The Days I Never Lived

The sunlight on her skin smelled like crushed pears. That’s the last thing I can remember about the day I stopped being a man. And tonight, on the one night the dead are permitted to remember, they say the sun will return, just for me.

I press my palm against the broken conservatory glass. The shards catch moonlight, fracturing it into pieces that look almost warm. Almost. Outside, the town of Brașov celebrates Halloween with American fervor they learned from television. Plastic jack-o’-lanterns glow in windows. Children dressed as monsters parade through streets that once ran with real blood. They don’t know that history walks among them.

Five hundred years. That’s how long I’ve carried this hunger.

Not for blood. Never for blood. The stories got that wrong. I hunger for something simpler, something every living creature takes for granted until it’s gone. The weight of sunlight on closed eyelids. The way morning air tastes different from night. The particular exhaustion that comes from a day spent under an open sky.

“You’re early,” Magda says from the doorway.

I don’t turn. She knows I don’t like being watched when I’m like this, raw with wanting. She’s worked for me three years now, this astrophysicist with her sharp mind and careful distance. She thinks she understands what I am. She’s wrong, but her misconceptions serve my purposes.

“The equipment is ready?” I ask.

“Yes.” Her footsteps echo on the conservatory’s stone floor. Glass crunches beneath her boots. “Eight minutes of synthesized solar radiation, calibrated to match the spectrum of a summer noon. The eclipse will mask any atmospheric interference.”

Eight minutes. After five centuries, I’ll have eight minutes.

My wife grew sunflowers here once. Before the Ottoman siege. Before the choices that carved me into something else. She’d stand among them at dawn, her dark hair catching light like water, and tell me I spent too much time in shadow. “You never choose light over your own darkness, Vlad,” she’d say, laughing. As if it were a simple preference. As if I could just step into brightness whenever I wished.

The irony burns worse than any imagined flame.

“You understand the risks,” Magda continues. Her voice carries that clinical detachment scientists mistake for objectivity. “If the stories about your condition are true, even synthetic sunlight could…”

“Destroy me.” I finish the thought she won’t. “Yes.”

But what if it doesn’t? What if I stand in that light and remain whole? Then I’ll know. Finally, I’ll know whether I’m damned or just afraid. Whether the prison I’ve lived in for half a millennium has bars or just shadows I’ve been too terrified to test.

The church bells strike midnight. Halloween begins in earnest. The night when boundaries blur, when the impossible creeps closer to real.

“Shall we begin?” Magda asks.

We descend into the castle’s lower chambers where Magda has assembled her machinery. Copper coils spiral around glass tubes. Mirrors angle from scaffolding she’s erected over weeks of preparation. The whole apparatus looks less like science and more like an altar to some forgotten god of light.

“Stand here,” she instructs, pointing to a circle marked in chalk on the floor.

I obey. Strange, how easily I follow her commands. Five centuries of giving orders, and now I wait like a child for permission to step into artificial day.

She adjusts dials, checks readings on instruments I don’t understand. Her movements are precise but something else lurks beneath. Hesitation? Fear? When she glances at me, her expression shifts too quickly to read.

“Tell me about the last sunrise you saw,” she says suddenly.

The question catches me unprepared. “Why?”

“Calibration. I need to know what you’re expecting. What you remember.”

What do I remember? Fragments mostly. The way morning birds sounded different from night birds. How shadows shortened as the sun climbed. My son’s face when he’d wake, squinting and grumbling about the brightness. My wife setting bread to rise by the east window, timing it by the light’s progression across the floor.

“I remember it was ordinary,” I tell her. “That’s what haunts me most. I didn’t know it would be my last, so I didn’t really look.”

Magda’s fingers pause on the controls. “That’s how most losses work. We never see the last time coming.”

She speaks like someone who knows. I want to ask what she’s lost, what final moment she failed to memorize. But the machine begins to hum, a low vibration that sets my teeth on edge.

“Two minutes until the eclipse reaches totality,” she announces. “Once I activate the array, you’ll have exactly eight minutes before the power cells drain. Eight minutes of manufactured noon.”

My hands shake. After so long, fear and hope feel identical.

“What if you’re wrong about me?” I ask. “What if I’m exactly what the stories claim? What if this burns me to ash?”

She meets my eyes then, really looks at me for the first time tonight. “Then at least you’ll know. Isn’t that better than wondering?”

Yes. God help me, yes.

The humming grows louder. The mirrors begin to glow with stored energy, phosphorescent and strange. Outside, the Halloween revelers have gone quiet, perhaps watching the moon devour itself. Or perhaps they sense what’s about to happen here, in this broken castle where history refuses to die properly.

“Thirty seconds,” Magda whispers.

I close my eyes and think of pears. Of sunflowers. Of my wife’s hand reaching for me through morning light I can no longer touch.

“Now.”

The world explodes into brightness.

It doesn’t burn. That’s the worst part. It doesn’t burn.

