Introduction

Welcome to the second installment of my short story series! This classic horror story was inspired by My Chemical Romance’s song “To the End.” If you’re not familiar with the band, I recommend listening to the song and the lyrics first, then diving into the story, for maximum enjoyment. My fellow Vampires can choose their own adventure.

CW: slit throats, blood, ritual suicide, murder

To the End

I’ll never forget all the diamonds we ate that night, washed down with chocolate mouthfuls of our wedding cake, or the sound of the Bluetooth speakers striking up our song, or the taste of cyanide-laced berry Koolaid on your lips.

I’ll never forget what came after.

#

The mansion was, not a house, but a tomb. Silent. Grim. All the guests were asleep, their bodies bloated with blissful breaths like balloons or perhaps sails, furling and unfurling, but I did not envy them their peaceful slumber as I stole through the mansion. I had a job to do.

The old house creaked as though to send a warning, but it was too late. The soup at dinner had been laced with narcoleptics; no one would be walking the halls tonight. No one would wake as I crept into their bedroom, as I walked with my slippered feet up to the side of their bed.

The first victim was my cousin, a walrus of a man with a bushy brown moustache to match and thinning hair. His snore nearly rattled the lamp on the bedside table. Good. He would not wake. Would not stir as I, in one quick motion, lifted my knife and slashed it deep across his throat, feeling it hitch against the cartilage of his trachea before sawing through his flesh. He gasped, sputtered, still did not wake and then would never wake.

I shuddered with pleasure and shocked glee. I had done it! I had not quite thought myself capable until the serrated edge of my knife actually met flesh. Now I knew. I could do it.

And would have to, a few dozen more times.

Carefully, I collected my cousin’s spurting blood, what did not splash over my face and eke between my lips, into my bowl, and then I left the room, drip drip dripping from my knife as I went.

#

I’ll never forget the first time you kissed me, your eyes sparkling like two dark beetles’ wings in the moonlight as you leaned in, pressing your dry, cold lips to mine. You grinned against my mouth, your teeth pressing against my flesh, and then you giggled.  

I’ll never forget your laughter.

#

Fifty throats, breathing blood, slit in their sleep, collected in my bowl. I was gleaming red by the time I found you waiting in the atrium, your shirt unbuttoned from the top to reveal an expanse of hairless ivory. You made as though to wrap your arms around me but I jerked back.

“Careful,” I warned, with a teasing grin. “You’ll spill it.”

“Ah, so careful,” you murmur. “After this is done, I’m going to lick you clean.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a promise.”

Giggling, we brought the bowl to the center of the room and dipped our hands into the mingled blood of our friends and relatives. It was warm, still, and thick like syrup as it drizzled off our fingers onto the marble. With bold swipes we traced out a star within a circle, a witch’s pentacle, all over the marble floor where we’d planned to have our receiving line.

“Now,” you growled, and you pulled me close, one of your hands squeezing my buttocks, and I could feel myself growing hard against you as you ground into me, as you pulled my hair and gnawed at my jaw. Then you captured my lips in an iron-tanged kiss, and our tongues tangled in our mouths until I thought I’d suffocate.

At last, I forced myself to pull back. “It’s almost time, my love. We must begin. Did you get the money?”

You nodded and gleefully skipped over to a duffel bag and a watering can you’d placed outside the perimeter of the pentacle. Careful not to smudge our handiwork, you brought the duffel bag into the circle, placing it with a thump at the very center, then you watered it with the watering can. The acrid smell of gasoline curled into my nostrils.

“Delicious,” I said, reaching in my pocket for the lighter. Taking your hand in my other hand, I flicked on the lighter and we stepped away as I arced it towards the duffel, shivering as it caught flame.

“It’s time,” you said.

“It’s time,” I repeated.

Then, “Vitas tellurian ite!” we chanted. It wasn’t Latin. It was some bastardized language, a nothing language. A magic language.  And as we did, the pentacle began to glow red. “Vitas tellurian ite! Agano palladius antro nec quorem!”

The more we chanted, the higher the red light of the pentacle spiked from the floor, until we were completely surrounded by a column of bloody illumination.

“Do you have it?” you asked.

“Of course,” I said. I reached into my bag and pulled out a crinkly plastic water bottle full of bright red liquid, uncapped it, and held it up. It stank of chemical berries.

“To the end,” you said.

“To the end,” I replied.

Then we each took a long swig of the liquid and kissed until we started to convulse.

#

I’ll never forget the first time you fucked me, your arms clamped around me as you moved in and out and through me. I’ll never forget the overwhelming musk of your aftershave or the way you said, “I’m sorry,” when you came.

I’ll never forget your taste.

#

Twisting reeling

Fighting, feeling

A century passed and more and so much less

I couldn’t see you in the dark

Where were you?

Where was I?

What was this nebulous nebula of starfall and stripes?

It was chaos and light

Shredding me open

Unmaking me right there on the floor

Ending my world

My existence

And more

So much more

#

Detective Harwell stepped up to the threshold of the Danbury mansion. Even if he had not been briefed by his team, he could have felt the nothingness emanating from inside the huge brick box. This was no longer a mansion, no longer a house. It was a tomb.

“You sure you don’t need a mask?” asked Dr. Cole, the Medical Inspector. “It’s gonna stink in there.” She looped her mask about her ears so it fluffed up her long dark curls.

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Let’s get in.”

