The World in Black, White, and Red

You know those days when everything seems out of place? The sentences you hear are all strung together in no real order, like they should make sense, but something drastic is missing. The people you see have blurred features, so everyone is exactly the same and unmemorable.

Try having that for fifteen years.

It must have been hard, in retrospect, being the only five year-old completely jaded about the world. Knowing that nothing mattered. That the only point to life was to find the point of it.

Living. Dying. When you look at it objectively, what is the difference, really? We experience time in a linear dilation. We can’t go back except to regret in pictures.

I knew this wasn’t normal, looking at the people’s lives drifting around me. No one else seemed to see the reality of the world. I wasn’t like the others. I just couldn’t say why.

Until I met William.

To be honest, I don’t remember where he came from. When I look back, one moment I was alone, and the next he was smiling down at me. And then he was always there, no matter what. He took me in when my place burned down. He held my hair back and took care of me when I fell horribly ill and couldn’t hold down a sip of water. He showed me that not everyone saw the world in black, white, and grey.

He tried to educate me. Warn me.

At first, it was just little side comments. Did you know the ancient Sumerians had tablets that brought together and separated all the people in the world? No, William, I didn’t. Pass me the cream?

Then he began leaving books and magazines out that narrated the details of antediluvian civilisations and curses and legends and magic. I flipped through them a few times, to humour him. I wanted to make his interests my interests. Get to know him better.

As time wore on, though, William grew tenser every time we walked the streets. He often looked over his shoulder and pulled me closer to him. Occasionally he would pull me suddenly into a side alley and press me against the wall, hiding me in his chest, until he said, “Alright. Let’s go.”

This behaviour bothered me. What was he looking for, I asked. Was he afraid someone was following us? Whatever question I asked, he asked laughed and lightly touched my cheek. “Don’t worry about it,” he’d always say.

He shouldn’t have misled me. He should have told me to worry. To run.

One late evening, on our usual walk through the park, we got into a very heated argument. I demanded to know why he was always so paranoid when we went out. Even as I spoke his dark eyes shot around the area. He told me not to worry, which only fed my frustration. So I said, alright, if there’s nothing to worry about, I’ll just be on my own then. I’ll just run.

And I started running along the dirt path. He shouted my name and chased after me, but what with his much longer legs, he soon caught up and tackled me to the ground.

We landed in a pile both on our stomachs. Somehow I wriggled out of his arms and ran again. At some point it became a game. I would run as fast as I could, and he would catch me and try to pin me down. It wasn’t until I turned back to mock him that I realised why he was chasing me.

All the breath in my lungs was expunged as William’s long, lanky frame tumbled onto mine. His long hair obscuring my vision, the whole sky seeming to have suddenly become midnight.

William lifted his head from my shoulder, revealing the world and the encroaching group of men. “I tried to tell you,” he whispered apologetically.

“A feisty one, eh William?” one man asked with an unsettling grin.

William was on his feet faster than I could see him move. “The chase thrills me,” he replied brushing back his hair. I rose to my elbows, staring at him cautiously. His voice, no, his whole demeanour had changed.

A shriek involuntarily leapt out of my throat as I was tugged off the ground, and I hung in the air, struggling. “Such a pretty little thing,” another said, tilting his head at me. The clothes that hung on his thin frame heralded from a bygone vintage and a bowler sat atop his pale head. His smile made my stomach crawl.

“Does she have a sister?” one of the men holding me asked, nuzzling his face into my neck. I kicked him as hard as I could, which only made the group laugh.

“No, she is all alone,” William announced, smirking and sauntering towards me. “I saw to that.” My eyes grew wide as he stopped. This was not my William, who cared for me, whom I couldn’t be without. I flinched as he touched my cheek, and the men laughed. “But she is mine.”

They set me on my feet and before I could move an inch to run, William had me in his arms. I squeaked as he ran his cold fingers down my throat. The men… his men… looked on with sickening glee. I tried to push him away, but his arms were iron shackles. His lips against my neck were just as cold.

“What are you looking at?” he snapped suddenly, making me jump. “Weren’t you all hunting?” The others also jumped, though to his order, and sauntered into the night. Once they were gone, William let me go. “I’m sorry, Claudia.”

But I was already running. Fear and adrenaline sped me away, but when I blinked, he was in front of me and I crashed into his arms again. “Claudia…” he reasoned. No, I said, hitting him repeatedly. And again, no no no! I continued to struggle as he said my name again and again until he grew tired and angry of this game.

William threw me to the ground like something well deserving of his disgust. That’s what this was to him, a game. “I warned you!” he shouted. I cowered from his anger, his eyes blazing red as Hades. “I gave you books and stories, and for what! Nothing! You never listened!”

He was a monster, I whimpered, tears streaming down my face. His expression softened and with a sigh of irritation, William swept me up again. “Oh Claudia,” he said, stroking my cheek. “Sweet, foolish Claudia. I didn’t want it to come to this.”

I cringed as he lowered his face to my neck, but nothing came. I opened one eye, then the other, then blackness.

When I awoke, it was weakly in an unfamiliar place and the sun peered through a crack in the curtains. I threw my feet to the floor and collapsed when my legs did not hold me, but I scrambled up again and lurched to the window. Throwing it open, I shuddered and covered my eyes with my arm, stumbling over my feet and falling off the window seat. But I did not burn or turn to ash.

So I was alive. But I thought of William and wished it weren’t so.

