the gloom is no less for it. I hear the music that escapes
when the grand door opens to receive them. I hear their
laughter. I hear their intimate pledges of love. The night
brings nothing like that for me.
I lurk. I listen. I lean against the stone and bleak
bricks, an outsider, while gaslight warms the windows
beneath arches, within halls and ballrooms from which I
am banished. I don’t feel the chill as my own flesh is equal
by degrees. Looming estates with black, iron gates shelter
families of good name from the wrath of nature but
cannot shelter them from the likes of me, the unnatural.
Should I dare to breach their world, I could. But to what
avail? These faces are familiar. I do not wish to feed on
them, and so I remain veiled. I watch only to remember. I
step furtively. I breathe in a hush. As their night builds, I
stand dissembled. My night has only the dark in common
with the night of the living. I steal away.
I beget children, children of the night. Like me in
curse only, not flesh. Cold, pale, yearning creatures of the
night mesmerizing unwitting victims under the guise of
passion only to suck the life from their souls in the eternal
quest for sustenance.
A night animal, fanged and winged and crouching
from all that is good and light. Starved of love. A monster
in other’s eyes, others who did not know me before, never
knew me as a man, would not remember who I was once.
The worst of the curse is that I remember. I remember
when my skin was warm and even warmer at the touch of
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