 "Behold and Become"
(Excerpt)
by David M. Fitzpatrick
“I deal with being an albino all right,”
I said to the Goth chick in the nightclub, “but, yeah, it seems like being
dealt a bad hand in life.”
She was honestly interested, looking at
me with a face almost as white as my own, through eyes surrounded by black
eye shadow. “So what causes it?” she asked.
“Well, normal folks like you have plenty
of melanin to give their skin pigmentation. I have none.”
She smiled through black lipstick, and
her dark eyes sparkled in the neon light. “I wouldn’t consider myself
normal,” she said.
I grinned. “Check that. Anyway, the
result is the whitest white boy you’ve ever seen.”
“I like white,” she said, sipping her
black Russian. A hundred Goth nightclubbers were enjoying some nameless
Goth tune droning too loudly. “I think it’s natural. Getting a tan isn’t,
or else people wouldn’t need melanin to begin with.”
“There’s nothing natural about burning
up,” I told her, downing the rest of my beer. “I can’t be out in the sun
even on a bright winter day.”
“I can think of many people in my circle
of friends who would kill to have your condition,” she said. “There are
some people who take the vampire thing too seriously. They have their
teeth sharpened… the whole nine yards.”
“That’s ridiculous. Hell, they can have
my albinism if they want to play vampire so badly. They can have all the
physical and social problems.”
She regarded me thoughtfully while
sipping her drink. “It must have been hard for you as a child. It was
difficult for me, dressing and acting the way I do… people have a hard
time accepting things they don’t understand.”
I wasn’t sure if I should tell her, but
somehow I wanted to. “About that teeth-sharpening thing...” I smiled,
showing my teeth. I saw her eyes widen in surprise as she studied the
long, sharp canines jutting abnormally low.
“No way,” she said. “You had them
pointed?”
“They’re natural.”
“Seriously?”
“Yep. So in addition to having the
complexion of a vampire, I have fangs to boot. Yet another ‘bad card’
dealt.” I laughed. “But I deal with it.”
“Holy shit,” she said, and perhaps she
was a little nervous then.
I pulled the chain out of my shirt,
displaying the huge silver crucifix. “Don’t worry. I’m not the real
thing.”
“I didn’t take you for the religious
type,” she said.
“Hardly. I just never know when I’ll meet
some wacko who’s convinced I really am a vampire. This usually dissuades
him.”
We stared into each other’s eyes for a
few long seconds. She said, “Your eyes are positively red. I mean, pink
where they should be white, and really pink where they should have color…
but your pupils are really red.”
“That’s albinism,” I said. “My hair isn’t
black, you know. This is a wig. It’s white.”
“Lemme see.”
I lifted the wig a bit and showed her.
She shook her head with obvious admiration. “I’m sorry, I know how it must
suck, but in some way it’s… just cool.”
It was, a little; always had been,
despite how it was miserable at the same time. I’d spent a lifetime being
used to it, and dealing with it by finding the good in it. We stared at
each other some more—she over her half-gone drink, me over my empty beer
stein. “There’s one more bit,” I said. “I’m allergic to garlic.”
Her face turned to stone. “No way.”
“Way. And it’s not psychological or
anything. I almost died from a severe reaction to it was when I was
five—too young to understand vampires, or at least to understand the whole
garlic connection. My Uncle Glen came in from Chicago and insisted on
making his prize spaghetti sauce, which involved more garlic than any one
person should ever be subjected to, allergy or not. It almost killed me.”
“Wow,” she breathed. “Your childhood must
have been messed up.”
“I got beat up a lot. Mostly, I heard
every single vampire joke you could imagine.”
“Did you date much?” she said.
I hadn’t been with many women, and the
few I had only since I started hitting the Goth nightclub scene—finding
people who enjoyed things like pale faces and vampire lore. “Hell, no.
There wasn’t a girl passing by in school who didn’t whip out a compact
mirror and jam it in my face. For the record, I do reflect.”
She grinned, the first fully normal—or
average—human grin since I’d met her. In that moment, she wasn’t some Goth
chick playing a role—she was just another person, just like I was just
another person behind the masks of albinism and alleged vampirism.
