Chapter Five

BAPTISM OF LIFE – A MEMOIR
Chapter Two
Battle scars

I have loved many women in my time, taken many wives, and given life to may sons and daughters. I do not feel my prolonged life has been a curse, indeed for almost two hundred years I have been on a quest to try and understand why it is my cells regenerate at such an alarming rate, and why only the very few have been granted such gifts.
I remember the first time I was shot, within minutes I was up and about as though nothing had ever happened. If it had been anyone else witnessing my radical recovery I believe things may not have turned out quite the same for me, but as it was, it was Corporal Chesterfield who watched in amazement as my organs repaired themselves and then my chest cavity closed.
The year was 1916 and I had joined the 1st battalion of the York & Lancaster regiment two months into their campaign on the Somme. Having seen so much blood shed already in my life when the Great War, the war to end all wars, broke I was content on staying out of this one. At the time I was passing myself off as a forty year old Professor of English at Cambridge University and was exempt from fighting in the war. It was only when I started to see more and more young men leaving the town to go and fight that I too signed up. I couldn’t sit back and watch the mortal give their lives while I knew I could perhaps make a difference.
After passing basic fitness training we were shipped off to the Somme where I was awarded the rank of Captain. It was only a few days later while enjoying a quite cigarette on night watch when I was introduced to Corporal Chesterfield.
‘Captain Johnson sir,’ a voice in the dark. I turned and saw no one but then into the moonlight moved Eric. ‘I have been posted onto night watch with you sir.’
I smiled. It had been over a century and a half since I had saved him from his villagers questioning his mortality and I must say the man had paled somewhat in that time. It is only later that we realised why, and found his immortality came with friends.
At first I believe I may not have recognised me, and if he did he certainly did not show it. The first night on watch together was uneventful and we scarcely spoke. In the trenches there is much silence and contemplation, we are alone in this world and we hope to get back home to see our families.
‘Who are you back home sir?’ Eric asked me on the second night of our posting together. The sky was clear and the moon shone down upon no mans land like a search spotlight, looking to depict the enemy to both sides.
‘I am a professor at Cambridge University, and you?’
My words hung on the cool night air for a very long time, so long in fact that I had almost forgotten shooting his question back at him. Eventually he answered, his voice hoarse like the cries of the wounded we could hear further down the line, that day’s casualties from no mans land.
‘I am a student back home, studying to join the priesthood.’
‘A very noble profession my good man, but why then, might I ask, do you find yourself on the Western Front? Surely you might find yourself exempt from enlisting if you path was for something greater?’
Eric then took his time to turn and face me before saying, quite clearly, ‘the very same reason you find yourself watching over the tides of death night after night.’
I nodded at this. I had been wrong, the man had recognised me from his grandson’s funeral and I would not shame myself to try and deny that Dr Steel had not been yet another alias. Instead I stood up from my perch and held out my hand. Eric grasped it with a firm grip and stood to meet my eyes.
‘Why did you intervene that day three life times ago? How did you know?’
I shrugged my shoulders and told him, ‘I have spent almost my entire life searching for men like myself, the divine who possess a further step in the evolutionary chain.’
Eric held out his hand to stop me, ‘let me stop you right there because if not we will be a loggerheads with one another all night. I am a follower of the Lord, I respect your opinion but let us not discuss the point of origin of our gifts because you will think me naive just as I will see you as a blasphemer.’
Although I wanted him to listen, although I felt I needed to sit him down and talk to him about natural selection, explain how the myth of a God was in fact instilled upon civilisations long before either of us as a form of control, and that the first worshiping civilisations in fact worshiped the earth, making them naturists and, in a sense, none believers also, I felt to follow this course might alienate my new found comrade.
Instead I simply nodded and said, ‘understood,’ and then we spoke at length of our experiences. Although I imagined us the same many years ago when I came by the quiet Mr Chesterfield living in the rural Lancashire dales, throughout our discussions I found subtle differences in our evolutions which made me question my theories of how the divine came to live amongst man. Back then I had yet to discover the likes of cell rapid regeneration, and DNA mapping was light years away, but I imagined us the next step. For the fittest to survive they had to adapt themselves to the ever changing world, and the most perfect form of survival would be to regenerate tissue mass quicker than it might diminish. In Eric I became aware of more startling feats of divinity, but first it seemed I would show my hand.
