by Becket
Wyn got to the coffin and opened the lid.
Inside, Bach’s music was no longer playing. Now it had moved on to the moving wall of music in the first movement of Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, otherwise known as The Symphony of Sorrowful Songs.
The Red Man looked so helpless and sad.
Wyn was tempted to weep. But Vulcans like him do not weep, not because they can’t, they just choose not to.
Bright light shone out from the coffin. It would have blinded Wyn, but Ms. Crystobal had prepared him. Together they had made the sunglasses that they were wearing. It helped block out the light that Lowen had harnessed. It was not a light from earth. It was the light of Khariton’s sun. Lowen had channeled it into the Red Man’s coffin through a spectral wormhole. He had magnified its power similar to a magnifying glass harnessing the sun’s rays over an ant.
The Red Man was immobile from the music. He was weakening from the light.
Wyn destroyed the speakers with the thrusts of his fists.
The music silenced.
The Red Man blinked and looked at Lowen. He looked so tired and confused, like a sleeper waking from a bad dream.
“I’m sorry,” Wyn said. And he meant it too. “It’s time to free you.”
The Red Man simply stared at Wyn, too weak to move.
Wyn leaned down. He and the Red Man angled their heads toward one another’s neck. Each one lengthened his Probiscus. Each one pierced the other.
Together they drank one another’s blood. Together they shared their Blood Memories. Together they communicated.
For a Blood Vivicanti, drinking down someone else’s Blood Memories can be like going to a really good movie, only in this movie you’d not only lose track of the time, but you’d also find yourself in a 3D cinescape.
You would be surrounded and swallowed by millions of sights and sounds and sensations that the twin nets of your mind – the conscious and the subconscious – would gather into a writhing mass of data.
Your intellect would say to your feelings, “Hey these aren’t really your experiences, you know,” while your feelings would say to your intellect, “Bugger off, mate.”
Wyn knew that the Red Man’s experiences were not his own. But the power of Blood Memories helped his intellectual side and his sensitive side come to an amicable compromise.
Look: objectively, we Blood Vivicanti know and understand that other people’s experiences are not our own.
But, subjectively, we don’t care.
Quaffing down great gulps of blood, Wyn now knew what the Red Man knew. He felt what he felt.
And in the same vein (pun intended), the Red Man had the best of Wyn’s memories and understanding too. The Red Man could engineer an earthling super-computer, he could develop a computer virus, he could make more Blood Vivicanti if he wanted to. He could do many things.
He could even bake a Bundt cake since it was the only thing Aemilia had taught Wyn to do in the kitchen.
The Red Man was surprised to feel love for her. He had never felt love for anyone before. He did not know he could love a human.
And I must confess, lately, his love has been surprising me too. But then again I’m not quite human anymore.
Blood does not make us stronger.
The Red Man was still very weak, despite the blood he drank. He could barely move.
Yet also in spite of his weakness, he gripped Wyn’s hand and held up his palm. Then with his own fingernail he carved into Wyn’s flesh three letters.
He knew that Wyn’s injury would heal almost instantly.
Wyn knew this too. So he let the Red Man carve away into his flesh.
It was painful. But the pain Wyn felt did not overpower his fascination.
He knew that the Red Man had been called Silent on Khariton. And he knew that Silent was trying to communicate with him now. So he eagerly watched the Red Man carve one letter after another into his flesh.
The Red Man finished and collapsed back into his coffin, utterly exhausted.
Wyn spelled out the three letters carved into his palm.
R - U - N
Wyn heard movement behind him.
As the carved message on his palm healed, he understood that the Red Man had wanted him to escape.
But it was too late.
Wyn whirled around and came face to face with Theo.
Only it was not Theo anymore. It was Theo’s face, but not his expression. It was Theo’s body, but not his body language. He was no longer graceful and beautiful. In very subtle ways, Theo looked twisted and ugly.
“Theo?” asked Wyn although he already knew the answer.
Behind Theo stood more Sleeper Devils than Wyn had ever seen. They seemed to fill the whole room, as far as the Blood Vivicanti eye could see.
Theo was sneering at Wyn. “Hello, my old friend.”
It was Theo’s voice, yet it wasn’t his tone.
“Theo?” Wyn asked again in some doubt.
“Theo’s not home right now. But if you leave a message, he might never get back to you.”
Wyn scowled. “Who are you?”
Theo’s face brightened with laughter. “I think you know.”
“Where’s Theo?”
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“How?”
“Ah,” Theo’s face beamed, “that I can answer. How is he gone? He is gone forever. His house is under new management, as they say.”
Wyn grabbed Theo’s neck and drew him close.
“Lowen,” he hissed.
The Sleeper Devils started to move behind Theo’s body, but Lowen, now fully in command of his new host, held up the hand that had once cupped my head and had drawn me close to his neck.
The Sleeper Devils waited for Lowen’s command – a command that would come from Theo’s beautiful mouth.
Theo’s eyes now stared Wyn in the face with a cocky smile.
