“I saw him as plainly.”
“But how?”
“Can you not guess it?”
I assured him I couldn’t imagine the impossible. “You have no twin, no sibling,” I said. “Was Laszlo Arros a replica?”
“One could draw that conclusion, perhaps, from my narration.”
He stepped back as though admiring me, and I winced at the thought of him feeding again.
“No,” he said. “I am satisfied.” He grinned to shake away the momentary awkwardness.
“Time,” I said. “Was it a bend in time, as you said?”
“Interesting possibility.”
He looked up and seemed to contemplate my suggestion as though it had never occurred to him. He glanced back at the window, checking on the purple haze, the sun having grown dark in anticipation of night.
“Simply put,” he said. “The trap was mental.”
“I don’t see what you mean.”
“Did Peter teach you about the ages of man?”
I shook my head.
“You see, Dagur, the iron age was the fifth age of man, and I was born in the fourth—the age of heroes. But my awakening has me straddling both, and now this new one. Do you see?”
I nodded and asked what came next, “Youlan said the iron age is ending.”
“She did say that,” he said. “And she is correct. In fact, civilization has long since been flirting with its end, with misery and toil, as children dishonored those who engendered them, brothers killed their kin, guests betrayed hosts, liars defrauded good men, even shame and dignity were worn as cloaks to keep up appearances—god had forsaken man, leaving him to decay as soon as he was born.”
“What age are we in now?”
“The age of the bloodless.”
“I thought they were all gone.”
“The age of the colonies, then,” he said. “The name is irrelevant.”
“And the settlers?”
He smiled. “You know. You have seen it. Things are not what they seem.” He backed away, taking up his post on the window ledge. “What if I told you Laszlo Arros was me, just like he said.”
“Then who are you?”
He turned to the sky outside and his aspect changed again. He grew younger looking, his features softening in the light. “You would not believe me if I told you.”
“Why not?” My voice rose in anger. “I’ve believed everything else. I’m here, copying it all down for posterity, and I haven’t questioned you. What am I supposed to think?”
“My oh my, how bold you are.”
He flew to my side and pulled me up from the stool with a single hand on my neck. My body grew limp in his grasp, as I struggled for air.
“You are certainly your father’s son.”
“Who,” I barely squeezed out.
“You want the truth of your origin,” he said. “Is that not what we all want?”
He released me and I fell to the ground, hard, my ankle twisting as I hit the stone. I shrieked in pain, and he rushed at me again. “You must hold your peace,” he said. “The pain is nothing.”
Agony ripped through me, up my shin, into my knee, and I bit my lip for fear of crying out again.
“Get up,” he said.
“I can’t.” The pain robbed me of my wits, and I grew teary-eyed.
“Ah,” he said. “This is meant to be.”
I muffled my whimpers, as my ankle throbbed. When Vincent reached down, I shuffled away, but he still caught me, twisting his hand about my injured leg.
“Allow me to right my wrong,” he said.
“No.”
He forced his hand on the flesh at the back of my ankle, pulling off my boot. His touch cooled my skin with a bolt of frost as icy as the water at the foot of Rijär Mount, and replaced my suffering with a dull ache that soon died.
“It’s gone,” I said. “How did you do that?”
“Magic.”
He helped me up from the stony floor and guided me to the stool, though I could’ve put weight on my ankle and walked there myself.
“Shall I make it up to you?”
I crossed my arms over my chest without intending to sulk.
“Shall I tell you about your father?”
“No,” I said without cause or thought. “Not yet.”
“Why?”
“Let’s finish with Laszlo Arros,” I said. “Then you can tell me.”
“I am many things, you know.”
“I know.”
He let his hand fall on top of mine, and I shuddered at its mass.
“But I am not your father,” he said.
My heart pounded in my chest and I was sure he could hear it through my chattering teeth. I couldn’t bear his confession. I had wanted to be one of his—his kin. I’d wanted to believe that was the reason he came for me, why he chose me to record his story, why Peter had been my guardian, and my mother had joined his clan. But I was nothing, and I never felt it more than at that moment.
“The truth keeps many masters,” he said. “But even she must bend before each of them one at a time.”
“I’m ready to begin again,” I said, picking up the pen.
He sank back into the darkness, and the chair creaked beneath his weight. My fear shrank as he moved away, my thoughts of a faceless father growing more and more heavy on my soul, a weight set to drown me. I raised my shaking hand to the parchment, poised and ready.
“Thetis had lied,” he said. “I was not to become a god, not really.”
I glanced over at the bound pages on the shelf, the journals he had left me, speaking of his approach to godliness.
“I spilled the truth onto those pages,” he said. “They are not to be mocked. They are for future generations, for your descendants.” His voice shifted with the final word, and I pictured the smile he wore when he said it.
“Laszlo Arros claimed to be me, but I insisted only Thetis could confirm that bit of truth. ‘She has little to do with the scheme,’ he had said. ‘The shifter is irrelevant’ …”
The Shifter Shifts
“You cling to an invention,” Laszlo Arros said. “Do you not see it yet—your truth?”
