Daguerrotype - Z/C, NC-17 (Trick or Treat Challenge)
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Yay! It's past midnight on Devil's Night, so that makes it officially Halloween!
Here's my entry for this year's Trick or Treat Challenge. A comment on fffc by prisca1960 sparked the resurgence of an idea I had months ago. Here's the result...
Daguerrotype
by Serai
Zeke doesn't look at the photograph very often, but sometimes he does. He sits on the floor in the corner of the living room, by the low shelf that holds family relics, and pulls it out of the photo album where it stays tucked away between wedding portraits. He doesn't know who first left it there, but its outlines have sunk into the smiling blandness of grandparents in white lace and tuxedo black, the ancient paper thick and hardened by time, age seeping onto the adjacent pictures in soft smudges of brown.
The man in the sepia portrait fascinates Zeke. The lines around his eyes are laugh lines, yet his posture is anything but relaxed - erect, serious, tense even, in his greatcoat and tooled leather boots. Zeke handles the picture delicately, its brittleness belied by its heft. Through the branches of the oak outside, the sun slants onto the image, the side light raising imperceptible shadows in the paper's grain. For a moment, the picture seems to spring to life, and Zeke again gets that weird sensation of looking in a mirror, one corroded and faded by more than a century of time.
On the back, words fading brown in a scrolled, cursive hand: My Ethan.
-----------------------
Now and then, Zeke staggers into school late, dark circles sunk around his eyes and a glower on his lips. He manages to avoid Principal Drake by ducking into the east side restroom, and slips into Physiology class while everyone is clustered around Furlong's desk looking at something or other. The guy's always coming up with odd shit to try to impress the class. Most of the time Zeke finds it pathetically amusing, but today he's moving through thick, dark water, fighting his way to air, and he barely makes it to his seat. The teacher looks up at him and opens his mouth to comment, but then his look changes to one of concern. Zeke only shakes his head and shrugs. Just let me sit here. Just let me breathe. Just let me catch my breath.
Zeke knows Furlong's never liked the way he just marks time, but it looks like he's not going to get into it this morning. Zeke sighs and looks out the window, nursing his raw throat and the taste he hates, the light still hurting his eyes.
-----------------------
Once, during a trip to London with his parents, his grandmother took him aside while they went off to dinner. She sat him down by the fire and told him a strange story about a traveler under a blood curse, whose life had been saved by a mysterious gentlewoman. How after her death, he'd fought against the thing that killed her, and how his strength failed, and he went back to the plains and the deserts that made him, keeping himself secret, as far away as he could get from the murder he sensed constantly at the edges of his vision. Still, death followed him wherever he went, and for all his stealth, he couldn't outrun the light of the moon. The curse drove him to despair in the end.
"Some say he threw himself off a cliff," his grandmother whispered, the firelight dancing in her eyes. "And some say he took ship from San Francisco across the sea to Russia, looking for his death at the hands of some dark forest spirit." She looked intently into Zeke's eyes, and he tensed, almost heard the words before she said them. "Ethan Talbot was my grandfather."
-----------------------
He can't remember the last time he saw his parents. It's lost in a haze of chill light, darkness and burning red. He remembers ambulances at their house, and police, and inside his head he'd been screaming, screaming, while outside he stared, frozen and mute at the indistinct forms under the ER blankets, the patter of dark droplets marking the stretchers' path. When a paramedic checking on him had asked if he knew his own name, Zeke had fainted dead away.
Now his mother's foresight is the only thing that makes his life possible. Deeds, keys, accounts, all in a package delivered from her lawyer - house, car, bank accounts, everything he'd need. Even the keys to their cabin in the woods upstate. A private place, her letter reminded him. You can go days without seeing anyone. She'd anticipated everything, planned it all to give him time, and a way to hide.
She'd anticipated everything - everything except Casey.
-----------------------
"Only the men in our family," Grandmother Isabel had said, her eyes glittering in the firelight. "Only the men."
He thinks of that now and shivers. Ethan's eyes across a century are guarded, set deep and marked with the trace of dark circles. The hand holding his bowler hat clutches the brim too tightly. He couldn't sleep, Zeke thinks. Night after night, he woke up never knowing if his mouth would taste of death. Zeke wipes a tear away impatiently and looks up through his window at the sliver of the moon. Another week, at least. Still time to eat, sleep, fuck. Still time to be human.
-----------------------
Sunny afternoon, Casey sitting by the window, the photo album open in his lap, his blue eyes full of trust.
