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12/12/2003: "David Parker's Journal: 1"

Music: Mozart
Mood: Deep in thought

People pass away,
And the truth of the passing world
Impresses me now and then,
But otherwise my dull
Wits let this truth too pass.

– Saigyo

* * *

I wear black now.

Black is the perfect color for a vampire. Dark, somber, austere. A color that manages to convey a both sense of formality and Bohemianism.

Black is the color Quakers wore, a long time ago, in their attempt to turn their backs on everything frivolous and sensuous in the world.

It is the color priests wear beneath their stiff, starched white dog collars.

Black is the junkie color. It hides telltale pinprick signs of blood leached from a vein when the needle is removed. So it is for the vampire: It is the blood; always the blood.

Ten years of walking with the blood have worked a thousand changes in me, some large, others so small and subtle that I am barely aware of them.

The most recent of these changes is this: The blood had begun to speak to me.

In a sense there is nothing new about this. The blood has called to me ever since Tatiana gave me the Change in Chicago. (That time seems like a century ago…) But those conversations are different from the new one that has started inside my head. When the blood spoke to me in the past, it was always the Hunger talking. The Hunger is about me. My need. My desire. My anger. The Hunger calls me to satisfaction, to erotic pleasure, to power.

This is entirely different – at least I think it is.

The new way the blood speaks to me is like Hunger held up to a mirror. It is as if the object is not me, but others. It is difficult to convey exactly what I mean by this. There are no words for some things – although maybe it is not words that are lacking but understanding.

It is as if the blood is calling me to other people to do something for them.

This both intrigues and frightens me. When vampire and mortal come together and blood is shared, the reward is all on the one side, the risk on the other.

How can drinking the blood of a mortal help them, or hazard them anything but the risk of death? So many have died, may by my hand, victims of the Hunger, of madness.

Maybe this is a new trick of the Hunger, working on me to turn away from all the Illuminati have taught, trying to seduce me into giving myself over to the vampire’s powerful instinct to be a hunter, a predator.

My ultimate fear is that I will be reduced again to the Hunger, to being the beast that is the Hunger’s slave.

Or maybe it is the madness returning…

The blood is speaking to me now. I close my eyes and try to listen, but I can’t quite make out the words. It seems to be different than the Hunger. Indeed, it is nothing like the Hunger, but it is impossible to be certain.

It is four in the morning. Yesterday it rained, the rain turning to sleet and snow as the temperature fell and it became night. It is twenty degrees outside, an overcast sky hiding the stars and moon.

I do not understand what the blood is saying to me now, whispering in its own secret language, but I am compelled to listen. The time has come to turn away from my computer for tonight, put on a coat, and go outside to see where the blood leads me.