The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (78 page)

One More
Fragment

“I know you are confused, Dagur,” Vincent said. “I
can see a million questions arising in your mind, yet only one needs to be
answered.” He reached out and drew his fingers up my forearm. “I will miss
this,” he said.

His aspect softened with the candlelight, and I felt
drawn to him more than ever.

“It is because I have given you up,” he said. “That
is why your desire is strongest now.”

He was correct in thinking I had a million things to
ask, a thousand words to speak, but I remained silent, as he finished what he
had come to tell me.

He sighed, and rolled his shoulders forward. “Give
your desire to them,” he said. “Their survival relies on you, and the children
you shall bear. Do you understand?”

I swallowed hard and felt a scowl erupt on my brow as
I mirrored his concern.

Then the slightest grin broke across his face and he
said, “I will return one day for you, but I cannot promise whether I shall be
friend or foe. Our resurrection is unpredictable.”

He glanced off to the side, and I recalled the sunken
look on Björg’s face when Vincent showed me what the resurrected Laszlo Arros
had done to the settler’s body.

I leaned forward on the drafting table, and touched
the transcription he seemed bent on my finishing. “You will never be like this
again,” I said.

“I do not believe so,” he said. “Though I hope I
shall not despise those who are.”

He rocked back and forth on his heels. “I shall miss
her most of all,” he said. “To her, you must be extra good.”

I knew he meant Evelina because he flinched when her
mosaic flashed before me.

“I would not abandon her,” he said, “my chosen one,
if it were not necessary to save her.”

He reached for the lapels of his long length,
double-breasted coat and turned up his collar.

“Laszlo Arros will not stop until I have joined
him,” he said. “He will drain every last settler, and then you as he did with our
last donor.”

“Béa?” The answer was on the tip of my tongue,
though I could have said “my mother.”

“You know of whom I speak,” he said. “Gerenios
suffers more greatly than you ever will, and so he understands the importance
of bringing the last woman to the colony safely.”

I stood up from the stool and leaned on my drafting
table. A collapse came over me and I put my weight on my hands to steady myself.
The truth was like a rock hung about my neck, weighting me down and down.

“Take a breath,” he said. “Your future will be
joyful, no doubt.”

“How can I alone remake an entire race?” I pushed my
knuckles into the angled surface of the table. “I’m one man.”

“The first shall be last and the last shall be first.”

Heat rose to my chest, as I said, “Who is she?”

“Rest assured,” he said, “she will be more than you
could ever hope.”

“Am I to meet the others soon,” I said.

“They are near,” he said. “This is for her.” He
pointed to the sheets on my drafting table, and then pulled the earlier ones
from his pocket. “And these,” he said. “I leave the design of the project to
you. When and how you share my story with her.”

“Doesn’t she know all of this?”

He smiled and said, “When she led the troop of
vampires to my rescue, they did not reach the facility, but found me in a hollowed
out structure, sitting by a fire to warm the sleeping child in my arms.”

“But how did you escape the facility?”

“You were not paying close enough attention,” he
said. “It is not about how I escaped as much as how I got inside in the first
place. The mind is a many-layered organ with scapes and voids that often go
unexplored, until necessary.”

I looked back through the sheets I had in front of
me, but would not know what he meant until I read the pages again, and put them
together in a narrative.

“Shall I give you one more piece,” he said. “You
must wonder about the things I know, those that it seems I should not. I have
shown you how I may manipulate the mind, and pull myself into another’s. But
also I have shown you that I may bring another into mine, which is a more
recent gift, one I developed after meeting Laszlo Arros.”

He sat on the window ledge for the final time, as
dawn broke up the plum sky and scattered the clouds over the ridges of Esja.

“Recall I told Laszlo Arros I had not been to the East
for centuries,” he said. “But that was not the truth. I had visited with Byron
many years before the Red Death to see a scientist handpicked by him. While
Byron went off to purchase samples of stem cells, I returned to see a man …”

South Korea,
2032

The geneticist held
the specimen up to the light, insisting the markers were invisible to the naked
eye.

“Put them under the
scope,” I said.

“But you will not see
the alter.” He stumbled over the language, his handle on Mandarin rudimentary.
Neither Italian nor Korean would suit our meeting.

“I am not interested
in seeing the change,” I said. “I want to know it is there.”

“How can you tell if
it invisible?” He shuffled where he stood, leaning against the metal counter
littered with petri dishes and slides.

I moved close to him
and he cowered. He had not grown used to the gleam of hunger in my eye.

“Please,” he said. “I
do my best. I slave for this. The alter is made, I swear.”

“Let me see.”

His hand shook as he
put a new slide beneath the microscope and bowed, gesturing for me to take a
look. I pulled the optical instrument toward me and bent over to gaze at the
mutation the Fates had set in my path. As the geneticist said, there was nothing
to see. The slice of frozen embryo looked as ordinary as the other five hundred
before it, but I confirmed the change had succeeded when I took his pulse, as
he confessed it had.

“The alter make a
hematope, it heamatopoetic,” the geneticist said.

I felt a pinch beneath
my left side, as the cords of my heart sang. “Perfetto,” I whispered.

