SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Chapter 4

  Dolan sat in the dark on Mentor's sofa near the dead fireplace. Mentor didn't bother to open the door. He merely went through it and transformed in the center of the floor. Dolan glanced up at him, unsurprised. "That didn't take long," he said. "I thought I saw you here a little while ago and then you vanished."

  Mentor sat in an easy chair and reached over to turn on a table lamp. Electric light was something Mentor liked very much. He had lived through the days before its invention and still recalled the thick greasy pungency of kerosene and, before that, of whale oil and stinking animal fat. "It wasn't as much of a crisis as I first thought. But I had to go back and see about something else. I'd just gotten here and was recalled."

  "Ah." Dolan fell into contemplation. Mentor sat in the silence, resting from the day, thinking his own thoughts.

  Finally Dolan said, "Why did you want me to come here? I'm not suicidal this time. You don't have to keep me in your basement, chained to the wall."

  "No, but you have ambition, Dolan, and that won't do around the Cravens."

  "I'm Craven."

  "But you border on being Predator, as I told you before. That places you between worlds, between the clans. You don't quite . . . fit."

  "Oh, great, just what I need. Lost in limbo." A sad chuckle escaped him.

  "That's why I asked you here. I need some help.”

  “You? The Great Mentor, the Master Psychiatrist to the vampire nations?"

  "There's no call for sarcasm. I'm trying to help you."

  Dolan looked down at his hands. He pressed the knuckles of his right hand with his left thumb, massaging the bones. "I'm sorry. I'm just disappointed my plan to bring together the Cravens was shot down so fast. If only we could join our forces, we could elevate them."

  "That's just it," Mentor said. "Cravens don't want your help. They can't see having the same ambition and energy you possess. In that, you're more like me."

  "Like a Predator, you mean."

  "Just so."

  "All right, I'm convinced. What kind of help do you need? I'd rather work for you than sit around that dark house one more day."

  "It wouldn't be working for me," Mentor said. "You'll be working with me. Our numbers are growing. Either I'll have to partition off part of my southwest territory and find someone to watch over it, or I have to have help doing it all myself."

  "Wait a minute, you're saying you want me to do what you do? Are you nuts?"

  "Sort of what I do. I think you'd be good at it."

  Dolan laughed. "I'm a Craven. Who would listen to me? I'll be laughed at."

  "Maybe at first," Mentor admitted. "But once you've been around a while, trust in you will build. They'll know I sent you."

  "Well . . . what about the fact I don't know how to do what you do, Mentor? I can't guide new vampires through their mortal deaths. I can't counsel them once they're vampire. I can't hunt renegades and save suicides and deal with . . . with Ross."

  "I'll always have to handle Ross. You're right, he's quite a handful. But I can train you to do some of the other work. Like tonight, when I was called away, when the alarm came and I was needed. You could learn how to handle minor disturbances such as that."

  "I don't know . . ." Dolan had stopped rubbing at the knuckles of his hand and was now scrubbing at his cheeks in nervous worry.

  "Relax," Mentor said. "You won't be sent out on your own for some time. You'll accompany me for a while, learn on the job, as it were." Mentor stood, crossed to the other man, and touched his shoulder. Dolan instantly lowered his hands from his face and was calm.

  "How'd you do that?" he asked. "I was suddenly at peace, just from your touch."

  Mentor smiled. "I'll teach you all the tricks. Just trust in me."

  Once Dolan was settled into the spare bedroom, the heavy covers over his head to block out any morning light that might leak through the window shades, Mentor left the house again, soaring into Dallas' night sky. He came down again in a poor minority neighborhood, lighting on a concrete bench in a small backyard Japanese garden. Moonlight gleamed from the two large white stones placed in a sea of white, carefully raked gravel. Small conifers and holly bushes ringed the yard and a small stand of bamboo grew in a corner, errant breezes ruffling their long spiky leaves. Behind Mentor, a large old weeping willow drooped its lacy branches over his hunched shoulders. It amazed Mentor that the largest portion of Texas consisted of desert, but from Dallas or San Antonio all the way east to the Louisiana border a great variety of plants grew in the temperate climate and rich earth. Except for Thailand, which he loved very much, he felt the eastern parts of Texas were his favorite places in the world.

  She lived here and had created the beauty he now beheld. Bette Kinyo, the Japanese-American hematologist he had saved from Ross' hands. She was married now, a woman of thirty-two finally wedded to Dr. Alan Star, the man Charles Upton had hired a few years in the past to find him real vampires. Star had been Upton's specialist in Houston, where Upton had the headquarters of his international oil and shipping company.

  Mentor had formed a pact with the couple—with Bette, really—who convinced Alan to go along with their wishes. Bette and Alan would stop investigating the shipments of blood leaving the Strand-Catel blood bank run by Ross. Though they knew there were vampires, they would never speak of them or reveal the secret. It was either that or be at Ross' mercy. And Ross had no mercy. Given half a chance, he would have split both Bette and Alan asunder and drained them dry of their blood.

