New York City, circa 1958 AD.

"Nineteen fifty-eight..." said the discjockey and Robert knew the voice came from the radio.  He was not completely disillusioned, he knew he'd been asleep, he knew it had been a long amount of time.  In the very first years it was as if he were not even half-asleep; he could hear Niki speaking to him.  She had explained that Troy had also gone to sleep.  She had promised to watch over them.  Niki said she was still getting letters from Louis and the girls.

Faye had written just one letter that Robert remembered well:  You were quite right about these people.  I am sorry that I did not see it as you did.  For ages I have passed for white and felt nothing, but though I am pale these people know, and I feel strange.  Perhaps this is because so many women like our mothers were raped or bought by white men here, just as their mulatto daughters would be.  And I like the thought of being owned about as much as you do.  Once I said to you, 'Loneliness is all we can hope to find in this world.'  Now I write to you, 'There is no real freedom for us in this country.'  Perhaps there is for nobody.  Do not worry, things are not truly bad for me in the city.  Men are gentlemen here, at least in public. Yours, Faye

Louis' letters usually had the quality of fiction. They were always dramatic, action-packed.  He wrote that he was a pirate, and then went on about the "Barbary Coast", the brilliant Portuguese navigators, Russians, foggy nights on the pacific sailing by moonlight.  He wrote often about people he met in San Francisco, the pretty little house he had with a view of the bay.  He wrote about the Chinese, the discriminations they faced, their distrust of Americans.  Louis said there were several old Chinese men whom he had impressed by speaking Mandarin as well as Cantonese.  Some Americans thought him half Chinese because he was so often among them and the green eyes couldn't be explained another way.  Louis would talk about fights he was in almost as much as he went on about the number of poor beautiful girls he was seducing.  He was usually talking about killing, except when he talked about the Chinese. 

Then nearly sixty years of blackness and silence.

After a long while Robert began to wake to the world, entered his half-sleep.  It was Louis' voice, quite close to him, that he first heard.  He knew Louis didn't expect to be heard.  He was speaking to his father in the coffin as one does to a wall, or perhaps as one might speak to their father in a coffin, actually, as if they were dead. 

Some time later Robert became aware of Louis speaking again. He heard his name, knew that Louis was saying he was beginning to sense that Robert was waking.  Louis would return every so often, speak in a low voice of trivial things, say that he loved Robert. 

And then, one night not chosen in particular, Robert woke.  He forced the lid of the coffin up and opened his eyes on darkness.  He was in a closed damp room, the air cool and musty.  Through the darkness Robert saw walls, knew that they were made of concrete blocks, saw a metal door bolted on his side.  There was a marble pedestal there, the sort of thing statues stood upon, but it supported only the weight of a candelabrum and a wine bottle marked with a paper tag that read: "Drink Me."

Troy was there too, sleeping inside a wooden crate.  Robert could half sense him, knew he must be deeply sleeping. 

Robert looked at the trio of candles, they lit.  He smiled in the candlelight, remembering he had taught himself that trick after the second time Lucifer burned him.  He pulled the cork from the bottle, discarded it, smelt of the bottle.  Convinced it was blood and not too old he drank. 

Trains ran overhead; the whole room vibrated.  It did not scare Robert so much as it startled him that he knew it was a train.  He opened the large heavy door then, blinked hard against the brightness of the light. 

A dark figure moved forward against the light, reaching for Robert.  Just as its hands took hold of him Robert saw it was his son.  Louis helped him across the room to a couch, something almost like velvet and grass green. Robert sat back, looking off to the left upon hearing strange voices.  A television. 

"Yes," said Louis, "It's a TV."

Louis picked up Robert's hand, let his own body fall back into the green of the sofa.  He squeezed Robert's hand.  "We're home," he said, "look at this place..."  He twisted to his side, moving up on his knees as he did and whispered into Robert's ear, "I made this place for us, for the family."

"We're underground," Robert said in a sigh.  The couch sat on the floor of an old subway station, several steps down the tile floor gave way to concrete, steel pillars painted black held up the ceiling, beyond that the floor dropped down several feet, rose again on the other side of a channel.  Tunnels ran on either side.  "The station, it's abandoned?"  And then Robert realized he knew of the Subways.

"For years, I'm not sure why.  I have the place mapped out for miles."  Louis rolled his eyes toward the sofa back.

Robert turned, felt Louis breathing down his neck.  "Look, over there," said Louis, "the vault I kept you in, and back there your bedroom, I fixed it up for you, and in that room, books, and through your room, can you see the old revolving gate? More rooms below...those get pretty damp though."  Louis' hand touched Robert's face, turned it so they stared at each other.  Louis laughed. 

