Like lovers parted.
Then Tavet squatted down and began to saw into the speartooth’s belly. He hauled out a coil of glistening intestines, then shoved his arm into the great beast’s chest cavity. With much grunting and jerking, he yanked out the creature’s heart. He held up his prize, arm red to the shoulder.
By the time Brulde had dressed my wounds, the cat had been skinned and its liver, kidneys and brain removed. We did not eat the muscle flesh of predators, just the heart and a few of their internal organs. It was a sign of our respect for their strength and their ferocity. Also, the meat was usually unpalatable. Brulde slathered my wounds with father’s unguents, dressed the injury, then left my side. He returned after a time with the speartooth’s claws in his hand.
They were nearly as long as my fingers, black and wickedly curved. I could see my blood dried to a crust on the deadly hooks. Brulde grinned at me, the scar on his cheek twisting. “They'll make an impressive necklace,” he said, eyes twinkling.
I agreed, and he tucked them in one of his pouches.
That night, we feasted on the cat's steaming heart, pulling it from the fire half-raw to be passed around our circle. We, the ten men who remained, had killed it together, and it was decided that we would all share equally in the feast.
“Though he was hardly our finest warrior, Bukhult's death has reduced our number by one,” my father intoned. “That is never a good thing.”
“A death so soon on our journey does not bode well,” Tavet muttered.
Brulde nodded in agreement, looking worried.
Git murmured something to his brother and they shared a chuckle.
“Be respectful, you two!” father snapped. “It could be that his spirit is still near us. If so, we should honor him and not speak ill of the dead.”
My father's cousin Kort-lenthe gazed up at the heavens. “Bukhult, if your spirit lingers, I ask that you bring us good luck in the days ahead. Break the spears of our enemies. Dim their eyes and weaken their hearts. Bring us success in our coming battle. Do this and we will honor your spirit... as we failed to honor you when you lived among us.”
We all nodded and mumbled agreement. It was a fine prayer.
The heart of the speartooth, when I put it to my mouth, was hot and bloody and had a pungent, salty flavor. I tore into the muscle with my teeth and swallowed a mouthful before passing it on to Hyde on my left.
We prayed to the spirits of our ancestors then, placing our hands on our knees with our heads tilted back so that we could look at the sky. The stars seemed very bright and close that night. There seemed nothing between us and the dark plain overhead but distance. We communed with the spirits of our forefathers as the fire crackled and the wind sighed through the forest that surrounded us, each of us reciting the names of our forefathers and appealing to them for good fortune. On the eve of battle, with the stars so clear and plentiful overhead, the ghosts of our ancestors seemed very near and their guidance and protection a very grave matter.
When we bedded for the night, Brulde moved close to me, being careful of my wounds. He took one of the speartooth's claws from his breeches and held it up in the moonlight to examine it. I looked into his eyes but they were just dark pools. My companion was a quiet man, with complex and often inscrutable emotions. Inscrutable to me, anyway. I waited for him to speak.
“I thought that speartooth had killed you when it struck you down,” he said quietly. He turned the great hooked claw first one way and then the other.
“I'm sorry. I was careless.”
“We've been companions since we were boys. I don't like to think we might soon be parted in this world.”
“Death parts all men.”
“I know that,” he said, sounding a little annoyed.
“If we are parted and I join our ancestors in the sky, I know you will rear our children to be strong and brave,” I told him. “I am lucky to have you as my companion, Brulde.”
“I have had bad dreams about this journey, Gon,” Brulde finally admitted. “I think there will be many deaths in the days to come.” He looked at me. The orange light of the campfire glinted in his eyes. “What say you?”
I thought about the snake in my dreams, the demon snake Tat, but I didn’t speak of it. Instead, I shrugged. “Nuhnhe.”
He snorted and lay back.
