a plague of angels Speak No Evil
by a.a.johnston
© 8/2000
"But the final destruction of evil? One can't expect that. That's a lunatic dream by which evil is not weakened but –quite the contrary –is strengthened and its effect accelerated., because one overlooks its real nature and distorts reality into an illusion rounded on one's own misleading wishes...The dream of destroying evil is only a reflection of the sense of despair which comes from the loss of faith."--Franz Kafka
"What do you see?"Have you ever heard a whisper so soft it was like no sound at all? So quiet that you aren't sure that anyone actually said anything, that it wasn't just the words your own mind spoken inside the silence of your own head?
Did you wonder if you were losing your mind?
"What do you see?"
This time the words were accompanied by a touch, the lightest trailing of fingers across my shoulder from neck to joint. Almost as soft as that whisper. But it was a touch and the whisper wasn't only in my head. Which still didn't prove I wasn't losing my mind.
"Night." My voice was no whisper, but it didn't sound exactly like mine either, if I even knew what my own voice sounded like any longer. I hadn't been doing much talking lately. Not for awhile. "City lights...people on the street." I went on because he wanted more, and now my voice sounded hoarse, raw; cold even. As cold as the touch on my skin – as cold as my own skin.
"People?" There was scold there, although he didn't raise his voice.
"Food."
"Yes."
Maybe he won something with that. Maybe he only thought he did. I sure as hell didn't know except that there were times when I thought, when I saw...food, not people. They blur after all, after awhile. If you are hungry enough.
Job kept me very hungry at first. I don't know if it were training, or punishment or as he said, because it was him I wanted, needed, had to feed from. It's blurry in the beginning -- I remember being sick the first time I fed from someone other than him. I might have been sick just knowing that whoever it was, the meal he'd brought, would be dead soon. I'd never killed anyone, had never helped killed anyone, never even wanted to except in those brief flashes of anger that come and are gone again the minute your mind catches up with your feelings. Maybe I was sick because I should have been able to stop myself – stop him.
I don't believe that any longer. That I could stop him or myself. Not when...not when I //need// it so badly, want it so much. All the books, the myths, the lovely little fictions out there – they don't tell you about that. They describe it in terms of need and desire and hunger and it is all of those. But it's more than that. It takes over all you are. It's a poison in your blood – or it's the poison that is your blood and it will kill you – make you scream in agony...until you can find something to ease the pain. You get this...poison in your blood when you are made. Or maybe it's more like a transfusion from a wrong blood type and it burns and scalds and eats at you like acid – your body turns on it, tries to destroy it, get rid of it, kill it, this thing that isn't blood any longer. But the only thing that can ease it, can take away the contamination of it all, is more. Your maker's blood at first, then others, slowly. Maybe because it's fresh, new, it confuses all the other little biologic mechanisms in your body for awhile.
Then it's not poison any more – it's a drug. Crack, cocaine, heroin, speed, opium, dust, uppers, downers, pot, poppers, crystal meth, fine whiskey – all of that, all at once, rushing through you, into your brain, your body, into every cell. A speedball dose of anything and everything you've ever heard of and some you haven't and even if you can't fly for real, you sure can //fly//. You want more of everything, all of it, all at once – you want a six course meal you know you'll puke out, gallons of rocky road ice cream, wine, fast cars, fast music, sex – oh yes...that too. Any way you can get it, take it. Fuck me, suck me, take my cock up your ass, in your mouth, in your hands, fill me, thrill me, hold me down and drill me.
Job really likes that last part. And when I feed from him, a drop or a mouthful, I want what he wants.
Right now he wants me to know that those people out there, that food, walking around on two legs, walking, talking, holding hands, laughing, living, fighting, worrying and carrying on about nothing – he wants me to know, to believe, to absolutely see them as food and nothing else. Cattle on the hoof, gourmet shop on wheels, nothing to do with us or what we are, what we need, any more than a piece of gum.
Ever wonder what the piece of gum wants? Does it want to be unwrapped, chewed up, broken down, sucked free of all it's sweetness until it's nothing but hard and tasteless and useless and spit out?
If you ever meet Job – meet any of us – think like a piece of gum, man, cause that's all you are to him, to me.
I never chewed gum until I met Job. Never craved it. Looked at it and looked away.
"What would you like tonight? Chinese? Thai? A little Creole, African, maybe some good old white bread?" he's asking me, moving his finger tips along my back, my spine. I can feel that little sharp claw, like a cat's claw only straighter and stronger, playing along my spine. He can rip me wide open with that thing. "Care to go out or eat in?" he asks me. His voice is more normal, not that whisper any longer. It's a voice that could move you to tears, make you say yes no matter what he asks.
It doesn't matter what I say. He's already fed. Hunted and fed, left the body to be found or wandering the streets badly in need of a transfusion. You never know with Job, although it's never a good idea to leave a trail of missing people or dead bodies laying around. Shitting in your own living room, as it were.
