TheVampireandtheMouse by Robin Stark

Author:Robin Stark
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Ellora's Cave Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-03-12T00:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

Benjamin Bretel had lived for more than six hundred years. He was a farmer when the Black Death (though they didn’t call it that then) surged and wiped out his entire family. “It was a dark time,” he told me solemnly. He caught the Death too. He’d heard rumors of a cure on the shores of England, a cure that made people whisper about the devil. But Benjamin was desperate. His daughter was still alive. So, almost collapsing from the Death, he carried her there. She died on the way. But he didn’t.

The cure was vampirism. The vampires didn’t ask him if he wanted to turn. They just turned him. They said it was for the best. They said it was the only way he could live.

Then came the centuries. “How to explain six hundred years of wandering?” he mused. “How can I make a human understand? I was lost, Kirsty. I was lost and I have not been found since—”

“Since what?” I asked.

He waved a hand. “Nothing,” he said, and carried on with his story.

He kept out of human affairs. He wandered like a vagrant, watching people live their lives but never getting involved. He saw whole families live and die in what—for him—was a blink of the eye. He saw wars start and finish, innumerable men die. He watched history happen before him. And he stayed apart. He stayed away. He was a lost man—a lost dead man—and he felt he wasn’t worthy of participating in the affairs of humankind.

And then, as the years rolled on, he saw me. He first saw me when I was walking home from work, through the very same underpass in which we’d met. This had been three years ago, and he had followed me ever since. I tried to interrupt here, but he held up his hand and said, “Just let me finish.” So I was quiet while he told his tale.

He did not know what he found so attractive about me. He’d watched humans before, but never had he watched one for so long, so attentively. When he woke he would go to that underpass and watch me pass beneath it. And sometimes he would follow me home and stand outside my house. I asked him if he’d been planning to kill me. He looked hurt. “Never,” he said. “I would never hurt you.”

He said there was some innocence about me that captivated him, something that reminded him of what life had been like before he became a vampire. “I remember once, before I became a vampire, after a long day of work, I watched a bird cross the setting sun, and I smiled to myself. It was so simple and yet so beautiful. This lone bird, a passing shadow across the sun. I never thought I’d recapture that feeling. But with you I got it every night.”

He watched and he watched. And then, one night, when he was watching, as he always did, he saw Rat and Fat, and he heard my screams.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.