Chapter Four

THE HUNGER

It is dark again, but then that is not really any change for me. I am a man who lives his life within the cloak of darkness. The wind and rain sweeps mercilessly through the isolated graveyard and somewhere in the distance the flicker of a lightning bolt illuminates the evil sky. It is, after all, an evil night.
As I kneel before the crumbling grave of my grandson I can’t help but weep. So many of my loved ones had lived full and happy lives and then, as nature had intended, passed away to make room for their offspring to do the same.
I am one of the exceptions to the rule.
Somewhere along the line I slipped off Mother Nature’s table and disappeared into the abandoned shadows of existence. Hopefully, after tonight though, I will be allowed to rot in peace as my grandson’s corpse had over a century ago.
I can feel it inside me now, the hunger mounting like sulphuric acid on the tongue, and unless the doctor arrives soon I will once again be a slave to that hunger and look to seek my fill.
Kissing the granite which now represents my grandson, I stand up, pulling up the hood on my trench coat and disappearing into the night.
‘Eric, you have enormous power, and if you will just work with me I believe we can cure the terrible afflictions which you suffer as part as your gift.’
The Doctor’s words echo through the night to me. The words always filled with such urgency.
What on earth is there to be urgent about Doctor? Neither of us is going anywhere any time soon. Where you get to live your lives and bask in the glory of civilisation, I spend my eternity trapped to the darkness, labelled a monster by society and shunned out into the cold. Yes I have killed in cold blood but so have you Doctor. We are the same person only we live on opposite sides of the fence.
Walking on through the graveyard I can see houses past the stone perimeter wall. Everybody is indoors and out of the wind and the rain with their loved ones, watching television, surfing the web, eating dinner, settling in for the night, cosy in front of the fire. I can remember when there were real fires, not the new gas and electric gadgets civilisation warm themselves in front of nowadays, but wide open fire places. Those fires would fill al of the room in the house with smoke and cause you to cough the next morning but they didn’t half keep the chill from you bones.
It’s sad reminiscing over the life I once lived but at the same time that sadness fills me with joy, or at least maybe a satisfaction of knowing that I still have my emotions and that the hunger has not raped me of them yet.
Not yet.
The church clock chimes eleven times and I make my way silently from the yard, keeping to the undergrowth for my own protection as much as anyone who might have decided to take a stroll in the bitter winds and fierce north-western rain. As the wind downsizes towards a breeze I catch the scent of an animal, possibly canine, and the distinct foulness of rotting meat on the animal’s breath almost turns my stomach. I read somewhere once that in Korea they eat dog meat as a dish, out of choice. Even just the thought of it revolts me; I mean their blood is dreadful enough, even when the hunger is in full swing, but to digest the meat...
Using the shadowed silhouette of a cluster of conifer trees I float upwards, my hunger now subdued from the concentration it takes for me to levitate myself. The initial floating had come to me quite quickly after the change; it was learning to control direction and speed that has taken time.
As I soar high enough into the sky so I don’t catch the eye of the local man walking his dog, I sigh heavily into the storm and will myself over to the church roof. Sitting down next to the frozen gargoyles that surrounded me I pat the closest spiritual scarecrow on the head and smile at the irony. These demons were posted on top of churches and cathedrals throughout the world to keep the mythical likes of me away:

Evil spirits do not come near,
We are Gargoyles, you can see us clear,
Surrounding our homestead to provoke much fear,
Move on sons of Satan, you’re not welcome here.

The thing is though, history and the myth makers have got it all wrong. I am no son of Satan and I feel no more in tune to evil spirits than before my change. I am a God fearing, God loving animal of the night. It is God who has no love for me anymore, not the other way around.
At my grandson’s funeral in the nineteenth century I had been outcast from society. How was it that a man did not age and yet all around him everyone else did? Benjamin had died an extremely old man of sixty-five and yet there stood his own grandfather appearing no older than twenty-five. There was an up roar. Over the years prior to my grandson’s death he would come and visit me, and I him. We were very close and I was close also to his family, I adored his wife and children. Of course Benjamin knew about my refusal to age, and always he played along, introducing me as a distant nephew to his family. The problem came in the shape of an elderly minister who had put two and two together and come up with six six six.
‘You sir are the nephew of the late Benjamin Chesterfield?’ the minister asked me after Ben’s funeral.
‘Yes father I am,’ I had told him.
There had then been hushed words between the minister and a few of the local men and women, the occasional glance in my direction and finger pointed my way, and then the minister approached me again.
‘What do you have to say to the allegations that you sir are in fact the grandfather of the deceased?’
What could I have possibly told the man? ‘Yes father it is true, this is in fact my one hundred and third year on this earth?’ I would have been hanged to no avail right there and then.
‘Who father, would suggest such a preposterous remark?’ I asked, and then came forward an elderly gentleman I remember as a neighbour of my son’s household some thirty years previous.
‘You sir are Eric Chesterfield,’ the gentleman said, ‘and I have watched all my life as your family grew older and yet you stayed youthful... The devil,’ he spat.
After that last remark there was a riot. The whole town turned on me, including Benjamin’s family, a family I had loved and who had loved me. I was branded an imposter, the walking dead, the devil himself, and I’m sure if a kind stranger had not stepped in right there and then I would have been buried alive.
That kind stranger, a new face to the town Dr. William Steel, stepped in and held the lynch mob while I made my way out of my local church, the very same church in which I am sat upon now, for the very last time. I didn’t see Dr. Steel for one hundred and fifty-two years. It was 1916 and already I had spent two months in a trench watching my friends and country men die all around me. It was early September when Dr. Steel, or rather Captain William Johnson joined us at the Somme and up until then I was unaware of there being anyone else like me.
Looking up at the night sky the clouds part momentarily and I am basked in moonlight. The hunger, the beast, the sickness my condition endures stirs restlessly, letting out a roar from within.
It is almost time.
Soon I will lose control of my senses, soon the veil of blood will fall down upon me and I will be powerless, soon the beast, the infection will have taken over my senses. It needs its feed and is relentless in its quest. For two hundred and twenty so years the beast and the hunger have gripped me like a vice every night, lusting for blood and needing the blood of the living to take the pangs away, at least for a while. Then the beast will sleep and so to can I.
I can now feel the thirst and looking up at the church clock tower I whisper, “Where is he,” to the gargoyles, “it is quarter to twelve, where the fuck is he!”
The mist is beginning to move in over my eyes. How long before I am at the hunger’s mercy? Already I am beginning to fantasise about the taste of the red, how my lips would quiver slightly as I lean my head down towards my victim’s neck. That soft flesh beneath which lay my desired...
“STOP IT,” I scream out into the night, shaking my head violently from side to side.
I need to concentrate on something, anything, as long as it keeps me from turning. That is the hunger’s great ally, the power of suggestion. It will leak those soft images into my head so that I can almost smell the fear of my victim as I imagine draining them of their life.
I set off upwards, higher and higher up into the night sky, trying almost to outrun the plague that is burrowed deep into my psyche. My skin begins to tighten, another sign that I am now delaying the inevitable. Higher and higher, searching the ever receding graveyard for the Doctor but he is not there. Thunder cracks and with it a bolt of lightening, scorching the earth momentarily and lifting close by silhouettes from the surrounding streets and into the night sky.
A scuffle.
Four figures, one of them fighting off the rest.
It appears the good Doctor may need my help as much as I do his.