The day I was shot was the day almost our whole platoon was wiped out. We were ordered over the top and into no man’s land to make a push for the German lines. Upon our briefing we were led to believe the enemy had all but vacated the trenches we were soon hoping to call our own. Throughout the morning heavy artillery bombarded our destination with the most awesome fire power no mortal man could ever hope to survive, and with Corporal Chesterfield by my side we led the attack. No sooner had we made it out of our trenches we were annihilated with heavy machine gun fire, mortars, and the crack aim of the German sharp shooters. Further forward we pushed, zigzagging across the barren landscape, through swampy foxholes and the cried of our dying comrades. And then I felt the wind being taken out of me not twenty yards from the enemy line but still further I pushed forward, deafened by the constant stream of fire, blinded by the mud being kicked up from the ground, unaware all this time that I was in fact the last man still upright and still pushing forward. Another shot, this time catching me in the arm and I was spun around with the sheer force. As I fell to my knees, back now to the enemy, I surveyed the ground I had crossed, now littered with the debris of the men who had followed me to their deaths. I was completely alone, and then, seemingly to appear from out of thin air Eric picked me up and lunged us both into a watery foxhole.
‘My God you’re hit,’ he cried out, his arm around my neck to keep my head from falling under the murky swamp, maroon with the blood of men lost underneath our feet.
I laughed at this comment for some reason. Maybe it was the shock and adrenaline battling through my system, I don’t know, but when I peered down at my torso I watched with Eric as my fatal wounds healed. A few moments later I was as fit and as healthy as the day William Wallace was hung drawn and quartered for the baying crowd at Smithfield in London. I stood in the crowds that day and watched as my doppelganger was hung drawn and quartered, but that is another story.
‘Are you read for that final push sir?’ Eric shouted into my ringing ears as I knelt forward, heaving almost at the stench of the rotting bodies which shared our hole.
Later Eric told me I had grinned wildly at this suggestion and charged with a feral like fury spurring me on. As we reached the enemy’s line Eric appeared to jump the barbed webbing which was there to keep us out, landing upon two German soldiers and as he gutted one with his bayonet he sunk his teeth into the neck of the second, ripping out his jugular and then gutting this man also.
It was a massacre. Two invincible English knights against a frightened army of the Hun. We were both awarded medals for our courageous valour, but unfortunately both Eric Chesterfield and Captain William Johnson were killed in action upon their next skirmish in no man’s land. Neither of their bodies were recovered and given a proper Army burial, but hey, that’s life.
I had found a contemporary with whom I shared a bond which most of humanity would not understand. We were the same but different, and as the Great War ended Eric and I travelled across the Atlantic to America. In order to understand our gifts we would need to employ only the brightest teams of scientists to help us figure out what exactly are gifts were and how they worked. This would need money, and in 1919 prohibition in the United States enabled us to earn more money than we would ever need...it was also in the year 1919 that I found out to what extent Eric’s gifts had hold over him as well as he over them.
I place my pen down besides chapter two. Earlier on, after throwing the opening chapter in the waste paper basket in my office, I fished it out and finished the blasted thing. It has been too long coming, this memoir of mine, and I hope somewhere within the pages I have yet to write I find a truth and a purpose to my existence. Each time I put pen to paper I find myself transported back to a much simpler time, when the grey areas in society were few. Man new right from wrong, man policed his own life, and if man was wronged then he would seek to put that wrong doing right. Now, I am not knocking the governments and policing bodies of today, indeed in the past I have tried both as a means to earn a living and more importantly, try to get an insight into humanity as it changes.
Things change, friends, family, and loved ones die, and I move on. It seems it is just Eric and I who are destined to walk hand in hand upon this earth for all of eternity. I have found no one else with the ability to live beyond their years and this worries me somewhat. It means, for one, that Darwin was inaccurate in his theory of evolution. Maybe I still have the long search ahead, or maybe I am not looking hard enough. I know there are people out there who can do some amazing things, and I wish they would help me help us all to understand our purpose on this earth. Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection states the purpose in life is to reproduce, to pass on life so that future generations can do the same, and slowly throughout time all species will either adapt to their ever changing world or die out. If this is true then why have I watched my sons and daughters live and die so many times over?
I have sired over fifty children in my eight centuries on this planet and followed their children and their children’s children etcetera, down the ages, and only Eric has avoided the grave like his great-great-great grandfather. I will never reveal this to him; I do not think this would do the boy any good to know he is a part of my lineage. There is a question he has asked me often through the years, and that is why was I at the funeral of his grandson. The answer now is obvious, because I have been present at the funerals of all of my ascendants, waiting and needing a sign that I am not alone in this world.
With all of my ascendants but Eric and Billy long dead and buried I am beginning to feel like maybe time is running out for me. There are people in this world who know about me, although only one or two a century has always been my rule. When too many discover the impossible they begin to wonder if there is any personal gain in this knowledge. I have, in the past, trusted too many a man at once with my secret so that they could help me discover more like me quickly, for their lives are short. This has always ended badly and resulted in me having to disappear, assume a new identity, and often slay the betrayers. This is...
“Damn that phone! And at this hour,” I find myself crying out as the phone on the desk in my study rings. My wife, Billy’s mother, is at her Friday night Bingo with the girls so I should really answer it and take a message, this modern device rarely sounds for me.