When he pulled his face away, I opened my eyes and reached up to touch his fangs. He threw his head back, as I drew close, and with a gravelly voice he said, “You cannot be enamored yet.” He tapped my cheek and said, “In time, my boy,” and moved away.
“I grew sick and fed up with it all,” he said, gesturing for me to return to the page. “Thetis could not anticipate such weariness when she made me. She has lived forever. The thought of my despising the world had never occurred to her. But she can shift, become something else, while I remain this for all eternity.” He spread his arms and looked up. “I watched too many come and go, yet nothing changed, an endless cycle of mediocrity. Can you see it?”
I only saw him.
“Take this down,” he said, backing away into the dark once again. He had to remove himself from my line of sight if I was to return to my task. The kiss he had given me had stolen my concentration, and I couldn’t think of anything else.
“An addendum to the whole,” he said. “I had not planned on speaking of Mendel but I see I cannot get away from him, a minor character, but important nevertheless. I visited Brno many years ago …”
A Gift for Johann Mendel
As I roamed the countryside, I met few of my kind. I often did in those days, our circles unlikely to converge on such a vast plain. But perhaps fate had struck, putting Johann Mendel in my path, leading me to the genetics that was, in fact, the first of its kind. A brilliant man and a creature of faith, he was a friar pursuing Augustine and botany with equal passion. His peerless faith piqued my interest since he was devout unlike any of our kind, but also his reputation for botanical crossbreeding had him struggling to beat the odds of nature. He, of course, was as brutal as any of us when it came to the hunt, but he tried to deny his taste for blood, and abide by a self-proclaimed manifesto.
I would take Johann Mendel as a companion, and my mother—always near, always covert—would see to it. She envisioned a future I could not, as my dispiritedness had already shown. The age of enlightenment had passed, but had left me with a concreteness too real to bear.
“You will not eschew my gift, yiós,” Thetis had said when we met on a hillside in Greece decades earlier. “You came through me,” she had said. “I know when you are thinking of death.”
“It is not death,” I had said. “But the end.”
“There shall be no end.”
“I am taxed and tired.”
“You need to find love.”
“I love but one,” I had said. “Myself.”
“Not if you are thinking of ending the life I have given you.”
“All things must come to an end.”
“Not those that are immortal, not godly creatures, not you.”
“Why do you wish me to live forever.”
“It is a gift, yiós. My gift to you.”
So mythology becomes history, I thought. The poets sang, more than three times Thetis tried to make Achilles a god, burning away his mortality, each attempt its own failure. She, who changed the fate of Zeus, raising Briareus to stand by her lightning bearer to save him from oncoming threats. She, who made men crawl and women writhe. She, who made me what I am.
“You are a thing of beauty,” she had said. “You are a creature so powerful even my father, banished to the depths of the seas, envies you.”
“Why do you cling to dead gods?” I had asked with an acid tongue.
Her back rose with my petulance and her aspect darkened, as a fire burst in her core and the chest of the body she donned glowed. Endless and unchanging, despite her shift, Thetis never settled into the stasis of another’s skin. She flung her hand across my cheek and rattled my jaw. Her eyes scorched me where I stood and I witnessed my heritage, my anger, my lust for blood wrapped up in the elegant body of a peasant woman. My mother’s rage practically burst the seams of her human flesh.
“To say I came through you is too mild,” I had said. “You made me with your bare hands, smelt me from Greek earth and forged me in a glory hole as one does with molten glass, liquefying me only to make me hard in the end, and the beast I am become.”
“I shall forgive your sharp tongue, yiós,” she said.
Like anyone raised with faith, Thetis spoke about her beliefs as though they were truisms. Named for the ancient Greek word to establish, she had set up my destiny with the triplets of Fate, making a fair exchange that steered my course. Centuries later, when she saw me wrapped in sorrow, she intervened and planted my desire for Byron, keeping me from death. But first she would pique my interest with science, and Johann Mendel would be with whom it all began.
I worked to convince him to follow me, to succumb to the world only I could show him.
“Why should I?” He asked. “Saint Augustine said men travel to see the gargantuan mountains, the vast and endless stretches of rivers, the circus of stars, but they pass themselves without wonder. I am interested in men, not the scenery in which they live.”
“He also said, ‘The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.’”
Mendel considered my offer long and hard, and still he refused.
“‘Faith is to believe what you do not see,’ he claims.”
“And the reward?” I asked, knowing the rest of the quote.
“‘The reward of this faith is to see what you believe,’” he said.
“Have you seen what you believe?”
“In most cases,” he said, “except one.”
“Which is?”
“That life may come at the hands of man, not simply his cock.”
“I do not see the point,” I said. “Are you saying you are likened to a god because you forego the use of your cock?”
“My cock is no use to me,” he said. “Complete abstinence is far easier than perfect moderation.”
“Says Augustine.”
