Three Thousand Five Hundred and Thirty Three

I long ago set aside the notion that every day is a gift, but not out of some cynical resignation to the mundane nature of life. No, I simply came to understand I had lived so long I could find no reason to resent the notion of there being no tomorrow.

And yet there are those times when I wish another tomorrow were a gift I could bestow. Life is not fair and never will be.

Rest In Peace, Cathy.

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Farley's Question

Farly asked me a question: if in 2012 you began aging a normal human lifespan... what would you do?

At first it seemed a simple question to answer, but each time I set about formulating a reply I found myself unsure of the easy responses. So many things spilled forth without consideration, as if the sudden realization I had but seventy or so years remaining might somehow erase thirty-five centuries of experience. I suspect the certainty of mortality might change me though I have often purported no fear of my own death- it would be in understanding my time was now finite. Seventy years pass so quickly.

I thought I might marry and have children. There was a time when the desire for mate and family overwhelmed me, but that was long ago and the ages have driven that need from me. Those times I allowed myself to become as a mother to an adopted family did offer a richness and fulfillment of sorts, but they also saddled me with the inevitable grief of parting from those I allowed myself to care for. That pain was not solely my own, often settling upon those I was forced to abandon as the years closed in about us. I found myself wondering if I could bear to be parted from my own children, had I any. Could I be content to die and leave them, never knowing their fate? To know as I passed that their own grief would weigh upon them long after? I must admit the thought of such circumstance is not inconsequential to one who has been party to such events more times than she cares to recount. That this is the accepted fate of men and women throughout time does nothing to mitigate these reservations.

I would not have children. My desire for that lies far in the past and is best left there.

Farly suggested I might seek to record the events of my life, the lessons learned over long decades. I do that to a very small degree in this venue, but I wonder if there is any point to the attempt? In recent correspondence with Hrodgar I offered the following:

I once thought to be a teacher of men, to attempt in some way to share those things I have learned, but in short order it became clear men need to learn for themselves those lessons that define the limits and opportunities of civilization. I am but one voice toiling in anonymity. The lessons I offered were unwelcome and unheeded, perhaps even useless. I am too far removed from the rhythm of the lives of those who surround me, out of synch as it were. Your lives race forward at such a pace should I allow my attentions to wander but a little it seems the culture has warped nearly beyond recognition. I adapt out of habit, but it seems I learn nothing new. The mores shift, the slang changes, but in the end what was alien is revealed to be so very familiar.

I suspect I lack the proper mix of devotion and charisma to be an effective teacher of the human race. It bears too much resemblance to the toils of Sisyphus. I write my words and leave them here. Those who encounter them may make of them what they will.

I have no new adventures to explore beyond this somewhat self-destructive habit of revelation (Yes, Loren, I am mindful of your admonitions- forgive my unwillingness to heed them). Were the yoke of immortality lifted from my shoulders I do believe I would set my affairs in order then find a place both peaceful and beautiful to await my end.

That notion suits me best.

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The Hope Of Others

I receive e-mail. Some messages are dismissive, a very small percentage of those evincing outrage at the thought of my existence, either as fact or farce. There are notes from those few people with whom I maintain semi-regular correspondence. Finally, and perhaps most disturbingly, there are those who seem to find some small sliver of hope in my scribblings here. To them I can only reply- I do not understand.

I have never accomplished anything of note. I did not rescue Jews from the Holocaust. I did not spirit escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad. I did not hold the plague at bay, nor lead any peoples to either greatness or destruction. I never eased life?s burdens upon Men. I have inspired no poets, tortured no romantics, discovered no transcendental truths? in short, there are no great acts I might point to with pride. The bulk of my life has been spent in the underside of humanity, amongst the poor, or the low, or the vile. What pride I might allow myself is writ upon the ledgers of the mundane.

I have acted to change things, to shape my surroundings to suit my liking, but those times are best left without comment. My capacity for monstrous behavior haunts me, and it is no small factor in the confusion that now surrounds me. It would be so simple to force matters in a direction more acceptable, but I cannot escape the fear such a notion brings upon me.

I compare the vast majority of my life against the last eleven decades and it leaves me somewhat at a loss. The sudden abandonment of the lifestyle that served my purposes so well for so long has unsettled me- I am uncertain of my direction, my place in these times. This journal is little more than the latest manifestation of the confusion that has ruled me since I cast aside the shadows. That recent events have driven home the folly of such a life only compounds my foolishness- faced with the certainty I should return to those dark and comfortable spaces I once called mine I instead choose stubborn denial.

That some find hope in this... it is yet more proof that no one can truly understand the workings of the inner human being.

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Rendezvous

It was an exercise in futility, but one willingly undertaken. Half a day spent in the air, trying not to think of the vast, blue expanse of the sea far below, then another day adjusting, waiting for the appointed day, and the appointed time.

The caf? was warm and relaxed, offering an excellent view of the square. It would have been simple to let my mind wander as it so often does in such places, but I had made a promise so my beverage of choice was coffee as I kept my silent watch upon the flowing crowds, seeking that familiar face, or distinctive walk. The day passed in its natural way, punctuated by the occasional attempted pickup declined with grace and a smile until dusk settled in.

I was surprised to feel a pang of such disappointment that it engendered a terrible longing within me. I had so wished to believe, my so-very-rational dismissal of the possibility suddenly riven and scattered upon the winds of emotion. The overwhelming urge to try again, to give him another day, another week, frightened me. It was madness to contemplate such a thing, yet I found myself in my hotel room, rescheduling my flight. Two more days. I had waited a century, what was two more days?

Those two days cost me dearly in terms of frayed nerves, self-doubt and self-recrimination. I felt foolish returning to that caf?, yet the thought of simply leaving? to call this episode finally closed was not something I could do. I despise such weakness in myself, wallowing in indecision, but there I was.

As the final hours passed I forced rationality upon myself. There had never been a chance. He had humored me as I had him. Such an insightful man, but those in his profession usually are, even today. I allowed myself to think of those days, traveling with a small circus as his assistant. He was not a magician, lord no:

?A magician produces doves from his sleeves and pulls rabbits from hats. I, my dear, am an Illusionist!?

He had seen something in me that intrigued him, and in our final year together I had told him in an offhand way of my unusual circumstance. Like any rational person he assumed I was lying, or deluded, or both. Yet he had played along and there had been a certain connection between us those final months before I moved on. He promised he would learn my secret and join me here in one hundred years. I had promised to be here.

I kept my promise. That he would be unable to keep his had been a foregone conclusion. That knowledge was cold comfort to me now.

As I gathered my things, preparing to leave, someone caught my eye- a woman, perhaps forty years old. She had been in the caf? every evening, arriving perhaps an hour before I departed each night. She deliberately made eye contact with me and she smiled, then rose from her table and approached me. She was handsome, her face a study in delicate beauty and aristocratic grace, with wide set eyes of grey framed in blonde hair going gracefully silver. I returned her smile.

?Forgive my intrusion, but you do look so very sad,? she said, her voice soft and warm, her French flavored with the accent of a Londoner.

?Oh, it really is nothing. Rather foolish of me, to be honest. My name is Genevieve.?

?Elizabeth,? she replied, taking a seat at my table, ?I really must apologize- I have been watching you for the past two nights?? and she laid her right hand atop mine.

At least I would not spend my last night in Paris alone.

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God

In the comments to this post, Mr. Renick takes me to task for my inhuman and murderous ways, then asks:

"By the way, do you even believe in God? He may judge you one day you know."

Mr. Renick,

What am I to believe in? What would you have me believe in?

God. If I assume you mean by God anything resembling the all-knowing, all-seeing creator of the universe depicted in the Bible, Talmud and Koran, then I am afraid I must disappoint, for I have no real ability to relate to that concept in any meaningful way. I worshipped many gods in my first two thousand years. I was worshipped as a minor goddess on and off for a pair of centuries. I have seen the religion complex from both sides and I am left feeling drained and unimpressed.

I know that religion offers much to those who believe. Faith is an immensely powerful force in the lives of Men. It can motivate entire nations to greatness, and even when we accept that the converse is also undeniably true we can still sift through the results and reasonably conclude that belief in God is a Good thing.

I am unimpressed by those who hold religion as maleficent influence in the affairs of Man. Yes, I am aware of the Crusades. I am aware of the Inquisitions, the Heresies and the auto-da-f?. I witnessed many such in my time and had reason to suspect that I might be on the receiving end of such un-tender mercilessness. Nevertheless, this was not the doing of religion- it was the handiwork of Men who used religion as an excuse. Lacking God, they would have found some other handy tool to flog the populace in to a frenzy of fear and murder.

I am no atheist. I do not pretend to great knowledge in the spiritual realms inhabited by such as you. I am denied such things. Your fears are not mine. Your failings are your own. That which I carry as an aching weight upon my heart would burn you to ashes in but a moment. That I might bear such burdens is by virtue of long practice and I undertake it without much in the way of joy or satisfaction. My life slowly becomes such that I wonder at my ultimate purpose. Perhaps I merely seek that one final act of contrition, that thing which might set the scales to balanced and allow me to fairly contemplate my own end in the sure and certain knowledge that what great harms I have done are finally, mercifully, put to paid.

God. If He exists for such as I, perhaps he might be so kind as to answer a simple question:

What did I do? What made You so terribly angry with me?

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Boston

I generally avoid staying in one place too long; however, Boston has become somewhat of a touchstone for me. I have had an apartment there since 1970 and it makes for a convenient place to meet lawyers and whatnot. I suppose it is coming time to leave that behind as well. These days with their computers and registries and databases? suddenly thirty years becomes an eternity of paper trails and evidence.

I fled the events in the desert that decades-past summer feeling the scrutiny of the police upon me. They had been kind in their own way, and amused at the idea that this ?little slip of a thing? could have dealt out such mayhem and destruction. They were willing to be deceived as I told them tales of my father teaching me the proper handling of a pistol and gifting me with his souvenir Army Colt .45 because he refused to let his little girl head out in to the world untrained and unarmed. Some of those men had tears in their eyes as I recounted those tales. I am a supremely skilled liar and raconteur- I showed them what the wished to see, and they accepted it readily.

First to California, into the embrace of friends who knew me for what I was, then back to Boston. As much as I dislike urban living, I could think of no other place to be and I took some small comfort from familiar things and well-known streets. I dabbled in university classes and oversexed coeds with too much money, too little history and overblown concepts of self. Given the backdrop of local strife those diversions fulfilled a need, but provided little in the way of real satisfaction. If anything it merely served to lull me in to a sense of complacency- a dangerous state for me.

I lose track of time. This is a recent development, something I began to notice at the onset of the Twentieth Century. It is not a matter of simply becoming engrossed and passing a day without intending to; rather it is the loss of months, even years at a time. It nearly always manifests itself when I feel myself at peace with my surroundings- life takes on a certain comforting rhythm and the days fade in an out from one to the next until I take note of the world once again to find that I have passed as much as a decade with little regard.

All of this is in sharp contrast with the past few months where each day has presented something to be confronted directly. To be certain, these are not life-changing events, they present no realistic danger and can hardly be called matters of import, but I find my life cluttered by dealings not easily left to the hands of those not privy to my unique concerns. I am unaccustomed to such distraction. It seems to have consequences beyond my mere displeasure.

My sleep is tortured. Long ago I ceased to be troubled by dreams. While I am certain my unconscious mind continued its nightly reshuffling and sorting of events, memories and motivations, those activities were no longer partially visible to my waking awareness. Instead, dreams seemed to become portents, warnings of some kind, or prodding towards or away from some course of action. Rare were the dreams I remembered, and those were always vivid and unmistakable in their intent.

Not so now. My nights are filled with visions of the open sea, a hunger for that one thing I fear most in the world, or else I feel myself lost and seeking solace, seeking that which I might call ?home?. That is an odd desire, as I have no real home. There are many places I live, but nothing yet is home. I have hopes for Pennsylvania? Yet I must consider just what Home would be?

Perhaps simply that place where I might pass those sudden decades without care or concern.

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Suicide

Why continue on?

Suicide is an odd construct amongst mortals. There are those societies and cultures that abhor and condemn it. Others are less judgmental. Still others glorify suicide in pursuit of some temporal victory. Regardless of which cultural construct one chooses to operate within I find the idea of taking your own life somewhat foolish given that death offers little but the unknown, and is quite likely the utter cessation of existence. In that case, suicide is the destruction of an entire subjective universe and hardly justifiable under most circumstances.

I understand seeking to end one?s own suffering. Those situations where life is merely the prolonging of an ever-escalating burden of agonies does indeed cry out for the rational to have the choice to bring existence to an end, but from my perspective your existence is so very brief, and you are so often not rational?

I have never seriously considered suicide. By that I mean to say I have never come to the point of actually laying in place those things I might need to affect a permanent end to my existence. This begs the obvious question: why not?

The issue is devoid of simple explanations.

On a personal level, while I carry a certain burden of pain as the result of my immortality it has yet to fully overwhelm me. I have succumbed to it in the past, let it form as a hot kernel of rage that fires the engine of depravity and destruction; however, in the end I learned what that rage was, what it meant. I shoved the genie back in to the bottle as it were, and moved beyond the days of anger and hate. It is both the advantage and the curse of my existence that I am afforded the opportunity to live past my accumulated evils. In this case it becomes somewhat comforting to view the coming days as an opportunity to right my wrongs and atone for my sins. They are legion, and not so easily put to paid.

To be amongst you causes me pain, this I freely admit. As the centuries move past I cannot help but come to view your lives as fleeting things, mere vignettes scattered in and about the slow drama that is my life. You often seem random and disconnected, even dissonant in your utter lack of relation to the difficult truths and comforting lies that construct my life among you. Yet it is by my own free choice that I live amongst you. I am of no meager resource, it is well within my means to live in blissful isolation, to hold the mortal world at bay and sample it but sparingly, if at all. If the truth is to be told such isolation might be the precursor to a decision to seek an ending, but it is something I seek only on occasion these days. My most recent sabbatical lasted less than twenty years.

I have noted before that in balance I am an optimist; that I look on my life, and on the relative progress of Man, and I find reason for hope. It seems to me that such hope is proof against the desire for self-destruction. I have loved, and the inevitable loss of that love to the relentless march of time pains me as well. Yet here I am amongst you, and despite my fears, the trepidations surrounding my current course of action, I find hope in the idea that I may yet love again. That when I do it is possible that my new love shall know me fully for what I am before our lives intertwine. That I might fall into that delusion that is love without the burden of secrets held close against fear. I do not dwell upon this, but neither do I dismiss it.

There is yet one final reason why I have not sought to end my life and this one is a matter of both technique and moral responsibility. In short, it is a question of fear. Not fear of death, for that holds no dread for me. Rather, it is fear of failure. It is not enough to contemplate suicide, or to act upon it. Were I to make a serious attempt at it I must be certain to succeed. In order to be certain of success I must seek complete destruction. Anything less leaves the slight possibility, perhaps vanishingly small, yet still quite real, that I might be condemning some new and undefined entity to the same struggle I have faced lo these thirty-five centuries.

This I cannot permit.

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Invitation to Despair

Having been absent some short while I feel the need to revisit something; however, I am uncertain of my ability to express this properly. In no small way a major purpose of this forum has been to seek the best, most complete method of saying what follows.

Note that I hold no faith. Note furthermore that I reject no faith. My existence is such that I am denied the easy definitions Men place upon the indefinable.

I am not as you, destined to spend perhaps a century upon this plane, a full lifetime of pleasures, pains, fears and triumphs. This span I shall count but in passing. This does not make of me something greater than thee, merely something different.

There is naught one such as I may call companionship, for it is the nature of mortals that they must perish. In words more direct, by the time you become truly interesting to me, you die. It is my fate to place my hopes and desires within such fragile containers and hope beyond reason that some thread, some connection, might persist in to the coming days: some inkling of understanding that has as its heart a beacon of hope rather than a desire for power, a plea for justice and mercy rather than a plot for dominance.

It is Death that separates us. Death has parted me from all I have come to know and love, but it further sets a wall between you and I, forcing either a painful revelation or the keeping of secrets both dear and dire. It has transpired that I shared the truth of myself with some who in the end could not accept what I am or that this ?gift? I cannot share. Those are the most painful of all for long experience can inure me to the pain of losing those I hold dear, but the burden of knowing I have caused suffering by the mere knowledge of my existence? how do I make amends for existing? How do I make amends for desiring the comfort of others about me? For being so weak as to show all of who and what I am?

Is this the infinitesimal mark of evil, that I should thrust myself in to the world of those whose lives might be carefree but for my need? Is this a right, something I deserve, or is it a cruel selfishness? Am I to see myself as blessed, or damned? I despair of kenning the difference. My knowledge is but of Men, not of Gods.

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Partings

There is no good way to bring anything to an end for any endeavor will always leave a gap, an emptiness, when it is concluded and put to rest. This journal is no exception. I noted before that I launched it in order to test the waters and that I had not found things entirely to my liking, but bringing this to an end is only somewhat related to that revelation. I did indeed desire to learn what reaction, if any, my existence might elicit and in that the results were almost universally encouraging; however, by its very nature this journal cannot provide me with a deeper understanding of what I could expect should I publicly proclaim my existence in a more direct fashion. The Internet is too fast-paced and far too ephemeral to provide me with the certainty I had sought. I believe I knew this going in, but as an incremental step it was most valuable.

What have I learned? Most cryptically I have learned that which I needed to learn. It has always been apparent to me that this little exercise had far more to do with me than with the outside world. The reflection upon my past, the episodes I chose to share, and perhaps more importantly those I have chosen not to share, all led me to a certain place within myself, an understanding that has likely always been there, but that I never once visited with any seriousness. Until now. I understand now that this chameleon?s life I have been living is a loser?s game. I always knew I was angry; that the need to pick up, let go and move on was the source of a bitterness that colored my relationships and robbed me of the happiness I felt I had a right to. This sometimes erupted in bouts of truly embarrassing self-pity, and sometimes in an almost pathological misanthropy.

To those readers who have found me an entertaining raconteur with perhaps a hidden softness inside I can only say that had I been less circumspect in the tales I chose to tell you may well have been disgusted, perhaps even horrified. Three and one half millennia afforded ample opportunity to fall in to monstrous depravity: my hands are stained with the blood of innocents.

That is not so easy to admit, here in this space. It has been my existence in this little digital arena that has led me to this. I have so many entertaining and informative tales to tell; glimpses in to lives past and cultures remembered only by graves and refuse. But I have found that the good tales are no longer so easy to tell. The weight of my sin grows heavier with each carefully crafted, carefully neutered tale I tell. The murder of Clayton was a glimpse of that darker portion of myself, but even that was chosen because it afforded me the cover of a somewhat moral act. I dealt out death because it felt good to do so, but perhaps he deserved it, so perhaps it was not so terrible a thing to do. I tried again, describing my eight-year murderous rampage through the streets of Ostia and Rome, but I seem incapable of finding the words to make the horror of what I was in those days clear. I lack the courage to face it squarely.

I am a moral coward.

All of this- this journal, my stories, and this confession: it all comes back to Jeremy. He understood me, both the good and the bad. In the end it was he who set me upon the path I walk today. After Clayton, after feeling the shame that act brought to my heart whenever I thought of Jeremy I came to believe I might be standing at the cusp, at the point of something momentous. The world had already plunged deep in to a whirlwind of change and I was caught up in it, blown upon the bitter storm. Just as Jeremy had predicted in those final days before he passed away. And in the end he betrayed me for my own good. I am still unsure as to whether to forgive him for that. Time will tell.

Now it all makes sense to me. I have now an understanding I had despaired of ever achieving. I know what I want to do. I know what I am going to do.

I am going home.

I am going to make my stand. Watch for me, those of you who are young enough. In thirty, or forty, or perhaps fifty years it will come out- the questions, the little tabloid stories, the speculations. Then some enterprising journalist will decide it is time to rip the top off the charade and will dig deep in to my past. I am looking forward to seeing the expression on his face when he comes to the inescapable conclusion.

Life should become terribly interesting at that point.

I remain faithfully yours,
Zsallia Marieko

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Random Notions

Some random notions that have come to the fore as a result of comments, events and other factors:

I am frequently surprised. One would think I should be beyond surprise, but one would be wrong. One would think I would be coolly in control of my emotions, having had so very long to come to an intimate understanding of my own inner landscape, but one would be wrong. One would think that thirty-five centuries would smooth the contradictions from the fabric of my soul, and one would be wrong yet again.

It seems some are convinced that one such as I should be either above human foibles, or incapable of them. They are wrong. There are those who insist that one such as I must view all those about her as nothing more than mayflies, lesser things to be used for amusement and hardly missed upon passing. I would ask them how they have come to such an understanding, and I would tell them their assumptions speak volumes regarding their own private demons, but they say nothing regarding mine.

I protect myself. I protect those I consider to be my friends. Those people are few and thus precious to me.

I am immortal, not indestructible.

I am often asked if I am bored and I always reply in the negative. Boredom is not the problem I face, and no one seems to be inclined to ask regarding what that problem may be. I understand this since it is likely unique in the acuteness of its manifestation with me; however, I still see it in others from time to time. It is not loneliness. When I become aware of the weight of ages upon me, what I feel is desperately tired.

Thirty-five centuries have taught me useful things, but not so many as some seem to insist must be the case.

I understand people- my ability to interact on a personal level borders on the telepathic. This is not some mystic ability, but the simple byproduct of millennia of experience. It is an ability that is limited to personal, face-to-face, situations. This also makes me a rather entertaining bedmate.

Conversing via the written word is an extraordinarily poor cousin to personal interaction. At the same time it offers a separate set of tools, and a different level of nuance that cannot be dismissed.

I am merciless in self-analysis- my ability to delude myself is limited, but when I indulge it the results are usually disastrous. I take no pity upon myself, for I posses the ability to outlive my errors. Others do not.

I understand that nothing ever really ends. Everything that has preceded this moment in time forms the foundation upon which the next moment must stand.

I have noted before that I view myself as primarily a destructive force in relation to those with whom I interact. There are those who disagree with me. They lack my perspective on this subject. This extends to this journal: every post I make, every comment left on any site constitutes an act of almost criminal selfishness on my part.

I never share everything with you. Never.

There is more to say. I choose not to say it.

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I Know Who You Are

?I know who you are.?

I said nothing, allowing Edna?s quiet words hang in the air behind me as I gazed upon Catherine?s final resting place. Her marker was large, yet very simple- a granite spire, somewhat weathered as were all the stones in this corner of the cemetery, with just her name and the dates: b 1831 d 1896.

?She was only sixty-five. Even being wealthy and protected, the damned winters were like a scythe, weren?t they??

?I know you heard what I said, so don?t pretend you didn?t.?

I had been feeling something from her for two days now. It was the only reason I had not left yet- I had to know what it was. Her certainty was so strong and it excited her so. I turned to face her.

?Who do you think I am??

