First published in Ethereal Nightmares: The Complete Trilogy.
Paying the Midnight Muse
All I need is a sentence. One true sentence to start with. After I establish that true sentence, I’m free to bleed all over the page. My life, everything I am, it all begins with one true sentence. I’m nothing without my words, but they come at a steep price. They require more blood than I have to spill. So I must harvest it elsewhere.
In this crazy thing we call life, I’ve forgotten more than I remember, but I’ll never forget the first time I paid the Muse. It was a sickly cold night. Drizzle gave the streets a soapy sheen that reflected car lights like images in a funhouse mirror. Looking at it gave me a damn headache. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to put up with it for long. The blood bank opened at midnight, and its name was Candy.
That night, like clockwork, Candy had turned the corner of Maiden and Cross and stepped beneath the dull orange glow of her preferred street light. This was the closest a guy could get to a Red Light District in this shitty town; an underweight ex-stripper on the wrong side of 40 selling her ass for a pack of menthols and a wad of sweaty Hamiltons. It’s enough to make a man spew.
Now don’t go thinking I’m one of those creeps who stalk hookers and shit. Far from it. You see, I have insomnia. Bad. Been like that since I got back from Afghanistan. It’s why I started writing. Therapist said it would help. Ha! Sure as shit didn’t help Candy. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
So like I said, I’m not some creep. It’s just, the insomnia got so bad I couldn’t write anymore. Made it so I couldn’t focus; the words got all jumbled up on the page. When I took those pills the doc gave me, well, then I couldn’t even find the words to jumble up in the first place. That’s when I got into the habit of walking at night.
I don’t like loud noises, cars, or people. All of that shit makes me anxious. So I walk at night. Clears my head and lets me think about something other than—well, it clears my head anyway.
It was during one of those night walks when I first saw Candy on the job. Didn’t think much of it until I saw her the next night. Then the next. And then every damn night after that for a month. She was always standing under the same streetlight and smoking the same stinking cigarettes. God, did I hate seeing her there! A man goes and fights for his country, and when he returns, what does he see? Women can only pay their rent by selling their bodies to any slob with a few bucks and a semi-hard dick. First world country my ass!
I won’t lie to you. There was something about seeing Candy every night—even if it was only in passing—that made me feel a little better about myself. I mean, my head’s pretty fucked up. Enough that the government sees fit to send me a check every month. But it ain’t all bad. At least I’m not the one under that damn streetlight every night, rain or shine, seven Godforsaken days a week. Can you imagine? No, sir, I’ll take the life of a failed writer with a few loose wires in the circuitry any day.
Sometimes I would nod at her when I walked by. I could tell she was a bit wary of me—honestly, I couldn’t blame her—but she’d always nod back. It wasn’t much, but I felt like there was some sort of kinship between us. After all, life had chewed us both up. Only, it spit her out while it swallowed and then shit me out the dirty end. Or vice versa, depending on how you view the kind of life she was living. Doesn’t matter, you get what I’m saying.
Back to the night in question, I’d walked my normal route through town. I hadn’t written a single word in over two months and I was feeling pretty damn lousy about it. Sure enough, midnight rolled around, and who turned the corner? You guessed it! Our girl, Candy. Congratulations! You’ve been paying attention. You know what you win? A big ol’ box of fuck all!
I was a good 30 yards away when I spotted her. I can’t say if it was subconscious or deliberate, but I seemed to always be near that streetlight right when Candy was clocking in for the night. Come to think of it, midnight is pretty late to start slingin’ tail. She probably worked a busier corner most of the evening and then migrated to that spot to pull some late-night tricks. That makes sense. Ha! Can’t believe I never thought of that until now. Oh well, it’s not important. I saw her the last night she breathed in this foul city air. That’s where this part of the story is going, okay.
Poor Ms. Candy—you know, I never told you how I learned her name. Fucking brilliant! Here I am telling you how I’m no creep stalker, yet I know the name of a woman I’d never spoken to a day in my life. Shit the bed, ain’t I just a goddamn peach? Ha! Listen, everything will make sense in a minute.
So as I was saying, I spotted our dear Cinderella right as the clock struck midnight. What clock? Some clock. Any clock, who gives a shit? Zip your lips and stop asking so many stupid ass questions. It was midnight, and Candy was open for business. That’s all you need to know. And this night was no different than any other, or at least it wouldn’t have been if it wasn’t for what had happened next.
