I awaken, like most Mondays, in agony. Today, however, it’s not mourning for the weekend, stacked with the anxiety of having a full week of junior year high school ahead of me, but real, physical agony. I writhe out of bed, screaming as I fall to the floor in a naked heap with my sheets draped over me. I clutch at my chest where a blinding pain reaches out and rends my thoughts apart, leaving me to curl on myself in pure, atavistic reaction.

When I’m done grunting and whining through my teeth, having passed the shock, I finally notice the sound. The first seems normal enough, my mini-fridge humming beside my desk, only it feels like I’ve placed my head inches away from the radiator. The next is the birds. So loud and obnoxious! And why are there so many? Then the cars. Gods, the cars. Their wheels, gears, belts, pistons, horns, hydraulics, all of them rushing up and down the street, mechanical abominations grinding over asphalt, filling the world with hideous, gnarled static that scrapes at the inside of my skull. I scream again, clapping my hands over my ears, finding that this does very little to abate the cacophony. Still, through my knees and up my torso, I hear an electric buzz all around, liquids rushing and gurgling. From everywhere, comes a groaning that is not the voices of a horde of shambling undead, but metal and stone and wood stacked, precariously, into the shape of a two-story house.

Minutes pass as the world’s ambience tears through me and I realize my mom should have burst into the room by now. Where is she? I don’t even care that she’ll find me nude, I just need help. I uncurl a little and open my eyes, almost blinded by the light bouncing off the plain, white walls. I squint at my door and see it’s closed. Why is it so bright? I peek at the window, unable to see much more than a rectangle of ocular pain.

I make a blind, groping crawl to my bathroom door, gritting my teeth at the squealing, grinding sound of the mechanics inside the doorknob. I fall into the room and kick the door closed behind me, laying on the floor in a fetal position, wondering why my eyes are still dry when the urge to weep has been bearing down on me for what has felt like hours already.

The darkness of the room helps a little. At least now my vision isn’t filled with the intense, ruddy glow of blood, from light piercing my eyelids as if they’d grown wafer-thin overnight.

I place a tentative hand on my face and give my closed eyes a tender prod. The skin feels cool and dry, but no different than I remember. Then my eyes have become more sensitive? I don’t remember drinking any alcohol last night. Of course, someone with a severe hangover wouldn’t remember much, anyway. I know hangovers usually come with a pounding headache, but the only pain I feel is the burning streak across my chest. I run a hand across the flesh there, registering the texture for the first time and gasp when my fingers press against a moist surface, like rough, bumpy leather. I crack open my eyes, turning away from the brilliant light spilling in from the bottom of the door. In here, I can see without irritation, almost as if the light was on, but had been replaced with a bulb that emits an odd, bluish-grey hue. I stand, careful not to agitate any other injury I’m not yet aware of, and pad over to the mirror above the sink. I’m nearly doubled over with the pain still bordering on intolerable.

The noise is as loud as before, but it seems to be pressing on my consciousness less with every passing minute. I reach the sink and lean on it, one hand still cradling my chest, as if something might fall out of it at any moment. I look up and yelp, recoiling in fear and stumbling over my own feet as I fall back against the wall opposite.

Red eyes. Something looked back at me in the reflection with glowing, scarlet orbs where its eyes should have been.

I stare up at the mirror, expecting the thing to reach past the frame of the glass and crawl through, but it only continues reflecting a portion of the wall above my head. For a moment, I wonder why I’m not breathing like I’ve just run a marathon, then I realize I’m not breathing at all. I inhale deeply and let out an unexpectedly smooth breath. The air feels cool and strangely dry as it passes my lips and nostrils. I do the same, three more times, feeling no different. By degrees, I come to understand I feel no urge to take the next breath and stop after the latest exhalation, curious. I sit still on my bathroom floor for several minutes, unmoving, only attuned to what I can sense past the dying embers of anguish that crawl through the skin of my chest and the blaring of the world. Nothing.

“What the fuck?” I murmur when it becomes irrefutably clear that my body and brain have ceased to demand oxygen. For the first time, I look down to the wound on my chest. Three parallel lines of seared flesh reach from my left pectoral to the middle of my right-hand set of ribs, as if I’ve been lashed by a heated flail. “What the fuck!” I hiss again.

I lean forward and grab the rim of the sink, ready to brave the mirror again. I pull myself up until I can just see the top of my bed-tousled cobalt hair, then jack myself up with my knees, inch by inch. The moderate grey skin of my forehead comes into view, but even then, I can already see the faint reflections of blood-red light scattering off the specular faces and vertices of the painted wooden frame and glossy tiles. The eyes of the thing in the mirror rise in time with mine, their lurid glow noticeably dimmer, but no less eerie. I stand and he stands, I raise a hand and so does he, I give him two middle fingers as he replicates the actions exactly.

