Chapter 6
No One Will Believe you
Frances lays in her bed staring at the shards of light on her ceiling. Her eyes wide open with images of the nightmares she had witnessed; repeatedly playing over her pupils. It had been three days since the incident and she hasn't stopped expecting him to come for her at any second; even now as her body is wrapped in a film of oily sweat from the anxiety and lack of self care. Her apartment, now a tomb of neglect with half finished plates waiting to be discarded, the night's clothes in a stiff pile in the bathroom when she last showered in a panicked attempt to scrub the grime of the parking garage, the blood of her own wounds, and the places she could still feel her attackers hands. Bruises under her skin crawl with the sensation of being grabbed, even now. As she feels it, she flings her hands around herself in an attempt to comfort. The sudden movement wafting her body odor around as she settles in to lay still once more. Had this been any other depressive episode she would have felt compelled to at least change her pajamas, but the efforts seem unnecessary at this point. An old thrifted green shirt and bleach stained sweatpants from three days ago seemed just as good of clothes to die in as any other. She would be expected to come into work the next day; she could already imagine it. Colleagues summoning sympathy, the same ones who gabbed about Jolean's death like it was a proper water cooler conversation, the same ones who never once bothered to acknowledge her or Frances, will now showboat halfhearted inquiries on her well being. Frances scoffs at the thought as her eyes flick over to her book shelves. Inspecting them out of the corner of her eye. She had entertained the idea of reading a few times, what once offered endless comfort now only reminded her of the impending fate she was sure to meet when that ferocious homeless man from the parking garage comes for her. Frances lets her imagination runaway with itself. She imagines that soon the dark silence of her apartment will be disturbed with the decimation of her front door and she will freeze in hopeless fear. Or, maybe he wont use the door and a deafening crash of glass will break the nights peace. She sees herself then, quite possibly, leaping from her bed only then to be paralyzed in powerlessness. His force is probably so powerful that it will reverberate a shock wave like a turbine or a jet engine and then certainly all the windows will implode. His dark presence will stand from a kneeling position and a furious wind will whip the curtains. A tall, dark figure, idling with malicious vigor, curtains wildly snapping, bathed in silver moon light. Scenario after scenario flooding her mind, the stress of every one of them weighing her down. She could not decide what fate would be worse; to have a moment to react before he ends her, or to never register his arrival and then be struck down and all becomes darkness.
Her thoughts roiled like the clamor of a sprawling market place. Beneath tangled sheets in the still of the early hours, her mind buzzed restlessly with unbidden questions. How deep did this secret truly run? Do vampires lurk in the very underbelly of this city, or is there a brooding, gothic castle where a dark master orchestrates them like pieces on a chessboard? How many more of them can there be? She conceives the notion of an entire legion. An army of shadows among the shadows. Predators with faces obscured by slick, inky veils, eyes glowing with a feral intensity, baring their fangs like a pack of wolves. Blood thirsty creatures lurking in every dark corridor. Ancient and Godless. An empire of evil.
Frustration surged within her, sizzling on the edge of discovery as she pored over cryptic clues that echoed with the essence of the occult. Yet the more she unearthed, the more lost she became amid the twisting labyrinth, with trickster doors and fun house mirrors. The way it has undone her. Her being, her, self. How Frances perceives herself has always been this complex system that took non stop work to keep together. The need to organize her scattered thoughts, priorities, and the very will to stay focused has always been endless. And now, spiraling downward through a vortex, she begins to understand this must be what they mean when they say knowledge is maddening. This connection to so many things in the unknown is terrifying. This fall is a cold journey. All of this has swallowed her. She never knew she could travel further into an isolating void. Caged inward, it is impossible to not be afraid. Strange that it still doesn't feel like her everyday decay. But never the less this feels like a walk into the dark and there is no one who can join her. It is the loneliest she has ever felt.
