by Hal Bodner
His preferred victims were male—always young and strong. Warriors gave him particular delight as, like a cat, Rex enjoyed playing with his food. He adored their shocked screams as they found their prized strength was insufficient to prevent the agonies Rex inflicted. He was aroused at the sight of their bunched muscles as they strained to avoid his teeth and nails. The scent of their sweat was a fine bouquet to his senses. The taste of their adrenaline-rich blood, flooded with a rush of hormones as they sought futilely to escape him, was an almost orgasmic pleasure on his palate.
And the more beautiful the victim, the happier Rex was. He loved nothing more than to reduce a once beautiful face and body to a writhing mass of torn, blood-soaked tissue and bone. Rex hated the pleasure others derived from physical beauty. He sought to possess it in the only way he knew how—by destroying it utterly.
Women, though, had always tasted flat to him. He despised them as weak creatures, fit only as chattel, which they were considered throughout most of Rex’s life. They had no power in society and were used to suffering physical abuse. He got no feeling of power when stripping away their physical defenses to leave them shattered, quivering wrecks. It was simply too easy, and thus their conquest gave him nothing to relish. No, his favorite meals were males, secure in their own strength and ability, whose fantasies of superiority he could slowly crush.
As for other vampires, he had no patience with them; he simply killed them on sight. They were simpering, spineless creatures, hiding from peasants in graveyards and catacombs, terrified of their own shadows. But by the thirteenth century, it was difficult to reside in any major city where vampires were not present—in abundance. Encountering their little groups became an inevitable nuisance. And frequently there were too many of them in a single metropolis to risk ridding himself of them all; he found himself in the despised position of having either to hide himself or leave. When an encounter with another of his race was absolutely necessary, he did his business quickly and departed; he doubted if he’d spent more than a dozen or so hours in total conversing with one of his own kind since Julian had been Emperor.
The Inquisition in Spain provided him with a welcome respite. For once, he was able to sit back and enjoy himself as the Church did his dirty work for him; he merely observed the banquet of pain and blood, lapping up the leavings with satisfaction. The Inquisitors did their jobs well. By the second or third decade of the fifteenth century, Rex realized with a shock of pleasant surprise, that he was quite possibly the sole remaining member of his race left alive in Spain. Seizing the opportunity, Rex joined the ranks of the church as an Inquisitor.
Gleefully immersing himself in his tasks, he sang ironic praises to a god whom he neither acknowledged nor believed in while glorying in the torture and degradation of helpless mortals. His favorite game was to prolong the agony until his victim was on the brink of madness and then to reveal his true nature as he sent his captive on to Hell. He excelled at his job—he was too good, in fact.
He’d finally drawn the attention of Torquemada himself. He met the inquisitor general only twice, the meetings almost thirty years apart. Unfortunately, he’d not reckoned with the churchman’s amazing recall of faces. Rex’s perpetual youth and beauty had caught the sly old man’s attention and Rex quickly found himself naked and shackled to a dungeon wall in chains so heavy even he could not break them. As the Inquisitor’s men worked on his helpless body with their red-hot irons, pincers and tongs, extorting him to renounce Satan, Rex roundly cursed them through his screams of agony.
His uncanny ability to heal at first terrorized his captors. Soon, however, they dug in with a new zeal, determined to exorcise the devils that so obviously possessed the young man’s soul. Rex writhed in pain nightly, sinking into blissful oblivion with each dawn, only to awaken at sunset, fully recovered for his torturers to renew their assault. Finally, hanging in chains from a high ceiling, shoulders dislocated and starved almost to death, he had gnawed through both his wrists and tumbled to the floor twelve feet below, almost shattering his spine in the process and leaving his hands dangling above him.
That evening, he had feasted on his former captors and escaped. Vowing revenge on Torquemada, he had fled Spain, trudging overland in great pain, leaving a trail of drained corpses in his wake until he finally reached the Black Forest of Germany. There, digging deep into the moist dark soil, he’d buried himself and had succumbed to a sleep lasting more than a century.
