CONFESSIONS OF A VAMPIRE - Chapter 9

Hmmm ... It's not really time for another installment of this novel. Yet, I've just looked at the calendar - there are only about 10-11 weeks until election day in the US. I don't normally put my politics upfront but I'll remind you that I did say this story had a political thriller aspect to it - well, election day 2000 can decide things a lot.

We have brother Pat Robertson at the Christian Coalition convention last year in Atlanta telling everyone that THEY were going to win in 2000. He has his pet mongrel, Ralph Reed, well-situated in Bush's inter-political circle. And earlier this year, Brother Pat and Jerry Falwell had their Christian fascists on the telephones in SC to turn the tide there after McCain had beat Georgie Porgie soundly in NH.

Let me put it this way, not voting in Nov is a vote for George W. Bush WHICH is a vote for Pat Robertson. That's as simple as I can make it. That's what this story is all about. An autocratic 19^th century Prince saves democratic America. That's sweet in fiction. It's even something of a lark and pretty heavily erotic in Confessions Of A Vampire. But it ain't gonna happen in reality.

Reality is that you vote for diversity and equal rights for all of us by voting for Al Gore OR you vote to give America to the fascists even after they lost Germany in 1945.

So, I'm speeding up the release of this tale - so it's all there for you to read several weeks before election day 2000. Sure, it's absurd. Sure, it's only erotica. Sure, you won't find some Gestapo freak in polyester at your door 22 January 2001. Sure, no one's going to pull you out of your house and shoot you for being queer in 2001. But Pat and Jerry, their lapdogs too, they'll be trying to make sure you don't have a chance to vote them out in 2004. Anyway, following are the next three chapters of Confessions. Enjoy. And think about the underlying sense of the tale.

Dave

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When I awoke late the next afternoon, Emil was already stripping off his y-fronts in preparation for a bout of love-making. His eyes were filled with lust as he slipped under the covers to lie beside me. His warmth against me brought my tumescence to immediate erection even before his lips had found mine.

"I've been needing this since I woke up this morning," he breathed against my ear as he straddled my abdomen and melded his body along the length of mine, his teeth nibbling at my ear lobe, his body moving sultrily against mine.

"You're especially passionate," I managed.

"Your goddamned fascists made it into the paper," he hissed. "You've managed to infect me with your fears. Now, hold me. Make love to me and let me forget about them."

Our lips met again and his tongue darted between mine, between my teeth, into my mouth. I forced my fingers between us to find him as he began to worry my fangs with his tongue.

As his hips moved down along my abdomen toward the erection he knew waited him, he nipped at my neck and, then, lower, at my left nipple. His drool spread across my chest as his tongue trailed from the first nipple to its mate.

Smiling, he sat up and, reaching behind himself, took my manhood in his hand. Pushing himself up on his knees, he directed me to the entrance of his nether-regions. "Bite me while you're making love to me," he mumbled as he adjusted the fit of his backside to me.

"You're way up there," I observed, sloughing his request away.

He lowered himself slowly onto me. "I won't be after you're all the way inside me. Bite me."

"Why?" It was difficult to think logically as centimetre after centimetre of me slipped between his warm, tight flesh.

"It's supposed to make sex even better."

He achieved as much union as I was capable of providing and bent down over me to kiss me. "Bite me, Karli. Drink from me."

When he collapsed to the bed beside me later, our abdomens both coated with his seed, he mumbled: "That was incredible!"

His voice was a continuous gasp for air, his words nearly unintelligible as his chest heaved, pulling air into his lungs and demanding still more. His eyes flashed with exultation.

In more than a hundred years as a vampire, I had not been as close to total orgasm as I came in the moments before. Unproductive testicles had churned within their soft bag in anticipation of eruption, rising up along my shaft and trying mightily to give forth the mortality they no longer carried.

His rasping breath slowly pulled at me, demanding my attention. In our months of sexual explorations, I had never seen Emil in such excitement his breathing remained this laboured. I studied him more closely, the languid aftermath of sex evaporating as I accepted his ashen pallor for what it was.

