Posted on by Lydia Ink

I Could Have Been Teaching Fiction Not Living It

It’s important for me to remain invisible. Impossible? Well, you’re right, it is impossible. So I do my best.

As a young wallflower, I was exceptional.  When I grew older, I’ll admit I didn’t want to be so invisible. Until I met him and then I met them. It’s complicated, as they used to say. I’ll try to be brief. Why? Well, there’s a trick to being nearly invisible. Keep moving. I learned that almost too late. I’ll forget it someday, out of exhaustion.

I mentioned I was a wallflower. Yeah, it was painful through my teen years and the surrounding girls in my high school weren’t too kind. Sure, I had core friends, one especially, Jennifer. She’ll picture in later.

So, during my wallflower years I read lots of novels and decided I liked to read. I went to a higher end but smaller college back east and something happened. My skin cleared up, I lost weight, and even my parents were hesitant when I came home for Christmas. After four years at said college I decided I wanted to teach literature on a higher level and by golly I started in for my PhD. What a ride, except for a major interruption.

Now this may sound petty, but a highlight for me was my 10-year high school reunion. Yup, I dressed it up and walked in on demure and smiling. No one knew me, but I made sure that I met all the thick-waisted moms who tormented me in the hallways. I didn’t speak to them, just their balding husbands. I stayed maybe an hour when who should walk in but my old friend Jennifer.

Jennifer had changed from thick glasses, long straight hair, and dowdy dresses to a sleek, slender, gorgeous woman in high heels and tight jeans. What changed the most was the tall, dark stranger who escorted her in. We hugged, cried, and laughed at our own petty drama. Her boyfriend stood and smiled at us like a benevolent older uncle. We left the school gym and met at a local bar. Her boyfriend wasn’t with her?

“Was he a prop?” I asked.

“No. Well, sort of. We… travel together.”

“Where did you meet?”

“College. He’s a professor. You know my attraction for older men.”

“No, I didn’t realize that, but you were always sort of secretive.”

“Are you staying with your parents?” Jennifer asked. The question gave me a chill.

“No,” I lied, “they moved to Florida.”  My parents would no more think of moving to Florida than they would move to Alaska, but I felt a quiver of distrust. Suddenly Jennifer looked like a wax figure; beautiful and unchangeable. We seemed to realize at once a chill; she was my enemy and I hers.

“I’m sorry it had to end this way,” Jennifer’s voice was suddenly a hiss and snake like. “It’s the good and evil thing you understand.” She left the table and walked away. Her friend was waiting outside.

I sat in that bar all night. I panicked when I had to leave, so hustled to the nearest church. Closed. Dark. I saw shadows everywhere. They met me outside Saint Monica’s. What choice did I have but to join them?

“Is she a vampire?” I asked.

“A demon. Her choice. We work to eliminate them.”

“Eliminate?”

“Yes.” The man in black stared at me without blinking. It was a test, I know.

“I’m in,” I said.

Sure, my immediate family knows. It’s not so bad. The old buildings, the ancient writings, all appeal to me. I’ve been around the world and I’m on my third workable language. You wouldn’t believe how evil gets around. If I make it to 55, I’m automatically retired to a basement somewhere in Paris or Rome, they won’t tell me. I don’t blame them. It won’t be bad, the daylight still means freedom in this fight.

Yeah, I’m looking forward to meeting Jennifer again. Life could have been a little different; I could have been teaching fiction, not living it.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Her New Ancestral Home

“I say we go, right.”

“I say we don’t, we should go left.”

“Arthur, left is down, we should go right and up.”

Arthur fought the urge to be glib. It was her fault they were in the mess they were in. She was the explorer, the woman who wanted to know every inch of Ring, her soon-to-be ancestral home. He would have said so too if he didn’t sound like a schoolboy. “Well, this is your soon-to-be ancestral home I suppose you know best.”  It was a juvenile and sarcastic remark, but he didn’t care.

