Chapter 20 - A Brief Aside part 3

Before I turn the page on this chapter, I should like to impress you with an accounting of my vampiric abilities. It is, no doubt, something you are very curious about.

I hesitate to call them "powers", as it brings to mind images of American comic book heroes, and I am the very antithesis of the notion. A super-villain, perhaps, though again, let the record show that I have never purposely harmed an innocent. I have performed great villainy in my time here on Earth, but never deliberately, never by a conscious act of will. When I prey upon the living, it is as the lion preys upon the antelope. I hunt only the evildoer, and try to kill as painlessly as possible. But, yes, we have powers, and I suppose you could say that they are superhuman. They are intrinsic to our nature, designed to make us the ultimate nocturnal predator.

First, I am resistant to all forms of injury, from crude physical trauma to heat, cold, radiation and chemical reactions. The cells of my body are composed of a super-dense, chemically inert material that seems both living and nonliving simultaneous. Not only am I resistant to injury, when my physical body is damaged in some way, the Living Blood that flows in my veins moves immediately to repair the damage, mending even the most grievous wounds in moments. I have been beheaded, burned, hewn to pieces and drowned. I have been flung from great heights. I have been pierced through with every type of weapon you can imagine. Each time I have arisen to visit retribution on my attackers.

I have no problem moving about in the sunlight, though it is harder during the day to camouflage the peculiar nature of my flesh, and the brightness hurts my hypersensitive eyes.

Yes, I feel pain. I feel pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation. I have the same emotions that any mortal man has. I fall in love. I laugh. I cry. I have a terrific temper when stirred to wrath. I tend to be an impulsive creature, and have been know to wallow in self-pity from time to time. I am a passionate lover, and a little bit of a schemer. I am very tactile. I love to touch things, taste them, smell them and see them. I feel all the things you feel, only magnified to a far greater extent.

My five senses are exquisitely refined. I can see in the dark. I can hear the beating of a gnat's wings. I can smell a drop of blood a mile away, even follow a trail that is weeks old, or detect cancer in the body of

a living human being.

My physical strength is prodigious. I can punch through a cinderblock wall. I can lift a man into the air with one hand and fling him dozens of meters away with the slightest effort. I can propel my body at such great speeds that I can move invisibly among mortals or appear to vanish. When I snatch a victim at such speeds, the impact renders them instantly unconscious. It can even kill.

The strange texture of my skin allows me to scale walls like an insect. How's that for an outré talent? It's not foolproof and depends upon the porousness of the surface, but brick, concrete and stone are simple enough to cling to. I can climb the side of a ten story building in seconds. Yes, I am that fast! Smaller buildings, say one or two stories, I might simply leap to the roof.

My thought processes are quicker, my reactions nearly instantaneous. I have learned to manipulate the subconscious thoughts of mortals with sub-vocal intonations, though that is more of a skill I have developed over the centuries rather than a so-called gift of my vampiric nature.

I cannot fly. I cannot change into animals or transform into mist or control the weather.

Crosses and holy water, being recent religious inventions, of course, have no ill effect on me.

I don't intend to make light of anyone's religious convictions, but I was 28,000 years old when Christ roamed the Middle East, performing his miracles. I have no opinion on the veracity of his divinity, or the Christian faith in general, but I have visited a great many cathedrals and have yet to burst into flames.

I have read the Bible cover to cover, as well as the Gnostic texts and the Qur'an and religious scrolls and codices and clay tablets of faiths you have never even heard of, lost to time as they are, their philosophies as dead as the men and women who clung so desperately to them, fearing that great mystery. None have struck me as embracing any transcendent Truth, nor caused me physical discomfort through contact with my flesh. I have never come across a mystic relic or holy book that could, by its proximity to my person, repel me or cause me physical harm.

There are vampires with more esoteric abilities, creatures who can read the thoughts of others or send out an invisible Eye to view events from a distance. There are immortals who can find hidden objects or dream the future or cause items in their environment to move of their own accord, but I have none of these gifts. I did not in life, and I do not in my un-life.

I suppose I should tell you of these other vampires.

I have crossed the paths of many an immortal being in the thirty millennia I have roamed this world and they are as varied in form and faculty as any other natural creature. Some are little more than shambling bones with nasty appetites, others beautiful and eternal. Most are, like myself, imperfect beings living as well as they can in the shadow of humankind, neither good nor evil. The pathetic and vile I dispatch as painlessly as possible. The cruel and destructive I wage war with, if there is any chance I can remove their blight from this world. There are not as many of us as you might imagine. In times past, there were more but in this modern era we are a rare breed, and growing rarer still. If not for the extreme longevity of my species, I wager we would have gone extinct long ego.

I have met a fair number of my exotic race throughout the millennia. I have loved some, made war on others and even murdered a few "in cold blood" when I found their ambitions contrary to my own values. Over the course of my existence, I have sired a great many vampire children. I did it out of loneliness, so that I might have company on this slow boat ride through eternity. I did it out of love or to preserve some quality that I found admirable. Never out of malice or the desire to have power over another living being.

Yet of my immortal brothers and sisters I more often remain aloof. There are old-fashioned vampire covens and more modern social networks, sometimes quite extensive, but I have rarely participated in such cliques. I value my freedom too much. I am at heart a solitary creature.

All vampires share my lust for the blood of the living. Without that nourishment, our bodies dry up, seize in rigid and agonizing immobility. Without the blood, we become stony relics, sleeping sepulchers haunted by dim dreams.

The infection that transforms us into what we are, which we call the Strix or the Living Blood, has even been known to mutate from time to time. This has led to outbreaks of blood-thirsting ghouls, and deadly plagues that have wiped out entire regions, extinguishing life instead of extinguishing death. There is an offshoot of our race, very small, that feeds on the sexual energies of their prey. I cannot tell you much about them, as they are a rather recent mutation and seem to be instinctively repelled by their blood-drinking cousins. Some are driven insane by the transformation. Sometimes the insane are driven sane. Some are transformed into pitiful mayfly creatures who prey on the living a brief season before succumbing to death. Others, like me, are remade into eternal demigods.

Rest assured, I will tell you more about these creatures in future volumes of my biography, but for now I should like to tell you how I was made this thing that I am.