“I have no sympathy for him if it is true what he just confessed to us,” Raluca said, spitting on his body. She knelt to his corpse to find out the truth for herself and was about to dip a finger in the pool of his spilt blood to taste it.
“Oprire! His blood is poisoned from the silver nitrate!” I exclaimed as I reached down to stop her.
We investigated, and pick pocketed his corpse. He had a folded-up newspaper article in the pocket of his jacket that I pulled out, headlined, “Transport Sloop Vanishes into Thin Air near Mythical Bermuda Triangle, off Florida Coast,”
One closer look at the headline, and then the picture right below, and I grew immediately sick. The waves of nauseating sadness started coming in pulsations all over again, when I recognized the ship as the same one that the Selenian women and children had embarked. They never made it out here.
The article mentioned that “the captain of a U.S. Navy sloop of war, U.S.S. Kearsarge was interviewed by journalists. The captain mentioned that two of his lookout watch standers witnessed a wooden cargo sloop from the poop deck, with the flag of Romania at the bow of the ship, and hoisted white and red sails, that was approaching 100 nautical miles off the coast of Daytona Beach under adverse weather conditions. As they observed the ship with more accuracy from a pair of binoculars, the two lookouts stated that the ship began to appear transparent, and then completely vaporize into nothingness right before their eyes. Other Sailors had also witnessed the phenomenon, and the lookouts had not consumed any alcohol prior to assuming their duties,”
Later throughout history, and around the time of the female Navy pilot, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance, more studies and increasing evanescencies within what was now known as the Bermuda Triangle came to light. In my heart, I knew my Selenians were completely eradicated, save for us three, and Cain in Iceland, and perhaps, my Vanya. This was the epitome of the existence we were condemned to.
We remained in this building all to ourselves for the next few years that followed. A year or so had passed since we had left Romania. Out of loneliness and the need of comfort, the widow Raluca and I, a widower myself, began to seek physical consoling in each other, hoping that this alone would prevent us from completely losing a sense of who we once were. She would cajole me in my moments of deep pondering, where I looked out the window at Selene for hours, and I gave in to her seduction. Nothing mattered anymore, and I poured from an empty cup, except for the brief moments of making love to her, which only mimicked almost mockingly what I once used to have. It was by no means a fault of her own, but nothing would ever bring our loved ones back, nor heal the everlasting pain. She knew it as much as I did.
Bennett sang and played the saxophone at local taverns, and we accompanied him to and from every night, taking absolute care to keep our true nature, and identities hidden from the citizens of New York. Even with all we could do to survive, we did not thrive, and I could sense the emptiness from Raluca, who would openly express the longing for her deceased children every time we saw a mother with a babe in a stroller. It weighed me down mentally, as every time I tried to broach the subject, she would violently lash out at me.
Feeding wasn’t much of a problem here, morgues were becoming increasingly popular with the advancements in medicine, and morbidly, the increase in death. We struck a deal with the owners of a morgue, offering riches we “stealthily acquired” for ten pints from emptied cadavers per week. It wasn’t much, but it prevented me from becoming a murderer. Life was mundane but perhaps either out of numbness of boring immortality, or perhaps life was improving, we grew used to it. Bennett to us served as a beacon of genuine hope, who was beginning to teach me to find joy in the little things, a skill I never knew before, and brought me to face the ugly truth that perhaps I grew up unrealistically privileged. As much as he complained of his hardships, as both a black man, and a human, I envied Bennett, as much as I loved him, for his resilience and his passionate drive to persevere and break the mold of success, in a time where minds were so narrow. Love here kept us sane and welcomed the sensation of us being family to one another.
