The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (68 page)

She paused in her
retelling, and the soft stroke of her hand on my brow eased my pain in the
darkness. The touch was lighter than a tickle, but penetrated me to the core, and
I grew in strength.
Rise, Rise, Be risen
,
her words were carried on the air with wings.

“I prayed for your
arrival on that shore,” she continued. “Odysseus’s men held off the shades with
their swords and spears. All were hungry for the blood, the serum to cause
loose lips and open their minds to the living past. They came, and we defended
our plot, until you, my yiós, rose out of the fog and ash to find me.”

I did not recall the
moment she described and yet it bound me up as though it were true. The moment
of my resurrection, my escape from the barren wasteland in Hades, my freedom come
at the hands of my companion, the wily Ithakan whose face remained most present
in my mind many years after I had risen.

“You gorged on the
blood, my yiós, and rose to lead a new empire, one for man to fear. Your wrath
became your darkness and you were to become the god who shifts into all things.”

I recalled the taste
of the blood, the hardening of my core, the rising of my spirit to life anew.

“My son, you were to
be forever,” Thetis said. “This life of change was to be yours until the end of
time, but you, you deceiver, have dismissed your gifts.”

The shapeless form of
darkness wrestled itself together to form a body, a hulking mass that hung
overtop me where I stood, a white light, the vision of salvation, the face of
sótéria. Thetis overcame the darkness then, and I gazed on my mother’s aspect. It
had never escaped my memory, her features branded like a tattoo on flesh. Young
forever, she possessed unchanging beauty like every goddess, though wore hers
like a hypocrite’s cloak of gold and lead. Thetis had always been a
cantankerous woman in human form, but a docile and demure goddess of the sea.

“Mitéra,” I said, my
Greek call a force of habit. “Mitéra, why do you forsake me?”

“It is you who have done
the forsaking, my yiós,” she said. “I come to save you from yourself.”

“I do not
understand.”

“This is your doing.”

At the time, I could
not know what she meant because forgetting what I had done had been a part of
the whole, what I had wanted. The finale I orchestrated was to be forgotten for
this very reason. From the moment I set it in motion, I was no longer its
maestro. Had I remembered, I would have done everything to stop it.

“To turn back is
impossible,” she said. “But believe me, I am doing all I can. I have left you
crumbs to follow, and you have picked up the trail.”

“I have come for
Lucia,” I said.

“You have come for
yourself,” she said. “Your kóri will save you. That is why she is here. For
you. Do not forget it.”

“What have I done?” I
asked, knowing the answer already.

“You must face Laszlo
Arros now. You must, my yiós. Repair the wrong you have done. He is your
creation, your equal in all ways, as powerful, as intelligent, as capable as
you are. But remember he is not you.”

“Who is Laszlo Arros?”

“The greatest
character in your story,” my mother said. “The hero to your anti-hero.”

“Laszlo Arros is the hero?”

“There is good and
evil in both of you,” she said. “You and Laszlo Arros are one, and the same.”

She pulled me into her
light, bursting with brightness as a star explodes and consumes the darkness
around it. Blinded once again, I reached for her only to find myself somewhere
new, a place I had been before.

The Burden of Immortality

Vincent paused
mid-sentence and groaned with a yowl so terrifying I nearly slid from my stool.
I wouldn’t turn to look at him but could hear him scraping his claw along the
stone wall behind him. I couldn’t tell if his anger drove him to the gesture, but
his dig rattled the walls at my end of the studio.

“You see, Dagur,” he
said, “I grew tired of my endless existence, and nursed complacency with an extreme
indulgence. Life’s boredom drove me to it, made me believe I could be a deity.
I tested the truth with blood, no longer wishing it as my only succor. I invented
a scenario, a scheme really, to rid me of the need.”

I swallowed and asked
why, my raspy voice barely audible.

He rose and went to
the open window to admire the sun, suspended in the sky as if in ice. The horizon’s
hue had shifted from red to purple, a common occurrence for this season.

“The reason is the
least interesting question,” he said. “The method is far more intriguing.”

“You caused the Red
Death,” I said.

He braced the window
sill and threw his head back with a dark chuckle, his mask of evil having come
back. I turned away and focused on the last few lines I’d transcribed,
I reached for her only to find myself
somewhere new, a place I had been before
.
I would have silently prayed for my own escape to somewhere new if
I thought it would change the course of my fate, but I was stuck inside the
tower with him, a nightmare from which I couldn’t awake.

“Do not be
frightened,” he said from the window. “My kin is safe now.”

His choice stung me
like a swarm of angry wasps,
my kin
.
The word kin doesn’t exist in the vulgate, but I understood it from the things
my guardian had taught me, and its meaning as the blood in a vampire’s own
line.

