Chapter 8: Aftermath

Jonathan was dreaming. It was dark, and the wind was whipping around him. He tried moving, but it was as if he were trying to run through mud and couldn’t move properly.

When he finally managed to lift his foot for a step, he was too slow and began to fall forward without stopping. The wind tore at him. He couldn’t see the ground, but he knew he would have to stop falling soon. As he thought this, there was the ground, rushing towards him.

With a jolt, Jonathan woke up, eyes wide open and arms spread out on his bed. He lifted his head but got dizzy and let it fall back on the mattress again.

He was in his room, his sheets were in disarray around him, and the door to the rest of the apartment was closed.

Jonathan shivered, feeling oddly cold. He pulled his blanket to his chin and curled into a ball in the middle of the bed. His left wrist felt bruised, aching as he squeezed a fistful of blanket. What the h*ll happened?

Then he remembered. Behind his eyelids he saw it all over again; Alphonse gripping his arm as he bent down to bite Jonathan’s wrist, the numbing sensation spreading across his body, the cold growing in his chest. Alphonse’s voice rang in his head: “… not blood alone will please me.”

Jonathan opened his eyes again and sat up on the bed, still wrapped in the blanket. It was like he was operating in a fog, hard to string together a consistent train of thought. He slipped his left hand out of the blanket and stared at his wrist. He felt the ache still, but there wasn’t a mark there at all. How did he even get back here?

Ice rattled on his nightstand. There was a glass of water there, and some of the ice cubes were starting to melt.

He stared at it and thought about the possibility of Alphonse carrying him into the apartment, leaving out a glass of ice water. If the ice was still in the glass, it couldn’t have been long ago…

A chill gripped him, and he felt as if he couldn’t breathe. Everything combined in his head made his mind spin. A vampire had come into his world, fed on him, and left him in his apartment alone, but didn’t go without placing a glass of water on his nightstand.

Vampire. The word entered his mind and he grappled with the new reality. He wanted to scream, he wanted to cry, but he sat there, mute, staring at the glass.

Jonathan felt like a passenger behind his own eyes as he reached out, picked up the glass, and drank the water. He felt it slide all the way down his throat and into his stomach, a cold outline of his insides.

The water cleared things a little and left a reminder of his hunger. Jonathan stared at the door for a second, thinking about whether Alphonse would be outside, waiting for him. If he was, was there anything Jonathan could really do anyways?

He stood, and, finding himself undressed, put on warm house clothes: a Van Gannison branded sweatshirt and generic sweatpants.

He padded out into the living room, finding it exactly as he’d left it, and made it to the couch before his knees shook and he had to stop. He leaned on the arm of the couch for support. Jonathan felt awful.

He made it to the kitchen and tried to go through the motions of breakfast. He tried for scrambled eggs and toast, but one bite of the greasy eggs and he felt sick, and decided to stick to the toast with just plain butter. Academically, he understood that the toast was good. It was a perfect golden brown, and the butter cooperated as he spread it. But it was as if he couldn’t taste it.

Everything around him was the same as yesterday but it was as if he were in a different world, filled with things that looked like objects he knew. What happened yesterday made him feel as if sinister meaning lurked behind everything in his surroundings.

He pictured everything he knew in life as a still lake, new knowledge and experiences as pebbles being tossed in and causing ripples. Ultimately, the ripples would resolve, and the lake would grow still again.

Alphonse had revealed to him that his lake was a puddle in the street. The vampire had splashed into his understanding of the world and scattered it, exposing its shallow depth. And what could he do about it?

Forcing himself to finish the eggs, he felt better for it in the end. A full stomach did a lot for calming his mind.

As he scrubbed the pan with a sponge, trying to bring order to his thoughts about yesterday. To bring it back into the fabric of what he understood.

Jonathan had gone into the office with Alphonse, and Alphonse had shown him around. Why? Why had Alphonse gone to the trouble if he had just wanted to feed from him? It didn’t make sense.

Alphonse… the vampire had said he wasn’t going to kill Jonathan, that he could have already if he wanted. But why? Jonathan heard the vampire’s voice echoing in his head again: “not blood alone…”

Jonathan had wanted to straighten out what had occurred but had only come up with more questions he couldn't answer. At least he had questions and not just the discombobulated feeling he’d struggled with before breakfast.

Jonathan sat on his couch and stared around his apartment. His eyes landed on his messenger bag, left by the door. His skin crawled, thinking of who had left it there. He crossed the room to it and opened the flap to make sure everything was still there. Yep, laptop, charger for the laptop, a notebook that was mostly blank still… and the black book from the library: “Unsagbare Gesichten.”