Emerging from his makeshift grave, hands fully rejuvenated, he had entered a nearby village and learned the date. Realizing that his enemy had gone to his grave lifetimes before, his fury was almost unendurable. His revenge thwarted by time, Rex had drained the entire village, leaving in his wake the bloodless, mutilated corpses of some two hundred men, women and children.
His anger turned inward and festered. Now unable to tolerate even the company of mortals, he retreated even further from the world. He found himself a series of secluded dens, usually deep caverns hidden in the wilderness surrounding major cities. He would emerge occasionally and invade the nearest metropolis, capturing several strong young men. Back in his lair, he derived almost as much sustenance from their anguish and terror as he obtained from their blood. Their deaths were slow, hard and satisfying.
As human society grew and expanded, Rex found it harder to preserve his solitude. Grudgingly, he abandoned his depraved pleasures and contented himself with a quick kill to survive. Eventually, the New World beckoned with its unexplored wilderness and vast frontiers, and Rex was quick to explore America’s possibilities.
By 1750, the forests and plains of the Colonial West had become his new home. The native savages were his first prey. However, Rex soon found that the term “savage” was inaccurate; they were inestimably more canny than their pale-skinned brothers. Baffled and enraged by the Indian ability to thwart his attacks by the burning of mysterious herbs, maddened by the inexplicable pain caused to him by certain of their religious ceremonies, Rex turned his attention to the wagons of Eastern whites who were slowly beginning their westward travels.
The pickings were leaner, but easier. Rex became less choosy about his menu. Many entire families, eager to homestead land in the virgin regions of the country, vanished long before reaching their destinations. Parties of explorers and surveyors disappeared during their treks. Once, to Rex’s pleasure and gratification, a contingent of a half dozen soldiers was unable to rejoin the main body of its force.
Always, his hatred grew. He resented having to be careful so that he would not awake one evening with a sharp wooden spar denting the flesh above his heart. He loathed his vampiric brothers and sisters who had learned to derive sustenance from their victims without killing—their timidity was anathema to him. He despised the various shape-changers whom he met in abundance in the New World. He considered their hunting techniques to be sloppy and unprofessional; quick, violent kills forgoing the added spice of terror and anguish. And though he would never have admitted it, he hated his own self-imposed loneliness most of all.
It had been a century since he’d first stood on the beaches of the Pacific Ocean along the California coastline. The creamy brown skinned men of the southern regions had been delightful prey. The various young members of the clergy, come to convert the heathen to Christ with youthful exuberance, had made excellent playthings. The almond-eyed Asians of the northern regions, muscles hardened from months of backbreaking labor on the railroads, had been most interesting quarry.
By the early part of the twentieth century, Rex had been forced to reevaluate his eating habits. California became too developed for the remains of his prey to lie undetected for long. Yet he was loathe to leave his feeding grounds. Modern man was, in many ways, stronger than his ancestors—health care and the abundance of good food had seen to that. In addition, California had been, since the 1930s, the home of the most beautiful men in the world. Even with the temptation of a second world war beckoning from Europe, he was reluctant to leave the das
hing young American soldiers on leave in their crisp uniforms. He’d stayed and, by a fluke of fate, met with misfortune.
In 1958, he’d been making his home deep within a series of caverns and caves below the city of Los Angeles. From the cave entrance to his lair, a walk of twenty minutes was required through twisting, dank corridors of stone, airless and without light, past pools of black standing water, hoards of rodents gathered around the edges. Rex had never before seen crude oil; thus he had no idea that greedy mortal men were in the process of raping the countryside in search of it. The drilling which had been occurring in the Los Angeles basin for several years, combined with massive construction on the surface, weakened the strata of the rock surrounding Rex’s lair. A relatively minor earthquake, which disturbed the surface not one bit, had been all that was needed to send the walls and ceiling crashing down upon him as he slept one day, burying him in the rubble and trapping him in a makeshift grave for more than thirty years.
