Vigil

The Present (1)

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The Parisian Countryside

2025 A.D.

Year Zero: Apocalypse

A cold wind blows in from the west. It blows from the English Channel, across ploughed fields and through the city. It carries the sea and a feel of the French countryside, fragrant brown earth and bitter stones. It brings with it all the tastes and smells and textures of the world that was. But also, in that gusting, chill wind, a taste of things to come.

Fire and blood and black rain.

A chateau stands in the last gasp of sunset. It sprawls across the landscape. Two floors of white walls. Leaded windows in dark wood frames. The first floor is hidden behind a long expanse of wall, as white as the house. The outside of the wall has been cleared of brush and grass and trees. The surrounding countryside is flat and bare.

In the distance behind the house, the lights of the closest village brighten against the rising night.

A man, dishevelled, stands before the gates. His head is poised, his legs slightly bent, like he’s prepared to run. He turns his head toward the night that rises from the east. The chateau’s white walls take on the fading glow of the setting sun, the colour of sullied gold, then the illusion passes and the man is left standing before gates held fast only by a ghostly wall rising from the black earth. Nothing gold remains.

The man’s face is a map of scars, each line a road drawn from pain. His features are still clear despite the scarring. His nose is long and noble. His cheeks are just slashes of bone, pushing against pale skin. He looks as though he has never eaten, and if he did, it was so long ago that his body has forgotten the taste of food.

A fierce light burns in his dark eyes. They twinkle and darkle as the light laces through their deep shadowy sockets.

He doesn’t feel the bitter cold seeping from the earth. His feet are muddy, leading to pale white flesh of an unclad ankle, scars visible even there, ghostly in the dusk’s late light. His trousers are torn.

He takes a deep breath, like a man getting ready for a hard and dirty task. Favouring his left leg noticeably, the limp doesn’t stop him leaping to the top of the wall and balancing there like a bird perched on a telephone wire.

He listens to heavy-booted footfalls and an accompanying clack-clack-clack of a dog’s nails on the paving surrounding the chateau. The last of the light fades outside the walls, but inside, the artificial glow of security lights set around the chateau light every dark corner in their unforgiving glare. But this section of the wall is in darkness. It is a long time since he was last here, but he remembers it well enough.

Silently, the man pulls his long coat around him to stop it flapping in the cold wind.

A guard and a dog on a leash round the corner, walking calmly. The guard wears a stab vest, blue in the hard lights. He carries a baton but the dog is the only weapon he needs.

The guard is ignorant of the intruder. Then the man drops on him from above. With a hand held like a claw and power unhinted at in his narrow shoulders, he swipes the guard’s throat and tears through the windpipe. The guard’s scream whistles, the sound blanketed with blood.

Before the man can silence the dog in the same way, it snarls and takes a lump of flesh from his arm along with some of the threadbare coat. The man in the dark coat drops to one knee, bringing the dog down with him, and sinks his teeth into the dog’s neck. He rips fur and spine free with his teeth and spits. It is the first sound he has made. The grimace he makes is for the taste of the dog, not the pain.

The dog’s grip does not slacken. The man pries the dead jaws from his forearm without complaint.

Now the risk of discovery is greater. He is bathed in light.

Time began with that first impotent cry from the guard’s burbling throat. The man in the coat breaks into a run, limp barely evident now, and lowers his shoulder. He crashes through the door to the guard house. The second guard, far too slow, leaps from his seat and tries to reach a gun by his side, but the scarred man is faster. Much faster.

Time is still running down, but slower now. Both guards are dead and silent. Two nurses and the housekeeper wait inside the house. No alarm has been sounded.

He punches a hole in the front door, two inches of hard wood, reaches through and turns the latch.

Too much noise. Move. Faster. There’s an alarm in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom.

But it’s quiet, and he’s close enough. He runs.

The hallway is empty. A twin staircase leads to the second floor. Nothing’s changed. Of course not. How could it?

The nurses would be staying on the second floor, but the housekeeper would be on the first floor.

The house is large but the intruder’s hearing is astounding. He hears the flush of a toilet down a long corridor and turns toward it at a flat run. He should make a sound. There should be a slapping with a hint of squeak. The floor is slate, his feet bare, but he’s silent, a ghost. Eerily, on soundless feet, his loping gait takes him down the corridor. As he runs, his limp is gone and suddenly he is in perfect balance, strength evident in every stride. Still, some sense makes the housekeeper turn toward him as he flies toward her, but without a cry she falls.

