My name is Skye Reynolds, but I go by the name Skye Phelps. I was born in Sacramento California, when I was seven my father died and my mother moved us to Camden Town England. She was raised there and thought it would be better for both of us, if we had the support of family nearby while we tried to pick up the pieces of our lives and go on. My mother and I were close, but I was what she considered a head-strong child. I never got into any trouble with the plod, but I was an expressive and free-spirit, always wanting to push the line. My mother was more structured, practical and grounded; that’s what she wanted for me, practical and grounded.
In the attempt to make her happy I went to college to study business, but it didn’t take long before the stuffiness of university got to me and I dropped out. Instead of becoming a respectable business woman I perused my deep love of painting. As a compromise, I met and married a respectable business man, thinking that would make her happy. It however, did not make her happy; unfortunately I wasn’t happy either.
It turns out, when you marry someone who’s a workaholic and control freak while they’re in school, chances are it’ll only get worse once they’re out and building their career. Erik, my husband, wasn’t a bad guy. It’s just that we wanted different things. I wanted a deep emotional relationship, where both of us could contribute by doing things we loved. I wanted a friend; a lover I could talk to. I wanted someone who understood me… or at least loved me enough to try. Erik wanted to become upper management, and constantly strived to work his way up the corporate ladder. He wanted a mild mannered wife who entertained business partners with home cooked dinners and served drinks at cocktail parties. He wanted a relationship that was congruent with furthering his career. That meant there was no room for an eccentric artist, no space for deep heartfelt talks that lasted late into the night, and with his eighty hour work week there was no time for passion. Mind you, we had sex, but it was usually quick emotionless and convenient. If you asked me now how we ever ended up together I couldn’t tell you, but somehow we did.
A year after we were married I got pregnant. I never wanted kids, but Erik wanted the baby so badly, I agreed to keep the child, and hoped that his new found excitement would carry into our relationship. When we first found out I was pregnant he cut his hours at work, so he could take me to the doctor, Lamaze, or just shopping for the baby. Erik was a great father, but it didn’t take me long to see that he was spread thin between all the time spent at work and his family life. He just didn’t have the free time to devote to both of us.
That’s a long story full of arguments that never reached a conclusion. After we’d have a roe, which was often, I couldn’t sleep. I began taking late night walks to clear my head and relax. One of those walks turned out not to be as relaxing as I’d hoped. I was on my way back home when some wanker attacked me. He jumped from the shadows and grabbed me. At first I thought he was just a mugger, but once he began dragging me off, I knew I was in some real trouble. As soon as he had touched me I’d felt a strange cloudiness take over my mind. It was as if I’d been drugged. I desperately tried to fight him off, but I couldn’t seem to keep my focus. Time seemed to disappear; things happened in an instant and they took an eternity at the same time. I think I might have hit him once, but if I did there couldn’t have been any force behind it. The weirdest part of it all was the way I felt. My emotions were confused, obviously I was terrified as anyone would be, but that seemed to be pushed to the background by a false sense of calm. My head swam, and I knew he was biting me, but I found it difficult to focus long enough to even want to fight back. I remember I could feel my heart beating and once, it faltered, like a small hic-cup. I concentrated all my attention onto one thing. I had to bite him back. I convinced myself it was the only thing I could do to fight him off. Mentally I coached and encouraged myself. ‘Bite him. Bite him. Bite him.’ I refused to let my mind drift to any other thought. It worked, too, I bit his face grinding down as hard as I could…and he let me go. He reeled back from me shocked and he cupped his cheek, immediately the fogginess lifted. Once my head cleared I was able to feel how badly he’d hurt me. I was so weak I couldn’t even stand. He stood over me staring, then just walked away.
I stumbled home and passed out on the floor of the lounge. My husband woke me up the next day by ripping open the curtains and yelling at me. He wanted to know where in the hell I’d been and what had happened to me. When I told him I didn’t know he accused me of drinking. I was scared and upset and all he cared about was whether or not anyone had seen me come in pissed up.
I remember thinking that the sun bothered my skin, sort of the way it does after you’ve burned yourself really bad at the beach. I scrambled to the edge of the room to get out of the light, Erik continued to lecture me the entire time. I was filthy, the knees of my trousers were torn and I had blood on my face and clothes. Erik never asked if I was alright. I’d suffered from some depression after the baby was born and Erik thought I was too emotional. Whenever I was upset he accused me of, “having one of my episodes” and to “straighten myself up.” He assumed I’d left the flat angry and drank myself into a stupor at a pub, just to be dramatic. He grabbed his jacket and told me, “I don’t have time to deal with your shit Skye. Get yourself straightened up, you’re embarrassing.” Then he left and went to work.
