Nocticadia: A Dark Academia Gothic Romance

Hunting the inebriated was horribly anticlimactic.

A white, vaporous mist danced across wet cobblestones, as I made my way down a shadowy alley in the heart of Emberwick, a moderately-sized, moody village just outside of Dracadia University. Like most of the villages on the island, it had retained its old-century charm, with French gothic architecture and vine-covered shops. A dizzying maze of coffee houses, book shops, museums, and as I understood, the most decadent chocolate on the east coast. Hardly a place for depravity, but that was exactly what I sought there.

The lingering scent of rose perfume clung to my shirt, the nauseating stench of a quick, incurious fuck. It was sickening, the way the mind could eventually grow numb to the parasitic needs of the flesh. I’d made a point to meet twice a week with Loretta Gilchrist, the entomology professor, to burn off the pent-up agony of an insatiable sexual appetite. A mundane, but effective therapy, up until that evening, when I’d been put off by the woman. Not because she was ten years older than me, or that she had a tendency to fall into a coughing fit during her climax. Though our routine had gotten somewhat loathsome, I’d always appreciated the intense release I couldn’t seem to find during any other physical activity, and even if she wasn’t the most exciting conquest, I appreciated the subtlety of our meetings.

Unfortunately, she’d broken my no touch rule.

Ordinarily, I’d have bound her arms to avoid the mistake, but that evening, I’d been hasty and irritated by my body’s needs. The incessant intrusion of thought which had rendered me anxious to get it over with. To fuck and be done with it, so I could return to my studies.

To my utter disappointment, she took my oversight as a show of growth. Or worse, affection. The very thought of such a thing sent a shiver of horror down my spine.

Even then, more than an hour later, I could still feel the invisible mark of her hand on my skin. I ground my teeth at the ghostly imprint of her cold fingertips across my shoulder, from where it faded down the length of my arm to my entirely insensate fingers. Not even the most excessive scrubbing could rid me of her unwanted touch.

I scratched at my shoulder as I kept on down the alley, until, in the darkest corner of the village, I found the man I’d sought out, one who’d been living in hiding. For that, the island made a perfect cloak.

Admittedly, it hadn’t been entirely random that I’d chosen him, and on a prior visit to the village, I’d watched the man scurry out of a corner market toward a quiet place beneath a tree in the nearby park. There, with shaky hands, he’d unbagged a fifth of cheap whiskey and swallowed it straight from the bottle, like water. The alcoholism was obvious. What I hadn’t known at the time was that the man had abused his wife and sons–his youngest, to the point of his having fallen comatose. Wanted by police, he was on the run for an entire lifetime of crimes for which he’d never paid the piper.

Perhaps that should’ve been good cause to turn him over to authorities, to act the hero for once in my godforsaken life.

Heroics were boring.

The man in the alley had been lured to Dracadia Island with the promise of money and refuge, but as it turned out, his ticket to asylum had never materialized. He’d been duped, and with no other resources, had remained on the island. A most unfortunate fate.

As I strode closer, an intense jolt of agony struck my skull, bringing me to a skidding halt. Like a shock to my brain, it radiated out from its pulse points at either side of my head, just above my ears. The pain, like blades dragging over bone, vised my muscles and a sharp ringing in my ears dropped me to my knees. Involuntary clenching of my teeth shot piercing spasms to my temples and eyeballs, locking my jaw. Quiet growls rumbled in my throat, my muscles shaking with the stabbing misery. A cold nausea expanded inside my chest, and I breathed through my nose.

One, two, three, four …

Until the intensity lessened.

The needling ache dulled.

And dulled.

Eyes closed, I took deep breaths, focusing on the relief. The loosening of tension and slackening of clenched teeth. Seconds later, it diminished, and I fell onto my palms, catching my breath. Cold wet stones dampened my knees through the slacks and the balmy air cooled the sweat across my skin. The headaches had gotten worse in recent months, and often struck without warning. A worrisome evolution.

