Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (14 page)

“Leave this,” she said taking his hand to lead him
away.

Paul didn’t move, “What does this mean?”

“You know what it means, it is diavolul pădure
and not safe to go here.”

“Devil Forest? And what do you think will happen if
you do go here?”

“You get sick. I tell you this already. It is like
dead animal that have disease, you can’t see disease, but it is there; and if
you spend too much time next to dead animal, the disease will get in you. This
is the same, but is not a dead animal with disease, it is a forest with
disease.” Ildico looked at him pleadingly, puppy dog eyes and almost lowering
herself in subservience. “Please...” She pulled at his hand slowly, begging him
away from the bad place, drawing out the word, ‘please’.

Bless her, she was such a sweetie. “OK,” Paul said,
stepping in the direction she wanted but not releasing her hand. “But why do you
think they put crucifixes. Why not a sign that says ‘danger’ instead of
crucifixes?”

Ildico seemed to squirm a little.

“Tell me why? Why do they have crucifixes?”

“Because of the strigoi,” she conceded. “Like John
told you. It is to keep the strigoi bound to the earth.”

Paul glanced across his shoulder as they walked away.
He wanted to explore and find what was hidden. Those crucifixes were merely a
boundary and he knew there had to be some hidden treasure at the centre.
Perhaps another vampire grave. But the choice was either to keep holding
Ildico’s hand, or antagonise her by demanding to go into the forest. He knew
she would never agree to go with him. He stopped walking and looked at her. She
was so sweet, so fragile. For an instant he imagined gripping her hair tightly
to pull her head back and kiss her. He suddenly visualised her face at the
moment his cock slid inside her. He wanted her to gasp at that instant, or
moan. Stop fantasising, stop fantasising. Stop it, now, just stop.

“Are you alright?” she asked.

“I’m sorry... I just...” Then he was hit by a strange
sensation of vertigo. The background seemed to fall away making him lean
forward. Dizzy, strange wobbling dizziness. “Whoaaa.” He placed his hands on
his knees to steady himself. Ildico placed a hand on his shoulder.

“What is wrong?”

“Nothing, I just felt a bit woozy.” He tried to steady
himself. Part of him wanted to sit in the snow to avoid falling, to wait until
the vertigo finished, the other part of him wanted to punch Ildico in the teeth
for having seen this moment of weakness. He could see himself doing it.
Fighting her on the ground, trying to pull those jeans off her. He wanted to
unfasten her coat and rip the buttons of her blouse open. He wanted to see her
tits judder as they broke free from her bra. He could almost hear her muffled
screams; could feel her warm mouth and spittle against the hand he clasped over
her mouth to silence her.

“I know you don’t want to hurt me,” Ildico said.

“What?” Paul sparked back almost panicking.

“I said, I know you don’t want to hurt me.”

The world was spinning with panic. What had he said?
The blood drained from his face. Had he said that out loud? Had he embarrassed
himself? She would laugh at him, mock him, think him a pervert. If so...
strangle her. Tie her down to the giant saw bed; spread her legs and watch as
it cuts into her cunt and guts... Stop fantasising. Stop fantasising. Stop
fantasising.

“I’m sorry, Ildico, I just...” He flustered, couldn’t
find the words, he knew he must look mortified.

What did I say?

She had said, ‘I know you don’t want to hurt me.’ Why
did she say that? What did I say she was responding to?

Ildico took firmer hold of his hand. “What is wrong?
Do you feel sick?”

Paul nodded his head as he blew out a few breaths to
purge. “Yes, I feel sick. I’m sorry, I was very sick yesterday. I thought I was
OK, but I guess I need more time to recover.”

Ildico held his hand tenderly and rubbed his shoulder
with the other hand. She glowed with a radiance, a pure light around her.
Beautiful. An angel. “Shall we go back?” she asked.

She really did look like an angel. Pure white skin.
Soft smile.

“Yes.”