I had drank too much. Sex and feeding were so intertwined for me I had difficulty differentiating them even in the most intelligent of moments. I bit him as he first began to ride me. I licked and drank as he worked his way through two orgasms. How long?

More importantly, how much?

I wasn't hungry as I lay beside him. Yet, waking and our sex normally left me craving the hunt - though I forced the desire from me that I could be with him. The bruised skin of his slender neck, no more than two centimetres from his clavicle told me what I did not want to know.

I had drank far too much. There was nothing wrong with the youth's breathing, except his lungs were instinctively labouring to pull more air into them to compensate for the loss of blood that carried it to the cells of his body. I had taken that blood. Far too much.

Had he planned it this way? I wondered, the thought fully realised when it appeared suddenly in my mind.

He gasped, struggling to pull in oxygen to feed his hungry cells, his eyes feverish as if he were a saint seeing a vision. I touched his thoughts timidly, knowing his awareness of my presence when I did so in the recent past. But I had to know. Had Emil sought to force me into granting him immortality?

His thoughts were jumbled with his satiation from our sex foremost among them. There was also the thrill he was feeling as his first paper was coalescing in his mind - how he would write it and the understanding it provided. Beneath those was doubt of himself; he couldn't understand why he was so weak. He had never been so incapacitated or so exulted by sex before.

Was he dying? That thought was rejected everywhere it alighted in his mind; yet, it still existed for him as an explanation for his sudden weakness.

I blushed brightly when I found thought after thought of what he felt for me. Columns of unconnected feelings blossoming into gardens of love.

I found no undercurrent of mischievous manipulation. He had not planned his request I feed on him. It had been a spur of the moment thought - a lark to be experienced as it offered itself.

His pallor was waxen, his breathing remained rapid and laboured. I sensed his thoughts becoming more kaleidoscopic, whirling dizzily.

I had known these physical reactions since I first fed on fresh blood - as I had the feverish pitch of his increasingly jumbled thoughts.

He was dying.

Emil, what have I done to you?

I had stolen his innocence and his youth. Never again would he walk along sun-lighted paths and enjoy mortal beauties. I had brought him the end of mortal life.

I knew instinctively what I had to do. I had to give him a new life before his old one was completely gone. Before his jumbled thoughts would slide into the oblivion of mortal death. I had to give him what he had asked and tie him to me for eternity.

Without thinking, I pushed myself up on my pillows until my chest was even with his face. With the middle finger of my left hand, I pulled back skin and flesh and cartilage, opening a wound between my ribs so close to the sternum it too was partially exposed and I felt the chill of the room's air upon the exposed bone.

I leant toward him, lifting his head with my right hand and bringing his lips to my breast. With my fingernail I nicked the vein behind the bone and pressed his lips to the hole now open to my heart. To my blood now seeping out onto my chest.

He sucked greedily. Instinctively. As a newborn baby sups at its mother's breast.

I became weaker and continuously looked to see if his pallor had yet begun to change. This was my first effort to create another vampire; I only knew he had to have my blood to survive. I didn't know how much he needed - or how weakened I had to become that he be saved.

An effervescence was developing in his skin, the coarseness of his mortal derma smoothing out and becoming even. I shuddered as the room dimmed perceptively to my eyes as weakness continued to grow over me.

I listened in the silence of the room and found his breathing was not as laboured as it had been. I willed my vein closed and pulled away, falling against my pillows. Emil moaned as my blood began to transform him, raising his head slightly and opening strangely clouded eyes. I moved closer to him and helped him lay his head on my breast.

My chest healed as I watched his transformation in the last rays of the weak winter sun. My strength returned to me as his breathing slowed and became shallow.

Stoker's romance and its emulators were wrong about everything there was to know about a vampire. We didn't reproduce ourselves as we fed. It took blood from our veins to do that.

We didn't die before our rebirth; if we did, if our hearts were to stop beating in those moments separating mortality and everlasting life, we would, in truth, be dead. And, if resurrection were possible, Würther would be alive and lying beside me now instead of this young changeling.

We do not, to coin a phrase, become pale as death or as Ms. Rice's marble. We are paler, however, than our mortal co-inhabitants of this world as we cannot survive the heat of direct sunlight when that star is closest to our world.

