Vampire Unseen (Vampire Untitled Trilogy Book 2)

by Lee McGeorge

  He was on the top bunk, staring aimlessly at the ceiling. His mind was quiet. He was thinking about Ildico. He pictured her in his mind’s eye. She was thin, borderline undernourished with unblemished pale skin and long glossy black hair. He’d met her on arrival in Romania. A chance encounter whilst dealing with a non-English speaking landlady. Ildico had stepped in to translate. She was nineteen years old, beautiful, innocent.

  “I love you, Ildico,” he whispered.

  He didn’t really love her, he’d only known her for a few weeks, but it was nice to say. It was calming and soothing. She was calming. The very thought of her brought gentle thoughts that tempered the confusion and harshness in his mind.

  This was what he needed. Today had been horrible. He had attacked those kids. He wanted to attack Louisa the bank clerk. He was consumed by rage, caused by thinking about...

  Thinking about...

  “Don’t think of Nisha,” he whispered in the tiniest voice. “Ildico... Say her name. Beautiful Ildico. You took me to Castle Bran. We went for a walk in the forest. We held hands... Let me think of you, Ildico.”

  His mind stayed calm.

  He pictured her in his fantasy over and over again. She was laying in bed, naked but concealed by an arm across her breasts. Her other arm reached forward towards him. She smiled as softly as the Mona Lisa.

  Despite her nudity the image was non sexual. Of course he had seen her naked. They’d made love yesterday before he murdered Nealla and Raul. No don’t think of that... don’t think of the murders. Think of making love to Ildico. Remember how she cried tears of joy, how you felt those tears on your neck as you kissed her shoulder. Remember how she cried when you bent her arm back. Remember how her mascara had ran in tears. Remember how she resisted. Remember how she sobbed with your erect penis in her mouth. Remember how you slapped her and demanded she look at you whilst she sucked.

  Reality.

  Paul felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach.

  He could remember them together, naked, in the bedroom, but she was crying. Her mascara had streaked. He remembered that when she was leaving the apartment she was angry, shouting at him. He recalled her getting dressed. She was wearing a vest and socks, looking around on the floor for her underwear. He saw her lips moving, speaking tearful words. She said, “I was saving myself for my wedding night.”

  She was crying.

  Oh, God.

  She was crying. He could see her kneeling on the floor and sucking his cock as he sat on the side of the bed. She was looking into his eyes, as he had demanded. She was playing with her nipples, as he had demanded. She sobbed and gagged and he slapped her. Makeup blackened tears running down her face.

  She had cried the whole time. She had begged him to stop.

  What have I done?

  He saw himself leading her to the bedroom, he saw her saying she didn’t want to, he saw him bending her wrist in a stress position to force her.

  Paul rolled onto his side and placed the knuckle of his forefinger between his teeth to bite. A moment of pain, a reality check. For a few minutes his whole insides seemed to vanish leaving him with the sensation of being utterly hollow. Perhaps he shouldn’t make plans to disappear. Perhaps he should get up and turn himself into the police. He needed help. Mental, psychological help.

  How had this happened? How could he change in only a few weeks from being too timid to talk to girls into a thug who literally twisted a girl’s arm to...

  Nisha.

  Nisha called him a rapist.

  It was not true. He hadn’t raped Nisha... but Ildico...

  He groaned loudly then clasped his hands over his mouth to stifle the sound. The tightening in his stomach rushed over his body, crushing him, physically hurting him as he thought on it.

  Oh, God.

  He felt tears welling in his eyes. He had killed two men, he had raped the girl he loved, he had thrown away his entire life and was now on the run. For as long as he was free he would be looking over his shoulder.

  But what future could he have?

  Yesterday he killed and raped. Today he tried to do the same.

  “I have to get this under control,” Paul whispered in self-talk. His hands trembled out of fear as a shock of sobriety hit him. He was suddenly wide awake and fully cognizant of his predicament. He wasn’t just on the run. He was sick. He had a serious sickness that must be brought under control. A sickness that could kill people, hurt them, damage them.

  For a moment his imagination wandered and he visualised putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. It was shame. Inescapable shame. It was one thing to ruin your own life, but he’d harmed Ildico. That was unforgivable. She would hate him. She would loathe and despise him. She would already despise him for what he had done to her. But when she learned that he had murdered Nealla and Raul, she would fear him. Of all the hardships he would face in the future nothing had seemed emotionally troubling. Running was a practical endeavour of the head, but accepting what he’d done to Ildico was different. He’d hurt her grotesquely. He could live with being on the run, but how could he live knowing Ildico surely hated and feared him?

  “I’m sorry, Ildico,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I would never want to hurt you. I don’t know what is happening to me.”

  He thought on it for a few seconds and realised he knew exactly what was happening. He had gone to the grave of a vampire.

  Poor Ildico. Poor, beautiful, innocent Ildico. She was frightened talking about evil spirits. He had smirked and teased her for being frightened. She had begged him not to spend time at the grave but he saw only a stupid superstition. You can’t get sick from a place, from a location; that is what he’d thought. He went there, he spent time there, she told him not to. Two weeks later he’d killed two men and raped poor, beautiful, delicate Ildico.

