Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  It may seem strange that a creature like myself would wish for goodwill, but I wish people could understand me. I do not expect sympathy. But can a man imagine the anguish that a vampire is burdened with? Such a long life, a creature whose every footstep is followed by death and tragedy, like a midnight shadow that cannot be shaken, cannot be fooled. I have such a lust for life, still, after my many years. I am drawn on by the call of something greater than myself. I am drawn inexorably toward a future I cannot plan, I cannot foresee. And yet I cannot die. I cannot avoid whatever fate puts in my path, even though I know it will never be joy, just more pain.

  The future holds only pain for a vampire.

  My loneliness was heavy and my future bleak. I knew that I could never share my life, that I would forever be set apart from the world of men. A lone traveller through the shifting territories of the world and its history. Destined to be an observer, a player of bit parts in a great show nobody but the divine could understand.

  Was there some great design that I too was a part of? I did not know. I did not wish to know. I only wanted to be left alone. The world of men had lost its allure for me.

  All that was left was the seasons, changing until I too passed from human consciousness. I would watch the seasons and leave men behind. I would wait out the end of the earth in solitude.

  So thinking, I set my heart. The mountains were to the west of me this time. I put them at my back and began to walk.

  I walked for many years, never stopping, feeding only sporadically, and never sleeping. I had never been conscious of my insomnia before. There had been times when I had been awake for centuries at a time, but I had never felt the need to sleep accompanied by the failure to do so. Wanting to sleep so badly, longing to curl into the bosom of the earth, yet completely unable to rest.

  My trouble had always been myself. I did not realise it for many years. I had a restless heart and a lively mind. I was wide awake in the world, a creature neither of the night nor the day. My cycle, it seemed, was the seasons, the years and decades and centuries.

  I walked. As I walked, pounding miles and turning in circles to start again, searching for a place to sit and watch the seasons, I began to feel myself slowing. I could count my heartbeat by my long stride. For the first few years it beat once every ten strides or so. As my long search neared its completion I counted nearer one beat for every fifty or so strides.

  I was slowing down, like a clock that has counted time until it has grown weary of the never ending slide of time from seconds, to minutes, to hours…and on into eternity. Who would not grow weary in the face of infinity, stretching away so far that it cannot even be imagined?

  Should I live to be a thousand years old, or ten thousand, I wondered if I would eventually slow like the earth had, cooling, occasionally creaking and shifting but slowing…slow…and then, what? Would I become stone? Would I sleep and become a part of the earth, my thoughts eventually fading away until there was nothing left but a fossil for future men to examine?

  Something about the thought was attractive, but I suppose in some ways I was feeling low and the thought of a slow death was invigorating, in its way. For most people the urge to die, to feel pain, is unfathomable. But when you are in the depths of a long depression the idea of pain and its reality can sometimes wake you, remind you of what it feels like to be alive.

  Even pain is a relief when you spend years numb to all but the changing of the seasons.

  That is not to say I did not feel emotions during those years. I felt them keenly. But on the surface of my heart, like a breeze on the skin that does not chill to the bone.

  In these ways people pass the lonely years, numb, wishing they could feel, feeling, wishing they could be numb.

  Melancholia, my sole companion on my journey, became constant, like the stars, watching over me and weighing me down so that I would not fall forever into the sky. Its weight held me to the earth.

  When I fed, rare though it was, I made sure I never left any of my bastard children behind. I would not leave this legacy of cruel loneliness to any child of mine. Should I have a child I would want him to feel love and joy and warmth. It is a curse, this long life. To give it to another willingly would require hatred and I was too sad to hate anyone or anything but myself.

  With this thought in my heart I took my last step. I was in the depths of Russia. My limbs were numb from the cold, my nose and fingers and toes were frostbitten and I had already lost two digits. The cold was stopping them from growing back.

  I didn’t mind at all. I wanted to hurt. I wanted to scar myself and bleed and maim the body that I had come to hate.

  But I am a coward. I am craven and weak. If I was strong I would have built a pyre and stood atop it as it burned my body to nothing but ash.

  Instead, I fed on a wolf and took its fur for my own. I finally made my home at the top of a hill overlooking a winter landscape of surpassing beauty. The country rolled out for miles in every direction. The trees were frozen and the only sound was the cracking of their sap and the occasional slithering of snow from branches to the ground. There was no birdsong. I could not hear a heart beat, not even a bird. It was perfect.

  I built myself a hut on that hilltop. I tore trees from the ground and with patience born of eternal life I cut lengths of wood with a dull blade that I always carried with me.

  It took nearly a year until I had a serviceable hut, but then I did not sleep and I did not need to rest. The work, as the walk, were therapeutic, in their way.

  I stayed that way for a number of years. But for some reason mankind thinks if a man lives a life of solitude he must have some wisdom that they lack. I think this isn’t seeking wisdom on the pilgrim’s part. I think it has a hint of jealously.

  What man has never thought to walk away from it all? Walk away from the death, the despair, the fighting and yes, the loving, the blissful and painful.

