From Ech-Pi-El to Ar-I-Ech

From Ech-Pi-El to Ar-I-Ech
by
Bobby Derie

The following is transcript of a letter from Howard Phillips Lovecraft to Robert E. Howard, believed by internal evidence to have been sent and received in April or May of 1935, recovered from a typewriter carbon in August Derleth’s home, The Place of Hawks. Supplementary letters suggest the missing missive was originally transcribed by Donald Wandrei and intended for volume four or five of the Selected Letters by Arkham House, but both the transcription and the original of the letter remain missing, so only the carbon remains. It is presented here in a direct translation from the carbon, and so it retains the gaps from Wandrei or Derleth’s editing, with no additional annotation.

- B. D.

Kadath in the Cold Waste

—Hour of the Night-Gaunts

Dear Ar-I-Ech:—

Blessings of the Prophet, and of the Elder Ones, upon you. Proceeding to answer the questions in your letter (& trusting perhaps overconfidently that the foregoing garrulous & egocentric comment has left you with enough patience & consciousness to hear the not-quite-so-garrulous (I hope)* replies thereto)—I may say that (a) I haven’t any especial claims to the title of “student”, being not even a university graduate (health broken down during years which should have been collegiate), & being more or less superficial & fragmentary about everything. Don’t let the Einstein-twisters catch you here! Lest you assign to me an excess of credit for conscious ascetisicm, let me say that perhaps the chief factor in my abstinence from the beguiling weed is that I detest the d——d stuff most cordially!

I had been hearing from Robert at irregular intervals for a period which must add up to three years or more. It seems to have taken Belknap completely by surprise—& I fancy he is properly grateful to little Bobby. My card sent from Salem last month attempted in a feeble way to express the delirious delight & unboundedly enthusiastic admiration which Ebony & Crystal aroused in me. Trust you’ll decide to take both Xexes & Artabanus to the trans-lacustrine hermitage. You’ll have to specialise in “The …. of the ……..” titles if they form such consistent passports to good luck!

About my own attitude toward ethics—I thought I made it plain that I object only to (a) grotesquely disproportionate indignations and enthusiasms, (b) illogical extremes involving a reduction ad absurdum, and (c) the nonsensical notion that “right” and “wrong” involve any principles more mystical and universal than those of immediate expediency (with the individual’s comfort as a criterion) on the one hand, and those of aesthetic harmony and symmetry (with the individual’s emotional-imaginative pleasure as a criterion) on the other hand. I realise that this kind of idealistic impersonality is not the same as the other sort of impersonality—arising from scale, distance, and mechanical media, and definitely inferior in ethical status—which I mentioned previously. You belong to the school of thought (to which, incidentally, I myself belonged at one period—for my beliefs constantly change as new evidence presents itself) which believes that pleasure or richness of experience is purely a balance between desire and fulfilment, so that a cat basking comfortably in the sun is just as happy and rich in experience as a scientist verifying a discovery, or poet capturing a mood, or philosopher grasping a value-concept. As for standards—see how your beloved force of telepathy has brought the public press to my aid!

As for occasional controversial topicks—I am acutely sensible that our differences rest upon a divergence in premises, & indeed believe that most profound controversies are similarly animated. Any vestigial philosophic resemblance I may have to the bygone Puritan is perhaps contained in my general belief (a mere personal opinion, whose application by force I would violently oppose) that a contemplative and imaginative life is of somewhat more evolved quality, and likely to confer richer ultimate rewards upon persons of highly organised sensibilities, than is a more elemental life with its concentration on the primitive, the more simply emotional, and the orgiastic. All this belongs to positive physical knowledge—as positive as the knowledge that an inkstand will fall if you drop it from the window to the ground, or that a rat will die if you keep it under water fifteen minutes.

