One Night in Manhattan

Horror isn't my usual genre for trying to write something — or, for that matter, my choice for my own entertainment when it comes to books and movies — but I thought I'd give it a try for ChloeTzang's event given the "night" theme. So, I'm an utter novice at this.

Plus, I thought I'd try something a bit ... tonal? Recipe for disaster, I know.

This isn't a pleasant tale (he said, with a nod indicating the name of the category it's posted in). So, if a story with violence and reluctance and not an ounce of tenderness really isn't your thing, please don't read it.

♦

Manhattan today isn't what it was thirty/forty years ago. Of course, not too many places are, but the extent of the change there is pretty significant. If you watch The Deuce on HBO, you see a shadow of what it was like but, in my opinion, it's a pretty pallid shadow. Multiply the sights, the sounds, and the sheer visceral reaction a couple of times, then fire up your sense of smell. That would approximate what I remember.

I don't romanticize it. It wasn't a better place. Times Square made me edgy after theater hours. The streets around the bus terminal made me edgy all the time. Port Authority restrooms? ... if hell had a hell of its own, they would be the toilets. The words "Central Park jogger" evoked awfulness not Nike sportswear, and the term "wilding" entered the common lexicon.

And yet, being accosted by today's aggressive cosplay-clad assholes demanding money somehow annoys me a lot more than being accosted by yesterday's spandex-clad women (and men) asking if I wanted a date or to buy an eightball. It was more colorful then.

But, of course, colorful isn't necessarily better. For many, colorful became pretty darn unpleasant. The idea for this story came from somewhere near that thought. This isn't that New York, of course, not even remotely. But it started in some of those memories.

--C

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I tasted the iron tang of blood in the air and smelled the sour, fecal odor of intestines and other organs. One of them — the one waiting his turn on her, the one whose panic at my approach made things inevitable — was already flopping on the ground, staring in dull disbelief at his abdomen, unable to process what was happening. His intentions had been the most vivid: biding his time because he intended there wouldn't be any turns after his.

The other scrambled from between her legs, raping cock's rigidity melting as would an ice cream in the heat of the evening, mouth open in a scream already turning his throat raw. It drowned the quieter mewling from her throat: cries of a woman's violation, not a rapist's terror.

Mewling that they intended would have escalated to bubbling pleas. Pleas they would have met with a tighter hand around that throat.

The knife in hand, suddenly remembered, thrust forward. I let it pierce me, reveling in the sharp pain it caused — yes, we feel, too — because it wouldn't, didn't, matter. Sensation mattered.

I let him have the illusory triumph, the gasped "Yeah, mutha fucka!" Then the stark incomprehension, the sudden, utter certainty of "I am so fucked" when his eyes rose from my belly to meet mine, and I smiled ... that mattered too. That was heady wine to what I was at this moment.

What did he see when he looked at me? I don't know. I rarely do. The nails were obvious, the heavily muscled legs. The teeth felt sharp on my tongue. But I had no mirror. I just knew that he looked into the face of something that terrified him.

I let him run, hiking sweats with one hand. He went thirty yards, maybe forty, enough to think he wasn't pursued. Sometimes I let them see their entrails, knowing ambulances are rare, death hovering in the wings. Sometimes I geld, careful not to nick the femoral. Which is worse? You tell me. Which frightens you more? Only rarely is it quick, according to a complexity I won't explain. Nightmares aren't quick.

I left him gagging in futile denial, his blood joining hers in staining his thighs. I returned to the first, contemplated his throes for moments that his subjectivity would turn into eons, then ended it, if only because his pleas had turned monotonous and gray.

I felt contentment ... or, perhaps more accurately, fulfillment. I basked in it, letting the slow coils of satisfaction twist through me. The sweat of a night far too hot, the labored breathing of air so humid you could practically see it, ears assaulted by distant horns and sirens and unidentifiable shouts, all of it anchored me in the here and now. I ignored the spots of pigment out there that made little tugs for my attention. They weren't pressing. The purple and poison-green thoughts of these two had found me early, and the night was young.

"Please h-help me." Her voice quavered as her eyes searched. I knew she had trouble seeing me, uncertain who was there. I would be a shadow, something glimpsable only from the corner of an eye because she hadn't called me.

