01: The Oddball and the Howler

Laura had a dream. She was standing in the middle of a deserted meadow, long ruined by something more of a storm. Everywhere she looked, petals savagely sliced in half loitered, the red of their features painted by thick, smelling blood, a lot darker than its usual glow.

But next to the trees lying helplessly in rows, it became rather trivial. From the way it looked, it seemed to have been ravaged by a cursive blow, as the branches hosting its supposedly fresh fruit had been burnt, still puffing grayish smoke. The wind danced purposelessly with it until it reached the scope of the starless dome-like horizon extending out of nowhere.

Taking a deep breath, she wrapped her arms around her shoulders, shivering a little when the cold wind picked up. It whispered such an ominous rhythm that pushed deeper into her eardrums. As though she knew what was going to happen, she looked up at the brightest of moon. Its celestial light wasn’t a helping matter either, for the moment the pair of her orbs feasted on its dimming rays, the world turned a hazy gray.

“I’m going to die,” she whispered, a single, fat tear escaping her right eye. “I’m going to die.” Gulping, she turned her head from left to right, back to front, biting her trembling lips. She didn’t want to think about it, though no matter what she did, the prospect of dying, even in a dream, was never something she was looking forward to.

“I don’t want to die!”

But just as her desperate voice clung about and echoed in the lonely meadow, a piercing cry muffled it, as though in response. Everything about her seized at once. Her knees betraying her, she ended up slumping on the rotting soil where wriggly white worms coiled on her legs. She didn’t even have the energy to recoil. All that she wanted at the moment was to get away from here as fast as she could.

She didn’t need to look up when the hair on the back of her neck prickled. She knew what it was. The big moon transformed once again into something like a comet, plummeting from where she was. Although the thought of running away gave her hope, she’d never be able to escape something as fast as light.

All she could do once the comet kissed her back was to let out a loud cry and watched as her body disintegrated. She could only curse her helplessness. In mere seconds, every inch of her skin had been outlined by cracked-up lines that seemed to have been carved deeper into her bones. There was a flash of crimson light and all of her floated in the air, a part of something so small now easily played for by the wind.

She was dead. Laura Gaunt was dead.

A dream she knew it was, and yet, when she opened her eyes, tears cradling her cheeks, she could feel the lingering pain of how her skin had been carved. For a moment, she didn’t know where she was. But she was definitely moving. It was making her sick.

She closed her eyes with a whimper when a stabbing pain sparked from her toes, traveling all the way to her head. It was beyond anything she’d felt, like something was stabbing every vein all over her body. Massaging her temple, she listened to her racing heartbeat. It gave her all the more reason to tremble, cold sweats trickling on her forehead, soaking even her shirt.

“Are you okay, Madame?” a manly voice said, intercepting her silent cries.

Blinking, Laura tried to sit straight, still biting her lips in case a cry escaped from her throat. It was only then that she realized she was inside a van, but she still felt hazy. She didn’t know where they were going and couldn’t understand why a fuzzy, warm feeling was playing about in her stomach.

Not trusting herself to speak longer words, she merely whispered, “Y-Yes.” But before she could so much as collect herself, she ended up bending over as her insides turned upside-down, all that she’d eaten ended up on the car floor. The sight of the rice and the ball-like reddish something mixed on the sticky vomit made her puke a lot more.

The driver immediately parked on the corner of the street to tend to his boss, but she merely waved a hand. Stifling a breath, she jumped out of the van, drawing her hand to her sweat-soaked hair. Compared to her dream, the wind from the empty street was warmer, a little bit cold but was merely enough to refresh her. She closed her eyes to breathe the air.

It had been, what, five times this week? She’d sleep and be transported to that hellish nightmare. It was always the same. She was standing alone in an unfamiliar place and would die there with her body disintegrating. The only difference was the moon and the surroundings. The first time she visited that place, it was not a meadow but a huge crater, though still with rows of pitiful trees, only chopped into pieces but still puffing out the same thick, grayish smoke.

She couldn’t understand what it meant no matter how many times she went there. All that she could think of was how the feeling of death lingered about even in her awakened system.

Raising her shaking hands, she couldn’t help but imagine they would dismantle any moment now. A shiver ran down her spine. She shook her head. No way. She would never die. Not this way. She still had a lot of truths to uncover, a lot of dreams to catch, and she couldn’t disappoint herself when she’d already come this far. Besides, unless she realized why she kept dreaming of death, she’d never be able to acknowledge peace; not when her mind kept nagging her with hundreds of hypotheses for why she had to see it, each one more absurd than the next. Shame.

