“If I’m an angel, paint me with black wings.” — Anne Rice, The Vampire Armand

A collective shudder of eager expectation like the ripple of massing waves over a dark sea sweeps through the crowd gathered to await the midnight premier of an anticipated film…the glowing palace of framed illusions beckon them and, inevitably, night dwellers, the moth and other kindred…

By the twilight they gather even as I stir. Their silhouettes are cast dark against neon lights to one trying to cross their lines as if in protest. As if the restless shadows were granted form and face to mingle with the crowd, I advance like a nomad army’s dark banner to the lines arrayed.

Lined up eagerly like so many nights before us to see their “twilight” even as we arrive soundlessly, tangible shades, mingling uncomfortably but effortlessly like their own shadows cast by the marquee lights. Like one who saves the moth from the killing light one tries to remind her of the breathless beauty of darkness…words a muted nocturne and endearment to the night…they turn away. We’re the real thing, but that doesn’t matter. They don’t want reality and we don’t want to be myth in their dreamscapes..

Like guardians of imagination and night, though they shun the unknown and strangers, yet we know all too well their desires in the blood-chant of their hearts like primal drumbeats in the night.

I pass by like a dark rumour traded amongst them. Like the shadow of each one cast in secession like shadows cast in languid procession as the moon ascends like a counter-spell of pale light. Lined up eagerly like so many nights before us to see their “twilight” even as we arrive soundlessly, tangible shades, mingling uncomfortably but effortlessly like their own shadows cast by the marquee lights. Like one who saves the moth from the killing light, one tries to remind her of the breathless beauty of darkness…words a muted nocturne and endearment to the night…they turn away. We’re the real thing, but that doesn’t matter. They don’t want reality and we don’t want to be myth in their dreamscapes.

Like guardians of imagination and night though they shun the unknown and strangers yet we know all too well their desires in the blood-chant of their hearts like primal drumbeats in the night. Where once they gathered in angry mobs to hunt us like they did to their own kind, now we mingle like old enemies reconciled. Lining in crowds to feed their own desires in the night, even as we shun the painful light of day, under the starless city nights, searching for that one face that reminds us of the dawn we once knew to spend an eternity with us, to show us again the light and way back. They come home then and we part ways to different dawns…yearning after couples escorting their own back like the fading rays of a midnight sun. We to our daydreams, they to their nightmares. Their dreamless sleep that lasts forever is an ageless nightmare ever denied us…

One stands out from the crowd and she, like a poem to behold in figurative expression written resplendent against the light, or the first musical note of a song’s score written by a composer’s conjuring hand…

I feel…human again…mortal again.

Inexplicably awkward…I avoid her sight…to try to decipher the words I feel…it’s literally been ages…

The mortals in their shuffling line, they seem the clumsily formed letters of a midnight scribe against an illuminated text. They are not here to see me, really…

I pass a row of posters, window-shopping with illusion merely. They don’t want to see us or know us anymore than they can see themselves in the hours of darkness. We don’t want to be myth any more than they want reality amongst them.

Angel by light, demon by shadow, approaching with a huntsman’s step.

I cast no shadow nor draw breath, but the shadow of their time has been cast long and cold. I mingle uneasily amongst them like an age-old separation of light and dark.

Our eyes are a dark looking glass to their own reflection.

There is a gap evident, yes, just as there is an empty void of shadow reflected in the line where I stand amongst them.

We remember when their elders gathered to hold the dark at bay while now their heirs seek the dark.

Their generation’s sanguinary aims leave us in dark.

I close my eyes to the sound of the blood chant of their hearts like a primal beat in the night…I drink deep the night air…my body shudders as I do so, and then I compose myself.

My manner is antiquated…confusingly so to their eyes. I remember when Grace Kelly’s name was in lights.

I look to the stars as if to see their names written there again.

I try to reconcile the unforgettable against this new world and void.

The presence of prey is intoxicating, but it’s a different craving that has beckoned like a nomad to a citadel. Angel by light, demon by shadow, approaching with a huntsman’s step.

I cast no shadow nor breath, but the shadow of their time has been cast long and cold. I mingle uneasily amongst them, like an age-old separation of light and dark.

Like a tundra wolf pacing the array of the herd, I scan the faces, searchingly but futilely.

I know nobody here…all I knew by name are but names on stone.

It is that gap in the line that betrays the void awaiting in that light.

They’ve all come to embrace the dark…

The dark side of their own yearning…I was ancient before their first cries and strode the shadows long before they were afraid of the dark and now seek its “glamour.”

But to their own kind…”a culture of fear” they cower in…and before I became…this…we did not suffer cowardice, save with loathing…we feared no one…neither dreading stranger on the roadside or rival at the table…

I do not understand them.

But what do they know of us anyway in these caricatured mockeries they line up for?

I know their dark side…as the scriptwriters do. What they want to see…but what do they know of it? The dark side, like a dark pilgrim venturing forth, scarce drawing so much as a curious glance. The line edges forward.

I’ve not been invited. Can’t cross as one of them. I waver at the threshold like words at the lips that dared not be spoken…another night, another separation…

A duet of lips seen in passing…laughter…how long has it been as we measure time…

If there was a soulmate, as they say out there, it would be the night, how my blood stirs at the approach, revisiting me like a lover to the confines of a rebel cell…filling my world like an unfulfilled glass, pressing that dark against the window glass when all other bright lights have left my world and me. Lights fade with friendship and love, flaring a last angry red in parting and then the night floats in to replace and heal the void.

