The Mammoth Book of Dracula (41 page)

It became obvious after a few weeks that it was time for her to leave, as she’d agreed. To go back to the streets, selling herself, I imagined. Yet neither of us said anything, me because I’d come to care about her as much as I could anything, and she, I learned later, was thoroughly and blissfully in love. So she just stayed.

One early evening, when I was about to go out to find my sustenance, she sat down on the bed as I dressed.

“You think of me as a sister, don’t you.” It was a statement.

“I don’t know ... I’ve never had a sister. Do you? Think of me as a brother?”

She chuckled. “I think knowing you’re hundreds of years old sort of kills that notion, even if you look like a man in his late twenties.”

“Oh, so now you believe me…Well, does this notion include not thinking of me as a potential lover?” My preternaturally still heart fluttered.

She squinted at me just then. “I’m ... afraid to think of you that way. I don’t know why.”

“As am I afraid to think of you that way.”

She brightened a bit. “You’ve actually considered it?”

My turn to brighten. “Well, yes, of course. You haven’t then?”

“Oh, hell, yes, I have. I’m just afraid to .,. you know, do anything about it.”

“We are good together, aren’t we.” It wasn’t a question, either.

She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, really good. But can we ... you know
... be
together? A vampire and a regular girl?”

I was suddenly young, recalling my youth with a longing I’d never known. Had I felt this way once?

“I don’t know, Ashley. Do you want to find out?” Please, I thought, please.

“Could we? Vlad ... I don’t want to go back out there. I want to stay with you.”

“Ashley ...” I opened my arms and she leaned warmly into me.

The concussion of two conflicting feelings overwhelming me was almost unbearable. Somehow, in the months we’d lived together, we’d stayed sufficiently apart to keep my blood hunger at bay. My lechery had not so easily been contained. Suddenly, now, my appetite and my profound lust battled for preeminence. Under my nose, her jugular pulsed, and her pink and luscious girl-skin gleamed radiantly, voluptuously. The scent of her made me swoon. I thought, for so long, I couldn’t feel anything. Now I’d been tossed into a whirlpool of emotions.

“Kiss me.” She turned her face up to mine.

My feeding incisors began extending, and I salivated, ready for blood. I could feel my eyes burrowing into hers, turning her into a helpless victim, not a willing partner. Could I ever simply make a woman my lover?

My Ashley froze, put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me to arm’s length. “You asshole, I’m not going to let you turn me into a snack. I want to be your lover.”

Oh, the spirit of her! I still reel at her memory. The Prince of Darkness’s wiles weren’t going to work on such as this worldly girl.

“I know, Ashley. My body’s taking over. I have no idea what to do.”

She grinned. “I love it when you get all little-boy lost, and stop being that big old stuffy Dracula.”

“All well and good, you’re happy, now. Have you any suggestions for how we can get around this ... hunger?”

She cocked her beautiful head and thought. Clever girl. “Well, after you eat, you don’t want to eat again for nearly two days. Why don’t you go feed yourself and then ... we’ll see.”

“Brilliant. I’m on my way.” And so I left Ashley sitting on my bed, waiting for her loverboy to return.

If only I knew then what I know now.

We walked into Dr Bloward’s office two months later, both of us miserable and wanting to make our union work. Ashley did the talking that first session, since she was the one with years of experience at the hands of a shrink.

As I sat back, eyeing the man who carried his balding, portly, self with the wariness of prey, Ashley explained our plight.

“Well, we’ve been together for about two months. At first it was great. The sex was unreal, the passion glorious, and the love was ... like nothing I’d ever known. You should know right up front, I’m not yet eighteen, but I’ve been on my own and a prostitute for three years, so I am totally cognizant of my choice in being with Vlad. We have both had to overcome previous baggage to be together, but some of it just feels like we’re stuck in cement.”

Alex, as he asked us to call him, turned his beady eyes on me, and asked me if Ashley had given a reasonable assessment so far. I nodded.

“Are you ill, Vlad?”

Ashley piped in. “Oh, yeah, I guess we have to get that out in the open, too.”

“HIV?” Alex frowned a bit

“No, he’s a vampire.” She saw the incredulity in his eyes. I saw the fear.

He chose to respond clinically. “And how long have you believed yourself to be a vampire, Vlad?”

“I have
been
a vampire for over three hundred years. I’ve forgotten my childhood, much of the past. I know this is stretching credulity for you, especially since your profession is trained to vet out the psychotic or schizophrenic who believes he’s something or someone else other than he is. I can only assure you I am, unhappily now, a true vampire.” I looked away. Not ashamed, but unwilling to see the look of derision on his face.

“You’ve forgotten your childhood?” I turned to him. His fingers were stroking his chin, considering. “What do you know of your parents?” Like ditch-diggers shrinks are, plumbing the bowels of one’s psyche for pay dirt.

And so our first few sessions went. Ashley or I talking about what we could recall of our childhoods, chronicling our declines. I grew comfortable with him quickly, which Ashley said was a mark in his favour, since her experience of therapists was that when she felt weird with one, she knew he or she was no good. I trusted her experience implicitly.

It was during our tenth meeting we finally told him our difficulties. I was eager to be the one to spill it. Quite unlike me, but I was changing even then.

“It has to do with jealousy, mostly. You see, I am out from dark until ten or eleven at night feeding. I don’t kill my donors, haven’t for centuries, but I must seduce them close enough to make a meal from their jugular, or another prominent vein or artery. Ashley resents this, which I completely understand, but I cannot live any differently. If I don’t acquire a donor, I won’t feed. If I don’t eat, I can’t live.

