Request: Hostel - Another Vampire Story

(credits)

Every single day, she would try something new.
First, it'd been holy water. Flinging a cup of liquid at your host face was just preposterous. Then, she'd slipped half a dozen garlic cloves in their evening soup. Her drawing holy symbols on her bedroom's door had infuriated him. Permanent marker. On century old oak wook. There was no way to get rid of it.

"Look, Julie, for the very last time. None of this is working, and none of this will ever work. I am a vampire, yes. I am immortal, yes. Think of me as a soulless spawn of some demented evil if want, I don't care! But for the love of whatever you believe in, stop making my life a living hell and just stay put! These things you hear about holy water, sunlight and such are the stuff of myths. I, on the other hand, am real. You are my only guest, so please behave as a guest should!"
She was firmly standing on the other side of the room, her bed between them, arms crossed agains her chest, her eyebrows locked into a resentful frown. "I still think a stake to the heart would kill you".

His face turned from pale to paler. He flung his arms upward in a gesture of earnest desperation and slapped his cheeks with both his hands.
"A stake to the heart would kill anyone!"
- "I don't know that. I've never tried before. Maybe you should be my first" She went around the bed, reducing the distance between them to a mere couple of inches and poked his chest with her finger.
"I don't see any reason to grant you anything. You advertize your place as a guest house but you put me in a room with a leaking roof where the layer of dust on the bed is thicker than the blanket, then you tell me there is no phone coverage, then you tell me that I have to stay because you 'chose' me to be your 'helper'?"
- "Look, vampires have to drink blood, alright? Not much be we do.  Soup is not enough. I just need you here for a couple of month, let me take an ounce of your blood every two days, and I won't bother anyone for the next century. We don't kill anymore, you know." He gave her what looked to be an apologetic smile. Showing a set of pearly white teeth. Perfectly healthy. Perfectly normal.
- "And why should I? And what can you do? You can't even bite me!"
- "See it as a favor"
- "No. That's final. You're going too far. Now stop that or I'll…"

She hadn't finished her sentence when the blow landed, sligthly pushing her liver in. She folded in half then dropped to her knees, nauseated, unable to catch her breath. The count's composure had changed. He wasn't a frail middle aged man. His hardened gaze was penetrating, boding for unpleasant moments to come.
"I have had enough of you, lady. Akin to the others, you believe that your innocent looks and likable features are a fate shaping tool, but I see further than a mere envelope. You are denying the meager pittance I am so gently asking. You will be punished". Even his speech had changed.

Julie couln't help but stare. Pain was giving way to surprise.
She had come to almost like the old man.

A month earlier, looking for some quiet holidays, she'd found the manor on an Internet listing.
Past the first day of her stay, she hadn't felt completely comfortable in the Count's presence.
The huge house, though, was too remote to leave immediately. A shuttle bus would only come once a week; she had to wait several more days.

The Count was clumsy and comically ill tempered. She'd seen him as a quirky, armless loner in need for someone to talk to. His rambling about being a vampire had come to amuse her and, to kill time, she'd entered his game, hoping to entertain them both.
Her tricks and their disputes were supposed to be fake. Role plays.

And there she was, on all four, gasping for air.

The Count briskly took hold of her wrist and started pulling her out of the bedroom. Down the corridor leading to the dining room, they took an impromptu left down a spiralling stairwell to enter an underground tunnel, forking every now and then.
She wasn't figthing back. He found her stoicism rather practical. Resisting was no use anyway, the feeding room's heavy lock would bar any attempted escape. He was feeling thirsty.

After they reached the place, he unlocked the heavy, metal coated door and sent her sprawling on the floor. "I am coming back very soon. Then, we will enjoy a very special kind of drink, you and I." He locked the door shut. The room was brightly lit by a common lightbulb. She had expected a chandelier and a fireplace. What she hadn't expected, though, was the operating table and the surgical paraphernalia in a stainless still tray by its side. And the handsaw.

