by Todd Gregory
The mosquito net billowed over us. I was naked. Soon, so was he. He slid his fingers into my mouth and told me to suck. Then he held his own prick in his hand and pushed my mouth toward it. The shock of what I was about to do nearly caused me to release onto his crisp linen sheets. I reached for myself, but he took me instead, his hand so strong on my cock that I felt briefly faint. It wasn’t painful—it was blissful. It was everything I felt I had yearned for as a youth and now, finally as a man, could have. Like a child who waits for the first glass of wine or the first bedtime after dark. The deliciousness was overwhelming. When the release came, I knew it would be life-altering. I wondered, fleetingly, if I should leave before these things happened. But I could not. And yet I knew that I was crossing a threshold from which I could never return. What’s more, I knew I would not wish to.
He tasted salty and thick and it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The sound he made was deeply masculine and I wondered briefly if I was too much of a boy still for this man who was so much a man. So refined and degenerate all at once. I wanted to please him. I wanted him to desire me the way I desired him at that moment. I wanted to be the best at whatever it was we were doing. I wanted to excel—to lick and suck and stroke until I broke the barrier between all he had experienced and all I had not.
When he was near to it I took my mouth away from his prick and lay myself across him, my thighs pressing against his. His cock was pulsing in my hand and I thought that the milky fluid that had for weeks built up within me would squirt out unbidden, my excitement was so intense. He grabbed my hand hard and jerked it on his cock, his other hand gripping my buttock so hard I felt blood come, but didn’t care. The hot jet spurted over my hand and he relaxed briefly underneath me.
He kept me there the whole long night: We slept and woke and spent each other again and again until I was certain we could not do more. As dawn broke, I knew I would need to leave, go home and hope no explanations were required to my uncle, with whom I had lived these past years. He too was known to spend a night away from home and I had learned never to ask where. But while I presumed my uncle to be entertaining himself at one of the local brothels on St. Charles, I was engaging in something far less common—or so I believed.
The man and I spent several months in similar pursuits as those of that first night. I would go to meet him at the Vieux Carré in a private dining room of his choosing. We would share wine and food and he would sharpen my wit and intellect as he honed my desire. Then we would return to his house and the servants would have retired and I would be hastened to his bedroom for the same slow disrobing, the same veneration of my cock, the same long nights beneath the mosquito netting. He had expanded his and my repertoire to include other intimacies, each more exotic and, I cannot deny, enthralling than the last.
Then after a night of particular intensity with him, I left. Once I had met Garcia I understood that my mentor was something more, something other than mere degenerate. I realized that he—the patience of centuries behind him—had been grooming me for months to be a companion. A companion in another world than this. For he was also, I understood that night, vampire.
We lay, spent, on his bed. I could never seem to get enough of him and had blurted this out in a moment of deepest passion. I wanted ever more—more tutelage in both the intellectual and sensual arts that he was teaching me. I wanted to be part of him. I had no words to explain it, which may have been my youth or my inexperience or both. But he understood. And he chose then to explain what more there could be.
“What if I could offer you eternal life?” he asked with the soft forcefulness that had first lured me to his bed. “What if I could offer you this and more forever?”
I was caught off guard. What did he mean—eternal life? That was the purview of God, not of man. What hubris was this? I must have shuddered.
“It’s a heady thought, I know.” His deep voice rushed over me, exciting me all over again. I reached for him and he took my wrist, hard, and brought it to his lips.
His teeth were in my vein before I could protest, but he stopped there. He did not go the extra step as Garcia would later. Instead he merely licked at the blood as he had licked at my thighs and more.
I could not respond—had no words to respond. What was this strangeness? He had taken me with some force before, but not without my acquiescence, and each time he had known just how far he could take us both and never went past that point. But this—I watched my blood drip onto the linens and for the first time realized that this man had a power over me that was, perhaps, dangerous.
I did not pull my arm away. Rather, I let him hold on to me as one does not yank one’s leg from a bear trap but instead plans an escape, despite the fear and pain.
“Only God can offer us eternal life.” I finally spoke, my voice holding none of the fear I felt. “You have offered me a different life than the one I had—but I am still intent on being the priest I have trained to be. Surely you know this?”
We lay for a while in silence. He released my arm and I saw that the bleeding had—surprisingly—ceased. There was a small wound where he had bitten into my flesh.
“I had hoped for more from you,” he said, with some finality, as if whatever I had forgone meant the end of what had been between us.
“I have tried to give you all I have,” I responded, my voice choked despite my best efforts, suddenly as fearful of losing him as I had been moments earlier of losing my life.
“There is more than that to give, and I won’t pretend I don’t want it,” he said then. I had no response. I didn’t know what it was he was asking of me, only that I was certain it meant crossing a boundary from which—unlike our nights together thus far—I could not return.
I turned onto my stomach, away from him but hoping he would lure me back. Instead he lowered himself onto me and took me a final time. I was still mesmerized by him and his abilities as a lover and I opened myself to him in the hope that he would see that he should not cast me aside because I would not do whatever dark thing it was he still wanted.
