Vampire Obsession

Vampire obsession…

Vanessa had always liked vampires. Not the ones from the legends, by the way; those deformed, rotten beings, capable of making their way from their coffins by swallowing earth, capable of gnawing unburied bones, devouring rats, chewing their own limbs if food was scarce.

No, she liked the elegant, seductive, pale vampires; perfectly capable of loving a person for centuries, entire millennia.
Book after book, she fantasized about cherishing that feeling of perpetuity: feeling eternally loved, wanted.
And because she liked these vampires so much, she read everything there was to read about them.
And she read voraciously, stopping at those paragraphs that shook her, going back, rereading. Her husband had gotten used to those late-night readings. He had even gotten used to hearing her read aloud, to murmur, over and over again, those paragraphs that overwhelmed her.
In any case, her husband knew that if Vanessa got a new book, it was best to put a couple of cotton balls in his ears, because the night would be long. For some reason that he could never figure out, and that she could not fully explain either, new texts that fell into her hands had to be read aloud.

She couldn’t help it, but in order to preserve her marital health, Vanessa had managed to reduce her murmurings to a barely audible tone.

And one night, almost by chance, she found a folded piece of paper, a handwritten note, inside the latest romance novel she had checked out from the library.

She said the following:

From the Flamma Tenebrae and the Summa Nocturna, lost pages of the Memento Umbrarum, repeat once the arcane prayer; once, and only once: NSPHRS VMPRS INCS et SCCBS CNVCT.
Those words, but especially the calligraphy, as if traced by the thin legs of a spider, terrified her. She felt them like a sticky substance clinging to her lips, and she knew that she had whispered them.

She tossed the note in the trash, washed her hands, her mouth, and ran down the hall back to her room. She found it absurd, and even amusing, that after having read so many vampire stories, she felt terrified by a paltry quote, undoubtedly apocryphal.

She opened the blinds to wake up with the first light of day, and went to bed.

Her husband stirred a little, groaning about something in his sleep, but he didn’t wake up. Vanessa was able to surrender again to her fantasies, to her seductive, phlegmatic, hypnotic vampires, pale as the moon, until she fell asleep.

When she woke up she was under the bed. The blinds were closed.
It was night?
Was it already dawn?
In her mouth there was a different taste from a long night’s sleep, a taste like metal, greasy coins…
(Blood?)

She felt a little dazed, dissatisfied, unwanted…
(She felt hungry)
From her bed, just above her, a thin trickle of blood was dripping.
She ran her tongue over the sharp canines.
It had started…

https://dimidesan.com/alouqua-the-female-demon-of-passion-and-madness/