BEEP BEEP BEEP
I turned over and silenced the alarm. The duvet was heavy on my body, but I didnt want to get up, didn't want to have to face what this world had become over the last thousand years. Technology had taken over everything. People no longer woke with the sunrise, because they were only just crawling into bed at sunrise. Children were no longer learning to write with pen and paper, but to use mobile phones to send abbreviated words and smiley face stickers, they didnt read books anymore, they looked at small screens.
And what happened to fashion? Why did a girl have to show every curve, every possible bit of skin? I had seen clothes go from the rough woollen dresses of Anglo Saxon England, to the satin gowns of Tudor times, to the nylon stockings and woollen skirts of the 1940s. Now everyone seemed to wear denim jeans and tees, male and female alike. I remembered a time when a girls hair could grow so long it would drag across the ground, now it seemed that it was women who shaved their heads and guys who let their hair grow out. It was becoming increasingly difficult to tell who was what these days. So many human rights activists, fighting for equal rights of men and women, for rights of homosexuals and all the others that my poor mind just could not take in, despite the many years I had roamed and the information I had learned over those years.
From my birth year until 1928, I had not been required to work and to fend for myself, it was expected of me to find protection and care from a man. Once the women of Britain gained an equal footing to man, I began to work and earn a living so not to stand out. So for 88 years I had worked through the day in some menial task or other, and then work into the night hunting the monsters my father had once hunted. Though as the years passed, the worlds population began to learn of these creatures, through literature that claimed to be fiction and yet contained more truth than fantasy. The world began to fall in love with the romanticised versions of them, and began to hate the Hunters sent to eliminate them.
In 1897 Bram Stoker travelled to the north coast of England and resided in a small town by the name of Whitby, and wrote of an age old Vampire by the name of Count Dracula. As folk lore went, it was believed that Dracula was in fact Vlad the Impala from the 1400s, who sold his soul to the devil in turn for eternal life, to rid the world of the Turks who had killed his wife.
Stokers account wasnt far wrong. There had been a vampire called Dracula, but he had not been Romanias Vlad Tepes; though he did often claim that he was. There had been no romantic story for Dracula, and unfortunately for, no death.
Other literary pieces of fiction came by year after year, romanticising werewolves, vampires, even witches. While my own story became nothing more than a childrens fairy-tale, a bedtime story. Stories of a Hunter by the name of Van Helsing began to emerge. They claimed his to be a man who travelled the world to destroy monsters, from wolf men and vampires, to monsters made of dead mens body parts and personality shifting men.
All elaborate works of fiction. Though many monsters had slipped my net, my reputation was becoming tarnished. Films and books put Hunters in a bad light and made the monsters look like the prey, not the predator.
I sighed and threw the covers back. There was no point thinking back to where it had all started, and where it had begun to go wrong. There hadnt been a sighting or attack in years, and, in all honesty, it was nice to have a somewhat normal life.
Sure living for a thousand years in the body of an 18-year-old wasnt great but it was better than nothing. I had seen so much of the world, in fact Id probably seen it all, despite the border changes and the shift in the geographical movements. And it was a long time to be completely alone, cut off from the rest of the human civilisation, and of course I wasnt really entirely alone.