Then she said, “Have you ever done
anything… vampiric?”
The question caught me totally off-guard.
I knew I blinked too many times in rapid succession before I managed, “I’m
not sure I understand the question.”
“Ever drink blood?”
It had seemed I’d been constructing an
Eiffel Tower of confidence within me, beam by beam, over the past half
hour. I’d been sure she truly was normal, just a girl in a costume, really
interested in the person I am. But she was just another Goth freak
obsessed with vampires and all that crap. I sighed. “It’s getting late.”
“No, wait,” she said. The look on her
face was that of someone who has just realized she’s accidentally used a
naughty word in church. “I wasn’t teasing. I wasn’t trying to insult you…
it was a legitimate question.”
I slid my chair back. “I’m sure it was,”
I said politely, “but I’m not into the whole vampire thing. I guess I
thought you weren’t, either.”
“Please—” she started, and her eyes
pleaded with me. I couldn’t get up and leave, and I didn’t know why. She
reached across the table and her warm hand covered mine. “I’m just…
fascinated by you. I’m fascinated by a man in your condition who managed
to live his life without giving in to his tormentors.”
Her hand felt good. It was warm and she
was squeezing mine lightly. I felt a stirring in my loins, and suddenly I
knew I wanted to be touched by her all over, and touch her.
“I’m sure it doesn’t look like it,” she
said, “but I don’t do this sort of thing often. But I live around the
corner, and I’d like it if you came home with me tonight.”
Numbly, I nodded, and whispered that I
would.
* * *
I’d had intercourse with exactly a dozen
women up until then, but they’d all been clubbers interested only in the
novelty of screwing the closest thing to a real vampire they’d imagined.
This woman was beyond fantastic. I’d never known the feeling of closeness,
oneness, sheer ecstasy, as I did that night. We made love for hours, over
and over, until morning.
The earliest rays of dawn were streaking
through the third floor window as we lay, recovering, preparing to drift
off into contented sleep. Her head was on my shoulder as I lay on my back.
She suddenly said, “Can I give you a hickey?”
She hadn’t even nibbled on me during all
of that, although her mouth had spent a lot of time kissing my neck and
throat. “I suppose so.”
“It’s gonna hurt,” she said. “I bite
hard.”
“Why? Are you a vampire?”
She chuckled. “You have the look, I’ll
grant you that. But I’ve got the weird fascination with drinking blood.”
I’d jumped around about my feelings for
this woman, whose name, I realized just then, I still didn’t know. And now
she was back on the strange track.
She seemed to know what I was thinking.
“I’m not a freak. It’s just… you can’t understand unless you’ve tried it.
I feel very close to you and… I want to feel closer. It’s the only way I
know how.”
I had no idea how to answer that. I
wanted to get out of her bed, get dressed, and run away; but at the same
time, I wanted to fulfill this bizarre desire of hers. I stared at her in
the darkness, watched her watching me.
Finally, she said very quietly, “My name
is Heather.”
Not knowing what else to say, and still
feeling awkward, I said, “That’s pretty. Not very Goth, though.”
“I’m really not very Goth at all.”
We fixed eyes in the brightening morning,
and somehow she just didn’t seem like a freak at all. “My name’s Nantai.”
“I’ve never heard a name like that
before,” she said, and she was stroking my neck lightly, right at the
crook by my shoulder.
“It’s Navajo.”
“Really? You’re Indian?”
“My grandfather was full-blooded. He
insisted on traditional names. Southwestern American Indians have the
highest occurrences of albinism, you know.”
She giggled. “That’s ironic… didn’t the
Indians call the white man ‘Pale Face?’”
“Oh, like I haven’t heard that one
before.”
“Sorry.” She giggled against my chest,
stroked my neck. “So are you gonna let me?”
It was either an innocent fantasy or an
unhealthy obsession. Either way, I was too involved with this person now
to get dressed and run away, and I think we both knew it. “Do you want to
that badly?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not going to rip open my carotid
artery, are you?”