I would have thrown him across the room had my body not resisted, my strength almost completely drained. His presence forced a weakness on me so great I could barely lift my arm. I hid my faltering brawn as best I could, but he sniffed it out.
“Let it go,” he said. “It was not yours to begin with.”
I had become the frog, and he the scorpion. He sneered with a derision I would have felt had I been the one mocking him. “Speak about your magic,” I said. “So I may poke holes in it.”
“It is not magic,” he said. “Our exchange is a work of natural selection, like the caterpillar. Do you know the larva builds his cocoon knowing he is to be melted down inside of it? He makes his own coffin, if you will. He races to the torture chamber knowing it will free him, unleash all that is to come. He has the same mind, you see? Even his wings, the beginnings of his beautiful pinions are already there inside his body, set to be spread wide after his melting down for his transfiguration. Do you think he knows this and moves toward his death rationally, or do you think it is emotion that carries him forth and makes him brave? Tell me Vincent, can you imagine setting up your own fall so that you may rise as something greater?”
He stared down at me with a grin and a twinkle in his eye, and it was in that look that I doubted he was me.
“You see I have changed the world’s course, yiós. I may finally live enlightened and fulfilled.”
“I am not your son.”
“The moniker is fitting, no? I consider myself your father.”
“You did not engender me.”
“In a way, I suppose.”
“I am the origin,” I said. “Thetis brought me back.”
“Yes, you are the Alpha,” he said. “But a beginning always has an end, and I am the Omega to your Alpha.”
“You cannot be both
my father and my progeny.”
“No,” he said. “That seems a paradox.”
He placed his hands behind his back and paced the floor a few feet in front of me. “The line you have engendered ends with me,” he said. “Without blood, your world has come to its end.”
“And yours, too, if you are like me.”
He raised a single finger and wagged it in the air. “No, no,” he said. “I shall usher in a new generation.”
“Without blood, there is no generation.”
He smiled and I found his look rather charming. “And so it begins,” he said. “The drought to end all ages.”
“There is no drought,” I said. “I come from a ship of blood donors.”
“Tsk-tsk,” he said. “You and I—well, we know that is not true.”
“What are they, then?”
“Insurance.”
“For what?”
“Soon every last drop of human blood—honest to goodness, fresh, living, pure, human blood—will be gone. And if the plague does not kill them, my freaks of nature will.”
“Freaks?”
“Gen H, if you prefer,” he said. “Those that carry mutated blood, unfit for the vampire.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” He leaned in and placed his hand on my shoulder. I could do nothing to lift it off. “I told you. We are one, the Alpha and Omega.”
“We?”
“Of course you do not recall any of this.” He tossed his head to the side and huffed. “Our little scheme.” He stepped back and narrowed his eyes. “I could kiss you,” he said, “and all of this would be over, but I want to make it last.”
“What scheme?”
“South Korea,” he said. “Rings a bell, no?”
I assured him I had not been to the East in centuries, long before the floods wiped out most of the Korean Peninsula.
“But you were.” He smiled. “Perhaps the shift made it difficult to recall. You were—how can I put it—not in your right mind then.”
I leaned forward and raised a finger to his smug face—my smug face. “You cannot trick me into thinking you know more about me than I do. I am greater than anything you could ever be. One does not live for thousands of years without becoming so.”
“I agree,” he said. “But your tenure is over.” He swatted my finger away, and the measure of his strength rattled my core. “This is why I have come to take your place.” He dropped down toward me again, reaching out to caress my cheek. “You wanted something even greater.”
“To be a god.”
“Clever,” he said. “I know the only god to whom you have prayed of late is science.” His touch sent a shockwave through my skull so strong it would have killed a man. I gasped for air, sucking in an enormous breath. “That is it,” he said. “Recall the moment you decided the skag would no longer rule you.”
He sent me out of body, into another place, pulling my mind up into his to witness the damage I had done.
I stood in a laboratory resembling one I had visited before. I spoke the language with ease, telling two men my specimen must appear human in every way. “The mutation must only affect their blood,” I said, holding out a tube of emerald-colored liquid. “What is it,” one of them asked. I replied, “The beginning of a new era.” The men nodded and bowed, assuring me I would be satisfied.
When Laszlo Arros pulled me back out of his mind, the memory stayed.
“You see,” he said. “You were present at the beginning.”
“That was not me.”
He smiled. “Who was it, then?”
“You.”
“Ah,” he said. “What if I said it was both of us?”
“How can you shift into my form without—”
“Tsk-tsk,” he said, raising a finger to my lips. “Logic gets us nowhere.”
“Thetis,” I mumbled.
“Ha,” he said. “Thetis is a mere character sketch compared to me.”
“She is as real as you or I.”
“Exactly,” he said.
I sneered at him, as I attempted to stand. He used a single finger to intercept my rise, sending me back onto the bench. “Your addiction to the skag makes you weak.”
“What is the skag?”
“Blood,” he said. “Your need for blood makes you menial.”