She sits up, "Enough." She says to herself frustrated. "This is unbearable." It has been days since she has gotten a good night's sleep. Her apartment is a dark void with the exception of the splinter of light breaking in through the top of the curtains near the bed. There is also a few little lights on her appliances in her living room, tiny glowing specs on the machines that indicate they are plugged in. Standing up she sighs exasperated. There is no shaking this feeling of crawling nerves as she then decides to just stay awake. Maybe she will rummage her fridge, mope on the couch and watch her television till she is forced to fall back asleep. If it weren't for the anticipation of his arrival this would have been just another isolated evening at home. An exhausted chuckle escapes her at the realization. "How sad," she sighs as she attempts to tie up her lifeless hair, getting her fingers snagged in the matted mess, "I've been waiting for someone to come kill me off, and it's still the same old same old."
She imagines the familiar voice of her Tio Frank, her eyes close in a moment of relief. What advice or joke would he say to lighten the situation for her if he were here? It had been too long since she last heard or seen him, her heart ached. It was impossible to feel alone in his presence. Frances could see it now, how concerned he'd be to see her so shaken up, encasing herself in her home. "Perdoname, Tio, I should have done more living than just staying alive," she says to him as tears begin to prickle at her eyes. She has asked for his forgiveness countless times in a similar state, like letters she could never send to him, and every time she could imagine him just shaking his head calmly and assuring her that she has nothing to be sorry for.
She turns toward the open door of the bedroom while still making up her mind. When she comes to a decision she takes a step forward. Only one step. Frances freezes as she sees there in the dark of the open door, the tiny lights of her appliances are swallowed by a shifting presence. A formless, sinuous mass that blurred the line between shadow and substance. Its movement seemed less like a simple trick of the light and more akin to a living darkness itself.
Barely managing to choke out, "Who's there?" Frances fights against the paralysis that threatens to strangle her voice. In that crushing pause, a thought whispers in her mind that those are the famous last words of a woman soon to die.
After a moment of dizzying silence she watches the black mass move, covering up the tiny lights. It is enough to know someone is there while still being ambiguous as to who or what. Frances rubs her fingers into her palms as they become clammy and beads of sweat form all over her.
"It's you, isn't it? The man from the parking garage. Are you here to kill me?"
She waits in the eerie stillness hoping for a chance at diplomacy, just before the darkness spoke. His voice is quiet and brutish. He speaks with a mellifluous blend of accents only to be anchored by a west London accent that deepens with every sentiment, speaking with unnerving calm, "You have something that belongs to me. I want it returned."
"Your… necklace?" Frances questions and after a long pause he says, "My ring. I want it back."
Instinctively, Frances lets the fragments of her terror coalesce into a desperate exclamation, "I know who you are. You're a vampire hunter… a Van Helsing, aren't you?" she blurts out with one knee buckling. Anticipation builds that eventually he will walk through the door to talk to her face to face, but he never does. He remains as a part of the dark, like the rain combining with the ocean.
"I am no Van Helsing." he says dryly. "From your literature I can see you have a fascination for vampires… or smut."
Her eyelids collapse in embarrassment, reaching a decision, though late, how she longed to have been ended before realizing what has even happened. He continues, "Your popular forms of vampire fiction. They represent your society's upper class. Leaching off the poor. Stealing your natural life blood through your labor. It is why they have long written the vampiric to be wealthy. Especially the poetic involvement of the sun, for if the truth about what the rich do, ever came to light, it would burn them to the ground."
Her voice stammers, "You… you're one of them, then?" But the dark presence shifted, and somewhere just beyond sight, a creak in the wooden floor boards demystifies his silent movement.
"No," he replied, voice resolute yet tinged with sorrow. "I long to snuff out that corruption. For every stolen life, for every shattered dream."
Frances wants to feel like their discussion is beginning to waver her personal alarms but she cant help shake the fear in the pit of her stomach. She is still alone in the dark with a stranger and the air is thick with a sense of hostility.
A heartbeat later he continues. "Understand, there is no such thing as vampires." He lowly says with conviction.
"If their not real then what were those men in the parking garage?"
