Fate's Vinculum

A [Weird] Note From Sarah

I have been working on this story since I was in high school, back in 2001. It came to me unlike any other story idea I had up until then, and I haven't had this happen since. Usually my ideas come to me the normal way; something reminds me of something, or I'm influenced by a song lyric, or a TV show, or a book. More recently, I pull from my life.

This story came to me in a series of dreams. You can imagine my startle when I woke up to a rapping at my window. There was a young man there, which was crazy because I was on a second story floor. He asked me to let him in. I, shocked, glanced out the window; he was clinging to the window ledge, no ladder to support himself. I remember shaking my head, frightened, but he had smiled at me, and repeated, "Let me in, it's important."

The fact that I let him in should have clued me in on the fact that I was, in fact, dreaming. I would never let a stranger into my house in the middle of the night (hanging precariously from my window or not). However, as dreams go, I thought this was really happening.

I let him in and he thanked me, and introduced himself rather politely. As he spoke I noticed he had fangs, and I nearly tore out of my bedroom. However, he noticed I had noticed, and he assured me he wasn't going to feast on me. When I asked him what he wanted, he replied, "I'd like to tell you a story. Could I sit, please?"

Once again had I been waking I wouldn't have allowed a vampire to sit on my bed and tell me the harrowing tale of his life. But I did.

Now, I always have vivid dreams. Always have, always will. This was, however, a feat even for my brain. He told me everything that had happened to him, from when he was made a vampire at the age of seventeen in France, all the way up to now (which, at the time, was 2001). Some of it was horrific; much of it was heartbreaking. Then, as the sky began to turn purple with the rising sun, he took his leave.

I asked him if I would see him again as he started to climb out my window. He grinned at me, winked, and said, "Maybe."

I awoke then, very confused. It was such a vivid dream it took me a while to shake the cobwebs from my brain, to understand it had been a dream. While very intriguing, I brushed it off to my then-obsession with all things vampire. That obsession had always existed, but it really became a serious interest of mine in 2000. Yet even so, throughout the entire day, I couldn't shake the thoughts of my dream.

You can imagine my horror when that following evening I awoke to a man dressed all in black, standing at the foot of my bed, holding a katana at his side. I was petrified, not even able to squeak. He gave a rather quiet, disturbing laugh, uncontrollable, one he tried to contain. The stranger gave me his name; I only relaxed ever so slightly when he told me he was friends with Marcus, the vampire from the night before.

This new person, never leaving the foot of my bed, myself too petrified to move, told me a story. It was his story; where he was born, what he had done, who he was. By the end of it, I was still very much terrified of this man. Yet I also felt a strange pull to him; while he told me he had done horrible things, I also realized none of it had been his choice. Terror aside, I really wanted to just pull him into my arms, stroke his hair, and tell him everything would be alright.

Instead, when his tale was done, he told me to go back to sleep. You'd think a man who had admitted to being an assassin, wielding a sword, standing in my room at the foot of my bed would have made sleep impossible. Instead, that's exactly what I did. The unease that never really left me around Marcus wasn't felt for this man; by the end of his story, I knew with one-hundred percent certainty he wasn't going to harm me, so I drifted off quickly and serenely.

By the next morning, I began frantically writing these two stories down. They were good, or at least good in my teenage mind. It was frustrating because I felt I couldn't write them fast enough. All this was happening over the summer, so I, thankfully, didn't have school. Even so, I stayed up all hours of the night, writing until my hand literally cramped.