05 Oct 03
The Night I Became a Vampire
It was not yet three years after we lost the colonies in the Americas. The majority of what my father had left me was invested in a Virginia plantation, though I had never left England. During the Rebellion, I lost it all. It was burned to the ground. My English home, just outside Thurnham, was but a day’s ride from Lancaster. It sat atop a lush rolling hill, overlooking a small cemetery two miles or so in the distance. The cemetery was ancient, becoming more visible each day as the leaves fell off the trees surrounding it. Some members of the Lancaster Royal Family lay here, cold and stale. My father was buried here on the first day of 1774.
I sat in a courtroom all day, defending a client accused of stealing chickens. I knew he had done it, he’d told me so. The judge wasn’t very sympathetic of him. I remember the way he gazed at me from under his white wig. The great arbitrator was searching, as I was, for the answer as to why I went on. More than thirty years had passed since the departure of my loving parents, whom he knew. They didn’t live to see me marry, or their grandchildren born. I shed a tear for them every day.
On my ride home that evening, a deep fog filled the air around me. I trusted my horse knew the way, and thought nothing of the road out of town. I couldn’t keep at bay the thought of the coming season. I wondered if I would have enough firewood to last winter. I imagined that things could be worse, but I couldn’t visualize how. Alice and I just added another hungry mouth to the family. Martha was almost five months now, as old as Robert when we lost him. She had begun eating solid food. Our other six kids were very thin. We have very little income since losing the plantation, and bread was scarce. I knew Alice would cry once she heard I lost another case.
I could look no further than my horse’s ears. I pat him, and his ears perked just as I told him he was a good horse. Just then, the fog cleared some. Contradictory to my previous remark, I realized that we were in the middle of the cemetery. I pulled at the moist reins. We had gone at least a few miles out of the way, I figured. When my eyes began to search around, they almost immediately locked on a headstone reading ROBERT CLARKE, 1686 – 1743. Shocked as I was, I didn’t move. I just stared, gazing into each letter of my father’s name. Nearly twenty years have gone by since I laid my eyes on this very stone, the layers of green moss indicating that I may have been the last person to wipe it clean. My mother lie next to him.
My horse began to breathe more noticeably, kicking his hoof. He didn’t like it here. The atmosphere denoted his nervousness, making me feel a bit uncanny as dusk neared. I thought I heard the gravel churn a short distance away. Startled, I immediately turned my body to face my back left side. My eyes scanned the area, detecting nothing. I let down my guard, sighing with relief. I could smell pleasing the scent of the freshly fallen leaves in the air. I took one last glance at my parents’ graves, touched my chest four times and perked my back up straight. It was time I got home. Just as I squeezed my thighs, I heard six footsteps right ahead of me. They were very close together, something was running. At me. Straight at me. I froze with fear, a cold chill running down my spine. With my eyes popping out of my head, they stopped, ten or twelve feet in front of me. My jaw dropped, and just as it did, something grabbed me right off my horse. I thought it was a man. It was him running at me, and jumping at me. He wrapped but one arm around me when he hit me, and I joined him in flying through the air. And in landing on the ground, right against a sarcophagus. We nearly knocked the lid from it, remembering nothing thereafter for I was knocked unconscious…
Copyright 2007, Joseph R. Holod. You may link to this copy of the work, all other rights reserved.
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