The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed

by Joseph Duncan

  “That pleases you!” she said angrily, leaping to her feet.

  “Of course, it does,” I said. “I am a selfish, spoiled child of a monster. Death was the only thing I could never have. But not anymore. I am released from the prison of my eternal flesh. I am free!”

  “You are an idiot!”

  “Eternity is a very long time.”

  She stalked toward me, furious. “So why not destroy yourself now? You very nearly did it back in Bad Wildbach. You survived-- by some miracle, and at terrible cost-- but if you still wish to die and join your loved ones in the afterlife, do it tonight! Do it now! I won’t stop you again.”

  I endured her storm. I have always enjoyed a good thunderstorm. When she had finally subsided, I answered:

  “Now that I can die, I find that I am no longer so eager to do it. Not soon, anyway. Life is not so precious when you have an unlimited supply of it. Would you drink blood every moment of the day, every day, without end? Even if you could, it would grow wearisome, even grotesque, to do such a thing. It is the want that makes a thing precious. Look how passionately we just made love. Would you have been so enflamed if we had made love this morning, and the day before that, and the day before that? Death has made life dear to me again. I no longer have an unlimited supply of it. I want to live, and cherish every moment, because I know that it will be taken from me someday. I can die! I can be destroyed in battle! You could kill me now with a single blow! Oh, Zenzele, my heart, I cannot begin to describe it! I am only now beginning to realize it myself! That is why you’ve always left me. Why you will leave me again. It is the wanting that gives us pleasure, not the having!”

  “So the sybarite preaches abstinence now?” Zenzele scoffed.

  I did not argue, merely smiled at her.

  “I do not want to lose you,” she said.

  “But you will,” I said. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, or even in a thousand years or more, but eventually we will be parted. And you will grow weary of living yourself. Well, you know how to end it when that day comes, when you cannot stand another moment of self-awareness. I only came back because Lukas was more of a monster than I had supposed. I did not know when I gave him the Blood that I was creating a new God King. I could not go into the light knowing that I had unleashed such a creature on the world, on my tribe. But that is over now, that whole debacle, and I will make amends for it somehow. To Justus and Nora and Sydney. For what they suffered at my hands. But not tonight. Not tomorrow night either. Tonight, I want to live. I want to go down to the sea and watch the sun rise. We’ll dispose of this worthless sack of meat. Throw him in the water. Let the fish have him. And then maybe make love again as dawn sets fire to the sky.”

  She looked at me a long time, and then she laughed in disbelief. “You are insufferable!”

  “Yes.”

  “Incorrigible!”

  “That, too.”

  “Irredeemable!”

  I had walked around the sarcophagus and stooped to pick up our luckless strangler. He stank of excrement and death. I threw him over my shoulder and turned back to my soul’s mate. “Are you coming?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Not so quickly this time, though,” I said as we started across the graveyard. “This body is not nearly as fast as my old one. I am having trouble keeping up with you.”

  “So try harder,” Zenzele said, and leapt into the treetops.

  7

  And that, my beloved readers, is the end of the story. It is not the only story I have to tell you. Thirty thousand years makes for a very long autobiography, and I have many, many more tales, some worthy I hope of your interest. But this is as good a place to stop as any. To give us both a break from my ramblings. Who knows? I may never sit to put my life to print again. There are so many things I wish to see, so many things I wish to do. I’ve seen and done it all before, countless times I assure you, but now that I can finally die, I find it all quite fresh again. My new mortality has added a certain spice to my experiences that I have never tasted before, and I am still at heart an unrepentant hedonist. I hunger for new experiences the way I hunger for blood. Yes, it may be a long time before I sit to spin another yarn, so I hope that you are satisfied. I hope I have left you well-fed.

  I plan to stay here on Karpathos for a while. It is a beautiful island, and I have missed my son’s family far more than I realized. Sunduk is a very good boy. Only three hundred years in the Blood, he is still exuberant and full of curiosity. We have great fun together. We stay up all day watching pirated movies on his state-of-the-art widescreen television. He has shown me how to drive a Sea-Doo skijet. The family owns half a dozen of the sea-going vehicles, each a different brilliant color. And then there is Paulo and Fatima, who treat me as if I am one of their children, which is wonderfully liberating. It is a great relief to behave irresponsibly and let someone else worry about the consequences. Steve and Acacia make for wonderful partners-in-crime. Steve Jackson has an amusingly devious mind and a real thirst for adventure, and they are quite happy to include me in their capers. We have gone several times to the mainland to hunt for criminals in Athens and Izmir and my old stomping grounds in Thessaloniki. Twice, Acacia has made romantic overtures towards me. They are both beautiful, fair-haired blood drinkers, and were it not for Zenzele I would have taken her up on her offer, but Zenzele is with me again, and her appetite for sex leaves me with little energy for des rapports sexuels occasionnels. I am having a grand time. Perhaps I should write a book about it. Call it The Oldest Living Vampire on Holiday. I’m afraid, however, that it would be about as exciting as looking at a relative’s vacation photos. Holidays are a lot like sex in that regard: far more interesting when you are an active participant.