  During the days when Mentor had dealt with the couple, he'd unintentionally fallen in love with Bette. He'd entered her mind three times to wipe it of memories to keep the vampire nations secret. While immersed in her mind he had found her as good and decent and without malice as any human he'd ever encountered. But it was not just her inner spirit he began to love. He loved her small stature, the delicacy of her hands, and the porcelain skin of her heart-shaped face. He had lost himself in the depths of her fine dark liquid eyes.

  She reminded him in some ways of his small Scottish wife, Beatrice, whom he'd loved so much that he hadn't been tempted by a woman in more than a century and a half. Beatrice, too, had been a superior woman, her heart as pure as a saint's. She had never raised her voice to another living soul. She had never harbored envy or longed to have more earthly possessions than her neighbor. To him, she was the embodiment of love, and from her, he had learned what it was like to put another person first in his life.

  Bette might suspect he loved her, but they didn't speak of it. He tried not to see her, knowing it would be unforgivable if he were to interfere in her human life and the love she had for Alan.

  Still, when he was overly tired from the work he did with other vampires, or when he was particularly burdened with all the memories he carried with him from centuries of living on Earth, he came to the little manicured garden and sat beneath the willow.

  Staring at the gravel sea he was able to imagine white-capped waves breaking against the island rocks that rose from the "waters." All vestiges of his complicated life fled as his soul emptied, giving him respite. His consciousness floated on the white moonlit sea, free of encumbrance.

  He had found other sacred places of peace during his sojourn on Earth, some of them just as necessary to him as Bette's garden. When he had first sickened and changed into vampire, he had gone nearly mad. No . . . he had actually gone mad. There was no point in lying to himself.

  He lived then in a superstitious age that did not admit there were beasts such as vampires, but readily accepted the idea of demons from hell walking the land.

  All the people around him who carried the same mutated genes as he only knew a terrible disease had afflicted them at first, carrying them inexorably toward death. They had no name for this disease then, and most often thought it was demonic possession. As the disease progressed, they weakened, their faces grew stony, they festered with sores, and sunlight gave them pain. Then some of them died, dying as natural
ly as all mortals, their breath ceasing, their pulses going silent. But they came back. Hours after death with rigor mortis already setting in and the body beginning the long process of final decay, some of them returned to themselves with a hard gasp. They flailed at the air as if fighting off avenging angels that would carry them to a bower of rotted meat and maggots watched over by things with hungry teeth.

  They couldn't talk, couldn't walk, sometimes could not even move, just suddenly opening their dead eyes on their assembled loved ones gathered for the wake. The mourners would scream and beat their breasts and make the sign of the cross to ward off this sudden, inexplicable invasion of evil. The dead should not return. The dead should not open their eyes and rise up to walk.

  It was not as if this had not already been going on for thousands of years. The first apelike human to stand on his two legs had lived in South Africa a hundred and fifty thousand years ago. Mentor believed the genes in those people held the precursor of porphyria and the mutation that would manifest into vampire. But the people among whom Mentor was born and raised knew nothing of those vampires who lived in other lands far away, too far for even tales of their debauchery and murder to travel. So when it happened to Mentor, who was a young man in his prime, though shriveled on his frame from the debilitating disease, his family ran from him into the streets of the medieval city of London. They cried out that the devil had come to Earth, walking now in the guise of their beloved dead son and brother.

  Mentor had fled, climbing from a window into an alley filled with bawling cats and scurrying hordes of rats. He elbowed aside two inebriated men who tried to halt him, feeling his strength return, gaining more strength than he'd had before becoming ill. It was as if molten energy coursed through his body, giving him the strength of ten men and ten wild horses.

  He hid himself from mankind, going down into the cellar of an abandoned brick building, closing the broken doors behind him and shutting out the world. That world now abhorred him and thought him the master of hell. He wanted nothing to do with people if they were that ignorant. Didn't they know the misery he was in? Didn't they know he'd had a dream that would make any man appear mad? In that dream he had embraced . . . something cold . . . something older than the world . . . something eternal. Since his family could not embrace him back into the bosom of their love, he would hide away from them until they came to their senses.

  But after a short time down in the dark of the old building, the hunger came. It was like a fire in his gut and in his brain and in the very tips of his fingers. When his hunger pushed him past all endurable limits, he crept back up the lichen-covered, slippery stairs to the city night and went on a hunt. He knew what he needed and he would have it and no thought of the death it might bring could deter him from his mission in the slightest. When a man is hungry, he will eat, he reasoned in his mad way. He will kill an animal, tear up a vegetable from the soil, and he will even turn on his brethren if circumstances leave nothing else upon which to feed.

  And so he did. He loosed his hunger on the populace. For no meat or vegetable now could he imagine going into his mouth or stomach. He turned to men and women, with their rich red blood, and he took them with abandon, some nights just dropping one horribly drained and bloody corpse onto the muddy street before grabbing another victim to fulfill the cold, driving need.

  It was months before this madness abated and Mentor sat in the twilight darkness of the cellar, alone, the bones of victims strewn about him like so many sticks of kindling. He seemed to come to himself, the self he'd been before the illness and the pain and then the strange death dream, which came to make him into a Predator vampire.

