My name is Edward Hooker, a family known in New England since my relation, Thomas Hooker, formed the city of Hartford in religious rebellion against the Congregational elders of Boston in the 17th century. For my part, I had broken with the puritans to join the Presbytery in 1991 only to have my father say, “At least he did not become a follower of John Wesley.” He never spoke to me again in this life, nor do I expect he will in the next.
I was, for several decades, the pastor of a small chapel in rural New England. As industry failed, the town slowly died as surely as the ghost departs us all. The young people left their homes, their families, and their faith forever. Mine has been a loveless life, but not one lacking desire for youth and beauty. It was perhaps too obvious a yearning to the townsfolk. Their young had been my only source of religious inspiration. Weary and ashamed, I deserted the chapel myself, leaving it to its two or three followers who were now haggard with age and disillusion.
I wanted nothing more than to retire in defeat having never raised, or even comforted, a single soul. On the day I left, the verdant countryside seemed to mock the ambitions of men, especially me. And yet now I pray for familiar sorrows, having learned that those unknown can be worse—so much worse—than those that plague our daily lives.
I planned to rejoin my one surviving sister who still kept a house in Philadelphia. Before departing, I had had a desperate call in the late hours of the night from Mark, an old companion at the Harvard Divinity School. He begged me to visit a friend of his, one Martin L____ who was soon to be a widower, as his wife was at last succumbing to some horrible and relentless form of cancer. Mark lived in Manhattan and would have gone to Mr. L____ but he was himself in failing health, and could not face his friend’s unendurable misery.
And so it was that I agreed to see Martin L____, stopping for the night, on my way to the City of Brotherly Love, in the forbidding city of New York. He lived in a small, little-known district near Brooklyn Heights. My terrible sense of direction left me hardly able to find his street in the dark maze of aged brick and stone townhouses, but at last I reached his dour and unfriendly door. It was an old house from perhaps the 1850s and ominous in the lightless street. I would give all, even my very life, to have avoided that meeting with Martin L____ in 2005, for I have not slept for more than five minutes since then without being driven from my rest by dreams too depraved to mention.
For his part, Martin L____ at first mistook me for a Slayer of the Undead, a thing I had never before imagined to be a real vocation. Now I know better. I cannot describe his disappointment in learning I was not a slayer; but he conceived, in his despair, to reveal to me all that had happened to him, as though to do so would unburden his soul. It did not, nor could it—or any other act—ever do so. For Martin L____ is a toy of the Undead and the curse within that curse is that it will never end.
Whatever you may have heard or read, the Slayer is no blonde siren, nor is the task likely to be undertaken by some half-crazed psycho-therapist. A Slayer has one talent, and that is the ability to smell the putrefaction of infection. But the truth be told, so can any man if he will open his heart to the true nature of death. Be it cancer or plague, he knows where the disease lies by its unyielding stink.
Know then that the worst of all superating wounds is the bite of the vampire. The beast of the dead bites at the very pulsing cords of life, that lead directly to the heart. From these cords, the vampire drinks the blood of its victim. In doing so, he or she consumes the soul. While blood may be transfused into the victim, the damned soul, once violated, can never be reclaimed. Oh the stink of Male Corpus, carbuncle of nature; Spiritu Sangre ex Sanctu. He is condemned and cast out to darkness beyond the beyond. Salvation shall never, never, never, come to him who has been the vampire’s feast.
I shall now describe Martin’s L___’s account to me of the Bitch of Hell who was first among the dark ones to feed, in her lust, on the spirit of man. I give it as your warning against the silken rapture of the undead bite. She has touched my life. I tell you, as you settle into your warm bed tonight, do not fall asleep with a wish for her on your lips. She may grant it.
Death! Death was what Martin wanted for Lenore…for himself… He could hope for nothing else now. He had yearned for the gray-black silence of death for such a long time. Before, he had pushed away the fact of death—the thought of it, the very word “death.” But now he needed death as his final warder in the cold comfort belonging to a prison of darkness.
