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I figured it was about time I threw something to the wolves =) Like everything I seem to write, it's far, far too long for what it is. Any advice appreciated - particularly the cutting variety.
Advisory: Contains profanity - one instance very strong - and graphic violence.
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At 2AM on a misty autumn night, Sheen Library had not one, but two intruders. The first was a gaunt, blind man of indeterminate age and the second a boy – almost a man, but not quite.
The boy was gothic, his eyes outlined in black, nails painted a similar hue. It wasn’t easy to sneak around in knee-length buckle-boots, but he strove to follow the blind man as quietly as he could. His name was Adam and he was seeking knowledge.
The man he followed onto the roof of the library and down through the skylight was wearing a pinstriped suit, spats, white gloves and a fedora. The white cane Adam had seen him tapping around during the evenings in the library was absent and he seemed not to need it. He moved with such assurance, there was doubt that he was blind at all, were it not for his occasional collision with potted plants.
Adam had been watching the blind man for some time now. At first he’d just been an evening curiosity at the library – an occasional amusement, given his tendency to swear and spit at the staff – tourettes, so they said, in half-sympathetic, half-terrified tones. Then, Adam had seen him during one of his midnight strolls through Mortlake Cemetery. The blind man was talking to a headstone and getting a reply from a column of mists that rose up from the grave. Adam had damn near wet himself at the time, but he had seen and heard a ghost that night. A real one. He wanted some of that action.
So Adam followed the strange blind man, down to the ground floor. He lost track of him in the reference section.
Adam looked around in disbelief. He’d not been far behind and despite hurrying from one end of a bookshelf to the other, he still couldn’t see where the man had slipped off to.
He didn’t have long to wonder, because as he rounded the bookshelf again, a skinny arm snaked itself around his throat and drew tight, cutting off his air. Another arm encircled his waist. He was lifted off his feet and then slammed face-first into the carpet.
As he struggled to regain his breath, the blind man jumped onto him, bony knees digging into the back of Adam’s legs. Hands pulled both his arms so fast and hard up behind his back, that for a moment Adam was sure they would pop clean out of their sockets. The man leant low to speak quietly in his ear, rank breath washing over him.
“You’ve been after my heels for days, you little turd burglar. Give me one good reason not to snap your neck and leave you under the skylight.”
Adam sucked and blew air for a moment, unable to reply. Then he managed to squeak out, “I was only following to learn! Please mister! Please – I just want to learn what you know!”
The blind man let go of one of a wrist to cover Adam's mouth, yanking his other arm up even higher. “You keep your fucking voice down or I’ll tear your arm off and ram the wet end down your throat – you got me?”
Adam nodded, tears starting to sting at his eyes, a hot line of pain in his shoulder. Even when the hand was taken away from his mouth again, he didn’t dare say anything until the man asked,
“So what do you think I know?”
Adam tried to look at the man’s face from the corner of his eye, seeing only the shadowy paleness of one sightless eye. Keeping the whine out of his voice was a titanic effort, “I saw you talking to a ghost in the graveyard … I want to know how to do that. I want to learn. I’m a Satanist!”
The blind man cackled quietly, “Pencil-dicked Satanist. You’re no good to me. Fuck off.”
Adam groaned as the man gave his wrist a nasty little twist before releasing him and getting up, starting to stalk off into the stacks.
With the resilience of youth, Adam forced his aching arms to push him up and as quickly as he could, took off after the man before he lost him again, “No. Listen. Teach me and I’ll do anything you ask me. Except – you know – I ain’t queer or anything. I’d do anything else.”
The blind man stopped, tilting his head to one side, “They say I’m crazy …” he crooked a finger in a beckoning gesture, “Come here and I’ll let you in on one of my little secrets.”
Adam approached the man tentatively, coming around to face him and looking hard at those milky eyes. He felt only faintly reassured that they didn’t seem to be focusing on anything, let alone him.
The blind man reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, running the other over Adam’s face despite the gloves. “I don’t think you really want to learn what I have to teach.”
Adam resisted the urge to brush the questing hand away from his face, “I can learn it. I could run errands for you. I could see things for you.”
