“I think a mind becomes sated by knowledge and numerous schools of thought. Once a mental level has been reached where the mind’s capacity to reason is disciplined to a supreme limit, solutions are attained automatically without much thought, almost involuntarily. At that point there isn’t much else worth learning. Nothing else would feel new anymore; so-called new ideas or theories would clearly be exposed as having little actual originality. All is just surface if you know what’s come over centuries before with all their fashions, sciences and learning.
“People who’ve lived hundreds of years are like the man in Simone de Beauvoir’s All Men are Mortal. Let me tell you about that. The lead character Fosca has been immortal since the thirteenth century. With so much time the opportunity is there for him to carefully nurture a project for the good of humanity. He picks a vessel who’ll lead the Empire. He’s got a lot a lot of time. If one emperor fails he can build up the political power of the next. Centuries of experience in developing his own expertise in state gives him the political acuteness to know which man is well placed, at the right moment in time, to expand an empire over much of civilised Europe. A place where he can build, paradise on earth. He quickly understands the means needed to create his dream. The wealth of empire has to be set on the plundered wealth and raw material of Africa and the Americas. Tens of thousands of lives have to be taken and thousands more repressed. If you’re immortal, don’t you start thinking how insignificant a life is in the scheme of things, when you’re thinking beyond one generation?
“But in time, like a god, he sees all good intentions and moral crusades for the general good of the world are doomed. Minor things can be done for the better but humankind is imperfect and if it can’t learn to live for the good of others or for the universal good, then let the world go to rot. It’s bound to do just that with or without his assistance. The result of the sum of experience and knowledge gained over several centuries is an indifference to all of humanity’s so-called achievements. Its arts and sciences, its ambition for the accumulation of power for the stated sake of noble projects and ideals. All is bullshit. In the end, there’s an overwhelming emptiness and pessimism. Fosca doubts any universal action can change things for a perceived good. And if it can, the change doesn’t last long and the world reverts back to type. Man will stubbornly do like what he wants to do, even if that means destroying the world the enlightened rulers define as perfect.
“If the immortal has an inclination to continue to participate in the world it’s to further the destruction of society rather than having a benevolence towards its components. Consistently humanity is the same over centuries. Perfect justice and law and order are reactionary abstractions for human beings who boast of their freewill. Given the choice, humans prefer to bathe in their own shit. Yeah, that sounds right. Fosca got bored with it, resentful even that people still get pleasures out of the basic experiences and arts, much like their many interminable line of predecessors enjoyed the same.
“In that context perhaps we can understand an apparently shallow character like Dracula.”
“Don’t flash your hypno eyes at me like that. It’s only a movie?” Anri’s intonation makes it sound like a question, her eyes switching demonstratively to the TV for a moment. “Chill and remove whatever that is, stuck far up your arse, why don’t you. I only said it was poor form. Like crap. I betcha even your slave thinks that. Hey, where you are, girl!” Anri hollers, swivelling her head to face the hallway. She sits up on her haunches, a freaky smile across her cushiony lips as the girl scurries in. “What do you think of that, huh?” Anri asks excitedly, as she whips her fingers through her hair.
“Who cares what she thinks. For now she’s only cattle.”
What a mind-fuck! Jason Winter’s on TV, his eyes pulling up from his sockets as - jump-cut from a gleaming crucifix exposed just below the woman’s neck – pain crosses his face. The irony of it is sweet. A real vampire getting a movie gig, as a prince of darkness. She thinks it’s so fucking cool. The master a film star! This is some weird shit. Okay, he isn’t Johnny Depp exactly, this looks like straight-to-video low budget nonsense, but for the girl, right now, he’s so many times bigger than any Hollywood actor on the A-list.
“What’re you gawping at?” Jason snaps, glowering at the girl. “And what’s with your head? I told you, your head should be bowed toward the floor. That’s a rule, for Chrissake’s.”
Gawping? Like gawking, the girl assumes. English-English, right? She hunches her body within two seconds. A rule – come to think of it, the girl muses, hadn’t he broken one of the most important ones of the vampire community? Discretion: do not make a sideshow of yourself. But then again, she tells herself she’s probably missing a subtle distinction.
