Personal Journal of the Forcibly Nocturnal

I had been in the library since four in the afternoon. It was now almost dawn. What kind of moron spends fourteen hours surrounded by silence and dusty books? The kind that has term papers due and exams rushing in for the kill; that’s what kind.
Around dusk the place had filled almost to capacity. As it approached midnight, the crowd began to wane and some people began to drop off to sleep on furniture throughout the building. Now it was basically deserted. Even the librarians had faded into a backroom somewhere for a little snooze.
I suckled the cola-filled sports bottle I had smuggled into the library in order to keep my eyes open just a little bit longer. There was only one other person in the large common room with me; she was asleep and drooling on her textbook. The idea seemed like a good one to me. I gave a great yawn while attempting to wrap my lips yet again around my straw. No liquid came when I applied a vacuum. The thing was empty in my hour of greatest need. After shoving the useless bottle back into my bag, I tried one last time to focus even as the world warped and wavered in my view.
“Mind if I sit down?” a decidedly alluring male voice asked into my ear. His whispering at such close range could be explained by a devotion to the stoic silence deemed necessary in libraries, but it still startled me. Why he even wanted to sit with me was beyond my comprehension; there were empty tables everywhere . Then again, you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.
“No, go right ahead.” Without lifting my head from its position over my literature notes, I saw a well-formed body clothed in torn and faded blue jeans and an equally well-worn gray sweater seat itself across the table from me.
“Thank you. I was hoping that we might be able to keep each other awake for awhile.” There was decided mirth in that suave voice. Soon he even began to laugh; a very nice, soothing sound that just made me want to curl up next to him and fall asleep.
A smile crept willingly across my face as I raised my head to get a good look at the man’s face. My eyes reached mouth-level and the teeth included therein, especially the elongated and wickedly sharpened canines, before falling hurriedly back. “Shit,” I whispered. He heard; I knew that, but hoped that the fact that I leapt to my feet, while instantaneously grabbing my book bag, and tried to beat a hasty retreat might still save my hide.
It didn’t. The man was in front of me, painfully holding my forearms in his hands, before I could take half of a step. I snapped my eyes to the ground just as quickly to avoid eye contact.
“Sit,” he ordered.
“Let me go,” I replied, but was not naïve enough to try to struggle out of his grasp. It wouldn’t have worked anyway.
“I do not wish to kill you. Now, sit.”
I did as he said because I had no other choice, but kept my eyes lowered. He took a seat to my right and let go of my arm. “What do you want?”
“Nothing you should be afraid to give. It will take but a moment and you shall remember nothing of it; I promise. Look at me.” I ignored him. “It will be much easier and more pleasant for you if you would look at me.” As I still refused. He let out a frustrated sigh. “You only make this harder on yourself, child.” When I refused to raise my head, he tried to do it for me.
His thumb happened to come to rest not-so-gently by my bottom lip. Following some long-forgotten instinct, I sank my teeth into it and bit deeply until the pain forced the vampire to let my chin go. It felt as if my jaw had been crushed when he finally did. He snarled at me, but I only heard the sound as I dashed for the door. The monster might kill me for injuring his pride if nothing else, but at least I would not be a plaything.
As I escaped through the heavy front doors of the library, a voice floated through my head and, perhaps in the air, although I could not be sure of that: “You will regret this child.”

I woke up the next day, after only forty-five minutes of sleep, feeling terrible. With forty-five minutes of sleep and an eight o’clock exam that I was pretty much fated to fail, what else was to be expected? As I did every day, I found my way on autopilot to class and began attempting to pass my chemistry test. Less than halfway through, I began to feel light-headed and increasingly warm. The sensations increased in severity until the world went blank.

I woke up in a hospital room what seemed like a good eight hours later. My head felt like someone had drained it of all fluid and then filled the ensuing void with rotted cotton. My body raged with a fever high enough to require an IV of icy liquid slipped into the veins of my arm. All in all, right then, I wanted to die on the spot.
A figure stood in the hazy twilight beside my bed. It took me awhile to turn my head enough for him to come into view, but, once I managed the feat, the vampire from the library and I made eye contact. Instead of the well-worn costume of your average college co-ed, he was now bedecked dangerously alluring items more suitable to his subspecies. There was no cape over an ancient tuxedo or such, but the nicely fitted leather pants and equally binding t-shirt, ripped at the cuffs to allow for the movement of his well-muscled arms, served its purpose just as well.
Although the outfit was thoroughly modern, he could never have been mistaken for human. For lack of a better word, an ancient aura hung about him like the missing cloak of mystical fame. Hair so dark it held purple tints running throughout fell to his shoulders. His eyes were slitted, so I couldn’t tell their color in the semi-darkness, but the unhappy power being emitted from them was unmistakable. The one piece of folklore I had always believed about vampires was their fear of crucifixes, yet there was a nice Celtic cross hanging from my visitor’s throat. Then again, I suppose, since a cross and a crucifix are two separate entities, the myth could hold true and just not apply to jewelry devoid of the corpus Christi.
