Dinner and a Show
by Jennifer Peaslee
Dan looks up from his beer when the curvy young blonde slides into the booth across from him. Smiles at her disarmingly.
“I’m glad you decided to come out,” he says. He had been surprised at his own temerity, asking out the perky college tour guide as soon as his daughter, Abby, was out of hearing. Had been even more surprised when the girl said yes.
“I’m glad you invited me,” she responds, sounding almost shy.
What’s her name? He doesn’t want to ask again. Women like it when you pay attention to the details. Emma? Emily? Yes, that’s it.
“Can I get you anything to drink, Emily?”
She looks embarrassed; for a second, he worries that he has gotten it wrong. Then she admits, “I’m not twenty-one yet. Next month, though.” She sounds as though she’s worried her confession will scare him off. Hilarious.
He smiles again. “I won’t tell if you won’t. I’m sure you’ve had a few drinks in your life, right?”
Emily grins. “You caught me. I’ll take a Sex on the Beach.” Flirty girl.
She could not have picked a more “college girl” drink, and he knows the server knows exactly who the cocktail is for, but thankfully, the young guy doesn’t press the issue.
Dan nurses his beer while Emily has a second drink, then a third. Nobody in the bar notices when a hand slips over one of the drinks and drops something in.
Emily is easy to chat with, all smiles and hair flips and batting eyelashes. She talks about her classes, her friends, her major. She expresses a complete lack of interest in anything outside her college bubble but chatters away with such ease that he easily swims along the shallow currents of her conversation.
“Your daughter is, like, totally going to love it here. If she decides to go, I mean. Where is she, by the way? I’m guessing you didn’t drag her to the bar with you.” Emily’s starting to slur her words.
“She has a friend who goes here. She’s staying in their dorm tonight.”
“Do you need to check on her?”
“I’m sure she’s fine.” The thought of Abby makes him think of his wife, so his mind dances around the guilt to focus on what’s in front of him: a pretty young thing who’s had a little too much to drink.
Emily smiles up at him. “So you’re all by your lonesome? Where are you staying?“
“The bed and breakfast on campus.”
“Oh, it’s super cute! I used to work there during my freshman year.” And she’s off, sharing anecdotes about troublesome guests. Dan waits through a couple, then cuts in.
“I should probably be heading out. Old man and all.” He laughs lightly. It’s a ploy, though he does feel unusually tipsy for only having one beer.
Emily bites her lip, looking disappointed. “So soon?” They’ve been at the bar for an hour, but she’s probably used to drinking all night with her friends.
“Well… I know it’s a dry campus, but I have some more beer in my room. Are you up for a nightcap?”
She grins radiantly. “Sounds good. But I don’t drink beer. How about you come back to my place instead?”
That sounds just fine to him.
Leaving with Emily is a blur. He must have put down his credit card, calculated a tip, and driven them back to campus, but his brain can’t seem to hold onto his memories.
“Wow, you’re kind of a lightweight, aren’t you?” Emily jokes when he falls against her, tripping over his feet on the way to her dorm room. Dan’s embarrassed—doesn’t know what’s wrong with him.
The next thing he knows, he’s blinking heavily and looking around an empty kitchen. “This is your dorm?”
“No… my roommates are around tonight, actually. But I have keys to some of the more private places on campus, thanks to my job. So I thought we could go somewhere quieter instead. Students call this place ‘the castle’ because it looks like something out of Harry Potter. It’s mostly locked up, except during weddings.”
“Oh,” he mumbles. His head pounds painfully, and the walls spin. A faint odor lingers as though the place wasn’t thoroughly cleaned after its last use. “Think I could sit? I’m… a little woozy….”
“Sure thing, hun. Right this way.” Emily places an arm firmly around his waist and leads him to a folding chair already waiting in the middle of the kitchen. “Got something special for you,” she tells him as she sits him down.
“Special?”
Emily strides over to a counter, opens up a drawer, and takes out some nylon rope. “How do you feel about a little light bondage?”
“Hell yeah,” Dan says, perking up. This is getting interesting. He’s seeing double, but it’s kind of nice, like getting ready to fuck twins.
Emily ties one of his hands behind his back, then surprises him by going a step further and tying his legs to the chair. His stomach roils, and he prays he doesn’t blow chunks and lose his chance with this nubile sweetheart.
“All tied up,” she sings.
