The Vampire and the Goth Ch. 05

Dmitri waved at us as he got into his car. We waved back. Then Elizabeth turned to me.

"Interesting fellow," she said. "I like him."

I laughed. "You can say it. He's weird. He would be weird even without that whole lycanthropy thing. He's Russian and a musician and he likes playing music that died out a good three hundred years before he was born. He's a weirdo."

"But he's your weirdo," she said, smiling at me.

"Well, he is that. He's very loyal and a true friend. Plus, he's always entertaining, even if he can be a pain in the ass sometimes."

Elizabeth leaned over and kissed my cheek.

I smiled. "What was that for?"

"For being my weirdo," she said.

Elizabeth held my hand while we drove back to my apartment. I pulled up next to her car. She looked at me with very soft eyes.

"I had a good time tonight," she said.

I smiled. "Me too."

She sighed. "I wish I could stay with you. But I'm pretty sure my sister would stick me with applying eye medication to any cats that come in."

"That sounds awful! I'll bet they aren't even grateful, are they?"

"No. They're mean. They yowl and spit and claw... and that's just the owners! You should see how the kitties act!"

We laughed together, and then she said, "So, do you have any plans for tomorrow night?"

"Well, I was going to get together with my girlfriend..."

"Oh, well if you already have plans, Mr. Shy... Mr. Sho... Mr. Shutski..." she said, stumbling over my name.

"You can call me Stosh," I said patiently. "And no, I don't have any plans."

"Well, would you like to come over to my house?"

I smiled and put my hand on her cheek. I kissed her softly, and said, "I would love that."

Elizabeth grinned and kissed me deeply. "Cool. I'll call you after I get home from work."

I stepped from the car and watched her drive away, that lonely feeling coming back again. As I turned to walk into the building, David stepped out of the shadows.

"Stosh, I have a problem."

David has always been someone who handles stress well. No matter what happens, he remains calm, cool and collected. But tonight, he looked rattled. His suit was rumpled, his hands were dirty, and his shoes were muddy. He didn't look like himself at all.

I found David's appearance disturbing. As I ushered him into the living room, I grabbed a bag of blood from the refrigerator and began to warm it for him.

"What happened?"

"It's Marcus, my latest protégé. Well, Marcus and that jackass Brother Humble, you know the money-hungry evangelist."

"Yes, I know who you mean. You said you were here because Marcus' mother fell for his scam," I said

"His mother and his grandmother. Marcus wants to get revenge. We tracked Brother Humble to an event here in town with local ministers, and Marcus decided that it was the perfect time to strike."

"Oh shit," I said.

David laughed a little nervously, and said, "Yeah. In front of the media and his hangers-on."

"What happened?"

"Well, I haven't lived for over 300 years to have a huge shit storm blow up on my watch. So, I told him no," he said

"And how was that received?"

David laughed again. "Not very well. He shot me. ME! His lover and his sire. And more than that, I'm a god damned vampire. But he decided that I should die if I wanted to stop him."

"Are you okay?" I asked.

David gave me a weak smile, stood up, and slipped off his jacket. His right shoulder was caked in blood and his shirt was covered in powder burns and a couple of bullet holes.

"He must have been right next to you when he pulled the trigger," I said, stating the obvious.

"We wrestled for the gun. The stupid slut thought that a bullet could kill me. The minute he pulled the trigger and I didn't die he knew he fucked up. He took off running for the trees."

"And that's what happened to your shoes?" I asked

David ran his hands over his face. "Yeah. When I find that mother fucker, I'm going to cut his head off myself."

I didn't know what to say. As long as I've known David, he's always had volatile relationships. His taste in men runs towards the dangerous. He's the smartest fool I've ever known.

By 1840, I found myself in Mobile, Alabama. The city was a busy port, which meant sailors came in every day, men who didn't have family and who wouldn't be missed right away. The alligators and other predators were only too happy to help me dispose of the remains of my meals, and when a sailor was found floating in the harbor, what was left of his body had already been so thoroughly chewed no one noticed any suspicious wounds.

As vampires age, we need to consume less blood. But the port of Mobile proved to be too rich a hunting ground to not indulge. Most nights, I found myself lurking along Shakespeare Row, Mobile's strip of gambling dens and brothels. Even if I didn't feel like eating, there was always something interesting happening.

One night, not long after I arrived, I was walking in the dark when I heard a passionate moan and noticed the unmistakable scent of sex. Around the corner, behind a brothel, I saw a vampire fucking a sailor. The vampire was a black man and had his cock deeply embedded in the anus of the white sailor. The vampire's hand was around the erect penis of the sailor and was rapidly stroking him. The sailor had an ecstatic expression on his face. The vampire just looked angry.

The sailor grunted and moaned again. "You're so big! So big! Fuck me with your big black cock!"

The vampire put his hands over the sailor's mouth. "Shut up and take it you ignorant fuck!"

