Category: vampires

Analysis of ‘Black Sabbath’

I: Introduction and Quotes

Black Sabbath, or I tre volti della paura (“The Three Faces of Fear”), is a 1963 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava and starring Boris Karloff. It’s an anthology of three horror stories loosely adapted (or so it claims in the Italian credits) from tales by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, ‘Ivan Chekhov,’ and Guy de Maupassant: “The Telephone” (‘F.G. Snyder,’ in all probability a pseudonym for Bava and fellow screenwriters Marcello Fondato and Alberto Bevilacqua; in any case, the story is vaguely influenced by “Le Horla,” by Maupassant), “The Wurdalak” (Tolstoy), and “The Drop of Water” (‘Chekhov,’ but probably based on a story by Franco Lucentini).

The American version of the film moved “The Drop of Water” to the front; I prefer the original Italian ordering, as it gives the film a kind of ABA, ternary form in terms of theme–statement, departure, return. Furthermore, the prudish Production Code, while waning, was still in effect enough to censor the American version of “The Telephone,” removing the hints at a lesbian relationship between Rosy and Mary, and at the fact that Rosy is a call girl, vengeful Frank being her former pimp.

Having seen people lined up at the local cinema to watch the movie back in the late 60s, the heavy metal pioneers decided to name themselves after it (this renaming in English being a fortuitous choice for them, since it bears no relation at all to the film; the renaming was just to lull movie-goers over to it after the success of Bava’s Black Sunday); the band marvelled at how people are willing to pay to be scared. As a result, the band invented heavy metal, with its doom-and-gloom sound, as a kind of rock version of horror movie music, in contrast to the ‘happier’ hard rock of the likes of Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Van Halen.

The film didn’t do well commercially or critically on release, but it has since seen its reputation improve. “The Telephone” is an early Bava attempt at giallo in film.

Here are some quotes:

“Come closer, please! I’ve something to tell you. Ladies and gentlemen, how do you do? This is BLACK SABBATH. You are about to see three tales of terror… and the supernatural. I do hope you haven’t come alone. As you will see from one of our tales, vampires – wurdulaks – abound everywhere. Is that one, sitting behind you now? You can’t be too careful, you know. They look perfectly normal, and indeed they are. Except… they only drink the blood of those whom they love the best. Ah… there I go, talking shop again! Let’s get on with our first tale.” –Boris Karloff, first lines

“You have no reason to be afraid.” –Mary, to Rosy

“What’s the matter, woman? Can’t I fondle my own grandson? Give him to me!” –Gorca, to Ivan’s mother

II: Unifying the Stories

So, why did Bava choose these “three faces of fear” in particular? Why these three stores, as opposed to any other three? If they were merely chosen at random, such a choice would seem to detract from the overall quality of the movie, one which is now ranked #73 on a Time Out poll of the best horror films. Surely, these three specific choices, and how they were crafted, have a meaning in itself.

Since the three stories are separated in terms of plot, time, and setting (the first in early 60s France, the second in 19th century Russia, and the third in London in the 1910s), the link uniting them seems to be one of theme.

Indeed, there are several themes that I’ve found uniting the three stories, especially the first and last in this ABA structure. The main theme is the relationship between fear and desire.

Lacan said that desire is “the desire of the Other,” meaning that we desire to be what other people desire (what we think they desire), and that we desire recognition from others. As for fear, Lacan said that our anxieties spring from not knowing what others want–“the sensation of the desire of the Other…Anxiety is the feeling of the over-proximity of the desire of the Other.” Hence, the link between fear and desire.

Is the desire of others a wish to rape or kill us? Is it their wish to absorb our identity into them and to make us one of them? Is it their wish to take from us what they lack? These are “the three faces of fear” that confront us–sometimes literally, sometimes symbolically–in this film.

III: The Telephone

Though a telephone is a means of communication, of connection, it’s paradoxically also a cause of alienation, since we use it to converse from far distances, making face-to-face communication impossible. This is the central problem of Rosy (played by Michèle Mercier), a pretty young call girl who gets a series of threatening phone calls at home one night from a mysterious person.

She hears the voice of a man who claims to be watching her every move in her apartment: knowing when she’s changed into her dressing gown, when she’s exposing her pretty legs, when she’s hidden her valuables. This knowing is an erotic link between fear and desire; it’s Freud‘s Eros connected with Thanatos, for though the caller craves her beautiful body, it’s to kill her, not to caress her.

She learns from the newspaper that Frank (played by Milo Quesada), her former pimp against whom she testified, has broken out of prison, and she understands that it’s he who has been calling her, wanting to kill her in revenge. She calls her former friend, Mary (played by Lydia Alfonsi), to come over to her apartment to help her feel safe; immediately after hanging up, she gets another threatening call, her victimizer knowing she’s just chatted with Mary on the phone.

Little does Rosy know that Mary, a lesbian admirer who’s had a falling-out with her, is the caller. Mary’s terrorizing of Rosy, to pressure her former lover to let her come back into her life–and into her home, which is symbolic of Rosy’s vagina–is a symbolic lesbian sexual assault. (I’ll return to this symbolism in “The Drop of Water,” the returning A of this ABA structure.)

So, the alienating effect of the telephone conversations, as opposed to Mary’s entering of Rosy’s apartment to talk to her face to face, represents the kind of object relations that WRD Fairbairn wrote about: the Central Ego/Ideal Object configuration (Mary and Rosy, when face to face), the Libidinal Ego/Exciting Object configuration (Mary and Rosy when on the phone, with Mary’s desire to have Rosy again), and the Anti-libidinal Ego/Rejecting Object configuration (Mary’s threats to Rosy, when impersonating Frank on the phone).

Put another way, Mary is torn between feelings of love and desire (her Libidinal Ego) for Rosy (Mary’s Exciting Object), and feelings of hate and resentment (Mary’s Anti-libidinal Ego) for the ex-lover who spurned her (Mary’s Rejecting Object). Mary’s claim of bearing no grudge is thus an obvious example of denial.

Mary has resolved her conflict between the Eros wish to kiss Rosy, on the one hand, and her Thanatos wish to kill Rosy, on the other, by making the threatening calls. On the one hand, Mary enjoys terrorizing Rosy, and on the other, she is goading Rosy to let her come in [!] her home. Mary’s putting of a knife under Rosy’s pillow suggests that Mary knows Frank is really coming over.

There is the ever-so-slight influence of Guy de Maupassant’s horror short story, “Le Horla” on “The Telephone.” The American bowdlerization of “The Telephone,” not only removing the hints at lesbianism and prostitution, but also making Frank into a ghost who sends Rosy a self-writing letter, makes the story a little closer to Maupassant’s, with its sense of an evil presence encircling, watching, and ultimately controlling the protagonist (who at the end attempts to kill his/her tormentor, but ultimately fails); I must say, however, that this alteration comes off as contrived when compared with the vastly superior Italian original, which needed no supernatural trappings of any kind.

The link between the influence of The Horla (loosely translated, “[that thing] out there,” hors-là), who wants to possess the body of the narrator, and “The Telephone” reinforces my interpretation that the encroachment into Rosy’s apartment is a symbolic rape, especially since I see Frank as a projection of Mary; her impersonating of him on the phone represents a wish-fulfillment to attack Rosy.

Mary gives Rosy a tranquilizer. We see Rosy lying on her bed, towards the end of her sleep; and the light of dawn (by which time the threatened killing of her is supposed to have already happened) is coming through a window. Mary is at a nearby desk writing a letter to Rosy, confessing that she was, in fact, her terrorizer: this was the only way she could be with Rosy again. I wonder–while Rosy was out, did Mary enjoy her? It seems unlikely that Mary would have passed up such an opportunity.

Then, Frank comes in and, thinking it’s Rosy at the desk writing the letter of confession, strangles Mary with one of Rosy’s stockings. Since I see Frank as a projection of Mary’s aggressive feelings towards Rosy, this killing can be seen to symbolize Mary’s Anti-libidinal Ego momentarily triumphing over her Libidinal Ego, meaning that it’s Mary who has wanted to kill Rosy after all. Still, that part of Mary that still loves Rosy wins out in the end, for the knife Mary put under the pillow is used by Rosy to kill her attacker, that projection of Mary’s killer instincts onto Frank, which is once again rebuffed by Mary’s Rejecting Object.

IV: The Wurdalak

A wurdalak is a kind of Slavic vampire that feeds on the blood of those it especially loves–its family and close friends. Here again we see the meeting of fear and desire.

This story is the most faithful of the three to its purported literary sources, in this case, Aleksey Tolstoy’s Family of the Vourdalak. Here we see Boris Karloff doing his thing, and hearing his lines dubbed into Italian is the only drawback of Bava’s original version.

Travelling Vladimir Durfe (played by Mark Damon) stops when he sees a decapitated corpse with an unusual dagger stabbed in its chest. Later, he comes to the cottage of a family, having taken the dagger with him. He enters the cottage and sees an empty space on a wall where the dagger is meant to be hanging.

One of the men of the cottage, Giorgio (played by Glauco Onorato), points a rifle at Vladimir and demands he return the dagger to the family. The dagger is an obvious phallic symbol (as is the rifle), and its not being in the possession of Giorgio’s family is thus a symbolic castration, a Lacanian lack giving rise to desire.

The rest of the family present themselves to Vladimir: Giorgio’s wife (played by Rika Dialina) and their little boy, Ivan; Giorgio’s younger brother, Pietro (played by Massimo Righi), and the men’s sister, the breathtaking Sdenka (played by Susy Andersen), with whom Vladimir is immediately smitten. More desire emerges.

A terrible fear is consuming the family: their old patriarch, Gorca (Karloff), has gone off to destroy a wurdalak. If the old man doesn’t return until after five days (ten days in Tolstoy’s story), then he’s become a wurdalak himself, and he must be destroyed, an agonizing task for his family.

Gorca does return, at just about the last moment when such a return would be safe…or has it been just slightly too late? He looks ghastly and pale, and he’s irritable. He also has a gory wound on his chest, a yonic hole, another symbolic castration, a lack leading to desire.

Indeed, he does feel desire: the creepy old man wishes to “fondle” his grandson, Ivan; the family must indulge him. Here we come to the uncomfortable symbolism of the wurdalak‘s craving of the blood of family–it represents incest, both literal and psychological, leading to enmeshment.

Sexual perversity is at the core of Black Sabbath, the merging of fear and desire: lesbian rape (bear in mind that I am not the one making moral judgements against lesbianism here, the film is; in 1963, homosexuality was far less socially accepted–I’m just exploring theme here), the symbolic necrophilia that I see in “The Drop of Water” (see below), and the vampiric incest in this story.

Vampire stories are a form of erotic horror, with phallic fangs biting into flesh and sucking out blood, leaving pairs of yonic wounds. Such attacks can be seen as symbolic rapes, a taking possession of the victims. I demonstrated such forms of erotic perversity as these in my novel, Vamps, and in my analyses of Martin and ‘Salem’s Lot. From this reasoning, I can conclude that the families of wurdalaks, craving the blood of their kin, are incestuous.

This incestuous desire goes way beyond children’s Oedipal desires for their parents, but it shares the same Oedipal narcissism. One regards one’s whole family as a possession to gratify only one’s own desires, never an outsider’s desires, such as those Vladimir has for Sdenka. For this reason, she feels she cannot escape with him, for Gorca owns her.

Similarly, even before Ivan’s mother has been made a wurdalak, she is so attached to him that, knowing he’s a wurdalak, she won’t let Giorgio destroy Ivan; she would kill herself before allowing that to happen. She takes a knife and stabs Giorgio instead, then opens the door to let her vampire son (and Gorca) inside the house, risking the turning of her entire family into wurdalaks. Such extreme, irrational, overprotective love, going beyond even her love of her husband, suggests a Jocasta complex.

Vladimir’s love for Sdenka offers her the hope of escaping this narcissistic, emotionally abusive family. She runs away with him, stopping at an abandoned cathedral, but the wurdalak family–Gorca, bitten Giorgio and his wife–find her there and, biting her, force her to return with them.

The enmeshment of the abusive family is complete: they just have to ensnare Vladimir with a bite from Sdenka when he returns to their cottage.

V: The Drop of Water

This story is claimed to be based on one by ‘Ivan Chekhov,’ though the actual source is “Dalle tre alle tre e mezzo” (“Between Three and Three-thirty”), by Franco Lucentini, under the pseudonym of P. Kettridge. This third part of the movie shares enough thematic similarities, by my interpretation, to “The Telephone” to indicate a return to A in the film’s ternary form.

