A Reader’s Guide to “The Associated Villainies”

12 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

I did one of these for my last collection of horror stories (Hopeful Monsters, as you’ll recall), so I thought for consistency’s sake that I’d tackle one for my newest collection as well (it’s available here). It’s basically just a rundown of where the ideas for the stories came from. Read, if you’re interested. Thanks. 🙂

“Time, of the Essence”
This was written (but not used) for an anthology of stories set in a specific Southern town on Halloween in a year of the author’s choosing (pre-1950, if I recall correctly). I wanted to play with the idea of costumes or masks as veneers hiding what was really going on underneath, but also the idea that the real veneer was perhaps the one you didn’t know you were wearing. I also wanted to tie that in with the conflict between progress (both social and technological) and conservatism, by throwing in references to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the beginning of the end of slavery, and the theme of machines replacing human labor. (By the way, I made a two-part YouTube video of me reading this story aloud, if you’re into that sort of thing; just do a search on the story’s title.)

“On the Halfshell”
This was also written for an anthology, but not used; the theme was basically giant animals or giant monsters. I wanted to think of an animal that wasn’t perhaps the most obvious choice for a rampaging beast, i.e. one that’s pretty much completely sedentary. I thought it turned out pretty funny, without completely losing the horror element. Of course, your mileage may vary.

“Three Stories Down”
Basically this was an attempt to write something in a rather David Lynchian vein, where I took a character’s mental state and made it manifest in reality, though I chose to keep the tale rather dreamlike and ambiguous, so that the reader was never really sure if what was happening was real or entirely in the protagonist’s head. I enjoy reading those types of ambiguous stories, so I thought I’d try my hand at writing one.

“Yellow Wings”
I have a very vivid memory of going on a camping trip as a kid and seeing a freakishly large yellow and brown moth just hanging out in one of the campground’s bathrooms. Until then I had no idea that moths that large existed, so the experience stuck with me, and served as the germ for this story.

“Living Fossil”
An attempt to take the “human transforming into animal” trope and do something a little different with it. Plus, Nazis.

“The Expulsion”
Because the whole concept of exorcism is sort of hilarious to me, and with a nod to the Leslie Nielsen film Repossessed, this was just a jokey little confection I penned on the idea of a for-profit exorcism outfit with no religious trappings whatsoever.

“Homunculus”
I’m enchanted with the idea that, before the concept of sexual reproduction was completely understood, there were actually serious theorists who believed that each sperm cell contained a fully-formed (if impossibly tiny) human being, which would then simply grow bigger in its mother’s womb. If this were true, I reasoned, then every male masturbatory session would result in enough tiny people to populate several armies, and the story just wrote itself from there.

“Auto-da-Fé”
I wrote this quite a few years ago, around the time of all that brouhaha in Kansas about the teaching of evolution in public schools (a battle that depressingly went on to encompass many other states as well). Anyone who knows me well knows that creationists are really my main bete noir, so this was a kind of dystopian vision of what I thought a future run by fundamentalist creationists would look like.

“Tempest in a Teapot”
This one is actually a sort-of sequel to a story I wrote called “Spreading the Love,” which is available in the ChimeraWorld #3 anthology from Chimericana Books. It posits a future where religion has been wiped out by a drug, but in this installment things take a strange turn involving particle accelerators and the whole Russell’s teapot idea (look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

“Three Sides to Every Story”
I’m not a huge sci-fi fan, though I do like to use some sci-fi elements in my stories and cross-fertilize them into relatively mundane situations where they don’t really belong, ha ha. So in this story I used the concept of overlapping parallel universes and applied it to a rather straightforward domestic violence/murder type scenario.

“’Til Life Do Us Part”
Growing up I often developed hopelessly romantic obsessions with various rock stars and so forth, so I wanted to write a story in which everything my teenaged self wanted to believe about these unobtainable people actually came true. But then, because it’s a horror story, I had to go and fuck everything up with a ridiculously tragic ending. Or not, depending on your perspective, I suppose.

“At the Gates of the Serpent’s Garden”
This was straight up based on a dream I had years ago; the description of the abandoned building and the ghostly women is pretty much exactly how I remember it from the dream, and the character of Ruth is based largely on how I perceived myself growing up.

“Component Parts”
The idea for this came from a book I read about unsolvable or unprovable mathematical hypotheses; I’ve always had a fascination with codes or mathematical proofs that resist solutions for many years (or forever). Of course I had to gore it up, because it’s a horror story, but I did like the idea of a mathematician becoming so obsessed with his work (in this case, trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis) that he goes completely batshit.

“Neither Rain, Nor Sleet…”
I live in Florida, and we get hurricanes every now and again. One summer we had four of them within a month and a half, and the woods behind my house were pretty much torn to shit. One day while I was contemplating the carnage, I thought how eerie it would be if all the downed trees revealed some structure out there in the woods that I hadn’t known was there.

“Fates and Furies”
I remember wanting to write a sort of subtle psychological study of three very different women that wouldn’t even seem like a horror story at first, but would slowly ramp up the tension until this big shocking revelation at the end. I also sort of saw it as writing separate characters that would roughly correspond to three different aspects of my own personality.