I ignored her, satisfied until I merged back with the night. A flicker a short way to the east caught my attention momentarily. The same colors that brought me here — I was particularly sensitive to them for the moment — but not nearly so bright, nothing like the desires that brought me to this place. Not worthwhile.

Her voice was weaker the second time, shaking. "Is s-someone there?" I stood, ready to go at last, took a final glance at her, wondering if she'd survive the night. Odds not. She'd been hit too hard to stumble out of the park on her own. She was looking almost directly at me. That was surprising.

"Help me. Please! I'm ... I ... I can't see well but please. Those two might—"

"They won't be back," I interrupted. I stepped forward, and her eyes tracked the movement even if they couldn't focus on the form and then dropped to what was lying on the ground by my side. I could see the widening, the disbelief, the stomach's need to retch an acid-tasting puddle onto the grass, a need that never registered because her body had far more pressing concerns.

A flare away to the north — Bronx? — vivid orange and searing yellow, brilliant in its intensity, pulled my attention from her. I felt the lure, the irresistible desire, the ... the resigned disappointment as the scent of white-hot metal over the sound of a roaring cataract overlaid it. I knew which of my sibs it was by that, quicker because it was Her usual demesne, as Central Park was mine. Something would burn up there tonight.

My attention returned back to the woman, to her incomprehension at what the world had dealt her this evening.

"I'm freezing. I'm going into shock."

"How do you know?" I asked, curiosity rising. Nothing around interested me for the moment. It was all too muted. That would change. It was a night that bred violence. I could feel it with the long centuries of experience. But, for the moment, I wondered about her, this woman who somewhat saw me when she shouldn't.

"I'm a nurse. Please, I don't underst—"

"It's not who I am."

Her eyes looked over to the eviscerated form lying not far away, shied away.

"You h-helped before."

"I didn't help you. I came because they called me. They dreamed of nightmare. But they couldn't embrace it when it came, so it became theirs in the end."

So few can own a true nightmare when it arrives. In the six-hundred-plus years of my existence? Four: Ecsedi Báthory Erzsébet, Saltychikha, Karl Denke, a nameless little man at Ettersberg hill. I remember each of them. But no others that were mine. Sibs my age have similar counts. The remaining ones, the ones who panic when they see what answered them, became the fuel for their own pyres. Other passions are easier: rage, greed, lust, fire — a faint whisper of envy from me at that last, a scorching flicker of answering amusement from Her — the frenzy of war. Once even love. They had limits where one could remain human.

"Just help me t-to the s-street."

"It's not who I am," I repeated.

"Who are you?" she sobbed.

I gave her the truth as I always did. "I am whatever you call into being ... for the moment, what they called." In her state, the unbelievable could be believed, but I doubted it would be. So few ever truly wondered what I was. They might demand, "Who are you?" or "What are you?" but it was rhetorical, a mind rejecting the impossible. And only a handful had ever wanted to know more. They were usually too busy struggling against insanity.

"I want an a-ambulance—"

"What you want doesn't matter," I chided.

"Then tell me what ... I mean, h-how..." Her voice faded, weakness claiming her momentarily, leaving her unable to finish her question.

Still, it was unusual that she'd even tried. I answered her as I had the scarce few who had asked that particular question over the years ... more importantly, had asked it as if the answer could fit into their world. "By something that leaves you sweating and clenched when you awake from it. Something you hunger for in an adrenaline-fueled haze of desire ... or anguish ... so intense it doesn't disappear when you awake." I smiled even though her eyes were closed now and she wouldn't see it. "And, if you do that, you often don't like what arrives. They didn't." Her eyes flickered open at that, glanced to the side, shied away again.

I've wondered if daydreams had something like me. I don't even exist in the light. I don't go someplace to sleep or to watch impotently. I simply cease with the dawn and return with the dusk. I thought it unlikely: they're too pallid to be worth making real.

I looked down at her, seeing the concussion taking hold. I felt my form slipping away involuntarily as fulfillment drained, my nature until I find something worth being.

"I don't want to die."

"Then hope that you're lucky and a Samaritan comes by."

