The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1)

by Joseph Duncan

  He was more severely abused than the others. His clothing had been torn asunder, exposing a body that was pitifully bloody and broken. His eyes had been ripped from their sockets. His genitals had been torn from between his thighs. There did not seem to be one inch of his flesh that was not bruised, bloody or lacerated. He was inhuman in his maiming. It seemed defilement enough to wound the spirit.

  “There! There! Do you not see him!” my father hissed, pointing energetically.

  As I shifted my attention to the mouth of the cavern, a shadowy form withdrew from the opening, then moved, hesitantly, back into the light. Even in the darkness I recognized it, the sprawling reptilian gait, the strange bird-like jerkiness of its movements. The creature scurried forward and craned its head from the shadows, eyes squeezed down to slits. The impression I got was of a pale tongue slipping from a dark mouth. It sniffed the air, head twitching first in one direction and then another, and then its gaze swung in our direction and it grinned. It was a crocodile’s chilling smile.

  “It smells us!” Brulde moaned. Superstitious terror had made moons of his eyes.

  “Quiet!” father snapped.

  “How many are there? Are there more of them? What should we do?” I whispered.

  It was the first time I had seen the fiend in daylight and I made a conscious effort to put aside my fear and examine our foe more closely. True, it was frightening and its movements were unnatural, but it was also small and thin. Just skin and bones, really, and lightly complexioned, as if it rarely ventured into the daylight. I was reminded of the albino cave newts we sometimes found at Bubbling Waters. The creature staring from the cavern at us even had the pink-tinted eyes of an albino. Yet as strange as it appeared, there was a sense of fragility about it. It did not seem as dangerous in the daytime, when I could actually see its full form.

  The fiend retreated suddenly into the darkness. It withdrew so quickly it seemed to vanish.

  “I have only seen the one,” my father said. “I've been watching it from hiding all morning. It keeps coming to the entrance of the cave to look at me, but it seems to have an aversion to the light and doesn't venture out very far. I think it's just keeping an eye on me for now. Waiting for darkness to fall.”

  “Or perhaps it is alone,” I suggested, “and it is waiting for its tribesmen to join it before attacking.”

  “That could be,” father said.

  “But what is it?” Brulde hissed. “I’ve never seen its like!”

  “A Foul One, I believe,” father said. “It has the same frail form and body markings. It looks as if it is adorned in bones, and that is something the Foul Ones do, but there is something strange about it. It is not like the other Foul Ones I have seen in the past. Its movements are so bizarre, as if its limbs were broken and healed back in an unnatural manner. ”

  “So what should we do?” I repeated.

  My father turned to me. His eyes were steely beneath the bushy gray fringe of his brows. “We kill it!” he said. “We kill it before night falls and it comes to kill us!”

  We exchanged grim, anxious glances, the four of us. It was not difficult to imagine what my tribesmen were thinking. We were all thinking the same thing. We were thinking of the losses our group had suffered during the night. We were wondering if any of us would survive to see the dawn if we allowed night to fall on us again. We were thinking of how far away home was right then, and we were thinking that there were four of us and only one of those creatures crawling around up there in that cave. No matter how fearsome it might seem, there was only one.

  “Who else lives?” my father asked. “Hyde and Strom fell during the night. I found them this morning, ripped to pieces in a gully. They were piled together. I could not tell one from the other but for the heads.”

  “Halde and Tetch are dead. I know nothing of Git,” Brulde said.

  “What of Kort-lenthe?” I asked.

  My father shook his head. “I do not know.”

  “Then we are all that remain?” I asked.

  “It would appear so,” father said.

  “It will be enough,” Tavet said, scowling toward the cave.

  We huddled together then and came up with a plan, speaking in low voices and gesturing emphatically. Brulde believed we should retreat and return with more warriors. Tavet agreed with Brulde, though he added that he was not afraid to fight our enemies this day, if we decided to attack instead of withdraw. My father was adamant. We had lost half our men coming to Gray Stone. Could just the four of us hope to fare any better if we withdrew, if we tried to fall back to Bubbling Waters and summon reinforcements? We couldn't risk retreat, he said. We would not survive another night in these accursed woods. We had to stand and fight now, this very hour, and hope our enemy was as frail and sickly as he looked. I reluctantly agreed with my father. With our numbers reduced by more than half, we would be easy pickings if we tried to return home, especially after night fell. Tavet came around to our side, nodding thoughtfully. Shortly after, Brulde conceded.

