Haematophagia

By Andrea Rossetti

Who is Louis Lefevre? A serial killer? A psychopath? A vampire? He doesn't even know the answer himself. Louis wakes up in a sealed room, chained to the floor, with only a corpse for company. He can’t remember anything, has no idea how he got there, and the only thing he can feel is overwhelming pain. He has been hideously disfigured by someone. Any chance of redemption he ever had has been torn away from him by a tragic and senseless twist of fate. Escaping, understanding and remembering become his basic needs, alongside which throbs an overbearing hunger, the base desire for an unusual kind of nourishment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edizioni Haiku
• Release date: Aug 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781507152591

Book preview

Andrea Rossetti

HAEMATOPHAGIA

*The sealed room

His eyes jerked open in the darkness. All he could hear was a slow dripping sound, plopping into the puddles on the floor, sliding down his skin.

The metallic clinking sound that appeared softly, almost whispering, at first, became an unappealable sentence screaming through his head when he realized he couldn't move. Chains.

Only his left leg seemed to have a little freedom of movement, although he could still feel the iron rings around his ankle.

The noise of each sound puncturing the silence, the biting cold on his bare skin - with each sensation his consciousness was gradually coming back to him, while the numbness left him reluctantly slow, leaving him at the mercy of a stark reality so incomprehensible it bordered on madness.

He was alone, he was quite certain of that. No steps, no voices.

Whoever had reduced him to this state had left him there, abandoning him to his agony.

The smell of blood gave him a tremor of excitement and a rush or panic at the same time, he sniffed carefully: it was his, there was no doubt about it. He could feel warm blood slowly oozing from still open wounds. Most of the bleeding must have stopped already, the wounds weren't too recent.

He couldn't work out if that was good or bad.

But every time he tried to remember what had happened, how he got there, it felt like a thousand pins were being plunged into his brain at the same time. His head was understanding about as much as his eyes were seeing: nothing.

Just then he shook his right arm, again setting off the plaintive wail of the chains that were tearing at his wrist. The echo was immediate, he had to be in a room, quite a small one at that and probably bare.

Kat? he asked the dark, which didn't answer.

For some reason, the name had stuck in his head. It popped up in his mind just like that, but it wasn't linked to any memory.

Is there anybody there? he tried again, but with the same result.

He tried once again to grasp the memory that was evading him, but it was even more painful than the last time. The more he tried to remember, the worse the pain became.

He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists, wrenching his hands down in an attempt to free himself, more out of frustration than any rational judgement.

He was astonished when he heard the chain yield under the force of his efforts, breaking apart and freeing his wrists.

Ah! he yelled, partly from the effort and partly because of the searing pain in his wrists that were covered with bruises and abrasions.

He tumbled forwards, flinging his hands out in front of himself as he landed on the ground, his knees splashing into his own blood.

He dragged himself back to his feet and lurched across the room until he found the wall in front of him, no more than three metres from where he had been chained, just before he reached it he stumbled awkwardly on something quite big.

His knees crashed to the ground again, but he picked himself back up quickly. Utterly focused on his search for a way out, he didn't hang around to explore the room or work out what he'd tripped over, he barely even registered the new stab of pain in his joints.

Once he reached the wall, he groped frantically left and right, without even bothering to free himself from the shackle that was still bound to him. It was as if his mind had regressed to its primordial state, base instinct had taken over and his only priority was to find