Chapter Text
Chapter Two: Fear of the Dark
Stephanie had bought a pregnancy test on the way home. She had the time, since she missed her bus, and she kept her wallet in her pocket rather than her purse, so she had the money. When she got home, she grabbed two water bottles from the garage and locked herself in the upstairs bathroom. That… thing… had to be f*cking with her, for some reason. She and her boyfriend didn’t use a condom, sure, which was… okay, Stephanie really should have drawn the line at that, but he pulled out! Didn’t he…? Well, even if he didn’t, she had to be ovulating, right? She couldn’t be pregnant unless she was ovulating… not that she knew if she was or not… but even if she was, there was still a pretty good chance the egg wouldn’t implant. The whole time she waited, she was busy convincing herself that she couldn’t possibly be pregnant. She got on her phone and started doing research, hoping to find information that would confirm what she wanted to believe.
Forty minutes later, the test was in the trash. Negative. Stephanie didn’t feel any better, though. All her searching had the opposite effect she wanted, sowing more and more doubt. The pregnancy test could detect pregnancy ‘as soon as ten days after implantation’ according to the box, and she could be on day nine, for all she knew. Also, you were supposed to take the test with your first urination in the morning, when the hCG hormone had been building up all night. That late in the day, she’d gone to the bathroom enough to not have enough in her urine for it to not be detectable. But she was willing to bet a vampire would still be able to smell it in her blood. So, that was a waste of ten bucks…
Her last period was three and a half weeks prior — which, if she was pregnant, meant she was three and a half weeks in as far as most practitioners were concerned — and ovulation happened about halfway between periods, with sperm sticking around a few days after sex and the egg staying around for a day after ovulation. So… yeah, the egg definitely could have been fertilized. Per cycle, there was a 20-30% chance of becoming pregnant. Even with ‘perfect use’ of withdrawal, there was still a 4% chance, and the more she thought about it, the more she was sure there wasn’t ‘perfect use’. Doing the math, even on the far end of the time she finished ovulating, it was too late for the morning-after pill. She didn’t feel like spending more money on another test, so she decided to just wait the next few days before her next period started to find out.
Stephanie stood up off the toilet, took a deep breath, then took the bag out of the waste basket. She brought it with her into her bedroom, planning to sneak off with it in the morning to dispose of it where her parents would never find it. It probably wouldn't be good if they knew she was having sex… She didn’t have a good night’s sleep, her dreams haunted by visions of pregnancy and vampires. She woke up in a cold sweat the next morning, and her hands instinctively went to her stomach to make sure a bat-monster hadn’t actually clawed its way out of her.
A few days passed, and her period was, in fact, late. She had always been pretty regular, but it could have just been stress or something. Then a week passed, and it still didn’t come. Something could have been wrong with her medically, though, so she did end up buying a second test… and this one was positive. It was time to stop living in denial, and to start thinking about her options. She could keep it, give it up for adoption, or terminate the pregnancy, but really, none of them felt like options at all.
Keeping it meant raising it, either with a father who clearly wasn’t all that considerate, or on her own. Her family was already in a precarious position as it was without another mouth to feed. It just wasn’t the environment a baby should be raised in (hell, she shouldn’t have been raised in it, or been in it currently, but here she was), and she couldn’t imagine it working out well for herself or the baby, father or no.
Giving it away meant, not only suffering through carrying it and birthing it, but after that she wouldn’t even have the baby. For the rest of her life, she would know it was out there, living its own life, forever beyond her ability to reach out to it. She would forever wonder, forever worry. Would that be the right thing for it? Would it be the right thing for her? Would she regret not keeping it? Would it be safe? Loved? Would it hate her? Would she hate herself?
Abortion wasn’t fun, but it was probably the best option after Plan B. Nip the problem in the bud. It would never impact her life after that, and she wouldn’t have to worry if she had done right by the baby, because there would never be a baby. It would, however, require her getting an abortion. Which, again, wasn’t fun. Non-surgical abortion required a prescription to get the medication in the US, and it was only slightly more common than surgical abortion. So, how not fun this was going to be was what the doctor ordered. Thank god New Jersey let minors get abortions without parental consent, at least, but god help her if her parents did find out somehow.
Mom was… okay… She was a nurse, so there wasn’t any medical misinformation. And she was… a kind of feminist, certainly. Maybe a few waves behind in certain respects… but she believed in a pregnant person’s right to choose. Stephanie just wasn’t so sure she believed in her daughter’s right to choose.
