Jazmine and Carmilla vs. the Ancient Vampire

Jazmine and Carmilla vs. the Ancient Vampire

1

Jazmine

Jazmine Thorne meditated while drinking herbal tea and chanting below the blacked-out mirror on the red-and-black, sloping ceiling of her basement ritual room. The flickering of the black and white cast ominous shadows upon her white Tau robe and golden slippers.

She visualized herself engulfed in an enormous violet flame, then, as she so often did, imagined that violet flame being overcome and enveloped by an incandescent white light. She then performed a psychic self-defense techniques, essential for her survival in this small town in which she was buffeted with negative energy more often than outsider-onlookers fawning over “New Jersey's mountain Mayberry” could possibly imagine.

Once she had offered the appropriate prayers, executed the proper banishing rituals, and visualized herself surrounded by a fiery-hot pyramid of light, she chanted and vibrated a series of both Pagan and Abrahamic divine and angelic names.

Jazmine arose from her crouching position within her salt-lined magical circle on the floor, dissolved the pyramid and all the white light, the flame, all of it, and, extending her hands as she drawing on her magically enhanced psychic abilities – extinguished the candles with her mind. She allowed herself to bask radically in the deafening silent stillness of the cosmic eternal night that she had opened up in her ritual room.

Even in the dark, she was acutely aware of the mirror on the ceiling, which she had covered up with black cloth. She reached out from within her soul from insights and Truth – the kind of hard, meaty truth that countless holy men and women for centuries before her had sought.

She stared into the obsidian, somehow welcoming surface of the mirror, then shut her eyes. She called out silently now to her pantheon, to the Cosmic Christ, to her spirit guides, for guidance, the kind of guidance she needed in order to properly interpret the wisdom of the dark mirror.

“Come, spirits, guide me forth, ever upward, toward the blackened mirror. O friendly, deathly-silent mirror, speak out of your silence unto me the secrets of my self, my soul, not the dross of my Lower Self, but the sublimest wisdom of my Higher Self, so that I may attain the conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel,” Jazmine intoned.

“O Wisdom, the beautiful, the majestic, O radiant Sophia, reveal unto the secrets of the mirror that reflect forth unto me the secrets of my Higher Self, my Holy Guardian Angel, as well as that of the collective consciousness, and the gnosis of the Holy Spirit!

“ Allow me to do what I must to protect what is right, but without losing sight of my path. So mote it be!”

Now Jazmine fell into silent contemplation.

Somehow, she sensed her work with the mirror had helped to recover not one but two extremely rare Masonic books that she had nearly given on up as irretrievably lost to the occult bookstore, Hidden Light Books, that she owned. She firmly believed, too, that the mirror had helped manifest for her finding an assistant manger for her occult bookstore, Hidden Light Books, which had allowed a loyal clientele, even among some townees, attracted enough patrons from out of town and online to be profitable, and enjoyed a cold, passive-aggressive tolerance from most of Jazmine's neighbors.

In any case, to the extent that such frigid responses had thawed to an extent, Jazmine's assistant manager Amber Harrison largely deserved the credit. Though Amber, with her thick, horn-rimmed glasses and generally bookish demeanor, fit the part in many respects, she was, in other respects, an unlikely student of esotericism. She hailed from a tiny, remote, sparsely populated, farming hamlet in southwestern Virginia that made Mount Serenity seem like Center City Philadelphia, if not Manhattan, by comparison.

Yet despite having a population of only three hundred, the town boasted two Southern Baptist and two Pentecostal churches; Amber had been raised by a Pentecostal minister. She'd never given Jazmine all the details of how she'd managed to leave and get a secular higher education, but she managed to go to a secular college and attained both bachelor's and master's degrees with honors. Her main area of expertise was Ozark folk magic and Ozark folklore in general, but she knew a hell of a lot about folk magic as well as Western “high magic” esotericism. She was mysterious and mostly quiet outside of her interactions with customers, but she was a godsend in operating the store both physically and online. Thanks to the mirror.

Yet it was not her day job that she thought of now, as she surrendered fully to the mirror. She levitated spiritually, mentally, and physically and fell upward and onward into the mirror, penetrating seamlessly, effortlessly, through its now porous, liquid, glass-ocean surface, deep into the black-hole-singularity-like depths beyond.

