It must have been a yule-tide celebration, because the bitter night was decked in snow, but every generation from tod to crone was gathered inside of the cramped, wooden house. The house was as one might have seen when wandering outdoor museums: crafted from logs, with splintered ladders leading up to ceiling platforms, and beds forced into the most unlikely of spaces. Yet here, this night, the house was a home: it contained none of the stale darkness that ruins do, but all the love and light and warmth of a place maintained from the heart.
There were craftfully woven tablecloths, tucked together to cover the long, unpolished table with its makeshift bench–nothing more than a long, half-stripped trunk–that had been hauled into the tiny living room for this evening’s celebration. Uncles, nieces, cousins and kidlens, all weaved in and out of the smothering little kitchen beyond, bringing jams and dried pork and all manner of goodies. A little boy, humming, sat stripping a yellowed bone in the corner, so that he could knife out its deep gray marrow. The moaning grandmother and Elder of the family, whose mind age had sadly stolen, was taken from her eternal chair–whose cushions bore her imprint–and bundled in blankets to sit at the edge of the bench.
She sputtered and whimpered half-statements as her granddaughter, fair and lithe, leaned close to her to place a bowl of nuts upon the table. The youth, whose gentle and unseeing heart was written upon her tender face, smiled and kissed her elder’s forehead. Those green eyes, blessed upon her features, reflected the shade in the crone’s own… but it bore none of the weight, or the sorrow, or madness–it was a color as fresh as spring grass, looking hopefully upon the world, with a vision as endless as love never broken.
An unheeded hand reached tearfully for that pixie’s form as it danced through the crowds into the kitchen. Her adolescent body was small, so very small… A finely crafted little skeleton that God must have strained his eyes in the making of, so complete and beautiful were her miniature features. Each finger upon her delicate hands were as miraculous to behold as a newborn babe’s, for one could marvel at the /completeness/ of her shape–so feminine, so delicate and womanly–despite the way it disappeared inside one’s palm.
Her carrot-colored curls were swallowed in a fog of other faces, laughing, grinning, exchanging jests and licking their lips–restrained from nibbling by the honor of prayer. Still, a child or two’s cheeks bulged secretly.
The door ripped open momentarily, bringing the howling of winds and rippling of snow, which dashed through and threatened every lady’s skirt. The man in the doorway looked distressed, bearing a knot of alarm upon otherwise fatherly lines.
“Vampyr!” he shouted. “There is vampyr here!”
The immediate commotion that gripped the cabin was such that no useful orders could be shouted, each woman and man fretting in their own panic, gathering and counting their children, grasping and honoring their crosses.
It was but moments before the door ripped free again, tilting it in its slot. This time, swallowing the whole of the entranceway with his shadowy height, was the figure of a vampire. He loomed, a great black demon at their door, letting the wind tug past his long frock and extinguish their candles, lighting their fragile inner flames of prayer. His face was a long one, weighed down by a thick and thinking brow, and slashed across with a long and elegant mouth, whose thin lips hinted some sensuality as he spoke, “Am I so unwelcome?”
Gasping, some of the more fretful mothers ushered their children to climb onto the ceiling partition, where they were to lay flat and keep quiet. The vampire took no interest in what the women did with their children, for his eyes were fixed upon one woman in particular, who had the misfortune of standing at the front line of the frightened pack, which seemed to inch ever tighter underneath the vampyr’s gaze.
She stood paralyzed as his eyes turned to her, unprepared for the eye-contact, which stripped him of his objectification as a frightening thing and forced the consideration of elements much more dangerous to admit–emotion, desire… thought. His orbs were deep onyx stones set upon a glossy, flawless white, and her own felt much too naked, much too telling, in their pale human greens… which gave away every clamping tension of her pupils; every throbbing pinkness of veins that crept upon the white. Her breast was made of living stone as he beheld her. Much too forceful, and heavier than she had ever known it, the sculpture of her inner life raged against its cage, making music with the desperate throes of its entrapment. She felt its cries must ring so clear, so obvious to every ear in the room, that her cheeks flushed rose… but all that emerged from her was a barely audible breath, which none but the guilty party could know as enrapturement.
The silence between them was near-absolute, save for the never-ending whimpers and rockings of the brain-rotted grandmother, whose unintelligible sobbing had elevated in the confusion. It was such a pitiable sound, to cut across such passion.
To the vampire, this young soul was the closest he had seen to the sun in two hundred years… Indeed her radiance brought some faint illusion of warmth upon his skin, glowing there as she did in her virgin white dress and her screeching orange hair, gathered in a sloppy crown of curls upon her head. He felt… familiarity.
Sadly, he would not touch her that night, nor any night soon thereafter… for as he made his advance upon the crowd, and crossed beneath the partition’s edge above, a small tub of icy water–placed there to gather the snow dripping through the cracks–rushed down upon him… and /burned/ his skin. Burned him cruel and hard.
The children above chippered and cheered, clapping their hands together as he writhed in the dark material of his frock, wailing, melting, before dashing out the door into the blizzard oblivion beyond. They were attentive children, see, and had amongst them blessed the water, praying with the purity that only children can to invite the Holy Ghost into its pool. The adults were calling out and sighing in relief below, embracing one another, while mothers scolded with smiling faces.
