The Vampire Sextette

by Edited by Marvin Kaye

  —On the contrary, Ms. Sperling. Just because creatures you're calling the undead are not specifically mentioned in law doesn't make them outside the law at all. Anyone who is evidently capable of rational discourse and capable of appearing here and making remarks, relevant or otherwise, is a prima facie candidate for personhood, and I can damn well hold them in contempt if I so choose!

  —Your Honor, the witness is… well… she's sort of swirling, melting into some kind of mist… and now there's a black cat running around the courtroom… it doesn't seem very friendly, sir… in fact, it's got poor Mrs. Coates trying to climb up one of the pillars… it could be rabid, Your Honor.

  —Shoot the critter! I won't have any more disruptions!

  —Sir, the cat appears to have leapt out of the window.

  —That's four stories, Bailiff! Surely even a cat can't leap four stories and survive… now what? It's flying into the night? You see great leathern wings against the face of the full moon, Bailiff? Is this Batman or is it a court of law? Put that camera away, Mr. Prinze, or I'm kicking CNN out completely. And I'm hereby instructing the jury to ignore all of this—the woman climbing out of the coffin, the soap-opera dialogue between Ms. Sperling and the witness, the bizarre metamorphosis from female to feline, and Mrs. Coates's screams. None of this ever happened, do you hear? None of it!

  —Your Honor…

  —What is it now, Counselor? My patience is wearing pretty thin.

  —In view of the fact that we have let the wrong… ah, cat out of the bag, and in view of the fact that the witness currently on the stand hasn't yet completed his testimony…

  —Quite, quite, Counselor. I think there's been quite enough claptrap for one day. Court will reconvene tomorrow at nine o'clock sharp, corpses and all.

  —The corpse… and I will try to make sure we have the right one on hand tomorrow, Your Honor… will not actually be able to say anything until sundown… might an allowance be made? Please don't consider it contempt; consider it rather to be a medical condition that prevents the witness from testifying during daylight hours.

  —All right. I'm going to give you a lot of leeway, Counselor. But any cats, bats, or talking corpses are going to have to abide by my rules. Court will reconvene at three p.m., then—we will allow the current witness to finish his touching story—by which time sundown will have arrived and we will be able to continue with your key witness—assuming him, or her, to have completed his, or her beauty sleep at that time.

  —So, Jeremy… having had your blood sipped by the sexiest girl at Kramer High in what can only be described as a somewhat erotic experience… did you then accept Ms. Sperling's invitation to an event which you believed would be some kind of wild, gothic orgy?

  —Yes, sir.

  —And did you bring the defendant with you on that occasion?

  —Uh, yes, sir.

  —And did you and the defendant drink blood at that event?

  —Yes, sir. Vanilla.

  —Vanilla?

  —When the new ones drink blood for the first time… they mix it with vanilla syrup. Kinda kills the taste. Gets you used to it. It's like, uh, you wouldn't give your kid brother a straight shot of JD the first time, not without mixing it with a Coke or something. He'll get just as drunk, but it won't burn his throat as bad.

  —What did you tell the defendant to get him to come to this event?

  —Oh, that was easy. Jody's a big vampire fan. He watches vampire movies all the time, and he plays role-playing games, live-action ones, too. Last year, we hitchhiked down to some sci-fi convention in Chattanooga, and he got into a live-action vampire thing that lasted the whole weekend, 24/7. He didn't even try to pick up no bitches or get fucked up, he was so caught up in the game. See, when it came to Cat Sperling's big event, orgy, whatever you wanted to call it, I was just looking to get laid, but Jody wanted something deeper. When I told him that she'd asked me to bring him, asked for him by name even, he got all glassy-eyed and weird, and he was all, "Finally. This is it. The call. The embrace of ultimate darkness." Which sounds like the script of a video game, but he said it all like it was for real. Jody has these deep eyes, that cornflower blue color, you know, that the bitches like so much; he could have had bitches, except he wouldn't play any of the games they wanted him to play. So when he starts talking about ultimate darkness, and he puts on this weird, toneless kind of voice, like he's, I don't know, possessed or something, it gets creepy. That's why the kid had no friends. He scared people. Even so, I wouldn't exactly call him guilty of murder.

