Second Bad Reaction

Second bad review, or rather I suppose I should say negative response. So far I have (I think) some 22 or 23 people who have actually READ "Give Me The Night" in its entirety, only one of whom is male to my knowledge. The negative reactions both came from women, one of whom says my sentences are too long, and the second one (who admits she did not complete the novel) essentially said that my vampire repulsed her and freaked her out, which I get. No kidding, ladies, this one ain't Twilight or anything remotely close.

The Review Amazon Wouldn't Publish

This lady was not allowed to publish a review on Amazon.com because she's one of the dwindling minority of Americans who has never actually bought anything on Amazon. But if she'd been allowed to do so, this is what she would have published:

Looking for a new kind of vampire? Look no further than Skoda in Give Me The Night by Martin Scanlan. Give Me The Night  classified as an evil love story, and that’s a great description because Skoda can be a very evil present-day vampire. Yet, he has a soft heart when it comes to Becky Carmody. Despite the fact Skoda needs to feed, and kill to feed, and is being hunted by not only the local police but also the FBI, his first priority is Becky. 

Martin Scanlan has taken the myth of vampires, brought it to life and dropped it into Seattle, Washington. From the first page to the twisted ending, he has managed to weave together a great story, a moving, intriguing plot, and characters that make the reader cheer for them, feel their pain and even laugh at them. 4.5 STARS!

w/a Allie Harrison
w/a Allie Quinn

Give Me The Night: An Evil Love Story

II. Room 215

Becky Carmody walked all the way from the King County Jail on Fifth Avenue to Martin Luther King Junior Way, on a cold and wet October night. She had no money for a bus, and her ORCA card was long empty of funds. She was wearing nothing but the outfit she had been arrested in, short brown leather pants and platform heel shoes and a thin pink cotton top, with a dirty white sweater from Goodwill that was almost as thin. At least she had the sweater. Then when she got to the Lake View Motel, fumbled the key out of her purse with her cold-numbed fingers and tried it in Room 215, she found that she couldn’t open the door. She twisted and jiggled it in frustration. It took her some time to realize that bastard Pablo had changed the lock.

Becky stumped over to the neon-lit office in a rage. It was six o’clock at night and Pablo was still behind the desk. “What the fuck, Pablo?” she shouted. “I paid up for the month!”

“You paid one month’s rent on October seventh, yeah,” Pablo agreed. He was a frazzled-looking man in his forties with kinky black hair “From that I deducted your rent for September. You still owe me two weeks of August and a fifty-dollar late fee for long-term guests who miss the deadline. Then you disappear for two weeks and I have no fucking idea whether you skipped town, or maybe shot some bad shit in your arm and you were lying dead in a ditch or on some slab in the morgue.”

“I was in jail!” she yelled. “Didn’t Benny tell you?”

“I guess he musta forgot,” said Pablo with a shrug. “Anyway, Benny ain’t living here, you are. Or you were. I’m tired of this shit, Becky. The year is almost over and during that time you’ve paid maybe half of what you owe.”

“You know you got paid for all of it, just not in cash,” she snapped.

“Yeah, that’s true, and I gotta admit you give great head, but I can’t be constantly paying your tab outta my own pocket,” Pablo said with a weary sigh. “Not to mention those fucking auditors at Worldwide Hospitality who would fire my ass if they caught on to our little arrangement. If it was just me and I owned the place, no problem, but I don’t own it, they do. I’m just the manager. Beck, I gotta have some folding green this time. Seven hunnert-fifty dollars to make it all balance out.”

“Where the fuck am I supposed to get seven hundred and fifty dollars?” she screamed in horror.

“Won’t Benny front you?”

“I still owe Benny more than that for the legal crap from last April, and now I’m in the shit again with this latest bust!” she yelled.

“Yeah, he came by a couple of times looking for you, and he didn’t seem too happy to find you gone. Look, I haven’t rented the room yet, but I need seven-fifty by this time tomorrow. You can come up with the bread, or else tomorrow night your shit all goes in the dumpster. Sorry, Beck, no more passes, no more free ride. End of the line.” Ten additional minutes of pleading and wheedling and shouting had finally made him come out from behind the desk and physically push her out of the door, not angrily, but almost wearily.

Becky staggered down the walkway to the locked door of Room 215 and sat down on the cold concrete, her back against the door. It was pitch black all around. Above her head a forty-watt bulb cast a dim glow into the inky air. The damp cold seeped into her bones and with it an even more freezing horror, as it dawned on her that this really was the end of the line. She had literally nowhere on earth to go.

The shelters were all full now that the cold weather had set in, and in any event she was banned from most of them for assorted prior acts of drug use, drunken misbehavior, and sober misbehavior such as turning tricks in the stairwells and sneaking johns into womens’ shelters. Benny might let her crash on his couch for a few nights, but he’d beat her and fuck her first, and then demand she go back out onto the streets and bring in some money, all of which he would take from her to pay back her bail and lawyer fees from April. Pablo was right. Benny wouldn’t help her with this latest beef, a possession with intent to distribute charge which was almost certainly going to send her back to Gig Harbor, this time for at least a couple of years. She had already cost him more than she brought in.

