Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (24 page)

Paul glanced to his left as Ildico returned. The
vampire wasn’t here anymore. It never was, he knew that now. It was something
else, not a physical presence, but rather a figment of his fertile imagination.
He thought he’d cut it with the knife, instead he’d cut himself. The layers of
fabric from his shirt and coat had provided just enough insulation to stop him
needing hospital treatment, but there was no getting around the fact that he’d
cut himself whilst hallucinating.

Ildico returned with the small first aid kit, a bright
red pocket sized pack with emergency travel supplies of a few plasters,
bandages, etc. She used the toilet seat as a table and knelt on the floor to
rummage through the contents. Abruptly, she stopped to ask, “When did Nealla
hit you?”

“When? This evening. A few hours ago.”

“And where did it happen?”

“Here. In the lobby, he was waiting. I think he had
been waiting some time.”

Ildico put a hand up to her eyes and sniffed. She was
crying. She mumbled a few sentences in Romanian then collected toilet paper to
wipe her eyes.

Paul looked down at her, kneeling at his feet, crying.
There were a few drops of blood in the sink. The kitchen knife was there. He
could take it and drive it into the back of her neck. He could entice her to
stand then throw her in the bathtub, climb on top of her and stab her
repeatedly to make a bloody mess in a way that was easier to clean up. She was
served up on a platter, ready to be carved for his pleasure. That feeling of
mastery, of pure masculinity, of having the power to end a life on a whim.
Power. Control. It was his for the taking and seeing her broken emotionally
made his body flush with a sexual desire for her. He wanted to fuck her and
kill her. He wanted to slice slowly across her throat as she screamed in
terror.

“Fucking Nealla,” she said as she stood.

Paul snapped out of the daydream cognitively but not
emotionally. Reality returned, he was fantasising about killing Ildico. His
cognition would stop him doing it, he knew he couldn’t get away with it, he
knew it was stupid, but he wanted to none the less. Oh, how sweet it would be
to cum inside of her as she bled out.

It was only a fantasy, he would never do it really,
his cognition would stop him first.

Would his cognition stop him? Really?

He’d just cut himself whilst hallucinating that a
vampire was here. His memory was untrustworthy, his violence ideation was
spreading into real life and he was fantasising about raping and murdering
Ildico using the knife that was two feet away.

“I can control it,” Paul said calmly, really believing
he could.

“You can control what?” Ildico took his hands and
lifted the now blood soaked wad of tissue away from the cut to his trapezius.
“You can control what?” She had prepared a long strip of sticking plaster but
stopped for a moment to let him answer.

“I can control... Nealla, don’t worry about him.”

Ildico frowned as she stretched the plaster from his
back to his collar bone. She stared into his eyes, tears in hers. “I’m so
sorry,” she whispered. Her fingers lifted and delicately touched his swollen
lips. “I’m sorry for what he has done.”

Paul made a tiny shake of the head as if to say ‘it
doesn’t matter.’

“He told me,” she said as two fresh streams of tears
fell over her cheeks. “He told me that if I would be his girlfriend, he would
leave you alone.”

Paul almost chuckled and waved his hand to indicate
his banged up face. “You turned him down.” As he watched Ildico’s torment he
realised that she was feeling a level of guilt that was misplaced but very real
for her. “Hey, wait. You can’t succumb to blackmail like that. Nealla is weak,
he wants you so badly that he’s resorting to threats and violence. But he’s
weak. He’s weak.”

He wrapped his arms around Ildico and pulled her into
a hug. She cried a little more and he felt her tears against the bare skin of
his chest.

“He’s weak,” Paul said again with a sly smile.

“He is weak.”

It was true. Nealla was weak. And against what Paul
was becoming, Nealla didn’t stand a chance.

PART IV

Paul
was lying in bed. Ildico was cuddled up behind him. She had agreed to stay when
he asked her but she hadn’t undressed to sleep. He was wearing only shorts, she
was still wearing her jeans and a cotton vest top. She was spooned behind him
and he could feel the denim of her jeans on the back of his legs. He was
sweating, unable to rest. Ildico was breathing softly into a small patch
between his shoulders that felt cold and uncomfortable, but he wasn’t going to
move. The only thing he had of security in the world was Ildico behind him.

His injured trapezius muscle felt strange; the idea of
the injury was worse than it really was but it still made him wince to think
he’d sliced across it. The damage was minimal and superficial, but the
realisation of what he’d done was debilitating. He’d sliced his own neck whilst
fighting a figment of his imagination.

“It is the strigoi,” Paul whispered to the sleeping
Ildico. “Exactly like you told me.”

Ildico shuffled in her sleep.

“I was wrong.”

Paul closed his eyes. He had barely the energy to keep
his eyes open yet the dark behind his eyelids was far more worrisome than the
dark in the room. In the apartment, in the real world, there was little to do
him harm. What he knew now, was in his mind, in his own subconscious was
something that was pure wanton destruction. It was pain and suffering and
misery.

It was an infection of some kind. That much he could
say rationally and believe.

