Banshee from the Vampire Palace

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. It had a white wooden frame, horribly chipped, as old houses usually do. The window displayed an inert area composed of backyard bushes and shrubs arranged in shapes into the awkward mist of the night. All the images that flashed through her soul’s eye seemed locked in a cistvaen, a prehistoric sepulchral tomb where her body lay in eternal sleep, her chest like stone, as if firmly nailed to the cold earth.

She appeared more and more often in the twilight now, illuminated by the glow of the full moon, since she awoke from a five-hundred-year sleep. But this was by no means a customary dream that other vampires might have. It was her second entity, awakened from the ashes of the previously punishingly perished life.

When she jumped out of the coffin set in the centre of his room, under the ceiling beams in the attic, the brightness of her eyes instantly disappeared between lustfully narrowed lids, trying to create the most realistic view of the objects in front of her. She reclined on the bay window; her veined temples gleamed in the dim light, followed by her teeth glistening like knives, her body shivering like a wild animal that must go out into the cold.

Penelope was still a virgin with blonde ringlets when the spectre of first love flashed through her innocent life. To an inexperienced lass, a boy twice her age was like a knight on a white horse, willing to save her from the loneliness and longing of her young years creeping up behind her wherever she went. Usually, she was waiting for him by the side of the country road, armed with her big open heart and velour slippers. She was also wearing a sky-blue dress with slits down the sides that swayed her body in all four directions.

He never came.

She waited for him the next and the next day in the same place. In the full glare of the midday sun, she counted the hours, minutes, and seconds of her pining, and the poppy petals were like the hands of a clock, large and small, accompanying her in this saddest movement for a young girl.

She later learned that he had eloped with a girl from the village, got married, and had a child surprisingly quickly. She resolved never to betray her first love, although he never seemed to care. But her heart cared too much for both of them.

Over the next months, she wandered through fields, meadows, and valleys, until one stormy night she threw herself from the highest escarpment and that's how much everyone saw her, or it seemed to them that they had seen her for the last time.

Most of the time, slides with images and ideas before her very eyes combined into a perfect collage, drawing frosty crinkum-crankum on the windowpane, with a perfect imitation of something real, yet it could never be real. It could only be reimagined, but it has always been far from reality, as banshee life always is. Living at night, preying on other bodies and souls, having two hearts and two souls themselves (and two sets of teeth to tear apart the lives of others), they had an advantage over any living thing. But their extraordinary properties have made them live outsider lives rather than centres of attention. And being five hundred years behind Penelope, memory must have been selective.

Some events of her life spanning several decades were erased by the Trickling Eraser, which operated in perfect dissociation with the salt water that formed the stalactites. Some have become sharper with age, others have vanished into eternity, as if their traces had never been stipulated. She knew it every time she looked at the world outside. She could never entirely recognise it, even from this viewpoint of the supposedly easier to grasp world outside the window in his room.

He wasn't very generous in giving her this room. The last and messiest room in his Vampire Palace, where all the banshees, strigae, and bats have found their home over the centuries.

It was the birds that made the whole mess in the attic. All the droppings formed a path leading to a white ladder at the end of the stairs, probably directing to another room on the top level of the house, above her attic, but she had no proper opportunity to check as its door was bricked up. And as she was a somnambulist, she often sauntered there in a state of epileptic euphory interspersed with doomed depression, only to discover something that wasn’t there. But for her it always was.

The return to her paillasse was always marked by extreme suffering. Her pent-up feelings unawares arisen on the surface of her face, causing carmine patches dripping like eternal tears. She had to hide them in that incited moment in the darkest corners of her double soul, and it usually took a while to amply tame the precariously advancing stream. She could never fully grasp what the other part of her psyche was dealing with at that particular time or where it was actually physically located. Worse, what she experienced was reinforced by the twin pains emanating from her jaded banshee body, including the double teeth that were the true mare's nightmare.

Every escapade to the outside world was veiled and non-existent as Penelope appeared in the form of an owl. That way, no one ever knew who she really was, and her body could be kept within the dank walls of his room without revealing her primordial identity. While the other strigae were incredibly busy sucking the blood of innocent infants in perpetuum lying in their cribs, she on those brightest days jumped over tall crops in an annihilating way preying on unsuspecting, unsullied souls. Often it was young women who expected nothing, which allowed Penelope to maintain her flawless features. And, oh boy, was she in seventh heaven every time her rosy cheeks shone in the full sun. It didn't matter that it was just for her in front of the mirror in his attic room. The knowledge that she could live and feed forever, and that she could still have the body of a mare galloping freely across the fields (only in her imagination, of course), filled her double heart with the purest joy, uncinched by any circumstance or person. It grew even younger and younger with every drop of blood draining from the bodies still alive and warm.

At night, when the busiest bats never hesitated to roar in her abode, that jarred on her nerves like a chainsaw, the firelight in the garden often lured her. She always wanted to get out at all costs. Superior Vampire Joseph used to warn her then over the PA system installed in every room of the Palace that it would be criminal.

“A banshee would never leave her room in her true form, ever!”

He thundered from his pedestal like Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, so Penelope wouldn’t dare disobey. She still wanted to retain her lavish dual qualities, even if it meant locking her divine body up forever. But what compares to eternal life? Absolutely nothing, and she always took this fact into account to the highest degree.

Her pale eyes matched the pale green dress with a grey cloak she had dared to replace with a carmine apparel she had once found in his room closet. It corresponded unsettlingly with her constantly watering carmine eyes and red hair that draped over her body like a shroud of night.

I guess she marches there to this day; her still youthful smooth feet creak on the wooden slats of the attic room; her hauteur bursts the walls of the Palace like a guillotine. I can’t be sure as I left long ago, leaving the past far behind.

Her vivid image comes to mind every time I take shammes to kindle the candles in the Hanukkah menorah. To save her soul from dripping on the bobèche, to catch her wild golden evil spirit. But what if she is the only threat to herself, and the penance will last forever? Then her molten soul will leave without a trace, seeking eternal salvation. The famine of those early years would never return.

– THE END –

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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