“Heartworms”
The germ of this story was another strong memory from my childhood. When I was a kid, my uncle made this kick-ass dragon mask for Halloween; it was basically a masterful papier-mache sculpture covered in glitter (hence the mention in the story about the glitter being in the house for years afterwards, which is completely true). For some reason that mask so terrified me as a child that I refused to go upstairs at my grandparents’ house while it was there, because I knew it was in my uncle’s room on its tall stand, lurking and contemplating my demise.

“Slumber”
I wrote this a very long time ago, so I’m not sure where exactly the idea for it came from. The character of Jilly is again based on my own self-perception as a kid, of being one of those quiet, shy, not-terribly-popular children that never got invited to parties. There’s also a strong “Carrie” influence, though it’s more obvious to me now than when I initially wrote it.

“Relieving Osiris”
Yet another story based around my longtime love affair with Egyptian mythology, this time tied in with an almost absurdist zombie motif.

“The Vulture’s Egg”
I’m a bit of a pervert, I admit that, which is why quite a few of my stories have elements of erotica.This one I wanted to be just sort of borderline pornographic, in my own lyrically schizoid way, with an added dollop of that whole sex/death symbolism thrown in for added spice.

“The Process of Elimination”
I apologize in advance for this story, which was basically my attempt to write the grossest thing I could think of, something that would make me gag even as I was writing it. I got the idea to go scatological from this other story I read (can’t remember the title or the author, sorry) where this fucked-up dude keeps his wife chained in the basement and makes her lick shit off his ass and various other horrible things (and yes, I gagged when I read that too, although it was a damn good story nonetheless).

“Quarantine”
Other than the supernatural ending, this story is a pretty much straightforward retelling of an incident that happened to my ex-husband and I a few years ago when we were visiting his family in Wales. And yes, the Cefn Golau cholera cemetery is absolutely real, and looks very much as I described it in the story.

“Winter House”
I really like haunted house stories that are sort of low-key and unsettling, so this was my homage to the genre; a subtle ghost story without an obvious ghost.

“Trip-Trapping”
Another thing I like to do in my own stories is to take an established trope or genre and try to do something not-entirely-obvious with it. So this is essentially a crime story, but one in which the crime isn’t actually what it appears to be.

“Alpha Canis”
A pretty much traditional werewolf story set in the somewhat unconventional milieu of the BDSM fetish scene.

“Pale Sire”
This story took me a long time to write, because the initial idea for it came out of a very personal situation in my own life, though I think the tale became sufficiently bizarre that the circumstances that inspired it would not be obvious to anyone but me. I wanted to play with the idea of guilt as infection, and again explore the fascinating (to me) theme of ambiguous perception, of never knowing if the protagonist is experiencing the events in reality or only in her own imagination. This is probably my favorite story in the collection, by the way, and it is also the most recent.

“Alpha Canis”

12 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Other than the fact that it was New York City, there wasn’t anything particularly unusual about the arrival. It took place between ten p.m. and two a.m., just like always, and like always a fat gibbous moon hung in the sky like a golden Chinese lantern emerging from beneath a black velvet drape. There was also the familiar smell of the car—clove oil and sweat and leather, and the not-unpleasant tang of cheap roadside burgers—and the driving industrial music on the CD player, not loud but just audible enough to insinuate its punishing beats into the brain, establishing a rhythm for thought.

Lucine smiled a little as she gazed out the car window, watching the twinkling lights of the city grow brighter from across the dark water. She’d never been to New York before, but Mars had. Lucine had always thought of it as a place apart, a place so magical that it surely didn’t really exist, a fairyland like Oz or Narnia. She certainly never thought of it as a place you could just drive to in Mars’s dirty red Viper, but reality was putting lie to that belief; there was the city, rushing forward to meet them as if it would devour them whole.

“The club manager put us up in an apartment less than a block from the place.” Mars was peering through the windshield with her cold blue eyes, getting a cigarette from her pack and lighting it without even glancing at what she was doing. In a moment the thick spicy smoke filled the air. “We’re staying with some guy who works the bar. I hope I have a place to park.”

Lucine did not comment, because she had not been asked to.

The miles went by as if in a dream, shifting lights and bridges giving way to towering concrete and noise, the energy and heat coming off the streets palpable even within the fume-filled bubble of the Viper. Lucine craned her neck eagerly, trying to take it all in. She had been to big cities before, of course; in fact, it was all one big city after another, and had been for years, but New York was different, simultaneously seducing and repelling, a dazzling debutante and a decaying whore. Lucine wanted to cram it all into her mouth and swallow it.

It was a Tuesday night, and traffic was probably as light as it ever got in lower Manhattan, but even so it took nearly an hour of inching, circling and swearing before Mars finally turned the car onto the darkened block where the Oubliette was, where the apartment was. Lucine looked out as Mars prowled the street like a shark, trying to find an empty space along the curb. Miraculously, she found one only a little way down from the club, on the opposite side of the street. She pressed her vinyl-booted foot onto the accelerator and the Viper roared into the opening with less than an inch to spare.

Mars reached into the back for her bag, which was also black vinyl, and then she pointed a commanding finger at Lucine, even though of course Lucine knew better than to move or get out of the car without permission. Mars got out, her leather skirt creaking, and then she walked around to the passenger side of the car and opened the door, reaching for the silver chain that had pooled in Lucine’s lap, the chain attached to the collar around her neck. Mars tugged it, just hard enough to be a little uncomfortable, and Lucine unfolded her lithe body from the passenger seat, keeping her gaze downturned.