Dad was a total crapshoot. He was not loving, and he was not stable. Best case scenario, he would keep on not giving a sh*t about her. Worst case scenario, he’d fly into a rage and kill her. Honestly, though, that could be his reaction to just her getting pregnant. Each option was also a coin flip for her safety, but at least with the abortion there was the chance he would never know.
She had absolutely no idea what to do. She felt torn in every direction, when she had always thought that, if she ever ended up in this situation, she would terminate the pregnancy without a second thought. Nothing had changed in her thoughts about abortion, it only turned out that her thoughts about having one herself were more complex than she thought they were. But at least she had time to figure them out. And before anything else, she wanted to talk to her boyfriend. He may have not been considerate of her, and she wasn’t exactly confident she wanted him to even be involved, but, if nothing else, he should be made aware of the dilemma he had put her in.
A month after she had started her job, and two weeks after a f*cking vampire told her she was ‘preger-nant’, Stephanie was on her break at work, taking a long hard think about her life. She was about five weeks pregnant…
She had talked to her boyfriend, gone to his place under the pretense of making out, and sprang it on him as soon as they had sat on the couch. She was surprised by how well he took it. He was apologetic, promised her support, even made her think things would be okay if she kept. His family was much better off than hers, they could help raise it so she could keep going to school. He said everything she wanted to hear. Everything she needed to head, to get her out of his house without a fight… Then, he started acting like he didn’t even know her. Blocked her on all his socials, didn’t answer any of her calls or texts. He called her a crazy fat whor* when she confronted him at school, and threatened to call the police on her for stalking when she went to his house.
So, yeah. She had talked to her ex-boyfriend. Which meant her options were: get an abortion and risk her parents finding out, give up the baby and live a life full of regret, or be a teenage single mother… Or, secret fourth option: take a bath with a toaster… Eh, but results wise, that was no different than if her father flew into a rage, which had a chance of not happening, so why go to that extreme? And her father could only get mad if he knew. If she didn’t get the abortion, he would eventually know. If she did get the abortion, there was a chance he wouldn’t know. No matter if that was a big chance or a small one, it was more than if she didn’t get it. So, simply going off of what was best for her, which was the only thing she should care about, terminating the pregnancy was the best option.
“Hello? Earth to Steph! You okay?”
Stephanie snapped herself out of her trance. Her co-worker and friend Harper Row — not the friend who got her the job — was sitting across from her at the break room table. Stephanie had just been staring into space for who knew how long, totally ignoring that her friend was even there.
Harper had dyed her hair again since the last time they had seen each other, which was a regular occurrence as Harper was always experimenting with her look. She had gone purple with blue highlights this time for her shaggy, jaw length hair. Definitely the best color combination so far; she hoped she would keep it. And not just because she was partial to purple. It went with her whole look.
In many ways, Harper looked almost like Stephanie’s total opposite. Sure, Harper’s turquoise eyes weren’t that far from hers in color, nor was the color of her skin that different, and she wasn’t so much taller as to make Stephanie look short by any means, but that was where any similarities ended. While Stephanie highly identified with femininity, Harper was more aligned with masculinity. She wore masculine clothes, had masculine interests, and some may say she even acted in a masculine way, but Stephanie thought she was just a tough girl who was confident and assertive, which of course only masculine people can be… Her face actually had soft features, but she touched up her countenance with piercings, and very, very rarely makeup, which usually only meant lipstick that complemented her hair. In addition to pierced lobes like Stephanie’s, she also had two helix piercings in their left ear, a labret and right Monroe lip piercing, a septum piercing, and two barbells in her left eyebrow. The difference that Stephanie always focused on, though, was Harper’s figure.
Harper lifted weights. A lot. Somehow she managed to find time for it with her packed days. She was far from a body builder, but she was more built than even some of the guys on the football team. She had well defined curves, contrasting with Stephanie’s bulging ones. Harper was strong, firm, and fit; she was weak, soft, and out of shape… Harper wouldn’t like it if she knew that Stephanie was thinking this way about herself. She was very body positive. And it wasn’t just talk. Based on some of her past partners, size meant nothing to her. And, Stephanie never thought anything negative about those people. They were all beautiful, or handsome in some cases. She just couldn’t make herself believe those things about herself, not all the time. Not when most of the things she heard about her body were negative.
Stephanie shook her head, focusing herself on Harper’s words instead of on their bodies. “Yeah, I’m good. Just, you know… boyfriend trouble.”
“Hmm… yeah, no, that’s a totally unrelatable experience to me.”
