“Is he still alive?” Zenzele asked Nora. “Is he still in there?”
“Yes,” Nora said, even as I felt her probe my mind. Her mental touch was feather light, as if she were afraid I would shatter into a thousand pieces if she pressed too hard. “He’s there. He can hear you.”
“I still live,” I whispered, smiling up at my soul’s mate. My voice was wispy thin. I felt my lips crack as I moved my mouth to speak. “No thanks to you,” I added, teasing her gently.
“Don’t you joke at a time like this!” Zenzele snapped. She gaped down at me despairingly. “Oh, look what you’ve done to yourself! Why, my love? Why?”
“Why?” I echoed.
“If you were so unhappy, why didn’t you cry out to me? You know I would have come!”
“Or I,” Apollonius said. “Turn from this path, father. Please! Let us heal you. It’s not too late. Come with me to Karpathos. You don’t truly wish to destroy yourself. You are just mad with loneliness. You need your family. You need your tribe.”
“Yes, let us go to Karpathos. I will come with,” Zenzele said, nodding and smiling at Apollonius, at me. Tears had started from her eyes, the Blood tears of a vampire. They clung in black droplets to her eyelashes, like tiny jewels.
I must look a horror, I thought. Zenzele never cried!
“We will swim the moonlit sea. We will make love every night,” she went on. Promising. Pleading with me. “We will sleep each day in one another’s arms, rise at dusk, dance the dark currents of the night. We will hunt the wicked, just as we have always done. Forever, my heart.” She saw repudiation in my eyes and begged, her voice going shrill: “Don’t do this!”
“I don’t want forever,” I said. “I never did.”
“Please, my heart, my soul, not now, not like this,” Zenzele sobbed.
“If not now, then when? If not this way, then how?” I asked. “I’m tired of living, my love. I’m tired of this world. I want to see what lies beyond.”
“And what if there’s nothing else?” Apollonius countered. “What if it’s just darkness? Endless, eternal darkness?”
“Then I shall rest,” I said. “At long last.”
“No!” Zenzele cried.
I saw that she could not accept it. She refused to. I reached up to comfort her. I stroked her cheek, and she took my fragile hand in hers, squeezing it though my flesh continued to crackle, little glinting pieces of me drifting away like ash.
“I have lived so long, my love,” I said. “I have lived so long that life has no meaning any longer. Feeding is no pleasure. Sight, sound, touch, taste… it is all just sensation. There is no joy, no anguish. I listen to music and it is just sound. I gaze upon beauty and find myself unmoved. I have lived so long that living has become an agony for me, and even that agony is meaningless. I have lost my desire to live. You may feel the same in another ten thousand years. You may come to understand. Come, then, and seek me out, wherever my soul has flown. Perhaps I will even be reborn. Reincarnated, as the Hindus believe. I think that would be a good thing, to start afresh, a tabula rasa, no memory, no regrets.”
“I don’t want to lose you,” Zenzele wept.
“Nothing lasts forever,” I said. “Not even me.”
“Gon,” she said, and kissed my hand.
“My beloved,” I sighed. I reached out with my other hand and Apollonius took it. “My immortal child, Apollonius. Paulo now. You were a good son. As good a son as this old fiend could ask for.”
“You are a good father,” Apollonius said, pulling my hand to his breast.
I looked beyond them then, to Justus and his new companion.
“Justus, you beautiful rogue,” I said to him. “And Agnes. Oh, Agnes, I am so sorry for the pain I’ve caused you. For all the pain you shall endure. My schemes have burdened you with eternity, and for that I beg your forgiveness. It was never my intent to harm you.”
Justus merely nodded at me, grinning that crooked grin of his, the one that made my heart race. Agnes said, “The sin was not yours, master.”
“And Nora,” I said, turning my head, seeking her out.
She stepped forward to say goodbye, to aver her love for me, tears shivering down her pale cheeks. She reached out to me, opening her mouth to speak, and then drew back her hand a little, unsure if such a gesture was welcome, or if it was even proper to make it. She glanced guiltily at Zenzele.
And in that moment of indecision, her control of my savage new fledgling slipped.
It was just for an instant, but it was enough.
