Twilight Children Episode 14
Sex, murder, and the beginning of the end.
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
Writing Skins is a reader supporter author newsletter that shares excerpts from Aigner Loren Wilson’s writing journal. Aigner is an award winning and nominated author of literary speculative fiction and nonfiction.
Previously On: In last week’s episode, Vlad fell deep into love and away from Elaine, devoting herself to only one woman now.
You’re Too Precious
Vlad
Vlad didn’t know many things. Vlad knew that much. But what Vlad did know was how to touch Carmen:
Place your lips and teeth on her ears. Drag and pull as Carmen squirms and moans. Lick inside the curl of her ears and give the woman a taste of what’s to come. Suck the lobe in and let it fall back before biting her neck.
Press hard enough to leave a mark, so she has to tell you, breathless and thighs clenched around you, “Vlad, stop.”
And you do because that’s part of the game. You now must leave kisses along her neck and say in a whisper, “I’m sorry.”
She’ll coo at your words but hold you firmly in place as she begins to lift her body against yours, grinding against you slowly.
She’ll say, “Prove it.”
And you’ll take off your shirt and pants if she hasn’t already told you to. If she wants you first, you always say yes. Turn how she wants you. Place your head here just like that and push your ass into the air so she can see how wet she makes you. There isn’t much room in her SUV, but you’ll bruise yourself to do whatever she tells you. She’ll roll the window down just enough for snow to fall in, to have it land on you as a reminder of where you are, who’s in control.
It’s Carmen.
And you love it.
Then she’ll kiss you where the snowflakes land. You’ll moan into the upholstery. Your hands will grip the seat belts wishing it was her arms you could pin down. When her tongue grazes the tender spot between your ass and cunt, you’ll do everything you can not to buck away but to stay very still and wish and hope and pray and beg for her to keep going, go lower. Lick you where your Black turns to pink. But she’ll make you crucify yourself like a fresh kill atop a truck first. You’ll flatten out as best you can while still sticking it all up for her.
You’ll feel one snowflake and more land on your cunt, lips, and, yes, even your throbbing clit. The seat belts are your only friends and salvation as Carmen starts to kiss and lick away the cold snow. She begins to suck you in, first your clit, then your lips, until all of you is resting warm in the pillow of her mouth.
You are her apple and pear. Her hollowed-out peach. She says she prefers you like this, hidden and yet, so open.
You tell her all you want is to eat her whole.
And she laughs and says, “Vlad, you do.”
And Vlad did. After Carmen made her come on the tip of her tongue so hard Vlad saw stars and tapped into another hunger she had forgotten about, she hunted Carmen out in the car’s hot interior.
“Come here,” Vlad growled, pulling Carmen down on the laid-out seats and ripping open Carmen’s dress with her teeth.
Carmen laughed, sprawling out for Vlad to take. “You want to hear a story, baby.”
Vlad didn’t need to answer because Carmen knew the truth. When Vlad got like this, what she wanted, what she needed, wasn’t Carmen’s dripping wetness, though she would take that and so much more. What Vlad needed was a story, a part of Carmen only Carmen could give. And as Vlad licked and gnawed at Carmen’s underwear, chewing the wet fabric away to reveal Carmen’s hairy mesh of wet matted hair, Carmen told her what she wanted to hear.
Carmen told her of leaving school, of wanting nothing more than to be nothing, to live and let the world sort itself out. She clenched her thighs around Vlad’s head as Vlad thrummed out a response to her words.
And this was the moment when it would all fall away. The world, Vlad, Carmen, Ghostwoods, and the creatures that call it home. It’d fall away into a wet stream of release, drenching Vlad and the towels laid out in Carmen’s backseat. Punching at the air and at a memory gone and forgotten, Carmen cried out.
That evening after Vlad cleaned out the car, Carmen asked, standing in the falling snow and headlights, “Do you love me?”
There were still strong traces of Carmen on Vlad’s face and lips. Vlad found herself in a cloud of Carmen saying, “Yes, yes, I love you.”
Turning away from Vlad, Carmen said, “I think me and Stephanie are going to have to move, leave Ghostwoods.”
