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

by K. P. Ambroziak

  To Feed

  “What did she witness?” I asked, as Vincent fell silent once again.

  The colonists didn’t bend to religion, they worshipped no gods, but my guardian had instilled a spiritual fervor in me that had me believing in some form of god.

  “I must feed,” Vincent said.

  His dark timber stirred me from the pool of light into which I had fallen, thinking about my guardian’s worship.

  I must have gasped without realizing because he rushed to my side and said, “It is natural for you and me. For this, you were made.”

  He caressed my arm, lifting it to his mouth. “I give thanks to Evelina,” he whispered before parting his lips and taking my flesh between them. He waved his other hand across my eyes and put me to sleep. I don’t recall the pain, the piercing of my flesh, the withdrawal of blood. I woke on my cot with my forearm bent toward me, his hand holding mine in a fist. “Are you lightheaded?” He asked.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “Then sit.” He pulled me up with a swift gesture, and examined my face. “You must eat,” he said.

  The smell of meat made my stomach rumble. I could not recall if I had broken my fast in the early morning hours before studying Björg’s bones. I kept no food in my studio at the top of the tower, but ate with the other settlers at the hearth.

  “Eat,” he said, putting a braised leg into my hand. “Fox,” he said. “From Freyit.”

  “When did he come?” My voice sounded as gravelly as Gerenios’s.

  “I went to him.”

  “Are they all right?” The urgency of the nimrod’s arrival returned. “Are they safe?”

  “Everything is as it should be.”

  “What is happening? Please tell me the truth.”

  “You know the truth, Dagur.” He stood up and gestured for me to return to my drafting table. “We must continue.”

  I took the braised leg with me, my hunger having torn it in half. I had never been so ravenous, and my sore arm proved the culprit, though he’d taken minimal blood, a taste he couldn’t do without. I was being saved for the others, when the real feasting would begin.

  “Evelina’s voice died,” he said.

  “Was the infant there with you?” I asked.

  “The magic of the quicksilver incited most of the things I experienced in the facility. Do you understand?”

  I had never been exposed to any kind of mind play in my young life. The colonists forbade mood altering drugs, painkillers, even some herbs were illicit.

  “It works as an hallucinogen, playing tricks on the brain’s currents. Everything I saw in the facility was taken from my past.”

  “Was Youlan real?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “All of it was real, but also constructed for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The memory of Johann Mendel was real,” he said. “Youlan’s admission was real, though I did not believe her until it was too late.”

  “She is your daughter, like Lucia?”

  He nodded.

  “She is gone, isn’t she?”

  He looked away and a muted sigh escaped his lips. “We must get back to it,” he said. “Darkness approaches.”

  I put the braised leg aside and wiped my hands on my pants before picking up the pen.

  “I stood alone in the room,” he said. “The child had evaporated with the memories, and I was left with few answers.”

  Meeting Laszlo Arros

  I spoke to Evelina in my mind, closing the space between us. She would heed my call, but not at that moment. Then and there, I was to stay, to learn more about my past, and occupy my future.

  “Evelina is elsewhere,” a new voice said, a woman I did not recognize. “She will make her way to you if you choose.”

  “Choose what?”

  “To awake.”

  “What?”

  “Wake.”

  “What?”

  “Wake—now.”

  In a blink, everything around me changed. The cell in which I had witnessed the child vanished, and a gray laboratory stood in its stead. This time, I woke strapped to a slab with bodies dangling overhead.

  “Awake!” The shout came from outside me, from the figure who stood at my side looking down on me. With blueberry eyes that seemed purple against her pale skin, she examined me, the bottom half of her face covered with a surgical mask.

  “Welcome back,” she said.

  I reached for her and found my wrists in restraints.

  “Adamantine bracelets,” she said. “One for each hand.”

  “Set me free.” My throat stung, my urge for mortal blood piqued by the imagined child.

  “No centaur is here to die in your place.”

  I reached for her, the manacles tearing into my flesh.

  “They are unbreakable,” she said.

  “Set me free.”

  “I can’t.”

  She drew a long syringe from her side and forced it into my arm, the needle piercing my skin, softened from blood deprivation.

  “How long have I been here?”

  My ire mushroomed when her needle pricked me a second time, as she adjusted the intravenous drip. I ripped at the restraints again, reaching for her with my neck, my irons poised to tear the surgical mask from her face. “Set me free.”

  “This will give you strength,” she said, holding up a bag of crimson gore.

  “Blood,” I mumbled.

  “It is blood.”

  “Bad blood.”

  “Of course not,” she said. “My master is not a sadist.”

  “Laszlo Arros?”

  “You.”

  “Who are you?”

  She leaned in and whispered in my ear. “You should be asking yourself that question.” She shot up and tossed her head back before hanging the blood bag on a rack above me.

  The high hit me firm, and I dissolved into the slab as though molten lava.

  “Do I know you?” I mumbled.

  “Not in this body,” she said. “But the one burnt on the bed of redwoods, yes.”

  Her blueberry eyes grew black and stormy and she straightened the mask on her face.

