guy's this xtory ix written by Larry Benjamin

.its α fictionαl piece....
truxt me I'm conxidering.... writing my own xtory xoon. till then ...

here ix α brief details of the xtory (vαmpire rixing)

it’s the mid twenty-first century, a wonderful time to be alive—unless you’re a Vampire. Gatsby Calloway lives on the fringes of society, avoiding humanity, until he meets Barnabas, a young encaustic painter. When Barnabas is mortally wounded during an anti-Vampire attack, Gatsby must forget everything he has known, and learn to trust.

Prologue
T HE WORDS WRITTEN HERE are less a story than a prophesy. Or maybe they’re a prayer. Whatever it is, you need to understand that what is written here is, like Moses’ tablets, written in the hand of God, accurate, and true because it could not be otherwise.

197 Chicksand Street
BARNABAS STEPPED INTO THE STREET and hailed the oncoming taxi. The driver stopped and, leaning across the passenger seat asked, suspiciously, “Where are you going?”
When Barnabas gave him the address, the man’s eyes grew wide. He quickly blessed himself, rolled up the window, and sped away.
Seeing no other taxis, Barnabas walked to the bus stop, cursing his decrepit car. The elderly Achieva had refused to start no matter how he tried to coax it to life. He hated the car but it had been all he could afford with the money he’d saved from his job delivering pizzas after school. Once, the car had seemed as bright and promising as a golden chariot.
The day he turned eighteen, which happened to be the same day he’d graduated from high school, he’d packed everything he owned—which, fortunately, hadn’t been much—into the Achieva and took off in the rain, without a destination, without a plan, knowing only that he had to get away. As the group home faded into the distance, and the recent past, he’d thought, with regret, only of… Gatsby.
Barnabas shook his head and consulted the Public Transportation app on his Wearable for the bus route he needed. An ancient bus finally arrived, sighing as its pneumatic doors cracked open. As he boarded the bus, he noticed an old Mexican woman in the first seat. She was heavy and dressed in several layers of conflicting plaids. Her brown face was as wrinkled and pockmarked as a peach pit.
“Where ya headed?” the bus driver asked as Barnabas fumbled his money into the coin box.
“Chicksand Street in Whitechapel.”
In response, the driver angrily slapped the lever that controlled the bus doors and attacked the gas pedal.
As Barnabas made his way to the back of the bus, he had to grab onto the overhead handrail to keep from falling as the bus, spewing gravel, its engine groaning, careened down the uneven road already dark though it was just past dusk.
At the back of the bus, a group of dark-skinned boys sat with their legs spread apart, and ear buds screwed into their heads. Scowling, they gleamed with menace like the edge of night. When, as the bus spun around a corner, Barnabas fell into an empty plastic seat among them, one of the boys asked, with an edge of belligerence in his voice, “Did you say Chicksand Street?”
“I did,” Barnabas answered.
The boys suddenly sat up straighter, and their knees snapped together, as their eyes shifted from side-to-side. As Barnabas watched them, they seemed to shrink inside themselves. And Barnabas realized that these fierce boys, with their badass attitudes, who carried guns secreted in the waistbands of their sagging jeans, were afraid. He wondered then what he was doing—if he, too, should be afraid.
“This here coming up is the stop for Chicksand Street,” the bus driver called out.
Barnabas stood and walked to the front of the bus. He peered out the windshield into the dark, then looked at the driver. “The schedule said you stopped at Chicksand Street,” Barnabas said.
“Not after dark I don’t,” the driver shot back. “This here is as far as I’m going tonight!”
Barnabas shrugged and moved to the door. The Mexican woman he’d noticed earlier touched his arm. As he turned to her, she drew a silver crucifix attached to rosary beads from around her neck and, muttering a prayer in Spanish, pressed it into his hands. He closed his hand around the offering still warm from her bosom and said, “Thank you.”
The bus slowed and the driver said, “This here road, about a mile on, becomes Chicksand Street.” He opened the door, barely stopping long enough for Barnabas to disembark. As soon as his feet touched the curb, the driver closed the door and sped away as fast as the bus’ ancient diesel engine would allow. As the bus passed him he saw the passengers with their foreheads and palms pressed against the windows, their eyes wide, and their mouths forming tiny “O”s of fright.
The bus, reduced to flickering red lights in the falling night, disappeared altogether as Barnabas knelt by the side of the road. He dug a shallow hole, and gently laid the crucifix into it. He covered the hole, and placed a large white stone over the burial ground.
At the end of the dirt road, hard packed with gravel and edged with sharpened stones, a cul-de-sac had been carved out of a dark wood. This was Chicksand Street. Massive iron gates, set between a high stone wall, hung crooked, and open, from their ancient rusting hinges. Looking up at the gates, Barnabas noticed an assemblage of small, long-legged gray-brown birds with pale bellies and short rounded wings riddled with white feathers, perched along the top of the gates. Mockingbirds. They seemed to be watching him as they chirped and chattered among themselves.
Beyond the gates, Barnabas could see large old houses of Wissahickon Schist, and brownstone, and dark red brick with heavy slate roofs and shutters inside and out. Each house had a massive front door of quarter-sawn oak banded with iron. On either side of each door hung old-fashioned gas lanterns whose soft flickering light swatted ineffectually at the dark. Lawns of fescue grass shone dull pale-green. Behind the houses was a thick wood of cypress and yew trees, and beyond that, fields of moss and mushroom.