Helen Chester (played by Jacqueline Pierreux), a nurse in 1910s London, is in her flat one night; just as Rosy, in “The Telephone,” has returned to her apartment, in early 60s France, at night. In both stories, the protagonist is a woman in modern western Europe, at home at night. Both of them receive irritating phone calls at the beginning of the story.

The caller requires Helen immediately to go to the home of an old medium who has just died; the caller, the medium’s timid maid, needs Helen to dress the body and prepare it for burial. Annoyed, Helen goes over there.

The maid is too afraid to go near the body of a woman who has tampered with the spirit world, so Helen must do all the work unaided. The body has a grotesque, eerie grin on its face. On its finger is a sapphire ring that Helen covets.

Since the maid isn’t there to see Helen’s act of petty larceny, the nurse thinks she’s safe in pulling the ring off the corpse’s finger and stuffing it in her blouse. As soon as she wrests the ring off the dead medium’s finger, though, it falls on the floor; and when she goes down to find it, the corpse’s hand drops on her head, knocking over a glass of water and causing it to spill and drip water on a tray. Then a buzzing fly is seen on the finger where the ring was. It’s as if the medium’s soul has passed by metempsychosis from her body into the fly, so it can pester Helen in revenge for stealing the ring.

Now, to be sure, it is a nice ring, but is it nice enough to steal? I suppose; but would the ghost of the medium be so enraged with Helen’s theft as to want to torment her to the point of making her choke herself to death…over a ring?…over something the medium cannot take with her into the afterlife?

I believe the theft of the ring is symbolic of a far worse outrage, and the medium’s involvement with spirits, likely including evil ones, makes such an outrage plausible, if only symbolically expressed. I see the ring as a yonic symbol, the band representing the vaginal opening, and the sapphire representing either the clitoris or the hymen.

Helen’s theft of the ring, her having been under the demonic influence of one of the spirits with whom the medium has made a dangerous acquaintance, thus symbolizes a lesbian, necrophiliac rape. This symbolism would link this last story thematically with the first one (Mary’s presumed having of Rosy while the latter has been tranquilized), and such an outrage on the corpse would give the medium’s ghost sufficient motive for revenge against Helen.

The spilled glass of water, like those glasses of alcohol Helen drinks in her apartment, would thus also be yonic symbols of her sapphic, sapphire desires [!]. We also see in all of this the link between fear and desire; for right after she slips the ring on her finger and admires it, a symbolic vaginal fingering, she starts noting all the strange, frightening occurrences: the pesky fly having followed her home; the sound of dripping water, symbolic of vaginal discharge, heard everywhere; the power outage (indeed, that light outside her window, flashing on and off, can be seen to symbolize the bright fire of never-fulfilled desire when contrasted with the darkness of fear); and the medium ghost’s appearances, all to terrify Helen.

The link between fear and desire here is in Helen’s guilt over her theft of the medium’s symbolic yoni, her symbolic rape of the corpse. Helen goes mad with guilt, what she sees and hears being visual and auditory hallucinations, and in her madness, she chokes herself to death.

The next morning, a pathologist and doctor discuss Helen’s discovered corpse with her landlady (played by Harriet White Medin), who the night before had to break open the door to discover what Helen’s screaming was all about. Just as Mary pays with her life for Rosy’s symbolic rape, the forced entry into her apartment, and her projection of Frank trying to kill Rosy, so has Helen paid with her life for her symbolic rape of the dead medium.

A cut, or bruise, on Helen’s ring finger indicates that the ring has been pulled off. One may assume that the medium’s ghost has taken it back; but as I said above, the ghost has no use for a ring in the afterlife. I suspect that the landlady, having an agitated look on her face when hearing the sound of dripping water, has stolen the ring.

After all, Helen’s corpse now has an eerie grin just like that of the dead medium. A fresh, white dress is laid out on her bed, just as the maid left one out for the medium. All of these observations suggest a passing-on of the evil from victim to victim, suggesting in turn that, while alive, the medium outraged a previous female corpse, taking the sapphire ring while under the influence of an evil spirit; and now the landlady will be terrorized by Helen’s ghost, and when the landlady dies with an evil grin of her own, yet another woman will snatch the ring [!], and so on, leaving a bruise on the landlady’s finger, symbolic of the injured vaginal walls of a rape victim.

Such passings-on of evil have been observed in the other two stories: Mary’s resentment against Rosy is passed, projected onto Frank, and their aggression is passed on to Rosy, who kills him, with his own killing of Mary being symbolic of her self-destructive lust; the evil of the wurdalak is passed onto Gorca, then to Ivan, to Giorgio and his wife, and finally to Sdenka and Vladimir. Finally, the ghoulish lust for the yonic ring is passed on from woman to woman.

All violent forms of sexuality, three faces of fear, merged with three faces of desire.

Analysis of ‘Martin’

Martin is a 1978 psychological horror film written and directed by George A. Romero. While Romero is best known for his Dead movies (of which the first, Night of the Living Dead, I wrote up an analysis), Martin was his avowed favourite.

Martin Mathias (John Amplas) is a vampire…or is he? He lacks the fangs, using razor blades to cut the wounds from which he drinks the blood. Sunlight bothers his eyes a little, and neither crucifixes nor garlic have any effect on him.

Still, he insists that he needs to drink blood; he also maintains that he’s eighty-four years old, though he looks like a teen, or at the oldest, a man in his mid-to-late twenties (i.e., Amplas’s age at the time of shooting the film). Finally, his “cousin”?/great-uncle, Tateh Cuda (Lincoln Maazel), following the superstitions of the family, is as convinced that Martin is a vampire as he is.

So, is he a vampire, or a madman driven to such extreme thinking by an emotionally abusive family, itself driven to madness by religious superstition? I’m convinced of the latter…in fact, Romero himself, in the commentary on my DVD of the film, attested to the latter interpretation.

So the film should be seen as a sardonic, modern take on the vampire genre. Indeed, Romero films are known for their critical social commentary, and there’s plenty of such satirizing in this movie.

Here are some quotes:

“Things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic. There’s no real magic, ever.” –Martin

“Do you believe God’s whole world runs by the laws of the few sciences we have been able to discover? Oh, no, Christina, there is more. But people are satisfied. They know so much, they think they know all. And that makes it easy for Nosferatu. That makes it easy for all the devils.” –Cuda

“When I see people together, they don’t talk. Not really. They don’t say what they mean.” –Martin, to Radio Talk Show Host

“In real life, in real life you can’t get people to do what you want them to do.” –Martin, to Radio Talk Show Host

“I don’t suppose it’s sacrilege to say the wine at St Vincent’s is putrid.” –Father Howard

“I can’t have kids. I can never have kids. I have something wrong inside. I don’t know, what do you think? Is that good for me, bad for me? No opinion? That’s why you’re so nice to have around, Martin. You don’t have opinions.” –Mrs. Santini

“People always go away so they can forget where they were.” –Martin

Mrs. Santini: Boy, do I wish what you had was catching.

Martin: Some people think it is catching. In the movies it’s catching.

Radio Talk Show Host: Live for yourself! Whatever it takes to get through the night. Right, Count?

Martin: Are you making fun of me?

“You may come and go, but you will not take people from the city. If I hear of it, a single time, I will destroy you without salvation.” –Cuda

I am drawn to this film for two reasons: first, my original name is Martin; second, I know the feeling of being driven to near-madness by a family of emotional abusers, so I can identify with Martin, in spite of the awful things he does, especially to his female victims.

As far as horror films go, Martin is a rather eccentric one. The whole story has more of a sad tone to it than a chilling one. There’s an overwhelming feeling of alienation and social isolation, as Martin lives in a dull, small town in the house of a dysfunctional family.

He has been subjected to gaslighting his whole life with this nonsense that he’s a vampire; and he has internalized the belief to the point that he has a craving for blood. Black-and-white sequences in the film are generally supposed to represent memories from his remote past, back when this ‘octogenarian’ was young, presumably back in the 1910s.

There are two problems with the idea that these sequences are real memories. First, there’s the first of them, at the beginning of the movie, when he’s about to attack his first victim, a pretty brunette on a train. The black-and-white part shows her, not a woman from a distant memory; and she welcomes him with open arms, as if he were a desired lover, instead of the “Freak, rapist asshole” he really is. It isn’t a memory; it’s wish-fulfillment, as is the case of a black-and-white sequence later on (i.e, just before the scene with the second rape victim, the woman cheating on her husband), in which another pretty girl calls out “Martin,” as if she wants him, rather than being terrified of him; again, this must be wish-fulfillment. These two sequences at least suggest that all of them are mere fantasies.

Second, there are technical issues affecting the believability of the other black-and-white sequences. For example, the ornate interior design of certain homes suggests a time at least close to the Victorian era, hence my conclusion that they’re meant to be memories of about sixty years before the time of the film; yet we tend to see 1970s hairstyles. Also, during an old exorcism scene, the priest’s Latin occasionally seems ungrammatical: “in nomine patris, et filii, spiritus et sancti“? I don’t consider these to be technical oversights on Romero’s part; the horror master deserves higher regard than that, even with the limited budget he had when shooting. I don’t think this would have been his favourite film if these ‘errors’ had been unintended. Instead, the errors are Martin’s, in the limits of his imagination.

I’m convinced that these ‘memories’ are just a madman’s delusions, his dissociating.

As inexcusable as is Martin’s sedating of women and taking advantage of them while they’re unconscious, though, the real villain of this movie is Cuda. The old man’s scapegoating of the boy as one having “the family shame,” as one being the ‘identified patient,’ is emotional abuse of the worst kind.

Cuda, first seen in his white suit, a costume of fake innocence, represents the narcissist who, identifying with the holiness of the Church, fancies himself a good Catholic. His condemning, threatening attitude towards Martin is a projection of his own inner evil onto the boy, and through projective identification, Martin introjects and assumes that evil, then tries to rid himself of it by putting it into his female victims, then internalizing their goodness through feeding on their blood.

Cuda would rather call Martin “Nosferatu” than by his real name; he thus denies the reality of Martin’s human existence, and replaces it with one he’d rather project onto the boy. He says he’ll save Martin’s soul, but after that, he’ll still “destroy” the boy, saying so with a smirk; the sadist clearly enjoys threatening and tormenting Martin.

Consider the two men’s names to see how Romero subverts and inverts the vampire genre. Martin Mathias has the names of two Christian saints, while Tateh Cuda’s first and last names respectively seem like a near anagram of teeth and a pun on the last two syllables of Dracula. In fact, ‘Tateh Cuda,’ said quickly with the ts gently tapped with the tongue, almost sounds like a garbled version of Dracula, spoken with a thick European accent. By their very names, sinner and saint have swapped roles.

Martin’s meekness suggests the good, almost saintly man he could have been, had he not been so brutally psychologically abused by his family. Indeed, one may wonder if he has murdered his immediate family in Indianapolis, in a desperate attempt to stop them from tormenting him; is he on the lam to Pittsburgh, then to Braddock (and does Cuda know this)? Instead of being an innocent boy, though, he’s a rapist.

Martin defies Cuda’s superstitious nonsense again and again, even making fun of it by dressing up in a Dracula costume (with fake teeth) one spooky night outside, when Cuda’s been walking about alone, looking for him. Martin (<<<!) Luther once said that, laughing at the Devil, one can defeat him through God. So when costumed Martin is laughing at trembling Cuda–the old man shaking his useless crucifix at the boy, hitting him with his cane, and calling him the Devil–we know who the real Devil is.

This projective and introjective identification that Martin and Cuda–and the superstitious members of their family, by extension–undergo, this swapping of the roles of sinner and saint, is the essence of the tragedy that is this story, the tragic effects of the abuse of religion in the service of narcissists like Cuda. Cuda demonizes Martin because this is the only way the old fool can feel like a righteous man.

Even more tragically, Martin must pass the abusiveness he’s been subjected to onto others, the projective and introjective trading of identities, for this is the only exorcism that seems effective for him. He is too shy to do “the sexy stuff” with conscious women, so he injects a sedative into them (using phallic syringes) to project his shy passivity into them. Then, after having his way with them (e.g., the woman on the train), he feeds on their blood so he can internalize their goodness.

His slicing open of their skin with razor blades to gain access to their blood, a projection of his inner hostility into them, then feeding on their blood, an introjection of their goodness, is like a grisly version of Wilfred Bion‘s concept of the container and contained. Normally, a mother contains her distressed baby’s fears, anxieties, and hostilities; she does so in a kind, loving, empathic state that Bion called reverie, which involves absorbing the baby’s distressed state, transforming this negative energy into a positive form, then sending this positive form back to the baby so it can feel at peace. Martin, having come from such an abusive family, never properly received this reverie as an infant, so now he tries to simulate it through these women-as-mother-substitutes, their passive unconsciousness being symbolic of this reverie.

