Crimson Reborn

Eva heard music. At first, she thought it might be a radio Tanner left on around the house somewhere. He often did absent minded things like that. With the distant tune on the air, Eva went to Tanner's office expecting to find the small radio he used to listen back to his own sermons playing some choral music. It wasn't. Off and silent, it offered no explanation as to the strange tune floating on the air. Eva chose to ignore it, returning to her housekeeping. This happened on the morning after Lucy took the Crimson Shade's gift and entirely without Lucy being aware of it.

The music didn't go away, but it grew incessant and louder. Eva thought of telling her husband, but she didn't know how he would react. "Yes, dear, I'm apparently hearing a heavenly choir everywhere I go. No, I don't think we need to go to the hospital. No, I don't think it's an immaculate vision either. No, I wouldn't like to discuss it further." Tanner would try to understand, of course, but he would want to fill in the unknown with something known as fast as possible. For a man who dedicated his life to a great unseen force, Tanner abhorred the inexplicable. Once, Eva considered asking him whether he heard it, too. She noticed some people at the grocery store nodding along to an unheard tune. Perhaps everyone could hear the music, but no one wanted to risk being thrown in a loony bin by admitting to it. She decided against asking.

He would make it about him, of course. The issue wouldn't be, "oh, Eva you're sick or touched by the divine or something," but it would become, "

my wife

is sick or touched by the divine or something, draw your eyes unto me so that I may impart my own opinions on the matter. No, don't look at her, she's fine." As long as Eva kept it secret, it was hers and hers alone. She could hear a music more beautiful than any Tanner could imagine. So far as she knew,

only

she could hear it, and so she decided to keep it precious for herself. It rarely got in the way, after all. The song didn't distract her while driving. It didn't swell dramatically when she went out to drag in the empty garbage bins. The music lingered on the corners of her thoughts, giving her a faintly heard bit of theme music throughout her day.

The songs did get louder or stronger sometimes, though Eva didn't like to think of why. It made her blush. She first noticed a change in the song after the second week of hearing it. It came to her more clearly when she woke up that morning, and it seemed to have more than one clear voice in it. Eva hummed along happily as she made Tanner his breakfast and sent him off on the errands of a young pastor, whatever those might be from day to day. With him out of the house, she went to take a shower. When she pulled back the curtain and stepped out to dry herself in front of the mirror, the music swelled, ever so slightly. Looking at herself in the mirror, Eva saw herself for the first time in years. A simple thought came through in the song,

You

're sexy.

Now, that isn't to say Eva hadn't looked at herself in a mirror while naked for the full duration of her marriage. Nor had she gone so long without considering her looks. But what came through in the music wasn't some note of self consciousness. It wasn't a flighty chord drawing attention to the slight pudge of her love handles. It wasn't her own thoughts rebelling against one another with doubt over what she saw versus what a lifetime of insecurity told her to see. The music spoke with clear voice that wasn't her own. The music said

you

're

not

I

'm.

Eva didn't actually think someone else could see her, but she had come to believe the music had some type of sentience behind it. And it felt nice for that disembodied being to compliment her.

The slight change in the song led her to further experimentation. She began to spend more time in front of the mirror while Tanner was out of the house. Rather than swiftly clothing herself when she finished drying, she began to sit naked at her vanity for the remainder of her beauty regimen. Eva spent much of her life avoiding vanity as best she could. Most of the boys she'd known never went for the girl with black hair for whatever reason. Not that she'd gone without male, and some female, attention through her younger years. She developed late, complimenting her athletic build with fresh, supple curves. This merely made it more difficult to attract the type of attention she wanted. Sure, she could have had the high school quarterback in the back of his car on a Saturday night, but she wasn't that type of girl. She wanted the boy who would spend the Saturday night holding her hand and getting to bed early to be up in time for church the next morning.

