Chapter 96 - The German Pornographer Tells All part 1

"So what happened? Did you kill the last four Elders? And what became of the boy Ilio? Does he still live?"

The German asked these things in a rush. I sat quietly gathering my thoughts, my head down, my white hands clasped between my knees. The curiosity—the need—writ on his features filled me with sadistic pleasure. If my hair were not hanging in my face, he would have seen the enjoyment I took from his curiosity in the twitching of my lips, though I tried to constrain my expressions, lest I betray my weakness to the treacherous man sitting across from me.

You think him helpless, this man sitting bound to my chair with silver duct tape? Men like him are never helpless. They're never anything less than deadly, these human predators. If I were a mortal man, every moment that passed between us would be fraught with danger. He would have taken advantage of any opportunity to free himself. He would have tried to get inside my head. Twist me to his will. Any angle he could think of—bribery, flattery, fear—to suborn my will, confuse me, seduce me, kill me.

Perhaps he already knew my weaknesses.

Yes… I might be immortal, but I have weaknesses.

I'm lonely. I love.

Those are my weaknesses.

Take this man, for instance. My captive. My evening meal. Already, loneliness had stayed my hand. His brutal beauty had enticed me, had led me to bring him here, to my private sanctum, rather than feed on him in some dark corner out there, in the city. I should have made a quick meal of him, tossed the carcass in the Meuse, but I hadn't. And already I was beginning to love him—this killer, this wolf in sheep's clothing. If not love, then fascination. I gazed upon his features, and I imagined how he would appear as an immortal, his flesh white and flawless and gleaming, his grey eyes glittering like diamonds. He would be a God of Death, this man. A terrible angel.

No! Too dangerous to think such thoughts! Was I so desperate for companionship that I would unleash a monster like him on an unsuspecting world?

Ha! I might.

I've done it before.

"I have shared with you," I said quietly. "Now it's time to keep your end of the bargain. I will finish my tale, but first I would have your story."

Lukas licked his lips. His eyes narrowed. Caution. Paranoia. "What do you want to know?" he asked.

I peered at him through the fringe of my bangs. "Start with the girl. The child you raped and murdered tonight. Who was she? How did she come to be in your…" I smiled. "…Not so tender care?"

He stared back at me. I could tell by the tension in his body that he did not want to share his secrets with me. Suspicion comes so easily to men like him. Men with blood on their hands. Paranoia is a country they live their whole lives. Finally, he submitted. He surrendered to my patient stare. His shoulders slumped. "I don't know her name. Not her full name." He sighed. "I don't recall it, anyway. She might have told me once. Yes! Yes, I remember she told me, but I wasn't paying attention. It didn't really matter to me. I only remember her first name. Amelie."

"Amelie," I repeated. A beautiful name. It rolled on the tongue like a candy.

"I came here to Liege to shoot videos for a business associate." He snorted a laugh. "Fuck films, to be precise." For a moment he grinned at me, as if we were partners in his crimes, as if it was all a big joke and we would laugh about it together. "Kiddie porn, to be more precise," he continued. "I'm a child pornographer. I make movies of little kids being raped, and I sell them on the black market." He confessed this as if it were a terrible intimacy. He searched my face for reaction.

I raised one eyebrow. "Is that supposed to shock me? Children have been the victims of monsters like you since the days I walked this earth a living man. The tribe that lived to the north of my people—the Foul Ones-- frequently raided the villages around them for children to exploit. They enslaved them, raped them. They even ate them, and adorned themselves in jewelry made from their bones. Your crimes are nothing extraordinary. You humans eat your young with nauseating regularity, in some manner or other."

He seemed confused for a moment, disconcerted by my lack of outrage.

I was outraged, don't get me wrong. I abhor violence. Man's propensity for visiting suffering on his fellow man sickens me to no end, but in thirty millennia, I have grown inured to any great feelings of surprise or indignation. World-weary. The ultimate cynic. Another weakness, perhaps.

