“Is this Sanskrit?” he asked, when confronted with the message.
“Something like that. We were interested in whose blood it’s written in.”
“Right. Look, I’m not on board for any Satanic junk.”
It’s hard to contextualize how amusing it was to hear a vampire say something like that.
“No Satanists, so far as we know,” I said.
“I mean, between the sulfur and the blood…”
“Do you know of any specific rituals this sort of combination might be tied to?” Mirella asked, beating her cousin to the question.
“Not really. I mean, kids play around with this stuff. Me, I seen it here and there, most times to try and drive me away, which is just… well, I bet the same’s happened to you, at least once or twice.”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“Garlic would do it. Sulfur’s bad, but it’s no garlic. There’s not many vampires in Italy, you get what I’m saying?”
“The blood, Calvin.”
“Right.”
He hopped up on the bed and sniffed the wall.
“It’s a couple, three days old maybe. Came from the living. Or he was alive when he donated.”
“You can smell the gender?” Mirella asked.
“No, ‘course not, luv. It’s not menstrual, though, I can tell you that.”
“What a charming consideration.”
“Not a bad idea, actually, if you’re looking to write spells in ancient tongues in blood on the wall and you gotta do it regular.”
“But it’s arterial blood,” I said, trying very hard to steer our blood expert back on-point.
“Yeah.”
He licked his finger and rubbed the blood, then sucked on the finger.
“But I may be right, probably a man. Incubus, I believe.”
“That’s a surprise,” I said.
“Well. Could be succubus, but I’m leaning toward my first answer. Why d’you find that interesting?”
“The people staying in the room went unnoticed, and I would never use that word to describe an incubus.”
“An excellent point. Hang on…”
He moved to another part of the message.
“It isn’t all the same blood. This first part is older. The passage was written at different times.”
“How far apart?”
“Difficult to say. Few days, maybe.”
He licked his finger and performed the same tasting ritual as before, which we all could have done without. He nodded slowly.
“Definitely different. This is some sort of animal blood. Preserved, I think. Very old.”
“Animal blood?” Esteban repeated.
“Unquestionably.”
“What manner of animal?” Mirella asked.
“Don’t know. It’s familiar.”
Esteban looked at me. “A sacrifice?” he asked.
“You’re hung up on satanic ritual, aren’t you?” I said.
“It would track.”
There is no such thing as a putative satanic ritual, not really. People have been playing around with the concept in recent years, but they’re mostly just making stuff up that seems sort of legit, based on whichever Alistair Crowley artwork they happened to stumble across. Historically, though, “satanic” ritual ceremonies were actually pagan rites that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Satan of Christian theology.
What was sort of amazing was that the idea of a satanic ritual was so culturally ingrained that it was being floated to me as a serious theory by a goblin in a hotel run by a satyr, while standing in front of a vampire who was licking blood off a wall. I was surrounded by the nightmares of insecure Christians; Esteban worrying about a devil-worshipping cult was a little like the monster under the bed worrying that there might be other monsters under there with him.
“How old?” I asked.
“The blood? Possibly very old.” He tasted some more. “There’s a way to reconstitute dried blood. I think that may have been done with this. You know… this is gonna sound crazy. Hey, pull that shade, would you?”
I stepped around the edge of the bed Calvin was standing on and pulled the drapes closed. They weren’t blackout shades and they weren’t the sort to utterly seal off the sun even on the edges and the center, but they were good enough to keep a vampire alive.
“How’s that?”
“That’s wicked, thanks.” He hopped off the bed and settled in the chair. It was one of those wicker things that must have cost a bundle. I couldn’t help but think that the flammable chair combined with the curtain and the sunlight on the other side of the curtain was the exact right combination to murder a vampire if I was so inclined.
But that would be uncivilized, and rude.
Calvin pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette, which I was pretty positive he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the room.
He lit it anyway. Nobody stopped him.
“Used to smoke when I was human. I get nothing from it, now, but I still love the feel of it in my lungs. I don’t use ‘em for nothing else, so… Apollo, you ever been to one of the gentlemen’s clubs, used to be all over London?”
“Of course.”
“Yeah, figured. Truth, you and I, we maybe met in just that kind of establishment. I can’t recall. It was something with girls that didn’t have much clothes on, so there you go. But I’m bringing it up not to embarrass you in front of your goblin lady friend, I have another cause. I’m remembering. I was at one of them places one time, except it catered more to my kind of folk. Still had girls, mind. I think all the clubs did, even if it was the kind of club where nobody was interested in girls. Anyway, someone there, he had a special kind of blood. Very unusual, very rare. Kind of thing nobody had ever tasted before. We didn’t believe him, of course, even when we were dropping shillings on the bar to have a touch of it. That’s a good con, right? The kind where you know you’re being conned and you still want to pay to get to the ending.”
“You had a taste.”
“I did. And I’m telling you, I think I just tasted that same kind of blood again off that wall there. I’m not fully sure, but I’m not gettin’ there.”
“You said animal.”
“I did.”
“So what kind of animal?”
