Note: Posted for/because of Schinguire.
The Vampire Alucard stood on the Indian rug in the midst of a collection of different colored arm chairs. The colors of the cushioned arm chairs suited the study, repeated elsewhere among the books that lined the walls, the wood paneling, the rug, and in other components of the room.
The vampire stepped slowly around a low coffee table that was laden with books and a few of Abraham's trinkets. These trinkets could be found among the shelves, on the mantle, or at the desk. The creature looked for these various trinkets now, doing so quietly, no longer pacing.
It was as though the room was frozen, in some way set apart so that time would not drag it callously over the mixture of gravel and razor-edged shards that made up this reality. The vampire attended to the perfect silence, and stillness; the precision of the contents of the room, their precise arrangement, colors, and scents.
Van Hellsing's corpse was growing cold upstairs in his bed, but the room still smelled of him, and carried remnants of his presence. A presence that was quickly disappearing, like sand carried into a desert. A forlorn and dark desert, empty of life.
This moment would not last. It would be swept away, just as the things in this study would be swept away, rearranged, discarded, in some way changed. It would change, as it must. Yes. Nothing could prevent that.
No. The vampire stared.
There was a small clock on the mantle, and the creature heard it. It ticked, ticked steadily, and the room remained as it was. But the ghost was fading. The room was hollowing, dying without the man who had sustained it; he who had built it, selected the chairs and the books and the rug, who had arranged his stupid trinkets and purposeless playthings all about, as though they would be retrieved or looked at again soon.
And here was the vampire, not quite a trinket, but yet another remnant of the man, another mark on the ever advancing present. The vampire was a belonging, left behind. A thing, now, to be laid in strange hands, to be turned about in strange hands, picked and prodded at by strange hands; to be used or discarded, ultimately changed - by strange hands.
One by one, the trinkets disappeared from the room as the clock ticked without fail. Soon, the vampire too was gone.