I left before dawn—I knew he needed me to leave and that only a woman would linger and debase herself with some level of pleading to be kept on. I would not do that. I could not. But I ached to stay and I gazed at him a long while as I dressed. His nakedness was all I wanted—the strength his body exuded even in sleep. But I knew to the core of my being that I could not allow my desire to supersede my self, my soul. And I was in danger of losing that self—I saw that now.
My studies and these extracurricular excursions with my philosopher mentor had become far too at odds with each other over the past few months. As I left him for what I knew to be the final time, I found my desire not in the least slackened, but awakened and stirred. Far from being chastened and sent back to my divinity studies as I should have been, instead I had left his house a few hours before dawn and found myself on the streets wondering if there were others like us and if what I had learned with him could be translated to another—sans the bloodletting. I wandered the streets for an hour or so, looking at men who seemed aimless in the narrow alleyways—what were they seeking? Some looked at me with what I now knew to be desire, but I chose to ignore them. It seemed enough to know they were there and that I had access to them if I needed them.
I had taken myself home then and while I should have gone directly to sleep or at the very least to prayer, instead I debauched myself, who should have been already spent from the hours with my mentor. As I touched myself, images of his body were in the forefront of my mind, but commingled with the sensation of his biting into my flesh and my blood flowing into his mouth. I tried to imagine other men then, men my own age as well as men older, men strong and powerful and… That was when I knew I had to flee New Orleans or lose myself forever to this demimonde I had uncovered. Instead of seeking God, I would be searching, ever searching, for men like myself or neophytes as I myself had been a few short months ago. I wanted to be neither teacher nor student. I wante
d to re-dedicate myself to celibacy and set myself anew on the path I had initially staked out for myself.
But that is when I discovered Nikolos and after him, Garcia. Now I am possessed as I had never been by my own puny desires, nor even by my mentor and his burgeoning ones. Now I live in and for the night and when I cannot slake my darker thirsts, I ache in ways I can only think of as damnable. And in fact I wonder if I am forever damned. Garcia says I am not—not yet. But then he is my downfall, he is the one who has taken me to the brink of this darkness and he is the one who has made it possible for me to live beyond the disease, beyond mere mortality. He says he can free me at any time, but I do not believe him and I think that if he does—if he runs a stake through my heart or cuts off my head as I sleep, there will be no redemption, although possibly no hell either. Just the blackness of the eternal abyss.
And yet I never could have said no to him. No one has ever done so, I think. Garcia has that much power, his desire is that enveloping, he is that incalculably charismatic. Who would have believed that the tales I had heard as a child were true, anyway? Who would have thought that there were indeed beings who traversed this world who had come from another? Who would have thought that men could drink each other in so many different ways?
Which story should I tell you now? The one where I contracted the disease that led me to Carville or the one where I became what I am now—vampire?
No one really knows when they first learn of lepers. The term itself has become a commonplace, a moniker for any despised individual or group. It is almost archetypal, this term. And yet there are real people, real lepers, who die the slow and awful death the disease brings them.
As I said, I was not sure how I acquired it—the leprosy. But I believe it was from Nikolos. And if it came from my dalliances with him, so be it. For those were remarkable and I would not have chosen otherwise. He brought me to a new and different level of my desire. We were equals on those nights in Crete—I was not his protégé, nor he mine. And our discourse traversed theology as well the sensual. We lay entangled and spent and he would talk of Damien and Molokai and I would talk of Aquinas. In that regard we were both novitiates to a religion of our own making—we were Catholic and also degenerate. Except with Nikolos I never felt a degenerate as I had with my mentor. Instead I felt alive, as if this were the better part of myself.
I think sometimes I should have stayed in Crete, stayed with the young man who brought me back to life from the brink of my soul’s death. For leaving my mentor had left me adrift and devastated and wondering if I should have stayed and let him take me wherever it was he thought we could go. But Nikolos had opened other avenues to me. Alas, he was pledged to Spinalonga and nurturing the souls of the poor lepers there where he had already been doing spiritual duty. And so we parted—not as I had done with my mentor, but as friends, as companions, as two men who had shared something lasting. We assured each other we would write, but I knew enough by then to know that was a promise never to be kept.
When did I discover that Nikolos had infected me? I am unsure. It was nearly a year before I returned to Louisiana after traveling on from Crete. There were other men—not nameless, nor faceless, but fleeting. A night here, a stolen afternoon there. I was always amazed at how many men stood in the doorways of holy places with their hats over their cocks, waiting for another man to ask them to walk down the Via Dolorosa or some other darker, less public place.
It had become clear to me that I could not break myself of the habit of other men, the habit of an almost daily debauchery with them or lying in my room, wherever I was, thinking of them as I debauched myself.
And so I returned home. One night on the voyage back I had spent time with a member of the captain’s table who had led me off to have an aperitif and to quaff something equally heady port side. As I buttoned up my trousers I noticed a small pink spot on my thigh that I knew should not be there.
