Manic Pixie Vampire Romance

The basement was all the cliches: equal parts dark, foreboding, sexy and nerve wracking. For all he knew it could have been decked out with a 46 inch tv and surround sound; from the top of the steps and with the lights off it was all the same. Pearl had finally invited Nic back to her house after two months of after-school make-out sessions, and she said she was ready for the proverbial "next step." They had each taken swigs from different bottles her mother kept around; him out of a crystalline gin bottle in the freezer and her from the tall bottle of tequila in the pantry. He wondered if her mother would come home and realize they had drunk her liquor.

"Are you kidding? She goes through like, two of those a week. I'll show you the flask she brings to work if you're still around when she gets home."

"And she's... Cool? Like with me being here?"

"Why wouldn't she be?"

"uh, like, I dunno..." he chuckled nervously.

"I dunno what you think you're getting, pal, but I'm a good Christian girl..."
After that, she winked at him, told him to meet her in the basement, that he couldn't turn the lights on, and that she would do so as soon as she was ready and she was there.

"Hey I think a rat died down here or something," Nic shouted back through the door, halfway down the steps. The stench reminded him of the time a couple years back when there was a blackout and all the meat in his freezer began to rot. "Are you sure you want to hang out down here? ...Seriously, it smells awful..." He felt drunk, and the smell made it that much worse.

"Shit, that bad? Hold on a sec, I'll be right down there to figure out what it is..."

                                                                                    ***

Nic was dizzy when Pearl arrived and stood centered in the wood frame of the doorway. "I hate to do this," he said, "but I kind of feel like shit. I don't really drink, you know..."
"No, no, that's totally okay," she replied. He noticed she was carrying a rope. It was thick and wooly; an old-school rope a dastardly villain would have used to tie a fair maiden to a set of train tracks. "Just sit down on the steps for a second, I'll turn the light on."

"I think this nasty smell is kind of fucking me up too, maybe we should just hang out upstairs."

"Two seconds," she said, and she flipped the light switch.

In the basement there were four or five rows of hanging cocoon-like masses, four to a row, each of them dripping a thick black-green and yellow substance onto the faded salmon carpet. He looked up at her blurring visage and saw eight arms and thousands of bright green eyes spinning in the light.

                                                                                    ***

Nic woke up with a drowsy, overslept feeling. He couldn't feel his legs or his arms. He could barely feel anything, in fact, except for an incredibly itchy sensation which he quickly realized was being caused by tiny threads rubbing against his skin.

"You're up," he heard Pearl say excitedly. The words echoed around his skull for a moment.

"You were out cold. Usually it's like, twelve hours or so but you've been out for like... more than a full day. How do you feel?"

His eyes were barely open and a bright light somewhere above him was blurring out the rest of his vision. "Uuuhhhhnngghh... What... what's going on?"

"You've just got to give it a second for your eyes to adjust. Most people are pretty okay with that shit but it seems like it hit you pretty hard..."
It took another couple minutes for Nic's eyes to focus. In front of him he could see one of the sacks, hovering about three feet above the ground and hanging by a single rope to a pipe on the ceiling. It was intricately woven, line after horizontal line of rope stacked up toward a smaller, sort of oblong-shaped...