INDIFFERENCE, Chapter One © 2007 Brian Hennessey
This is an original work copyright protected by the author, Brian Hennessey.
This is a dark fable about a dark underworld and contains scenes of violence, explicit sex, and themes of horror and fantasy. If you are offended by depictions of same sex sexual conduct, bondage and discipline, blood letting, and blood, you may not want to read this.
WARNING, this is intended for adults only. You must be twenty-one years of age to read this journal. By signing on as a friend you warrant that you are at least twenty-one years of age. After this initial posting, I am investigating how to better protect the journal from unauthorized access. It may involve friend locking, although I am not yet sure how to do that. But due to the explicit nature of this story, please do not attempt to access it if you are not an adult.
TO MY REGULAR READERS: This is a departure. I know you are used to a certain timbre in my stories, and this one is decidedly different. I have wanted to explore vampire lore for some time. I have my own take on how the vampire world might operate, and that's all it is, my own take. I don't believe in vampires or life everlasting as a corporeal being. This is only for fun and chills and thrills. I hope you take it that way and give it a chance.
My brilliant icon and image makers add so much to a story for me. So we cast people to play the roles but this is not fan fiction. The characters of Brian Kinney and Justin Taylor are not in this story, even though the actors selected for illustration purposes have played those roles. So if you are wanting a take on fan fiction, don't read this. If you just want a spooky, lurid, naughty little read about creatures of the night, stay tuned.
JenR did the banner illustration. Sandi did the icon. Arness did the story illustration. Enjoy, my fellow vampire fanciers and tell your vampire fancying friends.---Brian
P.S. The last chapter of GONE will post on Sunday, as usual.
***
London, the present.
I am indifferent to your pain.
Your pleasure is equally unimportant to me.
Compassion has left me, for good, and good riddance to it.
My world consists of hunger, lust, greed and survival.
I am a vampire, and yes, we do exist.
I construct this journal in my head, for an unspecified human audience, seeking to explain what I am to those who shall never fully understand. The day I sit down to transcribe this journal of my life on paper, or whatever form of communication has displaced paper in the future, it means I’ve reached the end. Given up. For now, the composition resides only as an internal dialogue.
My day starts much as yours does. I wake up, I get out of bed (coffins are a myth). I smell the coffee perking. It’s on a timer to be ready at the same time that the blackout shades over the windows are automatically set to raise and admit the lilac dusk. The sun is neither friend nor foe to my kind. We don’t catch fire, or turn to dust in direct sunlight. But we are sensitive to harsh ultraviolet rays. Like albinos and bats, we avoid it as much as we can, and protect our skin when we can’t.
Sitting on the side of my bed, my windows give me a view of the Thames River where the East End begins and the City of London ends. Across the water is Greenwich, home to the ghost of the elegant Cutty Sark. I say “ghost” because a recent fire destroyed the proud old schooner. For me, I will always see those tall masts when I look across the river to the opposite bank. I live on the second floor of a former textile mill. Downstairs are dusty remnants of the past occupation of this building, and there is nothing above me except roof and sky. I own it all, save the sky, and I oversaw the conversion from rat-infested attic rafters to sleek and contemporary lair. I made sure the portion of my extensive art collection that I house here was properly hung. I approved every Italian chaise, Burmese silk rug and Austrian crystal wine stem.
If you were to visit me here you would presume, correctly, that I am a man wealth and taste. You would presume, incorrectly, that I am also a handsome and charming man of thirty-two, perhaps as old as thirty-four. I am neither charming nor human, and you missed my true chronological age by centuries. My kind may resemble your race, but we aren’t part of it, once the conversion is complete. But don’t fear a social faux pas, for I don’t often invite dinner to be my guest.
I walk across black slate floors that are the negative pole to the white walls and predominantly white furnishings, and pour myself a cup of coffee made from beans I imported from Africa. My senses come alive at the smell, taste, and texture of the brew. Yes, I drink coffee, good wine, ale, even an ice cold Coke with a twist of fresh lime. I eat food, too. My favorite cuisine is Thai. I like the spices. For me, food and drink is merely a sensual pleasure, like fucking. I draw no nutrition from food and can produce no progeny from fucking.