Remember how I said the weather was shitty? Like everything was all cold and wet? Well, the asphalt might as well have been a damn mirror; every light bounced off it. I hadn’t even made it close enough to Candy to see that clown makeup she caked on every night when the screeching of bald rubber tore through the city. Before I could react, an old Chevy Impala squealed around the bend and plowed right into the fucking light pole. It took nearly a minute for the droning horn to overtake the sound the crash had left in my ears.
A plume of steam or smoke or both erupted from the car’s crumpled hood. When I squinted and looked real hard, I noticed a red mist in the dim headlights. It was a Goddamn horror show!
I’m no hero. Not even fucking close. But I’ll tell you this: as soon as I realized what had happened, I ran my gimpy ass over there as fast as these rusty knees would let me. Which unfortunately for our girl, wasn’t fast enough, because I didn’t catch the license plate. I’d only made it halfway to the scene when the car suddenly bucked and jerked in reverse, pulling free of the bent light pole it had so recently kissed. I have no idea how the driver managed it, but they were able to punch the accelerator and get the fuck out of town, spraying oil and God knows what else in their wake. It was like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon.
When I reached the corner, I was hacking up a lung; a nasty side effect from working the burn pits in the fucking desert. As bad as I felt, it got a lot worse when I laid my eyes on Candy.
I’ve seen my share of carnage: exit wounds the size of baseballs, blown-off limbs, the aftermath of a misinformed drone strike on a kid’s birthday party, but few things haunt my dreams like the sight of that poor girl mangled around that damn streetlight. The fucking car had bent her the wrong way around the pole like a fleshy horseshoe. One of her legs, broken so bad it looked more like the bits of a freshly cracked lobster claw, was pinned between the back of her neck and the pole. I’d never seen anything so terrible.
If you haven’t already guessed, there wasn’t anything I could do for her. A body that broken, shit, who would even want to live? But she was alive. Goddam it all to Hell, she was alive. For a little bit.
I’d assumed she died on impact. For the briefest moment, I felt relieved. Then I heard the gurgling. Sweet Jesus, I heard the gurgling.
I crouched down, and as gently as I could, I pulled her leg free from behind her head. The sickening snaps as I did so nearly made me hurl. If there was one saving grace, it was that she’d been paralyzed by the impact and didn’t feel anything.
As soon as her leg was free, her body dropped down, and the side of her head bounced off the concrete. I shuddered at the sound, but she didn’t react. Then we locked eyes.
“Are you okay?”
I know, I know, what a stupid thing to ask. Obviously, she was as far from okay as most Catholic priests are from unmolested kids. But at the moment, it was the only thing I could think to say.
She blinked a few slow, unfocused times. Then, to my surprise, she spoke. “Who are …” Her faint voice trailed off for a moment. There was a rattle in her lungs, and every time she breathed out, it sounded like a car tire hissing air through a puncture. “I’m dying,” she wheezed.
Not my proudest moment, but I nodded in agreement. “Yeah.”
“Candy,” she paused, collecting whatever air she could in her popped-balloon lungs, “will make you feel,” she smiled a bloody, shattered-toothed smile, “dandy.”
Her smile was like a homemade cherry pie that someone fucked with a jackhammer. How her facial muscles were still able to work, I’ll never know.
“What?” I said. It was the only way I could think to respond.
“My name.” She closed her eyes. I realized the growing pool of blood on the ground was pouring out of her ears. “Is Candy.”
That was it. Her last words. Her last breath. Her last thoughts—and my first night as a real writer.
I didn’t bother calling for an ambulance. Not that I carry my phone with me anyway, but I figured calling wouldn’t have helped. It’s not like they could bring her back from the dead. I’m sure some concerned citizens in one of the nearby apartments called the cops after they heard the car crash. Regardless, sticking around would’ve only made my life harder. So I made like Candy on a pole and split.
This’ll sound strange, but the smell from the mixture of burnt motor oil, antifreeze, blood, and rainwater had been intoxicating. When I got back to my apartment that night, I sat right down and wrote one true sentence. Then I wrote another; and another; and then another; throughout the early morning hours until the sun came up and my eyes grew too heavy to see. I was high on death, and the blood I’d smelled changed me, invigorated me. That was when I learned blood was the currency required to receive the Muse. Dark, crimson blood.
When I woke up that afternoon, the hangover from the previous night’s high still lingered. Acidic bile soured the back of my throat and my head throbbed like a freshly ejaculated cock. It wasn’t the worst I’d ever felt, but I sure as shit wasn’t in the mood to sing any show tunes. I did, however, after downing a pot of black coffee and force-feeding myself some overcooked eggs, sat down at my desk and read over the work I’d written. It was brilliant. The best story I’d ever put to paper. There was just one problem: I couldn’t finish it.
