I wheeled in my chair and pulled back the drapes to watch the summer rain fall. Thinking about the many summer rains I’d seen in my life, I wondered how many more I would see. The storm brought back memories long pushed to the back of my mind, about the day I’d been converted.
I was born Elijah Pike in Harrison, Maine, in 1797, of undistinguished parents. I worked as a logger in the summers and an ice cutter in the winters. My life was uneventful until the winter of my twenty-fifth year, when I was hunting moose in the mountains of central Maine and became lost in a blizzard.
The storm was a typical nor’easter. The sky went from clear and sunny to cloudy and overcast within minutes as the frigid air from the arctic circle blew into Maine at seventy miles an hour. As the gray, snow-laden clouds writhed and danced overhead, the temperature plummeted to below zero readings and the wind rose to gale force, bringing with it the snow and sleet and ice that could bury a man in minutes.. . .
* * *
Pike cursed himself as he slogged through the deepening snow. Born and raised in Maine, he knew better than to be caught in the open when one of these hit. The frozen snow and sleet, driven almost horizontally by the wind, abraded and scoured his exposed skin like sandpaper, leaving it raw and bleeding.
Half frozen and blinded by the wall of snow in the air, every breath causing knifelike pain in his chest as the freezing air seared his lungs, Pike offered up a brief prayer of thanks when he stumbled upon the isolated log cabin. Snow had already piled up almost to the eaves of the cabin, partially hiding it from view. Pike would have missed it entirely if he hadn’t made for the trees surrounding the cabin, looking for some shelter from the howling wind.
As he slogged up to the cabin, half submerged in the drifting snow, he thought the cabin appeared to be hunkered down, as if it too were trying to avoid the bone-chilling cold of the blizzard.
On his approach, the cabin door flew open and a large, bearded man dressed in furs grabbed him and pulled him inside. Pike stumbled into the cabin, drawing deep, gasping breaths of warm, wood-smoke-scented air into his lungs. As Pike collapsed into a chair and began to scrape the ice out of his eyes and moustache, the figure in the cabin shoved a cup of honey-sweetened tea into his hands. He gulped it down, hugging the warmth of the cup to his chest, and as his shivering began to subside and he became warmer, he looked around the dimly lit cabin.
The sputtering oil lamp on the table didn’t give off much light, but Pike could see that the cabin had only one large room, which had a musty, denlike odor. The furniture was simple, handcrafted from local wood, and consisted of a table, four chairs, and two cots, covered with animal furs. There were two buckets in the corner, one filled with water, the other presumably to be used for waste. A stone fireplace in the other corner contained a low fire, a kettle suspended over it, bubbling and steaming and giving off odors of meat and vegetables that made Pike’s mouth water.
He looked up at his companion, and even though he couldn’t see him very well in the gloom of the room, he noticed the man moved about with a strange, bent-over gait, and that his voice had a deep, gravelly timbre that was almost a growl. As they talked, over more tea, Pike thought the man’s questions about his family and whether they knew his whereabouts were unusual, but he told him the truth—no one, including himself, had the slightest idea where he was. The man went on to tell Pike that he was a trapper, and as soon as the storm cleared, he was going to town to sell his furs.
Pike asked him how long he had been at the cabin, and the man got a funny look on his face.
“It seems like forever,” he growled in his husky, rough voice. He looked around, adding, “I built this place some time ago, when the . . . pressures of humanity got to be too much for me.”
Pike glanced at the worn and aged logs and floorboards of the cabin, thinking to himself that the man was lying. The cabin had to be at least a hundred years old.
After their tea, the man lapsed into a brooding silence, sitting and staring at Pike from beneath bushy eyebrows.
Pike went to the door several times that afternoon, for he had an uneasy feeling about the place and its inhabitant and wanted to be gone as soon as possible, but the blizzard continued. Later, after again eating some of the strong-tasting stew from the fireplace, Pike fell into a deep, exhausted sleep.
Bizarre and terrible nightmares invaded his dreams. Strange shapes coursed through wooded darkness, some running on all fours, some flitting through foggy, misty moonlight. There were howls, growls, screams, and more. Pike awoke suddenly, sometime during the long, lonely night, clutching his throat in fear. A soothing voice enveloped the room, whispering that his fears were nothing but a dream. As the quiet voice continued, he felt his body relax, and complete contentment overcame his mind. Through half-closed eyes, he saw one of the creatures from his nightmare use a clawlike fingernail to make an incision in its wrist. It placed the wound against Pike’s lips and allowed him to drink of the salty blood to quench his thirst. Afterward, he lay quietly in the darkness awaiting sleep, feeling fire spread from his stomach to course throughout his body, causing his muscles to writhe and quiver as if from some strange disease.
When Pike awoke the next morning, his throat was raw and he had a voracious thirst. He tried to rise from his cot, but was overcome by a curious lassitude. His companion of the night before was gone, leaving no trace that he had ever existed other than the animal-like odor he’d given off.
