"Sonja."
"Umm, very well, then. Sonja, I would like you to do nothing to me."
I stepped out from behind the screen. "Are you quite sure about that, Herr Ghilardi?"
Ghilardi was standing beside the bed; he was still fully clothed and had the black bag open. He opened his mouth to answer but nothing came out. My workclothes often affected the customers that way.
I was dressed in a black chamois Merry Widow corset that lifted and separated my breasts like jelly molds. My legs were sheathed in black nylons with seams up the back, held in place by a black lace garter belt. I walked toward him slowly so I wouldn't overbalance on my spike-heeled patent-leather pumps. I still had my shades on. Most of my clients didn't mind that I kept my eyes hidden while I serviced them. Those who demanded to see my eyes never returned.
"Lilith!" It was a gasp of recognition and repudiation.
Before I could tell him he could call me whatever he liked, Ghilardi thrust a hand into his valise and withdrew a silver flask.
"Verdamt Nosferatu!" he cried, and dashed its contents in my face.
I staggered backward, spitting out a mouthful of lukewarm water. My makeup was ruined.
Pressing his advantage, Ghilardi produced a large silver crucifix and slammed it against my forehead, knocking off my shades and throwing me off-balance. I landed solidly on my rump.
I clapped my hands over my face and screwed my eyes shut. I was vaguely aware of Ghilardi intoning the words to the Lord's Prayer in latin. I was too dumbstruck to notice if the skin had been flayed from my skull.
I'd been found out! I'd been identified as a monster and was going to die like one, that was the important thing. I thought of Denise's parents; how it would hurt them to find out what had really happened to their child.
There were hands on my shoulders. "Forgive me. Forgive me, bitte! You must think me a crazy old man, nicht wahr? How can I explain why I did such a cruel, insane thing…" He pulled a neatly pressed linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and began to daub at my face. "Please, Fräulein. I'm sorry if I frightened you. Are you hurt? Let me see…"
I took my hands from my face, and to my surprise as much as Ghilardi's, I began to cry. It was the first time I'd done so since Joe Lent's death.
"I am Nosferatu. You're not mistaken."
"Nein." His voice was soft, comforting. His hand strayed to my damp, unmarred forehead and patted it reassuringly. "You are not one of the Damned, child. Forgive me for thinking such foolishness."
A flare of anger sparked deep inside me. "What do you know about it, old man?" I tried to pull away from him, and when he would not let me go, I bared my fangs. He sucked in a sharp breath, but did not draw away.
"Let me see your eyes."
I complied. Even the dim light of my room was painful.
"How long have you been like this?"
"Since 1970. Maybe 1969."
"Unmöglich!" He seemed as astonished as Pangloss. He wiped away my tears and told me to blow my nose. "You are something very rare, Fräulein Blau. Maybe something that has never happened before." He handed me my shades, which I gratefully slipped back on. "But you are confused, aren't you? And you do not want to be Nosferatu, eh? Maybe we can work out an agreement between us, ja?" The old man smiled and rocked back on his heels. "How would you like to come live with me?"
Herr Ghilardi bought my contract from Frau Zobel and promptly installed me in his home, changing my life forever, if not for better.
He was independently wealthy. The Ghilardi fortune originated from a series of arranged marriages between minor Italian princes and the firstborn daughters of Swiss moneylenders. The family estate was located on the shores of Lake Geneva, far removed from city life and nosy neighbors.
The manor boasted a private library devoted to the fantastic, although Ghilardi's filing system was an anal-retentive's nightmare; leather-bound first editions sandwiched between garish paperbacks, while secondhand book-club volumes were thrust among rare folios.
I was surrounded by fictionalized reflections of my affliction. Ghilardi allowed me the freedom to examine whatever I wanted, but did not steer me in the direction of any one book.
I searched countless volumes for information, no matter how distorted, that might shed some light on my condition. I had access to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Rabelais' Gargantua, Walpole's Castle of Otranto, Beckford's Vathek, Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho, Huysmans' Là-Bas, and even the infamous Malleus Maleficarum. I met with nothing but frustration. There were no fictional counterparts for the likes of Morgan and Pangloss—or myself; Rymer's Varney was a penny-dreadful scarecrow and Stoker's Dracula a pathetic Victorian sex fantasy.