The play, which deals with the marriage of a low Irish girl to an educated negro, went off very smoothly and capably—save that the mayor had forbidden the performance of the first act, which involved the participation of small children and the use by them of low language. Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. Of course they can’t let niggers use the beach at a Southern resort—can you imagine sensitive persons bathing near a pack of greasy chimpanzees? Indeed, the extraordinary thing is that homo sapiens has become as differentiated from other organic species as he has become. But that’s not saying that all times and companies are equally suitable for the airing of a hairy-chested vocabulary—or that all the current extremes of racy diction are of equal aesthetick value.

This is an experiment in really artistic fantasy weaving, just a word-picture with no plot, no climax, and no specific ending. It was the most vivid dream I have had in a decade, & involved subconscious use of odd scraps of boyhood reading long forgotten by my waking mind. We were, for some terrible yet unknown reason, in a very strange and very ancient cemetery—which I could not identify. The town was fairly sizable, with one or two streets paved (there were high sidewalks, and stepping stones at crossings) and considerable crowds of soldiers, colonists, Romanised natives of Iberian physiognomy, and wild tribesmen from the plains surging past the white-washed dead-walls of houses and gardens. Strolling south from Dexter’s mansion, Edgar & I noted the ancient churchyard & the new church going up with it. When we see such a thing we do not thrill with the illusion of recognizing a fragment of life. Something of spring’s intangible atmosphere was abroad—and at dusk an exquisitely slender crescent moon hung in the western sky not far from the blazing beacon of Venus. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. … Gawd knows what they are—…—a bastard mess of stewing mongrel flesh without intellect, repellent to eye, nose, and imagination—would to heaven a kindly gust of cyanogens could asphyxiate the whole gigantic abortion, end the misery, and clean out the place.

It seems to need rounding-out—& unless it explains why the narrator is exempted from the general death, it out to record his fear of coming death as he writes. Decay links the horror more closely to the familiar world around us, & to the beings of that world.  The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. There is a difference between mere originality and delicate symbolism, or hideously nebulous adumbration. Art is not the devising of artificial things to say, but the mere saying of something already formulated inside the artists’ imagination & automatically clamouring to be said. It is easy to imagine with what genuine regret the editors to whom it was submitted declined to print it.

I have now a third trip to Boston to chronicle—probably a final trip for this year, since winter is a season of drear blankness and indisposition. O let me not lie in the frozen waste…rescue my congealed corpse & give it a decent cremation…

The only permanently artistic use of Yog-Sothothery, I think, is in symbolic or associative phantasy of the frankly poetic type; in which fixed dream-patterns of the natural organism are given an embodiment & crystallisation. Were any child to be reared in isolation, and surrounded from infancy with the religious precepts of Tsathoggua, YOG-SOTHOTH, or the Doles, his inner emotions would all through life inform him positively of the truth of Tsathogguanism, Yog-Sothothery, or Dolatry, as the case may be.

Yrs in the Brotherhood of the Djinni—

Ech-Pi-El

* Later—how vain are the hopes of mankind!

Stars Threw Down

Stars Threw Down
by
Bobby Derie

The dead bottle of retsina rolled in the grass, and we stared up at the battling stars. This far from the action, without a telescope, the space-borne battles were little more than pinpricks of light moving across the celestial fundament, to flare and vanish suddenly when killed.

“Who do you think is winning?”

“Doesn’t matter. No skin in that game.”

At that he fetched the screw, and we proceeded to murder another bottle. I wished we had a telescope then, to see the battleships from Mars and Venus and far-out Titan and all those other planets set out on their missions of cosmic murder. The missiles and beam-weapons were too small and dark and fast for most to catch even a glimpse of, but you could see the explosions when they hit, the sudden spurt of gas into the vacuum, the scars left by crashing spacecraft on the face of the moon. The afterimage of a burning streak flaring across an inch of sky echoed in our vision.

“Close.”

“Yeah. Only a million miles away.”

