Bad Blood: May 2019

Chapter 4 December

7:46 AM

One day, I was sitting behind my desk, busy in my thoughts, cataloging books, checking orders from bookstores, when a pile of thick volumes landed in front of me with a bang. I raised my eyes.

‘Is it all that you have?’ I heard a boy’s voice.

I saw the titles so familiar to me, The Treatment of Mental Diseases, Postnatal Depression, Psychiatry: The Introductory Course.

‘Any problems?’ I asked looking at the boy over the books.

‘Nah, I’m writing a school project. My grandfather died from depression. He killed himself when I was a little boy. I got interested in the subject and wanted to explore more.’

I don’t know why but I felt a sense of duty. I took him to less attended bookshelves to show him more than could be found on the catalog. I prolonged his card’s validity, I extended his limits of books borrowing. I noticed that he wasn’t much of a reader. For the next couple of days, he returned to learn more. I helped him. I helped Mathew Hugh in his school project. I checked his library card many times. I remembered his name.

I told him about these horrific methods they used on us. I told him about lobotomy and metal sticks stuck into our brains through the eye hole. I told him that some of us were turned into vegetables. I told him about cold showers, beating, closing in coffin-like cages. I explained how mentally ill children were deprived of their teeth when they bit another child. I described how easily you could be killed by another patient and gave examples of instances when your body could be discovered days after your death due to mental hospital’s overcrowding and the lack of staff. I told him about belts that fastened us to the bed, about straight jackets which deprived us of our dignity. I told him about hysteria in unmarried women and nuns treated with mysteriously sounding hysterical paroxysm, while doctors were touching their sexual organs to make them achieve orgasm and calm them down. I told him about the trepanning of the skull, drilling holes in the bone to release demons of the soul. I told him about the disastrous conditions of institutions, I showed him pictures of patients sitting on the floor, dirty, covered in their own excrement. I told him how we were scared and how inhumanely we were treated by others.

‘You know so much.’ he was listening to me with attention, ‘As if you had been there and seen it all.’

I smiled. I was there. I saw things which not all were willing to see.

‘And now?’

‘Now? You’re mostly on drugs. Aripiprazole, Asenapine, Brexpiprazole, Clozapine, Prozac, Paxil, Lexapro, and many more. Of course, there are side effects. There are always side effects, unwanted symptoms, numbness, sleepiness, anxiety. There are alternative methods too. There’s meditation, rest, avoiding stress. Even simple holding of the thumb can help you with an anxiety attack.’

I told him everything I knew. I showed him pictures.

He came back a week later with a box of chocolates to thank me for help and boasted about being praised by his teacher. I didn’t know back then that I would miss his absence, that I would look for him intuitively among the bookshelves.

A month later, on my way home, I was passing the school’s yard and saw him. He was playing basketball with his mates. He was in shorts and a sleeveless shirt. I could see his muscles and hairy armpits. I watched him move.

He ran to me to say hello.

‘So this is your school.’

‘Yep. It’s not so bad. I don’t mind coming here.’

‘And how old are you?’

‘Fifteen.’

Fifteen was a little bit more than a child, even though he started resembling a grown man. Fifteen-year-old boys helped their fathers on the farm. Fifteen-year-old soldiers died on the battlefields. Fifteen-year-old girls were married off to older men for dowry money.

‘I’m thirty-three.’ I lied. I told him about the age of my transformation.

He smiled at me.

A week later, he came into the library with an excuse to borrow a book. I knew he wasn’t so much into books, he preferred sports. But he wanted me to explain to him everything that he should know about authors and advice him the best reads. I took him to the classics division. Funny enough, a lot of these books I read when they were published fresh from the publishing house, their authors still alive. I told him about Jane Austen, Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Prus. I told him stories in sweet summaries of people’s fates, mistakes, passions, and sins. He started coming for more. I saw him twice a week. We talked about books. Then we started talking about films. I told him about the first cinematic productions, about the lack of voice and subtitles, about actors of previous decades. He smiled when he listened to me. He touched my hand when I was handing him the history of the movies.

