The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (57 page)

His Arrival

He slipped by the door unnoticed, ushering in the
cool air, his hand gracing the small of my neck before I could feel the chill
on my skin.

“Do you want to hear the rest of my story?” He spoke
my language like a native, and I recognized his voice though I’d never actually
heard him speak.

For an entire season, I sat in the tower at twilight
overlooking the landscape, watching the lights go out one at a time, and waiting.
Five seasons had passed since we uncovered the second artifact. I’d believed the
first journal fortuitous, a historical text to cherish, but with the discovery
of the second I realized they were warnings for a sullied future. I held off translating
the greeting etched in the margin on the last page of the second one, his final
words addressed to me. I denied his message, afraid to send the colony into
panic. Gerenios would destroy what he’d built, and resign us to nomads, to live
on ships sailing the wasteland for tracts of soil, few and far between. But we’d
never outsmart Vincent Du Maurier, and though I’d convinced myself he’d
scribbled the note in haste, perhaps an afterthought written on a whim, I knew
he’d come.

“Yes,” I said, barely a whisper. Compared to his
tenor, fiery like lava, mine was air. When I first transcribed the lines of his
text,
I have gorged for thousands of
years
, I imagined his voice, his words weighty and ominous. I didn’t know
their mass then, the burden of his history.

His hand fell from the curve at the top of my neck and
he dropped a booklet in front of me. His paralytic powers had seized my body,
and kept me from looking up at him. When he told me to open the booklet, the
lamp on my drafting table flickered as he settled into the nook across the room.
The seat into which he sat creaked beneath the weight of his figure while I
remained a statue on my stool.

“Open it,” he repeated. “Read to me.”

He eased up his mental hold, and let me move my arms
to handle the artifact, but once I’d opened it I couldn’t make sense of it. I
cleared my throat and said, “I don’t know these markings.”

“It is like a code,” he said, conserving his words.

“I’d need a cipher to translate the text.”

“I shall wait.”

He asked the impossible of me. I couldn’t imagine an
alphabet, his mess of symbols and squiggles so unreadable I’d never learn its cryptograph,
let alone invent one for it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It is ancient.”

I’d been taught to read and write in several languages,
but I’d yet to see anything like it.

“Koiné Greek,” he said.

“I’ve never …” my voice trailed off, as I examined
the script.

A low growl like a pup’s rose up from the corner of
the studio. “A relic,” he said. “The remains lie in Laszlo Arros.”

“Where?” I asked.

He released another grumble, and then a second
disapproving growl. “Not where,” he said. “With whom.”

“I don’t,” I stumbled.

“Laszlo Arros,” he said. “The most significant character
in my story.”

He compelled me to look at him, his mystic figure drawing
my body around to meet his gaze. I studied his face, wrath revealing itself just
beneath the surface, his aspect like Milton’s exile, nothing of the face a
young Latinate girl could fall in love with.

“Do not,” he said, raising a hand with flexed
fingers. My fright must have shown because he dropped his hand and said, “Each
time you think of her, a dagger is dug into my skull. I do not wish for you to
think on Evelina.”

He got up and approached me, reaching for me with a
pointed claw. He held his hand up and open, willing me, I thought, to pass him
the booklet, but when I turned to grab it, it rose on its own and floated
through midair, landing in the palm of his hand.

“I shall dictate,” he said.

I didn’t need to ask in which language. He meant the
vulgate, the crude tongue of the settlers. His rich timber resonated at the top
of the tower high up in the clouds overlooking the second colony of the resurrected,
and no one heard it but me.

As he dictated, the lamp on my drafting table danced
with each shift in meter. “From the
file of Laszlo Arros,”
he began. “Subject 1013 …”

In the Beginning

My first look at Muriel
Heath was through the glass, after insemination. She is a fine subject, young
and ripe, and Doctor Keng assures me her body will support the embryos. When I
went in to greet her this morning her mouth rose slightly at the corners as I entered
the room. My shape pleased her.

