Sheena and Other Gothic Tales. Brian Stableford
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