Incarnadine: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula

I sensed that an infinity of other shapes jostled beneath my skin, and my delight in their multiplicity made me overlook a disquieting detail: that where the blade-splintered oak caught my arm as I emerged from it, I was bleeding, and would soon have a new and lasting scar. I, who had seemed impervious till now, was injured, if mildly. It seemed of microscopic importance, but would grasp for me like a hand from darkness later on. At the edge of the wood, I saw firelight in the distance, felt something evil ravening in my throat, and turned quickly away from the discontinuous beacons of the motionless town. A beckoning luminance still seemed to hover before me, and my cravings were only heightened by the voracious symphony of night sounds. Wandering the bug-thick woods, listening to the predator’s chirp and squeal and cry, I thought how easy it would be to simply accept my strange new otherness, and spread myself, like a wind-born malady, across and through and past the slumbering village that snored and gasped and dreamed beneath my glance. Dreamed of lost happinesses and impossible reunions. Of childhood’s forgotten games, and the milk-white skin of neighbor-house bridegrooms, of illicit partnerships clutched in sweating conjugal ecstasy on somebody else’s straw bed. How easy to become like the night-world that writhed and blinked and bit and sang. To join in the dark dance, and simply claim that which had become mine by divine right: the bright red blood of every woman, man and child who twitched and waited in restless reverie – there, within the limits of my considerably expanded reach. I could claim them as a kind of prey. The way a mosquito claims a wrist. The way a flea claims a leg. The way a corpse is claimed by the grave. I could, with no more energy expended than a dead leaf carried by an autumn wind, consummate my strange new relationship to mankind, drifting through cracked peasant lintels and splintered farmhouse doorjambs, floating above the sweet new grass on the floors of clandestine haylofts where prohibited lovers slumbered, each in the other’s forbidden arms. And I would declaim, in a soft voice whose authority would be magnified by the unnatural fact of my ice black silence: Dreamers, keep dreaming. Of arms and legs and sky and flight. I come bearing gifts. The waking world, the world of toil and woe, of betrayal and hardship and death, all this I take from you. Let us together quench the slow-burning fire the Adversary left you to die in -- abandoned, the way a drunken potter abandons good clay to crack and fail in the kiln. Newer hands have plucked you from the fire, and they rejoice in your steadfast shape. I here give you my one unblessed commandment: Thou shalt not wither and wilt. The Adversary has been pulled down. The chains are broken, and there will be no leave-taking. Mortality, carnal, earthly mortality, has itself been made mortal. And you and I and a thousand others like us are now and forever the sworn, implacable and in all ways triumphant enemies of time. We are imperishable. And we are one. Such thoughts teemed within me as I listened to the forest’s rapacious incantation, and they filled me with hunger and dread. The time was soon, but not yet. The mortal noose was slipped, but the impress of the rope had left scars and fibers. And so I hanged my head, uncertain and terrified, as though the scaffold still rested beneath my feet, and the short drop and long dangle remained as my all too sure human culmination. I had escaped the pen, but I was still God’s well-trained cur, able to feel the leash, even after it had slipped forever from my one time Master’s hand. I was as yet unready.