I don’t hunger for your food, I hunger for your blood. All of my nutrition comes from your blood. The thrill of killing you so I can feed eclipses the smaller pleasures of sex and other mundane activities we use to pass the endless time that stretches out before us.
I sit back on a glove leather tufted couch and sip my coffee. Caffeine, like all your recreational drugs, has no effect on me. Nor does arsenic, or holy water, or a crucifix pressed against my skin, or all of your other superstitions. I’m partial to garlic and once collected rosaries, when I was newer to this life and still trying to prove something. A stake to the heart? No human can overcome a vampire. It’s ludicrous to try. So how do we die, you may wonder? Some die from the sheer boredom of longevity. They let go of life and refuse to feed. But most of us die when another vampire turns slayer.
It takes a vampire to kill a vampire.
We kill our own, and not infrequently. We live by a strictly enforced code of behavior. We dispatch the ones who wander so far from that code that the rest of us are endangered, or those who go mad, or get too involved with the human condition, or develop the one disease that can kill us, the dreaded skullacia.
As I drink my coffee and watch the last light of day fade to black, I wonder how long it’s been since I fed. A week? Maybe more. I’m beginning to feel the fatigue that comes from abstention. Like an Anaconda, we don’t feed daily, or even weekly. It’s different for each of us, and we recognize our body signals that tell us when it’s time to kill. My signals are beginning to twinge a bit. I’ll let the evening’s events determine if I shall feed or not. Should something interesting fall across my path, perhaps I’ll strike. I’m not to a point where I need to be aggressive about finding a meal.
I reach over to push the series of numbers on my phone that will play back my messages. There are three voice mails. The first is shielded by the noise of electronic music in the background layered with ambient crowd sounds.
“Bryant, it’s Wally, mate.” Wally is the manager of my club, the Bloody Shame, the largest, most successful gay venue in Soho. I make a mint off this club. Like all successful gay venues, straights have discovered it and are constantly vying to get in. We let a few invade to keep it interesting, but it’s not the kind of place that seeks to be “blended”. One reason for that is the dark room in back, where sexual acts are freely shared. This freedom is a huge draw for the Bloody Shame, and the boys aren’t interested in putting on a show for curious women.
Women are strictly forbidden behind the steel-beaded curtain separating the dark room from the dance club. What’s right is right, and yes, I do know the difference.
“We got the pink submarine from our provider of spirits, my dear love,” Wally continues. “They dicked us again on the delivery. We’re short on vodka and gin, both. Unless you tell me otherwise, I’m calling another distributor in the morning to cut a deal. This is beyond ridiculous.”
I erase his message, agreeing with his conclusion.
The second message is a woman’s voice, “Bryant, it’s imperative that you check in with the Board. This is our third call. Please respond.”
I erase it. Fuck the Board. Fuck them!
The third message is a man’s voice. “It’s me, again.” I sigh. My stalker. “I was there last night, at the Bloody Shame. I saw you. I love your Prada suit. I love the boots and the way you look. Meet me, Bryant. I won’t bite. At seven, a pub called the Ten Bells in Whitechapel. I’ll be the blond in red. We need to meet. We need to talk.”
Delete. I don’t encourage stalkers. Funny that he should choose a venerable pub tied to the legend of Jack the Ripper. Coincidence? I wonder. All vampires attract obsessed fans. Why not? We’re beautiful and powerful. I find them boring. This one is particularly persistent and devious enough to have sussed out my unlisted number. He watches me from afar, and leaves me these messages. He’s yet to approach me at the club or anywhere else. I find that strange. I’m suspicious of strange.
The downstairs buzzer sounds, announcing a visitor at the entrance of my building. I push the intercom, but I already know who it is. I can catch the scent of another vampire from a kilometer away, and each of us caries a unique bouquet. “What do you want?” I ask irritably. She says,
“Don’t let’s play this game. You know I can come in if I want. Just save your lock and buzz me in, Bryant.”
Shit. I release the downstairs lock with the push of a button and slide open the heavy metal door leading to my upstairs home. I stand there in the threshold, waiting for her to ascend the stairs. She’s slim, beautiful, of course, in a long black leather coat and high boots. Her glossy black hair is blunt cut at her chin, with China Doll bangs. But she’s not Asian. She was Egyptian, once, I believe. Now, like the rest of us, she’s a nomad.