None, however, felt safe. The family convened in a dread meeting of scarce candlelight after that, discussing what they ought to do next. Clearly, the vampire would heal, and then return in his strongest state to consume their children. The uncles and nieces and cousins who had traveled so far now refused to stay, citing with the greatest urgency that they must take their children home and never let them return. It was agreed, in the end, that two of the men would stay behind and look after the elder woman and her granddaughter, who called this cabin their home. They would prepare for the vampire’s eventual return.
Many years passed without a trace of the vampyr’s shadow. The old crone’s condition deteriorated even further, but she did not die, no… She merely shriveled up more and more, until she hunched like a raisin in her dusty old chair, tucking her chin into shambling half-fists while she mumbled her nonsensical pleas.
“Dirty… dirty! Her room, always dirty!” she whimpered, and her granddaughter took the time to smile at her, occupied as she stood in the same room. She and three others were standing over the old tub, which as filled with what looked like shiny white eggs, floating in a variety of sizes. They were all holding long spoons–spoons as long as brooms, with wide, rounded ends, which they used to form and coax the water. With the right rolling sweep, they could force the liquid to take to hard matter and shape another egg.
“I’ve got another one,” the young woman informed, smiling as it took shape. “We will need lots of children if we are to protect ourselves when the vampyr returns.” Of course, she was not so /very/ young anymore… Repeated summer tans had roughened her skin and speckled it with freckles. The dry creases of smiles past hovered on either side of her lips. Her body, once so elfish, had grown close to normalcy, and its adolescent proportions had filled out into the less flattering, but ever beautiful, form of a grown woman. Covered in cloth, it was ambiguous whether she had borne children, but the increased strength of her arms and the wear in her ever-loving eyes suggested yes. The red curls on her head were dusty, and thicker than before, splintered with the wear of the seasons and the decline of vanity.
Still, a sort of glow emanated from her, like the hidden spark in a doomed ember, winking to those who stare.
The vampire came.
With a creak at the door, he entered their sanctuary once again–this time with the chilled early winds of spring behind him. The small family looked up from their egg-making, and the grandmother cried louder, louder, until she howled hoarsely in her seat.
But between the vampyr and his sun, there was only silence.
Once more, he stepped out across the distance to reach for her, and once more, water came tumbling over his head from above. He cringed, momentarily, feeling the deathly liquid soak his clothing… but then he righted himself with suspicious wonder, examining his hands. “That was not even blessed,” he observed, and tilted his head back to see the mischievous children who had done the deed. Their faces flashed before him before they scrambled back from the ledge in a cloud of giggles, and then fell silent. No hands and knees on the blanks–only moonlight peeping through their cracks. Finding himself still dry, the vampyr looked about the room… Empty. Somehow, it had transformed into day, and though the low, setting sun pierced through the window with its fatal rays, the vampyr felt nothing. There was no harm to come to him here, in this shifting place, where only the old crone’s sobs remained consistent.
“You!” he accused, grasping the old woman by her arms and shaking her fragile form. “You are the only real thing here, aren’t you? ANSWER ME!”
In her fear, she gasped repeatedly, nearly suffocating on her own panicked lungs, but somehow wheezing out a response: “Dirty… Her bedroom is always dirty.”
“Whose?” he demanded fiercely, desperate to unravel the cruel mystery that played his thoughts like harpstrings.
“No, no, no!”
“You do not understand!” He shook her again. “I do not come here to harm /anyone/! I have waited patiently to return because I love her–I must love her…”
Just then, the door creaked once more, and the young woman stepped calmly inside, her arms loaded with fresh-cut wood for the fire, depositing her load inside the door. The vampyr wasted no time, grasping the young woman’s arm and whirling her around to face him.
“Or is it YOU?” he demanded, with more certainty now–certainty rooted in hope. “YOU are the master of this illusion!”
“NO!” the old crone cried behind him, with such ferocious volume that he was forced to take a second look at her–to draw near to her trembling body as it reached a withered hand for his. With a cautious thoughtfulness etched deep into his pondersome brow, he knelt beside her and studied the acrid tears that weaved through her leathery labyrinth of lines, and followed her pained gaze to the young woman. Together, they watched as the little beauty dusted off her hands, seemingly oblivious to all other presences in the room… Walking with a privacy in her manner that belongs to those who wander unseen in their own thoughts, not merely confident of but too-long accustomed to solitude.
They watched as she walked to the window, locking eyes with the setting sun… and as she approached that light, it seemed that each step robbed age from her frame, until she stood in untainted adolescence again, as the vampyr remembered her, staring out into the sunset. Its rays saturated her lineless face until she truly was a glowing entity of light, her eyes pierced like crystals to reveal every three-dimensional detail. On her delicate form clung the unstained white of her virgin gown.
“She is you…” the vampyr whispered, turning his comprehending gaze back upon the old crone. He looked at her with the somberness of one who has uncovered the sorrow in too many mysteries, and the miracle in too few. “She /was/ you.”
“She does not exist…” the wrinkled woman sobbed, peering with half-aware longing at mirages too dark for her dying, emerald eyes.
“She does…” the vampyr sighed regretfully. “Inside your demented mind.”