They left it to Joseph to alert them when he escaped. Only then did they rush to come together and bring him back. With Joseph frantically searching for another body, he could spare no attention for his prisoner. This meant no one knew he was now the monk, Joseph.
He was Joseph. Completely.
He felt no thread of connection at all to the body he'd left within the cell.
All Upton had to do was infuse Joseph's old body with enough life to take him away from here. If he could do it . . . if he could only do it . . .
He was fully inside the body now, feeling the pain increasing inside it, suffering the earthquake that shook the foundation of the old, failing heart. Hold on, he cried. Hold on!
Unused to the new shell of flesh, he lost precious seconds trying to sense the hands, arms, and legs. When he did, they were wooden and unruly. He sent thought impulses to them and managed to get the hands to press against the floor, raising his upper body from the stone. He looked out of the dimming eyes and saw all peripheral vision was lost. He could see only round porthole tunnels of vision so that he had to turn his head to observe more than a few feet around him.
He forced the trembling legs to draw up and raised himself to his knees. Pain racked him and made him grimace fiercely with every small effort.
I can stand this pain, he told himself. I won't suffer long. I have to get away and then I can discard this old flabby shell. He despised the body's odd scent and the unfamiliarity of the muscle and sinew. It was like walking into a smelly old house that had been lived in by a family of untidy strangers.
By taking hold of the door handle of his cell, he was able to pull himself to his feet. He leaned against the barred grate in the door and with astonishment saw his old body inside the cell lying on the floor. The eyes were open, staring opaquely at the ceiling. There was no hint of life left in that body.
By fully leaving it behind, his entire spirit gone from it, the body must have died for good. When he'd become a bird or mist or a tiger, the molecules that made up his body came with him. But when he'd fled into Joseph's dying form, his former body had been totally vacated. He had taken another body, just as they all did when their housing grew too old. So this is how it was done. You had to want it badly enough, want it with all your being. Only no one, he would wager, had ever fled into a body near the brink of death. No vampire would be insane enough to do such a fatally foolish thing.
He mourned the familiar body on the floor of the cell for only a moment before remembering his important task at hand. He owned the monk's body now. It was his. He must move it or he would be trapped inside it. He did not know what might happen if he did get trapped. He knew he wouldn't die. His spirit could not be killed that way. He didn't yet know exactly how he could be truly killed, but he didn't think a heart attack would take away his consciousness.
Still, he didn't know for sure. He must hurry. He must be quick. Even now the cells of the brain were dying off, millions of them winking out and going dark and utterly silent.
He fought against the anvil that was the inert body. The heart had gone into sudden fibrillation, flapping like a wild bird against the ribs. Though it did not beat in the undead, it could still leap into movement and cause the death of a body too worn to be replenished by blood. He had not known this. There was so much he did not know, he felt like an ignorant peasant.
His vision dimmed and brightened, light and dark alternating in rapid succession. Fear ripped through him like a madman banging a big bass drum.
Upton stumbled away from the cell door, leaving behind his aged body, and angled down the corridor to where he saw stairs leading up to shifting sunlight. He could hardly think. The mad drumming of panic bore him step by step away from his old cell. If he could get out here, he'd leave the prison behind. He must take it. He had to, even if it took every ounce of strength he'd ever had in all his life.
He reached the stairs without passing anyone, ignoring the vampire hisses from other prisoners when he moved past their cell doors. They thought him their captor, their jailer. He shrouded his real persona from them by keeping his thoughts focused only on putting one foot in front of the other as he went toward the light. He got his hand on the wooden stair rail and saw the flesh of his hand was gray, the color of death. His extremities were leaden and difficult to animate. His feet were pails of cement, his hands cold and numb as if they'd been frozen solid.
His teeth were showing, his lips having pulled back in hard effort and savage pain. He took a step and then another, pulling himself up the steps, his face held up to the light. A second attack shook him, the heart spasming. It caused him to halt, his left hand clawing up and his heart sending out an excruciating radius of pain. The heart was treasonous, working now when it hadn't worked for years, trying to bring the body to the brink of real death.