Home to Kirkland was absolutely out; she hadn’t seen her mother or father for several years now. The last time she had any contact with them was when the deputy sheriff served her with their restraining order preventing her from coming within five hundred yards of them, her younger sister, her sister’s school, and her father’s place of business. She understood why they were pissed. She had thrown a rock through their picture window and dumped the contents of the garbage and recycling bins all over the lawn and the driveway when her father had refused to give her any more money or send her to any more expensive private rehabs. He had said horrible things to her and told her to get out, that he never wanted to see her again, so she had lashed out at him in blind rage and inhuman pain, and she had the piece of paper to prove it.

What the high-priced private re-habs had not been able to do, a piece of heavy wire had, at least for a while. Becky wasn’t jonesing now, a small mercy to be thankful for. She’d been clean for almost three months; the drug she’d been busted for possessing wasn’t heroin, but oxycodone pills she’d tried to deal to an undercover cop. When she’d gotten too messed up to work that summer, and stopped bringing in any money at all, Benny had taken her down to his basement, stripped her naked, tied her to a joist and thoroughly flogged her with an unbent coat hanger, then left her there for five days, feeding her nothing but power bars and plastic jugs of cheap full-sugar soda while she went cold turkey. When her screams of agony and heart-wrenching pleas for heroin had gotten too loud Benny simply turned up his home entertainment center. He liked gangsta rap, since he considered himself to be an authentic OG despite the fact that he was Vietnamese. Some of the neighbors must have heard her screaming in the basement, but in Rainier Valley no one cared.

When Benny let her go, he told her to get back to work and make sure she was at the Lake View Motel every night at eleven, and that she’d better have two hundred dollars for him every night. He also told her simply and conversationally, “Congratulations. You are now a certified and certifiable graduate of the Benny Loc Substance Abuse Recovery Program. Fuck up one more time and I’ll kill you, Becky. Sandy could use some company down there on the river bank.” Sandy was one of Benny’s prostitutes whom he had allegedly murdered and buried on the banks of the Green River. Becky was never sure if the story was true or not, but something about the casual and offhand way he occasionally spoke of Sandy tended to convince her that it was.

No, Benny was out. None of the other girls would help her. They were too afraid of Benny and they hated her anyway, calling her College Cunt due to the year and change she’d spent at UW. The police were out; they were the ones who were going to send her back to prison and they weren’t there to help people like her anyway. If she’d stayed home and been a good little girl like Mom and Dad told her to, she still would have been rich, and then the police really would be there to help her, but not now. That bull dyke bitch Sergeant Kizer who was her handler had gotten her out on ROR in exchange for one last round of snitching, but she said the actual trial thing was out of her hands and at least she’d get a bed and some crappy but regular food in Gig Harbor. Most of what Becky had told her in exchange for the ROR wasn’t true, and when it didn’t pan out the Kizer cop bitch would probably haul her in and beat her with the telephone book some more, maybe even revoke her ROR. That left what?

Nothing.

Becky Carmody stared blankly into the blackness. She didn’t cry, not at first. She was quite calm. Well, that’s it, then, she thought. I’m done. I’m outta here. The decision was made, and it calmed her. There was no point in getting upset about her locked motel room or that shithead Pablo shutting her out and keeping her from her stuff, or that motherfucker Benny beating her and keeping her tied to a wall while she rolled on the floor in agony from withdrawal. None of that mattered any more. She was done, she was outta here. Exit stage left. Good night, sweet princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. 

She thought calmly and sanely how she would do it, how she could do it, preferably without too much pain. If she could get back into the motel room she had a pack of razor blades for herself or her friends or any johns who wanted to cut a line or two of coke. Razor blades hurt like hell, she knew, since she’d been a cutter in her teenaged years. She figured she could take it on her wrists, a once more for auld lang syne kind of thing. The trouble was, she couldn’t get into the room and get to the razor blades.

Becky briefly considered trying to hitch or walk to Lake Union, but she was drenched with misty cold now and the thought of jumping into the freezing water was impossible. She could probably walk to one of the I-90 overpasses and jump off, but it might not be high enough to kill her, and she might linger for hours lying on concrete in the freezing cold and then maybe for days in a hospital. Eventually she decided on heading toward Alaskan Way and the Seattle Light Rail Link; she would get to one of the stops or else just wait by the tracks until the train came and jump in front of it.

She now had to muster the energy to stand up and start walking, but when she tried she slipped and hit her head mildly against the door as she sat back down, and for some reason that was it. The dam burst, and Becky hung her head and began to weep. Weep for the life that was now as finished as if she were already lying on the stainless steel table in the morgue. Weep for the tragedy and pointlessness of it all. Weep for a world that was empty not only of right, and justice, and goodness—Becky had long known those were simply lies those with power told to people without it, to keep them down—but empty of reason. Empty of purpose, empty of plan. Existence was a mindless beast. Confucius, Aristotle, Jesus Christ and Buddha, all had it wrong. Shakespeare had it right: life really was nothing but a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Woody Allen had gotten it right—life was an ordeal of meaningless suffering, but saving string didn’t help one damned bit. 

