Chapter 323 - Utah, One Week Ago part 8

Gon did not answer for several minutes, long enough for Sydney to recall what his friend had said earlier—that it was forbidden for a mortal to know how their powers were passed on—and worry. It had not occurred to him that the vampire might harm him for what he had deduced. He had simply blurted it out.

Sydney did not believe his new friend would hurt him, but how well did he know the man, really? They had only been travelling together a couple of days. In that short span of time, Gon had both threatened and saved his life. To say the immortal was unpredictable would be an understatement.

Finally, Gon sighed and answered him. "Yes, the secret is in the blood."

Sydney, who had instinctively tensed up while waiting for the immortal to respond, relaxed. He knew he shouldn't press his strange friend on the matter, that it might be dangerous for him to continue, but he couldn't help himself. "How is it done?" he asked.

"The vampire must pass a portion of his blood into the body of the recipient," the vampire answered. "Usually this is done orally, from mouth to mouth, although some vampires allow their acolytes to drink from their veins. Once the transfer of blood is accomplished, the Strix, which is what we call our enchanted blood, begins immediately to transform its new host, to remake him, cell by cell, into an immortal being. The process is very painful and the outcome is never certain. Sometimes the Living Blood devours a mortal from within, reducing the host to dust within moments. Sometimes it transforms the supplicant into a monster. We call these degenerate creatures ghouls, and destroy them as soon as the corruption becomes evident."

"But usually it works, right? Usually it makes a person like you, an immortal?"

"Well… long lived," Gon admitted. "True immortality is very rare. If I were to give you the Strix, most likely you would live a few millennia, then gradually succumb to the ravages of time."

"But some do not?"

"Eternals, which is what we call true immortals, are as impervious to time as they are to injury and disease."

"And you are an Eternal?"

"Yes."

"You cannot die?"

"No," his companion answered.

"Never ever?"

"No."

The vampire seemed ambivalent of this fact, as if he wished it were not so. It was not so much that the vampire wished to die, Sydney suspected, but that he felt trapped by eternity in some abstruse fashion.

Sydney thought he understood. When things were especially bad for him with Dutch, he had often contemplated suicide. If not for his mother, he might have put his Colt to his temple and pulled the trigger, or maybe hung himself in the barn. Death, as frightening as it was, would at least put an end to his misery. But that avenue of escape was barred to this creature. No matter how much he suffered, Sydney's companion could not destroy himself. He was as trapped by life as Sydney had once been trapped by his familial obligations.

But that was the operative word, wasn't it? Once. Sydney was free now. With a single twitch of his finger, he had freed himself from both the oppression of his enemies and the shackles of responsibility that had bound him so tightly to his family. The only thing he need fear now was death, and Providence had seen fit to deliver him into the company of the one being who might free him of that last dreadful burden. Although he'd never given much thought to death before he'd made the vampire's acquaintance (except as an out when life was especially onerous for him) once the thought of immortality had entered his awareness, it seemed death was all that he could think about. He even dreamed about it.

That night, the first night following his confrontation with the old bandit, he had dreamed it was him the vampire was burying. He was dead but somehow still aware. He couldn't move, couldn't speak. He could see so his eyes must be open, and he could think, but otherwise he was utterly immobile and helpless. The vampire had placed him into the grave and was scooping one handful of dirt after another onto his cold, still form. "Please, don't do this, I'm still alive!" he wanted to shout, but he could not move his mouth, could not twitch so much as a pinky. He woke when the vampire began to scoop dirt onto his face, lurching up in his bedding, clawing at his throat, imagining he was choking. It was hours before he quit trembling and had regained some semblance of normality.

And that was the mildest of the dreams.

Each succeeding night, the dreams were worse and worse. He woke drenched in sweat, shaking, sobbing, strangling on his terror. He began to avoid sleep, forcing himself to stay awake until he collapsed, mid-thought, into exhausted, dream-shot slumber. His travels with the immortal took on a phantasmagorical quality. He saw weird things from the corners of his eyes. Their conversations were meandering, not quite coherent. The vampire knew he was suffering, knew even what he was suffering of—he called it the "horror of true awareness"—but was helpless to alleviate his misery.

"There is no cure for the fever that has infected your mind," the vampire said. "For that fever is the Truth. You must accept it, freely and of your own will, or retreat forever into madness. What is learned cannot be unlearned."

One hundred years later, Sydney would learn the name of the malady that had tormented him so terribly in the dark, dreadful days following the murder of the old bandit. Modern psychologists called it Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD for short. It was a psychological disorder triggered by a shocking, fearsome or dangerous event—or series of events—characterized by flashbacks, bad dreams, frightening thoughts, difficulty sleeping, and emotional outbursts. He was not sure it would have helped to know what he was suffering from, if he could have pulled himself from the emotional quagmire his battered spirit seemed mired in, any more than it helped to name a physical ailment like the flu or the trots, but there was always some comfort in knowing what you were suffering from. Naming a thing was like putting it in a box, making it finite, a little more manageable. But at the time, as he suffered, he knew it only as "the horror of true awareness". It seemed omnipresent, all encompassing. It was Doom, and it dogged his every footstep, night and day.

How close death seemed! It was in the fangs of the rattler sunning itself on the rock. It was in the sting of the scorpion he shook from his boot when he rose. It was in every storm that massed on the horizon, every river they crossed. He began to imagine that death had taken on a physical form, a lean Christ-like figure with the grin of a fox, and followed him stealthily all through the day, remaining just out of sight, poised to strike at any moment—when he slept, when he lowered his guard, when he allowed himself just the briefest glimmer of pleasure or amusement. Sometimes it seemed he could feel its hot, greedy breath blowing down his neck. He was tense all the time, jumping at every sound or flash of movement in his environment. If anything happened to surprise or arouse him, a horrid rush of pure dread would pass through his body, and he would begin to tremble wildly, a foul-smelling oil gushing from his pores. Sometimes it felt like a great weight were pressing down on his chest so that he could barely draw a breath, and sometimes his heart pounded so forcefully that he was certain it would burst. His extremities were like ice, no matter how hot it was that day, and his eyes went all funny so that his vision was alternately blurry and then much too vivid. His ears rang. He suffered from dyspepsia and diarrhea. Sometimes the fits were so bad the world seemed to be spinning crazily around him. The fits were worse than any illness he'd ever suffered. He began to fear the fits almost as badly as he feared their inspiration. Sometimes the thought of the fits was bad enough to bring on a fit.

"Please," he begged one evening, in the midst of one of those terrible paroxysms, "if there's any mercy in your soul, give me the Blood. It's the only way I'll be rid of this maddening horror! I can't take it anymore! It's driving me out of my mind!"

The vampire regarded him sympathetically for a moment, and then he rose and moved across the campsite to sit beside the boy.

"All right," the immortal said.