Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  I make it back to Mount Storm an hour before dawn, hunger nicely quenched. True, I did drink a little too deeply, and Joe’s likely to have to take a day off work due to that pesky twenty-four-hour bug he comes down with sometimes. In the tower room, I sit in the dark, rocking in the new chair my sweet boy Bob bought for me. I try to name the constellations that straddle the eastern horizon—Angus used to teach me the names of the stars over Scotland—but that vision of Matt dead in the alley still fades in and out, especially now that I am drowsy with overindulgence.

  Bates. And those bashers, shouting Leviticus while they bludgeoned that high-school kid. The men who surrounded Angus and me the last night of our lives together, they were shouting Bible verses, probably the very same. They were more monosyllabic when I tracked them down later, in those first nights of my new life, when I silenced their shrieks forever.

  Rising from my nest the next evening, I hear groans nearby. Sliding back the secret door to the cellar crypt, I slip down the corridor to the dungeon. Bob’s bent over a sawhorse, getting tastily rammed by a boy I recognize. Kurt, a big farmer from down Helvetia-way, who’s been driving up a lot lately to play with Bob. Or perhaps this particular passion has evolved past play. One of these days, I reflect sadly, my handsome caretaker’s going to fall in love and leave me here on this mountaintop to keep up the place myself.

  As much as I would love to watch these boys going at it, I have more pressing things to do: Internet research. Bob, bless him, has taught this eighteenth-century Luddite a few things about computers.

  The Charleston Gazette on-line files are full of rancid bits about Reverend Bates. “All homosexuals are child molesters,” he keeps insisting obsessively. “Why should hate-crime legislation give them special rights and condone their sin?” he whines. Yes, there, inevitably, is a quotation from Leviticus, and there is his exhortation to his followers: “Pluck out Satan’s perverted minions across the Mountain State.” If that isn’t an incitement to sanctimonious violence, I don’t know what is. The Leviticus Locusts, as Matt and his musician buddies call them, might very well be taking Bates’s sermons as their call to arms.

  I’m pleased to find a picture of the man embedded amidst his printed blatherings. Knowing what he looks like will be useful for future reference, in case I’m bored some evening and decide to feed him to a pack of wild dogs. He looks just the way I expected. No wonder these devout types rail about the sins of this world, I reflect bitchily—they’re all too damned ugly to harvest its joys. He’s an oleaginous mooncalf, pure and simple. Porcine eyes, an almost terrifying pompadour. And as for his girth, well, “bloatacious” is the word begging to be coined. It’s clear from his copious jowls and monstrous gut that his idea of Blessed Eternity is likely to be an endless helping of Spam.

  Snarling with contempt, I read on. Here’s an article about the wealthiest member of Bates’s congregation. Jim Cofferdilly, who grew up in Belle, is now, through perverse flukes of inheritance, the owner of a small fortune in coal-industry money. Under Bates’s influence, Cofferdilly—“Imagine a childhood bearing that name!” I smirk—has begun a campaign to erect huge wooden crosses all over West Virginia and other Appalachian states. These crosses, claims the article, are built to remind onlookers “of the glory of God and the sinfulness of humanity.”

  Reminders of the stupidity of humanity, perhaps. Reminders of the pestiferous ubiquity of flesh-hating faiths in Appalachia. Batwinging over West Virginia, I have occasionally seen these crosses and wondered what fool erected them. Always they appear in clumps of three, besmirching the mountains here and there, planted like toadstools in pastures and along interstates. One trio even sits on a rocky islet near Gauley Bridge, where the Gauley River joins the waters of the New. Once I perched atop the central cross of that set, chewed at the wood with my bat fangs a bit, then spat upon it and flew off, goaded by the demands of appetite to seek more edible diversions.

  Up to now, they have almost amused me, those pathetic crosses, for seeing them, I have been reminded of the small chapel on Mull, where the last of Angus’s murderers took refuge. There were three crosses there too, carved into the front of the chapel. They crumbled as the chapel crumbled. I watched that fire for a long time. It warmed me; it stilled my rage.