“You haven’t given her a chance to answer. So what do you think of the movie?” Anri asks the girl.
The girl doesn’t dare lifting her chin; a high-pitched shriek, boot-sole sounds speedily crossing asphalt.
“Be gone, demon!” cries a silver-haired man in a greatcoat, wooden cross held out from his body.
“Leave it, Anri.” Jason gives her an ugly glare. Then switches to the girl. “I’m expecting guests; make sure you don’t keep them waiting. Now get yourself back to the kitchen.”
The girl scurries off. In the kitchen she glances around. There isn’t enough to do in this room proportionate to the time she spends here. She decides on doing the dishes; after that she can start on the ironing. Going through into the dining room, she picks up whatever’s on the table and heads for the kitchen sink. She takes the first plate from the pile and soaks it in tap water, reaching for the dishcloth.
“What a surprise, you’re in the kitchen.”
The girl’s shoulders jump, the plate fumbling out of her hand. She snatches the plate out of the air with a big sigh of relief, just getting to it in time before it crashes. She can feel Anri’s breath on her neck; she’d crept noiselessly out of nowhere. The girl’s heart pulses with a significant throb; there’s a tickling sensation working a way down from her spine. In her mind she keeps declaring she has to try to stay calm; Anri’s arm brushes hers while leaning for a cup on the strainer. The girl wills herself to cool the heat she senses in her cheeks. She’s shaking.
Anri stands by the girl’s elbow. Her eyes never leave the side of the girl’s face. She stays like that for at least half a minute.
“Do I disturb you that much?” Anri glances down at a plate wobbling in the girl’s hand. Nothing from the girl: she’s not ready or willing to answer. “Forget about the dishes for a moment. Turn round. Turn round, I said,” Anri snaps irritably.
Moving round, the girl keeps her gaze down, struggling to make her face blank. She bites on her lower lip nervously.
“Your head doesn’t have to be so low - I’m not Jason.” Anri places a finger under the girl’s chin and brings her head up a little. She sweeps aside the girl’s hair from her pale face with her hands; keeping the dark waves parted long enough so she can look at the girl’s eyes. “Aren’t you the miserable one. Someone tell you vampires aren’t supposed to smile? I betcha you look real cool when you do.”
In the tight T-shirt Anri’s bosom is considerable. The breasts are high, firm and totally awesome. Her absurdly sharp nipples poke at the cotton. The girl’s cheeks dimple; the smile looks ironic, it is unintentionally mocking.
“Well, maybe not,” Anri says, taking a small pace backwards. “That’s what I call a real vampire’s smile. It’s scary,” she affects a shiver and laughs warmly, her eyes on the girl’s face.
Still smiling, the girl lifts her gaze. The intensity of her joy quickly drops by a good number of levels, Anri’s voice might’ve sounded tender but the face is impersonal. The girl’s seen more emotion in a doll’s eyes; in Anri’s she reads nothing. It’s all a big let-down. But that’s the thing with vamps, the girl supposes, no soul and no feeling.
The girl intends her voice to be neutral. “Yes - I do, mistress,” she says. It comes out breathless, like a sigh. She wonders if her feelings for Anri are totally transparent. Has she been found out? The girl takes her diffident gaze low; her eyes, all at once becoming too readily enormous and affectionate, will surely give her away.
Anri swivels her hips slightly toward the door a moment before the doorbell chimes. On the ring she says, “There’s the master’s guests.” She searches the girl’s eyes. “Such a silly girl,” she grins. “Time for me to disappear. You better get the door pronto before Jason bursts a blood vessel. Funny as the sight of that would be. Away with you.”
The girl sidesteps awkwardly; her feet planted on the floor, she pulls away. Easily matching the girl’s speed, wheeling round on her heels, Anri catches the girl’s ass with a slap. Going off with a backward glance, the girl forgets herself and smiles. Her face quickly stiffens, like a newscaster abruptly correcting herself after realising she’s started the first line of a major disaster report with a big grin.
