This book is copyright 2012 by Joseph Duncan
Originally published under the pen name Rod Redux.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental
2014 E-book Edition
Published by Cobra E-books
Metropolis, IL
ISBN 13-978-1478103110
ISBN 10-1478103116
Table of Contents
Bibliography
Vesuvius
Dinner Conversation
Exodus of the Neirie
Ilio
Interlude
Life Among the Tanti
The Vampire Thief
Zenzele, My Captor
Zenzele, My Love
Uroboros
Journey’s Beginning
About the Author
Also By Joseph Duncan
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl
Menace of Club Mephistopheles
Mort
Hole: A Ghost Story
Indian Summer
House of Dead Trees
Nyal’s Story
Apollonius
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed
Frankenstonia
For my true love
And
For all my readers,
This long love letter.
Vesuvius
December 29
1
I felt the music penetrate my flesh even before I entered the building, the thump of its bass like a second heartbeat. They call it “techno”, but it has a primal quality that belies its modern label. It conjures memories of my people’s ritual chants, the drumming of bare palms on hollow logs, men and women shouting as they leap and spin around a roaring fire, their bodies moist with sweat, their faces tilted to the heavens in ecstasy.
I closed my iridescent eyes to drink in the music. I can feel it in my flesh, in my mind.
For a vampire, television and cinema are irritants. My thoughts fly faster than a mortal human’s thoughts, and so I am aware of each shuttering still image. They whirl like life itself for your human eyes, but for me they are still images, ticking steadily through my consciousness.
But music… Ah, music!
Music has the power to seduce me. A world without music would be a world without color, without dreams.
But I am not here tonight simply to enjoy the music, as attractive as the idea may be. No, my motivation for coming is far more malevolent.
I intend to murder a man.
And so I opened my eyes and stepped to the red velvet rope and waited for the doorman to admit me.
The bouncer was a veritable Goliath, arms thicker than my thighs, chest twice the breadth of my own. He had a shaved head and artfully groomed facial hair and wore an electronic listening device in one ear. It looked like a plastic insect feeding from his ear canal.
I had to wrench my eyes from the throbbing blue vein in his ox-like neck. The hunger was burning in my guts, squeezing my intestines between its taloned claws. Young men and women pressed behind me, drunk and loud, eager like me to gain entrance to this temple of sound. Innocent souls, they were ignorant of the very real danger they had stumbled upon tonight. They rubbed their plump, sweating bodies against me, making me squeeze my hands into fists for fear of turning and ripping their throats out.
Throughout the millennia, I have lost control of myself more than I care to recall. I have devoured entire tribes in the hot red grip of my bloodlust. Some vampires can easily move among our human prey, pushing aside the bloodthirst without too much difficulty, but not I. I have always been far too easily tempted, prone to bouts of savagery in spite of my gentler nature.
For a moment I felt like I was drowning in a sea of human smells: their salty human sweat and sex pheromones, the coppery scent of human blood sluicing through all that succulent flesh. I wanted to bite them, rend open their throats and suck them dry--
Get a grip on yourself, monster!
The bouncer finally deigned to notice me.
“Namen?”
“Valessi,” I replied.
The name I use in this modern era is Valessi. Gaspar Valessi.
He consulted a clipboard, began to shake his head.
Impatient, I hissed, “Let me enter!”
“Sorry, friend. You’re not on the list.”
I was a little surprised he refused to admit me to the nightclub, as I had pitched my voice to influence his mind. It is a trivial skill. Any vampire can master it, if that is something that they care to do. It only takes a few of your mortal lifespans to get the hang of it. He should have obeyed me without thought. Instead, he crossed his ridiculously muscular arms and scowled down at me like I was a child.
I realized then that it was the music. The music coming from inside the club had interfered with my carefully pitched tonalities, so I adjusted the frequency of my voice to accommodate the bass thumps pulsing through the steel doors—a bit trickier—and gave it another try.
“Step aside, you oaf. Let me pass!” I demanded.
The man’s eyes fluttered. For a moment he looked confused, then he unhooked the velvet rope with a blank expression and gestured for me to proceed.
I slipped through the door, feeling somewhat guilty. The temptation to abuse one’s preternatural abilities is a powerful one, but it is a danger I strive to resist. I need only remind myself of the Dark Ages, when the Catholics very nearly harried my kind to extinction, and I am duly chastised.
I passed though a brief antechamber decorated in the Roman style. Reproductions of Pompeian art—most of it quite raunchy-- adorned the walls of small alcoves, evenly spaced between faux marble pillars. I was impressed. The Pompeians were a very open-minded and sensual people. This modern world is not so liberal.
Plaster casts of Mount Vesuvius’s victims curled on the floor below the erotic frescos, bodies contorted in the throes of their final agonies. They were crude, cruel reproductions. Juxtaposed against the sexually explicit murals, I found it all a tad gauche. That’s just one man’s opinion, of course, but I was present when the volcano erupted. I lost a woman I loved when the great wall of burning ash came roaring down the mountain.