I’m only 24, Becky thought dully in her wretchedness. How could this happen? How did I fuck it up this bad? She knew the answer, of course. The answer was that she was a stupid piece of shit. There was no need to rationalize or justify or create elaborate fabrications of self-serving explanation blaming it all on others. She was worthless. All she wanted right now in this world was a key that would fit in that lock, so she could open the door and go in and turn on the electric space heater and crawl under the dirty sheets and rough bedspread and be warm for a while, and sleep a little, and forget for a time. Then in the morning she would take the razor blade and do it. In the cold and merciless gray dawn that always came she would do it, in exchange for one last night with warmth and cover and darkness, and no one knowing she was there. Yet even that was too much for her to ask. She had called this filthy hole home for a year, but she wasn’t even worth Room 215 any more.

She thought of her stuff just beyond her behind the locked door, especially the one cardboard box with the few things her parents had allowed her to take away with her when she quit rehab the second time. Her high school annual. The one group picture she had been allowed off the mantel with all four of them. (Dad had chosen which one she could have, of course.) A few pathetic stuffed animals and her Barbie doll. A few trophies and achievement certificates from elementary school and junior high. A conch shell from a vacation trip to Florida when she was eight years old. A small tin Altoids box of polished colored stones she had possessed since even before that, and whose provenance she couldn’t recall now. The last few fragmentary reminders that she had ever been here. She would never see those things again. Tomorrow night she would be dead and Pablo would be throwing the box and its contents into the dumpster, not because she was dead, but because she had not given him seven hundred and fifty dollars. She wept and wept, very quietly. After a while, not knowing she was doing so, she began to keen, soft and low, with all of the misery of the earth in the sound.

And she was heard.

A few hundred yards away a lean, pale man with a drooping moustache and long hair and a scar on his face was silently moving up an alleyway off Martin Luther King Junior Way. He was in the mood for something exotic that night, and Rainier Valley was full of tasty Asians. It was a prime hunting ground: a high crime area, the closest thing Seattle had to a ghetto. It was a place where police were not cooperated with. There was a large transient population, so people disappearing was not uncommon. He had already taken a couple of meals there, a man and a woman. No one suspected his existence. The Filipinos in the neighborhood had some legends about his kind, but since he had made off with the bodies and nothing had been found, nothing had set them to remembering grandma’s tales from back in Luzon.

Now he heard the cry of a woman in ultimate despair, and he homed in on it like a striking shark. In a matter of moments he was behind the nearest dumpster, watching Becky Carmody slumped before the door of Room 215, quietly sobbing, her heart breaking and melting in the fear and the horror and the sadness of what she knew it was time for her to do.

The man with the scar was many things, among them a connoisseur of human emotion. He could sense it, read it, smell it, feel it, dissect it in his mind, smell its bouquet and taste its robust fullness or clear-cutting slash. Quite often, he fed on it. Here, he thought. Oh, yes, here, tonight. He leaned back and inhaled Becky Carmody’s soul-destroying misery like a wonderful fragrance. It was heady, overpowering, wonderful. 

“Verzweiflung,” he muttered to himself. “So schöne Verzweiflung!”

* * *

Becky Carmody was too absorbed in her own grief to notice at first the mist that rolled slowly in tendrils across the parking lot, and when she did she simply took it in as a kind of ironic background to the overwhelming realization that she was about to end. A bit of motion in her peripheral vision to the left caught her eye, and she turned dully to see a man standing about ten feet away from her. Some trick of the light made his eyes glow red like burning coals. The man seemed to slide toward her. He must have been walking, but she could not see his legs move in the sudden fog. She looked up at him and saw him staring down at her; now his eyes seemed to be pools of black. His face was ghostly white in the weak 40-watt lighting, the scar on the left side a veal-colored slash.

The man looked down at Becky. Her shoulder-length hair was thin and limp, a fiery red that his nose told him contained no artificial hair coloring. Her eyes were green but now red and tear-stained, her face white with a light powdering of freckles. She was thin, but two weeks of King County Jail cuisine was better eating than she was used to, and she could not quite be called wasted. He silently inhaled and examined her odor; she was dirty, and the clothes she wore were sour and unwashed for a long time, but her perspiration and the water condensed on her skin contained no smell of metabolized narcotics or alcohol. Irischer oder Schottischer, he thought. “Why do you weep?” he asked her.

“Fucking Pablo changed the lock on my room!” she sniffed. “I got nowhere to go and all my stuff is in there.”

“How much do you owe him?” he asked.

“Seven fifty, if it’s any business of yours,” she replied sullenly.

“Wait here,” he commanded.

