by Ian Hall
I headed for Amos’s room, to find him tied to the bed, his head still on his shoulders, a long knife embedded in his chest. He lay dead, the dagger having passed through his heart. A letter sat on his belly, and I crossed the room to read it.
Amos Blanche.
You have been served a warning.
We are a patient species, and have no need to bring attention to our kind.
Your latest foray into the public consciousness has been stopped.
Do not let it happen again.
G.
I folded the letter and replaced it on the bed. Then I pulled the knife from Amos’s chest. Blood sputtered from his mouth as he gasped his first. I rolled him to his side until his convulsive breathing quieted, fearing he might choke on his own vomit.
Never before had I seen Amos Blanche the way I saw him at that moment; curled on his side, blanket clutched in a white fist. With misplaced sympathy I reached for his shoulder, comforting him. As he rolled again to his back, I saw a dark light burning in his eyes. Immediately I realized he did not need my pity.
“Survivors?” he demanded, a feral rasp to his voice.
“Only you and myself from what I’ve seen.”
Amos’s lip curled into a snarl. “Good. We’ll rebuild again – this time a thousand-fold more deadly than before.”
My fingers found the small piece of paper and I presented it to Amos with trembling hand. “They say this was just a warning. If we continue to push…”
“If?” he spat the word at me. “There is no ‘if’, my dear Valérie. We will rebuild.”
I rocked back in shock. “Who’s ‘G’?”
“Pah,” Amos spat. “An immigrant Romanian upstart from Miami; thinks he knows how to run a vampire cadre. He doesn’t know shit.”
I thought of the man who had choked me, his handsome face had looked somewhat Romany.
Amos proved as good as his word. Brick by brick, he laid the new foundation. And he had learned well from his first excursion. Amos Blanche no longer opened his door to strays, accepting whatever the ruin of humanity stumbled his way. He took to actively seeking out his conquests, devoting valuable resources to their finding; looking for humans who boasted a darkness as natural to them as blood thirst to vampires.
Amos had a good eye for the work. Over the next ten years, he boasted such despicable acquisitions as Hannah and Barton Lynch, Sheldon Newell, and in due time, Alan Rand. In my mind I questioned the validity of every one; they did not seem to have the qualifications necessary to grow our group successfully, but they shared one basic quality: hearts of purest black.
During that time, a young, charismatic womanizer by the name of Donny Kelp became entangled in Blanche’s net. It turned out that Donny had courted a friendship with a certain politician’s daughter, and Amos required leverage.
Amos announced his new drive for power as his ‘crusade’, but having seen his previous attempts, I moved my attentions in one direction – getting out from under Amos’s jackboot.
For some time I had known of the ability to make men see what I wanted them to; almost a hypnotic capacity which I had honed for some time.
When I sided with Donny against Amos, and he took my blood nightly, I knew my time had come.
It took me sixty-one days to disguise my physical state to the degree of atrophy I needed for my biggest deception. From day one, as Amos drank from my neck, I held back some of my strength. By the end of the second week, I feigned half strength, but actually grew in both power and vitality.
As Amos drank each night, he reveled in his supposed triumph, and allowed the chinks in his armor that I needed; cracks that let my veil cover his eyes, those dull, conceited eyes. I wept inside for Donny, forced to witness my apparent destruction, but I knew that I needed the partnership between Amos and Donny to be complete for me to put my plan into action.
Each night I clenched the muscles in my neck tighter, stymying the flow. By the end of the month, hardly a trickle passed into Amos’s mouth, but still he sucked, trying to drain me.
Each night, as Amos reveled, his gaze locked to Donny’s, I clouded his eyes more, my control over him becoming stronger. Sometimes as he nuzzled my artery for more, he came so close that I could breathe directly up his inflamed nostrils, my power growing each day. Not that I ever thought I could defeat the man in a straight fight, I just needed his eyes to be elsewhere when I performed for the final night. I needed Donny to play his part. I needed the performances of a lifetime.
On the sixty-first night, Donny leant close to our embrace, his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, his skin a deathly grey. I knew that this would be the evening of my escape.
I breathed into Amos’s face, then did the same to Donny. “I die,” I said repeatedly. “I crumble to dust,” I whispered softly. Their attention seemed so rapt on my declining condition, neither heard me. “I crumble to dust.” I gave a gasp, then fell limp in Amos’s grasp. “I crumble to dust.”
With every fiber of my being, I thrust the image of my body crumbling into their minds.
Amos stood up, letting me fall to the wooden floor. Donny gave a gasp of disgust, and stalked from the room in a dark temper. For a moment, Amos looked down at me, and I held my breath, too frightened to move. Then he shrugged and walked away, the footsteps in the hall getting quieter as he returned to his den.
For minutes I lay in silence, not entirely convinced that I’d gotten away with it and deceived the old man. I listened with all my might, but the dull chorus of the horns of faraway trains proved the only sound, their long plaintive tones announcing my victory.
I allowed myself the beginnings of a smile; I’d achieved success over one of the oldest vampires alive.