  —Objection! The witness is speculating wildly about the defendant's guilt… even without counsel calling for such speculation. He's not here to speak to these issues.

  —Yes, yes. The jury will disregard that, of course; the defendant's guilt is for the jury to decide, not this benighted young man. Please confine your testimony to the facts, Mr. Kindred… if any.

  —All right, Jeremy. You do understand what the judge is saying, right? Just tell us what happened. No opinions, just facts.

  —Yes sir.

  —You passed Cat Sperling's invitation on to the defendant.

  —Yes.

  —How did you convince the defendant to attend?

  —I told him it was the wildest live-action role-playing game of all time.

  —You didn't mention the… erotic element?

  —Oh, yes, sir. I told him there would be an orgy.

  —And how did he react to that?

  —He said, you can have the sex, Jeremy, long as I can have the violence.

  —So is it fair to say that the defendant had a tendency towards violence?

  —He was just kidding, sir! I never knew Jody to harm a flea, except in some fantasy or game, and then, of course, he'd go crazy… ripping off heads or wrapping himself in entrails… you know, movie-special-effects kind of shit. But in real life, no sir, Jody was gentle. I've seen him walk sideways so he wouldn't step on a bug. Most guys kinda enjoy stepping on bugs… taking a life, you know, even if it's just a bug's life. Jody wasn't like that. Loner, though. At lunch, he'd always be by himself, because even though I'm his best friend, you didn't want to be seen hanging around with a loser; he understood that; we only hung together after school, or at the mall. But even sitting by himself, munching on them Power Bars which was all he ever had packed for his lunch, he had an audience… there was always bitches eyeing him from a distance, wanting him. I guess it was the eyes. That's why he was on the cover of Newsweek, wasn't it? The eyes. I assumed that's why Cat wanted me to bring him. And I know he's been getting a lot of mail from bitches all around the country, since that magazine cover; he told me that one time when they let me visit him in jail. I thought he'd be more, you know, fucked up by jail, what with all them big dudes named Bubba, but he says ain't none of them touched him; they're all scared of him. It's been put out that he has powers, you know, going through keyholes, transforming into bats, and all that vampire-movie shit; but what I wanna know is, if that's true, why hasn't he escaped from jail? Well okay, I guess I'm getting off the subject again. You wanna know about the party in the cemetery, the Friday-the-Thirteenth thing… and how my friend Jody come to be accused of wiping out his family and a passel of his friends.

  —Yes, Jeremy. Take your time. I know some of this is painful. But the jury needs to get the whole picture.

  —Where was I?

  —Perhaps you could go back to the vanilla blood.

  —Yeah. It was like a cocktail almost. They served it in tall cone-shaped glasses, flutes they called them; champagne comes the same way, I heard tell. When me and Jody got there, it was close to midnight. That's because Jody took some convincing, even though he loved vampires; these weren't his kind of people. Leastways, we assumed that it would be mostly the school Goth crowd, the Nine Inch Nails types, the Anne Rice readers; actually it was kinda surprising who was there. It wasn't even confined to kids from Kramer High. I mean, Miss Higginbotham, the social studies teacher, was there… and she
was bare-ass nekkid, and lying on top of a big old gravestone with her hippo-sized haunches in the air… and moaning. And this… well, this black dude was all on her shit, and he won't wearing nothing but a pair of black leather Pampers, and a nose ring the size of a golf ball, which must have tickled old Higginbotham's clit something fierce… well, she was moaning every time his head bobbed up and down, and her titties were flapping around like a couple of beached flounders. Shit, she was a sight, all moaning and wet in the moonlight like that. And there were other people scamming against grave markers; some guy was even trying to pork the stone angel that guards the cemetery gate. And there was this girl I'd never seen before, passing around the glasses, I mean flutes, filled with vanilla blood, and that was the only food they had at the whole party, if you can call it food. Well, just about everyone seemed occupied with someone else, and no one paid much mind to me and Jody, and the only one who said anything to us was the girl with the tray of blood; she stopped to ask us if we were new, and when we said yes, she told us drink up, it's real important for the new ones to drink up, can't really be part of the action until you've taken the first step; so we did.

