The Delicate Dependency: A Novel of the Vampire Life

by Talbot, Michael

  “Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive mad, is that it?” I inquired acidly.

  “Most poetic, Dottore,” he replied with clinical disregard.

  “Is that what you did with all the others, with Dr. Chiswick and the physician in Liverpool?”

  “Yes.”

  “And everything, the war with the vampire, the train chase, the capture of the man from the società in Florence, it was all a game, an elaborate deception intended to make me destroy the virus and perhaps myself in a paranoiac frenzy?” I was so filled with fury at such a treacherous and dispassionate imposture that I shouted out the words, causing Ursula to turn toward me in alarm. Even little Camille was affected and she hugged my legs forbearingly. Only Lodovico remained motionless, unblinking—gripping the arms of his chair like a Cumaean Sybil.

  Again I became aware of a sound coming from the corridor. It was a clumsy sound, as of something dragging over the floor. Ursula heard the sound as well, for she looked toward the door with dread. Whatever it was, it was approaching. We both remained frozen, watching the resplendent carved white doors of the grand salon and wondering what freakish brute maneuvered beyond. It moved indolently. A nail scratched against the floor. There was a thud.

  I looked at Lodovico with consternation, searching for some clue as to what was about to happen. But his expression was stony, almost dazed. Something pressed against the door.

  I turned again, watching with Ursula, as the white door crept open. It moved so slowly I was almost unaware of it, save that the space between the door and its frame was quietly widening. Again there was a slothful scratching and both of our eyes followed the space down to the floor, where we were met with an unexpected sight. There on the floor was a large Galapagos tortoise. To our further surprise, as it slowly moved through the door we saw that it was inlaid with gilt and completely encrusted with jewels. Every inch of the carapace of its back glimmered with rubies, emeralds, diamonds, topazes, opals, and pearls. Furthermore, attached to the bejeweled back was a golden tray sparklingly laden with cordial glasses and a decanter of an unknown liqueur.

  “This is Artemidorus,” Lodovico introduced. “Would you care for an aperitif?”

  Before we could answer, the door at the end of the corridor opened and closed and footsteps, this time distinctly more human, padded down the hall. Artemidorus, the gilt-and-liqueur-laden tortoise, had barely made it to the middle of the room when the door swung open and in strode Monsieur des Esseintes in his pea-green waistcoat and holding his beribboned straw hat in his hands. His expression was solemn, more solemn than I had ever seen in his pale and bony face. He bowed before Lodovico and then turned and gazed at us.

  “Bonjour, monsieur... mademoiselle.”

  He turned back quickly toward Lodovico and muttered something in an unknown Eastern-sounding tongue. It might have been ancient Babylonian or Sumerian. I did not know. Then he snapped his knuckles and clicked his fingernails in a rapid and crackling succession. At des Esseintes’s appearance the older vampire appeared strangely relieved and lapsed even further into his peculiarly lethargic mood. Although he seemed on the verge of drifting into an almost narcotized state, his mind was still clearly cognizant of what was transpiring. He closed his eyes. His head tipped back limply, but one of his large hands lifted from the arm of the chair and issued a complex staccato of clicks in reply.

  The gilded and bejeweled tortoise stopped before Lodovico’s chair and turned its head torpidly in our direction. It blinked its large and woeful eyes at us as if wondering if we did indeed want an aperitif. Pondering the life span of the giant tortoises, I wondered how long this priceless monstrosity had been in the older vampire’s possession.

  “Oui,” replied Monsieur des Esseintes, taking up the conversation exactly where Lodovico had left off. “Everything that Dr. von Neefe told you about vampire hunters was a fabrication. There is a Dr. Weber at the University of Vienna, but he, too, is one of our kind. The abduction of the man from the società was staged merely for its psychological impact. In truth, the gentleman you saw taken into the carriage in Florence is one of the servants in this grand house. He works in the stables.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “All along, from the very beginning, when Lady Dunaway entered my house until we came to Massa Marittima, all you ever wanted was for me to destroy the virus?”

