I felt a pinch beneath my left side, as the cords of my heart sang. “Perfetto,” I whispered.
“You can’t see alter,” he said.
“The alteration,” I said. “I cannot see the alteration.” I had trouble pulling myself away from the view in the spyglass, the kaleidoscopic shapes mesmerizing me where I stood. To see one’s future come undone and yet still in one’s hands for the changing is humbling, though I was not one to be humbled. “When will the first be ready?”
“It is prepare as we speak.”
“And?”
“The implantation set for sunrise,” he said. “The surrogate, she ready.”
“Good.”
“Is Doctor Darrow coming?” The geneticist shuffled his feet, as he made his way to the other side of the metal table.
The slightest grin crossed my lips, as I pulled my eyes from the color mutating on the glass slide. “Give me your hand,” I said, as I reached across the chasm between us, a space no greater than an arm’s length.
“What for?” He gasped.
“I have your payment in my pocket here,” I said, tapping my chest with my free hand.
“Payment already made,” he said, stepping back.
“Why are you frightened?”
“I am not,” he mumbled. “I just have much work, and payment already made.”
“This is a bonus,” I said.
I pulled a vial from my inner top-left pocket, and held it out to him.
“What this?”
“This,” I said, holding out the vial, “is the future.” I gestured for him to take it and when he finally did, he held it up to the light. “See if that is not the most valuable organism on the planet,” I said.
“From where?”
His ignorance made me smile. He could not know what I gave him. All the microscopes in the world could not identify the microbe he held in his hand. But curiosity would gnaw at him, and soon I would bring him the best living petri dish in which to cultivate it. And my Pandora would carry the ill forth, letting it ferment and grow in her, festering and morphing into a germ that would infect every man, woman and child, in perpetuity. She would raze the iron age, sending it to the doom for which it was forged.
“This from Doctor Darrow?”
“Yes,” I said, without a care to the falsehood I spread.
He raised one hand to scratch the side of his greasy hair. “He genius,” he said.
Before I left, he asked me if I would attend the celebration.
“What celebration?” I asked.
“Chinese New Year,” he said. “We enter year of the water ox.”
“I did not know Koreans celebrated Chinese New Year.”
“We don’t,” he said with a toothy grin, his eyes disappearing beneath the smudges on his thick wire frames. “But it same time, and this new year special in Korea because it fall on the day of the third new moon. Year change to thirty-three.”
“Ah,” I said, touching my jawline with the back of my hand. “The year 2033, thirty-three is a master number, the mover and shaker—how fitting.”
I left the geneticist to his new sample, the virus he would eventually pass on to a successor who would complete his work.
Hematopes, or Gen H
Vincent drew near again, no longer sitting on the sill. His gaze seemed distant, but his mind was ever present. I cleared my throat and waited. When he didn’t speak, I asked, “When you say 2033, you mean the old calendar, right?”
He touched his lip with the tip of his tongue and pulled himself from his thoughts. “We marked time differently, yes.”
“Some of the settlers refer to years when they talk about the past, but otherwise we count seasons now.”
“Some prefer the old calendar,” he said.
“Like Gerenios?”
“Yes, he is an original Gen H,” he said. “It has been many years now since the settlers built colonies.”
“There are others?”
“The population is more dense than you think,” he said. “You live on an island, so it is difficult to know.”
“I was told there is only water beyond our shores.”
He smiled and said, “A convenient lie.”
“What exactly is a hematope?”
“That is the crux of it, Dagur,” he said, “the reason you are here.”
He had been leaning against the wall and now stood erect, as though balancing himself on a precipice.
“I don’t see it?”
“You live among a new race, one made up of hematopes. The blood of the settlers, the Gen H, is contaminated with mutated bone marrow.”
“The purple stuff in Björg’s bones?”
“Yes,” he said. “And the cause of the colors we saw in the den.”
“But they are so much like me.”
“In every way, except one.”
“Their blood,” I said.
He stepped forward with one long stride, standing over me and looking downward. “Theirs is the blood that turns us to stone. A self-mollifying, self-regenerating ichor detrimental to my type.”
“But why?”
“Do you believe I was actually with the geneticist plotting it all, the fall of my kind?”
“I don’t know.”
“I have given you evidence of mind manipulation, mine and that of others. I have also told you that Laszlo Arros may take any form, even mine.”
“So it was him,” I said. “Then how can you recall a meeting you never went to?”
“The fusion has begun,” he said.
He turned away and fell back into the darkness, and though I strained to see him, he seemed to disappear into thin air.
“Vincent?”
I rose from the stool and turned about the room, running to the window to see where he’d gone. The colony was just beginning to stir, as several settlers came out to greet the sun perched on the horizon, making a peach halo over the landscape.
I felt many things in that moment, but the greatest were his absence and the dissolution of danger that seemed to go with him.
