From the corner of my eye, I saw Brulde’s head jerk up, an expression of panic suffusing his features.
A shadowy figure suddenly reared up before us. He appeared with shocking rapidity, heralded by a violent flurry of snow. Before either of us could move to defend ourselves, before we even had time to cry out, the dark figure struck Brulde a vicious blow.
The astonishing force of the assault lifted my companion from the log he had been sitting on. It launched him into the air like a missile, sent him tumbling away into the gloom.
I heard Brulde crash through the treetops, heard his body thump down somewhere in the darkness behind me even as I rose, swinging the melon-sized stone I’d armed myself with. I was aiming for the dark creature’s head. I meant to bash in his skull. But everything seemed to be moving so slowly: my rage, my fist, the falling snow.
The dark figure twisted around to face me. I could see nothing of his features but the glamour of his eyes. The stone I had propelled at his head was still rising, but slowly, as in a nightmare. The creature reached out and batted the rock aside, then leaned toward me and gripped my throat with his hand.
White teeth danced below the beak of his nose. He was speaking to me, telling me something in the guttural language of the Foul Ones, but I did not know their tongue. I didn’t understand a word he was saying.
My forearm was buzzing, the pain like an electric shock. I looked down at my arm and realized the creature had snapped the bones in it when he slapped the rock out of my hand. It was bent at an unnatural angle about four inches below my wrist. It looked as if I’d grown an extra elbow.
I wailed in agony.
An instant later, I felt myself lifted from the earth, the clawed fingers still wrapped tight around my throat. The speed at which we ascended stunned me. The sudden acceleration was like being slapped by a giant invisible hand. I had an impression that the fiend had leapt into the treetops but everything was a blurred confusion. I could feel cold air slicing through my hair and clothing. Winter bare branches whipped me all over. A thick tree limb collided with my hip hard enough to fracture it. I yalped, tugging in vain at the icy fingers sunk into my neck, but it was like trying to bend stone. My broken arm flapped uselessly at my side, singing in agony. My knees and shins kept banging against tree limbs. Then another large tree branch struck me in the head. I saw a burst of red stars and then nothing for a while.
I do not know how far we traveled, how long I was unconscious, but I awakened sometime later at the bottom of a charnel pit.
The Charnel Pit
1
I must have been unconscious for several hours for the storm had passed when I finally awakened. I opened my eyes and saw the moon shining faintly through the circular opening of a large subterranean chamber. A few errant snowflakes drifted down the stone throat of the cavern, glowing faintly in the moonshine like tiny will-o’-wisps, but the storm had moved on. The patch of sky visible above was a cloudless Persian blue and speckled with stars.
I lay where I woke for a moment, sorting through my memories and trying to put the pieces back into some semblance of order. I remembered my father falling, struck down by one of the monsters that had been plaguing the Fat Hands. Brulde and I had escaped, had fled down the mountainside from my father’s murderer--
Brulde!
The monster had attacked us just as we passed Big River Camp. He had struck my companion hard enough to fling him into the trees. A killing blow, surely! Who could survive that?
I had to find Brulde! I had to warn the others!
My entire body was throbbing in agony but I forced myself to move. Rolling onto my right side, I craned my head around as best I could, surveying my surroundings. I was in some sort of cave. Not Gray Stone. The Fat Hands’ cave was not nearly so deep in the earth, or so dank. The entrance above was much too far too climb to, but perhaps there was some other point of egress. Grunting and cradling my broken arm, I looked all around, but I could see no other openings aside from the glowing circle through which the moon peeked down.
The pit I was in looked to be gourd shaped, wide and round at the base but narrowing as it ascended. The walls were moist limestone encrusted with draperies of flowstone and monstrous fangs of stalagmites. I could hear the wind hooting at the entrance of the shaft and the continuous drip and plink of condensation, but no other sounds.
Why did I still live?
