by Amy Cross
"You promise you're telling the truth?" she asks.
"I promise," I say.
"Thank you," she replies.
My phone suddenly beeps. I turn it around, and Twomoney's face falls into darkness once again. For a moment, I have this insane hope that maybe I've finally got some signal, but then I see that it's just a warning beep telling me that my battery's running out.
"What's happening?" Twomoney asks.
"The battery's dying."
"What does that mean?"
"No more light," I say and, as I watch, the phone goes dead. "It's gone," I say. "It won't work anymore."
"That's a shame," Twomoney says. "But at least we got to see our faces. I'm glad you're pretty, Sophie, and I'm glad I'm beautiful."
"Me too," I say, not really listening. I'm overcome by the darkness that surrounds us. Once again, everything's black and I can't see. Was that the last light I'll ever see? If I can't find a way out of this pitch black well, I might be trapped in darkness forever, just like Twomoney. For the first time, I start to panic. Although I assumed that Patrick would one day come and get me, I'm starting to realize that if he was willing to leave Twomoney to rot down here, maybe he feels the same way about me.
"You should have a rat," Twomoney says. I hear a squeak, followed by the sound of Twomoney trying to catch herself a snack. "I'll get one for you," she adds.
I stand there in the darkness, listening to Twomoney as she chases the rat, and I start to realize that I might never get out of here. This is it. Patrick has put me here to keep me out of his way, and there's nothing I can do except get used to this life, just like Twomoney. It's over. Patrick has won.
Twomoney
Many years ago.
They come looking for me, of course. All the men from the village, in a big horde, armed with axes and knives and any kind of sharp objects they can find. One of them is carrying what seems to be a bucket of kerosene, as if they intend to first disable me with their weapons and then burn my body. Makes sense. That's what I'd do if I were in their position. And there are so many of them, at least thirty, that I suppose they think they have a chance of killing me.
But I can kill thirty of them. No problem.
I wait in a tree. Having found a large, thick branch, I sit quite happily and listen to the sound of them searching for me. I'm not hiding, and they'll see me as soon as they look up. For now, they're scanning the ground, but eventually one of them is going to glance up and spot me. I don't mind. The fight would be invigorating, and I've recovered some of my strength. I still feel a little nauseous, but I know I can take these men on. I ran from them once before. I won't run again.
"There!" shouts one of the men suddenly.
I look down and see him pointing up at me. The others follow him and soon there are thirty baying men beneath me, surrounding the tree. At the back of the group, the young boy who I tormented is watching, with a look of fear and disgust in his eyes.
"What do you want?" I shout down at them.
"Come down, Twomoney!" my father says.
"Why?" I ask. "I like it up here, and you all look rather menacing."
"We need you to come down," my father insists.
"No," I say. "I haven't done anything, and I think you're going to try to kill me, so why would I give you a chance?"
"Something's wrong with you, Twomoney," my father says. "We're going to fix it."
"With a stake through the heart," says another man.
I smile. "Not if I kill you all first," I say.
My father steps forward, puts down his spade and pulls an ax from around his belt. "I'm sorry you're making us do this, Twomoney," he says before he starts swinging the ax into the tree. Some of the other men step forward and join in, and soon there's a small group of them chopping the tree down, while the rest of them watch.
"Sorry, tree," I say, putting a hand on the bark. "They're killing you in order to get to me. That's not fair, but life never is. I promise I'll remember you, and I promise that your sacrifice won't be in vain."
The tree starts to wobble and vibrate as the men continue to hack away at it. I look down and see that they're making good progress. I imagine the tree will fall soon, and then I'll have to fight. Taking a deep breath, I try to quell the nausea that fills my belly. I hold up my hands and look at them. They look human still, though a little pale. But why am I feeling so ill? I thought I'd be strong and invincible, but there's a growing sense of unease in my body.
Suddenly there's a loud creaking sound and the tree starts to fall. I allow myself to tumble to the ground as the entire tree crashes down around me. Getting to my feet, I turn as the men approach me.
