by Rachel Caine
“You got it, man!”
“Hey,” the girl pipped up, “tell us about, like, how it was, you know, when you were human and everything. And how you got to be a vampire.”
“Yeah, let’s hear some stories. You must have been like a prince or something.” The young man pulled a plastic box from his jacket, opened it and took out three capsules, which he swallowed. The girl helped herself. The box was offered to Réjean.
He stared at them blankly. They were famished infants, squalling to be fed. And yet even if he could feed them, which he could not, they would never be full. “Perhaps later. After refreshment.”
Jason’s leg jerked frantically for a few seconds, out of sync with the music. Suddenly he stood, but the girl hesitated. Réjean looked into her starved blue eyes, eyes that had seen so much and yet understood so little. There was nothing there worth capturing. She lived for the night, for death, and normal life was as alien to her as it had become to Réjean. Her hesitation did not stem from fear but ennui.
“Like, let’s hit the back room,” Jason said. “Get up!” He grabbed the girl’s arm and she stood, a zombie obeying a command. When they disappeared behind a beaded curtain, Réjean sighed. He picked up his cane and gloves and followed.
The narrow corridor he entered reeked of urine and mildew. It was long and dark, but he used the stray light as a cat would. He passed the only washroom; the door had been torn from its hinges. A girl sat on a toilet seat injecting a powerful substance into her arm while another female knelt between her legs, noisily consuming her juices. The seated girl stared at Réjean as he passed, her sunken eyes brimming with lust and hatred. He could tell from her odors that before morning she would be dead in the truest sense of the word.
Jason was framed by a doorway at the end of the corridor. “In here, man. Nobody’ll bother us.”
The small, windowless room was empty, except for the paper and broken bottles littering the hardwood floor. Réjean closed the door and slid the bolt. A yellow bulb on a cord dangled from the ceiling, enough light for all of them to see by. The girl shivered; no heat reached this desolate vault.
Jason used his boot to scrap clear a space. He began to undress the girl. Her small breasts were round and full, the nipples firm from the chill.
“There is no need for that,” Réjean said.
“Whatever, man.”
Jason sat on the floor and pulled the half-naked girl down. Réjean stood staring at them, the true children of the night, dead before they had been born, disenfranchised from their rightful inheritance. And yet he envied them. Life was within their grasp, if only they would seize it.
“So, like, where you take it from?” Jason asked.
“Where would you like me to take it from?”
“My cock.” The young man grinned lasciviously.
“There is a vein in your neck that will do.”
Jason snickered but pulled off his jacket. The ferret leapt into the air, hit the floor, raced into a corner and hid beneath a wadded up sheet of newspaper.
Réjean squatted before them. They both stared at him with the innocence of those jaded to pain. For some reason he felt an urge to nurture them and yet he knew they could not receive what little he had to offer. They needed him to be harsh; it was the only love they understood. And he needed their blood.
A crust of dirt coated the young man’s skin, but Réjean had long ago learned to ignore the unpleasant. He pulled Jason to him. The vein, weak, had been overused, but adrenalin pumping through the slim body helped it plump in a way that provided easy enough access to the coppery treasure it conveyed.
Réjean closed his eyes and his teeth instinctively found the entrance way to hot bliss. Blood coated his mouth and the moment the thick substance slid down his parched throat he moaned and pulled hard on the ragged wound.
A face flashed before his eyes. The face of someone dear. Étienne, ten years younger, who so resembled him, laughing, sunlight glinting off his fair hair.
The boy groaned and Réjean clutched him close. Étienne embraced him. “Mon frère! Mon ami!” An arm slipped around his neck. Étienne kissed him on both cheeks. Jason kissed his jaw.
Réjean struggled to take only half of what he needed. To stop now was excruciating, but there was still the girl.
Gently he pushed Jason back until the young man lay on the floor, his eyes closed, his legs apart. His diaphragm contracted and expanded rapidly. A hand moved to his crotch, unzipped his pants, took hold of the erection. Réjean had a vague memory of the sensations that must be coursing through the boy. But his own lifeless body could no longer appreciate such delights, and the memory was as cold and dense as the walls of the tomb in which he spent the daylight hours.