It was late afternoon, which meant I only had an hour, maybe two if I was lucky, until someone came for me. I knew they would when they awoke, hungry and anxious for blood. In that time, I lay on the bed, too large and too lavish for comfort—though it fit in the rest of my surroundings—and thought upon my life.

But every time I tried to remember my family, my old school friends, the life I hadn’t thought of in so long, my mind went back to William and there was nothing else. I thought of the times I found him standing outside my late class, quite at ease under the bright fluorescent light, and he would smile in greeting and walk me to work.

Or when he walked into the restaurant, sat at a table, and simply watched me work until I had no more work. He never ate, just sat and watched and smiled.

And our midnight walks through the park. I had just thought he slept during the day as I did, and went to school and worked evenings like I did. I never asked questions. Why did I never ask questions?

For a while I cried. I broke things. Eventually I sat at the window and watched the sun go down. Probably the last sunset I would ever see. I recognised where I was, though: the old abandoned house downtown. Sometimes William and I would pass it on our walks, and he would look up and guide me past.

The door slammed open and a man wearing a modern grey suit stepped through. He had long brown hair and bright green eyes that glowed in the dim light. “Good morning,” he said in a voice as smooth as frozen glass. I glowered at his ironic greeting. “The master wishes to see you.” He crossed to the wardrobe and pulled out a cream-coloured dress. “Though you are not dressed for the occasion.

Ivory. Red would be more suiting. And the blood would be less noticeable. The man laid the dress on the bed, wearing almost a smile. “Perhaps that is the point,” he mused before turning and closing the door. I watched him return to stand at the window, gazing out with his hands folded behind him. “I would suggest you hurry. The master gets angry when he has to wait for a meal.”

The man led me down a narrow flight of stairs and through a long, echoing hallway. Several men stood in two and threes and watched us as we passed. Or rather, watched me. We went through a set of very large doors, one of which the man held for me; oddly the door led to another staircase, this one grand and leading off in both directions to the upper floor. We took the left to the only door on that side.

“Thank you, Michel.” William stood behind a desk and large chair, at a window with heavy curtains. I glanced back as Michel bowed and closed the door behind him. “Sit.” I glanced at his back, covered in the navy pinstripe suit he got in Paris, before perching on the edge of the velvet couch at the opposite end of the room.

“I did try to warn you,” he reminded, turning away from the night. I only glared. William crossed very slowly as he spoke. “Let you figure it out on your own and run away. But you’re such an idealist, Claudia. Always living in the moment and thinking nothing of the future.” He stopped in front of me, face blank as fresh canvas. “You have something to say?”

I had nothing to say to him, I told him. He sighed and held out his hand. When I did nothing, he yanked me up by the wrist, that rage I had seen before glimpsing across his features. “Since you now know the truth, I am giving you the option.”

One hand still holding my wrist and the other on my lower back, William walked us to the window. “You can stay here with me, just as you have stayed with me all these years, and we can walk the streets at night as we have.” He looked down at me, and for a moment those brown eyes looked like my William. “Nothing will change.”

I turned my head away and he let me walk to the second door in the room, just beside the first. “Or you can lose everything you have left,” he finished coldly, making me stop. I bit my lip, hand gripping the brass knob tightly. “You can have no memories for the time you knew me, but you’ll lose everything you’ve learnt, everyone you’ve met, you’ll have a job you don’t know how to do, classes you can’t pass… you will be sixteen inside a twenty-year-old body.”

Or he could kill me, I hissed and spit on the carpet.

With a slam, my face pressed up against the door, William’s hand keeping it there. “Is that what you want, Claudia?” he growled. I turned my eyes as far as they would go to see his irises burning red. “You want me to rip your throat out and quench my thirst on your insides? Tear you to pieces?” He closed his fist in my hair and wrenched my head back, shoving my body into the door with his. I yelped and gulped down air as best I could.

“Do you know,” William whispered, leaning his cheek against my head, “How difficult it was to keep my secret all that time, Claudia love? Every night I would have to run out and find something to eat quickly before you got home, and blood is such a bitch to get out of shirts.”

He shook his head, inhaling deeply against my hair. I shuddered as his grip eased and I could feel him smile. “The best thing about women is the scent of fear. Men try to be brave and push everything out, but you…” William breathed again, though his chest didn’t move. “You only have anger, my dear Claudia, because you can’t bring yourself to hate me.”

He was such a Bond villain. In love with the sound of his own voice.

William laughed richly, stepping halfway back from me, but before I moved a foot, he yanked me to him and sank his teeth into my shoulder. A scream rose in my throat and died with a whimper as my limbs went numb. He adjusted his grasp as my legs gave out.

Strangely the pain subsided to a low, almost pleasant pulse as he pulled his lips away. “I’ve waited forever to do that,” he murmured before licking the new wound. I wished I had the energy to feel disgust, but as it was, I couldn’t even hold my head up. William wrapped his other arm around my stomach, swaying back and forth. “And as always, you do not disappoint.”

Small helpless noises probably trying to be words sounded in my throat as he paced backwards, my bare feet dragging across the carpet. “Oh, sweetheart. It can’t have been that bad.” William sat down in his chair and pulled me into his lap; he chuckled when my head lolled heavily over the arm and propped me up against his chest.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he decided after a long time of sitting, playing with my hair. Oh yes, William? And what now? There was that smile again, like the boy I thought I knew. “Now, I’m not going to kill you.”

William grinned, pearly white teeth still half-covered with red, and lightly kissed me on the lips. Like it was one of our jokes.