by D C Young
Maestro knew he’d never forget that night, and knew one day he would seek the shaman’s services. He had no idea how he’d earn the required money, and he would not have believed that within the 24 hours that followed he’d have figured out just that.
And the day after that, he and Sarah had taken a guided trek into the nearby forest with several other couples, all much older than them. At one point their guide had pointed to a large bush covered in tiny white flowers, most of which were only buds at the time.
“Vanaheim flower buds,” the guide had said. “They are so small and yet their power so immense! Come here, Madam. I show to you.” He’d motioned to an older woman in her late seventies, one whose face was heavily marked and wrinkled by time.
The young guide picked several of the buds, crushed them on a rock until he had a rough white paste. Then he’d rubbed it into the forehead of the older woman with the instruction, “Leave this until you are ready to go to dinner tonight. Wipe it off with a warm cloth, and then you will see the flower’s amazing properties.”
The small group had all been early to dinner, for once. The older couple, however, were half an hour late. And when they arrived, the entire group had fallen silent.
The older woman’s forehead was as smooth as an egg. A light bulb had gone off in Maestro’s head.
It had taken Maestro several years to set up an import process, as well as a formula and means of manufacturing his new Smooth ‘N’ Young cream. But once he had, his tiny company had sky rocketed steadily until it was among the Fortune 500... And as was to be expected, so did his income. It wouldn’t be long before he would have whatever funds he needed to visit that shaman one day.
***
Cocktail party 101: If you arrive on time, you’re already late.
The driveway and front lawn of the mansion in Hollywood Hills looked like a parking garage and it was all Sam could do but shake her head as she parked her car at the end of the packed driveway which led up to Elysium House. In a way, she was glad to have gotten the last spot between the house and the gate and as she turned the car around and backed into it, she couldn’t help but think that at least if she needed to leave in a hurry, the Windstar was already facing out toward the street.
It wasn’t a long walk to the front door of the mansion spreading out in front of her, but she was still caught off guard when the double doors opened wide to let her in before she even raised her hand to ring the bell. Two well dressed men held the heavy oak doors while she slowly passed through and then closed them silently behind her. The party was humming with bubbly conversation and the clinking of glasses and silverware. Uniformed waiters and waitresses passed between the small conversing groups of people bearing trays, heavily laden with hors d’oeuvres and drinks.
Sam stood at the bottom of the entryway steps in awe, unable to move or even think for a moment. She knew her hostess Julia, and her twelve companions were immortals, mostly vampires and for that reason, she couldn’t figure out why there was so much regular food and drink being served. Perhaps they just really liked the company of humans and had a lot of friends.
She shrugged it off and made her way to the bar.
“A glass of water please?” Sam asked the young lady who was serving at that end of the counter.
“Certainly, madam.”
“Water? Really?” a clear, feminine voice asked from just over Sam’s shoulder. It was like listening to the soft tinkling of silver bells.
Sam turned around with the glass in her hand and took a small step back. The woman who’d spoken to her was intimidating to say the least. She was obviously Julia Agrippina. She wore a Grecian style dress like the ones that were being favored by all the most relevant celebrities on the red carpet. It was lilac and made of a flowing fabric; chiffon or voile. It was cinched at the waist by a gold corded belt. Her gold, strappy sandals finished the picture. Enchanting.
***
As the limo approached the gate leading to the world outside, Maestro turned for one last look at the mansion where he’d been so happy and where so many discoveries had been made in the medical wing he’d added on to it for just that purpose. It had all been as the result of a conversation he’d had at a barbecue with Bruno McGill, his next door neighbor, who happened to be the county coroner.
“Maestro,” Bruno had said while their wives chatted near the pool. “A strange thing happened today! I know you don’t ever want to hear about my work, but this should certainly interest you. I mean, who wouldn’t find it curious!”
Maestro sighed and grinned. “Who can resist you and your stories, you old scoundrel? Go ahead. Did a body leap off your table and do the tango?”
“Even weirder than that!” His friend’s thick white eyebrows bobbed up and down. “They brought in a lady this morning. Early thirties, if I had to guess—and I did have to guess as usual, because she had no ID. Anyway, her autopsy was some weird shit, Maestro. I’m telling you! Some of her organs looked like those of a thirty-year-old but others—” the man hesitated, then continued. “Others told me that she could have been ninety.”
At the look on Maestro’s face, he threw his hands in the air. “I know what this sounds like but, I saw this shit with my own eyes. There was very aged cardiac tissue lying right next to youthful arteries. A tiny old bladder but very active and healthy ovaries! And I saw something I’ve never encountered in all my years—she had DNA unlike anything human.”
Maestro’s mouth dropped. “What the hell does that mean? She an alien, or something?”
“No, not at all.” Bruno looked bewildered. “But I did some research. I had her name, since her family had shown up looking for her. But researching that name—Maestro, what I found just isn’t possible.”
“What already!”
“Her birth certificate led back to a child who’d died five months after she was born,” Bruno began. “I really had to dig then. I looked into every name in her family. And finally I found a name, a birth certificate, and several photos in newspapers to validate... this woman was born in 1888, and has died three times since.”