  You were right about everything, Ildico.

  Something in that place had made him sick. Ildico said it was a dark spirit.

  It was a powerful sickness.

  He could kill two men and walk away without thinking, without remorse. He could rape his beautiful friend and not even realise he’d done anything wrong for two days. He could attack a girl in the park because her breasts looked pert. He could punch a young boy into unconsciousness in the blink of an eye.

  “Make things right,” Paul whispered. “Make up for Ildico.”

  He sat upright and pulled his notebook from his backpack at the end of the bed. In the glow of the night light he could just about see the words. He added to his notes. ‘Find out what is wrong. This has to be an illness. This has to have a cause. Find out what it is and get cured.’ He started to pack the notebook away when he had a second thought. ‘For Ildico: Sublimation.’

  The word had a special ring to it. Sublimation. It was the most perfect word. Sublimation, the act of diverting negative and immoral impulses into something more socially acceptable and positive. For Ildico, turn these negative impulses into something good. Atone for what you have done to her. He wrote the word on his arm, from the crook of his elbow to his wrist, a temporary tattoo until he could get the real one inked.

  For a few minutes it was all he could think about. He tried to create the fantasy image of her laying in bed but it no longer came. “I must make things right,” he muttered. “I must make things better. For Ildico.”

  ----- X -----

  In Romania, Ciprian had broken away from his assignment of knocking on doors. He’d been freezing his ass overnight combing through forests then taken a few hours sleep. All the while he knew he had a piece of knowledge he was withholding. He had to be careful.

  He’d arrested Nealla Stolojan and Raul Ponta on a few occasions. They were constant troublemakers and whilst they had evaded prosecution many times, they were always on the radar. They shared an apartment together which was the first place examined. There was nothing of interest other than mess, used needles and lots of pornographic magazines strewn about the place. Nealla was dead, Raul was mi
ssing.

  The ace in the hole for Ciprian came in the form of twelve year old Mihai, the young boy who was always with Nealla and Raul. All of them used heroin, but whilst Nealla and Raul seemed to have control over it, Mihai was a lost little soul in need of help. By now Mihai would be hurting without his big daddy to feed him. Ciprian figured that if anyone could throw light onto Nealla’s murder, it would be Mihai.

  In his short time as a policeman Ciprian had realised this wasn’t the career he’d envisioned. In Romania the police handled traffic, bureaucracy, identity cards and most other rubber stamp jobs. He wanted more than that, he craved excitement. The real action went to the Jandarmeria who were combat police, soldiers, a militarised division working under the direction of the civil police force. The Jandarmeria hunted criminals and put down riots. Ciprian spent time directing traffic and filing paperwork. He needed something special for his life and these murders had just dropped excitement and a career advantage onto his lap. This was his chance to make an impact.

  At the end of his double shift he called the station and requested information on his arrests to find Mihai’s address. He lived on Strada Brazilor, only a few minutes walk from the murder scene.

  Ciprian knocked on the second floor apartment. The door was answered by a woman in filthy clothes and the whole place smelled of piss. It was foul.

  “Mihai.” Ciprian said before pinching his mouth and nose.

  The woman barely even registered his police uniform. She pointed to the corner of a room that was littered with food wrappers and filth. This place was worse than any rubbish dump and as Ciprian crossed the threshold he heard a scurrying beneath the trash that he knew had to be rats.

  The young boy was curled up on the corner of a sofa. He looked vacant and had dirty rags bound around his hand like it was a bandage of some kind. There was something wrong with this kid, mental illness, autism, something that kept him from connecting with the real world. As Ciprian crouched down to talk to him he figured that for this kid, keeping out of the real world was probably a good idea.

  “Hi. Mihai. I need to ask you something.”

  Mihai didn’t change his vacant expression but his face turned slightly towards the policeman.

  “Do you know what happened to Nealla.”

  Mihai didn’t move.

  “Mihai. Somebody has attacked Nealla. Somebody has hurt him. Do you know...”

  “English vampire,” the boy said.

  Ciprian felt a hit of adrenalin. “What English vampire, Mihai?”

  “The English, he is a vampire. He drink my blood.”

  “Who is the English?”

  Mihai turned his face directly to Ciprian and for a few seconds made absolute contact with the world. “The English is a vampire. He drinks my blood. He is vampire but the lady tells me he is a good vampire and I must tell nobody.”

  “The lady told you to tell nobody?”

  Mihai made a very slow nod of the head.

  “Mihai, listen to me... This is very important. Do you know where I can find the English vampire?”

  Mihai made a another nod. “He drinks my blood.”

  ----- X -----

  He got the money. Ten thousand in cash. The alluring bank clerk Louisa was waving at him to say hello. He half waved back but was so desperate to avoid a repeat of yesterday’s sexual frustration that he practically ran from the bank to the underground station. He was stealing money and he felt the heat on his skin as he pulled off the crime. It was borrowed legitimately, but he would never pay it back; the theft had yet to happen, but he felt like a criminal and his hands trembled as he took the cash. Emotionally, it felt a far worse crime to knowingly defraud the bank than it did to murder Nealla and Raul.

