It was nothing, it had to be nothing. Of course it was nothing. If God actually killed him now, he thought (hating how crazy his thoughts sounded even as he thought them), there’d be no one to teach cruel little lessons to.

If only he could fall asleep and wake up with the morning sun glinting through these thick trees and laugh at the nightmare safely behind him! He wouldn’t of course be allowed to sleep through the night but he did believe he’d reach the morning.

He unlaced his heavy hiking boots one by one and pulled them off and then the crushed, matted socks, put the boots beside his hips, socks neatly tucked into them. He usually slept naked (because Colin Fletcher did) even when he was too cold. Carefully he pulled off jeans and underpants, feeling the slightly daring thrill of his naked ass against the salty grainy lining of the sleeping bag. Clothes in the sleeping bag stuff sack to be a pillow, pack tilted behind him as a backrest – none of these things would keep him safe in an attack but he was buried in the familiar.

Now to read by flashlight until he was sleepy enough – but he didn’t dare. Like a man feeling again the lump that might be cancer, he looked back at that place. The darker shadow that might be man-shaped was still there. He put the flashlight back into his pocket and slithered down into the sleeping bag.

His hand went now to his penis, to the guilty pleasure at the end of each day. God, beckoning to him with exciting authority. Himself standing naked before that Gray Man in a Gray Suit who reviewed every way Rich had failed that day and punished him in excruciating, exciting ways.

This time the Gray Man commanded him to service the vampire.

As his hand rasped up and down his dry penis, his finger pushed and twisted at his anus until it got in enough to find a ring of slipperiness. Heart hammering, he thought, I’ll do whatever you command.

THIS AND ONLY THIS YOU ARE MADE FOR.

This is all I deserve! Was he purchasing the right to live through this night?

Grunting, he spasmed, come splashing on the inside of his sleeping bag and down the V of his crotch.

He felt terrible as he always did after he came, rubbing at the wet spot, knowing his crotch would smell like fish in the morning and that his finger probably had shit on it. He promised as always through the cramping electric black gunk in his groin and belly that tomorrow night he wouldn’t masturbate.

If he could get through this night. The moment of sexual pleasure seemed as small and long ago as a glowing worm trapped in thick rubber.

He turned onto his stomach and dug his cheekbones into the lumpy clothes-sack pillow. Oh sleep!

A chill, ominous presence, footsteps approaching?

He turned over wildly. A cold white light!

The moon, it had to be the moon. And the footsteps were his heart beating, blood pounding in his ears.

Sleep seemed far away on the distant rim of a great cleft and in that cleft were hissing snakes like shards of poisonous ice. He must have slept a tiny pinch of the endless night because there’d been time for the moon to rise.

If there was moonlight, maybe he could see whether anyone was standing in that spot?!

Jerking upright, he stared. That spot was now in dappled shadow and the man shape was gone. Relief! But shouldn’t he have seen something that would have looked man-shaped in the old dark?

Trembling, he lay back down, and after long ages he must have drifted into sleep again because he came awake with a start.

His hand touched something. His hand had slipped out of the sleeping bag while he slept and now it touched something smooth and arched, like a boot but not rough like his hiking boot.

A dark, shiny boot.

His eyes fluttered helplessly open.

The vampire loomed above him, stark and silent in the night.

Rich screamed a short ragged scream and his bladder emptied itself in a hot gush. He scrambled away, still in his soggy sleeping bag.

The vampire stood, a carven idol, watching him with reptilian eyes as he backed against a tree. It was just as he had seen it in his mind: head naked as a vulture’s, thin cruel lips, long curved fingers.

It made no move. It simply stood, its very presence a negation of hope. On his piss-wet, stinging knees, Rich tried to imagine running away through the night, naked, rocks gauging into his feet.

So much easier to give up.

“Drink me, I’m yours. I’ll d-do whatever you say?” The quavering words seemed to damn him to hell forever but the vampire seemed to approve so he went on.

“It’s all I’m good for,” he whispered.