The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1)

by Joseph Duncan

  As I explained earlier, we vampires are as varied in strength and appearance as any other natural creature. Some of us are soft and pink and warm, barely more vampire than human. Short-lived and weak, the fate of these half-mades is a tragic one. These must suffer the curse of the blood hunger without the recompense of our full powers and longevity. Like the little Foul One I dispatched with my knife, whom my maker called Uel, these half-mades are more than human, with speed and strength superior to mortal men, but they are not like their more powerful vampire brethren, the cold white beings the Strix more fully transformed. They are vulnerable to injury, sometimes even to mortal diseases. They can be killed with a blow or a stake to the heart. Some, poor things, can even be injured by the sunlight! Like mortal men, their lives have a natural span, and at the end of that span they weaken and die. At the other end of the scale, you have the true immortals, whom we sometimes call Eternals. They are cold and hard and white, demi-gods of immeasurable strength, as immune to time as they are to mortal disease-- all but invulnerable to harm. The rest fall somewhere between those two extremes. I do not know why the Living Blood has such a varied effect upon the mortals it transforms, but there it is. The vampiric transformation, like all else in life, is something of a lottery.

  My maker was one of those immortals who fell in between those two extremes. Your average, run-of-the-mill bloodsucker, he was neither soft and weak nor an omnipotent demi-god. Though he seemed terrible and all-powerful to me at the time, I would estimate that he was about half as strong, physically, as I am now. He was not hard and white like me but somewhere in between man and marble. Still human looking for the most part, but pale, and with the requisite fangs and iridescent eyes. He did not seem to possess any of the strange gifts that some of our kind are granted by the Blood. I do not believe he could read minds or move objects by the force of his will. He certainly couldn’t see the future or he would have steered well away from me!

  To my reckoning as a living man, my maker's strength was irresistible. I could do nothing to defy his will. I was helpless to defend myself from his brutality. He could have killed me at any moment, rent me limb from limb as easily as you might pull the wings from a fly. Sometimes I think it might have been a kinder fate if he had done that… but life, as I have said before, is not fair. He seemed a monster to me then, a demonic being of vast and overwhelming strength, but compared to me now he was a minor fiend. In the eons that have followed, I have destroyed countless such creatures out of hand.

  Though he was strong and fierce, he was not intelligent. Cunning, yes, as any predator is cunning, but he thought little of consequences and he was completely devoid of the finer sensibilities: love, honor, friendship, mercy.

  I have occasionally wondered what brutal tribe he was born to, and how he had come to be what he was, but I never found out. Not for certain. In his dress and mannerisms he seemed much like the Foul Ones my people sometimes made war with, but he could have hailed from any number of primitive peoples. Nor do I know what undead monster made him a vampire—my immortal grand-sire, you might say-- or how old he was when he attempted to press me into slavery. He might have been an ancient by the time our two paths crossed, but if so he had gained woefully little wisdom in that time. His decision to give me the Living Blood was a misstep he would not survive to regret.

  Yes, I killed him. Of course I did.

  He had little knowledge of the particulars of the vampiric transformation ... that some are made weak and mortal like his servant Uel, whom I had dispatched with a knife to the heart, while a rare few are transmuted for some unknown reason into demigods.

  Uel was weak and easily subjugated, and so he reasoned that I would be as well.

  He was doomed the moment he decided to make me an immortal.

  Now let me tell you how I killed him.

  3

  The first thing a vampire is aware of, when he or she awakens from the torpor of transformation, is the blood hunger. As soon as my eyes opened, that terrible, gnawing thirst pressed itself to the forefront of my consciousness. It was like a vast void in the center of my soul, a gawping mouth clamoring to be fed. Anyone who has been addicted to a drug will understand the craving. It is relentless, demanding, maddening.

