Blood Sacraments (37 page)

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No one knew why I had left Louisiana to travel abroad, but I knew. There was a man—a man who was as much like Garcia would later be as I had known up to that time. A dark, truly unholy man with unholy desires who had discovered me in St. Louis Cathedral one evening kneeling at the
Prie Dieu
before vespers. He had invited me back to his home for dinner. What had transpired after a meal of fish and rice and a wine I had never drunk before had made me question my faith and myself.

I had stood looking out on the bayou—for he had lived in St. John’s Parish and the bayou loomed in the near dark before the long, unshuttered windows. I held my wineglass and contemplated the encroaching night and inhaled the sumptuousness of the wine and the leftover aromas of the meal.

When he came up behind me, his arm draped lightly over my shoulders. I felt an inexplicable and alarming frisson run down my spine and into my cock. I would like to say that I fought him, that he did not take me easily or readily. But that would be one more lie like the ones I told when I went to Carville.

As a boy I had felt this frisson again and again, but I had satisfied it solitarily and always felt ashamed after, washing my hands again and again, promising myself I would never touch myself with desire in future, saying a prayer or two or more. But it was a vain promise that I could never maintain. Desire is immutable, I have discovered. It must be sated one way or another. I had hoped to sublimate my base desires into love of God and pursuit of all that was holy and decent. I would surround myself with good works and I would wash away the uncleanness with which I felt I had debased myself.

Or so I thought. But desire might not come from evil, always. Or so I am starting to convince myself. Certainly Nikolos believed this—I was keenly aware that he felt none of the shame and guilt I had come to associate with sensual desire before I met him. Desire may be God’s way of making us feel alive and in harmony with him at a deep and impenetrable—yes, that is the appropriate word—level.

This is not what Garcia would say. For he is, to be sure, from that other side, the dark one. Although I still cannot bring myself to think of him as evil, even after all he has done and all he has told me.

I have steeled myself against that dark side—or so I say. I have tried to keep myself from succumbing to it, except that Garcia is there, and how can I not want to be with him wherever he is? These are the things all men have wrestled with as long as there has been desire and heat and the elusive promise of immortality—be it in Heaven with God or elsewhere.

My own struggles began with that man at the Cathedral. I will not reveal his name, even now. Yet it was he who brought me to this ultimate place. He was the first one, the one to show me what desire fulfilled really was. He wanted to show me even more, but I was not yet ready. I’m not sure I was even ready when Garcia took me over and made me what I am now—vampire.

But then, then I knew nothing of the world but books and my own conflicted desire. Why had I let this man lure me back to his home? What had I told myself? I had told myself that he was older and cultured and I was young and in need of mentoring. And over dinner it had indeed seemed like a lesson—in food, in wine, in conversation, in literature—he quoted liberally from books I had barely skimmed and I considered myself a budding scholar. He had told me about his trips abroad. We had discussed Aquinas and Augustine and the flaws of men attempting to be saintly when they were merely men. He had grown discursive over Augustine, lingering over Augustine’s life of degeneracy and sin, barely touching on his conversion. But I was rapt. I might as easily have been a schoolgirl, I was so attentive to his every discourse. But of course he was handsome and virile, and his trim beard and well-cut suit merely accentuated the body beneath. As he talked of Augustine, I felt myself wondering, shamelessly, given where we had met, what lay beneath the morning coat he wore, and where the buttons on his trousers would lead. I shook myself from that reverie, however, and took a long—perhaps too long—draft of the wine and stood, a bit unsteadily.

I had gone to the window and he had come up behind me. I had held fast to my glass as his arms encircled my waist and then his strong right hand traveled down onto my already stiffened cock. As I said, I should have resisted. But I never thought to. I wanted it—what he offered—and clearly he knew this. He had stalked me like prey, I realized. I wanted it and he sensed it. Just as I had wanted the dinner and the talk and the excitation of my intellect, I wanted this: I wanted his hands on me. I wanted to feel his flesh against mine. I wanted to feel the pulse of him against me, and soon I would.