  “Oui, Monsieur le Docteur.”

  “But the time and money you invested. Why such endless sleight of hand? Why didn’t you just have Niccolo torch my laboratory, or why didn’t you just take the virus from me?”

  Monsieur des Esseintes stood looking at us for many long moments as if he were reluctant to answer.

  Again the older vampire, who was now deep in some unknown mental state, lifted his hand and emitted a series of clicks. Monsieur des Esseintes turned to us again.

  “Helas, monsieur,; this will come as profoundly unbelievable to you, but we have been more truthful with you than you’ve suspected. When Niccolo first revealed to you that he was a vampire, he told you we disdained killing. I have never dwelled upon the matter, but that is more true than you can ever know. We have lived the bloody pageant of history. There is not one in our number who has not seen a loved one tortured or dismembered at the hands of you and your kind.” For the first time since I had known him, Monsieur des Esseintes shuddered. “Books could be written,” he said slowly. “Children have had their eyes gouged out. Throughout history the methods of disemboweling, hanging, beheading, breaking with the wheel, burning, flaying, trussing, flogging, cutting off of the ears, hands, breasts, and genitals boggle the imagination.” He paused for a moment, once again enveloped in his familiar unutterable calm. “My own wife, Noemie, was tortured to death during the French Revolution in 1792.”

  He conveyed the remark simply and factually, as if it were the time of day or a passing amenity, but I suddenly realized that the endless depictions of the woman in farthingales, the numerous statues, and the carefully tended altar of purple orchids conveyed a deep and sustaining bereavement even if the Frenchman’s countenance did not. I wondered what vast and unsuspected rancor still coursed through the unmanifested thinking processes of the vampire.

  He took a slow step forward.

  “It is true that we could have set the torch to your laboratory or murdered you and taken your work, but, believe it or not, Monsieur le Docteur, we are a race more moral and ethical than any species you have yet encountered. Unlike our human ancestors, and you are our ancestors, as distant from us as you yourselves are distant from the lower primates, we have evolved, we have passed into an awareness that is still many centuries from the grasp of your species. We have had enough of violence and killing. We have reached a state where we have realized that force, no matter how morally justified, will only beget force. For a while you believed that we wanted the virus because we wanted to destroy you. I must tell you that for untold centuries we have had the alchemical knowledge to destroy your race, but we would never do that. We see only aboriginal idiocy in the notion of an eye for an eye. Even if the day comes that you hunt us down, that you kill us every one, we will never use our knowledge to destroy you.

  “I have told you that there are things you would not understand. It is with little hope that I tell you we would die proudly before resorting to violence, for we have set our sights on a more distant vision. We are lucidly aware that achieving through mere physical force establishes the rules of a game from which there is no escape. When one grants oneself the moral justification to use force, one cannot logically deny it in one’s enemies, for all moralities are relative. The dissimilarity between different human cultures alone suggests that one cannot establish universal goods and evils. The enormous disparity between mortal and vampire makes such values a farce. In the end, if we see the wisdom in a world without violence we must be willing to take the first step, to refuse to resort to physical coercion, no matter what the costs.

  “That is why we go through such
an involved game. You see, we are creatures of pure intellect. We have chosen a weapon we are fully prepared to allow our enemies to use as well—words and illusion. We always play fairly with our enemies. We employ a set of tactics that never forces them or restricts their free will. We are of the opinion that through guile and bluff we can trick an opponent into killing themselves. We do not use airships or guns. Our only weapons are misinformation and confusion. Our only battlefield is the mind.”

  Could it be true? Was it possible that these creatures, beings who were infinitely superior to the mortal world both in body and science, were duty bound to refrain from using physical aggression no matter what the consequences? It seemed to me the height of folly, but for once I sensed in the blue eyes of the Gallic gentleman that it was the unqualified truth. I had suspected previously that some unknown code of honor was prohibiting them from actually taking the virus from my hands, and now that notion was verified. What other explanation could there be for the fact that Lodovico stood by so helplessly as we escaped from Monsieur des Esseintes’s, and as I unrelentingly made my way back to London, back into the middle of their attack on Cletus? At any second on the train he could have reached out and snatched the virus, but he didn’t. He didn’t because he was constrained by belief, as constrained as the Hindu is not to violate his caste, as constrained as a martyr, who, with a word of renunciation, could save himself from the flames.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked.

