Time—and you must always remember this, Boone—time means something different to the vampire, as it means something different to a child as to an adult. Not long after my metamorphosis I was independent, fully capable of surviving on my own. I was an apt pupil and my Master had taught me well.
We stayed together as long as we did for each other’s company and comfort. Vinci left in the 1830s, without a hint as to his destination, returning just as unexpectedly in 1859.
Much had changed in the intervening years.
Industrialization had begun in England a century prior, spreading like wild fire across Europe. It was an age of invention and deprivation, an age of labor and capital. Marx himself recognized the bourgeoisie’s crucial revolutionary role, casting off the feudal fetters that had bound man to land and lord. If capital and its servants had succeeded in “drowning out the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor,” they did so by substituting a new god: the market.
The seeds were planted and taking hold, a new faith based on “egotistical calculation” and economic liberalism. A faith at once at ease with a heretofore never imagined affluence; wealth alongside and owing to an exploitation “naked, shameless, direct and brutal”—Marx’s words. The great rifts in society were exacerbated, the haves and the have-nots staring out at each other across a widening chasm. The one ever scrambling to cement and retain its foothold in the upper stratums, the other gazing longingly towards the heights, despising those of their own station. Aside from a few perspicacious souls, neither side questioned the dichotomy, accepting it as given.
These changes and more were at work in the world. On a more mundane level, changes were afoot in my life.
I had met a girl.
First, a word regarding appearance. Continental fashion in the early nineteenth century encompassed hair wax and mutton chops; pantaloons and trousers with straps beneath the shoes; linen shirts and tall standing collars. Hessian boots I remember well. This was the dress of a gentleman. Gentlemen, of which there were more and more in Petersburg each day. This was the age of the clothes-obsessed dandy, he that would come to be lampooned in the novels and ephemera of the day.
The contrast was stark: there were peasants where I lived who wore little more than potato sacks cinched about their waists.
But enough of the habiliments of an age.
I had seen nine years when my Master turned me, and it was as a nine-year-old that I appeared for the majority of my existence. Thus it was in the 1850s I appeared as I had in the 1830s and would in the 1870s: a child, tow-headed and thin. Somewhat pallid perhaps, I was in fact quite hearty and hale.
And my dress, though fairer than the majority of the Russian peasantry, was in no way ostentatious. If anything, my raiment was a nod to the later years of the previous century, indicative of my admiration for the French: snug leather breeches with buttons at the knee, a cropped riding coat over a white waistcoat. I wore my hair cropped as well, cropped and unpowdered, in the style of the 5th Duke of Bedford.
We had come to Petersburg half a century prior. My master was a man of means and as such we never wanted for material goods. Wherever we lived we lived as gentry so long as doing such did not draw unwanted attention. In the early nineteenth century, my master had invested in a property in the eastern part of the city, a comfortable manse not far from where the Anichkov Bridge crosses the Fontanka.
And it was to this residence that we always returned.
Given our nocturnal peregrinations and solitary manner, we had little intercourse with any neighbors. A caretaker was employed to watch over the property when we were absent. He and his sons—for his sons succeeded him in this task—were paid to be elsewhere when we were present. All arrangements were conducted prior to our arrival via the post.
In the instances where parlay with neighbors or others was unavoidable, I was presented as nephew to my master. A generation later we continued the ruse, my master assuming the role of my earlier self now grown. And again, I was a nephew, son, or ward.
Long before I had abandoned my own name.
In the streets of Petersburg and other Russian cities I went by Leonid Mikhailovna Duorzhetzkii. Duorzhetzkii, a surname of my creation, unrelated to my past life. Mikhailovna, our patronymic—Mikhail, the name of the human man who had sired me. And, finally, Leonid: the name of my stout-hearted eldest brother. Though it had been the better part of a century and a half that he had perished at our father’s side, I had never forgotten my brother or his last act of courage—
“Bore—ing,” Boone stated.
