by Jack Conner
At Tommy's direction, Danielle turned the mini-bus onto a poorly-maintained private road, pausing while Tommy pushed open the gate, then wound her way up to what was left of the airfield. There was the twisted maze of runways stretching off to the left, where the ruins of many buildings lay wasted, and off to the right, incongruously large and tall among all the bleak flatness, rose the stone hangar and the three-story mission on top of it. Or, more properly, part of it. It was one great big stone nightmare, complete with ominous tower.
The bell tower soared like a battlement in the center of the mission's roof, which was unusual; in most cases, the bell tower was located in a corner of the mission, whereas this one seemed to run through the center of the building itself. Ruegger could see that the roof of the bell tower had been torn off and the bell itself was missing. Most strange of all, stairs made of scaffolding material led up to the top of the tower from the roof of the mission and, where the roof of the bell tower used to be, a type of fragile wooden platform, almost like a diving board, stuck out, as if someone were about to jump into the well itself. Very curious.
"What's all that?" Danielle asked Tommy, seeing it too.
"Not s'pose to say, lassy. Sorry an' all, but me mouth is closed."
Climbing out, Ruegger noticed that all the windows of the hangar had been boarded up and the hangar door (the only thing not made of stone on the exterior of the building) was sealed.
"I need to go in the hangar," Ruegger said. "I need to see Hauswell's body."
"'fraid not, mate. No outsiders're allowed inside. Been closed up like that for nigh on twenty years. Hauswell'd taken to using the old hangar 'fore he got whacked."
"Then I want to see Laslo."
"Sorry there, again, pal o' mine, but yer uninvited guests an' the Lord'll come to see ya when 'e chooses. Nothin' I c'n do about it."
Ruegger felt himself grow cold. There was something very strange about this place, something haunted. He hoped they could just find Hauswell's corpse and get the hell out of here. Something bad was going to happen in this place.
"So what now?" Danielle said. "We sleep in the bus till Laslo decides to say hi?"
"Nonsense," said Tommy. "I'll show ya both to a room in the mission ... Yer married, ain't ye?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Don't see no weddin' rings on yer fingers. Best not have relations while ya stay here or Laslo won't like it, an' you wanna get on the Lord's good side, trust me. I've seen folks who've learnt the hard way an' it ain't purtty, on that ya c'n be most certain." He hitched a thumb toward the mini-bus. "Best get yer bags. I ain't no bell-boy. You might be stayin' awhile."
Ruegger and Danielle glanced uneasily at each other and retrieved their two suitcases. He could see that Danielle was getting spooked and didn’t blame her.
"Where are the other bloodfinders?" he asked.
"Oh, don't worry, mate ... they're around. Follow me, if you'd be so kind."
Tommy ushered the vampires to the far side of the monolith, to a stone staircase that snaked up into the mission's vestibule on the first floor above the hangar. Once inside, Ruegger found it to be a narrow, angular room devoid of warmth.
"Wanna visit the chapel?" Tommy asked. "Have a chance to wash yerselves of yer sins? Laslo doesn't like the sin and that's a fact. Best to burn it off now 'fore 'e does, and this is m'good nature speakin' to ya."
"No, thanks," said Ruegger. "Just show us our room."
"You ain't atheists, is ya? The Lord doesn't like the ungodly ones." He yanked up his T-shirt to reveal a rotted torso marred by countless giant welts in cruciform shape: burn marks left by a brand. "I was without God once 'fore Laslo showed me th'true an' righteous path. God is with that one, He is, and the angels sit on 'is shoulder."
"I'm sure they do. Where's that room?"
Tommy showed them past a large dining hall with stained-glass windows, down a series of corridors until they reached a staircase, which they took to the second floor, then down a narrow hall. Finally Tommy opened a dirty wooden door, which creaked as it swung wide.
"This'll be yer room, lass, an' the one down there'll be the mister's."
"Separate rooms?" she said.
