A Vampire's Redemption - Castrato

PROLOGUE Noel Gordon was a hulking brute of a man, not pretty in any way, not handsome of face or features, but built like a brick shithouse and covered in fur. As he strode the corridors of Club Priapus in a bleached white towel that barely made it around his waist, most of the patrons ducked out of his way. A few stood taller, met his eyes, and glanced down and a few even reached out to brush his hairy back, wondering at the softness of the curls. He growled in appreciation and watched the younger men smile and giggle. His wife would tell you that it was all an act and to be honest, it was kind of fun. Playing up the hyper-masculinity, he thought. And on one level, he added to his internal commentary, I guess it factors out the men from the boys. But on another level, he wished he was more…normal looking. Luckily, the size of his body also played out in the rest of the stereotypes: fourteen inch feet and huge hands that dwarfed most of the men he came into contact with during his day to day routine. He lived on Vashon Island, just a ferry ride away, but his job kept him busy enough to have an apartment on Queen Anne; best views in the city and the perfect opportunity to exorcise some of his inner demons.

His wife was at home tonight with the kids and here he was in Seattle, trolling for dick. He laughed. He had been fortunate in finding a woman who understood his needs and didn’t begrudge him his desires for male companionship. She’d never really liked sucking dick anyway, and as long as he kept her and the kids secure in their four-bedroom “cottage” along the water and didn’t mind her own dalliances with the local swingers’ club, who was she to judge? Noel took a look at the clock and pondered returning to the Maze. His uncut schlong was still pulsing from the attention he had been receiving in the inner sanctum. He wasn’t usually one to be comfortable on display; he got enough looks and judgment due to his hirsute beefiness and height. Top that off with his auburn red but rapidly graying buzz cut, and he didn’t usually fly under the radar, but tonight, something had possessed him to whip out his full twelve inches and let some paper thin Euro trash go at it. He never got to climax, though. Since he had been getting older – he was fifty-two this year – it took a lot longer to climax it was another reason why his wife gave him carte blanche on blowjobs. “No women.” His wife, Joy had said. “And no kissing men.” She’d laid down the law when they finally had the “discussion” as she called it.

“And afterwards, I want you bathing in bleach, can’t have you picking up some god-awful virus and bringing it home with you.” She’d drilled that into him. “And…” She’d drawn out that “and” with a long pause. “I don’t want to know about it. If I ever do want to know about it, I’ll ask. But I won’t. And if I do, it will probably be because you’re neglecting your duties on the home front. And when I say, ‘home front’,” she added, “I mean, I want you available to me at least once a week. You got that?” And he did. He got that. And it had worked quite well, so far. He looked around at the clientele and decided that he’d had enough for the evening. It occurred to him he still needed to catch a late dinner at Hamburger Mary’s before heading back to the apartment, as his stomach growled. He quickly hit the showers, dressed and headed up to the desk to get his valuables out of the lockers. “Locker number 213?” The twink at the desk smiled at him as he took his key and brought out the lock box. The kid looked over his shoulder and nodded to someone in the background. Noel didn’t turn around. He was done for the evening, and he “never” brought a trick home. Didn’t want to encourage any poor schmuck to believe that it was more than it was. “Well.

It looks like you have a message.” The kid winked and handed him the small contact card that Club Priapus provided as a courtesy to its patrons who wanted to “connect” outside of the Club. A couple of feet away, a guy he would classify as Euro trash watched and waited, unnoticed. Noel looked at the card and shrugged. He was tempted to toss it out. But something in the back of his head nagged him. Go on. Take a chance. What’s it gonna hurt? You still haven’t gotten off tonight. The voice enticed him. Call the number. You know you want to. Noel took the business card and threw it in his camo-duffle with the rest of his gym clothes, then exited into the drizzly night sky. He had Hamburger Mary’s on speed dial and was calling in the order as he slid into his Dodge Ram. He was a big man, and needed a big ride, he’d told himself when he bought the gas guzzler. It was so politically incorrect. But so was he, he thought. He looked at the card again, and an unnerving push spiked through his brain. Call the Number. He did.