The others were snoring, mumbling in their sleep, farting. A piece of firewood popped, sending a flurry of sparks spiraling into the heavens. Brulde stared up at the stars, the spirits of our forefathers, in silence. I watched with him. After a while, he turned and put his hand between my legs. It surprised me. We hadn’t “practiced” in a long time. In fact, I couldn’t remember when we’d done it last.
“For old time’s sake?” he said.
I was tempted to decline. I was tired, and more than a little sore. But I had the distinct impression that what he actually meant to say was, “For the last time.” He would have been right if he had said that. It was the last time. But neither of us knew it that night.
“All right,” I said, pulling the covers over us. I checked to make sure the others were asleep, then rolled over, being careful of my injury, and put my arm around him.
9
I still bear the scars from that saber-toothed cat. If I lower the waistband of my pants and turn to the right a little, you can see them on the meaty part of my upper hip, four shiny furrows, carved into my hide by the beast's spectacular slash. They run at an angle down into the curly thatch of my pubic hair, forever immortalized by my vampiric transformation. They became a permanent adornment of my white and ageless flesh the night my creator cursed me with this unending life, this abominable eternal existence.
His “gift” of immortality, you see, was a punishment... an act of vengeance.
Maybe you think immortality a wonderful thing. I can understand that. I am not so removed from the world of living men that I do not remember death's fearsome mystery. What worlds lie beyond the darkness, or is the darkness all there is when the last breath is drawn and the heart falls still and silent in the breast? That question is a kind of torture for the living soul. Fear of death is the foundation of a million absurd religions.
I remember my own fear of death when I was a living man. The cold brush of its fingers on my nape. The gnawing in my guts when sleep eluded and my mind turned to grim fantasies in the night. It is the curse of intelligence, the knowledge of one’s own end.
Immortality, however, comes with too steep a price. At least for this vampire it did. I no longer fear death, yet to endure I must become death. Over and over and over again. Night after night, year after year, ages upon ages.
Think upon this, I beg you, if you still think immortality a prize.
Every second of every minute of every hour that I exist in this universe, I crave blood. It is like a drug addiction. To put it in a modern context, I am a junky for the hot salty lifeblood of the living. It has never been my wish to harm a living soul, yet every minute of the day my every waking thought is overshadowed by my ravening appetite. The hunger burns in my belly, tying it in knots. My heart cries out for it. My veins pulse and throb in need, like baby chicks chirruping for nourishment.
I am not an evil being. I try to be kind and gentle and honorable. But put me in a room full of plump, vital, living human beings and my mouth begins to water. I fantasize about sinking my teeth into them like I once fantasized about sex. I picture it in my mind, the violence, the taking, which is a kind of rape. The images are always so vivid. I cannot help myself. Their salty perspiration. Their perfumes and all their dirty habits. The tobacco on their fingertips. The alcohol on their breath. My senses are so fine I can even smell the residue of the mortals they've interacted with apart from my company. I can smell the food that they’ve eaten. I can smell the musk of their genitals. But above all that, straining my willpower to its limits, the blood. The coppery scent of living blood. The blood! I am a Hollywood monster movie villain, a pathetic caricature.
> Show me a pigtailed girl-child, a freckled little darling, and I will envision myself ripping off her screaming head and gorging on her spouting neck. Show me a nun and my thoughts will fly to her unsullied cunt. I will fantasize about lapping at her menstrual flow before climbing her body and sucking her dry from the fount of her chaste and powdered throat. Show me a kind and loving father and in my mind’s eye I tear his heart still throbbing from his chest and pulp it in my fist, squeezing its gelid contents into my hungry, fanged mouth.
Put me in a room with mortals and within minutes I am ready to murder them all. Usually I am forced to retreat.
As a creature of conscience, the unceasing temptation to kill is nearly intolerable. The fantasies alone are enough to drive me insane.
Can you imagine this?
Would you want to live forever if forever was unendurable agony?
The only peace I have is when I feed, and when I feed, I kill. I cannot help myself. The vampiric curse is one of endless insatiable need. I have no inhibition when the blood touches my lips. I cannot take “just a little sip”. Few of my kind can.
