Author's note: vampire stories are not exactly the thing I'm known for. It was written following an evening at my writer's workshop in Glasgow, at which a vampire story was discussed. I made a statement suggesting that despite its popularity, it was a genre that had long since played itself out, and I could never see myself having any reason to write one. And then I wrote this, two days later ... somewhat to my surprise.
I submitted it to a couple of fiction markets, then stopped when I had to start work on a new book. Rather than leaving it to languish on my hard disk, I put it up here. It can also be downloaded in rtf format; I don't have the means (or the time) to convert it to other formats, but if you choose to do so, I'd appreciate it hugely if you sent me a copy of the file so I can post it here.
I submitted it to a couple of fiction markets, then stopped when I had to start work on a new book. Rather than leaving it to languish on my hard disk, I put it up here. It can also be downloaded in rtf format; I don't have the means (or the time) to convert it to other formats, but if you choose to do so, I'd appreciate it hugely if you sent me a copy of the file so I can post it here.
The Ranch
The room in which I spend my existence is five metres long, four wide. The floor is thickly carpeted, and a television sits in one corner, tuned permanently to a sex channel. At the moment, however, it has been switched off, as per my latest client’s request. Opposite the only exit from the room is a bed: a mirror is mounted on the ceiling above, a second on an adjacent wall. The bed is styled after the kind of four-poster favoured by Southern dames in old black and white films set in the days of slavery. A cabinet stands nearby, in which can be found the many implements of my enforced trade, as well as a variety of costumes none of which, mercifully, I have yet been required to use. My clothing is simple: plain black slacks, low-heeled Italian shoes, and a black shirt open at the neck.
There are three cameras in the room - one mounted and visible in the corner above the wall mirror, another concealed within the ceiling light panels, while a third can be found lurking behind the ceiling mirror. Both mirrors are two-way.
The door is locked. There are no windows. This room is my cell, my purgatory.
I pace, feeling weak, dizzy with hunger. I catch sight of myself in the wall mirror: sallow cheeks, a light spattering of stubble, the cast of my face perhaps betraying a distant Italian ancestry. My name for the past few decades has been Carl Mencken. Before that, I remember little beyond a colourless mishmash of vague images and sensations that no longer have any meaning to me. I know only that that for seven months and nine days I have been a prisoner in this place.
A metallic rattle emerges from a speaker mounted just below the main, visible camera: Josie, clearing her wrinkled throat from somewhere at the other end of the Ranch. I can almost smell the unfiltered cigarette gripped between her polished fingernails, her hair a tight nightmare tangle of tired peroxide curls.
“Mencken, honey?” The voice brittle, old, tired. “Got your next client on the way.”
I can easily picture the roadhouses where Josie would have spent her formative years working behind a bar, the drive-ins where video store employees and truckers would have struggled to impregnate her in the back of their pick-ups. Now all that is left is a rancid, over-perfumed shell, a dozen carcinomas no doubt fruiting in the choked black soil of her lungs. In the vast boredom of my cell, I have constructed an entire life history for this woman.
“I want you to treat her real good, okay?” the voice continues. “She’s watched you through the mirror coupla times, now she wants to ride the Mencken train.” The voice fractures into a laugh that sounds like a series of seizures. I feel my knuckles whiten at my sides.
“You there, Mencken? Better say somethin’. Wouldn’t want to send in the boys with the tasers, now, would I?”
No, I wouldn’t want that. Not at all. “I hear you, Josie,” I reply, gazing in the direction of the microphone.
“Good boy. Comin’ through in just a minute or so. No special requests, just wants a good time. Bet you’re glad of that.”
I nod tightly, forcing a thin smile on my face. I imagine Josie’s life pouring from her, from the great red raw wound I would make of her throat.
A minute passes. I know what lies beyond the locked door: a corridor, its walls decorated with flocked red wallpaper, leading to other rooms occupied by creatures of whom I know little except that they are like me. At the far end of this corridor is the security room, occupied by beings of an entirely different nature, working in shifts around the clock: men wearing concealing black Kevlar, their faces hidden behind visors and helmets, feet shod with heavy boots that lace up to the knees, powerful and deadly weaponry within easy reach - deadly even to the likes of me. I fear them more than anything, and the things they might do to me if I gave them reason.
