A Summoner's Tale - The Vampire's Confessor (Black Swan 3)

by Danann, Victoria

  Since they didn't know how long a vampire could survive without eating, they decided to force blood down his throat if he hadn't eaten by the third day. It took all four guards to force him to swallow a meager amount of blood. If there had been any doubt that the vampire was determined to die beforehand, it was quashed after all five of them ended up looking like a massacre. The effort to force feed ended up with far more blood on the knights and the floors and walls of the makeshift cell than was ingested by the vampire.

  After a few more such attempts the knights devised a method that was more successful. Baka would have been humiliated by the process of their solution if he wasn't past caring about anything other than his own desired demise.

  The powers that be at the top of The Order held a series of hearings regarding what to do with the vampire who was defying everything they knew to be true about vampire behavior. In the end, in their wisdom, they decided that he could be useful to them on that very account - information. What could be better for the organization than learning about vampire from the perspective of a vampire that thought and behaved like a man? Observation was good. A firsthand account would be even better.

  It was to be a pioneer study that would, no doubt, render invaluable data.

  The first order of business was to build a state-of-the-art facility to house and contain Istvan Baka. Someone suggested a newly acquired former fortress in Transylvania that sat on the edge of a cliff in rugged, inhospitable terrain. It was remote. It was secure.

  The vampire would remain guarded at Jefferson Unit while the Romanian installation was renovated to specifications and then he would be transferred there for permanent incarceration. At the same time, they put the Science Department to work on developing a blood substitute that would keep their new prize healthy and predisposed to answer questions without intravenous feeding.

  After three months, Baka was transferred to a permanent home in Transylvania. As he saw the countryside of the Danube valley pass by from the window of a train car that held no one but himself and his guards, he remembered the journey he had taken on foot with the monks to Wallachia, where he had met and wooed his beautiful bride. How it had changed since then. The irony of a Romanian homecoming was not lost on him and he knew in his heart there was one Universal truth. Life is bitterness. Bitterness, ugliness, and sorrow.

  The Order's scientists had quickly and efficiently come up with a food source that was nutritionally adequate. That was the best that could be said about it. He had resigned himself to his new situation. It was apparent that death was to be later rather than sooner. They would not kill him. Nor would they allow him to die.

  It was in fact a perfectly exquisite punishment. He would have to live with his memories every waking second of every day. The mythical fires of hell could never aspire to such torture. So he accepted his fate as fitting and settled into a new role. To The Order he was Baka the Consultant. To himself he was Baka the Tormented.

  He climbed the stairs to the tower without prodding and walked into a room with walls of stone. He sat as directed and was sedated so that the guards could safely remove the chains that crisscrossed his body before withdrawing behind the seal of the vault doors. When the sedative wore off, he rose and walked around the perimeter of his new world. One room shaped like a half moon with stone walls and a glass window with iron bars so that he could be observed at all times.

  There was one rectangular shaped window, too narrow to fit through although it wouldn't have made a difference, because that side of the fortress was built on the side of a cliff and the drop was hundreds of feet down. The view of the Danube Valley was breathtaking from that height. Baka didn't want to take any comfort or pleasure in anything, but he was still slave to an artist's eye and couldn't help but appreciate the beauty of the scene.

  The space was furnished with a chair, a bed, and a wash basin served by a hinged compartment. They filled the basin with fresh water every day and instructed him to empty the bowl out the window. There was another compartment through which they passed artificial blood, clean clothing and other necessities, and a third through which he would be passed logs for the fire, one at a time.

  Sometimes his guards would leave the compartment open long enough to converse with him. It was a kindness for which he was grateful, a distraction, and it was a pleasant way for them to pass the time. He learned their names, their histories, their stories, their problems, and their hopes for the future. They never asked Baka about himself. They already knew his history and his problems and the fact that he considered himself beyond hope of any kind. The guards liked the notorious vampire in spite of themselves.

  When finally his thoughts turned to what he might do to pass the time that loomed before him and could very likely prove to be endless, he reasoned that he might be able to suppress the visions by busying himself with some sort of activity. Anything would be better than a constant stream of the sights of hundreds of people he didn't remember, but whose last moments had been spent in terror, the knowledge that the last thing they saw was his face. To Baka the fact that the monster was not he, but a disease wearing his face, was an irrelevant matter of semantics; a silly argument like theologians debating angels dancing on the heads of pins.

  His last hope for any semblance of sanity was that if he could train himself to be fully concentrated on something other than the sights and sounds of the demon's carnage, he could perhaps escape into moments of peace. Now and then. It seemed hope doesn't die until brain function ceases.

  What would that blessed something be? The answer floated down and settled around him like a drug formulated to ease pain. Beauty. Perhaps the ugliness of the waking nightmares could be combated with beauty. And where is beauty found? In music. In art. In poetry. In romance.

