Things That Go Bump in the Night

Tell the truth. Are you afraid of monsters? You know, ghoulies, ghosties, long-leggedy beasties, things that go bump in the night. Or do you think they’re just those cartoon characters your neighbor decorates their yard with every Halloween? Truth—real monsters don’t look or act like those caricatures in the franchise series. Sitting here on the metro, looking out my window, I feel slightly amused that others can’t see what’s reflected.  

We’re not spawned in cold, damp castles in foreign countries with names that start with Vee. Personally, I’m not fond of caskets and would prefer cremation. Maybe one of those new burial plans where they plant a tree in my ashes. If I’m in a cemetery, it’s to bury evidence, not because I enjoy the ambiance. Actually, chances are, you’ve passed me more than once without knowing.

It’ll be tonight—after dark, probably before midnight. I still have to work tomorrow. My target has no idea I’m on the way. It was an accidental bump in a store. I only wanted to pass. He wanted to impress his girlfriend. At this moment, he’s at home, doing the quotidian things that make him whoever he is, unaware that Death is riding to his door.      

For the record, I’m not all evil. I’ve helped the feeble cross the street—saved kittens and kites for children. I’ve been a hero in a fire. I hold doors and say thank you. I can be silent as the grave, strike swiftly as a mamba. But when I take your breath, it won’t come back. The people who see me don’t write memoirs—you call them victims.  

Whether my kind are born or created, I can’t say. Maybe each of us is sui generis, with a different backstory. It’s not as if we share confidences or trade craft secrets by the water cooler. By preference, we’re solitary hunters. When I speak, it’s only for myself.  

Sometimes I watch television. One night, bored, I was watching Animal Planet. There were two monkeys, doing monkey things in a tree. Suddenly, a reticulating anaconda surged up the tree. One monkey fled while the other sat there, frozen in terror. It just stared blindly in the face of death, never moving. Nietzsche was right. Stare into the abyss long enough, and it might look back. 

The subway car smells like an ancient ashtray, with vape flavors struggling for ascendancy. A fragrance catches my attention. Yves Saint Laurent, Black Opium. Her face is framed in black ringlets, her wide, brown eyes lost in the glow of her phone screen. I imagine how she would look, mouth open, eyes vacant, with ruby droplets across her neck. 

She reminds me of a kitten my parents gave me for a pet when I was five or six. Warm, fuzzy, mewing until I began playing with it. What stands out in my memory now is the looks of horror on my parents’ faces. Their mouths open, eyes bulging in disbelief. They tried making excuses. I was clawed—maybe it nipped me. I never had a pet after that. Over the years, neighbors occasionally came looking for theirs. By tacit agreement, my parents and I never spoke of those missing animals in our home.  

We always remember that first time. Whether it’s love, sex, victory, or death, those profound moments remain with us. My first was a punk in my class. Being a natural loner made me an easy target, I guess. He tried to bully me into letting him use my baseball glove in P.E. I refused. 

Too small or cowardly to do the job himself,  he reached out to an older family member who came to our school, caught me alone, and gave me a beatdown. As always, snitching was considered weak, so I told no one. But inside, I felt a blinding rage I could taste. The details are probably too lurid for your taste. Suffice it to say, my first was a package deal—a twofer. 

The train hisses to a stop, and a middle-aged man boards. He has broken veins across his nose and under his eyes. An alcoholic. He’s one of those people who were old when they were twelve. Stoop-shouldered, unshaven, in a brown trench coat, he looks like a stereotypical pervert. He would be an easy kill—no stamina, and the nicotine stains on his fingers tell me he has no wind. His death would probably be a mercy rather than murder.  

Not that I’m ever remorseful. I felt no guilt over the boys I’d killed. My concern now was covering my tracks. For the first time, I knew I didn’t need to fear the dark because it was already inside me. Taking my bloody clothes outside, I burned them in our fire pit behind the house. I sat a long time in the dark, looking up at the stars. I didn’t feel lonely, just alone. I wondered if there were more like me or if I was a one-off, a prototype? 