  I awakened with a groan, thinking only of the gnawing inside of me. Ignorant of the transformation that had been wrought upon my body, I was not certain what the hunger was for, only that it brought to my mind imaginings of soft warm flesh in my mouth, and that flesh parting between my teeth with an expression of salty juices. If not for the pain, I would have thought it a sensual need, as it was very similar to the desire a man feels when he is overcome with lust, only it was a desire to be filled rather than to penetrate, and centered upon my abdomen. My stomach was twisting itself into knots, coiling and flexing violently, like an enraged serpent. My thoughts were all jumbled as if someone had sawed off the top of my head and poured in a colony of ants. Every vein in my body seemed to be filled with molten lava.

  My body felt different. As I lay there staring up at the glowing disc of the cave entrance, I tried to push away the cravings and take an accounting of my physical being. There was something fundamentally different in the sensations of my form. My own flesh felt foreign to me, as if I had awakened in another man’s body, one whose dimensions were very similar to my own but not quite right. I touched my cheek. The skin there felt icy cold and smooth. Then I held my hand in front of my eyes and jolted at its whiteness and the strange, crystalline texture of it. Moonlight glimmered on my skin as if it were powdered with diamond dust.

  I held up my other arm then, bracing myself for pain, but my broken arm was whole again. It had healed while I was unconscious. I flexed my wrist and curled my fingers, expecting at the very least a twinge of discomfort, but there was nothing. I felt only the sensations of the movements—the contractions of the muscles, the joints turning as they should.

  In fact, nothing really hurt but the hunger. I felt whole. I felt… strong.

  I rose to my feet, standing on the stiff and twisted corpses of the Fat Hands. Being an ancestor worshipper, it seemed terribly disrespectful to trod upon the bodies of the dead, but what else could I do? Grimacing with revulsion, I held out my arms to balance myself on the shifting mass and surveyed the rest of my body.

  My abduction through the treetops had ripped my clothes to tatters. As my father was wont to say, I had wiped my ass on better rags than these. I tore them off. Tossing the strips of leather aside, I stood naked in the echoing cavern.

  The rest of my injuries had healed as well. Gone were the lumps and cuts and bruises that had disfigured my lower legs. The furrows the speartooth had carved across my hip were healed over. But for a slight roughness along the edges, they were barely noticeable. My battered ribs were unblemished. The bloody gouge across my belly, where a pointy stick had scraped me, had vanished completely. Even the scabs were gone, as if my body had absorbed the crusted blood.

  In fact, the flesh of my entire body was uniformly white, the same icy whiteness as my hands, as if it had been scrubbed so thoroughly even the color had come off. My feet, my legs, my cock and balls and belly… they still seemed to be my own, only they looked as if they had been carved of moonstone. The texture was very smooth except for my palms and fingertips, which were slightly raspy, like fine sand.

  My hair was the only part of me that still seemed normal.

  I suppose, being composed of dead cells, the organism that transforms us into blood drinkers has no effect on hair. Or fingernails. My fingernails still look now the same as they did 30,000 years ago.

  My hair was still soft and fine and dark. I ran my fingers through it and it felt as familiar to me as ever. My beard, too. And on my body, my chest and belly, my male organ and thighs and lower legs, it was as thick and curly and soft as ever, although the dark color of it contrasted sharply with all the white skin.

  I bit my lower lip, pondering my transformation, and felt my eyeteeth slice through the
flesh. The pain was immediate and sharp, and I cupped my hand over my mouth reflexively. I felt my fangs with my fingertips and explored their new length and shape, numb with horror. I couldn't see them, but I could feel how sharp and long they had become.

  “No!” I cried.

  It dawned on me then that I had become a demon! There was no word for vampire in those days, but we knew the word for monster, and that was what I had become. A monster. The villain that had tossed me in that pit, the beast who had killed all those Neanderthals, had cursed me!

  I remembered the black bile it had regurgitated into my mouth, how it had forced me to swallow its horrible vomitus. I remembered the way the black fluid had surged down my throat, almost as if it had a will of its own, the way it had coiled in my belly, then spread out through my body in icy tendrils.

