I can hardly believe what just happened to me. It was like something out of a horror movie - the kind of disgusting gore-filled torture flicks Mark used to watch - but it was real. It was real. It was real and it happened to me.
Oh God.
I never thought it would come to this. Ten months ago, I made the decision to leave Mark, my husband of three years. He was controlling, manipulative, and had a temper that… well, explosive doesn’t cover it. He didn’t have a hair trigger, that thing was permanently squeezed and attached to a fully automatic Grade-A bastard. I couldn’t take it anymore. The constant belittling, the isolation from my friends and family, the… the other stuff - it was all too much.
So I left. I got a restraining order and moved in with my sister in a different state. But Mark didn’t take it well. He called me relentlessly, leaving voicemails filled with anger and threats. He showed up at my sister’s house, pounding on the door and screaming my name. He even went as far as to track down my first couple diners I managed to find a job in when I moved here, spending entire 10 hour shifts waiting outside for me to leave.
I was terrified. I felt like I was always looking over my shoulder, always living in fear of what he might do next. It wasn’t until my lawyer got involved that he finally backed off. But even then, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was still out there, waiting for his chance to get to me.
And now, tonight, it feels like all my worst fears have come true. I don’t know why he chose tonight or how he found me, but he did.
I was walking home from work - my third shitty job at a burger bar I got to help cover my sister’s rent. As usual I was checking over my shoulder every few steps, making sure Mark wasn’t following me. I kept repeating the mantra “you have the restraining order, he’s in a different state, he won’t show up”. That had gotten me through every night since moving here. Every time the sun went down I’d worry the shadows I’d spy lurking in alleys or behind lit cigarettes in cars in parking lots were my ex-husband-turned-stalker. He won’t show up. He never showed up.
Tonight he did.
It was a typical Friday evening in the city, and I was on my way home from work. The sun was just starting to set, casting long shadows across the pavement. I was lost in thought, thinking about the week ahead, when I sensed someone behind me.
I turned around quickly, but there was no one there. I shrugged it off, thinking it was just my imagination. But as I continued walking, I could feel something wasn’t right. The mantra got recited another few dozen times under my breath, but to no avail. The feeling wouldn’t go away. I quickened my pace, my heart starting to reach spin class pace.
That’s when I saw him. Mark - his bad posture hiding the fact he had a right hook that could go through drywall like it was paper if you got him made enough. He’d let himself go since trapping me in the marriage but the ten months after the divorce had exacerbated his decline. His thinning hair was wild and outgrown, 5-AM shadow slick with splittle and grease at the corners of his mouth. He had a stained shirt on, one of those you could smell just by looking at it, but it was the way he was looking at me that was the worse.
Before the divorce he’d looked at me with hatred. The emotion his face wore now was far worse.
It was hunger.
I don’t know how long he’d been behind me, but it only took turning two corners and allowing myself a frantic look in multiple wing mirrors of parked cars to know my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me.
It was Mark. He was there. He was there and following me, his eyes bulging out of his head, muttering things I am so glad I didn’t hear under his breath. When I’d left him he looked like he’d given up trying, but now he looked like a madman - his veiny yellowing eyes almost forcing their way from his sunken sockets. I tried to pick up my pace, but he was right behind me.
I turned another corner onto a busier street, hoping to lose him, but he was still there, his eyes locked onto mine. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck, and I knew I was in trouble.
I started running, not caring who saw me or where I went. I just wanted to get away from him. But he kept pace with me, his eyes never leaving mine.
I turned yet another corner, and there he was again, his eyes still exploding from his face, mouth still reeling off a litany of built-up rage 10 months in the making. I could see the anger and desperation in his gaze, the fury and humiliation that had been churning in him since I left (and trebled in intensity since the restraining order) and I knew that I was in real danger.
I tried to scream for help, but my throat was dry and my voice wouldn’t come out. I was paralyzed with fear, unable to move or even breathe.
