WRITTEN IN SLIGHTLY ARCHAIC GERMAN, A SPRAWLING HANDWRITING AND GENEROUS INK STAINS
P O S S E S S E D
**
There’s no real way to start. I have tried, and I have torn the pages from the spine. But I feel that I must start. This story must be written. It is a story that must be passed down.
For two years, I tried to keep away. At first I thought I was only a danger to my family. As long as I was around them, the danger would come to them. But I was wrong. Without me, without someone to look over them, they would be gone. They would be dead, dispersed. They would not have had the opportunity to thrive. They are out of the old country, now. I have brought them somewhere new, somewhere not yet ravaged by war. If war comes to pass, I will not leave them.
Religion was at the forefront of the war that forced us to flee. I used to be a religious man. Maybe I still am, but my faith is something different now. Religion will crucify me. The religious would see me burned at the stake. They would call me witch, or demon. Both. I am not sure what I am. I am not sure if they have a right to hunt me.
Except – I am alive. I was saved. I do not think that she intended anything other than to save me. And yet I know nothing about her beyond her appearance. I returned to the city to try to find her but it was to no avail. There were too many warm bodies and there was too much noise. The city was too overwhelming so soon after my transformation.
I am not telling this story in the correct order.
There was a riot. It was in 1606, in the city of Donauwörth. The Catholics had organised a demonstration, which turned into a riot. It was an uprising, and I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I do not think they knew me for a Lutheran; they might have killed me sooner, had I made a show of my faith. As it was, I got caught up in the chaos. The carriage that I had arrived in was gone. I was trying to find some other way out of the city when there was a rush of men. Soldiers were trying to keep the Catholics back. I got caught up in the middle. They thought I was one of them. Knocked back, I slowly became aware of the warmth against my shoulders, sliding down my spine. At first, I thought I had landed in a warm puddle of water, and yet I knew that it had not rained. I was first aware of a coldness in my extremities, and soon realised that the warmth at my back was a deep contrast to the coldness in the rest of me. She dragged me out of the street. She fed me her blood. It is a notion that I want to laugh at, except for what I know I have become.
I woke up in a meagre bed. It was just a thin mattress and a side table, little else. The noise had dissipated outside. At first, I thought that I was well again, except it was only a deceiving numbness. As I lay there, an ache stole over my limbs. I knew that I had to try to get home, and yet as soon as I stood up I was overcome by dizziness. I vomited. I wretched and coughed until my throat burned with acid and blood. The proper amenities were lacking, and the contents of my stomach sunk into the unfinished wood of the floor. It soaked into the mattress, which was already stained with Lord knows what. I had defecated, unable to control the power with which my body appeared to reject everything and anything within it. Both bladder and bowel had emptied. I was a disgrace.
Night had fallen outside, and only after I could breathe properly without nausea did I notice that I could see. There was no candlelight. The window looked out on an alleyway and there were no lamps looking in. And yet I could see with perfect clarity. How many hours did I waste tracing the patterns of the grains of wood that made up the floor? I followed a trail of ants to the window. I could see the minuscule hairs on their legs. I could hear the click of their pincers. I could hear the house moving, the wood breathing in the cooler night time air, expanding, contracting.
I could smell the dew as it landed on the windowpane, though it was hard to smell anything outside of my own filth. Downstairs, suddenly, a door had slammed. It near deafened me, as did the voices, the laughter. And yet, the hasty footsteps soon died down; there was another bed, and the creak of springs. There was heavy breathing, and the wetness of lips against lips. Beyond their moans, however, I could hear their hearts. I did not know what it was, though. It was a jungle drum, deep and mesmerizing, rhythmic in its slow darkness. It was a call that I could not resist. I was a predator, drawn to my prey.
I was possessed. I still think that I am possessed. I ripped into their throats. I held one down while I killed the other, drained him of his blood before I drained her. Or was it the other way around? I could not decipher which was which, not in the frenzy of my feeding. I felt like a bystander, an omniscient spectator. And yet I can remember the way their skin felt, clammy and hot, pulsing with a life I no longer had.
