“Oh, Sara,” he whispered, his voice full of emotion.
My vocabulary suddenly missing, I heard myself moan in response.
A moment later he suddenly shot upright and put his head between his knees. He was breathing rapidly as if searching for oxygen to fill the hollow of his lungs. When he finally regained his composure, he glanced over at me. Still in shock, I looked into his eyes searching for an answer, but what stunned me into continued silence was his eyes. They were dark, not black, but a deep navy blue with traces of black circles under them, like a person who hadn’t slept for days.
“I – I’m sorry,” I whispered.
I must have done something wrong.
“You have nothing to be sorry for!” he said emphatically. Then his face fell. “This is all my fault. I should have known better.”
I turned my head, unable to look at the shame on his face.
“I think it would be best if we went back to the house,” he finally mumbled.
When he stood up, he didn’t gallantly offer me his hand like he usually did. I guess so soon after his moment of weakness, he didn’t want to touch me again. Picking up my bag of apples, I got to my feet and followed him back down the path to the house in silence. I wanted to say something to make him feel better, to somehow ease his pain, but I couldn’t find the words. A couple of times as I traipsed behind him, he peered over his shoulder allowing me to see the guilt in his eyes. I ached inside to comfort him, but I didn’t think the words had been invented yet that would erase that expression from his face. And yet, I could still feel his lips on mine, his soft tongue, his tender touch. The memory of our moment of passion was now indelibly etched in my mind for the remainder of eternity.
Would it ever happen again?
Would he allow it?
When we got inside the house, he immediately walked through the living room out onto the balcony. Once there he leaned against the railing and stared out at the lake in stony silence. I lingered in the living room and watched the muscles of his broad shoulders as they rippled under his shirt, and his hair as the breeze gently blew it around the top of his head. Something told me he’d often gone there as a place to think things through or just be alone. I didn’t have to be a vampire to tell he felt guilty for allowing his guard to slip. With all my heart I wanted to console him, but it was hard when I was glad it had. I knew if I was honest and told him so, he’d only be angry with me.
I gave him a moment then joined him at the rail. He made no acknowledgment of my approach. He seemed so deep in thought for a minute that I wasn’t even sure he noticed I was there.
“For what it’s worth,” I finally said “That was one heck of a kiss.”
I was pretty sure he wanted to smile but wouldn’t allow himself too.
“I’ll be honest and also tell you that … that was my first kiss as well.”
Startled, he turned to face me.
“I almost made it your last.”
There wasn’t a trace of a smile on his lips.
“Well, at least I’d have died happy.”
“Don’t joke about it, Sara. I’m serious.”
“So am I,” I replied just as seriously.
We both turned to stare out at the water.
“How bad was it?” I asked quietly.
“I was half way there … but something stopped me. I’m not sure what.” He paused. “I wish I hadn’t done it.” He sounded sad.
“Why?”
“Because now I know. Now I know how much … you’re a part of me.”
“Maybe that’s what stopped you.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, shifting his gaze from the water to me. For the first time in a while I saw some small glimmer of hope in his eyes.
“I mean, maybe you realized that if you killed me, it would be like killing a part of yourself.”
He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he was thinking about what I’d said.
“Maybe the longer we’re together, the stronger that part will grow,” I added, praying that it would be true; that he would give it enough time to find out.
As he stared straight ahead, he still looked anguished. I felt an overwhelming urge to lean up against him, to reach out and take his hand, but I feared it might make things even worse for him.
“So I’m guessing this sort of thing doesn’t happen when you kiss a female vampire.”
“No, not that I’ve seen,” he replied.
I tried not to wonder how many female vampires he’d kissed over the past hundred and four years, but it was hard to chase the images from my mind. In an instant, I could feel my mood shift from sadness to an intense jealousy of these shadowy figures from his past. He must have sensed it because his head turned toward me with a hint of a smile.
“I’m sorry. I’m ruining our day together. I’m better now so what would you like to do? I’ll bet you’re getting hungry. It’s after lunch time.”
I said I was, but really only because I thought it was what he wanted to hear. After he microwaved me something to eat, we sat at the kitchen table for a while. He talked while I ate. After I finished, he put the dishes in the sink and began to clean up. I offered to help but all he did was smile down at me and shake his head. Realizing I’d been dismissed, I pulled an apple from my bag and walked into the living room. A large fireplace made of enormous smooth boulders dominated the room. The pile of firewood stacked neatly on the floor and the fresh soot in the hearth told me that it was used often.
As I walked around the room, I noticed that although there were lots of paintings on the walls, there were no photographs. It almost had the appearance of a model home more than a place where actual people lived.
Daniel came in from the kitchen, took a seat on the sofa and watched as I walked around looking at the little items that were scattered about. I picked up a vintage candlestick on a side table and admired it. It was made of brass and intricately crafted.
“Do we pass inspection?” he asked playfully.
“I don’t see any photographs.”
