PUBLISHED BY GHOSTWOODS BOOKS AT SMASHWORDS
All Lies and Jest
Kate Harrad
Copyright (c) 2011 Kate Harrad
Executive Editor: Tim Dedopulos
Copy Editor: Genevieve Podleski
Cover: Tim Dedopulos
Original Photos By: Simon McMullen, Simon Stacey, “A House Used to Be Here” by Dave Gingrich, ndanger @ flickr.
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All Lies and
Jest:
Saving the World For Fun and Profit
By
Kate
Harrad
Author’s Note
Every
person and event in this book is imaginary. Some of it is inspired by
real internet
sites and conspiracy theories, hence the chapter
headings. But I really did make it all up.
Chapter
One:
Finding Stefan
“Being a vampire is difficult in today’s society.”
vampiredungeon.iwarp.com
Search terms: real vampire craving, vampire pathology, vampires among us
Saturday, September 20th
I fell into London face first, like a child with a box of sweets. I wanted to gobble it all up, the sticky, delicious, dangerous city. I wanted to do everything, meet everyone, make my mark, disappear into the night, leave an impression. But I didn’t really know what I wanted, not fully, not till later.
It started when I met Stefan. There was a party and a murder: there were drugs and sex and insanity and death. There was blood on Naomi’s lips, fervour and guilt in her eyes, and I stared into the dark alleyway where the body lay as if drunk, wondering how I’d come so far so quickly when two weeks earlier I’d never even met any of them.
Two weeks earlier, in fact, I hadn’t really known anyone in London at all, and that had become a problem. I’d been in the city for a couple of months by then, but it had turned out that London wasn’t an easy place to meet people. Though having spent my previous twenty-three years in Middleswithin, a small town in Somerset where I knew the names, ages, tastes, opinions, ancestry and golf handicap of everyone within a three-mile radius, I was in many ways thoroughly enjoying the anonymity of being a stranger.
My home was a tiny studio flat, reluctantly paid for by my parents because it was the only way they could get me to leave. I told them I needed time to repent. I told them I would pray for my sins daily. I told them I had a job to go. None of it was true. But they wanted to believe it, and they wanted rid of me, so before you could say ‘excommunicated’ I was living in Morden as a free woman. Free from parental authority, free — at least partially — from the Resurrected Church of England, and free to find something to do on a Saturday night. In Middleswithin, as in most British towns, if the Resurrected Church cast you out, your social life went with it. So I’d spent my time playing with my iTem, plotting the destruction of organised religion and dreaming of the big city, where they had social events that didn’t revolve around Jesus.
And now here I was. As I’d suspected, I had had no trouble getting temp work — if you can do repetitive administrative tasks competently for minimum wage and manage not to stab anyone in the process, the world is your very dull oyster. But that wasn’t what I’d come for.
It was the iTem that sparked things off. In those days, they’d just started testing the real-life Find a Friend application (introduced after concerns that people were beginning to lose the ability to interact on a face-to-face basis) and not that many people had signed up. Nevertheless, I’d played with it obsessively at home, trying to find if my town had anyone interesting in it (answer: no), and eventually I decided I needed to use it in London. I hadn’t managed to make friends by talking to work colleagues (I was too menial to be invited out for drinks), or by striking up random conversations in pubs (possibly I shouldn’t have handed out questionnaires as an opening gambit), and my sense of liberation from my claustrophobic adolescence had begun to sour into isolation tinged with loneliness. So, one Saturday afternoon, I found my way to Oxford Street and tried out some search terms.
I don’t know exactly why I chose to search for ‘vampire’. Blame those long Somerset Saturday nights, letting my imagination run wild about London and mystery and adventure and excitement. I wasn’t expecting to get any results.
But I did.
One hit. A photo stared up at me: dark eyes, pale skin, brooding expression. “Stefan Drayton. Sound engineer, goth and creature of the night” said the description — did that mean he had a sense of humour, I wondered, or that he really didn’t? In any case, with an impressive lack of care for his own privacy, he’d provided an email address and had even signed up for the GPS option. In other words, if I wanted to find out where he was at that very moment, I could.
I wanted to.
Some people, I reasoned, joined evening classes to make friends. Some got involved in political parties, or environmental activism, or — shudder — religious movements. I needed to meet people somehow. Interesting people. Weird people. People who didn’t belong to the Resurrected Church. And, maybe, people who believed they were vampires. What was the worst that could happen?
I tapped the screen and an address appeared: a bar, it looked like, on a side street off Oxford Circus. Even the idea that people might spend their Saturday afternoons in a bar gave me a frisson of excitement. I was there within five minutes.
It was a basement bar: wobbly tables, low ceilings, lighting that could more accurately have been described as darking. It had several goth-type people in it, but as I’d suspected, spotting Stefan Drayton wasn’t hard at all. In a corner sat three goths, one of whom was clearly the original of the photo on my screen. He was a boy around my age, tall with dark hair and very white skin and eyes you could drown — or at least paddle — in. He was sitting with two friends, and all of them were wearing black as if there were no other colour in the world. I leaned around a corner from them for a moment, to gauge whether it would be a good idea to introduce myself. I could hear their conversations easily. Actually, I could have heard the conversations of everyone in the bar, had I wanted to. The small room resonated with voices as if they were competing with each other for my attention.
If they had been, then Stefan would have won easily. Everyone else I could hear was discussing mortgages. He was talking about blood.
“Finding donors isn’t easy,” he was saying sternly. “I won’t feed from anyone unwilling or unworthy.”
“I can see that narrows it down, yeah,” said the girl sitting opposite him. She was short, curvy and displaying more cleavage than I’d realised anyone even had.
Unlike Stefan, she wasn’t pale. In fact, she was black. I was uncomfortably aware that I found her skin colour exotic, not in the sense that I thought she came from outside the UK — her accent was pure South London — but in the sense that I’d lived my entire life in a more or less all-white town. I’d barely even met anyone with black hair, let alone black skin. I told myself firmly than if and when I introduced myself, I would not be embarrassing about this. I hoped I was right.
