I chose this filthy, stinking corner of the district in vain hope that the souls drawn here might prove similarly tainted (and thereby make what I intend less terrible). I should've known better, of course. Creation has never been that kind, as others have noted when in cruel frames of mind. I invisibly fracture it where I dance, making it jagged and unclean, shards reflecting too many distorted potentials to comprehend.
If anything, those I pass, rub shoulders with, whose painted, half-lidded, lusty or drug-addled eyes I catch, are more innocent than any I've encountered in the city beyond. There's a sense of strange fraternity amongst them; of safety here. A sanctuary against the judgements of those more comfortable in their humanity, born to states of assumption and absolutism. Oh, wicked in their own peculiar ways: every brush, every breath, carrying echoes of desire, lurid intentions burning in their bellies, fantasies that have drawn them to this tainted playground.
But even the most bizarre or foetid peccadillo doesn't make them monstrous. Even those that have come lusting after the primped and painted lambs amongst the flocks, those barely beyond their high school years who ache for experience they've only known through masturbatory fantasy and internet pornography. All exude the same strange sanctity.
I don't——can't——hate them. Any of them . That makes it worse. Some faintly revolt me, the echoes of inclination they share eliciting shudders, nauseating in their sensory detail. But I'm used to that. The simple act of venturing beyond whatever warren I've gone to ground in elicits a cacophony of such secrets; confessions whose silent hosts wouldn't dare speak to priests or lovers. That, in many instances, they wouldn't even admit to themselves.
Here, the typical, minor frustrations and vengeance fantasies——the unbidden ruminations on raping wives into submission, beating husbands to death with claw-hammers, slaughtering employers and locking unruly or disappointing children in cellars——are absent. In their places, orgiastic tempests, fragments of drink and drug-fueled desire that lodge in my brain, slowly melting until they saturate me, one bleeding into another until I can no longer discern dreams of vengeance from sex, blood mingling with spit, sweat and semen.
Lyeman's Street, one of the first from which the city's gay district originally effloresced, is now largely forgotten to those informed by its history. An unassuming way, compared to some of the more ornamented squares, the glass and neon-fronted clubs and bars, the streets of chic boutiques and cafes that cater almost exclusively to our previously-shunned demographic. Dirtier, grimier, a place where time has crystalized everything, even the air tinted a filthy, industrial brown. The same that Victorian prostitutes and pick-pockets once breathed, those it now sustains no less predatory, albeit in a more playful vein.
I like to think that conscious inclination drew me here, the hope of finding a partner I can hate without remorse: a child abuser, a malignant narcissist, a con-artist. Maybe even another Dennis Nilsen. But no. Those who linger here remain stubbornly untainted, barring whatever petty poisons the world has cultivated in them. Little flashes of malignance, weeds that will die long, long before they have chance to flower.
It would be so easy to follow Morrow's example; abandon care, set down the confusions, the constant aching doubts, and learn to be pure in appetite. I envy the man, in many ways——a significant part of why I had to leave him, not that he'd ever understand. If I could only learn the trick of it, to drift through the world as though dreaming; as a dream myself. To give and take what pleasures I may before circumstance or despair conspire to snuff me out.
But it's just as the man himself said, during the escalating arguments of our latter days together:
“You ached for this. All your life, you begged for it. Now, you can't even let yourself enjoy it? It's pathetic, Sanford.”
Yes. Yes, it is. Pathetic. To have gotten everything I wished for the escape I begged from every star and full moon. To not be part of the world, to be separate from its petty, material demands and impositions.
“Do you really hate yourself so much? How long will you punish us both for your regrets?”
Yes. It was best for us both that I leave. No doubt he's already found another confidante, more suited to his tastes and temperament. And I? I can lose myself in my miseries without fear of them infecting anyone else.
