The Dark Need by Stant Litore

2
    2 hours after midnight
    The knocking snapped Oscar from sleep as sharply as you might break a twig. His was an old house, and sound echoed through it with a vigor and fury unknown to younger structures. Bolting upright, he sat in his bed, straining to hear over the clamor of his heart.
    There it came again: an insistent but light and almost feminine tapping at the door. Oscar glanced at his bedroom window: the shadow of cedar branches faint through a sheen of frost. It had to be ten below outside.
    It took a few moments to get his old body moving, into a bathrobe, and treading down the creak of his stairs, but whoever was at the door didn’t give up, didn’t like being left out in the cold. Four quick taps, repeated again and again. Oscar tied his robe, then blew air on his hands as he reached the last few steps. There was an old four-pane window by the door but it was entirely iced. He couldn’t see anything on his porch. The cold floor burned his feet; he hadn’t paused for slippers, and he groaned, wanting his bed and a swift return to the dream he’d been having, of a woman he’d yearned for in college. His sleep had been full of her body pressed softly to him, her gasps in his ear. A stab of regret: he should have asked her out. All those years ago. He should have asked her.
    A rattle of the door, then he jerked it open, and then all the breath seemed to leave his body. His hand whitened about the edge of the door.
    “Martha,” he breathed.
    The woman on his porch smiled, but her eyes were hard and cold. Her graying hair, the small wrinkles about her mouth, the way one corner of her mouth curved higher than the other.
    It was Martha.
    But she’d been… gone… for years.
    His whole body went cold.
    “Have you forgotten me?”
    “Never,” Oscar whispered.
    He had to be asleep. A dream, this had to be a dream.
    “May I?”
    He just stared at her helplessly. Then stammered, “Of course,” and stepped out of the way of the door.
    She stepped inside, her eyes on his. He frowned. Something about her wasn’t quite right. The intent way she was staring at him, unblinking. That slight smile, an unnerving smile—the way one imagined predators smiling from the brush as they watched a deer step down to the creek, just one short leap away from capture.
    “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” His hands were shaking. “I never meant to hurt you.”
    She lifted her hand to his cheek, and at that soft touch his eyes filled with tears that he fought to hold back. Her eyes glistened too. “I know.”
    His brain struggled to catch up with his heart. “Come sit down,” he whispered. “The… the kitchen. I’ll get you something to drink…”
    “That would be nice.” Again that smile.
    Coughing, he turned and shuffled toward the kitchen, his mind racing. Martha. His Martha. But she was in the grave. And had left his house before the grave ever took her. Thiscouldn’t be. Yet, ghost or dream, she was here. She was going to have a drink with him. Some things were too beautiful to be questioned. Some dreams you didn’t want to wake from.
    Pain, violent in the back of his head. The world grayed and then was gone.

    “Wakey, wakey.”
    A hand slapping his face. Oscar’s eyes shot open. He found himself gazing up at a younger man, probably in his thirties. He had a military cut to his blond hair and a scar just above his left eye. Like a knife scar. A hard, chiseled face. In it, eyes keen as ice. The man lifted a needle and peered at it in the dim light from the lamp on the bedside table. Oscar gasped, tried to jerk upright. Metal cold against his wrists. More around his ankles. His breath went fast and shallow, his heart wild in his chest.
    “Who are you?” His gaze locked on that needle.
    The man smiled and fitted the needle to a long tube. A black bag—an old-school medical bag, the kind doctors used to carry on house calls—was popped open beside him on the bed. “I’m a doctor. Call me House.” His smile