The root of it all was my fear of death. I was scared of dying, as I suppose every mortal is at times of crisis, but with me it was virtually a constant fear. I couldn't bear the thought of fading into the void, of lapsing into oblivion and suddenly no longer being. In a few short years, when my loved ones had ceased to mourn, it would be as though I had never existed. That was a harrowing thought indeed.
In order to lessen the fear and the pain, I needed something to believe in, something to truly confirm that there wasn't just oblivion. I tried religions the world over, but nothing worked. I took up Pagan Witchcraft, which gave a degree of comfort, but like so many in this modern scientific world, I needed proof in order to have true faith. And there just wasn't any proof.
I began reading about vampires when I was still young enough to be impressionable. I was captivated immediately by the romantic notion, as I saw it, of the person who refused to die, refused to become nothing but a memory. Ghosts were impressive in their own way but they were, both literally and figuratively, insubstantial. Vampire refused even to surrender their physical forms to death; rather they glorified themselves in death. It seemed such a beautiful concept to me.
I threw myself into my studies, writing almost continuously throughout the day, whether on paper or computer, or merely composing inside my head. And when the study time was over, I went out with a group of like-minded souls. We called ourselves 'The Children of Diana', Diana being the huntress goddess of the moon, and therefore the perfect symbol of vampirism in action. I became the Area Rep. of a nationwide Vampire Appreciation Society, a group of people devoted to the literature and the ideals of vampirism. We were beautiful, my precious little darlings and I, all dressed in black, our hair dyed, our faced painted. We prowled the shadowy streets trying to scare mortals, trying to pretend we were different from them. But the illusion was never complete. The same thick, heavy blood pumped in our veins as in theirs. And they were never really in any danger from us.
Often I wanted to open my veins to them, my dark brothers and sisters, but they would recoil from me if I did, I knew that. I loved the taste of my own blood, but how could I explain it to them? I let it rest. In the privacy of our bedchamber, my fiancé and I acted out each other's gothic fantasies, lustful dreams of power and blood and seduction. Eternal life for the price of a kiss.
But it was not enough. Even with my lover's help, the fear of dying would return to me now and then, waking me terrified and sweating in the middle of the night. He would hold me until the tears subsided, until the fits of shivering died away, but I was still losing myself, slowly but surely.
I began to be obsessed with the idea of finding one of the true vampires that I prayed might exist somewhere. God only knows if I would have had the courage to offer myself to him if we had found him, but I knew I had to try. My little coven and its innocent pleasures were simply not enough any more. I dragged my fiancé to haunted sites all over England and throughout Europe, but I never found anything more than superstition, and certainly nothing to undoubtedly prove to myself that they existed.
I'm not even sure why I'm telling this tale. Am I trying to offer hope to others who have lived and suffered as I have, who have tried to cope with the constant fear of the end? Or am I simply searching for my own salvation? Perhaps by telling what I know I hope to find a way to express my own fears and my own dreams. Perhaps I'm seeking redemption for what has happened to me.
All I do know for sure is that my story really only began a few short months ago...
It was a pleasant spring, showing signs already of developing into a blistering summer. The days were painfully long and the nights hot and sweet. My work was finished, my days at university over after three long years. I was free at last to work on what I wanted to work on. No more lectures, no more essays, no more exams. Bliss. I was writing and reading voraciously still, and watching films til my eyes hurt. I did not spend much time away from my beloved fiancé. This was the first time we had really had to spend together and I was not going to waste it.
Things were going well. I was all fired up about a new project I wanted to write, a novel about my little clan, 'The Children of Diana'. But of course, in the book we were real vampires.
I hadn't had the nightmares for over a month, although I still thought about my fear sometimes. It seemed to make it worse having my fiancé there sometimes, as my fears were localised on him: what would I do if he died? How could I cope without him? I knew I could not. I knew he was worried about me, but what could I say to him? If I were to tell him that I was fine, that years of fear and terror had just vanished overnight, he would not have believed me. And it would not have been the truth. I was still afraid, but it was disturbing me less and less than it ever had before.
That release I knew was in part due to the influence of my darling fiancé. Although I worried about coping without him, his support, love and kindness were vast and immense and suffocating, and with so many good things to look forward to – our wedding in the autumn, for one – I had very little time to dwell on morbid thoughts.
And then there were the dreams. At first I scarcely even realised what they were. I was so used to recurring dreams, and I was familiar also with premonitions in the form of dreams: I'd had such things since I was a child. I was of course accustomed to dreaming of vampires too, and it was only when I realised that it was one specific vampire that I kept dreaming of, and that it was not a distorted version of my fiancé, that I began to pay any real attention to them...
