“Why? What’s in it for you?”
The dark Lord looked away, and when it spoke its words were wistful. “I have seen those I have loved…I have outlived those I have loved.” When Boone did not reply, the vampire hummed the same song it had before, then asked, “Do you have any idea what that is like?”
Again, Boone forced himself not to answer.
“When I have sought to bestow what I conceived as the ultimate gift, my name and my person were cursed.”
“Fuck you, Rainford.” Boone lost his internal battle.
“You see?”
Pomeroy came into the room behind Rainford, lugging its dictaphone. Boone saw the device and sighed. “Fuck. You’re going to tell me one of those long-ass stories now, aren’t you? Fuck! Why me?”
“Because there was more to tell and you are a captive audience. So, where were we then? Ah yes, my love was gone away from me, and I was alone…”
The Dark Lord’s Tale, Part 2
My love was gone away from me, and I was alone. Nights I continued to roam the streets of our city, Petersburg’s stately palaces and ornate bridges more the lonesome for me without Elizaveta at my side. Many were the evenings I longed to visit the home to the west of the city in which she had lived. At first I swore I would refrain from going anywhere near her grandmother’s estate. And such was my resolve, adamantine, that I would never have ventured forth to said destination .
However, longing for my Elizaveta—even if only to stand in the empty room where she had once slept—took hold of me, and I soon came to visit the house. First, to her room, bare save for the faintest of scents on the air.
Shortly thereafter, her grandmother.
I will not attempt to conceal the fact that I imbibed from the old woman’s veins. The blood that had been coursing through her veins for eighty-some years bore the slightest hint of my longed for. The slightest but sweetest resemblance. Feeding from one her age soon left the grandmother wan and her doctors much concerned. I made no attempt to conceal my presence from the woman—in fact, I bore her some measure of ill will regarding the suitors she had pressed upon my departed. Nevertheless, I concealed from her my relationship with her grandchild. What she said to her doctors I could only imagine humorously; no one would think to believe the ramblings of an ancient dowager.
Elizaveta was gone from me ten years. Ten years. A moment in time to one such as I, yes. But my love for her made me feel the acute passage of each of those days in such a way as I had not experienced for some ages.
Not that those years were without event that did not occupy me.
In rapid succession three figures from my past reappeared in my life, casting the die in ways I could not then foresee.
My Master, Vinci, was fond of Petersburg. The Neva’s numerous distributaries and canals reminded him, perhaps, of his own Venice. His return bore quite a shock, as he had aged in his time gone, returning to me on the cusp of his senescence. He looked older, and I became aware first hand of the mortality of our kind. You see, we spend a majority of our existence appearing the age at which we were converted. But our kind are not—as superstition would hold—immortal, and as our ends approach ageing resumes with a ferocity unmatched, draining us of vitality and withering us as it would any mortal.
Even then there was a fluidity of his motion and his hands, his terrible hands so out of place with the rest of him.
Vinci, as I believe I have expressed before, was a compound of characteristics: urbane, genteel and, when necessity dictated, brutal.
When he had first appeared to my siblings and I so many years prior his mien bespoke a sophisticated nobility. In the various capitals and backwaters of the continents we visited together he bore the air of a man about town, confident and at home wherever our temporary home might be. He returned to me in Petersburg as I had never seen him, the quiet assurance he normally exhibited replaced with…fear is too strong a word. Vinci understood that his end drew nigh, that in less than half a century he would no longer be extant.
He returned to Petersburg, but never to stay. Instead, he urged me to leave the metropolis at once. In his company. To the west, Napoleon had installed himself First Consul. In due time the stunted Corsican would be emperor and visit his imperial ambitions upon Russian soil. Rumors of our existence—not perhaps, those of mine and Vinci’s own, but of those like us—had begun to spread. The vampire was hunted in the eighteenth century throughout eastern Europe, most notably in East Prussia and the domain of the Hapsburgs. Even so recognized an august man of god as Dom Augustin Calmet countenanced our existence in his 1746 treatise, Traite sur les apparitions des Esprits, et sur les vampires ou les revenans de Hungary and Moravia, a work not unknown to me at the time.
Above all dangled the fact that my master himself faced impending senectitude. Vinci wished to repair to a quiet resort for the last of his days. No doubt he desired my companionship in his final years, for both my company and my service. But though in appearance I was still a child, the fact was that by that time I had walked this earth nearly a hundred and thirty years. I was no one’s boy, much less servant, and would never agree to be treated so. Further, I could not accompany him to some unknown clime, not when the object of my desire was rooted here. Such my heart would never allow.
Ah, my love, Elizaveta. Four years passed, and she did not return. Vinci came, and stayed, concerning himself with his affairs. The fourth year of her absence gave to the fifth. Then six and seven, and yet another. Finally a full decade.
I had never forgotten her. Many was the night I would perch myself on her grandmother’s mansion, gazing down longingly, imaging her walking the grounds. I went to the old woman, perhaps more often than I should. In her dementia she was convinced I was her late husband, whom—I remembered Elizaveta recounting—she had met as a child. The pathetic woman would hug me to her withered bosom as I fed from her, calling me by her dead husband’s name. For near on a decade I drank from her, my tenuous tie to the one I loved.
