Horror / Second Life of Bishop (Analysis)

*CHAPTER ONE*
“Queen’s Gambit”
-PART ONE-

Some quiver with such delicious tremors of excitement. Others are silent, as sure and as steady as a surgeon’s scalpel. But what moves the hand of god? I look towards the future, my linear glance is approved. Like THOSE people, normal people, I never detour or stray. I have done the dutiful “King Pawn Four” exactly as was expected. My mind is perfectly centered in the RIGHT direction. That is, until the sun hits the mirror in my eye. The glint is maddening. I wish for nothing more than the sun to set around me. I have played these moves as long as ‘it’ can stand – all it wants is for the dark sky and small hour of dreaming. This is just a confession of how the Bishop wants to play; this is just a journal for myself in case I forget where I was before. Sometimes it would be nice just to be myself, but I have learned so much better than that now. To be myself is to shatter the church I have built in silence, allow heathens to burn it to the ground. But…..still, I do enjoy the sound of his voice when it’s spoken out loud. “Nice move…”
Bishop was born in California, in the summer of 82’. I assume it was the summer, because we were always playing – always reinventing different games until the sun went down. I would sneak out for an hour at a time. After they had all gone to sleep, climb over the fence to the graveyard that stood beside our house. The calm green of manicured landscape was soothing. It was a place that was full of just the right kind of life, the unmoving kind, the silent thoughtful kind. I’ll never forget the marble, all that endless sleek stone, always a few degrees colder than the heated air. I would lie down on the graves, a new one each night and stare at the stars. The smell of rich black earth would cover my senses, much as it’s freshly dug weight meant to cover a new member to the yard the night before. Sometimes I would cut my hour early. I would have to leave as the deep salt smell of an approaching summer rain rolled in. It was a dangerous place to be during a storm, all that open field, all those rows of reaching branches, leaves baring their teeth at the sky. Though, I was never more alive than when I ran beneath the ancient elms, weaving between the dead and their stone markers, lightning piercing the black-blue sky and lighting my path as I turned for home. Back then, Bishop was just a murmur, a dark thing content to wait for a familiar face. It wasn’t long until Bishop had his opportunity. He met his mirror in a young boy of 15, and one I certainly would never forget.

-PART TWO-

He tortured me for two years, sneaking into the silent pink walls of my bedroom at night. I would go through elaborate measures to prevent the bedroom door from opening without my knowledge. I set up a perimeter of stuffed animals around my bed; sentinels. I’d scattered sharp army men for him to tread upon in the dark, and lent a metal folding chair beneath the door knob thinking this would prevent access, but I was only six years old and the door swung open anyway. It had always worked in movies, but the metal chair told me that the perimeter had been breached and I would wake up in a start and run towards the closet to escape his greedy fists. The same fists that had shook my father’s hand, the same fists that had wrestled with my friends and waved as the neighbors went about their day. Now a days, I truly admire how bold he was. At 15 he was so god damned good at doing what has taken me years to perfect. That cold barrowed smile, the forced but not-seeming-forced laughter, and especially, the ability to hide the coiled and restless body beneath, ready to strike. Keeping the attack controlled, concise, until the perfect moment makes itself known. And one night, while my belly was pushed flat against the floor, the weight of his body crushing the shrinking figure beneath him, the sharp pain that accompanied every thrust, the smell of his hands as they fit snuggly around my mouth and throat – I fell down into something that was so much like my cemetery. It was dark and cool, quiet and still while the lightning screamed brilliantly above me. In this imaginary place, the graves began to move. Suddenly, I was not alone. One caught my eye with such intensity; it was as if the grave was singing. One word was etched carefully into its stone, one word that left me feeling something very close to satisfaction or perhaps it was the feeling one gets when they have achieved revenge at last. The boy above me had sodomized me for close to an hour, but the time I spent in the world beneath myself was eternal. A delicate white hand clawed itself from beneath the earth that held him secured and silent in the ground. The stone tablet whispered as I whispered, two voices in the dark undulating against each other as I read…”Bishop”. I grabbed the hand and in that moment, everything changed. It was something that was unperceived to the boy on my back, but much the better for that. In the end, he had never seen it coming, none of them do.

-PART THREE-

What makes a killer? Is it something that you’re born with or something that is made? I like to think that I am a little bit of both. Plenty of people experience trauma without ever succumbing to dark tendencies, they go on to live happy, healthy lives. And I was just like them…mostly. Twenty Seven years would effortlessly pass without a hint of my damaged self rearing it’s pretty pallid mask.
In the spring of 84’ my whole family had moved. We left that place without ever having to face the awful truth. My father gathered us like a brood of tender birds from his nest and flew to new horizons. And in that time I breathed a sigh of relief. I never said a word. Partly because I was scared, I was still just a kid. But there was a truth there that I couldn’t have known as a child and something that I have only now been able to understand. My father was like me. But he was a traditional sort of sociopath. Had I breathed a word, had a told him the truth about what the boy next door had done to me – the 15 year old would have spent his final moments in a haze of gurgled blood, expelled from a body that had been rendered like dog food is rendered from the meat houses. My father would have killed him in a rage and stolen the beautiful moment from me forever. I don’t think I would have ever been able to forgive him for that, Bishop would never forgive him for that. So, as I said before – I lived my life nearly settled as others may have, with only subtle changes along the way. All the while, Bishop kept me safe, kept me happy. He was my towering friend and guard that stood watch at my bedroom door from then on. It wasn’t until the summer before my eighteenth birthday that the long swath of some electric river cut through the meadow of my swimming synapses, shifting course and cutting a new path. How fitting that it had been seventeen years; nearly the same age as my attacker when my family had absconded with me to another town. It was on this night that my eyes would be opened fully.