That was why I was lured to the sound of their hearts. I could no longer hear my own.
I was covered in blood and filth. I knew that I had to get home, though it wasn’t so much a need as a want. This was a nightmare. The familiarity of my home and of my family would surely bring me to my senses and clear away the cobwebs of whatever madness had come over me. Anja’s warm voice and slow reassurances would bring my sanity back.
First, I had ot find a way to get there. I had to find my carriage and horses. Back in the room that I had vacated, I found my jacket – in its pockets still securely sat the money I had left home with. If all else failed, I would hire a carriage. I would avoid answering questions.
I did not know whether I felt unwell or whether I felt too well. Mentally, I was overwhelmed. I could still taste the blood, the thickness of it stuck between my teeth. The heat spread to my limbs. It was a surge of vitality that I had never experienced the likes of before. It should not have felt so good. I had just murdered two people and I was a religious man. I was good to my wife and I provided for my family. I treated my employees with respect and I paid my taxes. Murder had never been on the agenda.
And yet, I had committed murder and in the aftermath I felt like a God. I had been purged of humanity and of weakness; the blood was the nectar of eternal youth and I was blaspheming to count myself as one of the mighty. I climbed the stairs two at a time and felt absolutely no fatigue. I felt like I could tear this den of filth and murder down with my bare hands. And yet I knew that I had to focus. I felt ill not only because I had committed the ultimate sin but also because I had enjoyed it. I had consumed the blood of other human beings and I had enjoyed the consequences. I felt both cold and hot; both dead and more alive than ever before. But I could not stay. I had to get home.
When I reached the street I realised that I had either wandered further than I thought in the chaos of the riot, or I had been brought to this old house. It was located in one of the narrow streets near the edge of the city; there was a tenement just like it on one side, similar narrow houses, near abandoned, creeping down the street. It was one of the older parts of the city – growth had expended in the other direction.
I tried to be quick as I began to walk South; there’d be horses to hire on the road out of the city. I had decided that it would be too hard to find my own carriage and horses; they’d probably gone home, bereft of their master, or else the rabble of the city had claimed them as their own. I was in too much of a state to go to the authorities, or to retrace my steps. I did not have time. I needed to bathe; I needed home.
Knowing nothing of my condition, I did not know why a contradictory lethargy suddenly took charge of my limbs. The city was slowly coming alive around me as dawn approached, the beginning of a new day of business. It was hard not to follow a scent; it was nigh impossible not to trace the patterns in the brickwork or watch the moths dance so dangerously close to the sputtering flame of a street lamp. I could smell the oil; I could see the dust of their wings floating through the air, effervescent. The crunch of my boots in the dirt was hardly enough to keep me from chasing every rhythmic heartbeat that passed me by. The demonic hunger was not yet desperate enough.
When the birds began to sing, I was transfixed. I was frozen in place on the street corner, unable to detach myself from their melody. Until the melody was interrupted by a guttural scream – one that I realised tore from my own throat only as my skin began to blister and peel. Nearby, the butcher was opening his shop. I do not know what I did or how I managed. I cannot fathom my extreme good luck as I woke the next night tucked away among the slabs of meat and ice. My skin was still blistered, the burn tempered by the ice I leaned against. I was otherwise intact; the dead body of the butcher was beside me, bereft of its blood.
I was not frozen but felt that I should be. My life would never be the same. It was not a life anymore, not in the traditional way. Life, by definition, is fleeting; I have no more life. I have an absence of life. I am a man stuck in the moment that he died, frozen, while life thawed and surged onward around him.
It is such a fleeting thing, but if I ever find it again I shall not take it for granted. I thought that as soon as I stepped through those front doors I would be safe and whole. The house was just as I had left it, or so I thought. As soon as Anja burst into the entrance hall, however, I realised it was not the same. The air was fraught with nervous energy. Electrified. At first she was angry. I could see it in the daggers of her eyes. As soon as she translated what she saw – I have no words for the sound that strangled from her throat.
