Touched by an Angel

&

The Ranch

Two Short Stories by Gary Gibson

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Introduction

Gary Gibson is the author of several science fiction novels for Pan Macmillan./Tor in the United Kingdom, including Stealing Light, Nova War, Against Gravity, Angel Stations and the forthcoming Empire of Light.

Touched by An Angel was one of his first published short stories, and later became the basis for his first novel Angel Stations, published almost exactly ten years later in 2004. The story earned itself an 'honourable mention' in Gardner Dozois' 'Best SF' anthology of the following year.

The Ranch is previously unpublished and is, to the author's continuing and unending amazement, a vampire story, written shortly after announcing to a writer's group that vampire stories were entirely passé and that he himself would never write one. It is also an attempt to address the unlikely prospect that such creatures, if they existed, could possibly be the seductive creatures of the night that those who demonstrate an unhealthy interest in them might hope.

More information about his books and the author himself can be found at the website www.whitescreenofdespair.blogspot.com. His books can be bought in hardback or paperback, and also in ebook format from UK retailers. They can also be purchased, without DRM and without geographical restrictions, directly from Pan Macmillan at www.panmacmillan.com.

*****

Touched By An Angel

Gary Gibson

First published in Interzone 1994

Copyright © Gary Gibson

1.

Alis Dorican felt the book dissolve on her tongue, fresh new memories sluiced from someone else’s brain spilling into her ten year old mind. It was a history lesson, demonstrating how Angel technology had been adapted to human needs, allowing humanity to spread outwards in a bubble three hundred light years in diameter. Alis lived with her mother, an Observer for the Collective, in a gene-altered redwood that grew rooms and corridors and provided homes for over a dozen families in a cultivated forest on the edge of the lowland swamps that dominated much of south-western England. Alis wanted to be an Observer when she grew up, and had eaten many of her mother’s books on the subject of Alexander Freihold, the legendary scientist who had discovered the purpose of many of the artefacts left behind by the mysterious Angels. Even when her friends tried to drag her out to go mammoth riding through the cool English glades she would make excuses and stay in her room, remembering what it was like to stand on the topmost part of a Fulhausian Ship, watching the vast bulk of the genengineered Ship crashing through the waves of an alien planet. She’d never been there, but she didn’t let that spoil the fun.

2.

Three days after Alis finished her training in the Collective’s multiple environment station on Luna, the news came through that her mother had disappeared while on board a Ship in the northern waters of Fulhaus’ World. The Ship, two miles in length and slightly more than half that in width, had disappeared without a trace, taking a population of several thousand with it into oblivion. Officially Alis’s mother had been contracted by the Collective to negotiate in several long-running disputes over fishing rights between Fleets owned by the two main political groups on Fulhaus, the Loyal Fulhausians and the Justified Moralists. Unofficially, she was looking for Alexander Freihold. Freihold had disappeared on Fulhaus’ World more than two centuries before, during the first wave of colonisation and before the collapse of the first Singularity.

The news of the disappearance of the Ship was shrouded in vague references to colonial myths and legends - the Angels were still alive and watching humanity; the Angels snatched people and used them for strange genetic experiments; the Angels were dead, but their ghosts haunted the planets whose species they had gene-altered wholesale; the Angels had left their artefacts behind to see what humanity would do with them, and would judge it by the uses made of them. The Angels were angry at finding their Ships infested by humanity, and punished them accordingly.

\Alis’s tutor was a grizzled veteran and a die-hard supporter of the Illuminated. ‘The signs are there if you look for them,’ he used to tell her. ‘The Angels might have disappeared a hundred thousand years ago, but they were ten thousand years ahead of us. They might come back any day now. We have to be ready for that.’

Alis would shake her head. ‘It doesn’t make sense. They’re dead. We’ve inherited everything they’ve left behind.’

‘Ah, but what would they have to say about what we did with their property? There lies the question, Alis. How would they judge us?’

3.

The Oort Singularity was a sphere of superdense matter almost a light year out from the sun. From here the Collective sent out its ships filled with Observers to recontact worlds colonised shortly after the creation of the first Singularity eight hundred years before. Alis stood looking out through the transparent wall of the Oort Station at the collapsed proto-star and for the first time felt a stab of fear at the thought of what was out there. People disappeared; there were still instances where Angel artefacts hadn’t yet been explained, or killed people who tried to study or dismantle them.