He pulled out the book slowly, thinking. He reflected on the strange connection he had felt with the short passage he’d already read, and how he’d tried to dismiss it.

Jonathan noticed a page was dog-eared with the top corner folded over. The hair on the back of his neck stood up as he hesitatingly opened the book to that page.

“… the villagers set down lines of salt at their doors, hung cloves of garlic throughout their houses, carried with them crosses to rebuke the creature that beset them.”

Following this, underlined in a thick, uneven brownish-red line, was the phrase: “But nothing stopped it. Every night the creature came for a new victim, and each morning a body was found.”

Jonathan stared at the underlined passage. He traced the line with his finger, knowing without evidence that it was blood. A clear enough message for Jonathan.

He closed his eyes, and in a burst of futile anger, threw the book at the door while letting out an angry yell. He brought his hands to his head. His fingers twisting into his hair and he pulled as he yelled, trying to get all his fury out with the sharp pain.

And when all the anger was gone, he was just left with pain and fear.

Jonathan was sitting at the dinner table, head slumped on his crossed arms, when about ten minutes after his outburst, he heard a knock at the door.

“Jonathan?”

He heard Kelly’s voice at the door, and his stomach tightened into a knot. She was the owner of the building and ran a pottery shop downstairs. She had rented the living space above the store to him for a more than reasonable price, considering she included utilities and a decent internet plan. She had generally been unobtrusive since he moved in.

Jonathan never quite understood Kelly. The pottery shop, “Kelly’s Clays”, didn’t get many visitors except for the twice-weekly pottery classes Kelly led. Her stock regularly rotated but given that Jonathan’s most frequent interaction with her was her passing on free pots, mugs, and bowls from time to time, he didn’t know how much was being sold on any given away.

But for as long as he had lived there, the lights had always stayed on, and she was never too worried about money it seemed. In fact, more than once she’d let him make his rent payments late, if it was too long between a payday and the first of the month.

He thought about this and he felt sudden embarrassment and panic at his outburst. She must have heard; the floor wasn’t that thick. Jonathan’s face felt hot with shame as he quickly stood and crossed to the door.

Unlocking and opening it, he found her there. She was a little shorter than him and her lips pursed, and brow furrowed with apparent concern. “Is everything alright? I heard you yell earlier,” she questioned.

“I’m sorry, I- I banged my foot!” he said, and, when she didn’t seem convinced by this immediately, he continued. “And, you know, one of those days where all it takes is that one more thing to push you and…“

Kelly cut him off. “You look awful. Have you been sleeping?” Her expression became much softer, and he saw her hand almost reach out to him.

“I’m fine – “ Jonathan began, but realized he was growing tenser. It was hard to get the words out, and he realized that it hadn’t even sounded like he believed it himself. “… It’s been rough, today. For a couple of days.”

He considered for a moment how it would sound, saying everything out loud. That he had met a man briefly who had creeped him out but allowed himself to be drawn into a building alone with said man, who had attacked him, sucking his blood in some way that didn’t leave a mark.

Jonathan looked into Kelly’s eyes and saw the concern. He could picture it, as clear as day, that she would listen to him. That she would comfort him. It would feel good, to tell the story to someone who cared.

Then his mind recalled the German woman from the tale, who had tried to tell the town she was in danger, only to be restrained and isolated by the townsfolk, proven right in her death. He remembered the underlined passage and shuddered.

“I learned that I might have to give up on my thesis this weekend. There just… there wasn’t enough to it.” Jonathan swallowed a lump in his throat saying this, feeling tears welling up behind his eyes. “I’m going to go back home.”

He had to get out of town. He had to put as much distance between himself and that creature as possible.

Kelly blinked at this, and he saw the gears turning in her head as she spoke. “Oh! I’m, I’m sorry to hear that. When are you leaving, then?” She sounded genuinely surprised at the declaration.

Jonathan hesitated. “I’m not sure yet. There’s a lot to work out, about the details. Um. Yeah. I’m sorry to, uh, just spring that on you.”

Internally, he was a riot of emotions at the declaration. It was nearly as much a surprise to him as it was to Kelly.

“Well, no, I understand. Just let me know when you’re moving out, and I’ll come by and collect the keys. If you need to leave any of your furniture, I can take care of it too,” Kelly answered kindly.

He pictured her on her own, lugging the large sofa out that he had barely squeezed in with a friend. “I’ll keep you posted, yeah.”

They stood there for a moment. Jonathan wasn’t sure what to say.

Finally, she frowned. “Well, let me know if there’s anything I can help with.” She turned away and headed down the rickety wooden stairs.

Jonathan closed the door behind her and pressed his forehead to it, squeezing his eyes shut to fight against his tears.