Sex and Murder Magazine

By Garth Von Buchholz

She lured him, not because he was beautiful but because of her dreadful thirst.

Every day, as September floated through the hallways of Fortuna College to attend her class, or to pose as an artist's model for an insignificant fee, she felt the dryness intensify. She was also aware of the many eyes upon her; eyes that gazed upon her like a family watching a viper cross their dinner table, winding its way through their food and drinks and silverware.

This boy's demeanour was different. When he looked into her concave eyes, she saw his pupils widen for an instant, his lips open almost imperceptibly, and his chest stop expanding until it shuddered with a small, intimate gasp. September knew he would be her next one.

She was only 19 years old, yet already she knew what she was becoming. Her chestnut hair, strands of which were turning niveal every month, was tied with a loose, black, velvet ribbon, and cascaded past the sharp angles of her shoulders. Her eyes were as wide as a Pre-Raphaelite model, and her nose had a sloped, not-quite-aquiline bridge that hinted at a sexual predation in contrast to the submissive delicacy of her five foot two inch frame.

Her carriage and posture were perfect; unnaturally perfect, constructed from years of training at the barre. Yet her mouth seemed to belie that physical discipline, with lips pallid pink and almost child-like in their softness, the lower member slightly pursed, its flesh almost translucent, as if a hard kiss might burst it like an overripe grape.

Her manner of dress was always dark, loose and fluid, with many folds and layers that combined into a demure, rose-like effect, yet somehow there were always unexpected gaps that left exposed a sinewy white neck, a breast that seemed to press outward, or a sculpted flank of a calf and thigh that came together at the knee like a pas de deux.

On her ears, nose, lower lip, and on other unseen places, was silver jewelry, some adorned with miniature gems. When she would raise her arm in class, her sleeve would fall away from her wrist to the place above her elbow, and her classmates could see that it was painted in a tattoo ink that wound around her limb, depicting scenes of sex and carnage with arcane symbols and mythic beasts.

The other students recorded these details with sideways glances, rolling eyes, and smirking lips. Sometimes, when a group of young men spoke about her, they would flash their teeth in a lustful grin or pump their right fist against their left palm, to signify some kind of violent, sexual athletics. Yet they always spoke in a conspiratorial hush instead of with the typically loud male flourishes.

The young women would turn away quickly when September passed; but, when they would look at one another for confirmation of their fear, their faces would tighten defensively into a skullish smirk of superiority. They all hated her.

But he didn't.

He was attracted to her, she realized, and September found him attractive too, if a little too conventional. She could see the vein in his neck pulsate with animal force, and it made her thirst rise up though her throat until it provoked dizziness and sickness. There was no other choice for her, she wanted him, but if she waited any longer he would only move on to another woman who would never be able to give him the kind of sex she could give him.

On Friday afternoon when she saw him again in the hall, after her cello class, she pirouetted around and approached him gracefully, her chin thrust upward to catch his eye.

"I want to know why you always look at me," she said with a slightly upward inflection that was both a demand and a question.

He was startled, but it was accompanied by a smile, and it seemed he stepped backwards slightly, then regained his balance and leaned down to her ear to speak in a stage whisper: "You're different than everyone. It's hard for me not to look at you."

Her eyes were an incandescent green, even under the glare of the college hallway lighting. She lifted her right hand, and her sleeve fell away as she touched his left arm.

"I am different. Do you want to be, too?"

Their first time was Friday night, the same day they met, and they spent the younger part of the evening talking about their music classes (he was a year ahead of her) and listening to his compositions on piano. He poured wine for them both, and offered her some marijuana, but she strongly declined, hinting that she would not stay any longer if he indulged in it himself. Then he began kissing her at every opportunity, when she sat beside him at the piano, in the kitchen, while sitting on the window seat, even as she passed him in the hall on her way to the washroom. Each time, she returned the kiss deeply, pushing his tongue back with hers in an incredible demonstration of oral force, and he fought back with his, winding it past her thrust into a corner of her mouth or between her lips and her teeth.

Her teeth.

The young man could feel their edges abrading his tongue each time, yet it seemed as if this violence was increasing his sexual desire in rapid stages. At one point, while on the couch together, the rapid activity of their lips and mouths and tongues caused him to accidentally bite his own tongue and he withdrew it from her for a moment. But this action only caused her to plunge into him more desperately, as if trying to use her tongue to clean the blood from his lacerated mouth.

That was when he asked for more; and so did she.