Initially, I thought I’d depleted all of my creativity during that long writing session. Makes sense. Creative output is like working a muscle in the gym. Once the muscle has been exhausted, you need substantial rest before working it out again. Especially when you haven’t seen the inside of a gym for a long ass time, or in my case, hadn’t bled a single drop of ink on a page in months.
After a few days had crawled by and I hadn’t been able to add a single sentence to my story, I realized I’d fallen right back into my writing slump. Why, though? I’d been so focused, so obsessed with the work that night. How could the Muse abandon me after only one writing session?
That’s when it dawned on me. I needed more blood. Of course! That had to be it. I hadn’t been able to write until I saw that poor woman twisted up into a bloody pretzel. After seeing that, the words flowed like Guinness in a cheap Irish pub.
Hearing this, you must think I’m sick in the head. The old boy can only write after witnessing the flame of light extinguished in an innocent person’s eyes. Look, I get it. It ain’t normal. I might be a few pawns short of a full chess set, but I’m not crazy. Death shouldn’t inspire a man to write the best work of his life. But ask yourself this, who’s the real sicko here? Me, or the Muse? After all, the Muse is the one who doesn’t show up without a blood sacrifice. Trust me, if I could write without anyone getting hurt, I’d be more than happy to lock myself in my apartment and scribble away until the Earth burns to ash. It’s just, well, that’s not how things turned out.
A few days after Candy’s death, there was a small write-up in the paper. No, they didn’t give more than a passing fuck about her. I did find out her real name was Candace, if that matters—but the article, or two paragraphs, really—mainly focused on the busted light pole. Apparently, the city’s top priority was finding the perpetrator so they could pay for the damages. To Hell with the dead hooker. You know, because hookers aren’t real people. At least not to the asshats in government. They probably treated her the same way they would a stray cat that had been run over by a garbage truck. Bag up the body and when no one’s looking, toss that shit in a dumpster.
I bring up the newspaper piece because once I read it, which came after several days of staring dejectedly at the blank lines in my notebook, I managed to knock out a small chunk of writing. The memory of Candy’s accident was enough for the Muse to give me a quick hit. Like when a drug dealer feels sorry for a client and sells them a stamp bag of heroin below cost. But like the dealer selling to the junkie, I knew the Muse wouldn’t provide service for anything less than full price next time. I had to come back with the proper payment, or I could kiss my sorry-ass writing dreams goodbye.
Three whole weeks went by without me being able to write a single word. My insomnia was as bad as ever, and with winter arriving early, my late-night walks became a lot less frequent. Which means I spent most nights at my desk tormented by my unfinished story. Its beautiful prose and wonderful descriptions mocked me. The story said, “You didn’t write this. The Muse did.”
It’s true. All I did was transcribe what the Muse had told me. Any idiot could do that, but it doesn’t matter. The words, as far as anyone else would be concerned, were mine. Nobody could prove that I didn’t come up with them. Besides, who would care enough to look into it anyway?
Exactly one month after Candy’s death, something incredible happened. The city, in the middle of a cold snap, had a Goddam blackout. And because some no-good slumlord owns my building, the complex doesn’t have any backup generators to run the electric heating system. It only took a few hours, even after covering my onion-skin-thin windows with blankets, for the white plumes of frosted breath to show inside my apartment.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the Afghan mountains, so if I’m telling you my apartment was colder than a mortician’s nipples, I mean it. Even after putting on every stitch of clothing I could scrounge up, I was still freezing my gonads off. And that’s while the sun was still out!
I forget exactly when it was that they announced a state of emergency; I never charge my phone, so it’s perpetually dead, but I could hear the neighbor’s phone blaring the emergency broadcast through the walls. Must have been sometime after six in the evening. I know it was already dark. Anyway, I’m going somewhere with this. Don’t you worry!
It was cold enough to entice Dante to walk across my back and—what? You never read The Divine Comedy? It doesn’t matter. It was real fucking cold. Cold enough that frostbite was becoming an actual concern. And in case you’re wondering, yes, many of the pipes in the building froze and eventually burst. It was a real Goddamn mess. But that’s not the important part of this chilling tale. Ha! See what I did there? No, what I’m telling you now is about the second time I paid the Muse. This time, I had a direct hand in acquiring the currency.
The power came back on around 8:30 that night. Good thing too, because the tenants were in upheaval: I heard a lot of commotion in the hallways and the distinct smell of burning garbage permeated the air. With the electricity’s return, things calmed down immediately. Most of the tenants, the ones who hadn’t abandoned the building for a warm convenience store with a working generator or a relative’s place on the still functioning side of the city, were probably huddled around their heaters as soon as they realized the system was working again. As for me, I decided to lie down on the couch and get some sleep. Yeah, yeah, I know. Me, going to sleep before midnight? But trust me when I say this, nearly freezing to death has a way of making a man as tired as, well, the dead.