She pushes past me with an icy glare and tosses her coat on a chair. Beneath it, her short dress flatters long, shapely legs. I can admire her beauty even if it does nothing for me as a male. “What do you want, Meta?”
“You don’t return calls. Your rudeness has escalated, Bryant. The Board has requested your presence. I’m here to make certain you attend.”
I laugh and refill my coffee mug. I offer some to her, but she declines. “I have no intention of attending a Board meeting, Meta.”
“You have no choice.”
Oh, I like a challenge. I raise a brow. “Is that right? Do you really think you can force me to do anything I don’t choose to do?”
Female vampires are powerful beings, but they lack the physical power of the male. To be fair, very few male vampires could overcome me, if any. In the hierarchy of the vampire, there are a select few of us with powers that go beyond the ordinary. No one has been able to figure out why that happens. But a handful of us go through a second change during the conversion from human to vampire, and usually die, while in the throes of this additional agony. For those few who survive, we emerge with certain secondary capabilities that our brethren lack. Abnormal strength is one. Unusual longevity is another. But the essential difference is that we possess the ability to convert a human into a vampire.
Despite the propaganda in your cheap films, the bite of a vampire kills you. It doesn’t give you an eternal half-life. Only a few of us have the ability to convert you, and for that talent we are known in our society as “breeders”.
I’m a breeder.
And I despise it.
Meta glares at me. “I’m not here to try and wrestle you to the meeting, Bryant. I’m here to appeal to your common sense.”
Here we go again, I realize with a weary sigh. The good of the species, giving something back to my people, and so forth. She thinks she can lecture me on my responsibility to the continuation of vampirism. As if that’s a laudatory goal. I’m past hearing it now. I stare at her, picking up the scent of fresh blood coursing through her body. She’s fed, recently. Perhaps I’m hungrier than I think. “I have no interest in it. I’ve told them, and I’ll tell you, I won’t be a breeder.”
“You are a breeder, you impudent fool,” she corrects me with icy precision. I despise the prim, smug certainty that the vampires connected with the Board exude. It is delegated power and it doesn’t work on me.
I encircle her throat with my long fingers and lift her off the ground with this grip. She struggles, but it’s pointless. Compared to you, she’s very powerful. Compared to me, she’s as weak as a child. Vampires have a peculiar density. We weigh much more than we appear. We’re all slim. No vampire is fat. How could we be? Food has no impact on our weight, because we don’t metabolize it as fuel. We take it in and we shit it out. In between, it does nothing for us or to us.
As for blood, one can imbibe only so much of that nutrition before one becomes quite ill. Therefore, the plague of obesity that sweeps your ranks has no quarter with us. We’re all muscle and bone, and yet, as slim as we appear, we’re really quite heavy. From this density comes our strength. My power is such that holding her up like this requires no exertion.
“Meta,” I say in a calm voice while she writhes and slithers, trying to get free, but making no progress from her effort. “I’m quite cranky when I first awake. My advice is that you leave now and tell the Board I wasn’t home when you called. Otherwise, I’m throwing you through that window. By the time you’ve finished picking the glass slivers from your arse, I’ll be gone.”
She nods her assent, and I carefully lower her to the ground. She rubs her throat as she glares daggers through me. “You’re becoming a rogue, Bryant,” she hisses, her voice temporarily affected by the pressure of my grip. It’s a thinly veiled warning. “Rogue” is the term we give those of us who are marked for death after becoming a danger to our society. I laugh at her.
“Because I won’t breed? Hardly. That would be a unique infraction. ‘We must kill you because you won’t create more of us’.” Breeders are so valued by our kind, that one of us would have to be inflicted with skullacia, and more, before we’d be assigned a slayer. She leaves my lair without another word, trailing the delectable scent of whomever she had for dinner.
Time to dress and go out. I have a business to run. People rely upon me. I support a vampire clan as well as all the humans who are in my employ, unaware of what I am. And I have a sudden itch to scratch. It can’t be done at home. I am a creature of the night and the night awaits me with dark and open arms. I prepare to rush into them as I have done for so many nights for so many centuries with such little expectation of satisfaction.
