Chapter 1: Evicted
Staring into a golden swirl of piss churning in the white bowl below me, I first felt the change. A cold trickling down from heart to bladder, a dryness in my mouth, twitching fingers. Brightness. The white brick wall was blurring away as my eyeballs teared and burned, and I had to squint.
The bowl before me was full of swirling red. My eyes widened, searing the retinas.
Retroactive sense would come, or mostly come. The slow reconstruction of events would have been easier if I had been a heavier drinker. Who, what, when, where and why. C’mon, you can do it.
The cold trickle inside my quivering body intensified, and my mortal blood continued to churn in the porcelain bowl.
Me … pissing blood … no idea when … somewhere on campus … after that bite. That bite deserved a whole new journalistic breakdown. That quick pale bitch … while I was walking home, lunging from somewhere … last night, or the night before?
Losing focus. The memory cards were still shuffling in my head.
The bite! Two hot points near the base of my neck on the right side, suddenly all I could feel. I reached to the wound with a shaking hand. But I had checked in the mirror, and there had been no pain …
Special wound, didn’t see anything in the mirror, seemed like a dream, thought the whole thing was a nightmare …
Getting out the stall now, flexing my bladder muscles to stop pissing. Irrational, as if that might stop me from bleeding to death. Oh, it was so bright. That’s so clear in my memory.
And the mirror. What I saw in the mirror. Can’t ever forget that.
If I had been thinking in any supernatural direction I might have considered any of at least three possibilities: werewolf, zombie or vampire. I’m sure there were other things from many other cultures going bump in the night and converting people with a special magical bite that could turn invisible and then come back. The delirium stirred memories and nightmares and even passing thoughts together. Looking in the mirror made me think of H.G. Wells’s invisible man, and suddenly I was seeing my crumpled student’s clothes held up by nothing in that mirror. How had they done that, in that old movie?
Thinking feebly at this question for nearly a minute, I then realized that I had no reflection. I was a slow learner, at the very beginning.
Well, almost no reflection. A faint red spiderweb of capillaries remained visible to define the outline of my face, catching even the details of my nostrils, lips and eyelids as I stared harder, the blood vessels floating as if suspended in perfect glass. I hadn’t completely drained myself. My bladder was straining with the last of my human mortality, backing up the whole evacuation process that would leave me perpetually dry, perpetually in need of infusions from the prey I would claim as a …
“Don’t say it,” I mumbled. But my new teeth bit my tongue.
So there was the answer, of the three options. No howling at the moon, no brain munching. Arguably the best option.
The old woman then stormed into the men’s bathroom and kicked me outside. If I ever learned what the hell was going on, it would be in motion.
For the completely uninitiated: vampires can’t just go where they please. Invitations were necessary for first entry into a residence. I had yet to learn all the complicated magical legalese involved in invitations and how some invitations applied to whole buildings and others to just rooms, the rules about guests inviting unclean spirits into homes that they did not own, the longevity of an invitation, what to do when the inviter died, etc. My immediate lesson from the old woman was to learn precisely why vampires had to stop and ask permission:
Unclean spirits were kept out of certain locations by protective spirits, by tutelaries. And she was one of them. And I was now quite unclean.
I had known this particular old lady for several months, my last human months. Another person in the school’s residence. She looked perfectly human, and sounded perfectly annoying and chatty. I don’t think I was precisely rude to her, but maybe I hadn’t feigned interest in her babble well enough, because now she was giving me zero recovery time. I had metamorphosed inside her jurisdiction and, to a vampire of such youth, she was about as strong as a grizzly bear. Frail hands covered in sagging liver-spotted skin clamped on my shoulders with that enchanted strength that all guardians can summon when challenged.
“Okay, you’re done pissing. Out!”
I wondered if I should flush. The bowl had to look pretty frightening.
“What are you -“
She flicked my chest. I hit the brick wall behind me with a crunch.
“You are unwelcome in this house, beast.”
Looking down – bent into a question mark after the hit, actually – I noticed that I could still see my hands clutching my aching chest. So I wasn’t an invisible man.
“Beast?” I held up my hands, squinting. No claws. Could I extend claws? These new teeth were so far just awkward, clipping my tongue and mushing my question. “Beeesht?”
She grabbed my ear and gave me the bratty kid treatment, out the bathroom door and down the hall to the stairwell and the back exit. The hour had no interruptions, though I would later learn that protective spirits can manage human witnesses rather effectively.
“Out, out!”
“What happened to me?” She heard: “Whash hapunth tu mesh?”
There was a pause, and then I was thrown, to land face-first in fresh spring mud.
And stay out! Maybe I imagined that.
Outside the student residence the frogs were chirping, the nearby woods and swamp loud with insects as well. It was just past midnight. The bedroom lights above me in the student residence were almost all dark, an errant lamp on for a late-night reader.
Beyond the parking lot the forest went on and on for many miles to the north and west, the forests of southern Quebec around the city of Sherbrooke. There was a ring of road surrounding the adjacent Fleurimont hospital, with the student residence’s parking lot poking outside the ring into a hunk of green on the map. If I had changed at the hospital things would have ended very differently, and immediately. The protective spirits in hospitals are particularly ruthless with monsters of the night; the old student residence guard was just a bouncer.
I had jogged these woods in the day for more than two years, and knew the trails. I was able to stumble away from the building’s light, from the noise of all those pipes and electrified wires. My new senses were still waking up, and the pain in my bladder was suddenly excruciating. I pissed out the last of my mortal human blood just outside the parking lot. Now I was a dry as a mummy.
Scampering away without dignity, I returned to my daytime trails, leaning on trees, taking a long time to realize that I could see all the trees with ease. Moonlight bled down through the canopy, but the uneven earth marked by puddles and roots should have had me stumbling.
The dryness. The absolute dryness. This wasn’t any kind of decent hunger, and the ache in my chest from getting smacked was throbbing. I was breathing – rather heavily at the moment – an old habit that would gradually fade.
Alone in the woods, my favorite jogging spot, my fun away from work and school. Listening now, hearing the little fast heartbeats of chipmunks and wood mice. Two bigger beats – those would be the two porcupines I had spotted on occasion, and night was their time to lumber about. Leaning now on the fence that separated the shallow forest of the hospital grounds from the deep woods, I felt the change.
These woods were stronger, the fence a territorial line. They were original, and they would be guarded as well. The guardians would take more time to find me, but eventually they would track me down.
At this moment, though, I only knew the vague power in the air that hummed louder when I touched a tree. My breathing slowed.
I know that I ate that night, though I can’t say how many small and furry things. I think I obliterated a nest of groundhogs at the forests edge near a road, tearing apart the soil in the frenzy of my dryness, my confusion and anger. Some quick pale bitch had clipped me with her fangs and now I was evicted and wandering the woods, eating vermin. Their blood, though – that soothed everything, even the anger for a time. Such a sweet drink from whichever beast. The turtle was as far away from human as I went, however, and the smell of the frogs kept me from even trying. Mammals were what I needed, juicy hot mammals with red blood, nothing colder and more primitive.
Before the dawn I had chosen what seemed to be the darkest spot in the section of woods I knew, a few paces off the trail but over a hump of granite, down the old rock and under a bush with a dead tree fallen to make a dark little grotto, full of pebbles and sluggish worms. Dignity was now quite outside my thinking, and when the first sunbeam in the new day clipped the top of the trees I shut my eyelids, feeling the creeping burn on my strange retinas and turning away from the light.
Chapter 2: First Day and Night
Image credit: Mario Hains