Dhampire

by Baker, Scott

  I suppressed Nicolae's awareness of having told me how to get to Uncle Peter's, loaded the truck with branches of wild rose from the cemetery and with garlic from the kitchen, and left for Pennsylvania.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-two

  « ^ »

  Uncle Peter lived in the Laurel Mountains, south of Pittsburgh, in an area that had so far escaped development. The last of the dirt roads that Nicolae had indicated to me ended in a locked metal gate with a big TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT sign on it. Uncle Peter's property.

  I climbed the chain-link fence and followed the road a few hundred yards farther into the woods, to an unlocked garage containing a rusted white station wagon with four flat tires that looked like it hadn't been driven in twenty years. But there was no sign of any path, no matter how overgrown or disguised, leading away from the garage, and after a half-hour or so wasted looking for something better, I began following deer and game trails.

  I was still following random game trails when night came. The moon was almost full and wherever the moonlight fell it blotted out the earth's feeble phosphorescence. Any hopes I'd had of locating Uncle Peter's cave by its powerlight soon died: these woods were almost completely devoid of power.

  The sun was noon-high again before I saw the smoke of his fire. I made myself unnoticeable, descended the hill I was on to his clearing.

  He was squatting over a fire pit, roasting a piece of meat on a spit. He was barefoot and shirtless, wearing only a mud-stained pair of overalls. His gray hair and beard were matted with grease. I could see some blue smudges on his chest, part of a faded tattoo most of which was hidden by his overalls. He looked old, far older than he was, and when he moved it was with a hesitant jerkiness.

  Maintaining my unnoticeability, I crossed the clearing to the cave. His attention never left the piece of meat he was roasting. Inside, the cave had a wood floor, on which three dirty red wool blankets had been spread as a bed. A crucifix in ivory and gold had been wired to the rock over the blankets. There was a fireplace of cemented natural stone, the chimney leading up through the roof, and, facing it, an ordinary pine dresser with an unlit kerosene lantern on it.

  The gun rack leaning against one wall contained only three of the four rifles it had been designed to hold. Where the fourth rifle should have been was a silver scourge, the short, thick, ornately carved silver handle tapering slightly, the five lashes braided with silver wire.

  I took the cartridges out of the rifles and put them in my pocket, then went back outside. Uncle Peter had finished cooking his meat and was sitting on a log gnawing at it. He was facing half-away from me; what I could see of his back and shoulders was completely covered by puckered scar tissue.

  I walked over to him and allowed myself to become noticeable. He didn't notice me. I waved my hands in front of his eyes. Still no response.

  "Uncle Peter—," I began. He started violently and dropped his meat but he still didn't see me: I could feel his attention swinging through me, past me and back again, never connecting with me. I picked the meat up out of the dirt and pressed it into his hand. He clutched at it.

  "Michael? Michael, is that you?" His voice was higher than I'd remembered, thinner.

  "It's David," I said. "What happened to you? Why can't you see me?"

  "Did Michael send you?"

  I considered saying that he had, decided against it. "No. I came on my own, because I wanted to talk to you. What happened to your eyes?"

  "I can't see now. It happens to me—Go away, David. Please go away. If Michael finds out you're here he'll hurt me."

  "Why?"

  "I can't tell you why."

  "I won't tell Michael anything," I said, reaching out for his awareness, turning it away from his memories, his fears, away from everything he could have used to test the truth of what I was telling him, everything that could have made him doubt me. "You can talk to me, Uncle Peter. I won't do anything to hurt you and I'll keep you safe."

  He hunched forward some more, arms tight to his sides, refusing. "No. He'll know that you're here. He has things that watch me all the time, just like Gregory did. He's always watching me."

  It was possible: I remembered the albino bats outside our window in Carlsbad, remembered the cave insects crawling over the bodies, in through the dry puckered wounds, of the dead couple on the floor of the cave where I'd found Dara's shoe.

  But though Michael might—or might not—have been able to penetrate my unnoticeability himself had he been here, I was sure I could conceal Uncle Peter and myself from anything he could have set here as a spy: Dara and I had had no trouble hiding ourselves from the vampires searching for us the night of my father's funeral. But I didn't dare conceal us until I was sure I could suppress Uncle Peter's memories of what I'd done.

  I concentrated on his awareness again, focusing it on my words, away from his fears, bringing it back to what I was saying as I told him again and again that he could trust me, that he was safe with me, that I wanted to help him and protect him.

  He finally began nodding, slowly seemed to relax. I wrapped us both in concealment.

  He felt it. "What did you do?" he demanded, tensing.

  "I made us both invisible," I said. "To protect you, so we could talk together safely."

  He nodded again, straightened a little. "You can do that, can't you? I'd forgotten—"

  "You can't make yourself invisible?" I asked.

  "No, not like that, but your mother, I remember, she could… just disappear when she wanted to and you wouldn't even realize she was gone."

  "Can Michael make himself invisible too?"

  It was the wrong question. I had to soothe him again, detach him from his fears and convince him he could trust me all over again, but this time it was easier and he seemed more relaxed than before when I'd finished.