This is a dark fable about a dark underworld and contains scenes of violence, explicit sex, and themes of horror and fantasy. If you are offended by depictions of same sex sexual conduct, bondage and discipline, blood letting, and blood, you may not want to read this.
WARNING, this is intended for adults only. You must be twenty-one years of age to read this journal. By signing on as a friend you warrant that you are at least twenty-one years of age. After this initial posting, I am investigating how to better protect the journal from unauthorized access. It may involve friend locking, although I am not yet sure how to do that. But due to the explicit nature of this story, please do not attempt to access it if you are not an adult.
TO MY REGULAR READERS: This is a departure. I know you are used to a certain timbre in my stories, and this one is decidedly different. I have wanted to explore vampire lore for some time. I have my own take on how the vampire world might operate, and that's all it is, my own take. I don't believe in vampires or life everlasting as a corporeal being. This is only for fun and chills and thrills. I hope you take it that way and give it a chance.
My brilliant icon and image makers add so much to a story for me. So we cast people to play the roles but this is not fan fiction. The characters of Brian Kinney and Justin Taylor are not in this story, even though the actors selected for illustration purposes have played those roles. So if you are wanting a take on fan fiction, don't read this. If you just want a spooky, lurid, naughty little read about creatures of the night, stay tuned.
JenR did the banner illustration. Sandi did the icon. Arness did the story illustration. Enjoy, my fellow vampire fanciers and tell your vampire fancying friends.---Brian
P.S. The last chapter of GONE will post on Sunday, as usual.
***
London, the present.
I am indifferent to your pain.
Your pleasure is equally unimportant to me.
Compassion has left me, for good, and good riddance to it.
My world consists of hunger, lust, greed and survival.
I am a vampire, and yes, we do exist.
I construct this journal in my head, for an unspecified human audience, seeking to explain what I am to those who shall never fully understand. The day I sit down to transcribe this journal of my life on paper, or whatever form of communication has displaced paper in the future, it means I’ve reached the end. Given up. For now, the composition resides only as an internal dialogue.
My day starts much as yours does. I wake up, I get out of bed (coffins are a myth). I smell the coffee perking. It’s on a timer to be ready at the same time that the blackout shades over the windows are automatically set to raise and admit the lilac dusk. The sun is neither friend nor foe to my kind. We don’t catch fire, or turn to dust in direct sunlight. But we are sensitive to harsh ultraviolet rays. Like albinos and bats, we avoid it as much as we can, and protect our skin when we can’t.
Sitting on the side of my bed, my windows give me a view of the Thames River where the East End begins and the City of London ends. Across the water is Greenwich, home to the ghost of the elegant Cutty Sark. I say “ghost” because a recent fire destroyed the proud old schooner. For me, I will always see those tall masts when I look across the river to the opposite bank. I live on the second floor of a former textile mill. Downstairs are dusty remnants of the past occupation of this building, and there is nothing above me except roof and sky. I own it all, save the sky, and I oversaw the conversion from rat-infested attic rafters to sleek and contemporary lair. I made sure the portion of my extensive art collection that I house here was properly hung. I approved every Italian chaise, Burmese silk rug and Austrian crystal wine stem.
If you were to visit me here you would presume, correctly, that I am a man wealth and taste. You would presume, incorrectly, that I am also a handsome and charming man of thirty-two, perhaps as old as thirty-four. I am neither charming nor human, and you missed my true chronological age by centuries. My kind may resemble your race, but we aren’t part of it, once the conversion is complete. But don’t fear a social faux pas, for I don’t often invite dinner to be my guest.
I walk across black slate floors that are the negative pole to the white walls and predominantly white furnishings, and pour myself a cup of coffee made from beans I imported from Africa. My senses come alive at the smell, taste, and texture of the brew. Yes, I drink coffee, good wine, ale, even an ice cold Coke with a twist of fresh lime. I eat food, too. My favorite cuisine is Thai. I like the spices. For me, food and drink is merely a sensual pleasure, like fucking. I draw no nutrition from food and can produce no progeny from fucking.
