Chapter 49 - The Ghost Who Is a Man part 4

I did not rejoin my tribe.

I was never reunited with my wives and children.

I watched them from afar, protecting them, loving them from a safe distance as the years went by, but I did not learn to control my bloodlust until generations had passed and those I'd loved had all grown old and passed away.

Why did it take so long to master my hunger for mortal blood?

It was not then as it is in these modern days. We did not know what a vampire was. My people did not even have a word for it. Even the laughable blood drinkers in your popular mass media (I won't name names) would provide a newborn nosferatu with more of an education than was available to me, even one that was orphaned as I was an orphan. And I was an orphan. I might have destroyed the creature that made me what I am, but I was no less an orphan. I was ignorant and superstitious, an untrained monster. I was not a disciplined man before I was made an immortal and my transformation did not magically grant me any wisdom or self-control. I am, in fact, more easily tempted than your average vampire. Like any other creatures, we immortals have our own individual strengths and weaknesses. I am supremely strong and fast, resistant to most forms of injury and possessed of unusually fine senses even for an Eternal, but I am terribly lacking when it comes to resisting my thirst for mortal blood, so easily aroused. If I had had a proper vampire maker, someone to instruct me in our ways, it might have been different. But I was a child of rape, a killer of my own maker, alone and woefully ignorant of my condition. It is a wonder I did not murder them all!

Immediately after I disposed of Ludd's body, I dedicated myself to mastering my newfound powers… and my hunger for living blood. It was my single ambition to rejoin my family and reintegrate myself into the culture that I loved. The following evening, I found a lair for myself in a mountaintop cave overlooking our valley, a craggy peak we called Old Blue Man, and set upon a program of self-discovery. I was a pragmatic man who hailed from a culture not overly given to flights of fancy and so I tackled my ignorance in a systematic manner, exploring the limits of my strength and speed, testing the bounds of my enhanced senses and physical resilience. My progress was frustratingly slow, as every discovery I made was made by accident. We vampires do not have an instinctive understanding of our new abilities. We are limited by our tendency to think and act like the mortals we once were. I cannot tell you how many times I crashed into trees or plummeted from a high perch because I had mistimed a jump or moved faster than I intended. It was several years before I discovered that I could cling to vertical surfaces like an insect. All the while, I was trying to master my hunger for mortal blood, a task every bit as daunting as mastering my physical abilities.

And keeping a watchful eye on the People.

If I could not yet rejoin them, I reasoned, then I would be their guardian spirit. I would watch over them, protect them, aid them when it was possible, until I could walk among them without endangering their lives.

If only I could have tended to their broken spirits as well!

Our encounter with the Foul Ones threw the People into turmoil. The loss of so many brave warriors robbed my people of their courage. They cowered in their beds at night, jumped at every creeping sound. With Ludd's disappearance, some of the People panicked and did flee south after the Fat Hands. Ludd was the only one who knew that I had vanquished the monsters hunting our valley, but I had killed him, and so in ignorance my people shrank from the night. They stared into the darkness with a new and terrible dread. They cried out in their sleep. They stayed close to the village and did not allow their children out of sight. If my father Gan had lived, he could have buttressed their courage. He would have coddled those who needed to be coddled, whipped the asses of those who needed sterner encouragement, and seen them through their dark night of the soul. But Gan had fallen, and my brother Epp'ha was a poor replacement, though he tried very hard to fill my father's shoes. For a time I thought our entire community might come unraveled at the seams. There was infighting and desertions. Some adopted strange new superstitions. These fearful cretins gave up the worship of our ancestors to prostrate themselves before make-believe deities. They left sacrifice for their imaginary friends. They pled with the spirits to protect them from harm. I was afraid there would be conflict with these imaginary friend worshippers. They were quite hysterical that everyone believe what they believed. Perhaps it reassured them they weren't just talking to themselves. But it never quite came to a head, thank the ancestors!

I wish that I could have revealed myself to them, or at least made it known that their enemy was dead, but I did not know how it could be done without causing more confusion and panic.

Eventually, as time wore on and no more of the People vanished in the night, their fears abated somewhat, and the tribe settled into something closer to its normal deportment. It was never quite the same as it was before—too many had died—but the people quit jumping at every shadow. They returned to the business of living rather than waiting for some monster to snatch them out of their beds at night. I thought about revealing myself to them then, but again I decided to keep them at a distance.

