Teacher

It was in Rome that he finally caught up to me. He had been chasing for me for months, and I am forced to admit that his skill was not insiginificant; he was clearly a hunter of no small regard, though whether he had always been a hunter of my kind or of different game it is still impossible for me to say. In any case, it was very clever, the way he took off the pressure when I fled from Dresden to Rome, allowing me to believe I had lost him, and then struck the moment I let down my guard. The details are not important; it is enough to say that he clearly knew of our kind, and he used his every advantage to back me into an inescapable situation and then, interestingly, to capture rather than kill me.

It was the month of September, in the year ninteen hundred and ninty-four. I was one hundred and eighty-seven years old.

I found myself bound to a chair, in a dark chill room that felt like a basement, or perhaps a decomissioned meat locker. Even my sensitive eyes found it impossible to see to the walls, so it was either a very large room or one totally sealed of light, for even my kind cannot see in total darkness.

Even if I could not see, I was not totally insensate. There was someone with me in the darkness, a mortal human, standing about ten feet in front of me. The speed of his heart’s beating spoke of terror or excitement, or in this modern age perhaps only hypertension, as anticlimactic as that is. After a few minutes he spoke. “What are you?”

I raised my eyebrows, even though I knew the gesture would be lost. “I believe you know full well what I am sir, else you would not have me here.”

The voice spoke again. “I wanna hear you say it.”

I sighed. “If I must. I am a vampire, a child of the night, a lurker in darkness, et cetera, et cetera.”

A light flared in the darkness, and I smelled the sulfurous odor of a match being struck. The man took the burning matchstick and put it to the mantle of the propane lantern he was holding. The mantle began to glow brightly, and the man shook out the match and tossed it lightly to the floor beside him. “I wouldn’t joke about things just now, if I were you,” he said. “After all, you’re not the one with the power here. I am.”

I looked around the room. It was indeed a meat locker, or something similar, a windowless metal box. Crucifixes of various sizes and descriptions hung from the walls. “I see,” I said. “And I suppose that the rope you’ve tied me to this chair with-“

“Holy water soaked.” He said, grinning. You’re not going anywhere.”

“Indeed,” I said, looking up from my restraints to the man. He was short, slim but wiry. What little hair there was on his head was dark brown, and circled from temple to temple around the back, leaving the top totally untouched. “Why, then,” I asked, “have you brought me here?”

The man began to pace back and forth. “I’ve been a hunter for twenty-five years. I’ve killed just about any animal you can name, from squirrels to elephants. In all that time,” he said, turning to me, “No matter what I killed, no matter what I used to kill it, I never really felt like a predator, you know? Just a monkey using a tool.”

He pulled a knife from a sheath at his belt and pointed it at me. “But you vamps, you’re hunters all the way through, ain’cha?” It was a hunting knife, the kind with a hook on the back side of the blade for disemboweling caught prey. “Evil sons of bitches, sure, but you’re made to hunt.”

“And so you want to be one of us,” I said.

“I’m gonna do a better job of it than you do, that’s for damn sure. Look at you, for example. All the strength and speed you got, you’d think you’re a natural killer, but I’ve seen your ‘flocks’ in London and Paris. Gangs of people you keep around because they want you to feed on ‘em. A wolf playing sheepdog. I’ll be a better monster than you ever were.” He spat.

“And if I refuse?”

He gestured to the walls. “Not exactly as if you can escape, is it? But, if you won’t…” The man walked the few feet to the steel door of the room, pulled the lever that locked it, and pushed. Sunlight poured in the doorway, landing a few feet from me. My eyes stung.

“Enough!” I shouted. “I’ll do as you ask, just close the damn door!”

The hunter smiled, and sealed the hatch.

I will not recount the exact events of the change. Needless to say, it takes more than a bite to make one of us, or the world would be overrun with our kind. I will say that it is an unpleasant process, both for the sire and the fledgling. It took little more than an hour for the change to happen. When it was done, the man looked up at me from the floor, the pupils of his eyes dialated in the the extreme.

I looked down at him from the chair. “Do you feel it? The hunger, the power?” He nodded. “Good,” I said, and then I laughed. “Now that you’re one of us, I feel I should repair some of your erroneous notions about our kind.”

“One,” I said, tearing away the ropes binding me to the chair and standing, “the Catholics have no power over me, nor does any other faith. Ours is a physiological affliction, not a spiritual one.”

I stepped over to him, grasping him by the throat and lifting him bodily to his feet. “Two: our strength and speed is fueled by the blood we drink. Thus, it should be noted that you, who have not yet fed, are weak right now, weaker than you were as a man.” I held him there in the air, dangling from his neck, his legs kicking feebly. “Oh, stop trying to breathe,” I said, “it’s not as if it’s anything other than habit.”

Turning, I slammed him against the wall next to the door and held him there. “Three: while it is painful and damaging to all of us, sunlight is only immediately fatal to the newly-sired.” I pulled the handle, and the door swung out, the light pouring in again. The skin on the side of the man’s face began to crackle and peel.

I leaned in close, placing my mouth just a hair’s breadth away from his ear. “You made the mistake, my friend, of mistaking caution and restraint for weakness. Just because one can do something does not permit him the right to do so.” I pulled him away from the wall, put him between myself and the door, and then walked forward.

“A vampire I may be,” I said to him, as his neck began to turn to ash in my hand, “but I have never been a monster.”