Adam's Story
Chapter 10

It was nearing October when I went to London with Mr. Sullner under the alias Benjamin Moore. I was sorry to leave Catherine. She was a good friend, and I was fond of her. However, I couldn’t help feeling gladdened by finally getting to travel overseas.

It was my first time riding an airplane. The height gave me a pleasant sensation of queasiness. I sat by the window staring at the passing landscape with wonder, my hand in my coat pocket caressing the trinket Catherine had given me before parting, a gold pocket watch that had belonged to Nicholas Sullner.

I had told Catherine I could not possibly accept such a gift, but she insisted.

“Take it,” she begged, closing my hand around the watch. “As a reminder that there is good in everyone.”

I smiled at the memory. I was going to miss Catherine.

Haven House was a near exact replica of Sullner Manor - only larger. It had eight bedrooms and ten bathrooms on an expansive fifty acres of wooded ground. The house was fully staffed and well organized. I enjoyed my time there.

The London Underground was a perfect place to find willing subjects for my nightly activities. The Gothic scene provided many colorful characters, but - shockingly – I did not fit in. I found it quite amusing to watch the fakers play the fantastical stereotype version vampire. It was easy to spot them. They always had fangs.

They always laughed when I said I was a vampire. Even most of my donors were not convinced until feeding time.

Over time, I was able to control myself better and rarely killed any of my companions. It was difficult, but Catherine’s support helped me. We exchanged long letters weekly in which she always expressed her pride of me and her faith that I could continue preserving God’s gift of life.

Mr. Sullner continued to test my abilities. He preformed physicals and blood tests at different intervals and under different circumstances.

The blood tests were conducted in an interesting way. Hypodermic needles are not sturdy enough to penetrate my skin, so I was forced to resort to one of the few things that could: my teeth. Every time Mr. Sullner wanted a sample of blood, I had to bite my own wrist until dark liquid seeped from the wound. It was a grueling process I was forced to repeat five or six times to fill one small vial. It was mildly painful, but only until it healed a few seconds later.

I still have the scars from those ordeals. They are small and light, undetectable by human eyes. I, however, can see them clearly. Those and the ones Helena gave me. Vampire teeth leave an everlasting mark on the living and the undead.

London winter was cold and wet. The gray days passed quickly around me as I grew habituate to my new way of life. I was received among many of the respectable families in the community and hid my dark nightlife well. I was able to associate with humans daily with no adverse effects.

I usually kept three or four donors available at all times. However, I was forced to find new ones every so often due to my strict policies. The qualities I looked for in a donor was over the age of eighteen, single and trustworthy. Three simple rules that made it surprisingly difficult to keep anyone for an extended period of time. Yet they were in place for a reason and I could not afford to bend them for fear of being found out.

In my searches for willing participants to feed my desire, I discovered that I could release an increased amount of pheromones when I was hungry. It was an advantage, but came with a price. Often my female companions became too enamored with me and I was forced to stop seeing them. It caused me undue problems to have a love-sick girl follow me around expecting a commitment that I could not – and would not – give. I resolved to never change anyone.

*****

The serenity I had grown used to was disturbed in the fall of 1938. It was a foggy London afternoon when a telegram came from Tom. We had barely heard from him since leaving New York. Even my communications with Catherine had become sparse over the last year.

Mr. Sullner and I were in the library. I had taken to keeping a journal and was recording the weeks events as he sat at his desk reading the letter. I picked up his accelerated heartbeat and turned to see him holding the paper with white knuckles.

“What is it?” I asked.

Mr. Sullner looked at me with a pained expression. “Catherine,” he said in a thick voice. “She died in her sleep two nights ago.”

I felt like I was falling. The world began to spin around me. Catherine had joked about her age all the time, but in reality she was only fifty-four. Younger than Mr. Sullner and her brother. She was too young to die.

I had experienced death on a fairly regular basis since becoming a vampire, but never had anyone I really cared for died. Catherine’s death shook me. I didn’t get over it for a long time. I stopped attending church, stopped going to confession and started killing more frequently. I became a true predator.

