Sol Invictus

Vapours of morphine - Short story

This story is part of a collection of dark and noir stories called
Vapours of morphine
Click on the link for the full collection.

Sol invictus

The other day, on the news, they said they had arrested a woman, one who lived not too far from here. This lady was unemployed, spent her days doing fuck all, and to support herself, she prostituted her fourteen-year-old daughter.

You heard that right. Fourteen years old.

She would go around with her daughter, probably take her to bars, canteens, discount store parking lots, then have her get in a car with a stranger, or behind a hedge, or inside a public toilet, and she would wait there until they were finished. She asked for the money upfront, you understand? Like when you ask for money upfront for a rental car.

Fourteen years old. I remember when my niece was fourteen. That one, instead, got paid upfront, and waited there until those men were finished. Then she would go home, and maybe buy her an ice cream for being good. How disgusting.

After arresting her, they asked her where she found the courage to do such a thing to her little girl, and she replied that she did it because nowadays it’s not easy to get by without a job, and she didn’t want to be thrown out onto the street. Can you imagine? But do you really want to live in a world like this?

Then again, at my age, certain questions don’t even make much sense. As you can see, besides being here in this wheelchair, pissing myself, it’s not like I can do much else. The world moves on just fine without me, that’s for sure. But that’s not what we need to talk about.

I was seventy-four when I started seeing Sol again, and that was already ten years ago. I already felt incredibly old back then, let alone now. I don’t remember why we started seeing each other again. It had been many years since we had both been left alone: my better half died in ‘91, and I have no children. Sol, in the meantime, had ended up doing exactly what his father had done to him: he had abandoned his wife and son and tried to rebuild a family elsewhere, without succeeding. His son hated him just as much as he had hated his own father. Quite the achievement, right?

We had started meeting every Tuesday evening, after dinner. We met in the little square opposite the elementary school, sitting on the backrest of a concrete bench. We met there because even when we were young we used to go there to spend our evenings talking, drinking wine, and smoking cigarettes. Sol began calling our little gatherings “habitual.” Every time he brought something. Some beers, a bottle of wine, often also some weed to smoke. One evening he showed up with a sheet of acid. I couldn’t believe it. Who the fuck sells acid to a seventy-year-old? We each took two quarter-tabs. At first it was amazing, we were as excited as two kids, but then we paid the price: we were sick for three days straight. It was funny, in a way.

I, on the other hand, always to respect the “habitual,” had to bring my gun, a Beretta M34. When we met, Sol would ask me “Did you bring it?” even before saying hello. One evening when I had left it at home, he left without wanting to hear any reasons. “It’s not wise for two old men like us to be out at night unarmed,” he told me.

I mean, up to a certain age, if someone wants to hurt you, you can always fight or run away. One of life’s inevitable stages is reaching the awareness that you can no longer do either. So what do you have left? Well, and even then we were still lucky. Now Sol is dead and I can only be moved from the bed to the wheelchair like a fucking package.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about either. What I wanted to tell you is that you can find my gun in that drawer. Take it, it’s yours now. The story of how we came to possess it isn’t very edifying, you know. To make a long story short, one evening we were drunk, at a party, in the mountains. It was the sixties, and neither of us was married yet. At a certain point, a colossal fight broke out, people seemed to have gone crazy. Bottles and chairs started flying. Sol and I woke up in a ditch, inside a wrecked police car. I was the one driving. And I was also the one with the gun tucked in the back of my jeans. Sometimes you have to wonder why God is so merciful with clowns like us.

We walked back to town, hiding in the woods every time we saw a car passing. It took us the whole day. I wanted to get rid of the gun but Sol told me to keep it. He said it was the gun that had found me. Sorry, I’m digressing. When you reach my age, becoming long-winded is a right, but I also understand I shouldn’t digress too much. The story that interests you is another one. We found the girl on the first of June, 1999. I remember the date. When something like that happens to you, you always remember the date.

***

And so, one Tuesday evening, we’re there on the bench, downing our beers. Towards midnight we started getting sleepy and decided to head home, I set off on foot and Sol hopped onto his beat-up scooter. The bastard had never gotten a license, even though he drove constantly, just to savor the thrill of the forbidden. Anyway, we were near my house, just outside town, across the road were the fields. I got home, and I noticed an old Renault 5, brown as mud. Its suspension was going up and down and the windows were all fogged up. Well, I thought, it’s one of those hot summer nights. I lingered for a moment staring at the car and a smile escaped me.