Upstairs the nurses are in conversation. It doesn’t matter now. There is no one left to hear them scream, no alarm in this lounge on the landing of the second floor. The chance of failure has passed. Time slows yet again.

The second nurse has time to plead but it’s too late by then.

Then there were just two left in the chateau.

He walks along the hall. The bedroom is at the end. Hissing breath comes from behind the door, punctuated by a gentle beep, beating out time with a heart. The heart he can almost hear from within the room.

He pushes the door open and walks into the room.

A man lies on the bed. He’s old, perhaps as old as time. His skin is paper-thin. Waxy. A thin sheen of sweat stands out on a febrile brow. Wisps of hair float in the breeze coming through an open window. Liver spots stand proud on his forehead and scalp. His eyes are closed, but the man in the long coat imagines they will be cold and calculating, rivers of red capillaries running through them. Intelligent eyes, if rheumy.

The man in the coat turns and looks toward the far wall. There is a picture of a woman there in a gilded frame. He approaches it, the man behind him forgotten.

He stares at the picture for a long time. He remembers.

He checks the clock in his head and turns to the west facing window.

The machine beeps.

The sky brightens suddenly, impossibly bright, and he has to shield his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, the white light is gone, replaced by a glow that is as beautiful as a sunrise. The sunrise of a new dawn. A new age.

Beep.

Tick.

A fierce wind blows hard and hot, even this far from Paris. When it finally stills, the digital clock on the nightstand bleeps once and dies. The heart monitor fails too, but the old man’s chest continues to rise and fall.

In the depths of this darkest winter, 2025, true night arrives. There are no lights burning between the chateau and Paris. The only light is the raging, nuclear fire.

The ashes of mankind’s reign on earth begin to fall, and by the light of that distant fire the vigil begins.

*

Part One

The Hunger

Chapter One

Romania 

Foothills of the Carpathian Mountains

c. 1362 A.D.

Pain was the first word. Hunger was the second.

Awake, the pain was fierce. It was filed to the finest point, honed sharper than a razor blade. The pain was studded boots on shards of glass driven through bone and gristle. Sanded and abraded skin drowned in whisky and daubed with salt. Every inch of flesh screamed and every bone pounded. My head thrummed and danced a dervish while a horned Satyr fucked my brain raw.

That was the first. My birth was into blood. As a babe, the pain came first. As a man the hunger came second.

I hunger now and forever. The pain is nothing compared to the hunger. Even through the pouring blood and the knowledge, the surety, that my life bled and my bones crumbled as I hungered...the hunger ruled.

The pain let me know I was alive. The hunger told me if I did not eat I would die.

My first cry, a scream, then, nothing.

Was it sleep? I don’t think it was. I think it was hibernation. Becoming anew. Leaving the old behind. My body healed while I was under a blanket of stars, unaware of this fresh beauty above me. I wasn’t a creature made for beauty. I was a creature born of pain, not poetry.

So, in passing into life bloodied and broken, torn and sullied, my mind raped by something unknown, I was born a babe in a man’s mind. I had no words but a thousand feelings and thoughts I had no name for, save two.

As the night passed, the pain from my body and limbs faded. It faded as much as the distance between my eyes and the stars now...closed...to now. But that special pain, the one inside, was growing. The everything pain. The pain that had a name of its own. Hunger.

I opened my eyes to a new night. In this one there was a scimitar blade of light at the limit of my vision, a Moorish moon brightening the sky. The cold clean light hurt my eyes.

I closed them. Opened them. Everything was red. I discovered I could blink. I could feel arms, legs, chest...the parts that make the image of a man.

I could not move the man, though, nor my head to see. I blinked and cleared the red with my eyelids. Black swam into the void. But it wasn’t complete.

My blood pounded in my head and heart, a torrent growing in my veins. The red came back for just a moment and so I found my anger.

Stars.

The words were falling into place now. The words of my life.

Darkness. Light.

Sky. Space. Suns. Night. Moon.

