by Atha, DL
It was almost painful yet I enjoyed the sensation after climbing out of the cool water of the creek. The heat dampened by the water worked out the kinks of my muscles brought on by swimming after Ellie. We had made two trips back and forth across the stretch of water running between two sets of rapids and I was tired and sore.
She was a good swimmer and although I listened intently while resting on the rocks for her laughter as she played with Samuel in the water, I wasn’t actually worried about her. She was like a fish and had been swimming since she was two. The world always seemed perfect when we were here.
Opening my eyes, I trailed the edges of the cliffs. Unbroken by anything except vegetation and the occasional cedar tree that grew precariously in the cracks marking the cliff surface, I saw nothing out of place. But still I searched. For what, I wasn’t sure but inwardly, I knew something wasn’t right.
Sitting up, I scanned the surface of the water as I realized the sounds of her laughter were gone. A pit opened in my abdomen through which the entire creek could have poured. Starting to panic, I again ran my eyes over the cliff edges out into the distance until I could see them no more.
Instinctively, I knew the water wasn’t the danger and jumping to my feet, I ran to the water’s edge and dove in. Needing to reach the cliffs, I swam with as much power as I had but, as usual in a dream, rather than cutting swiftly through the water, it was like swimming through molasses. I finally made it to where the water and the cliffs met. Reaching up and catching hold of a crooked cedar, I pulled myself into a path cut through the cliff by the slow trickle of a millennium-old stream.
We had climbed it many times in the summer when the stream had dried up at its source from the power of the sun. This time of year, the moss had dried out and the footing wasn’t terribly slick. Somehow, as in most dreams, I had a sense of the terrible lying ahead yet couldn’t stop myself from following it. I couldn’t stop this nightmare from occurring even in my own mind.
I continued to scurry up the slope. Grasping at every small tree or shrub that presented itself, I managed to pull myself to the top and haul myself over the edge. Winded but now standing on the cliff, I went back to scanning the windblown edge, this time with a bird’s eye view.
West to east, I strained my eyes and finally saw her. Standing with her back to the edge of the diving cliff, her long soft tresses blew gently in the breeze of the sunny day. Here, the cliff arched out over the creek, a local jumping spot for lots of kids over the years. It was a short fifteen-foot drop into the creek at one of its deepest depths as long as you dove out far enough.
But I had no fear of the dive. My fear was of the animal I knew she faced. Her arms were pulled up defensively in front of herself and one leg was positioned farther back as if she might turn and dive at any moment. Starting towards her, I stopped abruptly as I realized the sun was gone from the sky, replaced by the cloudy gray skies of a February day.
Looking down from the cliff’s edge to the water, the placid waters had been replaced by the river’s winter current. Strong enough to carry vehicles from bridges and drown the most able bodied swimmer foolish enough to test its strength. The warm balmy air was gone and now felt cold against my still wet skin and swimsuit.
Looking back at Ellie, I hurried towards her and what she faced so defensively. Knowing what it was, I was unable to put it into words, to make myself think the word. Making my way across the distance standing between us, I stepped out to reach for her on the diving rock. “Ellie, take my hand,” I cried out above the wind. But she remained frozen on the edge of the rock.
Looking around, I still couldn’t see what had frightened her so terribly, but when I faced her again, I felt the terror rise up in me as well. The same hair-raising fear that had become a part of my life now and I couldn’t even dream normally.
It was him, the vampire. Turning back to Ellie, I reached out to her with my hands, not allowing myself to stroke her cheek or one lock of her hair for fear I would cling to her.
“I love you. Forgive me and forget me.” Smiling at her one last time, I jumped forward and shoved her off and over the cliff edge. Instinctively, she turned in midair and dove neatly into the gray churning waters below.