“No,” he shook his head. “There’s a box of them somewhere in the basement I think, but it’s best to keep them out of sight in case we have company.”
“How come?”
“It might be a little difficult to explain why the Professor is dressed in a World War One military uniform in France when he hasn’t aged more than a couple of days since then.”
“I suppose so,” I said absentmindedly as I picked up another candlestick. I was just noticing that there seemed to be quite a few of them scattered around the room.
“Who collects candlesticks?”
“The Professor. I think he’s more comfortable in candlelight sometimes. He doesn’t embrace the modern era as well as I do. But then again he’s a lot older than I am.”
“I love candles,” I said looking at the half burned beeswax candle in front of me. “I used to love to watch how the light would flicker about and make the shadows dance against the wall when I was little. Sometimes, when the power would go out, my mother would fill the house with them. It created this warm glow in every room. I used to imagine that was what it must have been like to have lived a couple hundred years ago.” I was still staring at the unlit candle for some reason.
“So what would you like to do for the afternoon?” he asked, changing the subject.
I looked up, roused from some strange half memory of gray eyes watching me over a candle. “Go to sleep now, Sara,” a hushed voice said. Then the candle went dark.
Shaking it off I said “How about we drive up to Mohonk Mountain House. I’ve heard a lot about it, but I’ve never been there.”
He had no objection, so we got in his car and headed up the mountain.
The ‘House’, built in 1869, looked more like a majestic yet rustic white, stone palace than a mere house. It was a lovely hotel resting on the rocky shore of Lake Mohonk. As we’d driven up the winding road, Daniel said he’d been here many times over the past century, but
hadn’t been back for a couple of decades. He sounded as if he’d like to see it as well, curious I think to see how it might have changed in all that time.
After we parked, we strolled through the lobby only to find ourselves drawn out the back doors towards the view overlooking the lake. When we gained the open air, we began to leisurely stroll hand in hand through the gardens with no particular destination in mind.
It was quiet. The hotel didn’t seem very full from the few people we saw lingering around in the lobby and grounds. I’d been looking around with a bit of professional curiosity. My job over the last year had been in a small hotel in Port Jefferson. Without realizing it, I found myself wondering when their busy season was up here on the mountain and what there nightly rates were. Shaking it off, I did my best to lose my work mentality and remember that I was walking beside a man who’d just professed to love me.
We wandered into a small garden containing an ivy covered, two story gazebo. The last of the fall flowers clung to its base in the center of the garden. Enjoying the peacefulness of the afternoon, we wandered through the garden and up the stairs into the gazebo in silence.
Daniel was silently mulling something over in his mind again. Each time I stole a glance up at his face, he seemed elsewhere. I desperately wanted to know what was occupying his thoughts so fully, but left him alone. He’d tell me when he was ready. Or so I hoped. But really, how well did I know him? In the grand scheme of things, he was really next to a perfect stranger. And yet, I felt as if I knew him intimately. How was that possible?
As we stood looking over the railing, he reached over and took my hand, but didn’t look over to meet my gaze. Instead, I glanced up to see him watching a hawk flying high above us as it gracefully rode the air currents over the expanse of the lake. Still staring up at the sky, he gave my hand a gentle squeeze. As simple a gesture as it was, it was a step in the right direction. It meant he wasn’t shutting me out. In return I leaned against his side only to feel him inhale deeply then slowly exhale, his eyes still fixed on the hawk gliding above our heads. After a minute, he stepped back from the railing.
“Come. There’s something I want to show you,” he said as he started off the gazebo pulling me along by the hand he still held. As we circled around to the far side of the garden; I admired a rustic wooden fence made out of sticks designed in a decorative pattern that bordered the path. It reminded me of an English country garden.
I sighed.
How nice would it be to walk hand in hand under the summer sun down a country lane in the English countryside?
I sighed again, how likely was that to ever happen?
He led me over to the side of the main building and stopped in front of a nondescript looking section of rock wall that made up this side of the hotel.
He pointed to the wall.
“I helped rebuild this section of the building back in 1915.”
I looked up at him in astonishment.
“I took a job as a day laborer when they rebuilt this section of the hotel.”
He took a few steps up to the wall and pointed at something.
“See?” he said.
I walked up to his side and saw a roughhewn D.B. carved in the stone.
“My initials.”
Amazed, I reached up and traced the outline of the letters with my fingers. Here it was. So simple, yet evidence of so much.
“How come you don’t go by Bennett anymore?”
“It seems to work out better if every so often we go by a different name. If someone suspected you and really wanted to track down your history, it just makes it a little bit harder for them this way. I usually just go by a different last name.”
“It must make you feel very isolated from the world, living the way you do. You see so much time pass, but try to not be involved in any noticeable way. It must get lonely.”
He didn’t answer, but looked up at the hawk again, leaving me to interpret his silence as a yes.
With no real destination in mind, we started to amble down towards the lake.
“Yes, it can be from time to time,” he finally said. “But I have the Professor and a few other close friends – family really, that come and go from my life. It’s not as bad as you might think.”
