by Ian Hall
The farm was small, and I thought it unguarded. I’d barely sunk my incisors through the cow’s thick flesh when I heard the explosion off in the distance.
The bullet ripped through my back and out my chest.
When I awoke the following morning, I flinched backwards, blinded by a burning torch as it lowered to my would-be funeral pyre.
Once again the red veil covered my eyes. To this day I can still see every face and hear the screams. When the frenzy lifted and the family lay at my feet, my vision cleared again and peace restored. Surveying the carnage, I knew I had at last done a good deed in freeing the trapped from their wretched existence.
But I had done more than free the occupants of the farm.
I had alerted one man’s attention, and it would be the bane of my life for many, many years.
As I stood in triumph over the bodies of the slain, it seemed a boulder had been smashed into my side. The world lost focus, and I struggled against the direction and speed of my travel. I was carried faster than ever before, my legs and arms flailing in the air, grabbed by the waist, hurtling through the night. I grabbed at my bonds, only to find strong fingers. I struck at the wrists, expecting them to splinter like so many before, but the man shrugged off my blows.
We sped through the night, then came to a stop, near a small house, dark and imposing.
“Be still,” he said as he dragged me inside. I tried to hit him, but it seemed that he deflected every blow; the man simply swatted my protests away.
I fell in a heap on his bed, discarded there like a piece of trash.
He looked thin, his slender frame belying the strength within. He would never be considered a handsome man, but he had an aura of power that scared me more than a little.
I dashed for the open door, suddenly laughing, but my mirth died in an instant when he appeared from nowhere and barred my escape. He lifted his hand to my neck, passing the backs of his fingers around my throat.
“On the bed, girl,” he said, then tore a huge strip of my dress from neck to lowest hem. It seemed he had no patience for my contrition, for he lifted me up with one hand, throwing me back onto the bed covers. He walked over to his dresser, where he began to unbutton his coat. “My name is Amos Blanche.”
Again I hastened to the door, but once more he miraculously barred my way, ripping my dress again, and sending me flying.
I sat on the bed, my arms over my bare breasts, panting in shock.
“My name is Amos Blanche, and you are mine tonight; just give up the struggle.”
“You are no normal man.” I readied my feet for another attempt.
“And you’ve got little enough clothes left,” he said, grinning maliciously, indicating the possibility of the open door. “Next time you will lie stripped, and I will feast on your nakedness. Tonight, girl, you are mine, and trust me, I will have you.”
I looked at the oil lamp, and thought of it as a decent weapon. I lay far nearer than he. I leapt from the bed, but he met me mid-bound, knocking the wind from me, and with one stroke completed his promise to divest me entirely.
“Very nice,” he looked at me with such longing, I nearly cried out in terror, my arms unable to cover myself completely. His shirt dropped to the floor. I began to retreat, but when my legs hit the bed, I knew I had nowhere left to run. As he advanced to me, I held my hands up in my defense, but he caught them in one strong grip, binding them behind my back.
“Please, no,” I said, my voice breaking and shaky.
Pushed back onto the bed, I struggled to little avail; he seemed to have muscles of iron. He kissed and caressed me, calling me ‘his baby,’ assaulting my body with his lips, tongue, and fingers. I fought most of the way, but his strength surged way beyond my resistance. For once I actually tried to channel my rage, but it would not surface.
“You were meant for this, my lover,” he said when his fingers finally entered me, painfully breaching through my maidenhood with neither finesse nor care. Then he drew back and I saw a ‘man’ for the first time, erect and threatening. With a look of some contempt, he plunged himself into me, his hips slamming onto mine. The pain felt almost unbearable, and I tried again to summon the rage which had invaded my body in times of crisis, but felt no response.
Let it happen.
Ah! My mother’s voice.
“Why?” I moaned loudly. “He is killing me!”
Let it happen.