  Now he needed a new home. He began by wandering North London’s more decrepit suburbs in search of a squat or derelict building and got lucky just north of King’s Cross. He stumbled onto a row of terraced homes with a fire damaged property at one end. It looked like a garage business of some kind, a mechanics yard had gone up in flames and spread to the house next door. The second house after that was damaged too but in a much better condition; from the street he could see nothing wrong with it other than the ground floor window being boarded up.

  As he walked the perimeter he felt it necessary to act calm and only peek from the corner of his eye. He knew it was stupid, but somehow his paranoia was keeping him in check, ensuring he didn’t look like a burglar casing buildings to break into.

  There was a tight alleyway leading to what he presumed were small private yards on the rear. The walls were seven feet high but could be climbed by jamming his feet in either side of the alley. He was right about the yards; each home had a small enclosure no more than ten feet square, space enough to store a bicycle or perhaps a dustbin. He dropped into the yard of the fire damaged home. The back door had been kicked in and led to the remnants of a kitchen. As a home it was unusable. Stairs led down to a basement that looked uninviting, another set of stairs led up ten feet and opened to the sky. The building was gutted by fire above the first floor and the structure was braced by scaffolding. The four walls were held in place by a skeleton of steel-work and braces. It looked like a child’s climbing frame with ladders fixed to the top.

  He noticed a detail.

  The fire had destroyed the roof of this building and spread into the roof of the next home. It looked as though he could access the second home through its roof. He climbed the ladders, feeling the height becoming exponentially more lethal with every rung. At the top there was an opportunity to reach out and grab the very top of the wall. It was perilous. In fact it was deadly. There was access to the roof of the second home but it would take a long reach and a leap of faith, made more difficult by wearing a backpack. There was no surviving a fall from this height.

  He took the chance, grabbed the brickwork and released himself from the ladder to hang off the wall almost fifty feet above a rubble heap.

  It was worth it. He could see a square hole in the floor that dropped into the top of the building. He pulled himself into the roof and walked carefully on charred beams, knowing they could give way at any moment. He lowered through the gap and dropped.

  “Jesus Christ, I’m doing this.” he gasped on landing. He stayed in a crouch position, listening carefully. Frozen in place. Scared. Worried that he wasn’t alone in the building.

  It was bold. Scary. He was trespassing, on the run, with thousands of pounds of stolen money in his backpack. He’d lost everything but was on the cusp of building something new. This place could be a home. The carpet was sopping wet and waterlogged and the wallpaper was peeling, but it still had the potential.

  Paul worked his way down, checking the layout as he went. Small rooms with single beds, minimal furniture and a smashed lock on each door, presumably broken open by firefighters ensuring the building was clear.

  There was a communal kitchen, shower area and toilet on the second floor. He instinctively pressed the light switch on the staircase and was surprised to see the light come on. There was power. He couldn’t have hoped for better.

  The best place to build a home was the ground floor. It was a small, self-contained apartment consisting of a bedroom, lounge and kitchen that connected to the yard. The sink ran with cold water. There was no gas for the cooker, but with running water and electricity it was perfect.

  Like the burnt-out shell next door, there was a staircase leading from the kitchen to a cellar with a door at both the top and bottom. The light didn’t work down there but Paul could make out a short T shaped junction. One end led to a toilet and the other a square room with a washing machine. This had been someone’s laundry.

  “This is it, Paul,” he whispered to himself. “This is going to be home. This is where you’re going to make your plans and escape. Stay paranoid. Stay invisible. Be bold.”

  He would sleep here tonight, then tomorrow he would buy new locks and tools to make the back gate and back door accessible. He would get dr
y bedding and create a space to live.

  Today had been a success. He needed more days like today, more successes, a little bit of luck. If he could get that, then he could get better, get away and everything would be right with the world again.

  That is what he wanted. For everything to be all right.

  He even said it to himself. “Everything is going to be alright, Paul. Everything is going to be all right.” Best of all, he really believed it. Everything really would be all right. From here on out, it would be plain sailing.

  ----- X -----

  Ciprian was looking for obvious English names on the mailboxes.

  “Are you sure this is the building, Mihai?” The boy nodded. It was an oppressive place, concrete and bare fluorescent striplights. A middle aged lady in a headscarf came down the stairs.

  “Buna,” she said politely on seeing his uniform.

  “Buna,” Ciprian replied. “Can you help me. I want to speak to the building supervisor. I’m looking for a man living here who may be English or American.”

  “Da,” the woman replied. Yes. “I know him, he lives upstairs. Is this about him being attacked?”

  “You know of the attack?” Ciprian asked.

  “It was right here,” she pointed to the doorway. “The day before yesterday. I came in and the Englishman was on the floor. He was attacked. Look, you can still see some blood on the wall. I helped him.”

  “Who attacked him?”

  The woman rolled her eyes. “Oh, I don’t know. A man, he came in through the doors and fought the Englishman before running away. I didn’t see him.”

  “Did he have a shaved head? About this tall?” Ciprian held out his hand to indicate height. The woman rolled her eyes to the side. She didn’t want to be involved. “Do you know where the Englishman lives, which apartment?”