Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

  "Then join us now," my grandfather said. "Living as you do—as you all do—you only thwart us. When you join us you will see how wrong you've been."

  "When I join your communion I'm sure I will, father. But until then I have duties I must fulfill."

  "It's almost dawn," my grandfather said. "I must sleep. Will you nullify the guardians for me?"

  "Yes," Michael said. I heard light footsteps, then silence. The door hadn't opened or closed.

  "Do you have everything prepared?" Uncle Stephen asked a moment later.

  "Almost everything. Unless there's a way I can use one of them to master father without freeing her, now that the Nagas are here—"

  "There isn't any way. If they try to interfere we'll have to stop them. No matter what the cost to the family."

  "Agreed. But if David and Dara escape I'll know whom to blame, Stephen. And I'm still not completely convinced that you weren't the one who brought David here."

  "To what purpose? His blood bears the same taint as yours and he is even less of a Bathory, even less fit to rule than you are. But it's time to finish readying her for tomorrow."

  "I'll be studying everything you do," Michael said. "Your knowledge of the rituals may still be superior to mine in some ways but I'll know enough to know whether or not you're trying to deceive me."

  "There would be no point. As you said, with you gone who would I have to protect me from Gregory?"

  Once again footsteps, then silence. They hadn't opened the door or gone into the hall. I waited a moment longer to make sure, then went out to my truck and got the vial of coke: psychic self-defense, to keep them from using Dara against me. Back in my room I snorted some, then lay on my bed and pretended to be asleep while I tried to make sense out of what I'd heard. But in the end what was hardest, despite everything that had already happened to me, wasn't so much understanding what they'd said as it was accepting and believing it.

  Both Michael and Uncle Stephen were dhampires. and a dhampire was someone who ruled his undead ancestors. His ancestors who were vampires who were my ancestors. Michael had been the one who'd taken control of Dara and me in the caverns, and who'd taken her away from me—and who'd tried to kill me in Chicago?—but he was planning to free her again tomorrow so he could make use of her somehow to gain control of father.

  For what he'd done to us, and what he'd made us do to each other, I'd hate him for the rest of my life.

  Michael was half Naga, as I was half Naga and Dara was half Naga, and Michael suspected Uncle Stephen of plotting against him—and Uncle Stephen was plotting against him, was lying to him and must be planning to use me against him in some way. Because Uncle Stephen hated him for his Naga blood, which was Dara's Naga blood, which was my Naga blood.

  My father was dead now but he would be alive again soon, and a vampire. As his father, my grandfather was a vampire, as Uncle Stephen and Michael would become vampires.

  As Dara and I would become vampires unless our Naga blood saved us.

  Our Naga blood. My long-dead mother was not dead, or not exactly dead, and she was a Naga, was perhaps even the cobra-headed Queen on the throne of ivory who'd saved me from the coral snake's attack—and her parents, my other grandparents, a Mr. and Mrs. Takshaka would be here tomorrow when Dara was freed.

  When perhaps we would have our only chance to escape.

  And it was strange that there'd been no mention of God, or Christ, Satan's traditional adversary. Only the Nagas.

  * * *

  Chapter Sixteen

  « ^ »

  About seven that morning I decided I'd stayed in bed long enough to simulate a night's sleep for anyone who might be watching me. I rang for a servant and told him to get my clothes from the truck, showered, then dressed and went downstairs to examine the books in father's new room.

  And realized how stupid I'd been in not looking at them the night before, because about a third of the books I'd seen on the shelves were missing. I glanced through a few of the others, found nothing that would have been out of place in the inspirational section of any West Coast bookshop.

  I'd been letting the seeming familiarity of my surroundings lull me into a false sense of security, treating everything like a game which I could win if I could outplay my opponents. Who intended to make sure I never got a chance to learn the rules.

  I went looking for the Takshakas, was told by Nicolae that they weren't expected back before the funeral. I checked out the house again anyway, but didn't find them.

