Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. Brian Stableford
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.