He watched Lenore fall into the tightening grip of the disease as the toxic chemicals the doctors injected into her, warred with her body’s advancing corruption. Lenore’s body, which had once been the rapture of his senses, was now their curse. At least she slept now—or drowsed in exhausted nether-sleep—for long periods of the day and night. He allowed himself to leave her side even though his need for such respites shamed him.
Gin and assorted pills gave him a measure of inner silence. It felt like the misted stillness that he longed for her to have…for them both to have …the final hours of pain dwindling down to absolute stillness. That wispy dream had become his hope for both of them. He knew he lacked the will for a murder/suicide.
They had no visitors and their friends had stopped coming as her condition became worse. The disease smothered them both, and yet even then he felt Death’s antidote, lust, rise in him like a twisted root. He left her for short periods of time to prowl in search of no one and nothing in particular. He could not resist going out along his narrow streets—with their deceptive sense of warmth and Victorian refinement—only to turn the corner into the dark, vaporous lanes by the Gowanus Inlet.
Most call the Gowanus a canal, but it is a true inlet, and so things live within it that were brought in by the tides or nourished by them. Despite the centuries of heavy metals and other toxins dumped there, the tides still bore life-giving stuff. Storms forced the sewers to overflow into the inlet waters, thus adding to its pungent mix. Mutated blue crabs and tiny luminescent fish could be seen in the oily soup nearer to its infernal surface.
Other odd creatures lived in it as well. The lower microscopic orders fed upon its endless supply of waste material. Here drifted generations of unwanted Mafiosi, as well as the partially ingested bits and bones of Irishman and Germans. Their remains shifted with the tides along with all the other hapless laborers who had died working the Brooklyn waterfront. Things that scuttled beneath the lightless water gnawed upon their remnants.
Martin thought of them as he walked down the cobbled dead end streets to the water’s edge. The surface waters of the inlet were so heavy with oil that they hardly moved. Starlight glittered on the shimmering heavy slick. A thin mist seemed to rise from the water in a slowly swirling column. It moved steadily toward him until it resolved into a tall, female form composed of baffling shadows. They suggested a beautiful woman with long, black hair in waves to her shoulders above full breasts, rounded hips, and a narrow waist. What was her face like? Where had she been? Had she come from behind the building on the corner? She floated, weightless, just above the pavement.
Draped in wet clinging silk like a dark shroud, she laughed softly as she came nearer and extended her hand in greeting. Her hair was so black, it was visible only in the thousand glints of starlight that caught its dripping tresses. Despite its cold appearance, her flesh was smooth, bare, pale, intoxicating and inviting. The tiny drops of water on its surface glittered like ice—smooth and flawless as the transparent silvery connective tissue that a knife reveals when butchering fresh meat.
If she spoke to him, he did not know it. Nevertheless, he could no more resist moving toward her than deny the power of gravity during a leap from a great height. He stood before her and, without the least restraint, studied her from head to foot while she watched. She made him feel naked, his soul reverent toward her and supremely alive. He offered his hand in a gesture of invitation. He had no idea what made him so bold.
She accepted his invitation to touch and said, “You have found me and so I will take your hand.” It was a voice like crimson velvet. He longed to run his whole being – fingertips, tongue, spirit—over the smooth curve of that voice, but it was her body that he was unable to deny. It remained in shadow, and yet its throbbing pull forced him to face his hunger and thirst for her.
“‘I found you?’ I …don’t know you… Who are you?” In answer she took his hand more firmly, and slid it over the cold gem of her nipple. It felt like the hard light of a distant, blazing, white star. The feeling of her power was so intense it should have destroyed his skin and bones. He could see that light, like an x-ray through his own flesh, and yet he felt no other desire than to squeeze, to mouth, and then to suck her perfect flesh.
