People can go entire lifetimes and fail to learn important things about themselves. So do not judge me too harshly when I say that I was five hundred years old before I fully understood that my only long-term relationship would be with loss—it has been the one certainty of my life, that I will lose everyone sooner or later.
By the late seventeenth century, merchants had become the dominant force in the city and they displayed their wealth by building large houses in the countryside immediately to the north of the city walls. At first this upset me greatly because the fields and woodlands there had been a favorite haunt of mine in the short summer nights. But progress can never be halted, and I continued to walk beyond the North Gate even as the landscape became swallowed up and transformed into an elegant extension of the city.
Indeed, the new houses and their inhabitants exerted a grim fascination over me, even after the countryside that I’d loved had been lost for several decades. So it was that I met Arabella.
Hers was a fine house set in walled gardens—the house is still there, though not as grand as it once was, and most of the gardens have long since been eaten up by other buildings.
One summer night in 1714 I was passing by on my way back into the city when I caught the unmistakable scent of blood in the gardens beyond the walls. Even at this time, people ventured out little at night, for fear of brigands and spirits, and though it was warm, the sky was moonless and dark.
I vaulted on to the wall and looked down upon the gardens to see just such a spirit traversing the lawns and walking among the flower beds. Dressed in white flowing nightclothes, her long hair a flourish of golden waves, her skin milk pale, she appeared like a ghost or an angel, floating through the darkness.
This was the then thirteen-year-old Arabella, and I was immediately smitten by her beauty. I descended into the garden and approached carefully through the shadows. And only after following her for some time did I come to understand that she was sleepwalking.
That first night, I was as mesmerized by her as my victims have been mesmerized by me. She walked for an hour before suddenly looking up into the night sky, and then she returned to the house just as if she had been called.
I looked at the sky myself and realized that I’d observed her too long, so bewitched had I been. I ran back into the city, reaching the crypt only as my skin began to prickle in discomfort at the approaching dawn, but I laughed and smiled the whole way, exhilarated.
I had seen her only once, but nothing had moved me so much in nearly five hundred years. If I had been a boy like any other, I would have declared myself in love.
I returned every night for the next week, and at first there were nights when I waited, but she did not come. Soon I realized that the sleepwalking only occurred on the warmest and most sultry evenings.
I chose the nights of my visits accordingly and so learned to read the weather and her nocturnal state well enough that I was rarely disappointed.
One night the following summer, the moon was full, but I was still there in her garden despite the burning discomfort of its reflected light on my skin. Even when I kept to the shadows, the prickling sensation of heat flared across my flesh. Yet little did I care because the night was warm and Arabella walked abroad. It was a distraction like none I’d known.
She had been walking only for a few minutes and was moving away from me across a lawn when she stopped and turned to face me.
I assumed she was still in the deeps of sleep, but with a curious tone, she suddenly said, “Hello.” Perhaps I should not have responded, but I did, and then she said, “Step out from the shadows that I might see you.”
I moved forwards, shielding my eyes as well as I could against the moonlight, and said, “I mean you no harm.”
She was about to reply sternly, but studied me in the faint blue light of the moon and said, “I know your face, as if I’ve seen you before. Who are you?”
“I’m William …” I stopped myself in time, remembering that any reference to my birth would arouse her suspicions. “Please, call me Will.”
She adopted a haughty air, something she managed even in her nightclothes, and said, “And you may call me Miss Harriman.”
I almost laughed, not least at the thought of a merchant’s daughter taking such airs with me, but I accepted her invitation graciously and said, “Thank you, Miss Harriman. But might I at least know your name?”
“Arabella.” Without my asking, she volunteered, “I’m fourteen.”
“I’m four hundred and seventy-five.”
She looked me up and down and said, “Then you are a Will-o’-the-wisp, though dressed in the latest fashion, and I must go to my bed in fear of my soul.” She laughed playfully and walked away across the lawn, saying, “Good night, Will-o’-the-wisp.”
“Good night, Miss Harriman,” said I.
At that time, no girl of her age could have been expected to behave as Arabella had done. If she’d believed me flesh and blood, she should have run in terror, fearing for her honor and her life. If she’d believed me a sprite, she should have screamed in terror for her soul.