“You might have been able to hurt me in another body,” Theo said in Lowen’s tone. “But I like this one. I could fall from the top of my building and suffer hardly a flesh wound.”
Lowen dropped his hand. The Sleeper Devils understood the sign. They mobbed Wyn. There were too many. They overwhelmed him. He could not fight them all.
Lowen casually turned back to the Red Man in the coffin. The Red Man tried to crawl out, but the music and the light had drained his energy entirely.
Lowen gently placed the Red Man back inside. He fixed earbuds into the Red Man’s ears.
Renaissance motets started singing songs of existential lamentation and regret.
The Red Man once again became paralyzed by the music.
He lay perfectly motionless in the coffin.
Lowen closed the lid. “I still need you, my brother.”
That whole time, I had been in Idyllville.
And I have to admit: I did look rather steampunk that night. Yes, I was wearing tight black clothes for stealth. And I was wearing a black jacket, with the collar folded over my neck and the jacket zipped up to my chin. And over all that, Wyn had outfitted me with a few of his gadgets and gizmos and whirlidoos.
In case Ms. Crystobal could not contact me through her telepathic power, Wyn would call me on one of his many marvelous devices.
At that time, I was sitting in the largest eighteen-wheeler I could find.
Why, you might ask, was a not-quite-five-foot-tall Blood Vivicanti sitting in a rig where you might ordinarily find a Chewbacca of a man?
It was all a part of Wyn’s plan.
It was also his plan for me to pierce a professional truck driver, drink his blood, and let his Blood Memories fill me with the knowhow for handling such a monstrous rig.
Before that time, I had not really wanted to drink much blood. I did not have the stomach for it.
Nell’s black blood had done that to me.
Normally – if there is anything normal about a race of Blood Vivicanti developed in a laboratory – the blood that we drink fills
us with out victim’s Blood Memories. And those Blood Memories are the best part about those other people.
I had abused my Blood Vivicanti power when I chose not to drink the blood of someone with great talent or artistry. Instead I drank the blood of an ordinary family. And I almost drained them to the point of death, destroying the thing that I loved about them, their ordinariness. They were not special, not a family that history might remember. Yet what made them special was the fact that they loved one another. And that love made them extraordinary, at least in my mind, since I had never experienced anything like that in my life.
Then I drank Nell’s Blood Memories. And they filled me with the best qualities of her too – which were perhaps the absolute worst torture anyone could go through, a torture of the mind and the spirit.
Nell’s black blood nearly destroyed me, pushing me off the cliff of my ego and letting me hit the rock bottom of a bad behavior. Her blood instilled in me a great desire to be sober.
Wyn practically had to force me to drink the truck driver’s blood.
The taste of the blood wasn’t bad. The association was horrible. Tasting it was like tasting my mistakes.
But once the truck driver’s Blood Memories settled inside me, they made me smile.
They also taught me how to drive a semi-truck quite well. And my photographic memory would never let me forget that talent.
Who knows? Some day my trucker’s CB handle might be Large Marge.
There was one drawback, however. The truck driver’s Blood Memories also gave me a peculiar itch to listen to Dolly Parton's Greatest Hits.
Thankfully a signal from Ms. Crystobal came right as I’d begun to hum 9 to 5.
“Go,” was all she said to me through her telepathic link.
I put the truck in gear and I pressed the gas, pushing the truck to her limits.
What a way to make a living!
Back in the Black Building…
Nell and the other Sleeper Devils held Wyn’s hands behind his back.
He let them. He was curious to see Lowen’s next move.
Lowen led them to another large office.
Unlike the last, this one was not decorated in the Kharetie fashion. Nothing was egg-shaped. In stark contrast, the office might have been a comfortable place were it not for the medieval torture devices lining the walls.
Lowen’s tastes were as eclectic as Wyn’s. The mansion was the bright side of the Black Building.
Nell and the Sleeper Devils stripped off Wyn’s shirt, kept his hands bound behind his back, and they made him kneel before Lowen.
Wyn studied Lowen’s new host body. He knew that Theo was not there anymore. The boy’s love for life was no longer a spark in his eyes.
He regretted making Theo a Blood Vivicanti.
And he could not forget the day that Lowen’s ghost possessed Aemilia. As if it were yesterday, Wyn could still see the damage that the Dark Man had inflicted upon countless innocents. And he hated the sight of him, even if that meant hating Theo now. His mind did not doubt. Theo was indeed lost.
“Dies irae,” he said softly, a requiem for Theo. “Dies illa.”
A strange emotion rose up in Wyn. It was like a pang in the heart that made his eyes pool with a single tear.
The tear ran down his cheek and fell to the floor and splattered where it would be crushed by Sleeper Devil feet.
Wyn was thinking of me. He felt sorry for me too, knowing how much I liked – no, not liked – how much I loved Theo.
“Mary Paige is going to be very sorrowful when she finds out what you’ve done to Theo,” Wyn said to the Dark Man. “Then she’s going to erase you from history.”
Lowen laughed. It was Theo’s voice and it was horrible for Wyn to hear.