"I'm sorry, Twomoney," my father says, leading the group, "but we have to do this."
"I understand," I reply.
My father raises the ax and swings it down at me, but I duck out of the way and lash out with my hands, gouging at his flesh. I'm more powerful than I realize, and my fingers dig into his flesh and bone, ripping his face and the front of his skull clear away and dropping them on the forest floor. For a moment, he stands there, his brain exposed, and then he drops to the ground, dead. My own father. Fancy that.
Another man rushes at me, swinging a larger ax, but I grab his head and twist it, pulling it from his body. He, too, falls down dead.
"Are you really going to make me kill each and every one of you?" I ask, smiling at the others.
Moments ago, they all looked so sure of themselves, but now I see doubt in their eyes. They can't help but look at their fallen colleagues, and note the brutal ways in which I dispatched them. One of them was even my own father, yet I cut him down with no second thought. The truth is, I long ago distanced myself from my parents emotionally, and in many ways I now relish the opportunity to use my new powers to kill them. I will happily kill every single person who stands in my way, regardless of any accidents of birth that might otherwise seem to suggest I should show mercy.
Suddenly another of the men rushes at me, raising a knife. I grab him, pull the knife from his hand and thrust it straight down his throat. He falls to the ground, gushing a fountain of blood from his mouth. Just as I'm looking down at my handiwork, I catch movement from the corner of my eye and look up to see the rest of the men are all charging at me together. I suppose they believe that there's safety in numbers, but the truth is, they're way out of their depth.
I kill them all.
As their bodies flail and churn around me, hacking desperately with knives and axes to try to bring me down, I lash out and rip them apart. Hearts, brain, lungs and other organs fall to the ground as men die all around me. Their cries of pain merge to form one long tempest of death, but it only takes a minute or so for all of them to drop down. Finally I'm left standing there, barely even injured and not even out of breath, with all their bodies littering the ground around me in a circle. Most of them are dead, while a few are still lingering but will be gone soon.
And then I realize that I'm still being watched. The boy from earlier is standing back, his eyes wide. He seems to be frozen in place, as if fear has overcome him.
"Aren't you going to run?" I ask. "After all, it was you who caused this to happen in the first place."
He just stares at me. I can see that he's scared, but he also seems to be determined to make a stand. He's a fool. Rather than run and live to fight another day, he's trying to prove that he's a man.
"You're brave," I say, walking toward him. "I'll give you that. Either that, or your body's malfunctioning." Getting closer, I stare at him with the contempt he deserves. "Shall I kill you like I killed all the rest, or shall I let you live so that you can tell others of my power?"
I lean down until my face is directly in his, and my eyes look directly into his soul.
"Come on," I say. "What should I do?"
"Die!" he shouts, suddenly producing a knife from his pocket and slicing it into me several times, cutting open my stomach and forcing me to stagger back. I'm in no danger o
f dying, of course, but I can still feel pain and I let out a terrible howl as I pull the knife from my chest.
The boy turns to run, but in my rage I throw the knife at him and it strikes him in the back of the head, digging into his skull and dropping him to the ground. He's dead before his face has hit the dirt.
I look down and see black blood pouring from my wounds. Turning to look at the dead villages, I figure that even though I've sustained more of an injury that I anticipated, I'm still not doing too badly. I turn to walk away, and that's when I notice Patrick standing nearby, watching.
"I won," I say. "Look. I killed them all."
He doesn't respond. He just stares at me. He won't speak, he won't do anything, he just watches me and I'm left wondering what he's really thinking.
"What more do you want from me?" I ask. "I -" At that moment, a searing pain erupts in my head, dropping me to my knees. I scream as the agony becomes overwhelming, as if something is cutting its way through my brain. This isn't anything to do with the stab wounds. This is something else. This is my entire body starting to fail, my brain dying. I look up at Patrick. "Help me!" I shout at him through the pain, but he just stares and stares. "What's happening?" I shout, but it's as if he can't - or won't - do anything. He just watches as I writhe in pain and, finally, as I sink into darkness. When I became a vampire, I assumed I'd be able to live forever. But this feels like death.