  "… sounds a bit like the Manichean Heresy, your idea that Satan is as powerful as God and is the absolute ruler of this world while God rules only in Heaven," I heard as I walked into the dining room. Two men were sitting at the end of the long table with their backs to me, talking in low, earnest voices.

  "But if a man commits a sin, hates himself for doing it, yet knows that he has had no other choice and that he will sin again in the same way, how can he beg God for forgiveness? What choice does he have but despair—?" The speaker broke off when he caught sight of me. He was a big man, well over six feet tall but stooped, as though deformed by a lifetime spent carrying some too-heavy load. His long black hair and full beard looked as though he'd made an unsuccessful attempt at removing years of tangles with one brushing.

  I seated myself across the table from the man to whom he'd been speaking. There was no doubt in my mind that this was Father Charles Bathory. He was a strikingly handsome man, still young, with a smug unthinking look on his face and something to the way his robes fitted him that suggested they'd been discreetly tailored.

  "Good morning," I said.

  "Good morning," the priest replied. His voice was over-hearty, with a public-speaker's sincerity. His companion mumbled something.

  "Don't let me interrupt your conversation," I told them as a servant brought me a vegetarian omelet.

  "We were just finishing," the bearded man said with an effort. He was gaunt and colorless, with a fish-belly pallor that made his black eyes look sunken, and he looked like a man who'd been afraid to go to sleep for most of his life. His skin was splotched with silver and he wore a too-large but expensively cut suit.

  "You must be Uncle Peter," I said. "I'm David. And you," turning to the priest, "must be Father Bathory."

  "Call me Charles," he said. Uncle Peter mumbled a greeting without meeting my eyes.

  "We can continue our conversation later if you'd like, Peter," the priest said, dismissing him. Cousin Charles's skin was so lightly tinged with silver that I was sure he could have little or no part in what was happening here, but he monopolized the conversation, to my uncle's evident relief. I was treated to an endless monologue about the good father's parish, in what had once been an upper-class neighborhood in Chicago but was now well on its way to becoming a slum. The loss of many of his well-to-do parishioners had hurt the church financially, it seemed, but the black children sang so beautifully that some of the richest members of the church had continued to take an active part in it even though they'd moved out of the neighborhood, and that, combined with the gas station and butcher shop which two other parishioners had left them…

  While Cousin Charles spoke Uncle Peter was eating with careful speed. He finished his breakfast steak and got up, obviously relieved at the chance to escape.

  "Uncle Peter," I called after him, interrupting Cousin Charles. Uncle Peter froze like a little boy caught stealing money from his mother's purse, turned unwillingly back to face me.

  "Excuse me, Charles," I said, "but I haven't seen Uncle Peter for fifteen or twenty years and there are a lot of things I'd like to talk to him about. I'm sure we'll get another chance to talk with each other later."

  "It's been a pleasure talking with you," he said genially. I pushed back my chair and joined Uncle Peter, escorted him out into the hallway.

  "Where would you like to talk?" I asked. "The library?"

  "No," he said quickly. "I don't like the library."

  "Good. Neither do I. How about
outside? Down in the forest. Of course, if you're afraid of getting your suit dirty—"

  "No, let's go outside. I feel better outside. And it's a beautiful day," he added as if the thought had just occurred to him.

  We walked down the drive. It was sunny out, with only a few cumulus and cirrus clouds in the sky. Birds sang and hopped and flew in the trees and gray squirrels were everywhere.

  Uncle Peter tensed, shrinking into himself, when the first gravestone came into view on our left. He only began to breathe normally again after we were well past the cemetery.

  Somewhat further on we found an oak tree fallen by the side of the road. We sat on its trunk and talked.

  It was almost impossible to get any information out of him. He volunteered nothing and after the first few minutes I gave up trying to keep up the fiction that what had become an interrogation was in fact a friendly conversation.

