Octavia

Octavia Part 2

I was wrought with guilt. She lay in her bed in a feverish state. The doctor arrived and announced that she might not have much longer to live. I went to her room and begged her forgiveness. She asked for her handbag and I gave it to her. She then closed her eyes to rest. I left the room to allow her to relax. When I returned later that evening, I saw that the parchments from Hekuba's cottage were out. The bottles of strange liquid were empty. It seemed like Octavia had drank them somehow. I didn't know how, because she seemed too weak to move when I had seen her earlier.

The following morning, she was in a deep slumber and tossed and turned in her bed. Evening arrived. I sat in my study reading more books on the occult, my imagination ran wild. I heard the creaking of a door. I arose to see what was amiss and found that Octavia was not in her bed. I searched the house and she was nowhere to be found. I asked the nursemaid that I had hired to help out with Octavia's illness, if he had seen her. She had not seen or heard a thing. I went out into the night and found only darkness. I headed back to the house and found that Octavia was in her room, with red stains covering her sheets, her mouth was also covered in red and her gown had soil all over it. Terror arose in me.

Had Octavia been out...drinking blood? I had the nursemaid clean her up and put her to bed. I grabbed the parchments and went to my study. The parchments were written in a foreign script that I had never seen before. How could Octavia have read them? Did she drink a potion and turn into a blood drinker? This led me to believe that old Hekuba was a witch and really had poisoned the poor villager.

The next night I waited to see if Octavia would rise again. She arose at approximately twelve midnight. The witching hour. She walked out of the house and I followed in the shadows not too far behind. I saw her digging in the ground. I prayed that she wasn't digging up a corpse. She stopped digging and scooped up something, and bit into it. Red liquid ran from it and I screamed in horror. She turned and I saw her feverish eyes and the "blood" that ran from her mouth. She stood up and rushed passed me. I grabbed at her and she said in a whispered unnatural voice, "You mustn't stop me...you cannot..." She walked back to the house and went to her room and collapsed onto the bed. Once again I had the nurse to clean her up. And then we bound her to the bed.

The next night and the night after, she tried in vain to rise form her bed to do her dirty deed. But we kept her there and each time she fell back into a slumber. Then one night she began to chant something in a strange tongue. I took it to be the same language as the writing on the parchment. Although I observed with a shivering fear, I couldn't abandon her. My fatigue got the best of me and I must have dozed off, because I saw old Hekuba smiling and talking to Octavia in that strange tongue and I understood them both. The talked of revenge. When I awoke it was morning and Octavia was quiet and still. She did not breathe. I called for the doctor. She was gone. We had her funeral and entombed her in the family crypt. I was distraught. My love had been bewitched into a vampire, and lost.

The following day, three people in Derby was said to have fallen ill and went into a deep sleep. They had all eaten beets the day before and the next day they were ill. A day later ten more people fell ill after craving beets and eating them. By the end of the week almost two dozen people had fallen ill after they had a maddening, insatiable craving for beets. Then they all died. But for some reason on the day of the mass funeral, they all rose from the dead. They hadn't been dead at all, but had suffered a peculiar foreign malady that causes fever, deep sleep, the slowing of the heart and pulse and mimics death.

My Octavia...she told me not to stop her and I did. She ate a thing so red and bloody that it had to be a living thing. In my imagined knowledge of the occult, I neglected to see that it was only a blood-beet. Hekuba had tricked them into thinking their loved-ones were dead. But she had not killed anyone. Now I had entombed my Octavia alive.

I raced from the house to the undertaker's office. I enlisted his help. Into the family crypt we went. I notice that the lid of Octavia's tomb was at a slant. My beloved had tried to get out. I hoped that I wasn't too late. Had I trusted her...had I loved her like I claimed, then she would be having lunch with me this very moment. But I did not. I fell attentive victim to the rumors of Gypsies and poison. We pulled back the lid and saw that it was empty. The inside fabric her casket had been shredded. But how had she got out? I did not understand. Did someone help her? Was she dead or alive? Or had some vengeful Derby villager, broken in and desecrated her corpse or kidnapped her? I couldn't figure it out. So I reported it to the authorities. I called for a private investigator and then went home.

That night in my study I heard a door creak and chills went up my spine. I opened the door and there stood Octavia. I opened my arms to embrace her and she ran away from me. She ran out of the house and into the night. I raced after her calling her name. "Octavia....!!!!!" I yelled frantically. I ran and ran until I collapsed. The next day I found myself here in the asylum. They claim that they found me wandering the streets after I had defiled several cemeteries, by digging up corpses and screaming for Octavia, my lost love, who now still ever haunts my dreams.

The End