I probably should point out that I'm not anti-religious -- every modern religion teaches peace and love, and the repudiation of hate. Unfortunately, there are preachers, rabbis, and imams who claim hate and fear to be the message of their god; and, even more unfortunately, there are people who believe them. So, I'm nowhere close to repudiating the God of Christianity in this story; but hate-mongers who claim to speak for Him are fair game.

This story is gay fiction. It is copyrighted and cannot be reproduced in any medium without my express permission. If you are a minor in your country of origin, don't read.

I have two other series running on Nifty: GLOBAL ENTERTAINMENT appearing in the Incest folder and ILLUSIONS in the Beginnings folder. If these two stories don't give you enough hot vampires and mortals, Starbooks has just released my LOVERS WHO STAY WITH YOU, and that has 28 tales that'll have you offering your neck to the next guy who offers to lick it. <G> You can help Nifty when you buy this book, just use their link to A Different Light bookstore.

I'd love to hear from you -- tell me what you think of this story, Illusions, or Global Entertainment. Just please put the title of the story in the subject box so that I won't delete your message along with all the spam I get. I'm at vichowel@aol.com.

Dave MacMillan 

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Henry and I showered -- separately. I was still trying to work my way through my thoughts and actions of the morning; and I figured Henry's close, naked proximity under the water would lead to a lot of action and very little thinking.

Somehow, I hadn't worried once about the blond's naked dick going up my butt. I hadn't thought about it once -- before, during, or after. It was like my brain shut off the moment I was looking at the thing -- or feeling it. And all I had afterwards were pretty graphic memories of how good it felt.

But I sure had had some afterthoughts about Henry's piece of meat being inside me. I allowed myself to hope that I'd learn to have some forethoughts about it, too. Bare dick and ass could be one of the most dangerous things a man ever encountered, and I wasn't ready to die any time soon.

That was easily enough taken care of -- if I made myself think instead of going straight into sex mode. I resolved to make sure there were condoms on me or close to me all the time. And I resolved to get one out before things had gone too far.

What wasn't easy to figure out was what I felt toward the blond -- and Henry too. The blond's big-assed dick slid into me and stayed there for hours and never hurt once -- not even on my virgin trip down its length. Yet, I'd had to work to get Henry's meat into me and it had hurt.

I hadn't gotten lost in a sexual fog with Henry. It'd gotten to where his pecker in me felt good, but he'd never pushed me off into some never-never land like the blond did. There hadn't been the peace, warmth, or even comfort with Henry that had enveloped me whenever the blond was fucking me.

And I'd had to struggle to get myself off when Henry started to cum. That sure hadn't been an issue with the blond -- I was cumming all over him and me and whatever.

So, what did the blond have that Henry didn't?

I was still trying to figure that one out as I followed Taylor Access Road around the mountain with Henry navigating.

Mr. Euston had set out a pitcher of iced tea on the verandah when we arrived. He came out carrying two glasses filled with ice and watched as Henry and I got out of the car and followed the path up to him.

"Go get yourself a glass, boy," he told Henry and I watched the kid walk into the house like he belonged there. Euston's mountain twang was pronounced.

"That Henry's a good boy, Sammy," Mr. Euston told me as he poured tea into our glasses. "You take good care of him now that he's yours."

My face burned, I was blushing hard. Did everybody on this fucking mountain know everybody else's business?

He sat down and looked up at me, studying me -- his eyes twinkling. "So, Sammy Taylor, how do you like your daddy's folks now that you've finally found us?"

"The people are nice," I answered carefully, sitting down next to him.

"They are that," he agreed. "That's how pappy set it up -- good people, easy to get along with, and the most perfect place on this green earth."

"It is that," I agreed.

"I never could understand why Junior and, then, his son -- your daddy -- didn't think so." He looked out at the woods on the other side of the access road and breathed deep.

"It worked out, I guess," he said finally. "Living there in Atlanta, they made all us Taylors comfortably well off, while we made sure that Taylor Mountain remained a piece of heaven on earth."

"I never knew my grandfather," I mumbled, feeling slightly embarrassed.

"Junior was a strange one." Euston sat back in his chair. He was in the Marines and hopped from island to island killing himself a bunch of them little Japs during the world war."

"He was lucky," I said for something to say to keep the man going. I'd never heard anything about my grandfather and I was interested.

Euston nodded his bald head, his skin wrinkling as he smiled at some thought. "He was that, Sammy -- leastways, he was during the war. And, afterwards too, I reckon."

I looked over expectantly as Henry joined us, taking the chair on the other side of Euston.