With the pain finally subsided, I pushed to my feet and kept on down the alley.

The man I’d sought lay slumped against the aging brick wall beside a line of trash cans. Remnants of what I presumed was vomit speckled a dark, shabby beard. I gave a light kick to the man’s leg, and he didn’t so much as flinch. Crouching to check his pulse, I was relieved to find a weak throbbing below his skin.

An object sticking up from the man’s ragged coat drew my attention, and with a gloved hand, I lifted a picture from his pocket. A clean-shaven version of him stood beside a young woman, perhaps no more than thirty, and two little boys, who looked to be about eight and ten. I tucked the picture back into the man’s coat, making a mental note to burn it later.

With that, I lifted him to his feet, to the sounds of grumbling and mumbling, and wrapped the stranger’s arm around my neck for balance. A repulsive odor singed my nose as I dragged him toward the mouth of the alley, where my car remained parked, waiting for him.

I sat in the shadows on an old wooden chair, waiting for Alley Man to fully wake.

Groans echoed through the dank and dreary corridors of Emeric Tower’s catacombs, which had housed prisoners centuries before. The maze of tunnels had been closed off and sealed sometime in the late seventeen hundreds, well before it had been purchased and turned into a university for clergymen. It was only by happenstance, during my junior year at Dracadia when, bored with physics recitation held two floors above, my classmate and I had snuck away for a cigarette and had stumbled upon what looked to be a doorframe’s mantle. Weeks of hacking away at the rock-like mud, which had hardened to a stony barricade had opened the entrance and revealed the archaic lab once belonging to Dr. Stirling. The pitch-black tunnels, untouched by light for centuries, had led us to the dark, abandoned cells. Long-forgotten prisons that still held the decayed bones of whomever had been unfortunate enough to dwell there. I’d since installed lighting throughout the tunnels, but even in the thick of summer, the ancient passageway casted an unnerving chill.

The man from the alley raised a trembling hand to his head, his eyes slowly fluttering open. He lay on the floor of his cell for a moment, perhaps trying to discern where in the hell he’d been taken. On a gasped breath, he shot upright and kicked himself back against the wall. Panicked eyes fell on me, as I watched with intrigue.

“W-w-where am I?” A thick rattle in his voice hinted at thirst and likely dehydration. The sound persisted on each ragged breath that followed.

“Dracadia University. Emeric Tower, to be exact.”

“Wh-wh-who are you?”

I plucked a piece of lint from my black slacks and offered a small but insincere smile. “Professor Bramwell, which is entirely irrelevant.”

The man scrambled toward the bars of his cage, fingers curling around the thick iron posts. “What am I doing in here? I want out! Now!”

“Calm yourself, Mr. Barletta.” I reached forward, the movement creaking the old chair as I grabbed a fifth of Macallan from the gritty floor beside me. “Tell me, have you ever had decent whiskey in your life?”

A longing in Barletta’s eyes told me his craving for alcohol outweighed his fear right then, and the man licked his lips. “I don’t think I have.”

I held up the bottle in taunting. “It’s delicious. Smooth. Like warm hazelnuts with notes of sherry. Would you like some?”

A spark of desperation lit his otherwise dull, rheumy eyes. “I would.”

I reached forward, passing through the bottle that only just fit between the bars of the man’s cage.

With haste, the stranger swiped it out of my hands, popped the cap, and chugged a good quarter of the expensive liquor before he lowered it from his lips. On a sigh of relief, he fell back against the wall and held the bottle against his chest, like he was cradling a small child. “You’re right, Bramwell, it’s good. Real fucking good.” He kicked back an even longer swill than the last. Two grand’s worth of liquor in his gullet. “Now tell me why I’m here.”

Exhaling a resigned breath, I sat forward and rested my elbows on my thighs. “Very well. I am a pathologist here at the university. The primary researcher for a parasitology project that’s funded by exceptionally wealthy and powerful individuals.”