“Why?” Vlad approached Carmen in the snow, watching her tremble.
When Carmen spun back around, her face was no longer in pain but raged. “Von Northman. Ron says he’s been making comments about us that make him think it’d be safer if we both went back home to Sweet Water.”
Vlad matched Carmen’s rage and doubled it quietly.
“Vlad, I feel like we just found each other. I don’t want to lose you.” Carmen touched Vlad’s face. “But I can’t fight Von. I can’t make him regret ever looking twice at me or Stephanie or any girl.”
This time when Vlad growled, it came from someplace other than her stomach or mouth but from her heart. Rage and anger had eaten it out and left an acid pit of hate with a name.
Von Northman.
Carmen’s voice came from a place far away because Vlad was moving now through the trees. “He has the story of what happened to all those kids with their heads scrambled. You know, the ones found all lost and confused. He knows what happened. He wants to do the same to me. He wants to take it all from me. He wants to take me away from my dad and my sister and everything. Away from you.”
Vlad was a storm. Vlad was a hungry building whirl on the first real hunt of her life. She moved through the forest in search of a cry she knew only existed in her head. It was Carmen’s cry. The cry of a Carmen being taken, beaten, raped, mauled, left for dead, half-naked, and lost. It was the cry of the Carmen Vlad was going to prevent. If Von knew how to take, then Vlad would show him how much she could take, how much she could devour.
Her teeth ached the closer she got to the pig pens of Von’s butchery and farm, but she knew he wasn’t there. He was further. Out past the bloodied snow and in the dark overhanging of the woods that surrounded his home.
And like a worm on the tail of a good story, Vlad broke out into a squirming run. Von was wandering the forest alone like he was waiting for Vlad like he had always been waiting for Vlad.
“If you’re not careful,” Von said, “These people will skin you alive.”
“The only one losing skin is you.” Vlad launched like a dog off a leash and tackled Von into the snow. She crashed her knuckles into Von’s face, raking his teeth and ripping her flesh open. Her screams weren’t of pain but of hunger. “Tell me what you did!”
“Nothing you haven’t done a thousand times,” Von said, laughing through the blood and beating.
This time what fell was not Vlad’s fists but her head. A flood of memories crashed over Vlad as her teeth broke Von’s skin. The man hollered, trying as he might to push Vlad off, but she was stronger now. The taste of frightened girls taking off their clothes to feed Von blurred together into one—Carmen. Vlad tore and ripped until Von stopped fighting. Then she chewed, bit, and swallowed.
Like a well-told book, Von leaked of stories, of memories, so many they made Vlad drunk. There was no past or present. It all crammed into one moment. Chewing through the spinal cord at the back of Von’s neck, Vlad kept eating, trying to chase down an answer to the onslaught of so much history, more than could ever be lived by a 43-year-old man.
This body was the tomb of a very old thing.
Behind Vlad, the forest moved and settled like a cloak with someone slipping into it. She pulled away from Von’s throat, blood dripping from her face, down her neck, and looked at what she did.
Von lay dead with his insides pouring out into the snow around him. She knew, like the stories coursing through her, that she wasn’t alone. Something like a shadow hung over her shoulder. Vlad took off into the dark of the night for home, leaving a trail of blood and Von’s corpse in her wake. Though she couldn’t see it, someone was out there watching her and had seen what she did.
3 - The Lost Tales of Ghoul City IV
The Wolf Man Returns
RythHello! It is yours truly, Ryth—caster of tales, weaver of worlds, and delicacy of your dreams.
Song of the Day:
Remember before when I said shit was getting weird? Well, it done gone and got weirder.
TBH. ‘Weirder’ isn’t really the right word.
A better one would be ‘bad,’ ‘awful,’ ‘bloody.’ Suffice it to say, Ghoul City as I once knew it is no more. The monsters have come to town—or they were here already. I’m not really fucking sure, but I’m not going to lie to you about what’s been going on.
Y’all are my readers, my supporters, and parts of what I consider my extended family. Stephanie thinks I shouldn’t say this on the internet—it could get us into trouble—but, shit, we’re already in trouble, trouble of the worst sort.
