The Gloaming: A Vampire Story by Leslie Ormandy

The Gloaming is a colloquial term for twilight, as the sun is about to set. It is a threshold time; a time when evil awakes and good settles in for the long-haul.

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The woods were dark although the sun was just about to set, layering red clouds over the top of the valley, and Seth hovered just inside the tree-line watching the valley’s margin of safety slowly shrink. Adults and children were tucking themselves in, safe behind their stone walls and cross-barred windows. Adults believed, and they kept their children safe. Seth knew he’d not catch an adult or child out after dark – ah, but the teens. And he licked his lips as saliva loosened his fangs.

The teens believed that nothing bad could happen to them. They believed their parents were fools with outdated and incorrect belief systems. They believed that they were immortal. They were wrong.

As the sun vanished behind the hills across the valley from his hiding place, he sniffed the breeze. He could smell stale human smells left in the outlying fields, but they were overlaid by the smell of dogs, cats, squirrels, rabbits, all the animals surrounding any settlement. All he needed was one teen running late returning from a date. He smiled, a slow and wickedly happy smile; he was in the money. He smelled dinner delivering itself.

As the line of sun-shadow eased away from the tree-line, he glided out of the tree-line accompanying it, a dark shadow hidden in darkening shadows. The shadowed shape of a young girl just on the other side of the line of darkness, a barely lit shadow, hurried towards a distant house. By Seth’s figuring, she had about two minutes to make it into the house, or he had two minutes before he could meet her. He was hungry; it would be a long two minutes.

He counted down the moments as he edged after the scurrying figure… one minute to dinner time … half a minute to dinner time … fifteen long breaths to dinner time … three steps to dinner time. When he reached the three step point, a light suddenly pierced the growing dark, shining bright from the open doorway where a man stood calling to the girl to hurry.

Seth knew that he couldn’t be seen by the man, but he could be sensed by feelings etched into mankind’s DNA over centuries. The man knew he was out there as surely as though the motion sensitive lights surrounding the home were shining upon him. “Hurry Melissa!” the man shouted at the scurrying girl. “Run!” The girl, Melissa, put on a burst of speed, and was almost to the lighted lawn.

One long step to go… Seth chanted in his head, finishing the countdown and the personal race to the finish line of survival.

He reached out as one of her legs crossed over into the UV lights, and snagged her back towards himself, pulling her backwards and away from survival. She screamed and thrashed as his hands tightened on her shoulders, and he gave her a love tap on the temple to stop the noises. He hated noisy food; it tended to pull crazy humans out of their own safe secure homes and into groups. One on one he was unbeatable, except by the specially trained slayers, but groups – more problematic.

The man’s voice carried into the darkness as he screamed the girls name over and over again, but the noise faded away as he moved back into the protective forest. He wanted to enjoy this meal; he hated eating on the run.

Finally he reached his den and set the girl down. Running his fingernail down the inside of her arm and piercing a vein, he sat back and let the sweet bouquet of her blood trickle into his being. He basked in the blood-smell while waiting for her to resume consciousness. It was more fun to kill them when they struggled against his overwhelming strength, so long as they didn’t scream – or beg, or whimper, too loudly.

What felt to him like an eternity passed before the girl’s eyelids flickered, rising and falling minutely against her closed eyes as her body reacted to the danger it felt close; her body wanted to see the enemy it could sense. Keeping watch on the flickering eye-lids, he lifted the bleeding arm to his mouth, and delicately licked at the narrow stream of blood. It was bliss. Ecstasy. Orgasm. All mixed together in the life-affirming substance he craved and had to have to live.

He watched the eyes crack open as the girl felt something wet licking her arm. She groaned and her free hand went to her head. Then suddenly aware of her surroundings, she wrenched her arm away from his grasp; his rusty laugh spoke amusement as she tried to crawl backwards away from him. He had never yet allowed dinner to escape, and this was an attractive dinner. But when there was time, he quite liked playing with his food.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice breaking on the “who,” as though the word she had begun with was “what.”Her eyes got bigger taking his elongated teeth, red blood-shot eyes, and talon-like fingernails which were already stained red with her blood, and her scrabbling backwards motion sped up.

For a long moment Seth contemplated the girl in front of him, observing her as she scrabbled in the dirt trying to get far enough from him to rise and run. He licked his fingers clean of her blood, hearing her heartbeat racing as she realized what he was licking, and what he was.

As she reached the far corner of the cleared space and flipped in place to run he reached casually forward and grabbed her arm, pulling her forward into his embrace. Her struggling resistance almost pushed him to take her then. Her scent—driven by her fear -- was driving him mad with need. He wanted to pull her apart and suck the pieces dry of the precious liquid hidden within them. But equally, he wanted to savor the feeding; to enjoy every moment and every drop which he could tease from her dying body.

She beat uselessly against his chest, vainly attempting to get her knee up to his groin, or to stamp down hard on his instep -- moves taught in beginner’s Self Defense classes – but he held her too strongly for either attempt to be effective. As she sucked air into her lungs and opened her mouth to begin screaming, he tightened his grip around her ribcage, squeezing until he heard the ribs begin to pop as they broke and she emitted a pained wheezing noise of, “no, no, no.”

Her mumbled wheezes of “no” increased marginally in volume and turned into a wheezy scream as he allowed himself to tear her shoulder upon. The flavor of her blood-filled flesh was sweet, but he spat it out and instead fastened his teeth into the exposed wound, letting the running blood ooze down his throat. With each gulp of her blood he felt himself becoming more alive, more strong, more immortal. For a brief instant he was so focused upon the taste and the sensations of feeding that she almost was able to tear free from his grip, but sensing the bunching of her muscles he instinctively forced her to the ground under him.

He was a narrow breath from losing control and tearing her apart immediately, but managed to get his impulses back under control. He reminded himself of his determination to drain her slowly, to make the pleasure last this time since he would have to move over several valleys before he’d find his next meal – news of his attack on a human girl would inevitably be gossiped about and, for a few days at least, teenagers would listen to their parents and be safe inside before dark fell. But he couldn’t resist another quick taste, and fastened his fangs onto the naked shoulder exposed by her sweater slipping to one side as he forced her down. Again he moaned at the sweet warm sensation as he sucked blood from her.

He realized that the girl was no longer moaning or struggling, but couldn’t bring himself to allow her to recover enough to fight him. Nor could he bring himself to pull back from the vein he had found as he took increasingly strong pulls from it, suckling it, thoroughly enjoying the life being passed through it from her to him. All too soon he could feel her heartbeat slowing – too little blood left in her for the muscle to move – he sucked harder. It stopped and he released her into a broken heap at his feet.

Knowing that there was still some blood to be found in her extremities, he soon had her body torn apart, sucking the remaining blood out of each part as he removed it. As he worried the blood from the final elbow joint, he heard baying of dogs off in the distance. They were a long way off still, as were the band of slayers called in to hunt him. But dawn was no longer that far off, and he knew he had to travel a fair distance before dawn caught him, trapping him in whatever shadowy place he could find. So he dropped the joint and looked at the pieces of carcass now littered around him, where he’d tossed the pieces randomly as he finished with them.

If his memory served him right, there was a nice spot outside a small village a few valleys over; though he hadn’t been there for a few years. The humans wouldn’t be looking for him there. And again, he smiled at the carcass of the girl patting his full stomach, he had dined rather well that night, and it would be several nights before he’d need to feed again. He could easily travel a fair distance each night, from gloaming till dawn. He would trust to fate to bring him the next victim, a teen he’d no doubt, who thought himself, or herself, immortal – and who thought vampires a figment – a boogie man – of their parent’s imaginations.