Feast of the Father
I am from the ground. I know what it is to rot, but I do not rot. I thirst for her blood.
The blood carries the spirit. It is flavored by the soul, and hers is pure and virtuous.
Its beauty would kill me, for I am death and vileness, so the drink must be diluted. I must corrupt this pristine goddess.
She is the Princess Christine. Her skin is alabaster perfection. Her breathtaking brown eyes are clean and clear. Her hair, long, abundant, and brown, is a silken marvel it would be an ecstasy to run my ugly hand through. But I can only endure wickedness, and could never touch her as she is.
I have one of their servants under my power. He has gotten a potent drug from me, created with the ancient arts of alchemy. A simple potion, with a simple effect. To cloud the mind. And, as the servant has placed this drug in her wine, Princess Christine, at dinner, swoons.
"The princess is unwell!"
"Let her retire. She has reason to be exhausted. She too much applies herself to her good works."
Christine is carried up to her room. Her bedchamber servant helps her to undress. Now the gorgeous creature lies in bed in a simple white gown.
I am a shadow beneath her window. I enter her maidservant's mind and tell the simple creature to leave the room. She rises from her chair and departs.
And now the drug rouses Christine from her swoon, but her mind is very clouded and she is happy and confused. Drunken, one would say. She is sixteen, and chaste, and has never been intoxicated.
Her beautiful eyes are glazed over and giddy in expression. She grins strangely and squirms distractedly under her sheet. She tears and kicks the sheet away and sighs, hands behind her head, and stares through the high ceiling.
"What is happening?" she murmurs. "What was I just thinking?" She does not know, and she sighs again, a mixture of regret and pleasure in the exhalation.
I can endure no more, and besides, the time has come for the next phase. I have ascended to the balcony outside her window, and have been watching my Christine through the glass. And now I enter through the window, and am in her bedchamber for the very first time.
Even now, her blood would burn me to cinders, or it would were I to take it in my mouth and drink in the ultimate, intimate consummation. But I shall not. First she must be weakened, darkened, damned. Then she will be mine.
I calm her as I approach. Her eyes watch me vacantly, seeing but not seeing. Someone comes towards her, is all she knows, and cannot produce the least association for that sliver of knowledge.
It is as well. I would offend and revolt any eyes which shine at the sight of pretty things. Clean room. Sullied very greatly by myself, but I'm little more than a phantom. Christine watches me. I lift one pale hand. Pointed claws glint in the dim room. With one quick stab I open a pinprick on my finger.
The blood is red. Red and heady. It is my blood, and it shall damn her.
Spots--red spots--dripping through the air over her bed. They please her. She is not alarmed. They are like flowers grown and bloomed instantaneously, but they are less flowers than polyps. Little swelling crimson balls. Christine stares at them as if hypnotized.
When the first scarlet drop falls and splashes on her forehead, she laughs. The strangeness has evolved beyond the ethereal to the corporeal. What a strange game this is! She laughs, the shadow above her grins and nods.
Christine tilts and turns her head, desiring, although only half-aware of it, for the fluid to run into her mouth. The drops cascade through the air. One drips down slowly, sparkling as it falls to her delicate face. Dancing over her pretty lip, the mischievous drop spills onto her waiting tongue.
It arrives with a thrilling, hair-raising shock, surprisingly cool in her mouth. Tentacles of electricity blast from the drop as it passes down her throat and enters her body. All of her being is flooded with alertness. It does not restore her from the lethargy of the narcotic, but combines with it, taking her even further from herself.
The drop sits inside her like a marble, like a bright candle, an alien presence so overbearing it would be an agony, if it did not feel so good.
Another drop falls. She twists to catch it. Her bright lips wide open as her delicate tongue arcs for the red candy. The drop is caught, and swallowed without hesitation. Its effect is just as chillingly electric. She gasps, her body tensing. The feeling is twice now what it was.