-PART FOUR-

The statistics out there are staggering, if you’re a man. I have read the literature, the scholarly journals, the publication of nearly every scientific study that was done between the early 1930’s to the present day and all signs point to mars. The symbol for the male persona hangs from a silver slim chain from my rearview mirror. It serves as a constant reminder, of who they are and who I am. The fact is, women do not hunt, and women do not prey or stalk, a fact that I have always found perplexing. Of course, a better way of phrasing that would be to say that men truly believe that there are no women that hunt. There are no women that prey on others, and there are no women that stalk the darkness as if it were their personal playground. And as much as I hold dear my beloved science, most of science is largely contained to the belief of its followers. Science is, just as much as its religious counterparts, a product of faith. It has its own creation myth; it has its own pseudo explanation for man’s “plan” or ascribed destiny. A better way of saying all this: there are no women that have been caught. If there were, these cases are almost always confined to three or four motives.
Women have been caught murdering their husbands, largely in self defense or as a “black widow”, and these deaths fall into the category of murder for monetary gain.
The merciful death or the “Angel of Death” where several women that were nurses or personal care attendants have done away with the frail, suffering, and helpless bodies of the terminally ill, believing that they were doing god’s work.
Women that have killed their children (and these frequent my personal List – something I’ll get to later) usually because they were suffering from a rare condition called Munchausen’s disease by proxy or were, in fact, suffering from extreme post partum depression. And of course, there is the fourth reason. They were not acting alone.
This last one has always filled me with a sort of disgust. Those that were doing the bidding of some other male, usually victims of trauma themselves at the hands of those they serve. Acting out some twisted desire to please a father figure. They could never take life on their own, but that they needed the accompaniment of some other instrument because the sound of their own voice was too weak to stand on its own. There is only one category that I was concerned with – one thing that all my research never seemed to uncover; the consistent (or serial) enactment of aggressive murder and abuse for reasons derived from an uncontrollable or pathological nature…..again, all signs point to mars.

-PART FIVE-

I was six years old when Bishop was born, six years. Nearly double that amount of time had passed since the painful labor which brought him into being, eleven years since I had visited my inner catacomb. I had found another playground for my late night excursions. This one was truly marvelous, a place of very old oaks and even more ancient family crypts. I had never really seen a proper crypt. Here, there were several. Large and luminous buildings full of whole families stretching back to the civil war. The first time I had seen graves from those mysterious Masons and all the artistic symbolism and effigy that accompanied them. There were statues that mirrored Michelangelo’s work, large ominous Angels that wielded flaming swords and bore the fierce and determined faces of warriors rather than the docile images of more modern grave sites. This was a very old cemetery and it’s dead held many secrets. I loved being there, and I loved going there with Bishop. I think a part of me had always believed that Bishop was just a delirious dream that I had conjured in my innocence to protect my frail psyche. But it was here, in this new place, this fresh, hallowed ground that I came to realize how wrong I had been.
I was seventeen now, and quickly becoming a woman, quickly leaving the sanctity of my childhood behind. My role in the world was changing, and so too, Bishop’s role as friend and guardian. It was approaching mentor, teacher of dark wisdoms unearthed from the self same burial mounds as the long deceased and decayed.
I had stifled myself for years, despite the fact that I was well into puberty. It held its roots in what was done to me as a child. And what would have been done to me over and over again if Bishop had not been born. The “boy next door” was not the last. The world was full of “boys next door”. There was another sometime later; this one was a grown man. He had tried his hand at taking what did not belong to him. But Bishop was there to guide, to keep me safe, and something Bishop had done while I was “away”, had scared the man so badly that he never spoke to me again. The man had been a friend of my fathers, and after that day he never seemed able to look daddy in the eye. Always casting a nervous glance towards me when I was around. I was seven and didn’t think much about it. The worst of those times had passed and I had a tendency to block out the events of my earliest years. I had blocked out my sexuality for as long as I possibly could. As if Bishop knew that this would give me away somehow, this behavior would let other people know there was something wrong with me, something depraved and damaged; he’d decided to act. The young woman and the child were officially at war.

I wanted them, their beauty, the raw sexuality that comes from the very young, but I hated every one of them just the same. The child screaming in terror and disbelief, “boys are disgusting”. The woman speaking low and breathless, “Boy’s are…interesting…” As if another body, another voice had been excavated from the graveyard in my head. Bishop didn’t like that voice. He preferred the voice of the child even though she was damaged and would….what, get us caught?
I think that was what it felt like. But this new voice, this sharper voice that sounded like syrup and razors, this one most definitely would get us caught! Boys were interesting to her in the same way cadavers are interesting to pre med students. It was a hungry voice, greedy and hot like adrenaline or smooth like teeth. It was a voice that meant to do whatever it wanted to whomever it wanted and it was just as damaged as the voice of the child that wanted to retreat from the world forever. So Bishop took me aside, as mentor to student. He needed to intervene, and he had done so the night I crept into that new cemetery. The one I came to love so much.
It was called Roselawn, a bed of roses. Fitting, I think that this was where the foundations of my world would shatter to the ground and be rebuilt, resembling those beautiful statues and crypts I had seen for the first time. It was a gamble, it could have backfired and gone badly. Releasing a menacing Queen, a Red Queen full of blood lust and rage. It was the queen’s gambit indeed. But it was up to Bishop to do something.

*CHAPTER TWO*
“Two Very Important Questions”