You are to me what the days can never be again.

With our curse comes a caveat akin to that offered the castaway on a barren isle…never drink sea water to them…to us: never drink the night…

My eyes and self fall upon one in their number…like a dreamcatcher’s chord snaring nightmare, I am given pause. She stands out from them in a background of radiance like an angelic image from a Celtic illuminated text, just as the first note of a musical score is the most important to the composer and audience, so too is she to my eve. Like a bereaved gentleman who attends an evening alone at the opera, so too is my look at the beautiful stranger in a distant row with a lingering sense of wonder and presence that bears her own song.

Her eyes and laughter catch the light the way the waves catch the moonlight, like the brightness of a midnight sun…the hair of star’s celestial gold, like rays of a midnight sun…like moonbeams on the waves….the dark caress of ocean-borne wind sweeps her hair…

One word only…poetry…

The youth with her I appraise…nothing.

He is unnerved, of course. The night is mine. I beckon…the entire line, like a dark stream of consciousness, like a composer’s train of thought, moves to slow motion…the ebb and flow of time itself alters. Like a flower in time-lapse she seems, and my dreams unfold.

Our moment…

He tries to ward me off with a look, but I counter with an immortal’s eyes. Like the blades of two duelists crossing before the blade of the better swordsman finds…blood. My eyes delve appraisingly into his gaze like a malarial fever through his bloodstream…drawn to the heart…shuddering its host, and he all but writhes in the throes of malaria-induced nightmare before his eyes close and he sways, appraising…the blood of kings does not course in your veins, mortal…naught to hold us at bay.

She approaches with a startling moment, as if of recognition…like seeing an old friend in the crowd…I do not call out to her imperiously like a lord clad in black armour would to a serf…no, but as a youth at a school dance who asks the most beautiful girl in the room to dance to a song he requested from the band….her touch like a tangible poem…words written by moonlight on the night shore before the sighing waves…only to be swept away…share my world, I yearn. Huntress and huntsman after dark.

Would you walk under the star-lit skies with me forever…the selfsame stars you shame of their very light.

It’s a request…not a demand. like what the heart itself tells you…

I extend the hand as if to escort to the dance floor, to waltz under the stars.

The eyes meet like headlights in the eyes of a doe strayed into the road…blinded…before the driver veers…

Me or the doe…

I turn away…as if in a dance…

“Go back to your beau…oh, I don’t know how you phrase such things now…that insipid thing over there…yes that…man-thing.”

Mortal…the word uttered with the contempt of the ageless. Not an elitism to the disdain, but of a scholar to the slow and insolent student who refuses to learn the timeless, all with the easy arrogance of the ignorant.

Only a fool would spend an eve gawking at a screen rather than looking into those eyes and listening to the song of that laughter.

In her radiance, I remember…the dawn again…not an ageless feeling, but a rejuvenating one.

I savour the vision, but a being of the shadow cannot court one of light without being burnt…and I feel the dawnfire like a monk’s immolation.

Oh, what a queen you would have made…the sigh like a lion’s purr in the primal dark…

The thirst…never venture into the bright desert…the thirst will have you…

I drink the night…deeper, as if sinking…

“Hey, are you okay…?”

I drink the night…I bare my teeth into the sigh.

“Hey man, those look real…”

“Because they are, you fool!”

My eyes catch the light of the bright signs like a bonfire’s smolder in a desert lion’s eye…balefire microcosmed. Now they see me.

They recoil now…the herd at last sees the hunter. We are not myth any more than you want to see reality…who wants that now, anyway? In this day and age.

Like a brightness of restoration sinking like a drowning mariner’s last sight of the stars as he is immersed under dark waves…like a midnight sun, he beholds her…they make way for her…I feel the lips…the breath of the daughter of Eve.

The crowd began to withdraw, like waltzers leaving the dance floor to one couple captivated in the dance and song and the two forms silhouetted against the neon lights seemed like the first notes  of a nocturne formed by a sleepless composer about to take flight in a Stradivarius soloist’s opening chords, awaiting duet..

Some brightnesses are phoenix fires, others heretic immolations..

I remember for the first time…the dawn, as if by her gentle hands nightmares feeding upon me recoil like scavengers at the approach of a great huntress..and the lips seek to breathe life into his own…hands pushing on his chest as if upon a door…with urgency of an emissary in the night..

“Come back to the light…”

I see as if through the eyes of my quarry…winged forms reaching for me…beckoning to me…wings enfolding in eternal embrace…I hear dimly the blood-chant of mortal hearts like drums of a rite of passage…quickening…as if a ritual reaches its end…

I drink the night…

The lips breathe into mine…I drink the…dawn.

The night drinks me now. The shadows reclaim me like long lost friends reunited…like retainers sweeping protectively around their lord, a mortally-wounded black knight. The shadows reclaim me. I drink the night.

I know…peace.

Angel by night. Demon by the dawn…

Man needs no monster, yet they turn to us, a darkness created in their own image, as if sculpted by a sleepless artist…