For the first time since becoming a vampire, I acted like one. I slept all day and roamed the streets at night searching for easy prey. I honed every stealthy ability I had from my night vision to my speed. I used them all and I was merciless. I wanted my victims to know what I was and I wanted them to be terrified. The more afraid they were, the more powerful I felt. I was stronger than I had ever been. I was addicted to the rush I got when I drained a defenseless human of every drop of blood in them. Sometimes I killed two or three a night just to experience the ecstasy of feeling their life flow through my veins.

It was Mr. Sullner who convinced me that I wasn’t really happy doing this.

“Adam, your behavior is a blatant insult to Catherine’s memory.”

I was laying on the floor in my bedroom. It was dawn and I had just returned home. The blood of a young brunette still stained my lips. The ash colored sky peaked in through a crack in the curtains which I always kept closed these days. The room matched my mood; dark and depressing.

“Leave me alone,” I said lazily.

Mr. Sullner stood in the door way, silhouetted by the light from the hall. He refused to come any further in the room. Though he was the one person in the world who was safe from me.

“I won’t,” he said. “I will not sit idly by while you destroy yourself. Just because Catherine is gone does not mean you should give up hope.”

I chuckled dryly and repeated the word. “There is no hope for me.”

“Catherine always said ‘Where there is life, there is hope’.”

I rolled my head his way. I could see him perfectly in the darkness. The crease of his suit, the lines on his face, the part of his hair. Mr. Sullner did not fear me. Nor did he have reason to.

“I’m not really alive, though. Am I?”

He surprised me by walking into the room and kneeling next to me. “You are a sentient being capable of complex thought and feelings.”

“I’m a monster,” I corrected.

Mr. Sullner looked at me with something like compassion. A countenance I was not used to from him. “You are remorseful.”

I gazed out the slit in the curtains refusing to meet his eye. “Adam, you believe that Catherine was the only person that had faith in you,” Mr. Sullner continued. “But you are mistaken.”

My eyes burned. That was the closest Mr. Sullner had ever come to saying he cared about me. I was able to read between the lines of his speech and realized that he depended on me just as much as I depended on him.

“Mr. Sullner?” I said quietly. “Do you think God will ever forgive me?”

I heard him sigh. “I do not have the authority to speak for God. But I believe that He offers forgiveness to all that genuinely ask for it.”

I finally made myself look at him. “Even a vampire?”

Mr. Sullner considered the question carefully before answering. “The Bible says all sin is judged equal. We are all sinners.”

I was able to pull myself out of my downward spiral and resume something like the life I had before Catherine’s death. Yet it took time and support from Mr. Sullner.

I lived in London until Mr. Sullner died in 1944. I inherited everything he had owned in life. I sold Haven House and the property in New York where Sullner Manor had been. It is now a large condo complex in upper Manhattan close to where I am currently residing.

I offered Tom a decent sum of money for all the help he had given me in the nine years I knew him. He would not accept it. He did, however, set me up with an arrangement to help me hold on to all my money during my frequent identity changes. So today, even though I live in a small house in Marble Hill, I am quite a wealthy man.

The world changes and I change with it. Adapting is not nearly as hard as one might think. In many ways I remain eighteen. Yet the years have left their imprint on me, subtle and undetectable. I am often told I seem older than what I am pretending to be. To that I smile and honestly answer, “I guess I am.”

In my years, I have witnessed the collapse and rise of our nation’s economy and can feel the world propelling itself unabashedly toward its own destruction. I do not wonder how it will happen. For, as Catherine told me so long ago, one book gives all the answers. I only wonder if I will be around when it does.

*****

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Thank you and God bless!

*****

Citations

Dracula. Tod Browning. Perf. Bela Lugosi. Universal Pictures, 1931

Anna Christie. Dir. Jacques Feyder. Perf. Greta Garbo. MGM, 1931

Romance. Dir. Clarence Brown. Perf. Greta Garbo. MGM, 1930

Dumas, Alexandre. The Count of Monte Cristo. France: Chapman and Hall, 1844. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. UK: Chapman and Hall, 1861. Print.

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. England: Bentley’s Miscellany, 1837. Print.

Wharton, Edith. Ethan Frome. United States: Scribner’s, 1911. Print.

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. UK: Chapman and Hall, 1859. Print.

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. UK: T. Egerton, Whitehall, 1813. Print.

Dinesen, Isak. Seven Gothic Tales. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. Russia: Russkii Vestnik,1869

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