"To ensure that this place remains without sin, y'understand. 'course, if ye were interested, Laslo could marry ye both in holy union an' you could carry out God's good work in the bedroom at yer leisure. I've seen 'im marry before, I have—burns the sin outta the newlyweds before they c'n be joined with God's blessin'. Beautiful, just beautiful."
"Thanks, but no,” Ruegger said. He was becoming used to the strange, frenzied stillness of the place, but there was some sound, just under the silence, some horrible noise like screaming ...
"Now, if that'll be all, I'll be off.” Tommy crept back the way he'd come.
Danielle laughed nervously, then whispered, "I think we should just get the fuck out of here, Rueg, Hauswell or no Hauswell. You with me?"
Ruegger lit a cigarette, took her hand and led her into the room, which was small and sparse, a narrow bed there, a cramped desk here, and the only window shattered; the fragments left gleamed of stained glass. Above it hung a large iron shutter—open now—to block out the sun.
"We've got to find out if Hauswell’s really dead. If he’s not, we need to know what he found out. Either that or Liberty takes over the world.”
"Baby, I want to get the hell away from here. Whatever we find out from Hauswell can't be worth what's going to happen here."
"Nothing's going to happen." He moved to the window and saw the cemetery not too far away, but there was something strange about it. The air outside blew suddenly cold, and dark clouds massed above.
"Looks like the storm's followed us," he said.
"Raining?"
"About to.” He turned to look at her. “What?” She was staring at him strangely.
She bit her lip, then let out a breath.
“Nothing,” she said.
* * *
Rain drummed against the windows. Danielle fidgeted. They’d been waiting for too long. A sudden impulse grabbed her. “Ruegger,” she said.
“What is it?” he said, sounding wary.
She sucked up her courage. “Your story,” she said.
“My what?”
“Your past. I want to know. I demand to know.”
“Danielle, please. Now isn’t the time—”
“It never is. It never will be.” Fuming, she said, “Now is the perfect time. We’re waiting on Laslo, we’ve got nothing better to do, we’re in a spooky fucking castle and there’s a storm. What better atmosphere could you want?”
He stared at her.
“I ... don’t know,” he said.
She lit a cigarette, rebellious. “Start talking,” she said.
“But ... I—”
“I said start talking.”
He blinked. He looked away in thought for a long moment, seeming to wrestle with something, then nodded. “You’ve waited long enough.”
She almost melted, but made herself be tough. “I have.”
“Where … where should I begin?”
Finally. “At the beginning.”
And, wonderingly, he began.
Chapter 16
Ruegger's family had moved to Vienna from Germany when he was ten. It was a large family, and he was the youngest of six children; as such, he'd pretty much raised himself, his parents cold and distant to him, having exhausted their supply of tenderness on the offspring who'd come before. Ruegger's father Henri had brought his parents with him from Germany, and they were harsher and more parochial than Henri himself, who was in every fiber a tyrant. In all fairness, he was considered a rebel by having married a Spaniard.
The family lived in the most upscale and conservative pocket of town they could find. They were aristocrats from old. Their estate was large and sprawling, complete with the catacombs of the family that had lived there before. In many ways, Vienna didn't suit them; its free-spirited and artistic ways offended them, so
they mingled mostly with the moderately-politicked gentry of the area.
When Henri told his youngest son he was to be sent to boarding school, the young Ruegger disagreed. Henri would not be denied. Once in boarding school, Ruegger had tried to burn it down. His protest was duly noted by the school authorities on his way through the expulsion process.
Following, his family hired a private tutor for the boy, a governess. He liked her. In fact, he enjoyed learning in general, but he couldn’t force himself to be idle. Wanderlust held him rapt at an early age. He ran away frequently, learning criminal behavior from friends on the street, but soon discovered a society of artists who accepted him and the good name his family brought.
