by Zara Novak
Ansel stared into the depths of Ruth’s dark brown eyes and delivered the statement as matter of fact as he could. A nervous smile flicked over Ruth’s face and he could tell that it had unsettled her. Ruth looked from Ansel to Kat.
“…he’s a real riot.” Ruth laughed nervously.
“Ruth.” Ansel pushed the girl’s name forward from his lips with Intention. His control snarled around her ear like a hook and she looked at him instantly and attentively.
“Yes?”
“It’s been lovely meeting you, but you’re going to leave us now. Goodbye.” Ansel waved a hand across the girl’s face, which had adopted the expressionless automaton gaze of a person under a vampire’s control.
“Goodbye.” Ruth answered instantly in a lifeless and obeying tone, and disappeared onto the dance floor.
“…Okay, you have to teach me how you did that.” Kat stared in awe as her eyes followed Ruth onto the dance floor. “I love Ruth, but she can definitely be annoying sometimes.”
“All good siblings are.” Ansel said over the music. “Where shall we do our interview?”
Kat looked over to her left and pointed to a door in the far corner of the bar. “There’s a door over there that leads in to the back. It’s a little quieter than in here. It’s for staff only really, but Avalon is a sorority owned club, so members get a little leeway when it comes to moving around.”
“Sounds good to me. Lead the way.”
Kat stalked across the floor on her heels toward the door ahead. Ansel followed behind carefully, taking careful measure to drag his eyes over the rotund curves of her body. Kat punched a code into the door, pushed it open and they walked through.
They were in a small hallway with several doors branching off it. Unlike the club, the hallway was well lit yet sparsely decorated. The backstage area of the club was bare concrete, exposed brickwork and a mesh of old pipework that ran directly along the walls close to the ceiling. They walked past supply closets full of booze or cleaning supplies, to a polished wooden door with the words ‘Office’ written on it.
Kat pulled out a key and opened the door. The office was small and dingy, much like the rest of the backstage area. In the corner there was a tall filing cabinet and an old set of metal shelves which were bent and rusted. Everywhere Ansel looked, there were mounds of moldy paper in old cardboard boxes. A small wooden table was on the left wall, with two chairs by it. Kat took a box off the table and set it down on the ground.
“Let’s sit?” She said as she took a seat at the table.
Ansel joined her and looked around the room. “Quite the office of luxury.” He remarked.
“Yeah… sorry it’s a little dingy, but it’s the only quiet place I can think of in the club. There’s a newer office upstairs which is where the management actually work. One of the girls figured out this room was deserted, and they started using it to do coke. The key was mysteriously ‘lost’ a few months ago.” Kat held the key and winked before dropping it into her purse.
“Now you have this room all to yourself for cocaine.” Ansel joked.
“Barely.” Kat leaned over, opened the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and pulled out an old book. “I rarely agree to come on nights out with the sorority, but when I do, I sneak into this place and use it as my own little library. I’ve smuggled in quite the collection.” Kat put the book back and pulled her phone out of her bag.
“Let’s get down to it then.” She said. “Is it okay if I record you?”
“Go ahead.” Ansel said.
Ansel watched Kat as she prepared herself for the interview. He looked at the girl and saw many things, but mainly he saw an intrepid hope in her eyes. Since he became a vampire, it was a look that Ansel had seen before, usually in the eyes of young girls like herself. It was a look of someone who desperately wanted to know that there was something more out there. It was the look of someone who knew something but never really had a reason to prove why.
Kat hit the record button on her phone and it beeped, but Ansel was the first to ask a question.
“There are many ways I could prove to you that I’m a vampire.” He said.
Kat smiled at Ansel quizzically. “Wait are we starting with the roleplay thing? That’s great. Carry on.”
Ansel ignored Kat and continued regardless. “I could show you my super human speed. I could demonstrate my super human strength. I could tell you how many exclamation marks are in the entirety of the Moby Dick, which is the third book you stashed in the bottom drawer of that filing cabinet.”
Kat’s jaw dropped slightly at that comment, and she turned to look at the closed cabinet in confusion.
“I could show you all this and more, and you’d meet it with the same faltering reaction. Disbelief. Dismay, emotional tumult. But I don’t have to show you anything, and you don’t have to pretend to be shocked - for we both know what it is I really am.”
Ansel sat up right and listened to the breath as it raced from Kat’s nose. The color drained from her face and the spark of amusement had left her eye.
“You’re messing with me right?” Kat laughed but there was no amusement in her voice.
“I’m not playing any games Kat.” Ansel growled. “You know what I am, I can see it in your eyes. Let me hear you say it.”
“You’re… you’re a vampire.” She said shakily. “A real one.”
A satisfied smile curled on Ansel’s lips and he sat back in his chair.
“When did you figure it out?”
“I think I knew it the moment I saw you. I think I knew it the moment I saw that bar… that place.” Kat dropped the word from her mouth as if it was ash.
“Why do you strive to find all of this?” Ansel gestured a hand through the air at himself. “Where does your obsession stem from?”
