Loneliness
As Victor walked down the unlit, lonely street of what could be described as either a small city or a large town, he had no difficulty finding his way, even though the night was black as pitch. There were no streetlights, and the moon and stars were obscured by a dense layer of cloud; but, like a cat, his eyes were accustomed to seeing in the darkness.
A light rain began to fall as he approached the entrance of The Chamber. Two young people, dressed head to toe in black, hurried through the entrance just ahead of him. The Chamber was not that large of a place, having just a dozen or so tables, a make-shift stage and a bar, but it was one of the few places in that part of the city that was still open at four in the morning.
The interior of the gothic club was as dark and dreary as the night outside. The walls were painted a flat black, and dark purple velvet drapes covered the windows, shutting out every inch of the outside world. Flickering artificial candlelight from eight gaudy Victorian-era chandeliers provided the only illumination other than the burning candles in the center of each table.
An attractive, slender, crimson-haired young woman, wearing a provocative outfit that consisted of black leather, scarlet lace and safety pins, sat on a wooden stool in the center of the small stage, holding a single red rose and reciting poetry.
"Loneliness," she cried out dramatically in a sensuous voice, too low in pitch for one of her age and gender, "is a malignant tumor, a cancer that consumes my happiness and a ruthless, barbaric invader who rapes my peaceful slumber. Solitude is a devouring worm that eats into the apple of my soul. Isolation is a virus that infects my mind."
Victor smiled. The beautiful performer may have been many things, he thought, but she was no poet, at least not when one compared her visceral verses to those of Byron, Keats and Shelley.
He sat down at the bar and ordered a glass of red wine. As he sipped it, he watched the poet recite her ode to the inattentive audience.
"Loneliness," she concluded in a whisper, "shall be the death of us all."
Her performance over, the redhead left the stage, briefly talked to several admirers sitting at the front tables and then made her way to the bar.
"I've never seen you here before. New in town?" she asked, taking the glass from Victor's hand and swallowing the last of his wine."
Her real voice was much higher than the one she used on stage. It made her sound more like a child than a grown woman.
"Do you know everyone who comes in here?"
"Just the good-looking men," she replied with a mischievous wink.
Victor returned her inviting smile.
"Are you paid for performing here?"
"Nah. At The Chamber, it's open mike night twenty-four/seven. Anyone who feels like emoting can go up on stage and give voice to his or her pain. It's like group therapy in a way."
"Does it help?"
"Sometimes. There are a lot of painkillers in the world. When this one doesn't work, I try something stronger."
"Such as?"
The young woman eyed Victor with suspicion.
"Are you a cop or something?"
"No. I'm just a stranger in town with nowhere to go."
The smile returned to the redhead's face.
"I know a nice, quiet place that's perfect for strangers."
Victor left a few dollars on the bar and followed the poet outside. As they left The Chamber behind, the attractive young woman placed her arm around her companion.
"Don't you know it could be dangerous picking up strange men in bars?" he asked.
"Now you sound like my father," the girl laughed. "He's afraid that every man I meet at The Chamber is either a rapist or a serial killer. But I'm not afraid. Besides, strange, handsome men are the only cure to what ails me."
"And what is that?"
"Loneliness. Chronic loneliness. Debilitating loneliness," she said as though reciting another of her poems.
"What do you know of loneliness?" Victor asked forlornly. "You're what ... nineteen? Twenty? You're just a child."
"You make yourself sound so old," she teased. "You don't look a day over twenty-five."
"Actually, I'm much older than I look."
The young woman renewed her attempt at seduction.
"I'll bet a good-looking guy like you has never been lonely a day in his life."
Victor shook his head.
"And you'd be wrong. Loneliness, like death, is waiting to claim us all."
"Hey, I like that. Mind if I use it in one of my poems?"
"Be my guest. But tell me, are you really that lonely?"
The young woman was pleased with the way the conversation was going. The handsome stranger seemed to be taking an interest in her.
"Yes. In fact, I get so lonely sometimes that I wish I were dead."
Victor took the melancholy poet into his arms, and she laid her head on his broad shoulder. As his fingers delighted in the silky feel of her long, red tresses, his lips gently kissed her cheek and then made their way to her soft, inviting neck. He felt her stiffen, momentarily struggle, shudder and then finally go limp in his arms. Victor let the young woman's body fall to the cold, wet ground. Then he took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her blood from the corners of his mouth.