“What the fuck…” One more time. The overabundance of aural stimulation is becoming even less insistent with my attention and I can ignore it for more than a few seconds at a time.

I lean closer to the mirror and observe the burns, hoping to find some sign of what could have done this to me. I prod at the edges and find only a tingling numbness. Pain flares as I run a light fingertip over a piece of flesh that looks ready to fall away, forcing a wince. The red glow seems to brighten for a second, prompting me to glance at my reflection. Though my eyes have indeed adopted a brighter glow that’s steadily dimming again, what captures my attention is what was revealed by my grimace. I almost missed it, but my canines are noticeably longer, coming to clearly defined points, the likes of which I’ve never seen, even in the peculiar smile of those whose canines are abnormally pronounced. Done muttering expletives, I simply run my tongue over what I hope is a fascinating optical illusion. The points feel very real. I touch one with an index finger, wincing again as it punctures my flesh with surprising ease. I watch my fingertip, waiting for the bead of blood that never forms. Something feels odd about the fangs, as if they’re more solid than the teeth around them. Heavier, perhaps. Once again, I study myself in the mirror, looking for the classic signs of a vampire attack, but find nothing after a thorough search.

Fangs, red eyes, and no need to breathe, I think, as I realize I still haven’t taken another breath. I place two fingers over my carotid and wait to detect a pulse. I change places over the next few minutes, double- and triple-checking every spot I’ve been taught to look for a pulse. Again, I find I’m missing one of the most vital of vital signs. If the pain on the surface of my chest hadn’t been so intense, I might have noticed the lack of a racing heart inside of it sooner. I look back to the burn and think about the light bleeding in through my blinds. Light angled to fall directly onto my bed. I almost welcome the blast of returning noise as my focus fails and my train of thought is obliterated.

Snippets of conversation, the roars of distant engines, a cat’s yowl, a toilet flushing, all blissfully ordinary sounds of a world whose sky has not fallen. Business as usual on Monday morning. I step back from the mirror until my back strikes the wall and slide down against it, waiting to wake up. This doesn’t make sense, any of it. Real monsters aren’t red-eyed, fanged teenagers, they’re power-wielding sociopaths and the uninhibited insane. Monsters of a very literal nature don’t exist in the same world as the lady next door, who just fell off her treadmill, or the two married men across the street, arranging a tryst with each other in transparent code as they water their respective lawns. How could such banal concerns and activities exist in a world where a bump in the night might truly be the heavy footfall of something inhuman, coming to steal your life away?

They don’t, I decide, smiling and humming to myself as I wait to wake up from this nightmare.

And wait. And wait.

“Any second now.” I say aloud, regretting my volume as the words reverberate in an irritating blather against the tiled walls. The minutes crawl on, throttling my hopes and expectations with the passing of every merciless second. I feel my hands incrementally balling into fists in my lap as my smile grows wider and more artificial. I only notice the pain in my hands when it becomes worse than the burning on my chest. I open them to reveal shredded palms and blood-stained fingers. Thick flaps of skin fall back into place after detaching from beneath my nails.

I don’t know how long I watched, but by the time I looked away, my chest no longer hurt and there was no sign of the self-inflicted wounds, besides a modicum of dried, flaking blood along my fingers.

Dessicated sobs crawl up my throat, escaping me like tired ghosts, all the more disturbing in the echoey stillness of the bathroom. Tears never come.

The sound of my smartphone pierces the static in my head by virtue of sheer familiarity. It’s the unique text notification sound I set for my one and only friend, Rock. Though it sounds the same as it always has, the notes now seem to crackle and jag through the air to reach me. Lying on my side, I groan and open my eyes, feeling fatigued and parched, but too lethargic to make an attempt at hydrating. Can vampires even drink water? I don’t recall any myths that claim yay or nay.

With an effort, I climb to my knees and lay a limp hand on the doorknob. I steel myself and pull the door open, squinting against the brightness of my bedroom. It’s not as bad as before, but painful, regardless. The ringtone sounds off twice more before I reach my nightstand, where my phone lays. I sit on the edge of my bed, well away from the parallel lines of sunlight that fall across my sheets, and navigate to Rock’s text.

Yo Gyre where r u bro?

sick tday? I remember you said you felt funny last night...