A stack of sheets sat on my drafting table, piled as perfectly as if I’d squared them myself. He had left me the whole of his story and I was to arrange it in the best narrative possible. I went to the table and took my place at the stool to begin the work ahead of me, and that’s when I saw his last note to me. His elegant handwriting flooded me with memories of hours spent deciphering and translating his original texts, the ones he had left for me to find.
I mouthed the words as I read them again and again, “Do not forget, Dagur, you are the last, and the fate of both races lives inside you.”
The End of Vincent Du Maurier
Gerenios waited on the trail where Vincent left him, following him along the path with his eyes. He was headed down to the river’s edge, where gullies ran out of the source in all directions. From above, the meeting point looked like an arm with long tendrils reaching out for the trees bordering the water. Gerenios would wait the time Vincent had instructed and then head down the same path to retrieve the ash.
“It must be buried in the hearth,” Vincent had said. “It cannot be scattered by the wind.”
“Why not?” Gerenios had asked many questions and whether he received the answer to this one was of little importance. The reasons for things were never quite as consequential as their being observed.
“My remains will stay close,” he said. “I do not want to be pulled away”
“She will come for you,” Gerenios said. “She is occupied with the rescue now but she will grieve.”
“Not for long. Peter has assured me he will minister to her in her grief.”
“How can you know she will stay?”
Vincent scowled, and then softened his look to study the Gen H he had chosen to father Béa’s child. He too must be considered kin. “She would never leave my remains behind.”
“And when you return,” he asked, “will she know you?”
“I make no guara
ntees, even to her.”
Vincent made little ceremony when he left Gerenios, though he shook the hand of his longstanding ally. Having abandoned me in the tower without a goodbye, I considered that a show of approval, or at least a sign of respect for the colonist he had chosen to watch over his kin.
When Gerenios got to the river’s edge, the wind picked up and the water raged. He was not superstitious but he told me the eeriness was something new for him, a feeling he had never experienced before or since. Several flocks of wren perched on the branches of the bog birches along the water’s edge sang with a trill, easily mistaken for an urgent call.
“A covey of Troglodyte troglodytes like that doesn’t usually sit out so long in the cold season,” he had said. “But there was a whole slew of them, and the sound they made was like the squeal of a muldvarp stuck with a dart. If Freyit had been there with his longbow, he would’ve had a hard time hitting them all. They didn’t fly off until I’d shoveled it all up.”
He had gently piled the ash into a metal receptacle as instructed. Vincent had told him to use a clean container, and to lay leaves overtop the ash before bringing it to the hearth. He fulfilled his duty with the honor it required, knowing the sacrifice was a great one.
I’ve asked him if he heard them, the nimrod and the vampire, Laszlo Arros and Vincent Du Maurier, meeting for their final tête-à-tête, but Gerenios promised me all was silent.
I’ve tried to picture the face off, the meeting of these two timeless creatures, one supernatural, the other about to become so. I’ve tried to imagine the burst of flame, the streak of lightning their fusion would have made, the conversation they may have had, as the one sold his superiority to the other.
“I failed,” Laszlo Arros would say. “But I’ve covered endless time and space to be with you again, to fulfill the fusion that will make us a god.”
“You force my hand,” Vincent would reply. “I do not go with you freely.”
“You have never been free, enslaved to mortality, then to blood. This evolution shall be your sweetest, and we shall rise anew, a creature for the ages.”
“We cannot control our resurrection,” Vincent would say, ever the skeptic. “As we cannot decide our destiny. The Fates continue their stronghold, and we bow before them.”
“Do you think Lázoros incapable of smiting the sentinels who keep guard on the Fates?” He would step forward and touch Vincent’s arm to pull him in, fearing he would change his mind and dart in the opposite direction. “Do you think Lázoros bows to anyone?”
“No.” Vincent would tarry, taking in the scent of his surroundings once last time.
“Do you think we shall be merciful when we rise?”
“Yes.” Vincent already knew mercy, its having won out. “We shall finish what we started.”
Laszlo Arros would take Vincent’s other arm and tighten his grasp, tasting the ecstasy, the fusion he had longed for. But Vincent would be ready, knowing Laszlo Arros would embrace him first, and he would step into the hug, touching the villain’s chest with his own. He would even lay his head on his shoulder before the end, and look up to the sky, awaiting the moment of absolute fusion. Then Vincent would whisper in his ear, “You are defeated once again,” and open his mouth wide, unlocking his jaw, unleashing his metal tusks to greet the air before sinking them into the neck of Laszlo Arros. The fusion would make them both suffer the venom’s burn, the transformation into fire, the dissolution into ash. But it would end, and his descendants would be saved from the nimrod come to claim them, and the god Laszlo Arros had tried to make him.
Peter told me his god commanded great sacrifice, tales of death and crucifixion, renewal and change, but nothing compared to the color of the sky that morning. When the sun reached the point where the mountain range in the east cut it in the middle, it painted the world sanguine, and I understood Vincent’s offering.