Even before they reached the club entrance, Lucine could feel the music pounding from the very ground beneath her, beats that simultaneously punished and soothed. Mars tugged on her chain and Lucine looked up, taking in the nondescript facade of the establishment, painted a chipping blood red with old frosted glass inserts. The door was open, and some random pulsing lights could be seen from deep within the building. As they approached, a black clad figure emerged from the shadows, silver eyebrow spikes glinting. “You’re some of the performers for Thursday?”

“Mistress Mars and Lucine. Is Adam Severin here?”

“Yeah, he’s expecting you. Just take that first left down the hall past the bathrooms, he should be in the office.”

“Thanks.” Lucine followed dutifully at the end of the chain as Mars clacked down the hall in her high-heeled boots. The smell of the place was strange and yet intimately familiar, the secretive, earthy scent of many bodies close together, mixed with the lingering pall of cigarettes that were no longer allowed to be smoked.

Adam Severin, the club manager, was indeed in the office, a whip-thin man in his late twenties with a head shaved clean and black-framed glasses sitting on the bridge of his hawk-beak nose. He smiled as they entered, and asked if they’d had a good trip. Lucine only half listened as he talked to Mars about the show on Thursday, about the other acts performing, about turning up a few hours early for an informal run-through. She liked the sound of his voice and was content to listen to the melody of its rise and fall as she stood at the end of her silver chain, her hands folded demurely in front of her.

At last business seemed to be concluding, and Adam and Mars shook hands; Lucine knew better than to offer hers, and even though Adam had only just met them, he knew better than to offer his to her. He rooted around in his pocket for a moment, coming up with a set of two keys on a plain ring.

“Roman told me to give you these,” he said, handing the keys to Mars. “They’re both the same, for the apartment door. He said to just go ahead and make yourselves at home because he doesn’t get off work here until three. Bigger bedroom is his; he says you guys can share the smaller one. His roommate’s in Prague.” Adam smiled at this, and Lucine thought he had a nice smile, sort of like a wolverine. “You know the address, right? The building number’s 134, only about six down from here. Front door should be propped open; if not, hit the buzzer and someone will open it. He’s on the fourth floor, apartment number eighteen.” He smiled again, and Lucine almost smiled back, but then caught herself. “Welcome to New York,” he said.

Lucine followed Mars back out of the club and across to the curb where the car was parked. Mars looped the silver chain around her wrist to have her hands free, and then she opened the trunk and pointed inside. “Carry the big one.”

“Yes, Mistress.” Lucine reached in and maneuvered their big black suitcase free. It wasn’t terribly heavy, though it contained most of their everyday clothes, and all of their performing outfits and accessories; after years on the road, they knew how to travel light. Mars grabbed the small overnight bag and slammed the trunk, giving Lucine and extra hard tug on the leash for almost not moving her hand away fast enough.

The front door of the building was propped open, so Mars glided in, pulling Lucine behind her. There was no elevator, and Lucine’s arms were starting to ache from carrying the awkward suitcase up the stairs. Occasionally she deliberately slacked her pace or mewled her discomfort, just so she could earn a swift rebuke from Mars in the form of a savage chain tug or a withering glare.

The apartment, once they had managed to shove open the tight metal door and fumble their way to the light switch, was a typical Manhattan closet with a postage stamp living room, a cramped toilet with a shower stall, a slip of a kitchen that looked barely used, and two miniscule bedrooms with worn hardwood floors and narrow barred windows overlooking a back alley. Lucine liked it immediately; it was cozy and oddly welcoming, and had a lingering animal odor that appealed to her sharp senses. At Mars’s command, Lucine carried the suitcase into the smaller bedroom. She dropped it on the floor a little too loudly, then shuddered with pleasure when Mars used the long silver chain to swipe her across the back.

They were both very tired, and once Lucine had undressed and curled up on the end of the bed, she watched adoringly as Mars unzipped her boots and tossed them aside, as she slid out of her leather skirt and her black tank top. Normally Lucine would undress her mistress, folding each article of clothing just so, placing the boots in perfect alignment under Mars’s eagle gaze. But tonight Mars was clearly too exhausted for games, and had ordered Lucine immediately to her usual sleeping place at the foot of the mattress.

Mars, now wearing only a red bra and matching underwear, stood staring down at Lucine for a long moment. She was achingly beautiful in this pose of studied disapproval: Her hair was ice-white and piled in disciplined curls upon her head; her pale flesh was alive with sinuous curves of ink. After making sure that Lucine had cowered sufficiently at her implied wrath, Mars yawned, then leaned down and unsnapped the collar, tossing it and the chain aside with a metallic clink. That done, she slipped beneath the covers, making sure to dig her toes painfully into Lucine’s ribs. Lucine sighed with happiness, and was asleep minutes after Mars extinguished the lamp. Sometime in the night, she half awoke to the sound of a key jingling and a door closing nearby, but in the presence of her mistress she felt no apprehension, and soon drifted off again.