  “Because the game is over,” des Esseintes replied. “We have tried and we have failed. We cannot start the game anew.”

  On one hand I was exhilarated by my newfound knowledge. It made me feel I had some power. Here I was standing in their midst with the virus they wanted so desperately, and they were completely powerless to reach out and do a thing. On the other hand, I was outraged. They seemed to consider their intellectual game as somehow noble. In their distorted view of things they obviously perceived their terrifying shams and deceptions as completely sporting, as urbanely acceptable as a parlor game, or a round of chess. Had I not come to understand the vampire better, I might have viewed their sweetly reasonable perception as raw evil. As it was, I did not accept that all moralities were relative. I could never hold that it was somehow more ethical or moral in any way to drive a person insane than to shoot him with a pistol. But some distant part of me seemed to accept his words, or at least intuit that it was not raw evil that spoke, but a complex and ordered intelligence, albeit nonhuman, that, taken within the context of its own existence, was as calmly accepted as any clergyman’s faith.

  The vampire apparently perceived my irresolution. “Stand witness, Monsieur le Docteur,” he said. “Ours is the way of the future. If there comes a day when humanity trafficks with a truly alien intelligence, evil will come not in their sword, but in the unconformity of their logic.”

  Outside the sunset was beginning to lose its vermilion. The shadows of the slender Tuscan columns grew long within the room and the olive trees still fluttered soundlessly. Only one question remained.

  “Why did you want me to destroy the virus?”

  With this Lodovico languidly opened his eyes, as languid as the gilded tortoise at his feet, and their black thunder cut through us once again. Another quaver of power trembled through his limbs as he kept those unfathomable orbs upon us. “The answer to that,” he said, “lies in your daughter.”

  On reflex I tightened my hands upon little Camille’s shoulders and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Ursula watched my every movement attentively I looked back at the Alexandrian scribe.

  “That is what drew me to her in the first place. We have ways of knowing the future more accurately than you. We cannot predict the final role of the dice, but we can sketch a passable picture of coming events. For uncounted centuries we have been playing our game. We knew that the time was coming when we would lose our secret influence in the world. We knew that the fates had chosen you to be the unwitting instrument in this denouement, but we did not know how. When I learned that your child was an idiot savant I thought the unseen wheels had delivered me a sign.

  “I have already told you why we wanted you to destroy your virus. I have told you many times. Because the world is blind and will use it for destructive purposes only. It is a sad truth, but it is a truth, indeed, that the knowledge of the human species far surpasses their wisdom. I do not know why fate has chosen this to be so, but it is so. It has been true since the first ape picked up the jawbone of an animal and swung it as a weapon. That is why we have done everything we have done. The engineer at Oxford had come up with the design for a dirigible that possessed the brushstrokes of genius, but it was a dangerous genius, a military genius. If he would have released it upon the world at this time the results would have been devastating. We had to stop him. You may be interested to know that your Dr. Chiswick had come very close to your own discovery. He had devised a way of creating endless biological mutations of the influenza virus. We had to put a stop to it before he achieved what you did achieve, the creation of a virus that completely lacks antigenicity.” With this last remark Lodovico underwent another faint seizure and in the flash of an eye his features were suddenly feminine.

  “Don’t you see?” said a voice that once again lacked the sonorous Italian accent. It was a deep, but more womanly voice. The voice was oddly disjointed with the countenance, the rumbling eyes. It was Dr. von Neefe’s voice, or at least the voice of the personality that had pretended to be Dr. von Neefe. Its effect upon me was piercing. I was swept with a warmth, an almost bereaved longing, but at one and the same time I was repelled by my own feelings. It was as if it were the voice of a deceased loved one speaking through the body of a medium, or the voice of an oracle coming from the mouth of an entranced priest.