?Great Grandma hired a Pinkerton man to track down Elaine a few years after the War Between the States. He went to Boston, found her lawyers? offices, but they were well paid, quite reputable and very tight-lipped.? She paused then and said, ?I think I need to sit... could we move to that bench?? She gestured with her cane and I nodded. Edna shuffled over, suddenly looking every day of her ninety-eight years, and settled down with a sigh, placing her cane before her with her hands perched atop. She waited until I took a seat beside her. ?Where was I? Boston. You always seem to go back to Boston. The Pinkerton man was no slouch, and you?d a way of impressing people, of course. He found a name: Melissa Burns, and there was some talk of Georgia. It took some doing but he tracked you down to a plantation where you were hired as a tutor in literature and mathematics. Then he discovered that you?d murdered a man named Clayton Williams. You were caught, tried, convicted and hanged. End of story, or so he thought.

?I have to wonder what he thought when Catherine sent him back to Georgia and told him to dig up your corpse, if he could. He went back and started asking more questions, spreading around money and liquor, until he bumped in to these two gents who?d had a near religious experience. Neither of them?d had a drink in years before they ran in to him- reformed men, they were. But his questions shook them up, and the whiskey was good, and the tale they told him? well, he?d never heard anything so wild and unlikely in his life, but he had his orders, and like I said, he was no slouch at his job.

?He tracked you to a border town in Texas. A pretty young redheaded prostitute named Molly, sweet and kind and very quiet, and sporting a hanging scar. Only by the time he got that far poor Molly?d had an accident, took a spill in to the river and drowned. Body never recovered. Of course, it couldn?t have been the same woman, because everybody swore she couldn?t be more than eighteen and Elaine?d have been close to sixty by then, except that Melissa Burns hadn?t been more than twenty-five??

?He would have had a very difficult time following me after that. Molly was a throw-away?? I stopped there because there was no point in continuing. Edna?s gaze was fixed on me, waiting. ?How many people know this story??

?Just me. It?s been passed down through the women in the family. Honestly, I didn?t really believe it myself until you showed up, and even then I wasn?t sure until just now. I haven?t told anyone; Sarah would be the obvious choice, but she?s such a Chatty Cathy I just couldn?t trust her with it.? She sat up straighter then, and took a deep breath, ?So, if you wanted to you could shoot me with that ugly old pistol you?ve got your hand on and the story?d die with me. I suspect you?d be able to get out of town before anybody caught on.?

I snatched my hand from my bag- I had not even realized I had my hand on the gun. I was embarrassed that she had noticed, that I had even unconsciously considered?

And then I was shaking, trembling so violently that I could not even speak. It was not fear, or anger, or joy, but simply conflict. I did not know what to do. Then a sharp pain exploded in my shin and I cried out as Edna drew back her cane after striking me with it.

?Get a hold of yourself! Lord, you?d think someone as old as you?d be beyond this kind of thing!?

I laughed out loud at that. ?I?ve heard that before? I should introduce you to the Yeti!?

?The who??

?Yes, never mind, it?s too hard to explain.?

We sat for several minutes before Edna finally asked, ?So, what?re you going to do??

?That?s the question, isn?t it? It?s not so easy as Jeremy thought it might be.?

?Sure it is. My son had you checked out- you?re loaded. I name you as my successor in the trust and then you can do what you want.?

?Really? It?s not that simple at all. Everything I know is telling me to leave, now, and never come back! I have rules I live by and I didn?t come up with them on a whim!?

?And you married Jerome- what?d your rules have to say about that? Why?d you do that? Seems pretty stupid to me. Be careful what you answer because Catherine had an idea and I think she was right.?

?I fell in love with him. Is that so hard to believe??

?Honestly? Yes, it is hard to believe. Catherine believed you were just lonely, and tired. Marrying her uncle was almost like trying to kill yourself. Just look at the trouble it?s caused you. Look at where you are right now, honey. Sure you loved him, but you loved him because it gave you a taste of something you couldn?t ever really have. You were trying to destroy yourself. Or at least destroy your life. You wanted an end, and Jerome was just the right man to help you find it.?

She sat back, her shoulders sagging. I could see the exhaustion radiating from her and suddenly I was ashamed again. How could I not see how much this was costing her? To be out here confronting me? Without another word I helped her to her feet and steadied her as we made our way back down the path to my car. She settled in to the seat and I buckled her in, then came around and started the car. Edna had her head back against the headrest, her eyes were closed.

?See, I think you?re going mad. All that running and hiding can?t be good for a body.?

?Do you understand how? how impudent it is of you to presume to speak to me like this??

She laughed quietly, opening her eyes to look over at me. ?Do you think you are wise?? she asked.

I thought about that as I maneuvered down the narrow drive to the cemetery?s exit. ?About some things, yes. Others, no.?

?Good answer. I am wise, and about a lot of things. That cemetery makes me wise- I know that?s where I?m headed, and soon, too. Focuses the mind, assuming the mind still works of course.? She chuckled then at her own little joke.

?And that?s something I lack, is it??

?It?s not just something you?re missing, it?s something you need.?

That was not a new thought for me, so why did it disturb me so to hear it from this woman?

?A cemetery?s not just a place of endings,? she continued, ?it?s a symbol, a place of roots. Kids today just don?t understand this stuff; they go wandering off in all directions and don?t give a thought to their family or their history. My daughters? I haven?t seen either of them in five years, or the grandchildren. All picked up and moved off to California and Hawaii? I kept hoping that one of them would get the notion to come home, but it?s never happened.?

?Yet here I am.?

?Yes,? she smiled, ?here you are. I?m fit to be pickled now that you?re here. I honestly never believed it was possible, just some funny folk tale, or better yet a practical joke.?

I considered that for several minutes as we drove on in silence.

?So, if I were to say I was merely humoring you??

?I wouldn?t buy it for a second. I saw the look on your face when you were touching that pistol- you?re first thought was to kill me and run like the dickens.?

?I would never have??

?I know, but you thought it. So why are you here??

?I needed to know how much damage? no. I wanted to come, to see what had happened to the people I cared about. I was here a few weeks ago- I visited Jeremy?s grave. I thought that would be enough?? I stopped then, feeling tears coming from someplace unexpected. I pulled to the side of the road and parked the car, then just gripped the wheel, desperate to compose myself. Why was this happening? Why was this woman, somebody who was still just a child in comparison to myself, having this affect on me? Why was I so damned angry?

?Don?t stop now.?

I looked at her, uncomprehending for a moment, and then I asked her, ?What would you do if I took you home and then left, and never returned??

?Nothing. I?d go to my grave knowing that I?d been privy to a great secret. Of course that?s easy for me to say because we both know you?re not leaving. C?mon dearie, stop trying to nice to the little old lady and spit it out- why are you here??

?Because I was never ready to leave!? It came out so suddenly and so succinctly that it drew all of the emotion out of me in a single statement: I had never wanted to leave. I left because it was my way, a habit, a rule I lived by. It had never been a problem before, but so much had changed since the early centuries of my life?

?Then why leave??

?That?s enough,? I snapped, my voice dropping in to a peremptory tone that made Edna sit back a bit. I put the car in gear and pulled out again, unwilling to talk any further, or to listen for that matter. Edna attempted to engage me, but I tuned her out so thoroughly that she soon gave up.

What was wrong with me? I had been willing to reinsert myself in to this family so long as I could do it on my terms, maintaining this thin fiction of secrecy, holding myself aloof from them. Why did Edna?s knowledge change things so? Why that sudden impulse to murder and flight? It was clear to me, unmistakably clear that she posed no threat. Even if she did choose to tell her family what she knew, what would they think? She knew this, I could tell she knew this.

I am terrible at snap decisions. Every one I have ever made has turned out to be ill advised in one way or another. I needed time to think. I arrived at that terribly insightful conclusion as I pulled in to Sarah?s driveway. Edna sat beside me, radiating dismay.

?I am going back to Boston,? I told her, making my voice as gentle as I could.

She emitted a quiet sigh of resignation, and then visibly nerved herself to ask, ?And What will you do there??

I paused, unwilling to be short with her again, and then gave her the most honest reply that I could: ?Think. Decide. Act.? She nodded at that, and allowed me to help her out of the car and up to the house. At the door something suddenly occurred to me. ?You never visited your husband?s grave??

?Oh, that?s not important. Perhaps next time??

?Yes, perhaps.? I turned to go, but I could feel her eyes on me, as if they sought to pull me back.

?Genevieve? now that can?t be your real name, can it??

I paused and turned back to face her as she stood framed in the open doorway, looking small and frail and forlorn. ?No, of course not. I don?t have a given name that I can remember, but I chose one, long ago,? and I told her my name, the name I chose that I have called myself for more than two millennia. Then I turned away and walked to the car. It was time to go.

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Visitations

Morning arrived clear and delightfully cool. I took an early stroll about the center of town before checking out and loading my things in to the car, and then I set off for Sarah?s home to pick up Edna. I was not particularly eager to make the visit to the cemetery, but it seemed a small courtesy to these people who had been so willing to accept me- call it recompense for my necessary deceptions.

I have never made a habit of visiting my dead; it always seems so pointless. Even my visit to Jeremy?s grave, so stylized and staged and Hollywood-dramatic was really nothing more than a lark. I was content that I had done it, but I believe I could have found as much closure reminiscing in my own living room with a bottle of brandy to mellow the mood. That I had been drawn back to this place so soon afterward was nothing more than the natural consequence of finally putting that entire episode of my life to rest.

Jeremy is dead. Catherine is dead. I could fill many, many pages with the names of those who meant something to me in some way who were now dead. To visit their graves would mean nothing to me. I understand that graves have meaning to those who are left behind, but I believe I have spent so long watching as one generation after another are returned to dust that any possible meaning has been diluted beyond detection. Cemeteries are packed with the dead and empty past. I choose not to dwell there.

Edna was already up and waiting for me when I arrived. Sarah had departed early so it was just the two of us sharing coffee and light conversation as we waited for the day to warm a bit before setting out. Edna seemed in very good spirits, commenting that she had felt guilty for neglecting her duty to visit her relatives, in particular her husband, over the past years.

?Henry?s been gone over thirty years now, so I suppose he forgives me, but I?m glad you were willing to come. I think Catherine would have been pleased to see that somebody from Elaine?s family had finally found this place.?

We were in the car and I smiled at Edna?s prattling. It is a common delusion of the living that the dead are witness to the day, but Edna seemed to take particular delight in the idea of me standing over Catherine?s grave. I felt better then- I have nothing against making a kindly old woman just a bit happier. We turned in to the gate of the cemetery and she directed me up towards the back, where the older plots were laid out over and about a low hill.

We parked at the foot of the hill and I helped her out of the car, then we began walking up towards the McAllister family?s section near the crest of the hill. As we passed various other collections of stones Edna pointed out families and individuals. I had known several of them personally.

?Surely your husband is not buried here?? I asked, ?These are all quite old.?

?Oh, no- Henry?s down by the western lawn. I thought we?d stop up here first. See that tall spire? That?s where Catherine and Jonathan are buried. Why don?t you go on ahead- I?ll catch up.?

This was all so odd, and I found myself just a little more curious than I would have admitted earlier. Edna had stopped to admire the carvings on a stone near the walkway so I strolled up the remainder of the path, and found that brief segment of my past laid out in neat rows.

Catherine and her husband were together. Off to one side were two small markers: young children, neither more than four years old. There were other pairs, more husbands and wives, and solitary markers of those who never wed, or who met untimely ends only to have their loved ones make new lives when they were gone. I knew some of their stories from Catherine?s letters; others were a mystery to me.

I heard Edna come up behind me. We both stood quietly and I began to remember times when such places had held meaning for me: never the same meaning they held for others, but meaning nonetheless. Then she spoke, and everything became deathly quiet.

?I know who you are.?

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Returnings

The town bore only a passing resemblance to what I remembered. The old church was still there- I wondered if people still worshipped in those same pews Mrs. Tremblay had gifted to the church so very long ago. When I had paid my visit to Jeremy?s grave more than a month before I had done no more than drive through- I had known then that the land was wrapped up in a dispute so I had come cross-country from a neighboring community. Still, there were enough familiar things and I found the Historical Society easily enough.

The building was easily a hundred years old and not well suited to its purpose as a museum of sorts. This had been some sort of a meeting hall, but I could not be certain, as it had been built long after I had left. The door was unlocked so I entered and found a table by the inside of the door with a small basket labeled ?Donations Welcome? the sole decoration. There did not appear to be anyone about. I dropped a few hundred dollars in the basket and set out to explore, making enough noise to ensure that anyone inside would eventually take note.

It was typical fare. Flags, documents, war memorabilia, some pictures, pieces of furniture, all of it documenting the passage of more than two hundred years: the town was older than that- perhaps the oldest pieces were stored away some place. Still, it was somewhat unsettling to be wading through pieces of lives that I might have touched so long ago. Things were familiar by their type and form, but nothing that I might point to and say ?I remember that.? Then I entered the main hall.

I felt it before I saw it. Everything in the room was so very, very familiar. There was furniture from the south parlor, the large dining table, my harpsichord? so many things that had been ours. I turned and froze, for hanging on the south wall there was a portrait of a young woman, decked out in Victorian splendor, her hair piled high in scarlet curls and ringlets? me. Jeremy had commissioned that portrait on our tenth wedding anniversary. The artist had paid particular attention to the eyes?

?Mesmerizing, isn?t she??

I turned to face the woman who had spoke and saw her start nearly as badly as had I. She was older; perhaps fifty or sixty, with dark hair going gracefully gray worn in a very modern style. Her blue eyes were open and friendly, though somewhat startled and there was something about the shape of her mouth and the angle of her jaw? I had to stop myself from commenting on it as her gaze tracked back and forth twice between the portrait and my face.

?I? I believe she was my great-great-?? the lie refused to fall gracefully from my lips, but she interrupted me as I stumbled on it.

?Oh, Lord, I believe it! Just look at the eyes, my dear!?

?Not to mention the hair, of course.? I smiled then, back at ease now that the moment had passed. ?I am Genevieve Baker.?

?Baker? Oh! You?re the one who?s got Josh in such an uproar!? She laughed then and the sound passed in to and through me, calling up memories- young Catherine at her wedding, her laughter as she danced with Jeremy. I was in control of myself now, none of this showed on my face. ?I?m Sarah, Sarah Jameson,? she turned towards the back of the hall and called out, ?Edna! Edna, come and see who?s here!?

?I?m out front!? came a dry, yet sprightly voice, then an elderly woman appeared in the entrance to the hall. She was small, and clearly closer to one hundred than to eighty, but she was spry and her eyes were clear. In her left hand she wielded a cane that certainly had to be a mere prop for her stride was brisk and her gait even. In her right hand she waved a clutch of bills. ?Somebody dropped five hundred dollars in the? Oh! Oh my word!? She stepped closer and looked me up and down, just radiating a mischievous delight as she grinned and said, ?Well, it?s a good thing I didn?t bump in to you alone in here- I?d have figured I?d finally had The Big One. And that straight hair does nothing for you, dearie.?

They offered me coffee- we sat at a table in the kitchen at the rear of the hall and they both began asking and answering questions. Edna was Edna Carstairs. Josh was her eldest son, Joshua, and co-executor of the McAllister Trust along with his mother. Sarah was Edna?s niece. Edna and her late sister were the great-granddaughters of young Catherine. I felt somehow lacking in the presence of these women who knew their ancestry and their family histories, where I was forced to lie and in turn keep my stories simple and boring. Despite this Edna seemed fascinated with my story.

?And you had no idea about the trust, or your connection to this place until you found Elaine?s diary??

?That?s pretty much it, yes. Oh, I knew a little about the family history, but it wasn?t until I found her diary and the legal papers that I had any idea what had happened. Even then, the diary only covers the year 1843. I assume she kept a yearly record, but I?ve not found any others.? Another lie- I had all twelve volumes, but this was the only one I could safely share with anyone.

?Did you bring it with you?? Sarah asked, ?I?d love to see what it has to say.?

?I don?t have it here- it?s back at the hotel, but I?d be happy to let you look it over after I?ve met with Joshua. I?m assuming he?ll want to see it as well.?

?Oh, don?t let yourself be too concerned with my son,? Edna commented, ?he?s really in no position to argue with you and he knows it. Truth is the trust is nearly bankrupt. He couldn?t afford to put up a fight even if you were a fraud.?

?Perhaps we shouldn?t talk about??

?Oh, piffle! It?s not a secret. Lawyers should never try to be investment brokers. We sank a lot of the trust?s money in to Internet stocks- lost it all. Since then with the town putting the squeeze on us we?ve barely kept up with the taxes. We tried to take a mortgage on the property, but the trust?s got no income to speak of?? Edna trailed off, but I could see the wheels turning in her, thinking about the money in the donation basket. Somebody who dressed so nicely and could drop five hundred dollars in a charity basket on a whim might just be in a position to ease some of the financial stress. She smiled again. ?Does my son know you?re in town??

?I called his office when I checked in to the hotel, but he wasn?t in??

Both of them laughed at that and Sarah said, ?Oh, he?s in, he?s just avoiding you. He?s afraid you?re somebody the real estate developers dug up to try and break the trust?? At the same time Edna was digging through her bag and finally produced a cell phone, which she opened up and put to her ear.

?Joshua? It?s your mother. I?m at the museum with Sarah? yes, I know you?re busy, but I need you to come over right away? Now don?t be like that? I?m not getting any younger and you?re wasting my time and I haven?t got a lot to waste so stop complaining? of course, dear, I know? now don?t dawdle?? She folded up her phone with a sigh, ?Don?t misunderstand, Jenny, he?s a good man. It?s just that he seems to think all the problems in town are his personal responsibility.?

Joshua Carstairs arrived within a few minutes. I was seated at the table having a second cup of coffee when he walked in and spied his mother over by the sink. He was tall and handsome, and quite distinguished looking with his thick silver hair and ruggedly lined face. His voice was quite warm and resonant- it must have been quite a boon to him in court.

?Okay mother, I?m here, now tell me what?s so important that I had to hang up on Jim Kelleher up in Boston??

?Ah, talking with your spy? And what did he have to say? But you might want to turn around before you answer that??

Joshua turned and stopped for just a second when he saw me, but no longer. Then he smiled and stepped forward, extending his hand. ?Miss Baker, I presume??

I rose and took his hand, smiling as openly as I knew how, ?I hope you understand this was not my idea- I had planned a more formal meeting.?

?Oh, don?t worry. I know my mother?s handiwork when I see it. I had intended to call you after I, uh, finished conferring with my colleague in Boston.? He took a seat and Edna brought him a cup of coffee, after which she and Sarah departed without another word.

?Don?t be embarrassed. You?ve done your research, and I?ve done mine. Perhaps we should just lay out our cards and see where we stand??

?Directly to the point, I like that. Okay, Jim Kelleher seems to feel you?re a legitimate heir, and now that I?ve seen you I certainly agree. You?re obviously not after any money, not with your bank accounts. So tell me: why are you here??

I sipped at my coffee and read him for a moment. He was unconcerned, actually relieved, which was good. His curiosity was certainly piqued, but he was absolutely unaffected by my looks or demeanor. He had a wedding ring and unconsciously fiddled with it- a thoroughly married and honest man.

?You and your family are well-off, but the trust is broke. You can?t afford to keep it afloat and you can?t get financing. Four years, perhaps five and you?ll have to default on the taxes and be forced to dissolve the trust and sell the property.?

?That sums it up nicely, yes,? he sighed, ?I?ve considered selling some of the pieces in storage, both to raise cash and save money- museum quality storage space isn't cheap. But that would be little more than a stopgap measure, and mother would never permit it in any case. Now, you haven?t answered my question.?

?No,? I smiled, ?I haven?t. I am not entirely certain what I want to do, but I think I?d like to help save the house. Once the pressure is off we can discuss the future.?

With that we agreed to leave any further discussion until the next day when I would present the trust document I possessed, just to make everything legal. Edna and Sarah rejoined us, having been not-to-secretly listening outside the door and the afternoon ran in to evening as we talked about the past and they filled me in on all the details of the family?s history they had collected. I had so little to offer them I again felt embarrassed, but Edna soaked up every little scrap I offered and was clearly eager to see the volume of the diary.

The next morning I met with Joshua at his office and we signed the various papers that made me an official beneficiary of the trust. I had already made arrangements with my bank so we were able to make a transfer of funds to the trust?s operational account- not a lordly sum, but enough so that Joshua could make the next few quarterly payments without having to liquidate any more of the trust?s dwindling stock holdings.

The remainder of that day I spent with Edna and Sarah, first letting them pour over the diary I had brought with me. Sarah was in heaven- it was filled with all sorts of minutiae regarding the daily activities of the family, both the children of the household as well as the activities of the other adult relatives and their families. Edna was quite please as well, but there was something overriding her happiness at having this piece of her family history in hand. She questioned me repeatedly about what I thought of this passage or that and I had to be very careful to avoid offering anything even remotely detailed, particularly when either of them got some piece of information egregiously wrong. Edna seemed to delight in having an outsider of sorts past whom she could run her historical narrative.

We took lunch together at a local restaurant and they took great pleasure in introducing me to any who happened by. After that Sarah drove me up to the house, Edna choosing to sit out that trip, as she was not up to ?traipsing through the wilderness? that day. I had been there just a few weeks before, but it was enjoyable still, as Sarah was able to tell me where work had been done, what had happened to the barn and stables (a fire in 1956), and other details. The house had not been lived in since 1951, but the family had used it as a reunion spot for twenty or thirty years after that time. It had not been sealed up for good until 1985, which explained why it was not in far worse condition.

Sarah and I returned to her home in the early evening and I prepared to take my leave. I would be driving back to Boston the next day.

?So soon?? Edna complained, ?I was hoping tomorrow Sarah and I could take you up to see the family plot- Catherine and her husband are buried up there, you know.?

?Oh, why go up there? You haven?t made that trip in over ten years,? Sarah protested, ?and I can?t take you- I have to go in to the city tomorrow.?

Edna looked at me and I could feel her anticipation. I smiled. ?I could stop by in the morning- I wouldn?t mind visiting the graves if that?s what you would like. I can leave for home after lunch.?

That night I was actually quite pleased with how things were going. I still had no firm idea what I would do beyond helping the family keep hold of the property, but I was already considering making some major investments to restore the house and the surrounding land. Perhaps we could move the Historical Society?s museum in to the house itself- the town had a tourism industry of sorts. A restored Victorian era home might make a nice addition. I took some time to review my cash status and see where I could gain liquidity without drawing too much attention. Then I started packing for the trip home. I hesitated over my pistol- I had been carrying it illegally for the past two days and it seemed silly to do that given the circumstances, but I am always reluctant to have it out of reach in situations like this. I do not like guns, and that makes me very, very serious about them. In the end I left it in the bottom of my purse. When I got home I would lock it up again.

I went to sleep that night with a smile on my face.

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Monsters

What follows was not easy to recount. I have alluded to such things before, but I have never been explicit, and even here I find myself forced to soften the words and the images. I nearly posted this elsewhere to keep it off of this site, but that would be inappropriate. If what follows offends or disturbs I can offer only that life often offends or disturbs. If it makes it any easier to accept, know that I still carry the sickening weight of this monstrosity. It haunts me to this day.

Roughly two thousand years in the past, I was quite insane:

It is a game, nothing more. I slip out in to the twisted labyrinth of the city?s stinking streets and drop my lure- in this case, myself. Naked but for a scrap of linen, or perhaps something finer, a little jewelry, and a pair of sandals I stroll the winding sewers that make up the Eternal City, centre of power and all things glorious. They think me a slave, a prisoner of their power, a thing.