Whether the infection was a supernatural strigoi or a
natural pathogen that swelled his brain he could never know for certain, but it
didn’t matter. The cause was less important than what he was understanding now.
The whole thing, the idea of a mythology surrounding an illness was far too
simplistic. There was more to this vampire idea than he could ever have
imagined. It was complex and sophisticated, something to be puzzled over and
debated and examined and explored.

Being a vampire, he had realised, was entirely
psychological. There was something that triggered it, some impetus to begin the
transition from ordinary man to vicious lunatic. Ildico called it a strigoi or
a dark spirit, Paul had imagined a parasite or bacteria of some kind, but
whatever it was it had unlocked something that been repressed in his own mind.
But that thing, that repressed self, had always been there. The strigoi didn’t
cause this, it merely released it.

The vampire was within him.

He was born with it, as are all men.

He reached over to check the time; two thirty in the
morning. The cockerel normally started crowing a little before five. A few
hours remaining to try and get some sleep but it was unlikely to happen. The
events of today had pushed him over the red line. If all that had happened was
the attack from Nealla then perhaps he could have lived with that, but when
coupled with crazy hallucinations, running around in the snow having delusions,
physical injury and self harm, it was time to get professional help.

What about the book?

Fuck the book, write it elsewhere.

What about the money spent on rent and utilities for
six months in advance?

Fuck the money.

What about the vampire he had running around in his
head?

That was a harder one to reconcile. There was no
running away from that. All he could do was think about it, try to rationalise
it, try to think of a coping strategy. The vampire was just his own basal
savagery and Paul understood that now with some clarity. With that
understanding came the belief that he could control it. At least, he could
control it as things stood, he could control it in its present form. If it got
stronger, he wasn’t so sure.

His mind wandered, piecing the fragments together into
a rational story; he was exploring the logic of what, where, how and why of
this thing. He spoke to himself with an inner monologue as though he was a
mentor talking to a student, giving a lecture on vampires to himself. The core
idea, he continually said to himself, was that somewhere in the past of humans,
way back along the evolutionary ladder, back before Neanderthals, before Homo
Habilis, before we walked upright, before we came down from the trees, there
was a time when we were at our most brutal. It was the time we lived as
hunters, killing other animals and tearing at their warm flesh with sharp
teeth. Killing as a means of survival. Fierce, savage, growling beasts that lived
in a world without rules or laws or social conventions, where the only way to
survive was to kill your next meal before it killed you. The minds of these
animals were primitive and instinctive, they slaughtered without thinking,
without compassion. This primal savagery, this state, this basal, low and
unthinking mind is what the word ‘vampire’ describes.

He could see it all laid out simply and elegantly. It
was beautiful in its own way. Somewhere within each of us, that savageness
lurks but for most people, the vampire is dormant. Locked in the primitive
regions of the brain. Gradually, over time, the brain grew and developed,
adding layers of complexity. Language, logic, emotion, comprehension, analysis.
Solitary hunters formed groups and developed strategies for survival based
around cooperation, they developed social structures, hierarchies. But
underneath it all, despite their evolutionary progress and ascent, somewhere
deep beneath the layers there still lay the instincts of a ruthless predatory killer,
a creature that had only two aims in life, sex and violence. Survival in its
rawest sense. That instinct was the vampire. For most people it will never stir
or cause trouble, but there could be times when this dormant aggression could
be called upon. Special situations requiring absolute savagery. A fight to the
death for example. If someone was trying to skewer you with a sharpened blade
in order that they stay alive themselves, would you not, in a state of panic,
try to stab them first? A life or death scenario of extreme stress could unlock
the more primal states.

Paul could remember reading that in survival
situations, ordinary people will kill other people for food after six or seven
days of starvation. If that was true then it was a revealing part of the
vampire mechanism.

His own basal psychology was no longer dormant,
sitting quietly in the background and controlled by rational thought and
emotion. His vampire psyche was up front and taking control.

He couldn’t let it take complete control. He had to
fight it. He had to resist. He had to keep his wits about him long enough to
seek medical help. It wasn’t worth trying to get help in Romania. ‘Hello, I think I’m infected by a strigoi.’ That wasn’t worth trying. It had to be
London. Get home, get help, get better.

Paul turned in bed to look at Ildico. She shuffled
towards him and in her sleep put her hand on his flank. He felt weak and needy,
asking this woman, this girl, to stay with him and hold his hand. He knew that
without her here to keep him steady, he would have been running on all fours
and howling at the moon by now.

It was interesting to see how she came into her own
when faced with a crisis. She exhibited a soft power, a strength of character
he hadn’t imagined her to possess. He suspected she had a secret liking to the
situation. When faced with an injury requiring first aid she jumped into action
and showed that she could take charge and be useful and important and a person
of merit. Paul saw the storytelling logic to that. Put people under pressure
and watch as their true character reveals itself. Put Ildico under pressure and
she takes charge and faces things. He thought about what he was doing, he was
under pressure, he was facing something. What did it reveal about his own true
character? He was running away, abandoning his writing dream and fleeing with
tears in his eyes as a failure.

