Vampire's snare

There is no escape. I look around the moonlit room, my eyes slipping over the ornate woodwork of the wall panels, my interest lingering on the only two doors that lead into my self made prison. Like many in the mad rush of blind terror, I have foolishly backed myself into a corner and instead of giving me zeal and vigour I feel only an all consuming fear.

I no longer have the domain of rational thought, all that remains to me is animalistic twitching as my heart surges in my chest and a torrent, as if of a stormy sea, assails my eardrums as the blood rushes through them, near making me deaf to any other noise. Deaf? Or death? Such a word is too close to my fear for as sure as can be it is death that stalks me this night in a way that no creature of living ever could. Whilst I stand here in terror, blood coursing through my veins, another slowly, but surely, closes in.

The creature that hunts me this night does not suffer from the affliction of mortality. Blood does not run through its icy, dead veins; instead it's core is filled with the devils own serum, a damned being cursed with immortality.

I jerk from my reprieve as I feel a fell shadow fall over me. A heart that only moments before had pounded so vigorously suddenly stops near dead in my straining chest as a cold sweat moistens my brow. I pause. The world pauses. And when death does not come it dawns that the shadow over me was only the passing of a cloud over the moon. I take a shaky breath that has no hope of alleviating my hellish predicament.

No doubt the beast can sense the flow of my life in my veins. After all, it is that on which such a nightmarish fiend does thrive upon and they say that a predator has a sixth sense for knowing it's prey. Indeed it knew me well enough, knew me well enough to entice me here with it's charms and guile. Such a beautiful smile and such porcelain skin even I could not help but feel flattered by its charismatic crooning and oh so reasonable demands. And then it had me here in this old, run down mansion. Easily fifty miles from habitation. It devoured my friends first. It liked me to watch, I could see in its soulless eyes, how it enjoyed my horror.

I don't know whether it had expected me to make a break for it, it's cackle that chased me on my aimless fright suggested to me that it found it all a game, but I had managed to evade it. However the mansion was its minion, and twists and turns inspired to snare me at every turn leaving me ever more confused and dizzied and...lost.

I finally stumbled into this room, as fine a place to die as any I suppose. It was perhaps the least dusty and disused of all the rooms I had encountered but the air still held a must of ages to it.

I fright again. The door handle. It rattles. I am seized in the very heart of terror. Tears stream down my face, mingling with a torrent of cold perspiration. And then the door stops its rattling. A cackle can be heard receding and I stifle a very unmanly sob.

The sob is short lived. The sound of nails on glass spin me quickly from my self pity and fill me again with dread. There it is. It looks like a man, perhaps even an angel with such pale yet beautiful skin. But it's sharp canines are those of a demon and those blood red eyes are both eternally youthful and ancient beyond knowing.

It smiles to reveal said canines and releases its cackle. The clouds completely eclipse the moon and I am left in frantic darkness, dreading to see that face at the window but fearing even more the inability to see it. And then the clouds part again and moonlight illuminates the pane of glass. The monster is gone. I hold back my impulse to rush to the glass and search the surrounding area.

But I let out a sigh of relief. It has barely passed my lips before my breath is once again clenched.

Nails, tap, tap, tapping. I stare at the glass expecting to have missed the creature somehow. But it is not there and the nails are not tapping on glass. They are on wood. Wooden panelling. Realisation is reached at the instant that the vampire releases its cackle. I turn to it knowing there is nothing I can do and catching a glimpse of those teeth aiming straight at my exposed and pulsing jugular.

The cackling ceases and I am engulfed in darkness.