“A few days later, one of my farm hands told me that he had found a dead pig. It had been dragged from the pen and the throat was torn open. Wolves had not been sighted in the area for quite some time. That night, we lost another pig and, two days later, the remnants of several chickens were found.
“So I decided to stay up one night in the hopes that I could discover the animal prowling around the livestock. I positioned my farm hand at the pigsty while I found a spot at the stables in case the beast had an appetite for larger fare. Then I waited.
“Several hours went by when I heard a shout, then a horrible gurgling scream, and the squealing of a pig.”
The man became lost in his memories as he continued, “The sound of it chilled me. At last, I forced myself to run, lantern in hand, to the pigsty. There, I saw someone hunched over my hired hand, Jorge, who was lying on the ground, weakly struggling to push off his attacker. I shouted out to him, but the man never looked up. I ran toward him, cursing and flailing the lantern. That got his attention. He raised his head, mouth red with gore, and fixed his eyes on me.”
Alphonse stopped as if he needed to catch his breath and Narain gently said, “It was your son.”
The old man nodded, sighed, and rubbed his face as if trying to rub out the grief. “Those eyes that I had once gazed into with such pride and joy now glowed an eerie red in the lamplight. Were it not for that glow, they would have been cold and lifeless. There was neither love nor hate. I was simply something disturbing his feed. Something he might go after next should the victim he was working on not quench his thirst. I ran toward him again, swinging the lantern this time as a weapon. My son, filthy with blood and the dirt of his own grave, snarled in fright and darted off into the night with amazing speed.”
“He brought down your hand. Why did he run from you?”
Alphonse shrugged. “I have asked that so many times. Was it the slightest recognition that kept him from attacking me? Or, alone, without a pack, did he fear he was no contest for me, despite the fact that he could have ripped me apart. Some of the fiercest predators may back down in a surprise confrontation. And at that point, that is all my son was. A predator.
“Jorge was dead. I testified of seeing a huge creature – a wolf or perhaps a bear, running from the body. I hated to lie, but perhaps that was what people needed to hear, since none of the other help or members of the family questioned why there were no animal tracks near the body. They were simple people, people of the land and woods who knew the legends and preferred not to dwell on them too long.
“Those legends whirled around my mind as, two days later, I went to my son’s grave and noted the freshly turned earth and the caved-in hole from a body working its way out. I never saw Laurent again. He might be out there right now, hunting with the pack that attacked the soldiers on the battlefield weeks ago.”
Narain had found himself transfixed by the old man’s story, unable to decide just what he thought of it. Mention of the battlefield stunned him, however, and a sickening feeling overcame him. “What is your meaning? I don’t understand why you share this story with me.”
Carefully, Alphonse said, “My boy, I think you do. And it is vital that you understand and accept it. It is your only choice to accept who you are now.”
The words were spoken with such a lid-slamming certainty that Narain was stunned into silence. Images gripped him as the words began to hit home. He looked up at the old man’s gentle face, then back down at the floor glowing in the fire light. In his mind, wolves and ghouls danced among the dead and dying on a blood-soaked field, ripping at throats, slurping the gore. And he was right there with them, joyous in the blood that slipped down his throat, fortifying a body that seemed no longer his to command.
The shrapnel! Leaping to his feet, Narain’s chair slid back noisily as he clawed at his shirt, ripping it open. The shrapnel had sliced into him on the battlefield, leaving him breathless with pain. It wasn’t clear before, but it was only too clear now. Yet, when he looked at his side, he saw only the remnants of a long healed scar, the knitting skin thick beneath his fingers. He hadn’t remembered the injury earlier in the bath, but he did now and he knew for certain that it had been deep enough not to have healed so quickly in a matter of weeks. His legs buckled as he reached out for the chair. The old man rose quickly and helped him to sit. Looking up at Alphonse, horrified, all he could say was a pleading, “No.”
“I am so very sorry, son. I can only imagine how painful the memories are.”