Sometime later, he said that I was beautiful. I saw how he was looking at me, probably in the same way as Nick stared at his blond school teacher, prepared only for her classes, ignoring the rest of his schedule. I didn’t know what Mathew watched in his spare time. I only hoped these were not the same things Nick watched behind his closed doors.

A week later, his parents came to the library with threats.

‘This is sick! You are an adult woman. You’re in your thirties. Our boy is only fifteen. He talks only about you. This has to stop.’

I didn’t say a word. Not only was I way over thirty, but I was feeding on blood and from the start, it was all immoral. I was a fallen woman. Twice-widowed, having more sins on my conscience than all of them in their short lives were about to commit. They took matters into their hands. They decided to move to another city, Matthew changed schools. I missed his smile and the way he was looking at me. I woke up in the middle of the night desperately looking for someone lying next to me. Just to touch, just to hold on to. I knew it was personal. I felt that something was growing. A feeling.

Two weeks later, I saw him waiting for me at the entrance of the library.

‘I ran away. I have nowhere else to go.’

I took him to the asylum. When we were entering its gates my family didn’t say a word. I asked them not to feed on him. They sensed that this was serious.

‘There’s one more thing you need to know. I am a vampire.’

‘Like this shiny guy from Twilight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like in this animated film Hotel Transylvania?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like Dracula?’

‘Less spectacular. But yes.’

‘Cool.’

This is how my relationship with Mathew started. I took care of a fifteen-year-old boy. I ended up with a potential husband number three.

Chapter 3 November

2:45 AM

My first husband was Christopher’s close friend, a rich aristocrat with his own palace, suitable income, servants, horses, and carriages. He could have chosen any girl in the neighborhood, but instead, he chose me. We discouraged him, told him about my condition, explained our sins. But he fell head over heels in love. He gave me jewels, he made sure that servants did everything for me. I didn’t have to do anything apart from hunting. Some days I lived in his palace, others I spent in our asylum. I needed the company of my old friends, I needed to be understood. Henry didn’t understand my depression, he also didn’t understand my thirst for blood. But we loved each other. Childless, surrounded by goods. He visited me every night that I slept in his house, blew up the candle and made love to me. Shyly and hectically. These days women didn’t talk about their own desires and needs. They remained quiet or were treated for hysteria if they did otherwise. I liked the nights with Henry. They were monotonous but pleasant, warm, and fond. I knew my duty as a wife. I didn’t have anything to complain about. He didn’t beat me. He didn’t spend money on lovers. He was good to me, even though I saw this disappointment in his eyes. I knew that to some extent he regretted marrying an eternal beauty who was useless as a mother and a housewife. Who disappeared for months due to mood swings or vanished at night thanks to an intense and unappeasable hunger for blood. He never asked me who I had killed. I knew that he pushed these thoughts away.

I waited for decades until I met my second husband. These were different times. It was a war. Planes were dropping bombs, millions died in trenches, people were gassed. We didn’t know what hunger meant at that time. I was working at the chapel converted into a hospital. I took a cigarette break and inhaled the smoke to rest from the view of wounds, broken bones and disfigured faces. He sat next to me, in his pilot’s uniform. We talked for a while. He promised to marry me if he survived the war. We laughed as at that time it all sounded like a joke. But he managed to survive. He found me, came with a bouquet of flowers and took my breath away. No one made love to me as Teddy did. He was big and muscular. His penis made me scream from ecstasy. He was starved for a woman and I was widowed for too long. Maybe he gained experience in all these military brothels with countless prostitutes, I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to know. We didn’t talk about the past, who we were with before we met each other. We focused on the enthusiasm of the post-war years. He was surprised that I had jewelry stored for thin years. We managed to build a house. Teddy wanted to have a big family so we took care of orphans, sheltered his cousins and children from the nearby villages. I told him that during the war I lost the ability to give birth. I made some silly excuse about a tram accident. I presented him with the scar. The dead cannot bring life to this world. They can only bring another undead. He never learned that I was a vampire. I think it would be too much for him to accept after the horrors of war. He would wake up at night crying, thinking that there was another explosion or one of his friends was shot. It occurred even years after the conflict had finished. I couldn’t do that to him. I asked everybody from the asylum to be discreet.