“Well that was why nobody took the bloke seriously. What he said was, it was dragon blood. But everyone knows there ain’t such a thing, right?”
5
What we called the top of the island was actually a ring of flat land, which circled the real top of the island. The highest point was shaped like the tip of a thumb, had no trees and only a thin layer of wild grass, and was subject to uncomfortably high winds, and would be considered a cool place to be only in the event the mountain was much taller and there was some bragging to do after the fact.
Top of the island, then, was another real estate phrase, and like most such phrases it wasn’t fully accurate.
One of the tourist expeditions involved a hike from the base to the top (the actual top) along a narrow, winding path that went past a lot of private property. Possibly the most dangerous thing anyone could do on the island was stray off that path, because most of the top of the island properties were violently private.
These houses benefited from the tree cover for privacy, and from the thick ground vegetation for the maintenance of their isolation. Also helpful, the ground was hilly and weirdly steep in places, so a lot of buildings were simply hidden by the earth, from multiple angles.
I was told it was possible to see most of the homes from the air, but from the ground they were virtually invisible. Even the roads leading up the mountain were all but impossible to find.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the one driving. Mirella was. She didn’t know where we were going either, but her cousin did, and we were following him.
“Where’d he go?” I asked, when it appeared Esteban’s Jeep vanished into wilderness that looked indistinguishable from any other wilderness.
“I saw,” she
said, steering our SUV into a gap that wasn’t there. To make it easier on both of us, I closed my eyes for a little while. The sound of tree limbs batting the side of the car was a sound I was familiar with, but I was used to hearing it when I was the one driving.
“Cars were a bad idea,” I muttered.
“Today?”
“No, in general. As an invention.”
She laughed. “You think shoes were a bad idea. You are not the greatest of authorities on this subject.”
“Shoes were a bad idea.”
The disturbingly narrow road did not lead to a ravine or a slope or a hidden crevasse of some kind—the sort of thing if I were on foot and traveling at a reasonable rate of speed I’d be able to adjust to in time—but to a gate.
A sentry stood on the other side of the gate. It was a goblin with a sub-machine gun, which was just a weird show of force in all respects. The amount of work involved to reach this entrance was so staggering—find the island, find a car, find the road—that anyone who made it this far would not have stumbled here on accident. Whereas a sub-machine gun (it looked like an Uzi, or a knockoff of one) basically existed to announce, “you have come the wrong way, you should turn around”. This is especially so when the gun is in the hands of a goblin. The gun, then, was more than just alarming; it was alarmingly out of place.
I will grant, though, that an Uzi might be more effective against a charging automobile than a sword, but the gate looked pretty sturdy from where I was sitting. It could probably repel a charging car.
There was a long exchange between Esteban and the guard, and then the gate was pulled open and we were all waved through.
The road continued around a corner defined by high trees, but only about fifty feet, and then the mansion was in view. It was a lot closer to the gate than it seemed it would be from the other side of the fence. From there, one got the impression there was an impressive amount of real estate to cover before reaching a vast building worthy of being called a mansion. But this was a small island, and the mansion in question only occupied a tiny part of it.
In other words, the building around the corner was surprisingly modest.
It took up roughly the same footprint as our house, but was much more traditionally designed, and with two levels. (Or possibly three. A sub-level was architecturally conceivable.) It was distressingly mundane, the sort of mini-mansion made to look larger by way of forced perspective, in the same style one might find in a suburb in Connecticut.
“Huh,” was about all I had to say.
“You’re disappointed.”
“A little bit.”
“I understand there’s a pool in back.”
“Unless it’s the Playboy mansion grotto, I don’t think it’s going to change things.”
“I thought your excitement related more to who lives here than in what the house looks like.”
“Little bit of both.”
I’d never seen this part of the island up close. Mirella and I had done the hike to the top a half-dozen times, but we took the path rather than stray into the forest, which was not an easy thing for me, I have to say. I look at thickly wooded areas the same way other people look at the street they grew up on. Also, if I wanted to invade someone’s private property, I was skilled enough to do it without being seen, and no fence that stopped thirty feet beneath the top of the trees was going to prevent me from doing that.
Or I assumed. If I was wrong—if the owner of the property had a way of detecting me that I hadn’t thought of—it could cause an incident, which was very much verboten on the island.
I didn’t want to be the source of any local political turmoil just to scratch an itch, in other words. So instead, I saved my wanderings for the public land in the lower middle of the island. Nobody had snapped up that real estate yet for housing, and hopefully nobody would for as long as I was a resident.
I had some curiosity, then, about the estates that were taking up perfectly good forest. But Mirella was right; I also had my share of curiosity about the people living there. Especially in this case.
She parked the SUV next to Esteban’s Jeep, and everyone got out. There was only space for four cars, total, in the driveway—six if you added in the space necessary to turn around—so we ended up blocking in the vehicles already there: two black SUV’s that were smaller than what we were driving but looked bulletproof. (Up close, you can usually tell.)
Another goblin, in a tux and tails, was waiting for us.
