by Becket
THE BLOOD VIVICANTI
Part 1
Mary Paige
created by
Becket & Anne Rice
written by
Becket
Text copyright © 2014 by Becket
ISBN: 0-9898785-6-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9898785-6-2
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the imagination of the creator(s) or are used fictitiously.
Under copyright law, if you are not the copyright owner of this work, you are forbidden to reproduce, create derivative works based on this work, download, distribute copies of the work, decompile this work without Becket’s express written permission.
CONTENTS
Title
Copyright
Becket’s note
THE BLOOD VIVICANTI - Part 1
Coming next in Part 2
About the authors
Credits
BECKET’S NOTE
In 2011, Anne Rice and I began talking about the development of a new breed of blood drinkers.
The first ground rule was that they had to have an entirely different cosmology from her other supernatural stories.
She and I spent many weeks emailing back and forth, sharing copious detailed notes. We had several energetic lunches and dinners, whence we discussed the foundation and framework of the story you’re about to read. We swapped ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of these new blood drinkers, ideas about the characters themselves as well as their back-stories, and more ideas about potential narrative devices.
One of the amazing facets of Anne’s writing method is that she seems to devote almost as much time to selecting the right names for things as she does to carefully crafting the narrative. Both go hand in hand, I’ve learned from her. She’s taught me much. The right name is as important as le mot juste.
But what name would we call our new blood drinkers?
One day, after we’d spent weeks thinking about what to call this new breed, I came into her office as she thumped closed a Latin textbook. She beamed at me with her irresistible smile. She told me she knew what to call our blood drinkers. She had not chosen a Latin word, but had developed a new word from Latin phraseology.
What was the new word she’d developed?
“Vivicanti,” she said as her smile broadened.
I loved the word instantly!
“Our blood drinkers will be called,” Anne Rice announced: “The Blood Vivicanti.”
Then it was my job to write the story.
I passed by you and saw you flailing about in your blood. As you lay in your blood I said to you: “Live! and grow up like a plant of the field.”
You grew up and became tall and arrived at full womanhood. Your breasts were formed and your hair had grown. Yet you were naked and bare.
—Ezekiel 16:6-7
CHAPTER ONE
Half Title
CHAPTER TWO
Mary Paige
My name is Mary Paige.
My skin is as white as a porcelain doll, but I’m not as fragile.
My eyes are as green as emeralds. They shine like lanterns in the moonlight.
My hair is as black as ravens. It hangs just past my shoulders in gentle waves.
Some call my nose a “button.” Some say it’s “cute.”
I have the body of a gymnast, small and lean and graceful. I wish I were as tall as five feet. People tower over me.
I was made a Blood Vivicanti when I was seventeen years old.
I was chosen to become what I am because of my photographic memory.
The scientist who made us – Wyn is his name – chose me because he was curious to know if my gift could improve his method.
Yes, the Blood Vivicanti are a science experiment. We are still subject to observation and experimentation – a little too much sometimes.
Thankfully I don’t have to scurry through mazes anymore.
There is much about being a Blood Vivicanti that we do not know.
We know we’re no longer human, even though we still look like you.
We know we’re not vampires either, since we do not have fangs, but we do drink blood and eat your Blood Memories. We pierce you with a stinger that comes from the tip of our tongues. We call it our Probiscus.
And we know we might be immortal since I was made a Blood Vivicanti a decade ago and I still look like a seventeen-year-old girl. I’m not complaining, but looking at least twenty-five might not be all that bad either.
Alas, my photographic memory has not improved the method for making the Blood Vivicanti.
But then again, I haven’t really tried to improve us, and neither has Wyn – not since we lost him in a massive explosion at the Locomotive Deadyards.
I don’t think we need improvement anyway. For the first time in my life, I actually like being me.
Yes, I’m petite. Yes, I look like a breakable teen.
But as this tale unfolds, you’ll see how I drank the blood and ate the Blood Memories of a dozen martial artists, a physicist, and a truck driver – how I read and memorized the collected works of Aristotle, Saint Paul, and Ben Loory in a day – and how I also leaped from the 120th floor of a building while simultaneously shouldering a quarter-ton alien coffin.
Not bad for a girl under five feet and a hundred pounds.
I’d like to think that God or fate or some higher purpose made me a Blood Vivicanti to make up for the crummy childhood I had.
My fifth grade teacher was the first to discover my photographic memory. His name was Mr. Wilkey. He had kind dark eyes, a shaven head, and a black mustache and goatee. He was the kind of teacher who would meet you where you were.
