The deputy swung his nightstick at the bars and ran it back and forth. “Hush up, you! Killers don’t get visiting privileges. Your wife don’t count ‘cause you’re dying.”
“He’s no killer,” Old Mrs. Blevens said. “You’ve locked up the wrong person.”
Iago sagged against me and closed his eyes. “I knew you’d come.”
“Will you live, Iago?” Old Mrs. Blevens asked, ignoring the night deputy who stood between herself and the prison cell.
“Yes, I think I will.”
“I told you to shush it,” the deputy said, and he beat the bars with his stick again.
Old Mrs. Blevins lifted her chin and I could almost see how that lost face might have looked before it melted away forever. She locked eyes with my husband and took a deep breath. “I’ve come to turn myself in for the killing of Bethan Vevay.”
The deputy’s cackle was the only thing to be heard for several long moments. “And why would an old woman like you want to sink an ax into that poor girl’s face, pray tell?”
“Because I hate her,” she said. “She tormented Iago Godwyn for more years than I can count and she wouldn’t let him be when he finally got the woman he loved. That was unacceptable. But even so, he didn’t do nothing to her. I was the one that did it. He was passed out drunk at the time.”
“So, this a confession then?” the deputy asked, as though he still believed it some great, hysterical joke.
“Yes.”
“Your name?”
She looked at me with her lidless eye. “Meriel,” she whispered. “Meriel Vevay.”
13
For the better part of my life, I’d been saddled with the memory of Unc Mael racing down Six Bells Hill, yelping as though he believed he could outrun the devil himself. “Damned fool,” my father said of him. “Thinks he can change the very blood in his veins by moving to a different shore.”
Now, courtesy of the black arts, his son had a clover-shaped scar seared into the palm of hand from the day he yanked a hot bow key out of a burning door. To save a young witch, Iago conned Gwendraith into cutting his ropes and freeing him after Bethan tied him to a kitchen chair. He raced into two-story flames, ducking a barnful of falling boards as he went, and wrapped his coat around a girl whose youth dripped into oblivion even as he carried her off with her prized mirror book clutched in her one good hand.
The same book she dropped in the yard at Cleopatra’s Needle when she lost consciousness. The same book Iago took from Bethan’s house after finding it sitting by the stove on the night that she was meant to die. The same book I read in a prison cell.
Never mind that Meriel had attempted a counteracting spell, he was struck with terrible pains in his stomach any time he got as far as Main Street. Paddy’s Run was twice as far, but that’s where the surgeon was, so that’s where he took her. Because of the pain, Iago couldn’t stay, and he didn’t give the doctor her name. Later though, when the time was right, he built a house and went back for her, and moved her into the attic.
The two had been protecting each other ever since.
It was hard for me to correct things in my brain. Old Mrs. Blevens was not old at all, and the girl who wrote of loving Iago was not dead. Everyone thought the fire had killed her, but she’d been living in the house with Iago all along.
Deputy Duly was at once summoned to question her. I sat on the cot beside my husband, tracing the clover on his hand. “Why didn’t you build your house somewhere else? Why stay next door?” It made no sense! Bethan had ruined their lives.
“It hurt to go, Lilabet. You have no idea. The pains started up every time I left the house. I had to settle for building my own place next door. Bethan was furious with me, never mind that I was a stone’s throw from her front door. She wanted to see me destroyed. What she didn’t know is that I had Meriel looking out for me. Every time Bethan tried to witch me, Meriel would counter as best she could, though at great cost to herself. Her health has been declining ever since the fire. Fighting Bethan aged her. She may be young in years, but her body is old, and she’s worn out. It couldn’t go on for much longer.”
“So why did Old Mrs. Blevens—Merial—wait all this time to do it? Why not kill Bethan long ago if it was going to come to murder anyhow?”
