He played his trick, and I lost all sense of myself because it was what he wanted. To turn me inside out, to show me my other half, the foreigner who lived among the colonists, the one who feigned similarity and fellowship.
“You are a stranger to yourself.” His voice, I recognized. “You are the last, Dagur. The wellspring from which all else must come.”
I searched the room for him, but my eyes grew more and more dim, as I groped the air in my blindness. His voice caressed me, whispering in my ear, “You are the last. The wellspring from which all else must come. She awaits you.”
I dropped into oblivion with the vision of one face in my mind’s eye, the mosaic I’d built in my imagination, the aspect of the girl the vampire had saved.
“She awaits you.”
Lucia!
I woke prostrate on the stone floor to the memory of her name whispered in my ear, “Lucia.”
Vincent sat on the window ledge in front of the glow that deceived the onlooker with his beauty. He scoffed and smiled, and I knew him.
“Lucia,” I said. “Who is she?”
“Evelina was impregnated with seed made from my DNA,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“How could you?” He let his shoulders slump forward, but he didn’t relinquish his place in the light. “The world was different then, as was human reproduction.”
“But you’re not human.”
“Of course I am,” he said. “I am both human and vampire.”
“I thought you were a god?”
“I am godly, though not yet divine.”
I sat up and my head spun. I waited a moment before dragging myself across the stone floor to my cot, where I pulled myself up and laid down my head. Vincent did nothing to help, but gazed at the saffron sun on the horizon.
“We must begin again,” he said.
“The night refuses to come.”
“She is here,” he said. “But in disguise.”
I took a few deep breaths with my eyes closed, and then braved a standing position, crossing the room to my drafting table, unaided. I sat on the stool and picked up the pen, a familiar instrument once again.
“It was in the third letter,” Vincent said. “His confession.”
He pulled the token from his pocket, as he retreated to the chair in the corner. I couldn’t see him anymore, though I wanted to study his aspect anew, his confession having sunk like a stone in the pit of my stomach. I could taste the bile of truth, and fidgeted on the stool as he unfolded the treasure. More was to come. I did not doubt the letter would enlighten me, but I heard the rapid crinkling of paper as he crumpled it in his hands. He sighed and whispered my name.
“You may face me,” he said.
I swallowed hard, as my body obeyed the sound of his voice.
“Why does my confession bother you so?”
His aspect, stewed in darkness, allowed me to imagine the supernal face I’d witnessed in the light.
“I can’t say—” My voice got caught in my throat.
“Lucia was brave,” he said. “As was her mother. A line of resilient women.”
“And her father,” I said, unsure of what I meant.
“Every male donor serves a purpose.”
“How could you not know?” I asked.
Vincent stood up and came forward, out of the darkness again. When he stepped into the light, he appeared younger and more beautiful.
“You are seeing beneath my skin,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Do you wonder how it is possible?”
“Yes,” I said. “I would like to know.”
He held the letter out to me. “Take it,” he said.
I rose from the stool and crossed to him on wobbly legs. Close enough to touch, his sorrow crushed my heart but I couldn’t say why. My difference from the other settlers struck me at that moment. I was more like Vincent than any of them.
I took the letter and he commanded me to read it. “Aloud,” he said.
It was written in Italian, a language my guardian had taught me to read and write, but never speak.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Yes, you can.”
The fanciful script was Byron’s without a doubt, as flourished and artful as Vincent had claimed in his journals.
I began with the first word, “Burn,” tripping over its pronunciation. It took several tries before I caught the flow and read with ease, my voice shaking in front of my audience. Mine didn’t rumble off the stone walls like his.
“Burn this once you have read it,” I said, reading the opening line a second time. “I have burned those you sent me. You must know this will be our final piece of correspondence. I have set things right—no, straight, sorry.” I fumbled but Vincent didn’t react. “You will never understand, but once I suspected your true intent, I took precautions to save him. The sample I gave you is not his …” I paused at the strange word.
“Gem,” Vincent said.
I looked up, and he gestured for me to continue.
“His venom,” I read, “is potent, but its ability for mutation is not where Vincent’s deity lies. There are things you do not know, things you cannot know about my—”
“Beloved.”
“Vincent.” I glanced up at him, but he gazed at the floor. “Things I know all too well,” I continued. “This secret, I have kept it to myself, but shall use it to ensure his immortality.”
Vincent shifted his position, seeming to move closer. I lost my place when I looked up at him again. “Continue,” he said.
“It is too late for you. The end is come. The solution to Vincent’s salvation rests in my hands and I shall coddle it, make it viable, bring it to life. Believe me when I say, he shall never die. But you and I shall only meet in death. Prepare yourself. Yours, etc., B. D.”
Vincent snatched the letter from my hands, holding it up to the window as though trying to see through it.
“Should I record it?” I asked, meekly.
The sun had morphed into a vermilion sphere, infernal and foreboding, bloodying the landscape.
“What did Byron mean the solution to your salvation rests in his hands?”
