Vampire "Unseen" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 2) (3 page)

At least he would have money from tomorrow. He had withdrawn as much cash as his credit and bank cards would allow, which when added to the loan would give him enough to last almost a year if he was careful.

There was a girl at the bar, someone he’d seen in the hostel. She was skinny, wearing tight jeans and a purple hippie blouse with beads and adornments sewn to the fabric. There was a man with her, Mr. Average. They took a seat at a table away from him but he found his eyes drifting to the girl.

Stop this.

Stop it before it even begins.

He went back to his notebook to try and get some ideas onto paper. He propped his head with an elbow on the table and used his hand to shield the girl from his gaze, but in his mind’s eye he was already squeezing her neck.

He thought of the mixed race girl in the park today. How good it had felt to crush her throat and see tears squeezed out of her eyes. Beautiful dusky skin.

Skin like Nisha.

His fist clenched on the thought of her name.

“Oh fuck.”

Paul felt his pen fall through his fingers. His hands were trembling. His eyes couldn’t focus properly. He realised that every muscle in his body was clenched and his teeth were clamped to breaking point.

Control... release the pressure. Control...

It didn’t release.

Jesus Christ... Calm down. Relax...

Paul saw that his trembling hand was pressed firmly against the table and the shuddering of his muscles was shaking the table top, spilling wine from the top of his glass onto his notebook.

In his head he heard the telephone conversation with her. It was a call from four months ago.

“Hi, is that Nisha?” he had asked.

“You fucking raped me, you rapist pig scum!” she screamed back.

Paul had to hold his breath and force his hand away from the table before his shaking either rocked it off its feet or he lifted it and threw it across the bar in rage.

“Jesus Christ. Paul. Calm down... Fucking calm down.”

No. It’s not possible to calm down. Not after what she said. Not after telling that lie. She fucked him at a party because she wanted to. She instigated it, she took him to the bedroom then claimed rape to play a silly power game and she should fucking die for it. Rape? If he saw her again he would do more than rape her. He would punish her and torture her without end. He would flay the skin from her body and roll her in salt whilst he murdered her. There was no level of pain too gratuitous to inflict onto Nisha.

His hand juddered forward and knocked his wine glass to the floor. Nobody noticed.

“Why?” Paul hissed through gritted teeth as he used his left hand to pull his right wrist against his chest. “Why is this happening? Please God, help me... Please... Ildico!”

There was a sudden drop in tension.

Ildico.

There was a counterbalance to thoughts on Nisha Khumari.

His body stopped shaking so much. He closed his eyes and forced himself to picture that counterbalance. Milky white skin. Long dark hair in a ponytail. He saw her laying in bed. She was naked, one arm draped across her breasts in concealment. Her other hand reaching out towards him. Her smile was soft, beckoning. She was naked but non-sexual. Ildico. Pure and angelic, calling him back to safety, guiding him, helping him, loving him.

Ildico.

Saviour.

----- X -----

He couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t expected to. The room had three bunk beds for six sleeping men. Most of them were young kids travelling the world, a mish-mash of accents and languages, backpacks and travel plans. An orange night-light lit the room to guide anyone making their way to the toilets that could be heard flushing every fifteen minutes or so.

He was on the top bunk, staring aimlessly at the ceiling. His mind was quiet. He was thinking about Ildico. He pictured her in his mind’s eye. She was thin, borderline undernourished with unblemished pale skin and long glossy black hair. He’d met her on arrival in Romania. A chance encounter whilst dealing with a non-English speaking landlady. Ildico had stepped in to translate. She was nineteen years old, beautiful, innocent.

“I love you, Ildico,” he whispered.

He didn’t really love her, he’d only known her for a few weeks, but it was nice to say. It was calming and soothing. She was calming. The very thought of her brought gentle thoughts that tempered the confusion and harshness in his mind.

This was what he needed. Today had been horrible. He had attacked those kids. He wanted to attack Louisa the bank clerk. He was consumed by rage, caused by thinking about...

Thinking about...

