Time!

“I understand the temptation,” the old man observed.

The vampire twisted around, only now observing his uninvited guest. A great, greying mustache was what he saw first; below it were the worn lines of a mouth hardened by many frowns, but above it, obsidian eyes sparkled with a hidden joke.

“Time is so short.” The old man stated, striking the ground with the point of his umbrella. “There’s so much I’ll never do, you understand. Take chess, for instance. I love the game. Fell in love with it as a boy. But I’ll never be a master at it. I don’t have the time.”

Pulling on a silver chain, the old man lifted a fob watch from his pocket. He flicked it open, and its soft tick-tick-tick played in the vampire’s ears. As the monster listened to the sound, a cold sensation crept over his undead body: he wasn’t surprised that he could hear the near inaudible movements of the mechanism resting in the old man’s hand, but he was appalled to realize that he couldn’t hear the old man’s heart, a thing which this blood-hunter’s ears were well trained to do.

“Time! There’s never enough. I’ll never have enough time to do everything I want. But you; you have all the time, forever. Think of what one man could do in a lifetime, and you have lifetimes ahead of you rolling on into an eternity that I shall never know. Ah, if I had that time! I understand, you see, the temptation. I’d visit every country in the world and learn every language ever spoken on this dusty earth. Oh the things I’d learn! But, ah, I’m wasting your time and mine.”

The old man stood up.

“I’m afraid my time is not my own, you see. But yours is, and so very much of it.” He closed the watch and replaced it in his pocket. “And what do you do? That’s the thing I cannot understand. Maybe that’s the mystery of it all. You have all the time, and you squander it. I know I’ll die, and so I do things. I have my limitations, and so I cannot do everything, but I do accomplish some things. You, I’ve been watching you, what is it you do? You sit around in your little lair and creep out every now and again for a drink. Pathetic. I understand the temptation to become what you are, but I can’t understand why all of you just stop. Every vampire I’ve ever studied has been such a disappointment. You have the body of a twenty year old and have been around for sixty or seventy years now. Most men, at that time, have done something and would like to do a little more before the grim reaper steals them away. But you have done nothing.”

“What are you?” the vampire asked, finally speaking.

“Time!” declared the old man. “I have such little time!” The old man’s observations seemed to echo from some distant place. The vampire saw that the form of his visitor was fading away, the edges of him merging into the surrounding shadows.

“Time!” It was hardly a whisper now. The vampire watched as his strange guest simply disappeared. One last observation came to his ears, so faint he could barely hear:

“I suppose time has to end for there to be time. It’s the nature of…”