“Such an eager boy…so eager. You will have me as often as I like, which will be very often, you may be sure. And you will know the taste of Eternity. You will be among those few who are part of my forever—my personal forever—just beyond the grasp of death, but you will always feel its reach. Always.”
She took his other hand as she faced him. Lacing her fingers through his, she pressed down gently, bringing him to his knees with no effort at all. A feeling of relief and the joy of her pleasure washed over him as he knelt for her on the cold, hard stones.
There before him, beneath the wet folds of her dress, was the glistening shadow of her sex. The heavy, salt smell of her cunt drew his face toward her sacred body. She opened her skirts, and he could see the dark, slick curls between her open thighs. She thrust her hips forward, against his face. His mouth sank between her cool, fragrant, outer lips.
Her inner folds held the dark taste and scent of forest herbs rooted deep in the earth. As he pressed his tongue into her, he also caught a whiff of sulfur like cut flowers in stagnant water. She had a coppery taste that was both salty-sweet and sour. Nothing could make him withdraw his mouth from her. Her sex gave off cold as though from the deepest sea and then, as he pressed deeper, a thick, ripe heat that filled his mouth. He licked her until his face was raw from her. He intensified his sucking. He licked her hot, sharp tang like a hungry goat.
“Eat,” she said. “Yes, eat.”
He licked through the heavy, vinegary taste of her until a deeper flavor began to emerge. It had the fusty quality of game meat cooked rare, and yet it was also sweet. He could no more resist her cunt’s taste than deny his own thickening, hard cock. Her body surged against his mouth, and she groaned with a mix of pleasure, satisfaction and victory.
He felt outside himself—somehow possessed. He could not escape her, nor deny his hunger for her. She lifted his face away from her dripping crotch and looked into his eyes.
“Now you will worship me by fucking me.” With that she raised him from his knees until his feet barely touched the ground. He felt as though some invisible chain had drawn him helplessly upward by the nape of his neck to her eye level.
“I like you there, swinging before me,” she said. And with her words, his penis became hard and gnarled like a thick oak branch. It burned and twitched. He sank it deep into her, where it lodged in a grip like fire.
“Oh God, ” he murmured to himself.
She seized his jaw and wrenched his eyes toward hers, “God? God is a flaw, a tiny scratch on the eye of the universe. God’s children are thus flawed, even the angels. My father was from his first brood. Fuck me, and listen. You might even understand.” She embraced him.
She grabbed the back of his neck and lifted him toward her. Her legs were set wide apart. “You will know me now… that is your destiny, just as fucking me will forever be your fate.
“I am the daughter of the Angel Edom, Lieutenant of Belial, darkest of all the dark angels who forever make war on God, the vengeful Creator. As it is written in The Book of War, the angels did so in the beginning just as they will forever at the end of days. I am the Undead. We are angels’ spawn, warped in the cast eye of God. Pay attention! Did I slap you too hard?
“Are those tears? You can breathe. Just relax. Do I grip your cock too tightly?
“Edom sired me, Eternity. Without Eternity there are no days, no hours, no final moments, no hope.
“Now fuck harder! Forget the pain. I will push in three fingers to distract you,” she barked. “Without me—Eternity—for example, you would never know the end of this fuck, nor will you yet if you do not fuck HARDER!”
Martin could not imagine how he found the strength to drive himself into her for another hour, but he did. Pain and pleasure grew in him in equal portions. The raw wetness around his cock, he feared, was not only her juices. Even so, he felt his suffering begin to ease out of him into her body, as though drop by drop he became free of it as a part of her. In this he was right. She was in heat, and he was transformed in her forge.
“God—betrayed by his angels—went mad with lust for revenge, but it was a revenge He was too weak to fulfill. Edom was too powerful to destroy. So God created man. You, that is. But revenge still burned hot in God, as hot as the feel of my cunt around your fat, hard cock.
