Clan Novel Toreador: Book 1 of The Clan Novel Saga

by Stewart Wieck

  He just didn’t believe it. Mostly, it was the lame story of the starving artist that did it. Leopold knew that he did fit that archetype. He was unkempt, lost long hours as though a fleeting moment while at work, did indeed starve for lack of blood when he sculpted instead of hunted. But he didn’t think he could long overlook a beautiful woman who clearly wanted his hands to enact more carnal pleasures than fashioning her stone likeness.

  For instance, though she probably thought him immune to her stunning good looks, Leopold had not overlooked the Toreador primogen of Atlanta, Victoria Ash. If anything, though, she gave some authority to his life story, for she was walking (not living) proof that such gorgeous creatures did exist. Another permutation of his new suspicions regarding his true past suggested that Victoria was his sire and had concocted this simple cover story to hide that fact from him.

  As soon as he imagined that, though, Leopold felt ashamed of such dull-headed paranoia as dominated conspiracy theorists. It’s not as if those theorists were not right, for there were conspiracies aplenty, but they should stick to their best guesses, and not indulge any crazy suspicion that happened to catch their imagination. There were vampires behind many of the conspiracies, but not aliens or yetis or whatever silliness was presently in vogue. And just so, Leopold stuck to his central theory of an entirely other life now unknown to him, and not any number of possibilities he could concoct to fit the evidence. The idea of a missing life just seemed right.

  Besides, Leopold felt such a brand of skullduggerous activity did not become the ravishing primogen. Victoria seemed stronger than that, and not one to trifle with loose ends. He recognized her obvious beauty, but his gift as an artist was to see more deeply into people than that, and he believed that if Victoria was responsible for his past, then she would not hide him from it. She would simply kill him if he wasn’t of use to her.

  He suddenly realized that part of this foolishness with Victoria was some vestige of mortal lust. She was just so damned beautiful that he couldn’t clear her from his mind. Frankly, it excited him to imagine that he was her childe, and he suspected he would harbor this crazy thought for some time.

  In fact, while he had spoken with her on the phone recently, Leopold had never been alone with Victoria Ash, though she was the head of his clan in this city. There was no point. He did the work that seemed important to him and steered clear of politics. Politics got one killed. Better just to follow everyone’s rules—the Prince’s, the Anarchs’, the Camarilla’s—and no one would have reason to be hostile, or even offended. The chance that he might accidentally blunder was what convinced him not to attend even events like the Summer Solstice Ball tomorrow night at the High Museum of Art. Such a density of Kindred would surely include one who thought Leopold a perfect foil or dupe for some scheme, and the fewer that knew of him, the better.

  That had not stopped him from accepting a commission from Victoria for the party when she called a week ago. She had very specific requests but suggested that completing the work was doing clan work, so for the pride of the Toreador he was required to accept. He did, and workmen—ghouls, Leopold imagined, for they hefted his sculpture as two mortals could not—had arrived to take possession of the work last night.

  He was actually proud of the piece, and wondered if he’d ever see it again. The fifty thousand dollars the ghouls paid him in consecutively numbered new one-hundred-dollar bills would have to eliminate or at least alleviate that thought. He already owned this house that served as his workplace and his haven, but eventually he would need more money in order to survive safely as an immortal being. He made pains to cross no one, but one haven was not enough, and until now one was all he could afford.

  He almost put his plan aside in order to look through recent papers for clues to good second homes, but for some reason the itch to attend to the matter of his past was severe. Such thoughts had previously been idle speculation, but now he felt the need to get to the heart of the matter.

  However, this was in all likelihood pure foolishness, for unless there were greater motivations at work—and Leopold doubted he could figure so prominently in any truly grandiose plan—then his fantasy-like life story was probably true. It bored him to think that. Since the past was gone already, he wished for something more vital in it, something he could tap to create truly great art, not just the fine showpieces he could create when concentrating on technical merit, or the outlandish pieces that came when he let himself loose. He was after all a good sculptor, so that part of his possible past was not a charade. Such talent could not concocted, though Leopold knew that some Kindred were capable of patently amazing things. But who in history was the last sculptor to be concerned with plots that might change the world or affect lives beyond those of wealthy patrons or other poor artists dreaming of living as pathetic a life as most skilled but unexceptional artists experienced? Somebody from long ago, Leopold decided. Maybe Leonardo or Michelangelo. Not even the great Rodin shaped international events, or at least so he thought.

  So, Leopold decided to engage in an experiment that he hoped would either dissuade him from his theory or recommend it even more strongly. It was his intention to sculpt the bust of his Toreador sire. She was gone, and the memories of her were limited, but there was yet a strong picture of her in his mind, and Leopold decided to see if he could sculpt her. If he could not, then the explanation he would have to accept was that the terrible pains she had inflicted upon him were indeed the reasons for his troubles, and consequently she must be real.