It is raining blood in Christine's room. The sight would not be believed, but the only witness writhes in her bed, half out of her mind. And this gorgeous and pure aristocrat, who has, up until this point, primarily derived pleasure from music, games, an attractive pair of eyes, and a kind gesture, now thrusts herself towards each falling drop like a circus beast.
Then it has been enough. With but a flicker of thought I close the wound. The rain stops, the blood flows no more. The princess moans discontentedly, and sits bolt upright in bed. Her eyes are wild, but she bites her lip, like a child disappointed at a game's end.
I sit at her bedside and lean towards her. I reach, as to caress, and gently rest my right hand on her neck. Our eyes meet and lock. Hers are lost in mine. I bend her head. I look at the soft white neck. The hunger calls to me as fangs glide from within my mouth.
She quietly gasps as I suck blood from her throat. Again my claws flash in the darkness. My wrist is opened. A shallow gash glistening with crimson fruits. I offer it to her.A mere drip, like the penis's pre-ejaculatory fluid, is all that is needed to make her understand. Christine licks the flesh of my wound and is rewarded. She closes her soft lips around it and sucks.
To give and to take are an ecstasy. It is the greatest physical pleasure there is. I see that Christine thinks so too. The vacancy in her lovely brown eyes has given way to more interesting things. At first, surprise, then pleasure, then hunger. It is like this with the blood. Even as it is drunk, one burns with hunger for more. But the supply is limitless, and so, so long as there is blood, there is great happiness. Christine's eyes glaze over like a dog's with lust.
The pulsing heat of her fills my mouth. Warms me and flows through my body. She suckles at my wrist, sweet delicate slurps. Ahhhhthis--this feeding and nurturing--is very, very good. I think, with this, it is better to give. Graspers, thieves, and gluttons, know not what they miss. To give, to lose, can be a great ecstasy.
But nothing is more sublime than witnessing what is happening to the princess. A pleasure which goes beyond the visceral. It is so pleasing to the soul to experience this. With my hand on her throat I can feel her gulping down my blood eagerly. Nobody, no matter how transported he is by drugs and drink, could be unaware of it when a monster has him by the throat. She knows an inhuman hand is defiling her, but she doesn't care.
Her mind and her body belong to me now. She is mine. Forever.
The power that she ingests now speaks in her brain and her veins with the most authority. In addition to the intoxication, pleasure, gradually, but undeniably, a transformation is occurring. It grows...a hunger in her eyes,
My blood warms her everywhere but in her heart. It sings in her head, but it is not a song little girls or nuns know. A feral light begins to glow in her eyes. Gleaming red light shining across my pale white skin.
It is done now. She is mine. I no longer suck and there is no more for Christine. I remove my hand from her feeble grasp and pull my mouth from her throat. Blood trickles from her lips and runs down her chin. She licks her lips. Her eyes are not her own. Perhaps they're mine, or the devil's.
There are two ugly marks on her neck where my fangs have been. I lean in, resting one hand on her shoulder, and lick the sores, like, if you will, an animal grooming her young. The profanities are gone--washed away by my saliva--and her neck is lovely again.
Christine rises from her bed. She does not look at me, her mind is elsewhere. Inside her a hunger has been created. A hunger like none she has ever known. A hunger that drives her to madness. Ah Christine....now you shall be reborn into the night. Reborn to be with me.
She crosses the room towards the door, which she opens. She pauses before the threshold, crosses her arms before her, and pulls her gown off over her head. The light glistens off her flowing hair. Off her naked back. She balls up the gown, and to my surprise, wipes the blood off her face with it, and then casts the soiled thing almost disdainfully back into the room. Then she steps out into the hallway of the sleeping castle. Her door remains ajar.
Those of the house who aren't asleep cannot see her. I have given her this power, and I help her. Their minds are nothing to me. The naked princess walks down silent corridors past guards and staff, whose minds I have entered, saying, "You do not see her. You do not hear her." Inside her head I drive her. Drive her to where she must go.
Is she not like an assassin? I'm reminded of those lines from the revered play:
Withered Murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl's his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost.
