How long have I roamed this urban maze? Searching, never finding, yearning
for the perfect gift, the perfect captive heart?
Too long for heart or soul or blood to bear, I have walked the night,
searching for the one to share my dark dream. Innocent, beautiful,
depraved, the boy who will bear My mark upon his soul forever and not be
destroyed by My fire.
It is the music I mostly remember. The soft gentle strains of the waltz,
the Charleston, leaping and coruscating, haunting wisps of jazz escaping
through a nightclub doorway on a tendril of acrid blue cigarette smoke. How
could We Meet Again, who have never met? I yearned for you my dark twin,
yearned for your yielding embrace and your ripe warm heart.
The beats grew darker, harder, faster, the signs outside the places of the
night grew brighter, but the faces were always of the same cast. Young, so
painfully awfully young to the eyes of an ancient soul, brittle, debauched,
callow faces scored with petty lusts and conceits, that marred their
transient beauty more than the lines of age and hard bought wisdom ever
could.
As the music lost it’s words, its soul, even it’s last shred of melody to
the driving beat of the speeding city, I lost heart and hope, and headed
out, away from the town, away from the river, the lights and the music and
the shallow glittering pretty ones, away, away.
Hungering, starving for more than the bright baubles that had been my
nightly sustenance I stalked empty street after empty street, until the city
at last ran out. I roamed the country roads, where the night creatures
still knew well enough to shun one of my kind.
In the small towns and villages my search was harder. The night so much
shorter, prey few and far between, I knew hunger, both real and the soul
hunger that had stalked me since my creation. I knew pain, fiery pain and
my veins burned as my soul had. Sweet ecstasy of pain, oh to share you with
my dark twin, and make us whole and full and return the promise to the
night.
It was that time when the world turns, when unholy things such as I reclaim
the night after the soft short nights of summer, and the prey begin to
huddle their frail forms in coats against the cold and dark, that I cam to a
small grey town, as new and raw as the young things in the city.
And here, by the railway station, after the last train had borne it’s
consignment of weary revellers away, I saw him.
Rather, I saw his shadow, strangely elongated in the orange glow of the
station carpark light. Soft curling hair tied in a ponytail, escaping the
collar of his coat. Long fine bones, and a dancer’s grace.
I did not stop to think. His kind and mine shun each other always, except in
the last embrace, when flight gives way to passion for the span of thirteen
heartbeats and is gone.
I drew my cloak around me, uncaring of the picture I must make, and spoke,
with a voice unused for decades.
“Come here”.
Mike shivered, and sniffed the air. Woodsmoke, discarded fish and chips,
the grease and diesel smell of the departed train, and something more
subtle. A soft metal scent, like old blood, mixed with church incense?
Mike was used to feeling out of place, out of time, out of sorts. Brentwood
was no place for a young man with a dancer’s grace, a poet’s soul, and no
apparent interest in drinking with the lads, or football or girls. The
night appeared to grow darker, thicker, more dangerous.
Mike took a deep breath, and slowly, gracefully turned his head to the
source of that subtle musk. He knew he should be afraid, but with a sense
of recognition, he realised that he was not as much as surprised when a
lithe dark form detached itself from a shadow that seemed pale by
comparison, and stepped out into the lurid light of the station floods.
Even there she seemed to drink the light. Hooded and swathed in rich dusty
black silk velvet to the toes of her little button boots.
A rich, hot darkness flooded through him, thick and sensual. Senses held
hostage by the mundane world he was born to flowered fiercely, rebelliously
into life. He could not even see her face, but her timeless attitude of
noble authority seared an impression of unbearable beauty across his eyes,
threaded his veins with silken fire. Desire exploded, fresh and new minted
upon senses more accustomed to the calm quiet pleasure of a good book. He
was already in motion when a voice like tarnished silver wrapped itself
around each newly quickened sense he possessed, with an irrevocable note of
command.
“Come here”
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