I catch several glances as I make my way down Lyeman's, the street flickering and misty with abstract effluent. Whilst far from as populated as the district's more fashionable environs, it still boasts its own peculiar clientele; a heady mix of older queers and younger specimens, the latter seeking some strange thrill or drawn by the oblique resonance of the place, whilst the former exude melancholia, a grey and pulsating mist that surrounds them, obscuring and distorting. Through it, I glimpse a little of what they really are, the putative states that only manifest in dreams or moments of idle, escapist fantasy. For the most part, they don't even realise, can't recall when they last brought those conditions to mind, having being shamed out of any transcendental thought many moons ago.
Regardless of age, the place tends to attract those of a like kind. Exiles from the primary tribes, non-conformists. The gay men who refute the dictates of fashion or proscribed aesthetics, coming here not in ironed or laundered outfits, but ragged jeans and ill-fitting shirts, their hairstyles shaggy and unkempt or priestly in their severity, the lesbians who conform to no cultural template of masculinity or straight man's pornography. Proscription of the sexual ideal.
Those whose eyes I snare linger on me with quiet desperation, even those that walk with lovers or domestic mates, sensing that I might relieve them of the burden they've resented since the first unasked-for mote of being kindled in their Mother's bellies.
That, at least, is a little salve. Whoever I choose, they'll thank me before the end.
* * *
Most of the buildings I pass are nondescript; old Victorian structures that were once shops or small factories, mostly converted into bars and nightclubs——the former already throbbing with music, buzzing with activity, the latter awaiting the moonlit hours to throw open their doors. Punctuating them, barbers, tailors, a massage parlour. Little eateries, places to spill into following a night's intoxication, unconcerned by the quality of what grey repasts they serve. It's been an age since I've eaten anything of the sort, the grease and fat and salt, the sauce and relish. Flavours and textures I can barely recall, softened by the weight of years and less savoury meals that have occurred in between.
I know how this dance goes, one I follow reluctantly but whose steps I must complete once begun. The silent music is already so sweet, pulsing in time with the blood in my veins, urgency in the pit of my belly. Lovers call, aching for me, though they don't know it yet. Those who are outcasts even in this outcast company, that the tribe would reject for their strangeness or absurdity, their flirtation of proscribed style or accepted behaviour. They're everywhere, those lost children. I know the cracks and recesses where they make their warrens oh so well.
Lyeman's Street is a furtive and fruitful hive of such souls, its pervasive decay repelling all but the most curious and self-defined deviant. Those I pass all sing their own peculiar songs—— silently for the most part——within the drink and drug-addled cells of their heads, not even realising the laments that are plain to me: their hatred for lovers whose arms they cling to, who guide them away from sites of familiar disgrace. The sugar-daddies who are as much jailers as saviours, the cautious friends whose reason is met with slurred and sardonic contempt. One, an androgynous youth whose smile flickers in and out of being, whose half-hooded eyes betray chemical indulgences, anticipates imminent violence; the rough ropes, the uncomfortable chair, the belt that leaves weals on his back and buttocks, making him weep for want and terror of it. Another, older than his companion by a measure of decades, bemoans the child he brought into his home, one he saved from the purported abuses of parents who regarded them as tainted in their sexuality but that now treats him as little more than a surrogate father. Provider, housekeeper, cook and cleaner, their entitled temper tantrums growing more violent as the days pass.
Fodder, all. Impressions that will disperse into the earth and air unremarked, unremembered. I've seen them all, every shape of every species of every soul, from here to Sydney, from Berlin to Marrakech. Little left in all the world that might surprise me now.
* * *
Silent hymns lead me here, to a façade from which music of a more temporal stripe throbs——old rave tunes, for the most part, punctuated by 1990s Euphoria. My mouth waters, the plates of my skull shift. An old urge, appetites more desperate than those I scent all around rising from the dungeon below, a hunger undeniable.
Poor, lost boy, waiting somewhere in the strobe-lit dark, no shadow he can cling to, no plea or prayer he can make that will see him last the night.
Another unhappy child, another orphan despairing of its unwanted life. Despite Morrow's urgings, I can't deny my sorrow for them, each and every one. Those who regard their existence as something to be endured, silently praying, against all odds, that there will be some grander meaning, some sincere poetry, after it's done. I'm not cruel enough to tell them the futility of that vision. I'm not their Father. It isn't my business to disappoint them. I want them to die as they've never lived, for their final moments to have some of the ecstasy that's always been denied them.
