She smiled when we debarked the ship and hastened down the pier to greet us.
“Canım!”
“Kuzucuğum!”
Paulo and Fatima embraced, kissing passionately, before Fatima turned to welcome Zenzele and I to the island.
“Mother.” She bowed formally to Zenzele, and then she looked at me and her mouth dropped open.
“Have no doubt,” Paulo said gently, “it is my maker.”
Fatima had always been fond of me, and I of her, but she looked me up and down as if I were a stranger. “You said he had changed, but I never thought…”
Zenzele looked sidelong at me and I suddenly felt very self-conscious, like a man who had shown up at a party uninvited.
“It is a long story,” I said.
She must have seen the discomfort on my face for she collected herself and said, “I’m sorry, father. I didn’t mean to…”
“Let’s go home,” Paulo said, slipping an arm around her waist. “We’ll call everyone together. That way he only has to tell the story once. I’m sure Gon would prefer that.”
I cocked an eyebrow. Just once? But I love talking about myself!
“Yes, of course,” Fatima said. She broke away from Paulo to embrace me, smiling at me with the old affection. She kissed my cheek and then drew back to examine my face more closely. “You’re a lot shorter now,” she said. “But still drop dead gorgeous. Let’s go home. You’ve been away for far too long.”
Home was a sprawling villa overlooking the Carpathian Sea.
Villa Carpathia perched upon a terraced garden of lemon, fig and date trees, crape myrtles, bay laurel and tall, narrow, shimmering poplars. Sunduk, Fatima’s son, buzzed us through the ten-foot-tall security gates and we rolled up the hill to the colonnaded entrance. Everyone came out to greet us: Acacia and her American lover Steve Jackson, Ezra, Leonora’s daughter, and Fatima’s son Sunduk. All but Leonora, their aged mortal servant. They all made a fuss over my appearance, bombarding me with questions, until Paulo raised a hand and called his clan to order. “We’ll tell you all what happened soon enough,” he said, smiling indulgently at his family. “Just give us a chance to settle in. We’ve had quite an adventure.”
“How is Leonora?” I asked as we filed inside the house. Paulo’s mortal housekeeper did not like me very much, though I was quite fond of her. Her prickliness amused me.
“She is very old now,” Ezra, her daughter, answered, staring at me with undisguised curiosity. “In two more months, she’ll be ninety-three.”
“She refuses to take the Blood,” Paulo said. “Still works every day. Insists upon it. But she retires early now, and rarely leaves her room during the night.”
In books, once a story has reached its climax, it is over. There is sometimes an epilogue or a brief philosophical denouement, a pithy quip and then “the end”. Not so in real life. In real life, once an adventure is over, you just go on living. Or unliving, as the case may be. One must eat, sleep, attend to the humdrum necessities of existence the authors of fiction do not dwell too much upon. I imagine Sherlock Holmes did his laundry between mysteries. Availed himself of the lavatory. Shopped for groceries. Got his hair cut. Polished his shoes. What we call routine. But it does not make for very interesting literature.
After Paulo showed us to our room, I sat on the bed and waited while Zenzele showered and changed into clean clothes. The clothes she borrowed from Fatima, who was nearly the same size. I had clothes from a previous visit, but found, after I had showered, that they no longer fit. I was a couple inches shorter now, and more than a couple inches broader.
Zenzele watched as I tried without success to button my trousers. I chuckled uneasily and sucked in my gut, but it was no good. I finally capitulated. Shucked off the pants and put my dirty clothes back on.
“You could borrow something from Sunduk,” she said, and then she strode from the room.
Sunduk knocked a few minutes later.
“Enter,” I said.
He tromped in with an armload of clothing. “Mother said your old clothes no longer fit.”
“It would appear so.”
“Don’t worry. I got you covered.” And he tossed his armload of clothes on the bed.
He grinned at me expectantly, a short stout dark-skinned young man with curly black hair and a broad toothy smile. He was Paulo’s fledgling and Fatima’s mortal child, only three hundred years in the Blood.
