Love Bites on Valentine’s Day

Strange days with a dream date

Deborah was new at work — we hadn’t yet spoken.

We were both part of a group at City Hall working on the great project of the moment — the Festival of the Wolf, tying in to nature, celebrating the State’s values, blah blah blah. All generously funded by some corporate sponsor or other.

It was going badly. Everyone was angry, fighting… Nobody had made eye contact with me for an age. It was like the whole project was drifting; I couldn’t quite grasp hold and start to make a difference.

Like I used to.

I walked out on a break, coffee cup in hand to a morning of red clouds circling. A foreboding feeling was skittering around inside my ribs, as if my very essence and lifeblood would start to drip away if I didn’t get a better hold of my life.

I sank to the lowest step, sipping, noticing that even the coffee was tasting extra bitter. I shut my eyes, and for no reason that I’m aware of, summoned up a mental image of an arched wooden bridge leading over water to a tiny wooden beach hut.

Somehow comforting.

I shook myself, then looked ahead at the Rubicon river. Or more specifically, a paved embankment above the river’s edge where the goth kids sometimes skate. The city shops and cafes lay beyond.

Something summoned me forward; I got up and walked. Crows on the march looked around and flew off as I approached. I often have that effect on animals

As the flock passed, that’s when I saw Deborah standing on the embankment, staring down at the flowing water.

I walked closer. Tinny music was coming from her phone, just about audible above the running water. She was deep in melancholy, gazing down, lost in thought. It was obvious to me that she felt as ground down as I did.

“Work just sucks sometimes, huh?” I said, walking closer.

She looked around. Her big dark eyes sparkled in the sunlight, catching tones of indigo, and the scent of rose petals filled the air. She didn’t answer, but a smile played across her lips, as if we shared a secret.

Then I heard the song playing on her phone. “People are Strange,” I said. “The Doors. That’s my favorite song.”

“Mine too!” she said. “Isn’t that’s amazing?”

A spark ran through my brain, icy but exciting at the same time. Perhaps because this was the first positive interaction I’d had with a co-worker for… well, for a long time. At least since a period of time off sick some weeks back. I felt a weight lifted from my chest, if only for a moment.

I looked out over the river, a gentle breeze ruffling my jacket and passing right through me. “They should really build a bridge here,” I said. “Pedestrians from the business distract could get over to the cafes and all.”

“Right,” she replied. Her hair was writhing in the breeze.

“If only City Hall could get its act together,” I added. “Can’t get nothing done these days.”

I smiled awkwardly as silence fell. I could hardly believe that I’d run out of things to say already.

I was about to point to Deborah’s phone and suggest playing the song again, but she moved at the same time, and my elbow whacked against her arm. The phone was knocked from her hand, sailing over the edge of the embankment and down towards the river.

“Shit!”

The phone had landed on a bundle of sticks that had been washed up against a protruding rock.

“It might be alright,” Deborah said. She pointed to a little slipway, some ten yards along, with a chain across it and steps down. I peered down over the edge. Sure enough, there was a ridge in the embankment’s edge. It might be possible to pick one’s way along.

“The water’s low, but I’d struggle to get across…” she added.

“I’ll do it.”

Two minutes later, I was standing on the rock, soaked up to my knees, but holding the phone. As I turned to go back, Deborah — who had waited on the steps — slipped, and tumbled forward into the water, thumping her head on another rock.

A thin chill filled me. Her face was beneath the water. Had my earlier foreboding linked to this moment?

Reaching Deborah, I picked her up in my arms, and carried her up the stone steps up to the embankment. Moments later we were both shivering on one of the benches.

Then Deborah laughed. “Thanks,” she said. “That was very gallant.”

Gallant? Not a word I’d ever associated with myself, that was for sure. “Clumsy, more like,” I said. I pointed at her temple, which was bleeding beneath her now drenched hair. “I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too bad.”

She patted gingerly at her head. “No harm done at all.” Then she rose, grabbed my arm and squeezed it. “Come on. I’ll put that song on again as we walk back.”

It didn’t feel like much, but as January shifted to February, I noticed a change.

Deborah and I saw each other around Town Hall. We made eye contact. A gentle touch of the shoulder. A dead rose was mysteriously left on my desk. And before long, we were meeting for a Valentine’s Day meal. First date.

The restaurant was unfamiliar to me. A sign outside said The Blue Ox’s Tongue, with a picture of a peculiar lump of meat, dripping with blood. It didn’t seem greatly appetising, but then, I’m not a big eater. Inside, I found a cozy, Bohemian restaurant with a Gallic menu.

Small talk ensured. I told Deborah a bit about how I’d started working for City Hall, even though it felt like a lifetime ago. She did the same.

She smelled even more strongly of roses, and I noticed how symmetrical and voluminous her hair was. It waved and danced in the low light even here, almost as if it had a life of its own.

Then, I decided to be honest. “I’m surprised you wanted to go for a meal with the likes of me. I… don’t really feel like I’m in your league.”

She smiled sweetly. “I sense a kindred spirit inside you,” she said with a gentle shrug. “Besides, you saved me at the river. I’d have hated to die for a second time.”

A chill clutched my stomach at that statement. Although I tried to laugh at what was obviously a joke, something felt… off. I don’t think I could have swallowed or digested another thing.

She was now rubbing her fingertips together and eyeing me curiously. Then she licked her lips. “Dessert? The rum torte is just killer.”

“I… I’m good.” I tried to look more relaxed than I felt. I was cool, getting over my silly momentary reaction. I rubbed at my neck, noticing how cold and clammy it was. Feeling the veins beneath my skin protruding. “This has been fun, though,” I insisted.

She chuckled. “Well then. Let’s have the final course back at my place.”