Likewise, I have to feed, for when I do not-- each night I abstain from the kill-- the cravings grow more and more demanding, the agony in each and every cell of my body waxing brighter and hotter. The longer I go without feeding, the weaker my self-control becomes, until all rational thought is occulted by my appetite and I fly out into the night, a ruthless and blood-crazed fiend, to feed upon the first vulnerable mortal I chance to stumble across... be it man, woman or child.
So instead, I compromise.
I feed regularly so that I do not lose control of myself and harm the innocent. I choose my victims from among the criminal element of whatever city I currently reside in: the rapist, the thief, the pusher, the murderer. It is not so difficult to find them. Not in this modern era. Not in the cities. They are many and I am one. I need only slip from my balcony and find my way to the grimier side of town, to those districts where neon signs flash XXX and LIVE SEX SHOW and the bars are filthy and dim and full of cruel, cold-eyed men.
I look for the man with the leather jacket and the 9mm in his waistband-- I can smell the gunpowder and oil from across the smoky chamber-- and then I spill money from my wallet in front of him at the bar, feigning drunkenness. “Oops!” I mumble, scooping the bills back inside. Sometimes I laugh a little at my clumsiness, but carefully, so as not to flash my fangs! I make sure his pitiless eyes catch sight of the cash inside my billfold before I push it back into my seat pocket. Sometimes I buy him a drink. I see avarice overwhelm his caution. He appraises my strength, then licks his lips and tenses on his stool, leaning toward me, eager to pounce.
When I stumble out into the night, I make sure he is following, and then I duck into an alley and pretend to urinate behind a dumpster.
“Give me your wallet, motherfucker!” he unerringly demands, pistol shoved into the small of my back.
And I smile.
I smile and turn-- faster than he's ever seen anyone move before!
I loose the reins of my bloodlust then, uncage the beast and let it feed. The killing is easy. I was made to kill. I am the perfect predator. I seize his shoulders with my implacably strong fingers. I drive my teeth into his neck with lightning speed. I slash his jugular and carotid arteries with my razor sharp fangs, and then I eat him, like a starving wolf. I drain him like a great mindless leech. I hold my hand over his mouth and I pull. I suck. His blood flows into me. I feel it gushing down my throat, pooling in my belly. I feel it spreading through me, winding through my ancient flesh, flowing through my veins like molten lava!
You all taste so good!
When I am full and the insanity of my hunger has begun to wane, I take the body and dispose of it.
Into rivers, into condemned tenements, into sewers and distant, untilled fields, I hide their remains. They're almost never found, and when I have a string of bad luck and too many of my kills are unearthed, I pack my belongings and move to another city.
Even after 30,000 years, I remain a nomadic hunter.
Yet, even for the cold-blooded killers, I feel guilt. I look at their mutilated bodies, their lifeblood throbbing bright and hot inside of me, and it makes me want to end this pointless, predatory existence. They always look so small in death. Even the biggest, meanest barroom brawler looks through death's dark doorway with the terror of a child. It's their final expression of confusion that makes me feel so sad for them. The universality of their suffering haunts my conscience every moment of my inhuman life.
I've tried to kill myself.
I really have.
Once, I doused myself in gasoline and struck the match. I found that fire had no effect on my strange flesh. Imagine trying to burn marble.
I've tried to drown myself and freeze myself. I've even been dismembered. I once threw myself from a great height. At the foot of the precipice, my plummeting body shattered like a crystal vase. There was a moment of sweet oblivion, and then black fibrous tendrils, thin as threads, wriggled from the shards of my shattered form and drew the scattered pieces back together again.
Other vampires die. I've seen it. They have died from fire, dismemberment, a stake through the heart. They have died from impacts and violent contortions of their bodies (sometimes at my hands) but I do not share those vulnerabilities. I am something altogether different. A mutation among mutants.
