Now Available for Pre-Order: Memory's Vampire
What's it About?
Memory's Vampire is an urban-fantasy, supernatural, horror short story involving a vampire hunter whose hunt just turned complicated. In her words:
Not all vampires feed on blood. The ones we hunt take your memories before they take your life—and now they are hunting back. We’ve been compromised, and I don’t know who to trust. That comes later. Right now, I just want to make it back to my body alive.
How Does it Start?
They say it is an extinct race, a cabal of creatures that do not exist, if they ever did. Mythical is one word, legendary another, but I prefer the term ‘nightmares.’ For they exist; I have seen them.
I see them every night, when I am supposed to be asleep. I hunt them, for they do not just threaten the existential stuff of dreams. They threaten our very physical existence, and we cannot touch them during the day, when the sun shines bright.
The portals to their lands lie hidden deep in our waking minds. Few there are, who can travel those corridors while they are awake, and none can remain aware of the world around them when they do. It is ironic that the protectors need to be protected, even more ironic that some folk claim the vampires are a good thing, mercy killers, because there is no memory of the bad events that have been suffered, and people die in peace. But I say they are murderers, because if you don’t remember, then you don’t remember to resist, until the memories return.
Because they will; they always do. Because memories are like blood, and, just as blood replenishes itself, so, too, do the memories grow back—if the vampires give them time.
This, though, they rarely do, but they don’t let their victims die in peace; they feed them enough of what they’ve lost that they die in terror, torn by agonies of what might have been.
The vampires are a sadistic lot, real, but rare, and rarely seen. Tonight, though, tonight we seem to have found ourselves in the centre of a plague, the dream portal opening in the centre of a teeming mass of the creatures, and depositing us in their midst. Fortunately, this land follows the rules of dreaming, and we are able to draw cloaks around us, so that we blend in with those already gathered.
Or I thought we did, right up until the one closest me raises its cowled head and sniffs the air.
“Prey.”
The word echoes around us like distant thunder, ominous and not quite real. I stand my ground, turning my head toward it, and then looking in the direction it’s facing. I, too, raise my head slightly, and sniff. All around me, more of the creatures do the same. We are in a world of trouble.
I take the edges of the dream, and think of matching my scent with theirs, hoping they are hunting by smell, and not some other sense. It works for me, but some of the others do not think of it in time, and they vanish from sight beneath a seething mass of teeth and claws.
From some of the writhing clusters, I hear screams. From others, come the sound of frustrated vampires. I pull the flame thrower from the ether, drawing fire-resistant armor around me, so the heavy tank, hose and nozzle settle over the top, and then I drop the cloak and cowl.
Where Do You find It?
You can find Memory's Vampire as at stand-alone short storyt a number of locations, listed at this Books2Read link: https://books2read.com/u/31XDqv.
OR
You can find it as part of A Collection of Death and the Undead, a collection of short fiction and poetry themed around death and dealing with it, and tales of the undead, which can be found at the locations listed at this Books2Read link: https://books2read.com/u/47gVYg.
OR
You can access it as part of the Wanderers and above subscription tier on my ReamStories page, here: https://reamstories.com/cmsimpsonwriter.
Comments
Post a Comment