EYES WIDE OPEN

Whenever I close my hazel eyes, the faces of emperors, kings, and popes begin filing past behind my eyelids, along with fragments of ages, conflicts, and wars, as if someone has started an old film reel inside my skull. I do not put the show on deliberately. It simply calms me and helps me drift off. I have witnessed more than most minds could hold - from the blood-soaked battles of the Middle Ages to the colours of the Renaissance. I move through the centuries unchanged, carrying them with me.

My name is Karsten Ludwig Wilhelm Bonifacius Wettin, and I am a vampire.

What are you grinning at, reader?! The last person who laughed at my name ended up looking like a dehydrated human husk.

Of course the ignorant little plebeian in you immediately thought of something wet and watery,[*Wettin lends itself to the joke because it resembles the English word wet.] but no. I am an ancient vampire, descended from the Ernestine branch of the House of Wettin! Have you even heard of that illustrious dynasty? The British royal family descends from its Saxe-Coburg and Gotha line! We have supplied Europe with monarchs enough to fill palaces!

I have lived beneath more names than you could count, and through them I have known both the sanctity and degradation of human life across the centuries.

Now go and check the likes on your latest Instagram post and stop gawking at me. I am trying to sleep!

You people of the year 2024, are insufferable. You tremble before my pale and imposing personage, yet shamelessly wedge yourselves between the pages of stories written about me and my kind, then peer into our bedrooms at the least appropriate moments.

How would you like it if I stood there staring at you while you brushed your teeth? You would not, would you?

In fact, you would not enjoy having a vampire anywhere near you. I have yet to meet a human being who appreciated my true nature.

I shift into a more comfortable position inside my new, beautifully ornamented rosewood coffin, which has served as my bed for the past several years. It took me ages to find the right one, so in the end I had it custom-made. I wanted something special: pin-fine hand carving, heavy blood-red velvet lining, and a snow-white silk pillow finished with ruffles along the edges.

There. You are grinning again.

The woodcarver's blood was very sweet.

Why did I drain him? Because the wretch tried to conceal an unforgivable mistake. He had rushed my order and, instead of turning the coffin legs himself, had ordered them from an online shop.

So watch yourself. I do not appreciate being mocked.

We-authentic vampires-sleep in coffins, not human beds, whatever your ridiculous writers of vampire romances may claim in their pink little books. My previous coffin had finally collapsed with age, eaten through by woodworm. I loved that coffin dearly. I had slept in it for more than five hundred years. No matter how often I repaired it or how stubbornly I tried to preserve it, eventually even I had to admit defeat and let it go.

The new one was still rather stiff, and its memory-foam mattress had not yet learned the shape of my body properly, but it did a respectable job.

When I shift again, microscopic motes of dust stir in the shaft of moonlight falling across the polished rosewood. I make a mental note to remind my online secretary, Maren, to arrange for the velvet lining to be dry-cleaned.

I cannot remember whether I have ever cleaned it. Possibly before I first lay down in the coffin, after it was delivered. Or perhaps it was simply time to wash my clothes again.

I had dined two hours earlier, at precisely eleven in the evening. I try not to feed after midnight. My digestion cannot tolerate it anymore, and the resulting gas keeps me miserable all night.

Even so, my stomach gives a small, disgruntled turn. A short burp works its way up my throat and reaches my cold lips before I can stop it. Annoyed, I release it through my teeth, sigh, and settle my head more comfortably against the silk pillow.

Perhaps I should change the pillowcase. Or the lining. One of them. Possibly both.

Fabric gets worse with every century. I shall deal with it tomorrow, after I have slept!

I closed my eyes and surrendered to the cool darkness around me. I waited for the familiar succession of colored hallucinations that came whenever I shut my eyes and allowed myself to drift away.

Nothing happened.

You would have no reason to know this, but eternal life truly is a curse.

Every age I have lived through, under one identity or another, has brought its own particular trials. I have survived conflicts that tested my soul in ways you ordinary mortals could scarcely imagine. Yet whatever darkness lived in me had never quite taken everything. Some stubborn part of me had always searched for what remained human, even when that humanity kept slipping beyond my reach.

And every night, by habit, I would lie down and let the endless procession of colours, faces, places, and half-remembered worlds play itself out behind my eyelids until sleep claimed me.

But this?

Insomnia?

I had not prepared for insomnia.

My thoughts broke ranks.

As I had done hundreds of thousands of times before that night, I had climbed into my coffin expecting to surrender myself to blissful oblivion. Instead, I lay there waiting for sleep to seize me and carry me into its usual rush of hallucinations.

Nothing.

Where was my sleep? Why couldn't I drift off?

The questions multiplied until there was no room left in my skull for anything else. The room seemed to turn around me. I squeezed my eyes shut to stop it. My heart began racing, my ears rang, and a coldness unlike anything earthly went through me.

Oh no. No, no, no. Not this.

Of all the things that could happen to me, I did not need a panic attack.

I knew those treacherous episodes well enough. I could count the truly terrible ones on the perfectly manicured fingers of my right hand and still not reach six.

My chin began to tremble.

For one appalling moment, I realised I was dangerously close to bawling right there in my coffin.