It was night and they were stars. Distant stars. This concept was immense, powerful, overwhelming. I reached out to touch them but I couldn’t move my arm. They were so far away. So beautiful. Glittering promises in the night sky.

Sorrow. This was new. The rush of discovery brought joy.

And in this way I was born. Is this the way all men are born? Through discovery?

I was a creature, I told myself, made of bone and muscle and breath and blood. But not just that. I was made of words and sorrow and joy and anger and pain.

But most of all I was made of hunger.

*

Chapter Two

Romania 

Carpathian Mountains

I lay that way for many days. I think it was weeks. I learned all I could from my memory but my purpose and my life. I understood that I was not a baby, though my mind could not understand why I could not speak the words I knew.

The pain was a constant companion but it no longer troubled me. It was the hunger that hurt the most.

Then I felt something new. A sharp prod in my stomach. I couldn’t move to push it away or scratch at it. It was irritating. It came again and again. Insistent and annoying.

‘You dead?’

So this was words spoken. Why did I not understand them? They were not in my head.

‘Shh. Call Papa. He’s dead.’

A childish voice, not yet broken, but unmistakably a boy. I didn’t understand the words.

The one poking me did not give up so easily. He prodded and prodded. I wanted to take the stick away from that voice.

I couldn’t move. But my eyelids could open.

I opened my eyes. The voice screamed. This I thought I understood. It was a scream of pain.

No. The tremor was different. This was a scream of fear.

He ran. I was pleased with myself. It was just me and my pain and my hunger and my words. I closed my eyes once again and slept for a time, then I was being lifted onto a bier. This is an old word. I wasn’t sure it was what I was searching for. I thought a bier might be for a corpse. I wasn’t a corpse. I was breathing. I could move my eyelids.

Like this. Open.

Two men jumped and dropped me to the ground. I felt my skull pound against hard earth and something jarred inside. I thought about screaming, but then I was in the sleep that was not sleep but was not death.

*

Chapter Three

Romania

Carpathian Mountains

When I next opened my eyes, I made sure it was safe. I cracked them open slowly and looked around. I was in a small room. I could see the roof. Timber beams crossed the ceiling. Above them was the apex. The roof looked to be made from some kind of straw, interwoven, forming a barrier which kept out the sky and the stars. I didn’t like it much. There was something beautiful about the stars, but this wasn’t beautiful. This was scared. They kept the stars out because of the sorrow. But I liked the sorrow. It was a feeling, a pure feeling. It was good.

This roof was brown. It was low. If I climbed on the beams crisscrossing the ceiling, I could touch it. There was no mystery. There was no sorrow.

Someone had covered me in a sheet. When I opened my eyelids now, there was no red mist covering my vision but the timber beams and the straw roof were murky, seen through the sheet that covered my eyes. The sheet and the beams and the straw that shut out the stars and the night.

But there is light to see well enough. A candle on a table out of sight.

And a woman. A woman sitting, I presumed. She was eye-level with me and holding beads in her hand. She was praying. Praying to God.

I did not understand her words. She spoke quickly, it seemed to me, and try as I might to grasp the meaning of her words they flitted out of reach as they sped from her mouth. The candle flickered slowly and her words spun forth, words I could not understand.

But her hands clasped in front of her breast, clicking beads and her head bowed. This I understood. Supplication to a god who lived among the stars.

Why pray over me? Was I dead? All this time, was I dead?

In my panic I tried to move my arms...and they moved. At last! The joy in this moment was overwhelming. My eyes misted red under the sheet and I understood that this was not my vision fading in death but my tears of joy for my life.

But it would move no further. This sheet was tight around me, covering me from head to toe.

I had to tear it. I had to tear free. They thought I was dead but I was not. I was not! But I could move. I could move.

I turned my hand against the sheet and felt for a seam. I found it and began to rip and the woman with the beads who was saying the prayer began to scream as I rose from under the shroud and sat up.

She screamed and it hurt my ears so much. Footsteps came at a run. Not far to come, it was a small house.

She screamed and shivered and pointed, all the while shouting, over and over again, until a man burst through a thin hide covering the doorway. He was carrying an axe.

‘Devil! Devil!’ she cried, but in her language I didn’t understand.

The axe swung at my head but now my arms could move. I took the axe from the peasant man’s hand easily and planted it in his chest. I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted my hands free.

