The Pre Wake

"Thank you." I didn't feel ready to comment on the possibility of Pauline's change of heart on the subject of our marriage at this point. There was still so much for my generally ordered mind to work on and the continuity or otherwise of our relationship was for the back burner all the while we still had to focus on burying our only son.

Then we heard the music stop, followed by Adrienne, clear as a bell, call out that the hour was upon us. My wristwatch confirmed that it was nearly five minutes past one o'clock, therefore two minutes away from the exact middle of the night. It was time for us presumably to head towards the dining room. I could certainly do with a drink as my throat was so dry.

We helped each other up off our knees and I watched her as she smoothed her dress, automatically checking herself that her within her plunging neckline she was still decently tucked in and finally brushed a hand through her shoulder-length hair, still blonde in color but streaked with grey, forming a natural soft frame around her still lovely face. I wondered, not for the first time in the last half a day, how would I feel accepting the fact that I would never see that familiar face again? It was impossible to contemplate any resolution in my state of mind. I challenge anyone to reach a comfortable conclusion at such a crossroads of mixed emotions.

Unexpectedly, the door opened and in strode Adrienne, followed by her parents. Gareth closed the door behind them.

"The time has come," Adrienne announced, almost icily.

"Yes, indeed," I concurred, "we'll be along to the dining room shortly. Just give us a moment to compose ourselves, make us fit for present company."

"I am sorry, Robert, Polly, but the Pre Wake is over," Adrienne said, with a steel in her voice that hadn't been present before. Her eyes moved from me to the coffin.

I turned to look where her eyes pointed and, slowly, surely, as if he was being effortlessly pulled on strings rather than pushing up from below, I saw my son, John Sullivan, deceased, sit bolt upright, his eyes still closed.

"Ah, right on time," I heard Adrienne say from behind me, "now we have moved onto the Wake."

All I could hear, as my legs buckled beneath me, was Pauline's scream.

***

THE WAKE

I must've struck my head when I fell in a faint, as my ears were still ringing and my eyes couldn't quite focus on my wrist watch when I awoke. I was lying on a chaise longue. I was still in the flickering candle-lit ante chamber where the coffin was, so it must have been carried in after I fainted. I could see a cloudy vision of the coffin from where I lay, and noted that my son wasn't sitting up inside it any longer.

I felt sure that I hadn't imagined it, at least I was almost sure. As a priest and bishop, dealing with death was a large part of the life that I had led all my working career. Naturally, I had heard undertakers tell of such stories of dead men sitting up on rare occasions, something about trapped gases in stomach and lungs overcoming the stiffness of rigor mortis. As soon as the gas finds a path to vent, the body loses that buoyancy and collapses back into the coffin with a sigh real enough to give the witnessing bereaved false hope. I had never experienced it myself, but the undertakers or gravediggers retelling the tale were often in continuous day and night contact with any number of bodies in their charge, so I had little reason to completely discount the tale, other than regard it as a tale worth retelling as a means to earn the diggers a free drink in the pub afterwards.

As my head cleared, I felt I could risk sitting up myself. Without the aid of decomposing gases, I had to push myself up with my arms and, turning as I swung my legs around to the floor, I was able to see another chaise longue opposite me, with Pauline already sitting upright, pale and absolutely terrified.

"Pauline," I croaked, "are you all right?"

"N-no, Robert, I really don't think I am." She tossed her head, indicating something behind me.

I turned agonizingly slowly, not trusting that I could maintain my equilibrium if I turned any quicker.

Standing behind me, and tight up against the wall, was the risen body our son John, restrained on either side of him by his father- and mother-in-law Gareth and Sylvia. They appeared to be using all their strength to hold him back. The first thing that crossed my mind was that my dead son was alive. Then he opened his mouth in a snarl, revealing elongated canines that were covered in spittle that gleamed in the flickering candlelight. An inhuman growl emanated from between those snarling lips that once kissed his mother's and latterly his lover's welcoming lips. Gareth and Sylvia renewed their efforts to restrain him and, parting their own lips revealed equally impressive canines that would not have looked out of place on a pair of sabre-toothed tigers.

John's eyes though, were not trained on me but were focussed on his mother Pauline, sitting on the seat now behind my head.