He had never known such physical suffering. He had never been so hurt, even when he was mortal and living with the disease of porphyria. His vision went black and again he panicked, the fear of entrapment in the decrepit body causing him to want to leap from it as from a furnace.
Yet he held on. The very real threat of physical death and entrapment forced him onward. The pain slackened only for moments and he could see again, though even less than before. It was as if his eyes had blinders on them, shutting out everything but one tiny pinprick circle. He was about to collapse, he knew it. He had to get up the stairs and out of the dungeon prison. Had to . . . had to . . . the sun up there . . . the air . . . he had to reach it.
He grabbed at the railing and pulled himself up the steps one at a time, silently screaming against the dimming of the light. He finally reached the top and staggered into the open. None of the monks were here either, as it appeared the passage had led to the back of the monastery. It was too early for the order to be working in the small garden where they grew herbs for seasonings and medicinals they sold in little packets at village markets. He had learned all the herbs' names as he'd watched from his cell window while they worked the gardens. Here was rosemary, tansy, and the nodding yellow heads of feverfew flowers. He stumbled across a bed of bright, fragrant lavender, broke through tall plants of spearmint and peppermint, crushed the ground-hugging pennyroyal. His feet dragged through the herb beds, crushing their tender leaves and stems as he staggered, and the air filled with pungent, green scent.
Would the monks notice his bedevilment of their precious garden? He didn't know, but he was very glad they weren't here now and that the garden was empty.
Through a nearby gate he could see a path leading into the jungle lying at the base of a forested mountain. Upton made for it, spilling forward like a drunk, the world turning above and below him. All his senses were on the precipice of being extinguished. He could hardly see where he was heading. He couldn't hear, his ears as closed as the door of a bank vault. He couldn't feel the warmth of the sun overhead. His feet were blocks that he painfully force-lifted to make the steps necessary to reach the path.
He gritted his teeth, his head splitting with pain now that narrowed his eyes to slits. He found himself on the path, still not pursued. This small freedom gave him greater impetus to press forward. He went on in his stumbling, shambling way, sheer desperation guiding him. What will I do now? He screamed silently to himself. What can I do? Oh, God . . .
Before he knew it, a young man was at his side, propping him beneath a shoulder, babbling in a dialect that made absolutely no sense to Upton. He was a native of the country, a Thai, trying to help what he saw as a fainting monk.
Upton tried to speak, but his tongue was lax and his throat would not move even to swallow. Thin streams of blood filled and dripped from his slack lips. He felt himself being lowered to the jungle floor, while above him the dark young man still spoke to him rapidly, but now he could not hear a word. He saw the lips moving, but the world was hushed and silent.
As Upton felt the last of the body's strength deserting him, his lids lowered and his gaze fastened on a leather pouch at th
e young man's waist. From it protruded the carved bone handle of a knife. With all his remaining will, Upton lifted up a hand and touched the other man, letting his hand slide with gravity's help down the broad chest to the young man's waist and to the knife's handle. He had to kill this man in order to take his body.
He had to . . . had to . . . if he wanted to live, he had to.
There was a look of surprise in the man's eyes as Upton withdrew the knife and pushed it with all his remaining might through the mortal's rib cage. The Thai hovered above Upton, his hands going to his chest and the knife embedded there. He looked down at himself in disbelief. He looked back at the monk, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell headlong to the side of the wide satiny umbrella leaves of a large elephant plant.
Upton gave in to the dying of the body he possessed. He willingly let it go, relaxing all effort to keep the pain of this death at bay. He closed his eyes and turned all his consciousness inward, gathering himself to leave.
He would be young again.
He would be free.
He would be undetectable for long enough in Thailand to flee to the far ends of the Earth.