“Am I kin?”

Vincent didn’t answer,
but remained seated at the window, using the last rays of the sun to recharge
his strength. He looked outward at the light.

I cleared my throat
and said, “The sun has never taken so long to set.”

The metal of his jaw
scraped against his lips, and I pictured his smile. “Athena once held off
Helios’s chariots for Odysseus and Penelope,” he said. “Why would she not do
the same for me?”

I took to the pen
again, transcribing his words, but he stayed my hand. Like a mist that rises
out of nowhere, he moved from one spot of the studio to the next, covering all
of it at once. His touch balanced the shake that had risen in mine, as he said,
“My boredom grew stronger by the hour, Dagur, and I fooled myself into thinking
I could toy with mortality.”

I stared down at the
sheet of paper, willing him to let go of my wrist, hoping he wouldn’t send me
into another spell of darkness.

“Look at me,” he
said.

I obeyed and turned
my eyes upward to witness his Janus face. My lips softened with a sigh.

“You should know you
have nothing left to fear,” he said.

“Was it my kin who
drank from me?”

“You do understand,”
he said.

“Will I see them
again?”

“Certainly.”

“Is my mother here?” My
eyes darted about the studio, soaking up the darkness of the empty space.

He raised his finger and
gently tapped my temple. A wave of cold rushed through my body when he said,
“She is here, forever.”

“But I saw
her—she spoke to me.”

“You did not,” he
said.

“It wasn’t a dream,”
I said. “She must be alive.”

He darted back to the
corner and took up his chair once again. “Shall we continue?”

“You woke to find
yourself in a place you’d been before,” I recited.

“Ah, yes. The
facility was a labyrinth of my own making.”

When he spoke from
the corner this time, it sounded as if he were still standing right beside me.
Magic, I thought, one of his many facets. He was a great illusionist, and a master
of obfuscation.

“Born out of apathy,”
he said, “my plan would revive the lust for blood I so desperately wanted to
rid myself of, having the exact opposite effect I had intended.”

The chair creaked as
he shifted on its soft buckskin cover.

“Imagine, if you
will, a creature so self-destructive it orchestrates its own demise, sets up a
chain of events to destroy an entire species just so it can experience
something new. Would you pity such a creature?”

He smiled his
wretched metal-mouthed grin, the sound making me cringe. “I know what you are
thinking, Dagur. Why not simply end its own life? Well, you must know that a
creature addicted to life may not easily cut off its head to spite its heart.”

He shifted again, and
I tried to clear my mind. His gaze burned the back of my neck, as he read every
question in my head.

“You cannot
understand immortality until you know its burden.”

How could I
comprehend a life that may last thousands of years? Mine would run its course
in a smidge of time. Without offspring of my own, without a bloodline to carry
my name into the future, whatever that future may be, I was the furthest thing
from immortal.

“You are not as
disposable as you think,” he said.

I braved the critic
in my head and spoke up. “Are you here to make me like you?”

“My mother would
never allow it,” he said. “Nor would yours.”

“Is Thetis like you?”

“I have already
explained who my mother is, what she is. Have you not been listening?”

My voice quivered
when I said, “I don’t know what it means for her to shift into another being.”

He seized my body
from his corner of the room, and I froze. Beating his paralytic force was a
losing battle. His grip seemed a punishment but was merely passion. “Take up
the pen,” he said. “I shall reveal Thetis to you, but first we must travel back
in time, to the night I met Byron Darrow.”

Head Row

The moon appeared cut
out of the sky like a spotlight on the backdrop of a stage, the landscape arranged
to look like a set—that of the best of the Scottish tragedies. The Darrow
estate, named Head Row, had belonged to the family since the eighth century,
according to the tapestries lining the walls, but by the beginning of the
twentieth, the expensive manor had gone to ruin, its smoky gray rock weakened
with time, eaten by lime and blackened with the battering of a steady fog. The
estate’s windows were immaculate, though. Always lit up, evincing some life
within.

I rushed toward the
light on the moor, hungry for the nightcap I craved. The lamp from Byron’s room
on the east side of the estate shone the brightest, a brilliant fire trapped in
a jar in the inky depths of my soul, and like a moth seduced by the magic of a
flame, I studied my object of desire before setting myself ablaze. I dismissed
my hunger that night, and also the next when I returned, but gained the courage
to indulge on the third night when I went inside to greet him.

A woman lay on his
examining table, her chest cavity split open. His brightness tripled at the
sight of his subject. His
studies of blood and hemophiliacs were carried to extremes, but the
woman on his table was the first he murdered. Before then he had relied on the liberality
of the local morgue attendant to furnish him with cold bodies. But this woman
had not grown stiff, for she breathed still when Doctor Darrow struck her in the
neck with his scalpel. He could not flesh out the circulatory system beneath human
skin without a fresh subject. I do not know if he considered himself a monster
then, but he did not see himself as a murderer.