Oh, Mother Lilith. Breathe, breathe, breathe, I reminded myself.

I tried to contain the panic scorching through me. Trapped inside my own head, I fought the fear and helplessness while the sick certainty that there was no way out pressed closer.

Cold sweat broke across me, although my body had long ago ceased behaving like that of an ordinary mortal.

What if I could no longer sleep? How was I supposed to rest if insomnia became permanent?

I did not want to panic, but every second gave my fears more room.

Another surge hit.

My chest rose and fell too quickly with each breath. Strength flooded my body-enough that the smallest careless movement could have reduced the coffin to splinters.

Against my better judgment, my mind began rummaging through the most horrifying diagnoses it could produce.

Vampiric neuralgia? Sleep psychosis? Some manner of neurotic disorder?

I ran through every disease and affliction I had encountered during my centuries of existence.

Where had my sleep gone? What unknown illness had found me now?

Desperate, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to stop the questions before they drove me out of my mind. One fear settled above all the others: that I had somehow developed insomnia and would never know proper rest again.

I did not want to end up like my cousin-Franz Maximilian Ludwig Bonifacius Wettin-confined to our provincial estate in Meissen, which my family had spent centuries using as a convenient prison for royal and otherwise highly placed members of society whose minds had become inconvenient.

Following established precedent, my assistant Leticia had personally ensured that the treatment prescribed for my cousin, who had gone violently mad after his heart was broken, was followed to the letter.

He had been wrapped like a cocoon in nine shirts woven in absolute silence by twelve naked virgins, then nailed inside his own coffin in the estate's cellar.

My eyes flew open in the dark.

What if the condition was hereditary? What if I had whatever he had?

Leticia was an exceptionally diligent woman, but I would be damned if I ever permitted her to stuff me into my own grave.

My teeth began to chatter. My pulse slammed inside my ears. Cold sweat beaded across my pale forehead, just above my brows.

What did humans do when they could not sleep? They counted sheep. I had to try it.

I closed my eyes again and imagined a lush green meadow divided by a long wooden fence. Exactly one hundred sheep stood on the other side.

No more. No fewer. How in damnation were real sheep supposed to clear a fence that high?

No. Irrelevant. The important thing was to count.

In my imagination, one sheep charged toward the fence, jumped over it, and ran away into the endless green beyond.

99...

Another cleared the fence.

98...

A third followed.

97...

My eyes snapped open again.

What idiocy was this?

Vampires did not count sheep! Drain them of blood, perhaps, if no human happened to be available. That at least had some practical merit.

My thoughts kept clicking away with the stubborn precision of a mechanical clock.

Think, Karsten, think! Perhaps you crossed through some spell, and it cursed you?

Perhaps I was finally getting old, and senility had come calling.

I had no intention of answering the door. I ran my tongue over the points of my canines. Still perfectly sharp after centuries of biting.

Whether I liked it or not, I had to contact Leticia.

If any creature on this earth could help me, it was Leticia and that inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge she carried around in her head. If I presented the situation in a form a woman could digest without unnecessary excitement, perhaps I could avoid setting off every warning bell in hers.

I seized on the idea with considerable relief and reached out with my mind, searching for the vampiress who lived with me in the castle's eastern tower.

Leticia was, as she insisted I call her whenever anyone else was listening, my consultant on all matters vampiric.

If you ask me, the devilishly beautiful woman in my employ was simply a thief with an excellent job title.

I had encountered her by chance at Wettin Castle one hundred and twenty-five years earlier while she was attempting to crack my safe and rob me.

When I discovered that she was a vampire like myself—though much younger, barely two hundred and eight—I offered her a position in the castle.

Being the only vampire around for centuries, with no company except the daily human menu, had become extraordinarily dull. I am not counting my cousin. He fell in love, abandoned me, emigrated to Britain, and went chasing skirts.

Perhaps Leticia had taken a liking to my dark-blond hair, which, I should point out, has never shown the slightest inclination toward baldness.

Perhaps it was my Roman nose.

Whatever the reason, to my considerable surprise, she accepted.

"Leticia, I'm dying!" I groaned into her mind. The strain had given me a headache.

"What?" Judging by the sudden pitch in her husky voice, I could picture her eyes going pancake-wide. "What are you talking about, Karsten? Are you hurt?"

"I don't know," I growled back. "I can't sleep!"

"You can't sleep?" Her bewildered voice echoed through my thoughts.

How was I supposed to know why I couldn't sleep? If I knew the answer, would I be contacting her telepathically, or would I be lying here blissfully unconscious, somewhere around my third dream of the night?

Women are very strange creatures.

"Well, I just can't!" I snapped, then gave an irritated snort.

"Describe the symptoms," she ordered. I heard pages rustling. She was probably in the library, leafing through the Wettin family medical book.

I bit my lips. There was hardly going to be a section devoted to vampiric ailments. My cousin and I had both become vampires after an unfortunate encounter with a blood-drinker during a late-night revel held for the Summer Solstice.

"Well, when I close my eyes, it's dark!" I huffed. "I don't fall asleep! I'm shaking like a leaf, I'm sweating, and I feel like smashing everything around me!"