-PART ONE-

I drank in every image, every nuance around me. I was alive with the shadows that glinted dreamily off every stone corner, every marbled edge of the vast and scattered rows of tombs. The cemetery was a place for death, but it was also - very much alive. There were crows and sparrows, night birds, song birds chittering in the tree tops, flying out and performing their pre dusk dances. The wind swayed the tops of branches in a symphony of noise that was something close to the sound of rushing water, all the leaves chiming in unison. Roselawn cemetery is a beautiful place in the summer, and even more so as the evening creeps into deep night. I was already out late, but I risked the brunt of what would certainly be a lively lecture. Lectures from adults seemed more abundant as of late, the older I got, the more they talked. The more independent I became, the more they tightened the reigns. Bishop did not seem to mind. Bishop was along for the ride. School life was more and more a source for my distress and anxiety, all those hot and densely packed bodies full of blood and life, it almost hurt to go there every day. But this was June, and school was almost out. I had come to Roselawn at Bishop’s insistence.
At first, he’d whispered to me in the standard way he had whispered for years. Never standard speech like one would imagine. But then, how does one imagine a voice in your head to sound? In fiction books, it was always like other voices, normal voices. Bishop was nothing like that. It was like listening to a language that was full of vowels and no consonances; breathy - as if this were all that he could truly manage. But, on that night, his voice was loud and hard. I listened, a little scared and a little intrigued.
How does one describe a life lived with a person constantly at your side? He was so permanently present as to be nearly unnoticeable. Bishop would submerge and rise from the depths of my mind like so much debris from a roiling ocean wave. Was he as helpless inside me as I was without him? We walked for a long while, just taking in the scenery. But, I could feel an anxiety coming from the back of my mind, coming from Bishop.
“Alright, let’s talk,” I said out loud. I said everything out loud when we were at Roselawn, “we can go sight-seeing later.”
There was nothing, no reply. Not even the gentle hiss of his whisper.
“I can feel you in there, Bishop. I know you want to say something! Now, let’s have it out.” I said, preparing myself for another lecture. Finally, his voice did come. It startled me and I halted in my tracks. His voice was no longer soft, not a whisper. It was permanent sounding, like the graves and the dead surrounding us.
“I’ve been noticing your poetry lately.” He said. The smallest shiver went across the nape of my neck.
Before I could respond, he added, “and your drawings.”
“Yes, I’d imagine that you would. I can’t hide anything from you,” I said.
Although I wanted to try, I wanted to slink away somewhere right at that very moment. I knew full well the contents of my recent art work. I had been getting quite good, especially with the anatomical subjects. Those were my favorites, and those were the pieces that I had bundled into a collection beneath my bed to hide from prying eyes.
I had drawn them in a fever. I hadn’t slept well for that previous week (although, truthfully – my sleep had been off for months). All I could do was lie in bed watching the spinning images of… all those parts. I would write sonnets to my new-found muse and finally, the art. I did so in the hopes that I could get them out of my head and finally have some peace. Once I had begun, I was consumed by the accuracy of them and the necessity for realism. I had stood back from the first two paintings I had created in awe. I had taken a few art classes in school without yielding many results. My teachers said that I showed talent, but lacked motivation. Things had certainly changed in that regard. If I could, I would have had them strewn about my whole house as a constant source of inspiration.
One painting featured a boy in the trees. He had been drawn and quartered, the pink gelatinous ribbon of his intestine spilled out from his mutilated abdomen. His wrists were just the right hue and shade of bruised, old bruises that come from many days in restraints. I was positive that the boy had endured long days and nights bound in agony. However, I had found peacefulness in the painting that seemed to calm me. Whatever the boy had done was over. Whatever had been done to him was also over. The painting was a place of rest now as he dangled in “The Hanging Tree”. That had turned out to be the title of the painting. As if this was a place of cessation for many, many more victims beside the hapless young boy.
“A place to hang the soiled and sordid rags of the world out to dry”, I thought.
But, even this was a test. I merely wanted to know how well I could capture the images in my mind and transpose them to paper. The picture that had been taunting me for weeks was the next to follow in the collection, and it was by far my most prized. There was a man, a grown man standing half hidden in the shadows of some endless and ancient wood. Trees of every shape and shade loomed in the foreground while the man stood like a tower of strength and controlled fury. I delicately shaped the lines crossing his exposed chest with a certitude and grace I did not know I was capable of achieving. The texture of his cream colored skin revealed a youth that seemed untarnished by the wear of the world. I drew the hair in syrupy black waves that cascaded down the bare, muscular shoulders. The figure’s long toned limbs hung inert at his sides. Somehow, I had captured the feeling that the figure was coiled, inert yes, but ready to strike at any moment.
He wore strange clothing that I had seen from older periods, movies from the turn of the century. But the torso was exposed; the white gathered shirt was left open with its draw-strings dangling. The gentle pink bud of each nipple caught the light and suggested sweat, as if the figure had just done something difficult. It was the face that suggested everything else. Immense green eyes peered out from beneath soft canopies of luscious brown-black eye lashes. The almond shape of them implied a “gypsy” quality that penetrated the viewer. Their power and perception sent a shiver through me even as I drew them. The mouth was left parted, as if he’d only just caught his breath and the taste of something intoxicating still clung to his lips. I drew the narrow hips with such care, determined to get them exactly as I had seen them in my mind. They held a long swooping, gentle curve that left a touch of androgyny to the figures’ body. Just a speck of his belly could be seen peeking above the waistline of the figures’ trousers. This had taken me days to accomplish. Certain that I would fail; I drew the small soft swell around the navel and the very beginnings of hair leading down to the groin. I had accomplished the task with amazement. What I drew next concerned the scene, the message, the conflict of the piece.
In the furthest point behind my figure, there was a crumpled mass. It had a lumpy sort of quality evoking a feeling that there was something terribly broken or misshapen beneath the heavy canvas covering it. One hand fell out from under the cloth as a miniscule hint that “all was not as it should be”. One speck of blood, thick and arterial clung to my figure’s chin and smeared across to the lobe of his ear. This implied the despicable truth of what lie beneath the hard canvass. Partially concealed in the night scenery of my painting, was a knife. This one was unlike anything I had ever seen before, because I would never forget seeing something like that. It folded to the figures’ hand like a woman might fold herself around her young. It was held with a cherished quality that could not be mistaken. However, there was another feature that was undeniable. The knife was deadly, and made so all the more because of the one who held it. I had titled this painting with a peculiar sense of regret. What use was a title if no one would ever see it? Did I want others to see it, or was it that I wanted just one other to see it? I had named it, “Raison D’être”. The French have such colorful sayings, don’t they? One’s Reason for living, their very being poured fourth into their work – whatever works that would be. I had not yet discovered my Raison D’être, although I was quickly on my way.
After I had drawn my figure, I was completely consumed with the desire to paint others. Countless faces and bodies poured themselves onto my canvasses, sketch books, and drawing pads. However, not a single one held that same look of wild satisfaction and not a single one since had the luxury of holding such a knife. I hadn’t been honest with Bishop about the drawings, but there never seemed to be any protest as I had created them. In fact, there was the softest tickle of mad glee that I thought was Bishop! Had I mistaken that for something else? Now, it felt as though I were keeping the truth from him. The whole thing felt strange, it felt like lying, something that I wasn’t supposed to do, not to Bishop. Perhaps the Red Queen was hiding something after all.
Bishop’s voice rose up inside me again. The same element of solidity had infused his tone. I swear I heard the subtle taste of an accent where there seemed to be none before.
“You know what I mean….” He paused, “they are different. You’re different. The poetry is dark, and the drawings are…well, they’re downright clinical.”
“Is that your word, clinical?”
“Exposing.” Bishop added quickly.
“What, you sound as if you don’t like them.” I said.
His voice came back in a whisper now, more like his old self. “I like them… very much. Everything that you managed to capture with ink and brush…I was sorely tempted…”
I stopped in puzzlement. “Tempted?” I thought. A sensation of pure satisfaction ran through my veins. I had not gauged the exact meaning of his words, I only knew that he had enjoyed them and that was enough.
Bishop added, “I love them in fact, but those things are easy for someone like me to –”.
“What, not people like me?” I had asked sharply.
“They are dangerous, “ he said bluntly.
“To whom? I would never – “ He cut me off and the voice that came back was even more real than it had ever been before. I felt woozy suddenly, as if, to speak this way was draining me.
“You would never YET!” he shouted. I slumped against a grave that stood in the shape of a bench. A long and ornate pallet, as if someone meant its use to be for something more than mere sitting.
“Like an alter,” I thought, “a place to sacrifice.”
The thought came to me so vividly, a young body splayed out with so much blood pouring from savage, jagged wounds. I blinked furiously.
“There! You see, this is what I am talking about.” Bishop would not let it go, he would not relent.
“You see him, the boy next door all neatly crucified and cut to your specifications, don’t you? You want to see him so badly…?” Bishop taunted.
“No.” I shook my head firmly “no, don’t. I don’t want to see him. I don’t want – “ But I was falling even as I had said it. Back to that place, back to that hell from which I had been thrown so many years ago. The violence of those nights and the sweet comfort of my imaginary yard.
“Don’t make me relive this!” I screamed.
Tears were pouring down my face. What had happened to my body while I was away? Did I think I really had escaped it completely, was Bishop the one that had taken my place, felt the pain of the boy’s manhood tearing into me? I couldn’t have been sure, but Bishop was making that fact known to me now. I saw everything and felt it as if it were happening for the first time. Only now, I was a grown woman, not six years old and helpless. The rage and hate inside me swelled to heights I hadn’t known were possible. I turned my self around in the boy’s grip and there was something in my hand. The way I had drawn things in my pictures. A knife, or was it a razor? I slashed out violently and laughed with each strike, every time my blade connected to skin, the rage evaporated and my glee increased. He was showing me something, Bishop was giving me a gift. It was control.
I cut and hacked, plunged the blade deep into the softness of his belly, right down to the hilt. His face was an inch away from my own. I could see the tiny lines that had only begun to grow on his face. The shock and terror in his eyes filled me with a warmth I had never thought was in me to feel. Blood oozed from the corner of his quivering mouth.
“Do you want me to stop?” I asked and twisted the knife to the left. The Boy Next Door screamed in the shrill voice of a child.
“All you have to do is say it, say you want me to stop. Can’t? Just shake your head yes or no.”
I knew my face was terrible and menacing. I knew the look in my eyes was hideous, I knew because it was his look, I knew because it was his face. Something barrowed, something blue. The boy shook his head up and down.
“You want it again, do you? Oh, good.” I whispered and stabbed him again.
The gut bleeds so much, but it won’t kill you right away, it will bleed and it will be painful, but it’s the perfect soft spot if you want to take your time. The boy shook his head violently “no” this time, as if he could correct his mistake.
“No, you don’t want me to stop? Oh…so very good.” I stabbed him again. And then, again. Over and over until his eyes rolled back into his head and the screams issuing fourth from his gaping maw stopped altogether.
It was the same game he had played with me, over and over again. Asking an unanswerable question, dangling the promise of my own escape before me and then cruelly taking it away. I had only done him the favor of returning the experience. I spit on his body and turned. For the very first time since that night in the deep Graveyard, the hidden catacomb, I saw my Bishop’s face. He was smiling.