“Where the fuck am I gonna go?” she demanded, but all of a sudden he was gone. She hung her head and stared down at the concrete, the tears welling in her eyes again.

The man went to the motel office. Pablo was sitting at the desk, a bottle of beer in his hand, watching a porno video on a laptop. “Yeah, what can I do you for?” he asked, looking up.

“I want the key to Room 215,” the man told him. He pulled out a large roll of money from his pocket, and Pablo’s eyes widened.

“Hey, looks like Becky’s got herself a new fancy man,” he said approvingly. “Right on, Beck!”

The man peeled a number of bills off the roll. He briefly considered killing Pablo and taking the key, but decided it would be more trouble than it was worth, and if Pablo was sticking around for a while his accounts would need to balance. He handed the money to Pablo and said, “Look at me.”

Pablo did. The man’s blue eyes changed color. They were luminescent white now, clear and translucent. Pablo’s mind was mush, so compelling him was quite easy. “Give me the key,” the man commanded him. Pablo handed it over. “Now listen to me carefully. The girl in Room 215, who appears to be named Becky, is now paid up in full. She is the one who is giving you this money, not me. I am not here. You never saw me and you do not know me. Do you understand?"

“Got it,” said Pablo with a nod. The man was gone. Pablo stuck the money in the register and duly updated Becky’s room record on the desktop computer to show full payment. “Damn,” he muttered to himself. “Never figured she’d pay up!” Then he went back to watching his porn.

Becky looked up. The man with the scar was back. He gently moved her aside, stuck the key in the lock, and opened the door. Becky stared at him in confusion, then stumbled inside and switched on the lights and the electric heat. Her stuff was still there, although the broken pizza slices in the box on the table were moldy. She walked over to the cardboard box in the closet, bent down and opened the flaps, and quietly ran her fingers over the contents. Then she looked up at the man who was still standing in the open doorway. “What did you do?”

“I had a word with Pablo,” he told her. “He won’t bother you again. May I come in?” That was one of the few legends about his kind that was true. He had to be invited.

“Sure, come on in,” she said, beckoning, still depressed and miserable, but happy to be inside. He stepped into the room and closed the door.

“You wept for this?” he said, looking around at the mess and the black mold on the walls

“I cried because I’d lost everything,” she told him. “This is my everything. How did you talk Pablo into giving you the key?”

“I paid him what you owed.”

“Just like that, huh?” she said, looking at him skeptically.

“Just like that,” he agreed.

“That’s a lot of money.”

“I have money,” he said. He walked up to her and pulled out the roll, peeling off more bills. “This is for you, if you will let me stay for a while.”

She took the hundred-dollar bills he held out to her and quickly riffled them, counting. “A thousand dollars!” she exclaimed. It was way too much for anything he could be expecting a woman on her low rung of the trade to do sexually. He could have had her any way he wanted for fifty, or he could make her work off the huge sum he had paid to Pablo over time. Becky’s heart sank inside her. She understood; there was to be no escape. Her wish had been granted. She was back in her room as she had so longed for only moments ago, she had a full grand in her hand, and she would never spend any of it, because the manner of her end had been decided by some puckish cosmic entity with a macabre sense of humor, who was mocking her at the very moment the sands of her existence were running out.

She looked up at the man with the scar, unafraid and accepting. “You’re going to do something really bad to me, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

She put the money on the nightstand and quietly began taking off her clothes, folding them neatly and laying them on a chair. When she was naked she smoothed the rumpled bedspread and lay down on her back, arms at her side. The bed was cold; there had been no heat in the room for weeks. “Can I close my eyes?” she asked in a trembling voice, like a little girl.

“That might be best,” the man agreed. She closed them. For a long several minutes there was silence other than the rumble of the heating unit beneath the window. Finally curiosity got the better of her, and she opened her eyes.

The man was floating in the air about two feet above her, his body parallel to hers. Her mind went blank with terror, driving out even the suicidal despair which had possessed her. She tried to raise her arms and hands to fend him off and opened her mouth to scream, but his face changed and he snapped at her like an animal, not in the neck but just above the collar bone where the veins were smaller. She filled her lungs with air to scream but the venom hit her instantly, and she deflated like a balloon. A glorious red sunset filled the room with light and warmth. But it can’t be sunset, she thought. It’s pitch dark and rainy outside. It didn’t matter. The warm red blotted out everything. For what seemed an endless time Becky floated in it, turning over and over in it like a crimson swimming pool in which she relaxed, suspended in the center. Then she drifted off to sleep.

The man only injected a few drops of his venom into her, not a killing dose, and he took his time, drawing the blood from her wound in long, slow sips. It was good. Not great, but good. Filling and nourishing like a warm Irish stew. There were a few residual traces of some opiate, heroin he guessed, just enough to let him know where she’d been. He took a little less than a pint and stopped, licking her wound with his tongue so his saliva would seal and heal it. Then he pulled a straight-backed chair to the foot of her bed, jumped up onto the back of it and perched there, squatting, hands on his knees, like some kind of medieval gargoyle on some inaccessible cornice on a cathedral, hundreds of feet off the ground, unseen by any eye of man save the sculptor who made it for hundreds of years, until some idiot with a camera finally climbed up that high and revealed it to the world again.