He just stood there and glared dispassionately at me, if that is possible. At first, I doubted that I could speak, and so assumed the silence would stretch forever. But eventually, I became adventurous enough to try my voice and was pleasantly surprised. It was scratchier and more hoarse than it had ever been before, and I could barely whisper, but any form of speech was an accomplishment.
“Come here to finish the job and kill me?” My enfeebled voice, thankfully, could hold no emotion because I was not sure how I felt beyond the torments of my sickness and a dull fear of death.
“Even if I was, I could not.” He finally mumbled without visibly moving his lips. This time I was positive that he had said it out loud, so perhaps he was just a very talented ventriloquist in his spare time. Even filled with pent-up, vague hostility, his voice was pure seduction. If I hadn’t felt like so much shit right then, I might have given in to it. “I am not strong enough to kill you.”
“So, what, you’re here to just watch my fade away?” In my mind, I added the phrase, “you sadistic bastard,” but managed to keep that thought internal only. He might not be “strong enough” to kill me, but he never mentioned anything about maiming, and, this time, I couldn’t run away.
“That would take a longer time than I can spare. You have within you my immortal blood. It fights with your living soul for control, and that heated battle causes your sickness. In the end one will win and, regardless of which is victorious, you will die; but that will take a long time. I told you that you would regret your actions upon our meeting.”
“That begs the question again of why you are here.”
“My mistress demands it. I am not strong enough to kill you or make you one of my kind, but she is and wishes to offer you the choice.”
Romanticism be damned; I did not want to become a vampire. A few of my friends from school would have jumped at the chance, but not me. I kept chickening out of getting a tattoo because that was too permanent for me. An eternity of nocturnal killing for sustenance made an inking seem like nothing. “So, she can kill me?”
“It is in her power…if you so wish.” A mysterious tone had snuck into the vampire’s voice. It almost sounded like he was holding something back from me. Not that such things should arouse my suspicions. Secrecy is, after all, a vampire’s stock in trade.
“Where is she? I want this over with.” Yes, I was speaking about my life, or rather death, but yet it didn’t matter to me. If the only other choices were slowly burning to death in that hospital bed or becoming the walking undead, death by vampiric ingestion didn’t seem so sinister.
“You are too impatient, little one,” a voice rivaling the vampire’s, only its female equivalent, coaxed at my subconscious from the doorway. Framed there in the artificial hallway light stood the quintessential vampiress complete with light, airy garments of funeral black and long, flowing white-blond tresses that matched her pallid complexion.
She floated over to beside my head, opposite of where her servant stood, and turned my head gently to face her with a delicate hand. “You should not wish away your life, especially since we offer it to you eternally.” The maternal tone with its tugging subliminal power undercurrent yanked viciously at my subconscious to give into her every whim. She had yet to express a whim; I was afraid of what might happen when she did. “Perhaps you should reconsider your decision to die so young. It would be a great loss to the world.”
My mind wavered as her voice swept away the pain and heat from my body, leaving only behind the hunger to be with her eternally. Some part of me held on, though, and managed to keep me thinking straight. “NO!” Then, more genially because of the injured look in the mistress’ eyes, “I am honored that you would even consider offering me your gift of immortality, but I cannot accept it. Eternity is just too long.” I was very proud of the eloquence of that speech, given the circumstances.
“So, you still wish to die.” I nodded. “Then, close your eyes, child. A person should never have to witness the grim reaper coming for her soul.” She gently covered my eyes with a hand as a mother would a rebellious child who refused to go to sleep without one more drink of water or just another chapter from the bedtime story. She laid a gentle kiss on my lips before beginning her night’s work.
The end was swift in coming. She struck at the base of my neck where it met the breastbone. It felt only like a sudden shot, and then all sensation was gone and I drifted into sleep easily; never, I thought, to awake again.

Of course, I did not die and, therefore, did wake up eventually. If I had not, I wouldn’t be writing this, now would I? Again the vampire was at my bedside in the shadowy silence of an unfamiliar room, but this time he was not intent upon me. Thus, I was able to take a few undetected moments to observe the world around me.
The room balanced precariously between the modern world and a horror movie representation of the past: clean almost to a fault, the bare, finished wood of the carved wall ornamentation glistened in abundant candlelight, while the thick tapestries that hung all around them absorbed whatever brightness neared their material, leaving a comfortable velvet darkness in its wake. The bed on which I lay and an upholstered chair placed in the corner for my vigilant companion were the only furniture in the room. Although I could not see any more of the bed than the sheets under which I rested, the chair was akin to what one might buy from a interior decoration catalogue in hopes of “classing up” a room. Its dark upholstered material was held in place by brass rivets, and the legs were slightly worn with use. As for the sheets: there was one of golden cream satin on top (for show, I suppose) over common flannel to keep out the cold.
The vampire had again changed his attire in an even more dramatic fashion; one of those floppy, peasant undershirts used so commonly in historic costume dramas was just barely hanging on to his well-muscled chest, all its ties and other fastenings having been untied and the tail untucked from tight leather pants. They had to have been made with his specific measurements at hand, because they fit to his skin too snugly without cutting off circulation, supposing vampires still had circulation, to have been bought off the rack. The darkness and edge of the bed cut off my vision before I could see his shoes.
