Masters of Midnight

by Michael Thomas Ford

  “Uh, guy, I wanna be paid first.” What greed, what bravado.

  I tug off the remnant of his T-shirt and toss it onto the ground. I run one finger over the black spikes of the tattoo spilling down his right arm. Tongues of black flame edged with red. I push him back against the rough wall.

  “Clarinda, do you know who she was? The muse of Robert Burns. I met him once.”

  “Burns? Uh, football player, right? About that money . . . ?”

  “No, rock star. His greatest hit was ‘My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.’ Can you sing that one? In Dumfries, I’ve seen his signature cut in glass.” I run the tip of the thorn along the thin line of hair that ridges his pale belly and disappears into the top of his jeans.

  “Hey, watch it! Look, I don’t get fucked, y’know. You can blow me, though, for fifteen pounds. Uh, twenty, ’cause you’ve ruined my shirt.”

  “I think I’ll do what I please,” I growl. “And you won’t be needing a new shirt.” His head slams back against the wall before he knows what’s happening. Stunned, he falls to his knees.

  I pull off my belt, wrap it around his neck. He begins to cry. Delicious, this tough kid, pierced ears and eyebrows, shaved head, scuffed Doc Marten’s, with a child’s tears streaming down his face. Wrapping the belt around my right hand, I slowly lift him to his feet and lick the salt from his cheeks.

  “God, man! Please!” He’s mewling like a colicky brat now.

  I backhand him once, then tug him forward with the makeshift leash, shove him over a waist-high grave marker, and jerk his pants down to his ankles. Now he’s screaming as I slam into him, or would be screaming if my hand weren’t clamped tightly over his mouth. His cheek and chin stubble tickle my palm.

  I ride him till he passes out, then pitch him onto the grass. Into the black flames snaking down his right forearm I sink my teeth. Just a tinge of ink, then the blood, edged with the hoppy remnant of beer. I take my time, drawing ruby ropes from his veins the way a spider draws from its own those deadly filaments of silver. Like eating the petals of a red, red rose. One after another, till only the golden stamens are left.

  His heart slows and stops like a clock someone forgot to wind. When they find him tomorrow, the letter D will have been cut into his brow with a thorn. Graveyard graffiti. Some over-imaginative police detective will probably deduce Dracula.

  I rarely allow myself the luxury of killing. Usually in cities I happen to be passing through, where urban anonymity makes it easier to escape detection. Usually the cruel and the vicious, the ones who use their looks or their lies to manipulate. And, once in a great while, those so beautiful that I am maddened and I must possess them utterly. After three hundred years I have developed the self-control to sip, not gulp. The bagpiping street busker I took my last night in Edinburgh will wake, chilled with dawn, in the shadow of St. Giles Cathedral, a little bruised, a little woozy, remembering nothing. I had to have him. He stood on High Street, bare-chested in workboots and kilt, piping in the dusk, and the pipes made my eyes moist. “For me and my true love will never meet again, on the bonnie bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.” I hum the tune to myself as I take the night train to London.

  Steven is my London houseboy. He’s short, endearingly so, the sort I love to lift into my arms when I drink from him. His beard is bushy, his ass is furry, he talks a lot about computers. So efficient, keeping the flat near Kensington Gardens ready for me at all times, though, truth be told, I get to London only once or twice a year. Too much busyness and noise. Though I cannot bring myself to return to Mull, my country roots are still too strong to tolerate cities for long, and so tonight, while I am prowling the Barbican for an acquiescent theater-goer during Macbeth’s intermission, Steven is booking an Atlantic passage for me. I want to smell, touch and taste the Appalachian spring.

  The ship leaves from Southhampton, a mid-afternoon disembarkation I miss. When I rise at dusk, Steven is waiting, having guarded me all day. Dropping his Dostoyevsky, he shows me proudly about the fine stateroom he’s booked for us. There are a small balcony from which to watch the stars, a suite in which to entertain what guests I might lure up for a nightcap, a bowl of roses from our own Kensington garden on the mantelpiece. In the fridge, along with the champagne, paté, and brie Steven dotes on, there are several bottles of pinot noir mixed with blood, so as to stave off hunger for a while if the hunt becomes inconvenient in such a hermetic environment. And in the bedroom, angled across the bed, a naked man, lying on his side.

