Clan Novel Giovanni: Book 10 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Justin Achilli

  “They turned me later that year. I don’t know how your Embrace went, but the first part of mine was fairly run-of-the-mill. They had one of the guys drain me—which was another tough-guy part of the test, because I’m sure you know how fucking bad it hurts when one of us drinks from some poor slob— and then finish the job with a splash of blood across my lips. I remember thinking it was a pretty strange situation because we were in the cellar of a butcher’s shop in New York. This is, like, about a hundred years ago, and it’s all very new to me—you know what I mean. It’s not like tonight, when every fucking punk who’s ever seen a movie or black-wearing spooky kid knows what to expect. I mean, our family keeps things kinda fucked-up intentionally, you know? I mean, the whole time I’m a ghoul and drinking blood, I’m thinking it’s some kind of Roman Catholic guinea communion thing, and that this is how everybody out there does it. I never read Dracula and I never had none of this Anne Rice shit to tell me what the whole vampire thing is about, you know? I mean, vampires fucking get off on all that sort of bent psychological shit—keeping you in the dark, never letting you know what they plan to do with you. I’m guilty of it, too. I guess it keeps you from being bored with fucking having to live forever. It’s a nasty game.”

  “You’re changing the subject a bit, aren’t you, Chas?” Isabel interrupted.

  This silenced him for a moment. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

  “What happened, then? You worked yourself off track after being Embraced.”

  “Well, that’s it, you see. Fucking Frankie, and all that talk about sacrifice. He wasn’t fucking talking about me having to sacrifice some bullshit attachment. He wanted me to fucking make a sacrifice—prove that what I was becoming was more important than what I had been. Those fucks—once they turned me, they left the cellar and locked the fucking door. I’m all freaking out in the hunger, running all over the room, looking for anything. I’m thinking maybe some blood has leaked through the floor from the butcher’s above, or maybe rats or dogs or some shit come down here and I can go to town on them.

  “Then I hear something banging around in the icebox. Remember, this is turn-of-the-century New York. We don’t have big, metal, climate-controlled meat lockers, we have big, metal boxes kept cool with layer after layer of insulation and literal ice stacked in there to keep all the shit cool. I’m all out of my mind with hunger and it occurs to me that whatever’s crashing around in there might well be alive, so I fucking dive in there like a man possessed.

  “It’s my fucking kids. It’s fucking Ruth and Amanda.

  “But what fucking choice did I have?” Blood-tears streamed down Chas’s face. He glared at the road in the darkness ahead of him, as if he could just drive away from everything he had seen in the past.

  “I’m sorry, Chas.”

  “Oh, that’s not the end of it. See, they specifically didn’t put my wife in there so that when I calmed down and they let me out, I’d have to go back to her. Well, I wouldn’t have to, but they didn’t want to make it easy or straightforward. If I killed my wife, too, I wouldn’t have any choice but to move forward with my unlife. But they deliberately left her out there so I’d have to fucking tear myself up over what to do about it.”

  Silence hung over the car.

  Minutes later, Isabel spoke. “And?”

  Chas shook his head and sighed. “I had to kill her, too. I couldn’t let her go on with something as fucked up as this completely changing her life. I mean, how the fuck do you respond to this sort of thing? Me, I’ve had to go on and come to grips with it, but that’s because I fucking did it. When something like this just happens to you, what do you do? How the fuck can you even stand getting out of bed, knowing that something equally as fucked up or worse won’t just arbitrarily happen to you the next day, you know? My fucking wife didn’t do anything to deserve this—she married a Mafia guy. The worst thing that was going to happen to her was that I end up dead and she makes her own way or gets remarried. My goddamn kids—they didn’t fucking choose to be born to Anna and I. They were just fucking born to the wrong guy at the wrong time and his fucking sick associates put them right in the path of totally wrong shit. Me, I fucking wake up with it every night for a hundred years—fucking get over it, you know?” More tears coursed down his cheeks.