“I commune with man because I must to survive, but I am not interested in sex, which isn’t to say I have not devised other ways to procreate in the name of science.”
“How is that?”
“The botany of the soul is a complicated and rigorous devotion, and one I am committed to expose.”
Mendel and I would often discuss science in the gardens of the Church of St. James while smoking tobacco, as we walked the rows of plants he had grown for his studies. But he would speak of things beyond my understanding and expect me to accept them at face value.
“Your desire to breed children without sexual intercourse,” I said, “reeks of blasphemy, does it not?”
“I do not see it,” he said. “My ideal is to make an unwanted child, to use its organs to save those God has forsaken in illness.”
His logic was unsound and soon I saw the kind of madman he was. He did not torture those he took, for finally I witnessed his feeding. He actually killed them and studied their anatomy, as Byron had done with the woman on his table the night I came for him.
“What is this obsession about, really?” I asked.
“God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil existed.”
“Is that you or Augustine?”
“Does it matter?” He assured me they were words to live by.
Thetis befriended the botanist too, seeing his potential and hatching a scheme to end my suffering. When she discovered his willingness to test his crossbreeding on a human subject, she made it a reality. Genetic coding remained a mystery until the mid-twentieth century, but DNA identification and isolation were discovered a century earlier. Johann Mendel had in fact made strides, a leader in his field, his faith struggling to cloak his skin and bones of science. When Thetis tempted him with a chance at human reproduction, his skin and bones won out. She found his first subject, a peasant named Agáta, and supplied him with the male specimen. How she retrieved my sample is no mystery. She simply took it, disguised as a whore on the street.
I had come into some money, and as was typical in those days, I visited one of the many public gaming houses in the Morav
ian city. I placed the whole of my small fortune on a round of backgammon I was sure to win. In all three rounds of play, my opponent rolled exactly what he needed to bear off before me. I had not seen he was a shill, posing as an amateur, until he foolishly placed a dice too close to the metal clasp of the board. They were weighted, stuffed with a magnet he had controlled. I let him have his victory, but followed him into the alley when he went to meet his partner.
He was an easy target and I satisfied myself with a pull on his juiciest vein after his partner left him with his cut. She was a woman of the night, marked with a corn poppy on the lapel of her dress. I found her without effort, as she lingered at the entrance to the forbidden alley. She approached me for a tidy trick, and we ducked into a portico to make the exchange. The shill’s blood had stimulated me, but hers was frighteningly taut. I retrieved my purse, as I sucked up her goodness, too engrossed in my high to notice when she pulled on my hair, plucking a sample. She clasped the strands in her hand even as she lost consciousness. Before I left her to her blackout, I tossed a coin on her chest and stole the corn poppy.
Thetis eventually fessed up to the trick, her disguise as the whore, but only after I changed the course she had set.
My relationship with Mendel grew strained, as he continued his pursuits to extremes, taking Agáta into his home, assuring me she was simply a servant girl. She became an object of desire, even as her belly grew engorged. My hunger swelled to unbearable portions, and I gave in.
One evening, I waited for him to disappear into his library, a pattern I had witnessed for months on end. We had taken up residency together, as companions often did then, but we lived separate lives, my keeping to a nocturnal schedule that had me gaming at the Moravian tables between the shade of the oil lamps and the lulls of the gutters. But that night, I feigned leaving and snuck up into the attic where the blooming Agáta kept her home. She was soaking in a steamy, lavender-scented bath when I approached, her belly the first thing I saw above the waterline. I stood at the rim of the tub, waiting patiently for her to come up for air. She wanted to scream but I kissed her hard and stole the cry from her lips. My attack set off her labor, but the sugary savor of her blood assured her and the babe in her womb certain death. I could not stop myself and pulled everything up into me as though I would never taste blood again. I left her tepid body in the bath, soon to grow cold, and fled into the night, far from my Brno home, never to return again.
Mendel did not pursue me. It was not his style. A man of science more than religion, he would turn Agáta’s death into a positive, culling data for success with his next trial.
So it was, and when Youlan reminded me of Mendel, I pulled him up from the mental depths into which he had sunk, in-between the folds of my mind, hidden even as I woke in a cell at the facility, my body having regained movement.
The prick in my neck was the only reminder of the lethargy to which I had succumbed at Youlan’s claw.
“Finally your return,” she said, speaking my ancient language.
“Why speak Koiné Greek?”
“I shall embrace my heritage,” she said. “For you.”
She stood before me as though a figment of my imagination, but touched my cheek to show me she was real. “I am here.”
“Where am I?”
“In the hub of his matrices.”
“Where is Laszlo Arros?”
“He will be arriving soon,” she said. “But first I must show you Mendel’s attempt wasn’t a failure.”
“Agáta died,” I scoffed.
“I stand before you as proof,” she said, “I did not.”
“How many attempts did it take to make you?”
“You left Agáta for dead,” she said. “But you didn’t consider the endurance of her child, the chosen seed planted in her womb—your seed wouldn’t die so easily.”
