Vampire Reflections

It’s not as if I chose to be a vampire. I didn’t walk up to one of the old ones and ask to be changed into a blood drinking fiend. I really didn’t.

I thought I had struck gold when I pulled her. Tall, dark, sophisticated, oozing mystery and absolutely drop dead gorgeous. That turned out to be an unfortunate turn of phrase, given that the bitch lured me up to her room, and during a particularly intense spell of what I thought was foreplay, but for her was merely an aperitif, she sunk her hitherto unnoticed fangs into my neck and sucked, quite literally, the living daylights out of me.

I died.

As you can imagine, things just got worse from then on.

I think she was more surprised than me when I started to get up after she had finished. She said that less than one in a million who were fed on were actually turned. Then she picked up her handbag, walked out of the room and I have not seen her from that day to this. Everything I have learnt about being a vampire, I have had to learn for myself through trial and error.

Here are some facts I have picked up along the way. Direct sunlight is uncomfortable, but not fatal. Problems with crucifixes, holy water, consecrated ground and garlic are all just myths, they do nothing. Also, I don't need to sleep in a coffin, in fact I don't actually need to sleep at all. Now that’s not as big a plus as you might think. On one hand I do get an extra seven or eight hours each day to play with, but I actually miss sleep. I used to like the dreams, which obviously I don't get any more, nor do I get that feeling of waking up refreshed, because I never actually wake up. On the downside, I can’t do that mesmerism thing where people obey my commands, and I cannot change into a bat and fly. That would have been great, but alas, it is just another fiction. I was surprised to find that I do actually still have a heartbeat, but it is so incredibly faint that I am not surprised that people think we don’t have one. I say ‘we’, but as the only other vampire I know of is the woman who did this to me, so I have no idea of how many of ‘we’ there actually are.

The big one, of course, is the stake through the heart. I don’t know if that works, but given there is only one way to find out, I am not going to test it.

In the six months since I was bitten, apart from being technically dead, the only real changes I have found are, firstly, that I am noticeably stronger and faster than ever I was. Not just a little, but a lot. Secondly, even if I put it off for as long as I possibly can, I have to hunt. I need blood at least once a week. It has to be human and it has to be fresh, and by fresh I mean that there needs to be a pulse associated with it whilst I am still drinking it. Now, I know what you are thinking, you are looking at me as some kind of evil monster preying on the innocent, and I understand that, so I have tried to take some steps to lessen the impact. I do have to admit that if I drink from you, unless you are that rare case who turns, you will die. I will get rid of your body so you are never found and I do concede that this is on the face of it, a bad thing. However, what I try to do is offset this by only taking bad people to feed on, that removes them from the population at large and thereby delivers a net gain of goodness in the world, so by my actions society benefits. I know it’s not a perfect balance, but I am doing the best I can here so I would ask for a little credit for at least making an effort to deal with this problem in a charitable and civilised way.

The problem is that, surprisingly, it is much trickier than you might think to lay your hands on murderers and rapists, paedophiles and war criminals, and as a result of this I have been forced to lower the bar on what an evil act that warrants my attention is. Some weeks I cannot be as choosy as I would have wanted to be when I first started to rationalise my predicament. When I started I found a man who beat his wife when drunk, the next week I found one who violently mugged people at knife point in the street. Both of those were fine, but it dropped off after that. There were a few house breakers in amongst them. On one occasion I recall a drug dealer, I really didn’t like that one. He was certainly a suitable candidate, but I think he indulged in his wares a little too much and he tasted absolutely foul. All the same, and in spite of my best efforts, it has become harder and harder to find any suitable ‘takeaway meals’. Consequently I have been forced to be a little less fussy when it comes to who is food and who is not. As such I have decided that a person is either good or bad, that an act is either right or wrong, and the degree to which it may be thought of as wrong is not my concern.

I am telling you all this so you can at least understand to some degree why this is happening to you. If you would just stop struggling for a moment, the reason that you and I are here like this, is that when you let your dog do what it did on the footpath, you crossed the line.