A pin board was hung on the wall in front of her, displaying locks of hair carefully tied in a ribbon-like manner, each one labeled from one to seventeen. A label marked eighteen was pinned alone in the lower right corner. She heard a key turn in the lock. Before she did anything, the Count was holding a damp, acrid smelling cloth to her mouth. She went limp. When she opened her eyes again she was on the table,  wrapped in heavy transparent plastic sheets from the neck down.

The count was leaning over her, looking satisfied and slightly extatic. "See, dear little thing, it would have been wiser to let me have some of your blood. I would have let you go back to your daily life, mind your irrelevant problems and work your irrelevant job… but no. Just like the others, you had to refuse. They all refuse. Nonetheless, I would like the express my gratitude, you will keep me well fed for quite a while."

His right hand, holding a razor sharp scalpel, steadily advanced toward her throat.
"Now now, stay still, it wont hurt much if you…"
He stopped mid-sentence.

Julie's left arm had darted from under the sheet, effortlessly piercing through them, grabbed his wrist and brought it to her mouth. The shock was so brutal it sent the scalpel bounce against a wall.
The Count could clearly feel her two canines puncturing his skin.

Still holding her bite, she sat on the edge of the table, completely unhindered by her bounds, before the nonplussed expression of her captor. Letting go of his wrist, she wiped her sleeve to her mouth, smearing a dark red drop of blood across her cheek.

"Oh my, I haven't drank in ages. Feels good, doesn't it? Just my luck, too. I've always liked eccentrics thinking themselves as vampires. Usually I just stick around for a couple of days and get out of their way. Most of the time they just like wearing ruffles and drink wine while pretending to be evil. Having said that, you're my first real psychopath.
So, you try to lure them into thinking you're just an crazy old man, and add them to your collection a la 'Dexter' as soon as they get tired of your nonsense… that's pretty sick."

The Count's eyes widened as he backed up in a corner.

"I must commend your knowledge, though. Garlic, sunlight… ", she scoffed, "Holy symbols! None of this works. It's no more than pop culture. But that scalpel, that was bad news, well played.
Still, there is one fact you got completely wrong. Do you know which one?"

He silently shook his head from side to side, still staring.

"We still kill, sometimes"
She rolled her eyes and added, to herself, "Mostly for fun".

She leapt.

The End.

This story is based upon a request from Julie (Keywords: Vampire, Funny... I just couldn't keep the funny part on this one, got pretty carried away. Julie is a badass though, and I'll hope she'll forgive me :p )

Request a story here!

Follow me on Twitter

More about me on Facebook

Hostel - Another Vampire Story by Danny Hefer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Request: Count on me

So, we meet again after a medium sized hourglass?
- "Sounds about right, then you'll explain me the job requirements  and we'll start ASAP".

Ignatius shook his future employer's hand and headed toward the parking lot. Once inside his car, he started the engine, clutched on gear A and drove down through the lower middle, upper-bases and base-base floor to finally exit in the city center. At the red light, he reached for his back pack on the passenger seat, pulling out his hourglass and upturning it against the back rest. He would meet his soon to be boss again, before the sand had filled the bottom half, which would leave him free until the next morning.

He hated the thing, an older model with a heavy aluminium base and thick plexiglass casing.The standard A-A caliber sand, most common in the nothern hemisphere, did nothing to diminish the weight. Luckier southerners would live on standard C-A African grain, much more compact and better flowing, allowing for smaller containers. Only, that very hourglass had been in the family since his great-grandfather, who had been alive during the Disappearance, when people could still use numbers.

Stories about numbers had always fascinated him. How they were used to define precise quantities, coordinate event, or even as memories and means to understand concepts defied his imagination. But just as magic, numbers were from another realm.