*****

September stood abruptly, and stepped away from him. She backed away, as if in mortal danger. Blood clung in a meniscus around her lips, slid down her chin like wet paint, washed over her neck and breasts, and flooded into her bra and panties. What she could not drink, she could not absorb, and this ecological spill of human proportions was vast across her slender frame, coating it in brilliant but rapidly darkening rouge.

He was dead.

So many times before she had wilfully retracted her bite, betraying her thirst to save her partner from certain death, but this time he had pressed her into murder, grasping her in a deadly grip that said, "Keep drinking; I have more to give you, pour me out like water." She could not help but oblige his need, for hers had an equal desperation; when she drank, she was not just drinking for one; she had the "thirst of a thousand," in the words of an ancient story she had read, and the longing sometimes made her half-mad. His willingness had made it harder to cease, to cease NOW, and in the end she had drunk him into dryness, a cup of nothing.

September dialled a number on her cell phone. There was time for a solution: "Henry? It's September."

Henry was a 60-year-old man that September had confided in about her peculiar thirst, and Henry, a partaker himself, offered her empathy.

"September," he said, surprised to hear her voice as they rarely spoke on the telephone, "what's wrong?"

"Oh fuck! Oh fuck!" she cried intermittently, between sobs and strings of words. "I killed him! Henry?"

A deep exhalation from Henry, somewhere across the lines and in another city. "Calm down. Tell me all about it. Withhold no details."

She had never met him in person, but had a long-standing virtual friendship with him on the Internet. A year ago she had confessed to Henry about her blood fetish, and he said he understood perfectly because he, too, had the same desires. They shared intimate stories of their conquests, and Henry often advised her on how to take precautions not to "over-indulge," for the sake of prudence. Now, she had overindulged to the extreme and Henry was the only one she could rely upon for advice.

As September began to pour out the details of her predicament, her friend sat in silence, listening. She imagined him sitting in a darkened room lit only by candlelight, even though she had no reason to visualize his surroundings that way. Henry had become her mentor, not a role he assumed, but one she presumed of him, and now their earlier, more philosophical conversations about her behaviour transmogrified into a practical discourse about the mass of flesh that was once a young man, posed on her bed as blanched and semi-naked as a male fashion model.

"Yes, you killed him," Henry finally said in a matter-of-fact tone. "What does it matter to you now, September? You're the one who's still alive. You need to be protected."

"How? Can I stay with you? I can't stay here."

"No."

Silence from both.

"Does anyone know he was going to see you tonight?" Henry asked.

A pause.

"No."

"Then you have no consequences. I will advise you how to remove what is left of him."

*****

Three weeks had passed since the young man's blood was drained, twenty-one nights of waking in fear, certain that someone was watching her, or breaking into her apartment suite looking for evidence. She imagined the confinement of prison, the terrible degradation of being swept into a concrete dungeon for years and years until she emerged a withered woman with much whiter hair. Even her cat began to spook her whenever he would suddenly leaped upon the kitchen counter as she was carving meat, lost in a reverie about the accidental death of her lover.

Lover?

He was barely even that much to her, just a vessel of blood with an appealing face. She kept returning to the couch where he had last lain, inspecting it for minute particles of dried blood or other evidence. If she found something brown and flaky, she would crack apart into a trembling earthquake of fear; as though, at any moment, they would crash through her door, seize her by the arms, and like the mad protagonist in the Poe story she would cry, "Villains! Dissemble no more! I admit the deed."

She smiled as she imagined herself portrayed in a Gustav Doré illustration. The obsession about finding blood on her couch began to trouble her more than she expected, so at last she found a friend who helped her dispose of the couch at the garbage dump. She had him set fire to it "because it was infested." but September knew that the only infestation was scratching and crawling behind her eyes. The fact that she had tasted no blood for three weeks only heightened her feelings of morbidity and desolation.

Henry had very cleverly advised her on how to remove and dispose of the body without his actually having to become an accessory after the fact, or even having to admit knowledge of it. There was no body in her apartment anymore, but somehow there was a lingering feeling that she had forgotten something, or that someone knew something. In a recurring dream, she found herself being chased in a dark, desolate urban landscape by vengeful figures ? friends and family of the young man she had murdered accidentally.

She would leap into the filthy river running through the center of the city, swimming desperately toward the shore on the other side, when suddenly she would feel hands and claws and even tentacles begin to grasp her limbs below the water's surface, pulling her down, down….