“Shut up, Arthur, this is serious, we are lost!  Something is down here, and we need to find a way out!”

“Will you try to stay calm, Julie, your panic is not helping in this situation.”

“Shut. Up.  Can’t you say anything original?”

“Pardon me dear, but I seem at a loss on how to please you.”

“I don’t want to be pleased; I want some serious insight during a serious time!”

Arthur remained silent and stared at her.  He wondered why he found her attractive; especially now.  She had been crying. Her hair looked like she had showered under raw sewage and her clothes smelled.  In her defense, she had just been through a harrowing experience.  Perhaps when this was all done, he would reconsider their engagement.  She could keep the ring.

“You can keep your damned ring, Arthur.”

Arthur started; had she read his mind?

“I know you had to buy the brand-new shiny thing that cost more than I can hawk it for because your family wasn’t about to relinquish a tiny morsel of the family jewels to bedeck a woman like me.”

“Like you, dear?”

“Yes, like me.  The girl who must work, the girl you met in the shop.  The only shining modicum of thankfulness they have about me is that I worked in a leather goods shop and not a pub.  Well, I’ll tell you what Sir Arthur what’s-your-name, I will apply at the first pub I come across if I get out of this mess.  The. First.  And I will live well, and I will save my money for the books I want to read, and I will buy a little cottage and I will join the CATHOLIC church, you bastard!”

She blubbered again and faced the two tunnels; the decision was one or the other.  Arthur felt an unreasonable disgust.  The situation was sobering, but not necessarily hopeless.  Either tunnel would lead back to Ring; one to the cliff side and the other to the cemetery; the family crypt.  But the crypt was the less inviting, and with the recent panic attack that Julie had, he wanted to avoid the moldering old place.   If he had been with Margaret, she wouldn’t have melted into hysterics.  Her rather long straight nose would have lifted as if she could sniff the correct direction and she would have made her recommendation.  If he had been with Margaret, he would have had proper lighting, good sturdy shoes and a methodical map laid out upon the note pad she always had with her.  She was a romantic woman, but a practical one.

“Yes, yes, you pathetic little man. If Margaret were here, no doubt she would have made everything right, but she’s not here.  I suggest you decide.”

“All right, Julie, but only if you stop that infernal sobbing and tell me right now that you will not blame me if the decision is wrong.  I do not want to spend the next hour or two of my life listening to hack and sob all over the old bricks.  There’s enough water down here and dangers of slipping and sliding, I don’t want you adding to; I can’t stomach that.”

Julie stood gaping at him. 

“Well?”

“All right, I promise,” she said, sniffing hard and wiping her eyes as best she could while squaring her shoulders.  Arthur felt no pang of passion but a softening of his heart.  Julie turned from being a besmirched raving woman to a young vulnerable girl despite the muck and the smell. 

“We go left.  You stay behind me and close.  Here, grab onto my belt.  Don’t let go.  If this is wrong, if there is a dead end, we turn about and try the other tunnels.  No more of your running mad.”

Julie’s eyes watered, but she held onto her emotions and nodded. Arthur knew she wanted to defend herself again, to insist that she saw a woman, a woman in white garb just behind him while they wandered the tunnels he knew.  Julie had screamed, turned in terror and fled.  He had no recourse but to follow, and they had lost their way.  His entire family and staff were no doubt out shouting his name; they had been in the tunnels for at least three hours.  The thought of his mother in any distress caused him to grind his teeth in frustration. 

The tunnel was dripping with water, the old stones were soft with mildew, and the squelching noise beneath their feet would probably haunt Arthur’s dreams if he lived to see another night’s rest. 

“I’m… I’m very sorry I panicked.”

“It happens.”

“But I lead you away from that awful woman.”

Arthur turned around, his ire was rising, “Julie, there was no woman.”

Julie gave a violent hiccup, and her eyes were wide with fear. She nodded at Arthur. He stared at her a moment, hesitated, looked at her once more and then continued in silence. After several minutes, he felt the ground beneath him inclined upward.