  He’s about fifty, bulkily built, with a slate-gray beard and silver-gray hair lightly dusting his chest, curling thickly across his beer-belly. His hands are cuffed behind his back. He’s sleeping—unconscious rather. In a crumpled pile on the carpet is an orange stoker’s jumper, stained at the knees with grease. I am amazed.

  “What is this, the complimentary basket of fruit?” I joke. “How did you do this?”

  “I’ve learned a few things from you, Derek. Think about all those books on Celtic mythology, Scottish poetry, herbalism”—here a wide grin—“I’ve had to entertain myself with while you slept. The Brothers Karamazov is a welcome change of pace.”

  “This is Dimitri, I gather. Fetch the champagne and light the candelabra.”

  Steven watches from the armchair as I slap the man awake. In the candlelight he grins lazily, drunkenly, held in my arms. I nuzzle his beard: soft as the thistle seeds wild birds scatter in their excitement, gray as those clouds snagged in autumn on Mull’s highest peaks. He smells like oil, like tobacco and day-old sweat. When I beckon, Steven moves to the side of the bed and begins to feed on our guest in his own way while I drink from the stoker’s neck. Just a little. No harm. Later he’ll wake in a cleaning closet down the hall, groggy, head throbbing, remembering nothing, cursing his own foolish overindulgence.

  He’s passed out again. I catch the last few drams in the two-handled drinking goblet we Scots call a quaich before lowering him to the mattress and solicitously—how caring I can be when the mood strikes me, when a man is so desirable—covering him with a blanket. Steven cleans opals from our stoker’s thigh with his tongue, kisses me creamily, then rises to pop the champagne.

  On the balcony, against the moonlight the golden flutes of champagne go pink, the very hue of wild red raspberries in the field below my West Virginian farmhouse. It’s like sipping restlessness itself, this constant stream of bubbles rising like cathedral spires, like the Light-Bearer’s ambition. Side by side, Steven and I drink. Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, I muse, the curlicue wake of this ship might cross the line of a wake centuries dispersed, the wake of the Persephone. I can almost see that immigrant ship, pitching as it did over the water, on its way to America.

  How eager I was to leave Scotland and the memories of Angus. I came with many of my folk, dispossessed Scots braving the sea, docking in Philadelphia’s harbor, discovering the best lands of Pennsylvania already spoken for. Down the Great Wagon Road the cart bumped, and on it the heavy box in which I slept, guarded by John and Ewan, Angus’s brothers. I had avenged their family, and they were loyal. Accompanying me all their lives, they helped me penetrate the frontier and erect Mount Storm, my fortress of a farmhouse in the Potomac Highlands. When the Shawnee came, they unsheathed their claymores. When the Cherokee came, they bartered. I never fed on them. They farmed my land; they married well, lovely Cherokee women. One of their descendants protects me still.

  John and Ewan. It was hard to see them age, their heads of long hair go gray, their warrior’s muscles weaken. It was hard to visit their graves in the night, after their families left, to sit by the fresh mounds of earth and whisper them to sleep. Sometimes, in September, when the ironweed is thick in the pasture and the fog said to herald a beautiful day begins to weave itself among the trees near daybreak, I can see them, young as when we first descended the Shenandoah, lifting their swords by the lines of corn and grinning at me.

  Manhattan. Tonight when I rise, Steven is reading Chekhov. He’s been on a Russian literar
y tear ever since that month in St. Petersburg. There’s a little silver on his temples tonight. Premature. He has years of beauty left. I slip off the kilt I usually sleep in, pull on leather bar garb—black jeans, white A-shirt, black leather jacket, black Durangos—then move to the windows overlooking Central Park. There’s a warm drizzle smearing the city’s lights. During these few days in New York, I have phone calls to make, a publishing empire to nudge along. One can accumulate much wealth, given several centuries, especially when the right people die at the right time. This evening, however, I prefer to focus on pleasure, not business.

  “You’re seeing Dale tonight?”

  “Yes,” he sighs, clearly enamoured. “I’m meeting him in the Village, in that French place we like. God, he’s, er, gifted.”

