Versipellis

Versipellis

The cellar reeked of mildew and iron. Dank water seeped in from the brick walls and ceiling, each drop echoing as it struck the pooled water on the uneven stone floor: a hollow, patient sound that marked time like a funeral dirge. The bricks themselves wept moisture, their faces slick with dark algae, and something more sinister that had crept into the mortar over decades. Roots from the street above had pushed through cracks, pale and blind, reaching down like arthritic witch's fingers into this forgotten place.

The air was thick, musty, tasting of rust and rot. The metallic taste pooled at the back of my throat.

I observed with distant investment his convulsions, sending ripples through the dark puddles, his body arching against the wet stone. His fingers clawed uselessly at the floor, nails catching in the gaps between stones worn smooth by hundreds of years of slow water. That sickly verdant hue spread across his skin like mold on bread. I'd seen it only once before, in my master's final moments, in another cellar much like this one.

The transformation was already inside me. I could feel it coursing through my bloodstream like an ancient fire consuming everything in its path. My skin prickled, my bones ached, and deep inside the fever burned, twisting my perception. The cellar walls seemed to heave with every breath I took, the dripping water had a story to tell, whispering in a language I almost understood.

Four thousand years of folklore suddenly made sense. Every warning, every whispered tale around winter fires.

He would die here, in this wet tomb beneath the city. I would not.

I fled.

The tunnels were an endless maze of jutting corners and blind cut offs, darkness enveloped by brick and stone. This place had been forgotten when the city was built above. My hands scraped against walls slimed with decades of grey and egg white seepage, the texture wet velvet over brick. The narrow passages forced me to crouch, my knees splashing through puddles I couldn't see, soaking the remnants of my clothes with fetid water that smelled of earth and stone.

The fever was beginning to crest. My skin was tight, my joints grinding as if filled with shards of glass. Each breath came harder, the air thick and suffocating the deeper I went, my organs demanding something other than oxygen. I could feel my teeth aching in their sockets, my hands and fingers swollen. I examined them with horror-like curiosity, watching my fingernails loosen and fall to the ground, unbedding themselves right before my eyes. I pushed forward in the darkness, my instincts coming alive, guiding me. I knew every turn. The darkness had no hold on me. I could feel the subtle movement of air, a draft, an opening close. I could smell the fresh air permeating the dank passage.

My hands found the iron rungs of a ladder embedded in the stone. Every step up, each reach to the next rung, produced rust that flaked off in the palm of my hand. I climbed, ignoring the way my muscles screamed, the way my spine took on an unnatural curve, the way my jaw cracked and reset itself with each rung. Above me, I could hear the city: the rumble of traffic, the hum of electrical lines, the footsteps of people who walked in light and never knew what festered beneath them.

I emerged into the October night, surprisingly moving aside the manhole cover with unhuman strength. The last quarter moon hung like a clock on the wall, reminding me of the waning time. The air hit my lungs: cold, sharp, impossibly detailed. I could smell diesel fuel three blocks away, could taste the copper patina on the church steeple. I could hear conversations through closed windows.

I ran.

My stride lengthened impossibly. My hands touched pavement, pulling me forward as my legs pushed me off the ground. An unnatural gallop took shape, moving me forward. The earth seemed to call to my body, drawing me closer, reshaping me. City blocks blurred. My heart thundered so loudly I was certain the entire city could hear its war drum pounding: dhuum dhudhuum.

When I finally stopped, I found myself in a thicket at the edge of a park, gasping, but not from exhaustion. From exhilaration. From hunger.

The park lay out before me, maintained by careful hands that would never know the shadows of the trees they tended hid such a beast. The hedges were trimmed into precise geometric shapes: boxwoods and yews that formed dark walls along the walking paths, their leaves so dense that not even moonlight penetrated their bulk. Japanese maples spread their delicate branches overhead, their autumn foliage barely visible in the darkness. Ornamental grasses bordered the flower beds, now dormant for the season, their dried stalks whispering secrets to each other in the slight breeze.

A crisp fog had settled over everything, rolling in from the creek in thick bands that clung to the ground like a spectral shroud, draping the earth in a hushed, ethereal veil. It softened the edges of the manicured world, blurred the Victorian lampposts that lined the main path, turned the wrought-iron benches into furniture of a ghostly nature. The air tasted clean and cold, sharp with the promise of frost, carrying with it the mineral smell of the creek and the mulch the gardeners had laid down for winter. The fog moved in slow currents, thick in the low places, creating pockets of concealment.

I crouched in a thicket of rhododendrons, their waxy leaves pressed close around me. Beyond them, a border of carefully maintained boxwood hedges formed a living wall between the wild edge of the park and the civilized paths where people walked their dogs and jogged in daylight hours. Here, in the margin between wilderness and order, I waited.

________________________________________

The darkness held no terror now. It was a friend. I could navigate the fog, my senses peaked and sharp. I could see the individual scales on the fish in the creek, hear their movements beneath the water, the crickets singing in three-part harmony, smell the layers of life and decay in the soil beneath me.

