Chinasa Adeyemi is a Nigerian-born

Chinasa Adeyemi is a Nigerian-born

**of Note**

writer exploring the diverse ways the unbound make do in an increasingly hectic world. Her work is distributed exclusively for the benefit of a very discrete audience.

BY: CHINASA ADEYEMI The Beast on a Leash In the third article of her series “Subculture Parasites”, Chinasa Adeyemi interviews the Toreador couple and petplay enthusiasts Janet and William Stoughton.

VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H W e licks like to talk about our Beasts and the Gangrel are known for their bestial nature, but the kink subculture of petplay takes becoming an animal into an altogether different sphere. I talked to the San Francisco -based Toreador couple Janet and William Stoughton to find out how our kind can interact with this subculture of sex play.

Whitebread I don’t meet many vampire couples who look as wholesome as you do.

Janet: [laughs] I admit, we’re pretty whitebread.

William: I suppose it’s true. We’ve tried to hold onto our humanity and the best way to do it is by maintaining the trappings.

The house, the yard...

William: Yes. I suppose it’s camouflage.

Were you a couple before you became licks?

Janet: No. We’re not related either, even though we’re both Toreador. We met after we’d both been Embraced and escaped our sires in the Camarilla.

Are you in contact with the society of licks in San Francisco?

William: No. We keep to ourselves. Do our thing.

Freedom in Slavery Let’s talk about your thing. What is petplay?

Janet: A lot of people think it’s only a sexual fetish, and it’s that too. But it’s also a lifestyle. There doesn’t have to be sex involved. It’s about taking on the role of a pet, like a puppy. This often involves the kind of paraphernalia you might recognize from a BDSM context: muzzles, tails, bodysuits.

So which of you is the puppy?

Janet: [laughs] Oh no, we both do it.

You both do it? How does that work?

William: Well, we can do it around the house, but the best experiences we’ve had were at events and with a third person as the dominant. The owner.

Janet: There’s many interesting events organized around this here in San Francisco, in other parts of the U.S., in Europe.

And you do this with mortals? Or others of our kind?

Janet: Usually mortals!

What does it feel like to be a vampire being led around on a leash by a mortal?

William: [silence] That’s the thing. That is exactly the thing. 5 4 Rabid Dogs up. I’d lost track of time. I was gagged so I couldn’t really use the safeword and she ignored it when I used the safety signal. I guess she was mad at me from the piss thing, but it was bad.

You survived, though.

Janet: I had to call on my Blood to break free. I was panicking so I didn’t do it subtly. It was a total Masquerade breach. We didn’t know what to do so we killed her.

Hunting Dogs Do you ever have any accidents?

You are licks after all.

Janet: Well, to be honest we’ve had two bad incidents. In the first, William was very deep in the mental space of being the puppy and the dom we played with started teasing him. William lost control, the poor dear.

William: It was terrible. I don’t know what happened.

What happens when you lose control in that situation?

William: I tore apart the leather straps binding my legs and arms and killed the dom.

Janet: It’s okay, dear.

Was this a friend of yours?

Janet: Yes, in a way. We found him on Tumblr. I have a blog we use to post photos of ourselves.

What was the other incident?

Janet: It was with a woman we’d never played with before. I was alone at her house, and it had seemed good at the start. We negotiated boundaries. She had wonderful equipment, a full bitchsuit for me, that kind of thing. She was very much into control and bondage, so she had William in her basement playroom and me upstairs. You know, taking me for a walk.

Outside?

Janet: Yeah, in her backyard.

It was awkward because she was into piss play and she didn’t know I was a vampire. She wanted me to pee like a dog, but of course I couldn’t.

I can see the problem.

Janet: But the really bad thing was that the sun was coming Using different subcultures to hunt for blood has been a running theme in this series of articles, but I’m not sure how being a bondage pet helps with that?

William: It’s all in choosing the right moment. You can’t hunt during play.

Janet: That’s not entirely true, William...

William: You’re right, of course. Sometimes a male dom will force me to suck his cock. I can bite very discreetly and they don’t really have the experience to separate the feeling of a blowjob from the Kiss.

I take it that bondage pet blowjobs are not the normal way for you to hunt?