Because of this I am obedient.
A knock on the door: small knuckles against wood panelling. I step over, and gently turn the handle, finding the electronic lock has now been deactivated. My client is standing there, small, like me: a little over five and a half feet in height, although some ancient fragment of memory tells me I was once considered tall, even imposing.
Her hair is expensively streaked Texas blonde, and in my imagination her story opens up to me: a life lacking excitement or danger, with only the common rituals of graduation and marriage and perhaps motherhood to alleviate the dullness eating at the heart of her. In her eyes I read the desire for something more, something to satisfy the secret needs that lurk deep within her heart.
To learn of the Ranch’s existence, she would have had to become part of certain exclusive circles: perhaps, like so many, a boyfriend or a husband took her to a wife-swapping party or a club catering to certain erotic tastes. As time passed, and her little perversions and games took on a particular flavour, the Ranch might be mentioned: a word here, a word there. She would have expressed curiosity, and would have laughed in disbelief when the truth was finally revealed to her. Eventually, given time, she would have believed, or at least dared to hope.
And now she stands before me, several thousand dollars out of pocket. At least I don’t come cheap.
“My name is Carl,” I tell her, pulling the door wider. I smile gently, ever conscious of the watching cameras and the guards in the security room. “Would you like to come in?”
I watch doubt flit over her features; she’s thinking of turning back. Blonde, but not so pretty. Lovers would not have been a given in her formative years. She has, no doubt, developed a rich fantasy life to compensate.
Then she steps into the room and smiles nervously. She eyes the bed behind me. In one delicate hand I see that she grips a tiny, useless crucifix with which, Josie will have informed her, she will be able to control me. This is nonsense, of course, but to suggest anything else would bring days of torture upon me, followed by much worse weeks or even months without sustenance. I had once before made this mistake, when I had first been brought to the Ranch. Never again.
“Would you like something to drink?” I ask, waving one hand towards the tiny mobile bar that sits in one corner. Sometimes alcohol helps them, if they aren’t already drunk or high. “Don’t worry if you’re apprehensive, most are. You’ll be fine.”
Doubt and desire war across her face: I can see the lust is winning. “You’re not real,” she tells me.
“I am entirely real,” I assure her. “I can show you,” I add, lowering my voice.
“You’d better.” I can hear her heart hammering in her chest: her breathing is sharp and shallow. I know what to do. I take both her hands and gently draw her closer to me. I smile and draw a hand through her hair; she gasps in response. I am filled only with loathing.
I study her clothes. She wears expensive black jeans, and her demeanour and way of speaking would make it clear to all who encountered her that she comes from money. She would have to, to afford the Ranch’s prices. I could tell you in that instant of the books that occupy her bookshelves, of the movies she watches late at night, dreaming of her vampire lover. I could tell you how little she truly lives in the here and now.
Her tension doesn’t fade, but she’s no longer as frightened: instead, she’s allowing herself to believe. She glances towards the main camera, the only one they would have told her about. She’s enjoying the frisson of danger gained from being alone, in a locked room, with a killer.
“Show me,” she says.
I lean down and kiss her. The harsh light of the ceiling panels leaches the colour from her skin. I gaze past her, at my own, entirely visible reflection, with pale blank eyes. Remembering.
*
I do not know how I came to be, or where I am from. Sometimes I dream of places that might be Rome, or might be Paris, or Berlin, or London: that might be a few years or half a millennia in the past. I have no way of telling, for I never kept records. To do so would have been to provide a surfeit of willing executioners the means to find me. Unfortunately, my memories fade quickly.
There is no romance or pleasure in my life: I am driven only to survive. I can last for weeks, even months, without sustenance, but for all that time I carry a raging hunger worse than any of my victims could possibly imagine, because they at least can look forward to the peace of death. Perhaps I also have that option, but having always survived, I cannot know.
Here in the Ranch, they bring dead down-and-outs washed up in canals or business rivals with bullet holes neatly drilled in their foreheads for us to feed upon. It is not enough, never enough.
When the hunger has hold of you, it slams you to the ground, makes you scream night after night after night, reducing your thoughts and your existence to an unquenchable, devouring misery. In order to survive, you learn to stalk your victims over days, then weeks and even months: and when you know the time is right, when you know there are no witnesses, you strike. Often your victim is a woman, simply because it is easier to disguise your assault as a sexual one: and if those investigating notice a remarkable lack of blood, well, hopefully you are long gone by then.