  A fair amount of time has passed. The nights have flown by, quite without me noticing. That’s why it’s taken me so long to get this final volume in your hands. It is difficult to force yourself to sit down and write every day when there is so much adventure to be had, and of course I had to completely rewrite the ending. My original manuscript ended in Bad Wildbach, just before I ascended the mountain to die. That’s where I expected my story to end. That was the plan. But that is life. Things rarely go as we plan them to. I think it would be rather dull if they did.

  I live on.

  I have a new body, but the memories, the thoughts, the soul are mine.

  My Living Blood continues to rework Lukas’s form, subtly altering its features to more closely approximate my original shape, but I suspect I will never look wholly myself again. It is like inspecting a composite photograph, with one face overlaying the other, one familiar and the other alien.

  I rather like the new face, if I am being completely honest. I think it is very striking. Zenzele is not too fond of it, but the others say that I am much more handsome than I used to be, with that long horsey face and doleful eyes. Acacia says that I have a raw, brutal sexuality now. Sunduk told me I look like Conor McGregor, an MMA fighter. I Googled the professional fighter to see what he looked like and had to concede the point. I am a little stockier, and my hair is darker, but there is definitely a resemblance.

  I also seem to have some new tricks.

  Lukas had the ability to absorb the rare talents of any blood drinker he chanced to feed upon. That is what made him such a dangerous individual. If he had survived, he would inevitably have discovered this power, and then he would have set upon his own kind, killing every gifted blood drinker he could find to steal their powers. He would have hunted them relentlessly, until he had acquired a god-like arsenal of outré abilities—telepathy, precognition, psychokinesis, clairvoyance.

  Power enough to conquer the world.

  It seems that I have inherited this mutation. Or stolen it. However you want to put it.

  Shortly after Sharing with Zenzele in that Byzantine necropolis, I realized I had gained the ability to see from afar. I had acquired Zenzele’s renowned Eye.

  I cannot see as far, nor as c
learly, as my beloved. It is not nearly as effortless for me, and I must confess that I feel somewhat unanchored when I do it, like a helium balloon that has slipped a child’s hand. When I send out my invisible Eye, I have this irrational fear that I will drift permanently away, unable to recall my spirit to my flesh. Perhaps if I practice it will come more easily to me. Perhaps then I will not find it so disconcerting.

  Fear.

  It is an emotion to which I am unaccustomed. I have not felt fear—real mortal fear-- in a very long time. It is, I think, the most human of emotions, and I am strangely gratified to experience it now. It informs our experiences, imbues our lives with a vivid immediacy, and now it is mine again.

  This may be my last kiss. My last sunrise. The last words I’ll ever write.

  I shiver in delight at the prospect.

  I write these final words in my apartment in the Villa Carpathia. It is sunset and a banner of shimmering red is drawn across the sky, a broad bright track of fire visible from my desk. In my bed, swathed in white silk, Zenzele sleeps the dreamless sleep of the undead. She rarely rises before the sun has set and the stars have come out in their abundance. The entire household, my family of vampires, still slumbers for the day: Paulo and Fatima in one another’s arms, Sunduk and Ezra, Acacia and her American lover Steve Jackson. Their housekeeper, the dour Leonora, has begun to heat her “soup”. I can smell the pig blood warming on the range, making the hunger in me snarl like a beast. Soon it will be night and they will gather in the kitchen, drawn by the smell like moths to a flame. I will join them then for their evening meal, and there will be conversation and laughter, gossip and debate—all the joys of loving fellowship.

  If there is any lesson to be had here in my rambling ruminations, it is this: find your tribe and keep them safe.

  It is the only thing that makes life worth living.

  Until we speak again, I remain yours,

  Gon,

  The Oldest Living Vampire

  About the Author

  Joseph has been writing most of his life. He produced his first novel, “Scratch”, at the age of 9. A story about a telekinetic cat and its attempts to save its master from a relentless serial killer, it was very well received by his grade school teachers. The Oldest Living Vampire is his seventeenth published novel. Along the way he has pencilled a handful of underground comics, owned his own video game shop and illustrated a few small press horror magazines. If you would like to contact Mr. Duncan, you may do so at authorjosephduncan@gmail.com. You can also friend him on Facebook, or visit his very sporadically updated blog Red Ramblings.