by Mark Tufo
“I did not even know she existed, it was just happenstance that we met. Although, perhaps I am so closely tied to that great bloodline that there is no corner of the world I can travel without confronting one. Or maybe it is just that they breed like rats and inhabit all four corners.”
“Tunnings are sluts?”
“She was a sight to behold; statuesque, tall for that day and age. She had gleaming silver armor and a heavy long sword that men larger than her would have had a difficult time wielding, yet she did so effortlessly.”
There was rapture in Eliza’s eyes as she spoke of her ancestress.
“I did not think women could be knights.”
“There were none that would tell her otherwise.”
“I like her already.”
“I watched her for three days as she led almost every charge into a Muslim stronghold. She would not be deterred; she fought with such abandon I thought that she might be one of my kind, hiding in plain sight. More than once, I saw her pull the still beating heart from one of her conquests; she would inhale of its essence, savor a small bite, then consume the heart entirely. A wonderfully ingenious performance if one wanted to conceal their true nature; she could feed while proving her ferocity and worth to the other knights.”
I had been digging this Lisdon, right up to that point, where we come to find out she was pretty much insane. That trait flowed like gravy at a meatloaf festival in Eliza’s relatives. I could empathize to a point. I’d danced along that edge a great many times and for fairly long distances. Something or someone always shoved me to the more or less sane side, eventually.
“It was on the evening of the third night. She had finished rutting with two of the men and had walked over to the fire. She was naked, and the blaze glowed upon her, turning her skin into a polished golden color.”
So, she had once admired this woman; possibly loved her. Well, I could see why.
“That was the first time I’d heard her accursed name. One of the men had called out from the tent for this ‘Tunning’ to get him some water. I spun around, looking for who the man was calling to, when the golden warrior herself swore at him. She told him to get his useless ass up and get it himself.”
“Then you turned her?”
“I did. Something inside of me snapped, anger blistered; I wanted to tear her limbs from her torso. That name, that she could possibly have anything to do with my father, was more than I could handle. She fought savagely, valiantly, to hold onto her soul. Even without her sword, she was powerful. She had broken two bones in my hand, my nose was split open and bleeding and I had damage to one of my eyes where she had tried to pull it from my head. Her blood was of the sweetest nectar I had thus far tasted. It made me giddy with the power of it. She had been blessed with some force I was not aware of. It was almost my downfall. The two she had lain with heard our commotion and rushed to the sound with their swords drawn. If I had risked staying there to finish her, I would have found myself dying next to her. I was certain there was no chance she could survive, losing the amount of blood I had withdrawn.”
“She lived, though?” I asked.
“She did. Her company laid vigil over her for a full five days, expecting that she would not recover. When she did, they wanted to kill her, fearful that the devil had taken over inside her. They almost had it right; they would have been correct to kill her. Instead, they stripped her of her armor and clothing and shunned her away. Without clothes, money or protection on hostile, foreign territory, she still managed to find her way back to England. Though she had never been an ordinary woman, now she was extraordinary.”
I was starting to see glimmers of where this story was going, but I’d been wrong once or twice so I let her continue.
“She fought every impulse she had to satisfy her blood craving. She arrived back at her home, pale and withdrawn. Her betrothed, who had been injured in the crusades some two years previous, recognized her sickness for what it was. He supplied her with blood from his farm animals, nursing her back to strength. By now, the news was beginning to spread throughout the small town. Fearful that the villagers would rise up and kill the woman he loved, he booked passage on a ship for the New World. He’d read about the savages and their ways, and reasoned that if anyone could help it would be their shaman.”
“You were on the same ship?”
“I was.”
“How did you avoid her seeing you? Pretty sure she would recognize the one that tried to kill her.”
“She stayed in her cabin throughout the voyage. I thought about killing the entire crew, even the man she loved. It sounded like something that might entertain me.”
“I’m not sure if I like the way that you kept allowing her to live. I suspect that somehow this story is going to come full circle.”
“The ship made port in Boston. The couple left during the cover of darkness. Lisdon was having greater and greater difficulty hiding who she was. I followed as they slowly traveled west. It was in Wyoming, Yellowstone, that they came upon a shaman who would be willing to cure her sickness.”
“This guy she’s with has some stones, doesn’t he? I mean, traveling with a known vampire and into the wilds of America where any great number of things could kill him, including the natives. I guess it makes sense that Lisdon would be attracted to someone as strong as herself. Mercy is not your strong suit, Eliza. It can’t just be curiosity that is keeping you at bay.”
“There were other forces here, playing a much larger game than I had ever imagined could exist, but finally I had to admit I was taking part. Lisdon, her mate Brentford, myself–we were but pieces being manipulated into various positions; you know how I hate being told what to do. The only way to combat this was to figure out who was rolling the dice.”
“Yeah, sucks being a Monopoly piece on a chessboard.” I was thinking about my own sets of circumstances. “Don’t really have a valid move.” I didn’t think Eliza would understand the reference, but she agreed with a slight head nod.