But the time after feeding is the weakest: then you are so filled with all the joy of creation that you cannot move, cannot walk, instead merely lie wriggling on the ground like a piss-drenched drunkard. Or else you stumble incoherently, vomiting red because you have gorged yourself too much. And when that wonderful, heaven-blessed rush fades, you are left only with the hollowness of your existence, and the desperate need to escape.
Before the Ranch, I believe I came across those like me only twice. This I do remember: I killed them both, immediately. Their bodies rotted like any other.
My last memory before the Ranch is of San Francisco. I had arrived there by Greyhound. My first – and last - victim there had been a sailor, living in a houseboat in San Francisco Bay. I had answered his lonely-hearts advert. We had enjoyed a few drinks in a bar near the sea, while I sat consumed with such terrible agonising hunger I wanted to shriek until my lungs were raw.
We retired to his home and I tore his neck open with a knife taken from the galley. I wept and moaned and shuddered with orgasms of pleasure as his blood gushed against my tongue.
That was when they caught me, as I lay supine in the night, the cabin walls around me drenched with scarlet. I heard their boots approaching across the pontoon, and knew I was done. I expected to die. Instead, they sprayed a gas in my face that made my skin boil and lesion.
When they brought me to the Ranch a few days later, I learned my first lessons quickly. Tasers, whips, sprays and rubber bullets made sure of that.
*
“Show me,” she repeats. I stare at her, waiting for her to elaborate.
“Your …” she points hesitantly at my face.
I smile obligingly, trying not to look too menacing. I open my lips slightly, and felt the emerging canines press against my upper lips as they push down. She shudders and pales at the sight, and for a moment I think she might run. I don’t care one way or the other: I have performed as required, and the money is not refundable. But she holds her ground.
Now the important part. I again lower my head towards her, watching her lips open in unconscious response. She stiffens again, and I stop for a moment, before continuing. She’s been briefed on the rules, which had been long ago drilled into me. She can stop me at any time: it only requires a word.
She remains silent. I touch my lips, very gently, to her neck. She jerks away at first, and then holds her place. She whimpers with fright and desire. I lick her neck, very softly, just allowing the tip of one sharpened canine to barely contact the taut pink flesh. Her tiny fingers grip my upper arms, still holding onto the ridiculous crucifix.
And then I pull back, aware as always of the cameras, the guards.
“There’s no hurry,” I tell her, conscious that every word is part of the game. I gaze into her eyes, ignoring the dull pain that has been building in my bones and my flesh for days now, soon to become a soul-crushing festival of agony. I think of Josie, and of how she would laugh if she could see into my thoughts.
“My name’s Susie,” she tells me, as I draw her slowly over towards the bed.
“Susie,” I repeat, as if savouring the name.
“You know what I want, right?” Her voice is lowered, hesitant. I nod. The instructions, run off on a desktop printer, had been slipped under the door a half hour before Susie’s arrival. I step backwards towards the bed, drawing her along with my hands, maintaining the illusion that I am the one in charge.
*
I feel her fingers draw sharply across my chest as I lie back. How many times had she stood on the other side of the two-way mirror with the wealthy select audiences who pay so much for their seats, letting her fantasy grow of when her own time in this room would come?
My arms are outstretched, as if about to embrace her. She is, in fact, safe from my all-vanquishing hunger: I could no sooner allow myself to cause her harm than she could imagine the sordid reality of my existence. I am her whore, her fuck-puppet. I am less than nothing.
I remove my shirt at the prearranged time, as specified in the instructions detailing the intricate course of Suzie’s fantasy. I have already unbuttoned my trousers, and they have been pushed down to my hips. I lie, exposed, upon the bed. She kneels half-naked upon my prostrate form and grasps my cock with clumsy hands, her breath ragged.
I become hard, not out of desire, but out of fear of what might happen to me if I do not respond as expected.
*
Sunlight does not greatly affect us. Pale skin is more a symptom of lurking in hiding places far from the light of the sun. We are visible in mirrors. Garlic, for some reason unknown to me, burns us greatly. Stakes kill us, but so do bullets and knives, though we can survive far greater physical trauma than the likes of Suzie or Josie.