But then I clearly heard a girl scream from inside the car, which began to shake far too violently for a simple country romp. From inside, a viscous substance that seemed black to me smeared the windows. I ran towards the car and opened the door. There was a girl lying on the seat. She was completely naked and was covered in blood gushing from a black lump on her neck. The poor thing had stopped screaming and had started making a sound I will never forget: it sounded like the whimper of a dog. But there was something else in that car. It was a man, my eyes saw him but it was as if my mind couldn’t focus on him. Like a shadow, which turned towards me, and looked at me with its eyes, blurred and hateful. He jumped out of the car and sent me falling flat on my ass.

Then he stood in front of me, so I could finally see him clearly. Sculpted physique, black bowl-cut hair, pronounced dark circles under his eyes, a vacant smile on indigo-colored lips, so ethereal, unmistakable. I knew him. He was an artist, a photographer, or some bullshit like that. It couldn’t be him, though: he should have been about my age, and seeing him like this, he looked no more than thirty-five. He stood before me. His smile was extremely attractive, sensual, it was impossible to take your eyes off him. Just like that, and don’t make jokes: I’m not some dirty old man or anything like that. I was staring at his smile, not at his cock.

That bastard’s mouth was still stained with blood and he had probably just raped and killed that poor girl, the impulse was to pull out the gun and blow his brains out but my hands wouldn’t move. And who knows what he would have done to me if Sol, for some reason, hadn’t come back and tried to run over that damned thing. He didn’t even know why he had come back.

The fact is, Sol missed his target and tumbled to the ground. That monster moved as fast as a helicopter’s shadow, then stopped for a moment in front of the car’s trunk. It started staring at me. Sol shouted at me to shoot him. I pulled out the gun and aimed it at the demonic son of a bitch. The devil just widened its smile, then turned back into a shadow and disappeared.

I can’t explain how, but before leaving, somehow he said something to me. The words “we’ll meet again” stuck in my head. A voice I recognized: it was that of the photographer, of the guy I also knew. Who was already a piece of shit when I knew him, and now he was also some kind of vampire. A real pain in the ass. We had made a bit of a racket, and people started leaning out of their windows to see what was happening. We yelled for them to call the police and an ambulance. Sol had gotten up in the meantime. He wasn’t hurt. That bastard never got hurt when he fell off motorbikes, bicycles, and scooters.

We went to take a look at the girl. She was still alive, panting and sweating, as if in the grip of a fever. She was very young. We would later find out she had just turned twenty. She seemed as if in a trance, in a strange state of ecstasy. Her face bore a little smile that I didn’t like at all. You should have seen her. She was so beautiful. Long curly hair the color of copper wires and skin white, white as a lily. Small but perfect breasts. Imagine, I’d already been done with women for ten years, because nothing worked down there anymore, but seeing her, everything reignited in me, i couldn’t take my eyes off her. And i wanted to, poor girl.

Anyway, the blood staining her looked like red tempera on a white canvas. We covered her with a sheet we found on the back seat. She was burning hot, her body gave off heat like a stove. I felt the same vicious attraction to her as I had felt for the other son of a bitch. Then after a while the police and the ambulance arrived, but I didn’t say anything about this thing, because I didn’t think it would actually be important. Unfortunately, it was.

But then again, what could I do? I was already struggling to believe myself what I had just seen; if I had tried to explain to the police that I believed that girl was dangerous, they would have taken me for a senile old man. I stammered something about how “it moved like a shadow” and they looked at me the way you look at an Alzheimer’s patient who says he just saw the Pope in his toilet.

I didn’t mention the gun. Obviously, they didn’t search us. Sol had some marijuana in a little bag in his pants, and it made him euphoric. He kept circling around the policemen, then came to me and said things like, “These assholes don’t know who they’re dealing with. If they lay a hand on my pocket, blow their brains out,” or, “Remember, at my signal, BANG,” and he’d wander off chuckling. Good old Sol.

They found no documents, and the car turned out to be stolen. I couldn’t sleep that night. The face of the vampire, the face of the girl. The desire I had felt was a new sensation, visceral, sharp, and as such my brain had sort of learned it, I thought about it constantly. I thought this: I could give in. I had the feeling the desire would stay with me for a long time, and so it has. I never gave in, though. I might have been a good-for-nothing, but a loser, never.

The next day I called Sol. That bastard made fun of me, started saying that these things happen when you see a pussy after years of nirvana. But, even though he was acting the fool as usual, I could feel that he wasn’t calm either. We decided we wanted to go to the hospital to meet the girl.

***

So that Friday we went to visit that poor girl who was hospitalized. When we got to the reception desk of the medicine tower, we had them point out the room to us. Emergency medicine, seventh floor. We took the elevator.

We were vomited out into a gloomy place, despite the walls being orange and blue and several paintings hanging on the walls. It must have been the neon lights, with their air of convalescence. At the floor’s station, they told us that the nurse was changing her sheets and checking on her and we would have to wait for her to finish before we could visit.

