Count Dracula

While it wasn't unusual for Drac to be up so long after dawn, it was unusual for him to be up and not doing things, ordering staff about, yelling at suppliers, or placating guests.

No, Drac had stayed up late into Tuesday morning talking with a painting.

At first, Drac had assumed it was leftover effects of the wine or someone playing a trick on him - not that he could think of someone that would. Perhaps a gremlin in the walls? It was not real, in any case. His wife was dead and this was nothing but a well done painting he'd never known existed.

But all Monday listening to his dead wife's voice pleading for him to say something, he broke and answered her.

And then, the longer he spoke to it, the more the painting changed. From a fine portrait to a fully moving image of Martha, trapped behind an invisible wall and bound by a crumbling frame.

"I was cursed," Martha had sobbed when he finally woke on Monday night.

Instead of dying, she had somehow survived and was found in the rubble of the fire by looting villagers. "They trapped me in this painting. A prisoner, forced to watch over them for eternity."

Drac... Drac could feel the old resentment and hate returning as he heard the whole of her tale of imprisonment for the past 117 years.

"Don't cry my beloved." He raised a hand to try to cup her face, an instinctive move he'd thought long buried. A move that was stopped by the solid wall of magic that was the cursed painting.

He couldn't touch her. Still.

"Oh, my love." Martha's head tilted gently as she wiped her cheek with one hand, the other reaching to lay flat against her side of the magic wall. "I've so long thought you dead. They told me... So many times I have wished I died that night with you and Mavis."

The sunlight streaming through the drapes was what it took to get him to leave her just as far as his coffin, Tuesday morning.

And now, Tuesday evening, he was again staring at the wall. The painting, however, was nothing but a flat portrait. Nothing he said got a response and there was no sign of movement. Reaching out, he could feel the oils on the canvas. He'd lost her all over again.

"Sir? I've finished the cleaning and gathered your things for the dry cleaner." The hotel housekeeper returned to the main room of the suite where Drac was standing. "Your kitchen is stocked again. Is there anything else I can do for you before I leave? ...Sir?"

"Hmm?" Drac finally turned and acknowledged the woman. "No no. That is all. Thank you; you may go."

He sighed as he headed to his desk to start some work. Perhaps his 'conversation' with Martha had been a dream after all.

Only after the click of the suite door indicated that the Count was truly alone, though, did the voice come from the wall behind him:

"Drac?"