Dreadful Desires
The Infernal Machine
Part III: King of Terrors
Content warning: This story contains explicit content and supernatural sex that may offend some readers. All depicted characters are 18 years or older.
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Chapter 11: The Ghost of Everything
Darkness covered the face of Seattle.
The I-90 interchange stood empty and abandoned, a broken tangle of asphalt ribbons winding across the charcoal sky. Shattered skyscrapers loomed above a lifeless oil-slick waterfront that girdled the moldering remains of Pier 57. A rusted Ferris wheel creaked and gave the slightest turn in answer to some subtle vibration of the wharf. The pale spindly shadow of the Space Needle stabbed the black mire overhead.
Further to the north, beyond the capsized boats and smooth inky sheen of Lake Union, a car’s headlights blazed through the gloom. Its rumbling engine broke the cemetery silence; the squeal of its brakes echoed down shadow-drenched alleyways as it swerved around the rubble. The black hatchback stopped at an intersection and idled in front of the crosswalk, facing the dead traffic lights, surrounded by rows of dead trees and smashed storefronts. No red light had signaled for the car to stop, and no green light would ever tell it to continue. Stopping at the intersection was just a lifelong habit. David shook his head and hit the gas.
“How’s the phone?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the ruined city.
“No signal,” Isabel said.
He grabbed the radio knob and gave it another hard twist: the same droning hum rustled through the speakers as before, pulsing with a steady half-beat cadence. David cursed under his breath and twisted the knob left and right, switching from one station to the next, listening to the throbbing seashell roar on each one. Too rhythmic, he thought, almost too organic to be ordinary static. A kraken’s thudding heartbeat. He turned it off.
“Maybe an earthquake?” he continued. “Smoke in the sky?”
“Where is everybody?” Barbara’s voice rose from the back seat. Her timid question hung in the air, and he glanced up at the rear-view mirror to see his sister staring out at the broken windows and empty streets.
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “They couldn’t have evacuated, we’d have seen that coming into the city. It’s more like we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in… I don’t know where the hell we are anymore…”
“Just so you know,” she said, “I didn’t do this.” A nervous laugh rose from the shadows behind Isabel and David, a choked sound that could just as easily have been a stifled sob. He fixed his gaze on her reflection to try to catch sight of her gray eyes, and he shook his head with a wry smile.
“Yeah, we’re your alibis. Besides, I’m pretty sure we know who did…”
He glanced sideways toward Isabel, but if she’d been listening, she gave no sign of it. She stared out at the passing buildings, her face turned away to leave just the sight of her long dark hair tumbling down her shoulders. David studied the reflection of her face in the passenger-side window, trying to gauge her impassive expression. She hadn’t said a dozen words during their drive through the Cascades and just two since they’d entered the city. No signal. He frowned and looked back at the road.
The tires screeched. The car lurched to a stop, and the engine died.
“The Delanne building’s just a block ahead,” he said as he pocketed the keys and swung the car door open. “Last time, Isabel thought it was a good idea to park out of sight. My guess is that’s even more true now.”
He’d meant to open the door for her, but Isabel had already rounded the back of the car by the time he stepped onto the pavement. David popped the trunk for her instead, closed the driver-side door, and opened the back door for Barbara. The trunk slammed shut as Barbara emerged, and he heard Isabel murmuring to herself. “Oh, mama’s missed you…”
“Come look at this!” Barbara hissed. David stepped beside her.
He hadn’t noticed the hunk of metal crouched by the curb, or at least hadn’t processed it as anything more than part of the wreckage. Now he could see that it was an old sports car long since stripped of paint, reduced to little more than a rust-red frame and smeared black windows. The tires had rotted away years ago to leave it lying flat against its chassis.
But the shape of the vehicle felt wrong somehow, a subliminal paradox he couldn’t quite put his finger on. He stared at it until it hit him.
Sleek. Streamlined. The design looked too new to be so corroded.
David pulled his right hand into the sleeve of his jacket and wiped the grime from the driver-side window. It only cleared the outside of the glass, but he took out his smartphone, turned on its flashlight, and shined it through the layer of gunk on the inner surface. The glow only revealed dim shapes and shadows, but it showed him enough. He caught the gleam of its reflection in a touchscreen mounted above the center console.
“This can’t be more than a few years old…”
“What happened here?” Barbara asked over his shoulder.
“It’s like the Sun just burned out,” David stared up at a soot-colored sky that flickered like static, casting a hazy electric afterglow that only deepened the shadows around them. “What is this? Are we in the future?”
“They call it the shell world,” Isabel said, and he spun around to find her standing behind them. She clutched her sawed-off shotgun in both hands, the stock knotted with turquoise-beaded straps, the shells filled with ash; she’d fixed it up for her very first ghost exorcism, the night before they met. Now he could see the look that, glimpsed as a reflection in the car window, he’d mistaken for impassive. She looked worried. Almost afraid.
She must have realized how much her expression had revealed; her grip on the gun tightened and she dodged his sympathetic frown with a sideways glance down the street. “It’s the ghost of everything that was.”
“You’ve seen this place before,” he answered.
“So have you.” Isabel looked up at him. “Late at night, the witching hour in a haunted house when it feels like time’s stopped and the world outside is all ghosts and shadows. You know the feeling I’m talking about?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that’s skimming the surface. This is dredging the bottom.”