She was going to Fulhaus. Before she had left Luna for the last time, her tutor slipped her a tiny vial of books which she subsequently brought with her to the edge of the solar system. They disagreed on a lot of things, but he was a good man and wanted his Observers to have an extra edge.

‘I knew your mother,’ he’d said. ‘We trained together, a long time ago. I haven’t even seen her since I retired from active duty. But we were close.’

How close was evident from one of the books; she touched it to her tongue with the Singularity hanging in the infinite night above her, and remembered the taste of his sweat, the sensation of his warm breath on her mother’s bare shoulder, and found herself experiencing her own conception. It wasn’t fashionable these days to know who your father was, but Alis had inherited a sentimental streak from her mother, and felt tears trickle down her cheek.

4.

Government House was made of wide bone arches a hundred years tall, pairs of them leaning against each other in rows to form the arched roof that reminded Alis of medieval cathedrals, if Hieronymous Bosch had ever had a hand in building one. It was raining, a warm rain that constantly pattered on roofs and streamed down sloping Fulhausian streets. Most people lived on the Ships; the total living area on board the many thousands of Ships was many times the land area of Fulhaus itself.

Fulhaus was an ocean world, the only land a scattering of islands large and small around the equatorial regions. Government House stood on Fulhaus Island, site of the First Landing. Alis stood on a wide promontory and watched a Ship sailing by under an alien sky, traces of early morning mist drifting by its colossal hull. Two miles long, almost one mile wide. The upper decks glittered with the diamond sprinkle of the lights of human habitation, an entire floating city following the warm ocean currents of the equator and the nomadic shoals of fish that it and the colonists survived on. She tried hard to remember it, every detail, every nuance, desperately wanting to capture the memory for future reference and cataloguing.

5.

Jonathan Van Iendos was a spy. His parents had been Representatives for the Mulden Fleet, which had allied itself to the Justified Moralists and their pro-Collective stance. He believed his parents had been murdered by Captain Van Orleos, a High Council member and staunch supporter of the anti-Collective Loyal Fulhausians, who favoured independence at any cost. Van Iendos had sworn to take the Captain’s life as revenge. The Fulhausians, Alis noted, were big on revenge. It was strangely like stepping through time to an earlier and simpler era.

‘If you can prove Van Orleos is suppressing information about undiscovered Angel tech, the Collective will hand him to you on a plate,’ Alis said.

‘What happens if he and the Loyalists go on ignoring the Collective’s demands?’

She shrugged. ‘The most likely result is that a military contingency from Earth will turn up one of these days and take over.’

Van Iendos frowned. ‘I always thought that the Collective preferred to avoid using force. Aren’t they more into negotiation?’

‘They are, but the Illuminated aren’t. They’re the problem.’ Van Iendos shook his head, not recognising the term.

‘The Illuminated,’ she explained. ‘A pressure group within the Collective. They believe Angel tech should be abandoned and left for the Angels in case they decide to come back.’

‘Come back?’ He shook his head at this nonsense. ‘Children’s fairy tales.’

‘To you, maybe.’ She thought of her father; in his last letter he had said he had fully embraced Illuminated philosophy, and abandoned the use of chemical books.

6.

They rose above the Ship in a glass-walled elevator that produced a spectacular view uniquely designed to induce vertigo. The whole Ship gradually tapered upwards towards the aft, enormous misshapen buildings growing directly out of the Ship’s hull like thousands of brightly jewelled mushrooms reaching towards the sky. She realised, not for the first time, that the whole thing was alive, an enormous living entity that dwarfed the humans that had made their life here. As they rose into the sky she could see some of the monkey-like parasites that formed part of the complex floating ecology of the Ships hanging and dropping and leaping across lumpy protrusions in the gnarled, wood-like surfaces. Walking through the intricate corridors and multitudinous levels of the Ship was an experience in itself - the way the corridors curved in sinuous organic lines, the patterns of the body of the Ship twisting along the length of the vaguely oval corridors. All grown from a single organism over thousands of years. Alis knew genetic engineering - life on many of the worlds now colonised by mankind would be impossible without it. But the scale on which the Angels had performed it was incredible, on all the worlds they had touched. They had been gone a hundred thousand years, but the mark of their passing might last a billion or more.

Something rammed the Ship and she heard its entire mass groan under the weight of the impact. She felt her stomach lurch and saw something black and enormous moving under the Ship, foam churning where its enormous tentacles smashed against the Ship’s bow far, far below. The Leviathans were almost as big as the Ships themselves, and were believed by many within the Collective to be the product of Angel tech as much as the Ships. Van Orleos and the Loyalists intended to begin culling the Leviathans within days because of the threat they posed to the fishing fleets.