Stephanie respected the hell out Harper. She was so unashamedly herself, and didn’t take sh*t from anyone for it. She never came out, she was just loudly and proudly bisexual since she was thirteen, in spite of the world and their horrible father. Something Stephanie doubted she could ever do, if she were queer. She would just be too afraid of her dad to even come out, let alone live as freely as Harper did in a hate filled world. She’d probably even do something unhealthy, like repress it and live in denial. Good thing she was definitely straight.
Self reliant and independent, Harper got emancipated from her sh*tty father the second she turned sixteen earlier that year, and also took custody of her little brother Cullen, who Stephanie also admired for his own strength and perseverance. She provided for both of them, doing this job on weekdays and another on the weekends, while also going to school, volunteering at the free clinic, and doing her aforementioned weight lifting. She wished she could be half the woman Harper was; be half as brave as her.
“Riiiight. So is that because you’ve never had a boyfriend, or because you’re such a perfect lover no partner would ever dare give you trouble?” Stephanie decided to meet Harper’s playfulness in kind.
A little smirk came to Harper’s face, as she motioned with her hand to flip the long hair they didn’t have. “Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.” It was a joke, but Stephanie was fully willing to believe it. Harper was definitely a heartbreaker, never without at least one partner. Steph was admittedly a little jealous, but she couldn’t tell if she was jealous of Harper, or the girls she dated. “Seriously though, what’s the trouble? Need me to show up at this guy’s house with a bat?”
Stephanie knew she would, if only she was asked. Harper was always willing to go to bat for the people she loved. And that wasn’t a pun, it was literal; go ahead and call Stephanie a ‘crazy fat whor*’, or any of those words in any order in Harper’s presence, see how many of your teeth you walk away with still in your mouth. Steph thought about telling her the full extent of her trouble. She knew Harper would have her back the whole time, no matter what she chose. But something kept her from opening up. Was she ashamed? Why? She had nothing to be ashamed of, except maybe her poor taste in men. Maybe she just didn’t want to burden her friend.
“Nah, we… we’re actually over now. He’s not worth being upset over. I’m just…” She took a deep breath. “Trying to figure out what I’m gonna do now…” Technically true, but a lie of omission was still a lie nonetheless, and Steph immediately felt bad about it. Not bad enough to be honest, though, clearly.
Harper stopped leaning her arms on the table, instead leaning back in the cheap plastic chair and crossing her arms. “Not to be all, ‘I told you so’, but I did say you were too good for that guy.”
A playful roll of the eyes. “I know. The overlap on the Venn diagram of: is my age, is my type, is single, actually has some charisma, and is actually interested in me is very slim. But I guess you can add this one to the ‘Stephanie was wrong and Harper was right’ board you probably keep in your room.”
“It’s actually filled up, I had to get a second one.”
They both laughed together. Stephanie felt lighter. Like everything was going to be okay, even if she knew it wasn’t. Harper really was great. A much better friend than her prick of an ex was, even before he got her pregnant and started ghosting her. They were always picking on each other, but it was all in good fun. They knew what each other’s boundaries were, and never crossed them. They talked about everything and nothing together, and always supported each other through whatever sh*t they were going through. It was easily the best friendship she’d ever had in her life. Except for what she had with Betty in the first grade. She was willing to trade her Skittles for Stephanie’s crackers at snack time, and there was just not competing with that.
“So,” Harper continued once their laughter died down, “what are you gonna do now?”
“Uh… I dunno… I think I’m gonna take a break from guys…” A nice, long, nine month break… “I’m kinda over them right now. I’ve had nothing but bad luck with them…” A deep sigh, and then her mouth went faster than her brain, “sometimes I just wish I was gay…” If she was, she may have just made a move on Harper. If she was ever… Well, not single, but looking for another girlfriend. Did she ever even have time to sleep with all she had going on?
“What an incredibly rational and heterosexual thing to say, Steph…” Harper’s voice was totally flat, her face showing no emotion.
Steph took the little paper wrapper her coffee straw came in, wadded it up, and threw it at Harper. It didn’t make it halfway across the table. “It’s not like that. I just think it’d be easier— hey, shut your mouth!” Her friend did as told, pressing her lips thin behind her mask. “I know it’s not easy to be queer in a deeply bigoted society… Well, I don’t know, but I believe people when they say it is. What I mean is, girls… Well, we aren’t guys! We’re not a perfect group, but it’s a group that largely understands that living in patriarchal society sucks, whereas the other group largely either don’t think we live in a patriarchal society, or they know that we do, they just think it’s a good thing! There are good ones like Cullen, and the guys you manage to find, but it feels like guys like them are so few and far between. I guess I just want access to a different dating pool. And, like, on top of that, when it’s two girls… well, two cis girls, you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant and then left high and dry! A-as an example…”
Harper nodded thoughtfully, taking in all Stephanie said, stroking a long imaginary beard sagely. “Well, I gotta hand it to you, Steph. That was a very well reasoned and thought out excuse for why you’re not actually a lesbian.”