He knew that below his home was a deep aqua flow.  The flow was the life-giving force of the place and throughout the history of his family, especially during the broad middle ages, the aqua flow gave the inhabitants of the old keep a source of water during sieges of armies and weather.  Tunnels made by hundreds of hands over hundreds of years intersect below the old keep.  What he wanted to avoid more than anything was a dead end, or a collapsed wall. Back tracking in these labyrinths of darkness would only melt Julie into more hysterics.

Yes, the tunnel was taking a definite slant upward.  He had been correct.  This tunnel was one of the oldest, and they used it in the early middle ages to fetch water from a deep well.  His grandfather had made repairs to the old tunnel when he himself was a young man, when Victoria was early on the throne.  He made a silent prayer of thanks for his family’s bizarre bend toward the macabre. His hand then found something hard and sharp-edged.  Jumping despite he hung on to what he found. With trembling fingertip he traced the lines of a cross, then brushing off the years of dust and mud, he traced the lines of a crucifix.  Success, he had been right; it was the old tunnel, and it would soon open to the night air if memory served right.

“We are close, Julie.”  But he was aware, with his words, that she wasn’t behind him.  Not noticing that the grip on his belt had loosened, so consumed with their forward progress, he turned with a jerk and surprise to no one there.  All he saw was blackness.  No, no, this could not be.  He could not allow her the terror of eternal darkness, afraid and alone, but he struggled to turn back and retrace his steps.  Why?  The answer was obvious; it terrified him.

How could he not notice she was no longer behind him?  How could she have tripped or let loose without a sound?  He pulled at the crucifix upon the wall until it inched upon the brick wall and then pulled away.  Without thought Arthur walked back down, tripped, and fell.  Getting up quickly among a tangle of arms and legs, he pushed himself back.  It was Julie and her body was repulsive to him, as if he had stumbled upon the remains of a stranger in the dark.

Taking a deep breath and keeping a firm grip on the old crucifix, he pulled her by her arms with little ceremony back toward the opening of the tunnel.  She was completely dead weight, her head lulled between her arms and her hair caught on the rough floor, causing her face, pale, open-eyed and ghastly, to look up at him in a blank expression.  Finally, out of desperation, he stooped down and wrapped his arms around her waist, allowing her head to rest upon his left shoulder, her forehead wedged upon his jaw.  It was here he sobbed because he could see that her eyes were glassy and that something had savaged her neck. 

“Arthur!”

His sister Estella’s voice.

“Arthur, where are you?”

He said nothing but kept pulling Julie forward, upward toward the door he knew would lead to the outside, to fresh air, to her cottage, her new job at the pub and all the romance novels she cared to read.

“Arthur!  Oh God, Arthur.  Father!  Father, he’s here.  Help us.”

But it was John Seward who first reached them.  He took the young woman from Arthur’s arms, Estella bent over her too. Silence only answered their entreaties. 

Posted on by Lydia Ink

From Curious to Fodder

I wish my mother were here. Not that she’d do much good, but still I wish she were here.

You know sometimes I wonder if I want her here with me because, though I’m not much good, I feel, just a little, that she deserves this place more than me. I press the palms of my hands together and feel my bones just beneath my skin (more so now than ever) and think she should be here, not me.

Then the terror comes over me, and I just want her to hold me. Hold me, please mother, just once.

Just once.

When I was walking the streets of Chicago, I’d get as close to the lake as I could just to hear the lap of water. It was usually late, so the roar of the boats and the laughter of people did not interrupt me. In summer I might find late night lovers walking hand in hand. I thought them brave to walk and hold hands after dark in Chicago. I’d stay quiet and hide, not wanting them to think I was some thug or mugger.

See, yes, perhaps I’m not so bad. Perhaps somehow that will benefit me.