Missed you at lunch. Ace was up to his shit again btw tell you about it later

I growl a curse as I read the last line. Ace Longshot, my personal bully since elementary school, usually ignores Rock, but when I’m not around, he knows he can get to me by tormenting my friend. Unlike most bullies, Ace has a brain that he uses; primarily, to manipulate others and find ways to make my life as unpleasant as possible without getting caught. Not that getting caught has mattered much, historically. Apparently, when you’re a star athlete, one of your parents is a decorated cop, and the other is the real estate agent that negotiated ludicrously good deals for a majority of the most affluent families in Canterlot, a surprising amount of people are willing to turn blind eyes to obvious harassment. I begin tapping out an angry response, but stop when I notice the tiny, crescent scratches appearing on the glass of the screen protector. I run an experimental thumbnail across the edge of the glass and suck air through my teeth as it leaves behind a deep scratch. I study my nails, noting that they’ve become visibly longer overnight and taken on a slightly darker hue, a yellowish or brownish. My own blood is still crusted beneath the nails, or rather claws, of each digit. Gods, what next, toxic breath? I finish the message and send it:

I’ll see if I can bait him into doing something in front of one of the principals next time. You know if it’s Luna, she’ll end him if I can pull that off. Anyway, I think I’m sick and I could use your help, but I can’t trust anyone else. It’s...hard to explain.

Sometimes, I feel just as bad as Ace. I know Rock won’t refuse, even if I tell him the truth. Since we became friends, he’s been more loyal and generous than I could have ever asked of another human being. But I haven’t earned a scrap of his goodwill. I’m praised by my mother, who says my dad would have been proud of me, and given heartfelt thanks from Rock’s grandfather, just for spending time with him. The truth is that I’ve no other choices. My own social status has had a stigma on it since childhood.

In a bid to gain the attentions of an elementary school crush, I once filled in her role during a Nightmare Night school play when she had broken her leg the week prior. My mistake had not only been in taking the part when no one else would, but in outperforming my classmates, particularly the students who had been given the two starring roles. In one fell swoop, I both ruined any chance at an ordinary social life and gained the unwavering attention of the bully that has hounded me ever since. Thinking back on it, at this very moment, I find it mildly ironic that such a pivotal event in my life took place over a whimsical rendition of the story of Van Helsing and his female sidekick, fighting the forces of Count Dracula. I was, of course, the female sidekick.

I’d like to think that I’ve adapted to the isolation resulting from the incident, but one can only be a loner for so long before it becomes a miserable, self-perpetuating state. Unless you’re built for it, which I am not. Thus, I came to know Rock through mutual ostracization. His slightly maladroit demeanor and overly eager-to-please disposition puts him off to our peers, whose dreams of glamorous popularity, seen only in the campy script of after school specials, keep them from associating with those who might bear too much resemblance to the televised icons of the gracelessly outcast. Further still, the fact that Rock and I experience a similar rejection and associate only with each other, compounds our situation in an endless feedback loop.

As immature and distasteful as my peers often seem, I sometimes find myself wishing I could have a normal life among them. Parties, clubs, group jokes, friendly gossip, perhaps even a girlfriend, the whole nine yards. During those times when I can’t appreciate the relative peace of solitude and I feel like I’m drowning in the clammy depths of alienation and anonymity, I can’t help feeling like I’m chained to an overwhelming weight, keeping me submerged.

Rock’s ringtone blasts out of the phone in my hand, causing me to jerk the thing away from me. The rest of the noises seem to have faded into a sort of background fuzz that only leap into the forefront of my thoughts when I think about it, as I’m doing now. I take a few moments to try tuning it out again, unsuccessfully. I give up and simply look back to the screen on my phone. The automatic lock timer ran out, so I carefully tap out my security code through muscle memory and open the messaging application again. I shake my head a few times to focus on the phone as visual stimuli seem to be obscured by the tsunami of input coming through my other senses. It takes me some time, but I manage to read the text:

Yeah no prob man! I gotchu!

Wat do u need?

I revise my response several times, adding a final, very important sentence before tapping the send icon.

Just come by my place after school and drink a lot of water before you get here. Before you say anything: No, this has nothing to do with piss, this is serious.