Kat didn’t answer the question immediately. Instead she dropped her eyes to the table as she thought something over. Her hesitation was answer enough for Ansel. Kat looked back up at him.
“Is this interview about me or you?” She said coldly. “I thought I was the one asking questions here?”
Ansel smiled and placed his right hand palm up on the table. “Give me your hand and you’ll see everything you want to know.”
Kat stared down at Ansel’s hand as if it were a live grenade. She looked up and eyed Ansel suspiciously, indicating she obviously needed more explanation before she would take it.
“We’re not just supernatural in the physical sense.” Ansel explained. “We have certain intellectual capacities that stretch beyond normal human capabilities. Touch my hand and you will see as I have seen. Touch my hand and I will see as you have.”
“Telepathy?” Kat looked down at the hand skeptically and scoffed. “You can’t be serious.”
“Give me your hand then and find out.” Ansel said coldly. “I’ll show you everything.”
Kat paused for a moment more and then she lifted her hand reluctantly. Her emotion was so strong he felt it rolling off her in thick waves of heat. Hesitation, fear, mistrust - but most of all, he felt her curiosity.
Kat placed her hand into his and jumped as she felt the spark flit between their fingers.
The small and dingy office room tumbled away instantly and they both whisked upward at a thousand miles an hour into some strange and dark unknown. They were still sat around a table, but it was pure black and wrapped tight in something soft like velvet. All around them, darkness stretched in every direction. Above them there was a solitary shaft of light, but no source to accompany it.
“Where are we?” Kat asked and looked around the dark void in shock.
“Thought. A place between worlds.” Ansel answered. “Ask anything you want and see the answer. For instance… where does your obsession with vampires stem from?”
Lights flashed at the edge of the darkness around them and Ansel found himself standing in an old house next to a young and frightened Kat. They were at the top of staircase, stood in the middle of a hallway. Light poked
from a crack in the door just ahead. A strange and gruesome sobbing came from behind the door.
“Where are we?” He said to the young specter.
“My childhood home.” The girl whispered back. “I thought this place had been destroyed.”
“This is just a memory.” Ansel said. “This is the moment your obsession began. Why are we here?”
“I can’t… I can’t remember.” The girl stammered. “There… I think.”
Young Kat raised a finger to her lips and pointed up ahead. Ansel stared ahead silently and listened. The sobbing of a terrified woman rang through the house like a chord from a nightmare.
“No!” The voice screamed with dying strength. “Please!”
Kat walked forward in morbid curiosity.
“I was desperate to find what the sound was. We’d heard them before. Ruth had told a boy at school, and he’d said it was mommy and daddy having sex… but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all.”
Ansel followed Kat to the end of the doorway and stopped as she peered through the crack in the door. There they could see the figure of a man doubled over a struggling woman on the floor.
Kat pushed the door and it swung open. “It wasn’t that at all…”
Ansel watched the young girl’s face as it twisted into a picture of shock and horror. He looked into the room and stared at the vampire drinking from the woman on the floor.
Both figures were naked, and the vampire drank with insatiable lust. The woman thrashed softly against him as the last of her strength wained. Bloody hand prints smeared the crisp white bed sheets, gruesome flecks splayed across the floral wallpaper at awkward angles. Both their bodies were covered in thin smudges of pink and red.
It was a messy kill, and it reminded Ansel much of his first. It was inexperienced, it was mad. It was the first execution of a fledgling vampire. He turned his attention back on the young girl who watched in horror.
“Father?”
The vampire looked up at the sound of the girl’s voice, and glanced at her in terror. His lifeless black eyes widened and the creature snarled in dismay.
“Out!” It roared. “Out! Out! Out!” The man jumped to his feet and ran toward the door, bloody, naked and filled with rage. Kat turned and ran down the landing, not stopping as she heard the door slam behind her.
The vision crumbled away and they found themselves sat back in the black void once more. Ansel stared into Kat’s eyes, but she was staring somewhere far into the distance. “I ran until my legs would no longer work. I made it to the woods at the back of our house. I climbed a tree and closed my eyes and cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.”
“Who was she?” Ansel asked.
“Our maid, Rosalind. Ruth and I were only young, but we could sense that something wrong was going on. Father and mother argued a lot. I think she thought it was adultery…” Kat broke into a dark laugh. “How much easier things would have been if it was just that.”
“What happened to him?”
“He had been on a business trip… and there was this one time he came back. We couldn’t explain how, but we knew he was different. I think he started an affair with Rosalind so he could have an easy source of blood. One day he lost control… and that is when I found him. I never considered he was a vampire, I thought he’d just lost his mind. I came home the next day to find the paramedics wheeling him out in a bag. Mother said it was suicide.”
“He killed himself?” Ansel asked. “But how?”
“Mother would never tell us.” Kat took a breath to focus herself and stopped reliving the memory. She pulled her eyes up to meet Ansel’s and stared into his soul.
“So there you have it.” She said with dark solemnity. “The source of my obsession. The secret I had forgotten. My father was a vampire.”