Robert bowed his head and got a good look at the clothes.  He touched the rough denim pants. 

"Jeans, Levi's," Louis said, "look behind me."

Robert saw the television again, curtained doorways leading to dim but warm looking rooms.  On the far wall of the room they sat in: a refrigerator, counters, cabinets, a small stove.  There was a telephone on the counter.  Half of what Robert saw he didn't know, but Louis made him understand. 

He kissed Robert then, gave him a taste of blood that made him hungry.  Seventy years, Robert was thinking to himself.  He hadn't taken blood from a body in seventy years. 

Robert forced himself away from Louis.  He shook his head and looked down at the sofa cushions without really seeing them.  "What else have they got?  Do they still live up there?"

Louis only laughed.  He explained everything as best he could.  Twenty years ago he had stopped hearing from Faye and Min, but knew that they were not dead.  Ten years ago Psyche and Splendor had told him they were needed elsewhere, Niki had phoned at the same time and asked Louis to come back to New York to guard his father.  Louis had got bored and begun building the Necropolis, as he called it.  He was going to New York University now, having forged transcripts from secondary schools in California.  He'd forged a driver's license. 

"Cars?  They have cars?" Robert asked.

The excitement was contagious, "I got a Mustang, convertible, it's beautiful, I'll teach you to drive it."  He giggled, "Doesn't really do much good in The City, subway's good for getting most places.  Or if you're very daring, like me, you ride a moped through the tunnels." 

b                  b                  b

Louisss had come to believe himself American, forgotten completely, it seemed, his Father's African ancestors, the German tribes his mother's people had belonged to, he forgot to be Greek or Roman, even his illusion of being a Frenchman, it was broken.  He went about with varsity jacket and class ring on, rolled jeans, brightly colored button-down cotton shirts open atop snug tees.  Loafers or sneakers on his feet. 

Robert wore things like jeans and tee shirts as well, remembered the first time he'd slipped his legs into a pair of Levi's and buttoned them up.  "They don't hurt at all," he said, surprised that the strange pants didn't itch or chafe the legs. 

But Robert never became a jock; he fell in with the beatniks.  Giving up a well-worn pair of jeans for black leggings every so often, wearing dark shades at all times of the day, beret tilted just so over the right eye, sitting with girls who painted their eyes as if they imagined themselves Cleopatra, pretending to sip iced coffee. 

It only amused Louis, "Should have taken you to San Francisco, the scene here is nothing compared to the one there, daddy."  And he'd lie stretched out on the couch sketching Human figures onto smooth heavy stock paper.  Louis was going to be, at least for a while, a cartoonist.  And Robert would sit perched atop the fragile television reciting a new poem, or maybe it was a thousand years old and newly translated.  Whatever the case it was full of angst and existentialism. 

Robert noticed, and found impossible to ignore, the fact that Americans saw everyone as being a color.  He hadn't faded to beige or honey as Louis and Faye had, his skin was still a dark shade of gold.  He'd never felt more out of place before, the blacks on the streets all seeming to be darker, the whites inevitably more pale.  Being Nephillim Spawn made it even harder to live with, he'd walk into a store, feel the stares, catch the thoughts from behind all those eyes. Many thought him, "one of those poor biracial children" while others told themselves he was white, and believed they were doing him a favor by thinking it.  On sight everyone's first thought was to place a color on him.  It made him sick.

And knowing the truth was that his father had been white only made him feel worse living in America where The Man was still taking advantage of the colored women, or so he heard it said. 

The sixties did not make things better like they were supposed to.  It was as if some wonderful future had been planned for America but they only had a narrow window of opportunity there in which to act and ensure it's continuance, and instead of grabbing hold of the future American's panicked, and murdered.  It bothered Louis extremely, the boy Vampyre who had only recently made new friends and told them he was black.  He wanted to hit the assassins.  

"It reeks of conspiracy, all the murders, a plot to change this country's future, to gain control.  There's no way for vengeance, no way to kill everyone a little bit responsible.  To do that you'd have to kill fear, because that's what made them do it."

"Don't they want to make America a better place to live?  Don't they want us all to have equal rights?"

"No."                         

Louis was crushed by the truth; he'd lived a long time blind to this one: that all Humans do not want to work to enable the whole of their race to evolve.  He understood their greed and need for submission or else dominance, but he never understood the real horror, the complacency and mediocrity that had set into the race over time.  Humans had missed a rung on the ladder to heaven, failed to open the window, and now they'd fallen backward just a step, and didn't care to go on again.  Murders and rapes committed daily were nothing compared to this true horror.

"Why don't people do something about it?" Louis would shout.  He didn't like the war, the assassinations, the slow dominance of power by the corporations.  He knew that not everyone had become complacent, not yet, because he went to all the protests and marches with them.  But it was so few.  "Ya know, it must be the Aliens, Man, been plotting all this for twenty years now...bet your Angels had something to do with it!"

