The Bats

It was in the cold night of that day, April 15, 1913, a year after the biggest ship in the world struck a huge iceberg and sank in the vast oceans of the North Atlantic, Sybelle, the beautiful daughter of Armand sat on her favorite chair, in front of the organ she liked to play best. In several strokes of he little fingers on the keyboard of the new piano that Armand gave her a month ago, she produced the sonorous rhythm of soprano alto that filled the air, attracting by passers outside to stop for a while and listen to the music being played in a distant. Those who were being allured by her sonata would gaze at the lighted window above, in huge three-storey redbrick house in Metairie, countrified suburb of New Orleans, and wondered about the marvelous person with a wonderful gift of music. Armand would always love to hear his beloved daughter play that song, the Appasionata from allegro assai or the First Movement in their rapid phrases as he lulled himself to sleep. She had a younger brother, Benjie who also loved to hear his sister play. Both of them loved the unusual ringing preciseness of her music that seemed to be the language of night during those nights they have been fully-fed by the blood of those criminals that sustained their immortality.
“You’re getting better everyday!” It was David Talbot, a man with a dark bronzed skin and a dry, thick black hair. He was young, about 20 years old. He was clapping from the hallway and entering the door, he praised Sybelle’s sonata. He caught sight of Pandora sitting on the couch on the right corner of the room and sat right beside her.
“She is the best.” Pandora suggested.
“Yeah, I’d better agree.” He replied.
“So what hurricane brings you here, my beloved David?” Her voice had a tinge of sarcasm on it. “Armand isn’t here by now, he had to go somewhere.”
“Nothing, I just missed our little talks.”
“Oh it’s you David!” Sybelle stopped playing and walked towards them.
He got up and gave Sybelle a gentle kiss and Pandora was not directly looking a them but was heeding at their conversation.
“I visited a friend from nearby and just thought of dropping here.”
“Well that’s good. It’s quite a long time since we talked.”
“I’d better go and find Armand.” Pandora interrupted. “Maybe we can talk some other time David, and Sybelle please take care of him.”
They took the concrete path towards the garden and Sybelle, sniffing the cold air from the east while David was tailing her. She smiled as she looked at their long-legged shadows that slipped in and out of trees under the bright moon.
“I love this scene at night.” Sybelle cut off the silence.
“Maybe we love the beauty of night,” David stopped and inhaled first the soft breeze before continuing, “it’s because we are beings who only have life at night.”
“And sometimes, it makes me sick all over. It’s not just the blood that we suck from these mortals. Sometimes it’s this Earth; it makes me feel as if it’s my purgatorial prison. You know what David; I don’t know what power it is that made me survived. I’m not afraid of death, but I can feel it, it’s like a shadow looming over us.”
“You’re talking nonsense Sybelle. You probably know our bodies are immortal, unlike these weak humans.”
“I never thought my dreams of blood would end up in this. I’ve never told anyone about this David, but I think I would burst if I continue keeping it.”
She gazed at the full moon above, preparing her thoughts. At their silence, swarm of bats came squeaking and disappeared suddenly behind the big trees.