That boy turned out to be Tanner, and she did get the naughtier part of the deal after a while. When they began dating, Tanner came close to worshiping her beauty. He even wrote bad poetry to that effect. Once they were properly married, things began to change. For reasons neither of them understood, the wall they'd built around their sexuality did not prove as easy to tear down as it had been to build up. Eva thought the ring on her finger and the lengthy sermon which accompanied their vows would somehow cleanse them of their prudishness. Yet when they laid together their first night, everything felt clumsy and intrusive. Things improved somewhat as Tanner learned the purely physical joy of being with her, but he never praised her sexuality the way he'd praised her chaste beauty. Eva never realized how much it bothered her until she heard it dissonant in the song.

Their marriage went on. They had sex from time to time. Eva even wore some lingerie a few times, hoping to excite something more primal in her husband. It never worked. They did have fun, and she considered a few of their couplings to be good. She rarely orgasmed, but she generally expected not to. From some race memory coalesced the ideas of a bland marriage — No, the woman shouldn't have an orgasm. No, it wasn't really expected of a husband to go down on a wife. No, the wife shouldn't really want sex, and she should withhold it from her husband as a tactic of negotiation for things like new dresses or forcing him into dinner with her parents. While Eva never went along with these ideas consciously, they manifested in her life nonetheless, like their own unheard song of unpleasant normalcy.

Then came the joyous music of an unseen mistress. It sang to Eva of carnal delights, free of guilt or obligation. It reveled in Eva's beauty, praising the curve of her breast and the bounce of her ass as her hips swayed. She hummed along with the music as she danced naked in her bedroom, imagining Tanner finding her. He would be so overcome with lust at the sight of her that he would force her down onto the bed to have his way with her body. And she would revel in that, too. The music would fill her mind as his cock filled her pussy, pushing apart her lips in a way it had never done before. His mouth would lower to her breast and suck, his tongue would roll over her nipple, and his hands would grope down to her ass as he thrust insistently inside her. He would crave her like an addict, unable to eat or drink until he had her. His zeal and worship would turn away from the stuffiness and drabness of his profession and fall to a new goddess.

The fantasy deflated some weeks after Eva first heard the music. Tanner did come home unexpectedly, and he did find Eva swaying to the silent rhythms as her hands roved over her naked body. "What are you doing?" Tanner said from the bedroom doorway.

At once, the music jerked to a halt in Eva's mind. In the silence, old fears and insecurities hissed like a den of snakes. "I, uh, just got out of the shower."

Tanner furrowed his brow, frowning. "Well, get dressed. What if the neighbors saw."

And that was the end of it. Tanner grabbed a notebook from his office and went off while Eva sat on the bed in a robe. Even until she heard the door slam behind him, she thought he might come to his senses, return to the bedroom, and have his way with her. She shut her eyes and waited for the music to return. Angry thoughts spun around in her head, warping into a music of her own, dissonant and chaotic. She imagined forcing her husband to his knees, making him grovel as she worked some hellish will upon him.

If I commanded this music,

she thought,

then no man would ever refuse me.

Tanner would never leave his knees.

I would take from him what I wanted.

I would use his face as a chair when it pleased me.

And when it didn

't, I would find the biggest fucking cock I could and shove it in every whole I have before making the godly pastor suck some stranger's cum out of my asshole.

The thought stopped with a near physical jerk. Eva felt as though someone was watching her. Not the neighbors as Tanner worried, but the music or the musician behind it. That illustrious song remained silent as the din in her own thoughts subsided, and she feared she would never hear it again. Hot tears rolled down her cheeks. Eva cried as a decade of frustration laid plain before her. The sex was the least of it. Nothing about the world made sense in those moments. Why would Tanner care so little about her body? Why had she waited to marry him of all people? Why had she waited at all? What was the point of marriage? What was the point of any of it? But she did not ask these questions for herself alone.

Until that moment, she saw herself apart from Tanner and all the men and women like them. But now, she saw them all as suffering together under a yolk of historic repression. It wasn't Tanner's fault he'd casually rejected her. He was simply the product of the world around him as much as Eva was herself. Of course he would tell her to put on clothes because the opposite would shake the foundations of his being and risk destroying him altogether. As much as she had come to value her own sexiness, she did not have the pride to believe she was worth the destruction of Tanner's sense of self.