  I smile, open the window, and begin to shift. “One of these nights you’ll have to share,” I warn, the last word grading into a bat-growl as I glide out over the street far below, then loop around several towers in the fine rain. Oh Westron wind, when will thou blow / The small rain down can rain? Drones within are still humped over desks in the florescent glare, and I bump at a few windows just for the spite of it. One man spills his coffee in his lap, a woman begins running in hysterical circles at the sight of my red eyes, before hunger pulls me from this game and I head for the Lure.

  When I return to the Potomac Highlands, I will have to resist any urge to drain a man completely—a diet of sorts—for murder is too much trouble to cover up there, in West Virginia’s small towns and close-knit communities. But Manhattan is another matter. I will glut myself for the few nights I have left in New York.

  And the Lure is like a buffet table, crowded tonight with the usual clientele. Men in chaps, tanktops, leather jackets and vests. Tattooed, bare-chested, pierced. Leashed boys being led about by daddies. I sit on a stool near the pool table and pull out a cigar. A boy sits beside me, with a bald head, muscle shirt and denim cut-offs so short his multi-pierced cock obligingly pops out with every other movement. He has his lighter out in an instant, ready to serve. I blow smoke in his face and dismiss him.

  Dark corners, or red-lit. Thick with the scent of unwashed armpits, poppers, beer, cigars. If this is Hell, I can see why Lucifer chose to fall. Myself am hell. Indeed. But the torment is so easily—if temporarily—escaped. Tonight what I want’s the bartender.

  I have a penchant for bartenders. In leather bars they’re almost always delectable and compulsively shirtless. This one is about twenty-five, with high cheekbones the dim lights above him throw into relief. He has a flattop, big sideburns that angle sharply across his cheeks, and a close-cropped brown goatee. No one relishes more than I the recent proliferation of goatees. Of course he’s bare-chested, and pale, almost as pale as early spring’s bloodroot bloom. Between his nipples, a diamond-shaped patch of hair. Around his thick neck, a studded dog collar. Around his moderately muscled upper arms, black leather bands.

  This one is too good to live.

  I take a draw off my cigar, stare at him till he turns his head, hands fumbling with bills and beers. “Whatever single malt you have,” I say. When he hands the glinting glass to me, our fingers brush, and I can see his death.

  I will not speak to him again, save to order another Scotch, for there are many witnesses here. I will follow him after closing, take enough blood to evoke a faint, then carry him—how’s that for a silhouette against the moon, were there a moon tonight?—back to the penthouse. He’ll keep nicely, tied to a chair and ball-gagged in the soundproof room. As young and strong as he is, he’ll survive for several nights, struggling for the first few feedings, wrists bloodied with his efforts to escape, drool running down his goateed chin. By the end, he’ll be sagging in the ropes, whimpering, so weak he submits. I cherish the whimpering, when a lover’s manhood is broken, when his tears taste as rich as his blood or semen. I love it when he lies near death, splayed across my lap, head cradled in the crook of my arm, and our eyes meet before I bend over him one last time.

  It only takes a few nights in Manhattan before I lose my patience. Despite the harvest of urban pulchritude, the urban abrasions are too much. What sounds were there in Lochbuie but the bees hovering about Scotch broom, the tinkle of sheep bells, that long sleepy roll of the sea up the shores of the loch? Here, despite what powers I possess, there is too much beyond my control. Traffic, crowds, the urine-yellow glare of streetlights, smell of garbage and exhaust. The inexhaustible banalities of the badly bred, exchanged on cell phones in the bookstore, in the opera, in the concert.

  And those damned car stereos. As if my sensitivity weren’t assailed enough. Finally, on Christopher Street, I mist into a car pausing at a stop sign, its sides throbbing with rap. The driver turns and chokes with shock. “When I first heard rap, I began to relax,” I state matter-of-factly, “knowing then that the art of the West could degenerate no further.” Reaching over, I slam his head—ridiculous brat, pimply teenager—against the steering wheel till blood spouts from his nose. “Keep your poor taste out of public space. It’s your civic duty.” Another slam against the wheel—the horn chirps—and now a snap of cartilage. A boxer’s nose might improve his looks. The car glides, stately as the Titanic, into a fire hydrant. I slam my fist through the stereo and the dog-humping stops. In the aftermath of that auditory garbage, the quiet that follows seems like the silence of mountain pastures. The lesson on manners over—this time, at least—I shimmer/fade, then drift toward the Hudson. First time, I’m guessing, that Christopher Street has experienced a fog bank that could snicker.