I sifted through the works of Polidori, Poe, Le Fanu, Wilde, Macher, Hodgson, Lovecraft, and a score of others and came away with nothing. Whatever clues I succeeded in plucking from the morass were inevitably contradictory. It was six weeks after my arrival when he finally gave me the book.
Ghilardi was on the terrace, studying a storm building in the mountaintops. The lake had grown dark and choppy. When storms break on Lake Geneva, they are awesome testimony to nature's potency. Ghilardi liked to watch.
"Did you know, my dear, that it was on the shores of this very lake, while watching a storm, that Mary Shelley first conceived the idea for Frankenstein!" He did not take his eyes off the darkening clouds as he spoke, a brandy snifter cradled in one hand.
I did not answer. I had already learned to recognize his rhetorical questions.
"So, you did not find what it was you were searching for?" His eyes flickered sideways, regarding me carefully. "Then, perhaps, this might be of some assistance." He removed a slender hardbound volume from a nearby table and handed it to me.
The book was entitled Die Rasse Vorgabe. The Pretending Race. This was the book Wallach had mentioned at Esel's party. The one that had ruined Ghilardi's reputation, reducing him to the level of Von Daniken, Churchward, and Berlitz. It became my bible, the revelation on which I built my world.
Humans insist on defining reality by their standards. They are poorly equipped to do so, since they are selectively deaf and blind in one eye. They are beings with an insatiable need to categorize the universe that surrounds them, but demand that the facts reveal a universe suited for human cultivation and exploitation. Things must remain status quo.
The Pretenders dwell in the cracks in mankind's perception of reality. To the untutored eye they are nothing to look at: beggars, cripples, prostitutes, anonymous strangers. Their faces are unremarkable, their demeanor bland. They aren't the type that like to draw attention to themselves. That is why Ghilardi refered to them as Pretenders; they pretend to be human, hiding their demonic otherness behind a mask of carefully constructed banality.
Only to the trained eye do the beasts stand revealed, their auras suffused with fearsome energy.
Ghilardi held the belief that mankind possesses a genetic trait for telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, and all the other sixth-sense stuff. Aeons of civilization and trickery by Pretenders led to the gradual withering of these psionic powers, the extrasensory equivalent of an appendix. Ghilardi was convinced he held the key that would awaken these dormant powers in any human, be they sigma-cum-laude or a hod carrier.
According to Ghilardi, Pretenders are the ereatures found in human myth and legend, twisted beyond recognition: vampires, werewolves, incubi and succubi, ogres, undines, and demons too numerous to mention. They escape detection by hiding in plain sight. The various species have only two things in common: they can pass for humans, and they prey on them.
Five years after the fact, I finally discovered how vampires—or what humans refer to as vampires—reproduce.
The bite of the vampire is not the factor that taints the victim; it's the saliva—in some cases, the sperm—that triggers the transformation. Once the victim dies, the corpse undergoes radical physical and genetic restructuring, readying itself for the new occupant. Once the transmutation is complete, a
minor demon enters the host, but that is far from the end of the process.
The transition from the spiritual plane to the material world is traumatic. The newborn vampire enters the host body without a personality or past. It has no frame of reference, only raw instinct. The neonate monster uses as its template the only thing on hand: the brain of the victim. This is either a good or bad move, depending on how long the victim has been dead.
If the host is freshly dead—say, two or three days—the fledgling vampire resembles, for the most part, a normal human, complete with memories and intellect. However, if the resurrection takes too long, what arises is a shambling mockery, all but brain-dead. These hapless monstrosities are revenants, the idiot children of the vampire race. Humans call them zombies or ghouls. They are far more plentiful than the traditional vampire, but their stupidity ensures their inevitable destruction. Many are so slow-witted they forget to hide during the day and die their final death, burned to the bone by the sun's rays.