Rex had not awakened from his involuntary sleep until the California Department of Transportation provided the alarm clock late one August. Excavations for the new Los Angeles subway project penetrated his tomb and he awoke, his nostrils filled with the scent of fresh prey passing by on the streets above him. Clothing tattered and torn, he emerged ravenous onto the streets of Hollywood.
His first victims were the homeless. Rex was amazed at the sumptuous repast of humanity modern Los Angeles had seen fit to provide him in its doorways and alleys. Unfamiliar with the modern society in which he found himself, Rex was careful to make certain that the bodies of his initial victims would never be found. Watching construction workers from the shadows of a tunnel early one morning just before dawn, he cleverly realized how simple disposal of the corpses would be. Thereafter, he would scrape a shallow grave for his victim underneath the floor of new excavations. By the next nightfall, the remains of his meal would be covered with a layer of cement as the subway platforms and tunnel floors were laid.
He grew stronger and his standard of living increased. He moved on to prostitutes and then to the occasional small groups of leather-clad teenagers who were given to roaming the streets at all hours—dangerous, but not to Rex. He staked out his new territory carefully, both above and below ground. With delight, he discovered a library in the midst of his hunting grounds. Breaking in, he began to voraciously absorb local newspapers, giving him a feel for the modern world.
One night he opened a sub-basement door below the streets of Hollywood and was again able to experience malicious glee. Imagine his joy at ascending the building’s basement stairway to open a door revealing literally dozens of men, many of them handsome and young, all bare-chested, wrapped in nothing but towels, restlessly roaming the hallways, alcoves and cubicles of the Hollywood Bathhouse.
But Rex had leaned from his sojourn in the library that modern law enforcement officers were nothing if not efficient; the newspapers seemed almost exclusively dedicated to the mortals’ undying attempt to stamp out what they considered crime. So Rex was careful. Stripping naked, Rex wandered the halls of the bathhouse, gaining appreciative stares from young men who, had he not already fed that evening, would have made deliciously intoxicating entrees. In the hours before dawn however, he was stricken with one particular youth, blond and smoothly muscled and his impulses proved irresistible. Capturing the young man’s gaze with his own, he’d lured him back down into the bowels of the sub-basement and had feasted on his agony as he had not done in years.
His passion for literature had also been assuaged that evening. Stacks of newspapers had been provided for the bathhouse’s patrons and Rex had been quick to seize one copy of each. Leaving the drained corpse of the blond boy behind an unused piece of machinery in an ancient, rat-infested boiler room in the sub-basement, satisfied that the voracious rodents would make short work of the evidence, he retreated back to his lair clutching copies of Frontiers, Edge, the Gay Gazette and Planet Homo in his blood-stained hands.
As dawn neared, he scanned the magazines and newspapers, marveling at the shirtless beauties displayed in the various advertisements and absorbing bits of information from the articles and letters. The personal ads were particularly intriguing puzzles. What was a “bottom”? What was the significance of the letters “HIV”? What in the name of all the forgotten gods did “out only” mean?
But as he read on, one short term began to absorb his thoughts, pounding at his consciousness with a dull murmur that quickly became a roar with each printed repetition. He sank back into slumber, still seeing its imprinted image on the inside of his closed eyelids, again and again. West Hollywood...West Hollywood...West Hollywood...
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I don’t see why we have to drive all the way out to the Valley,” Troy complained. “Don’t you know they’re going to make you turn in your American Express gold card and take a blood test before they let us past Mulholland?”
“I told you, Hanna and Gustav may know something new that’ll help us out.”
“Couldn’t we just call them?” Troy grumbled. “She’s always trying to pinch my cheeks.”
“So am I,” Chris grinned. “You never seem to complain.”