The blind man hissed, “There’s only one thing you’re good for as far as I’m concerned. Give it to me and I might consider you as a servant. To be a student takes more than I believe you’re capable of.”
Adam frowned, the gloved fingers moving over his brow and reading this expression as he said, “I told you, I ain’t queer.”
The blind man cackled again, tilting Adam’s head to one side with surprising strength and baring his yellowed teeth, revealing long, sharp canines. “I don’t want your spotty little arse, child, I want your blood.”
Adam gaped. It wasn’t the beautiful seductress he’d always dreamed of, but it was still a vampire. The goth Holy Grail, as it were, “Cool!”
The blind man narrowed his eyes, his expression registering some confusion. “What do you mean cool? I want to use you like a snack bar, boy. My bite is agony.”
“I won’t care if you teach me,” said Adam, “What’s a little agony when the dark powers are in reach? Besides, life’s a veil of pain and misery. Every day is a pit of untold despair …”
“Spare me the bad song lyrics,” said the blind man dryly, releasing his hold. “and follow me – silently.”
So, the boy followed the man. First through the library, acting as a book carrier as the blind man stole a small selection of the Braille – huge tomes that made Adam’s arms ache despite their small number. Then he followed him across Southwest London into a squalid basement flat in a street that seemed mostly condemned. Adding the books to a much larger pile of Braille tomes, Adam surveyed the old man's den, feeling nervous and elated all at once as he wandered around. The kitchen was a storeroom for more books and a selection of curious objects – not a scrap of food in it.
As he turned to look back to the living room, he startled, almost walking straight into the blind man who had crept directly behind him.
The man wiggled his fingers in the air, “I believe you have a payment to make for your lodgings before we retire for the day.”
Adam took an involuntary step backwards. “I can stay here?”
The blind man took a fluid step forward to close the distance again, “Of course. You want to learn, I want a ready supply of food. Or have you changed your little mind?”
Adam looked at the blind man’s openly hungry expression and hesitated. He thought of his parents, briefly. Neither of them understood his life and this... this was a chance he had thought existed only in the realms of his dreams. When he spoke, his voice was barely above a whisper, fear defying his thoughts and trembling through his limbs.
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
“Good,” breathed the blind man, reaching out for him.
Adam felt one of the kitchen counters press against his back, only now realising he’d been backing up the whole time. The man’s grip was iron as he tilted Adam’s head to one side, a gloved hand once more clamping itself over his mouth. The man used his body to pin Adam against the counter as he darted his head forward to bite into his neck.
The reason for the man covering his mouth was almost instantly apparent. The bite itself was as painful as teeth being plunged into his neck ought to have been. When the blind man began to draw on his blood, it was crawling agony and Adam struggled and screamed under the hand.
It seemed to last an eternity and the pain did not diminish for its duration. Adam couldn’t tell if it was blood loss or shock that made him feel so weak and almost fainting when the teeth were finally withdrawn. He shuddered as the blind man licked at his neck and was unresisting when he was lifted up and dumped unceremoniously on the threadbare couch in the living room. He was still shuddering when he slipped into darkness.
He didn’t wake again until late the next evening, after the blind man had woken. He was set to work immediately, mostly clearing things up around the flat. He was exhausted and frightened all that night and the only thing that kept him from running home while the man was out, was the thought of what his father would do to him for not coming home earlier. By the time the man returned to the flat, Adam was almost in tears and shied away from him.
The blind man smiled reaching into a pocket and bringing out two greasy-wrapped burgers, tossing them in Adam’s general direction. “Well, you’re still here - so eat. You need to recoup your strength so you can feed me again.”
Adam retrieved the burgers from the floor, unwrapping one straight away and taking a huge bite, barely swallowing it before he said, “I can’t. I can’t do that again.”
The blind man laughed. “What’s a little agony when the dark powers are in reach? You
will feed me again when you’re fit for it. You don’t have a fucking choice anymore. I’ve taken a shine to the notion of giving you what you want. Whether you want it anymore, or not. I’m going to break you in so many ways.”
Two bites into his burger, Adam’s appetite had deserted him. Before dawn, he wept and he begged for release. All it got him was handcuffed to a sturdy pipe while the blind man slept the day away.
