Vampire encounters , page 39

I wanted to say first of all that I’m new to this site. So if I make any mistakes I hope you all can forgive me. I came to this thread because I’ve found it increasingly more difficult to be taken seriously when talking about things like ‘Vampires’. As I was always a child who believed in the good little fairytales and laboriously shunned the darkness(I had plenty of that in reality already) I am a little skeptical of beings more powerful than the hearts and might of men. I have no doubt monsters exist. I suppose I just always reserved the right to explain them using science before I was forced to face one.

About five years ago I went out for a ‘girls night’ with two of my close friends. We fooled around at the restaurant until very late into the evening and after having thoroughly embarrassed our poor waiter into hiding, we decided it was probably best to call it a night. We laughed and stumbled our way outside, far too happy to be bothered with things like grace or dignity. But my joy was short lived for as we entered the parking lot I noticed a man out of the corner of my right eye. The first thing I remember thinking peculiar was the way he walked. I couldn’t say exactly how, but in some way he moved differently from other men. Being confident and more than a little hormonal at my young age, I turned my head to get a nice long look at this potentially attractive male coming my way. But instead of a handsome man to smile or wink at, I took in a pair of exceedingly cruel, cold black eyes framed by a head of lank white hair. Instantly regretting my decision to check him out, I looked down and was overcome by a sense of panic. A desire to run and hide washed over me and I knew there was nothing in this world that could ever convince me to look at him again. My hair fell across my face, hiding it and I was thankful because any measure of a barrier between he and I seemed a blessing and as he approached I continually fought the need to escape. An unspoken warning in my head told me to stand my ground, one that would be repeated like a mantra in the week to come. My friends looked at me strangely in concern, noticing something was amiss as I struggled to keep my face hidden from his view. Though the three of us stood close together, he pushed right through us and we moved to let him pass without complaint or comment from either of my friends. Thankful somehow that I’d been spared, I nearly ran to my car, trying in vain to keep myself calm as I sped home. I would find out days later in casual conversation from my friends that his eyes had been on me the entire encounter.

After speaking with my husband for a little while that same night, I’d been able to find some peace over the strangeness of the encounter. As he was hardly the first horrible person I’d met or been forced to share the air with, I was able to somehow file it away and move on. At least until the next evening. I had fallen asleep some time earlier and was sleeping relatively soundly from what I could tell when I suddenly awoke. On the outside of the master bedroom wall something was dragging along the stucco exactly where I lay. To my mind it sounded like nails, or a blade, almost metallic. Then the growling started, feral and strange. I‘d never heard anything like it. I felt like crying, tears already welling in my eyes, but thankfully the noise was loud enough to wake my husband who immediately looked at me in drowsy surprise and issued the canonical horror movie response of ‘What are you doing? Go to sleep…*snore*’. The noise stopped for that night, but I could hear my cat’s out by the sliding glass door that led to the backyard, hissing and mewling as though another cat were invading their territory.

Several nights passed in the same manner, with me getting less and less sleep. By the end of the week I’d become a nocturnal creature myself- staying up all night, going to work and immediately taking a nap from 3pm to 6pm when I returned home. I was getting more concerned over my sanity by the day, watching as paranoia and fear overtook me. Finally, early one morning I left for work as I always did, a full hour before sunrise. I made my husband walk me to the car those mornings, causing all manner of grumblings, but I was far too scared to care. Yet as I pulled away and toward the main road I took in a gruesome sight that very well may haunt me for the rest of my days. At the street corner was the carcass of an animal, its side completely ripped open, a five foot radius of blood and organs surrounding it. As I neared I could clearly see a trail of blood leading across the main road toward an adjacent farm, as though something had dragged it to it’s present location. There were only legs and a torso, leaving me to guess at it’s identity and it was clear from the hole in the body cavity that something had recently been feeding upon it. Once I’d regained my composure and made as much space between my car and the body as made me comfortable, I called my husband. Here I thought, was definitive proof that something predatory was stalking our neighborhood. I could hear the smile in his voice as he gently told me that yes, he had indeed seen it. But that someone had been cleaning it up when he drove past it and so all he saw was the blood and a little fur. This surprised me, since it had only really been ten minutes at the most since I’d driven past it myself and the mess had looked very fresh. How could word have gotten out that quickly in the early morning? I wasn’t aware road kill was cleared that efficiently.

I know my story doesn’t completely fit with the traditional stories of the vampire, but so far as I can tell it was the only way to explain such an odd and corresponding occurrence. Shortly after this happened both my cat’s got deathly sick with seizures and one of them passed. This coupled with the loss of one of my best friends made moving an attractive prospect. I left the house soon after and have been left relatively untroubled ever since, though I still check my locks several times every night…and have lost my ability to sleep without a light on.