Begging In The Shadows story is
It’s about a character who’s in the business of dealing with vampires. He’s a very big man, and as he gets older, he gets even bigger.
One evening he visits a club and enters a room where he sees three women in the act of being raped by a vampire. The big man intervenes and kills the vampire. He kills one of the women, too,
because he doesn’t think she deserves to die like that. Then he takes the survivor away to his apartment, where they begin a secret love affair.
“There are people out there who’d pay to see someone rape and kill another person,” he says to her. “People who’d pay to see someone’s head split open with a machete. There are people who’d pay to see someone get their heart ripped out. And the people who pay to see this are not really into murder — they’re into watching.”
“If you have ever watched a gangland execution you have seen this in action,” he says. “The audience is the same gangland executioners, the same people who put money in their eyes for that kind of thing. The same people who pay to watch the slow death of a person who is no longer a person, but merely meat to be chewed on.”
In other words, he’s the business of killing and dealing with vampires. It’s a dangerous trade.
At one point, after this relationship has lasted a while, she asks if he would do this sort of thing to someone he didn’t love.
He thinks about this for a while.
“Do I love you?” he says finally.
“Yes,” she says. “You do love me.”
“Well,” he says, “if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing this.”
And he shows her a mirror, and she sees that her face is covered with scars. “Are they old scars?” she asks.
“No,” he says. “They’re fresh. They’re new.”
“Why did they happen?” she asks.
“I was caught in a fight,” he says. “Somebody stabbed me, and my friends finished it off.”
She thinks about that. Then, “I love you,” she says.
“I’m glad you do,” he says. “Because I do love you.”
“Thank you,” she says.
Then they sleep together. Then he is taken in the night and killed.
But, like so many people, he survived, and had his head placed on display at the local hospital, so that he could be identified by his friends. There he sat for two weeks until he died. That is, he expired. There was no life left in him, and it was necessary to call in the doctors.
“They didn’t want the head to go to a medical school,” he says. “They wanted it to go to a butcher.”
When we consider his profession, what we think of when we think of that profession is the killing of vampires. Of course, there’s an awful lot of confusion there. There is a lot of confusion among vampires themselves about what they are, about what they do, and about what sort of world they live in. There’s all the more confusion when you start bringing human beings into the mix.
People in his business don’t see vampires as they really are. For most of the vampires, life is what it was. They are dead, and they have nothing more to do, so they make a living out of what they were once. But some of them have taken that living for themselves. They make a living out of something they’ve taken. They make a living off their talents, and they’re the sort of people who are most dangerous to the people like the big man who are trying to make their living by killing them.
Most of the people who deal with vampires do not see vampires. They see ghosts, or something else. But the big man understands what vampires are. He understands that these other people are dangerous because he has seen ghosts. He knows that they can be just as dangerous as vampires, but he has seen what they can do. So, at the end of the story, he’s going to take one of those people who has been working with vampires and cut him up into pieces and feed him to the people who would pay to watch someone get their heart ripped out.
There are people who see vampires as different from people. We’re more civilized than that, I think. Insofar as they have to be killed, they deserve to be treated as part of the natural world.
But how do you treat that other part of the natural world, the ghosts? They’re like people. They have their own rules, and their own way of being. As human beings, their lives are not easy. They’re not given to happiness. If you look at the way we treat them, we give them a sort of dignity. We don’t treat them like animals. And as we do that, we do so because we’re looking to our own advantage, trying to see how we can use them, how we can benefit from them, how we can use their spirits to do things we want done in our lives.
I don’t think it’s the place of the government to legislate with a view to how ghosts are to be treated. I think it’s a matter for private individuals, when they want to use ghosts in the way that they do. I think it’s an ethical question, really.
I think what I do is very straightforward. If I find myself in a situation where I feel that I need some help, then I try to find out whether there is a ghost in the area, and if there is a ghost, then I try to get their permission to help them. If I can’t get their permission, I go ahead anyway. I don.