“No infant could survive my draining.”
“Why not?”
“I left her dead,” I said.
“A newborn will fight to survive,” she said. “It’s instinctual. Johann Mendel found my mother before it was too late.”
“Bull,” I said. “You are no child of mine.”
“He saved me after he tore me from my mother’s womb, putting life back into me.”
“Impossible.”
“Let me show you I am yours.”
“You have no proof.”
“See how similar we are.” She clung to the wall of the cell as though waiting for me to call her forth.
“We are nothing alike,” I said.
“Not you and me, she and I.” She pointed to the small bundle in the corner. “Pick her up.”
“Lucia?”
“Yes,” she said. “Pick her up.”
I flew to the infant, despite the trick. The swaddling was not real, but a delusion of the underground facility set off by the quicksilver I walked through upon entering. Youlan’s dart, laced with hallucinant, numbed my brain.
“Kiss her,” a strange voice said.
“Who is here?” I asked, turning about the room. Youlan had gone.
“Finally we meet.” The voice sounded in my head. “Do you remember me?”
“Show yourself.”
The voice clipped and silence returned. The infant cooed, and my attention fell to her.
“Do you see Youlan’s face in hers?” The voice became clear and I recalled Mendel’s lilt. I shook the sound from my ears, a mere voice in my head. “You have played with genetics, too.”
“Come out,” I said. “Face me.”
“I am with you.”
“Who are you?”
“I am you.”
I stared at the child in my arms, beginning to wonder if she spoke to me, channeling Mendel’s voice, but she simply made gurgling sounds.
“See her for what she is,” he said.
“What?” I called to the empty air.
“The reason she was made.”
The walls of the cell peeled away to reveal the smooth vault of the underground facility. The change happened instantly, as shifts happen in dreams, as we move in our minds from one sphere to the next without effort.
“Taste her,” he said.
With that, the infant’s wail rose up and she was no longer in my arms, but in a basket paces away.
“Go to her. Taste her.”
The smell of her blood had not wracked me until that moment, an intoxication reminding me of those who had come before.
“She is you,” he said. “The crux of the matter, your desiring you.”
I touched my face and covered my nose, breathing in my own smell to quell the hunger building up inside.
“Do not resist,” he said. “She is made for you.”
I stepped forward, as though my legs had a will of their own, reaching her in a single stride.
“Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation,” he said.
“Mendel?” I looked up at the low ceiling.
The voice huffed and said, “The road to immortality is paved with blood.”
The child squealed from the crib in which she lay, ogling me as though she made sense of my shape. She had given up fussing, and stared at me with a concentrated look. I did not see my features in her face, nor did I see those of her mother, but I saw the resemblance she bore to Youlan, and I stepped back.
“Man braves the beautiful so that he may reproduce it,” the voice said. “For ages, you carry it inside you until one day opportunity knocks and you let it out.”
“My child?” I whispered.
“Your conception, creation, and seed,” he said. “In common with him, he nurtures the newborn. Such people have much more to share than the parents of human children. The children in whom they have a share are more beautiful and more immortal.”
The infant gazed up at me, unafraid of my hunger. Her small chest rose and fell, beating to its own rhythm.
“Pick her up,” he said. “Taste her.”
I cannot say how I broke the spell, bu
t I ripped myself from her and faced away. “Show yourself,” I said to the empty walls of the cell.
“I am that I am.”
“You cannot be,” I mumbled. The voice was no longer the same, but had become the voice I had once trusted more than any other.
“Remember why you came,” Byron said as clearly as if he were standing beside me.
“This is my doing,” I said.
“You believed the child would save us all,” Byron said. “You envisioned a new race, a healthy human population to rise up and prosper, outlive the plague.”
“But the fight was to be long and difficult,” I said.
“So it will be.” His speech was made ages ago in the cathedral, when he spoke into my mind, into my thoughts. “You must protect the child,” he said. “Leave before it is too late and you can’t undo what you have done.”
Though I desired the blood of my kin, my subtle fangs had not dropped, and I would not touch the infant’s turtle flesh with my hard points.
“To save her,” Byron said, “you must walk away.”
The simulation fooled me, wreaking havoc on my logic. The infant was not really there, but had been built in my mind, a composite from memory. Her smell was real enough, and I was flooded with thoughts of Evelina, drowning me in a wretched sorrow I had given up when she became me. Could I find the taste of her blood anew in the heart of our daughter? Could I become a kinblood?
“No,” Evelina said, her voice rising up to replace Byron’s. “No,” she said again. “Not like this.”
“How did you find me?” I asked the empty air.
“I am coming for you.”
“Take me from here,” I said.
I am coming, she whispered into my mind. Stay sane in the meantime.
I closed my eyes and pictured her face, a glow around it like a burst of light to consume her head. I cannot say I lost my mind, but she was my witness.
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 59