The last memory I had was of the powerful demon seizing me by the neck and ascending into the treetops. My flight through the wilderness had not been a gentle one. I was battered by the forest as if beaten by angry giants. A tree branch had finally struck me in the head and knocked me unconscious. I was helpless, broken, utterly defeated.
So why didn’t the Foul One kill me?
Nuhnhe.
I tried to rise and agony caromed through my body like bolts of lightning. The moist stone walls, as if mocking my pain, flung my cries back at me. I lifted my right arm to examine it. My gorge rose at the boneless way my hand flopped at the end of it. My entire forearm, from my elbow to the tips of my fingers, was swollen and discolored. I glanced up, looked back at my arm. There was no way I could climb out of this pit!
Perhaps the Foul One had not allowed me to live after all.
Perhaps he had simply condemned me to a slower and more torturous death, my broken body thrown down here to die of exposure.
I tried to stand. It is a painful process to rise with a broken arm. I had to twist my legs around and get them under me without using my arms for balance or to push myself up from the ground. My legs throbbed sickeningly. They hurt almost as badly as my broken arm. They had been beaten black and blue by my flight through the treetops. I could faintly see my body in the moonlight. It was crusty with dried blood and crisscrossed with multiple cuts and scrapes. My clothing, what little remained, hung in tatters. I got to my knees and tried to lunge to my feet and the ground beneath me shifted. I fell forward onto my face and howled in pain.
Panting, I waited there for the agony to abate, face down, ass in the air, clutching my broken arm to my chest. When my suffering had finally diminished to a more manageable palpitating shriek, I noticed that the ground beneath my cheek was strangely soft and yielding. It didn't feel like stone or soil but cold and smooth and somewhat pliant. I wriggled back, grunting at the pain, until I was sitting upright again, and then I looked down between my bloodied thighs and blinked in confusion, convinced that I was hallucinating.
There was a human face between my scratched and swollen knees.
The face was pale, still, the lips blue and slightly parted, the eyes filmy and blank. A man. A Fat Hand. There was a glimmer of frost on the man’s skin. I reached out and touched the cheek below the left eye, using my good hand to do so, and my finger dimpled the cold, stiff flesh, but the face did not stir. The eyes did not blink.
I scanned around the moonlit chamber, stretching my eyes wide open, trying to gather as much light as possible to see by. What I had first mistook as the abstract shapes of limestone deposits and lumps of ice were in fact human bodies. Dozens of dead human bodies.
More specifically, Neanderthals.
I was sitting upon a great mass of frozen Fat Hand corpses.
While I was unconscious, my abductor had cast me into a charnel pit.
The dead Neanderthals sprawled around me, a gory layer of lifeless flesh. Here were the Gray Stone People who had vanished in the night. Here were the children who had been snatched from their beds. Here were the women who had gone missing while gathering fruit or berries or nuts to feed their families. Here were the men who had gone out to face their enemy, and found only their deaths staring back at them instead. It looked to be all but the very few who had fled the valley, and the ones who had been hung outside Gray Stone to frighten away the curious. Frozen, dusted in snow, they lay one upon the other as if they had fallen, all together, into an enchanted sleep.
But they were not asleep.
They were dead.
&
nbsp; All dead.
I screamed then in outrage and despair.
I tried to clamber off of them, ignoring the pain in my broken and bloody body, but no matter where I retreated I found a corpse beneath my feet. Bloated Fat Hand carcasses covered the entire floor of the pit, in some places several bodies deep. They rolled and sank beneath my feet. If you will permit an anachronistic analogy, it was like trying to walk on Jell-O. I stepped onto the swollen belly of a Fat Hand male and he emitted a horrid blat of gas. Thank the ancestors it was too dark to make out their faces. I think I might have gone mad if I saw just whom it was I was stomping around on. Eyya’s father or mother, my brothers or sisters-in-law. Nieces and nephews. I was still groaning and stumbling about when the moonlight dimmed.