"That is even more surprising, Robert," Adrienne softly commented, from somewhere on my right. I could see her dimly, hiding in the shadows well away from the candlelight, "I thought that once you regained your senses that John would turn the object of his hunger towards you, being the least loving of the two people closest to his blood line."

"So why do you hide in the shadows, Adrienne, could you be a target too?"

"As newly turned, John will naturally have a hierarchy of favorites, a choice which he consciously cannot make because his brilliant mind is now in limbo, only his beastly nature will command his actions until the flow of fresh blood satiates his desiccated organs. Only then will his brain reconnect and become aware of memories and be able to make rational choices in his actions. We are all targets when the hunger strikes us, Robert. Do you question how humane the bacon in your breakfast was raised or slaughtered before you satisfy your hunger?"

"No, I suppose not, but why does he not strike out at your parents? He, or should I say 'it', the Beast, is unmuzzled."

"Oh, John is definitely not an 'it', he is every bit the man he was but soon he will so much more. He has the potential to live almost indefinitely, with no corruption of his body or mind by cancer, all he has to do is feed as regularly as he needs to on human blood."

"So he is a blood-sucking vampire, like the rest of your family?"

"Very perceptive, Robert, yes he will become one of us but first there has to be a sacrifice. As you well know, nothing ever comes free, especially immortality and it comes at the highest price imaginable."

"So what happened to him and what happens now?" I asked.

"His illness brought this about. Although I told you earlier that we started our family because of John's cancer, I lied. He actually kept the fact hidden from me as much as he had from you until a few days ago. Six months before he had persuaded me that the time was right to start our family, arguing that he would be nearly seventy by the time our eldest reached the age when they would venture out into the world. And, as I was over a hundred and fifty years old myself, I felt I was ready for my first child. In fact, I was as eager as he was to knuckle down and make the first of our babies together."

"So you criticize his reticence about his sickness, yet you kept secret from him what exactly you were, a vampire?"

"That secret, yes. This one has to be kept from humans. At the moment we are not suspected, after all, who looks for clues about us if we are regarded as not existing? So I am only telling you both that we are vampires because one of you will be leaving this room in the pine box, while the other has to live, to be a loving grandparent to the twins. I still think it will be you in the box, Robert, and Pauline helping out in the nursery, but there seems to be a glitch in the system as far as who you call the Beast is concerned."

"So, I suppose you were angry when John told you his secret about his terminal cancer?" I asked, "And was he upset when you suggested to him your 'cure' and did he readily agree to become this Beast or did you insist?"

"My, how insightful, Robert, I am impressed." Adrienne smiled, and hesitated before continuing candidly, "it is difficult being deeply in love with a human, never being able to fully release my emotions, never to completely give myself to my lover as he could give himself utterly to me. When he lied and the enormity of what his death and loss would do to my happiness, I almost lost it. To preserve his life, I had to rein in my passion, to take almost all his blood but leave enough residue to mix with the DNA I injected, necessary to begin to turn him. By the time he told me, the cancer had spread to his vital organs and he knew he wouldn't see his children. I was going to offer him the only way out, but he wanted to make gentle love to me after seeing the photos of our little babies—"

"You can be photographed?" I asked, "I saw the mirrors covered over and thought—"

"Misinformation, Robert, the history of vampires goes back to prehistory when a genetic abnormality showed up in the DNA. We shouldn't have survived that abnormality, but we did. It is all about blood. We can be seen in mirrors, we do show up on cameras and cctv. The mirrors are covered in the house because our ritual directs us to during the Pre Wake. We eat garlic all the time, stakes in the heart are ineffective, but silver is a problem, and crucifixes, that's why I only embrace Robert, never the Bishop."

I laughed, pulling the frills on my shirt to reveal my Bishop's pectoral cross against my chest. "When you confirmed your non contact when I was wearing my cross, I took the precaution of wearing it."

"Robert, please listen. We are not so inhuman as you think we are, we rarely kill for food and never for fun, but to survive we must have supplies of fresh blood from time to time, the time between feeds varies from vampire to vampire."

"H-how long is that time?" Pauline swallowed and asked.

