by Ian Hall
Continuing to plough his manhood inside me, he sucked the lifeblood from my neck, and I enjoyed every second.
“Oh, you are a natural!” he roared, straining his head above me, the blood dark and black in the lamplight. He took his hand from binding mine, and tore across his wrist with his teeth, ripping his veins asunder. I looked on with astonishment as the blood began to drip onto my body.
Then I smelled his blood, and at last the rage within me began to grow. I readied myself to kill this little man, then felt completely frustrated when it didn’t happen quick enough. I shook my head, trying to channel the anger, and gave an exasperated gasp when still it built up far too slowly to save me.
I still lay in pain. He still thrust inside me with desperate strokes. I could see his face grimace, ready for release. I screamed, frustrated that my rage would arrive too late.
At that moment I felt my mother move my hands, grabbing Amos’s wrist and pulling it to my mouth. I resisted every inch of the way. Then the first touch of his dripping blood touched my lips and my struggle seemed gone forever. Knowing my destiny, knowing my desire, and knowing that I had bonded with my mother, I sucked like never before, and his thick, creamy blood coursed down my throat like the sweetest honey.
The ecstasy flowed from my mouth, to my body, then to my loins, clutching round his manhood with a grip of iron.
I erupted in pleasure, the feeling flowing from head to toe with my mother still holding my hand.
Amos Blanche collapsed and shriveled inside of me. For a split second, he seemed soft, weak and vulnerable. I seized on that moment.
Clamping his head between my hands, I cracked the old man’s neck easily as if he’d been a squirrel. I pushed the dead husk off my body and it rolled to the floor with a pleasing thud. For a long time I remained sprawled atop the cot, wanting the sensations rolling through me to quiet.
Instead they redoubled in strength and a surging energy fired in my veins.
His corruption of me had been complete. My body had been awakened to a new longing, falsely induced but rampant nonetheless. I brought my fingers to the place of his intrusion, realizing I lay engorged with need. I took ownership of my craving, feeling at once empowered and ashamed.
As I moved myself to climax, that still, serene voice assured me it was right and good to work the desire through to fulfillment. In doing so, a hunger like none I’d ever experienced, roused and rallied. I dropped to the floor, dug my teeth into the dead man’s shoulder and sought to drain him dry.
An eerie laugh broke through my frenzy.
“I can see I made a good choice.”
Before I could react, his fingers were wrapped in my hair and I suddenly felt held in place by his steel grip. Amos Blanche encouraged me, almost gently, as he brought my arm to his mouth and took of my blood while I drank from him. Soon our mouths were locked; he took me by the waist and moved me over him. I joined with him freely, a willing participant in my own destruction.
“Do not hold back, girl,” he told me and I didn’t.
My abuse upon him proved as reckless and unyielding as he had been to me. Any other man would not have survived my ministrations. I watched his agony and reveled in it.
Sweating and panting I released everything.
“What am I?” I demanded.
A pair of glassy eyes stared up at me, unseeing. The back of my hand met his jaw square and the eyes immediately cleared.
“What am I?”
A sickening smile, laced with venom, looked back at me. “You are mine.”
Again I swung. Again he smiled.
“I have already killed you once. Don’t think I won’t do it again.”
“That which kills us makes us stronger, my dear.”
Amos rolled us over, pinning me at the shoulders. I could feel him already regaining vigor inside of me. I felt ready to take it but would have my truth first.
Despite my defenselessness, I sneered up at the man, “Tell me or I will strangle it out of you.”
“You already know what you are,” he said soothingly, “you are the thing of nightmares. I have watched you as you watched them; skulked behind you all those years you skulked in the shadows. I have witnessed your lust for destruction, girl, and now I have made you invincible.”
He moved himself inside me, and I lost my resolve to understand instantly. For the moment it seemed enough to hear aloud that I was indeed what I’d always believed myself to be. The cravings, the rage that set me apart and made me different were now acknowledged and even admired. I was a monster. But, for the first time in my life I no longer felt afraid of myself.
I don’t know how long we stayed in that cabin, feeding upon one another’s lust for both blood and sex. A time of madness and violence when the savage within me took full reign and the man who released that savage proved nearly her equal. I would never say I loved Amos Blanche; to me he lived as a tool to be used for my own purposes. He undoubtedly felt different; to him I lay subservient, his creature, his plaything. It seemed the way of the world.
By the time we embarked from his dreary cabin I’d learned to embrace the passions and hungers every other man in my life had sought to squash from me. Winter lay upon us.
So for the first time in my life I knew my name, and what I had been since the moment of my birth into this world: a vampire. A monster of bloodlust, driven by cravings no normal person could understand.
For most people, this knowledge would have driven them wild. For me, I embraced a calmness that settled my childhood, dimmed my infancy, and explained my adolescence. It came as an admonition and an acceptance of innocence. I could have not lived different if I’d tried any harder.
A tiger cannot suckle at a pig’s teat for long; one day the realization would come that it was indeed a tiger, and the mother’s breast becomes meat, not milk.
Amos treated me badly. His appetite for sex seemed incredible, and he would ‘rape’ me for hours each night, or at least I let him think so. In truth I secretly enjoyed our joining’s, wallowing at last as I had been born to do.