****

Morning brought the smells of coffee and sugary baked goods, which in turn brought Lucine out of her deep slumber. Mars was already up, her shampooed hair hanging like spun platinum down her tattooed back as she dug through the larger suitcase. Lucine did not make a sound; she just waited, and after a moment Mars turned to look at her as if she had sensed her consciousness. “Get up and come here,” Mars said, and Lucine obeyed, untangling her cramped limbs. Mars snapped the collar back on and tugged the chain, then studied Lucine’s face and body very closely. Lucine knew that she was already beginning to change, this near to the full moon; the hair on her body was a little coarser and thicker, the angles of her face were sharpening. No one else was likely to notice anything unusual, but Mars always noticed.

“Get dressed,” she commanded when she was finished staring. “Look presentable. You have to meet Roman.”

Lucine unearthed some clothes from the suitcase, just a regular black gypsy skirt and a tight purple t-shirt with a black rose printed on it. She didn’t have to put on any of her performing outfits, not until tomorrow night.

Once Mars had dressed and pulled back her still-damp hair, she led Lucine out into the living room, which contained no furniture except a couch, two small bookcases crammed with books, and a cheap desk with a computer on it. It was at this desk that Roman sat, staring at the computer screen, a chipped coffee mug beside him and a pastry dripping a dark red jam clutched in one hand.

He turned as he heard them enter. “Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” said Mars, but Lucine had stopped in her tracks and was staring at Roman, because she could see from his eyes that he was like her, lupine, and she could hardly believe it. She should have known from the thick animal smell of the apartment, but she’d been so tired last night, and pleasantly overwhelmed by the mythical city.

A painful tug at her collar brought her up short, and she glanced at Mars’s pretty scowl, apologizing with her eyes. “Say hello to Roman,” Mars commanded.

“Hello, Roman.” Lucine’s voice was soft, lilting, but she could hear the underpinnings of a growl all the same; it always happened a couple of days before the change. She didn’t know if Mars was aware of Roman’s nature, and of course she could not tell her. Lucine had never even met another creature like herself, save for her mother, who had died some years before.

Roman was looking at her with an open stare that barely masked a sort of feral intensity. She wanted to return his look, but she was aware also of Mars’s imposing figure just inches away, radiating heat, and so Lucine dropped her gaze.

When the strange moment had passed, Roman took a thoughtful bite from his pastry, not minding that bits of the red filling were clotting around his lips and jaw. “There’s coffee in there if you want some. And I got some doughnuts and stuff, they’re in that white bag.”
“I’ll get it,” Mars said, looking significantly at Lucine as she said it. “You stay here.”

Lucine deflated a little. Mars must have seen what had passed between her and Roman, or else she wouldn’t have denied Lucine the pleasure of getting the coffee and pastries and serving them to her mistress. She could sense Roman was looking at her and willing her to raise her head, but she didn’t dare.

Mars returned carrying one mug and one pastry, and she drank most of the coffee and ate more than half the pastry, then put the rest on the floor for Lucine to have. Lucine crouched and fell to, happy that Mars’s odd mood seemed to have passed so quickly.

There was a long silence as Lucine finished her sparse breakfast, licking her fingers clean of jam and sugar, and then finally Roman coughed uncomfortably and said, “What had you two planned on doing today? I mean, the show isn’t until tomorrow, and I don’t have anything in particular I need to do. If you wanted me to show you around, that is.”

“It might be nice to do a bit of sightseeing,” Mars said, glancing down at Lucine, who was still sitting on the floor. “She’s never been to New York. Have you, Lucine?”

“No, mistress.”

So Roman took them for a long walk around the crowded streets of the city, talking all the while as Mars glided along beside him, listening to him with her cold eyes staring forward and her red lips curled into her trademark scowl. A few times Roman deliberately tried to include Lucine in the conversation, but she resisted, happy to simply follow along at the end of her chain, peering around the city in silence.

In the early afternoon they rode the subway uptown and walked languidly through the Met, Mars pausing to examine the intricately worked swords in the arms and armory wing. Lucine thought it was a wonderful place, and stared eagerly at each object they encountered, trying to burn its memory into her brain. Roman was still talking—he seemed to know a great deal about almost everything, and Lucine couldn’t help wondering about him, wondering where he had come from—but after a while his voice became forced, and his surreptitious glances in Lucine’s direction seemed to be turning desperate. Lucine could see his eyes in the reflection from the glass case enclosing a medieval reliquary, and they glowed green like an animal’s eyes, like her eyes when the light was just right.

At dinnertime the three of them stopped at the café in the American wing for coffee and scones, Roman sitting across the table from Lucine and Mars. Mars was looking at them frankly with her own very human eyes, which in their way were just as frightening as a wolf’s. “I’ll be back in a minute, I’m just off to the ladies’,” she said, and she laid the end of Lucine’s leash in a little silver pile on the tabletop. “Stay here,” she commanded.

“Yes, mistress.” Lucine lowered her head.

The moment Mars had rounded the corner, Roman leaned across the table and spoke, as Lucine had known he would. “Hey, I know your relationship is none of my business, and I don’t want to mess everything up between you two because you seem happy and everything, but why, Lucine? Is that even really your name?”

Lucine couldn’t bring herself to look at him, even though Mars was not there. “It’s my name now.”

He lowered his head to her level, trying to meet her gaze, but she avoided it. He sighed. “You’re like me, Lucine. You could be… I don’t know, free, like our kind are supposed to be. How did you get mixed up in this? Why do you let her treat you like that?”

At this Lucine did raise her head, and she could feel her eyes flashing fire at him, could feel the growl building in her throat. “I love my mistress. And she loves me.”

