“I’m aliiiiiiiiive!”
* * *
Housewarming Party, Historic District, Macon, Georgia
Rising young attorney Ria Knight and her law partner renovate an old house on Orange Street into law offices and apartments. She retires to her apartment after the housewarming party and steps into a private theater wherein the house replays for her a past scene starring the original owners of the home, Dr. Paul Devlin and his wife Chloe. Originally built in 1883, it seems to have acquired new life in more ways than one. But it’s just the afterglow of the flowing alcohol imbibed at the housewarming party. Isn’t it?
* * *
Upscale subdivision in northern section of Macon, Georgia
Justin Dinardo, teenage private entrepreneur of the drug industry variety wakes in terror with a hand over his mouth. Mesmerizing eyes stare into his. A voice rumbles low, like distant thunder.
“My name be Cain. An’ my color be sebben.”
* * *
The house on Orange Street
It isn’t the afterglow of flowing alcohol imbibed at a party. Ria’s house is talking to her. Introducing her. To the original master and mistress of the house: Dr. Paul Everett Devlin, his wife Chloe, and his entire household staff. The scenes are so vivid she has to know what happened to them. And finds they didn’t live happily ever-after. Chloe lies in a grave in Rose Arbor Cemetery with their stillborn child, a fatality of childbirth in the 1880s. Paul Devlin went west, to escape his grief. So why is he buried in Rose Arbor Cemetery in a separate mausoleum?
* * *
Bookstore at the local mall
Ria reaches upward for a book just out of her grasp.
A voice asks, “Which one are you after? I’ll be glad to get it for you.” A voice she knows. She hears it often. She turns, ready to face the truth squarely. She’s mentally ill. She has to be. Especially if she sees the man she expects to see. And yes, that’s exactly what she sees.
A man wearing an impossibly familiar face, holding out his hand. “I’m Paul. Paul Everett.”
Coincidence? Ria doesn’t believe in coincidence. But she enjoys the evening she spends with the chance companion she meets in the mall’s one remaining bookstore. The man who introduces himself as Paul Everett. The man who’s the twin of the man her house just can’t forget. So much so that she’s already planning her next evening. Even though the location’s going to be a bit different.
* * *
Rose Arbor Cemetery, Macon, Georgia
Ria Knight masters the art of mausoleum breaking and entering. She sits, with dusk approaching and watches the man who introduced himself the prior night as Paul Everett. He lies on the bed of satin in the open casket, not on his back with his arms crossed, but on his side, his hand curled under his cheek. An open book lies beside him, for all the world as though he’s fallen asleep.
He stirs and raises one arm over his head, stretching. His eyes open. They widen at the vision of this unexpected visitor.
Ria speaks. “Dr. Devlin, I presume?”
“I guess you want to hear all the gruesome details?”
“Every last one.”
* * *
1888 – Banks of the Ocmulgee River – The Rise of Cain
Where he came from, no one knew. He didn’t know himself. Sometimes he thought he’d merely sprung, full-grown, from the depths of the deepest swamps, the darkest bayous, of Louisiana.
His name was Cain. His color was seven. His specialty was death. Paul Devlin’s death didn’t work out exactly the way he’d planned. For either of them.
Bottom line of all the gruesome details? Paul now resides in a mausoleum in Rose Arbor Cemetery and has since 1888. Cain moldered away into bones in a covered cave out by Stone Creek Swamp, leaving the stake impaled through his heart lying against bare rib bones. Until two teenage drug dealers uncover the cave and pull out the stake, thereby starting the cycle all over again. Because the past, like evil, never dies. It just—waits.
* * *
Rose Arbor Cemetery, Macon, Georgia
Paul sat in silence. He’d talked himself out through the night, sharing that summer of 1888 with Ria. Reliving it. Something he hadn’t done in all the long years of his existence. Then again, no living human except Ria Knight had ever tracked him to his mausoleum, watched him rise, and demanded all the details. He savored the warmth of her body through her jacket as she sat with his arms around her. An empty wine bottle and his grandmother’s old crystal goblets stood beside them. From the look of the sky, he’d talked himself out none too soon.
Something wet dropped onto his hand. He raised it slightly, feeling the liquid run over the skin. He smiled and shifted her to one side to gain a view of her face.
“And what are these?” he asked, watching tears stream silently out of her eyes.
“You know very well what they are. God, how did you do it? And still stay sane?”
He shrugged. “Because I had to. Ria, it’s almost dawn. You said you barely slept last night and now you’ve been up all night again.”
“Won’t kill me. I’ve done it before.”
“And you haven’t eaten a damn thing tonight, either.” He eased her out of his arms. “Wait here.”
“What—” she started. She stopped when she realized she was talking to thin air. She sat and watched the sky. How long till dawn? She watched the pre-dawn traffic speed north toward Atlanta and south towards Savannah. The cars and trucks seemed intrusive, out of place. She felt she’d been transported to 1888. And still hadn’t come completely back.
“Here.” Paul spoke quietly behind her and she started. Then she sniffed and smiled. Fresh coffee and fast food breakfast biscuits. She catapulted back into her own year.