“I am not addicted,” I said. “Blood is how I survive.”
“Oh if that were true,” he scoffed. “I can see your hankering as we speak, addict. Do you feel it? That sense of emptiness and longing, that hunger driving you to insane lengths, that lust gnawing at your liver, your spleen, the hard lining of your stomach, as though a rat were burrowing a hole through your intestine. Do you feel it, Vincent Du Maurier? Because I do. I feel it for you.”
“What are you talking about?” I mustered all my strength to rise from the bench a second time, to face him squarely. The room spun, as pinwheels lit it up. He put his hand to my cheek, and tapped it with the softness of a schoolmaster. Then he leaned forward and brushed his lips across mine. His breath smelled of blood, making me flinch.
“The finest ichor you will ever taste,” he whispered, “belongs to the child you made.”
My rage tipped and I gathered enough strength to send him flying across the room with one good push. The mention of Lucia’s blood gave me the power, for his threat to my source tempted my lust. I would stop at nothing to destroy him.
Laszlo Arros bellowed a laugh, rising to his feet. He slammed me into the wall with a single hand on my chest, but the moment he reacted with violence, he regretted it. “I apologize,” he said. “I am a creature of peace.”
“We are nothing if not wrathful,” I said.
“I am not.” He straightened the lapels of my coat, brushing them flat to erase the creases he had caused.
“Then you are not me,” I said. “For if you are me, your festering rage will win out every time.”
He laughed and tapped my chest with his flat hand. “Sit, please,” he said.
“You are a fraud.” I fell onto the bench anew, unable to hide my weakened knees.
“What have you done to me?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I am you.”
“You are not me,” I said. “You are Rhamnusia’s doing, the goddess of vengeance come to win me back.”
“Who am I?”
“Rhamnusia,” I said.
“Oh Vincent, how you cling to the ancient world. I am not your nemesis, though perhaps you would understand me better if I were.”
“What are you then?”
“The question is rather of what am I made, I should think. You believed you had seen everything in this world because you came back from death—the first awakened to blood. But the ash from which you sprung had energy left in it.”
The weight of my body increased, my eyelids heavy, and I fought the sleep he pressed on me.
“Shall we go back to the beginning?” He put a hand on my shoulder and a jolt ran down my arm, reviving me. “Shall we revisit your inception?”
“What for?”
“It is from that rubble that I arose,” he said. “From ash, reborn.”
“Of what sorcery do you speak?”
“You feign surprise, and yet you also rose from that same ash anew and vibrant.”
“My rebirth was not cause for celebration,” I said. “I did not awaken to joy, but suffered the agony of loss and tormenting hunger.”
He waved his hand in the air. “Yes, yes, we know. Your lust for blood has driven you since. But were you not erected a god by the one who made you immortal, raised you up from the dead?”
I gave him a nod, and he mimicked me.
“Is it so strange that I should be erected from that same ash?”
“A twin?”
He chuckled. “Not a twin. A replacement.”
“Why would I need a replacement?”
“You do not,” he said. “That is my prerogative.”
“So you are a brother?”
&
nbsp; “Tsk-tsk,” he said. “We are not related. I am you.”
“How?”
“Da Vinci claimed we must learn how to see,” he said. “We must realize that everything connects to everything else.”
Those words rang true, I had seen them etched somewhere—a tomb, perhaps. Or maybe it was a laboratory in South Korea.
Laszlo Arros smiled. “Your sight is improving.”
“Show me,” I said. “Do what it is you have brought me here to do.”
“Not yet. I want to be with you first.”
He leaned forward and whispered in my ear, his voice reaching through my core to the tip of my spine, the blood on his breath plucking at my spleen. “Imagine if you will a glorious bird—an Arabian bird—sitting amongst flakes and cinders, arising from the ash of its predecessor, its resurrection a cyclical regeneration as impossible to avoid as the sun rising each day in the east. I am that regeneration. I am the resurrected one, come out of the ash of my predecessor.”
“Am I your forerunner, then?”
“Of course. Can you not see it?”
“I see you are—well, that you look like me, but I have seen others who bear resemblances.”
“Like Youlan?”
“Yes,” I said.
“She is mine.”
“She foolishly claims to be my daughter.”
“Yes, but she is my vampire,” he said. “My one and only, born to blood. She is an original heirloom, if you will.”
“Does she know she is a trinket?”
“Hardly,” he said with a smile. “She is like you in every way. She cannot survive without the skag either.”
I scoffed this time. “You believe you are me, but can survive without blood. There is nothing further from me than that. Blood is my deity. My god is made of blood and I would drink him whole if he were before me now.”
“So you have.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your willingness to finish off the blood, every last drop, has brought us here.”
I smiled at him. “Is that not blood on your breath? Have you indulged in a nip, too?”
He turned away and covered his mouth with his hand, taking in a breath of air. “It was not a pleasure, I assure you.”
He used his other hand to stop me, pushing me back down into a seating position, as I attempted a feeble punch. My strength faltered despite the stimulation.
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 61