“Lucine…”

She looked down at the table again. “You don’t understand.”

“You’re right. I guess I don’t.”

A hard, swift clack of heels signaled Mars’s return, and for a second she stood over the table, casting both their figures into her long shadow, before sitting down again and sipping at her coffee, a strange smile on her beautiful face. “Did you have a nice talk while I was gone?”

Roman didn’t answer; he just shrugged and took a bite out of his scone. Lucine dutifully said, “Yes, mistress.” Mars looked at her, an endless tide of emotion and meaning in one single glance, and then she reached out and stroked Lucine’s cheek, first softly, then fiercely, digging her fingernail into the giving flesh at the junction of Lucine’s jaw and neck. Lucine closed her eyes, relishing the sensation.

After that, Roman hardly talked at all; when the museum closed, they rode the subway back to the apartment, none of them speaking. Roman walked to the corner and brought back Chinese food for the three of them, and after that he turned on the computer and left the two women to themselves. Lucine couldn’t help but feel a little bad for him, though there was some other emotion tugging at her too; curiosity, surely, and perhaps even a little longing, a desire to experiment with a different life, one among her own kind, one where she was not forever on the end of a leash, where her monthly change was not witnessed by crowds of fascinated onlookers. But what would life be like without Mars there, always at her side? She could hardly fathom it, did not want to imagine it. Mars was like an extension of her, an appendage, her representative to the wider world. Losing Mars would be like losing a limb.

The women went to bed early, Lucine undressing Mars carefully, lovingly, and then curling up at the end of the mattress. She slept well and woke late, already feeling the changes starting in her body, feeling her skin thrumming with anticipation. When she looked at herself in the mirror in the tiny bathroom, she could see the lengthening of her face, the striking definition of her muscles. She liked the look of herself this way, wild and hungry.

Roman was at his computer again, another half-eaten pastry in his hand. He barely turned when they entered the living room. “Are you going to see the show tonight?” Mars asked him, her voice bearing the slightest hint of mockery.

“I’m not working tonight,” he said without turning around. “But I’ll probably check the show out anyway.” He would be starting to change now too, Lucine thought, and she wondered what he did when his own time came, if he ran the streets of Manhattan, tearing at the throats of the lost, the homeless, the drug addicts crouching in narrow alleyways. The thought of such a massacre both repelled her and appealed to her. How did he keep from being seen, from being caught? It all seemed so precarious, so romantic.

At Mars’s command, Lucine had packed their performing clothes in a bag that she carried across her shoulder. They left the apartment and Roman’s silent back, and walked down the block to the club, where Adam Severin let them in and allowed them to leave their outfits in the back office. Some of the other performers were there also, milling around and talking, many of them clearly old friends. Mars knew a few of them from performances in other parts of the country, and she talked to them as Lucine stood contentedly at the end of her chain. Later a group of them went to lunch, and Lucine tagged along, smiling shyly at one other submissive who wore a tight black leather bodysuit and accompanied his tall, severely red-headed mistress at the end of his own thick leash.

After lunch, there was a rather ramshackle rehearsal back at the Oubliette, with Adam Severin presiding good-naturedly, assigning everyone their spot in the lineup and making sure they knew their places and had the music they wanted cued up at the correct time. The show didn’t have to be flawless, as many of the audience would only be half-watching as they engaged in various forms of play themselves, but it was important to have some sense of continuity and professionalism, just to keep spectators from getting bored or restless. Lucine did her part as she always did, miming her transformation as it was obviously not yet occurring, and then she and Mars cleared the stage for the next act.

Night fell, and from the cramped space behind the stage Lucine could hear and smell the crowds as they entered, the scent of their sweat and blood making her heart gallop like a hummingbird’s. She could feel the physiology of her body twisting back to ancient shapes, a memory of her distant mammalian ancestors, and she closed her eyes and breathed in and out deeply, enjoying the prickly sensation of each hair on her body standing at attention. Both she and Mars had changed into their stage clothes, and Lucine’s coarsely haired flesh was almost all on display, covered only by strips of red leather across her breasts and hips that were specially made to tear away when the transformation began in earnest. Mars stood by, silver chain in one hand, riding crop in the other, wearing a skin-tight dress of shimmering black vinyl whose hem revealed black stocking garters against tattooed white thighs. They were performing first; the rising moon would wait for no one.

As she followed Mars out onto the club’s small stage—really no more than a raised platform—Lucine could hear the pulsing of the music and beneath that the low hum of the crowd as it boiled and shifted and turned its collective attention upon them. Because of the lights shining down from the ceiling, Lucine couldn’t see any individual faces in the audience; it was just one many-eyed mass. And though she could not see the sky, see the fat white moon as it hovered over the city, Lucine knew it was there. Her body was telling her.

Mars led her by her silver chain, and as Lucine walked she could feel her shoulders hunching forward, feel her fingers and toes beginning to lengthen and consolidate. The noise from the crowd was already starting to swell as the change took place; it was unlikely any of those assembled had ever seen a true lupine transformation before, and they were riveted by it, and perhaps a little apprehensive, for Lucine could smell the sudden perfume of adrenaline in the air.