I don’t hunger for your food, I hunger for your blood. All of my nutrition comes from your blood. The thrill of killing you so I can feed eclipses the smaller pleasures of sex and other mundane activities we use to pass the endless time that stretches out before us.
I sit back on a glove leather tufted couch and sip my coffee. Caffeine, like all your recreational drugs, has no effect on me. Nor does arsenic, or holy water, or a crucifix pressed against my skin, or all of your other superstitions. I’m partial to garlic and once collected rosaries, when I was newer to this life and still trying to prove something. A stake to the heart? No human can overcome a vampire. It’s ludicrous to try. So how do we die, you may wonder? Some die from the sheer boredom of longevity. They let go of life and refuse to feed. But most of us die when another vampire turns slayer.
It takes a vampire to kill a vampire.
We kill our own, and not infrequently. We live by a strictly enforced code of behavior. We dispatch the ones who wander so far from that code that the rest of us are endangered, or those who go mad, or get too involved with the human condition, or develop the one disease that can kill us, the dreaded skullacia.
As I drink my coffee and watch the last light of day fade to black, I wonder how long it’s been since I fed. A week? Maybe more. I’m beginning to feel the fatigue that comes from abstention. Like an Anaconda, we don’t feed daily, or even weekly. It’s different for each of us, and we recognize our body signals that tell us when it’s time to kill. My signals are beginning to twinge a bit. I’ll let the evening’s events determine if I shall feed or not. Should something interesting fall across my path, perhaps I’ll strike. I’m not to a point where I need to be aggressive about finding a meal.
I reach over to push the series of numbers on my phone that will play back my messages. There are three voice mails. The first is shielded by the noise of electronic music in the background layered with ambient crowd sounds.
“Bryant, it’s Wally, mate.” Wally is the manager of my club, the Bloody Shame, the largest, most successful gay venue in Soho. I make a mint off this club. Like all successful gay venues, straights have discovered it and are constantly vying to get in. We let a few invade to keep it interesting, but it’s not the kind of place that seeks to be “blended”. One reason for that is the dark room in back, where sexual acts are freely shared. This freedom is a huge draw for the Bloody Shame, and the boys aren’t interested in putting on a show for curious women.
Women are strictly forbidden behind the steel-beaded curtain separating the dark room from the dance club. What’s right is right, and yes, I do know the difference.
“We got the pink submarine from our provider of spirits, my dear love,” Wally continues. “They dicked us again on the delivery. We’re short on vodka and gin, both. Unless you tell me otherwise, I’m calling another distributor in the morning to cut a deal. This is beyond ridiculous.”
I erase his message, agreeing with his conclusion.
The second message is a woman’s voice, “Bryant, it’s imperative that you check in with the Board. This is our third call. Please respond.”
I erase it. Fuck the Board. Fuck them!
The third message is a man’s voice. “It’s me, again.” I sigh. My stalker. “I was there last night, at the Bloody Shame. I saw you. I love your Prada suit. I love the boots and the way you look. Meet me, Bryant. I won’t bite. At seven, a pub called the Ten Bells in Whitechapel. I’ll be the blond in red. We need to meet. We need to talk.”
Delete. I don’t encourage stalkers. Funny that he should choose a venerable pub tied to the legend of Jack the Ripper. Coincidence? I wonder. All vampires attract obsessed fans. Why not? We’re beautiful and powerful. I find them boring. This one is particularly persistent and devious enough to have sussed out my unlisted number. He watches me from afar, and leaves me these messages. He’s yet to approach me at the club or anywhere else. I find that strange. I’m suspicious of strange.
The downstairs buzzer sounds, announcing a visitor at the entrance of my building. I push the intercom, but I already know who it is. I can catch the scent of another vampire from a kilometer away, and each of us caries a unique bouquet. “What do you want?” I ask irritably. She says,
“Don’t let’s play this game. You know I can come in if I want. Just save your lock and buzz me in, Bryant.”
Shit. I release the downstairs lock with the push of a button and slide open the heavy metal door leading to my upstairs home. I stand there in the threshold, waiting for her to ascend the stairs. She’s slim, beautiful, of course, in a long black leather coat and high boots. Her glossy black hair is blunt cut at her chin, with China Doll bangs. But she’s not Asian. She was Egyptian, once, I believe. Now, like the rest of us, she’s a nomad.
