Reflections on Time: Vampire Rimanez

1

I don’t often put pen to paper, but for today I will make an exception. 2

The decades have been kind to me and the friends I had who have long since died would be startled to see that I am still alive today. As they rot and mould into the earth, I alone remain untouched by the hands of time. 3

My skin is the same alabaster white. My eyes retain their lustrous sky blue tint, and my hair is the same dark brown that it always has been.4

At the age of twenty-nine I wore the appearance of a man already in his mid thirties, and when I first died at the age of thirty-five the look of my mortal body took on the same appearance that it has today. I have become ageless and my true age has been locked in a cellar forever.5

When I was just a lost young man people always guessed incorrectly, but now I am immortal their guesses are even wider of the mark. Sometimes I talk to what you rather uncharitably call ‘pensioners’. I used to think that conversing with people nearer my own age would help me to relate to the New World. Sometimes it does, but most of the times they appear to be only ageing children, as knowledgeable as the teenage children whom I converse with on other days of the week.6

This is what I want to discuss with you today, you poor mortals. Humanity has gone through many stages, but the only changes that I have noticed in the three centuries of my lifetime are those involving technology. I used to be able to hunt in one village until there were next to no people left to feed upon. As soon as I had drained one village I would travel fifty miles down the road, find a new village and start my feeding all over again. 7

But then as trade developed, and news spread faster the villages began to anticipate my movements and I was forced further and further away just to take a good feed for the night.8

Decades flew by and before long I was even forced to switch countries to find communities that were ignorant about my activities. As England developed large towns became larger cities and I was forced into the backwater villages of Eastern Europe. Here I could thrive as the peasants; suspicious of any new technology refused to embrace the changes that were making life so difficult for my kind. I spent years in the Appalachian Mountains; a decade in the Carpathians and the peasants in the surrounding villages would treat me like a king. Afraid of my presence I accepted sacrifices of their most nubile and untainted blood until I could drink no more.9

But then Bram Stoker wrote his silly little book and once again I had to keep my activities a secret. My lairs began to crumble and the peasants no longer feared me, so I abandoned them and returned to my country of birth in the hope that I could starve out a living on the waifs and strays that always litter their large cities. In 1898 I lost control in Whitechapel, London. The press blamed my little spree on ‘Jack the Ripper’ after I sent them a kidney and a silly little letter. Regaining my senses I escaped into the countryside around the Black Forest. Here I began to lose my mind and fall into a depression that left me unable to operate as the Vampire that I was meant to be. Luckily a group believing in the Devil saved me. To them I was Satan reincarnated, and needing somewhere to rest my head I let them believe the nonsense that they themselves had created. The years I spent with this gang of misfits and loners (they called themselves the ‘Hellfire club’) were entirely counter-productive for my health. Not needing to hunt I grew lazy, I waited in their lair and they gave me willing volunteers on which to feed on. This was not how it should be. Vampires live on fear, it is the oxygen that keeps us alive and is as invaluable as the blood itself. Blood tastes different without fear, it becomes lethargic and the thrill is no longer there.10

At the beginning of the 1960’s I began to separate myself from the Hellfire Club. Their founding members had long since died and the sycophants that replaced them began to bore me. Then one day I slaughtered a new member savoured his blood and my mind began to break free from the shackles of indolence. The thrill of the kill awoke in me the passions that I had long since forgotten. So with a new lease on life I once again began to hunt for my own prey.11

Emerging from my lair in the Black Forest I was startled to see how much everything had changed. There were roads packed with motor cars, television sets that could show live pictures from all over the world. Men had invented new weapons to kill their enemies, weapons that even I began to fear. They built space rockets and danced upon the moon like a child excited on the morning of his birthday. Everything had changed, everything was new, but as I explored the world through my interactions with its people I could see that despite surface appearances nothing had really changed at all.12

Men still hated their neighbours for petty, inconsequential differences. They still whored and drank like the peasants in the most remote of villages. Their leaders still thought wars of political convenience and blinded by the words of clever speakers the majority showed that ignorance was still alive and well. Put simply, the world was still full of sheep and a handful of Shepherds and the more I looked the more familiar it all became to me.13

Man has made the hunt more difficult for the likes of me, but even after all this time it continues much the same as before. I can still gorge myself upon the flesh of the innocents. Africa is a large continent and despite the intense heat I visit it often. I can still wipe out a village without anybody commenting on the slaughter. I still walk through the streets of Budapest; the children of the night are easily bought and rarely missed. But always I return to my home, and as desperate and lonely as it is now become London will always retain a special place in my heart. Yes, the hunt is difficult there now, but it is still the most thrilling hunt in the world. A starving English man has hope in his heart when I drain his life away. A hope that has often gone within the hearts of the dying Ethiopian farmer who I can slaughter by the hundreds without detection.14

Tonight I hunt in a little English town called Hungerford. Somebody will die tonight and I will drain the corpse until it no longer resembles the living being that once inhabited it. In this age of the Internet and twenty-four hour news coverage some lives are simply worth more than others. Somebody will die in Hungerford tonight, and nobody will even notice.15