by Ian Hall
Dr. Mortence waved off her excuse and leveled a pair of red-rimmed eyes on me, “The question serves only to deny the answer. You know the truth, Valérie. Now admit it to yourself. Recite.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” My voice trembled as if to betray a lie.
His eyes narrowed, seeing through the casing of my skull and into my mind, “But, you do, child. Think… think back to the day in the garden…”
As if just remembering it should be there, my fingers went in search of the locket and found it, miraculously, still in place. Time ran backwards, pulling me through the lost years to my last lucid moment before waking on the ship; Dr. Fabrini holding my wrists, the heavy orderlies pressing down on my shoulders, the needle boring into my muscle.
Strange images, more surreal than any dream, blinked through my consciousness and faded again like the snuffing of a flame. I reached for the trail of memory as it wisped through my fingers, only to leave me with empty hands.
Like a blackened wick, a dark truth remained where the fire had sparked. Alvise Fabrini was dead.
And I had killed him.
As the vial of tranquilizer got pumped into my body, I sucked his blood through an artery in his neck. The orderlies’ hands tried to separate us, but my strength proved much greater, locking us in a final embrace as I drew his life-force from him. My last image as the drug closed my eyes was father in the window, his hands on the glass, shaking his head and crying.
Fear is worse than death itself.
Death is but a cheat on the life it replaces.
Life is fleeting, a vision of Heaven.
Heaven is the lie that replaces fear of the unknown.
I don’t know where the prose came from, but Dr. Mortence narrowed in on me, moving so close he could touch. “I know that you can hear it, Valérie,” he said. He circled me, looking over his glasses, staring into my eyes. “Recite!”
He stopped in front of me. “I know you can hear the voice!” he roared. His spittle hit me across my face. “It follows you now, much more strongly than before. In fact, the farther you get from its source, the stronger it will become.”
Despite my strong will, I still shook at his words.
Fear is worse than death itself.
The English words made perfect sense to me, the accent of the speaker, somewhat French in origin. I wanted to tell Dr. Mortence of my revelation, but shied away, keeping my information close to heart. He leant closer. His nose now touched my own.
“I know you can hear the voice,” I felt the vibration of his speech enter my head. “You have told me before, many times. I don’t know why you resist this one small thing. There’s no need to worry.”
I had endured nearly four weeks of English lessons, and now, flashed across my mind in an instant, I felt it more as a first language rather than a new one. “The voice is in English,” I said. I watched as a slow smile invaded his face. Gradually he stood away from me. “She has a French accent.” Dr. Mortence walked backwards until he bumped into the wooden paneled wall. He tilted his head slightly, as if he still heard echoes of my words. “Perhaps middle French, near Lyon perhaps.”
I gasped. Mother’s family from Lyon, her roots in the Massif Central, in the house of Berthier.
“Ha!” Dr. Mortence roared, shaking the very fabric of the room. He dashed forward again, grabbing my face in his sweaty hands. I tried to hide my knowledge, but he must have seen a spark of my attempted deception. “You recognize her! You recognize her!”
“Berthier.” My mind told me. “Constance Berthier is my mother’s name.” I’m not exactly sure if I’d ever heard the name before, but I knew it as my mother’s maiden, family name. “Berthier, of the house of Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal of France under Napoleon.”
My mouth fell agape, my eyes searching for reasons why I should know this.
Dr. Mortence spun in circles, laughing as he did so, then suddenly fled the room, grabbing Sarah by the arm, dragging her out into the corridor. The large door slammed behind them, leaving me in my cabin, confused and afraid.
I had parted the curtains into a dark part of my mind which had been hidden for so long, and now felt petrified to repeat the process. Confused at my sudden insight into the English language, I tried to stop thinking at all, only to have the space filled with all sorts of gibber-jabber, which scared me more. Poetry in flowery English, dark and dainty prose, diary entries, and songs all spun in my head, competing for recognition and volume.
