Don’t Talk to Strangers
At the age of sixteen, he felt that a village hall disco was rather beneath him, but curiosity had won out in the end. His family had only moved into the area a few months ago, and he still had a natural impulse to be drawn to such social gatherings, especially as there would be girls there. And while he was good-looking enough to have already gained the attention of several girls at his school, he was ready to extend the scope of possibilities in the area in which he was now living.
The disco had been underway for a while – and a couple of girls he didn’t recognise had already given him interested looks – before he noticed her. She was dancing on her own, towards one corner of the hall, away from the loudspeakers and the lights. She was lovely; long black hair down past her waist, swirling around her as she moved, while her skirt… her skirt was deep red, coming to just above the knee, but it seemed to change colour as she danced; he realised that it was pleated, and the pleats were orange-coloured – as she span round it flared out, changing its colour by stages as it rose and fell. It did more than that; it showed tantalising glimpses of her slender thighs for brief, heart-clutching moments before it descended again, leaving him – and no doubt others – dry-mouthed in anticipation. Her slender legs were bare; she only wore a pair of flimsy sandals with thin, gold-coloured straps, the heels high enough to emphasise her youthful elegance but not too high to hinder her dancing. And her short-sleeved top… not only did it fail to meet her skirt by a good inch, revealing a tantalising strip of creamy-white skin at her slim waist, but it was stretched so tightly across her breasts that it was practically moulded around them, leaving very little to his fevered imagination. It complemented her skirt – it was tie-dyed; flame-orange in colour, with long vertical streaks and splashes of crimson in a near-random pattern.
Mesmerised by the sight of her, he moved round the walls of the hall until he was as close to her as he could get. Yes, her face matched the rest of her: she was extraordinarily pretty, with a pale, heart-shaped face, large eyes, and delicate features. Her age was hard to judge: her breasts bore evidence to her maturity, while her figure still retained some trace of the slenderness of a child. Fourteen or fifteen, perhaps? Certainly no older than that. He didn’t recognise her from school, though that was hardly surprising given the relatively short time he’d been living there. Considering her apparent age it was quite possible that this was the first time she’d been out for an evening.
The music faded momentarily and the next track began, but the girl had evidently decided to take a break, and stepped to the edge of the floor, only a pace or two away from him. Then, as if aware of his gaze, she glanced up at him and smiled. His chest didn’t merely tighten; his heart felt as if it had been clamped in a vice. Any thought of a complimentary remark was paralysed half-formed. She had already walked past him to the open main doors before he got his brain working again. Then he turned and, with forced casualness, followed her, stepping out into the relative quiet of the car park.
She was there, standing just to the side of the doors, leaning her shoulders against the wall of the building, her chest pushed slightly forward. It was a rewarding sight.
Noticing him, she turned and smiled again. ‘I was really hot in there,’ she explained. ‘I wanted to get out into the cool air for a bit.’
He had to clear his throat before he answered. ‘Yes,’ he managed. ‘You w… it was, wasn’t it.’ God, he ought to be able to think of something better than that. At sixteen he felt he should be able to be the one taking control. He’d never had any trouble with girls in the past. As he struggled to think what to say when a number of other people came out, all of around their age; several he knew from school. As the group walked past them, seeming to make a point of ignoring the girl, her smile faded. She watched them with almost wistful longing as they headed off across the car park and into the darkness.
His curiosity aroused, he dropped the chat-up line he had been planning. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked. ‘Friends not talking to you or something?’
‘Something like that,’ she said, forcing a smile. It didn’t quite work, and she must have realised it, for she went on, ‘I don’t have any friends. The others always just ignore me. They have done since… well…’ she petered out.
‘I can’t believe that,’ he said with genuine surprise. ‘A pretty girl like you – you must have at least some friends.’
‘Well,’ she admitted, lowering her eyes sadly, ‘I have had some, but they always lose interest in me before long, and don’t want to know me anymore.’
Against his baser instincts he found himself feeling sorry for her. People could be extremely cruel to those who didn’t fit in. Someone like this girl, rather dreamy and sentimental, would be an easy target for malicious teenagers like that.
He pulled himself together with a start. What was he thinking of? Pity? What was wrong with him? He continued his interrupted thread.
‘Well then,’ he said gently, adopting a brotherly tone as he cautiously planned his approach. ‘You can treat me as a friend. Do you want to have a chat with me? We can have a sit down in the park for a bit, away from the others.’ The park was a grassed area beside and behind the hall, fringed with trees. He tried to sound casual, but he awaited her reaction with almost a sense of anticipation which almost hurt.