The figure I saw in my dreams was a tall man, and not unlike my lover in build and stature. Yet there the similarity ended. His beauty was of a far different kind to that of my fiancé – like a blond demon, an angel with dark wings. He was frighteningly pale, and terrifyingly strong – I always seemed to see him fighting with another man, a man more like my fiancé, if the truth be told – and the pallor of his skin and the texture of it both horrified and captivated me. I knew what he was, but I was never afraid of him. I knew he came with gifts and blessings, not danger or curses.
The dreams were different in setting and situation, but the same in content. I would see him fighting, he would end the fight by drinking from the other man and casting his dead body away from him, and then he would beckon me. I look at the corpse at his feet with nausea at first, but then with increasing fascination. The face is never clear to me somehow, the way these things happen so maddeningly often in dreams, but at the time I seem to accept the face, as though it is right that way. I lean closer to look at the dead man's skin, to touch his soft dark hair and peer into his vacant staring eyes. None of this sickens me any more, it just makes me cry.
I am crying for myself, perhaps thinking that I will be the next victim, perhaps just sinking into the realisation that one day strangers will come and poke and prod at my dead body too. I feel nothing for the dead man; I do not even care who he is. All my thoughts are with the vampire.
There is usually blood still on his lips, and there is just a trace of it pulsing through his body. His face seems less blanched and more human, but the expression in his eyes belies that illusion. He is still what he was.
He holds out his hand to me, and without being aware of having taken it, we are racing through the streets to his lair. I instinctively know it's his lair we're going to, although no words ever pass between us. The place we go to is always the same: a tall tower which seems so ancient that it looks as if it would crumble at the slightest touch, but it has stood for centuries and will continue to do so. I am in no danger.
Once I have entered the tower I know I am past redemption. There is no way I can escape, but then I have no wish to escape. I am safe here, and death can never touch me.
Of course he makes me a vampire, and the whole experience is brilliant and ecstatic and shatteringly intimate. Words cannot describe how beautiful I feel when the change happens. I fall in love with every tiny little crack in the walls and the floor, with every dust mote flying through the air. The moon drives me crazy with desire, and I want to throw myself out of the window and soar up into it. He is old as a vampire, and his blood is strong, and his strength has passed into me. I feel as though I could leap hundreds of feet into the air and fly into the clouds, as though I could punch holes through the brick-work and bend the railings of the gates below.
The death-pains start very soon, and they are agonising. I scream and cry and blood pours out of my eyes all down my white dress. (Why do victims always wear white?! I never wear white!) Somehow the sight of the blood stirs the hunger in me, and takes my mind off the pain. My body is dying, and I am presiding over it all like some kind of weird god, careless and unconcerned, certain of his own resurrection. Death no longer holds a threat for me. I feel my vital organs dying inside me, flushing out their waste and shrivelling into tight balls of dissipated muscle. I can almost see it, the sensation is so vivid.
My creator stands beside me, watching my strength grow, watching all the fear washing out of me with the purging of my system. He know that I will make a consummate vampire, and he can leave me now. I already know everything there is to know about our kind through my studies. He seems to be leaving this place open to me. He does not speak, but I understand that this is to be my home until I find somewhere of my own which is safe from mortals.
The dream ended as I left the tower alone, pale and unearthly, in search of my first kill. I would wake up suffused with happiness and longing. I'd lie there waiting for my lover to wake. I needed him, more potently than I ever had. It was as though he was the kill I wanted; I wanted to taste his blood, just to complete the dream. I hated thinking of him like that, but in those first few moments of consciousness, that's exactly how I felt. If I could get him to wake up, get him to want me, the sex we shared at that time was so much more explosive for me. Perhaps my dream spilled over into reality, and the heightened vampire senses were still lodged in my brain. I climaxed over and over and over, I couldn't stop. All I could see in my mind's eye was blood and blood and blood, precious blood pouring from the wounds that I had symbolically made, and blood pouring from my eyes as it did when I cried at my death in the dream.
Of course such desperation and such a powerful response from me did not go unnoticed by my fiancé. He knew, I am sure, that something strange was happening to me, that I wasn't quite myself. We were neither of us 'morning people', and for me to be so sensual and so rapacious for sex that early in the day was most out of character. At first he just let it happen, delighted that I could get so much pleasure out of our intercourse, but as the weeks went by, and my desires only increased, he began to ask questions: was I taking something? Was I feeling alright? Was there something I wanted to tell him? What I knew to be the after-effects of a terrific dream, he took to be the result of taking too many anti-depressants and going hyper. I guess I might have jumped to the same conclusion if the situation had been reversed.
