adventuuuuure
It’s three in the morning when I shake you gently awake. You look up, shaking off vague dreams of building a house with tall walls, and it takes a little while to orient yourself.
“Bluh? What’s the matter?”
I’m doing that thing where I’m looking at you like I’m the luckiest man in the world again. At least you think I am. Your eyes are not quite focusing despite your excellent night vision, and you can feel that your hair is sticking at right angles where you slept on it. I must be looking at some other pale, waifish vision of loveliness.
“It’s a full moon. We have to go on an adventure!”
“That’s… What time is it?” You check your phone and learn the horrible truth. Mostly to yourself, you quietly murmur, “Why are you like this?”
“Adventuuuuure,” I say, and hold up some warm black clothing. You groan but sit up. Your stomach rumbles, midnight-hungry, with an accompanying sharp bite of hollow pain. If this is a bust, you figure, at least you can eat me.
Adventure apparently consists of a fifteen minute drive into the crisp countryside. The purring of the engine should be pulling you back to sleep but, well, something in the night calls to you by nature.
“You’ve been starving yourself again,” I say, perhaps spurred by another comment by your gut, like a plug was briefly pulled on a bath behind your belly button. “I thought you might be feeling vampiric.”
You put your hand on my knee, feeling the muscles shift as I select a lower gear. The dark, silent houses slip by like pale stone ships as we enter another Dales village. I’m hunting for a place to park.
“You know how it is,” you say vaguely, emptiness gnawing at your centre.
Without the full moon the walk would be perilous. As it stands we’re walking alongside a narrow stream that has failed to cut a defined channel into the hard stone bed. It splits and rejoins crazily, carving the grassy landscape into a froth of tiny islands separated by slick granite bedrock.
We invent a game of chase. I hop from one little island to another, then you hop, and we take turns trying to find a way to corner each other. When I jump on your island I pull you close and kiss you deeply. When you jump on mine you do the same, though you bite my lip and taste my blood. Your tummy growls like a beast roused.
I see you looking at me, happy and sharp with hunger. Your skin is a little cool against mine: you sip on my body heat when we embrace.
“Come on, I want to show you something!”
A knowing smile narrows your eyes and you punch me playfully on the shoulder, almost throwing me off your little island. You know when I’m trying to distract you from your hunger, but you go along with it.
The thing isn’t the cove, a cliff that rears suddenly from the valley and swallows the river whole into a pit the moonlight barely touches. It certainly isn’t the steps cut into the side of the cove, metal railing worn by time and many hands.
Instead it’s the shattered ground above the cove.
“Behold,” I say, holding you around the waist and gesturing grandly with the other. “The limestone paving.”
It’s like God dropped a sheet of ice. Under the moonlight, countless irregular pale blocks are knitted together by sprawling, black spiderweb cracks. Here and there grass or wild plants peek out from one of these so-called grykes, but otherwise the scene is sparkling, pristine, otherworldly.
“It’s beautiful,” you breathe, pulling close but not taking your eyes of the spectacle.
I nod, also looking at first. After a while you realise I’d stopped paying attention to the landscape and was actually looking at you. When you catch me I grin, then look up.
“The stars are strong out here.”
Moonlight on shattered ground, starlight like diamond in the sky, bounding a still, cold night that smells of green earth. You open up your senses to take it all in. The river at the base of the cove roars its little defiance as it feeds itself to the earth.
And… another sound. Talking. You cock your head, trying to locate the source.
I’m smiling like you’ve spotted a gift I bought you. “There’s a bouldering spot nearby. Sometimes climbers come of a night. Like tonight.”
Two men? No, a man and a woman. There’s the sound of scrambling then an impact on something padded. The woman laughs fondly.
I take your hand and lead you up a grassy bank to the top of the rock they’re working on. Before we become visible I grab you, enclose you in a powerful embrace, and kiss you hard enough my tongue catches on your fangs. Blood. The black and white night turns red in your eyes.
Wordlessly I pull back and look towards the top of the slope. My neck is exposed. You are hyperaware of that.
Instead of acting on that impulse, you crest the grassy bank. The climbers fall silent below when they see you.
What do they see? Framed by ancient stars, carved into sharp black-and-white by the moon, and wrapped all in midnight, all they really see is your eyes. Measuring the distance, calculating their likely resistance, stripping away their humanity before ever you take a step towards them. Something in their hindbrains recognises a predator with primordial dread.
And what do you see? In the desert of colourlessness, two small islands of red. Two microcosms of the miracle of life. Two hearts beating a torrent quietly contained, rushing faster now they see you. The torrent will run faster still, find a swallowing pit as deep and terrible as Malham Cove below.
And what do I see? As you step from the bluff with uncanny grace and swoop down upon your prey I see my future, averted for another day. I see the being in whom I invest all of my life exercise the full majesty of her animal power. I see the most beautiful woman I have ever known.
I am the luckiest man alive.