Jacob, p.29
Jacob, page 29
“Maybe you believed you were a dominant. And maybe you needed to express it as brutality. But I think there’s more to it than that. I think you were ashamed of your own desires—and therefore you had to punish anyone who saw you as desirable that way. You would be an interesting chapter in any textbook on psychology.
“Anyway, if that was your sexual identity—and based on the evidence of the past two months, I think I’m right about this—when that specific expression was taken away from you, completely and totally obliterated as an option, there was no place for your identity to go, was there? No escape, except to assume the reverse expression of that same role. You flipped over completely and became the most abject submissive. And my dear sweet puppy, apparently, you have been enjoying it even more than your time as a dominant. This seems to have been what you wanted all along—someone to force you into your own desires, so you wouldn’t have to be ashamed of enjoying them. You can still pretend it wasn’t your choice. Except—well, in this case it was. Remember? I gave you the choice.
“Okay, I admit it—I wasn’t completely honest. But then again, neither were you in your invitation, so let’s not worry about which of us is the bigger monster or who was the most at fault. It doesn’t matter. This collision was inevitable the moment you raised your fist to me.
“You do know what I am, don’t you? You must have figured it out by now. And you must also have realized what I turned you into—oh, wait.” I lifted my hand away from his chest, I held it up in mock denial—an unnecessary gesture to be sure, but I was beginning to feel melodramatic.
“Yes, I turned you. I created you. I transformed you—but despite that, you are nothing like me. Nothing at all. And you never will be. That was never a possibility. You are not my equal, you will never be my equal.
“You, my dear—you are a snack table. Maybe, with a bit of thyme and seasoning, you could become a whole meal—but right now, you’re still a snack.
“But then, you should have realized that by now. All the sipping and tasting I’ve been doing—like an Italian grandmother fussing over the sauce—
“Let me explain. I get hungry. Approximately once a month. No, not the full moon. The dark of the moon. I don’t need a whole meal, but I do need to slake my thirst—enough to satisfy the cravings that arise. And over time, I have become something of a connoisseur. It was inevitable. Doing the same thing over and over—first it’s a habit, then it’s a routine, finally it’s a rut. And a rut is a grave with the ends knocked out. So … I look for variation. And over time, my tastes have become more than epicurean—they have become esoteric and exotic. You—don’t flatter yourself—are nowhere near the pinnacle of taste. But you are—well, you are what you are—a demonstration that even a casual slab of flank steak can be tasty with the right preparation.
“The goal in any project of this type is to create a unique vintage. To an ordinary human being, one who has not been given this particular gift, blood is blood, it all tastes the same—a little salty, a little metallic, a little meaty. But to a Nightsider, blood is nectar and this is the important part, every person has a unique flavor—a distinctly identifiable blend.
“Pay attention now, Bud. This is important. Someone who has lived a reckless life, too much of this and too much of that, he’s overspiced—he’s a Texican burrito loaded with jalapenos and habaneros and God knows what else—not my style, very much an acquired taste. On the other hand, a teenager, young, and naïve and mostly inexperienced—that’s a nice healthy drink, youthful blood is invigorating, but too often it’s as flavorless as veal, occasionally delicious, but just as often as unsatisfying as oatmeal. Now, if you can find an innocent lover, blood laden with endorphins—he can be as sweet as peppermint ice cream, but cloying.
“When you’ve been around for a while—half a century or more—sampling here, sampling there, occasionally gorging, you begin to develop a sense of taste. The more you drink, the more that taste develops. What do they say? Taste is the product of a thousand distastes? That’s even truer for a Nightsider. A quickie grabbed in a dark alley is little better than the grilled hockey puck they call a hamburger at the Woolworth lunch counter. Frankly, my dear—I do not want an industrial burger. I want prime rib.
“And … when I can have it, when I can make it myself, that’s when it’s the best. Are you getting it yet? The darkest blood is the richest. And the richest blood is vampire blood. I wish you could taste yourself.
“The blood of the Nightsider is the best. It has the most subtle of flavors, deep and rich, unfolding on the tongue like a symphony. What makes it so delicious and desirable is a marvelous symphony of flavor. It’s the seasonings, the spices of emotion and experience, all of them together—as carefully blended as fine whiskey, aged for decades in an oaken cask. That was why I turned you, Bud. For the flavor.”
Was that a flutter of emotion? It was too faint even for me to tell. I could have taken a sip, but if the emotion had been that faint, the flavor would have been undetectable. Never mind.
I patted his chest and went on. “But even fresh vampire blood—like yours now—has a youthful and intoxicating quality. You see, the real flavor of the vintage develops in the fermenting—the process of transformation.
“A good transformation takes time—not just the physical process, but all the learning that must come afterward as well. That’s the best vintage. But—if you’re like me, occasionally impatient, and if you’re hungry enough and if it’s obvious that all you have is hamburger, not prime rib—then you settle for a well-prepared burger. It depends on the Nightsider. And like everything else, it’s a matter of taste. I’m not boring you, am I?”
I laid my hand back on Bud’s chest. His heartbeat remained glacial, counting out his dreamtime in a funereal beat. Not even a flutter.
“All right, Bud, I will admit—in the beginning, in that first moment of capture, yes, you had some flavor, a strong flavor, but a very simple flavor, lacking any real depth. And frankly, it had very little potential.
“But I was bored. Bored enough to be curious. Bored enough to experiment—what might be possible with a little seasoning, a little spice? You see, what you were missing was the full range of human emotion, and I began to wonder what you might taste like with a modicum of Nightsider flavor added. That would require some effort on my part, but at the time, like I said, I was bored, and I was curious, and I had nothing else to do.