The candle fell against the cloth that bound me so I pulled myself free and stood for the first time on shaking legs. Flames licked higher as I wobbled toward the woman, hands held out in what I hoped was a gesture of peace. I did not want to hurt her, even though her screaming and her words were hurting my ears, just as the brightness of the flames was hurting my eyes. I wasn’t angry or sad or happy, but I was in pain. It was the pain that came from within.

I wanted to tell the woman I meant no harm. I took her head in my hands to hold her still and quiet her but instead I bit off her nose as she was screaming.

For some reason I felt the need to explain. I thought of all the words I knew. The first word I had learned since birth didn’t seem appropriate. It was not pain.

Instead, I said, ‘Hungry.’

Words became speech. I mumbled. I was still chewing. I liked the way the word sounded, even so.

*

Chapter Four

Romania

Carpathian Mountains

The small hut burned behind me as I stepped out into the evening air. My legs shook with the effort and I walked unsteadily away from the chattering flames and the brightness. The fire took hold of the straw of the roof and ash floated in the night sky. The moon was high and the fire was bright. It hurt my eyes. I could see everything so clearly but I had to screw my eyes up to keep some of the light out.

I was in a small clearing in deep woods. The hut, house, abode, dwelling, cottage was the only structure I could see...I wasn’t sure which. There seemed to be too many words for places where people lived. There was a small stream trickling through the woods, a sliver of silver in the undergrowth. Its banks were high with weeds and plants I had no names for. I walked toward the river and pushed aside the weeds. They made me itch but it was nothing compared to the pain I had been born into. Kneeling in the muddy bank and watching a shimmering, shifting reflection of myself in the water, I could almost believe I was alone in the world. The fire behind me crackled. The warmth reached my back and as I took the water in my cupped hands I felt icy cold and fiery warmth from both sides. It was a pleasant feeling.

I washed the blood off and stood for a moment, listening to the sharp crack of the timbers burning, the crashing as the weak walls of the house caught fire, then the roof, falling in. I picked each sound out with my ears because it was too bright to watch, even though I wanted to. The sounds were delicious, as was the smell, wafting on a mild breeze, of roasting meat. But roasted meat tasted of ash. This, a memory surfacing. Some part of me knew that there was much I had forgotten. I shrugged. The taste of flesh was still in my mouth and my belly was full, and that was enough for now. I smacked my lips and licked around my teeth, hoping to find some small morsel stuck in a gap.

But, no. My meal was over. Any meat left was burning in the house, inedible now. Thinking of it was making the hunger come back. Thinking how there was nothing to eat. No people. The hunger wasn’t as strong now, but it was there, gnawing away at my thoughts, making me sway.

I shook my head to clear it. It didn’t work so I walked into the stream and dunked my head into the chilly flow and emerged, gasping, but wide awake and better, clearer. With my hands I wrung the water from my long hair and shivered a little in the sudden cold. I should go to the fire to dry off, but being closer to the fire would hurt my eyes. There was enough light to see by. There was nothing for me here. I needed to find more meat. I was hungry.

I walked for three days following my meal. My legs were weak, at first, even though my arms were strong. Both legs were bent and there was pain as I walked. When I caught a fox that was snarling and protecting its cubs (vixen, the word was vixen) my legs felt better. I ate the fox after it bit me, but not because it bit me. It was just hungry like me. The fur was disgusting, but I discovered I could tear the fur clear to reveal the meat underneath. There wasn’t much meat on it, but it was sating my hunger. I ate while the cubs mewled and yipped, nipping at my shins and thighs as I sat. It sort of tickled, even though they were playing rough and drawing little dots of blood with their sharp teeth.

I ate them, too, but there wasn’t much point. There was hardly any meat on them, and when I’d eaten them they didn’t tickle me anymore. It made me sad, but I understood now that to eat was to take away the pain. When I eventually stood, wiping fur and blood and flesh from my face, my legs were stronger, straighter. The pain from my legs and the hunger, too, were gone.

The hunger soon came back, though.

I couldn’t catch anything else to eat. The hunger, it seemed, never left. I couldn’t satisfy it. This I came to understand as I walked and tried to catch the dancing animals that ran through the forest. I climbed the trees and tried to catch the birds that flitted on the air, but they were too swift. I found a nest and cracked open the eggs within, but the meat was runny and it wasn’t really meat. It made me sick, so I didn’t eat anymore eggs.

