Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (13 page)

Don’t.

Kill me.

Kill me.

Kill me.

Then came the roaring screeching sound that shot
through him like he was in the electric chair. Craccck-a-caaaaaark.

Daylight.

The cockerel was crowing.

Paul woke in pain and almost cried out in agony as he
tried to move in bed. Searing, serious pain like a touched nerve hit him on
every joint and muscle in his body. Something was wrong. Something was very
seriously wrong.

----- X -----

The
day was spent in a feverish stupor. Paul admonished himself repeatedly for
falling in the stream and getting soaked in ice water. His body ached all over.
His joints were stiff, his muscles were pained, his eyes hurt like he was
getting a headache, his throat and neck felt swollen and he was burning a temperature.
He’d managed to convince himself it was a bad cold, or at worst a genuine
influenza infection. In which case he knew all he had to do was ride it out by
keeping warm, drinking fluids and taking paracetamol to keep his temperature
down.

He’d settled in the kitchen with the oven on full to
make the place warm and had a blanket wrapped around him like a shawl. He had
the laptop and legal pad beside him to work if he felt inspired but it was
stupid to expect any creativity today. He managed to sketch out some
interesting ideas from the crazy dream of the vampire in the basement but the
thoughts didn’t sit comfortably in the Shadowbeast universe. Mostly he played
cards on the computer. Occasionally he’d boil a pan of water to make hot
drinks. Hours ticked by with no other activity. For lunch he had a frozen pizza
which was a salt and taste overload. It would have been a great pick-me-up meal
if he hadn’t been so sick and miserable to enjoy it. For dinner he warmed a tin
of soup and dipped in crusty bread; it took over an hour to eat it and he had
to force it by the end.

By six in the evening he was exhausted and ready for
bed. He didn’t expect to sleep well as he’d been so inactive during the day,
but as he undressed he felt sleep approaching like a hypnotist counting
backwards from ten. The moment his head touched the pillow, he was out.

----- X -----

Vampires
on the brain. I must have vampires on the brain. Paul sat on the edge of the
bed with what felt like a bad hangover. He’d slept the whole night, but in
those sleeping hours he’d fought the world. His head pounded. Outside the
window the cockerel screeched its wake up call. It was just before six meaning
he’d slept through twelve hours of what seemed like physical torture. He’d
dreamt a lot and had disjointed memories of horrible images, truly horrible.
He’d seen throats slit, children trapped in the gears of fairground rides,
Islamists beheading people in internet videos, Christian witch hunters burning
people alive in Africa, serial killers kidnapping vulnerable women, hangings,
mutilations, amputations and a whole library of medieval torture devices. There
was no reason for it. He knew he was supposed to be writing a horror story, but
this was reality he’d been dreaming about. He was supposed to be writing sexy
monsters for teenagers, not photographing war crimes for evidence. The only
part that was remotely connected to the current project was throughout all of
his dreams, the perpetrators of violence seemed to share a common identity.
Whether it was a Muslim fanatic with a gun or an Inquisitor with the pear of
anguish, they were all... vampires.

As he sat on the edge of the bed he had a recollection
of Lice, the immortal Roman soldier he’d created in the basement. He realised
the metal mask he’d imagined was taken from a vintage, black and white Italian
horror movie called La Maschera del Demonio. A woman accused of being a witch
was tied to a stake whilst a metal mask lined with spikes was hammered to her
face, nailed into her cheekbones. Paul was seeing the instigator of the lynch
mob in his mind’s eye; this man, calling instructions and taking the decision
to hammer the spiked mask to the woman’s face. He was a vampire. Not the
literal blood sucking classic vampire, but a man infected with some kind of
evil.

That man tortured that woman.

He smirked whilst he did it.

He enjoyed it.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could do it in real
life? Nisha deserved it, the chopped up twin from The Shining who fucked him
whilst wearing her bloody blue dress before calling him a rapist. Would it not
be wonderful to regain one’s self respect by destroying her face with a hammer?
Hearing her scream for mercy as blow after blow hammered spikes into her
beautiful face, making her ugly, hideous, making her pay for her cruelty?

“What the hell?”

It was a random thought, a harmless thought, but it
was uncomfortable.

“Calm down, Paul. You haven’t even had breakfast and
you’re killing girls in your head.”

It was a jolt. Imagining other people commit crimes of
violence was upsetting, but fantasising about partaking in such crime was...
was...

“It’s just a fantasy,” Paul said to himself. “A
schoolboy fantasy to hurt a girl who hurt you.”

There was something niggling in the thought about
taking revenge in such a way. Something connected to vampires in that it seemed
to hold the core essence of what a vampire had come to mean. A vampire wasn’t
some mythical creature that transformed into a bat and flew in the night to
drink blood. A vampire was a man capable of inflicting cruelty and violence.
Someone who could enact such violence and believe his actions were just.

It was the inner psychology of poor Dragoste. Other
people had seen him and called him a vampire, but they’d never stopped to try
and imagine how Dragoste saw the world. Dragoste wasn’t just killing his baby
girls, he was trying to cure himself, using the same techniques as the priest.
He would have looked out of control, crazy and savage, but to Dragoste it must
have felt like he was doing the right thing.

Paul shuffled his naked body through to the kitchen
and wrote it on the legal pad. “Men who are capable of committing violence and
justifying it,” Paul said each word as he wrote it. “These are the real
vampires.” He paused to think for a moment then wrote the name St. Thomas
Aquinas underneath. Aquinas had to be a vampire; after all, he managed to
convince people that sex was the same as witchcraft, that demons walked the
Earth and that anyone who wasn’t a true believer in Christ needed to be killed.
Cue hundreds of years of Catholic persecution. Aquinas had definitely believed
what he was doing was right. No wonder they made him a saint.