"You haven't used the tezcatl from the chambers of your great-grandfather, Duke Christian of Saxe-Eisenburg, have you? Perhaps this is some temporary side effect—"

"I have not!" I growled. "You know perfectly well I am not a social butterfly like you!"

My relative had stolen the Aztec obsidian mirror from the Habsburg queen, Anna of Austria, and to this day no one knew where the damned thing had disappeared to.

The artefact was exceedingly rare. What made it particularly remarkable, however, was its ability to serve as a portal for angels and apparitions from other worlds.

I do not like meeting anyone. I have never been good at that sort of thing. I was... what is the word you humans use these days?

Introvert.

Yes. That.

"Karsten, you came back from Bohemia last week! Did you bathe in the thermal springs? The silver content in the water might have wiped your memory!"

"Good grief." I sighed inside my own head. That was all I needed now- a memory loss. "I may be old, but I haven't become that stupid. I did not dip so much as my little toe into those springs!"

"Well, something caused this, Karsten! You don't simply go owl-eyed under the moon for no reason!"

I could tell Leticia was beginning to lose patience because none of her guesses had yielded anything.

A small smile found its way onto my bloodless lips.

I liked her irritated. There was something particularly charming about the contemptuous lift of her brows when her patience finally ran out.

"Did you find anything in the medical book?" I asked.

"Nothing that can help you." She sighed. "You haven't been bitten by a werewolf, have you?"

"What sort of question is that? Of course I haven't." I frowned. "You would know!"

"When did you last eat?"

"Tonight, at eleven," I replied. "I had a business meeting in my private booth at the local nightclub. I was discussing the construction of a hydroelectric power plant on the Saale with an American plebeian from Duke Energy Corporation! He laughed at my sacred family name and ended up looking like a dried apricot."

"I hope you didn't leave him there in the club," Leticia snorted, eternally concerned with my impeccable reputation.

"What do you take me for?" Now it was my turn to be offended. "Of course I didn't. I folded him up and stuffed him into my diplomatic briefcase. I never leave evidence in public."

"Is the man still inside it?"

There was a sudden spark of interest in her voice.

"Yes. I haven't thrown him away yet. Why? What are you thinking?"

"I want to check something."

"I left the briefcase in the vestibule, beside the marble columns at the staircase."

I sighed and shifted restlessly in the coffin again. Now everything had started itching like hell.

It felt as though ants were crawling along the insides of my lace-covered arms and underneath the leather breeches at my thighs. I was definitely replacing the coffin upholstery.

Several long minutes passed without so much as a peep from Leticia.

My patience, already in poor condition, began to fray. My fingers drummed against the heavy velvet. I reached for her again.

"What is happening, Leticia?"

"Just another second..." Her thought came through in broken pieces. "I'm nearly there... I'm checking his pockets... Ah! There it is. Bingo!"

"Bingo?" I stared uselessly into the darkness from inside my coffin. "What could a number game possibly have to do with my insomnia?"

A small ripple of her laughter filled my head, and despite myself, I smiled.

"Oh, Karsten. It's an exclamation. Something you say when you've found the thing you've been looking for."

"Then what did you find?"

I pushed myself upright in the coffin. The fashionable slang of the last hundred years was not something I understood, nor something I had the slightest wish to learn.

My patience was wearing thin.

"I was right! You're drugged. I found a bag of cocaine in your victim's pocket!" she announced triumphantly inside my head.

"Drugged?" I repeated after her like a parrot.

"Yes! The man had been snorting cocaine, and you drank his blood!" Leticia laughed. "Calm down, darling. There is nothing wrong with you. You simply have to wait for the drug to wear off before you try sleeping again."

I blinked.

Cocaine... Drugs...

It took several minutes for my mind to catch up with what she had told me.

So I was not ill? Was I not mad? Was no one going to chain me in the cellar in Meissen beside my cousin after all?

What magnificent news Leticia had brought me. My whole body seemed to loosen at once. I felt lighter. Almost weightless.

What would I ever do without that little thief who had barged into my life and somehow made it better?

Then, quite suddenly, inspiration struck me. I nearly cried.

"Will you come to me for a moment, Leticia?"

I drew a quiet breath as I called to her. The pupils of my blue eyes had gone enormous.

Within a fraction of a second, the outline of a small, delicate figure appeared before me in the half-light of the room, surrounded by its exquisite furnishings.

My expert on all matters vampiric-Leticia-stood before me in a long, severe dark-green Baroque gown. Her long black hair had been swept into an elegant bun, and her emerald-green eyes regarded me with visible relief.

"See? There's nothing wrong with you. Well, almost-" She smiled, then fell silent when I raised one finger to my lips.

I was still half-sitting in the coffin.

Her eyes fixed on mine, widening with curiosity.

I looked at her properly.

Moonlight entered through the tall, narrow window and traced the outline of her figure while my gaze followed every curve.

Had I been mad not to ask her sooner? I only hoped I had not waited too long.

"Leticia Giovanna Scavo, would you do me the honour of becoming my wife?"

-- The End --

Cookies

Returns

T&Cs

Copyright

Privacy Policy