Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (18 page)

In slow motion, the firewood fell to the ground,
tumbling end over end as the sticks dropped to the floor. he saw them hit the
earth, scattering, some bouncing, but there was no sound.

He was gone.

The vampire was gone.

The action switched to the other side of the cabin and
became more of a movie. The man stopped swinging his axe as he heard either the
sound of firewood being dropped or an invisible scream or commotion from the
other side of the cabin. Something spooked him, alerted him, and he came
running with his axe.

This ends in tears.

It wasn’t an imagined story, this had really
happened... and it ends in tears.

The bearded man made it to the other side of the cabin
but there was nobody there. Alina and the vampire were gone. The dropped
firewood was there, the peeled vegetables, the stool she had sat upon. He
looked inside the cabin briefly, he drew a deep breath and bellowed out what
Paul assumed was the name of the woman.

“She’s gone,” Paul said contentedly. “You’re too late,
you missed her. She’s gone.”

The man looked out into the forest as the camera that
was the eye of Paul’s mind drifted high into those trees and away across an
almost endless vista of summertime foliage and lush wooded landscape.

The forest. A small clearing. Sunlight streamed
through gaps in the leaves. It must be late afternoon seeing as the light had
honeyed into a golden hue. Shadows looked longer.

The woman came crashing backwards, her body slammed
into a tree throwing her head back with the force. There was a cracking sound,
perhaps a few ribs breaking under the impact. She didn’t scream or cry out as
there was no breath left in her lungs. As she tried to inhale the vampire
slammed a fist into her stomach like it was the hammer of God. Blood spat from
her mouth as that tiny bit of air inside her was forced out under pressure. The
blood speckled the vampire as tiny crimson droplets on its pure white chest. It
changed its stance ahead of her as she inhaled as much as she could, a huge
gasp of air on which to try and stay alive as it continued the attack. Its next
volley came from a twist of the torso done as fast as a mousetrap. It spun, an
arm outstretched to smash its fist against her ear. Another twist backwards
chopping its hand into the side of her neck.

Paul watched his imagination run riot under the
dichotomy of a painful choice. He wanted her dead and watching the vampire
attack filled him with salacious enjoyment. At the same moment he knew time was
running out for the vampire. This ends in tears. This story has an ending worth
avoiding.

The vampire grabbed Alina’s smock and lifted her with
a single arm before punching her against the tree as though she were no heavier
than a baby. It spun around throwing her away and this time it ripped her smock
to expose her breasts.

Paul leaned forward as his pen scribbled the scene in
the notebook and the wall of the room played the unfolding cinemascape.

The woman landed heavily on her back and whined a
painful scream. Heavy breasts exposed, blood running from her mouth.

“Fuck that bitch,” Paul said with a grin. “Kill her.
Kill her quick and get out of there.”

There was a pressure building in his chest, an anxiety
that rushed down his arm and poured out through his handwriting. It was too
tempting, too enjoyable. Alina was broken, her exposed breasts juddering on her
chest as she gasped in breaths of air. Her white dress made dirty and pulled up
to the waist to expose long beautiful legs.

She made a sudden movement, rolling to her side
quickly. She had her wits about her; she knew she was in trouble, she knew she
had to get away or else she’d die. She was on all fours, trying to stand but
the vampire came in like lightening. It kicked her so hard in the flank she
literally lifted off the floor completely and turned in the air before crashing
down on her back again.

“Get out of there. End it now. Leave. Kill her and
leave, for God’s sake...”

The vampire ignored the pleadings. It stood beside her
looking down with lifeless glassy eyes. That last blow had killed any thought
she had of escape and her face held a look of resignation. She wouldn’t try to
get up again.

“Kill her,” Paul whispered to the vampire. “Kill her
for being the dirty little whore that she is.”

Then Paul saw the vampire from the woman’s point of
view. Lying on her back she was staring up at this naked man. His legs were
powerful and muscular, his chest and arms carved from stone. His exposed
genitals were a symbol of his masculinity rather than anything sexual, but the
scene had a sexual element. The broken woman, laid prone, exposed, with the
powerful man standing over her victorious. The worst excesses of male ego writ
large.

“You should fuck her,” he said to the vampire. “I know
that’s not what you do, but you should, you should fuck her and strangle her
and kill her and... OH FUCK!”

The axe smashed into the vampire’s back dropping him
in an instant. The bearded man was there, somehow he’d found them and had
attacked by stealth.

In the split second before it happened Paul knew this
was how it had really been. This wasn’t imagination. This had really happened,
this was a true story that was replaying in his mind. He didn’t know how he
could know that, but somehow it seemed more powerfully real than any
imagination he had ever experienced in his entire life.

Paul felt he was living as the vampire. Everything was
going wrong. The picture was wrong, the emotion was wrong. It was
uncomfortable. He felt a physical pain in his own back, sympathetic to the
vampire that he knew had to be psychosomatic.

Despite the jolt and the fade to black, the cinema
screen of his mind’s eye hadn’t finished playing.

The darkness faded to the forest at night. The woman
was staring at him. She was stood tall; Paul felt he was lower, perhaps
kneeling down. Everything was lit by a flame that cast dancing orange highlights.
Alina was clutching her ripped garments to keep her chest covered; everything
she wore was splattered with blood and her face was disfigured by swelling, her
left eye puffed closed. The bearded man was standing next to her, holding his
axe. They were both looking at him, just staring. He couldn’t see the flame
that was burning, it must be behind him, but he couldn’t see it or turn. Then
he realised he couldn’t move his arms.

“They’re tied. You’ve tied my hands?” Paul whispered.

