Nocturnal

by David Paul

  The assault on David has not ended, and the demon has not given up. The vampire is marred with a host of bizarre dreams once again. His mind swirls wildly, and his subconscious thoughts soar. Another mind trip begins. The vampire finds himself a stranger in a strange land. An unknown background falls heavily around him. There is no measure of the time period or geographical reference. Even the ground beneath his feet is unable to be described. The vampire is in a world that he has not seen before. He isn’t sure if he is even on Earth, although the air is crisp, but light.

  In his dream, David is walking hand-in-hand with a faceless woman in the sunlight. The woman is devoid of emotion and lacks a facial form. A strange sense of comfort washes over him. The daytime Sun is refreshing to him rather than harmful. He feels like a human for the first time in many years. A beating heart fills the center of his chest, and he breathes in deeply. The vampire experiences the equivalent of a rebirth or reincarnation. The dead feeling is gone, and life pulses within his soul.

  David is surrounded by a world of pure nature, yet he is unable to paint a picture in his mind of exactly what it looks like. It is everything and nothing simultaneously as if the spectrum folded upon itself and melded into matter. A cosmic oasis in the middle of nothingness seemed to encompass all that is or ever was. Time and space collided at this nexus point between universes. Light and darkness, fire and ice, science and nature, good and evil…they all seemed uniform and pointless. In a neutral state, the universe harmoniously existed in a varied cosmic suspension. The vampire has the strangest sensation that he may have crossed over to the other side.

  David feels a hunger, but not for fresh blood. A craving for actual food rumbles in his empty stomach. Food was a necessity that was long forgotten. The sensation immediately takes David to the place in his mind when he was a man. He remembers sharing meals with his family in his youth. The ancient smells of his aunt’s kitchen are vivid in his memory, and they intensify his growing hunger. The deep bottomless void in his soul is filled with the unique magic of life. With each step along this otherworldly path, his humanity returns, and he feels less like a beast. The monster lurking inside him fades away completely.

  They walk to a grand palace constructed entirely of white marble. Towers of marble stretch skyward and vanish into plush clouds. The structure’s hugeness is almost unable to be fathomed. A gargantuan staircase seems to stretch into the clouds for miles above the ground. They walk slowly up the stairs. Each step closer is better than the one before it. Her hand firmly grasps his, and this offers David comfort. The dream is a pleasant one filled with bright colors, comforting thoughts, and sappy love music. Getting to the top of the staircase seems like an endless task. The rules of time and the laws of physics seem to return. They walk slowly in silence for what seems to be hours.

  At the end of the staircase, they finally reach a royal looking entrance way with a gold crested door bordered by an intricate threshold. Ivory statues, carved in the likeness of a majestic eagle, watch over the doorway. The threshold is constructed entirely of finely worked gold and jewels set in delicate, yet durable perches. It all seems to make sense from within his dream. The aromas of jasmine and vanilla fill the warm air and create feelings of comfort and familiarity.

  A large doorknocker crafted of solid gold is centered on the massive portal. An awful rendition of the song Knocking on Heaven’s Door is quietly echoing is the vampire’s mind. He laughs in his dream and wonders which terrible band is covering the song. It sounds like more of a mockery of the tune, than a cover song. The dream is evolving and getting more bizarre.

  “Go forth,” the faceless woman said.

  She instructs him to use the gold knocker. A thunderous and booming thud is heard that echoes as if they were in a canyon. They both wait in silence. A moment later, there is a response from behind the grand door.

  “Who has come forth before me?” The phantom voice asked.

  “It is David Marciano.”

  “Your name is not in the good book,” the voice said. “Try again.”

  “It is David Morgano.” The vampire responded with another alias.

  “Your name is not in the good book. Try again.”

  The vampire gives every name that he ever used as an alias in his existence, and the voice keeps giving him the same replies. The awkward voice finally responds with a different answer when David gets to the end of the impressive list. The same song continues to play in all of its terrible glory in the background.

