In many vampire stories vampires are forbidden to write their history or tell mortals what they are. For my kind, there is no such rule that I, by putting pen to paper, am breaking. No hordes of vampires, obsessed with secrecy will come hunting me down, no immortal men and women will try to kill me for telling my tale. But that is because of one very important fact. We, the vampiric race that myself and my childe belong to, actually exist. You may laugh, you may scoff, but the fact of the matter is that we are there, lurking about the mortal world, immortal beings surrounded by mortality. It is for this reason that we need no rules. We need not tell our newly turned that they must not reveal what they now are. Indeed, we ask that our newly turned children rush back to their mortal family and tell them what they have become, for this drives home the first of the Dark Lessons.
No one will believe.
Yes, no one will ever believe that vampires exist among mortals. You may run to an educated mortal, who knows what humans can and can’t do and attempt to show him how you are so much stronger and faster then a human, but he will not believe you. We have gone about in this way, existing since before recorded time due to the fact that no one believes. Our existence has only been made easier with movies such as The Lost Boys and books such as Dracula. For they present vampires as something very different from what we are. They give humanity beliefs— that we have no reflection, that we wince at holy water and crosses, that we can be killed by a stake. Yes, we have reflections, for we still have bodies. No we do not wince at holy water and crosses— in fact I chose to wear necklace with a cross on it quite often and, although it might cause so much pain we would wish we could die, a stake to the heart will not kill us. But yes, we do drink the blood of the living and yes, we do live forever.
And now that you are comfortable in thinking this is a work of fiction, I may begin my very true tale.

My name is Logan Laurance. I was born in 1980, in San Luis Obispo, California and, at the time I write these words, I have been a vampire for little more then nine years. It all started in 1999, as the year wound down to a close and the population began to worry that the world would end, come 2000.
I had lived in San Luis Obispo almost all my life. Only one year earlier, in 1998, had I ventured out, to live in San Francisco while I went to college. I wanted to major in English and become a teacher. Like many of my friends, I was uneasy about the New Year, but I did not join in the full scale hysteria that many people around the country and the world chose to engage in. As one of the lesser privileged students, I lived in a loft apartment and managed to live on ramen microwave noodles and whatever else I could buy for cheap. I worked part time in a dinner across the street form my apartment and supplemented my wages by modeling for painters and sculptors. I am a more delicately built man then is average and this, although making me look more feminine then is usual, attracted a great many artists. I had not cut my hair in perhaps two years at that point and it reached my waist. I knew a few poets who, as birthday gifts, would write poems for me. In every poem that mentions my hair they liken it to raven’s feathers, a deep black with a strange shine when held to the light. From my father I received my emerald green eyes, although mine always have had more of a shine to them.
By 1998 I had no living relations. Or at least, I did not have any living relations that wanted anything to do with me. I had one Uncle on my mother’s side, but he didn’t want to be associated with her due to my father’s family being ‘beneath him’ or some such nonsense. But, to get back to my story, I was utterly alone at the time. I was never interested in girls as anything other then friends, and although I had several male friends whom I marched with in pride parades, I did not have a steady boyfriend at the time, or even a ‘friend with benefits’. On average, two weeks could go by without me seeing anyone I knew on a personal level, besides my teachers and boss. It was three weeks before Christmas when I first felt as if I was being watched. However, the events actually started two week before, when a certain man kept coming to the dinner at the exact same time every night that I worked there.
The man did not appear to be much older then men. He was remarkable in the fact that he was so unremarkable. His hair was a dirty blond that may have once been either a pure blond or a pure brown. His eyes were not a dull blue, but neither were they a sparkling blue. He wore jeans and a t-shirt, with a black jacket on over it all. Nothing about him stood out when you looked at him, yet he kept coming back to the dinner and always ended up sitting where I would serve him. The man came at 7:00 sharp. He would order coffee, pancakes and toast. He’d eat slowly, taking up an hour before finishing and then spend another half and hour drinking coffee. However he tipped well and didn’t mind if I took awhile to refill his coffee, so I didn’t mind. Every night he left exactly at 8:41, walking out of the dinner and crossing the street before heading up the street, towards the distant bay.
