Happy Halloween!
This is just a small piece I've been playing with to mark the occasion. The story is completely written with 7 parts and a small epilogue to bring it to a close. It's still going through the editing phase at the moment so I can't guarantee a posting schedule. But I'll do my best to make sure it doesn't take too long to be marked as complete.
I hope you guys enjoy reading this one as much as I've enjoyed writing it.
"Trick or treat!" came a chorus of excited voices as Emma pulled open her front door.
"Wow. Don't you guys look scary," she said, offering them the bucket of candy she'd bought from the grocery store three weeks earlier, just to make sure that she didn't get stuck with whatever dregs were left behind. The kids gratefully helped themselves to their favorite pieces and dropped their newest score into their Jack-o-lantern shaped buckets, before they thanked her and skipped off to the next house on the block.
Emma shut the door behind them with a little more force than was absolutely necessary, before tossing her stash of candy aside as she went in search of her second bottle of wine for the evening. She hated Halloween. Ever since she'd moved out of the city, she'd found that every year became less and less fun than the one before it. Her neighbors always seemed to go all out to impress the kids, and the first year she'd been there, she hadn't bothered to make much of an effort at all. Nobody in the city had ever seemed to expect more than a cheap spiderweb across the door with a fuzzy spider stuck in the middle. But apparently, that wasn't how things were done in the suburbs, as Emma had woken the next morning to egg staining the front of her house and toilet paper in her bushes and trees. It had taken her weeks to clean up the mess, and when she'd complained to Regina next door, all the evil witch had managed to say was, "Well, what do you expect when you can't be bothered to make an effort for the kids?"
Since then, Emma had put up decorations like the rest of the cul-de-sac and had invested in the best candy to pass around. But she'd taken absolutely no joy in doing so. Halloween was much less fun when you were being forced to celebrate the occasion just to save yourself from the stench of rotting eggs following you around until Christmas.
A glance outside her window showed there were no more kids in the immediate area and the time was edging closer to nine pm, so Emma made her way back to the living room to try and finish the movie she'd been attempting (and failing) to watch all night. She'd only gotten ten minutes into it when the doorbell rang again, and she picked up the nearest couch cushion to stifle her screams of frustration.
Emma did her best to school her features into a somewhat gentle smile as she reached for the bowl of candy once more and then pulled open the front door. But instead of being greeted by a group of kids on a sugar high, she was face-to-face with what was certainly an adult male, dressed in a simple pair of jeans, a plaid shirt, and a black peacoat.
"Good evening, Miss. Do you have a moment to talk about Dracula?"
Emma was already rolling her eyes and preparing to send the religious freak away, when her mind stumbled over the last word he'd spoken.
"No – wait. Dracula?"
"Yes, Miss." He offered her a disarmingly charming smile and Emma's eyes widened a little in disbelief.
"What, are you some kind of vampire?" she snorted out. Clearly, someone was taking the spirit of Halloween a little too far that evening.
"Yes. I have a pamphlet if you'd like to browse it." The guy on her doorstep handed over a folded piece of paper and Emma's eyes widened comically at the title written in Comic Sans across the top.
So, You Want to be a Vampire.
"Vampires have missionaries?" she asked, as she opened the leaflet to scan the contents of it. The guy had clearly gone all out in order to sell his joke. Even Emma had to admit that it was a pretty impressive commitment.
"Where else would new vampires come from?" He tilted his head a little as he waited for Emma's answer, and the action came across as surprisingly innocent on someone trying to sell a bad Halloween joke.
"I just assumed that you ran around biting whoever you wanted to turn," she replied, playing along for the moment.
The man on her doorstep sighed heavily as he folded his hands in front of himself. "That's just one of the many hurtful stereotypes we vampires face these days. If you'll allow me to come in, I can explain everything to you in a little more detail."
Emma wasn't sure if it was the bottle of wine she'd already consumed, boredom, plain curiosity or some mixture of the three that had her taking a step back to invite the stranger into her house. She certainly didn't believe what he was saying, but a part of her was truly interested in seeing just how far he'd take the charade. And it wasn't like she had anything better to do that evening.
The man nodded his head in thanks before taking one step forward, and then another, to cross her threshold.
"I guess the invite thing is another one of those 'hurtful stereotypes,' huh?" she teased.
"I'm afraid so. That one was actually born in the seventh century. A witch used a spell to bar the doors of her home so that her ex-lover couldn't enter it. She told the townspeople that he couldn't get in because he was a demonic creature and she hadn't extended him an invite. He was executed a few days later. It was an awful moment for everyone involved."
Emma turned to offer him a strange look that clearly communicated just how crazy she thought he was, before she headed for her kitchen.