My peers in school did not like me at all. I was always carrying around a large book for reading. Fictional characters were my best friends. My peers laughed at me for that.
I’d already read and memorized all my fifth grade schoolbooks. I knew the answers to any question that Mr. Wilkey might ask.
I always sat in the back of class. It helped me avoid being called on to speak. Speaking in class upped my chances for being misunderstood.
I don’t like being misunderstood. Never have. So at that time, I preferred not speaking in class, or to anyone for that matter.
One day, Mr. Wilkey came to the back of the class and he asked me to repeat the lesson on page 11 of our textbook.
I repeated it. My voice was quiet. A field mouse might have heard me.
“A little louder, please,” he said. “The class needs to hear your answer.”
Once again I repeated the lesson from page 11, word for word. It ran over onto page 12.
Mr. Wilkey had an expression that I had not seen before. I didn’t know how to react to it. Today I’d probably call it “controlled astonishment.”
He studied me suspiciously. “Would you repeat that one more time,” he said.
He read his textbook while I recited each word on pages 11 and 12.
He flipped to the next page. “Do you know the lesson on page 13?” he asked.
I did.
“And the one on page 14?”
I did.
“Page 17.”
I did. It was short.
“Page 23… Page 31… Page 75…”
I knew all of them. I recited each from memory.
I was surprised to learn that few people have a photographic memory, although I suspected as much in the first grade, when I was the only one reading and laughing at the funny bits in Slaughterhouse-Five.
Mr. Wilkey tried to show my mom and dad what I could do.
“Mary Paige has an eidetic memory,” he explained.
My parents did not understand that word. They di
d not understand what it meant to have a photographic memory either, so they did not understand me, to put it mildly.
As long as I did my schoolwork, they left me alone. And I liked being left alone. So I let my grades in school be just above average, neither too high nor too low. Being left alone felt safer than being misunderstood.
Despite my best efforts to survive, Mr. Wilkey set me apart from the rest of the class. He was a kind man. He had no idea what kind of torment he put me through.
My classmates watched me now. They pointed and whispered. They thought I’d been punished. They assumed I was the crazy girl.
Mr. Wilkey gave me larger textbooks to read and special tests to take.
I read A Brief History of Time – The Brothers Karamazov – Man’s Search For Meaning – along with a few college level science books on chemistry, physics, and botany.
I can remember every word of every page of every book.
My favorite scene in The Brothers K was when Ivan’s devil described how an enlightened Russian atheist was sentenced to purgatory. The atheist was doomed to walk in darkness for one quadrillion kilometers.
How long did it take him to walk that mind-boggling distance?
Dostoyevsky wrote that the walk took him billions and billions and billions of eons, earth’s life cycle repeated a centillion times.
I think the walk took him no time at all, all the way from Alpha to Omega. His punishment was not walking that great distance. His punishment was having to enter Heaven after that great journey: He had to learn a new routine, he had to evolve – that’s punishment according to most people whose blood I’ve drunk and whose Blood Memories I’ve gobbled up.
My classmates would have preferred normal people in class with them. Who I was threatened change. How I was challenged them to evolve.
My teacher did all he could for me. But my classmates did what came naturally to them: They pushed me further outside their group.
No one was interested in the kid who could recall everything.
Even though I thought I was alone, I really wasn’t. There was another girl in my class who was also rejected and abandoned. She was quieter than me, if you can believe that.
Her name was Nell.
She and I might have been friends, but she was kidnapped halfway through our fifth grade year.
My classmates didn’t really know what the word kidnapped meant. I could define it, but I didn’t really understand it either. Mr. Wilkey was devastated. He wept so badly sometimes that he could barely get through our classes.
Nell’s kidnapper was never found and neither was she.
Later you’ll see how I met Nell again after many years. Her Blood Memories told me all about how she was kidnapped by someone called Lowen, who also came to be known as the Dark Man.
Lowen is indeed dark. But he’s not quite a man. And he’s not exactly a ghost either.
After fifth grade, no other grade school teachers took an interest in me.
My sixth grade teacher was a woman who was as tired as she was elderly. She didn’t give me large books to read or any specialized tests to take. She wasn’t looking for gifted students. She was looking forward to retirement.
I was no longer set apart from the class. I no longer received attention. I was grateful that life seemed to return to normal, though my classmates kept up their cruel behavior.
Some were leaders and some were followers. They all wanted to be accepted. And being accepted meant making fun of those who were not accepted.
They never forgot that I was not like them and they made fun of me for it.
This routine went unchecked and unchanged throughout the seventh and eighth grade.
