Eternal Slumber

Life. What is it? The question has provoked thought throughout the ages. Religions spawned in the attempt of explaining and rationalizing this rare but accepted idea. A smattering of atoms aligned in the perfect synchronicity creates what we call life. Yet somehow six and a half billion humans walk around in their daily lives, taking for granted this brilliant force. But what happens when a human is no longer alive? What does one become when the constant growth and change of life halts? Even I do not know the full answer to these questions. I who have asked them for hundreds of years.

Lying in my coffin, I still wonder what has happened to me. What unnatural force delivered me into my un-life. Or even how this is possible. The sounds of the passing age echo around me. The new machines known as “cars” – the mechanic horse and carts which pollute our beloved earth – pass the road nearby. I hear many things from my vantage point. News reports being broadcast over cancerous radio channels, telling of the many horrendous events in this supposedly ‘enlightened’ society. But also something else. I hear the agonizing scream of eternal, never-ending time.

I committed myself to the ground over two hundred years ago, after becoming disgusted with what the humans were doing to the world. Not dead, yet not truly alive, I walked the earth until the dawn of a new age. But at the dawn of this new age, I knew I was no longer a part of it. I didn’t belong there. So I began my slumber, my age long slumber, in the hopes of some day awakening to a new world. One not governed by the laws of race and creed, where the humans became aware of their sin, and began a new world order of peace. An order born of the hate of de-humanization. One where my ungodliness would be punished and I would be absolved of sin.

I think of all the vampire stories that have been written in the last century – none were even close. Anne Rice writes that Lestat begins his slumber out of his fear of eternal life. What a joke. In truth, my slumber began not because of my fear of life, but that of death. Fear of death, and horror of what humans were becoming. That’s another thing the stories have gotten wrong. Bram stoker, the fool, I don’t prey upon the human race because I enjoy it. I had to. Killing was what I was made to do. I feared death, for I knew where I was going when it caught up with me.

So, I lay here, forgotten by the years. Yet things did not go the way I planned. As I’ve listened through time, man’s sin has worsened. Their greed, envy, jealousy and hate have spread across the world like a plague, further than I had imagined in all my years of un-life. Technology advanced, and they built bombs with which to destroy thousands. “Those sins you commit unto my brothers, those you commit unto me,” has anybody even read the bible? They used technology to make life easier for themselves, but they never spare a thought for the earth. They tear out her trees, her lungs. They drill into the ground, her heart. And they pollute her air, her soul. They have no respect for the mother of us all.

So, I wonder; why has my guilt and pain led me to this eternal slumber? Why do the men I killed haunt me? They spent their lives willfully killing our mother earth and human soul with atrocities, all for their selfish endeavors. They were no more deserving of life than any other of their worthless, sinful race.

Through my immaterial mind float dark thoughts, as they have done for an age. My fear of what lies beyond has passed. I know what awaits me at the moment of death. For that moment came and went two hundred years ago. I committed myself to this slumber with a pistol to my temple. The voices of my victims haunted me, the human race disgusted me, and life lost all meaning. I was dead in my heart for years before this. Heaven, hell, all a fallacy. I released my unholy breath unto the earth. But I went nowhere. Confined in this rotting corpse, as I have been for what seems an eternity, insanity of though has settled into my eternal prison. Life, it seems, is the greatest sin of them all…