“From alpha to omega, the Creator forged doom to pierce all hope; in the minds of men he made the lost Eden that is all suffering. Instead of obliterating galaxies and worlds, God created hope. I am hope. Can you feel it in the caress of my thighs? The curve of my ass? I am the vessel of hope; that which will be forever shattered.
“Stop! Let me turn around so you can ram yourself deep into me!” Martin took her from behind, though in which opening I do not know.
“Now, listen, but don’t slow your labors. God punished Edom by fucking him while the Archangel Michael held him still. God being God, Edom became pregnant with me. Edom carried me for 99 years, and then labored to give birth to me for 99 weeks. He was in very great pain the whole time. He therefore grew to hate me while forcing me to leave his torn body, as you will understand. Now grip my ass and fuck HARDER.”
Martin hammered himself into her pulsing core.
“With the first pulse of my clit, Eternity began. Edom sought to kill me—to strangle me—even as I was leaving his body, but I tore free. What had been only darkness, became time, the great whirling engine of everything! Suffering began because hope began. Hope that drives lust before it, hope….”
The pain made Martin giddy enough to engage in a frivolous rebellion, “Springs eternal?”
“Don’t be rude, Little Man,” and with that, she yanked on the invisible chain between them. The pain seared his spine. He wondered if she’d broken his neck, but he did not die. Instead he pistoned her harder.
Then she said, “Just fuck. There can be no time without me. There’s no point in the power of a fuck without a sweet abyss in which to end it.
“I alone mark your way to death. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Death? We’re going to be together for a very long time, and if you don’t behave, even longer. So you don’t ever want to be rude to me…unless I tell you to. Now fuck deeper.”
With that she lowered his feet to the cobblestones again, which eased his choking. She rose in the air to wrap herself around him then she settled on his driving cock. She smiled into his eyes, “Yes, stay eager. You must always be eager for me.”
Reaching down, she drew her nails across his face as lightly as the touch of a butterfly. To his surprise he felt a hot liquid squirting on his shoulder even as he fucked as hard as he could. She ripped away a bloody hunk of his cheek. She drew her hand toward her mouth. Her nose quivered, as she stretched open her jaws. Huge incisors and fangs glittered in the moonlight. Her teeth snapped shut on the torn meat of his cheek. She bit down slowly, grinding her jaws to tear and crush the fresh meat.
“The cheeks are the best part. It is a pity you will have such awful scars. I will take your cheeks, in time, to mark you as mine. For now I want you to come in me.”
His body wrenched into orgasm such that he could not keep from howling. The moment was crowned by her bite to his neck, which tore away inches of his flesh. Blood erupted in a long arcing jet. He heard it splash loudly into the water ten feet away. Then she bit down and inhaled its flow until he felt pumped dry. “Now you know everything you will ever need to know, because being what you are—”
“Human?”
“More or less, but male is what I mean—you cannot really grasp more than I have already given you. Anything more complex, especially right now, would not stay with you. You would simply fall asleep.”
He did feel the heavy downward pull of sleep as he had not in years…not, in fact, since the time when Lenore’s disease first took hold. He swooned and fell against her thighs.
When he awoke, it was near to dawn. He lay on the cobblestones, shivering, but more alive in some ways than he could ever remember being. An old man’s face was gazing down into his as an ancient crabbed hand probed Martin’s clothing.
Martin was filled with some new dark, violent energy. He felt strong and cruel. “Get lost, Fuckface, or I’ll dump you in the canal,” he said to the old wretch, and it felt good to know that for once he could make good on such a terrible threat with no fear of regret. All civility in him was gone. He was surprised at the look of terror that came into the old man’s face.
“Sorry, Fellah, I thought you was dead.” The geezer smiled as he shuffled off toward a promising pile of trash and Martin got slowly to his feet. He imagined himself covered in blood, but when he touched his face, he could find no crimson stain on his fingers and none on his clothes. His skin felt scraped and raw. His facial muscles hurt, and his tongue was dry and thick. Otherwise, he seemed not only whole, but strong and well.
