Without a Sound

If it wasn’t for the man’s even breathing so close to me, I would’ve been scared. The cave felt too much like the tomb I had been locked in. I was terrified of that place. However, a little bit of light from the sun crept into the cave while he slept. I still didn’t get to see color, though.

He woke up once the sunlight was gone. This struck me as strange, because I thought people slept during the night instead of the day. Maybe we were vampires.

When he sat up, he was still for a very long time. I thought he was probably thinking, but I would never know for sure. At last he came to my side and whispered, “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’ll talk to you anyways.”

I wanted to laugh. If I really couldn’t hear him, I wouldn’t have heard his unsure remark at all. But since I could, it made him sound a little foolish. Still, I was glad he was going to talk to me. I loved hearing his voice.

“I have to go,” he said. Panic bubbled inside of me. Was he going to leave me here? It was better than my former resting place, but I wanted him to take me with him.

“I’ll be back,” he assured me quickly, his sweet voice ringing through the darkness. “I just have to get you something to drink. That’s obviously what you need.”

I wondered if he knew I thirsted for blood. I even thirsted for his blood.

He put his hand on my bony cheek. “I’ll be back as soon as I van be. I promise.” I heard the rocks shift beneath his feet as he left.

I was alone for way too long. I started to worry that he would never come back, and I would be just as trapped inside my body as before. I tried to console myself by thinking he wouldn’t leave his leather jacket on me. Wouldn’t he have taken it with him?

It is impossible to explain the relief I felt when I sensed his warm, stationary blood getting close to me again. There was also another source of blood, but it was not alive. It was dead blood.

When I felt him near where the entrance to the cave should’ve been, he stopped and set down the strange sort of blood. I heard the sound of plastic hitting stone. It was a dull thunk. Then he approached me again.

“I brought you blood,” he murmured to me as he picked me up just as he had before. He brought me to the mouth of the cave and, very carefully, set me on the ground once more.

There was a little bit of light coming from the crescent moon. I could make out his face and a strange object sitting on the ground near me. It looked like a large thermos. And I just knew it was full of blood. With every ounce of my willpower, I wanted to drink it.

The man stood over me and frowned. “I don’t know how to do this,” he admitted, looking thoughtful. He kneeled down beside me and opened the thermos. If I had the strength, I would’ve been trembling with anticipation. He knew I wanted blood, and he was going to give it to me.

As gently as he could, he pried my mouth open. Then he dipped his finger in the blood and let some drip onto my tongue. It did not taste as sweet as I expected. It was mostly bitter and metallic, but it quenched a tiny bit of that parched feeling. My mouth watered, and somewhere I found the energy reserved to swallow.

I felt so disgusted with myself. How could blood taste so good? How could I want it more than anything?

My thoughts were interrupted when another drop fell onto my tongue. Who cares what it is? It was helping! The man was in deep concentration as he patiently dripped blood into my mouth. After maybe fifty drops, I blinked involuntarily.

Everything was so much clearer, and I could move my eyes! I focused on his face first, and he was smiling back at me. I blinked rapidly and decided that he was replacing the moon as the most beautiful thing I had ever laid eyes on.

After several more swallows of the blood, I took my first ragged breath. All the smells! I never remembered smelling them before, but I identified what they were. Leaves, pine, water, light, stone, earth… but most prominent were two smells: the man and the blood.

With the next drop and the next breath, I released a short sigh of longing for more blood. The man just grinned triumphantly and continued to drip the blood into my mouth.

At last, I could move! I reached out to the thermos eagerly, only to find that I could only move slowly. I looked at my hand in annoyance and almost gasped. My hand and arm would’ve been a skeleton if it wasn’t for the paper-thin flesh stretched over them. It was sickening.

“Can you drink it yourself now?” he asked. I curled my hand in response. As if I was as breakable as glass, he set my back against the cave’s wall. He sat next to me, holding the thermos to my lips. He tilted it just enough so that the thick blood poured into my mouth and I could swallow before too much flooded in.

It was gone far too quickly, though, and I needed more. My reflexes took over my mind, sensing the blood in the man. My lips moved swiftly from the now empty thermos to the man’s wrist, and I bit down.

He gasped in surprised pain and dropped the thermos, but after the initial wince, he did not pull away. I was immediately horrified. What was I doing? Was I going to drain him of his blood and kill him? The man who had saved me? And was I truly biting through human flesh to drink blood?

I was far passed appalled at myself and tried with all my might to pull away. I couldn’t, though. I was trapped, and I continued to suck his blood. The man waited patiently for me to finish, biting his lip. This was the only thing that indicated he was in pain. I wanted to stop that pain, but I could not.

When I finally drained him completely and was released from the cursed spell, I felt tears streaming down my face. I doubled over and made a horrible retching noise as I realized what I had just done.

I gagged and gagged, but I could not throw up. When I finally finished, I was exhausted and still crying.

The man did not even look phased. Shouldn’t he have been dead? But instead of dying, he was wiping the tears from my eyes. “Don’t cry,” he whispered. “It’s not your fault. It’s over now. You’re safe.”

His words echoed in the cave and were repeated several times. I wanted to believe them.