The lights in the corridor throbbed in synch with the music. I passed a group of giggling young women-- tight clothing, breasts exposed like French aristocrats, half spilling from their bodices. A couple of them gave me a quick appraising glance, then I pressed through an interior door, and the music swallowed me whole.
2
Inside, techno pulsed loudly enough to damage human eardrums. Patterns of light scintillated across the ceiling and walls, flashing red, orange, purple. Young humans threw their sweaty bodies around the dance floor or mingled together at the bar or the tables, hoping to find a mate to accompany them home for the night... Or, at the very least, a momentary distraction from an otherwise mundane existence: a fight, a thrilling bit of gossip, the flash of an attractive stranger’s eye across the crowded chamber.
They waved plastic sticks filled with luminous fluid, sketching the air with serpentine streaks of pastel light. They snorted coca powder up their noses and poured alcoholic beverages down their gullets by the gallons.
It reminded me of the Bacchanal-- or any of Rome’s countless drunken festivals.
You humans...! Always yearning for distraction. I don’t know how you can find your lives that tedious. They are so brief. So very, very brief.
Of course, such things are relative. To me your lives are
fleeting sparks. They rise up from the fire, twirling like little stars, to wink for a moment in incandescent glory before dying away, lost to the winds of eternity.
And this club--! This seething nightclub, these celebrants-- so tame in comparison to the sights I have seen. I, who witnessed the gladiatorial games of Rome in its heyday, who can recount the pantheon of Haman, a country-- and the gods its people worshipped, which they called the Vitae-- lost now to time but for my undying memories. I marched in the Bacchanalia, and watched in wonder and disbelief as the Bacchae, the crazed female worshippers of the Roman god of wine, tore their clothes from their bodies and ran wild through the streets, raping the men and the boys… even the dogs!
My name in this modern era is Gaspar Valessi, and I am the oldest living creature on this planet. I estimate my age at 30,000 years, although I could be off by a millennia or two. For a being as old as I, there is no accurate stick to measure the span of my existence. I was old when Homo Sapiens shared this world with other thinking beings, all of them now long extinct. I was married to a Neanderthal woman. I warmed my cheeks by the light of civilization’s first sunrise.
Do you know who I am?
You, butterfly child, you press your body against mine as I cut through the thrashing crowd, smiling with your blood-colored lips, arching your breasts toward me, so full and soft to the touch. Don’t you feel the lifeless chill that emanates from my flesh? Don’t you see the strange luster of my skin, or notice its unnatural inflexibility? Do you not know how you tempt the monster inside me? You run your fingers across the front of my trousers, laughing at your own audacity. Do you think you can shock me with your forwardness?
You have no idea!
If you knew the thoughts that burned through my mind at your touch, like falling stars streaking across a blackened sky, you would run screaming from this place. Join a convent. Dedicate your life to the Christian god.
I seize you by the throat. My grip is cold steel. Irresistible. I push you down on the floor as you struggle in vain to pull my fingers from your neck. Your eyes bulge, your bloody lips split open to loose a scream of disbelief and terror. I tear open the front of my trousers, releasing my totem like a beast from its cage, and then I rip away your garments, sweep them from your flesh as if they were made of tissue. I penetrate you, make you cry out, and then, even as you claw at my back, trying to force me off you, I penetrate you again, my fangs hooking into your flesh as savagely as my organ hooks into your sex, fucking you, feeding on you, until you’re as cold and lifeless as I am.
I would never do such a thing, of course! Not to someone as innocent as you. Not unless I was starved for blood. But your youth, your beauty… it tempts me. It tempts the monster that dwells within me. My soul is a terrible pit of ravenous vipers. Be careful that you don’t fall in!
Yes, that’s right. You’ve guessed my secret.
I am the vampire Gon.
No ordinary vampire, I am the Most Ancient One. The ghost god of the blood drinkers. For many thousands of years I have kept my identity a secret, but loneliness has driven me to publish my memoirs, to reveal myself to the human world, if only in the guise of gothic fiction.
Others of my kind have taken notice.
Have I told you that?
I have gotten very angry electronic mail from some of them. They are surprised by my revelations, and filled with self-righteous indignation at my reckless disregard for our secrets.
They speak of laws. They threaten retribution.
Bah! I do not fear them—not even the eldest!
My kind are too few now to have any real society. We have no laws for me to break. And even if there were a multitude to rise up en mass to silence me, who would carry out my punishment? Who among my brothers and sisters has the strength to challenge me?
Heed this warning, my immortal brethren! Gon has set up house in Belgium. This city is off limits to all of you, save those I have loved or made into immortals. You throw away your life if any of you dare venture into my territory!
My race is most rare, and yet I am singular. The oldest. The most powerful.
Indestructible, they whisper, in whatever dark crypts those self-righteous demons choose to haunt, and they are correct.