Stephanie waved her off dismissively. “I’ve done way too much to possibly be a lesbian.” Half of it she even enjoyed.
“Ah, right. Forgive me of all people for engaging in bi erasure.” Harper was dismissive right back at her. She then pushed off the table to stand up. “But, I’ve gotta get back to the job I’m actually paid for. We’ll pick this up at your next therapy session in a week. In the meantime, you have my number if you need to confess anything I already know.”
“When I get you, it’ll look like an accident!” Stephanie shouted after her as she left the break room. When she was gone, she let out a deep sigh.
By the time her shift was over, she was dead tired; the pregnancy fatigue was kicking her ass, and she wanted nothing more than to plant said ass on the crappy bus seats. She left promptly, having learned her lesson, and would never repeat her mistake of staying late again. Maybe when she got a car, but not while she had to catch the bus. She hadn’t been mugged or seen any vampires since she made that decision, so she was confident it was the right one. God, that was so unreal… had she even told anyone she was mugged, let alone that she was almost a juice box for a vampire? No, she didn’t think she had. She was too concerned over being pregnant to even spend much time thinking about what happened. Which should really put into perspective just how terrible it is to be pregnant. Some people were happy to be pregnant, and good for them, but then, some people had money, or a support network, and weren’t teenage girls.
But, just because she had seen no vampires, that didn’t mean no vampires had seen her.
Every day since her encounter with the shape, it had been stalking her. It had learned her schedule. She would arrive by bus at 4 PM, work for five hours, and leave on the bus at 9:20 PM. Those twenty minutes between leaving her work and getting on the bus, when she was totally vulnerable, that was when it watched her. It watched her from above on the rooftops. It watched her from the shadows of the alleys. It watched her as it walked just outside her peripheral vision. Every day. For twenty minutes. For two weeks. And Stephanie had absolutely no idea. It had been waiting, biding its time. Waiting for the perfect opportunity…
Stephanie stopped at the crosswalk, watching the cars go by while she waited for the light to turn. She pulled out her phone to check the time. 9:13 PM. She put her phone back in her pocket and then started tapping her foot. She looked left, then right. She’d been so edge lately. She always felt like there was a pair of eyes boring into her, and at that moment it felt especially intense. The hair on the back of her neck was standing up, and she had goosebumps on her arms. Something bad was about to happen…
Krrssh!
Stephanie whipped around, her heart nearly jumping out of her chest, and raised her arms to shield her face. She slowly opened one eye to see a cat had knocked over a trash can, and was beating a hasty escape from the mess it had made, like it hadn’t caused it…
“f*cking jumpscare…” She muttered as she lowered her arms. The light changed, and she hustled across the street. She walked a little bit further, then sat down on the bench. She took a few deep breaths; in through the nose, out through the mouth, then pulled out her phone to kill time. ‘Practically home free, now’, she thought to herself.
“Step-ha-knee…”
Her heart nearly stopped completely this time. Two weeks, and she still remembered that voice, like a pack-a-day smoker. She didn’t want to look. She wanted to keep looking at her phone. Pretend she didn’t just hear it speak. Pretend she didn’t hear it say her name. She swallowed, and looked up from her phone anyway. Standing in front of her, halfway between the curb and the bench, was the shape. And oh, how it looked like a shape, and not… whatever it looked like in the light of the streetlamp. Hood pulled up, casting its face in shadow. Black cape pulled around its body, hiding any evidence it had a humanoid form. It had come back for her. And now, it knew her f*cking name. Well… it kind of knew her name…
“W-w-what do you want from me?!” She couldn’t feel her legs. Even if she could, she had tried running the first time, and it caught her. In more ways than one. And the ‘fight’ half of ‘fight or flight’ sure wasn’t an option. It could probably rip her in half like wet tissue paper. So, freeze it was. Like a deer in headlights. Which actually happened because deer had so many cones in their eyes the headlights blinded them, and they’d stay in place until they adjusted to the light. Or they got hit.
…What? Stephanie liked trivia, sue her. It was the one thing she got from her father she didn’t hate.
A limb slowly protruded out from the curtain of its shadowy cape. Its gloved hand was clenched, bringing something out with it. It dangled from its grip. “Left this.”
