THE TONTINE
By
John F.D. Taff
©2011 by John F.D. Taff.
The wooden box gleamed on the sideboard, the sputtering candlelight captured in the depths of its lustrous, hand-polished amber finish. Like the man who regarded it, the box was a thing of its time; beautiful, strong in its way, delicate in its way. Like him, it was also completely out of place anywhere outside of this small, grandly appointed room.
It was a thing of its time, and its time had passed long ago.
Like his.
He brought his glass over to the armchair, placed it atop the narrow table at the chair’s left, sat carefully. Another taper, thin and sputtering, cast fitful red jewels across the top of the table’s small surface. No electric lights now, not for this. Fire, the light of the older world—his world—would illuminate what he did now, what he did here, just as it had when he and the others had made the agreement, had caused this box to be made.
Not that he required any light. His need for light had died centuries ago, gone in a single moment. But this small light, this artificial light would suffice as a reminder of the larger light, the real light, the killing light that he could tolerate no longer.
So, he kept the room dark, deliciously so, lit only by a few of these candles and a small fire that had burned down in the massive stone fireplace dominating the room. Shadows and the ghosts of shadows hung in the corners, draped like cobwebs in the rafters.
Ghosts, he laughed bitterly to himself.
Ghosts.
He felt like one himself. But these days ghosts—like him, like the box—were a thing of the past. Not even the shadowy corners of this new world could hide them anymore...or him.
Soon, not even this room would serve to hide him.
Even in the gloom, it was possible to see the room was elegantly, sumptuously appointed. Large bookcases filled one entire wall, its shelves lined with leather bound volumes set shoulder to shoulder like the dusty veterans of some antique war. Overstuffed leather furniture huddled near the fireplace, tapestries hanging on either side. Dark, gleaming wood paneling and wainscoting and blood-red velvet paper covered the walls.
The small chamber, once one of many, was a refuge for him, a quiet island amidst the gleaming metal and electricity, skyscrapers and airplanes, apathy and unbelief that existed outside in this brave new world. Here was a page torn from an older book, a better book.
But now, again like him, the last.
He lifted his glass, regarded the thick, red fluid that filled its cut crystals. Its smell came to him, thinner than he would have liked, colder than he would have liked, and he sighed. Touching its rim to his lips, he closed his eyes, downed the drink, replaced the glass. It rang like a tiny bell as it touched the table.
As he shifted his attention back to the box, the door drew open, admitting a thin shaft of the electric light he hated so much. His back to the door, he didn’t turn to see who it was or what he wanted.
“How can I be of service, sir?” came the voice of the shadow that stood backlit in the door.
“I asked not to be disturbed, Mr. Gerund, tonight of all nights.”
He heard the slightest of sniffs, crisp and haughty, from the shadow.
“But you rang, sir.”
“No. I am sorry, I did not. Please leave.”
“As you wish, sir.”
Again the sniff, and the door closed softly.
Alone again, just him and this box, this tontine, and the ghosts, yes, the rarest of ghosts that clung to him these days. They were all he had left.
The wolf had been the first to go; the prince, the last…at least not counting him.
Poor Larry, he mused, stroking the box with one sharp-nailed finger. So brutal, so senseless.
Of course, when he died, all of his kind died with him. It was their way. All of them, wherever they were. In the boardrooms of Wall Street or the sunny parks of San Diego or the fens of Bratislava. Day or night, asleep in their beds or curled around their mates in snug, dank dens below the earth.
All dead, all gone, because of some ridiculous college kid with a silver bullet.
He’d heard about Larry’s death. He had not been there, but he could imagine it vividly; the extravagant splashes of blood from his death throes. The claw marks on the walls, the concrete. The cries that would have rent the air and caused people for miles around to shudder, draw their shades, pull their children closer.
Ahh, that had been the art of his kind; the violence, the anger, the rage. He was sure that, even in death, no…especially in death…Larry had expressed its absolute quintessence, the secret beauty that lies in all violent death. The instinctual gulping of blood and rending of flesh that stripped the attacker to his basic senses and the attacked to his basic constituents.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, all helped along by teeth and claws.
In his mind, he could see Larry’ human form, lying in a Rorschach test of his own blood, his body no longer ridiculously muscled and furred. Just a limp, nude human, smooth and pale as a baby, curled in the pool of its birth.
All because of a small, silver cylinder.
He shook his head ruefully at the utter deadliness of something so small to something so full of life.
It was the same for him and his kind, too, though. Two pieces of crossed wood, a splash of the right kind of water, the tiniest ray of sunlight, and he’d be gone as well, a wisp of vapor, a heap of clothing and a pile of ashes.
For a moment, just a moment (but, ahh, weren’t they coming ever more common these days?), he longed for that release, the calm it would bring to his mind…maybe even whatever was left of his soul.
He wondered what that release had done for Victor’s tortured soul, locked in his hideous, piecemeal body. So tormented, so torn between wanting to be one of them and wanting to punish them for being what he could never be.
