The lay of the last vampire

Peter Wilhelm

1
On my thirteenth birthday, my father took me to the zoo to see the Last Vampire. Throughout the long intertwining of sunshine and shade of my childhood, I had heard of this fabulous beast - very old now, his pelt grey - in whispers not meant for my ears: whispers and words that evoked the cold smell of past evil. I recall being under a table, among the heavy shifting feet of adults, and hearing speculative murmurings cut short, abbreviated on the edge of revelation. "Hush," my mother said, "he can hear us." My hands were closed so tightly that, later, they ached.

And at school, in every yard, there was a child to conjure up monstrous figures from the half-heard: "They drink blood, they hide from the light." All of this shivery speculation made us excited and frightened.

At the same time, the image, however imprecise, had an inalienable force of conviction: there were nights when I lay awake listening to the house subside in sighs, and in the intermediate dimness before my eyes I saw a dark figure in a corner of a cage, and experienced a suffocation of fear. The slithery menace of night-stalking vampires had been stripped from the earth, staked and burnt - all but one, and he was old and dying; but he flew raggedly and vast in the bad weather of my mind.

We lived in a square brick house, painted white, with a heavy tin roof that groaned and stretched when struck by the sun. Most of the year it was summer, and from mid-morning the sun rose clear of a distant line of weeping willow trees that overhung a narrow, dead stream; and beyond that was a haze of dust starred with pinpoints of light, residue of quartz, raised up by a hot wind from the sallow dumps of sand turned over twice for gold after the old mine died and the abandoned machines blistered in the sun and there were few people left in the village where we stayed on.

The children played in the ruins, far and wide, heeding no warnings of sinkholes, collapsing machinery, the bloody menace of displaced men, or the cancers that raged in the ultraviolet. We made our own community there when the schools were shut or we chose not to go to school; we made up stories or played hide and seek, astronauts and cannibals, insiders and outsiders. A small girl took off her clothes. I wandered home at noon and stood, half in the exact shadow of the house, half out in the fiery sun, bisected by shade and flame. It was strange. I felt cut in two.

My father was a doctor and I paged through his books on anatomy with the avidity of a pornographer. Amidst that melange of morbidities, tumours, genetic defects and the suppurations of disease my eyes took in - drank in - the classic apparel of the naked human form, crucified by illness. The pale nude expanse of the girl in the dunes seemed hidden beneath the savage distortions of malignancy: I had been afraid to stare too closely at her in the sun, turned away, hurried breathlessly home pursued by the unspeakable, that for which there were no words. And so, I reasoned, this was what she would come to, this universal affliction. None would escape, none but the immortal vampire. Cradling Diseases Of the Peripheral Nervous System on my knees, crouched over the illustrations with eyes clamped shut, I was pierced by a dusty woe; and a flash of recall echoed in my mind - my father pronouncing of some patient, "I give him three months at the most," and his voice trailing to silence at the table as my mother rebuked him with a small movement of her hand, indicating my small, listening presence. I saw spots on their faces, marks of age, and felt pestilence and decay whistle through the air like wind under a doorway, inescapably.

2
Of all the books my father had, and all of which he locked away behind glass, not knowing that I knew where he kept the key, one alone remained inaccessible. This was Observations On the Life Cycle Of the Vampire by Dr Jonas Salk. An entry in an encyclopaedia told of Salk's famous expedition to Disappointment Island in Polynesia, and his discovery there of the pathetic residue of the vampire clans, huddled in limestone caves and subsisting on the blood of bats and eels. To this remote enclave they had been driven by centuries of terror, contamination and persecution in the Balkans and the New World, where they had intermittently fled in search of sanctuary, but had not found it. In the eternal war between mankind and the vampire there were dreadful episodes of massacre and atrocity, and, the encyclopaedia dutifully noted, it had not always been the immortals who precipitated the carnage. Nor were they truly immortal, dying in dark alleys and dumpsters of the stigmata of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome they had drunk from infected mortals, their skins consumed by Karposi's Sarcoma, their lungs blistered with pneumonia and the inner choking horror of the mushroom spores carried in the forms and shapes of all life when it rose up from the slime.

