A Murderer's Memoirs - Chapter 3

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An old whore in the brothel I was raised in once said to me that the only difference between man and animal was man's ability to devise new and increasingly humiliating ways to take a woman. A priest in a distant mountaintop temple claimed that while the gods created beasts, it was man who was blessed with being created in their likeness. A druid in a moonlit glade believed that between man and beast there was no difference at all, while a farmer tanned and cured by the sun lived securely in the knowledge that his animals existed solely to ease his work and sate his hunger.

The truth is there is only one difference between us. We all carry the same desire to mate, to feed, to rest, to kill... the only thing that sets us apart is man's quest for immortality, his need to ensure that those who come after him remember his name. And so we build cities, we write stories, we seek influence and power and we carve statues and temples out of stone in the hopes that centuries from now we will be remembered, and so live forever.

It was in the autumn of my 13th year that the one who would give me the tools to seek out my own immortality entered my life. He came to me in a clatter of hooves and amidst the baying of hounds, stealing me from my primal little world of instinct and coldhearted survival.

I had been tracking a doe and her fawn through the forest. My hair was hopelessly long and tangled; it fell in matted locks down my back and around my face. My nails were thick, yellowed with dirt and grime and curved over my fingers like claws. I was long, sinewy like the beasts I fought and fed on, and while I could easily have walked upright I chose instead to crouch and skulk in the shadows of the forest, which hid me so well. I looked like an animal, and the only evidence of civilization was the knife I always held tightly in my hand.

I heard them long before I saw them: the baying dogs and the hooves thundering through the woods disrupted the red and gold autumn stillness. They seemed to be getting closer at a rate I knew I could not outpace, but their numbers were too great. I stood and ran through the forest in a headlong rush to lose these strange loud intruders.

I did not run as long as I would have liked; the thick carpet of red leaves covered a few flimsy branches, which in turn covered a hole in the ground. Had I been more careful I would have spotted it, but instead I ran right into it and fell some distance to the ground below. A sharp pain raced through my leg and I felt the shattered bone inside scraping against the inside of my flesh and I knew that I would be captured.

The dogs came first. Three fell into the hole with me; I killed them quickly and easily. The rest surrounded the entrance of the shaft, making their loud obnoxious noises as I gritted my teeth against the pain in my leg. I heard the horses approaching and tightened my grip on my knife.

Three men peered over the edge of the hole; three well-dressed men who looked down at me with a look of pure astonishment. They spoke amongst themselves for some time, obviously arguing about what should be done with me. Their language was strange to me; I understood their words but their accents were foreign, lighter and clearer than the guttural slurring I had known in my previous life.

I may have been an animal for the last three years, but I was nobody's fool. I knew they would not kill me, and that it would be in my best interests to see where this new turn of events would take me. And so I allowed myself to be docilely wrapped in a blanket and lifted onto a horse in front of a rider and taken to my new life.