VAMPIRE WEEKEND : FRIDAY, a short story by actung. Date added: 2010-10-08. Times viewed: 1218.
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- Intro: First of three parts and first story in a series of six. Gabriel Grimmel is a day walker, one amongst a dying breed, forging truces and creating alliances wherever he goes, but when it comes down to it, just how much can a Vampire be trusted?
‘Can you see it?’ asked a male voice Janice did not recognize.
She couldn't help but see it so she replied ‘yes’.
Truth is that Janice could more than just see it. She could also almost touch it, feel it, taste it, smell it, and even hear it. Exactly what the ‘it’ actually is, is a drop of blood, just hanging in mid air for what seemed like minutes, almost as if time had stopped while Janice kept on going. Everything else surrounding that seemingly large drop of dark red blood appeared only as a bright blur. As well as that, just where Janice was at this very moment in time she did not know. Where the voice was coming from and just who it belonged to was also a mystery.
Time would resume in slow motion and gradually pick up speed until that drop of blood fell to become part of a red pool which seemed to have gathered on a bathroom floor. At this point Janice opened both her eyes wide. She had awakened on the morning of the first day of a three day weekend, a weekend which would forever change her world.
Janice and Alice didn’t particularly want to go away on a family trip unless they could choose as to where the destination would be. Their mum Denise didn’t mind where they would go to as long as they get to go away together, as a family. Dad Brian wanted to go the cabin that he owns in the woods close to the lake. To Brian the location of the cabin was perfect, peaceful. He would, if he got to go there that is, even get to do a bit of hunting, but to the girls the cabin meant boredom central. There was no way in hell they wanted to go there with their parents. If it was just the two of them with a couple of friends, maybe even some boys then the cabin might just be an interesting spot, but alone with their parents, no way.
It had been quite a while since they all last went to the cabin together as a family but Brian eventually gave in to his twin daughters and he agreed to let them choose the venue for a family break away.
The fifteen year old identical sisters couldn’t look any more different to each other than they already do. Janice loves her gothic look, her dark clothes, hair and makeup, and she has really been looking forward to becoming old enough so she can make her own decisions as to if she can get a tattoo or two, she knows what tattoo’s she would like to have done and where she wants them too. Alice on the other hand loves her angelic white look. She loves all things white, and nothing she wears ever lasts very long. She gets so annoyed when her clothes lose their bright white look. Her long blonde hair really sets the two girls apart in contrast to her sisters’ short dark hair.
Despite their clothing and hair differences both Janice and Alice have a connection on so many other levels like a lot of twins seem to have. They can almost sense each other’s feelings and they seem to know instantly if the other is hurting either physically or emotionally.
An advert for a hotel group advertising the upcoming few days as a VAMPIRE WEEKEND caught the girls’ attention. Not knowing anything more than what the advert included which was not very much, this particular hotel is where both girls immediately decided wanted to go and Brian almost felt like he was forced into giving in to his daughter‘s wishes.
Gabriel Grimmel arrived at the Castlemount Arms hotel.
‘Good to have you back Mister Grimmel’ spoke the desk clerk, a guy who had seemed to have already spent an eternity working as the desk clerk to that particular hotel.
‘Good to be back’ was Gabriel’s response while looking around his surroundings, ‘and please call me Gabriel.’
Gabriel took a deep breath through his nose, removed his sunglasses and smiled before picking up a pen to sign in to the hotel. A bright yellow glare in the iris of both his eyes soon settled to a strong blue colour. To Gabriel it did indeed feel good to be back.
‘Usual room sir?’
‘Yes that would be nice; calling me Gabriel would also be nice.’
‘Room 355 it is sir…’
Gabriel’s eyes began to glow a dark red for only just a moment forcing the clerk to continue ‘… Gabriel … sir.’
Gabriel moved to sit on a couch in the hotel lobby. On front of where he sat stood a small coffee table which had a wooden frame and a glass centre. On the other side of that table there was another couch facing his way where a man sat reading a newspaper.
‘Hello Lucius.’
‘Well if it isn’t Gabriel Grimmel’ spoke a man in his late twenties who began to fold his newspaper, placing it down to his left before sitting back in to the couch on his side of the table.
‘Somehow I doubt that this meeting is just an accidental coincidence and as for your buddies Luke and Daniel, I bet that I would be right in saying that they are not very far away either.’
Glancing down at the table Gabriel would also sit back into his own seat.
‘What is wrong Gabriel? Not afraid of a little glass are we?’