Our skin is less porous, less coarse, than is mortal derma. We do not sweat, there is no need for pores. We retain our various organs from our mortal lives, but few of them work as they once did. Testes, anuses, intestines - all are as useless to us as appendixes are to the human. Fortunately, however, our useless organs do not become infected. Bacteria does not feed on vampire flesh. Strangely, our prostrates - or clitorises, if female - develop heightened senses and react to the slightest stimulus upon our becoming undead.

Stomachs are an organ we need, but not in the same way as a mortal. Blood flows directly from it to our veins. It acts as a reservoir for us. It is also a transformer of that blood, changing cells from mortal to immortal. But it also becomes a filter that removes whatever our victims have caused to happen to themselves - except alcohol. That, it allows directly into our bloodstreams.

Lungs are a strange hybrid organ for us. From what I have been able to gather, they no longer distribute oxygen to our bodies. In that sense, they are useless - as useless as our intestinal tracts. But, we have need to speak to less evolved mortals and the mechanics of that act is the forcing of air over vocal chords - thus, the lungs serve a useful function in our new state.

Emil's body changed as I watched, becoming more perfect than even it had been. And I finally accepted I loved him as much as I ever had Sergei.

I rose and moved about the darkened room. From beside the fire, I remembered the Swiss youth was naked and uncovered as he underwent his transformation. Moving back to the bed, my foot kicked the newspaper he had read as he waited my awakening.

I picked it up and continued on to the bed where I pulled covers up to Emil's chin. Tucking him in. I smiled at the thought and returned to stand before the fire.

I studied him for a long time, seeing him in the dull red light cast by the fire and seeing him also with a vampire's sight that needed no light. My thoughts touched highlights from the four months we had shared our lives. My smile grew wider as I remembered so many good times crowded into such a short space of time. Yes, I loved Emil Paulik. And I was no longer concerned what that would mean in my life.

I straightened the paper and looked down at its headlines. The picture of a broken high-rise building grabbed my attention. I began to read.

A federal building in Texas had been bombed. Hundreds of people were injured by flying glass and falling concrete, some with severed limbs and others with crushed legs. More than a hundred were dead - most of them small children playing happily in a day-care centre. The Federal Bureau of Investigation labelled the attack terrorism. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms muttered darkly of an earlier militia threat.

Militia? There were armies in America other than the national one? Armies that would kill innocent American children in a government building?

Wahnsinn!

I let myself out of our room and went downstairs to the sitting room. I turned on the television to catch the latest information on the bombing.

A lorry filled with chemical fertiliser was the culprit of the Texas bombing, as it had been in Oklahoma the year before and New York the year before that. Someone had pulled within ten metres of the front of the building and walked away, leaving the lorry on a short timer.

The FBI was already interrogating a suspect arrested shortly after the bombing for a traffic violation. CNN had assembled a truncated biography of the man under suspicion, but his biography was already fuller than mine would be were the television network to try to understand me.

I rose to turn the television off when the attractive young anchor finished his report. But, before I could reach the set, he was reporting the eighty-fifth burning of a black church in rural Kentucky. I paused, now watching yet another atrocity.

There were no injuries or deaths in Kentucky. There were no suspects either. Negro leaders were demanding a federal investigation and, because all eighty-five churches had served predominately black congregations, the suspicion was that the burnings were racial in motivation.

I grinned lecherously as an extremely attractive young white man who appeared barely past his teens stood at a podium in a new scene and announced his organisation was promising a paultry twenty-five thousand dollar reward for information on the church bombings.

I already knew the man from earlier appearance on the news.

The anchor, however, returned to the screen and identified the young man as Joe McCarthy, the Executive Director of the Christian Centre, a two million strong organisation of Christian conservatives.

I blinked. The Christian Centre? The same group that burnt gay newspapers in Virginia public libraries? The same group that claimed sole responsibility for keeping the most reactionary Congress since the 1920's in power for a second two years? A man who oozed reasonableness led such a group? A man who claimed to be conservative? Real conservatives such as Churchill and von Bismarck would turn in their graves!