"Junior used the GI bill to go to college at Harvard. Got himself a degree in finance, like you and your daddy did, and went to work with one of those stockbrokers in New York."

"How did he get back to Atlanta?" I asked.

"He and pappy had mapped it all out back when he came home from the war and before he left for school. He'd get his degree, learn how things worked, and move down to Atlanta when he knew how to use money to make money."

"That makes sense," I told him. "I just never heard the history behind him setting up the company."

"Your company now, Sammy." He took another deep breath. "Junior and pappy

set it all up back in 1949, and it's worked well ever since."

"Set it up?"

He looked over at me and pursed his lips. "Pappy runs things here on the mountain; Junior, then Sam, and now you manage the family's money."

"I thought everything went through the Sam Taylor Foundation, Mr. Euston."

He laughed. "Who do you think is that foundation, Sammy? It's one of those lawyer tricks pappy heard about and made sure was set up."

"And people don't get fed up with that?"

Euston shrugged. "Some have over the years. They're the ones who leave." He looked over at Henry and grinned. "And a few have the balls to stay on the mountain and try to change things -- like this boy's daddy."

"Ralph does have some pretty interesting ideas, Mr. Euston. I haven't researched them yet but..."

"This mountain isn't going to be strip-cleared, Sammy. Not ever!" He didn't raise his voice, but the last two words carried a force that I hadn't seen before on the mountain.

"Why not? It'd give the foundation a lot of money from the lumber, and it'd free up land for guys like Henry when they start having families."

Euston studied me intently for a moment. "Sammy Taylor," he finally said, "you of all people should know that nobody on this mountain needs to work. Each family has its own money and the foundation takes care of their expenses."

"But men," I paused, remembering all of the women of the mountain segregating themselves last Saturday and Janet pushing her convention center. "Men and women," I corrected myself. "They have to work, Mr. Euston. Even if they don't have to. Look at John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, or Teddy Roosevelt -- those men were born rich, but they still needed to work. It's a fact of being human -- you've got to use your mind and the only way we know how to do that is work."

"It's taken two generations, Sammy," Euston said, "with Junior and Sam building up our nest egg, but we've finally gotten to where we can finally have a good life instead of going out and breaking our backs every day. Boys like Henry here don't have to farm to support themselves and the families they start, not any more."

"Maybe they want to. Ralph does."

"They've got the mountain's dirt in their blood all right." Euston sat back and took a long swallow of tea. "I'm going to tell you a bit of history that ain't in no history book, Sammy."

I nodded.

"Back in 1919 when pappy got out of the army and came home, he owned this mountain. His daddy died before pappy even got off the boat in New York and he was left with taking care of his momma and six sisters. The farm in the valley was mortgaged up to their ears." Euston paused, remembering his story.

"They was land rich and money poor. Don't you go misunderstanding me, no Taylor's ever been a dumb, peapicking hillbilly. No, pappy had the mountain and a whole lot of pine on it. He brought in a Yankee lumber company and they strip-cleared it. There wasn't a tree left when they was through. But pappy had enough money to buy his daddy's paper back from the bank and get his sisters married off."

"This whole mountain was stripped?" Henry yelped, trying to imagine it.

"It was, and the erosion was just awful. Pappy tried farming it for two years and the soil just kept blowing off and becoming silt in the Tugaloo River. That's when he re-planted it, this time with hardwood." He looked out across the road at the woods there. "That's what you see out here now -- pappy's hardwood."

"So, why shouldn't we cut some of it out?" I asked. "We know a lot more about farming and prevention of soil erosion nowadays."

"Because no matter how bad things get, pappy just won't consider it. He tried farming back in the 20s. He got married and my two older brothers came along, but pappy was right back where his daddy had been -- land rich and money poor. By 1931, we didn't have a pot to piss in."

"What happened?" Henry asked, one breath ahead of me.

"Pappy went on the road apreaching -- tent meetings, revival meetings." His eyes twinkled as he looked from Henry to me. "You two boys ever heard of Elmer Gantry? They made a movie about him a long time ago." I nodded and Henry looked confused.

"Well, that writer modeled old Elmer after pappy from what I heard. Only, there wasn't no woman fronting for him in real life."

I'd grown up with money. I'd never known a moment when there wasn't total assurance that it was there. I couldn't imagine times so bad that I'd have to go on the road and put on an act like Rastus Reed. To my mind, Brenda's father was a tent preacher who'd found television.

"Pappy didn't cut down one tree out of the new forest," Euston said, looking directly at me. "He made a living on the road in that tent preaching hellfire and brimstone to illiterate, dirt-poor farmers and white trash throughout the South. And, when Junior came back to Atlanta from Harvard and his stockbroker training in New York, pappy gave him all of his savings to invest."