At any rate, our relationship became even more rampant than it had been, and it wasn't long before I realised I was starting to get hooked on the routine: the beautiful dream, the shattering sex. It was far worse than any drug addiction could have been, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. At one point, it reached such a crisis that we were virtually never out of bed until after lunch, and my lover was constantly exhausted after satisfying me, while I just hungered for more. We were reaching breaking point...
We both knew that something had to change: either we would have to go our separate ways, or we would have to work something out. Being desperately in love with each other, the former option was unthinkable. We were meant to be getting married, for God's sake, in just a few months. It was inconceivable that we cancel at this late stage, and besides, we were in love, and we wanted to be together. I felt guilty at the way I was feeling all the time, and he felt guilty for not being able to fully satisfy me.
Of course in his own way he was satisfying me. He was providing some frankly dynamite sex, which was completing the dream for me perfectly. Whatever sordid little fantasies were going on in my half-awake brain, I kept strictly to myself. He would not like the idea of my fantasising in order to get my pleasure. It wasn't that I needed the fantasy, or indeed even wanted it half the time; it was just there. I woke up with it locked inside my head, and it didn't leave until I'd come so many times that I was weak from it. I simply couldn't control what was happening to me.
So we had to find some help. The problem was, how could I explain all this to a shrink? They'd probably lock me up in an asylum and throw away the key! My obsession with vampires, my travels all around the world in search of the reality behind a myth, my liking for the taste of blood – all this would have to come out, and I simply couldn't bear being shunned by society at large. Ordinarily I didn't give a damn what people thought of me, but to be considered insane or mentally unstable when I knew I was fine, it was just the dreams taking over my life, was more than I could bear thinking about.
At length we consulted a sex therapist. None of the dream stuff came out, and nothing was mentioned of fantasies or vampires. We explained about the sado-masochistic side of our relationship, the way we acted out little fantasies for each other now and then, and then we spoke about the 'unexplained' increase in my sex drive. The therapist was singularly unhelpful. The fantasies were fine, he said, if it helped us, if it gave us pleasure. Sexual behaviour, he said, is very much a matter of personal choice. (Reading between the lines, that meant 'I think you're sick as hell, but I'm not getting paid to tell it to you straight'.) The increase in sex drive he put down to my subjugated need for a child. Bullshit!
We went home in disgust, and wrote the day off as a big mistake. Ok, so sex therapy wouldn't help. That much was obvious. After that, we saw various members of other medical faculties, all of whom said similar stuff: the torture and the teasing and the domination routine were all down to hidden insecurities about sexual behaviour, fears about inadequacy, all that old garbage that psychologists and psychiatrists of the old school churn out when they don't know what else to suggest. Several more references were made to my supposed need for a baby.
It began to look as though we would never find an answer. I tried to purposely control the dreams, to stop them happening, but I could only make it through a few nights before they came back. I tried staying awake all night and sleeping during the day, which helped considerably, but I couldn't keep up that kind of lifestyle. It was making me sick, and I lost a lot of weight. Finally my fiancé said I ought to go back to a regular sleeping pattern. He couldn't stand to see me looking so ill, and what was the point of losing loads of weight and looking like death on our wedding day? But as soon as I started sleeping properly again, back came the dreams, and they were more vivid than ever. They would go on past the point they normally stopped, and I would see myself tearing off into the night, catching a victim, draining him, leaving him dead. When I woke up, I was even more anxious to be loved, and things were getting no better. I began to fear that if something didn't change soon, we might have to separate, despite our reluctance for such drastic action. Neither of us could go on like this for much longer...
The dreams became more vivid than ever, and then, finally, what I had always secretly hoped might happen, did happen. I met the vampire.
I was walking home late one night – I'd been out with my female friends – when I became aware that I was being followed. I had said goodbye to the last of my companions at the corner of the last street, and now I was alone. I tried all the usual tricks to ascertain whether the pursuer really was a pursuer: speeding up, slowing down, crossing the road. With every action that I took, the feet behind me kept up. Once or twice I turned around, but I never saw a thing.
