Authors: Larry Benjamin
Tags: #vampires, #literary, #political, #lgbt, #mm, #gay romance, #allegory, #novella, #civil rights
“A little,” Barnabas answered distracted by
Gatsby, by his proximity, his scent, his glistening wet hair like
molten steel.
Gatsby pulled Barnabas on top of him. “Come.
You must feed. You’ll feel better.”
“Feed? How? I don’t know what to do.”
“Just relax. Follow your instincts.” Gatsby
stretched his neck in offering and Barnabas lowered his head
hungrily. He felt his new fangs pierce the pale, willing flesh.
Their two hearts beat against each other
like two planets colliding. “Easy.
Easy
,” Gatsby said. He pulled gently, but
firmly away. Opening his eyes, Barnabas saw two small puncture
wounds on Gatsby’s neck but no blood.
“How do you feel?” Gatsby asked him
again.
How did he feel? He felt like a man who,
after a long journey, has finally reached home. Wordlessly,
Barnabas knelt, and pulled Gatsby up so they both knelt facing each
other. He took Gatsby’s face in his hands, intending to kiss him.
Before he could, Gatsby covered Barnabas’ hands with his own which
were larger, cooler, and murmured, “In manus tuas, Domine.”
+ + +
In the days and weeks that followed his
turning, Gatsby was patient and gentle with Barnabas, answering his
questions, letting him feed when he needed to. He treated him with
a solicitous indulgence that Barnabas tried, but failed, to
emulate, prompting Gatsby to tell him, “Do not imitate me. Just be
yourself. That you trust me enough to
be
yourself, to let me see who you really are is
reward enough for sharing your company.”
* * * * *
“BARNABAS! GET UP!” Gatsby shouted.
Barnabas sat up, frightened. Gatsby never
raised his voice, or spoke sharply to him.
“What? What is it?”
“Humans are here. Outside, I mean.”
“Humans? Are you sure?”
“Barnabas, I can hear them!”
Gatsby, his back to Barnabas, spun the dial
on the safe. Once it was open he started transferring wads of
money, U.S. dollars, and new Euros, from the safe into a worn
leather valise. Next, he shook the contents of an envelope into his
palm, nodded, then funneled the contents back into the envelope.
Even in the dim light, Barnabas recognized the unmistakable sparkle
of loose diamonds, sapphires and emeralds. Gatsby closed the bag
hurriedly and opened the massive mahogany wardrobe drawing from it
black flannel-lined jeans, heavy wool shirts and hiking boots.
“Quick,” he said, “Put these on.”
As Barnabas dressed, Gatsby drew out two
pairs of long calfskin gloves and two dark wool cloaks with
hoods.
“Gatsby?”
“Just get dressed!” Gatsby ordered,
stripping off his own lightweight “house clothes” and pulling on
the jeans and wool shirt.
Gatsby went to their dresser and stared at
the encaustic portrait of himself he’d first seen in Barnabas’
studio. He wrapped the painting carefully in a t-shirt then placed
it in the valise with the money and jewels.
Next, he pulled a leather knapsack, which
Barnabas had never seen before, from the wardrobe. Moving quickly
around the room, he filled the knapsack with the drawing supplies
scattered around. He added a sketch pad and, zipping the knapsack,
handed it to Barnabas. Barnabas remembered a conversation they’d
had early on about moving.
“
I travel light,” Gatsby had
said.
“
Not me,” Barnabas had replied, “Me, I
need steamer trunks and scores of porters.”
Barnabas set the knapsack on the bed and sat
beside it. “Now what?” he asked Gatsby.
Gatsby handed him the gloves and then
pulling him to his feet, helped him slip on the wool cloak. He
fitted the hood over his head and gave him a pair of black
wrap-around sunglasses. “Now, we go.”
“Go where?” Barnabas asked shocked as if
he’d thought they were only playing a game of dress up.
“Outside.”
“Outside? Are you mad? It’s almost
dawn!”
“I know. Come. We must go.” Gatsby grabbed
the valise with one hand and Barnabas with the other.
“Gatsby,” Barnabas protested, “This is
crazy. There are no humans out there.”
“There are, I tell you! I hear them!”
“Wouldn’t the other Vampires hear them,
too?”
“No. They’re too complacent. They think
they’re safe. They think if they keep to themselves they will be
left in peace—”
“But I don’t hear anything either.”
“That’s because you’re listening.” Gatsby
sounded impatient and his eyes went pink but the pink quickly faded
when he looked at Barnabas. “Stop listening and just let
yourself
hear
.”
Barnabas was about to protest again but in
his confusion, he stopped listening. And he heard them, too, the
humans. Gatsby saw the look of fear on his face. As they slipped
quickly, quietly, out the back door, Barnabas could see the humans
darting among the lavender and purple shadows. He could hear their
mischief like the whispering wind. Gatsby led him quickly up the
dark hill into the wood behind their house. And then they heard
them, the helicopters hovering in the air nearby. Barnabas looked
at Gatsby questioningly. Gatsby shrugged and pulled him further up
the hill, and deeper into the wood. He held the satchel tightly
using it to clear a path.