The turning point of the movie is when he meets Mrs. Santini: another near anagram…of Satanic? She is, indeed, a temptress, though in Romero’s subverted sense of being bad in a good way. Up until his meeting of her, he is a total loner; he doesn’t want to socialize with neighbours, and he takes a while to warm up to Christina, who despises Cuda’s religious fanaticism and wants to help the boy.

Santini’s sexual advances, however, really open him up…after a brief, shy resistance to her. He actually makes love with her while she’s awake. He even goes, for a while, without blood, for we see what he has really needed: human connection, for which the blood has been a symbolic substitute. As his new lover, she gives him that reverie, that containing of his emotional turmoil and transforming it into love that’s then returned to him. In what we can only assume to be an unhappy marriage, she–by committing adultery with him–needs that human connection, too.

Her initiation of the sexual relationship–a needed sex role reversal, for this movie is all about role reversals: sinner and saint, good and evil, aggressive and passive, projection and introjection–shows shy Martin that he needn’t dominate women to be close with them. Santini has the potential to cure him of his ‘vampirism.’

Old habits die hard, though, and his thirst for blood is growing, so he attacks and feeds on some derelicts, then barely eludes the police; as we can see, his relationship with Santini isn’t enough to cure his or her alienation.

Indeed, alienation is everywhere in this lonely town, which “is finished.” Christina and her boyfriend, Arthur (Tom Savini, who also did the bloody effects), bicker on the telephone. Martin discusses his ‘vampirism’ with a local radio talk show host who, while grateful to Martin for getting a bunch of enthusiastic new listeners, makes fun of “The Count”; indeed, the only way Martin can be popular is if he’s also laughed at. One of Cuda’s customers, a grouchy old woman, growls at Martin, calling him “a lazy boy.”

Santini isn’t the only adulteress in the movie: the second woman we see Martin drug and rape is one whose affair he interrupts–the most tense scene in the whole movie, in my opinion. As he’s eyeing her outside a shopping area and planning how he’ll get her, a group of young men are catcalling her…though he is a sexual predator far more dangerous than they could ever be.

Cuda alienates almost everyone. Christina finds him so intolerable, she leaves home with Arthur. Cuda’s religious extremism even makes the local priest, Father Howard (played by Romero himself), feel awkward, for the old man finds him too ‘modern’ in his thinking to be a real Catholic.

Santini, a church-going Catholic, weeps after her sex with Martin. When she assures him she won’t get pregnant, she says something’s wrong with her, inside: she seems to mean more than just sterility. She adores his sweetness, wishing she could have some of it. Guilt over adultery is, presumably, her motive for suicide…by slashing her arms with a razor blade!

Cuda seems to know razors are Martin’s weapon of choice for feeding on victims, so he refuses to believe her death was a suicide. He hammers a phallic wooden stake into Martin’s chest. The ‘good Catholic’ is a murderer, having killed the boy for the one time he actually didn’t use his razors on someone. Tragic irony.

Just as Martin’s victims are unconscious when he rapes and feeds on them, so is he asleep when Cuda stands over him with the stake, a symbol–as are Martin’s razor blades, syringes and raping phallus–of a kind of negative version of Bion‘s ‘contained‘ element (see Bion, pages 97-99), which is projected into the negative ‘container‘ element (symbolized by the yoni, the holes that the blades and needles are stuck into, and Martin’s bloody chest wound). Cuda projects his evil into Martin, right up to his death, rationalizing the murder by imagining he’s preventing more murders, and punishing Martin for a killing he didn’t even commit. More tragic irony.

Martin tries to escape from Indianapolis, in a hope of forgetting where he’s been; but he can’t escape the emotional abuse of his family in the form of its real evil–Cuda. He, indeed, is destroyed without salvation.

As with other horror movies/books I’ve done analyses of, in this one there’s the conspicuous absence of God, or goodness. While Martin also, as I’ve argued, lacks devils, for there is no real magic, it doesn’t lack evil. As Father Howard noted, the wine in his church is putrid.

Analysis of ‘Salem’s Lot

‘Salem’s Lot is a vampire horror novel written by Stephen King and published in 1975. It’s his second novel, as well as his personal favourite of all of those he’s written. There have been two made-for-TV adaptations: the 1979 one starring David Soul, James Mason, Lance Kerwin, and Bonnie Bedelia; and the 2004 adaptation starring Rob Lowe, Donald Sutherland, Rutger Hauer, and James Cromwell. While the first adaptation took many liberties with King’s novel, he felt no animus against it, unlike his reaction to Stanley Kubrick‘s version of The Shining.

Here are a few quotes:

“…the Lot’s knowledge of the country’s torment was academic. Time went on a different schedule there. Nothing too nasty could happen in such a nice little town. Not there.”        –Chapter 2, 4 (page 44)

“The town knew about darkness.

“It knew about the darkness that comes on the land when rotation hides the land from the sun, and about the darkness of the human soul.” –Ch. 10, 1 (page 321)

“These are the town’s secrets, and some will later be known and some will never be known. The town keeps them all with the ultimate poker face.

“The town cares for devil’s work no more than it cares for God’s or man’s. It knew darkness. And darkness was enough.” –Ch. 10, 1 (page 327)

In the Prologue, part 3, we come upon a newspaper article, ‘GHOST TOWN IN MAINE?’, referring to two ghost towns: Jerusalem’s Lot and Momson (page 8; also, pages 594-5). Some kind of evil has emptied both towns of their residents. By the end of the story, Ben Mears has started a brush fire as the only way to rid ‘salem’s Lot of its vampires. A fire to rid a city of its evil; two cities laid in desolation by some horrible evil; ‘Salem and Momson seem redolent of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Indeed, ‘salem’s Lot sounds like a pun on ‘Sodom’s Lot’. Is Ben Mears the ‘Lot’ of Jerusalem’s Lot? A fiery destruction is certainly ‘salem’s lot (i.e., fate). What’s more, ‘Salem sounds like fairly nearby Salem, Massachusetts, where the infamous witch trials took place.

Jerusalem is a most holy city (the fighting and controversy over it notwithstanding), as opposed to most unholy Sodom. ‘Salem’s Lot comes off as a quaint, wholesome town…on the surface. The Marsten House (a pun on monster, and almost an anagram, phonetically) is a magnet for evil, having been the home of a murder/suicide before housing master vampire Kurt Barlow and his human assistant, Richard Straker.

Is the contraction, ‘salem, removing Jeru (a pun on Jesu?), meant to indicate a removal of the outer veneer of goodness, leaving only evil? Indeed, the horror of this novel, as with The Exorcist and The Omen, lies in the presence only of evil, and the absence of good.

Jerusalem was originally the name of a pig that escaped the confines of its owner, Charles Belknap Tanner, then ran wild into a forest. Tanner then called the forest (part of his property), ‘Jerusalem’s Lot‘, and warned kids not to go into it, lest they be killed by the wild pig. The town was later named after the forest. The history of the town included a cult that practiced witchcraft and amoral sexuality, including inbreeding. Hence, we can easily see how the town has always been associated with outright bestial evil; hence, in turn, my association of ‘salem’s Lot with Sodom.

Before I go further into my comparison of ‘salem’s Lot with Sodom, let’s consider the story of Lot in Sodom. He was accommodating two angels, in the guise of men, when all the men of Sodom crowded around Lot’s house, demanding he bring the two men out so they could “know” (yada’) them, i.e., gang rape them (Genesis 19:5).

The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah included flagrant inhospitality, overweening pride (Ezekiel 16:49-50), and most controversially, male homosexuality (though it is only male-on-male gang rape that is explicitly dealt with in this story, not that that makes any difference to bigoted Bible fundamentalists, who use this story to justify intolerance of LGBT people).

Lot, demonstrating his duty to be hospitable to the angels, refuses to bring them out for the sexual sport of the Sodomites, who then try to force their way into Lot’s house. The two angels blind the Sodomites and warn Lot to take his family out of the city while the angels destroy the cities with fire and brimstone.

To show the parallels between the Bible story and ‘Salem’s Lot, I must start by pointing out how eroticism is all over the place in vampire fiction: Carmilla and Dracula are two well-known early examples of this. Those phallic fangs’ biting into flesh and sucking out blood powerfully suggests sexual predation, and many, if not most of the significant vampire attacks (including attempts) in this novel are male on male, symbolic of male homosexual rape.

Remember that no victim of a vampire bite consents to it, and I’m not at all agreeing with the Bible-beating bigots’ notion that consensual gay sex between adults is a sin (I don’t even believe in God). I’m not trying to moralize about gay male sex, but rather my concern is with the novel’s vampirism as symbolic typically of (attempted or successful) male-on-male sexual assault, which is every bit as indefensible as male-on-female rape, or any other kind of rape.

I’m just seeing an interesting parallel between the Sodomites wanting to get into Lot’s house to rape the angels, on the one hand, and the vampire Danny Glick biting Mike Ryerson, Randy McDougall (page 327), and Jack Griffen, and wanting to get Mark Petrie to open his bedroom window, so he can enter Mark’s room and bite him (pages 367-371). Petrie, of course, scares Danny away with a crucifix, just as the angels thwarted the Sodomites’ plan to push their way past Lot’s doorway and gang-rape them.

In this connection, remember also the Glick boys’ fear of “preeverts” while passing through the woods on the night Ralphie goes missing (pages 119-121). Remember also Hank Peters and Royal Snow wondering about the two new residents of the Marsten House: ‘Hank…looked up toward the Marsten House, which was dark and shuttered tonight. “I don’t like goin’ up there, and I ain’t afraid to say so. If there was ever a haunted house, that’s it. Those guys must be crazy, tryin’ to live there. Probably queer for each other anyway.”…”Like those fag interior decorators,” Royal agreed.’ (page 143)

Now, the homophobia of Hank and Royal aside, whatever Barlow and Straker are doing in the privacy of their own house is no one’s business but theirs; but their vampirism on the males and females of the whole town (a symbolic sexual predation), including such female victims as Marjorie Glick (pages 331-335) and Susan Norton, will be a major worry for Ben Mears. The vampire victim is hypnotized (or at least an attempt is made to hypnotize: pages 316-318) into allowing the vampire to bite him, just as a rape victim may be ‘hypnotized’ by alcohol or drugs into allowing a sexual predator to enjoy him or her.

What is of far greater importance, though, for the sake of my comparison of ‘Salem’s Lot with ‘Sodom’s Lot’, is how the blatant inhospitality in Sodom and Gomorrah was due to the excessive pride and arrogance of the inhabitants of those two sinful cities (i.e., their refusal to help the poor); for the vampirism of ‘Salem’s Lot can be seen as symbolic of narcissism.

Narcissists can be inhospitable in the extreme. Bullies by nature, they try to manipulate and control their victims (like vampires getting their victims to look in their eyes, to hypnotize them), even to the point of controlling their victims’ finances. They lure a victim in with fake, superficial charm (like the suave Barlow and Straker, with their charming furniture shop), then they idealize, devalue, and discard their victims (as Barlow does with Susan Norton after biting her, not caring at all that his ‘bride’ will be staked in the heart by the man who truly loves her…Ben Mears! [The Lot IV, 15, pages 514-520]).

Matt Burke notes several times that Barlow has a big ego (pages 525-527). Narcissists don’t necessarily brag overtly, however: having mastered their craft at manipulating others, they learn to present a False Self of goodness to the world (of the sort that Straker shows everyone [page 249], that he and Barlow are just business associates), while hiding their egotistical True Self, even from themselves (as Barlow must be hidden, sleeping during the day, and coming out only in the shadows at night).

This sleeping in the day, and coming out only at night, suggests that the day represents the conscious mind, while the night represents the unconscious. Heinz Kohut wrote of how narcissists will either repress their grandiose self (push it down into the unconscious) or disavow it (split it away vertically–Kohut, page 185).

Straker can thus represent this False Self: ‘”Mr. Straker?…Well, he’s quite charming,” [Susan] said. “Courtly might be an even better world…”…”Did you like him?” Matt asked, watching her closely… [Susan said] “I’ll give you a woman’s reaction. I did and I didn’t. I was attracted to him in a mildly sexual way, I guess. Older man, very urbane, very charming, very courtly.” […but,] “I think I sensed a certain contempt under the surface. A cynicism. As if he were playing a certain part, and playing it well, but as if he knew he wouldn’t have to pull out all the stops to fool us. A touch of condescension…And there seemed to be something a little bit cruel about him.” (pages 306-308)

Narcissists need narcissistic supply to be regularly provided. The vampires’ hunger for blood represents this craving for narcissistic supply. This supply, which feeds the narcissist’s ego, comes at the expense of the victims, who are drained of self-worth and energy, just like Barlow’s and Danny’s victims. Remember how sick Mike Ryerson feels after his bite at the graveyard (Chapter 7, part 3, pages 252-258).

