The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All: Revised and Expanded (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga Book 1) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Germany: 30,000 Years Ago

  The Search Party

  A Brief Aside

  The Cave of the Gray Stone People

  The Charnel Pit

  The Ghost Who Is a Man

  Not the End

  About the Author

  The Saga Continues…

  The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All is copyright 2010 by Joseph Duncan

  This novel was previously published under the pen name Rod Redux

  REVISED AND EXPANDED

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental

  2014 E-book Edition

  Published by Cobra E-books

  Metropolis, IL

  ALSO BY JOSEPH DUNCAN

  The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All

  The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl

  Menace of Club Mephistopheles

  Mort

  Hole: A Ghost Story

  Indian Summer

  House of Dead Trees

  Frankenstonia

  Apollonius

  The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed

  Cattle

  Lair of the Luciferians

  Soma

  This book is dedicated to

  Lynn,

  My wife, my partner in crime

  And my best friend.

  Introduction

  My legal name where I currently reside in the city of Liege, Belgium, in the year 2010 A.D., is Gaspar Valessi, but that is not my real name. The name I was given some 30,000 years ago, when I was born in a Paleolithic settlement in the region that is now called Germany-- the name my father gave me shortly after I was voided, bloody and howling, from my mother's womb-- is Gon.

  Over the eons, I have possessed many names, far too many names to list here in this autobiography. I'd wager that a chronological listing of all my former appellations would fill an entire hefty volume. Rest assured I do not intend to set every mundane event and frivolous fact from my unimaginably long life to paper. I'm afraid a mortal reader would never be able to finish the tome in a single human lifespan. Suffice it to say, of all my names, the original is the one I consider my “real” name. Over the millennia, it has become a secret name, a cherished keepsake that I have shared with a select few. You should feel flattered that I share it here with you.

  I am Gon, son of Gan, grandson of Gil. Mortal father of Gan, Hun and Breyya, Gavid, Den and Leth. Grandfather of nations. Vampiric sire of legions.

  Impressed?

  No?

  Then how about this:

  I am the oldest extant vampire.

  I know what you are thinking. “There's no such thing as vampires!”

  Am I right?

  Yes, of course.

  That is what you’re thinking right this very moment.

  You are sitting in your armchair, or snuggled next to a slumbering mate in your luxurious modern bed, and you are rolling your eyes, maybe a little smirk on your lips. But eager, I hope, to set forth upon the long and winding road that is the chronicle of my immortal existence, refusing to harbor even the faintest suspicion that any of the landmarks you spy along the way might actually be real.

  I hope you enjoy my life story, even if you think it nothing more than a bit of silly fantasy. Light reading before bedtime. For all I know, you might be sitting on the toilet with this book, alleviating your boredom while evacuating your bowels. It's probably the best my little tale deserves. I'm not exactly William Shakespeare. Pathetic, really, that the sum of my life, with all its endless nights of exotic experiences, ultimately reads like a cheap paperback thriller.

  What do you call them?

  Oh, yes. Dime store pulps.

  Is it pretentious of me to aspire to such greatness? The Black Bat, Fu Manchu, Conan the Barbarian... and yours truly, Gon the Vampire.

  Yes, I think that might be a bit of a stretch for me.

  I'm no hero. More of a villain, actually. And not even a very evil one, I confess. I have no desire to inflict pain or misery on the innocent, no aspirations for world domination. At best, you could say that I am a middle of the road, average kind of villain. I'm little more than a victim myself. A victim of circumstance, of my appetite for mortal blood.

  I assure you, however, that vampires are very real. Though we may not be quite what you imagine, though our attributes and the source of our preternatural abilities may not quite conform to the myths established by your popular mass media, we are as real as night and day, man and beast, heaven and earth.

  Although there is no way for me to know my exact age—I was ancient when humans first tracked the lunar cycle on cave walls-- I estimate my age to be approximately 30,000 years…

  Germany: 30,000 Years Ago

  1

  In the days of my youthful humanity, before I became what I am now, when hot mortal blood still pumped through my veins and the glaciers were in temporary retreat after a long and wearying ice age, we early humans shared this planet with several other sapient species, chief among them creatures we called Fat Hands... known now by the moniker Neanderthals.

  There were others we knew of: flesh eaters we called Foul Ones, who lived in the cold lands to the north, and the Mammoth Hunters. There were brutish beings who seemed half-man and half-beast, though we spotted them very rarely in our secluded valley. Those proto-sapient creatures flourished briefly and died out before evolution fully refined their intellect. But the Neanderthals were our neighbors. We interacted with them more than we did our own kind. With them we felt a kinship. The valley was our bond.

  Think about that for a moment.

  I have witnessed not only the passing of centuries, the birth and decline of countless empires and vigorous human dynasties, but even the extinction of other intelligent species, thinking beings who labored, as your kind do now, to survive on this tiny spinning world.