I told several of my friends about the mysterious man, and we had several good laughs inventing stories for why he always came at the same time and ordered the same thing before leaving at the same time. However we were quick to forget about the man if anything else came up in our lives. However, after two weeks things began to change. On the nights that I didn’t work at the dinner and during the day I began to feel as if someone was watching me. I would walk down a deserted alley way and feel as if someone was behind me, staring a hole into my back. However, when I turned around no one was there. It started to get on my nerves and at first my friends worried, but then they gradually began to laugh when I mentioned my ‘stalker’, saying that I was paranoid.
Perhaps I was lucky have my stalker. Perhaps he saved me that night, one week from Christmas. Or, perhaps the events that happened that cold December night are the fault of my stalker. I don’t suppose I shall ever know. All I know is that my life changed—for better or worse is debatable—one cold night less then a week before Christmas.

I was less then a block from my apartment. It was one of the rare days that I didn’t work at the dinner and the college was empty on account of the holiday season. I had been at a bar with a few of my friends and I wasn’t expecting to see them for maybe two and a half weeks. As I said, I was less then a block from my apartment when I slid on a half frozen puddle and fell, painful on my right leg. Wincing I slowly got up, looking down to see that my jeans had rode up and the outside of my right leg was scratched by little bits of gravel and glass that were on the sidewalk. The cuts were not important, for they only bled enough to make themselves known, but they stung very badly. I found myself whimpering as I got up and hobbled my way home and, for once, even though I felt the eyes of my stalker upon my back, I did not attempt to turn around and see him.
I reached my apartment, taking maybe two minutes longer then I usually did and, after quickly washing away the blood I fell into bed without changing and slipped into a deep dreamless sleep. The next time I awoke my body felt as if it was on fire, and I realized with a groan that I had managed to catch a cold— just in time for Christmas. I lay in bed that day, feeling the cold rise with every minute as I watched the sun slowly sink in the sky. By night I was in a foggy dreamland while my eyes were still open and I could still tell what was going on in my room. That was when my stalker finally showed his face.
As I had often thought, my stalker was indeed the blond haired man who ate at the diner. I found myself unable to do anything more then look at him as he opened my front door and came over to the bed, lying a wonderfully cold hand against my forehead before whispering something to me that, in my fevered state I could not understand. He smiled gently at me before placing one arm under my neck and one arm under my legs, wrapping me in my blanket before carrying me out of the apartment. As we descended the stairs to the ground floor I felt something soft brush against my mind and my world went dark as I succumbed to sleep.

I awoke to darkness broken only by a light, which shone faintly through a cracked open door to my right. A cool cloth was lying on my forehead and, as I tried to figure out where I was, a single droplet of water raced down my face, to fall on the pillow my head rested on. I wore the same jeans and shirt as last time, but I was under warm covers, which had been pulled up to my shoulders. In the hazy darkness hung the sent of incense, which placed in my mind images of Egypt, of ancient tombs and temples of cool white marble. I looked to my left and saw the red glow of the stick, the light from the door bouncing off the golden incense holder.  My eyes strained to see more of the room, but at that moment I heard the creak of old wooden floors and the door opened, casting light into the room where I lay. I turned by head towards the figure and saw that he was holding a single candle, which illuminated his face and gave him the appearance of a priest, blessing the host in some little medieval church. Slowly and with great care he walked over to the bed and kneeled, his clothing rustling faintly as he moved. “Hello Logan.” he whispered, his voice carrying an accent that I could not identify. “Are you feeling better?” he asked, placing the candle stick on a side table and taking the cold cloth off my forehead.
“Where am I?” I asked, sitting up in the bed and staring at my stalker, for it was indeed the same man who had come to the coffee shop all those nights. “Who are you?” I asked, as my mind remarked on how the flickering light f the candle made him seem a statue—carved from a block of marble and given life.