The light pours over me like water, like memory, like every dawn I thought I’d lost. My skin remains whole. No smoke. No agony. Just warmth spreading across my face, my arms, seeping into places that have been cold so long I’d forgotten they could feel anything else.

I open my eyes.

The artificial sun blazes above me, contained in Magda’s geometric arrangement of mirrors and tubes. It’s nothing like real sunlight. Too white, too steady, lacking the subtle variations of natural day. But my body doesn’t care about authenticity. Every cell remembers what it means to be touched by light.

I laugh. The sound erupts from somewhere deep, rusty with disuse. When did I last laugh? Not the bitter chuckle I’ve perfected over centuries, but this wild, uncontrolled thing that shakes my whole frame.

“It’s working,” Magda says quietly. She stands at her controls, watching me with an expression I can’t decode. “How does it feel?”

How does it feel? Like drowning in reverse. Like every morning I missed rushing back at once. I spread my arms wide, letting the light reach everywhere. My shadow pools beneath me, solid and real and mine.

“I had a shadow,” I whisper. “All this time, I could have had a shadow.”

The laughter turns to something else. Tears. They stream down my face, and I don’t bother to hide them. Five hundred years of nights, of hiding, of convincing myself the sun would kill me. Five hundred years of nothing but darkness and the stories people told about monsters.

What if I could have walked in daylight this whole time?

What if the cage was never locked?

“Four minutes remaining,” Magda announces.

I drop to my knees on the chalk circle. The stone floor feels different in light, more solid somehow. Everything feels more solid. More real. As if I’ve been living in some half-state between dream and waking, and only now am I fully present.

“My wife was right,” I say, though I’m not really talking to Magda. “I chose the shadows. Every time, I chose them.”

Magda steps closer, leaving her equipment. She kneels beside me, just outside the circle of light. Her face carries sympathy but something else too. Knowledge. Certainty.

“Vlad,” she says softly. “There’s something you need to understand.”

“Three minutes,” I remind her. “Whatever you have to say can wait three minutes.”

But she shakes her head. “No. It can’t.”

The light flickers, just for an instant. A hiccup in the power flow. In that split second of darkness, I see her clearly. Really see her. And I understand that everything I thought I knew is wrong.

“Because you were never a vampire, Vlad.” Magda’s words fall like stones into still water. “And you already died once.”

I stare at her. The light continues to blaze around me, but suddenly it feels less like salvation and more like an interrogation lamp.

“What?”

“The real Vlad Țepeș died in 1476. You’re just the guilt that stayed behind.”

My mouth opens. Closes. The warmth on my skin turns cold despite the artificial sun still shining. “That’s not… I remember. The siege. The choice. Drinking from the cup that changed me.”

“You remember what you needed to remember.” She pulls something from her pocket. A hospital badge with her photo. Dr. Magda Voiculescu, Neuropsychiatric Unit. “This isn’t a castle. It’s the ruins of the old Brașov Psychiatric Hospital. Abandoned since the earthquake in ‘97.”

“No.” But even as I deny it, details shift into focus. The scaffolding isn’t copper and glass. It’s medical equipment, old UV therapy lamps from the hospital’s abandoned treatment rooms. The chalk circle is just chalk. The conservatory’s broken glass comes from windows shattered by time and vandals, not Ottoman cannons.

“Your name is Radu Florescu,” she continues, voice gentle but relentless. “You were a medieval history professor at the university. Obsessed with Wallachian history, with your ancestry. You claimed descent from the Drăculești line.”

“Stop.”

“Three years ago, there was a fire. Your apartment building in Bucharest. You tried to save your family. Your wife. Your son. But the smoke was too thick, and you chose wrong. You went left when you should have gone right. You saved yourself instead of them.”

The light above us gutters. One minute remaining, maybe less.

“You created this whole myth because you couldn’t live with what you’d done,” Magda says. “So you found history’s darkest shadow and crawled inside it. If you were a monster, then the guilt made sense. If you were cursed, then the loss was inevitable.”

I want to argue. Want to point to my memories, my centuries of darkness. But they’re already fading, cheap theater backdrops falling away. The castle becomes a hospital. The mirrors become medical equipment. And I become just a man, kneeling in an abandoned building, crying under ultraviolet lamps while a patient doctor tries to lead me back to sanity.

“Ten seconds,” she says.

The lights die. Real dawn creeps through the broken windows. Actual sunlight, weak and gray through October clouds, touches my skin.

Nothing happens.

I stand there, palms open, waiting for flames that will never come. The sun rises over the Carpathian peaks, indifferent to my mythology. Birds sing. The distant sound of morning traffic drifts from the city below.

“I’m not him,” I whisper.

“No,” Magda agrees. “You’re not.”

But I smile anyway. Not because I’m cured. Not because the truth feels better than the fiction. But because for eight minutes, I felt sunlight. Real or imagined, earned or stolen, those eight minutes belonged to me.

Maybe I was never a vampire at all. But God help me, it was easier being one.