At the front door the girl straightens up and exhales hard. As she reaches for the door handle juices in her stomach make it whine. Saliva gathers in her mouth as she pictures a huge patty melt: a grease-dripping burger smothered with American cheese, fat-fried onions, a good-sized relish dollop, all jammed in between buttery, grilled bread slabs. She curses the image and tugs on the door.
She narrows her eyes; dipping sunlight behind the two guests forces her to squint. Evilyn and Electra, slouching on the threshold. The door open, they spring forward, making the girl retreat hastily backwards. The two women don’t slacken their pace. From a starting point of indifference both women start staring at the girl unashamedly, looking her over, up and down.
White-faced, geisha-style, Electra grabs the girl’s by the T-shirt at her upper arm and yanks her a big step nearer. Face-to-face, less than an arm’s length, the girl can smell and feel Electra’s breath. It’s coppery and between light to virtually non-existent, respectively. She wonders what their status is. They’re members of his cult, but are they empowered ones, have they been turned?
An important question, without being sure the girl doesn’t know what level of respect ought to be awarded. She’d learned many things about vampires. Like they don’t have fangs; they can eat solids and drink what humans do; sunlight does them no great harm; they don’t need to kill to get their supply of blood. Most she’d learned by observing; it’s a matter of going with the flow, she decides. Then looks up.
Evilyn wears a Nazi-type uniform, with swastikas and SS lightning insignia and patent leather knee-high boots. She hunches in her jacket one side of Electra, like she’s about to jump on top of the girl. Wetting her lips with the small tip of her tongue, her bug-eyes look like she’s contemplating how the girl’s going to taste. Electra, tightly clenching the girl’s bicep, doesn’t seem much different: poised, as though for an attack. She reviews the girl’s dimensions and attributes, neck, shoulders, size of boobs, arms, waist, hips, bare legs, feet and then back again, all in a few seconds. The conclusion shows up on her face, if that’s where it is to be found, as a fiercely focused glare and her obscene grin. It is a plain hunger she is happy to put on open view.
But hungry for what, exactly? The girl’s body for the excitement it gives her? Or exclusively for her blood? Or as a complete entity, one she wants to consume? The girl wonders and gets no answers; she doesn’t realise she’s been looking in Electra’s eyes non-stop for over a minute.
Electra in a bedroom, in the same short dress she’s got on – that is a few crisscrossing thin black leather strips and straps just covering her nipples, barely encircling her upper thighs and crotch, a dress showing much of the skin of her hips, stomach and all of her pipe-thin arms. Her face-paint isn’t much paler than the rest of her, so much skin provocatively on view. The horizontal leather strap around her chest doesn’t have any significant womanly protrusions to hold back. Stepping backwards till she can go no more, Electra lands on her butt on a bed. Her bold eyes always looking up, drawing in the onlooker, Electra slides up the silky bedcover. The leather strips going around her skinny upper legs and crotch ride up. She spreads her thighs.
Between her legs there are no pubes; the nub of the clitoris easily visible in between the smooth, hairless skin of the pearl-like shaped opening. Keeping eye contact with the observer, Electra draws her legs up, placing one sole flat on the mattress and uses fingers of both her hands to pull her labia slightly apart. The inner folds she exposes are a mouth-watering meaty pink colour, seemingly moist and delightfully smooth to the touch. And past them a slight glimpse of flesh of a paler hue, more like a skin tone. The inner flesh hints of the same delicacy as the stretched lips and the clit, but with the implicit promise of enveloping what comes inside, holding it in a tight, pleasing caress. Retaining the fingers of her right hand to hold her lips stretched out, Electra introduces two fingers of the left hand into her sweet slit. Slowly, the long extended digits go in all the way, up to her knuckles. Her eyes fixed on the girl she narrows them, a threatening look that provokes, savagely inciting the girl to come forward.
“Evilyn? Electra?” Jason’s acute voice comes from the living room.
The girl blinks. Letting go of the girl’s T-shirt, Electra, together with the other woman, goes in the direction of the voice; the two women go by the girl without a back glance between them. Out of the blue, the girl’s head jerks back.
“What was that?” the shock seems so great the girl says it aloud.