5. Kat
Kat sat almost completely stunned. Her father was a vampire. Now that she admitted it to herself for the first time, it was like a weight had been lifted. Ansel’s sparkling red eyes stared into hers with a picture of concern.
“Are you okay?” He asked. “We can stop if you want.”
“No.” Kat said quickly. “You saw something of me, now I want to see something of you.” She looked at the darkness all around them, half wondering what images would seep forward next.
“Fine.” Ansel said. “As is your right. What do you want to know?”
Kat weighed a question over carefully in her mind and spoke. “Who are you?”
Ansel’s eyes flared with black, and the void around them crumbled into memory once more.
The vision that came forth this time, was somewhat different to Kat’s, they weren’t taken to an isolated moment. Images flicked across her vision at breakneck speed, each one a memory, each one a day in the life of his last year as a vampire.
She saw the moment he was made. She watched the female vampire jump down into the darkness, and set upon a suited man walking back from a night out somewhere, in a city that was unrecognizable to her. She felt the fear as he walked unsuspecting through an alleyway, she felt the arousal of the female vampire hunting him. The image jumped forward and took them to a vision of Ansel waking on his first night as a vampire, being taken out into the world by his maker and shown how to hunt.
A dozen images like that one passed before her eyes in a second. Images of him stood alone in the darkness, stalking after faceless victims, dragging them to the ground or holding them upright against a shadowed wall. Drinking until there was nothing left. Letting their bodies fall when they had nothing left to give.
She watched in horror as body after body hit the ground. Each one a different life, each one a different night, all victim to the same fledgling vampire. She felt his lust, she felt the thirst within him. She felt his abject self loathing.
Then the images jumped to something else, and she saw him locked in chains with a tortured expression on his face. A leather clad woman stood in a doorway, silhouetted by the dim light behind her. Kat couldn’t make out a face, but she saw a pair of red lips moving in the darkness.
“You’re unruly. They wanted me to kill you. I think I’ll make you suffer first. Pet.”
A dozen more images flashed before Kat’s eyes. Months of torture, months of abuse and terror. She listened to the rattle of his chains as he screamed. She saw the veins in his eyes burst as he struggled.
Then one night the chains broke. A final dozen images flashed before her eyes, and Kat watched on in horror as she saw Ansel stalk through dark hallways, extracting his revenge upon his makers.
The vision crumbled, and she sat staring at the vampire.
“You killed them.” She said bleakly. “You killed your whole coven.”
“It wasn’t long after they turned me, that they realized they had made a mistake. I was stronger than I should have been, I was more powerful. They couldn’t keep a reign on me, I was a wild beast, spiraling out of control. That’s when they turned on me. They locked me up, they used me for their own enjoyment, they treated me like a prize in a sick game.”
Ansel spoke calmly, failing to betray a single thread of emotion. “Little did they know, I was growing stronger still. One night I escaped, and I killed them. I killed every last one.”
Kat looked into Ansel’s eyes and saw the revenge that was driving him. His hatred roared within him like a black fire, stretching out and begging to consume everything within it’s reach.
“You want to destroy all vampires?” Kat asked.
“No.” Ansel shook his head. “I want to destroy the vampires that rule us.”
Kat stared at Ansel blankly and he explained further.
“Vampires used to have free reign of the world. You could kill whomever you liked, you could turn whomever you wished. It was a golden age, it was a paradise.”
“What happened?”
“Our own paranoia made us slaves of secrecy, until we shrank to nothing but myth. A society was formed, The Red Circle. The Circle are a high-society of vampires who govern ov
er our kind. They monitor everything, they control the world, they decide who is fit to be a vampire, and who is fit to perish.”
Ansel’s eyes pulsed with the glint of fire.
“To this day they run things. Every vampire alive today is tagged on a database somewhere. The Circle watch everything. They believe that being a vampire is a gift, and it should only be bestowed upon the highest members of society. They are the reason I was chained. I was deemed unworthy. I will not stop until they are destroyed.”
The blackness around them crumbled away and Kat felt as if they were falling downward. A moment later they were back in the dingy office room, and the world had faded back into view. The air had grown heavy in the small room, and Kat and Ansel stared into each other’s eyes, weighing up the depth of their dark pasts.
Ansel sat still as a statue, with his hand palm up, in the same position it had been when they started. Kat looked down and noticed both of her hands where in her lap.
“Why are you telling me these things?” She asked.
Ansel shrugged. “I feel as if I can. I feel like you listen without passing judgment. It’s a rare quality these days.”
Kat nodded quietly, and for the first time she felt sorry for Ansel. She sympathized with his motives, violent as they were. Sat before her was a man that had been transformed into a killer. He’d never asked for the change, he’d never consented to it, but once it came - he was scorned by the very people that had brought it about.
“I have to warn you that I am not a good person Kat. You are not in the company of someone who walks on the side of light. Life is a picture of confusion, good and bad do not fall on the same side of the fence. Morality is a crooked line, and I walk straight as best I can.”
Kat supposed she should feel fear. She was sat opposite someone who had murdered, all to satiate the unquenchable thirst that drove him forward.
“Would you drink from me?” She asked with a reluctant pang of fear.