I was going. Then, because she was fractionally more interesting than any of the paltry colors around me, "Or learn to more than want, so that now can't possibly be real," I said out of a mouth that faded even as I completed the words.

The electric blue and peach of the addict, the craving that admits of no other purpose. So common in this city. I found him north by Naturalists' Gate, tucked under a bush. Snot, vomit, urine-stained trousers — they're not disagreeable. Much like a dog, I see them only as experiences.

He thought me a figment of his circumstance. The peacock clothing, the knowing look, the soft, "I got you, man." I was his desire incarnate. The belief there was a pinch in the arm, then the warmth, the euphoria, the charged flutters of nerves across the entire body, the Peter Max-colors. A body that could no longer take the abuse. No dreams of bad trips, of nightmare, for him. Dreams of a high. Then an ending welcomed eagerly: dreams of no longer dreaming.

They leave me quiet, the junkies, particularly the ones thirsting for an end. I'm different from their normal fare: they never crave awfulness, so I never give it to them, and I'm left with their bliss. I lay on the embankment next to his body, letting the psychedelic sensations drain, content to bask in my contentment, in the second-hand warmth as another piece of the Bronx burned and, now that I let myself relax and just feel, fainter echoes from sibs farther away. The colors of another addict far to the east — he or she, too, had caught the attention of one of Us early in the night. The incarnadine glow of lust-made-corporeal to the west, across the river: the sib we knew by His coppery taste and sound of clinking glass likely entering into some bedroom or back seat of a car.

Familiar colors: addiction and lust. Our staples. Rage usually did not burn long enough. Greed usually lived by day. True mania was rare. Addiction called us the most often because of its intensity. Lust, brooding hunger nursed and fanned over long nights, was by far the most common to encounter, if rarely so intense.

It echoed through this city in every direction, most densely at what I knew would be thirty-five blocks from where I lay: furtive men beseeched by dead-eyed women, ducking into hourly hotels or the shops that sold short-term gratification. Hundreds of sparks, thousands, from the palest pink of casual attraction to the occasional deep crimson of true carnality. Everywhere. I have answered it an uncountable number of times: male/female, straight/otherwise, lover/victim/predator — whatever was called for. Uncountable times. Now, it had to be extraordinary to avoid being wearisome.

One blooming close by, just to my south. I wondered if he — it was almost always a "he" — had found her lying there, too weak to cover herself or hide, prey served up on a platter. Or, perhaps, some other "she" had entered the hunting grounds, oblivious to what the night noises meant and now about to learn from him.

Another burst of the blue and peach to my left, unconvincing at first but growing. Outside the park, some Upper West Side abode. I watched and then fell back as it morphed into a rainbow of gratification, twinned with a spark of crimson. Another junkie trading sex for a fix, I decided, disappointed at being denied my pleasure.

My form faded. I could wait, even if I did hunger. The pressure cooker of the heat would work toward the inevitable end, and the night had already been delicious. The bubbling rage around me would crystallize and explode into neon soon: I watched its amber glow pulsing brighter with each passing moment.

The crimson of the hunter near me grew suddenly fiercer, but there was no answering emotion, neither the black of fear nor the red of answering lust. He'd found her, I guess, too weak to respond, a rag doll for his lust. Unless she was already gone and his perversions ran to that sort of thing. I'd seen that a few times over the centuries but rarely. The dullness of the moment and curiosity moved me.

Her eyes turned toward me as I was there. There was nothing for her to see; I had no form. Yet the eyes strove in my direction, barely able to focus. Crimson, brighter by the moment. Coming from her. Astonishing, given what she had just experienced.

Voices nearing from the left. A gang of five, all noise, trash cans toppling, every third word some variation of "fuck".

"No." Her voice was barely audible but threaded with determination. "Not them." It was not a plea. It was a demand, burnt sienna lace over crimson. A woman who had listened ... and who held something in her she now stoked, deliberately and wantonly, radiance blossoming faster now that she knew I was present.

The boys turned down another path. Chance? Probably not. Perhaps it was the abattoir smells ahead. Or possibly an unease at the bubbling, unintelligible hysteria you could still hear half a football field away now if you strained. They moved on, covering their disquiet with louder shouts of macho promise and more frequent use of Anglo-Saxon, taking their jangling, discordant shades with them, leaving what remained tinged in the pulse of oxygenated blood. Fortunate for them: the woman was staring intently at me now and I wouldn't have tolerated interruption.