  “Do you even know who you are anymore?” The voice asked.

  “I am Davide Alighieri.” The vampire announced his true name in grandiose fashion. David awaited his response. His faceless friend is silently waiting with him.

  “Come inside,” the voice said.

  The huge door opens up at the seams from the middle like a French door. Both David and the faceless woman enter beyond the door. He is amazed by the absolute splendor of the room. The door closes behind them, and it echoes loudly. The closing door does not distract him from the impressiveness of the room’s decadence. Precious gems and metals are used exclusively with marble, rare stone, and exotic hardwoods to construct this well-lit space. Intricate decorations are crafted into the walls.

  The room is beautiful and unique, yet gaudy at the same time. It appears as if there is too much going on at once. The decor is dizzying. The room resembles the inside of a mansion decorated by someone with extreme wealth, but little taste or refinement. Metaphorically, it appears as if they are in heaven or a mockery of such. A large golden podium with an ornate ledger resting upon it stands in front of the two guests.

  “Find your name in the Book of Life,” the voice commanded to David. The origin of the voice is unknown, but it reverberates throughout the room. After a slight hesitation, David scours the book for his name. After much time searching, his name is not present in the ledger.

  “I am not listed in your ledger.”

  “Did you think that you were going to be in the ledger?” The voice asked.

  The vampire really doesn’t know what to think, and he doesn’t respond. David can feel the ground shake slightly. The floor is humming with an odd energy. He feels like something bad is going to happen.

  The entire feeling of the room changed. The light and airy room transforms to dark and dreary. David looks at the faceless woman, and her long hair bursts into flames. Her burning skin drips off of her blank face and exposes the bone of her skull. Little by little, all of her flesh drips away. She melts like a flesh candle down to the end, and her bones turn to dust. All of the intricate decorations on the walls turn to rotting flesh, and the room bleeds from the walls and ceiling. The floor opens up, and the vampire finds himself engulfed in raging flames. Lucifer, himself appears before him and emerges from the flames.

  In a perverse way, the Devil almost looks like Jesus Christ, only with dead emotionless eyes. Maybe it is the long dark hair and the neatly trimmed beard that make this appear so.

  “Do you really think that you will ever redeem yourself?” The Devil asked. He spoke in a perfect Sicilian dialect from David’s region of origin. The vampire does not respond. “I guess that I’ll take that as a yes.” The Devil is smiling.

  “Fool…” He grins some more. “Heaven is for the subservient sheep that follow blindly and ignorantly to the slaughterhouse. Do you really wish to be a Lamb of God?” Lucifer asked.

  David still doesn’t grace the supremely evil, intelligent being with an answer.

  “Such a shame,” the Devil said. Lucifer’s eyes flash red ever so briefly. David is still speechless in the dream. “You could be like the valiant Lion that rules his own land and is bound by no restrictions.” Lucifer acts as if he is saddened. Lucifer points to a wall, and a vision of the world is projected onto it like a demonic PowerPoint presentation.

  “I have the world in the grasp of my hands,” Lucifer said, “and it will be all in my sole possession. Everything from the winds to the seas will belong to me
. Anyone who dares to defy me will feel my mighty wrath.” The Devil still spoke in a perfect Sicilian dialect.

  “You’ve got some pretty grandiose rants,” David said. The vampire shook his head. “It is almost comical how you own nothing, yet you act as if you have everything within your grasp. You were cast from Heaven and banished to the underworld against your wishes. It is the equivalent of living in a mansion, and then trading that in to live in a dumpster.” David laughs. “Do you still feel like such a king?” David asked. “You know this to be the truth, but a demon cannot speak about or admit the truth.” The vampire responded in the same Sicilian tongue as the demon.

  The Devil laughs.

  “Such a biting tongue.” Lucifer is amused. “You are of my bloodline and twisted pedigree,” Lucifer said, “yet you yearn for the heavens and seek righteousness. I’ve perfected your existence and bestowed a beautiful blessing on your soul, and this is how you show your gratitude for life eternal?”