He confronted me in a dark alleyway, a short cut I had been foolish enough to take. I thought I might die, though I might be subjected to the most humiliating experience a woman can know, thought I might be abducted and held, while my poor fiancé panicked and tore his hair out worrying over my safety. But the moment I looked into my pursuer's glittering blue eyes, I knew that such would not be my lot. And I knew his face!
Just as I had pictured him in the dream, he held out his hand to me. But this time there was no corpse, no fight, no blood. Just his hand held out to me, and the smile on his wide, mobile mouth. And those beautiful, seductive, hypnotic eyes. I followed him without a word. I knew...
Everything was as it had been in my dreams. The tower, the vampire, and then the kiss. The kiss of death, and yet not death. Not for me; not ever for me. He held me to him as I weakened, held me and called me his 'little child'. The love of mortal father and daughter was never as strong as this. Even as every ounce of my strength was stolen from me, I adored the one who destroyed me. I knew he would return my strength a hundred fold, and I worshipped him for his power, his beauty and his never-ending love.
When the roles were reversed and I drank from him, I almost fainted with pleasure and desire. Sex was never like this, never! Not even the greatest experiences I had known with my beloved fiancé had tasted this good. There is nothing like the kiss, nothing like the feel of blood – rich, pure, exquisite vampire blood – pouring down your throat. Mortal blood is heavy and sluggish in comparison with the liquid gold that is ancient vampire blood. I didn't want to let go, didn't want to take my mouth from the wound on his wrist, but he pulled me away. He was weakening, I was drinking so deeply of this nectar that even he, with his great age and strength, was suffering.
As I fell away from him, reeling drunkenly, I began to cry. As vivid as in the dream, the blood-tears ran down my face, staining my hands, my clothes, dripping onto the chipped paving slabs of the floor, running into the dust and the earth of the ground between the stones. I cried for myself, and for my fiancé, and for my dear, sweet, innocent friends in 'The Children of Diana'. It was regret that made me weep: regret that they would never know this ecstasy; regret that they were lost to me now, that they were no more than other mortals – a feast for my hunger.
And then the vision started. I had always had poor eyesight, and I had often mourned that fact, but I knew – with the powerful insight of the living dead – that mortal eyesight was nothing compared to this. Everything was beautiful beyond imagination. Tortured poets could not have gazed upon the world and felt as desperately alone as I did. All this beauty, and I could only destroy it, live off it, draw its life-force away. This was my curse: that I should always see the precious in everything, and know that I was damned.
He stood by, waiting for my death, watching me for signs of despair. Perhaps he read my thoughts as I stared vacantly around at everything. Perhaps he knew there was something wrong. Perhaps this disorientation was only temporary, and in time I would adjust and learn to cope. Perhaps. I looked at him the way I looked at everything else. This was not like the dream: I was meant to be strong and amazed and perfect, but instead I felt lost and alone and more pathetic than I ever had as a mortal.
When the death-pangs started, I screamed in terror and pain. I knew what was happening, that this was the last part of my life, and suddenly I didn't want to die. I'd looked on this as my salvation, but there was still death. I had forgotten so much, and I had so much still to live for. I screamed and screamed until the sound of my voice was deafening me, my head ringing with the sound of it, like fingernails dragged down a blackboard at school, like broken glass scratched across stone. I felt with exquisite pain every muscle of my body expanding and contracting, and I wanted to leave it all behind. If I only had the willpower, I would find a way to die. I would sit out in the sun, I would throw myself into a fire, anything. It was like giving birth, only a hundred times worse. They never told you this in all the books.
Finally it was over, and when I was done screaming, the vampire took me by the hand and led me into another room. I let him take off my sodden clothing and wash my white, fossilising skin. I let him dress me in something different, a luxurious green velvet dress as soft as cat's fur. He held up a mirror to my face and let me see what had happened to me. I wanted to scream, but there were no screams left inside me.
My face had always had a golden, olive look to it, but now it was the colour of February snows. My skin was hardening even as I looked, and it seemed stretched over the bones of my face as though moulded to them with nothing beneath. My hair was a livid halo of whipping serpent's tongues, red and brown and grey all mixed together in some terrible mockery of human hair. My eyes, stained still with pink from my crying, were blank yet alive, deep and unfathomable but still mine. The expression in them was mine, the colour was mine, but there was something else – a light – that had never been there before. And I fell in love with them. I fell in love with their perfect form, and the soft iridescent sheen of the triangle of silver glistening in the centre of each pupil where the moonlight flashed back at me from the mirror. I fell in love with the deathly pallor, and the strange lividity of my red lips, with the sharp angle of the cheek-bones which had never been there before, with the dreadful Medusa of my hair.
