“Your butt buddy Brold,” he grinned.
“Brulde,” I corrected him. “And he was not my ‘butt buddy’.”
“You fuck him?”
“When we were young, we engaged in sexual behavior,” I answered. “It was not considered a shameful act, as it is so often regarded in this repressed modern era. Our people called it ‘good practice’.”
“I bet you practiced a lot,” he mocked.
Ignoring his derision, I said, “In those days, we believed such behavior contributed to the wellbeing of the community. Mated tribesmen were more successful at hunting than a single male would have been, more apt to survive in times of war. It was a way for the men of the tribe to bond, and it also afforded our females more time to mature before they mated so that they were more likely to survive the act of childbirth. Childbearing was a hazardous endeavor in those primitive times. I do, however, prefer females when I am in need of sexual gratification.”
“Must feel like they’re getting poked by an icicle,” Lukas smirked.
“My flesh is warmer and more pliant when I am well fed,” I replied. “But the act of sex with a member of my kind is always fraught with danger for mortal women. For mortal men, too, I suppose, though there are more male vampires than female vampires. Or there used to be. Regardless, I have made love to a great many mortal women since I was made the monster that I am. The number who did not survive the experience, though small, is a constant source of shame for me. Yet, I am a man, just as surely as I am a monster, and I can be seduced just as easily as any mortal man can be.”
“Speaking of well fed,” Lukas said, changing the subject. “You’re looking very plump and ruddy. I take it your hunt was successful tonight?”
I smiled faintly. “Of course it was. You still live, do you not?”
“Poor Maurice…” Lukas said, looking down at his dinner with a grin. He glanced up at me suddenly, asked, “Will you tell me how it happened?”
His eagerness revolted me… and pleased me at the same time.
“If you like,” I answered.
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Yes, tell me! Did he realize what you were? Did he beg you for mercy before you drained him of his blood?”
“Your sadism is repulsive, even to a creature like me,” I sniffed.
“Yes, yes,” he muttered, waving my condemnation aside. “That is why I fascinate you. Now, tell me. Give me all the details. I want to know if he cried. I want to know if he pissed his pants.”
I sighed, pretending to be exasperated with his wickedness, but I have sworn to speak only the truth in these memoirs, and so I must confess to you that it was also gratifying. I have lived so long in self-imposed exile, here in the city of Liege, and abroad. I have hidden from the worlds of mortal and immortal alike, eschewing even the simplest pleasures of human companionship. It felt good to relate my experiences to another sentient being, to be heard by ears other than my own.
“He was at the Vesuvius, just as you said,” I began. “The skinny Frenchman with the big nose…”
I have fed on enough mortals to populate a small nation, yet even the most unremarkable events are brightened by their sharing. I found myself warming to the story of the Frenchman’s final hours. I could not help it. My captive was so eager to hear it.
2
Lukas laughed when the telling was told. “I wish I could have seen his face when you told him it was I who had betrayed him,” he said. He had finished dining and sat propped against the headboard of his bed, his stomach bulging. I could hear his intestines gurgling as digestive fluids liquified his meal.
“Have you no remorse for the deaths of your former companions?” I asked. It was not an accusation, simply curiosity. “No guilt for your complicity in their murders? Maurice was your father’s friend. He helped you to escape from Hamburg, when you were arrested for your crimes.”
Lukas sat forward, his dark hair falling across his brow. “Let me tell you about Maurice Fournier,” he said, his amusement giving way to sudden fury. “He may have helped smuggle me from Germany, but he was no friend to me! When I was a boy, my father would order my sisters to fuck him. Sometimes Maurice would have me join him in the act. My father pimped us all out— my mother until she was so old and ugly no man wanted to put his dick in her-- and then his own children. Can you imagine what that is like, you monster? My father and his friends had no regard for us as human beings. They thought only of the warm orifices they could shove their disgusting cocks inside! And Maurice was no better than any of the others. He took me in when my papa died, but it was only because I was useful to him. I had been well-trained by Papa and his cohorts. I did whatever Maurice told me to do. Fuck. Kill. If I am monster, it is because of the horrors that my father and his filthy friends subjected me to when I was too young to defend myself. They made me what I am.”