When that spark of life had finally fled his scarred, twisted form, perhaps in the second before his borrowed heart stopped beating, did Victor find peace?
Or was it just the fear, the exquisite fear?
That’s what had brought them all together, made them compatriots of a sort.
That bond of fear is what had brought about the tontine.
Not just the fear they engendered, but the fear that they carried within them.
Fear of something worse, some fate worse than the curses they suffered under.
If the world held fates such as theirs, each thought, certainly it held even worse in abeyance.
The thought had, at one time or other, appalled each of them.
So, they came together, warily at first, surreptitiously to be sure.
The bat, the wolf, the monster and the mummy.
Laughable, really, he mused to himself sitting now in this sanctuary, drinking from a crystal goblet. Like a cheap Hollywood movie. All they were missing was Abbott and Costello.
But they had gathered nonetheless.
Here, in this drawing room in London before it became their club.
The thin, ascetic Count, with dark, crafty eyes and a feral strength.
The hulking monster, his coat collar drawn up and hat pulled down to cover his puckered, discolored face.
The furtive wolf, nervous, cagey, whose sweat stank of the moon and blood.
And the prince, thousands of years older than even the Count, his wrappings holding together a body that was little more than articulated dust.
Each of them wanting life more than anything, whether it was gobbling it up or possessing some spark of it.
Each of them thrived on fear, made a living, as it were, on fear. Each had become so identified with fear that they were the very stuff of it, howling in every mortal dream, lurking in every shadow, imagined in
every dark place.
Funny, then, that fear should bring them together.
Victoria still reigned in England when they bought this bottle, this box.
When they made this tontine.
Like soldiers in a war in which only they still fought on, they had gripped this bottle, held it tight, sworn the oath.
“The last of us alive, whatever that means to ones such as us, shall drink of this bottle and remember the others, remember the fear, for in the end, that is all we have, all we bring, all we share.”
They toasted this epitaph with a glass drawn from this bottle’s twin. The Count remembered how the wine had stained the prince’s chalky cheeks, his gauze-wrapped neck a deep scarlet, like a spreading blush.
The monster’s lip had curled into a deep, disagreeable snarl at the taste of the wine, and he eyed it suspiciously.
Larry, too, hadn’t much cared for the wine. He was more a beer drinker.
Only the Count could truly appreciate it, one of the few things that he could stomach. Because, like blood, the wine was a living thing, and its energy filled the glass. It wasn’t the taste he enjoyed; it was the buzz, the crackle of its life as he drained it.
Now, with Larry killed, with Victor reduced to individual pieces kept “alive” in vats of fluid in a secret government lab, with the prince sent back to the Land of the Dead, he was the last one, the last…alive.
Funny, now, here at the end, it was him, the only one left; the only one of the four who might even want to drink this bottle dry to the health of his comrades.
There were others, to be sure, who had taken their places; others who stalked the fringe of mankind’s senses in these bright and shiny new days and doled out what amounted to fear. But he ignored them. They were less elemental than he and his tontine partners; more created by man than born from him.
There was an inbred butcher who wore the stitched together face of his victims and carried a chainsaw. There were two others who wore masks and lurched in the darkness wielding a variety of sharp implements. There was even one who arose from dreams, with claws for hands.
Laughable. To have to hide behind masks…
But even those of his kind who existed now were shades without nuance or dimension; hollow shells of desire and hunger, relegated to romance novels and movies filled with smoldering looks and teen angst. His kind had become mannequins of a sort; androgynous, beautiful, with dark eyes and hollow cheeks, lithe forms and red, red lips and only the finest tailored clothing.
They had become, in effect, the very things they had symbolized, and that was a lessening from which they could not recover. There was little behind this façade now; little to instill the delicious fear that he was accustomed to bringing with him.
They, both those of his kind and those others of this new age, had reduced fear to a smaller thing, a simpler thing.
Fear of pain…fear of blood…fear of death.
That was it, the basic fear of life being snuffed out.
A primal fear, perhaps man’s first.
The fear he’d brought was the fear beyond death; the fear of being lost…of being undead.
These…poseurs were unable to generate this. They could bring about only the fear of pain, of spattered blood, of rent flesh, of a slow, slow fading, and then…
…nothing.
But what he brought…oh, what he brought was the fear of being reduced to what he was…of being lost to the light, lost to life, but forced to continue within it, to be abandoned inside it…that was fear.
That was the fear that the others had brought, too, each in their own ways. But with their passing, this fear had passed, too.
Musing, he lifted the box, stroked its smooth skin of wood.
Perhaps this fear died because humanity no longer could wrap its collective mind around the larger fears; loss of soul, being cast out of the light, set on a path outside that of mortal man, yet desiring it, yearning for it, for release.
Perhaps the world had changed, moved past them.