‘You don’t really want me to comment on that now do you?’
Gabriel allowed his fangs to descend and was sure to let Lucius see them.
‘Relax Gabriel. We, my friends and I that is, respect what you have going this weekend and we will continue to respect it. I have no problem though to inform you that come daylight Monday morning, all bets are off.’
‘I wouldn’t expect anything less, your father thought you well.’
Gabriel stood put on his sunglasses and smiled, ‘by the way, who says that I am not relaxed?’
Lucius picked his newspaper up and opened it at where he had stopped reading while Gabriel moved away.
Brian and his family were the next guests to arrive. Lucius having noticed this arrival made his way into the hotel bar area. The first thing Brian asked about was what the whole VAMPIRE WEEKEND thing was all about. He wondered if it was a themed weekend and if so should he and his family have come in some sort of fancy dress? Although he thought to himself that his daughter Janice may have already come prepared and maybe in some ways so too had Alice. The desk clerk explained that this weekend had no gimmick to it at all and that it was just a weekend whereby there would be a truce in operation between vampires and humans so they can co-exist without anything going a rye. Brian gave the clerk such a look as if to say ‘vampire’s, yeah right’. The clerk could almost read Brian’s thoughts just by looking at him and would speak in an almost convincing manor.
‘I assure you sir, vampires are very real, and they’ll be staying at this establishment throughout the weekend.’
Slightly disappointed and relieved at the same time while also thinking the desk clerk needs his head examined Brian signed in and asked for two rooms. He still wanted to go to his cabin in the woods but he was most definitely not in the mood to try to convince any of the others to force a change to the scenery.
‘We have two rooms together on the third floor, rooms 356 and 357’. The girls complained. If they could have their way, they would stay in a room as far away as possible from their parents, but their dad wasn’t having any of it, the girls got to choose the holiday destination, but they were to stay in the room right next to their parents.
‘That will be fine’ Brian told the clerk.
It was just before four on the Friday afternoon when the family entered their rooms, mum Denise told the girls to be ready for five o’clock so they could go for dinner together as a family. The girls were ok with that, they usually argue with their parents over everything but they were hungry so they were happy enough to go for food in an hour or so.
As they got themselves ready the girls failed to realize that they had left the door to their hotel room slightly open. Gabriel Grimmel however did notice this as he passed by, having only just left his own room. He stopped turned and returned to stand in front of the door to the twin sisters’ room. While Alice was in the shower Janice from inside the hotel room noticed the door was indeed slightly open but she began to feel uneasy as she approached to close it. She felt a strange sensation. Within this moment things definitely did not feel right. There was a strange sense of familiarity to it too. Janice knew she should just close the door over but she was compelled to open it fully. She picked up a small lamp in her right hand and with her left hand opened the door in one swift motion half expecting to see someone or something on the other side of that door but there was nothing there. Janice stuck her head out into the hallway looking both ways but could see no one.
Alice usually sings and makes plenty of noise when she is in the shower, but things were unusually quiet after Janice had shut the hotel room door. Janice pushed open the door to the bathroom. To her things were very quiet, too quiet. The curtain was pulled around the bath tub which incorporated the shower. The room was fairly well steamed up but there was no water running. Alice was not singing. She was not making any sound at all. The only movement Janice could be sure of was that of her own. The steam began to dissipate with the door to the bathroom being open. Janice quietly called out for Alice asking if she is ok. There was no response. Steam had cleared enough to reveal a pool of red on the bathroom floor. Janice slowly and fearfully got closer and closer to the shower curtain and what she saw when she pulled back the curtain sent her running out of her hotel room and down the hallway screaming as loudly as she could. Her dad heard the scream, probably along with everyone else in the hotel; he got to Janice before she could get too far away.
There was no way Brian was completely going to calm Janice but he did manage to get a response out of her when he asked her what was wrong. When Janice had pulled back the shower curtain, she saw Alice lying motionless in the bath tub with both her wrists having been cut across from one side to the other. Blood oozed out from both cuts. Blood dripped from Alice’s right wrist onto the floor as her arm rested against the bath tub with the palm of her hand facing upwards. The reaction to seeing such a thing sent Janice into a panic. It had been something she most definitely had not expected to see even with the whole sense of familiarity she had in that moment. Denise stood at her hotel door as Janice told of what she had seen and Denise would soon let out a scream of her own. Brian called for Denise asking her to come and stay with Janice where she was in the hallway so that he could go check on Alice.