  One more computer search, a bit broader this time: hate crimes in West Virginia in the last few years. The statistics, I soon discover, support Matt’s suspicions. Ever since Bates took over the position of minister in the Belle Apostolic Holiness Free Will Nazarene Charismatic Church of Christ, attacks against gay and lesbian folk have escalated significantly. A lesbian couple was attacked while hiking in Coonskin Park. Two gay men were beaten senseless when they exited a drag show at the Grand Palace. Near Fairmont, a young black man was struck by a car driven by two men who then backed over the body several times to make sure their work was done.

  The blood I drained from Joe the Hot Cop is too sweet to lose and by now is thoroughly absorbed, else I might vomit last night’s feast on the hardwood floor.

  There’s usually a bit of a breeze at Mount Storm. We’re situated high on a ridge, and even in August the valley’s heat never climbs this far. I’m wearing nothing but my kilt tonight, and that Allegheny breeze plays with the hair on my chest and legs, then slips under the green tent of my hunter’s tartan to tease my cock.

  Kilts are the garb of warriors, the kind of garment I wore my entire human life. I’m used to them; they wrap me in a sense of security as I sleep. They remind me of my youth, of my family and of Angus. Not of his death, but of the lovemaking we shared, the battles we fought, shoulder to shoulder, the battles we won. Even now, thousands of miles and centuries away from Mull, here at Mount Storm I wear a kilt several times a week. When I’m not going out—always wise for My Kind not to call attention to ourselves. And always when I’m feeling warlike.

  Tonight I feel warlike.

  After just about breaking the sawhorse with the enviable vigor of their sodomy, Bob and his farmer have retired to Bob’s bedroom—for a cuddle-fest, I’m guessing—and I’m sitting on the back patio watching a waning half-moon give midnight a focus. The nicotiana Bob’s planted in my Edinburgh absence are getting tall. Soon they will bloom as whitely as this moon and pour out their summer scent. I’m sipping Drambuie and smoking a cigar, remembering that bartender from the Lure, the way he’d grunted against the ropes. Sweet futile struggle I sat and watched for hours.

  Stroking the fine wool of my clan tartan, I’m also remembering a Viennese anthropologist I wooed once, for a good part of the year 1897. Why rush a meal with all of eternity to enjoy? It’s one of my many mottos. And I loved the Hapsburgs’ Vienna. One night over a bottle of Grüner Veltliner, as we lounged about his apartment near the Hofburg, he told me that he’d once written a monograph about mountain folk in the Scottish Highlands and the Bavarian Alps, in which he’d also included a few references to Appalachia. Like many refined European masochists, Friedrich was fascinated by my rough edges, and I laid the mountain accent on thick for his erotic benefit. Unlike the historian Arnold Toynbee, Friedrich didn’t conclude that Appalachians were neo-barbarians, though he was fond enough of my barbarian tactics in bed. But he did say that mountain folk often evince a clan mentality.

  “You, Derek, are a case in point. Ruthless to your enemies, indifferent to strangers, hotly devoted to your friends, family, lovers.”

  I’d told Friedrich a bit about my history but had neglected to mention that my immediate family was over a century dead. “Devoted to me, eh?” he added hopefully, pushing my willing head toward his crotch. Not as devoted as he’d hoped, though it was hard to leave behind his fin de siècle Vandyke, those conversations braided with strands of philosophy, anthropology, and literature, those smooth buttocks I often topped with the rich cream Austrians call Schlagober, as if Friedrich’s ass were a kind of white-chocolate Sachertorte.

  Listen. Appetite is selfish, and I am all about appetite. But Friedrich was right. Once as a man and now
as a vampire, I am more than simple hunger. What was it that led Angus and me into those claymore-swinging battles if not a sense of honor and that inescapable sense of devotion that Friedrich would have called clan mentality? These are my people, and they come first for me. I will defend them. I will avenge them. The thistle is one of Scotland’s national symbols—beautiful, but prickly and hardy, dangerous to touch, a fistful of thorns. Nemo Me Impune Lacessit is the Scottish motto: No one provokes me with impunity.