“As for me, Ashley has taken to using the hours before we are together in the evening for supplementing our income with hooking. While I am aware her having sex with another man is a performance of sorts, as are my own seductions, I feel she should find other work and keep herself for me. I do not, I will point out, do anything more than kiss a woman, and only if she appears to expect it.”

“How do you see what Vlad is telling me, Ashley?”

Her arms were crossed on her stomach and her foot was pumping. “Well, he certainly is articulate, isn’t he? And to think English isn’t his first language ...” She glared at me a moment. “Yeah, he’s right. I’m jealous and he’s jealous. We’re both so fucking insecure, we can’t love each other right.” She began to cry. “Help us, Alex. I love him.”

I reached for her hand and she took it, her face going into my chest. She sobbed for a few minutes while I stroked her head.

“I can see you love and care for each other. We need to separate the issues between you into Vlad’s and Ashley’s, not the unit of the
us.”
He proceeded to show us how our old “tapes” of conditioned response and reaction reflexes were controlling us, and how we might get free of them.

It took Ashley four years to learn that she was terrified of losing me, needed to control me, had to learn to accept that my seductions were nothing more than calling a cow in for the slaughter, and that her anger was behind her prostituting herself. Not some imagined need for financial security. When she got it, she got it. She turned to acting lessons at a local theatre while I was out feeding, and began to get parts in equity plays.

For me, it took six years to learn that I was living in denial of my emotions for so long I had no self, no ego, and therefore no one to respect in myself. I also intellectualized Ashley’s jealousy as insignificant. I also tended towards an antisocial personality, and needed to acquire a sense of purpose in my life beyond food, sex, and the love of a beautiful woman. He also suggested I find another manner of acquiring blood that would put my relationship first, and not allow my sustenance to be lessened.

It seemed that after seven years together, I, the Prince of Darkness, and Ashley Hibbert, were making a go of a real relationship. Everything was wonderful. Ashley was about to star in a television series, and I had become a reader for the Braille Institute. I was feeling fulfilled, as was she, and our love life was renewed with passion and devotion.

Alex told us we didn’t need him any more, and off we hurried into a new wall. Too embarrassed to return to face him, I kept my new discomfort to myself.

Ashley was an instant little star. Because we agreed she wouldn’t allow anyone access to me or to know about me, she fell prey to every hip single guy or unscrupulous married man in town. She resisted them all, but their curiosity had to create some answer for her rejections or their egos couldn’t take it. The tabloids had fun with speculating on her gender preferences, and she soon had to devise dozens of circuitous ways to get home to me. All of this exhausted her, but she remained devoted.

Somehow, this annoyed and finally angered me. Her complaints she was too tired to make love grew in number, and the time apart due to her change in sleep cycle from mine multiplied as well. I suffered this in silence. After all, she loved me. I was nothing any more without her.

She sensed my troubled heart and soul and begged me to go back to Alex. Ashamed, but determined not to lose my Ashley, I humbled myself back into my nine o’clock appointment.

Alex listened, more fascinated now than ever. Ashley said she’d go with me, but she was always too tired. Alex said I should work on myself, and during the hiatus, she’d come in. He trusted her sincerity in wanting to save our relationship. So, I went alone.

What a mistake. I delved into the psyche of the most perverted compulsive the world’s ever known. Alex was elated in this process, while I only grew more and more depressed.

“When will this melancholy leave me, Alex? I am no good to Ashley when all I want to do is mope around the house when I am awake, and sleep too many hours in the day.”

“Vladdie, depression is the valley in the walk of life. You and Ashley hiked up a steep mountain together and while her road is still in ascension, she will grow depressed as part of her walk. You, my friend, are in the period of time when all you’ve learned has pitched you into a world where things are no longer familiar. You don’t know yet where you’re going, but the past is behind you. Trust that in time, you will be moving up the side of another mountain. This time to greater heights.”

“And how long should I give this
valley?”

He chuckled warmly, always assuming I was kidding around when I used his words in the mocking manner I had.

“If you’re still feeling blue in a year, I’d say we should try tricyclics on you. There are antidepressants around that could wipe this dysphoria right out.”

“Pardon my naïveté, but wouldn’t it be a helpful thing for me to take an antidepressant now, while I’m newly depressed?”

Again he chuckled. “Dear Vlad, you don’t want to run from these negative feelings. They’re just as valuable as your positive feelings. You grow from fully experiencing both of them. All of them. Don’t you enjoy your emotions now that you have them?”

I found myself studying his neck, seeking a pulse under his thick skin.

“Well, frankly, no, I don’t. And I’m afraid Ashley will leave me if I continue to be a sucking vortex of negativity, as she calls it.”

Alex mused over this. He had the habit of appearing to stare at me blankly, but that analytical mind was always working. Working. “Isn’t that telling ... a sucking vortex. She’s admitting to her co-dependence in this depression of yours. Tell her I want her here next session, even if she has to drink a gallon of coffee.”

Ashley was reluctant, only because, she said, she didn’t want to confuse her television persona with her evolving self. But she went. We were back to our weekly sessions, endless and intense discussions at home, our language peppered with psychobabble.

The years in love and therapy continued. Ashley’s show was cancelled, and she developed anorexia. My depression was unaffected by medication, and Alex got fatter, older and richer on us. He even put Ashley into a thirty-day residential programme for eating disorders, while I began combing the city in bloodlust, growing sloppier by the night.

My evolution was becoming my undoing. I was decompensating. Dracula was not meant to be self-aware. Guilt and remorse lived in me like parasites, sapping my motivation for living. I could barely recall what it felt like to know a positive emotion. My anger at my ignorance in this ate at me as well.

On Ashley’s twenty-eighth birthday, she insisted she never looked better, and would I please marry her. I blinked at her. She knew I couldn’t marry. Wouldn’t marry. I was working on that part of commitment phobia as her birthday neared.