Not a drop to drink 6-7

Chapter 6

Daisy’s father beckoned her closer. He asked Mrs. Chalk to leave, it was daddy daughter time. Her parents had been arguing for a while in the kitchen. Daisy had heard it all. She and her brother, Mark, had been sent to their rooms, but they heard everything. Guilt dragged Daisy down.

“Charlie, something clawed at my bay! We have to call the police!”

“We don’t know that. She went into haunted house. She probably just got spooked when she hurt herself.”

“Well we have to do something.”

“Let me talk to her. We’ll figure something out.”

So she had been called down, her mother floating between the kitchen and living room, her father sitting spread out on the couch, a beer in his hand. “Come here, big girl.”

She eagerly sat down next to her father and hugged him tight. She was in her pajamas. The wounds pink and bight from the hot shower water. Usually she didn’t like showers, but on that night, she just couldn’t feel clean.

“So, you want to tell me what happened?”

Oh she did so much. She wanted to tell it all and cry into his arms, but she knew that they hadn’t been human, and that was something the police couldn’t handle. And after that they’d come back for her. “No.”

“Listen, sometimes when people are scared, they imagine things. You think maybe when you got hurt, you panicked and imagined something?”

Yes. Let him drop it! “Maybe.”

“Let me see it.” He pulled back her collar to take a look. It was still fresh, livid against her pale skin. Perfect claw marks tracing down the tendon of her tiny neck. He couldn’t deny it. And judging by the marks on her ankles, there had been a thumb, something only humans had.

He sighed the way only dads who love their daughters can. “I don’t want to hear about anymore haunted houses, okay?”

“Okay,”

“Why don’t you go to bed? It’s late.”

“’Kay.”

She kissed him on the cheek and said goodnight to her mother before trotting up the stairs. There, she listened and waited.

“What do you think?” Her mother had floated in like a worried ghost as soon as Daisy had left.

“I think somebody did it to her,”

“What kind of sicko does that?”

“Probably just some bum squatting in that house.”

“What do we do?”

“We can’t go to the cops yet. We don’t have enough to report. I’ll just go over there and see if I can sort this out.”

“Charlie, you can’t! He might be crazy.”

“Then I’ll bring my gun.”

Her heart fluttered meekly. Her father had a gun, that she had known. But it had always been abstract. Like a toy kept in a big black Christmas box with a lock she would never be able to open and the safety on.

To open that box would mean disaster.

Chapter 7

Mr. Chalk had refused to leave until Mrs. Chalk was asleep. He didn’t want a big production and her staying up late.

Daisy forced herself awake in her dark bedroom. How easy it would be to fall asleep, let it all dissolve into dreams, but she couldn’t. She had to follow him, to get help if need be. No one else could do it, and that gave her the responsibility. Her parents always talked about responsibility with such noble, righteous voices. She had never imagined it as something so powerful it would drag her back to her nightmare.

She heard the door open and lock. Charlie pulled his coat on tight, the pistol, a semi-automatic 9m, tucked safely away in a shoulder holster underneath the coat. She slipped out the back screen door that was unlocked and ran to catch him, unprotected by either shoes or coat.

How far would Charlie go for his daughter? Once he stepped on that lot he was trespassing, to take out the gun was assault, to fuck the guy up a little bit was battery, to pull the trigger was murder. Yes, he’d go that far for Daisy, if it were warranted. A man has the right to protect his family.

The door was boarded up, untouched. He followed the trail of trampled leaves left by Daisy earlier that day to the window.

He stuck his head in, “Hello?”

Alarmed, Jasper turned to Pyrite for support.

“He’s yours,” she mouthed, “Do whatever the fuck you want with him.”

Something drew his eyes to the door. When he remembered Pyrite was there again, he couldn’t say where he had gone. Like magic.

“Pyrite?”

He scanned the room, for an instant he saw her again, but then something else caught his attention and he looked away. He could only see Pyrite if he was looking directly at her and thinking about her, and something she was doing made him forget she was there.

And she wasn’t going to help him. He was on his own. What to do? He needed to eat. Badly. The thought of all that fresh blood so close drove him mad, but the man would die if he let him in. There was no denying that.

Lie. That’s what he’d do. “Is someone there?” He called hesitantly down the stairs down the stairs. The words caught in his throat.

“Yeah,”

“Oh, thank god.” He whispered. It sounded relieved even to him. “I’m upstairs. You’ve got to help me.”

Mr. Chalk clambered through the window clumsily, landing in a heap on the floor. He wasn’t as graceful as he had been when he was younger.