I wheeled around in time to see the Foul One drop silently down the shaft. He landed in a crouch and grinned at me, then rose regally upright. In his fur cloak and great headdress made of bones, he looked like some mad shaman. He watched me expectantly, standing amidst the swirling snowflakes-- curious to see what I would do next, perhaps.
“You demon!” I roared. “You monster! Have you come at last to put me out of my misery?”
He laughed at me contemptuously. He seemed to understand my words, or at least the intent of them, and relished in my helplessness. Eyes gleaming, he spoke in the sibilant tongue of his people, his voice deep and strangely beautiful. “Heth’i’no padre sio,” he said. “Ne padre ti t’sha.”
“Damn you!” I shouted angrily. “Well, come finish it then!”
There was nowhere to retreat, no weapons lying about with which to defend myself. Nothing to do but curse him before I went to join my forebears.
Again he laughed.
“Sholoth ma’ia,” he said.
He took a step toward me, walking heedlessly on the bodies of his victims. His lips pulled back in a terrible grin and I saw the white daggers of his sharpened teeth. His eyeteeth seemed especially long and pointed.
He was at least a head taller than me, and as broad as Tavet had been. I backed away from him as he approached, squeezing my eyes shut, bracing my body for the fatal blow. Then he did something that shocked me. He spoke, quite properly, in the tongue of the River People.
“Come, little man… submit to me. Accept me as your master and I will harm you no more.”
I opened my eyes to gape at him, then shouted, “Never!”
“Resist me and I will break you as I broke the spirit of Uel.”
I shied away as he advanced, though there was no more room to flee. My ass was already pressed up to the limestone wall behind me.
“Submit to me willingly and you may walk at my side, my almost-equal. Deny me and you will crawl on your belly for the rest of your life. Either way, you will take Uel’s place as my servant.”
The demon blurred into motion. In the blink of an eye, he was upon me. His clawed fingers dug into my upper arms, holding me against the wall with implacable strength. His crazed face filled my vision. Moonlight glimmered in his eyes as if trapped there inside of them.
“You are mine!” he hissed.
He pulled me from the wall and threw me onto the floor of the charnel pit. An instant later, he dropped onto me, pinning my arms beneath his knees. I howled in agony as the bones of my broken arm stabbed into the flesh that enveloped them.
“Drink of my blood,” he commanded.
I struggled but my strength was nothing compared to the strength of the god-like creature that leered down at me. His cold, clawed fingers wriggled into my mouth and prized open my jaws. I tried to bite down on his fingers, but it was like biting a stone and only made him giggle. I tried to turn my head to the side but he grabbed my chin and jerked my face back toward him. It was as if his body was made of solid ice, cold and unyielding. He held me still with irresistible strength. The taste of his fingers in my mouth made me retch. It was the taste of rotten meat.
The vampire's fanged mouth yawned wide then and his gut heaved. With a revolting retching sound, a torrent of black fluid erupted from his lips. The viscous black ejaculation sprayed my cheeks and chin. I felt the cold, bilious fluid fill my mouth and gagged.
“Swallow!” he commanded.
He squeezed my jaws closed and used his thumb and forefinger to clamp my nostrils shut, forcing me to swallow the bitter vomit or choke on it. I flopped and pitched beneath him but he rode me as he had ridden Tavet, clenching his thighs around me. I held my breath as long as I could, held it until my lungs were burning and I saw cloudy shapes billowing behind my eyeballs. Finally, my throat convulsed. I could hold my breath no more. Eyes bulging with horror, I swallowed. The cold fluid slid down my throat. It almost seemed to move of its own accord, surging down my gullet, filling my belly, penetrating me.
The Foul One saw me swallow and smiled in triumph. “Ah, there! That is good!” He leaned close to my face and purred. “Drink it all down, little one, every drop of it, and become a god.”
Red and black dots swarmed in my vision. I felt my consciousness slipping. I felt as if I were flying down a long and lightless shaft, one that resounded with each beat of my heart.