“We hated her—that much is true. But it wasn’t until you came and Bethan started with more monkey business that I think Meriel saw the writing on the wall. It was never going to end, and poor Meriel isn’t long for this world, I’m afraid. Now that Bethan’s dead, the pain in my gut seems to be gone. I think I can finally leave this blasted place.”
An hour later, Deputy Dule came into the cell and kicked the leg of Iago’s cot. “Wake up, boy.”
Iago eyes bulged open and he looked capable of murder. “The name is Godwyn,” he said. “Iago Godwyn.”
Deputy Dule crossed his arms. “It took some time to check out the old woman’s story, but if you can get out of this bed, I guess you and your wife are free to go.”
Iago fingered the broken lock on Meriel Vevay’s Highly Personal, Highly Secret Mirror Book. When he looked up at me, I no longer saw the face of a man without any feelings, but rather, the face of a man who’d suffered too many.
“Free?” he asked.
Life is always ironical, my father used to say. Like drinking whiskey to feel better, then waking up with a bad head the next day. Like running away from a land of monsters, only to fall in with witches in America.
One big irony.
The rain had stopped and started a dozen times that day. By the time Deputy Dule told us we could go, it was but a slow, soft patter above our heads. Iago touched my cheek and gave me the kiss I’d been waiting a lifetime to know. Then he put his arm around my waist, and we left the prison together.
#
Sometimes pictures appear in my head. Thoughts will pop up like memories re-lived before they’ve been made. Usually, the memories get made. When we reached the Bay of Monterey, I didn't need pictures anymore.
“What about here?” my husband asked. He shielded his eyes from the California sun and smiled at the green pools forming along the rocky shore. “This seems a fine place for a house.”
Something different caught my eye.
Beyond the waves, on a golden hill, the rotting towers of an old Spanish mission slept under a dark umbrella of Cypress. Draped against the broken railing, a scarlet prayer cloth fluttered in the wind.
End
About the Author
Carole Lanham is the author of twenty-four short stories, one short story collection, THE WHISPER JAR, and the recent novels, THE READING LESSONS and CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE. Her work has twice appeared on the preliminary ballot for a Bram Stoker Award, and she has been short listed for The Million Writers' Prize. Her play, PLEASE REMAIN CALM, was produced by O'Fallon TheatreWorks in O'Fallon, Missouri this Halloween.
Other Books by Carole
The Reading Lessons
The Whisper Jar
Eyes of the Seer
by
Peter Dawes
Prologue
I spent the final days of my life alone, even though I did not know I was dying. Around me, the world seemed to be shifting. A cloud of darkness shrouded what had once been an ordinary existence and ripped from me everything I had known. For long hours, I would stand at work and stare at the people who passed me by as though attempting to figure out what changed and when. Little did I know what waited for me around the corner.
Granted, the final days leading up to the earliest hours of January 20, 1983 are somewhat of a blur to me. It might have been the enchantment I was under, or the haze of realizing I lived on borrowed time without knowing how I could be certain of such a thing. I could not tell you what those final nights were like, or if anybody could sense the fact that I was fading in the background, about to cross paths with destiny. About to slip from one skin to another. I only know that night, it all reached a crescendo and set me on the path I find myself today.
<
br /> I have lived many lives by now. I have held many titles and been several people and several things already. There were years when I gazed at others with compassion latent in my stare, and years when I beheld each victim I have claimed with coldness before sending them to meet their maker. Saint and sinner; bastard, friend, and foe. So many deaths and so many rebirths. So many layers to this creature I am. This being I became.
I am a vampire, but I have not always been. I can yet recall the days when I bore a pulse. Some memories stick out much more potently than others, but the first quarter century of my immortal existence frames the lot of them in a panorama of cause and effect. Through everything I face and have faced, I can look back upon the events which preceded me and see where I have arrived and how I have arrived there. I can see the hand of fate.
Oh, if only I would have known.