*** Noel didn’t remember exactly what the smooth voice on the end of the line said to him, but he knew that there was a promise of the “best blow job in your life” on the table and before he knew it, he’d pulled up to a construction site over in Rainier and was wandering his way by moonlight over uneven ground to one of those portable temporary trailer offices that the engineering team often used. A part of him was questioning his sanity, but he wasn’t thinking with his regular brain at the moment. He just knew his balls were full and aching for release. A light flickered on in the trailer and he headed towards the fluorescent pool that spilled out of the open doorway. When he entered the two-room structure, there was no one inside the first room, but he heard a noise coming from the second. A dim light, like that of a desk lamp, shone from this doorway and he walked towards it. “I’ll be with you in a moment.” The slightly accented voice called to him, and he walked to the doorway, but the door closed in his face. What the fuck? He thought. But below him, at just the right groin height, an aperture slid open with a click, like the sound of a camera lens. He looked down and a thin well manicured finger slid through, caressing the bottom of the hole.

He could just see the lips of the man as he waited for Gordon’s next move. Something inside Gordon said that this was a really bad idea. A really bad idea. But as happens to most men, the little head often triumphs over the big, for he was so horny and wanted the release so badly. It had been two weeks since he’d any sex at all, as his wife had been out of town at her folks with the kids and when she got home, he had been headed out the door on sales calls. Any sense that he had flew out the window and he released his straining cock from the jeans he was wearing. The lips parted with a hiss, and Noel sighed as his throbbing member entered the warm orifice of the supplicant before him. There was a rush of endorphins to the brain as the man worked on his rod, and the blood rushed out of one head and into the other. Noel began humping the wall as the man’s mouth sent spasms of pleasure up and down his spine and though there was a momentary spasm of pain at one point, “a little too much teeth,” he grunted, he knew that after this blow job, everything else was going to feel like second rate. Like your very first “good” blow job, you know, the one that you will always remember. Noel Gordon knew that nothing in his life would every come close.

And nothing ever did.

The morning construction crew found the clothed body of Noel Gordon, sitting in an office chair, and dangling twenty stories up off an extended girder beam, looking like death warmed over, but with a very gratified look on his face. The police didn’t find out that his genitals were severed, nor of the absence of bodily fluids, primarily blood, until he was laid out on the autopsy table with the ME. The Medical Examiner took one look at him, made a call to the powers that be, and waited for the cavalry. MINE is the way of Cain. Expelled from the garden for the sins of my Sire, my - Maker’s Maker, if you will; it has been my lot to wander, century upon century, estranged and accursed by the hand of God. As my father, and his father before him, I bear the mark. None raises his hand to harm me, nor raises his eyes to see me, either. I am wraithe. As chaos WAS at earth’s beginning – I AM. It was only a matter of time before my siblings located that which we had been seeking. Paradise Lost. You see, after the fall of Adam and the branding of Cain (Cursed be his name!), Eden was shut up by the Almighty, and a pair of Ophanim were placed at the gates, wielding tongues of fire. She was then clothed in darkness, hidden from sight - past human eyes and comprehension…until now.

In the writings of one Paul, disciple and apostle to Yesu Cristo, upon the fall of man and the abolition of Cain, he states, ‘For by one man, sin entered into the world, and death by sin. And so death passed upon all men, for all have sinned.’ It is high time we undid that little mistake. Translated from the writings of Seth. CHAPTER ONE: Scene One: Nathan Seattle, WA The evening sky was fraught with clouds and a towering canopy of grey fog hovered over Puget Sound. Thunder chased lightning across the bowl and the reflected lights of the city cast an ambient glow across downtown Seattle. The air, thick with moisture, slicked faces and facades with a lazy shimmer, like the dapple of twinkling stars. From the heavens came a majestic call and response as sheet lightning blanketed the sky, and the thunder rolled. The sky began to fall. The vampire knelt on the cold, sloping, and unforgiving metal. Resting his chin on his forearm like some 20th-century gargoyle or modern day Rodin, he looked out over Lake Union from his needle’s perch and watched the evening traffic far below him snarl its way from Pike’s Place Market all the way out to the Ballard Lochs. The atmosphere around him hissed and sizzled as rain evaporated around him, leaving behind wisps of steam and faint traces of musk and sulfur.