We walked down a long corridor and sat down in front of her door. Sol kept making dirty jokes about the nurse, ranting about forcing her to wash his family jewels with a sponge.

We waited ten minutes. Sol began to grow impatient and complain out loud. The minutes of waiting had become twenty. I went to check the station, there was no one there anymore, the nurse had left. At thirty minutes we decided to knock on the room door. No answer.

It was at that exact moment that we understood. Both of us, in unison.

I pulled out the gun. I had brought it with me. Since that cursed evening, I never went anywhere without having it within reach, not even at home. Sol pulled out a switchblade, looked at me, and snapped the blade open between our gazes. “I’ve been waiting to use this since ‘81,” he told me. Good old Sol.

I opened the door slowly. The bed was empty. On the floor was a puddle of dark liquid, in which the body of a nurse lay soaked. Her neck was torn open. Dark clots were forming in the wounds.

Behind her stood the girl. Completely naked again and covered in blood from her mouth to her knees. Her curls were matted with the dark substance and dripped onto the filthy floor.

God, she was beautiful. It wasn’t normal for me to think such a thing at that moment, but the thought nailed itself into my head the instant I saw her.

I knew I should shoot her, but I didn’t want to, to be honest I didn’t want to move a single muscle at that moment. And Sol fell for it too. That abyss hidden behind the dark eyes of that creature began to exert its evil influence on him as well.

We couldn’t resist, we could only stand there and watch her. Suddenly, however, a voice insinuated itself into our minds; just as her colleague had done with me, she also spoke to us without moving her lips, with that voice as cold as the breath of the dead.

“ Join us,” she told us. “We don’t want to hurt you unless we are forced to.”
”Join. Our sickness will never end.”
”The multitude will become one.”
”The multitude will become God.”

And then she said other bullshit along those lines that I don’t remember now. Fortunately, Sol turned out to be stronger than her hypnosis. He managed to throw his knife at her, but it didn’t stick anywhere and bounced off her shoulder.

This distracted her, and I managed to take aim with my weapon and fire.

I fired at least five shots, but when I was finished, she was no longer in the room. The bitch had vanished, she had become a shadow and somehow left the room, exactly as her friend had done a few evenings before. I had practiced a lot with that same weapon over the years. Despite that, I didn’t hit her with a single bullet.

The result I achieved, however, was to attract the attention of the entire hospital. That’s what made her run away, and it probably saved our lives. In return, it got me into serious trouble with the cops for possession of a weapon stolen from the police. Fortunately, the situation was later downplayed, since I had a major point in my defense: I was an old fart, and all the evidence indicated that we had tried to save the nurse from that crazed girl, perhaps drugged like the guy who had done the same thing to her a few evenings prior.

About what happened next, there isn’t much to say. The nurse ended up underground; fortunately, she didn’t start going around slitting other people’s throats too.

At first we didn’t understand why she didn’t transform. Sol and I knew the truth about what had happened, although obviously no one believed us. We wanted to do something, but we didn’t know where to start.

After a while, we gave up and ended up barricading ourselves in our own homes. The only time we spoke was the following Tuesday, to cancel our evening appointment since those things were definitely out there. He asked me how I was. I replied fine, then I asked him the same question in turn. Fine, he replied too. The conversation ended there.

Those things were strong. The multitude. Our friend had clearly been one for over thirty years. They couldn’t be that strong, otherwise humanity would have gone to hell a long time ago. Why then hadn’t the nurse been infected and had she died? There must have been something we were missing. They must have had some important weakness. Maybe it could be discovered. But then what? I didn’t even have my gun anymore.

And then: why should we have done anything? It’s not like I had any good reason to get myself killed or to try and save the world. I was about to shrug and conclude, well, let them all go to hell, someone else will deal with it.

Sol anticipated me and made his move.

***

On Friday, I had finished dinner and was about to lie down on the couch to watch TV when I heard that damned call. It was emitted by someone who was close, someone who drew me to the window with that evil influence. I looked towards the lot where that thing’s car was parked. She was there. Slick and sensual. I was seized by excitement and fear at the same time. Then Sol appeared. The son of a bitch had given in. That’s why he hadn’t wanted to see me the Tuesday before. That old pig stuck his tongue in the girl’s mouth. That poor unfortunate girl who would remain little more than a teenager for eternity.

A revolting scene. Sol, that lying traitor, I thought. I felt alone as I had never felt in my life. I felt like the saddest creature in the universe. I started to cry. Damn you, I thought, go away, why are you doing this to me?

