Nigel stopped at the gates of Grassmere primary school, where cars lined up like eggs ready to hatch. The bell clanged, and the deserted schoolyard mutated into a pen of gibbering brats, their spirits high in the autumn sun.
     
All the young kids liked Nigel. Dumb Nigel, some called him, or Dozy-Backward Nigel, but even so they all liked him, and they waved and shouted to him on their way home. Nigel waved back but, pallid as he was, stayed out of the sunlight. He smiled as the shadows deepened in defiance of the sun.
 
Then the chosen boy, Matthew, dashed into the schoolyard. Seven years old, eyes bright, giggling.
 
Before Nigel could do anything, another car pulled up, and from it Matthew’s mother emerged. Nigel had expected to lure the boy away before she arrived; she was usually late.
 
“Hello, Nigel,” the mother said, smiling up at him. “Shouldn’t you still be at your own school?”
 
Nigel slowly shook his head. “It’s PE,” he said. “I get to finish early.”  He maintained eye contact with her. 
     
Matthew’s mother was beautiful enough to have been a model. Too late, she tried to hide the pity in her face as she glanced down at his oddly short right leg, at his malformed foot encased in a shiny black built-up shoe.
 
Nigel was in his last year at Grassmere comprehensive. He couldn’t do sports, and he had no friends there. But Nigel was more interested in the younger kids anyway. They had something he wanted. 
 
“Well, goodbye Nigel,” Matthew’s mother said. Her eyes were still full of pity, even though they were now fixed on Nigel’s face. 
     
Matthew, bouncing his football like a basketball, approached the gates.
 
Nigel smiled. “Goodbye.”
 
The mother walked into the schoolyard, scooped her son into her arms, and placed a kiss on his face. “How’s my little monster?”
     
Nigel watched, fascinated. He could remember clearly what it had been like to be seven. But Matthew wasn’t anything like Nigel. Matthew was full of life, all blond curls, scabby knees and cute little grin. And always ripe for his mother’s love.
 
Matthew eeled from his mother’s embrace like a snake shedding its skin. “Mom, can we get some ice cream?” 
 
“Not yet.” She frowned. “Wait here, I’ve got to see your teacher.”
 
“Then can we get some ice cream?”
 
“After your tea.”
 
Matthew’s grin transformed into a scowl, and he kicked his ball against the wall.
 
“Wait here,” the mother repeated. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”
     
Nigel absorbed every word, and watched her vanish into the recesses of the school building. This was different. She never left the boy alone. It was an opportunity that Nigel would be foolish to ignore. Not just an opportunity, but destiny. Today was the autumn equinox. Light and darkness in equal measure.     
     
The schoolyard emptied until Matthew was alone. Pink lipstick branded his cheek.
 
Nigel had a vivid recollection of the last time his own mother had kissed him. It had been his seventh birthday, the day Mother and Father had their worst argument ever. The day Mother’s tantrums had finally exhausted Father, and he’d walked out of the house. 
     
Mother screamed at Father, “What about your son?” She snatched Nigel closer, and forced a hard-lipped kiss against his head.
     
Father yelled back, “He needs his mother.”
 
Mother pursued Father as far as the front door, alternately begging and cursing, but Nigel stayed in the kitchen. He picked up the half-empty beer can that Father had left on the kitchen table, and sipped. The beer was warm and flat, and tasted like a penny in his mouth. 
     
The front door eventually slammed, and the shouting stopped. Then Mother came back to the kitchen and saw Nigel with the beer. She attacked him with both fists.
     
Now, Nigel examined his reflection in the passenger window of the car Matthew expected to go home in, safe next to his mother. 
     
Nigel’s eyes were bulbous, and his eyelids always looked half-drooped, even when he forced them as wide as he could. His mouth tended to hang open, and his tongue often lolled out. This gave the impression that he was slow-witted, dull, stupid. Nigel allowed people to develop this opinion –- encouraged it, even -- and he let his schooling slip, his SAT scores drop, just to endorse the image.
    