There was only one solution to her creeping madness…another taste. Just a taste this time, nothing excessive or dangerous, a mere mouthful of the only Bordeaux that would both intoxicate and heal her anxious mind. It had to be a quick find; there was no time for tedious flirtation and introductions; she needed a lamb that would follow her without hesitation. The obvious victim was a middle-aged man, one whose morals would burn like rice paper when she gazed at him with translucent sexuality in her eyes. Henry would know someone. A married man, preferably.

September had extensive experience with married men, beginning when she was only 16. A friend of her father would watch her recklessly while visiting her family for a barbecue or a Christmas party. She had already been experimenting on boys, even younger boys, but they were dangerous to her because boys liked to tell other boys about their sexual experiences, no matter that those experiences entailed having a young woman imbibe their blood.

She had a series of checks and balances to ensure her secret passion was protected from common knowledge in her community. She would use threats and blackmail to keep adolescent mouths silent with fear. In exchange for sex she demanded two things: a taste of their blood, and a sexual secret they had never shared with anyone, something she asked them to share in writing, as if it were a teenaged game.

This married friend of her father would be different. She realized he would never disclose her secret, because he had everything to lose - his marriage, his children, his professional reputation, possibly even his freedom if he were charged with having sex with a minor. So for him there would only be one demand, the savouring of his blood, as much as she wanted up until the point where he would almost lose consciousness.

Their affair commenced the day he walked past her room on the way to the washroom and saw her lying on her stomach upon her bed, nonchalantly reading a book, clad only in black satin panties. Her breasts were pressed against the bed but could be partially seen from the sides. Her hair fell across her slender back as if she had arranged it carefully, which was not far from the truth.

She had heard him coming and had prepared herself. As he went by, she heard his pace slow for a half a moment. Startled, he said "I'm sorry." with an intake of breath, then quickened his pace. September looked up from her book and called him back to the entrance of her room.

"Do you like Nabokov?" she asked him innocently, rotating so that her left breast and nipple appeared in full view.

From that point, it only took a minute to arrange a liaison with him later that evening. She owned him.

Now she was once again falling back on her most reliable methodology. But, before she could inquire of Henry about any salacious married acquaintances he might know (and surely HE would know many), an opportunity presented itself within the slender reach of her hands.

A new music professor, filling in for her usual Prof. who was away on maternity leave, had arrived at Fortuna College. She didn't even have to look for a ring on his left hand; he was about 45 and had all the symptoms of marriage: a neutered style of dress that looked as if it hadn't been updated in years; lips that grinned nervously and eyebrows that twitched when he was speaking to the female students in the class; and, most of all, (this was her deeper self, her spirit predator inside) she sensed a churning desire within him that was smothered in layers of pretence and convention, dark oil upon raging waters, a pillow over a smothered scream, a cylinder heated to crimson from the piston-driving combustion inside.

At the end of the class, she wasted not a breath. She could see the vein pulsing on his neck. Even as the other students were still leaving the studio, she laid aside her cello and recklessly approached him in full view of her classmates.

He started to ramble some niceties to her, as expected, "Hi…your name again is…I should have remembered…I'm sorry…did you like the class…I…."

She placed a note in his hands. He stopped to read it, glancing up only once at her, then his eyes stopped midway before they reached her eyes. He actually stopped breathing for a moment, unable to speak, so she completed the contract on his behalf.

"My address is here. I'll see you tonight, okay?"

When 6:00 pm arrived and passed, she almost doubted her own powers and began to wonder if she should have had him there, in the classroom, after everyone had gone. It would have been quick and stainless; she wouldn't dare waste a drop if she had to restrain her thirst and conserve her supply. Then the intercom from the lobby buzzed, and in one balletic movement her hand swept across the button to open the security door downstairs for him. September felt her mouth turn dry with anticipation.

He entered her suite like a man stepping into a field with concealed trip-wires, goggle-eyed yet silent. Yet, she simply went into her kitchen, poured him a glass of La Fée Verte, absinthe-one of her favourites-and made him drink it back like a glass of milk. At 140 proof, the absinthe was a potent force to be drinking without the addition of ice and sugar cubes.

He was speaking but she could not even absorb or understand his words…apologies, qualifications, rationalizations, exclamations of desire, then self-deprecation, his age, her age, the effects of the absinthe on his mind, a cataclysm in his life and marriage, then a reversion to the things of his youth, memories of a sexual encounter long past, the importance of music, and…ahhh, what was all that gibberish to her, she had heard it all before, he was so predictable, yet still a sacred vessel of the most vital liqueur, so she seized him between the legs and thrust her long tongue between his lips to shut him up. She knew the sex would have to come first so that he could be persuaded to bare his neck to her.

