Chapter 320 - Utah, One Week Ago part 5

The first thing he thought when he awoke was that it was morning and he was back home and his mother was cooking breakfast for him. He didn't know exactly what she was cooking-- meat of some kind-- but it smelled delicious. He cracked open an eye, mouth watering, expecting to see the rafters of his bedroom ceiling. Instead, he saw that he was sleeping on the ground. Overhead, a canopy of leafy birch branches rustled in the breeze. It was still night and cold enough to make his breath steam, and sitting across the fire from him was the oldest living vampire.

"You came back!" Sydney exclaimed, leaping up in excitement.

The vampire was roasting a hare on a spit over the fire, which he had constructed while Sydney was sleeping. Tied to one of the birch trees alongside Black Devil was a large red mare with a white star on her forehead. The vampire still wore his bowler hat, though he had changed into a long coat with a red and gold brocade vest. He glanced up at Sydney's exclamation and replied, "I told you I would. Did you think that I had abandoned you?"

"Well, yes," Sydney sputtered. "You said--? But I--!"

"Ah, well, you were beginning to doze," the vampire said. "I suppose you forgot. I apologize if you thought I had forsaken you. As I explained last night, we vampires are nocturnal creatures. We can move about in the daytime, but our eyes are very sensitive to the light. It is painful for us. Generally, we sleep during the day and travel by night. When I arose at dusk and realized you had gone on, I procured a horse and some supplies. You were sleeping when I caught up to you. I could hear your stomach growling so I killed a hare for your dinner. I hope that is all right."

It was quite all right. In fact, Sydney nearly devoured the entire thing before thinking to ask the vampire if he would like some of the hare.

Gon smiled and shook his head no.

"Just blood then?" the boy asked, lips slick with animal fat.

The vampire nodded.

"That must get tiresome after a while," Sydney said, and the vampire shrugged with the same strange smile.

"Well, I suppose we can travel by night," Sydney went on, tossing the last of the rabbit bones into the bushes. "Probably be safer for me anyway, being a wanted man and all. I'll just sleep in in the morning, piddle around camp until you join me in the evening. Keep an eye out for the law."

"No one is pursuing you," the vampire assured him. "If they were I would know it. My senses are very fine."

"Ah."

Ridiculous as it sounded, he was a little offended by that. Did his townsfolk truly have so little regard for him that they couldn't be bothered to drum up a posse and light after him? He had killed a man, for Christ's sake! He didn't stop to consider that their apathy was more of a commentary on how they felt about Dutch Jacobson, but that was what Sydney thought. His rival had done a very thorough job of destroying Sydney's self-esteem over the years.

As they had the night before, Sydney and the vampire talked until nearly dawn. Sydney found himself drawn even more powerfully to the handsome white-skinned man. He was fascinated by the vampire's mannerisms, which were almost but not quite human. The vampire was wise yet unpretentious, powerful yet vulnerable, and the paradox of his nature completely enraptured the boy. The vampire possessed a sincerity, an unselfconscious guilelessness, that Sydney had never encountered before. Sydney had never been allowed such an unobstructed view of another person's soul, and it was both seductive and slightly unnerving.

Gon, the young man suspected, was a very lonely creature. Of course he would be, being so long lived. He preferred the company of mortals, he said. If that was so, Sydney thought, we must pass through his life like mayflies, there and gone in a single night, or maybe even quicker, like hot embers rising up from a campfire, a brief bright flash of light against the black backdrop of an eternal night.

The thought made his arms prickle with goose bumps.

His woman, another vampire named Zenzele, had recently divorced herself of his company, having grown weary of him over the past five or six years, and Gon had come to the American frontier to forget his heartbreak in an unfamiliar country. "She is my soulmate," Gon confessed, "But Time tires even the most abiding affections. She will return to me when she has forgotten me a little and my existence no longer seems like such a burden on her spirit."

"How long have you been together?" Sydney asked. This was the following evening, as they rode alongside the meandering creek. The night was cool and arid, the stars very bright and crisp overhead.

"I do not know with any certainty," Gon said. "I was old long before mortal men tallied the movements of the heavenly bodies. Mathematics and the written word still strike me as novelties sometimes. They are only recent inventions from my perspective." He glanced at Sydney then, as if he expected the boy to scoff. When the boy did not question him, the vampire went on: "If I were to venture a guess, based on your anthropological sciences, I would say about twenty thousand years."

Though it sounded fantastic, Sydney believed him. What possible motive could a creature like that have to lie to him? He couldn't impress Sydney any more than the young man was already impressed. It wasn't until the next morning, when Sydney really thought about it—twenty thousand years!—that the magnitude of such a claim sank in, and a cold shiver worked its way up Sydney's spine. For the first time, the vampire seemed truly monstrous to the boy. Fortunately, it was daytime and his new friend was sleeping in some secret grotto and could not see the fear and uncertainty come into Sydney's eyes.

What am I to a thing like that? Sydney wondered.

What if he grew bored of Sydney's company, or Sydney somehow, accidentally, offended the creature?

But Gon appeared to genuinely enjoy Sydney's company, and he was never impatient or short with him. He seemed to relish the boy's enthusiasm, and answered nearly every question the lad put to him as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible.

That night, after the vampire rejoined him, Sydney worked up the nerve to voice his concerns.

The vampire laughed.

"While it is true that your lives are brief compared to our own, we vampires experience time in exactly the same manner you mortals experience it. It does not move any quicker or any slower for us than it does for you. In that we are much the same. This night, this conversation, is just as present for me as it is for you."

"But you are so much older than me," Sydney said. "All those years and years, and you can remember it all."

The vampire shrugged. "The past is a ghost, the future a dream. It is only the present that is truly real. As we both experience the present in the same manner, mortal and immortal alike, we are equals."

Sydney thought about that for a long time, turning it over in his head, examining it from every angle. It seemed both profound and slightly dishonest. After some time of quiet reflection, he realized why the vampire's philosophy disturbed him.

Time was an unbroken chain of present moments, but the vampire got to enjoy those present moments forever. A mortal was allotted a finite amount and then no more. In quality of experience they were equal—perhaps-- but not in quantity.

That made him realize something else: he wanted more.

Immortality… it was a seductive thought. Once it got into Sydney's brain, he could think of nothing else.

He wanted to be a vampire.