I sat there studying the old man sitting between Henry and me. He looked every one of his seventy plus years. That was normal. It was real. But he was talking about his father who was over a hundred -- and who looked twenty. I still couldn't make that real in my head.

Euston stood up slowly. "One of the girls brought over some fried chicken and macaroni and cheese this morning -- are you boys hungry?"

"Those are Aunt Clara's dishes in there," Henry gushed and looked at me. "Sammy, that woman can cook. Come on."

Euston laughed as he watched Henry step through the front door. "He's all boy, that one," he mumbled and looked at me. "He's yours now -- by his own decision. You take good care of him."

There it was again. "You know?" I mumbled, suddenly finding it hard to breath.

"Sammy, everything that happens on this mountain has to be approved by pappy -- and it comes through me to get to him."

* * *

Once we were seated at the table, I saw that there were only chicken breasts, no dark meat. I figured it was just one more example of the male-dominated society on the mountain.

"You know about Henry?" I asked again, riding an emotional rollercoaster from shame to complete shock.

"Of course, I know that pappy put out the call for one of the boys on the mountain to be your -- uh..." Sheepishly, he looked from me to Henry. "Your bedmate, Sammy. Henry here volunteered before anybody else could speak up -- and almost had a fight on his hands with two of his cousins."

I stared at him in disbelief. "That can't be," I mumbled.

"Look, Sammy," Euston said. "Pappy's been cornholing the boys on this mountain since before -- since before he married momma. All the boys here been helping each other out that way since before I was born. Nobody thinks anything about it." He snorted. "And we don't have any of our girls knocked up because of it. When the time comes, they have babies who're loved and taken care of -- like they're supposed to be."

"Someplace rural like Taylor Mountain -- where are the preachers raising hell about queers and incest and stuff?"

Euston laughed then. "We ain't had no preacher on this mountain since 1931 -- except for pappy when he was still riding the circuit. That's when he put up the no trespass sign down at the highway. We don't have people up here trying to teach us how to hate. Pappy threw them out."

"So, everybody up here is pretty much bisexual?" I asked suspiciously.

"Yeah, Sammy -- just like the rest of the world. Only, we own up to it here on the mountain, instead of getting scared into lying to ourselves."

"Was he doing his own kids?" I asked, fearful of the answer but having to know about the blond who's dick I couldn't imagine not wanting.

"I know that he never did anything sexual with his children. And he never did anything sexual with a boy who wasn't already into puberty. But I get the idea that he likes his partners on the underside of thirty."

I felt relief pour through me.

"Nobody's ever talked about it, but I suspect he was playing around with some of the young men in the valley before he went off to France for the war. He sure was after he came back, by all accounts. It was before my time, but I sort of got the impression that he chose husbands for his sisters with his tallywacker. It was pretty well established by the time I was born that each family would only have three children." He laughed. "That probably meant those husbands were doing more than shooting birds when they went off hunting together."

"Okay, so he balls all the young guys around..." I hesitated. Did I really want to admit to being anybody's fuckee? I accepted then that, if I wanted information, I was going to have to be forthcoming. "Why did he show up the first night I was here and take me?" I looked at Henry. "He's got all of these guys younger and better looking than me."

"You're his, Sammy. You're his blood, his name. That was part of what he and Junior sat down and agreed to."

"He was fucking dad before he...?"

"That was another part of Junior's deal -- only I didn't find out about it until I was talking with your father after Junior's funeral. Junior forced pappy to agree to leave him and his son alone. The partnership would work from one generation to the next, but pappy had to leave their butts alone."

"So, what happened to me? I wasn't on that piece of land more than fifteen minutes before I was getting porked good."

"And you loved every minute of it, didn't you, boy?"

I felt my face burn again. "Yeah, I did."

"Thought so," Euston chuckled. "The reason why you now know just how much you like a little cornholing is because your daddy never got around to making pappy make the same promise to him about you that he made to Junior."

"I had a bullseye painted on my butt!" I cried.

Henry laughed.

"I suppose he's been biting on you, too, has he?"

"Biting?" I stared at him in surprise. "Why the fuck would he bite me? He fucks me half the night."

"Have you wondered why he looks as young as this boy here?" Euston asked.

"Hell, yes, I have! There's no way for a hundred-year-old man to look like that -- or have the stamina he's got."

"There's only one way I know about."

"Which is?"

"If that man happens to be a vampire, his body goes back to its peakest condition, Sammy. That's what pappy is."

"What!" I cried as I pushed back from the table.