I did not reveal myself to them for a very simple reason: I did not want anyone to come looking for me.

It was too dangerous. I was too dangerous. Though I was making slow but steady progress in mastering my physical abilities, I could not quite seem to get a grip on my bloodlust. My body acted of its own accord when the Hunger came over me. I would be flitting through the forest on some errand or another, sense a living creature nearby and awaken moments later to find that animal dead at my feet, its throat ripped open, its blood pulsating warmly through my veins, with no recollection of how I had run down and fed upon the creature. Thankfully, I found I could subsist just fine on the blood of animals, and that is what I survived on in the months following my transformation. When any of the People ventured into the woods near my mountain lair, I fled from them as if from Death itself. Yet it was I that was Death, and it was my own savagery that I fled from, and I was forced to flee time and time again as my loved ones grew old and passed away.

That is the dark truth of immortality: that you stay young forever as all those you love pass through the veil of death and into Mystery. Immortality is being left behind, always left behind. It is a terrible thing to be abandoned.

Brulde was the first of my loved ones to perish.

As Ludd had said just moments before I so rudely ripped out his throat, Brulde had survived that final, brutal attack. He lost an eye as his body went flying through the treetops. The assault fractured his jaw, broke his collarbone and several ribs and shattered his left femur, but somehow, miraculously, he had survived, and he managed to drag himself near enough to the village to be discovered by a group of women who were foraging for food in the forest. They helped him home, where Eyya and Nyala nursed him slowly back to health.

His experiences drove him a little mad, as one might expect. He was prone to fits of depression and crippling anxiety for a year or so after he recovered from his injuries. Eventually, he was able to hunt again, to provide for our family, but he was never quite the same man. There was a part of his spirit that could not progress beyond the night I was stolen away forever. For years afterwards, he would search the wilderness for me, alone, crying out my name. He once even journeyed to the cave of the Gray Stone People. He did not find me, of course, but he returned with my father's bones and interred his remains in our ancestral burial mound. Gan had always considered Brulde "one of his boys", and Brulde had loved the man like a father.

I watched from a distance the day he returned my father's remains. I was sorely tempted to go to him, to reveal myself to him then, but even as I watched him I wanted to attack him. I wanted to sink my fangs into his neck and drain every last drop of blood from his body, and so I kept my distance. Weeping of love, watching him limp through the forest with my father's bones cradled in his arms, I kept my distance.

I did reveal myself to him once, many years after my transformation.

It was a foolish thing to do, I know. I am well aware of how reckless it was to endanger him like that. I was a young vampire with very little control over my bloodlust, even after decades of being an immortal. I put him and our sons in grave danger. My only excuse is that I was lonely. I had not spoken to a living soul in ages. Not directly. I had learned a trick of projecting my voice from afar and sometimes spoke to a passing hunter if they came within range of my far-talk, but all they heard was a sort of ghostly whisper, and usually it frightened them half to death. It was not a real conversation. I had not spoken to anyone properly, and had that person speak directly back to me, for more years than I was capable of counting. (In those days, my People could only count to twenty-one—fingers, toes and one other extremity, which I will not be so crass as to name.) Brulde was old then, old and ailing, and I wanted to see him, and be seen by him, one more time before death parted us forever.

It was the autumn season and a cold mist was billowing earthward from a sky as lumpy and gray as sodden wool. Brulde was hunting with our two oldest sons, Gan and Hun, just on the far side of the Mound of Ghosts, where the pines gave way to hardwood and the forest floor was blanketed in fallen leaves.

What fine young warriors they had grown to be, my sons! Gan, who was so like myself: slim and tall and handsome, with long curly auburn hair and hazel eyes-- and full-bearded already! Soon he would leave our wetus and start a family of his own. He had already taken a tent mate, a sturdy young fellow named Horus, who was one of Hyde's younger siblings. Together they were courting a lithesome young woman name Anda, who was of Nyala's bloodline, a distant cousin, and just as fair as all of their kin. And then there was Hun—muscular and dark-skinned like his mother's people-- with thick black hair and a broad, open, friendly face. He was gentle by nature, quick to laugh, very devoted to his family. The quiet one. The dependable one. I was proud of my sons. I loved them completely and without reservation, as any parent does. I longed to be with them so fiercely I thought my heart would break to look on them.

