Chapter 5 January

1:52 AM

They say misfortunes come in pairs. They usually come in avalanches, snowballing into a disaster that destroys everything along the way. I don’t know how it happened. Was it an act of revenge by someone who had been observing us for years? Was it faulty wiring? A candle left by someone by mistake? A forgotten cigarette smoldering nearby the flammable piece of fabric? A bolt of lightning?

We were woken up by flames. The heat was unbearable. I opened the window, threw the mattress on the ground and pushed Mathew from the window pane. I ran along corridors and hit the doors to wake everybody else up. Amelia was screaming. Nick tried to collect everything precious from his room but it was of no use. Flames were spreading in galloping pace. Elizabeth tried to use buckets of water to extinguish the fire. Phillip made us all ran outside and leave everything behind. Bob, Rob, and Kit were swearing, as they store a lot of banknotes in many places all over the asylum and these were now doomed to be lost.

We were in our nightgowns watching the asylum burn. Its two-hundred-year-old walls were flooding in flames. Glass windows were breaking apart. We watched our priceless collection of paintings, furniture, photographs, and memories disappear among the flames like snowflakes in the heat. We stood dumbfounded. We were devastated. All proofs of our existence were turned into ash.

In the morning, we were looking at the losses. The asylum was uninhabitable. Among the burned items we found some jewelry and silver and gold coins. Everything else was in the black color of coal. We lost our identity.

I didn’t see tears in my family’s eyes. I saw their pain, numbness, and shock. I saw their uncertainty.

‘What are we going to do now?’ Elizabeth was shaking.

‘This is the end.’, Phillip lost all his belief in good. He sat on the ground and hid his face in his hands.

‘Why don’t you rent a flat?’ Mathew suggested. I knew his leg was broken after falling from the first floor. There was a grimace of pain on his face, he clang to his calf as if he was afraid of losing it.

We all looked at him.

‘We don’t have money.’ I tried to explain.

‘Don’t you all work?’

We looked at him with questioning stares.

‘You all work somewhere, right? You get your money transferred to bank accounts. You probably can afford to rent a flat.’

We slowly started understanding what he was saying. We used only money which Christopher had given us from his pirates’ deals and mysterious businesses. We used work as an excuse to mingle with people and have access to their blood. We forgot that we were actually paid for what we do.

In the library, I managed to find my employment contract with the Xerox of my ID, which got lost in the fire. I went to the bank to withdraw some cash. I have never used it, I didn’t need to.

‘You have acquired some substantial earnings,’ the woman at the cash desk announced. I felt relief.

I rented a flat. It wasn’t furnished but it was spacious enough to guarantee all of us a room. Rob, Bob, and Kit moved to their women. They pushed their relationships to the next level, even though for years they have been avoiding settling down. Me, Amelie, Elizabeth, Phillip, Nick, and Mathew went to the nearest furniture store and bought whatever we needed to have. Furniture also changed over the years. It got less ornamental. It was square, practical, and shiny. I was stiff the first night I slept on a modern bed instead of my usual two-hundred-year-old bed from the asylum. Everything smelled differently. We sat in our compact kitchen like the Addams family deprived of their home. We realized that a big part of our lives was lost indefinitely. Something was about to change. We discovered that we couldn’t stay in our old ways, we needed to interact with people.

Our newly acquired location brought us some new challenges. We moved away from our places of work and needed to use the public transport around the city. Phillip discovered his own bank account and for his accumulated doctor’s earnings bought himself a car, which he used to pick Elizabeth to work and Nick and Mathew to school. They picked me up a couple of stops and then I used the tram to get to my library. The biggest problem was with Amelie. For centuries, she has been hunting in the proximity of our asylum and the change of place made her more than confused. She didn’t buy the public transport ticket and was stopped by various ticket collectors, given the fine and forced to leave the means of transportation. Soon, she started defending herself against them. In the metro, when they asked her about the ticket, she pushed them and, uncontrollably, run into the tunnel to witness certain death. Of course, being run over by the metro train didn’t do to her any harm, but we were looking for her for hours in the complex labyrinth of stations and corridors. I had to sew a plastic metro card to her coat with the information about her disease and our address.

‘What has she done now?’ I asked, opening the front door to the flat, seeing Amelie in the company of two police officers. I was hoping that she didn’t kill anyone in front of them, but fed in a discreet place and didn’t leave traces.

‘She attacked the ticket inspector.’

‘She has a ticket. It’s valid for a year.’ I pointed at the plastic card sewn behind a transparent piece of foil.