"I am truly sorry you had to die, my dear, but at least you'll be spared the torment of any further loneliness."
With a heavy sigh, Victor closed the dead girl's lifeless green eyes and quietly disappeared into the night.
* * *
Another nondescript street. Another nameless town. Another empty night. Another irresistible craving for human blood. Victor had been trapped in the same vicious cycle for more than four centuries. As he walked down the dark road, he recalled the pretty, red-haired young woman he had met at The Chamber six months earlier, the girl who had thought it was so poetic to speak of loneliness. Victor knew better. Loneliness was not some fleeting emotion like anger, sadness or joy. True loneliness, as only his kind knew it, was a curse, a life sentence to an unbearable hell.
In his four-hundred-plus years on this earth, Victor had experienced what had seemed like an eternity of loneliness and despair. He had known love many times only to repeatedly suffer the agony of its loss. Before his transformation, he had been engaged to be married. Sadly, his betrothed became his first victim. After her death, he had hoped to find another woman to share his life, but to do so he had to bestow upon his chosen mate the gift of immortality, to make her a creature of the night like himself. Yet each time he bequeathed eternal life to a mortal woman, her love for him turned to resentment, anger and eventually hatred. Not one of his potential wives had wanted to live as he did, eschewing the light of day and feeding off the blood of innocent human beings by night.
It was not that Victor enjoyed being what he was. He was not a monster. He had no desire to kill unsuspecting people like that gothic poet from The Chamber. It was a simple matter of survival. It was either them or him, and he had a strong sense of self-preservation. At first he, too, hated what he had become. He loathed the killings and detested the hunt. After a century or so, however, he eventually accepted his fate and pushed the death of his victims from his mind in much the same way as an animal-loving human tries not to think about the slaughter of cows as he bites into a juicy hamburger or the mass extermination of baby chicks when he dips a chicken nugget into a cup of honey mustard or barbecue sauce. It's true that humans, animals and even the undead are all God's creatures, but they are all part of the food chain nonetheless.
The only thing about being a vampire to which Victor could not adjust was the loneliness. There was no woman in his life, no family and no friends. He was doomed to walk the dark streets at night without companionship of any kind.
"Will I ever be able to put my wretched solitary state out of my mind?" he asked himself many times. "Will I ever grow to accept it as I have accepted the other disadvantages of being what I am?"
Only time would tell, and he had plenty of time ahead of him.
* * *
As Victor cautiously approached the small, isolated farmhouse, he felt a strange sensation of familiarity, of what humans called déjà vu. It was patently absurd. He had never been there before, never even been in that part of the state. A wily predator, he always made it a point after feeding to move on, to put distance between himself and his victims. That way he could avoid suspicion and possible capture. Why then did he feel such an attraction to this place?
Under the cover of darkness, he crept up to the window of the farmhouse and peered inside. At first, he saw no one. Then a woman came downstairs into the living room. The shock of recognition left Victor momentarily dazed. The beautiful, blond, goddess of a creature who stood before him was one of his own kind!
The female immediately sensed his presence, turned and saw him through the window. She went to the door and invited him inside. The two vampires then stood face to face in the hallway of the old farmhouse. Male and female silently eyed each other for several moments. It was the female who spoke first.
"I haven't encountered another of our kind in a long while, not since I left Europe many, many decades ago."
"Me either," Victor said. "I know there are a few of us around, but most prefer to stay in the large cities, hiding in plain sight. What are you doing in this house?"
"I live here," the female replied.
"Isn't staying in one place dangerous for those like us, especially in rural areas where people are more easily missed?"
"No. You see, I stopped preying on humans more than a century ago, so there is no reason for anyone to suspect me. And I move from time to time so that no one questions why I maintain a youthful appearance as they grow older."
"I don't understand. If you don't feed, how can you survive?"
"I live on the blood of animals that I raise solely for that purpose."
Victor grimaced. He had heard rumors of vampires that tried to substitute animal blood for that of humans or had tried to exist on hospital blood supplies. Surely these alternative sources were unsatisfying meals that did little to ease the cravings that drove his kind out into the night.
"You don't believe feeding off animals is appropriate, do you?" the female asked.
"It's not in our nature."
"That's true, but I never liked living in the wild, striking without warning and then disappearing into the night like a common thief. Now I have a home, a place where I can rest peacefully during the day, in complete safety. I am happy here, at least as happy as one of us can be. I lack only ...."