“Oh, I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy the exercise. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Humiliating you, Bud—humbling you, reducing you to the most abject of all submissive behaviors—there was a poetic satisfaction to it. You confirmed my belief about the binary character of your sexual identity—indeed, the shift in your behavior occurred so quickly you surprised me. Thank you for that. There is little that surprises me anymore.
“And yes, you seasoned up well—better than I expected, although not quite as flavorful as I had hoped. But that’s not my fault. It’s yours. You’re really quite a shallow fellow.
“Nevertheless, it was worth the effort. I took you through as much of the emotional landscape as you were capable of expressing. Fear? That’s where I started—fear is the fundamental ground of being for anything with a spinal cord. What’s that lurking in the dark? What just made that noise? What’s out there? And what’s going to happen to me? Oh yes, Bud, I had you nervous, I had you queasy—but most of all, I had you panicked, terrified, pissing your diaper in fear. That frozen chill of terror—your sweat reeked of it. Your heart beat so fast you were in danger of a cardiac event. I loved it—
“And then anger—that’s so easy to create. It’s the flip side of fear. If you can’t flee, you have to fight. But if you can’t fight, if you’re tied down, if you’re being tormented and abused, all you can do is burn with unrequited rage. Oh yes, I did that, too—I took you from resentment to rage and back again, over and over. I humiliated you and taunted you, I played you like a violin. Diapers and panties—those were just the warm-ups. What I did to your body, everything—it was a methodical campaign to strip you of your last pretense of masculinity. I stripped you as raw as a flayed corpse, just to feel the heat of your fury. And yes, you burned, you burned like the wrath of hell.
“Then—when you finally burned out, when there was absolutely nothing left to burn—I left you to grieve, to despair. I let you sink to the innermost depths of anguish and hysteria. You hung there, on the brink of insanity for the longest time. What bizarre hallucinations did you experience? Tiny spiders crawling inside your veins? Harpies shrieking into your ears as they ate your flesh? Eyeballs exploding out of your melting skull? Skin decomposing and falling away from your rotting corpse? What fun you must have had!
“And after that—when you finally resigned yourself to the contemplative hell of your captivity, that this was the shape of your death—that was when I began to tease and tickle you and take you on your journey of exquisite discovery, all designed to demonstrate the qualities of physical sensation available to a transformed body. I let you experience it as pleasure, as delight, as joyous rapture—and yes, I gave you access to an emotional repertoire that you had never known before. That should have sent you plunging even deeper into fear and anger and despair—the realization that you had wasted your life on brutality when this had always been available to you—
“But no, I wasn’t going to send you there, that would have been cruel. And besides, it would have spoiled the flavor. No, I wanted you enthralled. I wanted you totally captivated by my power to control and manipulate you. I wanted that sweetness in your blood—and while it smacks of bragging, I think I accomplished it quite well. Despite my casual disparagement of your origins, you might very well become a worthwhile and respectable vintage. Time will tell. Please don’t die on me now. Let your death take a long long time. Very long. I’m curious to see how well you’ll age.”
Jacob puts his hands behind his head and leans back against the headboard. “I kept him alive for three years, sipping a bit here, a bit there—until I realized that as good as he was, he wasn’t going to get any better. So I ended him.”
What my lover is talking about is so far beyond my experience, I don’t know what to say. The best I can offer is a question. “Why? I mean, why didn’t he get any better?”
“Depth.”
“Depth?”
“He was incomplete. There was so much that he’d never experienced—”
“But you—”
Jacob faces me, his expression is intense. “It was my fault. I never let him out of the room. So he’d never had the opportunity to feed, never knew what it was like to capture and kill and celebrate the achievement of creating your own feast. You can’t be a healthy predator without that skill. That’s what was missing from his blood. He’d never had the chance to test the limits of his enhanced physical abilities. His body was vampire, but his blood wasn’t. It had never been … finished.”
I hadn’t experienced that myself. Not yet. I wasn’t sure what it would feel like. I could only imagine. I could only nod.
Jacob takes a deep breath and adds a final observation. “It was a useful experiment though.”
“Useful?”
“Mm-hm. By learning what I was missing, I learned how to do it better the next time.”
“Next time…?”
“Mm-hm …”
“But if you realized what was missing then, why didn’t you let him out so he could be complete?”
“Because he was stupid.” Jacob rolls to face me, pulls me into his arms, holds me close in a mutually cold embrace. “Being a successful vampire requires skill and training. It’s not enough to be a sociopath, you also have to be intelligent and cunning and practical. Bud was none of these things. He was brutal and selfish and stupid. He would have become a monster. I don’t want that kind of attention. None of us do.”
I have nothing to say to that. His arms are cold, colder than mine. His heartbeat is slow and methodical—and eventually my heart synchronizes to his. I feel our blood, his and mine together, pulsing outward in mutually exciting waves. He smells delicious.
“Jacob?”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can ask me anything. I might answer….”
“Did you ever think of me that way?”
“What way?”
“You know what I mean.”
He hesitates, then, “Yes, I considered it—”
“But…?”
“But nothing.” He begins tracing his fingers along the curve of my chest, circling inward around my left nipple.
About the Author
David Gerrold is the author of the Hugo and Nebula award–nominated The Man Who Folded Himself and When Harlie Was One, books that quickly established him in the hard science fiction genre during the 1970s. He also wrote “The Trouble with Tribbles,” voted the most popular Star Trek episode of all time, and is the author of the popular Star Wolf, Dingillian, and Chtorr series. He lives in Northridge, California.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by David Gerrold
ISBN: 978-1-5040-8605-9
This edition published in 2023 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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DAVID GERROLD
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