Here’s the text of an email from someone whom I’ve been worried about for years. Perhaps there are others out there stricken with their conscience, and I’ll share her painful thoughts with you. Can we all please show her that she’s not alone?
“Dear Vlad”
I am in agony.
It’s the blood guilt. For decades I killed for my food. I murdered people on four continents for their blood and I laughed as I did it. I murdered men, women, and children, and I thought nothing of them, except as things to be used up, destroyed and then thrown away. Children, Mister Blackburn: children barely old enough to talk and I drank them dry while their mothers watched in horror, all helpless and utterly doomed.
I can’t not think of it. The memories of my crimes fill my waking hours, and the long sleepless days, as I see their dying faces. Screaming faces. Waxy-dead pale white faces from
I used to enjoy my evil. I revelled in it and thought myself lucky as year by year I killed and staked and decapitated my way around Europe and Africa, and around North America and the
Then you and your bitch wife ‘cured’ me; made me see the evil of my ways, and encouraged me to feed mercifully from that moment on. Damn you.
All was well at first. I felt that by leaving off killing I could move on and help to make the world better. I might learn to atone. I can’t atone. All I can do is recall the pleading and the weeping and the animal shrieks of my victims.
Every day and every night I wish for the true death; to go to Hell for my sins and there to take the suffering of those poor dead human souls into me forever. I can never quite pluck up the courage to wait for the sun or to swallow garlic, as I fear the pain of dying once more.
The Pledge is a curse that you and your wife have brought upon me. It must be lifted. I insist that we meet and that you do the right thing by me and by the souls of the dead that I have made.
JD
5 comments:
Well, don’t all write at once.
Vampires.
Honestly, you’d almost think that the undead were just a bunch of blood-sucking monsters who didn’t give a toss about the feelings, or indeed the survival, of other people.
Oh, wait.
I’ve given you all a chance to contribute to advice to comfort Jennifer, but obviously you’re all off hatching diabolical plots and hurting humans and each other in your damned pointless turf wars. I suppose it’s up to me, in Lucy’s absence, to offer her advice.
Jenny, you can’t turn back time and make all those humans live again, and, without surgery or certain curses, lose either your memory or your conscience, so the guilt is going to stick around. Possibly forever.
Bummer.
The thing is, the thing that makes me feel better, is that now I’ve stopped. Sure, I can’t bring those people back - except as one of us, for which they might not thank me - but I can do two good things.
I can refuse to kill any more innocent human beings, and I can strengthen the peace movement.
That’s it, Jenny : refrain and defend. People get to live their own lives because of two decisions you make: to drink draught only from volunteers or aggressors, and to thin the numbers of the aggressors by using either or all of: persuasion, subterfuge, and hardwood heart surgery. How many humans are now living with their families because you took the Pledge? Hundreds? Thousands if you were a greedy girl? How many more will survive if you keep being decent over the decades and centuries and millennia?
It’s all down to human birthrates and breeding patterns.
Likewise, when you roast and toast a predator, all their victims rise from the graveyard of his future and get to live.
To use that berk’s transatlantic accented ditty:
Life isn't bliss.
Life is just this: it's living
You'll get along
The pain that you feel
You only can heal by living
You have to go on living.
…So thousands of people are still living, because of you Jenny.
because you decided to let them live, to lift your own curse, and grow a conscience.
Look, come and visit us at home, soon. Lucy should be awake any night now (you know how she is in mid-winder: practically reptilian.) We’ll get a handful of barbed wire strips for dipping and a big bowl of caustic soda and watch vampire films all day long, and at night, we can go out hunting raptors and slot a few. Kill vamps and save hundreds of lives with one blow.
How about it? that’s all I can offer – that you can help more and more.
There’s no chance, Jenny, that I’ll tie you up to greet the Sun.
Live – and do well.
Love,
Adonais
I can’t see how that will help. I’ll still know that I have killed the innocent, when I didn’t need to. Future virtues do not wipe out past sins, Adonais.
JD
It’s true - we can’t go back in time and relive our lives better and spare our victims. You’re also right because it’s surely agony to remember your crimes, night after night, year after year as the centuries pass. Take it from one who knows.
But to give up, Ms Deere, that is the final sin. You can do so much good now: there being so much evil in the world, and not to use your powers; strength, night-vision, speed, and so on, it would be a crime and a pathetic surrender to guilt and depression. We’ve all been there, in the peace movement.
Hanging around England with some Brit with a poker up his ass isn’t liable to cheer you up much. Come visit me in LA, and we’ll sink a few and you’ll actually have some fun, which is not raining down in England these days. Also, there’s a couple of people I’d like you to meet. They might help.
L
Forget the boys. They try, but they’re about as sensitive as stones, Goddess bless them. I’m an associate psych professor at UCLA so you can email me there, or you can contact me through the Cleveland or Scottish networks.
Come and see me. I know blood guilt alright, though I’m human enough.
Call me. You don’t have to live with the pain.
Love,
Salix lucida lasiandra
See, Jen? We’re queuing up to help you. One way or another, we all have our reasons to remember / share something like your pain.
We’ve all killed the innocent – or overdone punishing the guilty, as Salix did.
Yet on we go.
If you can’t bear Lucy and me - and how you can’t bear her I’ll never know, then go to Moony California and talk to DS The Messenger; who’s not too coarse for a Paddy. God knows he’s done his time in Hell once or twice. Better still, visit Salix, who’s an MD now and a damn good magician to boot. Just watch she keeps it professional, mind; life has not been kind to her, either.
Live, Jenny; live to fight another night. That’s all we have.
Love,
AB-.
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