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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Minding
A Vorare Story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

Gordon's eyes rolled up, frustration clearly written across his face. "Mother, I've already told you. I'm eating on my own time, in my own way."

"You're dead on your feet, Gordon Velander. You have got to eat something, sometime. I don't care what it is you want. Is it vegetarian? Something about the oils I use? You never did used to kick about my cooking, but whatever those people wrapped inside your head, I'm willing to work with it. You just need to tell me what it is."

"Trust me, mom. It wouldn't work."

"But you've got to eat!"

"I AM eating! When I go to the hills I've got a means of getting what I need."

It was a half-truth, and that half had more to do with his newfound need for solitude than any actual nourishment. Since his sacrifice in the north woods, and the coming of his Ally, Gordon had no longer felt the need to eat - neither the human flesh that was the stock in trade of the Gentleman Ghouls, nor any mortal food.

The scent of it sickened him - not violently, and not physically; but deep within his soul. The memories he bore of food and privation had scarred him thoroughly, to the point where he was unable to stay in the room for long when his mother prepared meals for herself and Ben Harris. The smell of roasting pork had actually driven him from the house two weeks earlier, and since then she had done what she could, but it was never enough.

She put down the ladle, turning the burner on the stove to a simmer and wiping her hands gently on a nearby towel. The past weeks had been hard on her, and too many times Gordon had thought it might have been best if he had stayed away altogether. Leaving her to the Ghouls was no option at all, however, and though they had been quiet over this time he knew in his heart that something was building - something like a storm, coming from the north.

"Mom, please. Try to understand."

"I am trying, Gordon. As God is my witness, I'm trying to understand, but you're skin and bones and gristle. There's muscle there, though I don't see how, and all I want - all I want is to help you get well again."

"I'm plenty well, mom. Physically I'm better off than you know."

"How?" It was a question she pressed on him, again and again. He suspected that Ben was pushing her to learn more about what had happened to her son, what torments he had been through, who was responsible, why he refused to go to the police or leave the house in daylight hours. He'd asked more than once himself, but Carol's questions were harder to bear.

"I don't know," Gordon said, a defeated note creeping into his voice. "If I knew how to explain it I would, mom, I promise you."

At the words, he felt an angry red heat begin to rise in his forearm. The wound that housed his Ally, growing tighter and deeper with every passing day. He'd tried to speak to it, tried to reason with it, tried pleading and cajoling, all for naught. Since the second day he had refused to leave in the night, the Ally had been silent, sulking beneath his skin like a recalcitrant toddler - or a caged animal.

"I would," he insisted, and his mother shook her head sadly.

"I believe you, Gordon." She reached for him, taking his hand in her own, and he realized suddenly how similar their hands now looked, both of them aged before their time in one way or another. Stick-thin fingers and bulging knuckles, a collection of articulated twigs and sticks with ashen flesh drawn across them, they intertwined, trying to communicate by touch what they could not say with words.

He saw the blood before he felt it - saw the black flecks of dried blood carried on a stream of thin, red, fresh blood, running quick as water down his forearm to pool between their intertwined knuckles. The heat he felt from his Ally grew sharp and intense as he jerked his hands from hers.

"Gordon?"

Quickly he turned and threw open the door to the basement, slamming it behind him in a panic and jamming a wedge of lumber underneath it to keep her from entering. The crimson splattered on the floor as he took the steps two at a time, followed by her cry of alarm on finding the blood upon her own two hands, and the desperate hammering upon the door.

"Gordon! Gordon, you're hurt! Open the door!"

He tore the front of his shirt open, pulling it desperately over his head and throwing it onto the washing machine's lid before laying his wounded arm across it.

"Stop it," he hissed, "stop it from bleeding now!"

There was no word from the Ally, though the ragged and glistening edges of the wound pulsed steadily, throbbing in time with a nonexistent heartbeat, allowing more and more blood to run from its obscene lips.

"I said stop it!" His voice was shrill now, desperate, sweat running down the back of his neck despite the subterranean chill of autumn. "Stop it, please! What do you want?"

"O my gentle host of man." The voice was a croon, sweet and slow, pitched like a singer's in a cabaret.

"What is it you want?" The blood continued to flow, running quickly from him and soaking the shirt through. He tore at his jeans, throwing them beneath the shirt to continue sopping up the seemingly endless flow. "What is it you want?"

"You know," came the teasing voice. There was a menace he had not heard since the early days, a tone which spoke of holding some true power over his head. "I want to leave this place. To go on the hunt. To do as you promised me …"

"I know. I know I did."

"You made a promise to me, and I to you, O sweetest child of Adam and truest to my name. We are to bring the Ghouls to their knees. Yet you crouch of nights by this filthy cot, in this cellar, beneath two who trust you not and even now think of phoning the doctor, the sheriff, the police."

"Don't call anyone!" He shouted up the stairs. "Mom, don't call anyone! I'm fine! I've got in under control!"

"Gordon, you're hurt! Open this door! We can get someone …"

"Nobody!" His voice was frantic now, dropping to a whisper as he addressed the wound. "Please. I know what I promised."

"But you do not fulfill that promise, and so we must treat it as false, and so we must begin anew."

"Fine! Fine, we can. We can! I'll bargain with you." His eyes were wild above the seeping wound, now mopping frantically at the surface in front of him as the pool of blood spread - more blood than he would have thought possible.

"I do not bargain," hissed the voice, as cold as a Minnesota wind. "Agam bargains, and see what has come of that. You gave away a name for naught, receiving papers for a name which not a single soul will use. It was poorly done and most unwise."

"Then what? What?"

"You made a promise," said the Ally. "And until that promise is fulfilled, rivers of blood will pour forth from your frame. You will walk marked and marred, set apart by this stigmata which neither man nor beast may stop. None will touch you - no house will hold you, until you return to the wild and the ways of my own.

"I released myself to you, O host of man, believing your word to be true. It is a mistake I will not make again, until the last Ghoul lies dead at the fading frontier of their vaunted civilization.

"Until the last lies dead at our blooded, bleeding hands."

The seconds passed, marked by the constant pump of that demonic heart, the endless rhythm that had nothing to do with mortal time, or flesh, or love - only a mockery of the things which lent life unto the human frame, and meaning to the mortal heart.

"One hour," whispered Gordon.

"What hour, O child of man?"

"One hour a day. Dry the stigmata up, for one hour a day. So I can say goodbye."

"I have heard these words before."

"But I mean it. And you know it. I know you're in me, deeper than my skin. You know I didn't mean to stay so long and you know that I don't mean to now. I'm human. I'm … I love her. I don’t want to leave her alone again."

"There is the Harris."

"I especially don't want to leave her thinking he's the only one she can count on!" Gordon's voice rose, and, shaking, he slammed his wounded arm down upon the washing machine. "God damn it, I don't want to abandon her! But I will. I will."

His voice sank again, his forehead now pressed against the cool metal surface, wishing for tears that would not come.

"But I need an hour a day. For seven days. That's mythic enough, isn't it? Good enough to please you? Pour forth out of me, keep me trapped here in this basement or drive me into the hills outside, but give me this. Seven hours to convince her to leave, and then I'll go, one way or the other, so long as she's protected like you promised."

The throbbing of his arm subsided. What had been an angry grip transformed into a delicate squeeze, obscene in its gentleness following all that had occurred.

"Seven hours," crooned his Ally, "over seven days. And then we are gone to the hunt and to the wild, to rid the world forever of all they mean and are."

"Seven hours," agreed Gordon, his eyes squeezed shut.

"Let it be done."

Story by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2008
Image by Leanne Emery, Copyright 2008