Dan smirks. “What are you gonna do to me now?” He’s already at half-mast, his mind filling with visions of her stripping, dancing, teasing him.
“Oh, you know.” Emily smiles flirtatiously. “I thought I might start with your fingers. I really want to feel them inside of me.”
“If you like my hands, you’ll love my dick.”
“Slow down, cowboy. We’ll get there.”
She saunters in front of him, bending over so that her cleavage rests in front of his face. She grasps his untied hand, brings his index finger to her mouth, and inserts it. Moans as she sucks on the finger. Dan grows harder by the second.
Emily looks him in the eye and bites down.
He screams and wrenches his hand out of her mouth. His finger remains attached but has been bitten to the bone. Blood spurts from the wound onto Emily’s lusciously plump lips.
“What the fuck?” he cries. “What the fuck did you just do?”
Emily slaps him harder than he would have thought possible.
“Shut up, bitch,” she says. “I’m not done.”
She grabs his hand, and he cries out again as she yanks it to her mouth and chomps down like a horse enjoying a carrot. She moans and shudders like she’s having an orgasm, then winks. “You taste delicious, baby.”
Dan passes out, mercifully, the room spinning around him.
When he comes to, his hand burns. Every one of the fingers on his right hand is on fire. He’s afraid to look. Emily is sitting on a counter leaning against an industrial blender, smiling in a deranged fashion. Chewing.
“Awesome,” she says. “I was afraid you would miss out on the next step.”
“What’s—what’s the next step?” he asks, the tremor in his voice apparent. “Are you going to kill me?”
She giggles like he’s said something funny and flirtatious. “Gosh, you like to move fast, you know that? We have a bunch more fun things to do before you even think about dying.”
This can’t be happening. He strains against the rope, certain that he can unravel the knots. She laughs at him. “You won’t get free,” she says.
He yells, calling for help.
“Nobody can hear you. But if you don’t stop screaming now, I will give you a reason to scream.”
He believes her.
His hand burns worse with every second. He needs to look. But when he does, he can barely stop himself from screaming again.
His fingers are gone, skin hanging past the knuckle bones in ragged and uneven chunks. Blood pours from the wounds. He feels his sanity start to slip away.
“Why are you doing this to me?” he moans piteously.
“Because you’re tasty,” she says. “And it’s fun.”
He doesn’t believe her. This is some dumb-bitch revenge plot for something that has nothing to do with him; he knows it. Some man hurt her, and she couldn’t hack it, so now she’s making it every man’s problem. Probably made up some justification about how he deserves it because all men are trash or whatever radfem bullshit she tells herself to fall asleep at night.
Emily hops down from the counter, spitting a piece of bone onto the floor. She pulls out more rope from the drawer and ties off a tourniquet at his wrist. The blood tapers off, but the pain continues growing exponentially.
“Don’t want you bleeding out before the main course,” she tells him.
“Yeah? So what’s next on the menu, freak?” he asks, trying to sound tough and unconcerned. He can take it. Whatever she throws at him, he can die like a man. His thoughts are on Abby. He’s thankful she’s safe, extremely thankful that his death or disappearance will likely mean Abby chooses another school, keeping her far away from this psychopath.
“I’m so glad you asked,” she says, in the same perky tone used during the campus tour. “I’m going to peel the skin off your bone and eat it while you watch. Until you pass out, that is. I wonder how long you’ll last, stud?”
He doesn’t, as it turns out, last long. Almost as soon as she slides the sharpened knife under his skin and starts filleting, he passes out again. When he comes to, strips of flesh are missing from the underside of his arms.
“Delicious,” she says, slurping on a raw piece of skin. “It’s a delicacy in certain circles of the internet, you know. Same with this next dish.” She waits for him to ask what the next dish is. He doesn’t. She laughs at his cowardice. “Just a good old-fashioned milkshake, you pussy.” She picks up a metal straw on the counter. “What did you think this was for?”
Dan had not, until that moment, noticed the straw. He shudders, thankful that the crazy bitch is just craving a milkshake.
“There is one special ingredient, though,” Emily says casually. She’s standing right in front of him. Dan tenses, looking at her. She smiles at him. “Left or right?”
“What?” he asks, not following.
“Left or right? Which is your favorite side?”
“I’m not… I’m not doing that. I’m not choosing.”