“Go away,” I said out loud, the words strange and almost unbidden, but still the maelstrom of voices threw snippets into my mind. I held my head with my hands, pressing hard against my skull, trying to shut out the barrage, but instead it grew. I turned to the wall and hammered my forehead against the paneling, sending shards onto the floor, then, just as I thought my head would surely burst asunder…
It stopped.
“I am Valérie Marneffe Berthier Lidowitz.” I addressed the room. The timbre of my voice had changed to a smooth lilt. I now recognized the inflection of French in my otherwise clear English. I wiped the splinters of wood from my forehead and stood straight. “My father is Pieter Lidowitz, assistant to the Russian Ambassador to Rome.” I smiled at my newly found knowledge, confident in its authenticity and its impeccable source; my mother; Constance Louisa Berthier.
They had met at a Paris function in 1856, and fallen in love immediately.
I accessed my mother’s memory like I would read a diary.
It felt the best day of my life, and I spun slowly in the cabin, my bare feet burning on the rough floor. And as I lived with her to the end, it felt also the worst day of my life, knowing that our lives had been torn apart on that fateful evening in Florence.
~ ~ ~
I can’t say the next three years passed in the wink of an eye.
Dr. Mortence, and my supposed ‘uncle’, Dr. Calloway, used me as both a pincushion and a firing board. I lived under the influence of one drug or another most of the time, and with the arrival of a Chinese herbalist, Wang To, they took turns in practicing their particular ‘specialties’ for weeks at a stretch.
They were all under the belief that I could access not only my mother’s memory at the time of her death, but somehow her spirit had followed with me, and I could delve into it too. Initially I thought them utterly mad, but as the time passed, some clues began to surface in my memory which I couldn’t easily explain away.
It seems that I had been named Valérie Marneffe after a character of dubious morals in a novel by celebrated author Honoré Balzac. Mother’s memories of him are quite confused, but I recognized many instances where they seemed to be quite intimate. He died in 1850, before mother met father, but it seems that he left quite a legacy behind with her.
Mother had married late in life, just after her thirty-ninth birthday, but it had been through choice rather than chance. She caroused Paris as a wealthy socialite for many years, dropping her grandfather’s name at every occasion. Even fifty years after his exile, the name of Napoleon Bonaparte exuded a certain notoriety and mystery.
This information, I drip fed the doctors, but they always wanted more.
Although my rage never manifested itself in America, I remained a prisoner, always under some physical shackle. As I neared my eighteenth birthday, I began to question both the validity and longevity of their study of me. To my surprise, at each pressing for freedom, the terms of my captivity constricted rather than diminished. After one such outburst, my walks in the gardens were immediately quashed, and weeks later, when I questioned their confinement of me, my door suddenly became locked between ‘treatments’.
I began to wonder if they intended to release me at all, or keep me prisoner into their dotage.
I remember quite clearly the night the world changed.
In my dark room, on the cusp of the last round of drugs, I felt hands upon me. Not medical hands, you understand, but the definite pressure of male hands, rubbing on my bare shoulders and do
wnwards toward my breasts. I gave a willful shrug, and the hands vanished into the night, not to return. The air held the unmistakable odor of Dr. Calloway, supposedly my uncle.
Under the care of Dr. Mortence at the time, he would inject me each afternoon, then question me relentlessly for hours. In the darkness, after the next such ministration, I felt the male presence again, pressing my skin, and touching my breasts through my bed linen. This time when I feigned waking, he did not leave. Emboldened by my docility, he pushed his hand inside my shift.
“What?” I lifted my head, but the room was completely dark. I heard footsteps on the carpet, and the closing of the door.
Valérie, you are safe here no longer.
When I awoke, the next day, I determined it would be my last with these jailors, and prepared for escape.
Because I had been free of any rage since the ship three years previously, my bindings were flimsy, designed for the Doctors use rather than my restraint. When Sarah untied me to give me breakfast, I sprung.