Maestro’s eyes widened, and his heart leaped in his chest. That was it! He’d had a feeling that something like that existed and he finally had proof. Or he soon would have.
“Bruno. I need that woman’s corpse! Can you—”
“Family had her cremated this morning,” Bruno said.
That had been a setback, but not a large one. For the next 10 years, he and Bruno had put word out that they were seeking people with a specific gene sequence in their DNA. Thanks to Maestro’s anti-aging cream, the two could afford almost any price: and they’d had several corpses delivered over the past decade.
Maestro had built the medical wing, and with Bruno’s somewhat rudimentary surgical skills, experiments had begun. Blood transfusions which were not always legal; they’d often used bums that Maestro’s men swept off the streets of Los Angeles and of course, no one missed them when they disappeared. Almost all of the test subjects had died after a transfusion, whilst the ‘donors’, those with the altered DNA, had lived on even after being nearly drained of their blood.
One subject hadn’t died immediately, to both men’s delight. ‘Subject 1534A’ had lived nearly 8 months before expiring! And even more satisfying, when 1534A had finally died, he’d done so as a man who looked easily 30 years younger than the 57 year old man he’d been.
At that point, they realized that what they needed was a brilliant geneticist; someone who could manipulate DNA at the gene level. But how were they to find someone who was both capable of such work and who wouldn’t think both of them were simply crazy?
Maestro began a massive search campaign. He included the keywords ‘brilliant geneticist’, ‘outstanding advances’ and ‘anti-aging research’ in searches for scientists who’d been alive during the past twenty years. There were forty global results. Once he’d tracked each scientist down, he’d learned that only four of his leads were viable; the rest were either
dead, crackpots, or both.
Each of the four candidates proved to be difficult to locate. When he finally did, one of them had reportedly died about two decades before, and another was so old that he had ‘one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel’, as Bruno loved to say. The research that both of the other two were involved in—although brilliant—wasn’t what he was interested in.
To his disgust, the absolute best match was the doctor who’d died. The man not only had been pushing anti-aging farther than anyone else, he’d been involved with research attempting to duplicate genotypes from one human with the desired traits, to another.
But even if the peak of that doctor’s own research hadn’t occurred in the 1940’s, Maestro would have been loath to even meet the man. Dr. Mengele was famous, or rather infamous, for having been Hitler’s beloved “Angel of Death.”
In addition to his regular duties, Mengele had been responsible for dividing the Jews who arrived at Auschwitz into two lines: ‘workers’ and ‘needing showers.’
No need to explain what happened to those in the second line, Maestro knew.
That bastard had single-handedly sentenced tens of thousands to death. But he’d also done research on twins, research so invaluable that it was still being used, in secret, of course. How else could one get results such as ‘how long do children live after poisoned with a certain toxin?’ Or ‘how can we take the perfect Aryan child and insert his genes into another child?’
It was Bruno who had gone to Germany, accessed files newly open to public scrutiny, and seen the most repugnant of photos imaginable. But Bruno had also paid a translator to interpret the meticulous records kept by the Germans, by Dr. Mengele, specifically. The records showed the Angel of Death’s brilliant, although disgusting, results clearly.
After taking a closer look at what they’d found, Maestro found it rather strange that one of the other ‘top four contenders’ in his search, the extremely old one, had a name oddly close to that of the ‘Angel of Death.’ Dr. Mengal had to be useless, though, Maestro knew, as the man was nearly 107 years old by then. He’d be lucky if he found the ancient doctor drooling into his lap as he stared out the window of an elderly care facility.
But that was when he’d received a call from Bruno, who was still in Europe. And he’d heard the words that would change both their lives forever.
“Maestro, I found that Dr. Mengal you talked about. I know you’d crossed him off the list, but I figured I’d take a look all the same. Maestro, this old fart is not only as sharp as a tack, he’s still working in a tiny lab almost every day. He can only stay on his feet for a few hours a day, but his work is fascinating. I’m sure you’ll agree. He’s managed to isolate a sequence of genes that are connected to the life span and general health of an individual. So far, he’s done minimal testing, and only on monkeys; he’s got no backers and is very close to using up the funds from his last grant. I think you should get over here and…” But Bruno was talking to a dead line.
Maestro had hung up, shouted for his butler to book tickets to Argentina and had begun packing as rapidly as possible.
Chapter Ten
“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”
—Marcus Aurelius
Sam was speechless as she sat in the small, secluded alcove listening to Julia’s story. A few days before, one of her youngest companions, Alexei Romanov, had been kidnapped as he’d been headed to the airport to return to his new home in Europe.
Yes, I heard right. She said Alexei Romanov, as in, Alexei Nikolaevich Romanov, Tsesarevich of Russia; the one who was shot to death by the Bosheviks in the basement of Ipatiev House. Surprising that I know all this, but what can I say, I loved history in school.
According to Julia, they had very little information to go on and most of what they knew had come from Alexei’s sister, Anastasia.