The wine was sticky and warm, with the oily aftertaste that foretold sickness and vomit. We drained it to the dregs. I remembered going through the old books, woodcuts of strange ships across the sky, peeks at awesome battles through primitive telescopes, taken to be the warring of gods, angels and demons, the Ptlomeic Men of outer spheres. Twenty centuries or humans had looked up bleary-eyed at the sky, knowing they were not alone.

“The news says the Reds may build a fuel dump on the moon. We’d be in it then.”

“Why would the Reds do that, when they have the Belt? There’s nothing for them on the moon. Nothing for them on Earth.”

Progress, this last grey century. Radio signals, translations, better optics. We used to think they fought one planet against another, but that was senseless; like all of Asia lining up against all of Europe. Or was it restricted to one race against another? There was some great and stranger tapestry to the millennia-old war, shifting alliances in the conflicts between things somewhere between nation-states and philosophies, groups of alien peoples determined to throw down amid the stars.

We watched the little lights move, the aliens fighting and dying above us. Never once did they come to Earth. No spaceships worthy of a kinetic harpoon or burning maser beam. No resources worth mentioning. Just six or seven billion monkeys staring up at the night sky.

“When do you think it will be our turn?”

“Why are you so eager to find out?”

###

The Ten Million Demons

The Ten Million Demons
by
Bobby Derie

So it was in the dusty road from Erebai to the dead empire, a scholar of small spells drew his circles with grains of rice. He had about him the village children, those free from other work or who could afford to tarry a little while, and he spoke to them of the ten million demons that dreamed the world of sins. Long he spoke in his low whisper, and it grew late in the afternoon, when the archmagus of Erebai was wont to take his walk along that dusty road. In that circuit was an antique necromancy of subtle power, each step timed with a certain prayer and a certain thought, and the rumble of that step was as a giant. For such was the potency of the archmagus of Erebai. Whether it was some caprice of wizardly rank or else he was too concerned with his droning chant, the archmagus did not deter his step as he neared the scholar of small spells, and his tread ruined his circles and banished the shapes that danced along them.

Now whether there was wroth in the heart of the scholar then, or some more mystic wisdom that accompanied the contemplation of his shattered circles, none now can say. Yet it was for the first time in memory that some months later, the scholar of small spells entered the Tourney of Sorcery.

Some took note of this, for while the collector of cantrips was not known for the particular potency of his enchantments, nor to have accomplished any great feat with which to build a legend, his measured tread had crossed the breadth of the world for two generations of necromancers, through the dusty tombs of sorcerer-queens and the forgotten libraries of minor hearth-gods, and he had set more than a few of boys' and girls' minds and hearts on the path to sin and sorcery.

The first three days were for apprentices and journeymen, demonstrations of skill. The archmage was exempt and chose to rest and prepare; but the scholar took his place with the least skilled, and offered freely his advice and criticism. So more passed their trials of the first three days than in any tourney before.

The second three days were for masters in their three ranks, and here there were a few duels, for those who had something to prove, but most were set some tasks by the judges worthy of their rank, and it was up to the contestants to impress those earnest greybeards by their conjurations. This year the archmagus of Erebai called for a spirit from the far outer gulfs, beyond the circle of light that girdles this world, and whose name none save he could utter with safety—and so awed the judges, that they passed him on the fourth day, and allowed him the additional time to study and prepare.

By this time the rumor had gone up of a feud between the archmagus and the scholar, so that immediately after Erebai had retired the collector of cantrips was called upon. The scholar of small spells stepped in to the rune circle with his worn robes and his shepherd’s crook staff, and in that dry and serious voice recalled an ancient spell familiar to all of those present, for it recalled an antique demon who of long standing had its lot to answer the calls of journeymen who wished to prove themselves to their masters, and there was not a witch or warlock there that had not called that self-same demon from its cozy hell. Yet that scholar did show his mastery in the precision of his chant and movement, the time and tones as perfect as human throat or mind could grasp, and he did it in the old way now forgotten and abridged, with all the embellishments lost and forgotten in a thousand crumbling schoolbooks, so that when at last the song reached its zenith the old demon came forth in all the glory and majesty that had been its in the days of yore, when it sat on basalt thrones and defiled virgins offered by bloody-handed sorcerers. Those who had thought themselves long familiar with the goat-hoofed thing marveled at its panoply of black glass and black gold set with smooth black gems, and the things that squirmed at its feet, and where its shadow fell. It looked each of the judges in the eye, and they felt once more that tiny wound in their souls which was the demon’s price to appear before their masters, a hurt that would never more be long forgotten.

