Dream Spores - 2. Vampire Invasion

We were in a hotel room with a girl of ten to twelve years we were supposed to watch. I think we were supposed to be some kind of guardians to her, parents of a sort. She wanted to go out and do something but wasn't allowed at first. When I got back from a failed attempt at a get-together to play a boardgame with school friends (who hadn't all shown up), we had got a package.

The parcel had no description of the contents on it, nor a label specifying the sender. So we turned it around and looked at it before prying it open. It contained raw ground meat in supermarket sized plastic packages. I got a terrible hunch then. On the inside of the flap we had opened there was a label reading "Kunterbunte Kindermischung" (=colourful children's mix), which turned, upon looking at it a second time, into "Kunterstumme Kindermischung" (=mute children's mix), and as I was going to investigate the horrifying package further to find out whether this really was -

-- our preadolescent girl there had one of those packages in her hand, opened, and was eating from it. I commanded her to stop immediately. She made a face and complained, of course, but I paid it no mind.

We were outside in this nice old, touristy city that consisted mainly of old architecture with precious little vegetation, and we were observing a particular woman. I remember she was a villain of some sort. (She looked a lot like the gallerist in the BBC Sherlock series who tries to sell a fake Vermeer.) She had a twin or doppelgänger, whom we spotted in the crowd as well, so we had to be careful to follow the right one.

But we lost her, because very quickly the streets cleared as people suddenly hurried into buildings and side alleys and vanished from view. We didn't, although we knew exactly what this behaviour meant. There were dangerous creatures on the loose. Zombies, vampires, whatever. We hadn't seen any yet, but whichever it was, it was wise not to stay in one place, so we moved down a street and my companion (a girl who didn't look like you at all, but felt like you. For some reason we looked exactly the same - not like me either) suggested we find a house to sit it out as well, and I agreed. We moved down a street past shuttered, blank facades until it became slightly less stony and we reached a garden. Maybe it was even the shy edge of a park.

There was a treehouse up in a ... well, a tree, of course, that had only three walls. The mostly open side faced the street. Nevertheless we thought this perfect to sit out the attack (we still hadn't seen even one of the monsters), because there was no one else inside and it seemed to have been built and furnished just for this purpose. As we climbed up, I noticed movement and soft shuffling noises down below a sort of bridge - it's hard to describe, but this particular yard and tree where on top of an undergrade crossing, an underbridge, with a metal fence on its edge of course, and down there the city continued. And the movement I caught in the corner of my eye was not one of the monsters on the prowl, but a group of young people with backpacks, clubs and guns, sneaking through the street, out of the underbridge and around the street corner. I reckoned they were being adventurous. Good people.

My companion and I climbed up into the treehouse, however, and agreed that we'd stay here until it seemed more comfortable outside. I don't know how, when or why exactly, but she left at some early point, was pretty much gone then, I think on some kind of errand maybe. I killed some time by wondering at the huge panel of tiny lights set up in the open side, facing the area you had to pass through when you climbed up the ladder and entered the boxy open room. I found a white remote control, flat and long, and turned it on. The lights were colourful and flat, they reminded me of solar cells. I couldn't figure out what their purpose was.

I have no idea how suddenly it happened, when and why, but they sat there in armchairs and on blanketcovered cushions right at the edge of the room (at the opening and by the big, mysterious lamp). They looked like people of course, but they were the monsters. They reminded me so strongly of Zillah and his crew from Lost Souls. Because a) they were vampires, b) they were sort of youthful, c) they oozed violence and sadism, d) they were goodlooking, e) they had an obvious leader, the most attractive of them, an almost androgynous boy/ young man with a pleasant, but cruel smile, who was the only talker.

He addressed me. I don't remember with what and what we were talking about, though. I only remember trying to use the remote control to turn the mystery lights on because I thought I'd figured out now that they were supposed to keep the monsters away. But when one of the vampires handed me the control as I asked, it was halved. It was a short end of it, and the one without the button I needed for the big lightboard. I asked him for the other part and had to wrestle it out of his hands a bit, but he relinquished it and I put the remote back together, pressed the button in question, the lights turned on, the leader turned around a bit and looked up at them, then back at me and smirked.

The fucking thing didn't work on them.

I groaned a bit in annoyance and threw the remote over my shoulder. I sat down in front of this leader person, right between two of his cronies lounging on the cushions, to pay more attention to the conversation we were having. A name came up, "Reita". That was his name? Alright, that sounds about right. But wait, no. I already know a person with that name. It's undeniably a DIFFERENT person.

Then I was shown a piece of paper that read: "Veigta". Oooh, ok. Sounds right. But strange.

Something's off with it.

Here it ended.