Calgary, October 2022
Like most of the young couples, my wife and I were dreaming about owning a house, and like everybody else, we found it too expensive. But unlike the other young couples, we made good money and buying a house wasn’t an impossible dream. We started to save for the down payment, but my wife was furious about how much taxes we had to pay. “Look at the tax bill,” she shouted showing me a piece of paper. “They are sucking blood from us.” I am less emotional and didn’t say anything. Eventually we saved enough and started looking for a house somewhere in the suburbs. There was a brand-new development we liked; we signed a purchase agreement, paid the down payment, and waited for our house to be build. The construction went surprisingly fast and in a few months it was ready.
Moving into a new house is supposed to be a happy occasion, but unfortunately this wasn’t our case. As soon as we moved in, my wife started to feel sick. She was pale and was complaining about being very tired. We thought it was the reaction to the move and that it will pass, but it didn’t. She was feeling worse and worse. One day I was also sick with some infection, and to prevent passing it to her, I slept in a separate room. At night I heard a noise coming from the bedroom, so I went to investigate, and couldn’t believe what I saw. In the darkness of the room there was a man kneeling by my wife’s bed, holding her neck. I turned on the light and yelled:
“What are you doing here?” The man looked at me; his face was stained with blood.
“I am sucking blood from your wife’s neck. I am a vampire.”
“You are a vampire? They only appear in Dracula’s stories.”
“O no, we are real, we have been in existence for thousands of years.”
“Is that why my wife is so pale and feeling tired?”
“Yes, I have been sucking her blood since you moved here.”
“Were you sucking my blood too?”
“No. Vampires suck only the blood of women.”
“How come we didn’t wake up when you were here?”
“I have means to make you sleep. Look at your wife, she is still sleeping. But this night you weren’t here, and I missed that.”
It was true, my wife was still sleeping. Neither the light, nor my yelling woke her up.
“Well, you cannot suck my wife’s blood,” I said.
“But this is the only source of food I have. Without it I will die of starvation.”
“I thought you vampires are immortal.”
“We are, but there was some design flaw, and we still need to drink blood.”
He didn’t say anything more and I asked:
“How did you become a vampire?”
“This is a long story. More than three hundred years ago I was a tax collector. One evening the villagers got so mad at me that they chased me with pitchforks. I managed to hide in a basement of an old house, fearing for my life. Then I heard a voice: ‘You are in a bind, aren’t you? If they find you, they kill you.’ It was pitch dark in the basement, I didn’t see anybody, but the voice continued: ‘I have a deal for you. I will make you look dead and will put you into a coffin. You will lie in the grave until we need you. Then I wake you up and you will be at our disposal. You will be our vampire.’ “But it wasn’t him who woke me up,” continued the vampire, “it was the machine digging your basement. That’s why I am here.”
“So,” I said. “You were sucking blood, figuratively speaking, from the poor villagers even before becoming a vampire.
“You can say that, figuratively speaking.”
“The job you had been doing three hundred years ago is now done by the Internal Revenue Service. Perhaps you can apply for work there.”
“They already have enough vampires. There are no more openings.”
“Too bad, but you definitively cannot suck my wife’s blood. Find somebody else.”
The vampire left and since then my wife is feeling better. The color returned to her cheeks, and she is full of energy. But the neighbour’s wife is getting pale, and she complains of feeling tired. “I feel as if somebody is sucking my blood,” she keeps saying.