If a narcissist feels threatened, that is, if his False Self is exposed as such, thus revealing his True Self, he’ll react with narcissistic rage and injury. When Barlow discovers Mark has infiltrated his house and killed Straker, the head vampire vows revenge (pages 510-512). He doesn’t bite Mark’s parents: he kills them by cracking their skulls together before the boy’s eyes (pages 535-539). When a narcissist feels a wound to his ego, his only way to feel better is to inflict pain on others.

Barlow has a special way of disposing of Father Callahan: he makes the priest drink his blood (page 542). By making the priest into a vampire of sorts, having Callahan drink his devilish blood, Barlow projects his evil onto him. Again, narcissists are known to project their vices onto the victims of their abuse. The tainted priest can no longer enter a church (pages 549-550).

Barlow enjoys having humiliated the priest, having stripped him of his ability to be a man of God. Similarly, the Sodomites’ wish to gang rape the angels may have had more to do with the desire to rob them of their holiness than to satisfy homosexual lust; indeed, when (often straight) men rape other men, it’s often to humiliate their victims, rather than just to get off. Narcissists humiliate and abase as just another way to get narcissistic supply.

Examples of narcissistic abuse can be seen on a normal, human level in the everyday lives of the people in ‘salem’s Lot, before they’ve even been attacked by the vampires. Consider Richie Bodden, the school bully, whose proud mother wants everyone to know “what a huge young man her son was” (page 83); then Mark Petrie puts him in his place (pages 86-7).

Then there’s hunchbacked Dud Rogers–the custodian of the Lot’s Town Dump–whose grotesqueness and strength remind me of that “dog”, that “elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog”, that “bottled spider”, that “poisonous bunch-back’d toad” (I, iii), the Duke of Gloucester, the hunchbacked Richard III, a man who “cannot prove a lover”, and so is “determined to prove a villain” (I, i, lines 28, 30); in Shakespeare’s play, the duke’s narcissistic ambition drives him to kill his way to the throne.

Dud gets his jollies firing his .22 target pistol at rats (pages 88-92); but when he encounters Barlow, whose “hypnotizin'” eyes are “like dark pits ringed with fire, pits you could fall into and drown in”, the vampire assumes correctly that “The girls laugh at [Dud]…They have no knowing of [Dud’s] manhood…[and] strength.” (page 233) And when Barlow bites him (page 234), Dud is as determined to be a villain as the duke was.

Also, there’s Mabel Werts, the town gossip (page 122)…and narcissists are notorious gossips. Susan Norton’s mother, disapproving of Ben (page 188), has a relationship with her daughter bordering on dysfunction (page 395). As an example of this troubled relationship, Mrs. Norton prefers “That nice boy, Floyd Tibbits” to Ben…and Floyd “put Ben in the hospital” (page 301).

Then there’s Sandy McDougall’s irresponsible treatment of her and Roy’s baby Randy (pages 71-73, 224-227, and 327-330), who ultimately dies, having not only Danny Glick’s vampire bite on his neck, but also Sandy’s bruises. Again, narcissistic mothers are known for putting their own needs before those of their children, and Sandy is the epitome of narcissistic inhospitality, before the vampires have even struck.

Back to Ben. The author has returned to ‘salem’s Lot, his childhood hometown, to “exorcise all his demons” (page 648) by writing about them in a new book. When he was nine, his friends dared him to go inside the Marsten House and take something from it, as initiation into their club, the Bloody Pirates. Inside the house, he saw the hanging corpse of Hubie Marsten, whose eyes opened for the boy (pages 56-58, 221, and 310)!

Young Ben stole a glass snow globe from the house, and has kept it as a memento until the end of the novel (pages 636-7), when, after seeing his own face in it (implying his fear that he, too, embodies the evil of the house), he destroys it, along with burning the manuscript of his book on the Marsten House. The only way to get rid of his trauma is to destroy it.

Another trauma of Ben’s is the death of his wife, Miranda, in a motorcycle accident, one for which, we sense, he blames himself (pages 482-484). Since I consider Ben to be the Lot of (the Sodom that is) ‘salem’s Lot, I find it apposite at this point to remind us of Lot’s own guilt. Lot offered his two virgin daughters (Genesis 19:8) to satisfy the lust of the Sodomites (making nonsense of John Boswell‘s claim [1980] that the Sodomites merely wanted “to ‘know‘ [another meaning of yada’] who [the two angels] were”, which in itself would hardly be a heinous sin for the Sodomites to have committed; the point in the Biblical narrative of offering, and rejecting the offer of, the daughters is to emphasize the Sodomites’ taste for male-on-male rape over male-on-female rape).

Though Lot and his family were saved from the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife looked back on the burning cities, then turned into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:26). Lot must have imagined himself to be, on at least some level, guilty of her death (as Mears must have blamed his carelessness on his motorcycle for the death of Miranda), having incurred God’s wrath for the offer of his daughters (as Robert Alter believes: Alter, page 85, note 8).

Lot must have incurred the girls’ wrath, too, since they later shamed him by getting him drunk and having sex with him (Genesis 19:31-38), to impregnate them and bear the ancestors of the despised Moabites (Mo-ab, “from the father”) and the children of Ammon (see also Alter, page 90, note 30-38). Lot’s daughters’ sexual predation is like vampiress Susan’s attempt to bite Mark (Ben’s double: more on that later) at his bedroom window (pages 449-451).

Evil occurs in cycles throughout ‘Salem’s Lot. Ben’s book on the Marsten House is “about the recurrent power of evil” (page 181). First, there was the evil, sexually perverse cult of James Boon back in the 18th century, as well as the myth of the dangerous wild pig, Jerusalem, in his “Lot”, the forest within Tanner’s property. Then there were the Hubie Marsten crimes in the house. Next came Straker, Barlow, and the vampires.

Other cycles include Mears’s traumas: first, his seeing Hubie’s ghost and its opening eyes; then, Mears’s return to the Lot, only to find himself battling vampires. Then, he returns again, with his double, Mark, to burn down the whole town in a brush fire. First, Ben accidentally killed Miranda; then, he’s forced to destroy the vampire version of his next love, Susan.

One of Mark’s traumas is watching Barlow smash together the heads of the boy’s parents, killing them (page 535). Earlier, Mark went into the Marsten House with Susan, only to find himself tied up by Straker (pages 438-440) and, failing to protect her (as Mears failed to protect Miranda by failing to turn a non-fatal corner–page 483: “in some parallel world he and Miranda had taken a left at the corner one block back and were riding into an entirely different future.”), Mark has let her be turned into a vampiress. Mark kills Straker (pages 445-6), Barlow’s presentable double (as Mears, of whom Mark is the innocent double, destroys Barlow), then runs out of the Marsten House (page 448) in a repeat of nine-year-old Ben’s frantic escape from the house twenty-four years earlier.

A fire occurred in 1951 (page 326), spread by the winds to incinerate so much more; then, Ben starts a fire to destroy the Lot at the end of the novel.

There are two pairs of destroying visitors, the younger of each pair either more innocent or more presentable than the older: good Mark and Ben, and evil Straker and Barlow, paralleling doubles of each other. A good casting choice was made in the 1979 adaptation, with Lance Kerwin (Mark) and David Soul (Ben), both actors possessing a conspicuous blond youth, to emphasize how the boy is a cyclical repeat of the man.

Straker, similarly, has an urbane suaveness like Barlow’s in the novel, though you wouldn’t see that in the 1979 adaptation, with James Mason (Straker) contrasted with the Nosferatu version of Barlow. On the other hand, during the scene of Barlow’s confrontation with Mark and Father Callahan, Mason’s Straker speaks for the snarling Nosferatu (instead of Barlow speaking for himself, as he does in the novel), thus showing how the servant (the False Self–see above) is the double of his master (the True Self).

Mears’s guilt feelings, and demons to be exorcized by writing about his childhood trauma, make him wonder if that magnet of evil, the Marsten House, has attracted him in the same way as Barlow (David Soul’s Ben asks this of Lew Ayres‘s Burke in the 1979 adaptation). Is Ben a double of Barlow? In destroying Barlow, is Ben killing the evil in himself (i.e., that exorcizing), or at least trying to?

Victims of narcissistic abuse often ask themselves if they, too, are narcissists. Have they themselves been infected by the disease of their victimizers? When Barlow’s hiding place has been discovered, he has to find a new one: the basement of Eva Miller’s boarding house…where Ben is staying. Rather than equate Barlow thus with Ben, we can see this move as symbolizing Barlow’s introjection into Ben’s psyche, something narcissists do to their victims.

The Marsten House symbolizes the narcissistic psyche, with its evil hidden in the unconscious id of its shadows. The boarding house can be seen as representing Mears’s psyche, the hiding vampires in the basement representing Mears’s repressed, unconscious trauma–Barlow’s introjections into him. Mark’s house is his own psyche. (Lot’s house can be seen as his own psyche, too.) Evil (be it in the form of vampires or Sodomites) infects all of these places by forcing its way in (or at least trying to), traumatizing its victims.

Even when Ben and Mark have gone as far away as “a small California town on the Mexican border” (page 3), they’re still affected by their trauma. They must go back to ‘salem’s Lot, and finish the town off for good. In the end, both ‘salem’s Lot and Momson, like Sodom and Gomorrah, are left in desolation, just as those psychological vampires known as narcissists leave their victims in a state of emotional desolation.

Stephen King, ‘Salem’s Lot, Anchor Books, New York, 1975

Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog!

My blog is called ‘Infinite Ocean’ because–apart from my dialectical monist philosophy, which I hope can help people heal from alienation, C-PTSD and the other effects of narcissistic and emotional abuse–I have a (potentially) infinite number of subjects to write about. I have eclectic interests, so I write on a variety of subjects. Here is a brief explanation of all that I do.

Now, Dear Reader, beware: while I write a lot about such topics as narcissistic abuse, I want to emphasize that I am no expert. I have no formal training in psychiatry or psychology whatsoever; I merely dabble in psychoanalysis, and even that comes only from reading a lot–I’ve never been trained in that field. I say this to prevent any misunderstandings about the efficacy of what I have to say in an attempt to help people heal from psychological trauma; indeed, I myself am healing, and so my writing is just my personal journey, my attempt to heal myself. So feel free to accept or reject whatever I write about here in terms of its worth as advice.

One of the annoyances of doing research is how difficult it is to find appropriate source material from a Google search. Sometimes, the sources I give links to that back up my arguments are passages that are, unfortunately, hard to find within a sea of text. What can I say? I try my best with what little I have; so please, if you choose to read what I write, take it with a generous dose of salt, and if you have serious issues of psychological trauma, seek a qualified expert. My scribblings are no substitute: they’re just me pouring out my feelings, and if they–for what they’re worth–can give you validation or inspiration of some kind, then they’ve done what I meant for them to do, no more.

In addition to the above, I write about anarchism, socialism, libertarian-leaning Marxism, and psychoanalysis, as well as writing literary and film analyses (again, with the same lacunae of authority as there are in my writings on narcissistic abuse). I also write fiction–horror and erotic horror, mostly. Here are links to some of my short stories, as well as to works-in-progress. Here are some poems I’ve written.

Then, there are a few novels I’ve written and self-published on Amazon. (If you’re a sufferer of complex trauma and find horror triggering, I’ll more than understand if you want to skip past the next few paragraphs.)

My Kindle e-book, Sweet, is about a woman who has a disturbing habit: she likes to have men get her pregnant, then a few months after the baby is born, she kills it, cooks it, and eats it. Her latest lover wants to be involved with their baby’s life–how will he stop the mother from ending its life?

…and here are links to my other two Kindle e-books, Vamps, and Wolfgang.

Vamps is a vampire erotic horror novel, about three groups of vampiress strippers/prostitutes who lure lustful men in, then suck…their blood. Vampire hunters, however, are out to get them, and have been exposing them to the lethal sunlight. Someone is helping the hunters find the vamps…is it one of the vamps?

Wolfgang is about a German billionaire who happens to be a werewolf. Racked with guilt over his killings (particularly those of his own parents), he has a young prostitute whip and beat him, in sort of an S & M style, in an attempt to assuage his guilt. She has her own agenda (a lycanthrope fetish!), though, as does his butler (to use the billionaire’s money in ways the butler deems fit). A love triangle develops between the three: who will get control of the money, which two will remain lovers, and who will be the next werewolf?