The expenditure of energy on a personal shield was so minimal to maintain that it cost him but a thought. But now…now, he needed to feel. He needed to feel the chill of ice at the back of his neck, the slashing sleet, and the pouring rain. He needed to feel the shiver of Hoare-frost upon his skin, and the cold winds that raked him as they went tumbling past. He needed the icy touch of sharp metal against his mulatto skin, and he needed the blood-letting that reminded him that though he was technically, undead…Tonight. No, now…now, he needed to feel…alive. His almond eyes narrowed as he did a precursory sweep with his senses. It was dinner hour. Most of the early commuters had already made it out of the city and were settled in at home for the night. How simple their lives are. Yet here I stand, envious of their existence. Puny, fragile, and so often shallow – mortals had a wonderful capacity for self-deception, diversion and ignorance that buffered them from the harsher realities of a nocturnal existence. To those of his kind, consigned as they were to the night, time ticked painfully away at the psyche like fingernails on chalkboard or a tree branch against a windowpane. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch. To the nocturnal, like every terminal patient, every tick of the clock held portent. Live or Die. Fight or Flight. Escape or Feel. His lip curled and he hissed into the night. Death was easy.

Life was hard. Love was the worst. Each moment of every day he sought respite for himself. But bliss was a commodity that a vampire could ill afford. With one foot braced beneath him, and one against the guard-rail, he settled his body back against the grade. His silver-tipped boot flashed chrome in the black and white spectrum of his view. He leaned back, crossing his arms behind his head, and gazed up into the heavens and dreamed. Oh, yes…Vampires do dream. At least this one did. But it was what he dreamed that set him apart. This vampire dreamed of a world, wide open to him; expansive in nature, and welcoming in manifestation. This vampire dreamt of walking the world without fetters. Oh, to live in a world where the sun had no power but to warm him; whose rays did not dry out his skin and turn him into a withering husk, but instead seeped its way into the core of his being and radiated outward through his flesh. It had been so long. His stomach growled. It had been so long since he’d eaten, he thought. Far above him, a molecule of glittering H2O formed at the hands of a mischievous elemental chased its way through the billowing clouds. Faster and faster, the undine galloped - the drop of water gathering speed and mass as it tripped through the heavens.

Delighted, the sprite flung itself across the sky with abandon until finally, the raindrop escaped its bonds, rolled off the clouds tapering edge, and bounced its way toward the waiting earth. The elemental screamed with glee, tumbling over and under the fast falling gem, descending until the very last moment, when it splattered on the nose of the unsuspecting undead far below. The vampire squinted with annoyance, then opened his eyes and began to laugh. The sprite giggled with him, then gathered itself together from off the vampire’s lapels and headed skyward once again, looking for another victim to surprise. Sticking out his tongue, the lone vampire lapped at the air like it was a premium vintage of distilled elements. The bouquet, a combination of nature and mechanics, erupted across his palate - leaving him with base notes of billow and brume, and top notes of oil and industry that invaded his senses. Past loves and past lives rolled out before him; a historic montage playing out a symphony against the sky. Thunder rumbled through his lanky frame, reverberating across the tannin of his skin, and beat like African rhythms upon his soul. The body held more than the memory of its own years. The rhythms of a race echoed through him and like the weather, the song was wild, and tempestuous…chaotic; and he loved every moment of it.

The vampire filled his lungs with purpose, and in waves that could only be explained through quantum physics, he contracted his aura. The energy rippled. Like the continuous thrum on the skin of a drum, it reverberated against his corporeal being bouncing and bounding, bounding and rebounding, doubling and trebling and quadrupling until every atom in his body hummed with the pressure. Like an addict sucking in that first hit of weed, he took it in and held it; a heady brew roiling through his emotions and stealing oxygen from his brain. The flow of blood began to slow. One by one, he blocked off arteries and passages, capillaries and corpuscles, reigning in the circulation of his blood – corralling it within the center of his being. The world around him began to crawl and the pressure began to ease as his mind became one with his body and the energies equalized. The chill wind, no longer whipping him in frenzy, caressed him, coating his gaunt features, full lips, and sloping brow with dew. His dark chocolate tresses, thick and sparkling with ambient highlights, were pulled back in a soft curl framing his face. His lean form took on a visage hard as stone, the illusion marred only by the glistening black silk that slid across his chiseled torso, the charcoal snakeskin pants rippling against his runner’s thighs, and the leather duster that reflected colors of copper, rust, pine-green, teal and purple in its depths.