It was almost midnight when Becky awoke. She still felt groggy. She was lying on the bed, still nude, but someone had had thrown off the bedspread and pulled a sheet over her body. She lay there staring at the ceiling, and she remembered what had happened, but since it didn’t make sense and could not possibly have occurred, it didn’t bother her. It was true the right lower side of her neck and shoulder ached. She touched it and felt a gauze bandage. She sat up a little and saw the vampire in front of her, impossibly perched on the back of a chair, his elbows on his knees, watching her with an expressionless face like some kind of solemn biker Buddha. “You’re real,” she said.

“Yes. I’m real,” he replied.

“You didn’t kill me.”

“No. I didn’t kill you,” he agreed.

“Are you going to?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided yet.” For some reason Becky wasn’t afraid. She must be in shock, she thought to herself, or else the whole thing was so surreal she simply couldn’t take it all seriously. “I thought you wanted to die?” the vampire asked her.

“I never said anything about killing myself!” she protested.

“You didn’t need to. Why do you want to die?”

“Not so much want to, just kind of have to,” Becky told him. “The totally out of options kind of have to. I have no place to go, I owe my pimp money he’s going to beat and fuck out of my ass even if he doesn’t kill me, and in a few months I’m heading back to women’s prison for twenty goddamned oxycodones. So I figured I’d just clock out for the last time. Now I don’t know.”

“What’s changed?” he asked.

“You. I figured I knew what was coming when I picked up the razor blade or jumped off something. A few moments of really severe pain and then just nothing. Then you show up, and now I have to die with unanswered questions. Am I remembering this right? You bit me, for real?”

“Yes.”

“And you drank my blood?”

“Yes.”

“So you’re a vampire.”

“The correct term is Immortal, but yes, I’m a vampire,” the man responded. “Different points of view. We think of ourselves as what we are. You think of us in terms of what we eat. 

Understandable, since what we eat is you.”

“I never believed vampires really existed,” she said in wonder.

“We don’t. Officially.”

“So what now?” she asked.

“That depends. Tell you what,” said the man, reaching into his pocket and drawing out the roll of cash. He tossed it onto the bed beside her. “Between that and the grand I gave you earlier there’s about three thousand dollars there. You can take the money and do what you want with it. You can give yourself some kind of fresh start, or you can let your pimp take it from you, or you can go back on smack and stay high as long as the money lasts. Whatever you want. I will leave here and you will never see me again. Is that what you want?”

Becky thought for a few moments. “No.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because assuming I haven’t gone cuckoo for cocoa puffs here and I’m not hallucinating in some rubber room at the county cackle box, something has finally happened to me,” she said. “I was all into the Twilight thing when I was fourteen. You don’t look like an emo.”

“Hardly,” he said drily.

“I won’t ask you if you only drink animal blood, since you just chowed down on me, but are you trying to atone for your evil life or become human again?” she asked curiously.

“No to both, and silly movies and TV shows to the contrary, I assure you it’s quite impossible for me ever to become human again. Nor would I want to.”

“Do you sparkle in the sunlight? Or burst into flames?”

“Neither. Hollywood has filled your mind with claptrap.” He hopped lightly off the back of the chair and took out blue pack of Gauloises originales, with the strong Turkish tobacco. He flipped a cigarette out of the pack, stuck it between his lips, and lit it with a Zippo lighter.

“Those things will kill you,” said Becky with a giggle

“No, they won’t.” He handed her a paper plate and a bottle of Tropicana orange juice. “You don’t seem to have any food around here except that furry pizza, so while you were sleeping I went out and found an all-night QFC. I got some gauze pads and tape to patch you up, and I brought you this. You need to eat. You’re in ketosis.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Your body is living off your stored fat cells, and unlike most American women you don’t have enough of those to spare.”

“How can you tell?” she wanted to know.

“From the way you taste.” The plate contained a large chocolate chip cookie, a blueberry muffin, and about twelve ounces of raw hamburger. Becky sat up, the sheet falling away from her breasts, about which she was completely casual. She made her living by being naked around men. She found she was indeed ravenous. She ate it all and drank about half the orange juice. The vampire hopped back onto the chair and perched, smoking silently while she ate.

“Okay, now what?” she asked again, eyeing the money. “Did you mean it about that three grand just now?”

“I did. You have three choices,” he told her. “Primo, you can start screaming and try to get out the door, in which case I’ll break your neck, and the only thing remarkable about your life will be that your last meal was orange juice and raw meat. Secundo, you can take the three thousand dollars, politely decline my further company, and I will leave you to see what you can do with a little money to either get out of this shithole or keep on wallowing in it, your choice. Tertio, you can come with me. If you do, some day a few months from now I will kill you, because you will have learned more about me than is advisable for one of your kind. Depending on how I feel about you when that time comes, I will either leave your body in bits and pieces far out in the forest, to be eaten and dispersed by wild animals, or else I will Bring you Across, and you will be as I am.”