His weight lifted off of me then. My mouth and nostrils released, I gulped for air. The Foul One moved a short distance away as I wheezed and coughed. He turned to watch me, eyes gleaming avidly. He wiped his fanged grin with the back of his hand.
“You will submit now,” he purred. “Submit to the Hunger, and submit to your new master.”
I writhed on the floor, coughing, spitting, trying to rid myself of the vile taste of the fluid he had forced me to swallow. I cursed the foul creature, tears glinting in my eyes. “Disgusting filth! Excrement eater!” I screamed at him.
He laughed delightedly, making a mockery of my rage.
“Curse me now, little one. Curse me all that you like,” he said. “You will call me master soon enough... once the blood has worked its magic upon your flesh.”
Pain lanced my stomach. I groaned and clutched my belly with my unbroken arm. I could feel the frigid liquid inside of me like a ball of ice in my guts. It was so cold, so heavy! As I lay there writhing, I felt icy tendrils spreading out from that cold core, like green sprouts bursting from the shell of a seed. The coldness expanded, enveloping my lungs and heart, threading its way down my limbs. The pain was terrible. Imagine freezing solid from the inside out, your internal organs crystallizing one at a time, your veins filling up with ice water. It was a cold so intense it was like burning. I flopped and shrieked as the Strix infiltrated by body, as it consumed me from within.
The Foul One observed my agonies with an expression of supreme delectation. There is no English word for the enjoyment he took in my torment. In the German tongue it is called schadenfreude, which means to take pleasure in the suffering of others. That is what he did as I lay writhing on the floor. He took great pleasure in my suffering, devouring my every spasm with his eyes, slurping up each scream and sob with his ears.
Finally, he seemed to grow tired of my antics. The light in his eyes faded, and his smile wilted by degrees. He began to pace around the chamber, restless.
He stopped.
“I shall leave you to your birthing pains,” the Foul One said, glancing toward the opening. “When I return, you will submit to me. You will crawl to me on your hands and knees and swear your fealty to me. This I promise you.”
He moved upwards then, bounding impossibly towards the mouth of the cavern. I would have been impressed were I not in so much pain. With hardly a sound, he leapt from one side of the shaft to the other and then out the opening of the chamber. He did it so effortlessly it was more like taking flight than leaping. He paused to look back down at me, his head tiny with distance, and then he departed.
I rolled and jerked on the floor of the charnel pit as the pain grew more and more intense. I felt my left arm go numb and held it before my eyes, bracing it with my good hand. As I stared at it in horror, the color leeched from my flesh. The skin blanched, fading from pink to gray
and finally white, while my veins turned black and throbbed obscenely.
“What has he done to me?” I wheezed.
As I lay there looking at my arm, the bones realigned themselves with an agonizing pop. The swelling subsided almost instantly, so that it looked as if my arm was shrinking.
The pain reached a crescendo then, arching my body backwards, tearing a final scream from my throat, and then I collapsed into merciful unconsciousness.
2
What else can I tell you of my maker?
I know you must be dreadfully curious about the being who made me what I am, but of my vampiric sire I’m afraid there is little more to tell.
I never called him master. I assure you of that. My loathing for him remains pure to this day. Thirty millennia has not been time enough to adulterate the purity of my hatred for him and three hundred millennia will not be enough!
Though he was the father of my living death, I never learned his name. I call him the Demon, the Foul One, the Beast, the Leech. I’m sure he had a proper name. He was a mortal once, just like me and every other of my kind. He had a mother and a father who named him as my father named me, but he never spoke his name to me, or if he did it was in the tongue of his people and I did not know the meaning of the words.
Though he made me an immortal, he was also the murderer of my true father, the genesis of my mortal life, and so the word “father” will never cross my lips when I speak of him.
He was cruel and brutal. He existed only to satisfy his own appetites, and not just for blood but for cruelty and domination as well. He made me what I am by force, took me as a man might take a woman, and put his black seed inside me. The very thought of him makes me tremble with hatred. However, as I know you are curious, I will tell you what more of him I can.
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 18
