The
VAMPIRES
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
City of Night
Numbers
This Day’s Death
The
VAMPIRES
by
John Rechy
GROVE PRESS
New York
Copyright © 1971 by John Rechy
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eISBN 978-0-8021-9312-9
Grove Press
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For the Memory
of
My Mother
“. . . a dead body which continues to live . . . sucking the blood of the living, whereby it is nourished and preserved in good condition, instead of becoming decomposed like other dead bodies.”
—Georg Conrad Horst, about vampires
The following appear or are mentioned in this book:
RICHARD, the host.
TARAH, his first wife.
LIANNE, his second wife.
KAREN, his third wife.
JOJA, an actress; once his mistress.
MARK, Richard’s son by Lianne.
GABLE, Richard’s son by Tarah.
BLUE, a call-boy.
SAVANNAH, “the most beautiful woman in the world.”
JEREMY, a Catholic priest.
BRAVO, an underground superstar; Karen’s companion.
MALISSA, a “friend” of Richard’s; she travels with a changing entourage of young companions:
LA DUQUESA, a figure in mourning veils.
TOR, a bodybuilder.
REV, a hood.
TOPAZE, a perfectly shaped midget.
ALBERT, Malissa’s partner of vague relationship.
THE DUKE, la Duquesa’s mourned lover.
THE MAMALOI, a voodoo highpriestess.
THE PAPALOI, a voodoo highpriest.
MR STUART, a male “madam.”
PAUL and VALERIE, twin brother and sister.
HESTER, their mother.
DANIEL, her husband.
CAM, a youngman.
THE BLUE WOMAN, a drug goddess.
Part I
1
The two figures were silhouetted against the stark rectangle of sky framed by the wide window. Drapes thrashed savagely in a trapped wind dashing at the room. Rigid as if the blood had frozen it in that position, one figure knelt over the other. The long silver knife was poised ready to plunge again: Now! Swiftly it was thrust into the astonished flesh. Again! Again!—seeking the heart.
For moments, it was difficult to determine the origin of the scream, which had suddenly stifled other sounds of frenzy within the palatial house. A scream welling like a siren struck momentarily mute, only to rise grasping at all sound—did it come from the kneeling figure rocking back and forth over the slaughtered body in a rhythm which was almost sexual, the brutal knife buried in a savage ceremony? Or did it come from the body on the floor—a final severed protest against the silver object raiding it? Perhaps the scream, already fading into a chanted moan shrouding the others, was a fusion from victim and victimizer.
Suddenly the wind released the whirling drapes. Motion stopped. The two silhouettes were still and silent, dark statues.
Like uncaged birds, voices rushed to fill the silence as the others moved swiftly in an enclosing circle about the body drenched in blood:
“Is this the game?”
“No, God, nobody plays games like that!”
“An exorcism!”
“Playing at God!”
“No—Satan!”
“No, no!”
“Your terrible experiment!”
“Exorcised!”
“Is this the game!”
That murder will happen tonight on a secluded island dominated by a huge mansion surrounded by coves and rotundas—an island embraced by water so clear it rejects reflections, revealing sand like pale-yellow sugar.
But that is not what Joja—red hair rumpled, purple eyes groggy—saw when she woke only moments ago. It was the angry sun clawing at her eyes through drawn drapes. She rolled to the other side of the bed to Escape the glare—and bumped into the body of a man, his head turned anonymously away from her, one naked leg curled over the black sheet.
A tattoo. There was an elaborately wrought tattoo on the man’s ankle: A star enclosed in a swirl of curled vines. An inverted star. From times of dabbling at fashionable, not-quite-serious mystic rites, Joja remembered dimly: A sign of violence? . . . Who is he? she wondered—dismissing him quickly as one more in the army of nameless morningbodies.
Disoriented as to where she was, she rose naked from the crumpled bed. Her skin was as flawless as ivory. She staggered cursing across the plush rug (stretching furrily to the edges of the walls in which were exquisitely mosaicked figures in silhouette: gathered as if at an arcane invocation) toward the hostile windows, to pull the treacherous drapes.
Then she saw it on the fleecy rug: thin, delicately blue like a piece of tissue paper. She bent over it. A prophylactic rubber, the lightest color of blue. A design was imprinted faintly on it. A cloverleaf. . . . No. The inverted star again among the viny swirls. A rubber used and slack—but nothing had been emitted into it.
She turned away from it. At the window, shimmering water flung darts at her eyes as she stood by the brocaded drapes. Thick vines with heart-shaped leaves, orange flowers with protruding slim tongues licked hungrily at the window. The naked sun commanded the green trees which rimmed the island like elaborately costumed sentinels. The island. . . .
Richard’s island!
Joja turned eagerly toward the sleeping figure. Now she could see his face. Long ash-blond hair, sideburns a shade darker, thick eyebrows and eyelashes even darker, almost black—a startling contrast. A beautiful youngman. Perhaps twenty-three. Ten years younger than she, came the uninvited judgment. Yes, beautiful. A naked, depraved angel. But, of course, it was not Richard.