So it was the scholar was admitted to the next round.

Now the archmagus of Erebai had heard of this summoning, and some rumors reached his ears from his familiars of the feud supposed between himself and the scholar of small spells, and on the night of the sixth day the archmagus called the scholar to his tent. They dined in silence and spoke little save of the other challengers, who had risen through the lists and who had fallen, and as the evening wore on the archmagus came to the point.

“I have heard,” he said. “That I did you hurt when I broke your circles, and you seek vengeance on me in the lists.”

“I am a teacher, as well as a scholar.” said the small spells. “I have but come here to give a lesson.”

“To me?”

“To any who would learn it.”

“Very well,” said the archmagus. “I have spoken with the judges, and they have agreed to pair us on the morrow. You have never been to the tourney before, but I know well my competitors. I would not have your lifeblood on my soul for so small an insult.”

The scholar nodded, and withdrew. It was only then that the archmagus of Erebai noticed the lesser wizard had tasted nothing of the repast, which sat untouched.

On the dawn of the seventh day, the archmagus found the scholar of small spells waiting for him before the runecircle, which would contain their thaumaturgies. A crowd had gathered even at that hour, for much had been rumored of their respective performances. On the side of the scholar were many of the apprentices and journeymen he had helped in the first three days, and not a few masters who had known him in earlier years, and those few of his own age that knew and respected him. The archmage’s side was lonely, save for the betmasters and his servants.

As if by common thought, the men entered the circle.

#

The little girl swept her legs up and down, setting the swing a-swinging.

“There was no beginning,” she said “but sometime long ago there were ten million demons, and they dreamed the world.”

A man sat on the swing next to her, holding a dripping side, making a red mud puddle of the dust beneath him.

“They were really more than that. Maybe ten million was as big a number as anybody could think of so that’s how many there were. And each and every one of them was their own little sin.”

She swung higher, catching the dying sun and golden clouds between the toes of her sneakers on the ascent, tucking them under to scrape the dust and gravel as she came down. The man wheezed a little, and gripped the chain holding his seat a little tighter.

“Can you name ten million sins? There was one for letting the fire go out, and one for watering down the beer, and another for leaving a lover unsatisfied. There was a demon for leaving out your piss for another to step or sit in, and a demon for burning a child, and a demon for spoiling a story, and so many more.”

The man had sunk in his swing, and the girl slowed her gyration to follow the blackbirds waiting above.

“You may think it very silly for there to be ten million demons for such things, when they existed before children and stories, piss or beer, or any of that, but they dreamed all that into being. You cannot have children without their sins, or they wouldn’t be children at all.”

She smiled at that, and hopped off to take his hand. The man fell into the dust and gravel, head lolling against the ground, and she took his head between her hands and turned it to the sky.

“Now what if I told you every now and again one of the ten million demons took on shape and form and a name? It’s true.” The blue eyes in her hand saw the moon, and hanging right beneath it, three stars that should not shine ‘til evening. “Not murder or lust or any other thing you might think of as a sin, but something specific and terrible all the same, a familiar evil clothed in flesh.”

He opened his mouth, but no breath came out, and she kissed him on the forehead with thin, dry lips. “But there must always be ten million demons.”

