Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. Brian Stableford
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