In the weeks that followed, no fingers were ever pointed at me. It was intoxicating. In my hubris, I was still a caterpillar breaking out of its chrysalis, not yet in my final form. For the time being, I returned to my regular routines and locked that part of me in a compartment inside my psyche. I started watching a lot of police shows, often with my parents.  But I was especially interested in procedural programs, which detailed how they caught killers. Know your enemy.

I had been living on my own for several months when a new neighbor moved into our apartment complex. He was loud, aggressive, and generally obnoxious. It was high school again, only now the students were adults who never grew up. It was a bully, beating me again. I saw him as just another glitch in the universe that needed to be addressed.  

I had learned that environmental conditions in the small hours favor surprise while reducing the risk of detection. As part of my self-training, I had practiced picking locks. It seemed like a helpful tool. Finally, on a moonless night, I made my move. 

After gaining entrance to his apartment, I listened for sounds. I heard only snoring from his bedroom. The architects who design modular buildings have no idea how much they help people like me. Every unit is a fractal of the whole. He lay on his back, snoring. Probably dreaming of all the people he’d bullied or would bully the next day.  

That was his final dream. It wasn’t a stellar performance—I was still new to the art in those days. That was long ago, the trail of corpses in my wake only beginning. Since then, I’ve honed my skills, my planning, and my reflexes. In my world, it only takes one mistake. 

We emerge from a tunnel into the night. There’s a fine mist, making the air damp and chill. My window begins to fog over. Good. Perfect weather for a killing. One day, on a bus (or was it a train or an airplane?), I felt another passenger’s eyes on me. Staring back, I felt a prickling sensation along my arms and around my neck. They were my eyes, looking back at me. When two magnets with the same poles are brought together, their forces repel each other. So it was with us. We are by nature solitary creatures. After disembarking, I never saw him again. But now I knew. I wasn’t alone.  

I feel the weight of eyes watching me again. Her face is cherubic, with golden hair and eyes the color of periwinkles. She looks to be three, at most four. Her expression is full of wonder and inquisitiveness. At the next stop, she and her mother get up to exit. I give her a wink and a grin. She giggles, and her mother gives me a grateful smile. I already have a target. Maybe another night, another train.   

I believe the universe has a purpose for all its creations. Perhaps we’re the apex predators of this planet’s dominant species, and it’s our job to take care of what nature doesn’t want around anymore—its aberrations. There could be a million explanations and rationalizations. Or maybe people should smile more. 

Sometimes, like tonight, I remember the faces, the sounds, even the smells. Looking out my window, I see the cold night for what it is—my domain, the hunter’s realm. I feel the tingle of expectation, the thrill of the act.     

Finally, the train reaches my station. Stepping out into the night’s chill heightens my senses. The shiver I feel isn’t the cold, it’s anticipation. I know the way to my destination, through alleys foul with the smell of stale booze, piss, and vomit. Through an empty lobby with peeling paint and stains on the shabby carpet. Up two flights of stairs to the first room on the right. He has no idea that death is only minutes away.    

Maybe I live far away—or next door. I may be riding this train to your residence at this very moment. What are the odds? Right now, you’re telling yourself that chances are, we’ve never met. And you’re probably right. But an unexplained noise in the dark startles you. You debate whether to investigate or stay in your warm, safe bed. Reason tells you it couldn’t be me. My advice? Pull up the covers and go back to your dreams in blissful ignorance. 

Because if you start looking, you might find me. Now, tell the truth. Are you afraid of monsters?

Coimetromania

Always prepared, always primed, that was Anna. She knew it. Her fiancee Phillip knew it, too. Ready for anything, including what Phillip referred to as their latest “adventure.” Smiling through her 39-year-old perfect teeth, she corrected him. “Sexcapade.”

“Evenfall with crescent moon,” Phillip said with his usual poetic flair as Anna drove the black Wagoneer up to a decrepit gate, chained with an equally decrepit lock. 

He didn’t bother mentioning the gray clouds that populated the sky. He didn’t mention the gravel popping under them. He was too busy listening to Roscoe Holcomb sing Village Churchyard on Spotify. And he was too busy thinking about their plans, things to come.

Anna put the SUV into park. They stared deep into each other’s soul. Both had brown eyes. Both wore black eye makeup. She was his immortal beloved, as he reminded her every day.