“This—” he motioned around at the room and towards the hallway, “is part of my home. The name I go by is Jonathan. However, I would prefer that you call me by my real name—Atum.”
“Atum?” I asked, turning the foreign word over in my mouth. “But why, why am I here?”
Atum sighed and leaned forward, so that his blond hair fell forward to frame his face. “I am going to tell you something Logan. This thing that I am about to tell you is something I have never told another soul. And, although you shall not believe it, you must know that it is true and very important.” I found myself leaning forward eager to learn this mysterious information that Atum felt I should know. “I am what you in American call a vampire.”
For a long time I could not speak. This man, this stalker who had abducted me from my home thought that he was a vampire, I was about to laugh at him when Atum moved forward and, in a move that was so fast that all I saw was a blur, clapped his hand over my mouth.
“Do not laugh at me, young one.” he hissed, his lips pulling back to revel two perfectly formed fangs. “I have walked this earth for ages and been called many names— upyri, wapierz, vampir and vampyre. I have fought in a dozen wars, from the World Wars to the American Revolution. And after all this time, it is to you that I chose to bestow immortality.” he paused, one hand moving up to grip my throat. “I chose you for no reason, for that is why I was chosen. And you shall have immortality.” For a second I simply stared at his face, then he moved forward and I felt the harsh pain of his fangs in my throat. I screamed, as Atum had taken his hand off my neck and tried in vein to struggle against his hold on me. In complete terror I heard and felt my heart slow down, till the wait between one beat and the next seemed to be an eternity of horror. I didn’t notice the moment when Atum pulled back, but I did notice when two drops fell from his slit wrist to my mouth. The drops slowly found their way down my throat and before I could think twice I had pounced upon the offered wrist and was drinking harshly from it.
My heat beat a few times more as I drank and then, with one final shudder, stopped completely. A few seconds after that a mysterious pain began to come over my body in waves and I moaned, losing my grip on Atum’s wrist as I threw my body against the bed, the blankets that had covered me were shook off as my entire body shock with the agony that seemed to come from my veins. I screamed and was amazed at the volume of my voice as I did so. Atum was standing back from the bed now, watching me as I twisted my body. “Calm down.” Atum whispered. “You are passing through the valley of the shadow of death. But you shall not fear it—you shall no longer fear anything, for now only one of your fellow vampires may kill you and it shall be you who is feared in a thousand folk legends, in a hundred bedtime stories told to scare children. You my child—are a vampire.”
My eyes snapped shut as the last terrible seizure racked my body and the pain slowly diminished as I opened my eyes on a world I had never seen before. The dark room now seemed to be as light as day and I could see everything with a clarity and depth that both scared and excited me. I looked up at Atum—my sire and found myself smirking, my lips pulling back to revel two tiny little fangs. “Welcome, to the night.” He smiled as I stood and looked down at my hands, which had lost almost all of their lines as my skin had hardened and become like stone. “You shall see, my child, that everything now holds a fascination that—when we were human—it never could.”
I rose and found myself following Atum as he walked out of the room, carrying the candle stick with him as we went down the now darkened hall. We passed through a larger room before coming to what must have been the living room. “We have perhaps two hours before the need to hunt is awoken within you.” Atum said, moving around the room to light several other candles. “There is time enough for me to tell you my history—I fell it shall prepare you in some way...will you listen?” He sat down in an ancient armchair, which protested under his weight. I sat myself opposite him on a low couch and nodded.
“I would very much like to hear your history.” I told him. Atum paused for a moment to look over at me, his eyes quickly going over my form, before he sighed and pushed his hair up out of his face.
“Before I start my tale I must tell you that, should you go to books and look up sections of my tale, you shall find many differences between my history and ‘History’ as men write it. You must trust that I, having lived through these events, will tell you the truth. We vampires have always been the ones who know the complete story—but can not publish or tell it. Do you understand?” At my nod he continued. “My story begins in Siwa during the reign of the Pharaoh Nectanebo...

To Be Continued