Spell Bound

How to begin?

I lose count of the times I have faced this question.

There are so many beginnings in this life of ours, and only a singular end for many of them. All the strands that we follow as we make our choices. Interwoven, however much we think we can keep them apart.

I’ll begin with words. Those strange conveyances of meaning. Or not, as is often the case. We occasionally take a moment to look up the meaning of a word, but all we are looking at is a clinical definition. Meaning goes much deeper than that. Meaning goes all the way to the source and there lies magick. A potent, sentient magick that cares not for men and women. We are all a part of something far bigger, and this renders us inconsequential in the shadow of magick’s monolithic power.

And so words are a spell, highly volatile if used unwisely, and yet there we are, toddlers with sticks of dynamite, playing with matches and with no notion of our mortality, nor the pain we may cause before that final certainty blithely occurs.

As an author, I should have known better. But then, how often is it the people who should know better are the ones who go the whole hog and crash through all the boundaries meant to keep us from harm. Knowing better is another way of denoting arrogance. I was too big for my boots, and I never stopped to think. Not until it was far too late did I deign to think.

There you have the notion of beginnings. The day it all changed I was in an antique cellar. I have always been inquisitive and there is a place, not too far from my home, that contains an ever changing assortment of curios. Sometimes I come away from this Aladdin’s cave empty handed, but never empty headed. The meaning squeezed into this expansive underground space is immense. I can smell it as I open the door and it wafts around me as I descend the stairs. I am always delighted to visit this cavern of wonders, and I navigate each and every nook and cranny in my search for hidden treasure. Often, an idea for a book will make itself known to me as I drive home. There can be no writer’s block when it’s possible to immerse oneself in a sea of meaning and feel the caress of a thousand ghosts whispering their stories with an eternal urgency.

On this day of change I was half way through my painstaking search when I saw them. I knew I had struck gold as soon as I walked into the booth. Tucked away on a shelf at the back of this unit were four well-worn hardback books. The spines may once have been tattooed with title and author, but those marks had faded over time, just as they do on an old sailor’s forearms. Memories of the past fading to herald old age.

Turning my back on the world beyond, guarding my new found gems, I delicately lifted the nearest book and gently opened it to the title page. It was then that I experienced the sort of thrill I had as a young man. The thrill of an illicit moment as the promise of something taboo presented itself to me.

What had conveyed that excitement?

One word.

Vampire.

The vampire genre is my thing. It is far more than an interest. There is an obsession to it and mated to that obsession is a passion that excites. I felt the familiar tingle of that passion as I took up all four books and headed to the till. For the very first time, I abandoned my painstaking search of the rest of the antique cellar, too intent on bringing my precious find home and poring over it with an avarice I did not know I possessed. 

From the very start, I jealously guarded my secret hoard. This was mine and mine only. I knew I had something rare and special, and the thought of sharing it was an unbearable violation. I could not countenance a dilution of the experience that awaited me. An experience that I never intended to share with another soul. I knew that what I was doing was wrong. My thoughts were lustful and impure. I was bringing this secret into my home and I had no intention of telling my wife. 

Before I’d even picked that first book up, I’d decided upon the secrecy of these items, and on my drive home I weaved a series of lies around that secret by way of a protective covering. I told myself that this was not something that my wife would be interested in; she wouldn’t understand.

And here is me, a purveyor of words and supposed meaning. I never once gave her the chance to understand. The conflict of my behaviour was apparent, but I chose to ignore it. My constant dream was to bring my words to a growing tribe and experience validation via their acceptance of what I had written for them. Yet here I was, fiercely guarding words with the intent of never letting them see the light of day.

Upon my return home, I was a hive of hectic energy. I could not wait to get that first book open. I knew I only had a couple of hours and that that could not possibly be enough time, and so I went to it as swiftly as was possible. I was shaking and sweating as I took to my armchair and began reading that first book. The connection was instantaneous and the initial excitement of discovery was as nothing as I turned page after page. I sank deeper and deeper between the words, the story drowning me with an impossible pleasure. 

The sound of the door opening shocked my heart into beating again. I had fallen into such a stupor there was an embarrassment of dribble on my chin and my eyes drooped with a stupidity I could not shrug from them. Scrabbling at my precious books I hid them under the chair and stumbled to my feet as my wife entered the room.