This narrative, built from his dictation and the journals he left us, speaks of that sacrifice. I can only hope to honor the legend of Vincent Du Maurier with it since I fear I won’t be here to witness his second rising.
Daybreak
The morning proved cold, but I took Saba with me for a walk along the Dáal river. She was bundled in the fur of the Arctic fox her grandfather had trapped himself. He and Freyit had nurtured a long-lived competition, and Gerenios had beaten the master three seasons in a row.
“Is the fish awake?” Saba’s little hand squeezed mine and I thought how big she had gotten.
“I think perhaps they are still asleep,” I said.
“We shouldn’t fish them, then.”
“Should we let them get rested enough to escape our nets?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What will we eat for supper if not fish?”
“Berries,” she said with a shrug. The fox fur slipped from her shoulders, and I leaned down to adjust it. “Thank you, daddy.”
Her voice was the echo of her four older sisters, and Saba’s compassionate character was due in thanks to her mother.
The day Netta Bijarnarson was bound to me in the grove at the foot of the birch trees in front of the entire colony, she thought of one thing apart from our union, feeding those who came to witness us unite. From the moment I met her, I loved her. It was not hard to see she had come from a place of pain, suffered under worse circumstances in another part of the world.
“She was enslaved, Dagur,” Gerenios had told me. “Your kin have freed her from wretched conditions, and she will never forget it.”
He was correct in thinking her loyalty would be steadfast. She, like me, understood our burden, and did not waver.
As I held little Saba’s hand, I thought of her mother’s vigor. She had given birth to five girls in a short period of time, and still she kept up with other responsibilities. I admired the mother of the new world, and the woman to whom I was bound.
“Is that Evie,” Saba said, pointing to the kneeling figure. She was at the water’s edge, her hands in her lap, a hood pulled up over her head. Evelina wore a sable cape that marked her for the widowhood she felt, and hid her gaunt frame. She seemed to have wasted away in the seasons since I met her, despite the succor available to her.
“Good morning,” Saba cried from a distance. Several wren trumped out a song, as chorus to my little girl’s cheery hello.
Evelina turned to greet us with a nod and a wave.
“Why don’t you cross the rocks, and collect some grubs for the fish,” I said to Saba. She giggled as she tore off, stomping her feet through the shallow riverbed. I smiled after her, keeping a careful eye as she crossed.
“She’ll be as big as Beatrice soon,” Evelina said. “What are you feeding that child, Dagur?”
I pulled up to where she knelt but remained standing. “The frost season was lean, but she seems to have defied it. She is a wonder.”
“I saw Hannah and Andor cozying up the night before last.”
“Netta thinks they’ll make a fine match when she’s ready,” I said. “But I don’t like to plan such things.”
“Fathers never do,” she said.
“When do you expect Veor and Lucia to return?”
“They’re close,” she said. “I’ve sensed them for days now.”
“Do you think they were successful?”
Evelina studied Saba as she crouched down, digging into the soil for grubs. She had a small pail at her side, and used the spade I had gifted her for her last fête.
“Peter thinks I should know,” she said. “He’s certain I’m renouncing some gift to see the future.”
“Isn’t he the mind reader?”
The corners of her mouth turned upward and a smile broke across her face. It was still the most beautiful aspect I’d ever seen, though that was a secret I would take to my grave. I didn’t need a reprimand from Netta, or my grandmother, for that matter. Neither of them could know how many times I’d dreamed of the benevolent Evelina, and the spark of wrath that marked her for Vincent.
“Maybe you can read minds.”
“Your face is always an open book, Dagur. Most of us can tell what you’re thinking.”
I was sure a crimson hue rose to my cheeks since they burned like wildfire.
“Last night, as I sat by the hearth,” she said, “I heard his voice.”
“What did he say?”
“Evelina.”
“Did you answer?”
“I tossed another log on the fire and blew the embers.”
Saba called to us, holding out her pail. “Got six,” she yelled, her voice garbled by the sound of the ravine.
Evelina sighed and said, “The future comes, Dagur, and I am grateful Saba will see it.”
“Are you worried?”
“For what?”
“His return.”
She turned to me, batting the long dark eyelashes every one of my girls had inherited, and said, “I can hardly wait.”
Her lips parted slightly and the points of her subtle fangs beckoned to me. I dropped to my knees, and kneeled beside her, pulling up the sleeve of my coat to bare my arm. I made my proffer and she took it with modest haste. Saba watched from across the river, smiling at the gesture she knew so well, the birthright she would claim when she came of age. I returned her smile and gave a small wave with my other hand, as she went back to her chore of searching for grubs nested in the dirt beneath the bog birches.
THE END
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Also by K. P. Ambroziak
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The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier
Book 1
Book 2
The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Page 66