I have only met a few other true immortals in my 30,000 years. I have transformed countless scores into vampires myself, but only rarely did they share my anomalous indestructibility. Of my vampire children, the majority have retained that measure of fragile humanity that promises oblivion should eternity prove too much to bear.
I suspect that true immortality is innate to the subject of the transformation, not a thing that is imparted by the parental fiend... for my creator was certainly not invulnerable to harm.
But once again I digress from my narrative. I beg your forgiveness. Immortality lends one far too much freedom to ramble on. After all, I have all the time in the world.
You, on the other hand, do not.
I no more wish to waste your life with my ramblings than I wish to drain it from you by force. Or fang, as the case may be.
Let us continue.
10
We buried Bukhult in a shallow grave, positioning his body like a child in the womb, knees folded up, chin tucked to his chest. The next morning, when the sky was bright enough to see the path, we rose, put out our fire and continued on our way. No one paused by the little mound of earth that marked his grave. None but I, and that only in passing.
As we crossed into the territory of the Gray Stone people, the mood of our war party turned deadly serious. With Bukhult removed from the equation, we were all, to a man, skilled hunters and warriors... and we meant to stalk and kill any interloper who dared trespass our valley. We put aside our careless camaraderie, the joking and horseplay from the previous day, and began to move silent and swift through the hunting grounds of our Neanderthal neighbors, searching the forest floor for any sign of our quarry.
As we moved stealthily eastward, we did our best to avoid detection by any sentries who might have been posted to guard the approach to Gray Stone. We moved singly, spread out through the woodland in a widely spaced line, keeping only our nearest cohorts in eyesight. Even with the ten of us moving steadily through the glen, not a sound betrayed our passage. No branch snapped underfoot. No leaf rustled but what the wind disturbed. We glided like spirits through the dense forest of the Fat Hand’s westernmost hunting grounds, slipping from tree to tree and communicating with sign language.
Tetch was the second fatality of our expedition.
We were still a few miles from Gray Stone when I heard the swish of running feet. I had Tavet to the southeast of me and Brulde to the northwest. We were moving southeast, the sun at our backs. The runner was approaching from Brulde's direction, sweeping his feet carelessly through the leaves that carpeted the forest flo
or.
I frowned in consternation at the noise the man was making. Brulde heard it, too. He gaped at me in disbelief, then turned and dropped to one knee. He nocked an arrow, his back to me, and waited for the runner to come into sight. If he were one of ours, my father would put a lump on his head for such a gross lapse of judgment. If he wasn’t one of ours, Brulde was about to put an arrow through his heart.
Brulde waited, the muscles in his arms trembling as the crunching grew louder. I crouched down, spear in hand, and started duck walking in Brulde’s direction. Whoever it was, whatever it was, it was just on the other side of the hill.
Friend or foe? I wondered, as I made my way toward Brulde.
The wound in my hip was burning but I pushed the pain from my awareness.
To my surprise, Tetch's brother Halde came sprinting over the hill.
The moment we saw his face, we knew that there was trouble.
“Brulde!” he gasped. “Gon! Hurry! It's Tetch!” He came to a stop a few feet away and stood hunched over, hands on his knees. He was too out of breath to get a full sentence out. He whooped a lungful of air and then said in a rush, “Tetch is dead!”
“Did you see who killed him?” I asked, coming alongside the man.
He shook his head. His curly red hair was pasted to his face with sweat. His eyes bulged from their sockets, wild, like a cornered animal. “I didn’t see anything! I didn’t hear anything either! I lost sight of him for a moment and when I doubled back to find him, he was dead!” He waved for us to follow and ran back the way he had come. I tried to restrain him but he jerked his arm from my hand and went loping down the hill, kicking through the leaves.
Brulde and I exchanged an anxious glance. I motioned for him to follow Halde... but cautiously. Halde was understandably distraught, but if enemies were afoot, it was suicide to go running carelessly through the woods. Halde would be lucky if they didn't kill him next.
True enough, Tetch had been killed.
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Page 14