I hate them. I hate their pretensions to civilization; their fascination with blood sport, their arrogant assumption of superiority. The very soul of their culture is warped and diseased and I had allowed it to infect me, to deceive me in to believing that I could become a part of it. Then I watched it destroy the first person I had ever truly loved.

So I play my part, enticing the lust-addled simpletons to my bloated mistress?s wretched establishment where lesser creatures sweat and toil for the pleasures of beasts. I bring a high price the nights I am there, but I serve my mistress better as an advertisement, and this permits me to satisfy my own need. Every day I seek what I crave, some misbegotten fool believing he has a right to my body, to my undivided attentions. I entice him with the easy promise of fulfilling my duty.

It is always the same, yet it is always just different enough. Each is unique in his own way. A dark corner, or a back room, private and unnoticed, a perfect place for his brutish pleasures, except? It is always such a surprise. Private for him, perfect for me- I delve in to my deepest place and produce a work of art. I never use a weapon; I delight in taking my prize with my bare hands.

A soft caress transforms in an instant to a sharp blow to the throat. Perhaps he is confused, not understanding what I have done. Then the panic sets in, the fractured airway sealed forever against the precious release of life-giving breath. Some, the pathetic ones, clutch at their throat, struggling to breathe, thrashing and kicking as I laugh, taunting them. Others are more entertaining, spending their last moments in a rage, trying to lay their hands around my pretty neck and send me to Hades before them- and they learn I am swift and strong and disinclined to die. I take small pity on those, as their strength fails and they fall, easing them to the ground, whispering to them, telling them how they have lightened the day of an ancient creature.

Playful wrestling, a game of chase that incites his lust until that moment when I dance in to that one spot, poised just so, where I have all the advantage and this fool is at my mercy, confident there is naught to concern him in the form of this curvaceous, giggling wench. I slip my arm about his neck and he laughs as I trap him, then stiffens as I pull. There is a spasm of reaction as I apply all my strength in a single, savage wrenching twist. Flesh tears, gristle popping, and bones grinding until the sudden deep, thick crack of separation is felt and he goes limp in my grasp. I let him fall, grinning, gasping as the laughter forces its way up to my lips and I am trembling from excitement and exertion- it is no small effort to break a man?s neck. It lacks the artistry of other methods, but the pure adrenaline, the sudden contest of strength with the certainty that I shall not be denied my trophy, it is the closest this comes to a pure sexual thrill, and it surpasses all in the sense of being suddenly, vividly alive when it is done. Again, I lower my lips to his ear, and whisper the secret I shall allow him to take to his grave. A parting gift he hardly deserves.

?Die quietly like a good fellow, yes? You have fallen prey to a Goddess??

Let my whispered words mock them and their worthless gods.

The first few become a dozen. The dozen become scores, then hundreds, and then many hundreds. This city is an abattoir- a few extra murders per week can hardly be expected to elicit concern. Still, eventually they come to suspect something is amiss, and even then they have no inkling. My score stands at Eight Hundred and Forty-Six the first time anyone thinks to question the pretty slave seen here and there where the corpses are discovered, and yet all they ask is ?Have you seen anything?? I am too small, too feminine, too submissive and far too deft at manipulating men to become a suspect, even when so many things point directly at me. It is a blindness born of arrogance, and fully thirty pay for that with their lives, tortured to death by frustrated agents of the law and other interested parties determined to punish somebody while I add another fifty or so by my own hand.

It had begun slowly and so does it end. Even one such as I cannot ignore the growing scrutiny and my pace slackens, and with it the madness that drives me ebbs, until one day when I draw a man in to my net? and then let him go. He would have been number Nine Hundred and Thirteen?

Six years of homicidal madness, arguably the price paid for my first taste of love.

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Vexatious Fate

This is proving to be quite vexing. I should put this behind me and think of it no more- let it lie as quietly as it has for a century or more, but it will not allow me to do that. Retrieval of the records was no mean feat itself: a company that specializes in the safe keeping of museum-quality historical documents stored them. One does not simply drive up and haul away cases of old records from a facility such as this. Nonetheless I was able to get at them after some hours of effort.

Thirteen large cases awaited me: the accumulation of over two hundred years of documents, books and letters. What concerned me would be contained in one of two particular cases and I set about the task of sorting them out once I had had them moved to my apartment outside the city. I suppose those who first collected these at my behest had been methodical in dating and storing them, but over the years as they were moved from one place to another they had become somewhat jumbled. Still, my money had been well spent- they were in remarkably good condition.

I started with letters dated after I had ended my contact with Catherine. Even after she was certain I was unlikely to respond she had continued to write in a most conversational manner. I nearly became ill when she mentioned that she had co-opted her son in to the task of ensuring I would be welcomed should I ever choose to return- this was written in 1890. Not once in any of her missives to me had she made any overt statement or even hint that she was aware of my secret: it was clear to me that her son was a lawyer and she had merely employed him in the creation of a trust to hold the family property inviolate for a great span of years, until 2050 to be exact. Unlike her words, her actions made it unmistakable that she had indeed been told, and that she believed.

Her last letter was dated December of 1896. Following that there was a letter from an attorney, informing me of her death and that I or my descendants had been named in a portion of her will. Two further letters followed, requesting a reply, then a final large packet.

Catherine and her son had been quite clever. The family fortunes had apparently grown quite large by that time so they set up a trust to hold title to the house and property. I am no legal scholar, but it appeared to me the trust stipulated any family member could reside in the house at will, but that efforts must be made to maintain the current structure and properties as they were. The trust also endowed a Historical Society for the town with a stipend for a museum. Finally, almost as an afterthought, it was noted that any person in possession of a specific legal instrument could present it to the trust as proof of descent from Elaine in order to take full advantage of the trust and its assigned properties. That instrument was sealed within an envelope in the packet.

It seems Catherine had been quite thorough.

I had already been aware that the property was in a trust- I had quietly engaged two different law firms to look in to the status of the property back when I decided to visit Jeremy?s grave. Now I was faced with having them probe more deeply, investigating the financial status of the trust and the Historical Society, as well as determining the legal status, if any, conferred by the instrument I possessed. These could conceivably be very dangerous acts on my part. They could also quite easily come to nothing. I found it hard to believe that whoever was holding the trust at this time would suddenly agree to surrender use of the property to somebody who arrived with a letter over a century old.

I chose to tackle the simplest task first: the instrument. A few hours huddled with some fine (and expensive) gentlemen determined that the instrument appeared to be valid, assuming the provisions of the trust were properly described and had not been changed; however, to execute it I would have to become personally involved as it could not be done by proxy. What surprised me was how easily I made my choice. I then set them to the task of learning everything they could while I set about making my own preparations.

Common sense tells me I should leave this be. Whatever threat there may have been is obviously minimal- digging in to this can only serve to make it worse. So why am I unwilling to walk away? Why am I so excited?

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Betrayed

Jeremy betrayed me. He told me he had done it in a letter he wrote some few days before his death, but in that letter he made it clear he expected I would not learn of his act for some time:

?I know you, my love. I know this missive shall remain unread for decades, perhaps centuries. It is conceivable you might never read it, and never know what I have done, or why??

He was correct on both counts. I had only recently begun carrying bits of my past forward, storing them against future need. Oh, I have left hordes in the past, but I have never returned to them- best to leave the past behind, let it remain dead. Only over the past few centuries have I made an effort to change this, with some success, I might add. Thus I still had my diaries from my years with Jeremy.

I retrieved the first volume of that diary some months ago, along with the letter he wrote on his deathbed. At first I had not opened it because my grief was too deep. Later I was afraid to read it and reopen the wound his passing had left in my heart. Finally, I had set it aside as part of the dead past. When recent events lured me in to revisiting that time the letter was still there. Once I had made my peace with my past I decided it was time to read it.

I cannot begin to recount it in its entirety for it is too detailed and I am loath to remake his words for my own petty needs. I am also somewhat at a loss to describe how I feel about this.

Five children survived the fire that took the lives of Reginald, Clarice and their youngest child, Sarah. I have made little specific mention of them for several reasons, none of which I am at liberty to discuss here. The eldest I shall refer to as Joshua, the youngest as Catherine (named after Reginald and Jeremy?s sister). Joshua was fourteen when Jeremy and I arrived in his life and while he respected his uncle he absolutely despised me. His intense dislike persisted until the day Jeremy?s Will was read and he understood that I had been left nothing of the family?s fortunes, and that I had been pleased to have it so. After that day he subsided in to simple irritation with me and with his youngest sister who, along with her husband, inherited the family home and its lands.

Catherine had always adored me, something I am sure contributed to Joshua?s dislike of me. After Jeremy died she insisted I remain with her and her family at the house, and I did so for one year, mostly in response to this odd feeling that she desperately wished me to remain more out of concern for my welfare than for her own purposes. When I did choose to leave, journeying to Boston, Catherine went to great lengths to maintain correspondence. We exchanged frequent letters for several years and when I was ready to set aside my identity as her Aunt Elaine I actually went to the trouble of hiring a law firm to collect any further letters or packages from her and hold them indefinitely until I sent an agent to retrieve them. I then became Melissa Burns and disappeared.

I had always wondered in an offhand manner why Catherine had been so concerned with me. Now I know why.

Jeremy revealed my secret to Catherine just over a year before he died. That I did not detect this I attribute to my foreboding of his coming end. He was still healthy, but he was no longer young. At sixty-one years of age he was now prone to infections in his lungs during the winter and I knew that it was only a matter of time. Preoccupied with what for me was an immanent change I failed to notice or properly account for Catherine?s change in attitude. In the wake of his passing, well, everything had changed for all involved.

His letter explained that he was not content to have me wandering the world, hiding here or there, always lost, always alone. He wanted to provide me with a refuge, a place to come to whenever I wished where I would be known and accepted. He wanted me to have a home. He charged Catherine with seeing to it that our home would always be available to me. He laid that obligation upon her because he knew she was fond of me and because she was such an extraordinary woman herself (a trait he insisted was my doing), having studied literature and law and the sciences at an advanced level despite her youth. He trusted her with my secret because he felt he knew her heart nearly as well as he knew mine. What surprises me most is that she might have believed him at all.

My very first instinct was to disappear: to drop everything and go underground in Eastern Europe or South America. I thought better of that- the secret had been ?out? for better than one hundred and fifty years to little or no effect so there could be little harm in taking the time to examine what this meant. Still, I did make certain arrangements against possible need.

Then I returned to Boston to sift through everything I had from Catherine.

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Mr. E Asked A Question

In response to Mr. E?s comment on a previous post:

If I were insane, how would I know? You and I could sit over coffee and have a nice chat and at the end of it you might be tempted to tell me you were fairly certain I was off my rocker, but would I be able to believe you? In my case I have lots of history to look back on and that gives me some perspective on myself. I can look back and say ?Oh, my! I was certainly not thinking too clearly, was I?? It is all relative, after all.

So what about love? I have offered a few paragraphs here to describe my understanding of the nature of love and its effect on Man and I know I have mentioned that there is a difference between this love to which Man is predisposed and the Romantic Love that is the source of such joy, such excess and such sorrow. I understand that first love- I rely upon it when I try to understand you and everybody else surrounding me. The second love, let me spell it Love for clarity?s sake, is something I try to avoid. It is dangerous to me. It is madness most raw.

Just so that you do not begin to think I am talking nonsense, please understand that what follows applies strictly to me and not to others.

Love is an invitation to pain and despair. When I allow myself to fall in Love I am guaranteeing myself a painful ending, one that is not possible, but inevitable. Tell me, please, what is rational about willingly inviting such horror in to my life? Given that, is it at all surprising that I have only had Love in my life four times?

Each time, I fooled myself in some way.

The first time was easy- when I confessed to him that his slave was immortal, he nodded and pronounced me Diana for he had encountered me as a huntress in the wilderness. Somehow my lack of chastity did not deter him in his conviction. When over the next few years our mutual foolishness made itself clear he ordered me bound hand and foot and forced me to watch as he opened his veins and bled to death. He believed he was doing the right thing.

I was none too eager to repeat that experience, but I did, three more times, the last being my Jeremy, whom I have discussed at some length. Each time I told myself that I could grasp those brief years of delirium, that the pain waiting at the end would be bearable, that this time I was far too mature to allow the inevitable to scar me so. Each time I was wrong. Oh, to be certain with the passage of time the pain eased, to be replaced with a certain rueful recognition of my own foolishness, but the memory of those times?

Only the last time came close to breaking the pattern, but I begin to suspect that there is more to play from that episode in my life. Jeremy is not through with me yet.

So, Love lures me with the promise of decades of joy and blinds me to a century of pain in payment. Self-delusion indeed. Do not seek to find flaws here, instead recognize that what I say of myself does not apply to all- it cannot for reasons I do believe I have made explicit.

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Things That Need Saying

I need to say something, to explain something, but I find myself reluctant. No matter how many attempts I make at putting this in to written words it comes out as somewhat arrogant and condescending. Would that I could meet with every reader who happens across this journal, sit down and explain in person- that is my personal strength. I can communicate with a gesture what I cannot describe in pages of text.

Complaining of the inadequacy of the only medium afforded me is pointless. Arrogant and condescending are all that are left me. So be it. Here is my gentlest iteration:

Do not attempt to understand me. You are by your very nature incapable of understanding me. This forum is woefully ineffective in providing you with what you would need to understand me. If you believe you understand me you are mistaken. All you have are fragments, musings, disjointed pieces and tattered remnants of the tapestry of a life too long to be fully described in a few dozen pages of digitized text. This is not your fault, nor is it mine. It simply is.

This does not give me satisfaction. It brings no joy to my heart. I began this site with the expectation that I might somehow make myself known- to test the waters as it were. I have tested those waters and found them not entirely to my liking, mostly for the reason that the waters were not what I expected them to be. I need something more concrete, more visceral, and I fear I know exactly what that something may be. I wrestle with that fear for I am above such things and they should have no hold on me. In this particular struggle I shall certainly prevail.

Finally, what I attempted to do when I began this site eventuated to be the opposite of what I seem to have accomplished. Rather than make myself known to others, I have made myself better known to me. The mirror of others? regard is a powerful thing indeed.

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Insanity

I am slipping in to insanity. I can feel it stealing up behind me, stray thoughts and desires, those things that make up the normal background chatter of an active mind are beginning to press their way to the fore. Irrational urges I am unable to ignore. The other day a realization that a young man had made a habit of admiring me as I took my morning latte mushroomed in to a ruthless seduction I was helpless to stop. He did not deserve this, to have me sweep in and out of his life like an emotional wrecking ball. He should have spent the weekend with his friends, spouting his silly politics, chasing after some doe-eyed freshman girl, not crashing about a hotel suite with me.

I expect better of myself, but such things have happened before. My grasp over my emotions slips, and it snowballs out of control, sometimes destructively so. At least this time it is only sex.

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Jeremy

Who was Jeremy? Why did I love him? Why is he such a powerful presence in my life? Why am I so inadequate to the task of describing him?

Jeremy was the eldest son and expected to take on his father?s law practice. There were his younger brother Reginald, and Catherine, the youngest of the three. There were two more siblings, but in the cold mortal calculus of the age they did not survive past early childhood.

He was a good student, but his heart was elsewhere. Jeremy saw the world shrinking before his eyes and he desperately wanted to see it, all of it, before it became commonplace and familiar. He left school, and his father?s good graces, and set off on a twenty-year journey around the world, paying his way with labor, skills and the occasional stipends from his brother. He began with wanderings across the frontier in North America. He joined the fighting in the War of 1812 where he served with distinction in the Northwest Territory before mustering out after the Treaty of Ghent was received in the States. After the war he traveled east, across the Atlantic and North Africa, into the Middle East, then Turkey. He entered India, and then went on into Asia proper, through China and then south to the British colony in Australia. From there he took ship via a rather meandering route to North America, where he ran in to me

Sounds simple, does it not? Consider that many of these lands were dangerous places for white men and Christians. He was on his own for much of that time, and on several occasions he found himself imprisoned, even facing death. Each time by providence or guile or both he managed to find his way to freedom. Never once did he consider ending his trek.

Consider further: in twenty years he saw more of this world than did I in three thousand. No mean feat that. Even our own jaunt across North America was the stuff of popular adventures. Jeremy could have had fame from writing his memoirs, but he did not live his life of adventure to seek out fame or fortune. He needed that time to nourish his soul. To see wonders. To see horrors. To see humanity in all its glory and despair, so that he could finally fully understand himself. And when he had that, when he felt complete, when he was satisfied, that was when he met me.

There I was, deep in my blackest, foulest of spirits, brimming overfull of disdain for men and Man when this confident, energetic, shockingly whole human being knocked on my door having chosen it solely for the fact that my lamp was still lit. I had never met a man like him. Let me repeat and emphasize that last: I had never, in three thousand three hundred and fifty-odd years met a man remotely like Jeremy. He shattered my angry wall of self-pity and cynicism with his courtesy and deference. He was grateful for my willingness to take him in. He accepted me in the guise I inhabited for he understood that sometimes, often times, women on their own were left with no good choices.

In appearance he was not remarkable, no more than half a head taller than me, and deceptively slender for he was quite strong as more than one ruffian discovered to his dismay. His eyes were pale blue, almost gray, his face was narrow, lending him an almost preacher-like severity that was shattered when he smiled, for when he did his face would light up and all the warmth within him shone through. His smile was quite disarming. He was well acquainted with the art of the fistfight and the blade, as well as being an accomplished marksman, but his greater strength was in negotiating his way out of the need to fight. He understood people. He understood me even when he had no inkling of the secrets I held.

He entered my life and in typical gallant fashion took me under his protection. In just days he came to understand that I did not need protecting and he took me to his side as a lover and partner in adventure. When he learned the truth about me he was afraid- afraid for me, not of me. He understood instinctively what loving him would ultimately cost me. He tried to protect me from that as well even knowing how futile it was. He loved me.

Yet some wonder why I loved him? Some wonder why losing him was so devastating? I fail to convey just what he was, try as I might. Were you a drinking man, you would have found him an able companion for a night of carousing. Were you a scholar an evening with him discussing the histories and foibles of man would have been counted as the best spent hours of your life. Were you a crusader for justice his thirst for the recognition of the innate nobility of all men would have set you on fire. Were you beset by misfortune his charity would have been easy to accept, for you would have understood his gratitude for being able to do so. Were you a scoundrel, an abuser of others, a thief and bottom feeder, you would have feared him. Were you as I, you would have had little choice but to love him.

Perhaps that last does say it best.

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Love

Why would I allow myself to love? For me love is both a selfish indulgence and an invitation to despair. It is destructive to the object of my affections, for if they return my love they make themselves a part of a relationship that will can only leave them childless and in their grave. One could cogently opine that for me to allow anyone to love me borders upon naked criminality.

In very condensed form those are the arguments I use with myself when I find myself tempted to fall in to that delusional state. They carry no small weight with me, both morally and intellectually and I wield them as a club to destroy any hope I might foolishly allow myself to hold when it comes to the subject of love.

But love is an insidious creature, determined to have her way, undaunted by the most vitriolic attacks and desperate defenses. Love is as much my nemesis as Time, seeking to draw me in to a state of madness from which I fear I may never escape, taunting me with the promise of happiness, then fetching me up upon my personal Scylla and Charybdis of reality and despair.

Love and Horror: opposing faces of the same bitter coin.

So, why? Weakness, selfishness, narcissism, jealousy, all those apply.

Weakness and selfishness are self-explanatory. Narcissism plays its part, as my vanity would demand that somebody could love me. But those are truly weak forces in comparison to the lessons of my life. They have little sway over me.

Jealousy, there is one monster that gnaws at me. It is difficult beyond description to live amongst you, to interact with you, to become part of your lives even in the simple, mostly tangential ways I do. To see your friendships, your loves, your crises, and your tragedies? and know that there is no way that I can ever truly be a part of them. To always stand apart, knowing that all of what you call your lives will flow past me and vanish in to the mists of what was but is no more. And I will remember, at least that small slice that I was permitted to share. And I will be alone, insulated from your fate, an alien in every meaning of that word.

And in those times when my heart is cold and my thoughts are dark and lonely, I will hate you for that.

Hardly sounds like a recipe for romance, yes? Yet that was precisely where I was when I encountered the last great love of my life. Forced to abandon my situation because too many years were piling atop me, lacking the resources to reach a place where I could tap what monies I had stowed away I found myself in a Mexican frontier port selling my body for food, whiskey and what coin I could muster to gather what I needed to make an attempt for the East. To say my mood was foul would be the understatement of the ages.

Enter Jeremy, facing arrest for not being Catholic and desperate to head in to the wilderness before the commandante?s men caught up with him. Hardly the time for a man to take up for a night with a young red haired whore with a reputation for surliness and a sharp tongue. Yet there he was, and because he was courteous I took him in. Because he was gentle and kind he touched that part of me that despised my own self-pity. Because he was a unique man, he ripped open my oh-so-carefully constructed armor of cynicism. And when he had done all that, and I lay helpless and defenseless, I foolishly let just the slightest glimmer of hope grow in me. Not love, not yet, just some hope of getting away from the hell I was trapped in. And in two days and nights together, Jeremy never laid a hand upon me.

?Your brogue is atrocious,? he commented, ?any real Irishman would catch you out before you spoke five words.?

?Lucky for me then that I?m dealing with Mexicans and lost boys from Philadelphia, yes??

We were packing to set out for the United States, cross-country via Mexico. We had pooled our money to purchase supplies, and one very sturdy mule. Jeremy impressed me by what he bought- shot and powder, blankets and canvas, spare clothing, tools, some dried and salted beef and pork- it was clear to me he was ably prepared to live off the land. I could feel his apprehensions about me- I was still an unknown to him, but his sense of honor would not let him abandon me, particularly not after taking my money.

I excused myself as he finished tying down the packs on the mule. Back in my little hovel of a room I gratefully stripped off my dress, petticoats, and corset essentially losing all the useless acres of clothing. I put on my last good set of undergarments (think a neck to knees linen garment, somewhat akin to a union suit) then leggings, over which I wore a simple homespun skirt hanging halfway down my shins and a loose blouse that tied high about my neck. My hair had to be unpinned and let down and I was a bit surprised that I had let it get so long- nearly touching the floor. Quick work with a knife brought it to just below my shoulders and I tied it in a ponytail. I finished off with a leather wide brimmed hat, thick stockings and a new pair of sturdy boots, then slung my own rickety pistol in its holster over my shoulder along with my powder flask and shot bag, stuffed my knife in my boot, fetched up my last two bottles of whiskey worth the name and strode out the door.

?My, my!? Jeremy exclaimed, ?Let me see what we have here.? I turned for him, smiling because I could feel his approval and relief at seeing me properly accoutered for the wilderness. ?You look like a boy,? he finally commented.

?Moi? I assure you I have had many comments upon my appearance, but never that!? but I was laughing because I could see the jest in his eyes.

?Have you ever fired that?? He asked, gesturing to my pistol.

?Umm, not recently, no.?

He took it from my holster and examined it with a practiced eye. ?French,? he noted, ?this was a nice piece of work. Have you ever fired it??

?Once, last year,? I confessed, ?It nearly broke my arm.?