Robert would answer only with bemused expression.

And eventually Louis gave up, like so many others.  Took to hanging out with Pop Artists and drinking blood tainted by hallucinogens.  Staggering about SoHo just minutes before dawn until Robert came in one of their cars and picked him up.

Perhaps if more voices had spoken out then, things might have taken a turn back to the better. As it happened the voices that did speak out were crushed, they forgot their ideals, raised children in the seventies, and got angry when their brilliant kids couldn't hack it in the public school system.  Instead of speaking out against the school system, they gave their children complexes, drove them to listen to doomy music during the eighties.

Robert was really hating America.  He liked the idea of the country, the scenery, a lot of the people, but the system running the country just didn't work.  America was a broken machine no amount of oil would fix.  America needed replacing.

Robert went back to England during the Seventies.  With Robert gone Louis ran back to San Francisco. 

b                  b                  b

Punk erupted in England a few years after Robert arrived there, taking their cues from New York bands and clever london merchandisers.  He liked the attitude of the punks, their anger and willingness to overthrow.  But he wished that they knew how to play their instruments.  He wished they would play melodies consisting of more than two notes, wished they would find a new chord.  He didn't join up with any of the punk groups.  Partly it was not wanting to be taken advantage of by a big record company looking to latch onto the latest craze.  Partly it was that he was older, less white than the punks; saw hypocrisy in denouncing the monarchy and mediocrity while living on the dole and shooting up heroin. 

It was the music that came in on punk's skirt ends that he really felt an affinity with, that nameless music that would spawn Eighties Pop.  They'd try to call it, new wave, alternative, post modern, post punk, mope rock, death rock.  When you excluded the more jangly popish songs the name Gothic stuck very well.  And those jangly songs the same groups had done?  No one ever knew what to make of those.  Some wrote it off as the songwriter being in too good a mood one day to write worth shit.  As long as you hated your family and kept breaking up with whatever lovers you had, you could make brilliant Gothic music, but if you got too happy, they tended to call you a sell out, for you'd certainly get all the way to number two on the Pop Chart.

Robert liked the scene around the music more than the actual music, the dark romance and affected existentialism.  Children dressed in funereal black sometimes a white shroud thrown overhead if they were really into it.  Moon-pale face, caked with make-up if your pallor wasn't natural, blood-red lips, eyes circled and smudged with black, children with faces like skulls with bloody mouths.  The Vampyre look made something more than it really was.  And hair teased or crimped into all manner of stacks and waves.  Gothics all the dark reflection of the Old French Court. 

There was no denying the Vampyre comparisons in this century.  Even many involved in the occult did not rightly know what the Nephillim were.  They theorized that they symbolized ancient astronauts or dinosaurs.  Their myths were all told in the form of Science Fiction or Horror.  Robert understood that from the moment he had lifted the lid of the coffin he had accepted the label Vampyre.   

In public Robert gelled his hair up above his head, twisted at the forelocks till they clumped just so over his right eyes, cringed at his reflection when he first saw how the Gothics were resembling Lucifer.  The Gothics very much resembled those 333 dead children who had washed ashore the beaches of Italy, all that was left of the Children's Crusade. 

Tall lanky boys playing bass guitar so that it sounded like the beating of a heart, and girls singing shrilly, fans blasting overhead, dry ice fog pooling out across the floor, everything echoing as if inside a tomb.  This was the scene. 

Insightful angst ridden youths who read Nietzsche and Camus, boys who looked like Nicolas and his honorguard of all those years ago in pointy-toed black leather boots, girls with blank stares like those in mourning who always picked the most heart-wrenching songs as their favorite then totally abandoned themselves to kissing as if their life depended on it.  Robert liked them all.

He said to them, "Yes, I am a Vampyre, my blood isn't the blood of those Old World renevants, it's much older, from Egypt."  And at the mention of Egypt eyes grew impossibly wider, mysterious curses, the after life, women in translucent dresses painted on tomb walls, death masks of gold, the Uadjet eye of Ra.  They liked the ankh Robert wore about his neck, asked if he wouldn't rather have one in silver. 

When he gave in and wore it, the white paint on his face always ended at the jawline, artfully resembling a mask, he could take it off any time; he wasn't making a life out of this stuff.  Robert thought it sad that some of the children would die before they'd grow up.  But he understood their reasons.  Life in the modern world was simply unbearable, they'd been fed illusions of freedom and privilege, and seen them broken like a glass mirror. 

It had been different in the past, because children had known from a young age that life was to be hard. There were no illusions presented to later be shattered.  These children he dwelled among had been fed many illusions.

