Better off Red – Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

There were stars up there. Pasty and tacky, but there, glued to the ceiling and starting to peel. Patrick Redding couldn’t sleep. Not with what was down there. He knew it was bad to think the things he was thinking, his parents had told him that much.

But was it really?

Was it really that bad? He was supposed to be kind and courteous to women, but—as his father had always told him—only as much as a man can take. Women needed to be kept in line and that was what his father was doing. That was why he had the girl down there. Patrick’s mother and sister had been trained, that’s what his father always told him. Although he knew that his sister wasn’t nearly as “trained” as anyone else in the household thought that she was. But those were things he would keep to himself, at least until he needed the leverage.

His mind kept going back to the girl. The thing in the basement. She didn’t look much older than his sister, and for some reason that thought excited him. He thought of the vampire. He thought of his sister. He thought of both of them together.

Patrick’s heart was pounding. He wasn’t going to will himself to sleep, not thinking about things like this. Maybe nobody would notice if he went down there right now. Maybe the vampire wouldn’t say anything. If she did, nobody would believe her anyway.

He didn’t even know what he wanted to do with her, exactly. Sure, he had ideas—oh, how he had ideas—but nothing that his fourteen-year-old mind could fully form. A vague outline at best. He wanted to feel her flesh and feel how different it felt from his own and from his sister’s.

So he went down, tiptoeing as carefully as possible. He felt like he was a little kid again, peeking at his Christmas presents under the tree. Patrick still did that every year, of course, but only out of habit. He hadn’t enjoyed it in quite a few years. He didn’t enjoy much of anything. He was in high school now, but all he did was watch people and feel nothing but a growing emptiness in his stomach. It was an emptiness that he knew was not shared by his peers, and to some level he hated them for that.

But this… this thing in the basement. It gave him an actual thrill, something he was going to milk for as long as he possibly could.

It was awake. It was staring at him before he actually walked in, probably smelled him as he came down the stairs. “What are you doing?” it asked.

He said nothing. Now that he was here, in the moment, he was nervous. He couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Get out of here.”

“Do you bleed?” was all that he could think to ask.

“What?”

“Do you bleed?”

“Yes,” the thing said, rolling its eyes, subtly struggling against its constraints. “Yes, I bleed.”

“Do you drink it?”

“Why would I do that?”

“I want to watch you bleed,” Patrick said, his voice having no more emotion or conviction than a draft of cool air. Still, she looked at him and didn’t understand until he drew the knife from behind his back.