“How is the pain
today?” I asked.

She nodded and said,
“I don’t feel well today.”

Her Lolita face and
large doe-eyes seduced me, and I put my syringe away. “Perhaps I can soothe
your ache,” I said. “Stomach, is it?”

She nodded.

I pulled out a capsule
from the pocket of my scrubs and poured a cup of water from the table on the
sideboard. We would only have a few moments to chat before the sedative put her
to sleep.

I gestured for her to
drink all the water since she would sleep for more than twenty-four hours. She obeyed,
and then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaning over to place the
glass on the table beside her. She smiled and thanked me.

“Your sickness is not
without reason,” I assured her. “But like everyone here, you have a responsibility.”

“I know,” she said.

“Vesselhood is not
something to take lightly,” I said. “Are you learning from the films?”

She nodded.

“Do you have any
questions?”

Doctor Keng spoke
with her after the last one, when she asked him about delivering multiples. He
assures me she understands.

“You volunteered, did
you not?”

She shrugged. “I
don’t remember.”

“Is your father Colonel
Heath?” I feigned looking at the chart I held in my hand.

She nodded.

“He signed for you,”
I said. “Since you are not of age, he granted his permission.”

“He wanted me to
volunteer.”

I leaned forward and
touched her chin, and she softened. My choice of form was a good one. “You are
special,” I said. “Not like the others.”

“Why?”

“You are a healer,
Muriel.”

“What do you mean?”

I told her I could
see it in her, but I could actually feel it. Her skin pulsed with my touch. Her
energy is incredibly strong but novel, and she has no idea how to tap it.

“Oh,” she said.

“Have you befriended
any of the other vessels?”

“Not yet.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

She shrugged, unaware
we have made it impossible for them to communicate with each other. Their sedation
and isolation are working as planned, and I have continued to insist on it. I
will not risk community, or coercion.

“When will I be
allowed to go home?” She swung her legs on the small chair, a spark dancing in
her eye.

I smiled. “Never, my
dear. Consider this home.”

“But my father said,”
her throat grew cottony, a side effect of the sedative.

“Colonel Heath is out
on a mission, my dear.” I touched her chin with the tips of my fingers and her
shoulders shook. “Just you see, my darling girl. This place will grow on you.”

“May I go back to my
room?”

“How is your stomach
now?” I lifted her chin anew, and led her eyes to mine. The twinkle in hers had
gone, but the tiniest flecks of brown were splashed between branches of green. “This
place,” I whispered, “is the safest one in the new world. It is the womb.”

“The womb?” She
mumbled.

“The new world
order,” I said. “The matrices base.”

She stared blankly.

I released her chin
and stepped back, admiring her still. “Nothing, darling girl. Never mind. You
trust your father, right? You know he would never put you in harm’s way.”

“Oh,” she said
softly. “Yes, of course, I trust the colonel.”

She swayed forward as
the sedative worked through her veins. She caught herself from falling as one
does when slipping into sleep, and wrapped a foot around the leg of the chair.

“I’d like to lie down
now,” she said, a slight color rising to her cheeks.

“Not just yet,
Muriel.”

“Okay,” she whispered.
She licked her lips and showed me the little gears slowing in her head. “May I
have some sweet milk?” Her eyes went up to the side, as she searched for the
courage to ask for the treat.

“You have had your
allotment for the day, have you not?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then I am afraid
Doctor Keng would not approve a second serving.”

She fidgeted with the
hangnails on her unkempt fingers.

I leaned forward and
whispered in her ear, “Would it make you feel better?”

She nodded.

“Okay then,” I said.
“I will see what I can do.” I never intended to honor my offer since she would
be asleep shortly. “Doctor Keng has a few more tests to administer today but I
will grant your wish afterward. It will be our little secret. Promise me you won’t
tell.”

“I swear.” She smiled
and looked through me with a stare sharper than a bullet, and I turned away.