“You can’t see
alter,” he said.

“The alteration,” I
said. “I cannot see the alteration.” I had trouble pulling myself away from the
view in the spyglass, the kaleidoscopic shapes mesmerizing me where I stood. To
see one’s future come undone and yet still in one’s hands for the changing is
humbling, though I was not one to be humbled. “When will the first be ready?”

“It is prepare as we
speak.”

“And?”

“The implantation set
for sunrise,” he said. “The surrogate, she ready.”

“Good.”

“Is Doctor Darrow coming?”
The geneticist shuffled his feet, as he made his way to the other side of the
metal table.

The slightest grin crossed
my lips, as I pulled my eyes from the color mutating on the glass slide. “Give
me your hand,” I said, as I reached across the chasm between us, a space no
greater than an arm’s length.

“What for?” He
gasped.

“I have your payment
in my pocket here,” I said, tapping my chest with my free hand.

“Payment already
made,” he said, stepping back.

“Why are you
frightened?”

“I am not,” he mumbled.
“I just have much work, and payment already made.”

“This is a bonus,” I
said.

I pulled a vial from
my inner top-left pocket, and held it out to him.

“What this?”

“This,” I said,
holding out the vial, “is the future.” I gestured for him to take it and when
he finally did, he held it up to the light. “See if that is not the most valuable
organism on the planet,” I said.

“From where?”

His ignorance made me
smile. He could not know what I gave him. All the microscopes in the world
could not identify the microbe he held in his hand. But curiosity would gnaw at
him, and soon I would bring him the best living petri dish in which to
cultivate it. And my Pandora would carry the ill forth, letting it ferment and
grow in her, festering and morphing into a germ that would infect every man,
woman and child, in perpetuity. She would raze the iron age, sending it to the
doom for which it was forged.

“This from Doctor Darrow?”

“Yes,” I said,
without a care to the falsehood I spread.

He raised one hand to
scratch the side of his greasy hair. “He genius,” he said.

Before I left, he
asked me if I would attend the celebration.

“What celebration?” I
asked.

“Chinese New Year,” he
said. “We enter year of the water ox.”

“I did not know
Koreans celebrated Chinese New Year.”

“We don’t,” he said
with a toothy grin, his eyes disappearing beneath the smudges on his thick wire
frames. “But it same time, and this new year special in Korea because it fall
on the day of the third new moon. Year change to thirty-three.”

“Ah,” I said, touching
my jawline with the back of my hand. “The year 2033, thirty-three is a master
number, the mover and shaker—how fitting.”

I left the geneticist
to his new sample, the virus he would eventually pass on to a successor who
would complete his work.

Hematopes, or Gen H

Vincent drew near
again, no longer sitting on the sill. His gaze seemed distant, but his mind was
ever present. I cleared my throat and waited. When he didn’t speak, I asked, “When
you say 2033, you mean the old calendar, right?”

He touched his lip
with the tip of his tongue and pulled himself from his thoughts. “We marked
time differently, yes.”

“Some of the settlers
refer to years when they talk about the past, but otherwise we count seasons
now.”

“Some prefer the old
calendar,” he said.

“Like Gerenios?”

“Yes, he is an
original Gen H,” he said. “It has been many years now since the settlers built colonies.”

“There are others?”

“The population is
more dense than you think,” he said. “You live on an island, so it is difficult
to know.”

“I was told there is
only water beyond our shores.”

He smiled and said,
“A convenient lie.”

“What exactly is a
hematope?”

“That is the crux of
it, Dagur,” he said, “the reason you are here.”

He had been leaning
against the wall and now stood erect, as though balancing himself on a
precipice.

“I don’t see it?”

“You live among a new
race, one made up of hematopes. The blood of the settlers, the Gen H, is contaminated
with mutated bone marrow.”

“The purple stuff in
Björg’s bones?”

“Yes,” he said. “And
the cause of the colors we saw in the den.”

“But they are so much
like me.”

“In every way, except
one.”

“Their blood,” I
said.

He stepped forward
with one long stride, standing over me and looking downward. “Theirs is the
blood that turns us to stone. A self-mollifying, self-regenerating ichor
detrimental to my type.”

“But why?”

“Do you believe I was
actually with the geneticist plotting it all, the fall of my kind?”

“I don’t know.”

“I have given you
evidence of mind manipulation, mine and that of others. I have also told you
that Laszlo Arros may take any form, even mine.”

“So it was him,” I
said. “Then how can you recall a meeting you never went to?”

“The fusion has
begun,” he said.

He turned away and
fell back into the darkness, and though I strained to see him, he seemed to
disappear into thin air.

“Vincent?”

I rose from the stool
and turned about the room, running to the window to see where he’d gone. The colony
was just beginning to stir, as several settlers came out to greet
the sun perched on the
horizon, making a peach halo over the landscape.

I felt many things in that moment, but the greatest
were his absence and the dissolution of danger that seemed to go with him.

A stack of sheets sat on my drafting table, piled as
perfectly as if I’d squared them myself. He had left me the whole of his story
and I was to arrange it in the best narrative possible. I went to the table and
took my place at the stool to begin the work ahead of me, and that’s when I saw
his last note to me. His elegant handwriting flooded me with memories of hours
spent deciphering and translating his original texts, the ones he had left for
me to find.

