Day 328 - The World Falls Away - Chapter 1.2 - (1,135 words)

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THE WORLD FALLS AWAY

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 1.2

I don’t remember much of what happened next, it was or is a blur, it’s hard to put into perspective now, afterwards.  So much of what we think we know is bullshit, but the darkness and the price you pay is everything that you’d expect.

I can’t claim my eyes were closed to the conditions and the after effects of the price, but then again that was what I was looking for after all. The exact process is not long or even painful, but it is scary if you stop to think about it. I guess the key is not stopping to think about it but just letting it happen to you, a change of life by default.

It’s possible of course that it if you are not open to it in the first place then it is not going to happen to you, like hypnosis in some respects. You have to go willingly into the dark, once you strip away all the superstition, pomp and circumstance there was surprisingly little to it.

Of course if you are not open to it, and you back out at the last minute your choices are very limited then. You can move forward or you can be lunch.

Though at the time of the night/early morning that they put aside for ‘ceremony’ it would technically be breakfast. I wonder how many unwilling prospective candidates get this far and back out? It was not easy to find my way in and I did not realize that I was being vetted by the girl I was so quick to want to use and discard in my subterfuge. They were not fooled for a second, I understand now why they never could be.

Dottie was my guide, and she knew all about me long before I crossed her path that night, they saw me coming weeks ahead of time.

There’s nothing mystical about it, it was a matter of foreknowledge and being forewarned about whom I was and what kind of person I was going to be. I was looking for my ex-girlfriend to bring her back and ‘save’ her from this life.

Now it was my life, and the closer I got to finding her the further I got from wanting to.

Ok that sounds a bit existential, but once you have paid the Price it changes you, makes you melancholy and overwrites whatever emotional data you had before hand. I can see myself in the rear view mirror of soullessness, and I was a bit of a dick really. She was my goal, but it was not really about her and saving her at all. Her name was Michelle, and she left me.

That was the part that I used to have so much trouble with, how could she? What was so good about this life that she had abandoned ours for? I see now she was looking for a way out, but more importantly a way to get away from me. I was controlling and unfeeling, about anyone except me. I stood on the threshold of finding this new ‘club’ she was in, this Vampire Appreciation society, or so I thought, because none of that is real, right?

She left a real man, for a cult of fictional groupies.

I blamed the Twilight books, and the Anne Rice’s of the world, filling heads with notions of romance, sacrifice and tradition. All seriously solid sounding mechanisms but all of them grounded in nothing.

The Price puts all of that to shame, not the fictional elements that lead people here, they have their place in obfuscating the Price but the shame that is placed is on the ‘grounded in nothing’ part.

‘Nothing’ could not be further from the truth.

The world did fall away from my feet, just like Dottie promised and oddly the same words that Michelle left for me on her goodbye voicemail. The one piece of letting go before the world falls away from your feet, that was how she had put it and now I understand.

Standing in the air, so that the world is the one doing the disappearing, and you are the reality left behind.

See? It does make you melancholic and poetic. You can’t help it, though even if that is not true for all people, I certainly can’t anyway.

No more daylight, no more people unless you want to bring them in or take them into you. There’s more to it than just blood, it’s nothing mystical I don’t think, it’s probably chemical and neurological. You drink in the blood and with it comes the chemical self, the DNA or the soul or the essence, I don’t’ know how it works, but it does not feel supernatural it feels mechanical.

You know the person and all their memories and feelings at your disposal, but removed from your ability to sympathise or empathise, just read only. That’s how they knew so much about me and why they were interested in letting me pay the Price, they knew me and hated me enough to give the choice to me.

That made a lot of sense, you can’t just eat and run, can’t just murder who you like without the mortal asking mortal questions and looking to exact mortal justice. If on the other hand you find someone like me, like the way I was before I paid in to the Price, then you can offer them a bargain that is a win win for the immortals. If I choose top cut and run then I am breakfast and never see the light of day again, even if I survive the first meal, there’s no leaving then. I am a bonded vassal of whomever has taken the choice from me. If on the other hand I decide the Price is worth paying? Then the old person who I used to be is dead, and someone else takes their place.

I’m still here, don’t get me wrong, but I’m underneath a pile of people and thoughts, ideals and memories all evening us out to make a hive mind of morals and decisions. This is true democracy, which is ironic that you have top completely subsume all rights as an individual to become a true democrat.

But there you have it.

I had to take someone in order to gain entry, and that is why it happens so infrequently and in such a controlled manner. This is not about thirst and not about need, it’s about a controlled culling of the mortals and a careful growth of the immortal.

We CAN live forever, sure, but we don’t. We’re not invincible and we’re fallible and fragile in some ways. Taking on new members is about survival, as a species.

Sentient viruses, that’s what we are now. There are minds in here that have thought on this for a long time.

I am only one among many.