Finally, I reached my sister’s front door and fumbled with the keys, trying to unlock it quickly. I was praying all the while that she was in, and even better still that she had Greg, her bouncer-figured boyfriend, with her. Took my five sobbing seconds to work out I was alone. Another ten to realize that, in the commotion of the final few yards of sprinting across the front patio, my phone had slipped from my bag while I fumbled for the keys.
“Looking for this, babe?”
I could hear Mark’s footsteps getting closer, followed by the crunch of something expensive and full of silicon chips, then
BANG BANG BANG BANG
I could feel the warmth between my legs and every muscle in my body relaxed, turning as rubbery and limp as a discarded pair of surgical gloves. I sat there for an hour listening to him pounding on the door, nothing but a few inches of wood separating those fists from the face - my face - that had been to them at one time almost like a second home. When the hammering stopped abruptly I had a stupid thought. What if he’s gone? Maybe he’s finally given up. In my panic I clutched at the utterly impossible notion, peeking out of the corner of the curtain of the little window by the door, praying that he wasn’t there on the other side.
He was. Mark was in my garden, a mere two inches from the glass, staring at me with those bulging eyes. I screamed, and he grinned, winking at me. I knew that I was trapped, with nowhere to go and no one to turn to. All I could do now was pray my desperate pleas woke one of the neighbors - the neighbors I had no guarantee were even in, and were just as likely in this neighborhood to work night shifts as my sister.
“Marcy, Maaaaaaaar-cyyyyy… open the door Marcy, I just want to talk.”
“Mark, you need to-“
“I said I just want to fucking TALK.”
He slammed a fist into the glass pane on the final word, hammering home the purity of his non-violent intentions. The glass didn’t shatter, but I did. I shattered so hard I couldn’t even jump back and yell. All I could do was kneel there, sobbing, fighting the Stockholm impulse to obey his request and open the door. I was terrified, my heart pounding in my chest. I didn’t know what to do or how to escape. Mark had me trapped and isolated, with the only means of rescue crushed on the patio a few feet behind him.
“Marcy, haha, MARCY! You’re killing me here babe, I said all I wanted to do was TALK!”
There was another BANG on the window as my few was once more obscured by the flash-back inducing sight of another oncoming fist. I tensed myself, waiting for the splintering shards to fly into my face, for my scared and pathetic body going numb as Mark’s arm reached through and undid the latch. I could see the news reports now - “Marcy Grace, 26, killed during a domestic dispute, ex-husband Mark Freeson, defending, received a 25 year sentence reduced to 10 due to his lawyers successfully arguing for diminished responsibility based on his history of alcoholism, and now for the weather…”
Mark’s bloodied knuckles forcing themselves on the sanctity of my new life without him, his probing grasp despoiling what sense of safety I’d managed to cultivate with my sister and her care, never game. The glass held - for now. I felt more tears rolling down my cheeks than I think have ever rolled down them before.
The wetness on my face wasn’t the only sensation I became inexplicably hyper-aware of though. Adrenaline is a funny thing, isn’t it?
Beneath the backdrop of Mark’s deranged snarls and the rumble of traffic far too far away, hiding amongst the audible backdrop of the city outside, I realized I could hear a strange noise outside. It was like nothing I had ever heard before, a low growling sound that made my blood run cold. And then, out of nowhere, it appeared.
Mark was too busy screaming obscenities at me to hear its clawed feet scratching on the patio slabs behind him when it touched down. When I started screaming too he just assumed he’d finally won, that I’d finally snapped.
Then it put its hand on his shoulder. He has just enough time to turn white, to start spinning around to see whose gnarled fingernails were digging into his skin with such pressure that blooms of red joined the beer stains on his t-shirt.
I hope he had time to get a look at the thing, to process what was happening, before his head was in its mouth. I hope he felt those broken-glass shaped fangs shredding through his cheeks, temples, and eyes before he died. Even if it was just for a second.
Of course, I wasn’t thinking any of this at the time. I wasn’t worried about Mark either - let’s get that cleared up - but I also was far too distracted to even notice that he’d just died.
