Bloodstone by Nate Kenyon Page B

in an instant and on the phone to her fat ugly friends spreading the news that Jeboriah Taylor was a scared little faggot.
       
    At Johnny’s he sat in a corner booth with half a bottle of whiskey and went over the scene again and again in his mind. She had been up to something all right. Probably wasn’t used to someone refusing her. He thought about what might have happened if he had grabbed her hard and pressed his lips against hers, and then lifted her up and carried her to the bedroom. Like a real man. Would she have gone willingly? It seemed impossible to believe, a rich woman like that willing to go to bed with him, Jeb Taylor, handyman, town idiot, son of the murderer Ronnie Taylor. He decided once again that she had been playing a game with him.
    A very dangerous game, wasn’t it? Because couldn’t you have kissed her anyway? There wasn’t anyone else around. Couldn’t you have gotten so angry that you couldn’t help yourself, that you might even have—?
    He poured another shot and downed it, feeling the burn across his lips and throat, sliding down into his stomach. It lit up his entire body with tongues of fire, caressing him, easing the pain in his cut hands. He looked down at the tiny half moons of broken skin. The rage inside of him was so strong and insistent that for a moment he felt he would explode. And the voices in his head just wouldn’t go away. He felt as if he were being pulled apart by something unseen and all-powerful.
    Get polluted, boy. Get shitfaced, so drunk you can’t think anymore .
    He knew one thing; he had found a way to get out of that job. Or, more accurately, it had found him. He would never go back to work for Mrs. Friedman again.
    Jeb Taylor sat there for the rest of the night alone, and bythe time the barmaid came to get him he had finished the bottle of whiskey and had passed out with his head on the table, and finally, mercifully, the voices had stopped.
       
    He awoke in the dark with the distinct feeling someone was watching him.
    Disoriented, alcohol still running freely through his veins, he moved sluggishly across the bed and moaned. His eyes were gummy, painful pockets of flesh. How had he gotten home? He remembered Johnny’s and the bottle of whiskey, and then nothing. His head was spinning and he felt as if he might be sick.
    The room was freezing cold. He lay shivering under the sheets, and let his gaze play about the dim surroundings. The moonlight let in through the window hardly gave him enough light. He could see only shapes in the darkness. The window was open; had he opened it before going to bed? He couldn’t remember.
    Jesus, it was cold.
    Something was in the room with him. He did not know how he knew it, but he did. He tried desperately to clear his head, afraid now, straining to see. The dresser in the corner, as it should be; the chair next to it, clothes thrown loosely across the seat. Nothing wrong there. But still, that feeling, eyes on him…
    The closet door was open. He sat up, his stomach turning over, his heart hammering against his ribs, and stared into the blackness of the closet. Walls running together in the dark and in the middle a black hole, and someone standing at the back, grinning at him. The figure looked like a man. He could just see the glint of eyes and white teeth.
    “Not real,” he croaked. His throat was dry and hot as a stovetop. “Drank too much, that’s all. Seeing things. You’re not real.”
    The figure did not move. Jeb Taylor sat with his back against the headboard and moaned to himself.
    They considered each other.
    It wanted him, he could feel it. And it looked familiar somehow. God help him, even as he sat there shaking with fear, something urged him to get up out of bed and go to it, just let it take him into the darkness.
    He moaned again, the fear alive in him. With a sudden lunge that turned his stomach upside down and made his head spin, he crossed the few feet of space between his bed and the closet