William: No. Normally the right moment to strike is during aftercare. You know, after the play is over and you’re all cuddling and sharing your emotions. People are very naked in that moment, spiritually. You can bite and feed with great love and tenderness.

It’s still a bite though. People notice when you bite them. 5 5 N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D William: It’s true. That’s why it’s good to prepare for this when you consider your pet personality. ‘Pet personality’?

William: How you behave as a pet. Are you obedient, flighty, eager, and so on. If you’re a vampire, it’s good to make little love bites part of your deal. That way, they’re not surprising when you feed.

Is this a sex thing for you, or a hunting thing?

Janet: I wasn’t into this at all as a human. After I became a vampire, all that talk of the Beast made me very anxious. I was worried about becoming this animal or monster. But after trying out petplay, I found it very relaxing, like I could somehow just settle into that space and not worry about anything.

Even sunlight or the Beast?

William: Well, you always feel bad after murdering your dom.

That’s a given. ■ Chinasa Adeyemi is a Nigerian-born writer constantly astounded by the variety of different ways we come up with to live our unlives.

VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H Vegas Nights I came to Las Vegas for the same reason as everybody else: To party and get wasted. And maybe lose some money at the poker table. I most definitely did not come here to get Embraced and become a vampire, but that’s them breaks.

It was me and a couple of guys from work. They were ribbing me for being a Vegas novice. They were threatening to set me up to get married with a prostitute, wake up in a trashed hotel room somewhere with no idea of how it happened.

Turns out, I managed it quite well without them. On our first night, we ended up in a nightclub called the Asylum. My friends didn’t like it and left but I stayed behind because I found the goth vibe somehow seductive. Got to appreciate any place that plays Chiasm’s Isolated in the bathrooms on a loop.

On my second night, I was in the queue of the Clark County Marriage License Bureau with Jeanette Voerman. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Las Vegas is a great place to handle marriage bureaucracy if you’re a vampire seeking to maintain a human identity: The Bureau is open until midnight.

Mad Love I met Jeanette on the dancefloor on my first night at the Asylum. I’d realized I was a little out of place so I’d just taken my shirt off and borrowed some eyeliner from a guy in the bathroom.

I could tell she was somebody from the way everybody treated her but I’d been inhaling confidence up my nose all evening so it wasn’t a problem. She was blonde, beautiful and dressed like an indecent schoolgirl. Everything she said was creepy and weird but I didn’t care because she had her tits in my face.

The last time I saw my friends was when we went for lunch after that first night. They asked me what had happened and I couldn’t really explain it. In the beginning I’d just wanted to fuck Jeanette, but by the end of the night I proposed to her.

Most of the people queuing to the Marriage License Bureau were fortyish women with identical faces and older, disinterested men in white shorts and sunglasses. After we got our papers, we took a limo to the wedding chapel. I debated how much to tip the priest and Jeanette talked strange. This is 5 6 going to make me sound like a weirdo, but it was starting to turn me on when she said things like: “My sister would be so mad if she knew I was marrying a pretty boy like you. But don’t worry, I’ll keep my little birdie safe. Or let you die. One of those.”

Undead Barman When our limo sped away from the wedding chapel, I was in love and I was in lust with the woman I believed to be my wedded wife. Jeanette got hot and heavy with me on the back seat, bit my neck... You know where this is going. She drank me dry, gave me just enough blood to make me into her childe and disappeared into the night.

I lost my mind and murdered the limo driver. I still feel bad about that.

I had no idea what had happened to me. I ran from the wreck of the car into the streets, sneaking into a hotel to find a bathroom and wash my face. My phone was full of messages from You know how in vampire movies there are these revelations that the barman or the taxi driver was a vampire all along? How you thought this was a normal nightclub but actually everybody around you is undead?

It’s a lot less glamorous if you’re actually the barman. 5 7 N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D my friends but I couldn’t call them when the very idea made me want to drain all the blood they carried inside and drink it in slow, pleasurable gulps.

I started to make my way towards Asylum because that was the only place where I thought I could find Jeanette. Let me tell you, Las Vegas is not a city for pedestrians, especially if you’ve just been made into a vampire and have no idea what’s happening.

