THE PIMP

THE PIMP
Lawrence Watt-Evans

Skin like white silk, pale as the sheets on which she lies, is marred by two deep-red scabs; beneath the skin blood is pulsing, hot and rich.

For long minutes she stares down at that pulsing, caught between hunger and repulsion, between lust and fascination.

“She could die,” she says, not looking up. She doesn’t see whether the observer shrugs; she doesn’t really care. At any rate, he says nothing in reply.

The white silk skin draws nearer, hunger overcoming repulsion, and she opens her jaws so far the dead muscles strain. She can feel her venom flowing, knows it’s running down her fangs like water down stalactites, slow and thick.

Her vision is forced away from the girl’s neck as her teeth set, sight lost in clouds of fine, tangled golden hair, and she closes her eyes.

Slowly, slowly, she presses her fangs against the white throat, the razor edges tearing through the scabs, cutting through the hard-clotted blood in a brief dry teasing before the new, fresh fluid wells up, blood and her own venom blending, hot and rich and bearing the flood of memories.

Eight years old, Momma’s drunk again, and she’s holding Amy by the blond braids they had plaited three days before, the morning before Momma’s boyfriend had left; she’s holding the braids so tight Amy can’t move her head, can’t turn to watch, but Amy can see from the corner of her eye as Momma pulls the steak knife from the drawer, the steak knife with the shining, serrated edge, and Momma holds it loosely in one hand for a moment while the other hand is clamped tight on the braids. Amy wishes she could pull free, maybe if her hair weren’t braided she could, she could pull the hairs away, let them tear out of her scalp, and it would hurt but it would be over, she could run and hide.

But she can’t pull out entire braids, and the knife is coming closer, Momma runs it across Amy’s throat, very lightly, then a little harder, hard enough to snag and scratch ever so slightly.

“Amy,” she says, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with you,” and Amy knows that she doesn’t mean that like the mothers on TV, she really means that she herself doesn’t know what she’s going to do, how far she’ll go this time.

And the knife blade slides across again, stinging this time, and Amy feels something flowing down her neck and she knows it must be blood, she whimpers, she doesn’t mean to but she whimpers, and Momma tells her, “Kneel down, Amy…”

And that’s all; the blood has stopped flowing. The vampire opens her eyes, pulls her fangs free of the wounds, glances down at Amanda’s chest.

It’s not moving.

She peers closely at the silk-white throat, at the small smear of blood she’s just left, looking for the old scars, but even her eyes can’t find them, not for certain; a faint line, so faint she might be imagining it, so faint it might be just a crease in the skin from normal movement of the head, might be there.

But she remembers the feel of the blade across her throat, and shudders with inexplicable pleasure at the stolen memory.

“Sweet,” she says, “but not enough.”

“Take more, then,” he says quietly, his voice a distant whisper.

“There is no more,” she tells him.

He gets to his feet and crosses to the bed, stares down at Amanda’s body. “She’s dead?” he asks.

She nods.

“Damn,” he says.

She smiles to herself. “I do,” she whispers, but he doesn’t hear.

“I don’t know how many more I can explain away,” he says.

“I said she might die,” the vampire reminds him.

“I know,” he says, “I know.”

“I want more,” she tells him. “There wasn’t enough left.”

He glances nervously at her. “I’ll see,” he says.

She waits calmly in the room, beside Amanda’s cooling corpse, as he leaves; she hears the latch click, hears his footsteps retreating down the hallway.

To pass the time until his return, she remembers—not her own life, but the memories she’s drunk from others.

She remembers the raw sexual passion that she felt when she drank the blood of a serial killer, the hideously erotic memories of his crimes, the power and glory of his hands on unwilling flesh, of his knife digging, of reaching into the wound…

And that blends into the memories of a boy trapped in a tornado-shattered home, the weight of a fallen ceiling joist driving his head onto the torn, bloody flesh of his mother, his hands flailing as he struggles to free himself, as he tries to fight free of his mother’s body…

She recalls the sensation of giving birth to a monstrosity, the strain, the tearing, the gasp of relief and then horror as she sees what she’s borne, as she sees, before the doctor can snatch it away, what’s lived for nine months in her belly, sees it still twitching as it dies…

Reviewing them this way is not as good, not as involving, not as rich as drinking them in the blood, but it amuses her.

For the moment.

She remembers the jumbled unbearable love and hatred of a molested child, the feel of a father’s flesh jammed down her throat, the hot sharp pain of torn and abraded tissue, blood spilling, trickling, spurting from a thousand wounds in a hundred different bodies, young and old.

All that wealth of experience, of sensation, lost to her own dead flesh forever, she can only taste through others; she hungers for the memories more than she hungers for the blood itself.

She places a hand gently on Amanda’s still breast, sees cold white fingers on cold white flesh, and she reminds herself that though she still moves, she is as dead as the woman she has just slain, the woman whose life she has sucked away.

The thought sends a thrill through her.

