palms. Sometimes one kind of pain can distract from another, enough to give a single moment of focus.

I take one step forward. A tiny, slow movement to allow that recognition to take root.

Then comes fear. And the sustenance I seek.

But the fear does not come. His eyes lock onto mine.

He does not recoil. He does not cry. He does not scream.

He sits up and stares.

I do not understand, and for a moment my hunger is nearly forgotten.

He cocks his head and crawls on hands and knees to the edge of the crib. He rolls down the lowered rails with a burbling giggle spilling from his lips.

I retreat back into the shadow. Something is wrong. My grip falters as his confusion softens into curiosity.

He steadies himself on his rocker and rises to his feet. He turns back to me and toddles unsteadily forward.

I cannot remember this ever happening before. This is not right. This is wrong. I should end this. I would leave a stain on the floor and charnel in my wake and waste this bounty. But it would end. And I would seek another.

He comes closer. I press myself against the wall of the corner. Why can I not unclench the muscle that holds this form together? Why do I not flee?

He stands below me, staring up. And he smiles.

I cannot move.

He does. His arms open wide.

He wraps them around my calf, his cheek resting against my shin. He squeezes.

Thump. Thump.

A heartbeat. 

Mine. 

Fire races through my chest like lightning as I collapse to the floor.

I clutch the matted hair of my chest as the room spins in my vision.

His arms find my shoulders as his head settles against my hand.

Thump. Thump.

An image flashes across my mind. A memory. Bright green grass. White clouds and blue skies. Sunlight. Copper tinged curls on rosy cheeks. A name.

It is gone as quickly as it came.

The boy’s arms are wrapped around my neck.

Now there is fear.
But it is mine.

The contracted spasm that kept me trapped in substance releases, and I descend. Down and deep, back beneath the soil.

Thump. Thump.

Its sound echoes within my being. I still feel the electricity that tore through me, though I no longer have form for its passing.

Deeper still I plunge, yearning to return to the oblivion of the hunger that once consumed my every thought. To hear the shrieking dirge of the sun above, aiming its hate at my core. That would be a mercy.

To forget.
To purge this fear.
This confusion.
This recognition of what may have been, and the state to which I have now fallen beneath it.

And then I hear it. The sound of his tearful cries above. But not cries of fear or pain. It is the sound of an absence felt.

A door opens loudly. His mother calls for him, her footsteps hurried down the hall.

I am far beneath, but somehow I can hear as though I am still there.

She scoops him into her arms and tells him she is with him. She asks how he got out of his crib, why he is crying.

He chokes back a sob, just enough to shape a single word. His first.

“Dah-duh.”

She holds her breath a moment, caught by the sound.

Then came recognition. And her tears joined his, the absence felt by both.

With the morning came the deluge of the sun’s fury above my earthen cradle, along with the burning ache of starvation. It drowns the sound of their slumbering breaths. But nothing dulls the fear. Nothing dims the echo of the white hot lattice of electric flame that tore through my being. Nor the flash of that memory, exhumed from some long buried ghost of a life I may have once lived.

A night without feeding makes a long and terrible day. I should abandon this particular prey, should shiver and drift through the dark firmament and flee. Find another. Feed elsewhere.

But something holds me here.

A curiosity has gripped me, a rare feeling among the blurred collage of hunger and feeding and searing screams.

And then there is the other part of me, the part that is loath to abandon such plenty, such abundance waiting to be consumed.

Perhaps I could feed two hungers at once.