7.

The deepsea research base had been abandoned for centuries. Van Iendos directed the two-man submersible until it clanged against the metal hull of the base. Robot arms with cutting torches burned through the thick metal walls and constructed a sealed passageway.

The interior of the base was dust and dried bones. They identified Freihold from the records and a quick genetic scan of the remains. Alis found some chemical books in a drawer and ate them, remembering how Freihold had himself adapted the Angel tech to human physiology. Memories almost a thousand years old filled her mind and she understood.

8.

The Leviathan was awesome as it moved through the caverns of light deep under the surface of the sea. It should have been frightening, terrifying, but Alis thought it was beautiful. Tentacles drifted through the water around its enormous bulk, scooping up plankton and small fish and ingesting them. They steered carefully, aware that impacting with one of those tentacles would kill them both.

‘They’ve always been there,’ said Van Iendos. ‘Since the first colonists came here. They eat the food we need to survive. That’s how wars happen here.’

‘It used to be a Ship.’

‘What?’

‘Really. That’s the secret of the Leviathans. The Leviathans and the Ships are different phases of the same species. When that Ship disappeared with my mother on board, it sank to the sea bottom and began to transform into a Leviathan.’

A series of slow booms slammed through the water; the shock waves sent the submersible flying. The Loyalists had over-ridden the Collective and begun slaughtering Leviathans. It occurred to Alis that war was probably imminent.

9.

Captain Van Orleos was a big man with a face like a dull knife and a mind like a well-honed axe. Alis stood beside him on the bridge and watched Fulhausian aircraft wheel and dip above a sea that was the colour of blood.

‘We are engaged in a war of life,’ Van Orleos boomed. ‘This is a world of limited resources. We are in direct competition with these creatures for those resources.’

Alis was acting in her official capacity as an Observer as part of a last-ditch attempt to halt the culling operation. Before he had died Alexander Freihold had identified a specific sequence in the genetic makeup of Angel-altered species that served as a kind of genetic signature. Find that signature and you had found the Angels’ legacy. Other Observers at that very moment would be attempting to smuggle Freihold’s discoveries past the Loyalist’s militia.

It was a two-fold problem; the Illuminated would gain from the Loyalists refusal to stop killing the living products of Angel tech. It would allow them to push the Collective into military action it might not otherwise take. What had once been a semi-religious philosophy had been converted into a tool for gaining political power. Political expediency prevented her father from writing any more letters to her.

‘Sir, my job is to assess the impact of the Fulhausian population on Angel-altered species. You must understand that we have information that proves the Leviathans are of the same species as the Ships.’

Van Orleos stared at her in shock. Then a craftiness came into his face. They understood each other then. ‘There’s no way you could prove that.’

‘But there is. You know that as well as I do. You must desist from this wholesale slaughter. The Ships are living products of Angel tech; it’s in their genetic code.’

‘Observer, you may yourself be aware that Fulhaus’s World has done very well for itself without the interference of anything like the Collective for several centuries. It was things like the Collective that caused my ancestors to leave Earth almost a thousand years ago. The Leviathans decimate the shoals that this Ship normally follows. Given the choice between starvation and survival, I might suggest we be allowed to live our lives as we will.’

Alis sighed. ‘I am trying to avert a war here. Surely you can see the wider implications? The Illuminated could gain control of the Collective. It would be bad news for you and bad news for many other people in other colonies.’

He shook his head. ‘That is not my concern. We came here to mind our own business, and I have no time for fairy tales about long-dead aliens no one has even seen. That is my final word.’

‘There’s no way I can persuade you otherwise?’

‘Absolutely not. Now get off my bridge.’ He turned away.

‘I see. I’m sorry that’s the case.’ She pressed the tiny switch she held in her hand and watched Van Orleos choke to death. Fortunately they were alone. The drug that had been placed in his food earlier only needed to be activated with the appropriate signal to stop his lungs working. It was the only way, but not one Alis necessarily regretted.

10.

Her father was being held in a low-security prison on Titan. Good behaviour had earned him a bubble window that looked out onto the Saturnian clouds.

‘Alis. I’m glad to see you.’

She nodded. ‘I’m sorry it had to be this way.’ War had been narrowly averted. Assassinating Van Orleos had thrown the Loyalists into such confusion that the culling operation was easily halted. The Collective had come out on top and the Illuminated were in disarray.