So, let’s go back to the beginning. I saw someone kill the butcher Von Northman. I can’t say who because, well, just because. Either way, it doesn’t matter so much as what happened after he was killed. Picture this because this is how it happened:
That big burly Black man sprawled out like a deer with its throat ripped out sat up.
His head loped back, sending a waterfall of blood down his oilskins. But it was like he couldn’t feel it. Like it didn’t matter that death had come and ripped out his throat and left him dead as stone in the snow. What did matter was that he make a phone call.
You read me right, readers. This dead man sat up and made a phone call on his brick of a satellite phone. He spluttered and dripped blood all over it, trying to form words his throat couldn’t.
Then it did, and words began to pour out of the bloody stump of his neck. “Your bitch is off her leash,” Von barked in a low, harsh voice that made me grip my throat from behind the trees I was hiding in.
Whoever was on the other end must have had a lot to say that Von could care less about.
“Control her, or I’ll bring it all tumbling down.”
Von chucked the phone as hard as he could in my direction, and it went spiraling into the night, nearly missing my head.
Slowly but not slow enough to keep me from catching a cold sweat, Von’s flesh started repairing itself, mending the skin like glue stretching between two surfaces. What the person on the phone didn’t understand, but I could see clear as day, clear as the impossible standing in front of me, was that Von wouldn’t wait. Von was never that guy. He killed most of his own meat himself, even at the processing plant. His wife was Old Lady. He let her wander around town, lost and shrieking for a home whose doors were always locked tight to her.
Von wasn’t a waiting man.
He was a man of blunt and brutal action.
I couldn’t let him heal fully and walk out of these woods. Like so many others, those pines needed to be his grave. I dug up a rock, slow and quiet like, while Von lay there in the snow, letting his body do the hard work of resurrecting him. When I found a sharp and heavy stone, I didn’t hesitate—most of his neck was back to being that thick, strong fearsome strand. I launched myself at him, gliding through the snow with only one thing on my mind.
I struck out at his head and didn’t stop till I tasted iron and saw pink. Then, I just went slower. I made sure there was nothing left to repair. But after what I just saw, it still didn’t feel like enough. I needed to make sure he couldn’t leave these woods. I had to end it here.
When Nos and I found those first teens lost and confused in the woods, he gave me one of his knives. Told me to keep it with me always and never to hesitate to use it. At the time, I fought against it.
“I’m not really the target demographic for whatever this is.”
Nos has a way of doing this thing with his face when he doesn’t know what else to say but the truth. It goes slack, almost numb. “You’re the target demographic for stupid assholes, though. And whatever this is, don’t change that. Just take it.”
He pressed it into my hand. I remember almost dropping it like I could feel what I would end up doing with it. Things were changing, and I was just afraid to admit it, afraid to see then because I was too busy being so fucking in love with some out of town bookseller. We were all in danger. Who the hell knows how Nos got me to take the knife, but I did. And I carried that double-edged blade everywhere. Just like his love. Just like all the love I will ever hold for everyone I love.
Love, not anger, is what made me saw off Von’s head or what was left of it. Love of my home and my family and the people daring enough to love me and call me one of their own. Then I cut out his heart—this was in anger. In hate, I stomped it out, buried it where I plucked my rock from, and tucked all of it beneath the snow, but I kept Nos’ knife, my knife.
After, I called Nos and Stephanie. They came to find me out in the woods next to Von’s body. They didn’t say anything, just helped me into Nos’ truck and loaded up the bits and sludge. We took Von to our special spot in the woods and set a fire large enough to consume every scrap of him.
My phone buzzed in my pocket while I watched Von disappear. After I got hold of the phone, I realize it wasn’t my phone at all. It was Von’s big satellite talkie. Someone was reaching out to the dead man, but instead of reaching him, they were going to get his killer.
Next Time: The monsters come out and Elaine begins to remember who or what she is.
Twilight Children Episode 15
Twilight Children is a horror serialization about care giving, family, and consuming stories. Episodes are released weekly. If you’re new here, you can catch up on episodes on the Twilight Children homepage.
What did you think? I’m trying things out and everything is an experiment. I’d love to know your thoughts? Love it. Hate it. Absolutely indifferent and confused?