‘This is amazing,’ he noticed after years we spent together, ‘You look exactly the same as on the day that I met you. It’s unbelievable. You haven’t aged a bit.’

I laughed that these were good genes, but when he was really old, I bet he had suspicions. He was sick. He died of lung cancer. They didn’t tell us those days that smoking can cause death. We used to smoke like dragons. For me, it made no difference. Teddy died thin as a piece of paper, emaciated after the battle with the monster. I cried for weeks. I missed his smile and his cheerful attitude. I missed our nights together, the forceful intensity of his touch. We were wild back then. We had nothing to lose and the world just started getting back on its feet.

‘I don’t want to marry. I don’t understand why you chose protection over your independence. You don’t need this money, Christopher gives us a lot. We could just as well start a business of our own and be independent.’ Elizabeth was a young suffragette. She hated the idea of women staying at home and having no power over finances, politics, and their lives.

Elizabeth didn’t understand me. She didn’t share my passion for a man, this bond that was created between two people of different sex. Physical attraction and fulfillment, two elements of the same puzzle. I loved my husbands. I loved them all. I watched them age, wrinkle and weaken. I witnessed their life crisis, their regrets, mistakes, fears, collapses. I loved being their woman. I was with them at the moment of their death. I allowed them to pass away quietly, I held their hand, giving them the comfort of my presence. It wasn’t about power, income, or the division of roles. I spent lifetimes with my men. I offered them my loyalty, fidelity, and love. I was with them for better and for worse. They were the husbands of their epochs, their times. They were the best you could find back then. And I tried to be the best to them as I only could.

Only I did marry. We noticed early on that Elizabeth had no interest in men. Even when she hunted she chose the blood of young girls. Her eyes shined whenever she saw a young beautiful virgin. She was laughing to herself as if she saw a prize. We didn’t understand it at first. We all thought that it was just a phase, that she would grow out of it. But she always remained in her mid-twenties and always stayed attracted to women. We had dozens visiting her in her rooms, close friends, best friends forever. After some jealous arguments coming from behind the closed doors, we knew that these friendships were covers of something deeper. Elizabeth was difficult. Apart from being a vampire, she had returning bouts of schizophrenia. She woke us in the middle of the night screaming that the asylum was going to be raided, that they were going to kill us. She suspected Nick of stealing her things, Christopher of trying to sell her in her sleep to pirates, me of abandoning her forever for a man, Amelie of sucking the blood out of her, Phillip of revealing to everybody that she was a vampire and making her lose her job. She used our real character traits and manipulated them into her own plots. We saw that she was afraid. Sometimes she was sitting with us in the living room and used her hand to make something go away.

‘Just go!’, she shouted angrily.

‘What do you want to go away?’

‘A clown! It’s getting on my nerves.’

We wondered what kind of clown was following her everywhere, biting her ankles, making her fall from the stairs. Then one day, when we were watching the 90s adaptation of Stephen King’s IT, Elizabeth saw the clown and pointed at it.

‘It’s just like mine!’

We all looked at each other astonished.

‘And he’s with you all the time?’

‘More or less.’

‘Even when you are with your friends?’

We knew that some of them stayed for the night, occasionally leaving their underwear behind.

‘Then he plays on the carpet. He knows I’m busy.’