Episode I contd


The houses were grouped around a broad circular avenue of cobblestone edged with slate curbs. The full moon, as if seeing him standing at the gate, paused in its journey across the sky and hung between the trees for a moment, unfurling its pale blue bounty like a magic carpet down the avenue, beckoning Barnabas to enter. Number 197 was straight ahead at the apex of the circle. Barnabas stepped through the gates and nervously began to whistle. Soon he heard an echo of his own tuneless whistling. Startled, he looked around and realized it was only the mockingbirds imitating him.
Gatsby
THE FRONT DOOR WAS OPEN so Barnabas walked in. Voices rose and fell on the cool air. A large room to his left held a mixed lot of men: some were dark-haired while others were blond; some had long straight hair, while others had kinky hair; some had pony tails, and others wore their hair cropped military-short; some had straight aquiline noses; others had broad, flat noses. They all seemed under forty. Many were dressed as he was in sneakers and low-rise jeans, but many more were dressed in well cut black suits over gray high-collared shirts and matching vests. Most spoke like typical Americans while others, clearly French and Spanish, spoke with extravagant accents. But they all had voluptuous red lips and complexions so pale they might have been hewn from alabaster or amber.
Several men watched him with a mix of curiosity and lust. Barnabas knew men found him attractive, but the knowledge did nothing to bolster his confidence; he’d grown up a ward of the state, unwanted and invisible for too long. When one of the men caught his eye and smiled at him, Barnabas returned the smile, with a tentative one of his own which was clearly a polite acknowledgement, but not an invitation to further intimacy. Another man, bolder than the first, detached himself from his group and approached. Once Barnabas explained he was a guest of Mr. Calloway’s the man drew back and directed him down a dark hall to the music room.
Barnabas had to pass through a rotunda to get to the music room. The rotunda was furnished with a large round table on which lay trays of food. Above the table hung a large chandelier of smoked glass whose jet crystals dangled from an iron band like black icicles in the chilly air.
Two men stood against a pair of French doors, arguing, their eyes red as charcoals in a fire. Across the room, a waiter, a swarthy young man with thin, pale lips, dressed in white tie, and kid-skin gloves, stood watching them with hunger and admiration. As Barnabas passed them another waiter, this one in black, sucked his teeth, and looking at the waiter in white, mumbled something under his breath. Barnabas couldn’t make out the words but there was no mistaking the contempt in his voice.
It was in the music room, then, that Barnabas saw Gatsby for the first time since graduation some seven years before. Barnabas paused to let his eyes adjust to the room’s dimness, for his night vision was poor.
It was a room of pearl grays and faded gold damask, dark wood and darker carpets, all shadowed in flickering candlelight. Gatsby was seated at an ebony nine-and-a-half foot Bosendorfer Concert grand piano—the one with ninety-five keys, rather than the standard eighty-eight—which dominated the room. Gatsby himself had a pewter finish: silvery hair swept back, eyes like pieces of ice, pale cheekbones that gleamed. He was cool and pale, champagne in an ice bucket. Playing selections from “A Chorus Line” for a crowd of stalwart admirers, he was radiant in that darkened room. He was gorgeous and charismatic, a charmer of snakes and men.
He looked up and, seeing Barnabas in the doorway, gasped, for Barnabas was as beautiful as he’d remembered: his caramel skin glowed with youth and vigor. His wide, innocent eyes were clear and his dark hair was cropped short; gone was the defiant retro Afro he’d worn in high school. Staring at him, the frisson of lust and love that shot through him caused Gatsby to miss a note, and frown. He bent over the keyboard; his face dipped into shadow, dissolving into triangles of violet and purple.
To Barnabas, Gatsby looked exactly as he had when he had been his teacher seven years before, and yet he seemed more glamorous; he looked like a 1930s film star perfectly preserved on silver nitrate.
Barnabas, unsure, started to walk across the room to where Gatsby sat at the piano. Gatsby, without taking his eyes off Barnabas, rose and, closing the piano’s lid, murmured something to his audience, who turned to watch Barnabas. Keeping his gaze on Barnabas, Gatsby drifted over, bringing with him sepia tones and a martini.
“Hello, Barnabas,” Gatsby whispered. A smile, fragile as tissue paper, wrapped around his words. He offered his hand like an argentine gift of inestimable value.
Barnabas took his hand shyly and murmured back, “Hi, Mr. Calloway.”
“Please! We’re no longer in high school. I’m no longer your teacher. Call me Gatsby.”
Barnabas nodded. “Gatsby.” He’d always addressed him as Mr. Calloway, but he thought of him, in his head, as Gatsby. Still, saying his name aloud sounded strange to his ears but he liked the way the syllables felt in his mouth: Gats-by .
“Ah. That’s better.”