I was exhausted and scared, but I pushed that aside and fed the baby. Then we both took a shower together. Josh couldn’t have weighed more than sixteen pounds at the time, and even with him supported on my hip, my arms quivered and shook trying to support the weight of his wet squirming little body. Somehow I’d managed to get cleaned up and get the both of us dressed. I put Josh in the pen next to my bed and laid down just to rest for a moment. He woke me up screaming his head off after what seemed like only a couple of minutes. I checked the clock; it had been almost seven hours. I was nauseous, my head was splitting and bright light made it worse. Josh’s screaming set my already frazzled nerves over the edge, and I broke down in sobbing tears. I changed his dirty diaper and had to stop twice because the overwhelming smell had gotten to me. I would have thought I had a migraine, only it seemed like something more, and I dismissed it as stress.
I was hungry, but couldn’t find anything in the kitchen to satisfy my craving. The scrapes on my hands and knees, the bruises on my arms and the deep purple mark on my neck were all gone. From the looks of me I hadn’t been assaulted at all, until I checked my ripped and bloodied clothes, I thought I’d dreamed the whole thing.
When Erik got home I told him I was sick and couldn’t make dinner, He grumbled something under his breath and went to the kitchen to make himself beans and toast. The smell made me ill so I had to leave the flat and sit outside in the garden. I thought things would get better, but they didn’t. By the end of the third day I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything. I felt famished but, everything I put in my mouth made me sick. Even if I forced myself to eat, it was as if my throat would close and not let anything solid down. At one point I thought I was going to choke to death on a piece of bread. Besides being physically ill I was terrified to leave the house and jumped at every little noise and shadow.
On the fourth night I laid in bed unable to sleep, listening to Erik breath in and out, slowly going crazy from the aggravating rhythmic sound. I was still wide awake at four in the morning, I finally became frustrated enough to get up and try and go for a walk. I stood at the edge of the garden, mentally coaxing myself for forty-five minutes before I could find the courage to leave my own property. The walk through the park made me a nervous wreck; I imagined potential danger in the mere rustle of a bush or every darkened shadow. The closer to dawn it got the more panicked I became. I misunderstood where the feeling of danger was coming from and assumed it was my over active imagination that caused me to become so unnerved. I refused to let some sodding wanker make me feel that way. I thought if I could hold out until dawn I could convince my subconscious that my fear was irrational. What I didn’t know was that my growing unease was my body’s natural instinct and sense of self preservation. Several minutes before the sun peaked above the horizon the reflective rays began to bother my skin. At first it was ignorable and then it became just barely tolerable, eventually I couldn’t deny what was happening. My skin was burning. ‘What in the bloody hell is happening to me?’ The moment that I watched the tiny little blisters form on the back of my hand and forearm is when I realized that fiction was in fact reality. The things that go bump in the night really do exist. I had seen enough in the cinema and read plenty of stories to know that everything that had been happening to me over the past couple of days was because I was changing. Four nights before, I had been attacked by a vampire and I was becoming one myself.
Terrified I ran for home, but I was too far and there was no chance in hell I was going to make it. The intense brightness seared my sensitive eyes and it became increasingly harder to see. I tripped and fell several times almost completely blinded by the light. I ended up spending the day hiding in a smelly rubbish bin. I slept on and off, but never soundly, afraid that every little noise was someone coming to open the lid and expose me to the deadly light.
When I made it home, Erik was holding the baby pacing back and forth in the lounge. He was furious. He’d missed a day of work and told me I’d forced him to file a missing persons report. “What the hell were you thinking leaving in the middle of the night again?” Crying I tried to go to him to apologize, but he reeled away and told me that I was filthy. “You stink! Go clean yourself up.” I can still see the look of disgust on his face, and it was obvious that the repulsion was not as much because of the smell as much as it was because of me. I wasn’t playing the role of his perfect little wife. My behavior didn’t fit into what he thought his life should be, I never really fit in that box, but I’d made him miss work and he had called the plod. ‘Now everyone was going to know that his life wasn’t as perfect and orderly as he made it seem.’