I learned that much, and a little more. Of the heresy of the Believers who followed St Paul when he said that the last enemy is death, and that the heart of the mystery was that "we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible". And, so believing, how the cult spread from the dark forests of Romania to the steppes of Russia to the shores of the New World; how the Believers abased themselves before the vampire and cried out for his kiss, the deep bloody kiss of submission to the inhuman other.

And there the encyclopaedia entry ended, too abruptly for my longing. The long history of the vampire reached back to the cave, but ended in the time before our time, a shaded memory like the title of a book that has disappeared from common sight. It was as if the subject was simultaneously taboo and embarrassing; an unfortunate litany of myth and fact that mankind chose to skirt, though obsessively drawn to the image of the old ones. The Last Vampire had been withering in his cage for a century, yet remained a focus of prurient interest.

My father kept Observations On the Life Cycle Of the Vampire in a wall safe with his revolver and ammunition. It had a combination lock which I couldn't crack. My timid questions were brushed aside: "Wait until you're older." I waited.

3
The day of my thirteenth birthday began solemnly; it was, after all, a public holiday, the Day of Peace. My mother brushed my hair and straightened my school uniform, the fabric shiny from use and cleansing. She kissed me gently and cradled my face in her hands. "Daddy will take you to see the monster," she said. "He was taken by his father when he was a child: it's a thing only fathers should do. He will explain."

My scuffed shoes were greased over with liquid wax. I was made to sit still for a few moments on the edge of my bed while it dried. As I sat I wondered whether I had been made spick-and-span for the vampire's sight; all the family's movements in the house seemed formal, as if set out in advance, as if it was necessary not to risk shame in the zoo. Behold, I will show you a mystery. I was afraid - for on what did the vampire feed? - and a keen sense of being close to a revelation. Because what I would see was still formless, a "mystery".

I am sure I had a slight fever, which I concealed from my mother, who would sentence me to bed if she suspected anything. But my hands and cheeks tingled and I was physically hot, surreptitiously mopping my forehead with a handkerchief when alone, waiting to be taken.

And finally I was driven there, to the Johannesburg Zoo set in a shallow valley within the margins of flowering bougainvillea, purple and violet, and a million other flowers in the garden-like space that surrounded the habitat, subtly fenced in with high electric wire so that the animals could not escape into the pastel suburbs or stalk the decaying motorways.

We stepped from the car into the hot tar of the parkade, blinking and (for myself) ill at ease. I could see the entrance on the far side of the parking area, a kind of tunnel into a roaring, chattering world, muted by distance. And behind me I sensed an enormous cliff and, turning to see, looked up glassy walls where no plant grew to the ridged summit along the entire width of which had been constructed the Black Cathedral, a vast slab of velvet obscurity, rectilinear but stony and impassive, from which rose three great pipes. These were of different height, but from each rose wisps of black smoke, thready, ashen in the bright pale sky, hardly stirred by the currents of the air. My father looked up too, not, perhaps, seeing the Black Cathedral as I did, but as the place where he worked. I knew it was a hospital, a place of birth and death, the repository of the foul designs in his books of disease. I had never been in there, other than to be born, but I had often seen it, though never from this overwhelming perspective, which laid yet one more layer upon my festering dread. I longed to be safe in the dunes.

So, into the zoo, my father holding the hand I had extended to him; he seemed unwilling to take it at first, perhaps because I stood as high as his shoulder, and was too grown-up for such reassurances, in his reckoning. Memory unveils this image of us, passing through a turnstile and into a green tunnel, the air heavy with contradictory scents of overripe flowers and the acrid, musky smell of animals penned together. Crowds, vast and babbling, in holiday mood with gaudy balloons bouncing in the eggshell air, wandered at will, up and down the alleys that led around cages, small patches of grass, mud wallows, artificial caves with ledges that stopped in mid-air, separating creature from visitor. There were thousands of people there, yet, even holding my father's hand, I felt isolated and afraid; and the faces of those who swirled around us seemed mean and cruel, not human, as if it should have been they who were caged up for derision and inspection. I had a moment of pure, abstract dislike of humanity and a quiet ooze of shame at my rejection; in school we had been taught that man, and woman too, stood at the apex of evolution, paragon of animals, but the crowds struck me as bestial and ill-constrained.