"It can be months or years, it depends on the activities of the vampire, Mom and Dad can get away with a small annual top-up, but Vincent, who is a successful amateur racing driver, has to feed before and after a major race, which takes some organizing and finely tuned logistics for supplies. We often have a lot of requests as volunteers, though, as they get a chance to see the world they would otherwise never see."

"Yes, I have always noticed all the servants here have high collars, but the tiny girl in the library, is one I have not seen before. She was so short that I could see down her neck and she has a number of puncture wounds."

"Thank you, I will send Carrie back home to the village for a much-needed rest. She is particularly tasty, I understand, although I have so far resisted. Mom says she simply tastes so much nicer than anyone else she knows. We have a lot of guests here, and Carrie is so eager to please. I will be having words with certain members of my family, as I will not have my people abused."

"Ha! Such sensibilities for one who has turned her husband—"

"Enough! I have no need to explain anything to you. I honestly expected you to be drained of blood and flat on your back in that box, fully twenty minutes ago, but he shuns you now as much as you have shunned him his whole life. Why do you not love your son John?"

"Love him? Of course I love him. I would gladly give up my jugular this instance if it would ensure he lived, even if it is this strange half-life that you have promised him. I have always loved him. Always."

"But he says you can never even bear to touch him, even from his earliest memories."

"And do you know why?"

"No, tell me."

"Because, in spite of my faith, in the face of everything I believe in about my soul, my commitment to God, my diocese and my family, I cannot get too close to John, because of my overwhelming desire and love for him."

"I don't understand, Robert." Adrienne came more into the light from the shadows.

"Yes, honey," Pauline chipped in, "you never cared for your son all the time he was at home. Even giving him a simple bedtime hug was too much for you. It was as if you had a heart of stone where he was concerned."

"I loved him too much to touch him," I shouted, "Look, I-I'm gay! I am attracted to men not women and have been since puberty. It was an impossible situation for me. Oh, I can appreciate your beauty, Pauline, your grace, the way you move, and I have developed a deep affection for you, call it love if you will, but John is my only true love and that love could never be consummated in the way that male lovers mate. I am gay, while John was not, and he loves Adrienne more than life. You talk about sacrifice, but I have sacrificed my happiness to maintain a lie ... a lie that persuades parishioners that I am a normal heterosexual priest who can be trusted with wives, mothers, girlfriends, boys, girls, physically and mentally vulnerable men. And, yes, I can be trusted to care for them, I am one hundred percent safe, but I can never kiss them, never reveal how much I like them, less my true nature be revealed and I lose their trust forever. You and I have so much more in common than you think, Adrienne, our true lives hidden behind a masquerade of deceit."

Adrienne nodded, a feint smile playing on her lips as so many things started to fall into place for her.

"Gay?" Pauline asked still trying to think this through, married all those years, us making love thousands of times, "what the fuck do you mean, 'gay'?"

"I mean, dear wife, that although I have never indulged my natural inclinations as a gay man, for the sake of my family, our reputation and my further service unto God and my fellow brethren, I have denied all those urges and been a faithful husband and ... the best sort of father to our son John that I could be. Can you honestly say the same, wife?"

Pauline's pale face reddened deeply, her mouth opened and closed wordlessly.

I turned to Adrienne. "So, tell me. What is the Pre Wake and why did Pauline and I have to be here to take part in it?"

"You have to be here and relaxed so that John can see you relaxed and your blood warmed. The fasting is not necessary for you, in fact it is important that your blood is refreshed and recently refueled, while all the alternative sources of blood around are starved and less appealing. It focuses the subject on the preferred candidate."

"I see. What exactly happens at the Wake part of your tradition?"

Adrienne walked into the light, looking at John all the time. I twisted my head and saw that John was still fixated on his mother. If he broke free now ... well, I could imagine his mother would provide his first feed of blood. The word 'sacrifice' now took on more significance, for us both. Adrienne didn't need to explain it, I knew that John wouldn't drain my blood, and if his own mother Pauline wasn't in the room to be drained of blood, then he would indeed sacrifice his lover, the mother of his unborn children, in his driven mindless need to survive, his parents and wife were the closest related blood containers. His parents-in-law were not considered food for him, merely surplus packaging that was preventing access to the morsel or morsels his urges sought.