  My cigar’s burnt down to a nub. The moon’s setting. I run a finger over the scars I received the last night of my life and think of how shyly I’d stroked Angus’s scars that first night together in the barn. I am no hero. Too self-absorbed for that. I am an occasional killer. Again I remember that bartender I kept bound to a chair for almost a week, the way he shuddered as he died, before Steven body-bagged him and carried him down to the cellar furnace. Bates and his self-appointed Crew of Light may range as they will. But if he and his impinge directly on my world, on the men whose beauty assuages my hunger and inspires my tenderness—men like Bob, Matt, even Joe the Hot Cop—I will make him pay. I will string him up the way hill farmers string up hogs in late autumn, slicing open their scalded bellies and letting the entrails spill out like pink and gray balloons.

  The return address is wvridgebear@yahoo.com. Matt’s less verbose electronically. “Hey, Hot Guy! Great to meet you the other night. Want to get together sometime? How about the West Virginia Pride Parade this weekend? Drop me a line.”

  Outside the study, even though it’s dark, there’s a mockingbird chirping and cackling, its own Tower of Babel, a confusion of languages. Bob has Kurt and a few other pagan Bears over to share some Kingfisher beer, kheema and paranthas while they plan the summer solstice celebration coming up in another week. I can smell the curry and hear the deep laughter from the kitchen. In a few minutes I will join them.

  How handsome they all are, how desirable. But none of them moves me the way Matt does. Luckily. That’s a depth of feeling I discover in myself only once or twice a century. Vulnerability in the midst of a dungeon scene is one thing, but the heart’s vulnerability is another. How easily a human life ends. How much I wanted to walk into the sun after the last of Angus’s killers was destroyed, after I sifted through the chapel’s ruins and scattered the bastard’s burnt bones, when my vengeance was complete, when suddenly my hatred was no longer a sufficient excuse to survive.

  Midsummer. I’ve been preparing for the holiday, rereading the Wiccan texts. On the summer solstice, the divine twin brothers fight for the love of the Goddess, and the Oak King, God of the Waxing Year, falls beneath the sword of the Holly King, God of the Waning Year. Then the days begin to shorten, the nights begin to lengthen, the power of the sun begins to fade. On midsummer, Hercules, the tribal king, representative of the Oak God, is sacrificed.

  In my mythology, those twins are wrestling lovers, not rivals. And each of the men I feed upon is, for me, briefly, an embodiment of the Sacrificed King whose meaning Christians have so neatly borrowed. With a silver quaich I catch my own communion, from a quaich I drink the liquid that drives their hearts.

  Rising from the temptation of Matt’s e-mail message, I stroll to one bookcase and pull down Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. “Hercules on the Lotus” is the chapter I read again and again. Midsummer, the Sacred King, drunk on mead, is led into the circle and bound to a lopped oak, T-shaped. Wrists, ankles, neck roped together in the five-fold bond. Beaten, blinded, flayed. Then his blood is carefully gathered and sprinkled upon the people to insure strength and fertility, and his body is devoured.

  Now, I’ll leave cannibalism to my werewolf cousins, and I’ll leave out the blinding, flaying, and hacking into joints, but devouring beauty is what gives meaning to my breath, what makes my existence worth extending.

  When I close my eyes, I can see Matt bound like Hercules to that cross I’ve erected for midsummer in the stone circle out back. Torches are flickering around us, and fireflies, and in the darkness beyond the firelight there’s the steady beat of a drum. He’s groaning, drunk. The rope binding his neck, wrists, and ankles is so taut that his head’s bent back, and all he can see are stars. He’s groaning as I take his cock between my lips and rake the shaft with my fangs, groaning and trembling as I take my sharp-bladed sgian dhubh and slowly, carefully, make a small cut in his side. The blood wells up like lava. It runs down his flank, gathers into dark droplets like midnight rain on twigs, and, before the famished earth can swallow it, I catch those drops on my tongue, as if my mouth were the Holy Grail.

  “Derek, c’mon in,” Bob’s calling. “Help us plan the solstice celebration. We’ve only got a week left.” I stare at the computer screen for another thirty seconds, then turn it off. In the kitchen, a small circle of Bears sits at the table. They cheer when I walk in. “Woof! Here’s our kilted wonder!” jokes Kurt, softly punching me on the shoulder and offering me a beer.