Yet no matter what the conventions of the age, some people find their own path and she was one such. On the nights that she woke from her walking slumber, she would converse with me, sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes for as much as an hour.
I never sought to wake her, and her night walks were confined to the warmest months, but over the next few years we spoke several dozen times, always in an elliptical fashion, as if she didn’t believe me quite real, but rather an imaginary friend who came to her in her dreams.
Perhaps it seems a great commitment on my part, to find my way to that same garden so many times over several years, but set against the span of my life thus far, I look back upon it now as you might upon a fleeting summer romance.
There was no romance, though the brief moments in her company warmed and restored me. I knew enough to know that I would have loved her if I had been able, if part of my curse had not been the loss of that physical emotion.
And the real curse was that I had not lost the memory of love, not lost my longing for things I’d once known. So in the year that Arabella was seventeen, I waited in vain through the warm nights like any lovesick youth would have done, but she never appeared again.
I wondered if she’d been struck down by some illness or other in the previous months, or if she had been married off and sent away. For several years I drifted around the city in the hope of seeing her, drawing as close to the lit world of affluent houses as I dared.
And it was not until the winter of 1742, long after hope had gone, that I saw her again. There was some entertainment in the city’s recently constructed hall, drawing the coaches of society families from all around.
I was observing from the shadows, as I’ve observed so much of the history and life of this city, and then I saw her. Arabella descended from a coach, and apart from the evening clothes she wore, she had changed little more than I had in the intervening years.
I was so transfixed to see her again, and so unexpectedly, that I took several paces towards her, my mind spinning with thoughts, clinging to the impossible hope that she had somehow become like me.
I was only a few meters away when the woman who accompanied her turned and fixed me with a stare, at first hostile, then puzzled. This woman was clearly the younger girl’s mother, a woman of forty-two, much older then than it is now.
It was as her puzzled expression briefly appeared troubled by some distant recollection, as if she was remembering a recurring dream from her childhood, that I realized my mistake. For it was the older woman who was Arabella and as the recollection finally knitted itself together in her mind, I doubt she could have looked more horrified if death himself had confronted her.
I think she fainted, though I couldn’t be sure. I heard the commotion only as I fled from the scene. And as I thought back to the way age had played itself out upon her face, I think I felt more alone than I have done at any other time over these seven and a half centuries.
That is why I tried to destroy myself because I realized at that moment that my life was nothing but a cruel trick played on me by fate. Just as the gods of Ancient Greece devised cruel and eternal punishments for those who had offended them, so I had been forced to live a half-life for eternity, with a withered heart and no hope of escape.
At least, almost no hope. Several years earlier, I had acquired a rare and unusual book—and, for all its faults, I still have it in my collection—which included the first account I’d ever read of creatures that shared most of the traits of my sickness.
Using the information gleaned from that book, I returned to my lair on the night I saw Arabella again, I fashioned a wooden stake, lay on my daybed, and plunged it with all my might into my heart.
The result was instantaneous, my strength falling away from me. I was immediately so physically weakened that my hands fell to my sides and I could no longer lift them. For the briefest moment, I was happy, sensing that death was upon me.
But death did not come. I screamed, not in pain, but in the agony of frustration, but I couldn’t move myself. I was doubly imprisoned, firstly by my sickness and then by the stake I’d driven through my own heart.
It’s impossible to describe the time I spent in that purgatory, pinned and helpless, yet fully conscious of my condition, hour after hour, day after day, year after year. I had thought that my condition could be no worse than it already was, but I was wrong.
The sleep of hibernation finally overtook me. When I awoke, the stake was gone from my heart and the wound had already greatly healed. I wish I could say that I felt joy, but I felt only as a criminal must when he is released from prison, but sent into exile.
I found the stake on the floor nearby. The wood had started to crack and I could only assume that this had reduced its hold on me, that I had somehow managed to tear it free in my sleeping state, just as the sleepwalking Arabella might once have removed a thorn from her hand or foot.
And yes, even freshly delivered from those decades of torment, I still thought of Arabella in the first days after my recovery. But a new world awaited me in the city above. Arabella was dead, so was the daughter with whom I had last seen her and everyone else arriving for that distant night’s entertainment.
The year was 1813 and, though it had taken the best part of a century, I had learned a valuable lesson, that death wanted me no more than life did. I was forever suspended between those two states and I believed it would always be so.