UNQUENCHABLE
by
David Dvorkin
I
Venneman
Chapter One
Richard Venneman, former vampire, wept in frustration. His prey had eluded him.
He stood on a street corner, shivering in the cold night air while tears ran down his cheeks, overwhelmed by what he had become.
It was seeing Jill again, he thought. Watching her on the hunt, watching her bewitch her prey and draw it into the dark. It was that instant of hearing and tasting blood again that had done it, that had made him forget what he now was.
It must have been an illusion, that momentary contact with the blood of Jill's victim. But it had seemed so real!
Just a memory, he told himself. You weren't hearing the boy's blood, you were remembering how it sounded when you could still hear it. You were remembering the taste, the electric flow of your victims' life energy into you. You were remembering what you yearn to experience again.
He stood in the cold, dark street and concentrated, but he couldn't bring the experience back. It was already a fading memory.
Nor could he feel Jill or her vampire companion. He had no idea where they were. The dark was his enemy, as it always had been during his human years. It concealed his prey from him.
Venneman remembered Jill's hunting style from the one time he had stalked with her. She and Hapgood would not have taken the young man very far - only far enough from the busy sidewalks to be safe from discovery while they drained his life. If the boy cries out, and if I'm close enough, Venneman thought, I might be able to hear him. If I walk around the neighboring streets, I might happen to be in the right place at the right time.
The odds weren't too good. It must already be half an hour since Jill and Hapgood had left the restaurant with the entranced young man. By now, the boy might be well past being able to cry out.
Venneman's wounded side began to ache in the cold.
So much for walking around at night, he thought.
He was in no condition to search the streets. And what if he did happen to find Jill and Hapgood by sheer chance? In the restaurant, Jill had reacted to him with fear and she had dragged Hapgood away. But the second time, she might overcome her fear and attack him. If she did, Venneman was in no shape to defend himself.
Not that I ever was in shape to defend myself against a vampire in my human days, he thought. My first human days.
He had been healthy and strong when he'd met Elizabeth Vallé, and she had found him easy prey. Not that he had resisted in the slightest when Elizabeth seduced and killed him. There would be that much difference now. Jill would kill him without any seduction, without any hint of sex. It would be pure vengeance on her part, pure agony on his - pure agony and real death.
No, it wasn't Jill Kennedy he needed, but Henry Hapgood. The man had been interested in something other than Venneman's blood. That had been clear enough in the way he had looked at Venneman. Hapgood might be willing to give Venneman what he needed.
But that only meant that Venneman must find Hapgood, and moreover must find him when he was alone, when he was apart from Jill. The nature of the problem had changed, but its difficulty had not been diminished.
Venneman went back to his car. It was marginally warmer inside the car than outside, and he had a sweater on the back seat. He put the sweater on and sat behind the wheel for a while trying to think of some promising plan, while the remaining heat left the car and the cold seeped in. He wrapped his arms around himself, trying to hold his body warmth in, trying to keep the wound in his side from hurting so much or from reopening.
The ache in his side grew steadily, making him forget the cold. The unhealing wound had ceased to hurt for a few minutes in the restaurant. The pain had disappeared, he remembered, when he caught sight of Jill and Hapgood. Now it was back with a vengeance, as though it were making up for lost time.
I can't just wander around the streets looking for him, Venneman thought. I'm just as likely to find an ordinary mortal mugger as I am to find a vampire. Probably more likely! The shape I'm in now, I could get myself killed. And if I did find a vampire, it might be some other vampire - Jill instead of Henry Hapgood, or someone else entirely. Which would also mean agonizing death.
How likely was he to find another vampire, though? He had no idea. He had no way of knowing how many vampires there were in the world, let alone in this city. He watched the crowds passing by on the sidewalk beside his car, and he could not even guess how many of them were normal humans and how many were something else.
He couldn't tell vampires from human beings by simply looking at them. Outwardly, vampires looked like human beings. Venneman knew from experience that humans were simultaneously fascinated and frightened by vampires, but they didn't know what it was that both drew them to the creatures and repelled them. Other vampires were apparently able to recognize each other instantly in some way that had nothing to do with the normal five human senses. Or so Venneman had been told. Even when he was a vampire, Venneman had lacked that ability.
Jill had once told him that that was symptomatic of his detachment from all life, of his essential juicelessness.
He knew how much truth there was to her accusation. In the old horror movies Venneman had loved to watch, vampires cast no shadow and had no reflection in mirrors. They were soulless and insubstantial creatures, their only solidity lying in their terrible ability to suck blood and life from human beings. But the vampires Venneman knew - himself, Elizabeth Vallé, Jill Kennedy, Karen Belmont - had more solidity and presence than any human being. They were filled with life and energy, especially after feeding. It was Venneman, after his reduction to human form, who was insubstantial and lacking in solidity. He thought of himself as a shadow, moving through the world but not affecting it, ignored by his fellow human beings, unable to touch them in any sense. If he remained a human, he sometimes thought, he would fade away long before his natural death.
Venneman wanted that vampire strength back. He wanted the immortality and instant healing of wounds. He wanted the enhanced senses. He wanted the vividness and sense of being alive. He wanted the delights of the blood.
Once, Richard Venneman had been a religious man. After his envamping by Elizabeth, he had ceased to pray, for he had considered himself cut off from God and Heaven. He had been a creature of night and nightmare, a tool of the Devil. Now that he was once again human, Venneman prayed only that he would become a vampire again.
