Shrouds of Darkness (2 page)

I’m not. A fall from here probably wouldn’t even kill me. It would hurt like hell; that I know for certain. I chose this spot with deliberate intent and without fear. Along with my incredibly keen eyesight comes unparalleled balance and reflexes. The longish nails that grow from my fingers are nearly as strong as steel and assist me in maintaining my grip on the concrete and mortar.

I used to curse the kind of chilly, soggy weather that I have chosen to put myself in tonight, but that was a lifetime ago—a couple lifetimes for some. I ceased caring about the cold and damp long ago—so very long ago.

I was turned, or cursed depending on your point of view, on December fifth, 1933. I remember the date so clearly because a lot of things happened to me that day. The first event of any significance was the repeal of prohibition. The streets of New York were alive with all manner of people drinking and toasting strangers. The fact that there could be so much booze in the hands of so many so quickly gave testament to the uselessness of outlawing alcohol.

That was how I met
her.
She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life. Alabaster skin; her long, black tresses hung past her slim waist. Long hair was completely out of fashion back then but it made her look only more exotic to my nineteen-year-old eyes. It was the height of the Great Depression, but that night I was anything but depressed.

Even her name made me quiver with excitement—Lesile. Her voice was soft but strangely powerful. The slight French accent was even more intoxicating than the champagne we shared. Little did I know that champagne was not her drink of choice.

She was intent on taking control of our liaison and I had no problem giving her the reins. I was no altar boy. Times were tough and I had taken to running the streets when I was thirteen, but she was an older woman and I knew she had things she could teach me and I was more than willing to learn. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, maybe even one of those women in her early forties that somehow maintained an incredible body and a timeless complexion. Not a line marred her perfect skin and every other part of her body was a work of perfection, as if personally sculpted by the hand of God himself.

She led me to where she said she lived. The fact that she lived in an abandoned theater never occurred to me to be the least bit odd. Her domicile was the last thing on my mind. I thought it was the booze that had my mind in a jumble, but later I was certain she had somehow bewitched me.

Lesile took me deep into the throws of passion such as I had never thought possible. The encounter was so raw and incredible I may as well have been a virgin. I winced when she sank her teeth into the nape of my neck, but I was so far gone the pain was lost in the ecstasy. When she told me to return the bite, I didn’t think twice. She kept telling me to bite her harder and harder. It felt like I was trying to chew through the soft hide of a leather sofa but I soon tasted the copper tang of blood as it seeped into my mouth.

I don’t remember how I got home, but I awoke in my shabby little apartment with my blood feeling like it was on fire. Agony as I had never thought possible flared through every cell in my body. At first, I was afraid I was going to die. As the pain intensified, I was terrified that I wouldn’t.

It was a good thing that I lived alone and in the worst part of New York. The only attempts at intervention were my neighbors pounding on the walls, floor, and ceiling shouting at me to shut the fuck up or have enough consideration to die. I blessedly lost consciousness after what seemed an eternity.

When I awoke once more, I felt cold so I donned every piece of clothing I owned and wrapped myself up in blankets, but nothing raised my body temperature. I had no heat in my apartment and ice covered the outside and inside of my small window but I soon noticed I got no colder either.

I shed my blankets, extra clothing, and stomped out into snow and biting cold. As I grew accustomed to my own frigid body temperature, I noticed that the freezing cold outside did not bother me. The second thing I noticed was that everyone I saw was blowing out thick puffs of fog as they breathed—everyone but me. That’s when I noticed I wasn’t breathing at all.

I rubbed the base of my neck, expecting to feel some remnant of the bite that beautiful, dark seductress had given me but my skin was unblemished.

I was been a big fan of the moving pictures back then. I loved to be scared, I had seen Vignola’s, The Vampire, and F.W. Murnau’s, Nosferatu, a dozen times, and I began to put things together. At first, I thought these crazy ideas were a result of whatever illness had struck me, but then I recalled Kipling’s,
The Vampire.
It was that poem that had gotten me interested in the undead when I was a kid. Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
had clenched it.

I almost convinced myself that the entire idea was an insane delusion brought on by this mysterious ailment. Realizing that I had almost started to believe in vampires pissed me off and I vented my frustration on a large trash bin in the alley.

My kick sent the quarter-ton, steel bin sliding more than ten feet. As I stood there staring in shock at what I had just done the hunger hit me. Suddenly, my stomach was gnawing at me with a voraciousness I had never before felt, and I was no stranger to missing a meal or five.

The smell hit me a moment later, the scent of blood pumping through the veins of another human, and it was nearby. I walked further into the alley and I could sense that I was getting nearer.

I saw him picking through some rubbish bins for anything of value. The bum probably hoped to scrape up enough for a bottle of the newly re-legalized booze. He flashed me a grin, thinking I was not so far from him in society’s social standing, before turning back to his barrel to resume pawing through its contents.

He pulled his head back out and looked at me with wariness as I stalked closer. Maybe it was the look of intent in my eyes or the fact that I was actually salivating, but he went on guard and backed slowly away. He cast his eyes about for a weapon or a way to escape but neither was within view.

“Look, buddy, I ain’t got nothin’, ok?” he told me nervously.

