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?