Читать книгу Sheena and Other Gothic Tales - Brian Stableford - Страница 5

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At first, Jez thought that the vamp was just another freak, just another weirdo, just another shit with a screwed-up soul.

Jez knew lots of freaks. Some people—including the female whores who strutted their stuff on the King’s Cross meat rack with the rent boys—would have said that all his johns were freaks, but that was just naked prejudice. Jez was a liberal, and he didn’t give a damn where his johns wanted to squirt their semen, as long as they paid the going rate for the location in question; but even he had to concede that more than a few of the guys were seriously weird and definitely freaky.

At first, he thought the vamp was one of those.

The vamp drove a black BMW, polished so assiduously that it gleamed. Jez couldn’t imagine the neatly manicured vamp laboring over the machine with an old rag and an ozone-friendly can of Mr. Sheen, so he assumed that the job was contracted out. The first time he ever saw the BMW kerb-crawling the rack, he noticed the girls edging out with a little more enthusiasm than usual, not just because they smelled the money but because they smelled the pride behind that polish. But the vamp wasn’t interested in girls, and they soon learned to turn away in disgust when it came nosing up from the station.

That first night, Jez thought the vamp just had to be crazy. For one thing, he took Jez home to a brand-new glass-faced block in the Docklands, to the place where he actually lived. Not many johns did that, certainly not on a first date; even the ones who lived alone and only wanted hand relief were nervous of the neighbors and scared half to death of becoming blackmail targets. The vamp ought to have been twice as scared, given the nature of his nasty little habits, but he wasn’t. The vamp didn’t seem to be scared of anything. He had nerves of steel.

Even that seemed like one more symptom of serious weirdness, in the beginning.

The vamp didn’t have fangs, of course—not Christopher Lee-type extended canines, anyhow. Nor did he go straight for the jugular, the way vampires were supposed to do. He looked for veins in the same places the regular mainliners did, in the soft white flesh of the arms and the legs. He’d break into them very carefully, nibbling away with his pearly-white front teeth, then suck for twenty or thirty minutes at a stretch. It took the vamp far longer to take his drink than it did to shoot his wad, which he always did afterwards, into Jez’s mouth, but he paid well enough for the time he used. It hurt, of course, but so did lots of other things, and hurt was just one more thing that got added on to the rent.

The bites certainly didn’t look like the little round holes that Christopher Lee left; they were more like ragged love bites. They healed very quickly, though, and they never got infected, and Jez soon decided that the horror stories that passed up and down the rack about the things you could catch from human bites must be exaggerated. Most of the horror stories that passed up and down the rack were exaggerated, though some weren’t; it was difficult to figure out which were which, but Jez was fifteen years old and learning fast.

The first couple of times with the vamp, Jez found the business moderately sickening, but for that sort of rent he was always prepared to swallow his pride, along with everything else if necessary. After the first couple of times, it got much easier. He got used to it. He had plenty of opportunity, because the vamp was a man of regular habits, and the BMW always made straight for his spot; one of the other kids told him that if the car came cruising when Jez was otherwise occupied, it just went straight on through and out the other side.

Jez wasn’t stupid enough to reckon that the vamp used him regularly out of affection; he figured that it was probably because his veins were easy to get at, because he was strictly a snorter and a dragon-chaser and never used a needle. Even so, he began to award the vamp a leading role in his fantasies of making a big enough score to skip the rack altogether and go independent. Like all the boys, he resented having to hand over so much of his take to the management—after all, he was the one renting out his tender young flesh to be poked and chewed; all they were renting to him was a square yard of pavement that they didn’t even own. They supplied the junk too, of course, and an eight-by-twelve in a converted Victorian semi, but Jez knew how easily replaceable those services were, as long as you could come up with enough pictures of the queen.

It was only natural, in the circumstances, that Jez was able to think positively about the possibility of being taken on permanently by the vamp, in spite of the ragged love bites. It was, after all, far less blood than the usual kind of donor was required to give, and the vamp never asked any awkward questions about HIV. Jez had never been tested and didn’t intend to be; he couldn’t afford to care, or even to try to figure out the odds as to whether the junk he smoked and sniffed would kill him before his immune system’s season ticket finally expired.

Apparently the vamp didn’t care either, maybe because he already had it, maybe because he had nerves of steel. Either way, he qualified for a starring role in Jez’s dreamland—for a while. In fact, the vamp didn’t stop being a prominent figure in Jez’s dreams even when Jez started wondering whether he might, after all, be something other than one more freak, something more ominous than one more shit with a screwed-up soul, in a world where shits with screwed-up souls were by no means scarce.

