I was quite surprised, at the end of that day, just how quickly Thomas and I had bonded; it was only that afternoon when he had cornered me on the promenade with every intention of hurling me into the sea if I had failed his inquisition. But, at that moment, I couldn’t fathom my life without him! Marku’s presence on the ship did little to comfort me because he was on the hunt for our pursuers, so my want of him must have manifested in my increasing need for Thomas. Yet, I confess that the mysterious vision that had been haunting me ever since I awakened from it drew me all the closer to him.

After undressing for the night, and making sure my door was secure, I laid down upon my bed with my pistol aimed at the door, and me facing the same direction upon my right side. Soon thereafter I transitioned indiscernibly from my quiet, happy vigil back to my distant loft in Romania; I was sewing a luscious black velvet top for myself in the company of my watching mother as she hummed languidly over me. Even in that dream, I felt myself growing sleepy in perfect and happy contentment, and I set the project aside, pushed myself up from the floor and approached her with a deep yawn and both arms stretched high above me.

She took me into her lap and I fell asleep upon her breast a moment later, feeling the vibration of it against my cheek as she hummed softly to me.

Within that dream, I began remembering something that occurred more than a century prior; it was the first time my submerged self began to manifest. I took to creeping out of my previous parent’s castle in the long lost English countryside we used to inhabit; I was an only child, just as I was with my Romanian parents.

I developed a strange and perverse hunger on those nights when the thing in me began to emerge, and I grew more and more bold with each nocturnal excursion. By the time I was discovered by my parents, I had accumulated a group of willing prey to feed upon so that the monster in me could avoid killing; they were less averse to the taboo than the general population, and had an inexplicable tolerance for the bizarre and grotesque.

The first of them that I came to found me more intriguing than terrifying; even though I peered at her from the shadows of her bedchamber corner with eyes like green flame, she engaged me in conversation rather than attempting to run away screaming; it was as if she knew why I was there.

I slowly emerged from the corner, naked and soaked with the rain of that chilly autumn night; my taloned fingers caressing my dripping lips as I approached; but rather than mounting her, I sat on the edge of her bed and inquired the reason for her lack of fear. She told me that she fantasized about such things, but confessed that I was very different to the creature she imagined,

“How am I different?” I asked.

“Well,” she replied. “You’re naked; he’s not. You’re a girl; he’s not.”

“I’m not a girl,” I objected with an uncharacteristically human snicker for a demon of the night, “I look like one, yes, but I am a boy.”

“Oh?” she said, looking at my girlish breasts for a moment, then turning her eyes toward my more intimate place, “I don’t see anything there, are you sure you’re a boy?”

“You don’t see anything because it’s very small,” I replied sultrily with an unexpected explosion of amorous desire, “I really am as I have said.”

“Well,” she replied, “Whatever you may be, you are, certainly, a striking creature to my eyes, with a voice pleasant to my ears, and a scent that fills me with hunger! I would be pleased to explore you, and learn your secrets.”

“You are the most remarkable person I’ve ever met!” I exclaimed, finding her unconditional acceptance of me immensely arousing,

“I think you will find me almost as rare and remarkable as yourself,” she returned, with the look of fascination, and clear arousal of her own, marking her face, “I can bring myself to climax just by lying here and imagining such encounters. You are not aware how much I have wanted something like this; I just… never thought that it would come in the strange and alluring form you bring.”

“Are my anomalous features less subtle than those of the creature you’ve imagined?”

“Yes; very much so! For example; I’ve never seen a boy who is indistinguishable from a girl; I find your anomalies captivating. Tell me, how do you evade discovery?”

“You are witnessing a nocturnal condition,” I explained, “I revert to human form at the first sign of daylight.”

“What brought this upon you?”

“I cannot say.”

“Would you be rid of it if you could?”

“I don’t want to be rid of it,” I confessed, “But, yes! Though I love this torrent of unrelenting desire, I fear what I may become. The heightened physical experience this subjects me to; it is far more than I am capable of enjoying in my human form; yet, I know that I am something perverse: something dangerous, even!”

“It conflicts you?”

“Yes. It magnifies and lays bare all my secret desires; exposing me in ways that embarrasses me while occupying my diurnal form. But you are not terrified, or repulsed, by me like the others initially were; I find myself enchanted by your bravery.”

“You are quite intoxicating,” she remarked with a smile, “I want to observe you in your debasement; go ahead, debase yourself, I want to see it!”

“If,” I remarked with a shy smile, “I debase myself before you, you will not be able to restrain yourself! You would fall upon me and ravage me, though my strength, in this condition, far exceeds yours. I find you too unique to harm; I must never make you a monster to sate the one I am forced to harbor.”

“You will not make me a monster,” she replied, moving closer to me, “I’m already a monster! I’m an outcast because of my prurient ways; not even my own father can stand to look at me! I adore what you are; I even wish to be what you are! But, I can tell that you are a creature of conscience, and will not ask you to make me as yourself, since I could never be as kind to those who would fear and loathe me as you, apparently, are. But, I do ask that you pleasure me. I’ve ached for something as remarkable as yourself for such a long time; most men and women have no genuine idea what it’s like to be as different as we are! They repulse me with their conventional ways! I need more from this life than such banality; and, here you sit, upon my bed, naked, cold, and wet with the rain of the night; gazing upon me with those illumined, predatory eyes! I need you, more than I could ever convey to you!”