Perhaps it was my disenchantment, then, that caused me to see the birds and beasts as intensely-focused objects of misery and degradation. There was a giant birdcage in which row upon row of flying species sat on artificial trees and flew, at best, a few metres within a lattice of wire. The lions lay flat in the sun, great mouths swarming with flies, near rotten bones; or paced in distinct neurasthenic patterns, like the bears in their awkward, filthy, baking, shaggy coats. Children hurled sticky sweets and nuts at the creatures, particularly drawn to the chimpanzees, who kept their backs to them and squirted shit and vomit at the jeering throng from their thick-barred dungeons. A yellowing, peeling notice stated that with the disappearance of jungles and thorn tree savannahs from the earth, some of these creatures were the last of their kind; one was not to feed them, since perhaps, one day, progress towards an agreement on the reinvention of the wilderness might see them, or their descendants, released into something resembling a natural environment and they would need their hereditary hunting skills to survive, as the gorillas of the Rwandan mountains - machine-gunned and eaten in a civil war - had not. Some viewers threw lit cigarettes at the chimps, who invariably picked them up and smoked them or burned one another.

There were no signs directing us to the Last Vampire. The lair had been placed some distance from the main structures of the zoo, on the uphill road to a war memorial, the main attraction of which was a floor-wide holographic representation of the Battle of Isandlwana, its arrow of time accelerated tenfold, showing the suicidal advance into Zululand of Chelmsford and of what came after - then looping back to the sunlit beginnings. A soothing female voice reiterated the narrative. But this is a spectacle I have witnessed subsequent to that first search for the vampire.

4
He had gone by many names since his birth - vampire on both sides of the genetic line - well over a thousand years before Christ. History records him as Scribe Kenkirkhopeshef, author of a Book of Dreams in which there is an almost modern interpretation of night symbols; and rational surmise holds that he was instrumental in contriving the fantastic and still-unexamined labyrinths to be found leading off royal burial chambers and other sacred sites in the pyramids and elsewhere. It was in this collective abyss that his race prospered, feeding initially, it was said, upon the embalmed flesh of the Pharaohs. It is rumoured, too, that he inscribed a secret history of the vampire nation which - with certain inexplicable lacunae - carries the narrative virtually to the present. But while Kenkirkhopeshef (or Kenneth Hope as he was when captured) was tortured during interrogation, this being constitutionally permissible, he never revealed the location of the secret history - or even whether he had written one. All copies purporting to be this key document have been exposed as frauds; but certain common elements in the murky chronicles of human writers suggest the authors may have received sight of, or information of relevance from, the secret history. Bram Stoker may have been a vampire. Kenkirkhopeshef's book was said to have been sealed in a crypt; one simply didn't know.

The concrete cave in which Kenneth Hope was confined was approached through arboreal gloom, deep shadows cast by equatorial trees with fat, sinister leaves that twined and grew into one another. It would have been difficult to find without foreknowledge, and I recalled my mother's words about each human father inducting his son into knowledge of the vampire: a form of Apostolic succession. One moment one was in the over-bright gaiety of the zoo; the next treading an uneven and, in part, slimy pathway towards deepening darkness.

And then we stopped, my father releasing my hand but standing close to me and placing his hand on my shoulder as if to brace me. He said nothing.

I was aware, firstly, of two or three curious figures on our side of the bars - ill-dressed, slouching males who smelt strongly of cigarettes and sweat. Intuitively, I knew that they too were visitors, but ones who came frequently, shabby and disreputable, and they reminded me of a pervert who once sat beside me in a deserted cinema (I was alone, not at school) and began to fondle me until a deep revulsion caused me to lurch away from him and leave the building. In the dirty streets of the windswept city I had hurried away, the taste of his foul breath in my throat. Predator, I had thought; and Predators I thought at the vampire's cage. I am less severe now.

