Anise took me to a showing of an old vampire movie. It was playing in a small, ancient theater where half the seats were too broken to use and the popcorn had as much salt as corn. I felt myself become way too aware of Anise’s every movement and reaction as we watched the washed-out scenes of the cackling vampire leaping out of nowhere to attack people.
Afterwards, even though it was late at night, she drove us to a park. We sat there in Bliss’ car in the park’s parking lot and talked for a while. With the headlights off, the park around was pitch black and it seemed as if we had left the entire universe behind, taking only the car with us.
“Are real vampires like the ones in movies?” I asked. I hoped that was okay to ask. I worried it might be rude.
“Sort of.” Anise took a moment to chew and swallow the bite of chocolate she had just taken. Because of our quiet surroundings, her voice sounded unusually clear, making everything she said seem both important and intimate. “Sort of. Stories of vampires are inspired by the real thing, but since the people who make those movies don’t think vampires are real, they just imagine them based on how other writers imagined them.”
“Did you watch a lot of movies like that one? Before the Hidden world?” I asked.
Anise gave me a small smile. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? The goth girl who’s obsessed with vampires meets one and becomes her thrall. But, no, I actually thought people like that were kind of pathetic. I thought if vampires were real that they could only be monsters. Even the broody, self-pitying ones still drank blood, after all. I even remember reading a story about a girl falling in love with a vampire, believing his promises that he would turn her, only discovering too late that he had made the same promise to hundreds of other girls and that he’d left them all dead.”
Then Anise told me about when she was a child. She began by describing when a bird got into her house. It had smacked hard into the window, breaking its jaw. To young Anise, the bird’s beak hanging open made it look as if it were laughing and she had broken into laughter herself while her father tried to catch it. Later, when her father told her mother about the incident, he mentioned that the bird likely wouldn’t live long and Anise’s delight had turned to horror as she realized she had been laughing at the bird’s pain and fear.
Anise quickly learned that the delicate nature of living things wasn’t limited to animals. Her grandmother was a sweet old handywoman who frequently stopped by to fix some appliance or another and would always bring saltwater taffy for Anise to snack on while she watched her work and joke in her gruff voice about how useless Anise’s parents were. One day, her grandmother came over to fix the air conditioner and Anise let her in. She gave Anise the saltwater taffy as usual, and Anise sat down in the yard to watch her. Then her mother came out and asked what was going on. The two had argued, with her mother insisting that she hadn’t called her grandmother at all. Later, they would learn she had Alzheimer's. Anise watched her become more and more helpless, forgetting names and faces as she seemed to age rapidly. Eventually she caught pneumonia and passed away.
A year later, when she was driving Anise to school, her mother suddenly released the brake in the middle of a red light, allowing the car to drift out into traffic. Anise looked up to see that half of her mother’s face was drooping like melting wax. Thankfully, they weren’t hit, instead drifting across the road until the traffic light’s pole stopped them. When they got to the hospital, the doctors expressed surprise that she was having such a severe stroke at such a young age. Afterwards, she was placed into hospice care. Anise spent the next week watching her slowly drift away, wondering how she could have lost her so suddenly.
Anise began to develop an intense fear of sickness and death. Every headache, every sore muscle, or upset stomach became a sign that her body was about to give out on her, and a reminder that even if it didn’t now, it would eventually. If she slept too hard on her temple and awoke with a tingling scalp, she would fear that she had damaged her brain. She would sometimes feel an impulse to stop what she was doing and feel her chest or neck, just to make sure her heart was still beating. When she updated her inoculations, she made the nurse check several times to make sure there were no air bubbles in the syringe.
Anise’s introduction to the Hidden World happened in her early twenties. She was living alone in her first apartment, attending a college where she hadn’t quite decided on a major. One winter night, she was embroidering while watching television when she heard a soft sobbing from outside. She peeked out her door to find a woman knocking on her neighbor’s door, crying and begging to be let in. The poor girl was wearing only a tank top and skirt, and her skin was frighteningly pale.
Anise immediately invited her in. She sat the girl down on the couch and found her a blanket to warm herself up. The woman only murmured vague answers to any of Anise’s questions, staring up at her with bloodshot eyes and running makeup. After several minutes of trying to pry out where she lived or whether there was anyone she could call, Anise could feel her anxiety growing as she began to wonder whether something was seriously wrong with this stranger.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked finally. “Something to drink? Some food?”
“Food,” the girl murmured.