“Why me?” she asked wonderingly.

“You have a very small ration of questions, and you have already used up yours for today. We will not be doing this so you can learn about me, but so I can learn about you. The less you know about me, the longer it will be before we cross the point of no return and you must either be Brought Across or die. So? Will it be death now, as you desired a few hours ago? Will you try for a do-over in your mortal life? Or will you accept death at my hands later, with a possible shot at immortality? I suppose I should also mention that an Asian man whom I presume is your pimp is outside the door right now. He wants to kill you as well. I suppose that might serve as a fourth option.”

“What?” gasped Becky. “Benny?”

The door crashed open, splintering the flimsy lock and deadbolt, and Benny Loc stormed into the room. He was wearing jeans and a loud yellow sports jacket, and his face was twisted with rage. “There the fuck you are!” he shouted at Becky. “You and me gonna to have some words, bitch!” He looked over and saw he was not alone with her. “So you working again? Good. Where’s my cut?” Then he noticed that the man was perched on the back of the chair like an owl. “So what the fuck are you, some kind of circus acrobat?”

“You have a problem,” said the man calmly

“Yeah, John? What fucking problem is dat?” sneered Benny.

“I don’t like you.” The pimp had a lifelong street criminal’s quick perception of danger, and as fast as the vampire was on him, Benny had his pistol out from the small of his back. He managed to fire one shot into his attacker’s middle before his neck was snapped; Becky was surprised at how loud the sound was, much louder than the pop of the gunshot. Then Benny collapsed onto the floor like a sack of dirty laundry.

“He shot you!” she cried out. The vampire leaned over and picked up the small silver-plated automatic.

“Yeah, with a twenty-five, of all the pieces of junk,” he said in disgust. “You’d think even a cheap little strolch like this could spring for a .380. This is just a bee sting.” He lifted his polo shirt. An odd blackish-purple liquid was dripping from the hole beneath his left ribs. It was not blood, at least not human blood. The vampire waved his hand over it, and it vaporized into a pale steam and disappeared. He spat on his hand and rubbed the hole in his torso; in less than thirty seconds it sealed up.

“Is Benny dead?” Becky asked tremulously.

“He’ll never be any deader.” He looked up at her. “You seriously don’t consider this man your friend or your lover or some such, do you?”

“Fuck no!” she said, getting up for a clearer view of the corpse on the floor. She stared at Loc’s body dispassionately, then looked at the vampire. “Benny beat me. Sometimes he’d get my attention by jamming a lit cigarette into the back of my head, where no one could see the burn mark under my hair. Look, if I go with you, you have to promise me something. You have to promise you won’t hit me. The killing part I get. I’m signing on for that. I know you can’t have me blabbing your secrets all over the internet or whatever.”

“No, no ishackedupwithavampire.com. You really don’t care whether you live or die, do you?” he asked with a bemused smile.

“I haven’t cared for a long time, really. But you’ve got me curious now. I want to see what’s behind the curtain before I go through.”

“Fair enough,” he said with a nod. “You have my word. No hitting and no burning with cigarettes.”

“So what now?” she asked. “What are you going to do with him?”

“For now let’s at least make the late Benny more comfortable.” He shoved the motel room door closed again and leaned the chair against the broken lock to keep it closed. There was a second chair in one corner of the room. The vampire lifted the corpse with one hand and sat the dead man down in the chair, his head lolling back against the wall, staring at the ceiling with a look of startled amazement on his face. “I’ll get rid of him later. As to what now, you will come back to my place and live there with me, but before that happens we need to seal our bargain, and we might as well get that done. I must enthrall you.” He began removing his clothes.

“Oh, okay,” said Becky. She giggled. “I wondered when we’d get to that part. I’ve never done a guy with a corpse looking on. Well, Benny always did like to watch.”

“You won’t be doing me, I will be very much doing you,” he said gravely. She saw he had other scars on his torso, one long slash and one puckered cicatrice that had to be a bullet wound, although it was larger than any she’d seen on any of her other, rougher customers. She wondered why they hadn’t healed like the wound from Benny’s Saturday Night Special. The man spoke to her. “In many respects, this will be the most cruel thing I will ever do to you. I’m sorry, Becky.”

When he was undressed he picked her up, dropped her onto the bed, and without a further word pulled her legs apart and rammed himself into her, causing her to arch upward and howl as a megaton orgasm racked her body. Then it began. She never knew how long it lasted. He took her again and again in every way that a man can take a woman, in and out and in and out, racking her with climax after climax that wrenched and snapped her body back and forth and made her scream like she was on the rack. It wasn’t lovemaking, it was a sexual assault of overpowering ecstasy. When she tried to gasp something out to him once, possibly an endearment, possibly a plea for mercy, he simply said “Do not speak.” Nor did she try to speak again.

