Vampiro
By Cartie Whitelaw
It was 3:04 am, and I woke up in a sweat, tangled up in the sheets in my bed. The sheets cloth tangled around me like ropes, like splitting bondage on my limbs. With every thrash my body made, I was trapped further, like quicksand in a place that once comforted me, now was on a mission to kill me. Sloth has no fury these days, more so now since I encountered that dark regalia inside my suit jacket an odd week ago.
My dreams that night were the same as the past five days. It starts with crashing ships, pillaged and splintered by clumsiness, by some seduction of the dark bellowing resting just below the tides. After I watch myself take one last cold, heavy breath of seawater and drift into Focalor’s bosom, my eyes close, and I am suddenly in a car. Some fury, an irrevocable rage possess the two people around me. It becomes pointed at the old man crossing the street. The car speeds up, and just before it collides with his brittle body, the brakes screech, and my new friends park. They walk to him and begin to rip him apart, his jugular area first, which makes the blood begin to sprawl across the concrete, across my face, dripping into my mouth. I stood there, paralysed as I watched them tear what was once a man into a limbless core. The two feasted on his ligaments, his worn-out muscles. After making themselves full to the point of being sick, they made one last move. They reached inside his sternum, in search of what was now an unbeating heart. The squelches of his insides for some reason began to excite me. As if their insane rage had now invoked itself through my veins. They offered the heart. As my hand embraced its fleshy atriums, its steaming desire began to beat once more, almost inviting me to ravish it. I watched myself, now possessed by some hoards of darker entities, begin to consume the heart entirely. I felt the muscular tissue ripping apart under the pressure of my canines. The blood gushing out with every bite like a silvery pomegranate. Its scent was intoxicating, and I was a slave to this newfound vice of mine. Bound to carnage like some animal, unreleased from a predatorial cage. After that point, the dream drifts away into the dark red mist like it always does, and I emerge awake, shaken and restless.
This time, instead of suffering the torture of being in my bed, I decided some cold water to my seemingly feverish face would do the trick. I lit my red candles and made my way to the bathroom sink. As I stared into my flickering reflection, something strange began to happen. My nose, my eyes, even my mouth began to change in a way that could only be reflected in the deep carnelian of my misty dreams. My smile began to look crooked, corrupted by a banal force, my eyes began to glow like coals, and my face began to find shape as a gargoyle. Maybe it was an animal. No, it was too human, but simultaneously something much darker. As I became more entranced by the darker side of my vanity, the strangeness began to spread to my sternum, and I quickly realised something was in the midst of enveloping me entirely. Something hungry and insatiable. It was cold, like stone trapped by November wind, its embrace made me wince, its unshakeable solidity froze me entirely. My arteries became granite, the frozenness slowly making its way to the centre, where my ageing heart lay. I felt myself die after my wake. Time of death 3:08, I woke with just a mere four minutes to live.
At 3:11, however, something stranger began to happen. The once frozen statue that was my corpse began to animate itself again, and my mind ran like a train pumped with steam. Yet when I stared into the silvery portal where this all began, I no longer existed, at least not in the way that the progression of time could prove. Not any way that ostentation could argue. For all intents and purposes, I was vapour, a spirit of some kind. I decided it would be good to finally turn on a lamp at this point. As I moved to the switch, I felt everything tenfold. I felt the creaking of the boards below my feet, the rushing air coming from the vents. I could hear the leaves falling from the oak tree outside. I reached for the switch, and the light began to scream. Somehow, its brightness now was a screeching sound, piercing me deeply like needles to the brain. Quickly, probably much too brazenly, I punched the bulb, which was quickly extinguished, and shattered glass dug itself into my knuckles and the carpet below. Before I could scream about the pain, I saw my body begin to eject the glass pieces like nothing I had ever seen before. Usually, glass shards get glued to me, but this time, they were something like two opposite ends of magnets, unattracted. No blood spilt from my wounds, if you can even call them that. I found that my skin seemed to be in perfect condition. I was as scared as I was excited, and realized that the only place I didn't want to be was home. So, the natural reservoir behind my house would be the perfect alternative.