The deputy opened the door, and Detective Harwell walked in—to a solid wall of stench. The rotten, meaty odor clawed its way up his nostrils into his throat and mouth until he was bending over, retching, adding his own bile and disgust to the pile.

Dr. Cole walked past him and shrugged. “Should have worn the mask.” She flipped one back and he caught it, yanking it over his nose and mouth. It cut the scent just enough to stop his eyes from watering, and he walked into the central hall where he noticed three things. One, there was a giant star within a circle painted in red paint on the floor. Two, there was a burned lump in the center. And three, there were two crumpled male bodies with blistered reddish lips.

Cyanide poisoning. He remembered some of the things Dr. Cole had always yammered on about.

“Fan out, people!” Hardwell called. “I want all of these rooms catalogued. Do not move a goddamn thing, just put one of those little yellow flags on it and take a picture. Go, go, go!”

Hardwell walked over to the center of the circle and leaned down, ran his fingers through the black ash. Money. It was a bag of money, or had been.

“The fuck is going on here?” he asked.

Dr. Cole pulled on her blue nitrile gloves. “Two deceased male victims, age between twenty and thirty, Caucasian. One with black hair and blue eyes, one with red hair and blue eyes. Identified by the mansion owner as Finley Crescent and Jem Adair.”

“What kind of names are those?” he snapped.

“The kind for dead men,” Dr. Cole quipped. She did not like to be interrupted. “Finley and Jem were here celebrating their wedding. Their were fifty guests sleeping here in preparation for the ceremony tomorrow. Last night around 8pm, they were all served dinner, and then the staff was discreetly ordered to leave the premises and not return. When the priest arrived this morning, he found it looking like this.”

“What is this? Some Satanic bullshit?”

Dr. Cole laughed. “Don’t be absurd, Harwell. This is just two sick men taking out some weird fantasy on their relatives.”

“Jesus Christ, Cole. Don’t tell me—”

She bent down, ran her finger through the red paint, and sniffed. “This is blood. There’s a whole bowl of it over there, Our boys aren’t cut, so my guess is, it came from their happy guests.”

“All of them?”

“No one’s surfaced, so either they’re all dead, or a lot of people passed up this scene and didn’t make a peep.”

“So I don’t get it,” said Harwell. “What’s all this ritual crap for?”

Dr. Cole shrugged. “I’m just the ME. I haven’t got a fucking clue.”

#

I woke. I was not in my body but I was me, outside of my body, unembodied. Yet I as alone in the dark cold archway of stone and when I looked down I was there as well, and everything was confusion for the first moments.

Then I was sucked back into my body and I began to breathe in air again, to gulp it in like water after fifty years in the desert, and my lungs, so shriveled and blackened before, began to rise and fall, and my lips, so parched and red, began to smooth.

The stone was cold beneath me, the air muggy and humid and redolent of petrichor and my stomach churned from hunger and that’s when I knew it: I was alive.

I was alive!

I was buried as I had been promised, uncovered, unembalmed, on a stone slab in my family’s mausoleum.

Which meant…

“Finley!” you cried, and I turned and you were in my arms and you were whole, and beautiful, your cyanotic lips tasting of berries and death.

“Jem,” I breathed into your mouth. “We did it. We did it.”

“Not yet,” you said, taking my hand. “Where is he?”

We waited there, sitting on the slab of stone, kissing and canoodling amidst the discarded relics of my family and the spiderwebs, when the giant gold door began to creak open.

Father Fletcher, gasping, fell through the opening into the huge chapel. “Well,” he said, in his thinning Irish accent, “you two bloody well caused a stir. You could have warned me.”

“We needed your shock to be genuine,” I told him, grinning, and Jem added cheekily. “Didn’t want you to get caught, did we.”

Brushing dust off of his black priest’s cassock, Father Fletcher flicked up a lighter from his pocket and began lightning half-dead candles around the room. “Not the place I’d have chosen, but let’s get this done, gentlemen.”

Giggling like brides, dapper in our burial suits, we scooted off the stone table and around to the main part of the chapel where Father Fletcher stood amidst swags of dead flowers.

“Stand together, there,” he told us gruffly. We stood in front of him, holding hands and grinning. I didn’t know how to hold all my happiness within me.

“Dearly departed,” said Father Fletcher, “we are gathered here today to celebrate the wedding of Finley Crescent and Jeremy Adair. Now, Finley, do you take Jem to be your lawfully wedded husband, for all eternity?”

“I do,” I said, turning to look into Jem’s eyes, which were glowing blue.

“And Jem,” said Father Fletcher, “do you take Finley to be your lawfully wedded husband, for all eternity?”

“I do,” you said.

“Then I now pronounce you, married! You may kiss each other.”

I placed my hand on the back of your head and when we kissed it was like the first time. When we kissed, it was the start of a lifetime.

“Alright,” said Father Fletcher, “if you want a ride out of town, I’m leaving now.”

“Yes,” you said. “We’re ready for our next great adventure.”

As Father Fletcher padlocked the door to my family’s mausoleum and then led us out of the old part of the cemetery, he seemingly couldn’t help himself. He asked, “Now, what are you going to do with…all this?”

“Oh,” I said, grinning in the twilight, “we’ll think of something.”

And that’s when you came up behind him and snapped his neck. He crumpled dead to the ground.

“You want first bite?” you said.

I blew you a kiss. “You’re too kind.” And then I knelt on the ground and, brandishing my new fangs against Father Fletcher’s neck, I began to eat the first meal of my immortality.

Thanks for reading C.J. Subko Books! This post is public so feel free to share it.