Nature of the Beast

The room she sat in was dark, the lighting grim and foreboding as half-burned candles flickered on broken shelves. Shadows danced against the peeling plaster walls. It smelled musty and dry, but there was a faint but undeniable aroma of death. Probably no more than the decaying corpses of a few rats below the splintered floorboards, she pondered. But, it could be more than that.

Brad sat opposite, across a table that appeared to have been recovered and repaired. He was slightly-built but had an air of confidence about him. He was lean and his skin was stretched tightly over functional muscles, the kind a man earns through hard daily labour. His black T-shirt had faded to grey and whatever was written on it had peeled so badly it could no longer be read. Beneath the collar, she could see a silver chain—white metal, at the very least.

"I like you," he told her, and sipped at a glass of blood-red wine. His voice was grave and deep and he spoke with a certain authority.

She smiled back and flushed slightly. She gave a nervous chuckle and said, her voice barely more than a whisper, "I like you too. I was interested in you as soon as we started talking."

She wriggled in her seat and reached out for her glass. It was roughly the same as his, but not a direct match. Nothing in the house directly matched anything else. She sipped at the wine and smiled at him warmly, sympathetically, and perhaps a little sadly.

He gazed at her fixedly under the gloomy orange light as the shadows shifted around the bony features of his face.

"Most girls are afraid when I tell them my secret," he said. A scowl formed as he gazed away into his own thoughts.

She watched in silence, letting him get the words out. When she was quite sure he had nothing else to say, she said, "I'm not scared of you." A faint smile fluttered over her lips.

"Are you sure?" he asked darkly. His eyes flicked up from beneath his brow and met her gaze.

She nodded back. She was quite sure.

He grinned back at her. "I've lived in darkness so long, my face illuminated solely by the light of the moon. I am doomed never again to see daylight. I shall never know the warmth of the sun on my skin."

She sighed to herself and sipped again at the glass of red wine. "It must be terrible. Is it terrible?"

He stared away into the distance and his eyes narrowed. "It's a terrible price, but I see this as a gift."

"A gift?" she asked thoughtfully. She had never seen it that way. "Being a vampire is a gift?"

He turned to her and nodded very softly, his head scarcely moving. "It's not what you think. We're not like you see in the movies."

After a long pause, she said, "Then what is it like?"

He thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "We don't turn into bats. I don't even like bats, to be honest. We don't kill people to drink their blood, we don't have long, sharp teeth, and we don't have super-strength."

She looked somewhat disappointed. "So what is it like?"

"We are immortal, I think," he explained. "We are made this way by the power of the darkness. We just have to accept the night into our blood until it flushes away all of the light and warmth of our human soul.

"We live in twilight. We are unique, we are separate, different."

She reached out and touched the back of his hand. "It must be very lonely to feel like that."

He nodded. "It is. I have always felt alone, but now I have embraced it. Now I have become the darkness."

"It's wonderful that you have embraced the darkness," she told him. "I'm so happy to have found you."

He smiled at her. "It doesn't bother you that I'm a vampire?"

She shook her head. "Vampires don't bother me. I don't understand everything you're saying, but I'm not afraid."

He took a deep breath and blew it back out noisily. A look of relief came over him. "I can't tell you how good it feels to finally meet someone like you. I've been alone for so long—there's been nobody! I've lived alone in this abandoned house, I've struggled so hard to survive, and reaching out to people on the internet had become the only way I connected with what little is left of my humanity."

"That is all over now," she told him with a smile. She squeezed his hand. It was warm beneath her touch, warmer than she had expected. "All that has finished forever."

"I have never killed anyone," he told her firmly. "It's really not like the stories. We're not bloodthirsty monsters, we don't rip open people's throats, and we don't have razor-sharp fangs that we use to suck blood. I'm not dangerous."

She gazed at him raptly, a look of burning desire in her eyes and she could feel her pulse quicken. "But you do like blood, don't you?"

He nodded slowly. "I'm fascinated with it. Blood is the water of life, and because of its power, it scares most people. That's why I'm so alone; that's why I don't mix with other people."

"How long has it been?" She held his hand tightly, feeling his warm flesh beneath her skin. "How long since you had human-contact with another real flesh-and-blood person?"

He shrugged and flashed her a faint smile. "A long time," he admitted. "I don't have any family left; I abandoned friendship many moons ago. I've been alone longer than I can remember."

"I see," she said. Gravely she continued, "You've lived alone in this abandoned old shack out in the woods, so there's nobody that cares for you, nobody that loves you, nobody that would miss you..."

He shook his head. "Nobody."

She smiled and said, "I'm so sorry to have to tell you this, but you're wrong. It is just like it is in the movies."

He gave her a quizzical look and his eyebrow raised on one side of his forehead. "What?"

She moved so quickly he didn't have time to even react. She flung herself across the table, filled with a burning desire that drove her beyond human limits. Her long, rapier-sharp teeth sunk into his flesh, pressing down first into his warm skin, shredding it, and ripping a jagged hole into his neck. He cried out in shock, a sound that would be lost in the silence that surrounded his cabin.

Her free hand forced his head to smash down hard onto the tattered old floor and she savagely ripped at the hole, her snapping jaws tearing deeper into the exposed jugular. Crimson blood gushed from the opening and she lapped at it greedily.

"No!" he gasped, a thin, weak voice that melted into nothing as his eyes peered around in horror, wide as saucers as his mind scrambled against what must have been confused panic. Each agonising snap of her sharp, viscous little teeth sent another spasm through his anguished body. His limbs flailing helplessly as his mind sunk further down into its base instincts for survival.

This wasn't a fight he had any chance of winning, and a part of him must have known that as his body went limp and he resignedly accepted his fate.

She stood gazing down at the mess. His body was pale and empty; his blood now filled her, and what she hadn't managed to swallow now stained the wooden floor. His neck was gone; his twisted, horrified white face was cranked over at an unnatural angle, supported by jagged lumps of bone that stuck out through the shredded meat.

His dark eyes gazed out into forever, piercing into the darkest layers of an unemotional universe where he had never dreamed that such things that had happened could possibly exist. He spluttered loudly. Bloody bubbles spat from his mouth and a crimson mist jetted from a torn lump of tissue at the base of where a man normally carries his spine.

"I'm sorry, Brad," she said with a sigh. "I really did like you, but I was hungry. It's getting harder to find food that nobody will miss. It's ironic that someone like me inspires someone like you to want be someone like me, which in turn inspires someone like me to eat someone like you.

"The world is a strange place.

"I like it though..."

A brilliant flash consumed her body and the black form of a bat flapped its leathery wings and vanished into the inky blackness of the night as Brad's home quietly burnt to the ground.