The Edge

ABOUT US
Who Are We?
About TEoP

STORY UNIVERSES
Rick Silva's Four Visitors 
Ivan Ewert's Solstice
Nick Bergeron's Mnemosyne 
Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road

Guest Quarters
Postcards

CONTACT US
Call for Submissions
Notification List
LiveJournal/Feedback
Contact

NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Homonculus
A Vorare story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

The Ally's voice was calm but quick. "Take the body into the darkness. It would not do for us to be seen."

Gordon knelt and slipped his arms beneath the dead man's armpits, hoisting him up as silently as possible and backing down the stairs. Every footstep sounded like a gunshot in his mind, a summons that would bring his mother from her home; but he also knew a sense of danger was surely heightening his fear of discovery. The television was sure to drown out whatever noise might be made, and as he moved further from the porch his fear sloughed away from him. With a short grunt, he laid Thomas' body down in the grass beneath an ornamental tree.

"Set me to his face," said the Ally in his wound. "Put me to his lips."

Gordon's face screwed itself into a mask of distaste as he considered what might come after. "Tell me you're not ..."

"You wish things to be easy, and silent. This will make it so."

He paused, then nodded and put his forearm - and his ally - to the corpse's lips. The blood began to pour once more from the wound, filling the man's mouth like an obscene chalice. The blood smeared across his chin and ran down his cheeks, yet much of the liquid flowed down the dead man's throat without resistance.

"Enough. Now stand, and order him to rise."

Gordon stepped back from the body with a queer lightheadedness. His blood had flowed heavily twice within the last several minutes, and while he had grown accustomed to the sensation in his arm and his flesh, the rushing tides threatened to overwhelm his consciousness for a moment.

"We're crossing another line," Gordon's voice was a whisper. "You know that."

"I am giving you what you asked for."

"I wasn't talking to you," he said, keeping the irritation from his voice with an effort.

He lifted his hand, feeling as though he were moving through water, his actions slow and deliberate in order to maintain as much equilibrium as possible. He didn't need the blood to survive any longer, he knew that much, yet the loss of so much had taken him to a new plateau. This was not the steady rush he had felt after consuming human flesh, but rather the same sense of the power of emptiness which had seized him when he woke from his suicide - that emptiness which had overtaken him on making the decision to continue down this path.

"Rise." His voice was a dry rustling, a herald of autumn in the heat of a Carolina June. "Rise, lift your limbs and rise. Stand and be counted. Rise. Rise." The words came in the rhythm of a heartbeat, his chest a bass drum forged in the darkness of the forest, his sing-song chant steady and low and not meant for mortal ears to overhear.

The tugging within his wound began again as his Ally set to work. He turned his forearm over to hold out an outstretched palm, then lifted the fingers into a claw. In time with the heartbeat his fingers began to pulse, squeezing and massaging the blood which he had spilled, moving the liquid which pooled in the dead man's stomach, setting it to a ripple beneath his flesh.

"Rise," he whispered, and the corpse's right arm twitched.

Gordon felt the words coming as if from a long way off, unsure if he was making them up or remembering them from some time in the distant past of the world, a time of blood and darkness when the forest filled the world, when power was held not in spirit but in flesh. "Stand and acknowledge, stand and be counted, stand and deliver your life unto me. Stand and surrender, stand as one deathless, stand and ..."

Destroy. That was the word which had come into his mind. Stand and destroy those who dare defy me. Even half-mesmerized by the rhythm, by the pulse and ebb and flow of blood and force and power, with the strange sensation of tendons and muscles sliding below the wound which held his Ally, he paused a moment at the thought.

"... defy those who dare defy me."

He shifted the words, on the fly, in his mind, on his tongue; and the corners of the wound tightened again in that strange half-smile he saw only in his own impressions.

The body's right arm moved now, sluggish but responsive, pulling on itself to roll the body onto its side. Thomas' corpse propped itself up on the right arm, brought its left arm around and pushed itself slowly to its feet. Its eyes remained open, rolled back into its head, blood still smeared across chin and cheeks - but it rose.