This one, this grubby little run-away; one of the more pathetic, one of the more beautiful. Even were it not for his inclinations, something more fundamental to his nature would've driven him from home and hearth, kept him from any measure of comfort. Given the choice, he never would've been born in the first place.
It's almost beginning to dawn by the time I bundle the boy into the back of a taxi, whatever toxins he's happily shoveled into his system starting to take their toll. Thin threads of golden light snake through the streets, staining the dark, dank concrete, the broken and pot-holed roads.
Lyeman's is all but abandoned at this hour, save for the odd, weary soul making their sad way home from overnight jobs (or, Heaven help them, to jobs about to start). Most do everything in their power to evade us, ignore us, desperate not to snare our attentions or be drawn into unwanted discourse. That's fine. Most of them are foetid anyway, compost-souls that would disgust me were I starving for want of company.
The taxi driver knows this routine well. I scent it on him the instant we stumble into the back of the black cab, slam the door shut behind us: weary resentment, hereditary disgust that he's learned to temper over the years ferrying queer clientele to and from their debauchs.
I catch his dark, hooded eyes in the rearview mirror as we strap ourselves in, the boy laughing at nothing in particular, losing himself in a fit of delirious giggles.
“Where to, man?”
“Holden Avenue, if you please.”
The man raises a bushy eyebrow, grunting affirmation. A nice estate, a decent place, he thinks. Criminal that these two faggots should have a home there. Worse than the rats in the walls, cockroaches multiplying beneath cupboards. He smells of smoke. Smoke, fire and blood. The violence in him is tantalising, making me grin as though having indulged in the same pills and powders that currently have my young friend in hysterics. An appetiser, a prophecy of the consummation to come.
“Hey, he ain't gonna puke in there, is he?”
I laugh, turning to my young friend. A subtle flex, a quiver of thought, the mildest influence. He grows silent, his head lolling as he looks up at me. The song still pulses behind his eyes, a captive dawn-bird in his skull desperate to break free.
“You aren't going to embarrass yourself like that, are you, lovely?”
He smiles, eyes fluttering, the depths of sorrow they contain almost welling, spilling down his cheeks in black trails.
“No. I promise.”
“Good boy.”
The driver grunts a dubious acknowledgement, content to seethe in silent fantasies of righteous violence the rest of the way.
* * *
Holden Avenue is still abed by the time we arrive. The boy steps out into the pre-dawn chill, somewhat more sober than during the trip. The driver doesn't look at me as I hand him a fifty pound note, tell him to keep the change. This close, the blood and hate is palpable, radiant, painting the air. I bathe in it, a red rain falling on my face, hearing the cries and pleas of those he considers degenerate in the eyes of God, that he prays will come to know their own loathsomeness in the apocalypse he's dreamed of, yearned for, since his early adolescence. I could show him, tear open his skull and leave him naked before the abyss where god has never sat. Instead, I wish him well, thank him, let him streak away, back to his wife and children, to the home that is as much a prison as his weak and wanton flesh. A flash: legs kicking impotently at the air, the choked regrets of a man who finds no more poetry in death than he has in life. So many tomorrows, so many miseries to come, before the final act of despair.
“Where are we?”
The boy hugs himself, shivering in the murk, casting around at the surrounding houses, all of them recessed, raised from the road on their own little mounds. Castles without kingdoms. Most dark, as though abandoned, many boasting rotting “For Rent” or “For Sale” signs, overgrown front gardens.
I draw close to him, his song scintillating, my body blossoming to it in ways he cannot perceive or appreciate yet. Such sweet despair, such dislocation. A thing cast outside of the fish bowl almost since birth, swelled to semi-manhood in the darkness beyond. He looked back in with envy, once upon a time, but has long since learned that there's nothing there for him, nothing he can love or that will love him in its turn. A dead world infested with dead people who don't understand that they've made their mortuary shuffling the measure of life itself.
