The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (58 page)

The Birth of
Laszlo Arros

My visitor quit reading from the booklet and said, “Are
you going to ask?” His voice had mellowed but his question clung to the air, sticky
like incense.

“Ask what?”

He stared at the back of my head, the cold
penetrating skin to skull.

“About Muriel,” he said.

He crossed the room again but his figure got bigger,
filling the entire space. I no longer felt cold but hot, as if his rage were
outside of him boiling the air around us. He wore a charcoal coat, long and
loose like a cape, that sashayed near the trim of his boots as he moved.

“Is she the girl from the ship,” I muttered. “The
blood donor?”

“Yes.”

“Was that before?” I pointed to the booklet.

“Yes.”

“Before everything?”

“She was a victim of circumstance.”

“How?” I shifted on my stool.

“She was chosen.”

“For you?” My spine tingled, as he clutched the
booklet before putting it back in his pocket.

“Yes,” he said.

“She is gone now?”

He nodded. “She is.”

“But whose booklet is that?”

“It is mine.” He paced the studio. “Though it
belonged to Laszlo Arros once.”

“Where did you get it?”

“From the facility where he used up Muriel,” he
said. “And the others.”

“What others?”

He glanced sideways, catching me with his eyes. I
tried not to cower.

“She is the only one who matters.” He turned to face
me and his coat drew a breeze that kissed my face. “Would you not rather know
about Laszlo Arros, the most important character in my story?”

“Was that—well, is she the one interviewing
Muriel?”

“Yes.” My visitor smiled and the gleam of metal in
his mouth made me recoil. His aspect grew more horrifying the closer he drew. “But
do not get hung up on gender, for she may as easily be a he.”

“I don’t understand.”

He sighed and turned away. “Laszlo Arros is a theonthrope.”

“A what?”

“A god that may take human form.”

“A god?”

He nodded and a brief smile rose to his lips, but then
he said, “You know none of this because the world in which you live is nothing like
the forgotten one. The other world had a longstanding tradition of mythos,
expressed in song and literature and even painting and sculpture. But settlers
do not value art, and they have left the forgotten world to ruin.”

“We don’t have the luxury of mausoleums like our
forefathers did,” I said.

“Museums,” he said. “A mausoleum is something quite
different, and those are still around.”

“Museums, excuse me. The word doesn’t exist in the
vulgate.”

“Do you know the earliest works of art were found on
the walls of caves?”

I shook my head. The recovered files didn’t go far
enough back for that.

“You have maps, do you not? Of the forgotten world?”
He asked.

I nodded and he told me to get them. I found the
rudimentary atlas, water-damaged but recovered nevertheless. One of my prized
possessions, I would explore its colored pages for hours. It had belonged to
Gerenios, but he gave it to me as a gift not too long ago.

My visitor took the book from me, making it shrink
in his hands. He handled it with little care, tearing through the pages to get
to the one he sought. He threw the book open on my drafting table and said,
“Here, this mountain range.”

“Pyrénées,” I read the French text, sounding out the
letters as my guardian had taught me.

“The Pyrenees,” Vincent said, translating it to the
vulgate. “A mountain range that spanned France and Spain, rock millions of
years old. Inside were Neolithic cave drawings that depicted animal-headed
men—gods that walked the earth at one time.”

“Have they all gone?”

“Not all.”

“Are you one?” I mumbled.

“You understand little of the forgotten world,
despite your attempt to learn of its downfall.”

“How did you know?”

“Why else would I leave you clues to the answers you
seek?”

“Your journals didn’t tell me what I’m looking for,”
I said, unabashedly.

His shoulders rose slightly and I lost all bravado,
shrinking as I sat on my stool.

“You think knowing the cause of the Red Death will
prevent it from returning, but you are foolish to think it ever left.”

“The kinds of creatures you write about haven’t been
seen for many seasons,” I said. “Since long before my lifetime there’s been no
illness, no disease, no fever, nothing like what you describe.”

“Until now.”

My throat dried up. “Is it you?”

He scowled and said, “Shall I tell you about the
Egyptian gods?” He flipped the pages of the atlas to one that showed the
African continent, once desperate for water, it now sits beneath the sea. “That
is Egypt.”

“I know very little about it,” I said, “just whatever’s
in this book.”

“Yes, but cartography cares nothing for monuments
and citadels. The pyramids, the desert, the gods are all gone now, and nothing
stands as witness to their ever having been.”

“But you recall them.”

“I do.”

He touched the frayed edge of the map, running his
hand across the faded ink. His nail beds appeared gray in the dim light of the
studio. I looked away for fear he’d punish me for sizing him up.

“The Egyptians, a far more civilized people than the
Achaeans—or perhaps the same people—worshipped therianthropes long
before any other civilization did.”

“Theri—”

“The word comes from the Greek,” he said. “The
language in the booklet.
Therion
means beast or wild thing, and
anthropos
is human being. The term can be found in many languages, for many have
worshipped shifter deities.”

“You said theon—something.”

“Theonthropy,” he said. “Gods into men. But animals
are most common.”

“Animals?”

“Theriocephaly denotes gods which share animal and
human traits,” he said. “Lycanthropy, for instance, is specific to wolves,
though there have been legends of lions, tigers, birds, even swans and frogs. In
Egyptian lore, Ra was depicted with the head of a falcon, and Sobek the head of
a crocodile. Have you ever seen a crocodile? Its long nose and jaw ready to
clamp its sharp teeth on flesh?”