  “Yes, but you can’t—”

  “And that’s basically why I’m following you around on this thing. Maybe it’s not the most altruistic cause, you know, helping a bunch of fucking vampires figure out the thing that’s coming after them, but it’s a start, eh? It’s making some kind of arguably positive difference. Frankie’s dead. Fucking Victor’s dead. It’s not like I have anything to go back to except who knows how many more nights of hurting people and taking their shit when I feel like it, and this at least lets me feel like I’m contributing something.

  “And that’s what fucked me up the other night—seeing all those goddamn kids set up in neat little rows at Prudhomme’s fucking school. He killed those kids. He fucking chose to do it. He went out of his way, selected individual fucking children and drank them dry. When I go to sleep at the end of the night, it’s all I can do not to face the fucking sunrise for some shit that happened a hundred fucking years ago, that I had no power to control, and it’s something that he can do and rationalize and get up fucking happy as though it’s no concern in the world to him. My kids and my wife—I would have destroyed anyone who touched them. But it wasn’t enough. In his case, he doesn’t give it the least fucking bit of consideration.

  “The son of a bitch.”

  Isabel knew she could say nothing that would change Chas’s condition. This was his nightly demon. No doubt, when he saw the Beast, it wore his wife’s face, twisted into a mask of betrayal. It spoke in the stereo voices of his children, asking Why, Daddy, why; what did we do?

  Just then, Isabel’s portable telephone rang. Chas jumped as the digital signal toned, jolted from his unpleasant reverie. Isabel answered quickly, “Hello?

  “Where?

  “Was he there the whole time?

  “From Las Vegas?” She spared a pointed look at Chas.

  “Right. Last night. No, this morning?”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  Isabel turned off the phone and looked again at Chas. “Well, I have another reason for you to stick with me.”

  “Oh, yeah? Great. What is it?” Sarcasm veritably dripped from Chas’s voice.

  “Our man Benito—he’s dead.”

  Friday, 29 October 1999, 11:43 PM

  Nussbaum Fuel

  Outside Las Vegas, Nevada

  Benito let himself into the bathroom, carrying his handful of newly purchased supplies. The entire trip from the storefront to the restroom on the side had been a protracted affair—the key was attached to an enormous old steering wheel and Benito’s hands were otherwise occupied with the task of holding onto the toiletries he’d just purchased. After letting himself in, he checked the sole, dented stall to make sure he was alone.

  Drawing the filthy sink full of tepid water, Benito looked at himself in the mirror. He was a mess. First things first. He took off his shirt and stuffed it into the trash receptacle. Lathered his hands with water and soap. Washed his face and the grime from his hands, arms, and neck. Splashed a little water through his hair to loosen the blood and desert crud that had matted there.

  Jesus, if I worked at a gas station in the middle of the desert, I wouldn’t let me even come near the place.

  Before beginning the shaving ritual, Benito put his hands on both sides of the basin and shook his head. What had led him here? He vaguely remembered talking to the stinking unknowns who had kidnapped him, but they had given him precious little about themselves. At this point, he wasn’t even sure if they had been Nosferatu.

  Bringing himself back into the present, Benito looked at the squalor around him. The door to the bathroom looked as if it had been bashed in and then bolted back into the frame. Someone had scrawled on the inside surface of the door


  P.O.E.

  O.P.E.

  and a greasy tin of mostly used pomade sat on the sill where the sink joined the wall. A half-smoked cigarillo had been discarded on the floor, looking so dry that it must be at least ten, twelve years old.

  Even the lights carried a sense of misery and despair—two of the six that lit the linoleum room had burnt out and the rest were so yellowed that they changed Benito’s complexion from pale to jaundiced. Unwashed crusts of traveler’s and gasoline filth accumulated in corners, crawled up the stall walls and filled the creases between the tiles. The Formica sink counter had been scored, burned by cigarettes, spotted with other mystery gunk, and streaked with half-assed trails of tile cleaner.