Robert was never at want for blood or warm bodies who wanted to die.  At times the memory of sending Zerachiel away from him was almost clear.  Sometimes he'd pass a mirror and see a pair of pearl black eyes, wish it were her, know that it wasn't her, and yet know that it was not himself.  Someone else out there watched him, pale as Death, black eyed, black haired, girlish, wide black-lipped smile flashing for an instant.  A Faerie. 

He was seeing all sorts of odd things since Zerachiel had breathed upon his eyes.

The threats of Lucifer, seemed like something that had happened in a dream.  This century seemed another world, the rate of invention here faster, the rate of information transfer.  They had rocket ships and computers, they were as advanced, technologically, as the Angels had been when they first came to this planet.  But they were scattered about the planet speaking different languages, warring with each other. 

The tower of Babel, his own kind had built it, and when the Nephillim had been defeated their Humans had scattered. 

Someone ought to unite the Humans, this was what Robert thought. 

But he didn't try.  He went through his life making acquaintances of Gothic children, living with them and off them.  He played guitar in several different groups, never found a gig where they would let him write.  He'd sit in clubs listening to pre-recorded music, the speakers seeping doom throughout.  It seemed to him Gothics who were really into the scene were quite androgynous, in dress if not in practice.  It was the boys everyone called beautiful, the girls surviving as future skate betties would, only to admire the talent of the pretty young men.  These boys could dance, could entrance you with the arc of a ghost white hand, a well-placed step of one long black-sheathed leg.  They looked like spirits, like shaman, ancient priests of some wandering tribe.  Robert saw what had been handed down through the Celtic blood.  Writhing and twisting through the smoke, skirts swaying, eyes closed, head tilted back, neck exposed, a dance of offering to watching Vampyres.

Robert himself excelled at the dance. 

True, every once in a while one would come across a girl who could mesmerize the audience just as well, but they were rare creatures, often calling themselves by romantic masculine names.  

In bed surrounded by candlelight and the scent of opium the children moved as they did on dance floors, make up smearing into make up, taking out the cheap red lipstick to draw on their partner's bodies, trembling with fear and anticipation, the music driving them on.  "I will never fall out of love with these children," Robert told himself.  They worshipped, or respected at least, Death as much as he did.

b                  b                  b

It was 1985.  Louis was in San Francisco killing homosexuals, Faye and Min had woken suddenly, Niki was back and in New York, asking Robert to come back to America. Robert said goodbye to his friends. Gothic was dying as a trend, the real Gothics were all underground.  And he caught a plane to New York. 

Niki was at the Necropolis, it still remained undiscovered.  She was sitting on the worn out green sofa reading an old paperback, something like a small pair of gloves on the cover.  She was laughing.  "Oh, this has got to be the most ingenious and inspired thing since Dracula."  Robert took her to mean it was a book about vampires.

She let him read it on the plane.  Robert decided right then, "I will be Anne Rice's fan."

Louis owned several houses around San Francisco and one up in the canyons.  In all the Human crowd there was no clear way to tell which he would be at.  So Niki and Robert decided to walk about the Castro just looking for him. 

"Anne lives on Seventeenth," Niki said.

"How do you—?" And then Robert had to remind himself that the boyish creature beside him with rose and indigo eyeshadow streaked at the temples was an Angel.  He saw her looking at him, mischievous smile.  "Nah," he said, "I like her too much."  He was not in the mood to play Let's Drive Anne Mad.

So they kept walking.

Niki led the way into a crowded bar.  Robert thought everyone in San Francisco looked strange, couldn't tell if it was supposed to be a gay bar or a vampire bar or something he'd yet to discover.  Niki looked almost at home amid the streaked hair and flashy clothes.  Robert went to the bar and asked if they had a Kirin, they had.  How trendy, he thought. 

Robert smiled at the man beside him, "Hey, I'm looking for someone, do you happen to come here often?"

He looked suspicious.  "Sometimes."

"I'm looking for my son, maybe you've seen him around.  He's really unusual looking—"

"Try, everyone."

"Listen, he's French-Egyptian, gold skin, big emerald green eyes slanted a bit, black hair."

"Wait...he's about six foot, slim, broad shouldered?"

"That could be him," Robert said.

"And really green eyes you say?"

"Yes."

Robert watched the man turn to the bartender, "Hey, that kid, you know, not-Louis, what's his name?"

"Trent," said the bartender.

Robert looked past the barkeep's eyes into his head.  "Yeah, Trent, he's my son.  Have you seen him around?"

"He's your son?" Asked the bartender.

"That's what I said.  You know where I can find him?"

It was the man beside him that spoke up again.  "He comes in here a lot.  I wouldn't know where to look for him."