"And if the Beast fails to feed by dawn?" I ask.

"Yes, Dawn is important. Failure to feed by dawn, two minutes to five o'clock, will leave the Beast as an empty shell, completely devoid of life and incapable of revival," Adrienne wept, "he would be buried in his coffin, the paperwork prepared, filed and never questioned."

"Never?"

"Never in over 150 years. This county is ours to do what he want, within reason. Hiding bodies is a reasonable favor owed by the authorities." Adrienne sat next to me, her back to the struggling trio, testing their strengths and weaknesses and finding that they were at an impasse, and the Beast stared unwaveringly at the terrified Pauline.

Both the women in John's life knew, I was sure of it. Did this need to be played out or would we all put our cards on the table?

"If John fed on one of the servants, or a rat or milk cow," Adrienne continued, "his essence as John, the man I love, could not be fully restored. He needs blood that is a close DNA match to his own, his father, mother or a full sibling. It is not possible to take his blood and store it, and the three days is necessary so that the blood I drew from him has been completely absorbed and changed by my own body. However, I am not completely off the menu. I am there because I have been his lover of six years. We even made love on our first date, Robert, you, I now know, fully understand how hot he is."

"And I understand how hot you are," I smiled, "even though you are not at all my type."

"Yes," she snorted as she giggled, "but as frequent lovers for years we have exchanged bodily fluids, and we vampires feed on more than blood. John has been sustaining me so well that I haven't touched a drop of blood from the time we met until three days ago. If he drained me now, he would achieve almost full restoration of his existence, but at the cost of his eternal love and lost forever would be the children he desired to spawn. He would indeed not be the John we all know and love but would be driven by grief to be a monster that cannot die, yet cannot live with himself. However much it will kill my heart, I would rather he was a husk in the coffin and I exist and endure the knowledge of what I had to sacrifice in order to save our children."

Pauline's eyes grew larger as Adrienne explained, and the full horror of her fate became clear to her.

"How long does John have?" I asked as I pulled my phone from my pocket and flicked through the unread messages until I found the one I wanted.

Adrienne consulted her watch, "Three hours and fifty-three minutes. The draining of the victim process takes a matter of moments. Why? What does the time matter? It seems obvious to me that the choice is clear and you would be a 'sort of' grandfather."

"I see." I said, as I read the note from the diocesan office, summarizing aloud, "'Reverend Darren Greensward, Minister of Tanglewood, was flown into your local airport by my office, and checked into Room 208 in the Skyline Motel at 8.30 this evening.' He thinks he is attending an interview for a permanent position at your church here first thing in the morning. He caught the last possible flight in. I was going to confront him in the morning and beat out of him the release of his hold on my wife. Apparently, Pauline advised him by phone of the death of his son three days ago, but I am reliably informed he told Betty Jones, one of his current lovers, that the death meant nothing to him."

"No!" cried Pauline, "You can't have found out all this after our conversation early this afternoon, you can't!"

"No, Pauline, my dear, but I have known Greensward was your lover before you found him cheating and you started going out with me, the good Christian boy who would never cheat and was destined to go places," I said, my mind calmer than I expected at this showdown, "I accepted you as my wife because you were the perfect cover for my shortcomings as a ... man. You were beautiful, charming, a caring mother and wife, except that you couldn't give up the cheater, could you? When Greensward made you pregnant, you passed John off as my child, but a public person can never hide secrets from a curious and determined congregation still loyal to a previous minister who they took to their hearts. Quite a few of the kind-hearted and a couple of the more malicious parishioners told me the truth, and a DNA test confirmed my fears."

"You knew all along?" Pauline sobbed.

"I shared you with Greensward all these years and sacrificed the sin of pride gladly. I hated it and I am sure it was common knowledge, and there were titters at my expense between the pews, but I did love you as far as I was able. I was bitterly disappointed when you didn't follow me to the Bishop's Palace, and Greensward was appointed as your Minister. I hoped that when you left his curacy that I still had a chance and patiently waited. When I heard John had died, I released all my evidence to your Bishop, I wasn't going to stand for that creep moving in with you. If he hasn't already."