But inside Nigel, there was a mind that none of these cretins could hope to understand. There was something special within him that he was only just becoming aware of. Nigel’s future, although the details were undivined as yet, was surely beyond the expectations of homo sapiens. He was changing; becoming something.
     
“Nigel, Nigel!” Matthew finally saw him, and ran to the gates grinning. The boy had the kind of angel face that no mother could resist, and that indefinable other quality that lured his mother’s love.
     
Mother’s love, Nigel believed, was not intrinsically necessary. But sometimes it could serve a purpose, and remove obstacles. Specifically, the obstacles that prevented Nigel from achieving his true potential; his metamorphosis into the greater being that he must become. The price Nigel paid for his superhuman potential was that he lacked the elusive quality that elicited maternal affection. 
     
But he knew how to get it.
     
Matthew juggled the football. “Do you want to play football, Nigel?”
     
“I can’t.”
     
“Why?”
     
“My feet are bad.”
     
“Oh yeah.” Matthew cradled the ball under his arm.
     
“But we can go for an ice cream,” Nigel prompted. 
     
As expected, the boy’s eyes lit up. “I’ve got to wait for my mom, though...”
     
“It’ll only take a minute.” Nigel took a step away. “We’ll be back before she comes out.”
     
Matthew bounced the ball, and tilted his head thoughtfully. “Where are we going?”
     
“There’s an ice cream van near the woods.”
     
“Okay.” Matthew held Nigel’s hand, carrying the ball under his other arm.
     
Away from the school, Nigel dragged Matthew from the pavement, and down the path that twisted through the woods. 
     
The boy tried to shake his hand free. “Where’s the ice cream van? Where are we going?”
     
Nigel gripped tighter. “Shush.”
     
Sudden panic emanated from the squirming boy. “No! I’ve got to go back to my mom.”
     
Although the woods appeared to be deserted, Nigel needed to act quickly before some passing do-gooder got the wrong impression. He clamped his hand over Matthew’s mouth, then effortlessly picked him up and carried him. Warm tears drizzled over his knuckles.
    
He put Matthew down in a fern-filled hollow. The child opened his mouth to scream, but a single punch to the head silenced him. Nigel didn’t even use all his strength, but nevertheless the boy lay senseless on a bed of ferns, a ribbon of blood trickling from his nostril like raspberry sauce on vanilla ice cream. 
     
Nigel slipped his penknife from his back pocket. He’d spent hours sharpening the blade until it was as keen as a surgical scalpel. 
     
With two fingers pressed against the boy’s neck, Nigel felt the regular twitch of the carotid pulse. Blood still squirted through the pipes, and that was important. Nigel placed the point of his knife against the pulsing flesh, and slit it open. 
     
There was a moment’s pause before a crimson sliver ejected from the boy. Nigel clamped his mouth over the slit and sucked.
     
The taste came as a surprise. He had expected the blood to be sweet, but in fact it was bitter, with a metallic undertaste, like the dregs of Father’s beer. But now, here, no mother would stop him.
     
The sky darkened, the sun descended, and its rays slanted sharply through the naked branches overhead. The hot spring that had gushed from the boy ran dry. Now, there was only a sickly, lukewarm moistness around the gash in his neck.
     
Nigel was curious as to what expression the boy might wear on his drained face. But it wasn’t Matthew’s face he saw beneath him; it was Mother’s. Nigel’s own mother lay in a green death-chamber of wild undergrowth, lips parted, eyes unfocused.
     
Skin crawling, heart racing, screams threatening to explode from his lungs, Nigel jerked away from the body.   
     
Then, a sudden flicker of movement above caught his attention. The gaudy, gentle flutter of butterfly wings, red with splashes of yellow and black. The butterfly circled Nigel’s head, returning serenity to him. Gracefully, the butterfly settled on the corpse in the ferns. And the corpse was, of course, only that of a boy, after all. Just the boy. 
     
