"Victorian Upir" Chapter 2: The Hunt

by: Jeel Christine de Egurrola

Deer Running through a Forest by Friedrich Gauermann

Chapter 2: The Hunt


As the sun falls far below the horizon the lady awakens in the moist of the cellar floor. The seven favoured with her, small ugly creatures. Her long curvy eyelashes flutter like butterfly wings. She breathes the stench like aroma of that fancy English perfume. From the lack of adequate red fluid, her body aches. Today she must hunt, she thinks. She imagines scarlet red fluid in flux in a narrow body-laden stream. The smell like flowers in her nostrils... The taste like sweet wine in her lips...

She rises from her wet floor bed gently as not to awaken her sleeping black darlings. Her gait less the zombie she was the other day but her face, still displeasing to the senses like her cats, ugly to the bones.

As soon as the Lamian sacrifice is over, her true beauty will be ones as it was again, the felines' as well.

To the upper level of the house she enters, to the portion where her room is located, via the grand stairs sloping around both opposite direction like snakes moving in projectile motion. She ascents. She tiptoes as silently and as elegantly as would any royalty. Her scarred and bruised bare feet from her previous walk pain she feels, but relishes it like orgasm on its wake.

The second storey of the house is as it used to be; hazel brown draperies hang along colossal windowpanes, pieces of Victorian furnitures with Gargoylelike projections pose on several spots. Tables sit from the ground adjacent to one another, tablewares of silver lie atop them. Grave Ivy trunks coil from pots beside the tables. They wound like snakes with leaf skins alongside each table leg posts. Dirty white cloths shroud couches and woodworks alike. Long dark hallways on both sides...

She moves.

Forward she walks on the left relative the center staircase where her grand room is located. Walking on the dark hallway unsurprisingly comforts her. As a kid, she likes to hang out on dark corners inside the house with her dolls. Sometimes she sojourns the dark wolf-dwelled forest within the enormousness of the Silent Hill alone. Her solitude means a lot to her.

The darkness soothes her better than candy or lollipops unlike her little sister Mayrn.

The tick-tock sounds of the pendulum swings she hears like euphony in her ears. The grandfather clock on the uttermost end of the hallway where the sound springs from, a memory takes her away for a while, making her stop walking, and standing for minutes in the same spot.

She and Mayrn used to play near the clockwork. Mayrn, like her, basks the sounds of the teetering pendulum. A tear flows through her face. She misses the live little doppelganger of hers. They both share the same straight auburn hair color, pale skin complexion, freckles spreading on their faces. And while her eyes are green, Mayrn’s are blue like their father’s.

She paces again, looks at the paintings spread along the black wooden walls. Pictures pasted on the manor house walls belonging to the manor founders, political leaders, and monarchs who are her forefathers and mothers. There they are—Alexander Vasilli de Saptarshi, Duke; Queen Marrionette Vasilli de Saptarshi, Ser Lorenz Anton Tatiana Argos, her father Carlos Munichin Vasilli de Saptarshi, her uncle Duke Carlos Edvard Vasilli and others.

She stops on a third to the last doors before the dead end of the dark hallway. Her room—the doorknob now she twists with yearning. Her bed she hankers to curl in. Pink duvet she longs to snuggle with like man arms of her Prince Marcus Xander Blake, her only bloke, the only man she loved and loves .The Duke she waits to awaken from the deepest slumber. “Soon, my love, soon!” in spite of herself, she whispers.

She sits atop her princess bed still covered with white cloth. She teeters like a little babe for a while and uncloths her enormous pink princess bed—like that of Disney’s princess bed. She slips in and dazes to a nap—short sleep but enough to bring her to REM where she dreams.

In her dream she moves up on the steepness of the house's roof—a usual activity that would make her lost track of the time she enjoys when she was ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen then on. She used to exit from the attic window and climb the manor house walls to the roof. She likes to sit there for hours to watch stars sparkle like gold coins and gems glittering when exposed to the sun, and find her favorite constellation, the Ursa Majoris, or the Big Dipper where the North Star is found.

In the dream, instead of sitting down and enjoying the panorama, she stands there unnerve of what might happen next, whether she would jump steeply down that might or might not end her life or fly high like a bird enjoying its freedom.

A sudden jolt from her insides awakens her from her day dreaming. Defeated from the chills, she feels more jolts from varied parts of her body. Pain all around is all she feels. She shrieked in fear. A cry of agony, as if her heart is about to bursts to teensy-weensy pieces. Her peripheral view begins to mist as tears fill her lenses. Her arms twist in distortion, then her legs. All her limbs bend in an ugly and horrific outcome. Her body wriggles and again and again until pain she can no longer bear and everything turns black and nothing.

