The Oldest Living Vampire Unleashed
By
Joseph Duncan
Copyright © 2017 by Joseph Duncan
Cover image Caduta dei Dannati by Pieter Paul Rubens
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First E-book Edition November 2017
Published by Cobra E-books
Metropolis, IL 62960
E-mail: [email protected]
Table of Contents
Also By Joseph Duncan
In Transit
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Final Words
The War of the Vampires
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
The Death of the Oldest Living Vampire
1
2
3
4
5
6
Dodecanese
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
About the Author
For my wife,
Lena Elaine Duncan, 1965-2017
Until I join you in Forever
Also By Joseph Duncan
The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All
Menace of Club Mephistopheles
Mort
The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl
Hole: A Ghost Story
Indian Summer
House of Dead Trees
The Oldest Living Vampire In Love
Frankenstonia
Apollonius
The Oldest Living Vampire Betrayed
Lair of the Luciferians
Cattle
Soma
The Silent Woman: A Western
The Oldest Living Vampire Reborn
In Transit
1
Though she might live a thousand years and perhaps even longer than that, she didn’t believe she would ever forget the first time she saw the man who would make her an immortal.
His name was Gon, and he was the oldest living vampire in the world, but that was not the name she knew him by at first. It would be a very long time before he trusted her with the precious secret of his true name, the name he was given at birth some thirty thousand years ago. No, he was a pretender from the beginning, inveigling himself into London society under an assumed name: Lord Guy Venport, newly repatriated from colonial India and sole living heir (ahem) of the Sudbury Venports.
A ruse.
You might even say a fraud.
His deception was not directed at her specifically, nor were his motives malicious in nature. All vampires, she would come soon to understand, must adorn themselves in cloaks of anonymity to move safely about the world of men. Some took new identities as casually as mortal men and women changed clothes. Others chose to skulk along the edges of mortal society, keeping to the shadowed fringes, nameless doll-eyed predators. Nevertheless, it was a deception, and one that he would compound in the months that followed—not excluding his hollow promises of love and eternal life. But she held a deep and abiding affection for him anyway. She flew even now to save him from himself, and with a confederacy of his friends and former lovers, mustered from the four corners of the earth.
Her eternal lament: she would always love him.
Did that speak to the quality of his character or simply underscore how credulous she was, even at the age of one hundred and sixty?
She had pondered that question frequently over the last century and a half, and still she was not certain of an answer to it.
Her name was Eleonora Havercamp, Nora to family and friends. She had never thought it a particularly melodious pet name. More like the bleating of a goat. But that was her true name, the name she was given at birth, and that was a thing on which vampires hung great value. She was born on March 3, 1853 in the village of Abingdon, also known as Abingdon-on-Thames, a market town and civil parish in the Royal County of Berkshire, and she was a maiden of sixteen the year she was seduced by the vampyre.
2
Nora Havercamp was a tall pretty young woman with wavy chestnut hair and a no-nonsense attitude that evinced itself as an intimation of severity in her expression. It was mostly the mouth. She had pale thin lips, which were often pressed so tightly together they seemed a bloodless slash across the lower half of her face. She did not have many friends, preferring the company of books over the society of her contemporaries, and she had a reputation for being rather brusque. Some went so far as to call her haughty, but she wasn’t, not really; she was merely thoughtful, and possessed of a somewhat caustic sense of humor, which she tried to keep in check. She was the last person one might expect to find caught up in adventure. Not dull Nora Havercamp, whose nose was so often lodged in the pages of a book one might as well hang a tassel from it!
Truth was, she was not an unfriendly person. And she was certainly not a snob. Not without cause. She was merely circumspect, for the Fates had been particularly cruel to her, and the experience had left her suspicious of further calamity, like a child who had been pinched once too often by a brutal governess.
Other than that, she was a young woman with a young woman’s heart and a young woman’s weakness to the guiles of handsome young men.
“Goodness sake, Auntie, who is that fellow?” she said in a conspiratorial hiss the first time she saw the vampyre. “Now that, I believe, is the most striking man I have ever seen!”
Her aunt, Lady Minerva Stuart, Countess of Harcourt, was so startled by Nora’s outburst she was momentarily lost for words-- a very rare thing indeed. She ogled her niece, her mouth a near perfect O of surprise, and then craned her head around to see whom her niece was referring to. In all the time she had known the girl, which was the entirety of the young woman’s life, Lady Harcourt had never heard her niece express the least interest in a man, handsome or otherwise. In the privacy of her heart, Lady Harcourt had begun to despair of the girl ever finding a suitable mate!
They were at the moment advancing toward the entrance of the famed Adelphi Theatre, having just debarked their private carriage with the intent of attending a French operetta called La Belle Helene. It was the first time Nora had attended the theatre since The Tragedy. That was how her aunt invariably referred to Nora’s misfortune. The Tragedy. As if it should be capitalized even in speech.
