I did not know he meant to eat me. I just thought of sex and murder, but he opened a vein in my arm and began to drink, nibbling the flesh at the edge of the cut. He was a modern vampire, human and reeking, not at all the romantic vision I’d seen in old movies. As I lay there, feeling the pull as my blood pulsed into his diseased mouth, I was not sickened or afraid, but amused. It is not easy to find food in the wilderness, and some will do anything to live. If my death meant the life of a debased creature like this, then so be it. There was some justice in it, I thought.
But I did not die. I found myself awake with raw morning light falling down upon me. Beside me was a wretched creature who squirmed upon the ground, clutching his belly. His hair had come out in clumps and lay upon the stones. I felt weak, but also vital. As I looked at him, I laughed. Not only was my touch death, but it seemed I was also very difficult to kill. Part of my new role, I decided, was to stay with my victims until they found peace in death. I would do what I could to ease their agony.
Unlike my beloved, this one did not die after the first day. Sometimes, he was raving and hallucinating and became violent with a preterhuman strength. At other times, he wept and mumbled about his childhood, his fingers over his face. His body was hot and bloated. He must be strong. How long would it take him to die? After two days, it began to rain, and I dragged him into a ruined office block. The rain itself can be toxic. Here, I built a small fire, and then went foraging, killing four bedraggled pigeons. I came back with two birds, and some welfare rice I’d haggled for with a band of oldsters I’d come across. My attacker, my victim, could not eat, but I cooked the pigeons and watched him as I fed. There was no feeling within me, merely a faint sense of curiosity. His skin was peeling.
On the morning of the third day, I woke up and found myself alone. I thought my companion must have died in the night, and some scavenger had come in and taken the body. Then I heard the words, ‘what am I?’ and turned to see an angel in the doorway. As his skin had peeled, so had all the filth. He stood before me, holding out his arms, looking at his smooth flesh. I could not give him answers. There were none. I felt that I had made him into something more and above me. He shared my difference. I had birthed a daughter-son.
I had thought him the most degenerate of beings, yet I quickly learned that he blazed with vitality and intelligence. Perhaps this was just another aspect of the change he had undergone. He asked me questions constantly and experimented with the force of his being. Unlike me, he was curious about the way he could affect reality; make inanimate objects move, heal pain, hear the whisper of others’ thoughts. He was proud of what he’d become, and did not hide it, but the shadow community to which he’d once belonged were now afraid of him. They did not want his healing power, his radiance. They saw not an angel, but a freak.
Unperturbed, he became almost evangelistic about our condition. ‘We must make more like us,’ he said.
I was appalled and shook my head. ‘No. You are a fluke. It is not meant to be this way.’
‘How do you know?’
We were not easy companions, yet our similarities, and the fact that I had made him the way he was, kept us together. He had changed so much from the wretch he’d been. We lived in the office block where he’d undergone his transformation. One evening, he made me climb a nearby hydro-tower with him, where the rusting shell harboured clear water. He took off his clothes and dived in, summoning me to join him. ‘We are not part of the filth now.’ He sluiced my hair and rubbed the grime from my skin. ‘I want the grief to run from your body with this water. You must be renewed, like I am.’
I think the transformation had affected his mind. He needed a religion to run.
‘How did you do it?’ he asked. ‘Tell me. Tell me.’
‘I don’t know. It just happened. You were trying to devour me.’
The light in his eyes was like that of the stars; cold and distant. ‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘Yes.’
I should have known he’d act independently. One day, he took me to a building near our lair, and here revealed to me his twisting litter of children. I was horrified, yet also amazed. Twelve people, both male and female, shivered and whimpered at my feet; all of them infected with his blood. I had seen myself as an avatar of death, but remote and accidental. Here was someone who was an active instrument of it, only he did not realise the fact. He thought he was a god, with a god’s powers. If I’d done something to end it then, what would the world have been like now?