Sophie
"Are you okay?" Twomoney asks, her voice looming out of the darkness. "You haven't spoken for so long, and I don't hear you moving." She sounds nervous, as if she's worried that once again she's been left alone.
I don't reply. There's no point talking, there's no point in doing anything. Patrick has sealed us both down here, and there's no way out. Patrick beat me in this battle before I ever really understood that there was a battle going on at all. What makes it even worse is that I risked my life to save him back at that camp, when I could have left him to die. And now he repays me by imprisoning me in this hole, locking me up with nothing to eat but rats and nothing to do but talk to a crazy woman.
"Are you there?" Twomoney asks.
Still, I don't reply. I don't feel like carrying on a conversation, not now that it seems I'm going to be stuck down here with Twomoney for the rest of my life.
"Sophie?" Twomoney asks. "Are you dead?"
"No," I say impatiently, "I'm not dead."
"Are you sad?"
I pause. "Sad's not the word," I say. It's true. I can't help imagining what's going to happen next up there in the real world. Patrick will be free to hunt for Abigail, and when he finds her he'll do what he wants; he'll turn her into whatever he wants her to be. Maybe Nimrod will try to stop him, but I don't see him having much success. Nimrod might mean well, but he's no match for Patrick. I guess I should be thankful that Patrick decided to keep me alive rather than killing me, although maybe it would have been better if I'd died. A life spent down here in the darkness, with only Twomoney for company and only rats to eat, doesn't seem worth living.
"I felt sad when I was first put down here," Twomoney says. "It took me a long, long time to recover."
I laugh. "You're doing fine now, are you?" I ask.
"Considering," she says. "Yes, I've avoided going insane. The first months were the hardest, but finally I got the hang of it. I think I have blackouts sometimes, but it doesn't really matter down here, does it? Time just passes however it wants to pass."
I pause. "How long have you been here?" I ask.
"Years," she says. "There's no way to tell. No way to count."
"What year was it when you were put in here?" I ask.
"It was 1850," she says, "or maybe 1851, I'm not certain."
I feel the hairs on the back of my neck tingle. "Are you sure?" I ask.
"Very sure," she replies. "Why, what year is it now?"
I stare into the darkness. "It's more than a hundred and fifty years later," I say. "But there's no way... How are you still alive?"
I hear her laugh, which is pretty creepy considering I can't see her. "I'm not quite..." She pauses. "Don't you want to know why Patrick put me down here?" she asks eventually. "Don't you want to know why I even know Patrick in the first place?"
"Tell me," I say.
"I'm an experiment," she replies. "A failed experiment. He bit me, he turned me into a vampire so that I'd be his daughter. I was supposed to become like him, except... Something went wrong. I don't know what. I started to change. I started to act like a vampire, to feel like a vampire. But something went very wrong and I became ill. I couldn't be the vampire that Patrick wanted me to be. I'm not even a vampire now; I'm just some kind of mutant. A failure. Worse than all the others. Even worse than Gwendoline. That's why Patrick locked me away down here. He didn't want to have to deal with me. I don't know why he didn't just kill me instead."
"He just threw you away?" I ask. "Like a piece of trash?"
"It's not his fault," she says. "It's my fault. I'm a failure. I failed him. I don't know why. My mind was willing, but my body was weak. It was as if my body rejected the change. And as I came to realize that I was a failure, I began to rebel. I tried so hard to be what he wanted me to be, and I failed. I became angry, and that's when he threw me into this place."
I pause. "So you're a human?" I ask.
"Partly," she says. "I was, once."
"But you started to become a vampire?"
"Started, yes. No more than that."
"But it went wrong and you ended up as... as what?"
"As this," she says, her voice betraying a great deal of emotion. It sounds as if she's on the verge of tears. "Whatever I am, I'm neither human nor vampire. I feel like a ghost of my own self. I don't even know if I should use the name Twomoney any more. Perhaps I should become nameless."
