The Shake

look back. I don’t mean that I lost all memory of my human past. I remembered it well enough. But I couldn’t look back to my former life and hope to find answers about the present, about what I had become. For all practical purposes, the only life that meant anything to me began in 1908.
I was on leave at the time from a small private college in New York where, ironically, I taught humanities. My wife, Rose, and I had decided to spend a few months in Sicily and had rented a small cottage in Messina. Rose was an amateur archaeologist and was interested in the history of Sicily. I had been looking forward to the quiet and relative solitude to work on a paper I'd been writing. Like most academics, I suppose I had a rather inflated opinion of the importance of my own ideas. I took it for granted that my status as a professional gave me an authority that extended beyond the confines of my specific discipline. In short, I was a moderately pompous ass, but with a gift for gab and a quirky personality that made me popular in the lecture hall.
Our first night in Messina, my wife and I were sleeping, each in one of the bedroom’s two single beds. Shortly after 5:00 a.m., something that couldn’t happen happened. Something monstrous entered our room, sank its teeth into my wife’s neck, and sucked her life away.
At the time, I would have denied the very possibility that an extravagant creature from folk tales actually walked the earth the same as I did. My entire adult life, as I saw it, had been devoted to freeing myself from the various fallacies and superstitions of the past. A vampire was a scientific impossibility. Rationality banned the idea from consideration, and as so often happens in this life, reality bit back.
Rose was a petite woman. Her blood failed to satisfy the vampire's thirst. When her heart stopped, it was my turn. I remember having one of those dreams in which some disturbing element of the surroundings is integrated into the details of the dream. I dreamed of a weight pinning my body to the bed, a vague irritation on my neck, a swirling descent. Had nature not intervened, those dreamed sensations would have been the final illusions of my life.
At 5:20 a.m., seconds after the vampire had bitten into my neck, the city of Messina was struck by a devastating earthquake. Like most of the buildings of Sicily, our cottage was made of stone. The initial shock collapsed the wall next to my bed, along with the roof it was supporting. I woke wide-eyed just as the whole thing came crumbling down on top of me. I felt the stones hit, but instead of crushing me, there was only the sudden impact of great weight cushioned by something that had absorbed most of the blow. Something on top of me had shielded me from injury. I heard a low, animal-like growl, half pain, half fury, then whatever it was coughed in a single convulsive spasm and a gush of blood sprayed my face. That spray of blood was the baptism of my new life.
As far as I could tell, I wasn’t injured, but I couldn’t move under the weight of the rubble. There was an intermittent stench every time the thing on top of me exhaled. It was making me nauseous, but I couldn’t turn my face enough to avoid it. Then I remembered Rose. In a horror of panic, I tried to free myself, kicking and twisting with all my strength. I managed to scrape the skin off my shins and elbows, but didn’t accomplish anything else. I called her name several times, but there was no answer. The night was silent except for the wheezing breath of my companion and the throbbing of my own pulse in my ears. I tried again to free myself, but it was pointless. The end had come. I resigned myself to the inevitable and soon lost consciousness.
I don't know how long I was out. Pain eventually woke me up. My neck was on fire and I was experiencing an unbearable agitation, like electric heat that seemed to be radiating from every cell of my body. Waves of some nauseating energy swept through me, and I hurt, everywhere. The pain was beyond anything I had ever experienced. My entire body seemed to be generating it, each wave growing more intense, until the agony made me long for death.
Again, mercifully, I passed out.
The next time I woke up, everything had changed. Of course, at the time I had no inkling of what had happened to me. The existence of vampires was not something I would have been willing to entertain. And the fact that they didn't exist would only make it that much harder to adjust to the awkward fact that I had become one. As if life wasn’t hard enough without turning into a mythical beast.
Rescue operations after the earthquake were slow and disorganized, primarily due to the extent of destruction, which was almost total, and the extraordinarily high number of casualties. When I regained consciousness, I realized the darkness was no longer total, though only the faintest indirect light penetrated the rubble. As far as I could determine, we, myself and the thing on top of me, were trapped in a space no larger than our bodies. I knew my companion was still alive because I could hear and feel him breathing. I could also still smell his breath, which had become both more intense and, curiously, less revolting.
The following day was a long one. I don't know how many times I passed in and out of consciousness. Each time I woke up, I seemed to be suffering less physically, and for reasons I didn't understand, I also seemed to be less concerned about the predicament I was in. Nothing external had changed. I was still trapped and I had