Back when this all began, if I could have seen the clear path to the present, I often wonder if I would have walked gracefully into the trials which followed. I would like to think so, but I know the experiences which have filled the years. The highs and lows; the moments of despair and the moments of triumph, they have made me what I am. I am vampire, yes, but I am no ordinary immortal. I still feed as one. I possess the fangs, the will, and the consuming instincts of one. The casual observer misses something very important when it comes to me, though; a very crucial feature beneath the unruly brown hair and above the crooked smile.
Most people do not know what they should be looking for when they see me. Not many humans recognize the emerald green eyes or know of their relevance for very good reason because unique creatures such as I do not wish for them to know. There exists an entire world underneath their noses they overlook every day and only when the supernatural falls onto their laps do they learn of its presence. I was much the same as them a few decades ago, an unsuspecting, unknowing mortal with pale blue eyes instead of the ethereal irises I now possess.
I shall not linger any longer on riddles. Suffice to say there are many layers to this creature who inhabits this mortal coil, and yet the world around me rarely casts a second glance my way. When the Fates fashioned what would be my existence, they created a paradox; an eternal enigma.
My name is Peter Dawes and this is my story.
It all started with a murder.
Part One
The Blind
“If man were immortal he could be perfectly
sure of seeing the day when everything
in which he had trusted should betray his trust.”
Charles Sanders Peirce
Chapter One
I cannot recall what caused the clarion alarm to sound through my psyche, but all at once the haze shrouding the world began to lift. Time froze and an epiphany struck in all its horrible glory.
I had completely and utterly screwed up.
Blood covered my hands. I gazed down at the knife I held, both fixated on the sight and yet failing to see it. A thought echoed over and over that this was some twisted nightmare I would wake from, but I could not help trying to piece together facts until reality could finally set in. Lifting my gaze from the weapon poised in my palm, I spied them lying there. Two people, a man and a woman. And both of them were dead.
My knees gave out. I slid down the bedroom wall. Settling on the floor, the knife dropped from my slackened grip and I brought both hands to my head while rocking back and forth. I had walked in on her, this was true. She looked at me and screamed; yes, I recalled this as well. It was when the other person shot out of bed that my memories shattered like a pane of glass. I struggled to replay the events, my head throbbing and the sensation of the knife’s hilt lingering on my skin.
The knife. I had fetched it from the kitchen. Oh God, what had I done?
Curling up with my back to the wall, I hugged my knees and winced. The dam of shock buckled under the weight of too many images crowding in at once. Too many images, such as her calling out, “No, Peter! This isn’t what you think!” and me spitting out the words, “You selfish whore, what did you do? What did you do?!” An involuntary laugh suddenly broke the silence when I remembered the bastard she had been fondling. He fell to the floor, tripping over his own jeans, and barely came to a stand by the time I rushed upon him.
Tears clouded my eyes. Hysterics burst forth from my lips. Neither convinced me I yet possessed my right mind, while doing nothing to make me feel justified in what I did next, either. Rather, I plunged deeper into the abyss while crimson tainted the black and white movie playing in my mind.
He had been my first victim. Not pausing to ask his name, I had also given no warning of what I meant to do. Instead, I charged forward with the kitchen knife and sank it deep into his stomach. His face contorted in pain, but as he looked up at me, he revealed a sight I found strangely delicious.
My gaze focused on his neck. I licked my lips and slashed the blade across his throat. Whatever he had been struggling to say, the gash ensured he would never speak again.
My senses should have come screaming back to me right then and there, but as my lover of two years looked at me with glassy eyes, I realized her tears were not for me. Enraged, I closed the distance between us and tore the gold chain I had once gifted her from her neck. The knife plunged through her chest with sickening ease and I held it there while watching the light dim from her eyes. The instrument of her death had slipped from her body when she crumpled to the floor.