am following nice write up keep it up

Ride on

Episode II


The room was cool and Barnabas shivered. “You’re cold,” Gatsby said, taking his arm. There was something antique about him. Heightening the effect was the way he treated Barnabas—with a certain genteel courtliness that in itself seemed of a different age. Indeed Barnabas noticed most of the men in the room exhibited a similar old world mannerliness. “Come, let us sit by the fire.” Gatsby gestured for Barnabas to sit. As Barnabas sank into a worn leather club chair, Gatsby placed his martini glass on a passing waiter’s tray and took from it two fresh Martini glasses. “A Vesper martini, tonight’s signature cocktail,” he explained handing one to Barnabas. “Two more,” he said to the waiter before sitting in the chair opposite Barnabas. Gatsby smiled and it was then that Barnabas saw the canine teeth. He’d suspected it but still he jumped a little. Gatsby noticed the tremor that passed through Barnabas. He stopped smiling and stared into the middle distance as firelight played over his features, painting them now pink, now pearl. After a moment the tension passed and they continued as before. “Tell me, what have you been up to since high school?” They began to talk, Gatsby’s voice as soft and seductive as the crackle and pop of the wood in the fire. The room and everyone in it seemed to fall away as they spoke of their histories and traded jokes. Barnabas slipped into a drowsy haze of contentment, and when Gatsby finally stood and said, “Come it’s late, you must go,” Barnabas was surprised to discover the room was empty. Gone was any sign that there had been a party. For a moment he wondered if he had dreamed it all. Gatsby slipped on a long wool cloak and pulled its hood over his headed before walking Barnabas outside. A black town car waited at the curb. Gatsby opened the door and motioned Barnabas inside. “Alfred will take you home.” “I can catch the bus,” Barnabas protested. “I know you can but I don’t want you to. It’s late. Besides no bus will come down here before day break.” There was an edge of bitterness in his voice. “Come. Off you go,” Gatsby continued. He pressed his lips against Barnabas’ forehead. Disappointed by the kiss, Barnabas threw his arms around Gatsby and buried his face in his broad chest. Gatsby gently disengaged and helped him into the car. As Gatsby walked up the steps to his house, he could feel Barnabas’ gaze on his back but he dared not look back, and listened, instead, to his heart, so long silent, as it thudded in his chest, disquiet, and awakened. The screen on the Wearable that cuffed Barnabas’ wrist brightened with an incoming message from Gatsby. “Did anything tonight frighten you?” Barnabas, who had half-expected the question, texted back, “No.” “Good. Come to dinner. Tomorrow.” “I’ll be there.” He looked at his Wearable until the screen went dark, then, lifting his eyes, he looked out the window as the car made its way down streets empty and bright with dawn. + + + They dined quietly and simply at the big, round table in the rotunda. When they were done, Gatsby took his arm and guided him though the French doors into the moonlit gardens beyond. The garden, small, and well-kept, was a wilderness of shade plants: hosta, periwinkle, Asian jasmine, baby tears, ajuga, dichondra, sweet woodruff, liriope, and pachysandra. Gatsby stood, with his hands crossed behind his back, staring at a fountain —an overwrought confection crowded with pissing cherubs riding on the backs of spitting copper dolphins; their unstoppable streams splashed and sparkled in the fountain’s great marble basin. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a Vampire?” Barnabas asked, sitting on a stone bench. “It never came up. We’ve only been speaking for a few weeks, Barnabas.” “You could have told me before then. We used to spend so much time together—you were my teacher. I trusted you. You could have told me.” “You were a child—” “I was seventeen!” “It never came up! How was I supposed to bring it up? Do you think I should have just blurted it out in class one day? Apropos of nothing?” Barnabas thought for a moment. “You could have said something when we were reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” “That was fiction, Barnabas! It reflected what humans thought of us —what many think of us still—it had nothing to do with me!” “Still—” Gatsby sighed. “It was different then —not that things have changed all that much. Oh, there has been incremental change, I grant you—back then I would have been forced out of the profession—” “Surely, they wouldn’t have driven you out brandishing torches—” “Believe me that has happened, more times than I care to remember,” Gatsby said with the same edge of bitterness in his voice Barnabas had noticed before. “Even without torches and rabid dogs, they would have found a way. I did eventually come out, you know—actually I was outed. When it happened, several teachers came to me and said they didn’t care that I was a Vampire, that I was a good teacher, that they would stand by me. Shortly after that I noticed the male teachers all began wearing turtle necks under their blazers, and the women all took to wearing elaborate scarves tightly wound around their necks—as if they had anything to worry about from me! And when there was a union hearing to decide if I should be dismissed, not one of them came.” “I’m sorry,” Barnabas said, “
That was childish of me. I’m sure it’s not easy to come out.”

“I have been called unnatural, an abomination, a monster like Frankenstein’s—a monster so grotesque he could not be named, neither by the doctor who made him, nor by the writer who created them both! So believe me when I tell you I couldn’t tell you, even as…” Gatsby’s words trailed off. Embarrassed to have caused him distress, Barnabas glanced skyward and was surprised to discover the bleeding edge of the night: the moon had lost its bright focus and the sky was paling with the effort to deliver itself of the new day. “You should go,” Gatsby said, glancing at the sky. “Or, I could stay,” Barnabas offered. Gatsby shook his head and pulled him to his feet. “Not tonight, anyway,” he said. His lips curled into a slight smile as he leaned down to kiss Barnabas on the forehead. This time Barnabas was prepared. He leaned back and, standing on tiptoes, pressed his lips against Gatsby’s. At first Gatsby’s lips were resistant, cold, but then he yielded and his lips became downy-soft and suffused with warmth. Barnabas pushed his tongue between the parted lips and ran it along the teeth. Gatsby seemed to pull back slightly and hold his breath as Barnabas searched his mouth. Gatsby tasted of spearmint. Barnabas’ tongue dragged along his teeth which felt jagged and slightly pointy across the top, while the flat surface seemed to carry regular indentations like the serrated edge of a knife. Gatsby broke the kiss. “Goodnight, Barnabas,” he said, turning again to face the gurgling fountain.

Are they gay couple? I mean gatsby nd barnabas, cos m confused here

alexblazzzer18:
Are they gay couple? I mean gatsby nd barnabas, cos m confused here

yeah.. they re