Tragically, I came to know, that perhaps a life of happiness wasn’t slated for me as I knew it. It had all but faded away in 1894 with the fall of our kingdom, and as much as we did everything in our power to overcome the great losses, it left an everlasting scar that welted on our souls, and never, ever healed, whether the passing of this linear time was short or long. One dawn, in December of 1897, Raluca grew sad upon remembering our Selenian traditions like the Festival of Alucard we celebrated every year near Christmas time, and this reopened the very wounds we had strived so hard to heal. December 22nd of 1897 was supposed to be a good night of cheer, where after Bennett performed “Oh come all Ye faithful” to a jazzy melody, we had champagne and played poker by the fireplace of the five-story building on Wall Street that we had all to ourselves now. Lindon was given a proper burial two years back after he killed himself. This method of death soon had a repetition. Raluca cocooned into a heavy depression when she remembered her family, and both Bennett and I put forth so much effort to reel her out of her state. The pain of a mother losing her children, I understood, was always greater than anything that I as a father could ever fathom. In a way, I was selfish in my desire of wanting her to stay beside me to keep me company in immortality, to fill the increasing void deep within myself. It didn’t work out this way at all, and that same night, after she threatened to kill Bennett and I for getting near her, she ran into the balcony as the sun came up, and stood tall, with her arms spread open, letting the soft morning rays take away her life in burning embers that danced upwards as twirling ribbons to the sky. I didn’t reach her in time, as Bennett held me back, so I wouldn’t risk perishing by sunlight.
Another death yet again, after only two years of none, affected us both and once again, the aftermath of grief forced me to leave New York City and travel back to Romania, for isolation, for Vanya, for slumber, I did not know what I wanted. The last day I would see Bennett was in 1898, the year my daughter would have turned ten years of age. As much as I longed for her, every time I tried to meditate on her whereabouts or even to contact Selene, a heavy veil of blackness blocked me off from concentration, and I always found myself only hovering just right outside of my body, not able to travel out to far. So… great, I could not talk to my Selene now either.
Everyone was abandoning me, so this time, before I risked losing Bennett to all of this, I left him, because I did love him, not in the way a lover would, but in the most pure-hearted form as in, I loved him simply for being a beautiful human being. I was going to miss him dearly, I knew it. I left him my warrior headdress made of silver and black feathers I wore in battle, as something to remember me by, and left him the address of the castle, and a method written on paper on how to astral project to each other in time of need.
Much later, in the coming of the 20th century, in 1901, he sent me a postcard of himself, and a beautiful African woman named Mawu, that I would encounter once again, way further into the 1980’s, and she would reveal that she was a vampire herself, neither Dragul, nor Selenian, but revered Sekhmet strongly, as did all Dragul.
I left back to Romania in mid-1898 and the first person I visited again was Raphael, who was ten years old now, and leaped into my arms, as did his mother Jolene, when they saw me at their door at night. Cyprian came out from a room of study, and he threw his arm around me in a brotherly way. As I promised, I took them to some vineyards, not here, but in Italy, where while they slept, I meditated to try to speak with Selene, to no avail.
With my remaining riches I had, I helped them settle into this region, away from the hauntings of post-mortem, post-Magalesti Meytros, that was ridden with the death of innocents even where day roamers lived. By now, everyone knew what happened, and the existence of dhampirs and vampires was no secret. Cyprian and Jolene bought their own vineyard through the years and went on to become winemakers, while Ra
phael studied to become an attorney, while sneaking drinks of the wine from production often. As years went by, and I travelled the world expansively, in search of Vanya in vain endeavors, I would occasionally stop by to visit the Celentano’s. I learnt tragically, that after Raphael had grown up to become a successful attorney, and lived a rustic, serene life in the vineyard with his new wife, he later died of severe alcoholism in 1931.
His wife revealed to me that Raphael had his own demons, and he spoke of a priest who touched him in bad places when he was only a six-year-old boy, and that he feared spiders so much that he would have a mental breakdown upon sight of one. I understood why but kept mum about his arachnophobia. But what she had said earlier piqued my curiosity and renewed my vitriol against Magalesti. It turned out he had molested Raphael while he was in captivity and convinced some of his clergymen to do so as well. Poor little Raphael was always too embarrassed to confess this to his parents, and consequently from keeping it bottled in, it ate him alive. He drank himself to death and died of alcohol poisoning and acute liver failure.
