The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 2) Page 2

  He ignored me then in a paroxysm of rage, jerking and thrashing against his bonds. He made the chair hop up and down an inch or two. The arms of the chair squeaked as he began to twist them loose.

  I wondered if my neighbors in the suite below were home tonight, and what they must think was going on in my apartment. I’ve nodded to them in the elevator a few times. They were an older French couple, cultured and polite, he a retired banker, she his trophy wife gone just a little to seed. Not yet enough to surrender her face to the surgeon’s knife, but soon I’d wager.

  I live in an expensive penthouse and the walls are soundproof, but I’m sure they could hear the chair thumping up and down on the floor, even if it was muffled. I wondered what fantasies the rhythmic thumping would inspire in their erudite imaginations.

  I’d have to get his attention before he broke my fine antique chair and I was forced to finish this. I didn’t want to finish it—not so quickly tonight. I felt like playing with my food.

  “You like to say ‘fuck’ a lot,” I observed.

  “What?” He paused to ogle me.

  “You like to say ‘fuck’ a lot. I think you like the word. Fuck. Fucking.”

  “Yeah, so?” He twisted at the torso. My Louis XV gave a squawking protest that made me wince.

  “Did you fuck the little girl before you killed her tonight?”

  He went very still. Every single muscle in his face and neck bunched up tight as springs, ready to fly apart. I saw his cheeks turn splotchy, and his eyes lost their focus.

  Fascinated, I watched his eyes twitch: up, to the side, down. Tiny movements. Thinking fast. I could practically hear the gears in his brain whirling into sudden, frenzied motion, working quickly, trying to come up with some falsehood or excuse that might exonerate him. Finally, he squinted at me and spoke. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you lunatic,” he said.

  I laughed, a little disappointed by his lack of creativity. So it was going to be simple denial? Unfortunate. I think he might die quicker than I originally estimated.

  “No?” I asked.

  “No!”

  I leaned forward suddenly, my eyebrows rising, my smooth white brow furrowed. “You can confide in me,” I whispered. “We’re kindred spirits, you and I. I myself have killed. I’ve killed more men and women, more children, than you dare imagine. The things I’ve done in my life… they would make you faint if I told them to you. They would make your head spin. So there. You see? You can trust me to keep your secrets. You can tell me all the dark things you keep hidden in your heart. Consider me your confessor. I can absolve you of your sins. Wouldn’t you like to tell me all the wicked things you’ve done?”

  I cannot read minds, but I can sense the current of a man’s thoughts, taste the flavor of them, by observing the subtle tensing and relaxation of the facial muscles. I can smell emotion in the chemical composition of glandular secretions.

  The contractions of the pupils, the rhythm of the heart, the gleam of sweat on particular regions of the anatomy: they all inform. It is a skill that any human can develop if they wish. I’ve had 30,000 years of practice reading the body language of humans, so he might as well have written what he was thinking on a piece of paper and handed it to me.

  Confusion. Fear. Anger. There was a certain degree of incredulity. He was thinking, This can’t be real. I must be dreaming. There was also shame, and the paranoid suspicion that he’d been found out by an unknown enemy, had become the object of a revenge killing, rather than being turned over to the authorities.

  Yes, I could glean that much from his gestures and scent. The way his eyes flicked from his bonds to my face, and from there to my clothing to check for a concealed weapon, and then the dilation of his pupils as he recalled the girl he had raped and then murdered. Was she the child of an important man? I saw him wonder. Someone wealthy enough to hire an assassin?

  He was also becoming aware I was not what I appeared to be.

  His gaze returned reluctantly to my eyes, stealing little peeks at my luminous irises before skittering frantically away, a nervous suitor, his conscious mind unwilling yet to contemplate the proposal of my otherworldliness.

  He had noticed and was trying to ignore the chalky whiteness of my skin, and its odd, shimmering texture. More like marble than flesh.

  “Will you let me go if I confess?” he asked finally. There was a whiff of surrender in his tone.