-PART TWO-

I smiled back, stepping over the body and closing the distance between us. It was a good smile, it was a good face. I wondered then how I had never seen before how beautiful he was. Of course, the last time I had really seen him, I was a child. Now, I was standing at the threshold of my adulthood and seeing him through these new eyes; I noticed many things that I had not seen before.
“Now that was one who deserved what he got.” Bishop spoke softly, his smile only dipping slightly.
I nodded. It was all I could do, I had no words to express what I was feeling.
“But what of these others, the ones in your pictures?” he asked. “Are they deserving?”
The question made me feel uncomfortable, suddenly. And the smile slipped off my face entirely.
“That boy you were with, what was his name…Eric I think? Did he make it into your private collection of art?” He asked.
To me, Bishop sounded almost jealous, almost hurt that someone real would grace the pages of my art. Bishop knew that he had. It wasn’t really a question at all. I didn’t answer, I was watching him too intently and my mind kept going over his face, his remarkable face and the strange impression of familiarity.
His eyes were a lovely shade of green; hair as dark a brown-black as my beloved earth in Roselawn. His skin was pale as if he hadn’t seen the sun in a long time. I had a disturbing thought then, perhaps he hadn’t ever seen the sun – locked away inside my head. But then, it was foolish to think of Bishop as a person, a real person anyway. He was a part of me, my own invention, wasn’t he? Still, I couldn’t shake my desire to pour over his body with my eyes. He wore a white shirt that was left unbuttoned at the top. It was light and gathered at the waist, tucked into a pair of brushed leather breaches. Bishop tucked a straying lock of long hair behind his ears, as if to say, “Let’s be serious now.” I tried to answer him, but stuttered out the words.
“Y-yes. I drew him.” I admitted.
“And how many others, nameless ones, boys you’ve never met, ones you’ve followed too closely or stared at for too long? Were these ones deserving of your introspection?”
He paused and crossed his arms over his chest as if he could feel the penetration of my stare. He didn’t seem to like it. Perhaps he was embarrassed, a feeling that I thought he was incapable of. That I was looking at him like that, I didn’t care for it either. I couldn’t seem to turn it off. The image was one I could stare at forever, but that I had so little control…that bothered me.
Why was he asking me these questions? Hadn’t I already been through enough tonight? I knew he’d been pleased with what I had done. I recalled the almost beautiful, almost hideous smile that had spread across his face like blood spreads through water.
“They ALL deserve it!” I snarled, surprised at myself.
Bishop cast his face down towards his feet. His arms went slack at his sides and he heaved a great breath of defeat.
“Do…I…deserve it?” His voice was just a sliver of its former weight.
I shrank back from the question as if he had slapped me. I couldn’t even contemplate the idea, how awful it was, my Bishop? Never! I would never! And then, the thing he’d said to me earlier, came back so quickly. It played over and over like a record.
I would never YET…