  I sometimes think if only one other sentient species persisted to this day, our modern world would be much changed, and for the better. If you humans had to share the bounties of this world with one of those Others, forgotten now by time, your race might not have become so megalomaniacal, mad with delusions of grandeur. Your species would not have become such spoiled only children, unaccustomed to sharing.

  Could you, as a mortal human being, really think some mythic deity had set your species apart, that you were somehow special in His creation, if the person sitting across the subway lowered his newspaper—a modern Neanderthal—and said, “Really? Then what about us?”

  If Homo Sapiens are superior, it is only because you have survived just a little longer than all the other thinking apes. And the way things are looking now, with your religious fanaticism, global warming, and senseless racial hatred, even that is subject to change without notice.

  Then again, I am a bit biased.

  I was, after all, married to a Neanderthal.

  2

  I was a typical man of my day. The youngest surviving child of five sons, I enjoyed my youth during the warm interglacial period that preceded the last glacial maximum. I lived in a fecund valley that was nestled within the mountains of the Swabian Alb in Germany. There was really nothing unusual about me. I was not especially handsome, intellectually gifted or particularly witty. I was above average in height by the standard of those times but otherwise I was just an ordinary prehistoric male living in a wooded mountainous region in Europe.

  My father, w
hose name was Gan, was inordinately proud of his five strapping sons, as if the act of producing five boy children was a testament to his manhood. My father had a tendency to be overly prideful, but everyone I knew forgave him that flaw because he was an honest and honorable man, and because his heart was broken when the love of his life, my mother, died when she was young.

  Can any boy say he did not admire his father? Perhaps, but not I. Gan was the model on which all my notions of manhood were based. My father was stubborn and loud and uncouth, yes, but he was also patient and wise and fair, and I worshipped the ground the man walked on.

  He was stout, and he had a great wild mane of grey hair, and his voice was roughened by years of smoking merje and all the hearty cries his broad barrel chest had given birth to. He had a full, fleshy face that was seamed by time and exposure to the elements, and a large bulbous nose, which perched like a fat potato above the tangled wilderness that was his beard. A great old lion of a man, that was my father, and I loved him fiercely.

  My brothers were just as ordinary as I. Their names were Epp’ha, Grent and Aldh. There was one other, my younger brother Vooran, but he died when we were children, snatched from our father’s tent one night by a hungry old speartooth. The people of our tribe called us Gan’s Wolf Cubs, partially due to the fact that we were rather similar in appearance, with our mother’s auburn hair and our father’s sturdy build, but mostly because we were always into mischief, and battling one another constantly for supremacy.

  Ours was a hunter-gatherer society and the epoch in which I lived was a time of plenty. There was little violence between my tribe and the other races that lived nearby. I hunted and fished and sought pleasure during my leisure time. The winters were cold but not terribly so. The summers were warm and pleasant.

  I had two wives during my mortal lifespan: Nyala, a Cro-Magnon like me, and my Neanderthal mate Eyya. I also had a male companion named Brulde. Between us we had six children, Nyala and Eyya birthing three each. We were a close, happy family before I became a vampire. Our children were plump and rambunctious. The four of us were freely and joyously intimate with one another. There was no jealousy among us, as there was sometimes with group marriages like ours.

  The other men in my community ribbed me quite a bit for taking a Fat Hand as a mate, but our quartet was fruitful and I grew accustomed to ignoring the petty prejudice of my peers.

  It was not unheard of among our kind to marry outside the species, but it was considered a debasement of our human bloodline—a comical thing. Among my people, mating with a Neanderthal was a little less sordid than mating with a phurgh, our word for a non-sapient animal. It was a bit of hypocrisy, as my people mated with the Neanderthals regularly (there were even ritual orgies on special occasions), but it was just one of those petty bigotries that persist among humans, even to this day.

  (You still do it, you know. Only now you divide yourselves by color and religion and political ideology, rather than species. It’s a fault of your kind. Always has been.)

  The general consensus among the members of my tribe was that the Fat Hands were dumb and ugly, but they weren't. Not really. The popular modern notion that these people were violent, stupid primitives is a huge misconception.

  Neanderthals were a short and muscular species, with broad chests and hips and proportionally short, powerful limbs. They were generally hirsute and had bony brow ridges and retreating chins. In all other ways, however, they looked just like us. We called them Fat Hands because their fingers were short and stumpy and they were somewhat clumsy with them.

  Although we liked to think their arts were less sophisticated than ours, we traded with them regularly. Their weapons were sturdy, their clothes and housewares durable and aesthetically pleasing. They were just as intrigued with the tools that we produced, which were usually more advanced than their own. They had stone knives and spears and hatchets, which they produced by knapping flint just as we did, but they didn't have bows, except when we traded with them, and then, more often than not, they broke the weapons soon after acquiring them.

  You might even argue they were more advanced than my people culturally. The Fat Hands had developed an elaborate belief system, populated with a vast multitude of gods and devils and supernatural beings, and they practiced complex religious rituals to appease those deities. My people were simple ancestor worshipers and held only a few basic religious and moral restrictions.