I felt a strength build inside me. Not enough to throw him from the bed, but as if my mother lay beside me, holding my hand through my ordeal.
Amos Blanche worked, unperturbed by my lack of defense, his attention elsewhere.
This is a fleeting moment. You will emerge a butterfly.
Despite the force of his entry, I found my body responding in a way I’d never felt before, almost as if the rage did build, but very slowly. As Amos worked above me, my attention held within myself, and I saw the mechanics of the rage change for the first time.
Then he began to build up the speed of his stabbing, holding himself above me, and his mouth opened wide. I instantly knew the meaning of fear. His incisor teeth had grown to a terrible size, larger than the biggest dog. Suddenly he dropped, pulled my head to one side and struck my neck with open jaws. I reeled, expecting pain, but instead gasped in awe as the blood coursed through my body towards my neck.
Continuing to plough his manhood inside me, he sucked the lifeblood from my neck, and I enjoyed every second.
“Oh, you are a natural!” he roared, straining his head above me, the blood dark and black in the lamplight. He took his hand from binding mine, and tore across his wrist with his teeth, ripping his veins asunder. I looked on with astonishment as the blood began to drip onto my body.
Then I smelled his blood, and at last the rage within me began to grow. I readied myself to kill this little man, then felt completely frustrated when it didn’t happen quick enough. I shook my head, trying to channel the anger, and gave an exasperated gasp when still it built up far too slowly to save me.
I still lay in pain. He still thrust inside me with desperate strokes. I could see his face grimace, ready for release. I screamed, frustrated that my rage would arrive too late.
At that moment I felt my mother move my hands, grabbing Amos’s wrist and pulling it to my mouth. I resisted every inch of the way. Then the first touch of his dripping blood touched my lips and my struggle gone forever. Knowing my destiny, knowing my desire, and knowing that I was bonding with my mother, I sucked like never before, and his thick, creamy blood coursed down my throat like the sweetest honey.
The ecstasy flowed from my mouth, to my body, then to my loins, clutching round his manhood with a grip of iron.
I erupted in pleasure, the feeling flowing from head to toe with my mother still holding my hand.
Amos Blanche collapsed and shriveled inside of me. For a split second, he seemed soft, weak, and vulnerable. I seized on that moment.
Clamping his head between my hands, I cracked the old man’s neck easily as if he’d been a squirrel. I pushed the dead husk off my body and it rolled to the floor with a pleasing thud. For a long time I remained sprawled atop the cot, wanting the sensations rolling through me to quiet.
Instead they redoubled in strength and a surging energy fired in my veins.
His corruption of me had been complete. My body had been awakened to a new longing, falsely induced but rampant nonetheless. I brought my fingers to the place of his intrusion, realizing I lay engorged with need. I took ownership of my craving, feeling at once empowered and ashamed.
As I moved myself to climax, that still, serene voice assured me it was right and good to work the desire through to fulfillment. In doing so, a hunger like none I’d ever experienced, roused and rallied. I dropped to the floor, dug my teeth into the dead man’s shoulder and sought to drain him dry.
An eerie laugh broke through my frenzy.
“I can see I made a good pick.”
Before I could react, his
fingers were wrapped in my hair and I suddenly felt held in place by his steel grip. Amos Blanche encouraged me, almost gently, as he brought my arm to his mouth and took of my blood while I drank from him. Soon our mouths were locked; he took me by the waist and moved me over him. I joined with him freely, a willing participant in my own destruction.
“Do not hold back, girl,” he told me, and I didn’t.
My abuse upon him was as reckless and unyielding as he had been to me. Any other man would not have survived my ministrations. I watched his agony and reveled in it.
Sweating and panting, I released everything.
“What am I?” I demanded.
A pair of glassy eyes stared up at me, unseeing. The back of my hand met his jaw square and the eyes immediately cleared.
“What am I?”
A sickening smile, laced with venom, looked back at me. “You are mine.”
Again I swung. Again he smiled.