I thought about all the times I’d stayed quiet, so I wouldn’t embarrass him, all the things I’d gave up so he could further himself. All the while convincing myself that once he graduated, or once he got the job, or the promotion, or once the baby was born, things would change. It didn’t change, not ever, and it wouldn’t. Unlike usual I couldn’t contain my feelings; my typical silent and ignored tears weren’t enough. “Don’t you dare look at me like that you sodding knob!” I growled through clenched teeth. “If you weren’t such a self-absorbed prick, you’d have asked why I didn’t make it home. You’d have seen that there is something wrong with me.” With my anger came a flare of hunger. A primal instinct told me to attack the source of nourishment in front of me. The beast didn’t care that he was my husband or that he was holding my child in his arms. The monster didn’t care about those things, but I did. Even though he’d hurt me deeply, I loved him and I love my son. Fighting the impulse I ran to the kitchen and rifled through the refrigerator desperate to find something, anything to curb my cravings. He took a minute to leave Josh in his pen, then followed me into the kitchen. My ears rang with rage and hunger, it took all of my will to ignore his relentless reprimanding. I’d hoped raw meat would help, it always seemed to do the trick for people in the cinema, at least at first. There was nothing thawed, and when I began licking a block of frozen mince, I stunned Erik into mouth gaping silence.
He slapped me. He’d never hit me before I don’t know if he thought I’d gone mad and he was trying to bring me back to my senses or if he was just trying to knock the beef from my hands. Whatever the reason, he sent the meat across the room and left my face throbbing with pain. I screamed and grabbed him by the throat with both hands. Terror filled his face and he struggled to get away from me. I didn’t realize it at the time but I had probably looked monstrous. My eyes were most likely glowing or had changed to some unearthly color, and I’m sure my teeth were razor sharp and barred for him to see. Gasping for air he desperately clawed at my fingers squeezing his throat. His face turned blood red and his eyes rolled in their sockets as he began to lose consciousness. I put him down, full of guilt when I realized I’d picked him up off his feet. I knew he’d been fighting to get away but the effort he put behind it felt like a weak child. When I let him go the color washed from his face and he turned a pallid blue. His knees buckled and he started to fall but I caught him before he could. “Erik, I’m sorry, are you alright?” I asked guiding him to the stool at the breakfast bar. I apologized again and again. And told him the story from the beginning, how I was attacked and how I was so afraid to leave the house, but when I did I got stuck in the rising sun and had to find a darkened place to hide. I told him I needed help, I didn’t know what was happening to me and needed him to help me figure out what to do.
Once his head had quit spinning and he had gotten his bearings, he began backing into the kitchen to stay as far away from me as possible. Eventually he’d backed in to the countertop and couldn’t go any further, he just stared at me with horrified silence. I pleaded for him to understand, but when I needed his support, as usual, he couldn’t bring himself to be there for me. Tears streaming down my face I tried to go to him, he was terrified of me; I guess I can’t blame him, I was terrified of myself. He grabbed a kitchen knife from the drying board and swiped at me with it. I put my hands up to shield myself and he slashed a deep cut in my forearm. He stabbed at me again but I was fast enough to maneuver backwards so he only cut my shirt and grazed my ribs. The scent of my blood was overwhelming; I thought that the ravenous hunger that it brought on might drive me crazy. I backed into the lounge struggling to remain in control of myself, Josh stood in his pen gnawing on the padded guard, his top teeth were coming in. When he saw me, he cooed and stretched out his little hands for me to pick him up. Erik moved to position himself between me and the baby, making sure to keep the knife pointed at me the whole time. “Erik, please help me,” I sobbed, taking a step toward him ignoring the blade in his out stretched arm. “Please.”
He slapped me with the back of his empty hand, and a flash red light lit up my vision. The pain in my face was nothing compared to the breaking of my heart. “Get the fuck away from him!” he yelled and made to hit me again, but I caught his hand. Betrayal and sadness flooded my chest, and thoughtlessly I hit him back. I felt his nose crunch under my fist and he reeled backward stumbling over and breaking the end table. Erik dropped the knife as he hit the floor and the baby began wailing with ear piercing screams. My mind was a whirlwind, I couldn’t think. I tried to cover my ears hoping to block out the noise, but it only muffled the sounds of the outside world. Thoughts foreign to me, clash in inside my head making me dizzy. Erik scrambled and grabbed the knife then tackled me at the knees. I landed on the blade and it stabbed deep into my thigh. I cried out in pain; Erik ripped the knife free and held the blade to my throat. He sat on me pinning my arms with his knees. “I don’t know what you are, but you are not my wife. Get out and don’t come back or I will kill you.”