The third person was a short stocky boy with ginger hair and cheerful freckles, who nevertheless managed to pull off an air of gothness through the determined application of black eyeliner, black velvet, and a serious expression. He said, in what I felt was a slightly disappointed tone, “So no hunting young girls down dark alleyways and sucking them dry, then?”
Stefan raised an eyebrow. “I am a vegan, Simon.” (“Heroin!” said the other boy sharply. Odd, I thought. Was he calling for some, like ordering another beer?) “Life is sacred and consent is all. As with animals, so with humans.”
His black lace top was quite see-through. This observation wasn’t relevant to anything, but I just happened to notice it, and once I had, I couldn’t stop myself leaning forward slightly to see if his nipples were visible. They were.
“But you need blood to live?” asked the goth girl. I noticed that she was keeping her tone carefully neutral, and deduced that she didn’t believe Stefan, but did find him attractive.
“Ultimately, yes. Not all the time, of course. I can absorb pranic energy from other sources, but sooner or later, the Thirst begins again. It’s a craving within my veins — lust and hunger and longing combined. And then I have to submit to the demands of my nature.” I was impressed by his ability to capitalise Thirst, and also by the way his tone of voice managed to make his words sound almost sensible. Almost.
“What’s pranic energy?” asked Simon. Stefan looked annoyed. I got the impression that he would have liked a minute’s silence while his words resonated in the air.
“It is not an easy concept to explain.”
“It’s like spiritual energy, from the air and from people and from other stuff,” said the girl helpfully. “You know breatharians, those people who say they don’t need to eat? It’s what they use instead of food. Or so they claim. Bunch of wankers.” She added hastily: “But that’s different from vampires, of course. You just use it as a top-up.”
“Indeed,” said Stefan authoritatively, regaining his control of the conversation. “Vampires like myself take energy from human emotions. We feed on fear, or desire... or hate.” The last sentence was said in a lower, darker tone. I winced.
“Do all emotions work?” asked Simon. “Like irritation, and cheerfulness?”
Stefan ignored him. “However, stealing emotion is just as immoral as non-consensual blood drinking. Unless I have active consent to absorb human energy, I gather pranic energy in more ethical ways.”
“Like...?”
“For example, eating lettuce.”
There was silence for a moment. Stefan clearly realised that his announcement had been less than impressive.
“You can assimilate pranic energy through material sources,” he elaborated. “When I eat salad, I am not merely assimilating its normal protein and calories, the way humans do. I am absorbing its spiritual energy into my body, and it gives me strength. Afterwards I feel... strong. And more spiritually aware.”
“Wow,” said the girl, again carefully balancing her tone. “Um... can you get energy from sex? I mean, I’m just wondering.”
“I am celibate,” he said aloofly. “I feel that sex wastes valuable energy. It drains me.”
“So you’d need to eat lots of lettuce to recuperate?” she said innocently. In the battle between sarcasm and libido, sarcasm was clearly beginning to gain the victory. I mentally applauded.
So then, a vegan vampire, I thought. Even weirder than I’d expected.
Still, in spite of Stefan’s conversation, I was starting to like him. Or possibly I was just giving in to his pale-skinned, brunette good looks and the gently enticing movement of his long slim hands on the red plastic tablecloth. But no, there was more to my attraction than his looks: after all, he was certainly interesting. And he might be the passport to other interesting people. Since the US had gone all fundamentalist, a lot of alternative cultures had set up shop in London. (One of those dark, mysterious little back-alley shops, presumably).
The bar was getting emptier and the goths had gone quiet for a moment. Now was the time to introduce myself. I smoothed my hair (currently a bright auburn), bit my lips, and plunged.
In the time it had taken for me to do that, Stefan had started explaining about the occult significance of green beans. As I moved closer he looked at me for a moment, then registered me as ‘not a goth’ and his eyes lost their gleam of interest. I was dressed in black, as a matter of fact, but faded jeans and a tee-shirt rather than anything you could do serious moping in, and I hadn’t managed to apply make-up. Attempts to put on eyeliner usually ended up with my contact lenses smeared in black goo. One of the many reasons why I couldn’t do the image full-time, despite my fascination with it. (Another was the fact that I was a John Denver fan. There are no goth clubs that play country music. Maybe I would set one up and become famous.)
I stood by the table until Stefan was forced to look up. “Yes?” he said, in a voice the word ‘hauteur’ could have been invented to describe.
I pulled out my iTem and showed it to him in an explanatory manner. It was glowing blue now, since I was standing next to him. Its screen showed the words:
“Results for search: ‘Vampires in London’.
1. Stefan Drayton. Currently in: The Bar Noir.”
The eyes reacquired their gleam. “Oh, I see. Yes, I remember registering for that. You were looking for a vampire, then?”
“The iTem directed me to you, yes,” I said noncommittally. “So, are you really a vampire?” It seemed wisest not to reveal that I’d been listening to their conversation for the last ten minutes.
Despite an credible attempt to disguise it, he looked flattered. “I am, yes. Greetings.” He smiled slowly and enigmatically, long black eyelashes sweeping down modestly over his eyes, waiting for breathless, embarrassed acknowledgement of his status.
Half of me fought the urge to giggle; the other half found that my knees had gone a bit weak. The combination made me feel slightly dizzy. The goth girl looked at me with sympathy.
I said, “My name’s Elinor Rosewood. Can I offer you a drink?”
An elegant hand reached out to grasp my wrist. He looked carefully at the veins between it and my elbow, and nodded.
“A willing donor? Certainly you may. Shall we do it here, or would you prefer a little more ritual? I have a flat in West London.”
“Actually,” I said, “I wanted to buy you a drink. From the bar.”
