In the gently pulsing blue glow of standby lights, the forest was sprouting new growth. The bulbous mushroom heads of hubs formed fairy rings in the matted tangle of the forest floor. Thick bundles of cables were pushing free of the undergrowth to twine around heavy trunks in search of an unclaimed access port. Seedling plugs split and branched in twos and fours. Here and there a seven segment display blinking eights into the dimness, or a speaker whispering a gentle hush of line level noise.

Through this all she stalked, interfaces for dozens of protocols, esoteric and universal, old and new, cascading off her shoulders and down her naked back, searching for a place to connect.

My growing rage was stalled by the sound of approaching footsteps. I noticed with some interest that the emotion had been stored away — compartmentalised — leashed and ready to be recalled at a moment’s notice. My mind was now taken with curiosity at the richness of tone and detail my new ears picked from this sound that I was fair certain I would not have heard at all with my old ears. There was more there, too. Information that my brain did not yet know how to process, but would learn with practice. And quickly. The sound of breathing joined the cadence, staccato, shallow and frightened. And a heartbeat, small and quick like a bird’s, but not weak. A new sound, metal on metal, key in lock, and the door sprang open. There stood the pit master, thick and wiry and, to my new eyes, clearly inhuman. In his arms, my little girl. The rage within barked and snarled, but I saw his hand at her throat and I held fast to its leash.

Hart’s workshop was a small place set a block back from the city’s edge. Parts small and large scattered the benches lining the walls; the only clear flat surface was the table beneath the window where Hart sat working on the turbine of a sensor platform.
“These the plans?” Rebbecca asked, examining the blueprints tacked to a corkboard by the door.
“That’s them. Still think you’re crazy.”
“You know as well as I that it’s necessary.”
“I surely do, Becky. Wasn’t an insult.”
Rebbecca smiled. “I’m going before the council tomorrow. I’ll need you there, if you can spare the time.”

Scritch, scritch.

The rat eyed them from atop an upturned bathtub. Its whiskers looked suspiciously like piano wire, and tinkled slightly when it wrinkled its nose to gnaw at the nickle clutched in its paws.
“I guess there’s life here after all,” said Peter. Startled by his voice, a flock of something with wings beaten from soda cans flapped lumberously away behind a shipping container.
“Of a sort,” said the rat. Alice stifled a giggle.
“Do you know, I wonder,” asked Peter, “if there is any place interesting around here?”
“There’s an alley over yonder,” the rat twitched its nose. “Back of a bar. Some good scraps there.”
“No, not an island,” says Alice. “What about in the junkyard?”
“There’s nothing in the junkyard. It’s all more of the same, isn’t it?”
They turned to leave.
“Except for the church, of course.”

A flutter of metal rang out — one of the soda can birds back to make a meal of the rat. With a scritch scritch it was away under a pile of shopping carts.

I am sure, when they handed me the formula and a blank cheque, they did not know what they had created. As memories come back to me now, squashed short somehow as if to make room for others yet to arrive, I wonder that perhaps they did not create it at all. Regardless of their intent, it seems the formula’s true product was not the compound, but this me that I am becoming. That I am become. They could not have known this, could not have engineered it, and could certainly not have desired it.

I remember writing the zeros, watching with the corner of one eye to see when they would balk or blink. They didn’t.

The lab was sealed. Hermetic. White walls and benches and clear tubes and glassware. In my first requisition I ordered indicators I didn’t need, just to make coloured solutions to scatter about the room in beakers to keep me from going crazy. A door in one wall led to a bathroom and a bunk, and in the other wall the ‘airlock’, through which came the supplies and requisitions. And, sometime around the end of the first month, Rose. Other than the mice, she was the first contact of any kind I’d had since entering the lab. She looked somehow familiar as she introduced herself, like an old lover whose name and face I could no longer recall. She was to be my assistant, she told me, though as I look back it seems unlikely that was her true purpose.

With someone as smart as Rose in their employ I do not know why they needed me, yet she took no initiative of her own, only following my terse directions and providing a sounding board for my ideas. The first time I headed for the bunk after she arrived, perhaps a day and a half in all, she followed. I did not turn her away.

When the Princess died, the King had her body laid upon a bier in a small courtyard. Its walls were high and windowless, and its sole door hidden away in mazes of passageways and rooms long unused. This done, he locked the door and retreated into his grief.

The kingdom ran itself mostly, and comings and goings to and from the castle were few and infrequent. When, therefore, the greenery began to grow down over the roofline to cover the windows of the castle’s upper floor, it was scarce noticed. By the time the greenery had reached the ground, a week later, and blocked all egress, it was too late to do much except hack a new passage clear with pike and sword each morning.