  For instance, we buried our dead and honored their spirits. We did not eat the flesh of other thinking creatures, like the Foul Ones in the north were known to do. If a creature could speak or otherwise communicate intelligently, we called them yemme and killed them only in self-defense or during acts of warfare. Never for food. We did not procreate with our parents or siblings, even during ritual orgies, and we did not kill other members of our tribe.

  As such, we had no gods. No Yahweh. No Zeus. No Odin. No Allah. Our pantheon was a litany of our ancestors' names, passed down through oral tradition. We believed their spirits watched over us. We believed the stars in the night sky were their campfires, their Ghost World a reflection of the living world below, as if the spirit realm were a dark mirror suspended in the sky. We swore on their names. We prayed to them for good luck. I can still recall the names of my great-to-the-twentieth-degree grandparents.

  Our summer camp was not far from the territory of the Neanderthals, so our groups mingled regularly in the warm season. Our neighbors called themselves the Gray Stone People because they lived in a big limestone cave a day's walk from our summer settlement. We called ourselves the River People, as we mostly settled along the waterways of the valley we considered our territory.

  Our camp was a sprawl of animal hide or bark-roofed tents, similar in construction to the wetus of the North American Indians. They were dome-shaped structures, about eight feet high, which housed the majority of our tribe's child-rearing group families. The elders resided in a cave at the center of the encampment, which we called the Siede. During the day, as the adults hunted and gathered, the children assembled at the cave of the elders to be cared for and instructed. The Siede was the hub of our community, where we met to make decisions and practiced what few rituals we observed.

  Brulde and I often fraternized with groups of Fat Hand fishermen who came down to the river during the summer months, when our people lived at what we called Big River Camp. Like most of the members of our tribe, we spoke their language and bantered with them while we fished and gathered crayfish and mussels.

  Fat Hands divided their labor among different family groups, so we normally saw the same half dozen or so Neanderthal men at the river every year. There were the brothers Kulp and Stodd, the oldest of the fishers, their sons, and then there was Veltch, who was Eyya’s father, and Veltch’s son Tod, my wife’s older brother.

  The Fat Hands were good company. They were just as clever as us, with a highly developed sense of humor, and they seemed to enjoy our company as well.

  The Neanderthal fishermen enjoyed our crude jokes and took keen delight in our riddles. I think modern scholars would be surprised at how advanced both our spoken languages were. We had no written language but our oral communication skills were nearly as sophisticated as your own modern languages. We certainly didn't grunt and fling feces at one another!

  Well... usually we didn't.

  I was always fascinated by the Neanderthals. Even as a child, I was excited to see them come down to the river to drink or fish or bathe. I think their size and strength impressed me, as young boys are often impressed by large, powerful things. They were, on average, only five and a half feet tall, but they seemed huge to me when I was a child, and they were stupendously powerful. I also liked their exotic manner of dress.

  In the cooler months, they dressed in clothing made of softened leather sewn together with gut string, with heavy outer coats trimmed in animal fur. In late spring and summer, they wore light vests and breechclouts, sometimes even chest armor made of woven plant material
or plated bone. I liked the way they bound their hair with string and worked colorful feathers into their braids. They wore necklaces made of shells or animal teeth, and bracelets on their wrists and ankles. They painted their faces in vivid hues of orange and red and white and black, with zigzags and mystic symbols dabbed onto their protruding brows. They always looked so bright and flamboyant that when I see your modern depictions of them, dark-skinned brutes in tattered loincloths, I can do naught but laugh.

  When the weather was fine, they would strip down nude and wade into the river to fish, leaving their clothes neatly folded on the bank beneath the trees. In those days, men were not so embarrassed of their genitals. Shame had not yet been invented by the pious.

  Even for our people, the young more so than the adults, summer was a time to run naked beneath the open sky, or dressed in as little clothing as possible. Although the adult men normally wore breechclouts and the women grass skirts, summer was always marked by the sight of several dozen Cro-Magnon children playing naked on the hillside or gathered at the Siede for instruction.

  I had little patience for the elders of the Siede, however. I took instruction only when I was dragged kicking and screaming to the cave of the old ones, and to be honest, I had only a little more interest in playing with the other children in my village. I had the soul of an otter, my father always said, and I was always down at the river with the Neanderthals.

  Their potent masculinity impressed me as a child. I remember wading out with them, naked as the day I was born, to frolic in the water between their sturdy thighs and furry, muscular torsos. I enjoyed helping them fish in the cool rapids. It was my job to pull the flapping fishes from the ends of their harpoons and carry their catch to the creels sitting on the bank. They laughed at my eagerness and called me Little Worm and teased me for being so small and slim and hairless, but it was always with affection, and they were always very careful to see that I was safe. Once, when the river was especially swift, I lost my footing and was almost swept away by the frothing currents, but Stodd snatched me up by the arm and carried me to shore.