He nodded, his back to me. “I understand,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
I was sitting in the parlor, listening to “Gloria” from “Mass for Four Voices” on the phonograph player when he exited the bathroom. He stopped in the middle of the parlor, waiting for some sign of dismissal from me. The clothes I had purchased for him were a bit snug, but he looked presentable. Quite handsome, actually. He would be a beautiful, perfect beast of a vampire. His hair, still wet, fell across his brow like the glossy black wings of a crow.
Aside from a couple fading bruises, he was none the worse for wear.
“Your wallet is on the table,” I said. “I put some extra money in it for you.”
He retrieved his wallet, flipped through the bills, stuffed it into his back pocket.
“I suggest you indulge whatever mortal vices you hold dear,” I said. “Get drunk. Or high. Whatever you will. It will be the last time you are able to do such a thing. And you will miss it when the deed is done. Believe me.”
He nodded, his face very grave.
“Your coat. It is cold outside.”
He shrugged into his jacket.
“Where do you plan to go?” I asked.
I was merely curious.
“I don’t know. Home, I suppose. For a little while. Then maybe the pubs. Or a club. I might even hire a prostitute.” He grinned. “Or two.”
I nodded. Gestured for him to leave.
He went to the door. Hesitated. When I did not rise to attack him, he let out his breath and stepped into the corridor.
“I will return,” he murmured, and then he shut the door.
5
“Mass for Four Voices” ended with a mechanical clatter, and silence rushed to fill my apartment. Self-loathing propelled me from my seat. I put my forehead against the door, my eyes shut. I heard the chime of the elevator at the end of the corridor, the swish of its doors parting. Lukas stepped inside and pressed the button for the lobby. In the apartment below, my erudite French neighbors were enjoying a late supper. I could hear them speaking, their voices genteel and proper. Henri, the retired banker, complimented his wife on the waterzooie. His wife, Josette, replied demurely, “Merci, j'ai juste fait.” The scraping of their silver set my teeth on edge. Anxiously tapping a toe, Lukas Jaeger descended in the elevator cab, gliding smoothly past their suite to the ground floor.
I paced around my apartment then, trying to ignore the voices in my head. They shouted condemnations: You have made a pact with the devil, Gon! You have fallen!
If I believed in the Christian hell, I would have trembled.
The condemnations swelled in volume, growing louder and louder until it seemed my skull would split in two.
I put my palms over my ears, though I knew it was a futile gesture.
Thirty thousand years, and I have never purposely committed an evil act!
Trying to defend myself, to silence the thundering critics.
I have done evil. Oh, yes! This curse has compelled me to do unspeakable things. My crimes are innumerable. But never on purpose, never with such cold-blooded calculation.
You will unleash a monster on this world, the voices accused.
“I know,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
So this is what damnation feels like, I thought.
I have never understood the Christian concept of damnation. My people worshipped their ancestors. We did not believe our mistakes clung to us like a stain, that they pursued us into the afterlife, where some stern and judgmental deity punished us for our shortcomings. It seemed rather hypocritical for a god to create flawed beings, then discipline them for the way He had made them, wouldn’t you say? Yet, releasing the rapist and murderer had left me feeling sullied, unclean. I was horrified by my own ruthlessness. I would have prayed for forgiveness if I believed in the god of the Hebrews. Not even my ancestors, I feared, could forgive such a terrible transgression!
I ran to my phonograph player and stacked up my favorite recordings. I tried to distract myself by working on my memoirs. As Puccini’s “Tosca” thundered in my apartment, my fingers flew over the keys of my laptop computer, but the thread of my narrative was hopelessly snarled with guilt and self-recrimination. I erased more than I wrote, and finally abandoned my efforts in frustration.
I tried to persuade myself to pursue the villain, to hunt him down and kill him, as I should have done the moment I saw him. He could not have gone far. It would be a simple task to track him down, especially at this time of night, when the streets were so deserted. I would take him quickly. Yes, that is what I would do! Snatch him at speed so that the impact rendered him unconscious. He would not even know that I had reneged on our contract.
