I remember how beautiful you were: as beautiful as only something that was never meant to live can be. I saw you staring at me on the dance floor with a hunger that stopped me in my tracks. I felt as if I had been stumbling along all my life in rehearsal for this moment. No one else seemed to register your presence. They did not matter. There was only you. Everything melted away and we stood on the surface of a silently spinning planet, contemplating each other. I was transfixed and you held me in your sway with the casual cruelty of a butterfly collector. You approached me in a manner that I could not comprehend. One minute you were all the way across the room and the next you were close, so close that I could smell the sparks flying off your skin and the dried blood in your breath. You touched me like an open flame and I roared in response, guided where you wanted me to go. We slid through the crowds until we were out in the open air and the sobering cold. I wanted to speak, but my voice was gone as if it had never been used. I could not tell if my feet were touching the floor any more as you carried me through the night.
We arrived at the park where the street lights were dim and you pushed me up against a tree, ancient bark whispering through me. You lingered with my hair in your hands and gently exposed my neck. I remember detaching from my senses and observing our scene as a diorama of an unlikely encounter. Far off into the distance there rose a dark wave of all the emotions I should be feeling: elation, terror, revulsion. It was too remote to make a difference. I was numb, helpless, a bystander in the path of a cyclone. You drew your lips back and revealed your sharpened fangs. It was like a dumb late-night flick, a bad prop, a party trick. There was nothing fake about the pain I felt when you bit into me. I was back in my body and I could experience my vitality slowly ebbing away. I was playing the role I was always meant to play: a vessel for your unnatural, unquenchable thirst. I knew in my bones that this was it. I wanted more from life then. Why should it stop there before I came into my own? Who was going to remember me? I had so many plans and hopes and you took it all away from me.
I should have taken more care with my final mortal thoughts. Regrettably, there was more after all. You gave me something in return. It was not a new triumphant life, as much as you have waxed lyrical about it. It was the key to a twilight realm of a parasitic existence. You took me under your wing: a pretty playmate to keep you company when the nights grow long and the whims are strong. You taught me how to hunt, how to momentarily stem the pulsating wailing in my veins. I did to many what you did to me, except granting them our so-called gift. You never showed me how to do that and I wonder if you even knew how it happened in the first place. It could be that my rebirth was a fluke. Be that as it may, you claimed that it was precious and rare and reserved for only a few, perhaps no one new from now on. Apex predators hunt alone or in pairs. I have never met another bearing our affliction. We might be the only aberrations to carry this baleful burden.
I eventually tired of your leash. I slipped away and I began hunting alone. For a while, it was enough. I thought I could embrace my condition as a power beyond anything I’ve ever known. The power to enthrall and snuff someone’s light out as I saw fit, all in service to my eternal undeath. When I chose a victim, it was as if it was always meant to be. Every decision of their paltry lives led them to me and I made sure not a single drop was wasted before I discarded them to be forgotten as the years went by. I was the only one who held on to the memories. I came to understand that I, too, was a slave to my circumstances. Power predicated upon others is no power at all. I needed them and their easily extinguished life force. Without them I was a mewling infant, squealing for its milk. The need was everything. I measured time by the intervals from short-lived satisfaction to when the drive to drink became unbearable again. Yes, I’m a seductive myth. Yes, stories are written about our kind. No one sees us for what we are. We are powerless against our immortality’s imperatives. Desperate and alone, casting shadows like monstrous bats while cowering from the suggestion of sunlight. Pathetic in our glowering guises. Slobbering and ravenous and doomed to wander from one fleeting fix to another.
I looked at mortals with their neuroses and addictions and flickering lives and I envied them. Some lose themselves in menial pursuits and some try to preserve and enhance every second. Ultimately, they all end up in the same place and that is their great, unrecognised blessing. Transience makes an indelible mark upon the world. What can be more meaningful than the promise of an end and a chance to make the most of a brief existence? This is my most terrible truth: there is no end for me. I found that out that first day I gave up and waited for the sun to finally obliterate me. Here is what happened: I cried and I burned and I was trapped in the most excruciating agony. I was blinded and my skin crackled and charred. There was no comforting void, no relieving silence. Instead, I crawled into a gutter where I lay as a slab of pulverised meat. My feebleness and immobility led me to yet another unwanted discovery: the absence of sustenance is not lethal either. As parched as I was, my thirst just became another source of torment. I had to stew on my suffering until I healed enough to feed on vermin to restore my strength and resume my half-hearted routine.
Every fable is a lie: nothing can release me from this purgatory. Holy water? No more effective than rain in a puddle. Crucifixes? I wear them in a mockery of divinity. Stakes? They hurt like hell but as with everything else, the wounds heal. Garlic? Utterly useless. Silver bullets? Wrong address. Decapitation? Impossible. I can tear my neck open, slice my fingers and hack at my feet, yet as hard as I try, there is no severing of limbs. I remain sadly solid. I have invented innumerable ways to test my boundaries and I keep crushing against the same old depressing fact: I persist. Impermanence lies forever beyond my grasp. How do I wile away the passing of interminable aeons in this indestructible form? In the throes of my despair, an answer dawned on me, so obvious in its simplicity. It was high time to become reacquainted with my maker.
At long last, my purpose is clear. It is you. You kept me going for a reason: you can now give meaning to this half-life with a violent and prolonged penance. It was so easy to follow and sneak up on you when you least expected it. You had become sluggish in your self-assurance. I observed you for a while: your trivial nightly rituals and your flashes of unchallenged power. I could see that you, too, were aimless and bored. I was tempted to let you carry on as you have. Could that be punishment enough? No. Time has not led me to kindness and wisdom. Instead, my spite has no limits. I had to demonstrate the depths of my gratitude. I pounced, and here we are.
I have lost count of how long I have kept you starved and bound here. By now you are a skeleton in an ill-fitting skin suit. Your flesh is pockmarked and saggy, your fingernails are long and yellow and your hair is wispy and white. Your teeth fell off so easily from your sweet, rotten gums. Your eyes, those smouldering eyes that held me on the spot on that fateful evening are now so deeply sunken in their sockets that they might as well not be there at all. You are constantly twitching and scratching at an itch that will not pass. Your moans are music to my ears. You are lost in your bloodlust, reduced to your base cravings. I have made sure to fill the space with mirrors. For as much as you can see, you can behold your true nature. You are finally exposed, far from your former glory, such as it was. I sometimes bring others here so you can watch me feed and relish in them. I save the final drips of scarlet so I can let them fall to the floor while you grovel and beg. None for you. Not now, not ever.
This is not what I asked for, but it will do. It turns out that we were made for each other after all. You moulded me into the monster that I am and I helped you move past the trappings of your predatory nature into the kind of anguish that you had never dared to dream possible. We are locked in a perpetual dance of domination, a hateful embrace for the ages. I am yours in loathing and you are mine in misery. I am never letting go of your withered hand as we enter new domains of depravity. You and me until all stars explode in celebration of our unholy union and the cosmos devours itself. Who knows? Perhaps that will not be the end either. I now have hope. Thank you for this gift.
