AN INTERLUDE: TALES FROM THE CRYPT

Claude had stopped worrying about getting his throat ripped out and his blood drained after Hester had forgotten that he had even existed for the second time.

Now Hester was off in a corner mesmerized by the magic of the computer screens showing the security footage of Beatrice's apartment and that suited Claude just fine.  It had been a little disconcerting to find a three thousand year old vampire locked up in Beatrice's vault, but that had been nothing next to the momentary terror when the old corpse had opened his fanged mouth and had mushed out some declaration which utterly failed to terrify Claude in anyway whatsoever.

It turns out that talking through a mouthful of fangs was harder than it looked.  In the movies the actors would just over dub the lines anyway, so it didn't matter how much they were actually drooling their lines and spitting on everyone within range.  The reality was a hell of a lot different.

"Are you the maid?" was the first terrifying question that Hester had wanted to know, except it had been utterly garbled and Claude had been covered in foul smelling saliva.

Hester had been in an upright coffin behind a curtain at the end of the room.  It was an expensive coffin, very high tech and there were a large number of tubes leading into the coffin and ultimately into the very dry looking statue who at second glance definitely wasn't a statue.  The screens and charts on the front of the coffin offered Claude a glimpse into pretty much everything there was to know about the not-statue including his name which rather disappointingly turned out to be Hester.  And according to the charts he was one of the oldest vampires still alive.

If Claude had been in the habit of talking to himself, he would have said something like: "Beatrice, there's a lot more to your twisted mind than you're letting on."  Since Claude definitely wasn't a self-talker, it wasn't something that was said and if anyone says anything differently, they're a goddamn liar.

Claude had kept on reading, glancing over at Hester on occasion, but there didn't seem to be any threat from that quarter.  What he was determined not to do was to A) turn his back on the body, or B) do something stupid like get anywhere within an arms reach because C) he was not eager to be another stereotype in a bad horror movie.  Claude's movie was an action movie, currently an action-comedy since he was after all still locked in a vault waiting for his idiot friend to show up and somehow bungle a rescue from the very vicious looking vampires outside who were huffing and puffing as hard as they could.

Claude glanced over at the screens from the four cameras Mr Bryce had not managed to find and was disturbed to find absolute quiet.  All efforts to pry him out of the vault had stopped and the silence and lack of activity was driving him crazy.  He knew it was supposed to lull him into a false sense of security to try something stupid, and he wasn't about to fall into that particular trap.  Hell no: he had Netflix the ultimate enemy of boredom.

And now he had Hester to keep him company.

So it was in that silence that Hester had opened his eyes and Claude had heard the mangled words coming from the lips of the vampire who was three thousand, seven hundred and thirty-seven years old, and was quite possibly a Libra.  Beatrice's notes were very detailed.

Claude had turned very carefully and very deliberately, part of his brain screaming at him to run, run, you're about to die, while the other part of his brain was calculating his chances for survival via talking his way out of this and it was actually liking the odds.

"Do I look French?" he had responded, almost automatically before his brain kicked in and told him how stupid that response had been, but he hadn't cared.

Hester's colourless eyes bored into him with a great intensity and Claude found himself completely unable to look away.  It wasn't that he was trapped or hypnotized, it was that he just didn't want to.  Those eyes had been around since before the pyramids and had likely seen the the rise and fall of empires. They belonged to a creature who had been feeding off of man for what may seem like forever and the secrets and stories they alone knew were beyond compare. Those eye burned his sould and reminded him of how hort his life was, how inconsequential... and those eyes were looking away, looking supremely bored.

"I don't know French," Hester had said. "What tribe is this? I knew a girl once, had a name that sounded like that, but I forget her name.  I may have eaten her..."

"Eaten her."

"Eaten, ate, et. I'm a vampire you see.  You should be running and screaming now."

"I'm Claude. Nowhere to run to in here, so I'm just going to skip right past that last bit if it's all the same to you."

"That will save me some bother. Tell me Claude, are you tasty?"

"Not really.  Are you hungry? There are some seriously wicked hot pockets in the freezer--"

"They call me Hester. Did you know that? I don't think it is my name, but I've forgotten what my real one was a long time ago. So many things I've forgotten..."

"So hot pockets then?"

"Victoria! That was her name."

"It doesn't sound anything like French."

"Is that what I said? Might be the wrong girl. Or the wrong year.  Wrong lifetime."

"Did you eat her too?"

