I knew it was a vampire, the way it posed beneath the streetlight. As impervious to the cold and rain as a marble statue, it stood in the sodium glare and glowed in the way they do when they want to be noticed. Solid in a way that weak human flesh cannot rival. Yet, in a heartbeat, it was gone: carried on the wind like a leather clad leaf.
It was a warning, of course. They love to taunt. So I hurried to my front door and turned the key in the lock, all the while preparing myself for what was to come.
Diane tottered towards me along the hallway. She was wearing a red satin dress that I did not recognise and was unsteady on bare feet, as if drunk. She spoke, but her words were muffled and slurred. Her mouth glistened cherry-red with lip gloss.
I caught a waft of her perfume and mistook it for one of those modern power statements that make your sinuses ache. Not her usual style.
Then, my nose cleared of the autumn chill and damp, I recognised the stink of fresh blood. As Diane collapsed to her knees and I reached to catch her, I realised that her dress was actually one of my long, baggy T-shirts that she wore to bed. It was drenched in gore. Her life was flooding from her mouth in crimson torrents.
In the half light through the open door, I witnessed the un-life entering her eyes in a corresponding tide of blackness.
Gently, but swiftly, I lowered her cooling body to the floor, then placed a wooden crucifix upon her breast and a garland of garlic at her throat. The best I could do for now.
I stood to confront the vampire. It was advancing, shadow by shadow, in a series of almost quantum jumps. With its unnatural speed and strength, it could have taken me already, but I guess it wanted to feed on my shock and despair.
I glimpsed something of its inhuman nature, as it flitted like a ragged shape of rags and bone, an unravelling skein of black wool and rusted needles, a neurotic scribble on the very air at the corner of my eye.
Then, it pressed up against me, smelling of old leather and nothingness. Its hands tangled hooks in the shoulders of my coat. Its eyes focused elsewhere.
I shoved my gun hard to its chest, where its heart would have been, if it still had one.
It smiled – and all of its exposed skin gleamed white as tooth enamel – as if its whole body was a fanged maw poised to strike.
“Silver bullets,” it said, in a throbbing monotone that echoed directly inside my skull. Its lips did not seem to move. But, in the depths of its eyes, something ravenous stirred, in the sense of being raven black and cruel beaked, making a high pitched screech-scratching sound in counterpoint.
“Hollow shells,” it continued. “Filled with holy water and a tincture of garlic. How very quaint.”
With my left hand, I grasped the gilt crucifix I wore on a prayer bead necklace, pulled it free of the neck of my shirt and pressed it to the creature’s face.
It did not flinch or even blink. Its forehead stayed botox smooth.
“I abjure thee, demon…!” I shouted, while trying to stay calm enough to remember the formal rite of binding.
“Let us forego the hocus pocus.”
It responded by grasping the cross and crushing it like tin foil, without even a hint of irritation. As if patiently removing the hazard of a pointed bauble from an infant’s hand.
“The Pax Cruor is broken. You humans have declared that God is dead. You say that vampires are not real. You make up fictions about us. We are entertainment. Though we were ancient when the dinosaurs feared our presence in the primeval forests…”
While it was distracted by its own oratory, I fired my gun point blank. The shot was deafening in the hallway’s close quarters. The bullet made a scorch-edged hole in the vampire’s leather coat, passed clean through and imbedded itself in my bedroom door.
I staggered back with the noise and recoil, while the vampire remained unmoved.
“We are inviolate. We choose not to partake of Time, but play the long game…”
What the hell. I decided to be defiant.
“Why the exposition? Why not just kill me and be done with it? Why play games at all, long or otherwise?”
“Sometimes, we allow the tree of life to bear fruit and pluck it when ripe. Sometimes, we allow it to run to seed, so that the stocks can be replenished. Other times, we prune it back without mercy, to promote new vigour and re-growth. It is not in our best interest to lay waste to this world’s natural resources, do you not agree?”
“Fuck you. We’re not blood cows to be kept in herds.”
“No indeed. We have allowed you to believe these grim fairy tales for our own purpose. We have our own truth and our own mythology. We do not need your noxious fluids.”
It pointed to Diane’s prone form. Already, her transformation was complete. She lay with pallid grace, with the unblemished beauty of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. She rose as the moon rises out of the mist of an autumn evening. She continued to wear the garlic as a fragrant corsage and toyed with the crucifix like a courtesan with a fan.
“As you see, we reject the blood,” she pronounced; her voice sonorous as a ghost in a well, again with an ear piercing overtone of a bat’s hypersonic cry. “The sacramental pact occasioned by our kind is now void.”
“Diane,” I pleaded. “If there is anything left of you…”
“The woman you knew is leaves on the breeze. The leaves of a book I have read and discarded.”
In my loss, I had almost forgotten the first vampire. It placed a cold hand on my head in a ghoulish mockery of benediction.
“It falls to you to prepare the way. As a voice in the wilderness who is prepared to believe, you must spread the word. We took your would-be Saviour from His tomb and ate of His flesh and drank of His blood. We raised Him back to life as a vampire. And now it is time for Him to reclaim his true throne.”
There was silence for a long while before I realised they were both gone. I could not tell where the vampires ended and shadows began. They had not even left footprints in the trailing pool of drying blood on the floor. Only a broken cross marked their passing.