  By some terrible magic, I had been transformed!

  I wanted to flee. I was in a terrible panic. I looked toward the opening of the pit but it seemed much too far away to be an option to me. Of course, I could easily have scaled the wall-- or even leapt the full distance with only a little effort-- but I was ignorant of my powers in those first few immortal moments.

  And I was so hungry!

  The hunger redoubled, bending me over with a groan. I stumbled back and sat against the wall of the pit, clutching my belly.

  I thought of my wives and children. I thought of my companion Brulde, who had surely been killed by the Foul One's horrendous blow. My longing for them was a pain as terrible as the cravings tormenting me so relentlessly. I began to weep.

  “Nyala! Eyya!” I sobbed. “Please! I love you! I don't understand what's happened to me! I don't want to be in this awful place!”

  I wiped the tears from my cheeks and saw them glittering on my fingertips, viscous and black. These were not a man's tears. These black smears were the tears of a devil-spirit! With a groan of despair, I flicked the tears from my fingertips. The sight of the black fluid was poison to my soul.

  I huddled there against the wall in an agony of need and self-mourning. I had lost my family, my friends, my very humanity.

  That's when my maker dropped soundlessly into the pit.

  He landed in a crouch, grinning at me with moon-pool eyes.

  4

  If hate could set the heart ablaze, my heart would have been immolated by the pure loathing I felt at the sight of the beast. I launched myself at my maker with an inarticulate cry. My speed startled him. In truth, I was a little stunned by the speed at which I threw myself at him as well. I flew across the cave at him, but he had been a vampire much longer than I. He grabbed my outstretched arms and redirected my flight with one simple pirouette, releasing my wrists and letting my momentum fling me across the chamber. I collided with the wall on the other side of the pit hard enough to shatter the stalagmites suspended there. They crumbled atop me as I slid to the floor, too dazed to move out of the way.

  Before I could push them off and regain my feet, my maker was upon me.

  “You're a feisty one,” he laughed. It was obvious by his good humor that he took great relish in physical combat, especially when he believed that he had the upper hand. He flung the broken rocks aside and began to beat me with his fists, landing one terrible blow after another and taking no care where they alighted. “You will submit to me, young one! You will submit or I will tear you to pieces!”

  He was strong. I dodged one of his blows and his fist collided with a chunk of rock instead of my head. The stone exploded into gravel, the shrapnel peppering the side of my face. The impact fissured the flesh of his fist as well, and he howled in outrage, clutching his injured hand. “You worm!” he snarled, and then he slapped me hard enough to flatten me to the ground.

  I tried to defend myself. Were I not freshly minted, starved for blood and still in the midst of the transformation, I’m sure I could have killed him with a single blow, but I was not yet fully made and ignorant of my new abilities. I was an infant beset by a brute.

  His fists landed on me again and again, striking me with terrible might. The force of the blows cracked open my strange white flesh. My blood, as black now as my maker’s blood, sprayed the walls in abstract patterns. The injuries healed as quickly as he made them, but they still hurt, and I crawled away from him on my elbows, grunting and crying out as he continued to assault me.

  “Submit!” he roared. “Submit and I will stop hurting you!”

  “Never!” I shouted.

  He pummeled me with his fists. Like the biblical Cain, he snatched up a hunk of rock and smashed it into my head. He pummeled my neck and shoulders and back, each a fatal blow had I been a mortal man. He was frenzied, determined to break my spirit. I finally collapsed and lost consciousness. Even then he continued to beat me. I don’t know how long he assaulted me after I went limp, but I was terribly injured when I finally awakened. Even with my regenerative powers, it was hours before I was able to move from the spot where I had fallen. He had all but pulped me in his paroxysm of rage.

  He was gone when I finally awakened. A coy dawn was peeping through the entrance of the charnel pit. Its timorous glow illuminated a body that was hideously disfigured and drenched in the stinking black fluid that was now my life’s blood.