Many have tried to kill me, even my own vampire children, yet I am still here, the hoary grandfather of a deathless race.
But I don’t like to brag.
Of course, I must appear to you, butterfly child, like any other human male. Early middle-age, handsome, longhaired and bearded. You have not guessed my secret yet, have you, little one? You see me here in this club, my white flesh disguised by cosmetics, and you think that I am just another 30-year-old “dude”, too old by your standards to be in this thundering place. I should be home with my wife and my children, you probably think. You believe you play a game with me, torturing some prosaic family man who has not the good sense to retire from this sport.
I could-- I should-- kill you for your presumptuousness.
No!
Damn this hunger! It is so hard to maintain my self-control in this place, with so many warm bodies writhing up against me. All this hot, blood-filled flesh, squirming against me from every direction.
You play with fire, little girl! The way you place your hand on my shoulder, the way you lean your face into mine, your silky hair-- smelling oh so clean and fine-- swirling like a dark cloud, your neck so near to my teeth.
Your ripe red lips part. You mean to speak.
I smile at you suddenly, baring my fangs.
Surprise! Fear!
I see the blood drain from your cheeks, your eyes grow wide, even as your body shrinks instinctively away from me. Your hands rise to your defense, and then I use my preternatural speed to flit through the crowd away from you, vanishing from sight, leaving you shaken, and with the unspoken admonition:
Careful, little butterfly! The world is full of spiders!
3
It had been five days since my last feeding: the pornographer and sadist Hans Loen.
Now there was a meal fit for a vampire king! Betrayed by his associate, who I’ve been holding captive in my penthouse, he was a giant of a man, well over six feet tall. Vigorous. Full of hot, delectable blood. And beautiful, too, despite the injury that had claimed his right eye and scarred the flesh of his face. In his form could be found the ultimate romantic expression, handsome prince and furious beast, all wrapped up in a single mouthwatering package. Body of an Adonis, face of a Frankenstein’s Monster. I have to confess, he was lying in pieces when I was through with him!
Oh, spare me your reproof, you tutting guardians of propriety, you waggers of fingers! The man was as much a monster as me. A deceiver. A child rapist. Delivered to me by his business partner, who is even more morally repugnant than Hans himself, if you can imagine that! Right to my door, just like you mortals order out for pizza.
I have made many moral capitulations throughout my unimaginably long life, driven as I am by this thirst for human blood, but perhaps I can win your sympathy by assuring you of this: I feed only on the wicked.
At least, I try to.
Oh, like any human addict, I have my slips. Just this previous August, I had gone to the Monos Gallery to take in a new showing. Local artist, lovely paintings. Reminded me of Cezanne. As I glided through the galleries, drinking in the sights, I was approached by an ethereal beauty, an art critic who wrote for one of the local newspapers.
She engaged me in conversation, and we talked at length about art. Her specialty was modern art. I, of course, impressed her with my knowledge of the classics.
Would you expect anything else?
She seemed quite taken with me, laughing at all my bons mots, nodding at my insights, stroking my chest and shoulders. She couldn’t keep her hands off me, and my desire for her swelled with every passing moment.
I knew I should withdraw. Flee from her presence, lest I poison her with the venom of my desires, but I was too fascinated by her—by her beauty and her
intellect. How can a man be rude to such an erudite admirer? I was helpless to resist her graces.
Before I was even aware of her intentions, she had swept me into a deserted stairwell, piercing my soul with a quiver of compliments, whispering that she had nearly fainted at the sight of me, she was completely enamored with me and that I must take her now, right here in this filthy stairwell like an animal, she wanted me so badly!
I covered her in passionate kisses, her head falling back in delight, her tiny warm fingers tangling in my hair. The flesh of her neck rashed with goosebumps at the touch of my tongue, so soft, so warm, and I thought: Just a little drink, as I press myself inside of her...
Yes, vampires can make love! The Strix, the black blood which animates us, has no quarrel with our cocks. Sex with us is dangerous for mortals, and not always pleasant if we—in our passion—let slip the reins of our true strength, but it can be done, and she wouldn’t even realize I had fed from her, if I took the utmost care!
All vampires must learn this trick if they wish to go undetected by mortals: how to bring the black blood up from their gut, how to slather it on the wound after drinking their fill. Just a drop, delivered on the tip of the tongue, and the wounds stitch right back up. And our teeth are so very, very sharp! In the throes of passion, even little pains can be a pleasure when delivered by an amorous lover. She would think it a love-bite.
“Yes! Now, Gaspar, I must have you inside me!” my beautiful art critic whispered in my ear, and so I slid myself inside her, and then I slid myself inside her.
She latched onto me as I fastened onto her, and I lost myself in the pulsing red pleasure of feeding and fucking. We could hear the low murmur of the art show attendees just beyond the door. I think it enflamed her knowing we could be caught at any moment, her reputation sullied. She wrapped her legs around me as I held her in my arms, filling her, draining her.
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 1