We agreed to play together on cloudy days or nights when the moon was bright. The only games a five-year-old child can conceive of are on the level of “house” or “hide-and-go-seek,” but I had fun regardless. Even such artless diversions were great fun with her. I remember smiling from my heart, and wondering if I had ever felt this way before in my life. Even today, the time I spent with that girl remains my priceless treasure.
Our relationship carried on for some time, and yet her relatives seemed to take no note of the girl’s habit of sneaking out after dark. Or perhaps, rather than not noticing, they simply didn’t care. They didn’t seem any more concerned for how slender the girl was becoming on the paltry diet they were feeding her, after all. Perhaps they would simply consider it a boon if she were to perish in some roadside ditch.
I made up my mind one day to have my ghouls prepare her a banquet whenever she came to visit. Human food was a mere luxury item for one such as me, but that also meant I was very particular about the quality and flavor of the food I stocked. It was a luxury, after all. I had hardly expected that I would be using the ingredients I acquired for my own personal pleasure in such a way, of course, but it served just the same. I would set the table with dishes of all varieties. They were feasts beyond anything the young girl had seen before in her life.
She ate a great deal herself, but the girl would always ask for food to take back to her relatives as well—the same relatives who had not been giving her enough to eat. I was moved by her kindness, but if she returned home with luxuriant dishes, her relatives would surely find it suspicious. Instead, I sent my ghouls to gather herbs and nuts from the forest for the girl to take back with her to the village. Her relatives, of course, snatched them up without a single word of thanks.
It pained me to see the sad smile on the girl’s face when she spoke of her family. I wanted so badly to ask her to forget her coldhearted relatives and come live with me in my castle, but I knew full well that my wish could never come true. She and I were beings of different worlds. The only time we could even meet was when the sun had hidden its face.
I understood that in my head, at least. But in a deeper sense, I didn’t understand it at all. I became careless.
One day a group of visitors came to the castle, the first other than the girl in a long while. They were a party of adventurers. Really, they were little more than petty thieves. Their faces were smeared with filth—it seemed they hadn’t been washing their bodies—and they wore perverted, leering smiles. They were frightened of me, to be sure, but it was clear that they saw me and my castle alike as nothing more than a bounty to be plundered.
The ghouls would have been more than enough to handle a group of baseborn scum like them, but as it happened, I was famished for blood. I hadn’t fed in a matter of years. My meals with the girl had filled my heart, but they had done nothing to slake my hunger.
The adventurers certainly didn’t seem like upstanding humans. I told myself I needed to exterminate them before they became a menace to the village where the girl lived. Of course, all I really wanted was to drink them dry and fill myself up on their blood.
A man from the adventuring party put his hands on my shoulders, trying to push me to the ground. Instead I bit him on the neck and began to drink. It was sickly, vile, disgusting blood, but hunger truly is the greatest of all spices. The warmth of blood filling my stomach sent me into the throes of ecstasy. The adventurers laughed, mistaking my reaction for something erotic, but their expressions changed quickly when they saw their companion shrivel up before their eyes. It was as if they only then remembered that they had come here to assault a vampire’s castle.
They wielded their weapons for all they were worth, but they had nothing that would prevail against a true vampire princess. I simply drained their blood, starting with whomever I could get my hands on. I was more energized than I had been in years, gleefully and loudly gulping down their life fluids. And when the last adventurer had been drained dry, I heard the sound of a branch snapping in the forest.
I raised my head, wondering if another adventurer had come to be my meal, but standing there was none other than the girl I had befriended. Her face was pale with horror. I knew it was no trick of the light, for her eyes were overflowing with tears as well. It was an expression of betrayal—of despair.
How frightful it must have been for her, to see my face dripping with red blood, redder even than my crimson lips. Even as I sucked some remains of blood through my long fangs, I searched my mind for some excuse or explanation I could give the girl. But it was no use. There was nothing I could say.
She and I were beings of different worlds. I thought I understood that, but in truth I hadn’t grasped it at all. The wretches whose blood I was drinking before her eyes were her fellow humans, and I was a monster, a scourge upon her kind. No matter what I might say to explain the situation, nothing could change the fact of what I had done.
How could I have been so utterly, utterly ignorant?
I understood at that moment that whatever friendship I’d had with that girl was gone. Every second I beheld that fearful face of hers, I felt a new wound rending my heart. I yelled at the trembling girl, telling her to never come to my castle again.
One after another, the adventurers rose again as ghouls—puppets under my control, with no will of their own. I should have never left the company of my puppets, I thought. That would have been suitable for one such as me. For a monster who devours humans to befriend those same creatures was the height of foolishness. I turned my back to the girl and returned to my abode, vowing never again to step foot outside.