A LUCID GOTHIC DREAM

On that night of funereal mists, my stomach rumbled as I wandered alone through the darkness of the city, looking for a prey. That’s when I saw, in the distance, the apparently perfect creature to revitalize me. It possessed a robust figure and its bearing was that of healthy young being with fresh blood. I camouflaged myself among the trees and waited patiently for it to approach; when I heard its footsteps, I grabbed it like a stray cat grabs a mouse. I wanted to be possessed by its hunger for life, to be its god to whom it would beg for freedom from my sharp teeth. My desires faded, however, the next instant when I saw its eyes close. It was seized by a perverse lucidity, fighting back with extreme force the weight of my body on its. He gripped my neck with one hand, its eyes alight with a disturbing scarcity of any humanity, and it lifted me into the air, my feet a head above the ground. For the first time, I felt a thick dread and beginnings of weeping similar to the one I had before my own transformation, hundreds of years ago. Then I realized what king of creature I was dealing with: it was a spirit of darkness, incarnated in the body of a mortal. That was the only entity capable of defeating someone like me. When I realized that I was approaching death diluted in the blood I had just drunk, I chocked on my own hatred as the hand that strangled me clenched tighter and tighter. The idea of handing my soul over to that beast to be enslaved for eternity echoed in my final thoughts, mixed with the repugnance of seeing myself as defeated, me, who conquered everyone and snatched from them their most precious possession, as the legitimate Lord I called myself to be. Intoxicated by this fury, I looked around, already quite dizzy, and found a white oak stake by the side of the cobblestone road. With a swipe at the creature’s eyes, delivered with my arm suddenly transformed into a bat’s wing, I managed to free myself from the fingers around my neck and reach for the stake. I would never allow myself to be beaten so cowardly. As the entity composed itself, I knelt on the lawn and raised the wooden stake over my head. “Better the darkness of the afterlife, than giving my freedom to the demon thirsting for the sacred secular blood”, I said, before burying the weapon in my own heart.

The Grove
ISSN: 1137-005X
29
Num.
Año. 2022

A LUCID GOTHIC DREAM

Valentina Alves Menezes Andrade
University of Jaén,Spain