##

The duel lasted until the ninth day, and the scholar of small spells leaned hard upon his staff, and his robes were little more than rags, but the archmagus of Erebai stood exhausted in his lonely corner, propped up only by those few familiars that remained. They had taken their turns casting spells and countering them, and for all the skill and learning and power of Erebai, there was no dwoemer or incantation that the scholar of small spells could not turn aside with some ancient word or name, by spirits so common they were nigh-forgotten, and one by one the powers the archmagus had painfully gathered to himself were stripped from him. So he sapped his strength and weathered the small, flitting curses of the scholar of small spells. At first the archmagus had dismissed these thin shadows at once, but as the conflict grew and resources became few, so did he wait longer and longer between cleansing banishments, and now could scarce mumble a counterspell. Yet somewhere he found once more that inner strength that had seen him through the ranks of necromancers to the summit of that dark mountain of power, and cast them off once again.

The collector of cantrips awaited his next gambit.

At last, he held up his hand—not in arcane gesture, but in hail.

“Brother magician, I would beg your forgiveness for shattering your circles.” said the archmagus. “Never in this incarnation would I have imagined such borrowed strength as yours; I fight not against a man but all the kingdoms of dead hedge wizards, every spell thief and apprentice who has lived and died on this small planet for countless centuries. Whichever of us falls today, know only that I am sorry to have ever crossed you.”

Then the scholar of small spells shook his head, and his face was dark as a thundercloud, and there was sorrow and regret in his voice. “Such hubris is unbecoming. Have you never learned of the ten million demons?”

The archmagus of Erebai said he had heard of them as the most minor of spirits.

“Then you have forgotten much that every apprentice knows.”

So saying the scholar of small spirits turned and left the circle, so forfeiting the duel, and his step did not falter ‘til he rested once more on the dusty road between Erebai and the dead empire, leaving behind him the smallest of ignorant sins to ponder his words.

###

Scarbearer

Scarbearer
by
Bobby Derie

The house was set for mourning, and the relatives set to wait.

The son answered the door, and nearly closed it in his face, but stiffened his lip and stifled his pride, and opened the gateway wide.

He was a big man, and stooped to brush the mistletoe, and nodded to the vicar, as one tradesman to another.

“There is no absolution in what you do,” and in the rector’s voice was holy iron.

“By his wounds Thomas knew him, father.” and the priest could not hold those eyes.

He passed into the gravewatch room, the old man on the bed, and he still knew the world. There were old battles in his one good eye, and lost love; a wife waiting in the sacred earth, but no sons or daughters who would bleed for him.

“I called for the scarbearer.”

“I have come.”

Flour and salt were brought before him, and he laid the blade on a strap with even strokes. The old man waited less patiently for him than he would for death.

“Who was your first?”

“My mother’s father,” the scarbearer fingered the pink line that crossed his face “I was his favorite, the most beautiful of his grandchildren, the only one to take his name. He had no sons, and I was happy to do it.”

“It is good.” The old man had eyes only for the blade. “I am glad for him.”

He laid the blade in the dying man’s lap, and the codger straightened and pressed a familiar hand to the hilt while the scarbearer sat next to him on the bed.

The old hand did not quaver much as he rested the edge against the scarbearer’s cheek, eyes locked. The cut was quick, if a little ragged, and caught the corner of his left ear.

The wizened hand laid the blade down on his thigh, not eager to let go.

“You will remember?” the dying soul croaked, as the blood flowed.

“I will always remember the man who gave me this,” said the scarbearer “On every cold morn when the old wound aches, in every silvered glass or still pool, and every time I tell the tale I will tell your name.”

“It is good,” the old man said, and laid the leather wallet down “to be remembered.” and closed his eyes.

The wound was packed and bound with flour and salt, to heal but not diminish much with the years, and the blade wiped on the bedclothes. None of the old man sons met his eyes, nor the vicar, but one granddaughter smiled and let her tears fall freely, hugging a kitchen knife to her breast.