She is dead, yet she endures.

As Amanda endured her mother’s madness, as the boy endured his ordeal in the wreckage, as so many of her victims endured so much, she endures this sensationless imitation of life, taking what she can from those who yet live.

And perversely, she enjoys that, the thought that she’s stealing what she cannot have for herself.

She finds a peculiar sort of hope in the awareness that she can still enjoy anything. She has been dead a very long time, yet she still finds this pleasure possible in her existence.

For a moment, her own memories stir, of a time when she still breathed—a vague blur of green fields and blue skies and a dark man who visited her at night.

And then there were the early days after her death, when drawing blood carried fear and shame and terror, when the taste of blood was a new and horrifying ecstasy.

She hadn’t known, at first, that the blood would carry the victim’s memories—but the blood is the life, and what is a human’s life but memory?

At first, the blood itself was enough; she ignored the memories, tried to forget them. The blood brought warmth and a semblance of life; the memories brought only shame, and a sort of dull embarrassment that she so intruded on the lives of her victims.

But then, as the taste of blood began to pall, she came to appreciate the memories, the homely little moments—a father’s story at bedtime, a lover’s caress, a child’s wild embrace.

With time, though, the novelty faded—one lover was much like another, the children’s hands were all the same, she had heard every father’s stories before. She began to seek the rawer, fiercer emotions for memories that could still stir her—the screaming hatred of a divorce, the wrenching grief of a friend’s death, the slow agony of a parent’s decline into senility.

Even that became dulled with repetition in time, for most of the lives she stole were so very similar, and her existence had become listless, boring, a weight to be borne—until the boy with the bandaged arm.

The dog’s teeth closing on his arm, the desperate jabbing at the yellow-brown eyes, the incredible searing pain from wrist to elbow and the grim satisfaction as the animal’s blood spurted up around his thumb…

She smiles, and runs her fingers lightly down Amanda’s corpse.

The boy led her to Paul.

The boy’s parents, worried about their son, took him to Paul for therapy, to get over the horror he had lived through. He was visiting regularly, though she didn’t know that when she first tasted that young, sweet blood, blood that carried intense memory of just exactly how it felt to drive one’s thumbnail through a dog’s eye into the brain.

She heard the parents talking. She heard the mother explaining that the doctor thought the boy was suppressing memories that had been clear before, and the vampire worried that this doctor might suspect, might notice the scars on the boy’s neck.

And to be safe, she found the doctor.

She found Paul.

She looks up at the door. Far away, she hears hesitant footsteps returning, echoing in the hospital corridor.

She found her pimp, found the man who brings her all the strange, the violent, the extreme memories for her to taste, to savor: The woman who had been held captive and gang-raped, the man who had been tortured in a South American prison, the couple whose little games had gotten so far out of hand that when the wife brought her mutilated husband to the emergency room he was given only a fifty-fifty chance of survival.

A slow smile spreads across her face.

The man might have made it, if not for the “inexplicable” blood loss.

That was the first death among Paul’s patients. That was the point at which he could no longer turn back, could no longer pretend that his only motive was alleviating unbearable memories.

That was what he said at first—that it was an experiment, an attempt at treatment. The boy’s nightmares were relieved when she drank away his memories of the attack, and Paul thought this could be a breakthrough for many of his patients. Even a temporary respite—and the effect was only temporary—could help.

She doesn’t care about that. She is no psychologist. Paul’s work, his theories, his degree, mean nothing to her except that he finds the most interesting treats for her.

And in a mental hospital, where no one believes if a victim tries to accuse her.

It’s so beautifully simple—Paul asks an interesting patient to stay overnight for observation, all strictly voluntary, of course, nothing threatening, he says it all so well. The patient stays, and that night she drinks from a new well.

A symbiotic relationship, Paul calls it—blood and pain give her sustenance and pleasure, and in exchange her feasts lessen the mental suffering of her victims.

That was his excuse, until the first man died.

She doesn’t need any excuses.

And then the door is opening, hard white light spills in, and Paul is there with his little cart, with the alarm device and the cold pitcher of orange juice.

“It’s all right,” he tells her, “No one will be coming by here for at least an hour.”

She rises to her feet, eyes on Dr. Paul Burchard, on the trembling hands and the pale face, the white coat and the carefully-scrubbed neck.

He closes the door and steps closer.

“My turn,” he says softly, as he lies down on the bed beside dead Amanda and tugs his collar out of the way.

Smiling, she stoops to drink of the nervous guilt, the perverse excitement, the nagging self-hatred of being a vampire’s procurer; to drink also of the relief he feels in knowing that his torturing memories of dead patients will soon be as faded and dim as a photo left too long in the sun; to drink of the dread and anticipation that this time, this time, perhaps he’ll die; to drink of the unreasoning lust he feels for her, for the vampire.

This is how she pays for what he brings her—and it costs her nothing.

Her mouth opens, her eyes close, and her fangs glisten in the lamplight as she descends.