So You Used to Be Human - Book 3 (Original Version)

Interlude: Tales from the Crypt

Hester's colourless eyes bored into him with a great intensity and Claude found himself completely unable to look away.  It wasn't that he was trapped or hypnotized, it was that he just didn't want to.  Those eyes had been around since before the pyramids and had likely seen the the rise and fall of empires. They belonged to a creature who had been feeding off of man for what may seem like forever and the secrets and stories they alone knew were beyond compare. Those eye burned his sould and reminded him of how hort his life was, how inconsequential... and those eyes were looking away, looking supremely bored.

"I don't know French," Hester had said. "What tribe is this? I knew a girl once, had a name that sounded like that, but I forget her name.  I may have eaten her..."

"Eaten her."

"Eaten, ate, et. I'm a vampire you see.  You should be running and screaming now."

"I'm Claude. Nowhere to run to in here, so I'm just going to skip right past that last bit if it's all the same to you."

"That will save me some bother. Tell me Claude, are you tasty?"

"Not really.  Are you hungry? There are some seriously wicked hot pockets in the freezer--"

"They call me Hester. Did you know that? I don't think it is my name, but I've forgotten what my real one was a long time ago. So many things I've forgotten..."

"So hot pockets then?"

"Victoria! That was her name."

"It doesn't sound anything like French."

"Is that what I said? Might be the wrong girl. Or the wrong year.  Wrong lifetime."

"Did you eat her too?"

"I never ate anyone I loved. At least I would like to think that I haven't. That would just be wrong to have eaten. Or ate or et.  Rude.  Remind me, am I going to eat you too?"

"Oh no, I was getting you a hot pocket."

"Will I like that?"

"You might.  It's gotta be tastier than me, that's for sure."

"You look stringy anyway.  I ate a girl once who looked like you.  Was picking her out of my teeth for days. Stringy little bitch, but I ate her all up. Meat was scare in those days. Everybody always seemed to be starving."

"When was this?"

"Too many faces. Too many lives. Too many places. Do you know they call me Hester? But I don't think it's my real name."

Claude had just watched Hester's eyes unfocused as he drifted off into whatever distant memory had grabbed his attention, and when the microwave beeped for the hot pockets, he had retrieved them and put them onto plates, all without taking his eyes off Hester for a second.  The conversation had left him a lot unnerved and for some reason the word "entropy" was banging around in his head like a fly trapped in between two panes of glass.

And then the real question that had really been bothering him solidified quite firmly as he watched Hester's eyes slowly close and a snore escaped from his slightly open and very fanged mouth: how the hell had he even managed to understand a word Hester had been saying and more importantly: had that even been English?

Claude bit into the hot pocket and Hester's eyes snapped open, nostrils flaring as if trying to suck all of the flavour out of the air itself.  Claude just froze, hot pocket still to his face as a scene out of a horror movie unfolded before his eyes, the same kind of scene where he would shave been urging the character on the screen to run, to do something dammit, don't just stand there!