QSFer Simon Doyle has a new gay horror book out: This is Not a Vampire Story.
Seventeen-year-old Victor Callahan holds a secret as ancient as the shadows.
Employed as a night porter in a quiet Irish nursing home, the teenager watches over a group of men he once knew a long time ago. Victor has orchestrated their reunion for a final farewell, a goodbye to those whose lives have shaped him through the years.
But can he keep his secret from Lakeshore Manor’s oldest resident, James O’Carroll?
As he cares for these remnants of his past, memories of a bygone era haunt him — of wild adventures on the rugged Irish coast, of forbidden love hidden beneath the threat of eternal night, and of a shipwreck that changes everything…
Gloria Pinto, the night nurse, doesn’t like him. But maybe she has her own secrets.
THIS IS NOT A VAMPIRE STORY weaves a tale of timeless bonds, the cost of immortality, and the lengths we go to for love.
But is love more important than life? Victor is about to find out.
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Excerpt
When I was seventeen, I’d slept in a cave for fifteen years. I was seventeen for a very long time.
And I missed that cave.
I had walked from Jaipur to New Delhi, and from there to Kathmandu, sleeping in deep trenches along the side of the dusty road when the sun was up and scorching the desiccated earth. It hadn’t rained since I arrived and my lips were dry and chapped. I was glad I had nobody to talk to because when I opened my mouth, my lips would crack and sting.
If I passed somebody at night, when the moon was high and the sound of crickets and katydids droned across the quiet landscape, I’d keep my head low and offer them a humble greeting. “Namaste,” they’d say. And they’d marvel at the white teenager with a T-shirt over his head. “Very nice eyes,” they’d tell me. People don’t remember my face, it’s my eyes that capture them.
I suppose that’s a good thing.
In Kathmandu, a farmer let me ride in the back of his tempo van among crates of underweight chickens and a single goat that stared at me as if he was reading my mind. I’d eaten goats before. And I think he knew that.
The farmer dropped me as close to the Tibetan border as he could and pumped his sharp horn as he drove away. He gave me a chicken as a gift—“for luck,” he’d said—and as we watched him turn down the dusty road in the blue darkness of early morning, I called the chicken Georgie, and said, “Shall we go?”
Georgie clucked her agreement and we crossed the border among the morbidly barren Himalayan foothills, under a navy sky dotted with more stars than I’d ever seen. In the east, the horizon was turning grey.
I zigzagged from the foothills into the mountains, Georgie trapped under one arm, using my free hand for support when the cliffs got too steep to walk on. I had a lifetime of pain to hide, and when I found a cave whose mouth was open against the northern wind, I ventured inside, slowly, a torch flashing in front of me. I stomped my feet and cawed like a bird. Were there leopards in the Himalayas? Or jackals? I wasn’t sure.
But the cave was empty, so I unpacked my travel case, a thin sleeping bag and a handful of soil from home that I’d carried with me for years. I pressed my fingers into that soil, tasting a grain of it to remind myself why I was there, five thousand metres above sea level, surrounded by a thick wind in the thin air and a blanket of snow beyond the cave’s entrance.
I tied a piece of twine around Georgie’s leg and trapped the other end under a rock so she couldn’t escape, though I knew she wanted to. Everybody leaves me. They always do.
I sat on the sleeping bag and folded my hands in my lap, and I spoke to Georgie, partly in English, partly in Vietnamese, which I’d been learning recently, and Georgie wobbled her head like she was objecting to my story.
When I grew tired of her incessant clucking, I said, “Sorry, Georgie.” I caught the twine, pulled her to me, and stroked her small head. She turned away from me like she knew what was coming.
Her eyes were as orange as her feathers. She fussed in my arms until I held her tighter and soothed her with gentle noises. And then I ate her.
When I was done, I wrapped what was left of her in an age-worn Nirvana T-shirt and built a small cairn over her remains, just outside the entrance of my cave where I could see it.
I crossed my legs on the sleeping bag, stared out at the distant peaks, and watched as the sunlight shifted across the earth, falling inside the cave’s opening but never outstaying its welcome. Day became night became day.
I stopped counting after two hundred and thirty-seven days. Or was it two hundred and thirty-eight?
During my third winter, a fierce wind knocked over Georgie’s cairn and I imagined I heard her clucking in the days while I watched the driving snow.
“Are you back?” I asked. But the noise of her stopped.
And I was alone.
When I came down from the mountains, I was a new man. And I was seventeen.
I walked back to Kathmandu, bought a plane ticket to Dublin via London, and from there I walked through the late summer nights towards County Clare and the coastal village I once called home. As I walked alongside the empty football field, up Comer Street, past the old apple orchard whose walls were crumbling, I didn’t feel tired. I was renewed. Fifteen years in a cave might drive a man to insanity. Or it might make an insane man sane. You decide.
I gathered up the money I’d been saving over the years and made a few calls. And two months later, I stood outside Lakeshore Manor Nursing Home under a waning moon that was hidden somewhere behind the building.
Death was in the air. I smelled him
Author Bio
Simon Doyle (he/him) was born and raised in Ireland. He discovered that he could travel the world on a shoestring by reading books at a very young age. When he won a local poetry competition at the age of nine, it sparked a lifetime love of words. But he swears never to write poetry again.
His first novel release is Runaway Train, book 1 of the Runaway Bay series.
He lives with a very neurotic rescue dog, and Lucas, his human soulmate. They met in kindergarten. Where all good stories begin.
| Author Website | https://www.simondoylebooks.com |
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