Simon and the girl failed to repress giggles. Stefan’s foundation failed to conceal his blushing. I failed to hide my pleasure — I’d successfully got him off balance.
He recovered quickly, though, and said “Espresso, please,” in a neutral fashion. I nodded and went off to get his coffee. Up close, Stefan had perfect skin and his eyes looked even bigger than I’d imagined. Wow. I sternly reminded myself that he was very, very silly, and that just because he was cute didn’t mean I should give credence to a word he said.
When I returned, all three of them were quiet, clearly waiting to interrogate me. I didn’t mind. I would have interrogated me. (Sometimes I did, late at night when bored. I always confessed in the end and took my punishment like a man.)
“So, who are you then?” said the girl in a reasonably friendly tone, starting things off straightforwardly.
“Apart from being Elinor?” I shrugged. “I’m twenty-three, I’m from Somerset, and yes I know I don’t have the accent. I moved to London a few weeks ago, and I want to meet new people. The iTem seemed like a good way of doing that.” I shrugged again.
“So you searched for vampires? Why?”
“All of the people I’ve met at work talk about house prices or church politics. I’m very bored of the mainstream, so I thought I’d take a dive into a subculture. I’ve been to a few groups and clubs and stuff but I thought I’d try this too. Be proactive. So,” I added, “who are you?”
“I’m Joanne, this is Simon. He was calling himself Heroin for a while, but he seems to have got over it now.”
Simon (Heroin) frowned at her. “I still think it would be cool, actually,” he said, “but I can’t get these two to go along with it, so...”
“I’ll call you Heroin if you like,” I said helpfully.
“Really?” He gave me a grin that might well have got him thrown out of some of the cooler goth clubs. “I like her. She can stay.”
“I should clarify that Simon has not actually ever taken any drugs, let alone that one,” said Joanne, “but he doesn’t seem to feel that disqualifies him from adopting it as a name.”
“Oh, it’s the drug you named yourself after?” I said innocently. “I assumed you meant heroine, like hero. It’s good to be in touch with your inner five-year-old fairy princess.”
Joanne snorted and even Stefan gave a half-smile. Simon looked genuinely taken aback. “No! I — no! Oh shit. Maybe I should be Cocaine instead. Or Ketamine.”
“How about Illegal Drug of Choice?” suggested Joanne. “That way you can be everything to everybody.”
“Fuck off,” said Maybe Cocaine (but basically Simon), with no particular aggression. Obviously a well-rehearsed argument.
“Anyway,” said Joanne, reverting to the introductions, “this, as you know, is Stefan. Our vampire god and entry ticket into the world of blood drinking. In his spare time he works as a sound engineer. Tonight he’s munching us.”
“Sorry?” It seemed to me that Joanne was almost certainly too sarcastic to be welcomed into the vampire subculture, unless it was a lot more able to laugh at itself than I imagined.
“He’s taking us to a vampire meeting,” explained Simon (drug name to be confirmed). “They’re called munches. We might be donors.”
“Donors? Really?”
Joanne shrugged. “It’s something to do on a Saturday night. And I have a thing for cute brunette boys with sharp teeth.” I tried not to nod too hard in agreement. I really didn’t want Stefan thinking I’d set this up in order to pull him. I really hadn’t; the fact that I now wanted to was something I’d sort out later.
Stefan gave up being aloof and decided to get the conversation back. “Joanne, you have to realise that there is far more to this than just sex. It may be the most meaningful thing that ever happens to you. Embrace it. Appreciate it. That’s assuming,” he added meaningfully, “that someone agrees to do you the honour of accepting your blood as an offering.”
“Wait, wait, wait. I thought vampires were supposed to be desperate for blood? I was working on the assumption that I’d be doing them a favour.” Joanne raised an artificially dark eyebrow.
“It’s true that we do need willing donors, of course,” conceded Stefan with reluctance. “But it’s still an honour.”
“I’ll try to feel honoured,” said Joanne levelly. “But there’d better be some sex in this somewhere.” Simon nodded in emphatic agreement. I got a quick flash of the kind of vampires he was almost certainly visualising. The image was almost entirely composed of breasts and full pouty lips. I hoped he wouldn’t discover that all the blood drinkers at the munch were elderly men with bad breath.
“So, Elinor.” Stefan gazed down at me. His own lips were quite full, come to think of it. And pouty. Nice hair, too. And those eyes, so dark, so full of apparent depth... oh, was he saying something? I tried to remember how to listen, a faculty I appeared to have suddenly lost.
“Would you like to come with us? You seem to have some interest in our lifestyle, and a certain amount of understanding. More than some others I recently introduced to it,” he added with a meaningful glance at Joanne. “Might you be interested in donating?”
“Er, blood? I’m not sure. I’m anaemic, I’d probably taste all washed out and pale, like really diluted squash. But yeah,” I added quickly, “apart from the blood aspect I’m on for it. Let me just check my diary.” I checked my calendar on the iTem, just to make sure I looked as if I had other options that night, which I didn’t. “Yes, I’m free. I’d love to, thanks. Cool. Excellent. Thanks.” I decided to stop talking.
“Very good. We shall depart for King’s Cross in one hour.” Stefan sipped his espresso with a poise that was either ridiculously pretentious or disturbingly sexy; I hadn’t decided which yet. I was finding that the more I stared at his eyes, the less I wanted to laugh at him.
“Cool,” I said again.
Something had begun.
Chapter
Two:
Marianne, Suspender of Disbelief
“A lot of clubs have themed nights where you can pervert something more mainstream into an outfit. They can also create a lot of scope for something different and interesting. At a Sci Fi theme night I saw a wonderful ‘borg’ outfit made out of rubber car mats cut up with old computer parts stuck onto them worn over a black catsuit. Very effective and inexpensive! ...One gentleman made up a wonderful outfit for his first club out of a thong and a pair of L Plates.”
http://www.londonfetishscene.com/newsdesk/ViewArticle.asp?ArticleID=405
Search term: “Torture Garden”
Saturday, September 20th — evening
Before I talk about the rest of my evening, I want to talk about someone else’s. She was in King’s Cross that night too, but I didn’t meet her, not then. Perhaps we passed each other on the street. I like to think we didn’t though, because I want to imagine that I would have remembered her.
