18 February 1889
I am writing in the hope that you, my son, will one day read this and understand the fallacy that is the power you refer to as The Eyes of The Sun. That you know me now only as a respected Elder and not the father that you rightfully deserve is as much my fault as the megalomaniacs who have transformed you into what you are.
Yes, I am your father, Oscar, and you once loved your mother and me as much as we were devoted to you. But that was more than a lifetime ago, before the war between light and darkness was waged, with power ultimately falling to darkness.
Once, we were a peaceful people, living in Lorraine after our ancestors could no longer sustain life in the mountainous regions to the south. We made our home in a remote and inhospitable location, knowing that our peculiarities would draw unwanted attention. For nearly two centuries, we existed without notice, taking only what we needed to survive from neighboring farms and villages. But in the end of the sixteenth century, it appeared that others of our kind had not employed similar discretions and hysteria swept the land. Our secrets were no longer and we were hunted.
It was your grandfather who suggested hiding in plain sight. Gathering the wealth our clan had accumulated for centuries, we migrated west to Paris, using our exotic appearance and higher understanding of natural sciences to establish ourselves as aristocracy. In Paris, we were welcomed into the highest social circles and quickly commanded enough power that others of high birth were paying for the privilege of our acceptance with their own blue blood. Soon, word spread and others of our kind came to join in the newfound luxury of living openly.
We grew stronger, more powerful. By the middle of the next century, we were the ruling class of Paris and as is the nature of power, it became a corrupting influence. Some among us began to take more than necessary and others were not content to rule alongside the humans who had accepted us. They began preying upon the commoners, draining innocents and leaving their bodies to be found by their families. They preyed upon political opponents, delivering their bodies to supporters as a warning.
Regrettably, the most power hungry of all was my own wife, your mother. Had I not been a romantic fool with a head full of denial, I might have noticed her swift rise and easy manipulation of those she felt were beneath her. Alas, the woman I had loved was gone and in her place was a cold and cruel witch, with eyes that now looked upon me with unveiled contempt.
Distraught as I was, I realized that I had to stay strong if I was to keep you from falling under your mother’s corrupting influence. It was then that we formed an order. We called ourselves The Sun as a reminder that a life lived in shadows is a life never truly lived. Our opponents were given a warning, which they failed to heed and the war began. Our victory was swift. The corrupted were hunted down and killed.
But when it came time to confront the woman at the head of it all, I faltered, unable to kill the mother of my child. I told her to leave and never return to Paris. The next day, she and her surviving attendants fled to the other side of the world, settling in New Orleans. We gave no more thought to those who left, and that turned out to be our downfall.
While we were attempting to restore order, there were those among us spreading doubt and discord. Unbeknownst to us, they had amassed a great following, calling more of our kind to Paris. They called themselves The Eyes, which indeed they were, seeing all and reporting our every weakness to those we had forgotten. Only after we had believed ourselves victorious and settled back into our comfortable symbiosis with the Parisian ruling class did they make their intentions known. The exiles returned from New Orleans, though changed in the most frightening of ways.
Gone was the exotic blush upon your mother’s cheek that I had found so appealing. In its place, skin as dark as the blackest night. The soft luminance of her eyes that once looked lovingly upon her newborn child was replaced with a blazing hellfire, the likes of which I couldn’t have imagined in my darkest nightmares.
But even her demonic appearance seemed harmless in comparison to the horror she unleashed upon the courts of Paris. Thanks to the information gathered by The Eyes, members of The Sun, our supporters, and our entire bloodline were executed en masse. Thinking only to spare your life, I pledged my allegiance to the woman whose very life I regretted sparing.
But my empty vow was for naught. I watched in horror as they transformed you from the beautiful man you had become into a creature of scientific abomination, wiping clean not only your memories, but also your comprehension of all things good and beautiful in the world.
The newly formed clan became known as The Eyes of The Sun, a gesture meant not only to display dominance, but to add a measure of humiliation to those of us who wrongfully expected mercy for compliance. For too long I have stayed silent. For more than half a century, I have watched you mindlessly perform every act of violence asked of you.
You remember not, but I have twice been able to reach past the darkness and find the son I once had. Twice have I witnessed the flicker of understanding shining through the moonlit coldness of your unnatural eyes. And twice I saw your mind once again taken away when you confronted the one who made you into the monster you had become. I’m afraid it has become harder to pull the man from the depths of darkness. With every treatment, you become colder, crueler. The euphoric ecstasy with which you commit unspeakable horrors lingers longer with every transformation. I’m afraid, after witnessing your most recent transgressions, this letter will fail to have an impact on your lost humanity. But I cling to my hopes, as always.
Having never received the cursed gift of immortality, I grow old and do not expect to see many more sunrises. Every one of my allies has passed from this world long ago. I have long given up hope that you will remember me or the way life was before the existence of The Eyes of The Sun. But I implore of you to look deep within yourself and find the man that is hidden beneath the flesh of the beast. Fight through the mind control, but keep hidden all that you awaken, lest they once again forcibly remove your humanity.
