Chapter 121 - Dinner Conversation part 3

"Don't you want to stay and watch?" Lukas inquired as I rose to give him some privacy. He pushed his underpants down his thighs and sat on the portable potty chair I'd purchased for him several days ago. "You can experience my bowel movement vicariously," he taunted me, "just as you did when you were watching me eat."

"That won't be necessary," I said, stamping down on my outrage. Keeping my face neutral, I slipped out into the hallway.

"Wait a minute--! Oh, here it comes--!" he grunted toward my retreating back.

I shut the door firmly, ignoring his mocking laughter.

Vile cretin! I thought. Then I felt amusement, and I had to stifle a chuckle. No mortal man had ever challenged me so thoroughly.

I moved down the dark corridor.

I wanted music—if only to drown out the sounds of his elimination, which I could still hear through the intervening walls. I turned on a lamp, idled through my collection of phonographic recordings, settling on Brahms' Tragic Overture, Op.81. 

No one knows for what exact purpose the Tragic Overture was designed—some thought Faust-- but the sonata is rich and energetic. I set the needle into the groove and retired to my sofa, closing my eyes to drink in the music.

To kill or not to kill, that is the question, I thought, paraphrasing the Bard.

Better yet: "Know yourself, vampire. When you strip away all vanity, you will find that your questions are only the truths you are unwilling to accept."

That advice from a mortal princess I once loved, many hundreds of years ago. Her name was Nina, after the Babylonian goddess of fertility. She is gone now, of course. Gone like all the others. Gone now to dust, like the lovers of my mortal span: Eyya, Nyala. Yes, even Brulde. Gone like my radiant Julia, who died with the city of Pompeii. Gone like my first vampire child, Ilio, and the blood drinker he made after his heart, his gentle bride who was called Priss. All of them dead and gone but for Zenzele, devoured by the insatiable maw of time.

And what strange continent did my Zenzele now roam? What music was she listening to at this very moment? If I know her, it is the piping of the wind or a chorus of crickets, or perhaps the rhythmic crash of ocean waves on some distant moonlit beach.

Zenzele, who is as hard and timeless as I. My soul mate. My female counterpart in this dark and empty universe. If I could move to her by some flourish of magic, I would fly to her with open arms. I needed her counsel, perhaps more than I ever needed it before. She might have been able to reason with me, talk me out of the mad schemes that kept whirling through my mind. At the very least, her company would distract me from my dubious contemplations. 

To kill or not to kill… but who did I plan to kill?

That was the question.

If only my love were here to guide me. But Zenzele is lost to me, no less than all the others. She had begged me, two hundred years ago or so, to release her from the chains of my love for her. This was just before I settled here in Liege. She needed her freedom, she'd said. Some time apart. She promised to return. And I let her go. Of course I did. And she had drifted out of my life just as she so often drifted into it, always with her the need to be free, even from the bonds of adoration.

She would return to me. In another hundred years, another thousand. When her loneliness outweighed her desire to wander unfettered through the world, she would return. To me. To the home I kept for her in my heart.,

But would it be too late this time?

Perhaps… it was already too late.

You see, a terrible, selfish plan was incubating in my mind. I was about to do something wicked and evil, and though I pretended to debate this mad and half-formed scheme, I knew.

I had already committed myself.

Yet, I prayed that Zenzele would come... that she'd come and save me from myself!