Narain stared into the fire. He remembered now. The ghoul that pounced on him, bit deeply into him, sucked him nearly dry. He remembered how desperately, painfully, his heart beat as the blood left him and then darkness overtook him. Then, he remembered the pile of bodies he hid beneath. The rodents and wolf and later the forays among wounded soldiers calling for comfort. And the hideous fever transforming him. What he had become now had a name and it was horrible. He had wanted to die. Why hadn’t the old man let him?
As if sensing the question, Alphonse explained, “I came upon you digging yourself furiously into the earth. Not far from here. You were raving, desperate to escape the sun, the light of which will only pain you more as time goes on. I gathered you up and took you to my estate, because there was something there that made me think you might be a sentient.”
“A sentient?” Narain mumbled dumbly, still staring into the fire.
“The loss of my son,” the old man said, “has led me on a quest to understand what I saw that night. I have always considered myself a man of reason, not given to being influenced by superstition and folk tales. But life has a way of challenging devout beliefs. Even the day after I chased my son from his home, I warred with myself. But a man knows his own son. And if a father’s grief causes hallucinations, he sees his son clean and whole, not the filthy, broken thing hunched over a hired hand’s body. So, my son had become the stuff of legends and, according to the legends, he was as lost to me as if he were still cold in the ground. He was now little more than a beast, like the other vampires whispered about, capable of no other thoughts beyond the next meal. These beings I have taken to calling “ferals,” for that is what they are. Mindless. Living on instinct. Wild.
“But life had another surprise in store for me. One that offered the faintest glimmer of hope. A week later, I found myself staring into the fire so lost in thoughts and memories that I did not hear the scraping at the door until it turned into an erratic pounding. What I saw when I opened it…well, I thought for a moment I was losing my mind.” He chuckled and poured himself a drink from a stand near the fire.
“Eh, sometimes I think I have gone mad. I wonder sometimes if I’m locked in my own mind and this is all a dream.”
Turning his gaze from the fire at last, Narain asked, “What did you see?”
“Jorge. My hired hand, who I had watched being placed in the ground days before. He was as filthy and blood stained as my son had been, but the eyes that met mine were of a different sort. They knew me. The horrible thought that someone might have met their end that night crossed my mind, but judging by the fear and confusion on Jorge’s face, I knew it was just as likely that his only victims were pigs and sheep whose bodies would be discovered the next day.
“Jorge was disorientated. He had clawed his way out of the earth and fed and now his human consciousness was returning to him. He came back to my door, hoping I could give him some answers. Unfortunately, I had very few to offer him. I told him what had transpired over the past week. That by rights he should still be in the ground. And I offered my theory on why he was not.”
Coming out of his stupor slowly, Narain grinned weakly. “I dare say that your technique for imparting this news has improved since then.”
The old man laughed heartily. “Yes, well, I have had practice. But Jorge was only the second of the vampire set that I had seen and the first one was heartbreakingly beyond my reach to communicate with. This ultimately led me to take up my mission. Why had my son,
the man who had ‘killed’ Jorge, been unable to progress beyond the creature that I saw that first night? Yes, the other questions were important. What created them? And particularly important to Jorge, what would he actually need to survive? But if I could discover why Jorge, why you, retained humanity, perhaps I could find a way to bring my son back to me.”
Anxiously, Narain stared at his hands, finding nothing different about them and yet feeling as though they were very different. As if he was very different from the young man who left India the year before. And, of course, he was. This war had taken so much from him, but he couldn’t reconcile with just how much had been lost. A wave of panicked desperation washed over him again and he exclaimed, “I don’t understand. Why do I feel so…normal? Why do I feel like myself? None of this makes sense. I should be dead. I should have died on that field.” He turned a helpless gaze to the old man. “Why am I not dead?”
