DRACULA: A VERY SPECIAL FLAVOUR

The Brooding Beast - Part 1

Foreword - Continues 8 months after A flavour called Lucy.

LONDON, 2020

IT MIGHT JUST BE A STORY...THE STAFF ROOM AT WORK IS ALWAYS FULL OF HEARSAY AND GOSSIP, ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE IS A GOOD STORY UP FOR GRABS...BUT I HEARD THAT A JOURNALIST FRIEND OF MINE WAS DOING A STORY ABOUT THE RECENT SPATE OF GRISLY MURDERS AROUND TOWN. THING IS, NO ONE BELIEVED HER. EVEN WHEN SHE STARTED TO RANT ON AND ON ABOUT BEING FOLLOWED IN THE NIGHT AND SEEING A BLACK CAR PARK OUTSIDE OF HER PLACE, AND THE MYSTERIOUS PHONE CALL AND THE WARNING WRITTEN WITH BLOOD OVER HER MIRROR...

AS I SAID, IT COULD JUST ALL BE A STORY...BUT, WELL...I'LL LET YOU DECIDE...

-ANDY ALLEN-

VV

THE VICTIMS ARE ALL THE SAME WHEN FOUND...PALLID, WITHDRAWN...HORROR FROZEN IN THEIR EYES...

Andrea Darlington removed her specs and sighed at the computer screen. This damned story was doing her head right in.

Diet coke. That's was she needed.

She went to the kitchen and pulled a can out from the fridge.

She wished she stayed freelance now. But being freelance didn't pay the rent. She sighed again and pulled the ring on her coke and had a couple of sips.

HE FEEDS ON THOSE WHO ARE VULNERABLE...HE LIKES FRESH YOUNG BLOOD...THAT'S WHAT THE RUMOURS SAY.

Andrea shuddered, that's what that girls mother said. The one that had been hooked up to a transfusion machine in the general hospital for 3 days. She begged it not to take her daughter...but it did and now she was...gone.

But not after sending her mother around the twist, and made her cut her own wrists.

VV

"MS DARLINGTON...YOU ARE PERFECT FOR A STORY LIKE THIS...WASN'T IT YOU WHO LIKES TO HAVE WILD PARTIES AT HALLOWE'EN"

That's what her Editor had said to her. He called her in his office the other week, and said that there was someone going around saying that some abomination was going around stalking and killing girls about town.

Namely, the person saying this, was a excommunicated Catholic priest that talked to himself.

The one and only chance she had gone around his place (a run town apartment block in the back end of town) he had babbled on and on at her for hours about how the city was damned and that the evil was enveloping them.

The next day, he leaped over a balcony and killed himself.

There was her trying her best with this story and her first port of call killed himself, after a long rant about all our blood running cold.

VV

The phone rang.

She went into her living room and answered it;

"Oh hi...who...wait a minute let me just go grab a pen...what's the address...thanks' for that Andy...I owe you...bye for now"

She had scrawled down a Meg Westenra...458 Anderson Green gardens, London W5.

She tore off the pad and stuffed it in her purse, then went to get her jacket and car keys.

VV

OH...OKAY...IT WAS ME WHO GAVE HER THAT LEAD...MRS WESTENRA...I HEARD THAT LITTLE GEM FROM SOME GIRL I USED TO DATE...SHE USED TO WORK AT THE SAME SALES FIRM IN LONDON AS MRS WESTENRA'S DAUGHTER.