Apparently, not everyone that history thinks is dead is lying in a grave. They still walk among us.
She’d received several telepathic messages from her brother about what was happening during the kidnapping. But in addition to being weakened, over powered by silver spray and bound in lengths of silver chain, she had no details of who his attackers were or where they were taking him.
Julia suspected that his captors had kept Alexei bound in the silver because over the course of the next few days, he reached out less and less to Anastasia as his body and mind weakened. When the messages stopped, the trail grew cold.
‘I understand why you’d ask me to assist in locating him, Julia,” Sam replied when the story was finished, “but to be honest if twelve ancient immortals such as yourselves haven’t been able to do it, I don’t see why you’d think I could do a better job.”
“You can hunt in the daylight now, Sam.”
Dammit! I knew that would bite me in the butt sometime soon.
“ I doubt Alexei has been taken by vampires and I doubt even less they would move him at night when they would be vulnerable to possible ambush by us,” Julia concluded.
“I see your point.”
“In addition, I believe I have an idea of who has taken him,” Julia continued, “and the reason why that would have happened now is as a direct result of the carelessness with which you, Kingsley Fulcrum and my strange new friends Veronica and Rand, have been gallivanting around town leaving your DNA and other clues of our existence everywhere.”
Sam’s mouth fell open in shock at the accusation. She was about to rebuff when Julia raised a dainty hand in admonishment.
“Don’t insult my intelligence by trying to defend yourself, Samantha Moon. You fly around Los Angeles in your primal form as if it was the image of a raven you see in the sides of those buildings. Kingsley has become so out of control during full moons that he escapes his cell and desecrates the bodies of the dead in the city cemeteries. You have all been playing with fire and that is why so many of the ancient evils are waking up and finding their way here.
“The medallions are appearing one by one and all of them seem bound to you for some reason. Veronica recently put down that demon who called himself, Storm. Now, it’s even been confirmed that another creature called Dominique, is making his way to the City of Angels as well.”
Julia sighed and bowed her head.
“You’ve certainly stirred up quite a shit storm but at least you’ve provided me and my Council some form of viability. It’s for us to clean this up now…or at least advise those who will be required to do the job. Our job for you, Miss Moon, is to find Alexei Romanov and bring him back to Elysium.”
That’s where the conversation had ended and Sam had been asked very politely to leave. Not being one to overstay her welcome she finished her glass of water and walked back to the Windstar, started the engine and began the long, winding drive back down Mulholland Drive.
***
For a man in his 70’s, the trip from the States to the depths of the Argentinean jungle was nothing less than pure hell. As he walked slowly through the damp growth, Maestro couldn’t help wondering why Dr. Mengal had chosen to live and work in such isolated conditions.
From what Maestro had heard, the doctor had set himself up in an ancient Toban city that had been abandoned many centuries before. The natives had been fascinated by the Caucasian man, who had revived that sacred old city and they’d been flocking there to settle for years. They even treated him like something of a God, Maestro had been told.
Scenes from the movie, Apocalypse Now, were running through his mind as he pushed aside vines, stepped around gigantic snakes and picked leeches off his legs during the near three week trip into the jungle.
Finally his guides told him that they’d reach Breicharo the next afternoon. Maestro was beyond relief. He hurt in places he hadn’t known could hurt, but above all he was incredibly curious. A well-known scientist, a doctor, who’d made several great advances and yet he’d chosen to live there? Why?
As advertised, when t
he sun was directly overhead the next day, Maestro walked to the top of a small rise and saw Breicharo spreading out below him in a verdant, hidden valley. A small city built around a pyramid similar to those built by the Mayans which had been reclaimed from the jungle.
As he and his people descended into the valley, they were met by the tribesmen who’d made Breicharo their home. Not many ever made the trip that far into the jungle, in fact, any visitors at all were cause for a great celebration.
That night there’d be a big party in Maestro’s honor. Good thing I brought one of my best suits along, Maestro thought. It actually seemed like he was going to need it.
As the sun set, Maestro discovered that he was woefully over dressed in his Armani suit. Any clothing at all would have been too much! The natives wore nothing but a small, woven green skirt around their waists, but it wasn’t the natives that Maestro had come to see.
Dr. Mengal was seated on a massive throne in the midst of a clearing. The village huts were spread around 3 sides of the clearing: the huge pyramid comprised the fourth side.
On that throne sat a man with flowered vines wrapped around his arms and torso. On his head was a wooden circle with beautiful feathers stretching upward, and crystals embedded in intricate designs. The man’s face was covered with bright-colored designs, mostly diamonds, circles, and one bird painted in the middle of his forehead. Only bright blue eyes gave away the man’s heredity as European and not Indian.
Maestro was led by three highly-decorated men to the foot of the throne. The seated man said a few words, the men vanished into the crowd and Maestro was left facing the throne alone.
“You came a long way, my man. You must have quite the story. I surely want to hear it all after this celebration. The people, they insist. Far be it for me to deny them the merriment!” The man on the throne said with a smile that showed several missing teeth.
