The Vampire’s Wife

She was not always known as the Vampire’s Wife, just as he had not always been known as The Vampire. There was a time, very long ago, in a small, cobbled village tucked away on a cliff overlooking an ultramarine sea, where they were in love. She was the most beautiful woman in the village, and the miles surrounding. The sun beamed a gentle yellow grin when she was near, and its rays made her skin glisten, in the purest, most chaste way. Beneath the vitalising sapphire of the Summer sky, she twirled in a rose pink house dress until she stumbled into the arms of her beloved. He was like a God to her, her very own idolised perfection. His hair was a sleek black and his eyes an electrifying emerald. Every time those glossy malachite eyes met with hers, it was clear that she was the woman he loved. Once they were married, nothing would warm her heart more than the prospect of cradling their child beside the radiation of a blazing fire.

But her longing for a family was soon frozen over by an icy predicament, and jagged cracks broke the surface of her emotional containment. She had troubles. Such troubles. No midwives’ advice yielded a result, and not a single tincture prescribed to her by the apothecary could prompt the growth of a baby within her. Like the ominous rise of the sea, her body filled with suffocating worry until her breath ran short.

As days became shorter, to her they seemed to drag like knives on stone. Her nervousness spilled into the night, where freezing darkness amplified the intensity of her racing mind. The sounds of the sea below her seemed to swirl louder and more violently, competing with the chattering dialogue in her head. One night, as she paced up and down in the attic, the slam of the front door startled her in her tracks. Assuming her husband had gone outside to retrieve wood to stoke their fire, her blood ran cold when the unfamiliar sound of muffled voices drifted in through the high attic window. She thought she may have been imagining it, but when the sound recurred in the shrill amplitude of a girlish giggle, her thoughts of anxiety crashed like waves and bubbled out into a foamy film of suspicion.

That night, when she eventually collapsed into sleep, she dreamt that she lay in a boundless field at the top of the cliff. There was not a house in sight, and the sky was an obsidian black illuminated only by a metallic moon. That was all she saw for a while. But as she turned her head she felt bodies pressed against her, and when she sat up she realised she was nestled amongst hundreds of unfamiliar, motionless women. All of them were breathtakingly beautiful, their hair smooth and wavy, brushing the shoulders of their neighbour. Their skin was alabaster against steel blue lips. They lay with their eyes closed, safely cocooned beside one another. But there was something unsettling about these women. As she looked around she noticed two holes penetrating the same spot on every one of their necks. Slow streams of crimson poured from the punctures, glistening under the silver light of the moon. And then her attention was drawn to a spot on her own neck, where she herself began to feel the trickle of cold, icy blood.

When she awoke, a devilish cocktail of confusion and tenseness swirled into whirlpools within her stomach. Suddenly, a knock at the door shook her into reality. Still shivering from her dream, she silently gathered herself out of bed and peered into the hall. Her husband, already awake and dressed in thick layers of black, opened the door. As winter entered her home, a young woman stood on the doorstep. Dressed in dirty rags and holding a baby, the woman seemed startled for a moment before bursting into hysterical tears. The baby, awoken by its mother’s wails, turned its head towards the man in the door frame and gazed up at him with innocent malachite eyes. At that moment, humiliation welled up inside the heartbroken onlooker, as it dawned on her exactly who her husband was. He had drained the soul of this wretched woman. She was married to a vampire.

The sun was indistinguishable as porcelain clouds obliterated its rays. It seemed to cast a queer anti-shadow that gave the cobblestone mansion no contrast inside. It was as if every wall was a nothingness of white. And it made the Vampire’s Wife feel ill. There was no longer a horizon, the ocean and the sky were blended. Both pewter in colour. Her eyes became a malevolent ebony, and her lips dehydrated rose petals. Every wash of colour in her cheeks was so faintly diluted that her skin became a transparent grey like the overcast sea below her. And like the advance and recede of the ocean, she felt both sucked in and spat back out. Gazing at the sea from her bedroom window, she could imagine herself flying out, escaping this aching haze of worthlessness. Escaping him.

The Vampire remained unbothered. Those glossy eyes sparkled as lush as ever. To her, they were a nest of cunning vipers, ready to penetrate the mind of another unsuspecting young woman. He barely noticed her body beside him as they slept.

In her dream that night, she saw herself lying on the floor beside her bed. However, her once dazzling, magnetic lustre had been drained and reduced to an etch of her shadow. Her heart was smouldering and ashen. A long, silver sword dripping with thick streaks of crimson blood, pierced the centre of her chest.

A ghost, she floated cooly through her hallway. Long, maroon corridors were like the flickering tongue’s of foolish girls; muffled giggling and laughter escaped rooms and bounced through her body as she drifted along. A strange ache in her heart picked her up like the wind and blew her beneath one of the doors like a draft. Hovering above a bed in the darkness she saw her husband, and beside him a divine, red lipped and red cheeked woman. Slowly and calculatingly she withdrew the dripping sword from her chest. She peered a cunning stare through cold, unmoving eyes, as if already piercing him. And in one steady motion, the tip of her sword ruptured her husband’s vampire heart.

A crack of lightning coruscated the heavens and recoiled the crumbling waves of the sea. The ocean surge lashed out and withdrew in rageful motions of evil, eroding rock faces to a knife edge point. A patch of riptides glowed a red hue from the reflection of a scarlet window in the grey cobblestone mansion near the sea. When the lightning stabbed the horizon at just the right time, and the tide receded and settled at the right second, you could almost see a woman, looking out longingly from the scarlet room. And when the sea foam had bubbled out and all that was left was the slippery mirror of the water’s surface, you could faintly picture a scarlet streak of blood trickling from her neck.

Fatima Ronquillo, Wounded Hand With Lover’s Eye,

2014, oil on panel