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

by K. P. Ambroziak

  “The correspondence inside reveals everything,” she said. “Secrets, master. They are haunting acts of betrayal from a past we cannot undo and a future we must face. Do not make me confess such darkness aloud here in your presence. They may be the last words I pronounce, and I cannot face my end uttering such shameful truths. I trust the letters will detail more than I could explain anyhow, and offer you enough evidence to draw your own conclusions. But you must know, master, I was fooled.”

  “Tell me what you know, Shenmé?” I used the name she was given at birth, the one she told me when I found her weeping on the east bank of the Feng River some centuries after I was awakened. To me, she would always be Shenmé, though I had empowered her to become the last great ruler of the Zhou dynasty.

  “I do not have proof, unless my illness can attest to the treachery,” she said.

  “What treachery?” Her evasion frustrated me, though her weakened frame softened my anger. “Speak now, for we cannot know how long we have together.”

  She knew I referred to her depleted state, her poisoned body. Her situation was more evident with each passing moment and I imagined her turning to ash before my very eyes.

  “It is true, my beloved master,” she said. “I do not know how much longer we have, but I have seen you again and that is the comfort I will carry with me into the unknown. You will save us all, if our race is to be salvaged.”

  I stood before the Great Xing Fu and suffered the anguish of witnessing another of my descendants—a vampire I had made with my own venom—robbed of the immortal promise to outlive every human empire and walk the earth for eternity.

  I am shocked to find my progeny on the ship, ill as she is, but I will confess, since opening her strongbox, I have uncovered something that stupefies me greatly. Can you tell me, Byron, why it is your hand I see, your signature, your seal, scrawled on the pages and letters bundled in Shenmé’s coffer? I have delayed the reveal, stalling to avoid facing the treachery that lies within, but now I must confront these dark acts and learn of the scheme set to bring about my extinction.

  THE END

  BOOK THREE

  Translator’s Note

  This is not so much a translation as a narrative sewed together with the fragments Vincent Du Maurier has left me. I suppose it is a beginning and an end, a story as well as a history. Time is irrelevant since it fluctuates drastically, though it is important to note we are living in a new common era, counting seasons rather than years. From section to section, I have given the narrative a heading to suit the speaker, as a story’s perspective may change depending on who narrates and how far back he wants his reader to travel. As preface to this account, I feel compelled to attach a few lines of poetry, dug up from an ancient text whose translation I received as a gift. Sung in another age about the one for whom this narrative is written, a character who, like all characters, lived but for a moment in time, his legend continues to breathe life into those whose lives his passion sparked.

  “O my son, my sorrow, why did I ever bear you?

  All I bore was doom.

  Would to god you could linger by your ships

  without a grief in the world, without a torment!

  Doomed to a short life, you have so little time.

  And not only short, now, but filled with heartbreak too,

  more than all other men alive—doomed twice over.

  Ah to a cruel fate I bore you in our halls!”

  (Homer, The Iliad)

  Dagur Bijarnarson

  The Break of Day

  The sun’s encampment drew a tangerine halo across the horizon, as the nimrod drifted into the colony. He crept up the main street, uninhibited, advancing to stake his claim before daylight. Any target would do, so he waited and watched from the cover of a lean-to for the first settler to rise. When Björg came out, shaking off his sleep, making his way to the water barrel a stone’s throw from the lean-to, the nimrod whimpered. He watched in anticipation as his target cupped his hands and dipped them in the basin, splashing icy water on his face and neck with a quick shake of his hair. Björg tossed his head back, his mane making a tail down his spine. The nimrod shuddered at the sight of his steady form. His target was bigger than the other settlers, with broad shoulders that evinced his bloodline.

  The nimrod touched the pile of wood beside him, knocking several logs to the ground.

  “Who’s there,” Björg called, the early morning frost clouding about his nose. He squinted to better see in the dim light, searching the darkened lean-to for the source of the sound. When no one came forward, Björg shrugged and made a note to re-stack the fallen logs beneath the canvas in the daylight.

  The nimrod studied the settler, remarking the sound of his voice, the cut of his chin, the edge of his profile, taking him all in.

  Björg stood still in the darkness, looking up to the sky, addressing the heavens with words the nimrod couldn’t hear.

  The nimrod picked up a log and cracked it against another, knocking a few more from the stack.

  “Who’s there?” Björg stepped toward the lean-to and dropped his head to the side, aligning his ear with the opening of the covered space. “Is somebody there?”

  He tiptoed unguarded, unwilling to be scared off by a fox.

  Once in the lean-to, Björg’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw a shadowy figure cowered in the corner next to the fallen logs of wood. “Come out,” he said. “Do not be afraid.”

  The nimrod hesitated and then smiled inwardly, standing up to show his physique, his size comparable to the settler’s.

  “Who are you?” Björg said.

  The nimrod stepped forward, placing himself in the single streak of early light breaking through a crack in the lean-to. Björg stepped back at the sight of his own image, a twin appearing before him as though a wraith.

  “How can it be?” He froze at the opening of the lean-to and stared at the replica in front of him. “Who are you?”