Of the twelve, only four survived, and all of them male. We tried to soothe the agony of the others with the healing power in our hands, but the experience was harrowing. ‘I think this process cannot be conducted with females,’ my companion said, with scientific detachment. ‘But we must try it with others.’
‘No!’ My protest went unheard.
I would not help him, other than to attend to his victims as they suffered. I didn’t even think about killing him, or trying to stop it any other way. At the time, it just didn’t enter my mind, but now I think it was because part of me knew that what was happening was preordained. My companion saw it as a cleansing ritual for the world. He loved the creatures he made, marvelling at their beauty. I saw them as perverted homunculi; as lovely as the angels of hell. Yet, despite this, they were also part of me and I was part of them.
I under-estimated the regard my companion had for me. He did not set himself up as a leader of our developing clan of beautiful monsters. That privilege he reserved for me, even though I shunned it. ‘It is your responsibility,’ he told me. ‘You began this.’
‘Only because you were hungry,’ I reminded him.
‘Can’t you see the potential here?’ he demanded. ‘This is the beginning of something. It is what comes next.’
I could only look down at the corpses of those who had not survived. The cost of the selection process was too high. ‘This is murder,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘You are right. We should give people the choice.’ As an inducement, he now had seven successful transformations to parade before the eyes of the desperate.
I never became involved in his recruitment drives, and for many years no other human tasted my blood. I cannot say that I wasn’t affected by my companion’s enthusiasm, and grudgingly I had to accept the benefits of being part of a community, something I had never previously enjoyed, other than those few weeks of running with the girl-pack. This was different though. With the girls, I had been a tolerated outsider. Now, I was part of a group of individuals who all shared the same attributes. It was both scary and exciting.
Although we could not effect the change in women, a few of them, through persistent entreaty, still joined us. In many ways, we had more in common with them than with men. From our sisters, we learned about the wildest excesses of adorning our bodies. We became tribal and developed our own rituals connected with the inception of newcomers, or the simple celebration of our estate. Sex became sacred, yet less taboo. There was so much to explore, and so many delights concealed in the labyrinth of our dual gender.
One night, we undertook a rite to name ourselves, opening up our minds with the effects of narcotic fungi. My companion became Orien; a name he felt held power. As for me, I wandered the star-gleam avenues of my mind, until I came to a place where a white shrine glimmered against a backdrop of stars. It stood upon the primal mound of creation, guarded by two pillars, and surrounded by the waters of life. Here, I learned my true name, the person I was to become. I am Thiede. The first of all. And the name we took for ourselves as a group was Wraeththu; a word that held all the anger and mystery of the world. The visions told us the truth: we were no longer human and must forget all that we had been before.
We were close-knit, and did not merely co-operate with one another. Laughter was spontaneous, and in our wild nights of dancing, as new recruits struggled with the process of transformation, I learned about the fulfilment that close friendship brings. I was intrigued by the way the different personalities within the grou
p interacted with one another; the partnerships that developed, the enmities. We weren’t above petty squabbling, but if anything from outside threatened our group, the ranks would close and seal as tight as a steel door. We were not afraid to kill to protect ourselves, and sometimes that was necessary. Various human clans and groups heard about us, and some were afraid, and thought we should be eradicated. We were seen as vampires, as predators, who stole people away in the night. In fact, that was not true. We hadn’t resorted to such measures since the first days of my companion’s explorations. We had to keep on the move, but even so, humans would often sniff us out and come pouring over the ruins, holding flaming brands aloft, intent on burning us alive. Then we would rise up, howling, our wild hair flying, our faces striped with the colours of the night.
We never lost a single brother in our skirmishes. In our unity, we were immensely strong.