Anyway. Her name was Marianne Swift, and tonight she was going to a fetish club for the first time. Like many other things, fetish clubs had recently become illegal as pressure increased for Britain to become a theocracy like the CUS. But being driven underground had, if anything, increased the clubs’ popularity. Why don’t religious fundamentalists ever learn this lesson, I wonder? Adding an aura of Prohibition glamour to something is never going to make people want it less. So they flourished, particularly around King’s Cross, which had just the right air of urban seediness to provide a suitable context.
The place to which Marianne was headed had chosen to masquerade as a members’ club dedicated to the advancement of French cuisine, called Le Pain. If one arrived at the entrance dressed normally and pronounced the name ‘le pan’ in correct French style, one was directed to a small room in which a very dull woman gave a lecture on the history of baking in Provence, calculated to ensure that listeners were not encouraged to return. If one pronounced it Pain, looked interesting, and was prepared to hand over a largish entrance fee to the dour receptionist, then the door down to the basement was unlocked and one descended down rickety metal stairs into a dark underground world of black leather, shiny rubber, and pleasures beyond imagining. Well, probably not beyond imagining. In fact, if you were the sort of person who wanted to go to Le Pain, you’d probably more or less imagined them already. But there was definitely decadence with a capital D and one of those little curly flourishes.
Unlike most of its patrons, Marianne had not imagined what Le Pain what would be like. This was because she hadn’t heard of its existence before three days ago, which was when she had met Martin. Martin was an unassuming man in his early thirties who she’d started chatting to in the pub while waiting for her date to arrive. By the time the date had arrived, Marianne had lost all interest in him and was instead committed to joining Martin in his lifestyle of deliciously forbidden BDSM. (Bondage! Discipline! Dominance! Submission! Sadism! Masochism! Never had four letters stood for six concepts in such an alluring way.) Martin had told her that she was a born Domme and, once he’d explained what that was, she was convinced he was right. Tonight he would be her slave and she would grind him beneath her heel. Yes.
In pursuit of that image, she had done some shopping. An afternoon in Camden had resulted in a short red leather dress (short enough that she had needed to buy matching red knickers as well), black fishnet hold-up stockings (which were failing to hold themselves up and kept falling down, but never mind) and red knee-high boots with a heel that made her a good four inches taller. Which, started from five foot two, was not to be despised, although she did keep nearly tripping over things. Perhaps next time, she thought, she would get Martin to show her where you bought the comfortable fetish clothes that fitted you and stayed on.
Still, waiting outside the station for Martin, she felt she looked the part, or would do once they got inside. Currently, of course, the outfit was concealed by a long black coat, partly because it was autumn and partly because the club was a secret. A secret club! Marianne hugged herself with excitement, then remembered she was supposed to be an icy, dignified mistress of pain and adjusted her expression accordingly. When Martin arrived, he found her gazing haughtily at a London Transport poster. She gave him a stern look.
“You’re late.” He wasn’t and they both knew it, but he apologised anyway.
“I’m so sorry, Mistress. Let me make it up to you by paying for entrance and all your drinks tonight.”
“Very well.” Marianne nodded graciously, perfectly well aware that such had been the arrangement in any case. “Let us go.”
Le Pain was situated in one of those buildings that could have been anything: grey stone pillars flanked wide steps up to a large anonymous door. Martin rang the doorbell and said “Pain, please,” to the narrow-faced woman in black who answered. She nodded, accepted three crisp notes, and let them in.
Tottering down the stairs to the basement, Marianne regretted not having spent more time practicing how to walk in heels. However, she managed to avoid breaking any ankles and having successfully negotiated the last step, she spotted a chair and sank gracefully into it — first removing her coat, though, to give Martin the opportunity to admire her outfit. He gaped gratifyingly at the expanse of cleavage revealed by her dress.
“Gin and tonic,” she ordered, thrusting her coat at him as well; he nodded, collected the coat and went to get drinks, leaving her to take a proper look at her surroundings.
The club consisted of one long dark room with several even darker spaces opening off from it. There was a small bar along one wall and a small dance floor in one corner. Images were being projected onto the wall above the dance floor, old Victorian black and white photos of plump-bottomed girls being spanked by tightly corseted governesses with severe expressions. Apart from that the room only contained chairs, bar tables and bar stools, and various items of equipment whose function Marianne was currently unsure of, although she was instantly determined to educate herself.
The room was about two-thirds full of people, mostly sitting at tables and watching each other either covertly or openly. Apart from the usual leather and rubber (Marianne was half-consciously pleased with herself for managing to be world-weary about fetishism on her very first night of exposure to it) there were an impressive variety of materials, though not much of a colour range — black PVC, black lace, black nylon, black fishnet... The men seemed to be wearing either all-over black clothing, from wrist to ankle, or virtually nothing. A man crossed Marianne’s field of vision clad only in a transparent jockstrap. It hardly seemed worth it.
The women offered more of a choice of colours. One wore bright red feathers, another what looked like gold cling film, another was in a rubber Star Trek uniform that must have cost a fortune. How often, wondered Marianne, would you get to use a fetish science fiction costume? Nobody was doing anything much, just standing about at the bar, or sitting in corners, or wandering from area to area without catching anyone else’s eye. The latter group was mainly composed of single men, and they occasionally glanced at her, along with the other women in the room, with a quick movement that was furtive yet clearly meant to be noticed. None of them were wearing more than a square foot of clothing over their bodies.
