My sister Martha was not an optimistic or friendly person, and she was radiating a smile that I had never seen. Tears of joy were rolling down her cheeks; Jesus gently held my sister’s face, and he told us, “whoever drinks this cup of water will know thirst again in their life, but whoever drinks the water that I give you will never thirst. Instead, a spring of eternal life will flow through your soul.”
Had that moment not occurred, my sisters would not be in heaven. I love Jesus for that, and am profoundly grateful. Had that moment not occurred, however, I would not have been used by Jesus, like a prop, for his own selfish gains. I also would not have spent the last 2,000 years detesting him and myself, and plotting against him.
We followed Jesus for a couple of years, and he and I became as close as brothers. A sudden and severe illness rapidly deteriorated my body though, and I was rendered too ill to travel. I felt as though death was rapidly approaching. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t expect Jesus to heal my body, since he had already saved my soul. My sisters were in anguish, and when they heard that the Christ was in a neighboring town, they sent for him, desperately seeking comfort from their living God. I held on for a few days, but Jesus never arrived. I remember my sisters, Mary and Martha, at my bedside, holding my hand and each other's hands, quietly sobbing. My memories of things on earth are a little hazy for several days after that, because I died.
Jesus arrived in Bethany after I had been in the tomb for two days. Martha said she went out to confront him, and this is pretty accurately relayed in the book of John. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. Even now, I know that God will give you whatever you ask,” she implored, kneeling in supplication before him.
“Your brother will rise again,” Jesus replied, pulling Martha by her hands up from her knees. He then turned to the rapidly gathering group of people around them. “I am the resurrection, I am the life. Whoever believes in me shall live, even though they die!”
Copious amounts of cheering from the crowd.
Jesus was a brilliant lyricist, gifted in the arts of metaphor and allusion. Surely, Martha thought, he was talking about salvation in general, but she had a different feeling. She was picking up a different vibe. She said the apostles were all giggling like little girls, so she felt Jesus might be up to something. Yup. He wanted to do something he had never done. He wanted to defeat the last and most irresistible enemy of man: death.
He “loved me,” so he brought me back.
He boasted all over town about what he was going to do, then he waited two more days so people could receive notice and make the trek to see the miracle. A throng of people stood and screamed when they rolled the stone aside and pulled me out of the tomb. One minute I’m in heaven, a content baby listening to my mother sing as she rocked me to sleep, the next I’m walking back into the blinding desert sun in front of a few thousand cheering acolytes. My sisters were overjoyed, and the crowd was amazed. Jesus left town with 1,000 people following him down the road.
Good news right? I get my life back, I’m healed, I can finish my mortality in peace as an old, distinguished, revered envoy of our lord before making it back to heaven?
Wrong. I am the only mortal to ever be resurrected. You may read differently in Matthew or Luke, but believe me, I am the only one.
When Jesus brings you back from the dead, there are side effects.
Bad ones.
I was emotionless, had no energy, and was very confused. I struggled to put thoughts together and to communicate, which is interesting considering I speak about 30 languages now. After the resurrection, my memory was unreliable, due to the time period that I was dead, and due to the fact that I had actually experienced heaven and returned as a living man again (sort of).
Jesus actually went into hiding after the resurrection, as the miracle had caused a lot of alarm in the local Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. He had gained followers that day, but he also scared some powerful people who started to want him gone. It was the beginning of the end, and Jesus started predicting his own death. Not long after my resurrection, Jesus came back into Bethany. I was still reeling physically, spiritually, and emotionally. I was barely functioning.
We had a large feast for him at our house in the orchard. Jesus avoided me. I don’t recall him even making eye contact with me, which confirmed to me that he knew all along what his resurrection stunt meant for me. I recall him washing my sisters’ feet with heavily perfumed oil before dinner, and I remember Judas Iscariot. He was complaining that the money spent on the perfume and the dinner would be better spent on helping the poor. Judas was the treasurer for Jesus’ traveling group, and everyone knew that he was stealing. He took what he wanted out of the purse whenever he wanted it, and he was not spending it on the poor, either. Just being around Judas made me want to rip his throat out. Unfortunately, he hung himself after Jesus was resurrected, or I would have done it. With my teeth.
First of My Kind
I never age. I have spent two millennia being middle aged. I have also proven to be very hard to kill. I know that I cannot be burned, I cannot drown, and I cannot be crushed to death. I cannot be frozen and have actually lost almost all sensation of cold. Arrows, swords, bullets and poison also fail. I don’t need to breathe. I can, but I don’t need to. I am relatively certain that cutting off my head would do the trick, but I have never tried that, and don’t intend to.
I feel pain, but marginally—maybe one tenth of a human. I have stunted emotions; I was reunited with my sisters then saw them die without feeling anything. I have seen plagues, war, famine, and none of it has stirred my soul. I feel three things: one is a remorseless disgust for mankind. The second is an unflinching loathing for the person who did this to me. Lastly, I feel hungry. Not for food, of course, but for blood. Warm, pumping blood.
Jesus made me into a vampire. I am the first of my species to walk this planet, but I wasn’t alone for long.