I wasn’t afraid for her for I knew she was in no danger now, and leaning over the cliff edge, I watched my beautiful daughter dive into the now sun-kissed summer waters of the river. Without looking back, she rolled over onto her back and looked up into the blue July skies. She was laughing as she swam back to a waiting group of friends where they picnicked with my mother on the heat-soaked rocks.
I laughed with her and paused for a moment before turning my back on the tranquil summer scene back to the dark and miserable cold day that awaited me. Wet and shivering, with gray skin and blue fingernails, I faced the damp sunless skies and the vampire waiting at the tree line.
I awoke, clammy and cool with the cold sweat of a nightmare to the point that even the low setting of the ceiling fan rose gooseflesh on my skin. I lay there unmoving for a moment, hoping my memories of the images would finally take on the quality of a dream and lose some of their reality. It didn’t happen.
The dream had brought to my consciousness what my mind had not dealt with until now. I had seen Ellie as she would be in a few months when I was gone from her life. Would she understand? I doubted it, but the images of her playing happily in the water gave me some peace that even if I wasn’t here, her life could and would go on.
I desperately needed to say goodbye to her. Somehow. But exactly how I would accomplish that I couldn’t yet decide. I knew I couldn’t call Ellie. My mother would answer and she could pick up trouble a mile away. She would know that something was terribly wrong and she would come. I’m a bad liar and I couldn’t fool her. But somehow I had to find a way.
And I wondered if it was a purely selfish need or would it help Ellie as well? It would be risky and I needed to think it through more clearly. I still had three more nights.
Right now, I needed to focus on surviving the day and that was going to take nutrition and possibly a blood transfusion. I laughed inwardly at the thought. I bet that would throw him off a little. Reaching for the bedpost immediately before standing, expecting to have to steady myself after the amount of blood I had lost during the night, I caught it in my right hand but discovered quickly that I didn’t need it. I felt pretty good. No dizziness or nausea this morning and no tired muscles.
The only bad sensation was a mild ache in the bones of my legs and chest. I must be making new blood cells, I rationalized to myself. Confused but not wasting much brain power on how well I felt, I headed into the bathroom to take care of the necessities and get a shower.
After rinsing off in the hottest water I could tolerate as it took the edge off of the bone pain, I stepped out and dried off. I slipped fresh underclothes on and then followed them with crisp scrub pants and a V-neck tee and headed back into the bathroom to brush my teeth.
My mother had always touted the importance of a clean mouth in the worst of situations. It was her firm belief that brushing your teeth could improve your outlook on any situation by at least fifty percent. It was a belief I shared and so after squeezing a generous amount of blue paste onto my brush, I brushed with fervor as I considered my situation.
I was working hard on the left lower teeth when I noticed again how unscathed the skin of my neck was. Lifting my wrist up to look at the most recent puncture wound, I inspected it under the bright light of the vanity. No trace of his penetration of my artery, not even any bruising. How was that possible?
As an ER doc, I knew trauma inside and out and bruises have a fairly predictable timetable. I should have had bright bluish purple contusions yet looking in the mirror, there were none. No puncture wounds, no bruising, and no redness. Yesterday I at least had bruises from where he had thrown me around. Now those were gone as well.
My skin was perfect and as I remembered back over the last two nights, I realized there had been little post
-traumatic bleeding. I sat down on the edge of the tub and began pulling a comb through my hair. It was long and the events of the night had left it so tangled that the water hadn’t even made much of a dent in the knots. Lost in thought about the lack of bruising and bleeding, I pulled the comb slowly again and again through my disheveled hair.
How did he puncture a vessel, drink free-flowing blood, stop the bleeding, and heal the tissue? There had to be a scientific explanation, I was sure that it wasn’t magic.
Drinking free-flowing blood was the easy part. Leeches and ticks did that all the time. It was a protein in their spit. The medical field even used leech saliva therapeutically when patients had clots.
But reversing the process had to be trickier. His saliva had to contain an anticoagulant to keep the blood from clotting and a protein that was activated secondarily to clot the wound, as well as growth hormones to repair the damage.