‘You said something very mysterious in your last letter, Alis. Some big secret you had to tell me.’

She nodded. ‘You know that genetic tag we found in the Ships and the Leviathans? The one Freihold discovered? It’s in us as well.’

Her father stared at her in confusion. ‘But that would mean ...’

‘That the Angels altered us as well. That we’re just as special as anything else the Angels touched. It means the Illuminated have no real purpose. Think about it. How could the Angels ever complain about something they might even have had a hand in creating playing with their other toys?’

He looked confused; he’d changed in the years since she’d last seen him, become an old man. It made it more difficult for him to look at things in a new way.

11.

Alis looked down at her wrinkled old woman’s hands and touched the ganglial controls. The whole Ship shuddered and slowly began to change direction. Enormous frond-like limbs hanging down from the bottom of the hull moved in new patterns, pushing against the current. She was its Captain, its ruler.

She looked down, feeling a sharp pain in her side; part of the wood-like hull had somehow grown a tiny branch, stabbing her in her side.

One of the monkey-like parasites outside the Bridge stopped and stared in at her. ‘It’s a matter of understanding, Alis,’ it said, which was impossible, because they were primitive creatures and incapable of thought or speech. ‘You can get lonely, even entire species do that. We needed someone to talk to.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Her hand quivered, trying to tug out the branch. But it remained firm.

‘Remember us, Alis. Remember us as we were, not how you imagine us to be. We’re not angels.’

She saw them, remembering a proud civilisation that had spread across the universe and ruled it for ten thousand years, but there had been no one else out there. Could a species die of loneliness?

‘You’re dying, Alis. You don’t have to die forever. Join us.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Our genetic code is preserved piecemeal in everything we touched. The Ships, you. We can help you, if you want it.’

She felt a burst of pain deep in her chest and she slid to the floor. Black specks danced in front of her eyes. Suddenly the pain disappeared and she looked up to see a figure standing over her. Her mother looked down at her and Alis looked around in confusion. Strange lights danced around her and she was somehow young again. She reached out to one of the lights and touched an angel.

THE END

copyright © Gary Gibson

*****

The Ranch

by Gary Gibson

The room in which I spend my existence is five metres long, four wide. The floor is thickly carpeted, and a television sits in one corner, tuned permanently to a sex channel. At the moment, however, it has been switched off, as per my latest client’s request. Opposite the only exit from the room is a bed: a mirror is mounted on the ceiling above, a second on an adjacent wall. The bed is styled after the kind of four-poster favoured by Southern dames in old black and white films set in the days of slavery. A cabinet stands nearby, in which can be found the many implements of my enforced trade, as well as a variety of costumes none of which, mercifully, I have yet been required to use. My clothing is simple: plain black slacks, low-heeled Italian shoes, and a black shirt open at the neck.

There are three cameras in the room - one mounted and visible in the corner above the wall mirror, another concealed within the ceiling light panels, while a third can be found lurking behind the ceiling mirror. Both mirrors are two-way.

The door is locked. There are no windows. This room is my cell, my purgatory.

I pace, feeling weak, dizzy with hunger. I catch sight of myself in the wall mirror: sallow cheeks, a light spattering of stubble, the cast of my face perhaps betraying a distant Italian ancestry. My name for the past few decades has been Carl Mencken. Before that, I remember little beyond a colourless mishmash of vague images and sensations that no longer have any meaning to me. I know only that that for seven months and nine days I have been a prisoner in this place.

A metallic rattle emerges from a speaker mounted just below the main, visible camera: Josie, clearing her wrinkled throat from somewhere at the other end of the Ranch. I can almost smell the unfiltered cigarette gripped between her polished fingernails, her hair a tight nightmare tangle of tired peroxide curls.

“Mencken, honey?” The voice brittle, old, tired. “Got your next client on the way.”

I can easily picture the roadhouses where Josie would have spent her formative years working behind a bar, the drive-ins where video store employees and truckers would have struggled to impregnate her in the back of their pick-ups. Now all that is left is a rancid, over-perfumed shell, a dozen carcinomas no doubt fruiting in the choked black soil of her lungs. In the vast boredom of my cell, I have constructed an entire life history for this woman.

“I want you to treat her real good, okay?” the voice continues. “She’s watched you through the mirror coupla times, now she wants to ride the Mencken train.” The voice fractures into a laugh that sounds like a series of seizures. I feel my knuckles whiten at my sides.

“You there, Mencken? Better say somethin’. Wouldn’t want to send in the boys with the tasers, now, would I?”