On cue, Martin returned to kneel by her feet and hand her drink to her, with a nice little dip of the head to indicate absolute subservience. Marianne took the drink without a word and thrilled to the feeling of control. There was nothing especially difficult about this dominating thing. She patted her slave on the head and he looked pleased. On a whim, she ran a sharp fingernail down his back and he shuddered, actually visibly shuddered, and let out a soft yelp. As if attuned to the sound — which of course they were — all the single male heads in the room swivelled round to stare at her. Marianne grandly ignored them all and sipped her G&T, enjoying the rush. She could do anything she liked with any of these men and they would not just let her do it, but plead for more. She could break their hearts and they’d thank her for it. (The smile she gave then made several of the watching men groan involuntarily.) This was a great club.
Chapter
Three:
Munch Time
“Recent surveys suggest that one in every thousand people is a vampire, which means everybody probably knows, or has met one.”
http://www.sanguinarius.org/vampsupport/articles/brownie.htm
Saturday, September 20th — evening
I hadn’t been to King’s Cross before, apart from the station. Most places in London had struck me as a lot less scary than I expected. Soho, for example, appeared to be mainly full of tourists and gay couples, rather than being the hell-dimension full of pimps and rapists that my mother had warned me about. Though possibly that was more to do with her feverish imagination than anything else, given that the most dangerous place in Middleswithin was the patch of ice by the parish church.
But King’s Cross looked genuinely dodgy, which was exciting. The dimly lit streets were full of women in very short skirts, men selling a variety of semi-legal substances, and buildings that looked as though they had once been respectable and were now being used as impromptu dens of iniquity. I stalked along the pavements with my new friends and practised an expression of blasé detachment while I thought about what I wanted from the evening.
Would someone on the street offer me drugs? We didn’t have drugs in my home town — or at least, if there was a seedy underground crack scene, nobody had told me about it — and I was fairly sure I’d like them. As we walked up York Way, I tried to look receptive to offers; surely the goths would be like catnip to drug dealers? But we didn’t stop to find out. Oh well, perhaps someone at the munch would shower me with grated cocaine. (I was a little sketchy on how these things actually worked.)
Did I want sex, I wondered? I had had some of that before, at least. Even in church-infested Middleswithin, teenagers remained teenagers, and several of the boys in my youth group had succumbed to my charms. As had a couple of the girls, although it was that which had tripped me up. One had an attack of religion and reported me to the vicar for deviancy. Cue a rather embarrassing public exorcism and a ducking in the town pond. It was after that incident that I’d persuaded my parents to fund my move to the big city.
Dismissing my memories, I shook myself back to the very promising present. Stefan’s long black cloak flapped in front of me as he strode gorgeously toward wherever it was we were going. I tripped up on it a couple of times but I didn’t mind. I was with cool people, they seemed to like me, I was out on a Saturday night for the first time since I moved to London. And most importantly, I was going to a place where nobody was going to talk to me about mortgages.
* * *
“So, have you bought a place yet?” said a short plump man wearing a black lacy cloak and an expression of genuine curiosity. “Interest rates are down, you know.”
This was not promising.
The venue had looked good — an dark underground bar in the middle of some disused warehouses behind King’s Cross station. Very Creatures of the Night. But the people had so far not proved to be everything I had hoped. This was my third conversation about property; why did everyone in London have this house obsession? I made a mental note to rent for the rest of my life, if this was the alternative.
I smiled vaguely in a sorry-didn’t-quite-catch-that way, and sidled off back to Joanne and Simon, who were huddled in a corner trying to decide who to donate to.
“I think I’m just going to mingle,” Joanne mused. “Nobody’s flinging themselves at my feet begging to be allowed to drink my menstrual blood.”
“You were expecting that to happen?”
“One can hope. I took my tampon out specially.” Simon stared pointedly into the distance, making a not-hearing-this humming noise.
“How long have you two known each other?” I said.
“Oh, since college,” said Joanne airily. “Of course,” she added, “we’re both still at college, so in fact we’ve only known each other a year or so.”
“She picked me up,” said Simon.
“Did not! I saved him from one of my friends who’s a notorious man-eater, or in this case boy-eater, and he latched on to me. Just couldn’t get rid of him.”
Simon raised his eyebrows in mock-shock. “You invited me to your birthday party, gave me a goth makeover and then tried to shag me!”
“I may have invited you to my birthday party, but I swear I’m not responsible for the gothness. And I refuse to even discuss your third accusation. You know we’ve always been just good friends.”
“Apart from that one time...”
“I remember nothing. Nothing, I tell you. I must have been extremely drunk, if anything happened, which it didn’t. La la la la, there’s no point you saying anything further about it, I’m not listening.”
“Anyway,” Simon said, waving at the room, “I refuse to save myself for you as you so obviously want. I’m out there, exploring my options. Like that woman in crimson and black over there.” He stared lecherously across the room.
We looked around. The room was dense with crimson and black dresses, all filled with busty dark-lipped women. “Which one?”
“That one. There. With the cleavage.”
“Still not making it easy.”
“Wearing really dark lipstick.”
“You’re just not trying to help, are you?”
“OK, fine.” He took Joanne by the arm and marched her towards a dark-haired woman in her thirties who did indeed have a lot of both cleavage and makeup. I watched him introduce himself to her and wondered what name he’d chosen to use. Judging by the way he was pointing at his own neck, I thought he’d probably missed out the small talk and gone straight for the killer chat-up line. Joanne was rolling her eyes at me, but I noticed she was also scanning the room for likely male candidates. Would she be able to keep quiet long enough for anyone to bite her?
I had to admit, though, that some of the vampire people were cute. Stefan was chatting to a goth even taller and thinner than he was, who was wearing a large cross which appeared to have blood dripping from it. I went to get a drink and managed to brush casually past them, wishing I was wearing higher heels. I’m five foot eight and a size fourteen, but next to them I felt like an obese gnome.