“Pardon?”
“Boring—boring—boring!”
Rainford had stopped pacing the room and stood in place, narrowing his eyes.
Wells retrieved the whip from the floor.
Boone assumed his worst Bela Lugosi Dracula accent: “Yoooou dooo not vant to-fuck, vit-me!”
“Do you have something you wish to convey?”
“Do you?”
“Your point?”
“No—yours. Is this story going someplace? Well then, shit, get to it. Goddamn…”
“Can I hit him?” Wells hefted the scourge. “Just once?”
Rainford ignored Wells, holding his gaze on Boone until the man on the rack had quieted down. The Dark Lord resumed his tale. “But where was I?”
“A girl.”
“Ah yes, a girl…”
I fed in the dark hours, but my appetite was never such that I needed to feed every night. Indeed, many evenings I wandered Petersburg, content to take in the city and its sights, admiring its canals and bridges, its museums and palaces. The Anichkov most—the bridge nearest my home—was decorated with bronze sculptures of men taming wild horses. The Trinity Bridge connecting Petrogradskaya to the rest of the city had not yet been built. One evening I had wandered quite far afield westward, to the Lion Bridge, so-called owing to its two pair of cast iron lions, the bridge’s cables anchored in their mouths.
I crossed the bridge over the Griboedov canal and there she was, a girl, alone in the night. I appeared to her a boy similar to her own age. Her brow furrowed; she seemed pensive, beset by some inner turmoil, her worriment unrelated to my materialization. A little girl and a little boy on the Lion Bridge in the dark: was it inevitable that we spoke? Speak we did.
Her name was Elizaveta. She lived with her grandmother not far from Yusupov Palace. She was then but ten years of age.
Even then—ten, I remind you—her beauty was a thing to behold. Her hair, straight, and black as the raven. Her eyes like green crystals. Their glance inquisitive and searching. Her’s a pulchritude beyond measure. A beauty of which the greats would compose sonnets.
We spoke. My apparent age, coupled with my manner and dress, putting her at ease. We walked through the theater square and spoke of the Kirov Opera and Ballet Company then housed at the Mariinskiy Theatre. In those days the streets of Theater Square were home to beggars and thieves, actors and artists, ballerinas and musicians. We travelled unmolested, and I enquired as to her initial forlorn appearance.
She came to answer my query, albeit in an indirect manner. She spoke of life with her grandmother in the Sennaya Ploshchad. Her parents—back in Moscow—having sent her to Piter for an education. She told me her grandparents had met when they were children, both noble by birth, distant relations of the Romanovs. Married in the Orthodox Church, for near-on fifty years her grandparents enjoyed each other’s company as husband and wife until some miasm took the grandfather away.
Now her grandmother whiled out her days on the estate, waiting for the time when she would be reunited with her love. Yet this woman, the grandmother, was no recluse, she continued to have an active social life, continued to live and plan—for herself and others. You see, she was no Havisham of Dickens, a woman whiling out her days bitter and scorned in Satis House. And Elizaveta was never her Estella. The old woman had experienced joy in her own life, and sought to foster it in the lives of others, to whatever degree she could.
Hence, the child’s despair.
That first night I listened. I listened to what she had to say of her life in Petersburg, of her parents in Moscow, of her grandparents’ betrothal and her own foredained. The questions I asked encouraged her to speak at length on our perambulation through the Ploshchad. By the end of our time together that first night she was calling me by the diminutive, Lyonya, calling me it affectionately. Well into the night I walked her home and bid her farewell, content that I was leaving her in higher spirits than when we had first met.
At the gate to her grandmother’s chateau she thanked me and leaned forward, kissing my check. She said she hoped to meet me again one night at the Lion’s Bridge and turned onto he grandmother’s property.
She kissed my cheek.
I knew then I would never forget that kiss.
And I have not.