"I never ate anyone I loved. At least I would like to think that I haven't. That would just be wrong to have eaten. Or ate or et.  Rude.  Remind me, am I going to eat you too?"

"Oh no, I was getting you a hot pocket."

"Will I like that?"

"You might.  It's gotta be tastier than me, that's for sure."

"You look stringy anyway.  I ate a girl once who looked like you.  Was picking her out of my teeth for days. Stringy little bitch, but I ate her all up. Meat was scare in those days. Everybody always seemed to be starving."

"When was this?"

"Too many faces. Too many lives. Too many places. Do you know they call me Hester? But I don't think it's my real name."

Claude had just watched Hester's eyes unfocused as he drifted off into whatever distant memory had grabbed his attention, and when the microwave beeped for the hot pockets, he had retrieved them and put them onto plates, all without taking his eyes off Hester for a second.  The conversation had left him a lot unnerved and for some reason the word "entropy" was banging around in his head like a fly trapped in between two panes of glass.

And then the real question that had really been bothering him solidified quite firmly as he watched Hester's eyes slowly close and a snore escaped from his slightly open and very fanged mouth: how the hell had he even managed to understand a word Hester had been saying and more importantly: had that even been English?

Claude bit into the hot pocket and Hester's eyes snapped open, nostrils flaring as if trying to suck all of the flavour out of the air itself.  Claude just froze, hot pocket still to his face as a scene out of a horror movie unfolded before his eyes, the same kind of scene where he would shave been urging the character on the screen to run, to do something dammit, don't just stand there!

Hester, ripped the IV tubes out of his arms and neck, greedy eyes fixed on Claude, a slavering monster made almost entirely of crooked fangs and deep haunted eyes. He easily pushed the door of his sarcophagus wide open and then seemingly glided across the floor, getting closer to Claude in seconds.

All Claude could do was watch, hypnotized as death drew close to him.

"Are you the maid?"

Claude opened one eye and peeked a the visage of death, who only now looked at him as if it was the first time.

"Don't you remember me? We were just talking literally a minute ago."

"Nonsense."

When death snatched the hot pocket from his hands and inhaled deeply of it's heady aroma, Claude knew he had a problem on his hands.

"I was eating that!"

Hester turned to Claude, fangs bared and hissed loudly, the primal noise of an animal, and Claude decided then and there that maybe a hot pocket was not something he wanted to die over.

"But you can have it. I made two of them anyway..."

"What is this delight? It smells like nothing I've ever encountered." Hester turned the hot pocket over in his hands, licking and sniffing it, utterly fascinated by it.  He glared at Claude and turned away in one swift motion, hiding his face behind his arm as he scarfed down the hot pocket noisily and greedily.

"It's the new Extra bacon cheeseburger hot pocket. Two minutes in the microwave and boom: instant meal."

Hester staggered then and Claude snatched up the box, scanning the box quickly. Had there been garlic in the box? What exactly was the deal with garlic anyway and would it even effect a vampire this old?  All those questions rushed through his head in the few second before Hester straightened up and Claude realized that the ancient vampire was laughing.  Laughing and licking his fingers.

"Bacon cheeseburger! Small girl, bring me another immediately!"

Small girl? Who? What?

"I'm a dude!"

"Are you? Apologies. You look like someone I once ate. If she's had one of these bacon delight around, she may have avoided that fate. Now bring me more!"

Claude offered up the plate to Hester and the hot pocket vanished in a cloud of crumbs and slobbering noises.  Hester turned to him, happy and remarkably animated.  His movements were oddly smooth and seemingly slow, but at the same time, remarkably quick.  It was as if he wasn't existing entirely on the same plane of existence.

"Is this the first time you've had bacon? It's your first time isn't it? You must have been asleep a very long time if you missed the invention of bacon."

"I don't remember. It has become harder to remember things recently, so I sleep.  It is possible I may have slept too much."

"Well I can get some more of the bacon for you, but I'm interested in hearing more about you.  You must have a fascinating story to tell..."

"Young girl—"

"Man."

"Young man, you stand in the presence of royalty and dare to ask me to tell you stories like a common bard? There are songs written about me. I am the vampire! The lord and ruler of this land and you dare?"

Claude found the box he had spotted earlier and pulled it out triumphantly.

"I have bacon."

"Well I suppose I could be persuaded to pardon you.  Tell me, where are all of my servants? They seem to have wandered off..."

Hester's eyes took on that glazed look again as he stared into the past and was swept away by it.  Claude took the opportunity to pop the bacon into the microwave, convinced that he was now locked in the vault with a forgetful madman, who was also a vampire.  If he was going to get out of this, apparently he was going to need a lot of bacon.