**
The blind man called himself ‘Dice’ and was, as Adam quickly discovered, completely insane.
The first month he spent in the flat was nightmarish. Every day he was handcuffed to the piping which wouldn’t budge no matter how he tugged and kicked and yanked on it – his left wrist grew so swollen, the cuffs wouldn't go around it anymore and he was shackled by his right.
Adam only called for help once and only tried to run away three times.
When he woke Dice with his yelling he was treated to an excellent example of the sort of bad mood a vampire could work up when made to move around during daylight hours. He was so badly beaten he hadn’t even been handcuffed for several days. As for running away, Dice seemed to possess a supernatural ability to know just when he was planning on an attempt. All three times Dice caught him mere feet from the door and all three times dragged him back inside and fed upon him there and then, whether he was recovered from the last feeding or not.
The fourth time Adam went to the door during one of Dice’s absences, he found himself unable to open it, terror keeping him inside at night as well as the handcuffs kept him there by day.
**
As the weeks and then months passed, the situation began to feel ‘normal’ to Adam. He was wasting away, since Dice was careless about feeding him and sometimes careless about feeding
from him.
Adam noticed that the hungrier Dice was, the crazier he got and he was frightening when he was crazy. Sometimes he’d just laugh for hours, or talk to things that might or might not have been there. He would tell Adam about some of the mad shit that was going through his mind, or about what he wanted to do to Adam, which was more terrible. Dice seemed to have it in his mind that Adam couldn’t ‘progress’ until he was every bit as crazy as he was. Worse yet, Adam was afraid he was starting to get there. Sometimes he could hear Dice when he wasn’t home. Sometimes he saw things that couldn’t be there, out of the corner of his eye.
Eventually, Adam began to volunteer for feedings, because the agony and debilitation of being drained was better than Dice being hungry. Submitting himself to the ordeal willingly leant the act an air of almost holy sacrifice and after a while, it leant Dice an air of ‘holiness’ too. Adam’s personal, demanding demon, promising dark secrets for a little blood, a little pain, a little sanity.
Almost a year after he’d first stepped into the flat, Adam turned eighteen. He was much thinner. Frail, really. The trappings of gothhood had faded away, his clothes charcoal and full of holes and mismatched with things Dice had brought back for him. Both his wrists were disfigured from the months of being shackled every day, although by now it was more of a formality, since he made no more efforts to escape. He didn’t even want to anymore – Dice was his whole world.
Some four months after Adam’s unnoticed eighteenth birthday, Dice stopped going out at night. He hadn’t fed from Adam for near two weeks. From the way he slavered, rocked back and forth and gibbered to himself, Adam didn’t think he’d fed from anyone for a while. Adam spent two days huddled in his corner next to the pipes, listening to Dice’s ravings and wishing he would feed so that he would regain some semblance of sanity. Adam felt more alone with him like this, than he did when Dice was out.
Eventually, he could bear it no more and he stood from his corner, legs shaking with the effort of holding him up. He felt unnaturally bloated with his own blood and aside from his dislike of Dice’s hungry madness, he was afraid that this lack of feeding meant Dice was thinking of giving up on him. So Adam crossed the room to where Dice was crouched down, head between his knees and droning on about the merits of cannibalism. What was good to eat and what was bitter.
Adam reached out a tentative hand to shake Dice’s shoulder, “You’re hungry. Why won’t you feed? Come on.”
Dice raised his head, his eyes yellowed, his lips almost white and flecked with foamy saliva, “but are you hungry enough? Hmm? Are you?”
Adam squinted, “I’m always hungry. You’ve brought me no food two days now.”
Dice leapt to his feet, shoving Adam backwards so that he flailed his arms and landed on the couch.
“Are you hungry enough to pay the price for what you wanted?”
Adam stared at him, hope dawning, “Yes! Teach me. Take what you need.”
“You belong to me?”
Adam nodded rapidly, “Yes! Who else would want me now?”
Dice grinned, discoloured foam dripping off his chin, “You give your life for my teachings?”
Adam felt a little colder, “My life?”
