We Were Eternal Once

39. Waking

Waking

Adoor slams.

I blink, expecting darkness or dirt. I find neither.

I am in a room, but when I try to focus, my head swims. I double over, my fingers pressed into my temples, waiting for it to pass. My senses are dulled by the searing in my brain.

My head doesn’t just hurt, it’s as if a thousand blades have run through it. I rest like that for a while. I think I sleep, but I don’t know.

When I open my eyes again I’m on my side, my cheek pressed to a cold floor.

There is someone else here. I blink, trying to get them into focus.

They swim and tumble, multiply then become one.

I open my mouth to speak but my lips are crusted together.

It takes all my effort to raise my hand to my mouth, to press my fingers into my cracked flesh.

My lips are coated with something. I press my nail into it, flaking it off. My tongue flicks out to taste it.

Blood. And dirt.

Dirt. I was buried. I’d buried myself to starve to death.

But I am no longer buried.

My head swims again as I try to remember, the searing pain returning. There are flashes of memory—of my hand reaching out, of the moon overhead. Was I dug up, or did I dig myself out?

I cannot remember.

Why am I alive? I don’t want to be alive. I was supposed to die, to suffer for all the pain I caused. I cannot say it is for all the humans I killed, I am not sorry for that. It takes me a moment to remember what caused me to bury myself, the memories sluggish and stubborn.

My anger with you.

Zora’s death.

You and that woman in our sitting room.

The pain and sorrow and betrayal in the blood that fed the soil I’d buried myself in.

The emotions overwhelm me and my body racks with a sob. I need to return to the earth. I need to find some other way to end it, because time has done little to dull the edges of my anguish.

When I open my eyes again, the other person is still there. No—a body. The flesh on their face has rotted, outlining the pits where their eyes should be. A mouse nibbles at what’s left of their nose. The mouse doesn’t acknowledge me. I wonder if he’s taken some bites of me as I slept.

I push myself upright, ignoring the way my head pulses again. I have to pause once I’m upright, my chin resting against my chest. When I open my eyes again, the pain has subsided into a dull ache.

The room is filled with bodies.

I count twenty, all in various stages of decay. The smell hits me a moment later. It should be worse, but my senses are blunt. My vision isn’t sharp in the darkness of the room, I can’t hear anything.

I crawl to the nearest body and flip it onto its back. There are two puncture wounds in the leathery skin of its neck.

That explains why I’m alive. How I managed to catch and drain this many humans in my condition is a mystery.

When I starved and burned in that box as a newly made vampyr, it took many humans to restore me.

You told me all about starvation, how once you reach a certain point, the hunger is too much and you lose your mind.

Is that what this was?

Did a poor human dig me up, and I ate them and everyone else? Or did I smell them and pull myself free and feast?

Perhaps my memory will return.

I am so hungry. I push to my feet and clutch the wall at my back for support, taking shaky steps around the periphery of the room.

The room is crowded with bodies. I have to step over them to move about the room, nearly tripping in the process. At the far end is a door. I open it and there is another room. Against the wall are…

I swallow every last drop of the two humans I find in that room. I barely remember doing it. One moment they were there, the next I was upon them, my teeth in their neck, their lifeless body beneath me.

I push away, chest heaving as I swallow and swallow and swallow. My parched throat screams in anguish, my stomach aches with the fullness of it.

It’s not enough.

I want to cry. I need more. I have to have more.

I stumble to my feet and lumber through the room.

I find another door, moving from room to room in search of more humans.

I find only bodies, or trash, or items I don’t recognize or understand.

I blink without understanding at the box covered in glass in one room, at the box on the wall, at the paintings on the walls.

I reach out to the painting and take it off the wall.

It’s in a strange style, depicting two humans in a most realistic fashion.

I leave a smear of blood over the surface, which I greedily lick off. The painting is covered in glass.

I suck my fingers clean and move about the rooms once more.

There are thirty bodies in total. They wear strange clothes I don’t recognize.

That isn’t unusual, I’ve been buried for a very, very long time.

Clothing evolves rapidly through the decades.

I find a woman my size and strip her clothing from her.