In psychosomatic sympathy his handwriting arm was
tightening, the muscles clenching up and refusing to move fluidly.

He was watching the couple from the vampire’s point of
view, looking out through its eyes, except at this moment they weren’t the
glassy, lifeless red eyes of a vampire, they were human eyes. He was human,
hurting, a deep axe wound to his shoulder blade had almost killed him. It was
just a matter of time before this ended. Paul felt as though his own body were
collapsing in on itself, muscles dying, unable to support their own weight. He
was living life as this man, and he was a man, not a vampire. He would be dead
soon, the axe wound to his back was non-survivable.

Alina looked down at him with her puffed eye, clinging
to her smock with her little fists. This wasn’t fair, she should be dead, not
him. She had won every victory in their lives, had caused every humiliation,
had made his life miserable with her taunts and her natural beauty. She had
controlled him by making him jealous and perpetually tormented him by never
letting that jealousy end. She had always won at every single thing and now it
was his turn to win by killing her... But it wouldn’t happen. This fucking
bitch, this disgusting cunt of a woman had reversed that victory and was going
to kill him instead.

The man with Alina pulled a small knife from his belt.
The blade was no longer than three inches but Paul could sense it was deadly.
The torment in this moment was heartbreakingly sour. She deserved to die, not
him.

“This is wrong,” Paul whispered. “Don’t kill me.”

The knife man walked straight to him, wrenched his
head back and dragged the blade across his throat. Paul felt it. A slice of ice
across the neck and a chilling sensation of absolute coldness rushing through
his veins.

“Not a vampire... You’re not killing a vampire.”

The cinema ended.

But it didn’t end entirely.

The pictures stopped and Paul was awakened from his
living dream to cognitively know he was sitting in his lounge, but somewhere
the imagination was still happening. He felt a dizziness as though his body was
falling forward. He sensed a thud as his imaginary body hit the floor despite
his real body sitting in an armchair. He could almost feel the cold earth
beneath him; he could smell the soil.

“That wasn’t a vampire you killed. It was a man. You
killed a living person, not a mythical monster.”

Then he felt as though he were slowly suffocating. It
took a few seconds to place the sensation. His hand wrote it in the notebook
first before he mentally caught up and understood what was happening. The note
read ‘buried alive’. It was true; despite slitting his throat, the man was not
dead, or rather, some part of him was still alive and he could feel it. He
could feel the dirt covering him yet couldn’t move a muscle to save himself.

“This is awful,” Paul murmured. Then he sucked air
through clenched teeth as his muscles involuntary went into spasm. It was the
cross, the big white cross. It was being hammered into the earth, into his
body, through his heart. He was alive and could feel it all. Murdered, buried
alive and bound to the earth.

“This is what people do in Romania,” Paul said in the
quietest whisper. There was anger in there too. “This is what people who
believe in vampires are capable of doing.”

----- X -----

There
was a bumping sound. It was the middle of the night and he should have been
asleep. The sound disturbed him, made him open his eyes and raise his head from
the pillow and listen. The second bump sent his heart into overdrive because it
came from within the apartment.

One of the surprising things to the block was how
little noise there was from other residents, they never made a peep. He heard
the dogs outside from the kitchen, he heard the cockerel crowing but he
never...

Bump.

There it was again. A dull thud and a sensation of
vibration through the wall. Logic was screaming that it couldn’t be inside the
apartment, that couldn’t be possible, could it? Hyperactive agency detection;
in darkness, you’ll always mistake a fold in the curtains for a burglar, but
you’ll never mistake a burglar for a fold in the curtains. He got out of bed
and stood still. It was dark. He was scared.

“Your mind is playing tricks.” The words should have
been a whisper, an inner monologue breathed rather than spoken but he was so
frightened the words squeaked like a mouse.

He was naked, he needed some clothing. His hand fished
around the pile of clothes on the floor to find some shorts. His eyes remained
fixed on the door as he pulled on some underwear, then he rested his back
against the cold wall to pry the bedroom door open just an inch. It had to have
been outside. The front door was solid and he was on the sixth floor so nobody
could get into the apartment without performing the impossible of scaling the
outside of the block.

Paul strained his hearing and held his breath, sensing
a presence rather than seeing or hearing it, feeling vibrations in the air of
something else that triggered paranoid senses. It felt as though there was
somebody else in the apartment who, in the same way as himself, had frozen in
place and was listening carefully. He couldn’t hear anymore due to his
overpowering heartbeat thrumming in his ears. His palms sweated and his muscles
locked with fear induced paralysis. Think logically. What could it be?
Intruders, burglars, Nealla and Big Man? It couldn’t be; it had to be something
benign. Had the noise come from the bathroom sharing the wall to his bedroom,
or the far empty room with the balcony? It didn’t seem like the bathroom but
his memory put two and two together and imagined the dry and lifeless hot tap.
The hot water was off, but perhaps the empty pipe had been struck elsewhere in
the building and the knock had reverberated through the plumbing.

He didn’t believe it. Like a child scared of the dark
his mind wandered to the primal rather than the logical. Whatever made the
sound, he was certain it was inside.

He eased the door open allowing the cold air and
enveloping dark of the apartment enter the bedroom. He could barely see a
thing. A few paces ahead of him was the kitchen, to his right was the bathroom
and the small room leading to the balcony.

It was in there.

He sensed it rather than detected.

Under that door was the faintest blue light,
moonlight, barely visible. Paul moved to the door and listened.

“Calm down,” he whispered almost entirely in his head
save for the little breath that came as he mouthed the words. “There’s nothing
to fear.” With that he slowly turned the handle and gently pushed the door
open.