Billy Came, Chapter 4

4.a, A Taste of Things to Come

…the Gibben axe spliced my wrist, nicking the skin and the vein beneath, which panic had set pulsing in great glugs.  What skill and instinct did Billy possess to command such strength and precision?  Was it honed, derived from centuries of practice?  Or were such accuracy and wits other essential parts of 'the gift'?  I was yet to comprehend, but that ignorance was soon to be satiated.

He strode over the little space between us, placed one spade-like hand on my shoulder, while the other retrieved the axe from the mess it had made of the wall in the 'ice bubble'.  He looked deep into my eyes as if trying to reach down to my very soul.

This was it: do or die.  His eyes gave me the choice: accept this new life or die here and now.  I've always had an aversion to death.  Especially my own.  So, all things considered, I nodded consent, then tried to close my mind off from whatever was going to happen next.

Billy Came, Chapter 3

3.a, Descent Into Darkness

Up ahead, even deeper into this underground chamber (which had all the charm of the basement level of a multi-storey car park, but grown from organic matter), a kaleidoscope of light danced at the edge of the darkness.  It was as if a rainbow had got lost down here and was disintegrating into a swarm of bees.

Had Billy not furnished me with his gift, I would have sworn that the buzz of colour swam way off in the distance.  I suppose in the context of a human, the lights were a goodly distance hence.  But, to my awakening vampire train of thought, they were within spitting distance.

The smell of ancient, musty air pervaded every orifice, every pore; the very atmosphere adhered to the skin like some virulent, bacterial body stocking.  Someone (or something) had recently disturbed the dust that looked to have otherwise lain here undisturbed for years.  Motes floated in the foreground against the backdrop of the haphazard, chaotic light show, giving the panorama an aged, dream-like quality.

Billy Came, Chapter 2

2.a, A Rite of Passage

Billy's crinkled eyelids began to close, and slowly enough for me to see that his eyeballs had rolled upwards to stare into his head, leaving only that opaque whiteness to fill the diminishing gap, until that too disappeared.  In his hands he took my left wrist, his thumbs and forefingers enveloping it—apropos in readiness to administer an Indian snakeburn—then raised it to meet his descending lips.

I closed my eyes, either in dread of anticipation or due to some hypnotic passage of which I'd been unaware.  At first, I thought he had merely kissed me, tenderly, above the pulse at my wrist.  But before that thought could even fully form, a tornado ripped through my very veins.

Whatever alien substance had begun to invade me, riding my bloodstream on a barbed surfboard, it was leaving a pre-coital fuzz of ecstacy in its wake, unabashedly berating my unsuspecting senses.  First, my forearm caught light, and then my chest, filling it up as if my lungs were going to burst through my sternum.  Once this all-consuming tonic passed through the chambers of my heart, my body lit up like a force gale rushing through the dwindling embers of a summer campfire.  From my follicles to the soles of my feet, every nerve ending tingled.

But I wasn't alone.  Whatever the vampiric equivalent of an orgasm is, Billy crumpled beneath one.  His knees buckled so violently that he had to snatch one of the hands from around my wrist to stay himself on the bed frame.  The sweetest smile kissed the corners of his closed eyes and...he drank.

Billy Came - a short vampire story; Part 1, Chapter 1

Part One: How to Make a Vampire

1. a, Like the thief in the night

It was strange that Billy should choose the summer solstice, of all nights, to steal into my room. 'The Longest Day'?  Really? That wretched day! It would, in a matter of mere minutes, despatch me to eternal night.

Recalling those cataclysmic moments now—but a few hours ago, although it seems a lifetime hence—I think he chose last night on a purpose.

According to reason, June 21^st should have afforded Billy the least time in the year to carry out his damned courtship and wooing of my immortal soul.

Yes, immortal!  I am doomed to wander nighttime forever, or at least that's my impression of how this thing works.

But he abides by no law, Billy.  That I know.  Now.  He's bound by neither natural nor ethereal forces. He pays little heed to myths, either those written in lore or the tales whispered in the cold, deep witching hours of a million nights spanning the aeons that have borne more than just legends of his kind.

Lestat

Tom Cruise looking at his most sinister as The Vampire Lestat

b/w graphite pencil, zebedeerox