The kind of colors you might find in an oil slick on the asphalt in the rain. The frost bit like needles against his face, but he didn’t mind. After all, he was dead. To the human eye, who knows how long he perched there, drinking in the silence that only a vampire or werewolf could attain; that hypersensitive awareness that listened, not to the words and symbols that humanity spouted, but also to that which lies beneath. It was like being in the eye of a storm, where every lazy stroke of the senses jumped to palpable relief. A drop of sweat, a hiss of breath, and the sound of a human heart all carried the same weight and echoed through him as if he stood within the core of a huge bronze bell, listening to the audible reverberating back and forth across the walls. Then, one by one, he factored them out to exclusion. And there was simply silence. It was this ability, this absolute quiescence that gave him the power to bring his will to bear on the mind of any mortal. It gave him the ability to release the psychic pheromone that lulled them into the little death. And all it took…was an inhale. He likened the experience to that of an aquanaut, submerged beneath the waves.

That liquid stillness that only cold water and distance divers truly know; the fluid, death-like embrace that numbed the joints and ate its way through the muscle, insinuating itself between the marrow of his bones. The slight disorientation of the brain deprived of oxygen sent ripples of euphoria through his system. When he tried to explain it to Joseph, his lover said that it sounded like laughing gas, and that what he described seemed similar to the heady sense of being swept away that one achieved at each inhale of nitrous in the dentist’s chair where spit, and blood and cartilage collides. Stay for a while and all is wonderful. Stay too long and you are lulled into oblivion. Rise too fast when you have spent too long in the depths; well, you’ll live, but it will hurt like hell on the way out. To reach this state took but a moment, but in that moment, it seemed that anything was possible. His mind expanded. Unexamined options and possibilities opened up and loomed before him. And once again, he found himself caught up in a dance of what was, what could be, and what might have been. A gnawing hunger throbbed within the core of his senses. It was time to return.

The inevitable snap of blood, like a dam breaking, plunged through his veins and brought his awareness back to real time - back to the harsh world and the even harsher edges of reality - smashing like concrete into place around him. His body heaved and he gasped, oxidizing the borrowed blood that kept him “living.” Like love, sex and death all rolled into one – his body convulsed receiving that wrack of pain that slams the pleasure home - that blessed relief as blood and consciousness once again begins to flow. Borrowed blood meant borrowed time and… Consciousness. He drank it in. Some nights it seemed as if his pores opened up and breathed in the very ethers. Zoe. Life. Eros. Sex. Dunamis. Power. They say on a scientific level, that we’re all made up of the same “stuff.” Well, if that were true, he thought. Then there must be a reason for being. Must be a purpose beyond mere existence. Most mortals lived their lives trying to get their needs met. And they had so many in comparison. A vampire’s needs were simple. Blood. Lust. Both together and rolled into one. And what defined the character of a vampire? How he got it. Did he take it by force and rip through the jugular of the people he could so easily call prey? Or did one only take that which was freely bestowed? His beast growled within him. Hungry. It was all about choice.

Every day he made the conscious choice to deny himself that which his nature told him he needed and deserved; the hubris born of despair that claimed that it was his “right” to feed from the flock of humanity. Daily, he struggled with the pain of living, centuries upon centuries, doing the next right thing, and hoping that one day his outward choice would change his inner disposition. But this was not to be. To live is to suffer, the Buddhist said, and the adage was the same for vampires as it was for humans. A tendril of awareness reached him. Vampires could usually sense each other and most other “nocturnals” which was what il politico called “their kind.” Half-breeds, or “transgenics” as was politically correct, were another story. It all depended on his proximity to the other nocturnals, and the amount of pheromones given off by their emotions. He’d tasted of their kind before. But this…this was something very different. Like a tune stuck in your head that you swore you’ve known for all your life, the Siren sang to him – haunting. She was out there. Somewhere…out among the streets and byways of Seattle - hidden behind a muddle of the prosaic and mundane, was a metaphysical call to his very soul; an embodied Goddess, who held the translation of his life in her hand. She was the teacher who opened doors of deconstruction in his brain. She was the temptress that he feared.