A family friend confirmed the diagnosis upon my return to Louisiana. It was then I determined to head to Carville, to take the place of the priest retiring—uninfected. My status was never disclosed—even my uncle was unaware. I had thought to write to Nikolos, but presumed it was he from whom I had contracted the dread disease.
Two full years passed at Carville before Garcia arrived one day with a veritable caravan of things with which to do his work. If I said I was not smitten immediately, I would be lying. He was everything my mentor had been and more, and I had never managed to quell that desire that only men can fulfill for each other.
I knew right away that he wanted me as well, despite the disease which had not yet spread beyond that small spot on my thigh—and thanks to Garcia, never would.
There is no lack of certainty in how I became what I am now: vampire. Although from a metaphoric perspective, it could be said I was merely waiting to be crossed over. I was certainly preying upon innocents long before Garcia sank his teeth deep into my thigh, draining my femoral artery as he stroked my cock.
It’s not always the neck, you know. It’s not always a young, female virgin lying demurely on a bed, sleeping the sleep of innocence while the vile and be-fanged Nosferatu beats through her open window on the wings of a shape-shifted bat.
Garcia arrived at Carville at dusk one day in a wholly different guise: as artist and also as tutor to the unfortunate. He had come, as I noted, at the request of the government to paint the leper home in all its fading magnificence before it changed to a wholly different place than it had been in the years I had spent there.
There were a few days of pretense, of course. We were introduced by the director and I was asked to acquaint him with all of Carville. You see, even the staff did not know of my condition, so I was among the elite of the place. Only I knew I did not really have carte blanche to leave.
How to describe Raul Garcia? He was what was called in those days a man’s man—an irony that bears noting. He was tall and well-built and his skin was a bronze hue because of his Mexican origins and his hair and eyes were deeply black. He exuded an air of confidence and also of sensuality. I noted the nuns would blush when he was about. That charisma was not lost on anyone.
But it was men Garcia preferred, and he told me as much a mere three days after his arrival. We were walking at dusk—he was never around much in the day, saying that he’d never acquired an ability to tolerate the heat, despite his birthright. We had gone through the arbor of live oaks and were coming round the old charnel house, long since abandoned. The air was thick with the late-day heat and we both had a film of sweat on us. I suggested we stop and sit on a nearby bench as the moon rose and then go back to the main building.
He did not speak for a time. Nor did I. Then he said, with shocking bluntness, “I haven’t been with a man since well before I left New York. I suppose that could be called a confession, padre.”
The comment had the requisite effect, which no doubt he had already calculated. My cassock strained at the crotch. He looked squarely at me there and for a moment I was certain he would reach out to touch me. There can be no question that I hoped he would.
But instead he stood and spoke, his accent somewhat thicker with what I presumed to be a desire of his own, for my eyes strayed as well and saw him hard against his trousers.
“I am glad to see that I have not shocked you, padre. That is good to know. As no doubt I will be revealing other aspects of myself to you during my visit that others might find”—he waved his hand in the still air—“unsettling.”
I heard him outside my room later that night. I could hear his breathing outside my door and wondered why he didn’t just come in, for I had been thinking of him rather than immersing myself in prayer. I had been yearning for him to come and confess more to me, reveal whatever else it was he had suggested needed revelation. But he left without even knocking.
It was the thirteenth day after his arrival that he finally took me. One might say he courted me prior to that day. We talked a great deal in those early days—I imagine that
he wanted to be certain that I would acquiesce and also that I would want to be taken over, to leave the life I had and become part of his. No doubt he also wanted to know if I would be a worthy companion.
When I had traveled abroad, the places I could always be assured of finding like-minded men seeking the pleasures I could no longer live without had been churches and other holy sites. I had often wondered how they could stand so near to God and pleasure themselves openly while waiting for a similarly inclined companion. And yet this was almost de rigeur. The hat over the exposed cock thrust through the unbuttoned trousers, the sussurations that could have been mumbled prayers as easily as they could have been obscenities meant to excite and tease and lure. I had found it as surprising as it was tantalizing.
And so it was with Garcia, then. He sought out the priest, the one creature at Carville most likely to fend him off, holding up his crucifix and sending him screaming away.
Except, of course, I never ran, never held up any religious artifact to ward him off. Rather with each passing day, each moment I spent nurturing our growing friendship—if that is what it was—I was opening myself more and more to him. Until one evening I told him about Nikolos. And then, temptation girding me onward, about my mentor. And about the blood.
That was to be the night when Garcia and I would become one, companions in the semi-afterlife that is where we vampires inhabit the world. No longer fully living, yet decidedly not dead.
My mentor had taught me well about how to exploit the tension of repressed desire. Throughout our dinners together I would be hot with the anticipation of what was to follow. Yet he would keep me at the table, sometimes stroking my trousered thigh beneath, even when the servants were about, and I would have to control myself as he watched me. He wanted to see the tension build in me, for that is what built it in him. And so I played the same game with Garcia—and found in him an appreciative respondent.