When Brian entered the girls’ room he could hear singing coming from the bath room. The shower was running. Alice was alive and well. She screamed at her father to get out. Being naked and showering, she hardly wanted her father to be in the same room as her. Brian refused to leave without seeing his daughters’ wrists. One arm at a time Alice showed her dad her wrists through a gap in the shower curtain. There was not a mark on her and Brian was left wondering as to what the hell was going on.
At this point Janice became overwhelmed by that strange sense of familiarity. It was as if she was in two places at the same time. This however was more than a twin connection acting up. The feeling was more like as if she was having an out of body experience but rather than floating out above herself Janice felt trapped in between states. Between the conscious and sub-conscious with Janice being caught within the moment she had just experienced and the memory of the dream with the drop of blood hanging in mid air, if indeed that was even a dream at all.
After things had calmed down, and everyone had readied themselves, the family began to make their way to the hotel restaurant. They met outside their hotel rooms before heading down towards the elevators. When the elevator door opened a tall man exited, his dark shoulder length hair was slicked back and he wore tinted glasses, a dark suit with a blood red shirt and no tie with sunglasses hanging from his jacket’s breast pocket. Adjusting his tinted glasses the man continued along his way. The very same man was sitting on a couch in the lobby when the family themselves exited the elevator. Brian seemed to be the only one to notice that man, that man of course being Gabriel Grimmel. Before Brian could inquire as to how this man could have got from the third floor to the lobby before he and his family did and as to why that man exited the elevator on the third floor only to return to the lobby, he was interrupted by the girls arguing about what had happened earlier.
‘Girls, girls that is enough’ spoke Brian, ‘can we not just get one night or even just an hour or two where we can just be civilised and be a family?’
The twins quietened, Alice smiled while Janice crossed her arms and looked away before all four continued on their way to the hotel restaurant. As they did so, Lucius followed by two men made his way out of the bar and towards the exit, glancing over to Gabriel and then at his watch. Gabriel acknowledged the move knowing that Lucius and his two companions wherever they were going would ultimately not move too far away.
All during dinner Janice felt that everything was not as it should be, she almost knew that there was something wrong, something different about her sister but she just put the whole thing down to whatever it was that she had experienced earlier along with her blood drop dream having an adverse effect on her, however even Brian and Denise took notice when Alice ordered a fillet steak blue.
It had already begun to get dark by the time dinner had been finished. Still worried about the incident earlier both Brian and Denise were prepared to let the girls do their own thing as they themselves would go on to enjoy a drink or two in the hotel bar. Brian made sure both girls had their mobile phones switched on and with them before they left.
Quite a crowd had gathered in the lobby by this time. Some were checking into the hotel while others were lounging around on the lobby furniture. Strangely enough there was not even one mirror anywhere in the lobby and this was something that both girls would only just notice for the first time. Even though Janice and Alice were well used to being stared at, they couldn’t help but feel a little uncomfortable as if all eyes were on them while those watching in their own way seemed a little strange too.
‘Would you like to join us ladies?’ asked Gabriel as he went on to introduce himself. Janice recognized that voice straight away.
‘What the hell is going on?’ she wondered as she gasped and opened her eyes wide. Janice hesitated for a moment. Her intrigue overpowered her wonder and a calm feeling quickly set in.
‘All is ok sister, we are all friends here’ Alice assured Janice.
Later in the evening Brian and Denise were shocked and in particular Brian was angered to find that the girls had joined company with the gathered crowd in the lobby among which sat the man Brian had noticed earlier. It had also looked like the girls had also been drinking what appeared to be red wine. Brian ordered the girls to go to their room, before beginning to make their way to their own room Alice told her dad to relax, and that they were only having fun. Gabriel got up from where he was sitting and approached Brian.
‘Sir I must apologise, I invited the girls to sit with us, I should have had made sure with your good self that this invite would be ok with you. I can inform you though that the invite was in good keeping.’
Inside Brian was furious, he was fuming.
‘I suppose you are one of these so called Vampires?!’
‘Yes sir, that would be correct. My name is Gabriel Grimmel and I am not looking for trouble, all I want is to improve relations between ourselves and the human race, I can see no reason why we cannot both live together in peace.’
Gabriel held out his hand in front of Brian. While ignoring Gabriel’s offer of a hand shake, Brian pointed his own finger in the face of the man who stood before him.
‘I do not care who you are ok? Just stay away from my daughters and please leave us the hell alone.’
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