As if this would thwart the disturbing thoughts tugging insistently at the quivering edges of her mind, she began to draw the sheltering drapes.
The splashing of water demanded her attention.
Below the window, a pool looped in an extension of the curling sea. As if having been waiting for a signal from her window, a figure emerged quickly from the water and looked up.
Through sun-needled eyes, Joja had the flashing impression that the figure—a boy—was naked. In fascination she stared at him. But the figure dove back into the water, now a floating shadow beneath its surface.
Overhead, an insistent whirring gathered seeking to localize itself. Following the sound into the sky, azure and cloudless, a shield of blue silver, Joja saw a helicopter descending weightlessly on the island. Like a giant thin insect, it landed in a clearing. Swiftly a woman emerged from its belly.
Malissa! Joja knew. The diabolical woman who flaunted her courtship of evil. Unwelcome memories st
irred like echoes: “Burn me!” “Yes, darling, do!—she wants you to!” The odor of singed flesh.
Now a man with enormous shoulders followed Malissa. Then a veiled figure in total, black mourning. And someone small—a child?—but was he carrying a cane? Then a man in shiny leather. Behind them all: a plump, older man, in a brown checkered suit.
Malissa—and Albert, still with her!—and this season’s entourage collected as usual from the devil knows where!
What terrible games is Richard planning?
Joja pulled angrily at the drapes.
Why did I come back?
She returned to the bed. The foot with the tattooed star was stark on the black sheet. She heard again the beckoning splashing of water outside. Did she imagine it now? Because it was more like the echo of applause. Applause. (A stage. “Louder, Joja!” Then the recognition: Her life a silent pantomime: “I had to kill her!”)
To stop the pursuit of memories, she reached out to touch the youngman beside her. He did not react. The splashing of water faded, becoming now like the slow flapping of a bird’s wings. Fiercely this time, she rose again. She looked out the window.
At the edge of the pool, the boy, now distinctly in trunks, looked up at her, capturing her eyes for a frozen moment.
Joja retreated quickly from the window.
Now the boy outside looked away and toward the helicopter which had just descended from the sheet of blue onto his father’s island.
Extravagantly shaped, backs like the spread tails of peacocks, grillwork chairs surrounded the pool. White statues stared without eyes at the blue jewel of shimmering water. On the vines, flowers sputtered like varicolored flames.
Facing the sun, Mark’s eyes were shockingly green, rimmed by thick, long eyelashes—eyes astonishingly light in the deeply tanned face. His full lips parted only slightly in the barest ghost of an undefined smile. Dark hair, wet, clung to his forehead and, long, licked lovingly at the back of his neck almost touching his wide shoulders. Mature beyond his fourteen years, his body was perfectly shaped, bronze stomach ridged, legs sturdy, muscular, long—a fact emphasized by the brief black trunks cutting high into his thighs. A boy of unbelievable beauty and dark, cold sensuality.
As lithely as a panther through his jungle, Mark moved along the tangle of paved walks, toward the woman and the others who had descended from the helicopter a distance away. Along the paths, flowers grew like fragments of a shattered rainbow.
“Mark!” Malissa’s hands were extended toward the boy. Her fingers, a fierce blaze of red rings, mimed the beginning of an embrace. But clearly they did not intend to touch the boy, nor did he move more closely toward her.
“Malissa,” he said. The ambiguous smile did not yet fully touch his lips.
Her face resembled a mask, a handsome, stark mask; the skin was tightly stretched over high, dramatic cheekbones. It was a face, therefore, of indefinable age—she could have as easily been forty—or younger—as fifty, sixty, seventy. Her mouth was rendered more brutal by its dark lipstick. She wore a brown hat whose brim swerved in a diagonal “S” shading a side of her face. Even so, and despite blue-smoked bubble sunglasses, her eyes shone intense and cruel. Though she gave the appearance of height—because she was monumentally imposing, exuding the radiance of power—her body was actually small, and slim. Elegantly attired, she wore a tan dress—and rings, rubies, on all her fingers, rings as red as the scarf—red like fresh, young blood—about her neck. And one black coiled ring like an ebony snake.
Demonic powers were attributed to this woman. Her capacity for evil was legendary among occult groups throughout the world; she was reputed to be one of the most evil women in the world: a reputation enhanced by her vaunted proclamation of alliance with “the dark world.” She carried that black reputation haughtily like an uncontested champion.
“Why isn’t your father here to meet me?” she asked Mark.
“He went to the mainland,” Mark said; that was their designation of the island city nearby. He spoke to her as a clear equal.
“Of course. He would be away,” she said.
The others had remained in the background, behind her, like actors awaiting their cues, which were now being given in introduction: but it was, more, as if Malissa were exhibiting a carefully chosen collection, as inanimate as that: objects given names only for the purpose of reference:
“La Duquesa.” Malissa extended a flashing-ringed hand toward the figure in mourning.