He crossed to the oil lamp on my drafting table and held the letter above its flame, dipping the page into the tongue, permitting the fire to lick at Byron’s admission and eat up the evidence of his treason. Vincent held the burning paper in the palm of his hand and watched it shrink to ash, letting the burnt pieces fall to the floor. Then he stepped on them, grinding his heel into the ash, making charred streaks on the stone.
He smiled when he looked at me again and I cringed at the metal points of his teeth. His ugly features had returned, his grief buried in a tomb of wrath. His monstrous aspect was never really gone—anger would always own the deepest part of him.
“There is more,” he said. “Sit.” He gestured for me to return to the stool, as he stood at the drafting table. I obeyed when he motioned for me to approach with a single finger. He kicked the stool out with his boot and tapped the top of it. I sat and he put his hand on my shoulder, leaning forward to whisper in my ear, “This is the seed—yours as much as mine.”
I looked down at the clean parchment and picked up the pen.
“Let us begin with Byron, shall we?”
Doctor Byron Darrow
A genetics specialist among other things, Byron Darrow was a bright member of the medical community, and his affiliation to Santo Padre Gio afforded him access to the equipment he needed. At one time, the hospital housed the country’s leading genetics lab. His work was his own, but we did not exist separately, and I encouraged his studies. His passion for the sciences was the thing that drew me to him in the first place. I could not know that by crossing his family moor one night our fortuitous meeting would seal both our fates.
Genetics had exploded in the years prior to the plague, as modes of insemination and child bearing had changed with the climate. After the eruptions
, the watershed, and both Great Floods, the population declined rapidly, and women relied on science to procreate, some even turning to artificial wombs for quicker results. Traditional copulation became an outdated mode for assuring pregnancy. Fetuses were genetically modified, made resilient enough to stay the course for what was to come. I suppose one cannot be surprised at the plague, the human race bound for mutation, a slip into another state of being, though not that of perfection.
At Byron’s insistence, when I dragged him from LaDenza, we remained close to the hospital where he had been on call for more than a decade. I did not frequent the infirmary, so when he discovered Evelina it was easy to keep her from me. He used the laboratory there to prep the sample he had already cultivated in his home lab, Evelina being the missing piece, the surrogate he needed for his plan to succeed.
Almost a month before he met her, he culled my DNA. We were feeding at the time, he and I tossing a body back and forth between us. The morsel was a flippant hotel manager who had smelled gamy, though not sullied. Our indulgence was fevered, as Byron instigated some roughhousing by grabbing at the neck before I had finished with it. His foreplay was frisky, until greed reared its pretty head and he begged for a smack. I slammed him to the ground when he tried to take the blood from me a second time. I was not starved, simply playful. I rather liked his fiery side, and hoped to stimulate him with my scolding. It pleased me when he raised a pointed claw and stabbed me in the cheek, tearing through flesh to my gums. But the pain was worse for him, as he struggled against my hardened skin and voracious high to press his claw in more deeply. He simply loosened a molar, and I scowled at him with a bloodied mouth. He backed off, fearing the wrath he had stirred.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I do not know what came over me.”
I laughed, which angered him. He thought I mocked his sensitive genius.
“I want the tooth,” he said, holding out his hand, palm up.
I reached into my mouth and yanked the loose molar from its bed. Another would regenerate and I thought it a small fee to pay for his effort. Plus, his sentimentality touched me.
“Will you wear it as a gemstone about you neck?” I asked.
“Perhaps.”
I never saw it again, and forgot all about it until his letter. The sample I gave you is not his gem, he wrote to Laszlo Arros. My venom was not the thing, but by some strange turn my DNA proved to be everything.
Like most scientists, as practical as they claim to be, Byron was an idealist. He believed every substance, every material had its perfect state of existence, whether subjected to some intense catalyst or simply deteriorated over time. Convinced I would fall in line with his plan, which was to keep Evelina safe, he inseminated her with the sperm he had cultivated from my DNA. She knew nothing of it, as he used his potency to freeze her mind and destroy the evidence of their ever having met. I taught him how to do that, how to clear a human memory. Evelina would build a new story to explain her pregnancy, a necessity she could not escape.
I have pieced this together from the scraps he left me, some from his notes and journal and other bits from his letters to Laszlo Arros. But her blood, of course, was the biggest clue.
Byron discovered Evelina Caro in a pediatrics ward, where she had been admitted for observation. This was still early in the outbreak, and some patients were kept at the hospital despite their not being at risk. Byron hid in plain sight, taking on staff rotations to blend in, and diagnosed her simple pulmonary infection, treating it as best he could. He noticed she rarely had visitors and questioned her about her family before he made his decision. He tested her blood, too, and found her to be a healthy candidate. Byron knew me better than myself, my vanity, my irritability, and my affinity for women. Men were a challenge, women a staple. Her tender aspect, her youth and beauty, were all to my taste. I could live and die for her.
In the meantime, my clan came together, as vampires I had known for years discovered where we were holed up to wait out the pandemic. Byron came and went freely, plotting his scheme, until it became too dangerous for him to go out alone. Once he had successfully impregnated her, he observed her closely, hour by hour, until she vanished, and he was lost.