Elizaveta returned to Petersburg after ten years. That first night I watched her move back into her grandmother’s house, attended by the old woman’s servants. She came in a fancy coach with a man and three little children in tow, each of whom looked much like her. I presumed the man her husband. She had left me a young woman and reappeared a lady. What was only hinted at in her youth was here before my eyes fully realized: her allure and comeliness, the elegance and style of her dress, the grace of each move.
As she looked towards my position I hid from her view. As I have said, ten years to one such as me is naught, but to her…I watched the way she doted on the children as she ushered them into the house, taking the youngest up into her arms. And I feared she had stopped loving me. Perhaps it will amuse you to hear, but I returned to my own abode then, long before the encroachment of day, and I worked up my nerve to approach her. Her! The one I considered each day in her absence converting, allowing her to join me as a child of the night. The one to whom I had sworn my undying love. And she to me.
I went to her on the second night, finding her alone in her gardens, staring into the sky. Any fears I harbored were immediately assuaged as she came into my arms. Her ardor for my being had never diminished. Time had cemented her love for me, even as—pressured by society and her parents—she had taken a husband and bore his children.
We resumed our relationship as if the past years had not interrupted. Nights she would steal from the house, joining me in the park, on the Neva. I chose not to take her to my home quite yet, as Vinci’s presence would require some explanation. We lay together those nights, under the stars, and knew each other as man and woman, though to any who saw us hand in hand in the city dark I appeared her child and she my mother.
By the fourth months her stomach had begun to show with our child. Our child! Imagine my joy. Even then I had little knowledge of my species and knew not that my kind and hers could produce offspring. Vinci had protected me and taken me into his tutelage, as I have explained, yet there were gap
s in my education.
We began to make plans for our future at once. Elizaveta would join me in the long night, a vampire. She would become the first human being I turned. Though I appeared but a child, I was a fully mature member of my species. Of course there was the question of Elizaveta’s husband and their children, a minor obstacle for two enamored of each other such as we. And of course I grasped the solution to this conundrum, yet I thought it best not to force the answer upon her as yet. Let her come to it in due time. Better, in fact, that she recommend it to me.
I asked her of her children and she told me of them, their names and personality traits. Her face gleamed and her voice lilted as she did so. However, as she continued to speak, her tone grew more controlled, her expression less animated, until finally she spoke of them as if they were strangers. She must have recognized then they were all—nominal husband and children—a distraction of the decade separating us. The conversation of what should be done with her children and husband came up once, abruptly faltering. Neither of us spoke to it, for we both knew what needed to be done.
I was at the height of my appetites then, but I could never feed off Elizaveta as I so longed. Doing so would kill her. I continued to find victims along the quay, in the back alleys, and outside taverns. I even stole into Elizaveta’s quarters and continued to feed off the grandmother. The husband—whom up to this point I had dismissed as of little or no concern—grew much disturbed with his in-law’s physical state as she quickly deteriorated. Elizaveta remarked of this one night in my arms, and I thought nothing of it, content to draw my finger across her protruding stomach, tracing the life that grew there. Imagine my surprise the following evening when I returned to the estate to find the grandmother’s room strewn with garlic and crucifixes, the windows barred to me.
Against my better judgment, I confided in Vinci. Even then, I did so diffidently, not convinced of the judiciousness of my action. Vinci’s nature was not to cosset—though he did wish my accompaniment in his impending departure for just that purpose. He heard me out, his expression stoic, seemingly disinterested.
So it has come to pass, he remarked when I had bared my soul or as much of it to him as I would allow. Rainford in love.
He said it as if bored.
His gaze betrayed nothing, not even the slightest interest. It was only later that I came to recognize his seeming impassivity in regards to the matter as imperiousness. He listened, yet offered no advice, remarking only that loss is the greatest teacher, in that it determines value. His words were meaningless to me at the time. I thought then he spoke of his own dwindling years, of past loves denied and taken from him. Of my love, as later events would bear out, Vinci did not approve. Such was the nature of my education.
Elizaveta reported that her husband had taken to acting suspiciously about her, that she knew he was keeping things from her. I pressed her for examples, for details. He had begun a correspondence with foreign parties, she explained, secreting the missives from her. Aside from this quirk, he doted on her as he had in the past, and spoke hopefully of the child in her womb—the fool convinced it was his own. I assured Elizaveta she had nothing of which to worry, that our time together was fast approaching. The protections adorning the grandmother’s bed chamber spoke to his suspicions, and any queer behavior she detected on the part of her husband towards her stemmed from this. So I believed, and so I persuaded her. We spoke of the life developing in her stomach, of the family we would make together.
Into these propitious circumstances a third figure from my past let himself be known. My brother, Viktor, thought to me long lost. I had not seen him since we were boys, since the final flight from our village. And I was still very much a boy to all outward appearances when he approached me on the quay, where I had just taken nourishment from a workingman.