“What are you up to?” she asked, more questions sitting upon her face, throwing darts of accusation at my all too sensitive frame.

“Nothing,” I blurted, and in that one word was a wealth of shame. I was small and weak before this woman, and I hated her for what she’d made of me. Blaming her for the lie I’d resorted to.

“Are you OK?” she asked me, “you look pale and peaky.”

“I fell asleep,” I said, using a half-lie to cover the truth of my furtive activities.

She stepped forward to feel my forehead, a simple gesture of care and affection. I squirmed from under her hand and told her to leave me be. An inexplicable fear of her uncovering the truth with her love for me. I knew I was making matters worse with my behaviour, but I felt compelled to do so. I resented my wife for that, told myself that she was the problem and it was her that was making me feel so awkward. As my mind chattered away with these easily found lies I understood that I wanted her out of the way so that I could address my longing for the words that awaited me. All I wanted was to return to that book. A desire rose up in me. A feeling that could not be denied. My wife had separated me from that object of my desire, and the long wait for a reconciliation burnt my skin and roiled in my guts.

The act I performed for the remainder of the evening was stilted and unconvincing. I leapt at the lifeline my wife presented, the suggestion that I may be coming down with a bug helped mask the physical reaction I was having to the book that lay under my armchair. I wanted it so much. My excitement should have frightened me, but it was too persistent and noisy for me to feel anything else.

I showered before bed. I felt cold and clammy, but the real reason for my shower was so I was at my best for my return to the next chapter in the story. In bed, I picked up the paperback I was in the midst of, and for the first time in my life, the words would not enter my eyes, let alone my mind. I stared at page after page, performing the pretence of reading. And yet I experienced no anxiety and no sense of loss. Not even for the place marker I had moved on from. This book was lost to me. There was only one book for me now. Her and her three sisters.

The wait for my wife to drift into the depths of dream-ladened sleep was tortuous. I stared at her prone form with a force of will that should have rendered her unconscious. Smothered her with my need to leave the bedroom and scamper downstairs like a thief in the night, snatching stolen moments with my book. The book. I could see it laying there, waiting for me and I wanted it so much.

Hearing the change in her breathing, I stared at my watch for a further fifteen minutes. Then I crept away. Downstairs, I turned on the lamp and knelt to find the book. 

“Ouch!” something under the chair caught the tip of my finger and drew blood. I could feel it, but I disregarded the wound in my haste to retrieve the book and read again.

Barely was the book open, and I was falling into the story yet again. My breath caught in my chest and I felt an overpowering arousal. She was there. She had been waiting for me. We stared across the room at each other, and it was all I could do not to run into her arms. But I knew better than that. Knew that she was dangerous, but that it was her power that so enflamed me. The main character, and the author of this book. 

The vampire.

The story led me this way and that. An exquisite wooing. The gentlest and most exotic form of foreplay. My body was alive with a pleasure I’d never before experienced in my drab and ordinary life. The promises she made of the pleasures that awaited me were maddening. I was dizzied in her presence and the fear of what she was and what she was capable of only added to my desire for her. So when she asked me what I wanted, I panted my responses quickly and eagerly.

“Do you want me?” she purred as she stared deeply into my eyes.

“Yes!” I gasped, a drowning man thrashing around in her presence, franticly attempting to take a hold of her and be drawn out from the waters of his own isolating desperation.

“Will you invite me into your home, so I can come to you?” she asked with words of velvet that caressed the back of my neck.

“Yes! Come now! Come to me!” I hissed the words, spitting them out as quickly as was possible.

She chuckled and smiled a wicked smile, “in time. There is no rush. I have waited a lifetime for moments such as we shall share.”

I reached out to her, feeling cheated by this delay, but she was gone and when I opened my eyes, I was in bed clawing at the air. The only sound, my wife’s gentle breathing. On my chest was the book. I tucked it under the mattress and lay awake until the alarm woke my wife and we began another day of humdrum routine.

I fell into a pattern of reading each night. The books were my guilty pleasure and the night was a shroud to hide my growing guilt and unease. I knew what I was doing was sinful. Not only the deceit with which I was doing it, but also the thoughtless promises I was making. I would have said yes to anything she asked of me. And I did.

