Since he’d been married. Since his first wife…or was it his second? His wives…where were –?
“Do you love her, Friedrich?” said a woman’s voice. He froze; his blood turned to ice.
“Do you love her, Friedrich?” said the other voice. Friedrich stammered, but could not reply. Mary seemed to hear them. Friedrich dared look up, and there, at the bedside, was the ghostly, flickering images of the two women, their eyes wide and unblinking, their bare skin smeared with blood.
“Do you love her?” said one.
“Do you love her?” said the other.
“Well, do you?”
“Do you love her, Friedrich?”
“Do you love her?”
“Do you love her?”
Their voices echoed, chasing themselves and each other down the corridors of the house. “Yes!” Friedrich said, almost screaming. “I love her, I love her, I love her!”
“Then she’s doomed,” said one of the women.
“And so are you,” said the other, shaking her head.
Something changed; the woman in Friedrich’s arms no longer felt the same. He looked at Mary and saw what had become of her, saw that with his back turned she had grown old, turning into a pallid, withered thing, a monster hag who clung to him. As he tried to pull away she bared her sharp white fangs and sank them into his neck. Hot blood spurted. He tried to scream, but could only produce a wet gurgle. Mary’s pale, corpselike lips swallowed the red flow, drinking him dry. He fell back and she fell with him, arms locked around him. The room spun and his mind reeled, and the women laughed, and he felt himself growing weak. She was taking too much. She was taking it all. I can’t die now, he thought, I’ve just begun to live again.
He tried to fight, but he was tired now, so tired he could barely move, and she was so much stronger than he was. When she pulled away he saw that she was young again, again his soft, sweet, beautiful Mary, but her mouth was full of blood, and blood was splashed across her naked breasts and thighs, and he knew that he was old again, old and withered and weak. “Kill him, Mary,” said the ghostly women. “Kill him for us, so that we can have him again. Have him forever.”
“No,” he said, mumbling, crying, barely able to form words. “No, please, please don’t, I’ll be good, I promise, I won’t hurt anyone, I’ll never hurt anyone again, please, please, please –”
He realized that he was awake, and alone, and crying to himself, mumbling “Please!” over and over. He was in the parlor, and Mary was nowhere to be seen. He saw that he had broken the arms off of the easy chair, and that his fingers were still embedded in the upholstery. He let them drop. He was all right. Well, no, he wasn’t all right, but he was no worse off than normal. It had all been a dream. Just a dream. A dream.
He went to the mirror again, a useless gesture he had never outgrown. He ran his hands over his face; it felt the same as always. Still a death mask.
He paused, listening; where was Mary? Not at home. Still out celebrating her birthday, no doubt. He recoiled at the thought of her return home, then chastised himself. As if Mary was anything to be afraid of. But what was he afraid of, then? “Time,” he mumbled, almost not hearing himself. What time was it? He checked the clock. Mary would be home soon. In fact, if he leaned his head a little and listened closely, he could hear her voice, and her laugh, carried on the wind from somewhere nearby. Yes, that was Mary, Mary and…someone else?
Pulling the heavy curtains aside, Friedrich opened the window and scrambled down the exterior wall, following the sounds of voices to the end of the gravel driveway. There he saw the polished black frame of a big motorcycle, and in the yellow light of its single headlamp Mary was silhouetted alongside an anonymous young man. She’d flung her arms around his neck and was kissing him, at the same time (playfully) pushing his hands away from her hips. Keeping to the shadows, Friedrich watched.
Something about the young man puzzled Friedrich. He was some six or eight years older than Mary, but there was still something of a boy about his features. Friedrich was startled to realize that he recognized him; it was the same boy who used to bring their jewelry to the pawnbroker when Mary was a child, the one she’d found the very night she came to live at the house!
The two whispered ridiculous things to each other for a bit, and then the boy climbed onto his black motorcycle and roared off. Mary watched him go, then followed the gravel path to the house, walking right by Friedrich without seeing him. Friedrich watched the retreating vehicle and considered catching up to and killing the boy right then and there…but no, the sun would be up in just a few minutes, and besides, this added a new wrinkle to his plans. He needed time to consider what it all meant.
Instead, he followed Mary as she slipped back into the house. She went upstairs, pausing to look in at his coffin where she no doubt believed he would already be asleep. She smiled, then went to her own room. When the door closed Friedrich heard the click of an interior lock, which surprised him, as he’d never known Mary to have such a key. He listened at the verge, waiting for the sound of bedsprings creaking and the steady, rhythmic breathing of sleep. Tired as she was after a long night, it wouldn’t take long. When he was satisfied by what he heard, Friedrich slid through the cracks between the door and frame, reforming on the other side, and went to Mary’s bedside.
He was shocked to see that she had taken the curtains off of her windows. Outside, the sky was already showing the grey that precluded blue. Moving fast, he placed a hand on Mary’s forehead and, just as he’d done when she was a child, looked into her memories…
Mary licked her lips once and parted them, taking the boy’s stiff cock into her mouth almost experimentally, teasing, running her tongue over the head and leaving it glistening when she backed away, giggling and fluttering her lashes. He moaned, impatient, and grabbed for her, but she fended him off. “Now, now,” she said. “I’m the birthday girl, shouldn’t I get my way?”
The boy made another impatient sound. She rolled her eyes. “You’re such a man,” she said, but she smiled as she said it, and she took him in again, her soft tongue bathing the length of his —
Friedrich jerked his hand back. Mary turned over in her sleep. He blinked, trying to clear the remains of the vision from his eyes. Cautious, he put his hand to her head again, and saw:
Mary took him all the way in, opening wider, relaxing. She let him hold her still as he pushed in, and suppressed the urge to gag as best she could. She lashed her tongue up and down his cock as it slid inside her mouth, and when her mouth was completely full she just moaned, letting the sound of it vibrate up and down him. She knew he liked that. She pulled his pants further down as she did this, leaving them around his ankles. He took off his jacked and shirt, throwing them away. Her own clothes were folded neatly on the dresser nearby…
Friedrich looked away. He bit his lip and fretted. Finally, after a moment’s more hesitation, he put both hands to her head, and a kaleidoscope of images, merging and overlapping, fell over him, blinding him, burying him in the immediacy of her recollections: