It was a frosty October morning, the morning I found Albert's mangled remains, and I didn't yet suspect there was a direct correlation between my wife's folding addiction and his untimely demise.

He’d been half-buried in the woodland surrounding our garden, just beyond the vegetable patch. And staring down at the corpse, all I could think was: bloody hell, that’s the third time this month…

“Well, Albert Eggstein is dead,” I announced, as I re-joined my family in the kitchen.

“Foxes must have got in again,” Kerry said from the breakfast counter, her back to me.

“Not a chance. That coop cost more than the damn car, Houdini himself couldn’t break in.”

At the far side of the table, Ben piped up and said, “It’s the monster. I saw it outside my room the night Hen Solo disappeared, remember Dad?”

“There’s no such thing as monsters sweety,” his mother replied, setting down a cup of hot chocolate in front of him. With a cutting glance in my direction, she added, “Phil, animals live in forests. Some of them eat chickens. Mystery solved.”

Not wanting to kick off another fight, I ignored her tone and instead pointed out I’d already made Ben a hot chocolate earlier.

“Yeah, but yours tasted weird,” he replied, before drinking the new one in two gulps.

Since his tenth birthday, that kid had practically been inhaling food.

I said, “By the way, the pumpkins are looking ripe. What do you say we finally carve them?”

After breakfast, all three of us worked on jack-o-lanterns in the garage. Together, we made quite the trio: Ben with his green eyes and blonde hair, the old ball and chain sporting a thin build and dark complexion, and finally me, the freckly redhead.

Just as I finished etching my stencil, Kerry clamped down on her own palm, juicy blood seeping between the fingers, two of which were already wrapped in plasters. “Silly me,” she said, her voice all casual.

My attempts to inspect the damage got brushed aside. “It’s fine, I just nicked myself. I’ll go get a bandage.”

“That looks pretty nasty. We should—”

“It’s fine, Phil, I just nicked myself. I’ll go get a bandage,” she repeated, then disappeared upstairs.

“Is Mom gonna be okay?” Ben asked.

“She’ll be fine bud. You know her, just a bit of a klutz sometimes.”

‘Bit of a klutz’ was an understatement, my dearly beloved had this uncanny ability to injure herself under the most unlikely circumstances—whether by getting caught between a prowl of warring cats or dropping ceramic plates.

Once the pumpkins were done, I marched upstairs and knocked on the door to her changing room.

Footsteps shuffled down a creaky stairwell. A door inside Kerry’s room brought you to the attic, the only way of reaching the third floor. When we bought the house, before Ben, she insisted on keeping that area for storage. In exchange, I got the garden.

A key twisted in the lock, the door inched open, and then Kerry’s head poked through the narrow gap. “What?”

“How’s the hand?”

“It’s fine. I’m not dressed.”

I pushed my foot beyond the threshold so that the door wouldn’t close. “I don’t mind,” I said, with a cheeky grin.

“Well I do.”

Had I not reeled away, that door would have mashed all five of my toes.

In order to maintain the delicate feng-shui, Kerr’s room remained strictly off-limits. She kept things neat and meticulously organized, especially clothes.

Three days later, while Ben and I played Fall Guys in the lounge, he out of nowhere said, “You’d never move to Australia, would you?”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“Garys parents argued all the time and they split up. Now his dad sells surfboards in Australia.”

From the anxious expression, you could tell he’d given this matter some serious thought. His parent’s compost heap of a marriage had clearly alarmed him.

“I promise if I move to Australia, I’ll take you with me. How’s that?”

Even after a friendly nuggie, the poor kid still seemed upset. “Something else on your mind, bud?”

He lowered his gaze, shivered. “I saw the monster again last night. It was watching me sleep from the hallway.”

My hand dropped onto his shoulder. “Hey, you know they’re just dreams, right? The scariest thing you’d catch wandering around this house after dark is your mother in her face cream and hair rollers.”

After tousling his hair, I carried our empty chocolate wrappers and Pepsi tins toward the kitchen, but on the far side of the door, I froze.

The needle I didn’t feel, only a warm puddle growing beneath my foot. I bit down on a scream.

As I hopped toward the bathroom, blood splashed all over the white floor tiles.

Kerry appeared, said, “Oh,” then followed me along with a dishtowel, soaking up dark red pools.

Sitting on the toilet, I struggled to get a grip on the slippery needle and, in the end, was forced to use a pair of clippers to twist it out whilst simultaneously reassuring a panic-stricken Ben there was no reason to panic.

Annoyed, I said to Kerry, “How’d you manage to leave this crap on the floor anyway?”

“It must have dropped out of my sowing kit,” she said, her rag wet and squelchy.

Each time I took the pressure off my sole more blood gushed out. “I need you to drive me to hospital.”

“What, for this?”

“Kerry, I’m leaking like a tap.”

“Fine.”

She disappeared into her inner sanctum for a quick change of clothes before driving me to hospital, where she complained incessantly throughout our three-hour stay in the waiting room.

“See? All that time wasted over a fucking bandage,” she said on the drive home. I supressed the urge to call her a heartless witch.

In bed that night, the earlier conversation with Ben slid into my brain. My son suspected our family unit might wither and die. Surely the least I could do was attempt a little marital de-weeding?

Over the coming weeks, each of my date suggestions—romantic dinner for two, spa weekend, jazz cruise—were mercilessly shot down by Kerry, who insisted she either didn’t have time or was too tired.

How could anybody tend the emotional needs of a spouse that spent all day hauled up inside their secret lair?

One night, deciding I had nothing to lose, I chanced my luck at some romance by rolling over in bed and kissing along her bare shoulder.

A drilling elbow to the ribs sent me careening back. “Not tonight.”

“There’s a surprise,” I muttered.

This spurred her to flick on the bedside lamp. “What was that?”

“Nothing.”

“Speak up Phil. If you’ve got something to say, come right out and say it.”

Under my breath, I mumbled, “It’s just…lately I think you’ve been acting a little…selfish.”

“Selfish?”

That sure did it. After five minutes of furious finger-wagging and spittle hitting me in the face, a welcome distraction came in the form of a little rap at the door.

“Ben, is that you?”

He stepped into the room rubbing his eyes.

“Did we wake you?”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry bud. C’mon, let’s get you back to sleep.” I swung both legs out from beneath the blanket.

“Can I have a hot chocolate?”

With a weary sigh, I slid under the sheets again while he and his mother lumbered down the hall, and after he got his treat, she opted to disappear into her room rather than continue the stern lecture.

The facts stared me in the face, plain as day: I’d become a doormat. A braver man—or perhaps one possessing some semblance of a backbone—might have bit the bullet and tossed the relationship into the compost heap.

Sadly, I wasn’t a braver man. I was, however, an exceptionally petty one.

My revenge came in the form of discarded clothes left scattered around the house; either tucked behind the washing machine, under Ben’s bed, or on the window ledge in the guest room.

By morning, they’d all be meticulously folded and placed back in the proper drawers because Kerry couldn’t control her obsessive compulsions.

Was this act of defiance pathetic? Yes. But picturing her endlessly infuriated by the little seeds I’d planted gave me an immense sense of satisfaction.

Sue me.

While not busy with this ‘secret project’, any pent-up energy got channelled into the garden. Soon, there was an impressive produce collection: peas, leaks, sweet potatoes, even garlic; anything you could grow in a milder climate.

And, even though he’d suddenly gone off strawberries, Ben became my dutiful helper. As the only child in the world who enjoyed maths homework, he had a good mind for figures, and so he kept track of the number of vegetables, along with when they'd be ready for harvest.

Unfortunately, all attempts at instilling healthy eating habits were torpedoed by Kerry, who indulged him with hot chocolate three times a day.

The ice Queen mostly remained hauled up in her den, emerging to fold after dark, a true creature of the night. When not napping, she shuffled around like a zombie, and if she was clumsy before, her gracelessness reached a whole other level: soon her fingers were permanently wrapped in bandages like an Egyptian Mummy, her arms permanently bruised.

At one point, after three days of silent treatment, she called me into the kitchen out of the blue. A spatula had become wedged inside the top drawer preventing it from opening all the way. “I can’t get it loose,” she said. She put one foot against the wall and pulled with both hands.

As I stepped closer to help, she lost her grip and crammed an elbow straight into my nose, producing a sickening crunch. “Silly me,” she said, immediately holding a dishrag against my face. “Here, tilt your head back.”

Throat already congested, I rasped, “Kerry, what the hell.”

“Quit being such a baby. Hold still until the bleeding stop.”

My free hand shivered the spatula sideways until it slipped out. “You couldn’t have managed this yourself?”

“Thank you,” she replied, her voice a few notches short of genuine, before she gestured toward a document on the centre island. “By the way, you need to sign that. It’s the new life insurance policy. I’ve upped our coverage.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, our trip to the ER got me thinking: you never know what might happen. You said it yourself, you could have bled out. Here, gimme the cloth. I’ll chuck it in the wash.”

Later that day, I turned tiptoed around turning the house into a bombsite of scattered clothes—a true Arc de Triomphe of disarray and disorder.

But the following morning, the mess hadn’t rearranged itself.

Odd. Normally Kerr’s radar homed in on even the most well-hidden items. This I dismissed as a rare ‘off’ night, but those lonesome socks and crumpled underwear refused to budge. Suddenly, I’d lost my release valve.

All three of us sat down in the kitchen one morning, silent.

As Kerry placed a hot chocolate in front of Ben, my eye happened across the top of her wrist, mostly hidden beneath the sweater. “What the hell happened to your arm?”

“Nothing.”

In the split second I managed to reach over and pull back the sleeve before she wrestled it away, I glimpsed the beginning of a nasty mark, red and inflamed. It looked as though she’d been attacked by a rabid wolf.

“Like hell nothing.”

“Phil, enough,” she bellowed, loud enough that Ben flinched.

That became my checkout point. There were zero indicators our relationship might ever bloom again. My gut told me the two of us would trudge along, quietly draining the life from one another, until Ben departed for university.

What I couldn’t have known was how huge a red flag those unfolded clothes were, and just much danger we were in…

It happened on a Saturday. Ben and I spent hours harvesting potatoes and tomatoes, then replanted seeds and trimmed stems—the works.

At sundown we dropped the tools into a wheelbarrow, too sweaty and exhausted to tidy them away in the woodshed. After some TV, I ushered him upstairs into bed, and as I read him a bedtime story, his lower lip got all wobbly.

Weird. It had been weeks since his last nightmare about the monster.

“Everything okay bud?”

He avoided my gaze.

I cupped his chin and used it to steer his head up. “Hey, you know you can tell me anything, right?”

Those teary eyes finally met mine. “Well…I was wondering…you’re not gonna walk out on me and mom, are you?”

I closed the book. “I’m not gonna lie bud, your mother and I are going through a rough patch. But whatever else happens, I promise I’ll always be there for you.”

“You wouldn’t disappear without telling me?”

“Of course not. Why would you think that?”

“Because Mom said you would.”

I stared at him, dumbfounded. Marital decay I could stomach—hell, I’d even accept 50% of the blame—but what gave that woman the right to poison my relationship with my own son?

I stormed up to the make-up lounge and pounded the door so furiously hinges almost splintered.

A hysterical Ben tugged my arm, begging me to forget what he’d said. Poor kid probably figured he’d as good as filed the divorce papers. I didn’t tell him to leave. Part of me wanted him here as witness, selfish as that may sound.

When the door finally shivered open, I demanded an explanation.

“I’m busy. We’ll discuss this later,” Kerry said, like her word was law.

Rage bubbled up, deep inside the pit of my stomach. Again with the dismissal. How long could one man live like a eunuch?

I pushed into the room, Ben clinging onto my shirttail.

Inside, there sat a make-up table with a mirrored front, cabinets, clothes hangers holding up fancy coats, and a sowing machine. Kerry stood motionless, veins pulsing along her forehead.

Enraged, I said, “You’re taking out new life insurance policies all while telling Ben I’m about to walk out? What kind of game are you playing here?”

Just then, there came a metal groan from beyond the door at the top of the stairs. A hush fell over all three of us.

Kerry’s eyes flicked toward the attic then she suddenly shifted gears. “You’re right. Come downstairs, we’ll talk things out.”

From the look on her face, she clearly had something to hide. But what could be up there? What could possibly be so important our marriage became a distant afterthought?

“Now,” she hissed.

This piercing sound made me hesitate. What sort of reaction might she have to a direct act of disobedience?

I reminded myself this didn’t matter. My days of being a spineless weasel were done. I started up the stairs.

“Ben, get back into bed now,” she screamed.

A locked door beyond the steps opened at a shoulder charge while, behind me, Kerry faked the world’s most unconvincing panic attack, insisting she needed a doctor immediately.

Inside the darkened space, a cord dangled beside my skull. At a pull a weak bulb blinked on, illuminating stacked boxes, clothes racks, and rickety furniture; a controlled, meticulously organized mess. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. The air up there tasted stale, sickeningly warm.

My ‘better’ half stepped in front of me, her panic attack miraculously cured. “Now you know my secret. I spent too much money on shoes and handbags. I’ve…I’ve got a secret credit card. It’s maxed out, I’m an addict. Let’s talk this out in the kitchen.”

