Wherein a new realisation of self is made, and a new acquaintance leads to disturbing questions…
I knew what I was, of course.
The savagery with which I had intruded upon the rutting couple last night, the rush I felt after the act, left no room for doubt as to my true nature. My kind is called many names, and many theories as to our origin exist, none to my knowledge are accurate. We are like cast-out angels, indeed there are those among us who claim our heritage springs from the expelled angels of the first Biblical war in heaven. The Lightbringer, the Morningstar took many angels with him when he “fell”, and many of my kind claimed his blood or the blood of his followers flow in our communal veins. Others claim that we are spirit made flesh, some unholy creation resulting from a mistake, a spirit overly desirous of physical embrace trapped and doomed to ever destroy the beings it attempted to blend with. There are those that take a much more moralistic approach. We are sinners, suicides and heretics, doomed by a vengeful God to prey upon the physical bodies of righteous humans as we once preyed upon their morals and values when we were alive.
I ascribe truth to none of these. I was neither sinner nor heretic, suicide nor fallen angel, before I awoke to this existence. I conducted no black magick rite, invoked no daemon and prayed to no Dark God to end up here. I was gifted with this curse by some device, the means of which I have not understood.
My search for the truth of my purpose continues.
I lay in my stone tomb and felt the darkness rising about me, the falling of the day and the triumph of the night. Felt it like a child feels a mother’s warm blanket envelope them after running through the cold winter rain, but this blanket gave me no comfort, no succour, and no rest. The darkness called to me, and I awoke.
The desecration of the tomb struck me like a blow, what had this deceased soul done to deserve my rude interruption of his everlasting sleep? Scattered bones and tatters of cloth adorned the ruptured floor of the mausoleum, discarded where I had dumped them on the coming of the dawn, like toys thrown by a petulant child. I felt moved by my irreverence, and stooped to tenderly pick them up, one by one, each bone, each knuckle, each tattered scrap of cloth, before gently placing them back in the sarcophagus I had borrowed for my slumber. Finally, the skull, faded and stained, placed gently among the rotting remnant of the velvet cushioning, cradled atop the jumbled of skeletal remains, the only recognizably human remnants bar the caved in ribcage I had shattered in my haste.
I must have been unquiet in my motions, that or else I radiated some damnable presence that drew them to me. I turned and left the tomb under watchful eyes. A scampering of feet, a gasp of hurried breath and a blurred motion was all I detected before the rock crashed against the side of my head as I stepped from the threshold into the waiting post-dusk twilit graveyard. The hand that did not hold the rock dived to my trousers, but was not quickly enough to find purchase there, as I dropped and spun to face my attacker. A skinny group of hoodlums, dressed in torn jeans, death-metal t-shirts and adorned with multiple body piercings and impractical hair styles faced me, one with rock upheld and three with blades upon their bodies as they leered at me where I crouched.
“Hit him again!” one exclaimed in an excited whisper.
“Get his wallet you fool!” commanded another.
The rock descended again, and I twisted aside, easily evading what seemed to me to be a clumsy attack barely fitting of a child, let alone a scrawny but desperate young man. The rock continued its descent unimpeded and crashed into the ground where I had been.
“Watch him, Stein, he’s a fast one!”
Stein? How appropriate, I thought, named for the rock he was using to assault me? What was I dealing with here?
Stein ducked and retrieved his rock from the ground as I stepped backwards, not even thinking to kick it beyond his grasp. I pressed my fingers against the side of my head where he had struck me. Why did I feel no pain?
Taking advantage of my apparent distractedness, he rushed me with his upheld rock. Before he could strike, I was within his guard and propelling him up through the air with one quick thrust of my hand, sending him to land in a spread-eagled heap metres away, sprawled between the head-stones. The other three threw themselves towards me with their blades drawn.
Something instinctual took over, and I dodged quickly between them in a movement too swift for them to truly perceive, wrenching each blade from its owner’s hand as I moved. They stumbled to a halt with their backs to me, and all three looked down at their hands to find the knife gone, and their quarry vanished. Even before my re-birth, I had been quick, now I was preternaturally fast, evidently I retained some skills I had gained in life in this new existence. I wonder what puzzled thoughts drifted through their gelatinous minds in those few instants before I spoke.
“You shouldn’t play with knives. You might have cut somebody.” I spoke from behind them.
Startled, they whirled to face me as I held all three knives by the blade in may hands, leaning casually against the tomb within which I had recently slept.
“You shouldn’t play with those you cannot best,” I said while comprehension leaked glacially slowly into their brains.
“You should never turn your back on your enemies,” I continued from behind them, sitting cross-legged on a grave plot while balancing the three blades on the palm of one hand, their points describing delicious points of sensation on my palm. They spun again to face me, alarm beginning to show its presence behind their eyes. Stein continued to lay sprawled between the neat rows of graves behind them.
“And you should never relinquish your blade to an adversary.” I finished from directly behind them. They spun to find me within arm’s reach and scuttled backwards like, well, like frightened children before tripping over a low grave-marker and landing, all three, on the ground staring up at me.
Gibbering in three voices they pleaded with me.
“Don’t hurt us mister …”
“… we only wanted money …”
“… we wouldn’t have hurt you …”
“… we’re sorry …”
“… what are you?”
“… we can make it up to you …”
That last drew my attention.
“You can make it up to me? Now that’s an interesting thought... How would you do that? What could you offer me?”
“We – we – we – we could, you know, wipe somebody out, or get you stuff. You, you need drugs? Girls? Urm, Boys?” stuttered the nearest as I spun the blades between my hands, as deft as they had ever been but so much more sensitive in this new life, balancing them together while he spoke.