How could I refuse?

Her home looked normal enough for one of the older stone houses in the city outskirts. Bleak iron fences, tall stone windows, candles burning.

“Someone else home?” I asked.

She laughed softly again, then said she wanted to go get changed. “Wait for me in the lounge,” she said, holding the door open for me. “Don’t run away. The atmosphere is… ideal.”

It was dark, that was for sure. The only lights were the candles, burning but dripping no wax.

I hesitated on the threshold of the room, eyeing a central candelabrum, then noticing a wreath of roses behind the door on some kind of wooden box. But I was distracted by a figure in the hallway. He was tall, broad-shouldered. But he hurried away down the hall before I could introduce myself.

Did Deborah live with her parents, I wondered?

I took a seat in the lounge, willing myself to relax and chill out, even muttering, “Come on,” a few times. The most feeble of pep talks.

I rubbed at my stomach — psychosomatic, perhaps, but it genuinely felt as if my digestion had frozen. My appetite was still completely gone. I didn’t even feel like having a drink.

Perhaps I was coming down with something.

I didn’t have long to wait before Deborah returned. Her appearance had… changed. She’d put on more make-up as well as changing her dress, but it was her eyes that I found myself captivated by, though I didn’t quite know why.

Not often you see eyeshadow like that, I guess…

She flashed a smile as she sat down on the couch beside me, and I noticed that People are Strange was playing once again, though it sounded disembodied.

“So… you have family?” I enquired, gesturing towards the hallway.

The eyes narrowed. “I had a younger sister. She died in a fire that consumed only her and her bed. The rest of the house was untouched.”

“Oh Jesus… I’m so sorry.”

She arched an eyebrow. “We must move on, correct? Life comes, and then it goes.”

“I…”

Deborah reached up and clicked on some little purple lamps that hung down from the ceiling. They didn’t make the room any brighter, but it suddenly felt a lot less cozy.

“Give me your hand,” she said sharply. “It’s time to play a game.”

I obliged, and she pulled back my sleeve, then ran one fingernail down the back of my arm with a sly grin.

To my shock, I saw a line of red. She’d broken the skin.

She then leaned over and licked it.

I leaped up, pulling my arm away. “Uh, I think I need to go get a glass of water, Deborah,” I said, beginning to back away towards the door of the room.

But as I backed away, I thumped into something solid. I staggered forward a pace, then spun around to see that it was a huge hulking figure with a face so pale and pasty that he could have been dead for weeks.

His eyes were almost closed, with only a glimmer of jet black through the openings. He started forward, making to grab me, and I instinctively raised my arms in front of my face.

That’s when I saw that my hands were full of holes. Perforated, as if stabbed by a hundred quills.

Deborah had stepped forward, and now she gently wrapped her arms around my shoulders and neck like they were a cowl. “Don’t hurry off, my little sourkraut,” she murmured. “You need to rest before you go anywhere. Don’t you agree. You should sleep…”

I barely heard. I was still staring at the holes in my own body. I looked at where her nails had cut the skin of my arm, and saw white bone flashing through. And between my radius and ulna, a tiny gap grew, an opening… a door. I found myself leaning forward, then falling into it.

I yelled out in panic, but words became jagged and accentuated as I fell, Deborah’s music back in the house forming a distorted background.

My head was thick with confusion, my breaths getting gradually shallower until they were hardly there at all. Gasping for perspective, I closed my eyes for a long moment, then found myself in total darkness.

But soon, I saw shapes moving. They were figures from City Hall, walking like automatons, plugging themselves into gallows-like trailing wires to recharge. In moments, they had begun crackling and glowing. Others were being toasted on vast spits by tiny shrieking demons. Crows circled overhead.

I ran to the nearest one, a friend to whom I had barely spoken for far too long. Gagging at the stench of frying flesh, I tried to pull him free from red-glowing metal that crackled and scorched my hands. But then I saw that he was held not by a gallows but a wrecked automobile. His body was ruined, long past saving.

I turned away. For hours, I ducked, swooped and crashed into the threads of these foreign nightmares, shapes that couldn’t be discerned, and lights that haunted my peripheral vision. The ambient light cycled between pitch darkness and the glow of an alien dusk. All the time my head throbbed, unrested and confused.

I was seeking a way out, but failing that, the source of this madness.

As I drifted deeper into my visions, I found myself stepping out onto a shadowy bridge: thin, wooden, only wide enough for one.

As I stepped out to cross, the murder of crows returned, and began to peck at my body. I held up my arms, and found that they were returning half-rotted flesh to the holes in my body, but yet I was disintegrating further, my arms now skeletal.

Panicked, I stumbled around, flapping the birds away, only to see that I was now hammering on the inside of a casket.

When I pushed it open and clambered out, I was standing at the foot of the very same stone steps in the river, directly below the same riverside embankment where I’d first spoken to Deborah.

It was dawn.

I climbed up the steps, seeing a funereal wreath at the top. I pushed it aside as I clambered up, then leaned on the bench to gather my energy.

With nowhere else to go, I set out for City Hall once again. A box of newspapers stood by the corner near the bench, and I checked the date: February 15th.

I pinched at myself a few times, rubbed my eyes, trying to ignore two lingering holes in my hands, or the bony feeling of my face. Humming the now-familiar tune to myself, I marched back to City Hall, ready to face another day of conflict.

Coffee tasted better that next morning. But I didn’t see Deborah again.

It felt good to have escaped the house of the dead.

Many thanks to Justiss Goode for suggesting the tag ‘Weirdest V-Day’, and Aria Wraithe for the third image. It also drew on these fiction prompts, #9: “Write a story that mashes together two genres or settings…”