By this time, his family had given up and all but cast him out. He didn't care. No love was lost between the Rueggers and their youngest son. The artists taught him poetry and literature, and it was in their company that he began writing. Under their tutelage, he also learned how to play chess, and he became well-known for his skill at the game. Only later did he come to see most of the artists as shallow and pretentious. They were disappointed when his family cut him off. Since the Ruegger family money solved a lot of their problems, they made their displeasure with the young poet abundantly clear.
One big exception proved to be Maria, a sincere poet with some talent. Seventeen when he met her, Ruegger fell in love from the start. She was an eighteen-year-old Spanish refugee, whose family had fled from the authorities in their home country after her father had killed a wealthy merchant for political reasons. The irony didn’t escape Ruegger that, like his father, he’d fallen for a Spaniard.
Her intertwined innocence and cynicism attracted Ruegger. It hurt nothing that she was also voluptuous, with oily black hair and almond eyes. He couldn’t understand what she saw in him, but she did. As they began courting, Ruegger's family became enraged at the low breeding of Maria's heritage and her family's lack of material assets, and they threatened to disown him. He invited them to do so.
Maria and Ruegger fell deeply in love, and eventually he asked her to marry him; she accepted. By this time, Ruegger was living almost exclusively among the poets in town—had rented a flat himself, in fact, and had very little contact with members of his family. The situation suited him fine, and Maria didn't seem at all disappointed that they wouldn't have the benefit of his family's money. Indeed, she was delighted at the romantic notion that she and Ruegger would have to make it together all on their own.
For awhile, they did. He honed his skill in vaudeville acts, always hoping to publish something, while she became an excellent professional dish-washer.
Their happiness didn’t last. Perhaps due to all their romantic midnight cavortings, which had exposed them to rain more than once, Maria caught pneumonia and became desperately ill. Her family had no money for a doctor, and Ruegger's family refused aid—a fact which he would remember later.
He knelt by her deathbed day and night, tending to her every need, but to no avail. Winter had come, and though it was the kindest one in recent years, the cold was too much for her and she faded away, turning frail and skeletal, her dark skin now pale. Finally death claimed her, and Ruegger nearly died with her.
Some would say this was the beginning of his insanity.
He dressed her body in her nicest dress, stole a suit for himself along with a pair of tarnished silver rings, and slipped these on their wedding fingers so that they could be married in death if nothing else. He gathered her in his arms and crept onto his family's estate during the night, delving deep into the catacombs, where he walled Maria and himself up in a tiny chamber, with hardly air enough to breathe. Air which soon become unhealthy and fetid.
He stayed there with Maria, waiting for death, for three days and four nights before his family discovered the new brickwork and unearthed him.
Most said he'd probably gone insane during his days in the tomb, but the ones who spent the most time with him felt it was only after his release that madness took hold. Whichever, he was clearly sick, walking around his room talking to himself, throwing occasional violent fits and cutting himself with anything he could get his hands on. He blamed his family for Maria's death and vowed revenge. They sent him to an insane asylum, where he stayed for seven very unpleasant months before he found a way to escape.
Armed with thoughts of avenging Maria’s death, he returned to his family's estate. Before giving in to his desire for vengeance, he kept the presence of mind to steal as much money and clothes as he could carry. Then he set fire to the house and ran off into the night.
He never found out if anyone had been harmed in the fire, but they had killed Maria through their own prejudices and he felt that they deserved whatever they got. Being raped and beaten and starved in the insane asylum didn’t ease his feelings toward them. May their souls burn as bright as their house, he remembered thinking, though he cringed to remember it now. Two weeks later, he woke up to find his mind suddenly clear, sane again, and he was alone in an alien city, hung-over and sleeping in a ratty inn.
He became a wanderer. Times were different then and people were more hospitable to charming young vagrants. Ruegger always managed to work a certain spell on people, frequently finding lodgings with gullible families but street-smart enough not to rely on this.