Now! Before it’s too late! Hunt him! Kill him!
But I did not do it. Instead, I cleaned his bedchamber. (Yes, I do my own housekeeping!) I stripped his stinking sheets, put fresh linens on his mattress. I vacuumed the carpet, disposed of the chain with which I’d bound him.
As I tucked in his fitted sheet, I discovered a spoon that he’d been sharpening. It was hidden beneath his mattress. Naughty boy, I thought, examining the shiv, and for some reason the whole situation struck me as being fantastically hilarious. Standing there beside his bed, sharpened spoon in hand, I began to laugh.
A shiv! It was so ridiculous!
I did not even notice it missing from whatever dinner tray he’d stolen it from.
I found the scrape marks on the frame of his bed where he’d been sharpening his makeshift weapon. He must have been doing it while I slept during the day. He was nothing if not persistent, I thought, still smiling in amusement.
I threw the spoon into the waste bin atop the coiled chain and empty food containers, then exited his room.
His room…
You should not think of him as a guest, I chastised myself. He is a tool, nothing more.
A means to an end.
6
He returned, just as he said he would. I could hear him waiting for me in the corridor. His footfalls, padding restlessly up and down the hallway. He paced like a wild animal in a cage.
Let him wait, I thought petulantly.
I bathed, put on some fresh clothes, watched the last light of day bleed out of the sky. The heavens had cleared while I slept through the daylight hours. The snowstorm had dumped its freight of ice upon the city and moved on. The wind, when I stepped out on my balcony, was as cold and sharp as the razor of a back alley killer.
In the corridor, Lukas paced.
Finally, lazily, I went and let him in. I was afraid he would accost some passing neighbor if I put him off much longer.
“I told you I’d come back,” he said, grinning his shark-like grin.
“Enter freely, and of your own will,” I said gravely. I did not ask him to leave something of the happiness he brought.
If he took note of my jest, he gave no sign of it.
“It’s colder than a witch’s tit outside,” he said, edging around me into the apartment. “At least it stopped snowing.”
I was somewhat taken aback that he could enter my lair with such seeming lack of concern. Perhaps he intended to put me off balance with a show of braggadocio. I half expected him to hand me his jacket as if I were some common diener.
“I have been debating whether I should renege on our agreement,” I said, closing the door behind him. “Your lack of respect for these proceedings does not argue in your favor.”
His eyes flashed toward me. His grin withered. “We had an deal!” he protested.
I shrugged.
“I am not sure you grasp the gravitas of our contract,” I replied. “If I do not feel confident that you will uphold your side of our bargain, I will dispose of you and look for someone more trustworthy. This is not a game. There are no rules for you to bend. If you do not take this serious, I will kill you in the most terrible and painful fashion you can imagine.”
And then I grinned, making sure he saw my fangs.
&n
bsp; I stepped toward him.
He shuffled back involuntarily, visibly alarmed. I smelled his sudden fear. His heart skipped a beat and then began to race.
“Nein! Nein!” he stammered, holding up a hand. “Have no misgivings. I am very serious about the bargain we have struck!”
“I hope so,” I said. “For your sake.”
He fell into step behind me as I started across the apartment. “So… what’s next, Drac?” he asked.
“We talk,” I answered. “As we did before.”
We passed into the dining area. I sat at the table and he eased into a chair across from me, folding his hands in front of him. I could see out the window just past his right shoulder. Liege, surrounded by her forested hills. The Belgian city does not have the most impressive skyline. There are few truly tall buildings. Still, I enjoyed the twinkling of her lights, the way the hills enfolded them, like giant hands cupping something delicate and pretty. The intimacy of the city appealed to my reclusive nature.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked, reaching into his jacket. He slid a pack of Gauloises Blondes from his shirt pocket as I gestured my acquiescence. “I quit smoking for my health several years ago,” he explained with a grin, “but I figure it doesn’t really matter now. Our arrangement can only have two outcomes.”
