The First

by Michael Santana

  What they thought was true. I had done those things and enjoyed every blood-soaked moment of it. It had been a long time passed, but I had remembered it as if it were only the night before. During this time in my life, I had embraced the beast in me, and I alienated myself from humans. I felt no need to immerse myself with the little trinkets and houses. I was just passing through these places. These were some of my bloodiest years.

  The small orphanage was outside the city where buildings such as these were usually found. That far out the tykes weren’t seen and therefore not a nuisance to the affluent. Being out that far also made it to where no one heard their screams. I came upon the place entirely by accident. I had found a cellar to spend my days in while I was passing through.

  The children’s laughter is what made me aware of them. They were playing a game of “hide and go seek” around a tree that was only a few feet from where I lay. A group of stones and brush hid the cellar. It had once been used to store vegetables and smoked foods. I have met others of my kind over the years who have told me how the smell of meat sickens their stomach. I do not suffer from the same affliction. The smell of roasted meat still makes my mouth water, except it is living blood I crave. The vision of my teeth sinking into flesh is what I associate with the smell.

  I heard their little feet as they ran above me. Children were darting back and forth. The sounds of their laughter filled the air. That night while the moon was high, and the candles had been out for hours, I crept in.

  I quickly barricaded the doors, so none would escape. I found the nun’s quarters first. I used their bed sheets to bind the women into little cocoons. There were four nuns keeping residence at the orphanage. Taking them all back into the main hall, I hung them upside down from a single rafter. Then I went for the others.

  The children slept in one large room. Their little beds were lined up against the wall with their feet facing the center of the room. I woke them up with a bloodcurdling scream. They shot up, eyes wide and mouths open. I stood in the center of the room with my fangs bared, saliva dripping, staring at the little piglets.

  They leaped from their beds and ran screaming down the hall, where they found the sisters hanging. I followed behind them watching them run from barricaded door to barricaded door. Tears streamed down their faces as they jumped up and down trying to free the suspended nuns. They turned in unison towards me as I entered the room and locked the remaining door behind me. The children slowly huddled in a corner. Their bodies became entwined like vines as they tried their best to squirm out of my view. Their little voices pleaded with the sisters to save them.

  They watched as one by one I fed on their little friends. The sobbing children crawled over and under one another until they looked like one teeming mass of flesh. Their attempts to escape my grasp were in vain. The nuns squirmed in their sheaths like butterflies during their change. Muffled exclamations of outrage came from the cocoons after each child was discarded when their usefulness ended.

  In between meals, I danced, reciting verses from their bibles. I danced while the children screamed, and the sisters cried. The blood flowed like wine. I drank it. I bathed in it. I painted the walls with it. Showers of life-giving fluid fell upon me as I held them suspended above me.

  I spent the next day in the monastery with the four remaining nuns. I drained them all before leaving when the sun went down.

  “So, is this your oldest account of me?” I asked the priest, already knowing it hadn’t been. “No, it wasn’t the oldest, just the first. It was the catalyst that set the church on to you. Before this we had no knowledge of your kind,” he said.

  I still don’t understand how you knew it was me.” I said.

  “There was a witness, a Monsignor. If it had been anyone else, it would have been dismissed as a lunatic’s ravings. The Monsignor had hidden in one of the vestibules and watched as you massacred them all.”

  Once again, I had been made aware of my sloppiness. How did I miss someone hiding in the room?

  “He gave a detailed account to Pope Adrian the Fourth himself, before being defrocked and put to death for his cowardice.”

  “What of the other accounts? The older ones, how did you know of these?” I asked. We have learned much from the vampires we have captured over the years. They were interrogated for long periods of time, some for many years.

  I think the hunger was the greatest torture for them. Until they told us of their makers or where others could be found, they weren’t allowed to feed or die. After centuries, the church was able to trace a genealogical family tree of sorts. In the end, the stories led back to the queen of the vampires, named Irisi and her maker Manzili.”

  “I am impressed,” I admitted.

  “The description is how we were able to track your exploits. There were drawings on walls, sketches on parchment and many written accounts that described you. If I do live through this encounter, I will dictate my own account.”

  I lifted the crucifix and held it in my hand.

  “Did you expect to bludgeon me to death with this relic?” I asked holding his jeweled crucifix in my hand. His face paled, and his mouth let out a little gasp. His eyebrows raised in a quizzical look. “No! It cannot be. You cannot lay hands on the symbol of the Lord.” He exclaimed. Now, I didn’t know at the time, but it seems the Christian crucifix does affect many of my “children.” It has never affected me. At first, I thought it was because I predated this Christ person. Later I concluded that it wasn’t that at all, but the faith. Not the faith of the holder of the crucifix but the faith of the vampire itself. It is more psychological if anything. If they had been a believing Christian before their making, they felt that it’s “God” had power over them and were repelled by his symbols. In my previous life, many had held power over me. But, I have not been subservient to anyone since my ascension to a higher being.

  I looked back at the priest as he marveled in my immunity to his ward.