In the next moments the unthinkable
happened: two state-owned helicopters moving in opposite directions
flew low over the houses and dropped, what would later be revealed
to be, FBI-supplied water gel explosives, a substitute for
dynamite. The military grade C-4 bombs ignited a massive blaze.
Mockingbirds rose, screaming, against the
smoke-filled sky, as Vampires, aflame, burst from the burning
houses and sprinted for the front gate, a keening sound like a
singular prayer, rising from their throats and floating in the air
above their burning heads. Reaching the gates, slender white hands
with blue-white nails, extended from sleeves of fire and grabbed
for the gates, intending to tear them open. The Vampires, drawing
back singed hands, realized too late that some time during the
night the bars had been silvered. The police, outside the gates,
opened fire hoses and turned them on the staggering, burning
Vampires. The Vampires fell to the ground, burning, blackening. The
keening stopped, as if the prayer, unanswered, had fallen back to
the earth, useless.
Sound receded. The mockingbirds, wings
stilled, began to plummet to the ground, as if the keening sound of
the Vampires’ suffering prayer had been all that had kept them
aloft.
It was only then that Barnabas and Gatsby
realized the “water” was actually liquid silver. Gatsby’s eyes
flashed red in the first light of day as he surveyed the rubble and
the smoldering bodies that had been his home and fellowship. He
pushed his glasses back up his nose, and his eyes, fading back to
silver, disappeared. Gatsby pulled Barnabas farther up the hill,
away from the devastation that had been the cul-de-sac. Barnabas
stumbled and blinked. Gatsby caught him.
“Are you all right?”
Barnabas nodded weakly, removing his
sunglasses; exhaustion crowded his eyes, and he blinked
rapidly.
“It’s the daylight,” Gatsby said. “Come, you
must feed. You’ll get your strength back until we can rest.” Gatsby
removed the hood from Barnabas’ head and carefully tucked his head
under his own hood and against his neck. As the sharp teeth pierced
the sensitive skin of his neck, he sighed, a prolonged sibilant
sound that was like white noise floating on the chaos.
At midnight, they emerged, coughing, into
the moonlight, from the grove where they had slept, undisturbed, on
a carpet of pine needles. The grove was so thick with spruce trees
that the long arm of the sun had not been able to reach them. The
smoke-choked air outside the grove scraped the insides of their
noses and burned their throats. In the distance, the silver birches
greedily drank in the reassuring moonlight and gave back a miser’s
feeble glimmer like bronze.
“What happens now?” Barnabas asked, “Is it
over?”
Gatsby shook his head. “No. From its own
ashes the Vampire nation will rise again.”
Barnabas tucked his arm into Gatsby’s, and
together they climbed the hill, ash swirling in the air around
them. In the distance, a lone mockingbird rose and circled, its
song rising with it like a new, wordless prayer on the still
air.
Gatsby stopped, and pointed, “Vampire
rising,” he said.
And, as they watched, a second mockingbird
joined the first, their two voices, rising as one, pushed against
the ash-filled sky.
+
Amen
+
* * * * *
Bronx-born wordsmith, Larry Benjamin
considers himself less a writer than an artist whose chosen medium
is the written word rather than clay or paint or bronze. His debut
novel, the gay romance
What Binds
Us
was released by Carina Press
in March 2012. His second book,
Damaged Angels
, a collection of short
stories, is a 2013 Rainbow Award Runner-Up in the Gay Contemporary
General Fiction category. His third book,
Unbroken
, was a 2014 Lambda Literary
finalist, and a 2014 IPPY (Independent Publishers Book Award) Gold
medalist.
He lives in Philadelphia with his husband and
their two dogs.
Website:
www.larrybenjamin.com
* * * * *
When 17 year old Thomas Edward meets the man
of his dreams, he assumes they'll be together forever. When their
relationship ends abruptly, he learns that sometimes it's in an
ending that we find our beginning.
You’ve seen them, for they exist in every
city in the world. In every city in the world, they claim as their
own a single city block, sometimes more. And they stand there, on
these city blocks, a confederacy of angels, slightly damaged,
marked down for clearance. These are their stories.
My parents, unable to change me, had instead,
silenced me. When they’d stilled my hands, they’d taken my words,
made me lower my voice to a whisper. Later, I remained silent in
defense, refusing to acknowledge the hateful words: Brainiac.
Sissy. Antiman. Faggot.
Gatsby Calloway lives on the fringes of
society, avoiding humanity, until he meets Barnabas, a young
encaustic painter. When Barnabas is mortally wounded during an
anti-Vampire attack, Gatsby must forget everything he has known,
and learn to trust.
At Christmastime, a mother, unhappy her son
is gay, turns to an Obeah practitioner to change him with
surprising results. (A story from
Boughs
of Evergreen: A Holiday Anthology
.)