“Nowhere in particular.” I place an arm around his shoulders, hugging him close. He flinches at the contact, such avuncular familiarity so often either an act of quiet coercion or a prelude to cruelty.
“You...live here?”
He sounds incredulous that anyone could inhabit so Edenic a setting.
“I wouldn't say live. Abide might be more accurate."
He follows meek as a lamb as I lead him up the meticulously maintained garden path, away from the pre-dawn chill where all his most unwanted secrets live, happy to leave them out in the dark for once.
I don't have much requirement for heating, always happier in frosty temperatures, but I maintain a warm household for guests. The boy seats himself in front of the fire, sipping red wine. A stray brought in from the night, not knowing where to put himself or what to say.
I seat myself in the leather chair opposite, admiring him, bathing in the stories he silently confesses. So sad, almost from the very beginning. A life made broken. Never still, never fixed, never in place. A sentient splinter in the eye of creation, conscious of its nature, but unable to deny it. I drink him more earnestly than the wine, the latter lacking all but the merest traces of flavour to me——hints and echoes of those who plucked the grapes, who crushed and distilled them, who later bore the bottles to all and sundry——whereas he is radiant and pungent and complex. A plate prepared by a craftsman, a dessert of such skill that even the old French masters would blanche.
He sits in silence, allowing me what must seem this strange moment, watching with his over-large grey and sunken eyes, not daring to speak for fear of breaking some unknown protocol.
“Did you enjoy yourself tonight?”
I know he didn't. There's no lingering trace of joy on him, no actinic qualities from the contacts he made, the vices he indulged. Just a pall of grey frustration, which, far from smothering the gold and silver inside, serves to emphasize them by contrast.
“No. I mean, there wasn't anything that interested me. Until you, that is.”
I smile. “Happy to have made the night worthwhile.”
He swirls wine around his glass, watching sediment settle.
“I'm not sure you have yet.”
A familiar game, this coquettish dance. So often, it leads to tongues entangling in a far more literal fashion. So often, it leads to sex and sleep and the horror of a new dawn, grey and fumbling rejection. Tonight he knows better.
Standing, he comes to me in his tattered, ill-fitting jeans, his rumpled shirt, cheap jewelry tinkling at his throat, around his wrists and ankles. He seats himself in my lap, the warmth and vibrancy of him washing through me, narcotic in its potency.
The song, the song, the song. A bellyful of sunshine, storm-clouds in my brain. Shocks and pangs of such sincere misery, such anger and disappointment. No one, not in his entire short life, not in the days that might've come after, could ever know him, love him this way.
“You're a work of art. You understand that?” I smooth the unkempt, lank hair from his face, wanting to see those eyes, in all their want and confusion. He smiles.
“I've had worse pick up lines.”
“I think we're a little beyond that, aren't we?”
He murmurs, mewls, curling into me, running his pale, shivering hand across my shirt, another curling around the back of my neck as he kisses my throat, the vampiric play a consistent favourite.
He saturates me. I open, blossoming invisibly, drinking him more sincerely than any imagined vampire lover. Not merely blood and spit, but his unspoken essence, echoes of memory and potential and regret that surround him. The stuff of his soul. All the days that have been or that might have been, all the decisions made and denied, the chances taken and rejected. The children he might have become, had he allowed himself. All mine, now.
A sweeter meal I can't recall, the textures of him; the shades of suicidal despair, of existential ennui, of grotesque realisations and ecstatic self-discovery, all dancing upon my palate, bloating me on vicarious experience, echoes of what can never be.
Through it all, I see him. A flickering shade, a thing of many faces, pausing to strip away its tussled shirt, revealing a scarred and bony frame, better suited to some plucked, exotic bird than a human being. A series of tattoos running down his left hand side, a great snake of smoke and mist, sweating monsters from between its scales.
“You understand, yes? You...”
I can barely breathe, barely speak through the drunken, heady swell of it all. He smiles through myriad mouths that lightly bite my chest and shoulder, that clamp leech-like to my neck.
“Yes,” he tremors, turning my eyes up to his, forcing me to watch them blaze. “Yes, I understand.”