Their conversation mostly consisted of mocking jokes. The vamp had a great line in deadpan answers to teasing questions.

‘Will I become a vampire after I die?’ Jez asked, once. ‘That’s what’s supposed to happen, right?—a vampire’s victims generally become vampires themselves.’

‘You don’t have to wait until you die, Jez,’ the vamp told him, serenely. ‘You could start right away, if you saved your money the way I do instead of blowing it all on synthetic endorphins and ersatz ecstasy. You could buy your own place and pick up some kid fresh off the train, and bleed him to your heart’s content—or even her, if your fancy goes that way. If you really want to be a vampire, that’s the only way to do it. There’s no way to extend a lease on a body.’

By degrees they built up quite a double act.

‘Hey, Vamp,’ said Jez, when he felt entitled to be a little more familiar, ‘I bet I know what you do for a living—you’re in the city, right? You’re a bloodsuckin’ capitalist who got filthy rich by exploitin’ the toilin’ masses, right?’

‘Got it in one,’ the vamp conceded. ‘I’m the sole proprietor of one of the oldest and most respected firms in the Golden Square Mile. My family has been managing investments since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.’

‘Bullshit,’ said Jez. ‘You don’t expect me to believe you got a family, do you? I bet you’ve been doin’ it all yourself since day one—except you sometimes have to disappear for a while and then come back pretendin’ to be your own son, so that nobody gets suspicious.’

‘Alas,’ the vamp replied, wistfully, ‘even vampires aren’t immortal. I only wish we were.’

Jez enjoyed the conversations, at first. It made a change—most johns were too paranoid to say much more than ‘How much?’ and ‘This’ll do.’ Most johns wouldn’t look Jez in the eye, but the vamp did, without the least trace of embarrassment or shame or shiftiness. Nor was his stare at all mesmeric, as might have been expected if he’d been a real vampire—‘real’ meaning, in this paradoxical instance, the kind you could watch at work for a couple of quid on a rented video. The vamp had a gaze much softer and infinitely less haunted than Klaus Kinski’s, although he was sexy enough in a dignified kind of way. Jez figured that if the vamp had girls working at his offices in the city the air was probably heavy with unrequited lust.

‘How come you got garlic in the kitchen, vamp?’ Jez asked him once, after he’d done a bit of snooping. ‘Not to mention mirrors all over the place. Ain’t you got no sense of propriety? Why don’t y’hang a crucifix on the wall, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Like every other species, vampires are subject to the rigors of natural selection,’ the vamp assured him, calmly. ‘All the ones who could only go out at night, or who couldn’t be seen in mirrors, or got frightened half to death by the sight of a crucifix, ended up with sharpened stakes through their hearts. My kind is the only one left. But I don’t go in for crucifixes—one ought to show a little respect for the lost undead, don’t you think?’

‘Great,’ said Jez, laughing. ‘All the true blue Draculas got impaled, and only the harmless ones survive. With us normals, it’s always been t’other way around.’

‘Oh, we’re not harmless,’ the vamp corrected him, in a voice as mild as milk. ‘We’re civilized, discreet, modest...but not harmless. Only the fittest survive, Jez—only the cleverest, and the strongest, and the best.’

It was good fun, for a while. It might have been a fraction sicker than talking about what the greenhouse effect was doing to the weather or why England’s batting had collapsed in the test match, but it certainly wasn’t as sick as exchanging merry quips about the first signs of Karposi’s sarcoma, or what you get when you cross a green monkey with a traffic warden, or any of the other contributions that the great gay plague had made to the oral cultural intercourse of the London Underworld. Jez was tempted once or twice to ask whether vampires were doomed to extinction now that AIDS was here to stay, but he never did; he figured that if anything were to qualify as overstepping the mark, that would probably be it.

There was no particular point in time when Jez’s attitude to the vamp began to change. There was no sinister clue to catch his attention and make him shiver with unease, let alone a ghastly revelation. In fact, it didn’t seem to be anything to do with the vamp’s behaviour at all; Jez thought that the change was purely in himself, and didn’t make much sense. It took the form of a creeping paranoia, which stole up on him like a wasting disease. If there was a single starting point, it must have been some fugitive dream that he had forgotten completely by the time he woke up, or came down.