I toss the phone aside and bury my face in my hands. Already, the thought of blood sends a needy wave of excitement through me, weak and easily ignored, but with an insistence I can tell I won’t be able to refuse forever. I rub the sleep from my eyes and glance over at my dusty laptop. A top-of-the-line, custom built gaming rig with so much computational horsepower packed inside, the hard drive is required to be external. It died on me almost two months ago. Of course, I was devastated, at first, but without it, life had become surprisingly simple. I’d rediscovered hours in the day with which to study and engage in more wholesome activities than browsing the dregs of image boards and whiling away hundreds of hours playing mindless video games. I even recently signed up for parkour lessons, so I’d be less of an unremarkable dork, and started working up the courage to ask my latest crush to the Spring Formal dance. As beneficial as my hardware failure has been, I have a lot of research to do. I’ll have to use the computer in my mother’s office. Feeling trapped and resigned, I move to my closet where I pick an outfit of loose sweatpants and a t-shirt. As I pass the full-sized mirror I notice the red glow has completely left my eyes, returning them to their usual mint green. A sense of relief crawls over me as I realize how difficult it would have been to hide that aspect, had it not faded on its own. I check myself over in the larger mirror, one more time, for some sign of how this has happened to me, but the effort proves fruitless. After showering and brushing my teeth and fangs, careful not to disturb the shrinking, but temperamental burns, I trudge downstairs to Mom’s office.

Her computer is password locked, but Rock and I worked out the correct hash sequence with a few scripts almost a year ago. It was the result of a short-lived programming kick brought on by watching a television series, featuring a mentally ill hacktivist. I log in and bring up a web browser in incognito mode, then run a search for blood donation events and holding facilities, mildly surprised to find a blood drive only a couple blocks away from my own home. It’s scheduled to be held this weekend at the local community center. I can’t risk going without blood for a whole week. Still, I make a mental note and move on to the banks. One is relatively close to my school and another is closer to the city. Better start with the farthest one to reduce risk of the heist being traced back to me, in case something goes wrong. The drive would be nearly twenty minutes, so the walk is going to take several hours since I’ll need to go unseen for as much of the journey as possible. That means back roads, alleys and the generally scenic route. It’ll be a long night. At least I have the internet. Vampires in the tales of the dark ages would have loved what basically amounts to a buffet menu. But they also didn’t have highly organized police forces and sophisticated forensics to deal with.

I move on to doing research on my new form of existence. Turns out there are more versions of vampires than I expected, ranging from the classic pale-skinned, red-eyed, demonic leeches, to more romanticized versions suitable for fancy gothic castles, dinner parties, sappy love films or teen magazines. Thankfully, I don’t have much in common with the Eastern versions of vampires, with their malformed bodies and feral minds. Not yet, at least. Some myths claim vampires become hideous, rotting abominations when starved of blood. Others say they become more like zombies and simply begin consuming any living flesh they get their claws on. Mostly, it’s said this transformation is irreversible once complete, but a few sources claim to provide rituals or spells to return a vampire to ‘their former glory’. I decide not to put much stock in the sites providing lore that seems more like worship or fan-fiction. A few resources immediately stand out, however. A gloomily decorated, but expertly constructed site, bluntly named Darklore, provides anatomical descriptions with diagrams of a vampire’s logical physiology and a detailed breakdown of the starving transformation process from slick, refined predator to blood-crazed animal. The author, or authors, even highlighted areas where historical tales were incomplete or unclear.

Darklore provides links on their articles to numerous other resources, but one site is referenced far more than any other. This prolific site, Vitae Arcana, contains information about the biological theory of mythical creatures, including a huge section on vampires, and how they could or should function. The site is clean and concise, without decoration. More like a medical journal than a site full of speculative information based on fiction. Curious, I follow the links to a page that lists the researcher credentials, finding an immense list of names that take up several scroll-wheel rotations to view. Many of the names are prefixed with titles like Doctor, Professor, and, in a number of cases, even Provost or Vicar. Running searches on some of the names turns up mostly aliases for obscure forums, social media sites, or browser game archives. A few names return historical records of long-dead men and women. After the third such result also turns up articles about homicide investigations, and even a strange suicide, I begin to wonder if I’m poking into something with dangerous depths. How have I not already heard of something so overtly suspicious? Beneath the list of names, a line of text reads:

In memory of my friends, family, and beloved colleagues, I dedicate the sharing of this knowledge to the brilliant men and women whose lifelong work is compiled here, for all, for the future.

- E.G.