"I guess I'll wait around," Robert said, "if you see him first—"

"I'll tell him his daddy's looking for him," laughed the still suspicious man.

Robert just nodded and took his bottle of Japanese beer over to a small table where Niki sat.  "Maybe you shouldn't have said he was your son," she laughed.

"Why?"

"Looked in a mirror recently?  The blood could knock ten years off anyone's age, you know, as far as wrinkles and fat.  You look like a kid yourself, especially with the black shit around your eyes, and that hair!"

"I like the hair," Robert said twisting the lock over his right eye.

Niki shook her head.  "How long are you going to do this look?  You look like that guy on MTV, you know that annoying song, yesterday I got so old I felt like I could die Yesterday I got so old It made me want to cry."

"MTV?" Asked Robert, "That like Top of the Pops?"

Niki just laughed. 

b                  b                  b

Louis came into the bar quite late at night with a pretty Chinese boy.  Something made him look at Robert.  He didn't look altogether happy.  His eyes quizzed as if to say, "What the Hell are you doing here?"

He saw that the bartender was telling Louis someone was looking for him.  Louis said something like, "He's not my father."  And then he and the boy came over to the table.  "I told you I didn't want to see you again," Louis said.

Robert tried to look upset.  He took in a breath slowly, stood up.  He put all his weight back on one leg and glared at the boy next to Louis.  "That's not how I remember it."

"What's this, that's not how I remember it?"

"You didn't tell me nothing like that.  I'm your man, who is this?"

"Jon."

"Jon?  He doesn't look like much to me.  You're a stupid slut, Tren'," Robert said.

"Well let me tell you somethin, hon, Jon treats me a whole lot better than you, we all know how cheap the black boys are."

"Whore!" Robert said, almost shouted. Niki took his arm, pulled him toward the door.  Niki pulled him from the bar.  Robert smiled to himself as they turned the corner. He lay back against the brick and turned his head to look at Niki.  "He coming yet?"

Niki turned the corner, looked surprised.  "Yes."

Louis skipped up to them, the boy still with him.  He gave Robert a kiss.  Stood laughing. 

"When did you learn that?" Robert asked.

"What?"

"That, to give attitude like a faggot."

"A while ago.  When did you learn to say stuff like, 'Didn't tell me nothin,' huh?"

Robert smiled, "Riding the Subway."

Louis was smiling, "Could you always read like that?"

"We did explain to you about Faye and Min's father, didn't we?  Afraid we originated much of what is shady and fierce long before you were born, Dear; just cause you dressed like a fop doesn't mean you know something I don't."

"And all this time I thought it was your name because you were ghost-like and not because you threw it on everyone so viciously," Louis said sharply then laughed.

b                  b                  b

They stayed in San Francisco almost a family.  Robert and Louis lived in Louis' pretty Victorian in the Castro and rented out two of the rooms.  Niki came and went as she pleased, as did Splendor and Psyche.  Faye and Min lived in the Haight, sometimes renting rooms sometimes sleeping in abandoned buildings, always walking about in second hand clothing.  Even Louis didn't know if they bought the clothing or stole it off their victims.

The two men who rented the rooms were both gay, both paranoid they would lose their jobs if their employers knew.  One wouldn't even tell his family living back in some mid western state.  And yet nights they would go out to a bar, or disco, or even a bathhouse (before they had all been closed of course) and pick up men. 

Robert had no real understanding of their life, that "life in the closet."  Whenever he'd had a lover in his life, be they male or female, he'd never made it secret to people who knew him.  Of course if people chose to ignore what they saw, he hadn't complained out of some ill conceived pride.  There were times and places where one could be hanged just for being homosexual. 

And so Robert never really felt at home in San Francisco, the Castro especially.  He thought the city beautiful, like Rome in that it was built on seven hills near the sea and had dark narrow streets and houses with red roof tiles, the freeways all reminded him of aqueducts...it had absolutely nothing to do with baths surrounded by Corinthian columns.  But Robert had never loved Rome either.

Perhaps it was just that it did remind him of Rome and that one man in a purple toga is impressive while many are a bore. 

It was only for Louis that he stayed.  His son's habit's worried him. He had become something of a serial killer, pursuing the same type of victim night after night, the type being homosexuals.  Robert didn't understand it, especially after the letters in which Louis had explained he could not kill Chinese people nightly because he was friends with Chinese people.  So Robert had to ask himself, was Louis not truly friends with the gay men he was spending time with, or did he not believe that homosexuals would see themselves as a community in such a way that if several were attacked the rest would unite to defend themselves? 

Robert saw that they did not all see themselves as a community then.  And he thought it would be to their advantage to do so.  He knew that many of them really were discriminated against in many American cities.  If only something brought them together, they might work toward winning those rights.  They might prevent those growing up from going through the same troubles they had.

