I would rather rot than feed.
It was not a noble thought—only the last one I had left.
After the child, I didn't return to the vineyard for three days. I wandered the hills aimlessly, avoiding roads, villages, rivers—anywhere life might brush against me. The sun blistered my skin. My throat was a furnace, but I refused.
I did not deserve shelter.
Not after that.
She had smiled at me.
The memory scraped like rust against the inside of my skull. That innocence—so complete, so unthinking. As if I were still a man. As if I could be trusted.
She hadn't seen the monster.
But I had.
When I finally returned to the vineyard, I didn't look at the fields or the sky or the broken tree. I went straight to the cellar and closed the hatch behind me.
Then I barricaded it.
Crates, bricks, and iron rods scavenged from the vineyard's forgotten corners. I sealed myself in like a priest in a crypt. No exits, no choices. Only earth, stone, and the thing I'd become.
The hunger wailed inside me.
---
That first day, I lay curled in the corner, arms wrapped around my stomach, willing it to pass.
It didn't.
By the second day, the scent of old dust began to sting. I could smell the rats in the walls, the mold on the wood, the iron in the nails. Everything was sharp, distinct, unbearable. My ears rang with the sound of my own thoughts.
I saw them again.
Élodie. Nicolas. Victorine. The child.
They sat in the corners of the room, silent. Watching.
"You're not real," I muttered.
But my voice cracked like old parchment—weak, starved.
The hallucinations didn't speak this time.
They only breathed.
---
By the fourth day, I was on the floor, back pressed to the cold stone, arms limp at my sides. I couldn't move without trembling. My muscles rebelled—unaccustomed to thirst being denied.
I didn't know what would happen if I kept going. Would my body shut down? Could this undead thing die without blood? Or would it simply wither, frozen in a state of unsatisfied hunger?
Part of me hoped for the latter.
I had nearly killed a child.
There was no future in me.
No one to call
No one to warn
No one left to blame
Only choice, and I had made it.
If starvation was the price of refusal, so be it. I would not become the thing I saw in the mirror. The thing crouched in the field with trembling hands. The thing that salivated at innocence.
I would not.
The cellar, in its stillness, began to hum with memory.
I remembered the office in Lyon. The crooked shelf, the yellow chair, and the sound of the kettle boiling at 4:03 p.m. each day.
I remembered my patients' stories.
Their laughter
Their grief
Their illusions
So many of them had been trapped.
By guilt, by pain, and by memory.
Now I understood them more than ever.
But unlike them, I could no longer speak. No longer help, I had no words for this place.
And no language for what I was becoming.
---
On the seventh day, I screamed.
It tore through the cellar like a storm—long, animal, wordless.
It didn't stop the hunger.
But it did silence the illusions.
For a while.
When the silence returned, I curled up near the far wall, cheek pressed to the floor, the ache inside me now dull and constant. My body trembled with each dry breath. I imagined what I must look like—eyes sunken, skin too bright, veins alive with unslaked need.
But I hadn't fed.
I had not crossed the line.
Not yet.
That had to count for something.
Didn't it?
Above me, I heard birdsong. The cellar was quiet, the child was gone. The vines were probably growing.
I closed my eyes.
And waited for the thirst to pass.