-PART THREE-

These things WERE dangerous. I was beginning to understand. What were the words Bishop had used?
“One who deserved what he got.”
He was deserving, like an award. No, the others didn’t deserve it at all. They had only been caught within my cross-hairs, I had wanted them but could not permit myself to want them. So, I hated them instead.
“It was fear that governed what you drew, was it fear that governed your hand when you killed The Boy Next Door?” He asked.
He knew that it was not, I knew it beyond a single doubt. It was rage, revenge, and maybe even a little justice. There certainly was no desire for the boy next door and absolutely no fear. There was only rage, only the desire to see his blood spill out like a cascade of crimson rain. And then there was the calm, cool feeling of relief – a sickness, bile that had been building inside me for years. Finally, I had let it out.
Bishop looked up. His eyes were filled with torment.
“They ALL deserve it? Do I deserve to be cut from you, torn out and dissected?” he asked.
I stopped him with a raise of my hand. I had thoroughly gotten the point. But I shook my head in protest all the same. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out at first. I just gaped at him, trying not to say what I wanted to say.
“You…are not like them. You’re not a man!” I pleaded. “You’re part of me, you’re not real!”
I had regretted the words even as I was saying them. But, in my mind – they were the truth. It had to be the truth, otherwise it meant that I was sharing space with…one of them. The thought was almost as unbearable as the thought of him being a ghost of myself. But If I was wrong, and he wasn’t just something that I had created, if he was a man, what did that leave me with?
There was no response, only the same tormented look in Bishop’s green eyes, the slight tug on the corners of his quivering mouth. He was guardian, he was Mentor, he was companion, and all this long while I had thought of him as no more than a sliver of a being. Surely he had to know how I felt, how I thought of him. Perhaps there were things after all that remained hidden away from his prying sight. But, how could you hide from yourself? I didn’t like the answer. We stood there, in that place, silently locked in each other’s gaze; mine growing ever more frantic – his growing ever more dark. After what seemed like a very long time, Bishop moved towards me, closing the distance, his hands still at his sides. Only this time, those neat delicate hands were curled into fists. The sharp angular face that had almost seemed feline in nature was dark and menacing.
“Prepare yourself,” he said, “we are leaving now.” Before I could brace myself for the ascent (perhaps he had done this on purpose) I was falling…up. My stomach went spiraling round inside me and I felt the urge to throw the contents of my lunch into the whirling grey skies. The trees and graves and black earth mounds below me grew smaller and smaller, until they were mere dots in a blue-grey blanket of mist. I closed my eyes and my teeth as the mounting feeling of pressure closed in around me.
“Bishop, slow down! Bishop, please, I’m going to be sick.” I said.
He did not slow or stop. He was angry. I could feel the white pulse of his rage washing over me, turning my arms and fingers into slow, thick pieces of ice. My body felt dumb or drugged. I felt the rising urge to scream, but before I could open my mouth, we had stopped. I lay splayed out on the ground, fingers digging into the cool grass. I was panting hard, but I would not lift my eyes to meet Bishop’s. We were back at Roselawn; all the stars had shifted in the sky. Hours had passed and I wondered vaguely how much trouble I would be in when I did finally creep back into the house. At least it was not yet sunrise.
I heard Bishop call. I did not move. I thought that I would look up to find that he was no longer there. The one chance I’d had in almost a decade to simply see him (and touch him); and I had both wasted it and managed to wound him. He called to me again, but still I would not meet his gaze.
“God Damn you! Look at me!” he screamed.
I lifted my eyes slowly. There was no doubt that he was still there, and his voice was still solid; not in my head.
“This can’t be happening, not really.” I thought.
“It is happening, Alex.” He said.
It had occurred to me then that it was the first time he had spoken my name aloud. I liked the way it sounded in his mouth. A shiver went through me as he continued to speak.
“You’ve no idea how difficult this is – “Bishop gestured severely towards his body, as if in disgust. “Keeping this shape, being out here.” He said. “I’ll have to leave before…”
“Before what?” I asked. “You turn back into a pumpkin?” Bishop did not laugh.
He didn’t finish, he only left the words unsaid. There were other pressing matters. Bishop had a reason for all of this, for taking me to Roselawn, for allowing me to relieve myself, even if it was only in my mind.
“Last week, you drew something that was of particular interest to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I did know what he was talking about, even though there were hundreds of drawings that all lay neatly compiled inside a folder beneath my bed. I knew it because it was the strangest one, the darkest one. It was the one that had sparked all the others. In that moment, I realized that before me stood the object of my muse, my “Raison D’être”.
“The knife?” I asked. Bishop nodded. “I just saw it in my head…I liked it. I’ve never seen one quite like it before, does it mean something?” I was leaving out the figure holding the knife, of course.
“Only that you’re growing.” He said. His voice was barely a whisper. His face had gone a lovely shade of deep pink. He was blushing and I couldn’t help but claim responsibility – I wanted it to be me that turned the strength and will of my Bishop to such dissolved states of mortality.
“You’re becoming more and more unusual to me, something I have not seen in you before.” He said.
I quivered with the underlying meaning beneath his words. I didn’t want to get defensive again, but I couldn’t help myself.
“That’s pretty fucking vague.” I snorted. I was so secure in myself that I never saw it coming. When Bishop next spoke, my mouth dropped open and stayed that way for a long time.
“So…” He paused, “you’d rather penetrate them?” He asked. “You’d rather fuck them with a knife than let them fuck you?” Bishop’s voice was the very image of malicious.
He sneered at me. It wasn’t a bad look for him, as if it was a very natural motion. But he had hit the nail on the head exactly. Should I have expected anything less?
“Have I ever told you how much of a pain in the ass it is to have a know-it-all crammed into your skull?” I asked.
I cocked a half smile and a sideways glance, hoping to see that sneer fall away, melting into his smile. He finally relented. I had my Bishop back.
“I can only imagine – I wouldn’t want me lurking around.” He laughed. “I must know something, though.” He began again. “Why is it that you would still be so afraid of something that is so natural to you?”
I shook my head, “How can you even ask me that? Because of…him! Because, they’re…disgusting!”
“Is that truly what you think? Or is it that you disgust yourself?” We were both quiet. I couldn’t answer him.
“These things that you abhor – “
He stopped again, searching for the right words, “Alex, they make you weak! Weakness is the only thing that you should ever find disgusting; weakness that you are unwilling to face or change!” He said.
