The Secret of Fellmouth Bay Pt. 01

Unfortunately, Lucy was fairly close mouthed about what exactly her problem was with Fellmouth, although Helen suspected it was something a little more personal than small town claustrophobia. She had made a number of references to the Thorn family, an important and well-to-do collection of snobs living in a huge house surrounded by woods on the edge of town. Helen had had some dealings with them and she wondered whether anything had been going on between Lucy and Mark, the Thorn family's son - a huge, rugby-playing brute of a boy in appearance. Although he did seem to get charmingly tongue-tied whenever he spoke to Helen. She had noticed his eyes staring at her tattoos on more than one occasion. She did struggled to see the two of them together, but you never knew.

As they walked the coast road back into town, a light mist had begun to roll in from the sea, blocking out the lights of ships hovering on the nighttime horizon. At night, and from this height, the town was a dark and sprawling shadow, a black mass of buildings crowding together at the shoreline, as if the slightest tremor would send the whole town crashing into the water. The buildings were old, leaning in on each other, throwing deeper shadows onto the street below. Lighting was sparse, particularly at this time of night, and the random dusting of street lamps and lighted windows seemed to mirror the night sky above. Helen had wondered about the lack of public lighting. Many people believed it added to the Gothic atmosphere of the town, it's chief selling point. Of course, it's also easier to keep things hidden in the dark, although this, of course, was never said, and didn't occur to Helen until much later.

Against her own expectations, Helen had actually learned to enjoy living in the town. She had spent enough time in more modern towns, with their brightly lit, sterile, characterless streets of concrete and steel. She much preferred the sinister, claustrophobic atmosphere of her new home. It sparked her imagination and added to the dark romance she hoped to capture when she finally got around to writing her book. And she had always been drawn to the sea, particularly at night.

Stopping suddenly, Lucy gazed out at the pallid stretch of beach curving away towards the harbour wall beneath them. Helen followed her gaze and saw, just before the first tendrils of mist reached out to obscure the view, a pale shape on the sand below them. She looked at her friend questioningly. "What is it?" She asked.

"I'm not sure," Lucy replied. "It might be a seal washed up on the beach but, for a moment, I thought it might be . . . "

The beach was now completely lost from view, but the two women continued to peer into the dark, hoping for a breath of wind to tear through the gauze and offer them a second look. In the end it was Helen who spoke first.

"Look, whatever it is, it's not far from my house. Fancy a night walk on the beach? If it's a seal we can call the RSPCA or whatever the hell you need to do with beached seals."

"Well, I'm not sure what city people do, but us locals tend to cook up and eat whatever we find washed up on the beach." Lucy kept her face perfectly straight as she made her way down the steep slope down to the beech.

Helen began to curse her decision to wear her finest leather boots. Comfortable and eye-catching as they were, they weren't exactly designed for beach walking. She considered taking then off but Lucy's sharp intake of breath distracted her.

At first glance the shape resembled nothing more than a heap of rags washed up on the beach but, as Helen moved shakily over the sand she realised, to her alarm, what it was. He was wearing what seemed to be rags, tattered pieces of cloth that did little to cover the skeletal frame beneath. He's dead, he has to be dead.

It was as though the ocean had thrown up a corpse, dragged from a long submerged shipwreck. His skin was stretched tight across his bones so that he resembled a waxwork exhibit. He was laid out on his back, and she could see his his gaunt face staring into the mist. Helen slowly approached. Lucy held back; Helen didn't blame her.

It was only when the desiccated corpse blinked slowly that her alarm rose to outright horror. He was alive! She sank to her knees next to him. Overcoming a sense of revulsion, she placed a hand on the man's forehead. He was ice cold. Corpse cold. She could not imagine how the remnant of a human being before her was still drawing breath. His eyes remained fixed on a point just over her shoulder. He barely seemed to realise she was there at all.

She needed to get him inside out of the cold. She knew that the easiest option was to wrap him in clothing and call for help, but the night was turning bitterly cold and her house was so close. Turning around, Helen called out for to Lucy for help. Lucy, coming a little unwillingly, was eventually persuaded to help Helen lift the man up so that his arms were draped around their shoulders and between them they managed to carry him from the beach. He barely weighed anything.

