Wherein the nature of the beast is contemplated and an exploration of self truly begins...
Looking back I see clearly how foolish I was, but hindsight is always perfect, is it not? Flushed with an arrogant confidence in my new-found life, body thrumming with the animal instincts I had inherited, I had no thought as to the stark reality of my existence. Knowing what I was, Vampir, was the smallest facet of it. The reality of my state and the costs it brought were yet to hit home ...
The night spread before me, empty and chill, I was alone. My attackers fled, the mysterious Sheivan departed, his enigmatic advice spoken, the night was all mine.
I lifted my arms and felt the night embrace me, the chill winds gathered about my body and I could sense the city flowing with life. From the smallest mouse scurrying in the grass about the graveyard, to the hustle and bustle of frantic life in the buildings and streets beyond, the city thrummed with a vibrancy I could almost taste. My consciousness spread on dark wings overshadowing the city and as it did, a hunger took me. My instincts, I discovered, were a dangerous thrill. Giving in to my new-found abilities triggered an equally thrilling hunger, a thirst that demanded to be slaked.
Mindlessly, barely more than an animal, I leapt from the mausoleum roof and slipped into the darkness.
The water was preternaturally hot against my skin, flowing in slow but scalding eddies past my body. I realised that the water was only hot by comparison with my grave-cold skin, no steam arose from it, no boiling convection currents disturbed it. It did not burn me, the sensation of heat was merely a side-note, to be observed with a raised eyebrow rather than contemplated with any sense of danger. The corpse drifted slowly from my arms to float gently outwards into the deeper river before sinking beneath the low ripples, arms upraised and trailing, seemingly imploring mercy or rescue. I did not know where I was, I knew not how I had come to be here. I was flush, full of sanguine essence, and vibrantly alive for it. The corpse so recently sunk beneath the oily waves of the river must have been my sustenance this night. I wondered who they had been, what he or she had done (I had never even paid attention to the gender of the corpse as I let the river take it!) to earn death at my hands if, in fact, that death had been earned and the poor soul has not simply blundered across my path unknowing.
I had learned something now, when the hunger took me, when I had expended myself, the thin veneer of control I held over my ever-thirsting nature fell away, shattered into incoherent shards, and with my control went my conscious memory. It was as if, hungering, the beast within had arisen to roughly shoulder aside my will before taking me on a nightmare journey on which I would be a blind passenger in my own body. How could I bear responsibility for this? Day-time courts provided provisional pardon for acts committed under sway if such insanity, I could never assume such moral excuses applied any longer to me! How then to control this beast, how to evade it's clutches?
Faded now, the rabid urge to feed, gone the madness and dusky grey of unknowing, was the beast sated? Having fed, was I now free of its influence? It seemed so to my slowly gathering senses as I lurked there, half submerged in the greasy river and hidden from sight by a rotted jetty over my head, my feet bare and tangled in scummy sea-grass and silt. I could feel the gritty reality of the sand and hear the faint burbling of the last dregs of air leaving the lungs of the recently departed. My senses rich with stolen vitality, I set about discovering where I was and how I had arrived here.
A pair of slippery drag marks in the sand showed me my final movements before the drink, the drag marks straight near the water and gently roiling further up the shore, evidence my prey had not been fully unknowing of its fate. A pair of scuffed footprints pressed deeply into the sand, deeper than my footprints now sank, I had carried my faintly struggling food here before dropping it to drag it further into the water. A few brief spots of blood on the sand and dirt there, perhaps we had fought briefly. My burdened footprints snaked back, broadly spaced as if I had been running, to the brick-bordered concrete sidewalk that snaked along the shoreline, narrowly dividing parking space from the detritus of the river shore. Here they vanished, unsurprising, I had never expected to leave footprints in the asphalt!
