That Magic Moment
By Fojiao2
THE YEAR IS 1860.Drusilla scrambled backwards and fell, the floor so slick with blood that she couldn't keep her footing. She nevertheless kept moving away from the devil who approached her. Her hands grabbed onto whatever they could-a dead arm, a face, an unmoving torso-and hauled her backwards while her scrambling feet found purchase on the bodies of her former sisters in the convent. Her breathing was fast, ragged, and expressive of her deep voice, which was almost broken out into screams.
Yet the devil kept coming. He grinned at the sight of her, this wide-eyed beauty who'd lived through her parents' deaths but thought that she was safe in the convent. She never gave up, always keeping her gifted eyes turned to the horizon. A Seer born, Chosen of the Powers, and yet destined to be his childe. But only useful to him if she could be controlled, if she were malleable and could be spun in the direction of his goals. If she were, say . . . insane. It had been a challenge to think up ways to drive her to distraction, but that had only made the implementation of his plans all the more delicious. And now he'd killed an entire convent just to show her that there was nowhere she could turn, no escape she could find from him, except into the recesses of her own mind. He'd thrown all the dead girls into this large lighted room and waited for Drusilla's discovery. And now here she was, in a panic but not yet up to the level he desired. Angelus continued forward, each step landing on a body, getting ever nearer to his quarry.
When Drusilla's hands hit the door at the back of the hall she hauled herself up so that her back was against it. Her right hand clutched desperately at the latch, but there was a lock on it. There were no locks in the convent! This grinning devil must have placed it there! She finally had nowhere else she could go. The monster was grinning, yellow eyes flashing and horrible features twisting to make it the most insincere smile ever. The Englishwoman finally found her tongue as his shadow dropped across her. "Damn you!" she cried. "Damn you!"
"You're too late. I damned myself a long time ago, before you were even born. Welcome to hell, my dear." He bent his head and kissed her then, his hands sliding to her hips, tugging her dress up, and touching skin left bare save for the silk of her panties.
Angelus grinned into her face, lips still against her own, sharp teeth cutting her skin. "Ooh, silk. Mummy must have been treating you nicer than the other girls." She panted in absolute fright at the monster before her and was nearly there, nearly there, but not yet lost. A rape would have been nice, but it might also give her more resolve to fight against him. Inspiration struck the vampire, and he stood.
"Always kept yourself apart from these girls, didn't you, Dru?" he roared. "Your family was just a little bit better, with a tiny bit higher place in society! Well, I think it's time you got to know them better!" He lifted the young woman up by her shoulders and threw her into the middle of the crowd of corpses.
She turned over so she could keep her eyes on the beast, but it would have been better had she looked away. Angelus had picked up one of the young girls he'd killed and was dancing her forward like a marionette. "Ooh, look at me, I'm Miss Abigail. I tried to be your friend, Dru, but you just wouldn't have it," he sing-songed in a working-class accent like the girl's. His long reconnaissance of the convent and its inhabitants served him well, and his memory for faces and names gave him all the ammunition he'd need. He grinned at Dru and threw the body at her. The woman shrieked as the corpse flew across the room and landed at her feet.
Angelus snatched up another body instantly. "Oooh," he crowed in a high-pitched taunt, "you never had time for sweet little Alice, did you, Dru? Helped change your sodden clothes when you came here, I did, yet did I ever get a word of thanks? 'Course not! That'd be too good for dirty little Miss Alice!" He barked laughter and threw the child's corpse at Drusilla. The Seer's eyes were huge, bugging out of her face. The fact that she didn't scream was nice . . . and telling. Oh, she was right there, her entire mentality on the verge of collapse. Angelus began to actually salivate at the thought of damaging a living creature so. Of course, she wouldn't be living for long.
He looked around him at the pile of convent girls' corpses, wanting something special for the coup de grace. And there she was! He smirked wickedly as he picked up the lithe beauty whose neck he'd snapped, and held her up for Drusilla's perusal. The Seer gulped and tried to move herself back again, but her arms were weak and useless. All the strength had flown from her at the sight of this too-familiar face.
From behind the dead woman, Angelus' voice drifted out in a frightening parody of the deep voice this girl had had in life. "And what of me, Dru? How will you remember Miss Edith?" He began to slowly move forward, holding the body up so that she floated like a fleshy ghost over the other corpses. "The nights we shared here in the convent were the best of my life. The joy we gave each other in your bed and in mine . . . I kissed away all the tears you shed for your parents. You were my one true love, my darling."
"D- d- darling," Drusilla moaned, not fully in control of her voice.
Behind the corpse, Angelus grinned widely. "Oh yes, that's what you called me when I lived, isn't it?" he continued. "I only ever had one darling, Dru. But we had to keep it secret, always secret. We knew a love greater than God, didn't we, Dru? We knew pleasure more than the angels could provide."
"Angels," Drusilla said, her voice drifting into the sing-song lilt Angelus used.
"And I've carried my secret into death with me, Dru," the vampire said. He and the corpse had reached the living girl, and Drusilla cast wide and adoring eyes upward, looking with awe at the image of her dead lover caught forever in her young beauty, floating above her. Her unblinking eyes looked down on Drusilla, and the living girl imagined that the lips she saw above her actually moved. "Miss Edith is waiting for you. Do you want to join her with the angels, darling?"
Drusilla could not help herself: surrounded by her dead companions, looking at the corpse of her only and last lover, she giggled. She raised her knees and clapped her hands and bobbed her head forward. "Oohhh yes! I'd like that ever so! Please bring me along, Miss Edith!"
Angelus laughed triumphantly and threw the woman's corpse aside. And his eyes shone with the satisfaction of seeing Drusilla, because she was still looking up, as if the body's face was not now lying on the floor. Her imagining had become her reality, the only firm thing her weak and damaged mind could grasp.
Monster though he was, Angelus had to pause a moment in looking down on this thing he'd made, this creature he'd shaped from what had been a powerful Seer. It was enormous, this thing he'd done, a challenge such as he had never set for himself, and yet here he was at the moment of victory. He wanted to make it last, wanted to stretch this moment of her crash into insanity for years and years.
Angelus smirked. Yeah, keep it going for an eternity-and there was one sure way to do that, wasn't there? He squatted down and cupped her face in his large hands. Her large blue eyes were vacant, lost to their own vision, and her smile was fixed and lovely. She would make a wonderful vampire, a queen of the shadows, with pale skin and dark hair and a delicate fragility that would lure thousands to her dark embrace.
He put his fangs to her throat and hesitated but one moment more. In many ways, this was his most evil act-because he knew, unlike any mortal, that there was a Heaven above them. And in that Heaven waited Miss Edith for her lost love. But the soul that arrived to her open arms would not be the frightened yet loving Drusilla she remembered-it would be this grinning, giggling madwoman that he had brought into being. Making her mad before he turned her was the evil brilliance in his plan, and it had all come together just as he wanted.
Angelus sank his fangs into her and felt her gasp at the sensation, but she put up no fight. As long as she existed she would be a testament to his victory, to this moment when Angelus reached new heights of sadistic cruelty. And he planned to keep her around for a long, long time.
~Fin~