He taught me to hunt, and my prey were no longer animals penned in fields, but people of my choosing, lithe healthy men, who rushed headlong into my arms to meet their destruction. Amos shared my prey, joining us on the bed, ready for the moment of release, then we feasted together.
Amos taught me vampire speed, and I immediately took to flight once or twice each week, running the moon washed countryside, feeling a great strength infest my body, and reveling in the freedom.
Once, Amos picked the prey; a nubile girl, no older than me, and for the first time, I seduced one of my own sex, learning as we caroused the taboo structure of that manner of love. Amos watched for hours, then joined us on the bed. I looked on, detached from the fray, struck with awe as he tore into her willing flesh, driving his manhood for hours. We ended her together, feasting from both sides of her neck as she slipped into darkness.
Amos told me his story, how he had been turned in Europe, and fought his way across to America, despite being hunted both on shore and aboard ship. For years he had planned an assault on the nearby town, and now, it seemed, with me as a Lorelei, he had the means to begin to create his empire.
But the world of the vampire is full of fear and balance, and it seems we exceeded the latter, and after only a few of the locals were taken, we were chased from our humble cabin.
We moved west to the town of Albany, and took up residence in a fairly decent apartment. I used my vampire speed to steal from the pockets of the rich, and in the larger town, we passed many years in complete anonymity, never becoming too prominent, never too much in the limelight, and certainly never getting caught out like before.
We culled humans from the surrounding countryside, and like the cleverest of dogs, never shit on our own doorstep.
In Albany, I became aware that I held a particular charm with the young men in the town. After a while, suitors would come calling on me, ignoring the presence
of the older Amos; this proved to be a grave mistake on their part.
It set up our routine for many decades. Every ten years or so, we moved our place of residence. Once into Boston proper, and then into the growing conurbation of New York.
In the mid nineteen thirties, living outside Philadelphia, my mentor finally began to manifest his growing vision of empire. Until that time, he seemed quite happy with my lone companionship, but slowly he grew dissatisfied with riches alone. He began to dream of power, and that meant instead of culling for food, we began to turn humans into vampires. I first heard the term ‘Philadelphia Crusade’ at that time, spoken by Amos like some declaration of war. It meant nothing to me then, but little did I know that I already played a tiny part of it.
Like some modern day, dark messiah Amos Blanche grew his following one convert at a time. His message seemed clear: hatred for all mortals. His method of inclusion remained unchanging: brutal, vicious force coupled with agonizing sex. Much of the time I noted nothing in the way of foresight or insight in his numerous acquisitions. Though he touted his own intellectual prowess, I felt seldom impressed or inspired by what appeared a random cross-section of American youth.
This was a time of hardship for my adopted country. As the glistening new world plunged into an era of adversity and hopelessness, Amos’ resources were accumulating. Unaccustomed to the trappings of wealth, he wore his lavish lifestyle like a pin on his lapel, shining it in the eyes of the hungry and desperate. Association with Amos Blanche meant escape from the dismal world collapsing around them. There were many takers. But every one that joined became tainted by the darker side of the vampire existence, and a total disregard for the sanctity of human life.
Like Amos himself, I too got fat off the impoverished. Although I looked no older than twenty, I strutted through the new regime like a whorehouse madam, content in my position as the ‘old lady’ of the company. But as the Blanche troops slowly amassed and new ranks got assigned, it came as no shock that the more valuable positions were entrusted to the males of his brigade. Men ran the world outside, and Amos needed a male army to continue his advancement. As each new addition rose in the ranks, they tested me in turn, but none could master my will. Few came even close to matching me. Amos turned the boys into men and I slapped them back to boys again.
As the thirties passed, Amos and his followers came to respect me as the force of nature I was born to be. For many of the early years I had endured his attention to my body. At last he realized the power of my fist.
Growing Tired with Life
On the 26th of July, 1939, as I turned eighty years old, news began to filter through to America of the struggle of the Jews in Germany, and my thoughts were increasingly of my mother and father, both now long dead. No sooner had I began my ruminations, when they were cruelly interrupted.
On the morning of 1st August, a veritable typhoon of violence hit our household.
I lay taking a leisurely bath, when I heard the sound of breaking glass outside in the hallway. I did not have time to act. The bathroom door burst open, and two strange men filled the doorway. One looked hardly more than a teenager, but the other stood tall and striking. If I hadn’t been in so much shock, I might have looked upon him differently, but anger boiled in my veins and I screamed at them. “Get out!”
To my surprise, they vanished, but reappeared looming over my bath, one holding my arms by my side, the other pushing my head and torso under the water, his strong hands clasping over my windpipe. I struggled against their holds, but to no avail; they were immensely powerful. The bathwater lay clouded with fragrant salts, but as I fell into darkness, I looked up into his misty eyes and realized I was being murdered by two vampires.
Two strangers.
It wasn’t the first time I’d died. Sex with Amos lay fraught with such danger, and many times I’d passed out under him, his fingers squeezing my esophagus as this stranger had done. But this would be the first time I’d drowned, and it felt quite alarming.