Her brunette hair was shoulder-length. She was short and stunning. She was voluptuous, her large breasts supported by a push-up bra when they weren’t in his hands. Her ass was wondrously not small. And all of her was vampishly sexy in Goth attire, from bat earrings and necklace to her scarlet high heels that looked ready to stab, if not kill, to say nothing of a low-cut black dress that would have been perfect for Morticia.

Phillip matched her style that day, the two wanting to dress appropriately for their isolated debauch. His black hair was greying, but it still matched his black shirt and sports jacket, the right lapel adorned with a pewter pin in the shape of a raven. Charcoal trousers, black socks, and black Italian loafers. 

It was time. After getting out of the vehicle, they shared the load: picnic basket, blankets, and a bottle of Freixnet.

Twilight of the sex gods into Valhalla Cemetery. Entry assured, without any key, just by sneaking through a section of falling iron fenceline. Ever the aspiring gentleman, Phillip pushed it open for his true love, his grip befouled by recent dust and ancient corrosion. 

As they stepped onto the overgrown grass, Phillip wiped his hands, not clean, but less dirty. Anna shot him a lewd glance. 

“Heels,” she said, lifting her right foot. He pulled the shoe off, then the same again with her left, no easy task while holding a picnic basket. But it was worth it. Anna would saunter through the boneyard in her bare feet, if only not to trip and fall.

Remembering his Poe, Phillip lifted an eyebrow and said “senescent.”

“Me or the fence?”

“You’re fresh as a daisy, angel.”

“No daisies in here.”

“Angels?”

“Not me.”

“Not for the next hour.”

Anna led Phillip deeper into the remote cemetery, or perhaps it was the other way around. The perfect spot beckoned, even if it was yet to be discovered.

Valhalla opened for business in 1823. Phillip was the researcher. He knew. Anna heard, and she loved it. Location, Middle of Nowhere. Contents, corpses so old they weren’t corpses. Bones, maybe. Dust to dust, certainly. 

Six feet above the aging ash was a grand collection of large tombstones and gravemarkers, some featuring the winged skull so popular in early America. Several leaned. Others had broken into pieces, just like their owners. The cemetery was home to many less-than-monumental monuments.

The most fortunate residents had mausoleums, but that might have made them the least fortunate, certainly in the 21^st century. Roofs collapsed. Walls crumbling. Interiors inhabited by insects, vermin, and the occasional drunk teenagers.

Phillip and Anna inspected the statuary, particularly a shrouded figure, its stone hood hiding its face and its gender. Stained and covered with mold, it was historical, but not necessarily an oracle. The sphinxlike sculpture either saw everything or nothing. There was no in between.

Valhalla’s overgrown weeds were new. Its trees were not. Here was a dank, humid necropolis, wind blowing just enough to accentuate the heat, just enough to indicate limited life among the desolate dead.

And there was that smell, not rancid, not stale, but a fetid mingling, the perfume of putrescence and the cologne of creation, the earthly and the unearthly layered into a grievously erotic aroma. The duo took deep breaths in order to relish it.

After quite a few steps, Anna halted with precision and confidence. Triple-X marked the spot. Dilapidated tombstones. One grave surrounded by its own small, wrought iron fence. To the east, a weeping willow. To the west, a gnarled and twisted tree, its biggest limb shaking unsteadily in the sultry breeze.

Anna lay the blankets on the ground, three of them, overlapping to keep the ants off their soon-to-be naked skin. Phillip opened the picnic basket. Two champagne glasses. He popped the cork. She gripped her smartphone and cranked up their latest favorite album, Bashful Billy’s Late for an Early Grave.

Phillip stuck his hand back into the basket. Three Godiva chocolates for her, each filled with truffle. A bloody rare steak wrapped in foil for him.

She began to eat. He began to read.

Phillip had chosen not Shelley, not Keats, not even Poe. He had printed out something unique, something folded and tucked carefully in his jacket pocket. She devoured the second truffle as he opened the paper.

It was Baudelaire. Phillip recited in his most dignified and seductive voice: “Sweet souls that shrink from chaos vast and etern/Essay the wreaths of their faded Past to entwine/The sunset drowns within its blood-red brine/Thy thought within me glows like an incense urn.”