A tear played at the corner of Alphonse’s right eye. He closed his eyes to let the emotion pass over him. Then he reached out and touched Narain’s hand gently, explaining, “I became an investigator and Jorge my subject and together we came up with plausible theories based on my research and his experience. You, my boy, are sentient. There seem to be two types of vampire. Sentient and feral. The ferals are what may have attacked you on the battlefield. You, and others like you, are sentient. Capable of everyday intellect. Capable of some semblance of your old life.
“We studied the human body, Jorge and I. I traveled abroad, more so than I had ever done before, collecting stories and legends from other cultures. I questioned medical doctors on the possibilities of vampirism – true vampirism as opposed to the legends told of it – and suffered their bemused replies. Most humored me. Some were downright arrogant. And how could I blame them? It went against everything known about nature. And medical science had never had a specimen to study though, oddly, vampire legends appear in cultures around the world. Even in your own India.
“I told this last point to Jorge and he suggested that he might be that specimen, but I warned against this. We are incredibly cruel to that which we do not understand. I feared even the logic of doctors would not keep them from going too far. Besides, to the outside world, Jorge was now a demon. The undead. A monster. Society would never have accepted the truth.”
“And what is the truth?” Narain asked, sadly, his horrible recollections forcing him to accept the horrible truth. “Are we not monsters doomed to feed upon humans to survive?” Alphonse sighed before a bit of passion rose up within him. “You are victims of circumstance. In fact, I believe this condition has a medical, not a supernatural, answer to it. It is beyond us now, but progress never stops and one day the answer will be there. You have a chronic condition. A bizarre one, but one you will have to adjust for. You have something, however, that my son did not. You have the ability to make choices. And it is those choices that prove whether you are a monster or not.”
“And what became of Jorge?”
“One thing you will discover is that while this condition has limited you in some ways, it has freed you in a whole host of others. There was a time when his imagination never went further than the boundaries of this estate. Helping me as much as he could with my research, Jorge eventually found himself willing to test those boundaries. Apparently, his constitution has become quite durable. He has the curiosity of youth in a seemingly ageless body. And he still sends me details he feels might be important to my research, including the seamier details of what he must to do survive. From what we can gather, it is possible to survive for a time on animal blood, horse blood being particularly potent, but at some point, human blood is necessary. The others have confirmed this.”
“Others?”
The old man paused, and then nodded. “Every so often, I go on…expeditions.”
“Searching for your son?”
“Yes. A father never loses hope. As I have said, this stupid war has coaxed the ferals from their hibernation. Occasionally, they leave survivors. Newborns as confused as you were. How can I not help them, especially when my son could be the one responsible for their infection? Like Jorge.”
“And everything you learn, hopefully brings you closer to bringing back your son.”
Alphonse shrugged. “I have only my hope. It is my hope that I will be able to cure my son. To bring him back to me…not only physically, but mentally.” Alphonse went over to the side of the chair Narain sat in and placed a hand on his shoulder, saying, “You can look upon this as a gift or a curse. Actually, it is probably both. But it is what you make it. My son never got the choice. I will help you if you like and you may stay as long as you wish. I will tell you all I know. Perhaps we can be of help to each other.”
It all seemed surreal. Narain could not deny his memories, however. They were real and vivid and tore at his soul. He watched silently as Alphonse left the room. The old man was right. It was his reality now to make of it what he would. The question was: What could he make of it? He turned his gaze back to the fire, on some level possessing the ridiculous wish that if he stared at it long enough, the fire would burn the memories from his mind, giving him the peace he might never have again.
Note from the Author:
My novel To Touch the Sun takes place in current day Chicago, but since every good vampire deserves an origin story, one of the chapters is devoted to the vampiric origin of the protagonist, Narain Khan. Narain was 25 when he left his family and native India to fight in the trenches of France during World War I. As he would eventually discover after being wounded during a push across No Man’s Land, the soldiers had more than bullets and bombs to worry about. That night, the creatures that prowled among the dead and dying of No Man’s Land, would change his life forever.