I awoke with a loud gasp, throwing myself upright in the now cold, stagnant water. I threw myself over the side of the bath and emptied my lungs onto the tiled floor. Sick and water cascaded from my lips in such a volume, I wondered how much a body could hold.
When I sat back, exhausted, the house remained quiet, and the low yellow light of evening passed limply through the single window.
I rose, shivering from the cold water, and donned my thick toweling robe. One figure lay in the corridor, his head completely removed, his features turned against the dark oak trim. I walked slowly to the main room of the house, ready for flight. Two more bodies lay there, both beheaded, both discarded recklessly to the floor.
I headed for Amos’s room, to find him tied to the bed, his head still on his shoulders, a long knife embedded in his chest. He lay dead, the dagger having passed through his heart. A letter sat on his belly, and I crossed the room to read it.
Amos Blanche.
You have been served a warning.
We are a patient species, and have no need to bring attention to our kind.
Your latest foray into the public consciousness has been stopped.
Do not let it happen again.
G.
I folded the letter and replaced it on the bed. Then I pulled the knife from Amos’s chest. Blood sputtered from his mouth as he gasped his first. I rolled him to his side until his convulsive breathing quieted, fearing he might choke on his own vomit.
Never before had I seen Amos Blanche the way I saw him at that moment; curled on his side, blanket clutched in a white fist. With misplaced sympathy I reached for his shoulder, comforting him. As he rolled again to his back I saw a dark light burning in his eyes. Immediately I realized he did not need my pity.
“Survivors?” he demanded, a feral rasp to his voice.
“Only you and myself from what I’ve seen.”
Amos’ lip curled into a snarl, “Good. We rebuild again- this time a thousand fold more deadly than before.”
My fingers found the small piece of paper and I presented it to Amos with trembling hand, “They say this was just a warning. If we continue to push…”
“If?” he spat the word at me. “There is no ‘if’, my dear Valérie. We will rebuild.”
I rocked back in shock. “Who’s ‘G’?”
“Pah,” Amos spat. “An immigrant Romanian upstart from Miami; thinks he knows how to run a vampire cadre. He doesn’t know shit.”
I thought of the man who had choked me, his handsome face had looked somewhat Romany.
Amos proved as good as his word. Brick by brick he laid the new foundation. And he had learned well from his first excursion. Amos Blanche no longer opened his door to strays, accepting whatever the ruin of humanity stumbled his way. He took to actively seeking out his conquests, devoting valuable resources to their finding; looking for humans who boasted a darkness as natural to them as blood thirst to vampires.
Amos had a good eye for the work, but we both knew he needed a male pied piper to seduce the cream of the young girls to the fold.
And Amos Blanche liked young girls.
So to keep the story continuity, we pause Valerie’s story (Original Sins) for a moment to tell a far more detailed account of the tale of the pied piper; the boy Amos had picked to seduce the females to his vampire pack.
This is a two voiced tale.
April writes as Alan Rand.
Ian writes as Valerie Lidowitz.
We hope you enjoy…
Vampires Don’t Cry: The Turning of Alan Rand
By Ian Hall and April L. Miller
I had no idea why Valérie Queen-of-Homecoming Lidowitz would be inviting me out for a milkshake after school. The note had been stuffed into the crack of my locker, folded all prettily into an origami swan and smelling of some too-sweet perfume. And there at the bottom lay her flowery signature, all in big, scrolling letters:
Valérie from home room.
XO!
“
Yeah right,” I said, crumpling the counterfeit love note and chucking it into the nearest trash bin.
Probably that Clark Dugan; he constantly tried to get under my skin. Some of the Littleton High student body had too much time on their hands. Not me- stopping to unfold that swan put me three minutes behind schedule and marching band try-outs wait for no man. Clutching my clarinet case, I dashed off to the auditorium before Mr. Schuster crossed my name right off the list.
But yards away from the double doors, a white, fuzzy sweater stretched tight over a generous bosom intercepted my intended trajectory. Valérie was a tall girl and my outstretched arms were perfectly level with the bumps she took no trouble to conceal.
“Hi, Alan,” she said, arching her shoulders, successfully jutting her bust out that much further, “I thought I might run into you here. Did you get my note by any chance?”
Well of all the childish nonsense. So, Valérie participated willingly in Clark’s little set up. I’d been willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that her signature had been forged. No such luck. Pretty Valérie had a bitchy side, just like everybody else.
I lowered my gaze and lifted my clarinet case, “I’m late for try-outs; will you please excuse me.”
I made off to one side but Valérie moved quick, very quick. If she wasn’t the fastest thing on two legs then I’ll be dead duck. Side-stepping in a blur, she cut me off.
My glasses had slipped down the bridge of my nose. I pushed them in place and looked straight into her flirty eyes.
“What is it you want from me, miss?” I demanded.
She giggled, tiny little bubbles bursting in mid-air. Extremely annoying.
“That milkshake for starters, Alan Rand.”
“Excuse me but I’ve got better things to do than be bothered with anymore pranks by your band of rabble-rousers.”
I went to push past her, but Valérie shot her hand out at my chest. That little tart seemed as strong as she was fast. For certain my sternum would be bruised.