The Asylum bouncer told me that I was expected at the manager’s office. He took me there and sat me down in from of a woman who introduced herself as Therese Voerman. She looked very serious, a businesslike blonde woman the VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H same age as Jeanette had been. I guessed this was she sister she’d mentioned.

“I’ve managed this club for a long time, since we were in Santa Monica. I won’t have it threatened by fools like you, taken in by the games my sister likes to play. I’ll give you two choices. Get out of the city or work here.”

I chose to work there. That’s how I went from running my own consulting business to working in a nightclub. I didn’t even really get paid, just provided a place to sleep.

Swipe Right For Blood to expand, to guys, to different kinds of women.

I’ve started to learn a simple vampire truth: The best blood is not always inside the young and the sexy. Sometimes the blood of an aging slot machine addict has just the right touch of sedentary maturation.

Theresa has told me a lot about the Second Inquisition and what it means to live in Las Vegas as a lick. I got lucky in a sense, being Embraced only after the local Camarilla suffered the full wrath of the intelligence agencies. The Asylum is too well integrated into the mortal world to be easily detectable but the Camarilla and their Elysiums were much simpler to ferret out.

All this is foreign to me because I have never experienced what the Camarilla really is. For me, the status of Las Vegas as an open Anarch city is just the normal state of affairs. We hunt from tourists and the only authority I bow to is Theresa.

Nomadic Anarch groups come and go, many of them stopping at the Asylum. I’ve understood that the place has some notoriety in Anarch circles although for me it’s pretty much the totality of the vampire world as I know it. For these licks, the Asylum is a club where the hunting is good and something fucked up is always happening. If not otherwise, then because Jeanette makes it happen.

White Wedding Theresa forbade me from hunting at the Asylum so I had to come up with something else. For a few weeks I hoped I could live some sort of married vampire bliss with Jeanette, but when she finally showed up at the club, she wasn’t much interested in me. It took me a while to understand that for her, it had just been a little prank she played on her sister.

Sometimes I think that without Tinder and Grindr, I would have been lost to the Hunger. I’ve been blessed with a pretty face, good abs and a solid line of selfdeprecating patter. I know how to take a good selfie.

There’s something special about using Tinder and Grindr to hunt for blood. You’re not really thinking about who you want to fuck but who you want to taste.

At first I went pretty much for the same kind of girls I’d wanted to have a date with. Then I started The Asylum building is an old chapel. I realized I’d got off easy when Jeanette found her next victim. She flirted with humans and vampires alike. It made me jealous to watch her do it but I knew I’d had my moment with her and there wouldn’t be another. The next clubgoer she started to play the marriage game with was a girl, a Degenerate of only a few years as a vampire from the middle of nowhere.

She was taken with Jeanette and the same thing happened as with me: She proposed on the dance floor. Jeanette made a production of it, with a marriage ceremony at the club in a few nights.

They had a priest and everything.

The girl looked like she couldn’t believe her luck when she walked Jeanette to the altar. They kissed and we all applauded. She’s come to Vegas to have the kind of fun only a vampire could have and the city had delivered.

The only thing she didn’t realize was that it wasn’t real. She was a girl from the sticks who fell for the Vegas illusion. The night after the wedding, she stumbled to the Asylum, looking for Jeanette.

Instead, she got a stern talking-to from Theresa.

I’m not too broken up about it.

I got promoted from the bar when she started to work here. I even taught her how to use Tinder to get at all those tourists looking to hook up in Vegas. ■ 5 8 The Night Circus Come one! Come all! For tonight only, the Night Circus is in town. Gets your tickets, bring your family and see miracles like you’ve never seen before!

Witness the amazing Princess of the Trapeze fall to her death!

Marvel at the Hypnotic Man and the illusion of lost time!

Delight in the tortures of the Screaming Mermaid!

Watch the Tigers and the Bears, the Elephants and the Seals cavort for your pleasure and edification!

Laugh at our uproariously hilarious clowns as they beat each other with sticks!

Learn our story: Founded in Victorian England, the Night Circus is closing in on two centuries of touring all across the world, going from town to town to delight the young and old alike. Taking its aesthetic from the burlesque shows of old, anachronistic wunderkammers and the most suicidal circus performances, it’s the most deranged show on Earth.