Her words seemed like healing to a long suffered wound; she melted away my insecurity by openly speaking of the passions that I so worked to conceal; it produced a very unusual response by resulting in a spontaneous, and potent, climax: heat surged from every extremity of me into my pudenda; my back arched; my head rolled back; I pressed my fists against my breast, and then reached to grip the quilt; my legs stiffened and quivered violently; an involuntary moan of release and, at last, the spilling of my burning magma upon her bed.

After this, I collapsed; the orgasm had seized me with such ferocity that I lay, spent, before her. With great effort, I rolled onto my side and faced my host; her understanding countenance faded to black as I drifted away.

Some indiscernible span of time had passed between that moment and the moment in which I awakened; my host no longer sat on the bed, but in a chair next to it; she had made a pot of tea and kept herself there, watching me intently as I slumbered. When she had seen me stirring, she poured a second cup and offered it to me,

“Here,” she said, “Sit up, and drink; it will rejuvenate you.”

I pushed myself up and sat on the wet spot that I had made; it was quite cold at that point,

“I regret soiling your bed,” I stated as I took the cup, “I’ve never had an unprovoked climax before; least of all, one capable of taking my vitality!”

“Do not regret it,” she implored, “I have other quilts. How is the tea?”

“Marvelous,” I said after taking a sip, “I should be going.”

“Not yet,” she begged, “Dawn is five hours away, you have plenty of time to stay and converse.”

“What is to converse?”

“You.”

I stared at her for a moment; I knew she was entranced by the unnatural light in my green eyes; the long, ebony claws that extended from my finger tips, and the intoxicating scent I emitted.

“You shouldn’t be so curious about me,” I replied after a moment, “Everything you’re feeling now seems to be physically induced by my condition; you wouldn’t feel such desire if you knew me diurnally.”

“I care not,” she returned, “I sat here for near an hour thinking you the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen! When you broke forth upon my quilt, I’ve never observed a more magnificent display of ecstasy and vulnerability; you are a gift to me, and I don’t want to lose you!”

“What are your designs?”

“It’s a proposal,” she explained as she set her cup on the table next to her, and then leaned toward me; taking in my scent, “You make these nocturnal visits to feed; I can help you do that without others being harmed.”

“How?”

“You need a group of people to share the load. I have friends who are equally prurient and bohemian as myself; they will adore you, just as I do! We write sexually taboo stories and pass them around to one another; we can give you what you need, and ease your mind in the process.”

I was momentarily stunned at the brilliance of her proposal,

“I would love that,” I laughed, “I cheerfully accept your proposal!”

“Wonderful,” she remarked, beaming with a glorious smile, “I will tell them of you tomorrow and make arrangements. Return tomorrow night, and we will begin.”

Her name was Helen. And after she sated me enough to bring my hunger to a manageable level, I left her cottage and ran home with the unnatural speed that my condition gives me; delighted with the new friend I had made. In addition, the assurance she gave me regarding the group feast provided the hope I needed.

The following night, I learned that her plan succeeded; the group awaited me in her cottage and were much more stunned by me than she had been the previous night. After many questions and much examination of me, we had our first feeding session; it was awkward being so vulnerable to them, but they assuaged my discomfort by their excessive delight in me.

That arrangement actually fed me enough to go several nights without being altered, which provided no small amount of respite for me.

The night my parents learned of my condition came near the end of December that same year. Unbeknownst to me, I had fled the castle on that bitter cold night as my parents were on the second floor balcony admiring the heavy falling snow. They saw me running on all fours like a naked, agile cat at great speed toward the forest and, realized that the thing they feared of me, and kept from me, had come to pass.

When I returned home from the group session, I found them in my bedchamber; mother fetched me a quilt to cover my nakedness, and father began by asking me how long the nocturnal transformations had been occurring; I was honest and informed him that I had been changing since mid September that year. They were greatly concerned about who might have seen me in that state, but I assured them that I kept my identity a secret from every victim except the group; I then explained the arrangement to them, and they insisted on meeting the members to assure themselves of their capacity for secrecy.

Mother held me the rest of the night, and at dawn, I reverted back to my human state in her arms as she watched; instantly I fainted from the exhaustion my sudden weakness inflicted after all the exertion the monster put our body through hours earlier.

Slowly I opened my eyes to find myself lying upon my cabin bed; the transition was so sharp between that remarkably vivid dream-memory and my present state that I momentarily failed to discern where I was. At that moment, as far as I was concerned, I was in the 1700s, and my then mother was just holding me and watching me become human again before her face faded to black in my sudden fragility.

Upon coming to the realization of where I was, I was grateful that it was just a dream. I had not transitioned into that creature since it repressed itself in 1797; my parents explained to me that, once it begins hibernation, it might never reemerge within the lifetime of the person afflicted with it.

I, however, don’t have a normal span of life; I have been alive for well over a century! Somehow, I stopped aging after my fifteenth birthday, and my mind seems cloistered from the memory of what happened to me. My parents, of the time, never told me what I was; they only confessed to knowing of my condition long before it emerged; this made me quite uneasy about my own past, that they would elect to keep something so life-defining from my knowledge.

After pondering these things for a short time, I rolled over on my left side, facing the wall, and quickly went back to sleep.

I didn’t know this at the moment, but that memory within a dream began the process of awakening the hibernating monster within me, as transition was to be vital for what was to come.

I cannot help but to think that I was being prepared by unseen hands for that encroaching trial by fire and water; I learned later that I was not the only one on Titanic that had visions or premonitions portending the calamitous event we were to suffer.

Since I had not transitioned in more than a century at that point; were I to become aware that my nether-self threatened to afflict me again, I might have sank to levels of despair to eclipse what I had already endured. Mercifully, the thought never occurred to me, until the thing emerged on that horrible night when I so desperately needed it to survive.

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