He might have been on the road wandering for a month or longer before one day, beside himself with recriminations that kept sweeping over him like a filthy ocean on a ruined shore, he came to a place in the road where a footpath led into the forest. The gloom called to him, whispering of darkness and surrender. That was where he belonged, he thought. With the wild animals he so much resembled.
He sped down the path, embracing the pinpricks of pain sent through his arms from bramble bushes growing close to where he walked. His wounds healed quickly, he noted with surprise, but the pain lingered with phantom twinges.
Low limbs swatted him in the head and bounded back again to knock with bony hands against his fleeing back. He didn't bother to duck or to move aside, welcoming the pain. As he plunged deeper into the forest gloom, a clarity began to steal over him like none he'd had before, even when human.
He was a killing creature and must face it. The world was full of murderous beings, whether animal, fish, fowl, or human. All of recorded history spoke of the monstrous acts men had perpetuated against men. In South Africa when the dawn of man brought forth a thinking being able to feel some small remorse for his actions, he, too, must have felt something akin to regret about the beasts he murdered.
That he had turned to feast on his own kind was not so remarkable. There might even be some way to avoid it, as he'd done during his days of forced march away from London. He had taken small furtive animals and drained them of their blood, but he had not tossed the lifeless shells. He had buried each and every one, every muskrat and weasel, every wild pig and cat and horny goat.
He had not even been tempted to touch another human, horrified at his past senseless actions that drove him now from the madness of murder to the madness of flight.
He stumbled on and noticed the gloom giving way slowly, by tiny increments, to sunlight. First it dappled the pathway through the forest canopy, and finally it shone with brilliance straight down between the rows of trees bounding each side of the path. He slowed and looked around, noting the brambles were gone and in their place grew heather green and low to the ground, tiny bluebells nodding within taller grass, and wild peace lilies with their striking white heads bending down in prayerful solitude.
Where was he and what sort of place was this? He had lived all his life amid the hovels and streets of London where the multitude clogged the arteries during the day and crawled back to their miserly tenements in the dusk. There they cooked cabbage and ham bones with precious little meat still fastened to them, cuffed their children about the ears, made noisy love, and snored into the new dawn.
He had not seen a lily except in the flower stalls in the better part of London. He had heard of bluebells from country kin, but never spied one. He marveled at nature and the wild profusion of beauty it had created in this lonely wood.
As he walked softly now over velvet sod, he came to a clearing that spread out from the meager path to encompass an almost perfectly round pond fed by an underground spring. Rocks ringed the pond and the forest stood back, drooping limbs over the pool so that the reflections of green were deeper than the pure, sweet aqua green of the water itself.
Mentor, known then by another name, came to a halt. He sat down on a stone and stared into the pool's depths. It burbled slightly in the center, and he knew if he were to dive deep down into the water and open his eyes, he would see the source of the spring—a fissure in the earth, out of which the pond flowed. On the other side of the pond he saw a small creek, barely more than a rivulet really, easing through the forest and going . . . he did not know where. To a river, perhaps, or another pond or lake or stream.
He firmly believed he'd arrived at a sacred place. A place meant to house him until he could return to the world. The place itself was peaceful and beautiful, yes, but it wasn't just that. It was set off from the world, brighter than it should have been, quieter than the tomb. A place to find relief. A place to drop the burdensome rock of guilt and the baggage of past sins.
This was where he stayed until he was sane. He came to understand that there were mysteries in life, untold thousands of mysteries, of which his existence, against all usual understandings of nature, was but one. He believed when in future times of agony, remorse, or need of redemptive balm he would find places on Earth like this, where he could lay down his pain and go on. Not as he had before, but better, with more purpose and a surer footing.
Just as he thought, so it was. Over years and tens of years and hundreds of years. He might not know where the sanctuary lay hidden, but if he set out boldly and with faith, he knew he would find it, and he always did.