  “Let us fight, then,” Brulde said, baring his teeth. He puffed up his chest and brandished his bow. “Let it be war.”

  We decided we would bait the creature into the light. It obviously did not like moving about in the day. Whenever it peered from the cave at us, it slitted its eyes as if the sunlight hurt them. This, then, would be our plan: one of us would approach in the open and taunt the creature after the other three had taken rear and flanking positions, staying under cover of the forest. When the creature attacked, we would strike at it from multiple directions simultaneously. My father and I had seen it slap spears from the air, but could it defend itself from three directions at once? Would it be so nimble in the daytime? It looked blind as a mole when it blinked from the cave.

  “What if it doesn’t come out?” Brulde asked.

  “Then we will go in after it,” Father said. “We cannot turn back now.”

  I volunteered to bait the fiend.

  There was a bit of arguing over that. I was the fastest of our surviving four, I said, and the best at close-up fighting. Brulde contended that he was the better choice as he was smaller and more vulnerable looking. The creature might be more apt to attack a smaller rival, he said. It was logical, but I was and had always been the more stubborn of the two of us. I intended to face the fiend, and my tent mate finally relented. Brulde clapped me on the shoulder before moving away to get into position.

  “My son,” Gan said proudly. He took my shoulders in his hands and placed his forehead to mine.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Father.”

  He kissed me on the cheek then and said, “Be brave, boy.”

  Then he was gone, scurrying away through the underbrush.

  Tavet remained nearby. He looked at me dispassionately, then turned his attention to our foe.

  I gripped the handle of my knife, feeling my heart beat hard and fast within my chest. It felt like a fist punching against my breastbone from the inside. When the others were in position, they whistled to signal me-- quick little tweets, a birdsong melody. Tavet gave me a nod and then I pushed through the leafy undergrowth.

  I stepped out into clear view of the cave.

  “Hoy! Foul One!” I shouted. “Come out of your hiding place and face a true warrior!”

  My cry ricocheted off the surrounding peaks, caroming to and fro as though I had thrown stones after the creature instead of words. I thought the fiend would come flying out of the dark when I shouted, all eyes and teeth and dirty, grasping claws, but it did not show itself. I mounted the limestone slabs that rose like stairs to the cave—one, two, three. Frag hung to my right, mouth agape, eyes pecked out, flies boiling in the air all around him. My knees felt weak and wobbly, my bladder hot and heavy. I climbed up two more steps, passing a head on a pike. A woman. I could see the shaft of the stake through her open mouth. Ants were crawling over her face.

  “Hoy! Craven beast!” I yelled again.

  I had begun to think the
creature would not take the bait, that we would have to go in after it, into the darkness, when, as if by some terrible necromancy, the fiend suddenly rose up in the mouth of the cavern. The suddenness of its appearance made me fall back a step.

  Ancestors, it was fast!

  It hunkered down, its head cocked at an unnatural angle, its strange red eyes fixed on me. Its mouth was twisted into a hateful sneer, black lips peeled back from twin rows of filed teeth.

  It so resembled the Foul One I remembered from my childhood, the one who had nearly stolen me from home, that time seemed to double back on itself. I felt as if I were reliving that moment all over again. The French call it déjà vu. The creature that snarled at me from the mouth of the cave possessed the same spindly frame, all ribs and bony angles. Its flesh was painted with strange decorative patterns, black and red predominantly, just like the fiend on that long ago day. Its hair was cut close to the scalp and sculpted with clay. It wore tattered leather and a necklace of bones. It also possessed the same deranged expression I had seen on the face of my would-be kidnapper. The eyes bulging with madness from black-pigmented sockets. The avaricious grin.

  Despite the distance between us, I heard it growl. The pitch of its voice was eerie, inhuman. It took all of my courage to step forward again, to puff out my chest and taunt it once more: “Come meet your doom, flesh-eater!”