Inside, you will see the centuries melt away as ancient monsters prowl the land once again. The limits of the human form are exposed as the merest fantasy as our acrobats perform the impossible. Feel the madness of the crowd as you participate in a show of cruelty and comedy, terror and wonder so amazing it’ll change your life.

Step right up and come right in. It’s the most incredible show on Earth, and you’ll find you’ll never want to leave its shimmering wonderland.

The Tent They’ll tell you that you have to live a lie, wear a mask, make your entire existence into a tedious Masquerade. You’ll lie to your family and your friends. You’ll lie to your neighbors and random people on the street. You’ll lie and lie and lie because the truth will kill you.

Or so they say.

Every night, I look myself in the mirror. With powder and eyeliner, I build my true face. They introduce me to a crowd of hundreds of mortals and they all murmur my name.

I arrive on horseback, circling the ring, smiling at all the little boys and girls who will fall in love with me forevermore. I drink in their wonder, their adulation, the terror in their eyes as they see how fragile, how slight I appear on the back of a powerful, muscular animal. They sense the violence, the hunger gifted to the beast by our precious Blood.

The lights turn up. A rope descends and I leap, pulled up by my lovely compatriots hidden in the rigging. They take me all the way to the ropes and trapezes swinging high above the audience.

The Tout 5 9 N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H I begin my dance. I swing and turn, leap and fall, twist and risk everything with each carefully rehearsed move. There is no net. There are no safeties.

The people must feel death, they must sense the danger, they must understand their own mortality. I’m a sacrificial victim, and each time I die, they live.

For that’s how it ends. I make one final jump, somersault in the air. Spread my arms and close my eyes. There’s nothing for me to grab onto. I plummet to the ground.

To me, this moment is more beautiful than anything in existence. The audience senses death, damage, bones breaking. They sense my intention.

They understand this was no accident. They imagine my body breaking on the sand of the ring.

The lights go out just before the impact. The audience breathes in disquieted relief. It was just a trick.

The death was an illusion. Applause scatters in the dark, empty tent before the next number.

In those few seconds of darkness, they drag my broken body backstage. I bask in the truth of my own glory and tragedy.

JOIN THE NIGHT CIRCUS!

Tired of hiding who you are?

Ready to bask in the adoration of a witless crowd? Willing to revel in the beauty of your dark truth?

Join us and demolish the Masquerade in front of the ignorant human multitudes night after night, leaving them dazzled and none the wiser.

Embrace life on the road. Enjoy life among kindred spirits. Escape the torpor of servitude!

Become who you really are as part of the Night Circus!

Apply tonight. (Mesmerists and animal handlers needed.) Later, they will bring someone from the audience to me. Usually a man, someone normal who suddenly saw a glimpse of the wondrous and unnatural. He wants to give me a bouquet and say thank you. I allow him to do so even as I take something more from him as well.

The Trail The Night Circus never stays in town for more than one night, one show. In its wake, it leaves behind terrifying memories, blood drained corpses and municipal authorities confused about who exactly gave the permit for them to set up their tent.

The Circus is a traveling caravan of trucks and trailers, transporting the performers, the animals and the crew as one tightly-knit family of humans and those less than human. Everyone in the Circus has tasted the Blood, whether they’re mortal or not.

They all know the secret of why the show looks like nothing else on Earth, and they will never reveal its secrets.

Between cities, they set up camp in a small town somewhere and relax. They rehearse the numbers, train new members, organize weddings and funerals. For many in the Circus, these private days and nights lived inside a rolling camp are the happiest of their lives.

Sometimes at the end of a show, someone from the audience wanders backstage to ask questions.

Perhaps they’re a circus professional wondering about the amazing stagecraft, seeking to improve their own circus practice. Many of these end up dead or confused, having lost their memories, but a few appear in the ring after a few weeks, as new members of the family. ■ 6 0 6 1 N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D Delusions of Humanity VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H He still went to work, but only at night. He had a job as a lawyer, and somehow he’d been able to arrange it so that he never had to meet clients during the day.

He had some kind of a bizarre bullshit medical excuse about being sensitive to sunlight.

