Chapter 44 - The Charnel Pit part 10

As I have said, my maker was strong... but he was not a true immortal. I do not think that something as simple as a knife to the heart could have killed him, but taking his head off did.

Eventually.

His limbs thrashed for a long time before they fell still. Even decapitated and stabbed through the heart, he did not give up the ghost easily. At one point, his headless body even tried to stand up. Thankfully, the gruesome thing overbalanced and fell onto its belly before it could go crashing blindly around the chamber. After that it just writhed around like a turtle flipped onto its shell, its vitality waning. My maker's death was slow and agonizing.

Satisfyingly slow.

Satisfyingly agonizing.

I had fallen into a state of shock-numb lethargy after pulping the sadistic creature's head, crouched against the far wall, brains and flesh and dried black blood caked on my body. My knife had snapped in half while I was stabbing his decapitated head. I had tossed the handle aside, exhausted, then sent the pulp of tattered flesh rolling after it before stumbling away to rest. Now I slumped against the wall, watching the Foul One's slowly writhing body, afraid it might try to rise again. When the headless body twitched its last, I finally took notice of the "meal" my maker had brought me.

It was a Cro-Magnon female. She lay motionless on her side, her face turned away from me. She was naked but for some tattered rags draped around her waist. Scrapes and whelps crisscrossed her body where she had been cruelly dragged through the treetops by the Foul One. I could tell by the rise and fall of her shoulders that she still breathed, but she did not shiver or rouse herself, despite her nakedness and the frigid cold of the pit. She had not stirred, even during my final climactic battle with our captor. It was a certainty she was injured... badly, I imagined.

I shrugged off my fatigue and moved to tend to the female's injuries. Perhaps I could help her. I swear that was my sole intent. I rolled her gently onto her back and saw with a shock that it was a member of my clan, a woman named Pendra. She was a mother in one of the larger group families in the village. I did not know her very well but I remembered her to be a quiet and kind woman with two subordinate wives, three husbands and many, many children.

It took only a moment to see how extraordinarily severe her injuries were. At some point she had suffered a terrible blow to the head. There was a large discolored dent in her brow where her skull had been shattered. Her eyes were purple and swollen shut. Her nose and lips were crusted with blood.

"Pendra," I said gently, stroking her cheek. "Pendra, good mother, can you hear me?"

Pendra's eyes fluttered, showing their whites, but that was the extent of her response to my words.

"Pendra, can you hear me?"

I caught myself staring at the blood smeared on her flesh and realized that my hunger for it was guiding my eyes and my touch. My filthy fingertips ran lovingly through the blood that trickled from her nostrils. I crouched over her, staring intently at her puffy, bleeding lips, my face scant inches from hers. The aroma of her body drew me closer, closer. I squeezed my eyes shut and inhaled her scent, devouring it with my nose as I ached to devour her blood with my mouth.

The smell of her excited my appetite. The scent of her blood overrode my restraints.

"Ahh!" I exhaled. I could feel my mouth watering. I couldn't stop myself. I leaned closer and began to lick the dried blood from her face. As my tongue slid moistly along her cheekbone, the taste of her blood sent sparks of pleasure sizzling through my brain. I wasn't worried about my tribe or my family, who must have been visited by the Foul One tonight. I was only thinking about that taste. That wonderful, coppery taste!

Pendra began to convulse. Her limbs trembled and she made guttural choking noises in her throat. I could see that she was dying. I thought, It would be a mercy to finish this, to release her from this broken body. I knew somewhere deep down that I was deceiving myself. My motive was not mercy but the satiation of my maddening hunger. Yet, I could not let myself think this. It was easier to pretend. It was easier to tell myself that I meant only to hasten her death, to spare her some of the pain of her passing.

"Here, my darling, let me help you," I whispered.

