Vampire Rising

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

Copyright 2015 Larry Benjamin.

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/larrybenjamin

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own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this
author.

* * * * *

This novel is a work of fiction and the characters
and events in it exist only in its pages and in the author’s
imagination.

* * * * *

“
To be a Vampire is to know your pale skin and red
lips offend others.”

-Malcolm V

It’s the mid twenty-first century.
Anti-Semitism, racism, sexism and homophobia have been consigned to
the dustbin of history. The world is run by “the state,” and
Christian zealots, whose chief governing tools are fear and
oppression. It’s a wonderful time to be alive—unless you’re a
Vampire. Vampires are despised, and feared, and subjected to
discrimination and unspeakable violence.

Considered undead, unholy, without basic
human rights, Gatsby Calloway lives on the fringes of society,
avoiding humanity. Until he meets Barnabas, a young encaustic
painter. When Barnabas is mortally wounded during an anti-Vampire
attack, Gatsby must forget everything he has known, and learn to
trust.

* * * * *

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

197 Chicksand
Street

Gatsby

A Vivid
Chaos

Our Seed And Our
Feet Are Rooted In The Carpathian Mountains

Malcolm
V

In Manus Tuas,
Domine

Vampire
Rising

About the
Author

By the
Author

* * * * *

As always, for
my husband, Stanley H. Willauer, Jr.

And for Jose
Rafael Prieto.

And finally,
for my handful of loyal readers—you keep me writing; if you
numbered a million, you could not be more precious to me.

* * * * *

It takes a village to raise a child…and write
a book. I’d like to thank my village.

Brenda Howell, a friend for nearly forty
years and a talented artist—thank you for allowing me to get inside
your head to understand how an artist creates and sees the
world.

Jose Raphael Prieto who first had the idea
for a book about a tribe of gay vampires.

Marty Lindley of NuAxion who brought my
vision to life in the video trailer for this book. I am in awe of
your talent and your generosity.

Natasha Snow with whom it was my great
privilege to work on the cover for this book.

My editor, publisher, and friend, Debbie
McGowan—thanks for always believing.

And my entire Beaten Track Publishing
family…

* * * * *

THE WORDS WRITTEN HERE are less a story
than a prophesy. Or maybe they’re a prayer. Whatever it is, you
need to understand that what is written here is, like Moses’
tablets, written in the hand of God, accurate, and true because it
could not be otherwise.

* * * * *

BARNABAS STEPPED INTO THE STREET and
hailed the oncoming taxi. The driver stopped and, leaning across
the passenger seat asked, suspiciously, “Where are you going?”

When Barnabas gave him the address, the
man’s eyes grew wide. He quickly blessed himself, rolled up the
window, and sped away.

Seeing no other taxis, Barnabas walked to
the bus stop, cursing his decrepit car. The elderly Achieva had
refused to start no matter how he tried to coax it to life. He
hated the car but it had been all he could afford with the money
he’d saved from his job delivering pizzas after school. Once, the
car had seemed as bright and promising as a golden chariot.

The day he turned eighteen, which happened
to be the same day he’d graduated from high school, he’d packed
everything he owned—which, fortunately, hadn’t been much—into the
Achieva and took off in the rain, without a destination, without a
plan, knowing only that he had to get away. As the group home faded
into the distance, and the recent past, he’d thought, with regret,
only of…
Gatsby
.

Barnabas shook his head and consulted the
Public Transportation app on his Wearable for the bus route he
needed. An ancient bus finally arrived, sighing as its pneumatic
doors cracked open. As he boarded the bus, he noticed an old
Mexican woman in the first seat. She was heavy and dressed in
several layers of conflicting plaids. Her brown face was as
wrinkled and pockmarked as a peach pit.

“Where ya headed?” the bus driver asked as
Barnabas fumbled his money into the coin box.

“Chicksand Street in Whitechapel.”

In response, the driver angrily slapped the
lever that controlled the bus doors and attacked the gas pedal.

As Barnabas made his way to the back of the
bus, he had to grab onto the overhead handrail to keep from falling
as the bus, spewing gravel, its engine groaning, careened down the
uneven road already dark though it was just past dusk.

At the back of the bus, a group of
dark-skinned boys sat with their legs spread apart, and ear buds
screwed into their heads. Scowling, they gleamed with menace like
the edge of night. When, as the bus spun around a corner, Barnabas
fell into an empty plastic seat among them, one of the boys asked,
with an edge of belligerence in his voice, “Did you say Chicksand
Street?”

“I did,” Barnabas answered.

The boys suddenly sat up straighter, and
their knees snapped together, as their eyes shifted from
side-to-side. As Barnabas watched them, they seemed to shrink
inside themselves. And Barnabas realized that these fierce boys,
with their badass attitudes, who carried guns secreted in the
waistbands of their sagging jeans, were afraid. He wondered then
what he was doing—if he, too, should be afraid.

“This here coming up is the stop for
Chicksand Street,” the bus driver called out.

Barnabas stood and walked to the front of
the bus. He peered out the windshield into the dark, then looked at
the driver. “The schedule said you stopped
 
at
 
Chicksand Street,” Barnabas said.

“Not after dark I don’t,” the driver shot
back. “This here is as far as I’m going tonight!”