My fascination with the room had momentarily distracted my attention from the very important question of why I wasn’t floating down the river Styx or gazing at the Pearly Gates right then. There was, of course, one very obvious explanation. In order to test it, I carefully ran my tongue along my upper jaw and, indeed, there I found two extraordinarily elongated canine teeth as well as a sharpening of many around them.
Without meaning to, I let out a defeated sigh, which gained the attention of my guard, who had been staring at, if not out, of a tapestry-covered window across the room. Again, we made eye contact. This time he smiled; it wasn’t a truly happy expression, but at least he no longer felt the urge to glower at me. Probably one of the things even more torturous than an eternity of hunting fellow human beings would be being hated by those I would have to live with for that eternity. Of course, I was no longer human, and that smile far from promised a warm welcome. Perhaps, he was just gloating over my being Made against my will.
“So, you have survived, little one.” The vampire’s voice was as close to human as I could possibly conceive of it ever being, and still it was quite nice. What it had lost in seductive power was more than made up for in amicable tone. I wondered for a moment if this was how the human man had sounded before his eventual mistress found him.
“I should be dead,” I commented in a matter-of –fact tone that surprised even me. “Why aren’t I?”
Dare I say, a little sympathy snuck into the vampire’s eyes? “Our mistress did not wish it.” Suddenly, I remembered what he had told me in that hospital room when I asked if his mistress could kill me: “It is in her power…if you wish.” He had obviously been speaking plurally. Both the Mistress and I had to want my life ended if I was to die, and she hadn’t, so I was now a vampire instead. This dependency on her whim was to become a trend in my life…afterlife, I could see that now.
The vampire took a seat on the edge of the bed near my waist and waited patiently for me to soak in all the information that one little statement had held, still staring at me. “So, what now?” I tried to sound contented if not jovial about the situation and failed miserably.
“For now, you feed and then rest away the day as you have these past three. Soon, you will be strong enough, at least in body, to join the rest of us in hunting.”
I could always stand the sight of blood, but it never particularly affected me in any way. Suddenly, I was practically drooling at just the mention of the liquid as a hunger I never even realized could be this strong gnawed at my stomach. If this was how vampires felt every night, I couldn’t really blame them for being a little messy in their eating habits; I would have done anything right then to make it go away.
“Are you ready?” the vampire asked calmly. I shrugged. It was a little intriguing to think what I was going to be fed with since I was not yet strong enough to hunt: plasma bags pilfered from the Red Cross? Virginal sacrifice in bed? The one thing I was not prepared for was the vampire to roll up his own baggy sleeve and bare his teeth in preparation to open a vein.
“Hold it!” I exclaimed and quickly jumped up slightly to grab his wrist, an action I deeply regretted a moment later as the world swung haphazardly around me. I flopped back to a fully reclined position, but kept my grip on his arm. He moved forward on the bed to accommodate my reach. “Is that really necessary?”
“Our mistress wishes you to survive, so, yes. Although you no longer are in danger of immediate death, you are not yet strong enough to survive and will not become viable unless you drink.” I suppose that made sense, and, now that I had already made the conversion, I really would have preferred to stay as alive as I was right then, but yet, this didn’t seem quite right. The confusion must have shown on my face, because the vampire gently removed my hand from him and laid it at my side with a soothing manner. “I am responsible for what you have become and, therefore, must feed you until you are ready to begin hunting. If I don’t, the mistress will make my life quite unbearable.”
This guy was good at the guilt trip. It worked perfectly. “Could I at least know your name; it’d make this whole thing seem a little less sleazy.”
Thankfully, he didn’t take offense to the “sleazy” comment. “The mistress named me Aaric, as she will name you once you are healthy.” In other words, that wasn’t his birth name, and I would be getting my own new monocer soon enough, so don’t bother telling him my real name. “Now please obey me for once and remain still.” He favored me with a teasing, lopsided grin that made his deified features more human and, if it was at all possible, more attractive. As I opened my mouth one more time, he placed a hand over it. “Not another word; now, close your eyes and open your lips like a good girl.” A vampire in a pirate shirt and Saran-wrap tight pants was teasing me. That just tells you how weird my continued existence was destined to become.
It wasn’t Aaric’s arm that met my lips, nor did I feed immediately. There was a little peck on the lips, like a father might give to his little daughter while tucking her in for the night, followed by a more carnal, definitely non-paternal contact. The hunger gnawed at me for a moment or two as my numb mind was unable to conceive what could possibly be expected of me to do now. Then, the same instinct that had gotten me into this predicament in the first place took hold. I sank my teeth deep into the tongue that slid through my lips. Aaric did not draw away, but allowed the blood to flow directly from the injury into my mouth.
The world again swam, but this time it was accompanied by a warm, comfortable feeling that wrapped around me like a familiar blanket and dragged me down contentedly into unconsciousness. I fell asleep, if that’s what you call what a vampire does during the day, with the feel of Aaric’s lips on my mine and his blood flowing down my throat. If all my nights ended like this, Undeath might not be that bad.