Night Feast (2 page)

Cora Patterson was cleaning the kitchen windows when the telephone rang.

“Jay it’s for you, it’s Kevin” she called to her son who was in his bedroom listening to music in an attempt to relieve his boredom.  He rushed down the stairs to speak to his friend, hoping that he could offer him some light relief.  Everyone was talking about Elena Hudson's disappearance, and the hooker rumours around college were really getting old.

“Hey what’s  up?”.

“Have you heard about Elena Hudson?”  Kevin said breathlessly.

“No, why? Has she gone back home?”

“No, I mean Jay it’s not good news, someone found her body.”

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For the next two weeks, the Elena Hudson story was covered by all the Maine papers and on the news.  The seventeen year old girl was portrayed as a sweet, intelligent, straight ‘A’ college student with her whole life ahead of her, who had been found dead by a neighbour, a man who had been walking his dogs..  Acute paranoia swept through the city of Portland like an emotional tidal wave.  Parents forbade their teenage offspring from going into the woods where Elena’s  body had been found.  Jay Patterson was really quite shaken by the news.  He had liked Elena Hudson for quite a while but had never really had the chance to talk to her.  He had, however, been very pleased when he’d caught her shy, furtive glances  in the corridors at their college.  He liked her shyness, she was different from the other girls.  They tended to be bold and obvious, especially around him.  They assumed that he liked their behaviour but he found their  blatancy and  willingness very embarrassing.  Unfortunately it was always the shy,  sweet girls who found themselves in dangerous situations because they were so innocent.  

The police did not release all the details of the condition of Elena Hudson's body because they didn’t want to cause any more alarm .  An out of town forensic team examined the corpse and concluded that the deceased must have been killed by some sort of animal.  The fact that her body had been totally drained of all its blood, and the only sign of  broken skin was on its neck, caused a lot of confusion and indeed, fear amongst the Portland police department and the team.  It was so strange no one had ever seen anything like this....except in horror films, but nobody would actually say that out loud.  So Mr and Mrs Hudson were informed that their daughter had been killed by an animal, and her body had been so badly mutilated that it was best that they didn’t see it.  A female police officer insisted that it was best that they remembered their child as she was, and that seeing her body would only spoil that memory.    The Hudson’s decided reluctantly that this was probably the right thing to do, and went home to grieve the death of their youngest daughter.

A distraught Eddy McCann was ordered by the police department not to tell anyone what he had witnessed.  He agreed, he didn’t even tell his wife Marybeth who he always told everything.  Marybeth knew nothing about the half naked, bloodless body that had once belonged to the young college student, but hoped that her husband’s nightmares wouldn’t go on for too long.

It was said that she had been killed by an animal, probably a wolf or some sort of wild dog, that had attacked her out of fear.  However no explanation was offered to why her purse had been found a long way away from her body.

The case for the disappearance of Elena Hudson was closed.

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Lia lay on her wooden, four poster bed, clutching Elena Hudson’s jeans and shirt to her chest.  The vision of the beautiful face of the boy came back into her head and she used her imagination so that it was she herself who was meeting the interested gaze of Jay Patterson.  She didn’t usually take the clothes of her victims after a kill, but this time it was different.  The smell and the touch of Elena’s clothes caused the vision to appear in the vampire’s head time and time again.  When she saw Jay’s face she felt herself soften in a way that was alien to her.  Something had awakened in her that she could not explain.  But she knew that it was an itch that she intended to scratch.

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Valentin Malenkov was totally unaware of his daughter’s recent activities.  He had taught both his daughters to hunt and he knew that they could take care of themselves.  However he was aware that the twins wanted to expand their horizons and although they were both strong girls, he still felt that they needed to be protected from the vampire hunters that were spreading in number.  He himself had fled his motherland, Russia,  during the year 1412.  He had been a vampire for just two years when a new breed of bloodsucker hunters had risen in society and had decided to make it their life’s work to destroy all vampires.  However Valentin Malenkov, unlike his two daughters, was not a vampire born.