A surprising number of vampire myths are actually true, including becoming a vampire through the bite of an existing one. My feedings have spawned thousands of new vampires, sometimes out of the necessity to quell my burning hunger, sometimes out of spite or anger, and sometimes to create an ally, soldier, or worker when I needed one.
Modern conventional wisdom regards vampires as immortal, but that claim definitely has an asterisk or two following it. To be completely honest, we are pseudo-immortal; when conditions are favorable, we don’t die, but I’ve witnessed many a vampire burned to a crisp by the sun (which put a significant crimp in their immortality), and then there’s the curious concept of food. We need to eat, but not to sustain life—we need blood to keep “the wasting” at bay. I’m the first vampire, so all of this is filed under hypothesis, but I do think that if I had a daily fresh supply of blood, I would be truly immortal and never die. When the blood supply is interrupted, vampires suffer the wasting, subtly at first, barely noticeable, but once it sets in, it accelerates rapidly. Our skin becomes leathery, tight, and pallid, and our flesh seems to disintegrate on our bones. Vampires who are in the last stages of wasting are still technically alive, and can be revived, maybe for eternity. They are aware and able to speak long after movement has ceased; I’ve seen it. It’s quite pitiful, really. Many wasted vampires have been found by humans, assumed to be a person long dead, and buried alive—all while thinking, seeing, thirsting.
Thinking of that terror is rather delightful, provided of course that it is some other poor ghoul in the grave, and not me. When wasted vampires are provided a blood meal, they do recuperate, and to a degree, regenerate. I feel that most of the “aging” on my face has come from times when blood has been scarce, not from the passage of the centuries.
I don’t have any of the surprisingly well-known vampire vulnerabilities (I think because Jesus powers made me), but the vampires I make (and the ones they make) all have similar weaknesses. Sunlight burns them up immediately. Human beings I have attacked for food have almost all met this particular
demise, as they were unaware of and unprepared for their new fate. Garlic is unpleasant, and crosses do cause painful burns on contact, but we can look at them without hissing and recoiling. Kittens do that, not bloodthirsty murdering fiends.
Invitations are not necessary for a vampire to enter a dwelling, and we all obviously have reflections. Why wouldn’t we have reflections? I have always thought that was pretty silly.
Coffins are one thing the myths have right. I was reborn in a tomb, so coffins, mausoleums, basically all forms of eternal resting places—they all feel, in my unbeating heart, like home to me. I can sleep anywhere, certainly, and have on many occasions, but I do prefer to sleep in a coffin. My palace in the arctic contains several luxurious options, as do my houses around the world. Sleeping in a coffin in a basement is truly the most relaxing experience, as being below ground for me also adds a rejuvenating factor.
The wooden stake through the heart myth is a fascinating one. A wooden stake is no more dangerous than any other weapon, and probably a sight less dangerous than a sword or firearm—because it’s a wooden stake!
Background on the wooden stake myth is something I can provide, though. Upon my resurrection and immediate lifestyle change, I made my home in Jerusalem. I needed the big city to provide people (food—blood) to keep me alive. Big cities also contain a significant population of people who are not missed when they go missing, which obviously is an important ingredient in me not getting caught. There is a certain amount of time that my nocturnal nefariousness can be undertaken without arousing suspicion, and this amount of suspicion-free time increases with the size of a city. In a modern 21st century city, I can exist for an almost indefinite amount of time if I keep my wits about me and avoid careless mistakes. Populations of a million plus offer infinite opportunities for someone who needs to live like I do. Back in the year 0010 however, larger cities had populations in the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, and I had to utilize all my faculties to stay one step ahead of criminal conjecture.
Cities during most of the last two thousand years contained tremendous amounts of livestock as well, and that was always my primary supply of blood. People are much less concerned when pigs, cows, and sheep disappear than they are when human beings do so.
My welcome in Jerusalem was being worn out, to say the least, and people were getting organized and motivated to apprehend whoever was marauding in their Christian city at night. Religious persecution was what they thought they were dealing with—someone massacring Christians—but really, it just happened to be where I lived at the time. The first band of assassins to set out against me were a religious vigilante force commissioned by the clergy, armed with long daggers, which featured handles made from what was left of the cross that Jesus was crucified on. The cross had been displayed in a church in the city, a church I promptly burned to the ground after they started making anti-me weapons out of the thing. The daggers’ handles were long and rough, and they projected backward from their belt-scabbards so the assassins could be readily identified by their unique weapons. When they were sheathed, or when they were being carried, the daggers actually looked like long wooden stakes.
This brotherhood remained viable for several generations, and incredibly, this gave rise to the irrepressible myth that wooden stakes are the preferred weapon for undead hunting. I have several of these daggers in my collection.
Every vampire can also go invisible, albeit a qualified version of invisible. It is not intuitive; it has to be taught by an experienced creature, so very few vampires know how to vibrate fast enough to achieve the effect. It is uncomfortable due to the tremendous amount of exertion needed and heat generated, but it has “saved my life” on many occasions (or at least kept me from getting caught stealing orphans).
