Happy Halloween

My friend Maegan graciously allowed me the opportunity to read her new short story. As soon as I finished it I knew I wanted to share it here as my Halloween entry. I thank her for letting me use it, and I hope you enjoy. The last paragraph hit me so hard. I wonder if she even knows the awesome truth in what she wrote here. It made me think anyway. Happy Halloween.


A Daughter’s Revenge by Maegan Rayne Nevin

I woke as I always do, with the fading light of the setting sun. My dark skin blends well with the night, which suits me fine. I am a hunter. I have been a hunter for 159 years. The prey I seek is no weak helpless victim. He is a predator of the greatest magnitude. A killer of thousands. He is my father.

I’ve watched all the vampire movies, read the books, from the absurd to the sensual. I enjoy the erotic heroes of Anne Rice and Laurell K. Hamilton and the cardboard characters of Bram Stoker and others, but they’re all wrong. And they’re all right. But have you ever noticed all the vampires of popular fiction are beautiful with pale white skin?

I read in one of the better fictionalizations of my reality that the answer to the beauty question is that the predators choose their prey to destroy the lovely or in a perverse attempt to preserve it. Maybe there’s some truth in that. I don’t know. But if the beautiful vampire is the rule, I am the exception that proves it. I am average in my appearance, although there is an air of the predator in me that makes me striking and catches the eye of people as I go by. But does that make me beautiful? Does the gazelle find the lioness stalking through the grass beautiful? I doubt it seriously.

And that predator animal that others sense was not always there. I lived, when I lived, unnoticed until I caught the eye of the wrong person. I use the term person loosely, as you may have guessed. I had a friend who always warned me never to pray for patience. I wish he had warned me not to pray to be noticed. I only prayed the prayer once, as the sun rose on my twenty-first birthday, October 31, 1850. By the standards of that era, I was an old maid.

My skin set me apart. Too light for the field hands I toiled beside to want me as their own. Too dark to ever pass for anything other than a descendant of Mother Africa. My mother had been a house slave the master’s son noticed. I guess that teen-aged boy impacted my life not one bit other than to lighten my skin enough to burn in the summer sun shining down on the cotton fields of Louisiana. In fact, his weak genes did little to change the features of my face from those of my ancestors, and as it became apparent by my thirteenth birthday that I looked more like my mother’s mother than my mother, my days of helping in the house came to an end. I guess I was too ugly for polite white company. The master’s wife exiled me to the fields.

But while my eight years as a field slave did not make me beautiful, they did make me strong and hard. Not hard enough. Moments after I whispered my prayer to a God I was not even sure I believed in a man burst from the woods screaming in agony and plunged himself into the cool water of the creek beside me. I rushed in to help him, not thinking to ask myself any of the important questions like who was this white man and what would happen if he died and I were found standing over him. Questions like why a man ran screaming through the woods at dawn covering his eyes with an arm that smoked like the coals from a fresh dead fire. I did not think, I acted on instinct to aid and comfort. That’s when God laughed and my prayer was answered. He noticed me. My momma always said no good deed goes unpunished. In this case she was right.

He grabbed me, pulled me under the water with him, and used my body to shield his from the sun. I feared I would drown. Soon though, drowning became the least of my fears. I knew as I struggled against the grip of a man stronger than any I’d ever known, and I had known some big, strong, African men, and saw the red, blistered face through the murky water, that this was no man. The devil had come to the plantation.

He sank his fangs into my neck, draining my life and strength to fight. We must have been drifting with the current, because after a minute he surfaced in the shade of an overhang in the bank. Protected from the sun he calmed, gulped in the blood seeping from my wound, and whispered into my neck, “You’re an ugly bitch but you’ll do until I get my strength back.” At sunset he climbed from the water, slung me over his shoulder the way I’d seen the master’s son carry a dead doe across the field one winter morning when I was nine or ten. He carried me into the woods. He walked for hours and never hit a branch or stumbled over a root. It was as though the night shed the same light for him as the noonday sun did for me.

That first night he only fed on my blood. The second night he fed on my body as well. I knew hell awaited me. I had saved the devil from perishing, and then he had lain with me. I lost my virginity to Satan on all Saints Day. Surely God would not save me. When he finished grunting above me, no erotic vampire fiction experience to relay here, just the brutal, selfish, grunting, gasping thrusts of pain that thankfully did not last long, he drained me to the point where I hovered in the twilight between life and death.

“You saved my life,” he said with his evil still inside me. “Now I will save yours in return.”

He bit into his own wrist and placed the wound over my mouth. I tried not to drink the thick blood filling my mouth. I swear I did. But that part of me that would do anything to survive overrode my disgust and I choked down the offering.

“Stay out of the sun, drink the life of others, don’t lose your head, and you’ll live forever.” He stood, buttoned his trousers, turned and walked away.

I rose to follow him, to chase him down and try to kill him, but that’s when the pain hit me. For the next several hours I died over and over until I was reborn shortly before dawn, undead. I lay on the ground in the woods miles from the plantation I had never before left, marveling at the beauty I had never seen in the night. I can not describe my new vision to the living and the dead know of what I speak. It awed me. Then it attacked me. My new vision exploded into white with the first rays of the morning sun. That same survival instinct that made me drink now made me dig. I buried myself until night returned.

Somehow I knew when to rise. I crawled from the earth and made my way back to the plantation. There I found the first of many victims to feed my thirst. The master’s son, my first father, served as my first meal. I set my heart, mind and soul to find the devil that had released the anger I’d held in check so long, the beast who had transformed me from a quiet slave girl into an animal huntress.

It’s taken me 159 years to catch up. Somehow he always managed to stay one night ahead of me. Finally I caught him. Caught up in the rapture of the kill he never sensed me as he drained a girl no more than five years old. I will never forget the pleasure I felt shoving the stake into his back, through his heart, as I whispered, “Hello Father. I’ve been looking for you. Happy Halloween.”

Tonight I am 180 years old. Tomorrow night is my 159th birthday as a vampire, and for the first time in a century and a half I have no goal, no plan. I am free to choose any direction, take any path. And I have no idea where I will go or what I will do. I am empty. But the night is beautiful and alive with possibilities for a dead girl like me.