“Madame, the van’s clean now. Let us go?”

The voice of her driver brought her back to reality. She took a deep breath and looked over her shoulder to see him waving his free hand, the other one a little occupied with the plastic bag of Laura’s puke. A small smile caressed her lips. It was weird to look at him wearing a formal suit, yet he’d been forced to clean her mess—like he always did whenever the need arose.

He’d been their driver for as long as she could remember, so she somehow considered him a father figure. He was kind anyway and he cared about her as though she were his real child, though she didn’t know much about his personal life. She was only aware that he was divorced and that he never had a child. She loved him, but she never bothered to ask him about it.

After all, it was hardly her business to meddle in his affairs.

She was about to make her way into the van when a pair of cold eyes caught her attention. Her teeth chattered when she gritted them. There, from the other side of the road, shadowed by the gigantic tree, stood a hunchback figure. No matter how small she narrowed her eyes, she couldn’t quite see past his features; however, when he looked up, it was his orbs that made her move a step back. It was a merciless tint of gold, a red and blue splashed about in the irises that were dilating as though it had found its prey.

“Madame? Anything wrong?”

Swallowing hard, she turned at the driver who was now standing beside her with furrowed brows, his eyes directed at the direction where Laura was once staring. No one was there.

Laura shook her head. “N-Nothing.” Without another word, she went inside the van, putting her hand on her chest to feel the rapid beat of her heart. Whoever it was that she saw, she hoped it was just a trick of the light, for no matter how she looked at it, those cold, penetrating stares were and would always be the harbinger of death.

***

It had been about two hours since they hit the road. Laura still couldn’t forget the image she’d seen earlier. Somehow, she wished she hadn’t left the sanctuary of her bed. But she was here now anyway. Might as well just go with it. As far as her looking-by-the-window-every-minute-or-so could suffice, that hunchbacked man didn’t follow them. It could even just be a figment of her imagination. It shouldn’t bother her anymore.

But unfortunately for her, it still did.

“Is your neck okay?” The driver sniggered. “You’ve been doing that since we left.”

Laura sat straight, clenching her slightly shaking fist on the hem of her shorts.

“You can sleep if you want. We’re still three hours away from New York.”

The thought of sleeping and revisiting that dreadful dream made her shake her head vigorously. She faked a smile as the driver chuckled.

“Your grandmother wouldn’t have wanted you to—”

“I’m fine, Frederick,” she said a little stingier than she intended to. “Just let me sit here in silence for a moment, please.”

Staring at the rear-view mirror, Frederick’s lips curved into a small smile. Just like that, both of them started minding their own business; him, driving her safely to New York and her, thinking about how fucked-up her life had turned out.

Ever since she was a child, she knew she was an oddball, an eccentric soul fitted into such an ordinary vessel. Possessing an overbearing self-confidence and an unfazed look in her eyes, she’d been touted as a walking disgrace. Even the name Gaunt crowned her a strange reputation that was either linked to the way in which her parents had died or to the old madwoman who had brought her up regardless of her own well-being.

She closed her eyes, breathing rather heavily. It was hard enough leaving the Gaunt’s residence with no one to take care of it, but it was even harder to be reminded of what she had left behind. Her grandmother, just like her parents, had already cut the chain that bound her in this lifetime, crossing the invisible border separating life and death.

Per her wish, she cremated her and sat her at the altar together with her son and husband. They were probably throwing a party out there on the other side because after about two centuries, they were able to meet once again.

“Twenty years, huh.” She sighed, cupping her cheeks as she stared into nothingness.

Sometimes, she couldn’t help but wonder what life would be if her parents didn’t die. It’d probably be a lot more special. Don’t get her wrong. She loved her grandma and she treasured every moment they stayed together. But a parent’s love would be on a whole lot different level. She longed for it still even after childhood, even after puberty, and even after adulthood. She would continue to miss it because the pleasure of being with those who had given her life had been taken away from her even before she could experience it.

She looked up, blinking when tears threatened to spill from her eyes. She promised she’d never shed a tear anymore. It would only worry Frederick and he’d be nagging why she felt that way. That would be the last thing she wanted.

Leaning by the window, she tried to distract herself by counting the streetlights. Their orangish beams were the only source of illumination in the deserted street. The stars and the moon had cowered behind the thickest of clouds, sissy enough to face the terrifying cursive lines flashing through the horizon.