We felt sorry for her. We couldn’t imagine how it was to see this nasty creature at all times. On the other hand, the sight of us sucking blood from the still warm body wasn’t the most appealing either. We took her to a psychiatrist. We allowed for treatment. We found a trusted doctor who accepted our condition. He was fascinated with vampirism. He gave her medications, he also prescribed a big dose of antidepressants for me. Dr. Pavlovitch made miracles. The clown went on holiday. The fearful accusations were less frequent and intense. Even these girls that Elizabeth spent time with felt the difference and she was able to maintain longer and steadier relationships.

Nick stayed at an age when the boy’s interest in girls just starts developing but I could tell that he had his desires. Porn wasn’t enough.

‘I don’t understand his teachers’ complains,’ one of his teachers invited me to a teacher-parent meeting. ‘He always does his homework and makes other children listen whenever they are naughty. I can’t believe that he had been suspended. Are you his mother?’

‘Step-mother.’ I explained looking at a blond attractive woman in her thirties and thinking that the only reason Nick behaved nicely to her was the fact that he wanted to shag her in every single possible position that he had seen over the years, and possibly, the teacher-student fantasy now played the motivating part we hadn’t been able to achieve. Possibly, if we had invested in prostitutes, Nick might have completed a university degree. Our mistake.

The problem with Phillip is the fact that he is too honest. He will open too quickly to his potential date and he is devastated when she runs away after hearing that he is an over two-hundred-year-old vampire. I don’t know whether this or the fact that he is a workaholic obsessed with his job makes all the romance in his life impossible. He’s been burned many times. He prefers keeping himself to himself. He would never admit that he is lonely. He is occupied. But how much more can you achieve in the medical world? We all have our moments of weakness. We remained humans.

Rob, Bob, and Kit have their women. Their women usually work as prostitutes or some women of company. Do our boys mind? Do these women mind that their men kill for blood and make money in the shady funeral business? Do our boys mind that their women sleep with a dozen clients a day? As long as there is money at home, no one really cares. There are different kinds of jealousy. Some don’t mind sharing.

I was always somehow attracted to Christopher, objectively you could say that he is a handsome man. He doesn’t tell us anything about his love life. He’s discreet. For decades, we have seen him with luxury whores, Asian geishas, highly trained beauties who could seduce kings. But all this stopped one day, we have never learned why and how. They just stopped coming.

Amelie recalls her previous loves, gentlemen from her youth, admirers of her beauty. But in her state, you wouldn’t expect that she’s interested in love affairs. I wish she wouldn’t raise so many eyebrows strolling alone naked, as she forgot to dress that day. It’s difficult to explain to everybody the pains of Alzheimer. It’s hard to imagine that your memory is decimated with significant holes for which there’s no return.

I often wonder if it’s possible to forget everything. Can you forget your basic needs of eating, drinking, sleeping? Can you forget how to love?

Chapter 2 October

7:26 AM

Yes, we kill. We have lived with it for centuries. But don’t overestimate our guilt. We watch carefully what is going on around us. We travel to battlefields, wait to drain the dead. We are always there where there’s a bomb explosion, a plane catastrophe, a terrorist attack. We follow plaques, earthquakes, car crashes. We are always there just before death. We are always somewhere in between. You can be scared by the sight of our white fangs and the smell of freshly cut flowers, but it’s a better sight than the one of raw fear, pain, and grief. We tried to calculate your life. We decided to be merciful. We learned to make storage for thin years when no one seemed to die in big numbers. We constructed devices to suck the blood out of a living body within minutes before the final sleep. Phillip did this in his free time to make our meals as humane as possible. We are merciful. We have worked in hospices, hospitals, old peoples’ homes. We need to be close to humans. A single drop of blood can be given to us just by chance.

