Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight


It was the year 1780, and the Right Reverend Aleister Sheraton hunted me in the night. I was just a fledgling then, new born to the darkness. Night after night I would hunt the sweet darkness until the dawning realisation came – the hunter had become the hunted.

But, what did I care. He came at me again and again, charging from the shadows with the cross and the stake, cursing me with book, bell and candle – to no avail. Yet, after a while, he became a nuisance, like a fly that constantly buzzed around the wake of the carnage I left. A fly which, for some reason, I had been unable to crush.

Somehow, I still know not how, he discovered my name, the position that I had held when still in the world of the mortal.

All I knew was that one night his attacks ceased. I thanked the stars, who were my constant companions.

Then I received a message, he had taken my sweet Robert, held against his will. He was still a mortal, my ambition to make him one with me in the night had not yet been realised. The price of his freedom, my head atop a silver platter – the melodramatic bastard…

But, as I have said, I was young, the violence of blood running fresh and strong in my veins. Impetuously I flew to Robert’s rescue, unplanned and violent, I massacred all of Sheraton’s men that I could find. But Sheraton himself was not to be found, neither was my sweet Robert.

I walked from the carnage, my head held proud and vain, my hunger drowned in an ocean of blood that lay behind me, when I found Sheraton’s gift.

My son had been returned to me, butchered like a swine. I could feel the agony he had endured, each hack wrenched at my dark soul, each scream rang phantom like in my acute hearing. He had been ripped apart, packaged into a parody of the canopic jars and left where I would find them by the whore spawned devil who called himself a priest.

Long I wept blood tears, crying for the loss of an innocent, when all I knew was darkness and corruption.

Fearing my anger, unparalleled in my life, Sheraton had fled. I searched the corners of the globe, yet never found him…

Until now…

Sheraton, cursed bastard of my darkest dreams, I will have my revenge.




© 1990 & 2006 Andrew M Boylan