I slept one of those ugly, drooling, wonderful sleeps that are usually reserved for exhausted toddlers and the elderly. I guess you can add relapsed insomniacs to that list, too. Because I was out cold. Ha! Okay, that’s it for the puns.
When I woke up, the room was dark and the air was crisp. For a few seconds, I thought maybe the power had gone out again while I was asleep, but then I heard the heater humming. The room glowed green—which turned out to be the microwave clock showing midnight—and after rubbing the sleep from my bleary eyes, I realized I wasn’t alone.
Pale moonlight poured in through an open window on the other side of the room. There was a faint rattle of wind blowing through the fire escape’s metal slats. Through the bedroom door, a shadowy figure stood at my dresser, rummaging through my drawers as silently as a phantom mist. Slowly, and even quieter than the intruder, I reached underneath the coffee table and pulled free the Bowie knife I’d taped there for this exact kind of situation. I moved so stealthily that the intruder didn’t notice me slip into the bedroom and creep up right behind them with the knife pointed half an inch from their jugular.
The intruder had a lithe, feminine figure, but when I inhaled, I detected the unmistakable scent of a man’s musk. With its peppery and fresh citrus notes, it might have been a cologne I’d worn when I was younger. Back when I still cared about such things.
“Don’t move or I’ll jam this into your fucking neck,” I said, pressing the knife point against the intruder’s soft flesh.
With a sharp exhale, they stiffened up and didn’t dare move.
I pushed the knife a little harder and felt the skin give some. The intruder let out a small gasp, and their body began trembling.
“Who are you and what the fuck are you doing in my house?” I said.
They only managed a panicked stutter when a sudden horn honk outside snatched our attention. It happened so quickly that I couldn’t suppress the urge to turn my head toward the window. It was only for a split second, but when I looked back, the intruder had moved and was in the process of pivoting out of my grasp. The light from the passing car flashed through the window and sent a beam arcing across the ceiling and down the wall. It glinted off something metal in the intruder’s hand. As fast as the light had entered the room, it disappeared into the shadows and left us scrambling in the dark. Adrenaline pumped through my veins, and my brain screamed, “Knife!” I reacted without thought, just like I’d been trained to do.
Stabbing a person in the neck feels a lot like pushing a knife into a hollow melon. The rind gives enough resistance to force your strength into play, but it immediately gives way, and then the blade slides straight in until the hilt thumps unexpectedly. It takes less than a second. Unlike the melon, there’s a nasty scraping and gurgling sound that follows the impact. Of course, the ensuing stickiness is also different from that of a melon; it’s more viscous.
As soon as I yanked the knife free with a sickening slurp, hot blood sprayed all over my face and chest. After a few moments of holding their thrashing body still, the intruder slumped into my arms. They weighed less than 100 lbs. This presented me with the startling realization that I was possibly dealing with the corpse of a young teenager.
Strangely, my only thought was that I didn’t want to turn on the light. I didn’t want to see the face of the person I’d just killed, and I didn’t want to see the mess I was going to have to clean up. What rotten fucking luck!
I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and stared at the black shape on the floor in front of my dresser. My lips tasted of pennies, and a metallic tang pervaded the air. Unseen, a giant mill churned the contents of my stomach until I was sure I’d hurl. Not the best night.
When I couldn’t take the smell of coagulating blood anymore, I finally mustered up the nerve to flick the light on. As soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t.
It was a fucking mess alright. Who knew such a petite body could hold so much blood? Seriously, there was no way I’d be able to clean it all up. I contemplated calling the cops. I mean, I was just defending my home, right? But here’s the thing. Well, two things. One, it wasn’t a teenager. The brutal, knife-wielding home invader turned out to be a 90-lb cancer patient. I could tell because she, a young woman of maybe 25, wore a beanie to cover her patchy, semi-bald head. She also swam in her clothes and wore heavy cologne to mask that funky, metallic chemical smell from the chemo. As soon as her blood got on me, I recognized that smell right away. It was the same smell my mom emanated before she died. Two, and this is the important thing, that knife I thought I’d seen in her hand, turned out to be a fucking silver cross. When I pushed the Bowie against her neck, I’d inadvertently snapped her necklace chain, and she caught the cross. Probably out of reflex.
So there I was, covered in blood and standing over a still-warm body with no idea what to do next. That’s when the strangest sensation washed over me: the irresistible urge to write.