Unable to look with the same nostalgic feeling on the street, Laura snatched her iPhone inside her pocket. The article she was reading a little earlier had greeted her when she opened it. Had it not propped on her newsfeed, she wouldn’t have phoned her driver for this unprecedented journey. Pursing her lips, she scanned through the narrative and ended up reading the whole thing.

***

THE UNDEAD ON THE RISE

… and have we ever been one with ourselves, our eyes would have never fooled us for what the truth really was…

Two days succeeding the 4th of September last year, a phenomenon such as not for all the eyes to see had made it past the world’s unresolved mystery and has inscribed its every rich detail in the history: The blood moon. Prior to its awe-inspiring surfacing, New York had been branded as the city of suicide, with a mortality rate as high as six or more heads by the passing week. Even up until this point that the suicide cases had, somehow, found itself in inertia, no one was still any wiser as to how and why it came to be.

Many speculations, of course, had made it to countless of papers; one of them being a case at which many atrocious officials had just made up to stir the folks. It was, after all, a tactic that worked when they wanted to make themselves look bigger and more useful. They spread about fake news and hushed it down after a while and the credit of the silence would be seated next to their names. But exaggeration couldn’t be ruled out as well. Knowing the public, it wouldn’t take that much to intimidate them. You take one usual case of self-killing, fit it into a narrative of serial occurrence, along with absurd theories and negative speculations, then the fear was sure to arise. As such, it would bring about an opportunity for not only journalists but also to those who were well-seated in their thrones.

However, on the other side of the coin, there was a thing or two that, though seemingly impossible and in itself fictitious, had made it to publication. As though it wasn’t weird enough, this paper had sold more than the other published facts. This, somehow, blurred the line of whether the public believed every inch of it or they just wanted some pure entertainment and a hint of fantasy had a nice ring to satisfy these needs. Either way wouldn’t change the truth that the celebrated vampire reigning literature, the kind of which involved romanticizing and undermining the relationships between the prey and the predator, had bridged fiction to underline the enigma of these one-of-a-kind occurrences (the blood moon and the sudden inflation of suicide cases).

These journalists aka novelists—as what they’ve been touted—proved they would stop at nothing until their reasonings would be understood by their co-journalists when they have pressed in the public their eye-witness for the vampire’s continued and true existence.

“Rubbish,” said Araya Rabdul, one of the most celebrated journalists of all time. “If one of those articles were any real, I’ll put down my pen.”

Araya herself vouched that the suicide cases, as what she had pointed out in a newly released magazine, ‘The Lies Behind Gotham,’ there involved authorities and fake news released in the neighborhood, which was disseminated by an unknown source that had now been taken down. She recalled the infamous Howlers whose supposed goal was to realize the reasons behind these occurrences but ended up wasting their time by hunting these vampires that for all they knew weren’t at all existing.

“Oh, I met those amateurs, of course. They weren’t any better. Dressed as those under them, they spewed nonsense that barely kept me at bay. If not for their licenses, I’d have thought they were good-for-nothing folks. Unfortunately for their ‘avid’ readers, they graduated from a prestigious university, and this covered up the obvious fact that they were writing a novel more than an article.”

The Howlers, in response to Araya’s ridicule, released a newspaper cut detailing their exclusive interview of Martha Everdeen, the front desk of the infamous hotel in Time Square, Casablanca—which, to Araya’s outrageous disbelief, also became a best-seller.

“Last year was a dark time for the hotel, I tell you,” Martha began. “We were under pressure because very important clients had booked in the hotel and, according to the manager, we may or may not have the greatest deal of our career, so it is rather crucial for us to satisfy them as best we can.”

These clients were the celebrated pillars of mining, Robert and Melinda Martin. Both of them had reached the point to which everyone who dreamed of mining knew of their names. Melinda Martin herself had published hundreds of best-selling books about the work, why it mattered, and how it could craft a brighter future for the country.

“When the Martins arrived, they left immediately. They just told us to take care of their child. As per my workmate, Celestine, no one knew they had a child, so I wondered about it but thought they probably didn’t want the press to bug their daughter. You know how the press could be a little bit out of the line. You’re one yourself.”

“This child, you say?” she said with a rather stiff smile when asked about the Martin’s supposed daughter. “She was weird. She was called Zhiera, and I really wasn’t able to see her face at first. She wore this thick jacket, see, and mind you, it was a hot afternoon. Not to mention the odd bulk on her hood. I didn’t bother to ask her because she seemed so timid. She fidgets every now and then and barely talks. Everything started to boil down when the camera in her room stopped working and Celestine found her with a fragment of glasses stuck on her cheeks.”

