Chapter 21 - The Cave of the Gray Stone People part 1

I once met a particularly cruel vampire who called himself Cro Ammutep. Like me, he had had many names over the course of his remarkably long life, but Cro was the name given to him by his mother when he was born in a temple of prostitution in 4,000 BCE. I came across him tens of thousands of years after my transformation in the Swabian Alb of Germany, shortly after the Black Death had emptied half of Europe of human life. This was in the year 1349, in the County of Castile, which is now part of modern day Spain, when the plague was everywhere and it seemed man's time on Earth had finally come to an end.

I was travelling alone at the time, a vagabond blood drinker, dazed by the hopelessness and squalor I found everywhere I went. The enlightenment and order of the Roman Empire was not too far gone in my mind, relatively speaking, and it seemed that mankind had fallen into a pit of penury and hopelessness so deep and dark it could never hope to climb back out.

Vampires are nomadic creatures. It is a necessity of our parasitic nature. We wander from city to city, nation to nation, feeding on the blood of those unlucky enough to cross our paths. For our own safety, the wise among us do not overhunt a region. You do not ever want a village of mortals to discern your presence and come, with torches and pitchforks, to strike you down in your lair. It's never a pleasant thing to have a stake pounded through your heart or your head lopped off. For a true immortal, it's a terrible embarrassment. For the average blood drinker, certain death. So we drift along from town to town, supping discriminately, taking care to feed on those who won't really be missed-- the criminal, the insane... in-laws.

Not this beast.

He was a shriveled creature of immense power and cunning. Small, bald and stoop-shouldered, he was made an immortal in his twilight years, transmuted by the Blood from a frail old man to a being of terrifying power. Once a lamentation priest serving in the temple of Utu, the Sumerian god of the sun, he had adopted the practice of feeding on entire villages. He was cold and hard, like me, invulnerable to all but the most cataclysmic violence. His indestructibility had given him lease to become a sadistic glutton. Instead of feeding on one or two townsfolk and moving on, as most of us had learned to do, he fed on entire villages.

His behavior was not surprising, I suppose, considering his mortal vocation.

In case you haven't noticed yet, I have little affection for priests. Greedy men who wear tall hats, that is what I think of priests. I'll never understand why you mortals are so eager to bow and scrape at their feet, why you cede your will and fortunes to them so enthusiastically. Is it the promises of heavenly recompense… or is it the big hats? I haven't quite decided which.

As I was saying, it was the height of the Black Death, so it was no surprise to come upon another empty village, sadly silent and stinking of human corruption. I had travelled through many a plague infested village in the preceding five or six years. This one was no different. What did shock me, however, was the realization that it was not the plague that had quashed the life from this little seaside settlement, which overlooked the Bay of Biscay, but one of my own kind. I sensed it as I hurried through its moonlit streets, eager to remove myself to more amenable surroundings. More specifically, I smelled it. The victims of the plague had a very distinctive odor due to the gangrene and oozing tumors at the neck, armpits and groin. This village smelled of death, yes, but I did not detect the odor of the plague, which was a mixture of necrotic flesh and suppurating tumors. Instead, I smelled blood, the coppery scent of mortal blood. It seemed to come from everywhere, every hovel and manor, every alleyway and shop. The village smelled like an abattoir. And then I sensed the presence of another powerful blood drinker.

I sensed him as I stood in the desolate town square and felt his own formidable perceptions turn in my direction. Slipping wraith-like through the shadows of the village, I found him in the home of a wealthy landowner. Ammutep was enjoying the amenities of the family he had just sucked dry, sitting contentedly at their hearth, their hounds at his heel. Upstairs, the dead bodies of the lord and his household were tucked primly in their beds as if for sleep.

I introduced myself, and we made small talk as I took my measure of him and he, I'm sure, took his measure of me. He seemed a frail thing, old and ugly when he was made an immortal. He had only two teeth in his mouth, his vampire fangs, and great dark eyes that shimmered like oil in their sockets. He was dressed in a rather poor-looking tunic and hood, with dirty stockings and mud-encrusted boots. He was filthy, his flesh and clothes encrusted with mortal blood. Yet I found, to my dismay, that this vile and pitiable creature was an illusion, that he was in fact a powerful Eternal and every bit as potent as myself, if not quite as old.

He took great relish in describing how he fed upon each household in the villages he visited, emptying entire towns, family by family, until he had drained a hamlet dry. The only caution he took was to carry the carcasses away and hide them when he was done, so that the nature of their deaths remained a mystery as long as possible.

"Only out of convenience, mind you," he chuckled. "So that the townsmen do not flee their homes too soon." He spoke in castellano-- we vampires have a fast command of foreign tongues-- but with the accent of his native land. I had hated the time I spent in the region of Sumer, and the hint of its tongue in his speech greatly annoyed me. "Why should I worry? They have no power to harm me," he boasted. "Nothing I have encountered has ever wrought lasting harm to this flesh."

I had only known a blood drinker to behave in such a manner one other time in my long life.

My creator.

Oh, how I hated this foul thing! This glutton! This wasteful, wanton leech! My fingers sank into the arms of the chair in which I sat. My lips curled back from my teeth as I glared at him.