I shook my head and held my breath, picturing the
puncture wounds in the dead settlers’ necks.

“Can you guess what animal-head Anubis wore?”

“Who is Anubis?” I asked.

“The god of death.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat, and my eyes
welled up with tears.

“A dog’s head,” he said. “The first kynanthrope,
Anubis is the Egyptian god of the afterlife, mummification and burial.”

“Mummification?” The word came trippingly off my
tongue.

“Do you know what that is?”

“When a body is wrapped tightly and preserved,” I
said. “After death, I mean.”

The corners of his mouth turned upward and he said,
“Good. For what purpose does one preserve a dead body, do you suppose?”

“I can’t say.”

“No?”

“We burn ours.”

“Down to the bone, I see.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Why not preserve the body?”

“The colonists don’t believe in it.”

“Why?”

“They don’t think there is life after death—in
this body.”

“I see,” he said. “Shame.” He turned his head to the
side and asked, “What about death after life?”

“Huh.”

“I have confused you.” He tapped a finger to my
temple and a bolt of pain shot through my eyes. “We shall cure you of your
blindness,” he said.

“I’m a quick study,” I said, beating away the lump
in my throat. “I learn quickly.”

“And so you shall learn, little by little. In the
meantime, my story must hold some air of suspense,” he said with a wink as he
backed away, his feet barely touching the stone floor.

“Was Muriel a therianthro—an animal god, too?”

“Oh no,” he said. “She was nothing really, though Laszlo
Arros considered her more.”

“More than a source of blood?” I tried to keep my
voice from cracking, but the mention of blood made my throat tighten.

“Do you see the similarities between you and her?”

I shook my head and the lamp flickered, throwing
shadow dancers on the wall. He released a grim chuckle. “Still you do not see,
even as I stand before you.”

“I don’t know,” my tongue swelled, “what you mean.”

“You do,” he said with a smirk. A grotesquerie, his
mouth like the grill of a rake made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. “You
know what you are.”

“I don’t—I’m just like the other settlers.”

“You are nothing like the others,” he said. “Trust
your gut. It will serve you.” He spoke as though our conversation had begun
long ago.

“I’d like to know,” I said quietly, “how I’m
different.”

He took in a breath and licked his lips. “You want to
know who you are, and where you come from?”

“My parents—” I couldn’t finish. The mention
of my bloodline seemed a bad idea, though learning why I was nothing like the
colonists who had taken me in would give me some sense of self, something I had
sought for a lifetime. Even Gerenios couldn’t ignore my differences, and the
guardian who had abandoned me long ago reminded me of my position as the
colony’s smartest member. A man without a name, my guardian taught me
everything I know, things about language, texts and more. “Your contribution
shall be for humanity,” he had said. But that was all I recalled of him. His
voice, his face, his name were all flushed from my memory. “Your guardian has
blown into the wind,” Gerenios had told me the day he disappeared before sun
up. “Let him be.” he’d said. “He’s a part of the forgotten world now.”

Vincent rapped on the drafting table with the back
of his hand. “Has my journal revealed some truth?”

He studied me with his ancient eyes, seeing through
me. To say his look penetrated doesn’t do it justice. Like being the target of
an arrow swift to its bullseye, one couldn’t dodge his hard stare. I couldn’t
even swallow to loosen the phlegm in my throat. My heart raced and the pads of
my hands throbbed, and the hairs in my nostrils tickled my nose as the air sailed
past them.

“I admire your ignorance,” he said.

He thought me puerile but I couldn’t know the one
thing he did. He wouldn’t live to see the sunrise, not with the predator in our
midst.

“Where did I leave off?” He glanced up at the sky,
now the color of burnt umber. “We have the rest of the night.” He sat back down
in the shadowed corner of the studio.

“For what?” I stammered.

“Shall we continue?”

I returned to my drafting table, savoring the
silence before his voice darkened the room once more. My hand trembled when he
spoke, taking me back to the ship, back to the horrors of the den, back to the
place that had given me nightmares.

“You will need a stable hand for this, Dagur.” His
voice shifted, melodic enough to soothe a child—or like the scratch on a
door that begs to be answered.

“We must reach the conclusion,” he said. “Before dawn.”

I did my best to nod but my neck was locked in place
again, and when I attempted to speak, my voice failed.

“Shall I begin with the child?” He said softly, as
though thinking aloud. “Or perhaps the letters. That is where I left off, no?
Byron’s letters?”

I scratched the words at the top of the page:
Byron’s letters
, and they stared back at
me with curiosity.

“He was the greatest,” he trailed off and groaned
before picking up again. “The greatest part of the whole. His letters to Laszlo
Arros reveal much.”

I heard the crinkling of paper, as he opened the
letter he’d produced from somewhere on him. His voice changed to suit the
exercise, his tenor colder, indistinct, as he read selected excerpts for
notation.

“I will not keep this from my companion,” he began. “He
must learn about you. You two must meet, for I am certain he will approve your cause.
I do not know when our next visit to the Nortrak shall be, but the suggestion
will come up without my raising suspicion.

“He knows me better than I know myself, but will approve
if I do. He defers to me with regard to scientific matters, though he is far
from obtuse. He may not understand genetics as we do, but he knows more about
our kind than any other, I assure you.”