Soon though - as the other visitors stood well clear of my father and me - my eyes adapted to the darkness and with a kind of flinty resolution and awkward piercing thrill I searched out the creature. Against the far wall, withdrawn into a corner, I saw a shapeless, elongated mass - of tattered rags it may just as well have been, but nested within the shadows, themselves within shadow - a leathery thing, half man, half beast, pitiable and horrible. My most immediate emotion was sorrow, then guilt at the manner in which the vampire had been imprisoned, chained as he was, incapable of shielding himself - perhaps his secret form - from the prurient, demotic stares of the passing multitudes. Those long yellow nails, broken now, and the slumped, defeated yet feral features, yellow fangs barely discernible … It was shameful to see him so naked and unprotected except by his ragged cloak. His head was held down, he crouched tensely, and the sole colour of his flesh in that dimness was a faint shade of blue and purple. I was aware of his shallow panting, like a dog turning the corner towards its own death. Aware, too, of a subtle scratching within my mind, as if Scribe Kenkirkhopeshef had extruded a fragile exploratory thought to which I could give a tentative physical reality; and at the moment of that realisation, the creature altered its stance, becoming more upright and raising its leonine head, dank hair swirling like weeds in water, and penetratingly seeking my eyes with its own.

Vampires have red, glowing eyes.

Touched by those fires I must have cried out or uttered some inarticulate sound, for my father immediately turned his back on the cage and stood between me and the vampire's eyes. Now we were alone: the others had gone. "That's enough!" My father's voice was low, growling, full of fear. He embraced me as if to take me back into himself, to reverse the seeding process. Then he pushed me, carried me, towards the pathway and through the plump, dank leaves of the unknown trees and back into the annihilating brilliance of the Day of Peace.

"Now I have a surprise for you!" he said, grinning and afraid, and led me by the hand through the alleyways and circuits of the zoo until we reached the cheap restaurant where he bought me a milkshake and cakes, sweet stuff normally denied but now laid out in plenitude as if this was what we had come for, this was the true delight of my birthday. He drank tea, his cup rattling as he raised it to his lips with a hand that shook. I drank the cold sweetness in my glass, but it did not appease my thirst.

"Tell me about vampires," I said at last. After all, that had been the initial promise of this day. But my father blushed and would not meet my eyes: he was like a parent abruptly asked for the details of sex and unable to respond, not from lack of knowledge but from a core of repression and guilt in his heart.

"Well," he said at last, "they hate the light. They are evil. There are none left. Just him. Just him." The silence vibrated. At last he put his cup down and watched my plate; I could see his hand pressed against the plastic surface of the table. A bee settled on the rim of my empty glass, drowning in sugar. My father said: "If you don't want that bun … I'll have it." And he took it, chewing greedily. We went home.

5
In the months following our unconsummated visit to Kenkirkhopeshef I found myself withdrawing from my customary life, bounded by school and home. In the classroom it was as if I slept, though I did not. The teachers accused me of being inattentive, rebellious, yet when I wrote exams at the end of that year I had no difficulty in passing all my subjects. Even mathematics, previously elusive and baffling, suddenly became transparent to my mind. I read the symbols as if they were words, a gift that diffused throughout my cognition with no active straining after meaning and guided my hand in writing out solutions and even noting and exploring further implications of the formulae. No one thought to interrogate my new-found capabilities - such advances on to intellectual plateaus went unobserved in the flux of the school's routine.

At home, when I isolated myself in my room, my parents assumed I was studying; but I was not, lying on my back staring into nothingness. They were locked into that amalgam of affection and hostility that represents the middle passage of marriage.

The friends with whom I used to play in the dunes assumed shyness, or diffidence, whatever. With them, as with everyone, it was easy to become effectively invisible: unless one is crippled, sick or from another country there is never any need for self-consciousness - you can be as invisible as you wish.