At the far side of the room, beyond stacked boxes, metal jingled around. In response to this, Kerry stabbed her tongue inside my mouth. “Come to bed,” she whispered.

I held her shoulders and used them to steer her aside.

Through a narrow gap there hovered a pair of eyes, regarding us from the shadow of the corner. I pushed away a tower of boxes and then froze.

Before me lay some kind of torture hostage. A thin pale figure, barely visible in the gloom, wore a metal collar attached to the wall by a heavy chain.

What. The. Fuck. Had my wife been keeping an anorexic sex slave? For a moment I felt relief our love life had welted…

Ready to channel months without intercourse into the ass kicking of a lifetime, I stepped forward, but as I did Kerry threw herself in my way and laced her hand with mine. “I didn’t want any of this. Nick, he…he manipulated me. I had no choice.”

Nick? So this bastard had a name. “Kerry,” I said, still in a state of complete shock, “this is…”

As I took a second, harder look at the intruder, my voice died away.

Those eyes glowed, two circles of green light in the outline of a skull marked by liver spots. Beneath pale skin vertebrae, cartilage, and muscle fibre shone through, connected by a network of blue and black veins. I didn’t think anything so frail could possibly live, yet the concaved chest went up and down in little heaves, the chain rattling away.

“At first I could manage alone,” Kerry continued. “I just let him have a little taste of my own every now and again. Or I’d fish tissues and clothes out of the bin whenever you got cut. He’d wander around the house at night, and nobody got hurt. But lately sustaining both him”—she hesitated, as though realizing what she was on the verge of saying—“I just haven’t been able to keep him…satisfied. I hoped the chickens might do, but he said there was no substitute for human. And the less I could feed him, the more dangerous he became. Then he said I had to let him eat you. He said we had to get rid of you, but I refused because I love you. That’s when he took a bite at me.” She held up her wrist, the scars still prominent. “So I locked him away up here to keep you safe—to keep us safe.”

A soft hand caressed my cheek while she reaffirmed her love, her right arm behind her back. “Come downstairs. I’ll explain everything.”

This pathetic act didn’t fool me. When she made her move, I was ready.

My hand caught Kerry’s wrist in mid-air, the knitting needle halting mere inches above my left temple. Her eyes went wide with fear.

The two of us stood there, my fingers sinking deeper into her flesh. She released the weapon which dropped onto the floor, and when she tried to wriggle free, I let go.

Her momentum carried her across the room, toppling over a box of garments along the way, where her skull collided with the angled wall, hard. A red ink blot smeared across slanted wood boards as she slid onto the floor, directly beside her ‘secret lover’, whose nose twitched like a rabbit sniffing out a juicy carrot.

He leaned over her, far as the chain would allow.

‘Nick’, she rasped while he hunched over her body, drawing long, satisfied inhales. Frail hands, capped by long curved nails, ran all over her damaged skull and then the creature licked blood off its fingertips, groaning with delight. Every subtle movement carried this elegant, almost regal manner.

His mouth opened, revealing long, curved fangs longer than Cayenne peppers—fangs capable of stripping flesh off a live chicken…

Groggy and confused, Kerry’s eyeballs rotated up towards him. “Darling,” she muttered.

A single digit pressed against her lips. Her companion smiled. Then, those fangs plunged deep into her neck.

Kerry shrieked, her body quickly draining any sort of nutritious element. She deflated like a balloon after someone released the stem, her squeals becoming raspy croaks, quickly melting away.

This macabre display startled a shocked gasp from me. My feet remained rooted on the spot.

Meanwhile, ‘Nick’s’ muscles flexed and writhed, his belly swelling. Blonde hair sprouted from the taut skull, his spinal column becoming less defined, the wrinkles less pronounced. Now he appeared almost alive, better-ripened.

As the withered husk vaguely resembling the lady I married slumped onto the floor, a voice behind me screamed: “Vampire!”

This broke my paralysis. I spun toward Ben, whose cheeks were wet with tears.

Oh shit. Even though this awful series of events made zero sense, I knew we needed to run, fast.

I manoeuvred him toward the stairs with a series of stiff, desperate shoves.

From across the space, there came a metal groan and I glanced back right as the prisoner snapped the chain binding him to the wall with his bare hands. Although free, he didn’t come after us immediately because coloured garments lay spilled across the floor—collateral damage from Kerry’s earlier tumble.