  Its piercing howl made my eardrums throb. It was the same cry we had cowered from the previous night—Tavet, Brulde and I—in that damp burrow beneath the log. Its mouth yawned much wider than was natural, like a snake unhinging its jaws. A tremor coursed through its body from head to toe, a weird thrumming that made the dust leap around its palms.

  As its jaws gaped to give birth to its shriek, I was nearly overwhelmed by an impulse to flee. I wanted so badly to turn tail and run that my feet shifted around of their own accord. They meant to carry me away and damn my friends and father. No! I held my body stock-still, gripped it in the fist of my will until the impulse had passed. I will not run!

  It bolted from the shadows of the cavern then. One second it was crouching in the black gullet of the cave, the next second it had closed half the distance that lay between us.

  It moved so fast it seemed to melt away in one spot and reappear in the next. It snarled at me, stretched out lizard-like across a limestone slab about twenty meters away. For a moment, it sat motionless, head cocked queerly to one side, muscles quivering like a bowstring.

  Then it melted again.

  The space between my heartbeats seemed suddenly to expand, to become each of them a vast chasm of time, one in which I could see pale faces peering from the shadow-world of my memories. I suppose it was my life flashing before my eyes. I saw my mother, my brothers, little Vooran sliding away into darkness, his hand reaching out to me, fingers splayed… and then I saw Brulde. I saw Brulde rising from his hiding place. I saw him rising and loosing an arrow at the blurred fiend. At the same moment, Tavet came charging up behind me. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him, the rustle of the bushes as he sprang from cover, the clomping of his feet as he flew up the stone steps behind me. To my left, my father, also charging forward, his arm swinging up and back over his shoulder, the shaft of his spear in his fist. They all seemed to be moving very slowly to me. My father’s arm swept forward and down, flesh rippling as powerful muscles contracted just beneath the surface of his skin. Strange how fluid human flesh appears when observed at a heightened rate of speed. I noticed he had one eye shut, and that his tongue was slightly protruding from his lips. At the same time, I felt a whisker of wind upon my cheek and watched in mute astonishment as Tavet’s spear floated past my head. It drifted by so leisurely I had time to note every notch and imperfection along its length. It was like a merje trance, that moment. My life hung by the thinnest and most fragile of threads... and the thread was stretching... stretching...

  Would it hold, or would it snap?

  The Foul One's gaunt body contorted like an eel in a net. It spun beneath Tavet's spear at the same time it plucked Brulde's arrow from the air. It melted forward again, tossed the arrow aside with a flick of its fingers and swung up its other clawed hand to knock my father's spear from its path. My father's weapon went spinning overhead. I watched the projectile stick into one of the scarecrows hanging to the side of us, piercing the dead Fat Hand with a moist punching sound.

  The Lizard Man had managed to deflect all three attacks—!

  But in so doing it had also come too close to me, and it had slowed too much in defending itself from the triple assault.

  “Die!” I cried, thinking of Hyde and Strom, thinking of Halde and Git and Tetch, and my father's cousin Kort-Lenthe. For my wives and children, for all the Fat Hands who had died here, their bodies desecrated so savagely, I thrust my knife into its heart. There! Even Bukhult, who had lived and died an object of derision, deserved his vengeance, too.

  My blade pierced through the strange creature’s white hide, just below and to the left side of its breastbone. It scraped between the Foul One's ribs. It rammed home in the creature's heart, all the way to the hilt.

  The fiend's fanged jaws snapped shut less than an inch from my nose. I felt its breath upon my skin, cold as the winds that swept down from the creaking glaciers. I heard the clack of its teeth as it brought them together.

  It reeled from the force of my blow, its fingers encircling the handle of my knife. For a moment, I thought it would pull the blade from its heart and cast it aside. For a moment, I thought it truly was a demon, as the superstitious Fat Hands believed it to be. I crouched down, bracing my body for another attack. Instead, it tottered back. It continued to grip the handle of my blade, but it didn’t pull it free. I believe it knew that I had struck it a mortal blow, and it was afraid to remove the blade and hasten its dissolution. It blinked at me in disbelief, bloody tears welling in its eyes, and then it looked down at the dagger protruding from its chest and those awful red eyes rolled back in despair.