Also, if I die here, I’ll do it without a tattoo. My hair might be a blue one day and pink the next, but tattoos are too expensive and will look hideous after 50 years. I won’t live that long, I know.

It was the mist on the lake that attracted me. I’ve heard tourist wonder where all that water came from, they did not know Chicago sported a lake. What the hell people, do you think Chicago is in Kansas, (and not on the Missouri side, mind you)? Help me.

Yes, please help me.

Right, the mist on the lake. When I was younger, when my teachers tried, despite my mother, I would look out at this body of water and ache for it. Feel sorry for myself that I wasn’t on it, touching it, floating on it and freezing to numbness. It seemed so lonely, so forsaken, so beautiful, so cold, and I knew cold. We could only have our hats and gloves on while freezing on the playground, we couldn’t take them home and the bus ride home was so cold without them. The school would send home notes stating I needed a hat and some gloves, but the notes went unread and I grew older and more used to the freeze. So Lake Michigan drew me in during that frigid November day.

He was beautiful in the mist. He stood there, tall and lank and serene. How could I resist? At first I thought he wanted me for a night and though I never go to the Lake for that I shrugged and thought I would have him and revel in the thought I could find a secret place for secret self fulfilling desire. I guess I did. He keeps me here, in this bricked place, where I can’t see the lake. I hear it thunder in the wind, mostly I feel it within the walls of my prison. When I feel it, I feel the ache of cold and I know; I know he is here to feed upon the heat of my soul, and I’ll never see the lake in daylight again.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Her Hunt His Folly

The best part of her day is when everyone she works with sets off for home or some other dubious spot that lends a sparkle to their otherwise lack-luster eyes. She enjoys her coworkers; feels no animosity towards them but enjoys the quiet promoted by their absence and the residue of relief, even joy they leave, calling it a day. 

There is no shuffling, no one-sided phone conversations, no opening and shutting of doors, no murmur of business as usual, just a silent desertion that most, her being the exception, would consider an eerie peace.

She goes about the small office, closing window blinds, locking necessary doors and making notes to help start her next working morning. These menial tasks comfort her in a rushed and bustling world. Her evening tasks give credence to the fact that she has survived another day.

She has kept to the job for five consecutive years. 

She is proud of that fact, and she is also proud of the fact that she has maintained her resolve not to hunt any longer, though pondering the drive, which lingers within her mind and tingles along her arms and legs keeps her up at night.

The last successful hunt wasn’t her fault, and that fiasco strengthened her resolve to retire from all the complications and angst a hunt can cause. She was tired, exhausted really, and there he was, ready to rescue her; they all wanted to rescue her. That was the crucible of her hunt; empowering a man to come to her rescue, which invoked her power. Her prowess.

Philadelphia went smoothly, the hunt lasted three years and basically she tired of it and finished it and moved to Atlanta. The heat in Atlanta was excruciating. She felt so mercenary in Atlanta. In each city she had fulfilled a hunt and that complicated things for the next hunt. Her success in Philly gave her too much confidence, she did not research Atlanta at all. The only fact she focused upon was that Atlanta seemed happening sharp, and she was in the mood to fit in. The heat hit her like a ton of bricks and she got messy, greedy. 

Minneapolis was just what the doctor ordered. But Minneapolis proved too fertile a place after Atlanta’s heat. She knew change was impossible. Philosophy of the ancients were for chumps and religion too. Trying to rise above the time bending reality of who we are today because of evolution, is contrary to the basic construction and purpose of the world. Humans are humans; some to hunt, some to be prey.

Her hunt began in the primordial ooze, and the creation of an alphabet and a pulpit are props of defense for the weak. In each city there were those who seemed to sense that she wasn’t right. Men who either couldn’t find their socks in the morning or needed that deep mental and heartfelt connection avoided her. 

Conversations on Plato or meditation exercises she despised. Prey who talked fables and fairytales as if there was a basis other than deception about it sickened her. No, those were not her type. What brought about her hunt were men, prey, who insisted that she needed rescuing.