Those first few days I learned much. I learned there were things that made me sick. My hunger told me what I could eat, but I couldn’t catch anything that moved. Moving things tasted much better than other things, even if I could sense life in them. I could sense, or perhaps hear, things that grew in the earth. There were trees, and there was grass. There were tubers under the ground, and things hanging from some trees that I could hear, growing. But they had no beat. I needed the beat. The things that went thump thump thump inside tasted the best.

I didn’t know what that thump was. I could hear it within myself, steady and comforting. But I couldn’t eat myself. I knew that would hurt me, and if I ate myself there would be nothing left to eat with. And I wanted to eat. It was all I wanted to do.

So I walked, the daylight burning my eyes so badly I had to walk with my eyes shut and my hands over them to cut out the light. It drove spikes into my brain and made me shiver and cry out sometimes. When clouds passed the sun there was some relief, but night time was the best. Then it was cold, but there was nothing to fear in the night time. The woods were quieter then. The sound of things growing was quieter, and after three days I realised I could hear the thump thump thump of a living thing, a quiet thing, but it was sleeping.

I crept closer to it. I made very little sound. But it seemed the sleeping thing had good hearing too. I heard a rustle and something small dashed past me. I leapt for it but I was too slow. I heard the beat, faster and faster, but more distant. I chased it for a while, but when it went into a tree I couldn’t catch it. I tried to tear the tree down, but I could not. I was not strong enough.

Not then.

So I walked during the night and hid under bushes I tore from the earth during the day. The moon had gone and the night time was my time. I came alive when the sun went away. I felt stronger and there was no pain in my head. I could see better in the dark. I could hear more, too, because the background noise did not confuse me.

I picked out the sound of something large crashing toward me. I waited for it. Food! And coming to me!

I was excited, and happy, yes, happy, when eventually it crashed through the undergrowth and roared at me. It was immense, dark as night itself. It had claws and teeth and it smashed me to the ground with one of its huge claws. I wanted to eat it, but I passed out from the pain and entered the sleep that was not sleep.

When I woke up my arm was at a strange angle, one that was not natural to it. I pushed it back into place and held it there for the rest of the day. When it stayed where I put it, a new word came to me. Bear.

Plenty to eat, but too big. It could hurt me. It could put me to sleep.

I avoided bears from then on.

I got better at hunting. Some things could hurt me, but I found the small things, the things that tickled. I caught them when they were asleep. I was quiet, now. I could creep up on the little things and they did not hear me until I had them in my grasp.

But they weren’t enough. I was still hungry. Hungry all the time. Sometimes I cried, and my eyes misted over with that red film and the red dripped down my face. The only time the hunger had truly gone away was when I had eaten the woman. I wished I had eaten more. Perhaps then I wouldn’t be so hungry now. I was ravenous. My stomach began to rumble and growl. I woke a few sleeping creatures by mistake, not with my feet or my breath or the steady beat of my heart, but with my stomach grumbling in the stillness of the night.

So those nights I went hungry.

I walked in a kind of state of non-being, wandering, alone. I passed from happy to sad often in those first few days, but I did not know the meaning of lonely. In a way, I was fascinated. There was so much to learn and so many words in my head. The words in my head tumbled out and sometimes I spoke them aloud, just to hear them and taste them running over my tongue.

‘Whisper,’ I said. And, ‘rustle’, ‘earthen’, ‘flying’, to describe things I thought of as things, then I moved on to words to describe things I thought of as thoughts, such as ‘interesting’, ‘horrible’, ‘monotonous’. Sometimes I would speak words that described things I was doing, like ‘walking’, ‘breathing’, ‘speaking’.

Mostly I walked and my hunger kept me awake all the time, whispering and complaining and grumbling and moaning.

The ground began to slope steadily upwards. In the distance I could see mountains which seemed to cover the horizon, immense beyond my limited understanding, even though the view was broken into morsels I could take without going insane as I saw each glimpse through gaps in the trees. They were breathtaking, immense. I could hear a steady rumbling. It was the mountain’s hunger. It was the belly of the mountain, trying to eat the sky.

One week passed. My hunger was like that of the mountain.

That was