“You are pathetic! If I wanted any of those I’d take them! The only thing you can offer me is your lives, but I’d have to bathe myself afterwards to get rid of the stink!” I dropped the knives on the ground and turned away.
“Take your comatose friend and go. Do not return.” I gestured at the still-prone Stein, “I hunger now, and none of you has enough flesh to interest me. Besides, you smell bad. I go to hunt.”
I turned back to look at them as they gawped after me, “I can do better than such as you.”
In a flash, I was gone. I leapt in a move to sudden for them to follow onto the Mausoleum roof, where I crouched to watch them pick themselves up, hurriedly retrieve their knives and drag Stein upright.
“Who was that? … What the fuck was that? … What just happened?” Their voices a confused babble as they quickly made their way back to the street, and out into the suburbs, their dead-weight friend a loose bag of flesh and bones slung between their skinny shoulders.
“You should have killed them,” a deep voice said behind me which such darkness and timbre that it set to stirring the hairs on the nape of my neck.
He had been watching me, bemused perhaps by my overly fluid evasion of their knife strokes, bewildered by my mercy and the fact that I let them go. I wonder what he took me for, as he lurked in the darkness, watching. Certainly, he took me for no threat, or else he would not have dared to crouch so close to me on that roof, so close that his softly spoken breath stirred the air about me, so close that I should have smelled his scent. Close enough.
He dodged and rolled, but not before I had scored his arm with my talons, my nails somehow transformed on my lean fingers into vicious claws that had easily permitted me to climb the mausoleum wall to gain my rooftop perch. Lunging, I followed my blind swipe as he leapt high, avoiding me and then he shifted through the air, with a speed that even I had difficulty following, to come to rest on the far corner of the square concrete pad of the tomb's roof. I gathered myself like a giant cat, crouching in a blur, angered at his temerity, his audacity in coming so close. He halted me with a word.
“Vampir.”
I slowly drew myself erect to face him.
“Yes,” warily I remained poised for motion, this man knew more of me than I did, perhaps. Cetainly he moved in a manner that challenged even my hightened senses, “I am vampir, and I hunger. A warning.”
I felt confident in my chiding, the adrenaline-like kick of my earlier ducking and weaving thruming through my being still.
“You are young,” he said, “and foolish. Never let a human know you exist and live to tell of it. Secrecy is our only security.”
Our? Did he say “our”?
“Who are you?” I asked, relaxing slightly, too bewildered to know that the one true threat to me came from another of my own kind, and not from the puling mortals I fed on.
“I will not try to convince you I am a friend,” he said, “but consider me one who is ... less antagonistic towards you than they will be.”
He pointed over my shoulder in the direction the humans had scurried.
“They will be back, them or others, come to hunt you as you hunt them. Foolish boy, you should have destroyed them.”
A wave of tiredness passed over me, I had not yet fed.
“Ah, but I see you swoon where you stand. Weakened? Recently woken? Come, let us not waste the early night when the hunting is good and the humans are unwary. Safe they think in their numbers. Let's hunt!”
He leapt from the roof and alighted gently first on a crucifix, then rebounded off a marble angel to land squarely in the centre of a concrete grave-plate, which cracked under his weight. An eyebrow raised in my direction, he beckoned me with him, to the hunt.
I should pause here to give you some understanding of this creature that challenged my world, invaded it with such a mocking voice and at the same time proved I was neither alone nor unique. He stood some six feet tall, or would have had he stood upright. The deformed curvature of his back marred what would have been an imposing frame, twisting his body in such a manner that he seemed considerably smaller and more feeble than I suspected he was. Not one to underestimate, this one. A long gray robe or cloak flapped gently about him, masking many of his deformities, a deep cowl lay against his neck, and as I watched he flipped it up until it obscured his face, showing only the luminescence of his eyes, deeply recessed in the darkness. Skeletal arms depended from the stooped shoulders and hung limply by his sides, exposed for the moment by a soft zephyr that pulled the robe aside.
In all, he radiated a feeling of great age, preposterous age it seemed, such a concentration of age that it seemed he drained life from the world around him just by existing. His face, I had caught only a glimpse before the hood had masked it from my vision, was deeply lined, worn and gray, just like his robe. A narrow mouth and sunken eyes and a shrivelled nose overshadowed only by great batlike ears that ascended to points on either side of his bald head. His pate glistened with an almost greasy sheen before he had hidden his features under that tattered and filthy gray robe.
Some aspect of my growing distrust for this aged thing must have shown on my face, I must have drawn back ever so slightly in my appraisal of him. Shrugging, he turned from me and began a slow walk towards the trees that lined the edge of the graveyard.
“Follow me if you would know more of yourself, or call my name, Sheivan, to the wind when the times take you and you find yourself desirous of answers. You are a new occurance, the first I've seen for decades.”
He turned to look and me, head bent over and peering up at me across the intervening darkness. There was no doubt in my mind now that this aged creature know much about me and my kind, my new family as it were. But I was cocksure and not ready to heed his lessons. This and some lingering doubt, some instinctual sense warned me he was not to be trusted. Nevertheless, it might pay to cultivate a friend.
“Sebastien! My name is Sebastien,” I called after him as he faded into the trees.
“I know”, the faint reply drifted back to me as he faded from sight.
I had met my first “Other” the first other member of my own kind. An utterly enigmatic and aloof character, I was yet to learn, and mysterious in his manner I felt drawn towards him, an aching need for fulfillment, a panacea for the loneliness I was yet to experience. Loneliness our kind has always been stricken with, these facts I was yet to discover.