“In my last moments of human existence, I hoped and prayed that the Other would drain my last drop of blood, leaving me a hollow, lifeless husk.   However, the vampire was too careful for that: he left just enough blood in my veins to ensure that I would return from the dead as a vampire.   For the next three days he nursed me through the throes of human death and vampire rebirth.   At first I fought my new existence, tried to starve myself back to death, by refusing to consume any blood.   However, the pain of a vampire’s starvation is many times greater, many times more agonising than that a human being faces.   So, reluctantly I took lives, always keeping to the very old, terminally ill, or criminals.   Never young, healthy people who would lose too much through death.   Then after awhile I found that I could survive by drinking the blood of animals, or even by drawing energy away from people, little enough from each of them so that no one was ever killed….”

Again Borg paused to gauge our reaction to his tale, then after a moment he continued, “I couldn’t understand at first how the Other could bring himself to make me a vampire.   When a vampire takes a life, it can kill its victim outright, or else make him undead.   With the misery of my own plight, whenever I had killed for blood, in the beginning, I had always been careful to drain off every last drop of my victims’ blood, to spare them the misery of returning from the dead.   Yet my creator had willingly inflicted his own plight upon me.   Then as I roamed the streets of Stockholm, Uppsala, Vasteräs, and Orebro night after night with him, the answer slowly dawned upon me: whatever else the Other’s death had done to him (however it had managed to turn him into a vampire), it had certainly damaged his brain.   In death he had become insane.   Not merely content to survive off human blood, he intended to inflict as much misery as possible upon the human race, to create a race of killer vampires, which would eventually annihilate the human race!”

“But where the hell would that get him?” demanded Walker.   “How could he survive after he had made the human race extinct?”