"Look,"said Lucy, '"lets just call an ambulance and leave him here. Its alright for you living alone. My dad will go spare if I'm any later. Especially if he hears I stopped to help some beggar whose probably had an overdose"

"We can't leave him here, just help me carry him to my home. We're almost there and I can't do it on my own."

It took them a few minutes to reach her cottage and, as soon as the front door was closed behind them, they lay the stranger out on the sofa and sat back, breathing heavily from the walk.

Part 3 --

Helen was the first to recover. "Well, that's my exercise for the month. Listen you wait here. I going to get some water for him. Then I'll call an ambulance and you can get off. Okay?"

Lucy, despite her reluctance to go anywhere near the man on the beach, nodded and perched herself on the edge of the sofa. She would make a good psychologist, Helen thought, she cares despite herself.

In the kitchen, Helen found that her hand was shaking as she filled a glass from the tap. She needed to get a grip. Lucy was barely holding on; Helen needed to be strong. Returning with the glass, she passed it to Lucy and started looking for the phone. Lucy lifted the man's head up, gently tilted the glass to his lips.

In the bright light of the room Lucy managed to get her first clear look at him. It was impossible to guess his age. He could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, with a gaunt pale face with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. The skin stretched tight over his skull giving him a slightly mummified look. He should have repulsed her, normally she would cross to the other side to avoid people like this, and yet there was something about him that held her gaze.

She sat there, patiently waiting as he took small, painful sips of the water, examining every detail of his face. She felt a sense of unease well up in her, as if there was something she had forgotten that she needed to remember before it was too late.

And then, the stranger's eyes slowly opened and stared, for the first time, directly into hers. Lucy found that she could not look away, even had she wanted to.

The noise of the glass being dropped made Helen look around, her mouth open to admonish Lucy for her carelessness. The words died in her mouth as she saw the strange look on her colleague's face as she gazed down at the man who, Helen saw, was now staring at the younger woman. Despite the fact that he had seemed more dead that alive, his eyes were piercingly blue and alive with a fire completely at odds with his physical appearance. The atmosphere in the room had changed and, without even realising she was doing it, Helen held her breath.

For what seemed like an age, no one moved.

Then, with one hand cradling the stranger's head, Lucy brought her other hand up to the scarf around her neck. Slowly, she awkwardly unwrapped it, dropping it in a pile next to her.

The power of speech finally came back to Helen, although she could only manage one word due to the terrifying, unaccountable, sense of anticipation welling up within her. 'Lucy...' she whispered. Lucy managed to look up and Helen caught a glimpse of a face full of longing and fear before Lucy's attention went back to the man lying beneath her.

Now that the scarf was off, Lucy began to unbutton her coat. There seemed a sense of urgency now in her movements and her hands fumbled in their task. Eventually she succeeded in loosening the buttons down to her waist and shrugged the coat from her shoulders, revealing her white work shirt beneath. She yanked at the shirt and buttons flew, rolling along the wooden floor. Helen caught a glimpse of Lucy's white bra and she could tell, even from where she stood, that the young woman's nipples were erect.

Slowly, and for the first time, the man began to move, painfully straining himself to sit up. Lucy pulled her blouse to one side and, closing her eyes, raised her chin, exposing her long slender neck. The man let out a long, shaky breath as he reached up a skeletal hand to caress the skin of Lucy's throat, his thumb traced the outline of her jugular. Lucy trembled.

Helen backed away as she saw the stranger open his mouth to reveal four inhumanly long canines. Wolf's teeth. She moved carefully around the room, widely circling the two people on the sofa. She only stopped when her back came into contact with the hard, unyielding wood of her front door. Unable to tear her eyes away from the scene before her, she tried to find the handle, hoping she would be able to escape while this monster was occupied with Lucy. Part of her knew this was cowardice, that she should fight to save her friend. She heard the sound of a car outside, reminding her that there was a world out there to escape to, a world of reason and logic. She felt a powerful desire to return to it.