The night’s forest became invigorating. It’s wild, my lifeline, it’s mystery, my reprise. I walked now, not scared of the predatory stares of lurking coyotes, of jaguars in the shadows, but of an undying reverence for the pulse of everything in and around me. I was frozen, but the night’s sky and the earthy smells of the forest began to feel like a torch, a warming fire. I played as I had never played before, and I ran by myself among the overgrown foliage. Hours passed, and I realised I was starving, had a hunger like the one that consumed me in my dreams. My head began to pound only inside my head, and the world around me was now orange and fiery. I sprinted as fast as my lungs could take me towards any smell that made a resemblance to the one in my dreams. I passed through corpses of prey, rotting smells of fawn, and even the droppings of birds in the trees above me. Breathless, I finally stumbled to a pond dripping in moonlight.
At first, I saw nothing and believed that my senses deceived me. Then, suddenly, a rippling began to emerge, moonlight flickered, and there he was. He had long dark hair, high cheekbones, and a strong physique, someone whom you worship and simultaneously loathe. I knew he thought he was alone, so I kept it that way at first. I lurked around shadows, behind trunks, with each step getting closer to his pond-soaked body. I could hear his heartbeat echoing across the water, like sounds in a tunnel, its rhythm a siren song to my instincts. I began to toy with him, throwing bits of bark in different places. He would look around for a moment, tensing, his heart racing faster, then would release once again. I liked seeing him ride along the tension line, seeing him hang over the edge, but never quite fall into fear. I finally began to use my manners and approach him directly. I found through my arboreal recreation from earlier that I could move quite fast now, quite silently too. Like a vapour, or a shadow, I appeared in front of his gaze, now startled and teeming with violence.
He began to shout, but I just stared at him with intent, bending my head to the side and smirking. Quickly, he saw I had sharper teeth than most others; now, instead of challenging me, I could feel him begin to quiver. He asked what I wanted, what I was doing in his pond. I reached out, I grabbed his trembling face and began to caress his cheek. My grip quickly turned harsh as my hunger became insatiable. I ripped his head back, where his neck was now clearly exposed in the light of the moon. My fingers were much sharper than before, so with my other hand, I ran my index finger across. A slit followed, and his blood began to spill, his body growing weaker with every second. As he grew closer to fainting, I lowered myself down to his abdomen and began drinking his life force. I ran my tongue all over his sternum, all the way up to the gash I made, thoroughly on his biceps and pectorals. I have fun playing with my food. Just as he began to grey with death, I engorged myself completely, covering my face in blood, turning the water at my waistline darker. When he had no more to give, I ripped his head off, starting with the sight of the gash. When his trachea was clearly exposed, I dug my hand deep into his body, feeling around for his heart. The muscles were mostly dry now, so not as much squelching as you could imagine, more like a rubbery tunnel. Finally, I felt something wet inside his chest that wasn’t digestive. I grabbed it and ripped it out as hard as I could. It sort of fractured the spot where he was beheaded, and began to wilt like a flower. So like a water lily, I drifted him off my embrace and allowed him to float away from me with his head. I now looked at the final course, and stared at it, now with less hunger and more fascination. I looked at its shape, thinking of how it could power such a seemingly strong man despite being so small. My mouth grew three times in size for just a few seconds, and I devoured his heart in one bite. Now all covered in blood, I needed to bathe. Sort of like cleaning up after hot wings, but much more draconian.
After dinner and a swim, I went for a stroll in the woods to air dry and continue my much-needed frolicking. As I made my way further into the wild, the same wincing that had occurred in my house started again; it began quietly but slowly gained in volume. I looked eastbound and realised that the sun was starting to rise, and for some reason, this new existence hated light not reflected by the moon or the stars. I began heading west to try and buy some time; something was telling me that the sun would cause more than a headache.
The sky began to turn purple, then red, and the only thing I had found in my desperate sprawling of the night was a small boulder range. There had to be a cave around here somewhere. Luckily, there was a slight opening just in the knick of time when the sun was peaking over the horizon, so I dove in, back into shadow, back into the warm depths of darkness that once scared me. Yet, just when I thought I was safe, I began to tremble like the young man in the pond. Talons and snake tails caressing my face. I knew that the bondage I was trying to run from would catch up to me, but I never expected it so quickly. In front of me was a member of the regalia who started this whole thing, coming to claim me under his hoards, or at least tell me what I was, Astaroth.