CONTENT WARNING: Depictions of gore, death, sexual content
The beetle had a thousand eyes. From this angle, at least. I couldn’t say for certain if all were focused on me. I found that I am quite beyond such petty details. Mostly.
Like for instance, I noticed its eyes. All of them. They are like jewels. Like polished jet and onyx. Especially when the light hits them. Even though I am not the best authority on the quality of the light, I could still appreciate its effects. After the light was reflected by the mirror it was then refracted by the crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. From where I lay, I would hazard a guess that the chandelier was a little over to my left, approximately fifteen feet high. Give or take a foot or so.
Gauging distance is tricky when one is lying down.
The beetle had a thousand eyes. I could swear that they were all focused on me. Mandibles a-clicking it worried at its barbed legs as it squatted on my chest like a pasha on his divan. I could almost visualize the lilac-tinged smoke it blew out from its hookah. Was it doing the insectoid equivalent of picking its teeth? Or pedicure?
Do insects groom their legs?
The clicking mandibles … the unending chitinous chittering tick tick tick as it continued its ministrations.
Even death is no respite, as the sound haunts me still. I might as well avail myself to its company while I languish here.
Oh, I’m sorry. Didn’t I tell you? I must be getting senile. The beetle paused, the clicking stopped for several second as it adjusted its perch on my chest. The clicking picked up again as it resumed. I took it as my cue to continue.
I’m dead. Or a facsimile of it. I believe people have a different name for me and my kind.
Undead.
Throughout my existence I found that it was best to keep my true nature hidden. It was relatively easy, contrary to what people say.
I don’t burst into flames when I’m out during the day. Not that I do at any rate—my eyes are highly sensitive. My eyes would get irritated and water profusely when I am out and about during the day. The light cast by a single burning candle is broad daylight to me nowadays.
Ha! Nowadays. Ironic, no? Since I hardly go out during the day.
The beetle paused before resuming its previous ministrations again, a rapid tick-tick-tick seemingly acknowledging the aside. Its eyes were still transfixed on me as it remained perched on my chest.
At any rate, extremely heightened senses may sound like a gift to some. I am telling you now, it is not. Not at all. Taking the train is a nightmare. The stench of stale urine, unwashed bodies and various other nausea-inducing odours threaded and woven together and jammed up forcefully in one’s nostrils is no way to live.
Heh. Live. Another irony, there.
The beetle paused, cocking its head. The glittering composite eyes almost glinting with skepticism. One of its legs were held up—either in raising a point, or admiring its handiwork. Pedicure, I told myself. Definitely pedicure.
The train? Of course, you would ask that. An ageless immortal taking public transport? Whoever have heard of such a thing?
Well, all I can say is not everyone is born a European prince. Some of us were poor serfs toiling away in our lord’s fields.
I could not say for certain, but by that era’s reckoning I was born several centuries after the fall of Rome. The world had just been introduced to the predations of people from the East—we know them now as Muslims—who had seized control of the Bosporus. But the rough touch of strife had not reached us yet when I was growing up. That period in my life would come much later. I could still remember the village where my family used to live. Modest by any standards. You would’ve turned your collective noses at it, I’m sure. It was a small hamlet of roughly twenty or so families. My family grew turnips and raised pigs. With four sons preceding my sister and me, my father had help enough in the fields. Our lord lived several miles away from our hamlet, in a manor nestled among the forests where the sun dappled the grass in pockets of gold among emerald leaves. We hardly ever saw him, except for the times when his black carriage would pass us during the evenings. He was distant, but he was fair. We were not treated unkindly, and was always paid a fair price for any services we rendered unto him and his household. Us two youngest helped our mother around the house while the older siblings toiled away with our father in the fields.
I grew up like the proverbial weed. My olive-hued skin and set me apart from my siblings who were born fair-haired and blue-eyed. My amber eyes made some people uncomfortable. They called me Wolf-kin in our language—one because of my eyes and by the time I had reached sixteen summers I could be found braving the wilds and woods for game to sell or bring back to our lord’s manor.