Her grasping fingers had finally found the handle when the stranger, moving slowly, even tenderly, tilted Lucy's head further to one side. From her position by the door Helen could no longer see the man's face, only Lucy's. But she saw enough to know that her friend was lost. Her expression was languid, dreamy and now utterly without fear. Lucy held onto the man's bony shoulders and seemed to pull him slowly towards her bared neck. Helen watched in horrified fascination as the man settled his mouth on Lucy's throat.

Lucy's lips parted and she let out a soft sigh. Then, Helen heard a slight ripping sound and her friend's body stiffened as though being electrocuted. Her hands clutched tightly against the man's shoulders, though not to push him away. The cry that escaped her lips sent a savage spike of desire through Helen's stomach into her groin. Instead of escaping, she found herself slowly sliding down the door until she was sitting, knees clasped to her breasts, as she watched this performance of one of her deepest, darkest fantasies.

After the initial cry of pain Lucy was now breathing heavily, and her moans were unmistakably those of pleasure. If you closed your eyes you would have mistaken the sound for someone being slowly, satisfyingly, fucked. Not that Helen had any intention of closing her eyes; she wanted to see it all.

The sense of fear had gone, in its place was a feeling of intense envy. She had never believed such things were possible, not really, despite all the times she had wished they were. Even now it occurred to her that this could be a trick, but she had seen enough charlatry over the years to recognise it and there was no denying the passion of her friend. Lucy was just not that good an actor. This was real.

Helen was a rational person; she prided herself on that. But there, in that moment, in that room, she would have given anything, including the soul she had never believed in, to have swapped places with Lucy. The feeling was as intense as it was terrifying

Lucy seemed to have accepted her fate. Instead of struggling to escape, she tightened her arms around the vampire, holding him to her like a lover. Blood trickled down her neck to seep into the plain white fabric of her bra. Her original, sensuous breathing had been replaced by rapid, heavy gasps, as though she had been immersed in ice cold water; the sound of a woman surrendering herself helplessly to an orgasm.

Helen noticed a change occurring. She could see, through the many tears in the man's clothing on his back, the spinal column pressing out through the parchment skin. As she watched, the column appeared to sink back into the skin and the grey, corpse-like pallor began to take on a warmer, healthier hue. The stranger's hair began to darken as though soaking up ink. The vampire's strength seemed to be returning to him just as Lucy seemed to be rapidly losing hers. His hand came down from the back of her neck , and Helen could see that it was no longer the pale, spindly claw of a sick man. He began to gently trace the line of Lucy's collarbone before sliding it inside her bra to cup her small breast, drawing a moan of arousal from the nearby Helen as well as from Lucy.

At her inadvertent sound, the vampire whipped his head around and, for the first time, Helen felt the full force of his gaze on her. He was unrecognizable as the gaunt shadow of a man they had easily carried over the threshold only a few moments before, in another life, another world. His mouth was smeared darkly with blood but he seemed to have grown younger by decades. He was young, maybe even as young as Lucy, and his eyes burned with a fierce hunger that drove the breath from Helen's lungs.

The moment lasted for little more than a heartbeat before Lucy reached up with a pale, trembling hand and, turning his head, brought his attention back to her. She pulled his head down and, for a second, Helen expected them to kiss, but Lucy inclined her head to one side, again offering the monster her throat. Helen saw that one side of Lucy`s neck was red with blood, but it was not this side that was offered. As the vampire's teeth tore into the unblemished skin Lucy let out an almost feline hiss of pain and release, closing her eyes as she surrendered fully to the vampire's hunger.

The feeding seemed to last for hours but, eventually, Lucy was too weak to even sit upright and she gently sank backwards onto the sofa. The vampire, never losing contact with her neck, followed her, his throat working furiously as he drank the last of the young woman's blood.

And Helen sat and watched it all, a tight knot of anticipation and fear sat like a lead weight in her chest. She had wanted a story. She had wanted the truth and here it was, in her house. She knew the danger she was in but she wanted to watch it all, experience it all. And this last desire terrified her more than anything else: she wanted to experience what Lucy was experiencing now.

She wanted to feel it all. Everything.

Gradually, Lucy's moans subsided and her arms slid from around the vampires back, and fell to her side.