The girl proved submissive and he decided on second thought to undress her completely. She helped him strip her skirt and tights away. Her slim body, pale as a Death Lily, seemed on the verge of something—opening, closing—he could not be certain. He held her firmly with one arm and ran a hand over her breasts, forcing the nipples to firm from more than the cold. He roved the swells of buttocks, squeezing and pinching until she twitched in a semblance of life in his arms. He slid down her hairy mons and slipped a finger between her legs. The flesh inside felt dry and cool. He stroked her until she heated and moisture flowed over his hand and she moaned softly.
The vein he chose was in her breast, near her heart, at the center of a tattoo of a Black Widow spider. As he bit, her nipples hardened and thrust at him. Her head fell back. She pressed her groin against him in a grinding motion, and he felt or imagined himself stir.
Hot blood swelled within him and another memory crystallized. Amulette, on a sultry midsummer’s day, the blue lake behind her, waist-length hair lush across her full breasts, his hand gently pushing the hair aside. His lips tasting her warm salty flesh, the bud eager to firm to the worship he offered. She moaned and shivered beneath him. His groin felt heavy and hot. The scent of her fiery sex wafted up to tease his nostrils.
He sucked harder, clutching the girl to him, struggling to bring life to the memory. As his body fed, for precious moments the past revived, igniting a ray of hope in his dark existence. Amulette cried his name over and over. He thrust one last time, impaling her impossibly deep, until their bodies seemed to merge.
The girl slumped against him at the same moment he could hold no more. Reluctantly he stopped. The memory evaporated.
The girl’s face looked soft, dreamy. Her full baby lips had parted as though at last she was ready to receive something from a withholding world. Blood snaked along her breast from the wound, painting her pink bud scarlet.
Looking at the two of them was torturous. They could not appreciate what they had. No matter how bleak their existence, their access to memories, both good and ill, allowed them everything. He was full of their life’s blood, yet hollow within, unable to seize even his own past. Being with them left him impoverished.
To have what they have, what they take for granted… Bitterness cut through him. He had been cheated. He needed to leave before he did them real damage.
He headed toward the door.
“Hey, man, that’s some rush. Lemme take yours.” Jason struggled to his feet, his body weaving.
“I do not share my blood,” Réjean said coldly.
“You do me, I do you. That’s the gig.”
“You said you’d tell us stories,” the girl slurred, her voice whiny. Already her body, ripened by his hands, was losing its fullness, retreating to the familiar, the insensate.
“You do not appreciate what you have and yet you want what is mine?” Réjean felt astonished by such greediness.
“Man, don’t upload this shit. It’s my turn. Get over here!”
The girl crawled across the floor. She grabbed the hem of Réjean’s cape and tugged it. “Come on! You promised you’d tell us about your life and stuff.”
He felt repelled by them. It was as though they were intent on consuming everything he possessed, w
hich was so little. They wanted his blood. His memories. His life, if they could get it. Like leeches, they would take from him until what little he had was theirs and he was left with nothing.
“Man, I want some of yours, and I want it fast and hard!” Jason jumped on him, tearing his shirt from his body. The girl yanked the cape from his shoulders. They would drain him if they could and toss away the shell. He did not have much but what he had he must protect.
He lashed out. Jason flew across the room. The boy hit the back wall with a thud. Réjean kicked at the girl. She rolled over and over screaming; he heard glass crunch beneath her body. He raced from the club and into the black night, fleeing through the dark streets, seeing nothing, terror clinging to him like a nightmare. The cemetery was miles away but he returned hours before sunrise.
His ancient coffin offered a peculiar kind of comfort and the cool stone walls of the crypt kept the world at bay. He lay trembling. Memories had surfaced yet he could no longer recall what they were, or their significance to him, but the longing embedded within those recollections lingered. A longing that he knew he could never satisfy.
He clutched himself, but his hands were cold dead things, the flesh of a corpse. Any assurance they could provide grew stark: he was alone. He would be alone always.
Except in the world of the night, a world populated by hordes of the ravenous living dead.