Lucine dropped to all fours, snarling her discomfort as her limbs stretched and bent. Her barely-there costume fell away, though now there was no titillating human flesh to see, for she was now covered with a thick down of silvery fur. Mars was standing very near, talking to the audience in her commanding voice, the chain held loosely between her fingers as if she might drop it at any moment. The tension in the crowd was palpable now; Lucine heard a stifled shriek as she turned her massive head toward them, letting them see her glowing green eyes.

“Lucine is my slave as a human,” Mars said, raising her chin and smiling a wide, red-lipped smile that suggested she held a delicious secret. “But will she be so accommodating as a beast?” On this cue, Mars dropped the silver chain to the floor.

The audience gasped, as they always did, and Lucine, trained well even in this form, followed her own cue by lunging toward the first row of the crowd, baring her slick white teeth and growling. There were screams now, and she thought she heard a slight commotion beneath the music that might have been a few people darting from the room. After a few more moments of this charade, Lucine turned her head toward her mistress, fixing her with a flat, hateful stare.

Mars stared her down, defiantly, the riding crop raised. She spread her legs in a gunslinger stance, planting her feet in their high-heeled boots. “Lucine!” she commanded, and again on cue Lucine lunged at her, snapping her jaws closed a mere inch from Mars’s saucily exposed belly. The audience was in a near frenzy now, thinking something had gone wrong, wondering why someone didn’t stop it. In her wolf form, Lucine basked in the attention, making a great show of fierceness, snarling up at her mistress, flecking lupine saliva all over her beautiful tattooed flesh. At last Mars drew back and swiped the riding crop across Lucine’s snout, and even though Lucine loved the feel of it she pretended it had hurt her; she pulled her head back and howled. The crowd was getting into the act fully now, terrified to watch but terrified to look away, and this was the point that Lucine loved the most, when she knew everyone in the room was with them, fascinated, mesmerized.

And then there was a blur in the darkness, coming from the space at the back of the stage, and suddenly Mars was no longer standing there with her crop, mistress of the wolves in her black vinyl dress. The screams in the audience began again in earnest, but there was no panic; perhaps they all just thought this was another part of the show.

It wasn’t. For there was another huge mass, another wolf, charcoal black with a red, red mouth, and he had knocked Mars onto her back and was straddling her, his jaw open above her quivering throat.

Roman. He had come to the show after all, Lucine thought in her oddly disjointed lupine manner. The smell of him was powerful and fearsome; he had come to kill.

Lucine crouched on her haunches, watching. Utter silence had befallen the crowd, and even the music seemed to have faded into insignificance. Roman’s dripping canines were poised ever so softly on Mars’s neck; he had only to close his jaws and her blood would shower the onlookers with scarlet arterial spray. Mars lay on her back, looking small and vulnerable beneath the beast. She had dropped her riding crop, but her face was composed, her cold eyes open and staring into those of the wolf astride her. She knew he was going to kill her, and she was not afraid.

Lucine waited. She knew she could attack now, defend her mistress, tear the interloper limb from limb. He was no bigger than she was; it would be an even match. But she also knew, somewhere deep in her animal consciousness, that this was a test of some kind. A growl began, very low in her throat.

Roman’s jaws were beginning to close, and as the edges of his sharp teeth broke the flawless skin of Mars’s neck, the first trickles of blood began to flow, and then among the crowd there was panic, for now it was clear that this was no longer part of the act, no longer the safe manifestation of transgression they had all signed up for. The blood was impossibly red against her flesh; yet still she did not flinch. She waited. Lucine waited.

At last, just when Roman’s terrible jaws looked poised to tear the life from Mars’s bleeding throat, Mars opened her mouth, her lips as red as the blood. When she spoke, her voice was ragged and barely audible, yet its commanding tone was undiminished, and Lucine understood it perfectly. “Lucine. Kill.”

Lucine could not say “Yes, mistress,” but in her wolf-like way she thought it as she sprang forward onto Roman’s back and buried her teeth into his jugular.

“Winter House”

12 Jun 201419 May 2016 / Jenny Ashford / Leave a comment

Upon opening her eyes, Lorna would always see the same thing: The floors, the walls, the ceiling, all sparkling with frost in the darkness like the inside of a candy sugar house, still and white and glinting in the light of the silver moon. Icicles dangling like delicate blown glass, reflecting her image in miniature, here, there, a thousand places.

Lorna would slide out of bed, wide awake, and she would hear her feet crunch on the snow. She would breathe out and release a cloud of crystal air.

The window would be frosted over, but the moon would still be glowing through it, icy illumination, and Lorna would walk over and put her hands on the sill, knowing that something outside had awakened her. She wouldn’t open the window to see, but would just stand and wait, not feeling the cold at all in her thin nightgown.

And after a few moments, she would watch as five spots appeared in the frost, holes in the seamless sealed winter around her, and then the spots would become lines, five raggedly parallel lines growing longer and longer down the length of the glass, and Lorna would realize that the lines were made by fingers, by someone dragging a small hand through the thick caked ice on the window. She would try to peer through the lines, reality through prison bars, through zebra stripes, and she would strain with the cornea of one eye practically touching the glass, but she’d see nothing but a dark shape running away into the woods. And wherever that shape had just passed, the world would be white and soft and silent, covered in a blanket of snow.

Lorna had been having the dream since childhood.

***

“I can’t get rid of it, you know,” said the old man, fumbling with the lock on the front door. He was easily past eighty, stooping and nearly bald. The armpits of his yellow t-shirt were sopping. “Had a for sale sign in the window for a while, but don’t see the point anymore.”

