Chapter 8 April

9:46 AM

I remember the night I visited the asylum again. It remained a devastated ruin of our previous glory. There was nothing left except for metal chandeliers, bed frames, some door knobs and old medical equipment used in times we entered it for the first time. There was nothing which signified all these years. Nothing which would be a proof of these thousands of days we lived here and items we collected.

I remember myself walking along the black and burned corridor, then down the staircase. Suddenly, it struck me. I froze. In the dark, I saw a figure emerging from one room. I felt the time pause at its regular pace. My heart stopped. A black-coated creature paced before me in slow motion, making no sound. I smelled freshly-cut flowers. All these memories came back to me. I remembered that day. The day of my transformation.

I ran after it. I saw it disappear into the nearby forest. I needed to find it. Trees passed before my eyes, thorns wounded my legs and twigs bruised my face but I ran, no other thought occupied my mind, I had no other aim.

After hours, I reached the cemetery. It stood miles from our asylum but, as a vampire, I didn’t feel tired. The place consisted of old tombs stuck in cascades on the forest hill. I passed the graves. I watched the sculptures of angels, metal crosses, big family tombs, and lonely marble plates. I read the dates. The majority of them died in the nineteenth century. I found graves of my family members, whom I managed to forget. These were the times that would mean my departure. If I hadn’t been transformed, I would be lying somewhere among these people. My people. My times.

I saw the creature disappear into one family grave. I followed it. I walked inside. I felt the cold of the water embracing my feet. I decided to go further. I had the lighter in my pocket. I took a branch of wood, tore a piece of cloth from my T-shirt, sprinkled it with the perfume I had in my bag and lit it to make a torch. I was carrying it in front of me to see where I was about to go. I heard some whispers. I followed them, feeling the waters reach my waist. If I were a human, I would freeze to death. There was lifelessness inside. I was sure that all living forms disappeared in time, leaving nothing but bacteria.

The chamber of an enormous grave opened in front of me like gates to hell. They were there. Hundreds of them hung upside down like two-meter-long bats. They had no hair, their skin was of transparent color. They had pointed ears, flat noses, and black claws. Some of them opened their eyes and saw me. They became unmoved. They smelled me and they smelled one of their own. The smell of freshly cut flowers reached my nostrils with the intensity of washing detergent. I was in the cave of vampires.

I heard them talking to each other. I didn’t understand a word. They were speaking in some ancient language, which didn’t even sound like any of the languages I knew. They were hissing, moaning, and grunting.

‘What are you saying?’ I spoke, hearing my voice echoing in the cave.

They adjusted. They began speaking in my language.

‘We are older than time, Nina. We were here before Jesus Christ, Buddha, and Mahomet. We were here before the gods of Egipt, Greece, and Rome. We were here before you could write and form any civilization. We are older than you can imagine.’

I was looking at their mouths whispering the news for me too difficult to comprehend. They weren’t the legendary vampires I was always imagining or hoping to meet. They were gruesome. They were monsters hanging in the cave, waiting for the blood which didn’t allow them to disintegrate completely. I didn’t see them when they raided us two hundred years ago. I couldn’t have suspected that it was them who made us into who we were. They transformed us and killed everybody else.

Some of them climbed down from the walls and approached me to get a closer look. They weren’t afraid of the fire. They looked at me like a specimen in the zoo. They looked at me with their dark bottomless eyes, me: their long-forgotten child and creation.

‘We saved you, Nina, we saved you from the fate you were about to meet. We gave you eternal life. We gave you a drop of our time. These two hundred years are nothing for us. We were here from the beginning when the fate of humankind wasn’t yet that certain.’

There was something disgusting in them. In the way they spoke, licked their teeth with their tongues and exposed black mouths. They seemed to be possessed. No human behavior applied to them. Nothing in the way they moved or stared was similar to what I was used to seeing.

‘And what will be the future? What is the future for us?’

More of them descended the walls and surrounded me. They weren’t human. Their clothes were made thousands of years ago from different kinds of threads woven to last eras. Through the holes, I could see their bodies, devoid of any reproductive organs, melted into one transparent wrinkled sacks for bones, muscles, and black veins. They looked like Siamese cats except for their size and shape. They were only vacuums for blood. Nothing else.

‘You will turn into us. In time, you will forget how it is to be human. In time, you will forget about everything. Give yourself time.’