My next erotic horror novel, Creeps, is a work-in-progress as of the writing of this update. It’s about a prostitution ring that uses small tech put inside worm-like ‘creeps’ that slither into the body, so the tech can take control of the bodies of the people forced into “consenting” prostitution. Two people, a young man and his older sister, discover that a woman friend of theirs is trapped in one of the legalized brothels, and they have to figure out a way to get her out of there. If the mafia ring (protected by a corrupt government) catches the woman’s two friends, though, creeps may be used on them to keep them quiet…permanently.

Anyway, I hope you have fun looking around at all of the different topics I’ve been writing about, and I hope you find some that interest you enough to make you want to follow me. Cheers!

‘Vamps’, Chapter Seven: Twice Bitten, So Sly

The following night, I found the CNT Club; like the POUM, it was shrouded in a forest, but to the northeast of town, whereas the POUM Club was to the southeast of town, almost along the same longitude as the CNT.  Also like the POUM, the CNT Club had male vamps protecting it from Christian vampire hunters.  The original sign over the front door, Tramps, hadn’t been taken down: a red V was spray painted over the Tr, but later, CUNT, in black lettering, was spray painted over all the original letters; then the C, N, and T were spray painted again, but in white, presumably to distract one from the obscenity of the black lettering.  I went in.

Amid the loud techno music and flashes of strobe lights that coloured up and dotted the darkness, I saw the by-now-typical, perfectly curvy strippers, either half naked or fully so, giving table- or lap-dances.  One of them, a buxom blonde goddess in a white lace bra and thong, with matching fishnet stockings and high heels, approached me.  Her vamp fangs were hidden in an overbite, behind full lips with lush, dark red lipstick.

“Hi,” she sighed in a thick Slavic accent, her hand held out to shake mine.  “My name is Anna Petrovich.  Are you looking for a job here?”  We shook hands.

“Well, I’m stripping in the POUMTANG Club right now,” I said, “but if I like it better here, I might consider asking you for work.”

“We’re always looking for new blood,” she said.

“Oh, I know that,” I said.

“How many times have you been bitten?  I’d say once, from the slight mark on your neck.”

Since the mark was now practically invisible, especially in the darkness of the bar, I figured she must have psychically sensed its presence.  “That’s right, I’ve only been bitten once; but I’m eager for my second and third bites.”

“We can help you with that, if you’ll be willing to help us.”

“Speaking of help, do you know of a vamp traitor who’s telling the vampire hunters in town where you girls are sleeping?” I asked.

“We were hoping you could help us with the same thing,” Anna said.  “We’ve had three of our vamps destroyed, exposed to the hellish sun.”

“Awful,” I sighed.  “I heard it was only one.”

“Two more were destroyed today.  That’s why I was hoping you could strip for us.  We don’t have enough girls here.”

“That’s too bad.  I hate the bigotry against vamps here.  We’re not the Satanic beasts the Church says we are.”

“And the Church isn’t the pantheon of saints it pretends to be.”

Same scholarly vamp vocabulary, I thought.  So odd to hear such erudition in strippers, particularly in uneducated me, yet so cool, too.  I’m sick of men always thinking we’re all just a bunch of dummies.  “How can I help?”

“First,” she asked, looking me straight in the eyes with that hypnotic fire in hers, and stroking my hair.  “Do you trust me?”

“I don’t see…why not,” I said, my vision already blurring and my head swimming.  “I don’t trust…the Catholics here.”

“Then we must love each other.”  She kissed me on the lips.  “But first, come get to know some of us.  Come with me.”

Anna led me through the bar, and I passed by the stage, where a short, tanned stripper with slight muscle tone was doing her third song, “It’s Alright (Baby’s Coming Back),” by the Eurythmics.

Anna and I sat at a table close to the stage.  We chatted as the nude girl onstage carried on with her floorshow.  Apart from her awe-inspiring, curvy body, she had an unusually large clitoris.  Crawling about barefoot with her legs spread wide apart and her ass pushed out, she had everything proudly on display for her rapt male audience at the tip rail.

“Who is that hot-looking girl?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Francine Tremblay, or ‘Franny’, as we all call her,” Anna said.

“She’s the sister of Fanny in POUM,” a short, petite stripper with black hair said in a Spanish accent.  She was wearing a dark red bikini and matching high heels.  She sat beside me.

“Really?” I said.  “They’re sisters?”

“Yes,” Anna said.  “It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Franny sure resembles Fanny.  Their similar names are appropriate.  I’m Erica,” I said to the Latina girl, holding out my hand to shake hers.

“Maria Gonzalez,” she said, shaking my hand.  Her fangs were showing without inhibition.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

The song was over, and Franny got off stage without even bothering to put her clothes back on.  Not that she needed to: her nakedness was a glory to see, even for those not sexually attracted to women.

“Hi, I’m Franny.  You must be the new girl in POUM,” she said in a French Canadian accent.  We shook hands.

“Yes,” I said.  “I’m Erica George.  Nice to meet you.  You looked really beautiful onstage.”

“Thank you,” she said.  I looked over at Anna, who I already envied and admired. Being a vamp had given her an inscrutable, beautiful calm and confidence.  I wanted that coolness so badly.  “So, where are you from, Anna?”

“Russia,” she said.

“Your English is amazingly good,” I said.

“It wasn’t always,” she said almost sadly.  I assumed correctly that her vamp powers were responsible for the perfection of her grammar.

“What brought you to Canada?” I asked.

“A job opportunity here,” she said with a frown, looking away.

“Why not strip in Russia?” I asked.

“Because I thought the job would be in social work,” she said, still frowning and looking away.  Her confidence was obviously also something she’d only acquired as a vamp.  Her life before becoming a vamp had suddenly become all the more fascinating, as I could easily empathize with those lacking in self-assurance.

“Oh?  The job offer was a lie?” I asked.

“Yes.  About a year ago, these three strip-clubs were a front for human trafficking,” Maria said.  “We all got tricked into coming here, thinking we’d get good jobs.  Instead, we were made into prostitutes against our will.  Then the Vampire Revolution liberated us.”

“Yes,” Anna said.  “A vamp named Leona Trotta bit me one night after I escaped.  She made me a vamp, I returned, bit the other girls, and we killed the whole mafia family who had been holding us against our will.  Now, the strip club is our own.”

“Awesome!” I said.  “These three strip clubs are the first ones I’ve ever seen where the strippers are actually the ones in the saddle. It’s awful, though, that you were all sex slaves before.”

“I had been hoping for a good job to make money for my poor family in Mexico,” Maria said, a tear running down her cheek.  “Because of my being a slave here, I couldn’t send any money home.  My sick mother died because I couldn’t give her any money to pay for medical help.”  She began sobbing, and Anna put her arm around her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I said.  With my blossoming psychic powers, I could feel Maria’s pain quite acutely.  I almost wanted to cry, too, as if her mother had been my own.  Of course, my own mother’s death made it even easier for me to sympathize with poor Maria.

“My sister, Fantine, has an illegitimate daughter for whom she was hoping to earn money with the stripping job here,” Franny added, snarling.  “We were able to get our family in Chicoutimi to take care of the little girl, thank Empusa, but Fantine, an unpaid slave, was so distraught at not even being able to see her.  Those mafia bastards!  I’m so glad we sucked them all dry.”

“I’m glad I never had to meet them,” I said, feeling Franny’s anger.

“Well, I have to go onstage,” Maria said.  “It was nice to meet you, Erica.”  We shook hands again, then she turned around and walked toward the stage.

“Bye,” I said.

A man approached Franny.  “Can I have a lap dance?” he asked her.

“Sure,” she said, smirking, licking her lips, and contemplating all that delicious blood in him.  She went with him to a VIP Room, never bothering to put on any of her clothes.

Two more strippers approached Anna and me, one of them a golden blonde and the other a dirty blonde.  They smiled suggestively at me.

“Let’s go upstairs now,” Anna said to me.  We got up and went with the two strippers to a staircase leading up to the second floor.

“So, what does CUNT stand for?” I asked.  “I understand the Caledonia strip clubs’ names are all acronyms.”

“It stands for the Collective Union of Nudists and Transwomen,” Anna said as we began ascending the stairs.  “We got rid of the word ‘Union’ not only because it was redundant, but because we were getting flak from the Catholic community here for the acronym’s ‘obscenity’.”

“So there are transwomen here who want bites to make them physically female, too, eh?” I asked.  “Just like in POUM?”

“Yes,” she said.  “Transgender people from all over flock here to have the bodies their souls desire.”  We reached the top of the stairs and went into a bedroom, one not unlike the one I’d been in with Andrea, Christina, and Meg.  The two other vamp strippers had entered first; having only worn bras, thongs, and high heels, they’d already stripped naked and were waiting for us on the bed.  There was no need to tell me about the ritual for my second biting: we all psychically communicated this intention.

Anna removed her bra, revealing the two most beautiful, natural breasts I’d ever seen.  Each of that soft pair of giant cake balls was topped with sweet berries for nipples.

Then she removed her thong, revealing her shaved pubic region.  Next to come off were her fishnets and shoes, and she was as nude as the two vamps on the bed.  I quickly got naked, eager for that bite (not to mention the hot sex), and Anna and I got on the bed.

“Erica, meet Celina Helmer and Josie Beverley Druitt,” Anna said.  “Celina and Josie, meet Erica, a once-bitten who just started working in POUM.”

“Hi,” I said to them.

“Hi,” Celina and Josie sighed in unison.

All three of them started caressing my arms, legs, and breasts as I lay on my back on the bed.  Anna put those delicious breasts of hers on either side of my face and gently pressed them on my cheeks.  Oh, their softness and smoothness!  I was really coming to like lesbian love.

After she tickled my lips with her erect nipples, I asked, “When you…bite me, will I…Oh!…lose my will…completely?”

“Not quite,” Anna said, gently kissing my left cheek and neck.  “Only if…you’d been bitten…twice by…the same vamp…would your will…be all hers.”  She squeezed my right breast, pinching the nipple.

“Ah!” I moaned.

Josie, who also had lovely large breasts, began rubbing them against my belly as she sucked on my right breast.  Celina, with smaller, perkier breasts but ones no less tasty, had buried her face between my legs and was making my vulva as wet as her saliva-soaked mouth.

My sighs and squeals were getting higher and louder.  As I got hornier and hornier, I feared the pain of that second bite, as well as the possibility that Anna wasn’t being honest about how much control she would have over me after the bite.  Would I completely lose my will, and be made her slave for an indefinite amount of time…maybe forever?

Still, the vamps’ expert lovemaking kept me more and more excited, and that pleasure relaxed any worries I had…though in the back of my mind, it occurred to me that such a relaxation would be a perfect way for me to surrender my will to them completely.

My fear of the pain of the second bite, and of possibly losing all my will, didn’t distract me from the pleasure, though: actually, that fear increased my excitement.  My body was tensing up and shaking with anticipation of my nearing orgasm…and new vamp powers!

Finally, I let out a scream, with my eyes squished shut, and I orgasmed; with perfect timing, Anna bit me the very second of my climax.

Again, I felt the numbing daze as of one on drugs, my perception blurrier and blurrier as I felt my blood being sucked out.  I felt my will become more that of the vamps’ Blood Collective than of my own.  I just lay on my back, my head spinning.

“How do you feel?” Anna asked.

“High,” I moaned.

“No marijuana or ecstasy ever made you feel stoned like that, eh?” Celina asked, grinning.

“No,” I sighed.  “Not like this.”

“Celina has a wicked tongue, hasn’t she?” Josie asked.

“No,” I said.  “She has a…very good tongue.”

Celina laughed, always proud of her abilities.

“Do you feel more connected with us?” Anna asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s because your blood is merged with that of the Collective,” Josie said.

“More and more, you’re becoming one of us,” Celina said, licking her lips and proudly baring her beautiful fangs with a sinful grin.

“You’ll care more and more about our needs, and we’ll care more and more about yours,” Anna said.

“We vamps all love each other,” Josie said.

“In mind…and body,” Celina said, kissing my belly several times.

“How do I look?” I asked, getting off the bed on the left side.  As with the first bite, my initial stupor was abating somewhat.  “That bite didn’t…hurt as much…as last time.”

“The second and third bites hurt less and less,” Celina said.  “Your third will hardly hurt at all.”

“Then you’ll be impervious to pain,” Josie said.

“A mirror is over there,” Anna said, pointing to the wall to the right of the bed.

I went around the foot of the bed and approached the mirror, which went from the floor up to a few inches taller than I.  I gazed on my frontal nudity, waiting for my blurry vision to focus.

What a difference!  I was grinning in narcissistic adoration.  My teeth, those four fangs, were sharper; my skin was whiter, but creamier and more delectable; my breasts were again larger, rounder, and firmer, like a perfect silicone job, only without silicone; and my curves were snake-like!

“How do you like yourself?” Celina asked.