That sixteenth summer brought several changes in my life. Years of physical labour out in the fields and hunting had honed my form and rangy limbs and with my colouring and height I was deemed comely in some quarters.
I admit that I quite enjoyed the attention. Especially from the men and boys who find me desirable. Often when I was accompanied by Vilas, the rugged, grizzled hunter on many of our joint hunts it usually involved with either one of us on our backs, or on all fours while the we sank ourselves in that welcoming, clenching warmth of our partner’s depths. Feeling myself being filled and seeded by another man—or me them …
The beetle chittered, as if letting me know its disapproval at the turn in my narrative.
My apologies.
It was not quite my twenty-fifth year when I was called to serve in the lord’s household. I have had my fill of the limited diversions offered by our little hamlet and leapt at the chance. The promise of new clothes, room and board—as well as the monthly stipend of my wages forwarded to my family—were good enough reason. Not to mention the possibility of new acquaintances to discover.
The beetle chittered again its admonishment.
You ‘re quite a prude, aren’t you? Very well then.
I will not belabour you with the sordid details of my sexual escapades—don’t flash those eyes at me—but suffice it to say that I was well utilized. I was assigned as his cupbearer, and like Ganymede to Zeus I saw to it that our lord was not left wanting.
I suppose you were not surprised that our lord was an undead. The signs were there, in hindsight. But I was an unlearned servant and while I would like to say I am not a fool, I was still a stranger to the ways of the world.
And what a world it turned out to be.
The night when he turned me—during one of our many, many assignations—I could have sworn my skull felt like it had been cracked open and my insides hollowed out. Then came the hunger—and not just for him. It explained why he was rarely seen in our village. He was clever and prudent enough to range afield for his hunts. The occasional captive prey was fed using the produce we supplied to him. And I became his willing assistant, among other things.
And so it went. Until tonight.
He was lying several feet away from me. His headless body drained of the blood seeping from the gaping stump of his neck. My Zeus, decapitated like the Hydra. They had taken his head as a trophy.
I lay here now, telling you this story. The dull, boring tale of a dull, boring man who had learned nothing in his long existence.
Oh, there were infusions of culture of course. And all the landmarks of history that I experienced. I lived through the Crusades. I was there when a German priest hammered his rebuttal on the door of a church in Wittenberg. I heard about the fat king on his island throne murdering his two wives by beheading them. Then the beheading of the nobility and royalty several centuries later in France. The wars. The discoveries and advances in knowledge—fields of sciences and technological marvels—that we managed to witness. And even on occasion, helped to facilitate.
No, I learned nothing. I was drunk on my own hubris. I never learned what mercy or pity was. How could I? I’m a predator.
The beetle chittered, dropping down on all of its six legs. This one knows now that the story was nearing its end, I acidly thought. It crawled off of my chest, uncaring of the swathe of blood down my shirt-front. The ragged, gaping maw of my opened neck didn’t faze it as it crawled along its jagged edges. My lord was decapitated in one stroke of a katana. I had the ignominy of being hacked by a dull machete. And it wasn’t even fully cut through. My head was still joined to my neck by some thread of flesh and skin. Which explains the awkward tilt of my vision.
The tilt and angle were enough to see my torso lying on its back. And the ragged skin where my head is attached. And of course, the fifteen-inch stake of polished hawthorn jutting out from my chest. People thought that once you stake a vampire—or cut off the head for that matter—that is all there is. That we crumble into dust, or burst into flames.
Not so. The soul is immortal. And we are damned to be tied to our mortal remains.
And so it ends: the dull, boring tale of a dull, boring man who had learned nothing in his long existence … oh wait, I think I heard something. A skittering of the chitinous legs of a cricket as it came up on my chest, chittering as it climbed.
Wonderful, another audience.
END