Dead Souls

by Campbell, Ramsey; Warren, Kaaron; Finch, Paul; McMahon, Gary; Hood, Robert; Stone, Michael; Mark S. Deniz

  When I finally revealed my true nature to him, he surprised me again. He never questioned the truth of my existence, and did not turn away in fear. Instead, he became even more fascinated, wanting to know about past civilizations that had long since died. He even went so far as to ask me if I had ever seen the face of God. His undying faith inspired me. I had never known such a man, who could love his Creator in spite of the tremendous loss he suffered when his hearing was taken from him.

  Many nights we spent debating why God would have inspired him to a life of music only to steal away his ability to hear it. He never had an answer except that God’s will be done. He was furious over his loss, but he never allowed it to take away the music that he loved.

  Days turned to weeks, and weeks into months, when I began to realise that I loved the crazed mortal composer. His music spoke to me in ways that words could not, and his fiery passionate spirit ignited my immortal heart with a new zeal for life.

  After a few years, I could see that my beloved Beethoven’s health was beginning to fail. I could hear it in his fluttering erratic heartbeat, and I began to worry for him each sunrise when I laid to rest. Would my friend still be alive when I awoke?

  Human life is such a fragile gift...I begged him to accept immortality, to drink of my blood and live forever, but of course he would not. He was still devoted to his God. He was convinced, regardless of what I told him to the contrary, that his music was a divine gift from heaven. If he were to become a vampire, he was certain that he would be cursed and lose his music forever. Without it, he saw no reason for living.

  I respected his wishes and was lucky enough to enjoy his company for nearly twenty years. During that time, he composed some of the most brilliant music I have ever heard. His ninth symphony still moves me to tears.

  Over our twenty-year relationship, there were periods of time when I was called away, but even then we kept in touch through letters, wonderful letters, that expressed a love we could never discuss face to face. For what we felt for one another in our hearts, was forbidden by his God. So we buried our true feelings from the world as well as ourselves. I had no choice. I loved him too much to do otherwise.

  He was beginning his tenth symphony when his liver began to fail. He continued to refuse my offer of immortality. It was relentlessly painful for me to stand by and watch him suffer. During our last night together, I cradled my beloved friend, kindred spirit, and love of my soul, holding him close to my heart. And although he could barely whisper, his mind spoke clearly as I read his thoughts. But what he told me was not what I wanted to hear.

  He asked me to leave him.

  I shook my head, refusing to move, but he begged me to go, to remember him as the man he was and not the invalid he had become. Tearfully he asked me to never forget him. I wept with him, and vowed to honour his wishes. I spoke into his mind of my undying love for him, promising to remember the Moonlight Sonata that brought us together twenty years before.

  He drew me close and very tenderly kissed my lips. It was the first and last time that our lips ever met to bond us for a brief moment as we allowed our secret adoration for one another to surface beyond our hearts. I met his eyes as he whispered, “Ever thine, ever mine, ever ours…My Immortal Beloved...”

  And now Melina sits in my home, playing my beloved Beethoven’s feverish melody on the piano. Igniting his memory in my heart and mind. His florid Moonlight Sonata once again filling my ears and burning into my soul. She is driving me to madness.

  For nearly two hundred years there has been speculation about the identity of Beethoven’s secret love, his “Immortal Beloved” from his letters. Never would anyone guess that his love still walked this earth; that the immortal love he described was an ancient vampire. Never would they guess that his Immortal Beloved still missed him.

  Damn that woman! Will she never stop her infernal playing? She no longer calls to me with her voice, but with her music. I cannot stand the pain and temptation his memory kindles inside of me. Perhaps she knows this.

  My beloved Beethoven would have approved of her interpretation of his masterpiece. She plays his Moonlight Sonata with the same combination of blind anger and carnal passion that he had in his soul when he composed the piece nearly two hundred years ago. She knows his fury and his pain. But Melina is teetering on the brink of insanity; I can see it in her eyes. And her playing is no longer coming from notes on a page, but a masterpiece written in her heart. There is a striking difference when music comes from the soul rather than the page, no matter how tortured that soul might be.

  I cannot stand to hide away in my room any longer. I must go listen, and pray that listening is all that I do. Her music is hypnotising me, wrapping me in her spell and I am helpless to resist.

  Standing in the doorway, watching her play, I cannot help but wonder if it is really Melina that I hear? The longer I listen to the piano sing, the more I see my beloved Beethoven, sitting on the floor of his upper room with candles flickering around him.

  This is madness! Surely his spirit cannot live again inside of this tormented mortal woman’s body...But what if I am wrong? What if he lives again inside of her? Perhaps that is the reason behind her insistent playing. Could my Beethoven be calling me through his music to save him and free his soul?

  Her heartbeat is pounding in my ears; I hear it and I wonder if it might be his. The scent of her mortal blood tempts me, calls to me, until I can no longer fight my thirst.

  The piano bench crashes onto the floor, as I pull my beloved back from the piano keys and sink my fangs deep into the fount of blood hidden inside of her throat. I drink deeply, my ancient flesh warming as I quickly take Melina’s life, for sadly this is not my beloved composer. I know this now. And now it is too late.