###

Legacy of the Vein

Legacy of the Vein
by
Bobby Derie

The red tide flowed past pallid lips, a sharp tongue drank the waste of life unborn, and the young woman cried every time those curved tusks brushed her labia. The fanged head rose from between those pale thighs and gave her a grisly smile. I saw her leave through the window and walk the streets of San Lucca. Tall and fair in the moonlight, which washes the color from skin but could never hide those striking green eyes or the features of the mestizo. Menses dripped down her chin to stain her dress, and she wore a belt of dried fetuses wrapped around her, dangling like amulets. In the dark behind her, I saw no shadow, only a train of faceless ghosts.

“Hail, Queen of Vampires.”

She paused and looked at me, cousin of the moon and night, and showed once more that gory grin.

“Once there was a conquistador, and the hunger in his soul was great, so that no amount of prayer or Aztec gold could fill the void within him, but drove him on to new heights of depravity and bloody murder as he killed and converted the Indios. So great were his sins and his hunger that he drew the attention of Tlaelquani, who eats the filth of the world and makes it pure again. Already was she to fade from the world, and she took that conquistador to renew herself – but he would not be the conquered, and they made love for three days and nights, until both were spent and broken. Nine days later, I was born.”

We went about her rounds in the village of San Lucca, and here and there she would stop and sniff, then stop in at some house and return with fresh-painted lips.

“I am the shameful pleasure and the surcease to the moonblood, the taker of stillbirths and abortions, who visits the first-bleeding virgin and the last-bleeding matron alike, and take my due. All women know me, some with fear and others with desire, and I take only what is my due, and shepherd the unborn until their time comes again.” She fingered the chain wrapped about her, long nails idly circling the orbit of a tiny eye in a tiny skull. “Once I went to a camp of the Indios, who still followed the old ways, up in the mountains. Where the women were all locked away to bleed together. They knew the daughter of Tlaelquani. Oh, what and orgy that was. I thought I would drink until my stomach burst.”

We stopped at a ditch that ran between two graveyards.

“Here is where I stay, where the women bury the things they bear but cannot speak of to husbands or lovers, and await the moon and night to come again. Here is where we will part,” she planted a bloody kiss on my forehead, and nuzzled cheek to cheek I felt the press of a fang on my ear as she whispered “but I am not the Queen of Vampires.”

#

At a desert that smelled of dust and sagebrush, a corpse in a suit sat on a log and stared at the fire like a wounded horse, the bodies of two travelers propped up on either side.

“It was the cat.” The revenant croaked, through a parched and ragged throat. “They was all set to bury me and lay me in the ground, but there was this damn black tom called Midnight, and he leapt across mah open grave.”

The suit was ill-fitting; clothes fit only for a final Sunday, now rumpled and torn.

“Ah woke with a powerful thirst, that no whiskey nor water could cure. An’ that ain’t the way of it, to wander into a bar with a pocket full of grave dust and try to drink that place dry. Ah got mad.”

Hands twisted into fists, grave-born nails biting into palms, tendons creaking in the quiet night.

“King o’ vampires? Ah was alone in mah generation. Ain’t no one about to teach me proper. Things got wuss then. Whole damn town crammed into that churchyard, and the padre spitting fire and forgiveness and terrible names, while I could just shuffle along outside. The mean holiness of that place was like to burn mah sorry hide.”

He held up his hands, showed the black scars from crosses laid there.

“Maybe ah was a bad man in life. Ah shot that Jenkins boy, and did his sister and her son. Ah howled at the moon that one night out with the Comanche, and let them drink deep of the wood liquor so they all poisoned and died, and made off with the horses. Ah quarreled and fought and drank and stole and drank some more. Ah had a thirst in me in life that I never quite clenched, and now here ah am.”

He hugged the dead man next to him, then drew out a long knife and a tin cup.

“You might want to look away from this part, boy.”