I, Nina, have worked in the library. It allows me to see people. It makes it possible for me to read them. Sense if they are sick, if their time is slowly coming to an end. Maybe one day, instead of a book, they will gain something more than a pleasant evening of reading. I will follow them: tired, deep in their thoughts, miserable. I know their sadness. Their unspeakable pain. Their lack of treatment. I know the history of their books’ subscription: Clinical Depression, How to Alleviate the Pain after Losing Someone You Love?, Five Simple Steps of Mood Improvement. I sense that they are lost. That the final step for them is a phone call to seek the last help, receive the studied whisper of consolation words, revelation, discouragement from what they are about to do. To express the unspeakable. These I take for myself. I want to give them the same sight that was given to me decades ago. The same peace. Security. Comfort. I’m in opposition to families, doctors, psychologists, therapists. But I’m there for those who lost this battle of life. Those who decided on a sweet taste of death.

Elizabeth works in a blood transfusion center. She drinks what is considered contaminated, sick, lost somewhere during veins bursting or left in plastic bags labeled the inadequate amount of liquid. She digests your venereal diseases, HIV infections, pregnancy results, leukemia surprises. She does medical tests, licking her fingers every time the blood drops somewhere around her. We decided that it’s the best job for her. She can see whatever she wants to see and she doesn’t raise suspicions. For eight hours, she’s closed in the lab, usually alone, fed, satisfied, adding her brick to the prosperity of those she’s used to killing.

In the nearby hospital, works Phillip, now as a surgeon. The view of blood inspires him. He’s quite a professional. He has years of experience. Nurses are amazed at his cutting technique, colleagues at his ability to conduct an open heart surgery without any sign of stress. His staff is astonished at how clean everything is after each procedure. No blood on the surgery table. No blood on the tools. Phillip has significant expertise both in dissecting the human bodies and saving blood. I would allow him to open my head while awake, take my brain away and put it back inside. He’s this level of trust.

Rob, Bob, and Kit work as rescue workers and ambulance drivers. They bring victims after accidents, they suck from open wounds. They have a deal with a few funeral houses, informing them who isn’t about to make it. It rarely depends on the seriousness of the accident. More often it depends on our boys’ hunger and the number of casualties. If there are only a few, none of the patients can survive the ride.

They remained petty criminals. They just increased their level of a felony. Funeral business brings good money and it’s quite secure. At the end of the day, you all are about to die.

Of course, it looks as if we have it all under control. But people don’t cooperate with you in the way you would like them to. Some suicidal ones at the last minute decide that they want to live. Some patients fight on the way to the hospital. Sometimes there’s a lack of blood. Not only for you who need it but also for us. We have emergency days too.

For instance, Kit is diabetic. When his sugar levels drop down he attacks the first overweight person he sees just to maintain his glucose. At times, he’s so desperate that he will force you to eat a chocolate bar before he sucks the life out of you. At least you won’t die hungry.

Amelie lives from day to night. Sometimes I find her in her sleeping gown, covered in blood, not having the faintest idea where she had been and who she had killed. I suspect the worst. I suspect children, young families, innocent and healthy. But we cannot close her at home. She’s still independent. She can take care of herself. Even though she rarely remembers anything, including our names. She sometimes calls me Elizabeth. Or Nadine. Sometimes she speaks to me in French, Russian, Italian or Spanish. Occasionally, she talks about the eighteenth century. She remembers more than we do. But she forgets to clean the drained body from the courtyard and we have to do this before we leave for work.

I wish that I could say something positive about Nick. That he remained our mascot, our little child, our joy and reflection of our positive traits. He remained eleven. He was in schools, we sent him to the best ones that were available. Boarding schools for boys, private schools for growing gentlemen. Christopher sponsored it all, saying that his father did it for him with no apparent outcome. Nick was thrown away from them all. Not for attention deficit disorder. Sure, even now it is a challenge in the upbringing. He was thrown away for alcohol abuse, degrading influence over his peers, skipping classes, participating in fights, teachers’ threats. He’s still at school. I sometimes see him in front of his computer. He watches clips of some guys setting the cat on fire or making explosions out of Mentos and Coca-Cola light, adding to this hip hop and rap music videos to which he sings in his premature voice. But he mainly watches porn. He doesn’t turn down the volume so we can hear all moans and screams coming from his room. We have learned to ignore them.

