| | Here's a halloween apropriate story that I wrote several months ago.
I woke up tonight in a bad way. The dreams have been getting bad lately. I went into the bathroom and started the shower. As was my ritual, I looked into the mirror, but of course nothing was there. I only keep the stupid thing for other, I tell myself. It's for the occasional transient guest. These nights company is infrequent. I live alone.
When Rachel left, she broke every mirror in the house. She called them foolish, called me weak and childish. She was the child. We argued, as I followed her path of destruction from room to room. Sometimes I wander around the building, retracing our last, angry dance, and I wonder how she's doing, how all of my lost children and lovers are faring in the dark world. I last saw her in 2001. It was three months before the towers fell.
I remember waking up that night, watching the destruction play over and over on the news. I wondered what it meant, and I knew that there were secret casualties that September morning. There were deaths that would never be recorded, because the victims were already dead to the world. I saw the telltale signs in the way the smoke shifted and the dust blossomed. It was photographic evidence.
I remember buying my first camera. I was living in France at the time, and daguerreotype was the closest thing to magic I had seen in a very long time. Everyone was excited, so we procured one. We turned the lamps up so much that I feared we would burn, as though it were oak and cold iron on the skin. Still, every one of us sat there through the torturous hours, holding out hope. When there was nothing there, I was so disappointed I slept for a year.
Standing under cold water, I can't shake the sleep from my soul. I had a dream, still half remembered, about one of the children, but I could no longer remember which one. It had been so clear in the dream, but the face slipped away from memory, like blood through cobblestones.
I remembered London, in the first year. It was all so easy then, on the blood-ridden cobblestone streets. I felt more alive than living, then. So much time has past, though. I have learned in my time that it isn't the years that get to you, like everyone thinks, but the lives. It is the faces that fall through your fingers like grains of sand, that wash away like foam on the sea.
It was washing my hair, seeing the foam fall to the drain that I fully remembered the dream. I had dreamt of Anton, the barber. Than, in retrospect, had been a very bad idea. I had thought him necessary, but we had been vain then. I dreamt he was chasing me, holding his long straight razor. It wasn't like that night when war was declared, and he was full of rage and fear. In the dream, Anton was calm, slow yet fast enough in the way of nightmares. I knew that he had come to kill me, in the dream. He had come from Hell to take me back where I belonged. I fled in terror, through an endless maze, and in all my forms, slipping through grates and out high windows, but there was no escape from the maze, or from his endless, measured footsteps behind me. They were counting down my doom. Then, suddenly he had caught me, and was delivering the stroke which would cut my neck. However, the stroke never came, could not cut me. I awoke with tears in my eyes.
There were tears in her eyes when I caught her, on the streets of London, the one who got away. I had taken more pathetic ones than her, and my heart had never broken. But standing over her, sharp of claw and fang, the mask of the predator broke, and I found myself lacking. To this day, I cannot say why her, but that was my last night in London. There were men with stakes there, after that.
I turn off the water and dry myself off. There is no reflection for me to shave to, of course. That was what Anton had been for, all those lives ago. Then, ours was a large family. We had thought ourselves to be aristocrats of the darkness, taking what we wanted from mortality and feeling none of it. Those were hedonistic nights, of revels and song... and blood, of course. Always of blood.
A tendancy of modern horror writers which bothers me is the tendancy to have vampire characters that either don't have the traditional vulnerabilities, or overcome them through "being really powerful," as in the Anne Rice book in which Lestat flies into the daylight, but survives. If anything, I would think that as their "dark" powers become stronger, so would their vulnerabilites. Down the line, I would like to write a longer vampire-related work, but at this point, there's too much other work in the queue.
Nano is just two days away! I'm mostly ready, but this year I'd like to have a map of where the action takes place and where the characters come from. Like last year, I'm writing high fantasy. Last year's nano took place in a city over the course of one day, so I was able to get by only worldbuilding as needed, but this years is a more traditional quest-style story, so I have to do more background work for it
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| | Posted 10/30/2006 3:44 PM - 39 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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