Once, they set an example.
A few short months before, I had been manacled, chained and marched under guard into an atrium deep within the sprawling vastness of the Ranch. The atrium was open to the skies, and for the first time in many long weeks I saw real sunlight and tasted fresh air.
There were a dozen others already there, similarly chained and manacled and under guard, whom I instantly knew to be the same as myself. I ignored them, knowing I could not kill them at that time. I saw a man – his body wasted beyond belief – chained to a tall steel pole driven into a block of concrete in the centre of the atrium. I knew immediately he was also of my own kind. Certainly, no ordinary human could have remained alive with his body in so desiccated a state.
Wil was the owner of the Ranch, a tall, rangy Texan who always carried a hunting knife on his hip. I had heard whispered stories from a few of my clients that he owned and ran most of the whorehouses in this part of the country as well as operating websites and organising paid parties for the rich and sexually jaded. He also carried a bullwhip on this particular day, and strutted around us, eyeing us one by one.
“I want you to know what happens when you try to hurt one of my clients,” Wil bellowed, his voice strident and self-assured, his potbelly pushing at his shirt buttons. “I want you to know I can be real fucking mean when my orders don’t get obeyed. I want you to see what happens.”
I learned later that the individual chained to the steel post – I never found out his name, not that I would have cared – had been carefully starved for the better part of six months following some unspecified transgression. I can only imagine he tried to attack one of his clients while in the despair of hunger. He was, quite literally, a walking skeleton. What happened next was appalling beyond measure, and I cannot deny I learned my lesson well.
They sprayed him with hoses, twice: the first time with a mixture of garlic, water and sand at high pressure, which simultaneously burned his skin with the effect of the garlic and near flayed him alive with the sand. He was, quite literally, scoured half to death.
But it didn’t end there. Next, they sprayed him with corrosive acids. I watched his skeleton melt: and towards the end, even then, I knew there was something still alive in that melting ruin. What was left, they shovelled into a hole in the ground and covered over.
Always I dreamed of freedom: yet I could not countenance the thought of what happened in that courtyard happening to me.
And so I obeyed every client’s whim to the letter.
*
I lie back and let her take me. She manoeuvres me between her legs, while I try to appear as if I am enjoying myself. She leans down and whispers to me, “Don’t worry, nobody’s watching.”
I glance towards the two-way mirror, an involuntary motion. I open my mouth, then close it again before I can tell her what an idiotic proposition this is.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” she says, cupping my jaw with one hand and turning my head back towards her. “I paid extra so we’d be left alone. Ain’t nobody on the other side of that glass. Now, I want you to kiss me.”
Not so shy, after all. My lips part, and she leans down. I know what she wants: I push my lips back until my extended canines are fully visible.
She leans down, her hips beginning to move rhythmically now I’m inside her. I feel sure she’ll come quite soon. Perhaps I once took pleasure from this act, but instead of pleasure I only ever feel a kind of dull tingle between my thighs.
One thing I have learned in my time here. Male vampires, myself included, all have unusually small genitals. Perhaps there is a reason for this. If we truly evolved from some common human ancestor, as some apparently speculate, perhaps we have some other means of reproduction and the penis has become an evolutionary dead-end for our kind. Or perhaps we truly rise from the grave, but our lack of sexual interest causes the organ to wither over time. For all I know, we reproduce by splitting down the middle every thousand years. I have no way of knowing or remembering, and care less.
Her lips touch my cheek, and I can hear the frantic rush of her every breath. “I want you to bite me,” she says.
I feel my penis begin to shrivel rapidly.
“Bite me,” she repeats, laying soft kisses across my chin and other cheek. This was not in the instructions.
“It’s against the rules,” I croak. “They would …”
I can taste her life, she’s so close: she’s a bag of blood, and the hunger is a whirling maelstrom in my guts.
She twists suddenly to one side, and slaps me, hard, and then again. Did the little bitch actually want me to kill her?
“I can do worse to you,” she hisses, her irises wide and black. I wonder what she’s sniffed or swallowed for courage in a washroom before walking down the corridor to me. She shows me a small perfume bottle, carefully palmed so it is visible neither to the main camera nor to the one-way mirror on the wall. I can only speculate as to how she smuggled it into my cell, since all are searched before coming to me.