He got off of me, then stood me up pushing the knife deeper into the soft skin of my throat as he did. I could have easily fought back; his crooked and broken nose gushed blood and it took every fiber of my being to silence the impulses pushing me to attack him, to feed on him, to hurt him as bad as he was hurting me, but I didn’t. I was deflated by how easily he was willing to give up on me, and devastated by how viciously he could attack me. “Erik, please. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” He only shoved me toward the door and again told me to get out. He wouldn’t let me near Josh, he wouldn’t let me get any of my things, he pushed me out the door and slammed it in my face.
I wandered the streets devastated and sobbing. Torn between understanding why he acted the way he did toward me and confused as to how he couldn’t love me enough to help me. Tears streamed down my face, and I sat on the curb my chest heaved with my sobs. A man out with his dog for a late night walk stopped to ask if I was alright. I completely lost control, all of my anger and heart break, all of my confusion and hunger I unleashed on a perfectly innocent man. Like an animal I attacked and beat him. He screamed but I muffled his voice with my hand, and tore into his soft flesh with my sharpened fangs. The little dog at the end of his leash yapped and growled at me, but I barely noticed. I gulped down his blood like a thirst starved mongrel. Feeding was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I the flavor was savory and rich; satisfying beyond description. Certainly not the flat metallic taste I remembered from biting my tongue or splitting my lip. It made my mouth tingle slightly and warmed me from the inside, like coco on a cold day. I could feel it wash away my exhaustion and ease the pain of the wounds Erik had inflicted. All of my senses became more acute, I could hear his breath whistling deep within his lungs and I could feel his frantic heartbeat as if I were holding it in my hand. It was the most exhilarating high I’d ever felt, better than any lover, better than any drug; for the moment the world was forgotten and all that was left was pure gluttonous pleasure.
The man hung limp in my arms, he had dropped the dogs leash but the little guy refused to leave his masters side. He bit me and the sharp pinch in the back of my calf brought me back to my senses. Horrified with myself and what I was doing I dropped my victim and ran. The high wore off after about fifteen minutes leaving me feeling stronger and healthier than I had in years, but weighing me with enormous guilt and self-loathing. The emotional turmoil of losing my family was bad enough, that was added on top of trying to cope with the changes stirring inside and not knowing if ,or when they would take over. I hated what I had become and was terrified of myself.
The first couple of nights were the worst. Once I had found a good daytime hiding spot away from people and the light, the physical part of dealing with my new situation got a little better. I lived like a rat for the first month, not caring what I looked like, or whether or not I was clean. All that mattered was that I had a dark place to spend the day, away from any temptation of people. The guilt I felt for attacking and violating that poor man, ate me up inside. I promised myself that I wasn’t going to feed on a person ever again, no matter how strong my desire. I caught a rat once, it bit me and I crushed it until its eyeballs bulged out of its head. I tore it in half and drank the small trickle of blood that poured from its mangled little body. The flavor was so foul I gagged and spat it out on the floor; dog wasn’t much better. I ate nothing for almost seven weeks, everyday growing harder and harder to keep my control. During the days I slept, if I was disturbed it was usually by a vagrant or some teenage kid who’d been dared to go into the old darkened building. I ran them off quickly the first few days and didn’t see too much of people after that. Apparently the word got around that it was not a place to be. At night I waited until long after dark to venture out, and when I did I made sure to stick to places where there weren’t people around. The longer I went without feeding the more violent my thoughts would become.
Almost five weeks from the time I’d first and last fed, I laid curled up on the moist dirt floor of the empty building I was squatting in and I was woken by some children playing in the alley out back. I could hear every word they said through the stone walls. They had knicked a video game and were fighting over who got to keep it first. One of the boys was more of a bully and it appeared that he was going to take it regardless of what the other boy said or did. Of course the boy threatened to tell, whining that it wasn’t fair. I started out annoyed by them but eventually I became disgusted by their bloody sniveling. The only thing that kept the boys safe from me was the sunlight. Instead I sat in the darkened shadows of the broken factory and imagining myself choking the little shits until they wheezed out their last whining little breath. Every day I lost myself a little more to the monster living inside me.