“I have to get out of here,” I whispered, swiping at my cheeks as I returned to the present. Two dead bodies lay before me. A lifetime of remorse loomed on the horizon. My fingers left bloody smudges where I had touched my face, but I did not care. In fact, I was amazed when my weak knees supported my weight enough for me to pick myself back up.
I stumbled down the hallway to her front door. The thought occurred to me that her neighbors may have heard the screams emanating from the apartment. When I swung open the door, however, I saw nothing more than an empty corridor. So I trudged forward, not knowing where I intended to go, yet realizing I could not stay there.
Images assailed me again.
I saw the look in her eyes as our gazes locked, her brain not yet dead from the lack of life-giving oxygen. “Peter . . . I’m sorry.” That miserable bitch. Why did she say she was sorry? Why did she rob me of a pure lover’s vengeance by staining my actions with her repentance?
My walk became a run.
I remembered the scowl of hate I had directed at her in return. “Burn in hell,” I had muttered. How could I say that? Did I not realize what I had just done? Even if her love for me was so easily cast aside, mine for her remained strong.
Hysteria threatened to claim me. I dashed for the main door and slammed through it, only to recoil when the cold of January impacted me. The idea of being lost vulnerable struck as I stumbled outside, surprised not to find a lynch mob gathered with pitchforks and torches. Running toward the street, I tried to escape the guilt pounding through my head. My conscience was moving fast and gaining, leaving me naked before my own scrutiny.
I passed beneath awnings of upscale apartment buildings and raced across a dimly-lit park. When a patch of Philadelphia asphalt suddenly stretched before me, I darted across it without caring one iota for the traffic. One car swerved, then another, but I did not remain on the street for long. I dodged down an alleyway, still running from the pain threatening to tear me limb from limb. Footsteps closed in. Someone’s breath tickled against my neck. A presence enveloped me, but none of that prepared me for the abrupt way my sprint came to a halt.
It was as though my conscience obtained corporeal form; or so I thought at the time. Ignorance converged with my frenzied panicking and prevented me from understanding when one hand grabbed me, followed by another. I struggled wildly against the grip, screaming, “I was going to marry her! It isn’t my fault! Oh God, why did she do this to me? Why did she make me kill her?” The pair of hands kept firm grasp of me through my manic attempts to break away, and I continued shout
ing pleas for understanding until my attackers silenced my rant with a swift smack against my throat. Suddenly, I began to realize I was not being held back by my conscience at all.
The second clue was more painful.
I felt a tongue slide along my neck milliseconds before a set of sharp teeth pierced my skin. Hollering as an afterthought, I gasped while blood ran down my chest in rivulets and mingled with the sweat already present. The lips pressed against my flesh pursed and drew inward. A sickening sucking noise resonated in my ears and the hands around me tightened.
My eyes fluttered shut. My head bobbed. I could not see the face of my attacker, but had little desire to as my pulse became faint and my knees threatened to buckle a second time that night. Whoever held me prevented me from falling over while my brain began the same shut down I had witnessed minutes earlier with Lydia.
“ . . . Lydia.” I whispered her name as though remembering it for the first time through all the chaos. It formed the only apology my dying breaths could manage before I was robbed of the chance to add any further words of remorse. Instead, the cool flesh of somebody’s wrist touched my lips. It silenced even my thoughts and focused my fleeting attention toward a viscous liquid that ran into my mouth. The moment I tasted blood, a foreign notion stirred my senses the same way seeing the exposed throat of Lydia’s lover had.
A feminine voice spoke in a soothing manner. “Drink,” she said. “Take it in, Peter. Because tonight, we will fulfill your destiny.”
I drew inward once, compelled by the woman’s command. It restored enough of my strength for me to drink again, leaving me wanting more without knowing why. In fact, I became more and more ravenous with each mouthful of blood and did not realize I had grabbed hold of her arm until a violent pulse of pain caused my fingers to tighten. My mouth lifted from her wrist so I could cry out in agony. Before I figured out what was happening, another wave of fatigue struck.
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