Waking up a Vampire - short

Waking up a Vampire - short

Waking up a Vampire

She goes down the stone staircase, the rocks are hard but grainy. They are eroded and cracking, they will crumble more with time. She steps down into a pool of darkness, the cold air touches her skin like entering a dark, icy lake. She cannot see anything, but she keeps going, feeling the gray crumbling bricks of the staircase as it spirals downward.
She trips a little as the ground appears underneath her, unexpectedly.
“Ah!” she says, startled, and embarrassed for being startled. She puts a hand on the rocky walls, and the little rocks stick to her palms. The wall is cold and hard, but she leans against it until her eyes adjust. She begins to see a rectangle form on the ground, and her eyes widen as she realizes she has discovered what she was looking for.
She sees the box on the ground, that's his coffin. She goes over to it with echoing steps in the rocky tomb. She lifts the top off the box and there he is, stiff as a board.
Alice sits on the edge of the box, her hands gripping the thin sides.
“I'm bored, what the hell are you doing?” There's no response. “You should get up and entertain me.”
She looks into the depth of the box, she looks over his face. It is exactly as if she were at his funeral, and he were just a corpse made to look alive. She touches his face, and feels his skin slide over his stiff muscles. It is really grotesque in a strange way. His skin is smooth and cold like a popsicle. She touches his eyelids and presses down on the squishy fluid of his eyeballs. There's no response at all, he is completely dead. She pulls on his arms, which are crossed across his chest, and they are hard as metal. She pulls hard, and she manages to lift him up, but his arms stay where they are. She lets him go and he falls back with a thud. So she just sits there, looking at him for a moment.
It was not long before she got an idea. She has a knife in her pocket, for no reason in particular, and she draws it out. She thinks about sticking it in his chest, but decides not to. She slices her arm, just enough. It's a sharp pain, as she cuts a thin valley into her flesh, one that runs with a red river inside. She puts it on his cold, stiff mouth.
And then he was alive.
He grabs her arm and holds the wound to his mouth, and the thick syrup drains over his pink tongue. Alice keeps calm, and she gently takes her arm back. I must not act like prey, she thinks. He lets her arm slide through his fingers.
His eyes open up, slowly, and to her surprise his eyes are black. Completely. Like a shark whose white face appears before you in a dark ocean, his eyes are purely dark.
He smiles at her, his teeth are sharp and blackened with her blood. His grin is big and dopey, like a happy dog, and Alice laughs (like a “Pfft!”) at the expression. His face is vacant like that of a sleepwalker.
“What state is he in, I wonder?” says Alice. “But now you're awake!” she feels a giddy happiness now. “Come this way,” she says, waving the wound before his dark eyes. His big grin widens and he reaches out to her arm. “Oh no, not that easy,” she says wickedly, pulling back. She takes her gushing wound out of his reach, and she starts to walk backwards.
He reaches a hand out of the coffin, and he pulls himself out of it. He is coming towards her and all she can think is that he looks like a great black panther. He movements are liquid and single-minded as he approaches her on hands and knees. Then he gets up, in a rolling way, like a fiddlehead fern that is unwinding. He is standing now, with his eyes still on the crimson liquid that drips from her pale arm.
“Come here,” she says. She feels her cheeks hurt because she's grinning hard. I feel the adrenaline now, she thinks, why am I so nervous? She draws him onward, up the stairs. She brings him to the couch.
“Now you can sit and watch TV with me,” she says, laughing. She picks up a joint. “I bet you can smoke, too.” She puts the joint in his bloody mouth, and he puffs on it. He hands it back to her.
“Wow, you even passed it back! You aren't thinking, are you? You are just going through motions. But I still know what you like.” She squeezes her own blood into a wine glass. She hands it to him and then she goes to wrap it up. She feels that if it continues to bleed she will faint, so she cleans it and wraps it in gauze. She comes back and sits next to him, leaning on him a little.
They sit and watch the TV together, he even laughs when she does.

The End