DING!

The bacon was finished and Hester snapped awake.  He looked around to Claude and smiled.

"No I'm not the maid.  Bacon?"

 ***

Here's something that no one thinks about when they talk about living forever: the brain doesn't get any bigger.  We vampires might heal fast and recover from some seriously fucked up injuries that we have no right ever surviving, and so we can expect a longer lifespan as our cells constantly rejuvenate and keep us in decent shape. I had noticed even with Harry and Madame Vera that they seemed to be older, and it wasn't because they had been older when they has become vampires.  They were still aging, but doing it a hell of a lot slower.  Harry was over six hundred years old and looked like he was in his forties, so the years definitely took a toll.  Nobody stayed looking like they were twenty forever.

Brains work a little differently than bodies.  They are designed to retain information and recall that information over time.  There is limited capacity at birth and there are no upgrades to make it better and even worse, no way to dump the data or back it up and gain some more space.  What you have at birth is what you die with.

So imagine you're born in a small town with 10,000 people and you live your entire life there, never moving or travelling, seeing the same people and same places over and over again.  Your experiences would be limited and you would have a much longer memory.  Your brain will use itself efficiently for both long term and short term memory.  If something new happens in that time, something extraordinary, you would remember it for a very long time and perhaps even talk about it as if it had happened just yesterday.

Now imagine you were born in that same small town, but what if at the age of 20, you left and went to a new town.  All of a sudden you have 20,000 people you've never met, but you set about a new routine in a new town, and after three years there, you've pretty much set up an entire new life.  There are new faces to know, new friends and experiences. Maybe you even keep in touch with your old friend from your first town.  But you begin to remember things differently already.  Sometime you talk to a friend about someone you think they know, but then suddenly remember that person was from your other old life.

After three years you pick up and move again to a new city and you start the whole process over.  New places, new streets and routes, new job, new friends, new routines.  New memories. 

Another three years, you move again. Then another three years.  And each time you set up a new life and new memories, and you begin to forget, but you have no idea just how bad it is.  Sometimes you slip up giving directions, talking about a highway or a street with a similar name from on of the sites you've lived in.  It's something as simple as a similar street name with a house that reminds you of somewhere else.  Doesn't matter what it is, but it pulls your memory back and your brain is trying to process this information and make sense of it and failing badly.  It's taking all of these lifetimes you've build and is trying to make sense of them but the thing of it is that none of it is supposed to make sense.  It's just life and your brain can only process so much.

They say that ever seven years you forget people and places, you move on from old relationships, that you essentially become a different person.  Some people come along for the ride and others are just forgotten.

So now you've been away from that small town you grew up in and you have seven lifetimes of memories and people and experiences.  You've lived the lives of seven men in three year bursts, and you decide to go "back home". 

Your brain at this point is completely fucked, and you know why? Because everyone there still remembers you and every embarrassing thing that ever happened to you, but you've forgotten about 90% of the people you knew for 20 years, including family (unless you were very close) and the things they talk about and try to remind you of, you really don't have a clue.  They remember it like it was yesterday and you have some vague recollection of... something that may have happened. You want to remember so badly it hurts, and everyone is looking at you like you're some kind of heartless monster, because they can't ever imagine having to live seven lifetimes and having to forget people and places from each of those lifetimes over the years.

Now imagine living for 3500 years.

Got it?

At some point in the first 1000 years Hester had pretty much lost his fucking mind.

***

Claude kept an eye on Hester who was now poking at the computer screens and happily chewing on a strip of bacon, while Claude tried to get Bob on the phone once again.  

A plan had already begun to form in his head and it was likely going to be very messy since it involved gun, explosives and a vampire with severe short term memory problems who thought he was a king in pre-ancient Egyptian times (and hadn't even heard of Egpyt at least not by that name).  Claude thought he had figured out the whole speech thing, since it would have been completely impossible for Hester to ever learn, let alone speak English due to the teeth and the fact that he likely only spoke some dead language that even the Pharaohs would have difficulty understanding.  Hester was very likely using some form of telepathy to communicate directly to him and while that was scary, that wasn't the worst of it.

Voicemail. Again.

"Bob, it's me. Again. Pick up the goddamn phone and call me or I'm breaking out of here and believe me, nobody is going to like that.  Oh and if you get this soon, bring more bacon!"

Claude began to solidify plan M.

It was going to be messy.