To his intense relief her face lit up. ‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ she beamed happily. She suddenly slipped her hand into his and held on to it, moving closer to him, as if she was afraid he’d retract his offer. He found his breathing quickening at the sensation; her proximity was incredibly arousing. Even having her long hair blowing against his bare arm in the light breeze seemed highly erotic, and he found himself giving a faint shiver which owed nothing to the cool night air. Unfortunately for his concentration however thoughts of how cold it was caused him to wonder about something else. Finding his eyes being drawn irresistibly towards her breasts he saw how her nipples had stiffened and become erect, distending the already stretched fabric of her tee shirt, and it was only with great difficulty that he managed to tear his gaze away. He cleared his throat, dragging his thoughts together.
‘Right then,’ he said, attempting to radiate honour and dependability as he turned towards the park. ‘Come on.’
Still completely trusting, she drew his arm to her side possessively as they set off. As they walked she bumped against him, and her left breast made delicious contact with his arm, the firm mound squeezing momentarily against him. Its effect was astonishingly powerful; a feeling of desperate lust surged through him.
‘Sorry,’ she said, her voice full of contrition, looking up at him apologetically.
‘That’s all right,’ he said, somewhat hoarsely, but it was all he could do not to cry out please do it again!
How could a girl reach her age and still be so naïve? It wasn’t as if she was still a child – she must be aware of the effect she had. How could she be unaware? Was it that her lack of acceptance by others of her own age had made her prepared to look to people she didn’t know for friendship? Whatever it was had clearly overridden the warnings she must have had as a child about not talking to strangers – though he was quite happy to exploit that to his advantage.
They soon reached one of the benches which was out of sight of the hall entrance, but which still got some of the lighting from it. It was a simple thick plank on supports, with no back; he released her hand and sat down near to one end, stretching his legs out in front of him, leaving it to her to decide how close she was prepared to sit to him. He didn’t want to push things too quickly; to frighten her.
Smiling again, mischievously this time, she put one hand on his shoulder and lifted the hem of her skirt with the other, then stepped over the bench to put one leg on one side of him… then, curling her hand round the back of his neck for balance, lifted her other leg over to his other side before dropping down into his lap, so that the insides of her thighs were pressing against his hips. ‘It’s warmer than sitting on the bench,’ she said impishly, looking him straight in the face, grinning at his stunned expression.
Oh God, he thought, as the heat of her bare thighs was rapidly transmitted through the thin cloth of his trousers. Then again, as she gave another delightful wriggle, forcing herself even closer up against him, Oh God. He was getting an erection. Would she feel it? How could she avoid feeling it? Suddenly conversational gambits like What would you like to talk about then? seemed wholly inadequate to the situation.
He gave up trying to sort out his conflicting emotions. He was beyond wondering now. Either she was a lot more innocent than she appeared, or a lot less, but either way he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity. He put his hands to her slim waist and slid them up under the lower edge of her tee shirt. Her skin was incredibly smooth; he moved his hands round her back and upwards, pushing up her tee shirt, running his fingertips along her spine, stroking her back, feeling the exquisite warmth of her body. She trembled slightly at his touch, and her eyes widened, but she did not attempt to stop him. He leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth: her full lips were deliciously soft, and parted as they made contact with his own. He was aware of her raising her own arms up behind his shoulders; he felt her fingers at the back of his head, pushing through his hair.
The kiss was long and sweet, and left his heart pounding. Her shyly tentative manner revealed her lack of experience, but she had certainly done this at least once before. Perhaps he could risk going a bit further.
However it was she who took up the initiative this time. As he broke off, leaning back and breathing heavily, she moved forward and ran the tip of her tongue along his throat. He found himself shivering with the thrill of the contact, and his pulse began to race even faster. Now it was his turn to stroke the silky length of her hair down her back and let her continue. She tilted her head sideways, and moved round to one side of his neck; he could feel her breath against his skin. He felt her soft lips kissing him, her mobile tongue licking him, her sharp little teeth nibbling, biting…
She bit hard and felt hot liquid spurt into her mouth, and swallowed it eagerly, savouring its salty taste. There was no sensation to equal it; she felt pure ecstasy surge through her, filling her entire body. The youth shuddered in her suddenly tight embrace as his life-essence pulsed out of him, and she continued to gulp thirstily until the warm throbbing ebbed away at last.
She held him until he began to go limp and the last available drop had been drained from him, then she slowly relaxed her grip, letting him fall back. His hands still held her, but weakly now. She looked into his face with a faint pang of regret as she watched him dying. He was so young and handsome; what a waste. But had his parents never warned him not to talk to strangers? She eased him down onto the dew-damp grass behind the bench and his arms fell feebly away from her; his eyes flickering closed for the final time.
She stood, glancing down briefly at the fresh bloodstains on her tee shirt, pouting slightly at the sight. There was a limit to the bloodstains that the pattern would mask – she would have to wash it again. But the short summer night was ending; the sky was beginning to lighten. It was time for her to go home.
