The Inappropriate Vampire

The Inappropriate Vampire

I'm not sure how I became a vampire. Is this some sort of dream? Have I been created by an inept author’s fantasy? Do I have  amnesia or senile dementia?  Nothing makes sense. But somehow I feel that this isn't much different from most people’s lives.

It was indeed a dark and stormy night. The wind rattled the windows of the old mansion, and the flickering lightning and rumble of thunder continued through the evening. I found myself awakening from my dreamless sleep and pushing against the cover of an antique coffin. The lid creaked open, and I sat up and crawled out of the ornate box. The coffin was in an old dusty bedroom garlanded with cobwebs and covered with many years of dust. What the heck am I doing in a coffin? I have claustrophobia! It seemed like I’d been written into a story as a vampire, but I am quite disturbed by the sight of blood. And I have an under-bite which makes vampire teeth quite uncomfortable. I hate spiders and I’m very particular about keeping my living space neat and tidy.

I walked around the old bedroom, looked into the mirror and tried to straighten my hair. Oops, I had forgotten, vampires can’t see their image in a mirror. Then I noticed another coffin in the room, slightly smaller than mine. Did the author give me a vampire family? That could make life…or death…or whatever they call vampire existence a bit more interesting. I knocked on the top of the casket. The lid shot open, smacking me in the chin. I found out that vampires can feel pain and bleed. A gangly, sheet white, venomous looking, vampire adolescent sat up and looked at me with an exasperated expression. “Why the Hell did you wake me up Dad…you know I always stay out late. I just got in an hour ago!” He slammed the lid down, catching the fingers on my left hand.

I certainly didn’t remember having a kid…let alone a vampire kid…but here I was a parent. In fact, I didn’t remember anything about my life previous to finding myself sleeping in that coffin.

I started feeling a bit drowsy myself and I crawled back into my coffin for a nap. I pulled the lid down, but I couldn’t get to sleep. My chin hurt, and the fingers on my left hand were throbbing. I started worrying. What was the author up to? What was he going to make me do next? Then I started thinking about my “kid”. What was he doing running around all night?  He was a vampire. Who was he getting blood from?  Was he hurting or killing people? And what if some child protection bureaucrat came over to my place and found I was keeping my teenage kid in a coffin? I’d spend the rest of my life in prison and make the front page of every tabloid in the world. After a while, I drifted off to sleep. I dreamed my author had been Charles Dickens and he’d made me Oliver Twist, then I dreamed some cheap pornography author had written me into existence…I won’t go into that…and finally that I’d been written as the Prioress in Canterbury tales, which wasn’t much better.

I was awakened by knocking on my lid and I heard a squawky, adolescent voice asking, “Dad, I’m hungry, let’s go out to eat." At first my mind went to typical adolescent fare…hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos...and then I remembered that the kid was a vampire and so was I. I climbed out of my coffin to the judgmental gaze of my kid.

The first thing he said was, “Dad, you need to go to a vampire orthodontist, that under-bite of your is really irritating your lower lip. The kid seemed to be a fairly normal Goth teen. Sure, he was pale as paste and wore a nose ring, but I knew that wouldn’t warrant second glance at most large shopping malls.

Not surprisingly, my teen vampire suggested we go to the mall to pick up a snack. Suddenly, I found my mind swirling with images of delicious, graceful teenage necks, the warm nourishing feel of some young person’s blood flowing into my stomach, the sense of satisfaction after finishing a nice dinner. And then I was suddenly appalled by those same images.

I said, “No son, we should go to St. Mary’s Hospital.”

“Dad, I’ve heard St. Mary’s Hospital cafeteria has some of the worst food in the world.Can we at least go to some joint where we can order an extra-rare steak? St. Mary's is a dingy old hospital with obnoxious green walls and an incompetent staff.”

I looked over at my kid and noticed big lumps where his shoulder blades would normally be. I also noticed that he had an AC/DC tee shirt on…at least he had good taste in heavy metal music. But then I asked him why a modern Goth teen would wear such a dated tee shirt.

He frowned and said, “Look dad, we're both hundreds of years old. I even met the real Count Dracula. You know he was just some vicious tyrant, not a real vampire.”

“And son, have you had a physical recently, what are those lumps on your back.”

“Dad, reach back and feel your own back,” said my pasty vampire kid.

I felt my back.  Where my scapula should have been, I found a folded wing.

“We can fly…we can turn into bats too…we're vampires, Dad.”

I was beginning to think that this vampire thing could be fun, but I still didn’t relish sucking the blood out of a bunch of people and leaving them lying around dead…or did I.

Look author, either make me an evil vampire with no conscience at all, or make me something else. All this ambiguity is driving me crazy, and I never heard of a crazy vampire.

I told my son to follow me. We were going to eat. We climbed up to the old turret of our run-down Victorian mansion and fluttered over to St. Mary’s. There was an open window leading into a third floor storage room, which was perfect. There were even a couple of ratty laboratory coats, to help us blend in to the hospital staff. We wandered into the hospital lab. Since it was late at night, there was no one in the lab. The one person on duty had left a note on her desk saying she was down in the cafeteria having coffee. We pulled out several tubes of blood from the fridge, and slurped them down. They all had little colored tops. Some tasted a little weird and some were downright nasty. My kid picked up a big container, thinking it might be a real find until I told him it was a urine sample.

Then we wandered out of the lab, a little sick to our stomachs, and went up to one of the nurses' stations. I was rather concerned about the way my son was staring at the nurse’s neck. I quickly asked the nurse where they stored the blood. She looked at me quizzically, but gave me directions to the blood storage room. I grabbed my kid by the shoulder, and pulled him away before the staff behind the counter got too good a look at him and his nose ring.

We surreptitiously made our way to the blood bank where we made our big score. I’d brought some grocery sacks, and we soon had quite a load of blood. Just as we left the lab, a security guard spied us. Fortunately, he was far enough away that we could make it to the storeroom. Just as he opened the door, he saw us flutter out the window with our bags of groceries.

When we got home, we put the excess blood in the freezer, and then emptied the dinner blood into our bowls. We warmed it in the microwave to give it a nice, savory temperature we would enjoy. Though we vampires must have blood for nourishment, we also enjoy a nice bottle of Zinfandel with our meal, though I was worried the boy might be too young to drink.

I sometimes suspect that my life is some sort of sordid fantasy written by a deranged author from some other dimension. But who hasn’t had thoughts of that sort. Here I am a vampire, so I guess I’ll just make the best of it. The sun is starting to peek over the horizon and I find that I am getting quite drowsy. Maybe tomorrow I'll wake up in a detective story or a spy novel or some children's fantasy.  But now, my soft, comfy coffin is beckoning me and I guess I will just have to wait until the next nightfall to figure things out.