John Worthy and Sam Coleridge went flying away in opposite directions, their bodies pinwheeling through the canopy of the forest. Their cries of surprise and pain echoed across the mountainside as they crashed through the winter-hardened tree branches.
With a howl of unadulterated rage, Lukas scrambled across the ground, snatched up his axe in both hands, and leapt into the sky. It seemed that he hung there, suspended directly above me, for much longer than was physically possible, eyes bulging from their sockets, fangs exposed in a maniacal grin, and in that timeless instant the stars in the heavens did seem to shift and draw together, just as I had imagined they would, and it was as if he were surrounded by a brilliant nimbus of starlight, every feature made stark and pure. For a moment, I imagined that we were connected by a ghostly umbilicus, a serpentine cord that pulsed like a living thing from his navel to mine. For a moment, I experienced a curious double vision, as if I were looking through both of our eyes at once, my own eyes gazing up at him, and his eyes glaring down at me.
Through his eyes, I saw a withered scarecrow figure, chest split open, heart exposed. My flesh was colorless and translucent, the bones clearly visible, like veins of frosted glass. I looked like a creature that had evolved in some subterranean biome. I was pathetic, repulsive. I was crumbling and falling apart.
I smiled up at him, welcoming.
Yes, my savage child, my soulless acolyte! Destroy your maker!
“No!” Zenzele shouted, moving to protect me.
But as fast as she was, she could not shield me from my psychopathic fledgling. He was already descending, the head of the axe sweeping down in a lethal arc.
At last, I thought, as the axe plunged into my chest.
My last living sight was of my hand flying to dust.
4
Or so I thought.
There was a light in the darkness.
It was tiny as if with distance. Warmly golden but inconstant. Like firelight or a candle flame.
I realized I was seeing then. And then I realized I was still aware.
I am Gon, the Oldest Living Vampire, I thought. And then: No. I no longer exist in that plane of reality. I am no longer Gon the vampire. No longer even living. I am simply Gon. Gon of the River People.
I liked that. It felt good. It felt right.
My fledgling, Lukas Jaeger, my bespoke killer, had drained me of my Living Blood. Not every drop, but enough to disrupt its ability to mend my injuries, which had kept me alive for some thirty thousand years. And when he struck me with that axe, cleaving my ancient heart in two, my fragile form had burst into so much glittering dust. I had crumbled like some cut-rate Hollywood vampire. I was ash now in that other world, streaming away on winter winds. To put it in the modern vernacular, I was dead as a doornail.
And yet I still saw. I still thought. I was still, essentially, me.
So death was not the end.
I was not certain I was happy about that.
Curious, I looked around myself, or imagined that I looked around myself. It was hard to know exactly what I was doing as I did not seem to have a body. I could not see it on any account. I could feel it. I could sense that I had some sort of physical form, but all was inky darkness but that one tiny glimmering light.
Well, let us go see what it is, I thought, with more excitement than I had felt in a very long time.
Where was I going? What was going to happen to me? What was that light, and where would i
t lead me? The questions tumbled through my mind, stoking my excitement to a roaring flame.
I started eagerly toward the light, thinking I would fly to it, or swim through the darkness like some exotic species of fish. But no, I was walking. That was disappointing. Two legs then, just as I’d possessed when I was a corporeal being. How mundane!
The light grew slowly but steadily brighter as I trekked through the darkness towards it, increasing in only the tiniest increments. I could not see the legs bearing me to the light, nor any kind of movement in the darkness that surrounded me, but the light grew nearer and nearer, brighter and brighter, as I progressed.
I do not know how long I tramped through the void. Time had no meaning in that womb-like darkness. It might have been seconds. It might have been eons. I only knew that I was moving willfully toward the light, and my mind, my memories, seemed perfectly intact. Wonderfully complete, in fact. And for the first time in millennia, I was unencumbered by the hunger for mortal blood. The thirst was gone, utterly gone. In fact, I was more purely myself than I could ever remember being. There was a wonderful sense of wholeness and well-being, as if I was the most flawless version of myself that I had ever been, the most truly me.