“I have already killed you once. Don’t think I won’t do it again.”
“That which kills us makes us stronger, my dear.”
Amos rolled us over, pinning me at the shoulders. I could feel him already regaining vigor inside of me. I felt ready to take it but would have my truth first.
Despite my defenselessness, I sneered up at the man, “Tell me or I will strangle it out of you.”
“You already know what you are,” he said soothingly, “you are the thing of nightmares. I have watched you as you watched them; skulked behind you all those years you skulked in the shadows. I have witnessed your lust for destruction, girl, and now I have made you invincible.”
He moved himself inside me, and I lost my resolve to understand instantly. For the moment it seemed enough to hear aloud that I was indeed what I’d always believed myself to be. The cravings, the rage that set me apart and made me different, were now acknowledged and even admired. I was a monster. But, for the first time in my life I no longer felt afraid of myself.
I don’t know how long we stayed in that cabin, feeding upon one another’s lust for both blood and sex. A time of madness and violence when the savage within me took full reign and the man who released that savage proved nearly her equal. I would never say I loved Amos Blanche; to me he lived as a tool to be used for my own purposes. He undoubtedly felt different; to him I lay subservient, his creature, his plaything. It seemed the way of the world.
By the time we embarked from his dreary cabin I’d learned to embrace the passions and hungers every other man in my life had sought to squash from me. Winter lay upon us.
So for the first time in my life I knew my name, and what I had been since the moment of my birth into this world: a vampire. A monster of bloodlust, driven by cravings no normal person could understand.
For most people, this knowledge would have driven them wild. For me, I embraced a calmness that settled my childhood, dimmed my infancy, and explained my adolescence. It came as an admonition and an acceptance of innocence. I could have not lived different if I’d tried any harder.
A tiger cannot suckle at a pig’s teat for long; one day the realization would come that it was indeed a tiger, and the mother’s breast becomes meat, not milk.
Amos treated me badly. His appetite for sex seemed incredible, and he would ‘rape’ me for hours each night, or at least I let him think so. In truth I secretly enjoyed our joinings, wallowing at last as I had been born to do.
He taught me to hunt, and my prey were no longer animals penned in fields, but people of my choosing, lithe, healthy men, who rushed headlong into my arms to meet their destruction. Amos shared my prey, joining us on the bed, ready for the moment of release, then we feasted together.
Amos taught me vampire speed, and I immediately took to flight once or twice each week, running the moon-washed countryside, feeling a great strength infest my body, and reveling in the freedom.
Once, Amos picked the prey; a nubile girl, no older than me, and for the first time, I seduced one of my own sex, learning as we caroused the taboo structure of that manner of love. Amos watched for hours, then joined us on the bed. I looked on, detached from the fray, struck with awe as he tore into her willing flesh, driving his manhood for hours. We ended her together, feasting from both sides of her neck as she slipped into darkness.
Amos told me his story, how he had been turned in Europe, and fought his way across to America, despite being hunted both on shore and aboard ship. For years he had planned an assault on the nearby town, and now, it seemed, with me as a Lorelei, he had the means to begin to create his empire.
But the world of the vampire is full of fear and balance, and it seems we exceeded the latter, and after only a few of the locals were taken, we were chased from our humble cabin.
We moved west to the town of Albany, and took up residence in a fairly decent apartment. I used my vampire speed to steal from the pockets of the rich, and in the larger town, we passed many years in complete anonymity, never becoming too prominent, never too much in the limelight, and certainly never getting caught out like before.
We culled humans from the surrounding countryside, and like the cleverest of dogs, never shit on our own doorstep.
In Albany, I became aware that I held a particular charm with the young men in the town. After a while, suitors would come calling on me, ignoring the presence of the older Amos; this proved to be a grave mistake on their part.
It set up our routine for many decades. Every ten years or so, we moved our place of residence. Once into Boston proper, and then into the growing conurbation of New York.
