Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  He crossed himself, unconscious of the gesture, and stepped into the heart of creation.

  *

  The Parisian Countryside

  2025 A.D.

  Year Zero: Apocalypse

  The watcher does not have long to wait until sunrise but he doesn't look out the windows to see the light coming. He has no need to. He can feel the lightening of the sky. Sense the subtle change in the air that a new day's sun brings, whether the land is polluted or fresh.

  He has known many sunrises. He knew times when the sun was brighter in the sky, when the air tasted virginal. He has known the crisp mountain air of centuries past, the tang of gunpowder on the battlefield, the stench of dried blood and shit. His nose, aquiline, is remarkably acute, as are all his sense.

  As are all the elder vampires.

  The heightening of sensation comes with age, though. The newly born vampire, conversely, can barely sense anything above a heartbeat and the warmth of flesh.

  There is a dull metallic clank as the old man's mechanical arm falls to the linoleum flooring. In its place, a nub of a new arm searches plaintively, like a baby's fist clenching onto a mother. There is no mother, just crisp white sheets. The bloody nascent fist leaves a trail as it grows slowly along the sheet.

  Born in blood.

  No doubt left, the watcher, the elder vampire, prepares his silver. He could end the change now...but he had to know. Centuries gone, centuries of waiting, learning, dying and killing and yes, living.

  He needs to know.

  He holds a thick blade up to the brightening sky. His fist smokes when he touches the blade and his face, a map of scars and pale, ghostly flesh, crinkles into a grin.

  The pain reminds him. Reminds him of times gone by.

  Part Four

  The Dark Heart

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Germany

  1697-1702

  I wish.

  Such a human phrase. Full of hope and longing.

  Humans wish for many things. They wish for the things they do not have. As the years pass, I hear it more and more. People wish for more as the centuries slide by. By the start of the eighteenth century, you could hear it in city streets, in towns and villages across the whole of Europe. People dreaming of life they perceived as somehow better, more fulfilling than the lives they had. People, not a collection of singular entities, but some vast organism, connect by hopes, biology, society, civilisation itself…but more than anything connected by one simple phrase; I wish.

  I shunned people during those years, because I looked the part they would imagine for me. I looked like a monster. I was a glutton for blood in those years, feeding until my stomach was bloated, pregnant with blood. No matter how much I fed though, my wounds did not close. I could not heal. The fire had burned me deeper than I had thought. I walked with a pronounced limp. I shuffled like an old man. My heels had been stripped of flesh by the fire. The blood could not heal me. I did not know what to do.

  I bound my seeping flesh and hunted, slowed by pain and disability. My hands were weeping claws, my face hideous and disfigured. I could not be seen. The sun burned like the fire and I only left my hide that I built in different places when night fell and there was no moon.

  People screamed when they saw me. I could not run after them. I could not feed as much as my wounds needed. I needed a thousand souls, a million, to heal these hurts. I fed on everyone I could. Whole families fell to my blood lust. Travellers on the road. Once, when the pain was a bolt of lightening within every fibre of my ruined body, I allowed the hunger to lead me into a village where I drained the blood from each family in each house.

  I looked like a monster, but I am not. I am not purely led by hunger and desire. I do not kill because of some mental aberration. I do not kill without purpose, as many humans through the ages have.

  I kill to eat. I kill to heal. I kill so that I might live.

  But no matter how much I fed the pain would not leave. My wounds were so great even the blood could not sooth the hurt. The flesh would not close. With my wounds open to the world perhaps I should have grown sick with all the foulness of the world, but my blood would not let me sicken and die.

  I wanted to die. At times I truly did. A mortal cannot imagine the pain of wounds that will not heal. For years, walking on broken feet. Every inch of your body open to the whistle of the wind and the sawing motion of even the softest fabrics. Your blood seeping from your wounds every day, your muscles and tendons visible where skin cannot grow.

  There are many things that can kill a vampire. Left alone, perhaps we are immortal. Fire is the worst. Minutes more, in the fire, and I would not have survived. Perhaps because I had been able to feed afterward I had survived what I should not. I had found my fear.

  But humans wish, all people wish.

  I am made of human flesh, too. I have that capacity. I discovered it in those days drenched in pain. I found what I wanted, and in doing so rediscovered some of the human within me. I became sure that once, I had been human too.

  A human who had somehow learned immortality. But I was not so different. I still wished. I wished to die.

  *

  Chapter Fifty

  Romania

  1702

  I suppose, in my way, I went back to Romania to die. I wanted to smell the soil again. I wanted to see the mountains and smell the clean air that blew down from the snowy peaks.

  It was cold on my journey. I had taken to walking naked again, and the cold was biting but better than the grating feel of cloth on my burnt skin. I removed the bandages and allowed the whistling wind to blow across my wounds. It was like a caress.

  I felt a burst of joy as I saw the mountains rise before me. Crossing those mountains was a story in itself, but perhaps one for another day.

  After a month I reached the Transylvanian plateau, the place of my birth. Perhaps it was not the true land of my birth. I must have had a human mother once. But when I came to my awareness, became a conscious creature, I was on that plateau. It was there that I wanted to die.