The sailor continued to moan and grunt as the vampire's hips sped up. The vampire kept his hands over the sailor's mouth while the sailor took his own cock and began to jerk it swiftly.

The vampire noticed me. He gave me a big, evil grin as he orgasmed into the sailor. Then, he leaned his head back and embedded his fangs into the sailor's neck.

I smelled semen and fresh blood as the sailor ejaculated. The vampire drank quickly, emptying the sailor's body. He pulled his cock out of the sailor and wiped off onto his pants. He turned back to me as he put his penis away.

"Usually people have to pay to watch a show like that," the vampire grinned.

I barely understood a word he said.

"Sorry... English... bad..." I said

The vampire looked at me. "You're not American."

"No," I said. I pointed at myself. "Jestem Polakiem,"

"Polakiem? Oh. Are you Polish?"

I smiled. "Yes, yes. Polish. Polskie,"

He looked thoughtful for a moment.

« Ah. Est-ce que tu parles français? » The vampire said, asking if I spoke French.

« Oui,» I responded, with a smile.

He nodded. « D'accord. »

At the time, French was the most common language in Europe, so now we had a shared language. This was good. I'd met one of my own kind, and we could speak with each other, at least a little. It was a huge relief.

As we began to go through the sailor's pockets, we talked about how we'd come to be in Mobile. David said that he had grown up in Louisiana with French as his first language. He came to Mobile after he'd escaped from slavery and lived on the edges, even more of an outcast that I was. But he'd found the same thing I had - drunk sailors were easy pickings, and the alligators, crayfish and other preditors quickly removed any evidence.

We weighted the sailor's body down with stones and rolled it into the bay. As we watched it sink, David grinned at me and asked, "So, did you like what you saw?"

"I wasn't so much watching for the sex so much as I was surprised to see another vampire," I responded.

"Are you surprised to see a black vampire?"

"Are you surprised to see a Polish vampire?" I responded.

He laughed. "I guess we're both strangers here.

David's shoulder wound had healed long before he arrived at my apartment, but the emotional damage brought by Marcus' betrayal would last longer. I could tell David was still furious as he stepped out of the shower, although washing the blood and powder burns off had gone a long way toward improving his mood.

"Do you have anything I could wear?" David asked.

David has always been a clothes horse, saying that he feels more confidant in nice clothes. I've learned a lot from David over the years, but I didn't pick up his interest in fashion.

"Most of what I have are polos and khakis."

"Ah yes... the uniform of the 21^st-century middle-class American male," he smiled.

I rolled my eyes. "Sorry."

"You don't need to apologize," he said. "In this case, your clothes are exactly what we need to deal with the shit show Marcus wants to start."

Brother Humble loved IHOP, David told me as he dressed in my clothes. He'd found that most mornings, Brother Humble liked to order a short stack of pancakes and a glass of orange juice. Apparently, he liked to start his day early, before dawn. He was usually accompanied by one or more local pastors, because Brother Humble was not one to let an opportunity for networking go by. The original plan was to find and confront Brother Humble outside the IHOP near his hotel, and David thought that would be a good place to find and grab Marcus.

I looked at him for a long moment. "He's gone rogue now, David. You know what has to happen."

David sighed. "Yes. And I've already made my peace with it. I'm actually looking forward to it."

"That's cold," I said.

"That's necessary," he responded.

I thought of the last lover Marcus had who needed to be killed.

Our world vastly improved once David and I met. I had someone who could help me understand American society, and he had a white man to provide him cover.

A black man in the south during that time was almost certainly enslaved, and even black men who weren't "owned" were treated as criminals, restricted in where they could go and what kind of financial transactions they could engage in. But when David was acting as my valet and translator, he had an excuse to be anywhere I was. Moreover, people spoke freely in front of us, assuming I didn't understand English and that David wasn't intelligent enough to understand what was going on. We often used this to our advantage in business dealings, with most white people never understanding how we got the better of them.

After nearly 20 years in Mobile, David and I moved north, to Memphis. We presented ourselves as a displaced nobleman from Europe interested in trading cotton and his "boy" who worked as a translator. We bought a large house outside of town and acquired two slaves, Thomasina, who kept house and cooked, and Gideon, our driver. In reality, Thomasina and Gideon were both vampires.

We were doing well, for a while. We were able to feed almost as easily as we did in Mobile and we were making money. David, Thomasina, and Gideon could live relatively open and we were even able to help some escaped slaves make their way to the free states in the north. No one suspected a thing. For all they knew, I was a slave owner. And with the southern states beginning to clamor to leave America if they couldn't own other human beings, no one noticed if an occasional body washed up from the river.

And then, David met Julius.

Julius was a handsome young man, maybe 20 years old. He came to us as part of a group of runaways, but he had been seriously injured during the journey, and the rest of the group expected him to die. They said their good-byes and left without him, to continue their journey to freedom.

Thomasina, Gideon, David and I gathered around Julius' cot in the basement. "We can save him," David declared. I looked at him, as Gideon rolled his eyes and Thomasina said, "Hmmm," It was clear none of us thought this was a good idea.