“Sausage or steak?” Paul asked, digging into the bags.
She laughed.
“What?”
“You,” she said. “Voodoo and bokors and mambos. Tamara and Cain and Blood Drinkers. Sausage or steak.”
He grinned. “And you need to hurry up and decide, ‘cause darlin’, I’m goin’ have to excuse myself in a red-hot hurry in about—” he glanced up at the sky, “twenty minutes, now.”
“Steak.”
He handed her the wrapped biscuit and flipped the lid of his coffee cup, drinking quickly. She did the same and almost spewed the liquid back out.
“Damn! That’s hot!”
“Well, yes.”
“You’re drinkin’ it like water!”
“I told you, hot and cold don’t bother me too much.”
They sat and ate in silence for a few minutes.
“Good cover story, you gettin’ killed out west. The body shipped back home.”
“Papa. He did himself proud. I always thought so.”
“So he did recover?”
“He had a few more years.”
“And Joshua?” she asked, referring to Paul’s mulatto half-brother. After the death of Paul’s mother, Paul’s father shared an epic love story with his housekeeper Sadie spanning over twenty years, against all odds and all conventions of the 1800s. Joshua had fallen into Cain’s grasp that summer of 1888, at least until Paul pulled him out of it and paid for doing so with his life. In a manner of speaking.
“We sent him north that winter. Boarding school in Boston.”
“Why do you still use the mausoleum? I mean, wouldn’t a house or an apartment be more comfortable?”
“Too dangerous. Neighbors, you know, unless you’re way out in the country and even then, you have repair people, utility workers. Somebody, sometime, would notice they never saw me in the daytime. Not just seldom, but never. Besides, this is sort of home now.”
“I guess so.”
“I did toy with the idea of getting rid of the coffin, getting a regular bed or at least a mattress, but somehow I never got around to it.”
Ria laughed. “It’s a perverted sense of humor, and you know it!”
“Well, yes. Yes, it is.”
They sat in silence again, both of
them watching the sky.
“Paul? What now? You’re not goin’ to just disappear, are you? Never see me again?”
“I should.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Don’t you? You’ve known me for two days and you’ve lost two nights’ sleep already. Real normal lifestyle there. Very healthy.”
“There’s a reason I saw you, your past in the Orange Street house. So I’d know you when I did see you. I was meant to, Paul.”
“C’mon. I’ll walk you to your car. I don’t have long.” He stood and offered his hand. They moved back up the hill, through the old markers.
Paul stopped at the short wall and spotted her car, parked down a steep hill outside the cemetery walls and gates, the least observable place Ria could think of to park.
“Dangerous place to park all night, don’t you think?”
“Didn’t want to leave it in the cemetery grounds. I don’t think any patrol cars tour through it at night but I wasn’t sure.”
Ria started to jump up on the ledge and Paul stopped her.
“Wait.”
He lifted her up easily and sat her on her perch.
“Now hold on.” He disappeared and reappeared almost instantaneously on the outside of the wall and held his hands up to her.
“I got to admit, that does take some getting used to.”
Paul smiled.
“Now, get on home,” he said. “I have to get back. Maybe five minute to sunrise.”
“Paul, wait! You never answered me. Will you come? Tonight? My house? I mean your house? “
“Ria, you’ve got to sleep.”
“I’ll take a nap this afternoon, I don’t have much on the calendar today. And I’ll sleep some tonight. I promise. You’d have called me again if I hadn’t found you, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “Knowing I shouldn’t, I’d have called you. But then I was a man passing through town who’d be leaving in a month or so. There’s no point in even trying to pretend tonight hasn’t changed things and you know it.”
“Don’t kid yourself, buddy. If I’d never known Paul Devlin existed, Paul Everett would never have been a casual thing for me, not after the first sentence or two in that book store. And you know it. You felt the click, too, I know you did. Now, will you come?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Oh! That thing about having to be invited—”
“Is pretty much a crock, actually. I can go anywhere. As long as I know where I’m going. I can’t just decide to show up somewhere if I have no idea how to get there.”
“Then you shouldn’t have any problems. It’s your house, after all.”
“I’ll think about it.”
That was the best she was going to get, and she knew it. This might be the last time she’d see him. She moved into his arms and raised her face. He kissed her forehead.
She pulled his head down and gently grazed his lips with her own.
“No, don’t.”
He was afraid to kiss, frightened of the sharpness of his incisors.
“You won’t hurt me, Paul. You know you won’t.” She raised her face again and he did kiss her, gently at first and then, gaining confidence, more deeply.
The old legends raced through her mind. The wicked incisors, the fetid odor of the vampire’s mouth. He tasted of new coffee and fresh biscuits, the hot, sage spice of sausage. The trace smell-taste reminded her of sunup, country mornings, open pastures. Paul hadn’t seen sunrise in over a hundred years. He’d never see it again. And the sun was close.
“Go,” she said. “Tonight. Please.”
“No promises.”
“There’d be lots of fringe benefits. I’d let you use my shower and you wouldn’t have to borrow empty hotel rooms anymore,” she offered.