We left the window. He led me to his bedroom and lay me on the bed. He took time undressing me—a fetishist’s time, I would think later. The slow unbuttoning of my shirt, the opening of my pants, the exposing of my cock—it all happened slowly. Deliberately, maddeningly and exquisitely and torturously slowly. I ached for him to touch me, to touch me fully, to release me from the intensity of my desire.

The mosquito net billowed over us. I was naked. Soon, so was he. He slid his fingers into my mouth and told me to suck. Then he held his own prick in his hand and pushed my mouth toward it. The shock of what I was about to do nearly caused me to release onto his crisp linen sheets. I reached for myself, but he took me instead, his hand so strong on my cock that I felt briefly faint. It wasn’t painful—it was blissful. It was everything I felt I had yearned for as a youth and now, finally as a man, could have. Like a child who waits for the first glass of wine or the first bedtime after dark. The deliciousness was overwhelming. When the release came, I knew it would be life-altering. I wondered, fleetingly, if I should leave before these things happened. But I could not. And yet I knew that I was crossing a threshold from which I could never return. What’s more, I knew I would not wish to.

He tasted salty and thick and it was like nothing I had ever experienced before. The sound he made was deeply masculine and I wondered briefly if I was too much of a boy still for this man who was so much a man. So refined and degenerate all at once. I wanted to please him. I wanted him to desire me the way I desired him at that moment. I wanted to be the best at whatever it was we were doing. I wanted to excel—to lick and suck and stroke until I broke the barrier between all he had experienced and all I had not.

When he was near to it I took my mouth away from his prick and lay myself across him, my thighs pressing against his. His cock was pulsing in my hand and I thought that the milky fluid that had for weeks built up within me would squirt out unbidden, my excitement was so intense. He grabbed my hand hard and jerked it on his cock, his other hand gripping my buttock so hard I felt blood come, but didn’t care. The hot jet spurted over my hand and he relaxed briefly underneath me.

He kept me there the whole long night: We slept and woke and spent each other again and again until I was certain we could not do more. As dawn broke, I knew I would need to leave, go home and hope no explanations were required to my uncle, with whom I had lived these past years. He too was known to spend a night away from home and I had learned never to ask where. But while I presumed my uncle to be entertaining himself at one of the local brothels on St. Charles, I was engaging in something far less common—or so I believed.

The man and I spent several months in similar pursuits as those of that first night. I would go to meet him at the Vieux Carré in a private dining room of his choosing. We would share wine and food and he would sharpen my wit and intellect as he honed my desire. Then we would return to his house and the servants would have retired and I would be hastened to his bedroom for the same slow disrobing, the same veneration of my cock, the same long nights beneath the mosquito netting. He had expanded his and my repertoire to include other intimacies, each more exotic and, I cannot deny, enthralling than the last.

Then after a night of particular intensity with him, I left. Once I had met Garcia I understood that my mentor was something more, something other than mere degenerate. I realized that he—the patience of centuries behind him—had been grooming me for months to be a companion. A companion in another world than this. For he was also, I understood that night, vampire.

We lay, spent, on his bed. I could never seem to get enough of him and had blurted this out in a moment of deepest passion. I wanted ever more—more tutelage in both the intellectual and sensual arts that he was teaching me. I wanted to be part of him. I had no words to explain it, which may have been my youth or my inexperience or both. But he understood. And he chose then to explain what more there could be.

“What if I could offer you eternal life?” he asked with the soft forcefulness that had first lured me to his bed. “What if I could offer you this and more forever?”

I was caught off guard. What did he mean—eternal life? That was the purview of God, not of man. What hubris was this? I must have shuddered.

“It’s a heady thought, I know.” His deep voice rushed over me, exciting me all over again. I reached for him and he took my wrist, hard, and brought it to his lips.

His teeth were in my vein before I could protest, but he stopped there. He did not go the extra step as Garcia would later. Instead he merely licked at the blood as he had licked at my thighs and more.