  I tilted my head a little. “Do you really want to know the answer to that?” I asked him.

  He thought long and hard about that. “You’re going to kill me either way, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  I smiled, showing him my fangs. I watched the blood drain from his face, smelled the metallic odor of fear in his sudden gush of perspiration.

  “Wh- what are you?” he stammered, his gravelly voice going up a few octaves.

  “I think you can guess the answer to that question.”

  “No,” he protested.

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Lukas, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” I murmured with a smile.

  He shook his head in denial. “That’s ridiculous. This is some kind of prank. Did Maurice put you up to this? Is he watching from the closet? Maurice! God damn it! This isn’t funny!”

  “Your life will last only as long as our conversation,” I said gently. “You will share some of your life with me, and then I will share some of my life with you. If you lie to me, about anything, I will know it. My senses are a thousand times more sensitive than your own. I will smell the lie in your sweat, see it in the quiver of your pupils, and then I will kill you, more slowly, and more painfully, than you could ever imagine. Now… Do we have a bargain?”

  He nodded, his eyes beginning to glimmer.

  “NO!” I said furiously, jumping to my feet.

  He quailed back from me, squeezing his eyes shut. I smelled urine as his cock gave vent to his terror. “No tears! I will not abide them!” I roared. “I will kill you right this instant, as slowly and as painfully as I’ve promised!”

  My captive shrank back from my rage, his body quaking.

  “You think you know pain?” I hissed. Coming close to him, our noses only inches apart. “You know nothing of pain. This pain you feel right now, this weeping for a life that is drawing to an end… it is but a fleeting sting compared to the eternal black despair I have suffered through the eons! I, who have buried nations of loved ones, a thousand generations of my own children… So don’t! Insult! Me! Again!”

  My teeth snapped shut as I bit off each word, just inches from his face. I could smell the terror boiling out of his pores-- a sour odor, astringent like bleach.

  I sucked in his smell like I would suck in a mouthful of his blood, and the pleasure of it soothed my terrible wrath.

  I had become a glutton for carnal pleasure over the course of the last few thousand years. It seemed to me that I had become not just a sucker of blood, but a sucker of all earthly experiences, the ultimate tick on the ear of the world, fat and ready to burst.

  The smell of this killer’s fear-sweat was as sweet and intoxicating to me as the smell of a virgin’s unspoiled bloom.

  I wasn’t just hungry for his life blood. I was hungry for his Life.

  I hovered near him as he trembled, grinning now, breathing in his smell, then I stepped away, a pleasant smile on my face, my sudden wrath forgotten. I circled my bedroom, touching my possessions idly, enjoying the feel of them beneath my fingertips. The slick surface of my cherry wood dresser. The cold brass of an antique alarm clock.

  (I’d bought the clock in the 1920’s in a little shop in Paris, and it still worked. Fabulous thing. Like me, it just keeps ticking.)

  This is all I really have now, I thought. My addiction to sensual pleasure, my earthly possessions. These things… and my memoirs. I have not known love for many years. I was abandoned long ago by all my vampire children. Only Apollonius visits me now, and then only once or twi
ce a decade.

  Presently, I turned my attention back to the man strapped to my chair. He was still pale, shaking. “You know what I am,” I said.

  He stared at me with bulging eyes. He shook his head “no”.

  Violently.

  I laughed. “Of course you do! Your media is rife with fiction of my kind. You humans slaver over every outré tale that is set on the table before you, so long as it invokes my race. Immortality has a sweet smell, does it not? But then again, so does rotten meat.”

  He shook his head again, then I understood. It wasn’t that he didn’t know, he was shaking his head no because he didn’t want to believe it. His mind revolted at the idea.

  “Don’t deny what you know. It’s insulting. I want you to say the word. We can’t proceed without a common understanding.”

  “No,” he stammered.

  “Then I’ll kill you now,” I said, taking one step toward him.

