Ophelia Banks

By Gail Fulkerson   

The little girl awoke to a damp and dreary evening; raindrops stained the windows and sluggishly meandered down the panes. She could hear faint rumblings of thunder and could see small, intermittent flashes of lightning in the distance. The storm would be overhead in a matter of hours. It was the perfect backdrop for the events that would soon unfold.

                                                          **********

Ophelia Banks is a precocious10-year-old vampire-child who is small for her age. Her blond curls and striking blue eyes endeared her to many of the townspeople, but they have no idea of her true identity.

She had little need of sleep, but enjoyed the feeling of lounging in a bed, wrapped in cozy blankets and afghans and surrounded by myriad pillows. Her stuffed teddy bear, Bronwyn, watched over the coffin when Ophelia wasn’t around. When she was ‘turned’ from human to vampire back in 1790, her maker, an old vampire named Aloysius, made it so. He had envisioned Ophelia as a companion, much like a pet, to keep him company in the ensuing years, but she had other, grander, plans. In the decades that followed, Ophelia managed to rid herself of Aloysius by frying his ass in the noonday sun, early on in the new 19th century. It didn’t take long, just a few minutes by her count; an eternity by his. Ophelia watched, ears plugged with candle wax to lessen the pitiful sounds of the old bugger’s screams, until the last embers died and the breeze took the ashes aloft. Aloysius was gone for good.

Many’s the evening she awoke just after darkness fell to discover that light had gotten in through a pinhole in her coffin lid and fried a small area on her body. The pain wasn’t enough to awaken her, but the small, circular scars were adding up and she didn’t want questions about them, so she made the necessary repairs to the inside of the coffin lid with a well-known spray-on black rubber compound. As much as she disliked shopping, Ophelia knew it was only a matter of time before her coffin completely fell apart. Before that happened, Ophelia ordered a snazzy, custom-made coffin, ebony wood with black leather accoutrements and obsidian handles, from the funeral home on Kenderdine in Saskatoon.

                                                           **********

Ophelia went to the drug store looking for a foundation that matched her skin tone: cadaver white. Not finding anything in the beauty department, she went to the office supplies aisle in search of correction fluid that she would blend with a small amount of charcoal to match her skin tone. Luckily for her, there was a tiny brush inside the bottle that she could use to apply the altered liquid to her burns and no one would be the wiser. Once at home, she mixed up the concoction and dabbed the fluid onto the black, circular wounds. It made a definite difference — instead of black spheres, she was dotted with corpse grey ones that were quite pronounced. Should anyone ask her what happened, she’d tell them there was an accident at the school and a few bottles of correction fluid had exploded, splashing her and a few other kids. It seemed plausible enough…  
    
Waiting for sunset, as she had done for a few hundred years, Ophelia watched through inky black sunglasses for the final flare of the departing light as the sun dipped below the horizon. She always loved seeing it, because it signalled the darkness was soon to follow. Then she lifted off. Once she cleared the trees in the yard, she ‘turned on the jets’ and, without leaving a vapour trail to mark her ascent, she shot straight up towards the moon. A vampire with a practiced eye could make out the afterburners, but all a human would be able to discern only an unidentifiable, streaking, dark orb.

                                                              **********

Just before daybreak, Mrs. McCarthy, screamed bloody murder when she found her beloved pet Yorkie, Cecil, dead on the doormat at her front door. Her crying awoke the neighbours on both sides of the street, who thought an intruder had gained entry to the McCarthy home and slaughtered her husband, and perhaps their two children. When they discovered it was the dog that had been killed, they offered the woman their condolences and walked back to their homes, perhaps to try to go back to sleep, or more likely, to start the coffee pot going. Hardly any blood was found on the porch, which struck Mrs. McCarthy as odd when she thought about it. The wound on little Cecil’s neck looked torn and ragged, although something had ripped the skin instead of slicing it open. She knew her fur baby was small, but the loss of blood should have left a sizeable puddle around the corpse; there was no evidence of that. It was a conundrum to be sure, and one that Mrs. McCarthy would ruminate upon for years to come.

Ophelia wiped an errant drop of dog blood from the corner of her mouth with a linen handkerchief on which her mother had hand embroidered the letter ‘O’ in one corner, then crocheted a tiny border around the entire item. Her mother died shortly thereafter, in 1789, hit by a team of horses pulling a carriage in the main thoroughfare, leaving Ophelia an orphan.