Everything that begins in the world starts small, be it a mighty tree from a seed, or a deluge from a single drop of rain. A cell becomes a child becomes a king or queen. The greatest concepts are based upon the most fleeting of ideas. Such it was with Wraeththu, the race that I spawned from my fear, my pain, my ignorance. I stand upon the pillars of the world, and look down to see the carnage perpetrated by the human race that had been its guardian. I am amazed that humanity, with all its cruel selfishness, ever rose to prominence, and that the world itself allowed the situation to continue for so long. We are the exterminators, who will rid the palaces of the earth of all its vermin. We have no choice in this role, it had been decided for us. We are the true messengers of the gods. The howls of slaughtered innocents rise from the ruins, the whimpers of the bereaved, the snufflings of the betrayed. I stand as a colossus above it all, looking down. There is a star in the sky that is the soul of my lost love, and my own soul has fragmented into a thousand parts, into each of my children. But I do not grow weak from it, only estranged. There is much to explore about myself, and for this I need a real wilderness, where all the devils of the earth and the angels of the air can come to tempt me and teach me. I cannot make the inward journey here in the city debris.
Last night, Orien came to me, worried that some of our brethren had split off to form a separate group. I tried to assuage his fears. ‘This is the way it will go,’ I said. ‘We were the catalysts, nothing more. We must not interfere with the growth of our child.’
He thought I was mad, or damaged, and spoke softly. ‘The time will come, soon, for us to move toward the city core.’
I nodded. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘You will.’
He touched my shoulder. ‘We will. You cannot deny us, Thiede.’
And I smiled at him to reassure him, knowing that already I had left them.
The First
Wendy Darling
Since the time of the Ascension, Wraeththu scholars have been hard at work studying the many documents uncovered within the Aghama’s private library. Among the chief treasures are personal writings. The following short document was found tucked inside an antique guide to human sexual intercourse, a circumstance which documents not only the Aghama’s sense of irony but also frames the subject quite appropriately.
Ai-cara 20
As progenitor of our race, I have had the privilege of witnessing many Wraeththu firsts. Included within that is the first Grissecon. This took place within the very early days, when Wraeththu consisted of a single wild band. Living amidst the ruins of the city in which I’d come of age, Orien and I led our group as we grew and, facing a hostile world, discovered the nature of our difference from humanity.
In Grissecon, we discovered a key to our own potential. The event was celebrated with a night of frenzied dancing and even more frenzied aruna. It was a momentous event. Still, I am writing today to say that this early time saw an event in my mind more important than what we later called the first Grissecon.
At the time there were only two of us, not a band, not a tribe, not a race. Still, two was more than I had ever expected. The one who later called himself Orien had come to me not as a companion but an attacker, feasting upon me like a vampire, and then succumbing not to death but to rebirth. Orien’s transformation, only three days earlier, had been so spectacular that I was left humbled and, both then and for a long time afterward, completely bewildered.
He and I were still living in the ruined office block where he had been born from his filth and rags. Together we subsisted on what little food we could manage, haggling for rice and killing pigeons, the gray-winged neighbours doomed like us to the shuddering decrepitude of a city devouring itself. We had no direction in life, only hoping to survive and muddle through what seemed like the end of the world.
It was cold the night it happened. The sun had sunk behind the sagging shells of the surrounding office buildings, stone-clad steel hulks, their once-gleaming rows of windows dirty with smoke and grime. In the basement where we lived there was a fire, but winter was coming and, Wraeththu or not, we were cold that night.
Orien was tired, I could see that in the way his hands and jaw were faintly trembling as he spoke with me, the way he kept rubbing his head. He had a headache, he’d told me earlier. I’d tried to take away the pain but had been unable to work the trick. No matter to him, he told me, as overnight it would fade on its own. Whatever we were – we did not yet have a name for ourselves – we were quite resilient.
From the first Orien had been delighted with the results of inception, feeling pride and wonder in both his body and his abilities. He had far more curiosity than I had ever had and even in a scant three days, he had discovered much. All day long he had been taking it upon himself to teach me and now, trembling and tired with what I thought was pure exhaustion and perhaps a headache from lack of food, he began to share with me a new discovery.
