IN THE SAVAGE GARDEN
by Auden, 1996
sarah-rhiannon.barber@corpus-christi.oxford.ac.uk

This is a work of speculative fiction.  No infringement of the copyrites
of Anne Rice or her publishers is intended. 

***********

I live in darkness. The night is all I ever see with my vampire eyes. But the
physical darkness that envelopes me now is a thing of beauty, the spiritual
darkness that surrounded me before was something other than this. It had seemed
to me that night was all I would ever know. The depression that hung heavily
upon me like a cloak, brushing against me when I walked, covering me tenderly
when I slept, had become so familiar that I accepted it as a part of myself. And
it was gentle. It demanded nothing of me. No actions, no words. 

My initiation into the savage garden recreated passion for me. My death, actual
and symbolic, opened the way for a new person to be born. My birth to darkness
was an awakening. An end to the long sleep of my soul.

I kill indiscriminately, for that is my nature. Nature has always divided her
children into the hunters and the hunted and I have simply changed categories.
To walk in beauty and power instead of in fear is a gift not easy dismissed, and
to deny my nature would be to dismiss it. I do not ascribe to the masquerade of
humanity, the illusion that my appearance defines my nature. I am a predator and
whether or not the prey realises it in time, I must accept this in myself. 

To change from passive to active is also not easy. But the transition from
mortal to vampire has demanded this of me. Speed, strength, skill, the abilities
I now possess must be used. If I dance myself into a frenzy or kill with the
rage of a beserker, either way it is the expression of what I am. Fear me. Hate
me. The mortal world has no power to hurt me any more, it touches me like a
breath of wind, barely noticed, not worth the regard of a moment. 

Equally, love me, and I will take as little interest. I lack even a scientific
curiosity in the human race now. The passions that animate it are not mine. The
time when they had the power to move me is so far in the past now that it seems
little more than a dream. I know we are worshipped, even adored. A cult of
darkness has grown up around us among those who would also share in our vampire
night. It is the combination of beauty and danger that mortals find erotic, with
the added seductive force of death. For death is the ultimate seducer. I also
thought to find peace within its embrace. 

Peace is the last thing that I have found. I died every day I lived. But once I
was born to darkness I found the life which had been wanting in me. It is not
the same for all of us. The dark gift is a kind of insanity. The madness it
brings takes us all in different ways. But I, who had thought passion dead to
me, have found it again in this endless night.

It is darker and colder than mortal passion. The lusts we inspire in mortals
fail to animate us. I had loved both men and women. I had drowned in that wave
of lust and heat, been lifted by it, and felt it flooding down around me. Now
for many I am that wave, but I am no longer carried by it. It crashes against me
to no avail. My passions are other than this. Dark blood flows in my veins,
drums in my ears, like the spirit of the night. I am filled with darkness,
defined and embraced by it. 

Love us if you will, but you will never understand us. We are alien. The 
humanity you seek for in us has been erased, we wear its shell, its outward
visage. But the night deceives and so do we. What graces the shadows is not
human. We are the hunters in the savage garden and those gates, once passed, are
locked against us.


THE END