Blood Rhapsody

by Nancy Morse

  “It began soon after my return,” she said. “At first, he complained of being tired and cancelled several of his lessons.”

  That would explain why the music master’s footman had called at his home to inform him their lessons were being postponed indefinitely.

  “You say he grows weaker. Does he also grow paler?”

  Could it be that another such as he was on the prowl in London? They were everywhere, in every dark corner of every city and hamlet. Foolish mortals, not even aware of the bloodthirsty evil that lurked in their midst. Not that his kind were all created equal. Some possessed super human strength but were exceptionally addlebrained. Others had vastly superior intellects but were little more than mesmerists. Was the music master the victim of a common blood drinker?

  “No,” she said. “Just weakened a little more each day, as if the life were slowly slipping from him for no good reason.”

  His cool outward countenance did not register his inner alarm. It was possible that the music master was not the victim of a blood drinker, but of something much more insidious. A life drainer, subsisting on the energies of their victims, leaving them feeling drained and fatigued without ever having to draw a single drop of blood. In all his years on earth, in all his wanderings, he had come across only one such creature. Lienore. Red-haired, fiery-eyed, beautiful beyond words. Born of a black magic blood ritual at a time when the Druids inhabited the ancient land of Dubh Lein and the Goddess ruled the earth. A ghostly presence that moved from host to host, a dangerous and enigmatic foe of the living, seducing her victims and slowly daining them of vitality, a cunning and devious mistress of deception.

  He suppressed a fiendish chuckle to think that not even the scurilous de Veres, with their centuries-old vendetta against his kind, could know what they were up against in such a diabolical creature as she.

  A hulk passed beneath the bridge with its cargo of prisoners bound for the North American colonies. The wherries were busy shuttling passengers to Gravesend. A punt thudded against the bank, the waterman hauling his baskets of fish on shore, the smell wafting upwards on the breeze.

  The river traffic drew him away from his murky thoughts and toward the river itself. It was fitting, he supposed, that the Thames should derive its name from the Celts’ word for “dark”. That Lienore was a product of a Celtic ritual. That he and his kind roamed in darkness. All bound together by a fate which mere mortals could not possibly comprehend.

  His thoughts returned to the music master. In all the centuries since his making, music had become the only source of pleasure in his shadowy and lonely existence. The instrument of his choosing, the violoncello, had become a life source for him. No other instrument could rival the mournful longing, the deep lament, the plaintive sorrow or the fierce rage of his own heart. It was only when he was seated behind his instrument that he was able to keep the stark reality of his existence at bay. With its maple body suspended on its endpin, holding it much like a lover between his knees and against his chest, drawing the bow stick across the strings with his right hand while the fingers of the left depressed the bridge, the sound he created filled him with an incomparable depth of emotion. The music master had taught him how to draw the most out of his instrument, to make it come alive in his hands as he himself would never be alive, to make it sing as no earthly voice could ever sing and draw the heavens down to where earth abides, and for those few moments of rapture, for him to feel almost human.

  It was with his own selfish motives in mind that he caught himself thinking aloud, “If only there was something I could do.”

  She turned to him then. The glow of the oil lamps danced across her face. Her complexion was dewey from the mist off the river. Her eyes glistened with tears, and for the first time he realized that they were blue, like the silent clarity of a sky that was almost beyond recall, until now. Her smile was luminous despite her pain. Into his nostrils came the scent of her, fresh and clean and sweet. He felt an animal power surging through his loins, and he knew with almost cruel certainty that he would have her. But not now. The time would come. If there was anything a man who had lived for centuries learned, it was patience.

  “My father told me about one of his pupils who shows remarkable accomplishment,” she said in that soft voice that fanned the flames of his desire.

  “I am sure it was one of his other pupils to whom he was referring.”

  The modesty of his reply was matched only by the swelling of pride from within. Yes, he was a superior musician. Unmatched in raw talent and emotion. Wasn’t that how Amati had put it? But what was a musician without an instrument? So he had stolen from the luthier’s workshop in Cremona one of the painted and gilded instruments intended for the French court of King Charles IX. Amati had been furious to learn of the theft and had immediately suspected him, rightly so. Perhaps if the blood thirst had not been so strong that night the master luthier would have lived. Ah well, all mortals must die. And the instrument bearing the coat of arms of a king of France became his.

  “No,” she said, “it was you. He told me that a music master is fortunate to have one such pupil in his lifetime.”

  Her voice cracked with emotion and a misty look passed over her blue eyes. With the back of her hand she wiped the tears that sprang anew.

  “Here,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew what he thought was a handkerchief for her to dry her tears, but when he saw the alarming suddenness with which she flinched away, he realized his mistake. In his hand he held the bloodied neck cloth from his most recent feeding.

  The crimson-stained fabric disappeared beneath his cloak in a movement too rapid for human eyes to detect. “Forgive me,” he said. “I found a mongrel that had been struck by a speeding coach and used my neck cloth to staunch its bleeding. It was only a superficial wound. The ungrateful beast ran off without as much as a glance back.”