  "Can Michael make himself invisible?" I repeated, testing him.

  He ignored the question. "What do you want from me, then? Sex?"

  I stared at him. He was gaunt and filthy, trembling, an ugly splotchy-skinned turkey-necked old man with a half-gnawed piece of greasy meat in his hand who looked like he was at least seventy years old.

  "What do you mean, sex?" I asked.

  "That's what they all wanted. Gregory, Stephen, Michael, even Judith one time, when I was already old. They came to me when they needed power."

  "I'm not here for sex," I said, amplifying and repeating it until I was sure he believed me. "I'm just here because I need to know more about the family."

  "My memory's bad," he said. "It started to go thirty years ago, when Gregory took the family away from me." He was speaking more easily, as though he was finally beginning to feel comfortable about trusting me. "Father taught me a lot about the family but it's gone now, and Gregory and Stephen never shared their secrets with me."

  "Tell me what you can, anyway," I said.

  "Only if you'll promise to do something for me in return. I'll help you if you'll help me."

  "What kind of help?" I asked cautiously.

  "Nothing evil," he assured me quickly. "Some farmers who live near here just had a baby daughter and I want you to protect her tonight."

  "Protect her from what?"

  "From me. It's not that—" He shook his head, continued unwillingly, "I don't want to hurt her or anything, but I'm a—A virolac. A werewolf. That's why I'm blind now. I'm always blind the day before I change."

  He was blind, and he'd been perfectly able to see when I'd talked to him the day of the funeral, but—"I'll help her if I can," I said. "If you tell me the truth. But I'll need to know more about you to protect her from you. To begin with, what's a virolac?"

  "A werewolf, I guess, but—Look." He undid the brass buttons at the top of his overalls, pulled the denim away so I could see the sigil tattooed on his chest.

  "You see?" he asked. The skin around the tattoo was red, inflamed, as though by some sort of allergic reaction.

  "I don't understand," I said. "I c
an see that that's a sigil, but—explain what it means."

  "Marachosias. He's a—A Marquis in Hell. A demon. But when father summoned him he came as a wolf with long black wings. You see, I was two years older than Gregory and father had trained me to replace him as the reigning dhampire when he died, but I wanted to be a priest and when Judith—"

  "Start over again, Uncle Peter," I said. "You're going too fast for me. You're a werewolf because your father summoned Marachosias?"

  "No, a virolac, because the vampires can take me and make me a vampire like them when I die even if I don't commit suicide or make a pact with Satan."

  "Why?"

  "Because father knew I didn't want to be a dhampire and so he… just before he died he summoned Marachosias and made a pact with him to bind me to the family. Because, you see, I wanted to be a priest, I didn't want to serve Satan, even though I always knew that Satan can do nothing that doesn't serve God's ultimate purposes.

  "I was older than Gregory, and when father died I was supposed to use Judith to build up my powers and take control, but Judith refused me and I couldn't make myself force her, so Gregory took her and used her to take the family away from me. It was horrible, I never wanted to be a dhampire, I just wanted to dedicate myself to God's service so I could go to Heaven, but when Gregory took father away from me it was like dying.

  "But then I thought that maybe that was enough, that I was free and I could go away to the seminary and learn to be a priest, but they came and got me one night, Gregory and Stephen, and they made me go with them to this… tattoo parlor; it was late at night and there was no one else there but they seemed to know the man and he… put this on my chest with his needles and then they invoked Marachosias and made it so that once a month he comes for me and possesses me and makes me into a wolf…"

  "You could get the tattoo removed. They can do that now."

  "No, what they do is tattoo over it with a different color ink, and that, don't you see, that would make it that I'd done it to myself all over again. This way, at least I know it's there and I can't lie to myself and pretend it isn't there; I can see it and fight it. Because that's why it's there, you see, God's testing me, He's giving me a chance to save my soul and not go to Hell. That's why He's given me to Gregory and Stephen and Michael, so He can see if my faith is strong enough to endure the pain and the temptations. I always knew that Gregory and Stephen were using the power they got from me to do evil, but that was the temptation, don't you see, to hate them for that and pretend that the evil wasn't in me too just like it was in them, to not be meek and forgive them for having used me to do evil, but I knew that if I could forgive them and resist the temptation and the pain, if I could let them use me without hating them and without ever honoring or worshiping Satan, then God would free me and save me…"

  Moonrise. Uncle Peter knelt naked on the wooden floor, the silver chains wrapped loosely around his wrists and ankles, praying.

  I stood beside him, concealed from him, gripping the heavy silver handle of the scourge, ready to use it as a club if I needed to defend myself. He'd explained that any chains or manacles that he could get around his wrists and ankles were too loose to hold him after his transformation, but that it took him some time to regain control of his altered body after the change, and that during that time I could wrap the chains tight around his new legs and lock them tight.

  He jerked and fell forward, began rolling around making snuffling noises. I stayed with him, ready to lock the chains into place as soon as he began his transformation. He got up on his hands and knees, lurched against the wall, and snapped at empty air with his stubby yellow teeth, then collapsed, unconscious.