They continued their lives as if the husband, Mark, had an unusual addiction but was otherwise normal. They held dinner parties for their friends and talked football and politics. They had a subscription to the Guardian and two children I quickly learned to hate. Every once in a while, Mark had to go out to feed, but they never talked about it.

Maybe the joke’s on me, because I never realized that something weird was going on in that household. They were so incredibly tedious in their crushing beige normality that I never considered the possibility they might have a dark secret.

At least, I didn’t consider it until Mark cornered me in the kitchen one night. He told me how their marriage lacked passion, and how he found me attractive. First I tried to evade Did I ever tell you how I got Embraced? It’s an embarrassing story, so I’m sure you’ll like it. It didn’t happen here in Reykjavik, even though this is where I was born and raised. The licks here are very strict about progeny.

No, it happened in London. I went there straight from school to work as an au pair. It seemed like a good deal. Look after the kids of a cosmopolitan, successful couple.

Get paid, get room and board. See the city, experience a new life.

What could go wrong? How about a family where the wife is a horrible micromanager who thinks one evening off every two weeks is reasonable? A husband who keeps leering at me, asking if I have a boyfriend yet?

How about a couple who are a vampire and a ghoul?

I didn’t realize how embarrassing they truly were until much later, when I’d gotten out of there and seen some more of vampire society.

So, the husband was the vampire and the wife was the ghoul. him, then I told him I wasn’t interested, and finally I shoved him off me because he was getting too insistent.

That’s when he made me into a vampire. To show me that he was still the big man in the house.

I went rabid straight off the bat, punched his teeth in with a strength I didn’t even know I had and disappeared into the night.

I didn’t understand it then, but Mark had made me into a Duskborn. I liked the irony of it.

His Blood was weak, but not weak enough to allow him to go out during the day. That privilege was reserved for me, his progeny.

After I became a vampire, I went a little crazy. I got a place of my own, hit the clubs, changed my style. My newly dead body had an amazing resilience. I’d been the shy little au pair from Iceland, but now I became something else. I felt like I could do anything, get anyone, do drugs, dance, party forever and ever. 6 2 6 3 N I G H T S O F T H E U N B O U N D VA M P I R E – T H E M A S Q U E R A D E – A N A R C H I was still curious about Mark and his shitty life. Sometimes I went back to the house in Barnet and watched this couple who lived in denial, desperate to still pass for humans.

The wife was called Sarah. After I’d left, she seemed to become ever thinner and more neurotic, snapping at the children and crying when she was alone. From the way they talked, I guessed that Mark had told her I had left after a dispute about free time. That was kinda plausible, because I’d had that talk with Sarah many times. But looking at her, I knew she suspected that the reality was something worse, something to do with her husband’s true nature.

It was funny, in a way. Mark did his absolute best to suppress any sign of being a vampire. This wasn’t a house with blood bags in the fridge. Just heavy drapes in the master bedroom. They never talked about it, even when they were just the two of them.

When Mark was at work and the kids were at their friends’ house, Sarah relaxed sometimes by watching a romantic vampire movie and drinking red wine. At first I thought it was funny, but then it started to feel sad. She was really into it. She liked the idea of being married to a vampire. If only he could have been persuaded to play it up, once in a while.

It could have ended with this, me leaving, they continuing their lives . But it didn’t.

One night, Sarah caught me snooping around. I’d gotten careless, watching them like my own little reality show. She’d thought Mark had killed me, but now that I was obviously up and about, she accused me of having seduced her husband. She was crying when she told me that she knew we were having an affair and Mark had made me into a vampire too.

I’m a monster now, like all Kindred. I live as a parasitic being, sucking the life out of humanity.

But even I have my sentimental side. What could I do?

I gave her some of my Blood and took her out partying. By the end of the night, she was a vampire too, courtesy of a guy who owed me a favor. The last I saw her, she was planning to move to Berlin before the London Camarilla realized that an illegal childe had been made.

And who knows, Mark could still be in that little house in Barnet. Checking himself in the mirror to make sure there’s no blood spatters on his white collar.

Taking the kids to school. Fighting hard against everything the night could give him. ■ 6 4