  Still, Benito had about half an hour before his car arrived, and he’d rather spend it making himself look civilized than hearing whatever hard-luck story or cinematic yarn “Dan” had waiting for him. He lathered his face with the soap and dipped his razor into the rippled water, preparing to cleave away the stubble that adorned his face this and every night since his Embrace.

  “…Terrible place to die….”

  Benito looked around. He hadn’t heard the door open, nor had he observed anyone in here when he had first entered. Must be someone outside. Still, what a strange thing to overhear.

  “…Elodie, Hazimel, Nickolai…”

  This string of gibberish unnerved the half-dressed Giovanni, though he recognized the last as a name with which he was uncomfortably familiar. He spun, hoping that he would be able to “see” where the voice had come from, whether via moving shadows under the door or, less possibly, someone who had hidden behind something in the restroom itself. But where?

  “…Kiss like a spider…”

  After this last strange pronouncement, Benito heard a pop and one of the four lit light bulbs in the restroom burst, showering him, the sink, and the floor with a cascade of thin, jagged glass.

  What the hell is going on here?

  Pop. Another bulb shattered leaving the room illuminated only by a sickly half-light.

  And then the door to the stall swung slowly open, creaking on its rusted hinge. Benito spun to watch it in disbelief—he had checked the stall to make sure no one had been inside.

  From the tiny vestibule crept a form familiar but somehow different to Benito. What had once been smooth, swarthy skin had been crisscrossed by a lattice of livid keloid scars. The figure’s eyes didn’t match—one was the same as Benito had seen it before but the other looked as if it had been plucked out and returned rudely to its socket. The foreign eye veritably glowed red, brightening and dimming at seemingly random intervals. The clothes the figure wore were ragged, dirty, looking as if, since their owner had made the transition from his former self to this new…thing, he had forgotten all about personal upkeep. The hair was matted, the fingers longer and pronounced.

  “Leopold?” Benito wondered, aghast.

  “The same…same again and always. Leopold knows you. Leopold… So many nights wasted on you, Benito. So much time… your blood no longer cries out as it used to. Lost among the scum, Leopold—no! Benito! You traffic with those stinking rats?” Obviously, Leopold was rambling, probably maddened by whatever had wrought this hideous change upon him.

  Benito took a step back, acutely aware of the strangeness of the situation. Here he was, in the middle of nowhere in a gas-station bathroom he had presumed—known!—to be empty, wearing no shirt, with his face partially shaven and some twisted Kindred staggering from a place it could not possibly have been only moments ago.

  “Leopold, what are you talking about?” Benito asked slowly, hoping not to incite the ravaged Cainite to any rash act.

  “I told you, this is a terrible place to die!” Leopold spat, his good eye, if such could be said, pinched shut in anguish. “Don’t you listen? The names of the damned fall trippingly from the tongue!”

  “This is nonsense, Leopold. What are you saying? Do you need me to understand you?”

  “I don’t need anything!”

  “All right; all right. You don’t need anything.” Then what do you want?

  “What do I want? I want you to die, but this is a terrible place.”

  Benito knew he hadn’t spoken his last question aloud—or had he? Leopold was eating the thoughts that spun from his mind, approaching him with more and more malice. What had looked wretched and defeated seconds ago now seemed poised and malignant, a monster feeding on the fear and worry that poured from Benito’s self.

  “A terrible place? Why do I need to d—”

  Quicker than Benito could see, Leopold lashed his arm forth, twisting it into a fleshy crescent crowned with a razored crust of bone. The tendril swiped across Benito’s midsection, opening the flesh of his abdomen and spilling the withered remains of his once-vitals. Blood sluiced from the wound, covering the floor in a sticky sheen. Benito’s eyes registered a horrid pain and shock, and he stumbled backward, willing what was left of the meager vitae in his system to close the wound. If Leopold intended to kill him, he had only little chance of overpowering the deranged Cainite.

