Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (17 page)

As he approached the communal bins he looked at the
steel frame for beating rugs and this time pictured Ildico’s naked form
suspended from it. Poor Ildico. What villain had trussed her up outdoors in the
cold? Snow was falling, she was shivering. He had to rescue her, he had to be
the hero. He would cut her down and rescue her and be the strong man that his
ego desired him to be. He would rescue her and she would fall in love with him.
It wasn’t right to see her in pain, only Nisha should...

His imagination transposed Ildico into Nisha and his
thoughts reversed with the ease of flipping a switch.

Thoughts of chivalrous rescue became a surging and
overpowering desire to abuse. Nisha was where she deserved to be. She was
stripped naked and exposed, hanging by her wrists from the frame. She was
already in pain, her body stretched under it’s own weight as her bare feet
tried to stand on tip-toes against the sharp ice and gravel of the floor. Nisha
was in the helpless position his ego desired. Her dusky skin bristled with
goose-pimples, her teeth chattered with the cold and her little heart was
beating so fast with terror that he could almost see the throbbing of a pulse
in her delicate little neck. The image exploded in his mind, intensifying,
dressing him in the uniform of an SS officer at a concentration camp. His shiny
polished boots crunched the snow underfoot. He had absolute power over her, the
absolute power that corrupts absolutely and he was pleased it had corrupted him
so. He was pleased he could torment and torture her without guilt or shame or
fear of reprisal. She had hurt him and now was the time she would pay the price
for it. He took hold of his officers dagger and pulled it from the sheath
slowly, hearing the scrape of sharpened steel as it withdrew; black handle,
embossed with the deaths head skull and SS runes, the blade inscribed ‘Meine
Ehre heist Treue’. My Honour is True.

He could toy with her the way a cat toys with an
injured bird.

“I’m going to peel the skin off your face, Nisha.”

She cried.

Sobbing.

Paul was shaken out of his fantasy world and back to
reality. There really was sobbing. He wasn’t imagining it, someone was crying
inside the communal bins enclosure. With some trepidation he looked inside and
noticed someone hidden in the corner. The big wheelie bins were full of garbage
but had a fresh coating of snow. The smell was subdued under the cold, more
like the smell of wet cardboard than household waste but it was still no place
to be crying.

He looked around the furthest wheelie bin to make the
discovery and instantly wished he’d walked on by.

It was Boy.

Instinct... get out of here.

The kid was in pain, holding his stomach with both
hands, bent forward crying.

Get out of here.

Just because he was away from Nealla and Big Man
didn’t mean they weren’t close. The kid was wearing a filthy brown suede
jacket, the cuffs almost black from worn in grime. It was the first time Paul
had really looked at him. His clothes, his hair, his skin; every part of him
was dirty. He looked homeless, almost feral.

“Hey,” Paul called to him. “Hey, Kid.”

Boy looked up to him and his face screwed in a
grimace, he wailed on sight, seemingly in anguish at being discovered, but then
gasped sharply as some abdominal pain took over causing him to jolt and squeeze
his hands against his stomach even tighter.

How to talk to him? He was in pain. This wasn’t
emotional upset, the kid was in genuine physical pain.

“Hey, Kid... do you need doctor... doctor...” Language
barrier was one thing, but Boy looked harder to reach than that. It was the
first time Paul had looked at his face close up and he was struck by the same
thought he’d had the first time he’d seen him; this child was autistic or had
some mental impairment.

“Lasa-ma in pace,” Boy said. As he spoke he gripped
his stomach tighter as though trying to stem the bleeding from an invisible
stab wound. His face screwed in a tight grimace; the pain he felt was
undeniable.

“Are you... You is OK?” Paul tried logically to think
of what to say, some universal language. Under normal conditions he would help
the kid walk out of here, bring him outside, sit him down, call an ambulance.
You don’t leave kids in bins in pain. What if he was in too much pain to move?
What if he died here? What if they found his frozen snow covered body here in
the morning? How could he explain to people that he could have helped but
didn’t?