The King cared not, thus it was the chief steward, the baker, the librarian and the scullery boy who, upon opening the door to a small courtyard (the scullery boy was no stranger to locks, or mazes of passageways and rooms long unused), discovered the source of the problem. The bier upon which the Princess’ body had lain had been shattered to pieces of rubble by a tree that erupted from the flagstones and soared upwards, bedecked with short stubby branches and drapings of vines and creepers. Just beside the door, the Princess’ small blue shoes were placed neatly in a pair, with her socks rolled up inside.

He came to in a room that smelled of fish and salt and bile, the echo of a scream that sounded familiar rapidly fading from his ears. It was a basement, probably; large, stone, and dank in a way that rooms above ground could never manage. It was also dark — dark enough that the single candle flickering a few feet from his face only made it harder to see.

From behind and to his left, a robed figure dragged a young woman he had never seen into the small island of candlelight. A low keening whimper escaped her lips, but her eyes made it clear that it was the mental equivalent of a light left on; the owner mercifully long gone to some other place. He struggled to stand or to shout, but his hands were tied to something solid and low behind him and all that escaped his painfully raw throat was a low sort of gasp. The robed figure snapped its head up and from beneath the hood the candlelight reflected off two deep-set eyes and a row of smiling teeth.
“Getting to you, Professor,” it said. “Wait your turn.”
Turning back to the task at hand, the robed figure dragged the girl across the circle of candlelight. There it pulled a long, thin-bladed knife from the loose rope belting its waist and almost casually sliced the girl’s dress and belly open. With a snap her eyes registered fear again and the whimper turned into a scream. The robed figure pushed her and she fell away and down, out of the candlelight, her scream echoing and fading for a long time before it cut off. A blast of hot, foetid air struck the Professor’s face and he heaved, finding his stomach mercifully empty.

“You killed her,” his voice quivered with astonishment and a rising anger.
“Hardly,” the figure replied, coming to kneel in front of him and drawing back its hood. It was a young man, unremarkable to look at. “Oh, don’t get me wrong, she is surely dead, but not by my hand. She was just chum.”
“The blood…”
“No, Professor. The terror. At his will, I call them to feed.”
“You worship those… those things?”
“Oh ho, Professor, I was right about you after all. You do know what lurks beneath this town. But no, I am no brainless cultist worshiping monsters in the dark. I serve the deepest. From his watery throne he dreams me here to do his bidding.”
“If you are to kill me, then do it now and dispense with this rot.”
“All in good time, Professor. You must wait your turn. You are an interesting one, though. I wonder, what dreams you?”

The God Of The Wastes was out there somewhere beyond the dunes, buried in the sand. She was the god of death. She was their protector. The God Of The Skies stretched above. He was the god of life. He was their creator.

The stories of the People told of a time when the tears of the God Of The Skies had fallen on the wastes, splash, splash, splash, forming the three oases the People called their homes. To travel between them, one must set out at dawn in the direction the elder indicated and walk straight from horizon to horizon, then again, then a third and a fourth time. When dusk came the next oasis would be in sight. If it was not, the God Of The Wastes had taken you.

In all other directions lay the lands of the dead, from whence the restless spirits sometimes came and charged the air with malice. When they did, the God Of The Wastes threw up sand into the air to force the People to stay inside their homes until the danger had passed.

Alice was crouched on the beach, building cathedrals in the damp sand when Peter arrived. He stood for a minute or two while she smoothed the last few grains from a steeple, then helped her to stand. He kissed her before she could speak.
“Not that I’m complaining,” she said, “but what was that for?”
“Something I wanted to do last night as you were getting in the cab.”
“Why didn’t you, then?”
“Didn’t want to rush things,” he shrugged. “People get hurt that way.”
“So why did you now?”
“We’re further along here. Speaking of here, any idea where we are this time?”
“The shore, of course. Where things wash up.”

Away up the beach, the sand gave way to dirt and grass and the occasional tree. In the other direction, through a shimmer only vaguely suggestive of water, the ground dropped away in a shelf to the junkyard. Peter walked down to the stuff-that-was-not-water and looked out. The pillar of flame, so large from up close, was but a speck on the horizon.
“It’s so… big.”
“Poetic.”
He laughed, punching her on the arm. “You know what I mean. I wonder how far it is to the other shore.”
“I don’t think it works like that,” Alice shook her head. “I think the only thing on the other side is nothing.”
“What about the church?”
“That’s out there somewhere. An island. Not the only one, either.”
Peter turned to her seriously. “How do you know these things? Have you been coming here for a long time?”
“On and off as long as I remember, but never so regularly before you. I just know, though. That’s how dreams work. It’s why you don’t question it when you can fly or become president or dance a samba with a potted plant.”
“Do you know why you’re here, then? Why I’m here?”
“No,” she frowned. “But whatever the reason is, it’s out there somewhere.”