“Don’t think of Nisha,” he whispered in the tiniest voice. “Ildico... Say her name. Beautiful Ildico. You took me to Castle Bran. We went for a walk in the forest. We held hands... Let me think of you, Ildico.”

His mind stayed calm.

He pictured her in his fantasy over and over again. She was laying in bed, naked but concealed by an arm across her breasts. Her other arm reached forward towards him. She smiled as softly as the Mona Lisa.

Despite her nudity the image was non sexual. Of course he had seen her naked. They’d made love yesterday before he murdered Nealla and Raul. No don’t think of that... don’t think of the murders. Think of making love to Ildico. Remember how she cried tears of joy, how you felt those tears on your neck as you kissed her shoulder. Remember how she cried when you bent her arm back. Remember how her mascara had ran in tears. Remember how she resisted. Remember how she sobbed with your erect penis in her mouth. Remember how you slapped her and demanded she look at you whilst she sucked.

Reality.

Paul felt a tightening in the pit of his stomach.

He could remember them together, naked, in the bedroom, but she was crying. Her mascara had streaked. He remembered that when she was leaving the apartment she was angry, shouting at him. He recalled her getting dressed. She was wearing a vest and socks, looking around on the floor for her underwear. He saw her lips moving, speaking tearful words. She said, “I was saving myself for my wedding night.”

She was crying.

Oh, God.

She was crying. He could see her kneeling on the floor and sucking his cock as he sat on the side of the bed. She was looking into his eyes, as he had demanded. She was playing with her nipples, as he had demanded. She sobbed and gagged and he slapped her. Makeup blackened tears running down her face.

She had cried the whole time. She had begged him to stop.

What have I done?

He saw himself leading her to the bedroom, he saw her saying she didn’t want to, he saw him bending her wrist in a stress position to force her.

Paul rolled onto his side and placed the knuckle of his forefinger between his teeth to bite. A moment of pain, a reality check. For a few minutes his whole insides seemed to vanish leaving him with the sensation of being utterly hollow. Perhaps he shouldn’t make plans to disappear. Perhaps he should get up and turn himself into the police. He needed help. Mental, psychological help.

How had this happened? How could he change in only a few weeks from being too timid to talk to girls into a thug who literally twisted a girl’s arm to...

Nisha.

Nisha called him a rapist.

It was not true. He hadn’t raped Nisha... but Ildico...

He groaned loudly then clasped his hands over his mouth to stifle the sound. The tightening in his stomach rushed over his body, crushing him, physically hurting him as he thought on it.

Oh, God.

He felt tears welling in his eyes. He had killed two men, he had raped the girl he loved, he had thrown away his entire life and was now on the run. For as long as he was free he would be looking over his shoulder.

But what future could he have?

Yesterday he killed and raped. Today he tried to do the same.

“I have to get this under control,” Paul whispered in self-talk. His hands trembled out of fear as a shock of sobriety hit him. He was suddenly wide awake and fully cognizant of his predicament. He wasn’t just on the run. He was sick. He had a serious sickness that must be brought under control. A sickness that could kill people, hurt them, damage them.

For a moment his imagination wandered and he visualised putting a gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger. It was shame. Inescapable shame. It was one thing to ruin your own life, but he’d harmed Ildico. That was unforgivable. She would hate him. She would loathe and despise him. She would already despise him for what he had done to her. But when she learned that he had murdered Nealla and Raul, she would fear him. Of all the hardships he would face in the future nothing had seemed emotionally troubling. Running was a practical endeavour of the head, but accepting what he’d done to Ildico was different. He’d hurt her grotesquely. He could live with being on the run, but how could he live knowing Ildico surely hated and feared him?

“I’m sorry, Ildico,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. I would never want to hurt you. I don’t know what is happening to me.”

He thought on it for a few seconds and realised he knew exactly what was happening. He had gone to the grave of a vampire.

Poor Ildico. Poor, beautiful, innocent Ildico. She was frightened talking about evil spirits. He had smirked and teased her for being frightened. She had begged him not to spend time at the grave but he saw only a stupid superstition. You can’t get sick from a place, from a location; that is what he’d thought. He went there, he spent time there, she told him not to. Two weeks later he’d killed two men and raped poor, beautiful, delicate Ildico.