Then I heard her.

Footsteps. Measured, graceful. The distinct click of heels on pavement, the roll from heel to toe that spoke of confidence and breeding. She emerged from the fog like an apparition, her silhouette softened by the mist that clung to her coat and hair. Her perfume reached me long before she came into full view: jasmine and vetiver, expensive, worn by someone who'd never known hunger. The fog carried her scent like an offering, swirling it through the hedges to where I crouched, trembling.

Beneath the perfume, I could smell her. The chemical signature of her body, the pheromones that spoke of warmth and life and flesh. It was intoxicating, primal, a scent that bypassed all rational thought and went straight to the monster beneath my human-like facade. I could smell the salt of her skin, the faint musk of exertion from her walk, the traces of soap and shampoo that clung to her hair. And deeper still, more intimate: the lingering scent of an encounter from earlier, traces of another person's chemistry mixed with hers, fading but still present. The beast inside me catalogued everything, reading her like a book written in flesh and fluids. Every breath I took filled my lungs with the essence of prey.

She drew closer, her figure becoming more solid as she passed under a lamppost. The light created a halo in the fog around her, made her seem almost holy, untouchable. Her breath came out in small clouds that added to the mist.

Then I heard it: her heartbeat. Steady, strong, a drumming that echoed in my ears like thunder. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub, unaware. I could hear the blood rushing through her carotid artery, a river of life pulsing just beneath the surface of her pale throat. The whoosh and surge of it filled my skull, louder than her footsteps, louder than her breathing. My mouth flooded with saliva. My hands dug into the soft earth beneath the rhododendrons, claws sinking deep into the soil.

Something inside me split in two. One half howled for her blood, imagined the give of her flesh beneath fang. The other half: smaller, weaker, but still clinging to human, begged to let her pass.

"No, no, not her," the human voice whispered. "Let her go."

I trembled in my hiding place. She walked past, unaware of the danger lurking. The relief and frustration hit me in equal measure.

What am I becoming?

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I didn't have long to wonder.

The bicycle chain needed oil. I heard that first. Then the whisper of air through spokes, the crunch of gravel under tires. The sound came from deep within the park, where the fog hung thickest over the path that wound along the creek. The man hummed something tuneless as he pedaled, his leather coat creaking, his tweed cap pulled low against the evening chill. He materialized from the mist slowly, first just a shadow, then a shape, then a person: oblivious, alone.

As he drew close, his scents reached me. Rich beef gravy, still clinging to his mustache and the corners of his mouth. Yorkshire pudding, its eggy, buttery smell woven into his breath and lodged in his teeth. He'd had a proper dinner, maybe several hours ago, sitting at a table in a cozy house with warm lights. I could hear it digesting in his belly, could smell the beer he'd drunk with it: dark and malty. The ordinariness of it all, the domesticity, made the hunger worse. He was fed, satisfied, content. I was starving.

His heart beat slower than the woman's, the strong, steady rhythm of someone who cycled regularly. I could hear his lungs working, smell the tobacco that had stained them over decades. Old Holborn, rolled thin. The leather of his coat gave off the scent of saddle soap and age, and beneath it all, the particular smell of his body: aftershave applied that morning, now faded, and the natural scent of a man in his late fifties or early sixties, his hormones different from the woman's, less intoxicating but just as readable.

He had no idea what watched him from the edge of the thicket. The fog had settled thick around my hiding place that even the boxwoods faded into gray. I was a shadow within shadows, invisible, hungry.

The beast inside me surged stronger than before, drowning out that small human voice. I couldn't fight it any longer. I was hungry, he was here, and the night was mine.

I leaped.

He made no sound. One moment he was on his bicycle, the next he was in the shadow beneath the hedge. His bicycle clattered to the ground. I was bearing down on him with strength that I had not known before this moment. His coat tore away like paper. His skin, pale in the moonlight, beckoned.

I struck.

The platysma muscle gave way, blood hot, iron-sweet, filling my mouth. His heart still beat, pumping life into my jaws. I tore deeper, feeling muscle separate from bone, hearing the wet sounds of a body coming apart.

Then I heard something else: a soft gurgle. He was still alive. Still aware.

The human voice found me again, screaming now, horrified at what I'd done. I pulled back, seeing him clearly for the first time: a man, just a man, crow's feet around his grey eyes, looking up, blinking in disbelief and shock, a wedding band on his left hand.

"What have I done?"

In a moment of mercy that felt more like cowardice, I snapped his neck with a quick jerk. His eyes went distant. The gurgling stopped.

I held his body in the darkness, feeling his warmth fade into the October cold, and understood with perfect clarity that I had crossed a threshold. The fog had thickened around us, drawn perhaps by the heat of spilled blood, curling around his body like a shroud. The man I had been died in that cellar with the pale-skinned stranger.