  The falsehood soothed her and even garnered for him a look of admiration from her beautiful eyes. “You are a lover of animals then?”

  Well, yes, he thought sardonically, when there is no human prey readily available, an animal will do. “Most assuredly. I cannot turn away from a poor dumb creature in need. Is this better?”

  He handed her a handkerchief decorated with lace at the ends.

  She accepted it and dabbed at the tears that stained her cheeks. “You are very kind, sir.”

  “No, please,” he objected, drawing his hand away, “you must call me Nicolae. And might I ask by what name I may call you?”

  She lowered her gaze shyly, and then peered back up at him. “Prudence. But those who know me call me Pru.”

  “I should be honored to know you, Prudence.” In ways you cannot imagine, he thought slyly. “Come now. I will escort you home.”

  An owl screeched from the gatehouse, and the murky scent of the river came drifting down the wind as they walked from the stone bridge toward her house in Folgate Street.

  “Tedescu,” she said presently, testing the name out loud. “I’m not familiar with the origin.”

  His muscles tensed beneath his cloak. “The name is Romanian.”

  “How long have you been in London?”

  If he told her he’d been standing among the crowd on Tower Green and watched that insolent slut, Anne Boleyn, lose her head, what would she think? Or that more than a century later he was in the city when the plague took six thousand people in one week and the only sound that could be heard day or night was the tolling of bells. Or that the fire that broke out in Pudding Lane which destroyed nearly the entire city was caused when the king’s baker, from whom he’d been feeding, knocked over a candle which, in turn, set the timbered building aflame. He had dwelled within London’s medieval stone walls since fleeing his homeland and the gruesome rituals of the villagers who hunted his kind for reasons that ranged from fear to profit. He could have told her all these things, and she would have laughed in his face or, more likely, shrunk in horror. And then he would have had to kill her, and until
he had satisfied his carnal lust, the killing would have to wait.

  “I arrived two years ago,” he lied.

  “That’s odd,” she remarked. “Your speech bares only the slightest trace of an accent.”

  Oh, but she was a clever girl. He would have to be careful with this one. “I have done my share of world traveling,” he said. “It is amazing what one loses along the way.”

  “Is your family with you?”

  He answered flatly, “My family is dead.” The presence of words left unsaid hung in the air between them. “And you?” he questioned. “You said you left for Paris when your mother died. Might I ask how she died?” One of his victims, perhaps? Now, wouldn’t that be ironic?

  She was silent for several moments, and then said quietly, “She drowned.”

  He felt a certain relief knowing that he’d had no part in it. It would make seducing her that much easier if there were no connection. “A swimming accident?”

  “She threw herself off the bridge. They found her body when the tide fell, among the mud and shingle.”

  “She must have been very unhappy to resort to such a drastic measure.”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand it. She was one of the happiest people in the world, always laughing and smiling. We were not wealthy, but we were a happy family. And then, darkness descended over her. Aunt Vivienne had just arrived from Paris for a visit, and not even she could chase the shadows from my mother’s heart.”

  “Is that why you went to the bridge tonight?”

  “I go there when I am distressed. I stare down into the water trying to imagine what it must have been like for her in those last moments.” She looked at him then, blue eyes all shiny and vulnerable. “Do you think she was afraid?”

  He knew what it was to take life, to watch the fear form in the eyes of his victims in those final moments. But what knowledge did he have of the kind of death of which she was speaking? There were times when the loneliness had grown so unbearable that he had wished it were possible to take his own life, to put an end to the misery of immortality. But short of plunging a stake into his heart, or worse, letting a de Vere have the perverse satisfaction of doing it, his fate was sealed. An impenetrable look darkened his eyes. “I cannot say with certainty, but I would think at times like that the greatest fear is in continuing to live. The relief that waits in the arms of death is all that matters.”

  “Sometimes I think she comes back to me. At night, in my dreams, through the veil of sleep, I see her face. She seems distressed. It’s as if she is trying to tell me something, but I cannot hear her words. All I can see is her face. She looks so frightened and tired and pale.”

  An impulse of suspicion raced through his mind. A dream? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  ***

  Away from London’s bustle, in a house situated in a secluded spot in Clapham, Simon Cavendish hunched over boiling crucibles in his shadowy laboratory, squeezing a bellows before a transformative flame. He was a silent, solitary man who shunned personal relationships. So secretive was he that his comings and goings were relegated to a back staircase to avoid daily encounters with the housekeeper. The only social outlet he permitted himself was the monthly meeting of the Fellows of the Royal Society Club, but even the members there did not know much about the painfully shy and elusive man. Unlike other alchemists who put their talents to use in uncovering a technique to turn mere lead into gold, he was in pursuit of something much more life-altering that would affect mankind for all time, harboring a vainglorious desire to concoct an elixir that would prolong mankind’s earthly span and unlock the elusive mysteries of life.