Six months previously, Nora’s mother, father and her two younger sisters had perished in a house fire. Of the members of her household, only Nora and two of the family’s servants survived the conflagration, which had swept through their home shortly after midnight the day before Christmas Eve. The fire was set off by a faulty gas lamp in the downstairs drawing room. The house had burnt to cinders in minutes. Nora survived the horrible inferno by leaping from the balcony of her second-floor bedroom. The girl had landed badly on the paved path below, breaking both wrists and her right
ankle. Her parents perished attempting to save her two younger siblings, overcome by the heat and the smoke. Lady Harcourt, her father’s doting sister, took Nora in the moment she was released from hospital. She had even employed the family’s two surviving servants. In the months that followed, Lady Harcourt nursed Nora’s broken bones and battered spirit with equal measures of tenderness and practicality, and for that Nora would be eternally grateful.
No sooner had her exclamation escaped her lips than Nora wished she could reach out and snatch it back. She blushed to the very roots of her hair, thankful that her uncle had not heard her unseemly ejaculation. A man of advanced years, Lord Harcourt was as old fashioned as he was kind. He was also, thank goodness, as deaf as a stone. He strolled ahead of the women in his top hat and tails, nodding to acquaintances in the crowd outside the playhouse.
Nora sighed in relief at his blissful expression. She strove at all times to be above reproach. It was very important to her that she should never outrage the sensibilities of her aunt and uncle, who had treated her so benevolently.
Aunt Minerva, however, was not quite so old as her husband… or so easily outraged.
“What man? Where is he, dear?” her aunt demanded. Though there was a mischievous twinkle in her eyes, Lady Harcourt spoke in similarly hushed tones.
Her aunt searched the crowded boulevard, her small gray eyes bird-sharp. Nora’s exclamation was shockingly out of character for such a prim young woman and Lady Harcourt was terribly curious to see the man who had won such an extraordinary response from her niece. He must be very handsome indeed!
For a moment, it seemed Nora would not satisfy her aunt’s curiosity. The young woman hesitated, looking terribly chagrined, but Lady Harcourt was so earnest she finally relented.
Nora smiled and tipped her head toward the gentleman who had caught her eye, making a subtle gesture with one gloved finger.
The man she pointed out had just exited an elegantly appointed hansom and was paying the cabman before joining the theatre crowd. He was unusually tall, with broad shoulders, narrow hips and long muscular legs, and the exquisite fit of his tailcoat and trousers only served to accentuate those features. A profusion of auburn curls cascaded to his shoulders in an unfashionably long but profoundly wonderful excess. As the two women stood staring, the man turned so that his finely proportioned profile was visible to them both, and Lady Harcourt could not help but gasp.
“You weren’t exaggerating!” her aunt stage whispered. “The man is an Adonis in black tweed!”
Now it was Nora’s turn to ogle her aunt. She could not restrain a nervous titter at the mesmerized look on her guardian’s face-- though she had the good taste to hide her amusement behind her hand. After a moment of unladylike staring, Nora’s aunt blinked her eyes rapidly, as if waking from a dream, and then looked at her niece with a mixture of embarrassment and pleasure. As fresh roses bloomed in the cheeks of both women, they shared that delight in the male form that is purely feminine.
“Shield me from your uncle while I compose myself,” Aunt Minerva hissed.
“Auntie!” Nora exclaimed in mock consternation, but she moved to block her aunt from view while the older woman retrieved a handkerchief from her pocket and dabbed a shimmer of dew from her throat and upper lip.
Nora studied the man surreptitiously while her aunt made herself respectable. His clothes were obviously new and finely made, from the crown of his beaver fur tophat to the tips of his polished black knee-boots, but there was something oddly anachronistic about his dress, something Nora couldn’t quite put a finger on at first. And then she had it! The man’s garments, fine as they were, were at least half a century out of fashion. He looked like a figure that had stepped down from some dusty family portrait-- one that had, by some incomprehensible magic, sprung to life and taken a carriage downtown to catch the opera.
She was seized suddenly by the romanticism of the scene. A pale moon, nearly full, hovered over the glittering boulevard while whorls of dense fog, which had arisen from the Thames at dusk, drifted down the street like ghostly traffic. The object of Nora’s interest seemed just as otherworldly, his skin strangely waxy and pale, his hair preternaturally lustrous. The more she studied him, in fact, the more intrigued she became by his peculiarities.
“How pale your handsome gentlemen!” Lady Harcourt remarked. “Lady Strathmore was pallid like that. Skin as white as porcelain. Well, it was anemia that did her in, poor dear, though there was some talk that her new husband poisoned her for her fortune. Perhaps your gentleman suffers from some malady that requires the use of leeches. What do they call it? Bloodletting? I’m no physician, of course.”
Nora opened her mouth to respond—she meant to say that the man did not look sickly to her, despite his pale complexion—but then he seemed to realize they were gossiping about him and bent in their direction a pair of very piercing hazel eyes.