  I suppose I could have killed the first man, a hunter, that happened upon my cabin, but I was feeling the loneliness particularly sharply on that day. I took him in so that he could warm himself by my fire. And so it goes. That is how rumours start. With the word of one, passed on and growing like an avalanche.

  People began to seek me out. I think they thought there was something mystical about the man who lived in his cabin, alone atop a hill. I was unkempt and unwashed. I had but one possession.

  Talk began of my heartache. It must have been monumental, they said, for the man to live alone with nothing but a painting. The woman was hauntingly beautiful, they said. She must have died and left him heartbroken.

  Somehow, despite the stories that circulated among the people in villages far and wide, they thought this man who had suffered such a loss must be wise because he lived alone in the hills.

  People who live alone in the hills are not often mystics, but they often bear scars that cannot be seen.

  People wish, as I have said before. People no doubt came to visit me, taking the long hard path to my home like it was a pilgrimage, thinking I would have the answers to their troubles. But to wish is no wiser than chasing rainbows.

  The people that came were all driven by hope for an answer. Only one who came during my time as a hermit wanted something different. God help me, he took it, and in doing so manufactured my downfall and shaped the world to come. In some small way his actions were the first pebble tumbling down a shale hillside. Europe was the shale, the pebble was a man called Rasputin.

  The blood that flowed within that traveller’s veins was mine.

  *

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  1888

  Russia

  On a bright summer morning I sat in the shade of my cabin. I had heard a heart beating from a great distance. I prepared myself for a visitor.

  The sunlight did not trouble me so much anymore. I still felt pain in my head, like a stabbing knife deep into my forebrain, but the pain had become bearable after so many years. Out of preference, I prefer the night. The night is s
oothing on my eyes, but I do not shun the light anymore.

  I watched the base of the hill until he came into sight. His heart was beating faster, but he was young and strong and the climb was not taxing him greatly. He walked with his back ramrod straight. He had the beginnings of a youthful beard, hairs poking through his pale skin inconsistently.

  His eyes were his most arresting feature. They were eyes that had seen too much, even at his obviously young age. He was driven. It was the look of a new born vampire, a look of deep and dark hunger burning within.

  I could not help but be drawn to him. He had the most powerful mind I have ever encountered. I think I loved him from that first sight, not a sexual love, for I had no sexual leanings at all, but I loved him as I loved a dark, still night, with fascination and coolness.

  And he was refreshing. He was the one who came to me seeking knowledge and already I was hoping to learn from him. The other pilgrims that sought me out had nothing to offer but the burden of their sad lives. I could see sadness in this man’s eyes, but also, something else. Unshakeable confidence and knowledge of his place in the world. He smelled different, too. It was the smell of power.

  In a way, we learned from each other.

  ‘Makary.’ He didn’t ask. He didn’t bother to ask himself in. He just walked to my side and touched me on the shoulder. Some people back then in Russia thought it good luck to touch someone who was touched by God. His gesture was perfunctory, though. He was just going through the motions.

  Makary was the name I had taken for myself. People expect you to have a name, and being nameless would have only increased the allure for the pilgrims. If I had told that first man to visit me I had no name I would never have had any peace. There was enough mystery about me as it was.

  ‘I hear rumours of your wisdom,’ he said.

  ‘Some I know,’ I said, honestly, ‘more I don’t.’

  He sat opposite me so that he could look in my eyes. He stared at me with unsettling directness.

  ‘I think you know much, hermit,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe I do,’ I said, with a smile. ‘But you might be disappointed.’

  ‘I may be,’ he said.

  ‘What is your name, pilgrim?’

  ‘My name is Rasputin,’ he said. My Russian was rusty and out of date. It wasn’t a name I had heard before. But then I did not imagine that I had heard all the names of men in my time.

  ‘Then you are welcome to sit awhile. It is a beautiful day and one worth sharing, I think.’

  He nodded, and shifted so that he could gaze at the vista laid out before him. I watched him from the corner of my eye. I could tell he was thinking. I wondered what it was. The view did not seem to interest him overly.

  I waited for the questions that I knew would come. Sometimes it amused me to send people on their way with half-truths and misleading wisdom. Sometimes I spoke in riddles and tried to befuddle my visitors. Immediately I knew that Rasputin would not fall for such tricks. He would not leave until he had what he wanted. I was burning to know what that was.

  ‘I have heard many rumours of your wisdom,’ he said.

  I kept quiet and waited for him to get to his point.

  ‘I am a traveller, of sorts. I am a seeker.’

  It did not seem as though he was expecting any input from me. I watched him, and waited.

  ‘I have heard many rumours in my time. I have read books…books which contain secrets. I have spoken with many men about the secret places and things in the world. I have found perhaps the greatest secret in the world.’

  ‘And what would that be?’ I asked. I was fascinated. He was the first man that had come to my door and presumed to tell me something. He was the first man who was not overwhelmed by meaningless questions.

  ‘I think there are those in the world who hold the secret. I do not think it is written in books, but is spoken of in the quiet nights and whispered in smoky corners. I think it is a rumour of a people. The hidden. You hold that secret.’