Sometimes an old homeless alcoholic comes to our place and asks about Nick. It’s usually his friend from some old school. One of the best ones who was a companion in his mischievous plans, suspended or expelled to the despair of his parents. They laugh and hang out for some time until the old friend dies or Nick mercifully drains his blood. He’s lucky when they are drunk. Nick can also have fun from the sucked amount of booze.

Finally, there’s Christopher. I don’t know what he does. Maybe I don’t want to know. He doesn’t ask us for blood, he spends some time with us and disappears for month or years on end. He comes back with money. Big money. He leaves gold, jewelry, stocks, and shares. We bet he has shares in all of the most significant companies that were started over the last two hundred years. He observed every kind of business idea put into practice. He personally knew the entrepreneurs, he suggested structural changes. He watched the biggest go bankrupt and the most unexpected blossom to success. Thanks to him, we own the best jewelry, clothes, gadgets. We have collections that would suit the greatest galleries and museums all over the world. We turned our asylum into our own museum of the passing time. We have original paintings by Manet, Van Gogh, Gaugin, Picasso. We keep them for sentimental reasons. The value of money is no value for us. We keep dresses of changing fashion, we maintain fabrics, laces, shoes. We play music at night amazed at how the piano concert can be watched online and arouse almost the same emotions as during the actual performance of Verdi, Chopin or Schumann, whom we saw with our own eyes when they were still alive. We store in our drawers century-old pictures of royal families and we still watch them, seeing the resemblance of grandchildren to their grandparents, treating their family history as our own. We remember Tsars, Queen Victoria, weddings, funerals, affairs, abdications. We recall colonies. The glory of Russia and France. The magnitude of the British Empire. The rise of Hitler. The first plane flight. The first walk on the Moon. The first atomic bomb. We remember all of it distinctly. The stepping stones. The fear and excitement of changes. These were our lives, lives prolonged endlessly through the consumption of death.

Sometimes we sit in our living room, surrounded by paintings, after a hard day at work, and we recall. Nick takes the stash of his favorite cards and sets them on the carpet. Elizabeth sits on one of the pillows with her knees under her chin. Phillip sits by the piano and plays. Over the years, he learned how to do this with the proficiency of a Chopin contest winner. Amelie tells us something about the French Revolution or the Polish Constitution. Rob, Bob, and Kit laugh at their own nasty jokes with a questionable sense of humor. We see the setting sun. Its rays never did us harm. We don’t sleep in coffins. We are immune to garlic. We used to work in military hospitals located in the churches, indifferent to the presence of crosses and figures of Saints. We wear silver necklaces and have a reflection. We don’t change into bats, wolves or rats. We cannot fly as a mist. For years, we have been searching for answers. We have looked for our background. We have read every book about vampires, saw every film, heard every story. In vain. Sometimes we all sit in front of a TV set to watch Coppola’s Dracula, Interview with a Vampire or Twilight. We appreciate that you care. That we exist in your mythology. That you accept us somehow, even though we have probably killed one of your beloved. Even though we would kill you without the slightest hesitation and cause you pain.

Chapter 1 September

4:21 AM

I always think about that day, that day in September, when leaves were slowly turning into yellow dry handkerchiefs and we were looking at the world from behind the bars. We were in an asylum. I was taken there by my father and his second wife. He, a widower, didn’t know what to do with an unmarried thirty-three-year-old woman who refused to eat, dress, and leave the bed. They sent me here, forced me into the gates of the asylum, abandoned me, allowed me to be labeled clinically depressed from day one.

I suppose I was melancholic. I was sad. I could cry for days for no reason. I felt this numbing pain at the back of my head every time the onset was about to start. And then my whole body hurt, every touch was like a burn, every laugh was an inner cry inside me. I wished I was dead. So they got rid of me, a burden difficult to deal with, a daughter with no wish to start a family and bring a decent fortune to them all. Back then, in the nineteenth century, it was difficult for a woman to live on her own. We were the property of our fathers, then husbands, with no rights to vote and very little to own. Of course, we weren’t dumb, we could manipulate our fathers and husbands, we could make our lives as comfortable as it was then possible, but many of us often fell victim of the world run by men. I didn’t live back then. I remember I was focused on my sadness and I didn’t see the changes of up-coming decades. That life wasn’t for me.