This Viktor who stepped out of the shadows in this fifth decade of the nineteenth century was a man, not the boy I had last seen, but I knew at once who he was. Imagine my surprise and—yes, I will admit it—joy when first I saw him. And then imagine my further shock and delight when I recognized almost right away that he was just as I, in ways I could never have imagined or hoped for. Spying the crumpled form above which I crouched, his lips drew back instinctively to reveal tapered fangs. My brother—a child of the night, a vampire! How I marveled at his conversion, all these years imaging him forever gone.
He made no move to join me at my feast.
Our reunion was short-lived. Viktor greeted me by my name, one I hardly recognized. In truth, I would not have, were it not Viktor extending the salutation. His tone somber, he declared outright his opprobrium at my use of Leonid’s name. He knew I used our heroic brother’s name…
I had heard of a boy who did not age.
Yes, he had heard of me, and come to see firsthand if there was any truth to the rumors, if it were truly I. Seeing him there, near the water, brought back a flurry of memories thought lost. Our frolics in the river near our own boyhood. Our village and the characters that inhabited it—from the gypsy Maleva with her dog to that treacherous Jew Feigel and his porcine offspring. I thought to ask him of our sister, Sasha, but held my tongue. Apparently Viktor shared none of my nostalgia.
There are others who come after me. Others, he warned, who have also heard. He had come, he told me, to warn me of these others. Those who, even now, searched me out, riding on Petersburg. Viktor told me he himself planned to depart at once, having now accomplished his task. Rubbish, I told him, he must join me at my home, as my honored guest, to sit once again with Vinci as we had that night so many years before. My brother declined my invitation, the weightiest gravitas to his manner, his mien straightforward, even severe.
I offered him the body at my feet and he glanced upon it with despisement, fobbing me off with the excuse that he had previously fed. A brother once—but no, now so much more—he was as a stranger to me. Again he urged me to leave, and then he himself was gone, turning his back to me without adieu and walking away without a sound. Only I remained, with the stiffening corpse of my workingman, with a thousand queries.
The following night, Elizaveta and I moved to cement our lives together. She willingly brought her children to me on the banks of the Neva. They resembled her, but only as counterfeits to the actual treasure. The real beauty was mine alone.
I took the oldest one first, while Elizaveta restrained the remaining two. She held them fast, spectators to a fate visited upon them next. True love knows no sin. Such was her love for me that she encouraged me to drain them. No doubt my manner exacted terror from the children: I grunted and snarled as I fed—the blood spraying from their bodies in my frenzy—carried away with the knowledge that this was one last obstacle to our future.
They were strangers to their mother as I bled them out, one by one, Elizaveta ignoring their desperate pleas. And oh, their blood was sweet, so sweet, tasting more like their mother’s than the grandmother’s had. When it was over, she came into my arms. Whatever love she bore them paled in comparison to the rapture we found in each other’s arms. Now eight months pregnant, I allowed her to mount me amid their lifeless forms, the two of us smeared with their fluids. Afterwards we disposed of the bodies in the Neva.
Anon, I returned her to her grandmother’s house, her husband fast asleep. Thus it was that our plans would have born fruition, our two lives lived as one. Our bliss assured, we would have been complete. If not for one.
“And?” Boone asked after some moments had passed.
“And what?”
“Come on. What happened next?”
“So now you listen. Yet it is I who weary of the tale.”
“Look, man. You can’t do that.”
“Do what exactly?”
“Leave your audience hanging like that. Kind of bullshit story-telling is that?”
“Some stories, you shall learn, Boone, are still being written. The d’enouement to my own sad tale shall be related at some other juncture in time.”
Boone
looked at the old vampire, wanting to tell him again that was some bullshit there, but not wanting to give him the satisfaction.
Son of a bitch.
Monday
19 October 1998
20.
3:19 P.M.
“Here, hold this here,” Bianchi said to Jimmy Scal, the compression bandage on his knee, his inflated elbow pressed to the gauze pads he had resting in it. “You hold it here while I tighten it.”
“Che cazzo stai dicendo?” The Scal in his gold-framed sunglasses asking him what the hell he wanted.
They were sitting around a table playing cards, Dickie and Carlucci and the boys, when Werner walked up to them, stood there with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting until Carlucci looked at him and said, “What d’ya want?”
“There’s somebody wants to talk to you.” The screw addressed Dickie directly, his words making Dickie think back to what Renfeld said to him on line the other day. The Master wants to see you.
Carlucci about to answer for him, Dickie shaking his head, “Cheeks,” he had it. “Tell him he wants to talk,” saying it pleasantly to the guard, “tell him come by and say hello. Like you’re doin’.”
“It’s not going to work that way.”
“’S matta’ wit’ you?” Carlucci’s face reddening. “You heard him?”
“Cheeks.” Dickie held up his palm, trying to placate the muscle, still speaking to Werner. “We got something we need to talk about, we’ll find time to talk about it right? That’s all we got in here, time, right?”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” Werner ignored the other men at the table, the hard looks they were giving him, the screw unarmed in here like all the other guards, “you don’t want him to come to you.”
“Whoa!” Bianchi rose, outraged, Dickie holding up a palm, stopping his men. Dickie saying to Werner, “I heard you.”
I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Page 12