‘I don’t want to turn into you. I don’t want to become an organism feeding on blood and live in cages like a bat.’

‘Otherwise, you will die. This is the only way.’

‘Were it you who burnt the asylum?’

They hissed.

‘No, it was this other man, Christopher. The one who abandons you from time to time and returns with no wish to stay.’

‘Christopher?’, I was shocked, ‘Did he want to kill us?’

‘He knew he couldn’t kill you. You cannot be burned. He just wanted to destroy the asylum. We had a deal with him. He would destroy all proofs of your vampire lives and we would turn him back. He gave us all his money. He resigned from everything that was precious to him.’

‘Back into what?’

‘Back into a human. We have the power to transform and the power to turn this transformation backward. This is our gift. He did it all for a woman. He was overwhelmed by love. He went to some African village and fell in love with a black woman from the tribe. Poor as only the poorest can be. Imagine, two hundred years ago they would have been put to prison for any act of fondness. Two hundred years ago she could have been his slave. He amassed a fortune of billions. He could be considered the richest man in the world. And he left everything for a woman. His wealth, his status, and his eternity. He found us and begged us. We turned him into a human.’

I listened to it with a beating heart. Christopher was just like us. He was won by his human nature. He was taken over by feelings.

‘And what would it take for us to be turned into humans?’

‘For you?’

They whispered in their ancient incomprehensible language. Then they turned to me.

‘For you, it would be to lose the people you love. It’s the greatest sacrifice. For if you lose your beloved, you also lose a part of you.’

I couldn’t imagine losing Mathew. I couldn’t imagine allowing them to hurt any of the people we so deeply cared about.

I never forgot their faces, their bodies, and their teeth. Maybe our fate was to turn into monsters and end up in caves. To lose senses and memories of what it was like to be human. To turn into worms.

I cried that day from disillusionment. The senseless deaths we were contributing to for all these years, the thirst for blood. There was no higher aim to it, just the constant preservation of our digestive system. We were just a species which instinctively fed on other species like spiders on flies. With no chances of improvement. Ever since I took the life of my first victim, I tried to seek sense in it all. I tried to find the meaning. Now I knew that there was no meaning. It was their experiment and our pain. I felt like a child who stopped believing in Santa. I felt like a priest who stopped believing in God.

I bought a plane ticket. I traveled to Madagascar to find a small hut overlooking the ocean. Inside, there was nobody. I walked out to the beach. I saw him. In a white shirt and shorts, he was collecting shells spat by the waters under his feet. He waved to me. I waved back.

‘Hungry?’ he asked, looking me in the eyes.

‘No, I ate on the way here. One dying passenger and a sick boy in the hotel.’

He laughed. He laughed just like on the day we met.

‘Well, well, well.’ Christopher looked less pale and I noticed that he started growing older, ‘I already forgot this hunger. Now I’m only hungry for her.’

I saw her. She was a beauty. Her black skin shined in the sun. She was holding a little boy, both of them walking along the beach, collecting shells.

‘They told me about the fire. And your transformation.’

He smiled.

‘I’m sorry if I caused you pain. You see, Nina. I had access to the greatest possessions in the world, I was rich beyond my calculation. I could buy everything at any age we were blessed to see. I could buy any woman. I could kill any woman and drain her blood. I always thought it silly, Nina. Your life with men. You could have achieved so much, you could have had anyone you wanted. And you devoted lifetime for these men. I wasted my hundreds of years and billions in banknotes and coins. I did it even before I was a vampire. I was lonely and lost. I couldn’t stand the pressure that my father instilled in me when I was young. I lived for this pressure. I made companies grow and helped people get rich. I could go to Mars and come back, taking into account my resources and the fact that I wasn’t going to die.’

‘So what happened?’

‘I fell in love. It struck me harder than I thought it would. I got lost in my aims. I saw no sense. I stopped racing with myself.’

I was looking at her closely. She had this womanly charm very few had in their aura. She was a natural, curvy, African princess that would have stolen her prince even those two hundred years ago.

‘It’s not my son. He was with her when I met her. I try to be to him a better father than my father was to me.’

She approached us and kissed him on the cheeks.

‘He gave up so much for so little,’ she said in a low sensual voice, exposing her accent.

I knew that he gave up nothing for everything. These years with us and these years of money-making ventures were like a sack without a bottom. Never enough. Now he had a very small sack, but there was no need to fill the bottom. Christopher found his peace.