  There was a time when he had known where to look for beauty: in the monks' conception of god, in a young wife's adoring face, in the laughter of a child happy to see him home for the day, in the spring-time wildflowers strewn over the mountain that had been his home.

  He vaguely remembered being fascinated by the organ he heard Bach play. He asked for an organ and got a piano. An organ could not be disassembled and hoisted up the ancient stone steps that wound to the tower. Nor did they want to provide him with electricity because they feared he would use it to commit suicide. But when legs and top were removed from a piano, it could be stood on end and was narrow enough to be carried - at great expense - to the vampire's prison.

  Since funding was not an issue for The Order, they procured a Steinway Model M from the factory at Hamburg, Germany. A finer piano had simply never been made. There were some logistics problems getting a five-hundred-seventy-pound piano up the tower's old curving stairs, but if you're prepared to throw enough money at obstacles, they tend to disappear. When all was said and done, after two sedatives were administered, Baka had a gorgeous ebony studio grand, freshly tuned, and sitting in his half moon world. And he had nothing to do but teach himself to play it.

  Without a teacher he had no way to learn to read sheet music, but he taught himself to mimic the sounds he heard from the crank Victrola his guards had given him as a Yule gift. They had taken up a collection and generously provided him with a handsome collection of long playing recordings that featured classical piano and a few jazz records as well.

  The Negro influence on American music had created an art form that was so dramatically different he wondered that it was still called music and hadn't been given another, separate, name. The tones of dusky voices, the way they made musical instruments weep - they called it The Blues. And he loved it. How he wished he could hear that music played in person. How surprising it was that he heard himself make a wish that involved living.

  His effort to learn how to play was assisted physically by long, agile fingers and by the discipline of a mind that had been trained to concentrate. For that very reason his favorite music to play was Bach. Because of the technical precision, it required a complete focus and did not tolerate the
wandering of the mind.

  When the piano no longer held Baka's attention with rapt intensity, he requested a new challenge in the form of a mandolin which was considerably easier to deliver. He remembered when he was a boy there was a man in his village who made haunting, beautiful sounds with a mandolin. Eventually he learned to mimic those sounds and then moved on to other stringed instruments played by strumming rather than bow.

  After a couple of decades of music and musical instruments, his attention returned to art. As time had passed he began to dream a little less often about the abominations the virus possession had been responsible for and more and more about his life before he became vampire. Those dreams centered on his family life, but he also relived the feel of painting; the creation of a work of art from conception to completion, his sense of satisfaction and accomplishment, and the recognition he enjoyed from the monks and occasional visitors to the mountaintop monastery.

  When he was not painting or playing, he devoted himself to learning such disciplines as literature, philosophy, math, science and history. He discovered a brainy and innovative network of colleges whose entire four year curriculum was based on the great books of Western Tradition. It was an ideal template for someone in his situation, the most logical approach to self-education. He asked for a few less than two hundred books.

  The Order had come to value their vampire informant very highly. They wanted more than just to keep him alive. They wanted him to be as happy as was possible under the circumstances. So, as an additional gift, they put him to sleep for long enough to have custom shelves made to hold his books and albums. While they were at it, they had hangers installed for his collection of stringed instruments.

  After three days of being sedated, Baka was revived to find half his wall space lined with beautifully fitted shelves installed by a master craftsman cabineteur. The other half had been transformed into a display of his fine array of instruments secured by sturdy hangers. There was plenty of shelf space yet to be filled, but quite a bit was now occupied by the entire list of books he'd requested in leather bound copies with gold leaf edged pages. In addition to the books he'd requested, there was also a brand new fourteenth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, all thirty two volumes and a library edition of Webster's Dictionary, almost six inches thick, sitting open on its own dedicated, waist-high stand.

  They had also taken advantage of the opportunity to bring in several dozen large canvases which they leaned against the wall next to a new mahogany easel with a cross bar that slid up and down at will to adjust the height of the painting.

  Last, but not least, a rare, massive, French rococo, antique desk in ebony to match the Steinway now sat near the window where he could face the room with his back to the light and spread reference materials in front of him.

  The guards who had come to know and like Baka were all gathered on the other side of the glass to see his reaction. It was apparent that they were hoping for enthusiasm which made him feel suddenly very self-consciousness about wanting to give them something in return. He did his best to manage a smile and an affirmative nod of the head.

  "Thank you. This is quite unexpected and very... humane of you."

  Baka wasn't just putting on a show. He was, in fact, overwhelmed with the generosity they had shown him. He was all too aware of the fact that they could have put him in a windowless, dirt cell and thrown away the key. And that would have been better than he thought he deserved. His second thought was that he had found himself in a gilded cage.

