CHAPTER 7

Alucard had always loved the nights. As an immortal, he was excited each evening when he was able to rise from his coffin. Even on those evenings when he wasn`t hunting he could hardly wait to become bat.

Of all that he had lost following his transformation to being human, the freedom of flight, that stuff of dreams, was most grieved. He loved standing on the patio of Redicz Castle, overlooking the Carpathians and the valleys below.

Alucard would transform himself and fly for hours. He knew every inch of his domain and remembered how proud he was to show it all to Mondrian. Ah, those first evenings!

Mondrian, wide eyed, flying on his right side; her first attempts in attack mode, dropping down, swiftly through the clouds. Her first feeding; Alucard saw a human in the mountains, camping, obviously a stranger. No one from the villages any longer ventured far from their homes at night. He directed Mondrian to the campfire and nodded his approval.

Mondrian pulled in her wings and fell directly towards the victim. Wings again spread, the final swoop, tendrils ripping the victim`s face as she transformed to human form. With vampirish strength holding the man in his struggle; the biting and gnashing, the ripping. Blood spurting before she settled to feed. Alucard felt the sweat on his brow as he remembered that evening. How happy he was for her as she lay sated next to the body. How beautiful she was in the moonlight, smiling at him, calling him to herself. No more!

His evenings were now filled with unsettling dreams. Alucard had read all of the important works by Freud and his disciples concerning dreams and generally agreed with them as to the impetus for dreaming; unresolved internal conflicts and wish fulfillments.

For Alucard, as for most humans, the beginning of his dreams usually involved visions of recent experience. As he settled into REM sleep, his subconscious began seeping into his dream, things becoming more bizarre as his mind attempted to integrate more intimate parts of himself, those unfilfilled desires and conflicts which if not disguised would immediately awaken him.

Symbology of his earlier lived experince would then resurface, a somewhat more threatening attempt to rid his present conflicts of their charged energy, their cathexis. For most people, this powerful threat to their identity was enough to awaken them in the middle of their nightmare.

But Alucard had lived for hundreds of years as vampire. His dreams spiralled downward, through the killing and evil, through the destruction. Only images of his own mortality would awaken him.

Waking up, shaking, perspiring, he would get out of bed, disoriented and walk out to the patio. Sitting there, his respiration normalizing, he would think of Carrie.