No, I wouldn’t want that. Not at all. “I hear you, Josie,” I reply, gazing in the direction of the microphone.

“Good boy. Comin’ through in just a minute or so. No special requests, just wants a good time. Bet you’re glad of that.”

I nod tightly, forcing a thin smile on my face. I imagine Josie’s life pouring from her, from the great red raw wound I would make of her throat.

A minute passes. I know what lies beyond the locked door: a corridor, its walls decorated with flocked red wallpaper, leading to other rooms occupied by creatures of whom I know little except that they are like me. At the far end of this corridor is the security room, occupied by beings of an entirely different nature, working in shifts around the clock: men wearing concealing black Kevlar, their faces hidden behind visors and helmets, feet shod with heavy boots that lace up to the knees, powerful and deadly weaponry within easy reach - deadly even to the likes of me. I fear them more than anything, and the things they might do to me if I gave them reason.

Because of this I am obedient.

A knock on the door: small knuckles against wood panelling. I step over, and gently turn the handle, finding the electronic lock has now been deactivated. My client is standing there, small, like me: a little over five and a half feet in height, although some ancient fragment of memory tells me I was once considered tall, even imposing.

Her hair is expensively streaked Texas blonde, and in my imagination her story opens up to me: a life lacking excitement or danger, with only the common rituals of graduation and marriage and perhaps motherhood to alleviate the dullness eating at the heart of her. In her eyes I read the desire for something more, something to satisfy the secret needs that lurk deep within her heart.

To learn of the Ranch’s existence, she would have had to become part of certain exclusive circles: perhaps, like so many, a boyfriend or a husband took her to a wife-swapping party or a club catering to certain erotic tastes. As time passed, and her little perversions and games took on a particular flavour, the Ranch might be mentioned: a word here, a word there. She would have expressed curiosity, and would have laughed in disbelief when the truth was finally revealed to her. Eventually, given time, she would have believed, or at least dared to hope.

And now she stands before me, several thousand dollars out of pocket. At least I don’t come cheap.

“My name is Carl,” I tell her, pulling the door wider. I smile gently, ever conscious of the watching cameras and the guards in the security room. “Would you like to come in?”

I watch doubt flit over her features; she’s thinking of turning back. Blonde, but not so pretty. Lovers would not have been a given in her formative years. She has, no doubt, developed a rich fantasy life to compensate.

Then she steps into the room and smiles nervously. She eyes the bed behind me. In one delicate hand I see that she grips a tiny, useless crucifix with which, Josie will have informed her, she will be able to control me. This is nonsense, of course, but to suggest anything else would bring days of torture upon me, followed by much worse weeks or even months without sustenance. I had once before made this mistake, when I had first been brought to the Ranch. Never again.

“Would you like something to drink?” I ask, waving one hand towards the tiny mobile bar that sits in one corner. Sometimes alcohol helps them, if they aren’t already drunk or high. “Don’t worry if you’re apprehensive, most are. You’ll be fine.”

Doubt and desire war across her face: I can see the lust is winning. “You’re not real,” she tells me.

“I am entirely real,” I assure her. “I can show you,” I add, lowering my voice.

“You’d better.” I can hear her heart hammering in her chest: her breathing is sharp and shallow. I know what to do. I take both her hands and gently draw her closer to me. I smile and draw a hand through her hair; she gasps in response. I am filled only with loathing.

I study her clothes. She wears expensive black jeans, and her demeanour and way of speaking would make it clear to all who encountered her that she comes from money. She would have to, to afford the Ranch’s prices. I could tell you in that instant of the books that occupy her bookshelves, of the movies she watches late at night, dreaming of her vampire lover. I could tell you how little she truly lives in the here and now.

Her tension doesn’t fade, but she’s no longer as frightened: instead, she’s allowing herself to believe. She glances towards the main camera, the only one they would have told her about. She’s enjoying the frisson of danger gained from being alone, in a locked room, with a killer.

“Show me,” she says.

I lean down and kiss her. The harsh light of the ceiling panels leaches the colour from her skin. I gaze past her, at my own, entirely visible reflection, with pale blank eyes. Remembering.

*****

I do not know how I came to be, or where I am from. Sometimes I dream of places that might be Rome, or might be Paris, or Berlin, or London: that might be a few years or half a millennia in the past. I have no way of telling, for I never kept records. To do so would have been to provide a surfeit of willing executioners the means to find me. Unfortunately, my memories fade quickly.