No mothers here. 
     
Spellbound, Nigel returned to the corpse to watch the butterfly more closely. The black spots adorning its wings regarded him like knowing eyes. The insect’s proboscis extended, and dipped into a splatter of the boy’s blood. 
     
Nigel laughed. The hallucination -- or vision, or whatever it was that had caused him to see his own mother’s face -- must have had some meaning; a significance, just as the arrival of the butterfly itself carried some deeper implication.
     
By consuming the essential fluid of the angel-faced boy, Nigel had ingested the qualities necessary to elicit Mother’s love. The prophetic vision of Mother -– for prophetic it surely was; another sign of the greatness that awaited Nigel at the completion of his metamorphosis –- indicated that she was no longer an obstacle. The exercise had been a success. 
     
The arrival of the butterfly –- once a lowly, wriggling larva, now transformed into a winged majesty -- was a supernatural validation of this. Licking the crusts of dried blood from his lips, he set off for home, and Mother.

As Nigel shambled up the drive to the front door, he glanced through the living room window, and saw Mother lying motionless on the couch. The ashtray on the coffee table in front of her was piled high with cigarette butts, and there were two empty wine bottles in front of her. 
     
Mother had obviously decided to take the day off from her job as Hygiene Manager at Grassmere Meadows Shopping Mall. It was a grim job, but Mother worked a lot of hours, earning enough to give them a comfortable lifestyle. Father, wherever he was, hadn’t sent a cheque in a long time.
     
Most evenings, and on her days off, Mother got drunk. But whether sober or not, she was angry. There were only two types of calm in the house; when Mother was in the dizzy, brief limbo between sober and hammered, and when Mother was unconscious.
     
Nigel decided to enter quietly. One day soon, as his transformation drew close, he knew he would have to kill Mother as well. When she was no longer useful to him. Until then, he would tolerate her drinking and sleeping and shouting. 
     
Later tonight, when she woke from her alcohol-induced coma, he would attempt to talk to her, to evaluate the power of his newly-absorbed qualities in the way she would display her affections for him.

Nigel’s bedroom stunk of sweat and mouldering clothes. Dirty underwear littered the floor. Two wall-mounted shelves buckled under the weight of books; one shelf for fiction, the works of Stoker, Lumley and Rice among others. Another shelf for factual works; Advanced Anatomy sat next to The Shocking Truth behind the Vampire Myth and Nigel’s favourite: Cannibalism through the Ages.
     
Vampirism was, of course, the highest refinement of cannibalism. To consume blood is to consume life. Consumption of enough blood results in immortality and metamorphosis.
     
There was a knock at the door.
     
Mother.
     
Somehow she’d heard him creeping upstairs. Perhaps she’d been aroused by a sudden surge of maternal affection.
     
“Go away,” Nigel said.
     
The door opened and Mother stepped inside. She was a small, lean woman with a permanent frown that left a deep vertical crease in her forehead.
     
Mother had once been very attractive. She was a natural blonde, but since Father left she always dyed her hair black. Even now, there were black stains at the edge of her scalp. Nigel believed she left these stains deliberately, in the same way that she wore the most unflattering grey and brown clothes she could find; shapeless, below-the-knee skirts, and thick, woolly tights. 
     
“Where have you been? You’re late!” Mother’s eyes were red-rimmed, and her breath smelled of cigarettes and stale wine.
     
“I went for a walk in the woods.” He was disappointed that there was no sign of maternal love in her eyes. Perhaps it would take a little longer. 
     
Mother looked at him disbelievingly. She closed in on him, her face level with his chest, and glared up into his eyes. “A walk in the woods? Don’t you dare lie to me.”
     
“I went for a game of football with some of my friends.”
     
Mother drew back her hand and slapped his face. Nigel didn’t flinch at the impact, but his eyes watered. Not real tears; he wasn’t crying. It was just an involuntary reaction. Nigel did not experience emotional distress the way lowly humans did.
     