?Well then, we will have to make a point of teaching you the proper handling of a firearm, once I get it back in to proper condition.? He handed it back to me and I returned it to its holster, then he swept his arm in a broad arc to the east. ?Shall we??

It was a long walk.

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Awakening

Awakening. Imagine you have slept with your arm under your body, squeezing off the circulation so that the limb is completely insensate. You roll off your arm and it flops free- you can feel the circulation returning, fresh blood rushing in as your arm returns to life in a tingling rush, sometimes quite painfully, stinging as if infinite pinpricks were assaulting you.

The first awareness is that of nothingness. I am numb, like that arm, but throughout my body, to the very core of myself I am numb. I recognize this; I know what it means even though I cannot remember exactly how or why. It slides in to the very center of me, a tiny thread of sensation, first warm, then achingly hot. I am drawing air, oxygen setting me ablaze from within. Pins and needles and fire and throbbing pressure are the total of existence for an indeterminate length of time.

I am on my back, with my hands folded across my chest. My ears ring so that I cannot determine my surroundings, but even though something covers my face I can taste fresh air and suddenly I am drawing in great draughts, my lungs eager for the taste of breath again. There is thirst; burning, raging thirst, and I can smell water.

Motion is pain, but I am incapable of resisting the babbling call of the nearby stream. My arms clumsily draw away the blanket that covers me and my eyes slowly focus on? stars. The canopy of the heavens is ablaze above the trees. Something calls to me, trying to force its way to the forefront of my mind, but I cannot think, only move, crawling towards the tantalizing scent of running water: sweet, cool water, sparking and wet and delicious, and irresistible. It is a journey made in increments of inches, but I arrive, first my hands are in the stream then I plunge my face in to it, sucking in water and grit, my body shuddering in the first sensation other than pain since returning to awareness.

Jeremy.

That was the first coherent thought, forcing its way up past the now relieved thirst and the gnawing ache of hunger in my belly. I was shivering and weak, but at least I could think, and my head was clearing, I could hear the sounds of the night; the horses shuffling nervously, a rhythmic buzzing sound? snoring. Jeremy. I crawled towards him, my limbs stronger, but my right side still very much weaker than my left. I could smell the fire now, smoldering to one side, could see the silhouette of a sleeping man, recognized the strong scent of brandy.

Of course: Jeremy only snored when he had been drinking.

Then the hunger was too much to ignore, but our supplies hung from a tree, out of reach even if I could stand. I crawled to Jeremy?s side and lay there, warring with myself, frightened to wake him but unable to do anything else.

I pulled myself up to a sitting position, and laid my left hand on his shoulder.

?Jeremy?? My voice was a dry croak and I cleared my throat, ?Jeremy, you have to wake up.?

His snoring abruptly stopped and he stiffened. I pushed feebly at him again. ?Wake up, Jeremy.?

With glacial slowness he rolled on to his back and looked up at me, his eyes wider than I would have thought any man?s could be, his face? unreadable. He pulled himself to a sitting position, staring at me. His eyes flickered over to where I had lain covered, then back to me. There was so much I wanted to say to him, but I had not the words and my hunger was driving at me?

?Jeremy, help me?food??

He stood and walked to the spot where the rope suspending our food was secured, releasing the knot to spill the packs to the ground. It took all the willpower I possessed to keep from leaping at them. Instead I waited until he returned carrying bread and jerky. He held them out and my control was gone- I seized them from him and tore in to it, ravenous, almost choking as I forced the bread down my throat in seven or eight large mouthfuls, then taking on a strip of jerky, pulling at the dried smoked beef.

?I thought I was deluding myself,? he whispered. I stopped for a moment, the need to speak, to say something, nearly overwhelming the hunger, but not quite.

?You just didn?t look dead. I kept uncovering you and looking at you? I?ve seen my share of dead men, in the War and through the years?you just didn?t look dead, even with that hole through your chest, and your spine snapped??

He stopped then, regarding me as I choked down the last of the jerky, my belly finally full enough, at least for the moment. Almost immediately I felt the urge to sleep coming over me so powerfully that I began to sway and Jeremy reached out to steady me. It was so comforting to feel his hand on my arm- at least he was not afraid to touch me. I could not give in, not yet. Not until he understood.

?Jeremy, I am ancient.? I was whispering, unable to summon the energy to speak any louder, but I had his attention. ?Rome was but a cluster of huts when I had seen a thousand years pass by.?

?Why? What are? why are you here, with me? What can I have that you desire??

I felt tears hot on my cheeks. This was wrong! So wrong! ?I don?t want anything but what you?ve already given me! I love you?? I began to sway, unable to hold myself upright as torpor settled over me, a thick blanket of exhaustion enveloping me? just as Jeremy?s arms encircled me. He picked me up and I curled in to his grasp, feeling him shaking? he was crying. He carried me to his bedroll and set me down there.

?You sleep,? he whispered in my ear, ?I?ll be here when you wake??

He bathed me in my sleep, removing my bloodied clothing and cleansing away the stains of my brutal misfortune. When I awoke, he brought me food and water and brandy. When I was lucid, he listened, and I told him all there was to tell: all my joy, my fear, my shame, my sorrow, my hope, and my love.

?You have been injured like this many times??

?No. I?ve been hurt, left for dead, but it was seldom so traumatic. When it was I usually took months to fully recover,? I smiled then, ?I usually haven?t anyone to take care of me. How long has it been? how long was I down??

?It?s been three days since you fell. Do you think you can ride??

I lifted my right arm, feeling it shake uncontrollably. ?I don?t think I can manage a horse. If we doubled up I think I would be good? you sat with my body for two days??

His eyes dropped to the ground and I could see the raw emotion rippling across his face as he tried to work up the courage to lie to me. To his credit, he failed.

?I was nearly insane,? he whispered, ?and I kept telling myself that you did not look like a dead person. Your face? when a man dies his face grows dark. Two days dead and you didn?t look? there was no scent of death? do you understand??

?Of course I do.?

?You did not look? I thought I was deluding myself. It hurt so much. I could not just wrap you up, but inside I was afraid I really was going mad. You had to be dead, so I must have been? That night, last night, I opened the brandy I had brought for us and I began drinking? and I did a fine, thorough job of loading my pistol. Couldn?t have a misfire, you see? I was going to put it to my head?? He stopped then, and a single, gasping sob shook his body. The understanding of what he was telling me sent a sickening chill down my spine. That I could have brought him to that, however inadvertently?

?But you did not do it??

?No? I pressed that barrel under my chin seven, eight times, but? two things stopped me, even as drunk and as miserable as I was. First, there was Reggie and the children. He trusted me to do right by them. And then there was you: I couldn?t shake the conviction that you would be ashamed of me. Eventually I packed the pistol away and I went to sleep, knowing that in the morning I would have to bundle you up and take you home.? He paused then, his eyes wet; yet very, very firmly fixed on mine. ?When you woke me, for one long horrible moment I thought I had done it.?

?Jeremy? Can you ever forgive me??

For the first time since I had crawled to his side that night, he laughed. ?Forgive you? Forgive you for what? Not dying? Elaine, I know you planned to tell me. I knew when we set out on this little excursion that you were prepared to share with me that great, brooding secret you kept locked inside. The anticipation was writ all over you in your face, and your words and your bearing,? he reached for me, taking my hands in his, ?I just never imagined? this.?

He believed me. He accepted me. He understood me.

He feared me.

I was content with that. Of all that he could have felt, fear I knew I could overcome. For the nemesis of fear is love, and that we had in abundance.

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The Truth

We were riding together. It was the spring of our second year and the house was rebuilt, the children were as settled and adjusted as anyone could expect and we finally had some time to devote to ourselves. No genteel traveling for us, instead we packed up what we needed and struck out on our own, determined to put as much distance between civilization and ourselves as we could for the next ten days.

It was a delightful time, a small taste of our past years together, though certainly made much easier by ample provisions, sturdy clothing and fine mounts to carry us. Catherine was horrified, of course, but she knew better than to try to stop us, instead insisting that Jeremy provide some clue as to our destination and coming away with no information of any real value. This was a chance to relax, and a chance to finish something I had been working towards for several years by then.

?This reminds me of you,? Jeremy commented as we rode away from our third camp, beginning our climb in to the low hills. It was late spring, the air crisp and cool with just a hint of the coming warmth filtering with the sunlight through the trees above, and the taste of resurgent life permeating the air. Nature was done with her first wild explosion, preparing to settle in to the long grind of summer- kill, eat, die, and be eaten. I love the wilderness.

?Really? How so??

?So calm and peaceful on the surface; beautiful and lively and inviting, but underneath it all, seething with all the passions and tragedies of the finest Shakespearean dramas. Nature has secrets hidden from the eyes of the common man? just as do you.?

I turned to look at him, knowing the question I had heard in his voice, but desiring to see it in his face. I said nothing. I wanted to see how much he had figured out for himself. Not that he could have possibly discerned the truth, but knowing his thoughts would help me with the remainder.

?It made sense to me at first, your being with me. You were so young and alone in that festering pit. I offered you a way out and you seized it,? he laughed then, just a chuckle, ?you know, I nearly left without you? I thought you might be too much trouble.?

He stopped then as the trail disappeared and we had to guide the horses through a spot of rough terrain, letting them pick their footing. Once on better ground he picked up again.

?Later, once I realized how unique you were, I started to fear you would leave once we returned to civilization. I was so hopelessly in love with you and I had no idea how to tell you. I hadn?t felt like that since I was a boy of fifteen. I took as long as I could making our way back. As it turned out, that was unnecessary.

?The strangest part is even though you are such a mystery to me, I?m still absolutely certain that I know you, that I know your heart.?

Fate has never been a factor in my life. I have never once felt that some higher power was watching me, prodding me along one path or another, or placing obstacles in my way out of malice or any other motivation. I reject that, have always rejected it, even in light of what happened next.

I turned to smile at him, to begin to tell him things I ached to share with him? Something spooked the horses. Jeremy?s mount shied hard, but my Melody reared with a screech, turned, bucked, and I was airborne. I tucked in to a ball, arms covering my head just as I hit the soft loam. I bounced once and unfolded as my spine slammed up against something hard and unyielding, the blow driving a red fog across my eyes.

A scream splits the air, something primal, horrified, agonized: Jeremy. Jeremy is screaming my name. I try to draw breath and sickening agony is my only reward. My sight wavers, red to black. I try to move and fire ripples through my belly, the bitter salt of blood and bile filling my mouth as I try desperately to call out. My eyes lower and I stare at the glistening crimson stained spar of the broken tree limb upon which I am impaled.

Jeremy. He runs to me. His face? horror, pain, tears? I try to speak, but only blood? only blood? my right arm will not move, the left flails towards him and he falls to his knees. My lips try to mouth words, his name?

Jeremy? secrets?

He is talking to me, holding me? the pain shudders through the core of my body as he draws me off the limb. I collapse in his arms, my blood, everywhere, covering his coat, his trousers, his hands... He is weeping as I find the strength to grip his coat, to raise my face to stare in to his eyes?

Jeremy? don?t leave me? don?t leave me?

Lungs scream for air as the cold seeps inward, slowly at first, then faster and faster as sight darkens and contracts, the roaring in my head drowning out the words he whispers in my ears. I am fighting, terrified of this, terrified of this for the first time in a very, very long time, but there is no strength left, there is nothing?

Jeremy! Don?t leave me!

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Revelation

How do you tell somebody you love that you are not what you seem to be? How do you tell anyone that you are immortal?

I met Jeremy in California in 1829. We journeyed together across what was then northern Mexico, pretending to be an Irish couple to avoid problems with what few local authorities we encountered. Most of the land was wide open then and we managed to avoid the natives, who were somewhat of an unknown for me since I had had no dealings with them at all, though Jeremy claimed he had and I believed him. From the Pacific coast to Jefferson City it was an adventure the likes of which I had seldom experienced, and by the end of that trek I knew that I would be spending many more years with him.

He was an odd man. Not handsome by any measure, and small, barely taller than myself, but possessed of a wiry strength, wily mind and an optimistic wisdom that shone through whenever he graced me with a smile. In short, he was infectious in his likeability and somewhat of a rascal in his behavior. A Gentleman he was not, but he could fake it, and when people deserved it he could mean it, heart and soul.

We traveled across the States, staying wherever the night found us, sometimes under a roof, often under the stars. We huddled together through miserable rain and blinding snow with naught but our shared warmth to hold us against the chill. I nursed him back from the edge of death when his lungs were assaulted by pneumonia of immense virulence. By then we had been together for six years and he had begun to suspect that his lovely and fearless young lady had secrets both deep and profound.

That is how I told him, or at least how I began to. I let him see the true me in small pieces, and every part of me that I gave to him, he returned to me in his devotion, his trust, and his admiration. He never questioned how I had come to learn to survive in the wilds, or how I had learned to handle even the most bizarre situations with learned aplomb. He accepted it and adored me all the more for it.

Then came Philadelphia, 1836. Jeremy had an attorney in Philadelphia who handled all of his correspondence. He tried to check in with him yearly, but oft times it was longer than that. He would collect his letters and spend a few weeks composing responses, or writing to his family- then he would entrust those letters to the lawyer for delivery. In this case it had been a full two years since they had corresponded so we traveled to the city to meet with him personally. It turned out to be a fortuitous choice.

I remember the look on his face when he returned to the Inn- there was pain etched in every line of his countenance, but there was also an aura of anticipation, something immensely hopeful. Without a word he took my hand and led me up to our room where he motioned me to sit by the fireplace.

?What has happened?? I asked. He knelt before me and took my hands in his, his eyes moist with tears barely held in check. I could feel him trembling, and even though the confused pain he radiated I knew what his next words would be.

?Elaine, would you be content to settle down with me? To end this vagabond life and be my wife, the lady of my house? Will you marry me??

?You already know the answer?? I began, but I could see his need to hear it, so I said it, ?I would be proud to be your wife. I will be content to be by your side wherever we may be, whatever we may do. I will be your bride. Now, tell me??

?My brother is dead? and Clarice as well.?

?Dear, Lord! How? What??

?There was a fire. Five of the children escaped, but Reginald and Clarice could not find little Sarah. They were trapped?? he gasped then, deep wracking sobs shaking his body as he laid his head in my lap and I folded my arms about him, holding him, just holding him until his sorrow was spent enough to let him speak again. He slipped from my arms, standing and composing himself and I could see a definite change in him for he had made several decisions, and now that his first had been made real, he knew he could move forward with the remainder. He knew that I would be beside him.

?I?ve been a very fortunate man. I was never able to sit still, I always wanted to see what was over the next hill, what was beyond the horizon. I have sailed the seas, and visited lands most people only know through the tales told by great men. My father never accepted this- he always thought me a failure, but not Reggie. Reggie envied me. He loved his wife and adored his children. He was a farmer and a gentleman through and through, but he would have lived my life if he hadn?t found his love first. He is the one who made my journeys possible; always willing to part with a little treasure just so he could receive letters from far-away places. In very many ways he bought me a freedom I could never have earned for myself.

?I?ve always known that someday I could be called to stand and account for his patronage of me. It?s somehow unseemly that I should be the benefactor of a man ten years my junior, no matter what the reasons.?

?You?ve spoken of Reggie before. I know he never once resented you, never once begrudged you the money he provided.?

?Of course not, never,? he smiled at me then and I saw that he was content with that, ?but there is a debt, a moral debt. A debt of honor.? Somehow he seemed taller, stood straighter as he continued, ? I am responsible for his legacy. The news only arrived here three days prior. Mr. Hannaford was just setting about hiring men to find me when I arrived at his door. I am executor of Reginald?s estate and responsible for his children.?

He grinned a bit sheepishly then and I laughed. ?You already wrote back, didn?t you!?

?Yes? I told them that I would return home? with my wife.?

?Presumptuous man!?

?I prefer ?prescient?. Elaine, I am forty-six years old. I have never married, and I have no children. I know that you can give me none. I am content with that. I crave only your companionship?? and then he was silent for my lips were on his for a very, very long time.

The first year was wrenching for everyone. Jeremy?s family was wealthy, but wealth is a relative thing when counted in the context of that time. They had land and crops, and social standing, but Reginald?s accounts were hardly overflowing and Jeremy desperately wished to rebuild the house and move the children back to their own home though his sister, Catherine, was somewhat mistrustful of Jeremy?s judgment and even more so of me. I could hardly blame her on either account for Jeremy had remained in contact only with Reginald. Catherine insisted we remain in the guesthouse on her husband?s estate and much rancor ensued.

Four months in things were getting out of hand when I finally took receipt of a package I had requested from a law firm in Boston, Massachusetts. It arrived at Catherine?s attorney?s office, a deliberate act on my part for I needed her cooperation. We took a carriage together in to town and at the lawyer?s office I opened the package with Catherine in attendance. It contained a small locked wooden chest, which I opened with a key I had been carrying for years. The chest contained 300 gold coins, Spanish doubloons to be precise.

?My word!? Catherine exclaimed.

?My dowry?? I offered.

?Jerome never mentioned a dowry. I thought you had no family living.? Catherine was probing, trying to be polite, but desperate to learn all she could. She knew Jeremy from her childhood, but despite the past months she knew little to nothing of me. I was about to test her taste for scandal. I asked the lawyer to excuse us.

?Jerome never mentioned a dowry because I never told him of it.?

?You never?? her blue eyes widened, ?You have kept this a secret for six years??

?Not at all. You see, this money, it is no inheritance. It is my money. I earned it.?

She digested that information, then her eyes narrowed a bit and she asked ?How??

?I spent a few years in the British ruled islands. The Gentlemen from London pay handsomely for comely whores with refined manners. Less unsightly, you understand, easier to pass off as a visiting niece should the wrong people take notice of the goings on.?

She started to laugh, derision lighting her face, then she saw my eyes. ?Oh, my God! You?re serious! My brother? oh!? This last came as the inevitable result of the combination of shock and tightly laced stays- Catherine wobbled and sought a nearby seat. I took little mercy.

?Your brother, my husband, is well aware of my past. Remember, we met in a Mexican port. He had some money and I had a supply of fine whiskey and a warm bed. We bonded instantly and after just a week he invited me to leave my sordid past behind and join him on his journeys. He knew a kindred soul when he met one. We have been inseparable ever since. When news of this tragedy reached him we married at once and travelled here.?

?Why?? she gasped, slowly recovering her breath, ?Why are you telling me this??

?Because Jeremy and I love each other. It is a love born of our own pasts, a love that we could never have found with anyone else. I never expected to find myself in a place like this, in a situation like this. I did not marry your brother to better my place in the world, I married him because he needed me to be his wife, so he could face this and conquer it, and because the thought of being apart from him was too painful to bear.

?You don?t trust me, Catherine, and if you started snooping about and having me investigated? things are already too sharp between us, between you and Franklin, and Jeremy and I. This must stop. I am being as honest as I can be with you because I hope you might understand that neither Jeremy, nor I, are looking to make off with the family fortune or to ruin reputations. We are here because we see a responsibility to Reginald, and Clarice, and the children. I am giving this money to my husband because he needs it to rebuild the children?s home. I am giving you the truth because we need you to be a partner in this, not an obstacle. Your distrust breeds ill will amongst people with whom we must live, who form the circles these children should be part of. If you can find it in your heart to believe we have no intention other than to do right by Reginald?s trust, then that, too, can spread amongst your friends, and perhaps then they can accept us freely and without reservation.?

Catherine sat very still, very silent and I could almost see her mind working, feel the conflict in her beginning to resolve. I took a seat across from her, quietly waiting for her to speak.

?I know that you love him,? she finally whispered, and then in a firmer voice, ?it shows so clearly. And he adores you, that is unmistakable.? Her eyes lifted to meet mine. ?I cannot even begin to? no, that is not what I want to say??

?You will help us,? I whispered, but it was a statement, not a question. I had read her correctly.

?Yes? yes! We will put this behind us, a secret that none need know of,? she nodded, her conviction growing, ?and you and Jerome will make your home here, and we will be family. I can respect your honesty with me, even if I can?t imagine? never mind, we should not speak of this again.?

Together we took my small treasure to her husband?s bank while I quietly patted myself on the back for working out a resolution to one of our many problems. Unfortunately I still had one very large secret to share, but that would have to wait.

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Revisiting The Past

I made a brief visit to Boston where a certain Safe Deposit Box contains certain things of little value to anyone but myself. From that box I retrieved a Diary, and a letter. Both are quite old, but the script on the diary is still familiar. I can remember the first line without looking:

?I am most insanely foolish to keep a reckoning such as this, but my Jeremy insists, and I shall deny him nothing.?

Should any care to know, this is all Etherian?s fault. Her fault, and the perverse creature Fate, turning my thoughts to love lost and pasts left to dust. Once I set the issue of William Travis to rest I found myself drawn to this place and these desires.

I spent a quiet afternoon on the Common reliving two glorious decades. And when I was done I had made a choice without ever realizing there was a question before me.

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Awareness

Awareness is an odd thing. One is tempted at all times to draw a fine, bright line between the time when there was no awareness, and the time where there was. Unfortunately, awareness is seldom so neatly defined. Even in the most extreme cases, there is a disconnect between when reality reveals itself and the mind recognizes and accepts that reality. Think of the crash victim who recalls the violence of an accident as something he witnessed rather than experienced, or the cuckold spouse who has all the evidence of unfaithfulness before him, yet cannot comprehend the betrayal.

By my loose reckoning it required nearly half a millennia to understand what I was and even longer to fully accept it. The evidence was there almost from the very beginning, but I was too addled, too primitive in my thoughts and emotions to comprehend my uniqueness.

Consider the following:

I came in to consciousness naked, swathed in furs, uncomprehending as an old woman bathed a wound in my scalp. She spoke to me in gibberish. All of this is very simple, very primitive- I had no language, no internal dialogue with which to make sense of what I was experiencing. The memories are jumbled, almost abstract- impressions of occurrence rather than narrative recollections. I remember Gtochk, the sour odor of thin brew on his breath, rolling me to my back, dumb and uncomprehending as he opened my thighs and taught me the first lesson that would guide me in my relationships with men for nearly three thousand years. I must have learned that lesson well for he named me his Precious Flower and kept me by his side for many winters despite my fruitless womb.

Gtochk?s people told tales. From them I learned that I was taken in a chance encounter with a wandering band, but the details were sparse, or else my recollection is poor. When famine threatened I was sold to another clan where my existence was more wretched as there was no one man to protect me, but I was desirable so I could survive by playing on the lusts of the younger men.

That which made me acceptable to men made me despised amongst women, but I was a hard worker as well and able to ingratiate myself to some small degree, deflecting the worst of the animosity by taking the most arduous and unpleasant tasks without complaint. It was always a selling point when I traded hands for my childlessness could not be concealed: no one willingly parted with healthy and desirable woman unless she was barren. I was sold as whore and beast of burden many times over and it never occurred to me to resent it. It was the way of life for me.

The first hint came the day an odd traveler guested in the roundhouse of my master, a man small and swarthy with a lilting cant to his voice. I was sent to entertain his bed for he had found favor with our chief and shaman, no small feat at a time when strangers were habitually slain. In the dwindling light of fading firelight, in the idle talk after pleasures taken he asked my age and I could not tell him for I could barely count beyond my fingers and toes. He taught me the basic skill of counting (incidentally doubling my value in years to come) and I totaled the winters I could remember, then lied and told him thirty-three because one hundred and thirty-three seemed a ridiculous number. Even then I understood instinctively that honesty would not serve me well in that regard. To be unusual was ill advised.