Moments later, she opened her eyes and out of the obsidian depths, one point of light emerged, then another, and another, and another, and soon a whole world materialized before her. Then she saw a raven-haired, porcelain-skinned woman wearing a plain gray dress.

“Carmilla,” spat out a tall, gaunt, beady-eyed man with an old-fashioned, pointed Russian beard “your performance on both the harpsichord and the piano were atrocious. Your violin playing is an abomination. Your singing is execrable. Your penmanship displays an unladylike sloppiness, and you display a belligerence, a disordered rebellious spirit – demonic, indeed!“

“What the hell is this?” Jazmine said.

The two figures showed no signs of hearing her. Carmilla bowed her head, struggling to stop the flow of tears down her cheeks.

Ivan the Terrible Beard leaned just a couple of inches away from her face and snarled, “You insufferable, sniveling, impudent shrew! You lack utterly the docility appropriate to a woman! The wise men of ancient Athens recognized haughty young girls like you, not yet domesticated by men, as mad, dangerous beasts. Unfortunately, our era has fallen prey to sentimental delusions about your kind. And yet, you are far too old for such nonsense. You should have been married and a mother years ago.”

“So everyone keeps telling me,” Carmilla replied in a husky monotone, her cheeks flushing slightly. Her affect remained flat, as if this bleating imbecile had deadened her emotions over the years.

“Damn you, miss! How impudently you speak to me. How many perfectly good suitors have you arrogantly refused?”

She shrugged.

“Have you lost count? I haven't. Seven!”

“Oh. I am sorry, sir, but I must follow...my own path.”

“Your path is that which God has ordained me for womankind.”

“Oh? Then perhaps you will have to deal with me as the Roman authorities did with the virgin martyrs, Saints Agnes and Agatha.”

“I'm seeing something from the past,” Jazmine said. “Oh, my God, Carmilla! What an odd name! That's got to be Carmilla Wainwright, the eccentric reclusive author who just moved into a town a few weeks ago! No, this has to bee too long ago!” She paused, then shook her head. “No, this is Carmilla Wainwright. The time doesn't matter. It's she.”

The scene morphed into another, that of a Carmilla, appearing to be moderately older – into adulthood – indeed, strikingly like the purportedly middle-aged woman she was at present, wearing a black dress that was a size or two too large for her. Her hands, raised above her head as if in prayer; were entirely red with blood.

“I had no choice. I had to protect myself and the others,” she said.

A shadowy figure with gleaming yellow eyes in the inky shadows behind Carmilla rasped, “You will not be safe unless I turn you. I need to transform you, my dear.”

Then the yellow eyes and gazed directly into Jazmine's eyes, and she screamed. She fell backward out of the mirror. It let out of a thunderous growl, and its nebulous form lunged toward her. This was no sexy vampire. This was a hideous monstrosity, but it definitely lived on human blood. The mirror exploded. Jazmine awoke hours later, aching and shaken but otherwise unharmed within her magical circle, but the salt had been trampled over.

Jazmine groaned as she awakened, immediately beset with a raging tension headache and throbbing neck, shoulder, and back pain. “Damn, I need to find Carmilla before that thing does.” She groaned again. “And Amber may be an odd duck as friends go, but, damn it, she is my friend, but if that thing lays on her finger on her, it will have to hell to pay from me!”

2

Carmilla

“Oh! Oh, no!” Carmilla Wainwright cried. “The Ancient One! The Archaic Father! He's...out among us!”

“Babe, what...are you talking about?” Becca Samson, a Goth college sophomore with whom Carmilla had connected through an age-gap dating service, said, rousing herself groggily from her slumber next to Carmilla on a large, soft sofa in the vampiress's living room. Becca was heavily in the vampire lifestyle subculture, self-identified as a sanguinarian – though her boyfriend, with whom she was in an open relationship, described himself as a psychic vampire, and she didn't realize just how authentic a specimen of vampire she had found in Carmilla.

