Night in the Life

A tremor in the ground woke him sometime in the early morning…a dull, distinctly human sort of sound. Repetitive. A digger, perhaps, but far enough away to avoid alarm. The comforting weight of the earth on top of him remained unshifting, and the deep cool held him in a reassuring calm. Still, since that one particular afternoon, he was never able to sleep through any sounds that could potentially lead to his exhumation from the soil…and even the slightest nuance seeping down into his bed chamber, from the bright cheery daylight heavens of above, would stir him and send him abruptly into half-conscious awakeness. The muted purr of a lawnmower; the various scrapings, and churnings, and diggings of the top soil. They were ever busy up there, while he slept…that teeming swarm of bees, writhing on the bright yellow honey comb.

When he could sense that night was once again upon the world, he would begin the agonizing routine of tunneling back out of the ground, dragging his wrapped up belongings with him. He’d finish the last bit of tunneling slowly, just to safeguard against rogue instincts, and the possibility of the sun still being up as it had been on more than one occasion in the past. If there were any hints of light at all in the sky, even the safe-light of the dimming twilight, he would sink back into his hole until it was completely dark. It was the only way to make certain that he wouldn’t be seen by those who would tear him limb from limb were they to happen by and see his filthy head sticking out of the ground.

On desperate occasions, when digging was not an option, and time was growing short, he had to settle for somewhere inside the iron network of sewer and drainage lines that webbed downward, under the city. A long, snaking journey, and a comforting darkness…but without the pleasantly restrictive quality of the bare soil; sometimes full of water, sometimes full of less speakable things, he would wake in those fetid chambers to more acute afternoon sounds, echoing down the pipes. Men shouting distant inaudible things, children screeching and laughing, hammers tacking away…and always in the most distant and sensitive frames of mind. A noise would wake him for a moment, and after it was determined that it was not threatening, and as he drifted off once again, a ghostly image based on it would haunt him. The sound of a child far above, and suddenly he could see bright green grass, a white fence, and the mist of a sprinkler…a little boy in blue shoes, jumping back and forth through it…over and over, and over, and over again..

In the early days, just after the turn, he had tried to maintain some degree of a relationship with humanity…spending his first few hours of the night sniffing out sleeping deer, or other missable carriers of nutrients. He would eat, and shower, and spend the pre-midnight hours in sport and conversation with his peers…but it was always short lived, and their temperaments always so worn and strange, on the brink of sleep when he himself was so wide awake and so full of life. Eventually they would retire, leaving him alone for the bulk of the silent evening to think, and mill about, before eventually crawling under just before daybreak, when the first sparks of human life once again began littering the surface of the planet. This isolation drew him further and further away from his human roots, until at last his shelter was no longer affordable, and showers were no longer easily accessible, and the perpetual darkness had finally worn away any human sanity he might have had. Without any kinship, or natural desire to reproduce, he withdrew from humanity completely and forgot that he was ever a part of it.

Although he had spent an afternoon in an actual coffin on more than one occasion over the course of his years, it was mostly out of novelty and dim curiosity that he found himself motivated to do it. Each instance was largely on accident, as he happened to tunnel into the private residence of one clothed set of bones or another, and he found the entire experience of it a bit less restrictive than he preferred. The hollywood idea of having one’s own coffin, with human assistants to lug it around from basement to basement, was laughable and ludicrous, but there was no harm in trying to gleam as much glamour out of his existence as possible…even if it was simply quaint, and forced.

He preferred eating men, over women. Not only did they tend to have about a quart or so more blood on average, but they were less likely to be missed, and less likely to invoke the kind of sympathy and retribution that a woman would. He would crawl from his hole, put on his ratty hooded clothing, and roam the streets for the most discarded and lonesome individual he could find. Tricks and formalities weren’t necessary, and he would simply grab the person by the neck and mouth, and drag them back to his most recent tunnel in the earth. Although it would be easier to eat them on the spot, he couldn’t risk the inevitable evidence that would be left behind. Anything to indicate something other than a simple case of missing persons was sloppy and unwanted, in the unlikely case that someone would have reason to inquire or investigate. If anyone spotted him hauling his wiggling victim back to his hole, he would release his prey and run swiftly off to find another and try again…but once he finally made it back to his former exit from the earth, and no one was around to interrupt his business, he would seize his victim by the neck with his obscenely large jaws, and back himself down into his hole…dragging his desperate spasming prey behind him. The kicking and squirming usually did a good job of sealing the earthen pipe as he descended, and once he reached a comfortable depth, the afternoon’s sleeping quarters became the evening’s dining room…

In the later part of this century, there have been a number of attempts at humanizing the lore
of vampireism by romanticizing them, and making up for their psychological and physical
shortcomings by giving them "magical powers" with which to survive…

…but I think you will find that if you truly try to
humanize one of the creatures, without the ad-hoc
magical powers, you will end up right back
where you started– with a monster.