  In West Virginia, no doubt, the new leaves have already lost their gold and are jading into summer. The irises Bob has carefully planted for my pleasure are already collapsing in on themselves like toothless octogenarian mouths. Tomorrow, I will return to my mountain, where the nights are silent and flecked with fireflies, where the only faces I meet are those I love.

  The train to Washington, D.C., then a van hissing down rainy interstates and up bumpy backroads. From the uneasy sleep of my travel I sense the series of movements that take me home.

  When I lift the lid of my coffin—solid still, after these several centuries—I can smell, beyond the damp foundations of the house, the hills cooling with dusk, the high grass of late spring, and my throat tightens with pleasure.

  Bob is standing nearby. When he sees me rise, he smiles. And what a smile. His face transforms, from the usual shy pout he habitually bears to as close as I get to noontime heat. He’s wearing nothing but jeans, just the way I like my caretakers. Ink-black goatee, hairline receding just a bit, and fur matted all over, from his pierced nipples to his shoulders and the small of his back. No wonder he once posed for Bear Magazine.

  “God, I’m glad you’re finally home,” he effuses, pulling me into a hug before tugging me toward the sliding panel of this secret cellar room. Upstairs, two glasses of port await, and he seizes them before shouldering me about the house.

  “You’ve got to see what I’ve done with this place while you were in Scotland!” he chatters, full of improvements to report. “The back parlor is painted—sort of a mushroom—I love that Martha Stewart paint. I replaced a few chair rails, had the chimney cleaned. Got a new armchair for the tower room. Tried to put the cats on a diet, but it didn’t work. And I’ve planted a butterfly garden and a wildflower garden. You just missed the bluebells. The bloodroot blooms—sorry, I know they’re your favorite—are long gone. But the royal ferns are unfurling, and the clambering roses are thick with buds.”

  That about sums up Robert McCormick. He’s big, furry, and burly, the sort that would look great straddling a Harley and looking mean, the sort that you know would want it rough, would hurt you if you wanted it. But he’s also as sweetly domestic as they come. The house is immaculate, simply but beautifully appointed. The lawn is carefully landscaped. He has shelves of cookbooks and, with my permission, invites a small and trustworthy coterie of Bear buddies up once in a while for complex feasts, which, unfortunately, I cannot
share, though on Burns Night I do manage a few bites of haggis just for auld lange syne. His apparent contradictions are typical of so many leathermen and Bears I know, so many butch mountaineer queers. With what ease and grace they alternate between toughness and tenderness, between the wild and the civilized. If, over after-dinner Bärenjäger, I were to bring up yang and yin, Apollo and Dionysos, their eyes might glaze over—“Derek, you’re being a professor again!”—but they embody that balance nevertheless.

  Descendant of John and Ewan, and just as protective, just as industrious, for years Bob has kept up the old farmhouse his ancestors helped me build. Mount Storm was ambitious to begin with, but a few centuries of renovation have made it even larger.

  In the cellar, there is the usual series of dusty and heavily laden shelves common to rural homes: row after row of Ball jars full of beans, tomatoes, pickled beets, and chowchow Bob has canned, like any devoted amateur farmer. Incongruously, there’s also a well-equipped dungeon, complete with exposed ceiling beams, sling and St. Andrew’s Cross, for those guests who want rough play. And behind a secret panel lies the room where I sleep during the day, in the coffin my father had carved for me so long ago.

  On the ground floor, there’s a big porch—we Appalachians are inveterate porch-sitters—with the usual rocking chairs, where Bob and I rock some evenings, watch the lightning bugs, and smoke cigars. A patio’s in the back, reached through French doors, full of night-blooming plants that Bob has chosen for my nocturnal pleasure. There’s a huge kitchen he’s insisted on expanding, and a roomy study, with desk, laptop, printer, and walls of books collected over centuries. A living room, full of the sort of antiques Bob takes pleasure in scouring West Virginia for, with, at one end, a picture window overlooking German Valley and, at the other, the original stone fireplace John and Ewan helped me build back in the 1700s. Over the mantel hangs my old claymore, the one with which I fought many battles while I was still human, while I still had Angus at my side.