  On the other hand, if he could sculpt her when he could sculpt no other Kindred, then he reasoned this would prove a conscious connection to the still unconscious knowledge that his lovely benefactor was not real at all. That is, he believed that if he could sculpt the one Kindred who was presumably the source of the block that prevented such work, then she must not be the real reason and that would be because his unconscious mind might know better than his conscious mind that she did not exist. It would be no different than the likenesses of Bela Lugosi as Dracula that he sculpted, since he knew Dracula did not exist, yet it was a vampire he managed to portray in clay.

  He would still not know for certain, but such a result would give him the confidence to proceed with other possible experiments. Perhaps even to go so far as so seek out another—maybe even Victoria—to see what might be done to help him regain his former knowledge. Such a gross move would be dangerous, though, for what if the Kindred he sought for help was part of the charade perpetrated against him? What if it was Victoria, and he revealed even slight suspicions to her?

  Leopold laughed to himself. At the worst, he supposed, he might find himself in another city, perhaps on another continent, but maybe the story of his life would be a better one.

  And maybe the discovery that his remembered life was a charade would only ruin his life. Should he give up a storybook past in order to learn that the truth might be otherwise? If his sire was a farce, a fable invented by someone hiding something from him, then what trouble, what very possibly dangerous trouble, might he stir up with the return of his memory?

  But Leopold was decided in his course of action. Art was about truth, he believed. Though his work of Kindred might never be for public consumption—as such might be considered a dangerous leak in the Masquerade—Leopold felt it might reveal some truth to some few among the Kindred who sought it as well.

  But not if he couldn’t sculpt those who would see his art, for such an absence would have a clear impact on how his message was broadcast and hence received. Sculptors from Rodin to Brancusi spoke about humans with Kine as the center of much of their work. Maybe there was a way to speak about vampires without Kindred in his work, but for his message to be honest, that method would have to come naturally and not be an impediment around which he constructed a method.

  He finally exhaled a great breath and unrolled the cloth covering a large piece of clay he’d cut and covered with a wet towel earlier this night. He was anxious to get to wor
k immediately, for although he was perhaps eternal so long as he fed on blood, his patience to achieve self-discovery was not likewise infinite.

  The thought of blood made his stomach tighten, and his throat. He considered delaying his work to seek sustenance, but he resisted the possible procrastination and returned to gazing at the block of clay before him.

  He stood and pushed the stool away so he might have freedom to pace about the pedestal upon which the clay rested. He placed his right hand on the clay and then walked clockwise about it. His strong fingers left four slight furrows in the medium, and these he lengthened through several revolutions by spiraling them higher as he continued clockwise.

  He played thus for several moments—a cat toying with its prey. And just as suddenly as a cat realizing the game has breached the boundary into tedium, Leopold pivoted and attacked the clay. He was now a bird of prey, his fingertips pressed together like hawk talons as he struck the clay and withdrew a small piece that he tossed to the floor outside the reach of his pacing feet.

  Within a matter of ten flurried moments, the ungainly lump of clay was whittled down to a vaguely humanoid bust and Leopold was covered with dollops of the stuff. His fingers were shod in thick shells of grey, completely transforming them from implements seemingly capable of precise work to bludgeons presumably meant only for destructive endeavors. But then there was much that was destructive in sculpting, and Leopold believed in creation through annihilation, perhaps explaining why he was willing to destroy his current life if a new one was created in the process.

  He felt himself letting go, though, which was always a good sign for his work. This was a feeling of separation from himself that he could not explain, and could only describe as an out-of-body experience wherein he imagined he sometimes looked down upon himself as he worked, though in such cases he had no conscious control over the work he did. Alternately, he sometimes faded completely and only when he grew desperately tired—or, now that he was a vampire, when dawn was near—would he wearily regain his senses and find a sculpture that was a stranger to him.

  Invariably, though, this letting go resulted in better works—ones where technical concerns did not intrude and restrict him. It was also this letting go that in his youth had convinced him that he was a great artist and would eventually be recognized as such. The genius of greatness manifested in such odd ways, and he presumed this his eccentricity.

  That hubris, however, is what in more recent years, convinced him he would never achieve that greatness. Only when the artist was not aware of his own folly, his own freakishness, could greatness be realized. He knew then that he used this loss of control as an excuse to deserve greatness, instead of a whip with which to flog himself to greatness.

  This time, he did at first feel like he floated over his studio. His reasoning was intact enough to be impressed with himself despite his lingering reservations about his talent. He saw a confident artist boldly striking marks into the surface of the clay model. Careful consideration seemed to occur instantly, for the work was steady and constant and there were no errors; at least there was no work that dissatisfied him, for no move was countermanded or covered up.

  The form of a woman’s face slowly gouged, carved and smoothed its way into existence. It would be a beautiful woman, Leopold understood, so long as the whole of her lived up to the sensuous stretch of the neck and the mischievous tilt of the head.

  Then Leopold watched as the sculptor faltered. The rhythm of the work lost its 4/4-time magic and bumbled into a tragedy of inexpert improvisation. The sculptor even dropped his carving blade and stood slack-jawed and dazed for a moment before retrieving it. Then it was as if an automaton were at work, as if the Leopold floating above the sculptor was the soul of the artist and not the artist’s Muse. The sculptor worked methodically, inevitably detracting from the work by virtue of his attention to it, and in fact not adding to the work at all, because Leopold saw now that the sculptor was working in a loop of cutting, smoothing and replacing those same three areas of the bust.

