by Toby Bennett
“I know that tune,” Lillian says, seeking the comfort of her own voice in the echoing emptiness of the hall
“I do not doubt it,” Blake replies, “it was probably brought from here by the First Fathers.”
“What could this place have to do with the founding of the Union?”
“Everything,” Blake answers still struggling to get a grasp on his own suspicions, “I always wondered how the first soul I drained could have actually seen the Gate, seen it and not used it, he sought its salvation almost as strongly as I did. The answer is simple.”
“What?”
“We all had access to the Gate before the Strigoi came, these people died trying to defend it.”
“That’s if this Gate of yours even exists at all! The only thing I see is a tomb.”
“It is here I can sense we are near, we must be.”
“Or it’s all wishful thinking, whatever happened here happened so long ago that it could have been about anything, if this was some kind of Church or holy site I don’t see much evidence of it.”
“Not all faith requires outward show and if you doubt that there is always, Yorick.”
“What does he have to do with anything?”
“He is a prophet and he sought the Gate here, so it must be close.”
“Or he simply told you he did like everyone else has, it seems to be the surest way to get you to do anything.”
“That is not so.”
“Then why did he leave as soon as Aden died? The Gate would soon be here wouldn’t it?”
“I cannot fathom the mind of a creature such as Yorick.”
But you can understand this place? Only the dead could tell you anything about what went on here,” Lillian argues
“It’s just as I remembered it, a woman’s voice says from behind them, of course I was only a child when I last saw it.”
Chapter 19:
“Genesis”
“Julia,” Blake breathes, not needing to turn round to identify the speaker. It has been decades but she still fills him with both dread and need.
“You don’t need to tell me, child, you thought I was gone, they all did, it was necessary.”
Lillian turns to look back at the woman behind them, “Julia?” she echoes the Pilgrim’s confusion and Blake can tell that there is genuine recognition in the girl’s face, “what are you doing here?”
“How do you know her?”
“Julia? I’ve known her since I was a child. She was my nurse and then my tutor.”
“What part have you played in all this?” Blake voices his suspicion to the empty air before using all his courage to turn and face his former mistress. He nearly falls to his knees at the sight of her.
“Yes, still beautiful,” with a great effort of will Blake looks away from his mistress, “You say you’ve known her for your whole life?”
“Yes, how do you know her?”
“From a long time before that,” Blake murmurs, “ though she always had a talent for making the years run fast, I bet you’ve never asked why, in all the time you’ve known her, she has never changed.”
“It never seemed important,” Lillian answers lamely, suddenly uncomfortable when confronted by the truth. “Father just sent me to the tower to see her.”
“And you always read by candlelight.”
“Why should that matter?”
“It matters to Samuel, my dear, as far as he is concerned you and your General’s amulet have lead another vampire to his precious Gate.”
“It is not my Gate, it belongs to the Almighty.”
“And I am not fit to approach, no doubt.”
Blake hesitates in replying, sixty years of experience vying with his need to simply supplicate himself before his mistress.
“You wanted to be here all along,” he says softly.
“Of course, where do you think you got your obsession with this place? It was how I made you.”
“You didn’t make me.”
“What else would you call it? Or do you really believe that your father was a preacher? He was no more a preacher than your mother was his wife.”
“I am God’s creature not yours!”
“Believe what you like.”
“You couldn’t have planned this for so long.”
“Not long so far as I’m concerned, it was easier when Yorick was helping me but he seems to be looking after himself these days, a problem for another day perhaps.”
“You may have planned to find the Gate and you may have escaped the Crusade and left the rest to die but you did not make me.”
“Of course I did I made you both, whether you want to believe it or not, do you think that a normal man could be so perfectly suited to hunt the Strigoi? Could take so much strength into a feeble human frame?”
“Then you knew, you abandoned me, let me get old. You allowed me to damn myself.”
“I knew what you would have to do, if that is what you mean, Samuel and I gave you all the training to do it. I let that fake priest fill your head with fear for many years but what else could I do? You had to find the Gate for me and what better way to convince everyone I was dead than to let my favourite, my strongest creation go wandering. I made you strong as well as beautiful, Samuel.”
“I’m not beautiful any more.”
“Vanity,” the vampiress laughs, “a part of you I have always been proud of. You are still beautiful, Samuel you just do not have eyes old enough to see it.”
“Older than they should ever have been! I have drunk countless souls! Was it all for nothing?”
“You survived, just as I knew you would and you have brought us all here. As for damned? You have little more in common with Adam than a few chromosomes, I am not sure if your pact is really with God or with me … and neither are you.”
“Why do you say you made us both?” Lillian asks, “how could you ‘make’ anyone?”