“I think I’m in love with my body,” I said.

“I think I am, too,” Celina said with a lustful glint in her eye.

My eyes were welling with tears.  Vamps rule!  I thought.  Wait till Hal sees me!  He won’t be able to resist me.  I just hope…for his sake…that his love for me isn’t only skin deep.  “When do I get my third bite?” I asked.  “I don’t think I want to wait.”

“After you’ve looked around the PSUC Club for us,” Anna said.  “When you’re a thrice-bitten, you’ll fully know the danger we’re all in.”

Vamps, Chapter Six: Meeting Stella

After my lap dance with Hal, I went over to a table and sat with two of the strippers I hadn’t met yet, one a blonde, the other a brunette.  “Hi,” I said.  “My name is Erica George.  I’m the new girl.”

“Hi,” said the brunette, a short, petite beauty.  “I’m Jenny Milton.”  We shook hands.  She smiled, baring her beautiful fangs.

“I’m Tiffany,” said the blonde, who was short, skinny, and cute.  We shook hands.  “Nice to meet you.”

“I have a question,” I said.  “Why did The Candy Club get renamed ‘POUMTANG‘?  You know the sign out front is misspelled, right?”

“It’s an acronym,” said Jenny.  “The spelling is deliberate.”

“OK, what does it stand for?” I asked.

“The Party Of United Mothers, Transwomen, And Nudist Girls,” Tiffany said.

“Wow,” I said.  “That’s awkward-sounding.”

“Yeah, well, it originally was the Party Of Obscene Naughtiness, Transwomen, And Nudist Girls: POONTANG,” Jenny said.  “But the Christian community here didn’t like that acronym, so we had to clean it up by misspelling it on purpose.”

“What’s more, ‘United Mothers’ sounds more family-oriented than ‘Obscene Naughtiness’,” said Andrea, who now joined us.  I smiled up at her as she grabbed a chair and sat beside me.

“Do you all have sons and daughters?” I asked.

“In a way,” Andrea said, stroking my hair.

“All the boys we bite are like our sons, since we made them vampires,” said Jenny.

“And the girls who we’ve made vamps are like our daughters,” Andrea said.

“Hence, we’re mothers,” Tiffany said.

“I like the sound of that,” I said, looking at Andrea.  “My mom died when I was very young.  Oh, how I cried and cried as a little girl from her loss.  And then my dad changed into such a…well, maybe I shouldn’t talk about that.  It’s depressing.  But anyway, I’ve felt so empty without a mother’s love.  I like the thought that I can get that from you all.”  Especially from you, though, Andrea, I thought as I still looked at her.  (Actually, she kind of resembled my mom physically.)  After all you’ve done for me, I like to think of you as a mother figure to me.  I sensed she felt my thoughts, and was smiling her love back to me.

“I’ll be happy to be your new mom, Erica,” she said, kissing me on the cheek.  We smiled lovers’ smiles at each other.  I was really hoping for not only my second bite from her, but a second love-making; for that daughters’ love I felt for Andrea was, if you will, quite Oedipal.

The stripper onstage, Fanny, just finished her third and last song, and got off the stage.  Tiffany looked over there.  “I have to go onstage now.”  She got up and went there.

“See you,” Jenny said.

“Well, you’ve explained ‘Mothers’ in POUMTANG,” I said, “but what about ‘Transwomen’?  Are there any here?”

“Of course,” Jenny said.  “Look around.”

“Do you really think every female face you see here is physically so?” asked Andrea.  “Look carefully at those two over by the bar.”

I leaned over and strained my eyes a bit looking to my right at the two she was referring to, in glittery dresses and heavy makeup.  Indeed, I noticed Adam’s Apples protruding most inconveniently from their necks.  I also vaguely sensed their biological masculinity from the psychic vibes they were giving me, vibes of acute dissatisfaction with their bodies.

“Wow, they are,” I said.  “Why do they come here?”

“Because they admire us,” Jenny said.

“And with every bite we give them, they grow more biologically feminine,” Andrea said.  “Those two over there haven’t been bitten at all yet; I can sense it.  But they’ll be wanting it, since they’ve heard rumours, from their once- and twice-bitten friends, of what we can do.”

“I don’t understand how your bites can change them so radically,” I said.  “I thought the bites only make people into vampires, and really hot-looking ones.  How do the bites make all those other changes?”

“One of our abilities, remember, is shape-shifting,” said Fanny, who now joined us.  She sat at my other side.

“A vamp can change into a bat, for example, simply by wishing it,” Andrea said.

“As strippers, we all naturally want to be hotter looking, so with each bite, and each resulting gain of power, we immediately get sexier,” Jenny said.  “We want better looks instinctively, so those changes are more or less automatic.”

“Transwomen want women’s bodies to match their female souls,” Franny said.  “So three bites give them a free sex change operation, with none of the surgical risks.”

“That’s the beauty of being a vamp,” Andrea said.  “Our powers give us whatever we want.”

“The only catch is needing to drink blood,” I said.

“That’s right,” Jenny said.  “That, and staying out of the sun.”

“Speaking of which, where are Meg and Kristen?” Fanny asked with a frown.  “Tell me we didn’t…”

“We did…we lost them,” Andrea said, a tear rolling down her cheek.  “The vampire hunters found them.  Jim saw her ashen remains in her apartment when he went over earlier tonight, correctly sensing trouble.”

“Oh, no,” Jenny said, her eyes widening.  “Kristen gave him his third bite.  He must be heartbroken.”

“He is,” Andrea said, baring her fangs and snarling.  “He’s sworn revenge on the Christians.”

“I hope he sucks the whole town dry,” Fanny said.  “We’re not safe.”

“I’m afraid to go to sleep at dawn,” Jenny said, almost sobbing.  “I keep lyin’ awake, helpless in bed, wondering if they’ll find me, break down my bedroom door, rip open my curtains, and fry me in the sunlight.  I’m really getting scared.”

Andrea put her arms around Jenny and kissed her cheek.  “Don’t worry, baby,” Andrea said.  “We’ll be OK.  You have your once- and twice-bitten guards watching over you, don’t y0u?”

“Yes,” Jenny sobbed.  “But what if they aren’t strong enough to protect me?”

“And when are we going to find the vamp traitor, or traitors, in whichever strip joint they’re working for?” Fanny asked.

“That’s what we need you to help us do, Erica,” Andrea said to me.  She gave me a map of the forest areas all around Caledonia so I could find the CNT Club.  “Go to CNT tomorrow night and find out all you can, any hints that the traitor could be one of them.”

“Speaking of possible traitors,” Fanny said.  “Here comes Stella.”

“Who’s she?” I asked as I saw a tall, curvy, long-haired brunette approaching us in a white dress shirt, black dress pants, and matching high heels.

“Stella Lynn East,” Jenny said.  “Owner of the PSUC Club.”

“And major man-hater,” Andrea said, sneering.

“If she hates men, why does she own a strip club?” I asked.

“To suck men dry,” Stella said in an English accent as she sat down to join us.  “Good evening, vamp sisters.”  She looked at me with a grin that proudly showed off her fangs, and a sparkle in her eyes that looked a combination of deja-vu and discovery of someone long-lost.  Indeed, she stared at me for several seconds, in a wide-eyed daze, before asking, “And you are…?”

“Erica George,” I said, shaking her hand.

“A once-bitten, I see,” she said, kissing my hand.  “Oh, do let me have a bite or two.”  Now that sparkle in her eyes was one of flirtation.

I blushed.

“So, what’s the news at PSUC?” Andrea asked with a frown.  “How many more of your vamps have they destroyed?”

“Four today,” Stella said with an angry sigh.  “Oh, those bastards will never leave us alone.”  She was giving out an energy of deep hate for the Christian community, very sincere vibes: I figured she couldn’t be a traitor.

“Which ones?” Fanny asked.

“Chantale, Alexis, Mercedes, and Beth,” Stella said.  “I swear, when I find out who the vamp traitors are among us–males, I’m sure–I’ll expose them to the sun myself without remorse.  They’ll be the only vamps deserving of such a fate.”

“I’m aware of a female traitor,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Stella asked.

“I went to the Sunshine Pub today,” I said.  “Some men who killed Billie Bryson said a female told them where Billie’s apartment was.”

“Erica, the men you talked to were just that…men, and they can’t be trusted,” Stella said with a twitch of agitation on her face.  “They’re all liars.  They’d love to make us believe a female vamp betrayed us, to divide us.  Make us not trust each other.”

“How can you be so sure they were lying?” I asked.  “What they said felt like the truth.”

“I can’t honestly believe a female would betray her sisters,” Stella said.  “But a male vamp, resentful of his period of servitude to his female biters, before his third, liberating bite, would gladly betray us.  Men can’t handle female power.  They think it’s natural for them to rule over us; so when we get power over them, they have us destroyed.”

“It didn’t feel like those men were lying,” I said.

“Honey, your powers aren’t fully developed yet,” Stella said to me, stroking my hair and looking in my eyes as if I were an old lover she’d lost long ago.  “When I bite you, and liberate you, you’ll understand men’s true nature.  Vamp or no vamp, men are afraid of female power, and they’ll do whatever they have to to stop our ascent to power.  Those men lied about the traitor being female, I assure you.  Watch your male vamps, sisters.  Guido, Jim, and Jorge: they may seem trustworthy to you, but they’re not.  We’re not safe from them.”

“Jim’s out hunting men as we speak,” Andrea said.  “In revenge for Kristen.  Gino and Jorge’s helping him.  We trust them completely.”

“Why?” Stella asked, sneering.

“We don’t share your…extreme views on men,” Andrea said.

“Extreme,” Stella chuckled.  “Extremely common sense.”

“We believe men can be changed,” Fanny said.

“Men will never change,” Stella chuckled louder.  “I know from experience.”

“After a period of servitude to us, under our gentle rule,” Andrea said.  “The rein of the yoni, if you will.”

Stella had a belly laugh.  “The only way to end the rein of the phallus is by usurping it forever.  No temporary women’s rein with tame men.”

“We think it will,” Fanny said.  “We’ve seen the proof in Gino, Jim, and Jorge.  And all of the FAINGS seem loyal.”

“Seem loyal,” Stella said.  “They’ll turn on you.  Give it time.”

“If you refuse to see any good in men, why do you have male vamps working for you?” Andrea asked.

“They aren’t full vamps,” Stella said.  “They’re twice-bittens, you know that.  And they know their place.”

“In other words, they’re your personal slaves,” Andrea said.

“That’s right,” Stella said, smiling.

“Look,” I said.  “I don’t like male power over women any more than you, but if you enslave men, how are you any better?”

“It’s not about being better than men, love,” Stella said to me.  “Either we control them or they control us.  When the vampiress revolution finally happens, males will be reduced to ten percent of the population, used only for reproduction, so we vamps can have a limitless supply of blood.”

“We don’t believe so radical a solution is necessary,” Fanny said.

“Agreed,” Andrea said.

“Same here,” I said.

“Very well, sisters,” Stella said, getting up.  “Have it your way for now.  Time will tell, and we’ll see which vamps’ views are proven right.  Goodbye, Erica: I hope to see you…and to bite that pretty neck of yours…soon.”  Stella gazed at me one more time, with a kind of mysteriously melancholy longing, then turned around, walked away from our table, and left the club.

“When you’ve finished looking around the CUNT Club, we’ll need you to go to the PSUC Club, too.  As much as the vamps there hate men and insist of sisterly solidarity, there’s always the possibility that all that misandry is just a cover-up, and they want us dead for some reason.”

“I do think the traitor is female,” I said.  “I felt honesty from those men.”

“Still, Erica, consider all possibilities,” Andrea said, stroking my hair again.  “Stella is right that your power as a once-bitten is limited.  Keep your mind open, for bias will limit your ability to gain access to all the enemies that will lead to the true identity of the traitor or traitors, who could be male or female.”  She kissed me on the mouth, a delicious kiss, and I felt her will vibrating through my body, making me want to seek out any traitors in CNT.

“How do you win the influence over men here?” I asked.

“After you’ve searched CNT and PSUC, we’ll give you your second and third bites, and influencing men will be easy,” Andrea said.

“Influencing men is easy once you’re a full vamp,” Fanny said.

“Yeah, just look at Tiffany onstage,” Andrea said.  Tiffany had been wearing a cute cheerleader outfit during the first song of her floorshow, grinning and giggling as she danced before her rapt audience of horny men.  Now doing her third song, she was crawling about nude and displaying her vulva and anus, in all insouciance, to a panting man at the tip rail.  “We can easily see whose blood she’s going to have soon.”

“How can you be sure he’ll ask her for table dances or lap dances?” I asked.  “Maybe he doesn’t have the money to spend.”