You were right about everything, Ildico.

Something in that place had made him sick. Ildico said it was a dark spirit.

It was a powerful sickness.

He could kill two men and walk away without thinking, without remorse. He could rape his beautiful friend and not even realise he’d done anything wrong for two days. He could attack a girl in the park because her breasts looked pert. He could punch a young boy into unconsciousness in the blink of an eye.

“Make things right,” Paul whispered. “Make up for Ildico.”

He sat upright and pulled his notebook from his backpack at the end of the bed. In the glow of the night light he could just about see the words. He added to his notes. ‘Find out what is wrong. This has to be an illness. This has to have a cause. Find out what it is and get cured.’ He started to pack the notebook away when he had a second thought. ‘For Ildico: Sublimation.’

The word had a special ring to it. Sublimation. It was the most perfect word. Sublimation, the act of diverting negative and immoral impulses into something more socially acceptable and positive. For Ildico, turn these negative impulses into something good. Atone for what you have done to her. He wrote the word on his arm, from the crook of his elbow to his wrist, a temporary tattoo until he could get the real one inked.

For a few minutes it was all he could think about. He tried to create the fantasy image of her laying in bed but it no longer came. “I must make things right,” he muttered. “I must make things better. For Ildico.”

----- X -----

In Romania, Ciprian had broken away from his assignment of knocking on doors. He’d been freezing his ass overnight combing through forests then taken a few hours sleep. All the while he knew he had a piece of knowledge he was withholding. He had to be careful.

He’d arrested Nealla Stolojan and Raul Ponta on a few occasions. They were constant troublemakers and whilst they had evaded prosecution many times, they were always on the radar. They shared an apartment together which was the first place examined. There was nothing of interest other than mess, used needles and lots of pornographic magazines strewn about the place. Nealla was dead, Raul was missing.

The ace in the hole for Ciprian came in the form of twelve year old Mihai, the young boy who was always with Nealla and Raul. All of them used heroin, but whilst Nealla and Raul seemed to have control over it, Mihai was a lost little soul in need of help. By now Mihai would be hurting without his big daddy to feed him. Ciprian figured that if anyone could throw light onto Nealla’s murder, it would be Mihai.

In his short time as a policeman Ciprian had realised this wasn’t the career he’d envisioned. In Romania the police handled traffic, bureaucracy, identity cards and most other rubber stamp jobs. He wanted more than that, he craved excitement. The real action went to the Jandarmeria who were combat police, soldiers, a militarised division working under the direction of the civil police force. The Jandarmeria hunted criminals and put down riots. Ciprian spent time directing traffic and filing paperwork. He needed something special for his life and these murders had just dropped excitement and a career advantage onto his lap. This was his chance to make an impact.

At the end of his double shift he called the station and requested information on his arrests to find Mihai’s address. He lived on Strada Brazilor, only a few minutes walk from the murder scene.

Ciprian knocked on the second floor apartment. The door was answered by a woman in filthy clothes and the whole place smelled of piss. It was foul.

“Mihai.” Ciprian said before pinching his mouth and nose.

The woman barely even registered his police uniform. She pointed to the corner of a room that was littered with food wrappers and filth. This place was worse than any rubbish dump and as Ciprian crossed the threshold he heard a scurrying beneath the trash that he knew had to be rats.

The young boy was curled up on the corner of a sofa. He looked vacant and had dirty rags bound around his hand like it was a bandage of some kind. There was something wrong with this kid, mental illness, autism, something that kept him from connecting with the real world. As Ciprian crouched down to talk to him he figured that for this kid, keeping out of the real world was probably a good idea.

“Hi. Mihai. I need to ask you something.”

Mihai didn’t change his vacant expression but his face turned slightly towards the policeman.

“Do you know what happened to Nealla.”

Mihai didn’t move.

“Mihai. Somebody has attacked Nealla. Somebody has hurt him. Do you know...”