I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley
 

Becoming a vampire has its perks. There’s virtual immortality, of course, as well as eternal youth, power, stamina, and speed. My favorite ability, however, has always been the gift of mind reading. After all, how cunning we all are—mortals and vampires alike. We’ve all become so clever at putting on our masks of strength, happiness, professionalism, apathy, or interest that it literally takes a mind reader to know the weakness, misery, passion, anger, and boredom festering deep beneath our outward facades. God, I can’t even count how many times I’ve been on a crowded city bus and overheard the driver imagining simply driving off the freeway overpass and into the oncoming traffic below. Or how many doctors cheated their way through medical school. How much passive-aggression, frustration, doubt, and—ultimately—sheer savagery lies at the heart of even the most “normal” members of society. Remember above all that I’m not talking about homicidal maniacs with dead bodies stowed away in their basements. I’m talking about the neighbor across the street, the mom carpooling your kids to school, the dentist about to ram an extremely shiny, extremely sharp object into your mouth; I’m talking about the regular people everyone inevitably interacts with on a daily basis and the chaos that lies beneath their calm veneers.

Take me for instance. You might have passed me in the street. You might have smiled as I held a door open for you. You might have talked to me in a crowded bar. You trust my crisp clothes, my expensive haircut, my warm smile, intrinsically categorizing me as a civilized, trustworthy member of society. If I invite you into my home, you will you see the books on my shelves, the art on my walls, the stainless steel technology transforming the drudgeries of daily life into quick and aesthetic efficiency, and I assure you, you will mistake these for signs of culture and refinement. Few will ever fathom the seething, blood-laced nightmares that haunt each moment of my existence. Fewer still recognize me for the unredeemable serial killer that I am—even when I bare my fangs, even when pure murder glints in my eyes, my victims still more often than not disbelieve that I could ever be anything more or less than human. And only I myself carry the burden of one million souls, each one parted from its human body by my murderous hand.

There are the hundreds of thousands killed over the years to feed my insatiable blood thirst, of course. But then there are also the deaths that came long before I needed blood for sustenance. There are the pointless murders. The ruthless murders. The murders whose causes didn’t matter, whose reasons were flawed, and whose results were insignificant and unjustifiable to any rational mind.

But I suppose these are the burdens every military commander carries to his dying day. Yes, long before I ever became a killer of the night, an entire army of men was willing to sacrifice their lives and souls at my decree. If I said kill, they asked, “How many?” And to what purpose? For an inconsequential outcome to some long-forgotten battles during the military entanglement history has simply dubbed “The First Punic War.” My men—mere boys of nineteen or twenty in actuality—died serving my military pursuits, they were slaughtered when I miscalculated, and they were eternally damned when I commanded them to murder and massacre.

These are the ghosts that haunt my nightmares and the sins that permeate every facet of my waking night. So there is no need, my precious mortals, to try and peek behind my gilded mask: I have already shown you the monster that lurks beneath.