“Haven’t you forgotten?” Fanny said.  “We don’t sex the men up for money, but for blood.  And he has plenty of that.”

“And he won’t want a dance,” Andrea said.  “He wants sex.  We can feel his desire all the way from here.  It’s that intense.”

“He wants anal from her,” Fanny said.

“And she’ll give it to him,” Andrea said.

“Don’t you mean ‘take it from him’?” I asked.  We all laughed.

“Of course,” Andrea said.

“But that’ll hurt,” I said.

“You forget again,” Fanny said.  “We vamps are impervious to pain.”

“Actually, our vamp bodies are adapted to enjoy anal, as much as vaginal sex,” Andrea said.  “We don’t even shit anymore, since we don’t eat.  The anus is now only for sex.”

“Eww,” I grunted.

“You’ll like it, too,” Fanny said.

“Really?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes,” Andrea said.  “In fact, anal is the best way to get men ready for a bite.”

“Either that, or doggy-style,” Fanny said.  “If a man fucks you and you’re facing him, you might enjoy it so much that you’ll open your mouth wide in sighs.  Then he’ll see your fangs and get scared.  Then, even if you bite him, his will won’t be as much at one with yours.”

“The best way to influence a man is to get him to like you as much as possible,” Andrea said.  “That’s why the best time to bite is when he orgasms, for that’s when his desire for you is at a maximum.  Then his will is all for you.”

“With your back to him as he’s fucking you, you’re free to moan and sigh with an agape mouth, and he probably won’t see your fangs,” Fanny said.

“And if you offer him your asshole, that tells him you’re a ‘bad girl,’ and you’re all the sexier for it,” Andrea said.  “That’s why when I strip for the men, I always bend over and offer the men two choices instead of just one.”

“As do I,” Fanny said.  “And as you should, too.”

Sure enough, after the song was over, Tiffany led her male admirer into a private room.  We’d hear a groan of sharp pain from him about twenty minutes later, and feel the pulling of some of his blood out of him and into the Collective Blood.

(If you liked what you just read, please sign up for my free newsletter.  A link to it is at the side of this page.)

‘Vamps’, Chapter Five: Erica Meets Her Heckler

I returned to my apartment after my long run from the Sunshine Pub and its vamp hunter patrons, a run that, thanks to the increased strength I’d got from Andrea’s bite, got me home amazingly quickly.

Sitting on my bed, I thought about my situation as a vamp, or vamp wanna-be, actually, and the threat that all those vamp hunters posed to the vamp community I was now a part of.  I was upset not only because of the danger of being destroyed by them one day after receiving my third bite, but because Andrea had changed me in a way that made me actually like myself more…and the vamp hunters were trying to take all that away.

Self-esteem was a new thing for me.  You see, I didn’t have a very happy childhood.  Though I had a fair number of friends at school, life at home in southern Ontario had become a hell ever since my mother died.  My widowed father became a morose drinker, taking out his unhappiness on me at every opportunity.  He’d call me an idiot whenever I got bad grades at school, which was usual, because I was a rebellious teenager and didn’t care about learning; so we fought a lot.

By the time I graduated from high school, he griped at me, in slurring words and bad beer breath, for not thinking about my future, that is, not trying to get better grades and get into university.  Actually, I thought about my future a lot, but not in that way: I just wanted to get out of his house and live on my own.  I was a pretty girl with a good body, so becoming a stripper looked like my best option at the time.  So that’s what I did.  I never saw Daddy again, and I have no regrets.

Of course, getting naked in front of a bunch of drunken, leering, cat-calling pigs results in its own kind of verbal abuse (and often far worse than what I put up with from that heckler my first night stripping in the POUMTANG Club).  That was when my love affair with drinking and drugs began.  Whiskey, tequila shots, you name it, I drank it.  Smoking marijuana and hash were a common pastime during high school, so as a stripper I also checked out the harder stuff: ecstasy, ketamine, cocaine…you name it, I at least tried it, if not made it a regular habit.  When I was about 24, my health had declined to the point that I realized I had to come clean.  I went to rehab, and after a painful month or so, I got better.

About a month or so before going to Caledonia, I was getting frustrated with my aging and not-so-hot-looking body.  The ad for the stripping job in Manitoba promised work “far better than any ever imagined,” so I, having nothing to lose, gave it a try and went up there.

Now that I realize what was meant by “far better than any [job] ever imagined,” I feel eternal gratitude to Andrea.  She literally saved my life; for I really had no idea what I could do as an aging, flabby, uneducated stripper.  I didn’t have the money for silicone implants or anything like that.  I didn’t even have the escape of drugs to give me solace; but the high of being a vamp, with increased beauty, strength, and even intelligence, is better than any drug, and the improvements she gave me are better than any education or plastic surgery could ever give me.

But beyond that, I was increasingly realizing that Andrea had introduced me to a much larger world.  My mind had been expanded.  I felt a psychic connection with all life around me, all thanks to the Collective Blood that I’d been more acquainted with from Andrea’s bite.  I was able to gain access to forms of knowledge that at first had seemed the domain of university scholars; I couldn’t believe the vocabulary increase I suddenly had acquired, for in conversations with people I was spontaneously–and correctly–using words I hadn’t known even existed before the bite!

That psychic connection had also increased my sense of empathy for everyone, vamp or non-vamp.  I wanted to help my vamp comrades, and also wanted to give liberating bites (for that’s how I saw them now) to all non-vamps, so they could gain the same advantages I’d just gotten.  I could feel people’s pain, frustrations, and disappointments, all from the vibrations I felt around me, everywhere in Caledonia and in the POUMTANG Club.  I was glad to search for whoever the vamp traitor was, not only to help Andrea and the other vamp strippers, but also to improve my chances of being able to help all those struggling people I had around me on the street.

And vamp hunters were ruining everything for all of us!  Bigoted bastards!  If only they knew that vampires are actually a force for good.

Back in the POUM Club that night, I went over to Andrea just before I was to go onstage.

“So, those old-timers in the Sunshine Pub scared you off, didn’t they?” she asked me.

“Yeah, they did,” I said.  “You can feel it, eh?”

“Yes, I can,” she said.  “You’re vibrating those feelings from all over your being.”

“How does that work?” I asked.  “How am I able to feel others’ vibes?”

“When I sucked your blood, I got connected with your psychic energy, and you are beginning to get connected with everyone’s” she said.  “We vamps are a network of connected blood; the Blood Collective adds to our awareness, to our knowledge, and to our intelligence.  Hence, I can feel the fear you felt when you ran out of the pub.”

“So if you already know, then why ask me?”

“I don’t know everything that happened, only basic vibes.  Now, as for the details: did they tell you who helped them find Billie? Which vamp?”

“They didn’t give a name,” I said.  “They just said she was a pretty young woman, also pale and with a pointy overbite.  Definitely a vamp approached them at night, though they didn’t believe she was one, and they didn’t say her name.”

“Very well,” Andrea said.  “Go to the CUNT Club tomorrow night and find out what you can there.  It’s another vamp strip joint, directly north of us here, north of the town, in the forest up there on the other side.  We’ll tell you more about it later.”

How do all these strip joints here get away with such raunchy names?  And in this Catholic community? I wondered.  “OK, tell me about the strip joint in about twenty minutes,” I said.  “I have to go on now.”

“Will you be OK up there?”

“Oh, yeah.  I have much more confidence now, thanks to you.  I really wanna express my appreciation for all you’ve done f0r me.  You’ve helped me in ways that I’ll never be able to finish repaying you for.  Thanks again, Andrea.”

“It was my pleasure,” she said, grinning and showing off her fangs in a way that didn’t at all look scary or freakish to me.  I grinned back, wishing I had fangs as apparent as hers, and impatiently waiting for those second and third bites.

I went onstage.  My first song was ‘Love Bites,’ by Judas Priest (I was going with a quasi-vampire theme that night.)  I was wearing only a pink thong and bra this time; now that my confidence in my body had improved, I wanted to flaunt what I had.

As I was moving about the stage, I looked out at the audience, who were much more attentive than last time.  They seemed a little hypnotized, too, but not as powerfully as they had been with Fanny.  I assumed I’d get even more rapt attention after my second and third bites, which I now waited for with even greater eagerness.  Still, I was satisfied with the fact that the men were now interested in what they saw.

Towards the back, I saw that asshole who was being rude to me the night before.  I still wished that scream I’d heard, after he made me cry, had been his…of him being sucked dry, as my three escorts presumably had been.  Anyway, he was behaving himself this time.  In fact, he seemed to like what he saw onstage.

I removed my bra towards the end of the Judas Priest song.  My breasts were now, as you know, larger and firmer, a pair of beauties I proudly showed off.  He was still interested.

My second song began: ‘You Suck,’ by Consolidated, with a naughty rap about cunnilingus by The Yeasty Girlz.  As I danced around mouthing the words with a wicked smile and looking him straight in the eyes and mouthing “Baby, you suck!”, an idea came to me: if having sex with the men was desirable for blood and mind-control purposes, then once I got my third bite and became a full vamp, I could seduce him, then get my revenge and suck the bastard dry.

If only I could have been a vamp right then and there.  I was so, so impatient for those second and third bites: how long would I have to wait for them?  I was starving for revenge against that guy!

I removed my thong.  He was still watching me, his mouth thirsty for a taste–I could sense his desire.  Now nude except for my high heels, I picked up the thong, made a slingshot out of it with my fingers, and flicked it at his face.  It slapped him right on the nose, and he was happy to get it.  The lecher was sniffing all along where it had been rubbing against my anal cleft.  What a perv!

The song ended, and I took off my shoes.  My third song was ‘Vampire,’ by Gorilla Zoe.  I still had his full attention.  He was standing a few feet away from the stage.  I slowly walked towards him, allowing his eyes to pour all over my nakedness.

Now not only confident with my body, but with defiant pride, I got down on the floor, my eyes locked on his, and spread my legs.  His jaw dropped at what was now showing.  His former rudeness had been transformed into awe.  His tongue was hanging out a foot.

I rolled over and started crawling back from him, my ass pointed at his face.  My legs were still wide apart, so everything was showing.  I could see his still rapt reaction in the mirror on the back wall.  I smirked.

The song ended.  I grabbed my shoes, bra, and purse, and got off the stage.  He followed me.

“‘Scuse me,” he said, presenting my thong.  “I think you forgot this.”

“Oh, thanks,” I said, still not able to smile at him, despite my plan to seduce him.  I put the thong on.

“Can I have a lap dance?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said as I put my bra back on.  “Ten bucks a song.”  I put on my high heels.

“Yeah, I know.  Lap dances sure are cheap here.  That’s why I like it here.”

“OK, there’s a private room in the corner over there that’s available.  Let’s go.”

We went in the room, and he closed the door.  He sat on a sofa against the far wall.  I sat on a chair facing him.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Hal,” he said.  “What’s yours?”

“Erica.”

“Almost sounds like a boy’s name.”

“I don’t think so.”  I glared at him, then thought about all that blood I wanted to suck out of him.

“You don’t?”

“No.  You aren’t going to be rude to me again, are you?”

“Again?” he asked.  “When was I rude to you before?”

“Last night,” I said, still angry, though controlling it.  “When I was onstage.  Don’t you remember?”

“No, I don’t.  Then again, I was really drunk, and I get a little out of hand then.  They kicked me out last night, actually.  Look, if I made you mad, I’m sorry.”

“You made me cry.  I ran off the stage.”  I was almost about to cry right then.

“Oh, look, I’m sorry about that.  I can be a real dick sometimes.  Booze’ll do that to you.  But I think you’re really beautiful.”

“Really?”  I felt his sincerity.

“Yeah, really.  An’ I don’t mean that in a dirty way.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling.  Maybe when I become a full vamp, I won’t kill you after all, I thought.  Unless you piss me off again, that is.

A new song began, ‘Heavy Metal Love,’ by Helix, a longer, live version.  I got up and sat on his lap, facing him.  He was already hard as a rock.

I started grinding on him.  The pointy bulge in his jeans was rubbing against my groin, the sensation going through my thong and stimulating my clit.  I’d never felt that way about a client in a strip joint before, especially for a man who’d been rude to me.

Was my heightened horniness another side effect of the bite Andrea gave me?

Hal was actually a reasonably good-looking man: short blonde hair in a baseball cap, clean shaven, and thin, but with a little muscle tone in his arms and chest.

He also had sweet, baby blue eyes.

Without warning, I took off his cap and put it on my head.

He was bald.

He twitched in embarrassment at this revelation.  Now he was frowning like a little boy who’d had his toys taken away.

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” I said, trying not to gloat at having piqued the physical insecurities of a man who’d done the same to me the night before.  “I know of ways to make you even better looking than you already are.”