“Morning, Go-Go,” Esteban greeted. He and the well-dressed goblin hugged, then parted as the sheriff made a show of checking out how his friend was dressed.
“You look stupid,” he concluded.
“Shut up, I get extra to dress like this,” Go-Go said in a poor approximation of an English accent.
“How much more for the accent?”
“It comes with the tux. Now get out of the way so I can greet that beautiful vision behind you. Mirella!”
“Hi, Go-Go.” The two of them hugged, and I was beginning to feel left out in the hugging department, just a bit. I wondered if I should go over and hug Stubby, just to balance out everything.
“Adam, this is my uncle Gaugin. Go-Go, this is Adam.”
Going by the hand he had on Mirella’s ass, I was thinking they weren’t legitimately related by blood, and uncle meant family friend. Although given the overall population size of the species, they were probably all a lot more closely related than they realized.
We shook hands as he sized me up.
“Pleasure,” he said. His body language suggested otherwise, but that wasn’t entirely unexpected. Goblin/human relationships were about as accepted as Jew/gentile; most people were okay with it, but there were some traditionalists with whom it bristled.
“Come on in,” he said to all of us after three seconds of uncomfortable eye contact. “He’s waiting.”
Go-Go led us up the path to the front door, over the threshold, into a decidedly pedestrian entryway, and through two more doors (dining room, kitchen) to the back of the house. There we found… the Playboy mansion grotto.
More or less.
“Are you impressed now?” Mirella asked under her breath.
“A bit more, yes. Let’s make friends with him so we can come back.”
She grunted a modest disapproval. Or approval. Hard to tell.
We walked around the pool, which was an amoeba-shaped thing designed to look like a natural pond. It had genuine vegetation around it, and while I couldn’t see it I could hear the rush of a waterfall. There was an enclosed space at the far end: a cave that was potentially artificial. That was probably where the water was coming down. If the architects wanted to they could have skipped the pool and made the house twice as large instead. I can’t imagine why they would do that, but they could have.
At a corner of the poolside, more or less opposite the cave opening, was a cabana. It looked permanent, with stay-cables bolted to the pavement keeping it from taking off in the periodic gusts of wind. (Mostly, the trees kept the upper island winds away, but some make it through.) It was a shame, because the cabana didn’t fit in with the theme in the slightest.
There was a table under the cabana, and a cushioned bench with an assortment of throw pillows, a number of chairs, a standalone ashtray with traces of cigar use contained within, and an elf named Dmitri.
Dmitri was mafia, and everyone knew it.
* * *
I have what you might call a highly contingent moral code. This comes from spending most of my life in a world where fair and unfair were, on a good day, abstract ideas. Codes of conduct—moral, social, ethical, pick one—are new things.
Sure, okay, every group of people with a head-count larger than two had some sort of standard, but I wouldn’t call them codes.
For instance, let’s say the party we’re talking about consists of five people, and all five of those people have to rely upon one another to continue in the world as five people, and not as three people, a de
ad person, and a dying one. It’s reasonable to say that if in that scenario you anticipate being one of the three, rather than the dead or the dying, you’re going to be okay with that, morally or otherwise. But the smarter ones eventually figured out there wasn’t a lot any of us could do to control whether we were going to end up being one of the living, the dying or the dead. However, the other four people had a lot to say on that matter.
In fact, with a little more thought we figured out there didn’t have to be a dead and a dying in this hypothetical party if all five of us were actively interested in keeping each other healthy and somewhat intact.
From that understanding came the realization that each person we added to the group improved our individual chances of not dying. This is more or less how tribes got built, and tribes led to civilizations once we figured out how to plant food and tame wildlife and so on.
This is the kind of morality I can get behind: you do what you can to keep me alive, and I’ll do what I can to keep you alive. If you decide to believe in a god and that god tells you it’s important to him or her, for some godly reason or another, to keep me alive, that’s fantastic. I’m all in favor of you and your god and your god’s moral code.
Anything beyond that, though, and I start to have questions.
Here’s the thing: the bigger a group of relatively homogenous humans gets, the more rules they have to start stacking in. Now, a lot of these rules are similar to the ‘you keep me alive and I’ll keep you alive’ code that I’m all in favor of, most obviously rules like: don’t kill other people in this same group. However, some of the rules are frankly ridiculous and have nothing to do with keeping everyone alive and healthy, especially once those gods began distributing ethical codes that appeared to have a lot more to do with whatever sexual kink the priests or the royal family were into than with good, solid advice contributing to common survival goals.
Inevitably, rules start popping up whose obvious goal is not to keep all the members of the tribe alive, but to keep only certain members alive, and that’s where I begin to get uncomfortable. I mean, I’m kind of okay with peasants having to grow food for royalty and then starving to death themselves as long as I don’t happen to be a peasant, but that certainly makes me think twice about taking any of the king’s other rules all that seriously. Likewise, if your tribe’s rules about private property are more important than the rules that say don’t let people die from exposure, I’m not going to pay that much attention to your laws about stealing. You’re already showing bad judgment; I see no reason to take you all that seriously.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 9