With the edge of my teeth, I sliced into the soft flesh of her neck. I opened the arteries there with two parallel incisions. She made no sound as the blood pulsed out in warm streams. Pressing my cheek to her shoulder, sealing my lips to the wound, I began to draw on the pumping founts, my eyes drifting shut in ecstasy, my body atop hers. I cradled her head in one hand and held her wrist in the other, my pelvis settling between her thighs without conscious thought. Her thighs were very plump and warm, her breasts full and soft beneath my chest. As I swallowed her blood, I writhed in pleasure atop her body. I moaned as I sucked and gulped the red, hot spurts. I let my hand stray down to her breast and ground my stiffening cock against her pubis. It slipped down, settled into the fleshy cusp of her sex, and I sank slowly into her.

She did not make a noise as I swallowed the last draughts of her life, not even to choke her last breath. She simply expired, slipping gently into the afterworld as I sucked the blood from her neck. One moment alive, the next moment still.

For all eternity: still.

Yet, I continued to suck the wound in her neck. I continued to defile her corpse until my body tensed with orgasm and I jerked my mouth from her bloodless flesh with a frustrated growl.

It wasn't until some time later, after her blood had cooled inside my body, that the horror of what I had just done struck me with full force.

But first... oh, the satisfaction!

I rolled onto my back beside her, smacking my lips with a smile. I was looking up at the sky through the opening of the pit, feeling the blood wend its way through my body, a tingling flush of heat. For a moment, the unrelenting thirst was gone. I was at peace. I floated in dreamy contentedness. Imagine a golden haze suffusing your body, that post-coital rush of endorphins multiplied a thousand fold. That is how it felt!

Then the horror. The guilt and shame.

I looked at the gore speckling my hands.

I sat up and turned to Pendra. How still and pale and fragile she appeared. Like a child's discarded doll, damaged and defenseless, and I had preyed upon her. I had violated her helpless body.

And I called my maker "Foul One"!

I glanced down at my drooping cock. Black fluid still drooled from the slit at the tip. Even that—defiled by my curse! No longer the pearly white sparker of life, my seed had turned as black as my soul!

With a moan of disgust and self-loathing, I scrambled to my feet. All around me, the cold and rotting dead! My eyes grew wider and wider until I let out an echoing shriek. I clawed furrows into my cheeks (scratches that healed a moment after I made them). I ran to a wall and began to scrabble at it, trying to find a purchase with my fingertips, trying to climb out. I had to get out! I had to remove myself from all this death!

Bits of stone and earth crumbled down upon my face, into my open mouth and eyes. Yet still I did not discover my vampiric abilities. I moved my limbs as a mortal would move them because that is what I was in my mind. That is what I knew. I threw myself at the wall until I was overwhelmed by the futility of it all.

I collapsed to my knees, sobbing. I stayed that way, crying black tears, until the hysteria subsided and I could think a little more rationally.

Wiping my cheeks, I rose and tried to order my thoughts.

You can get out of here, I said to myself. Remember how he sprang into the air? He has remade you into his image. Your flesh is as cold and white as his. Why can you not do the same things that he could do?

I sketched a path with my eyes, seeing how I might leap from side to side up the walls of the pit. It seemed impossible, but I had watched my maker do it more than once, and with little apparent effort on his part. I stepped back, took a deep breath and then launched myself into the air.

I jumped too hard the first time.

Thinking I must use all of my strength to propel myself into the air as my maker had done, I left the ground with such velocity that I made what I think might have been a miniature sonic boom. It was a sound like a clap of thunder, and the subterranean chamber resounded with the sound like a vast bell. The violence with which I collided into the wall stunned me, and I fell onto my back and lay there for a minute, dazed, before climbing back to my feet.

Not so fast, I said to myself.

I tried again, this time with less force, and managed to leap to the wall and bound off of it to a higher purchase.

I mistimed my movements and landed back on the floor of the charnel pit, but I was not frustrated this time. I knew I would be able to free myself if I could just time my movements correctly. My new body, cold and white though it was, had strength that was beginning to amaze me.

I tried again, bounding from one side to the other, before my fingers slipped in a channel of ice two thirds of the way to the opening, and I dropped back to the bottom.

On my fourth attempt, I grasped the ledge of the opening and pulled myself up and out of the charnel pit.