“Oh?” he said, smiling that his baldness didn’t seem unattractive to me.  “How?”

“I wasn’t all that hot last night, when you saw me onstage,” I said, removing my bra.  “These were floppy then, as you had observed; now they’re firm.” I then put his face between my tits, and squeezed them against his cheeks.

“How’d you make them look better?” he asked.  He was touching them, gently pinching the nipples.

“It’s a secret.  But if you’re good, and you show devotion to me, I’ll divulge the secret, and you won’t need to wear that cap anymore.”  I removed my thong, burned around, bent over and gave him a look.

“I’d like…to…believe you,” he panted, staring at my…front and back doors, if you will…with equally disbelieving eyes.

Looking back at him upside-down from between my spread-out legs, I said, “You don’t have to believe me; just stay loyal to me, be a gentleman, and I’ll reward you.”  Then I reached up from between my legs with my finger and tickled his chin.

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‘Vamps’, Chapter Three: Kissing, Licking, and Sucking…

In the bedroom was a king size bed.  We went over and I got on it.  The dim light in the room was tolerable for the other women.

I was so distracted by my eagerness to have their mysterious method improve my looks, that it was only when I saw the other three strippers, well, stripping, that I remembered I still didn’t have any clothes on myself.

“Um, ladies, I’m straight,” I said.

“Why does that matter?” Andrea said, now in her navy blue lace bra and thong.

“What’s wrong with experimenting?” said the first stripper, also now in her underwear, a pink bra and panties.

“Well, we don’t even know each other,” I said.

“My name is Christina Ball,” the second stripper said, shaking my hand and letting her white panties drop to her feet.  She was now fully nude, and she got beside me on the bed.

“And I’m Meg Hamilton,” said the first.  “You already know Andrea.”  All three women were nude and on the bed with me now.

“OK, I know your names, and I’m Erica, if you didn’t already know,” I said, my voice a little shaky now with shyness.  “But that’s all we know about each other.”

“Erica, we’re knowing each other more and more these very seconds,” Andrea said, kissing me on the cheek and fondling my right breast.  I now felt six hands and three pairs of lips gently roaming all over my skin.

Christina, a short, curvy blonde with long curly hair–a sexy little pixie–was sucking on my other breast, her lips gently pulling on my erect nipple.  Meg, also a short, curvy long-haired blonde, was between my legs, having kissed her way from my belly down there and making my whole body vibrate with pleasure.  Indeed, my original misgivings about lesbian sex were quickly dissolving into delight.  These women had the hands of masseurs and the tongues and lips of masters.

I just lay on my back, closed my eyes, and received it all, more and more eagerly all the time.  I softly moaned my thanks to those great kissers, lickers, and suckers.

Andrea’s tongue was slithering in my right ear, then it slid down across my cheek to my mouth.  She plunged her tongue deep inside my mouth and tangled it with my tongue, massaging it and the roof of my mouth.  No man had ever French-kissed me so expertly!

She wouldn’t let me move my tongue around much; she kept it away from her teeth, so it usually only stayed in my mouth.  I wondered why she didn’t seem to want my tongue to dance around inside her mouth the way hers did in mine.  Not that this mattered at all: I was getting really hot!

Meg’s face was now buried in my hairy, wet nether regions.  She was exploring me inside and out.  My moans were now sighs and squeals.

Christina’s hands gently roamed and caressed my skin, her left going from my neck, which she was kissing, along my chest and down to my pubic region, then back up.  Her right hand slid up and down my left arm.

While I was loving this lay better than those of the very best male lovers of my past, I still didn’t see what lesbian lovemaking had to do with giving me a better-looking body.  I couldn’t complain, though.

As Meg continued to slide in and out of me, I cried, “Ooh!”

Though embarrassed at how dirty and smelly I was down there, I couldn’t deny how good her sensitive tongue felt.  I could feel myself approaching orgasm.  I was squirming and writhing, but with intense excitement.

If lesbian sex was typically this good, I was switching to gay, immediately.

Christina was sucking on my right breast now while pinching the nipple of my left.  Andrea was kissing my neck, lightly nibbling on it.  Was I about to get a hickey?

Her nibbling was always in small, careful bites; but on one or two occasions, I was sure I’d felt a tooth as sharp as a cat’s.  I didn’t think too much of it, though, for I was just sizzling with lust.

My sighs and squeals were growing into screams.  I was about to climax.

Meg was working hard, her tongue and lips going faster and faster.  I was buzzing down there!

Finally, I let it out like a dam exploding.  It was the best explosion of pleasure I’d ever had, but with a big shock.  That hickey I would get from Andrea bit sharply and deeply into my neck!  My pleasure was matched with an equally sharp pain.

“Aaaah!” I screamed.  I felt my blood being pulled out of me.

I lay there in a daze, as if I were stoned.  I felt my will strangely half given to Andrea.  I didn’t know why, but apart from the bite, I felt better, stronger, more powerful…and despite my stupor, even more intelligent.

“What did you…do to me?” I asked with lazy panting.  “Why did you bite me?”  I looked over at Andrea.

Then I saw her bloody, bared fangs.

Then those of Christina and Meg.

“Holy shit!” I gasped.  “Those men…my three escorts here…were right: there are vampires here…Either that,…or I’m as high…as a kite.”

“We told you our plan was radical,” Christina said.  “But go look at yourself in the mirror.”

“Yeah,” Meg said.  “See what we did for you.”

I got off the bed, still feeling woozy after that bite, and went over to the mirror, on the dresser on the other side of the room.  I gazed on my nakedness with amazement.

“Oh…my…God,” I said, my eyes and mouth wide open.

No more flab.  Not even a bit.

My skin was smooth, creamy, and fairer.  No blemishes.  I looked several years younger, even.

My tits, which used to be floppy, were now firm…and bigger!

My curves were curvier.

My hairy bush?  Not so hairy now: it appeared neatly trimmed, as if by magic.

I turned around to look at my ass, which was no longer dimply, but round and beautiful.  Then I spread my legs and bent over to see how everything looked down there.  What used to be hairy and raunchy-looking was now neat, trim, and totally pleasing aesthetically, like a porn star.

My body wasn’t quite as perfect as those of the three blonde beauties who’d just had…and transformed me, but the improvement on my looks was something I could only be awed about.

I grinned with delight, tears forming in my eyes.

Then, having straightened up and turned around again to face the mirror, I took a closer look at my teeth.  There was no blood on my neck; after Andrea’s sucking of my blood, the wounds healed remarkably quickly–indeed, the bite marks were a barely noticeable pair of tiny dots.  I didn’t have the vampire fangs of Meg, Christina, or Andrea (or, presumably, all of the other strippers in the POUM Club), but my corresponding teeth were noticeably sharper; apparently, I was turning into a vampiress slowly.

“Why don’t I have full vampiress teeth, like yours?” I asked.

“Because you need two more bites to become a full vampiress,” Andrea said.  “When you’ve had your third bite, your body will be as perfect as ours are.”

“You’ll also have all our powers,” Meg said.

“And our intelligence,” Christina said.  “And psychic connection with everything, which gives you access to all worldly knowledge.”

“Is that why you strippers talk like, well, university grads?” I asked.  “And what are these powers you brag of?”

“Superhuman strength,” Andrea said.

“Shape-shifting,” said Meg.  “Quick healing.”

“And mind control,” said Christina.  “That’s great for making the boys do what we need them to do.”

“OK, and what about us being the spawn of Satan?” I asked with a tremble.  “Aren’t we all doomed to Hell?”

“Bullshit,” Christina said.

“Vampirism has nothing to do with Christian ideas,” Meg said.  “That’s why neither crucifixes nor garlic can destroy us.”

“Holy water’s useless against us, too,” Andrea said.

“Vampirism is pre-Christian and pagan,” Meg said.  “There are ideas in Greek myth that are closer to what we’re all about.”

“Old chthonic religion,” Christina said.

I was hearing this highfalutin vocabulary for the first time ever, yet strangely…inexplicably (See?  Even I use those big words now!)…I could understand, intuitively, what the girls were talking about.  That must have been what Christina meant by having a ‘psychic connection’ giving ‘access to all worldly knowledge’.  I really was getting smarter as well as sexier!

“After your third bite, you won’t need food anymore,” Andrea said.  “But you will need blood to drink.”

“You won’t need money, either,” Meg said.  “We strip and hook for men’s blood.”

“Don’t you need money for rent, water, and electricity?” I asked.  “And I don’t hook, by the way.”

“You will,” Meg said, “and you’ll like it.  For to get the men to do our bidding after we bite them, getting them hot enough to come maximizes our chances of winning their wills to our cause.”

“Our psychic powers provide our water and electricity,” Andrea explained.  “As for paying the rent, we scare the landlords away, use mind control to keep them at bay, or suck them dry.  Mind control also gets our liquor supplier to give us free booze.  We’re all secure that way, don’t worry.  But speaking of security, we need you to do something for us.”

Andrea approached me, looking me straight in the eyes in a way that felt hypnotic.  She caressed my cheek and stroked my hair.  As I mentioned before, I felt my will to be half at her command, while my remaining will, though my own, was charmed enough by her to want to do her bidding.

“What do you want me to do?” I sighed, still feeling as if I were high.

“Our world here is in danger,” she said.  “Someone is trying to destroy us.”

“Who?” I asked.  “I thought the usual Christian things don’t hurt you.”

“No, but sunlight does,” Christina said.

“Man-made light makes us uncomfortable, but exposure to daylight will burn us to ash, within seconds,” Meg said with a frown of fear.

“We all sleep in our apartments in town during the day,” Andrea said, still stroking my hair and gazing mesmerizingly in my eyes.  “And there’s no way the mortals could ever find us; but they have, and the only explanation is that enemy vamps have been helping them.”

“Who are the enemy vamps?” I asked.

“That’s what we need you to find out for us,” Meg said.

“You’re only once-bitten,” Christina added.  “So you can still endure the daylight, though it will bother your eyes a little.”

“Wear sunglasses when you go outside,” Meg said.  “There are other vamp strip joints here in Caledonia,” Andrea said, caressing my cheek, her eyes locked on mine.  “The CNT Club, short for CUNT Club, and the PRICK SUCK Club, or PSUC Club.”

“The Christian community here has wanted all three of us out because we’re strippers, but our use of mind control has kept them from knowing where any of us live,” Christina said.

“The only way the mortals could possibly know of us is if other vamps informed them,” Meg said.

“Vamps who hate us, for some reason,” Christina said.

“Why do they hate us?” I asked.

“Competition for blood, we assume,” Meg said.  “Who knows?”

“I suspect the reason is more subtle than that,” Andrea said.  “And that’s what we need you to find out.  Tomorrow afternoon, go into town and ask who knows of the finding of Billie Bryson’s apartment.”

“Who’s Billie Bryson?” I asked.

“She was the stripper you’re replacing,” Christina said.  “The mortals found her place a week ago, broke in during the day, opened her bedroom windows to the bright afternoon sunlight, and burned her to a crisp, her screaming in pain as she died.”  A tear ran down her cheek.

“The CUNT Club vamps claim one of their girls was similarly destroyed around the same time, and the PSUC Club vamps claim they lost two in the same way,” Meg said.

“We think one of them, or maybe both of them, are lying,” Christina said.

“Go into town tomorrow,” Andrea said, kissing me on the lips.  “Ask the people there who led them to Billie’s apartment.  When they describe the vamp, who of course approached them at night, we’ll know who he or she was.”

“A mere description will be enough to know who?” I asked.

“Yes, it should be,” Andrea said.  “Our psychic abilities will connect with the mortals’ words, and then we’ll be able to sniff out the traitor amongst us.”

“How do you know the traitor isn’t a vamp here?” I asked.

“We’d know,” Meg said.  “The proximity of our own vamps would make detecting their treacherous thoughts easy.  The closer you physically are, the easier it is to read your mind.”

“Go and find the traitor,” Andrea said after giving me another peck on the mouth.  “Help us stop our enemies, then after two more lovemaking rituals, and two more bites, you’ll be a full vamp.  We’ll give you eternal life.”

“Eternal life?” I gasped.

“Yes,” Christina said.  “Just drink blood, avoid the sun, and make love with the men you suck so they’ll be our loyal and willing protectors.”

“Their bodies improve with each bite, too,” Meg said.  “As does their intelligence and sensitivity, so a man who started out as an asshole can quickly become a nice guy.”

“Sex with the men will never hurt; in fact, it’s always pleasurable for you as a vamp, no matter which man you’re with,” Andrea added.  “For we vamps are impervious to pain…only pain inflicted by other vamps, or the sun, can hurt us.”

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