I can't even remember what it feels like to take a shit. Or feel the sun, although he says I will. That's a lie too – false words, false tales – that we can't go out in the sun. They're out there in the sunshine. We are. It takes some work, some training and a really loaded system, but it's doable. Something about UV or maybe something else – too much vitamin D, maybe. Or heat: melts that anti-freeze that locks us into these bodies that change but don't get older. Or that get older, but don't change. I don't know which, but it's something.
Shitting. The sun. Food that I can eat to fill my body instead of to fill a pretense. Liquids are easier. Much. We don't process solids...eat it and it tastes awful, makes you want to gag and later you will. Barf it all back up with blood too old to be any use to you any longer. Job says you get used to that but I haven't yet. After six months of it you'd think...but you don't. I haven't. Maybe I'm as slow as Job says.
Kind of takes all the glamour right out of being a vampire, doesn't it? Some can kill a dozen people without breaking a sweat and get drunk enough on their blood to make a riot look like naptime at KinderCare. But watch 'em eat a little bit of something and they will vomit until they can't stand up straight. Forget the wooden stakes – shove a slice of Wonderbread down their throats and run like hell.
"I had Korean a little earlier."
Well, Job's not subtle and he's not patient and he's fed so he's feeling a little high and I haven't so I'm feeling a little low and achy and hungry and....I need it. Need it bad enough to believe whatever he wants. They're food, those things down there, walking around. But once I liked chicken or a little beef now and then but it didn't mean I wanted to butcher it myself. And if I resist, say no – he'll let me. Let me go hungry and smile that smile of his and kiss me in a way that would be sweet if he were anyone, any //thing//, other than what he is. Because he knows and I know it too...that it's damn hard to commit suicide when you are a vampire. Cause there's a point where the hunger is all there is and no matter what you thought, or where your morals were, or how your ethics stack up – it doesn't matter. When the hunger is there, that's all there is. When the poison starts to eat at you from the inside, all you know is that you want it to stop. It's all you are.
"Korean sounds good."
Now it's my voice that isn't making much noise and I can't see the outside or the night or the food for the wrist in front of my face. Can't see the reflection of my face in the window to see my lips curl back and nearly disappear, to see the fangs that used be teeth that were good for tearing open a bag of Fritos, or opening a plastic bottle of Coke while I juggled my car keys in the other hand to get the door open and walk in to my apartment and go on with the rest of my life. Everything in the world that I am or want or need, is right here with this pale skinned arm, with the scent of that spicy, wonderfully fresh, Korean blood that's pulsing under Job's skin rising up like a seaside sewer in the middle of summer.
My hands look the same, paler but still there, the fingers kind of long and slender, supple from all those piano lessons as a kid, and strong – stronger than they used to be and they hold that wrist just so. Not the neck...that's special. He'll get mine but I get this and it's okay, cause I can smell it now and I don't even have to worry or care about the fact that he's going to feed me and fuck me at the same time and then take back a little of his own because that's the way Job does it. You don't get nothing all the way.
Rush, baby, rush, the taste is enough to choke me but I don't. First taste: sliding across my lips, my tongue and palate, down my throat to do whatever it does – I may as well mainline the blood for the way it takes me. Warm still, but not hot – I'd have to go for the takeout myself for that but it's warm, thick, salt/sweet/aluminum/ice/steel/acid sliding down my throat like I've swallowed a sword because it cuts deep and it hurts and I can't get enough of it.
Job is good. He's smooth, he doesn't hardly even tug his arm at all as he moves, me, moves us, toward the bed. Not for comfort but because it's easier, even with his strength, to fuck me when I'm laying down rather than standing up.
I can feel my cells expanding, my brain is on overdrive, starved for whatever it is: Oxygen, adrenaline, endorphins, only //more// of whatever it is that makes me think of life instead of this death I've taken on instead of breathing. Then it's sword number two, up my ass, cutting me a different way, diving in hard and sharp and not worried about how I feel about it at all, because he doesn't. But that's what it feels like inside me: The sharp, gag me, fill me, feed me slide of his blood down my throat – like the blood itself has hardened and widened to the size of a mutant zucchini, rough on the edges and taking up my whole insides from mouth to throat to belly and Job...thick and hard and revved up from the same blood, filling up my ass, like liquid fire and ice daggers, opening me up and making a place for himself that no one short of an elephant on Viagra could ever fill. The two points meeting in my middle somewhere until I feel spiked like a pig at a luau and that spike is red hot and lethal.
He decides I've had enough but he hasn't and I know better than to fight him for what I want, what I need. That pig at a luau thing, that metaphor, see, he'll make it real just to let me know. And it's enough, to take the edge off, to leave me wanting...that other thing...not necessarily with Job but then he's here, he's //there// already and that's what 's left.
I'm so buzzing...so full of it, feeling it, all of it from the threads on the sheets and the dust mites buried in the cloth to the calluses on his hands and the dead skin there where he holds me, to the skin on his thighs which have no hair, any more than my ass does, and it's cold skin to cold skin and blood to blood shoving inside me and twisting and grinding my cock into the threads and the dust and the microscopic bits of dirt that feel like sandpaper even though I just washed these sheets yesterday and will again when he's done.