Barnabas shrugged and moved to the door. The
Mexican woman he’d noticed earlier touched his arm. As he turned to
her, she drew a silver crucifix attached to rosary beads from
around her neck and, muttering a prayer in Spanish, pressed it into
his hands. He closed his hand around the offering still warm from
her bosom and said, “Thank you.”

The bus slowed and the driver said, “This
here road, about a mile on, becomes Chicksand Street.” He opened
the door, barely stopping long enough for Barnabas to disembark. As
soon as his feet touched the curb, the driver closed the door and
sped away as fast as the bus’ ancient diesel engine would allow. As
the bus passed him he saw the passengers with their foreheads and
palms pressed against the windows, their eyes wide, and their
mouths forming tiny “O”s of fright.

The bus, reduced to flickering red lights in
the falling night, disappeared altogether as Barnabas knelt by the
side of the road. He dug a shallow hole, and gently laid the
crucifix into it. He covered the hole, and placed a large white
stone over the burial ground.

At the end of the dirt road, hard packed
with gravel and edged with sharpened stones, a cul-de-sac had been
carved out of a dark wood. This was Chicksand Street. Massive iron
gates, set between a high stone wall, hung crooked, and open, from
their ancient rusting hinges. Looking up at the gates, Barnabas
noticed an assemblage of small, long-legged gray-brown birds with
pale bellies and short rounded wings riddled with white feathers,
perched along the top of the gates. Mockingbirds. They seemed to be
watching him as they chirped and chattered among themselves.

Beyond the gates, Barnabas could see large
old houses of Wissahickon Schist, and brownstone, and dark red
brick with heavy slate roofs and shutters inside and out. Each
house had a massive front door of quarter-sawn oak banded with
iron. On either side of each door hung old-fashioned gas lanterns
whose soft flickering light swatted ineffectually at the dark.
Lawns of fescue grass shone dull pale-green. Behind the houses was
a thick wood of cypress and yew trees, and beyond that, fields of
moss and mushroom.

The houses were grouped around a broad
circular avenue of cobblestone edged with slate curbs. The full
moon, as if seeing him standing at the gate, paused in its journey
across the sky and hung between the trees for a moment, unfurling
its pale blue bounty like a magic carpet down the avenue, beckoning
Barnabas to enter. Number 197 was straight ahead at the apex of the
circle. Barnabas stepped through the gates and nervously began to
whistle. Soon he heard an echo of his own tuneless whistling.
Startled, he looked around and realized it was only the
mockingbirds imitating him.

* * * * *

THE FRONT DOOR WAS OPEN so Barnabas
walked in. Voices rose and fell on the cool air. A large room to
his left held a mixed lot of men: some were dark-haired while
others were blond; some had long straight hair, while others had
kinky hair; some had pony tails, and others wore their hair cropped
military-short; some had straight aquiline noses; others had broad,
flat noses. They all seemed under forty. Many were dressed as he
was in sneakers and low-rise jeans, but many more were dressed in
well cut black suits over gray high-collared shirts and matching
vests. Most spoke like typical Americans while others, clearly
French and Spanish, spoke with extravagant accents. But they all
had voluptuous red lips and complexions so pale they might have
been hewn from alabaster or amber.

Several men watched him with a mix of
curiosity and lust. Barnabas knew men found him attractive, but the
knowledge did nothing to bolster his confidence; he’d grown up a
ward of the state, unwanted and invisible for too long. When one of
the men caught his eye and smiled at him, Barnabas returned the
smile, with a tentative one of his own which was clearly a polite
acknowledgement, but not an invitation to further intimacy. Another
man, bolder than the first, detached himself from his group and
approached. Once Barnabas explained he was a guest of Mr.
Calloway’s the man drew back and directed him down a dark hall to
the music room.

Barnabas had to pass through a rotunda to
get to the music room. The rotunda was furnished with a large round
table on which lay trays of food. Above the table hung a large
chandelier of smoked glass whose jet crystals dangled from an iron
band like black icicles in the chilly air.

Two men stood against a pair of French
doors, arguing, their eyes red as charcoals in a fire. Across the
room, a waiter, a swarthy young man with thin, pale lips, dressed
in white tie, and kid-skin gloves, stood watching them with hunger
and admiration. As Barnabas passed them another waiter, this one in
black, sucked his teeth, and looking at the waiter in white,
mumbled something under his breath. Barnabas couldn’t make out the
words but there was no mistaking the contempt in his voice.

It was in the music room, then, that
Barnabas saw Gatsby for the first time since graduation some seven
years before. Barnabas paused to let his eyes adjust to the room’s
dimness, for his night vision was poor.

It was a room of pearl grays and faded gold
damask, dark wood and darker carpets, all shadowed in flickering
candlelight. Gatsby was seated at an ebony nine-and-a-half foot
Bosendorfer Concert grand piano—the one with ninety-five keys,
rather than the standard eighty-eight—which dominated the room.
Gatsby himself had a pewter finish: silvery hair swept back, eyes
like pieces of ice, pale cheekbones that gleamed. He was cool and
pale, champagne in an ice bucket. Playing selections from “A Chorus
Line” for a crowd of stalwart admirers, he was radiant in that
darkened room. He was gorgeous and charismatic, a charmer of snakes
and men.