When it stopped Becky was lying on her back, staring at the ceiling, drenched in sweat, her body trembling as if every nerve ending was on fire, her mind disoriented and confused. After a time her breathing and her heart rate slowed. She rolled over and he took her into his embrace, allowing her to rest her head on his shoulder. “How did you do that?” she whispered, stunned and overwhelmed. “How could you make me come like that? I don’t come. Not for years. I just don’t.”

“With your customers, no,” he told her in a low rumbling voice.

“With me, yes. Any time I want. I cheated, Becky. You know that when you hold your finger over a candle flame or stroke a cat with your palm, you don’t feel the pain or the soft fur with your fingertips or your skin? Your extremities throughout your body are merely nerve endings. You actually feel these things in your brain when the sensory receptors in your hand report them occurring. The same thing goes for pleasure or pain. My compulsion is not just good for overwhelming and re-imprinting thought processes in tiny minds like Pablo’s. I did not make love to your body, Becky. I manipulated your mind. See?” He delicately twirled one nipple erect with his finger, and she once again writhed in a passionate arabesque as her loins detonated.

 

“Oh God, stop!” she cried desperately. “You’ll kill me!”

“Yes, if I overdo it,” agreed the man. “Sometimes I do so deliberately, and sink my fangs into a woman’s neck at the crescendo when her heart bursts. Strong emotion or sensations of any kind flavors the blood. With us, sex is a kind of bait that we use to lure our prey and hold them fast when we catch them. I may kill you like that, Becky. You need to understand what you are getting yourself into. But do you know why I just did what I did to you?”

“I think so,” she whispered. “I think you did it so I won’t ever want any other man but you.”

“Precisely,” agreed the vampire. “From now on, for the rest of your life, you will compare every man you sleep with to me, and find him wanting. No magic; there is no such thing, at least not in the common conception of eye of newt and tongue of Harry Potter. More Hollywood goat droppings. But the human heart and human memory can be more powerful than any spell, Becky. I have enthralled you, in the old sense of the term. Enslaved you. From now on, for the rest of your life, you will never find another man like me who can do what I just did to you, drive you to the point of madness with the pure sensation of touch and thought and emotion run wild, the glorious awareness that a man is inside you, and that you are thereby fulfilling the function God intended for you, the connection to me, to the act itself, to the earth and the cosmos than comes from sexual joining between man and woman.”

“That doesn’t sound very politically correct,” giggled Becky.

“Reality isn’t. But it’s true. You felt all that you felt just now because I got into your mind and made you feel, made you respond. I caused every one of those orgasms you underwent by stimulating your mind rather than your body. I cheated. I did so in order to make you psychologically dependent on me, to make sure that you will keep my secret, and to make sure that you will not run away from me before I decide what is to be done with you. Unless you are a remarkable young woman indeed, you will not be able to. If you run away or misbehave or disobey me, Becky, I will kill you, and you will never again feel me hold you in my arms and enter your body as I did just now. If you should somehow succeed in escaping from me, the same thing. You will never lie against me naked as you are now, never feel my hands and my lips on your body ever again. Are you ready for that?”

“No!” said Becky, her eyes filling with tears. “Please don’t leave me! I’ll do anything you want. Whatever else you do, don’t go!”

“I won’t,” he promised kissing her head gently. She looked up into his eyes.

“Uh, say, I forgot to ask—what’s your name?”

“My name is Radovan Skoda.”

“Is that your real name?” she asked.

“It is not the name I was born with, no, but it is the name I chose when I joined the army,” he told her. “I decided to hang on to it.”

“You were in Iraq?”

“A bit before that.” he said. “For public consumption, I generally shorten it to Ray Skoda. When we are in public you will call me Ray. When we are in private, you will address me as sir, as master, or as my lord. Because it is true. That is what I will be to you, your lord and master. I hold your fate in my hands, Becky. I alone will decide what will become of you. No one else. Not the police, not the courts, not God, and certainly not a rodent like that,” he concluded, nodding toward the staring dead eyes of Benny Loc.

“When will you decide what becomes of me?” she whispered, fascinated.

“It will take a while. I need to decide if I want to love you. No, I am quite serious. I will explain later, but it’s true. And you must decide whether or not you wish to love me,” he told her. “You may prefer to die.”

Cover Test

Trying to get a good, basic image of the cover off Amazon.

Hmmm....okay, but not very large, is it?

Catch-22

I am starting to get e-mails and FB comments to the effect of, "Well, if you want me to read your vampire novel, Martin, jump through the hoops. Interest me. Woo me, Pique my curiosity..." etc.

Uh, well, yeah ... that's why I'm attempting to create internet "buzz" to begin with, to do that very thing.

It's kind of a Catch-22 situation.  Can't get people to read the book until I get some buzz, generate the buzz until I can get people read the book. Luvverly.