However, Carmilla rarely indulged her innate craving for human blood anymore. Since the 1950s, she almost always sustained herself with a blood-substitute in capsule or injectable form that a human scientist friend had developed for her – a man who had worshiped her in unrequited Petrarchan fashion. When she needed a bit more on occasion, animal blood sufficed. These eccentric willing victims – well, they could be fun, but sometimes she felt a bit uncomfortable. After all, well over a century earlier, her blood hunger would have caused her to destroy a woman whom she had loved deeply had she not been thwarted by outside intervention. She barely knew this Becca at all, but, whoever she was, she did not deserve an untimely death, or an existence as a freakish and always hunted and haunted creature such as Carmilla herself.

She looked at the foreboding full-length mirror, draped in black – for which she would be invisible in it if it were left uncovered. Still, she kept it both as a reminder of her otherness, of the necessity of discretion, of the limitations she had learned to impose upon herself over the centuries – no truly lasting romantic relationships or even genuinely close friendships, no mingling with unethical vampires. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries had been, in many respects, a godsend – indeed, she had begun to hope that perhaps God/Goddess had not damned her irretrievably after all – with blessedly more advanced artificial light, movies, television, and, ah, the Internet!

After retreating into a hermit-like lifestyle during the past decade and a half of her career as a novelist, with only highly boundaried company of personal assistants who helped manage their daytime affairs – ah, the sunlight problem, that was a bitch! True, she loved to write. Her favorite nay-saying critic called her works “oddly philosophically erudite, esoteric historical family saga potboilers, prettily written tomes signifying nothing.” Nevertheless, she had produced a number of bestsellers and had a devoted fan base while managing to avoid the vast majority of requests for interviews – two exceptions being graduate students writing dissertations on her work. Perhaps her proudest and most surprising accomplishment had been waking up one morning a couple of months later to discover that her work was the subject of a lengthy, elaborately produced video essay by a popular young feminist social media content creator of whom Carmilla was a devoted fan.

Still, her black-draped mirror reminded that her limits to her ability to be popular, to be happy. And, now, she swore that she could hear the mirror screaming at her.

“Carmilla, honey, what's wrong?” Becca cried.

She rubbed Carmilla's shoulders. “Hey, babe, what is it? This is the first time we've been together in person, but you've been really distant for the past couple of hours. Please talk to me.”

As if coming out of a trance, Carmilla turned to Becca and hugged her tightly. “I'm sorry, Becca, darling. I like you, I really like you. It's not about you.”

“I...know. I mean...I hope so. It's just that...I'm feeling kind of rejected, babe. I've offered you my blood. I've offered you sex, no strings attached – though I'd like more than that with you. But you've turned me down flat for both of you. I thought you found me attractive.”

“Oh, honey, I do, believe me.”

“Then, what was it? Brandon and I have an open relationship.” Her face fell. “Oh, no, please tell me it's not because I'm bisexual. The Carmilla Wainwright who wrote Destiny's Rainbow can't be a biphobe.”

Carmilla leaned toward and kissed Becca on the forehead, then lightly on the mouth. “Oh, no, my dear. No, I have no problem with the fact that you also love men.”

“Then what is it? Damn it, it's because of my age, isn't it? You've now decided I'm too young.” Her brows furrowed in a cross expression. “God, I've been through this before with a number of older women --- and older men, they tell me they're cool with dating a younger woman, hell, they even convince themselves they're cool with it, but they get uptight and realize they're not cool with it for their bullshit reasons, and they oh-so-politely cast me aside.”

“Becca! Oh, no, Becca! No, you're perfect.” Carmilla clasped Becca by her shoulders and brought into an oddly Victorian lady-like bear hug. “You're just perfect for me, my enchanting Gothic princess. Shh. I'm not rejecting you. I just need a little time. OK? And, unfortunately, there is danger afoot.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I need you to stay here. This house is protected by powerful magic – magic that I have cultivated over my time as a powerful vampire.”

“I knew you were the real real deal, sexy lady. My associates, Theodora Jefferson and Ormond Hampton, they help me...manage my affairs.”

“Are they...your plural spouses or something?”

Carmilla chuckled. “No, no, nothing like that. They are trusted friends whom I employ for their professional competence.”

The mirror squawked at her, but Becca could not. She sensed about books.

“Bookstore. There's something involving a bookstore. That occult bookstore in this town. Do you shop here much?”

