Chapter 226 - The Birth of Death part 1

Tell me, Lukas, my cold-blooded child, my beautiful vicious protégé... what are we?

Yes, vampires. But that is the obvious answer. That is the simpleton's response. I am asking you what we are. What is our essence, our unembellished nature, our singular summation?

I see that you do not know.

You do not know the answer, or you do not understand the question.

So let me tell you.

We are a static screen upon which the illusion of life dances brightly, like your modern moving picture show, the cinematograph, but that is not life. The illusion does not live. It is just illusion.

My nom de guerre, the Oldest Living Vampire, is as much a lie as it is a cruel jest. I am no more alive than the images in your television box, than the light emitting diodes in your personal computer monitor. In action we have the illusion of life, but we are as devoid of the living spark as that brick wall, the clothing that adorns your body, that overflowing dumpster you stand beside. I have not lived since the night 30,000 years ago that the nameless creature that made me what I am prized my mortal jaws apart and forced this endless curse upon me.

Let us retreat to the fundamental idea, for it is essential that you understand this lesson.

Life, my vicious offspring, is a continual process of birth and death, apportioned by episodes of hunger and satiation.

From the moment of fertilization, the living cell begins to multiply, and those multiplying cells begin to differentiate, and this tissue becomes an eye, and that tissue becomes a hand, and so on and so forth until the developing fetus is capable of surviving outside the womb.

All those cells become what they are so that the living creature, which is really just a mass of differentiated cells, a cooperative aggregation, can satisfy the essential drives: hunger and the urge to reproduce.

A mouth so that the newborn can cry and be fed. Fingers to grasp the teat and draw it to its mouth. Lips and tongue to suck the milk from the breast. Eyes to see the organ that brings it nourishment. Intestines to absorb the nutrients it ingests. Anus to expel the waste that's left behind.

Hunger and satiation.

For the next decade and a half, the cells of that aggregate being continue to multiply and differentiate, according to its genetic blueprint, until it is time for the creature to reproduce. Then, in a firestorm of hormonal secretions, its reproductive system and secondary sexual characteristics develop, and it experiences a new kind of appetite, the urge to find a mate and propagate its kind.

Hunger and satiation, rinse and repeat, ad nauseum. From the very moment that some complex chain of organic chemicals came together in the primordial ooze-- just so!-- all those countless ages ago.

We nosferatu do not truly live because our cells no longer reproduce, nor can we strike the spark of life in the womb of a living woman. We are cut off from that unending cycle. We are exiles. Aliens in our own world.

Look at your hand, Lukas. In a thousand years, if you are unlucky enough to endure so long, it will look exactly as it does this night-- hard and white and gleaming-- each wrinkle, each glinting strand of hair, even the whorls of your fingerprints and that tiny comma-shaped scar on the knuckle of your left thumb, your eyes, your hair, your face, they will all be exactly as they are right now, no younger, no older, no warmer, no colder. Not one single petrified cell in your body will ever change again, and if your cold white form is ever damaged, the living blood will repair the cells exactly as they were.

If that thought does not horrify you, it is only because you do not grasp the full implication. But don't fret. Few vampires do. Not in the beginning.

I suppose what I am trying to say, in my typically verbose style, is this: there is no such thing as eternal life, because life is a cycle of cellular replication. The only thing that lives in you is Death. And that unchanging form, that mass of lifeless hollow cells you call a body, is merely a shell, a conveyance, an instrument of ambulation, for the symbiotic life form that has taken possession of your body.

When we kill, when we feed, we are merely satisfying the hunger of the creature that dwells within us. When you someday make another one of us, as I have done with you, you will only be satisfying the reproductive urge of the living blood inside you.

You will believe those desires to be your own. You will insist that your actions are of your own volition, but they are not, not truly, and they will never be again. You are the shell of a hermit crab, the leather skins the hunter clothes his body with. I have not given you eternal life, my vampire child. I have given you Death.

Unending, unchanging Death.

What is that? How did it all begin?

I'm so glad you asked.