Brian Stableford by The Empire of Fear

Author:The Empire of Fear
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-11-21T21:51:05+00:00

But if all these chapters in the season of his dreams were only different circles of a Dantean Hell, he had also glimpses of Paradise.

His waking self had journeyed further across the face of the world than was ordinary, and yet had seen very little of the vast Creation engineered by the hand of God; that waking self had often looked raptly to the sky, failing to count the stars or compass the wanderings of the planets. But his dream-self, unfettered, had often dragged his sentient soul far away from the prison of flesh, to fly aloft with all Creation at its mercy, leaping free into the sky to bathe in the rays of the sun or blaze a comet-course among the stars, lonely in the great darkness yet proud in its power.

Alas, the taste of heaven within these dreams was a faint one, for in the abyssal reaches of the void he could feel a special remoteness which was as hellish, in its way, as the labyrinthine prisons of solidity to which nightmare sometimes confined him. He felt, when his soul strayed too far from the comfort of the sun, which became as tiny as any other star, that like Odysseus he had incurred the wrath of fate, and would be tortured by postponement of his homecoming. Such flights of the soul seemed never to reach any final climax or conclusion.

But there was another demi-paradise, which he shared with the women of the vampire race, who used him far more kindly than his interrogators, or those to whom he played the catamite. He thought when he later tried to appraise this season that perhaps he had been saved from the extremity of despair only by the vampire ladies.

Or, at least, one vampire lady.

His waking self had never lain with common woman or vampire. He had never made love, even to the gypsy who had liked him since she was a girl. Shy and shamed, made ever more cowardly by the long extension of restraint, his waking self had put erotic feelings aside, tight-binding them with personal taboos.

But his dream-self…!

Neither shyness nor shame had shadowed that phantom being which moved within him, and no bonds forged by consciousness could possibly contain the impulses which rose unbidden in the sleeping body to command the service of the dreamlocked soul.

In his dreams, he had never lacked for yielding flesh, lustrous and undying, for the bloody kisses of immortals. There Cristelle still lived, no severed head sent screaming into Hell but whole and free, couched and clad in any wise he might imagine, always open to him, always anxious to caress. Carmilla Bourdillon was also there, not bloated by the plague which had turned her blood to bile, but warm and white and everlasting, ever-gentle, ever-lovely, ever-thirsty.

In his dreams, there were a thousand vampires, often faceless, always perfect; often nameless, always soft. In his dreams, which knew no limit to fear and fury, monstrousness and malevolence, no bounds were set either on beauty and bewitchment, ecstasy and ease.

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