She’d already started walking away as she spoke, and David darted across the street now to keep pace with her stride toward the Delanne Institute. He cast a glance over his shoulder to find Barbara following a few steps behind the two of them, then focused on the sight ahead, a concrete plaza and bone-dry fountain, and then another crosswalk. And then…
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.
The high-rise stretched fainter and fainter into the sky until the top stories vanished into the flickering blackness. No rusty metalwork, no broken windows or crumbling foundation— apart from the three of them, and his car parked a block away, the Delanne Institute stood as the only thing left intact within this forsaken world. But something boiled within the polished glass walls. Black and gray shadows swirled together like a thundercloud and flashed now and then to reveal a scarlet web, veins or neurons that pulsed with a secret, silent half-time cadence all their own.
David stared at it even as he felt Isabel’s hand on his left arm. She pulled him a step back as Barbara’s anxious face blotted out half the skyscraper. He tried to listen to what she was saying, but the roiling darkness and cold red glare held his gaze and consumed every thought until his pale eyes reflected its throbbing light. Barbara gripped his shoulders, her lips mouthed the syllables of his name, and he shut his eyes tight.
Something crashed through the glass ten stories above them. The sound tinkled like a wind chime through the stillness: they’d never have caught it on an ordinary street, but here it rang through the whole city. His eyes snapped open and his head lifted as he searched the building. And the warning shout on his lips fell away into stunned silence.
An eruption. A luminous black solar flare leaping from the building and arching through the darkness. No, an abyssal eel, a writhing subway-train titan of dripping flesh that looped and stretched away and away through the shattered windows and back through the murky depths of the institute, knotting itself through the high-rise like a hagfish devouring the innards of a whale. Its blind head split wide with a roar to reveal a cavernous mouth swarming with a thousand viscous tongues, and it smashed through the glass three stories below to plunge back into the skyscraper.
The glistening body coiled the sky between the tenth and seventh floors, unmoving save for rippling earthworm undulations. Then its tail wrenched free of the structure, whipped through the air, and wriggled through the lower opening to slither back into the building, to melt away again into an amorphous swirl of black, gray, and crimson light. David tore his gaze from its glow and stared back and forth between Isabel and Barbara.
“What the fuck was that?” he whispered.
“That,” Isabel said, “is the reason I was told not to come here.”
She heaved a sigh and ran her fingers back through her hair, then popped the chamber of her shotgun open and closed one eye to count the shells. The barrel swung and locked back into place with a click.
“So I’m going to go up and say hello,” she continued. “You two go inside and get anyone who’s still in there to safety. We’ll meet here afterward.”
David took her left hand and held it clasped between them as he searched her brown eyes. “Izzy,” he whispered, “will you be okay up there?”
“When’s being okay ever worried us?” Isabel asked with a smirk. She let go of his hand, and her arms wrapped around his waist, the shotgun pressed lengthwise between his shoulders and her fingers tangling the back of his loose auburn hair. And his lips met hers in a kiss that, no matter how chaste and earnest its intentions, built into a frenzied passion, that found his hands gripping her shoulders and pulling her body closer. He held her tight as their lips melded, as she coaxed his tongue deeper with a muffled, sultry moan, welcoming his exploration of her mouth.
She pulled away with a sigh and lifted onto her toes again to kiss his cheek. “I‘m not about to die for those assholes in there,” she whispered. “I’ll keep it busy for you, and after that, we’re going to celebrate. Promise.”
“I’m holding you to that,” David replied. Isabel drew back with a smile and took his right hand to lift it to her lips, to kiss his knuckles. Then she took a step back from their embrace, then another step. And, with a flip of her hair and a wide fling of her arms, she wasn’t Isabel anymore.
Except, of course, she was. If anything, she was more Isabel now than she’d been a moment ago. David took in the sight of her fringed brown wings and bare legs that stretched and twisted down into curved talons to match the razor claws of her hands. Her clothes had vanished to leave her lithe curves clad only in a thin white plumage — or, in truth, she’d never been wearing clothes at all. For Isabel, human form was just a trick of light.
She still gripped her lever-action shotgun tight with one hand, and her face glanced between David and Barbara, as beautiful as ever with her brown eyes now a bright amber and her features framed by dark feathers that swept up her forehead and spilled down her shoulders.
“Don’t take too long,” Isabel said, and she catapulted into the sky.
The ground shuddered. A seismic pulse quivered through the skyscraper and a black torrent burst through the fifth-floor windows to congeal once more into a ravenous maw and gleaming black coils. It looped skyward after Isabel’s fluttering shape until they both disappeared.
Barbara stepped closer with a light touch of his left arm. “She’ll be fine. Isabel’s tough. She’s, like, insanely tough. We’ll see her soon.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he turned toward the lobby doors. “Let’s get started.”
The Infernal Machine: Chapter 12 arrives Friday, February 9.Each week I’ll be posting a chapter from the Dreadful Desire erotica series, a collection of taboo, sometimes forceful — but never degrading — sexual fantasies. You can find links to my Medium stories in this handy compendium…
And now there’s a Dreadful Desires novel! The five-part supernatural romance The Fallen Sky is available in an omnibus edition that contains the complete erotic fantasy adventure. You can find it on Kindle and Smashwords!