He was eighty-five years old.

He was seventeen.

Sometimes his brain pounded and ached until his thoughts turned to moths dizzying around a flame. He was a man who thought often and hard. Usually he dwelled in the present, but he couldn’t always turn his mind away from the past.

First and fore-most, his heart was a black vortex that bent his ribs back to the point of breaking, until his whole chest felt ready to succumb to the negating effect of dark matter.

Tonight a super-nova brewed in his heart, waiting to explode.

Hunched on his bed, sheets of crimson silk piled around his legs, he clutched himself in the gloom. The only light in the room came from the bathroom, its door left partially open. A collection of swords acquired from around the globe hung above the head board, their silvery blades rippled with sparks of yellow light. One half of his face was illuminated; features taunt and wrinkled more tremulously than his youth prescribed. He seemed to be teetering on the edge of something greater than his extravagant bed sheets.

Claws tinted the color of polished bone dragged a path down his brow, his soft cheeks, his young lips and undefined chin. He clenched his fore head, scratching at the wrinkles, the only pattern on his face that hinted of age. Even these symbolized only the emotional maturity that starkly contrasted his physical form.

He was appalled by the thought of looking into a mirror. He could barely resist the compulsion to smash the bathroom mirror when he left. Vampirism’s true curse was not being deprived of your reflection; but having to face your wretched self every night in a pane of glass. Blood drinking was no curse. He enjoyed that.

Baring his teeth, pointed and yellow from neglect, he dug his nails in between the creases of his brow. Blood bubbled around the edge of his fingers and trickled over his eye brows. His fingers, which had always been boney and calloused, twitched and he snarled.

Wounds would heal. Youth would retain itself.

Where was the old man?

He wanted to pull back the flesh from his skull, lift away that tired mask, reveal the bone and muscle beneath. That was where his true identity lay. In sagging skin, in protruding veins, in sunken black eye lids, in a place closer to death.

Youth meant nothing to him. His childhood years were buried in the cemetery with the skeleton of his father and his mother’s worm eaten corpse.

Immortality was more plague than blessing. Sealed permanently in a body of cooking hormones, he was granted none of the dignity that the elderly enjoy. He would never be the sweet old grandfather who gives money to his daughter’s sons. Retirement drove his body mad with rebellion. A teenager has too much energy to spend in a recliner listening to the radio shows of the 1950s preserved on tape.

Why had he done this to himself? This was the worst form of masochism, the most sadistic psychological torture the mind could imagine; to endure disrespect from others, to suffer through perverted fantasies of his own design, wanting something he could never in his endless lifetime possess. Fifty years ago he chose this path believing he might, possibly, find someone, someday, who would want to share their tender warmth with him. Love is such a fickle, difficult thing to find. For years he thought there was love for him in the woman who turned him to immortality. And there was, but he was deceived by it. Her love was sisterly; faithful, but not intimate.

So he waited for love to find him. Decades passed with him still waiting, certain that one day he would stumble across love again, but not love that was merely sibling to sibling. Yet for as long as he waited love never came.

Hate he found easily, whether or not he was searching for it. Anger was always such an easy emotion to express and so gratifying. There was nothing as easy on earth as to spite another man or immortal and no better method to stroke his ego than driving an enemy to their knees. Oh the countless people he killed! He snorted a dry laugh between his teeth. They were young like him and sometimes he wanted them the way a young person should. His laughter choked, almost a sob.

No. He was tired of waiting for love, and sex filled him up with emptiness. Self-control became his mantra. He wished for the entropy of old age that would finally put his fruitless desires to an end. Numbness and apathy was were he wanted to be. No sex, no love, no hope, no dreams. He rebelled from his desires, desires that ached in his bones like the arthritis he wished he knew, desires that fed the raging caldron of his heart, thumping hot and relentless, counting down to detonation.

Hunger drilled in his stomach. He pulled his hands back from his face, blinked wetly at the thin ray of light penetrating from the bathroom. The mirror was on the other side, but only the upper right corner was visible from the bed. He stared for a moment, indifferent to the tears trickling down his cheek. Then he turned his gaze on the assortment of exotic cutlery mounted upon the wall. Katanas, lancers, Romans, rapiers, ninja-tos, and Celtic daggers all gleamed in angelic, yet unholy light.

His eyes acquired the animalistic glow of a predator as they wandered over the various instruments of death and war. The blood thirst was in him again tonight and he had the conviction to satisfy it. Tonight he’d kill a young girl; seventeen, sixteen, maybe younger. Just as death was fixing its icy hand upon her breast he’d draw his weapon, give her a final terror to take with her to the grave and deprive her family of the means to identify their lost daughter. Punishment for being so damned young and gorgeous. He smiled with self-righteous glee.

Oh lord, how easy it is to hate.