  The body in my arms does not hold Beethoven’s spirit. This is simply a tortured, angry young woman on the edge of madness, and I am about to give her eternal life. Her eyes are dead as her lips search blindly for the open vein in my wrist.

  It would be best to let her go, to just let her die. But I gave my word to my only friend left in this world that she would be safe in my care. Am I such a monster to kill her after promising to give her sanctuary? I must let her drink, but in my heart I know that even immortality will not save this one from death. Her mind is not strong enough to face an endless eternity of dark evenings, but she will not perish this night. I have learned over the centuries that a friend is more precious than gold. Marcus is my friend, and he loves her.

  Melina is pulling at my veins now. Drinking deeply of the eternal life in my blood with a voracious appetite. My decision has been made. She will be a vampire.

  I watch her open her eyes, the madness is still burning deep within them as she stares at me with a twisted grin. What have I done? But I already know of my horrible mistake. And all that I can offer my dear friend, Marcus, is a silent prayer. Forgive me…Please forgive me.

  ****

  subito piano

  Lisa Kessler

  Pianissimo...Hauntingly soft

  I cannot escape her music. Hidden behind the closed door of my room, I still hear her playing. How could Peter make the same mistake again? He swore he would never make another immortal. Perhaps our kind are doomed to repeat their errors throughout eternity. The blood enables us to live forever, but our hearts are still those of impetuous human beings. Sadly, eternal life and preternatural ability does not grant us wisdom.

  I hear Melina’s fingers floating over the ivory keys, making the piano sing with glorious melodies that used to bring me such joy. Now they stab at my heart mercilessly. Music used to be my passion, my first love. I played the lute, and...I sang. Perhaps it was her music that first attracted me to Melina...Perhaps.

  Now her playing brings me pain. Peter stole her mortality before she could experience the magic that her mortal life could have held. She was barely eighteen! She was angry, rebellious, depressed and underneath it all, so naive.

  For years the piano was her sole
friend. Her family paraded her across the country, through countless cities to perform. She never experienced life, and now she is locked in the clutches of an eternity of numbness. She is a child of the night now, neither dead nor alive in the mortal sense of the word. Trapped somewhere in-between. Peter stole her from the beautiful sunlight that might have healed her tortured soul, and his decision wounds me each time I see her face, her cold inhuman eyes.

  She will never experience an afternoon kiss in the hot summer rain, walking on the beach watching as the sun sets over the water, or making love under the stars. Did he know my precious Melina was still a virgin when he drank from her veins? All of the simple human pleasures, the memories of life that our kind cling to through the centuries, Melina never experienced, and now she never will. Instead of yearning for pleasures of the flesh, now she will crave blood. I am left wondering if she will grow to hate me for entrusting her to Peter's care that fateful night.

  He promised me she would be safe with him.

  Mezzo-Piano...the melody grows with intensity

  I watch her playing the piano, and I see pieces of myself, of an impossible puzzle. When we first met, she had recently lost her parents in a car accident. I found her in a bar brandishing her false identification, and inside of her mind I saw her new guardian’s abuse, her own uncle beating her to make her perform, to play the piano. In that instant, I was taken back to the Rome of centuries ago, when I was still a mortal boy. When I lost my family.

  I was taken, stolen from my home, and sold by my captors to sing for the church, as many boys were in my day. Our angelic voices soon became our curse when the priests castrated boys to keep their voices from changing into the low-pitched voices of men. Our bodies would be forever disfigured in order to keep our songs pure like those of angels. But Peter saved me from that fate.

  Who would save Melina?

  When I reached into her thoughts that first night we met, I felt her fear, and I understood her pain. The darkness that consumed her mind was so similar to my own when I was a mortal man. We talked, and began to meet in the dark corners of the bar nearly every night. The evening that she came in with a black eye, I paid her uncle a visit. After taking his life, I became her saviour just as Peter had been mine centuries before.

  Mezzo-Forte...the passion in the notes builds

  My chest tightens with emotions that I will never allow to surface. How can I stop her feverish playing? Can anyone stop her now? I wanted so much more for her, and yet all she desired was the Dark Gift. She longed to live forever, to be strong like me, just as I had once yearned to be like Peter. But she didn't understand what she was asking...Does she understand now?

  How did all of this come to pass? Peter denied me his blood until he was certain I was ready to face lifetimes of endless night; yet now, centuries later, he shared the dark gift with a young mortal girl in the passing of a single night? A child I asked him to protect and watch over in my absence.

  I will probably never understand his decision. Melina isn't equipped to face eternity. Are any of us really? Was I prepared for the true burden of immortality?

  Peter had been my friend in the outside world, the world beyond the expansive church walls. For months, he secretly took me under his wing, teaching me to read, discussing philosophy and art. He told me stories about other parts of the world and I became an enraptured student.

  All the while, I sang.

  The chorus master groomed me for my future within the church. “You have the voice of an angel, Marcus,” he would say. “Your music must be preserved, not molested by the secular world.”

  But I didn’t know the horror that would lie in store for me. I immersed myself in my studies, learning to read and write music, and under the cover of nightfall, I would secretly crawl out of my window to meet my mysterious tutor outside the church walls.