I cannot imagine how much Byron suffered when he discovered she had fled. He hid his devastation well. He had no way of finding her, and could turn to no one for help. When we moved on to the cathedral, he grew distraught.
I do not know if he believed our finding her again a miracle, or simply fortuitous. She was healthy, and still carrying my child. Perhaps her attachment to me is what drew me to her. Whether his genetic modification, his act of god, made me angry did not matter. Byron Darrow proved a genius, and did the one thing I would have never believed possible. But he not only changed the course of my fate, for Evelina’s would also never be the same again.
A Sunken Ship
“Can you picture it?” Vincent’s grumble made my throat clench. “Evelina would be my consort, and the head of Cixi’s doomed coterie.”
I pictured the rise of his new clan, the vampire horde that would destroy its members to get to Lucia’s blood if it knew what it drank was killing it. But I couldn’t see Evelina as their leader.
“Your mind turns, Dagur,” he said, “but your question may only be answered one way.”
He rose and stood close to me, his cool air giving me gooseflesh. I threw my hand up to warm the back of my shorn head. He stepped forward and placed a flat palm on my back. “Do you see it yet?”
He drew his mouth up to my ear, and his kiss slowed my breathing, sealing up my airway. The room seemed to empty out of sound, and fill with stillness. His hand bore down on my back as though his reach crawled beneath my skin and his fingers plucked at my lungs, pressing my organs together, squeezing them like husks. He sucked the air from my lungs, making pinwheels of orange light spin in my head. The sensation was similar to my swim in the Reykjadalur in the frost season, and I lost consciousness, his words carrying me off. “Follow me,” he said.
He shuttled me back in time, back to the ship where the brood of vampires fed on toxic blood. “Come see,” he said.
We landed on the deck beneath a brilliant sky, bursting with constellations I had only seen in pictures. My guardian told me they used to see animals in the sky, each point marking an outline. I tried to see them, but there were too many points to connect. I concentrated on the air instead, the briny smell of the sea unlike the freshwater lakes outside the colony. The salt stuck to my tongue, as I touched the metal rail that kept me from falling into the pit of blackness below. My legs wobbled beneath me, as the deck seemed to drop, sinking into the black pool that held it suspended. My panic dissolved, as Vincent put his hand on mine.
“I have thrust your spirit back in time, pre-conception,” he said. “Here you are merely a work of the subconscious, a kernel in an undetermined timeline.”
I won’t waste ink trying to explain the experience of time travel. I’m not sure I actually traveled through time, but was not simply brought inside his mind and shown his memories as though they were a collection of paintings in a gallery, haunts I’d read about in recovered files. A different world now, men no longer waste hours on frivolous exploits like sculpture and illustration, valuing their work as if it were a spiritual donation.
Vincent gestured for me to follow, leading me through a hatch, down into the bowels of the ship. My body seemed to ghost, as my senses fired, seeing everything through his eyes. “You must see,” he said, speaking directly into my mind.
We walked from one passageway to the next, the lights bursting to full capacity as he passed each one. The light revealed the rust on the bulkheads, with algae-ridden counters and blocked crevices blooming with coral, crustaceans and carapace. The priceless works of art were gone too, disintegrated and decayed like they’d never existed. The exquisite ship detailed in the pages of his journal had become a skeleton.
“For years,” he said, “it has lain beneath the sea, a sunken reef.”
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I couldn’t understand how we walked a ship settled on the bottom of the sea, but his magic was not to be explained. “Explore it,” he said.
We toured for an endless period of time, and when we finally reached the cabin he’d intended to show me, he said, “This is the rub.”
I wouldn’t understand his meaning until much later, but I can’t forget what I saw there, in that sunken ship, beneath the sea. The wheel of the hatch seemed stuck but Vincent struggled and fought against the rust, pushing it open as the seal broke.
“Enter,” he said. “I am behind you.”
I suppose if I’d been in my right mind, I would have clamped up with fear and kept outside despite his insistence, but I entered and witnessed what he brought me to see.
“Memories are always past, never present,” he said.
The compartment was dark, but I recognized the striped head and single braid of the one who floated cross-legged in midair. The Hummingbird looked peaceful, despite his ferocity. His eyes were closed, and his face a clay mask. His whole body looked like it was covered in clay, the cracks on his skin revealing the hardening beneath. His weight seemed to defy the water, as he remained buoyed up by something tied to his waist. I moved closer, unafraid, as Vincent pushed me toward Huitzilli’s statue, revealing the chain about him. The thick adamantine link was attached to a beam overhead, which kept him towed in midair.
“Touch him,” Vincent said.
I obeyed and drew my hand up to the top of his head, his eyes remaining closed as I laid it on his forehead. I didn’t move, waiting for him to wake from his sleep. When he didn’t stir, I touched his eyes and then his nose, and even his lips. His face was harder than the sides of the cliff at Reïkyadul.
“He will not wake,” he said. “He sleeps for eternity.”
I couldn’t ask Vincent why, but remembered to do so once I could speak again.
“Come,” he said. “There’s more to see.”
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 52