But he was more than just boyish. He was truly handsome - nearly as much so as was Emil. My quest for information could well provide pleasant interludes. I smiled.

Zürich's time was six hours ahead Washington's - six o'clock in the evening on the eastern coast of North America was midnight there.

I had my opening soiree planned out when I woke the next afternoon. I would call on my country's embassy to the United States and introduce myself to its ambassador. With what I hoped was the slightest of mental nudges, he would fall all over himself to introduce me to the American political elite. Doing so had been a function of ambassadors since there were nation-states to which they could be accredited.

A man of power or, at least, potential influence in the home capital visits the capital to which the ambassador is accredited. He is unknown there, but wishes the contact of his own kind, his own level of society. The ambassador throws a gala party if the man is sufficiently an eminence at home. Or a soiree if the man were but a country nobleman.

It opened doors in the new country to the visitor and established political credits back home for the ambassador.

Before I called upon the Austrian Republic's ambassador to the United States, however, I needed to assure myself I was in fact Austrian. That I held a position of importance that had meaning to the ambassador. And that I still carried the title of Fürst von Muribor. Such would open at the very least the First Secretary's door to me and not just that of some nondescript and unempowered underling.

I grinned to myself. From the screaming headlines I was seeing of the tabloids sold in the supermarkets, Americans, though devotedly republican in their national and local politics, were in love with royalty. Charles and memories of the Princess of Wales contested their front pages with the discovered corpse of Satan and alien possessions. I supposed that fascination with royalty would easily translate to one with a Prince of a dead and nearly forgotten empire that had risen like a phœnix as a republic from the ashes of war and dismemberment.

I would pay Marcus Eichmann another visit. One that would reassure me before I set off on my planned discovery of the underbelly of American politics. And one, I told myself merrily, that would not reassure Herr Eichmann.

I return to our room and looked in on Emil. I smiled as he slept peacefully. Tonight he would not go to the library - or tomorrow during the day, either. Remembering my own transformation, I knew he would be ravenous tomorrow when he finally awakened.

A few drops of vampire blood it appeared was enough to heal anything but decapitation or cremation. It was an elixir against momentary but extreme anæmia which was a sure result of feeding a vampire as he had done the afternoon before.

By seven, the evening after Emil's vampire birth, I was as strong as I had ever been - and again ravenous. I stood at the door, ready to begin my hunt. It was already one o`clock in Zürich, and I realised I was running behind the time table I had given myself.

I grinned. I would feed in Zürich. Herr Eichmann's surprise would be heightened when he found me in his bedroom tonight. Poor man.

I laughed. I would enjoy waking him and feeling the surge of his fear. Sated, I would pose no threat to him. I would know it, but he wouldn't. I would heartily enjoy my little joke at his expense.

I concentrated on Eichmann's bedroom, remembering its every detail, and brought it toward me. For a moment, it blurred in my mind's eye as I sought to ensure I saw myself with clothing upon my body. Then it grew stronger, more real, as I, fully clothed, entered it.

The window was behind me as I faced the bed of the Wansee monster's grandson. He lay there, naked. Each limb was tied to a corresponding bedpost. His erection pulsed warm and full of blood as he stared up in rapture at the naked man leaning over him. A burly, young man with but a leather mask over his head, softly thumping a riding crop against his open palm.

I had really done it, teleporting myself from Washington to Zürich. Such distance! I barely contained my pride.

And what fun I was going to have with what was before me.

I laughed.

The masked man whipped about to face me. `How did you get in here?' he demanded, anger rising in a crescendo in his voice. Right along with it, keeping pace with that anger, was an equal measure of fear.

"Mein Gott!" Marcus Eichmann growled from his bed. Then, he said: "My Prince."

"Herr Eichmann," I answered, as courteously as he had every right to expect from me.

"Who's this bastard and how did he get in here?" the masked man demanded of Marcus Eichmann.

As young ladies in American films were once prone to say of themselves, Marcus Eichmann was no longer in the mood. "Untie me," he demanded, attempting to assert his authority.

I could see where that might prove difficult given his present circumstances.

The masked man looked from me to Eichmann and back to me again. I noticed his erection was leaving him. "Who is he?" he demanded finally of the bound Eichmann, continuing to leave him in that condition.