“Tell me about your
dreams,” I said. “Are they vivid enough to recall?”

“Not really,” she
said.

“Are you certain?” Her
brain activity showed otherwise. Her monitors often recorded erratic and
unusual movement when she slept.

She purred like a
kitten, having fallen asleep again on the chair. I woke her with a nudge on the
leg, and she tossed her head up and smiled. “I fell asleep, didn’t I?”

I shrugged. “You’re
tired.”

“Would you believe I
just had a dream?”

“What about?”

With a thin voice she
said, “Him.”

“Who?”

She pointed to my
reflection in the mirror in front of her, standing to gaze more intently at
whatever it was she saw.

“Me?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “The
man behind the glass.”

“That is not glass,”
I said. “It’s a mirror.”

“No, it isn’t,” she
said. “I see him plain as day. Don’t you?”

I studied the mirror
and tried to picture what she saw in me. My figure hadn’t shifted, and I
wondered if she was dreaming.

“Are you awake?” I
took her by the shoulders and shook her.

She looked directly
at me and asked who I was as if she saw through my disguise. I sat her back
down and shone my light into her eyes. Her pupils were dilated, and she proved
awake.

If she dreamed of the
origin in that moment, if she somehow saw him in me, it is too early. The
fusion will not begin for years, only after the plague has come.

I asked her to
explain what she saw exactly, but she seemed bewildered. “I don’t know what you
mean,” she said. “I said I saw a man in the mirror?”

It was as if she had
imagined the entire thing. She nodded and her eyes glazed over before her head
flopped to the side.

I woke her anew and
said, “It sounds like your dreams are the result of an overactive imagination.”

I have since adjusted
her dosage to account for hallucinations.

“But you,” she said.

“I what?”

“You and him.”

“Him who?”

“Never mind,” she
said.

She picked at a
hangnail on her left hand until it bled and then stuck the finger in her mouth
to suck on the blood. The thought of the metallic taste on the tip of her
tongue, sliding down her throat, contaminating my embryos sitting in her womb
made my stomach turn. I yanked the finger from her mouth, and she stared up at
me, stunned.

“I will send someone
in to tend to your nails,” I said. “You must not pick at them.”

“It’s a habit.”

“I can see that, but
it is one we shall break.” My voice dipped into a darker register, and the hair
on her arms rose.

“Sorry,” she
whispered.

The blood’s allure
escapes me. It is beyond me how anyone can suffer such a foul taste. The thought
alone makes me cringe.

“Do you understand
the importance of your role as a donor?”

“A donor?”

“Yes,” I said. “You
are here as a surrogate and you are to donate the purest part of you.”

“I don’t under—”
She nodded off, her head rolling onto her chest and her shoulders slumping
forward, her bloody hands nesting in her lap.

I reached forward and
tapped her cheeks to wake her again. She inhaled with a vocal drag, as though
coming up for air, and then smiled. “Did I doze off?”

“Yes,” I said.

She touched her cheek
with that single finger that would not relent its gush, as the blood bubbled on
the rim of her nail. “Will I meet you again?”

“Of course.”

A red pattern crawled
up her neck and crossed her ears to their tips.

“Blood,” she said.

“What?”

“He wants blood.”

“What does that
mean?”

She shrugged. “Something
I just dreamed, I guess.” Her lips curled into another smile and she shifted in
her chair, looking up at me with doe-eyes again. She stuck her finger in her
mouth anew.

“Overactive
imagination,” I said, pulling the finger away.

Her head rolled back,
and this time I did not wake her but let her sleep until they came for her.

She will not see me
again, though I will watch her closely. Her intuition is remarkable, her
capacity to empathize strong. I must keep an eye on my embryos, as they grow inside
of her. If the origin has selected her, I must make the necessary adjustments.
I may not be allowed to keep her.

It is closer than I
thought. But if he sees my plan before it starts, I will fail. I must begin our
correspondence at once. It is time to greet his beloved Byron Darrow.