“Hi, Elinor.” Stefan touched me lightly on the shoulder. I jumped, but luckily he seemed to mistake it for fear rather than uncontrollable lust. “This is Justin, leader of the Jesus’ Blood church.”
Church? Fuck, not here too. My face fell. I was reluctantly impressed, though, when Justin bent down, took my hand and kissed it.
“Always good to meet a new recruit,” he said gravely, with a precise intonation. His accent was soft Southern American. It wasn’t hard to guess why he’d left, or been thrown out of, the Christian United States. Whatever the Jesus’ Blood church was, it clearly wasn’t the same as the Resurrected Church of America, and anything that wasn’t the RCA (or its British equivalent, the RCE) was blasphemy.
Wait — recruit? Oh no. Please don’t let this evening end with me being told to accept God into my life, I prayed. (Not to God, of course, that would be silly. Just a general prayer.) If they all turned out to be evangelical Christians I was going to have to kill myself, or, preferably, them.
Justin saw my expression.
“Don’t worry, Elinor. I take it you haven’t heard of us? We don’t take pains to be noticed.” He smiled, exposing fangs. Well, that would explain the careful way he spoke. They were stainless steel — must have been implants — in the shape of tiny crosses, sharpened at the end. The cross part was on the canines, with the long end as the fangs. My mouth was hanging open rather unattractively, but he seemed pleased at the reaction.
“We worship Jesus as the first and greatest Vampire,” he said. I could hear the capital V even through the pointy teeth. “Jesus said ‘Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life.’ And his disciples drank his blood and were given eternal life. And — two thousand years later — so were we.”
“Given eternal life?”
“Indeed.”
“So, when were you born?” I made sure to say this in an interested, rather than disbelieving, way. I was getting lots of practice with that today.
“1980.” He must have seen this wasn’t quite as impressive a date as I’d been expecting. “But I don’t look like I’m in my thirties, do I?”
It was difficult to tell under the foundation, to be honest. “No, you look, er, twenty-five at most. So, have you met any of the original disciples? Presumably they’re still around somewhere?”
“Sadly not. In a typical example of Christian vampire persecution, they were all staked, set afire or decapitated before they had the chance to enjoy their immortality. However, they had time to turn others, and those others are our blood ancestors.” At the word ‘blood’, he touched his cross, which didn’t, I noticed, actually have blood on it. It was made of a rust-coloured metal, though, with metal drops hanging off the arms. “When we pass on the gift, we are passing on the blood of Jesus himself.”
“Wow.”
“Indeed. The vampire church is an old and active one.”
I involuntarily pictured a vampire church, stalking the night dragging its graveyard behind it, wearing the world’s largest black cape. “Does it drink the blood of other churches?” I said. “There must be a bit of a problem with the holy water.”
Justin looked sternly at me. I tried to keep a straight face.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, deciding to forgive me, “holy water and crosses do not affect us. As Christians, albeit of an unusual type, we are immune.”
“How handy. Um, is it a big church? I mean, I can see that the vampire community is quite large.” I glanced round the crowded room to make my point.
“The church has a substantial membership, yes. Mainly Americans like myself. Indeed, many of the people in this room are American. Hardly surprising.”
“No,” I agreed. The population of London was something like 20% American these days.
Stefan was only half-listening to the conversation; clearly he’d heard it before. I found that I was very aware of him, though, and I could still feel the exact spot on my shoulder where he’d touched me.
“You seem very ready to tell me about all this,” I said tentatively. “I mean, it’s fascinating, but should you reveal all this to a stranger?”
“Why not? We do nothing illegal. Which is more than you can say for some others of... our kind.” He glanced briefly across the room and I saw his eyes catch those of a serious-looking woman about my height with very pale eyes, dressed in black from neck to wrists to ankles and standing alone. She shuddered at his glance, and turned away.
“Let me assure you, we’re quite harmless. We oppose the non-consensual taking of blood and we are extremely choosy about our membership policy. Stefan himself cannot —” He paused, then seemed to change his mind, and went on: “So, Elinor, tell us about yourself. Stefan says you are working in temporary administrative positions at the moment?”
“For a while, till I get my one of my ideas going and become rich and famous. I’m not the world’s most enthusiastic temp, to be honest. But I have lots of ideas for other ways to make a living. For example, I’m planning to design Adult Lego.”
“Interesting,” said Stefan noncommittally. “More complicated Lego, you mean? Or bigger blocks?”
“No, no. Adult Lego, as in ‘adult shop’. Anatomically correct Lego people you can fit together, like blow-up sex dolls in small plastic form. You could have whole conga lines of little Lego gay men. I think they’ll be a huge hit.”
I was possibly not addressing my target audience. Stefan and Justin both made identical ‘hmm’ noises and then turned the conversation to the care and maintenance of velvet shirts. But I wasn’t put off. After all, I still had to let the Lego people know of my plans, so the idea was very much in the early stages of development. I also didn’t know how you made Lego people, but that was just a detail. Admittedly, a lot of my plans foundered on my lack of attention to detail, but I was sure I’d get better at that. The important thing was to make one’s mark on the world.
I looked around. Joanne was talking enthusiastically to a slim man who waved his hands around a lot, and Simon — where was Simon? Oh yes, in a dark corner with the woman he’d been chatting up earlier. All I could see of her was a shining white V of breasts held up by a dark red, underwired velvety top. And even that was a little obscured by Simon’s head being buried between the V. Well, good for him. I allowed myself a small shiver of excitement. This was the kind of London I’d wanted to find. My search for excitement, adventure and really wild things was going somewhere. Now I just needed to persuade Stefan to sleep with me, and all would be well.
For the moment, however, it was time to go back to the rest of my life, such as it was. There were a series of night buses to be navigated before I could get home, and all of them would probably contain someone very drunk who would want to either kiss me, throw up on me, or both. I needed to leave while I was still awake enough to push them away.
