(A few characters I’ve been playing around with inside my head. Please enjoy.)
It was the blood which woke him. In his dreams, the pouring, dripping noise of the sheep’s slit throat, its life cascading into the bronze receptacle, what hollow music, invaded like the rolling din of rain. The smell too, like a fog, filled his mind with hunger. His eyes opened unto darkness. The hinges of his casket creaked as all respectable coffin lids should.
“What’s cooking,” he joked before noticing the sky.
Above were clouds of thick darkness broken in places to reveal swathes of fiery red, and as he woke, he could hear the sloshing sound of waves. He could feel it too, the rocking of the hull which made his coffin lid try to close on him as the ship tilted back and forth. He kept his hand pressed against the soft inner-lining of his box.
“I specifically asked that we go by train,” he said.
“He’s awake,” grunted a ghoul. She was waiting patiently, plate in hand, for the butchering mallet to crush the little sheep’s skull in so that she might, with her dainty silver spoon, slurp up the gelatinous mess of brains within.
As the vampire tested his wavering, landlubber-legs on the deck, his head twisted back and forth, taking in his surroundings.
“Where’s the others?” he asked.
“Others?” mocked the ghoul.
“Oth-thers,” he repeated, accenting both syllables. “We were hibernating together because . . . “ the bleariness of sleep left his eyes in an instant, “because of your insane coup,” he accused, pointing his finger at the ghoul who was now happily scooping bits of grey matter into her rotted mouth. “Where is my family!”
Being a well mannered ghoul, well mannered for a ghoul, she didn’t reply, her mouth being full, though some speculate that she didn’t want the fresh brains she was swallowing to escape by dribbling down her chin. Either way, Simon didn’t give her much chance to answer:
“You worthless pack of gum-chewers, you envious corpses! Isn’t it enough we suffer your kind at the college? Do you have to hunt us down like you’re no better than the Blue Order? The college has stood long before you, stood for greatness and power and refinement and—”
She had finally swallowed, “I don’t know where your dreadful family is. I hope they’re all ashes blown about under the sun.” That was perhaps one of the worst curses one could say to a vampire, and if he had had any blood in his stomach he might have turned red. Instead, he snarled, bearing his fangs like an animal. A voice interrupted:
“Simon, have some blood. Your family should be safely interred in the old ancestral crypt.”
“I don’t want any,” he said, glaring at the ghoul.
“Yes you do,” said the speaker, ringing the bronze with his knuckle.
For the first time, it seemed, Simon noticed the shadowed form by the dead sheep.
“G’dagh?” he asked frowning. He stared at the figure. It was there, but imperceptible, like an outline of a person sans any detail. “Did you die?”
G’dagh chuckled. “Have some blood. The sighs of the dead fill our sails, driving us ever nearer forgotten, plutonian shores, and we’ll need your wits in this sleepless and chthonic night.”
Tale Told 