That is how the monastery in Thailand, their prison for the unquiet monsters, came to be. He had been searching for something after his wife's death and thirty years of desolation in a cold Swedish fortress. He yearned for a sacred place to give him some reason to go on, and he had come upon the crumbling cells and chapel and underground corridors of the monastery, long abandoned by its earthly order and fully forgotten. The jungle had overtaken it, vines wrapping around towers to bring them tumbling down. Doors were riddled with wormholes and soft sodden spots that gave way at a touch. Stones in the halls and cells had been pried and lifted out of place, taken for who knows what purpose—maybe to build a hut or to top a grave.
But . . . it was sacred. He could feel it like a silken cloak laid upon bare skin. It was a place that enveloped him and stilled his frantic, tortured mind. It had been made sacred three hundred years before Mentor happened upon it and, though abandoned, it held that sacred peace in trust for the next weary traveler who needed to find succor there.
There were other places, too; some hidden away like the spring-fed pond in the English countryside and the jungle-entombed old monastery. Some were open to the public, people tracking through these places daily with little Japanese cameras and notebooks and pens. They fondled the stone or glass, leaving behind their imprints, their oils that could corrode. On occasion they unavoidably passed gas, made lewd remarks or gestures, drank from secret flasks, slipped illicit and spellbinding pills beneath their livid tongues—never dreaming they were in jeopardy of desecration. Sometimes couples stole kisses and made promises they'd never fulfill.
One such public place was the Taj Mahal, the grand monument built by one man to one woman, a magnificent expression of depthless love. In there, in the dark when the place was closed and quiet and tomblike, Mentor could sit and ponder the hardest questions and confirm the best actions to take. Or he could just rest, as he needed—and he needed rest almost as much as he needed blood.
Some public places he'd found to be sacred were surprising, even to him. It was easily understandable if he found a pew in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral to be a place of rest, but who would have imagined that the ward in a children's institution in Athens, Greece, was another? He'd happened on it by chance, as he did all the best havens.
He'd been summoned by the strident plea from a child halfway across the world. It was the millennial year, 2000, and he had been sitting quietly in his own home, reading. He seldom interfered in matters off his own continent, but this cry for help was heard around the world, and other vampire mentors—for there were a few more—were too engaged to take leave from their stations. By telepathic means they all urged Mentor to go to the young vampire screaming for someone, anyone, Help!
The child was a boy, around eight years old, who had been mercilessly taken as he hobbled along an Athens street at night. The boy, Justin, had a clubfoot and some slight mental retardation. His family had left him to die. Unable to keep him when he was much younger and displaying an inability to walk because of his misshapen foot, they took him out into the arid lands bounding the city. It was such a disgrace in Greece to have borne a handicapped child that engagements were broken on the basis of a baby born with disability to anyone in the family. Most of these babies were given away young to institutions, but some, like Justin, were dumped on the mercy of the world to die beneath the harsh elem
ents.
This heartless treatment seemed alien to Mentor. Men had progressed for two thousand years, their sins too many to number, but for a family to throw out a child as if he were garbage in these modern days was unfathomable.
However, Justin proved resilient and lived. He never prospered, but he became cunning at survival. That is until the fateful night he was making his way past the closed doors of vendors' carts in an old marketplace, looking for some safe place to sleep. He was snatched by a rogue vampire, one of the scruffy, half-mad beings who, like Mentor when newly changed, didn't stop to consider the age of a victim. But something went wrong, the murder was interrupted, a policeman having come around a corner and spied the adult vampire latched like a leech to the young child's throat. When Justin fell to the street, his attacker having absconded, his heart still beat, and he was already recovering from the attack. Even as he had survived the pitiless abandonment in the desert as a younger child, his tremendous will to live now drove his heart to fill anew with blood and take up a slow, irregular rhythm.