The answer was not long in coming.
“Join us.”
I recognized Sol’s voice, even though it was different, it was metallic and flat. With a superhuman effort, I managed to close my eyes. That was all I could do. When I reopened them, they were gone.
“We will be back. Sooner or later you will yield,” they said.

I collapsed on the floor. I curled up like a child and started to cry again. I don’t really remember what I did the next day. Nothing, I think. I must have stayed sealed up in the house like a mummy, staring at the wall.

Towards evening, the phone rang. It was Sol. I was petrified. Why would he even use the phone?
“What the fuck do you want?” I asked him.
“Did you see that thing?”
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Come on. It’s not like you haven’t thought about it too.”
“Don’t talk shit.”
“You’re old, you don’t have to think too much about what you do. Come on, join us.”
“Fuck you!” I yelled at him.

I was about to hang up on him, but I restrained myself. He started laughing.
“Nah, I’m pulling your leg. You don’t really think I’ve become that much of an asshole, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I spent two days locked in the house thinking, then I decided I didn’t give a fuck about anything anymore. Anyway, this ride wasn’t going to last much longer. Did I ever tell you about the cancer?”

I was silent for a second. The thing hit me, my brain was receiving more information than it could handle.

“Well,” he continued, “Actually, I didn’t do it to live forever. I don’t give a fuck and I don’t even think it’s right. I did it to do something good, for once. I would have croaked anyway. I want to go out with style.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean taking all those sons of bitches to hell with me. That’s why I let myself get infected.”

Good old Sol. A tear rolled down my cheek. I felt a little less alone in the world.
“Okay, but what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know yet. Give me some time to figure out how this thing works. In the meantime, when the sun goes down, you stay locked in the house. The warm light bothers us, it burns our skin. Sleep with the blinds closed, and for the night, light all the candles you have in the house in the bedroom, that way you should be safe. They don’t think you’re dangerous, but you never know. That poor bitch at the hospital didn’t transform because of the neon lights.”
“Tell me, what the hell are they doing during the day?”
“Around here they do nothing but rave about telepathy and oneness and copulating like rabbits. You should see the spectacle.”
“Actually, that doesn’t sound bad.”
“Do you want to join us?”
“If it means seeing your flabby ass cheeks, I prefer death.”

We shared our last laugh together, and said goodbye. That was the last time I spoke to him. Thinking back, I would have liked to tell him that I loved him or some other sentimental bullshit like that, but deep down it’s fine like this, we said goodbye without anything left unresolved between us. In the following days, I followed his instructions, and nothing happened, although I felt something. I felt them as if they were in the next room, waiting.

One morning I found a small, dark wooden box on my doormat. Inside was my gun along with a letter and a small note with an S drawn on it. The letter was signed Sol, and I recognized his handwriting. It said that the best tool to fight those things was fire. By day, they were holed up in the basement of an old abandoned nightclub to protect themselves from the light. Yes, the very one that caught fire in ‘99. That was me. In the letter, Sol gave me all the instructions. He had left some propane tanks placed outside, next to the entrance. Inside, he had placed gasoline. Those others were too busy, i don’t want to know doing what.

I showed up there at dawn, as indicated in the letter. I opened the valves of the tanks and set fire to the gas escaping. Then I hid in a car, shot my gun at the tanks, and BANG, everything exploded. Also in the letter, Sol claimed he learned this trick from a fisherman in ‘54. He would throw a gas tank with the valve burning into a body of water, then take a rifle and shoot it. Good old Sol.

Well, anyway, the bang was spectacular. In my head, I could hear them screaming as they were roasting. My mind was tuned into them, and with their screams they tried to drive me insane, but they didn’t succeed. I told you, I may have been a good-for-nothing asshole, but never a loser. I can still hear those screams. Distant, like a rustle in the night. They still want their revenge. Or maybe it’s me who has finally gone truly mad.

Anyway, the letter said that besides the ones in the nightclub, there were others around. I had to do something, and I had to do it alone. So I did. The fire at the youth hostel. The one at the sports goods warehouse. And others too. I sent many to their maker.

Until five years ago, when I fell out of bed and broke my femur. I tried to get back on my feet, but in the end, I gave up. Some battles can’t be won. But that’s not what we need to talk about.

The S stood for “Sentinela.” It means guardian. Don’t ask me where he came up with this Jedi knight bullshit. Sol had written that I had to tattoo it on my shoulder, so that I would forever remember what was right and what was wrong, and looking in the mirror, I could never pretend otherwise.

It’s your turn now. Take that gun. And remember to tattoo the S on your shoulder. You won’t be the only one who has it: I’ve already warned the others.

And those bastards, out there, will call to you for your entire life.

You must never yield. Not even for a second.

---

© 2026 Grimelight. All rights reserved. Don’t be a dick. Good luck, and godspeed.