AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“ ‘You will get stronger,’ Christopher told me, ‘but the color will fade from you as your blood changes. Your heart will cease to beat, yet, nevertheless, your blood will crawl through your veins. You will take in air out of habit only; you will need it to speak but not to live. And you will shun the day and its burning rays, because the daylight is for the living and the sun rejects us. You will live by night. But what power you will have! The power to suck the very essence of life itself and bend others to your will. You will live a long, long time—time enough to accumulate wealth and to afford many pleasures. We will be good together, Simon. You won’t be like Mother.’
“ ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded, dreading the answer.
“And Christopher told me. ‘Wulfram wanted me to kill her to prove I was loyal to him. I didn’t like it much and offered her a chance. But she turned from me. She didn’t love me anymore.’
“ ‘Mother?’ I said, softly at first, in shock. ‘You killed Mother?’ I asked louder. Then, ‘Mother!’ I screamed.”
Zoë shrieked and jerked back. The table had cracked. The glass was rimed with frost. Simon shook.
“I hurled myself at him, but I was slammed to the ground. I didn’t expect it from one his size. He grinned at me and gloated. ‘As I said, you will grow stronger—but not now. I am the strong one now.’ He turned.
“ ‘Oh, who do you desire for your first meal?’ he asked casually over his shoulder as he left. ‘Shall I bring home your favorite girl from that tavern of yours?’
“I pulled myself from the floor. ‘You said animals.’
“ ‘I lied,’ he said through the crack of the door. It closed, and I heard him slide a bolt home outside. It was then I realized what I had done.
“I stumbled frantically around that room looking for another way out, but there was no other door. I wrenched down drapery, meaning to flee through a window, but found none, just blank wall. I pummeled the locked door with useless fists and battered my shoulder against it, to no avail. I even tried to dig through the wall with a spoon, but the room had to be underground, with rock behind the plaster, for all the impression I made. I gave up, exhausted, and flung myself back on the shattered bed. I was trapped, and damned, with only a hideous corpse for company. Maybe that was when I started to go mad.”
Simon suddenly noticed the table and removed his hands. There were no cuts.
“He brought me a girl that night, a cringing young thing. I refused to go near her. ‘You will.’ He laughed and dragged her away.
“Yet night after night I refused, and he grew angrier each time. But I was growing weaker, and every time he brought me the offering it was harder to resist. Finally, he brought her in bound, and slashed her throat with a kitchen knife so the blood would run freely. He took his fill in front of me until his ploy worked, and the smell of fresh blood drove me wild. I made a mess of it while Christopher laughed and laughed, as if it were a great joke. But the joke was on him, for he’d given me the power to overcome him. To his surprise I knocked him aside and ran from that room, from that detested house, out into the streets.
“I ran and ran.
“I remember retching in an alley, wiping my mouth over and over with the only thing I wore, a ragged, blood-soaked shirt. But after that my mind broke with the guilt and disgust.
“I must have found my way to the outskirts of the city, to the fields, then to the woods. I don’t know how I survived. Don’t ask me what I did, because I have few memories of that time. I became a mindless animal. I did find that Christopher was right after all. You can survive on animals for a time, but it never satisfies—the hunger is never totally sated, it never leaves you, and it hurts. I know I killed people when I could find them, and anything else when I could not.
“It was years until my senses began to come back, and I made my way into the world of men again. By that time I was used to the killing, but never to the disgust afterward. As my memory returned, I swore to avenge myself on Christopher, for my mother’s sake—for mine.
“I have followed him for many years.”
“How did you trace him after all that time?” Zoë asked.
Simon smiled sadly. “It was easy, really. I followed reports of a certain type of violence—girls disappearing or found mutilated. Three times I even came face-to-face with him. I almost had him in London in the eighteen eighties, but he got away.”
“How did you get here?”
“I came over in the thirties. An ocean-liner murder reported in the paper tipped me off. I was terribly sick all the way.”
Zoë shook her head, “No, I mean this town.”
“Oh.…There was a mysterious spate of deaths at an orphanage. I had lost Christopher’s trail a year before. He had left such a disquietingly obvious trail of child pornography, it was as if he were taunting me, but suddenly there was no more evidence; the trail dead-ended just when I was getting close. The orphanage was the first clue since then.
“I went there. I had trouble at first, but because of my resemblance to Christopher, finally one of the administrators talked to me. I didn’t know what story he’d told, but I said we were separated by the courts, and he’d run away from a foster home. I explained that he wasn’t always very truthful, but that if I could just see him, I was sure we could set everything straight. She was kind but firm. This was impossible; he had gone to a home, and without any papers to prove my claim, there was nothing she could do. Why didn’t I have my social worker contact her? I don’t know what she thought I was up to, but I don’t think she believed me one bit.
“I left as if crushed, but she had invited me into her office, so I could go back. I returned that night, through a crack in her window frame, and read her files. I found out where he was, then I came here.
“I’ve been watching him, Zoë. I’ve seen what he does. You don’t want to let him roam free in your town. He drinks their blood, Zoë.”
“Like you?”
“But, Zoë, he doesn’t have to kill them. Not like that.”
“You’ve never killed anyone?” Her eyes were piercing.
