Elimelech the Twice-Damned

And Elimelech Naomi’s husband died; and she was left, and her two sons. Ruth 1:3 — as auspicious an entrance into the ranks of the eternal as any. Elimelech of Judea never knew his sire. Was he kind? Cruel? Did he bestow the Curse of Caine upon his fledgling as a blessing? Or a punishment? Could damnation fall upon the unwitting by happenstance, or did some unseen purpose lurk behind it all? Without its head, what would become of his household in this foreign land? After waking to find him pale, cold and unmoving, Naomi, wife of Elimelech, placed her husband in a shallow, unmarked grave. Three nights hence he summoned the strength to rise, clawing himself from the cold earth. Halfmad and possessed of a thirst no fountain on this earth would slake, the Judean made his way eastward in search of his beloved family and some form of release from the abhorrent unlife into which he had been thrust. Elimelech’s search took him months, but he found his family — in the inland country of Moab, where his sons had taken converted idolatresses as wives and started families of their own. The shock proved too much for the fledgling Cainite; morning found Mahlon and Chilion, Elimelech’s sons, in a field with their throats torn out. They were unwitting victims of their father’s fiendish hunger, and their deaths left Naomi, their mother, alone again. Tears of blood coursed down Elimelech’s cheeks as he beheld the malignant harvest he had sown; he saw his widow (who now called herself Mara — “bitter” — for “The Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me,” she said) collect her worldly possessions. From afar, he watched the angry confrontation with her inherited daughters, the heart-rending separation that followed as Orpah remained behind, unwilling to leave the life she had built in the Moabite village. Ruth, however, accompanied her mother-in-law back into the desert, penniless and pitiable. Elimelech followed, torn between the compulsion to see right done by his children and the shameful secret that prevented his revealing himself to them. Over the years he saw his wife and daughter reduced to reaping sheaves of barley on others’ estates for simple sustenance. He watched oncebeautiful Ruth, grown haggard and hunched in the fields, betrothed to a miserly kinsman three decades her senior in an incestuous parody of marriage. Naomi-called-Mara settled in a household that paid her little attention face-to-face and mocked her cruelly behind her back. Even Elimelech’s lands in Judea were divided and sold to thieves and slavers. If my Lord wishes it thus, it must be so, Elimelech late of Judea told himself, trying to come to terms with his unnatural existence. He took up residence in a series of southern caves abutting the Dead Sea and fed from cattle or sleeping wanderers. He continued to watch and aid his family, and their families, to do for them what he could not for his own children — yet always from a distance and always alone, lest he again fall prey to the madness that had stripped his sons from him. The Cainite condemned himself to an eternity of solitude for his sins, and resolutely awaited his sentence. Generations came and went, as did the passing of the seasons to Elimelech’s time-wearied eye. His immortality gave him no immunity to tragedy’s bite, however. The Judean had word of his estranged child Orpah, by then an old woman, being persecuted and tortured with her daughters and granddaughters at the hands of Moabites who had no faith in her earlier religious conversion. He saw sickness come to the village of Bethlehem-at-Judea, his grandson Obed dead of plague and his wife and daughters made barren. A score of years later, the lands of Elimelech’s forefathers, along with his kin who had not yet scattered to the four corners of the earth, were overrun by the Philistines and forced into slavery as he slept during the sunlit hours. Only Elimelech remained, unchanging, undying, unable to ward off any of the cruelties fate and God continued to mete out, unwilling to accept whatever wrongdoing had thrust him into this Hell on Earth or to forgive himself for the abominable crimes he had committed decades earlier. Elimelech left the smoldering ruins of his ancestral home and drifted aimlessly through the new kingdoms of that early world in search of destruction, redemption, damnation, anything. Years later, in the valley of Ephesdammim, as a champion of Gath fell to the slung stone of a boy-king of Israel, Elimelech found an answer. There, in the muted torchlight of the stone-circled arena where David, great-grandson of Ruth, slew Goliath, great-grandson of Orpah, Elimelech realized that it would never be over — that his was a curse from which none could escape. It was enough to sever the now-elder vampire’s already tenuous hold on reality. Mad Elimelech fled that place in search of the saint or sinner who could end his unlife. He lost CHAPTER ONE 15 himself to the Beast for a span of centuries, throwing himself to the mercy of the four winds, killing indiscriminately, neither willing nor able to separate man from monster, indulging in every excess his inhuman existence would allow. He rampaged southward to the burning sands, where the serpent-children found they had no charms to sway his savage soul. He fled east to the unexplored wastes whose forgotten secrets and sorcerers held no salvation for him. Elimelech traveled west to the water’s edge, where he was burned by righteous flame and could not enter the gates of the Forbidden City, and finally north, where the death-seers of Cappadocia subjected him to the torments of their grails and grimoires. Indeed, Elimelech bled into Christ’s very cup, only to realize the treachery of foul Cainites too late. Time and time again the Judean rose to cheat Final Death and remained forever barred from rejoining his family, forever caught between Heaven and Hell. And, in another mind-wrenching moment of epiphany, the son of Nahshon wondered if all this — even his name, Elimelech, “my God is king” — could have been preordained… if he was indeed the orphaned vagabond to Job’s victor, impotent in the face of what he was becoming, powerless even to make a difference. Elimelech’s travels ultimately threw him in league with the Black Hand; he is too unpredictable for the Seraphim Council to trust completely, but too old and powerful for them to turn away. He has sampled every sliver of the world and slain innumerable souls over the course of millennia, during which he has been woefully conscious. To him manus nigrum is nothing more than a means to an end, another amusement with which to while away eternity. He plays the faction’s pathetic power games and tries to forget what he once was and what he has become. In vain, he uses the Hand to distract him from the thing he feels growing slowly inside him, compelling him with increasing frequency, taking hold of his very being. Perhaps an end is imminent; perhaps some night soon that terrible creature will rise to assume permanent control, forever eclipsing all that is Elimelech (already he has degenerated to the point where only Cainite blood, not human, quenches his dreadful thirst, a hypocrisy that unduly taps the Black Hand’s already-stressed resources). In the meantime, the Seraphim accept him (tentatively) as their peer, include him in their deliberations, hear his counsel when he is himself, and send him chained and screaming to his cell when he is not. And yet the Seraphim wonder if the screams aren’t really sobs. All of the vaunted elders of the Black Hand refuse to enter a room with Elimelech alone, for reasons that none of them discuss.