“What’s wrong?”

Lying, he found, was like an avalanche. Entirely natural, and once started, could only grow. “That psychopath’s keeping me here.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“He broke my leg so I wouldn’t be able to leave.”

“Is the door locked? I’ll get you out. We can call the cops.”

“Thank god, man. I’ve got to get out of here!” He faked choking back tears. His voice got higher and higher. “I thought I was going to die.”

He started to climb the stairs. “Did a little girl come here?”

“She got away. She’s damn lucky. The guy was going to keep her here like me.”

Mr. Chalk sat down next to him. How would he go about it, Jasper thought. He didn’t want to. He was going to, though. He wouldn’t do it until he saw blood. Pyrite would not help him.

Daisy ran in the dark, had to get there and stop it from happening! Her feet ached from hard concrete, but she didn’t care. Her heart hammered to the beat of the percussion of her bare feet. Speed!

Mr. Chalk got to the top of the stairs and looked at Jasper. It was a sad sight. He was filthy, pale, leg covered in a dirty bed of bare cloth. How long had he been there? He looked like he had never seen the sun. He looked up at him for support with his intelligent gray eyes.

Charlie crouched down next to Jasper. He looked at a pulsating blue vein on the man’s neck, looking there for strength. It pulsed like a dancer, rose and fell like the pipe of a snake charmer. It was hypnotic. The rest of the world melted away.

There was a thud downstairs, the sound of Daisy hitting the hard wood floor with her numb feet. Charlie turned, jerking the artery away, throwing reality back into perspective.

“Dad!” Terror and love and fear and loyalty ran thick through the tiny word dropped into the silent night. She would take her father away to home to safety and warmth so they could live together like a perfect family ought to. If he was going to do it, it would have to be done that instant. Now!

Jasper’s bottom jaw came clear off, hanging on by flesh, hanging vertically. The two once obscure fangs at the roof of him mouth, became the whole of his existence, shocked with cold air as they swung forward like a snake’s.

In the brief moment between fed and hungry, life and death, he became aware of the thing Pyrite had done to him, the silver needle, lithe and deadly. He plunged it into the part of Charlie that couldn’t be seen. The thing that he only knew existed, but Jasper saw it himself and wanted it gone. He stabbed at it with his invisible silver needle, feeling the resistance like that of so much meat.

The remains of it tumbled about him, lost confused, as Jasper’s physical fangs buried themselves in his flesh. Daisy screamed, but Jasper could scarcely hear it below the rush of blood.

Chalk’s blood rushed with the sound of a million rapids in Jasper’s head as it speed against gravity into Jasper’s fangs, pounding like a waterfall against the roof of his skull. The little that escaped the fangs, Jasper drank down greedily. None could spill. He wanted it all.

Daisy tugged ferociously at him. She pulled at his shoulder, at his arm that kept her father pinned down, at his loose hanging jaw that might deter his fangs, but he was made of lead, pulsing with another’s heartbeat.

The rush of the ocean sped up intensifying like the crescendo of an orchestra. Heart thundering, mind reeling, chest rising and falling against the smothering flood…

If I could just see them one more time….

It was Charlie’s last dying thought, and jasper saw it tangibly, for an instant he knew what it was to be another man and die at his own hand. He unlatched himself, staring down in horror at his own responsibility. Daisy’s shrieking cries came back into perspective. She pounded at him with he tiny fists, pulling him away from her dead father. He wanted to throw up. He couldn’t, but he wanted to.

Daisy sobbed, as she’d never sobbed before. Those deep, defeated sobs would always haunt that house.

“Daisy…” He’d learned her name from the dying man’s last wish.

“Shut up!” Something she’d never said before. Something she’d start saying immediately afterward.

“Daisy, just go home.”

“No! I’m not going home until you’re dead!

He stood up. He was entirely clean of blood. She backed away. “You monster! You killed him! You killed my Daddy.”

“I’m sorry…” there was nothing he could say.

“Don’t tell me you’re sorry. You liked it! I could tell!” She hit him in the shin hard. He didn’t feel anything.

“Just go home,” he heard himself getting louder, angrier in his shame.

“Someday, I swear. I’ll make you pay for what you did. I mean it. I’m going to fucking kill you!” And with that the left and ran away from the haunted house, back to her warm bed, to dream of her revenge.

When he turned back to the body, wondering what to do, Pyrite was there, fully visible, sucking on a leg wound. She lifted herself solemnly to face him.

“It always sucks the first time.”