Perhaps mankind could only perceive the smaller fears these days; the fear of bloodshed, of split skulls and open abdomens and slashing knives.
If that were the case, and he was tired enough now to concede this point, then he had reached the end, just as surely as the other three had.
Yet, they were gone now, and he was still here.
He shook his head, laughed, but the laugh was arid and grating.
Still here, after his wife had died and children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and…he didn’t even bother to continue. He’d lost interest in hovering around those of his own bloodline, watching their lives, long ago.
For all he knew, there were others of his blood now walking the same path he was on, turned by another of his kind.
He felt nothing for them, for their fates. That particular blood tie meant so little to him now. After centuries of drinking from the well of humanity, the blood in his veins was no longer merely the sum of his ancestors co-mingling their blood.
He sighed again, stirred, examined the box.
Ahhh, he thought to himself. Best just to get on with it.
His sharp-nailed fingers found the seam of the box, cunningly hidden by its maker (so long dead now), and slipped in to slide it open.
The door behind him opened again, and a wedge of incandescent light oozed into the room, fell over his hand, the box.
“Wait.”
The Count froze, not something he typically did.
But there was something about the voice, something sure and commanding and…
Free from fear.
He turned slowly, his fingers tightening their grip on the box.
Three shadows stood in the doorway, and Mr. Gerund hung behind.
“Who are you and why should I wait?”
The three figures stepped into the pool of firelight, and he stood to face them.
Mr. Gerund drew the door closed softly.
“There is no need to partake of your tontine just yet,” said the first man. The candles shimmered on his dark, bare skin, bald head. “There are yet worlds of fear to explore.”
“Really?” the Count asked, his tone bland. “Do tell.”
“I bring the fear of that which is beyond death…the mindless shuffling, the hollow hunger, the compulsion that draws a man from out his grave to feed on those still living.”
This figure stepped forward, bared his white teeth in a rictus that might have been a malefic grin. “I am Papa Loa, Father of Zombies.”
The vampire narrowed his eyes, betrayed the smallest hint of a smile.
The second figure stepped forward, thin and smaller by far than Papa Loa, gracile and insect like, with delicate limbs and a triangular head. Its large, slanted eyes were pitch black, reflecting nothing of its surroundings.
In a voice that was a reedy whisper, the thing said, “I bring the fear of dreams and nightmares…the loss of self, the theft of memory, of time…of children replaced by changelings. I bring the fear that turns men into cattle.”
Stepping fluidly into the light, the being bowed slightly, its smooth, grey skin wrinkling at its waist, at its joints like rubber. “I am Ebe, the Keeper of Missing Time.”
A possibility sprang into the mind of the vampire, a suggestion…
…perhaps…just perhaps.
Then the next figure stepped forward.
The wan light revealed a man, a simple, straightforward man with slicked back hair. He was dressed in a dark suit, neat and well tailored. A collared shirt, a tie of red silk. His pants were crisply pressed, his dark shoes shined. A thick gold watch clutched his wrist. In his left hand, he held a briefcase, and the vampire noted that the man’s nails were perfectly manicured.
“I bring the fear of ruin, of relentless pursuit, of overwhelming retribution. I bring the fear of mysterious language and occult workings. I bring the fear of powerlessness, of sleepless nights and endless days.”
Still the vampire waited for this final fi
gure to reveal its true nature.
The man smiled, revealing perfectly formed, perfectly white teeth, straight and even.
“I am Stanley Zurich, attorney-at-law.”
The vampire felt his hand lift away from the smooth, cool wood of the tontine box.
He surveyed this new group, so like and yet so unlike his previous associates.
But it could work, he thought.
It would serve for a time…and that’s all he needed.
“Mr. Gerund,” the vampire called, tapping the wineglass on the table with the nail of one of his long, thin fingers.
At the crystalline ring, the door opened.
“Yes, sir?”
“Drinks, Mr. Gerund, for us all.”
The servant pushed the door open further, walked into the room carrying a tray.
“I took the liberty, sir, thinking you and your guests might wish something.”
Gerund passed the tray before the four men, each lifting a thin glass of champagne. When each had a glass in hand, Gerund inclined his head to the vampire.
“Oh, and Mr. Gerund,” the vampire said, nodding toward the wooden box on the side table. “You can place the tontine back in the tabernacle…for a later date. A much later date, I think.”
“Yes, sir,” Gerund said, carefully taking the box, backing from the room, drawing the door shut behind him.
The vampire held his champagne flute aloft, let its bubbles capture the light.
The three others likewise lifted their flutes together in a toast.
“To us, gentlemen,” said the vampire. “To the monsters of the new world…and to the fear we bring.
“Cheers.”
~The End~
John F.D. Taff is an author with more than 25 years of experience writing short stories and novels, mostly in the horror, fantasy dark fantasy and science fiction genres. He has more than 50 published short stories and seven novels. Most are available at Amazon. Learn more about his work at johnfdtaff.com.
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