Sleep, I told the masked man and he yawned.

Sleep now! I told him, brooking no disobedience. He slumped to the floor, his body arranging itself to become comfortable.

He snored.

"I would think he wasn't your type," I told the tied man.

"He's not - he's local trade." He peered down the length of his hirsute body and blushed. "Untie me please, my Prince."

"Local talent? What's happened to your hold on students seeking to learn to make computers do improper things?"

"They haven't returned from semester break, meiner Herr. Please, the ropes-?" He turned his head to look back at me beseechingly.

The poor man was becoming quite frustrated he was so bound up in what he had been doing and nobody was willing to release him.

"Perhaps the two of you could exchange places?" I mused, wondering how to milk the two naked men and their tableau for my greatest satisfaction.

"What in the hell are you doing here-?" His eyes rounded as he remember he hadn't included the honorific. "My Prince?" he added with embarrassment.

"I come to ensure your actions in my behalf, Herr Eichmann."

"At a time like this?"

"Were you enjoying it?"

He stared at me and finally realised my sense of humour was showing. "It had its moments, my Prince," he allowed.

"I had the impression you preferred your partner bound and you holding the whip-"

He chuckled, finally accepting his position would remain unchanged until I tired of playing with him. "Like I said, it has it's moments. Variety makes life pleasurable."

"I see," I offered.

"Would you please untie me, my Prince - that I may conduct your business with you, of course."

I smiled encouragingly. It pleased me to have men remember their manners with no help from me. It showed their mother had done something right since birthing them.

I did not move to the bed; instead, the bindings unravelled of themselves. Slowly, one after the other - with Herr Eichmann watching each of them with eyes that grew rounder and a heart that beat more fearfully.

"You aren't going to kill me, are you, my Prince?" he asked timidly after his hands were free.

"Do you deserve to die, Herr Eichmann?"

"I-" He shuddered and fell silent as each of his feet in their turn was released.

"Please rise," I told him. "I would have your friend replace you that we might speak without interruptions."

He was off the bed almost as quickly as I could be, he moved so quickly. He reached to the floor and retrieved a pair of boxer shorts.

"Please do," I told him as he shoved one leg through them. While I grew into manhood in an era when being overweight was considered manly, I had never found myself intrigued by a bare human body the size of a small elephant.

Covered, if not dressed, Herr Eichmann faced me. I could sense his continuing fear of me, but it was contained by his knowledge I would have already killed him if that was my intent. Smiling, I lifted the masked man with my mind and moved his sleeping body that he hovered over the bed as the rope from each bedpost snaked out to his arms and legs to bind him there.

"Herr Eichmann, I wish to know what an Austrian ambassador would learn of me if he were to ask Vienna who I was."

His eyes narrowed as they continued to watch me. "He would learn that you are the Prince von Muribor, meiner Herr."

"Explain - or, as Americans are prone to say - lay it out for me."

"Is that where you are, my Prince?"

"It behooves a man to mind his own business, don't you think?"

He flushed and lowered his gaze at my rebuke. "Your grandfather automatically became Fürst upon your presumed execution in 1940 by the security forces of the Third Reich. That was under both old Austrian law as well as German law. You acquired the title and whatever of the estates and other holdings were left when your father died - again, under current Austrian law."

"Don't I have to be invested?"

"Austria was a republic after 1918 and became one again when it was separated from Germany after the world war. Even the Third Reich was a republic. Investitures rarely take place in republics, my Prince. What that means, then, is that the title automatically passes on to the first born male heir - or the adopted heir."

"This is what the ambassador will learn?"

"That is all he can learn, my Prince. Most of your records are Swiss as you were technically a Swiss citizen until you claimed your title."

"And this virus with which you threatened me?"

"It is destroyed."

We were through. I had learnt what I wanted to know. But I was not yet ready to leave. The bound masked man drew me, evoking my curiosity. Not of him, of course. His physique was not of the type that would interest me.

His seemingly complete domination of Eichmann was what intrigued me. "Where is your dildo?" I asked softly.