I remained close to the Celentano family as the decades rolled on by, some of the important ones who still lived in 2018 was a witch named Ophelia. In 2007, after I had rejoined the Bucharest Police Department, I met a dark haired, green eyed man named Vittorio Celentano. He became so much like a father figure and mentor, reminding me so much of my bereft Nicolae, who was the very first beloved person taken from me when I was only fifteen years of age.
Humankind was raw in its beauty as well as never failing to rear its ugly head. The wars with the Christian religion and others became increasingly clashing and more violent as the dawn of weapons of mass destruction, and nuclear technology developed. In a trip back to NYC in 1932, during the Great Depression, I came across a racist paper mill owner who was forcing African American children as young as 6 years of age to very hard labor, and failure to meet expectations meant hours of lashings. It ripped my heart away to see fearful children working behind the counters one day when I naively went by to buy the local newspaper. Upon the sight, I sensed something was severely wrong, when a child with tear stained cheeks handed me a paper. I knelt to the child, a little girl in a pink smock and old wooden clogs and asked her if everything was ok. The mill owner barked at her and scolded at her to not be talking to clients, and only do what she was told. Right off the bat, I immediately felt a severe sense of hatred towards the man, who revered me such a maniacal stare from his bloodshot, blue eyes.
I flashed an electric blue metaphysically loaded stare, and grabbed the man by his arm, and dragged him into a little office alone. Here, I had asked him who the children were, and if they had parents. He didn’t want to tell the truth and I always knew when people lied, partly in thanks to my ability to read auras and notice the sudden color change when someone lied. With my sonogram-like hearing, I picked up an irregular heart beat and breathing pattern from this man. He lied once more, so I reworded the question differently. When he lied again, I resorted to showing him just who I was. I grabbed the man before he could run out, and I sank my teeth into his neck, bleeding him completely dry until nothing, not even a drop remained. He died twitching in agony, and I left him writhing on the ground. Soon after, I shut off all the running equipment in the mill, and I gathered all six children into a Ford parked outside and worked throughout the night to find each child’s family, well until dawn almost came and killed me. All six youngsters were reclaimed by their parents, and I went about the day, back into the building, where Bennett lived with Mawu, and they allowed me to stay for three days. By now, I believed, he had accepted the gift of immortality from his wife.
All in all, I felt a warmth enter the place of emptiness I long carried, seeing the faces of happy children reunited with their families. Had I not come by, who knows what exactly would have occurred to them. The children were in a mystical way, my form of a catharsis that transformed me from a man bearing a weight of hatred and revenge on his shoulders, to seeking justice for those in need whenever I could, and often did. My killings I always assured, were for rescuing people and not so much solely anymore for revenge. Raphael, sweet little boy I would always remember, was the very catalyst to my much-needed catharsis.
Soon enough after this second incident where I began to learn just how much humans could despise one another and treat each other so despicably due to something as asinine as skin color or religion, the issue exploded exponentially. I was alive to hear the news about the Holocaust currently happening in Europe, where six million Jews, gypsies, gays, lesbians, the mentally ill, the disabled, and anyone regarded as “lesser”, were gassed to death or shot by a firing squad. How humans could really do this to one another based on a lie and acting without second thought was beyond my level of reasoning. Of course, I felt the moral obligation to act, and I sent myself off to Germany, Poland, and parts of Eastern Europe to conduct searches and rescues of thousands of Jewish folks that were taken from the ghettos.
The excursions were always perilous, as the SS Nazi soldiers were a dime a dozen, and they often traveled in groups of ten or more during their raids which they conducted in daylight. I would have had to sneak into the barracks at nighttime unnoticed or steal the uniform off a soldier, and then develop a methodical scheme to kill them all off.
