Quite high out of my mind, I uprighted myself on my island just in time to take a blast of dawn to the face.

“Ohfuckeverythingforever-” 

A rabbit carcass was in my lap, limp and half-drained, the fur light grey – like Bugs. The rabbit had a strange mushroom gripped in its incisors, deep purple and iridescent like a beetle shell, a kind of mushroom I’ve looked for but never found for all my eager searching – because with time this high would be a fond memory, a nostalgic ‘place’ that I would want to return to.

I gradually put things together. Rabbit eats mushroom, gets delirious, I drink rabbit, trip out into dimension X – that’s what happened. And that’s why I’m just staring at the new day’s sun like a moron while my front turns to ash.

But wait.

I wasn’t burning.

I was shedding. Like a snake. Even my eyes had scales that were now pealing away, the thin layer vanishing to leave less than powder.

And under that, the skin held together without pain against the sun. My eyes squinted, my pupils shrunk, but I wasn’t in terrible agony anymore. Was this …

Jean-Claude’s thought swam back into my awareness: scales from eyes.

“What?”

Orlok … Nosferatu, the first movie vampire, that story was a ripoff from Dracula. Count Orlok turns to dust with the dawn, but Dracula isn’t killed by the sun in Stoker’s dramatized account. It merely diminishes his power. Young vampires, I heard, don’t always know that, so they hide from the sun, but the burning … it’s just moulting once the change is finished, and now you’re set. Full-blown monster.

Rising on unsteady and bare feet, I felt the uncomfortable warmth of the heated rock through my soles. And the rock felt rougher too. Was I … human? Had Nanabozho turned me back? There was a thrill, and then a gulf of disappointment: I didn’t even get to be a vampire for a full week, and now I had to go back to human life? In a cubicle, in traffic, paying taxes, all of it? Well, Nanabozho would have approved of such a fate – but I still had Jean-Claude bumping around in my head.

“So after the first molt I can walk around in the day?”

You may not change form under sun except at dawn, noon and dusk, and your power above a human’s will only come back as the Sun starts to sink, after the strike of noon. If you get a wound between dawn and noon there should be a scar that lasts …

As it turned out Jean-Claude had read Dracula in full, not just the Great Illustrated Classics version.

“Can you tell me where I am?” Surveying from my rock in the young daylight, I saw forest all around, but no powerlines, no contrails in the sky … and my ears heard no traffic, though it seemed I was down to human hearing now. After leaving my rock, I quickly wanted some shoes.

Jean-Claude didn’t know. In the night I’d whizzed around the woods like a rabid bumblebee and finally collapsed somewhere completely untrodden in the wilderness of southern Quebec. And it wasn’t necessarily guaranteed that I had been tripping for just one night, I slowly realized. I knew that the St. Lawrence was probably to my north, and that I was probably closer to Maine than Montreal, but that was it. I don’t think I could tell the count of days by hunger just now – drugs modify that – and I had no idea what was in that mushroom. When I returned to inspect the rabbit and the deep purple shroom they had both vanished. And did I hear Bugs Bunny giggling in the wind?

Listening for traffic, I instead heard birds – mating calls, territorial chants and a determined woodpecker – and once before noon there was a loon that creeped me out in a sudden scream, because I was less than a hundred present sober. Thorns and granite and knobs of wood would trip me up now, and not wanting any permanent marks I was flinching and hopping about quite pathetically, also stopping to stare dumbfoundedly at common leaves and bugs and streams that seemed a little different. Because I had new senses that I’d never used in the day, or because I was still coming down?

Wandering in a vague circle without results for these first few hours, and then sitting under a lush evergreen to escape the strength of the high sun, I decided to pick up the pace once the descent into night began. I also needed to pick a direction, which was hard when you didn’t know where the hell you were.

South? More people, more blood … but did I want to meet other vampires so soon? Did I want to hook up with whatever covens or gangs they had, become a soldier in someone’s army to fight the likes of Wesley Snipes? Fuck that. I’d always wanted more time in the wilderness once I’d found a way to escape school and work, so I wouldn’t go south. But what would I find north? More pissed-off guardians, most likely, and I wasn’t looking forward to whoever was watching over bears. If I dealt with them I’d reduce my meal options with each vow, and more than a few would try to screw me over with worthless exchanges for that vow.

As noon began, I felt the tingling of extra strength, extra sight, extra balance, and whatever instincts still lurked within my new being. I didn’t need to flinch away from sharp sticks and rocks anymore, and I thought more rationally. I couldn’t be up all days – it would be safer to be hidden away somewhere, and if ground was patrolled I needed some sleeping hideouts. Up north, between cities in the middle of nowhere, animals guardians might get rarer, since they fed off human respect and love for animals, not the animals themselves. Getting screwed over by tricksy guardians every now and then would be unavoidable.

And when I did finally go south, and work out what kind of underground ‘society’ of bloodsucking freaks we were, I wanted to be stronger.

No drunken master, no Yoda, no Nanabush – so I’d do it myself. I bent down to the earth, still in the shadow of my big evergreen tree. No prayers, no empty words, just pushups.

After twenty or so I felt kinda silly.

“I need … Jean-Claude, your trinkets were silver, right?” I fished them out of my pocket. In the palm of my hand they had a dull heat and maybe a touch more weight than they should have – not sufficient as a dumbbell.

“That’s not heavy enough.”

Put it over your heart and say that.