The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3)

by K. P. Ambroziak

  “Was Muriel a therianthro—an animal god, too?”

  “Oh no,” he said. “She was nothing really, though Laszlo Arros considered her more.”

  “More than a source of blood?” I tried to keep my voice from cracking, but the mention of blood made my throat tighten.

  “Do you see the similarities between you and her?”

  I shook my head and the lamp flickered, throwing shadow dancers on the wall. He released a grim chuckle. “Still you do not see, even as I stand before you.”

  “I don’t know,” my tongue swelled, “what you mean.”

  “You do,” he said with a smirk. A grotesquerie, his mouth like the grill of a rake made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. “You know what you are.”

  “I don’t—I’m just like the other settlers.”

  “You are nothing like the others,” he said. “Trust your gut. It will serve you.” He spoke as though our conversation had begun long ago.

  “I’d like to know,” I said quietly, “how I’m different.”

  He took in a breath and licked his lips. “You want to know who you are, and where you come from?”

  “My parents—” I couldn’t finish. The mention of my bloodline seemed a bad idea, though learning why I was nothing like the colonists who had taken me in would give me some sense of self, something I had sought for a lifetime. Even Gerenios couldn’t ignore my differences, and the guardian who had abandoned me long ago reminded me of my position as the colony’s smartest member. A man without a name, my guardian taught me everything I know, things about language, texts and more. “Your contribution shall be for humanity,” he had said. But that was all I recalled of him. His voice, his face, his name were all flushed from my memory. “Your guardian has blown into the wind,” Gerenios had told me the day he disappeared before sun up. “Let him be.” he’d said. “He’s a part of the forgotten world now.”

  Vincent rapped on the drafting table with the back of his hand. “Has my journal revealed some truth?”

  He studied me with his ancient eyes, seeing through me. To say his look penetrated doesn’t do it justice. Like being the target of an arrow swift to its bullseye, one couldn’t dodge his hard stare. I couldn’t even swallow to loosen the phlegm in my throat. My heart raced and the pads of my hands throbbed, and the hairs in my nostrils tickled my nose as the air sailed past them.

  “I admire your ignorance,” he said.

  He thought me puerile but I couldn’t know the one thing he did. He wouldn’t live to see the sunrise, not with the predator in our midst.

  “Where did I leave off?” He glanced up at the sky, now the color of burnt umber. “We have the rest of the night.” He sat back down in the shadowed corner of the studio.

  “For what?” I stammered.

  “Shall we continue?”

  I returned to my drafting table, savoring the silence before his voice darkened the room once more. My hand trembled when he spoke, taking me back to the ship, back to the horrors of the den, back to the place that had given me nightmares.

  “You will need a stable hand for this, Dagur.” His voice shifted, melodic enough to soothe a child—or like the scratch on a door that begs to be answered.

  “We must reach the conclusion,” he said. “Before dawn.”

  I did my best to nod but my neck was locked in place again, and when I attempted to speak, my voice failed.

  “Shall I begin with the child?” He said softly, as though thinking aloud. “Or perhaps the letters. That is where I left off, no? Byron’s letters?”

  I scratched the words at the top of the page: Byron’s letters, and they stared back at me with curiosity.

  “He was the greatest,” he trailed off and groaned before picking up again. “The greatest part of the whole. His letters to Laszlo Arros reveal much.”

  I heard the crinkling of paper, as he opened the letter he’d produced from somewhere on him. His voice changed to suit the exercise, his tenor colder, indistinct, as he read selected excerpts for notation.

  “I will not keep this from my companion,” he began. “He must learn about you. You two must meet, for I am certain he will approve your cause. I do not know when our next visit to the Nortrak shall be, but the suggestion will come up without my raising suspicion.

  “He knows me better than I know myself, but will approve if I do. He defers to me with regard to scientific matters, though he is far from obtuse. He may not understand genetics as we do, but he knows more about our kind than any other, I assure you.”