JOSEPHINE THE TATTOO QUEEN
By Joshua Gage
TEXAS
Right this way, gentlemen, right this way. Step right up with no delay to see the living wonder of our day. From her ears to her ankles, wrist to wrist, her ice cream scoops to her cherry twist, not one inch of skin is left unkissed by ink and needle. And for one dime, that’s right gentlemen, the one-tenth part of a dollar, you will receive an intimate tour and connoisseur’s edification of this gallery in the flesh. Gentlemen, step into the tent to meet Josephine the Tattoo Queen, lady of one hundred tattoos.
THE DANCE
The stage was lit by a hanging string of naked bulbs, which caught the dust inside the tent in a lambent halo. Ruben Admison found himself in a press of men who shuffled in the grass, converging towards the stage until he was practically leaning on its rough boards. The air thickened on the moans of Mae West, who sang from a worn 78 about a guy who takes his time, its clicks and pops echoing the soft crickets outside. A slow foot parted the curtain, softly turning in time with the music, until it became a calf, and a whole leg. The barker outside had not lied. To Ruben, it was as though a painting was wearing dusty socks, as every inch of ample flesh that came through the curtain was decorated. Here there was a vine of crimson roses, there a flock of sparrows with ribbons in their beaks.
As Josephine slipped through the curtain, wearing nothing but a silky half-slip tied at her hip, Ruben seemed to lose himself in the designs on her body. It was as though the music, the tobacco smoke and whiskey breaths of the other men, even the stage and Josephine herself, faded into one sinusoidal tempest of primal pictures. Ruben felt as though he were standing not on the grass beneath a tent at a carnival, but on a wide beach beneath a giant blossom of moonlight. Boats crashed offshore into giant octopi, their sailors caressed beneath the foam by lascivious mermaids. A giant eagle, talons splayed like forks of lightning, wrestled in the sky against a snarling panther, saliva dripping from its eager fangs.
Abruptly, the music stopped, and Ruben was thrown back into himself. Then from the other side of a stage, another record began, this time the strong bajo sexto of a driving norteño. With one shake of her hips and quick movement of her fingers, Josephine undid the half-slip and sent it fluttering to the grass. There, undulating in all the ample glory God gave her, was Josephine. Ruben found himself enthralled, his heart racing in time with each curvaceous ripple marked in ink. He felt the music bore through him, the rolling r’s of the singer’s Spanish trilling his skin into goose bumps as Josephine gyrated before him. He stared, wistfully, as she shimmied around the stage, then squeezed herself between the curtains as the music slowly faded and stopped. Amidst the ululations and applause of the drunks around him that scratched at his ears like rusty nails on sheet metal, he wrapped his arms around himself, squeezing his ribs as if to hold them together, as if they, and the heart beneath, would burst open without the support.
THE SUMMONS
The bamboo slapped Ruben in the chest like thunder in a clear desert sky. He had been leaving the tent with the rest of the shuffling crowd, when the barker caught him with his cane, almost knocking him off balance. “Slow down there, son. Let me talk to you for a bit,” the barker said, hooking Ruben’s arm and pulling him closer. “You look like a curious young ace. Let me ask you this. Did you enjoy the show?” He grinned conspiratorially, a chuckle whistling through the gaps in his teeth. Ruben pulled back, but nodded. “I’m sure you did. I’m sure you did. Now, son, let me offer up a proposition to you.” With this he leaned closer and dropped his voice to a whisper. “How would you like the privilege of a private performance by Josephine? No stage, none of these other cake-eaters hassling you, just you and her in an all-night exclusive that you’ll never see by the light of day.”
Ruben’s heart leapt. “Sure,” he said, and smiled. “Sounds great.”
“I thought you might like the sound of that, son. Now, let us negotiate on a pecuniary level. I can arrange such a tête-à-tête, for, let’s say, a five-spot.”
“Five dollars? That’s almost half a week’s salary. No deal.”