"And uh… what about the biting thing? Where did that come from?" She gestured to her kitchen table and the 'vampire' carefully pulled out a chair to take a seat as she busied herself with preparing some coffee.
"That one was much later. Around the thirteenth century. A young noblewoman had been rebelling against the marriage that had been arranged for her. The final straw came when she was caught by her father in a very compromising position with a stable boy. She had a mark much like a bite on her neck, and in order to avoid being sent to the convent, she told her father that the stable boy was some kind of demon that had been using her to feed himself. She claimed that was why she'd been acting out for so long, and why she shouldn't be held responsible for her own actions. Of course, it all backfired on her. Someone had read a legend of a creature who turned others by biting them on the neck and both she and the stable boy were burned at the stake that evening." The man sighed heavily as though the loss had been truly tragic, and Emma wasn't entirely sure how to react to that.
She'd always considered herself to be a good judge of character. Her mother had said that she was like a portable lie-detector, always sensing when someone wasn't being truthful with her. But the more she stared at the man sitting at her kitchen table, the more Emma found herself believing him. She knew it was completely unreasonable. There was no such thing as vampires. But her inner lie-detector was as silent as a mouse, so the guy was either the best-damned actor in the world, or he truly believed what he was saying.
Maybe that was it, she told herself. Maybe he wasn't mentally stable and he believed his own delusions enough that her gut wasn't reacting to the lies. Either way, Emma knew there was something off about him.
"Would you like some coffee?" she asked, as she tried to diffuse the inner conflict happening inside her own mind. "Wait - do vampires drink coffee?"
"Of course," he replied simply. "That's like asking if humans drink coffee."
"In what way is that the same?" Emma snorted out. She was looking forward to seeing what kind of bullshit explanation he'd come up with to explain his answer.
"Much like humans, we don't require coffee to sustain us. It's not a life-giving sustenance. So, much like humans, we drink it because we simply enjoy the taste."
"Huh."
Well, when he put it like that, his explanation kind of made sense. And Emma couldn't believe she was rationalizing the answers of a crazy man.
"So, Dracula, how do you take your coffee?"
"Killian."
"Excuse me?"
"My name's Killian. Dracula doesn't do his own soliciting. That would be like sending your President door-to-door asking for campaign donations and votes."
He had another good point there, and Emma was starting to wonder if maybe she'd fallen into some kind of warped alternate reality where the ramblings of a crazy man suddenly made sense to her. With hindsight, she realized that opening that second bottle of wine probably hadn't been the best of ideas.
"Cream and three sugars, please," he tacked on, before adding, "I'm already dead so it's not like the added sweetness can hurt me."
Emma rolled her eyes a little at the way his own seemed to sparkle with mischief. He was actually kind of cute when he was being playful. It was just a shame that he was certifiably insane.
"Here ya go," she told him, as she set a mug down on the table in front of where he was sitting before she rounded the space to take her own seat. "So uh… what about garlic?"
"What about it?"
"Don't you have to avoid the stuff?"
"God no! I mean, have you ever tried eating Italian food without it? That's the real horror story here," Killian argued, as he picked up his mug to take a deep sip of the scalding hot liquid.
Emma was impressed by just how little it seemed to bother him.
"Holy water!"
"It was vodka. And that stuff stings like a bitch when it gets in your eyes! The priest just didn't want to admit that he was an alcoholic who had more vodka on hand than water."
Emma snorted into her mug as she picked it up to blow gently across the surface. She'd met more than a few alcoholics in denial before, so that story she could certainly believe.
She racked her brain trying to come up with more vampire stereotypes to throw at the man, just so she could see how he'd explain them away, but she found that she knew surprisingly little about the mythical creatures. Emma much preferred her horror movies to be based on real-life crimes rather than supernatural beings.
"Crucifixes," she almost yelled at him, when one finally sprang to mind.
"Those can actually do a lot of damage to a vampire if wielded correctly," Killian stated. He paused to take another sip from his drink before he added, "But any heavy wooden object can if you hit us hard enough with it. That one just happened to be shaped like a crucifix. It was actually part of someone's garden, I believe. It had been used to steady the trunk of a sapling that kept being destroyed in harsh winds. However, unlike the stereotype, being stabbed through the heart by anything wooden won't kill us."
Emma finally braved a sip of her own coffee and Killian watched her curiously as she did. His eyes lingered over the way her throat bobbed as she swallowed the liquid down before they trailed back up to meet her gaze.
"Have I passed your test yet?" he asked innocently.
"I still don't believe you."
"Then what can I do to prove to you that I'm telling the truth?" Killian folded his arms across the tabletop as he leaned forward a little in his seat.
"Do something that would prove you're what you claim to be."