“Have you guessed, Samuel? Can you tell the child the answer to her question? You spent along time in my service, probably longer than you can truly remember, I guess. What power does this Elder have that others are not privy to?”
“Blood!” The Pilgrim answers shortly.
“Yes, blood and flesh and all the tiny subtleties that make up the living. It took centuries to do it but I remade Lillian Carter from the smallest drops of blood which she shed when she took me from this place.”
“You made me from her blood?”
“Simply put yes, but it took longer than you can imagine and there were many false starts. By the time I was ready, there were so many who wanted to find the Gate or keep it shut, the original reasons were lost to all but a few like myself, the rest were chasing a legend.”
“The Gate is real,” Blake snarls.
“Oh of course it is! We are here, aren’t we? Its existence had not been forgotten but what it was has twisted with the years. The first decades of humanity in this place were a desperate struggle for survival, with few records, a perfect breeding ground for myths.”
“What myths?”
“Quarantine became a sacred pact; a vampire’s need to escape became salvation and those who tried to study the strange affliction that had overtaken those trapped in this place soon became secretive mystics, more involved in the twisted science of necromancy than any attempt to get anyone home. You’ve lived long enough to see how lies can grow from one generation to another.”
“What are you talking about?” Lillian asks.
“The beginning of everything my dear. Do you know what this place is? Why the trains still run after a thousand years, without engineers, without human intervention of any kind?”
“No, no one does.”
“They did once and I know a bit, though as I say I was only a child when it all began. I was reborn thirty years later and I must admit my memories of waking life are dim.” The vampire stops talking for a moment and an old longing passes over her perfect face.
“I still remember home though and I am sick of b
eing trapped in this desert.”
“You made my blood like Lillian Carter’s, so that the doors would open for you?”
“That should be obvious enough by now, I thought I’d taught you to notice detail better.”
“Sorry, I just can’t believe you could make me like the first Lillian Carter.”
“Not like Lillian Carters, I made you Lillian Carter down to the last cell. No so easy without the right equipment and I don’t mean the feeble scraps that Kalip spends a wasted eternity finding.”
“What does it all mean? Why did I have to be her? Why couldn’t you open the doors yourself? Why do the trains still run?”
“Because they were only made to look like they belonged here, the whole world we live in is a joke. People came here as travellers to experience a time long gone where people were primitive enough to use pistols and steam.”
“So where did the people come from?”
“We came from there,” Julia answers pointing to the thickest pillar at the centre of the hall, “your voice and blood can re-open a Gate to the sky… the Heavens if you prefer, Samuel.”
“No, it cannot be that, you must be lying.”
“So that I can get to your Heaven? Had you ever stopped to ask why anyone with eternity in front of them would seek that kind of judgement? The first of our kind sought the Gate as a means of escape, if I remember things rightly the sarcophagi you saw in the Citadel were not bought from outside but found and they were not empty, it was the creatures in those coffins that infected us with bloodlust and they sought to break the quarantine for reasons of their own.”
“Where are these Elders now?”
“Dead, their children were jealous and greedy. Man or monster their campaign ended in a pathetic corner of the galaxy subsumed by the desires of blood bonded tourists and thrill seekers trapped in a decaying funfair.”
“And even if that were the truth, what does one of these children want with the Gate now?”
“Simply to go home.”
“No more than that? You were a child then, you said so yourself.”
“Don’t question me, Samuel,” a mental whip seems to turn his legs to water and he finds himself on his knees, before his head clears. Instinctively his hand reaches for his gun but at the thought of drawing the weapon on his mistress his hand locks into a useless claw.
“I owe you no explanations, Samuel, do not mistake a whim for any obligation to answer you. Glare all you want, you know you cannot fight me, you are my creature, you are both my creatures. You’d have more luck trying to draw a weapon against your imaginary God than against me.”
Blake growls with rage, his eyes flaring with a light that had meant death to so many others but his mistress is right, when it comes to her, his body is not his own.
“Oh, Samuel,” Julia laughs, “you must not believe that you are no longer beautiful, it is marvelous to still see so much passion in you after all these years. If only for that I will grant you an eternity with me.”
“No!” The Pilgrim protests but at the core of his being he thrills at the thought of her sweet blood flowing through him, restarting his heart, at the moment she drains the very last drop from him.
“You will have your dearest dream,” Julia continues, reading his thought and disregarding his words, “and you too, my dear, once the Gate is open, my children, you will come with me to the stars to live forever.”