The thing that killed him had taken up every ounce of attention I had at my disposal, and several more tonnes of attentiveness I’d never had to use before. The adrenaline kicking my heart into my lungs so hard the wind left me made extra damn sure nothing else could penetrate my focus - all that existed was my terror and the leathery, pale, winged thing in my front garden causing it.
It was like nothing I had ever seen before, with skin as pale as a fresh corpse and eyes that… that were as far from human as I think it’s possible for eyes to be. It was a vampire, a god damn fucking vampire. That’s only for a lack of a better term though - “nightmare man” would probably be more appropriate, but writing it down makes this seem like I’m five. Fits better than “vampire”, but I also want you to take me seriously, because if you can’t then I genuinely think I’ll go mad or - worse - I already have and I’m just imagining writing this while Mark does god-knows-what to me back in the real world.
This wasn’t like anything in the movies though. It wasn’t Dracula or something sexy that sparkles like from Twilight. This was… shit, it was like something out of a serial killer’s nightmare. Seven fingers on each hand, two sets of eyes, one large on small, that glowed with an almost subaquatic bioluminescence. It’s pale skin was the wet slathering off-peach of freshly extracted fatty tissue, but it’s veined, lean muscles were clad in no excess weight whatsoever.
I only caught a glimpse of the wings before the carnage started - two boney canvases of thin membranous skin that only half-blocked the light from the streetlamp in the half-second between its Hawklike descent and Mark’s death
There was no sound behind the almost-inaudible growl when it swooped down on my ex-husband. No sudden triumphant howling or roaring or shrieking. There was just Mark’s screamed barrage of hatred, a faint rustling, a wet crunch, and then before I knew what was happening my ex-husband’s limp and headless body was being consumed by a hairless moist-fleshed nightmare from the polluted city skies.
It was like watching one of Mark’s horror movies, but worse. The vampire didn’t just drink his blood, it fully cannibalized him, tearing him apart with its razor-sharp teeth - the jagged and irregular shards of enamel wedged in the nightmare-things quivering gums. The sound of bones crunching and flesh tearing cut through my frantic sobs. For ten whole minutes I sat there, listening and watching and trying not to sob so loudly I became dessert, while all evidence of my Ex-Husband was meat grindered from the face of the earth between those powerful, phlegm-coated jaws.
I wasn’t concerned about Mark - again, just want to make that clear. I was hoping against hope that I wouldn’t start shrieking is that seeing a lower intestine being sucked out a gaping stomach wound like spaghetti in Lady and the Tramp is harrowing - no matter who’s lower intestine it is, even if they killed your dog.
I was in shock, unable to move or even scream. The vampire… nightmare man… that fucking thing looked up at me when it was done, its four eyes faintly glowing with that bluish otherworldly light, the one that had my mind racing to the crushing blackness of the deepest trenches, and the unknown near-alien predators that dwelled down there.
This one wasn’t down there though. It was up here, in my fucking garden, eating my stalker. It grinned, showing teeth like a shark, and - to my absolute unending revulsion given the hideousness of its snouted face - spoke. Spoke aloud, in plain human words like such a thing wasn’t an utter blasphemy against all that is sane and rational. It said, “I was following that one all night. I hope I didn’t disturb your evening.”
And then, just like that, it vanished back into the rolling fugue of polluting above, licking the last of Mark from my patio with a final elongated slathering of its body-length prehensile tongue before it did so.
I’m still shaking as I write this. I don’t know what to do or how to feel. On one hand, I’m grateful that the vampire saved my life by eating Mark. On the other hand, I’m terrified of what else might be out there in the darkness.
The glow of those eyes, the sounds of Mark being torn apart… all will haunt me for the rest of my life, I think. I’d barely slept in the time between the divorce and tonight. Knowing Mark’s not out there anymore means I should sleep soundly again for the first time in forever right? Thing is, now I’ve seen what was stalking my stalker, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to sleep again.