"And how would I do that? Your kind has only managed to get a handful of myths about our own kind accurate, and most of those are only kernels of truth buried in fiction. Would you like me to sit here for the next decade so that I can prove to you I don't age?"
"Won't you turn to dust at dawn?" she sniggered.
"That's got to be one of the most infuriating stereotypes your kind has," Killian sighed.
"Okay then, I'll bite. How did that one come to be?"
"Spontaneous human combustion." At Emma's look of complete disbelief, Killian snorted sardonically as he shook his head. "Exactly. It's hard for your kind to believe that someone could spontaneously catch fire, but you don't have trouble believing that sunlight will turn an immortal vampire to dust? Seriously? I mean, the sun's rays are made up of infrared, visible and ultraviolet light. If that were truly harmful to vampires, we'd have to live in dark caves in the middle of nowhere! Your television remote uses infrared technology. I'm not going to spontaneously combust if you point it at me. If visible light was harmful to me, I'd have been ash the moment your porch light came on. And most fluorescent lighting emits ultraviolet rays, but the worst that does to me is highlight just how pale I am."
Emma snorted out another laugh at the 'vampire's' mini-rant. It was rather cute how much that particular falsehood seemed to irritate him.
"If we got so much wrong, what did we manage to get right?"
"Well, the immortality is real," Killian told her, as he lifted his head to meet her eyes. "That's actually our biggest selling point. We also have enhanced speed, senses, and strength. Vampires tend to be slightly more developed than the average human, so we're not only physically stronger but we're more mentally advanced than most of your kind. But there isn't much else you got right."
Emma turned everything over in her mind for a moment. Given what Killian had just said, if vampires were actually real, she could see the appeal in becoming one. Who wouldn't want to remain young and beautiful while being strong and smart for the rest of their lives? And it was exactly that thought which reminded her of why she didn't believe the mad man sitting at her kitchen table. Nothing in life was ever that smooth sailing.
"What about the blood?" Emma asked, cringing a little at the thought of having to swallow down human blood. She couldn't even bring herself to try Black Pudding when she'd been on holiday in the UK a few years ago, so the thought of having to drink blood to survive turned her stomach a little. "You said that you didn't bite people to turn them, but don't you still need blood to survive?"
"Actually, I said we didn't just go around biting whoever we wanted to turn. We're not complete savages," Killian explained. "Before turning someone, the vampire in question first needs to gain informed consent from the human. The human must then be taken through the pros and cons of eternal life at a workshop that's run every quarter by Dracula's operation. Only when a contract has been signed by both parties can we begin the process of changing someone."
"Wait, immortality comes with a day class?" Emma knew there had to be a catch somewhere, and day classes were certainly it.
"Of course it does. It's immortality! This isn't something that you can just change your mind about when you get bored twenty years down the line. It's a decision that deserves to be carefully considered after you've been fully informed of the consequences of choosing our life." Killian allowed that information to sit with Emma for a moment as she finished the rest of her mug of coffee, before he asked, "So, what do you think?"
"What do I think?" Emma repeated, a little bemused by his sudden change of tone. "I think you're insane," she replied honestly. "Vampires aren't… they're not real, Killian. Nothing you've told me tonight proves that they are!"
"So how would you like me to prove myself? If you don't believe me now, then who's to say that you won't find a way to explain anything that I show you? I've already told you about how some of the more common legends came to exist. So tell me, Emma, how exactly can I prove myself to you?"
A cold chill ran down Emma's spine. She pushed back from the table and away from the man still sitting at it as she asked, "How do you know my name? I've never told you that."
"I can see it on your gas bill on the counter over there," he told her, as he nodded his head in the direction of the stack of unopened mail on Emma's countertop. "By the way, you're being ripped off. There's no way heating a house of this size should cost that much."
"You're fucking crazy," she mumbled, more to herself than to him, as she began pacing the floor. "I can't believe I ever invited you into my home. What the hell was I thinking?" She finally turned back to look at the crazy man sitting at her kitchen table and told him as firmly as she could, "I think it's time for you to go."
Killian fixed her with another of his intense stares for a moment before he nodded his head and stood from his seat. "Of course," he said, almost like he'd been expecting that this moment would come eventually. He slipped the long fingers of his right hand into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small, white card before tossing it down on the table between them. "If you change your mind, you know how to reach me. Thank you for your time, Emma. I'll see myself out."
He didn't give her a chance to reply to what he'd said. One second he was standing before her, looking rather dejected when faced with her rejection. The next, he was gone. If it hadn't been for the business card and pamphlet still sitting on the table, Emma would have assumed that she'd hallucinated the entire thing.
"Killian?" she called out softly, because surely he was playing some kind of trick on her now. There was no way a human could move that fast. Not even Usain Bolt. "Killian?" she asked again, but she got absolutely no reply.
Thanks for reading.