In a moment, all my fears fell away from me, and the sight of this unbelievable face staring back at me was the culmination of all my research, all my hopes, all my prayers. I was a vampire!
The thirst crested in me like a tidal wave. I needed more blood. I needed a victim. My creator needed it too: I felt the pain and the hunger in him as keenly as I felt it in myself. My dream had not told the full story – we were to feed together on this first night.
Without my really being aware of it, my fang-teeth had started to sharpen and grow. As I smiled at him, I felt them, a tingling, itchy sensation in the corners of my mouth. When I closed my lips together, I felt them, hard and lethal, grazing the gum of my lower jaw. "Cain," I whispered, looking at my creator.
"Named after the ancient one, my daughter," he replied. The first time I had heard him speak out loud. His thoughts were a constant rippling stream of information in my head.
"Where shall I find you, if I need to?" I asked, my voice soft and gentle and low.
"Call to me," he said, taking my hands in his. "I shall always hear you."
That was the only speech that passed between us. During the hunt he remained silent and precise, mind and body focussed on the capture and the kill. His thoughts, if he indulged in any, shut me out. I fed, my sharp teeth tearing easily at the succulent flesh to get at the sweet blood beneath. When the taste of it filled my mouth, I knew that I could cope with what I was. Years of study had made me ready for the part I had to play. Unlike so many, taken into this secret unawares, I was ready and alert, and I knew so much already. I did not have to be taught much.
And then suddenly there was no time to think. There was just the blood and the heat and the raging fever of the thirst. I was born to Darkness at last, and death was just a very amusing and tragic joke which I would never be called upon to understand...
But what of my fiancé, you might ask? My precious mortal lover who was no doubt worried about me, who was probably calling the police right now because I hadn't come home last night? These thoughts occurred to me when I awoke the following night and climbed from the sepulchre which had been my resting place.
The moon was high and bright and radiantly beautiful. I shed a few tears just to see it, hanging empty and forlorn in a painted velvet sky. "'The Children of Diana'," I whispered softly, bowing my head. My little clan, but no longer safe from me. But there was one mortal I had to see.
Dressed in the green velvet, I fled the shelter of the tower and ran through the lush wheat fields, following the distant glare of the city lights. Somehow I knew where I was, although this place was unknown to me and I had never been there before last night. It seemed as though I had known it, in the dreams perhaps, or in the multitude of visions that came to me as I slept. Cain's dreams. Cain's visions.
The urgency of hunger could not deter me now, though I felt its heat in the back of my throat and in my mouth and in the wasted shell that used to be my stomach. Strange how even when an organ no longer functions, we still feel sensations where it used to be. Perhaps that's how it feels when you have a limb amputated, I thought. The brain still thinks it's there, even though it's long gone. But I could not, would not feed before I saw my lover. My pale skin would be the proof he would need to be truly convinced.
The city streets were familiar to me, and I raced through them, the trees and the cars and the people blurring into a white mist in the corners of my vision. Perhaps they never even saw me pass. My body thrilled to the frisson of its new powers: this was better than any adrenalin kick I'd ever had from anything else, this complete sensation of everything and nothing all at the same time. I think I was laughing out loud by the time I arrived at the house.
It was still and dark along the road. Curious, as it was only just gone eleven, but perhaps it was simply that in-between time after the early birds have closed up for the night and before the night-owls and the pub-goers find their way back. There were lights on in our window and in the room at the back of the house: I could see it filtered under the door.
The world seemed to stop turning and watch me then. It suddenly occurred to me that I could not possibly turn up cool as anything, looking like this. The unnatural pallor of my face, the strange clothing, the crazy flares of hell-fire in my eyes: if I believed that no-one would consider this peculiar, I was a bigger fool than I had thought.
And yet I wanted to see him, wanted at least to tell him that I was ok. Well, safe, anyway. And what would he think when he saw me? He'd know it wasn't make-up, he'd realise it wasn't all an act. And maybe the certainty of knowing would be as terrifying for him as it had been revelatory for me. Maybe he would turn from me in disgust. I couldn't bear to see that. I didn't quite know what I wanted from him, but I knew that I did want him. Maybe I even considered the possibility of bringing him into this. After all, it had been his life's work too, hadn't it? Wasn't I being colossally jealous and greedy, keeping it all to myself? Shouldn't I share everything with him? Didn't I love him more than anyone in the world? My thoughts fled briefly to consider Cain, but that was different. That was a parental relationship. This was physical, emotional, sexual; this was personal.