  “Show you gratitude for being cursed?” David asked. “You took my entire life from me and replaced it with eternal damnation.”

  “Life everlasting and unearthly power is eternal damnation?” Lucifer asked. “You are my child, and I gave you the power to live forever. I let you freely partake in all of your worldly desires of flesh and materialism without passing judgment. I encourage you to be whatever you want to be without guilt or patronization.”

  “You’ve cursed me to eternally walk the night and forever take shelter from the light. You’ve given me the same curse as yourself. It is a case of misery loves company. You are not a welcomed companion of mine. You should spend eternity in solitude to think about your unjust actions against the Creator.”

  “Our creator…” Lucifer laughs sarcastically. “Our Creator gave us all of the forbidden fruits, and then asked us to avoid them. What a crock of shit that is. Why even make us cognoscente of such pleasures if we are to be denied the right to partake in them?” Why torture all of your wonderful children? If that isn’t a power trip, then I do not know what is.”

  “Our life on Earth is one giant test of our worthiness to enter Heaven to live in eternal peace and happiness,” the vampire said. “All of these worldly desires are a distraction from what is truly most important in life. All you have been able to accomplish is becoming a grand distraction. You come along with your lies and empty promises in an attempt to fool the weak-minded into believing that what you have to offer is priceless.” David grins at Lucifer in defiance.

  A battle of ideologies follows. The two match wits and throw jabs at the other’s cause. The vampire shows no sign of caving into Lucifer’s arguments in the dream. The Devil is taking his shot at turning David to embrace true evil. The vampire has seen Hell in his dreams before. David has walked on both sides of the line. The vampire knows all too well what lies beneath the reality of this life. Lucifer is not making a strong enough argument to sway the vampire. They are at a stalemate. The Devil senses this. All of a sudden, the dream revamps itself. The Devil rearranges the dream to take another angle at David.

  The dream takes another bizarre twist. The vampire is thrown into a completely different scene. David finds himself at a poker table in what looks like a private high-roller room at an old time Las Vegas casino. Wild colored carpet and gaudy golden light fixtures adorn the room. Mirrored glass covers the upper portion of the walls. David can see his God-given reflection in the glass. He sees the handsome man that he once was. The image jars him.

  A private wet-bar is against the back wall, and the hunchback bartender is wiping down glasses with a silken cloth. This scene is surreal and could sound like the beginning of a corny joke. David is sitting at the table with Kurt Cobain, Al Capone, Adolf Hitler, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Lucifer, an unknown dealer, and the demon, Baphomet. Both Lucifer and Baphomet are in their human form. The only thing missing was the priest and the rabbi to complete the joke.

  Everyone is smoking cigars and drinking the free liquor. Elvis looks like the young Elvis that drove the world’s women wild. Hitler has a smoking bullet hole in his head and speaks broken English. Al Capone looks as if he hasn’t aged a day since the Chicago typewriter days. Kurt Cobain has half of a shattered head, and it is absolutely revolting. The dealer resembles Jack Nicholson slightly, but only because of the deranged look that Nicholson had in The Shining. Sinatra keeps cracking jokes and taunting Cobain in front of the others.

  “You are only half of the player that you could ever be,” Sinatra said in an alcohol-induced tirade. He repeated this over and over. Old Blue Eyes was actually bringing Capone and Hitler to tears.

  The dealer lays down the final card of the hand. The laughter continues, but all eyes at the table quickly shift to the card game. Baphomet is completely silent. A very lucky Kurt Cobain caught his card on the river to make a flush, and he knocked the demon out of the game. Everyone can feel the demon’s rage, and his bitter puss exaggerates his odd features. Ironically, Baphomet has goat-like features even in human form. Kurt Cobain rakes the huge pot, and Baphomet storms off out of the room livid. The table roars in laughter.