"I'm sorry," I say.
"For what?" she asks.
"For what he did to you."
"Don't be sorry," she replies. "I allowed him to change me. It's not his fault that my body turned out to be weak and unsuitable. There was something wrong with me long before Patrick ever found me. I don't know what, but I wasn't born right. I'm just... I'm just a mess." There's a pause, and I hear Twomoney shuffling closer to me. "Promise me one thing," she says. "If you ever get out of here, and you find Patrick, tell him that I don't hate him. Tell him that I understand why he did this to me, and that what I lost in a free and fair life, I made up for in contemplation and sanity."
I smile ruefully. "If I get out of here," I say, "I'll take you with me, and you can tell him yourself."
"But if you can't take me," she says, "I'll understand. And you just have to give him that message. Do you promise?"
"I promise," I say. "But I also promise that I won't leave without you. If I find a way out, there's no way I'd just go without taking you too. You know that, right?"
"Yes," she says, and I hear her shuffling away from me. Her voice is faint now, and distant as she moves to the other side of the pit. "That's fine. I understand. Time passes. It always does."
I sit in the darkness. I've tried climbing, I've tried checking the walls and the floor, but there doesn't seem to be any way out. My phone battery's dead. There's simply no way to escape, unless Patrick decides he's changed his mind. Is he capable of that kind of compassion, or will he just forget about me and leave me to rot down here with Twomoney? I'd like to believe that he'll come back for me, that he's just put me down here temporarily. But given what he did to Twomoney, I guess I can't rely on him to even remember me. Maybe I'm down here forever, and I'll be forgotten as I slowly become more and more like Twomoney and less and less like Sophie Hart.
Twomoney
Many years ago.
"No!" I scream, wrestling with Patrick as I try to get away from him. He's holding me firmly, but I kick and punch and eventually I manage to loosen his grip a little. I twist and try to get away, but he pulls me back and clamps a hand over my mouth to stifle my voice.
I try to calm d
own. I try to take long, deep breaths so that I can come up with a plan. Looking straight ahead, I see the dead bodies of all the men I killed, including my father. They're cut up and hacked to pieces in the most horrific manners possible, yet I was justified in my actions because they were attacking me. When they came for me, I hadn't killed anyone. They attacked me because I've become different, and because they were scared of me. That's what humans do, isn't it? They kill things that are different.
I manage to slip my head away from Patrick's mouth. The fight has gone out of me, at least for now, and I feel ill. Small quantities of black blood keep erupting into the back of my throat, and it feels like my veins are on fire. Something's wrong, and I'm sure this isn't how most vampires feel. Perhaps it's part of the process of changing, although part of me is certain that there's more to it. It's as if my body is rejecting the change.
"You can let me go now," I say, still a little out of breath. "I won't run. I won't do anything." I gasp as a striking pain rips across my gut. "What's wrong with me?" I ask.
Patrick loosens his hold on me and I fall forward, landing roughly on the ground. I roll onto my back and look up at him, and a trail of black blood dribbles from my nose. He just stares down at me, looking completely distant and uncaring.
"Am I dying?" I ask him, my voice sounding weak. "Is that what this is? What's wrong with me? I thought I was going to be strong, like you?"
He says nothing, as usual. He just continues to stare down at me, as if he's surveying the remains of an experiment that went horribly wrong. I can't help believing that he planned for me to become a vampire, just like him, but that I let him down. For whatever reason, my body couldn't handle the transformation, and it's collapsing as a result. I feel weak and scared. Fighting those men took a lot of energy out of me, and I can see from my hands that my skin is becoming pale, perhaps even a little gray.
"I'm sorry," I say to him, staring at his eyes and hoping to find some humanity in him. "If I'm really such a failure, you should kill me. I won't blame you. We're animals, it's what animals do. The strong survive and the weak die. I don't blame you for whatever's gone wrong with me. My body just wasn't strong enough."