  The flight instinct took over. No matter Benito’s relatively advanced age, his hunger prodded the Beast to flee. He spun, bringing the full bore of his undead strength to bear against the door, shearing it from its hinges and sending it flying into the parking lot. And then he bolted—

  —but slipped in the pool of his own precious fluid staining the bathroom floor.

  Leopold wasted no time in closing on his prey. His ribs erupted from his torso, lengthening and piercing Benito, splaying and spreading and rending their victim apart. A quarter of Benito’s chest, the part attached to his neck, separated gruesomely from the trunk of his body. An arm tumbled to the ground, pried out of socket by Leopold’s intruding bone and severed as the rib-worm curved over itself to re-enter Benito’s body. Within seconds, what had been Benito Giovanni was nothing more than scattered piles of gore defiling a Nevada restroom. Presently, after the Final Death overtook him, Benito’s remains crumbled to a greasy ash.

  By the time the ash coated the floor, Leopold had vanished, but whether into the night or back to the realm of the unconscious from which he had surprised Benito, no one could say, for none saw.

  Within the hour, Benito’s cab arrived. The driver, a ghoul from the Scottish branch of the Giovanni family, knew exactly what he was looking at. With a careful mien, he scooped up enough ash to hopefully allow one of the accomplished necromancers to investigate the death of Benito Giovanni, and sped off into the night.

  Dan Nussbaum scratched his head and cursed whoever had knocked his door from its hinges. Goddamn vampire hitmen.

  Sunday, 31 October 1999, 12:21 AM

  The Bourbon estate

  Outside New Orleans, Louisiana

  The remains of the Bourbon estate house—the home where Oliver Prudhomme had experienced his ordeal with Blind Tom and whatever it was that dwelt there—had fallen into disuse over a century ago. Terrorized by the monster that made its haven in the basement, the widow of the house and her servants had followed Oliver’s example soon after he left, and abandoned the estate.

  The swamp had since made every effort to reclaim the land that had once belonged to it solely. Creeping vines worked their way up the boggy hill toward the house, enveloping it in an organic cage of vegetative murk. Time and the elements had eroded the foundation and walls of the once-proud home, leaving breaches, rot, and decrepitude in their wake. Although the air refused to move at ground level, some tremulous breeze passed through the shattered windows and splayed French doors of the house’s upper level, moving the heavy burgundy drapes of the house so that they looked like lethargic black ghosts in the darkness of the night.

  Isabel and Chas circumnavigated the enormous building, looking for whatever remained of the cellar Prudhomme had described in his letter or journal. Before long, they found it, a rude, rotten wooden affair laid over the gaping grotto that no doubt formed the cellar itself. No sooner had t
hey found the entrance than the air came alive with a keening wail. Cold wisps of wind whipped across the grounds.

  “The restless dead,” Isabel confided inside has them bound to the house, serving as sentries or something. “They’re probably angry at its dependence upon them—I can feel that they don’t serve it willingly.”

  “Can that help us.?” Chas asked, with an uncharacteristic tone of hope. Since the latter half of the car trip he had been dour and withdrawn, affected by the ghosts that populated his own past and the death of the Kindred he had been initially responsible for finding, before everyone he knew who had been involved in the affair had turned up dead themselves.

  “I doubt it,” admitted Isabel. “The Kindred beneath the house is probably older than all of these spirits combined, and far more powerful. Even if they acted in unison, the monster could probably dissipate them with a wave of his hand or banish them into other realms. No, I’m afraid we’re going to have to face this thing alone, and on its own terms.

  “Well, fuck,” Chas added. Isabel noted that at least this was in keeping with his personality.

  Stepping carefully in the darkness, the two made their way to the wooden door that feebly shielded the world from the creature within. Chas pulled the door open on its rusted hinge, which gave a metallic shriek that sounded not unlike the voices of the unsettled ghosts wailing around them.