Finally, some progress. “What can I get you? A snack? Some cereal? If you need a meal, I have some leftover pasta primavera.”
The girl looked away from her for the first time since she had sat down. “It’s more complicated than that. I’m not human.”
She opened her mouth, showing Anise her teeth.
Anise didn’t fear that the girl would drink too much, or that she would catch a sickness and be too weak to recover. The fears that had plagued her were now distant. Suddenly the boundaries of her universe had greatly expanded, far beyond what she had been told her whole life was possible. Maybe she could find a way to escape the encroachment of entropy. Maybe she could finally be safe. She couldn’t allow the opportunity to know what secrets the Hidden World held slip away.
She tried to explain to me what it felt like, but I found it difficult picturing pain mixed with ecstasy. When she described the way that the sensation of teeth piercing her neck left her afraid to move, or the way she grew numb and dizzy, she did so with rapturous passion, but it just sounded painful and terrifying to me.
Once she was fed, the vampire’s whimpering, disoriented demeanor vanished, replaced with a commanding strength. She easily lifted Anise and carried her to bed. As they lay there together, she explained how she had come to arrive at Anise’s door.
She explained that she was being targeted by a vampire hunter. Vampires had many of the powers that they do in stories, including immortality, incredible strength, near invulnerability, and hypnotic voice. However, they also had many of the same weaknesses, such as a need to be invited into homes and a need to sleep in complete darkness. To deal with these limitations, vampires set up a series of routines and systems such as consistent ways of acquiring blood, groups of thralls to assist them during the day, and several safe locations to sleep in case one was threatened. Vampire hunters worked by carefully dismantling these systems. Extra homes were destroyed, thralls were killed or kidnapped, and sources of blood were eliminated, leaving vampires starved, weak, and desperate. Anise’s vampire had watched her resources suddenly vanish and dry up until, after a failed hunt, she returned to her home to find it burning, leaving her to wander desperately in search of refuge from the impending morning. The vampire promised Anise that if she helped her restore her full strength, that she would turn Anise into a vampire and they would live together eternally. Anise readily agreed.
The vampire lived with her from then on, initially sleeping in Anise’s closet before the pair could acquire a coffin. Anise was originally the vampire’s only food source, offering up a little of her blood every day. However, she quickly found herself becoming more and more sluggish. She began sleeping in and missing her classes. Worse, no matter how much she offered, it didn’t seem to be enough for the vampire. Her strength remained limited and she frequently returned to the languid, confused state in which Anise had first found her. It quickly became clear to both that neither would last long unless something changed.
Anise suggested bringing someone else into their confidence, a trusted friend, but the vampire expressed fright at the idea. Anise had been willing to accept her, but she was an exception. Most people saw vampires as monsters. She turned Anise’s suggestion of stealing from a donation center too. It was too risky. If Anise were caught, she’d be left all alone. In the end, Anise was left with one troubling idea: Rick.
Rick was a member of her friend group who was something of a creep, constantly attempting to flirt with everyone he met, even when they showed disinterest or discomfort. Worse, he had recently broken up with Clive after the two of them had sex only once, leaving poor Clive completely distraught. This was a pattern with Rick, Anise had heard from some of his other friends. All he did was hurt others. The world would be better off without him. Certainly the vampire deserved to live more than he did.
The vampire protested, saying it wasn’t worth killing someone to save her, but Anise insisted. At this point, the vampire represented more than a way to cheat death, Anise had fallen in love with her. She would have done anything to keep the vampire alive. That was how the girl who had cried when her parents had caught a mouse in a glue trap and begged them to release it, the girl who caught the spiders in her apartment and set them free outside instead of smashing them, lured a man to her apartment to be murdered.
From there, it was other people Anise disliked; a sexist teacher, a racist barista, a man at the bus stop who kept staring at her. Then it was strangers, people she met in bars and dating apps. Finally, she turned against her friends, inviting them over to visit when they expressed concern for how isolated she had been lately, and how sickly her appearance had become. She would watch, smiling, as her friends’ lives were drained away, knowing that the vampire was gaining a little more strength and that she was one step closer to immortality.
At this point in the story, Anise trailed off into silence.
“What happened in the end?” I asked. “Did hunters come for her before she regained her strength?”
Anise shook her head. “She had her strength back when she drained Rick.”
“Then why didn’t she change you?”
Anise stared out into the darkness. “Vampires don’t change their thralls. They keep us so that they have someone to take care of them during the day. She was everything to me, but I was nothing more than a tool to her.”