Mentor . . . Mentor would never find him . . .
~*~
Dolan, tuning into the corridor where the special prisoner was jailed, knew suddenly something was wrong. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He walked to the corridor door and held onto the roughly hewn wood facing, his head cocked as if listening to a distant tune. He was listening with his mind to the unrelenting silence in the far cell. Too silent. No sound of movement. No electrical charges from anything living. Nothing occupied the cell but inanimate objects.
Dolan had kept his distance from the place where Upton was held. On his visits to the monastery over fifteen years he had never approached the old vampire, knowing that to do so would put him in jeopardy. Now he rushed back down the halls and took the stairs leading to the underground corridor of cells. He saw ahead of him a spilled bucket of blood.
He's gone, Dolan thought wildly. Upton is gone!
He hadn't any fear the vampire was playing a trick. Though a Craven, Dolan had grown more and more like the Predator species—strong, powerful, full of supernatural instinct. He could walk in the daylight now. He could go in Mentor's place to guide new vampires as they tried to fit back into the world again.
He knew what he'd find before he reached the cell and peered inside. Upton's body lay there, its spirit fled. Had the body died and trapped him in it, Dolan would have sensed it. This body was as dead as any mortal who had died. It was empty and cold, nothing but a fleshy container.
Dolan turned around, hearing a woman's voice calling him.
"Did he try to get away again?"
Dolan strode to the adjoining cell on his left and saw the woman there at the window. She seemed amused. She'd evidently seen Upton attempt escape many times before.
"His body's here. He's not here with it."
The woman put a hand over her mouth. She whispered, “Oh, no. How could he do that? That's never happened, not in the nearly twenty years since he'd been here. I heard Joseph the monk outside his door. Where is Joseph? Why didn't he stop him? For God's sake, call Mentor, call him right away."
Dolan went back up the stairs at a heady speed, his mind reaching out and sending the alarm that would travel over half the world to his master. "He's gone!" went the alarm. “Upton's gone!"
Dolan ran into a monk coming his way and grabbed him by the shoulders to keep them both from falling over. “Charles Upton has escaped. You must find him."
The monk's expressionless face changed, evolving before Dolan's eyes. It became a mask of hatred, the eyes darkening, the brow lowering, the lips drawing back so the fangs could lower into place. "We will find him, then," he said. “Please release me."
Dolan dropped his hands from the monk's shoulders and watched as the Predator monk rushed away. All over the monastery he felt the monks turn from their work and speed toward the underground prison cells.
Where were they when this happened, Dolan wondered. He returned to his room and tried to throw out his net of consciousness to pick up the missing Upton, but he caught nothing but the fearful coming together of the monks as they set about to share what information they had and give orders for the search.
"Jesus," Dolan whispered, staring out at the hot summer evening casting lengthening shadows over the courtyard. "I can't believe he did it."
Mentor had told Dolan the maniac Charles Upton did not understand his vampire powers or how to use them. He had never changed bodies until now.
Upton must have changed bodies. If he was not present in his own body, he must have taken . . . the monk's. Joseph. But how?
Dolan, like any vampire who had lived beyond a normal life span, had transferred from one body to another. No one had to really explain it to him or teach him how. The pure necessity and urge to survive helped draw him from a dying body toward a live one. After the first time, usually an abrupt event where one's body gave out suddenly, a vampire tried to be aware of his host body so as not to be taken by surprise and without a plan.
Had Upton's body been dying? It shouldn't have been as Upton hadn't been more than eighty-three. A powerful, strong, vibrant eighty-three at that. His disease had been healed and his body appeared to be near optimum health. Had he simply left his old body when it wasn't dying at all? Had he taken the monk's body just to escape?
Of course he had.
Since Dolan had never abandoned his own human form until it was of no further use to him, he couldn't imagine how such a thing was done. He imagined it would take a very powerful entity to do it. Someone so determined he could jerk away his consciousness from one body and enter with it into another.