I love you, my son. I realize that love is a harsh and foreign concept, but I can only hope that one day you will learn to find comfort in the infinite power behind my simple words.
By the time I finished the letter, I was so disgusted that I had to go back and read it again just to make sure that I hadn’t misinterpreted what was being implied. Though Charles didn’t mention any names, it was clear that Oscar’s mother was Delphine LaLaurie. This was the terrifying LaLaurie of folklore; a woman so twisted, she would transform her own son into a mindless monster simply to punish the husband who dared defy her. I looked at the dates and made the connections in my head. Oscar neglected to tell me that the transformations that robbed him of his memories had been done deliberately to erase his humanity, but he must have known. And by his own mother, of all people.
Suddenly, the motive behind her elaborate and deceptive plan became clear. It wasn’t enough to simply poison me and steal my abilities in an attempt to become invincible. She needed me to suffer, but she needed me alive, so physically torturing me while my immune system was nonexistent was risky. Setting a trap by manipulating my own memories of Oscar served no other purpose than to satisfy her sadistic addiction.
The only piece of this puzzle that was still unclear was Damien. Certainly, he was a pawn in LaLaurie’s twisted game since I now had proof that everything he had told me was a lie. But unlike the others, Damien didn’t act like someone who was under the influence of hypnotic suggestion. I had to question whether or not he was lying when he told me his only motive was self-preservation. Either way, he was still someone I could not trust.
I scrolled back up and read the rest of Oscar’s diary. I didn’t expect I would uncover any more answers, but I was curious nonetheless about the man I truly never knew anything about. The more I read, the more I realized that it was likely whoever created the fake had read nothing of the original save for the letter. Nearly every entry, dated one week apart, was a detailed list of every l
ife he ended along with a description of the person and whether or not the death was justified.
I couldn’t stop the tears from blurring my vision. I too had kept a similar list of lives taken versus those I saved after I quit the Eclipse project to join the outreach. My reasoning had been nearly identical to Oscar’s, which was to justify my own existence and atone for mistakes I had made under the false pretense of doing the right thing. I only hoped that like me, Oscar came to accept that there was no reasonable balance and forgave himself. If he did, he never put it in writing.
There was no mention of the artist Erwin Arthur or his paintings, nor were there any graphic descriptions of torture fantasies starring me, for which I was grateful. In fact, the last entry was dated in 1975, more than a decade before I was born, and detailed the plans for a new environmental control system that was being installed in the compound and how he hoped to devise a plan to sabotage it. What struck me was the almost euphoric tone in which he described the end of not only the ES, but also his own life, thus erasing the manufactured evil from the world once and for all.
That the one woman responsible for destroying so many lives had survived was an injustice that left me sick. This was no longer about simply saving my own life. It wasn’t even just about avenging the deaths of those like Oscar and his father who stood against her. I had to survive long enough to see LaLaurie and her legacy of terror come to a fitting end.
Chapter 26
I hadn’t realized how much time I had spent reading the report and the diary until I looked at the clock and realized Holly had called me several hours ago. Surprisingly, I wasn’t uncomfortable or cramped from hanging out in the trunk of my own car for the better part of a day, but I was probably going to need to stretch before I attempted to run all the way to the other side of the Quarter in time to meet Sam. Still, I kept my promise and called Holly back.
“Do you want to let the rest of us in on this secret mission you have planned tonight?”
Holly’s voice was much deeper than normal and sounded suspiciously like Evan.
“Depends,” I said steadily. “Has Abe figured out a cure yet?”
“Not yet, but they’ve stepped up their research,” he replied hesitantly. “Lucy, I know what you told Andre earlier and… I’m sorry. We’re all working as fast as we can.”
“So it’s true then?” I asked. When Sam told me I was dying, I was scared, but it didn’t seem real. I had been holding on to the hope that he was misinformed.
“Abe and Wendella ran through a few tests and…” I could hear the discomfort in Evan’s voice. “I’m sorry, Lucy. If we had known sooner we might not be in this situation. But understand that no one is giving up on you. If you come back to the lab they might be able to work faster.”
Evan’s words hit me hard. “How much time does he think I have?”
“Based on the information you gave him last month, anywhere from a few days down to a few hours.”
“Oh.” I took a deep breath and tried to calm the hammering of my heart. “Then I’m sorry. I’ve got one shot at this and I have to take it.”
“Lucy, listen to me,” Evan started, but I cut him off.
“No, Evan, you listen to me. This isn’t a movie. My life is in real danger and time isn’t going to magically slow down so that the doctors can save the hero with seconds to spare. I’m going to get the antidote, but I’m certainly not going to attempt to fight LaLaurie on my own, so don’t worry about that. Once I have the antidote in my hands, I’ll call you and go immediately to headquarters. If you don’t hear from me in two hours… well… tell everyone I’m sorry.”
“You’re taking a huge risk,” he said with a sigh. I could practically hear the new gray hairs I was giving him sprouting. I almost felt bad, but he wasn’t the one who might only have hours to live.