“So why repeat their evils? Why not strive to rise above your sordid past?” I asked.
“It is the only life I know,” he said, leaning back. His eyes rolled toward the window, devoid of emotion, concealing the memories that squirmed in the lightless depths of his awareness. “I do not derive pleasure from anything else in this world,” he said softly. “Rape, murder, they are the only things that move me. Perhaps I should kill myself, remove the corruption that is my soul from this world of death and decay, but I do not wish to die. Why should I? I did not ask for this life, and the guilt for the acts I have committed do not stain these hands alone. I am merely a product of my environment.”
I felt pity for him suddenly.
“When I kill you, I will not make it unnecessarily painful,” I promised him.
He glanced toward me and smiled.
“No,” he said. “I want you to. It is the only way I will feel it when it happens.”
I stared at him in mute shock, taken aback by his need to be abused, his desire to die in pain. Then I thought: perhaps he only plays another game with me. This exhibition of vulnerability may simply be a ploy, one designed to evoke pity in me.
“I think we are like the opposite poles of a magnetic field,” I murmured. “Fated by our nature to be drawn together.”
I observed his demeanor as only a vampire can: the workings of his facial muscles, the tiny involuntary movements of his limbs. Even his smell. My instincts told me that he was not being deceptive, but I could not trust my instincts when it came to this mortal monster. His mind was like an onion; each layer I peeled back revealed yet another layer, and another.
He returned my stare and smiled, his mirth failing to reach his eyes.
“I have to shit,” he said.
3
“Don’t you want to stay and watch?” Lukas inquired as I rose to give him some privacy. He pushed his underpants down his thighs and sat on the portable potty chair I’d purchased for him several days ago. “You can experience my bowel movement vicariously,” he taunted me, “just as you did when you were watching me eat.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said, stamping down on my outrage. Keeping my face neutral, I slipped out into the hallway.
“Wait a minute--! Oh, here it comes--!” he grunted toward my retreating back.
I shut the door firmly, ignoring his mocking laughter.
Vile cretin! I thought. Then I felt amusement, and I had to stifle a chuckle. No mortal man had ever challenged me so thoroughly.
I moved down the dark corridor.
I wanted music—if only to drown out the sounds of his elimination, which I could still hear through the intervening walls. I turned on a lamp, idled through my collection of phonographic recordings, settling on Brahms’ Tragic Overture, Op.81.
No one knows for what exact purpose the Tragic Overture was designed—some thought Faust-- but the sonata is rich and energetic. I set the needle into the groove and retired to my sofa, closing my eyes to drink in the music.
To kill or not to kill, that is the question, I thought, paraphrasing the Bard.
Better yet: “Know yourself
, vampire. When you strip away all vanity, you will find that your questions are only the truths you are unwilling to accept.”
That advice from a mortal princess I once loved, many hundreds of years ago. Her name was Nina, after the Babylonian goddess of fertility. She is gone now, of course. Gone like all the others. Gone now to dust, like the lovers of my mortal span: Eyya, Nyala. Yes, even Brulde. Gone like my radiant Julia, who died with the city of Pompeii. Gone like my first vampire child, Ilio, and the blood drinker he made after his heart, his gentle bride who was called Priss. All of them dead and gone but for Zenzele, devoured by the insatiable maw of time.
And what strange continent did my Zenzele now roam? What music was she listening to at this very moment? If I know her, it is the piping of the wind or a chorus of crickets, or perhaps the rhythmic crash of ocean waves on some distant moonlit beach.