“The shaman could sense my presence in Lisdon’s life and he shielded her from me. She became invisible to my senses. I lost track of her for years, until I started to realize that it was not her I needed to look for but rather the lack of her.”
“The hole where she should have been. Yeah, I get that.”
“By then they had moved to Colorado. Far into the wilderness and high in the mountains, they had carved out an existence. The Tynes had two children and a small farm….”
I slipped off my perch. “What? The Tynes? Oh man, those pieces have been shuffling around far longer than I realized. Again, you let them live?”
“I tore Brentford’s throat open as she watched. She was paralyzed with indecision, whether to fight me or to drink from her husband. I would have kept her around for a while, had she eaten. The guilt and torture that would have emanated from her would have been cause for a great many of my smiles.”
“I don’t understand, you killed them?”
“The parents, yes. I was so wrapped up in their deaths I forgot about the children who had already run from the scene.”
“They survived…so somewhere down the long and twisted line, it was inevitable that I would run into a descendant of Lisdon. I guess it shouldn’t be that big a surprise that your finger was swirling around inside the fish bowl. Well, I guess I can see why you would hate the Tynes’ as well. Did Tommy know all this?”
“He pieced it together over the years. I never related it to him like I just did you.” She looked off to the side like she was wondering why she had.
I was stretching the thought out. “Odds are if you had never been introduced into Lisdon’s life she would have either died somewhere in the Middle East or back in England of old age. Coming to the New World would most likely be out of the equation. So many outcomes; who can be the captain of all these ships? And what’s the eventual outcome? Did it already happen, or is it ongoing? I hate this kind of thinking. Plenty of questions and zero answers. I don’t want to be some god
’s plaything!” I was standing and now I was pissed. I loved BT like a brother, no I take “like” back, he was my brother. But the fact that our meeting was pre-ordained by some uppity higher power irked the living shit out of me. It was trying to cheapen what we had for its own amusement or interests. It was apparently a foregone conclusion we were going to meet, but there was no guarantee of how we would interact; I guess that’s where our own will takes over.
“No more stories, I have no desire to know how you influenced my first wife’s relatives. I was just lucky enough she wanted to date me.” Those words had no sooner come out of my mouth when I thought on the influence Eliza had wielded and was currently having on my present wife. It seemed this vampire was a catalyst for a great many aspects of my life. It was like Victor was reaching out from his grave and influencing all things Talbot; and what about before Victor? There was a time in my life when I more than half believed in a great many government-led conspiracy theories. Maybe there had been something to them, if only I had set my sights a little higher or lower.
Out of the blue, I blurted it out like an awkward teen might ask a girl to the prom, not the same words, obviously, but the same manner and screeching tone. “Do you like having your soul back?”
She regarded me for a few moments; I thought I saw the flicker of a smile. She thought about it before answering. “It is a part of me, but it is a burdensome one. It has a weight to it that I do not care for.”
“Does it affect who you are?”
“Michael, I believe your conception of a ‘soul’ is flawed. It does not contain morals, it does not dictate how you act; we are neither ‘good’ because of it nor ‘bad’ for its lack. It is a manner of connection to other worlds, a leash, might be a good description. It is a conduit of control. And I will not allow that; not from anyone ever again. I will shed this choker when I am able.”
“A harness? You’re saying we’re harnessed?”
“Man is a horrible creature. Surely you have been around long enough to realize that.”
“There is a lot of good as well.”
“Oh, that old argument. When I left the earth, the civilizations of man were on the verge of collapse. Did Michelangelo’s paintings or Widespread Panic’s music save it?”
My head shot up at the reference.
“Sometimes there are creatures so misaligned that the gods feel taking control is the only way. Souls were created for this.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. If we were so controlled, why did things still go bad?”
“You can spray perfume over a pile of cow dung; in the end, it is still sweet-smelling cow dung.”
“Yeah. Talk about shit, I think you’re full of it.”
She laughed. “You can feel any however you want, the truth affects people in different ways. Now, I have given you enough time to ponder our escape from this realm; have you done so?”
“Yep. Got it all figured out, as a matter of fact.” I was fine with not exploring that line of thought anymore. “Going to go down there and demand our release. Tell them that they have the wrong people–that we don’t belong here.”
To her credit, or more likely naiveté, Eliza took my often-used prison words at face value. It had never worked in any of the shows I’d watched, there was no reason to think it would work now. What the fuck else was I going to do, though? I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling that something was wrong only because it was too easy. I know that makes about as much sense as saying something tastes so delicious because it’s bad for you. Wait…that one is wrong, because that’s usually the case…it’s either fried or loaded with sugar. Forget it, the analogy isn’t important. But most times when you think something is too easy something is wrong. It’s not because when you’re stealing the crown jewels from a museum you were really being set up by MI-6 so they can catch the infamous thief. No, it’s usually where you walk into Starbucks at peak time and no one is there, or you go to a McDonalds drive thru and they understood you the first time around and by some weird twist of fate got your order right. So…that means invariably a cop is going to pull you over for going through a stop light on your way home. It’s a way of balancing out the little highs with little lows. Can’t have one without the other. Nope can’t just let a good thing slide for a while, got to throw a hatchet straight at the heart of it. But I’m not fucking bitter.