Dark black sunglasses stared from behind a black veil. The sheltered eyes seemed pasted on the pale-white face. Now one hand—fingernails lacquered black—drew the veil slightly apart, the other raised the black glasses, also slightly—to gaze at Mark for only an instant. But for that moment the sorrowful, black-painted eyes devoured the spectacle of the incredibly sexual boy. La Duquesa sighed, the veil quickly drawn, the glasses adjusted: a shield.
“Your grace,” Mark acknowledged graciously, knowing la Duquesa was a man.
“Albert— . . .” Impatiently Malissa’s fingers indicated a plump, past middle-aged, unattractive man in a brown checkered suit. He hovered deferentially about the woman, whose eyes avoided him entirely.
Mark knew him—Malissa’s unlikely permanent companion, the only one who lasted from year to year: as she traveled like a high-class vagrant from country to country, collecting a new “entourage” of youngmen replaced each season: a source of constant speculation as to their purpose: Malissa was notorious for her hatred of sex.
The dumpy man smiled eagerly at Mark.
Malissa pulled away even the hint of attention from Albert. Her fingers shifted it—like a physical tide to be easily manipulated by her—to a youngman in leather. “Rev— . . .”
A diagonal scar from the edge of one eye to his lips sliced Rev’s face into two distinct aspects: one hardened and savage, the other almost soft, the two fusing into a brutal, sensual face mounted on a slender body which instantly projected the tightly wound violence of a champion boxer. He wore black buckled boots, tight black pants, a leather vest open at the neck to reveal the growling face of an emerald-eyed panther tattooed menacingly on his chest.
Mark studied Malissa’s companions, the smile on his face still not formed, objectless.
“Topaze!” Now Malissa’s ruby fingers were reaching down as if to touch a very small man at her side. Again, they merely mimed the act of touching—as if, consummated, it might contaminate her. Inches from his head, the ringed fingers rose.
Slightly more than three feet tall, Topaze was a midget—rather, the miniature of a perfectly formed man, because there was nothing of deformity about him; his body was flawlessly proportioned. Strikingly handsome, about twenty-five, he was a dashing, haughty figure in a see-through flowered shirt with full sleeves, a bright neckerchief like a pirate’s under his proud chin, a plumed cavalier’s hat, and furled swashbuckler boots. He carried a studded cane.
“Tor.” Malissa continued displaying her new entourage: Coolly: She could have been exhibiting her rubies. She had indicated a huge youngman with muscles like coconuts.
He wore a striped tank-top shirt which revealed deeply carved pectorals like armor plates and a small waist just this side of ridiculous over massively muscled, sculpted thighs; a body, not tall, astonishing in its muscularity, each muscle seemed to shock the others into competitive tension. For a moment, looking at Mark, the good-looking, squarejawed, blank face of the blond muscleman seemed to strain, unsuccessfully, to form an expression.
Mark shrugged his own broad shoulders. The floating smile had still not fully shaped on his face.
None of the entourage—nor Albert—had spoken, merely nodded in greeting—walkons on the stage of Malissa’s life.
A goggled man waited silently in the helicopter for Mark’s orders.
Given: “I’ll send for their bags,” Mark told him.
Malissa was looking at the house, Richard’s house. It rose above the low cloud of trees like a temple.
Now
Mark moved with her, the others following along the curling, mosaicked walks, the elaborate grottos, flowers like distorted stars, fountains jetting satiny ribbons of water. The sun gazed intensely, anxious to expose everything, yet emphasizing dark black shadows.
They reached the stairs leading to a wide semicircle of massive white columns choked by purple vines. Then they passed inside, into a giant hall with a high round ceiling like that of a cathedral.
Overhead, a clear glass dome captured a perfect circle of sky. In a graceful “Y,” a swirl of balustered stairs swept to the upper stories of the palatial house: a luxurious cavern of ornate arches mounted on high, proud, elaborately wrought columns. Chandeliers hung like exquisite silver icicles: lighted despite the sun rushing through the dome: muted halos like burning moths in the brightness. The walls were a panorama of paneled tapestries and paintings: colors smothered: all depicting mute figures waiting somberly. Shadows of silhouettes. The floor was a gleaming vortex of whirling black and white patterns.
“Welcome to our house,” Mark said with a proud toss of his head.
2
The motorboat cut the water into a frothy triangle which quickly disappeared behind them into a sea so calm that sand was visible like crushed crystals.
At the helm, Bravo faced Richard’s island. A hostile world to be attacked. From this distance it was a cluster of green crowned by the luminous blue and gold dome of the house.
Dark-haired, amber-eyed, of angular, tall body, Bravo wore a cowboy hat thrust defiantly on her head, a vinyl blouse, brown bell pants, tight, emphasizing the extravagantly slim hips; and shiny boots to her knees. Even as she steered, she clung to a thickly woven whip, an integral part of the image she had molded on the screen, and, now, a part of her identity. Hard, fiercely feline, her androgynous beauty had made her an idolized superstar of underground films: Women admired the maleness, men desired her cold beauty.
“The boat may take longer, but it’s better than being in that fucking helicopter with that bitch Malissa,” she said. Two women sat behind her, one faced the island, the other turned her back to it.