Slowly, the music returned. Not as loud and joyous as before, but soft and consoling. In it sang a new, solitary voice, sweet and happy,

You have seen truth, sister.

I will come to you soon.

***

Soon proved to be a much more elastic concept than Eva expected. The song remained and grew stronger by the day, but the days themselves fell in to one another. Small Creek changed, little by little. For one, people seemed to be missing. Eva didn't realize this until the daycare workers at the church came to her asking what they were supposed to be doing. Eva had no idea. So she told the women to entertain themselves with the toys and books around the daycare.

Odd plants kept showing up all over town. The appeared rather conspicuously in flowerbeds overnight. Long, phallic stems jutting out of plush foliage. The song grew louder whenever Eva considered the obvious application of such a plant.

And milk began to show up on everyone's doorstep, like the old days. At least six bottles per house, delivered by beautiful, and busty, women in overalls with a big C on them. Eva certainly hadn't ordered the service, and when she inquired as to where they might have come from at all, the questions were dismissed as silly. "Obviously, the milk comes from the dairy," a woman at city hall told her. When Eva asked what dairy, the woman simply hung up.

These developments didn't worry Eva, but she did find them curious. Something about the changes made her impatient. The song seemed to promise great change for everything except her, but still she waited. The wait was pleasant enough. Dreams of beautiful men and women and other creatures kept her nights interesting. The days passed like the absent-mindedness of a long drive. Eva kept her attention on the steps ahead as time rushed by around her. She did not know what she was waiting for until the day she decided to take Tanner some lunch at the church.

For as pleasantly as Eva had experienced the past weeks or months — she wasn't terribly sure how much time had lapsed — her husband had suffered. Not pain, but an existential discomfort which he could not attribute to any cause. Tanner was called to the ministry at a young age, parading around in a cheap blazer with Bible in hand as young as sixteen. He believed from that age until the day he saw his wife dancing naked in their bedroom that a voice from on high had told him to become a minister and spread the joy of the Gospel to the others of the world. This belief carved his path through the life. It led him to Eva and their marriage. It brought them to Small Creek where Tanner expected to take over Pastor Colin's congregation in only a few years. The belief answered his questions on a day to day basis. Sometimes it gave him a spiritual answer to a question, but other times it answered him with mystery. In this way, it answered everything, even the unanswerable.

The whole of his life revolved around the seed of his belief. For that seed to die would be a whole destruction of character. For it to be sickened and shaken, therefore, was perilous. And seeing Eva dancing naked shook him to his core. Of course, he had seen his wife naked, and he had seen her move seductively a few times. He'd even allowed himself the tawdry feeling of peeking at her when she slipped in or out of the shower, seeing her casually exposed and vulnerable. In her dancing, though, she was something more. As though possessed, moving in rhythms which he'd never seen her body express. Tanner didn't go for the idea of power in dance until he saw Eva's hips swaying, her breasts shift from side to side, and her ass jiggle to unheard music — mostly unheard music. While watching her, for only a second or two, he heard a song. He truly heard a heavenly voice while his wife danced like a whirling dervish.

In those seconds, the voice spoke to him of things he didn't understand. Old things, he supposed. Old ideas of sin, rutting like animals, the worship of flesh and pleasure. He came to two minds on it instantly. For one, he wished to give himself over to the music, embrace his wife, and become entwined in passion. For the other, he was afraid. Not of some malevolence, but that he might have been wrong all his life. That the voice of god he heard as a teenager might have been a construction of social pressure levied on him. Fear won out, and he did what came naturally, shaming Eva for her gratuitous display.

This only began the strife in Tanner's soul. Small Creek was changing. While his wife noticed strange milk deliveries or flowers, Tanner saw the much more urgent issues of people disappearing, most importantly, his congregation. First Missionary Church boasted only around two hundred members on the high holy days. On a normal Sunday, a hundred might sit in the sanctuary. The passing weeks became less and less normal, though. The flock dwindled from a hundred to fifty almost overnight. This did not worry Tanner or Pastor Colin too much as faith can sometimes be cyclical and the summer was going long and hot.