He was born in Moscow, Russia  during the year 1377.  His parents had taken work on farms to support themselves and their only son, but at the age of fourteen Valentin became an orphan when his parents became ill and died of a disease that had been sweeping around the country at that time.  Valentin found himself homeless, so he returned to Moscow where he begged and found odd jobs to keep himself.  He grew from a young boy to a man without ever having permanent accommodation or any real companionship.  Life was hard,  devoid of any warmth or happiness.  At the age of thirty three, he worked in a local inn in the town where he was born.  Night after night he served alcoholic drinks to the heavy drinking clientele that frequented his place of work.  Most of the men were already drunk when they arrived and they would insult and abuse him for their own entertainment.  One of these men, Yakov, was particularly offensive.  He saw Valentin as fair game for his sadistic pursuits.  Yakov always wanted to prove himself stronger and more powerful than the younger bartender.  Valentin had been subjected to this man’s barrage of spiteful comments, and the occasional shove, when he had walked past him carrying trays of drinks.

One night Valentin left the inn after finishing a shift and walked out into the cold, dark night.  He was heading for home, which was a rat infested room in an old house. His wage was meagre and he could barely afford to rent it.  He suddenly heard footsteps behind and was surprised because the streets were usually empty at this time.  At first he felt no particular reason to be afraid but when he heard the footsteps quicken in pace he had a strange feeling that he was being followed.   He felt himself being shoved to the ground and as he lay face down on the road he felt someone turn his  body onto his back.  Before a large fist hit his face he saw in the darkness the red, leering face of  Yakov, his tormentor.  Then everything disappeared.

Valentin did not know how long he had been crawling from the place where he had been attacked.  His face was covered in blood and he could feel that one of his legs were broken.  His lips were so swollen that he could not have cried out for help, and anyway no one would have heard him because the place was deserted. As he crawled into a nearby  park he slipped back into unconsciousness. When he came round  he thought that he was being carried but it could not be true because his Samaritan was a young woman.  He must have been dreaming, because even though he was a little short in stature and light in body weight. a woman would not be able to carry a man of his size.  As he floated in what he thought was an unreal scenario he felt a sense of peace for the first time in his life.  The pain from the violent attack had left his body and he felt oddly invigorated.  The young woman had bent to kiss his neck.  She had not removed her lips from his skin and he had felt a sharp prick as she sank her teeth into him.  It was unlike any other encounter that he’d had with the girls who had demanded money for their company.  Valentin thought that he had indeed died and gone to heaven.  His miserable and lonely existence was now firmly behind him.  He felt his lips move slowly into a smile and realised that the swelling was going down.  The young woman had laid him down onto a soft mattress, he had no idea where she had taken  him.  As Valentin drifted into a deep sleep he realised with joy that everything was now going to be alright.

Sunlight was streaming through a glassless window when he awoke.  He was still lying on the soft mattress, but there was no sign of the young woman who had rescued him.  He was surprised because he felt extremely well and strong, considering what he had just fallen victim to.  His leg was no longer broken, he felt no pain, he had no bruising, however the blood on his face and clothes were still there.  Valentin sat up and looked around him.  He was in what looked like the living room of a deserted old house.  Spiders clung to cobwebs that they had spun on the high ceiling and the squeaking and scampering  of rodents was audible in the quietness of the room.  Valentin did not feel afraid, alarmed or upset, even when his eyes fell upon the human skeletons piled up in the corner of the room.  He rose and left the old house.  He noticed that he felt strangely full and had no need to take breakfast or any kind of refreshment.  Valentin also felt that is body was unusually cold.  He had never really liked the feeling of being cold, the winters in Moscow were unbelievably punishing, but for some reason the low temperature of his body felt delicious to him.  He found his way back easily to his rented room in the hovel he had grown to despise.  The first thing that he did when he entered the room was to catch and kill the four legged vermin that had plagued him from the time he had moved in there.  Their constant squeaking had kept him awake for many nights and they had crawled onto his bed and all over his body relentlessly.  Valentin sensed their fear of him now with great satisfaction and as he squeezed the life out of their fat furry bodies, he knew that there was a fundamental change in him and that from now on his life was going to be totally different.