  Vincent paused a moment and I’m almost certain he expressed another groan. When he began to read again, his voice sounded with a new resolve.

  “One of the greatest living artifacts, he is history incarnate. He, more than any other, can tell you what you would like to know. The samples I sent have been tested, but as I wrote last time, molecular replication is difficult, and I admire the work your team has already done. Man is meticulous in his mode of reproduction, as you know; limitations are set to protect the species. You may balk at my choice of words, but our kind is not excluded from Darwin’s principles. Our desire to reproduce is human in some ways, but immortality is subject to survival of the fittest.

  “I wish you the best of luck with the project, and of course my findings are at your disposal. I have included them on the chip, which I have cushioned between my penned letter (a habit I cannot break after years of living without a keyboard). Yours, etc, etc, Byron Darrow.”

  Vincent commanded my pen as though I were outside of myself, my hand hostage to his words, as I transcribed the parts he read for me. With a slight shift in his voice, he turned me into a dictation machine, and I would spend the rest of our time that way, taking down the record he needed to leave behind.

  “That letter is dated two years before the plague,” he said. “Seven hundred and twenty-eight days before the bloodless rose to infect the world.”

  He prevented me from turning to look at him, but I longed to see in his face the sorrow I heard in his voice—just once, I wanted to gaze upon the aspect the young Italian girl had loved.

  My mistake at that moment was letting her into my mind. I didn’t know he tracked each of my thoughts, sifted through my mental pictures, and recognized my mosaic of Evelina.

  My spine clenched, as it contorted backward and he drew me off my stool, raising me in the air. My throat closed and the room went dark, as the air clashed with his rage, and he smashed his fist into the wall, burrowing a hole in the stony tower. Pebbles rained on the ground as I slipped into silence.

  ***

  When I woke I lay on my cot in the darkened corner and he sat at my side, looking down on me. On the precipice of consciousness, between blurred sight and imagination, I saw his godly aspect, the one she would’ve loved. But it was gone by the time I gained my senses, and he chilled me with a painted smile.

  “I assume you have learned your lesson,” he said. “We must continue.”

  He stood up and motioned for me to return to my stool at the drafting table. A fresh sheet of paper had replaced the previous one and I looked around for the record I’d already begun.

  “It is safe,” he said, tapping the left pocket of his long length, double-breasted coat.

  The pen rose on the surface and floated before me, waiting for me to take it. No magic trick, no wires, it was all him.

  “Let us begin again with Shenmé, shall we?”

  I seized the pen but he waited until it no longer shook in my hand. Shenmé, I scrawled in the margin as subtitle. I remembered her most vividly, resurrected as she was in those last few pages of his journal. She had been on the ship the entire time, waiting for him, wanting her master to come to her, readied for something.

  “As you will recall, Shenmé was my first,” he said. “For centuries I had lived alone, the only of my kind, and then one night, this young girl changed my world, as though she recognized my power, and could draw it out of me. Shenmé was a child but awoke to womanhood—a
bloodlusting queen among mortals. Her aura spoke to my power, and I embraced my creation.”

  He sighed and let out a grumble before recounting everything he needed me to record, as he paced the small nook, his capelike coat flourishing with every turn. He began his dictation with, “I visited Shenmé after I read Byron’s letters.”

  Shenmé, the Great Xing Fu

  “Master,” my progeny said, “I wanted you brought to me.”

  “Why?”

  “I no longer rule,” she said. “None of the others know I am here. My progeny is their commander now, as it must be. Cixi’s ways are barbaric, but she has won their respect, and her failure to do so would have been mine, too. She has some good qualities, believe me when I tell you I tried.”

  She spoke as any honest maker would. Shenmé held her hand out to me and asked me to sit with her. I did not refuse my first, for she was on the cusp of darkness. Her skin, flaked and shredded, showed signs of the interior combustion to come. The hardening would begin in the spleen and spread to the abdomen, burning every cell in-between before turning her outer shell to ash. It happened to Byron, and it would happen to Shenmé. This time, I would witness it with my own eyes.