I’m a fucked up individual. I’ll be the first to admit it. Yet even I know sitting down to write while a blood-soaked corpse cools in the other room is some next-level shit. But I couldn’t do anything about it! I’d inadvertently paid the Muse and got my fix before I could gather my wits. Before I knew what was what, I was tearing through my story like a madman. By 7 AM, the story was finished—blood-smeared pages and all—and I knew it would change my life. It was going to be my ticket to stardom!
I did call the cops that morning, and though they were rightly suspicious about what had occurred in my apartment, they ultimately dropped the case against me. Of course, they looked at me like I was a monster, but I had the right to defend my home. It also helped that I’m a veteran, and the woman had recently been caught two other times breaking into houses to steal money and food. Cops called it bad luck on her part. “Broke into the wrong guy’s place.”
One of the detectives was adamant about me knowing every single fucking detail of the girl’s miserable life. As it turns out, the young woman, Angela, was homeless. Well, had recently become homeless. Poor thing had gotten sick, real sick. Stage four breast cancer. Her job shit-canned her soon after the diagnosis, and her life spiraled out of control. Learning all that made me feel like a huge hunk of garbage. Though she was going to die anyway. At least a knife in the neck was quicker than months of wasting away to nothing. Still, I felt pretty rotten about what had happened. The Muse, on the other hand, had found a new favorite customer that night. And that literary stardom I so desperately craved? Well, let’s say it required many more payments.
You get used to killing. In the beginning, it makes you physically ill—at least if you’re somewhat sane—but like anything else, if you do it enough, it loses its edge. It becomes another mundane part of your life. If you work at it, like me, you get pretty damn good. Not to brag, but seeing as how I’m one of the most celebrated authors alive, it’s pretty obvious how good I am. Few authors in history have been able to pay the Muse as many times as I have.
Candy and Angela got me the initial story that kicked everything off. Won a damn Nebula Award for it. That put me on a rocket to the fucking moon!
I learned that paying the Muse directly garners better results. Candy was an indirect payment—which is why I only knocked out half of that first story—and Angela was more or less accidental, but it scored me enough to finish the job. After them, I took a more direct approach. Hookers and drug addicts mostly. Those netted me a few award-winning short story collections, but it wasn’t until one night when I stumbled upon a teenage girl in a park—probably a runaway—that I learned the most valuable rule of this crazy game: innocence pays the best.
I now have 13 best-selling novels to my name. Innocence wrote those books. The words, penned in blood. I know it was wrong to do the things that I’ve done, but isn’t great art more valuable than a few meaningless lives? If you’ve read my work, I think you’ll figure out the answer pretty quickly. 100 years from now, people won’t care about those girls. What they will remember is my work. What they will remember is the name of one of the world’s greatest authors. That name is—
“Oscar Francis Hyde. Age 37. Serial Killer. Suffers from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, violent outbursts, and delusions of grandeur. He’s also a pathological liar and on more than one occasion, has been caught masquerading as a war veteran.”
Standing behind a two-way mirror, a doctor wearing a white lab coat is talking to a young journalist. On the other side of the mirror, a disheveled man wearing gray sweats stares at his reflection and mumbles incessantly to himself.
“How long has he been institutionalized?”
“On and off for the past 15 years. This has been his longest stretch at a little over six years.”
“Does he always talk to himself like that?”
“Depends. Some days are worse than others. The medications he’s on haven’t been working lately, and we can’t up the doses anymore.”
“So he’s getting worse?” The journalist studies the madman’s features through the glass.
The doctor nods gravely. “Unfortunately. Over the past six months, he has convinced himself that he’s a famous writer. He claims that his success can be attributed to the murders of those innocent women.”
“Paying the Muse. That’s what he calls it, right?”
“Correct.” The doctor glances at his watch. The big hand inches over to six p.m. “We have to wrap this up.”
“Sure thing.” The journalist closes the notebook he’s been writing in. “Just one more question if you don’t mind?”
The doctor smiles. “Yes?”
“Has Oscar actually written anything? You know, stories or?”
The doctor shakes his head. “Oscar is functionally illiterate. He can barely sign his own name.”
“Really?”
“Surprising, I know. He has a vivid imagination and an unusually high vocabulary, but that seems to stem from a lifetime of watching movies and television. Nothing more.”
“Interesting.”
On the other side of the glass, the man dressed in gray continues mumbling to himself. “Fame isn’t cheap. Neither is the Muse. So if I had to do it all over again, yeah, I would kill those girls. Ha! Who wouldn’t? Small price to pay.” His voice trails off. “Small price to pay.”