“No, silly! Lower, right here—” she ran
her fingertips in a tight circle at the crook of my neck “—I’ll just give
you a hickey. But you’ll bleed a little.”
“This is crazy.”
“Maybe.”
I sighed. “Okay.”
I might have flipped a switch. In
seconds, she had climbed atop me and leaned down. Her soft breasts crushed
against my white chest, and her damp fur tickled me, stirring me a bit.
She kissed her way from my left pectoral up to my neck, and that was it
for the foreplay. She muckled on to my skin with a powerful suction and
began working. Already it was the harshest hickey I’d ever received.
Her hands roamed up and down my sides,
from hips to armpits, with lives of their own. Her body moved in a steady
rhythm, in concert with her hands and the regular, pulsing sucking of her
mouth. Her hips gyrated slowly, bringing me to life. She suctioned harder,
working the skin with her teeth, and now it hurt a bit. Her hands moved
faster now, stroking my body with a firmer touch, gliding up over my
shoulders to squeeze them before retreating to slide under my ass. It felt
as if she had six hands: sliding, groping, squeezing, up and down, all
over. All the while, her breasts, silky and smooth, ground against me, her
nipples like hot coals tracing fiery patterns on my chest. Her hips ground
in hard circles, her legs tightly clamping mine. I was sexually ready,
aching to be fulfilled.
Suddenly, she adjusted her mouth and bit
down hard. I had to stop myself from yelping, and my entire body tensed.
She had a good chunk of flesh in her mouth, and she was clamped down hard,
sucking for all she was worth. Her hands moved like lightning, all over
me, fingernails clawing recklessly. Her hips no longer moved in circles
but back and forth, riding along my rigid length. I relaxed a bit, moved
my hips, and we joined. I’d been inside her several hours that night, but
it was like a new woman bucking atop me, trying to suck the life out of me
in two places.
She was grunting as she sucked on my
neck, and I could swear she had enough flesh to have her molars clamping
on it. For a moment, I was afraid she was going to rip that mouthful right
off my body and I’d bleed to death—but she suddenly tangled her fingers in
my hair and gripped tightly, and she bucked crazily above me. My head
swirled, my world spun, and any attempt at moving my body beneath hers was
lost. She was in control, completely commanding me in this bizarre
encounter, and I was entirely hers.
She knew it, growling now, yanking my
head roughly aside and biting harder, sucking fiercely. Her hips slammed
against mine and all I could do was lay there and take it, like a man
careening down a mountain in a car without brakes, having no choice but to
ride it out, only hoping he can survive.
She increased her pace. I thought she’d
shatter both our pelvises, but suddenly I was there, on the edge, and
there was no turning back, and I began groaning and flailing my hands and
she growled a high-pitched growl that reached and incredible peak and we
finally exploded, together, there on that bed.
She went limp, collapsing on me. It was
several minutes before our breathing slowed and we were both recovered. By
now, the sun was quite up. Her head was next o mine, her black, tousled
hair in my face. I kissed her head.
She said, “Wow.”
I said, “Ow.”
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
“That was really good.”
“It certainly was.”
She pushed up with her hands and sat up,
her left side bathed in the morning sun. She threw her head back, flipping
her long hair behind her. I watched her, admiring her beauty and sexuality
as she sat, naked, upon me, head back.
She tipped her head down and looked at
me, and she saw my eyes widen.
Her mouth was covered in my blood. Her
teeth were red, her lips thick with it. It was all over her upper lip and
nose. Her cheeks were streaked with red rivulets. It coated her chin,
dripping onto her perfect breasts and my exposed chest. The side of her
head, where it had rested next to my neck, was sticky with crimson.
“Jesus!” I said.
She smiled, licking her lips. “It’s okay.
It looks bad, but it isn’t.”
Frantically, I groped to my neck, and
came away with a little blood. Not too much, but blood nonetheless. “What
the hell did you do?”
“Just what I told you I would, and what
you agreed to. I hickeyed you until you bled a little.”
“A little? Your face is covered!”
“I worked hard.”
I was afraid, although I didn’t know why.