She stepped lightly away from the bench and walked away under the trees, her feet leaving dark patches in the newly-forming dew.
NOTES
With regard to the writing style, please feel free to criticise. However as to the content, I should like to point out a few things before you make any biting remarks.
I should first like to acknowledge Elizabeth Walter for her horror story Prendergast, which provided the main inspiration. I must have read it somewhere in the late 1970s, having bought a secondhand copy of her collection Come and Get Me and Other Uncanny Invitations (Collins, 1973). Her story is a good deal darker than mine, and takes both a different perspective and results in a different ending, but anyone who has read it will see the connection.
This story was one of my earliest entries on Journalspace, and in its original form I was deliberately vague about the age of the male protagonist, giving the implication that he was in his twenties or thirties, and was more obviously and cynically exploiting the girl’s seeming innocence and vulnerability. To me, it made for a better story – a classic case of the biter bit, a genre which is always highly satisfying to readers, who love cases of poetic justice. However one of them (I think I had about three or four readers at that time) was obviously uneasy at this premise, so I reduced his age. In this version I have explicitly given his age as sixteen right from the start (adding an entirely new opening paragraph), and made more a play of his youthful self-confidence. It also fits in better with his distinctly adolescent reactions to the sight of the girl. I’m still not entirely happy about the change, as the boy, however cocky he may have been, is not the obvious sexual predator of the original. Thus he comes across as more of a victim than I had intended, meaning something was lost. But I could understand the point, so I have attempted to satisfy my readers’ tastes rather than my own.
For those of you who are thinking that the erotic descriptions seem like the fantasies of a teenage boy who has no actual experience, you are not far wrong. Thanks to my crippling social phobia I never did experience anything like what I described. Even in the period when diazepam allowed me some degree of social mixing it never got that far. There was just one incident of what might be called a near-sex experience; it involved French-kissing the sixteen-year-old girlfriend of a mate of mine. It was the first time he had brought her out with him, so we were all as new to her as she was to us. I was sitting on the same bench seat as the two of them, next to her, while her boyfriend was to her other side; she had been curious about me and had asked him about me. He had evidently told her that I was solitary and reserved, especially where girls were concerned, and that had provoked her interest. I had represented a challenge to her. She had bet him she could persuade me to kiss her. I say ‘bet him’, but it turned out to be more a case of her challenging him and all my other mates who were in the pub at the time to pay her if she should be able to do so. She had nothing to lose herself. I seem to remember she got a little over 65 pence. It may have been 67p. That was all I was worth. The price of my virginity. 67 pence. But what was a shrewd move on her part was that when I initially refused – it was so obviously a setup – she had explained that she had made a bet, and would lose if I didn’t kiss her. It meant that to continue to refuse made me both heartless and selfish; she would suffer for my high principles. So I kissed her. After the sordid deed was done she even whispered that I was a better kisser than her boyfriend, which again was the right thing to say. I like to think she did so because she felt guilty for cruelly manipulating an innocent young man for her own selfish ends, rather than being a cynical and calculated move so I would feel better of her. Either way it suggested she knew far more about human nature than her tender years implied. But I felt dirty. She had used me like a disposable paper handkerchief; she had blown her nose on me, screwed me up, thrown me into a wastepaper bin to be collected and taken to the nearest household waste disposal facility and left to rot in a landfill site, to be digested by the enzymes produced by the bacteria in the gut of insects and woodlice, until nothing was left of me. I have remained distrustful of women ever since.
That was, needless to say, many years ago. It lasted about a minute, and took place before the inquisitive, calculating gaze of all my other mates and their girlfriends, meaning it was transactional rather than sexual, and was devoid of emotional or erotic pleasure. Ever after that I wondered what it would have been like to have such a kiss in more ideal circumstances. Not necessarily having my throat torn open and my life’s blood being drained from my twitching body, but I would have taken that chance. However the opportunity never came; hence my vagueness when it gets to those touchingly intimate scenes, for almost all the sensations described have had to be the products of my own disturbed imagination.
In the years when taking diazepam allowed me a pleasant respite from my social phobia I went to quite a few village hall discos; the evening receptions for weddings, for birthdays (especially 18th and 21st), and for more general parties like the one in the story. It made a nice change from the crush of the pubs in the town, and with the large number of relatives in the hugely extended families of my mates there was always something coming up. What I liked most about such events was – as you will undoubtedly have already guessed – watching girls like the one in the story dance. Well, when I say ‘like the one in the story’ I don’t know if they were vampires or not, but you could never be sure in the rural district in which I lived at the time. Who could say? There was almost always at least one pretty girl there, somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, old enough to be allowed to go to a local disco but too young to go into town. They certainly brightened my evening. This story is dedicated to their memory, and girls like them everywhere, whether they drink the blood of foolishly unsuspecting young men or not.
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