The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (64 page)

Doctor Byron
Darrow

A genetics specialist
among other things, Byron Darrow was a bright member of the medical community,
and his affiliation to Santo Padre Gio afforded him access to the equipment he
needed. At one time, the hospital housed the country’s leading genetics lab. His
work was his own, but we did not exist separately, and I encouraged his studies.
His passion for the sciences was the thing that drew me to him in the first
place. I could not know that by crossing his family moor one night our
fortuitous meeting would seal both our fates.

Genetics had exploded
in the years prior to the plague, as modes of insemination and child bearing
had changed with the climate. After the eruptions, the watershed, and both
Great Floods, the population declined rapidly, and women relied on science to
procreate, some even turning to artificial wombs for quicker results.
Traditional copulation became an outdated mode for assuring pregnancy. Fetuses
were genetically modified, made resilient enough to stay the course for what
was to come. I suppose one cannot be surprised at the plague, the human race
bound for mutation, a slip into another state of being, though not that of
perfection.

At Byron’s
insistence, when I dragged him from LaDenza, we remained close to the hospital
where he had been on call for more than a decade. I did not frequent the infirmary,
so when he discovered Evelina it was easy to keep her from me. He used the laboratory
there to prep the sample he had already cultivated in his home lab, Evelina being
the missing piece, the surrogate he needed for his plan to succeed.

Almost a month before
he met her, he culled my DNA. We were feeding at the time, he and I tossing a
body back and forth between us. The morsel was a flippant hotel manager who had
smelled gamy, though not sullied. Our indulgence was fevered, as Byron
instigated some roughhousing by grabbing at the neck before I had finished with
it. His foreplay was frisky, until greed reared its pretty head and he begged
for a smack. I slammed him to the ground when he tried to take the blood from
me a second time. I was not starved, simply playful. I rather liked his fiery
side, and hoped to stimulate him with my scolding. It pleased me when he raised
a pointed claw and stabbed me in the cheek, tearing through flesh to my gums.
But the pain was worse for him, as he struggled against my hardened skin and
voracious high to press his claw in more deeply. He simply loosened a molar,
and I scowled at him with a bloodied mouth. He backed off, fearing the wrath he
had stirred.

“Forgive me,” he
said. “I do not know what came over me.”

I laughed, which
angered him. He thought I mocked his sensitive genius.

“I want the tooth,”
he said, holding out his hand, palm up.

I reached into my
mouth and yanked the loose molar from its bed. Another would regenerate and I
thought it a small fee to pay for his effort. Plus, his sentimentality touched
me.

“Will you wear it as
a gemstone about you neck?” I asked.

“Perhaps.”

I never saw it again,
and forgot all about it until his letter.
The
sample I gave you is not his gem
, he wrote to Laszlo Arros. My venom was
not the thing, but by some strange turn my DNA proved to be everything.

Like most scientists,
as practical as they claim to be, Byron was an idealist. He believed every
substance, every material had its perfect state of existence, whether subjected
to some intense catalyst or simply deteriorated over time. Convinced I would
fall in line with his plan, which was to keep Evelina safe, he inseminated her
with the sperm he had cultivated from my DNA. She knew nothing of it, as he
used his potency to freeze her mind and destroy the evidence of their ever having
met. I taught him how to do that, how to clear a human memory. Evelina would build
a new story to explain her pregnancy, a necessity she could not escape.

I have pieced this
together from the scraps he left me, some from his notes and journal and other
bits from his letters to Laszlo Arros. But her blood, of course, was the
biggest clue.

Byron discovered Evelina
Caro in a pediatrics ward, where she had been admitted for observation. This
was still early in the outbreak, and some patients were kept at the hospital despite
their not being at risk. Byron hid in plain sight, taking on staff rotations to
blend in, and diagnosed her simple pulmonary infection, treating it as best he
could. He noticed she rarely had visitors and questioned her about her family
before he made his decision. He tested her blood, too, and found her to be a
healthy candidate. Byron knew me better than myself, my vanity, my irritability,
and my affinity for women. Men were a challenge, women a staple. Her tender
aspect, her youth and beauty, were all to my taste. I could live and die for
her.