There we were, just walking to this shimmering gate like we own the place, gigantic cat guards are leisurely padding back and forth on their side, I could see their tails swishing, looking again like they are on the other side of that bubbly shower door glass. The cats had Eliza’s attention; I don’t think she’d seen them before as she’d taken the express train down here. It was the glimmer of movement that caught my eye, like something was there but hiding effectively, some active camouflage or damn invisibility cloak. I only caught a fleeting glimpse when whatever it was, was on the move–like its camouflage needed a millisecond to react completely to its new surroundings, thus giving a brief window for me to “see” it. I really wasn’t sure I wasn’t just seeing things. I could almost hold on to that thought, right up until Eliza was picked up a good ten feet off the ground and hurled at least double that.
A normal human would have broken in half, like a worm-eaten stick. She was a little out of sorts, but she recovered quickly and looked to me angrily as if I’d had something to do with it, tricked her to stand in the ejector spot or something.
“Trust me. If I had that kind of power, things would have been a lot different. You can only see it out of the corner of your eyes; it’s an intermediate shimmering.” I could mostly keep an eye on the thing and it knew it as well. I had my axe up and I was going to do my best to bury it deeply into its flesh.
“I have it.” The cords on Eliza’s neck were pronounced as she strained to hold it. “Kill it,” she muttered.
The first thing I wanted to utter was “You caught it, you kill it.” But playing games with Eliza was like playing hide and seek with Charles Manson, the ramifications are too frightful to explore. “It’s still moving,” I told her, though it only seemed to be repeating a five-foot loop.
“So strong…can’t hold long. More…com…coming.” Each word was halting and took longer to come out than the previous.
“I hope this sucks more for you than me,” I said as I ran to it. My axe resounded like I’d struck iron. The vibration threatened to pulse the handle free from my grip. I thought I’d hit some sort of armor, but the piercing screams the creature issued told me I’d done something to incur some pain. It had no plans to suffer much at my hands. A vise-like grip wrapped around my neck. Now when I say vise-like, I’m not even using a turn of phrase. It was cold, and when my hand went up to yank on it, I would have sworn it was iron or some other indifferent metal. Pulling on it was not going to produce anything soon. I would be blacking out from lack of oxygen as my windpipe was shredded against my spine. I did the only thing afforded to me; I started swinging my axe. The vibrations made my shoulder feel like the socket was going to be rattled out of its own pocket. The squeezing on my neck intensified for a few moments and then began to subside as I relentlessly hacked away. The screams, along with the grip, finally faded and I was dropped unceremoniously back to the ground.
“Keep going,” Eliza said hoarsely, she was partially bent over like she’d done a couple wind sprints and was trying to catch her breath around the burgeoning gorge that wanted to force its way up.
It is difficult to have an intense fury for something you cannot see, but I gave it my best shot, repeatedly. I was confused at first by what I was seeing; pieces of things, like misshapen burnt crayons were all around me. Then I realized I was hacking pieces of the monster off and they were landing all around me. Not that this whole thing wasn’t weird but this was slightly stranger than the rest; each piece was a unique and different color. There were the major three, red, green, and blue, then some pastels, of all things, even a terrible teal, some gold and silver,
some that glittered, some that shimmered. It was like once each piece had been removed from the part of the brain that controlled the camouflage aspect; it just went haywire.
One would think that it couldn’t get much weirder, well that asshole would be wrong. Some of the pieces portrayed imagery of landscape, like an oil painting of its surroundings, and some looked eerily like the Grand Tetons. Then faces formed– people, animals, monsters, demons, life forms I couldn’t even describe or had any basis of familiarity with. There was a being with the top of its head white and eyeless and the bottom half was jet black with a toothy, worm-like pucker for a mouth. That one struck a chord deep inside; I did not want to play. I kept going even when I recognized Eliza’s words that it had been stilled.
“Michael, we must go. There are more coming and I will not be able to control them.”
I was covered in multi-colored gore, looked sort of like I’d walked through one of those car washes that shoots that tri-colored foam all over the place only this was from a psychedelic murder fest. It had been kind of trippy to watch after smoking a fatty back in the day. Right now, I just wanted it off me.
“I don’t really have any idea of how to get through this,” I said as I reached out and touched the unyielding wall.
“I do. We will need to bite each other.”
“What? No! No fucking way. You think whatever you want about souls but mine is my ticket to the promised land and I’ll not yield it again.”
“Oh, that drab area. You will have a place in my castle…that place? Like a dog being kenneled. You are far better without your constraints than with them.”
“You’ve already admitted being the queen of deceit. Hell is not where I start believing you.”
“Fine, Michael. I don’t really care what happens to you. Bite me so that I may pass.”
“That won’t work, will it? I can’t make you more of a vampire, can’t take what you don’t have. And now that I’m on that train of thought, why the hell does it take your soul away?”
“There were mages and witches that discovered our tether and ways to shed it.”