“I wasn’t even aware that anyone owned it.” Lorna fanned herself with her notebook, glancing up and down the street, which was deserted.

The old man turned and smiled, reminding Lorna of a half-rotted jack-o-lantern. “Everything’s owned by somebody,” he said. He went back to work on the door and a second later it swung inward. “Voilá. Pardon my French.”

Lorna peered around him into the dimness. She took a step forward, but he didn’t move. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked.

“I’d rather not.” He was looking at her again, and his eyes looked as though they’d been immersed in clear jelly. She wondered if he’d been drinking.

“You don’t believe all those stories, do you?”

He glanced inside, the interior a twilit gray broken up by harsh yellow rectangles from the uncurtained windows. “I just don’t like it in there, is all.” He dropped the keys back into the pocket of his sagging trousers. “Did you bring a coat?”

Lorna stared at him. “It’s almost a hundred degrees.”

“Not in there it ain’t.” He jerked his thumb toward the house, toward its half-seen entry hall. Then he crossed his arms tight across his chest, as though he had felt a chill. His skin was translucent, and Lorna could see the purple veins like tangled branches beneath its surface. “Well, try not to break anything,” he said. “You can poke around as long as you want.” He hobbled down the three steps from the porch to the ground. “When you’re done, just stop by my place and I’ll come back and lock up.”

Lorna watched him as he made his way across the yard to his own house a little way down the block, the grass flattening with his passage. She waited until he had disappeared behind his own door before crossing the threshold of Winter House.

***

Well, it’s aptly named.

That was the first thing Lorna thought as she stepped inside. It was like walking into a meat freezer, a temperature change so drastic that for a full minute she felt faint, and had to put her hand to the wall to steady herself. Her breath came in cottony puffs (like in my dream) and her fingers and toes began to lose sensation.

Shivering, she uncapped her pen and made notes about the cold in her notebook, cursing herself for not bringing a thermometer.

She made a quick survey of the rooms; the house was not large, and most of the rooms were empty. One of the bedrooms upstairs held a dirty child-sized table and chair, but that was all.

When she came back down to the first floor, the light slanting in from the windows had changed, taken on a bluish tinge. It was still light enough to see, but the shadows in the corners had deepened, even though it was only just past noon.

Lorna had written a page and a half in her notebook, recording her sensations as she moved about the house. In a way she was disappointed; she’d come here hoping to feel some sort of…presence? No, not exactly. But something. So far she hadn’t felt anything except the cold. Was this the place that had so fascinated her growing up, the house she’d dreamed of, heard whispered stories of after her parents thought she was asleep? The house she’d stood in front of so many times when she was a girl, rooted to the spot with a terror both sickening and delicious?

She sighed and closed her notebook, tucking the pen back into its pages. Maybe writing about Winter House wasn’t such a great plan after all.

She looked up and noticed that the room was definitely darker now, almost as though night was falling. Scowling, she checked her watch; its hands stood at 12:17. Then she noticed the windows.

They were frosting over, from the edges inward, a white camera shutter closing.

Lorna gasped as she watched the tiny ice crystals forming on the glass, and she noticed that the temperature had dropped considerably in the last few minutes. I should write this down, she thought, but then the idea passed from her head, displaced by the disbelief, the fascination, the unreality of the situation. I’m at home dreaming, she heard herself think or say out loud. Then, on the heels of that, I’m freezing to death.

She could have fallen then; she could no longer feel her legs, and she knew that if she fell it would be into the waiting embrace of the soft snow around her, the glittering white shroud that would wrap around her limbs and fill them with its essence, turning her skin as blue as the light in the room, pulling the living heat from her body. She felt gravity working upon her, drawing her toward the earth.

Lorna was snapped out of her trance by the pain, finding herself sitting awkwardly on the wooden floorboards, the heels of her hands smarting, her notebook open beside her. She shook her head to clear it and immediately looked to the window, but there was no frost, no nothing, just a regular window with early afternoon sunlight pouring in. She got to her feet, brushing dust from her clothes. It was still cold enough to see her breath, but that didn’t seem so cold anymore. She took one last look at the window, almost expecting to see five long ragged finger marks, a ghost of them left there on the glass, but there was nothing.

***

“Who died in that house?” Lorna was sitting on a threadbare couch in the old man’s living room, sipping hot tea from a chipped mug.

“No one that I know of.” He had gone and locked up Winter House while she sat there. When he came back, he’d introduced himself as Davis, not specifying whether it was his first or last name. “I inherited it from my father, and he bought it from a fellow in town. Hasn’t been there more than fifty years, I’d say.”

“But how can it be haunted if no one died in it?”

Davis shrugged. “Beats me. Far as I know, no one’s ever seen a ghost, or even heard one in there. It’s just that weird cold.”

“You don’t go in there, though.” Lorna sipped her tea. It was sweltering in the room, but she couldn’t seem to get warm.

“I’ve been in there lots of times,” he said defensively, scrunching up his almost toothless mouth. “Had to, when it was left to me. But I try to avoid it. I don’t like that cold.” He looked longingly at her tea, apparently wishing he’d made himself some.

“But you’ve never seen…what I saw?”

“The windows, you mean? No. I guess I never stayed in there long enough.”