True vampires of power—like the fictional Count Dracula and his real-world counterpart, Sir Morgan—are rare. Even under ideal resurrection conditions, vampires are born with imperfect brains. It takes decades for them to learn how to master their powers. Most end up killed, either by humans, or rival predators, or their own ignorance, long before they gain enough experience to lay claim to being a Noble, one of the vampiric ruling class.
Nobles are proud and arrogant. They are not afraid of being discovered; they flaunt their powers, often going out of their way to attract attention to themselves. They can control the minds of others, their strength and vitality are immense, they practice a form of astral projection, and by human standards, they are practically immortal.
The most interesting difference between Nobles and their wet-mouthed country cousins is that they do not feed on blood alone. In fact, they prefer feasting on human emotion—the blacker the better. Nobles are skilled in summoning and manipulating the darker aspects of man's nature, cultivating it so it provides them with an excellent vintage. Ghilardi claimed, that Nobles had been covertly involved with the Nazi death camps and the Stalinist pogroms.
It was easy to see why Ghilardi had been treated like a pariah dog by his peers. If I didn't know better myself, I would have dismissed the book as the ravings of a crank. Ghilardi claimed that the key to his discovery of the Real World was an ancient grimoire called the Aegrisomnia or, loosely translated, Dreams of a Fevered Mind.
I asked to see this so-called tome of forbidden lore, still uncertain whether Ghilardi might be a good-natured crackpot.
"It is a most wondrous book, the Aegrisomnia," he explained as he unlocked the display case. "I came across it while researching the folklore of the vampire. Most interesting. Shortly after I read it for the first time, I discovered I could… see things. That was ten years ago. I was hosting our little klatsch that year. When Herr Doktor Pangloss arrived I…" He fell silent, then glanced up at me. "I am told I had a collapse of some kind. I do not remember very much. But after that, Pangloss did not attend our parties for nearly a decade. That is when I began working on my book."
The Aegrisomnia was a large, rather awkwardly bound volume with metal hasps and an Arabesque lock. It looked like a medieval teenager's diary. The text was in Latin, although some passages looked to be Greek. There were alchemical tables, conjuring diagrams and what Ghilardi claimed were non-Euclidian geometric formulas. Every other page was covered in complex, multilayered patterns that, at first glance, resembled a child's collection of Spirograph drawings. However, when I looked at it a second time, I detected words hidden amid the esoteric scribbles.
Although my Latin was rusty enough to inflict lockjaw, I managed to decipher the opening line: "Greetings. You have regained that which was lost." I had to rely on Ghilardi's translation of the "secret text," which detailed the habits of the various Pretender races.
There were discourses on the matriarchal structure of the vargr, treatises on the reproductive cycle of incubi and succubi, and essays on the diet of ogres. Ghilardi was convinced that the Aegrisomnia was a Rosetta Stone for viewing the Real World. In theory, once exposed to its wisdom, the readers' "inner sight" would awaken, allowing them to pierce the veil and see the real world. Unfortunately, Ghilardi's attempts to prove the existence of the Real World were disastrous. Most of the handpicked initiates saw nothing but meaningless scribbles. The last one started screaming and didn't stop until he was sedated. After that, Ghilardi kept his precious volume of forgotten lore under lock and key.
Once I accepted him as my mentor, Ghilardi outlined the details of our arrangement. He would provide me with shelter and an identity while I would permit him to observe my evolution into a Noble.
Ghilardi stated I was a fluke, a freak even by Pretender standards. I was proof of man's tampering with the reproductive cycle of the vampire. Human technology had interfered in the natural order of things. Morgan had left me for dead in the gutter—and by all rights, I should have died—but new blood was forced into my veins, diluting, if not completely neutralizing, the virus polluting my flesh. The demon was trapped inside a living host, not a piece of dead meat. Most irregular. Since I never died and my brain was in perfect working order—well, almost—I was evolving into a Noble, a "king vampire," at an unheard-of pace. Ghilardi was thrilled by the prospect of documenting my progress. I was to be his proof that Erich Ghilardi wasn't a crazy old fool.