Zenzele, who is as hard and timeless as I. My soul mate. My female counterpart in this dark and empty universe. If I could move to her by some flourish of magic, I would fly to her with open arms. I needed her counsel, perhaps more than I ever needed it before. She might have been able to reason with me, talk me out of the mad schemes that kept whirling through my mind. At the very least, her company would distract me from my dubious contemplations.
To kill or not to kill… but who did I plan to kill?
That was the question.
If only my love were here to guide me. But Zenzele is lost to me, no less than all the others. She had begged me, two hundred years ago or so, to release her from the chains of my love for her. This was just before I settled here in Liege. She needed her freedom, she’d said. Some time apart. She promised to return. And I let her go. Of course I did. And she had drifted out of my life just as she so often drifted into it, always with her the need to be free, even from the bonds of adoration.
She would return to me. In another hundred years, another thousand. When her loneliness outweighed her desire to wander unfettered through the world, she would return. To me. To the home I kept for her in my heart.,
But would it be too late this time?
Perhaps… it was already too late.
You see, a terrible, selfish plan was incubating in my mind. I was about to do something wicked and evil, and though I pretended to debate this mad and half-formed scheme, I knew.
I had already committed myself.
Yet, I prayed that Zenzele would come... that she’d come and save me from myself!
4
Brahms had finished. The needle rose from the grooves of the phonographic record and returned to its cradle with a click. For a moment the music reverberated in my mind, but then I put it aside. I rose and returned to the my captive’s bedchamber. I did not want to be alone with my thoughts. They were too melancholy, too desperate and unnerving.
I paused at his door to listen. I could hear nothing on the other side. Only his breathing. The beating of his heart.
For some odd reason, I felt compelled to announce myself, to ask his permission to enter the room.
Ridiculous! I thought.
I let myself in.
Lukas leapt toward me with a howl, throwing his chains over my head. He meant to garrote me!
He sprawled on the floor, but was on his feet a moment later, spinning around with a frantic expression.
“Really?” I asked from the other side of the room. I was standing casually beside the frosted window, nary a hair out of place.
“Ha!” he yelled, and then he raced across the floor toward me, his fingers curled into claws. He ran until the chain jerked taut and his feet shot out from beneath him.
“Let me know when you tire of this foolishness,” I said-- back at the doorway now-- taunting him with a grin.
He rolled onto his hands and knees, panting raggedly, his long bangs hanging in front of his feverish eyes. “I’m going to kill you,” he wheezed.
“You cannot,” I replied, speaking gently, as to a child. “Don’t you understand? You cannot choke me to death. I cannot drown. I do not burn.” Frustrated, I strode toward him.
He cringed, expecting me to retaliate.
“Get up,” I commanded. “Stand!”
He rose, his body trembling.
“Hold out your hand, Lukas.”
“Why?”
“Hold it out!”
He extended his palm toward me.
I took his cohort’s switchblade from my pocket. It was the knife Maurice had stabbed me with in the park. Lukas’s hand twitched back when he saw it, then he pressed it toward me eagerly. I placed the weapon into his palm.
“Stab me,” I said.
Grinning, he pressed the button on the hilt that unleashed the spring-loaded blade. It flashed out with a snick, then he eyed me up and down, licking his lips, trying to decide where he wanted to stick it. At the periphery of my vision, I noticed the front of his boxer shorts beginning to tent out.
“Go on,” I encouraged him “Perhaps you will believe me if—“
He shoved the blade into my throat.
I stumbled back, knocked off balance.
“Die, you fucker!” he hissed at me, his eyes avid and insane. His flesh was flushed with excitement, his male organ fully erect.
I couldn’t speak with the blade lodged inside my windpipe. Hoping to impress on him the futility of any further attempts on my life, I squared my shoulders and gripped the handle of the blade. Meeting his gaze, I shook my head, and then I used the blade to slice my throat completely open.
He blanched in disbelief, retreating a step, as I sawed the knife in and out of my flesh. I worked it all the way around to my right ear, and then I tilted my chin back to open the wound. It hurt tremendously-- I might be immune to death, but I am not immune to pain-- but I gave no outward sign of my discomfort. I kept my expression bland as I displayed the interior of my larynx.
“Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed.
I lowered my chin. I could already feel the Strix knitting the wound. The living blood shifted inside my body, racing to the region that had been injured. It frothed at the edges of my slashed throat, tingling, as fibrous white tissue went zigzagging back and forth across the gash. The edges drew together like a pair of gruesome lips. Finally, the injury faded from sight. It took-- at most-- four seconds. I swallowed experimentally. Cleared my throat.
“Do you see now?” I asked, slightly hoarse.
I judged by his expression that he was having trouble believing his eyes.
I held my free hand up, palm toward him, then sawed off one of my fingers. I sliced through the flesh, then snapped the bone with a grimace. It was only then, at the sight of the black tendrils wavering from the stump, that he accepted what he was seeing. He covered his mouth.
“Stop, please,” he said with a belch, struggling to keep his dinner down.
I held my finger near the stub. The Strix snatched ahold of the severed digit and drew it back into place. In less time than it took me to saw off the appendage, my body was whole again. I flexed my hand to show him.
“I cannot die,” I said. “Nothing you can do in your present form can possibly harm me. The light of the sun will not incinerate me. A stake through the heart will only annoy me. I do not burn. The strongest acids will not etch my skin. I am the deathless hostage of time… just as you are mine.”
My captive sank onto his bed, his chain clanking on the floor at his feet. “So what do we do now?” he asked softly.
“Just talk,” I said soothingly. “I only want to talk.”
Exodus of the Neirie
23,000 Years Ago
1
Twilight resolved slowly into night as my vampire child and I watched the Neirie from afar. The band of escaped slaves had traveled all day through intermittent showers, a group of some fifty-odd, work-hardened souls. They had marched relentlessly, even through the lashing rain, pausing only to care for their wounded, the sick and the old.
The clouds had lifted shortly after we arose, hurried on by a westering win
d, and it was as if a heavy gray blanket had been swept away from the sky. A multitude of glittering stars winked down at us, a milky river of them, flowing from horizon to horizon.
I was just as exhausted as the Neirie below. My body ached where I had been pierced again and again by the arrows of the Oombai. The living blood had healed me, of course. Healed me without a trace of the injuries I had sustained, but even vampire flesh remembers its wounding, and in remembering, throbbed tiresomely in the night’s moist air.
The sight of the Neirie exodus raised my spirits, however. If not for me, these people would not have had the opportunity to win their freedom. I had killed the leaders of the tribe that had subjugated them, decimated its army, allowing the Neirie to rise up, to free themselves from tyranny. The pride I felt in their liberty lifted some of my weariness from my shoulders.
If you are there, father, I hope that you are pleased with your son, I thought, glancing toward the heavens.
I once believed the stars were the campfires of my forefathers, that the night sky was a dark inverted plain that hung suspended over the world. I know now that the stars are really distant suns, much like the sun that warms this busy world. They appear tiny, like flecks of diamond strewn across black satin, but only because of their distance. Still, sometimes I think about my people’s myths, and there is a part of me that takes comfort in those old fantasies.
The stars dimmed and brightened like the distant fires of the Neirie camp. If I squinted, I could just make the wayfarers out, moving among their crude shelters, huddling around their glimmering fires for warmth. The refugees we followed had camped for the night in the middle of a glade. How they had managed to find enough dry wood to make their fires, I could not say.
I recalled the pitiful living conditions they were forced to endure in the village of the Ground Scratchers. Worked until they fainted from exhaustion, whipped at the slightest hint of disobedience. Raped. Reviled. Butchered for sacrifice, and sometimes just for sport. Their Oombai masters had kept them in pens like they were animals. Disposed of them without even a modicum of human compassion just as soon as they were too old or worn out to be useful anymore. I was glad they’d escaped, and I intended to escort them to the lands from which they’d been stolen.
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 4