I do not tell this story in the hope of gaining some kind of absolution. Rather, I tell it in the face of the knowledge that for us there can be no absolution. We are an abomination — a perversion of the natural order. But then, so are you, and every living thing that walks this world. We are as dust, and to dust we shall return.

In my time I have been more of an abomination than most men, I have killed more men than most wars, and I have seen enough to know that true evil exists only in the hands of the righteous.

I tell this story, not to soothe any remnants of my conscience, not to find my soul in its baring, but only to see that the truth is recorded for those who care to seek it.

A well-fed healthy adult has about five litres of blood that will continue pumping for somewhat in excess of a month with no external sustenance. To a vampire, such a meal will sustain for a fortnight or so. The victim, naturally, dies instantly. I was not so fortunate.

The great and bounteous Roman Empire was built on power and excess. The power kept the whole engine running through sheer force of will, so long as there was space for it to expand into. When that space ran out the power turned inwards, and in the end it was the excess that was their downfall. That same excess was my downfall, too. I was a successful young merchant with a silver tongue, a blushing bride and a beautiful baby girl, along with drinking and gambling problems to match even the emperors themselves.

My business profits, as extensive as they were, poured into the bloodsport of the arenas, where it sang to the fires of baser instinct locked away inside myself. Blade and bone and blood. At the time I was ashamed, but I have long since lost the concept of regret. I did not, in the strictest sense, gamble myself and my family into slavery, but I did gamble myself onto the dirt of the arena floor: a free gladiator, yes, but one with a great debt owed to the pit master. There, with sword in hand, skull underfoot, and crowd cheering above, the fires within sang even louder.

On the dirt of that arena, stained dark with fluids spilled from dying men, I was as a god. Life was mine to take, and the crowds worshipped me for it. I loved my family as ever, but they withdrew from me as though frightened at what I had become. Still, in our marriage bed the passion my wife and I shared was fiercer than ever before.

Months passed and my debt lessened, then the sickness came. I grew weak and could not stomach even the food the pit master dished out to me specially as his star performer. I ran a fever and the light of the sun was too bright for my eyes, yet I had a full docket and still I had to fight.

For a man to become a vampire, two things must occur. First, he must drink deep of the blood of a vampire. This I had been doing for weeks without my knowledge by the machinations of the pit master. Second, he must die. Half-blind and weak, it was not long before my fights turned for the worse, and soon my guts were spilled in the dirt. Often I have seen in my mind’s eye my death in that dirt; wondered whether all since has been naught but a play staged by Dis for his amusement. But the crowd did not want my death that day. Badly wounded and delirious, I was taken by the pit master to a room where he left me, locking the door behind him. There I saw not food nor water nor care for the rest of my life.

It took me days to die, though I know not how many. I descended into incoherent madness, retreating from the pain, until a moment came where I found myself awake and sane and painless and thirsty. And dead. Then the thirst grew and I edged toward madness once more. The next thing I can remember clearly is my wife being shown through the door. The lock clicked again behind her. It was clear she was sick with worry and concern for me, but that was soon replaced by fear when she saw whatever it is that lies behind my eyes now in place of that spark of life. I loved her still. Wanted her still. But I did not trust myself, for my lust for that place on her neck below and behind her right ear, so familiar to me, was tinged now with a wildness I did not remember. I lasted until nightfall.

We sat for hours huddled in opposite corners of the room, not speaking, her confusion just as obvious as her fear. When she finally slept, I drank from her. A mouthful or two, maybe, before she fought me off and my slackened thirst allowed me control once more. I retreated to my corner and cried rose-coloured tears. She pounded and screamed at the door, and before long I could smell the blood from her torn fists. Help did not come, but the dawn did, then night, then dawn again. She curled in a ball and cried from hunger. I cried from thirst and from the knowledge of the inevitable. The next night I drained her dry.

My new thirst slaked properly for the first time since my rebirth I came to realise what I had become. I had no name for it, nothing but whispered stories half-recalled from my childhood, yet I knew somehow that I was now that thing which causes men to fear the dark. I also came to realise who had done this to me, and in me grew a great rage.