  The nimrod dropped his head to the side with a quizzical look. “I am you,” he said in a voice that matched Björg’s.

  “No,” the settler said. “You can’t be.”

  “Come,” the nimrod said. “Here.” He opened his arms and gestured for Björg to step forward.

  “I’m dreaming,” Björg said. “This is a dream.”

  “Gen H do not dream,” the nimrod said.

  Björg knew that to be true of settlers. They didn’t dream, though they’d learned what it was to have nightmares.

  “Come,” the nimrod said again, dragging Björg toward him, having bewitched the particles in the space between them.

  “No,” the settler said, digging in his heels.

  The nimrod redoubled his effort, seizing him more quickly still. “It will not hurt,” the nimrod said. “I promise you will not feel a thing.”

  “No.” His body disobeyed his mind, dragging him to his twin, unwillingly.

  “I have you now,” the nimrod said, wrapping his arms around Björg as though embracing him. The settler squirmed to free himself but soon collapsed with fatigue, as the nimrod drained him of his energy. The last thing the settler saw was a great phallic stinger with a four-pronged tip rising up from the nimrod’s tailbone and over his shoulder. Björg’s body seized up with a terrific crunch and then dropped to the ground, prone and lifeless.

  The nimrod stepped out of the moonlight, and slithered back between the shadows, disappearing before the sun had gained an inch on the horizon.

  The Second Colony of the Resurrected

  Björg hadn’t time to alert the other settlers, and they woke to find their neighbor dead. They burned his remains on the bier, and the smoke from his body perfumed the air, masking the stench his death had left behind.

  “The bones are not safe,” a settler said. “We must send them up river.”

  “To contaminate the water supply?” A second settler asked, his voice timid.

  “His bones shall be pulverized,” Gerenios said. As the head o
f the colony, his word was final. “And we shall not speak of this again.”

  “This makes three.”

  “So it has begun,” Gerenios lowered his head and took in a breath. “Get Dagur.”

  “Is it safe for him,” said one of them, brave enough to question Gerenios.

  “He must see this,” Gerenios said. “As it lies.”

  That’s when I was called to the bier, though I’d already heard all that had transpired. They couldn’t keep me from any of the goings on despite their effort. Most of the settlers had no idea their voices carried through the colony as though on wings. I perceived everything from my spot in the clouds. From as early as I could remember, I’d been banished to the studio at the top of the tower in the second colony of the resurrected. “You’re the most treasured member of our colony,” Gerenios had said to me long ago. “And the smartest, too.”

  When I came to see Björg’s remains, I was flanked by two settlers.

  “Have you seen anything like this in the records?” Gerenios’s voice was more gruff up close, and when he spoke it was as though he engaged a crowd on a hilltop.

  “It was the same as the other two?” I asked. “The four punctures at the top of the spine.”

  Gerenios nodded and looked away. “Well?”

  “It’s nothing like the Red Death from what I can tell,” I said.

  Gerenios exclaimed his dissatisfaction with a “Humph,” and led me to the lean-to where Björg’s body had been found prostrate and drained like fruit for the winter.

  “If I could’ve seen the markings before you lit him on the pyre,” I said, “I may have learned more.”

  Gerenios shot up a hand and said, “Impossible.”

  “I can’t tell you anything without seeing the actual punctures.”

  “There was nothing to see,” he said. “They were basically scars, already healed up.”

  “Did you examine any other parts?”

  Gerenios rolled his eyes and said, “Only bones are left.”

  “May I see the bones?”

  He blew out a gust of air that smelled of fish. “Come,” he said, flanking me.

  He showed me the bones, but wouldn’t allow me to pick them up. They were once as white as the bones beneath the skin of an animal, but I knew better than to let their outer shell fool me.

  “Can we slice one open?” I asked.

  “Impossible,” Gerenios said. The expression was a favorite of his and I’d grown used to it. The limitations under which I lived were ever-present.

  “It can’t hurt,” Freyit said. An expert huntsman, he pulled out his blade and stuck it in the bone without actually touching it. He used the mallet at his side to hammer the point into Björg’s femur, cracking it open like an oyster. The bone, once split, revealed what I expected, though I didn’t tell Gerenios.

  “It’s purple,” one of the settlers said.

  “Electric purple,” another said.

  “The fox’s collagen is milky white,” Freyit said. “Unlike his coal eyes.” The other members laughed, recalling Freyit’s boast of an Arctic fox that had attacked him several seasons ago. Every comparison he’d made since had been to the fox, and his brush with death. He had beaten the fox, skinned him, dismembered him, ate him, and come back from his hunt with his pelt over his shoulders. No one doubted Freyit when he said the liquid inside the fox’s bones was milky.

  “And Björg’s?” Gerenios said. “Why is his purple?”

  “The poison,” Freyit said, “rots them from the inside. This is the seat of contamination. Don’t touch it.”

  They all stepped back, suspicious and wide-eyed.

  I let Freyit’s explanation stand since it seemed to convince them all. I couldn’t confirm the real reason Björg’s body was filled with ossein the color of a flower blooming on the ridge of Mývatn, but I had my suspicions. This was the third death in a single wind cycle, and I’ll admit it became a preoccupation of sorts, interrupting my efforts with other matters, even as my subconscious worked to solve all puzzles simultaneously.