Logically, the relationship ought to have continued to become more comfortable; the two of them might even have learned to trust one another. As the weeks of their acquaintance turned into months, Jez found out more and more about the vamp. He knew not only his real name and his real address, but which bank and credit cards he used, where he got his groceries, where he had been to school, what kind of music he liked...all the little data that fleshed him out into the perfect image of a human being. But the more Jez found out—the more intimately he came to know the innocence of the image—the more the suspicion stole upon him that it really was all image, all sham, and all disguise, and that the only real and true thing about the vamp was the particular way he used his teeth and his prick, in that order, in the course of their expensive rituals.

At first, Jez was happy enough to construe his suspicions about the vamp’s fundamental unhumanity as a natural extension of their joking relationship—was it not the case, after all, that such suspicions were a tacit assumption of all their humorous banter? But in time, although Jez and the vamp did not cease to joke with one another, the comedy wore thin. The idea that the vamp was just another freak seemed to shrivel up inside Jez’s head, of its own accord, soon to be reborn as an anxiety that the vamp might in fact be thoroughly and utterly normal—by his own alien, unhuman, diabolical standards.

That anxiety was all the more pernicious, and all the more persistent, because Jez did not know exactly what it implied. He became gradually afraid, without quite knowing what it was that he was afraid of.

That was when his questions gradually became more pointed—and, inevitably, when the answers became gradually more evasive.

‘Who’d you put the bite on before you took up with me?’ Jez asked. ‘The old-timers on the rack say they never saw you before.’

‘Does it matter?’ the vamp countered. ‘It was no one special—I paid him the way I pay you, and at much the same rate, allowing for inflation. Rents are cheaper up north, I hear, but that’s because no one wants to live there.’

Jez was from the north himself; the rack was full of northerners, put there by the state of the nation.

On another occasion, Jez asked whether everybody’s blood tasted the same, and whether the fact that he was so often coked up to the eyeballs made his blood more addictive than the blood of a non-user.

‘A connoisseur gets to notice subtle differences after a while,’ the vamp informed him, punctiliously. ‘But it’s not as obvious as the difference between burgundy and claret. As to the hypothesis that my compulsion might have intensified by virtue of drinking the nectar of too many drug-addicts, I can only say that it sounds just a little far-fetched.’

Later still, Jez asked what would happen to the vamp’s considerable personal fortune, given that he had no son and heir to leave it to, adding the sarcastic suggestion that he might care to leave it to the Blood Transfusion Service.

‘Oh, I intend to have an heir,’ the vamp assured him, blandly. ‘There’s plenty of time for that, dear boy...plenty of time.’

The vamp looked to be well on the downside of fifty; he kept Grecian-2000 in his bathroom as well as a mirror, and there was not one jot of evidence to suggest that he ever kept company with members of the opposite sex. Maybe that was the crucial incongruity that finally sowed the seed of something crazy in Jez’s addled brain—although the crack through which it crept was, of course, already there.

Truth to tell, it wasn’t just the vamp who had begun to seem a little less sick and freaky to Jez; the whole world was beginning to appear ordinary by its own implicit and thoroughly unhuman standards.

Jez wasn’t particularly worried when he first began to feel the movement in his guts. It didn’t seem to be painful, even when he hit dirt after a high; to begin with it was just there, disturbing simply by virtue of its presence. But it got steadily worse.

As time went by, he found it more and more difficult to sleep. Every time he lay down—whether he was drunk or sober, high or low—the quietness of his own limbs showed up by contrast the activity of whatever was inside him. Sometimes, he watched his own stomach, trying to see the skin bulge and stretch where the thing was shifting in its restless fashion. He began to run a tape measure around his waist every day, worried about the possibility that he was expanding from within; but he wasn’t—in fact, he was getting thinner.

He thought that he was getting paler too, but it was difficult to tell. The rack was full of pallid faces, which grew gradually whiter as careers progressed along their customary trajectories. No one else on the rack saw anything in his face or his gait or his manner that seemed worthy of comment, and if ever he mentioned to one of the other boys or one of the more maternal whores that his guts felt as if they were practicing their boy-scout knots they would just laugh, and tell him he ought to have their problems.

Jez was no wimp, and he would have ignored the feeling if he could, waiting patiently for it to go away, but the nature of the feeling simply wouldn’t permit that. It was too intrusive, too consistent, too close to the core of his being. He couldn’t help but worry about it, and he couldn’t help his anxiety transforming itself by inexorable degrees into an obsession.

Although he never actually saw the thing shifting under the skin of his belly he became absolutely certain that something was in there, that it was alive, and that it was feeding off him. He knew it wasn’t a tapeworm or a tumor, but imagined it instead as something resembling a newborn rat or a blind mole, with massive jaws filled with tiny teeth, which it used to clamp on to his intestine in order to draw out the best of his blood—blood newly-enriched by the products of digestion.

