Vampire Island (12 page)

(before he tore it up into a hundred little pieces)

In the year of 1618, outside the rural province of Pembrokeshire, I was received with great relief and celebration as a firstborn son. Home was a cottage built of wattle-and-daub. Father rented cattle and tilled fields of barley. Mother kept goats and tended beehives. Our Bess was a short-jointed mare, fourteen hands high.

Whilst I was yet in milk teeth, an early frost blighted our harvest, followed by a winter so vengeful and bitter we ate naught but winter root and stewed fruit bat. Our misfortune was followed by a deadly scourge of smallpox that devastated our populace. Being of well-reputed herbal and medicinal skills, Mother brewed a preserve of new milk and garlic clove against infection. We prayed, fasted, and drank the conserve thrice daily, to no avail. On first dread sight of skin pustules, Father felled a sycamore and set to the task of fashioning five long-nail coffins in preparation for a decent family burial.

On the night we knew ’twould be our last on earth, we stoked the hearth and huddled together for comfort. By chance, either our greatest fortune or darkest calamity, a shape-shifting vagrant came upon our wretched home. With intention to slake his terrible thirst, the beast punctured each of our necks with his most vengeful mark. By next sunrise, we were drained, weak—yet unrelieved by death. Whither the vat brew or stewed bat had been our talisman, we did not know. We persevered, and ’twas not long afore we were befriended by a secret colony of fellow hybrids and came to be enfolded into a larger family, safeguarded and disciplined by ancient Argos.

By day, we took to our coffin beds. By moonlight we scavenged the land for prey, siphoning small meals off healthy animals. A band of fruit hybrids, voicing dissention at this most unholy eternal life, took refuge in a ship bound for the New World. At that time, fear of the unknown barred our joining them. In the ensuing centuries, we resigned to grim existence until the end of the earth. Yet continued good news of the prosperous New World, and its possible blessing of mortality, drove our decision to emigrate. With permission and under the Argos’ observance, we set forth for the New World’s largest metropolis, New York City, where to our joy we believe that we have at long last escaped the curse of stopped time. We shall see.

It has been whispered that creatures of similar dark ilk, seeking refuge and solace, might live amongst us here. But I cannot speak of the verity of this rumor, and at this time must dismiss it as such.