  “What am I to know?” I asked.

  “Byron was loyal, first and foremost,” she said. “No matter what you’ve read in those letters, master.”

  “Who is Laszlo Arros?”

  “The one to whom you must go,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “He awaits you.”

  His name as addressee to all of Byron’s letters was the first time I had seen it.

  “I heard of him in the Nortrak,” Shenmé said. “The Empress met her connection there. She’d made a plan early on, seizing the opportunity to harvest blood of her own.”

  “Plague profiteer,” I mumbled.

  “Her intent was never charitable, it is true.” Her fragile hand slipped from mine and she pulled it into her lap. “It eventually caught up with her, though. She has traded with a dubious character. The facility is a poisonous hive.”

  “How so?”

  “All manner of experiments, breeding, and plenty of blood.”

  She cringed, and showed me how loose her teeth had gotten.

  “Rot,” she said. “I’m rotting from the inside.”

  “Tell me everything you know.”

  Byron’s letters left me with holes to fill.

  “I don’t know how she made the connection with Youlan,” she said. “But she is from the facility and helped my Cixi acquire the donors. I suppose she brokered the deal, and the loyal horde of vampires followed.”

  “And Laszlo Arros?”

  “As I said, I heard of him, but I never met him. I don’t even think Cixi knows him. He is the one, though. The one you must see.”

  “How can you know that?”

  Shenmé forced a smile. “My donor escaped his prison.”

  “Muriel?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The only true donor onboard.”

  “She has been good to my Evelina.”

  She looked away and grit her teeth. The pain seeped through the stony face she braved.

  “Muriel’s arrival has done little to slow my illness. Even her blood can’t quell my starvation.”

  “What is happening to you?”

  She clasped my hand in hers and brought my fingers to her lips, indulging in a caress. I allowed her the indulgence, submitting to her praise since it would be her last chance to show me the respect she owed.

  “I’ve been poisoned,” she said.

  “By what?” I did not doubt it was something like Byron’s substitute, the one that killed both him and Elizabeth.

  She looked away again and said, “I don’t know what, exactly.”

  “Muriel’s blood has not restored you?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t recover,” she said. “The poison rots me from the inside.”

  “How can you not know the source of your own poisoning?”

  She looked away and winced, her face bearing a grimace. “Muriel has been inside the place,” she said. “She knows it.”

  “Is it run by a military faction?”

  “It’s non-governmental,” she said. “Private industry from Korea, I think. It moved to the Nortrak before the Second Great Flood.”

  “Is the Nortrak as it was?”

  “Nothing is, master.”

  Her eyes were deep black, blacker than currents, eyes in which a man could rightly lose his bearings.

  “Tell me about Muriel,” I said.

  “Youlan brought her onboard—she was part of a deal.” She struggled with her words. They would become muddled, as the pain snatched her ability to think. “She knows the Viking.”

  “Veor is a kinblood,” I said.

  Shenmé smiled. “You see so much, master.”

  The edges of her mind fizzled. I could see it in her eyes just as I had in Byron’s. The fire was lit and the anguish had begun. As I sat with her, she held onto me with a steady hand, never expressing the horror, a nightmare I could recall with the memory of my own short-lived poisoning.

  “Laszlorosesmutation.” Her words were smashed together, though I understood her meaning.

  “His mutation?” I asked.

  “A new race,” she said.

  “Is Laszlo Arros cloning vampires?”

  Shenmé nodded and looked away. “Cixi’s supply,” she said.

  “Are you speaking of Youlan—is she a clone?”

  “The letters …” She slumped forward and I propped her up beside me.

  I thought of Byron’s final letter, the words he used, I never should have trusted you with his venom – You have dishonored our kind – He will come for you – His wrath is epic – He will find you, I promise.

  “Muriel … the letters,” Shenmé said.

