Vampilena by A. J. Gillespie

It’s been a long time.

Far longer than I can remember. Decades, maybe centuries.

However hard I tried, I couldn’t remember a thing of what had happened before the day I died. I only remember what was after: Insane bloodlust that I felt, rage and rapidity growing up within me. I couldn’t remember how I quenched my thirst, either, for it was a picture so morbid my mind had decided to erase it for forever. That was the day I became a vampire.

I still recall the feeling of guilt building up in my soul, that is, if I still have one, after my first “meal.” It wasn’t a human, but a rabbit. I woke up in the woods, feeling hollow and not knowing what to fill this hollowness with. And then I saw that tiny, poor creature. I sucked it dry. Then I scold myself for a week.

But after a week I understood that I was obliged to do all of it, and I couldn’t help it. I had to kill. Or at least to drink blood. I tried to go for blood of wild animals for a little while, but I couldn’t stay there long: I wasn’t satisfied. So I had to start drinking human blood.

Time passed and I learned to suppress culpability. After all, I didn’t kill those poor folks, I drank just enough for me to satisfy my thirst. And then the visions came.

Every person, big and small, is being told that blood is life – but nobody really knows how much of it is true. It is not that you will die without blood; it is that blood is also the host of all information about oneself.

I didn’t know that until I had my first vision: A boy almost getting run over by a carriage. The following week, the vision was that of an elderly woman baking cookies, then her, except younger, getting married, and her writing a letter to her fiancé promising to elope soon. The more blood I drank from a person, the more tied to them, I got, the more visions of their life I saw. I couldn’t bear it. I had to do something to ease my pain, so I did the one thing I knew I could do best: I wrote the visions down as if they were stories. Fictional stories.

I thought it would put my mind at peace, but it didn’t. Instead, it only did worse: the stories were never meant to get published, nor were they going to see the light of day. But I had to survive, I had to pay rent somehow. So I went to a publisher and showed them those works, hoping to get at least some money to get by for a week or two, or maybe even three if I was lucky.

I was lucky: The publisher agreed. But as fortune was on my side, so was remorse. These weren’t my stories, I didn’t create them, I stole them. I was a vampire for decades, but a monster – a monster has awoken in me just recently.