"No really, just listen to me. He's young, he's in good shape. And Stosh, weren't you telling me just last week that we could use an errand boy?"

"I'm sure I didn't mean that we should create a new vampire," I said.

We were all silent for a moment, as the young man continued to die in front of us. Finally, Thomasina spoke up. "I could use some help in the kitchen when we have humans over. It would be expected that we'd have a kitchen boy to chop wood and bring water. No offense, Gideon, but you look too old to be doing that stuff."

Thomasina had been in America since the time of the colonies. She had a soft, motherly face. She was a great cook and had used this talent to move in the human world in ways that remained a mystery to the rest of us.

Gideon rolled his eyes and said, "New vampires are always a problem. They can't handle sunlight very well, they need a lot of blood, and they do stupid things. And being black just makes it harder."

Gideon was a younger vampire, having been sired during the American Revolution, but he was older when he was made. He had a few deep wrinkles and more than a sprinkling of grey hair. I liked Gideon a lot, but he was always suspicious of David's interest in other men. Vampires rarely worry about who has sex with whom, or how, but Gideon made it obvious that he considered David's sex life to be a potential threat to all of us.

David laughed. "You're just worried about what goes on in my pants."

No one responded.

Gideon turned to me. "You're not going to say anything to him, are you?"

"No," I said.

"Even though you're the oldest here," he continued.

"No. Being black is a problem that I don't have. So, I'm not saying anything."

Gideon rolled his eyes. "You know making another vampire is a bad idea, and color doesn't have anything to do with it."

I stood there, silent, as the young man began to seize.

Gideon said, "We all know war is coming. Sooner or later, these stupid ass crackers are going to war against the rest of the country. We don't need any more trouble when that happens."

I looked at Thomasina and David and said, "He's right."

Thomasina's face became clouded with doubt. Suddenly, David said, "Fuck this." He opened his wrist and put it to the boy's mouth before the rest of us could move to stop him.

David and I pulled into the IHOP parking lot near Brother Humble's hotel just in time to see him walk in with another man and take a table. It was 5 AM and the parking lot was almost empty. We sat in the car and waited for the next shoe to drop.

"What did you originally plan to do with Brother Humble?" I asked.

David sighed. "We originally planned to dump him in the trunk, drain him at the abandoned dump over the hill, then take him down to the Okefenokee and feed him to the alligators."

"That's a long drive just to dump a body."

"Well, if you're going to do a job, you should do it right," he smiled. "Besides, alligators worked for us in Mobile. Why change up now?"

I chuckled.

"In any event, given the way Marcus acted tonight, we need a new plan. So, for now, Brother Humble gets a reprieve, until Marcus is settled."

Despite Gideon's dire predictions, life after David sired Julius was quiet. Julius adapted to life as a vampire quickly, and he worked around the house was completed without complaining. Even better, David was very happy.

Julius was polite and solicitous of Thomasina, and she was glad for the help. We all took turns teaching Julius to read and write, a knowledge that was forbidden to him as a slave. Even Gideon had to admit that things were going much more smoothly than he had feared.

And then, just when we relaxed, everything blew up. It started with a visit from a neighbor.

When we moved to Memphis, I began to establish myself as a cotton trader. To the rest of the area, it appeared that I owned my fellow vampires. I had no interest in owning anyone, but David, Gideon and Thomasina weren't able to move freely and it was unusual for a wealthy white man to not own any slaves, so this ruse was helpful to all of us.

Everything was fine for a couple of years, but then I met Royce Jenkins.
Royce was a friendly neighbor, so much so that he bordered on being obnoxious. After finding out that I was nominally Catholic, Royce considered it his Christian duty to turn me into a Protestant. He seemed to take particular pleasure in dropping by unannounced to tell me about the latest sermon his minister gave, and he often offered unsolicited advice on the treatment of "nigras". Why his Christian duty didn't tell him it was wrong to own another human being I'll never know.

On the day everything changed, Royce stopped by in the afternoon to introduce me to a young man, George, whom he had hired as an overseer. Royce was sure that this moon-faced slab of ignorance would be great for his plantation, so he brought him to town to prepare for the next slave auction.

"Do you need more workers, Royce?" I asked.

Royce laughed. "Always. Darkies get sick and die and some of them just straight-up run away, so you've always got to buy new ones. It's a damn shame, but that's life."

I looked at David and said, "Isn't that a damn shame?"

David looked back at me and dropped his eyes. "It shore be a damn shame, Massa," Even with David's eyes dropped, I could hear the venom in his voice. He hated these people more than I ever could.

Royce and George held forth on the "nigras" that were to be sold at the "slave mart" on Adams street the next day. The slave mart had a series of wooden stalls for human beings who were waiting to be sold. Royce and George had examined the "goods" and seemed to be very excited to tell me all about it. I was sickened by the obvious joy they found in the enterprise, and stopped listening, not that they noticed.