In a pirouette of loosened then discarded garments they turned and turned until they reached her bed. He slid himself inside of her and crashed down upon her in tides of joy and release, while all the time her eyes kept watch on the pounding vein in his neck; until, penultimate to the climax that was his alone, she let out a cat-like cry of orgasm, and hissed:
"Let me drink you! I want to drink all of you, baby!"

He jolted back, but continued to heave down upon her, nodding his assent. and instantly her teeth razored into his fleshy neck, finding the pulse, feeling him pull back a bit in primal loathing, until he finally gave himself to her in defeat, whereupon she nipped through his skin as one would pierce the flesh of a grape. At last she felt the vast core of her soul filling with the richest, sweetest, yet bitterest iron cocktail the world has ever, never known. His vein pumped, not oozed, into her throat, and for a moment when she was choking she almost wished she could die this way, drowning in the Bordeaux river of life.

Suddenly he was forcing her away…he had not yet climaxed, yet was clearly becoming alarmed. His pallor was white and his bulging eyeballs seemed to pulse with each heartbeat. He was rapidly losing his erection, and the blood began to spurt down his neck in pulses the instant she became detached from him.

She lunged forward to try to catch the flowing crimson…a waste! But he would have none of that, and kept blocking her, albeit weakly. She reasoned to herself that he had consented, he was a consenting adult, and she was not trying to drain him, just to save the essence that was being wasted as it ran down his back and chest. She knew how to apply pressure with her lips and tongue to stop the flow, but the more he pulled back the more she fought him, now viciously, with a strength in her small frame that shocked him. As soon as her mouth was reapplied to his neck, she suckled on it like a child, stroking his hair as if to reassure him, while he grew weaker, and the pulsations slowed from an ejaculate stream of lava to an intermittent ooze of molten corpuscles. September caressed him as she drank, as he grew quiet and still. Her thirst abated, and a realization came upon her.

She did not need to call Henry, for this time she knew what to do.

*****

This time there was no tremulous guilt and apprehension afterwards, only a gnawing restlessness and irritability - withdrawal symptoms, as it were, without the annoying remorse of the previous incident.

She overheard some students talking about him days later. He was not married, after all, she learned. He had been divorced from his former wife for almost a year but had continued to wear his wedding ring, mourning the failure of his union. The faculty at the college gossiped away; some said they thought he was a flake, they knew he would quit mid-term; others said they heard he was severely depressed about his divorce, possibly suicidal. There were rumors that he had left a previous post this way; the man had no children or relatives who reported him missing, and police were advised in case a body turned up in the river, but unknown to the school's administration they closed the file almost as soon as the instructor's disappearance was reported. No one ever saw him again, and because he was originally from another city, everyone at the college soon stopped speculating about his whereabouts.

She was safe. Better yet, there was no residual guilt. If anything, her thirst increased tenfold. This time there was no intermission, no fallow period in which to ponder what she had done-no moral consequences. While playing her cello at a recital for students of the college, she found herself daydreaming about the instructor's crazed struggle for life, and how fiercely she had clung to her prey as his blood had jetted out upon her bed. She recalled an inspiring Edvard Munch painting from 1893 called The Vampire. Those who were sitting in the front row seats might have even seen the corners of her lips turn up at their edges in a satisfied smile.

September's finest achievement that same month was literally a double-header. Two boys from a bar followed her home with the promise of sharing her with one another, but when the one boy passed out on her (new) couch, she drank the conscious one dry, then left him dangling from the corner of her bed so she could have a second and final drink of the night from the somnolent bar boy who not so much as flinched as she emptied him out like a broken bottle of ale.

She began to be more careless in her dispassionate leeching of men's necks; in fact, her next conquest had to be fucked on the couch because the last two bodies were still hardening in the bedroom, not yet spirited away to some unknown resting place. Now, all of a sudden, there were three.

She never called Henry about them anymore. Nor did she share her secrets with Henry as she used to do. There was no pleasure anymore in disclosing the undisclosable. It was done; the blood was gone, as were the previous owners of said blood, so there was no use philosophizing about it. Theirs was a merciful end; fabulous sex followed by a long, swift slope into eternal sleep, where they would arrive in the afterlife just as desiccated as mummies.