I've rarely met another of my peculiar kind (Morrow being the grandest exception). I don't know their protocols when it comes to lovers, the children they pluck like fruit from the bough. But I will not take them by force or deceit. They have to know, to understand. Don't mistake me, it isn't some moral qualm on my part. Rather a preoccupation with cultivating the perfect experience, a communion the memory of which will sustain for days or months to come. It's better for us both if they come willingly, understand what's going to happen and celebrate in it.
We kiss through a haze of wine, tasting sweet and sour on one another's palates. He burns inside, as they all do, his corpse-pallor masking something more vital: the memories of old loves that ride on his spit mine to savour, as is the taste of blood from their abuses, games that have gone too far, dependencies that have revealed themselves in all their cruelty. I feel blows that were meant in play but that split his lip, others that come through a haze of fury and disgust, spittle raining down to mingle with the blood he drools and weeps, silent prayers that this will be the last disgrace before silence takes him.
And I let him have a sliver of me, a tendril unspooling, delivering sweet nectar onto his tongue. He shudders against me, almost convulsing, as he tastes a whisper of what I am, finds himself in the places of old loves who have gone before.
“Shit. Shit. ”
I laugh, running fingers through his hair, raking the protuberant contours and angles of his back. He arches like a cat against the attention, inviting deeper cuts.
“Is it what you expected? Is it what you want?”
I don't need him to say it. I hear it, feel it, the song he sings communicating need more eloquently than any words: Take me. Love me. Open me. Teach me to fly.
But I want to hear him say it.
“Yes. Yes. ”
I smile against his smile, biting his lip, drawing a little blood. The taste is intoxicating, the songs and stories it carries even more so.
No more waiting. No more want. My body bleeds, though he cannot see it. I am so open, so wounded, the air makes me tremble, the disturbance of his breath and heartbeat enough to almost excite orgasm.
Hoisting him up, I lay him down before the fire, the boy writhing in the gentle glow, eager to be naked, to be seen and consumed. I strip him slowly, ritualistically, tongues both seen and unseen following in my finger's wake, tasting so much more than the chemicals in his sweat. Not even a lover would know him like this, every forbidden fantasy, every momentary, idle imagining. Every twitch and tremor and strange habit. Mine, all mine. His song thrills, the boy piercing me with it, eruptions of pale silver, streamers of moonlight, licking my wounds, carrying his confessions, all that he is, was or might be. I bloat, barely able to hold onto my mask of humanity. It wavers before his eyes, shifting on the bone. I try to hold onto it, for his sake, but the song is too sweet, too sumptuous.
Some of them have screamed upon witnessing the truth of me. Some have kicked and raked out, attempting to flee. Sour notes in the honey. Others, the least satisfying by far, have simply surrendered, becoming meek and suicidal. He does neither.
Smiling, he stares, rearing up, singing all the more sweetly, giving me his elegies. This is his now, the final verse. He draws me into a kiss that carries his every suicide: those contemplated, those conducted, in other whens and wheres. He sees the monster, knows it and wants it, as he always has, ever since those first unwanted nights when he lay enveloped in black omens of the life that was to come, the sanity-shredding horror of being caged inside a skull that would never allow him to fly free, a skin that would always constrict and chafe and disappoint.
I almost can't contain him, almost can't take what he has to give. A feast to glut armies, congregations of starving faithful. All mine. All mine.
The song shreds reality around us, causing it to flicker and distort. Shadows swell, the walls draw away and old, alien moons shine their light down on us as I draw his legs up, entering him.
There is pain. There's always pain, for us both. But he's an old hand at this perversion, practised a thousand times over, a vessel for the sin that entire bloodlines have been put to the flames for in more ignorant centuries. Here, a communion, a rite beyond any proscribed sacrament. He burns inside, a molten thing, a furnace. I can barely keep myself together as the song resounds and swells and washes through me. The days unlived, the nights undreamed, all experienced here, in these sweating instants, these gasped and grunted breaths. He is murdered, stabbed and throttled by his lovers. He murders them in his turn, biting out their throats, smashing their skulls as they lie panting over him. Confessions of love come just as profusely, weeping and gasping, riding waves of orgasm that ripple out into the surrounding darkness.