  “No! No!” he yelped. “I’ll say it! Vampire! You’re a vampire!”

  “There,” I sighed. “Was that so hard?”

  He shook his head no again, but gentler.

  “Liar,” I laughed. I returned to my bed and sat on the edge, facing him. “Are you familiar with a book called the Arabian Nights?” I asked.

  He shrugged, dizzied a little by my sudden change of subject. “I… I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never read it.”

  I nodded, pleased that he had answered me, that he wasn’t babbling hysterically. Humans generally react two different ways when they realize what I am: horror or hysterics. Very few remain rational after I reveal myself to them, and then I must take extra caution, for they are the most dangerous ones.

  I continued: “The book, which is a very, very old one, concerns a Persian king named Shahryar, a man, we find out, who harbors some rather deep-seated issues when it comes to trust. Shahryar is a brutal ruler who, at the beginning of the tale, has been executing his virgin wives, freshly deflowered, the morning after their wedding. His first wife cuckolded him, you see, and so he decided that he would have his brides killed after their wedding night rather than give them an opportunity to shame him again. Not a very nice fellow. Kind of insecure, if you ask me. He probably had a very small penis. Eh, bien… c’est la vie!

  “Eventually, his kingdom… well, it ran out of virgins, as will happen when you go through them like Kleenex. His vizier, whose job was to provide the virgins—sort of the royal pimp, if you will—finds himself facing the prospect of unemployment (probably in a very violent and permanent way, knowing the king) due to this dearth of unspoiled maidens, so the vizier’s daughter volunteers to marry the king. You see, she’s a clever young lady. She knows the value of a good tale, so she proceeds to entertain her new husband with a story every night, only each night she leaves off with a cliffhanger.

  “Unwilling to have his wife killed until he finds out what happens next, he allows her to live yet one more day, and each night she leaves him with just the first half of the next tale.

  “Well, eventually they have children and the king falls in love with her and decides not to have her executed, so the book has a happy ending, I suppose, if you put aside all the forced matrimony and murder, but I’ve always enjoyed the book, as decadent and amoral as it is. I’ve enjoyed it since the first time I read it in Ninth Century Syria, and I still read it every couple decades.”

  I leaned forward, my eyes gleaming. “I tell you this because I propose a similar arrangement. Henceforth, we will be Shahryar and Scheherazade. We will tell each other tales—true tales, however, from our lives. Not made up fables, as in the Arabian Nights. So long as I remain entertained, you live.”

  “And when you are no longer entertained?” my captive asked.

  I let my lips split into a slow, wicked smile, showing him my fangs. “Perhaps it would be best for now to put aside such imaginings. I am offering you an opportunity. I am offering you a kind of immortality. You can share your life with me, and I will carry those memories until the end of time, or you can die with all your tales untold, and I will forget you like you’ve forgotten the dinner you had two weeks ago.”

  He looked away, his eyes narrowed.

  “Quickly! Make your decision!” I prompted him.

  “I would rather hear about you,” he said slowly.

  Oh, the devil!

  He cut his eyes toward me, clever as a fox. “Are you really a vampire?” he asked. “I mean, a real one. Not just some faggot with teeth implants, dressed in leather pants.”

  “Do you not believe your senses? Have you seen any other man with eyes that gleam like mine, with fangs like a wolf and skin like marble flecked with quartz? Have you felt, from any other living creature, the cold that emanated from my body when I stood with my teeth pressed to your throat?”

  “How old are you?” he whispered.

  I leaned back, smiling. I did not bother to conceal my fangs. There was no need, and I must admit, it was a good feeling. It was refreshing to be my true self in the presence of another living soul, without camouflage or subterfuge. I so often have to hide my true nature from others. It is a kind of self-imposed exile. Even in a room full of people, the heart grows lonely.