“True,” I agreed.
He lit a cigarette and breathed out a cloud of redolent gray smoke.
“Ashtray?” he inquired.
“In the kitchen cabinet above the oven.”
“Danke.”
When he had returned to the table, he tapped his ash and said, “So I suppose we continue with your story.”
“Yes.”
“You followed the escaped slaves to their homeland,” he summarized. “During the journey, you discovered that your adopted son had gotten one of the slave women pregnant. Most importantly, you realized that the Tanti were descendants of your original tribe… your grandchildren to the nth degree.”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” I replied, oddly impressed with him.
Criminals are usually stupid. I am always surprised when they display some cleverness.
But his mind is broken in other ways, I reminded myself. He is bereft of empathy, not intellect. Do not forget.
I tried to decide how I should resume my narrative, but it was difficult. My present concerns overshadowed those ancient memories, made them seem less consequential.
“I would like to linger on the days I spent among the Tanti,” I finally said. “It was a happy time for me. For the first time in several thousand years, I felt as though I belonged to a community again. I felt whole. We are social creatures, after all. It is our nature to seek out the society of those who are like ourselves. Though I am a vampire, a cold white mutant monster, my soul has always been the soul of a mortal man, and I was happy among the Tanti. So indulge me if I linger on the season that I spent among them longer perhaps than its import to this tale deserves.”
Life Among the Tanti
1
The Tanti were the descendants of the tribe I was born to millennia before, but a great gulf of time separated the Tanti from the people of the German valley from whence I’d come. Seven thousand years, to be exact.
Seven thousand years is nearly the whole of recorded human history, and yet the days I speak of now to you, sitting here in this snow-covered city, is four times that length receding into the past, and the bucolic summers of my mortal life yet another seven thousand years deeper still.
The Tanti were much changed from the River People who had occupied the forested valley of the Swabian Alb. So much so that I had only gradually come to recognize our familial relationship. The Tanti were shorter and stockier than they had been in the past, owing, I am sure, to the rigors of the last glacial epoch. They were no longer the lanky forest dwellers I remembered from my mortal life. Their forms had slowly adapted to the long chill that was by then only just loosening its grip upon the world. While I lay insensate in my prison of creeping ice, they had shrunk, gotten fatter and more muscular. The physical alterations were also influenced, I suspect, by the Neanderthal DNA that my unusual group family had thrown into the mix. My tentmate Brulde and I had both made babies with our Neanderthal wife Eyya, and those vigorous hybrid children had lived to make even more mixed species children. Seven thousand years later, the influence of those Neanderthal genes was faint, a weak chin here, a sloping forehead there, but it was easy enough to discern the lingering traits once I realized who the Tanti were. And there were even a few among the Tanti—throwbacks, I suppose you could call them—who resembled their Fat Hand ancestors to a remarkably large degree. Enough to give me pause when I first saw them among the others.
The noble race we now call Neanderthals, the people I had so admired when I was a young man—so much so that I’d taken one of their women for a wife—had strut and fret their hour upon the stage. They had passed from the world of living men but for a dwindling essence, which their surviving cousins, Homo sapiens, carried forward through time like a guttering candle. Their bloom had withered while I lay insensate in the ice, but they lived on in the Tanti, just as they live on to this modern era in many of you.
Height and weight were not the only physical changes the ice age had wrought upon my people. The sexual dimorphism of my descendants had become more pronounced. The women were fuller in the breasts and hips, their behavior more submissive. It was another ice age adaptation-- one that has only recently begun to reverse itself. The women of my mortal era were much like your modern females—assertive and athletically built. More so than the buxom and dutiful Tanti women. They were not masculine, the women of my day, simply more self-possessed and powerful. The Tanti men had changed as well. Their features were more crudely drawn, their bodies hairier. They were also much more aggressive than the men of my era, more confrontational and domineering. I suppose natural selection chose those traits—aggressive males, submissive females—over the more egalitarian gender roles I was accustomed to. Extreme environmental conditions breed extreme cultures-- even gross physical adaptations, given a long enough span of time-- and my people were no more exempt from this rule than any other race.