  —What sensation did you associate with drinking this, ah, "vanilla blood?"

  —Hey, I don't rightly know if I should tell you what it was really like—this being a court of law and all.

  —You're under oath, Jeremy. And also, you have immunity.

  —So you can't use nothing I say against me? Nothing at all?

  _ Well—no.

  —Objection! The witness only has use immunity.

  —I'll sustain that, but I want to hear the witness's answer.

  —Jeremy, the judge isn't going to do anything to you for what you say. He just wants to hear your answer.

  —Well, sir, did you ever try E?

  —Are you saying that the effects of this "vanilla blood" were somewhat akin to the drug E—Ecstasy—a drug popular among the "rave" segment of the student population?

  —Well, if I answered that, I'd have to say that I'd used E before, and the judge just sustained that mean-looking bitch's objection. So I'll just say it gave me a boner the size of a baseball bat, and I wanted to screw the first thing I saw.

  —Which was?

  —Objection! Irrelevant.

  —Actually, Your Honor, this answer speaks directly to the defendant's motivation.

  —All right, I'll allow the question, but you'd better proceed very quickly to something important. Or the gentleman from CNN is liable to wet his pants.

  —Jeremy, and what was the first thing you saw that you wanted to, as you so delicately put it, screw?

  —Well, this is kinda embarrassing, sir. I mean, I wouldn't want you to think I'm gay or nothing, but I was so horny I wanted to do Jody… well, okay, there was something about him, the eyes, or whatever, anyway, on Brother Thompson's Christian summer camp last year, we all learned about circle jerks from the brother himself, so it wasn't like…

  —Order in the court!

  —And I mean, people were going crazy in that graveyard. I swear, I saw Mr. Smith, the football coach, getting boned up the butt by Mr. Oliver, who's like a police sergeant down at—

  —Order in the goddamn court!

  —Your Honor, we're not here to discuss the sexual antics of half the town. Could the witness confine himself to—

  —Brother Thompson was even there, and he was handcuffed to a gravestone, and these motorcycle bitches were prodding him with cigarettes, and he was all moaning.

  —That's enough, Mr. Kindred. Counselor, instruct your witness to get to the point.

  —So, Jeremy, you, ah, made a pass at your best friend.

  —Well, not exactly. It was more like this: I swallowed a couple of mouthfuls of that blood-cocktail thing, and everything went all misty… well, okay, and I felt like my veins were on fire… like this burning sensation, this tingling, everywhere, especially, you know, down there… and the next thing I knew, I was on Jody's leg, like a dog or something, rubbing myself up and down on it. But he wasn't getting horny off that blood at all. It wasn't affecting him the same way. Even though there was couples, threesomes, getting down every which way, in the light of the moon, with a dark, pounding music pouring out of a ghetto blaster somewhere… like one of them imperial orgy scenes in Caligula, you know?… Jody wouldn't have none of it. He shook me off of him like you'd shake off, well, a dog. "Don't," he said. "You're like all them others. To me the blood feels different. I think maybe I ain't the same kind as you, maybe I don't belong with the likes of you. What you're all doing seems so empty to me. Blood sings a different music to me. When I look into the dark, I look right past all of you and all your sleazy thrills, your wanna-be games, I see you all just flirting with the darkness… not willing to embrace it… to become a part of it… no, you're not like me after all, and it makes me sad because you've been a good friend to me, Jeremy, all these years when no one would talk to me because I'm like the school outcast, the mutant in the hallway… today I'm starting to learn who I really am."

  —So the defendant had, as it were, an epiphanic moment from the drinking of human blood?

  —I don't rightly know what that means, sir.

  —Doesn't matter. That evening changed him, didn't it?

  —Maybe so. What he said to me, though, was he found his true self.

  —And his true self was what? A vampire?