The night I attacked my second victim, I remember sitting under a foot bridge desperately trying to block out the sounds of life going on around me. I was over stimulated by my heightened senses and it was driving me completely mad. My ears rang with the sounds of foot falls, voices, and heart beats. I could smell the earth under my feet, the moss growing on the stones, meat cooking in the restaurant down the street, and cigarettes on the clothing of the pedestrian’s yards away. I tried to stay away from people, but I was drawn to them, I longed to be near them. It wasn’t the vampire that enticed me toward the crowds; although, the beast yearned for humans in its own way, it was me; I was so very lonely. Like a prisoner in solitary confinement, I missed talking and laughing…and bonding with people. I’d always been a social person that part of me hadn’t change. Lots of things about me hadn’t changed. My thoughts and feeling were all still there, the things I loved, the things I cherished, the things I hated, all there. It was kind of like another person was living inside of me, and not so much as telling me what to do, as much as manipulating me into doing it. I could feel its glutinous impulses pushing on my heart. My own emotions, the one’s it could identify with, it fueled them intensely, manifesting my thoughts into a freakish affectation.
I don’t even remember leaving my little hidey hole from under the bridge. I came into my senses standing over a woman lying unconscious at my feet. The “beep, beep, beep” of her car door drilled its way it way in to my subconscious and I snapped out of it with a sunderance. I was in a residential neighborhood where anyone could have seen me. I scanned the street for any witnesses, thankfully we were alone. Her breathing was shallow but her heart beat seemed strong, so I left her in her car and set the alarm off before I ran, so someone would find her quickly.
I worked my way to a busy street full of shops and cafés. My filthy clothes and hair made me very unseemly, and people paid special care to take a wide berth around me as I passed them on the sidewalk. I stunk like a musty cellar and old machine oil, but I think I was the only one with a nose sensitive enough to notice. With my head down I focused on getting to the abandoned distillery I’d been hiding in for the month and a half. I was so worried that someone might have seen me attacking that woman that I didn’t notice right away the clamoring in my head had quieted to an ignorable droning. I felt like myself again…only better. All of my senses were still as sharp as before, but I was able to filter them, the feeling of being overwhelmed was gone. If I concentrated I could hear a whispered conversation from across the street or see deep into the darkest alley. I stood in the middle of the side walk for the first time truly awed by my new abilities. Excited, I tested the limits of my five senses, trying to decipher all the different smells I could pick up or experiencing the new taste of things, solids were out, but liquids seemed to be ok. I sat on a bench enjoying a hot cup of coffee and giving myself an eye exam by attempting to read flyers attached to a light posts down the street, when I noticed a photograph of myself. It was a “Missing” poster with a reward for any information on my whereabouts. It stated the date and location I was last seen and said “Her family is very worried and misses her terribly.”
My heart leapt into my throat with the hope that Erik had changed his mind and wanted me to come home after all. I began to walk home collecting any flyers about myself that I found along the way. I don’t know how I’d missed them before, they were everywhere. When I rounded the corner onto my street I was surprised to see Erik standing on the front stoop with a bag of groceries in one hand while trying to unlock the door with the other. He disappeared inside for a second before running out again and getting the baby from the car. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Jason’s little face. Just as Erik turned and headed up the stoop a police car pulled up and two men got out of the car. For some reason just the site of them made Erik angry and his disposition changed dramatically from when he had been alone. I was across the street and about six houses down but I could easily hear one of the men ask if it was alright to come in and ask some questions. “I already told you people everything I know; she left us. And tell her God damned mother that I’m not hiding anything. Her daughter went crazy and then ran out on her family.” He wasn’t yelling, but his words were full of venom and his American accent seemed to make his voice carry easily down the darkened street. The bobby who had spoken to him the first time insisted that they had a few more questions that they wanted to ask and that he realized it was late but that it would only take a short time.
Tears welled up in my eyes as they all went inside and closed the door behind them. Erik’s words left me heartbroken all over again. It wasn’t him who “missed me” it was my mother. I should have realized it before, but I so wanted to believe that it was my husband who’ put out the flyers. I’d been so absorbed in myself I never even thought to realize that when my mother hadn’t heard from me she’d be worried. We usually spoke once a week and have lunch every month or so, after not hearing from me for so long, she would be worried sick and of course she’d be looking for me.