  “There isn’t much time,” Gerenios said, escorting me back to my studio in the tower. “You must have some sense of it,” he urged, “if it is upon us again.”

  I assured him I wasn’t convinced this was the same plague, but he remained unsatisfied.

  He looked up to the sky, saffron now with the arrival of the mid-morning sun. “Your guardian wouldn’t approve of the liberties I’ve given you,” he said. “Especially now, with this.” He pointed back to the direction from which we’d come. “Three now. I think we should pack up.”

  “Change is coming,” I said. “But this is not it.”

  “You talk like a prophet sometimes and it makes my head swell, you know that?”

  “I do,” I said. “It’s a gift.”

  He chuckled with a fierce roar and I blushed. Gerenios had been like a father to me, especially for the circumstances under which I had come into his care.

  “Keep at it,” he said before we parted. “And bolt the door.”

  I returned to my drafting table at the top of the tower and tried to pick up where I’d left off. I’d been given the duty of not only translating texts, but also discovering the cause of the Red Death. I had piles of data to sort through, an enormous knot of information from which to cull my findings and decipher some sort of logical reason. The project had nearly driven me mad, the correspondence staggering, and I’d cursed the settlers who brought me new findings. Every now and then an expedition would head out, and return with artifacts that had washed up on shore.

  The world had once been a small place, a global network unaffected by distance. Now its lands are vast and separate, as water has stretched the earth to epic proportions, making it a sphere with very little connection between its corners.

  But the world shrank the day Björg was killed, when several hours later the safety of my tower was breached and my long awaited visitor arrived.

  His Arrival

  He slipped by the door unnoticed, ushering in the cool air, his hand gracing the small of my neck before I could feel the chill on my skin.

  “Do you want to hear the rest of my story?” He spoke my language like a native, and I recognized his voice though I’d never actually heard him speak.

  For an entire season, I sat in the tower at twilight overlooking the landscape, watching the lights go out one at a time, and waiting. Five seasons had passed since we uncovered the second artifact. I’d believed the first journal fortuitous, a historical text to cherish, but with the discovery of the second I realized they were warnings for a sullied future. I held off translating the greeting etched in the margin on the last page of the second one, his final words addressed to me. I denied his message, afraid to send the colony into panic. Gerenios would destroy what he’d built, and resign us to nomads, to live on ships sailing the wasteland for tracts of soil, few and far between. But we’d never outsmart Vincent Du Maurier, and though I’d convinced myself he’d scribbled the note in haste, perhaps an afterthought written on a whim, I knew he’d come.

  “Yes,” I said, barely a whisper. Compared to his tenor, fiery like lava, mine was air. When I first transcribed the lines of his text, I have gorged for thousands of years, I imagined his voice, his words weighty and ominous. I didn’t know their mass then, the burden of his history.

  His hand fell from the curve at the top of my neck and he dropped a booklet in front of me. His paralytic powers had seized my body, and kept me from looking up at him. When he told me to open the booklet, the lamp on my drafting table flickered as he settled into the nook across the room. The seat into which he sat creaked beneath the weight of his figure while I remained a statue on my stool.

  “Open it,” he repeated. “Read to me.”

  He eased up his mental hold, and let me move my arms to handle the artifact, but once I’d opened it I couldn’t make sense of it. I cleared my throat and said, “I don’t know these markings.”

  “It is like a
code,” he said, conserving his words.

  “I’d need a cipher to translate the text.”

  “I shall wait.”

  He asked the impossible of me. I couldn’t imagine an alphabet, his mess of symbols and squiggles so unreadable I’d never learn its cryptograph, let alone invent one for it.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “It is ancient.”

  I’d been taught to read and write in several languages, but I’d yet to see anything like it.

  “Koiné Greek,” he said.

  “I’ve never …” my voice trailed off, as I examined the script.

  A low growl like a pup’s rose up from the corner of the studio. “A relic,” he said. “The remains lie in Laszlo Arros.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  He released another grumble, and then a second disapproving growl. “Not where,” he said. “With whom.”

  “I don’t,” I stumbled.

  “Laszlo Arros,” he said. “The most significant character in my story.”

  He compelled me to look at him, his mystic figure drawing my body around to meet his gaze. I studied his face, wrath revealing itself just beneath the surface, his aspect like Milton’s exile, nothing of the face a young Latinate girl could fall in love with.

  “Do not,” he said, raising a hand with flexed fingers. My fright must have shown because he dropped his hand and said, “Each time you think of her, a dagger is dug into my skull. I do not wish for you to think on Evelina.”

  He got up and approached me, reaching for me with a pointed claw. He held his hand up and open, willing me, I thought, to pass him the booklet, but when I turned to grab it, it rose on its own and floated through midair, landing in the palm of his hand.

  “I shall dictate,” he said.

  I didn’t need to ask in which language. He meant the vulgate, the crude tongue of the settlers. His rich timber resonated at the top of the tower high up in the clouds overlooking the second colony of the resurrected, and no one heard it but me.