A second clue. For the first time I was turned out in to the cold of winter- food was short, I was a luxury, and there were no buyers. I knew enough of the basic skills of survival to find shelter and fire, and I did not starve though there was little of nourishment to be found. I slept through much of that time, rousing only when fortune brought some prey close enough for my sling to fell. When spring arrived I knew better than to seek out those who had abandoned me to the wilderness. I struck out on my own and passed ten winters in solitude- the first of many such interludes over the centuries. By then I was counting myself at nearly three hundred and I wailed to the sky, pleading to know why. What had I done to deserve such misery?

A hunting party gathered me in, a fair bit of prey for their entertainment. I could have eluded them. Perhaps I could have killed them as I had become quite skilled with my small bow. But I hungered for the company of people, even for the brutal lust of men, and in the end they were not so brutal, being amenable to my charms. I entered again in to the dangerous game.

I knew I was older than anyone I had knowledge of. There were myths and tales of ancient ones, but they offered nothing to me. Those of legend had power, what had I but a comely form and a strong back? Every new clan, every new cult, and every new god I preyed to, sacrificed to, pleaded with. I sought deliverance, and end to this pointless existence. Yet it never occurred to me to deliberately attempt to put an end to my life by my own hand. It was just as well.

The final clue, the one that crystallized my understanding, came after many decades of dwelling with people. Another terrible winter after a terrible harvest. The man who called me his own led me out in to the wild in the company of one of the elder women and I thought I was to be turned out again. I had seen this coming of course, so I had a good idea of where I would go, but something was wrong. He was tense, far more upset than I would have expected and the woman, Katka, radiated a certain malevolent pleasure that I at first attributed to my departure- she despised me, and she was a vicious, vindictive sort.

?Far enough,? she said, and I looked to my man, then gasped as Katka?s wiry arms seized my own, drawing them up and back behind me, ?This is the end of the trail for you!? she laughed in my ear.

?I don?t understand!? I cried, but then I saw the blade. I looked in to his eyes; saw his unhappiness, his determination as he reached for me, pulling open my cloak and my tunic to expose my chest. I smiled at him. ?It?s better this way,? I whispered, ?strike true.?

I could feel Katka?s disappointment. She had so wanted to hear me beg for my life. I trembled in fear and excitement, an intensely sexual thrill coursing through my body as I lifted my head, arching my spine to offer a clearer target. I could feel the conflict rising in him, but Katka broke the spell.

?Do you expect me to hold her forever? Do it!?

?Makta!? he cried, and his fist lunged forward, plunging the blade in to my chest, the edge perpendicular to my breastbone, entering inside the curve of my left breast, seeking and finding my heart in an expert stroke. It did not even hurt; rather it drove the breath from me, my chest collapsing inward from the force of the blow. Breath would not come and my knees buckled as Katka released me, letting me drop to my knees as he stepped back, drawing the knife from my chest. Vision wavered as I saw crimson stained snow, then I could support myself no longer, falling forward in to the cold and darkness, a throbbing, pulsating roar of sound filling my ears as their voices receded. I embraced the darkness, welcomed it, invited it to envelope and consume me, erase me, make an end to this, to everything?

Cold and pain and aching pressure in my chest dragged me from the embrace of the nothingness I craved. My body shook and I could feel the thin stream of air torturously drawn in to my lungs, slowly filling me with breath, then a wracking, agonizing coughing exhalation; thick, vile goo spitting from my throat, fouling my mouth, forcing me to full awareness. Hands sought purchase, trembling arms lifted me and another breath entered me, much easier now that the clotted blood and mucus had been expelled, then made its exodus in a scream of rage and anguish. I probed at my chest with numb fingers- the wound was barely perceptible.

Cold, and starving, and betrayed I tried to stand, but slipped and fell back, landing across a frozen hump in the snow. Rolling over I struggled to my knees, feeling fur under my bare hands. Uncomprehending I swept aside the snow to reveal? Katka? She was on her back, but her head was twisted, her neck quite emphatically broken, shock frozen on her face. In my state I was unable to appreciate the irony of it all. I began tearing at her clothing, stripping the furs from her frozen body, wrapping myself in a desperate attempt to shelter myself from the biting cold. And through it all the gnawing ache in my belly grew stronger, more insistent, a scent touching my nostrils through the dry, frosty air: tantalizing, intoxicating. Raw meat.

?I don?t think so!? I shrieked in to the coming darkness. Not that cannibalism was new to me: it happened, on occasion. But Katka, and uncooked? No.

Forcing myself to my feet I sought my bearings and set out west? but stopped after only three steps. I could not think, could not force my feet to move, my body trembling violently as the hunger became like fire within me, warming me even as it sapped my strength further. I felt under my garments for the knife I had secreted there what felt like an age ago. I drew it out and turned- Katka?s body lay stretched out in the snow.

After all, what difference did it make? He had left us to be food for beasts. I sank down beside the body- once the decision was made I wasted no time. The knife bit in to the frozen meat of the thigh, cutting, tearing at the tough flesh until a strip came free. The first mouthful was the hardest. The meat was grainy and tough, and so cold it was tasteless, at least at first. After that it did not matter what it tasted like: I fed like a starved animal?

I had a small cave in mind- easy to seal off from the wind, if not terribly roomy, and far enough from the village to avoid being detected. I dragged Katka?s carcass behind me, my mind fixed solely upon my destination and reaching it before dark. The sky cleared offering bright moonlight to make the last leg of the trek possible, but the temperature plummeted as well. The cave was south facing, really just a depression in the hillside, but I had spied it years before and any time I had a chance I had done my best to prepare it against need: there was wood and flint and soon there was a fire.

Katka?s frozen, colorless eyes regarded me from the edge of the circle of firelight.

?You don?t know how lucky you are, old woman. And how did you wind up dead, anyhow? Did you put him up to killing me? You always hated me, so I guess that?s probably what happened. I?ll bet you just laughed a little too loud, and now there you are, and here I am. You know, if I could give you back your life and take your place out there, I?d do it. But since I can?t? if it?s any consolation, you taste terrible.?

The fire snapped and muttered at me, only just blunting the bitterness of the winter night. I was alone in a way I had never truly allowed myself to understand before. When he produced that knife I was so certain that finally, finally this would end. Instead here I was, with only flames and the dead for company.

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A Conversation With Loren

A conversation between Loren and me:

I have allowed Loren?s words to stand uncommented upon by myself for a pair of days, waiting to see if anyone else had something to say. The silence is deafening, but not entirely surprising. In the end, this is my forum and hence the responsibility for all posted on the open pages is mine and mine alone, as is any obligation for response.

I must admit that when Loren and I began correspondence I was relatively dismissive of him, as was he of me. In my position I am not permitted the luxury of trust. As open as this forum is it is still fairly secure in its own right as I can expect everyone who views it to see it as fiction at best, delusion at worst. I am satisfied with this.

Loren has a keen mind. He delves beneath the surface of the accepted reality and produces insights both exceeding strange and tantalizingly familiar. Despite this, I had not even begun to entertain any kind of hope regarding him. Time and patience are my most potent tools and I abandon them for no one. Still, my heart sank when I read the post he submitted to me and encountered a key phrase: ?inverted faith.?

I have encountered such notions before. Where they are the musings of individuals they are mostly harmless, though they often lead to much personal horror and despair. Where those in positions of power propagate them the result has always, I repeat, always led to widespread and indiscriminate death and destruction. The assorted Heresies of the Catholic Church are but a taste of the wreckage foisted upon humanity by the idea that what is accepted as good is actually evil, and what is feared as evil is actually good.

This actually corresponds neatly with my own problems with organized religion: that any one faith could be so arrogant as to claim that it alone has intimate knowledge of the mind of God would be hilarious were not so many graves dug as a result. Take the word of one who has lived through such times- there is no greater horror than finding oneself in the midst of two religious ideologies at war. Anyone paying attention to the on-going slaughter generated by Islamic reactionaries should have at hand the barest hint of what I mean.

So, I reject the notion that what passes as religious faith today is some perversion of the true relationship between Man and his Creator. It may be wrong, if you choose to be vituperative you may wish to call it ignorant, but to suppose that is in and of itself evil is? arrogant. Forgive me, Loren, but that is what I taste in your words.

Over thirty-five centuries I have listened as one faith after another, one civilization after another has prophesied the immanent End of Days. This is what Loren apparently refers to in his closing statement. I have no foreknowledge of such things, but I can say with some certainty that the ever-upward progress of humanity since descending from the trees can come to a halt. After that halt, there is only one direction in which to go. Humanity has suffered many setbacks throughout its history, but there has always been some culture, some civilization waiting in the wings to carry the torch of cultural progress forward. With the growth of an increasingly interconnected global community the danger is of a collapse from which nothing can arise but anarchy and despair. I personally believe the chance of such a collapse is relatively lower now than it has been in several decades, but that is no guarantee. I am no Oracle. The End can come, but it does not have to, and I reject categorically that all of this is the work of some benevolent (or malevolent) alien race.

Loren's reply:

Greetings!

You're being harsh? There's nothing here to be offended about as far as I'm concerned. My use of the word "inversion" with respect to Christianity has little to do with religion as a concept and much more to do with litteral fact within the given context. Allow me to explain: Judaic religions are by definition inversions of the religious systems and belief-structures of elder times. In no negative or positive sense.

Your comments are perceptive in every way, but you're sort of making a mute point since I simply don't disagree with you. I don't think I do anyway.

Human history at a social scientific level is, among other things, a series of revolts against past established orders - within religion as within politics etc. So it happens that (for the sake of our subject) older Sumerian faiths are sort of "up-side-down" as compared to the faiths of today - i.e. the entities praised as good before are today litterally held as "the devil". Names are different, naturally, pluralistic states have become singular (and vice versa) but the underlying themes remain.

I hope I have at least clarified this. As for them "aliens" and so forth, I think it's safe to say that only that which has been verified is worth believing in. The term itself is hampered by the perspective of those who coins it - wouldn't you agree?

Imagine humanity leaving this planet a thousand years from now, how do they deal with the somewhat more developed lesser primates upon stopping by in a million years or so? I'd be pretty faced if a gorilla in a suit ran away screaming "impending doom!" upon seeing me walking down the street - I would also be rather numbed by historical lessons posed by such folk, and I think I would laugh myself to death at their half-blind half-guess theories regarding who I was.

But that's just me. And I know I'm a pretty bad guy. Sorry for any disappointment I have caused you.

I think those are the relevant perspectives here, for whatever reasonings such as these are relevant at all - since the only interesting perspectives would be unknown ones. Essentially, the scope of those that simply "know better" beyond reproach or discussion.

"Our" perspective, if you will, regardless of our life-spans and the finer details of our existence, is all but too well known to us - anything superior to us (be it by age, technology, or even divinity for lack of better words) must be met in its own light for dealing.

Everything is relative, no? A demonstrating question to pose is whether existence is manufactured as a scientist would pet a herd of rats in a laboratory, or in the ways parents would nurture a group of children, or the manners by which life-forms usually Seem to be alone at the whims and chances of chaos-math and basic universal physics.

In my experience, one not seldom finds exactly what one is looking/wishing for in conducting investigations such as these. Which is why one so rarely hear of devout religious people "changing their minds".

So you do not believe in "aliens"? Good for you. Neither do I. I find it pointless to name things for which one has little or no conceptual understanding. Hell, as I've made clear before, I'm having a hard time fingering a definition of my self - let alone you yourself. Still, for the sake of argument, with your accutely original qualities (for which the only verification to date is my own) let's look at the possibilities here:

Would a singular mutation randomly grant an extreme minority of a given population such extreme qualities as the ability to live virtually forever?

Maybe. Why don't you ask yourself. Experience is something you've got and experience counts a long way when it comes to wisdom.

So what seems to be more likely here?

A vastly more advanced race (that's really all we're talking about here, "aliens", "gods", "demons", are just examples of rationalized words used to describe things for primates when "spelling everything out" would just be futile or even destructive to the 'cause of the explanation) gives evolution a little nudge and then lets time take its part in the process - or genetic mutations spawn a species big-headed enough to argue existence into serious questioning simply because "the real world" didn't seem to offer enough stuff to be remotely interesting.

From Sumerian gateways and lengthy incantations using cannabis and self-starvation as boosters, to Christian angels with flaming swords and golden trumpets, I sometimes sit back and marvel at how incredibly bored humanity must be with herself on a cultural collective level.

I find my misanthropy warranted. We have dwelt on this before.

As for pretty much everything else you mention, I'm right with you though probably a bit more extreme. Religion is protection for slaves and petty masters - synonymous to the word stagnation and yet none the less crucial for keeping order in less than educated collectives.

And I do agree that Christianity's notions are amongst the more insane ones. The very word "catholic" translates "universal" - I'd say they are destined to take water well over their heads (again, again, and again...)

Still, with the clarifications and ramblings above taken into account I sense nothing in your comments that doesn't fall to my liking. You are after all the one individual on this forum who has both the authority and the alledged experience to separate the weed from the crops, in a matter of speaking.

Finally, whether your faith in me as a person is restored or not, everyone is cursed with their own opinions and ideas. I for one think the medium of our correspondance does much more to confuse things than the other way around - be it secure or not.

Security is not really the issue, by the way - the issue is mostly dealing with at least half-serious topics in manners that easily puts them on the same level as all the other mindless gibberish on this global network of ours.

Then again, you're correct, the diffidence with respect to truth and verity amongst mortals certainly serves as our protection. As long as I don't exist, I can say whatever the hell I want - and so can you.

Best wishes,
Loren

And finally, my reply to Loren:

Consider this matter closed between us. I believe I committed the sin of allowing my own past experiences too deeply to color your words. Modern science refers to this as projection and it occurs to me that they may indeed be on to something. I spent a large portion of my life in thrall to the adherents of the Christian and Moorish ideologies. I witnessed vast slaughter between them, as well as the internecine warfare and purges within the Christian faith as various heresies were propagated and brutally suppressed. Prior to those times the clashes of cultists were only lesser evils for being smaller in scale, not for lacking fervor or blood lust. When I read your initial offering it brought those times front and center in my mind. I sent my message to you because I felt that I was indeed missing some aspect of your analysis and I was hoping for clarification. You delivered an admirable recapitulation, such that I rather enjoyed being shown the error of my analysis.

I dislike the written word for correspondence- my forte is the interpersonal, close physical contact, and the ability to discern an individual?s internal dialogue through body language and intonation. The written word lacks this entirely; however, it is useful in that it forces me to be as precise as I possibly can as I attempt in my own meandering way to tell the tale of my life.

As to your misanthropy, I may yet come to rely upon it. I certainly do not hold it against you and I do not think of you as a ?bad? person. I do look forward to conversing with you again.

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Loren Speaks

The following is a letter from Loren, whom I have mentioned tangentially in previous entries. He and I have carried out an interesting, though somewhat one-sided of late, correspondence regarding who and what I am. We are wary of each other and he has requested that I respect his wishes not to have his true name or e-mail address posted. Regarding his true name, I am certain I do not possess it, but Loren is simply another layer of anonymity I have layered upon him. His address shall remain secret. Have you any desire to respond to him I am certain the comments will do. All that being said, Loren has proffered the following in response to the conversations I have posted between The Yeti and myself:

This time I actually have a comment of quite a precise nature. Eyed through the last entries on your forum and the careless ramblings of "the Yeti" truly caught my attention. This is with regards to his theories regarding the origins of present day humanity, the artificial breeding of such as imposed by "aliens", and how this commonly ludicrous though perceptive "mix" of facts and fiction seems as the most plausible explanation to these questions.

Sadly, I must confess that the Yeti is on the money in his conclusion - my stated sadness relates to my extreme skepticism about dealing with these matters on a public forum, as I have amply explained to our hostess privately.

Without going into too much detail, I can verify the Yeti's conclusion by stating the following: After conducting studies similar to his and cross-referencing with material both uncommon and widely used by historians and archeologists etc. I soon came to an identical conclusion.

At this point, I will point out that I have not gone into detail when it comes to the Yeti's presentation in this forum - not for lack of time ;) but rather because the nitty-gritty details of what diety was called what in Sumer is of little or no relevance to the greater scope of things. In my opinion, that is.

These "aliens" we so ignorantly call them are named "the liars in wait" in some old (partly reproduced) texts. Naturally, the inversion of faith that modern religion represents deems them as "demons" and so on.

This is all very interesting. It is always nice being further verified by others making sound conclusions on forlorn subjects.

Excuse my satire on the subject. It's a pesky side-effect of things I'd rather not go into publicly.

Perhaps the Yeti has come far enough in his understanding of things to comment on the following: As far as my investigations has taken me, it would seem likely that the activity of these "aliens" stretch for purposes far beyond just mining - everything I've found actually points to regular primate life-forms being "test-subjects" of theirs. Put on a time-line granted the correct perspective, and starting at the point where monkeys were upgraded to "being aware of their own awareness" (i.e. homo sapiens sapiens) the next INTERESTING step in this species evolution clearly seems to be the point where this awareness also begins to incorporate knowledge/understanding of their veritable creators.

The pointless side-tracks of this perticular subject are many: The converging of Armageddon-theories in inverted modern faiths with the progress of the "educational revolution", for example, not to mention the "eternal reoccurance" noted in certain Eastern creeds. It is not for such reasonings I find all this interesting, however.

Given my circumstances, I've spent a few decades plowing though everything I have been able to find regarding this civilization's past.
With all this lore and symbolic gibberish put into perspective compared to its singular source one is provoked to emphatic laughter.

What we're dealing with here is wisdom beyond the whims of most human scholars, which is why I find it questionable to deal with it at a site as open as this one, but while the above stated (whether one is educated enough to grasp it or not) is as truthfull as can be, what I'm about to linger on below is nothing but my own theories.

I both suspect and hope that these fabled "liars in wait" are nothing but waiting to reveal themselves to the primates on this rock. They are waiting for time to take its tool on the fallacies of common man of today, primarily religion and other pipe-dreams, since their appearance in public would cause too much fuzz around Jesus-shouting mobs and vagrant flower-power-alien-lovers.

The world we live in today is for the most parts uncivilized, ignorant, stupid, religious, and really quite primitive (something PC-progenies often forget) - pretty much where they left it back in the days. If modern civilization overcomes the problems it faces today and manages to sort out the petty struggles of monkeys else-where I for one find it perfectly within reason that the rewards bestowed upon our hosting species will be far beyond their highest notions of fiction.

Having said as much, I would just like to extend a greeting to all partaking in this forum - keep your heads down and your eyes open!

Our noble hostess will surely explain why.

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A Response To The Yeti

I am flattered when anyone takes the time to speculate rationally regarding the nature of my existence, particularly when one goes to the lengths The Yeti obviously did in his missive to me. That having been said, I hope he does not take what I have to say about it as dismissive or disrespectful.

I have several problems with the theoretical premise and it begins in the very first paragraph. Cro-Magnon man likely did not suddenly arrive 35,000 years ago. The same mitochondria DNA evidence that excludes Neanderthals from the ancestry of modern man also pushes the emergence date for modern human beings back to as far as 200,000 years ago

Ignoring that for the moment (because evidence of this type is still in a state of flux) we have to understand that none of the ?facts? are fully established. What archeologists present for both peer and public consumption are at best highly educated guesses and attempting to draw hard conclusions based upon those data, or for that matter attempting to categorically refute such theories is an exercise in futility.

Given the above, I am not going to argue the scientific merits of what The Yeti has proposed. I will point out that he and the authors he references seem to suffer from the common human predilections towards compression of history. ?Suddenly, civilization appears in Sumer.? While Sumer and Pre-Dynastic Egypt certainly pre-date my memories I can assure you there was nothing ?sudden? about their rise. Modern humans? major advantage over Neanderthals seems to be an innate ability to deal in abstract concepts, particularly numbers, symbols and historical trends. When these abilities developed and were honed, the rise of civilization would seem to be a natural consequence. But it did not happen suddenly, of that I am certain.

The point I am attempting to make with the verbiage above is that the entire record of evolution and the birth of civilization are still too rife with holes to be bent to any one purpose or another.

Whenever I am confronted with theories about anything to do with human beings, or theoretical intelligences, I always fall back on a basic tool of analysis: motivation.

What motivated the hypothesized aliens to come to Earth? Mining metals is suggested, but it seems to me that any race capable of space travel, even if only within the Solar System, could much more profitably mine metals from the asteroids. Consider: once out of the gravity well of their own world, why descend in to another just to collect raw materials that are so much easier to obtain in space? If they can travel from their planet to Earth they can travel to the asteroids and reap the cornucopia of materials available there. As such, the idea that such beings would go to such lengths solely for metals seems unlikely. If they desired a race of slaves it seems to me they have been dangerously neglectful, as their beasts of burden have developed some interesting habits and abilities likely to make them unsuitable for coerced labor.

Perhaps these aliens acted out of mere altruism? They came across proto-humans and saw potential there, so they meddled in order to give them an evolutionary nudge in the proper direction? There is little to be gained in speculation on this point as we can easily imagine that such actions were taken and the theorized benefactors of humanity then moved on to let Homo Sapiens find its own way towards full sentience. Unless we uncover 100,000-year-old genetic laboratories buried under the ice cap of Antarctica (or elsewhere) there is no empirical method of proving or disproving such a theory and no profit in debating it.

But where does this leave me?

Am I a failed genetic experiment? A pet left behind and forgotten by my masters when they left this world? An autonomous monitor, unaware of my underlying purpose? I am viscerally inclined to reject all of these possibilities; however, honesty requires that I not do so. By my own admission I have no knowledge of my origins, or even of my true age. I claim thirty-five centuries, but this is merely an informed guess- perhaps I am far, far older, but my memories were erased when I suffered that head wound so very long ago? Short of submitting to full genetic analysis I am unlikely to come to any definitive answers in the near future.

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The Yeti Offers His Thoughts

The Yeti writes, offering the following theories and speculations. The links are my own, just to provide some background. I have comments to make; however, I will offer them seperately.

Man's ancestor apes are now placed at a staggering 25 million years ago. Hominids appeared about 14 million years ago. 3 million years created the first Homo species, followed by Australopithecus. 1,000,000 years later, we have the first evidence of Homo Erectus. And finally, after another 900,000 years, primitive man, known as Neanderthal. The difference between Australopithecus and Neanderthal is noticeable only in evolutionary terms. They used the same crude stone tools, and had no civilization that we would recognize.
Suddenly, Cro-Magnon man appeared 35,000 years ago. Discoveries in the last two decades have shown that Cro-Magnon is a different offshoot than Neanderthal. Originally, it was thought that Cro-Magnon was our progenitor. Now we know that there truly is a missing link.

And then suddenly, civilization appears in Sumer. I've been reading a lot of my old texts and some of the new articles out. There's a lot of study that simply does not make sense - and can't be fit into the accepted view of civilization. So why did I bring this up.

Because the accepted views of mankind?s origins are not complete. And you maintain that you truly do live a different life than any we've heard of.