It seemed for a moment that he wasn’t talking about me anymore. If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve thought he was talking to himself.
“I am NOT weak!” I screamed.
I hated the very idea! I was weak as a child, cowering in the dark, fists pulled tightly to my chest, feet braced against the closet door; braced against that terrible evil imbedded into the flesh of an ordinary human boy. Had I not already proven this fact, erasing the distasteful memory of my helplessness and replacing it with a memory of my hands wrapped around cold Steele?
“You feel nothing? You walk ever closer to the edge of sterile emotion, towards shutting down everything you feel so that you might escape that which you fear!” He shot back.
He was speaking of the new voice, the grown woman’s voice that was creeping, lurking around the edges of my mind. He was right to describe her in that way, cold and indifferent. But, I liked the way she made me feel; powerful and free of fear. However, she was also reckless, seeking only to satisfy her morbid curiosities. She was nearly without emotion at all. Was this to become my new fate, my new voice governing all other voices?
“And just what is so wrong with that? What use are emotions anyway? I’m sick of being afraid, I’m tired of being anxious and…and…” I ran out of steam, and simply stared at my hands. Were these really the hands that killed the Boy Next Door? It seemed like a dream where, perhaps, it was someone else doing everything for me. I suppose that, in a way, it was. Bishop grabbed both my arms and shook me, his fingers biting into the flesh and bruising the muscle beneath. His face loomed before my own, mere inches away, the sneer perfectly returned and alive with malice.
“Weak!” He screamed. “Fear is necessary, fear keeps you alive!”
Bishop slipped a hand beneath the gathered too-large white shirt and produced the knife, the exact knife from my drawings. As if anything else about this night and the comfortable hollows of reality could not yet be tested. It had the same curving spirals of vine-work that caressed its flawless blade. It had the same strange partition in the center like the forked tongue of a snake, no larger than a quarter centimeter in width and stretching from the tip to the hilt. 13 inches hovered at my throat while Bishop stared into my eyes.
“This…was my knife, Alex.” He said my name again, producing the same shiver in me regardless of his blade. A quick wisp of a thought flitted through me, Bishop saying my name in a softer voice, in a compromised voice…I pushed it away hoping he hadn’t noticed.
“Wuh-was your blade?” I had asked. “How did I –“, Bishop interrupted me. I began to grow uneasy with the realization that this grown man with a very sharp knife that should not exist had me dead in his narrows. The eyes were drawn to slits and locked firmly on my face.
“Do you know what the split is for?” He asked calmly. I began to shake beneath his grasp. I had never been so afraid.
“It’s called a blood-let. When you drive the blade into a part of the body that proves…resistant…not like stabbing a man in the gut, dear Alex,” he sneered again.
“The knife can get stuck. It can even break when you try to pull it out.” He paused and I felt the pressure building in my ears as if they would pop, my heart pounding so fast I thought it would burst from my chest and fly away.
Everything was beginning to go a milky sort of white. I struggled not to move, to remain absolutely still. I knew with certainty that the blade held against my throat could kill me, would kill me if I were to fall if even a mere fraction of an inch towards it.
“There is nothing worse than killing one who takes the blade with them to their death and leaves you defenseless. What do you think it feels like, Alex? Driving straight through the ribs, into the chest so that one may cut out another’s heart? You think it’s easy? Do you think the knife goes in like going through butter? It is REAL!” He screamed, and I screamed along with him. That is when the questions started.
“What are you thinking right now?” Bishop asked, though I did not answer.
“Do you feel it yet? The adrenaline pouring through your veins? The quick sick thrill of flight? Or is it…fight? What do you choose, Alex?” He shook me again.
I stuttered into my speech like a car that refused to start, “I-I wuh… w-was…”
“You were what?” He yelled again.
“I was thinking about escape!” I screamed.
“What else?”
“H-huh…how to hide, how to…get the knife away from you. You drop your left arm too low. I was thinking about where I could stab you…and kill you, where I could get stabbed and not die immediately…blinding you so that you couldn’t find me in the dark. I was thinking about the most painful places I could injure you so y-you would be distracted…” I stopped.
“Do you feel anything else?”
I didn’t have to say anything. He knew it as I knew it, the molten rage that had begun to bubble up and out from me. How could he turn on me like this? The betrayal left my senses reeling. I felt the fear slip away like water down a gutter. I was ready, I was prepared to fight. Bishop’s face shifted, his brows gathering up like a purse string, his mouth softening.
“Do it.” He said.
His voice was supple and certain. I moved so quickly that my hands became a blur. I was behind him in seconds. I did not need to look down to know the knife was in my hands. I did not need to check to know my footing was sure. I pressed my face against his ear, “like this?” I had asked. My breath was hot and I could feel him as if the shiver were my own. I could feel him melt against me as if I had taken the tendons from the long flanks of his thighs. I don’t think that even Bishop had expected to react to my desire in the way that he had. But there was something else beside anger guiding my movements. The whole of his being blew into me like a gust of warm wind, opening my eyes to the great beauty of what he was. I rushed him, pushing him hard against an old oak that had been standing in silent vigilance. The breath blew out of him in a groan as his back thumped against its trunk. It was my turn to hold the knife high above my head, and it was my turn to strike. Bishop’s eyes were closed. His face was a strange mix of pleasure and concern.
It was my turn to say, “Look at me.”
His eyes opened, the long dark lashes hovering at half-mast, eyes that were sour and saccharine, yielding and stubborn, and brilliantly green. I wanted to see him acquiesce to my will, I wanted to see him shiver again as he had done before. I was galvanized and consumed by my desire to see his eyes relent to me and me alone, when I knew that they would never surrender for anyone else. I brought the knife down, burying my hate and furry along with it. The blade made a course chopping sound; thrust into the heart of the old oak. I braced my thigh against his own pinning him further. I was young, but I was not weak.
“It was not fear that allowed me to draw you, Bishop.” I said his name the way I had wanted to hear it said…or perhaps it was the way he had wanted me to say it. The only attack I gave next, was my mouth upon his, opening to him, pushing myself into him as if I could be inside him. I wanted desperately to be inside him like the knife could be inside him, as he had been inside me all those years. I wanted to know the hot moist places of his flesh that a knife could know if it had eyes to see or skin to feel, to drive deeply into his body, penetrating him like…a man.