  “You thought this would hurt me? This trinket?” I asked turning it over in my hands inspecting it more carefully.

  “The power of the Lord flows through it. He is more powerful than you.” He said.

  “I would like to meet this Lord of yours.”

  “Impossible, he would never let the likes of you into heaven. You will spend eternity with the dark lord himself.” He protested.

  “I would like to know more about this religion of yours. It seems to have many fantastic characters. If you want to live past tonight, then you will tell me all you know.”

  “What do you want to know?” he replied.

  “Everything! I want to know everything.” I said snatching him by the collar and taking him out the window with me.

  Within minutes, I had the priest tied up securely in my daylight home. After assuring myself he had no chance of escape, I went back to the monastery, taking every book, map and loose scrap of paper from his room, and brought them to him.

  His eyes welled with tears from the constriction of his bindings. It seemed I had been overzealous in my securing of him and he had lost feeling in some of his extremities. I loosened his restraints and placed his books on a table. He was lucky I had run into him in one of the periods in my life where I had chosen to lavish myself, or he might have found himself in a hole in the earth with me. The abode I found for myself in Cadiz was on the outside of the city to guarantee my privacy. It did have all the amenities a traveling second cousin of the queen would need. This was the story I had told the local vendors upon my arrival. I had given them the name Alejandro Cortez.

  I secured a metal shackle to the priest’s ankle. This I attached to a spike that had been driven into a heavy stone. Roughly ten feet of chain was linked between the shackle and the stone. He would not be able to carry it more than two or three steps without having to stop and rest. I held the Archbishop captive for months while his faith was explained and tested. I read hi
s bibles many times. Sometimes laughing and other times crying at the stories that the books held. He explained every little tidbit of information that the church had on me. I was told how the information was obtained. I had learned the who, when and why of each piece of evidence of my existence they owned.

  I picked up meals for him when I went out at night to feed and brought them back before the morning sun. There were times I would bring my meals back with me. He was forced to watch me drain my victims as he told me more of his faith or debated a contradiction I had found in his scripture. Through him, I learned the history of my “offspring.” It seemed that Irisi had been very busy making others of our kind to serve her. Some of these had made others themselves. He explained how the church had previous successes destroying my kind using their holy relics and wooden stakes. From his accounts, we suspected there were at least a hundred or more vampires roaming the world at that time. They all had a direct blood connection to me. By using his own beliefs, I was the Adam of my kind, and Irisi was the Eve.

  By clearing out all his papers and books the way I had, everyone had assumed that the Archbishop had left in search of me or went back to Rome. It was many months before the church realized he was missing.

  During that time, I learned all De la Iglesia knew about his own faith along with all the church knew about me. I had to admit I was intrigued with the Christian faith, the fight between good and evil, or between God and Satan. Sadly, I didn’t believe any of it. To me, they were nice stories meant to scare the little children. It then became ingrained in the minds of adults and then spread like a virus.

  We had grown accustomed to sitting across a table from each other when we had our discussions over meals. He had asked for his satchel to prove a point in one of our debates. I had all but forgotten about the pointy wooden sticks. I had placed them back in the bag with the crucifix and holy water before closing it. It seemed I had angered him by feeding on one of the traveling sisters in front of him. As I closed my eyes to savor the last drops of her blood that were being pumped into me, he sprung. The stake plunged into my chest breaking the spell that the blood had held.

  I showered him in crimson as I vomited the fresh blood back up. I staggered back in horrible pain. The wooden stake was sticking out of my chest in an upward angle. Blood spilled from the wound and my lips as I reached my hands around the weapon and slowly, painfully removed it. The wood clattered as it hit the ground. My hand covered the gaping hole as the thick, near black liquid, oozed between my fingers. I watched as he slowly bent down, grabbed the stone, and lifted. He took three steps, and the stone dropped with a heavy crash. After a few seconds more, he would lift the stone take a few more steps and drop it again.

  “That should have killed you.” He shouted.

  “You never learn” I replied weakly.

  “You should not have killed her. She was a servant of the Lord.” He screamed.

  “She was food.” I replied hoarsely.

  My chest felt like it was on fire. The wood had stabbed deep. I slowly raised myself as a small puddle of blood congealed at my feet with even more sliding down my abdomen from the gaping wound. Reciting verses from the Bible, he moved toward me slowly, clumsily.

  “I should kill you where you stand.” I said defiantly.

  “Don’t mock me demon, you’re dying.”

  “Your weapons do not work on me you ignorant fool. I am THE FIRST, I am THE ALPHA.” I exclaimed rising from the ground.

  With little effort but great pain, I pulled the stone from his grasp and flung it across the room. A second later, he was flying after it. I rushed to his fallen body. Grabbing him by his throat, I drug him to the satchel. I reached in and first pulled out the crucifix and bent it in my hand. I squeezed the gold object until it was no more than a misshapen ball.

  Reaching back into the leather bag I retrieved the vial of so-called holy water. I popped the wooden cork from the vial and poured the contents into my mouth. I swirled the liquid around in my mouth, through my teeth, picking out the little remnants of flesh that the nun had left in between them. The blood and flesh mixed water sprayed over him as I spat into his face.