I am all of them, and so is he. We lose ourselves and one another, all distinction dissolving. This is it, the exquisite apotheosis that I seek, the communion that dissolves us, returns us to that original, chemical condition, in which we swill together, becoming expressions of one another's potential.
He aches for it. Begs for it. A climax to eclipse all others, a sensation that will undo all he has ever presumed of pleasure.
And the beast will no longer be denied.
The mask of humanity gives way and he sees me at last. I bite, tearing into his throat with fangs long and sharp enough to puncture clean through, shearing arteries and windpipe and vertebrae, the hot eruption of his blood in my mouth, upon my face, an angel's rain; the same that invisibly baptised me in the night beyond. And still he gasps in his ecstasies, still he smiles, through blood and pain. This is how it was always meant to be, how the song ends in his every dream of it. I take him as I took the others before, make him part of that same choir.
We erupt as one, his semen hot against my underside, mine filling him to capacity. In that instant, we fly from this carnage, into a condition far purer; one that I know well from previous communions, from the angels I have made in blood and want. I carry him there, my teeth and talons in him, tasting not only blood, but the moonlight stuff of his soul. I know it's only temporary, that he'll be gone from me and the world very soon, into states and places I can only imagine, when one of my angels deigns to sing to me, when we make love in drug-fueled dreams.
He laughs as we soar, as stars and states of being stream by, as he leaves behind pain and disappointment and want. Everything that drove him into my arms, that I ache to taste, in this fleeting, ephemeral condition. I am pure here, too. A beast woven from the darkness between stars, the empty void, hungering, vacuous and eternal. I feel him inside of me, moonlight kindling in my belly, my mind, becoming raw potential: a meal of the days that will never be, the loves he will never know. Mine, now, saturating me, filling my emptiness. Some lovers fight to hold onto them, raking at me, struggling to free themselves. He does not. He embraces me, draws me deeper, inviting me to drink my fill.
And I do.
* * *
Waking is a descent as awful as our shared flight was rapturous; he is gone from me without a word, without oaths of adoration, confessions of love. Wings erupt from his larval condition, more numerous and complex than those of any flesh-bound life, jeweled with burning eyes. In that instant, I have no choice but to let him go or be murdered by the fire in his gaze. He ascends, becoming invisible, intangible, one with the light, leaving nothing behind but the echoes of what he might have been had he lived, had the world proved worthy of him.
Ashes. The ashes of dead things. All my meals, my communions, my love affairs, come to this desolation in the end. He is no different.
Surrounded by echoes of our lover's song, I fall, my own wings tattered and insubstantial. Things of shadow that cannot bear me up, carry me into whatever plane of being awaits beyond unendurable eternity. I am so afraid, so terrified of what it might be. I can't allow myself to trespass there, not yet. Still so much a child myself, unable to grow, for fear of what adulthood might oblige.
The fall tears me, tatters me, my wings streaming away in black rivulets, until I tumble into the flesh that should have long, long since gone to mulch and dust, that has been murdered and undone more times than I recall and yet still moves and breathes, aches and lusts. Bloated, now. Filled to capacity like a tick, still buried in the ragged remains of the boy, in that cold and abattoir-stinking murk.
The fire has burned low, and he is still and cold beneath me. Weeping, drooling blood, I extricate myself from him, laying down his tattered carcass, forcing myself to witness the carnage I've wrought upon it.
No great loss. Not to me.
A distant whisper, a fleeting laugh. Maybe an angel's forgiveness, maybe nothing but the salving echo of my own guilt. Whatever the case, I ease myself free, still hard, still pulsing cold matter, that might have the capacity to make children for all I know, though of what deranged or diseased kind I shudder to imagine.
The house groans and creaks around me, the walls settling, faint ripples still passing through as though they're painted on curtains that stir in a cosmic breeze.