I mouthed the words as I read them again and again,
“
Do not forget, Dagur, you are the last, and the fate of both races lives
inside you.”

The End of Vincent Du Maurier

Gerenios waited on
the trail where Vincent left him, following him along the path with his eyes.
He was headed down to the river’s edge, where gullies ran out of the source in
all directions. From above, the meeting point looked like an arm with long
tendrils reaching out for the trees bordering the water. Gerenios would wait
the time Vincent had instructed and then head down the same path to retrieve
the ash.

“It must be buried in
the hearth,” Vincent had said. “It cannot be scattered by the wind.”

“Why not?” Gerenios
had asked many questions and whether he received the answer to this one was of
little importance. The reasons for things were never quite as consequential as
their being observed.

“My remains will stay
close,” he said. “I do not want to be pulled away”

“She will come for
you,” Gerenios said. “She is occupied with the rescue now but she will grieve.”

“Not for long. Peter
has assured me he will minister to her in her grief.”

“How can you know she
will stay?”

Vincent scowled, and
then softened his look to study the Gen H he had chosen to father Béa’s child.
He too must be considered kin. “She would never leave my remains behind.”

“And when you
return,” he asked, “will she know you?”

“I make no
guarantees, even to her.”

Vincent made little
ceremony when he left Gerenios, though he shook the hand of his longstanding
ally. Having abandoned me in the tower without a goodbye, I considered that a show
of approval, or at least a sign of respect for the colonist he had chosen to
watch over his kin.

When Gerenios got to
the river’s edge, the wind picked up and the water raged. He was not
superstitious but he told me the eeriness was something new for him, a feeling he
had never experienced before or since. Several flocks of wren perched on the
branches of the bog birches along the water’s edge sang with a trill, easily mistaken
for an urgent call.

“A covey of
Troglodyte troglodytes like that doesn’t usually sit out so long in the cold
season,” he had said. “But there was a whole slew of them, and the sound they
made was like the squeal of a muldvarp stuck with a dart. If Freyit had been
there with his longbow, he would’ve had a hard time hitting them all. They
didn’t fly off until I’d shoveled it all up.”

He had gently piled
the ash into a metal receptacle as instructed. Vincent had told him to use a
clean container, and to lay leaves overtop the ash before bringing it to the
hearth. He fulfilled his duty with the honor it required, knowing the sacrifice
was a great one.

I’ve asked him if he
heard them, the nimrod and the vampire, Laszlo Arros and Vincent Du Maurier,
meeting for their final tête-à-tête, but Gerenios promised me all was silent.

I’ve tried to picture
the face off, the meeting of these two timeless creatures, one supernatural,
the other about to become so. I’ve tried to imagine the burst of flame, the
streak of lightning their fusion would have made, the conversation they may
have had, as the one sold his superiority to the other.

“I failed,” Laszlo
Arros would say. “But I’ve covered endless time and space to be with you again,
to fulfill the fusion that will make us a god.”

“You force my hand,”
Vincent would reply. “I do not go with you freely.”

“You have never been
free, enslaved to mortality, then to blood. This evolution shall be your
sweetest, and we shall rise anew, a creature for the ages.”

“We cannot control
our resurrection,” Vincent would say, ever the skeptic. “As we cannot decide
our destiny. The Fates continue their stronghold, and we bow before them.”

“Do you think Lázoros
incapable of smiting the sentinels who keep guard on the Fates?” He would step
forward and touch Vincent’s arm to pull him in, fearing he would change his
mind and dart in the opposite direction. “Do you think Lázoros bows to anyone?”

“No.” Vincent would
tarry, taking in the scent of his surroundings once last time.

“Do you think we
shall be merciful when we rise?”

“Yes.” Vincent
already knew mercy, its having won out. “We shall finish what we started.”

Laszlo Arros would
take Vincent’s other arm and tighten his grasp, tasting the ecstasy, the fusion
he had longed for. But Vincent would be ready, knowing Laszlo Arros would
embrace him first, and he would step into the hug, touching the villain’s chest
with his own. He would even lay his head on his shoulder before the end, and
look up to the sky, awaiting the moment of absolute fusion. Then Vincent would whisper
in his ear, “You are defeated once again,” and open his mouth wide, unlocking
his jaw, unleashing his metal tusks to greet the air before sinking them into
the neck of Laszlo Arros. The fusion would make them both suffer the venom’s
burn, the transformation into fire, the dissolution into ash. But it would end,
and his descendants would be saved from the nimrod come to claim them, and the
god Laszlo Arros had tried to make him.

Peter told me his god
commanded great sacrifice, tales of death and crucifixion, renewal and change,
but nothing compared to the color of the sky that morning. When the sun reached
the point where the mountain range in the east cut it in the middle, it painted
the world sanguine, and I understood Vincent’s offering.

This narrative, built
from his dictation and the journals he left us, speaks of that sacrifice. I can
only hope to honor the legend of Vincent Du Maurier with it since I fear I
won’t be here to witness his second rising.