Surely, though, the drinking of Christine's coppery nectar has intoxicated me. She is no murderess. She carries no dagger to wreak a waking nightmare at dawn. Is it not so? Perhaps, though, she carries the dagger within.
She passes down a most familiar and beloved length of hall, which concludes with an exceedingly impressive closed door. It all has a different meaning to her now. She lays a pretty hand upon the door, touching it briefly with affection. And then her hand descends to the handle, and Christine silently opens the door. She enters.
Although the guards cannot see or hear her, I think it best that they depart. And more marionettes faithfully respond. They too move like ghosts and do not disturb the sleeper as they noiselessly exit.
Before her, in the darkened room, a vast, canopied bed. The king, sensing her presence perhaps, awakens. He sees a feminine silhouette, and, being king, immediately realizes that it is the silhouette of an unclothed woman.
"Who's there?" the old man asks hoarsely. "Lina?" (his concubine) "What are you doing there? Light a taper."
She sets the room on fire with light. But he has not seen her face. Admiring the youthful and voluptuous body, he realizes it is not Lina's. Lina is very beautiful, but this is not she. This girl, he thinks, with gathering certainty, makes the other look like a toad.
"Stop," he gently chides. "You'll blind me. With whom , child, have I the pleasure?"
She turns, grinning lovingly.
"Daddy"
"What?!" He recoils. This is his daughter, naked in his bedroom like a strumpet! It's a dream! It cannot be!
"Christine! What's the meaning of this? Why do you appear before your father like this? Return to your room at once!"
She smiles wantonly and dances towards him seductively. Her hair is disheveled. Her creamy white body is breathtaking. Her father stares at her full breasts and dark pubic thatch with alarm.
"Sweetheart," the king groans, much amazed. He fights to avert his eyes. "You're unwell."
Calling in a servant is out of the question. He has no desire for his daughter and himself to be caught in this compromising position. But what must he do?
She sits down on the bed next to him. Her shapely thigh next to his. She touches his chest and pouts and looks at him with teasing mock concern. "Have I made you unhappy, Daddy?" she asks.
He is trembling, a prisoner in his own bed. "Very," the king nearly whimpers. "Very unhappy."
"I'll make you happy, please daddy." She moves towards him. Her soft arms wrap around him tightly. He knows not what to do, what to say. He tries to push her off, but she is stronger then seems possible. She wraps him tightly in her arms. "Daddy....kiss me..."
She gently caresses his back even as her arms entrap him. He looks about for his guards, but they are gone. She exhales a hot gust onto his neck. She opens her mouth wide, revealing fangs, and buries them in her father's throat.
He tenses and fumbles and flails about limply, but Christine's fanged grip hasn't a prayer of being broken. The king is falling plunging into a cold dungeon of anxiety and despair. Christine ceases to feed, and it is she who hurls him onto his back so that he can see what has happened.
His daughter is on top of him. Her face is contorted into a mask of diabolical aggression. Her flesh grows pale and spotty. Her hair darkens and becomes mangled. Black nails twist from knobby fingers. Her stench grows putrid and stale. She is fanged like a tiger, and her lips and her chin and her teeth are drenched with his bright red blood.
Terrible laughter freezes him. A voice from across the room says, "Christine." The demoness slides off of him, leaves the bed, and comes. The king, clutching his bleeding throat, turns to see who it is.
He gives a start and shivers to see such a monstrous being. But now he stares. "You!"
Christine leans into my embrace, for I am her master, and now she is what I am.
And her father's expression is the richest pleasure I have known this night. For it is not merely a princess, but a kingdom which I have brought low. My laughter as I consider this makes thunder sound like the chortle of an infant. Christine shakes in my grasp. Her mind trying to come to terms with that she has done. I laugh again, no Christine, no. My power holds you yet. Tonight, and forever.
"Finish him Christine. I am your father now." She nods and advances again. The king trembles in fear as he staggers from his bed and falls weakly to his face.Her fangs flash in the darkness as she bends over him. I feel the hunger grow in me as I watch her feast. But that is well. The castle is yet full, the night is not over yet.
THE END