There is no romance or pleasure in my life: I am driven only to survive. I can last for weeks, even months, without sustenance, but for all that time I carry a raging hunger worse than any of my victims could possibly imagine, because they at least can look forward to the peace of death. Perhaps I also have that option, but having always survived, I cannot know.

Here in the Ranch, they bring dead down-and-outs washed up in canals or business rivals with bullet holes neatly drilled in their foreheads for us to feed upon. It is not enough, never enough.

When the hunger has hold of you, it slams you to the ground, makes you scream night after night after night, reducing your thoughts and your existence to an unquenchable, devouring misery. In order to survive, you learn to stalk your victims over days, then weeks and even months: and when you know the time is right, when you know there are no witnesses, you strike. Often your victim is a woman, simply because it is easier to disguise your assault as a sexual one: and if those investigating notice a remarkable lack of blood, well, hopefully you are long gone by then.

But the time after feeding is the weakest: then you are so filled with all the joy of creation that you cannot move, cannot walk, instead merely lie wriggling on the ground like a piss-drenched drunkard. Or else you stumble incoherently, vomiting red because you have gorged yourself too much. And when that wonderful, heaven-blessed rush fades, you are left only with the hollowness of your existence, and the desperate need to escape.

Before the Ranch, I believe I came across those like me only twice. This I do remember: I killed them both, immediately. Their bodies rotted like any other.

My last memory before the Ranch is of San Francisco. I had arrived there by Greyhound. My first – and last - victim there had been a sailor, living in a houseboat in San Francisco Bay. I had answered his lonely-hearts advert. We had enjoyed a few drinks in a bar near the sea, while I sat consumed with such terrible agonising hunger I wanted to shriek until my lungs were raw. We retired to his home and I tore his neck open with a knife taken from the galley. I wept and moaned and shuddered with orgasms of pleasure as his blood gushed against my tongue.

That was when they caught me, as I lay supine in the night, the cabin walls around me drenched with scarlet. I heard their boots approaching across the pontoon, and knew I was done. I expected to die. Instead, they sprayed a gas in my face that made my skin boil and lesion.

When they brought me to the Ranch a few days later, I learned my first lessons quickly. Tasers, whips, sprays and rubber bullets made sure of that.

*****

“Show me,” she repeats. I stare at her, waiting for her to elaborate.

“Your …” she points hesitantly at my face.

I smile obligingly, trying not to look too menacing. I open my lips slightly, and felt the emerging canines press against my upper lips as they push down. She shudders and pales at the sight, and for a moment I think she might run. I don’t care one way or the other: I have performed as required, and the money is not refundable. But she holds her ground.

Now the important part. I again lower my head towards her, watching her lips open in unconscious response. She stiffens again, and I stop for a moment, before continuing. She’s been briefed on the rules, which had been long ago drilled into me. She can stop me at any time: it only requires a word.

She remains silent. I touch my lips, very gently, to her neck. She jerks away at first, and then holds her place. She whimpers with fright and desire. I lick her neck, very softly, just allowing the tip of one sharpened canine to barely contact the taut pink flesh. Her tiny fingers grip my upper arms, still holding onto the ridiculous crucifix.

And then I pull back, aware as always of the cameras, the guards.

“There’s no hurry,” I tell her, conscious that every word is part of the game. I gaze into her eyes, ignoring the dull pain that has been building in my bones and my flesh for days now, soon to become a soul-crushing festival of agony. I think of Josie, and of how she would laugh if she could see into my thoughts.

“My name’s Susie,” she tells me, as I draw her slowly over towards the bed.

“Susie,” I repeat, as if savouring the name.

“You know what I want, right?” Her voice is lowered, hesitant. I nod. The instructions, run off on a desktop printer, had been slipped under the door a half hour before Susie’s arrival. I step backwards towards the bed, drawing her along with my hands, maintaining the illusion that I am the one in charge.

*****

I feel her fingers draw sharply across my chest as I lie back. How many times had she stood on the other side of the two-way mirror with the wealthy select audiences who pay so much for their seats, letting her fantasy grow of when her own time in this room would come?

My arms are outstretched, as if about to embrace her. She is, in fact, safe from my all-vanquishing hunger: I could no sooner allow myself to cause her harm than she could imagine the sordid reality of my existence. I am her whore, her fuck-puppet. I am less than nothing.

I remove my shirt at the prearranged time, as specified in the instructions detailing the intricate course of Suzie’s fantasy. I have already unbuttoned my trousers, and they have been pushed down to my hips. I lie, exposed, upon the bed. She kneels half-naked upon my prostrate form and grasps my cock with clumsy hands, her breath ragged.