But the folk who did keep coming every Sunday unnerved Tanner. A good many of them had the same look on their faces that Eva did, as though they were listening to something Tanner couldn't hear. Others were worse. They seemed changed in peculiar ways. Mrs. Ethridge, a divorcee in her forties, had long looked disheveled and pious. As the weeks went by, Mrs. Ethridge dressed in tighter clothes, putting her cleavage on subtle display. The ratty, over-teased hair on her head turned glossy and full. She started wearing bright red lipstick that made an almost bloody grin when she smiled. None of this particularly compared with the way she watched the two pastors. Eva and those like her drifted along in a daze, but the ones like Mrs. Ethridge watched with hunger in their eyes.

These strange happenings did nothing to sooth the discomfort in Tanner's soul. He found himself looking at women in a way he never had before. He'd been attracted to his wife, certainly, and he knew her to be an exceptional creature of beauty. But until her dance, it had been a pastoral or divine beauty, to be observed and appreciated with the more carnal aspects held at bay. Now, though, with the changing of the world around him, it was a beauty he wanted to possess and dominate. The feelings made little sense to his long prudish mind. He saw her naked thigh and wanted to put his hand on it, take a greedy handful of her flesh, and move his own hand further up. He wanted Eva to dance for him again, but he wanted to join, to feel her body move and sway against his, to work his cock into the crease of her ass. And it wasn't only Eva after whom he lusted, the women in his congregation, dressing more and more suggestively continued to catch his eye. It was an easy thing for his thoughts to drift into a daydream of Mrs. Ethridge's bright red lips wrapping around his cock.

He confessed his worries to Pastor Colin. The older man of God wrote it off quickly. "Sin worms its way even into the hearts of righteous men, Tanner," Colin told him. "It is your youth, most likely. We must keep vigilant against the betrayals of our own bodies until the Lord calls us home. Even when you get to my age, you'll need to remain steadfast." The old man's hands thumbed idly at the Bible he carried constantly, and Tanner left the conversation wondering if the same doubts and dark thoughts were plaguing his mentor.

And so, the world slid forward in time for a while. Eva hummed in secret. Her husband suffered in silence. Neither understanding the why of it. Eventually, on a day that might have been a Tuesday or a Thursday, Eva decided to take her husband a nice lunch. She arrived at First Missionary and spoke with Lorrie, the secretary, who directed Eva to the sanctuary where Tanner was repairing a light. While she didn't enjoy time with her husband whenever he applied his rudimentary knowledge of house repair, she didn't want the food to go to waste. She made her way across the lot and into the sanctuary, a fine building of red brick and tall windows. Inside, she saw Tanner standing on a ladder with a toolbox balanced on the top step. Eva also saw a woman, sitting in the front pew, locks of ruby red hair hiding her face. Eva's heart fluttered as Lucy turned around to look at her. The Crimson Lady gave a wave and patted the pew beside her.

***

Eva walked forward into the church. She expected Tanner to turn around and call to her, but he kept on with his work. She thought him lost in thought until he looked directly at her, made no acknowledgment, and returned to his task. At that point, Eva felt the odd fluidity in the air, as though she were walking through syrup.

"That's a little trick of mine," Lucy said. "Please, sit."

Eva didn't. As she came closer to the strange woman, her heart quickened. The song in her mind grew louder and louder. "It's you," she whispered.

Lucy smiled as she stood. A silky, red dress clung to her curvaceous body. Breasts the size of watermelons jutted out, straining the shimmering fabric and proudly displaying cleavage like a chasm. Lucy glowed faintly, like the shine of a ruby in dim light. Standing, she was taller than Eva expected, but it seemed to fit. Like an Amazonian goddess, Lucy towered over the smaller woman before giving her a short hug, pressing her breasts into Eva's face. "It's me alright. Now sit." Dumbfounded, but compliant, Eva allowed herself to be led over to the pew. Lucy slipped the small basket from Eva's arm, placing it between them. She opened it up and examined the contents, "Oo, snacks."

"I've seen you before," Eva said, some desperate need creeping over her body. "In my dreams. In the...the song."