  “Take it,” my tongue grew thick, “off.”

  “No.”

  “Show me,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Shifter.” I garbled the word.

  “Shush,” she said.

  “Who—hoo?”

  “This body is borrowed.”

  “Mitéra?”

  “Yes.” She leaned forward and pulled the mask down around her neck. Her face was too close to recognize.

  “Set me free,” I whispered.

  “I cannot.”

  “Why?”

  “I am not here as myself.”

  “Who, then?”

  “As you.”

  The blood infused with opiates continued to distract me, as I struggled to hold on to reality. “Obey me,” I said. “Free me from these chains.”

  “The physical cannot hold you,” she said. “Breach the metaphysical to break yourself out.”

  I reached up again, but the manacles restrained me anew. “I cannot.”

  “Consider time a wave that reoccurs, breaking on the same shore again and again,” she said. “We remain stagnant, floating through the wave that carries us nowhere but in the same circle.”

  She fiddled with the drip, and then yanked it out. The needle had gotten stuck, my choler hardening around it, and it broke off at the tip. When she bent down to examine it, I grabbed her hair, contorting my wrist despite the manacle, and held on to her mane, curling my claws about her tendrils. “Set me free,” I said.

  She pulled up against my grasp, struggling to get away. When she finally gained ground, she snapped her neck, and stumbled backward, losing a chunk of hair.

  “That was cruel,” she said, feeling the bald spot on the side of her head.

  I let the strands fall to the ground and unleashed a roar that put fear in her blueb
erry eyes.

  “No,” she said. “I obey my master.”

  “Take me to your master?”

  The spirit of my mother had fled when I grabbed her, and I was left with the soulless drone. She smiled and said, “I am sworn to follow your orders.”

  “Take me to Laszlo Arros.”

  She glanced off to the side, to where I could not see.

  “Set me free,” I said. “Take me to your master.”

  “I cannot.”

  “If I am your master, I demand you to obey me.”

  “Your original orders trump all others.”

  “I am that I am,” I said. “Can you not see that?”

  “I see you,” she said. “But you said you would say that.”

  “When?”

  “A moment ago.”

  She leaned in and gasped. “Oh.”

  “Look more closely,” I whispered.

  She leaned in even closer, close enough for me to touch her skin with my lips. She shivered at the kiss I planted on her cheek. “Oh,” she said again.

  “Free me.”

  This time she obeyed and unlocked the manacles with a slip of her key.

  “Go,” she whispered. “He awaits you.”

  I sprang to my feet, knocking the cadavers hanging on hooks overhead. The first one I touched awoke, moving its limbs with a jolt. The bare midsection evinced its gender. It opened its eyes wide, bearing its genetic similarity to the drone who held me prisoner. Blueberry eyes. I went down the line looking at the bodies, different faces on each, different shades of skin color, but all male in gender.

  As I passed by, my energy awoke the bodies, and they struggled to get down off their hooks. I made it to the other side of the laboratory on wobbly legs, but when I reached the only door at the end, it was locked. I turned to the scraping sound rising up behind me, the drones had freed themselves from their hooks and dragged themselves toward me. Set after set of blueberry eyes pinned on me, as the drones got closer with each step. I slammed my body up against the door to make it open, until the idea came to me as a hot flash, and I pressed my hand on the wall pad next to it. The door hissed as it opened, and I slipped through the smallest gap, slapping my hand on the pad on the other side of the wall to close it. The sound of the drones died, though the image of them coming at me stayed.

  “What do you think?” Youlan said with a grin.

  “Of what?” I asked, concealing both my inebriation and how much the drones had shaken me.

  “Your awakening,” she said.

  “To what?”

  “The future.”

  “None of this is real,” I said. “You have bent my mind somehow and I am still asleep.”

  She huffed and said, “If only.”

  “Where am I now?”

  “You don’t know,” she said, taunting me as she dragged a talon along the counter beside her. The squeak sounded like a nail on a chalkboard. “This is where you two shall meet.”

  “I am ready,” I said. “I look forward to meeting this great enemy.”

  I had decided either Johann Mendel would appear, or some other form Thetis had taken. I believed then that Laszlo Arros was an invention they had concocted together. I moved toward Youlan but she glanced sideways.

  “Not you,” she said. “Hush now.”

  I reached for her with claws out, but she dodged my hand and slapped it away. The effects of the enhanced blood made me feel stronger than I was, and I flung my body into hers, pressing her into the countertop behind her. She laughed at my effort and pushed me off her with a force I could not match. “Pathetic,” she scoffed. “You’re weakest here.” She gestured to the side of her head.

  I launched my pointer claw at her neck, attempting to put a prick in her as she had done to me. My talon cracked up against her skin and a flash of cold ran up my arm. I roared and smacked my lips, biting at the anger corroding me. “I am done with you.”

  “You will never harm me,” she said. “He wouldn’t let you.”

  “Who?”

  “You.”

  I redoubled my effort, dropping my shoulder and plowing into her again. She absorbed the hit like a load-bearing wall and turned it back on me, sending me flying several feet.