“Oh, yeah, Hidden Light Books. They have some esoteric vampire stuff.” She paused. “And the owner is pretty cool.” She rifled through her wallet and produced a card. “She gave me her card. Here it is. Jazmine Thorne. She's one of the cool nerdy ladies who doesn't judge our kind, totally chill.”

An image blushed of a woman with reddish-brown hair and fair, freckled skin screaming and chanting in several archaic languages, then shouting “Get back, O fell Monstrous One, Primordial Elder, Archaic Father!”

Carmilla snapped back to her present reality.

“She knows,” she said.

“Knows what?”

“Becca, please trust me. I know you don't know me very well, but, please, just trust me. The magic with which I have enclosed this place, will protect you. My associates will fetch you anything you need. You won't stay long. I'm not keeping you prisoner.”

“I know. I get it. You're a really real vampire. OK. What about Brandon?”

“I think Jazmine and I should be able to contain the evil within this --” she waved her hands in exasperation – “at once delightful and haunting town. Tell Brandon whatever you need to make sure that stays a safe distance – at least fifty miles – beyond this area for now.”

Becca gulped and nodded, then hugged Carmilla. As she turned to text her boyfriend, Carmilla literally dissolved into the shadows.

***

3

Jazmine

Though this was a magical operation of a magnitude she had never previously attempted, Jazmine knew that traditional magical garb was unsuitable for working out in the open. Accordingly, she donned loose-fitting paramilitary-style black pajamas, white gloves, and red boots, all of which she had magically consecrated.

“Miss Thorne,” the Ancient Vampire hissed, his voice surrounding her and vibrating deep inside her skull, “thank you for your kind work with your bookstore. You have generated a great deal of knowledge and power at its site. I will take it over and spread my work, my greater power, harness its energy – to spread myself – to consume.”

“I used to think you'd drain copious amounts of blood out of innocent people's necks,” Jazmine said. “Now I'm not so harsh.”

“I, on the other hand,” Carmilla said, appearing gradually in the weak light of the waning moon, her face framed in the black hood of her magical tunic, “had long assumed that you devoured their energy, their life force.”

Jazmine gasped in recognition, saying, “You're the young woman from the past I saw in my vision in my black mirror.”

Carmilla nodded. “That makes sense.”

“But, yeah,” Jazmine added, “I couldn't figure out this mother – this creep. I've read about the Ancient Vampire, the Archon of Ultimate Darkness, the Archaic Father, whatever the hell he's supposed to be called. He's a vampire, but he's so much more powerful than nearly all the rest --”

“Because he's so old,” Carmilla interjected.

“Old, you say,” the Ancient Vampire said and roar-laughed. “Everything old will now be new forever.”

“Yeah, I got that. As in already old by the time the Romans executed Jesus,” Jazmine said, doing her best to ignore the Ancient Vampire's psychological warfare. “Maybe even old back in the Age of the Pyramids.”

Carmilla walked forward. “Ms. Thorne, I might as tell you what I think, on some level, you already love you. I, too, am an honest-to-God vampire. I've had just about three hundred years to research just about anything I could possibly want, including this delightful gentleman. As far as I can tell, he was enslaving, murdering, and stealing the souls of Neanderthals. And he is supremely versatile; he is able to feed equally well from both blood and energy.”

Jazmine gasped. “So...we're at a bit of a disadvantage in terms of magical and life experience.”

“Well, Ms. – Jazmine, I know this self-important jackass very well --”

The Ancient Vampire howled in anger and sent a flaming tornado hurtling Carmilla backward, but, seconds later, she bolted back upright, levitated ten feet above the little crimson cyclone, made a chopping motion with her arms, and intoned, “Cease!” The tornado vanished simply blanking out of existence all at once.

“You are a powerful magician. Clearly a magus,” Jazmine cried.

“Silence!” the Archaic Father roared and sent a bolt of purple lightning directly into Jazmine's open mouth. She began to convulse.

I can't think. I'm going to die, she thought, just as her consciousness bolted to a turquoise island over a violet sky. A tall, muscular man who looked like her fraternal twin approached her and said, “You have all the strength, all the resources, magical and mundane, physical, mental, spiritual, astral, and etheric, exoteric and esoteric, within you, Jazmine. You can do this.”