Louis thought nothing of this theory.  But Faye and Min happened to disagree.  Min said that being gay was not like being white or black, people could not tell by looking at you.  And so she thought as they were deviant, were the minority, they might as well keep their sexuality secret, and they would avoid the pain of discrimination.  Faye, as usual, agreed with her sister, though she added that Robert, saying these things, may as well ask them to come out of the closet as vampires.  What then?  Wait for the stakes in the heart?  All modern people had very clear ideas about their kind.  They would not hesitate to channel their fears into aggression.

"All modern people think garlic will drive us away," Robert laughed at her.  But he saw her point.  He did not want everyone to know he was a Vampyre.  Phillip had gone mad, knowing.  And his gothic friends had only half believed him.  It certainly was convenient to pretend he was Human.  

At the house Louis and Robert's bedroom became something of a salon, it was the only room that Louis had taken care in furnishing.  And so several of them might lounge on the bed together, five if Jon was about.  It seemed for a certain number of months Min had a girlfriend and brought her by a few times.  Robert was impressed that the same girl was with Min and still alive.

In more of their conversations Faye would say that San Francisco was nothing like Rome, that it was very much like Paris.  And then Louis would say something about the city having a certain amount of citiness about it just as all cities did and the rest was made up of corruption, it was that essence that made one think the cities similar.  Robert was impressed that Louis had read The Allegory of the Cave and remembered it. 

 Despite the constant racial tension that was inherent in New York Robert rather liked it better. He was tired of the West Coast, much too sunny. And he'd grown used to the New York brand of dirt, the smell of its air.  He thought that in Gotham one expects to see things such as Vampyres while in California when the sun goes down everyone is a freak.  And so Robert left while still on good terms with Louis and went back east with Niki.

Faye and Min left soon afterward, going back to New Orleans which was the only city in America they really knew, the only city they felt comfortable in.  In New Orleans Vampyres are the only things that don't eventually decay in the sunshine.  (Though all the modern people happened to think vampires did decay in the sunshine.)

Jon had been sick with something when Robert had left.  On the phone Louis would say he was getting worse.  Once he called and said in a whisper, "I think Jon's got that weird new cancer."  It was a year later that Jon died, of a previously rare cancer, because AIDS had already destroyed his immune system. 

When Robert called Louis he sounded more depressed than Robert had ever heard.  He even cried.  All his friends were dying before he could kill them, "It just isn't fair!" 

Robert muted the phone as he laughed.  Of course he felt bad knowing Louis felt bad, but it was such a ridiculously inhuman thing to say life is unfair because people die before you can kill them. 

"You muted the phone, didn't you, I didn't hear a thing.  You were laughing at me!"  Louis rung off and wouldn't answer his phone.

Robert thought it a bit strange Louis had not got so depressed during past plagues.  And then he thought perhaps Louis had, and he hadn't noticed. 

b                  b                  b

Louis began making phone calls to Robert from different cities around the country about a year after their last falling out. Robert would have been glad to hear from him if Louis had not sounded so messed up.  He was feeding on junkies and urchins, people he met along highways who wouldn't be missed.  The drugs in the blood left him disoriented after he fed, as they wouldn't if he tried taking them himself. 

Phone conversations started falling into two categories then.  First came a frantic call, "He want's me, he's always here," Louis would say.  Absolutely in panic he would be whimpering to himself on the other end of the line.  Robert would guess he meant Lucifer.  It shocked him that Lucifer should bother with them anymore.  Not too many people seemed to care about religion anymore.

Louis would speak rapidly into the phone, sometimes becoming unintelligible, "He calls me his toy, the devil, he wants me, he wants to fuck me!"

"Feeding on drug addicts?" Robert would ask.

"I don't know," Louis would answer, which meant he was.

"Is Psyche with you?"

A long pause, then, "Yeah."

"Are you OK?  Do you want me to come bring you to New York?"

"I'm fine!" He would shout.  Then Robert would really worry.

Louis would call again, sometimes the same day, other times after several weeks had passed.  He'd announce the name of the city he was in as if he thought his father had ever had any notion of the geography of the US.  His voice very low, dreamy, he would say, "I found the dream."

"Are you tripping?"

A hiss.  "Maybe it's a nightmare.  It's a deliciously evil dream."

"What are you taking about, where the hell is Phoenix anyway?" Robert would ask. 

"The killing dream."  Long pause.  "Masochists.  I never...noticed...these people in SF.  Hiding from me in these places, wanting me."

"Shit, Louis what are you doing to them?"