Ruben turned quickly to walk away, but the barker caught him with the crook of his cane and pulled him back. “Come, now, son. I’m not trying to bleed you dry. You ain’t got that kind of green. Fine. Let’s be honest. Who does in these days of want and woe? Work with me, son, work with me. How about I knock a checker off the call? Four dollars, son. Josephine has a map of these here forty-eight United States tattooed on the inside of her thighs. Four dollars, and I promise you a moonlit geography lesson you ain’t never gonna forget.”
Ruben knew he could scratch together an extra few bucks over the next week, especially if he worked overtime at the restaurant. It would stretch him thin, but he kept thinking about the dance, the way Josephine’s thighs shuddered against each other on stage to the rhythm of the music, and imagined being able to reach out and touch the lines that marked her body. Almost as if by its own volition, he felt his hand reach into the pocket of his trousers, and pull out four wrinkled bills.
“‘Atta boy! Follow me, son, follow me.” The barker scurried to the back of the tent, around the stage and out into the cool night. Ruben followed the barker as he wove behind the show. Ruben’s young body began to tremble with anticipation as they snaked in and out of the tent shadows to the very edge of the carnival and up the dimmed stairs of a trailer. His eager heart seemed to mimic the delicate rhythm the barker tapped out on the door with the crook of his cane. The man silently opened the door with a ceremonious bow to Ruben, who stepped inside.
A simple lamp blushed the back end of the trailer through its red shade. Ruben stumbled towards the light, tripping over boxes hidden in the shadows until he arrived at an empty bed with a small nightstand beside it. He quickly spun around, ready to chase down the barker and demand his money back.
Suddenly, in the penumbra of the lamp glow, a place where Ruben would have sworn had only been dust and shadow earlier, stood Josephine, cigarette tucked between her lips. Her hand rubbed her naked hip as she exhaled a silvery smoke ring and said, “So, you’re my date tonight.”
AFTERGLOW
Josephine struck a match off the wall of her trailer and lit another cigarette. She inhaled a deep drag, then nuzzled into Ruben’s chest, breathing the smoke out across his naked skin. She slowly curled a finger in his chest hair, the ashes from her cigarette falling like dust across him.
“So,” she said, “first time?”
Ruben stammered, but Josephine smiled and placed a finger on his lips. “Don’t worry. I already knew. A girl always kno
ws.”
“Was I… ? Was it… ?” Ruben found himself struggling for words.
“Oh, you did fine, sugar. Don’t worry. You’ll be a big hit with the girls when you get back home.”
Ruben looked around the trailer, eager to find something, anything, to shift the conversation. A worn copy of Green Light by Lloyd C. Douglas rested on the bedside table. “You like to read?” asked Ruben, immediately regretting it.
“Sometimes. It helps me get from town to town.”
“What’s that book about, then?”
“A doctor. Mistakes. Life.” Josephine said, pulling another drag off her cigarette. “It’s sort of preachy, though. Evelyn, who does the snake charming act, gave it to me to read. Did you see her show?”
Ruben shook his head. “No, just yours.”
“What a gentleman,” Josephine smiled, then rolled back onto the pillow. Stretched out beneath the lamp light and up close, Ruben could see that, despite what he saw on the stage, Josephine wasn’t completely covered with tattoos. Thin seas of bare skin rolled between the continents of ink on her body. With one finger, he traced the lines of a butterfly on her shoulder.
“Where did you get all your tattoos?”
“Oh, here and there,” she said, sitting up on her side.
“Seriously, why did you get all of them?”
“My, you are inquisitive, aren’t you? Did you know that the word gargoyle has to do with the sound the water makes as it pours through them? Well, what if I told you my body is a cathedral, and these are the gargoyles, keeping me safe. You should hear me dance when it rains,” she said with a wink. “The way I see it, we pay for our sins in this life so we’re clean for the next. Each one of these is for some sin I committed, to let God know, to make sure we’re even. This here,” she said, pointing to a small star behind her ear, “is when I threw a rock at my brother when we were kids and hit him on the head. He had to have five stiches, and still complains about the scar when it rains. And this flower here,” she said, pointing to a rose on her ankle, “is for the first boy that ever loved me. Each petal is a tear that he cried when I broke his heart.”