If my father had known what kind of treatment I would get in the asylum, he would have never thrown me there in the first place. He couldn’t have suspected it. None of us could. I couldn’t predict it back then. I was afraid of cold showers, electric shocks, lobotomy, straight jackets my entire life. I have never been afraid of death, my depression wanted me to die so badly that I wished I could help her achieve the aim.

But, instead, something else happened. I don’t know if they broke into the asylum or whether they entered it calmly and quietly. Maybe the front door was open, maybe someone invited them in. They ran into each and every room. They unleashed their deathly instincts. I remember a figure bending over me, white fangs shining in the moonlight, and these eyes, which saw my fear, my wish to end it all, and hesitated. I remember that sweet smell of freshly cut flowers. I remember the strength with which my body was held, an overwhelming force which I simply couldn’t resist. The pain was unbearable. I felt all blood sucked out of my body at once and I fainted, leaving all my worries behind. Finally, I died. I found my peace.

I woke up the next day to see the remains of that terrifying night. I left my chamber to see disfigured bodies on the floor and a pool of blood on the asylum’s corridors. I glimpsed at myself. My white sleeping gown was stained with blood. My long red curly hair was glued with blood to my breasts, neck, and head. But apart from the fact that I had a wound on my neck, I was feeling well. I regained my strength and I was able to walk. I saw more clearly, I heard more distinctly and my sense of smell improved.

The bodies were lying everywhere. No one moved. A dozen or so asylum workers lied in terrible poses on the floor, their dead eyes staring at something with unspeakable fear. I heard a cry coming from the chamber at the end of the corridor. I rushed there, my bare feet stomping on the bloody pools, meandering around stiff limbs and pieces of clothing. I almost slipped. I entered the room to see a crying woman sitting at the dressing table. Her white bed sheets reflected the massacre of the previous night. The girl was sobbing. She pulled away her short black hair and showed me her wound.

‘We have been changed!’

I touched the wound on my neck and I knew. Later that day, I learned that the girl whom I met was Elizabeth. She was eight years younger than me. Her parents left her in the asylum for she was seeing things and hearing voices. But that night she saw everything correctly. We were turned into vampires. And Elizabeth was to become a big part of my new, slightly special, family.

Among fifty-seven people, who were at that time in the asylum, only five of us were turned. The rest were drained. We found an old woman with dementia, a little boy who couldn’t stop talking, and a doctor, who remained in a state of shock for days after the raid.

‘I’m here just doing my practice. I haven’t even planned to become a psychiatrist. I wanted to be a surgeon...’, he was talking to himself as we were taking the bodies into a pit dug in the ground. They were beginning to rot.

‘Stop crying over a spilled milk, help us,’ I begged, pushing the body into the hole.

Even the old lady helped. The boy was running around, collecting from the floor the blood-stained clothes. We burned the bodies in the pit. We didn’t have another option. The stench was unbearable. We stayed in the asylum. We didn’t have another home. We cleaned the floors, we burned the bed sheets. We hoped that our family members would want to contact or visit us after some time, but they left us there forever. We lost touch with our old lives, we lost our relatives, friends, and memories of the previous selves.

And then, the change began getting noticeable. We started feeling hungry. We sensed that food was no longer for us. We knew that the salted meat, flour, and wine bottles kept in the pantry were going to be wasted. We realized that we had to kill to keep ourselves alive.

So we went, five of us, in search of blood. Me, Elizabeth, Nick (eleven-year-old boy), Philip (the doctor), and Amelie (the old lady who barely remembered her name). We were more terrified than the people we were going to deprive of life. But we did it. We killed with our new strength and appeased the thirst that for us was more than painful.