She pivots sharply and looks for the woman in the leather strip dress. A flash of black uniform, a pallid almost naked back cut up by black leather stripes. Both women break into piercing cackles as they enter the living room. The disturbing and carnal images had been so vivid and the only thing the girl remembers seeing for – how long? she isn’t sure. How could they have come into her head and taken it over at the exclusion of anything else? The woman must’ve entered her mind, that’s how the girl sees it; she can’t believe the clear pictures came out of her own head. It has to be a mental projection; totally awesome, the power these vampires have! And at the front door she couldn’t tell if they were vampire or human. The shame of it! she cries reproachfully, inside.
A floorboard creaks as the girl pads barefoot, back to the kitchen. Anri isn’t there. Has she entered her mind too, filling it with love, in much the same way as the woman in the leather strip dress had penetrated with lust? If so, she is a lot more subtle. The girl jumps; Jason’s voice is sharp coming all the way from the living room. She hurries through the corridor.
Apart from a modernist sofa the rest of the living room furniture seems musty and dank, walnut, mahogany and other woods tarnished and with little shine, as would be expected if the diverse pieces had been inherited over several generations. Gilt-framed paintings, where oil has saturated deep into the canvases - producing a murky unintentional chiaroscuro - and nicotine-glazed tracery, add to the ambience of decay. Collector figures of a variety of grotesque/gory iconic horror movie characters, stationed all over the place, strangely lighten the mood when set among wrought-iron candlesticks, dubious objet d’art, dingy art nouveau and Gothic-stylised ornaments, and other uncommendable antique shop tack.
Evilyn and Electra, their complexions wan in the dim-lit room, lounge on the sofa, Jason slouching in the middle. All three of them are a jumble of connecting limbs, the two Es putting a good number of theirs through his. Observing one of the rules, the girl keeps her head down. A good rule in the circumstances; she’d read enough vampire novels to know a human gazes in a vampire’s eyes at his or her risk.
“Obedient thing, isn’t she,” one of the Es observes, her inflection making it sound a taunt, bringing up a few colourful pict
ures in the girl’s mind of moments in her subjugation. A sharp pink tongue flits between half-parted dark purple lips. “Oh my, the poor waif’s out of breath.”
The Es giggle caustically, thrashing about on the sofa and throwing Jason about with them; the TV picture’s on pause, the vampire trapped within a quivering frame.
“Hmmm. Funny.” Jason says, without humour. “Put a fresh sheet on the cellar mattress,” he says evenly, glancing up at the girl’s T-shirt for a derisory moment. “And then stay there.”
“Oh goodie, are we going to have some fun? Jace, I’d so like to have some fun,” Evilyn remarks delightedly, simpering. She glances at Electra. Her grin gets wider and wider; Electra shows off her rapidly flickering pointed tongue. “Ya, me and sister E agree; time for an itsy-bitsy bit of fun.”
“Go now,” Jason says gratingly to the girl.
She nods deferentially and turns on her bare heels. Jason gets pulled around some more on the sofa. The two Es howl with laughter. A healthy flush comes to Jason’s face. One of the Es fumbles with the remote with her free hand; taps the pause button.
“Is this the bit when the vamp’s about to get staked, Jace? I don’t like it when the vamp gets staked.”
“I don’t know,” Electra pausing, sticks her narrow tongue in Jason’s left ear, “it’s kinda fun. All that blood.”
“Creepy,” the other E says in a little girl’s/sarcastically spine-chilling voice.
In the cellar the girl smoothes the wrinkles in the wraparound sheet with a hand, kneeling at the side of the mattress. The cotton sheet covers deeply encrusted blood and other stains so isn’t too sure of. Their come? Is she going to be the their feed for the day, laid out on the mattress? Then it’s the end – or the new beginning. There isn’t enough blood in her veins to satisfy them all. The girl shudders in anticipation, aware this maybe the day when she is turned. The re-existence she wants, her dream, to die and be raised, an Undead. But the thought of it – such a frightening but ultimately empowering concept - doesn’t stop her hands from shaking.
Vampire Lust Page 4