Half Life
Wednesday 29th April 2009
My husband, Jonathan, died in 1907. That's over a hundred years ago. It still stings like yesterday.
Perhaps, to start at the beginning would be simpler. With my birth, perhaps, into an unremarkable middle class family in London in 1876? No. I'll begin where it began, with the blood.
Dracula.
I can hear the word hanging of your lips with a hiss, with its own venom, its own sigh. We should not have come. We should have turned and run for the safety of the village the moment our eyes found the castle. I was not a strong woman, made to deal with such horrors: I was a simple school mistress, nothing more.
He tasted like death, and death was sweet.
Thick, like honey that dripped and ran. Sweetest nectar that corrupted your soul, made you beg for more like an opium addict.
Of course, I regret it, but that voice of his could make a person loose all control. He owned you. He loved you. He was you. I believed every word of that drivel pouring out of his mouth: that my blood was better than the finest wines, that I was as a marble statue carved by Michaelangelo himself, that I was everything to him...
Lies. Every word, a lie.
I lost two very good friends of mine that year, both at the hands of this supposed `Count` and his underlings, the demons that the peasants in the town so feared. It is true, what they say, that the Dead travel fast. Very fast indeed.
Lucy Westrana, my friend since lazy, childhood years: weakened, drained, dead... And beloved Quincey Morris, the suitor who would have been... Torn apart. How I miss Quincey and his idle talk.
I can never forgive the man that made me this way. Never. He deserved the death that graced him.
Perhaps, to start at the beginning would be simpler. With my birth, perhaps, into an unremarkable middle class family in London in 1876? No. I'll begin where it began, with the blood.
Dracula.
I can hear the word hanging of your lips with a hiss, with its own venom, its own sigh. We should not have come. We should have turned and run for the safety of the village the moment our eyes found the castle. I was not a strong woman, made to deal with such horrors: I was a simple school mistress, nothing more.
He tasted like death, and death was sweet.
Thick, like honey that dripped and ran. Sweetest nectar that corrupted your soul, made you beg for more like an opium addict.
Of course, I regret it, but that voice of his could make a person loose all control. He owned you. He loved you. He was you. I believed every word of that drivel pouring out of his mouth: that my blood was better than the finest wines, that I was as a marble statue carved by Michaelangelo himself, that I was everything to him...
Lies. Every word, a lie.
I lost two very good friends of mine that year, both at the hands of this supposed `Count` and his underlings, the demons that the peasants in the town so feared. It is true, what they say, that the Dead travel fast. Very fast indeed.
Lucy Westrana, my friend since lazy, childhood years: weakened, drained, dead... And beloved Quincey Morris, the suitor who would have been... Torn apart. How I miss Quincey and his idle talk.
I can never forgive the man that made me this way. Never. He deserved the death that graced him.