In the meantime, my
clan came together, as vampires I had known for years discovered where we were
holed up to wait out the pandemic. Byron came and went freely, plotting his
scheme, until it became too dangerous for him to go out alone. Once he had
successfully impregnated her, he observed her closely, hour by hour, until she
vanished, and he was lost.

I cannot imagine how much
Byron suffered when he discovered she had fled. He hid his devastation well. He
had no way of finding her, and could turn to no one for help. When we moved on
to the cathedral, he grew distraught.

I do not know if he
believed our finding her again a miracle, or simply fortuitous. She was healthy,
and still carrying my child. Perhaps her attachment to me is what drew me to
her. Whether his genetic modification, his act of god, made me angry did not
matter. Byron Darrow proved a genius, and did the one thing I would have never
believed possible. But he not only changed the course of my fate, for Evelina’s
would also never be the same again.

A Sunken Ship

“Can you picture it?”
Vincent’s grumble made my throat clench. “Evelina would be my consort, and the
head of Cixi’s doomed coterie.”

I pictured the rise
of his new clan, the vampire horde that would destroy its members to get to
Lucia’s blood if it knew what it drank was killing it. But I couldn’t see
Evelina as their leader.

“Your mind turns,
Dagur,” he said, “but your question may only be answered one way.”

He rose and stood
close to me, his cool air giving me gooseflesh. I threw my hand up to warm the
back of my shorn head. He stepped forward and placed a flat palm on my back.
“Do you see it yet?”

He drew his mouth up
to my ear, and his kiss slowed my breathing, sealing up my airway. The room
seemed to empty out of sound, and fill with stillness. His hand bore down on my
back as though his reach crawled beneath my skin and his fingers plucked at my
lungs, pressing my organs together, squeezing them like husks. He sucked the
air from my lungs, making pinwheels of orange light spin in my head. The
sensation was similar to my swim in the Reykjadalur in the frost season, and I
lost consciousness, his words carrying me off. “Follow me,” he said.

He shuttled me back
in time, back to the ship where the brood of vampires fed on toxic blood. “Come
see,” he said.

We landed on the deck
beneath a brilliant sky, bursting with constellations I had only seen in
pictures. My guardian told me they used to see animals in the sky, each point
marking an outline. I tried to see them, but there were too many points to
connect. I concentrated on the air instead, the briny smell of the sea unlike
the freshwater lakes outside the colony. The salt stuck to my tongue, as I touched
the metal rail that kept me from falling into the pit of blackness below. My
legs wobbled beneath me, as the deck seemed to drop, sinking into the black
pool that held it suspended. My panic dissolved, as Vincent put his hand on
mine.

“I have thrust your spirit
back in time, pre-conception,” he said. “Here you are merely a work of the subconscious,
a kernel in an undetermined timeline.”

I won’t waste ink
trying to explain the experience of time travel. I’m not sure I actually
traveled through time, but was not simply brought inside his mind and shown his
memories as though they were a collection of paintings in a gallery, haunts I’d
read about in recovered files. A different world now, men no longer waste hours
on frivolous exploits like sculpture and illustration, valuing their work as if
it were a spiritual donation.

Vincent gestured for
me to follow, leading me through a hatch, down into the bowels of the ship. My
body seemed to ghost, as my senses fired, seeing everything through his eyes. “You
must see,” he said, speaking directly into my mind.

We walked from one passageway
to the next, the lights bursting to full capacity as he passed each one. The
light revealed the rust on the bulkheads, with algae-ridden counters and
blocked crevices blooming with coral, crustaceans and carapace. The priceless
works of art were gone too, disintegrated and decayed like they’d never
existed. The exquisite ship detailed in the pages of his journal had become a
skeleton.

“For years,” he said,
“it has lain beneath the sea, a sunken reef.”