As I walked back to the distillery, for a moment I considered going to my mother’s, but I thought back to the look on Erik’s face when he found out and decided against it. ‘It’s better for her to worry and think I’m missing than know the truth and hate me for it.’ I’d made up my mind that I had to leave London and get as far away from my life as I could, some place where no one would know me and where no one would find me. It took me about a week of picking pockets, or just plain bulling tourists out of their money to collect enough quid to try out my plan. There was no way I was able to do it on my own so I chose to ask a young man with a leather jacket, a studded belt and blue spiked hair. I suspected from seeing him around the past couple of weeks and knowing he lived out of his van he could use the dosh.
“You’ve got to be off your head,” he told me, “but I like your style. I’ll do it.”
I gave him all of the eight-hundred and thirty pounds I managed to steel and convinced him to seal me up in a shipping crate and mail me air freight to the United States. The cost of the shipment was about two-hundred and fifty pounds and he could keep the rest. When I was young may father had brought us on a camping trip to Colorado, it was the last trip we took together before he died. I remember dad loved it there, and in turn, so did I. The wooden crate was labeled for Denver and was supposed to be picked up at the airport by a recipient that would never come.
The trip was painfully boring and took a little over a week before I arrived at my final destination. I didn’t have to worry about the usual dangers of starving to death, suffocating, or dehydrating, and using the toilet didn’t seem to be something I did any longer. Besides being very bumpy and uncomfortable at times, it was a really convenient way to get overseas without any paper work. All of my identification was still with Erik, and at the time I didn’t really care, because in my mind Skye Reynolds was no more.
I didn’t have the misconception that once I got to the states things were going to be better, or that living with myself would be easier, but I figured a completely fresh start would help me get over my old life and begin accepting the new one I was stuck with. In fact, my new life wasn’t much different from the way I’d been living in London, except the city was younger, the accents were different, and instead of staying in a stone and mortar distillery that was falling apart I was staying in a run-down concrete warehouse.
Weeks, then months passed and before I knew it I’d been living in the states for a year. I spent my days holed up in the dark and my nights were a combination of avoiding people at all costs and doing everything in my power to keep from feeding again. No matter how hard I tried, the monster eventually won. The longest I went without feeding was almost three months, I can only remember bits and pieces of the final few weeks. I’d locked myself in a room with no way out and figured I’d either beat it or die trying. I didn’t beat it and I didn’t die, but the man who had tried to come to my rescue did. I’d starved myself into insanity, voices that were not really there spoke to me and apparitions of my loved ones visited me with the sole purpose of torturing me. The man must have heard me screaming and came to investigate. I don’t remember him opening the door…I don’t remember him at all. I’ve tried to remember what happened that night, but at one moment I was sick and crazed in the small walk in freezer listening to my mother’s voice tell me that I disgusted her and how ashamed my father would be of me, and the next; I was outside under the clear sky, feeding on a drunken woman dressed like she’d been out clubbing. I didn’t find his body until I returned shortly before dawn.
It certainly wasn’t the first time I’d thought about it, but it was the first time I actually tried to kill myself. Sobbing over the body of the man I’d murdered, the decision snapped into my mind like the crack of a whip, and with the same intensity that the thought came into my mind I jumped up to act. I couldn’t stop; I couldn’t give myself time to let any fear set in. I was a danger to everyone around me, a parasite that took and killed, but didn’t have anything to give back. Charging for the door I shouldered it open and exploded into the light. The pain was so sudden and so intense it stole my breath; it hurt too bad to scream. My skin burst into flame like a match to petrol, and with the shock of such excruciating pain my knees buckled about five strides outside the door. I took in a desperate gasp of air, again trying to scream but the flames scorched my throat and lungs. The couple of seconds that it took after I’d exited the door felt like an eternity, but it was only a couple of seconds and then I blacked out.
I felt like a prisoner in my own body, but instead of being able to hang myself quietly with a sheet from the bars of my cell, I couldn’t end myself unless I took to warden with me. Unfortunately the warden was meaner and stronger…and had the survival instinct of a wildcat. I woke up…I’m not sure how long after my blackout, face down on the floor. My eyes were blind, but the smell of my melted and burn flesh hung heavy in my nose. I knew I was back inside but I could still hear what sounded like bacon sizzling in the pan. I didn’t realize it until later that my legs were still in a beam of sun coming from the door I’d left ajar. Surprisingly I didn’t feel much pain, actually I couldn’t feel much of anything, my whole body was kind of a heavy numbness. I tried to get up but my extremities didn’t seem to be functioning properly, and all I could manage was to turn myself over. I felt a twinge of pain across my back and the sizzling sound lessened and then subsided. Consciousness faded in and out throughout the first part of the morning, I managed to sleep for about an hour when an uncomfortable prickling sensation nagged me awake. My vision had started coming back, but all I could see was the contrast between light and dark and not much else. The stickery-tingling feeling that had woken me was increasing rapidly. I was beginning to get sensation back; I’d been burned so badly there were no nerves left to feel any pain, but as the day went on and I began to heal the tiny tendrils repaired themselves and sent their agonizing impulses back to my brain. To make things worse, even though I wasn’t directly in the beam, the sunlight streaming in from the open door was hurting my eyes. I couldn’t get up to close it and like the sensitive tissue of my lips and nose, my eyelids were gone.