I was still standing on the doorstep, one hand poised near the doorbell, when the front door swung open and he was standing there.
I cannot say who was more shocked: I at his sudden and unexpected appearance, or he at mine. All I know is that within seconds he had dragged me into the house and was kissing my white, unnatural skin, kissing the seething mane of my hair, kissing the deadly, venomous lips. There were words pouring senselessly from his lips: that he had been so worried; that he had thought I'd been killed – was it simply my imagination, or did he look at me with curiosity and confusion as he said that? He was embracing me as though I were a normal, dead human being, and I knew it was wrong. Surely he could see the pallor of my skin, surely the changes wrought in me could not have gone unnoticed? I didn't even feel human any more – I was lighter, colder, more slender. How could he caress me as though I were still his lover?
I drew away from him and whispered his name: "Christian...", just like that, but my voice so low and so sensuous and so different from my real voice. How could he just stand there, smiling and relieved, with tears welling in his gorgeous eyes? How?
"Precious, I'm so glad you came back to me."
Stupid thing to say, unnatural thing to say. Something was very wrong here. He should have said he was relieved I was safe, that he'd told the police I was missing, that everything was all ok now. He should have been asking me what the hell had happened to me.
But he knew! The revelation hit me with the force of a tornado licking across my consciousness. He knew what had happened to me, and yet he didn't seem surprised or shocked or confused or angry. He had accepted it in the split second he had seen me on the doorstep and he had treated me as though I were the same person I had always been. Jesus Christ, he knows what I am! And he knows I'm hungry. And he knows that I need to feed. And...!
I was getting these thoughts from him. He was offering himself to me, the way no mortal ever should. He was speaking into my mind, knowing that my brain was now receptive to his the way he'd tried to coax it to be in the past. We were linked now as we never had been before, and he was offering his blood to me, offering his life. He wanted me to kill him! No, he wanted my blood – he wanted to become what I was.
I was reeling, and I shrank back from him, but he clutched at me like a man possessed and kissed me full and hard on the lips. I opened myself to him, clung to him as though we were just us again, and then I felt my fang-teeth graze his tongue. The blood was but a droplet, but it sent shock-waves of desire and need and anguish to the very roots of my soul. I wanted him so much!
"Christian," I whispered, my voice sounding cracked and dry and starved in my ears. "You cannot know what you ask."
He laughed, sick, hollow, mortal sound of someone dying. "You can say that?!" he exclaimed. "To me?!" That sound again, so parched and so dead, like wood-shavings. His laughter, that had so enchanted me when we were lovers.
I put my hands to my ears, but the sound was inside my head. "Stop it, Christian, stop this madness!" My voice was shrill and wild and far too loud. I could see him wincing in pain at the sound of it.
"Come upstairs," he suggested, his arms around me. "Let's talk." He led me up the staircase. I went, mute and unresisting. If I'd wanted to, I could have flung him down the steps and snapped his spine. But I went.
"We need to talk I think," he said, sitting down on the bed, our bed, and leaning back on his elbows the way he always did.
"What's to say?" I replied in a whisper. "You know what's happened, don't you?"
He nodded, his eyes wet with tears. Such beautiful eyes. When the eyelids snapped back, he gazed up at me and seemed to be drinking in my appearance. And all I saw was love and wonder and adoration. His eyelashes were spangled with tears and they glittered wonderfully in the lamplight.
"But you still look at me as though you love me."
"I do love you!" he said vehemently. "I always have and I always will."
"Always..." I smiled, recklessly showing the fang-teeth. Perhaps I wanted to see a reaction, a shock of fear, but there was nothing like that. "'For ever and ever' – like in the film." I could feel hot tears burning my eyes, but I refused to shed them. Too horrible a sight for him. Yes, my darling, still love me, come with me into this heaven and hell, come with me, let me make you into what I am...
"Yes." He looked clearly at me, taking in everything. He had heard my thoughts, and he understood. "You're tormented, because you want to and you don't want to. You're scared you couldn't do it, or that you shouldn't do it... to me."
Shamefully I felt the blood-tears scalding my face and I groaned. "I want you so very much," I murmured, moving to sit opposite him. "I don't think I've ever wanted you more, not through all the dream times and everything. This is so much better than sex!" I hadn't meant to say that, hadn't meant to confess so much. I tried to back away but he was holding me again and I could hear his heartbeat pounding within the cage of his ribs. "I love you."
