In the Dark

In the Dark



In the dark, he looked like a man. He was stronger than any man, though. No man had seen as many centuries as he had. No man had felt the power he had at his command. No man could experience the world through senses such as he possessed, although some animals could. He was undead, and lived only by night, and had brought uncountable masses under his sway. He sat in his dark apartment and toyed with the phone, thinking about using it.

Humans had been nothing to him but cows. When he thirsted, or when he was bored, he took someone and drank. Morality had never even been a consideration. He was higher up on the food chain, and so by human kind's own logic, they were fair game. Humans even freely used each other up physically, mentally and emotionally to achieve their own ends. Not even animals did that. Occasionally he would try to build up relations with humans, but when things became complicated (as they inevitably did), rather than making the effort to work things out, he killed them.

Then he met a girl who forced him to sit up and take notice. He saw her out walking one night, looking upset. He was attracted to her as to so many forlorn women in the past, because he knew that he could give her ecstasy such as she'd never felt in her life, that he could make her one of his women, with one foot in this world and one in the next, and that she would be so grateful to him, just like all the others. When he encountered other vampires (which was rarely, because they are very territorial beings), they would chide this habit of his, saying that if he was a human he would be constantly taking in stray cats and dogs, and probably be having sex with them too. But apart from her obvious depression, something else about this girl interested him. She smelled different in some way. He had a sense of smell that could rival a wolf, and he could recognise people by smell as well as by sight, but this smell was totally unfamiliar to him, in hundreds of years of meeting people over the world. Intrigued, he joined her in her walk, accompanied her to her house, and persuaded her to invite him inside.

He drank deeply from her, the sense of difference filling his mind. He couldn't decide if he liked it or not, but the novelty alone was worth it. When he left her she had no heartbeat, but was driven now by another force. Another soul lost forever. A few months later, changes started occurring in his body, which was a terrifying experience for someone who went through puberty so long ago that he couldn't even remember the names of the parents who had seen him through it. His arms, his chest, broke out in brown splotches. He became sick, vomiting and dizzy, which had never happened before except in the presence of garlic, and this felt entirely different. He thought maybe he was reaching the end of his life, that even vampires must succumb to old age eventually, but knew this could not be true, because he had seen other vampires far older than him who showed no signs of weakness whatever.

Eventually, as this sickness enveloped him fully, he became aware of the smell of it, and realised it was the previously unique smell of that unhappy woman. He went to her house in a rage, smashing down her door and storming into her room. There was a man lying in the bed beside her with a look of rapture on his dead face as she sucked at his throat. She was totally pale now, an after-effect of her encounter with him, but he was more interested in the effect she had had on him. He noticed that she too had marks on her naked body.

"What are you?" he snarled. "What have you done to me?"

She laughed, blood dribbling down her chin. "I would have told you if only you had the decency to ask before taking advantage of me."

It was 1981. He had been living in England for the last fifteen years, and up until then AIDS was just something happening in Africa and a little in America, shrouded in mystery. It had suddenly become very personal for him. From then to today, twenty years later, it felt like he was getting sicker every year, every day lately. He had no doubt a human would have died long ago with the virus as strong in them as it was now in him. People had tried to destroy him in the past, with fire, with swords and arrows, with bullets and explosives. Folktales and fiction held the answers to his destruction, but educated men had no time for them. It seemed that this disease was also no match for his immortality either, but it had his health completely at its mercy. He was still stronger than any man, but internally, it took an enormous amount of effort just to get out of bed in the evening.

He considered arranging for his destruction almost straight away, and dismissed it just as quickly. He knew what was waiting for him. Every day while the sun shone, he had fevered visions of the afterlife that made the AIDS virus positively charming.

He could no longer drink blood. With his own so corrupted, just the thought of it made him queasy, and the last time he had tried to, about seven years ago, he had been violently ill. So he hungered, he always had a cold or flu, he was constantly exhausted, and in excruciating pain as his muscles deteriorated but stayed together by the same force keeping him alive. And over time he found himself increasingly dependent on the human beings he had so easily manipulated in the past. He went by night to clinics to seek help, but surprisingly, so did a lot of other people, all unable to bear the sun. He was given countless cocktails of drugs by doctors, pills and medicines and needles and powders all delivered on a strict schedule. These things didn't help. He realised one day that the reason he kept with them was for the support from the other sufferers. He craved the attention, the feeling that someone was feeling pain like he was, if not half so bad. They would encourage him, saying he was doing really well to hang for so long, and when they started realising just how long he was hanging on, he'd move to another country, and they would probably just presume that he had finally died.

And then he became too weak to even leave his house. And he sat now, in the dark, so that no one could see the ragged holes in his skin, or smell the decay of his flesh. In the dark, he looked like a man.

He toyed with the phone. He picked it up, and dialed a number he had found in a phone book, of a place he had never been to. The phone rang for a long time, but he didn't have the energy to hang up and try another number, so he just let it ring, resting against his head. Eventually someone answered in a dazed voice.

"I… I need you to tell me something," the vampire said. "You know? You can help me out…"

"Who is this?" the man said over the phone, his voice sounding sharper now, as he became angry. "It's four thirty."

"Are you a priest? I've…" What would get his attention? "I've killed people. Lots and lots of them."

"Oh… dear Lord," said the priest. "Come to me tomorrow, you know the address of this church. Come, I'll be there early, and you can tell me about it." He sounded concerned now, and the vampire loved him for it.

"I can't come into a church," he said. "I'm sick… I can't leave my bed. I have I have a disease of the blood, and I've given it to a lot of people over the years and made them sick too. I take them and I make them sick, sick, sick, but I was never sick before, I thought there was just something wrong with them. It wasn't my intention…" Faces swirled in his sight, of all those lost souls, damned to eternal limbo, eternal nothing, just so he could slake his thirst for another night, another hour. It hadn't been worth it. All that suffering he'd caused, it hadn't been worth it just for his damned thirst!

The priest was saying something, his voice buzzing in his ear. "…hospital? Have you done that?"

"Priest," he said, "I need you to tell God something. Tell him I want to make things right. I'll keep suffering for a while longer, but just tell him to let those people I took go into heaven. They never had any choice. Just let them… let them… Oh, God!"

He let the phone slip from his numb fingers. It clunked to the floor, dangling on its cord. "Hello?" the priest was saying. "Are you there, my son? Are you there?"

The vampire crushed the box of the phone with one hand and hurled it away, leaving a shattered impression on the wall. He dragged himself over to a tinted window, opened it, and lay painfully down in front of it. With his passing, all those he had taken as slaves, would be released. He would meet the afterlife knowing that the suffering was only his own.


He saw the sun rise for the first time in almost a thousand years that morning, and the sight made him weep with joy even as he burned. What had he been doing in the dark for so long?