“Hospital?” Paul hoped the Romanian word was similar.
“Hospital... Doctor... Ambulance?”

“Du te dracu, lasa-ma in pace.”

The kid could speak, but what he was saying didn’t
sound friendly.

“Du te dracu. Du te dracu,” he spat. Each time he said
it made it sound more like he was saying ‘Fuck off!’

“I don’t understand... Do you need help? Hospital?”

“Du te dracu!” he yelled, drooling spittle on to his
coat. As he said it he slid down the wall to a crouch, tipping his head back
and gripping his stomach for dear life. Tears cut rivers into his cheeks,
washing some of the dirt from his skin.

Whatever ‘du te dracu’ meant was of little
consequence. The intention was clear. The Boy didn’t want help. Did he not
realise how bad his situation was? Fucking ungrateful little shit. Paul was
risking a confrontation with Nealla or Big Man. He was showing compassion
knowing full well that if either of the kid’s compatriots arrived they would
show nothing but threats and violence. Paul wanted to tell Boy that, he wanted
him to know that he was putting himself at risk in order to offer help. He
wanted Boy to acknowledge that he was trying. But he wasn’t acknowledging it
because he was a retarded little cunt.

“Du te dracu, lasa-ma in pace.”

And now the little shit had the audacity to say ‘Fuck
off’ in a foreign language?

Rage built. Fierce, swelling. Just kick the little
cunt in his head. Smash the sole of your foot against his face and break his
skull off the wall.

Then he thought of Nealla and Big Man. The kid would
speak. They would listen. they would come and find him. Better to leave the kid
here and let him freeze to death.

Paul walked backwards, blowing the air from his lungs
between clenched teeth. When Boy was out of sight he turned and walked away,
hands in pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. For a little while he was
angry and raging, arguing in his head, wanting to go back and smash the living
fuck out of that child. Over a few minutes he calmed and allowed his anger to evaporate,
allowing himself to drift back to the state of neutrality he had been in. He
thought about that kid, thought about how retarded he was. Autism or something.
Definitely not right. He was in pain too. Perhaps he was homeless. Perhaps he
was feral, living like an animal. Perhaps he’d eaten something from the bins
that had poisoned him. He was definitely injured or in pain and he was
definitely mentally vacant.

Paul suddenly stopped walking as the situation
replayed in his head as a presentation to his more compassionate personality.
It jolted him like an electric shock.

“My God... I wanted to kick an injured autistic child
in the face!”

----- X -----

It
was dark outside. The windows of the lounge were double paned which silenced
the barking dogs that were all too audible from the kitchen; here it was
peaceful. He was sitting comfortably, laid back in the chair with one leg
crossing the other to hold the notepad. The candles were lit and the lights
were out. The wall had long since dissolved into pictures of imagination, a
private cinema screen for an audience of one. Several movies had already played
but the one unfolding seemed to hold the promise of eroticism. He was looking
at a log cabin tucked away deep in the forests. There was a man with a beard,
wearing traditional Romanian clothing of a white smock covered by an
embroidered black waistcoat. He was using an axe to chop pieces of firewood.
The man was on one side of the building, whilst around the other side was a
woman preparing vegetables for cooking. The woman was in a similar smock but it
was tight fitting against an ample bosom. She didn’t look like the traditional
wife, instead she had a sexy fairytale quality, like seeing a soft porn actress
dressed as Snow White or some other adult play fantasy. Long flowing black
hair. She was sitting on a little stool with her legs apart, her skirt hitched
all the way above the knee to show some inner thigh. This woman need to be
ripped out of that outfit. It was going to happen.

Stalking its way through the forest, was a marble
skinned naked man. Paul walked with the vampire, sometimes standing behind to
look over its shoulder, sometimes looking through its eyes to see what it could
see.

The woman.