He also had other, far less academic plans for me. He'd spent his entire life steeped in the romance of the occult investigator. He fancied himself in the role of Professor Van Helsing, tracking down the scourge of humanity and driving a stake through its heart at cockcrow. But he was too old and infirm for such heroics. It wasn't until much later that I realized how insanely brave his attack on me at Frau Zobel's had been. Ghilardi had stepped into that room expecting to be killed, yet determined to play the role of fearless vampire hunter. Now he had the chance to vicariously experience the danger and adventure through his pupil.
I should never have allowed him to do it; it was stupid and foolhardy—neither of us had any idea of what the consequences might be. But I had come to trust Ghilardi as a wise man who knew what he was doing, and if he wanted to hypnotize me so he could talk to the demon trapped inside my psyche… well, who was I to tell him no?
It didn't take very long for him to put me in a trance. I felt as if I was sliding down the throat of a huge animal. I was surrounded by red darkness; part of me started to panic as I felt control of my body slip away. I realized I'd made a big mistake, but it was too late to do anything but fall. I thought I heard something begin to laugh. I regained consciousness thirty seconds later.
He kept insisting it wasn't my fault. That I wasn't responsible for what happened. Maybe he was right, maybe it wasn't me. But they were my hands. The bones are so brittle at that age—so fragile, like a bird—and broken arms don't heal as fast as they used to. I'm sorry; I'm so very, very sorry. Wherever you are, please forgive me. Forgive us.
From then on, the Other was my constant companion. It had always been there. At first it was too weak to assert itself, except during times of extreme stress, such as Joe Lent's beating. For years it had been my silent, parasitic partner, feeding on the emotions generated by my clients. Now it was my intangible Siamese twin, joined at the medulla oblongata, and I could no longer ignore its existence. I was unable to predict its behavior or, worse yet, safely control it.
My first outing as a vampire hunter was in Frankfurt, since Ghilardi deemed it wise to avoid a ruckus in our own backyard.
The neighborhood had been a ghetto before the Nazis emptied it. Then the Allies had bombed it until nothing remained but the cellars. Although rebuilt after the war, the neighborhood's soul never recovered. The nice new apartment buildings quickly withered, transforming the district into a slum. There was so much despair permeating the area the half-life would last for another thirty years. Perhaps that's what attracted him.
He was new; he
still had grave dirt behind his ears. He wasn't experienced at Pretending; he'd forgotten the basics, such as breathing all the time. That's a problem among the recently resurrected: most of them suffer from massive brain damage. This one didn't look too zombed-out, although he was far from MENSA material.
I watched the derelict, fascinated and appalled. I'd never seen a revenant before. Morgan was as far removed from the thing huddled in the doorway as Homo sapiens is from Homo erectus. The human eye could see nothing but a starveling junkie, shirtless and barefoot, shivering on the doorstep of an abandoned building. He was just another street person, made invisible by poverty. How long? How long had I been walking among the dead?
The revenant wore the body of a white male in his mid-thirties; he stood in the shadows of the doorway, thin arms wrapped around a narrow, sunken chest that did not rise or fall. His clothing consisted of a pair of ill-fitting pants held up by a length of rope and an old greatcoat the color of smoke. The uninformed would have attributed the derelict's shivering to the cold, but I knew better. He was a junkie, but it wasn't smack he was hurting for.
Ghilardi wrinkled his nose in disgust. "Mein Gott! I can smell him from here."
I nodded, never taking my eyes off the man. "Probably a bum to begin with. The district's full of them; they sleep in condemned buildings and in the piles of uncollected garbage in the alleys." I put one hand in my coat pocket, caressing the silver blade Ghilardi had presented to me in Geneva in anticipation of our first kill.
"Stay put, verstadt? I don't want you getting hurt."
Ghilardi said nothing, but we both glanced at his arm resting in its sling.
I walked across the street, aware of being watched from both sides. I prayed the old man would not try to interfere. If anything else happened to him… I suppressed the thought. I was going into battle and I needed to concentrate my attention on my prey… the enemy.
The revenant straightened as I drew near, his eyes gleaming hungrily. I spoke to him in German.
Sunglasses After Dark Page 11