"I apologize," I said with a tiny gesture. "You were saying…?"

His eyes twitched to and fro in their sockets as he searched out the trail of his thoughts, then he said, "I found her at the train station. She'd run away from home with her boyfriend. I didn't care about him. He was just a skinny, blond-headed jono named Bertrand, a dirty keck poseur with an acne-pocked face, but she was something special. Young. Maybe fifteen. Thin and pretty and naive. She was small for her age. She looked much younger than she really was. The two of them were from a little villa in the south. I forgot where they said. Their parents did not approve of their romance, so they bought train tickets and came north to the city. To Liege."

"So there they were, alone, cold, homeless," I prompted.

He laughed. "Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen." Two flies with one swatter!

"And of course, you befriended them."

"It was snowing outside the train station. A beautiful Christmas snow. Flakes as big as your thumbnail. But so cold, and they had nowhere to go. I drove them to my flat. It only took me a few minutes to talk them into my car. I think they knew what they were doing. That they were selling themselves to me for food and shelter. They even saw the cameras and lighting equipment, the bedroom set in the corner of the flat by the windows, but my apartment was warm, and I had lager and reheated some sauerbraten and potato dumplings I had in the refrigerator for them.

"I called Maurice while they were eating. I told him I had some chickens in the coop. He said he'd be right over."

"Maurice?" I asked.

"Maurice Fournier. He's an old friend of my dad. A Frenchman. Or half-French, half-Jew. Something like that. He's a short guy with curly gray hair. Got a big kike nose. He's my financier. He bailed me out of jail when I was arrested in Hamburg. Smuggled me out of the country. Set me up here in Liege under a false identity. I guess you could say he's my producer. He likes the way I shoot my films. Says I alchemize suffering into poetry, or some artsy shit like that. Sometimes he helps shoot and edit my work. Mostly he deals with production, though. Distribution."

I nodded.

"Maurice got there about an hour later. He had Hans with him." Lukas smiled. "Hans Baer. My god, he's a big motherfucker. Almost seven foot tall, with a wiederschlappen the size of your forearm. Ugly as sin in the face, big scar running down through his right eye, but the body of an Adonis. If I was a faggot, I would worship that body. It's absolute perfection, from neck to toe. Hans… he stars in a lot of my films. The man can stay hard for hours, and when he cums, it's like someone shook a bottle of champagne and popped the cork." Lukas laughed, blushing a little.

"Hans made my little chicks nervous, with the glass eye and the scar, but they were well on their way to getting plastered, and he has a knack for putting the children at ease. He acts very meek and slouches when he is off camera. Wears hornrim glasses like that American super hero Clark Kent. They're not prescription glasses, though. Just to protect his good eye.

"We all partied for a while. Smoked some hash. Drank. The boy, the skinny jono, wanted to know what all the cameras and lights were for, so I told him. I film young couples for an internet pornsite, I said. He wanted to know how much I paid. When I told him two thousand Euros per shoot, I thought he would shit in his baggies!" Lukas laughed. "You see? I didn't even have to sweet talk them. It no sooner left my mouth than he was begging me to shoot them.

"Of course, she was not so eager, money or no. Young girls protect their virtue like they are setting seed aside for next year's planting, but she was drunk and her boyfriend wouldn't stop badgering her. 'We can get our own place, Amelie!' He said. 'We can live until I find a job to support us!'

"I acted as though I was unsure about it all. I asked them how old they were. Of course, they lied. He told me he was twenty, his girl eighteen. I looked at Maurice and he smiled back at me. It was hard not to laugh.

"Finally, she nodded. She said, 'Yes, all right, Bertrand! I'll do it for us.'"

Lukas's eyes had gone distant. He smiled at the memory.

"So much for love, yes? A few hours in the big city and he was already pimping his girlfriend out. Himself as well. Little whore. The punk wanted their money up front. He thought he was being slick. I counted it out on the table for them to see. Two thousand Euros. And why not? They certainly weren't leaving with it."