And Brulde, my old companion, my tent mate, my lover… the years had been terribly unkind to him, but my eyes did not see him as he was that day. I did not see the limping old man with the bowed back and the sun-weathered face. I did not see the gray hair and beard and crusty blind eye. I saw my Brulde as he was in his prime, straight of back and strong of eye, his golden hair lying upon his muscular shoulders like a mantle of sunshine. I had always admired that hair! You might even say I was jealous of it. How it curled like ivy around his face and then flowed in golden cataracts down and across his shoulders. He was not quite fifty years old then, middle aged by your modern reckoning of time's passage for men and women, but in those days fifty years old was ancient. But he was beautiful to me. I loved him and he was beautiful.

I had killed the buck deer they were tracking that afternoon, descending from a tree and ending its life with one painless blow to the head. It was a thing I had done many times before, helping my companion to provide for our family. Although there had been offers, Eyya and Nyala had never accepted another male into our group marriage after my disappearance. That left the burden of providing meat for our family to Brulde alone, so I helped when I was able to, killing game and leaving it in his path, or dispatching them after he had wounded them with an arrow so that he did not have to chase them across half the valley. One particularly harsh winter, I had brought meat directly to the wetus for them, left it outside the tent in the middle of the night. The bloodlust very nearly overwhelmed me, being so near to them, and I had fled at top speed back to my lair before I did them harm. It had been a terrible risk, but they did not starve that winter. They would never go hungry if I could help it.

Ordinarily, I would have left the deer for him and moved to a safe distance, but I was half mad from loneliness and thinking, Perhaps this time. Perhaps this time it will be all right. I did not yet know that I was an immortal, but I had seen that I was not aging as a normal man would do and I wanted him to know what had happened to me before he passed into the Ghost World. I didn't want him to die without speaking to him one last time

So I squatted beside the great buck's haunch, and when the three hunters rounded the hill and saw me, I smiled and raised my hand in greeting.

The heavy furs I wore concealed all but my face and hands, but they were startled nonetheless. All three men nocked arrows in my direction.

"Who goes there?" Brulde bellowed, his voice raspy and high-pitched. "Name yourself, stranger! Are you friend or foe?" His arrow, I saw, did not waver, despite his advanced age.

"Put down your bow, Brulde. You know who I am," I said gently.

"I do not! Name yourself, I say, or I will put this arrow through your heart!"

He could very well have carried out that threat, though it would have been a simple thing for me to snatch the projectile out of the air if he tried.

"It is I. It is your old companion, Gon."

My heart convulsed in my chest as I spoke the words. Our vampire hearts do not always beat, but mine beat that day, a spasm of anxiety that almost made me clutch my chest.

I feared for my sanity if he did not believe me, if he passed on through the veil of death without knowing what I had become, without knowing how much I loved him and how badly that I missed him. I had been contemplating suicide those past few seasons as the weight of my loneliness piled up on my spirit like heavy stones. I did not know then that ending my own life would be such an impossible task. I thought I could simply fall upon a spear or throw myself from the ledge of my aerie. How ignorant I was! If he did not believe me, if he turned his back on me, I feared I would lose my mind and destroy myself, and death still had the power to frighten me then, despite my loneliness and torment.

But Brulde did put aside his bow. "Gon?" he wheezed, squinting his good eye.

I nodded. "Yes, Brulde. It is I. It is Gon."

"Father, no! It can't be him!" my eldest son objected, glaring at me fiercely. "Your old companion died many years ago, during your battle with the Lizard Men! You told us this yourself! I do not know who this white-faced man is, but it is not your tent mate!"

"It is an imposter," Hun said, "some sort of trickster-spirit."

"No," Brulde said to the boys. "Look at him! Don't you remember the face of your father? It is truly him! Even half-blind I know that face!" He leaned forward then, squinting at me. "But... so young! Why, you haven't aged a day, my friend!"

I scowled, ashamed that he was so old and I so young. It seemed terribly disrespectful. Had I thought this would go any other way? I was a fool. A monster and a fool. Yet, Brulde approached. Our sons tried to grab him, tried to hold him back from me, but he waved them off angrily.

"Gon?" he whispered.

I rose to meet him. "Yes."