  One morning I reached the spot where I thought I had been born. Not far away there was a town where there had once been a village. There were fewer trees and more farms. I skirted those. I did not wish to feed. The hunger was there, but it was not curing what ailed me. I didn’t abstain. I just couldn’t find the energy to feed, or the will to try and catch a meal with my clawed hands and my torn feet.

  I shunned the places where men lived and wandered into the wilds. I found a grassy plain, a smattering of snow on the ground giving it a patchy look. It was the time between winter and spring, but it was much colder back then. Nearby there was an abandoned farm. The roof of the farmhouse had long ago fallen in and one wall was crumbling. I supposed those who had lived there had died of some sickness or fled one of the many wars of the last century. It was not my concern. I had found my place. It was in the shadow of the great mountains, the Carpathians. There were trees around. It was dark and there was a thin sliver of moon in the night.

  My five-year long depression lifted for long enough to allow me to appreciate the beauty of the view. I suppose a human would find the daytime vista more enlightening, but I could see the shape of the mountains in the darkness, make out the snow low on their slopes, each branch of the bare trees and the beginnings of their buds, early and grateful after a respite in the long winter.

  I sat that way, legs out in front of me, propped on my arms, staring off at the mountains. Eventually I felt the dawn approaching. I never wanted to smell another dawn.

  I suppose I could have set fire to myself, or tried to remove my own head, but I could not face the pain.

  Instead, I dug into the earth. My hands burned and bled and then the flesh began to strip away until I could see the tips of my finger bones through my skin. I did not stop though. This would be the last pain I would have to endure.

  Pain had almost become an old friend. Sometimes when people suffer deep depression and they can fe
el no joy, pain can be a relief. I felt that way. The pain was better than the numbness that I felt in my heart.

  Eventually I had a hole big enough and deep enough to crawl into. I rolled into the hole, exhausted. Then I pulled as much earth into the hole as I could, covering what I could manage, then shifted around so that not an inch of me was left in the open.

  I cannot describe well what it is like to be coddled in the earth after years of pain. If you could be a baby inside a mother’s womb, perhaps you could feel what I felt. The earth was cool. I had no sight. The earth was crisp and laid its cold hand on every inch of my naked body. It held me tight and loved me with its cold embrace.

  I laid that way and felt the motion of the earth. I felt it rock and turn. I sensed the sun rise above, and the sunset. My mind slowed, like a bear’s mind must as it lies hibernating.

  I did not die. I drifted in the arms of the Earth and after a time, perhaps it was weeks, perhaps it was years, I finally slept.

  *

  Chapter Fifty-One

  1702-1843

  Transylvanian Plateau

  At first I was unaware of anything but the earth on my skin, always cool, always soothing. I think perhaps I was dreaming, but occasionally I felt rumblings overhead. It might have been caravans, or it could have been something heavier, perhaps cannons and horses. I heard people’s voices too, and distant heartbeats muted by the beat of the earth and the constant low grumbling of the mountains shifting. Mostly, though, I drifted, unaware of the world passing by above.

  I dreamt of many things, pure dreams that were uninfluenced by the sporadic noises that came from above. I dreamt of distant places I had never travelled to. In my dreams people spoke my native tongue, which I came to understand was English. Sometimes I was speaking to soldiers, sometimes scientists, but their garb was strange. The soldiers wore a uniform I could not place. Their muskets were unusual, too. I understood in the dream that these were different places. Strange fantasy realms thrown up by the mind. They were places that could not exist.

  The buildings were different, too. There were buildings larger than any palace or castle that I had ever seen. The glass of their windows shimmered silver in the bright sunlight. Instead of sprawling across the landscape like a palace they towered into the sky. Perhaps, I thought, this is the realm of angels. This is a kind of heaven, and the angels perch atop those aeries firing down flaming arrows onto mankind. What else could a man from my age think of such marvels?

  A dream sent from God full of impossibilities. Such buildings would tumble before they reached such heights. There were carriages of steel and glass on strange wheels that looked too small to bear their weight. How could a carriage be pulled without horses? For that matter, how could a man write words onto paper that was not paper, without means of a quill? Where did the words come from? Who remembered them, if they were not in a book?

  I saw dogs that were like nothing I had seen before, people who were beautiful beyond belief but somehow wrong, their teeth were all perfect and their smiles untroubled. The sunlight shone differently, there were trees growing from stone, miles of paved road, wealth I could not imagine. More people wore gold and fabrics in hues I could not imagine but through the medium of a dream.

  I was not afraid. These were not daydreams. They must be sent from God. A vision of a world beyond mortal…perhaps this was a place for me. A land beyond this Earth that would accept me, take me into its arms and hold me close like the dirt that was my bed.

  I thought these thoughts throughout my dreams. Sometimes I had more mundane images in my sleeping mind, of feeding, most often, but of wars fought by men with swords, still, not muskets. A couple I had met once danced in my memory/dream and I watched by the bright light of a campfire.