If what you say is true, perhaps so is some of the research done by Sichin and Velikovsky and Fromm.

Allow me to throw something out there. Ralph Solecki had evidence that man had actually entered a regressive period through time. Then, inexplicably, "thinking man", Homo sapiens sapiens appears, with a high level of cultural sophistication in relation to what had been a regressive culture. Almost as if man had received a boost.

Do these names sound familiar? Anu, Enki, Enlil, Ninlil, Ea and Ishkur. They're the name of Sumerian Gods. They also have a significant role in what I'm going to suggest.

The theory is that real live aliens came down and utilized prehistoric man as labor to mine metals. They used their knowledge of genetics to create "man" in their own image, using the "clay" of prehistoric man.

This would explain the regression of man, as different types of men would procreate like animals, and be abandoned by their creators.

Enki was the God if the Underworld, and it seems he was in Africa working the mines, away from the original landing places in Mesopotamia.

We know that every culture has Gods and Kings, and all of the ancient literature, from the Iliad, to the Egyptians, to the Bible, to the epic of Gilgamesh to the Indonesian legends all talk of Gods intermarrying the females of man.

Even in Genesis, the sons of Adam left the Garden and went out to procreate with men.

Anyway - that's a lot of information. But the specific understanding, is that Enki was the great protector of man. And also responsible for disobeying Enlil, giving man the secrets of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which were assumed to be increased intelligence and the power to procreate.

Some texts, including that of Berossus, talk of genetic manipulation that included men with two heads, with animal parts, and also, something that we could easily describe as cherubim and seraphim. Manlike creatures, created to serve the Gods, without the power of reproduction, but with other skills according to their need. Say, recreation and a gene that prevents the aging gene from turning on and destroying cells?

Sumerian texts describe men created by Enki and Ninhursag (a type of Female mother Goddess), including one that could not hold back his urine, a woman who could not give birth, and four others, including those who were old too soon, and another with neither male or female organs.

The animals did not work well, but perhaps this explains the artwork and statuary of the time. The Gods realized that they had to mix the ape-men of the time with their own genetic material. And this was Homo-Sapiens created - millions of years ahead of when evolution would allow them to, and without branches leading from Homo Erectus to Homo sapiens.

Straight forward readings of the Bible, the Greek legends and the Egyptian ones actually make sense. It's only when we claim that they had to be myths and legends that they suddenly become convoluted and no longer fit the historical record.

Knowing that this is possible, or probable, or at least no more strange than a woman who claims she is 3500 years old - could it be that you are literally a creation of the same gods that created man, made in their image (God always seems to speak in plural), but bred for a different purpose? The Nefilim, which is the name Sitchin gives them, return every 3600 years, based on the non-elliptical orbit of the Twelfth Planet. In the last six months, we have confirmed the existence of a large body in an non-elliptical orbit that affects Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

Now - obviously this is pretty far out. And it is not "accepted."

Then again, how would the human race react to finding out we domesticated pets and workers? How would this affect our religion, and our government?

This is the information that is supposed to reside in the secret societies of the Masons.

Interesting, No?

Try finding a copy of the Twelfth Planet, by Zecharii Sitchin. Then look into studies of current astronomy on Planet X, theorized in the 1980's, and recently in the news.

Fascinating. I eagerly await a reply.

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1000 Years In A Nutshell

Let us assume it is late spring. Morning comes before the sun is above the horizon. Usually the adults rise first; however, in short order the children are up as well. Breakfast is simple and seldom hot- bread, fruit or nuts, dried meat (jerky, if you prefer) if there is any about and perhaps the milk of goats or cows, depending on the time and location. It is a quick meal for there is work to do. Always.

The men head out to their chores, be it in the fields with a plow or other tools, or in to the wilds to hunt, or to the river or the shore to fish. It hardly matters for the type of work is merely a particular iteration of the uniform struggle to wrest the essentials of life from the world around them.

Back at home, the women and children are just as busy. Carefree childhood is a modern construct, in these times any child who can walk and carry is put in to service, perhaps to gather fuel such as fallen branches or animal dung, or to tend to livestock or to whatever garden plot may exist. There is wood to be moved, water to be hauled, feed to be poured, bread to be baked. There are always things requiring mending: clothes, tools, dwellings, and even weapons. Often the older men remain behind to handle the heavier work while the women do finer tasks, but all are hard at work long before most modern peoples would have stirred from their beds.

Food storage is primitive. Human beings are ingenious and bend all sorts of knowledge to the task of taking what is in hand today and storing against need for tomorrow, but it is all labor intensive. Drying, smoking, salting (assuming you happen to have salt), mashing, cooking, preserving? as the technology grew more sophisticated the options grew broader and more effective, but not particularly easier.

Midday often produces brief respite. In warmer climes it is best to stay out of the sun if possible. The concern is not skin cancer; rather it is simply the heat. Chores that can be attended to indoors might be left to that part of the day. Perhaps a midday meal, usually more substantial than the morning meal, is prepared. It depends on the nature of the village or clan, whether the men will return to eat or will take whatever food they might need with them so as to remain at their own tasks.

Afternoon progresses and it is time to finish what tasks must be completed before nightfall. There is a constant bustle to get things organized for the evening meal, see to it that the animals are secured, sort through whatever has been gathered and see that it is properly stored. If the men are hunting or fishing there will be the day?s catch to be properly dealt with, and whatever was gathered fresh for the day must be prepared.

Evening is the only regular moment of respite, and it is brief by comparison to the day. A meal is taken- perhaps large if times are good, but more likely simply adequate. Sometimes, in bad times, it will be desperately sparse. As darkness closes in perhaps there will be rituals to whatever spirits your people pay homage. The hope is always essentially the same though: ?Dear Lord, please keep the monsters at bay.? When it is time for sleep it settles quickly, the reward for a hard day?s work.

The routine varies with the seasons. Harvest time means twice the food, but four times the work. Winter in the cooler climes means cold and darkness and often worse. A bad harvest means deprivation no matter where you may be- not losing the farm, but perhaps losing your life, or the lives of your children. In my case a poor harvest almost always meant I was on my way out, either driven away or sold for whatever value I might bring. Summer in a farming community means pleading with fickle deities for rain. Everywhere summer means fear of disease. Spring means you have survived long enough to start this all over again.

One constant companion is death. Throughout the years babies are born, and babies are buried in the ruthless calculus of reproduction and mortality. Adults fare only slightly better. Once past puberty life is often just a span of thirty years or so. Hard living breaks bodies so that a man of thirty would seem far older to modern eyes, and in a relative sense that judgment would be accurate for at 45 years most are facing the end of their days. Some live far longer, but most do not. Burying the dead is a regular part of life and death is not so much a spectre as an accepted fate, surcease to the struggle of carrying on from day to day. There were times when I saw death as immensely desirable.

Of course, random events can break up the routines of life, forcing people out of their accustomed rut (random events being war, plague, disaster, and the occasional celebration). It was not all toil and drudgery, but the vast balance was and that made the bright spots that much the better, while placing the darkness in some kind of proper perspective. Still, all in all the routine remains constant, day in and day out, with minor variations as the seasons progress.

The paragraphs above are a fairly complete description of the first ten centuries of my life.

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Resolution, Of Sorts

In the end the crisis point of my latest little misadventure stole up behind me on quiet feline feet. Several days had passed without any activity, meaning that none of my few very modest ?monitors? had detected any action regarding inquiries in to my name, or my finances or my history. So of course early Saturday afternoon my doorbell buzzed.

I regarded the intercom for a full minute, fully aware that if the person who rang the buzzer was truly looking for me my days in this city, in this identity, were quite likely over. The buzzer rang again.

?Yes??

?Miss Baker? I need to speak with you. My name is Roger Travis.? There was no anger in the voice, perhaps just a trace of apprehension. With a heavy sigh I triggered the latch for the security door and then opened the door to my apartment. Mentally I checked the location of my pistol, then examined myself in the mirror- I was wearing a light white sun dress as I had been preparing to go for a walk and enjoy the summer heat after so many days of rain. I was not made up. I appeared painfully young.

The man who arrived at my door was nearly forty, tall and in good condition- barely breathing hard after climbing four flights in the heat of this summer day. He bore a strong resemblance to his father, handsome in that square-jawed, steely-blue-eyed quintessential American Cowboy way, all of it accentuated by blue jeans that had obviously seen their fair share of hard days? work and a crisp, clean khaki shirt open at the neck and sung about muscular biceps. There was the scent of fresh hewn cedar about him, enticingly masculine.

He introduced himself again and I invited him in. We exchanged pleasantries and he commented on all the boxes still stacked in the kitchen and the hallway.

?Moving out??

?In, actually. I?ve been in Colorado for several months- I only returned two weeks ago. Everything was in storage so I?ve been sorting out what I need and what can go. I just made a pitcher of iced tea, would you care for some??

?Yes, thank-you,? he smiled then, put at ease by the nicety of domestic hospitality. Just as I had intended. It was a dance, each carefully feeling the other out in a game both ancient and tantalizing. I poured a tall glass over fresh ice cubes and handed it to him. He took it in his left hand and I deliberately noted the lack of a wedding band, allowing my index finger to trace the length of his ring finger. I produced a bowl of sliced lemons and sugar and we fixed our refreshments to taste then took our leave to my living room. There we sat, and an uncomfortable pause stretched out for several seconds.

?I hope your father was not terribly put out by my behavior the other day. I?m not normally so easily flustered.? That drained a great deal of the tension from his face and I began to hope just very, very slightly, that this might turn out well after all.

?My father?? he began, and then hesitated before starting again, ?It?s been a very tough year for him. For all of us. Four months ago my mother passed away- she?d been sick for nearly a year, bone cancer.?

?Oh! I?m terribly sorry.? I did not have to feign sympathy- mortality always strikes a chord within me and I let it show clearly. I have seen so many times where death has wreaked havoc in otherwise normal, happy lives that it always leaves me feeling at least a little compassion towards those left behind. It is odd, but it is innate. Furthermore, I had suspected this was the case. ?You all must miss her very much.?

?Yes, especially my father. They were inseparable?? he caught himself then, unwilling to offer any more to this stranger than he had to. ?When he showed up at my place last week he was so badly shaken I thought he was sick. He wouldn?t talk to anyone about it, he just said he couldn?t be home alone.?

?He did seem very distraught.?

He ignored me and went on. ?That night, he told me about Claire. Mind you he?d never mentioned her before, I don?t even think my mother knew about her. It?s not like it?s some giant scandal in the family or anything like that. Hell, it?s just something he never, ever mentioned? ?til he ran in to you.?

I could see everything coursing through him: concern over his father?s reaction to me, relief that I was so obviously not some youthful-looking sixty-something, an uncomfortable and titillating awareness of how thin my dress was and how neatly I curled in to my chair. I drew him out with a dangerous and carefully applied mix of genuine concern for the words he spoke, inviting sexuality, and open friendliness. It was an elixir he was ill prepared to resist, assuming he had cared to. Men cannot be badgered in to opening up, instead they must be invited, seduced.

?He had a photo album, pictures from his racing days I?d never seen before because all of them showed your mother. You really do look exactly like her, you know.? I nodded and he went on. ?I can see how he might mistake you for her at first glance, from a distance? but after he introduced himself? What happened??

I recounted the meeting in full factual detail, only prevaricating where my own internal reactions were concerned. Roger nodded and I knew he had already spoken to others about it, ticking off facts in his head as I replayed the scene for him. I could sense his concern deepening and once again I had to review my own impressions, but I saw nothing beyond what I had originally surmised.

?Damn,? he sighed, ?I don?t know what to think. I thought he?d bounced back as well as anyone could expect after ma passed away.?

?He still thinks I?m Claire?? That thought disturbed me immensely, not so much for its implications for me, but rather for William.

?No? at least he understands that it?s not possible that you?re her, but??

?He knows it up here,? I whispered, touching my head.

?But not here,? he finished, touching his chest, ?exactly. I?m not sure what to do. Hell, I?m not even sure why I?m here, telling you this. I have to wonder if there?s something wrong, something psychological??

He said psychological, but he was thinking Alzheimer?s. It was a possible out for me except that it was absolutely untrue, and I knew that for a certainty. I could have let Roger continue thinking that, perhaps go and convince his father that something was wrong? and curse him as fully as were I some ancient shaman of myth and lore. Such doubts could become self-fulfilling prophecy. No matter how much I desired to see this episode filed away as something innocuous I simply could not purchase my security at such a price.

?You said yourself that your father has been through a lot. What if he actually was sick that day??

?What do you mean?? he asked, his eyes looking directly in to mine, piercing, searching. It was all well and fine for him to privately consider his father?s mental state, but he would brook no disrespect from me on that topic.

?You said he looked ill when he got to your place. What if he was? Has he been sleeping well? Has anyone been looking in on him to make sure he?s taking care of himself? What if it was just a long day and he was coming down with something? He saw me and got one shock, then was told something he certainly didn?t want to hear, that had to be another blow, and then I got all defensive when he wanted to meet again. So for a moment he thought he saw something that he knows he couldn?t have seen, and now it?s something that he can?t let go of because it upset him so much.?

Roger was nodding because it had a certain consistency about it, and because I was prodding him as hard as I possibly could with body language. No man truly wants to be in disagreement with an attractive woman, particularly when she is telling him something he desperately wants to hear. He mulled it over for all of thirty seconds.

?I have a favor to ask??

?Of course. I would be happy to meet with your father again.?

?Thank-you,? he said, smiling. I felt myself blushing. This was growing more complicated by the second, but I did not let that stop me from returning his smile.

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Escape

Fate smiled upon me: the bus was preparing to pull out and I caught it just in time. Even then I was soaked to the skin from the downpour. The weather fit my mood perfectly as I took a seat in the back to wait for my stop and attempt to sort out what had just happened. I wanted to believe I had not seen what I had in William?s eyes, but I am far, far too old to deliberately deceive myself.

Throughout the ride I went over the events in the restaurant, assessing what problems I could expect, drawing out every shred of information I could recall. Part of me was screaming to drop everything, take the thousand dollars in my purse, get out of town and never look back. This was actually the most reasonable part of me. The colder, more calculating, more selfish part of me wanted to stay and tackle this head-on. That part of me could be quite dangerous and had to be held in check.

I do not remember getting off the bus. I became aware that I was standing in my apartment, staring out the front window with the lights off. The air conditioner was running and my clothes were becoming clammy from the chill. I undressed in the bathroom and turned on the shower as hot as it would go, but before stepping in I went to my bedroom and took my pistol from its drawer. Nothing fancy: a model 1911 Colt .45. Large, unlovely and utterly reliable it had been my companion on and off for over eighty years. I loaded it, chambered a round, verified the safety was on, and set it on the vanity in the bathroom.

The scalding spray cut in to my skin, shocking, invigorating? cleansing. I flipped the control over from full hot to full cold, turning as liquid ice coursed down my back, then over my shoulders, across my breasts, down my belly. It centered me, driving away the uncertainty as I let it cool my scalp and my face. Five minutes was all it took, five minutes to bring logic and order to the chaos that had forced its way into my life unbidden. Even then, it was too long.

I slipped into my bathrobe and took up the pistol. I felt silly now for taking it out- by any objective measure I had little to fear tonight. I secured it and slipped it back in to its holster, but I did not put it away. I had to consider- instinct made me take it out. Instinct told me to run in the restaurant, I ignored it, and that turned out quite badly. I am no huge fan of guns, instead I accept the basic truth about them: when you need one nothing else will really do.

What course to take? The encounter in the restaurant could conceivably turn in to nothing, depending on who and what William was today. Both the hostess and the manager of the restaurant had recognized him and from their reaction I knew he was more than just a regular customer. As chaotic as things had been that still came through unmistakably. I went to my computer and called up a search on the mall- I did not dare to search for his name, but instead began methodically browsing through the information on the web site. I found it almost frighteningly fast.

General Manager: William Travis

I began a mental inventory of my visits to that particular mall; when, what stores, what purchases. I always pay cash so there was no easy way for anyone to come up with my name? I nearly laughed when I realized my largest problem was sitting directly in front of me: the cherry wood computer desk. Paid for with cash, of course, but delivered and assembled in my apartment only a week after I returned from Colorado. The panicked voice that wanted to run began piping up again, and this time I listened a little closer, but still?

Running posed a problem, just as it had in the restaurant. If William did search for me my disappearance would make the mystery more intriguing. Furthermore it would mean leaving the country, for I currently have no new identity prepared that would allow me any degree of security. I do have an escape route prepared against need, but? I do not want to go.

With that decision made I began to prepare for a confrontation, should it come to that. The story regarding ?Claire? was verifiable- it was how I had transitioned from that identity to the one I currently wear. The best lies are always spun about a framework of truth, after all. I could produce everything short of a grave to prove that Claire had lived and died in Guatemala and that I was her daughter. My financial records would hold up to an audit, but not a criminal investigation, at least not a determined one.

The time I spent in Colorado could be problematic, but a phone call or two would help to close any holes in the time line. Once again I was forced to confront my foolishness: what had ever possessed me to go skiing? It had not been a bad fall, but I fractured my left leg in three places. I can only imagine the perplexity of the doctors when I failed to follow up with them or anyone else- hopefully they were used to injured vacationers going home to their own doctors. Perhaps those doctors sometimes failed to request records and X-rays. It was plausible, but I should have been more diligent.

Of course the problem was more complex than that: the injury had healed rapidly, but I had also dropped a number of years in appearance as well. It happens and I have no control over it. While my birth certificate and driver?s license said I was twenty-four, without make-up and a conscious effort I looked all of eighteen. Not a huge difference, but enough that the last time I presented an ID to someone he had looked twice.

Despite the cumulative effect of these issues, I felt I had a very good chance of defusing this if I held my ground. Most in my favor was that no reasonable person could seriously entertain the idea that I was over sixty years old. Most likely William would wake up in the morning feeling foolish for having accosted that girl in the restaurant, for thinking even for a moment that she might be other than she claimed.

It made sense. All I had to do was sit tight and most likely this would pass.

Still, I slept with the .45 under my pillow.

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A Chance Encounter

It was a chance encounter, all the more unnerving for that. I was at a mall shopping for some replacement items for my wardrobe. Since returning from Colorado I had been feeling an urge to make a change in my daily attire and I finally decided to indulge it. As it was well past dinnertime I decided that I could stop for a bite at one of the restaurants just off the food court. I am not terribly fond mass-produced food, but this mall is rather upscale and the dining options were fairly attractive. I took a small table looking out upon the mall that allowed me to engage in my favorite hobby: watching people.

I was waiting for my meal, sipping at my tea, casually looking over the passers-by while avoiding any direct eye contact. It actually works better if I have a magazine or a book, but I can put forth an expression of bored indifference well enough to convince anyone that my gaze in his or her direction must be nothing more than coincidental.

I spotted him as he left the food court, and he instantly made eye contact. His reaction was so startling that I nearly reacted myself, but I let my eyes slide off of him as if he had not come to my attention. Still, in my peripheral vision, I saw him stagger over to a bench and carefully take a seat. Alarm bells began ringing in the back of my head after another pass revealed him to be sitting, staring at me intently. Then I recognized him: William Travis.

William and I had shared one very short, exquisite year of hedonistic pleasure together in Southern California on the cusp of the 1960?s before I had ended our relationship for his own good. He had promise, and he wanted children, eventually. It helped that I only liked him, I was still too deep in the grip of my last true love to be foolish enough to let it go any further, but he had felt otherwise. Or at least he thought he had. How could he love me when he knew only what little I had been willing to show him of myself?

Our eyes locked. I gave him a ?confused, why you are staring at me?? expression I hoped would convince him to move on, but as he rose to his feet again he made straight for the entrance to the restaurant. For a brief moment I considered fleeing, but I knew that might make matters far worse. I pretended not to notice as he came in, waving off the hostess who addressed him by name, saying he was here to meet somebody and, oh, there she is right over there, thank you very much.

He came to my table and I looked up in to his earnest, questioning face.

?I?m so sorry to bother you like this, miss, but? you wouldn?t be related to Claire Simon by any chance??

Lie? Or deny?

Lie.

?Claire Simon is my mother,? I replied, smiling, ?and you are??

?Will, Will Travis. I knew your mother many years ago- I would have guessed you to be her granddaughter, rather than her daughter, but the resemblance is? striking.? He gestured to the empty chair, ?May I??

?Please, yes,? I smiled at him. This had the potential to be very, very painful for him, but once begun there was no way to stop it. ?My mother was forty when I was born. It came as quite a shock to her, or so she said.?

?I?m sure it was. Your mother and I? Claire was very important to me. We were very close??

He seemed at a loss for words, trying to put it in to some sort of context he thought I might understand. I had to help him out, so I offered, ?Mom always thought she was sterile. She said she had ended more than one relationship because she couldn?t have children?? His eyes were still so very blue, and the way he looked down at the table, the set of his jaw, was the pain still so sharp? How deeply had I wounded this man? And I was about to multiply it, for there could only be one answer to the obvious question he was about to ask.

?How is your mother? I would love to see her again.?

I let my face tell him before I uttered any word, waited for him to see, and to draw the obvious conclusion. ?My mother died several years ago. She was doing medical missionary work in South America at the time??

We had dinner together and talked about Claire as I tried my best to ease his pain, but there were problems. He kept coming back to how uncannily like my mother I seemed to be.

?I noticed you in the window here, but it wasn?t so much your appearance at first, as what you were doing. You were people-watching, weren?t you??

?Well, yes, ? I smiled, letting a little blush show.

?That?s what startled me so- Claire used to do the same thing, sometimes she would be very dramatic about it, telling stories about people who passed by, stories that you always had a feeling just might be true. When I saw you, the way you were sitting and looking over the people walking past? it was such a shock of recognition? though Claire usually had a newspaper or a magazine in her hand when she did it. At first I was sure you were her, then I realized how young you were?? but he was looking in to my eyes. Always in to my eyes.

I could see the wheels turning inside him and I knew this was becoming more dangerous by the moment. William was never stupid, nor was he given to flights of fancy, but at such close proximity, the two of us talking about my ?mother?, his senses were picking up all sorts of signals from me, unmistakable signals that kept drawing him towards a conclusion that his rational mind had to deny. Suddenly he inhaled deeply.

?You wear your mother?s perfume,? he commented.

Oh, Dear Lord, if you exist, please, you have to help us both! Right now!

The check arrived and he insisted on picking it up. He wanted to continue our conversation, but I pleaded other commitments. I tried to make it clear that I had enjoyed meeting him, but that there really was no reason for us to make plans to meet again. He became insistent almost to the point of rudeness. I could see the turmoil inside him, the certainty that there was something more he needed from me, the inner shock at his own behavior and the irrationality it bred. Every attempt I made to circumvent, to handle and direct him, was overwhelmed.

It was becoming a scene; people in the restaurant were turning to see what was going on. The hostess and a man who had to be the manager were approaching, discreetly, but deliberately. William was known to them- the hostess had greeted him by name. It was time to leave.

?Mr. Travis, I?m certain that your memories of my mother, and the news of her death have upset you, and I am very sorry for that, but I must be going.?

I snatched up my bags and rose to leave, but the manager was in the way and as I tried to brush past him he caught me by my arm.