  Even as I recoiled the ghost faded away.

  “That is why I saw your little daughter as an omen, or portent,” Lodovico continued. “Camille is a creature who possesses a certain genius, a very special genius, but completely lacks all awareness or understanding of her own capabilities. And what is the entire human race if they are not creatures who possess genius, but are also bound by their own blindnesses and stupidities? Don’t you see, what is Camille if she is not the perfect metaphor for the human race? What are your scientists if they are not idiots savants?”

  “That is the work of the vampire,” I chided scornfully, “to function as the benevolent overseers of the human race? To scour the newspapers and scientific periodicals and every time you come across an invention or discovery that you deem dangerous in the hands of we mere mortals, you bring your fist down?”

  “Never the fist.”

  “Your game, then. Your game!” I shook my head in disbelief. So that was why the vampire were always associated with centers of knowledge, why Lodovico had been drawn to the scholarly exploits of the Medici, why the medieval vampire of Europe had participated so benignly in the school of Notre-Dame. “How long has this been going on?” I demanded. “How long have the vampire considered themselves the grand inquisitors of human learning?”

  “Since the Unknown Men decreed it,” Lodovico boomed. “I am going to tell you, Dottore, what I have told few other mortals. I am one of the Unknown Men. There are eight others. We are the undisclosed rulers, the hidden powers at the top of the secret hierarchy of the vampire. Together we possess the combined knowledge of this world.” He clutched the arms of his chair, and his dark eyes blazed. “For centuries we have pulled the secret strings of history. You seem to greet our work as mere censorship, but if you knew the gravity of the forces at play, if you knew what holocausts we have prevented, you would understand a glimmer of the sovereign reasoning behind our task. These forces have been discovered before. They were known by the ancients. They were preserved in the library of Alexandria, and that is why the library had to be destroyed. Your history books say the library was burned by the Arabs in A. D. 642. That is not true. It was destroyed by the Christian Patriarch, Theop
hilus, in A. D. 392. It was a simple matter for the vampire to convince Theophilus that the library contained the works of the devil.”

  In an awesome flash my mind dredged up all that I knew about the fabled Alexandria. Not the Alexandria of today, but the Alexandria that Lodovico must have known, the Alexandria that remains only in a few crumbling catacombs and pillars and submerged beneath the Mediterranean. I recalled reading of a city whose splendor encompassed no less than four thousand palaces, four hundred baths, and four hundred theaters. In a dreadful vision I imagined its library, containing all the knowledge of the ancient world, in a roaring tower of smoke and flame against the Egyptian sky. A few short months ago I would not have believed that there was a conspiracy that had infiltrated our entire history and stretched back through the mists of time, but my skepticism had long since died. I had witnessed enough. I had seen the stones laid by their hands and I knew of their influence. I knew there was a second intelligent species on this earth, that they had mingled with popes and kings and infiltrated every level of our society. I knew that there was an entire other history of the world, and that that was what was being spoken to me now, merely a page of vampire history. What invoked my fury was that this was not an age-old dispute, a crime committed by his ancestors. It was a crime committed by this creature himself. No doubt it was he who had whispered the words that had set the library of Alexandria to flames.

  “How could you!” I croaked. “How can you dare to say you value knowledge and then destroy it so carelessly?”

  For the first time since I had known him des Esseintes gaped unbelievingly. Only another series of raps and clickings from the older vampire seemed to pacify his perplexity.

  “He doesn’t know,” Lodovico muttered to him. Lodovico turned to me, shaking hia head slowly. “Nothing has been destroyed, Dottore. For the centuries of our work whenever it has been necessary for us to keep a certain discovery from being released upon the world, we have never allowed anything to be lost. The papers of the engineer at Oxford, Dr. Chiswick’s findings—copies of all of these things can be found here.” His voice lowered to a reverent hush. “Every word, every arcane fact from the library of Alexandria has been preserved.”