“Get off me.”
“What?”
“Get off me!”
She heard the emotion in my voice and
complied. I rolled off the bed and found my clothes. She sat on the bed,
supporting herself on one hand, watching me dress. When I looked back, her
eyes were mournful. Blood still covered her chin, although it no longer
dripped. She’d licked most of it from around her mouth.
“Why are you angry?” she said quietly.
I shot her a cold look, but didn’t answer
because I realized I didn’t know why. She’d asked; I’d let her; I’d even
enjoyed it. We stared at each other for a few moments. Absent-mindedly,
she reached up, wiped most of the blood off her chin, and then slid her
fingers into her mouth, sucking them.
“Mmmm,” she said.
“Stop that.”
“You just don’t understand,” she said.
“It’s so fucking intense… I can’t begin to describe it. You know the
closeness you felt when you climaxed inside me? That’s what I felt times a
thousand. A thousand, Nantai. It’s unbelievable. There’s a feeling of
power, of control, of domination during it… and all the time, unequalled
ecstasy. That final moment, when I felt your blood pumping into my mouth,
and we both climaxed together—it was the most amazing, most powerful thing
in the world. You can’t know what it’s like until you try it. If you did,
you’d understand.”
“Is that what you like in your men?” I
said angrily. “Men who do that to you?”
“It’s what I want. I’ve never had a man
do that to me. They usually let me do it to them, but they end up pissed
off, like you. I thought you’d be different. I thought you’d be the one.”
“Why? Because I look like what you pretend to be?” My mind was reeling in
confusion.
“I don’t pretend to be anything. I like doing that. I like feeling your
lifeblood coming into me. The taste, the feel, the whole experience—”
“Enough.”
“No, it isn’t. I can’t just let you walk
out. The others, they didn’t matter. But you… have you ever stopped to
think about your condition?”
“All the time.”
“Not that way. You look at it as a bad
hand you were dealt in life. Albinism, fangs, garlic allergy… have you
ever considered that maybe you are a vampire?”
“Give it up. Look, I’m standing in
sunlight. I reflect in this mirror.” I turned to the mirror on the wall,
and only then noticed the amazing wound on my neck. The hickey was at
least four inches across, damn near black. She’d truly feasted. “And I
can’t fly, I don’t have the strength of twenty men, crosses don’t scare me
away, or any of that.”
“Fantasies created in the minds of people
who couldn’t understand. Maybe vampirism isn’t about being undead or
cursed or needing blood to survive. Maybe it’s about a choice, a desire
for blood… a desire for the absolute, complete oneness between two people
that even the greatest sexual rapture can’t achieve.”
“I’m not listening anymore,” I said,
grabbing my hooded sweatshirt and getting into it. “It’s early in the
morning, there isn’t a cloud in the sky, and I have to get home before I
get sunburned out there.” I zipped up, pulled the hood up, tied it around
my face. My sunglasses joined it and I headed for the front door.
She called my name, and I turned back.
“I’ll be here if you change your mind,”
she said.
I left in a hurry, and slammed the door
for good measure.
* *
*
She stayed vividly in my mind. I couldn’t
stop thinking about what had happened and all she had said. Every night I
worked at my security guard job, I thought about it. Every day when I
slept, she was in my dreams.
I wondered if there would ever be a woman
who would love me for who I was, not just looking for a night with an
albino freak with extra freak bonuses. I’d never been with a woman more
than a few nights. Heather had seemed different. Maybe she was a freak,
but maybe so was I...
* *
* * * * * *
*
Nantai deals with this by returning to
Heather... but he has a lot to come to terms with. Should he let her do it
again? Should he do it to her?
Night to Dawn is no longer
available. I'll save this one for an anthology! |
I'd written a few vampire stories for
Night to Dawn and found I enjoyed it, trying to come up with new
twists on what could easily be the same old boring vampire genre. I don't
know if I succeeded with this, but I was in the mood to do a vampire story
without any supernatural versions of vampires, and without using "vampire
wanna-bes," per se. This one could be considered erotica. It could also be
considered gross.