  It’s the colors I miss. Imagine seeing color only by electric light, firelight, moonlight or candlelight. I have never seen these hills I love by the light of the sun. Always they are black or blue-gray, as I gaze at them from the tower room or arch over them in the form of a bat. Always dark, save for those times I wake from a dream of Mull, remembering the way afternoon shadows spread over the pastures, the way morning dew glittered in a spider’s web, the way the hills colored with heather purple in early autumn. Then I leap from my coffin and rush upstairs, desperate to see the reds and greens and blues of Bob’s garden, colors fading in those few minutes left between the sun’s disappearance over the horizon and the ineluctable descent of night.

  I want to see office workers jogging along the Kanawha River during their lunch breaks, college boys washing their cars in the summer heat, farmers hoeing their corn or glistening with sweat as they gather the hay. I want to see Matt perspiring in a pair of cut-offs as he cuts his grass; Matt clad in nothing but silk boxers, dozing away the afternoon in a hammock; Matt in jeans, cowboy boots and tight tanktop as he strides through downtown Charleston during the Pride Parade. I want to walk beside him in the light. I want to see the sun rise over Seneca Rocks, the sun turn the surface of the New River a polished brass, feel high-summer light warm the carven marble of my face.

  This regret is not the yearning for another life, a past life, my human life. I do not regret the choices I have made or what I have become. It is simply the regret of any soul bound to one body, one identity. This is what we all regret: that there are always limits, that we cannot have it all.

  As much as I want Matt tied to that cross for midsummer, I am afraid to see him again. I have not met a man who so arouses me in many decades. I am afraid of utterly devouring him, of becoming so crazed when I finally hold him in my arms that I will drain him in one draught.

  The St. John’s wort is blooming in the meadows, Bob’s garden is coming in. Midsummer night passes without a sacrifice, willing or otherwise. I lead the coven in its lighthearted ritual within our circle of stones, those stones that remind me a little too much of the place where Angus died. The bonfire sends showers of sparks swirling into the night sky. The oak Tau-shaped cross looms before us, an empty emblem. We are calling the quarters, invoking the Gods, celebrating the zenith of the light. Afterward Bob sits everyone down to a feast of liebfraumilch, new peas and potatoes, wilted lettuce, brown beans, cornbread, and strawberry pie. For the sake of Bob’s buddies, who know nothing of my true nature, I plead dyspepsia, think of Hercules, and sip a little glass of mead while they tuck into the meal with their country-hearty appetites.

  A few weeks pass. The summer humidity descends. I track down amnesiac snacks in Elkins, Helvetia, Lost River. Matt drops me another tentative line: “Hey Derek, what are you up to? Hoped I’d see you at the Pride Parade. Want to meet at the Blossom for dinner sometime? My band will be performing at the bookstore day after tomorrow at eight p.m. Come on by.”

  I compose a reply, then delete it.

  It’s mid-
July when Bob and Kurt wander into the kitchen one evening holding hands. Bob flashes a silver thumb ring. “Check out what Kurt got me!” Later I find them curled up together on the living room couch, watching Interview with the Vampire. I can’t help but join them, just for the sake of Brad Pitt’s lips. “Man, Louis could bite me!” groans Kurt as the tormented Catholic vampire stalks the night, and Bob and I exchange surreptitious grins, knowing that what Kurt doesn’t know can’t hurt him. As I watch them together, it’s suddenly clear to me that their sex play has indeed led to something serious. Bob nestles his head in Kurt’s lap, and Kurt strokes his head with an almost reverential gentleness. Occasionally, when Bob looks up at Kurt, I see adoration in Bob’s brown eyes.

  Kurt’s headed up to bed, Bob’s locking up, and I return to the study for another intimate evening with Nietzsche and Proust. I’m pouring myself a little port—just the color of that biker blood I sipped in Buckhannon last night—and wondering what a madeleine tastes like when Bob appears in the study’s open door.

  “Hey, Derek, I was wondering if I could leave you here alone for a week? Some of Kurt’s friends are renting a house in Rehoboth Beach, and I was hoping that—”

  “You bet,” I reply. “I’ll manage fine. Get a tan for me.”

  “I will, I promise!” he replies eagerly, clearly relieved by my response. “I may even get a henna tattoo. I can hire someone to keep the garden up, if—”

  “I don’t mind weeding lettuce by starlight. Don’t worry about it.”