Pike scooped snow into a bucket and made a fire to melt it to slake his thirst and soothe his aching throat. While waiting for the snow to melt, he rubbed some on his dry, parched lips, and was startled to see the snow come away stained with blood. He shivered, realizing that there was more to the night before than a bad dream. Once his thirst was slaked, he collapsed back onto his cot and burrowed beneath the furs, seeking warmth for his soul as well as his body, for somehow he felt soiled, dirty, as if he’d rolled in something vile. He soon fell asleep and slept the whole day through. The next day, as quickly as it had come, the blizzard ended.
Pike wrapped himself in the furs from the cot and set out to find his way home. After two days of wandering through the mountain forests, he found his village.
His wife flung the door open and threw her arms around him at his knock. As the children gathered to grab his legs and jump up and down, his wife released him with a frightened look on her face.
“Elijah,” she cried, her hands to her mouth, “you’re burning up with fever.”
He looked at his arms and could see that she was right. The snow that was falling melted almost before it touched his fiery skin, steaming in the morning light. His wife put him to bed, bringing the village doctor to look in on him.
The doctor placed his palm against Pike’s forehead, looked into his glazed eyes and flushed face, and just shook his head. He’d seen many men with fever like this, and few survived. He told the wife to bring him soup and lots of water, but Pike was unable to keep anything down. Over the next few days, as the flesh melted from his body and his eyes became more sunken, his wife and children reconciled themselves to the fact that Elijah was dying.
Eventually, Pike fell into a coma so deep that he was pronounced dead. After a brief service, which most of the villagers avoided from fear of contagion, he was placed in a coffin. The coffin was stored with others in a barn where they would be kept until the spring thaw when the frozen earth would soften enough so that they could be buried.
* * *
Inside the coffin, Pike’s nose wrinkled and his eyes popped open at the smell of warm bodies nearby. As his awareness increased, he was at first terrified; then the Hunger began to take control and forced him out of the coffin. He was amazed at his ability to see into the darkness. It was as if the barn were bathed in bright sunlight.
He crept through the darkness on hands and knees, exploring the barn, and discovered two young people coupling in the straw in one of the stalls. Hiding there in the darkness, he raised his nose in the air and snif
fed like a dog, smelling the warm blood coursing through their bodies and the scent of their lust as they made love. As his mouth began to water, he found that he could read their emotions in his mind almost as if they were shouting their desire out loud.
His stomach contracted in hunger, and an overpowering desire came upon him. Suddenly, he was on them like a wild animal, ripping and tearing with his hands and his teeth. They struggled and fought but were no match for his strength. He couldn’t get enough of the warm, salty blood, and he sucked the young ones dry, finally flinging their crumpled bodies to the side. Sated, he lay back, appalled and ashamed at what he had done but feeling stronger and more powerful than ever before.
His mind, which had always been quick in spite of little formal education, seemed to work even better with the young couple’s blood spreading through his veins. After a short contemplation of what had occurred, he came to the only conclusion possible: he had become one of the “Undead,” a vampire. He shuddered at the memories of the legends and stories he had heard about these creatures since childhood, when threats of them had been used to make young children behave.
With a cunning unusual for him, he knew that he must leave his past in order to spare his wife and child the fate of those he’d just killed. He would have to live by his wits in the future. He stole into the night, determined to uncover what his powers and weaknesses were.
The discovery was both exciting and terrifying. He learned that when he was well fed, he had the strength of three or four strong men, the swiftness of a horse, and the agility of a mountain lion. Sunlight made his skin itch and burn, and if he stayed in it for more than a few minutes, his tissues would begin to smoke, crack, and blister.
He could see in complete darkness as well as mortals see in daylight, and when he made the effort, he could read a human’s mind well enough to identify superficial thoughts and emotions.
The Hunger forced him to feed only every three or four days, and he found that he had the ability not only to read, but to control the victim’s mind. If he could control his own thirst and lust, he would take only a little of the blood and the victim wouldn’t die, and wouldn’t remember his feast. Feeding like this wasn’t nearly as exciting and fulfilling as ravishing and tearing until the victim expired, but was infinitely safer and caused him much less guilt. He was already beginning to feel the self-loathing his new condition was causing, and hoped to lessen it by refusing to kill his victims.
After a while he found he didn’t age. At first, he tried to solve this problem by staying on the move and never remaining in one place long enough to be noticed. However, after some years of this, he found that he sorely missed intimate, daily contact with other humans, humans that knew him by name and could be called friends. He felt if he didn’t establish some ties to other humans, he would lose his humanity entirely and become nothing more than a beast roaming the countryside.
In a stroke of luck, he apprenticed himself to a touring acting troupe. Here among the actors, he learned the art of applying makeup to change his appearance so that he would seem to age normally. After a while, it became second nature to him to slowly alter his hair coloring and skin texture so that no one would suspect he wasn’t normal. In this way, he was able to stay in a community for ten to fifteen years before being forced to move on.
The absence of aging also forced him to learn where and how to procure documents of new identities, especially as the country grew and became more dependent on documentation of identity for finding work and establishing credit.