Still, further along the road, a rent in the chainlink fence that divided a rail-siding from the road, and scraps of cloth caught in the torn wire. I felt my shoulders and arms, no tears. The cloth was fresh, tell-tale evidence of my passage? I strode across the darkened road, the street lights shattered and broken, to quickly and deftly unwind the cloth fibres from the jagged wire, discarding them into the air where the scraps were taken by the wind beyond my sight. From the torn chainlink fence I could see scuff marks in the dusty ground of the rail-yard, evidence that it was maybe here I had taken my prey. I fancifully envisaged myself pouncing like a great silent cat from the shadows to worry my quarry to the ground, tearing out its throat before raising a blood-smeared muzzle to the sky and screaming my triumph to the stars. A shudder passed through me as some remainder of my human morals quivered in horror deep inside me, this was a man I had murdered, probably innocent, and almost certainly unaware! The truth was probably much less dramatic anyway. A small splash of dampened soil drew my attention, urine in the dirt, it seemed that the truth was much less romantic, much more base and considerably less hygienic.
Broken bottles and steel drums lay scattered about a rough circle that was over-run by boot-marks and footprints. Random remnants of human clothing, garbage, food containers and paper bags were scattered about the surrounding area. I remembered enough of my human life to recognise this as a gathering place for homeless bums and vagrants. One or two of the steel drums were still hot, and chunks of burned wood lay strewn about, some emitting fractious and surprised curls of smoke in a similar manner to the way that an aged and dieing smoker utters a final incredulous, offended gasp before their lungs terminally collapse into ashen failure.
I could almost see the scene in my minds eye, like the memory retained of a long night with hard drugs. In my minds eye I burst into the yard, ravenous and hunched over like a beast. The nearest to me barely has time to scream before I thrust my teeth into the skin of his throat, tearing and drinking simultaneously to drop him in seconds, a bloodless husk. The others, recovering from the shock, begin to run... One by one, they fail to make the presumed safety of the fence. One catches my gleaming eye, and suddenly I am gone, chasing my prey through the containers and garbage before catching up against the chainlink fence. One arm hoists the prey over a shoulder, while the other slashes and tears at the chainlink fence, ripping a wide rent, and that brings me back to the present, looking down at my feet where the trail of footsteps begins.
It is evident to me that I am in danger, this beastly rage has exposed me to the world, something I instinctively know is a bad thing. It is inherent in my nature that I wish to remain hidden, and equally clear that witnesses to my actions remain alive. God knows what they think they saw, where they go now, or what kind of consequences I have called down upon myself! With no bodies remaining here in the rail-yard, and nobody to vent my anger and fear at, I run. Running with all the terrifying speed that I can summon, this entire district of the city falls behind me, my mind imagines the ranks of law enforcement on my trail, and spurs me to further efforts. The streets fly past. They are blurs in my vision. My recollection fails me.
More darkness, time passes, how long I ran I do not know. What scenes I passed, what gale the wind of my passage caused, what dazed impression I left on the minds of the city's stumbling inhabitants, unknown. I awoke somewhere cold. About me was gathered the accumulated detritus of a million human individuals gathered in close proximity. Broken furniture, plant refuse, plastic bottles and an over-abundance of plastic wrappers and fast-food containers crowded against me. As I pull my thoughts together, no longer hungry, numb from the horror or what I have done, I survey the dump-yard in which I have sought refuge. Rats crawl through the garbage, animating it with their furry bodies, it seems the accumulated crud itself is on the verge of waking, so prevalent are their furtive comings and goings. Discarded dump machinery, great yellow behemoths that roll back and forth over the yard, crushing the crud down, compacting it into "land fill", stood idle, like slumbering beasts, on the edges of the great pit in which I stood. Small shacks, rude housings for the poor souls whose job it was to minister to this ocean of junk, stood like hollow skulls, eyes rotted away in their empty and dark windows.
Some instinct tore my eyes from the urban filth about me, and drew my eyes east, towards the sky. The faintest glimmer of light grew there. The sky lightened with startling speed and a faint tinge of pink grew behind the ranked clouds on the horizon. A light rain fell as the chill air of pre-dawn condensed about me. With nowhere else to go, and no time to seek alternate means, I turned and began to burrow into the filth, away from the day's inclement rays. Some basic magnetism drew the rats about me, drew them from their own dim burrows to cluster close around me, covering me in a soft, spongey and totally impervious to light protective layer of flesh. So covered I sank into the earth and slept.