A chill ran beneath his collar when I slipped into
his laboratory, his den of science cut from the page of a Shelley novel. The
creeping vine of my presence crawled on top his flesh and into his bones, as a
slight tremor rose to his Adam’s apple and his breathing doubled. His gaze was
drawn to the candelabrum on the sideboard, which flickered and then went out.
He turned to the door as I approached, and time stood still. The draft had
gone, and all that remained was a chimera, the nightmare he could only love.

“Good evening,” I said with a smile.

“Who are you?” He asked coldly, too shy perhaps to
return my pleasantry.

“An admirer.”

“Why have you come?”

“It is a pity,” I said. “She looks quite tasty.”

A mess of papers blew across his desk, as I whipped
past him to admire the sleeping beauty, and the sheaves scattered to the floor.
Nothing stole his attention. He had become the moth, and I the flame.

I had never seen anyone as taken with my presence as
Byron, and had I known Thetis had mesmerized him, I would not have been so
flattered. I cannot say if he was frightened of me, and I am not certain it was
love at first sight, but his entire being was sucked into mine. I had put him
in a mental paralytic, I will admit, but he did not lose the use of his legs
and could have moved away as I approached. Something greater kept him steady,
unafraid and yearning.

I touched the girl’s body first, drawing my hand up
her arm, testing quickly for a pulse. One could hope, in any case. She was
still warm, but the congealed blood on the opening of her wound made my stomach
turn. Her ichor had already soured.

“Have you learned much about her blood?” I asked.

He stared at me with bright eyes, lonely in their
way, and I crumbled beneath my own skin. Looking at Byron, one would not see
why I would choose him. His appeal lay deep beneath his exterior, where love’s
cultivation blooms best.

“You have potential,” I said. “You know it, too.”

I released him from my hold, but he was not ready to
be freed. He clung to me despite it.

“Do you know what is wrong with this woman?” I
asked. “Is that why you ended her life?”

The scientist in him would not forego the chance to
boast of his diagnosis. “Leukos haima,” he said.

I smiled inwardly. “Why am I not surprised you know
Greek.”

“If I cut into her bones, the marrow inside would be
dirty, yellow-green.”

“Was that your plan? To cut into her bones?”

“I planned to study her veins first, actually.” His
excitement stimulated me, taken by the horns and dragged up the mountain of science
as he was. We flirted shamelessly over the body of the dead woman.

“What are you looking for?”

“Do you see this?” He reached for her arm and turned
it over, revealing the spider web of veins just beneath the surface of her
skin.

“What is that?”

He shrugged. “I can’t say, but that is why she
agreed to come with me.”

“How did you know she had Leukemia?”

He grinned. “You won’t believe me.”

“Try me.”

“I can smell it,” he said.

“Smell what?”

“Disease.”

I returned his smile then, and he softened.

“Do you smell disease on me?” I asked.

“Who are you?”

“An admirer,” I said.

“Have you been watching me?”

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

“A simple observer come to admire my work,” he said.
“Are you from the university? I already told the chair I am not interested in
sharing a lab.”

“Do I look like someone who frequents universities?”

He looked up at the timepiece sitting on the mantle
and then convened with the watch he pulled from his pocket. “I don’t have much
time.”

“No, you do not.”

“Her blood is souring.”

“No one likes sour blood,” I said.

“It may take a while.”

“My time is endless.” I smiled but he did not share
the joke. Byron’s sense of humor developed in later years.

“Fine,” he said. “Perhaps you can help me.”

“If you would like.”

I studied him as he worked, smitten as one is with
the soul they know will change the course of their life. I did not understand
Byron’s role then, and I mistook what he was more than once. It is only now I
see why Thetis forced him on me. My mother was there at our first meeting,
embodied in the wretched girl on the slab. The shapeshifter is keen with her
gifts, especially one as old as she. By the time Byron had finished flaying his
subject’s skin, my mother had long since shifted into the body of a mouse,
scurrying between the stone walls of Head Row.

“It is the way the blood flows that gets me,” Byron said,
as he worked. “The channels that run up and down, centered by a core. We are
built like a circuit board, our main energy source our heart, but its fuel is
the blood.”

“Blood as fuel,” I said. “I see, but what is
a—what kind of board did you say?”

“A circuit board.”

“Ah, yes.”

“It is a German invention,” he said. “I have only
just heard about it, but it is a multi-layered insulating board covered in flat,
laminated foil conductors. Well, they are covered in linen or something to protect
them. I’m convinced it is the future, a feat modeled after the circulatory
system.”

“What does it do?”