It is delicious. It is awful. His blood and meat swilling in my belly, a meal that will sustain for many, many moons to come. I need sleep, somewhere to dream and digest in peace. It can't be here. As atomised from one another as the neighbours are, some of the more curtain-twitching ilk will have seen us arrive, will take salacious delight in mentioning the youth of my companion to any willing to indulge their gossip. And the boy's friends will notice his absence, the shallow soul manning the bar where I found him, whose glares burned the back of my neck as I shepherded him out into the morning, others whose faces linger in his memory, that swirl and coalesce behind my eyes as our experiences intermingle, become one.
Old weariness stirs at the thought of what awaits. The end of one game, the beginning of another. Every communion an uprooting, a life abandoned. I won't lament this one in particular. It was a lonely, joyless thing. Even so, the play of stillness lasted longer than most, allowing me to grow used to certain comforts. I would take a moment to cleanse myself, allow the beast to recede, leave as discreetly as I may.
Not this time. It's been too long. I've forgotten the hideous, loathsome joy of it. The taste of blood on my tongue, the strength that pulses through my limbs, the raw want that still aches between my legs. There is potency in this, poetry beyond what any static and ephemeral life can imagine. I am a nightmare in the painted darkness, a million nameless senses blossoming, the world a garden of alien experience.
* * *
I smell the one in the dark, hear the frantic staccato of his heart. Petals of fire unfurl in the night, so short lived and yet, to my altered senses, slow and variegated as any blooming bird of paradise.
Pain. Rare and all-eclipsing, burning cold momentarily whiting out the world. I hear them singing together, my angels, as they make love somewhere beyond my reach or comprehension. Then, fragmented prayers muttered in broken, archaic Israeli, peppered with mispronounced Arabic. I recognise the abjurations, for all their ineloquence. Old, old verses, designed to wound my kind, to bind and render us impotent.
Through tears, through the living lights that dance across my swollen eyes, I see him, trembling as he advances. Ha! The taxi driver. I should've known. What is he? Some degenerate descendent of the old hunters, the Circles and their genocidal creeds? If so, a poor reflection of what their bloodlines have become. So afraid, I smell his sweat, the urine soaking his trousers, raw terror staining the air around him pellucid yellow.
Too quick with the prayers, too slow with the gun. He fires again, only this time, his shot is wildly off mark. Even were it not, it wouldn't have found me. The bullet already lodged in my shoulder erupts with spines of frost, anesthetic venom searing its way through my systems. A familiar disgrace, almost nostalgic in its rarity. I tear the wound open in the blink of an eye, ripping out the nub of flowering silver that shudders and smokes as I drop it to the ground. His prayers become more frantic the closer I approach, his eyes so wide as to start out of their sockets. He fires wildly, until the gun is empty. Lights flicker on in surrounding houses, voices call distantly from open windows. I'm on him in an instant, bearing him to the ground. Poor man. He hardly knew anything of this before tonight, had almost begun to believe that his Mother's stories were exactly that. The delusions of a mind slowly losing itself to hereditary dementia.
Now, he stares up into the face of childhood nightmares, everything he has been conditioned to define as evil since he spoke his first word, took his first step. His prayers and icons, things he has no true faith in, mean nothing. Inert on his tongue, cold in his hands. So, I take them both, his hands coming in a series of quick-silver bites, his tongue in a smothering kiss. I swallow it like a bloody oyster, prayers still trembling in the meat, though the throat that shaped them now fills with martyr's blood. Through it all, the filth of hatred and intended violence, I still taste him; the boy who so happily made a meal of himself, who has become something beyond this one's futile imagination.
“He, at least, has some joy now. For you, my love...Oh, for you, it will be terrible. That I promise.”
I revel in the sound of my own voice, the joyous growls, the resonance in my belly, as though I've swallowed a roaring furnace or have become a hive of living and furious swarms. He will not die. Not yet, anyway. I know how to preserve them in their states of disgrace, their mindless despairs. Morrow taught me the trick of it, though I've never felt moved to practice it before. In this instance it will be a pleasure.
Taking him in my arms, I carry him into the failing night, where he and I will become rumour together. His laments will echo through the heads of the sleeping and unborn alike, making both equally reluctant to wake.