  “Did she bring the letters?”

  “Bought her passage,” she said.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Viking,” she said.

  “Did Veor come with Muriel? Was he at the facility, too?”

  She shook her head and mumbled, “Youlan … together.”

  If Veor and Muriel were kinblood, it was not by chance. He would have known who she was, where she came from. Though the ties are strong, it would surprise me if her scent alone revealed her relation. Those bonds proved more inviolable than I once deemed possible.

  “Some,” Shenmé whispered.

  “Some?”

  “Replicas.” Frail as she was, she barely moved her head to gesture. “Not real.”

  “Who? Youlan?”

  “Don’t vie for loyalty.”

  “To Cixi?” I said.

  She dropped her head. “To you.” Her gray skin turned plum, as she choked back the pain. “Muriel—yours—” Vague and truncated, her words tumbled from her lips disjointed. “Laszloroses—bloodless,” she said.

  “Tell me about the donors,” I said. “Why the colors? Their blood is—are they the replicas you speak of?”

  “Authentic, master.”

  “Authentic and inauthentic, you had said that before.” She pushed away and I pulled her to me. “What do you mean?”

  “The taste,” she said. “You taste?” She clutched at me and her eyes grew wide. “Don’t taste.”

  “Is the blood contaminated?”

  She closed her eyes and I tapped her cheek, the skin chipping as Elizabeth’s had.

  “The pain,” she hissed. “Unbearable.”

  “Why the colors?” I urged. “Is it something in their blood? Something given to them in the facility?”

  “Gene … engine …”

  She fell unconscious, and I tried the one thing Byron had not allowed me to do. I bit into her crumbling flesh and shot my venom beneath her skin. The relief was temporary but she revived enough to speak again.

  “Cixi’s donors,” she said, “are from there.”

  “And they are poisoning the vampires onboard this ship? Does Cixi kn
ow?”

  “My progeny is oblivious.” I held Shenmé more tightly, as she seemed to slip again. “Foolish … venom for blood.”

  “She traded venom for blood?”

  She shook her head and said, “She bought venom with blood.”

  “Whose venom?”

  “Yours.”

  The thought of my venom as a source of trade swelled like a balloon in my stomach, filling with my spleen’s black bile, as I succumbed to a wrath like none I had before. I pulled myself away from my progeny and paced the cabin. “Why did Cixi broker a deal for my venom?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “She used the sample.”

  I flew to my precious Shenmé and pulled her broken body up from the berth, drawing her eyes to mine. “On whom?”

  She bowed and nodded her head, unable to hold my stare. “Evelina Caro,” she said, the name a meaningless set of syllables stumbling from her mouth. She yelped when I let her slip and her body touched the cold metal of the deck. She lay her head at my feet, clasping my boots with her hands. “Please,” she whimpered. “Please.”

  The deck fell away, and my rage reached down and hung me up as though by a hook. It carried me up and up and up, my eruption breaking through the bulkhead above me. The Empress had flouted the greatest rule. Full circle, it had all come. My beloved Byron had started it, managing to purloin my venom without my notice, sending it to a nemesis, and setting the wheels of my extinction in motion. But the cunning Empress brokered a deal for my sample to make my counterpart. How she could know Evelina’s power over me was impossible. The irony was not dramatic, for no audience had witnessed the first theft, the grandest larceny that became my boon. Despite the violation to make Evelina so, she became the missing piece.

  “The novice,” Shenmé said, “is the anchor.” She looked up at me from the deck, attempting to gain my favor once more.

  “Your progeny has violated everything sacred to my kind,” I said.

  “Evelina was always yours, master.”

  I have cut off heads for lesser reasons, but I listened to my ailing progeny as she insisted I hear what I had not known before. I never doubted whether Evelina had forced Cixi’s hand, inflicting the wound to her own neck, but the past was newly revived in Shenmé’s cabin, and the question hung in the air unanswered. Had Cixi taken Evelina’s life to awaken her?