“It generates energy,” he said. “Or at least it will
at some point.”

Byron had a way of seeing things others could not. A
man of imagination, he derived his genius from the part of his mind he could
stretch the farthest, for many great men work poetically. Poesis is the mode
and manner of genius, the highest form of art, creation as a god—to live
as god does. I came to realize men of power seek god, but men of science have
already found him. Mad men are men of genius, and the most godly of men. Byron
was mad in the greatest sense of the word. His mind was out of this world, able
to capture ideas as they floated by, moving in other directions. He took those
ideas and expanded on them, unafraid to test them, to turn them over, to explode
them, to careen them into wrecks and ruins.

“Tell me what you are doing now,” I said.

He had placed his hands into the lower cavern of her
body and was working his way around something.

“Her womb,” he said.

I said nothing, but he offered explanation. “The
fetus is dead,” he said. “The baby died several hours ago.”

“Is that why you killed her?”

“You think me merciful?”

His question surprised me. If he could not see his
own compassion, no one could convince him of it. “All doctors are to some
extent, I suppose.”

He shrugged.

“Do you not think you are kind?” I asked.

“I don’t think about it,” he said. “I am that I am.”

I had wanted to give him my gift from the moment I
met him, but had gotten distracted with the blood, the girl, the gore. My
fevered excitement rose anew when he confessed his godliness,
I am that I am
.

“You are merely mortal,” I said. “But you think you
are a god.”

“As do you,” he said. “Don’t lie and tell me you are
not some sprite come here to bewitch me.”

“I am that I am.” He looked up at me, as he dropped
the satchel of blood in a scale by his side.

We reminisced about that night long afterward, his
telling me how when I stood in front of his window, admiring him from afar, he had
sensed my eyes on him, and anticipated my arrival. For three nights, he had
expected me to come. “I drew you in on the third night,” he had said. “I knew
you would come if I made a blood sacrifice.”

I often asked him to tell me about the kill, but he
refused. Not because it bothered him, but simply because he could not recall his
act of murder. She had begged him to take the dead child out of her and to end
her pain, that much he recalled, but the rest sat like an empty space on the
landscape of his mind. He spoke the truth, for I never saw the memory either. “For
a brief moment,” he had said, “our lives collided like cells of a single
organism.” When I asked if he meant the woman and him, he corrected me. “You
and I,” he had said. “Our cells, Vincent, raced to find their counterparts
amidst a sea of raging particles.”

Like me, he believed our meeting fortuitous, but
also the most significant moment of his young life. I will not say he is the
only instance of awakening that changed me. Obviously Evelina, Lucia, they are
the greatest companions I have gained, but Byron is their cause, and he takes
his place alongside them.

“I have never known a man quite as fascinating as
you,” he said when his work with the woman was done. “Are you a doctor?”

I assured him I was not.

“Why do I feel as though I know you?”

“It is strange,” I said, “for I feel the same and
yet our paths have never crossed.”

He blushed. “You pull me in.”

“And you me.”

I told him I had a strong sense of character and
that I could tell he would do me some good in the future.

“How do you know?” He asked eagerly.

“You see me for what I am.”

He stepped back then, away from the torn corpse on
the slab. The woman had lost all feminine wiles, her charm and skin had gone.

“I know of a legend,” he said. “A man who awakes to
a hunger for blood so great he feeds on those around him.”

“I am that I am.”

“You are greater than he, more great than that
fairytale, I should think.”

“Yes.”

“Have you come to kill me?” He asked, planting his
two feet firmly on the stone floor, squaring himself to face me. He refused to
look away from the little bit of wrath which had crept across my face. It is
difficult for me to hide my animal side when that kind of temptation sits
before me. I had a choice to make, in what way would I make him mine. His blood
appealed to me and I grew hungry, stimulated by the corpse, but I was not
prepared to end his life even as I confirmed I wanted him to be a part of mine
for all time. “I am deliberating,” I said, as I advanced.

I snatched his wrist, and he denied his fear, standing
firm against my hold. He actually stepped closer.

“I don’t fear the pain,” he said. “Only the end
frightens me.”

“What end?”

“Life’s end.”

I had not promised I could give him more, but he
intuited my gift.

“What do you know of me?” I asked.

“Not enough,” he said.

I should have gathered by the change in his speech,
the slight lilt that had come into his voice, that another possessed him.
Thetis had hidden herself well, shifting into Byron’s warm body to make his
transition easier, and to assure the communion between us. Her godliness had
fooled me, making me think I saw it in Byron. But I cannot say if after a
lifetime with him he was not my deity. My mother assured me she had only
entered him that one time, but I know to doubt a shifter’s word. Perhaps I
would have spared Byron’s life, I may have loved him despite his ordinariness,
but I was not given the chance to find out.