He shifted into third gear and became serious. “Anyway, it’s not the kind of thing we want to talk about over the telephone. All we need is one nosy operator. You remember Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame, don’t you?”
“There is no San Francisco,” Troy quoted absently, nodding his head. “It’s not like you and Sylvia weren’t Chatty Cathy’s about this for hours on the phone last night, you know,” he added with irritation. “It’s all automated now, anyway. You can’t even get a real person on the phone when you call Information.”
“It’ll be good to see them again,” Chris said, firmly, putting an end to the argument. “It’s been a while.”
Chris had been only partially successful at ignoring Troy’s continual bitching. He’d given up trying to get Troy to stay quiet or wear a seat belt and was desperately trying to focus all of his attention on the road. Gripping the wheel tightly, the tip of his tongue emerging from between his front teeth in concentration, he was silently cursing whoever it was that had the bright idea to construct a road through Laurel Canyon. Just when he’d finally hoped to have negotiated the last of the hairpin twists and turns, new ones appeared as if by magic.
Chris fought with the gearshift, thanking Providence for making him incapable of sweating; otherwise he’d have been drenched by the time he reached the top of the hill at Mulholland. Ahead, he saw a straight stretch of road which prior to seeing it with his own two eyes, he would have assumed would have been anathema to Californians. Figuring that fate had been on his side for two and a half centuries and was unlikely to desert him now, he gave up and, shifting into neutral, rode the brake all the way down to Ventura Boulevard. At the light, seeing the road stretch out before them on a more or less flat plane, Chris breathed a heavy sigh of relief and turned to face Troy, a look of satisfied accomplishment on his face.
Troy, however, was unwilling to compliment him on his successful negotiation of their hazardous path. He looked Chris straight in the eye. “I told you to let me drive,” was his only comment.
Chris had never been quite comfortable with automobiles, and in the fifty-odd years since they’d become popular he’d often cursed the memory of Henry Ford. He’d been born during a time when most transportation was via horseback or carriage and he’d never really gotten used to being behind the wheel of a car. Even though he’d been driving automobiles for nearly a century, he had never been able to break his instinctive habit of trying to reign-in by pulling back on the steering wheel whenever he wanted to slow down or stop. He’d once broken the steering column of a turquoise Nash Metropolitan of which he’d been particularly fond.
Troy, on the other hand, had been young at a time when Americans were just beginning their never-ending love affair with the automobile. He adored cars. He didn’t know the first thing about thei
r maintenance or upkeep, and he couldn’t care less about the mysteries of the mechanics involved in keeping them running—but he adored them all the same. Oblivious to the idea that his nature made him considerably more frail than Chris, Troy delighted in driving with reckless abandon, using the horn more frequently than the gear shift. Thus far, Chris had been able to side-track him in his pleas for an automatic transmission, fearing the consequences of Troy’s being able to accelerate without the restriction of having to switch gears might be hazardous to pedestrians, trees and other motorists alike.
Troy suddenly twisted on his seat and flung his outstretched arm across Chris’ line of vision to indicate the left turn, which would bring them to their destination, and Chris made a mental note to trade in the VW for a small Volvo. He’d seen the television commercials and figured that any car which could be driven off a high bridge and sustain minimal damage, as he had seen one do in a television commercial, would also be able to survive having Troy as a passenger.
Shoving Troy back into his seat with one hand and trying to both shift and steer with the other, Chris managed to make the turn and park in front of a small house, half timbered so as to look like the interior of an old English pub.
For someone who’d been so obstinate a mere moment ago about visiting, Troy seemed unable to restrain himself a single moment more without seeing Chris’s two old friends. He was out of the car in a flash and ringing at the doorbell before Chris had barely managed to set the parking brake and lock the doors. Chris had only gotten halfway up the front walk, inhaling the pleasant scent of the fragrant night-blooming jasmine trailing up the fence, when the front door was opened by a pleasantly stout, matronly looking woman wearing a white apron.