The Countess of Blood
When I left what is now called the Middle East around the year 1445, I stayed for a few hundred years in central Europe. Cities there were large enough to sustain me, but small enough that I didn’t have to worry about organized groups of detectives and pitchfork and torch wielding platoons of townsfolk. Cities like Bucharest and Ulpia Serdica (modern Sofia, Bulgaria) were beautiful, vibrant, and growing at a rate that provided many opportunities. I found existence there to be quite exciting.
I made and lost many fortunes, and back then I still resembled a human being almost perfectly, so I could blend in during the daytime. Complicated relationships delighted me; the opportunity to prey on the frailty of human nature and the predictable egos of men has always been a source of amusement and pleasure for me, as well as a source of a vast amount of treasure.
In 1575, I met the love of my life. Her name was Countess Erzsébet (Elizabeth) Báthory de Ecsed, and she was beautiful, funny, sarcastic, and dark.
Also, completely, unabashedly, crazy.
Her aunt was a witch, her uncle a devil worshiper, and her brother a pedophile. It was love at first sight. She shared in my dislike for her fellow man, even before I turned her. After I turned her, she was the most prolific serial killer since, I guess, me. She killed and fed on at least 600 young girls.
She got caught because she never budgeted out her violence; she just kept it coming, every day, every day, relentlessly, passionately, killing and feeding. Another factor in her apprehension by authority was that I never taught her how to perform the illusion of invisibility. I had used it on her a number of times, but I never showed her how to do it. I had to threaten several people to save her life; she avoided beheading and was instead sentenced to be sealed inside her house (with bricks over the doors and windows) until she died.
Of course she could live forever, so that was going to take a while.
They eventually found remains in the house, so she either wasted to bones, or she escaped and planted a corpse there. The DNA testing in 1614 was a bit unsophisticated, so I will never know. I still think about her all the time (at least once every twelve years or so), and I miss her dearly.
Vlad
While living near the Carpathian Mountains north of the Danube River in a place called Wallachia, I met a fascinating, brilliant, charismatic defender of Christianity. He was a prince, and a member of the House of Drăculeşti Vlad was his name, and I turned him. He was much too vigilant in his proselytizing and converting the masses, much too Christ-like. When he became a vampire, the world was treated to a dragon of a man, a ruthless and cruel butcher whose deeds would not be matched for five hundred years. This was Vlad Dracula—one of my sons.
Poor Lucy
London was my home in the late 1800s, and at that time I went by the name of Henry Irving. I made my living as an actor, which was grand. My existences in the 19th and 20th centuries were made bearable by the trouble I caused and got into while involved in theater troupes in London, Paris, Barcelona, New York, and New Orleans. New Orleans at the turn of the century is a hard place to match for debauchery. Modern day Amsterdam? Sunday school!
I had been acting and lying and manipulating people, to survive, for many hundreds of years; the theater culture is rife with drug use and excessive drinking, and populated with loose-living characters who stay out all night and routinely vanish. I loved it. Theater for me was a match made in heaven (I love religious puns).
In London, as Henry Irving, I became quite successful, and as I had many affairs to keep in order, I acquired the services of a personal assistant. This man’s name was Abraham Stoker, an interesting intellectual man who was already an accomplished writer. He saw the world through macabre colored glasses, and every idea he had revolved around magic, the occult, and evil people. I did something with him that I had done repeatedly during my time in Europe, something that amused me and created chaos and discontent, something that drove people to fear and to action. I told the truth. I told Stoker about my experiences in Transylvania and Romania. I told him about Vlad, who had posthumously gained the nickname Vlad the Impaler. I was such a proud daddy.
Stoker, the little devil, kept my secrets but wrote my story. Embellis
hed with several added elements and invented circumstances, Dracula became one of the best-known novels of all time. Stoker finished what Poe started, and gave writers of dark stories credibility and popularity.
Hijacked Holidays
The idea for my revenge came from the Christians themselves.
One of the ways they paved over the pagans was to hijack their holidays and customs. For example, to celebrate Christ’s resurrection, why just generate a new holiday, when you can squash some non-Christian traditions in the process? Pagans celebrated the Spring Equinox with obvious symbols of fertility, namely rabbits and eggs. Makes perfect sense, as no one would argue that spring isn’t a time of new life. To celebrate the resurrection of their savior, the Christians also chose spring, which they could argue made sense with the “born again/new life” connection. To represent Christ’s resurrection, the Christians chose obvious symbols of Christianity, namely rabbits and eggs. Brilliant isn’t it? Establish your own sacred traditions while simultaneously rubbing out pagan ones—by adopting them! Even the word “Easter” comes from the name of a Germanic goddess.
Winter festivals, particularly those centered on the solstice, have been around since people started living in settlements together. There is not as much agricultural work to do in the cold, it’s dreary and depressing, and after the solstice, winter is on its way out, so let’s celebrate! The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, which honored the god Saturn, from December 17-23. This holiday featured lights, displays of greenery, merrymaking, and gift giving. Sound familiar? Christians wanted to celebrate Jesus’ birthday. Understandable. Don’t have the slightest inkling when his birthday is? No problem. Kill two partridges with one pear tree, and establish your holiday while pulling the plug on a vile pagan ritual. Brilliant, but I already said that.
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