“Aw, you’re no fun! That’s okay. I can choose. Your right side is your better side, handsome.”
She pats him gently on his right cheek, then stabs the metal straw into his left eye. He screams. She slurps. His eye collapses, blood pouring down his face. The left side of his vision has gone dark, but the pain shoots into his skull, and he screams and screams until his vision fades completely and he knows nothing.
He wakes up one final time, and his ruined eye socket throbs worse than his mangled hand and arms. Through his right eye, he sees Emily stuffing something into the blender. Although he hasn’t made any sound, she knows he’s awake.
“Final course,” she says brightly. “It’s my homemade stuffing. You’ll love it.”
“Fuck… you.”
“You kiss your daughter with that mouth, perv?”
“I’ve never touched Abby, you bitch. Just because you have daddy issues doesn’t mean every woman does.”
Emily bursts out laughing. “Is that what you think? I see you as my daddy? Please. You’re nothing more to me than dinner and a show.” With that, she presses a button on the blender, which roars to life, chopping up what appears to be some mixture of meat and bones soaked in congealed blood. When the mixing is done, she reaches into the cabinet above the rope drawer and pulls out a large funnel and a tapered hose. She holds up the hose. “Open up,” she orders.
He presses his mouth firmly closed.
“This is either going in your mouth or up your ass,” she tells him. “It can be up to you, but like I said, I’m good with choosing.”
Dan chooses to open his mouth. She forces the tube down his throat until he’s practically choking on it.
“Your deep throat skills are pathetic,” she sneers. Holding up the funnel, she returns to the blender and starts scooping in the blended meat mixture. “Oh, shoot! I almost forgot. I need to add my special seasoning.” She puts down the funnel and practically skips over to a fridge in the corner of the kitchen. When she opens it, he starts to gag. The faint stench from before triples. It’s coming from a mass of rotting meat in the fridge.
Emily inhales deeply, savoring the scent. “This has been marinating for weeks,” she says, grabbing two small chunks. “But I like to add fresh meat to it. Anyway, the meat isn’t what’s special to me, though you might feel differently. To me, it’s what’s in the meat.”
She holds a fistful of offal underneath his remaining eye so he can see the wriggling maggots festering. He gags. She throws the glob into the funnel, where it lands with a wet squelch. She forces down the mixture with a wooden spoon. He struggles against the tube, but he can feel the maggots squirming inside as they fall into his throat. He gags again and vomits, but he swallows that, too.
“Good job,” she says once he’s forced down the putrid mixture. “How did it taste?”
Dan doesn’t answer, just weeps softly. He wants to believe that he ate some rotten beef or pork, but deep inside, he knows the truth: she has made a cannibal out of him.
Dan focuses his eye on Emily. Sweat plasters his hair to his face. Vomit and gore linger on his tongue. The smell of copper hangs thickly in the air while he wavers on the verge of shock.
Emily, face streaked in blood and viscera, smiles enchantingly.
“You’ve impressed me, you know. Hung on longer than I would have guessed. I’d like to reward you for that.”
“Kill me,” he begs.
“Oh, I will. Don’t worry about that. But before I do, I thought I would give you the gift of knowledge. Don’t you want to know what your precious Abby is up to? Don’t you want to know if she’s safe?”
Dan, on the verge of passing out again, almost doesn’t hear her. Then the words permeate the fog surrounding him, and he focuses as best he can on the psychopath grinning at him.
“She’s safe… from you,” Dan manages. “She’s with a friend.”
“You sure?”
She’s toying with him. Wants to make sure his last thoughts are of fear for Abby. But he knows better. Abby is safe.
Emily watches him, her delicate features twisting in anger when she sees that she hasn’t affected him.
It’s almost a blessing when she puts the knife to his stomach and slices deep. His guts bulge from the gash. She slips a hand into the laceration and yanks on his intestines until they spill out on the ground. Then she places her lips against his ear and speaks.
“I followed Abby after she left you.”
“No,” he mumbles, coughing up blood. But she’s already walking away, back to the fridge with the rotting meat, only this time, she opens up the freezer side. She steps aside, giving him a clear view of the head on the shelf.
“She died thinking you would save her,” Emily whispers, her voice as cold as the freezer’s chill.
Dan moans. He stares into the unseeing eyes of his Abby, and the last of his sanity breaks. All he can feel are the maggots squirming in his throat.