The smell of his body enveloped me and the Hunger leapt up, snarling ravenously, clawing at the walls of my self-control, trying to tear them down. I went stock-still, battling my own terrible desires. My heart was pounding in my chest now. My mouth flooded with saliva. My hands wanted to fly out and snatch him to me. I curled them into fists and held them at my sides, trembling.

Brulde stepped closer, and then closer still, and then he was close enough to touch me. His hand, silky with age, reached out and stroked my cheek. His good eye glimmered moistly. "It is really you, Gon! But how can it be? You are so pale and cold to the touch! Are you a spirit? Have you come to take me with you? Do we go now to dwell in the land of our ancestors?"

There was such hope in his voice as he asked me that. Such terrible hope.

My heart broke.

"No," I whispered. "I haven't come to take you to the afterlife, old friend. I came because I miss you."

"But what happened to you? Why are you so cold and white?"

I hesitated. Do I tell him a simple lie or a confusing truth?

I opted for the truth.

"The Foul One cursed me," I answered. "The night he took me hostage. He meant to bend me to his will. To make a slave of me. But I am my father's son and I would not submit to him. No matter what he did to me, I would not submit. We fought and I destroyed him. But before I defeated our foe, the fiend cast a spell on me. He froze me in time, and in this whitened form."

Brulde gasped, then nodded. As fanciful as my story was, he knew it was the truth. I was the cold, white evidence of its veracity.

"Oh, Gon! I knew you were alive! I felt it in my heart. Everyone said that you were dead, but I could never accept it. I looked for you. Sometimes it seemed you were very close. Just out of sight. Over the next hill. And now I know that I was right! But why did you not rejoin us? Your family would have welcomed you back! None of us would have cared that you were cursed!"

I clasped his hand, holding it to my cheek. He was so warm! I closed my eyes and drank in that warmth. It had been so long since I felt the touch of another human being!

"I know you would have," I said. "And I wanted to come back. But it is not as simple as that. The spell the Foul One cast on me did not just change my appearance. It is so much worse than that. It was his vengeance to remake me after his own evil spirit, a creature of the night, half-man, half-demon. He cursed me with his appetite for blood, a terrible craving that can never be satisfied, a desire that I battle even now, as much as I love you. No, my friend, I can never rejoin you in this life. Perhaps not even in the Ghost World. It is the price I paid to vanquish the Foul One who haunted our valley."

"Oh, Gon!" Brulde groaned. "The price was too high!"

"Perhaps I am barred from the heavens," I said. "My spirit may never be allowed to join our ancestors in the afterlife. I do not know. But do not weep for me overly much. I watch over our people now. I will not allow anyone, or anything, to harm our tribe. Or our family. Not even myself. This I promise you."

Brulde began to sob. He embraced me. I allowed it, though the closeness of his body stirred my hunger for his blood to a fever pitch. I wanted to put my arms around him, to embrace him back, but I was afraid to do it, afraid of what I might do to him. I could feel my control crumbling. The beast was tearing down my walls.

Gently, I pushed him away. My sons had edged closer, still watching me suspiciously. I turned to address them before I must—for their sake—take my leave of them.

"Gan, Hun," I said. "You make me very proud."

"Papa?" Gan whispered.

As Brulde struggled to stem his weeping, I looked at the two young men with a stern eye. "I am so sorry that I could not be there to help raise you and your brothers and sisters," I said. "That was not of my choosing. But know this: I have watched you all, and loved you all, all the days of your lives. Care after your mothers when Brulde has departed this world. I watch over them too, but I can only do so much from a distance."

"Is it really you, father?" Hun said.

Gan's mouth worked with some sudden strong emotion. His eyes widened and then glimmered with tears. "I remember you!" he gasped. "I remember you now, father! I would sit in your lap and play with the little animals that you carved for me out of wood. I remember your face, and how your beard tickled my nose when you kissed me."

He reached for me and I stepped back, holding my body as rigidly as possible. The Hunger--! It was fully upon me now, crowding all other thought out of my mind.

"I love you all," I said, talking rapidly now, backing away from them. "I have always loved you. Take care of your mothers. Love and obey your father. I must go now. Good-bye, my sons. Good-bye, my dearest friend."

And then I turned and propelled myself through the air as fast as I could.

To their mortal eyes, it was as if I had vanished into thin air.