Anna began to disrobe. “Say it,” she teased.

“Tenebrous,” he cooed.

“Not that one.”

“Obscurantic.”

“Nope.”

“Decayance,” he proclaimed.

Her smile grew, because he had uttered a word of his own invention. His smile grew, because she was completely nude.

Anna had cast her clothes onto the blanket, at least most of them. Her panties fell short. They dropped onto the lawn, a damp spot glimmering in the darksome light.

Phillip never knew where to look when Anna gazed at him obscenely. Her eyes or face. Her breasts or pussy. Or the curves that connected everything into a singular fantasy, one seemingly conjured by an archaic, magicke incantation. 

She looked at her best without clothes, wearing only her eye makeup, lipstick, and a pearl necklace with a handful of red gemstones that dangled downward, as if they were oozing blood. 

Anna licked her lips as she straddled a marble memorial, moving to and fro three or four times, as if she was riding a ghostly horse in slow motion. The grit felt softly hard against her vagina, and even better with Phillip watching. 

“More,” she asked, loving his arcane words.

“Eldritch,” he said, before adding “Cimmerian.”

Her eyelids half-shut with pleasure. He knew she was already close.

“Slumbrous,” he said, taking a pregnant pause before adding “Crepuscule.”

“God, more.”

“Caliginous.”

Anna had never squirted so quickly before. It trickled down the side of the marble, which bore a name, black as any ink: “Unknown.” 

Phillip read that word and offered his own in return: “innominate.”

Taking a deep breath, Anna dismounted. With her circling finger, she signalled Phillip to disrobe. In so doing, he accidentally knocked the champagne bottle over, its bubbles quickly soaking into the soil.

After grabbing the third and final Godiva, Anna seductively consumed it before grabbing Phillip by his hard cock and ushering him to the same marble stone, pushing him against it before kneeling. He could feel her juice on his ass cheeks. She smiled up at him, her teeth speckled by the remains of the chocolate. Then she devoured her next treat.

He could feel her warm, wet mouth, as well as the remains of the last truffle. He was getting “head on a headstone.” He started to laugh, but she interrupted.

With his cock in her mouth, Anna said “more.” It came out as an inarticulate, guttural sound.

Phillip knew what she wanted. He complied, thrusting in and out of her mouth as if he was fucking a rupture into another dimension.

And he spoke, though not much better than she had with her mouth full. “Sonorous horns sound into sepulchers, heard by embers glowing.” 

She removed her mouth to move her jaw. 

“Poe?”

He shook his head “no.”

“You?”

“New poem.”

“You deserve some pussy for that.”

They returned to the blankets. She got on all fours. 

“Heels,” she asked.

Before Phillip snugged them back onto her feet, he had the wild urge to lick a few of her toes. Combined with cemetery dirt, they tasted preternaturally sexy. 

He breathed inward, slowly, his cock leaking jizz. Exhaling, he shoed her.

“Eat me,” she said.

“The steak?”

“And the steak.”

Phillip removed the meat from the foil, holding it in his hands while gnawing away with his canines. Bloody grease dripped down his mouth onto his chin, and down his fingers onto his paws. Three big bites. 

The sound of him ripping into the steak thrilled her. She couldn’t see Phillip, which made him seem all the more ravenous. She listened to him chew and swallow, her titillation soon transforming into impatience. 

“Eat me,” she ordered. “Now.”

Phillip tossed the rest of the steak onto the grass and grabbed her ass with his ruddy hands. He licked her from stem to stern. They often fought gently over who loved it more, his tongue slithering up and down her crack, from one hole to another. 

But he stopped abruptly. 

“More,” she moaned, wiggling her ass.

“Thought I heard something.”

“Me saying more.”

“Before that.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know.”
“People?”

“No.”

“Tell me something, quick,” she said while touching her clitoris. 

“Ebon shades gather,” he said.

“And?”

“And I want to fucking eat you.”

Phillip smashed his face in between her cheeks, oblivious to the fact he really had heard something, if not some things, now unvaulted.

He munched. He flicked his tongue. He lapped and lapped, until another enigmatic noise distracted him. That prompted Anna’s next move.