At this point, Martha dove into mindless speculations, all because she herself couldn’t understand why things had to be this way and that. But with the theories of vampires having been thought to have connections with those circumstances, things started to be a lot more senseful.

“I’ve read a lot about the suicide cases in the neighborhood, and I couldn’t believe it at first, but when this Zheira got wind up in the picture, I started to see there was something more to things than just meet the eye. I mean, come on, for all the years I’ve worked in the hotel, I’ve never witnessed anyone killing themselves. So, when I saw her close to dying on the broken windshield of the car, I thought that New York had indeed become the fodder for suicides. Guards have seen her to it, see. She was standing on the railing of the rooftop. She didn’t look scared at all. But one of the guards claimed to have a glimpse of the barely visible horns twisting on her head. And then she just fell and was taken away by the ambulance.

“And you know what’s even weirder? It’s the fact that the nurses inside the ambulance were found dead, their blood scattered all over their seats. Their necks were severed and they had bite marks, too. And Zheira’s body was nowhere to be found. It was all over the news, but because no one knew who the girl was, no one was really able to locate her whereabouts. It was until I saw her descending the stairs of the hotel that same night that I was horrified. There were drops of blood all over her lips and her eyes had a hint of gold glinting maliciously in there. What’s worst of it all was when Robert had been brought to the hospital, barely breathing. To think she’d do it to her father made it clear she wasn’t like us.”

Martha Everdeen didn’t fail to point out the horrifying commonalities of the corpse in the suicide cases, in the van, and in Robert’s circumstances. All of them had bite marks, their necks almost severed. And some of them, if not most, had something to do with Zheira Martin.

So, with all these being said, the underlying question was whether you bite these narratives or not. What was your truth? Was the undead really on the rise? Or was this yet another fabrication of some sort to fool us into a sense of fear?

One thing was certain; if people were only one with themselves, they would not and should not be misdirected to what the truth truly meant.

***

Laura yawned as she reached the end of the page. She closed her eyes for a moment, massaging her head. There was only one way to verify the truth of this article: to see the witness and hear the truth from her lips. Fortunately for her, Martha Everdeen was still working at Casablanca, where everything had begun to stir. Perhaps she could be luckier to meet the parents of this miraculous child. She didn’t care what they would think of her, because she knew that without clarifying things and silencing her nagging thoughts, she wouldn’t be able to sleep.

She couldn’t remember how long was she intimately inclined to the concept of vampires. She knew, though, that one factor of it was the fact that they didn’t have to live every day thinking when and where death would strike. If she were born like them, she wouldn’t have to worry about growing up, and she wouldn't have to think of losing her loved ones since all of them would be to death immune. They would laugh their hearts out as the reaper turned away from them, quite disappointed.

Not unlike now.

Because she was a mere mortal, she had to suffer from this grievous phase, crying over someone’s corpse, and living with the scar and hole in the depth of her heart. She didn’t want all of these and never would it happen again. And the only way for that was to unravel the mystery of these beings—whether or not they were a figment of playful imagination, she would take all the risk and cling onto this very hope through and through.

“The creatures of the night looked down on humans,” her grandma used to say. “Unlike us, they’re a being of immense prowess. They far surpassed human intelligence, speed, and brawl, and it is for this reason that they were able to evade the territorial hands of death.”

Always the same, in the afternoon, in the basement of the Gaunt’s residence, Laura and her grandma would cuddle in her armchair, watching the crackle of flames on the dirty, almost derelict chimney.

“When you come and think about it, we, humans, have no right to own this land when we can’t even surpass our limits. We claim intelligence, yet we fail to understand the cycle of the universe and the truth of the things our bare eyes couldn’t see and our small brain couldn’t comprehend. In truth, we are but inferior to the beings who are watching over us, waiting for the time they could haunt us as freely as they could—and when that time comes, Laura, let us force our way to the beginning of purification. We can either join their purpose or swim in the blood of our kin and die as impure as them.”

Laura closed her eyes as a single drop of tear trickled down her cheek. She could almost see herself and her grandmother in that chair, could almost hear her soft, melancholic voice, and the feel of her shaking hand as she cupped her young face. It was unbearable.

“So, Laura, be that as it may, but find the secret of these honored creatures. Maybe then we’ll understand how your parents meet their ends. Maybe then we’ll understand the meaning of death, of life, and of our very existence.”