It should not have been her throat that captivated me so. The way she fell toward me, her fussy hands touching my face and my ruined clothes, adjusting to the smell and sight of me – it should have transfixed me. The warmth of her concern was the light at the end of the tunnel that I had been struggling toward, and yet now that I had reached the end of the tunnel, it was not the warmth of her care that had me enthralled. It was the heat of her skin. I could see it, beneath the surface, surging through her veins which were laid out like a veritable banquet. I could not hear her questions. I could not hear her concern. I could only hear the beat of her heart, so steady and strong.
My fingers were pressed to the curve of her neck when Johannes called from the top of the stairs. Papa! The exclamation was a stuck knife in my soul. The boy was tired, but his voice was threaded with excitable enthusiasm. Even though he was now nine years old and capable of reading on his own, it was rare that I was not there to read to him – to them – before bed. I had missed the past two nights. When I raised my eyes to him, his little feet thundering down the staircase, I realised that he had saved his mother. I’d been about to rip into my lovely wife’s neck.
Behind Johannes, Jorge appeared. Ulrich was only three, and oblivious, still fast asleep. The boys were slower to realise the ill state of their father’s wellbeing; I could feel Anja’s fingers pushing at my chest and when I turned back to her I knew that she had seen it. What had I looked like to her? Were my pupils wide and my lips curled? The teeth were sharp, that much I knew. The hunger would have been etched so perfectly into my features. When you spend so much time with the person you love, you know when they suddenly become someone else. Although I had already questioned the state of my humanity, seeing the fear and the recognition in my Anja’s eyes only confirmed that it was lost. I was not possessed by a demon. I was the demon. I was the monster who’d nearly consumed his own wife.
I didn’t require the encouragement. With a hoarse shout I told the boys to go back to their rooms and pushed Anja back. I stumbled out into the yard. Home should have provided warmth and security and yet I had brought only danger and the cold. My beautiful Anja, however, would not let me go so easily. I heard as she repeated my command to the boys, though she was far gentler. Although she had witnessed the demon, still, she followed. The curtains in the windows twitched, and I knew that the staff were watching their master pace the front garden. Later, I would learn that the staff could not be trusted. The staff were prone to supernatural inclinations, and I could not blame them. They believed in the devil, and it did not matter who I had once been to them. A good man possessed is no longer a good man.
I do not need to go into the details. There was an inglorious way in which my wife exerted more strength than I was capable of. Within minutes of my homecoming she knew that I had changed. From that moment there was nothing that I could hide from her. How many times did she slap me that night, and the nights following? How often did she hiss or shout to remind me of where I was and who I was with? How many times did I break her heart? And yet, she persisted. I cannot claim that she ever accepted it. There was a distance between us from that night onwards, though I would sometimes wake to find her hot body curled beside my cold one. I slept in the basement. At first, it was only so that she could lock me away from our children. It became habit. It was befitting of my station.
Without Anja, I would have been lost. I would have been rabid. I would not have learned to curb my thirst. I have not met anyone like her since, nor will I find anyone like her again. She was so fiercely loyal – not to me, not first and foremost, but to our children. I would not have changed her. Instead, I learned from her.
I would not live for myself. I would not live for religion. I would not live for passion or politics. I would live for my children. And my children’s children. I would do all that was in my power to keep them safe and secure – even if that meant keeping them safe and secure from myself. Even though I soon gained control of my urges, even though I could never, ever harm my wife or children, I was still a danger to them. The staff knew that something was not right, and on a small estate such as ours, food for a demon who could only drink blood was scarce. I needed population. And I would not bring more devils to their door. I’d be hunted. I’d be burned, if ever I was discovered. I would spare them that grief.
It tore my heart from my chest to leave, but what choice did I have? I needed to find out more about what I had become. I had to find others like myself. I had to search for the woman who had done this to me. By now, I know it was futile – but I needed to find a cure.