“That’s great. ‘The fuck does that have to do with me?”

“I’m glad you asked. It so happens, I am in desperate need of human subjects.”

Chuckling, he rolled his head against the wall to face me. “The answer is no. I’m not your fucking guinea pig. Now let me go.”

Lowering my gaze, I smiled and eased back in my chair again. “Oh. I wasn’t asking your permission, Mr. Barletta. You see, the whiskey you just chugged contains thousands of tiny eggs, each of them encased in a wonderful spore-like outer shell that protects it from the ethanol. In two days, those eggs will be embryonated as they settle into your very nutrient-rich liver. The larvae will continue to grow inside of you and, in another six days, will hatch from their eggs. That’s when the real fun begins.” I watched with pointed amusement as the color drained from his face and his jaw slackened with shock and perhaps a bit of disbelief. “The larvae will then release potent toxins that will breach your blood brain barrier. The toxins will intensify your most basic needs–thirst, hunger, sex. When the parasite finally realizes there is no warm and cozy womb to lay more of their eggs and complete their cycle, the adult worms will then aggressively begin to feed on your liver in an attempt to fatten themselves for survival. You will ultimately go into organ failure and die. And that is when you will finally expel them.” Sighing, I shrugged. “But I wouldn’t fret. You were well on your way to liver failure, anyway.”

Barletta jumped to all fours and shoved a pudgy finger down in his throat. Vomit poured from his mouth and nose onto the floor.

As he retched and gagged, I tugged a small pocket watch from my slacks and polished its surface on my shirt, noting the time was just before midnight before I stuffed it away again. “It’s futile. Say, for the sake of arguing, you managed to expel a good few hundred eggs. There are still many more. On their way to your liver now. Which, I’m guessing, is in a grotesque state of cirrhosis at this point.”

He shoved a finger into his throat again and let out a hoarse cough. “You sick fuck. You sick and twisted fuck! Let me go!”

“Sick fuck? I gave you shelter. Expensive drink. It’s not as if I battered your skull with a liquor bottle and left you comatose. That would’ve been absolutely unconscionable.”

His eyes widened, and he fell back onto his heels, letting out a weary sob.

“What separates monsters from good men is only a matter of perspective. In your eyes, I’m a sick fuck for what I’ve done to you. But I, on the other hand, see you as a parasite.”

Swiping up the bottle, he threw it at me. On impact with the iron cage bars, the broken glass crashed to the floor.

“Now that’s a shame. I estimate in about an hour, you’re going to be going through some fairly intense withdrawals.” Lips flattened, I shook my head, and pushed up from the chair. With one hand clasped behind my back, I lifted a piece of the glass, where a small amount of liquor had pooled on its surface. While the eggs were virtually invisible, the fluid seemed to move with the wriggling of the parasite contained inside of its cocoon. Smirking, I tossed it away. “I was the one who offered money and asylum on Dracadia Island. The one who lured you here.”

Again, a flare of disbelief shined in his eyes. “You? Why?”

“The why will be revealed later. There is a fragile thread that ties us, Mr. Barletta.” A sharp strike of pain hit either side of my head, and eyes screwed shut, I let out a grunt, rubbing the heel of my palm where the agony damn near vibrated my skull. Whatever Barletta said to me after fizzled to an annoying blur of sound, until it came back into sharp focus, and I opened my eyes.

A short episode that time, thankfully.

“Fucking let me out of here!” Nabbing one of the broken pieces of glass, he drove his arm through the space between the cage bars in a pathetic attempt to cut me.

I chuckled and shook my head with a pitying expression that undoubtedly pissed him off. “Consider this penance. Your opportunity to save a life, for once.” I shoved my hands into my pockets and turned away. “I can see you’re upset. I’ll return tomorrow with some breakfast.”

Barletta’s screams echoed behind me as I strode down the corridor.