  The dreams came thick and fast. Images seemed to bleed from one to another, changing and sometimes fantastic in scope, sometimes plain, sometimes comforting and sometimes frightening. Even a vampire can have nightmares.

  I saw myself strapped to a metal bed in a shining room. My leg was sawn from my body by a man wearing a white coat, whiter than the purest snow, but he was no angel. He was cutting my leg from my body. Later he came back and put something into my head. I screamed in the dream but my body would not let me wake.

  And so my mind shifted from one thing to another. One minute or day or year I could be in a world of such grandeur and magnificence that my heart leapt with the joy of rapture to see it, the next I could be tortured, imprisoned, dissected, the next dancing with a woman in a fine dress with a pearl necklace, but I did not feed on her, the next Radu passed through my dreams and spoke words that I did not understand. Switching with a jarring bolt of light I would be in a battle, or a small shack huddling in the cold but relishing the solitude, eating a hog burnt crisp spinning on a spit, burning myself as I spun above the pit in place of the hog, singing a rousing tune among dirty men in another language I did not understand…

  The dreams came and went and became mixed up.

  Then one day I was dreaming of a woman I had seen before and I heard a wagon or perhaps it was one of the horseless carriages, or a (tank) or a (lorry) or a cart. Then there was a disturbance in the dirt above me.

  I heard someone speaking, in a language I did not fully understand. People had passed this way before, but I had managed to largely ignore them. The language was largely Romanian, but with words and cadences that I did not fully understand.

  I tried to go back to my dream. It was no use. After a time they began to sing and there were instruments playing. I felt the earth tremble and I understood that they were dancing. I opened my eyes for the first time in many, many years. I listened to their hearts quicken and my heart quickened.

  My hunger was awake.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  1843

  It is not easy to dig yourself out of a hole. You have very little leverage, and your arms are at your side. But I have immense strength. My long sleep had replenished me. Even though I had not fed while I had been in the earth, this time I had not been dead. I did not need to feed to wake. My heart went from perhaps one beat for every ten minutes to a beat a minute…then two…I felt the old power running through me. I began to struggle against the dirt, pushing and wriggling as best I could. Over the years the hole had got deeper and tighter.

  After what seemed like hours, although there really is no way to tell the passage of hours within the earth, I pushed up with my hand and felt the cool night breeze on my fingertips. My fingers tingled madly in the sudden change of temperature and the wind awakened nerve endings in my fingers that had been dead before my long hibernation. I pulled myself through the earth. My head broke the surface. At first I could see nothing. I thought for a moment that I had become blind over the years, but it was just dirt gumming my eyes. I wiped them clean and peered through the dark and the people dancing and cavorting in the clearing away from me. I saw that trees had grown up around me while I had been asleep. They were dancing in a clearing among the young trees. There was a camp that consisted of perhaps forty people. Women, children and men all danced to a happy rhythm played out on pipes and string instruments and a set of hand drums.

  They danced, whirling in the soft breeze. The women’s skirts splayed out as they danced, fluttering like the flames from their campfire. I watched, mesmerised. I sat that way for quite some time, relishing the sound of the music and the sight of their bright dancing. I was hypnotised by the wind on my naked skin, the rhythm of the night, their colours and their lives, their verve as they leapt and laughed and sang their strange songs.

  It might seem strange that I have not heard music but the drums of battle in all my long years. Imagine never hearing a song or singing for centuries, then waking to an ancient tune full of joy and hope. Imagine the way your heart would sing and want to be part of that joy. Then imagine living in silence for a hundred years before you hear that sound and you might understand the impact their song had on me.

  I wanted to dance and join in
. I wanted to be a part of their circle, holding hands with their women and twirling them so that their skirts might rustle in the silent moments of the dance.

  I knew I could not be one of these happy people. I was not their kind. I was full of hunger. I lusted for blood while they revelled in the dance.

  I could not be one with them. But perhaps, I thought, there was another way. I pulled myself from the earth and walked toward the camp.

  I saw their caravans, then, and realised that these were their homes. While they were distracted I walked toward a stream I had felt from within the woods. Along the way I heard a rustling in the bushes and a hammer-like heart beat, strong and virile in its youth. I ran the deer down and drank my fill of its blood. The hunger abated, although I knew it would not be long. But then my need for blood seemed to have diminished somewhat after my long sleep. My body’s desires were slowing, it seemed, with age. In many ways the dirt had nourished me. It had seeped into my wounded body and healed the hurts.

  My feet were whole. My hands unmarred underneath the blood and dirt. I was healed and stronger than I had been for years.

  There was food in the dirt. I wished I had learned to sleep before now. Perhaps my troubles would have lessened if I had know I could just creep into the dirt to heal. I should have understood as much after my short initial life, before an axe wound to the head had knocked me insensible. It was the earth that had healed me. The earth was, in many ways, my mother. I had only to creep back into her womb to grow new flesh.

  After feeding I returned on my walk to the stream. There, I washed the dirt of hibernation from my skin, tore my finger and toenails short, scrubbed my long hair and beard until the skin underneath was clean and burning from the cold water.