"My great-great-grandfather," Zeke answers, plucking the photo carefully out of Casey's hand, feeling a strange anxiety at the thought of anything happening to it. Mom would kill me, he thinks, but he doesn't believe in ghosts.
He looks into his forebear's haunted eyes and murmurs, "You would have liked him... and he would have liked you." Thoughts of pale skin, chill sweat, dark red, ripping, tearing, and he feels claws dig into his palms, his tight fist the only sign of the war raging in him.
-----------------------
Sometimes he's careless, pushing his luck. He's not sure if it's deliberate, or if he's really trying to end everything. Late at night, thrusting hot and slick into his lover's pale body, licking his skin to feed on the taste of his sweat and his eager lust, the two of them twine grunting, growling together. Zeke bares and snaps his teeth, his hunger poised to leap out of this hot fucking and become something else, something ravenous, horrific and final, that would blind him and deafen him and tear his world apart. As Casey throws his head back and comes with a yell, Zeke speeds up, and lifting his head, sees the light breaking through the curtains. The moon just one night shy of full burns his eyes.
Time to go, he thinks, and a snarl curls inside him. Casey falls back, panting, as Zeke runs his teeth over his flushed skin, not knowing how much longer he can hold out, how much longer salt sweat and desperate sex can thwart his hunger for the sweet flesh beneath.
----------------------
When he was little, his mother used to look at him as if she were searching for something buried in his eyes. He never understood what she was looking for, but he loved her gaze. She would hold him tight, as if afraid to let go, afraid of what she would never say. Stroking his hair, she sang an old lullaby, about a raven and a pearl, and silver light making a path on the water.
"Soon," she'd murmur, watching him grow.
---------------------
The harvest moon pushes up full and huge, orange on the horizon, but the GTO's engine won't start. Frantic, Zeke kicks at the pedals, cursing the car. Time to go, time to go, time to go, repeats over and over in his head, a mindless chant of terror, his knuckles tight on the steering wheel. Finally he gives up, tears bursting out as he punches the wheel. He throws the door open - run, run into the dark, disappear - but freezes when he hears the approach of sneakered feet. It's too late.
The scent of flesh, blood pulsing hot and secret, fills his world, and every cell in Zeke's body shatters as he turns with a roar.
Casey never even has a chance to scream.
Yay! It's past midnight on Devil's Night, so that makes it officially Halloween!
Here's my entry for this year's Trick or Treat Challenge. A comment on fffc by prisca1960 sparked the resurgence of an idea I had months ago. Here's the result...
Daguerrotype
by Serai
Zeke doesn't look at the photograph very often, but sometimes he does. He sits on the floor in the corner of the living room, by the low shelf that holds family relics, and pulls it out of the photo album where it stays tucked away between wedding portraits. He doesn't know who first left it there, but its outlines have sunk into the smiling blandness of grandparents in white lace and tuxedo black, the ancient paper thick and hardened by time, age seeping onto the adjacent pictures in soft smudges of brown.
The man in the sepia portrait fascinates Zeke. The lines around his eyes are laugh lines, yet his posture is anything but relaxed - erect, serious, tense even, in his greatcoat and tooled leather boots. Zeke handles the picture delicately, its brittleness belied by its heft. Through the branches of the oak outside, the sun slants onto the image, the side light raising imperceptible shadows in the paper's grain. For a moment, the picture seems to spring to life, and Zeke again gets that weird sensation of looking in a mirror, one corroded and faded by more than a century of time.
On the back, words fading brown in a scrolled, cursive hand: My Ethan.
-----------------------
Now and then, Zeke staggers into school late, dark circles sunk around his eyes and a glower on his lips. He manages to avoid Principal Drake by ducking into the east side restroom, and slips into Physiology class while everyone is clustered around Furlong's desk looking at something or other. The guy's always coming up with odd shit to try to impress the class. Most of the time Zeke finds it pathetically amusing, but today he's moving through thick, dark water, fighting his way to air, and he barely makes it to his seat. The teacher looks up at him and opens his mouth to comment, but then his look changes to one of concern. Zeke only shakes his head and shrugs. Just let me sit here. Just let me breathe. Just let me catch my breath.
Zeke knows Furlong's never liked the way he just marks time, but it looks like he's not going to get into it this morning. Zeke sighs and looks out the window, nursing his raw throat and the taste he hates, the light still hurting his eyes.