  I knelt by him, chains ready, waiting, but nothing happened. There was no transformation.

  Uncle Peter wasn't a werewolf. He was only insane.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-three

  « ^ »

  It was almost dawn. I'd spent the night sitting watching over Uncle Peter, waiting for him to awaken so I could turn him away from all memory of having seen and spoken with me.

  As soon as I'd realized that he wasn't going to turn into a wolf, that he wasn't a werewolf or a virolac, and that the sins for which he'd been punishing himself for thirty years had never been committed, were only delusions, I'd tried to pull him from his trance and bring him back to a reality in which he didn't have to be afraid of killing innocent children. But his fantasies meant too much to him, were real to him, perhaps, in a way his waking life could never be, and his awareness was knotted tight to itself in some private region too deep within him for me to reach.

  If that had been all that I'd learned—that my ability to direct and control other people's attention was limited, and could be resisted—it would have been enough to justify the trip. But though Uncle Peter's memory was bad—so bad that I was sure that Michael, and perhaps my father before him, had taken from him any memories he might have had which they'd thought could be dangerous to them—and though what little he did remember was colored and distorted by his obsessive need to prove to himself that by surrendering to Satan he was really purifying himself in the eyes of God, I'd still gained some information about the family that I thought I could trust.

  While I waited for him to awaken I tried to piece together what I'd learned, sifting and rejecting, making connections between things I knew had to be connected even where Uncle Peter had been unable, or unwilling, to connect them himself.

  My father's marriage to my mother had been arranged by his father, but had been planned generations before, as part of the same plan that had made the Bathorys the only surviving vampires and dhampires in the world. The Bathorys had survived because they'd taken those dhampires they could into the family by marriage while destroying the others, and they had hoped to extend their dominion in much the same way to the non-Christian world, where there were powers, such as the Nagas, that could oppose them and their plans. These powers, Uncle Peter explained, were in some way or another that he seemed unable to make clear ultimately not real because they owed allegiance to neither Christ nor Satan, but real or not they had to be dealt with if the family wanted to extend its dominion. So the Bathorys had planned to assimilate those of the non-Christian powers whose strengths and influences they thought they could turn to their benefit. So father had married Saraparajni, expecting to make of her a willing servant of Satan, and had been himself converted to the worship of Shiva. Why he or the family had expected her to give up her previous beliefs and allegiances was unclear: Uncle Peter, with a missionary zeal worthy of the priest he had hoped to become, seemed to think that a simple exposure to Satanism—and, presumably, to Christianity as well—should have been enough to make its superiority self-evident.

  Michael had been six when Saraparajni died and became a vampire, then allowed my father to seal her into her coffin. Father had been training him as a traditional Bathory dhampire, keeping whatever reservations he might have had about the family and its destiny to himself while preparing Michael to succeed him as reigning dhampire, and he continued this training during the seven years Saraparajni remained in her coffin. But after her rebirth he began turning further and further away from the paths he had trained Michael to follow and Michael, abandoned but unwilling to give up the destiny for which he'd been prepared, had gone in secret to Uncle Stephen to obtain the further training which had finally enabled him to force father to commit suicide and which had enabled Michael to take over the family.

  Uncle Stephen was a black magician, a necromancer and an expert in the summoning of demons whom Uncle Peter blamed for the sigil on his chest that made him a werewolf. He was also an accomplished sadist, if I could trust the detailed descriptions Uncle Peter gave me of the things he had been forced to submit to whenever Uncle Stephen came to him for power.

  And Uncle Peter himself—While waiting for him to awaken I'd been forced to think about him, about who he was and what the family had made of him, about, finally, the way I'd been pla
nning to use him myself—and that, perhaps, was as important as anything else I'd learned.

  Because he was too much like me. Like me he'd retreated to the woods, tried to live free from all involvement with, all responsibility for, the family, its actions and its victims. With the result that for thirty years the family had been able to use him at its convenience, and that the responsibility he had tried to refuse but never succeeded in escaping had driven him insane.

  And it seemed impossible that it had been coincidence alone that had driven Aunt Judith to her isolated cabin in the Big Sur woods, even less likely that it had been another coincidence that had put Alexandra and me there in her place after she killed herself. We'd all been stored away until needed, like clothes in mothballs, or meat in a meat locker.

  Even now—I'd been trying to get Dara to some vaguely imagined place of safety, some quiet secluded retreat where we'd have the leisure to study my father's plans for us at length before attempting to put them into effect. Like Aunt Judith, studying her grimoires in the Big Sur woods until the time came when the only option left her was suicide.

  Uncle Peter turned over in his sleep, threw off the blankets I'd put over him. I covered him again, went outside.

  Dawn was breaking. I'd have to leave soon to make it back to the house before Michael returned. I'd learned more reasons to be afraid of Uncle Stephen, and that I couldn't trust my ability to direct people's attention to give me the advantage over him that I'd hoped for, but I'd learned nothing that would have enabled me to deal with him from a position of strength or that would have enabled me to avoid the necessity of dealing with him at all. As far as I could tell, he was still the only person who could help me against Michael.