It didn’t take long to guess what the entity might be—to ‘formulate a hypothesis’ about the thing, as the vamp would undoubtedly have phrased it. At first, the idea that came into his mind seemed too way-out, and Jez knew that even the vamp, despite his love of understatement, would have found a dismissive description far more colorful and contemptuous than ‘just a little far-fetched’. But he couldn’t shake the idea loose, and the longer it stayed with him, the more its incredibility was eaten away by familiarity. Every night, while he took his place on the rack, waiting and waiting while the creepy-crawlies inched past in their Astras and Cortinas and Volvos and Datsuns, the thing would gnaw away at his entrails—gently and painlessly enough, but no less horrid for that—and the idea would gnaw at his mind, gently and painlessly but no less horrid in its turn.

As the creature in his belly grew, so did the idea in his brain. They grew together, like shadowy twins, until the one was a mature homunculus, as sleek as strong as any fond parent could wish for, and the other was a full-grown fantasy, as vivid and venturesome as anything that morphine or magic mushrooms could ever hope to compose.

The fantasy that possessed Jez’s mind took off from the supposition that the vamp wasn’t just a shit with a screwed-up soul, like every other city gent who liked a bit of rough from the rack, but that his taste for blood was merely a matter of the routine nourishment of his species. Perhaps, Jez somehow could not help but think, this was one john who wasn’t even queer, because he belonged to a kind that didn’t have two sexes at all, but only one. Perhaps, Jez somehow could not help but fear, this was one john who was only doing exactly what came naturally, for the proper purpose that nature intended. Perhaps, Jez somehow could not help but believe, the heir that the vamp fondly intended to have had already been conceived, after the fashion of his alien kind.

When Jez first wondered whether the strange stirring in his belly might have something to do with the vamp his immediate inclination was to share the joke, but he couldn’t. He didn’t see the vamp that week, and by the time the black BMW came cruising again he was well past the point where he could think the churning in his gut was anything trivial and temporary. He didn’t want to mention it to the vamp, because he didn’t want to see the vamp’s reaction. It was like the blood test he’d never taken—one of those moments of possible confirmation that were best postponed forever. He was scared that if he told the vamp that something was eating away at his guts, the vamp would smile—not an amused smile, but a proud smile; the smile of an expectant father.

Jez thought—and believed, despite one or two brave attempts to doubt it—that the vamp had shot an alien spore into his fertile gut, where it had taken root and begun to grow after its alien fashion, and from which it would, in the fullness of time, emerge, the moment of its birth a baptism of blood

In time, it became a little more painful, but never unbearable. Without hurting him unduly, the thing simply wore him down. By the time the creature in his abdomen had been gnawing at him for two months, Jez was so listless and so starved of sleep that simply taking his place on the rack became an ordeal. The intervals between enquiries began to get longer, and the management began to quiz him about the decline of his takings. If it hadn’t been for the vamp, the management might have decided that he wasn’t worth his spot, given that more fresh meat arrived just around the corner with every intercity 125, but the vamp was still a regular, and one well-used to meeting sky-high city rents without a murmur.

The vamp never commented on the way Jez looked, or enquired after the state of his health. The blood, it seemed, was still good—and the vamp, in any case, had other reasons for keeping in touch. Those reasons didn’t have to be spelled out; their relationship had reached that magical pitch at which they no longer seemed to needed words to help them understand one another’s motives and desires.

It still went on, day by day and week by week. Jez lost twenty kilos, and became as weak as a kitten. Eventually, after one more quiz administered more in sorrow than in anger, he lost his place on the rack, and he knew that he couldn’t complain. The management had had no choice, in the end; they were men of business, after all. The vamp hadn’t been around for a while, and no one except Jez could be certain that he wasn’t gone for ever.

The management even overrode his strenuous objections and sent him to the hospital, but the hospital couldn’t make a bed available and the doctors sent him back to the eight-by-twelve after leeching a generous helping of his blood in order to carry out tests. Jez didn’t tell them about the creature inside him, because he could tell that they didn’t want to know, and would refuse to see it on an X-ray. He could tell that the doctors didn’t want to take him in—that they’d rather he simply vanished, or at least had the elementary courtesy to die somewhere else instead of wasting time that they would far rather devote to the deserving sick.

By this time, Jez was in bad trouble. The worst of it wasn’t that he was playing host to the vamp’s offspring but that he was cut off from his connection.