Sex was spontaneous to these types of men and well calculated to her. As any huntress, she had her role to play; the desperate moves, the weak knees, her weeping and his inevitable vitality expanding in his chest and the moving of heaven and earth to keep her safe.

She lasted in New York (before Philadelphia) for almost two entire years but woke up one morning, felt that driving urge to make him beg for mercy, and slipped the tiny needle in while he finished his last supplication for mercy.

She was grateful that in Atlanta there was no beneficiary money–not coming so quickly from Philadelphia. That would have definitely sent up some red flags to the densest of people. Philadelphia set her up for life–as wild a ride as that was. She even wondered if she couldn’t become capable of actual love, but she needed to feel him drain, fade away, dissipate. Now, five years later, not really needing to work but needing a place to belong, she had avoided the rescuing type. 

She tried hard not to involve herself at all with coworkers. There were too many knights in shining armor or bored husbands to go around. She kept to the company of women in the workplace. Her hunt did not include them. She knew what to avoid; the more expensive restaurants and upscale bars were the happy hunting grounds. No clubs. 

The fact of the matter was, however, she wasn’t getting any younger. She still liked to keep that perfect distance in age, but the rescuing type were not frequenting restaurants and bars as much. Perhaps she was finally seeing them go extinct. Though there was the hard working delivery man who expanded his chest when she signed for deliveries. Smelling his mind amused her.

Attempting to keep to herself, she let him know she was not from the area. She could almost hear his mind contemplate her history. Obviously hurt by some bastard, or perhaps the love of her life perished in some fiery crash flittered through his open mind. They would chit-chat about the weather and he would try to make eye contact with her… perhaps on Monday she could manage a little sorrow.

Posted on by Lydia Ink

Into the Asylum

There are days I wish it were over.  I don’t want to know who I am and I don’t want to face another night.  It’s different when the sun goes down.  I know and they know and the world just goes on, ignorant.

When I was a kid, I would read every fantasy novel I could get my hands on.  I was the skinny kid saving his pennies for the dictionaries on Middle Earth and I was the kid alone on the playground acting out the last epic battle of good versus evil.

Teachers would pull my mother aside and tell her I made other children uncomfortable.  They told her the reason other kids picked on me and ridiculed me was because she allowed me to stay in my fantasy world.  I’ll give my mother this; as overworked as she was, she stood up for me.

Occasionally she would pick me up early from school, sign me out, and we would have ice cream in the full light of day.  I know that she felt it was us against them, but I didn’t know how many battles fronts she was fighting.

She didn’t come home one night.  They found her remains three months later, down by Navy Pier.  She didn’t die there.  The police still call it an open case.  The cops that investigated her murder even came around to check on me in foster care. I know she didn’t die easy; it wasn’t quick.

I was thirteen when she died, and foster care was one of the worst things that could have happened.  When they tapped on my window and I cried for help, my foster parents didn’t believe me.  At one point they institutionalized me for schizophrenic behavior.   That was worse because then the bastards could walk right in–the loons invited them in all the time.  Nobody questions why a homeless schizoid dies alone–they pack them off to cold storage with a shrug and a “too bad.”

Strange, though, the loons never turned.  Never.

I would have won if a weary old priest hadn’t heard my screams one night.  He didn’t believe they could crawl along the ceiling and hide in shadows, but he gave me a golden crucifix that has never left me. That stops them, scoffers be damned.

You don’t know how desperate and crazy you can sound when a white clad orderly is standing in the doorway with a straight jacket for you and one of the cursed ones is smiling at you from the ceiling; they would crawl around like flies.   I think many of the inmates went crazy after they arrived.

I sleep in the church’s basement now.  I do odd jobs, so they let me.  I sleep well there, despite the unbelief of the old priest who saved me.

I miss my mother.

I work hard to avenge her.  That’s what she did, worked hard.  Maybe it will all end with me.  Or end me.