It was strange to be without the hunger. There was a curious absence where it had been, a hole in my psyche. I know that must sound insane to you, for the Hunger is a constant gnawing ache, a terrible agony that all immortals must learn to endure, but it was true. There was a part of me that missed it. I was like a rehabilitated drug addict who laments his old dependence. I missed the need, the craving, as a man might miss an old friend. Yet I felt no desire to feed. The thought of drinking blood was neither exciting nor abhorrent to me. I could remember it. I could recall the orgasmic pleasure of feeding on mortal blood, how it tasted, how it felt, but I was unmoved by the memories. They had no power over me.
As I continued toward the light, I gradually became aware of some sort of repulsive force. It seemed I was having some difficulty proceeding forward, as if the light were pushing me away, or some unknown agency were pulling me back the way I’d come. Perhaps the darkness was becoming thicker in some unfathomable way, reluctant to give me up to the light.
No, I decided. I was being pulled back. It felt like a knot in my tummy—a tummy I could no longer see—as if a fist were twisted up in my guts.
For the first time since I died, I felt anxious. I willed myself around in the darkness, searching the void for the entity that was holding me back. For one chilling moment, I was struck by the superstitious dread that some demonic agency meant to keep me there in the darkness, or carry me off to some torturous punishment.
Hell is a rather recent creation when measured against the yardstick of my own interminable existence, but the concept has always been a powerfully seductive one, and one that has been shared by countless human cultures.
The names tripped through my head.
Hell.
Hades.
The Egyptian Lake of Fire.
The Mesopotamian Underworld.
Tartaros. Gehenna. Gomokodan. Uffern.
Might there be some grain of truth to the belief? Were mankind’s visions of Hell inspired by some realm that truly existed? Would I be snatched away to Hell, now, even as I closed on fabled Paradise? If anyone was deserving of eternal damnation, it would be me. I doubt anyone had sinned longer or more egregiously than yours truly.
So I turned, looking for the pit.
Instead, I saw a snowy wood. Low wooded mountains. A night sky. And in the distance, the gleaming lights of Bad Wildbach.
I saw my beloved Zenzele, trembling with rage. Apollonius and Justus were restraining her, holding her by the arms. Her cheeks glimmered with the tarry black tears of the living dead. She was screaming, lunging between the two men. They were struggling to hold her back.
“I’ll destroy you!” she howled, twisting like a serpent in their hands. Spitting. Kicking. “I’ll grind you to dust beneath my heel. Erase any sign you ever existed. Wipe you from the memory of the earth. You destroyed my soul’s mate. You destroyed the only man I ever truly loved!”
She was looking directly at me, her hatred a blast furnace. I was seeing, I realized, through the eyes of my murderous acolyte. Lukas Jaeger. The man who had destroyed me.
I could feel his flesh around me, cold and powerful and immortal. I could feel his hunger. I could feel his malice, and the chaos of his thoughts—his tragic memories, his crude desires, his playful, vicious cruelty.
And then it dawned on me. I understood where I was, what I had become, and how my consciousness should persist even after Lukas had shattered my physical form to dust.
I was not me!
Not the real me, anyway, the me who had been destroyed. Gon, the Oldest Living Vampire, was dead. He was dead and dust and this, my thoughts, this unexpected afterlife, was just some lingering imprint, a psychic residue, transferred to my destroyer through the Sharing of my Blood.
!!!NO!!!
I could imagine no blacker fate, no crueler punishment, than to be trapped inside the psyche of the beast who had destroyed me.
I was dead, and this…this version of me was some psychic ghost trapped in the haunted house that was Lukas Jaeger’s subconscious.
I recoiled from the thought, diving back into the darkness, retreating from the sights and sounds of the mountaintop where I had died, back into the womb-like void, back into oblivion.
The light was still there.
What was it? Why did it beckon? Was it some portal of escape? A release from this hellish second life?
I raced for it then. In desperation. In horror. I pushed toward the light, clawing my way through the darkness. But the harder I pushed, the more powerful the pull back into the living world became. I heard snatches of conversation from the mountaintop, the threats and insults Lukas traded with my loved ones. I caught glimpses of the standoff through my destroyer’s eyes. My friends and lovers were furious, but they were unsure if they had the right to destroy my executioner. Lukas had, after all, only done my bidding. And he had my Living Blood. He possessed my final memories. And my blood had made him powerful. They were uncertain they could best him.