The words ‘brilliant men and women’ are blue, indicating a hyperlink. I follow it to a page that loads slowly, due to the sheer number of photographs on display. The top left of the page bears the words, in tasteful script font, “Our brave and ardent forebears…”. The grainy, black-and-white photo nearest this is an obviously scanned original. One of the subjects is a rugged, smiling, middle-aged man posing for the camera on an ornate, straight-backed chair. He’s missing an arm, indicated by a neatly pinned right sleeve on his vintage-style overcoat. Four nearly parallel scars trace rough lines across the left side of his face. A somewhat younger-looking woman stands behind the chair, one scarred, spidery hand that’s missing a middle finger rests on the shoulder of the man’s intact arm. She wears a corset-style dress and her long, pale hair hangs loose over her shoulders and back, a socially unacceptable hairstyle for women, long ago. Though her small nose, full lips, and round eyes are endearing and feminine, her slight squint and tight smile betray a personality more often described in the lines across the face of a crusty military officer. The first few dozen photos contain similar subjects and poses, sometimes alone, sometimes in larger groups, many bearing scars or missing limbs that often seem to have been acquired between photos, for those that appear in more than one. These blemishes and injuries begin to subside as I scroll further down and the photos become more modern. The last photo is of excellent quality, but the color and grain is evidence that it was taken in a decade when palm-sized multi-megapixel camera phones were abstract theoretical concepts. A man in his late fifties or sixties, holding a silver-topped cane, stands beside a seated man who looks at least two decades older, in much the same pose as the first photo. The two men are clearly related and dressed in similar modern business suits. A full mane of crimson red hair shows only a few grey streaks on the younger man while the older man’s hair is a thinner, inverted version of the same colors. The younger man is a parchment yellow and the elder is a pinkish peach. Somehow, the younger man looks less virile than whom I assume is his father. I look around the page to see who these last two men are, but the site provides no details on their identity.

Perhaps, if the subjects of this photo are still alive, they might be able to provide me with insight into my condition. At a distance, of course. Revealing to a scientist or priest that I’m a vampire sounds like a quick way to get hunted and, ultimately, end up on an autopsy table or a burning stake. I download copies of the latest photos and navigate back to the Darklore forums where I perform a quick search for threads discussing the Vitae Arcana accreditees. Finding nothing, I make an account, start my own thread and upload the photos, inquiring if anyone can identify the subjects.

I return to the articles on Vitae Arcana and peruse the vast section on vampires. It begins with the description of simple biological processes, many of which can be likened to the usual suspects in the animal kingdom, vampire bats, leeches, etc., but the terminology grows maddeningly complex around the third paragraph and I can only catch sidelong glimpses of the advanced physical and biological concepts described. I resolve to study more. A lot more.

Before I knew it, the morning had hardened into a day and the day is beginning to dissolve into late afternoon. School will be out in less than an hour and I haven’t the slightest clue on how to broach my situation with Rock.

How does one break this kind of news? If I learned anything today, it’s that interpersonal relationships are pretty low on the priority list for vampire research outside eroticism and worship. Sure, I could read one of those cheesy novels or watch something on the matter, but I can’t fool myself into thinking the reactions I’d observe are anything but pre-arranged fantasy. There’s nothing else to do but to wing it. I groan and lean back in the office chair, staring up at the ceiling. Thoughts whiz past, over, under, and through each other, forming newer, stranger, and more terrifying ruminations as they collide. I’ve raised far more questions than answers in my bumbling search for insight.

What kind of vampire am I? Will it be too late when I know? How do I figure it out safely? Who can I really trust? Is this actually happening? Has it happened to anyone else? Will it happen to anyone else? How? Why?

The static only continues to build as I rest my head on the back of the chair. I lock the computer again and wander into the living room where I sink into my mom’s favorite reading chair. Leaning back, I close my eyes and promptly lose myself in the blast of auditory information. The world cries with its usual, innocent chaos, as if nothing has changed. As if the birth of a new monster means as little as the death of an infertile insect. The clock chirps thrice, signalling a half-hour to the end of the school day, then moves indifferently on, as if it had only been patronizing my tiny existence by marking the arbitrary hour with a birdsong as short and meaningless as human life.

When did I get into such a dark mood?

A stillness seems to descend on the world. I hear a vehicle pass near my house. Or was it far away? The ticking of the clock seems to grow distant while remaining perfectly clear. Space and time suddenly feel meaningless. Alarmed, I cock my head to the side as I sense something new. It takes several moments, but I begin to perceive an irregular humming. Its bassy thrumming seems to vibrate the innards of my skull and I can’t tell if I’m actually hearing a sound or feeling the earth tremble. It starts and stops in a pattern that might be speech, but I can’t make out a word. It’s like trying to comprehend a language composed of thunder while submerged in water with ears full of cotton. Without warning, the thrumming begins to intensify. There’s no pain, but I sense my mind growing numb. Though I know my eyes are wide open, I see nothing, not even blackness. I can’t feel my body nor smell. All I know is the sound. It demands my attention. Five beats. Repeating, growing more insistent, louder. Angrier?

I am consumed, overwhelmed by a cyclone of alien perceptions and senses that threatens to tear my mind apart.

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Beat The Devil's Tattoo

Proofread by sevenofeleven

I hope you'll come back next week for Chapter 2!