In the mid-nineteen thirties, living outside Philadelphia, my mentor finally began to manifest his growing vision of empire. Until that time, he seemed quite happy with my lone companionship, but slowly he grew dissatisfied with riches alone. He began to dream of power, and that meant instead of culling for food, we began to turn humans into vampires. I first heard the term ‘Philadelphia Crusade’ at that time, spoken by Amos like some declaration of war. It meant nothing to me then, but little did I know that I already played a tiny part of it.
Like some modern day, dark messiah, Amos Blanche grew his following one convert at a time. His message seemed clear: hatred for all mortals. His method of inclusion remained unchanging: brutal, vicious force coupled with agonizing sex. Much of the time I noted nothing in the way of foresight or insight in his numerous acquisitions. Though he touted his own intellectual prowess, I felt seldom impressed or inspired by what appeared a random cross-section of American youth.
This was a time of hardship for my adopted country. As the glistening new world plunged into an era of adversity and hopelessness, Amos’s resources were accumulating. Unaccustomed to the trappings of wealth, he wore his lavish lifestyle like a pin on his lapel, shining it in the eyes of the hungry and desperate. Association with Amos Blanche meant escape from the dismal world collapsing around them. There were many takers. But everyone who joined became tainted by the darker side of the vampire existence, and a total disregard for the sanctity of human life.
Like Amos himself, I too got fat off the impoverished. Although I looked no older than twenty, I strutted through the new regime like a whorehouse madam, content in my position as the ‘old lady’ of the company. But as the Blanche troops slowly amassed, and new ranks got assigned, it came as no shock that the more valuable positions were entrusted to the males of his brigade. Men ran the world outside, and Amos needed a male army to continue his advancement. As each new addition rose in the ranks, they tested me in turn, but none could master my will. Few came even close to matching me. Amos turned the boys into men and I slapped them back to boys again.
As the thirties passed, Amos and his followers came to respect me as the force of nature I was born to be. For many of the early years, I had endured his attention to my body. At last he realized the power of my fist.
On the 26th of July, 1939, as I turned eighty years old, news began to filter through to America of the struggle of the Jews in Germany, and my though
ts were increasingly of my mother and father, both now long dead. No sooner had I began my ruminations, when they were cruelly interrupted.
On the morning of 1st August, a veritable typhoon of violence hit our household.
I lay taking a leisurely bath when I heard the sound of breaking glass outside in the hallway. I did not have time to act. The bathroom door burst open, and two strange men filled the doorway. One was hardly more than a teenager, but the other stood tall and striking. If I hadn’t been in so much shock, I might have looked upon him differently, but anger boiled in my veins and I screamed at them, “Get out!”
To my surprise, they vanished, but reappeared looming over my bath, one holding my arms by my side, the other pushing my head and torso under the water, his strong hands clasping over my windpipe. I struggled against their holds, but to no avail; they were immensely powerful. The bathwater lay clouded with fragrant salts, but as I fell into darkness, I looked up into his misty eyes and realized I was being murdered by two vampires.
Two strangers.
It wasn’t the first time I’d died. Sex with Amos lay fraught with such danger, and many times I’d passed out under him, his fingers squeezing my windpipe as this stranger had done. But this would be the first time I’d drowned, and it had been alarming.
I awoke with a loud gasp, throwing myself upright in the now cold, stagnant water. I threw myself over the side of the bath and emptied my lungs onto the tiled floor. Sick and water cascaded from my lips in such a volume, I wondered how much a body could hold.
When I sat back, exhausted, the house remained quiet, and the low yellow light of evening passed limply through the single window.
I rose, shivering from the cold water, and donned my thick toweling robe. One figure lay in the corridor, his head completely removed, his features turned against the dark oak trim. I walked slowly to the main room of the house, ready for flight. Two more bodies lay there, both beheaded, both discarded recklessly to the floor.