“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 a
m 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, s
tanding 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.
I approached him, and still my mother stayed. She kept inside him until the last possible moment, waiting until my venom began to work its way to his spleen—some foolishly believe the heart is the center of the matter, but the spleen in fact stores the wrath, and the venom transforms the house in which it lives. Our hardening rises from the spleen first and foremost.
“I have a gift for you,” I said.
“I do not fear you,” he said.
“One must be worthy.”
“I am,” he whispered.
With Thetis driving his will, he got under my skin, his ego tempting my wrath. I bit into him, as I remained undecided about his fate. To drink his blood was most tempting, but my mother reached up from within Byron and drew me to him, persuading me to release my venom, inoculating both his soul and mine.
The Flight of Gerenios
Vincent seemed taken with the memory of his encounter with Byron. I didn’t ask how after so many years of meeting people he could become so connected to one living person. He confessed his mother had drawn them together but she seemed only part of it.
“She was,” he said, reading my thoughts. “Thetis was merely the storyteller, setting up the characters. We were the ones who played out the action.”
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 56