Another ability manifested itself in the second year of his new life as a vampire. He found that he could recognize another of his kind from a great distance. Already a solitary personality, he elected to remain completely aloof from the others of his kind, both out of fear of discovery and out of repugnance for what he, and they, had become. He saw his own degradation mirrored in their acts of savagery. Somehow, against all odds, he managed to hang on to the threads of his humanity and learned to feed when the Hunger first appeared so he would be able to control it and leave his victims alive.
* * *
As I sat there in my office, I felt my depression begin to lift as I remembered my past lives spanning over two centuries. In all of that time, it was only in the last decade that my immortality had been seriously threatened.
Out of a sense of morality, I had fed for many years only on the dregs of society: the criminals, the prostitutes, and the drug addicts. In the past few years, with my increasing medical knowledge, I realized my immortality carried its own risk—it gave me time to acquire and be infected by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. This discovery changed my way of life forever. I discovered two of my kind suffering from the disease and took them into my care to secretly study the effects of the prions on them.
I found that the prions wage a constant battle with the ability of the vampire to heal itself. That over many years, the illness wears down this ability and leaves the victim in a state of constant disease and pain. My subjects’ minds became totally consumed with the prions, causing them to go slowly mad. In the end, in their decreasing episodes of lucidity, they begged me for release, and I obliged them.
I tried several methods of killing the creatures, all without success. Finally, through trial and error, I discovered that beheading and total consumption by fire was the easiest and least painful.
After observing the other hunters and the living hell they endured with the Sickness, I became morbidly afraid of contracting the disease myself. From that time on, I vowed to feed only on humans who were strict vegetarians, until I discovered how to test them for the presence of prions in their blood.
I bought used medical books and taught myself medicine. To establish my identity and create a paper trail, I worked for many years in small, rural communities where the people were so happy to have a doctor they didn’t check my background. Eventually, I made my way to Houston and opened an office in the medical center after killing and taking the identity of a physician who resembled me. Once there, I devised a computer program that enabled me to enter the hospital’s computer and obtain the names and addresses of patients who were undergoing lab tests. I managed to hack into the computer and order the tests I needed, under the admitting doctors’ names. I finally had a way to track people safe to hunt.
In spite of the difficulty, I continued to try to pick victims from the seamier side of life, but the Hunger often left me with little control. I was continuously threatened by my insatiable hunger for human blood. With the passage of time, I became increasingly dissatisfied with stealthy feedings. I found the Hunger could only be fully satisfied by the complete domination of the victim, both sexually and physically, which always ended with the death of the victim.
After the Hunger had been appeased with such a feeding, I was left feeling guilty and disgusted at what I had done. My depression only receded as the Hunger came once again upon me. Recently, I had begun working on finding the cause of, and possibly a cure for, my vampirism. However, without a breakthrough, I was a long way off from bringing my suffering and degradation to an end.
So far, I had been lucky. By spreading out my feedings over different areas of the city, the similarity of the victims’ deaths had remained undiscovered. But, by increasingly having to pick my victims from the middle class, I knew I was leaving a trail that would endanger my continued existence and I vowed not to let anyone follow that trail to me.
I needed some scapegoats to take the blame, should it ever come to that, so I began to work on finding suitable candidates, and to fix it so they would take the fall if the killings were ever connected.
Ten
The crime scene was as garishly lit as a carnival by the flashing red and blue lights of the patrol cars. A light mist was falling, and the moisture in the air gave off starry points of glare that rainbowed Matt’s windshield. He had stopped off at an all-night convenience store and bought a large coffee, hoping it would wake him up, or at least clear his head enough to make
it safe for him to drive. Between managing a four-speed floor shift and drinking coffee at the same time, Matt was lucky to arrive at the address Clark had given him. He sat in his ’Vette, sipping the steaming coffee and trying to steel himself for the grisly scene he was about to be face. Ten years, he thought, and it still gets to you.
Matt sometimes thought he would never get used to the carnage that people did to one another. Since his residency, he’d rarely seen victims of the random violence that pervaded society at the crime scene. In the emergency room, things were clean, sterile, and orderly. The wreckage of bodies torn asunder by hurtling automobiles or penetrated and shredded by bullets and knives was mitigated by the clinical problems they presented. The humanity of the victims was somehow lessened, as it had to be for doctors to be able to deal with treating them day in and day out. Matt knew that brutality and death among the everyday trappings of normal life would seem all the more tragic, all the more real. He hoped he was ready for it.
He opened the door and got out of his car, dumping the dregs of his coffee on the ground. A station wagon, with a logo on the side that read NEWSCAST 10, was parked in front of the house. Jesus, Matt thought, four o’lock in the morning and the vultures are already here.
Damon Clark materialized out of the mist, looking like some bedraggled ghost in a horror movie. His glasses were fogged by the mist and tiny drops of water were nestled in his hair like a dusting of diamonds. A London Fog trench coat covered his Armani suit, the collar up against the rain. He put his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Thanks for coming, Matt. Doctors Silver and Scott are already here.” He motioned toward the house. “From what Shooter told me over the phone, we can use some medical expertise on this case.”
Matt hunched his shoulders and pulled up the collar of his raincoat to keep the water from dripping down his back. “Why don’t we talk inside, so we don’t drown?”
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