Vigil (16 page)

The Parisian Countryside

2025 A.D.

Year Zero: Apocalypse

The machines that kept the ancient man on the bed alive are silent.
The roar of nuclear fire that rages through distant Paris does not reach even the scarred man's remarkable ears.

             
But there are sounds in the night. He closes his eyes to hear them more clearly. The night has been long, but he is not tired. He is a creature of the night.

             
With eyes closed he can hear his own heart and the heartbeat of the man on the crisp white sheets for whom he stands vigil.

             
Both hearts beat slow. The old man's is erratic. The watcher's heart beats maybe once a minute.

             
With his eyes closed against the blinding light of the fire on the horizon, he can hear the wind, the mice in the surrounding farmland, the swish of the sheets on the bed as the poisonous wind caresses them.

             
He hears a soft sound. Almost imperceptible. Opens his eyes and looks down. He watches intently for minutes. Those minutes turn to an hour. Two. The night, and the vigil moves on, but he is not mistaken. The sound he heard was the sound of the old man's mechanical arm moving. Not by thought, but by rejection. The man's flesh rejecting the foreign body.

             
Rejecting it because it is no longer needed.

*

Part Three

The Fast

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Eastern Europe and the Western World

1599-1672

How do you cover over seventy years of history in anything less than seventy years? Do you condense it? Boil out all the feeling to leave nothing but hard cold fact? What is there left of those years when they have been laid bare?

              Nothing. Even the most powerful words leave events stripped bare, devoid of the passions that pushed events forward. Who can know how Gallileo, or Isaac Newton on the completion of Principia Mathematica, felt?

             
Feeling drives invention. Passion drives war. Indifference, strangely, is often the greatest engine of all.

             
What is left when historians have poured over vast tracts of dried up old text? A crumbling old skeleton, devoid of marrow. A honeycombed and brittle version of what was, to the people who lived it, immense, overwhelming, all consuming. It was their life. History can never weigh the worth of a life, not even in years lived or achievements gained.

             
In those seventy years of long and lusty feeding I tasted history. I tasted the people that lived way back then, at the dawn of a new age. I was born again, born anew, with each new discovery, each language absorbed. When you live through an epoch in history you do not look back and say, I remember when the Mayflower landed, I remember the beginning of the Thirty Year War, or its end, because you are too close. History for those that live it is not measured in lengths but moments, seen in close up while sometimes the panorama escapes us.

             
Did I live through the 17
th
Century? No, I bathed in it. I revelled in it. It was my altar, my boyhood, my first love, my teenage years, my education…I rolled in it in a way no mortal could.

             
Who could see both ends of a century in those days? People did not have the luxury of long life and free travel. It was a world ravaged by plague and war, when the horsemen rode free among the races of man.

             
I saw much of the century, but did I boil it down and dissected it for consideration or discussion in the lofty halls of academia? Never. Nor will I do it here. It would lessen their pain. Their pain was something delicious and untameable, something that will always be repeated time after time, but the exact flavour can never be recreated. Pain is the one flavour a gourmet can never duplicate.

             
Believe me, in those years I tasted pain, I saw it from afar and I saw it in the swiftly contracting pupil of a terrified eye. I lapped it up in blood and held it quivering and dying in my arms.

             
Pain is ever changing. That, I believe, is why man fears it. It lives within. It can never be controlled, not with drugs or thought or peace.

             
So what did the world boil down to? Tensions erupting between Protestants and Catholics, the start of centuries of strife. The Long War did end. I had played my part. I spent the rest of my life avoiding battle.

             
But not bloodshed.

             
1618-1648. Dates I remember well. The Thirty Year War. You would think it would have affected me…it didn’t. Not really. I wandered the length and breadth of Europe throughout those years and the only problem I had was avoiding the battles. I could smell them moving from miles away. The quickening thud of a thousand frightened hearts. The smell of the blood drove me insane sometimes, although I might have been miles from the battle.               But I was no longer a slave to the blood. I didn’t need to feed to stave off the hunger as I could control it better than it could control me.

             
I fed because I wanted to.

             
Years of famine, a constant reminder for humans, came and went. The famine did not affect me. I had plenty to eat. Even when the humans were gaunt their blood tasted fresh.

             
Bubonic plague ravaged much of Europe. I had to leave Italy for nearly ten years because of an outbreak. The infected did not taste good. Other than that, I didn’t care. I was immune to plague, to any disease or ailment in fact.

             
Europe suffered and burned and I was flush with good health and cheer.

             
Wars were fought and lost. Human barbarity outweighed my own. Dumb luck laid just as many low.

             
Gallileo, Newton, the King James Bible…the list goes on an on. Now people call it the Age of Science. Was it? Gallileo was tried before the Inquisition at the start of the century. The Salem Witch Trials took place at the end.