  Lucifer is laughing mightily, and he has a monstrous pile of chips in front of him. The Devil is clearly the chip leader amongst the group of sordid characters. The mind of the vampire is taken aback. Even within a dream, the vampire can at times take control. He is aware of his company. David knows that he is having a direct meeting with the Prince of Darkness. The fact of whether he is actually in Hell or really just in a fairy-tale dreamland is unknown, and it doesn’t matter. Whatever transpires in this interaction could have consequences in both the physical world and the spirit world.

  David had temporarily succumbed to Devin’s trickery previously, and he almost doomed himself. The quick vampire comes to the realization that he is dealing with the highest form of evil intelligence to ever exist. Handling this wild encounter nonchalantly could prove costly for David. The vampire is playing the scenario through in his mind. He is analyzing the dream as it unfolds simultaneously in his own sharp mind. David is completely aware of his surroundings. A part of this is rather amusing to David in a way for several different reasons.

  Everyone at the poker table most likely deserves to be in Hell for one reason or another. Some reasons are more obvious like in the cases of Capone and Hitler. Everyone knew or at least had an inkling that the German and Al Capone would end up roasting in the flames of the underworld. Hitler had a one-way ticket whether he killed himself or not. Their quest for power was their downfall. Kurt Cobain’s suicide sealed his fate. Elvis and Sinatra both sold their souls for fame and fortune.

  The vampire watches Elvis in gold sunglasses as he takes down a sizable pot against Lucifer with a pair of kings. David has to refrain from snickering at the irony of it all.

  While observing the hand, he took note of a barely noticeable quivering of the upper lip that Elvis had done when he had re-raised Lucifer. Perhaps, this is a tell on his game play. In poker, a tell is something that can tip off your opponent to the strength of your hand or possibly give an inside look into your game-playing strategies. Good poker players study every movement of their opponents in an effort to discover such tells. This helps them make the correct decisions against their opposition.

  Poker is a game of cards where the best hand may not always win. Often, an adept player will play against the man in front of him and not the cards that he was dealt. Opponents try to out-think each other and intimidate each other into folding their hands. A pair of Aces will always beat a pair of eights by the classical rules of the game, unless the one holding the Aces folds because of the fear of being outmatched. Players mix and match their strategies to win, much like chess. A huge psychological battle occurs with every hand. Poker is also a game that sometimes requires luck as well as skill to become victorious, and this is much like that of David’s mission against evil.

  The dealer quickly makes a move toward David. Out of nowhere, the vampire notices a stack of chips in fr
ont of him. Tension surfaces in the silent air. There is an awful momentary silence that seems to last for hours. The entire table looks at David with no conversation. Even the bartender refrains from his job to watch the action or lack of action at the table. For a brief moment, the vampire thinks that he sees Dean Martin in the distance in an adjacent room. The dealer waits patiently for the vampire to act. The silence is broken up.

  “Well, if your not going to buy-in,” the drunken Sinatra said, “then get me a drink, Spider.” The entire table erupts into uncontrollable demonic laughter.

  “Dance the drink over here,” Capone added. The old time, mob boss belly laughs in a deafening and somewhat annoying fashion.

  The table is roaring for a while after those comments. The vampire gets the movie reference and has a small chuckle as well. He laughs to himself briefly at the notion of Hell having a Red Box or pay-per-view because Capone was long dead before that movie came out. David knows that all of this joking is just a ploy to give him a false sense of comfort. He remembers the fattened lamb. The vampire knows at any moment that chaos could ensue.

  Meanwhile, Hitler is giving the vampire dirty looks behind his insincere laughs. The Nazi remembers Falcon’s Landing and what happened to his men at that camp. Somewhere down the line, he must have found out who was responsible. The vampire remembers Falcon’s Landing as well. David enjoyed his work on that night. David is enjoying the fact that he has finally come face to face with the man. The vampire wanted to take his life, but the Nazi had opted for suicide. A hateful eye watches David.

  It is unsaid, but buying-in is referring to putting up his soul to sell, and David is fully aware of this. He weighs the price of the wager while he shuffles his chips one-handed.