Part of my brain registered that Henry didn't act at all surprised at Euston's revelation. Euston looked as serene as the Cheshire Cat.

I knew right then that the Taylors on Taylor Mountain were crazy.

It was the only explanation that made sense as I stood up. Some blond kid goes around banging the shit out of me and he claims to be my great-grandfather. The oldest man on the mountain accepts that insanity. The good-looking kid with a big dick and a willing butt next to me at the table accepted that the blond wanted him to keep me satisfied. And he accepted that the blond was his great-granddaddy too. Yep, they were crazy all right.

And I'd almost gotten pulled into it. Like some white boy in Haiti getting pulled into that voodoo stuff.

Vampires. What hokum!

I struggled to pull back from the shock that hovered over me, threatening to crash down on me. I had to play their game, at least to some extend. Once I was back in Atlanta I could keep these escaped inmates from an insane asylum at a healthy distance.

I smiled. I was pretty sure now why dad had never mentioned this place and these people. And why he only came up for a weekend once a month. I now saw me doing the same.

I'd make them money -- just as dad had. I'd do my part -- just as dad had. But I'd hold these nuts at arm's length -- just as dad had. I'd probably even edge into gay circles back in Atlanta. And I'd find myself an intelligent, sane guy in Atlanta to get it on with.

I didn't need vampires and demons and things that went bump in the night in my life.

"How did your father become a vampire?" I asked Euston as pleasantly as I could, like I was asking about the weather or something. Keep everything on an even keel until you're out of here, Sammy boy, I told myself.

"He went to visit some French boy he'd met in the Great War." Euston paused and, a moment later, nodded. "That was in 1948, during that mess over in Berlin Germany."

"That doesn't sound very life-threatening," I observed.

"About a week later, we got a telegram that he'd died. The Frenchman brought his coffin over and we buried him. Junior, me, and our brother all sat around feeling sorry for pappy that night with the Frenchman. That's when pappy walked through the door, looking younger than any of his sons and naked as the day he was born."

"And, of course, everybody just accepted the new order of things without even a murmur."

Euston chortled gleefully. "Junior wasn't too happy. Me and our other brother were sort of shocked."

"I'll bet."

"Pappy reminded us that the foundation held everything. Nobody had nothing without it. And he was the foundation. There wasn't much any of us could do but go along with it."

"I don't think dead people -- or even undead people -- have any legal rights in this country, Mr. Euston," I told him.

"That's true, but the way pappy had things set up meant he kept on running things like he had been or everybody on the mountain got off -- and the money got channeled off to some French charity or something. Junior couldn't let that happen. There were a good fifty -- sixty people up here then -- all family. All being taken care of by the foundation."

* * *

I'd taken Henry home. I didn't know if that was where he'd planned on going, but I didn't ask him. Back at the log house, I'd fixed a stiff drink and plopped myself down on the top of the stairs to stare out at the mountain across the valley from me. I wasn't even able to think. I was shellshocked.

I loved it here on the mountain. I loved the beauty that soothed every frazzled nerve in my soul. I loved the nature that seemed to touch my every sense. I loved the peace that held me when I was here like a gentle fog on the Cape Cod shore. They had become an integral part of me in the four days I'd been here. I didn't think I could desert them. I knew that I didn't want to.

I loved the blond with the big dick who serviced me so willingly. No, I didn't love him -- I didn't even know him. But I did lust for him and knew that was all right and that he accepted it.

But how did I put the person and everything else together with this hocus pocus of a vampire? How did I live with that?

I could run as dad obviously had. He came here just enough to fulfill his end of a bargain that his father had made with his grandfather. He had grown their money as his father had before him.

But dad had shut himself away from Taylor Mountain. From its beauty beckoning with more urgency than any Dutch renaissance painting ever had. From the nature that held sway here. And from its peace that soothed the soul.

Could I do that?

I figured the blond with the body of a god and a dick that guaranteed nirvana couldn't enter the house as long as everything was locked down. And I had locked up when I came in. I told myself that he'd stop coming around when he realized he wasn't going to get my butt again.

I didn't have to see Henry again. I could always bring Paul up here when I came -- if he wanted to and if he was good enough to make me want him.

I only had to see all these cousins at the family council. I didn't have to see them any other time -- no matter how many times I came up to this house. I didn't have to socialize with them. Or fuck with them.

I ignored the desire to come outside that came over me as the sun set behind the mountain across from me. I pretended not to hear the knock at the kitchen door that reverberated through the house when twilight had faded enough that it was almost impossible to see. I continued to sit on the stairs and gaze out at the darkness that had come to cover the beauty that was life on Taylor Mountain.