Plague (English)

Chapter I

Just a little before gaining my apparent breath again, the darkness reigned eternal and sovereign. Slight deaf noises, hushed, as I was just under the surface of a vast and terrible black lake. I was reliving the sweet sensation of bewilderment that you feel in your mother's womb. But it was not exactly like that.I was still asleep or maybe dead but - even though the blood did not flow anymore in my veins - I felt that I was going to rebirth, gorgeous and immortal. In the moment in which I opened my eyes, my body ceased of floating in the void. At first, I could not understand where I was, nor I was able to distinguish fully the surroundings.
Then my hand moved and touched a bizarre ligneous object, coarsely smoothed. I understood almost immediately that the space was rather narrow and that I could not move sufficiently. Suddenly, yet - as a instinctive impulse -I stuck my nails - that had become long and sharpened - in a cover of a tapered shape. The robust welding shattered without any fatigue, as if it was made of crystal.Then I became aware of the place in which I was and - above all - of what I have become. In the air there was a mildew smell, an unpleasant and stale odour. Long candelabrums were heightening all around, set on marble plates, covered by fabrics not much valuable. Then, I focused on myself. I was wearing a white tunic which - after an more accurate inspection - resulted a shroud, a funerary dress, rather plain and bald. My hair, straight and black, had grown up disproportionately -  almost reaching my knees. The moon, was enlightening with her silver rays my pale skin and my eyes, that were painted bloody red, similar to two shiny rubies, blazed. I stood up with an unexpected agility and walked out the crypt. The stones that made up the walkway were humid and emanating the pungent smell of the decomposition. The night was clear, the sky was limpid and there was not any wind. The shadow of the silent trees, covered by dense moss and ligneous fungi, it hugely and spookily loomed on the ground made of weed and brushwood.
The field was disseminated by uneven earthy heaps and holes half dug. In several spots there were rests of great bonfires - indeed - there were numerous black points and ashes of wood, tatters and other objects, not actually easy to describe and creepy, carbonized. Sinister warnings in Latin were sculpted all over the place and it nearly seemed that Gregorian carols were resounding imperiously. The place - however - presented a carelessness so disconcerting that you could sense it immediately. It exuded from the stone walls and from the wood structures, both ruinous and humid. Already the ivy was taking its way, suffocating everything, eating the lifeblood of every being still in life. As I was saying - more or less - the night remained still and quiet. But in me, there was a strange worry. I got closer to a small pond exhaling terrible vapours, I looked into it, in the muddy and unhealthy waters. The only figure reflected was the pale moon. Nothing more. I was there, next to that watermirror, I was aware. Anyhow, there were not any reflections of my image. Prey of the terror, I bit my lower lip and I could notice that also my canine teeth changed in shape and length. They were much more similar to the wild animals' ones, rather than to the human's ones. But that sense of disgust towards the creature I became, it was all at once subsided by a sudden and impatient thirst. The thirst of that only, sublime carmine liquid, of which - at the only thought - my eyes still blaze as burning coals.All night long I wandered furious, trying to kill that disturbing and painful situation which - as I discovered afterwards - makes the research the only purpose of our existence. However, many hours passed and - as the dawn appeared - I was already burrowed in the darkness of the crypt, by that time fully aware of how much the solar rays became devastating.I spent many years in solitude, by moving to a high tower, in ruins at some points, but anyway inhabitable. I elapsed the night hours (when obviously the thirst gave me rest) under a cypress, reading the writings that I found in the higher floors of the building. Mostly, they were sacred texts but there was also a modest quantity of classical and epic poems copied and minutely decorated by those who - as I supposed afterwards - might have been scribe monks. There was - besides - a kind of wardrobe in a sort of bedroom and I found a great quantity of purple or black dresses, jewels and brooches. In any case, I spent most of the time in the inside of my cold tower, watching trough the railings the valley lightened up by the moon and the flight of the bats, whose shadows formed eerie figures on the ligneous floors of my sinister dwelling. It also fascinated me collecting the skulls of my victims, that I flayed with care by using my claws, and I studied them in the smallest details, I caught the most bizarre and macabre aspects. I had many of them and they were the most various. I put them on long plates of wood and I treated them with a cure almost maniacal and morbid. Sometimes I retained the skins, too. But - as it is obvious - they remained unaffected only for a short time. Anyway, I was very proud of them and I was able to contemplate them for an interminable time. When the sun rose up, I entered the underground floors and I rested in my wooden coffin. Rarely I expressed my will to go trough the habit and the monotony of my nights and I never walked away from there, if not just to calm down my thirst. At least until - even in that region - infiltrating silently, the scourge of the Black Death arrived. Then the food began to lack, although I was nourishing me exclusively from beasts and not properly from human beings. I still had no idea of how human blood was by far more delicious and satisfying.