The lover that he craved. The mother that he despised for casting him out alone among humanity, an abomination to them all. He dreamed of her in the daytime and searched for her in the night. It sounded crazy, but how else could one explain it? Explain the presence that reached for him across the astral plane. The voice that stirred a hunger within him for something that he didn’t know he lacked. Joseph would never understand. Joseph…his modern lover…his confidante’ and friend. Joseph, who thought the world was all clean lines and straight edges; whose world was a mathematical equation, where sexuality was fixed in an either/or, not both/and definition; a solid world in black and white that brooked no wavering or compromise. Joseph, who needed constant reassurance that the world around him was predictable and secure, who needed the illusion of control that science and medicine brought him and the compartmental boxes that allowed him to walk with sanity through an insane world. Joseph strove so hard for a perpetual present of Zen serenity. While Nathan constantly fought to maintain the illusion of life itself. It was Joseph who sought a place away from the chatter in his own head and it was Nathan, who kept pushing the boundaries of experience to remind him what it means to be human. Like fire and ice they danced; but either way, someone was going to get burned.

The metal groaned beneath him as the conflicting forces of cold and heat, expansion and contraction echoed through him. If he listened closely, he could even hear when his Chi aligned. But the experiences of serenity for a vampire seemed few and far between. There were fleeting pockets of peace that he grasped at, but in the grasping, felt them slip between his fingers. Sometimes the despair of living was too great and he was tempted to surrender to the draw of the grave; to sleep, perchance to dream - to dream and never awaken. What bliss! He thought and dozed. Lulled upon the tide of memory and time he found himself recalling the women in his life. His grandmother. His sister. His lovers and friends. His mother, who birthed him into the world, then passed quickly from it. The mother that he’d loved, but never knew. The sister who he’d killed. The draw was undeniable. It was like a gnawing in his belly for something that promised to satisfy. Something his heart told him he was missing, but his brain couldn’t quite comprehend. How could he make Joseph understand that SHE was calling, and that HE must answer? How could he explain the gnawing dissatisfaction that drove him to seek more than existed in their little world? Joseph, who strove to be content with the abundance that his own fortune provided, and Nathan, who was always hungry for more; for whom there was never enough.

He inhaled deep into his lungs letting his rib cage expand even more and then blew out a smoky mist from between his lips. Since he had made a conscious choice not to drink from the “vessel,” as religious nocturnals sometimes called humans, it was more important for him to breathe, to oxidize the borrowed blood that worked its way through his system. Vampires don’t make new blood, which is why they must take it from both willing and non-willing donors. Oh, they had plenty of tricks in their repertoire to make the process more palatable; pheromones to attract their prey, mental powers to wipe the memory after feeding, and both anti-coagulants and coagulants within the saliva to encourage or discourage the flow of blood from victims. But taking blood to Nathan was like intercourse for others; a giving of yourself to another in one of the most intimate of sharings. Drinking of another’s life-force by the blood was an act that he had chosen to forego in lieu of his relationship with Joseph and in his search for enlightenment. But it wasn’t easy. He inhaled again and his lover took precedence in his mind. They had an engagement to attend to, and he should have already been on his way. He rose, drawing himself up to his full height of six feet seven, and brooded over the dark landscape before him.

Without fear or faltering, he stepped to the edge of the precipice, leaned precariously against the wind, and then, without a thought, surrendered to the Fall. CHAPTER ONE: Scene Two: Puck The boy huddled, shivering, behind a dumpster just outside of the Comedy Underground at Washington and Occidental. Emaciated, with sunken blue eyes, pasty sallow skin, and bleached blonde hair that looked and smelled like wet straw, he wrapped himself in hand-me-down layers of patchwork cardigan and cast-off polyester. He was sick - sick and hungry and tired. If he could smell it, he would have known that the place smelled of piss and rotting garbage; a mixture of odors like ammonia and sulfur, strong enough to make a person gag. But tonight, with head pounding from sinus pressure and nose stopped up, he couldn’t smell a thing. A mixed blessing; but a blessing, nonetheless. A large refrigerator box and plastic sheeting from the furniture store down the road housed him from most of the rain, but the bitter cold and wind still found its way through the cracks and soaked through him. Though the multi-colored blankets stank of sweat and body odor, he wrapped them tightly around himself.