She was sixteen then, living with her younger brother Benjie and her old parents in an old town in New Orleans. Her father was a businessman who traveled for days and weeks in different countries, while her mother waited for his return like any faithful dog waiting for his master.
Her dreams of a beautiful woman dressed in gold, with her accessories glinting as the light struck on them started soon as she arrived at her sixteenth year. She was beautiful, perhaps a queen, an ancient queen of an ancient land. Yet it was not her dazzling beauty that always appeared in her dreams that mystified Sybelle. In her dreams, the beautiful woman was cupping a red liquid with her hands from a fountain; it was blood, a fountain of blood! And Sybelle could hear her feminine laughter. “It is I who summoned you!”
She kept on telling her dreams to her father whenever he was at home and yet her father would always gave her the same answer.
“It’s because of your stupid fascination with women.” He would say.
She believed she had disappointed her father. He wanted her to become the decent woman like her mother. And that decency wouldn’t allow her to have an intimate affair with a woman. Whenever her father was not at home, she would invite her girlfriends in their house and they would just hang around, teasing and laughing with each other. And it was her mother who would tell her father about their whereabouts.
Some nights, Sybelle together with her friends had to sit on the wooden benches by the park to watch cars and people pass by, under the luminous moon and flickering lights of the stars and let the lousy time passed by.
They went there again one Saturday evening and strolled on the street side by the park. They stopped at Hermo’s coffee shop to have a sip of black coffee when Sybelle spotted a young woman sitting on the left corner of the shop. Her eyes searched for someone who might be the companion of the woman, but there were only her friends. She had dark, innocent eyes, a beautifully-carved nose and a lustrous hair. She had a very well-formed face; Sybelle thought she maybe was waiting for someone.
The next night they were there in that coffee shop again, with Sybelle’s persuasion of her friends, hoping that she would see the woman again. Her friends were chattering but she was carefully waiting on her chair in her furtive thoughts, and feeling a bit nervous for she was planning to introduce herself, if in case she was alone; that woman who had a beautiful hair and a dark intense eyes. In her silence, she could hear again the feminine laughter of the ancient queen, and it recurred to her, the words in her dreams; “It is I who summoned you!”
The shop had transparent window panes and beyond her gaze, she saw the woman coming towards them. She was wearing a black dress and her looks still looked the same, the brilliance of her face struck her secret disposition.
She was silently waiting on her chair, carefully watching the woman beyond the glass window. The shop had a solid door in the middle but she didn’t see the woman enter.
Sybelle leaned on her chair, looked at the people inside and searched for the woman. She was not there, finally she sighed. A moment later she excused herself from her friends and decided to go home. She said she was not feeling well but deep inside was her frustration.
She slowly walked the street side along the park, thinking of her dreams that bothered her fro several nights. She thought of the ancient woman, her laughter and the blood that she cupped to drink. It was the last bench near the street that she was about to pass when her eyes caught sight of the woman sitting there. The woman who dressed in black, the same woman she was waiting to enter the shop an hour ago. She stopped to look at the woman, while the latter, feeling someone’s eyes watching her turned to look at her direction. They stared at each other as if the woman knew what was on Sybelle’s mind. She darted from her position and walked towards Sybelle.
“Pandora.” She introduced herself and smiled, extending her hand to Sybelle who was still caught in silence. “I’ve long been watching you.”
It was a beautiful name and Sybelle saw again the brilliance of her beauty in one frozen instant glowing in the radiance of the moon: dark eyes and fresh, red lips, lustrous, black hair, smooth skin and a full breast hugged tight by her long black dress. Realizing Pandora’s arm extending before her, she received it, feeling its smoothness yet she couldn’t understand the extreme coldness in it.
They sat compatibly on the nearby bench and watched the moon closely. They were silent and Sybelle couldn’t dare speak.
The nocturnal bats came squeaking up in trees. The gentle wind at night blew calmly, kissing their smooth cheeks.
“The bats feed every night.” It was Pandora who broke off the silence. “They’re on their refuge when the sun comes up.”
As if the bats had interested her, but Sybelle just sat there, she was not responding to Pandora. It was not the conversation that would start up the night. They could just sit there and feel each other’s presence. With Pandora, she felt safe and warm.
“Can we be in some other place?” Sybelle asked the woman as the people on the other benches were beginning to talk noisily and their chattering seemed to irritate her.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere.” She replied shortly.
Minutes later, she found herself in a big room and Pandora staring at the closed window. She didn’t know how she got there and she didn’t want to ponder on it either. She was too absorbed by the sensation brought by that room, with only the two of them and her thoughts of what will happen next.
She walked towards Pandora and they both looked at the moonlit surroundings outside.
“It’s cold over there.” Sybelle said.
Without Pandora’s response, Sybelle stared at her, at her beautiful eyes intently looking at the stillness outside. As if driven by the coldness, Sybelle’s hand came up slowly to fit against the curve of Pandora’s beautiful jaw while Pandora responded with her coaxing passionate kiss. Pandora’s fingers combed Sybelle’s thick, wavy hair until she sighed at the pleasure of being petted like a cat. Pandora was kissing Sybelle all over, more deeply, and more demandingly. It was a sparkling, irresistible feeling. There were only the two of them, and there was the slowly unfolding pleasure, lapping at the edges of their warm, insistent feelings like the heat being exerted by that room.
They were lying on that soft bed, watching the ceiling above while listening to each other’s throb. It was the throbbing that also lulled Sybelle to sleep.
By morning she found herself in her room. Everything that happened last night was like a dream yet it was all clear; how they talked in the park and the scene in that big room where she could still feel the stream of passion between them; between her and that mysterious woman with a beautiful name; Pandora. Even at her sweet slumber beside Pandora, she could hear her soft whispers, I know all about your dreams, but it’s not yet the time dear Sybelle.