Nora’s reply caught in her throat as if the words had turned to stone, and she blushed so furiously she was certain her face was glowing as brightly as the gas lamp the man was standing beneath.
And then he smiled and tipped his hat and was lost in a group of bustling theatregoers.
“Do you know him, Aunt Minerva?” Nora whispered, after she had recovered her wits.
“No, my dear,” Lady Harcourt said, “but I intend to make inquiries. You can be certain of that!”
They had very nearly made their way to the entrance of the Adelphi. Just ahead of them, Lord Harcourt was conversing with a friend he had come upon in the crowd. They were talking politics, of course, a subject that interested Nora not in the least. Nora’s uncle was completely oblivious to the excitation of his wife and niece.
Nora saw the handsome stranger once more that night.
It was shortly after they had taken their seats in the box her uncle had reserved for the evening. She had just settled in and was fiddling with her opera glasses when she glanced across the chamber and spied the handsome stranger taking his place in one of the boxes on the opposite side of the auditorium.
The interior of the theatre was illuminated by a Stroud’s Patent Sun Lamp, a vast chandelier of brilliant cut glass. The pale stranger, as if sensing her scrutiny, looked back at her that very instant. Though they were separated by a distance of some twenty yards or so (that was just an estimation) she saw his eyes catch those scintillating lights and flash at her in a most curious fashion. It was as if each orb encapsulated a tiny dancing flame.
They were the eyes, she thought, of an angel.
Or demon.
He smiled once more and melted into the shadows. Shortly after, the lights dimmed and the operetta began.
Nora Havercamp was still a virgin. In truth, she had never so much as touched the bare skin of an unrelated male. Not that she could recall. The intimate touch of a man—a kiss, a passionate caress—was wholly unfamiliar to her, though she had read of such delights in the gothic romances she favored. But the sight of the man inspired in her a delicate frisson of fear and want, a kind of hunger that she had never experienced before. It was as if the engine of some enigmatic machine had suddenly roared to life, and she could not help but wonder, with a feeling close to terror, to what destination such an engine might convey her.
If she allowed it.
If she should seek it out.
Nearly two centuries later, she still asked herself that question. As she rushed across the German countryside with a coterie of the vampyre’s friends and former lovers, she could not help but wonder at the affection she still harbored for the man.
Why, when he had so thoroughly broken her heart, when he had abandoned her to her fate so very long ago, did she still desire him?
3
Said company consisted of herself, the American Sydney Meadows and his newly made protégé Miranda, the ancient Eternal Zenzele, and Nora’s own vampyre companions John Worthy and Sam Coleridge. The six of them were packed like sardines in her automobile, a 1961 Aston Martin. They had crossed the E
nglish Channel via the Channel Tunnel just a couple of hours ago and were currently roaring down the E40 at nearly 180 KPH. At that speed, Hambach Forest, which they were now traversing, was little more than a watercolor smear beyond the windshields of the vehicle. They would arrive at Engel Abbey within the hour, where they planned to rendezvous with the immortal Justus and his companion Agnes, and Justus’s vampyre sibling Apollonius, who had come all the way from Karpathos. Once they had assembled, they meant to continue on to Bad Wildbach, their maker’s mortal birthplace, where the oldest living vampire planned to end his incomprehensibly long existence. Justus had foreseen their maker’s destruction, and had conspired with Nora to gather all whom Gon had loved.
One last gesture of fidelity, Justus had said. Let us pray it is enough.
Nora’s fledgling Sam was behind the controls of the Aston Martin. He zigzagged through the sparse late-night traffic, driving at such a high rate of speed the taillights of their fellow commuters were transformed into scarlet bolts of lightning.
Nora observed this without fear, trusting to the driving skills of her fifty-year-old acolyte. If they crashed at this velocity, it was very possible her vampyre body would be mangled beyond repair. She was a blood drinker of only modest strength, and not nearly as indestructible as some of the ancients she travelled with tonight. Then again, it was also possible that she would survive. She had never tested the limits of her body’s regenerative powers. She just hoped they would not be put to the test tonight.
It was almost farce, if one really stopped to think about it, this cabal of living corpses streaking across the German countryside. The word vampyre evoked such romantic imagery: supernatural beings gliding through the nighted heavens in defiance of Newton and his laws. One imagined dreamlike—some might say nightmarish—creatures with god-like powers and inscrutable, inhuman motivations. You wouldn’t imagine this. You wouldn’t imagine the world’s oldest and most powerful immortals packed into a sports car like university students on holiday, racing cross country to stop one of their number from doing himself in. But it was necessary, this mode of travel. Although Zenzele could propel herself at speeds to rival a high-performance race car, though she could take to the sky like some mythical dark angel, the rest of them could not. Not all of them. And they must plead their case with Gon together. The oracle had foreseen it.
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