From that night forward I was smitten. It was not a physical hunger; I had already eaten that evening. Instead, she had awakened in me an appetite I had never known. Although I appeared a child like her, I was already an old soul. I had never thought to feel for one the way I found myself feeling for her. And less you chalk my emotions up to some prurient desire, understand it was more than mere sexual longing.
I was left feeling as though I was on the cusp of something—something unknown and frightening, yes, but equally momentous and roseate. To Fritz’s demons’ inquiry, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ I answer wholeheartedly yes—Yes!—oh yes a thousand times over. To this demon I proclaim truly ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ To that demon I say you, sir, are divine!
So enamored was I immediately following our dalliance that before I returned to my own home I stopped and fed once more at the English Quay. A celebration of sorts.
The next night I waited at the Lion’s Bridge, hoping she would come. And she came. Again we walked and spoke. She asked me more questions of myself, and I did not lie so much as choose my answers carefully. She confided the enormous trouble she would be in if it was discovered she was stealing out of the house into the night, and I voiced a similar sentiment. Our delinquency served to bind us further.
If my grandmother discovers this deception, Lyonya, Elizaveta professed, grasping my hand in her own as a confidant, she will have us both impounded on Hare Island. She referred to the fortress of Peter and Paul. Then we shall consort with the Decembrists, I replied, evoking her laughter. Again I bid her farewell outside her grandmother’s, late into the night.
She came the following evening, and that after that. Together we became well acquainted with Petersburg at night. The Nevskiy Prospekt was one of our favored strolls. We passed the Stroganov Palace, one of the oldest buildings on the prospect, pink and white in the moonlight. The Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan, its Corinthian columns forming an arch, its design drawn from St. Peter’s in Rome. Bartolomeo Rastrrelli’s hand was evident all along the prospect and throughout the city. Rastrelli, the Tsarina’s favorite; Rastrelli, an Italian like my master.
My master, Vinci. No word from him in many years. And he was far from my thoughts. When I was with her, I was enraptured. When we were apart—in the daylight hours—she was prominent in my mind. We walked together at night, enjoying each other’s company. Side by side at first, soon enough hand in hand.
What a sight we must have made, two minors out and about in Petersburg after dark. We did our best to avoid contact or conversation with others, and in this endeavor we were mostly successful. My presence alone was enough to throw the curious off. If they looked too hard my return gaze would leave them blinking, questioning their percipience. Of this, my faculty, Elizaveta had no clue.
This would be the spring of 1847. Our meanderings were not confined to the western part of the city. We wandered Petersburg far and wide, dewey eyed youth excited by the vastness of the metropolis and each other’s company. Together we stood in the Palace Square, admiring the bas-reliefs of the Alexander column, gazing skywards upon the red granite monolith, near fifty meters in height. We passed the Hermitage and Saint Isaac’s Cathedral, near completion after almost forty years.
On star-lit nights we looked upon the gilded, angel-topped cupola of the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Petropavlovskaya Krepost, where Russian tsars made their final rest. This would have been twenty years before the anarchist Kropotkin escaped its walls. Elizaveta spoke enthusiastically of the canon firing there each noon from the Naryshkin Bastion. I had to admit to never having witnessed such, steering the conversation elsewhere. So long as the canon were discharged in the day, I would never witness such with my own eyes.
We stood on the sandy beaches beneath the fortress walls, and there it was we kissed. I will not bore you with the physical details. Some matters are intensely personal, and revealing them cannot but sully their enchantment.
She spoke of the coming summer and the White Nights, of the fun we would have when the sun refused to set. On these occasions I would merely nod, knowing I could not be with her whence come the season.
Stately palaces and ornate bridges dotted the city’s southern waterfront. Workers congregated along the quays in the day, ships putting in at the docks from far off climes. At night, some of these same workers were often still about, besotted, their wages exhausted on grog. And thus it came to pass one evening that my hand was forced and something of my nature revealed to Elizaveta.