In Nuremberg, the report of a major Gestapo base there that caught on fire after a stove was left, caused an explosion that killed all but one soldier who slept in living quarters. Other soldiers outside of the compound were found with their throats slit, and a female nurse with two puncture wounds on her neck, and I planted a pitchfork near the crime scene as evidence. The soldier who survived the attack, I framed for the crime. It didn’t morally disturb me at all, after they rounded hundreds, thousands of innocent people they didn’t consider “pure” and committed their atrocities against humanity. Nobody ever saw me slip past the gate, and render the gate guards unconscious, before I stripped them of weapons and uniform. That is when I carried out my attack in the base. I did know that the soldier I framed ended up going to the electric chair. I had infiltrated the Nazi regime for a while under cover and I was called “The Kommissar” by them. Little had they known that the reason so many of them died on missions was partly due to me setting them up. I rose up the ranks quick enough, and I gained the trust of the highest ranking official, and I became second in charge. As I scanned through their notes and different books they wrote and confessed their crimes in, it was enough for me to end up betraying all of them and carry out another massacre. Consequently, I did end up saving about two or three thousand Jews, including some of my fellow Romanian people, at the expense of an equal number of SS soldiers. Eventually, they discovered me and the true nature of who exactly I was, but I slipped away after my moral obligation was accomplished.
After the end of the Holocaust when Hitler committed suicide, by heaven’s grace, the Nazi’s were eventually brought to trial at Nuremberg, and a warrant was issued out for my arrest, but I had since long then moved back to Romania into a Selenian dwelling that remained standing. I worked with real estate agents, and eventually, I put all the dwellings except for two, on the real estate market where both Lower and Upper Meytros expanded vastly into the outskirts of what I now knew to be Bucharest. It was near the forests before the mountains and attracted many wealthy families who craved to escape the chaos that came with living in a metropolis.
I purchased myself a black Mercedes-Benz in 1943. The Celentano family had moved back to Meytros (nothing more than a district now) after the threat of the Nazi regime in 1933. They remained here up until modern day times into the 21st century.
The memory of Nayeru was buried deep within me, and would resurface yearly around the Christmas time, and it would bring me to inconsolable audible sobbing by her grave, almost driving me to suicide each time. It wasn’t only her death, it was Mother, it was Vanya, Raluca, Tiberiu, Lindon who went mad, Nicolae, my coven. I so badly longed for the da
ys of glory and pure, unadulterated joy that we had a right to, even if we were considered the “damned.”
One night in 1945, after the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I carried out the act by shooting myself in the head, surprisingly failing. The wound healed and closed, lodging the bullet out of my brain. Selene appeared to me after what seemed like a millennium without seeing her, and I desperately threw myself at her feet. She appeared to be less than enthusiastic to see me and especially like this. I felt as if I was already dead even in the moments of life I carried on into the new century, the former version of myself I was in my coven was but a phantom. I was beside myself with such incredulous sadness. When I stood up, Selene slapped me and told me to snap out of it, for I had become so poisoned by the claws of Basilisk sinking into the depths of my being, that I was starting to become what I hated and stood against. She was angry that I found the necessity to kill all those Nazi soldiers.
“Yes, but haven’t you not seen the crimes against humanity they committed?”
“And haven’t you learnt the very hard way once before, that not every battle is your battle to fight? Yes, humans have and will keep committing horrific acts against each other and primarily now, it’s a competition to see whose religion is more peaceful, which is a contradicting paradigm. You need to stay on track with your own kind, Enttu, or you all will die, and if you all die, the rapture might as well befall life on this planet as we know it,”
“Selene, what are you talking about? All my people are dead, what is left for me to do? If I can save the little goodness in humanity, why would I not take the opportunity to do so? I know it’s what Nayeru would have wanted me to do in her memory,”
“Oh, you think that? You don’t think Nayeru is a little too occupied with her own matters of the transcending soul to really worry about what you’re doing? Nayeru was but a vessel you loved, her soul will live on forever! Please wake up from this nightmare you’ve only made worse. I didn’t ever ask you to kill, I asked you to become aware of your purpose here. What have you achieved?”
The Dhampir Dimension Page 25