"Then take me with you." His hands were all over me, examining my icy skin and the soft, hard texture of my face. "We can be together for ever. Like we always wanted to. A vow for a mortal lifetime is such a shallow promise. This is eternity, and I want to be with you forever. Take me with you into Darkness."
The tears were falling everywhere: I was mesmerised by the dark stain appearing in the fabric of the duvet cover. This is my blood, but I cannot die. And he was kissing my face again, licking at the blood, my blood, vampire blood. "Oh God, help me," I wailed, throwing myself into his arms. "I don't understand, I don't know what to do. I'm so afraid!" To admit it was heaven, the release of a burden I could not shoulder alone.
And then all there was was the desire for him, rising and pulsing and cresting in every sinew of my unnatural body. And it wasn't just the blood, it was sex too, sweet surrender, playful games, deep and penetrating intimacy. To feel that shattering climax again, to feel him inside me, thrusting and breaking me, making me bleed. Always back to blood. My breathing was uncontrollable and my heart was racing until I thought it would burst, and explode into a million saturated fragments of brittle glass. And then I would die, over and over again until there was nothing left to die, just green velvet and a hank of red hair shot through with mercury.
He was feeling it too, he was living inside my mind, breathing my breath, thinking my thoughts, his mind expanding and burning with my desires. We are the same person, he seemed to be saying. We are two halves of the same soul – we belong together. Do not fight this bliss, let it happen, let it come.
Oh God, oh God, oh God!
And I was tearing at his clothes, ripping at the shirt around his neck, but it wasn't his blood I wanted, it was him, his body, his closeness, his sex. My claws were pulling the buttons away, and they were flying across the room and crashing into the windows with an eerie zinging sound like a metal hairbrush creating static. And all I could think of was him, of having him again. It never occurred to me that in all the vampire tales I'd ever read, that kind of intimacy was impossible. We make our own rules, Cain had said as I slept. We do what the hell we want to do. Yes, yes, and that included this, it had to include this.
Swept away on tides of passion, and we were riding the same waves, he and I. Human and demon together, and it was possible, it was! He was lifting my skirts, wasn't he? He was naked and I was naked underneath, and nothing had changed there. And he was hard and anxious and ready, and I was wet, so wet, and it was blood again, thin sheen of blood on my luminous white thighs, and I wanted him so much. The penetration was so swift and so deep, and I could feel the muscles contracting around him, holding that throbbing, swollen manhood inside me. Don't even move it yet, just let me feel it there. But then it was moving, twitching and dancing of its own accord, back where it belonged, safe and secure in here, warm and moist and fragrant, and every movement sent a ripple of indescribable sensual pleasure through me. This new sense, the vampire in me, could feel every vein standing out and every pulse of the heart that fed blood into this swollen thing that ached and burned and thrust inside me. Don't let this feeling ever end.
And then I did what I knew I would do, one of the most despicable things I could ever have done. In his weakness, I took him. As desire possessed him and rendered him powerless against me, I sank my fangs into his hot throat.
He offered no resistance, surrendering like the love-lorn fool that he was. Maybe he didn't even realise quite what was happening as I drank from him. Maybe it was just another of our little sex games to him. But to me it was life, it was survival, it was eternity. I had not drunk since the previous night, I was starving, and if I was not careful I would drain him too far, kill him completely. Mustn't let you die, my precious mortal lover, mustn't see you grow old and die and want to die myself. Must bring you into this rapture, this beauty.
Our minds were joined as surely as were our bodies, and the psychic link, the physical link of sex and that of blood were more than I could bear. His thoughts were streaming through my brain, I was sucking the life-force out of him with the blood. His memories, his fears, his aspirations – all of these were mine now, as he had never confessed them before. We were one being.
Against the endless surge of his thoughts, I felt the pulling of his heart, beating faster and faster, fighting against death. Surrender he would offer a thousand times over, but never would he offer me his death. Life eternal would be his prize for such perseverance, and as the heart began at last to slow, and the spasms of the delirious sex were over, I reached out one long, colourless nail, and cut into my own throat. When his mouth closed over the gaping wound, my own heart constricted and tensed. His strength was incredible; impossible to believe that he had barely enough blood in him to survive if I were now to leave him. And yet with every pull of his powerful mouth, my veins were running with liquid pain, fiery and intense beyond all other sensations. He would surely kill me if this kept up – it was agony.