Do not look, I told myself. You are dead and dust. There is nothing you can do. Your days of meddling are over. No more blundering heroics. You have done it. You have accomplished what you set out to do. You have destroyed the eternal prison that was your body. The Gon that was will never be again.
All that was left for me, sad revenant, was release or oblivion, and that was what I dove for.
The light.
I drove at it, stretching, straining.
It grew closer, brighter.
I felt a quickening in Lukas Jaeger’s consciousness. He had engaged my loved one’s in battle. I saw flashes of the conflict through his eyes. The mountaintop. The starry heavens. Pale forms racing through the icy woodland. Attacks and counterattacks, so swift they would have beggared mortal vision. Zenzele attempted a decapitating blow, but Lukas ducked, grabbed her forearm and sent her tumbling down the slope. Apollonius sprang from the treetops, hoping to catch Lukas by surprise, but my devious acolyte sensed him coming and neatly dodged his sneak attack, catching Paulo with a backwards roundhouse kick that smashed him into the bole of a great black oak tree. Nora attempted to seize control of his mind, but Lukas fired back such a volley of hatred and madness that she reeled away, stunned by his vitriol. They outnumbered my vicious fledgling nine to one, but Lukas possessed my powerful Blood, and thirty millennia of battle experience. His immortal form was not as resilient as mine had been, but that was no guarantee they could defeat him, even with their greater numbers. Only three of them were more than a couple hundred years old. Most were barely more than fledglings themselves.
Ancestors, protect them, I prayed, even as I reached for the light.
It was like swimming in quicksand, this darkness, but the light grew steadily brighter and closer. It took on an irregular half-circle shape,
and I became aware of a drumming, low at first, barely audible, but growing louder and more distinct with each lunging footstep.
The musical syncopation was all too familiar, and my heart—my very soul—leapt in joy at my recognition of it. It was the drumming of my tribe’s ritual orgy celebration, performed on the nights of the summer and winter solstice.
Memories flooded my mind. I had attended the orgies from the time I got my chumsuhk. Chumsuhk, in the language of the River People, meant “flowing waters”, but it was also a rather poetic way of referring to the fluids of the body. For women, the menstrual flow. For men, the production of semen. On the nights of the solstice, we gathered at the ritual cave. While the elders drummed on hollow logs and our medicine women prepared an intoxicating drink called brash, we feasted and danced and copulated in honor of the neverending cycle of birth and death and rebirth, a cycle we called holy for it was present in all aspects of our existence: the cycle of night and day, the waxing and waning of the moon, the passage of the seasons, sleep and wakefulness. That the very universe echoed the mileposts of our lives—we were born, we grew, we procreated, and then we died—was evidence of its holiness. Did not the very earth and all that lived on it flourish in the summer, die in the winter, only to be born again in the spring? Yes, the cycle was a holy thing! It is the cycle that all human religions revere, no matter how they dress it up. And the orgies were our tent revival. And hearing that drumbeat now, and the voices of my people lifted up in frenzied celebration, sparked in me an emotion I had not felt in a very long time. That I had not dared to feel.
Hope!
I shall plunge into that light and be reborn, I thought.
As the light grew wider and brighter, I realized that it was the entrance of a cave, the ritual cave where we had celebrated the solstice in my youth. I could see my people inside, naked bodies glistening as they leapt and twirled in the ecstatic trance state induced by the brash. I saw them, and I knew them. I knew them all! There was Hyde, tent-mate of Strom, who perished when we made war on the fiend who made me what I am. And there was Tavet, the hulking half-Neanderthal. I saw my brothers Epp’ha and Grent and Aldh, and even young Vooran, who died when we were boys, snatched from our tent in the middle of the night be a hungry old speartooth. I saw my mother, beautiful and young, her long red hair lashing the air as she danced in the haze. I saw my children: Gan and Hun and Breyya, Gavid, Den and Leth. They were all grown up, beautiful and strong. They were all there. My people. My tribe.
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed Page 24