The Descent

June 17, 2025 • story

Based on a dream from January 2010

The hallway stretched before me like a throat waiting to swallow. Fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting intermittent shadows that danced across peeling wallpaper. I’d been searching for them for three days now—the Hendricks children, ages seven and nine, who’d vanished from their beds on a Tuesday night that now felt like a lifetime ago.

Their mother’s pleas still echoed in my ears: Please, Detective Morrison. They’re all I have left.

The hole in the wall appeared without warning, a jagged wound in the institutional green paint. It exhaled the smell of stagnant water and something else—something sweet and cloying that made my stomach turn. I should have called for backup. Should have waited. But the children’s faces haunted me, and I could hear something from beyond that breach. The soft click of billiard balls.

I squeezed through the opening, my jacket catching on exposed brick, and emerged into a basement that belonged to no building I knew. The pool table sat beneath a single bare bulb, its green felt the color of algae. Behind it stood a woman who might have been beautiful once, before whatever had happened to her eyes.

They were silver now, mercurial and ancient, set in a face that couldn’t decide what age it wanted to be. Her dark hair moved as if underwater, and when she lined up her shot—an impossible bank off three walls—she moved with the fluid grace of a predator.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said without looking up. Her voice carried the weight of decades, maybe centuries.

I reached for my badge, then my gun, finding neither. “I’m looking for two children. The Hendricks kids.”

She laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “Everyone’s looking for something down here, Detective. The question is: are you prepared for what you might find?”

The cue ball balanced on the table’s edge, defying gravity. One gentle breath would send it tumbling. Without thinking, I bumped the table.

The ball fell.

Her head snapped toward me, those silver eyes blazing with fury that belonged to something far older than human anger. “Now you’ve done it.”

I ran.

Behind me, her laughter rose to a shriek that shattered the bare bulb and plunged us into darkness. I stumbled through shadows, hands outstretched, feeling for walls, for doors, for any escape. The ground gave way beneath my feet.

I tumbled over a banister I couldn’t see, fell through darkness that seemed to have weight and texture, and crashed into water so cold it stopped my heart for one terrible moment.

The pool was deeper than it had any right to be, filled with rainwater that tasted of copper and desperation. But it wasn’t empty. Things bobbed in the water around me—children’s sneakers, a backpack with cartoon characters, a stuffed rabbit with button eyes that seemed to watch.

And below, in the murky depths, shapes wrapped in something that looked like seaweed but moved with purpose. Cocoons. God help me, they were cocoons.

I dove down, lungs burning, and grabbed the nearest one. It was warm—too warm—and when I brought it to the surface and tore away the green wrapping, Sarah Hendricks looked up at me with eyes that had seen too much.

“The lady,” she whispered. “The lady with the silver eyes. She says we’re going to live forever.”

I pulled two more cocoons to the surface, found her brother Tommy and another child I didn’t recognize. All alive, all changed somehow, their skin pale as bone china, their eyes reflecting light that wasn’t there.

“We have to go,” I gasped, gathering them around me. “Now.”

That’s when she appeared at the edge of the pool, no longer bothering with human pretense. Her fingers had become claws, her teeth sharp as broken promises. “They’re mine now. As are you.”

I had matches. A Zippo lighter. And somehow, impossibly, a can of gasoline that hadn’t been there moments before. Dreams have their own logic, their own terrible physics.

The flame caught her hair first, a golden crown of fire that made her beautiful again for one horrifying instant. Then she screamed, and the sound shattered something inside my skull. I poured the gasoline in a trail up the stone steps, toward shapes moving in the darkness above—her brothers, her family, her children in blood and shadow.

The fire followed the trail like a living thing, hungry and eager. Their screams harmonized with hers, a choir of the damned that would follow me into waking.

But I was no longer the man who’d entered that hallway. The fire that consumed them had marked me, changed me. The children’s pale eyes met mine with understanding now, with recognition of what we’d become.

I am vampire.

The words came to me like a revelation, like a curse, like both. We ran from the flames, but we carried the fire inside us now. Different. Other. Hungry for things we’d never needed before.

They hunted us through streets that twisted into shapes no human city had ever known. We scattered like leaves before wind, and I found myself alone in backyards that stretched into infinity, past chain-link fences and tool sheds and the detritus of ordinary human lives that now seemed impossibly foreign.

The pool was nothing but a tarp stretched over a wooden frame, filled with brown rainwater that reflected a sky the color of old blood. Two people floated there like offerings—a man with arms thick as tree trunks and a woman whose blonde hair spread around her like spilled sunshine.

I wasn’t thinking clearly. The hunger was growing, gnawing at my insides like a living thing. I needed to cool the fire in my veins, needed to understand what I’d become. I slipped into the water, and immediately the man’s head snapped up.

“What the hell you think you’re doing in my pool?” His voice carried the flat menace of someone who’d learned violence early and well.

“Sorry,” I managed, pulling myself out. “I’ll go.”

But he was already standing, water streaming from his bulk, and I could smell his anger like ozone before a storm. “Damn right you will. But first, you’re gonna learn some manners.”

He reached for a beer bottle, thick glass that would split my skull nicely. His companion just watched, her eyes wide with the kind of excitement that comes from watching violence about to unfold.

“You might want to reconsider,” I heard myself say. The voice didn’t sound entirely like mine anymore. “I’m not… entirely human right now. If you hurt me, I might need to feed. And you won’t like what I feed on.”

He laughed, the sound ugly and familiar. “You’re crazy, you know that?”

I could have run. Should have run. But the hunger was growing stronger, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear the silver-eyed woman’s laughter.

That’s when my brother appeared.

He’d never been my brother before that moment—we’d been strangers, really, despite sharing blood and a childhood house. But now I recognized him for what he truly was. His transformation had gone differently than mine. Where I remained mostly human, he’d become something altogether wilder. His body was coated in coarse hair, his teeth sharp as razors, his eyes yellow as old amber.

The man with the beer bottle had perhaps three seconds to understand what was happening to him. My brother’s jaws clamped down on his throat with a wet crunch that would echo in my dreams for years to come.

The woman tried to scream, but I was already moving, catching her face in my hands before the sound could escape. Our eyes met, and in that moment, I understood the terrible gift I’d been given.

“Look at me,” I whispered, and watched as her world narrowed to just my face, my voice, my will. “Everything is fine. Everything is peaceful.”

Her terror melted away like ice in summer heat. She smiled then, a expression of perfect trust and contentment, and I felt the intoxicating rush of absolute power. I could make her believe anything, do anything, be anything I desired. She was clay in my hands, her mind as malleable as warm wax.

I drew her deeper into my will, watched as her individuality dissolved into something simpler, more manageable. She became a reflection of my desires, a puppet dancing to strings only I could see. And God help me, it felt wonderful.

The hunger quieted. The fire in my veins cooled to a manageable ember. This was what I was now—not just a vampire, but something that fed on free will itself, on the terrible beauty of absolute control.

My brother looked up from his meal, blood still dripping from his muzzle, and nodded once. We understood each other now in ways we never had as merely human brothers. We were family in truth now, bound by transformation and hunger and the sweet corruption of power.

The woman in my arms gazed up at me with perfect adoration, her mind a blank slate waiting for my commands. And in her eyes, I saw my reflection—no longer detective, no longer human, but something altogether more terrifying.

Something that had learned to love the very thing it had once fought against.

The silver-eyed woman’s laughter echoed somewhere in the distance, and I realized she’d never been the real monster at all. She’d simply been the mirror, showing me what I’d always had the capacity to become.

The descent had been complete from the moment I’d stepped into that hallway. Everything else had just been the inevitable fall.

—End—

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