The Vampire Memoirs - chapter I

The Vampire Memoirs

Mort

As with many stories, mine begins with a death. The year was 1902 – I was seven - an innocent child- living alone with my sister on the cruel strip of sludge and poisoned water known as the Black Marshes. My father had died many years before- when I was no more than an infant - of sickness; leaving my mother - a corpse like creature, with blood red lips- to care for my sister and me. We were desperately poor; my mother was of weak health and often spent many months in bed, her once beautiful face drenched with cold sweat; her skeletal frame bent double; her lungs ravaged by constant, violent coughs. Tuberculosis, and in the bitter cold of my fifth winter she too joined my father in church yard.

Too young to work and too poor to pay our landlords my sister and I became homeless; nothing but our ancient farm horse for company. Destitute and cut off our home became the marshes. We slept under trees and on grassy banks in the summer; then in damp, moss lined caves and hollows in the winter. A cruel life; there was barely any food and often we starved; moving all the while amongst the gnarled trees and stagnant lakes of our bitter home. Death followed us in those months; his dark cape billowing in the wind; his cold breath shuddering down our necks. My sister – although older than I- was weaker and became ill within a year. A strange sickness claimed her body - leaving her unconscious in matter of hours - death hanging over her small frame like a vile cloud.
It was on the day she died my life as an immortal did truly begin.

The wind raged outside our hollow – we had made our home deep in the rock of a hill – the murky marsh ground waters sucking at the entrance, green tendrils of mist reaching in like claws. Usually the nights were impossibly dark - for we had no candles and no fire – no light at all in fact- yet on that night the moon danced bright, illuminating the hollow with its pale glow. Her skin whiter than the moonshine and her eyes ringed with purple my sister’s dying body lay in my arms, my tears wetting her cold face. Desperate sobs drowning out the disturbing noise of her wheezing, ragged breath. Outside the hollow our horse snorted loudly, resisting against the thick vines I had used to tie him with. Horses can sense death- they feel it’s draining presence in the air- and ours sensed it then, stalking us, slowly and soundlessly through the trees.

Night came and passed. The grey light of dawn seeping into the hollow, waking me from a fitful, worry filled slumber. My sister was alive, if just by a fraction, her breathing slightly less laboured than before. The tranquil breath of someone- although I did not know it then –who waits patiently for death. Then, brushing her tangled hair from her eyes I heard it. The horse gave a frightful snort and a whinny of panic from outside. Curious I gently laid my sister down on the damp earth I stumbled to the mouth of the hollow. Outside in the damp, boggy marsh clearing we had lived in for the past month the horse had broken free of its bonds, cantering wildly around in circles. Being only a small child, and young, I could do nothing but wait for it to calm, calling out its name all the while.

When- after many minutes- it finally calmed, the horse came to a nervous stand-still on the leaves near me, swaying slightly. Reaching up I stroked its nose gently, whispering sweet words into its warm skin, caressing the dampness of its neck. A strange dampness. Not cold like water or warm like sweat, but hot, like blood. Two thin scarlet rivers poured from a wound in the horse’s neck – drenching my hand and dress with warmth- soaking the sodden ground with red. Shocked and afraid I pulled back sharply from the bleeding animal, which had sunk heavily to its knees. Stumbling backwards across the slippery earth, I fell, catching the tatters of my dress on a fallen branch.

I was caught suddenly- before I hit the muddy ground- by a pair of cold, solid arms. The arms of my sister I thought at first. Yet as my saviour spun me round to face them- I saw nothing of their face but the blur of their dark hair - and felt the stinging plunge of their sharpened teeth into my neck I knew I was wrong.

My misfortune during life had been great. I had suffered awfully and was to suffer more still. I had been led cruelly by fate into the arms of an unspeakable evil. An evil as cold and as unloving as the marshes, as wild and as bitter as the sea, as unmerciful as the devil. A vampire. And on that dawn, so grey and clear, I was sure I would die by him.