  “That’s always the first question!” I laughed. “I am old,” I answered him. “So old I cannot know my age for sure. I was ancient when your people first marked the lunar cycle on cave walls. Curious about that very thing myself, a hundred years ago or so, I researched the geological and archeological history your people have amassed in recent times, and from that research, I estimate my age at somewhere in the vicinity of thirty thousand years. Give or take a thousand years or so.”

  My captive, the murderer Lukas, scoffed at me.

  “You don’t believe me?” I asked. “Ah, well, it’s a rather large pill to swallow, I suppose. Perhaps I can convince you of it during our exchange. By brunt of detail? No? Then I ask you to give me the benefit of the doubt. Suspend your disbelief for just an hour or two, and let me tell you a tale. When I am finished, then you can decide if I am an honest or deceitful creature.”

  Taking a deep breath, I launched myself into my story.

  “I am the vampire Gon, and I was born a man, just like you, during a brief interglacial period in a fecund valley that was nestled among the mountain peaks of the Swabian Alb in Germany. I was born to a tribe of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers thirty thousand years ago, and it was from there, a happy fellow with many wives and children, that I was snatched away to darkness and made an immortal...”

  3

  There was nothing special about me, other than, perhaps, my uncommon height. I was not unusually clever, extraordinarily handsome or braver than my fellow tribesmen. I was a simple hunter like all the other men in my tribe. I had two wives, six children and a male companion named Brulde.

  We called ourselves the River People, as my tribe never ventured far from the waterways which meandered through our valley home. We did not wander far and wide like the Mammoth Hunters who claimed the territories to the south. We had three regular camps, and settled back and forth, from one to the other, as the seasons turned.

  My family and I lived in a cozy, dome-shaped tent, no different than any of the other families in our village. Brulde and I had fashioned our home when we were young men, after we moved from the shelter of my father, who raised the two of us. Our wetus was constructed of a curved wood frame that was bound with leather cords and had a roof of tanned animal hides. The tent had a couple flaps through which one could enter and leave and an opening at the top to let out the smoke of our cooking fire. Inside, the ground was piled with warm, thick furs. It was very comfortable. Later, after marrying, our wives hung decorations of shells and glinting stones from the ceiling, and our children played with figurines I carved for them from wood and antler.

  I was very good at carving little animals and human figures, and I loved to watch my children play with them-- my beautiful little chubby babies. I remember how they galloped their toy deer across
the ground, and how they made the little hunters I carved for them chase those deer, just like their father did when he went out to get meat for his family. My heart breaks to remember them now!

  I wish I could go back in time and change the things I did that caused me to be stolen away from my wives and babies, but even for a creature like myself, time presses forward, relentless. There are no trails that double back.

  Shall I tell you of my children? Do you even care?

  There were six of them when I was snatched away from life, when I was ripped too soon away from them. There was Gan, Hun and Breyya, and then our other three, Gavid, Den and Leth. I loved each of my children with a ferocity that makes my heart ache even now, thirty thousand years later. Breyya, my youngest girl, a little wicked snake, so quick-tempered and headstrong. My boys Gan and Hun and Gavid and Den, all of them bold and boisterous. Leth, our quiet little beauty, shy and gentle, always hiding behind her mother’s legs. Of course, you don’t love them as I do. No child is ever loved as they are loved by the ones who gave them life. I only want you to know how much it hurts to lose a child. Even thirty millennia is not enough to blunt the pain.

  I only tell you this because I want you to understand what immortality really is. I want you to understand its unbearable cost. You think immortality a wondrous thing? Come back and tell me you still believe that when you have lost every single person you have ever loved.

  Time steals them away from you, all of them, like motes of dust in a windstorm. You grasp for them, try to hold on to them, but the wind is so strong, and it plucks them from your fists, and then they are gone forever, sucked whirling into the vortex, and all you are left with is your memories, your memories and your regrets.

  A lucky vampire is one who lives but one human lifespan, who can still count the ones he’s lost on just his fingers and toes. It’s no tragedy when one such blood-drinker is destroyed, for he has escaped the awful torture of immortality.