Hunger was also a factor that began to set in. Even before midday I began to feel the stirring pangs; the damage I’d caused myself had taken a huge toll. The cravings that usually started to set in after a couple of weeks I was experiencing mere hours after feeding. The pain, was agonizing and only fueled my guilt. The man I’d killed lay a few feet from me only a room away. My one wish was that I could be dead along with him. By dusk my injuries had become a mass of twisted leathery scars and I was completely unrecognizable; I wondered if I might stay that way, part of me hoped I would, but it was apparent than it would only be a matter of hours before I looked as if nothing had ever happened.
I don’t know the man’s name. I know it’s horrible of me, but I couldn’t bear to know. I didn’t look for an ID, I didn’t contact the police, or leave him some place that he could be found, I didn’t leave a note or do anything to give his family closure…I didn’t even know if he had a family. I waited until hours after dark and buried his body in a vacant field, then went back to my darkened little lair and tried to pretend that it was all a horrible nightmare. It would be an understatement to say that my first year and a half as a vampire didn’t go well. In those eighteen months I’d fed nine times, each time in a mindless uncontrollable frenzy. When I’d first changed I feared that the monster would take over and I’d lose myself completely, but reality turned out to be an even greater hell than I’d originally imagined. I lost control long enough to hurt people, then regained myself to live with the guilt.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over knowing that I took someone’s life, but I swore that it never let it happen again. Once every three to four weeks when I could feel the pangs of hunger stirring, I swallowed my guilt and fed. It didn’t take long to realize that if I kept the monster sated it was usually content to stay in the background of my thoughts and emotions. If I didn’t starve I could remain in control and I felt like myself. ‘Well…at least for the most part.’ My conscience ate at me for stalking and hunting people down every few weeks, but it was better than losing control and hurting someone permanently. Searching for someone and following them until I could get them to a secluded area forced me to be among people again, and eventually I relocated myself from the empty part of the warehouse district to a poor but relatively populated area of the city.
It was a little over two years since my life had fallen apart and the eternal nightmare began. I’d almost completely lost touch with the real world and most of the time didn’t even know what bloody day of the week it was. Up until then I’d resigned myself to living like vermin and was convinced, that a rat was how I would spend my life…How I’d spend forever. If ever the thought that I should pick myself up and dust myself off crept into my mind, I quickly squelched it with guilt and self-loathing. ‘I don’t deserve to pretend that I am normal, living amongst innocent people. I’m a murder and a parasite.’
Many of my nights were spent walking up and down darkened street or sitting on a park bench by myself. I wondered how I’d come to this point. At one time I was considered to have “so much potential and ambition”. ‘How could I just lose myself?’ I suppose I could argue that it was the fault of circumstance, it’s not every day that a woman is attacked and turned into a vampire, but really it all started before that. It started when I chose to give up my dreams for someone else’s. I stopped painting and traveling so Erik could build his career. ‘Why did I do that…Why did I give up my own happiness?’ I carried on like that for some time, questioning all of my decisions and mistakes. I wallowed in my own self-pity. One night an elderly gentleman sat next to me in the park and handed me a cup of coffee. It was the first time I’d spoken to someone in months, I don’t mean it was my first conversation in months, I mean it was the first time in over seventy some days that I had opened my mouth and spoken to another human being. As we spoke I sketched a picture of him, it felt wonderful to draw again, and to talk and laugh…to just be myself. As a thank you for the coffee and the conversation I gave him the sketch. He had made me realize that I couldn’t continue to avoid myself. ‘If I’m going to be this way for as long as I think I will, I have to find a way to be happy. I have to, because I can’t go on feeling this way forever.’
Submitted January 14, 2016 at 08:51AM by Lilgabbymac http://ift.tt/1Os6zSw nosleep
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