Part 4

Helen knew enough to realise that this was her last chance to get away. Her rational instinct for self preservation directed her body's movements. Rising shakily to her feet, she turned her face to the door, her hand once more resting on the handle. It was not locked. It would be the easiest thing in the world to turn the handle and steal away into the night while he was still distracted. So easy.

She rested her forehead against the wood, it felt chill and hard against her skin. Through the door she could still sense the outside world; the laughter of two people walking past, a couple possibly. She imagined then living the rest of their lives never knowing how close they were to a darker world, living in ignorance, just as she had been.

Behind her, she heard a creaking sound as somebody slowly stood up from the sofa. Her hand tightened on the handle.

"If you wish to run." The man's voice was weak, no more than a strained whisper, but it was enough to drain the strength from her legs. She leaned heavily against the door, keeping herself upright. "I give you my word I will not pursue you."

She hesitated, confused. What exactly was he saying? She felt a whirlpool of different emotions surging through her. There was fear there, but it was muddled. Was she terrified of him, or of her own powerful reaction to watching him feed? She was, and there was simply no denying it, deeply aroused by what she had seen. There was a heavy weight in her chest and a throbbing, wet heat between her legs. One idea surfaced through the maelstrom of her thoughts: she was being offered a choice. Whatever happened next would be her decision. She would never have wanted it any other way.

"And if I stay?" Her voice too was faint.

There was a pause, and then she heard the unmistakable sound of a step being taken towards her. She did not turn around. Instead, she closed her eyes, trying to calm her wildly beating heart. She did not want to appear weak before this man.

"Then I will claim you," his voice continued, and his words sent another wave of desire directly to her sex, "as I claimed your friend. It has been.... so long since I have been able to savour such delights. If you stay, I will not be able to rein in my appetites, nor will I be minded to. I can smell the blood in your veins from here. It is... familiar. I believe I may owe you a debt, so I offer you this choice."

"Is she dead?" Helen's voice was stronger now. She needed to know.

"For now." Another step. His voice sounded closer now. She had no idea how near to her he was, how much time she had to make a decision.

"She'll come back?" Her heart was beating so hard; her mouth was dry. She swallowed.

"Yes, I have taken her mortal life, but she will awaken. If you choose to go, you must go now. Or stay and share her fate. Share my fate."

She couldn't speak, she felt weak with desire. With her back still turned to him, she reached into her pocket, pulling out the front door key. In what she knew was an act of madness, she fitted the key into the lock and turned it, sealing herself inside. Behind her, the man let out a long breath. She slowly turned to face him. If it was to be her turn now then she did not want him to see her cowering in the corner. She slipped off her own coat and let it fall to the floor.

He hadn't moved very far from the sofa, and Helen gasped in surprise when she saw him. He looked fully twenty years younger and the air of decrepitude was no longer there. He was tall, several inches taller then she was and his face could only be described as beautiful, strong and sensuous, his hair jet black. His tattered clothing showed glimpses of a tightly toned, muscular body. He was reborn.

"I apologise for my appearance,' he said , moving towards her 'Trust me, this is not how I usually choose appear to people.' As he spoke he pulled at the ruined fabric covering his chest. It came apart easily. His trousers too were tattered and torn, barely holding together.

He moved slowly, gracefully across the room. There was something of the predator about his movements. He stopped in front of her, gazing down into her eyes. She yearned to step forward, to close the distance between them but she enjoyed the anticipation of what was about to happen; what he was about to do to her.

'Did you know what I was when you brought me into your house?'

'No,' she shook her head 'I just thought you needed help'.

'A good Samaritan then?'

"If I had known you for what you are," she said, her heart beating wildly in her chest, 'I would have let you in anyway."

'Well it never rains but it pours,' he said finally closing the distance between them, 'I haven't touched a woman in generations and now on the very night I find freedom I find two such wonderful specimens to enjoy.'

He raised his hand, gently cradling her cheek and tilted her head up to meet him. His hand felt cool to the touch and she sensed his strength despite the tenderness of his movements. His other hand pushed a few strands of her blonde hair away from her face.