Months passed - no, years. The dreams began. I hungered for the night, when I would be left alone to embark on these journeys. First I would lie on my back, hands crossed on my breast. Then I would slowly shut my eyes against the flickering of light on the ceiling, the intrusive susurrations of the house. Starry clouds would converge within my field of perception - nebulae intertwined with galaxy-wide, coiling dark clouds of helium and hydrogen in the proportions released by the creation event 13 billion years in the past. I stood, so to speak, outside the cosmos, in that nothingness that nests the egg of being. Then, fully embodied, it seemed, I would rise above my prostrate self and ascend towards the swathes of light, up and up, into the interstellar geography - though I could never rise high enough, and a sickening plunge awaited me whenever some earthly sound or slippage caught me back. As it always did. In this fashion - I became aware - the planet bound me and I could at best hover above the dimmer lights of the city, pinioned by the gravity of human habitation; the greatest journey was as yet beyond me. It was all very real, charged with erotic anticipation: you have not known pure pleasure until you have flown.

Long experience taught me to manoeuvre my spectral body so that it could be directed by thought alone: it was like learning a new physical ritual, one that grew in force as my control of the process increased and strengthened. I found that if I could so manipulate my sensory core, and imagine (if that was what it was) that I had wings, the essential solidity of the ascent was reinforced - one might call it evolution through will. That which I wished to be, I could become. Then, extending my wings to the fullest extent, I could swoop swiftly above the huddled rooftops, seeing the lives within, scenting their conversations and the contradicting inner perversities that come with mankind's problem of an infinitely recessional self-consciousness. I could dip down and swiftly see the layers of mind crushed between earth and the astral influences. In this manner I gained a deepening understanding of the heart.

My control of the nightly flight increased and impressed itself upon me as a loosening of the forces that bound me to the flat human world. I knew that I was as yet condemned to fly in circles, a limited outward spiralling set against the immensity of the starry vista; but the circles were widening, increasing as the years passed.

In my daily routines I functioned with an automaton-like efficiency, and my thoughts were elsewhere - I became "strange", as my parents and guardians would have it. At those times when I was condemned to bouts of psychoanalysis, I laughed within: they could not know, and would never comprehend, my gathering freedom.

And so it was that when my power had been sufficiently tested and mastered, I circled the Black Cathedral in the blackest of nights, and tilted on a wing to the zoo, to the prison of Kenkirkhopeshef.

6
Though I could have passed through the bars with my unreal body, I remained outside the vampire's cage. A pressure kept me out. I cannot say that the sensation was one of hovering; rather, the bolder stars in the Milky Way, the Black Cathedral, and the locked fortress of the zoo were points of navigation that I had learnt and they had helped triangulate and steer my shadow body to this place, where I waited for acknowledgement, frozen in the wintry air. That Kenkirkhopeshef was aware of my presence I didn't doubt: his glowing red eyes had settled on me as I arrived in silence. But his gaze was lambent, the inner force muted, and this gave me the understanding that the century of his incarceration had had its intended effect - the slow death of sentience in the monster, a frighteningly human acquiescence in defeat. After all, all life in this universe is comprised of the selfsame celestial components, the heavy elements created in the churning, chaotic tides of gravity and runaway fusion fires. The different forms of life, the species, must all conform to the quotidian imperatives of survival: food, safety, procreation. Dislodge a species from its evolutionary niche and it will fail, however long it struggles against the dark.

Though my night sight was preternatural, Kenkirkhopeshef remained obscure and I believed his filmy appearance, his wasting essence, was the working-through of the fatal syndrome with which he had been deliberately infected after his capture by the security forces of the Black Cathedral. Even as I watched, his coal-like eyes wandered away, were even momentarily extinguished when - with an ultimate weariness - he closed his inflamed lids over them. Then they opened again and I spoke: "Wake up, Kenkirkhopeshef: I have come to join you."

The eyes resumed their probe; a rustling chuckle stirred the silence, the tiny rustling of windswept leaves. How ill he was! How weak! How indifferent! Yet at last he did reply: "You do not wish to join me. Where I am is a realm of perpetual pain and regret. And you may have come too late. I called you long enough. You and your mayfly kind have done me in. You can repeat to them what I have always said, that without me to cull their numbers they will soon arrive at the Extinction. They will give birth standing on great piles of radioactive bones. But they won't believe you."

"Come forward," I said. "I wish to see you clearly."