My parents seemed to understand me less too.
They liked going to social events. They liked talking with other people and sharing very openly about their happinesses and sorrows.
That wasn’t me at all. I liked silence. I liked not talking to people. I liked being alone in my room for hours.
My parents told me that I was antisocial, they told me that my grades needed to improve, and they told me that I needed to “get a life” – whatever that means. They talked to me, never with me.
They never saw my inner life. They weren’t interested in the worlds of my imagination. They did not seem to know or care that I had read and memorized the collected works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Frank Herbert.
Yes, the Dune series will one day be categorized as classic literature.
Grade school finished. High school came.
My eighth grade class had a graduation ceremony.
Did I graduate at the top?
Nope.
Could I have?
My IQ was 240 – I could have graduated from college eight times by then.
The summer before freshman year, I read and memorized all my schoolbooks for each grade – freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior level. I could have answered any teacher’s question at any time. I could have graduated from high school on my first day.
I didn’t, though. I chose to go to high school. I have no idea why. Perhaps it was some strange part of me that enjoyed a good penance.
Meanwhile, the kidnapped girl from my fifth grade class, Nell, was being twisted and tortured and spiritually eviscerated. She was becoming the first of a long line of things that were not quite zombies.
And I thought my life was hell on earth.
High school shocked the grade school from my former peers. The togetherness of our eighth grade class crumbled at freshman inauguration. We were joined with other eighth grade classes from other grade schools. We became one student body.
Upper classes called us “fish.”
It would have been more accurate to call us flies. Once the quietness of our new ninth grade class wore off, survival meant vying to be lord of the others.
We were all out of our depth.
Even I was shocked, but not by the schoolwork. High school brought a new definition to the term social work – being social was work.
High school was ground zero for the Darwinian fittest. Clique Alpha to Clique Beta, and all the way down to Clique Omega, were your typical hunter-gatherer tribes. Each in-group specialized in exclusivity, mistrust of outsiders, and hunting in packs like wolves.
Like grade school, high school peers saw the fringes of my photographic memory and they didn’t like what they saw. Mostly they left me alone, but sometimes they made fun of me behind my back.
A part of me wanted them to accept me because I thought that being accepted was the only way to survive the loneliness of life.
Today, another part of me would like to rip out their throats, drink their blood dry, and toss their carcasses to the carrion crows.
I could. I’m powerful enough to do so.
But I won’t, thanks to a wise old man whose Blood Memories taught me the meaning of mercy: Sometimes the best way to love someone is just not killing them.
Lunchtime seemed like a strange experiment. Either it was a study of social mitosis or social vivisection.
Everyone a part of a group sat together.
Others apart from a group sat alone. They hoped to be a part of the larger groups. They didn’t want to be seen with those who were like them, apart from the whole. Ironically they stood out even more.
Some outsiders formed small groups that would survive for a time. They had little internal fidelity. They dissolved quickly when group members were accepted into other groups. Or when the stampede of the strongest group crushed them.
Then there was me.
I usually sat alone under a tree during school lunch. I read more books and I remembered what I read. I also overheard many lunchtime conversations. I never forgot them either.
I can still recall one day with perfect clarity: I was reading and remembering Plato’s Apology with a part of my awareness, while another part was overhearing two students talk about Miss Alpha’s gorgeous clothes, while a third part was observing ants marching toward a prayi
ng mantis.
My mind mixed this data together like ingredients in a flavorful stew. Its delicious taste was this realization: The framework of the world is based on needs.
Ants need food and safety and community. So did Socrates. So did my classmates. So did the praying mantis.
The ants killed the mantis to survive. Compatriots killed Socrates to survive. The numerous killed the few for different reasons. Sometimes the few were physically weaker than the numerous. Other times they were intellectually stronger. Regardless, the need to survive was the constant. A fear of change fueled the majority. A fear of evolving hindered them.
My two classmates thought that surviving meant adapting to the trend set by Miss Alpha’s fashion taste. They didn’t know that they were already a part of the numerous. Alphas are the minority.
Those two didn’t survive much longer together. They weren’t the fittest.
Freshman year finished.
I never understood the point of sophomore year, although the actions and attitudes of my peers helped me more accurately comprehend the meaning of the word sophomoric.
Junior year changed my life.
I was sixteen now – the year before I was made a Blood Vivicanti.
But this was also the year when that poor kidnapped girl, Nell, who was still being tortured by Lowen, told the Dark Man about another girl whom she had known in the fifth grade – a girl with a photographic memory.