I could not respond—had no words to respond. What was this strangeness? He had taken me with some force before, but not without my acquiescence, and each time he had known just how far he could take us both and never went past that point. But this—I watched my blood drip onto the linens and for the first time realized that this man had a power over me that was, perhaps, dangerous.

I did not pull my arm away. Rather, I let him hold on to me as one does not yank one’s leg from a bear trap but instead plans an escape, despite the fear and pain.

“Only God can offer us eternal life.” I finally spoke, my voice holding none of the fear I felt. “You have offered me a different life than the one I had—but I am still intent on being the priest I have trained to be. Surely you know this?”

We lay for a while in silence. He released my arm and I saw that the bleeding had—surprisingly—ceased. There was a small wound where he had bitten into my flesh.

“I had hoped for more from you,” he said, with some finality, as if whatever I had forgone meant the end of what had been between us.

“I have tried to give you all I have,” I responded, my voice choked despite my best efforts, suddenly as fearful of losing him as I had been moments earlier of losing my life.

“There is more than that to give, and I won’t pretend I don’t want it,” he said then. I had no response. I didn’t know what it was he was asking of me, only that I was certain it meant crossing a boundary from which—unlike our nights together thus far—I could not return.

I turned onto my stomach, away from him but hoping he would lure me back. Instead he lowered himself onto me and took me a final time. I was still mesmerized by him and his abilities as a lover and I opened myself to him in the hope that he would see that he should not cast me aside because I would not do whatever dark thing it was he still wanted.

I left before dawn—I knew he needed me to leave and that only a woman would linger and debase herself with some level of pleading to be kept on. I would not do that. I could not. But I ached to stay and I gazed at him a long while as I dressed. His nakedness was all I wanted—the strength his body exuded even in sleep. But I knew to the core of my being that I could not allow my desire to supersede my self, my soul. And I was in danger of losing that self—I saw that now.

My studies and these extracurricular excursions with my philosopher mentor had become far too at odds with each other over the past few months. As I left him for what I knew to be the final time, I found my desire not in the least slackened, but awakened and stirred. Far from being chastened and sent back to my divinity studies as I should have been, instead I had left his house a few hours before dawn and found myself on the streets wondering if there were others like us and if what I had learned with him could be translated to another—sans the bloodletting. I wandered the streets for an hour or so, looking at men who seemed aimless in the narrow alleyways—what were they seeking? Some looked at me with what I now knew to be desire, but I chose to ignore them. It seemed enough to know they were there and that I had access to them if I needed them.

I had taken myself home then and while I should have gone directly to sleep or at the very least to prayer, instead I debauched myself, who should have been already spent from the hours with my mentor. As I touched myself, images of his body were in the forefront of my mind, but commingled with the sensation of his biting into my flesh and my blood flowing into his mouth. I tried to imagine other men then, men my own age as well as men older, men strong and powerful and… That was when I knew I had to flee New Orleans or lose myself forever to this demimonde I had uncovered. Instead of seeking God, I would be searching, ever searching, for men like myself or neophytes as I myself had been a few short months ago. I wanted to be neither teacher nor student. I wanted to re-dedicate myself to celibacy and set myself anew on the path I had initially staked out for myself.

But that is when I discovered Nikolos and after him, Garcia. Now I am possessed as I had never been by my own puny desires, nor even by my mentor and his burgeoning ones. Now I live in and for the night and when I cannot slake my darker thirsts, I ache in ways I can only think of as damnable. And in fact I wonder if I am forever damned. Garcia says I am not—not yet. But then he is my downfall, he is the one who has taken me to the brink of this darkness and he is the one who has made it possible for me to live beyond the disease, beyond mere mortality. He says he can free me at any time, but I do not believe him and I think that if he does—if he runs a stake through my heart or cuts off my head as I sleep, there will be no redemption, although possibly no hell either. Just the blackness of the eternal abyss.