“Do me slow,” she said, rolling over and looking up at him.

Phillip understood that slow meant glacially slow, except for the temperature part. Creeping pace and torrid heat.

“Siegfried,” she said, grinning. That was her name for his cock.

The two as one, locking eyes, before synchronously closing their lids, like a vampire movie when it fades to black.

Phillip and Anna remained in the cemetery, but now it was in them. In them as much as it was around them. They were encrypted and outcrypted on Valhallowed ground. 

“Speak it,” she said.

“Elegiac.”

“More.”

“Encrimsoned.”

“Oh, yeah, baby.”

“Triumvirate.”

Neither of them understood why he chose that word, but both of them simultaneously did, in this elseplace that allowed them entrance. 

Light rain fell, landing rhythmically on their bodies. Fingertips from the river Styx or from river nymphs. It didn’t matter. The lovers succumbed without hesitation. Bashful Billy was singing about “vast waves eternal.”

Phillip moved in and out of Anna as she held him. 

Her nipple was pinched so hard as to not be hard enough. It was not his hand. A crow soon cawed above them.

Something scratched Phillip’s back, so deep as to be like getting finger-fucked, but it wasn’t a fingernail. More like the tip of a rusty coffin nail.

He saw through the eyes of dead romantics, staring at long-gone women who passed through the past back to the present in the form of Anna, his truest of loves.

She envisioned men of different eras, gentlemen of the nineteenth century, goth rockers of the twenty-first, all embodied in Phillip, her cherished partner.

They heard the howl of wind. They heard something else. Not a person, but something that sounded pleasurable, something that sounded like it was being pleasured. That which festered now flourished.

No questions. Anna and Phillip wanted more, needed more, so much more of memento mori. Their mouths agape, dirt lightly coated their tongues. It tasted good. And nasty. They French kissed, sharing the flavor.

Warm stone seemed to move against their bodies, its shape reminiscent of a statue’s hand. The lifeforce of the dead. The hereafter was after her, or at least something was. Interred and instirred. Inhumation and exhumation. 

At times the presence definitely seemed male. At times female, being flowers, not of evil, but of mournful and joyful neverending remembrance. Bashful Billy promised, “This night is going to live forever.”

The stone hand went from monolith to monolilith, lavishing attention on Phillip. Anna felt sweet stings on her butt, as if from snake bites.

The funereal was fun and real, so it seemed, so it was, even if it wasn’t. Wreaths of a faded past had perchance grown vibrant again.

The sordid scene intensified. Weeds encircled Anna’s wrists, holding her arms down. She was uprooted by a root, as if being doubly penetrated, Phillip in her pussy, and something beautifully rough in her ass. She had wanted it. Now she had it, in all of its bubbly and somber glory.

Droplets like hot wax spattered on both of them, his back, her nipples. Anna imagined that it was molten wrought iron. She was probably right. 

Bashful Billy sang Beyond the Vale. Wind gusted, blowing everything and everyone. The weeping willow no longer wept. Where once there was wither now was strength, rigid and unyielding. 

Thunder clapped, as much with applause as with fury. Lighting cracked, striking the big limb on the gnarled tree.

Those present simultaneously orgasmed. The ground shook. Everyone shook. Had he been able to speak, Phillip would have said “effluence.” 

The tree limb fell downwards, hitting the ground. Phillip and Anna opened their eyes. Catacombed, marked by markers, they realized that an unfathomable third party had taken part in their party. Anna had not planned for it. Neither of them had. But it happened. 

When they stood up, their bodies were deliciously weak, their genitalia moist. After dressing, they packed their belongings. Once again, he carried her heels as they returned to and through the sloping fence.

“Coimetromania,” Phillip said.

“Your’s?”

“Webster’s.”

“And?”

“Abnormal and strong desire to visit cemeteries.”

Anna started the Wagoneer. Phillip thought about playing Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, but the ground hadn’t been cold. So he chose Götterdämmerung.

As they bounded down the gravel road, bits of stone sputtering under them, the cemetery became ever the more distant. Without speaking, the lovers agreed to return. They needed to. They had to. Fornicari in pace.