David placed the noose around his neck. The buckle felt cold against his skin, but the belt held strong against his weight as his chair rocked to and fro. This is the end, he thought. Finally.
After years of clutching at reasons to stay alive, excuses which only postponed the inevitable, he had finally run dry of delays. Limping from day to day, it has taken far too long. David wondered how long it would be until somebody found his corpse.
The blinds split open with a crash, a dark shape bursting through them to the floor. David almost fall off of his chair from shock. Is it suicide if an error deals the killing blow? The black mass stirred against his floorboards, rising into a human form. It brushed long, dark hair from its face, and stared into his eyes.
A vampire? With chalk-like skin against a blackboard of hair and clothes, the creature had come straight from a Gothic horror film. It appeared to have flown into his room. A banshee? It was definitely a she of some variety: although paralysed by fright, David could appreciate a sort of eldritch beauty. Social anxiety had made him used to those conflicting emotions; he had only ever met attractive women under a veil of fear.
"What... are you?" he managed, when the creature didn't speak itself.
"Your end," she rasped, her voice the sound of death itself. Or perhaps her throat is simply dry.
"If you have come to drink my blood, you have arrived just in time." His imminent death, by her hand or his own, had made him bolder than in normal life. What more do I possibly have to lose? "I assume you like it warm?"
"Blood?" The monster seemed confused. "Oh, your poetic types and their embellishments. Essence, life force... these are such abstract concepts, without the requisite colour and gore. They call it blood for the imagery, for the rhyme, and people think they actually mean the rusty water in your veins. No, David, I have not come to drink your blood. I simply wish to eat your soul."
"My soul?"
"I need it to survive," she said, as if that was everything explained.
"So do I." How did she know my name?
"And yet you don't wish to survive. You don't enjoy your life as I would: its gift is wasted on you, wouldn't you say?"
"Life hasn't been a gift to me."
"Of course. You have been dealt a bad hand, I know, but you have the larger stack of chips. My hand is rather good: why not stake me instead?" Stake me, the vampire said: David was lost in her analogy, and noticed only the ironic choice of words. "Look at you: afraid, pale, locked away in your darkened room. What sort of life is this?"
"You can speak." David had been about to take his life, but felt suddenly moved to defend himself. "You look worse than me, a living corpse, somewhere between a creature of Victorian Gothic fiction and a modern teenage goth. When did you last see the sun?"
"You think I am your introverted stereotype? Believe me, I am an extrovert at heart: some define the term as one who gains energy from being around people, opposed to one exhausted by that interaction. If that is the case, I am the most literal extrovert that you have ever met."
"And yet you look much more like me."
"Of course, and that is no mistake. I feed off introverted souls. They shape me: you are what you eat, as your kind like to say. I only feed on loners, those who have little left to live for. It is their souls, their powerful ideas, which have shaped how I appear. Did you think that your goths, with their large personas and their lust for death, styled themselves after me? The chicken had to lay the egg before it hatched."
