"The Veil of Tabula Rasa"

Marina’s desk still smelled like gin, though she never drank. The hum of the club below filtered through the floorboards, bass shivers rising through her chair’s steel legs. Saturdays always brought the strange and the restless to Tabula Rasa, but tonight brought something different. A shadow that walked in with purpose. The vampire’s tongue must taste of iron and secrets, Marina thought, as she watched the visitor adjust her lapels with a predator’s languor.

Marina was never surprised anymore—not since she inherited the club from her uncle, not since her clientele, night-dwellers one and all, made clear there were districts in the city where sunlight never mattered. Her customers rarely smiled, hardly ever bared their teeth. Unless they hoped she might see what they truly were, and even then, it wasn’t the teeth that worried her. It was the jaw, the patience.

The vampire was old enough that the lines on her face made Marina think of weathered marble, carved and unyielding. Her questions were soft, precise: about relatives, about faces that passed through the haze of strobing lights and fog machines on Friday nights. The library girls—that little coven that worshiped rumors over romance novels—had sent her over, certain that Marina’s office stored more truths than the city archives.

Marina’s mind wandered as she inventoried the faces she’d catalogued over months, years. No names necessary, not really. The gentle thing about running Tabula Rasa was anonymity. Her regulars expected discretion, and she delivered it in bottle service and torn ticket stubs. Vampires, she’d learned, measured time differently, but even they liked to know who was who, what flavor of secrets the city offered. Some vampires lingered. They rented apartments, attended evening readings, sometimes left tokens—scarves at coat check, lipstick on napkins, flirtatious sighs that echoed long after their owners vanished.

Yet others arrived in haste, eyes wide and hungry, with luggage that left trails of graveyard dirt on the floor. Some left suddenly, never to be seen again. Sometimes they burned too brightly, drew the wrong attention, and a regular would quietly ask if anyone had heard from that one—yes, the one with the laugh that sounded like shattered glass. Marina would shake her head, and feel her ledger—so many names, so few endings—grow heavier in her mind.

As the vampire probed, Marina’s thoughts scattered like coins on the dance floor. She could never admit how much she observed, how every new arrival was a subtle rearrangement of the city’s ecosystem. Did this one bear a family resemblance—jawline, smile, the slant of the eyes? Faces blended together, like wet paint left too long in the rain. The vampire in her office seemed hungry not for blood, but for belonging. A search not for prey, but for kin.

Marina’s mind cycled through her mental list. That February, the tall woman in a velvet coat with ice-white skin, too polite for trouble, gone by spring. The autumn before, a pair of brothers, charming and sharp, who left whispers of a feud—had they settled it, or did only one remain? Sometimes Marina noticed the subtle marks, the hesitations, the looks that passed between regulars when a stranger entered. Blood recognized blood. Secrets recognized secrets.

She always wondered what happened to those who disappeared without echo. Did they become mist and drift east, or were they pulled under by deeper currents, further secrets? Maybe running a club was like tending a lighthouse: she kept watch, mapping the ships that passed, never knowing which ones would founder on hidden rocks.

As the vampire’s questions continued, Marina’s attention drifted to the photo on her wall, a photo taken the week she inherited the club. Everyone smiled then—the staff, the band, even a pair of somber figures who never reappeared, their eyes reflecting camera flash with pupil-less blackness. She remembered finding their checked-in coat months later. No one had claimed it.

Was the relative someone she had known? Had she served her a drink, watched her dance alone beneath coruscating lights, listened for a name shouted above the music? Or was it someone who’d merely passed through, invisible even to Marina’s careful gaze, leaving only a trace of rumor behind for the library girls to catch?

Marina didn’t know. She measured the night by arrivals and vanishings, by the whispered confessions over half-finished cocktails, the glances exchanged under disco balls. Her world throbbed with attractions and departures, a tide of stories washing in, washing out. Bloodlines tangled and intertwined beneath the city’s skin, and she, queen of Tabula Rasa, ruled over a domain of fleeting ephemera and collective memory.

As the questions finished, Marina watched the vampire’s expression, cool and calculating. She knew that even without answers, she’d offered something: compassion, or as close as any club owner could give to a creature who belonged to neither night nor day. Marina glanced at the empty glass on her desk—a ritual, not a thirst. Tonight, as always, she listened harder for the stories behind the stories, counting the shadows that lingered, the ones that faded forever. And when the vampire left, she’d add another thread to her tapestry of disappearance, a perfect mystery woven into the pulsing heart of her city.

This story was generated by user kitty.cat07 with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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