‘That doesn’t mean that she can attack the man. She started beating him with the bag. He lost consciousness. He was taken to the hospital.’

‘Maybe he had said something unpleasant to her. Men these days are rude.’

‘Do you let her run around like that without a guardian? She’s dangerous to herself and to others.’

I laughed in my thoughts. She has been deathly dangerous to others for centuries.

‘What should I do then? We all work, we cannot stay at home with her.’

‘Then put her in some institution.’

I looked at him in a condemning way. He understood instantly.

‘Then hire someone to take care of her when you are away. She’s disturbing the peace.’

We tried to look for a nurse who would take care of Amelie during our absence. We tried to be honest with them, but as soon as we mentioned that she is a vampire feeding on blood they all gave us strange looks and left without a response. They thought we were crazy. To some extent we were, but about our vampirism, we were deadly serious. The last woman to visit our casting for the nurse was more than a woman. She was a giant Russian immigrant. Almost two meters tall, stout, with ankles resembling tree branches, leaving us in astonishment at her appearance, she sat at our sofa.

‘Lubov,’ she introduced herself.

We told her about Amelie. About her forgetfulness, occasional aggression, the fact that she sometimes got lost in the city and she needed to be found. We explained that she lived mostly in the past and this past was distant.

‘She also speaks Russian, you would have no problems with communication.’, I said encouragingly, smiling friendly, preparing myself for the worst.

‘And one more thing. She’s a vampire.’

‘A vampire?’

‘Yes. She feeds on blood. She kills people and drinks their blood.’

‘Oh.’

Lubov wondered for a while.

‘That changes the conditions.’

We knew that was a problem and we disappointingly awaited for her declining the offer.

‘Listen. If she’s a vampire, you have to give me a pay-rise.’

We all looked surprised. So it was about the money.

‘I worked for the Russian mafia in the past. You never see the bodies as long as you are paid well.’

We established the price and Lubov came to us before eight in the morning and left at four in the afternoon. Amelie approached her suspiciously, but when she heard her strong Russian voice, she saw a chance to use her company to brush up on her Russian. They made a strange pair. Fragile and old Amelie. Strong and muscular Lubov. But since the day Lubov came into our house, not even one police officer knocked on our door, not even one ticket collector complained about Amelie’s behavior and we had the problem over with.

Soon after we met Lubov, we started experiencing problems with Elizabeth. She was so stressed due to the fire and the change of location that her symptoms of schizophrenia started getting stronger. She started aggressively talking to herself, convincing us that all of us are responsible for the fire and soon this flat will also get burnt. The clown came back from his foreign escapades and also supported her in her views. She was talking to him in our presence and she didn’t say anything that we would like to hear. She treated us as her biggest enemies.

‘I know you are going to burn us, Nina. I told everybody. You are going to set us on fire! And then you are going to escape with this boy. You are sick. You seduce children.’

She would talk to me like this for hours, occasionally changing her conversation for something less accusing. I have had enough. I called for the doctor Pavlovitch to arrange a meeting.

‘Unfortunately, doctor Pavlovitch died last month. We have a new doctor. Doctor Davidov, would you like to schedule a visit?’

I had no other choice. I forgot that doctor Pavlovitch was old. I forgot that he was human.

Doctor Davidov looked at Elizabeth over his papers and asked me to leave the room and had a conversation with her. Later, he invited me back to discuss Elizabeth’s situation.

‘I think these are still typical symptoms of schizophrenia, I checked the history of her disease. The clown, accusations. She thinks she’s in the center of attention. I suggest increasing the doses of her current medications. Some rest. She said that you moved. This is always a stress-causing factor. And one more thing. She mentioned that she is a vampire and she feeds on blood. Another obvious delusion. But does she bite? Does she physically try to abuse you?’

‘When she feeds on blood, she has to. This is the only way she can open the veins. She can use the sharp tool if she’s desperate...’

He looked at me and laughed.

‘I see you have a sense of humor.’

I didn’t know how to tell doctor Davidov that Elizabeth was a genuine vampire, but I decided to do this later. I took the prescriptions for drugs and brought Elizabeth home.

‘See, I told you that there’s nothing wrong with me. The doctor said that I’m healthy. And he agreed that it was you who burnt the asylum. And that you’re going to set us on fire again.’

I stopped listening to Elizabeth at that time. The clown followed us on our way to the flat, apparently biting my feet which made Elizabeth laugh. At least hallucinations couldn’t cause you pain.