Then what happened to the monk? Had he been thrown out of his own body by force or had he fled it for some reason?
It was all a mystery, but one Dolan hoped would be cleared up when they caught the monster again.
The monster who walked now in the robes of a vampire Buddhist monk.
~*~
Upton straightened from the ground and reached down to pull out the bone-handled knife from his chest. Blood gushed at first, but the flow lessened as the edges of the slit skin came together, and then beneath the skin, the muscles mended, the organs that had been pierced by the knife's point healing in scant moments.
He was truly vampire.
He had a brand new body, whole and strong and brown as a walnut.
As the young man, Upton stared down at the carcass of Joseph and kicked at it until he could get the body rolled off the path and into the cover of the jungle. He looked behind him and saw no one in pursuit. But he knew they would be coming soon. Someone would find the spilled blood in the corridor, or one of the monks would casually look for him in his cell and find his old dead body.
Upton didn't know where he was going, but he knew he could move faster if he were a low, sleek animal and not a man. Even a fast young man could not outrun some of the faster jungle predators.
He closed his eyes and focused his energy, changing rapidly into a black jaguar. He found himself on four paws, his vision at ground level. He could smell the scent of hot blood left back on the path during the stabbing. His nostrils flared at the smell of death from the old one who had been kicked and prodded away from the path. A long pink tongue snaked out and curled around his lips. He would like to eat the dead man. But he hadn't time, no time, no time.
He leaped up the path, bounding forward and then into the jungle, running as fast as his strong animal body would carry him. He noted monkeys racing away from his passage, screeching madly. Birds fluttered from branches into higher cover and small furtive animals made for burrows, but Upton ignored everything. He must put distance between himself and the monastery. He thought a village lay in this direction, but wasn't altogether sure. He relied on his animal sense of smell to lead him toward where men lived.
Within a half hour he was many miles
away from the monastery. He lay on his belly at the edge of a clearing. He had run faster than any man could have followed. He could see ahead of him a small, thriving village where people moved about in a natural manner, unaware of his presence. He slithered back on his jaguar belly, digging into the soft ground with sharp claws and stood when he was in the shelter of cover by a wall of thick green foliage. He focused again and his molecules spun, whirling into a dark cloud first and then forming the outline and finally the solid body of the young man he had possessed. Energy remembered the matter it came from, returning to the same form it had left. He marveled at this, at how much power he'd been granted by being made vampire.
Upton did not know what he looked like except that he was rather tall, with long limbs and large bare feet. His skin was dark, his face and chest hairless. His hands were finely formed with slender fingers. He wore a pair of beige shorts streaked with dirt and a striped polo shirt stained with rusty droplets of blood. He did know his vision was perfect, his teeth all present and whole, and the internal organs that supported the frame were as healthy and vital as could be. He could not have asked for a healthier body, but he didn't know what the face looked like and because of that went into the village shyly, holding his head down as he walked. For all he knew he was an ugly creature with a deformed face, a face only a mother would love. But at least he was Thai and wouldn't stand out the way he might if he had been entering the village in his old white man's body.
He found a worn bench carved from a tree trunk and sat in the shade of a crumbling building that housed both a tea shop and an old watchmaker's shop. He sat on the bench, watching life stream around him. The people of Thailand were beautiful to him—slim, small-boned, dark-haired. They smelled of spice and sesame oil. The women, especially, drew his attention. For the most part they were short and small breasted, with shiny hair twisted into intricate buns at the back of their delicate necks.
Watching the women, he realized he was ferociously hungry and also sexually excited. Being in a young body that had never tasted blood increased his appetite tenfold. It also had reawakened his sexual appetite. He waited for dusk and for darkness to fall so he could snatch a victim. He would take care of his sexual needs later, when he felt safe, but he didn't think he could go much farther from the monastery until he fed. His stomach seemed rolled over onto itself and his intestines all tangled.
SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy Page 42