  I rolled over with a groan, cursing the fates that I still lived. Looking to my hand, I saw the Living Blood repairing my injuries, the broken fingers slowly realigning themselves, the weeping fissures in my skin knitting closed. Was I not so starved for blood the process would have gone much more quickly, but I did not know that. I was an ignorant fledgling. I only knew that I was cold and in pain and still maddeningly hungry-- for what I did not know.

  I tried to rise but my back was broken.

  Please, ancestors! I prayed. Deliver me from this torment!

  But deliverance did not come that morning.

  Only my maker.

  5

  Night returned and the Foul One with it, swooping down from the entrance of the pit like a great carrion bird. He landed across the cavern from me, barely bending at the knees though the drop was at least thirty meters. When he alighted, the bones that adorned his massive body clattered like the charms my wives hung from the roof of our wetus. Two furry creatures wriggled in his hands, squealing and clawing at the icy fingers that encircled their necks.

  I had spent the daylight hours in a stupor of pain, moving only to cover my eyes with my arm to protect them from the needling light. I might have said that it was painful, the sun glaring in my eyes, but any discomfort the sun might have caused me was overshadowed by the stupendous agony of all my other injuries. I looked little better than a squashed bug when the Foul One took his leave of me. The Strix had worked steadily at putting me back together, but I was starved of blood and newly made and the healing was slow and torturous.

  But I had recovered enough to crawl, and so I crawled toward him, seething with hatred. I dragged myself across the cold, stiff bodies of my Neanderthal kin, pulling myself along by their limbs like they were the rungs of some gruesome ladder. I intended to throw myself at him with what little strength I had recovered during the day. I wanted to wrap my fingers around his neck and choke the life from him, not knowing that such an attack would have little effect on my captor. I had no illusions that I might vanquish the powerful being. I merely hoped that he would lose patience with me and put me out of my misery. At least then I would die as a warrior.

  He stepped on my back with one foot, pinning me to the ground. “I've not come to fight, little one,” he purred. “Not tonight. Tonight I bring you sustenance. You see? I can be a generous master. We do not have to be enemies.”

  He rolled me over with his toe and squatted down. I tried to strike him but he brushed my fist aside and pressed something warm and furry to my mouth.

  “Stop it, worm. I have no time for that right now. Here, eat. You are starved and weak. If you do not feed, the Blood will devour you from within and then you will die.”

  The squirming creature he ha
d pushed to my lips was an ape. It was one of the tan and gold monkeys that capered in the treetops near Far Away Camp. We called them “little cousins”, as they had human-looking hands and faces. We didn't hunt them because we assumed they had souls, and it was taboo for my people to devour thinking creatures. We were afraid their spirits would be vengeful if we killed them, and the little cousins were mischievous enough when they were alive.

  “Use your fangs to cut its neck,” my maker said. “Its blood will nourish you.”

  “No!” I protested. “I will not do it!”

  I tried to push his hand away. His arm was like cold stone. The monkey thrashed and squealed, its cheek lying warm against mine, its tiny fingers scrabbling at my face.

  “Bite it and drink its blood,” my maker commanded, a little more gruffly this time.

  I turned my head from side to side, pressing my lips together. I would rather starve and die.

  Yes, of course!

  My maker’s tongue had betrayed him! Without realizing it, my captor had revealed the avenue of my escape. I could starve myself. I could starve myself and die. I could be free of this torment!

  The monkey squirmed and howled, its intelligent brown eyes bulging from their sockets. The smell of its flesh was in my nostrils. I could smell its wet fur and the fruit it had recently devoured. I could smell its fear and the enticing scent of its blood. The blood! My maker had handled it roughly in capturing it and there was blood caked in its nostrils, blood trickling down from one ear. Saliva gushed into my mouth at the rich, coppery scent. My hunger snarled and snapped in my belly. It was the blood I wanted! That was what I craved!

  But I refused to bite the little animal.

  “Drink!” my maker shouted.

  “No!”