You get used to killing people. Phillip once laughed that it is similar to the section of the dead body. The first one is on the verge of trauma and disgust. The following ones don’t make such an impression. That was true for us all. We learned how to get by. We learned how to appease the thirst drinking the blood of those we killed. We learned how to cover traces, how to get rid of bodies, how to hunt in areas which wouldn’t raise suspicions and bring unwanted guests to our asylum. We turned this asylum into a dream villa of luxury and peace. We watched generations perish. We took advantage of political conflicts and wars. We survived.

Our diseases never abandoned us. Elizabeth kept hearing voices and seeing things which were not there. Amelie didn’t remember what happened the day before but she would recall events from previous decades, then centuries. Nick remained this crazy little child, who couldn’t focus on anything, and ran around as if he had the energy of a ticking bomb.

And then the sadness overwhelmed me. The depression didn’t want to forget about itself and the burden of distraught didn’t allow me to hunt.

I admit it. I tried to kill myself many times. I drowned myself with rocks in my pockets, I hanged myself on the velvet scarf that was given to me by my father. I jumped from the cliff. I cut my veins open in the bathtub. I took sleeping pills. But it appears that you cannot easily kill a vampire and the vampire cannot kill itself. I decided to starve myself, deprive myself of blood, but I only hibernated for a couple of months to wake up with an enormous thirst and run to kill a goat (the first thing that crossed my way) and sucked the life out of it within a minute. I was alive. As much as you can call it life. I was left with returning bouts of depression and a new family, whom I was supposed to know for centuries.

After decades of our peaceful existence in the gates of our institution, another raid happened. We were woken up by noises coming from the entrance door. We distinctly heard footsteps. I sensed the smell of freshly cut flowers.

They came again. There were four of them, three haggard looking fellows and one gentleman in his forties. Indefinitely in his forties.

‘Well, well, well, my friends, look here.’ he pointed at us, unsuspecting anything. We have never seen other representatives of our kind.

Apparently, they were also surprised to see vampires instead of people. Rob, Bob, and Kit had been turned in prison. They were petty criminals who robbed, stole, and wasted away the money in inns all over the country. They were positively surprised after one night, when the prison was raided, to gain a new life, immortality, and strength. Later, they stole money and jewelry from their victims as soon as they drained their blood. Christopher (the aristocrat) was different. He was a different kind of conman, he was a higher league. He traded with pirates, he smuggled goods, gambled away millions. It wasn’t the best time in his life when a change from human into a vampire happened. He was orphaned by his strict parents, he inherited his fortune. He didn’t have a family but he had a lot of women to accompany him. One night, his house was raided. The bodies of his ladies of company were lying motionless on the floor. He was changed. Christopher was lost indefinitely for humanity. He noticed wounds on his neck, for the first time in his life he felt a thirst for blood. Used to his new condition, while he was coming from a brothel, wasting his family’s fortune, he came across Rob, Bob and Kit. They wanted to drain him, but that was impossible. He showed them his fangs, they expressed fear and respect, seeing an aristocratic vampire of his class. Christopher kept them for company. He tempted them with golden coins and promises of female warm bodies. They stayed with him weighing pros and cons, while pros seemed to outweigh the cons. He offered them a better life.

‘Well, well, well,’ Christopher laughed again, ‘It seems that we have found home!’

They stayed with us, making us a family of nine. A family connected with a different kind of blood. Blood of the same guilt. The same death. Bad blood. We had been with each other for decades. We lived side by side, knowing each other’s flaws like old horses. We turned our asylum into a family home of strangers who became everyday companions.

I still think of these times, of how much has changed over the years. Of how our position changed. Us, women. Us, the sick. I look at our unchanged bodies and still admire these rustling leaves, which turn yellow behind the window of my room in September two hundred years later.

Chapter 4 December

Chapter 3 November

Chapter 2 October

Chapter 1 September

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