"Draining their blood of course," he laughed.  Momentary lapse into lucidity, "Psyche likes to watch.  They want the pain. It's the killing dream, I tell you.  They want it like blood."

And then he'd fall back into near mindlessness.  "Fuck art, I should have killed Andy for getting you started on tainted blood!"

Giggles.  "It wasn't Andy, really.  I was doing stuff long before...anyone...these American drugs...make you really see things."

He'd just walk away from the phone, leaving Robert to pay for a long distance collect call that lasted hours until Robert could explain the problem to an operator or someone hung up the phone.

Of course he'd call again when he was in a new place. He'd sob some story about meeting Lucifer, hating his touch.  He couldn't give up his killing, or the drugs.  He was giving drugs to his victims in order to get an added high later.  "I'm in the papers here," he'd say, begin reading, "Vampyre Murder in Memphis...victims found drained of blood...bound with leather handcuffs...motel..."

And then the nineties came.

b                  b                  b

Niki said to Robert as he lay on that old green sofa watching MTV, "Let's drive someone mad, like we used to."  And Robert was bored, and so not entirely against the idea.  He only wanted to know whom.

Between themselves they made a short list of names.  Niki said Robert Smith was bad enough off as it was.  Robert said Anne Rice was getting a bit old, and if she went mad he couldn't read any more of her stories.  Niki absolutely refused to bother with Neil Gaiman.  Robert wasn't interested in the President, though the risk of attacking someone high profile interested him.  Neither really wanted to deal with Jim Baker.  So Niki threw the paper at Robert, the Daily News.  Right there on the cover was Steven Jewel, billionaire rumored to be negotiating to buy the Metro Transit system from New York City.  "Him!" Said Robert placing his finger on the many black dots on newsprint that made up Steven Jewel's nose.

And so Niki and Robert planned their attack.     

b                  b                  b

Robert found where Steven lived, in one of two penthouses in the Jewel building in Midtown, which he owned.  He watched the building, watched Steven.  He was a good looking man, just tall enough to be of average height, in his mid-thirties probably, brown hair kept short but for a bit at the front which lay neatly on his brow, small deep set but very bright blue eyes, one of those classically masculine faces complete with sexy movie-starish smile, and of course he was always well dressed.  Steven wore a lot of blue, Robert admired that; it was his favorite color.  And he didn't keep a regular work schedule, he came home at a different hour almost every day, in a limo always driven by the same young black man, left his house again at eight in the morning.  He dated sometimes, on the weekend he often brought a woman home with him, for drinks at least if she wasn't going to get in bed with him. 

If you sat up on the roof of the building cattycorner from the Jewel building you had a pretty good view into two of Steven's windows, one being the large plate glass wall facing East and Fifth Avenue.  Robert was disappointed seeing Steven take women to bed; he'd been interested in Steven himself actually.  Steven wasn't the pretty boy type that Robert might usually go for, but the watching him from afar lent him a movie star glamour.  Watching Steven moving slowly over different women tripped Robert right back to the time Niki had been a young girl called Lily and he had watched her make love to Star, his future lover. 

One night looking into the darkened windows waiting for Steven to come home Robert decided he'd go over, it was time they met.  He walked past the doorman, smiling, armed with the thought that he belonged.  Past the desk clerk, the guard walking the lobby. He took the elevator up to the 33rd floor, got off, stood a moment recalling the turns he made, figured which door faced east, opened the lock with half a thought. 

Steven was in need of a decorator, everything was beige, cream and white, hints of blue and black, everything modern, furniture positioned to discourage conversation.  The large main room continued to the glass, stairs led to a second floor on the right, everything open to the floor below, doors on the left led to secluded rooms.  Somewhere in the jumble of the main room was a kitchen.  Robert found Steven's bedroom behind one of the doors and lay down in his loosely made bed. 

Steven came home, got a drink, and came into the bedroom.  The drink smelled like it was scotch.  They had a conversation, flirtatious, aggressive; Steven threatened to have Robert thrown out.  Robert lit a cigarette and waited.  The guard came up into the penthouse.  Robert bowed and then he jumped from the window.

He hit the ground softly, landing on his feet, sprung up and turned to look up at the window.  He waved at Steven and the guard as they gaped down at him. 

Then Robert really began to play with Steven.  Days he spent half asleep in the Necropolis, Niki lounging beside him in bed.  Nights he visited Steven, always evading answering anything truthfully, often dragging Steven out of bed to go to a bar.  Robert liked bars, liked the way Steven didn't fight but came along with him. 

Steven would drink scotch, or wine if that's what Robert bought for him.  He'd give half a smile to passers by, ask if they weren't in a gay bar.  Robert always laughed.  They weren't.  He might try arguing with Steven, but Steven never fought, he just gave in, dropped it.  Steven said arguing with people made him feel as if they were a couple.  Maybe his parents had fought a lot when he was younger. 