Valentin returned to the inn during the evening.  The owner had given his job to someone else because he had not turned up for the last seven days.  Valentin had not realised that he had been absent for so long, however he did not regret losing his job.  He sat alone at a table in a dark corner of the room.  The men that he had served previously piled into the inn, one by one.  He looked at their red, bloated faces with disdain, and watched them badger and harass his replacement behind the bar.  However, there was only one man that Valentin wanted to see that night.

Yakov Anchova finally lumbered into the inn.  He stumbled to the bar with red rimmed eyes, already intoxicated from an earlier drinking binge.  He demanded a drink from the new bartender without uttering a please or thank you.  Then he drank the shot swiftly, from a wooden drinking vessel, before banging it down on the bar and demanding another.  Valentin had not only seen him but he had smelt him.  He knew that his sense of smell had heightened when he’d left the deserted house because he could smell every plant, tree and animal from a large distance.  The odour that came from Yakov Anchova was strong and pungent.  It filled him with an all consuming desire for revenge in the form of blood spill and death.  His drunken tormentor scanned the room with his watery, bloodshot eyes.  He was looking for his drinking buddies but they were nowhere to be seen.  He remembered how he had made them laugh when he had pushed Valentin to the floor while he’d been carrying a tray of drinks.  He had always been a bully and had enjoyed the sadistic beating that he had given to the previous bartender.  Yakov’s eyes suddenly fell onto the eyes of a man who was sitting at a table in a dark corner of the room.  He found that he couldn’t turn away, he tried but it was as if his neck had turned to stone.  He felt his drunken haze slipping away from him when he realised that he was once again face to face with Valentin Malenkov.  Or was it?  It couldn’t possibly be the same person because he had beaten him so badly, he had broken his bones and left him for dead.  He could not have healed in such a short period of time. The man he could see was not only in perfect physical health but also different somehow, changed.  He appeared strong and powerful and hungry for something that Yakov dared not think about.  Such was his fear that he could no longer hear the shouting and the raucous laughter of the other men in the inn.  He suddenly felt full of regret.  He had been a disappointing son, husband and father but had never tried to mend his ways.  He had ignored the little voice inside him, and drowned it out with drink when it had told him that one day he would reap what he had sown.  This time he had gone far too far.  He knew  that there was no escape.

Without warning Valentin released Yakov from the trance in which he had held him so tightly.  Yakov had not realised how hard he was trying to turn his face away from the man he had beaten to near death.  He stumbled and almost fell over as the invisible grip that had held him so forcefully finally let go.  Yakov had felt that he had been in this strange  and unexplainable captivity for hours when in fact it had only been for a few minutes.  He pushed through the drunken crowd of men and headed for the door.

Valentin had a good reason for releasing him so abruptly.  He was shocked at his newfound power that could literally freeze  an individual with his mind.  During those few minutes he had tried to imagine giving Yakov a taste of his own medicine, by beating him to the cold hard ground outside.  But every time he had tried to visualise this act of revenge his mind had replaced it with another vision.  Valentin had seen himself using his teeth to rip apart Yakov’s lumbering body.  He had seen himself drinking his enemy’s blood with great relish and satisfaction.  This image had shocked Valentin to the core.  He had watched himself behave like a wild animal in his imagination, and his initial revulsion had quickly turned to an unspeakable joy.  What had he become?

Yakov Anchova, now feeling very sober now, hurried home.  He kept looking over his shoulder, convinced that he was being followed.  Yakov had never been afraid of anything before but now even the darkness of the night disturbed him.  He intended to lock himself in his house and to keep a weapon by his bed, and with him at all times from now on.  He didn’t like this feeling of fear.  He had instilled it in so many people, including his wife and children.  He had lied and cheated, coerced and controlled everyone that he had come into contact with for most of his life.  Valentin Malenkov had annoyed him because he could see that even though his life had been difficult, and he’d had to fend for himself from an early age, there was still a glimmer of hope in the young man’s eyes.  Yakov had hated the fact that Valentin’s unfortunate circumstances had not really broken him.  He had wanted to remove what little optimism he had, by his violent act towards him.  But when he had looked into the young man’s eyes at the inn, he had not seen hope, he had not seen optimism.  He had seen a hot, greedy all consuming desire for his blood.