He was wrong. He had exactly what I wanted, what I needed. I covered the fifteen or twenty feet that separated us in a second. I broke his neck with a quick twist at the same time my teeth tore into his throat. There was so much blood, but somehow I seemed to consume most of it.

As my stomach settled, my brain began to issue disturbing rumblings of its own. I dropped the transient down into the shallow carpeting of snow. I looked down in horror at the dead, accusing eyes that stared up at me from the scarlet backdrop that contrasted so starkly with the layer of white all around.

I wiped my face with my sleeve and scrubbed away the blood on my face, neck, and hands with handfuls of clean snow. Images of a beautiful woman and an old theater flashed through my mind. Disjointed memories began to align themselves into a coherent pattern. I knew what had happened and I knew who had done this to me.

I sprinted out of the alley and down the sidewalk, forcing myself not to run faster than the black cars that sped down the street beside me. Block after block I ran until I stood facing that once majestic hall where actors once performed the works of Shakespeare and Moliere.

I walked through the formerly grand lobby and up the stairs that were still covered in a red but moth-eaten carpet. A swift kick shattered the door to Lesile’s boudoir and I stormed in, rage and fury etched all over my face.

If I thought to put fear into this woman, this creature, that had done this to me I was sorely disappointed. She pursed her ruby-red lips into an amused look of disapproval at her ruined door.

“Leonard, Look at what you have done to my beautiful door. It was an antique, you know. I do so love antiques—being one myself,” she crooned, seemingly lost in momentary recollections.

I shouted at her, “Don’t fucking call me Leonard! My name is Leo!” I railed. Although I lowered my voice, it still trembled with rage. “What have you done to me?”

Her laughter made my anger spike once again. “Oh, Leonar—Leo, you poor boy. I have made you better. I have made you eternal.”

I shook my head back and forth furiously. “No, no, you turn me back, you fix this right now or I swear I’ll kill you!”

This amused Lesile even more and her laughter was like a hammer driving nails through my flesh. “You are perfect now. Perfect for me and we can be together forever—or until I tire of you.”

Tire of me? And then what, toss me out like a piece of trash? Like I was nothing? Her lilting laughter, something I would have found melodious in other circumstances, was like a thousand paper cuts to my soul. I was a man of my time and nothing was worse than being laughed at by a woman, or so I thought. Lesile quickly showed me the error of that thought as I lunged across the room, my hands outstretched, reaching for that delicate, alabaster neck.

There is one thing more damaging to a man’s ego than a woman laughing at him, and that is getting his ass kicked while she’s doing it. She moved with a speed and struck with a strength that would be formidable to me even now. Her blows shattered the bones in my legs, crippling me in seconds. A blow to my spine ended my struggles, and thankfully the agony of my ruined femurs.

There was still plenty of pain to go around from the numerous other broken bones and ruptured organs in my body as she strapped me down to a heavy oak table. Why she had such a device with its thick, leather straps was beyond me until I realized that this was not the first time she had done this.

She looked down on me as lay strapped to the table, that infuriating smile never leaving her perfect mouth. “The problem with making new vampires is a lot like bringing home a new puppy,” she sighed. “You have to train them.”

“Let me go, you bitch!” I shouted at her with all the scorn I could put in voice.

Renewed pain radiated from my broken jaw and shattered ribs and I winced. I felt no need to be polite or placating. I knew I would never leave this room alive. Even if I did, I knew I was crippled. I heard my spine snap and felt my legs go numb when she kicked me. Or was I?

Already I felt the tingling sensation of feeling returning to my legs. I tried to wriggle my toes and succeeded. If it were not for the fact that I was strapped down on a table by a psychotic vampiress I would have whooped with joy.

She spoke, as if reading my mind. “You see the power of our kind now, how quickly you can recover from even the most severe of injuries. It takes a great deal of energy however, and you will need to feed again soon. I will leave you for now, and when I return with your meal we shall begin our lessons.”

I had no idea what kind of lessons she was talking about, but I had a good idea of what kind of meal she would be bringing back and the thought horrified me. It did until the hunger began to return as my body repaired itself.

Lesile returned in less than an hour with a middle-aged woman in tow. I figured the woman was a prostitute on the downhill slope of her career. The vampiress sent the woman sailing into the room with a casual flick of her wrist as if tossing a bag of groceries onto the counter.

The woman crawled to the far wall where she hugged her knees and wept. Lesile glided across the room to where I lay strapped down and smiled at me.

“Feeling better?” she asked sweetly.

I was but I still hurt and I told her to fuck off.

“Such language to a lady,” she responded disapprovingly. “I think our first lesson must be on manners.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. I cried out as she casually snapped the bones in my lower left leg and then my right arm. Fire erupted in my chest as she once again destroyed the bones that had been well on the way to healing.

Still smiling she said, “Now, how much and for how long you are in pain is entirely up to you. You have the ability to not only block the pain from nearly all wounds you suffer, but force them to heal at phenomenal rates as well. You see how fast you heal naturally and you can increase that several fold by shear effort of will. Do you have that? Do you have will, Leonard?”

“Don’t call me Leonard, you crazy broad!” I shouted defiantly.

She slapped me hard like a regular, angry woman. “You belong to me, you little shit, and will call you whatever I damn well please.”