Now Kenkirkhopeshef did not speak, but I heard an exhalation - of breath - that expressed the beginning of a kind of wonder. "You speak words contained in the book kept by your father, the one who was with you before. How did you manage to open the book? Everything you need to know now is there."

"I needed to understand that the code had as its basis the number 666, an obvious calculation. I took it, I read it, I put it back."

The Last Vampire slithered along the foul floor of his den, his shackles dragging behind him. His hands, like entwined cords of thin veins and peeling thews, made their way up the bars until his eyes were close to mine and he smiled. "There is very little time. They are withdrawing my rations, the food they condescend to bring me in brown parcels from the Black Cathedral. Not only do I carry their plague, they are putting me to the torment of the Hunger. When I am reduced to a strip of dirty rags they will use meathooks and drag me into the direct sun. They will show me to their children, bubbling and screaming there. I will disappear from this declining cosmos, and in a millennium there will be few of them left, scratching and blind in the unharvested world. All the signs are there - obvious to me and, I see now, to you. Henceforth, every father will rape his baby to death; the mothers will seek to escape, but they lack the technology and will be kept in hives. It will be the greatest biocide of all time. You should not seek to defer it, even if that is the only way in which you can live. They have made their choice."

I was uncertain. "There will be others like me."

"Yes. But you are a child, you lack capacity. For the moment, the enemy is powerful and fecund."

"At least I can find the pride you have lost. If others are whelped, we can live secretly on a great ice floe until the Extinction; there we might be safe. But you know what I want."

"Yes."

And because I could now see through his body, and I understood his diffident urgency, I implored him: "Kenkirkhopeshef - tell me. What must I do?"

And then his sighing, slow response: "Bring me your body. Come here by day and hide in the laughing crowds, flirt with the girls, torment the lions. Watch the bright flags fluttering. Then, in the darkness, bring me your body."

7
Reader - I drank his blood. I took him the knife for which he had asked and he stood at the bars - a grey light outside fell from the full moon - and cut himself so that what was left in his body could be made to flow down the metal and I drank and sucked and licked. It took a long time, but when I left he was fallen. He was no more.

I live in the vaults of the Black Cathedral, deep in the uncharted labyrinth, near the frozen chambers from which the servitors of mankind had taken Kenkirkhopeshef his daily bread: the aborted foetuses they so voraciously pluck from the bodies of their women. The contagion of the blood I drank has long been replaced by a purer essence; and I am cautious when I feed or fuck, as all predators should be.

Kenneth Hope had a theory that men and women represent different but parasitic species, and that as this knowledge grows and becomes the formal religion of their kind - they drink the transubstantiated blood of their god, as it is - they will bring the Extinction closer. I think my Last Vampire may have been joking - his mind was wandering as we neared the end of the transfusion - but that does not concern me. I do not even care much to spread my gift; I no longer hold or have any great hope of a convenient ice floe coming my way.

No - in this stormy caesura of time - the passage between two eternal gulfs, nothingness and nothingness - I have my being and fulfilment. By day I live in a cardboard box below an underpass. I drink sweet, viscous wine. I read Kenkirkhopeshef's secret history, which I found in the labyrinth. When I have sufficient money I may travel in a jet. Not now.

Because in the dark I fly.

I soar.

Peter Wilhelm Born 1943, Cape Town. My father was a commander in the SA Navy. My mother was a doctor. I have visited the Middle East, Ireland, Israel, various countries in Africa, China and the former Yugoslavia, and covered them both as a fact-seeking journalist and as background for my fiction writing. I am the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, and two volumes of poetry. My last novel, The Mask of Freedom (Ad Donker) won the Sanlam Award for Literature in 1995. Other awards I have received include the Mofolo-Plomer Prize for Literature (1975) and an award from the English Academy for reviewing. My stories have been selected as "The Bayonet Field" (Donker, 2000) and my satirical columns as "The State We’re In" (Ravan, 1999). I am The Financial Mail’s film critic, having been political editor; and I was also editor of Leadership Magazine for two years. I live in Cape Town.

LitNet: 28 June 2005

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