"... a mate," he finished her sentence.
"You know how it is with us. Those we make vampires can never forgive us, just as I will never forgive the one who bit me even though many centuries have passed since that night."
"But you," the male said, feeling a flicker of hope he thought dead for more than two centuries, "are like me already. We are the same. Perhaps we could be together."
"Would you be content to live like this? Never again tasting human blood, never stalking your prey in the night?"
"If it meant an end to my cursed loneliness—yes. I would make any sacrifice to know love again, to have someone to share my life with."
Victor found life with Donatella, the beautiful female vampire, well worth the domesticity of his current situation. In fact, after several months of his new diet, he began losing the desire for a tender human throat and warm, slightly salty Homo sapien blood. He even learned to care about the cattle on which he and his beloved bride fed. They consumed just enough to sustain themselves without killing the harmless beasts. For the first time in four centuries, Victor was happy. He had a female of his own kind to love, one who would not turn on him in anger or grow old and die while he lived on as a lonely, miserable creature.
A year passed, and Victor's happiness continued to grow. Donatella was the most enchanting female he had ever met—human or vampire. With the beautiful, loving blonde by his side, he no longer dreaded the centuries ahead of him since they would not be blighted by loneliness.
* * *
Police Chief Merle Foley stared at the big city private detective sitting across the desk from him and tried to suppress a smile.
"You're tracking a what?" he asked in amused disbelief.
"A vampire," Ramsey Godwin replied with a straight face. "An inhuman, blood-sucking monster that has left a long trail of bodies behind it, including that of a young woman whose father is now my client."
Foley looked at the man's credentials and letters of introduction. Whether the private eye was crazy or not, the police chief could not be sure, but Godwin was indeed a qualified and experienced investigator: a retired, highly decorated New York City homicide detective.
"I know what you're thinking," Ramsey said. "I would have thought the same thing once. That was before my client's eighteen-year-old daughter was found with every ounce of blood drained from her body."
"But a vampire? Come on! Perhaps an animal got her," Foley suggested. "A wolf or a coyote. Maybe even a bear."
Godwin shook his head impatiently. He had already gone through the various alternatives dozens of times himself, refusing at first to consider the reality of the undead.
"It was no wild animal that killed her," the detective stubbornly insisted. "At least not the usual kind. During the past year and a half, I've contacted dozens of police departments and read hundreds of missing persons reports. I then plotted the vampire's victims on a map. The trail of bodies ends with a young teenager killed about a year ago in a small town less than five miles away from here."
"A year ago?" Foley echoed. "What makes you think the killer would stick around for a year waiting to be caught?"
"Because there's been no trace of another victim since then."
"Perhaps he is dead. There was a John Doe hit by a car last year. Maybe that was him."
"It's not a he or him I'm looking for but an it. A vampire is no longer human. It won't die if it gets struck by a car, not even if it is run over by a Mack truck."
"If what you're saying is true, what are you going to do when you find it? Take it back to the city and throw it in prison?"
"No, my client doesn't want to risk the monster ever escaping. When I find the creature, I plan on destroying it."
"Now, look here, city feller," Foley said sternly, "I'm the law in these parts, and I ain't gonna sit back and do nothing while you drive a stake through a person's heart just because you suspect him of being a vampire."
"You watch too many movies, chief. I don't need a stake to destroy it. I'll just bring it out into the sunlight. It's by far the easiest way to rid the world of one of the undead."
* * *
"Are you sure this is the place?" Foley asked the detective.
"Yes. I talked to several of the people down at Bill's Tavern. It seems they've had their suspicions about this farm for some time now."
"Hell, you can't trust those drunken fools. Most of them claim to have seen UFOs landing in their backyards."
"I was here yesterday," the detective explained. "I had a good look at the cattle. Every single one of them has been bitten."
Chief Foley, Deputy Enis Norbeck and the private detective stood in a thicket of trees waiting for the sun to rise.
"You got that warrant with you?" Foley asked his deputy.
Ramsey was amused by the police chief's question.
"You went before a judge to get a search warrant? I would love to have seen you explain our quest to him."
Foley's face reddened.
"Actually, I didn't reveal the true nature of our investigation. I told him we were after drug-dealing radicals. You see, the judge is a good ol' boy; he hates liberals, communists, atheists and minorities—you know the type."