During goodbyes, I gave Stefan my email address and he unexpectedly invited me to a party at Joanne’s in a fortnight’s time. Joanne overheard us and detached herself from the enthusiastic man to come over and give me her address — a shared house in Crystal Palace. She’d invited everyone in the room, she said.
“Bunch of wankers, but I quite like them all so far,” she said cheerfully. “And I can’t wait to see my housemates flee in terror when this lot show up. Bet you a fiver they lock themselves in the bathroom for the night.”
“See you then, Elinor?” said Stefan, waving a languid hand in my direction. I thought he was pleased I was coming to the party, but it didn’t necessarily sound as though his life would be meaningless if he never saw me again. Still, I could work on that.
Chapter
Four:
Not Peace, But a Whip
Search term: “Christian BDSM”
Sunday, September 21st
Marianne remembered reading somewhere — some self-righteously healthy women’s magazine, probably — that an hour’s sleep before midnight equalled two hours afterwards. Since she’d got to sleep at something like 5am the night before, that must mean she’d had no sleep at all, mathematically.
Well, that explained why she was feeling so vacant. The next thing she needed to establish was where exactly she was. Not her flat. Martin’s flat? But that wasn’t Martin in bed with her. This was a new flat, with a new naked man beside her who looked only vaguely familiar. Marianne sat up and squinted down the length of the bed. His lower half looked really quite familiar, actually. It had long red marks on bits of it. There was a riding crop lying on the far side of the bed. Suddenly, everything swam into perspective. This involved an actual swimming feeling, which made her sway a little, but at least she remembered last night now.
She had beaten Martin with the riding crop. She had demanded to be told how to use the pieces of equipment, all of them, and half the club had begged to be allowed to show her. She had ridden high on a dizzy sense of triumph, feeling the kind of self-confidence that normally took her several lines of cocaine to achieve. (Several lines of cocaine had in fact been offered to her and accepted by her during the evening, but she was sure that had had nothing to do with it.) Men had literally queued up for her services. She had been bought so many drinks that she’d started just pouring them over the heads of the men kneeling around her.
Wow.
At some point, Martin had respectfully reminded her that he was her date for the night. Which, now that she thought about it, wasn’t actually an unreasonable thing to have said; but she had been high on her new-found power and suddenly Martin had seemed far too pedestrian for her tastes. So she had told him he was rude and presumptuous, and he had left looking disconsolate, and she had ended up going home with the man who was currently lying beside her. Um, Giles, was it? Or Gerald? They had presumably come back here and she had inflicted some damage on him, or possibly just fallen unconscious the moment her head hit a soft surface; she had no idea. Oh well, she was the Mistress, she could do what the fuck she liked. In fact she seemed to remember telling several people that last night, accompanied by emphatic strokes of a crop.
However, what she would currently like was breakfast in bed, brought to her by her new acquisition. Whose name she would doubtless remember before long. She prodded his shoulder experimentally. “Urgle...” he muttered, and curled up, stealing all the duvet in the process.
Well, fuck him then. Marianne, feeling rather naked and a lot more awake, crawled out of the bed and found some clothes on the floor that looked like they might be hers. When she’d finished dressing she had a feeling that she’d put some of them on upside down and/or inside out, but she left the bedroom anyway.
The Unidentified Sleeping Man appeared to live in a smallish two-bedroom flat with both bedrooms opening into a long, thin, pale living room. In the living room, she discovered, were two people. They looked as though they could be left over from last night’s fetish club, more or less: they were wearing black leather, covering most of their bodies, and around the necks of each hung a large fish symbol. One was male with short dark hair, one female with long dark hair. Apart from that they looked remarkably similar, and were both watching Songs of Praise with quiet concentration.
“Hi,” offered Marianne, momentarily thrown by the choice of TV programme. The man and woman looked up, and then straight down again.
“Hello,” said the woman with an impressive lack of any tone whatsoever. Their attention returned to the TV set.
After the triumph of the night before, Marianne found this lack of interest extremely disconcerting. Admittedly she was dressed rather more randomly this morning and her make-up was probably on the back of her head by now, and she wasn’t wearing the heels, but still, she deserved attention. And respect. And, preferably, deference. So she didn’t walk back into the bedroom, but sat on a chair next to the sofa and said “My name’s Marianne Swift,” in an assertive twang. As an afterthought, she asked, “And can you tell me the name of the guy I just woke up next to?”
The couple managed to make their shiver of disapproval chill the entire room, but the man said “I’m Daniel, and this is Patricia,” in a not unfriendly tone. (It occurred to Marianne at this point, though, that there was a very definite gap between ‘not unfriendly’ and ‘friendly’.) “And that’s Mark,” he added, with a nod at the bedroom she’d just come from. Mark. Right. Yes.
“Thanks.” Marianne smiled at them and settled a little more comfortably on the wooden chair. “So, were you at the club last night?”
“No, we weren’t at any club.” Patricia’s tone, like Daniel’s, was definitely on the cooler side of ‘not unfriendly’, and they were both looking with clear disapproval at the cleavage she’d exposed. It was impossible, she thought, to imagine them ever being referred to as Pat or Dan.
“Oh, OK. Sorry, I don’t remember that much about it; not the end of the evening, anyway.” She tried out a wider smile. It made the atmosphere, if anything, chillier.
“You’d been drinking?” said Patricia, in a tone that made it breathtakingly clear how she felt about people who drank a lot and then turned up half-naked in her flat the next day. Marianne bridled.
“I was drinking, yes. It’s a perfectly normal things to do in fetish clubs, and I assume you are familiar with the concept of fetish clubs. Given what you’re wearing.” She was still assuming that anyone who had that much leather on had to be some kind of kindred spirit.
She’d said the wrong thing again. “Certainly not!” squeaked Patricia with indignation. “Those kinds of places are a haven for drinking and drugs and depravity and debauchery...”