  For more than thirty years he had pursued the elixir of life, a potion not just with the ability to prolong life but to actually create life. He began his experiments by dissolving simple sea salt in morning dew until a black powder formed, which was then calcined to become gray, and again dissolved in more dew and digested to whiteness. Virgin’s milk, he called it. He was unsure of its powers until he tested it upon himself by ingesting a vial, whereupon he discovered that it enhanced his memory and the thinking power of his mind. More vials ingested opened the doors of his psychic perception into the spirit world, enabling him to hear and see things that could only be seen in the ultraviolet spectrum of light. And what he saw in the spectrum changed everything.

  He turned his attention to leeches, the slimy creatures he collected from bogs that fed on human blood, and came to the realization that in blood lay the answer.

  The Fellows of the Royal Society scoffed at the myths which went back thousands of years and occurred in almost every culture around the world of pagan creatures that come back to life to drink the blood of the living. At first, he too had scoffed. He was a scientist, not a member of the Roman Church which believed that incorrupt bodies were saints, or of the Orthodox Church that believed the creatures were vampires. And yet, as the folklore spread throughout the centuries, with more and more accounts of bodies swelling up like drums, corpses with ruddy complexions, dead cattle and sheep showing no outward sign of trauma, exhumed bodies with long hair and nails, he began to wonder.

  He started collecting books and journals and first-hand accounts of undead creatures that drank the blood of their victims, turning his attention from the ones that dwelled in bogs and marshes like the leeches in his laboratory, to the ones that walked the earth on two legs as described in Eastern European folklore. The shelves of his library were crammed with dusty tomes. Chronicles, dating back to the twelfth century recording revenants in England. The Malleus Maleficarium, a witch hunter’s bible of the fifteenth century which discussed how to hunt and destroy the undead. Treatise on Vampires by an Italian scientist in the sixteenth century who was burned at the stake for his views. De Masticatione Mortuorum, a German text of the seventeenth century.

  Known by many names, strigoi in Romania, bhuta in India, mullo by the Slavic gypsies, he thought it strange that no such word for these creatures existed in the English language, when cases were documented of the undead preying on the living as far back as ancient Egypt. He had, in fact, come into possession of a German translation of a well documented incident in Serbia where an ex-soldier turned farmer who had allegedly been attacked by the undead years before, died while haying. After his death people began to die and it was widely believed that he had returned to prey on his neighbors. It was time to give the unwitting population of London a new word to add to their vocabulary, and the word was vampire.

  But how could he test his theory when there was no tangible proof of the existence of nosferatu? Then, one night, as he sat alone in his parlor on a cabriole-legged sofa reading the Evening Post before the fire, his attention was drawn to a grisly story about a body that had been found by the wharf with no visible signs of bludgeoning or stabbing but completely drained of blood. A week later another such body was discovered in the East End. The victims were known criminals and their deaths aroused no particular interest from the populace of anything untoward. Using his Fellowship in the Royal Society as an excuse to gain entrance to the morgue, he had examined each putrid body prior to burial. The first body exhibited two small puncture wounds on the neck at the site of the jugular. He had felt his own blood quicken. When the second body exhibited identical bite marks, he had raced back to his subterranean laboratory, convinced that nosferatu did indeed walk the streets of London. Toward that end he devoted every waking hour to devising a scheme to trap the killer and unlock the secret of its immortality, roaming the dirty streets of London at night in search of telltale signs. This evening, the only thing he came across was a dead body in an alley in the East End. Too stinking to examine closely, he dismissed it as having been felled by disease.

  ***

  It was Edmund de Vere’s bloody luck to be the first born son of a first born son.

  It began in a small town in the Loire valley where his ancestors had lived. There had been whispers racing throughout the villages that inquisitors of heretical depravity were tor
turing accused witches in the most diabolical ways to extract confessions, with innocence or guilt being trivial matters. No one was innocent, neither the milkmaid nor the seigneur. Edmund’s ancestors were neither witches nor nobles, yet they were condemned by a special tribunal of pious Dominican friars and burned at the stake for heresy. Thus, in the small hours of the night nearly three hundred years ago a secret society known the Sanctum was born, an order that proposed a truth far more dangerous and grotesque than any the inquisitors had put forth. The truth was that many of the inquisitors were creatures without souls who drank the blood of the living in the depths of their dungeons and sent the bloodless bodies to the stake. From that day forward it was deemed that the first born son of the first born son of each family in the order would devote his energies, indeed his very life if need be, to the destruction of the blood drinkers.

  From his father Edmund learned the tricks to lure a vampire out of hiding. A black horse might be used. Or a white one. Or a virgin astride a white horse. Sometimes the loathsome fiends could be tricked into revealing themselves by strewing poppy seeds on the path to the graveyard, for it was known among the sanctioned hunters that a vampire’s fascination with counting would compel it to count the seeds one at a time, thereby revealing it for what it was. If a hunter could capture the child of an undead father and a human mother, its ability to see the creatures could be used in order to entrap one.