As he struggled, as his heart beat erratically, the cavity filling with the last of his blood, his will came to the fore and forbade him to give up. Unbeknownst to him, a minute amount of blood left behind was tainted with the vampire's own, and it was already working the magic of transference, the sickness of infection. It was even now sending him straight into the hands of the Predator-Maker in the death dream. Had he died, he'd have been spared, but living out to the end, he teetered into the world of vampire.
There he was at the moment of his greatest despair, lying in the arms of the policeman in the real world, dying, but in the supernatural world he faced the giant Predator who swooped down through a dark wood, a full bloody moon at his back.
Justin's cry echoed and found Mentor's ears. Mentor swiftly took to the skies, traveling so high that below him the Earth turned. He came down again in Greece, in a sultry Athens night, and speaking to the policeman in a mesmerizing tone, took the dying child from the other man's arms. Together they disappeared, or so it would have seemed to the officer, who woke disoriented from a small trance.
Mentor had Justin firmly clutched to his chest, moving rapidly down moon-bathed stone stairs and into a crypt in the shadow of an old pagan temple. He went immediately into the nightmare world where each of them died to the real world and woke into the new. He was with Justin in the dark wood, advising him to run, run away from the Predator-Maker, if his soul allowed it. Did his soul truly wish to rise again into a life of murderous intent? Or did he wish to be nearly his human self again? Or at the very least, did he wish to listen to the Craven Mistress and embrace a life of darkness and sickness?
Justin was but one of the many thousands Mentor had given this same advice, offering counsel about the choices involved, but the fight never failed to give him the fright of his life, each and every time. He and Justin could see the Predator, large as a comet approaching landfall, rushing down on the boy in fiery glory to make him into one of his own. The struggle went on for hours on that other plane, when in real world time only minutes might have passed. Had anyone seen them, the old vampire with the white unruly hair, head bowed as if in prayer, holding a dead child in his arms, they could not have guessed the two were in serious combat with the Predator-Maker and the ancient Mistress of the Craven.
Justin, as Mentor had hoped, disavowed the eternal life of a Predator, forgave the Mistress for hoping to convince him to be born again as a Craven, and turned into Mentor's arms, choosing at the last to be a Natural when he returned to life. He would from then on live as man lived and he would pass as human, doing no harm, spending all his many lifetimes in service to, and for the benefit of, mankind.
When Justin, having chosen his way, woke from the death dream, Mentor laid him gently on the stone floor in the near darkness and said, "I'll leave you, but don't fear. In a while the paralysis will wear off and you'll be able to leave this place and find the Master of the Blood here who will supply you on credit until you can pay."
All this Mentor said without speaking, mind to mind, and saw the boy's now open eyes increase in understanding. He could leave him and not worry for his soul or his future. But there was something Justin wished to tell him, so Mentor paused at the door and listened quietly.
Again, mind to mind, the boy said, "Thank you for saving me."
Mentor nodded and was about to continue on his way when Justin said, "There is a place you need to go to see about little children."
Curious, Mentor turned and retraced his steps. He stood over the boy, looking down on his still face and vibrant eyes. "More children like you who need me?" It was astounding to think there might be a whole slew of little vampire children, newly made, awaiting him in Athens.
No, not vampires, Justin said, projecting his thoughts quickly now. They're like me. They were abandoned because they're different.
Mentor's attention was drawn to the small boy's deformed foot. He couldn't fix it. It had been formed when Justin was a fetus, and now it was a permanent disfigurement.
Yes, like my foot. Some of them have something wrong. But most of them have something wrong in the brain. You know how my brain is not as good as yours . . . you were in it . . . you know it's . . . broken.
That was how Mentor came to cross Athens and find the sacred place no one would ever have thought existed. Going by Justin's directions, he found the building, a square, squat place made of white stone, the windows darkened for the night. Entering an open window, sensing already how full the building was of children, feeling their soft breaths and hearing sounds of muffled weeping, he found them congregated together in a ward of metal cribs with tall sides. Standing stock-still, frozen in place, Mentor gazed around the big open ward and his heart sank within him. Hundreds of children, all of them imprisoned in their cribs, tied with white gauze by ankle or wrist. The ages ranged from one year to a full-grown man of thirty-five, but most of them were under twelve.