And Steven was famous of course.  It wasn't days before gossip columnists had noticed Steven Jewel had taken up with a strange new companion.  Everyone knew his habits, the way he'd date one woman no more than a handful of times, and rarely exclusively.  They knew he rarely could be lured out to a social event that wasn't for charity.  And here he was going out to small hole-in-the-wall bars and trendy dance clubs with a devastatingly handsome young light-skinned black man whom no one in New York who counted knew.

Tabloids named him the Mystery Companion.  Anytime they stepped out of a club it seemed the poparazzi were all there.  Flashes would go off, cameras click in fast succession, Robert would shield his eyes.

One day, secretly suffering in the sun, Robert moved into Steven's house.  Everyone in the lobby saw the trunks go up in the elevator but no one really seemed to know who Robert was, or that he really was supposed to be there.  They just found themselves allowing him to do as he pleased. 

Once Robert was living with Steven reporters searched madly for his identity.  Some just made stories up.  One tabloid said Robert was a vampire, put the headline "Vampire Companion" on the front page in 40 point black letters and made inferences to the large trunks that had been seen coming into the building.   The same week a competitor published a story in which the mystery companion was a rich Arab prince.  Someone else said that he was a descendant of a hermaphrodite pharaoh and brought up in London where he had been in a famous punk band. 

Robert found Steven's household cache of money.  He went shopping, new clothes, piles of deluxe edition comic books, horror novels, vegetarian cookbooks.  He called Steven at work one night and said he'd fixed dinner.  Steven rushed home to him afraid the house would be on fire.

And then Niki introduced herself to Steven as he was eating lunch with his friend and attorney, Chance Everett, in a very nice restaurant.  Both men were taken with her.  Steven felt something like to stomach sickness as he looked at her, and yet he knew it wasn't revulsion.

Robert walked into Steven's bedroom as he was fucking Niki.  He sat up in their bed and watched.  Steven flushed red, came.  Niki wandered off into the bathroom.  Robert sat smoking and looking down at Steven, who was naked, and asked what name the woman had given him. 

Steven half believed Robert was a vampire.  Robert let him believe it; in fact he subtly encouraged him with hints toward blood and a long history. 

And then Louis showed up.  Robert hadn't even hoped to see Louis, thought he'd surely fallen into a stupor and went underground, or been captured by Humans.  And the call came from the front desk, "Louis Shade to see you."  Steven turned slowly and looked from Niki to Robert.  Robert had jumped from his seat and rushed toward Steven, saying it was his son. 

"Your son?  How old could he be?" Steven asked.

"Oh, I don't know, he looked about sixteen when I last saw him, but that was a long time ago," Robert said.

As they awaited Louis, Steven dared to ask what it was Louis did.  "Oh, he's a serial killer," Robert said with a careless wave of one hand.

Steven found it suddenly difficult to breathe, like all the oxygen had been sucked from the room.  He collapsed on the cream-colored couch. 

Louis came in, Psyche behind him.  He and Robert kissed as lovers do.  He gazed at Steven.  Steven shrank back into the couch.  "Relax, Steven, you're not his type," Robert said. 

Louis smiled. 

The tabloids said that Steven had bought for his mysterious companion number one a huge diamond engagement ring.  Robert confessed to Louis it would have been a terribly romantic gesture if the story had been true. 

Steven left the house for work one day.  Niki went out when Robert and Louis slept.  Neither came back for three days.  Robert and Louis debated the reason. 

When they returned together Niki was not only sporting a huge diamond ring but a gold band.  "We got married!" Steven said.

They'd agree to drive Steven mad, not that Niki would marry him.  "To her?" Robert asked callously.

"Who else could he want, Honey?" Niki asked and strutted to the bedroom. 

The change in plan pleased Louis.  He left a pair of handcuffs beside the bed.  Then he lay in Robert's room and waited.

In the bedroom Robert sat in the window, Psyche stood in the shadows of the closet, and Niki lay in bed with her husband, picked up the cuffs and said, "You want me to tie you up."

Steven went into a panic.  Niki had the cuffs around his right hand and the headboard; she was sitting on him. Steven started screaming.  The screams brought Louis in.  He had a knife in his hand, a disturbing gleam in his eyes.  Robert left the window and held Louis' wrist so he could not use the knife. 

They fought over Steven then, Louis, Robert and Niki. 

Niki won.  Robert backed off as long as Steven wasn't going to be hurt.  Louis huffed and left the house. 

Niki smiled and said, "You're raving Steven, I hope you're not going mad.  If you went mad I should have to have you judged incompetent, and then I would be left to manage your estate all by myself...all that money."