The Journal of Michael O'Shane

Journal Entry – April 11, 2008

Tonight, I celebrated my one hundred and twenty-eighth birthday as an immortal.

Hard to believe that number, in both its enormity and its smallness, but it found its way to me nonetheless. Each year strikes me a bit differently. Sometimes, it causes me to become melancholy. Other times, I am able to raise a glass and toast others to another year, or decade, or century with a smile and a laugh. There are years I attempt not to recognize the date and other years when I wax nostalgic. This has been one of the latter years. Sabrina has been on my mind a lot lately.

I met her on a Saturday. I remember this because I spent the day at my small flat, with no classes for the day and nothing else to do than walk about Kilkenny and read. For several years, studies led me elsewhere in Ireland – to Dublin, for university and then, as a professor of linguistics – until my parents passed and my sister called for me to return home to Kilkenny. By then, I missed it. My occasional visits home reminded me of happier times as a schoolboy and time spent with Katherine called to mind the scrapes my sister and I got into together.

Within a short time, the listlessness set in, though. Katherine married. I remained a bachelor past my thirtieth birthday, not eager to settle down and give up my dream to travel the world some day. I made a pittance at Kilkenny College compared to the salary I earned at university and was left with little hope of traveling into Britain for a holiday, let alone venturing into Europe. Books sat in stacks on my desk at home of other languages and cultures. Things I wished to do with my life while my thirty-first and thirty-second birthdays passed. I was inching toward thirty-three on the Saturday evening I walked down to the pub.

I never expected to find what I found there.

She was not the first redheaded woman I’d ever met, but she was certainly the most exotic. The wild colour of her hair was a compliment to the wild look in her brown eyes when we first gazed at each other. She walked up to me. This is how I knew I was in for an adventure. Never once, in all my years spent both in poverty and academia, did I have somebody sit across from me and stare at me until I finally set down my book and looked at her.

I asked what brought her to my table. I recall adjusting my spectacles – good heavens, I wore glasses in those days and my hair was a short, messy mass of brown. Sabrina often told me she looked at me and saw potential, but as I remember what I looked like, I have to wonder how she found a gentleman hidden inside the unkempt Irishman. For all the flowery words of seduction that came out of those red lips of hers, what won me over most was the promise of being somewhere else. Of being something else.

I recall her telling me I would have lifetimes to study the languages of the world. To see each country and reside in whatever place I decided to reside. Utter immersion and complete dominion over my future with only my imagination as a tether to my pursuit of knowledge and discovery. I loved that she was different. Her ideas and her plans were not the common Irish woman’s ambitions and she presented them in such a gilded chalice that I wanted to drink deeply from it. If I have any regret, it is that I did not find my sister Katherine to say goodbye to her before I left. But Katherine would have never understood.

April 11, 1880 was the day I finally looked Sabrina in the eyes, fully understanding everything she was about to do to me, and requested that it be done. Of all her fledglings, I suppose I was the most blessed, because Sabrina did not spare any detail from me. Before we left Kilkenny, she strolled around town with me pointing out I was just as removed from the world of mortals as she was. Sabrina’s words involved terms such as ‘inferior,’ but there was some truth in it all. A single man at the age of thirty-two with wanderlust and a hunger to taste life in all its exotic flavors. I was not typical, compared to the others in my hometown.

She told me about the entire process as the train took us to Dublin. Drinking blood, dying, rising again. Being consigned to the night, but owning the night. “I’ll make a proper gentleman out of you, Michael,” she said as her cold lips touched my neck and I didn’t stop her. On April 11, 1880, my heart stopped beating and I breathed my last. Professor O’Shane became the vampire Michael when I opened my eyes again. One hundred and twenty-eight years of endless nights and the only thing that has disappointed me is that the woman I once traveled the world with transformed from being my immortal love to the vilest form of evil I ever had the displeasure of witnessing.

Every night, I walk through my coven and see all of her children, who have now become my wards. Charles, turned at the age of eighteen with the promise of superiority amongst his peers. Louis, turned at the age of twenty-five when he bartered for immortality with the money he inherited from his deceased parents. Peter, turned at the age of twenty-eight with the allure of permanence and stability. We all signed the dark contract for all of our own reasons, but thinking on that first night, I had stars in my eyes and the future was an open book without one pen stroke on the page.

So many chapters written now. I have a position of prominence due to the gentleman she made me into. There are still days, however, when I wish it was just she and I in the Orient, her laughing through the haze of sake and Asian blood and me practicing my Japanese on her. Or walking the streets of Paris, watching the city bear forth art and intellect through Bohemians and absinthe. How many of those so-called intellectuals did I consume after engaging them in discourse over drinks? How many mortals have died by my hand by now?

Heaven only knows when I will see fit to bestow the dark gift of immortality on my own line. I only hope when I do so, they can look back on one hundred years passed with less of the bitter and more of the sweet. For now, I close the book and wait to see what my one hundred and twenty-ninth year will bring with it, because each year is unique in its own way and yet, each year resembles the ones past with only a different cast of actors in slightly different scenes.

Sláinte,
Michael