Paul watched her with a sense that this was the onset
of an erotic fantasy. She was ripe, with heavy swollen breasts, voluptuous,
wide hips with nice legs. He licked his lips feeling his heart flutter at the
thought of what he could do to her.

He watched her through foliage. The forest was thick
with fresh green leaves and the smell of woodland was uncommonly clear in his
nostrils.

Alina.

The woman was called Alina. From nowhere the name came
to him along with the sensation that he knew her, or rather the vampire had
known her. He’d seen her before, he’d watched her, he’d grown up with her and
spent his whole childhood watching her. She was older, slightly. She had always
used her age advantage in condescension and put down. She was the teenaged girl
who treated the skinny young boy with derision, presenting herself as a woman
to make him feel like a little boy. Alina, definitely Alina. He had known this
girl. A powerful memory came of him as a boy, swimming in a river whilst Alina
walked past with girlfriends. They wore bikini tops to show off freshly grown
breasts and spoke a few words to laugh at his thin little chest with ribs
showing through skin. Deliberate and calculated humiliation. She was horrible,
flaunting herself, parading as the queen bee and treating him with derision.

It would be different now. She’d hurt a boy who had
never forgotten. She had grown up and filled out, a trophy wife for the bearded
man chopping wood. Meanwhile, he had grown into a monster.

It would be very different this time.

Sitting in the living room chair, Paul scribbled notes
as fast as they came to him. His imagination normally outpaced his writing but
this encounter was going crazy fast. Details to everything, super-precise
memories. This vampire was a person, a living breathing entity that he was
practically experiencing from the inside out. Never had his creative thinking
moved with such fluidity or such realism. It wasn’t even like imagining, more
like he was in the moment, living it all.

The woman adjusted her sitting position on the stool,
hitching up her dress further to reveal a little more inner thigh to each leg.
No proper woman would sit like that. No decent woman would tease like that.

I see you.

Alina.

The vampire didn’t have cognizant thoughts to be read
but Paul was so deep inside its psyche he could practically feel the bond of
their empathic link as though they were two magnets desperate to clamp
together. This woman, Alina, had hurt the vampire when they were children. She
had caused pain and distress beyond compare. She’d forgotten her torment with
casual ease and grown up, but that little boy had never forgotten it. He had
stewed and twisted and cried himself to sleep from boy to adulthood. The pain
was so deep he would never rest until she knew just how fiercely he despised
her.

And there she was, sitting blanching vegetables.
Carrots and potatoes. The only sound was the infrequent chopping of wood from
the other side of the home.

She stood and walked around the cabin, out of view.
Somehow Paul knew she would return in a few seconds but without being able to
control it, his body was moving from cover and crossing to the cabin.

“This is wrong, she’s coming back.”

It was like he was watching a movie and now, halfway
through the picture, he realised he’d seen it before. Paul knew Alina was
coming back but the vampire didn’t.

“Hide. Get out of there. This ends in tears.”

This ends in tears.

It did. He knew it did. He didn’t know why, nor did he
know how he knew with such certainty but he knew, he really knew. This wasn’t a
lucid dream, this wasn’t imagination at play, it was a story written elsewhere
that he was discovering. The vampire was going to go for the woman, driven by
lust and desire, but he would pay a price for it.

“Don’t do it. Leave, leave now.”

The woman was suddenly back in the scene, frozen in
place staring him straight in the eyes. Chopped firewood was collected in her
arms. As she made eye contact Paul could see that she recognised him; rather,
she recognised the vampire. She knew exactly who he was and she hated him, but
in that instant he hated her more. He hated her with a ferocity that was beyond
madness.

The tip of Paul’s pen jarred with jagged and horrible
movements. He wanted to kill this woman with such crushing hatred that his pen
scratched the paper under the pressure of his handwriting. Oh God, he wanted to
kill this woman so much his heart was almost arresting from the tight squeeze
in his chest. His teeth were almost at shattering pressure they were clenched
so tightly, his knuckles pressed white through the skin of his angry fists.