– PART FOUR –

So there it was. The dark heart of my true desire, revealed. It is a cruel trick of fate that some are either born to or develop urges that the biology of their limited forms cannot exact. Some would wish that they could fly; others pray to breathe beneath the waves of some vast depth of ocean. And for all the dreams and wishes that fill the earth with their unyielding wail or groan, not one is fulfilled unless we take what we want from the world. Man builds himself a Plane in order to fly, a capsule of Steele to search the ocean floors or navigates his vessel amongst the stars. My wishes were less tangible and something that held no solution through science or any of her exploits. Simply put, I did not want to take. I did not want to be the receptacle of another’s desire, to passively ingest another’s longing, but to give instead. I wanted to satisfy the pressure inside me, that thing that had no name, that phantom limb that was never there, severed metaphysically before my birth. I wanted to enter, to have another take me into them like the earth receives the rain. I wanted to feel and know the power of the thrust. That was the only word that sufficed, the only description that would do; the Thrust. I thought the words, no longer necessary to say anything aloud.
Bishop could hear me say, “Let me hold my hands inside you like a prayer, let me worship within the pristine white-walled corners of your church, let me pour my devotion into you, all that IT wants…”
“The flesh and all that it wants.” Bishop moaned. The sound of his tangible voice enflamed me.
“The flesh and all that it wants.” I repeated, closing my mouth over his again.
I was clamoring through the gathered white shirt, desperately seeking more skin, exposing more of his body to the cool night air, to the blistering greed of my fingers.
“You touch the center of me with those thoughts, you’re perfectly enchanting words. Give me more of that secret language. Give to me what you…” Bishop paused. Holding back what he wanted to say was almost silly under the circumstances. But, he felt out of control. His forgotten desires found new life in the embrace of his very willing student.
“Give me so precious a gift, that you would share it with no one else.” His plea was all I could stand, and certainly – he had only to ask. I was willing to give him anything in that moment, but that he asked for the one thing that I needed most to give, sent me reeling. His body was magnificent. The definition of the muscle beneath his abdomen was barely contained by his exited skin. It was his belly, the lowest reaches of his torso that I wanted to caress, to taste. It was sinuous and searing, yielding and hot to the touch. I could see the scant trace of hair that only barely crested above the waist line of those leather breaches. I had never so appreciated how low they rode on the hips of my quarry. I had never appreciated the natural scent of a man, my Bishop, as he sweated. The power of his musk, of sweet salt and something else rooted deeply within my senses like a drug. It is the kind of smell that is so luscious, so delectable that you want to fill yourself up with it, drink it in until you’re overflowing with its flavor. My talent for poetry was wasted on others, but not here and not now. Everything I had longed to say, to whisper, found its rightful place with Bishop.
“I need to taste you, please!” I said, while loosening the clothes, crouching and digging my knees firmly into the grass. I pulled the leather breeches down around his feet in one swift motion.
The sight of his bare thighs sent waves of electricity through me, and as I ran my flattened outstretched palms up the length of them, I felt Bishop tremble, felt HIS pleasure mounting within him. I saw his hardened sex before me and pressed my face against his middle, relishing in the softness of his belly. I gave a few tentative kisses to his stomach, kisses that gave way to delicate teeth tracing the skin, giving way to my tongue playing coy and never going too far below his naval. It was becoming more difficult to focus as his thoughts assaulted me. He was aroused to the point of pain, and I felt every sensation as if it were my own body screaming for relief. I grabbed his hips on either side brutally, keeping him from squirming beneath me. I pressed my lips against his erection so slowly I thought he would cry out. I felt a sudden sharp sting on my mouth and could taste blood. Bishop was biting his lip. I could feel the distant throb of his hands as they gripped the bark of the tree tightly enough to break the skin. And somewhere inside all this sensation, I was taken back at the softness of his skin there. The tenderness of the shaft felt like…like…
“Rose petals!” Bishop screamed my words, unable to say them with the same sense of awe as I had.
He was unable to say anything as I took the whole of him into my mouth. Before I could scarcely blink, he was fighting the need to push himself into me, he was fighting the ever increasing blend of our minds, and fighting against something else that I couldn’t explain. I could almost see it, almost touch it.
There was this ball of blackness that swirled like solid smoke inside the heart of his being. Every time I came close enough to touch it, it would escape me. I pulled him by the hips hard, guiding him into me, forcing him to do what he would not. I wanted to feel the thrust, needed to feel it. He let out a great gasp and I could feel his will dissolve. The thing inside him that he kept so guarded was within my grasp, like a door that Bishop kept locked. As my mind reached towards the vulnerable part with a scant force of will and immeasurable curiosity, Bishop cried out! His voice echoed through the graveyard.
“No! Alex, you must not!” He cried.
But the tender press of my mind’s fingertips had already loosed their touch around the elusive substance. Like black strands of silken hair, it ebbed between my thoughts’ touch. It was too late. Bishop rocketed his corporeal form against my mouth. The hot, sour and sweet liquid filled my senses before I knew what was happening. His climax tore at my mind and my body as if it were my own. So strange that I should feel it, this sensation that was too intense for words, but one that seemed to fit me like a glove, like a neatly tailored suit that I had been born to wear. My eyes shut tight to the waves of pleasure racing though my/his body.
Only seconds had passed before my eyes were violently forced open with the echoes of my own voice screaming into the night.