  Peter and I talked together for hours, and then I would sing songs just for him. Not the sacred Latin songs of the church, but secular songs in my native Italian tongue, songs of love and longing, of young lovers and moonlight. How I loved to sing.

  But I gave up my music when I gave up my mortality to Peter. Each time I hear Melina playing her feverish melodies, I remember the night when the priests bound me while I slept and took me to the secret chamber. I awoke, and fought to break free, my screams muffled by a tight gag in my mouth. I was only thirteen, barely more than a boy myself, trying to fight off four grown men who stripped me naked and tied me down to a table.

  All for the love of God and music.

  Forte...the music reverberates with power

  That was the night I sang my last song...Peter broke through the window just as the priest raised the blade. Hot blood sprayed across my shivering body, and the sounds of the priests’ screams pierced my ears. The knife missed its mark and cut deep into my thigh, sending searing pain through my entire body. Peter scooped me into his arms, and carried me out into the night, saving me from a life without passion.

  I sang for him that night, a pain-filled cry to heaven. Dies Irae for my precious family I would never see again, for the other boys in the church who would not be saved as I was, and for the happiness that I would never know again. Dies Irae for the darkness I would embrace years later when I took Peter’s blood. Dies Irae, Day of Anger...

  My music was silenced forever.

  Her playing is louder now. I can feel the vibrations in the floor beneath my feet. How can a child who is so completely lost in darkness play with such fiery passion? How I wish I could make her stop!

  I remember the night I gave up my mortal life. I sat in Peter’s chamber, weeping like a babe. I had opened my mind to him and welcomed him into my life. I had thought myself to be a man, but I was still a child. I thought I understood what I would be giving up. I wanted eternity with Peter. I wanted to be powerful and live without fear of death. No one would ever harm me again, and I would never be at another man’s mercy.

  It wasn't until I watched my newly-made Melina playing that I understood what I had lost. I gave up music, and love, and family. I never enjoyed the rush of infatuation or the pain of heartbreak. I ran to the arms of immortality to hide from life. I realise now that those precious mortal years can shape an entire millennia. I have been forever searching for someone or something to believe in, to cling to for balance. Always yearning for the family I lost, and the one I never had. Without it, the endless nights on this earth become pure chaos and darkness. When I look at Melina now, that is all I see...Darkness.

  Decrescendo...the melody softens

  Is she looking for something to believe in? What does she see? Will I be forced to care for her for all time? Will she ever stop playing the piano?

  I can't bear to look upon her anymore. She is a reflection of me. A mirror that I do not wish to gaze upon. Now she too will never know independence, or the love of a man or mortal children. I wanted more for her than I had. I wanted to protect her from the Dark Gift, to fill her mortal life with light and love as mine had never been, and maybe through her, my own soul could be saved. But Peter misread my love for the girl...He made her one of us.

  Already she is showing signs of madness, and I cannot help but wonder what eternity has in store for her. She won’t stop playing, not even to feed. Only the sunlight ends the insane lustful passion she calls forth from the cold ivory keys of the baby grand piano. Will I have to sever her hands to stop her frenzied playing? Could I bring myself to take her hands? Is there any other way to save her...and myself?

  Subito Piano...Suddenly silent...

  Melina’s pain-filled silent whisper echoes through my mind, Help me, Marcus...Help me.

  ****

  the migrant

  Michael Stone

  On 18th December, 1918, a young Austrian by the name of Adolf Hitler disembarked from a train in Munich. Snow was falling from darkling skies, curling like ashes in bitter wintry draughts. It coated the stark framework of the steam sheds, glistened like sweat on the engine's black iron f
lanks.

  Adolf stepped onto the platform, his nostrils flaring as he savoured the commingled scents of coal, dung and oil-laden steam. He thumbed the moustache that grew thickly on his cheeks. I thought he appeared calm and appraising, if a little dishevelled after his train journey.

  He sauntered past me, the snow squeaking under his boots. He gave no indication of noticing that the snow at my feet was ugly with bloodstained phlegm.

  I fell into step behind my quarry.

  Presently he stopped outside a gasthaus, squares of sallow light leaking from its windows onto the slushy road. Das Schwarz Wildschwein. The Black Boar: a drinking hole popular with servicemen. Adolf hitched the rucksack higher on his shoulders, straightened his bonnet cap and ran his fingers through the close-cropped hair above his ears.

  He shoved open the door and let the babble of deep male voices wash over him. A badly scarred pine counter ran the length of the opposite wall. Pewter steins hung by their handles from brass hooks. Yellow candlelight flickered on brown bottles. The smell of beer, stale sweat and fresh sawdust commingled with the blue-grey miasma of pipe-smoke. A single oil lamp struggled to penetrate the fug. Adolf Hitler placed a coin on the counter then selected a table near the fireplace.

  I stood on the pavement outside and watched through fern-frosted glass and condensation as he struggled to remove his wet rucksack and greatcoat. A Christmas tree stood in one corner, decorated with spent cartridges and silver paper, the role of the fairy taken by a crude imitation of Wilhelm II, cruelly complete with a withered left arm.