?Just a moment, miss?? he stopped in mid-sentence because I had his wrist in my free hand and had twisted it from my arm, turning it just enough so that he knew another inch would make it quite painful.

?Jack! No!? William cried out, ?Let her go? let her go.?

I released the manager, and the tableau froze- William?s eyes and mine locked for the second time that night. And he knew. The manager made no move to stop me as I sped out the door and made for the nearest exit, fleeing in to the rain-soaked night.

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Loneliness

Etherian asked me about loneliness. It defines my life, but not in the way one might think. Early on, after I came to understand what I was, every dislocation was wrenching and death came to take on an aura of a prize that I had been deliberately denied. I have never had children, but I raised many and to have to leave them? to this day that is the single most difficult act I have ever committed. So, the short answer is yes, I am terribly lonely.

Despite this, loneliness does not cripple me. I know that death stalks every relationship, that friendships are ephemeral, but I am blessed as well: I have had so many friends, so many interesting people in my life that I have to count the balance as in my favor. I met Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He took my hand and smiled when I offered up the notion that his writing was timeless and he said, ?Perhaps it is, my dear. Unfortunately, I am not,? and he chuckled. I remember his scent and the twinkle in his eye, thirty seconds of time locked forever in the vault of my treasured memories. Who is there living today that can recall that day? (And before anyone asks, I have just described the entire encounter- he was a magnificent man.)

There is a secret inside me that aches to be told, to be shared with people who, when they look upon me, see an object of adoration, a partner in their journey of life, someone they love. I have had that precisely four times in my long life, each time an all too brief episode of delirious joy, followed swiftly by devastation. Each time I swore I would never again allow myself to become so delusional as to love anyone. The interludes between those times grew longer, but I am afraid I crave the wholeness that is part of being in a loving relationship and I will stumble again, and again I will weep for a century when my nemesis, time, steals away all I hold precious.

I loved them, and more important, they loved me. Rufus, who swore he only learned to love a woman in my arms. Robert, who gave up the only chance any mortal has for immortality to be true to his love for me. Genevieve? sweet, gentle, laughing Genevieve with her emerald eyes and golden hair. You saw right through me, so perceptive and so warm. And Jeremy. Good God, Jeremy, I still weep for you. So wise, and strong, and gentle, and firm? Jeremy, if the world desired a King they could have found no better than you. So desperately I tried not to love you, but you were in my soul, and you are there still. I stayed with you to the bitter end though you tried to send me away. You gasped your final breaths cradled in my arms, my tears the final blessing to fall upon your brow, and you told me you were immortal now, for I would always remember you. And your words were so true. I remember the promise I made you and here today, this day, I honor it again- you will never truly die, my love. There will be others, but never another Jeremy, or Genevieve, or Robert, or Rufus?

Loneliness. Loren was right: you people cannot truly fathom loneliness. Be thankful for that.

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A Suggestion

E-mail from John at Weekend Pundit:

I?ve enjoyed all the speculation and ?what-if?s? proposed by other readers that you?ve been posting lately and your responses seem geared to making everybody take a kind of laid back attitude. You seem to be in some sort of ?whatever? mode regarding what you might be. In particular I liked the Yeti?s comment that perhaps you were some sort of ?key?. So far everyone seems to be acting as if this were all benign, so let me get all dark and paranoid, since somebody?s got to do it:

What if you are simply a Judge? Seems to me you'd be uniquely qualified to pass judgment on the human race as a whole.

I take exception to that characterization, but not with any ire. Perhaps I would be qualified to pass judgment on the direction of cultural development in the western world, but the human race? I think not. Consider: my experiences have been mostly confined to broader Europe, the Mediterranean area, Northern Africa and the Americas. On reflection I have spent less than two centuries in the Middle and Far East, and that in bits and pieces. Hardly an all-encompassing worldview, to be certain.

I understand that you might have assumed that I had traveled the world extensively since I have never offered any detailed accounting of my travels. This is partly by design and partly out of necessity, as I could not truly give anyone an accurate accounting of just where I was for the first ten or so centuries of my life. I have done some research and what I recall versus what is recorded in the historical and archeological texts fails to match up at all neatly. I could make some educated guesses, but that is all they would be.

Finally, I existed in what would best be described as semi-civilized barbarism for a large portion of that time. Not that there was no social order, but my own place in that order was always very low and constantly shifting. As a barren woman I was at the mercy of the men surrounding me- unable to bear children I was either sport or burden, but seldom if ever considered exceptionally valuable. When food became short, or other dire circumstance arose I was always expendable, hence my prolific wanderings between clans and villages. Given the suspicious and superstitious nature of folk at that time I was often forced to live on my own, in some cases for decades at a time, scratching an existence out of the wilderness and meeting only the occasional passer-by who might shelter in my hut out of need or desperation. After that time I was still a dweller on the outer fringes, but civilization advanced to the point where it was easier for me to ingratiate myself: civilization leads to wealth, and with wealth comes the ability to afford such luxuries as myself. I became more valuable as sport, and less of a burden: a gritty calculus, but one that I accept. It allowed me the time and opportunity to prove myself to be more than what I had been before.

So were I a judge, upon what should I pronounce judgment? What constitutes desperation? Or despair? A properly run brothel? A worthwhile civilization? And to whom would I render such a judgment? God? No matter what form of deity you choose to believe in I find it hard to comprehend why the Alpha and Omega would choose such a one as myself for that task.

Forgive me my stridency. I have had those in whom I have confided seek to twist the fact of my existence in to some form that would concur with their own understanding of the world and reality. I do not resent it, but neither do I enjoy it. I simply am what I am and I have yet to find any great significance to my existence. In the unlikely circumstance that I was created to some purpose I can only assume that I have proven a disappointment to my creator.

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Joe Bowers Speaks Portuguese

Joe Bowers offers the following:

Eu li apenas sua resposta a Yeti em seu blog. Eu suponho-o acredito que h? alguns para fora l? do esse o acredita. Quando voc? diz que somente a lata m? vem deste blog, eu n?o sigo completamente. Eu sou certo que se voc? sentir amea?ado, a coisa l?gica seria abandonar apenas o blog, paro de escrever. I, para um, faltaria realmente suas entradas, mas voc? deve proteger-se. Yeti menciona que seu corpo pode ter sido habitado pelos esp?ritos estrangeiros, mim perguntou-lhe uma vez que sobre o Nefilim... voc? n?o comenta naquele. Voc? n?o acredita em tal "absurdo"? Eu sou muito curioso sobre seus pensamentos no Nefilim. Voc? acredita-os existiu, e se voc? acreditar, n?o ? ele poss?vel que voc? pode ser um produto deles? Eu esperarei sua resposta, se voc? escolher assim. Obrigado fazendo exame do momento de ler minhas perguntas.

Joe

I say that only bad things can come of this exercise in writing, and I do believe that; however, I am not so terribly concerned that I would be moved to stop just now. It is merely that there are essentially four responses to what one finds here: critical curiosity, acceptance as fiction, angry rejection, or delusional acceptance. To date I have been fortunate in encountering only those who seem to have a firm grasp of their own reality and do not feel threatened or outraged by my scribbling here. Those who would become angry over this are easily ignored. Those who are delusional can be? difficult.

As for the Yeti?s references to the Scientologists? belief that proto-humans were invaded by alien spirits, or any reference to Nefilim, I do not hold to that belief any more than I do to supernatural manifestations such as vampires, werewolves, zombies and the like. While those tales are somewhat ubiquitous it has always seemed to me that they are more related to ignorance and are often encouraged by those in power as a method of keeping the lower orders in thrall. The idea that aliens were involved in the early development of humanity is an attractive conjecture, but lacks any truly debatable facts and as such cannot be proven or disproved nor even profitably discussed. I am aware of the stories of St. Germaine, and the various iterations of The Wandering Jew, but these have nothing to do with me. I cannot explain why, but I harbor a certainty that I am alone and I have never expended a great deal of effort in the search for others such as myself. For that matter how, exactly, does one go about tracking down an immortal being? Remember that it is only fairly recently in terms of human history that record keeping, communications and travel technologies have advanced to the point of making such a search conceivable.

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The Yeti Speaks

Comments from The Yeti, and my responses:

On your peculiar regenerative condition.

It indeed sounds like you do not die, but rather consume fuel, which would not make you human. You could perhaps be an intelligence inhabiting a human form that was reduced to a simple parasitic state in the distant past. It would explain your comments on how you thought you were rather stupid when you first remember consciousness.

There are plenty of science fiction stories from the 60's that theorize this kind of possibility. I could look them up if you are interested.

Other possibilities - that you are what was once perceived as a minor God, as you thought yourself for a while. The Scientologists teach that precursors to human beings were invaded by alien spirits. Perhaps they are not entirely wrong, and only a few people were. Those few are destined to wander?

You raise some interesting points; however, I am not quite prepared to abandon any claim to humanity just yet. The idea that I consume fuel and that this would be sufficient to distinguish me from humankind seems a bit rash. Let me propose that you allow me to lock you in my basement and feed you nothing but water for three weeks. I daresay you would come out of it alive, but with a noticeable loss of body mass. Would I be justified in saying that you consumed your own mass as fuel?

Do not misunderstand- I freely admit that my continued existence is in and of itself sufficient to raise suspicions as to my humanity. Add to this that I apparently cannot reproduce and I have to conclude that if this is a mutation it is a singularly unsuccessful one. While immortality might seem a desirable goal for an individual it appears it would be terribly inhibiting to a species, an evolutionary dead end.

Or perhaps anyone like you truly does just learn to lay low. With the vast amount of experience gained over time, they would seem god-like to others. Or demonic, as you have found.

Jesus Christ? Mohammed? Buddha?

Of course one might begin to remember what happens to those who step forward to show a new way for humanity. Christ the Almighty has risen? How hard would that be for you to pull off?

Or perhaps myths and scary stories.

Vlad the Impaler? Zombies? Werewolves?

No doubt a person with your peculiar talents would easily inspire stories among illiterate peasants. But what might it do to a philosopher with an ability to write and on whose writings portions of societies are created.

Why did I ?lay low? for so long? It was not a conscious choice at first, just a seemingly fortuitous set of coincidences which led me to move from one situation to another in a way that served to protect me from scrutiny by those too primitive to understand my nature. I am willing to entertain the idea that at some subconscious level I was aware of the danger presented by staying too long in any one place; however, by my reckoning it was some four hundred years or more before I came to fully understand and accept my condition. This implies more than just subliminal understanding, almost a programmed response. I dislike the idea that I might be some semi-autonomous device gone slightly awry.

As to myths, scary stories, etc inspired by me, I tend to doubt I have had such influences. I recently recounted probably the most public and untidy of my exits from society and that failed to generate much in the way of folklore. Of course since I make a habit of avoiding returning to places I have dwelt in the past it is possible that I did leave such things in my wake without being aware of it. Still, I tend to discount it for as I have noted before I have steadfastly avoided bringing attention to myself. Even in those rare circumstances where people began to suspect something was odd and acted against me it was never a momentous event. In most cases I was simply banished. On occasion it was worse.

What would Voltaire, or Emerson, or Thoreau have done with this knowledge.

And if there are more of your kind, is there some impulse that leads itself to eventually outing yourself to the world - like you have just done on your blog?

You count on hiding out in the open - and I'll respect your choice whatever it may be and never ask you, the suspense of not knowing of course being a fantastic creative engine on its own for me. Well done, Methuselah's Daughter. Here's to another 3500 years.
-TheYeti

As to what impulse has led to this ?outing? of myself, who can truly tell? Perhaps it is a subconscious urge to self-destruction. It is certainly frightening to be so open (and believe me, I am being deliberately obfuscatory in both my replies and my recounting of events), and in all honesty I can only see bad things coming of it. Yet still, here I am.

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More Questions From Joe

More e-mail from Joe Bowers, whom I have mentioned before. He touches on some topics that I have been reluctant to speak to:

Do you keep friends that are ignorant of what you are? Telling untruths to hide your nature? Destined to leave them after a decade (or a little more) and never to meet them again? That has to be hard on you, not being able to get close to anyone, not having something lasting. It must be incredibly lonely to be immortal

Those I would call friends are few and very far between. Friends must be confided in, and even those whose company I truly enjoy usually cannot be trusted with the truth. I do not enjoy lying and I go to great pains to avoid situations where I would be forced to lie to someone I care about. Most times this is accomplished by remaining aloof and refusing to care, painful as that can be. In the end it is the most merciful solution for all involved.

I have married, but I have always chosen my husbands carefully- men who already have families, who are looking for a surrogate mother for their children or grandchildren, or who realistically have no prospects of ever having a family. I am not so cruel as to deny a man his chance at the only form of immortality available to him simply to satisfy my own emotional needs; furthermore, the deeper my ties the harder it is to move on. Better that I be the young bride in a May/December marriage.

Loneliness. There is a topic I deliberately avoid dwelling upon. I cannot truthfully say that I experience loneliness because my life has been so solitary for so very long that I am not sure I have any true understanding of the concept. Do I enjoy the company of others? Yes, I most certainly do. Can I tolerate being completely alone? A meaningless question for I am completely alone and so far I have tolerated my existence quite well. And yet? I keep this very public journal, something I have never done before in any way, shape or form. I keep no written diaries, no journals; I leave no traces of myself in the history books, but I decided to begin this site. It is addictive- I enjoy telling these tales, discussing things with strangers that I have kept from all but a few confidantes. It occurs to me that I have never in my life gone in to such detail and the act of revelation is thrilling in a way I have not experienced before. I know the day is coming when I must abandon this and for the first time in a very, very long time I feel reluctance at the thought of moving on. Perhaps when I do I will again become acquainted with loneliness?

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From The Grave

Warm, dark and quiet- I could hear the slow rhythm of the beating of my heart, hypnotic in its promise of new sunrises to be seen. Awareness came upon me slowly, stealing up on quiet paws to slowly, carefully prod me back towards understanding. Finally I took in a slow, ragged breath, my chest relaxing as air finally streamed in to my lungs. Oxygen invigorates me and I was finally cognizant of where I was.

The casket was small and I could not easily move. I had to force myself to be calm, to move slowly and deliberately- the supply of air was very, very small- each breath gave a burst of energy that had to be husbanded and applied in a tightly focused manner.

My hands were crossed over my chest, but something was underneath them, between my palms and my breasts- my bag. Joseph had not failed me. Stiff fingers were forced in to painful action, pulling open the loosely sewn seams, allowing me to draw out the small, flat iron tool. I reached up and traced my fingers across the lid inches above my face, feeling in the utter blackness for the edge that I knew must be there? yes, just there.

My casket was plain, just a pine box with no fancy adornments. But in the lid I had had the carpenter cut out a section and put in an inlaid design- a stylized family crest. Not mine, of course, but he had accepted my desire to have it on the casket, though he questioned why I would want it placed as in insert rather than simply attached to the top of the lid. Money had been enough to quell his curiosity and I could now tell that it had been money well spent.

The tool twisted in my grip as I worked it up against the edge of the insert, worrying it in between the lid and the plaque. I had to be careful not to over exert myself- if I used up what little oxygen there was in the casket I would slip in to stasis again and then my only hope for a quick escape would be a very shaky and messy back-up plan. As I pried at the joint I became concerned: the carpenter had done a very thorough job. I was going to have to work a lot harder to loosen it than I had planned.

A noise intruded. Thumping, irregular, scraping and growing louder: Good God, somebody was digging! Had it been that long?

I fumbled with the bag again, caution gone now, for the next few minutes were going to be ugly in the extreme. I clutched the tool in my left hand and in the right I gripped a small one-shot pistol. It could drop a man at close range; otherwise it would merely be an annoyance. I had wanted something larger, but had been constrained by my desire not to provoke Joseph?s curiosity.

I listened carefully, trying to count how many were digging. As they got closer to the casket I could tell there were only two of them, and from the sound of them, they were likely drunk. I jumped when a shovel blade struck the lid of the casket.

?Here it is, Zed!? one grunted. The sounds of scraping and digging continued, the two men muttering to each other in slurred speech.

?C?mon Lester, gi?mee a hand up with this.?

The casket lurched up at the head as they drew it up to an angle, with the head end perched on the edge of the grave. Then they attacked the lid with a pry bar. I closed my eyes and held absolutely still- it was possible I could get out of this cleanly. Unlikely, but possible.

The lid came off with a creaking protest of nails drawn from wood and cool, sweet, fresh air caressed my face, tempting me to draw a deep breath.

?Well, will you look at that,? the one named Zed declared, ?she sure don?t look like she been in the ground two weeks.?

?I would?n know, Zed. Damn! There?s the bag!?

I had let the bag drop to my feet. My arms were crossed over my chest, the pistol and the chisel as concealed as I could manage. One of them fetched up the bag and tore it open. I heard my money purse hit the ground and Lester giggled as he hefted it.

?Now why would she be getting? put in her grave with all this gold??

They were laughing, counting their treasure and I kept hoping that they would take what they had found and go. But they were greedy.

?Think she?s got any jewelry on ?er?? Lester asked. I felt the hands reach for my arms and I let him pull them forward, then opened my eyes and drew a loud rasping breath through my ruined throat as I cocked the pistol an put the barrel firmly against Lester?s forehead.

For a full second, two seconds, the tableau was frozen. Lester?s eyes went wide and Zed froze. Even in the moonlit darkness I could see the color drain from their faces. Then Zed screamed. Lester?s eyes rolled back and he simply crumpled to the ground in a dead faint. I shifted my aim to Zed, but he was already scrambling backwards out of the grave, twisting around as he lurched to his feet. He made two steps and tripped over one of the shovels, hitting the ground with a sharp ?crack ? as his head struck a pickaxe lying on the ground.

I pulled myself free of the casket as Lester moaned at my feet. I gave him a good thump with the blunt end of the chisel to ensure he remained out until I could decide what to do. Climbing out of the hole I grabbed Lester by his shirt and dragged him up next to Zed, then set about collecting the contents of my bag. Next I took the lid of the casket and did the best I could to pound it back in to place. Finally, I managed to work it back in to the grave just as Lester began moaning.

Time for hard choices to be made.

Lester struggled back to consciousness and promptly began retching up the contents of his stomach. I stood back until he finished and he finally sat up and looked about him, seeing Zed still unconscious on the ground, then turning and seeing me, my pistol trained on him. For a moment I thought he was going to faint again, but he simply stared.

I motioned for him to get up and he crawled unsteadily to his feet. I tried to speak, but all I could manage was a rasping croak, not at all helpful under the circumstances. I motioned to one of the shovels and to the grave. Warily he took up the tool and began filling the hole.

?I don? know what the hell you are, lady, but Zed an? I, we wasn?t tryin? to be? disrespectful??

I had to grin at that and he saw it, and it seemed to make him relax a bit. I let him go on as he filled the grave because it told me what I most needed to know. I had made certain that a rumor spread that I had been buried with an unspecified treasure in a bag. It had been easy to do- an offhand comment here, a little slip there- just enough information so that after I was buried someone might get just curious enough to decide to see if it were true. Had I been able to escape on my own they would find an empty casket and assume somebody had beaten them to it. Otherwise it was my back-up method to escape; a very messy back-up plan, but a functional one. After all, here I was on the proper side of the grass again, yes?

Zed began stirring and soon was busy filling in the grave beside Lester. It was clear to me that the two of them had heard the rumors, gotten all liquored up, had somehow managed to figure out where Joseph had buried me and had come to see if there was a fortune to be had. In all honesty my plan had been that if I had to wait for somebody to dig me out they would be going in to the grave in my place, but the two of them were just so? pathetic.

When the hole was filled I stood and walked over to where they had tied their horses. I picked the better of the two and mounted up, every muscle in my body sore and protesting. My mind was in a fog and I still was unsure I was doing the right thing, but there had been enough killing in this sad little episode of my life. I trotted up to the two of them and lifted my purse. I still had no voice, managing only a hoarse whisper.

?I suspect the two of you may be wise enough to avoid ever speaking of what happened here tonight.?

?I wouldn?t dare, ma?am.?

?No, ma?am, not a word.?

?Good,? I tossed the purse on the ground before them, ?you might want to give up drinking, too. Just a piece of advice.?

With that I wheeled the horse about and set off. The sky was growing light behind me as dawn approached and I had a keen desire to put distance between this place and myself. I had a destination chosen and this time, with just a little luck, no one would be on my heels.

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The Hanging of Missy Burns

?They gonna? hang you, Missy Burns!?

The pastor looked up from his bible with a pained expression, but I simply smiled. ?Give me just a moment, pastor.? I stood and stepped up on to my seat so I could see out the barred window in to the alleyway. There at the end was Timothy, all twelve years and 90 pounds of him, looking all bedraggled, yet grinning like a Prince counting his horde.

?Thank-you, Timothy,? I called in a cheery voice, ?It had nearly slipped my mind.?

?I don?t know how you can be so cheerful with that little beast,? the pastor sighed as I took my seat again, ?cruel he is to be taunting you so.?

?It?s somewhat complex- he was my little project you know. I was trying to draw him in, get him back to school, and I was making progress before all this unpleasantness.?

In the end, I simply had not run far enough, had not covered my tracks sufficiently, counting on the aftermath of the war to muddy the waters. It is a lesson I had learned the hard way once before, but time has a way of blurring the hard-won wisdom of years past, even in one such as I. Mr. Cletus Williams had pursued me for more than two years, convinced (correctly, of course) that I had murdered his brother Clayton and (incorrectly) that I had made off with his fortune. I had made an assumption that the Union Army would sweep through town and Clayton?s death would have been lumped in with any other misfortune that befell the community; however, the Blue Coats had simply destroyed the local militia and moved on, leaving the town virtually untouched but for one fresh corpse and witnesses telling of Missy Burns galloping out of town on Clayton Williams? own horse.

?A Christian act of kindness? You repeatedly show me that you are so much more than the murderess you have been named.?

?You do need to stop fretting so much over the fate of my soul, Pastor. I appreciate your concern, truly I do, but there are others who could benefit even more from your attentions. Timothy, for example. I?m afraid I have disappointed him, betrayed him, even. Right now he needs guidance and comfort far more than I.?

The pastor was not elderly, perhaps fifty years old, but at that moment he looked ancient. He had been coming to visit me in my cell every day for the past week, since the day it became clear I was destined to hang. Partly it was rote discharge of duty, but there had been a bit of curiosity as well and our conversations had become quite intense as he probed my own understanding of faith and morality. It pained me that he labored under the erroneous assumption that I was soon to die for he took my calm acceptance of my fate and my concern for those who might be harmed by my death as something far more meaningful than it actually was.

Mercifully for all concerned the deputy interrupted us, tapping on the bars to my cell he said ?Miss? Sorry to interrupt, but the undertaker is here.?

?Oh! Excellent. Thank you, Pete. Pastor, I do believe I will be seeing you tomorrow at the gallows, yes??

?Of course, my dear,? he sighed as he rose to leave, ?and if you feel the need, please send someone for me, at any time.?

?That?s very kind of you, and I may, perhaps if I have trouble sleeping.?

Pete opened the cell and led the pastor out, then returned a moment later with Mr. Burke, the undertaker. Contrary to stereotype Willy Burke was a smiling, rotund and jovial man, though he possessed the unique ability to project profound concern and sympathy at will. It was all an act, of course- he was a pure businessman, but he understood that concern and empathy were part of the business. He had a contract with the town to dispose of the remains of the condemned. Me, in this case.