  Who am I? he wondered. What has become of me? I am not an animal. I am not a man. I am a new creature under the sun and as God made all creatures, I am one of them. But if that is true, then for what purpose have I been made? Need there be a purpose? There must be, he wailed to the heavens. I must have a purpose!

  He knew instinctively that it was not just to maraud among London's poorest, taking life wherever it presented itself to him. Why, he'd even killed a child, a little boy no older than five who had wandered too near the cellar steps chasing a small carved wooden ball. And he had taken him gleefully, laughing uproariously afterward at the hot sweet taste lingering in his mouth and the feeling of bright steely energy flooding all through his sleek body.

  For now, yes, after feasting so long and so well, he was sleek and beautiful, his gaze bewitching to male and female alike. They did not appear to notice his tattered and bloodstained clothing, or his tangled, uncut hair. They were captured in an instant by his gleaming eyes and his smile, that hauntingly beautiful smile that held out such promise.

  He had murdered too many to remember. Old, young, male, female, crippled, virile. He had done it because it was his nature to do it and until he was completely satiated, he had not been able to think about the consequences to his soul.

  Once he did, he was appalled. He had been studying religion before his death, stealing books and parchments from the rich by invading their homes when they were away or when they slept. Early on, he had found someone to teach him to read, lying in her bed each night in his fifteenth year, resting after his sweaty service, bending close to the letters and struggling with the words.

  His lover was not a good woman and only gave him the lessons because he would do her will for nothing else. She was heavy, a woman whose fat rolled from her belly and her thighs as he climbed on top. She was always perfumed, but beneath the fragrant scent she still reeked of scorched potatoes and of goose dripping yellow fat, these items being among her favorite dishes.

  He had been a man in search of holiness, despite what he'd had to do in order to learn to read and in order to find material in the ancient texts he wanted. At least in his own regard he believed he searched for perfection of the spirit and a rapport with God. His family thought him overly ambitious from the beginning with his crazy hope to rise from the class into which he'd been born.

  "Nothing good will come of it," his mother said, brandishing a wooden spoon about his head and whacking him on the ear when he least expected the spoon to descend. "You need to find work, to find work and feed us before we starve, that is what you need to do! Why don't you have your stumpy woman in her fine costumes give you a handful of coins, for pity's sake? Does she not love you enough?"

  No, she did not love him, but she loved his finely timed and exquisite abilities lavished on her in the private quarters of her great mansion. Though she would tire of him before he tired of learning, he would have no more asked for coin than he might have begged for a morsel from her overladen table. Hunger at that time did not drive him, as it did most of his family. They worked and sweated and went into servitude only to fill their bellies. Love did not drive him, as he had never loved yet and knew nothing of the glory of it. What drove him was his quest for God, as if he were God's bridled prize stallion and all he wanted to do was to find a way to slip from the meanness and degradation of his life into the robes of the Holy Church.

  His mother understood none of that, nor did any of those who lived around him. Love God, yes, believe in His righteous anger, yes, but to think one of their kind could ever hope to attend a place of higher learning or don the robes and bear the chalice, no, never, ever, never.

  So it was when he came to himself and remembered God's holy edict against taking life, and he found himself surrounded with the brutal evidence of his bloodthirst, he cried out piteously and buried his head in his arms. He was lost, dear God in heaven, he was set for the furnace of hell, just where his misguided family believed he'd come from when he returned from the dead. Perhaps he was possessed by demons or his body and mind were substance to clothe the devil himself. How else had he caused such great destruction and suffering without guilt until now, this moment months into the mad bloodletting rampage?

  He could not bear to be alone with himself. He could not stand to hide like an animal in the burrow of his dank cellar stinki
ng of corrupted flesh turned gray and falling from bones. He rushed up the stairs, sprawling a time or two as he went in his haste, yearning for the sky and clean, fresh air not redolent with his misdeeds.

  He came out into the sun, shading his eyes. He saw people shy from him the way they did when he was ill and showing all the outward symptoms of his dread disease. Women spoke to one another behind their hands, clutching their market baskets to their breasts. Children hushed and clustered together for comfort, seeking an adult for protection. Men opened wide, frightened eyes at him and hurried along, almost running to be away.

  He must look a monster. No longer lit from inside with the power that produced a beauteous gaze to entrance his prey, he was now simply a wrecked creature deep in the mire of guilt, fearing for his soul.

  He slunk along the side of the buildings, shading his eyes, hiding his face until he came upon a dirt path leading from the city. He took it gratefully, hurrying now with all the preternatural speed he possessed at this point in his vampiric development. He hurried headlong into some oblivion away from humankind where he would not do them harm; where they would not stare at him and see him for the terrible, blasted revenant he had become.

  He hurried for days uncountable, haunted by despair that he, a man questing after God, had done such despicable things against men, women, and even children. He wept and let the blood drip and dry on his ragged shirt. He slept where he fell, whether it was a ditch or a hummock off the road, and woke in a frenzy to get away, get away fast. He didn't know where he was going. It didn't matter. He hadn't the insight to realize he ran from nothing less than the shred of human conscience which still beat quietly as a tiny bird fluttering within the iron cage of his vampire body.