A Coven of Vampires (13 page)

I caught a glimpse of something bulbous and black, hairy and red-eyed—a tarantula, a bat, a dragon—whose joined legs were tipped with sharp, chitinous darts. A mere glimpse, without any real or lasting impression of detail, and yet—

“No!” I cried, throwing up my hands before my face, turning and rushing wildly back down the long drive. “No, you fool, don’t let me see it! I don’t want to know!
I don’t want to know!
”

THE THIEF IMMORTAL

Klaus August Scharme was born in a tiny village called Paradise close to Köln in the middle of the year 1940. The name of his birthplace has nothing to do with Scharme’s story; the village was anything but paradisiacal, being a collection or huddle of farm buildings, some middling private dwellings and a grubby gasthaus, all reached along unmetalled roads, which, for at least four months of the year were little more than ruts around the perimeters of boggy fields.

Therefore, neither the date nor location of his origin was especially auspicious. The best we can say of them is that they were uninspired…drab beginnings for a man whose longevity would make him a legend of godlike proportions, not only in his own lifetime but also in every one of the countless
millions
of lives which would come and be lived and go—often in unseemly haste—before Scharme himself was yet fifty years old.

But here the paradox: he achieved that age not as might be expected in 1990, but in the summer of 2097. And the following story includes the facts of how that came about.

• • •

Aged sixteen years and three months, Scharme left Paradise and became an apprentice signwriter. He took up lodgings in Köln at the house of his master, where for the next five years he learned how to paint those intricate
Kreise
signs which signify with heraldic sigils the boundaries of the many and various districts of Germany. At that time such signs could be found on all major roads where they approached any specific district, and where for many years they had been the prey of avid “art collectors” from England, France, the USA—the troops of NATO in general—energetically manoeuvring and war-gaming across the long-since conquered German countryside. But this too is a mere detail and should not be allowed to detract…except that it also served as Scharme’s launching point on his trajectory of four hundred years’ duration.

It started as a dream: Scharme dreamed that he was growing old at an unprecedented rate. He aged a day for every hour, then a week for every minute, finally a year for every second, at which point he collapsed in upon himself, died, crumbled into dust and blew away.

He woke up screaming, and it was the morning of his twenty-first birthday. Perhaps the dream had come about through a subconscious awareness of his proximity to the age of manhood; perhaps it had dawned on him that the first part of his life was done, ended like a chapter closed. But that same day, as Scharme replaced a purloined sign upon its post, he saw speeding by him a military Land Rover…and reclining in the open back of the vehicle a good half-dozen of these very signs over which he laboured so long and hard! The driver of this vehicle, a young Corporal in British uniform, laughed and waved as he sped into the distance; Scharme, wide-eyed in anger where he gazed after him, thought:
“Damn you…you should age a year for every sign you’ve stolen!”

At which he was horrified to see the Land Rover swerve violently from the road to strike a tree!

Leaping onto his bicycle, Scharme raced to the scene of the accident. The Corporal, alas, was dead; also, he was old; moreover (and as Scharme would later work it out) it was probably the instantaneous aging which had caused him to swerve—making Klaus August Scharme a murderer! And he knew it was so, for at the moment of his wish—that the Corporal should age commensurate with his thieving—he had felt
himself
the beneficiary of those years, some thirty-five in number. The Corporal had been twenty-five years of age; he was now sixty. Scharme had been twenty-one and still looked it, but some strange temporal instinct within told him that he would be fifty-six before he began to age again. Somehow—in some monstrous and inexplicable fashion—he had stolen all the young soldier’s years!

And so for the next thirty-five years Scharme aged not at all but remained twenty-one;
but
—and most monstrously—in the twelve-month after that he aged altogether too many years, so that while by rights (?) he should only be twenty-two, his internal hourglass told him that in fact he had spilled the sands of ten whole years! It was the summer of 1997; K. A. Scharme had lived for fifty-seven years, should have aged by only twenty-two of them, and yet knew that physically he had aged
thirty-two
of them. In short, he knew that he was now getting old at ten times the normal rate, and that therefore he had started to pay the world back for the time he owed it. In just two and a half more years he’d be pushing sixty, and all the pleasures of an apparently eternal youth would be behind him and senility just around the corner. It was all grossly unfair and Scharme was very bitter about it.

So bitter, indeed, that the guilt he had felt over the past thirty-five years quite melted away. He determined to do something about his predicament, and of course it must be done quickly; when one is aging an entire year for every five weeks, time grows very short. But still Scharme was not a cruel man, and so chose his next victim (the very word left an unpleasant echo in his mind) with a deal of care and attention.

He chose, in fact, a crippled greypate who suffered incessant arthritic pains, stealing his last four years with the merest glance. The old man never knew what hit him but simply crumpled up in the street on his way to collect his pension. And Scharme was pleased that (a) the old boy would know no more pain, and (b) that the state was plainly a benefactor, likewise every taxpayer, and (c) that he himself, K. A. Scharme, would now live for a further four years at the constant age of only thirty-two and some few months. Which would surely be sufficient time to work out some sort of humane strategy.

Except…no sooner had his mental meter clocked up the defunct dodderer’s four years, than it inexplicably halved them, allotting Scharme only two! Alarmed, he returned home and collapsed before his TV, where at that very moment they were showing an interview with a prisoner on Death Row. It was reckoned that this one could stave off his execution by a maximum of only two years, and that only at great expense. Scharme decided to save him and the state both money and trouble, and snatched his two remaining years right through the screen! The prisoner died right there in full view of many millions (good riddance, the majority said) but Scharme only gasped as the stolen time registered within him at a mere fraction of the time perceived: namely, six months!