Paulo had given him the Blood at his mother’s request. He was a Turkish soldier at the time, stationed on Karpathos during some old war or another. Fatima, newly turned, was the consort of a brutish blood drinker named Baracka. Paulo fell madly in love with her and destroyed her domineering maker, then brought her mortal child into the Blood to please his newfound love. Their family had grown slowly over the years, welcoming first Acacia, then Ezra and finally the American Steve Jackson, Acacia’s lover, into the fold.
“Yes, thank you,” I said, sorting through the young man’s garments. They were disconcertingly modern, very slick and artificial. I selected black denim jeans and a dark blue t-shirt with what appeared to be a green frog-like creature with pointy ears emblazoned across the chest. Below the illustration was the legend, “Judge me by my size, do you?” I did not know the reference.
“That’s Master Yoda,” Sunduk said at my questioning look.
“Master who?”
“Never mind,” he laughed. “I’ll let you get changed.” He gave me a bear hug and then departed.
I took the clothes with me into the adjoining bathroom. It was a thoroughly Spartan chamber of white marble and chrome with little embellishment. Beautiful but sterile. I much prefer the grand excesses of the Victorian style in my surroundings, but it was not my home.
I disrobed and examined myself in the mirror, really looked at myself for the first time since my rebirth.
The fluorescent lighting had made a monster of me, as it does to all our kind, flesh chalk white and bloodless, eyes glinting, veins squirming beneath the surface of my skin like little black worms. I bared my fangs and hissed. Now that was scary! I looked so much fiercer now. My hair was shorter and straighter and darker. My body was shorter and broader and more densely muscled. My cock was shorter and thicker now, too. And my balls--! They dangled at least three inches below my cock, looked like two large eggs wrapped in a handkerchief. So delightfully grotesque, I thought, shaking my hips to make them swing. Every aspect of my new body seemed denser and more crudely shaped. I was still me, but it was as if I had been squashed down to fit the dimensions of the body I had stolen.
Was Lukas still here somewhere, I wondered. Did some aspect of his personality linger in my awareness, as did the personae of all the other immortals I had Shared with in the past?
I turned my attention inwards, seeking him out, but there was a curious emptiness where his memories should reside. He should be there, I felt, but he was not. Perhaps he was hiding, or perhaps I had exorcised his consciousness completely. There was no way to know for certain. Blood Possession is a very rare thing. So rare, in fact, that even I, the oldest living member of my race, knew next to nothing about it. It was very possible I had destroyed him utterly. No great loss to the world, I know, but I felt strangely ashamed of myself, maybe even a little remorseful. In some perverse way, I had grown to love the little fiend. He was so unrepentantly evil!
Enough navel-gazing, I thought.
My family was waiting.
They were dying to hear my story. Why I was moved to destroy myself. How I meant to accomplish the feat. And how I had survived the destruction of my body.
I’m sure they were curious about one other thing, too.
If I still meant to do away with myself.
I wondered that myself.
4
They were waiting for me in the common room.
The common room was a broad open chamber with a low domed ceiling and circular seating recessed in the floor. The chandelier suspended over the white leather sofa was comprised o
f hundreds of crystal teardrops that shimmered with a pleasant tinkling sound whenever the air conditioning kicked on, casting glinting reflections across the walls. Like most of Paulo’s home, the aesthetic here was smooth curved lines, flat glossy surfaces and a lack of ornamentation. And lots of light. The room was awash with light, tuned to the spectrum of natural sunshine. I expected it to sting my eyes, as I always did, but there was no pain. The last time I had visited, Sunduk explained that the bulbs were specially designed to emit only visible wavelengths. It was the ultraviolet, he informed me, that caused our mutated eyes so much discomfort.
They all fell silent when I strode into the room, looking at me expectantly.
I saw no judgment in their faces. Just love. Acceptance.