And yet so beautiful, to surrender all my thoughts to him, to let him share my experience of the transformation in Cain's tower. To show him my first feed, the victim crushed suddenly and violently as I could so easily have crushed him. But always tender with him, never show aggression to one so beloved. He was dragging these thoughts from me as surely as I had raped his mind for his most private things. This degree of intimacy was terrifying – pillaging someone else's psyche and leaving them bruised and ashamed and yet secretly exhilarated.
"Christian, no more!" I gasped, pulling myself away from him, scared and afraid of the extent of our knowledge of each other. "Too much. Enough for now." I knew I had done what was necessary to bring him over: I had drained him to the very point of death and then resurrected him with the vampire blood. All I had to do now was wait for his death and try to be strong for him. My lover, my child – more precious to me than anything.
He was lying back on the bed, physically exhausted from the sex yet alive and reborn from the taste of my ancient vampire blood. "Stay with me," he whispered, his voice rich with the lustre of blood, both mortal and immortal. "When I die, will you stay?"
"Of course." I lay beside him, holding onto him. His skin was already changing, and the embrace of my warmed skin with his seemed a cruel inversion of the truth. He seemed the vampire, and I the dying mortal. How vicious the illusions of that time still seem. I felt a strong and overpowering love for him, more potent than anything I could have known as a mortal. This was devotion beyond all else, 'forever and ever'. And this time we both meant it. The mortal vow we had made, to spend the rest of our lives together, was obsolete. What awaited us was far more than a lifetime, and that realisation was slowly dawning on us as his death-pangs started...
I knew of course when it started. I had felt it so recently myself, and I empathised to such an extent that I almost felt the pain again. When it was all over, I helped him downstairs, turned on the shower for him and undressed him. Stood him under the warm water and washed his hard skin. Exact replica of my initiation with Cain. Cold hands on cold skin, soothing and smoothing away the last remnants of humanity. The blood he had taken from me ran away with the water, pooling in a gory puddle at his feet and leaving his skin soft and flawless. He looked angelic and demonic all at once – more perfect as a vampire than I could ever be, more prepared, more determined to survive. Together we would be invincible amongst mortals, taking the blood swiftly and cruelly, tantalising humanity with a brief glimpse of something their poor brains could not accept, and then crushing the life out of them with the swiftness and precision of a pack of wolves. The future, endless and full of mortal death, was opening up before us, rich vista of humanity which we should always live within, and yet ever be divorced from.
The life of those born to Darkness was ours at last.
So that is my story. For someone who never believed in anything, I have come a long way very quickly down the pathway of understanding. I have shared great pleasures with those most precious to me, and I know, with the certainty of the redeemed and resurrected, that I have the rest of eternity in which to improve myself. In the taking of my mortal lover, I have assured myself a companion for those long years which await me. I have found something to believe in, something to cherish which promises everything I had ever hoped it could.
We are still living as if in our mortal lifetimes. Our wedding is just a few weeks away, and we are then going to solemnise a decision which was taken a long time ago. Perhaps it seems sacrilegious to take a vow such as this, but we both want it still. Ours would never have been a conventional marriage in any case.
The books were wrong about one thing, for which I am eternally grateful. It is possible for the undead to know carnal pleasures, and indeed to carry on with that side of life as though death had never interrupted it. In fact, I believe it might still be possible for us to have a child, a perfect creature with vampire wit and vampire vision, with the insight of the truly immortal fed to it even before it is born, in the blood of its immortal mother. If sexual intimacy is still possible, surely every other human function is still accessible to us. How exquisite to watch the perfect baby grow into the perfect adult, skilled in all the fine arts, faultless and accomplished in so many ways. And then, should they wish it, to bring them to us, to give them the kiss of eternal life. And slowly, eventually, our family would grow, in size and in strength, as any mortal family does.
I am still undecided as to my motives for telling this tale, but it has been very therapeutic to tell it. Even though it will inevitably be passed off as very clever fiction, it feels good to know that someone may take it seriously one day. Someone may seek us out, attempt to discover the truth. And perhaps we shall give them proof, if they come to us, and genuinely want the gift of eternal life. Perhaps we shall one day make others not of our kin, and thus our ranks swell and multiply, and we shall be a force in this world which can no longer be denied existence.
Perhaps that is what I am searching for in revealing my true nature – recognition. A very human desire, after all. And in the life I lead, with my lover/child by my side, perhaps I am closer to the human than I have been in a very long time...
[13th September 1994]
Home
Back to Story Listing
Back to Literary Header
Previous
Next