Tiny Type For Tiny Tots From Tinytown

Hi, guys:

Okay, as part of my increasingly frantic efforts to get SOMEBODY, ANYBODY actually to READ even a few words of my book, I have uploaded a sample chapter to Writer's Cafe, with extremely disappointing results technically.

The bloody site will only accept a wretchedly tiny 10-point font type face, or at least if there's a techie secret to getting around that, I haven't found it. If I try to take it up to a readable 14-point or even 12-point type face, it comes out all jumbled. I'm not even sure I want to give the link; I am probably not helping my cause by sending people to a cramped, hard-to-navigate site where they will have to read my work with a magnifying glass or else cut and paste it and move it into their own word processing program so they can kick it up to a type font size they can actually read.

Any suggestions?

Over The Transom

Back In The Day before the internet, back when agents actually tried to get manuscripts in front of editors instead of preventing that very thing, and even before the Big Five (or Two or Three), there used to be an old expression. Manuscripts that an author somehow managed to sneak in front of an editor's eyes, in some cases literally through gaining access to his office by subterfuge and surreptitiously, physically slipping a typescript into the pile on his desk while he was out, were referred to as "coming in over the transom."

I think I may have hit on modern equivalent of a way to slip Give Me The Night over the transom onto the desk of reviewers and people who can create the necessary buzz to get readers curious and actually go to the Amazon or other order page. There are a couple of problems, though. 

This method relies on using the physical book itself, held in the hand, with its neat cover especially designed to catch the eye, and the back jacket blurb to stimulate the interest. This may be why I haven't been able to get more than three or four people actually to read the .pdfs I'm giving away. No purty picters and no blurb on a computer file. It is stashed away out of sight and out of mind, most likely not even on the desktop, but in a folder where the person might remember it by Labor Day (maybe) and might actually click on the mouse and open the file sometime around Thanksgiving (if I'm lucky.)

The first obvious problem is expense: I will run through my remaining free comps from the case of 30 copies I was sent pretty quick and then I'll have to buy more, which even at my author's discount will mount up. 

The second problem is that I will have not only need to choose my "targets" carefully, but then run down a physical mailing address for them, which is increasingly difficult in these times when more and more people hide behind e-mail addresses so as to avoid having to deal with real-world people stuff as much as possible. I get that--this reality really sucks, and the cyber-world is so much more fun and so much easier, dealing with a machine and not a person--but that doesn't do me much good in my quest for the New York Times best seller list. 

Somehow, I have to get people--the right people--to read the goddamned book! If I can just get those pages cracked open, and "Chapter One" in front of people's eyes and not hidden away on a machine or one of a stack of 17 TBR books on a table gathering dust, I'm on my way

Okay, here's the spritz: I mail a physical copy to someone or something with buzz potential, usually a periodical or a web site. An individual name is nice, but often not available since reviewers and buzzmakers A) hide behind e-mail addresses like everybody else, and B) are often physically located nowhere near their "office," which may well be a rented mailbox in a copy shop.

This process will most likely involve a mail room or else some flunky who opens the mail, and who will suddenly find dropping from the envelope into his or her unprepared rooker a real-world paper copy of the finest vampire novel since Dracula. A lot of these will be going to these outfits who write in letters of fire across their web sites: WE DO NOT REVIEW SELF-PUBLISHED FICTION or some other rendition of that old publishing industry classic, It Ain't What Ya Can Do, It's Who Ya Know And How Yez Jumps Through The Hoops In Old New Yawk. (Cue ragtime piano.)

Okay, the book clearly will not be placed on the right desk and in front of the right set of eyes. At least not at first. This is where it gets a little tricky and may fall down.

I am starting with the assumption that these recipients, whoever they are, will still in some inner core of their being be Book People, with enough respect for the printed volume not to simply throw it into the dumpster as "unsolicited, does not meet our godlike requirements, fuck you insolent Irishman, how dare you bring your wretched existence to our exalted notice? We'll show you! We will throw you away, we have the power, BWAHAHAHA and your little dog. too!" 

I am basing this gambit on the theory that this will not happen. I may be wrong on this, and if I am, a lot of copies of GMTN may end up in landfills. That's the risk I take. I am also presuming the recipients will be too cheap to spring for the postage to return the book.

So what I am hoping they will do--what I am gambling that they will do--is after turning the book over in their hands and muttering a few incantations and finding it to be Unclean, they will toss it to some secretary or mail room girl or barista at the Starbucks and say, "Here, Caitlin, you're into vampires, right? Present for you."

(I'm using female gender here because the stereotypical vampire fan is supposed to be a woman, which actually is one of the things I'd like to change, hence a male vampire protagonist in GMTN.)

Anyway, Caitlin from the mail room or data entry will then take it home, be fascinated by the cover and blurb, and I will achieve my ultimate goal. She will actually crack open the pages and read the frigging book. 

She will then take it back to whatever Dalek made the decision and talk it up so much that even the Dalek will become curious and he will Do The Deed, the forbidden dark deed--he will crack open the pages and read the effing book. Then I've got him.

Because yes--it really is that good.