As always, he prefaced his lesson with the acknowledgement that I was probably aware of these special powers, and would be either unsurprised or unimpressed. I took my abilities for granted, he said, whereas to him were something miraculous.
I told him there are no miracles.
As the sky turned a deeper shade of iodine red, Orien began to speak. Did I know, he asked me, that we needn’t suffer the cold?
I laughed, telling him that of course we needn’t suffer, at least so long as we could locate blankets or fuel supplies.
Orien scowled and scolded me for being “unimaginative.” (Imagine that! I was once called “unimaginative!”) It was then that he explained it to me: By directing our energies and our intentions, we could produce not only warmth but, he had a strong suspicion, fire. So far, on his own, he had only managed to produce heat, not fire. I told him that considering the outdoor temperature and coming winter, heat sounded like enough. I did, however, wonder how we could harbour the heat and use it to our benefit.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “just let me hold you.”
Hold me? A shudder passed through my body as soon as the words had registered. I had never been held in my life – except once, the night I killed my beloved, burning and killing him with my essence. He had held me, stroked my hair. It had been a new thing to me, sweet and beautiful, that closeness, the lack of violence, the feeling of care. It had never happened again.
Orien picked up on my reaction. He did not even have to ask what the matter was. Using the faculties borne of the blood that had transformed him, he knew. At the time I didn’t realize how well. I was startled when he said, “I was going to hold you and warm us both, but I see you don’t want to be held. You have never been touched, have you? Never except with coldness and hate.” Orien, for all our eventual differences, was very good at making inferences.
“No, that’s not quite true,” I told him. I followed with the story of my beloved. Until that moment I had kept this from Orien, alluding to it but never telling him the details. How could I bear it? It was too painful to relate. Every time I looked at Orien, I thought of my beloved, what might have been. Nevertheless, that night I shared my story.
When I
was done, Orien looked sad but told me thank you. Then he took my right hand in his own, which was shaking, and gave it a squeeze. “You're cold,” he said. “Let me make you warm.”
He told me to lie down on the bed of cardboard boxes and newspapers where we slept. I did so, thinking he would be going off to bring me some secret stash of blankets or gather more firewood. But then, beginning with my shoes, Orien began to remove my clothing. When I asked him what he was doing – it was still cold – he assured me he would be making me warm. He knew the trick.
Drained from telling my story, I did not protest, remaining limp as Orien stripped me, tossing my clothes into a pile. I thought once I was naked he would begin, but then he announced that he would be joining me, exposing his own skin as much as mine. I thought he was mad but I often thought that, and so I closed my eyes as garments fell to the floor one by one.
“Now we will begin,” he said to me.
“What will you do?” I murmured, feeling my skin prickle with goose pimples against the night air.
“Warm you,” he answered.
My eyes were closed and so at first I did not know what he was doing. The cardboard shifted as Orien put his weight upon it, kneeling as he shared his newly discovered power. He was silent as he worked. At first I did not feel it, but then in my feet I felt a tingling. It could have been the cold. Soon, though, it grew stronger and then, I felt something else, like something stroking my bare feet, only without really touching it. My feet were getting warmer. Yes, just a bit warm, then a little warmer, then yet a little warmer.
“Do you feel it?” Orien asked me.
I opened my eyes and he was kneeling with his hands over my feet. I nodded yes, wondering, could he only do my feet? Orien worked over me then, moving from the feet to the calves to the knees and up my thighs. When he reached my mid-point, he asked what I would like warmed next. The look on his face was an odd one, strained and awkward. For a brief moment, I sensed he had something more to say, but then I realized I had better let him proceed. I was warm in my lower half but still cool in my upper – too cool. He swung his leg over me, spanning my middle as he spread his hands to soothe me with warmth.
Paragenesis: Stories of the Dawn of Wraeththu Page 3