I attempted levity to conceal my discomfort. “What’s going on? Is this an intervention or something?” I asked, doing my best impersonation of an American stand-up comic.
My Brooklyn accent was flawless, but the joke fell flat.
Paulo rose from the couch and gestured for me to join them. He was a glorious sight, as always, in his gleaming white clothes. His hair, a mass of golden ringlets, shimmered every bit as brightly as the chandelier overhead. “It is time, father,” he said. “Come, join your family. Unburden yourself.”
My vampire child, as handsome as his namesake! I considered this man, this ancient blood drinker, one of my few uncompromised successes. Hard to believe, looking at him now, knowing all that he’d accomplished in his life, that he was once a dirty, vengeful, violent slave-child. The Blood does not always corrupt. It helped to be reminded of that. Sometimes I do good. Sometimes I am a maker, not just a destroyer.
The others murmured their agreement, all but Zenzele, who sat apart from the rest, watching me silently.
I nodded hesitantly, then walked forward and descended the three steps to the sitting area.
I took my place among the circle.
I told my tribe my story.
5
Sunduk showed me his collection of high resolution, high fidelity audio-video equipment later that evening. A sheik showing off his harem of nubile concubines could not have been prouder. I only pretended to be interested because he was so eager to impress me, but then he turned on the monumental television set and started a movie—a film called Blade Runner—and my jaw dropped to my chest.
“What is this?” I gasped, approaching the vast screen.
I did not quite dare to touch the display, although I wanted to. The images were so crisp, and they moved with such lifelike fluidity! I have never been able to watch television. The bright swarming pixels drive me to distraction. It is one of the unfortunate side effects of our enhanced senses. We vampires are not fooled by the illusion of television as mortals are fooled by it. The pictures do not appear to move so much as stutter by, one still frame at a time. But the technology of this immense panel of plastic and metal and microscopic circuitry had the power to confound even my immortal senses.
“It looks so real!” I exclaimed.
For the first time in my long life, I was able to appreciate the wonder of television!
Sunduk beamed. “It’s an 8K, 240 hertz QLED TV.”
I nodded blankly. He might as well have said it was magic.
“They’re not available to the general public yet,” Sunduk went on as I leaned a little closer to the display. I tried to make out the individual pixels that composed the picture but could not. The display was like a painting with the motion of life. “This is a pre-production model,” he went on proudly. “It cost 250,000 euros, but Paulo here is made of money.”
Paulo from the kitchen: “Paulo is not made of money!”
Sunduk tilted his head toward me confidentially. “Yes, he is.”
“It has the illusion of life,” I said, backing away from the screen to admire it more fully. I flinched as a detective in a worn brown overcoat shot at a fleeing woman. The woman, who was nude but for an outfit made of transparent plastic, wailed and went crashing through a series of plate glass windows.
“It’s the same principle as any other film or television program, a series of rapidly displayed photos, only this television set advances the frames two hundred and forty times a second, slightly faster than even our senses can perceive.”
“Amazing!” I gasped. I sat on the settee without looking behind myself. My eyes were riveted to the screen.
“You can finally watch TV!” Sunduk exclaimed.
Apollonius peeked into the television room, saw the expression on my face and rolled his eyes. “Oh, boy,” he said. “We’ll have to pry his butt from that couch now.”
“I have waited one hundred years to watch a motion picture,” I said, somewhat defensively. “Now, at long last, I can enjoy the movies I’ve always wanted to see.” I looked at Sunduk excitedly. “Do you have The Wizard of Oz?”
“No, but I can download it.”
“Yes, please!”
“It will take a few minutes. We have internet, but it’s not the fastest. We have to use satellite here on the island.”
I smiled, leaning back in my seat.
“No hurry, Sunduk. I have plenty of time.”