Let me find a vampire to grant me that blessing once more, he prayed to a God who seemed ever vaguer and harder to picture in his mind's eye. Let me enter that state of grace again, O Lord, and I won't waste it or flee from it. Not this time.
Prayer seemed ever sillier, though. Hadn't it always been? Venneman could not point to a time in his life, an event, when it had worked for him.
Right now, Venneman had to face a very practical, worldly problem: lack of money. He had started the evening with twenty-five dollars, and he had spent most of that in the restaurant where he had seen Jill with Henry Hapgood. If he was to keep searching for Henry Hapgood, then he needed food and a place to spend the nights.
No, he corrected himself. I need a place to spend the days. I have to adopt a vampire lifestyle. If I'm to find them, if I'm going to go hunting vampires, then I have to be out and about when they are.
But what if I pull it off? he asked himself. Suppose I find some way of making money, enough to support myself, and then I manage to arrange things so that I can hunt the city at night looking for Henry Hapgood.
And suppose I find him.
What then?
Elizabeth Vallé had envamped Venneman by seducing him first and tearing into his neck and feeding on him at the moment of mutual orgasm. Later, he had done the same to Jill Kennedy. Too late, Venneman had learned of the strange combined power of sex and blood. A vampire's victims become vampires themselves only if the vampire drinks their blood while having sex with them and while both achieve orgasm. Otherwise, if the vampire simply feeds, the victim dies without resurrection.
So by searching for Henry Hapgood in order to be made into a vampire by him, Venneman was really searching for Henry Hapgood in order to have sex with him.
Sex with a man? The idea revolted Venneman. He could not imagine doing it, not even for the sake of becoming a vampire again. No matter how much he wanted to be a vampire again, he could not do what was necessary. There are limits, he told himself. I can't violate my nature.
That means I have to find a female vampire and give her reason to envamp me.
Once, in his first human days, he had possessed some strange attraction for women and many men. He had never understood that quality within himself, had never known what it was, had wanted to be rid of it. But whatever it was, it had caught Elizabeth's attention. Because of it, she had decided, deliberately and consciously, to seduce and envamp him so that he would be available to her whenever she wished, for eternity.
This time, his second passage through mortality, he no longer had that quality. In burning vampirism out of himself and becoming human again, he had also burned away that strange attractiveness. Now neither women nor men paid any attention to him. Except, ironically, for Henry Hapgood.
I threw that part of myself away, too, he thought, shaking his head. What a fool I was!
Why could he see and understand things so much more clearly now than he had been able to during his vampire year, or his many human years before that?
If it came down to it, if he could find no other way, could he force himself to go to bed with a man for the reward of becoming a vampire again? He had been a vampire and a murderer, he told himself, so why not be a prostitute as well? What prostitute before had ever been paid by being granted the glory of the vampire life? Perhaps he'd be able to do it, but only after he exhausted all other possibilities.
So, he told himself, you must search for a female vampire.
He knew of three: Jill Kennedy, Elizabeth Vallé, and Karen Belmont.
Jill was out of the question. She still hated and feared him, and if she ever stopped fearing him, she would kill him painfully and permanently, not grant him vampire life. Unless I could convince her that it might be a form of revenge, he thought. It would give her control over me, or so she would believe. And it would fill me with helpless anger against her forever. That should give her some satisfaction.
No, there was something else to consider. In spite of Jill's claim that she could recognize another vampire immediately, when she had seen Venneman in the restaurant a few hours earlier, she had not sensed that he was not a vampire. Why that should be, Venneman didn't know. There must still be something in him that was different from ordinary humans. Or maybe she couldn't even entertain the possibility of a vampire becoming human.
In any case, Jill seemed to think that he was still the strange being he had once been, the creature that fed on other vampires. That was why she still feared him - because she had suffered death twice at his hands. If she learned the truth about him, that he was once again only a human being and thus subject to pain and aging, then she would impose on him the worst revenge she was capable of. She would refuse to help him. She would condemn him to remain a human, to grow old and die.
What about Elizabeth?
Thanks to Venneman, she could be anywhere in the world.
When he had tried to destroy her by exposing her to the man-made sun inside Harold Dinsmuir's machine, he had instead destroyed himself and made her into what he had been. Venneman had become a mere man again, but Elizabeth had been transformed from vampire into what he now thought of as a super-vampire. She had become what Venneman had made himself into, months earlier: a creature that lived on the blood of vampires, that could not stand the taste of human blood, that was not harmed by sunlight.
So now Elizabeth could travel as easily as any human being. There was no reason for her to limit herself to this city, no reason for her to return to her mountain home in Colorado. She could be anywhere in North America by now - anywhere in the world.
She might resume her writing career, though. That would give him a way of tracking her down. But the last time he had seen her, she had taunted him with his return to humanity. She had once seduced him and murdered him in order to make him a vampire and thus one of her partners for eternity. She had ridiculed him for throwing that away. Now, even if he did find her, he was sure that she would refuse to help him again.
She might even do something worse than help him, something that, in a way, would be worse than killing him. She might take a small sip of his blood. It was part of her new nature - also thanks to Venneman's attempt to destroy her - that her bite filled her human victims with ecstasy. Venneman had experienced that only once, for a moment, but the memory still haunted him. The worst torture Elizabeth could inflict on him now would be to grant him that rapture again, for another brief instant, and then refuse to let him experience it again. He had cursed himself with mortality. She had cursed him with the memory of her feeding kiss.
No. He would not go in search of Elizabeth Vallé.
That left Karen Belmont.
Yes, Karen. Venneman knew where to look for her, and he knew how he might persuade her to help him.
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