  My heart began to quicken. I thought about killing him then, but I was crippled by curiosity.

  ‘You think I have a secret?’

  ‘I do not think. I know,’ he said, with a confident smile.

  ‘If you can figure out what it is, I’ll tell you,’ I said. It was the same offer I made to everyone who visited. I think it was true, too. Who could guess that I was centuries old, a vampire?

  The problem was that he knew already. He knew much that was not written. People say he had visions. That he spoke to god, knew the future. He predicted his own death, but then that was out of necessity, because he knew I was coming for him, then.

  But out in the woods, high up on a hill, I had toyed with men for my amusement and in the end I was the one who lost.

  He smiled, and there was something unsettling about that smile. He took a flask from the pocket of his jacket and drank something that had a metallic hint to it. It irritated my nostrils, but I thought nothing of it.

  He capped the flask and returned it to his pocket. I should have seen that he was suddenly on edge. But it was a slight change, and anyone could easily have missed the change.

  He watched me with those startlingly direct eyes. They seemed to bore into me. I was transfixed, I think. I don’t know if it was hypnotism, but he held me long enough to withdraw a small flute from his pocket.

  Then, staring at me, holding me still with his gaze, he began to play.

  I am undone by music. The simple, the complicated. He played a simple tune and I was like a cobra tamed in a pot. The music soothed me and stole me and I did not see what his free hand was doing as he reached into his pocket and drew a knife.

  Dimly, through the haze, I was aware that he held a blade against my bare hand. I felt the sting of the blade slicing through my flesh but I was frozen, held against my will by the simplest of tunes played on a single instrument. It did not take much to undo me.

  If people through the ages realised how easy it would be to subdue me, I believe I would have been dead a thousand times over.

  With the blade that held my own blood he sliced his own hand.

  And then the music stopped for he was suddenly thrashing on the ground.

  Believe me when I say that my anger was towering, implacable and huge. In my rage I was suddenly as powerful as a leviathan.

  I think my anger was not at Rasputin, as he writhed insensible and in agony on the dirt. I was angry at my own hubris. Nobody had ever guessed what I was unless I had first given them a clue. Each time I had been undone it was through my own hubris. It was that which angered me. My own stupidity.

  But I could not let him best me. I took his head in my hands and held him still. I would tear his head loose before the hunger could take him.

  What I was seeing was just the pain of rebirth. When the thrashing finished would come the hunger, the mindless need to feed that untamed would take years to abate.

  All the time we had spoken he had known what he was going to do. How he had found out what I was, I never did know.

  What I found out was that he, too, was like me. A traveller. A seeker.

  I increased the pressure and watched as his head bulged under my power. Then he was screaming at me to stop.

  I think the shock of it more than anything else made me sit back and release him. He was not a demon. He was coherent.

  ‘Thank you for not killing me,’ he said with that knowing smile. Suddenly I found it smug and irritating, and not fascinating at all.

  ‘You tricked me,’ I said simply. My anger had fled in the face of all the questions I had.

  ‘Come now,’ he said. ‘You have been tricking people for how long?’

  ‘The music…’

  ‘A trick I learned from a gypsy man. Of course, it was a gamble. I gambled with my life. You could have just killed me. But I did not think you would.’

  ‘How did you know? My God, how did you find out? Why are you speaking? My blood…it drives people insane…’

&n
bsp; ‘Markary, there is much about yourself you do not know. I think people know more about your kind than you do of yourself. You sit high in this perch and dispense knowledge to people, but in many ways you are a child.’

  ‘You dare to mock me, after stealing my blood!’

  ‘Be calm. It is not my intention to anger you. But you have been blind. People have been talking about your kind for centuries. But you have hidden yourself away and have not listened. The stories told about your kind say that you are held in thrall by music, and that your blood can be tamed by silver. I drank a mixture of silver in my flask when I met you. It would have killed me, but when I saw you I knew you were a vampire. Your scars, you see. The flesh is never whole when it has healed, and the wounds you show would have been fatal for a man. It was easy,’ he said, ‘when I knew what to look for.’

  ‘You risked your life on rumour and tales told by gypsy people, a people who only knew me for a short time?’

  ‘I did. Now, father, tell me of your life.’

  I shook my head. ‘I am no father to you. You stole this. You think it a gift, but it is a curse. You have tainted blood within you now. You can never infect another. The infection is dangerous. You are more dangerous than you know. When the hunger comes you will be a murderer. When you touch another with your spittle or your blood they will become like you. You have cursed yourself to a life apart.’

  ‘No, father,’ he said, ‘You have cursed yourself to a life apart. I will not live as you. I will not waste this gift on solitude.’

  ‘It is no gift, son,’ I told him. ‘You will find that out soon enough.’

  ‘Enough. There is nothing more you can give me. I had outgrown you before I took your blood. You will see. You will hear your son’s deeds even here.’

  He rose and stretched. I marvelled for a second at how controlled he was, even though he had just been turned.