Echo's Departure

Echo’s Departure

     She wants it all. Eyes meet in darkness as a cold cemetery wind blows across their bodies; minds meld with the discovery that they are kindred spirits; passion overwhelms any vestige of resistance. Shrouded in the moon’s white nimbus, they draw close like moths to candlelight and embrace, and forever after she is changed.        

     Love: for good or ill, grand enough to shake the foundations of all creation. And what's wrong with extremes? She thinks. Was not the blood of Christ spilled for love? Did He not say to eat and drink of Him to remember, to continue to remember the tenants of sacrifice, of an ideal love?

     Blood....

     They make fun of her; they snicker when they see her head buried in another book of erotic vampire fiction or of factual accounts of paragons of myth wrongly labeled. Creatures of the night. Her eyes skim the pages with reverence, keenly incisive, chopping through the fluff as if the words, the sentences, and the pages were dense jungle foliage that obscures many secrets.

     They laugh at her dark attire and outlandish tastes: striped knee-high stockings and gothic boots, black corsets with crimson laces, obsidian jewelry darker than ravens’ wings, midnight black hair streaked with silver, lips painted the color of aged red wine, teeth filed to fangs. “She isn’t normal,” they whisper, as if normal is the pinnacle of human conditioning.

She doesn't care; she knows it's real; she knows that if she's driven and does not lose faith, it will happen. She believes thought shapes destiny, that human potential and desire moves the universe.

     She searches seedy bars where they say her kind dwell. They smoke clove cigarettes and smell of incense and patchouli. They drink blood red wine and paint their skin the color of bone and wear Hot Topic clothes. Their bodies gyrate to the thumping bass of techno dirges. She doesn't like them. They are charlatans; posers who fell into this lifestyle because no other would have them. They waltz about and socialize like a cult of clueless aristocrats with a penchant for blood worship, as if their petty form of emergence strengthens their dedication to some imagined Goth pantheon. Every one of these establishments is a clone of the other and claims to be a keeper of a gothic sacristy.

     That is not what she wants. She wants the reality, not a lifestyle devised by pretender Wiccans and apostates too afraid to really live. Each and every one of these people is an echo, a fleeting thought, a glimpse through a blind man’s eyes – a glimpse of what she truly desires. They want it because they need to feel wanted; she wants it because it is her destiny.

     She strives and yearns for that which she knows has the possibility to destroy her. Did the nymph Echo not pine for Narcissus in lonely glens and grottoes until all that remained of her was a voice drunk with lament? Only people with courage attempt this, the real movers and shakers before they become legends.

     She calls herself Shadow now.

     Darkness is her friend and the dawn mocks her sincerity. She travels across the country searching graveyards and dark edifices with histories rooted in the macabre. She makes pilgrimages to places of hideous legend, and with each sad departure she hopes and prays the next will be her Mecca. She lives as a transient and sleeps under the veil of a night sky. The moon is a blur as she observes it through tear-filled eyes. She is losing hope.

     Nothing...

     She is alone.

****

     He skulks along the shadows on the cemetery grounds; grave-dirt falls away with each stride. An opaque fog follows him, skimming the surface of the hallowed earth and screening his rotted feet. Silent, he observes her sleeping under the glow of the full moon. Beams of pallid light, vespertine rays, shimmer through the nooks and cracks of the hunched and dying elm sheltering her with twisted, crippled branches. Her chest rises and falls with each unconscious breath. He hears the slow cadence of her heartbeat and trembles, shuddering in sync with her palpitations.

    The ancient creature is male, but time and mutation have made sex unimportant. He is ravenous hunger and voracious appetite now; he is bloodlust. This savage impulse consumed his gender long ago, leaving a sexless thing in its stead – a soulless horror, a husk of bone and sinew covered in dead flesh stretched thin like a scarecrow come to life, a parody of man.

     Adorned in decay and pestilence, he inches closer. The darkness converges around his presence; shadow and pitch gravitate and bend to his will. The fog careens around the gnarled roots, the primeval gravestones, crooked and misshapen like ghastly teeth that populate the grounds – cadaverous mounds of forgotten people. A keen set of ears would be more likely to detect the pitter-patter of the rats that scurry several feet behind him, careful not to follow too closely; they have learned that when he awakens there is usually food to be had.

     He inhales the cemetery air. She is fresh and alive, and her blood is plentiful. His skin is blistery white and bloodless, sustenance-deprived. He looms over her; she does not awaken. He exposes fetid incisors; they are near the front of his mouth, more rodent than canine. He wraps his bony fingers around her chin and throat. She awakens to his frigid touch and stares into his colorless eyes. Her heartbeat quickens.  For a moment there is stillness; he hears a haunting requiem, a banshee wind that rattles the dying branches and flowerless stems. The lament is a perverse contralto veiled by Nature’s normality and function, but he knows she hears it too.

She is warm, and the blood pulsing through her veins is potent. She paws at his face, and he snarls and laughs, drooling foul things. Her nails dig into the rubbery flesh of his bald head; clumps of dirt and dead skin fall away. He gently wraps his other arm around her back and waist as if leading her through some mock waltz. She squirms and twists to no avail. With ease, he lifts her into an embrace and stands.

     She is repulsed by his hideousness, by the bugs and many-legged crawlers that writhe and fall away from him as they struggle. She is crying; he forgot empathy long ago, but a part of him relishes the fear, a lesser sustenance is derived from it. He bites deep into her neck. Her body shudders. Blood pulses through her veins like the waters of a torrid monsoon, her heart beating like machinegun fire. He smashes her against him with orgasmic force. Their forms, they meld into one in the cemetery dark. His teeth gnash, dig, and rend as he drinks and drinks; she moans a final protestation as her heartbeat wanes. There is no pleasure or bliss in its quality. He drinks even more, a murderer of love and passion and dreams. He is laughing inside. She is dying.

And forever after, she is changed.