For more information on my novel, visit my website at http://laura-enright.com/home.html
About The Author
I am the author of Chicago's Most Wanted™ The Top 10 Book of Murderous Mobsters, Midway Monsters, and Windy City Oddities and Vampires' Most Wanted The Top 10 Book of Bloodthirsty Biters, Stake-wielding Slayers, and Other Undead Oddities. I'm currently working on a vampire fiction series that is set in Chicago. I'm interested in any number of things, far too many for my limited free time to accommodate. Never the less, I remain a giggling idiot for the ages and encourage the world to follow suit. Some already have. You know who you are.
http://lauraenright.blogspot.com
http://laura-enright.com/home.html
Twitter: troublethebook
DIFFERENT KIND OF VAMPIRE
By
Sherri Jordan-Asble
My name is Summer and I’m a different kind of vampire. I am not like the traditional Hollywood type at all, but I don’t know what else to call it. It’s just as terrible. It happened so quickly, that day in the Bad Lands.
My friend, Hope, and her boyfriend, Steve, went out there with me. Steve had been there before and found a cave he wanted to show us. I study archeology, so I was very interested. Hope was my best friend, but she would never have let me or any other girl go out to the Bad Lands alone with her boyfriend. She wasn’t really jealous or possessive, just pro-active. I guess I couldn’t blame her and, since she was my best friend, I didn’t mind her coming along at all.
Twenty feet into the cave and pitch black darkness swallowed us. I took out my flashlight and shined it into the dark of the cave, but the light was eaten up by the intensity of the darkness. We could only see about a foot in front of us, or less.
“Yeah, that happened to me when I was here before. I never got past this point,” Steve said as he pulled out an industrial flashlight as big as a toaster from his backpack.
“Good move,” Hope said.
He turned the light on and it bit the darkness back. We had a good view of the cave. I half expected a flock of bats to come rushing down from the ceiling, but there were none. The cave smelled dead and stale. Steve flashed the light around. Stalactites and Stalagmites reached toward each other fr
om ceiling to floor in eight or nine foot spans. What appeared to be a natural path wound further into the cave, and we followed it. The formations were fantastic. Crazy rocks and boulders stood around dry and forgotten for centuries, evidence of the water that once dripped through the site. Columns of hard stone that looked like poured mud lined the path.
I began to question the naturalness of the path as it began to appear too perfectly cut through the formations, winding around them even deeper into the cave. We found hard evidence that the path had been manmade when we came to a big wooden set of double doors in the wall where the path dead-ended. The doors had to be at least seven feet tall and just as wide. The handles were iron rings, and they looked like something out of a bad western. The wood was dry, but not rotten at all, probably due to the lack of moisture in the cave.
Steven tried to open them, but it took all three of us pulling for one to budge at all. Steve shined the flashlight into the crack. “What’s in there?” I asked. I could not believe a manmade room lay hidden in the back of this cave that had remained untouched by man for so long that no one remembered it was there. I had done some research when Steve first mentioned it. I didn’t believe the cave existed because I couldn’t find any record of it.
“It looks like a saloon,” Steve said in awe.
Hope pushed up to him for her own look. “Weird,” she said.
“Let’s get the door open further.” I wanted in. Stupid me.
Steve wedged himself in the crack and pushed as Hope and I pulled. We managed to shove the door open enough to squeeze through one at a time. Steve sprayed the room with light. It did indeed look like a saloon right out of an old western movie set. Round tables were scattered around the room, chairs turned over. A long bar ran the length of the room along the right side and a piano, broken in half, lay in pieces on the opposite wall. A balcony stretched across the back wall, stairs coming down at an angle, then turning into the center of the room. I could almost picture prostitutes strolling down, tucking their little pistols in their bustiers and looking for a good cowboy. Or maybe a good cowboy with dusty chaps would slam back a shot of whiskey at the bar. Behind the bar, pieces of mirror that had broken still clung to the wall.
Vampires Romance to Rippers an Anthology of Tasty Stories Page 12