At some point, I understood that I would be granted my wish once I was reading book four. This thrilled and disappointed me. Being made to wait was torture, but a delicious torture at that. The anticipation of what was to come built and built and in itself was a glorious feeling. My disappointment was also growing though. The prospect of things coming to a head hurt. Then there was the coming end of the last of the books. I could not countenance coming to the end and having no further books to read.

Each night, I would await the deeper breathing that signalled my wife’s slumber and I would read by the scant light that a surreptitiously opened curtain afforded. The story slipped and slid this way and that, a serpent in search of its prey. When the male vampire companion emerged into the story I was crushed, but I could not help but read on. Now the two vampires hunted together and I lived for the hunt. I delighted in the seduction and subsequent bites that would subdue the vampires’ prey and have the victim further succumb to the vampires’ will. 

I never tired of that. I drew an intense voyeuristic pleasure from it and increasingly felt more and more a part of the story. So much so that my waking life was become grey and lacklustre. Drained of meaning and joy.

Then one night, I lifted the fourth book and noted the thinning depths of the remaining pages. However slowly and painstakingly I read, I would finish the last book this night. I drew in a sob of bereft breath and wondered what awaited me in those last pages and beyond that. A blank page of dread that I did not want to lay my eyes upon, let alone fill. I had ceased my writing from the moment I’d opened the first book. There was nothing other than these four books now and so, I knew, it was nothing that awaited me. The oblivion of a loss that could never be recovered from.

Turning the final page, I came to myself and a fugue of confusion. Something had changed, but I could not establish what the change was, nor what it meant for me. Turning to look at the slumbering form of my wife I saw instead her absence and it was then I knew, or at least suspected what the nature of the change was. 

I’d made reckless promises and let something dangerous seduce me and enter my life. I’d known from the very start that the pages of those books were alive, but I’d gone ahead regardless. I had given myself over to the ultimate of stories and now there was no way back. My fear of nothingness was a shade of the fear I had of what awaited me beyond the bedroom door.

On legs made insensible with my terror, I made my way along landing and down stairs like a comical drunkard. Drunk on the insanity of my fear. Tears streamed unnoticed down my face and my breathing was as ragged as a vanquished pirate’s mainsail.

Entering the living room I saw her standing before me. The woman of my dreams, now in the midst of my unfolding nightmare. She took my hand for the very first time and led me to one of the sofas, “you like to watch, don’t you?”

I nodded despite an awful reluctance to do so, I did not want to accept any of this and I certainly did not want to watch what I knew would play out across the room before me. I sensed the presence of the vampire’s companion and I could taste their endless hunger.

She leaned in, breathing words into my ear, “this is what you wanted. You invited me in and now I am fulfilling my promise to you.”

Never will I know whether she turned my head, or it turned all on its own. I certainly did not want to witness what was about to happen. But then I did, and I was consumed by it. I could not help myself. She was right. I wanted this. I wanted this beyond all else.

On the sofa, my wife sat back as the vampire’s companion gazed into her eyes. It were as though they had both paused this scene until I was seated comfortably, and ready to view their play. 

They kissed.

There was a betrayal in that kiss, and the betrayal was all mine. That one kiss broke something within me, and once again I was immersed in the story with a passionate obsession that burnt everything else away. 

I watched as my wife raised her hand to the vampire companion’s head and pulled him closer. Encouraging him as he broke from their kiss and showered kisses downwards until his mouth was upon her neck.

“Bite me!” she gasped and her eyes found mine in the moment before his teeth penetrated her.

Our eyes met and I saw it all. 

She knew!

I watched everything. And when it was done, my eyes fell upon the book my wife had been reading. The book she had found despite my best efforts at concealment.

“Now you write,” whispered the vampire, before her and her companion slipped away into the night, abandoning me to an eternity of damnation…

…on a shelf, in a discrete antiques shop, in a backwater town that had once seen better days, there are five well-worn nondescript books. These unremarkable books will be overlooked my many a passer-by. But one day soon, they will catch the eye of someone who sees them for what they really are, but lies about their truth from the very start… 

…of their end.