  Leopold was then certain that this was his unconscious block asserting itself, and this was without doubt the most demoralizing instance, for never had this fugue state failed to produce something which Leopold held in high personal regard. Even this state, the seat of his fervently desired genius, was incapable of success.

  He felt doomed. And lost.

  And he felt himself fading farther away, ever higher, though now it was escape, blessed escape.

  It was the sensation of gradually losing focus on himself and the clay sculpture. Instead, he began to be aware of the entire studio, and he took it all in without the capacity to concentrate on any one aspect of it. He saw the pattern of the long tables along the walls and the portions of them that T-ed toward the main work space. He saw the boxes of bozzettos and unfinished works atop the tables along one wall, though he was unable to pick out any specific piece. And atop the other tables he could only sense the blacks and greys and whites of clay, stone and marble.

  Even these items of the large work studio faded and he gleaned the periphery of his haven: the loosely mortared bricks of the walls of this basement, the warped and water-stained but resolutely sturdy wooden staircase to the ground floor up into which he felt himself drift, and the door to the dry and cool vegetable cellar that went deeper even than the basement and within which Leopold spent every daylight hour comatose on a firm mattress, feather pillows and down comforter.

  From the vantage of his height, though, he felt for a moment that there was something deeper even than his root cellar. Something dark and formless and powerful. Then it was gone, but shapeless appendages still tickled his brain as he floated even higher.

  He eventually encountered the ceiling that was the ground-level floor. In his present state, the ceiling was also a permeable barrier that separated waking from sleeping, and the blurring details of all he had sensed snowed to pure white in a brilliant flash that suddenly brought Leopold fully conscious again.

  Sunday, 20 June 1999, 11:57 PM

  An abandoned steel mill

  Atlanta, Georgia

  The motorcyclist shot over the dark streets of Atlanta. He chose to remain off the main north-south arteries of I-75 and I-85 that cut downtown Atlanta in twain. Simpler to dodge tails if there were abundant side streets to screech along, and with a virtual Blood Hunt declared on anyone remotely considered an Anarch, it was imperative that the Prince’s minions not follow the courier to his destination.

  He wove through the crisscrossing streets for which Atlanta is notorious and so only gradually made his way in the proper direction. Satisfied that no one tailed him, the courier made a final dash across a stretch of open ground toward a massive edifice of brick and steel.

  He knew this was the time he would be most vulnerable, so he poured on the speed. The BMW motorcycle responded admirably, and the skilled driver edged the wheels around the numerous potholes and breaks in the road.

  As he neared the facade—and that’s all it was, as the bulk of the old steel mill was collapsed and left only this single proud wall—the courier took a final glance over his shoulder to make certain he was clear.

  He was.

  But then there was gunfire.

  The thunder of large ammunition roared from the wall of brick and steel before him. The courier nearly laid the bike down on the broken pavement, the hard edges and potholes of which would surely have shredded him like a cheese grater.

  When he recovered from the shock of being fired upon from his own side’s position, the courier noted that the large-caliber weapons were firing into the sky over his head. First setting a course over the road that seemed stable for a moment, the courier craned his neck around and up. He couldn’t hear them above the grinding of his own engine, but he could now see the three helicopters. One in the front appeared to be black and unmarked, and that was presumably the one that tailed him. The other two were closing rapidly from a distance, and they appeared to be police copters. />
  The courier cursed and then pumped the gas handle hard back to unleash all the might of his Bavarian motorcycle. The bike responded with a great burst of acceleration even though it had already been traveling at over 120 m.p.h. Not only was he likely to die for the sake of some fool message—no matter that it was deemed urgent—but he had also failed the most basic aspect of his duty: don’t lead the enemy to the hideout.

  Bullets suddenly sprayed around the courier like the patter of heavy rain. One of them tore through his arm and lodged in his right thigh. He nearly spun out of control, but the ghoulish strength of his intact left arm was enough to keep him in control, at least for the moment. The arm was almost worthless. He could still muster enough hand strength to manipulate the throttle, but there was no sturdiness in his elbow and the courier knew his ability to drive the motorcycle was severely impaired.

  He glanced back again and saw there was a substantial gap between the lead helicopter and the two police ones. If he could maneuver himself into that crease, then he might live.

  The courier slammed on his brakes. At the same moment, he laid the bike down on its right side and leapt off the saddle. He landed with both feet firmly planted on the top or left side of the bike and he surfed the road, his sole good arm maintaining its grip on the handlebars.

  Sparks and pieces of the motorcycle flew as the courier struggled to maintain his balance. The bike careened over the potholed road. And then the helicopter whirled overhead, unable to check its speed as quickly as the motorcyclist. The courier could barely spare the time to watch the helicopter, but he did see it begin to slow as if the pilot thought to circle back for the kill. Then it sped forward.