The Renfield Syndrome by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 27

One evening, while taking a break from his online studies, he sat in front of his television watching old movies. There was something about the old black and white images that seemed to bring out a character of the movie that could no longer be produced. Everything was made in glaring color with computer graphics and advanced technology, robbing the movie of its plot. People seemed to be mesmerized by it and no longer appeared to be interested in what the movie had to say. Given what he had been studying, he immediately gravitated to an old movie that he felt was vaguely related to Romanian history. He watched ‘Dracula.’ Although the character was a fictional namesake for what he considered one of history’s madmen, Caspian saw the movie as pure entertainment until one scene grabbed his attention. The victim of Dracula’s bite always seemed terrified, but there was some degree of the erotic involved in every attack. Going to his laptop, he found a video of the same scene and, playing it over and over again, found himself becoming aroused as if the actual bite represented something not just violent but highly sexual. It didn’t take long for him to become obsessed with that particular scene, flooding his dreams and overpowering his every waking moment. One night, while, again, watching Dracula, his thoughts became oddly real as he quietly voiced what he should only have been thinking.

“Wow,” he said. “This guy nails all these women, and he lives forever. How cool is that?”

Caspian had become so consumed with the character that he began internalizing some of its

characteristics. It started with the stare—eyes glassy and intrusive. He began practicing it in a mirror, not knowing exactly why.

Having been cleared by Doctor Sinclaire, Caspian returned to school. If he could get caught up, he would graduate with his class, and as intelligent as he was, it didn’t take long for him to complete the necessary work. He had put himself on the fast track to a timely graduation, but there were problems. Between the trauma he had suffered throughout his life and his mental illness, the other students he encountered most often quickly saw him as being different. People stood back as he walked through the hallways, afraid of someone they would never understand or even speak to. As he walked past the crowds, Caspian’s ears picked up the faint words others were trying to hide. ‘Freak, weirdo, maniac, head case.’ At first, he ignored the crude comments as words of the ignorant, but that would soon change. However, one thing was certain. They would never understand him as the wounded soul he was.