It didn’t take much of a mathematician to work out the implications. Complete this sequence: If thirty-five equals thirty-five, and four equals two, and two equals one-half….

Patently Scharme was only going to get one-eighth of his next victim’s span of years; and after that one-sixteenth; then only one small thirty-second part,
und so weiter
.
Which was precisely the way it was to work out.

But…let’s not leap ahead. Scharme now had two and a half years of other people’s time in which to think about it and plan for his vastly extended future. Which, diligently, he now set about to do. Nor did it take him thirty months by any means but only one day. You’ll see why if you apply yourself to his problem:

His seventh victim would yield only one sixty-fourth of his remaining span, his eighth perhaps four or five months…
good God!…
By the time the vampire Scharme had taken his tenth victim—and even were that tenth a newborn infant—he would only be gaining a matter of weeks! Twenty victims later and he’d be down to seconds! Then half-seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds! By which time, quite obviously, he’d have arrived at the point where he was taking multiples of lives, perhaps even entire races at a gulp. Was that his destiny, then: to be a mass murderer? To be guilty of invisible genocide? To be the man who murdered an entire planet just to save his own miserable life?

Well, miserable it might be, but it was the only one he had. And life was cheap, as he above all other men was only too well aware. And so now he must use his two and a half year advantage to its fullest, and work out the
real
way it was going to be.

Scharme’s grandfather had once told him: “It takes hard work to earn a sum of money, but after that all it takes is time. Money in the bank doubles every ten years or so. That’s something you should remember, Klaus August Scharme….” And Scharme had remembered.

And so for now he lived as frugally as possible, saved every
pfennig
he could get his hands on, banked his wages and watched the interest grow month by month, year by year. And while his money was growing, so he experimented.

For instance: he knew he could steal the lives of men, but what about animals? Scharme had read somewhere that no man knows the true age of sharks; so little is known about them that their span of years is beyond our scope. And he’d also read that barring accidents or the intervention of man, a shark
might
live for as long as two or three hundred years! Likewise certain species of tortoise, lizard, crocodile. Test ing out the sharks, crocs and such, Scharme gained himself a good many years. But at the same time he lost some, too. The problem was that he couldn’t know in advance how long these creatures were destined to live! A hammerhead off the Great Barrier Reef earned him three whole years (miraculous!), but another, taken the same day, was worth only an hour or two. Obviously that one had been set to meet its fate anyway. As for crocodiles: he ensured that several of those would never make it to the handbag stage!

And so eventually, without for the moment doing any further damage (to the
human
race, anyway) Scharme clocked up one hundred years on his mental chronometer and was able to give it a rest. He was more or less happy now that he could take it easy for a full century and still come out the other end only thirty-two years and some few months old. But rich? Oh, be certain he’d come out rich!

Except…what then, he wondered? What if—in the summer of 2097 when he’d used up all his stolen time—what if he then began to age too fast again? And just how fast
would
he age? Would it be ten years for every ordinary year, as before—or a hundred—or…a thousand? Or would he simply wither and die before he even knew it, before he had time to steal any more life? Obviously he should not allow that to happen. But at least with an entire century to give it a deal of considered thought, he wasn’t going to let the knowledge of it spoil what he already had. Or what he was going to have….

The spring of 2097 eventually came around, and Scharme was a multimillionaire. Back in the Year 2000 he had had only 23,300 Deutsch Marks in his Köln bank; in 2010 it had been 75,000; in 2050 the sum was 3,000,100; and now he was worth close to one hundred million. (Not in any bank in Köln, no, but in several numbered accounts in Switzerland.) And Scharme was still only thirty-two years old.

But as the spring of that year turned to summer the thief immortal was prepared and waiting, and he sat in his Hamburg mansion and listened to the clocks in his head and in his very atoms ticking off the seconds to his fate. And he knew he was taking a great chance but took it anyway, simply because
he had to know
!

And so the time narrowed down to zero and Scharme’s internal time clock—the register of his years—recommenced the sweep which he had temporarily stilled back in 1997. And so horrified was Scharme, so petrified at what transpired, that he let the thing run for a full three seconds before he was able to do anything about it. And then, on the count of three and when he was capable again, he pointed a trembling but deadly finger at a picture of Japan in his Atlas and absorbed the lives of all its millions—yes, every one of them—at a stroke!
And saw that he had only clocked up five extra years!

He killed off Indonesia for another ten before his panic subsided—and then took half the fish in the Mediterranean just to be absolutely sure. Then, when he saw that he’d clocked up thirty-eight and a half years, he was satisfied—for a brief moment. Until as an afterthought (perhaps on a point of simple economy or ecology), he also took half of the
fishermen
in the Med and so evened up the balance.

And he knew that he must
never
let time creep up on him again, because if he did then it were certainly the end. For during the span of those three monstrous, uncontrolled seconds Klaus August Scharme had aged almost a
half-billion
such units and was now fifty years old!

Ah, but he would never get any older…not until the very last second, anyway.

• • •

There had been no one left to bury the dead in the Japanese and Indonesian Islands; for fifty years they were pestholes; mercifully, being islands, their plagues were contained. That lesser ravage (men called it The Ravage) which had slain so many in and around the Mediterranean was guessed to have had the same origin as the Japan/Indonesian Plagues, but science had never tracked it to its source. It was generally assumed that Mother Nature had simply bridled at one of Man’s nuclear, ecological or chemical indiscretions. No one ever had cause to relate the horror to the being of Klaus August Scharme. No, not even when his strange longevity finally became known.