?Miss Burns! So nice to see you in such good spirits so close to your Final Day On This Good Earth!?

?Well, Mr. Burke, I don't see any purpose to being in anything other than good spirits, do you? The sun is shining, and so many good folk such as you are coming to visit this day. Tell me, is my casket prepared??

?That is why I am here, to see to it that you are satisfied... though I do wish you would consent to allow mw to handle the burial. I know you trust that Negro, but...?

?Now, now, none of your 'but?s', please- I have made my own arrangements and I beg you respect them.?

Pete had opened my cell and Mr. Burke stepped inside, collapsing in to the padded chair the Sheriff had so kindly provided for my visitors.

?Of course, Miss. Just that Joseph is such a slow sort and all... I could at least check up on him and see that the job is done proper.?

?That's very kind of you, but Joseph knows what I want. I'm the first official hanging this little town has seen- the first murderess convicted in the fine new courthouse. I would like my grave to be a private place. I?m certain you understand and you have been more than adequately compensated??

One thing Clayton?s brother had failed to accomplish had been to deprive me of my fortune- every penny of Clayton?s gold had been accounted for and he had no claim on my estate. I had arranged to have a delightful elderly Negro named Joseph (?Not a bit more, not a bit less, jus? Joseph if you please, ma?am?) claim my body in a casket I purchased from a local carpenter. Joseph had tearfully memorized my instructions and I knew I could rely on him. Joseph was the heir in my will, keeping my few possessions and a tidy sum of money, the rest being given to the Pastor to further good works in the town. Such arrangements made it terribly difficult for Mr. Williams to gain any sympathy for his outrageous claims.

So I signed Mr. Burke?s contract after carefully reviewing the terms and ensuring nothing was amiss. Pete witnessed the document for us before escorting Mr. Burke from my cell. Once he was gone the Deputy returned.

?I do trust him, Pete, but if I might impose on you, I would dearly appreciate it if you could make certain he respects my wishes??

?Oh, don?t you worry yourself on that, Missy. I?ll see that ol? Willy stays in his place?? his voice trailed off.

?What is it, Pete?? I asked, my voice oozing concern for his wellbeing.

?Mr. Carlton wants to see you.?

?No.?

?Missy??

?No.?

?He?s just tryin? to do his job? he?s your lawyer??

?I know that. There is nothing more for him to do. I admitted my crime- I murdered Clayton Williams. The jury heard the case and rendered its verdict. It is done.?

?But he? Clayton tried to??

?It makes no difference, Pete. I knew what Clayton would do when I confronted him. I went there to kill him. I?m guilty.?

Pete stopped then. It was tough on him, being only nineteen and so smitten with me, but he also had a deeply abiding sense of duty. In a way my insistence on seeing my sentence carried out made sense to him in a way that others had a very difficult time understanding. Mr. Carlton was trying to do his own duty as well- he certainly had enough to work with what with my extradition and trial; however, for me this was not at all about justice. I had allowed him to make an appeal, but the result had been a foregone conclusion given the turmoil after the war.

The day passed quickly enough as I was treated to a steady parade of visitors. It came to me via some of these folks that Mr. Williams was quite put out by the way people were treating the woman who murdered his brother. I actually had some sympathy for his position for I, too, wished this episode were not attracting so much attention. This was going to be very public. That was a source of some trepidation for me.

When night fell it was a relief. The visitors stopped coming and I could begin to prepare for my upcoming ordeal. I requested an immense meal, heavy with beef and eggs, milk and nearly a pound of fresh baked bread. Pete watched in amazed disbelief as I methodically dispatched a feast fit for five men. We talked well in to the evening and I found myself feeling deep regret that come morning I would never be able to spend time with Pete again.

Morning came quietly. I had not slept; rather I meditated in a semi-conscious state I had learned to employ centuries before. The execution would be unpleasant to say the least: I can tolerate a great deal of pain, but this does not mean that I enjoy it, and this promised to be particularly difficult. I knew how my body reacted to injuries and I was not looking forward to returning to consciousness. My meditation was directed towards preparing for those first moments of pain and disorientation.

I had set out clothes for this day and I dressed at the break of dawn. I let the sheriff know that I would prefer not to be disturbed until it was time to go to the scaffold and he agreed to keep people away, including the pastor. In a deep state of relaxation I let my senses expand, drinking in the sounds and scents of the new day. As morning progressed I could hear the crowd growing, people conversing- speculations about how I would comport myself, or would the hanging be clean. I could pick out individual voices, people I knew, some somber, some not. I could hear Timothy, suddenly a subdued little boy, not coming to taunt me from the alley outside my cell, and the murmured tones of the pastor speaking with first one person, then another.

They began testing the gallows and the crowd began to swell. Though destined for greatness this was still a small town, people were coming from some distance to witness this first hanging. I listened to the mechanical release of the trap, the plunging of the weighted sack, the sudden taught snap of the rope. Calmly I analyzed the information, the time elapsed between the opening of the trap and the snap of the rope- the hangman was adjusting the drop and I trusted he knew his business. I was light enough that I need not fear decapitation (something I am certain I could not survive)- I simply hoped that the end would be as swift and painless as those who extolled the virtues of the long drop claimed.

Finally, a tap on the bars brought me back to my immediate surroundings. I looked up to see the Sheriff and the Judge, along with Pete.

?It?s time, Missy,? Pete whispered.

?Yes, I suppose it is,? I sighed straightening up and brushing at my dress to smooth the pleats and folds, ?Shall we??

The sheriff took me by right arm and led me out of the cellblock. The door to the office was open and bright sunshine spilled over the scarred wooden floor and dusty furniture. The sky was perfectly cloudless and brilliant blue, the day warm and dry with just enough light breeze to render it delightfully comfortable. We stepped out on to the porch and I saw the crowd turn to stare at me as I was led down the steps and across the center of the town to the gallows. I found myself counting my steps from the porch to the base of the steps to the gallows- 169. I gave a small laugh and Pete must have heard me because he reached out as if to steady me, thinking I was becoming emotional, perhaps.

?I?m fine, Pete,? I whispered, ?I was just admiring somebody?s attention to detail: 169 steps to the gallows, thirteen times thirteen.?

The Pastor was there and overheard. He looked stricken, but he held his bible to his chest and began a quiet invocation to God as I was led up the steps (thirteen again- somebody had far too much time on their hands). The Judge turned to the crowd (I would estimate no more than five hundred souls) and began reading out the finding of the court. I searched faces in the crowd and finally found Timothy off to one side near the front. He was crying and it pained me more deeply than anything else about this entire sad affair.

It was the Pastor?s turn next and he led the crowd through a pair of Hymns that I found to be peculiar, but not inappropriate. If anyone had doubted the Pastor took a dim view of the day?s proceedings they could hardly doubt it any longer. Many were the uncomfortable faces below me, and what little there had been of an air of the carnival had fled.

?Does the condemned have any last words??

?Please, yes,? I replied, then raising my voice, ?I murdered Clayton Williams and I have never maintained that I did not. He was a coward, a lecher, a thief and a brigand and if any of the men in this town had had a single shred of decency they would have spared me the trouble of putting an end to the blight his miserable existence inflicted upon the world. This town is the better for him being in his grave.?

The Judge looked grim as he stepped back and the Pastor followed me to the trap over which the noose hung.

?Pastor, do promise me that you will look after Timothy??

?Of course, my dear, of course. If you have any final desire to cleanse your soul before going to God, now would be the time.?

My hands were drawn behind me and bound at the wrists.

?You do the praying, Pastor, I?ve never been particularly good at it. And thank-you again.?

The Sheriff wrapped a cord about my ankles and cinched it tight, binding my feet. A hood was offered and refused and then the Sheriff settled the noose over my head. Another pair of hands adjusted it, placing the large looped knot behind my left ear and cinching it down so as to prevent it slipping off over my head. There were murmured protests from the crowd.

?Missy,? Pete?s voice sounded behind me to the right, ?I think you should have the hood.? He sounded as if he were desperately trying to avoid being ill.

?I don?t need it, Pete.?

?It?s not for you, Missy- a hanging is an ugly thing??

?So they?ll come to see me hang, but be upset if it?s not so pretty? Can you imagine how little I am moved by their plight??

?Missy, please? I don?t want to see your face.?

That made me reconsider because it was clear Pete was having a terrible time with this, so I relented and the noose was removed and the hood descended over my face, sealing out the light. The noose was placed again, and positioned.

Everybody stepped back. Despite everything, all the preparation, all the certainty that this was nothing more than an inconvenience, my heart began to pound. I might know that death had little hold on me but the primitive, reflexive parts of my mind were not interested in the nuances. I forced myself to remain still, breathing evenly as I waited. What was taking so long? What more could they possibly-

A mechanical ?clack? signaled the tripping of the trapdoor and I instinctively tried to throw myself back as my footing failed- weightless, falling then pain exploded in my head as if I had been struck by a massive bell clapper and the rope snatched about my neck like the gnarled fist of Hercules?

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The Dialogue Continues

Joe continues our dialogue by posing some questions:

With the information age, I suspect that assuming a new identity will become more difficult-

Indeed. In particular the recent unpleasantness with regards to the reactionary Islamists has made travel more problematic. I am entertaining the possibility of relocating to a less technology-pervasive locale, but I am relatively proof for the near term future. Who knows what the next few decades will bring?

I was wondering why you would put yourself out there on public display? You are stating your nature to a very public forum...I am sure you are counting on most that see this post as the musings of someone a little unhinged-

I wonder myself. I have learned to trust my instincts and I felt that this was a worthwhile exercise, hence the weblog. I do not count on being considered unhinged; rather I count on being simply dismissed. To date Joe is the only person ever to engage in any sort of conversation regarding this.

How many others through the centuries have you "came out" to?In one of your posts, you said that you have revealed yourself to a "Mr. & Mrs. Professor", of course they didn't really believe you until you showed up on their doorstep half a century later looking as young as you last left them. (BTW, how goes it with "Grandson"?)-

Very few, for obvious reasons. Even those I have confided in have mostly viewed me as simply a harmless eccentric except in situations where my nature was undeniable. Mr. And Mrs. Professor did indeed believe me, but even belief can be an ephemeral thing- it lodges in the brain and is held as some kind of phantasm until confronted with the indisputable. As for my efforts on their behalf, I realize I have revealed far too much (despite my deliberate obfuscations) and I shall comment no more.

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More Questions

Joe comments again, asking about Comte Saint-Germain, a name I have heard more than once. At the time of his influence I was living in the North American colonies, but I was aware of him. My take on him is that he was a fascinating and eccentric man living in a time and circumstance when those about him were exceptionally prone to wild theorizing. The European aristocracy of the time was? somewhat unstable. The passage of time and the desire of some to believe such things make the tale grow, and grow and grow.

As to the nature of my ?immortality?, I never claimed to be immune from death. I am convinced that I can die. In the instance that Joe commented upon I certainly did drown- I remember it happening. I am a slave to the very same laws of physics as all others- when I crawled from the sea I was emaciated, my feet were gone, my skin sloughing off my body- it took months to regain my full strength.

Whatever mechanism allows me to cheat age and death still requires fuel and raw material and some basic structure to begin with. Were my body thoroughly destroyed there would be nothing with which to begin anew, no reasonable starting point. My memory goes back only as far as the head wound I mentioned in my previous entry, a wound so grievous (my skull was split open, from what I was told) that it left me insensate and amnesiac- I am certain I came as close to death as I ever have. Furthermore, on those occasions when I have lost limbs, the severed members did not persist, and the process of regeneration was closely related to the availability of both plentiful food and ample rest. Needless to say, in any such event I was required to relocate or be forced to answer questions I preferred never to see asked. If the wounds I suffered were sufficiently severe I would fall in to deep shock and would be taken for dead. I have clawed my way out from more than one shallow grave.

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A Question

Joe Bowers asks a very reasonable question in the comments to my previous entry:

I happened across your post; you have some interesting tales. Have you "ran across" others of your kind?

The short answer is ?no?.

I need to clarify a number of issues:

My early life is a mystery to me as I came to consciousness in the lodge of Gtochk after having been taken as loot in a raid on a band of wanderers. Many had chided Gtochk for carrying away an obviously dead girl, no matter how comely, but I recovered from the terrible head wound and became his prized possession. That is the beginning for me, and most of that itself is lost to the mists of ignorance. I had no inkling of my nature for several hundred years. This might seem absurd, but I was not terribly intelligent then and I seemed to have a natural talent for relocation every fifteen or twenty years. Perhaps an innate understanding that to remain in any one location for too long would be ill advised?

Enough on that.

When I realized that I remained as others withered and passed, that my life spanned the rise and fall of Kings and Empires, I assumed I was some sort of lesser god. Mythologies are rife with the offspring of the dalliances between the Gods and mortals- it was not an unreasonable deduction. I became an acolyte and minor priestess to more than one odd deity before I came to understand that whatever validity (or lack thereof) might adhere to any cult, none of them had anything to do with me.

Most of my life I spent in bondage of one kind or another- I seem to have a knack for catching the fancy of powerful men. I can read others in a way that those who know of my nature swear is nearly telepathic. In reality it is just a manifestation of millennia of experience in dealing with mankind. I am terrible at prognostication in regards to those I have never met, but let me speak with you in person for ten minutes and I can predict you with relative ease. It is simply experience; there is nothing mystical or supernatural about it. It serves me well and I leverage it for my own comfort, and lately to build my own wealth.

I began to actively seek evidence of others such as myself some sixteen centuries ago. I have encountered more than one trail of evidence, but never anything that gave me any realistic hope. In a way, it makes perfect sense. Immortality is a dead end for any species. It brings the evolutionary engine to a halt. I am sterile (trust me on this) therefore if my condition is due to mutation the genetic defect is absolutely detrimental- no reproduction, no benefit of genetic replication.

So, that constitutes the long answer. I suspect I am alone. Perhaps this very unusual activity of mine, placing my thoughts and words in a forum for all to see is merely a final attempt to settle the very question Joe raised: am I alone?

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The Vale of Tears

Life is referred to as a ?vale of tears? for a reason. Even in these times I often find myself standing awestruck as I witness humanity?s ability and willingness to persevere as daily life metes out one disappointment after another. Certainly for some these are minor matters- a promotion denied, an opportunity lost, a relationship ended. For others it is more rending and visceral- oppression, starvation, disease, and death. Yet human beings stride ever onward, indomitable in the pursuit of something better than what life offers for them today.

It is this aspect of humanity that makes me optimistic regarding the future of the race. In my unique situation I can hold any circumstance to be temporary. My life has already been unimaginably long and so far as I know it shall continue to be so. I can afford patience. I routinely defer my aspirations. How a person who can at best expect ten short decades to live a full life can then present that same sort of patience is often beyond my capacity to internalize. My perspective is too skewed, meaning that while I accept it and understand it at the intellectual level it remains one of the aspects of humanity with which I have great difficulty empathizing.

I suppose this is my loss. One major difference between myself and all those about me that I have noticed is my singular lack of creativity. Those things I do well are the result of immense amounts of practice, but originality has never been my strong suit. It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that this is likely the price I pay for such a long life. It is an idea that has even been broached by writers of fiction, who often have an innate understanding of things I have learned only through long experience. My approach to difficulties consists mostly of plodding doggedly forward- perhaps the closest I come personally to the hope that sustains others.

Do not infer that this saddens me. Truth to be told I am a particularly unemotional person and I am content to be so. On the rare occasions where my emotions overrule my sense I usually end up married or in prison, and the last time it happened it took me nearly a month to dispose of all the bodies. All in all, better for everyone that I remain dispassionate.

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Well, Colorado proved to

Well, Colorado proved to be? interesting. There is always a bit of discomfort, even dislocation when I meet up with old friends after a prolonged period of time. Mr. And Mrs. Professor had long ago lost any doubts they had regarding my veracity; however, it is one thing to accept the reality that is my existence intellectually, it is quite another to have to face it in the flesh. Despite everything they know about me they still expected to see a woman of some fifty years at their door when I arrived. The Professor was simply quiet. Mrs. Professor cried. All in all it went much better than other reunions I have had.

The problem with the youngest grandson is not something I can straighten out without a great deal of time and effort. Sometimes people insist on self-destruction and my general rule is to get out of their way and hope they do not take too many innocent bystanders with them. If I had met this young man under other circumstances I might have let him go on his merry way, unless I could figure out a quiet, painless method to put him down for the good of the community. Yes, it really is that bad. Since he is the grandson of good friends I feel compelled to at least attempt to salvage him, and of course, he has not hurt anyone. Yet.

I wrote earlier regarding youth, and how it is both the great engine of social and scientific advancement, while simultaneously being the wellspring of violence and destruction. It has been my experience (this will not be a surprise to anyone, I assure you) that all young people go through this wrenching of the soul- a time when all that was normal and safe and secure is called in to question, when all that is held forth as wisdom is rejected. Most go through this in a mild form- they take on new fads, some of which eventually become the foundations of new culture; they rebel against the authority of their parents and teachers. Then they grow up and move on. For some, this period is more traumatic, either due to life circumstance, or the cruel genetic lottery that bestows beauty of form and quickness of mind upon some and not others. Most of these also eventually grow up and move on. Each of the above groups carries those formative years forward with them as the foundations of their lives, with all the attendant scars, joys, fears and loves accumulated. Finally, there are those who begin this titanic struggle that accompanies the transition from pre-sentient youth to young adulthood, and begin a downward spiral from which they cannot seem to escape. These individuals will hit bottom where they will either bounce, or break.

That third category is where Grandson fits in. He is eighteen, intelligent; alienated from his peers with affectations of anti-social behavior that provide cover for the immense emotional pain he carries. I would not call him unattractive, rather his own internal demons show through- he is unkempt and overweight. I met him during my visit to Colorado and the impact was almost painful for both of us. I can see the monster inside him, and my presence merely added to his own suffering- he is terribly shy around women, and even more acutely so in the presence of particularly attractive women. He is a disaster waiting to happen.

The Professor disappointed me when he suggested, ?All the boy really needs is the attentions of a pretty girl?? though I understand that what he really means is that he does not care how I help, so long as I help. Still, the implication was simplistic and unworthy of such a sharp mind. Mrs. Professor was more tactful, and more precise: ?He needs someone to show him that he really does care about other people, and about himself.? In any case, what he needs from me is something more than can be delivered over a weeklong visit, so it seems I will be moving.

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Obligations Willingly Accepted

My private line rang the other day. Less than a dozen people know that number, and all of them know not to call unless it is supremely important. When that number rings it means something is wrong.

Just for purposes of clarity, let me explain. Throughout my thirty-five-or-so centuries, I have occasionally chosen to confide in people the true nature of my existence. In the last thirty years or so I have actually provided those people with a method to contact me if they ever feel I can help them in any way. I owe these people, they have accepted me and helped me in ways both large and small, and in every case I hold their friendship to be a precious thing.

Still- I seldom meet with my confidants. Once I move on in my ceaseless change of identity the contacts necessarily become less frequent and less personal. This protects me, but it is also a mercy to them. Despite an intellectual acceptance of the reality of my existence, most cannot truly deal with my agelessness. Better to correspond via letters and the annual phone call.

But the personal line is my concession to any who accept me on my own terms. If you need me, call.

The Professor (a suitably descriptive, yet obscure euphemism) called last Sunday night. I met him and his significant partner (Mrs. Professor- a grand and enlightened educator in her own light) in 1962. We have not met in person since 1975. When I realized who was on the line my first thought was that somebody was about to die, but the first few words from the Professor?s mouth dispelled that concern. Both of them are nearing seventy now and the Professor wanted my input on their youngest grandson, a boy of seventeen whose path was headed decidedly in the wrong direction.

After a long discussion, I booked a flight to Colorado.

There is more to this story, but I need to see how the next few days unfold before I proceed. I beg your patience.

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History From The Trenches

I am not a student of history as it is taught in the schools around the world. People in whom I have confided over the centuries have universally found this hard to reconcile, but that has always been the result of their own knowledge of the past. When one studies history one is afforded the luxury of collecting all the perspectives of far-flung individuals and events. For those actually living in the times being studied, the only perspective immediately available is the one before their very eyes. Given the state of communications technology prior to the telegraph is it any wonder that one might be ignorant of what transpired in other parts of the world at any given time? Of course not.

I have lived through a few ?momentous? times, but mostly I slaved away in some obscure corner of the world while events transpired far, far away and I was as ignorant of them as the normal people around me. I spent a large portion of the first half of my life as a slave, either literally or virtually. In an odd way it afforded me a level of protection, almost anonymity as I glided through one decade after another for no one affords much attention to a slave. I always managed to move on before anyone noticed that the master?s concubine never seemed to get any older.

These days I spend my efforts in more productive ways. I am a teacher by choice, and wealthy enough to teach where I please. I am quite adept at reading the financial markets, identifying trends towards peaks and stepping in long enough to make a tidy sum. The recent dotcom madness served me quite well in a number of respects, particularly in allowing me to dive in and out of certain companies as they rose as well as leveraging my technology positions to attempt to redress one of my most pressing problems: identity. I still have not found an acceptable solution to that, but I am by nature quite patient.

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The Golden Age

There never was a Golden Age, though every generation seems convinced that there was one. Each successive wave of humanity is burdened by childhood memories of less stressful times and tales of great things done by those before them. Even in the most primitive societies, where existence is literally hand-to-mouth and children are ritually pressed in to service in the pursuit of mere survival, children lack the cognitive resources required to fully comprehend that struggle. In the later years of their lives they usually remember childhood as being far freer than the current circumstances. They are wrong- they simply could not take the true measure of the challenges life presented when they were young.

I envy the youthful, and not with any sort of bitterness. I do not suffer from the age induced resentfulness of quicker minds unchecked by accumulated wisdom for my mind is as sharp, for that matter sharper, as it was when I first became aware of my own existence. To be blunt about it I was not terribly bright when I was young. That was a time when I was most like all others around me, convinced that my time in this world was short, devoted to the pursuit of simple pleasures and simple needs. In those days I was foolish, and it was delightful. Young people are foolish; they take silly risks and ill-advised paths. They ignore the counsel of their elders. They shake the foundations of the known to cast aside the encrusted detritus of what is common wisdom. They are an indispensable part of humanity?s ceaseless quest for knowledge. They bring new light to old domains and cast off the tyranny of what-has-always-been. They also sow death and destruction and despair, but in the end the balance is mostly to the good.

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Explanations

It is hard to write like this. I have spent so long making certain that I do not draw undo attention to myself that to suddenly speak clearly and simply, citing my own experience in unambiguous terms in such a public forum... it is a novel experience for me. That is saying quite a lot for one who has spent decades the way one might spend a pleasant summer?s day.

Call me a liar, or a spinner of fictions, or delusional. Hurl invective if it will make your worldview more secure. I have been stoned, whipped, drowned, burned, banned? suffice it to say that with this share of sticks and stones behind me there is nothing that mere words can do to bring anguish to my heart.

I am not here to make grand pronouncements. I cannot make the world a better place. I possess no magic, no otherworldly plans. I have nothing but a vast encyclopedia of experience with people. Nothing more.

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Beginnings

There are many things to be said, many tales to be told. But who listens?

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