             
No, the world was still ruled by violence and superstition.

             
I mention this because by and large it still is. Can science give us answers that God cannot?

             
No. Neither can.

             
Some things are ineffable. Some things defy quantification as they defy faith.

             
Seventy years. A good span of time for a human.

             
I met an old man once, many years later. He told me not to blink. His life, he said, went by in the blink of an eye. Before he knew it he was old. An old lonely man in the cold winter of his years.

             
Wisdom takes many years and it all boils down to one thing. Time, whether its span be long or short, through mortal eyes or through immortal, it all passes the same way.

             
In the blink of an eye.

*

Chapter Thirty-Nine

1672

Scherzingen,
Lake Constance

1692 was the year of the Salem Witch Trials. They took place in Massachusetts. Give or take a few thousand miles, they had the right idea.

             
I wandered for too many years. My feet were weary. I wanted to rest, to take time to assimilate the things I had learned over the years.

             
There had been a change in me. It was gradual. Not the earth shattering impact of an asteroid, or a tidal wave, but of erosion and tectonic shift. I change during the course of decades and centuries. I have that luxury.

             
I learned much about myself. I relished learning new languages from the people I happened across along my way, lonely years of travelling the lands of Europe, roaming freely and needing nothing. I had no need of finery, or property, or even food. People were numerous and easy picking for a creature of my talents. My first lesson had come soon after my birth and I had learned it well. No longer a ravening lunatic with a lust for flesh, I could wait and bide a while before I fed. Few people were fool enough to travel the roads alone, but there were plenty of meals to be had in wayward cottages and solitary farms.

             
I never went hungry, but nor was I a glutton.

             
Throughout those years I fed, but I also met people I did not kill. At first it was a strange experiment. I met a couple on their way north from Italy. I had difficulty with their language, but I insisted they abide with me awhile on the road. I picked up a phrase or two here and there, and I had a grounding in Latin. The road was more interesting in a way for the company and the lesson.

             
Perhaps you imagine that I fed on that couple and that they never made their destination, but you would be wrong. I waved them goodbye after two weeks, full of knowledge, not blood.

             
The woman gave me a kiss in passing, and remarked upon my cold cheek. I told her I had a slow heart. She seemed sad for me. Perhaps she thought it a bad thing. In a human, perhaps. But I imagine my heart beats slower so that I might live longer, if a lifetime can be measured in heart beats.

             
I roamed countries and borders that no longer exist, and ones that would be made afresh by the end of the second millennium. I have seen so much of the world change around me. I may be eternal, but that change has shaped me, also.

             
But in the way of slow things. In the way of erosion. I am a landscapes shaped by wind and rain. Only if you have lived a life as long and full as mine could you stand back and see those changes. To tell of them, in some ways, lessens the beauty of the changing landscape.

             
I met many more people that I did not kill. Toward the end of the century it was becoming the norm for me to leave the bit players in my life with their life, and to pass on into the night.

             
Of course, daylight was a problem, and people are understandably careful in the night. After all, that is when the dangerous beasts roam unhindered, under the moon and stars.

             
So I roamed, for years, alone and a bit player in too many human’s lives to mention.

             
I made small waves those days and nights. I don’t expect many of the people I happened upon remembered me for long. Perhaps they remarked upon the strange man they met, who could not stand the sunlight, and the affliction he suffered, that which made his skin pale and wane. Perhaps a few told of my sleepless nights. To them it must have been strange, the man who walked all day and left them when they camped for the night. I met many travellers along the way, and not a few farmers and villagers.

             
I met mercenaries and soldiers, too. But I tried to steer clear of that ilk. I didn’t want to become a warrior again. I could sense the darkness in those soldiers I met returning home after a battle or a war was done. I met deserters and dark men whose souls were stained with the blood of men and women they had killed. I could smell the blood on their hands. It was a repulsive smell. Stale and tangy, cloying in the back of my throat. They did not know what they had done. To spill blood for nothing? That, I can at least say of myself, I have never done. Never have I killed on a whim. Nor will I. I am no murderer.

             
I am a vampire. I kill to feed. I do not relish their pain. I am the hunter with the sure bow, the hunter that knows the pain of the deer. I do not miss. I do not maim. I am sure and swift and that, I think, is all the mercy there is in the world.

             
So I roamed and listened to the breeze and the words that people spoke. They spoke of a place of beauty and peace, a haven between the warring states of man. It was there, spurred on by rumours of its beauty, that I headed. Eventually, I came to the shores of Lake Constance and a small village of surpassing loveliness in the throes of a terrible plague.

             
It was there that I met the white monk.

*