"My-" Marcus Eichmann's eyes rounded in surprise. Then, he looked upon the sleeping man and grinned. "It's under the bed, my Prince."

"Shall I use it on him?"

"If you wish to." He was grinning even more broadly. "I clean it in bleach after every use; it's safe for him."

I reached under the bed and found the box that contained the plastic phallus. "From the greed I see in your eyes, this one isn't likely to have had this experience before," I observed as I held the plastic monster aloft in the shadows to see it better.

"He hasn't, my Prince. He's very selective with what he permits." He chuckled. "This leech is only too happy to take my money to tie me, beat me, and abuse me-" He inclined his head toward the dildo. "But he refuses to make the fun reciprocal."

"I suspect his refusal will have ceased after tonight." I smiled at the rotund, hairy man in his boxer shorts and handed him the plastic phallus. "If your rented companion changes his tune will you leave your students to their own devices?"

He looked sharply at me, startled at my question and its implied knowledge. "They are so pliable, my Prince," he answered, but his entire face had already become a study in speculation. "You can make this man enjoy the bondage?"

I nodded.

"And you can make him enjoy it with me?"

"Momentarily only, Herr Eichmann. Telepathic control is haphazard at best if it requires the subject to do something he finds offensive. It's only operable in my presence. The man obviously enjoys your games or he wouldn't play them - I can help him expand his enjoyment. But I can't make him enjoy doing so with you."

"Scheiße!"

"You must win his interest, his heart, yourself - as any man must one who loves him."

"Verdammte!" he growled bitterly.

"Why don't you look into yourself - perhaps with his help when I'm gone - and find those things he likes about you, that keep bringing him back to you. You can build on those and, together, build a relationship - if that's what you want with him."

He studied me speculatively as we stood on either side of the sleeping masked man. Finally, he laughed. "When I met you four months ago, you were a lost vampire Prince hurled fifty years ahead of the time you understood. Now, you are a vampire philosopher well-established in this time. Perhaps, I should have let you bite me, my Prince."

"That option is past you, Herr Eichmann. You made your choice."

Slowly, he shrugged and looked down at the masked man. A smile moved across his face and he knelt to reach under his bed. Standing again, I saw he held a tin of cooking lard. Curious, I watched as he opened it, dug out a palmful, and began lovingly to smear it along the length and width of the dildo. When he had done that, he reached between the sleeping man's spread legs and coated the insides of his cheeks.

Gently, he placed the dildo between the man's legs and, with near tenderness, began to work it into him. The masked man's sex grew tumescent and slowly developed into an erection. "Would you wake him now, my Prince?" Marcus Eichmann asked.

I touched the sleeping man's thoughts, planting the feeling of growing sexual excitement among them as I released him from his somnipathy.

The man ground his backside against its abuser and groaned as he began to wake. "Fuck it good!" he groaned and opened his eyes to look down his body. "Give me all of it."

I left. Perhaps Eichmann had found himself a companion. I allowed myself to wonder how that might change him. The burly man was certainly enjoying their play and that, of course, was the first step in any lasting relationship.

Emil still slept the sleep of the recently born when I entered what was now our bedroom and began to make myself ready for bed. Dawn was still several hours away but I enjoyed taking my rest, even though it wasn't the necessity for me it was for mortals. I had need to make my initial contact with the Austrian embassy and arrange a meeting with the ambassador - or, at the least, his deputy - to institute my plan for entering fascist society in America.

Hopefully, I would wake before Emil. I had to ensure he acquired my feeding habits that he not open us up to police scrutiny.

Gods! Why had I bitten him? I knew so little about his ideas and feelings as a mortal, I knew nothing of what they would be now he was a vampire.

My one consolation - my hope now - was that he loved me. He had as a mortal and that would carry over into his new reality, at least temporarily. Now, however, he had need to trust and respect me enough he permitted me to help him learn to be something as evolved as a vampire.

I lay beside him and closed my eyes, willing myself toward sleep. I smiled when he snuggled against me, holding me to him in his own sleep. I drifted into a more peaceful sleep than the one I had envisioned for myself moments earlier; Emil would do nothing to expose me. There would be no nightmares for me because of him.