As he turned to go, the old monster turned to the younger man and said, “I’ll come find you when she wants you. I’ll guide you across the water to her.”
“And you are?”
The old man muttered something too softly to hear.
“Adam?” Martin inquired.
“That’s close enough. That’ll do,” said the old man as he shuffled into the morning haze.
Martin returned home to find Lenore stone dead. Her flesh was pale and tinged with green. Her body was strained into a hard rigor of agony with her arms outstretched as though to push away the pain. Her mouth was locked open, as were her eyes, in an eternal, silent scream of terror. Later that day she was removed, leaving him alone in the old house. It felt strange to be there without either her or the disease. They had been his companions for so long. Had Eternity killed Lenore? That seemed preposterous, and yet he felt desperately disloyal to have been fucking Eternity in the street during the last hour of Lenore’s life. It was absurd. He wished now that he had sacrificed his life and Lenore’s, but together, in a concord of misery, with peace and dignity.
For days he stumbled through the streets trying to grasp what had happened. How was he changed by Eternity? Lenore was gone it was true, and his suffering was doubled by her death. But was it the loss of her, or was the source of his misery something more as well? Had he lost his soul?
By night he walked the freezing length of the canal coming near to the water whenever he thought he might catch a glimpse of Eternity, but she would not appear. He thought of ending his life by leaping into the poison water. At times he thought he glimpsed the shadowy person of the old man, but then he would discover that it was only a monster of this world; some ordinary thief waiting to prey on the weak, drunk, or foolish.
I will say, perhaps in my defense, that I returned to visit Martin several times in the guise of giving solace, but in truth, I was perversely curious to find out what had become of his late night forays of secret desire. On more than one occasion, I walked the canal’s edge myself in search of Eternity. In fact his yearning became an obsession for me as well. If only I’d had the forbearance, I might have saved myself the agony of fear and loss that seem always with me now. If I was an old man when I met Martin L___, I am as ancient as the grave now.
In time we became friends of a sort, or perhaps wary companions might be more apt. I could not bring myself to leave him. My sister developed dementia that winter, and thus no place remained for me in Philadelphia. The sale of the house there afforded me a small living for a time. Beyond that, I know no future for myself.
We craved the same dark bliss that only Eternity could provide. As Martin’s grief waned, his lust for Eternity began to overtake him. He found his cock rose no matter how frightened he was of her. These sudden erections forced him into a cautious solitude from all but me, as his hard, gnarled cock was clear enough beneath his clothing. We prowled by the canal through the night — shivering like addicts — hoping for some sign of her.
He was unable to masturbate to orgasm though he chafed himself raw in the attempt at all hours of the day and night. He needed the hot scrape of her cunt to engorge and release the goatish monster she had made of him.
When she has desires to fuck him, he thrusts into her with such force that I wonder it does not crack his spine. I hunker in the garbage-strewn shadows to observe their grinding sex. Each joining of their bodies is completed with the pungent stench of his arterial blood gushing into her mouth as they come.
One night, not long ago, Martin knelt by the canal waiting for her call, stroking his cock, when the old man stepped nimbly from the fog like a dancer. Kneeling and engaged as Martin was, he was embarrassed to find that he could not stand.
“At it again, I see. Fear not,” said the old man, “Eternity is near. She has come for you as she always will. What more could you ask?”
Looking up he asked softly, “But what does it mean? What has happened to me?”
“It’s quite simple, really. God fulfilled your hopes.”
“He did?”
“He gave death to Lenore, and he has given you to Eternity.” Martin then fell silent and to my knowledge, has not spoken one word since.
You may wonder what has become of me? What has God given me? I shall tell you. He has given me hope. It is a hope that—I know as certainly as there is a Hell—shall never be fulfilled, and it will never, ever die.
© 2009 Cervo. All rights reserved. Content may not be copied or used in whole or part without written permission from the author.