“What does she say about your dreams Sybelle?” David asked.
“That night, she didn’t tell me about my dreams.”
“But how come you know about Queen Akasha?”
“It was only later, when I myself had drunk her blood, Pandora’s blood.”
She looked at David and diverted her gaze at the dark clouds.
“I killed my parents David.”


Sybelle and her father had a terrible fight one night, after he learned tat she was still hanging out with her boyish girlfriends. She knew she had disappointed him, even on his death. After that fight, her father had to go to Paris for another business transaction and by morning, he was on board on a huge shipping line. And sooner they learned about the terrible shipwreck on the vast oceans of the Atlantic where the only body that was not found was their father’s.
She saw how her mother grieved over the death of her father. She was kissing her picture like a madwoman and for nights, she could hear her sobbing that pierced her keen ears as she lay awake in her room.
And another cold night when Sybelle and Benjie walked the dark alley towards their house and several men appeared from behind the big trees and carried them by force, both of them blindfolded towards a silent place. She presumed it was the old cemetery, a few kilometers away from the town.
When the blindfolds were ripped off from their eyes, Sybelle was squinting in the dark, but she could see the nearby grave in blurring light. They were kneeling on the ground as the men held them tightly. The different faces of these men were clear to Sybelle and she will learn later from Benjie that these were the men whom he owed debts to. It was quite a large sum.
The men beat him terribly, as he struggled in pain and Sybelle was crying helpless. They kicked him hard while he whimpered softly like a dog being whipped by a merciless master. The man who was wearing all in black lighted a candle and pushed it towards Benjie’s face. He let a drop of hot wax from the melting candle in his eyes that made him scream more in pain.
Sybelle also felt the pain as Benjie struggled in anguish. She was crying and beyond the dark she saw another figure, yet it was a different figure from the men who abducted them. It was a blurry outline of a woman wearing a hood.
Like a flash of lightning, she saw how she ravished the men one by one, her fangs sinking into their necks. Both of them, Sybelle and Benjie saw in horror how she drank their blood, how she dispatched them all; her victims in an instant.
It was Pandora; she knew it was her, her beautiful face showed off yet faintly obscure in the dark, as her hood fell on her back.
Benjie staggered weak in one corner. Sybelle ran towards him and caught him on her arms. Pandora appeared standing before them. Sybelle’s eyes were felled with tears, pleading in pity, pleading the mysterious woman to do something for her brother.
The woman drew his blood, sipping through his neck and gave it back to him; her mouth on his mouth, his blood and her blood in one.

“I never saw Benjie for days and nights after that incident.”
“Didn’t you look for him? He asked.
“I searched for him and one night I went to that old cemetery. There I saw him lying weak. “I saw him suffered David.” Her voice was filled with sadness.
“But he was given another life.”
“I know, but I guess that life didn’t seem to be the gift after all. It seemed a curse.”
“You know it’s not a curse Sybelle.”
“I’m not sure David.”

Benjie was almost dead on top of the grave Sybelle was shaking him an he wasn’t moving either.
“Drink my blood Benjie!”
A shadow appeared from behind the dark, it was approaching them.
“What have you done to my brother?”
The figure in the dark was silent. She moved closer and without a word, she fed him again with her blood. Benjie stood up and walk uprightly like a soul without a life.
“It was the least I could do Sybelle.” Pandora said sadly.

“I asked her to do it for me, like what she did with my brother. Pandora did it without hesitation David.”
David carefully listened yet he was not responding at that moment.
“I also killed my mother.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t know. It wasn’t my intention and I never told my brother. One night, I was weak on my bed. I didn’t dare kill a mortal. She appeared on my door. I didn’t recognize her, but I could smell her blood. I even smelled it before she entered. In hunger, I ran towards her, drooling for flesh. I tore and open her throat as my mouth satisfied with blood. How it bubbled up out of the artery, over my lips. I drank all of her, until I was relieved with strength.”
Sybelle was now weeping softly while the man was just staring at her, silent, as if he was savoring the words that came out from Sybelle’s mouth like blood.
“I could feel her blood boiling inside me. Her death choking me as my vision became clearer again. How I wanted to die, perhaps I died in the moment Pandora made me into this creature I am now. It was death the moment I did my betrayal to my mother.”
The moon was now on its perfect curve, casting its light on the still trees, over the silent man and weeping woman.
“I’m afraid David. I could feel her soul and the other souls I’ve fed on everywhere. Perhaps death hasn’t found its way towards us but I might lead the way.”
She cast her words out to the still surroundings. The moon will fade moment later and there will be dusk.