His eyes watered, but he still stared out through the duct-tape and plastic-wrap “window” of his hovel towards the Men’s Gospel Mission, where a hoard of masculinity, those “not too proud to beg”, lined up in hopes of getting a warm meal and the chance at a hot shower and a bed. He didn’t disdain handouts, but if that charity came with strings to an old and, in his opinion, dead religion - he adamantly refused. He had to have some pride, he told himself. On the other hand, if he closed his eyes, he could almost remember the feel of hot water splattering on his body and streaming down his face. A fit of coughing overtook him. He watched the shadows in the upper windows of the gospel mission and imagined silhouettes of men showering and shaving, regaining some sense of the humanity that was easily lost and not so easily found on the streets of Seattle. His body ached with flu and fever, and another cough raked through him, spasm upon spasm, until his forehead touched the small flat cardboard that served as the threshold to his “home.” The “Welcome Mat,” he called it. He chuckled and another shudder took him. He knew he should move, but he didn’t have the energy. His eyes squeezed shut and his ears pounded with the sound of Metro buses shushing by.

He dozed and the especially pungent scents of the gutter assaulted him, and an onslaught of images passed before his inner eyes. A sage-green house with a big back yard stretching out to a matching garage and a slate covered patio surrounded by plum trees. Two big fruitless mulberry trees that dwarfed the place and a crème-colored retriever to lick his face. Another bus whooshed by him, sending currents of cold air into his hovel and icy spray into his face. Again he drowsed. A Mom and a Dad and a toe-headed child at a carnival. A batch of cotton candy and a dozen red balloons. A ten-penny sideshow that was more fascinating than freakish and a tall, handsome stranger in a top hat, who offered to show him the world and more. The Metro screeched to a stop nearby, letting passengers on and off. Women in suits and men with power-ties struggled against recalcitrant umbrellas and flapping trenches in the unforgiving downpour. Round and round, the Ferris wheel climbed higher and higher - people getting on and people getting off. The rising of the sky above them, and the falling of the ground beneath their feet. The butterflies that danced on the way up and the dropping of the stomach on the way down. The strong arms and wide chest that enfolded him in a protective embrace and the smell of tobacco, clove, and cinnamon reminded him of his own father, but without the blows and bellowing.

The callused hands that motioned for a stop at the Wheels' zenith and the snuggling closer as the stars winked out, one by one in his embrace. He sneezed and shook himself against the coming memory, for it was a day just like this when the “system” had come to take his life away. Some well-meaning Republican had reported him, but before the social worker could get their hands on him, he’d disappeared into the night. He had heard he died in prison, the Barker, he called him; off-ed by another Chester. Funny how he never knew his real name. The boy gave a quick jolt as a “suit” slogged by, running for the tram, and he huddled further back into the recesses. A flash of light blinded him, and he winced, his eyes squinting against the glare. Another bus passed. A shadow lingered. A front-on mug shot of his tear-stained face - a placard that bore the name, Matthew Spencer; a name that meant as much to him as the nondescript faces of the ‘rents who bore him. He had taken the name Puck when he became a carnie, due to his small stature and habit of popping up in places that others thought he shouldn’t be. Though the name had stuck, he had gotten a growth spurt within the last few years that left him gangly and uncoordinated.

He was only fourteen, but he had already run away from two foster homes; one which was physically abusive, the other – well, let’s just say that at least out here on the streets, someone would have to pay to take advantage of him for their own lusts and pleasure. Another flash in his eyes – some stupid tourist kneeling on his front porch, capturing another Kodak moment he’d rather forget. A shadowy image branded on his brain, then dissolving like a Polaroid in the gutter, in the rain. He threw an empty coke bottle at the fading apparition as she scrambled away, clutching her camera protectively. “Stupid cunt!” He barked in his sleep and began to cry. He didn’t even know if she was real. There was no woman, his brain told him. It was just a dream, or a memory. Go to sleep. Don’t try to care. Try not to feel. But he couldn’t. With little resistance he cried, fighting feebly against the tide of exhaustion, and his awareness slowly faded into a sea of metros, munis, and dark patent leather.