Often, to occupy his time, he played chess. It was in this way that he met Ludwig:
"I was playing chess by myself on a stone bench near a fountain when he came up and plopped down opposite me and challenged me to a game,” Ruegger said. “He was this tall, skinny thing who hadn't bathed in weeks, with wild hair and expensive clothes. I never found out why he'd left his home, but he had. Naturally, being the stubborn sort Ludwig is ... was ... it took him two hours to concede, but by then we'd grown to like one another, so we took up together, rogue chess-playing poets with enough stolen money to keep up minimal appearances and sustenance. For awhile, anyway."
They became well-known characters and often people would gather round to watch them play. When they ventured outside of Austria and discovered that they were unknown in other places, they turned their obscurity to their advantage when someone would challenge them to a game. Mostly these challengers went away disappointed, but it got so that Ruegger and Ludwig made a sort of living off of placing money on the games, and this sustained them until they got to Paris.
They'd bounced around Europe for so long that it was only a matter of time before they wound up there sooner or later; it was just a question of timing. They arrived starving and destitute, not even speaking much French. They were forced to learn quickly.
Ludwig had always been fascinated by Ruegger's poetry, so when they met a group of spirited, impoverished philosophers, Ludwig sent out some of his friend's material. In retaliation, Ruegger distributed some of Ludwig's weird epics to the populace, and they were both surprised when their literature was well-received. Of course, they learned soon enough that the young philosophers they'd encountered were anarchists—revolutionaries. To them, the fact that the newcomers’ poems made no sense was a good thing. It showed a desire for change.
The revolutionaries dubbed Ludwig and Ruegger the "odd flock" (a phrase out of one of Ruegger's poems), and the two stayed on.
This was during the early stages of the Revolution, when most of the revolutionaries ended up dead and rotting of gangrene on the barricades. Gangrene tends to take the romance out of most things, Ruegger learned, and it was at this time that he discovered his natural violent tendencies. He killed better than he wrote, it seemed, even if his heart rested with the latter. Soon his fame spread among his peers for his suicidal antics on the front lines. Meanwhile, Ludwig rose in the ranks of the revolutionary leaders, becoming something of a commander, a strategist, which suited him wonderfully.
It ended one day when Ruegger was leading an assault on a corrupt police station. The revolutionaries were ambushed and slaughtered without mercy. A traitor had given them away. The survivors were forced back to one of their se
cret encampments, just about to be overrun. Ruegger, dying with two bullets in his stomach, gathered the remnants of his men and told them that he was going to make his last stand there. In a touching gesture, they agreed to stay with him.
Amid the stench of gunpowder, gangrene, burning flesh and hair, the anarchists loaded their weapons and waited for the final assault. When it came, it was swift and brutal. Half of Ruegger's men were cut down within the first minute, and he was struck twice in the chest and a few times along his limbs. He crumpled in a wet heap at the bottom of the barricade.
One thought chased at him as he lay there dying: he had to find Ludwig, make sure Ludwig knew that he was passing over. But Ruegger was too weak and there was no time. He was using his own blood to write a goodbye letter when one of the revolutionaries easily hefted him off the ground and sped him off into an abandoned alley.
Gunshots echoed off the streets nearby. The revolutionary patted Ruegger with a gloved hand on the cheek and smiled. It was a woman, a girl really, no more than seventeen, perhaps, but though she looked several years Ruegger's junior, she gave off a presence and had such command of herself that he felt she was much older, and of course she was. Approaching her 200th birthday, in fact. She had cloudy, pale green eyes and deep dark brown hair shot through with streaks of soot and ash.
"She told me that she'd read my poetry, had watched me from afar—watched me smoke my cigars, or mull over some stratagem, or laugh with the other anarchists at some small joke when the tension got too high. She said I should live forever, and that she would do that for me under the condition that I use my gifts to continue the fight for freedom."
He’d started to drift into unconsciousness, but the revolutionary pulled out a knife and nicked his throat to keep him awake. She made him promise, and he did. She drained him of what blood he had to give, then gave him her own, making him a vampire. He later found out that her name was Amelia.