Dice didn’t seem to care if there was doubt in his answer or not. It was entirely possible that whatever Adam had said to any of the questions would have had no effect. Dice was barely in control of himself. Perhaps what control he appeared to have was simply an illusion. Adam shrunk back a little on the couch as Dice leapt on him, pinning his arms and leering blindly into his face.
“Are you bloody re-eady?”
Adam managed only an inarticulate whine by way of response before Dice darted his head forwards, clamping his cold and slavered lips against Adam’s left eye and sucking hard. Adam’s scream lacked strength and volume as his eye was sucked out of its socket and Dice’s teeth bit through the nerves and blood vessels. Dice licked the socket clean. Adam kept on screaming, not so much with pain as with the sheer horror of both losing the eye and having Dice’s cold tongue rasping inside the cavity.
Adam was sure Dice meant to blind him completely, but the vampire’s teeth moved on, not to his other eye, nor neck, but his face, chewing at the flesh, biting off and consuming one of his ears as he had consumed the eye. He left bloody rents in Adam’s cheek and scored Adam’s jaw with his sharp canines, giggling as he listened to Adam’s fractured and weak howls of terror.
Adam, worn down by his long stay in Dice’s keeping, felt himself being chewed and eaten alive by his blind, mad demon. It hurt, but not quite as much as the feedings and it was, in a way, just a more complete sacrifice than before. As he screamed, he began to laugh too, his one remaining eye rolling in his head as he watched shadows and shapes fly across his vision. Then Dice was grinning at him, blood dripping from his chin instead of saliva. Flesh caught between his teeth.
“You start to understand now. You have to go beyond words.”
Adam made a keening noise, part laughter and part just noise, “I can almost see.”
Dice murmured, “Then let me rip away the final veil,” dipping his head back down again to Adam’s throat and sinking his teeth in there as he began to feed.
Worse than all the feedings that had come before it, the agony intensified. Adam knew this one would not end before his death. His cries grew fainter as his limbs seemed to turn to leaden ice, Dice not even needing to pin him anymore as he sated his terrible hunger. Darkness fell across Adam’s remaining eye and he exhaled a long, rattling breath.
He had expected death to be darkness and sleep, but this death was a cacophony of voices. A blight of sensations raking his nerves. Visions of the dead howling at him, trying to drag him down into a mire of eternal torments.
As Adam struggled against these demons, who cared nothing for knowledge, he was dimly aware that the pain had stopped and something cold was trickling between his lips and down his throat. It was wonderfully reviving and as soon as he had enough of his senses to move, he began to suck on the liquid. Stirring more and reaching insensate hands to hold onto the wrist pressed to his lips, he drew on Dice’s blood greedily, feeling strength returning to his limbs, until Dice pulled his wrist away from him with a couple of sharp yanks.
The sun began to rise, Adam drifted in and out of consciousness on the couch, seeing strange things, hearing strange voices. The demons of his death seemed to have crawled out of oblivion with him, plucking at his clothes and whispering in his ear. His face was no longer bleeding, but healed into a mess of puckered scars. The socket of his left eye was a dry cavity with a withered half-shroud of eyelid.
Dice laid himself down on the floor by the couch, seeming equally exhausted by his efforts. Sleeping his dead sleep with his own demons in the darkened room. Glutted with the last of Adam’s living blood.
**
When Adam woke, he knew instinctively that night had come again. Dice was buttoning on a clean shirt, the other lying at his feet, stiff with blood.
Adam sat up.
Dice turned in his direction to say, “I am the mother of your madness. The father of your waking death. It is time for you to revisit the parents of your life.”
Adam ran his hands across his face, feeling the uneven flesh on his blind left side with wonderment, “My parents?” people he had near forgotten in his growing obsession with Dice, “What good are they to me now?”
Dice smiled, drawing on his jacket and moving to sit on the couch next to him. “It is the blood of the bastard living you need now and who better to provide your first meal than those who birthed your flesh to begin with?”
Adam smiled, seeing the beauty in this plan instantly. The closing of the circle of his life and the beginning of the new, “That’s brilliant.”
Dice chuckled, “I try, dear boy. I fucking try.”
“You’ve still got blood all on your face.”
Dice felt around his chin and grunted, “Damp a cloth and see to that. And dispose of my shirt when you go.”