Blake rails, caught in his mistresses light mental grip, with all his will he batters against the compulsion to rise at her command and follow Lillian over to the hollow pillar that holds the Gate but he cannot win for he is really fighting against himself. What Lillian might be thinking, as she executes their mistress’s command Blake can only guess at but his own thoughts are dark, as he realizes that the Devil’s greatest power is to trap his victims in their own desires. Rail as he might, there is nothing that he wants as deeply as to feel the touch of his mistress again, to taste her, for it all to be as it was before she left him.
Lillian withdraws her hand from a panel next to the Gate and blue light flares through the chamber bright and pulsing.
Julia smiles, “Here is your Gate, Samuel, would you like to be the first to enter?” Did he detect caution in Julia’s eyes, trepidation that after so long the beam might not be safe. In his mind’s eye, Blake sees again the stolen glimpse of the column of fire blazing up into the Heavens; he feels the desperation of that first victim, the belief that redemption lay in that blinding light. A light he is sure is shining across the desert above them, even now, piercing the cloudless night sky with holy fire. Whatever she says, he knows in his bones that his mistress must not be allowed to reach beyond that light, but there is no way to stop her, his every cell burns at the thought of raising a weapon against her.
“Why must you continue to fight?” Julia asks impatiently, “there is no changing fate, surely now you understand that? You cannot raise a hand against me. How can you win and would you want to even if you could?”
“I know good from evil, I will not renounce my faith.”
“I gave you that faith in the first place, child. It has served its purpose, now let it go.”
“Never!”
“Do you think you can fight me then? Fight what you were made to be?” Julia mocks, taking a step close and shoving mentally in an attempt to force him back into the beam of light. Blake holds, not through any act of will but rather by giving in to his basest desire. He could not harm her, could not even think of raising a hand against her but when she had made him, she had had to make it possible for him to drink and that is what he does now, sweeping the struggling Elder into a powerful embrace and bringing his teeth down hard on her throat.
The hunger and passion of decades carries him through what must come next, the blood wells, seemingly endless, choking him so that he must learn to draw oxygen from the thick, syrup sweet icor. His mistresses struggles tear huge rents from his coat, breaking the steel links and gouging lumps of meat from his chest but he feels nothing, only the burning exhilaration of tasting her, of finally having her, drawing her into himself. At last her struggles stop and he feels her enter him, bitter, broken a flash of images and foiled dreams. He can see the inhuman thing that first bit her that hunted her and the other children, those that the adults had done their best to keep safe from harm. He sees a Lillian Carter, older than the one he knows and watches a nation grow by night from the scattered survivours in the towns and resorts that line the railway tracks. He feels the thrill of killing those inhuman masters of starting a new order and guiding men through centuries of forgetting, the frustration and the sardonic humour in knowing that none of it is any more real than the tiny towns themselves, that none of it truly matters in a greater universe.
Centuries of life and still insignificant! Blake shares the joke with all the fading souls still entangled with his own. She had made him to be the embodiment of all that pointlessness, a true believer in a world of lies. Damned by a search for salvation.
“We are a matched pair…” he murmurs, looking back at the pulsing blue light with new eyes and allowing the husk of humanity in his arms to fall with a brittle crunch to the floor. “This was always a world of ghosts,” he says, perhaps to Lillian, “but those who came here could not see that.”
“What will you do now?”
“I have found my Gate,” the Pilgrim answers “to stop now would show a lack of faith.”
“What should I do?”
“You know already.”
“I don’t know if I can seal the outer door.”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as you turn off the Gate once I am gone and never come here again no one else will be able to follow.”
“You’ll be trapped.”
“I must believe otherwise. Whatever else, I am not returning to this world.” Despite Julia’s strength flowing through him Blake feels age and weariness battering at him.
“When should I….”
Samuel Blake does not he
ar the rest of the question as he steps though into the blinding light and ascends in a streak of fire into the Heavens.
Epilogue:
Zak Tenichi has watched the stars above the tiny world of Augon 3 for longer than he can remember. In brief moments of lucidity, he has them every couple of decades, he rembers being the last back onto the orbiting station. His master’s voice driving him to reach the override switch. He had not made it and their bullets had bled him out to the point where the survivours had left him for dead, he had not heard his master’s voice for most of the time he lay on the cold metal floor and he wondered if being left to count stars was part of his punishment for failing. What then for Angelo, he hadn’t even tried to go for the switch just rushed off with the rest of the survivours. What punishment had the master given him? I could not be as bad as I got, Zak had often moaned to himself. The escape ships were not all used but, and that was the rest of his torture, with no life signs left on board the station had powered down, stopping the heaters and freezing him where he lay. Even when he had recovered enough to move his fingers, he had not been able to break the grip of his own frozen blood and crawl to the escape bays. There had been nothing left to do but lie back watch as the universe spun around him through the great glass bubble of the observation dome.