“I’d be taking a bigger risk by doing nothing,” I said honestly. I glanced at the clock and saw that I was cutting it close. “If I survive, you have every right to yell at me, fire me, cut my pay, whatever, but right now, I have to go.” I hung up without giving Evan a chance to respond.
After turning off the phone, I slid myself out of the trunk and onto the back seat, stretching my limbs before attempting to sneak out of the car unseen. I switched off the dome light, opened the door on the side parked against the wall, and crept out into the garage, keeping to the shadows in case the security cameras were actually functional.
Getting out proved to be a bit dicey. Even though I picked a garage in a rougher area that even the most clueless tourist would pass by, it wasn’t completely abandoned. There were plenty of opportunists and small time drug dealers hanging around. Still, I managed to hop the back wall into an alley that connected nicely to the familiar maze of the Quarter. Feeling far more confident than I had earlier, I quickly navigated my way to the back of the abandoned shoe repair shop with ten minutes to spare. Remembering Sam’s warning, I moved to the shadow of a nearby doorway. Unfortunately, it was already occupied.
“I’m curious, Lucy,” Damien said, leaning casually against the crumbling brick wall. “What is it about this dismal alley that intrigues you so? Surely, you can’t think you’ll find the mistress home now, do you? I would think that with the racket the construction crews have been making, even the ghosts have left the manor. What are you hoping to find?”
As if he didn’t know. “What do you want, Damien?” I asked with a sigh. “That is your name, isn’t it?”
“When it’s convenient,” he said with a derisive laugh. “Does a mere label matter that much to you?”
“It does when you are pretending to be someone you aren’t,” I said, palming a CPA and flicking the safety with a loud click. “Oscar never had a brother, but it has come to my attention that he did indeed have a mother. I admit that I’ve been wary of you from the beginning, Damien, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise to find out that every single word that has come out of your mouth has been a lie. My only question is why? LaLaurie’s motives are clear, but what are yours?”
“I freely admit that my deception was a shameless attempt to play your emotions against you,” he admitted, “but I made my purpose for doing so abundantly clear.”
“Have you?” I asked, spinning the CPAs into position. “Because I think we have two different definitions of abundantly clear. Give me one good reason not to kill you right now.”
“You can try, little girl,” he said with too much amusement. “Make no mistake, Lucy, we still seek the same ending to this deadly game. I want the witch dead just as much as you do, more so in fact. I don’t know what you have discovered, but I assure you, it is just the tip of the iceberg. You found her, didn’t you?”
He could have been bluffing, but then again, maybe I was giving him too much credit.
“LaLaurie? No, but I figured here was as good a place to start as any. Obviously, I was wrong.” I waved my hand to indicate the construction crews.
“I see,” he said, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me. Instead, he was looking at the shoe shop with keen interest, which was making me uncomfortable. “What is it, a hidden door?” He tapped on the bricks in several different areas. I really hoped that if there was a hidden door, it wasn’t that cliché or simple to find.
When he bent down to examine the boarded up window, I realized that if ever there was a perfect moment to catch him unaware, this was it. My fingers tightened around my CPA as weighed my options carefully. Every fiber of my being was screaming, Do it! But there were too many unanswered questions. As easy as it would be to kill Damien, I couldn’t do it, not yet. But I had to get rid of him and fast.
“I don’t really have time to play games tonight,” I said and began walking away. It was now six minutes until midnight. I ducked between two buildings and jumped the fire escape to the roof as quietly as I could. Hoping that he thought I ran down Royal, I checked my hemograph and saw that he had followed and was now walking down the opposite side of Royal, clearly looking for me. I g
ave myself a mental high five and climbed back down into the alley, feeling less like a super hero and more like the roadrunner from the old cartoons.
At exactly midnight, I heard a soft noise, like stones being scraped together. At first I saw nothing, but then I looked down. Where I had previously noticed a boarded up access panel was now an empty space and the ancient cobblestones that lined the alley began collapsing down on themselves to form a staircase. A few seconds later, I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw Sam climbing slowly from inside the tunnel.
“You here?” he asked with a grunt as he emerged completely from the darkness.
“Over here,” I said and stepped out of the doorway. I barely made it two steps before there was a loud rush of air and something landed heavily behind me.
“For someone with a knack for party tricks, you sure have a lot to learn about stealth.” Damien chuckled as he pinned my arms behind my back. I cursed myself, both for carelessly putting away the CPA I had drawn earlier and forgetting that the bastard could fly.
“Let go of me,” I snarled. I should have listened to my gut instinct and killed him when I had the chance. I lifted my leg and delivered what should have been a bone shattering kick to Damien’s shin, but my heel met hard armor and his grip on me tightened.
“You aren’t the only one who prepared for a fight, my dear,” he said with a low, menacing chuckle.
“Sam, get out of here,” I ordered, hoping the old man still had enough fight or flight in him to recognize that sticking around here was a bad idea.
The Eyes of the Sun: The Complete Trilogy Page 88
