It was only when Satan Coil died that any of us discovered that Satan hadn't been his real name. He died in 1956, the year that the Russian tanks rolled in to Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution. Of course the Hungarian Revolution was of no concern to me, I was nine years old and what I cared about was my new black Raleigh Junior bicycle, the TV set with the huge mahogany cabinet and the miniscule, blurry and often rolling black-and-white picture, and the Glenalough Adelphi, the local cinema that was owned and managed by Satan, where my friends and I spent every Saturday afternoon, transported to other lands, other times and other lives by the magic of the flickering screen.The idea of a cinema being owned and operated by Satan was one that must have appealed mightily to the local Roman Catholic hierarchy, it may even have been them who gave him the nick-name, but I suspect that it emerged more from his habit of running up and down the cinema aisles during the Saturday matinees when the building was taken-over by hordes of runny-nosed pre-teenage youngsters intent on admitting their friends without tickets through the fire-doors, while brandishing a high-powered flashlight and screaming at them in his thick Galway accent to "Sate in yer sates!". It was but a short step from "Sate-in" to the popular familiar name for the Prince of Darkness. And the Prince of Darkness, in a manner of speaking, is exactly what he was.Satan was not a well man during the time that I knew him. He had been tall, and may even have been handsome in his earlier years, but by the beginning of my cinema-going career he had become unnaturally lean and bent-over, wore a permanent hang-dog scowl on his scrawny pallid face, and seemed always to have last shaved a couple of days prior to any encounter. He spoke in little short bursts, punctuated by attempts to catch his breath, each of which resulted in a cough-like gulp from somewhere at the back of his throat. One could chart from Saturday to Saturday the decline in his ability to climb the stairs to the projection room.Looking back across the decades to those distant Glenalough days, things become obvious that were far from obvious at the time. I could make a good stab now at putting a name to the condition from which Satan suffered, but more importantly perhaps I can see some of the underlying causes for the slow atrophy of his will to continue. Satan had originally come to Glenalough and purchased the Adelphi in order to be close to Dilly Morgan, the Widow Morgan, as we knew her, Sean Morgan's mother. Sean Morgan was a couple of years older than me, a street-wise thick-set ginger-headed boy with a penchant for bullying, whom nobody liked but many secretly admired at the coarse Christian Brothers Primary School at the south end of the town. Whether the Widow Morgan was really a widow, or whether this was a courtesy title awarded to any woman who found herself alone with a child in the hypocritical and moralistic society of 1950s Ireland is anyone's guess. There were even rumors that Satan Coil might have been Sean's father, but we discounted that theory on the simple grounds that everyone knew that the Coils were Protestants, and the idea of a romantic liaison between a Catholic woman and an unbeliever was even more unthinkable than the notion of fornication itself. More likely Sean was the result of some ill-fated affair in Ms. Morgan's teenage years, and Satan, whose devotion to Dilly was perfectly genuine, hoped that despite his apparent disqualification on religious grounds he might still merit consideration as a suitor to a Catholic woman who was, after all, somewhat damaged goods herself. In the event Dilly Morgan never, to my knowledge, showed the smallest interest in Satan's amorous advances, and drifted into middle-life in the sole company of her thuggish son, the two of them living in one of the smallest cottages within the town boundaries of Glenalough, on the bank of an overgrown, littered and rather foul-smelling stream that only flowed if there had been a few days of heavy rain in the mountains. The cottage was called "Riversdale House".As well as being unlucky in love, the value of Satan's business investment and the income that it generated declined rapidly and steeply during his years in Glenalough. He often complained that it was the Roman Catholic Church that had engineered his ruin, because although Glenalough was technically within the Protestant dominated and British ruled state of Northern Ireland, it was a border town and peopled predominantly by Catholics. This Catholic/Protestant divide was enormously important in every aspect of Irish life then and still is to this day: about twelve years after Satan's death it led to the armed uprising of the Northern Catholics that is still tearing the unfortunate country apart. In fact Satan was less than honest about the part played by religious affiliations in his floundering fortunes. The truth was that th

Two is trapped: hooked on drugs, held as property, forced to sell her body to feed the addiction. Time brings her ever closer to what seems an inevitable death and Two waits, uncaring, longing only for the next fix.That's when Theroen arrives, beckoning to his Ferrari and grinning his inscrutable grin. He is handsome. Confident. Eager to help lift her out of the life that's grinding her down.The only problem? Theroen is a vampire.His blood can cure her addiction, grant her powers she has never had, change her forever into something greater than she was. But when he sinks his teeth into her neck, Theroen also thrusts Two into a world of danger, violence, madness and despair. The powerful, twisted elder Abraham will use her arrival to shatter the uneasy peace that exists in his mansion, bringing an end to the dark game he has been playing for centuries.Excerpt:Her name was Two, and she sometimes thought she could smell her death, blowing in from the cemetery that lay south of her building in East New York. Sometimes she even hoped for it. Stinking, muttering, moldering death. Cold and dark. On these occasions, she felt as if even the dirty embrace of the grave would be better for her than the squalor she lived in now. She thought, maybe, she might find some sort of peace that had been missing all her life.Darren owned her building, like he owned the girls who occupied it. Three stories tall, four rooms to a floor. They lived two to a room, two bathrooms per floor, two kitchens in the building. Just over twenty girls, every single one of them selling her body each night at his command. In return for the money they brought him, he gave them food. He gave them shelter. He gave them drugs, and the drugs gave them escape.Two was not supposed to be here. She reflected on that often, and if she'd ever believed in a God, she'd have cursed him now. Fickle, twisted fate had delivered her into Darren's arms. Promises of salvation, undercurrents of doubt, desire, desperation. The cold prick of a needle.She tried not to think about it.Darren held the plastic bag filled with ****** above her now, like a treat for a dog. Little better than a dog she was, really, down on her knees, eyes wet with tears ready to spill over. Angry, vengeful Darren, so filled with hate. Hate for his parents, who'd given him his gorgeous mulatto features and then abandoned him on the street. Hate for his ex-wife, who'd left him immediately upon discovering the nature of his business, but still found fit to take half of what it had earned him. Hate for the girls he had made his slaves, and who had made him rich. Hate for the very money they handed over to him every night.Darren didn't know of his own hate, but it burned in him so brightly it scarred his features. Twisted, cruel lips. Pinched brow. Two might have understood this hate, seen reflected in it her own self-loathing, but Two spent most of her time thinking about the ****** now. She had no sympathy for Darren, or his girls, no sympathy for herself. Lucid existence was the time between sleep and drug, drug and ***, *** and sleep. Short bursts of clarity, ever more painful, amid an otherwise blurred, waking dream.“Beg for it, Two,” Darren snarled, and Two's mouth formed words of penitence against her will, pleading through tears without even realizing she'd meant to do it. She begged apology for some imagined slight, some invented twist in her voice that had caused this punishment.“Darren, I'm sorry! I'm so sorry for what I said!” But what had she said? She'd only asked for her daily ration of the drug, in the same manner she had for the past four months. If Darren had detected any real change of inflection, it hadn't been intended. But here she was, on the floor, begging and pleading for something she didn't even want. Begging and pleading and dreaming of death.