“Take the rest of the night off John. I am going to just have a quiet one and I am sure I can scrounge some left overs.”

My body man stared at me for a beat before nodding. “As you say Sir.” He closed the doors and I heard him walk down the stairs towards the Rolls.

I briefly thought about peaking out the stained glass windows beside the doors to watch him, to see if he still walked in an iron-rod spine way even when not around me. He has been my body man for almost 10 years now and I have never caught him in a chuckle, a smile or anything less than pure propriety. I gave up with a shrug and turned away.

My shoes clipped along the marble inlay of the foyer and echoed away from me as I headed towards the cavernous kitchen at the back of the mansion. I am sure that Mr Andrews will have something in the fridge I can eat. That man has never accepted that I don’t host parties or gatherings, it is usually just me. He still cooks incredible amounts of food that usually ends up going to the staff and their family. I don’t mind, it’s not as if I am hurting for money. Besides, I don’t have the heart to tell him to stop. He enjoys it too much.

The fridge raided I am sure Andrews would despair to see the cold sausages in white bread slathered in hot sauce. It is not what a gentleman should be eating. I retire to my study, close and lock the door behind me.

Once safe I relax and feel my skin and bones melting, shifting, flowing. I am no longer the 7ft tall, jaw line you could crack rocks on, piercing blue eyes and a body that would make Michelangelo drop his tools.

I now look like a wax figurine that a toddler held too close to the fire. All indeterminate features and everywhere a suggestion of drooping.

Sighing loudly I collapse into my well worn chair in front of a panel of computer monitors and begin eating, the sausages just a hot sauce delivery mechanism.

It has been 15 years wearing the face of Laurel Pavilion, eccentric billionaire and tech company pioneer. I was sick of it. Sick of the meetings, of the board rooms, the politicians all slavishly fawning for money, the incessant whining of the media about the very things they themselves are perpetuating.

It had been long over due to build another persona. But after hundreds of years I was bored, bored of change, bored of living.

If I was being honest with myself it was also because I couldn’t exactly remember who I was anymore. That was the thought that kept me up at nights.

I have been living my life as other people, it has been so long now that I can’t quite recall who I used to be. I remember growing up in….France? England? Back then during what is now called the middle ages they all felt the same really. Was I a farm boy? I was poor because the first time I changed it was to take the place of a nobleman’s son who had died. I think that’s what it was anyway. I remember hunger. That was the strongest memory of my childhood. I couldn’t picture my mother or father but the pains of a stomach eating itself, keeping me from sleep, they were vivid and strong.

I can recall little of being that nobleman’s son. Had I killed him? Where had he gone? That time is a kaleidoscope of consumption, I think I went mad there for a while. Thankfully my new father was focused elsewhere and took a long time to notice how different his son was. I had fled when the searching looks became a constant companion. If even one question was raised it would not have ended well for me.

This current society though meant that I could live a life of luxury that you could not even dream of years ago. It was also a lot easier to amass wealth when you lived as long as I had and could look like anyone.

This insane lifestyle had been fun, oh yes it was amazing. However I have been yearning to be me again, to put away these flesh masks.

I just don’t know who that is any more. Did it even matter? What was a French farm boy from the middle ages going to do in this world?

Feeling my face with my hot sauced smeared fingers I tried to recall what I looked like. My body started to shape and flow. I couldn’t picture my original face at all. It was lost to me.

When I first learned I could do this it was an escape. A way out of the crushing poverty that ruled my life. I will readily admit for the first hundred years or so I was drunk on the power, cycling through bodies whenever the fancy took me. However I begun to learn just how lonely it was. I have never met anyone else with the same powers so no one else knew what it was like watching your friends and loved ones grow old and die. While you have to disappear and become someone else so that the speculations do not become questions. To never be able to mourn their deaths, to grow old with them and find out what the twilight of life is like. Instead always slipping away like a ghost, leaving a hole shaped like a stranger to you now.

Starting all over again.

It was grotesque to feel sorry for myself while sitting in this mansion knowing that I had more wealth and power than some countries.

But sorry I did feel. I mourned the death of Laurel Pavilion and sat there, thinking long into the night.

Thinking of a farm boy from France.