“Men who cause violence are vampires,” he said as he
shuffled his way back to the bedroom. “There’s something in that.” It seemed right
but the vocabulary was wrong. Ordinary men who become violent men. Possessed by
demons. Enacting horrible acts of murder and torture and mayhem. They start out
fine, they start out as nice wholesome lovely men, but something happens.

The strigoi happens.

The strigoi infects a man and when it does they become
so fucking evil they can hammer a spiked mask to that bitch Nisha’s face. I’ll
teach you to threaten me with calling the police, you cunt.

He could almost feel the hammer in his fist. It felt
good to hold. It would feel even better to use.

----- X -----

It
was 9am. He was dressed, had eaten, was positioned in the lounge ready to
continue writing when the doorbell made its grating rattle.

As he opened the front door he was treated to far more
happiness than his muddled mind was prepared for.

“Hi, are you ready?” Ildico asked with a beaming
smile.

Paul stared back blankly. “Ready for...?”

“We are going to Bran today. You said today, I should
come here at nine o’clock. It is nine o’clock now.”

“I said you should come?”

Ildico’s face dissolved from being the happiest little
girl to one of being flustered and embarrassed.

“It is today, yes? You did say today?”

“I don’t remember saying anything.”

“When we meet John, when we are walking back I asked
you about going to Bran and you said today at nine o’clock I should come here.”

Paul blew out as though purging his system. His head
still held the feelings of a hangover recovery. What the hell was Ildico
talking about? He was sure he would have remembered arranging something.
Perhaps this was his chance to fuck her six ways from Sunday and...

“Fuck,” Paul said sparking to life at the shock
thought. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. Come in, please. I guess I just
forgot.”

Ildico’s magic smile reappeared.

“Just give me a few minutes to get ready,” Paul said
as he quickly gathered his coat, wallet and camera. He hadn’t organised this
trip. He was sure he hadn’t organised anything. “Sorry Ildico, where are we
going?”

“Dracula’s castle. It is where Vlad Tepes stayed,”
Ildico said.

“I don’t remember this at all,” he mumbled, not for
Ildico to hear.

“You told me about Vlad Tepes was called Vlad the
Impaler, which I already know, but you told me his father was called, I think
you said Vlad Il Dracul, which means the dragon.”

“Vlad Il Dracul, is right, it was his father. Tepes
was Son of the Dragon which is where Dracula comes from,” Paul said whilst
fastening his shoelaces.

“You see,” Ildico chirped back. “You told me that, I
didn’t know but you told me. You also said come today at nine o’clock.” She
sounded as though she was pressing the point, trying a little too hard to make
him realise that this was a genuine appointment.

“It’s OK,” Paul said. He walked over to her, held her
hands and kissed her cheek. “It’s OK, lets go.”

Holy shit.

Did I just kiss her?

----- X -----

It
turned out the bus to Brasov stopped only two drops after the big supermarket
and from there they took a tourist coach for the hour long drive to Bran. The
coach had a poster on the back of the driver’s cab of a woman in lingerie. It
was a picture from the 80’s with big hair and powerful makeup. Why it was on
display on a bus was one of those mysteries of the universe. The bus also had a
chain of compact discs hanging from the front window .

“Who decides to decorate a bus with CDs? I can’t
believe somebody thought it would make the bus look nice.”

“It’s not to look nice,” Ildico said as though he was
being silly. “It’s for when the police use the radar to catch people driving
too fast. If you have discs in the window the radar doesn’t work.”

Paul laughed out loud. “OK.” he said to agree.
Scientific literacy in Romania seemed inversely proportional to religiosity.

The castle at Bran turned out to be a letdown. It
looked picturesque from a distance, standing high on a steep and rocky
hillside, but up close it was a mishmash of reconstructions. Smooth rounded
towers with a white rendered finish gave way to uncovered brickwork which gave
way to a few concrete slabs from the same factory that produced the communist
tower blocks. Not a historic restoration. More an exhibit of building work
through the decades. It was a travesty really.

Inside was little more than a furniture museum
showcasing wardrobes and beds from different periods. Paul had expected a tourist
trap, he’d expected waxwork figures torturing in the dungeon or at least a
history lesson on the Prince of Wallachia but there were no such riches. There
was one secret passage that led to a balcony from which he took a photograph of
Ildico and she took one of him. After an hour Paul realised he’d seen
everything in the first ten minutes.

Beside the castle a museum village of log cabins held
more interest. The most impressive was a sawmill with a giant blade two stories
high that would have been used to cut tree trunks into long beams. In his
imagination the huge cogged gears and blade could be the stage for a terrifying
fight. So many sharp teeth and edges to crush, cut and mutilate the bones. As a
death machine it rivalled the swinging scythe from The Pit and the Pendulum.
Discovering this one thing made the trip worthwhile.

“Do you want children?” Ildico asked Paul as they
wandered through the surrounding woods.

“I suppose so, eventually.” Paul replied. “I haven’t
really given it much thought.”

“I do,” Ildico replied. “I want a boy called John and
a girl called Alina.”

“Alina? That’s a nice name. Ildico is a really nice
name, I’ve never heard that before.”

“Thank you. It is Hungarian. My father is from Budapest and he worked on the railway in old Ceauşescu times. Do you know you can get
train from Brasov to Budapest? It is like a hotel, you sleep on train in Romania and wake up in Hungary... Paul?”

Paul wasn’t beside her. He’d stopped walking a few
paces behind and was staring into space. When Ildico followed his eye line she
understood why. Ahead of him, approximately ten yards from the path, was a line
of trees each with a crucifix nailed to the trunk to mark a perimeter.