They were drunk and three in number. Neither my presence nor my gaze proved sufficient to deter them from their devilry. They appeared from an alley, hounding us with brute comments. Oh, that their insults had been leveled upon my person alone; I would have been content to ignore them, and we would have continued along our way.
However, they chose to insult my adored.
Grown men speaking such vile filth to a girl but ten years old, as if she were some tawdry dock whore.
I could not control myself.
There are many ways that a man can die; I will not bore you with the details. Let us just say that, emboldened by drink, by the specious superiority of their numerical advantage, by the disparity in our ages, their words gave to deeds and their attempted deeds brought down on them swift and terrible repercussions. It was not the first time I had rent limbs from torsos or torn throats out with my bare hands.
Nor would it be the last.
As they lay dying in the street, broken and bloodied, I so wanted to drink from them.
Yet, it would not do for Elizaveta to witness such.
I turned to her, fearing she had already seen too much, fearing her delicate temperment would be traumatized by what she had seen. Imagine then—my pleasant surprise! Like our first kiss, I will always remember the manner in which Elizaveta stood there, watching me at that moment. The look in her emerald green eyes. Neither fear nor shock; instead: wonderment.
She was impressed and buoyed, and she asked me how I had been able to accomplish what had just been done. I asked her if she was not afraid of what she had seen, if my actions had not prejudiced her against me. She assured me she was not, that in fact she found my actions invigorating. It was apparent from the way she spoke and looked upon me that she was in awe of my person. I felt immensely powerful at that moment. I had revealed to her a part of what I was and she had not flinched, had not run.
She took my hand in her own, my hand stained with the blood of those hooligans, our palms pressed slickly to each others’.
That night I took her to my own home. It was empty in my Master’s absence. We explored its winding halls and commodious chambers as would adventurers. Decades I had spent in that house through the years, yet that night I saw it—through her eyes—as though for the first time. We searched every room and corridor, from the cellars to the attic, opening each door save those barred to us.
Who’s chambers are these, Lyonya? Elizaveta enquired outside my master’s chambers.
My uncle’s, I
told her. We should not enter there.
I showed her my own rooms, their windows open to the night. She had no way of knowing how tightly these were shuttered against the day. The night air cool, the rooms were cold and I stoked a fire in the hearth. She sat with me before the flames and we held one another fast until we had warmed. And there, before the comforting flame, we undressed each other, exploring more than my house that evening—
“Wait a minute,” Boone interrupted Rainford’s story again. “Let me get this straight. You were, like, what? A hundred and seventy five years old at that time?”
“Yes, that would be correct.” Rainford sounded somewhat cheerful. Boone had been listening after all. Wells stood with a severe expression on his face, the whip in his hand.
“And she was—you said ten? Ten, right?”
“She was an old soul, even then. Mature in both spirit and intellect—”
Boone rolled his eyes in his head at the way the dark Lord said mature, pronouncing it mah-teur.
“—her age was a matter of little consequence.”
“She was ten years old, dude. What part of this am I supposed to find romantic?” Boone turned his head towards Pomeroy taking notes. “You find any of this romantic? Cause I sure don’t.”
Rainford was staring at Boone again. Boone looked right back at him. “What?”
“Let me give it one turn,” Wells had his hand on the lever that controlled the rack. Rainford waved him off, relaxing his expression, actually smiling at Boone before continuing.
Many was the night we would stand at the river as one, content in each other’s company. At Vasilevskiy Island, the Neva is divided in two branches. The Malaya Neva flows north-west; the Bolshaya Neva south-west. One evening that May, the last of the snow flurries behind us, the promise of spring before us, Elizaveta spoke to me of her grandmother, of the woman’s plans for her future.
As I said, the woman had found a suitor.
Elizaveta’s intended was a prig, the scion of a wealthy family. He was ill mannered and of questionable moral character, his behaviors excused due to his social standing and youth. He was older than my Elizaveta by six years, sexually mature and looking for willing partners upon which to avail himself.
I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Page 4