“Do these friends live like you and the Professor?”
“Yes, for the most part.”
“Sounds like an interesting bunch. Where are they now?”
My curiosity was driving me crazy, but I tried to hide it. I didn’t want to scare him away from the topic. As much as he’d revealed, he seemed predisposed to hide the vampire parts of his life from me. Maybe it was just a habit formed over the last century. I hoped that’s what it was and not that he was purposefully hiding anything from me.
“I’m not sure. Sam’s somewhere in Colorado. The last time we heard from Lucy, she was in Italy. I don’t know about the others. It’s odd, but sometimes they just show up on our doorstep after we were talking about them just the day before. There’s also Thomas and Lily. They usually stay together. You’d like them. Where Sam and Lucy are more on the wild side, Thomas and Lily are more like you.”
“Me?” I said, shocked.
“Yes you.” He laughed at my expression of surprise. “Lily’s the youngest of us all. She was born in the forties. She was twenty at the time she was bitten and living in San Francisco. Thomas is closer to my age, so you see they have an age difference as well.” Then he winked at me.
“Who are Sam and Lucy?”
“I guess you could call them my family, they’re the closest thing I have to one. The Professor sort of raised all of us. They all spent decades with him, at different times, changing to his lifestyle.”
“But they didn’t stay with him like you did.”
“No, they didn’t. It doesn’t usually feel normal for us to travel together. It’s only in rare circumstances that we find someone we want to spend a long period of time with, and even then we take breaks from each other every so often. It’s part of our nature to be solitary creatures. It was natural that they would leave him eventually when they were ready, just like it was for you to go off to college and begin a new chapter of your life apart from your parents.”
“Did the Professor – make them vampires?” I asked hesitantly.
“No, Randall feels very strongly about that. Even if they were on the brink of death, he’d never steal a human’s life from them. He would never rob them of a natural existence even at its end.”
We reached a stone porch lined with rustic wooden rocking chairs overlooking the lake and a dock below. In front of us an old wooden boat gracefully skipped across the otherwise placid surface of the lake.
“Randall?”
“That’s the Professor’s real name,” Daniel answered as we sat down.
“Oh. So do you agree with him on that?”
He thought about it for a moment.
“I suppose so, but he’s had experiences that have made him feel the way he does. I haven’t, so I guess I wouldn’t really know how I’d feel until I was presented with a situation where I’d have to make that choice. I’d like to think I’d do the right thing, whatever that was.”
“But you wouldn’t want to make someone like you?”
He sort of laughed and watched the boat skim across the black waters of the lake for a moment while he thought about his answer.
“I’ve had a hundred and five years to think about it and I don’t think I’ve been able to fully come to grips yet with what exactly it is I am. How could I do that to someone else? Besides, I don’t think I could sit there and watch someone go through the transformation.”
When he didn’t elaborate, I was left to wonder what this transformation process was like. Daniel seemed like a pretty tough guy. How bad must it be if a vampire didn’t want to watch it happen to someone else?
“So if you and the Professor are different, what are normal vampires like?”
“We’re different for a few reasons. One is be
cause normal victims of vampires are the dregs of society, people who won’t be missed. Drug addicts, hookers, criminals mostly. When they survive, for whatever reason that may be, the corruptible nature that made them who they were as humans, carries over. They in turn feed on their former kind with little after thought for right and wrong. It almost feels imprinted on us to live in secret, hidden from main stream society, and we all abide by that – well, most of the time.
“We are ingrained with a compulsion to live in the shadows of society and not draw attention to ourselves. I’ve been told that, like all of our more baser animal instincts, this compulsion lessens when you live as we do. This urge for reclusiveness fades to a certain extent. I guess you can see that if you look at us as a group.
“You see my family; we were the rare victims, the ones of our creator’s necessity. Normally a victim is chosen because of easy opportunity. Alone in a dark alley for example, or found somewhere well off the beaten path, but always someone that should they disappear no one would miss. Blood hunters are of course an exception to this rule. They hunt pures exclusively. But even though they go after people like you, ones that will most definitely be missed, they will usually try to make it look like a human committed the crime. Either that or they won’t leave the remains of their victim anywhere where a human could find it even with the most extensive search.
“Our theory is that because of the kinds of people we were – our old nature as humans, we were better equipped to live this new life than the rest of our kind. It’s not that they can’t live like we do, but they are forced to fight harder against their nature than we seem to have to. That said, it isn’t easy for any of us. In the end, we are creatures that desire blood, which means our basic nature is that of a killer, a predator. But we’ve been able to suppress this nature at least in part, mostly because of Randall.”
I leaned back in the chair, rocking back and forth as I watched the boat dance across the water. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two men standing on the rocks a little ways down the shoreline, casting their lines into the water. It was as tranquil a place as I’d ever seen. It seemed an odd spot to be having a discussion with a vampire about his darker nature, but I was starting to get used to that.
The Purity of Blood: Volume I Page 24