I glanced down at myself. Skin darkened by the sun. Tall, scarred, with muscles standing out in stark definition against a body that carried no excess. I wondered if she dreamed of a desert sheik: an Omar Sharif with hooded eyes staring at what lay on the cushions of his tent.

Or perhaps of the seraglio — of a sultan, victorious from the wars, surveying the trove of bare-breasted beauty sprawled about the serail. "Her," he'd say to his agha, indicating his evening's pleasure.

I looked lower to a heavy penis, meaty and thick, cut to expose a head turning angrily purple as it swelled. Testicles like plums hanging weighty and dark below.

Fantasies of size are common.

I saw the sudden second thoughts as her gaze found it, remembering now my cautionary words about what might answer. What stared her in the face was a weapon, and she knew it. But protests meant nothing anymore. She had given me form and I was unconstrained. But this wasn't a dream of injury, though maybe of some discomfort along the way. Dreams of abandon, dreams of capture and ravishment don't end in misery, not for most imaginations. Already she was more present, the concussion fading away into the time-that-never-was.

I stalked forward, smiling at her fruitless, crab-like scuttle to back away. I dismissed the clawing, fending swipe of fingernails that drew a thin line of red down my length with a hiss of pain/pleasure. A snatch downward to gather one ankle, the other caught as it flailed to kick. A moment to savor the heady mixture of fright commingled with something warmer and barely acknowledged as she contemplated the now-inevitable.

Between her legs now, past her ability to kick me, I let go with one hand and seize her hair. A moment of hammering fists meant nothing as I draw her mouth to mine. She bites hard, drawing blood. It hurts badly — I said we feel pain — but she cannot do too much damage: my body heals as fast as it is hurt, and the sensation is just one more in my hours of being alive. I pull back and savor the expression as she sees my untorn mouth, a dark smear of blood the only evidence of what had just happened.

"If you bite again, you'll regret it," I say. "I'll take that mouth in other ways you won't like." A gasp. An involuntary glance down toward my hips so near to hers, to the proof that her desires were heterosexual, to a sudden mental image she shied from.

I feast on those lips, not caring that she holds herself aloof, doesn't respond. It's not about her pleasure. I savor the soft, full feeling of breast, drawing a protest and jerk toward freedom.

Then I am in her. A scream of shock at the sheer effrontery of the intrusion. I ignore it. My attention is on what I feel, on the heat as her raw tissues knit themselves back together unnaturally.

The familiar progression: outrage shifting to recognition. She sought this, after all. Torso twisting, first in escape and then in response to something approaching pleasure no mortal lover is likely ever to elicit. It has nothing to do with the invading bar of flesh between her legs. Her rapists had had those, too. It has to do with what I was — a fantasy of pillage: splayed, spent satisfaction. But her reactions mean nothing to me either.

I feel the warm, wet, clinging embrace of cunt around cock ... and care about nothing else. It's who I am at this moment.

The knowledge that she chose this, that this came from ... what? Countless nights tolerating indifferent satisfaction under a lover? Hundreds of hours spent in steamy self-embrace with erotic romance in one hand and artificial phallus in the other? An appetite simply too strong for ordinary pleasures? I have no way of knowing nor do I care. Whatever birthed this inside her created this moment, a moment that might eclipse the memory of the earlier invasion. She is mine and I take her: relentlessly, inexorably.

Her moans of orgasm also mean nothing to me. All that matters is the drive to completion, the muscle-wrenching convulsion of my body as I spill deep into her. She feels the wetness flood her. She probably thinks it is over.

But do dreams of too much end at the first taste?

Of course not. Human males and I have only superficial similarities, and the night was very young.

I lapse to the side, allowing the flood of neurochemicals to finish their task. I look over to see her staring at me. It's a peculiar blend of expression I've seen time after time: fear, disbelief, desire ... and shock at the latter.

I reach and draw her to me. She hears the implacable tone when I tell her what I want. She surrenders, nursing on my length. I allow her to control the pace, to back off when muscles threaten to revolt, but I take my pleasure.