It… it was her purse! She had totally given up on it the second she put it down in the alley! The vampire had taken it? And kept it for two weeks? And was now giving it back…?
“W-why…?” She verbalized her confusion.
The shape shrugged its hunched shoulders. “Mugger told you to.”
“W-what? No! Not why I left it! I mean why did you… why are you giving it back to me?”
The shape tilted its head under its hood. Why did the hood have two points on it? Were they supposed to be horns? They were too far to the sides for that. “Because… it yours.” It sounded like it couldn’t comprehend needing any more reason than that “Do not want?”
“N-no, I want it! I just…” This was so surreal. She was just having a casual conversation with a vampire that was returning her purse like it was just a good samaritan, and not a blood sucking abomination. “Just give it to me!”
Just like the way it approached the mugger, the shape came over to Stephanie looking like it wasn’t moving at all. Like it was perfectly still, and it was the rest of the world that was moving around it. It held the purse out at arms length, then dropped it into her lap with all the care of a claw machine dropping a prize in the hole. It pulled its limb back into its cape. Then it just stood there. And stood there… and stood there… Until, “What do you say…?”
Huh? ‘What do you say’? Was it an old man trying to make small talk now? Hold on… did it want…? “Thank you…?”
It nodded. “Welcome, Steh-pony… sh… Shel… h-hur. Welcome, Stehpony Shelhur”
Wait, what? Where was it getting Shelhur? Her last name was (unfortunately) Brown. She was pretty sure Shelhur wasn’t even a real name. “How… how did you almost know my name…?” Perhaps the vampire just had approximate knowledge of many things…
The vampire’s limb came out again. It reached towards Stephanie with its pointed fingers. For a second, she was certain it was going to rip her heart out. Instead…
Tack-tack
The sound of a nail tapping plastic. Oh, she was still wearing her vest and name tag from work.
Stephanie
She/Her
“Sh-she/her. It s-says she/her. And that’s not my last name, those are m-my p-pronouns…” Why the f*ck was she explaining this to a bloodsucking monster?! Like it cared about pronouns! Most people didn’t care about pronouns!
A manicured eyebrow raised from behind that mask of its. It was slit, like Harper’s. “Pro… now…?” Genuine confusion. Not in an ‘I don’t want to even know what that means’ kind of way but in an ‘I have never heard that word in my life’ kind of way. It was starting to fit together. With how it annunciated, how it paused to consider its words, how it replaced or totally left out certain words. English really wasn’t this thing’s strong suit. Maybe Romanian was the prefered language of the Count here…
“Yeah, like… you use it instead of someone’s name. Like, ‘this is Stephanie, she is my friend, I like spending time with her’. That sort of thing.” It was no big deal to explain something to someone who had never heard of a concept before. Not to Stephanie, anyway. Nobody is born knowing anything, nobody dies knowing everything, and every day someone is learning something for the first time. It was, however, a big deal to do that for a vampire, and she had absolutely no idea why she was doing it.
This up close, Stephanie could see the shape’s mouth form an ‘O’. Its fangs still looked deadly sharp, and just as long as last time.
“She/her.” The vampire said, pulling the outstretched limb back to jab a pointed finger into the padded fabric of the… vest? Under the cape. Yeah, vest. It was definitely a vest. Stephanie was still going with vest.
But, oh. Oh, this was a person wasn’t it— she! She! She was a person! Well, Stephanie just felt awful. Who was the real monster here? Probably still the vampire feeding on the blood of the innocent… But, Stephanie still didn’t feel all that much better than her. “That… that’s awesome, good for you…”
The way Stephanie trailed off, it must have made the vampire think she was searching for a name, because she offered one, “The Black Bat.”
“Well… Black Bat—”
“The Black Bat.” She corrected her.
“Okay… The Black Bat… it was… an absolute pleasure to make your acquaintance…” She didn’t have a way out of this sentence, but apparently the universe did show mercy sometimes, because the bus pulled up to the stop. “…but I’ve gotta get going… see you around…”
She got up, skirted around… ‘The Black Bat’, and boarded the bus. She looked back over her shoulder as the doors closed, and the vampire was gone.
Watching horror films the night before
Debating witches and folklores
The unknown troubles on your mind
Maybe your eyes are playing tricks
You sense, and suddenly eyes fix
On dancing shadows from behind
Fear of the dark, fear of the dark
I have a constant fear that someone’s always near
Feat of the dark, fear of the dark
I have a phobia that someone’s always there