Her last one was almost a gift from the gods after she had spent almost a month and a half having to hunt for her nourishment. He was sitting in the public library reading a collection of books he had gathered. She noticed that he looked familiar, like many other boys she had known before.

She wanted to see his neck, but it was rudely covered with a turtleneck sweater. As she sidled past him, he did not glance at her, but continued to read as though he were preparing for a mid-term exam that was about to begin. She stopped, stared at his books, and snickered.

Still no response.

Finally, he glanced up at her, then back to his book, then back to her again, admiringly. He was bookish, an academic, a study hall rat who never saw the sunshine. His thick glasses were partially tinted, but she could see that his eyes were red from lack of sleep.

She taunted him, "Nothing available on the Internet today?"

He replied haughtily, "These aren't available on the Internet. They're out of print. Rare."

"Oh, rare," she laughed.

He ignored her. Then she saw what was on one of the pages.

"What are you reading?"

"Oh…this is a Bulgarian myth…the story of Ubour. I'm Bulgarian, too. That's why…never mind. They say that when he moves, sparks fly from his body."

"Why?"

"Maybe," the boy attempted a smile, "he saw a girl he liked. You know…sparks? Ha, ha…"

She grimaced inwardly, wishing she could pry the fabric of the sweater away from his neck to see what lay underneath.

"Are you going to be studying all night? Or do you want to come over to my place."

He smiled again, revealing teeth that seemed coated with nicotine and coffee. She was repulsed, yet held true to her offer.

*****

September wanted to get him drunk and unconscious so there would be no sex involved. She was already thinking about the procedures for wrapping him, transporting him, and annihilating his body. She would make certain there was no spillage, but this would be a meal of sustenance, not a feast of the soul. He was not right, and she doubted he had as much fluid in him as any of her other boys or men; but, what little he had in his papery flesh would hold her over until the next day.

What were once desire, climax and release for her were now becoming a carnal butchery that yielded little satisfaction. Yet, the desire and the compulsion had increased in direct proportion to the decrease of pleasure and catharsis.

She poured him drink after drink, and they playfully rolled on the couch together while her music played on the boom box. It was her own instrument; in fact, for she had recorded herself playing the first cello concerto by Shostakovich, a piece she always loved because it begins with an almost mocking, sarcastic flavor, then becomes even darker as it reaches the finale.

The dryness of her apartment and his stupid woollen sweater began to create static electricity that zapped her several times, even once on the lips as they kissed.

"You see," he said, "we've got sparks."

She was not amused. "Take that stupid sweater off."

He obliged her, revealing a concave chest even more repulsive than his teeth or eyes. She surmised that he had had surgery for some condition, perhaps open-heart surgery, that had healed into a map of scars and mottled skin. It made him look as if he had the body of an 80-year-old man.

He plunged his tongue into her left ear and then along the side of her face as though licking a line of spittle across her. His hands groped her breasts and she felt the hardness inside his pants.

"Take off your top so I can lick you," he implored, and she did, reluctantly.

September knew that he was not going to pass out drunk, that it was time to use sexual leverage to pry his neck open so she could be done with it and move on to someone better next time.

"You know what really gets me hot?" she asked, or rather, stated, crossing past his right ear as she spoke in a husky voice, "I'd like to bite you, taste your blood…just like that book you were reading."

His body arched back a bit. She clung to his neck and eased her mouth down toward his carotid artery.

"Come on…don't be afraid of me…I can feel how hard you are right now." She opened her eyes into slits, watching for a reaction, a sign of acquiescence, then opened them wider as she saw the wound on his neck.

"Do you remember me now?" he asked quietly. "It's been a while, hasn't it?"

He reached down into his pants and, for an instant, she thought he meant to rape her, but as he removed a small silver blade from its plastic scabbard, the kind of container you might keep a toothbrush in while travelling abroad to Europe. The hard thing in his pants was not what she had expected.

She realized that the jaundiced, emaciated man who was holding her now, ever so tightly, was once a beautiful boy with the sweetest blood.

His dagger tore open her neck as the rounded notes from her own cello seared the air with the demonic Shostakovich finale.

She thought she could see a rain of embers, dazzling as birthday sparklers, appearing from his arms. As her own blood sponged into her gauzy, India cotton dress, transforming it from blush pink to glistening red, she started screaming, "Ubour! Ubour!" until she died struggling beneath his scorching flesh.

Her last thoughts before the lights went out forever and ever and ever were the story of Ubour, and how, after 40 days and nights, his restless form arises with the thirst of a thousand.

















































Text