Physical appearance was not the only way my people had changed in the intervening millennia. In times of plenty, when there is less pressure on a group to reproduce and provide for their young, sexual mores become more relaxed. I was born at the end of a long interglacial period, a time of abundance and ease. When I was a mortal man, food was plentiful and there was little competition between my people and neighboring clans. Because of that, my tribesmen were lazy and laid back. There were few cultural restraints placed upon our sexuality. We had group families, traditions of wife sharing, ritualized orgies. Homosexual behavior was not only tolerated, it was an institute of our culture.
The sexual practices of the Tanti were much like the sexual customs of this modern era. Orgies were no longer a part of their religious celebrations. A man took only one or two wives, and homosexuality was frowned upon. Men no longer shared their wives with visitors. In fact, Tanti men and women had become quite jealous of their mates, and extramarital affairs had become a punishable offense. As I’m sure you’ve already deduced, jealousy and intolerance have distinct evolutionary advantages, especially in times of deprivation and hardship.
Their technology had advanced. They no longer lived in crude domed tents and caves, which was the standard when I was a living man. They lived in lodges made of wood and stone, with thatched roofs. Though they had rudimentary furniture—benches, tables and shelves—they still slept on mats of woven reeds, padded with fur and primitive textiles. In the center of the village was a community workshop, a freestanding structure with a central hearth. There, a variety of tools and weapons were constructed of wood and bone and stone by the Tanti men. To supply the large community with tools as efficiently as possible, the men sat in a line and passed the work down from man to man, each performing only one task in their production. An early
assembly line! Other groups worked as boatsmen or hunters. All hours of the day, and sometimes into the night, Tanti fishermen plied the still waters of the lake, fishing with string and hook or with woven nets. The hunters stalked the dense forest that surrounded the village, armed with spears and bows.
The women were just as industrious as the men—perhaps more so. While the older women looked after the children, the younger women foraged for fruits and vegetables and nuts and berries and grains. They prepared meals together at the communal cooking pits that stood alongside the central lodge. They made and mended clothes in what I suppose you could call “sewing circles”. They even tended to the community’s livestock—goats and pigs, which they kept penned near the tannery, and a type of domesticated fowl (extinct now) which they called Nukku.
I realize you’re thinking, “But, Gon, archeologists say mankind did not raise livestock or plant crops until much later.” I assure you, however, neither of these things was invented by any particular culture at any particular time. They are technologies that were developed by man again and again-- lost, reacquired, and lost again—until the invention of written language some thirteen thousand years later. Until mankind learned to preserve its knowledge, mortals lived in a constant state of forgetfulness, a perpetual dream existence, its progress lost to disaster, disease and warfare like sleeping fantasies flee when one is woke abruptly. Before written language, all knowledge was passed down orally, easily lost should a single link in the chain of telling be removed. It also resulted in exaggeration, not to mention outright lies and misinterpretation.
In other words: religion.
The spiritual beliefs of my people had grown quite elaborate over the course of seven thousand years. Crossbred with the myths of all the other cultures they had encountered during their ice age wanderings, the Tanti had become polytheistic god-worshippers. They still believed the spirits of their ancestors resided in the heavens, but they now held that the journey to the afterlife could not be made by man alone. They insisted that the spirit must be carried there by one of their deities, and then only after his deeds had been weighed by his patron god, the good versus the bad. If a soul were not judged worthy of Esselem, the Tanti word for the afterlife, they believed that person’s life-force remained bound to the physical plane, a miserable wandering spirit, until such a time as their suffering put paid to whatever misdeeds they’d committed while they were alive.
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 3) Page 16