Vampire Untitled (Vampire Untitled Trilogy Book 1)

by Lee McGeorge

  “This is wrong, she’s coming back.”

  It was like he was watching a movie and now, halfway through the picture, he realised he’d seen it before. Paul knew Alina was coming back but the vampire didn’t.

  “Hide. Get out of there. This ends in tears.”

  This ends in tears.

  It did. He knew it did. He didn’t know why, nor did he know how he knew with such certainty but he knew, he really knew. This wasn’t a lucid dream, this wasn’t imagination at play, it was a story written elsewhere that he was discovering. The vampire was going to go for the woman, driven by lust and desire, but he would pay a price for it.

  “Don’t do it. Leave, leave now.”

  The woman was suddenly back in the scene, frozen in place staring him straight in the eyes. Chopped firewood was collected in her arms. As she made eye contact Paul could see that she recognised him; rather, she recognised the vampire. She knew exactly who he was and she hated him, but in that instant he hated her more. He hated her with a ferocity that was beyond madness.

  The tip of Paul’s pen jarred with jagged and horrible movements. He wanted to kill this woman with such crushing hatred that his pen scratched the paper under the pressure of his handwriting. Oh God, he wanted to kill this woman so much his heart was almost arresting from the tight squeeze in his chest. His teeth were almost at shattering pressure they were clenched so tightly, his knuckles pressed white through the skin of his angry fists.

  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, th
ey 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.

  As the door moved, he saw more of the blue moonlight, brighter than he imagined it should be, but as he looked into the room something was amiss. Whilst the room was in moonlight, outside on the balcony was lit with a delicate red hue. The ruby glow around the edges. He couldn’t see it properly due to the net curtain hanging over the window obscuring the view, but he could see the colour of the light.

  There was nothing in the room to give him fright and he walked to the window calmly and pulled the net curtain aside. He wanted to know what it was, he wanted to see from where the red light came.

  The window pane jarred as something hit it. A hand, a human hand hit the glass with its palm. There was a man on the balcony. The sound that had awoken him was his hand slamming against the glass. trying to stir him, to bring him here and open the door, to invite him inside. The man was hidden in shadow and appeared more as a silhouette, but he was there, looking in, looking at Paul. The only thing separating them was a pane of glass.

  “It’s awful what they did to you,” Paul said.

  The vampire didn’t move.

  “You were right all along. That woman tormented you and she deserved to be punished. Even just once, she needed to be taught a painful lesson.”

  The creature outside was still; rigid, like a statue.

  “I understand now why you were filled with so much rage and anger and hatred and fury. She hurt you so much and it was wrong. It was dreadful. What she did was a sin against you. It was a sin.”

  Paul reached out his own hand and rested his palm over the vampires, making himself and the creature outside mirrored reflections of one another.

  “That’s why it happened. They killed you. But you were so filled with rage and fury and a desire for vengeance that a part of you didn’t die. It came out, walked free, became the strigoi and waited in the forest for someone to come. That’
s what you are. A bad spirit that infects men.”

  Slowly, Paul removed his hand.

  “I will pray for you.”

  He let the net curtain fall back to obscure the window. As he turned to leave, the delicate red hue seemed to filter into the room and Paul felt a tingling sensation running across his naked back as though heat was being shone onto his skin. He turned back to the window and found that the vampire was no longer outside. It was in the room; somehow it had melted through the glass to be inside the room with its back to the window, still obscured under the net curtains. It stepped forward a single pace making the curtain ride up its body as the meshed fabric pulled over its head.

  There was nothing to fear now.

  Paul stood before the vampire, separated by mere inches and a fine muslin shroud of net curtain. There was something else to see, some other part to this story. What did it want him to know?

  “I don’t understand?” Paul whispered to it. “Show me what you need me to see.”

  The vampire took another step forward, a tiny step, just enough to pull the curtain a little higher.

  Paul took hold of the curtain and gathered it in his hands. It was cold, ice cold. When he had the bulk of it in his hands he lifted the netting up to reveal the vampire as though he were a husband lifting the wedding veil to his new bride.

  He saw its face.

  My God.

  He saw its face.

  ----- X -----

  Paul somehow managed an extra hour in bed despite the cockerel. When he did finally get up, he took his time about it. Today would be easy, relaxed, preparing stories at a calm and steady pace; you can’t rush this stuff.

  He made coffee and cut some crusty bread to eat with jam for breakfast. He sat by the kitchen window looking out over the courtyard, fascinated by the amount of animal tracks around the bins. A new layer of snow had fallen during the night but there must have been dozens of dogs since. He watched a house cat bound through the snow and examine the bins and wondered if any exotic animals such as bears or wolves did likewise. Wolves had been hunted almost to extinction and the bears would be hibernating, but he could imagine that if he sat in this window long enough he would see exciting things.