  He grudgingly admitted that he lived in a cave hollowed out of the side of a hill in Pennsylvania. I already knew that. He told me some things about the forest where his cave was, though not how to find it, but he wouldn't tell me why he had chosen to live there as a hermit. He did his best, in fact, to tell me nothing at all yet he seemed mortally afraid of lying to me or offending me in any way.

  He gave each question I asked him careful consideration, like a squirrel turning a nut over and over in its paws while trying to decide just where to bite into it, then answered with a flood of inconsequential or irrelevant details. And after each such trivial or incoherent disclosure—after, for example, he'd revealed that he'd been born two years before my father or that he'd last seen me when I was thirteen—he'd go rigid, sitting with a look of pure terror on his face and refusing to say anything further.

  At first I pitied him and did my best to make it easy on him but as the time passed I lost patience with him. I bent the power of the forest to my will, used my ability to focus his attention where I wanted it to don a mantle of spurious charisma but it was no use. He cringed away from me but still refused to answer my questions.

  Finally I asked, "What do you know about vampires?"

  "Nothing!" he stammered, his face contorted and twisting. "Just what I read in Bram Stoker's book. I can't read in my cave. The light's too poor. I haven't read a book in years. I don't remember what I read in Dracula. It's been too many years."

  He stared at me a moment longer, then fled back up the hill, leaving me alone on the fallen tree.

  Dracula? I hadn't read it since I was twelve. Aunt Judith had taught me that it was just a malicious fantasy but by now it was obvious that she'd made a practice of protecting me from knowledge she thought too dangerous for me. Perhaps there was something in Dracula I'd forgotten.

  I walked back up the drive to the house, asked if my grandparents had by any chance returned early. They hadn't.

  The librarian was anxious to help me but I told him that I just wanted to browse through some books in peace while I waited for father's funeral. He said he understood and left me alone in the library.

  I found three listings under "Vampires" in the English-language section of the card catalog, plus a number of cross-references to the Russian, Romanian, German and French collections—all languages that I should have been able to read as a graduate of St. George's Academy, none of which I could actually read, though I understood a little spoken Romanian.

  Some Of Your Blood by Theodore Sturgeon I discarded almost immediately: as far as I could tell it was a "psychological study" of a man who'd developed a taste for blood because his mother always bled when she nursed him. Dracula gave me a wealth of information about vampires, but I had no idea whether any of it was trustworthy, though the book's preface said that Stoker had been a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, which it described as a society of serious students of the occult that had flourished near the end of the nineteenth century and had included such people as Aleister Crowley.

  Montague Summers's The Vampire: His Kith and Kin was an irritating pseudoscholarly compilation of legends, superstitions, rumors and errors—he misquoted one of the grimoires in my aunt's collection—all of which the author seemed to take as literal truth. Some of what he said corroborated Stoker's tale and some was patently absurd, such as his claim that you had only to scatter mustard seeds on your roof and threshold to keep yourself safe from any vampire intent on doing you harm, since the vampire would be forced to spend the time until dawn compelled him to return to his coffin counting the seeds.

  But despite its many evident absurdities the book contained some information that seemed to corroborate and clarify things I had overheard while hiding in the manuscript room, including the statements that a suicide will often become a vampire and that forty days must pass before a vampire can rise from its grave. The book also claimed that vampires could not abide wild roses, and though the reason it gave, that the vampires were afraid of becoming caught in the brambles, was another of Summers's idiocies, there was the evidence of the wild-rose bushes planted on my ancestors' graves to lend credence to the idea that there was some sort of connection between vampires and wild roses. But Summers's book made no mention of dhampires.

  My reading had consumed most of the day. I had unconsciously wrapped myself in unnoticeability while I read, as I realized when, emerging from the library, I was almost knocked down by a servant who failed to see me until he ran into me.

  "Mr. Bathory!" he said. "Dinner's ready and we've been looking everywhere for you so we can proceed."

  "I'll be right there," I assured him.

  "Excuse me for mentioning it, sir"—he looked disapprov-ingly at my faded jeans and plaid wool shirt—"but shouldn't you dress for dinner? The funeral's directly afterwards."

