The moment I saw her that autumn afternoon, I knew that I just had to have her. Sitting quietly in the shadows of the empty library, lit only by the lambent warmth of the reading lamp over the desk, her demure beauty ignited a fire in my soul that had been dormant for many centuries, and I knew that I must take her life force and make it my own.
ooOoo
I was born long before the present day in a small town in what is now Romania as the dying embers of the Roman Empire were finally being extinguished by the hordes of barbarians from the East. My birth name was Vladislav, but I have long since taken a name more fitting to my adopted country, and today I am just plain Walter Drake.
Even in early childhood I realised that I was different from my fellows. I could not share their delight in the bright sunlight of Spring and Summer, and preferred to remain indoors reading while they played in the meadows outside the town walls. The light hurt my pale blue eyes, and my skin would burn and blister if I stayed outdoors too long. As I grew into adulthood I slowly withdrew from normal society to inhabit the shadows, where I pursued my studies of ancient history and philosophy by the light of a solitary candle.
It was not until I was in my early twenties that I discovered the electrifying effect of blood upon my soul. I had always had a liking for raw meat, a rare treat in those days, but it was when I sucked the finger of a niece who had been left in my care — which she had carelessly cut on a piece of broken glass — that I first experienced the rush of energy that comes from drinking the blood of a fellow human being. It was far more intoxicating than any drug, and believe me, I have tried them all, from coca leaf and magic mushrooms to cocaine and heroin, as well as the concoctions of modern chemists.
After that first heady taste of the life essence of a mortal human, desire turned to addiction, and I sought ways to satisfy my overwhelming need. Very soon I discovered that blood was at its most potent during the act of sex, when the life force pulses most vigorously, peaking at the apogee of a lover's orgasm. Oh the ineffably sweet moment when I have penetrated my willing victim's succulent and yielding flesh and she is impaled upon my rampant manhood, writhing and moaning in the extremity of ecstasy — that moment of rapture when I sink my teeth into her unguarded neck. There are no words to describe that climactic moment as I fill her with my hot seed, and feel her life force flowing in an incandescent stream throughout my body as her blood pulses from her punctured arteries.
At this point in my tale, I feel I need to dispel the myths about vampires that have taken root in the human consciousness, mainly as a result of Bram Stoker's gothic novella about Count Dracula. I once raised this with him over dinner, but his rejoinder was that the true facts about the life of a vampire were too dull to make a best selling story, and even admitted that the character of Dracula was based on his actor friend Henry Irving, rather than a real life vampire. The way we have been portrayed in films hasn't been much better, and Nosferatu was particularly insulting — the best portrayal by an actor in my view was Gary Oldman in Coppola's Dracula, but there was still too much blood.
Our immortality is not dependant on drinking blood, merely that without it life seems stale and flat, just like a typical winters day in soggy Manchester compared to the brilliant light and colour of the Mediterranean. Like most of my kind, I stopped ageing at about the age of forty five when the normal processes of fleshly decay became arrested, and I have looked the same now for nearly 1500 years. Nor is it true that daylight is mortally deadly to us. As I have said, direct sunlight is painful and burns our flesh, but we can live quite happily in subdued light, and the atmosphere of an industrial city such as Manchester, where the sun rarely penetrates the blanket of cloud and smog, is an ideal habitat.
My own story is fairly typical of my kind, most of whom have attempted to seek refuge in an ordinary dull existence on the fringes of society. As the centuries rolled on, and my need for the fresh blood of a human victim, preferably female — the blood of a male really doesn't taste all that pleasant — grew more acute, I realised that if I were to survive, I would have to forgo my desires. Although vampires have existed since the beginnings of human history, their persecution only became an epidemic in eighteenth century Europe, particularly in the kingdoms of the Hapsburg Empire. The witch hunt was fanned by the Catholic Church, chiefly I believe to divert attention from the depredations of their own clergy on ordinary people — it has always struck me as interesting that the early Christians were themselves accused of drinking blood, and the effect of the blood of Christ at the Eucharist on the believer is described in the much the same language as the effect of human blood on a vampire.
At the time about which I am writing back in the 1950s, I had not tasted blood from the neck of a female victim in over 200 years, although I could still remember it with piercing clarity, and three were days when the craving was almost unbearable. All that changed on a foggy day in the University of Manchester Library where I worked as an antiquarian and custodian of the collection. I saw Eloise, and my resolve was shattered in a moment and I knew that I just had to have her.