She slides the bottle between our bodies, moving it down towards my crotch. I feel a sudden cool moist pressure against the inside of my thigh: the pain comes a moment later and my back arches violently in response. I try to scream, but she’s clamped her other hand firmly over my mouth. I feel the crucifix press hard against my gums and cheek.
Garlic spray. My eyes fill with tears, and a keening sound escapes between her fingers. I’m lost in animal panic. What does she intend?
“Bite me,” she repeats again, her voice harsh. “Make me like you.”
No, I want to scream. Make her like me? Impossible. I don’t even know what makes me like me. My panicked eyes dart again towards the watching camera: but now I’m seeking aid rather than the opportunity of escape.
“Listen to me,” I mumble through her fingers. She’s stronger than she looks.
“One wrong word, and I’ll spray you again,” she loudly whispers, madness in her eyes. I can picture my skin bubbling under the effect of the spray, and hold back the desire to release the agony in a shriek. Whatever happens to Suzie, it won’t be half as bad as what will happen to me.
She releases her hold slightly.
It’s hard to speak through the pain, but my existence depends on it. “I can’t make you like me,” I tell her, forcing the words out.
She presses the bulb of the spray against my crotch once more and I convulse. “You’re a vampire! You can turn me. You’re lying! Make me like you!”
“You would die,” I beg. “And then they would kill me.”
“I don’t believe you. Do it.”
I shake my head. “I have never made anyone a vampire. I don’t know if they can be made.”
She reaches down and grabs me by the hair. “I am telling you to turn me,” she hisses in a half-shriek; I can hear the growing desperation in her voice.
She slaps me several times again. The blows sting. And then I laugh. It’s so ridiculous: after so long, trapped in a room like some pathetic Hollywood wet dream of a vampire’s boudoir, with some idiot Texas housewife so addled by her deranged fantasies she thinks I can turn her into something she could only ever dream of in her worst nightmares.
She becomes furious at my laughter, but I can’t stop. She slaps me again, but I only laugh harder.
“They’re going to kill you, you stupid bastard!” she screams at me. “So you might as well do it anyway!” She sobs then, muttered curses spilling out of her mouth. The desire for death and oblivion is written in her eyes. She throws herself over me, the smooth curve of her neck next to my face, and begs me yet again.
“What do you mean, they’re going to kill me?” I ask, my own blood thundering in my ears.
“That’s what I heard. There’s too many people heard about this place, so they’re gonna shut it down real soon. Won’t want you round in case anyone figures out what’s going on here.” Her expression becomes vicious, and I see her plan unravelling: she came here intending to force me to ‘turn’ her into a vampire so she can no doubt lurk on moonlit rooftops, perhaps wearing the impractical black velvet dresses I can easily picture hanging in her wardrobe.
“You’re lying,” I stutter.
She shakes her head rapidly. “So turn me now, and we can escape together.”
By now I’m completely incredulous. But for some reason, I believe her: I’ve learned to read people over all those long, long years, to know when they are or aren’t lying. And she’s telling the truth, as far as she knows it. The Ranch will close: and I will die. Suddenly any other possibility seems absurd. How long, after all, could an entity like the Ranch continue to exist, before rumour and hearsay spread too far? Before it came under investigation? And when the time came, could any of its unwilling whores truly expect to survive?
“I’ll do it,” I tell her. Terror and the desire to believe again war with each other across her face. I lift myself carefully, trying to gauge how many seconds I have left. Is Josie listening in to our conversation? Of course she is, sitting there no doubt in some little cupboard surrounded by screens and microphones and speakers. How many seconds do I have before the guards come and drag this idiotic child away, and punish me? Very few.
Necessity can make anyone a great actor. I look up at her, putting on the brave, noble face so many of them seem to like, and beckon to her.
She’s trembling. I still her, and bring my incisors close to her neck. Perhaps, if I do nothing, they will let me live regardless. Perhaps I am wrong, and she is indeed lying about the future of the Ranch. But if she’s telling the truth, I can defy their authority with Suzie’s death.
I touch incisors to flesh, and pause, indecisive.
In the distance, I hear shouts, and boots slamming against soft carpet, coming closer.
END
Story Copyright (C) 2008, Gary Gibson.