They'd all been put here by their families. They'd all been given up as no good. Mentor knew all about them in an instant. Why they had been put here and forgotten. Why their poor mothers gave them up. Why they were crowded this way and kept in cribs, kept bound so they wouldn't crawl out or fall to the hard tiled floor. They were all to some degree or other mentally diminished. Some also had physical handicaps added to their problems, as did Justin, but for the most part it was their minds which were in disarray rather than their bodies. They received no comfort or personal attention, as there were not enough staff people to care for so many abandoned children.
Mentor moved swiftly to a crib and reached in to take the hand of a little girl, four years old, who lay awake, sensing him and beginning to cry, frightened of the intruder. She calmed and the tears dried. She looked up at him, smiling sweetly.
For one terrible moment Mentor imagined himself leaning over the sides of the crib, taking the child's slim neck into his hand and lifting it to his mouth. He could vanquish this life for her, he could steal it from her and release her from bondage.
But no. It was not what she wished and not what he wanted. She'd been given life, as lowly as it appeared to be, and it was hers to live, however small and circumscribed.
It was then Mentor knew this place, as horrible an institution as it was, filled with as many tortured souls as the eye could see, was as sacred a place of peace as any he'd ever discovered in his global travels. There was no hatred here, no remorse, and no ego. Ambition had never existed, lies had never been uttered, and these little ones had never meted out pain to another.
The children knew on some level they were in a small prison that measured no larger than the sides of their metal cribs, but they hadn't the capacity to hate their caretakers or even the parents who abandoned them. They did not know what hate was or how to muster it. They knew no vanity and when despair came, it vanished just as quickly, the shells of their minds rejecting it as easily as a bovine will shake off the flies on its swinging tail. They were as perfe
ct in goodness as any newborn, untouched, unsullied by the vagaries of the world.
The girl, now quieted, let go of Mentor's fingers and tucked her hand beneath her cheek, shutting her eyes and drifting into sleep. Mentor slid down to the floor and sat with his own hands folded together in his lap. He soaked in the love that permeated this large populated room. The love came from the children who projected it, having no other emotion to give. They were lost children, pitiable in their tiny prisons, but they had made this place a haven, a sanctuary. To one another they communicated with their glances, with their sighs and grunts. None of them possessed a language, so they were rather like the vampires, able to project their simple thoughts to one another over the distance, mind to mind.
He heard a child with a deficiency in understanding ninety percent of the stimuli that came into his mind cooing to another child in a crib next to him, cooing that said it was okay, it was all right, he was not alone, never really alone.
He heard another speaking in thought symbols that only roughly translated to human language, yet it seemed to Mentor it was as pure an embodiment of the emotion of love as any thinking creature could distinguish. Everywhere Mentor turned his intelligence, he picked up the myriad mind sounds coming from the children, like susurrations of warm wind through palms, and it was like being led through a fantastic land where lollipops grew on trees and gingerbread cottages sprang up along strawberry lanes.
I am so happy here, Mentor thought, falling into meditation that drew him away from his life and the world he lived it in. These babies are imprisoned and alone with no mother or father or sibling to care for them, he realized, but they whisper about love and dream of heaven.
Often, the institution for children in Greece was where Mentor headed when he needed reminding of how precious life was, the bare breath of it. No matter how mean or distressed an existence a man or child lived, it was still imbued with a beauty untold. If, as the Buddhists believed, a man, a child, a stick, a leaf, a bird was not separate from one another, that all was one while being singular, then that was the complete reason for the children's survival. They were part of the whole. They served some purpose not even Mentor could decipher, but knew instinctively existed. He would not fall into the conceit that they existed solely to comfort him, but they did exist for some reason kept secret from him and he was sure of that.
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