6
The population of Karpathos was a mere 6,200 mortal souls (and eight immortals). That number more than doubles in the summer months as expatriates and tourists flock in from all over the world to vacation on the island. The shops are flush with customers, the cafes and bars filled to capacity. Bus tours run day and night, shuttling the tourists from sight to sight. But in the winter months things are generally quiet, as the core population, the year-round inhabitants, are a small and tightly knit community, with simple needs and modest wants. So it was quite a shock when there was a spate of murders shortly after I arrived.
The first body was found on Apella Beach, which is on the east side of the island. It is a small, remote beach composed mostly of fine white gravel. The victim was a nineteen-year-old male, a local boy named Abrax Frangos. The young man, a construction worker from the village of Olympos, was killed by a single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Though Frangos had no criminal record and was by all accounts a quiet and hardworking young man, it was generally agreed upon by the inhabitants of the island that the unfortunate fellow was the victim of a drug deal gone sour.
Mortals, I have found, tend to blame the victim when a tragedy like this occurs. It makes them feel more secure.
Two days later, a young woman named Rena Halkias was found strangled. Her body was discovered in a dumpster in the village of Diafani. She was naked but for a black stocking cinched around her throat. Forensic examination determined that she had been raped before she was killed. She was twenty-eight years old and worked as a bartender in the village of Olympos, the same small community where Frangos resided. It was revealed the following day that she was in fact Abrax Frangos’ girlfriend, and that they were last seen the night before Frangos was discovered. Frangos had picked her up after work to drive her home, as he did most every night she worked. This was a little after two AM. Halkias shared a drink with her coworkers before she left, as she also did most every night she worked, but did not indicate that she was going anywhere other than her home. Neither was seen or heard from again. Not alive, anyway.
Of course, we all followed the news of the murders with keen interest.
The night following the discovery of Rena Halkias’ strangled body, Zenzele and I went to Apella Beach to look for clues.
It was a cold night, the wind off the Aegean Sea blustery and piercing. The surf threw itself upon the gravelly beach as we combed the shoreline for evidence. “It is like a lover in violent mourning,” I said of the sea, the gusts lifting my hair from my shoulders. Zenzele paused to look out to sea, then quietly returned to her investigation.
The beach had been visited by several mortals recently. Any of the scents could have belonged to our mysterious assassin, to the victims, or to any of the horde of investigators and curiosity seekers who had swarmed to the loca
le following the discovery of the young man’s remains. We returned to the Villa Carpathia no more enlightened than our fellow detectives.
“It’s been too long since we hunted together,” I said to Zenzele as we trekked home in defeat. We were walking side by side along a wooded path. I had not quite worked up the nerve to take her hand. I normally would have done it without thinking, but her uneasiness kept me at a distance. Might as well be a brick wall between us.
“Yes, it has,” she said, looking up at the stars. She glanced at me thoughtfully then. “Do you remember the last time we did this?”
“Before Wildbach? Before I changed? Of course, I do. It was in Liege. The spring of ‘92, I believe. You had come to visit with that obnoxious little fledgling. The one with the golden hair.”
Zenzele laughed. “Aleela!”
“Horrid creature,” I said. “Beautiful but so arrogant.”
“She was not arrogant. You frightened her. It was a defense mechanism.”
“I can’t imagine how I might have frightened her,” I replied. “I was a perfectly gracious host. I did everything I could think of to make her feel at home.”
“You can be very intimidating sometimes,” Zenzele said. “You do not understand the effect you have on other people.”
“Ah, well… So whatever happened to her?”
“She left me,” Zenzele said. “As children do. As they should. She fell in love and flew the nest with a lover.”
“She gave him the Blood?”
“It was a her. And yes, she did.”
“So… spring, Belgium, 1992,” I continued. “There was a piffling gang war going on. Some small-time crime boss was gunned down in front of the Chez Lillo. We tracked the killers to their lair-- a warehouse by the Meuse, très banal! We slipped in through the skylight while the men were playing poker. There were three of them, which was pleasantly serendipitous. One for each of us! Aleela, your rude little devotee, made quite a mess of her victim. Ripped the poor fellow’s head right off.”
The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed Page 28