Adam nodded and went to fetch a cloth, marvelling at the strength in his limbs, so long absent. He became more aware of the hunger growing in him. Different to his old hungers, but every bit as insistent. He cleaned his own face, now intriguingly crafted into a half mask of unsightly scars. Then he rinsed the cloth and brought it back to wipe Dice’s face, checking to be sure that all traces of their bloody deed had been hidden as he stuffed the shirt into a pocket.
“I shall miss your ever-present vision to remind me when I’m indelicately presented,” said Dice, standing again, “You must go your own way now. Listen to the voices, those cunts and see what knowledge they lead you to.”
Adam nodded, feeling a little lost already. “I’ll miss you too.”
Dice grinned, “Oh, you’ll see me, time to time. When I do call on you, you drop whatever shit you’re doing, come running and mind your fucking master,” he waved a hand imperiously, “Now go and do as I told you. You’ll know when I need you again.”
Adam smiled, saying, “Bye, mum.” which made Dice laugh uproariously.
**
Adam left the flat for the first time in over a year.
The living boy he had been when he’d first crossed the threshold was a mere ghost in the back of his mind. He breathed in the night air, habit rather than need, looking up at the beautiful moon reflecting a sun he hoped never to see again.
He threw the bloody shirt into a tramp’s fire on his way home, laughing at the itinerant’s reaction to his mutilated countenance. The need to feed was strong and growing stronger, but Dice’s will seemed stronger yet and he denied himself half a dozen opportunities to sate himself as he walked the streets that night.
It was near dawn when he reached his parents house and he used the key to the cellar door, hidden in a fake rock, to let himself in. He spent the day down there, his ‘sleep’ restless. When the late winter sun set, he walked up into the house to find his mother in the kitchen starting dinner.
“Hello, mother.”
He wasn’t sure how he would feel until she turned to look at him and he was relieved to find that his overwhelming desire was to sate his hunger. Dice was wise. Dice had sent him here, starving, that he might feed upon the hardest of meals with barely a qualm and feed freely forever after.
His mother dropped the dish she had been holding and gave a cry, “Adam? Oh my God, Adam!” She ran to embrace him, crying hard as she looked at his ruined face, practically screaming, “Adam! Adam, what happened to you?”
He stroked her hair, snaking his other arm around her waist, “Shh, mother. I’ve had a hard time – but everything’s alright now.”
She shook her head, her expression contorted as he stared at the empty eye socket, then she buried her face to his chest, “Oh my God … oh my God, you’re so cold! You’ve been gone so long! And that smell …”
“It’s alright,” he assured her again, brushing her hair away from her neck, smelling the sweet blood that ran just under the thin skin there. He moved his hand to cover her mouth and tightened his hold around her waist as he bit down.
She screamed and struggled as he always had in Dice’s agonising embrace. Then she seemed to stiffen in shock and as he drew her glorious blood into his mouth, swallow after swallow filling his stomach with wonderful warmth. He was deep into his drinking, letting his hand slip away from her mouth as he supported more of her weight, growing stronger as she faded.
His mother grew colder, her arms falling away from him to dangle at her sides. It was harder to draw the blood from her now and it was starting to lose its vibrancy. He moved her towards the kitchen table, licking at her neck before laying her down upon it. His hunger was largely sated now, but there was still a powerful urge for something more. A sense of incompleteness.
He bent over her face and kissed one unseeing, staring eye. Cupping his lips around the orb he sucked until it leapt free of its housing into his mouth and he bit down to sever the cord as Dice had done. He rolled the eye in his mouth a moment, feeling more complete as he swallowed it whole. He did the same thing with her other eye, licking the residual blood and goo from each socket before standing back to survey his work.
Dice’s voice came to him, from … somewhere, from nowhere.
“Interesting.”
Adam looked around, but he was still alone in the kitchen, aside from his mother’s lifeless body ‘looking’ up at the ceiling with two raw, red holes.
“Has anyone ever told you, you have your mother’s eyes?” asked Dice’s voice, dry and amused.
Adam began to laugh, sometimes loud and wild, sometimes just giggles as he set about moving his mother’s corpse to the basement for later disposal.
He was still laughing when his father returned home.