“You should be proud of yourself,” Lowen said through Theo’s voice. “You are the father of a whole new race. The new Abraham.”
“If I am the father of the Blood Vivicanti,” Wyn replied, “then Clotho was the mother.”
Lowen blinked in thought, staring with an expression of curiosity at Wyn.
“Clotho was one of your so-called Fates,” he said at last.
“She was the weaver of life,” Wyn added.
Nell, who never left Lowen’s side, now looked up with her sad eyes, and she spoke in a quiet and quite broken voice.
“Clotho was the daughter of necessity.”
Wyn tried to stand, but Sleeper Devils on either side forced him back down. He let them – for now.
“What did you do to Theo?” he asked Lowen. “Is he what you call a Sleeper Devil?”
Lowen bared Theo’s teeth and hissed: “I ate his soul!”
Wyn narrowed his eyes. “Is Theo dead?”
Lowen started to speak, but stopped with second thoughts.
“Come to think of it,” he said a second later with a smirk. “I have no idea. I never stopped to ask the question before.”
“Do you have souls from your planet?” Wyn asked.
“When did you learn about Khariton?”
“I learned all about you,” Wyn said angrily through his clenched teeth, “right after you killed my wife, when I lost my soul making the Blood Vivicanti.”
Lowen’s finger ran lengthwise across his lower lip. His mouth parted slightly in realization. “Why do you want to be more like the Kharetie?”
Wyn shrugged and countered with, “Why do you want to be human?”
Lowen chuckled. “I had never heard of irony until I came to your planet. It does not exist on Khariton. If it ever did, we lost the knack for it eons ago. If it is there now, it is a new invention altogether. You have a saying here: One person’s tryst is another person’s trash.”
Nell raised herself up on tiptoe toward his ear. “Actually,” she whispered, “the saying goes: One person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”
Lowen slowly turned to glare at her. His hand twitched, as if he might strike her at any second.
“I think both work,” he said, turning back to Wyn. “The point is that you trashed what I cherish.”
Wyn scowled at Lowen in disbelief. “You don’t cherish human life.”
Nell looked up at Lowen, a look of hope and hopelessness commingling on her face.
“Maybe not human life,” the Dark Man admitted. “But I do love human skin and bone and hair and stink. Your bodies are so soft and malleable. I can stuff my Sleeper Devils inside you so easily. I can possess you with even less effort.”
A tear pooled in one of Nell’s black eyes.
“Yet,” Lowen went on speaking with a new tone and a new thought, “the human body can also be the greatest prison. Bones bar the spirit. Sinews straightjacket the soul. Perhaps that’s why you escaped the human body when you became a Blood Vivicanti.”
Wyn grinned defiantly. “Yet I am still within this flesh and bone body. You have not eaten my soul.”
“Before all that,” Lowen said in an amicable tone, “I just wanted a chat with you. After I devour you inside out, the most I might get from you is groveling and waffling. I want to learn more about you. After all, you remade your prison cell into a paradise of strength and grace and beauty.”
“You’re one to talk, you who hops from body to body. Are you hoping that one will anchor your restless wandering spirit?”
“Psychoanalysis is also either extinct or nonexistent on Khariton. But I am fascinated with this new experience.”
“So you are a ghost from your planet.”
“Ghost is a good term.”
“What would you call yourself? What would another Kharetie call you?”
“Beyond your comprehension.”
“Try me.”
“Impossible. Humans have only one throat with one set of vocal chords. And your single tongue gets in the way.”
“Come on,” Wyn coaxed. “Give it a go.”
Lowen tilted back his head and he crooned something that was not quite a screech and not quite a yodel.
Wyn blinked.
> “I see,” he said at length.
“In your language,” Lowen said, stepping a little closer, “you might call me a Nonlingual Omnidimensional Respectralized Multisentience.”
Wyn had not heard those words before, but he understood them. He repeated them to himself. He spelled them out. Then he abbreviated them.
“N – O – R – M?”
Lowen shrugged. “In your speak? Sure.”
“So you’re called NORM?”
Lowen twitched.
“Can I call you Norm?”
Lowen now glared at Wyn. “Tell me how you make your Blood Vivicanti.”
“Tell me how you make your Sleeper Devils.”
“You’re in no place to bargain.”
Wyn laughed. “Of course I am. Kill me and you’ll kill the answer to your question. Bargaining is all we have.”
Lowen gestured to all the medieval devices in the office. “I could torture you.”
“To sleep?” Wyn went on. “I’d heal almost instantly from anything you could do to me.”
“I could separate your bones from your body and then eat you whole.”
Wyn shuddered. “That doesn’t sound very tasty.”
Back in my eighteen-wheeler…
I had gotten the truck just over 80mph. Now it was starting to shake pretty badly.
Ms. Crystobal’s voice once again spoke to my mind through her telepathic connection. “How far along are you?”
“I’ve been driving this rig as fast as I can down the straightest street I could find. It got to seventy quickly. But it’s now slowed around eighty and it’s struggling to get to a hundred.”
“If you do not get to one hundred miles per hour, then our plan might fail.”