"He's for redneck justice, right? Not above a little Saturday night lynching?"
"I guess things are different where you come from. All those big city lawmen running around armed with garlic and crucifixes."
Godwin laughed good-naturedly.
"All right, chief. How about a truce?"
Foley smiled, spit and answered, "Fine with me, Professor Van Helsing."
As the early morning sun came up over the fertile green fields of the isolated farm, an uneasy stillness lay on the land.
"That's odd," Foley said. "Most farmers I know are out milking cows, feeding chickens and tending their crops come sun-up."
"This is no ordinary farm."
Foley signaled to his deputy.
"Let's go."
The police chief forcefully knocked on the farmhouse door.
"This is the police," he announced loudly.
There was no response from within. He waited a few minutes and knocked again. There was still no reply. He drew his gun and indicated to the detective and the deputy to do the same.
"All right. We're going in."
The living room was no different from those found in houses all across America. It was properly furnished with a couch, two easy chairs, two end tables, a coffee table and a television.
"I never knew vampires watched TV," Foley joked.
Godwin ran his finger over the coffee table. There was no dust on it.
"Everything looks normal to me," Deputy Norbeck said.
Foley opened the bedroom door.
"No bed," he announced.
"I'm not surprised," Godwin replied.
"No casket either," Foley added with an impish wink.
The three lawmen next headed for the kitchen. The detective opened all the cabinets, drawers and the refrigerator door.
"Empty," he said. "Just as I suspected."
"Maybe no one lives here," the deputy offered hopefully, as fear began to set in.
"Then who dusted the furniture?" Foley asked his underling brusquely. "And who do you think feeds the animals?"
"The same one who has been feeding off them," the detective answered.
Neither of his companions contradicted him.
"Where do you suppose it is?" Foley asked.
"Downstairs."
The detective turned on his flashlight and led the way down the cellar steps. When the three men made it to the bottom, the flashlight's beam illuminated a coffin in the far corner. They approached it cautiously. Foley and his deputy grasped their guns tightly as Ramsey raised the lid.
"There she is," the detective announced. "There's our killer."
Without hesitation, he leaned over and lifted the sleeping Donatella from her resting place. Then he triumphantly carried her up the dark staircase, through the gloomy kitchen and outside into the bright morning light.
The female woke with a start when the first rays of sunlight touched her body. Donatella screamed with agony and terror, and the detective dropped her unceremoniously as her flesh started to smolder and smoke. When fully exposed to the sun's rays, the vampire burst into flames. After a brief moment of intense misery, the female died. The three men watched in fascination as her once-beautiful body turned to ashes.
"How are we ever going to explain this, chief?" the deputy asked.
"Explain what?" Foley asked. "As far as I'm concerned, we followed an anonymous tip concerning drug-dealing hippies, but when we came out here to investigate we found the place deserted. I'll call the humane society to come and take care of the livestock."
The private detective took out his digital camera and snapped several photographs of the ashes, the coffin and the bite marks on the cattle. No doubt his client would want some form of proof that the vampire that killed his daughter had been destroyed. Then the three men left the farm, anxious to return to the world of the living.
* * *
Victor woke from his sleep when the sun went down at dusk. Unlike his mate, he did not sleep in a coffin; he preferred the cool, dampness of the bare earth in the root cellar. As he passed her coffin, he saw that the lid was left open.
"Donatella?" he called out to her, but she did not answer.
A terrible foreboding descended upon him. He quickly searched the house and then ran outside into the blackness of night. He immediately noticed the cattle were gone.
"Donatella!" he screamed with mounting fear. "Where are you, my love?"
He closed his eyes and concentrated his more primitive senses on locating his mate. He could no longer detect her scent.
Victor walked back into the house. He went to Donatella's closet, picked up one of her dresses and buried his face in the fabric, smelling the natural fragrance of her. After a while, the scent faded. Soon there was nothing left but the familiar loneliness, a curse he foolishly thought he had outlived. The sudden loss of his mate was unbearable, driving out every thought and natural instinct, even the desire for self-preservation.
I can't take this abysmal loneliness anymore.
Eventually, the long, lonely night came to an end. Just before dawn, Victor opened the front door of the small farmhouse, stepped outside and patiently waited for the sun to rise.
Picture in the upper left corner is of Stuart Townsend starring as Lestat in Queen of the Damned.
Salem is one cat that never suffers from loneliness.