“Don’t cheek me, either,” Mother hissed. “While you live in my house, you’ll show me some respect.” 
     
“I’ll leave home then. As soon as I’m old enough. I’ll go.” This house could not hold back the Being that Nigel was to become. 
     
Mother turned to leave Nigel’s bedroom, then paused at the door. Her eyes were a little redder. “I know what you get up to.”
     
Nigel felt the sudden impulse to club her over the head, and slit her throat; to gorge on her blood. But he stopped himself. Not yet. Until his Ascension, he needed a parent.
    
Anyway, he felt tired right now. His eyes wanted to close, not because of the tears that welled there, but because he had exhausted himself by devouring the boy. And so he slumped to his mattress and descended into darkness, as Mother closed the door on him.

Nigel revived as dawn’s furtive light stole into his room. He was thirsty and considered getting a glass of water, but decided against it. After the momentous step he had taken yesterday, he would feed only on blood, further hastening the day of his metamorphosis.
 
He threw back the quilt. He couldn’t remember getting undressed, but he was now naked. In bed with him, nestled wetly against his hips, was the gory mess of what appeared to be a small human heart. Blood splattered the mattress and covers.
 
Nigel swallowed, didn’t scream. Shock was not appropriate for a Greater Being. What mattered now was analysis.
     
Picking up the heart, Nigel tested its weight. It was definitely human. He knew something of anatomical study, but that wasn’t the point. He simply knew it was human, by his superhuman intuition. And the heart was small. Once again, the image of Mother, pale and immobile in the woods, flashed into his mind.
     
Mother should still be asleep, either in her bed, or on the couch in the living room, surrounded by empty bottles.
     
“Mother?”
     
No reply.
    
“Mother!” Nigel got out of bed and dropped the heart on the floor. He hobbled onto the landing and called out again, “Mother?”
     
Mother’s bedroom door stood open. Her bed lay undisturbed. A single, bloody handprint glistened on the wall at the top of the stairs.
     
“Mother, are you there?” 
     
Silence filled the air. Sunlight streamed down the stairs. Nigel descended sideways, good leg first. Splatters of blood in the carpet were moist under his feet. 
     
“Mother?”
     
He limped to the living room door. It was slightly ajar. Beyond was darkness, the curtains tightly shut.
     
Pushing the door a little further open, he whispered, “Mother?”
     
Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he could see Mother’s outline slumped, not on the couch, but in a chair. The smell of blood hung thick and delicious in the gloom.
     
Then she stirred. “Nigel? You woke me.”
     
Now he pushed the door wide. A band of light fell across the room, illuminating Mother in the chair. Blood splatters covered her chest, her hands, her neck and face.
     
Mother smiled a sleepy smile at him. “Did you like my present?”
     
A dark bundle lay on the couch. Bloody rags, a flash of curly blond hair. The corpse of the boy, drained and now eviscerated.
     
“A walk in the woods?” Mother chuckled. “I told you I knew what you get up to.”
     
Nigel opened his mouth, but no words formed in his throat.
     
“They’re all looking for him,” Mother said, smiling. “His mother is panic-stricken.” She stood and approached him.
     
Nigel was frozen in place, as surely as if he were encased in a chrysalis, awaiting a marvellous rebirth.
    
Mother reached up her arms and hugged him; the first true act of maternal care he had felt in years.
     
It had happened. Nigel truly had absorbed the essence of the boy.
     
“They’ll come looking for you,” Mother said, pulling away from him. “Sooner or later.”
     
Nigel looked at Mother as she circled him. The light behind her shone through her hair, and he could almost believe she was blonde again.
     
“I’m different,” Nigel said.
     
“I know that now.” She clutched his hand, and whispered, “You mustn’t leave me. Not like your father did. We can... do things together.”
     
On tiptoe, she placed a soft, lingering kiss on his cheek. “Stay with me.”
     
Tears welled in Nigel’s eyes. “Yes Mother.”