But why would his body go to that much trouble? Evolutionarily speaking, DNA was not altruistic. There had to be more benefits to his spit for him.
I continued to think about this as I put the comb on the bathroom counter and walked into the kitchen to find something to eat. Pouring a large glass of milk and grabbing a left-over muffin from a few days gone by, I sat down at the kitchen table and continued to mull over the possibilities.
Clearly biology begets survival of the species. So how did this help him? I was now pretty certain his fluids also contained neuro-stimulators. Blood coagulation, tissue growth hormones, and neuro-stimulants no doubt allowed the prey to live longer, requiring fewer victims and therefore the ability to blend in more. My theory still seemed to be missing something, but I couldn’t seem to put my finger on what that missing element was.
Walking into the living room to rest my overactive mind, I slumped onto the couch. When you’re a prisoner in your home, you realize how boring a place it can be. Even in this roomy old house, I felt as if the walls were closing in on me.
Absentmindedly and out of habit, I reached for the remote. Looking at it in my hand, it occurred to me I had lost touch completely with the outside world. A war could have been going on and I would have had no idea.
Flipping on the TV, I hastily turned to one of the national news channels, jabbing at the next channel button when any image of violence popped up. I just couldn’t take that right now.
Finally landing on the news, I had seen all of the national headlines in ten minutes. Nothing too exciting, just the usual stuff and just as violent as the fiction so I turned to Discovery Channel. At least people probably weren’t going to die in front of my eyes.
Tossing the remote control down, I just sat there for a few minutes lost in thought. Something in the dialogue on one of the educational channels caught my attention and I listened intently to a Ph.D. discussing how the Internet was changing the face of American civilization.
The Internet. I hadn’t even thought about it until now. Not a huge web surfer, I had let it completely slip through my mind. I doubted Asa would be checking my search engines. He probably didn’t even know how. Perhaps others out in the real world knew something about vampires. Getting up quickly, I hurried to the computer and pulled up my favorite search engine.
At first, I typed in vampire and blood-clotting. Forty three thousand hits. I spent about an hour going through the first sixteen pages. Mostly it was about vampire bats and their ability to keep their prey’s blood from clotting. Nothing that helped me very much.
Deciding to try a less specific search, I tried vampire. Over three million hits. I certainly don’t have that much time, I thought irritably to myself. I spent another couple of hours and only got through about one hundred pages. Again, nothing much of any value. Usually my eyes gave out after that much time on the Internet but today I gave up first, deleted my search, and went back into the living room. My eyes felt surprisingly good, but my bones were still aching.
It was about three in the afternoon. Glancing around at the taupe walls, I felt more claustrophobic in the house. I really needed to get outside for a while, but remembering his warning, I decided the sun room might be a safer alternative.
Grabbing a drink as I passed through the kitchen, as dehydration seemed to be my constant companion, I went to the opposite end of the house and walked into the glass-enclosed room. I had always kept the blinds closed when the room wasn’t in use for energy purposes, but also the exposure from all of that glass always made me a little nervous at night.
Reaching the cord for one of the blinds, I gave it a strong tug. The vertical blinds turned quickly and the dimness gave way suddenly to extreme brightness. Sharp pains stabbed at my eyes and I clasped both hands tightly over them, my eyes squeezed shut behind the palms of my hands.
Slowly, I moved my hands and opened my eyes cautiously, adjusting to the light. I had never suffered from light sensitivity before now. My head ached at the sudden onslaught of what to me was the most brilliant light I had ever experienced.
Finally after several minutes, I was able to open the other blinds, forcing myself to endure repeated episodes of the stabbing bright light each time. I was desperate to feel like I was outside in the sunlight even if it was just an illusion.
I sat staring out the windows with my eyes squinted, wishing I had some sunglasses. I couldn’t remember where a pair was off the top of my head. My bones were aching harder now and I couldn’t convince myself to get up and look for a pair.