When his great-grandfather had still been a boy, people had slowly started to forget how to employ them. Complex operations were the first to go. Specialists in the field suddenly became inept. Several industries had threatened to collapse, although the use of number processors called computers, later relegated to museums, had avoided a massive catastrophe. Despite everyone's best efforts, numbers continued to vanish from humankind's collective intellect, untill even counting (whatever that was -apparently something very basic) had turned into a mistery.

Speculations were made about the phenomenon, successively blaming a new kind of virus, radiations, long term effect of specific food enhancers… without ever finding out a cure.

Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, scholars from all around the planet saw the importance of preventing existing technologies from fading out of existance. The Counsil For Knowledge was founded for that purpose, and issued scores of references and manuals to guide, step by step, the production of the most vital transportation, communication and medical tools.
Following the passing of the last Counting Elder, the Council refocused its aim toward organizing an increasingly chaotic society, renaming itself the Counsil of Measurements.
The post Disappearance era had begun.

Time standardization had been the first problem to be tackled.
If people could still refer to the day-night alternance, they would not be able to keep track of more than a single cycle. Hourglasses were introduced, comming in tiny, small, medium, large and huge sizes, keeping people synchronized as long as the sand would flow.

Distances were measured via hourglasses as well: A walk to the city was a small hourglass away on foot, and a tiny one by car. Quantities would range from single to 'many lots', speed from 'almost stopped' to 'as fast as can', and many more approximation were found to feel the gaps left by the total absence of anything mathematical.

The result was a slowed-down world, where things would only happen after many failed attempt and endless adjustments.

Ignatius arrived home.
He went for the kitchen, unwrapped a standard size pack of frozen french fries, then another, poured a large size pack of oil into his pan and proceeded to cook.

Food packaging was said to be one practical side of life without numbers. Everything would fit into boxes, standardized, off course, from very tiny to very large, and one would rarely resort to cutting and 'measuring' as shown in the archive from the old times.

Waiting for the fries to be ready, he sat near the stove and started handling a Rubik's cube.
His hobby was shared by many others. When counting had left human brains, logic had -quite fortunately- kept on standing its ground. If none of them could figure out how many facets composed the surface of a cube,  they were all aware of the steps needed to achieve the right block position. Twist left, again, again, up, back. Cube solved. Dinner ready.

After moving to the living room, he turned on his television. A filler program was on.
The insipid shows, meant to keep the audience waiting until the production had re-synchronized the hourglasses, always left him with a bitter taste in his mouth.

As he often did, he started talking to himself. "We had industries going on and growing, we had innovations, you can see it in the archives. Now nothing ever gets new, we don't travel anymore, we just keep our activities to a minimum compared to our great-grand's epoch.
We just read the manuals… even our barters are settled in those damned manuals. I want to create things and I want people to use them, but how can you trade things you don't know the value of? I'm tired of watching fillers because TV station are incapable of good synchro…"

His reflexion stretched until bedtime.

His next morning was spent sitting in wait for his future employer. The sun was well into its upper-low quadrant when the suit wearing, almost over-groomed man showed up. Government officials were always touchy about their appearance.

"I'm sorry, I must have kept you waiting. My cat knocked my hourglass sideways during the night."
"Standard excuse", he though. That man didn't look like a pet owner. He'd probably spent too long perfecting his tie knot and was too proud to admit it.

"Anyway, Ignatius, glad we could still sync. Hopefully you didn't wait for too long"
-"Well, I can't be exact about it, but it would be around two and a half small standards HG, sir."
His interlocutor paused, a smirk slowly forming on his face.
"Yes… yes, as I said yesterday, you're the perfect man for the job. Come, I'll brief you on the way. We have a lot of work to do… reforming the Counsel will take some time."
- "At least five years".
This time, they both smirked.

Fin

This story is based upon a request from Ignatius (Keywords: Numbers, Hourglass, French Fries)
Request a story here!
More info, more cake and still no lemon at Without a Lemon's Facebook Page


Count On Me by Danny Hefer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.