I couldn’t understand
how we walked a ship settled on the bottom of the sea, but his magic was not to
be explained. “Explore it,” he said.

We toured for an
endless period of time, and when we finally reached the cabin he’d intended to
show me, he said, “This is the rub.”

I wouldn’t understand
his meaning until much later, but I can’t forget what I saw there, in that
sunken ship, beneath the sea. The wheel of the hatch seemed stuck but Vincent
struggled and fought against the rust, pushing it open as the seal broke.

“Enter,” he said. “I
am behind you.”

I suppose if I’d been
in my right mind, I would have clamped up with fear and kept outside despite
his insistence, but I entered and witnessed what he brought me to see.

“Memories are always
past, never present,” he said.

The compartment was
dark, but I recognized the striped head and single braid of the one who floated
cross-legged in midair. The Hummingbird looked peaceful, despite his ferocity.
His eyes were closed, and his face a clay mask. His whole body looked like it
was covered in clay, the cracks on his skin revealing the hardening beneath. His
weight seemed to defy the water, as he remained buoyed up by something tied to
his waist. I moved closer, unafraid, as Vincent pushed me toward Huitzilli’s
statue, revealing the chain about him. The thick adamantine link was attached
to a beam overhead, which kept him towed in midair.

“Touch him,” Vincent
said.

I obeyed and drew my
hand up to the top of his head, his eyes remaining closed as I laid it on his
forehead. I didn’t move, waiting for him to wake from his sleep. When he didn’t
stir, I touched his eyes and then his nose, and even his lips. His face was
harder than the sides of the cliff at Reïkyadul.

“He will not wake,”
he said. “He sleeps for eternity.”

I couldn’t ask
Vincent why, but remembered to do so once I could speak again.

“Come,” he said.
“There’s more to see.”

He dragged me deeper,
it seemed, into the hull, further into the bowels of the ship. When we reached
the ring, I recognized it. The railings above, allowing vampires to hang and
sit as they watched their peers vie for glory on the metal deck, stained with
gore and blood. But it seemed less frightening, empty as it was.
Where are they all?
I thought.

“The ash has been washed
away,” Vincent said. “Nothing left but metal.”

I understood, and
wept inwardly, though I don’t know why I felt sorrowful.

“No cause for that,”
he said. “You are here because they are not.”

My hands tightened
into fists and my sides spasmed violently, as pressure rose in my chest and
burned my lungs. I passed out in agony and woke to a euphoric sense of relief
from physical pain. I had been moved from the stool to my cot, and Vincent sat
on the edge of my mattress, looking down on me. I touched the side of my left
arm first to feel for wetness, but I was perfectly dry.

“How did you do
that?” I whispered.

“We shall continue,”
he said.

“What was that?” I
asked, groggily.

“The present,” he
said.

“The ship is sunk?”

He nodded. “We must
continue.”

“The Toltec?”

“I have much to narrate
and Time’s arrow will not be suspended forever.”

“Did the blood turn
Huitzilli to stone?” I hadn’t grown bolder, but the weight of my question
begged an answer.

“They all turned to
stone,” he said.

“He is unbreakable.”

“It seems he is.”

“Is he alive?”

“Perhaps he is in
stasis, I cannot say for sure,” he said, with a sigh. “The salt water has
worked to preserve his body—a trick of the Aztec.”

“Will he wake?”

Vincent smiled. “Why?
Would you like to meet him?”

I shook my head, as I
sat up. “He’s as frightening as Evelina’s account.”

“Then return to your seat
at the table,” he said. “We have to finish.”

He retreated to his chair
in the corner, and I to my drafting table. Before beginning, I noticed the
clean sheet he’d prepared for me and my pens arranged in the order I liked. My
urgency to know about the Hummingbird cooled, as I prepared to record a bit
more of history, the one I was charged with salvaging.

“We arrived in the
Nortrak fifteen days after leaving the ashy docks of Genoa,” he said. “By then,
I had made a plan.”