Then she wakes up in terror but is unable to remember what it was that provoked her feelings of fear and anxiety. Her pillows and the other side of the bed where she slept now damp from sweat. Her whole body shudders.

A consequence from insufficient blood in her system must have been the cause of this anxiety, she justifies. A hunt she must seek out as soon as possible. A further physical deterioration she must avoid. She hurries through the hallway, down the grand stairs, to the parlor.

She calls the seven, which responded in less time.

Outside they go, walk the paseo toward the Gate of Mizar, located east of Castle Black, one among the seven gates of Silent Hill. Like the Gate of Alkaid, the Gate of Mizar is wrought iron structured, whose horizontal posts are attached to a stone pier on both sides, and intersects with vertical pointed posts emphasizing its gothic architectural design. Twinning plants that must have been Grave Ivys, which Silent Hill is famous of, coil through its tendrils, spread through the pier’s four surfaces and reach both imposts and its tops.

Mizar or Zeta UMa, like the rest of the gates of Silent Hill, is one of the seven stars in the well known constellation Ursa Majoris. And unlike the Gate of Alkaid, it doesn’t have any carved stone structure like the Rhoanne Horse of Alkaid. It is in fact the simplest of the seven gates.

The path out of the gate leads them to the dark forest.

The forest is one of Meresse’s favorite places in Silent Hill. The needles of the pines complement perfectly with the manor house’s Victorian style as if the gods themselves knew how the Castle Black would be structured—as if they favoured the mortal makers of the manor enough to comply with them. However, according to old stories, Castle Black is created by Erebus himself as a gift to his daughter Nyx who expresses a distinct fondness to mortal men and women. For whatever reason Erebus awards a loft for mortal utility is quite not known.

The haze of the night fills Meresse’s vision of fuzzy forest outlines. For a moment there she thinks she sees woods motioning along with roots propelling up and down and sides as if they are walking and moving from one place to another. She could not tell exactly if what she sees is possible. Her mind must be playing tricks on her or it could be the dimness and the fog inducing movements that aren’t there—illusions the human brain cannot comprehend. But her resurrection from the death in itself sounds more out of the question, but here she is now walking not quite alive but not dead either. Who knows what mysteries there are in the world where we are living.

She continues to walk, following a trail she used to pursue with her father and his hound consorts when they go hunting on the woods. Hunting was a common sport for the monarchs and elite men and some women in England.

As they walk, time seems to stop as she and her felids get absorb in the forest cold ambiance. And even in the darkness Meresse sees another movement somewhere one o’clock her current spot. The felids start hissing as if they smell danger. She begins pacing to that area where the movement fixes. It must have been an antler, which is a common prey in the forest, she guesses, but the little felids think otherwise. While she steps further, there the movements start again that looks as if an animal is fleeing away from her direction. The felids start running forward, and she follows but in a slow course.

There in that same spot where the movement begins she sees an injured brown antler lying in the damp forest floor, as if some animal belonging to the upper level of the food chain got to it first. The antler is still alive but is grasping air for survival, but the looks of it shows an animal in its deathbed. Most of its belly is consumed by whatever predator that caught it. It must have been a wolf. Wolfs are common in the forest.

Blood fills the forest floor and the plants near it, where the blood must have splattered. What Meresse wanted is a quarry untouched but what she has now is a body of a dying one. But her instincts cannot be stopped. At the sight of blood she darts down to the animal and starts consuming its blood.

It wasn’t enough. She needs more and she wants human blood.

The hunt isn’t over yet.

After her first feed, she moves again. Her advanced senses lead the way. They move farther and farther away until she sees another movement of an animal that she now sees. It flees with an unnatural locomotion, like her Xander, she remembers. She follows its trail. She moves as silently as would a hunter—a lioness. Her swift, flashing and yet soundless movement—an ability that hers and her kind possesses—makes her hunt an easier one. She jumps up one of the pines, and from there she spots her prey inches down below it. She readies herself for a silent dive like diving on water to a fall on the anterior of the animal that will leave its body lying still on the ground below it.

And she drops.

The animal tries to struggle but her inhuman strength overcomes it. She punches the animal down and again and again until its body surrenders from consciousness.

She catches her first real quarry, now in the middle of the forest—lost in the wilderness and away from the world. It is another antler, a much bigger one. She presses her fangs on the animal’s neck where the jugular is located. She feeds. The lush of it she revels.

The seven favoured watches as their mistress perform her rite, in awe of the bloodsucker.