-Part Five-

Two pure blue electric tentacles shot from behind Bishop’s body, each tipped with a vicious spear that could have been an implement of torture or biology, like a bone-claw or primeval tooth. They had come alive, come from that swirling mass inside of us/him. They went for flesh, for real flesh. They went for me!
What would the onlooker see; the careless wayward soul who just happened upon Bishop and I while in the grip of our post-coitus passions? What would the night watchman glimpse, the grave-digger, in the aftermath of our strange embrace? Would they see two people writhing against one another amidst the marble tombs and epitaphs of the dearly departed? Would they see instead, a crazed woman spinning in agony, alone and insane? I could be sure of neither, until I had touched the dark thing inside Bishops’ sealed and mysterious heart. It was only this that made me certain Bishop was not simply some fractured vessel for my twisted vengeful desires. He was not a frail and lifeless spirit that took refuge in the head of a 17 year old girl, either. And above all, he was absolutely standing before me in the same flesh and bone that cages us all. He was just as real as anything.
But, was he human?
This would be a question that the casual observer would take to ponder. Hell, it was one that had certainly crossed my mind.
Was I dying…?
Was he Human…?
Two very important questions.

*CHAPTER THREE*
“The Man in the Moon”

-Part One-

“His Bones I’ll break and his Dog I’ll shake – and they’ll howl no Demon louder. So, it’s swell that we sing Bonnie Boys, Bonnie Mad Boys, Bedlam Boys are bonnie, for they all go bare and they live in the air and they want no drink nor money…”

I could see the red sliver of the crescent moon hanging in the sky like a slick crimson grin. I could see the contrast of those blue tentacles writhing in excitement as they sluiced into something soft, something warm and alive. It was pain, like a gun shot. Pain that one knows should hurt a lot more than it does at the time. The shock and panic of every cell cries out with a noise so loud that it drowns out normal communication. I’m sure that it was similar to the drugged pangs of a dying animal in a spider’s web; too intoxicated with venom to know that it has become something’s meal. I merely hovered in between the knowledge of pain and the reality of its burning touch. I knew that the cords had punctured my spine and the other had a firm grip in my liver. Thoughts that were as alien to me as insects’ wings began to flutter (first feebly, and then aggressive) through the failing half started thoughts of my own. It was easy for Bishop’s mind to take over. Although, I wasn’t entirely sure it was him. It was something so awful and loathsome, so unlike anything I had ever known.
“Delicious, consume her! Alive, we want, the plasma, the bile. Milk – the red cells…ah, her suffering.”
The words were an assault completely unto themselves. But, something was happening that neither of us had been able to foresee. That thing inside my Bishop that I had touched despite his warnings offered a derangement that I had never known. The desire to consume was next to intolerable. It was like a life of starvation and drought. The ability to feel Bishop as if he were my own body had jilted to life again like a very large…and now very pissed off machine. Where the tentacles had once been feeding from my liver, taking the bitter blood, the piss and filth of my body’s filters – and the warm psychotic fluids of my spine, now the flow was beginning to shift.
“Listen to me…Alex, think of the moon, the Red Sliver moon. A door that swings both ways, a river that runs upstream…” Bishop was panting, barely able to make the words escape the clenched teeth of his mouth.

His eyes rolled in perpetual white, as if caught in the massive thrall of a seizure. I had the meaning instantly, and the thing inside me that could reach for Bishops’ dark heart learned this new trick with appalling speed. Two red cords burst from me, from where exactly I could not see. I was devouring myself with sick delight and fighting for my life all at once. I could barely see the moon, but it was the thing that I focused on as if my life depended on it. Somehow, I was certain that it was.

-Part Two-

Inside, a war was raging. Bishop was not what he had appeared to be. But, for his part he refused to become the thing that he once was and certainly, not with Alex. She was his ward, after all. But had she not been more than that to him? She was so like him in ways that he had never hoped. The promise that was made to Bishop seemed as if it might actually be fulfilled. The contract might come to fruition. If he could only control this thing inside himself! Oh, but Alex had poured fuel over the fire, hadn’t she.
He wanted her to rip “it” out of him, to hold the writhing beast of his desires in the cold moonlight. He wanted her to breathe new life into it as if he could have his old existence back again. And yet, he cowered at the premise that she might - that she could. His subsistence had been devoid of real meat, real heat, real life and all the hot sticky things that pulse and throb, things that bleed and suffer, things that devour and consume in complete sinful repletion, for so very long. That was the past now. It was something that Bishop had thought lost to him forever.
“Perhaps, in due time,” He’d been told.
Wasn’t that the deal, if he could just wait, bide his time while riding around in the flesh-box?
He had tried, had been complacent and silent for six years – suffering the boredom of childhood development. Occasionally, Bishop allowed himself the amusement of humanities’ bumbling progression, and surprised himself when he shared the simple awe and wonder of discovery with the child-thing. As if this were an experience he had never undergone himself, as if he had been thrown into the world fully formed. However, he never betrayed his place inside the flesh-box. He was as quiet as the dead, as the saying goes.
But, damn it! There were people who deserved it, weren’t there? People like the Boy Next Door. Bishop felt the fear of the child-thing spread through the remnants of his shattered existence like a poison. Was he allowed to do anything? Could he do anything even if he wanted to? The rules weren’t exactly clear. In fact, Bishop wasn’t even sure that there were any rules. Maybe there were only physical limits that had nothing to do with anything ethereal.

Night after night Bishop had felt the child-thing. There was something familiar about that fear. Something in the way one predator recognizes another predator for what they are. Normally, two creatures that stalk the night will pass one another. Even those creatures that might share the same hunting grounds…because the game is abundant, isn’t it? Enough to feed everyone’s particular tastes. But, something that has its eye on HIS meal…that was a different story. At least, this had been the way Bishop had phrased it, the way he carefully justified the mystery of his own actions to himself. The fact was, it was his fear now, and he’d had enough. It was his child-thing and his possession would not be treated that way. So, he simply woke up. It had made him feel far more substantial than he’d been up until that point.
Then, there was the call. The pleading call down into the depths of the child-thing’s very soul. Bishop had believed that all the long while, he was living inside the flesh-box. But, without her invitation, without the acceptance and the gesture

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