Ildico started walking taking him in tow. She still
held his hand. It felt really good to have her hold his hand. She was nice. He
couldn’t imagine why his imagination was so determined to hurt her. This was
Ildico... not Nisha. Nisha was a bitch who deserved to have her throat slit.
Ildico was purity. Nothing must ever happen to Ildico, or her purity. She must
never become like those other whores.

----- X -----

The
cockerel crowed after a night of the most horrible vampire dreams imaginable.
They were worse than ever and they weren’t even about vampires anymore. They
were prison guards in war zones, cutting off the toes of babies for their own
amusement. He watched a Nazi SS officer gouge out the eye of a pre-teen girl
and fuck her eye socket whilst she screamed for her mother. He imagined a
mechanical death machine with humans hung upside down on an overhead track like
cattle. The victims were carried around a factory that slowly butchered them;
their arms cut off first before most of the skin was flayed and only after many
terrible and unnecessary injuries would their screaming and skinless faces line
up with a special groove to cut off their heads.

The horrors of his dreams were the most grotesque
spectacles of imagination and were deeply upsetting. As he lay in bed awake, he
realised he was crying.

He still didn’t feel right. The fever of falling into
the ice water had passed but the other symptoms seemed to linger like a
blanketing and smothering cloud around his head. He occasionally felt sick. He
would have a dry throat but couldn’t bear to drink. His head would throb and
his thinking would feel muddy. A few times he’d felt the strange vertigo
sensation that had embarrassed him with Ildico.

“Ildico.” He said her name aloud to the empty room,
hearing the sadness in his voice. Tears ran over his cheeks and nose. “Ildico,”
he said again. He just wanted to say it, to fill the space with her name. She
was coming to visit tonight. They had arranged it. He would spend the day
writing and she would come in the evening. That would be nice. That would be
great. It was so lonely here.

By 7am he was out of bed and had every pan in the
kitchen boiling water on the stove. Bathing would be done squatting in the
bathtub with a plastic bucket. Nu este apa calde. For five years, nu este apa
calde; there isn’t any hot water. Jesus Christ, the people in this building
must really be poor.

Dressing in fresh clothing after bathing felt
luxurious. It was the last of the clean clothes meaning laundry must be done.
He hadn’t noticed any launderettes in Romania so far, so he figured it would be
the same as bathing; boiling water in pans and hand washing in the sink. He
would do that tomorrow. In the meantime, there were a few housekeeping chores
to be done. Cleaning the tub, sink and toilet. Cleaning the kitchen, the oven
top. He put the mop, brush, dustpan, bleach and scouring powder to work and the
smell reminded him of when he’d first stepped into the apartment and he could
imagine the landlady cleaning the place in the hours before he arrived.

There was a surprise whilst cleaning. By the front
door there was a thin and threadbare rug. When he moved it, he discovered a
tiny silver cross beneath. It was very similar to the one he’d found in the
forest, the one that had been wrapped around the wrist of the...

He had that cross.

It was a sudden flash of memory. He was back in the
forest holding it, he saw himself dropping it into the breast pocket of his
coat. He never used that pocket normally, it was small but it had a zipper.
Paul leaned the brush to one side and examined his coat hanging on the back of
the door. He could feel the cross through the fabric before he had even
unzipped the pocket.

“Oh, wow!” How could he have forgotten about this? He
held the twine high, allowing the cross to dangle in front of his eyes. It was
quite small and pretty, the sort of thing a Christian girl would wear on a
chain around their neck.

“I’d better not let Ildico know where you came from,”
Paul said to the cross. He wrapped the twine around his wrist to let the cross
hang the way it must have hung from the body in the forest. It immediately
empowered him. Ildico was coming this evening. She would visit, he would charm
her and tonight they would make love. As he looked at the cross dangling from
his wrist, nothing had ever seemed so certain as that.