I had intended just to run away, but my swing with the porridge plate proved heavier than I’d intended. I hit the poor woman directly over the eye, bursting her eyelid wide open, and causing her to stumble backwards onto the floor, where she lay, unconscious. With frantic fingers I untied the buckles on my legs and jumped from the bed. I only meant to punch her, but for some reason I stopped, my fingers reaching out to touch the blood seeping from her wound. I raised my finger to my lips and licked.
It tasted better than any honey.
I fell to the floor and instinctively pushed her head to one side, diving past her high collar to puncture the artery I knew to be there.
It only took the slightest suction and blood flowed freely into my throat.
Easy, you don’t want to kill her.
I drank, letting the warning wash away unnoticed.
Valérie!
I jumped up, and looked round the room.
Forget the meal. Get outside! Run!
Knowing my mother’s words held far more importance than feeding, I hurriedly wiped my mouth with a bed sheet, and took off.
I ran free, for the first time in my life.
The world seemed far bigger than anything I might have imagined, always having been shut away in dark corners. I had encountered an endless garden and I took my time exploring it, touching, smelling and tasting all that I could, fearless of ridicule or punishment. A bounty of living creatures provided for my every need; I never went hungry or naked. I never longed or went unfulfilled. For those all-too brief years of liberty, the red veil lifted and my vision cleared of rage. My inner self lay in peace. Only my precious locket and the wisp of my mother’s voice through the trees kept me company through those years.
But right before my eyes, as I roamed this wild new country, the world changed; it grew and yet somehow become smaller. As the new Americans expanded to cover every spare inch of earth I got pushed deeper and deeper into the backwoods until little backwoods remained. With a growing concern, I knew I was not like these people. Young girls became old women; yet the reflection that greeted me in the clear crystal brook never aged. In time I came to muse that I had, in fact, been killed in my escape attempt and it seemed merely my ghost that wandered the forest and spied on the mangy settlers.
I watched them at a distance. Their English sounded rough and ineloquent, as jaded and unrefined as the people who spoke it. They went about their lives caught in a trance. Day in, day out the same, unbroken routines. Women bent over washboards, scrubbing at the ever-present grime. Men with their tools and weapons, building and tearing down. Useless and endless drudgeries.
They traded time for coins. In the end both were lost. From my safe vantage I watched young children take up the yoke of their parents’ legacy, knowing they would carry it through all their short years until they too became too old to drag it another inch. Most would succumb to the abuse inflicted on their feeble bodies before they ever got the chance to enjoy the fruits of their efforts. And so the next generation would spring up and do the same. Civilization had snared them, snagging their very souls, imprisoning them within a life of monotony. At first I hated them. Later, hatred softened to pity.
Dr. Fabrini’s voice sounded in my head often, “You have an innate distaste for anything man-made, Valérie.” I could not deny the truth behind his indictment.
Their intrusion did afford me one luxury I hadn’t enjoyed since my early years in Florence. No more scrambling for rabbits or rats, I now had a veritable pantry of large, fleshy beasts to draw from, all conveniently penned for easy pickings.
On a sultry summer night, the moon full, bright and yellow, I eased into a farm. The good, civilized folk were asleep in their shelters. I hadn’t eaten for some days and my craving for the rich, viscous bovine blood felt at its peak. When even the shuffling of the dogs had finally ceased, I edged in closer to the boundary between my world and theirs.
The farm was small, and I thought it unguarded. I’d barely sunk my incisors through the cow’s thick flesh when I heard the explosion off in the distance.
The bullet ripped through my back and out my chest.
Growing Up the Hard Way
When I awoke the following morning, I flinched backwards, blinded by a burning torch as it lowered to my would-be funeral pyre.
Once again the red veil covered my eyes. To this day I can still see every face and hear the screams of encouragement; they’d caught their demon, and I would pay the price of capture
I snapped my bonds, and jumped over the fire, right into the heart of the crowd. When the frenzy lifted and the family lay at my feet, my vision cleared again and peace restored. Surveying the carnage, I knew I had at last done a good deed in freeing the trapped from their wretched existence.
But I had done more than free the occupants of the farm.
I had alerted one man’s attention, and it would be the bane of my life for many, many years.