"Raise your right leg," commanded Gordon, and the body obeyed. There was little shift in muscle, no change at all in balance, simply an acknowledgment of orders received. It was as if strings held the body aloft, bypassing physics altogether. Flesh and muscle no longer animated the body of Thomas, but something stranger and more ancient, and alien to the laws of this world.

"Put your leg back down." The corpse did so, and Gordon nodded. "Wait."

He moved back to the porch and retrieved the knife, placing it in the corpse's hand. "Now follow me." The undead body stepped soundlessly behind him, moving toward the corner of the building, and as Gordon peered around he saw the truck still idling.

Nodding, he ordered, "Get in the truck ... and stab the driver until he is dead."

As he spoke the words, he felt the sour taste of bile in the back of his throat. His killing of the first man in the motel had been accidental, and while he had killed the man he now watched move toward the truck, he had fought in defense of his own life and that of his mother. He had arranged the hounds in a ghoulish display, yes; but that had been direct revenge against the Farm, and besides, he had told himself, they were only dogs...

Difficult as these tasks had been, none had felt so alienating. As a mortal man he had been no kind of leader, as ... whatever he had become, he had been a loner these many months. Now he controlled the thing he watched, controlled it utterly and without question. In many ways, he owned it. He had created it.

"Demiurge," he whispered, and "sorcerer."

***

"Done and quiet," said Marcus with an approving nod from within the truck. Reaching across, he grasped the latch and pushed the door open. Thomas looked dazed to him, walking so quietly and so straightforwardly that Marcus assumed he was in shock.

"It's well done, Thomas. You did right," he said as his co-conspirator climbed into the truck. Looking over, he started for a second. The blood on Thomas' face gleamed in the reflection of the streetlight, though his eyes were still in the shadow cast by the roof of the truck.

"You ate of her?" Marcus hissed, "Thomas ... you weren't to do so. It's not fit to eat those not of the blood, not fit to ..."

The knife slipped easily into his right side, pushing effortlessly through shirt and flesh, puncturing his body like the membrane of a water balloon. Too shocked to cry out, he gasped for breath, sucking air into his lungs and then panting it out for only a second as the blade struck into the side of his neck, stabbing again and again up and down his right side. The corpse continued to stab, unseeing but unerring, its blade thrusting again and again as Marcus' body slumped forward against the steering wheel.

***

The truck's horn burst through the quiet night, knocking Gordon from his reverie and into a blind panic. He exploded from the bushes, running with all his strength toward the truck as lights began to come on in the adjoining homes.

He slammed both hands on the hood of the truck, pulling himself around to the driver's side door and wrenching the latch open. As he climbed into the driver's seat, shoving the body away from the horn and into the center seat, he felt his Ally suddenly tense.

"Sit you still and do not move," came the hissed command from the wound in his arm, and Thomas' corpse - blade raised, prepared to follow its orders and stab the driver - ceased in the middle of its motion, sitting rigid as a statue in the passenger's side.

"Thanks," growled Gordon as he turned the key in the ignition and stepped on the gas. The pickup roared into the night before anyone came to their porches, but he knew too well how quickly he'd need to move. There would be no explaining a pickup truck with two dead bodies inside.

The lightheadedness that had come over him earlier had doubled, spiraled out of control as he felt the danger of his situation increase. He was a killer now, fully and completely. He hit the brakes too quickly approaching the stop sign at the end of the street, the sound of the brakes tearing at the air, and at this he felt suddenly as if hot needles were at the corners of his eyes.

"You do not weep," said his Ally softly, "you do not breathe." The voice was gentle, hypnotic, after the mind-numbing fear of the flight. "The blood is not your blood. The flesh is not truly your flesh. Fight it through, my host, fight it through. You are not afraid. You are not lightheaded; you are not in any danger. Remain calm and we shall see ourselves through this."

It was hardly a calming thought. But it was the only comfort he had.

"There is a lake not far from here," said his Ally, "turn to the west, and we will soon enough be free of our guests. Well played, O my host, well played in all extremes ..."

Story and image by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2007