#

Spindly fingers stretched to impossible arcs that ended in splintered nails, between them translucent membranes mapped with small black veins. The back was huge, humped with muscle, and covered in brown-black fur shot with silver. The torso was narrow and deep, like a dog or cat; but when those arms were spread wide  the chest was broader than a blacksmith or circus strongman’s, and nipples ringed down the milk lines to the hairy tuft of the penis sheath, and the small, bandy legs with their outsized toes. It was the face that held me, the prognathous jaw, the flared nostrils on that near-muzzle, the overhanging arch of the beetle-brow, and those dark wide-staring eyes, all framed by those vast pink, shell-like ears.

He hung on the tree branch, and the night forest was alive around us. We regarded each other, and I know not what he saw in me, but as I traced his form I wondered at what strange path his evolution had taken. In the weeks I had seen him shuffle on the ground, fists curled up and top-heavy, like a great chimp; and I had watched him climb the trees with those spread fingers, shuffling up the trunk. Perhaps that had been the divergence, the descent from the trees. Or something farther back, some primal divorce between species that had led one to walk and another...

I had seen him fly.

Slooping glides and flutters of wings. It took only one each night – a child, if it could manage, or an old villager whose gaze was on the ground to look for snakes – and if none could be found there were animals. To wrap those finger-wings around them and bite and lick the salty wounds that bled long after the struggles had stopped. Then once more the shuffling run, bloated and too heavy to run.

It had fed already tonight, and I wondered if those were animal eyes. Then it spoke, casting my own voice back to me in a high-pitched whispering screech.

“No king.”

#

A pale blue plastic valve was set in his wrist, and when he turned it a line of thin red flecked with black filled the hollow plastic tube, to drip into the beaker. The flame under the flask burned blue, licked with orange. A pale hand mapped with broken capillaries tapped at the elixir within, watched the liquid dissolve, turn to a clear translucent pink. He clicked off the flame and closed the valve. We waited for the black ash to settle on the bottom.

“There is a legacy in these veins.”  We regarded the array of tubes and piping, the scales and stoppered bottles. He had dispensed with the headpiece of his orange plastic suit, and ran a dry hand over his bald scalp, scratching at the black scabs. He wore glasses that showed pale brown eyes, the whites shot through with yellow, and the ghost of stubble on his chin and around his mouth spoke of a mustache and goatee, gone now. “How well they know it.”

“Hereditary illness. Retroviral DNA, the result of some past infection. My mother had it, never lived past thirty. Physician, cure thyself. The blood-ague, a race against time and my own body. What would go first – my liver? My kidneys? Perhaps my bones would rot from the inside out. So I tried everything.”

He took out a six-sided pill, dry-swallowed it.

“Leeches. Anti-coagulant properties in the saliva, sometimes used to make drugs to treat heart disease. High incidence of blood-borne disease, interesting immune responses. Other untapped miracles: a secretion from a specific nerve, certain proteins in the stomach. I took them apart.”

The walls were papered with diagrams, anatomical studies, invertebrates flayed and exposed. The wind whistled, and the walls shook.

“The drugs paid for it, kept me going. The first symptoms were lassitude, loss of appetite, energy. I pushed it off with amphetamines, went to the limit of my studies. I got sloppy, desperate. Funding was cut, access about to be.”

I watched him unzip the suit, to show the pale, waxy grey flesh hang limply off the ribs. Things slithered beneath his skin, tapered bodies that undulated slow paths through him.

“They’re such simple creatures. Communicable cancers, growing beneath my skin, tumors that suck and filter and shit in my veins until they’re motile. Here,”

A jar on the table brought forth, a dull fat grey thing floating in alcohol.

“The best part.” He whispered. “Is they think they know what they’re getting. They shoot it up, and they feel the high come on, and think they’ll live forever. It isn’t until later, when they find an odd lump that they’ll think there’s anything wrong. Until it moves, and they can feel it crawling through them. Or they’re on the toilet one day and something bursts inside them; they shit out something that wriggles and when they go to wipe they get a handful of bloody shit.”

His teeth are yellow and grey, the gums drawn back and bloody-looking. A grey body bulging beneath one cheek.

“I am the king of the fucking vampires. Want a hit?”

###