It was at her mother’s graveside that Ophelia met Morgana, a kindly woman who was willing to take her in and teach her things she’d need to know to get by in the world. One night, after the lessons and dinner dishes were done, Morgana suggested to Ophelia that there was a way to communicate with her dead mother. At first, Ophelia was shocked that Morgana would suggest such a thing, then, thinking on it that night, she decided to listen to what Morgana had to say. She drew up a chair by the fire and asked Morgana to tell her story.
    
“My child,” she began, “there are things in this world that are known to a very few people, me being one. I believe that at your age you are able to comprehend and apply the information I’m about to impart to you. Are you ready?”
    
Ophelia nodded eagerly. Morgana began to describe magical beings and the places they reside, the magic that’s in this world and in all others, and that death is merely a transition from this life to the next one. Ophelia took it all in and asked for more.

“It’s getting late and the sun will be up soon. I’ve opened your coffin and changed the sheets for you. Your stuffed animal, Beauregard, is waiting for you by your pillow. Have a good sleep, my dear,” said Morgana. With that, Ophelia padded downstairs to the basement and into her coffin, quietly closing the lid as she stifled a yawn.

Thus began Ophelia’s training in the arcane arts.

                                                                **********

The years carried on. Ophelia did not age — no crow’s feet or arthritis for her — yet the ones close to her did. One by one they died, leaving her alone in the world once more. Being a vampire, Ophelia would forever remain a diminutive blonde and blue-eyed ten year-old ‘girl’. After roaming the world alone since 1790, solitude was her choice.  

                                                                **********

The vampire in her was becoming thirsty. The Yorkie had satisfied her craving for blood, but it had been days since she drank. Ophelia dreamed of biting into the necks of her neighbours and tasting the sweet life’s blood as it filled her mouth. She awoke starving after one of these dreams, and she could feel herself getting weaker as the days wore on. She would have to feed, and soon.
    
Ophelia was out for a midnight stroll when she stumbled upon a stabbing in an alley and watched, blue eyes blazing with an unholy fire, as the assailant stabbed their victim again and again. The victim fell dead, but the perpetrator was very much alive, overheated blood coursing through their body, ripe for the reaping. She leapt upon the killer’s back in an instant, biting into hot flesh, and tasting the coppery blood as it flooded her mouth. The man screamed, but no one was within earshot. Ophelia clamped down on his neck in earnest, sucking his blood faster and faster. The man tried to buck her off, but Ophelia was much too strong. It wouldn’t be long before he succumbed, and she could unlatch and watch his dead body fall in a heap in the alley. She made sure to wipe her mouth on his clothes before she resumed her walk.
    
Oh, the things you see when you go out walking…

                                                               **********

Ophelia’s next victim was an elementary school teacher. She found her out walking the dark streets during a rain storm, trying to decide whether to end her career in education or to end her own life. The woman’s thoughts were as dark as the wet, glistening pavement, deeper than the puddles accumulating on the sidewalk. The little blonde-haired and blue-eyed girl stepped out of a shadowy entrance and into the path of the teacher.

The next morning, a woman’s body was found lying face-down in a puddle on the sidewalk. The police surmised that whatever blood had been shed at the scene had since been washed away by the rain, and left it at that.

Ophelia’s blood lust was sated as she made her way home, but she would have to hurry — the first light was stirring just beyond the horizon. She passed cats who were hunting for mice and rats that made their way out of the sewers; dogs who wandered the streets looking for scraps to eat; and homeless people who never seemed to sleep at night, much like her.

The local newspapers reported the stories of the dead teacher, the stabbing victim and their killer, and attempted to hobble together a plausible explanation for the deaths. Most people who read the account in the papers accepted the explanation at face value, but there were others in town who didn’t buy it. There was no explanation for the puncture marks on the necks of two of the victims. Someone suggested that those two had died from a vampire attack, and were summarily ridiculed for saying it. Ophelia snickered as she read the fabricated accounts of her exploits; no one would believe that a tiny little girl had succeeded in killing three adults in one night — it just wasn’t possible.
    
The townspeople soon forgot about that night and carried on with their daily lives. Ophelia kept to the shadows and only came out when there was a killer on the loose. She acquired the taste for criminal blood when she reaped the guy who’d stabbed the woman in the alley. The longer she hunted, the more criminals she found: there was no shortage of them in the alleyways, back streets, or homeless shelters and encampments. And the pickings were good.

Ophelia learned that to remain under the radar she would have to keep moving from city to city, never staying more than a few months before moving on.

                                                              **********
    
Recently, there have been a spate of missing elderly relatives and pets in a community in Saskatchewan…

-- Gail Fulkerson is a writer who specializes in the supernatural. She lives with her family in Saskatchewan, where she is working on another story. This is the first story in a series about Ophelia Banks. Stay tuned to 'OZ' for future stories.