Lorna finished her tea and got to her feet. She wanted to get home and make a few more notes before the events of the day had lost their luster. And Davis didn’t seem like he had any more useful information. “Well, I’ll be in touch if I need to go in the house again. Thanks a lot for your time.”

“Sure thing. And let me know when the book comes out.” He gave her the pumpkin grin again. She could feel his gaze boring into her back as she left.

***

Lorna was having the dream again, but it was different this time, she knew it. The first part was the same, getting out of bed, feeling the cushion of snow beneath her feet, and seeing the finger-lines drawn in the frost on the window.

But this time, when the dark figure had run away, leaving winter in its path like the White Queen of Narnia on her sledge, Lorna’s dream-self did something it had never done before. She slid open the window, climbed over the sill, catching her nightgown on a nail and tearing it, and then dropped to the ground below.

The figure was far away, in the trees, but still just visible. Lorna followed it through the world gone winter, everything around her silent as death, colorless save for the bluish cast of the ice that covered the earth. She was not cold, and she was not afraid. She didn’t feel as though the figure would hurt her.

Lorna had walked for ages through the snowy wood, pushing aside the black branches, when all of a sudden she thought the figure had disappeared. Confused, she stopped walking, her breath heaving out, crystalline in the black night, but then she looked down and saw a small burrow, just big enough for a person to crawl into. She got down on her hands and knees and wriggled inside.

At first she could see nothing, hear nothing but her own quickened breathing. But as her eyes adjusted, she realized that crouching in the back of the burrow was a little girl.

Lorna sat cross-legged on the ground facing her. “What’s your name?” she asked.

The girl’s face was as white as the world outside, her lips blue and cracked. “Gwen,” she said. She looked as though she were glowing.

“What are you doing here all alone?”

Gwen stared at her with black marble eyes that looked like holes. “I’m lost.”

Poor little thing, thought Lorna’s dream-self. She looks half-frozen. “I can help you get back home.”

The girl didn’t say anything then, just sat and stared, frail and birdlike. She seemed exhausted. She rested her head against the dirt wall of the burrow and closed her eyes with a sigh.

And suddenly it was as though Lorna was transported into the girl’s weary reverie, because all at once she was back in Winter House, standing on the wooden floorboards, and all around her the windows were frosting over, white fingers spreading, concealing. The cold had a cruel weight, pressing down and into her bones, and she clutched at herself desperately in a vain attempt to keep warm. The house was growing darker and darker, the cold becoming harsher, coating the rooms with a layer of icy death. Lorna felt the same sensation she’d experienced earlier in the day, when her waking self had stood in this very spot, that feeling of falling into the loving arms of the freeze, succumbing to it, wrapping herself in it like a second skin.

And then Gwen, the little girl, was there before her, standing at the foot of the stairs, and with small, deliberate steps, moving slowly as though walking was difficult for her, the girl mounted the stairs and began to climb.

Lorna followed her, teeth chattering helplessly. The cold had entered her body and was killing it from the inside out, blood glaciating in her veins.

The girl entered the room upstairs, the one that had held the child-sized table and chair, abandoned and covered with dust, but now the room was fully furnished, with fresh pink wallpaper and a little bed with a lavender quilt, and the table and chair were new. A few crayons were scattered across the floor, and a doll was propped up on the pillows.

Gwen crossed the room, not seeming to notice Lorna watching her, and stretched her arms above her head, arching her back, yawning in a charming, childlike way. She pulled back the covers on the bed, revealing matching lavender sheets, and then she crawled in under the quilt, snug and warm, nestling down with a smile on her tiny china mouth, on her blue lips, a smile that spoke of a long journey finally at its end, of a well-deserved rest to come.

The house went dark as Lorna stood in the doorway, the cold closed in, and she saw no more.

***

Filtered sunlight falling on her closed lids coaxed Lorna from sleep. She felt strange, uncomfortable; there seemed to be something in the bed with her, poking at her arms and face. She opened her eyes, blinked twice, and then sat up sharply.

She wasn’t in her bed at all. She was on the ground in the woods, her nightgown torn and tangled amid the pine needles and dead leaves that crinkled beneath her body.

Lorna looked around her, seeing no one. The trees reached upward on all sides, and various birdsongs drifted down from their heights. She didn’t know where she was.

And then she noticed the burrow. Rather small, like an animal would make, but big enough for a person to crawl into.

Despite the yellow heat of the morning oozing down upon her, Lorna’s skin was suddenly swept with cold gooseflesh, fingers of ice on her body, in her blood. She approached the entrance of the burrow, an unsteady rhythm tripping in her chest. She knew what she would find in there.

She peered into the darkness, into the hole where none of the sun’s light would reach.

The tiny skeleton was there, the skull still wedged against the dirt wall where it had fallen when the little girl had succumbed to the sleep from which she would never awaken. The bones were as white as a new snowfall, luminous in the blackness of the hollow.

Lorna got to her feet, seeing the frozen woods of her dream superimposed upon the summery reality, and for a second everything was cold and still, the air pristine and clear as a pure frost. Even the birds had stopped singing, as if they sensed this change of season, this clash of opposing forces.

And then Lorna shed a single tear, a token of mourning for the lost little girl who had dreamed of home as the winter closed in around her.

The tear grew cold as it slid down her cheek, and as it fell it caught the light, a frozen prism, and reflected the snow-covered world back at her from its crystal heart.