“...And swearing and immorality and fornication,” said Daniel, proving that he at least was aware of sins that didn’t start with the letter D. “We would never set foot in such a place.”
“OK, look,” said Marianne, who felt that something needed to be cleared up, “you’re Christians, right, I get that, with the Songs of Praise and the fish symbols and everything.”
“We do indeed worship Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, yes,” said Daniel, unbending a little.
“But the leather? And you choose to share a flat with a guy who, not that I know him at all, obviously goes in for BDSM in a fairly lifestyley way. Plus,” she added, “your bedroom door is open and I can see a wide range of whips hanging on your wall above the bed.” Both her new acquaintances flicked their heads towards the bedroom, then back at her, then nodded briefly in unison. They’d clearly been together for a long time.
“Like many people,” said Daniel, turning the volume down on the TV, “you see but you do not understand. The use of implements such as whips is not incompatible with a life dedicated to Jesus, far from it.”
“Oh, like monks wearing hair shirts?” said Marianne brightly, feeling that she’d got a handle on the situation now. “And nuns flagellating themselves?”
“No, no!” Daniel sounded horrified. “Those were Catholics, not real Christians. God is not found through pain, but through faith and true belief. And love for one’s fellow man.” The love in question was presumably being saved up for someone who wasn’t Marianne, as little of it was coming through in his voice.
“So, er, the whips are what? Decoration?” She raised an eyebrow.
“Is this really any of your business?” snapped Patricia. “We were watching Songs of Praise.”
Marianne shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ll get myself a coffee, then.” She wandered deliberately across their line of sight to get to the kitchen, which was small and very clean. Her curiosity was growing intense, but she made herself a cup of coffee and stood in the kitchen deciding that she’d better let these strange people finish watching Songs of Praise.
Which, she now remembered, lasted for a good three hours, enough to fill in the gaps between morning service and mid-afternoon communion for those who needed non-stop godliness on a Sunday. She’d just have to interrupt again, then. First, though, she redid her clothing to reduce the amount of visible flesh and wiped off as much makeup as she could, peering into the cloudy silver side of a kettle to assess the effect. She was pleased to discover that she looked significantly more respectable.
The existence of her erstwhile pick-up Mark was now as far from her mind as the existence of Martin. Marianne was all about the present, with a hefty dollop of the future; the past dissolved in her mind like the steam from the coffee she was holding. In her twenty-seven years, a lot of people had been taken aback, and in some cases quite upset, by her blithe inability to be interested in anything longer ago than yesterday. In this case, even yesterday was too far back, since in Daniel and Patricia she had encountered people who were both resistant to her charms and apparently in possession of a knowledge she didn’t share; they had come into focus for her, and Mark’s attractions, whatever they might have been, had become merely a blurred backdrop.
When she went back into the living room, therefore, she was not the sarcastic dominatrix she had been half an hour earlier, but a shy, anxious girl, keen for enlightenment.
“Hello again,” she said with a bright smile. The couple looked up, and appeared mollified by Marianne’s demeanour and lack of cleavage. She even won a small smile from Daniel and a relaxation of the eyebrows from Patricia, which was probably as close as she got to friendliness. Good. She decided to try to establish some common ground.
“The thing is,” she said, perching on a stool, “that club last night was the first time I’ve done anything like... that. And it was fun, but this morning I felt oddly hollow inside when I woke up.” (I’m fairly sure that this was not in fact true, but when Marianne switched roles she did it thoroughly, and she certainly now believed what she was saying.)
Patricia nodded. “You see, you made the mistake of practising BDSM outside the proper context. Just like sleeping around, it might feel good at the time but it leaves you empty afterwards.”
Marianne, who had slept around plenty of times and felt perfectly fine afterwards, said: “Oh yes, I know what you mean. It’s just meaningless, isn’t it?”
“Whereas,” said Daniel, “within the proper context, BDSM can be a fulfilling and spiritual experience.”
“And the proper context is...?” said Marianne, who had a feeling she was expected to work that out for herself but was worried she’d get it wrong if she guessed.
“It’s very simple, really,” said Daniel, with the air of one who had explained this before. “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church. Ephesians 5:23. I have a God-given duty to guide Patricia and she has a complementary duty to submit to me as her husband. Particularly in bed.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands. 1 Peter 3:1,” said Patricia. “To put it another way, Jesus wants Daniel to spank me.”
“The fact is, the Bible sanctions dominance and submission — within a lawful wedding relationship — and also sanctions the husband beating the wife on a regular basis, both as punishment for misdemeanours and, er, for fun.”
Marianne waited for Patricia to give chapter and verse for that one, but she merely smiled and wriggled a little on the sofa.
“I see. So you whip her and she has to do what you say,” — suddenly Marianne realised why the kitchen was so clean — “and you have to tell her what to do?”
“Indeed. The black leather and the riding crops aren’t ordained by God as such, but they’re not actually forbidden, and we like leather. Though we only wear it in the privacy of our own home, to avoid inciting other people into thoughts of sex.”
“Thoughtful of you.”
“Thank you,” said Daniel, with no apparent sense of irony.
“What if you want to swap, have a day when she beats you and tells you what to do?”
“That would be forbidden by the Bible,” said Daniel smugly. Not a switch, she guessed. Patricia looked resigned; clearly it was an idea that had occurred to her before and had not gone down well.
“And God’s happy about all the beating?”
“The important thing,” said Patricia firmly, “is to remember our primary purpose in life and honour the Lord with our every action. Each of our whips has a Bible verse written on it, and when Daniel beats me I thank Jesus with every stroke.”
“Yeah, I tend to use God’s name during sex as well.”
There was a pause.
“Whereas you, you see, are damned.” Patricia’s tone went cold again, and Marianne jumped slightly. “You practise fornication, you swear, you use drugs —”
“You don’t know that,” protested Marianne.