My first foray into Erotic Horror. Only 4000 words, so please read, vote, and leave constructive comments!
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Londoner Calling
I look round my new city, my new manor. It's actually been my home for millennia, but London's changed again, after my quick ten-year nap.
I've escaped a growing infection of shiny polished skyscrapers and steel-glass office blocks, all smooth and sealed. No dingy alleyways left, nor any harbour for anyone not welcome in these oppressive high-rises.
But walking my revised corporeal form another half-mile brings me to Victorian red terraces, with chunks broken off that soft orange brick; ethnic cafés on the ground floor, various businesses on the first, overpriced bedsits on the second and third. Some newer buildings in gaps where bombs landed in the Blitz, all Fifties utilitarian blocks or Sixties concrete. The odd small marble church, a modern Eighties Post Office with garish plastic trim. This hodge-podge of architecture permits passages into small pedestrian courts and fire escapes into poured-concrete yards. Gaps, interstitial spaces. I feel I can breathe a bit better.
Not that I need to breathe.
I reach the Strand; escape the traffic into Villiers Street, where no vehicle ventures unless it must do a delivery. It's a cesspit of barely-adequate franchised takeaways nowadays, though at least the theatre under the arches is something a bit different, enticing, even if it is now neighboured by a respectable barber and an expensive Vietnamese sandwich shop.
At least there's still pubs; thank goodness for an authentic boozer, still painted in cheerful colours from the 19th century, with etched-glass windows hiding the depravity within. Though there's less of that, less obvious vice, now. No proper gin palaces leading to sotted Sallies who would do anything for a bed for the night, no fights over illegal betting, at least not within. But where physical desperation has mostly fled -- those old constant miasmas of hunger and the pain of untreated disease have generally gone -- there's still the old demons of the mind.
Loneliness.
Feeling unloved or unappreciated.
Worries of losing what you had or never getting any further.
And the big one: feeling unseen.
We all feel that way, don't we? Like all our friends and family are wonderful, kind, love us -- but they don't know the
real
me or the real you. We don't know even how to show that. We just know that it's there: a deep, hidden part of us that would trigger disgust on the behalf of any beholder.
Which makes us both more desperate to be seen, yet more terrified. It's become a cliché: friends are people who know all about you, but like you anyway.
What that doesn't cover is what you call someone who knows all of your secret sick, twisted erotic desires, yet wants to fuck you anyway.
Because
of them, even.
Humans don't need a word, I suppose, seeing as they so rarely encounter such creatures. Or rather, so rarely are able to tell tales about it afterwards.
The stories of incubi or succubi reflect a faint familiarity with the concept, I suppose, splitting us into two ridiculous groupings, but we're so much more than that.
We call ourselves the Witnesses.
The first pub is full of lunching tourists. Not much in the way of pickings there. Office workers in the second; all in pairs or groups, no way to sneak into a conversation.
I need a place where lone travellers or workers go. Or government officials, wanting discreet chats. A student, seeking a refuge from both house-shares and academic pressure.
That infamous wine bar it is, then. A painted sign on the ceiling, over unprepossessing stairs going down into a basement, is the only clue as to its existence. All the regulars like it like that. Any tourist shies away, nervous for their safety. And quite right. Never enter a strange cellar, alone. You never know what you might find.
In this one, as it happens, you would find excellent wine, comfortable seats in various alcoves in between wine barrels, congenial lighting, and your classic Dickensian etchings covering the walls. I remember when they first bought them. Ever so modish, they thought. Couldn't get more old-fashioned now, but that's how I like it. They serve simple food: cheese platters, meat platters, and concentrate on conviviality.
I acquire a glass of the day's special and begin to listen.
Most of the thoughts I pick up are your superficial top-level ones.
What to have for lunch, when will the food turn up, I'm starving, what time is it?
I'm used to tuning those out.
Below that are people's mid-level thoughts. They're only partially aware of them.
How am I coming across?
He's getting boring.
Will I ever get promoted at work and would I want that anyway?
This cheese reminds me of that holiday in Alsace -- shame me and him split up.
There's a few crumbs of nourishment for me there, but precious little. I need those deeper thoughts, ideally conscious ones, though I'll settle for unconscious ones when I have to -- the thoughts which drive people's minds crazy in their efforts to rationalise or suppress them. Or, rarely, the thinker embraces them and lets them run wild, like a smorgasbord for my kind. That's what I'm always on the lookout for.
Problem is, most people don't think much.
They get general impressions of what fits with their life view or opposes it, and amble, like cows, in that direction.
They used to say TV rotted the brain; I can assure you people were equally stupid beforehand, just quoting from fewer works that everyone knew. The King James Authorised Version was the meme of centuries, and it wasn't even funny. That pun about Simon Peter being 'petros, my rock' wasn't any more hilarious a millennium ago, I tell you.
Maybe one in ten people regularly produces a rich vein of real thought. In this bar, it's a bit higher, full of civil servants and university scholars. There's someone contemplating the rind on his cheese:
how do they make it, what does it add?