  “Enough!” The voice was not hers, or mine.

  “Show yourself,” I said.

  “I am here,” he said. “Show him.”

  “It cannot be,” I whispered.

  Youlan stepped to the wall and drew back a curtain, revealing a window that may as well have been a looking glass, for my twin stood on the other side, identical in every way.

  “Meet Laszlo Arros,” she said.

  I caught my breath, entranced by the image behind the glass. My face, my hair, my shoulders, arms, hands, my member, legs and feet. He was me to a tee, and when he spoke, he used my voice. Chills skipped down my spine, as he studied me too. He smiled and said, “Do not be confused. Our plan has unfolded most perfectly.”

  I got to my feet and rushed to the glass. How different this was from staring at Evelina from behind the window. My desire for her was not as fierce as the one I had when I saw Laszlo Arros. To see oneself in the flesh is—well, there is simply nothing like it.

  “Shall we greet each other properly?”

  “How are you possible?” I touched the glass and he raised his hand to meet mine, mirroring me.

  “It is not I who have defied possibility,” Laszlo Arros said. “You have gone above and beyond our wildest expectations.”

  Anyone watching us from the outside would think we were each a reflection of the other, our voices an exact match, though mine slightly more gruff from the blood.

  “Come,” he said. “Youlan will bring you.” He looked over at her and she stepped forward, as the curtain closed.

  “Come, father,” she said. “Let me take you to him.”

  Danger had not occurred to me then, but a kernel, especially if invisible, may grow quickly when given proper nourishment. Memory is a tricky thing. I did not recall my fate and yet I recognized Laszlo Arros when I saw him. I do not mean his physical features, which were mine, but rather how he fit in my story—who he really was. But with him as me, I questioned little. Since, my mind has sought nothing but answers.

  “He wanted to go to the ship to greet you,” Youlan said, “but has yet to leave the facility.”

  She turned to me with a quizzical look.

  “The plague is not the thing,” she said. “It was merely a decoy, a necessity to destroy the race of men, to end the iron age.” She raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you going to ask?”

  I refused to speak to her now that I had met Laszlo Arros.

  “He’ll tell you everything,” she said. “As you wish.”

  She brought me to another room. The facility was larger than I had time to explore in my stay there. I barely saw most of it. Whether I was in the womb where Muriel had been, or the core where the drones were made, the facility proved an underground labyrinth, each cell similar to the next.

  Laszlo Arros greeted me in a room built to emulate my home in Italy, not LaDenza where Byron and I had spent most of our time but the modest villa we kept in town. I recognized tokens from my life strategically placed about the room to recall my past, but one artifact drew my attention.

  “Go to it,” Youlan said.

  I stepped forward, and tore my spear from the wall. My dory came into harmony with my hand as I held it again, memorizing every nick in its spine. It weighed exactly as it had, and bore the same grooves on the ash-wood handle, showing its age. When I brought the leaf-shaped spearhead up to examine it, I witnessed the rust on its iron and the decaying bronze butt at its other end.

  “The poets sang of your massive battle pike, too heavy for another to wield.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  Youlan admired me from across the room. “Chiron had it brought down from Mount Pelion as a gift for your father to give to you when you came of age.”

  “How is it
here?”

  “It claimed the death of many heroes, did it not?”

  “Is this a trick, too?” I tightened my grip about the ash, willing it to vanish.

  “No trick,” she said. “You brought it here.”

  I considered launching the spear at her across the room, but it grew heavy in my hand, and I placed it back on the wall. “Where is he?”

  “Are you all right?” She asked. “You look like you need to sit.”

  I could not know Laszlo Arros drained my energy, that he took back all the life he had given me, siphoning my spirit to patch his own. “What is happening?” I faltered, and she caught me as if waiting for me to fall.

  “Sit, father.”

  “I am not your father.”

  “You can’t deny me forever,” she said. “You will need me soon, and always.”

  “I need nothing.” My voice sounded hollow.

  She had placed me on a rustic bench against the wall, as my knees gave out.

  “What is this magic?”

  “No magic,” she said. “The blood is wearing off.”

  “What blood?”

  “All the blood,” she said. “Every ounce you have ever taken in as succor is—he comes!”

  “What have you done to me?” My body grew weaker, as my physicality seemed to catch up with time. “What is happening?”

  “It’s him,” she said. “He comes.”

  The wall bent to my twin as he seemed to walk right through it, planting himself a few feet in front of me. I looked up at him, and he gazed down at me. “So it is as we predicted,” he said.

  “What?” I attempted to stand and he raised a hand, his gesture holding me in place.

  “I shall come to you,” he said.

  He was dressed as I was dressed, and looked even more like me than he had through the glass. “What sort of game is this?”

  “I am you,” he said.

  “How is that possible?”

  He stroked his cheek with the back of his hand, feeling the cut of his shave. “Let me tell you,” he said.

  One Single Lie May Seem the Greatest Truth

  Vincent stopped and pulled the pen from my hand, commanding me to look up at him. “You see me, yes?”

  “Of course,” I said.