"It is one thing to feed on mortal man. We serve a purpose in the universe just as surely as the wolf and the lion serve their purposes. But this gluttony... this unrestrained destructiveness... it is evil," I said. "You take too much from the natural order of things and give nothing in return but death."

"Evil?" he cackled. "There is no such thing as evil or good. You are a fool! Be gone with you!"

His philosophy was extremely distasteful to me, but he was too old and powerful for me to dispatch. I could tell from the white hardness of his skin that he was a true immortal. Any battle we engaged in would end in stalemate, our wounds regenerating as quickly as we exchanged them. I could only hope to restrain him in some manner, if I could overpower him-- which was not a sure thing despite my advantage in size.

He could read the disgust on my face, my impotent rage, and laughed.

"Why should we just dip a toe?" he said. "How much better to leap in whole and wallow in their blood? They are cattle to us! Am I so wrong to treat them thus?"

"You are like a tick that sucks the dog's ear 'til it bursts," I retorted. "You offend me!"

His laughter trailed after me as I flew in fury from the desolate village.

I did not hear of him for some three hundred years. I was living in England then. I had taken the identity of a Welsh duke and resided in a fine mansion beside the Thames, between the cities of Westminster and London. I read of the lost colony of Roanoke in the Daily Courant, the city's first newspaper. It seemed an entire colony had vanished in the New World. All 118 men, women and children... gone without a trace. I read the article by streetlight as a dusting of snow swirled in the bitter air. The author of the newspaper article, which was titled "Whence Goes Roanoke?", conjectured that the English colonists had been massacred by some native tribe or had fallen to disease, but if so, what had happened to their bodies? Not a trace could be found of the 90 men, 17 women and 11 children who had attempted to settle in the New World. But I knew what had happened to the colonists. It seemed that, after feeding on the colony in its entirety, the beast that had destroyed them had carved his name into a tree.

CRO.

We do not normally leave much sign of our passage through the world. It is not safe. There is actually now an Injunction against doing so, and woe to any foolish blood drinker who breaks it! But this ancient tick took great pride in his gluttony, and knew that his insult would find its way to me, or some other self-righteous Elder, eventually. He had carved his name into the tree to advertise his defiance of the Injunction, to make it known that he was the author of the Lost Colony's destruction.

My creator shared that old priest's wanton nature.

Greedy and indolent, the fiend who made me what I am abandoned a feeding site only when he had drained his final victim of their last drop of blood. He was too lazy even to chase the few who grew wise to his presence and fled the killing grounds. Fodar and Evv and the other young Neanderthals who had disappeared were merely his first cautious kills. When my creator had finally settled in, and felt secure in his lair, he began to prey on our Neanderthal neighbors with abandon, sometimes taking as many as two or three in a single night. He did not take them every day, else they all would have been gone in less than a month, but he preyed on them steadily, snatching them up at his leisure, one after another.

Half a day's walk away, my clan had no idea what was going on with the Gray Stone People.

Despite my father's promise to Frag, we paid little heed to our neighbors' absence at the river. When the moon waxed and waned and they did not come to trade with us as they normally did once a month or so, we only thought it passing strange. A few of us discussed sending a party to investigate, to see if everything was okay with our Neanderthal neighbors, but nothing ever came of it. It's funny how blind you can be to your neighbor's travails when your bellies are full and your mates are content. We had had no trouble with the strange Others, and so we were careless. Even I, in the weeks that followed, began to forget the frightful creature that had menaced our search party in the middle of the night. Our lack of concern for our neighbors' welfare was a shameful lapse-- but all too human, I suppose.

Finally one afternoon, winter's bite in the air, a pair of hunters spied a group of Fat Hands departing the valley, headed south. Our Fat Hand neighbors rarely ventured beyond the low mountain range that was their territory, so the two young hunters ran back to camp to report on the Neanderthals' odd behavior. What concerned them most was that the Fat Hands appeared to be running... or at least, shuffling more quickly than their normal leisurely pace. Unless they were chasing down a buck or the forest was on fire, Fat Hands didn't run.

My father and his councilors were just as concerned. Though we joked about the Fat Hands being ugly and dumb, we had always had good relations with our neighbors and many of us Fast Feet counted a good number of the Neanderthals friends. Ancestors, half of us were related to members of their tribe!

"Do you think they could be fleeing from the Lizard Men?" my brother Epp'ha asked.

"Why else would they be leaving?" my father said, looking angry and embarrassed. He had remembered his promise to Frag and our negligence shamed him.

"They would have sent a messenger if they needed our assistance," I said. "I have never known the Fat Hands to run from anything."

Father turned his baleful gaze on me. "Perhaps they did and the messengers were killed."

It was an alarming thought.

A party was quickly organized to catch up with the fleeing group and find out what they were running from. Brulde and I volunteered, as well as the hunters who had originally noted their passing, two young men named Hyde and Strom. Eyya insisted that she be allowed to accompany our party. She was not as adventurous as when she was a girl, but she was worried about her family. The elders, of course, gave their blessing. Her concern was understandable.