He laughed at the reference to the night before when he’d proclaimed showers the single greatest convenience of the twentieth century. “That is an advantage I hadn’t considered,” he said thoughtfully. Then he grinned and disappeared.
Chapter Two
Paul materialized directly in front of the small chest. His wife Chloe, the love of his human life, smiled at him from her picture. He lifted it and smiled back. Then he frowned. Ria Knight. Lord God, what to do, what to do?
Of course he’d known she was different the minute he’d seen her. Chloe’d been a lightning bolt from above when he’d come home from medical school in Edinburgh, Scotland. Ria? Growling thunder, building to crescendo with every moment he spent in her company. And now she’d tracked him, by God, with unerring instinct and steely determination.
All he could offer were hours of darkness. Ria needed sunlight, a man to court her over open picnic baskets in sunny meadows, exchange vows with her under a garden bower. Instead, she’d met him.
He’d made his own peace with destiny. Good books, an occasional good meal, a night spent in the back of a dark theater watching the huge screen, or mingling with the crowds at the malls. He poured over medical journals and hovered invisibly in the emergency rooms and corridors of the local hospitals, still practicing pseudo-medicine of a sort. He’d made himself forget what life was like with … the one. He’d come to terms with who and what he was.
And now another woman was … the one. Her fascination wouldn’t last, it couldn’t. Sometime, somewhere in the future, she’d meet a man to walk beside her in the sun. If that didn’t happen, before he ruined her life completely, he’d erase himself from her memory. Very easily. The mesmerizing stare of the vampire wasn’t legend. It was truth.
But for a little while, a few weeks, a few months, even a year, maybe, could he have—whatever he could have? He looked at Chloe again and raised his head. His senses warned him as energy drained away. Sunrise.
He gently tugged off the ring Chloe’d placed on his finger over a hundred years ago and laid it on the chest beside her picture. With his last remaining strength of night, he fell onto the satin of his coffin. He slept.
* * *
Ria moved through the day mechanically and took a nap during the three open hours on her afternoon calendar. She watched night approach through her windows and paced the length of her living room. Would he come? And if he did, what then?
* * *
Paul rose with the early moon and swung his legs out of the coffin. He moved to the chest of drawers and stared at Chloe’s picture. He changed into fresh clothes. Then he picked up his wedding ring and put it back on his finger. He couldn’t share Ria’s life for any time, no matter how short. Insanity to think so.
He gave himself a mental push and materialized on the banks of the river where he’d relived the summer of 1888 with Ria. He watched the cars pass on the interstate.
* * *
In neighboring, more modern Riverside Hills Cemetery, another entity possessed of Paul Devlin’s powers also woke.
No fool, Cain recognized the safety inherent in taking up residence in a cemetery mausoleum. It was much nicer than the cave he’d accidently been resurrected in out by Stone Creek Swamp. A lot dryer, too. The folks who’d spread the legends about the dampness of the tomb should try a stint in a swamp cave. However, he didn’t have the advantage of a specially designed structure complete with secret living quarters Paul Devlin had. Then again, he had no need for books or radios and wasn’t particular about changing his clothes all that frequently. He’d simply materialized within the walls of one of the larger mausoleums and ripped the top off the coffin containing the earthly remains of Nathan Wilkerson, 1892-1956. Those remains now sprawled unceremoniously on the concrete slab floor. Ethel Wilkerson, who’d never in her life known any man except her husband, still slept comfortably in her own coffin. She’d have been horrified to know she was sharing her bedroom with another man.
Cain yawned. His stomach didn’t rumble exactly, his whole body vibrated with the new hunger that had overtaken him immediately in this second life. Blood hunger. Time to hunt. He cast out into the dark, intending to cross
the river to the woods. Something different. What? He stopped flight and hovered a moment. Something else. A moving life form, human in shape. Cain turned his swirling essence to the right, moving over the grounds of Riverside Hills and out across the boundaries of Rose Arbor. He hovered over the seated figure gazing out over the river at the vehicles passing by on I-75.
Cain had difficulty pulling himself together again in his excitement but finally managed. He materialized behind some cedar trees several hundred feet to the figure’s left. Could it possibly be? The man who’d banished him to that dark cave all those years ago? Though he hadn’t been just a man then and wasn’t just a man now, no more than Cain was. No mere man could ever have defeated Cain at the peak of his power all those years ago. Then Paul moved his head, giving a clear silhouette of his profile. His hair gleamed, mingled gold and silver, under the moonbeams.
Him. It was him. Cain smiled. The dark gods were with him.
* * *
Ria paced restlessly across her living room floor. She’d paced for hours. It was almost midnight. He wasn’t coming. She could go to him, of course. But she wouldn’t. If any man, ever, had earned the right to his own peace, it was Paul Devlin. She’d never see him again. She didn’t even feel the tears running down her cheeks.
* * *
Paul sat quietly by the river. His thoughts moved as restlessly as Ria’s feet. If he hadn’t been reliving the feel of Ria’s head against his shoulder, maybe he’d have sensed the dark presence watching and waiting with the patience of a giant snake. But maybe not.
Dark Series, The Color of Seven and The Color of Dusk (Books We Love Special Edition) Page 21