  In spite of being impressed by the compassion and humanity that had been shown him by The Order and being grateful for the terms and circumstances of his captivity, he never forgot for an instant that what he really wanted - all he really wanted - was the ultimate escape. Death.

  So he set about studying. He learned geometry from Euclid and chemistry from Lavoisier. He studied philosophy under Plato, Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger. He studied metaphysics with Aristotle and Kant, physics with Newton, psychology with Freud, Jung, and William James, and natural science under Galileo, Darwin, Pascal, and Einstein. He delved into theology with Augustine, Aquinas, Nietzsche, and Hume then looked at politics through the writings of Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Hamilton, and Marx.

  Though the value of all the various disciplines expanded his mind, the biggest impression was made by the literature of Homer, Chaucer, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Faulkner.

  He was always eager to converse with others on a wide range of subjects, especially questions of philosophy and theology. He also loved discussing the complexities of the great literary works and the entanglements of the human emotional condition that inspired them. Order personnel stationed at the Romanian unit who were familiar with a particular discipline would make the time to sit on the other side of the two-way cubby and visit with the prisoner.

  Occasionally the Unit would host a visitor who was particularly conversant on a topic either because it was an area of professional specialty or because it was a hobby. Baka didn't care if their motivation was to say they had experienced a dialogue with the equivalent of a circus exhibit. He found the exchanges a nice break in routine and, more important, a potent distraction from the memories that were always pressing against the walls of his consciousness for his full attention.

  As time passed, Istvan Baka's appearance didn't change, but the man inside the body was vastly changed by education and the experience he gained by reading the perspectives of thoughtful people. The knights who guarded him came and went. When they left he never saw them or heard from them again.

  In the 1950's he began writing poetry. He sent query letters to various publishers, but always got a variation on the same rejection letter: too dark and nobody's interested in poetry.

  At the same time he asked for a radio. They said okay, sedated him, and wired the room for electricity. It seemed that no one who understood why he shouldn't have access to electricity was still around. They were not just comfortable with his docile behavior. They were complacent about it as well.

  Truthfully, the whole issue of electricity had never been well thought out because Baka could have set fire to his room and burned to death had that been his choice.

  So he got a radio and with it the long awaited opportunity to end his life, but, though he still desired death, the passion required to follow through with suicide had waned enough to allow the natural instinct of self-preservation to override the impulse.

  The radio opened up a metaphorical window into how culture was changing on the other side of his circular stone wall. The changes were delectable, but nothing matched the change in music. Rock. And. Roll. Upbeat, optimistic, and sexy as hell. The first time he felt his hips involuntarily rocking back and forth with the music he made the connection and laughed out loud.

  The laughter was startling. It was a jolt his body hadn't felt since he had asked Sir Ruddy Hallows to end his wretched life which was what Black Swan knights were supposed to do. Instead the double crossing bastard had taken him into custody and left him to rot or flourish or whatever you would call what he did with his seemingly infinite allotment of time.

  The picture formed by the narrative on the radio told him the post World War II years were full of prosperity and an overhaul of culture driven by baby boom youth.

  At the same time, one of The Order's singularly talented scientists had proposed the theory that the conversion of a human to vampire was the result of viral infection. A few personnel assigned to work on proving or disproving that theory temporarily moved into the Romanian installation so that they could work with fresh samples of blood. Drawn from Baka, of course.

  Naturally, he cooperated, never voicing either objection or complaint. He didn't have any personal investment in whether the cause was virus or act of god. What happened to him had happened and couldn't be undone. However, if the theory should become a discovery, that fact might lead to someone else being saved from his fate.

  In the 1960's he asked for a Fe
nder Stratocaster and a Silvertone Tube Amp. He had written to some musicians and told them he couldn't shop as he was incarcerated, then asked for advice about what sort of equipment to get. The guards weren't necessarily thrilled with the sounds he made while experimenting, but they learned that gun-range-grade ear protection worn over cotton and wool ear muffs helped a lot.

  The next decade he added a bass guitar to his line-up and updated the Stratocaster to one identical to the model Jimi Hendrix played. He was good, but knew he'd never play for anyone besides his guards who were already too old to appreciate the style and would prefer that he didn't play at all.

  In the eighties he tried his hand at writing mystery thrillers. He carefully prepared query letters and manuscripts according to the industry standard specifications presented in 'how to ' manuals and sent them to agents and editors. He rarely got the chance to mail off a manuscript. If he sent twenty letters, he would get ten rejections and simply never hear back from the others.

  After more than a decade characterized by one round of rejections after another, he finally sent off twenty letters to publishing houses asking what they were looking for. Five sent replies and they all said the same thing. Romance with something paranormal thrown in.