I look down at myself—I am naked and covered in blood and dried dirt.

I cannot hunt looking like this.

I move through the home, looking for linens to clean myself with.

I find a room with a large tub and pause, blinking at it.

It is a small version of the baths from Rome and Greece so many centuries ago.

It was what I missed most about those times, being able to submerge into the warm waters and truly clean oneself.

The French favored wiping down with towels and using perfumes.

You and I both thought it unsanitary, and tried to bathe as often as we could without arousing suspicion.

I stumble as I approach it, pressing and turning things until water empties from the wall into the tub.

It is freezing but I don’t care. I scrub myself until my skin is raw.

It takes hours to get the knots from my hair.

I consider cutting it off, but other than religious leaders, I’d never seen a woman without hair.

I don’t need anyone to look too closely at me.

I dry myself with the rough fabric near the tub and look into the mirror in the bathing chamber. My face is sunken and hollow and paler than ever. My cheekbones are so sharp I worry they’ll cut through my skin. I trace the broken blood vessels under my eyes, pull free the dried skin of my lips.

It would have to do.

I put on the woman’s dress, socks, and shoes. They fit strangely, falling much higher than I would have thought proper. The shoes are practical, at least.

The night air is cool against my fevered skin.

The hunger grows again, gnawing at my stomach.

My vision blurs and tilts, threatening me with collapse just outside the home.

It was in the middle of a field—a farm? I see no animals.

The fields around it spread in every direction, fanning far and wide.

I stumble along the road before the house, taking it until it diverged. I go to the left and follow it until I reach the next farm and the next house.

There are humans inside. I can smell their blood from the street. My mouth waters at the thought of it.

My teeth are in their neck before they could wake.

I drain all five humans I find, leaving their bloodless bodies in their beds.

The hunger abates, sated for now. My stomach bulges at the volume of blood.

I’ve never drank so much in my life. It makes me lethargic.

I am about to fall asleep when a noise stirs me.

I move through the house toward the noise. My ears and nose strain for another human and find none. Yet I can hear voices.

I pause in the front room. One of the boxes speaks. I drop to my knees before the box, moving my hands over it to try to understand. I turn a knob and the voices stop, replaced with a buzzing noise. I turn the knob again and again until the voices return.

“Good morning from Radio 7! We’ll start the morning off with Amoureux Solitaires by Lio!” The voice stops and is replaced by noise. I stare at the box until a voice starts up again, singing. It’s French, but not the French I was used to. Some of the words I don’t understand.

The sound changes, another song. It takes several lines before I realize it was a form of English. I sit in front of the box until the sun rises outside, when I crawl under the bed of one of the humans and sleep until the sun goes down once more.

The box is still speaking when I wake. I listen to it until it cuts out for the evening, replaced with a continual buzz of noise.

I leave the house and walk back to the first house.

The smell hits me once I open the door, my senses stronger now that I’ve fed so much.

I need to eat again tonight, I can feel the edges of hunger.

I move through the house, searching for a clue to how I’d gotten there. The tattered, dirty remains of what I wore when I fled Paris lay crumpled on the floor. I find nothing else to answer my question, so I turn to the field.

It looks different than it had when I was buried. It takes me awhile to find the spot. There is a hole where I’d been with a shovel next to it. It wasn’t as deep as I remember, time removing the layers of dirt.

I should have had the human dig it deeper. I did not account for time disturbing my grave.

I sit at the edge of my grave until the moon begins to fall, then I return to the home.

I can find someone to bury me again, but that left too much up to chance. I can not risk being fed blood by the earthworms and the dead, or being dug up by a human.

I break the leg off a chair in the sitting room and turn it over in my hands. I could sharpen in, I could fall upon it and hope it hits my heart. I could compel a human to cut my head off.

Or I could live.

The thought gives me pause. Did I deserve to live? Did I want to live?

No, and—I wasn’t sure.

What am I without you? Do you even still live?

Yes. I know that in my bones, in my soul. If you’d died, I would have felt it. It would have been another absence, another hole, just deeper.

I will not make the decision this night. I am hungry and only just recently awoken. I should take some time to think, to consider.

I will make a decision tomorrow.