-----------------------
Once, during a trip to London with his parents, his grandmother took him aside while they went off to dinner. She sat him down by the fire and told him a strange story about a traveler under a blood curse, whose life had been saved by a mysterious gentlewoman. How after her death, he'd fought against the thing that killed her, and how his strength failed, and he went back to the plains and the deserts that made him, keeping himself secret, as far away as he could get from the murder he sensed constantly at the edges of his vision. Still, death followed him wherever he went, and for all his stealth, he couldn't outrun the light of the moon. The curse drove him to despair in the end.
"Some say he threw himself off a cliff," his grandmother whispered, the firelight dancing in her eyes. "And some say he took ship from San Francisco across the sea to Russia, looking for his death at the hands of some dark forest spirit." She looked intently into Zeke's eyes, and he tensed, almost heard the words before she said them. "Ethan Talbot was my grandfather."
-----------------------
He can't remember the last time he saw his parents. It's lost in a haze of chill light, darkness and burning red. He remembers ambulances at their house, and police, and inside his head he'd been screaming, screaming, while outside he stared, frozen and mute at the indistinct forms under the ER blankets, the patter of dark droplets marking the stretchers' path. When a paramedic checking on him had asked if he knew his own name, Zeke had fainted dead away.
Now his mother's foresight is the only thing that makes his life possible. Deeds, keys, accounts, all in a package delivered from her lawyer - house, car, bank accounts, everything he'd need. Even the keys to their cabin in the woods upstate. A private place, her letter reminded him. You can go days without seeing anyone. She'd anticipated everything, planned it all to give him time, and a way to hide.
She'd anticipated everything - everything except Casey.
-----------------------
"Only the men in our family," Grandmother Isabel had said, her eyes glittering in the firelight. "Only the men."
He thinks of that now and shivers. Ethan's eyes across a century are guarded, set deep and marked with the trace of dark circles. The hand holding his bowler hat clutches the brim too tightly. He couldn't sleep, Zeke thinks. Night after night, he woke up never knowing if his mouth would taste of death. Zeke wipes a tear away impatiently and looks up through his window at the sliver of the moon. Another week, at least. Still time to eat, sleep, fuck. Still time to be human.
-----------------------
Sunny afternoon, Casey sitting by the window, the photo album open in his lap, his blue eyes full of trust.
"My great-great-grandfather," Zeke answers, plucking the photo carefully out of Casey's hand, feeling a strange anxiety at the thought of anything happening to it. Mom would kill me, he thinks, but he doesn't believe in ghosts.
He looks into his forebear's haunted eyes and murmurs, "You would have liked him... and he would have liked you." Thoughts of pale skin, chill sweat, dark red, ripping, tearing, and he feels claws dig into his palms, his tight fist the only sign of the war raging in him.
-----------------------
Sometimes he's careless, pushing his luck. He's not sure if it's deliberate, or if he's really trying to end everything. Late at night, thrusting hot and slick into his lover's pale body, licking his skin to feed on the taste of his sweat and his eager lust, the two of them twine grunting, growling together. Zeke bares and snaps his teeth, his hunger poised to leap out of this hot fucking and become something else, something ravenous, horrific and final, that would blind him and deafen him and tear his world apart. As Casey throws his head back and comes with a yell, Zeke speeds up, and lifting his head, sees the light breaking through the curtains. The moon just one night shy of full burns his eyes.
Time to go, he thinks, and a snarl curls inside him. Casey falls back, panting, as Zeke runs his teeth over his flushed skin, not knowing how much longer he can hold out, how much longer salt sweat and desperate sex can thwart his hunger for the sweet flesh beneath.
----------------------
When he was little, his mother used to look at him as if she were searching for something buried in his eyes. He never understood what she was looking for, but he loved her gaze. She would hold him tight, as if afraid to let go, afraid of what she would never say. Stroking his hair, she sang an old lullaby, about a raven and a pearl, and silver light making a path on the water.
"Soon," she'd murmur, watching him grow.
---------------------
The harvest moon pushes up full and huge, orange on the horizon, but the GTO's engine won't start. Frantic, Zeke kicks at the pedals, cursing the car. Time to go, time to go, time to go, repeats over and over in his head, a mindless chant of terror, his knuckles tight on the steering wheel. Finally he gives up, tears bursting out as he punches the wheel. He throws the door open - run, run into the dark, disappear - but freezes when he hears the approach of sneakered feet. It's too late.
The scent of flesh, blood pulsing hot and secret, fills his world, and every cell in Zeke's body shatters as he turns with a roar.
Casey never even has a chance to scream.