  The Foul One fell to one knee and let out a scream so long and high pitched I thought it would burst my eardrums. It kneeled there for a moment, shoulders rising and falling, and then it wrenched my knife from its chest with a splash of black ichor. It did not even register on my thoughts that its blood was not red like the blood of a living man. It was such an eerie creature little about it would have surprised me right then.

  It dropped the knife to one side and toppled onto its back, gulping like a fish out of water. Its heels pressed upon the stone slab it lay upon and raised its buttocks off the ground. Black fluid gurgled up its throat and spilled over its lips.

  Tavet placed a hand on my shoulder. Father was struggling up the hill, breathing heavily. “Is it dead?” Brulde asked, joining us from the other side. He had nocked another arrow, squinted at the writhing creature warily.

  “Dying,” I said. And then I added, “I hope.”

  I stepped back as dark tendrils erupted from its mouth and the wound in its chest. We all jumped back. They wavered in the air for a moment like coiling vines, strange black vines that had been granted a dreadful vitality by some mysterious enchantment. The glossy tendrils had the look of crude oil. The tendrils trembled, straining out a few inches further… and then the black threads froze. They coagulated with a dry crackling sound, and crumbled into a puff of fine particles.

  The Foul One fell limp.

  No final groan. No wheezing death rattle issued from its throat. It just stopped moving.

  I watched with grim fascination as its flesh sagged suddenly upon its skull. Its eyes sank away into their sockets, first blanching and then collapsing in upon themselves. Its belly inflated with gas and then deflated with a putrescent hiss. Its limbs withered away, the muscles wasting, the skin drawing tight around the bones, drying, cracking.

  Then, from the darkness within the cave, another cry arose, infinitely louder, infinitely more terrifying. It was a roar so deep and powerful it seemed to shake the very earth, a monstrous outpouring
of venomous hatred and rage.

  It was the little one's master.

  It was the fiend who made me what I am.

  13

  His voice alone was terrible enough to send us scurrying. The volume of it was so great that it was like a blast of thunder on the mountaintop. Small rocks shivered down the stony slope. Dust devils spun at the mouth of the cave. It felt as if my head had been seized by invisible talons and squeezed near to bursting. I cupped my hands over my ears and cried out at the pain but my voice was lost in the crashing.

  My father was the only one who did not break and run. He stood his ground while the rest of us fled. He stood, strong and brave, the gray-headed warrior. Blood trickled from his nostrils and ears, tears wept helplessly down his cheeks, but he stood.

  Then my maker flew from the cavern of the Gray Stone People, a dark blur, and my father rose up off of his feet in a cloud of his own blood, his head gone, just an empty space between the broad shoulders I once laid my cheek on to sleep.

  The blur coalesced.

  Ancestors, how I loathe that creature! That murderer! That leech! Even now, separated from that moment by unimaginable gulfs of time, my hatred still glows white hot.

  How can I even begin to describe the abhorrence I feel for that creature? If you have ever witnessed a beloved parent struck down right before your eyes, you might begin to understand the kind of hatred I’m talking about. You might understand that no amount of time can extinguish such flames. Even thirty millennia later, it burns in me as fiercely as if I were living that moment right now.

  But what did he look like? Who, or more precisely, what was he exactly? I'm sure you're terribly curious about the monster I've been hinting about for the last one hundred pages or so, so I will try very hard to choke back my bitterness and describe to you the wicked creature who murdered my father and stole my mortal life away.

  The being that murdered my father was a powerfully built creature, almost as tall as I, and as broad in the shoulders as the half-breed Tavet. Like his smaller companion, my maker adorned his body in human bones. He wore a breastplate made of ribs and a headdress made from shaped skull fragments, all the osseous segments drilled and linked together with strips of leather. He wore a thick and crudely made cloak of animal fur. His face was painted white but for two circles of black pigment around his gleaming eyes, giving him an even more skeletal appearance. He did not adopt the animalistic postures of his smaller companion but stood as a warrior would stand, chest thrust out, shoulders back, legs slightly spread.