  “Your Christ has no power over me.” I roared.

  With this statement, I bit into his blood-specked neck. I felt the blood start to flow as he screamed into my ear. For a few minutes, I slowly drank. My chest began to heal. When the pain in my chest subsided, I stopped drinking.

  He fell to the floor grasping at the little holes in his throat. I walked across the room and grabbed some of the food I had brought him when I returned earlier. I tossed the bread and meat to him.

  “You should eat. You’re going to need your strength.” I told him as I walked away scratching the now itching annoyance on my chest.

  Interlude: Casey in the box

  Casey sat in the cold room listening to the tale told only a few feet from her. She was thankful to still be able to hear the muffled noises of her friend. “If you’re still screaming then you’re still alive. Stay strong Mandy, stay strong.” Casey thought.

  Casey figured she had been in the room about two hours already. Two hours she had been listening to the voice talk about times he surely couldn’t have known about. She knew that soon people would start to look for her and Mandy. Mrs. Cohen, the scout leader, knew which girls were on which streets. When Casey and Mandy didn’t show up, they would start looking.

  “What if they think we went home or met some boy like Lisa Cheney did last week?”

  If that happened, Casey didn’t know what she would do. She hoped that they would find her before the lunatic in the next room found her and killed her. “How deranged does someone have to be to believe they are a vampire?” she wondered. She was sure the man who smelled like cinnamon was absolutely bonkers. ‘“Bonkers or not, dead is dead.” She thought.

  She, who has been a part of “Team Edward,” knew about vampires, and vampires don’t hurt cute girls like her. They are sad and lonely. They are not some nasty, although attractive man who kills his true love.

  Her mind drifted to thoughts of her mother and father. Her father was a police detective, and he would be able to find her. He had caught a lot of crazies and put them in jail where they belonged. He would go house to house, building to building till he found the girls. He would put this maniac either in jail or in the ground. She was sure of it. Putting thoughts of her father and mother behind her, she pressed her ear back to the wall.

  Chapter 10

  It took two full nightly feeds before my chest had healed completely. The wooden stake, although not killing me, did quite a bit of damage. This time when I fed, I made it a point to pick women of faith and to make sure he had a front-row view of my meals.

  His howls of protest went unheeded as I drank my fill. The first was a matronly woman in her fifties. She was huge and full of the fight. The second was a young woman barely out of her teens. She was beautiful maybe even stunning. One, who I am sure was probably forced to join the nuns by some jealous mother or aunt whose husband may have let their gaze linger a little too long in the young woman’s direction. I watched the priest’s face redden as her breasts rose and fell while I drank. His eyes stared lustfully at her while his mouth proclaimed her righteousness. His protest ceased, and his eyes widened when I whispered in her ear to strip.

  She stood and turned to face the good father. Her hands rose to a little piece of rope by her neck, and her outer robes fell to the floor in a heap. Her hands moved quickly, and the pile soon contained the last of her garments. Exposing all her natural wonders, I laid her across the table spreading her legs wide. My mouth found what it was looking for as my teeth sank into her femoral artery. My eyes glanced across the room to the priest who sat in stunned silence as her body rhythmically rose and fell with each pull of her blood.

  His eyes opened wider as her hand came down and reached for my head, slowly caressing it as
I drank. The moans, gasps and the movements were too much for him. His shouts rang through the house.

  “You foul beast” he exclaimed.

  She caressed my head into her eternal oblivion. Her hand falling softly away as the last of her blood entered me.

  “The Lord Jesus Christ will strike you down you dark damnable creature.”

  “The Lord! The Lord” I exclaimed. “You are dense. The Christian religion is based on the story of the death and resurrection of a man. A man that offered eternal life with the acceptance of his blood.

  Did it ever occur to you, even once, that he might be of my bloodline? Do you not see the similarities? If my story were to be chronicled, my death, my resurrection, and my eternal life, how many followers do you think I would have? Almost two millennia I have lived. It was off the blood of others, but I have lived. Where are my churches? Where? Where are my believers? Where? You seek to kill me when you should be seeking my forgiveness, my blessing. You say you seek eternal life, yet you want to kill the only one who can give it to you. I see now that you are not deserving of the special gift I would have offered. The knowledge of your investigation wasn’t anything more than a distraction. If the church comes for me, then let them come. I will welcome them openly, and I will spill their blood just as I spill yours. He was in my grasp squirming as I finished the job I had started only three nights before.

  I felt his holier than thou blood course through me. It wasn’t a gentle bite this time. I ripped into his throat with a ferocity that stunned even me. His blood spilled from my mouth when the artery was torn by my invading teeth. The condescending Archbishop would not follow the story of “Manzili, The First,” ever again. My anger slowly faded as I ripped his arms from his body and squeezed the remaining liquid into my mouth. He fell backward, eyes stretched wide with his mouth letting out a silent cry and died. The last vision the priest ever saw were his limbs dangling over my head as I licked the droplets from his ragged flesh.