"Men… just men. Not stronger, nor smarter than anyone else. It is only their money and their ability to abandon humanity that makes them different from you. Children of the super rich, continuing the tradition of aristocracy behind the guise of vampiric rituals. A clandestine fraternity in an elusive criminal empire. Operating in plain sight. Their rituals are built on exploiting the vulnerability of their current modernity."
"So they… they were just… pretending to be vampires?" He doesn't dignify her question of vampires with a yes or a no, only an ambiguous grunt.
After a moment of stirring silence he says with his brutish voice, "To conceal their rituals, they want to appear as though they are vampires. What the world thinks vampires are. That fraternity has been perpetuating this idea since the Victorian age. Their idiotic, having such a concept as to perform the sacrificial murder of women on the night of cosmic events, with the belief it will uphold their 'Age of power'."
"Is that what they were going to do with me?"
"Possibly. Sometimes, they just nab a lady, only to keep her locked up in a cage somewhere. Till another cosmic event occurs."
A chilling silence followed as the implications of his words sank into the confines of the apartment. Frances's eyes are wide as they begin to swell, "Great. That was almost me. So you.. save women from these… from this… fraternity?" she inquires, half hoping for any answer that would be in the neighborhood of reassuring.
His voice held an edge of bitter irony. "I don't save everybody. Someday I will burn away the stain of their crimes. Until that day, I live as a hunted creature in a world too blinded by its own legends." A pause, heavy with unspoken sorrows, passes.
A wave of revelation washes over Frances as she recollects his animalistic speed and otherworldly strength. "A hunted creature? You… you're a… you're a vampire."
She can hear him move, the floor boards giving out a creak where he stands. It makes her blood curdle at the sound. Still he remains indiscernible in the dark and with that unsettling calm he conveys in his voice, he says, "Where you have made a mistake, is that you think your fairy tales are written about me… and they're not. Give me my ring."
The darkness returns to a noiseless void. Frances waits so long that she starts to think he has left and as she takes another step forward, "Stop!" he says with a bark. "Please. Give me my ring and I will bother you no more."
"I have to go to my books to get your ring." With her eyes down she asks, "Can I go to my books?"
The way her heart races is starting to concern her as though she could up and die of fright as the tension is wearying in waiting for his answer.
"Yes." he answers, and with caution she walks around her bed to her book shelves. Stepping over the sorted piles on the floor and then kneeling down. Handling her books with care, she takes a few off of the bottom shelves to unveil a small hidden box.
One of the books she takes down and rests on the top of a pile is Annakaranina.
"You have the book Annakaranina." There is something vulnerable in his voice that Frances recognizes. "I do. My Tio… my uncle. He gave it to me." she stands holding the necklace and ring and says, "Before I give it back… Who is Victoria?"
"What?" He sharply replies. Frances impulsively responds as though maybe he truly could not hear her. "I said, who is Victoria? Her name is engraved on the inside of the ring. Who was she."
"Throw it towards me." the low coarseness of his determined voice is fearfully unforgettable to Frances. She is scared to the point of empty curiosity and tosses the necklace and ring into the darkness of the other room. Frances can only assume he caught it because there was no sound of its metal weight hitting the floor.
It is with her last ounce of confidence in this night that she utters, "What do I call you?" The static in the silence cooks before she hears his voice again, "Call me whatever you want. It doesn't matter." Noticeably his voice drifts further away, "No one will believe you." and with that, the sound of footsteps recede towards the door, and the latch clicks shut. Frances's breaths come in fast, an ebb and flow that fills her lungs like she is able to come up for air under drowning tension. Her feet stumble over themselves as she makes her way into the darkness, unsure if he truly left. She stands where he once was, her mind combing every word, every affliction of his voice leaving Frances alone with the obsession of unanswered questions.
THANK YOU FOR READING!
Follow us on bluesky.com and tell us how you are liking
"THE DREAD LEGACIES"
We will be making announcements about the series very soon.
http://www.instagram.com/the_dread_legacies
You can check out the playlist for The Dread Legacies to listen to the music that inspired the story on Spotify and Youtube.