----- X -----

Stillness,
like a photograph. Paul sat in the chair at the centre of the room staring at
the story panels. They were messy, like graffiti on toilet walls, but those
scribbles were all interesting fragments, splinters of glass from shattered
stories that were building in size. Soon he would be able to slide them
together to create interesting mosaics. Narratives of interest, born from his
imagination. But to the casual eye they were nothing but scratches of ink on a
wall.

Ahead of him was the laptop, opened to the image of
the white cross at the shrine. It was still planted in the earth, before he’d
stupidly pushed it over and broke it. He toyed with the small silver cross
fastened to his wrist.

Things were different now. His batteries of
imagination were charged and primed. He’d seen Bran, the castle and the forest.
He’d met John and learned of strigoi. He’d visited the grave of a vampire. He
even wore the cross on his wrist he had grave robbed from a corpse.

It was time to meet the vampire for real.

“Show me.”

The wall dissolved to become a window into the forest.
The shrine stood in frozen air, the cruciform hung from the entrance. Nothing
moved. No breeze swung the cruciform or rustled the trees. There was nothing
but dead silence.

Paul settled back into the chair, watching the forest,
feeling the outline of the cross on his wrist.

“Show me the real vampire.”

The first movement came from behind bushes, a leading
edge of what was perhaps a man some distance away. It was instantly
recognisable as the person who had stalked him, the one camouflaged, sneaking
up on him and chasing him. That wasn’t a hunter it would seem. Rather he had
laid eyes on the elusive strigoi.

“You can come out and be seen.”

Like a film director positioning an actor, the strigoi
slowly stepped from behind cover to be revealed in the icy winter daylight.

The strigoi of his imagined mind wasn’t a vaporous
ghost or spirit.

It was a man. And he was magnificent.

His skin was marble white, bleached and colourless. He
was naked, stepping cautiously through the forest, stepping forward with his
toes, touching them into the snow before resting the heel down. Something about
him was beautiful, pure, understated yet majestic. He was a statue, like
Michelangelo’s David, perfect in size and form. His muscles were toned and cut,
his posture was precise and natural. To the casual eye he looked like a naked
man coated in white paint; but it went way beyond being just a man. This
strigoi made flesh was the most perfect being imaginable. The muscles of its
arms and shoulders bulged with visible strength, the skin was taught across its
back and abdomen to show lines and ridges of muscle tone. He was the most
perfect specimen of masculinity with a physical perfection to rival any athlete
or gymnast, but there was an extra dimension to the perfection in that he
looked strong. On this frame of skeleton and muscle was a visible power. The
vampire was in some ways a super-hero from a comic book, with strength and
talent that went beyond what mere humans could do.

The vampire stepped through the forest until it
entered the shrine and stood with its back to Paul. It was right in the centre,
where the cross should have been. A single spot of light fell through the tree
branches to illuminate the creature so precisely it looked as though he was
glowing from within. Angelic. It raised its arms out to the sides as though in
the shape of crucifixion and Paul noticed the small silver cross hanging from
its wrist. Subconsciously, he took hold of the cross on his own wrist.

“What did they do to you?” he asked.

Paul’s eyes drifted to the point on the vampire’s
spine between the shoulder blades. The scar was clear.

“They put the cross in you. They buried you face down
in the earth and then hammered that cross through your back and into your
heart.”

The vampire turned its head to look across its shoulder
and make eye contact.

Eyes.

It was the first time Paul had noticed its face. A
strong jaw line and proud handsome features, it looked every bit as statuesque
as the rest of him, but there were two things that brought it to life. First,
the expression was blank, or rather, saddened but not showing. Something about
the face was angelic and calm but the underlying emotion was one of sadness as
though the man had lived his life and was not angry or upset to have died, but
just sad that this was what had happened. But inside the face were the eyes,
glowing, rubies of light. They didn’t shine like lights, rather they were made
of a deep red glass and they reflected or refracted an unseen source of light.
They were dead, lonely eyes. Against the white marble skin, these glassy red
eyes were striking.