If the hospital had admitted him, they’d have been obliged to feed his habit after some sort of fashion, rather than see him shrivel up to nothing at all, but the management worked on a strictly cash basis. They had done their bit, and owed him nothing; he’d never taken the trouble to pay into any kind of pension fund. He didn’t have any friends among the other rent boys, and although some of the older whores sometimes seemed to experience a ghostly maternal affection for the prettier boys, there was no way that sort of pantomime affection was going to be convertible into any kind of supply.

Even so, Jez was home for two whole days, in bed but not sleeping, before he called the vamp and begged for help.

Any run-of-the-mill freak or weirdo would have put the phone down on him, but the vamp didn’t. The vamp listened. Jez wasn’t particularly glad about that, but he wouldn’t have been glad if the vamp had cut him off either; he knew that there was no way out.

The vamp brought the black BMW to the semi, and came upstairs to Jez’s room. He didn’t waste any time; he just picked Jez up in his arms, all wrapped up in a blanket, and carried him down to the car. He laid Jez out on the back seat and he drove home to the brave new world of the half-reconstructed Docklands. He installed Jez in the spare room, and brought him a cup of hot, sweet tea.

‘That’s no good,’ Jez pointed out, politely. ‘I need some stuff—white and pure. I can’t feed your lousy kid unless you can feed my head as well as my guts.’

The vamp only held the cup to Jez’s lips, patiently but insistently, and in spite of what he’d said, Jez drank it. He knew, somehow, that the vamp wasn’t going to get him any hard stuff, or give him any money so that he could get it himself. Now Jez was in the spare bedroom, it was Jez who owed rent, in cash or in kind—and Jez knew that if it were to be paid in kind, it wouldn’t be paid in the usual kind.

‘Why me?’ asked Jez, when he’d finished the tea. ‘Why’d you pick me?’

‘Why anybody?’ countered the vamp, with a shrug. ‘We can’t even pick and choose our own selves with any degree of rationality or any semblance of good aesthetic judgment, so why should we be any better at picking the others on whom we elect to inflict ourselves?’

He was a philosopher to the bitter end, was the vamp. Jez might have admired him for it, if he hadn’t been so desperately in need of a hit.

When the vamp left him alone, Jez thought that it would soon be all over. In fact, he felt so close to the end that he was certain that the vamp had misjudged it, and would be too late returning to witness the birth of his son and heir—but he didn’t know whether or not that would matter to the vamp, who was, after all, unhuman.

As things turned out, though, Jez had longer to wait than he thought, and the vamp had come back

It was nighttime when the moment finally came, but the light was on. The vamp was sitting by the bed, patiently waiting. When Jez began to retch and gasp, the vamp unhurriedly pulled the duvet back, and unbuttoned Jez’s shirt to expose the pale white belly within. Then he stood back to watch while the thing inside chewed its way out, ripping and slashing and tearing with its tiny, clawed fingers and its tinier teeth.

The vamp could have brought a razor or a carving knife to help it on its way, but he didn’t. His kind obviously didn’t believe in cosseting their young; the ones who couldn’t make it on their own must simply be deemed unfit to live. The vamp just stood and watched, his face devoid of any expression, while his son and heir fought his messy way out through the surprisingly resilient flesh of the host who had carried him to term.

Jez watched too, though he would rather have been shocked into insensibility. He watched the rip in his belly from the moment it first appeared until the much later moment when the thing that was so laboriously making it was ready to squeeze through, stained top to toe with blood and flushed with the triumph of its first success in the harsh and hazardous game of life.

The pain had always been muted before, but it was given free rein while the thing was extracting itself, and the agony increased steadily all the while. Jez would have given anything for a hit powerful enough to blast him into orbit, but he was down at ground level, flat in the gutter without a shooting star in sight. There was nothing he could do to fight the pain except stuff his knuckles into his mouth and bite down hard, as if the self-inflicted pain might somehow exorcise the other. Strangely enough, it did help.

Eventually, though, the creature was free. It didn’t look much like an ordinary baby, but there wasn’t any particular reason to expect it to.

The vamp picked it up.

Jez looked down at the bloody wreck of his abdomen, and slowly unclamped his teeth from his bloody hand. He realized, pathetically, that he wasn’t going to die. In spite of everything, he wasn’t going to die.

He didn’t immediately understand why he wasn’t going to die, but in the end he looked up from his rapidly healing wound to stare at the vamp. Then he saw that father and son were looking down at him with earnest concern, sincerely glad to see that he was getting better.

Jez’s mouth was full of the taste of his own blood, and as the pain gradually ebbed away, he realized for the first time how supremely sweet and nourishing that blood must be, in the mouths of those who were that way inclined.