She pushes past me with an icy glare and tosses her coat on a chair. Beneath it, her short dress flatters long, shapely legs. I can admire her beauty even if it does nothing for me as a male. “What do you want, Meta?”
“You don’t return calls. Your rudeness has escalated, Bryant. The Board has requested your presence. I’m here to make certain you attend.”
I laugh and refill my coffee mug. I offer some to her, but she declines. “I have no intention of attending a Board meeting, Meta.”
“You have no choice.”
Oh, I like a challenge. I raise a brow. “Is that right? Do you really think you can force me to do anything I don’t choose to do?”
Female vampires are powerful beings, but they lack the physical power of the male. To be fair, very few male vampires could overcome me, if any. In the hierarchy of the vampire, there are a select few of us with powers that go beyond the ordinary. No one has been able to figure out why that happens. But a handful of us go through a second change during the conversion from human to vampire, and usually die, while in the throes of this additional agony. For those few who survive, we emerge with certain secondary capabilities that our brethren lack. Abnormal strength is one. Unusual longevity is another. But the essential difference is that we possess the ability to convert a human into a vampire.
Despite the propaganda in your cheap films, the bite of a vampire kills you. It doesn’t give you an eternal half-life. Only a few of us have the ability to convert you, and for that talent we are known in our society as “breeders”.
I’m a breeder.
And I despise it.
Meta glares at me. “I’m not here to try and wrestle you to the meeting, Bryant. I’m here to appeal to your common sense.”
Here we go again, I realize with a weary sigh. The good of the species, giving something back to my people, and so forth. She thinks she can lecture me on my responsibility to the continuation of vampirism. As if that’s a laudatory goal. I’m past hearing it now. I stare at her, picking up the scent of fresh blood coursing through her body. She’s fed, recently. Perhaps I’m hungrier than I think. “I have no interest in it. I’ve told them, and I’ll tell you, I won’t be a breeder.”
“You are a breeder, you impudent fool,” she corrects me with icy precision. I despise the prim, smug certainty that the vampires connected with the Board exude. It is delegated power and it doesn’t work on me.
I encircle her throat with my long fingers and lift her off the ground with this grip. She struggles, but it’s pointless. Compared to you, she’s very powerful. Compared to me, she’s as weak as a child. Vampires have a peculiar density. We weigh much more than we appear. We’re all slim. No vampire is fat. How could we be? Food has no impact on our weight, because we don’t metabolize it as fuel. We take it in and we shit it out. In between, it does nothing for us or to us.
As for blood, one can imbibe only so much of that nutrition before one becomes quite ill. Therefore, the plague of obesity that sweeps your ranks has no quarter with us. We’re all muscle and bone, and yet, as slim as we appear, we’re really quite heavy. From this density comes our strength. My power is such that holding her up like this requires no exertion.
“Meta,” I say in a calm voice while she writhes and slithers, trying to get free, but making no progress from her effort. “I’m quite cranky when I first awake. My advice is that you leave now and tell the Board I wasn’t home when you called. Otherwise, I’m throwing you through that window. By the time you’ve finished picking the glass slivers from your arse, I’ll be gone.”
She nods her assent, and I carefully lower her to the ground. She rubs her throat as she glares daggers through me. “You’re becoming a rogue, Bryant,” she hisses, her voice temporarily affected by the pressure of my grip. It’s a thinly veiled warning. “Rogue” is the term we give those of us who are marked for death after becoming a danger to our society. I laugh at her.
“Because I won’t breed? Hardly. That would be a unique infraction. ‘We must kill you because you won’t create more of us’.” Breeders are so valued by our kind, that one of us would have to be inflicted with skullacia, and more, before we’d be assigned a slayer. She leaves my lair without another word, trailing the delectable scent of whomever she had for dinner.
Time to dress and go out. I have a business to run. People rely upon me. I support a vampire clan as well as all the humans who are in my employ, unaware of what I am. And I have a sudden itch to scratch. It can’t be done at home. I am a creature of the night and the night awaits me with dark and open arms. I prepare to rush into them as I have done for so many nights for so many centuries with such little expectation of satisfaction.