As I stood in triumph over the bodies of the slain, it seemed a boulder had been smashed into my side. The world lost focus, and I struggled against the direction and speed of my travel. Carried faster than ever before, my legs and arms flailed in the air, his arm grabbed me by the waist, hurtling through the night. I grabbed at my bonds, only to find strong fingers. I struck at the wrists expecting them to splinter like so many before, but the man shrugged off my blows.
We sped through the night, then came to a stop, near a small house, dark and imposing.
“Be still,” he said as he dragged me inside. I tried to hit him, but it seemed that he deflected every blow; the man simply swatted my protests away.
I fell in a heap on his bed, discarded there like a piece of trash.
He looked thin, his slender frame belying the strength within. He would never be considered a handsome man, but he had an aura of power that scared me more than a little.
I dashed for the open door, suddenly laughing, but my mirth died in an instant when he appeared from nowhere and barred my escape. He lifted his hand to my neck, passing the backs of his fingers around my throat.
“On the bed, girl,” he said, then tore a huge strip of my dress, from neck to lowest hem. It seemed he had no patience for my contrition, for he lifted me up with one hand, throwing me back onto the bed covers. He walked over to his dresser, where he began to unbutton his coat. “My name is Amos Blanche.”
Again I hastened to the door, but once more he miraculously barred my way, ripping my dress again, and sending me flying.
I sat on the bed, my arms over my bare breasts, panting in shock.
“My name is Amos Blanche, and you are mine tonight; just give up the struggle.”
“You are no normal man.” I readied my feet for another attempt.
“And you’ve got little enough clothes left,” he said, grinning maliciously, indicating the possibility of the open door. “Next time you will lie stripped, and I will feast on your nakedness. Tonight, girl, you are mine, and tr
ust me, I will have you.”
I looked at the oil lamp, and thought of it as a decent weapon. I lay far nearer than he. I leapt from the bed, but he met me mid-bound, knocking the wind from me, and with one stroke completed his promise to divest me entirely.
“Very nice,” he looked at me with such longing, I nearly cried out in terror, my arms unable to cover myself completely. His shirt dropped to the floor. I began to retreat, but when my legs hit the bed, I knew I had nowhere left to run. As he advanced to me, I held my hands up in my defense, but he caught them in one strong grip, binding them behind my back.
“Please, no,” I said, my voice breaking and shaky.
Pushed back onto the bed I struggled to little avail; he seemed to have muscles of iron. He kissed and caressed me, calling me ‘his baby,’ assaulting my body with his lips, tongue and fingers. I fought most of the way, but his strength surged way beyond my resistance. For once I actually tried to channel my rage, but it would not surface.
“You were meant for this, my lover,” he said when his fingers finally entered me, painfully breaching through my maidenhood with neither finesse, nor care. Then he drew back and I saw a ‘man’ for the first time, erect and threatening. With a look of some contempt he plunged himself into me, his hips slamming onto mine. The pain felt almost unbearable, and I tried again to summon the rage which had invaded my body in times of crisis, but felt no response.
Let it happen.
Ah! My mother’s voice.
“Why?” I moaned loudly. “He is killing me!”
Let it happen.
I felt a strength build inside me. Not enough to throw him from the bed, but as if my mother lay beside me, holding my hand through my ordeal.
Amos Blanche worked unperturbed by my lack of defense, his attention elsewhere.
This is a fleeting moment. You will emerge a butterfly.
Despite the force of his entry, I found my body responding in a way I’d never felt before, almost as if the rage did build, but very slowly. As Amos worked above me, my attention held within myself, and I saw the mechanics of the rage change for the first time.
Then he began to build up the speed of his stabbing, holding himself above me, and his mouth opened wide. I instantly knew the meaning of fear. His incisor teeth had grown to a terrible size, larger than the biggest dog. Suddenly he dropped, pulled my head to one side and struck my neck with open jaws. I reeled, expecting pain, but instead gasped in awe as the blood coursed through my body towards my neck.