  —Won't that simple, sir. But anyways, I didn't have time to listen to him ranting on at that point, because, as I said, I was thinking with my dick. And soon my dick found something to play with. There was this mousy girl, no one anyone would look at twice in the daylight… her name was Constance Thorpe… and the only time I ever spent more than five seconds in her company was when me and her was paired off cutting up rats in biology lab one time. You know, she always used to make me nervous. She had nerd glasses, and she had a way of pulling out them rat intestines that made it look like she was enjoying it too much. And she dressed like a refugee from the sixties, parents must've been hippies or something and she forgot to rebel. Well, I saw her leaning against a tombstone, and she wasn't the same bitch at all, lemme tell you. She'd lost the glasses and she even had a spot of makeup on. But I didn't really give a shit, because of whatever it was in that blood; all I cared about was that she made a beeline for me and kinda nose-dived toward my crotch. Before you knew it she'd unzipped me and she was all up on me like a noisy old vacuum cleaner. I mean, I wouldn't have been seen dead with her normally, but you should have seen her suck, I mean, that girl could suck. She was wild, too, licking up a storm on my balls and even thrusting down past them, I think she'd have stuck it up my butt if my pants had come all the way down, but the zipper was all tangled in her hair. Must've hurt, it yanking on that hair like that, sir, but she sucked with a will, like her life depended on it. So I sorta leaned back against a gravestone, closed my eyes, and slipped into like a kind of trance, just letting myself go with the flow of it… then I sort of came to with a shock because I could feel this pinprick, this sharp pain that wouldn't go away. I looked down and she had pulled out a syringe and she'd stuck me right in the shaft, and you know how much blood gets down there when you got a boner. I guess I kinda panicked, even though I knew that these people have a thing about blood, and I drew back, and well, I knocked the syringe out and I jizzed at the same time, and there was blood and cum everywhere… well, Constance was going crazy now, lapping up everything, sperm, blood, sweat, I could have pissed on her face and she'd've drunk it. Holy shit! I didn't like it. The high of the vanilla blood was coming down now. I was all dizzy. This wasn't how I thought it would feel. I felt all dirty inside. That's when I decided to go looking for Jody. I sorta pushed Constance out of the way. She was on all fours, the fucking nympho bitch, and already sniffing for a fresh piece of meat to chew on. I kept calling Jody's name, asked a couple people where he was, and they kept shrugging or being too involved with their own shit.

  —And where did you in fac
t discover the defendant to be?

  —Well, I'm getting to that, sir!

  —Good. I see that the prosecution has become too, ah, involved in its prurient fascination with the material to object any further…

  —There's no need for the defense to snipe, Your Honor, when it is clearly burying itself with every word this so-called witness utters.

  —Be that as it may… Mr. Kindred?

  —Okay. Well, there's this big old structure bang in the middle of the cemetery, see, and it's the oldest monument there. I think it dates to long before the war.

  —You mean the Civil War.

  —Yes, sir.

  —I think most of the jury are familiar with the monument you're referring to. It's the Forbin-St. Cloud Memorial, right? Built by a prominent French family, in the days when our little city was booming. Which times, since the banning of hemp cultivation, are long past. A bizarrely incongruous Gothic monstrosity, surrounded by a wrought-iron fence with strange-looking gargoyles on top, rumored to have underground passageways, under whose sheltering eaves the homeless of this town often rest, as the local police force rarely bothers to kick them out, rarely even patrols this area because of the mysterious death of Police Sergeant McKinley, found garroted and disemboweled and spread-eagled over the—

  —Why is the defense now regaling us with a history lesson, Your Honor? Objection!

  —I'll stop, Your Honor. I just thought the local color would be helpful. The Forbin-St. Cloud monument has… vibes. I want the jury to understand that. Since all of them heard the ghost stories when they were kids, and few were brave enough to go there. I know the prosecution is anxious to get back to the dirty bits. So how about it, Mr. Kindred? Let's have 'em. The dirty bits.

  —Like I said, sir, I thought I saw the back of Jody's head, and he was squeezing through the iron bars into the Fo-for-… well, we don't call it that, sir.