I become hard, not out of desire, but out of fear of what might happen to me if I do not respond as expected.

*****

Sunlight does not greatly affect us. Pale skin is more a symptom of lurking in hiding places far from the light of the sun. We are visible in mirrors. Garlic, for some reason unknown to me, burns us greatly. Stakes kill us, but so do bullets and knives, though we can survive far greater physical trauma than the likes of Suzie or Josie.

Once, they set an example.

A few short months before, I had been manacled, chained and marched under guard into an atrium deep within the sprawling vastness of the Ranch. The atrium was open to the skies, and for the first time in many long weeks I saw real sunlight and tasted fresh air.

There were a dozen others already there, similarly chained and manacled and under guard, whom I instantly knew to be the same as myself. I ignored them, knowing I could not kill them at that time. I saw a man – his body wasted beyond belief – chained to a tall steel pole driven into a block of concrete in the centre of the atrium. I knew immediately he was also of my own kind. Certainly, no ordinary human could have remained alive with his body in so desiccated a state.

Wil was the owner of the Ranch, a tall, rangy Texan who always carried a hunting knife on his hip. I had heard whispered stories from a few of my clients that he owned and ran most of the whorehouses in this part of the country as well as operating websites and organising paid parties for the rich and sexually jaded. He also carried a bullwhip on this particular day, and strutted around us, eyeing us one by one.

“I want you to know what happens when you try to hurt one of my clients,” Wil bellowed, his voice strident and self-assured, his potbelly pushing at his shirt buttons. “I want you to know I can be real fucking mean when my orders don’t get obeyed. I want you to see what happens.”

I learned later that the individual chained to the steel post – I never found out his name, not that I would have cared – had been carefully starved for the better part of six months following some unspecified transgression. I can only imagine he tried to attack one of his clients while in the despair of hunger. He was, quite literally, a walking skeleton. What happened next was appalling beyond measure, and I cannot deny I learned my lesson well.

They sprayed him with hoses, twice: the first time with a mixture of garlic, water and sand at high pressure, which simultaneously burned his skin with the effect of the garlic and near flayed him alive with the sand. He was, quite literally, scoured half to death.

But it didn’t end there. Next, they sprayed him with corrosive acids. I watched his skeleton melt: and towards the end, even then, I knew there was something still alive in that melting ruin. What was left, they shovelled into a hole in the ground and covered over.

Always I dreamed of freedom: yet I could not countenance the thought of what happened in that courtyard happening to me.

And so I obeyed every client’s whim to the letter.

*****

I lie back and let her take me. She manoeuvres me between her legs, while I try to appear as if I am enjoying myself. She leans down and whispers to me, “Don’t worry, nobody’s watching.”

I glance towards the two-way mirror, an involuntary motion. I open my mouth, then close it again before I can tell her what an idiotic proposition this is.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she says, cupping my jaw with one hand and turning my head back towards her. “I paid extra so we’d be left alone. Ain’t nobody on the other side of that glass. Now, I want you to kiss me.”

Not so shy, after all. My lips part, and she leans down. I know what she wants: I push my lips back until my extended canines are fully visible.

She leans down, her hips beginning to move rhythmically now I’m inside her. I feel sure she’ll come quite soon. Perhaps I once took pleasure from this act, but instead of pleasure I only ever feel a kind of dull tingle between my thighs.

One thing I have learned in my time here. Male vampires, myself included, all have unusually small genitals. Perhaps there is a reason for this. If we truly evolved from some common human ancestor, as some apparently speculate, perhaps we have some other means of reproduction and the penis has become an evolutionary dead-end for our kind. Or perhaps we truly rise from the grave, but our lack of sexual interest causes the organ to wither over time. For all I know, we reproduce by splitting down the middle every thousand years. I have no way of knowing or remembering, and care less.

Her lips touch my cheek, and I can hear the frantic rush of her every breath. “I want you to bite me,” she says.

I feel my penis begin to shrivel rapidly.

“Bite me,” she repeats, laying soft kisses across my chin and other cheek. This was not in the instructions.

“It’s against the rules,” I croak. “They would …”

I can taste her life, she’s so close: she’s a bag of blood, and the hunger is a whirling maelstrom in my guts.

She twists suddenly to one side, and slaps me, hard, and then again. Did the little bitch actually want me to kill her?