My wife’s lover scooped these up, began folding, and set them on an antique side table nearby.

Holy shit. The serial folder wasn’t Kerry. It was Nick…

Those dazzling eyes scanned me from head-to-toe, a long, forked tongue whipping across a thin set of lips. He appeared completely calm, like the idea of us escaping was simply unthinkable.

The steps flew beneath Ben and I’s feet. We charged past the make-up room, downstairs, along the hall, into the garage, only to discover a shadowy figure hanging from the rafters like a bat.

How on earth did he move so fast?

We franticly scrambled for the sliding glass doors at the back of the house, but outside, beyond the vegetable patch, the shadowy figure sat perched on a fence post, those glowing eyes silhouetted against the darkened forest.

As a wintery breeze carried a cruel, quiet laugh across the garden, it occurred to me this cat-and-mouse game most likely delighted our pursuer.

There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. That left only one option…

The wheelbarrow lay perfectly still fifteen metres ahead of us. I ordered Ben to make a break for the woodshed.

“But Dad—" he protested.

“MOVE.”

Heart pitoning in my chest, I trampled over strawberries and grabbed the hedge shears and held them out defensively.

A single leap made Nick sail straight over the vegetable patch. Before I even knew it, an icy claw clamped tight around my throat, the force driving me down amongst the broccoli, breathless.

My hands unintentionally released the shears. Above me, a glistening tongue slid out to wet the grinning mouth. I glimpsed pink-stained teeth, hooked fangs. This was the end. Any second now that bastard would drain my body and bury the remains in the soil, like the chickens.

A sharp nail cut across my throat, and then Nick sucked the blood off his finger with delight, eyes rolled back in his skull. “Oh, I’m going to make you pay for what you made me do to Kerry,” he said. “I was so hungry; I simply couldn’t resist.”

He tapped his metal collar. “I want you to know, Phil, these chains were meant for you. Kerry and I planned on keeping you locked up as an inexhaustible supply of blood. But lately, the ravenous hunger, it simply became too much, what with Kerry rationing the food supply. So I agreed to be locked up while she got all the ducks in a row, and now look what unfolded. Well, at least my sweet Kerr-bear will know the man who forced me to feast on her flesh died screaming in—”

Out of nowhere, a child-sized object vaulted onto Nick’s back and stuffed some kind of vegetable inside his mouth.

This sent my opponent into furious convulsions. Only when I forced myself to sit up did it become clear Ben was paint-brushing Nick’s face with a portion of garlic he’d dug out of the vegetable patch.

The pair whirled around, a bulb half-lodged inside the vampire’s frothing mouth.

He whipped his top half forward, simultaneously sending Ben airborne and dropping onto his knees, and hacked up a tidal wave of blood, both hands clutched around his own throat for relief.

Fury washed over me. Having an affair with my wife was one thing, but nobody hurts my son, even the undead.

In one smooth motion I jumped up and grabbed the shears and then charged forward with every ounce of strength I could muster, arms outstretched. Nick was too distracted to prevent the sharpened steel from piercing his chest, right where the heart would be.

When I released the handles, they stuck out all by themselves.

A death rasp went up. Expanding from the entry point, the bloodsucker’s body evaporated like dust, peeling away in every direction across the torso, the breeze carrying the scattered remains away. Within seconds only the shears and metal collar remained, both of which dropped into the soil.

It was over.

A battered Ben staggered to his feet, his breaths slow and choked. Pained even. I scooped him into my arms then the two of us collapsed amidst the turnips, sobbing.

-

For some time, I believed we’d escaped the nightmare (mostly) unscathed. The beast died, I’d escaped a toxic marriage, and—after a months-long investigation—the police conceded they had no idea where Kerry disappeared to.

Sounds like a happy ending, right?

Wrong.

Over the coming weeks, Ben’s appetite dwindled to the point he couldn’t even keep hot chocolate down. The poor kid had so little energy entire days passed without him so much as climbing out of bed. A series of dietary specialists were completely mystified.

Then one morning, while he sat behind the breakfast table, I studied his blonde hair, those green eyes, and had a sudden, chilling realization.

At the counter, I poured out a hot chocolate. Subtly, I pricked my finger with a needle, shook a few drops of blood into the cup, and stirred vigorously.

Here went nothing…

Ben took an apprehensive sip, slapped his lips together, and beamed. “This tastes great, just like the ones mom used to make.”

And then I watched, horrified, as my son drained the liquid in a single gulp…