It was her animus – in Jungian terms, her masculine self. I can do this. She brought up a ball of pulsating light-energy, with psychic power akin to that of a burning sun, from her belly up throughout her body, out into her arms, diffusing and stopping the convulsions, and then up through her throat and out her mouth, forcing out and then shattering into tiny bits of impotent energy the formerly proud purple lightning bolt.

She struggled to keep the lightning as the Ancient Vampire added additional voice. “I will have your store. I will have this town. Out of this place, thanks to your mirror, you frivolous harlots, I will tear apart and build a new world – my world, a world that will love and reflect back me, forever, and feed me forever! My will be done forever!”

“Oh, really?” Carmilla shot back, holding up a large photo of a gleaming St. Benedict's crucifix on her brightly lit tablet.

“You shrew, you know that that can't stop me, but it causes me pain! How can you be a vampire and not flinch from the sign of the deceiver?”

“You're the biggest deceiver I know!” Carmilla exclaimed and lunged with the tablet as it transformed into a black mirror.

Jazmine screamed as she even saw an even more horrid face than that of the Archaic Father flicker across the surface of the tablet-mirror. “Carmilla, wait! He's got a trick to get out of your containment working!”

“Well, mortal, your move. For once, I'm running out of power,” Carmilla replied.

Jazmine concentrated hard and sent a telepathic message to Carmilla. Here. I've glimpsed this dude's fundamental traumatic memory, I think. Let's use this, she thought-messaged to the vampiress.

“Aw, Carmilla and Jazmine murmuring sweet nothings in the kissing booth,” I said.

“You miserable, sulfurous wretch, the last man who taunted me with such sophomoric taunts lived hours of excruciating pain to regret it –before I snuffed out his life altogether,” Carmilla said.

“And I demolished a kissing booth with my mind,” Jazmine added.

Then the two women flooded the Ancient Vampire's mind with a barrage of images of singing feminine discarnate beings, perhaps elemental or siren-like in nature, perhaps some kind of cosmic oracles. He shrank and materialized more clearly as a solid, bulky, but still shadowy, hideous vampire. He screamed in agony. Carmilla rushed and plunged a thick stake through his heart.

“That...can't..work,” he groaned.

“This can,” Jazmine cried, raising her arms high above her head, shutting above her eyes, and chanting gutturally in an angelic language. The Ancient Vampire was soon engulfed in flames.

“This is an outrage, a sacrilege! You cannot vanquish me like some ordinary vampire!”

He disintegrated, hurling out ever more adamant protests and obscenities until his voice finally faded into silence.”

“He's not really gone, is he?” Jazmine said. “I mean, that was awesome, but we can't actually have killed him, can we?”

Carmilla sighed. “Not quite. But we have contained him very decisively. It will take tremendous event to revive him, to bring him back into our world.”

Jazmine took a deep breath. “So, hey, damn, I'm glad you've been a customer at my bookstore. You were amazing. Without you, I – you saved my life. Don't worry. I won't tell anyone your secret.” She frowned. “You don't have to take my blood, now you? As in either kill me or turn me into a vampire?”

Carmilla shot her a puzzled look. “You say that, but you don't particularly scared.”

“I guess I'm not. I have to ask, but, for some reason, I' trust you, and I'm weirded out now. Also – and I know it's both foolish and perhaps kind of inappropriate for me to say this right now – but I also find you to be ridiculously hot. A gorgeous lady vampire? “ She grinned. “I have a weakness for bad girls. And I'm also fond of older women.”

Carmilla blushed slightly. “Well, I must say my frequenting was mainly for the excellence of your occult books, but your beauty and charm were also a factor.” She cleared her throat. “I should tell that I'm sort of casually seeing someone – a younger woman --- even younger than you – who also knows my secret – well, kind of – she's poly. Her primary relationship is with a man.”

Jazmine chuckled. “Very postmodern for...a very classic lady.”

Carmilla shrugged. “Look, I must return to my home. My...Becca is waiting for me. I think she needs a hug. I can't go out in the daytime, but I'd love to catch a late movie with you sometime.”

“OK,” Jazmine said, crying a bit. “Oh, God, that was so scary.”

“I know.”

The two women embraced before going their separate ways into what remained of the night, a night now owned by the light-workers of the world.

THE END