  I felt like laughing for the first time since my return. "I'm afraid I don't have any proper clothing," I told him. "I've been living in a cabin in the woods, you know."

  "Your black suit is hanging in your closet, sir, and Robert shined your shoes for you this morning, while you were out walking with your uncle. If you'll permit me, I'll inform the rest of the family that you'll be down in a few minutes."

  There were five people I didn't know at the table: three undistinguished-looking persons with only a minimal silver sheen to their skins—no doubt the other cousins—and a diminutive couple with dark skin and wavy black hair who I knew must be my maternal grandparents.

  They were small, neither over five-four, and very slender, with fine delicate bones. Their faces were smooth and unwrinkled, their movements swift and graceful, but the very fact that they showed no sign of old age's degeneration somehow marked them as ancient. They seemed to wear their age like a second skin, a cloak of wisdom and experience, yet they had a vitality surpassing that of anyone else at the table.

  Their eyes, startlingly, were the deep blue of a Siamese cat's, and their human features were at times veiled by barely perceptible auras of transparent blue flame that sometimes suggested the heads of giant cobras with spread hoods, sometimes suggested multitudes of smaller cobra heads, each with its own life and intelligence, yet they alone, of all the creatures and things I had seen since Dara and I had first made love, manifested no evidence whatsoever of the silver phosphorescence that I had come to expect of everything I saw.

  No. Dara's bracelet, the golden Naga she wore twisted around her left forearm, had had the same blue aura. And these two little dark-skinned people, my grandparents, were Nagas, as I was half Naga.

  A place had been saved for me between Uncle Peter and one of the cousins, too far away from the Takshakas for me to be able to talk to them during the meal. Everybody was standing behind the chairs. I took my place and Michael, who was sitting at the head of the table, asked Uncle Peter to say the grace. Cousin Charles looked offended, no doubt because as a priest he considered it both his right and his duty to say the blessing.

  "Bless us O Lord and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty…" Uncle Peter said haltingly while Uncle Stephen watched him with a ma
licious smile. Uncle Peter stopped, obviously at a loss for words, and Cousin Charles finished triumphantly, "through Christ our Lord. Amen." Everyone sat down. The servants brought the soup.

  I studied the Nagas covertly while I ate. After a while I realized that they had been watching me while I studied them and as soon as I realized they knew I was watching them they grinned at me, then resumed their conversations with their neighbors. But I had no chance to speak with them before the funeral and though Uncle Peter sitting next to me drank an immense amount of wine, the more he drank the more tight-lipped he became.

  The funeral began with Mass in the chapel. I sat with the other pallbearers in the front pews. Though I hadn't confessed, I took Communion with the others. If Cousin Charles knew about my omission he said nothing. More than twelve years had passed since the last time I'd knelt at the rail and the wafer the priest put in my mouth was so unexpectedly bitter that I almost gagged on it.

  Before the Mass ended I'd begun to feel chills and a growing nausea. Helping roll the bier out of the chapel to the waiting hearse, I felt a giant hand clench itself in my stomach and begin twisting. Weak and dizzy, alternately hot and cold, it was all I could do to help lift the coffin into the hearse and make my way back to the car in which I was to ride.

  Nicolae drove the rented hearse down the hill to the cemetery. I was in the back seat of the second car; behind us came other cars with more family and the household servants.

  The sun had set by the time we reached our destination but there was still a little light in the sky. I staggered out of the car. Around me servants were lighting kerosene lanterns. No one seemed to notice my distress.

  I couldn't understand what was going on around me. I knew I was supposed to help carry father's coffin to his grave but I couldn't connect that knowledge with the black box I could see being unloaded from the hearse.

  "Hurry up, David. Give us a hand," Michael called and I ambled over to the hearse and helped lift the coffin from it. I was imitating my brother's actions without understanding them. We carried the coffin into the silver-shining woods.