Ildico rolled her head and purred a soft sleepy moan.
The sound was sexual, alluring, and it jolted his thinking away from self pity
and on to more primal ideas.

If this had been any other night he would have woken
her with kisses. The plan formulated in his mind to lift her vest and stroke
fingers across her abdomen and kiss her at the same time. It was a plan. If she
didn’t resist as she woke, and if she kissed him back, he would slide her vest
up and kiss her nipples.

He squeezed his eyes closed knowing the plan wouldn’t
be brought to fruition. It would damage the safety zone he was in. This place
right now was comfortable. It had felt safe until he thought of doing that.
With those thoughts came anguish and frustration. It was unfair, it was all
unfair. Why was this happening to him?

Just go to sleep.

Try. Try and sleep.

He closed his eyes and tried to purge the barrage of
negative emotions and stress that had just hit him, but sleep wasn’t coming.
Instead his mind switched from psychoanalysis of his personal vampire to
thoughts of Nealla beating him. It was an odd form of lucid dreaming, similar
to his regular creative process where ideas unfolded on a movie screen; but
this time it was more like a defence mechanism that was trying to calm him
down. Nealla had hurt him physically. In the real world Paul felt sad,
stressed, upset and anxious, but in his creative imagination he could be
anything, in here he was stronger.

He saw himself facing off against Nealla in the lobby,
but this time he had powerful muscles and lightening fast reflexes. He stood
naked, with marble white skin and eyes made of deep red glass. Nealla tried to
attack him much as he did earlier, but in this version of the event Paul
punched him with supernatural strength and ferocity. He beat him to the floor,
knelt down to straddle him, then smashed Nealla’s head repeatedly against the
concrete until his skull caved-in and went soft. The positive resolution to
this encounter was calming. The scene changed to being in the forest. They were
in almost the same pose. Nealla was on his back, Paul was naked, straddling him
and holding his head. Beneath them the snow gave way and they fell the few inches
into the stream. Paul held Nealla’s head under the water and watched him panic
as he drowned. This killing was deeply satisfying, probably because he could
see Nealla’s face in absolute panic. The dream changed again and this time they
were in the forest but Nealla was dying because Paul’s fingers were so tight
around his larynx that he was turning red, then blue. Even better than the
drowning because this killing had pain as well as panic.

Then Paul was alone at the shrine. He spent a moment
looking at the cruciform of Christ above the entrance and wished he had Nealla
like this, nailed to a cross, ready to be brutalised.

No sooner it was thought, it was done.

They were in the basement. Nealla was naked except for
a loincloth, his feet stood on the ground but his hands were nailed to a cross
against the wall. In his fear he was trying to tear his hands over the nails.
Like a frightened fox that chews through its own leg when caught in a hunter’s
trap, Nealla was more afraid of Paul than he was of even dying and would do
anything to get away. Seeing this brought a sensation of tranquillity and
completeness. This is what was supposed to be happening.

Nealla was screaming, wrenching his hands against the
nails. If he continued he would escape in twenty or thirty seconds. This
couldn’t be permitted. Paul realised he was holding the large kitchen knife; he
put the blade behind Nealla’s knees. Nealla screamed for him to stop, but
vampires don’t care for the screams of misbehaved peasants. He sliced the tendons
behind Nealla’s knees. Nealla shrieked in fear and pain as his body slumped,
incapable of supporting itself. Even if he escaped the cross he couldn’t run,
he was slumped in agony as his nailed hands took the strain. From there Paul
carefully used the knife to cut off Nealla’s bottom lip, then one of his ears
and finally very slowly gouged out one of his eyes. It seemed a fitting
reprisal for the split lip Paul had received during the lobby attack.

“Are you practicing?” Ildico said in his dream. “Is
this a rehearsal?”

Paul, being the vampire, said nothing.

Ildico came from nowhere. She walked around him,
trailing her hand across his body, his chest, feeling the size and substance of
his biceps. She was wearing the same clothes as in bed, the jeans and black vest.
Paul pulled her forward by the vest, put the knife underneath and sliced the
fabric up to her neck cutting it away in one easy motion to expose her breasts.

“Oooooh,” Ildico purred. “Are you going to fuck me?”

Paul, being the vampire, said nothing. But Paul, lucid
dreaming in bed, felt his penis swell.

“When you kill Nealla, I will let you use me however
you want. But I want you to kill him first. Let me watch you kill him.”

Paul the vampire sliced Nealla across the beltline of
the loincloth cutting both the skin across his hip and the garment. The fabric
fell away. Paul took hold of Nealla’s penis and pulled him away from the cross
by it. The cut with the knife was sure and firm. Nealla screamed so high it
barely registered as audible. Paul tossed the useless sausage of flesh aside
and wrapped his man grip around Nealla’s scrotum pulling him away from the
cross by his balls. Jarring crimson blood was spurting from the remaining root
of his penis across Paul’s hand as he cut off the testicles and threw them away
too.