Did the ache in my bones and the sudden onset of sensitivity to sunlight have anything to do with the vampire? It seemed likely since I had never had a reaction like that to the sun before. I stretched out on the wicker couch thinking about everything that had happened to me. About the puncture wounds that disappeared and the fact that I was actually feeling better than I really should be after all of my blood loss. The neuro-transmitters were obviously doing their job.
Lying on the couch, my eyes fell on the crystal handle of the ceiling fan that turned above me. Ellie had picked it out at the local hardware store, laughing at the facets glimmering in the overhead lights of the store.
Catching a ray of the sun, bright light reflected suddenly into my eyes, causing me to turn my head suddenly into thick cushions on the couch while my stomach lurched at its brightness. “Great, I’m turning into a vampire,” I groaned out loud to myself.
In the span of a couple of seconds, all of the missing pieces fell into place. The biology of his saliva now made perfect sense. The point was to keep the prey alive long enough to convert them. Most of the victims would die, but occasionally one would make it through to become a new vampire. Maybe I was the one.
Vampires had once been humans according to all of the legends I knew. Was it possible that I was becoming a vampire? According to the common myth, it was the vampire’s bite that turned a human. Was that happening to me?
I had a sudden burst of hope. Not that I wanted to be a vampire because that couldn’t be less true. But if I did become like him, would I not at least stand a chance at surviving him? As a human, I had essentially no hope of standing against him.
Would I rather be a vampire than be dead? I could watch Ellie grow up, at least from a distance. Would I still think of her as my daughter? Would I look at her the same or would I be the same soulless creature Asa was?
Did he choose to be this way or did it come with the territory? Had he given up his soul to become what he was and would I do the same by choosing that life?
For surely, if what I was postulating were true, I would need to increase my exposure to him. It would be a conscious decision to become a vampire. I would have no excuse in the afterlife if the rumors of vampires and their lack of souls were fact and not fiction.
I stayed there on the couch attempting to logically think through the hundreds of questions that were turning themselves over in my mind until I noticed by the waning light that the sun was beginning to set. I slipped off of the wicker divan and moved to sit right in front of the largest window. The room h
ad been lit by the natural light only and I made no move to turn the lights on, but continued to sit in the dark as I had the night before.
I couldn’t see the setting sun as the sunroom faced south, but I watched as the shadows grew across the yard and pastures until they weren’t just outlines of the forms in the yard but overtook the forms themselves, their previously distinct lines blending into the darkness. A few stars appeared in the sky. I didn’t know which direction Asa would come from, but I stared intently into the dark, hoping to catch a glimpse of his return to my house and my life. I needed and wanted to learn more about him.
My night vision was stronger as I could distinguish more characteristics farther out in the pasture than I had ever been able to before tonight. I did catch the movement of what looked like coyotes near the tree line and even thought I saw a rabbit hidden in the taller grass at the junction of the lawn and the pasture. But I saw no movement from Asa nor did I sense he was in the house yet.
I continued to sit looking out the window, contemplating my possible conversion to a vampire, convinced it was a scientific event. I was sure that there was nothing magic about the process and the most reasonable explanation was that this was a viral process.
As he had bit me, he had spread the virus through his saliva. The virus spread from one cell to another, that’s why it was not an immediate conversion. Possibly a retrovirus, one that incorporated itself into the human DNA, forever changing the person into essentially a different species.
Wouldn’t Asa know what was happening to me? Had he ever spent a long enough period of time with a human to allow the conversion to take place? From our previous conversations, I knew he was pretty superstitious and I suspected that viral genetics weren’t his strong point.
But obviously he had been turned so he had to know how it happened, right? But if he knew I could change, why would he be taking the chance? Wouldn’t it have been better to just kill me and move on quickly? Or was it possible he didn’t know how he was changed? And this was as new to him as it was to me.