Then he bites me, my neck, cause he has to get his back. His hands are so tangled in my hair he could snatch me bald or break my neck and it hurts. I can't even tell you how much, too much to scream, to do anything but wait it out...wait...wait...//there//.
He knows me too well and my scream is blocked by his fist in my mouth, enough to crack my jaw, but it will heal. Fire...ice...dying and living all in one instant because for one instant we are...just one – same blood, same body, same moment in time – like it would be to meet God.
But God would never let me fall so far.
It's just rutting then and the pleasure is all surface. I couldn't tell you if it felt good, cause nothing does, really, except the blood. But like sugar and chocolate for a pothead, it's something. Job's done: sprayed me inside and out with some kind of weird altered mixture of semen and blood and piss and whatever else passes for come among the undead. It doesn't eat through cotton but it sure as hell stains it.
He rolls away, but that little claw is back, tracing patterns on my ass, around my anus, drawing little pictures in the blood and semen. I can look at him now.
Don't ever be taken in by a pretty face. They'll kill you every time.
He is pretty – sinfully handsome: all sharp planes and well defined cheekbones, eyes like overcast winter skies but sharper, glittery like ice and that's when he's in a good mood. He's got blond hair Lady Clairol would kill to be able to bottle, skin hundred dollar an ounce face cream couldn't give you and a body that would put Bowflex into a church like Michaelangelo if it could claim to have sculpted.
I thought I had gone to heaven when I met him. I like the type and he was about as much of the type I like as I'd ever seen. Makes me wonder how the ugly vampires do it. Maybe they don't. Job likes to play. I wanted to be played with and he did before I ever knew. Never noticed. Not the cold skin, not the lack of heartbeat. It wasn't just lust in my heart, but lust in every pore, every cell. Maybe other vampires use persuasions or glamours or influences or hypnosis or whatever – he didn't need to. He might have but...Eyes wide shut ring a bell?
And now I can look at him and he's still perfect and I want him with every one of those lustful pores and I hate him so much I'm surprised the words don't rise up on my skin like stigmata.
He knows it too and he loves that I hate him and won't, can't do anything about it. Vampire evolution. Young vampires hate their makers. Need their makers. Depend on them, obey them like zombies and can't, can't kill them. He says. A maker can cut them loose on their own if he wants, she wants...but that blood thing? That poison, that drug. It's forever. And that's a long time when you can't die and are hard to kill.
So why keep me? Why make another...why any of this?
Because it is what it is. Because Job, at least, likes his comforts, likes his power, likes being top dog, likes his kits to watch his back when he's poaching on somebody else's territory.
I will kill for him. The others will too, if he asks it. We'd kill each other if he didn't stop us – territorial too, vampires are. He won't answer that question, or many others. What I don't know can't be used against him.
He's moved his hand, up my spine again. Anyone seeing us might think, how sweet – touches between lovers. But we aren't that. I'm his whore, his housekeeper, here at least. His toy, his weapon, his whipping boy – his anything. Slave fits, but there was never any slavery like this before. My thoughts aren't my own. My desires aren't mine either. I don't even have a name anymore. He told me to forget it and I did. Just like that. I can remember my life before, my family, my friends, even conversations but it's like someone took a page and whited out my name in all the spaces it appeared. He calls me a lot of things but until he says, "There, that's your name," I have to live without one.
Doesn't sound like much of a problem, does it? You ever think how often you think of yourself, who you are, what you are in terms of your name? How it sums up all of who you are to people who know you. You say "Alice" and if you know an Alice or two, it's her or them you think of. You say, "Job" and the name has meaning. Maybe not the same for me as for you but it has meaning, or not. But it's a //name//.
Finally, he lifts his hand and gets up. "You should clean up this," he gestures vaguely, the bed, the linens. "I'm going out for a bit. Stay here."
This part I don't understand. He grabs my hair and pulls my head back and kisses me. Hard. Deep. Taking his time. Then he leaves to bathe, dress, whatever he needs to do to go out among the cattle and the gum. I don't even hear him leave.
He may go feed one of the others or just visit or just...maybe hunt down another to add to his collection. Maybe he was Catholic once and big families are important to him. Maybe he'll rob a bank. Something. He has to have other places besides this one. The others don't live here.
I do what he told me to do: I get the sheets, the clothes he's left, wash them, wipe off the plastic that covers the mattress because he's sure as hell not replacing that every time he fucks me. I bathe and get dressed because it's something to do but there isn't much else. Not now. Not //yet//, he keeps promising.
Maybe when I've earned my name, any name, back. The TV is on in the other room. The washer is chugging. There are books to read and music.
There's nothing.
I stare out the window again, refusing to see my own face looking down, watching. Waiting.
Maybe he'll bring me some gum back.
~~end~~