“I can do worse to you,” she hisses, her irises wide and black. I wonder what she’s sniffed or swallowed for courage in a washroom before walking down the corridor to me. She shows me a small perfume bottle, carefully palmed so it is visible neither to the main camera nor to the one-way mirror on the wall. I can only speculate as to how she smuggled it into my cell, since all are searched before coming to me.

She slides the bottle between our bodies, moving it down towards my crotch. I feel a sudden cool moist pressure against the inside of my thigh: the pain comes a moment later and my back arches violently in response. I try to scream, but she’s clamped her other hand firmly over my mouth. I feel the crucifix press hard against my gums and cheek.

Garlic spray. My eyes fill with tears, and a keening sound escapes between her fingers. I’m lost in animal panic. What does she intend?

“Bite me,” she repeats again, her voice harsh. “Make me like you.”

No, I want to scream. Make her like me? Impossible. I don’t even know what makes me like me. My panicked eyes dart again towards the watching camera: but now I’m seeking aid rather than the opportunity of escape.

“Listen to me,” I mumble through her fingers. She’s stronger than she looks.

“One wrong word, and I’ll spray you again,” she loudly whispers, madness in her eyes. I can picture my skin bubbling under the effect of the spray, and hold back the desire to release the agony in a shriek. Whatever happens to Suzie, it won’t be half as bad as what will happen to me. She releases her hold slightly.

It’s hard to speak through the pain, but my existence depends on it. “I can’t make you like me,” I tell her, forcing the words out.

She presses the bulb of the spray against my crotch once more and I convulse. “You’re a vampire! You can turn me. You’re lying! Make me like you!”

“You would die,” I beg. “And then they would kill me.”

“I don’t believe you. Do it.”

I shake my head. “I have never made anyone a vampire. I don’t know if they can be made.”

She reaches down and grabs me by the hair. “I am telling you to turn me,” she hisses in a half-shriek; I can hear the growing desperation in her voice.

She slaps me several times again. The blows sting. And then I laugh. It’s so ridiculous: after so long, trapped in a room like some pathetic Hollywood wet dream of a vampire’s boudoir, with some idiot Texas housewife so addled by her deranged fantasies she thinks I can turn her into something she could only ever dream of in her worst nightmares.

She becomes furious at my laughter, but I can’t stop. She slaps me again, but I only laugh harder.

“They’re going to kill you, you stupid bastard!” she screams at me. “So you might as well do it anyway!” She sobs then, muttered curses spilling out of her mouth. The desire for death and oblivion is written in her eyes. She throws herself over me, the smooth curve of her neck next to my face, and begs me yet again.

“What do you mean, they’re going to kill me?” I ask, my own blood thundering in my ears.

“That’s what I heard. There’s too many people heard about this place, so they’re gonna shut it down real soon. Won’t want you round in case anyone figures out what’s going on here.” Her expression becomes vicious, and I see her plan unravelling: she came here intending to force me to ‘turn’ her into a vampire so she can no doubt lurk on moonlit rooftops, perhaps wearing the impractical black velvet dresses I can easily picture hanging in her wardrobe.

“You’re lying,” I stutter.

She shakes her head rapidly. “So turn me now, and we can escape together.”

By now I’m completely incredulous. But for some reason, I believe her: I’ve learned to read people over all those long, long years, to know when they are or aren’t lying. And she’s telling the truth, as far as she knows it. The Ranch will close: and I will die. Suddenly any other possibility seems absurd. How long, after all, could an entity like the Ranch continue to exist, before rumour and hearsay spread too far? Before it came under investigation? And when the time came, could any of its unwilling whores truly expect to survive?

“I’ll do it,” I tell her. Terror and the desire to believe again war with each other across her face. I lift myself carefully, trying to gauge how many seconds I have left. Is Josie listening in to our conversation? Of course she is, sitting there no doubt in some little cupboard surrounded by screens and microphones and speakers. How many seconds do I have before the guards come and drag this idiotic child away, and punish me? Very few.

Necessity can make anyone a great actor. I look up at her, putting on the brave, noble face so many of them seem to like, and beckon to her.

She’s trembling. I still her, and bring my incisors close to her neck. Perhaps, if I do nothing, they will let me live regardless. Perhaps I am wrong, and she is indeed lying about the future of the Ranch. But if she’s telling the truth, I can defy their authority with Suzie’s death.

I touch incisors to flesh, and pause, indecisive.

In the distance, I hear shouts, and boots slamming against soft carpet, coming closer.

END

Copyright © Gary Gibson 2009.