Dark Master by Jack Stevens

Author:Jack Stevens [Stevens, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LGBTQIA+, contemporary, paranormal, vampires, incubus, immortal, Jacobean poet, lecturer, policeman, all-male college, multiple partners
Publisher: NineStar Press, LLC
Published: 2021-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

From the diary of Rufus Hamilton

October 5th

Freedom! At last. Liberation from the prison of a provincial boarding school. Deliverance into the dreaming towers of St. Thaddeus’s College…

I feel like a man released from a prison sentence that he had begun to fear was for life. Freedom! Escape from the petty tyrannies of school masters and prefects, from compulsory cold showers, obligatory rugby matches, shared dormitories. Release from the shackles of one’s peers.

Freedom to be myself.

Or as much of myself as I am allowed to be. The liberty is intoxicating, but I must not let it fuddle my good sense. For such a one as I can never be free. Such a one as I must always stay apart. Alone. In the shadows.

Enough with morbid introspection!

I understood years ago my nature and the kind of life it would lead me to. I will always live a life separate from others, but I need never be as truly alone as I was at school. Here at St. Thaddeus’s I can finally devote my life to art, to literature. I can live for the beauty of other people’s lives, even if my own life may hold no beauty of its own.

It is enough.

I am at peace at last.

I put the book down. This was what I wanted, wasn’t it? The key to what was going on, as well as a better understanding of a man I’d felt so close to for so long. But finding out like this made me feel…uncomfortable. Dirty? And I don’t know what I had expected to feel about Rufus, but sorry hadn’t been it. My nature. I think I was pretty sure what that referred to.

I flicked through the following pages. Entry after entry about day to day, mundane matters, the routine of the fresher that didn’t seem to have changed over the many years since Rufus had recorded his experiences. It made me smile, went some small way to making me feel that perhaps the link between us hadn’t been completely cut yet. But as I flicked on the entries became shorter, more cursory. Days would be missed out altogether, and then an entire week, entries no longer dated, until I stopped at this one.

Late November

I wish I were dead.

How wrong? How wrong can one man be?

I thought it was my nature to be alone, but as I grow at last into manhood, as I begin to make my own way in the world, I see at last the truth of Donne’s words: “No man is an island.” I thought I could be, thought my defences were strong. But there is too much beauty in the world, too much life. It overwhelms me.

Jamie Kelley. In my weekly seminar group. He has hair like a raven’s wing and eyes of an astonishing grey. He laughs at Chaucer and yawns carelessly through lectures on Shakespeare. I adore him.

Michael Logan. I saw him playing for our college’s rugby team last week. He was like some careless young god. My heart was still singing hours later.

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