I silently got to my feet and crept to the door, stealing a look out into the corridor. The dark hallway beckoned, and my feet took to the left, away from Amos’s room. I couldn’t take the chance of saying a proper goodbye to Donny, but silently wished him well, and with a trembling hand, gripped the handle of the main door.
In a second, I stood outside.
South.
In a minute, I passed out of the main streets of town and raced down the street. The setting sun lay on my right, and I kept it there as I did fifty miles without stopping.
Ivan’s Story
The Fall and Rise of a Jesuit Vampire
The Jesuit Collegium in Lviv stood a marvelous building. Designed as a sister to Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, and founded in 1661, the Greek Roman Catholic Church had never been so strong in Poland.
I still recall attending my first class, the stone of the buildings lay pristine, unscarred by future generations, and I knew that I gave birth to new dreams as I entered. I had studied the philosophies for many years, taking work where I could find it, but when Father died, he left me a small amount, and I joined the Collegium in its first year, one of the older students at the age of thirty-six.
I lived the life of a zealot then, immersed to my forehead in the Roman Catholic faith. In those early days, I spent my time between devotion, prayer, scripture, and sleep. If I did anything else, I did it within those boundaries, and never noticed.
I still remember the nun who broke me of such practices – Sister Magdalene. Her prayer might have been sent in a heavenly direction, but her worldly practices were of an earthier base.
Not that I went readily; it took her six months of attention to break my spirit, but my body followed mere minutes afterwards.
Expecting the seduction to be the ultimate goal of her attentions, I’d relaxed my guard, my instincts fallen asleep. When she bit my neck and sucked on my life-force, I had little resistance to offer, if indeed it would have mattered. When she offered her wrist, I suckled like the hungriest of babes.
Despite my devotion to God, I had been ‘turned’, drawn into the Order of the Strogoi: a vampire.
Sister Magdalene proved an experienced teacher, both in the ways of the flesh, and the darker side of the Order, beyond the mortal coil
.
At first disgusted in my slide from righteousness, I railed from her teachings, but soon my hunger took over and I listened, accepting a drink of cold, rancid blood from a vial on her belt.
“You are now of The Order of the Strogoi,” she would repeat as I nodded. “You will feed cautiously and wait for the directions of your Elder.” She left me with little other instruction.
When my hunger grew, I roamed far outside the city, returning ashamed and repentant to my devotions, my lust sated.
I studied for another four years before being approached by another of the Order.
A thin man, most advanced in years, told me to follow him. And I did.
Never speaking his name, we rode in Jesuit robes to Moshny in the Ukraine, some four hundred miles to the east, a journey which took us many weeks. Our Jesuit prayers were increasingly asked for, and we played the part. We blessed many, and drank the blood of a few.
Once in that small-walled town, I was assigned the task of rising in the ranks of the Hetmanate, the Cossack ruling class, to keep a close guard on the elder member of the Lucescu family, Apostol Lucescu of Zaporozhia, then a mere boy of teenage years.
A direct descendant of Yakiv Ostranin, who had sacked Constantinople in 1615, Apostol had yet to marry, but my Elder seemed sure he would rise to prominence in the Cossack Hetmanate.
It took me many years, but I rose to his side, an advisor and mentor, in a position well beyond my Elder’s original plans.
Thirty years later in 1699, a great sickness befell the nation, and the strategies of the Elders fell asunder. I watched as my instructor was killed before me, and the house of Lucescu torn apart, mostly by plague, but also by Hetmanate clan retribution. My house became disengaged from Zaporozhian politics forever.
Despite my most valiant efforts, Apostol’s albino son, Tomas, got killed in the political machinations, and I fled with my woman, Samara, to the west.
We settled in many towns, moving every decade or so, our wealth accumulating as we did so. Mostly we lived in modest comfort, seemingly always heading to the Mediterranean, our bodies craving warmer climes.
For almost a century we stayed discreetly below the comment of the modern aristocracy, but it seems that vampires are like moths, and frequently fly too close to the flame. We rose from our station once too often, and were run out of town by an angry mob. I lost my Samara that day, her body captured and burnt by a legion which beggared no mercy.
I watched from high on a church roof as she screamed her last, her body tied tight to the post, the flames quickly engulfing her.
In mourning, I returned to the lonely guise of Jesuit, and roamed Spain and France for many years. With anger in my heart, I joined the army of Spain, and fought for the King. Killed three times, my comrades forced me to flee my regiment, banished and shunned as a demon from the very pits of Hell.
Travelling north, the deep fervent against the royalty gave me ample food, and little chance of discovery. When the people of France rose, I served as a messenger in the people’s revolutionary army; I found being a vampire helped in this profession. Virtually immortal, I could shrug off minor wounds easily, and the battlefields held a plethora of fresh blood, lying, waiting to be consumed. I rode whenever I could, but when horses became scarce, I took to my heels, knowing I could outrun any man. It was a grand time for Ivan Vyhovsky; I lived well, and never stayed in the same place for long periods. When the coalition of nations exiled Napoleon to Saint Helena, I offered my services to anyone who could afford me. In those early days, wars were a constant source of both employment and food; a perfect situation.
For many years I did without a female companion, the memory of Samara’s demise still relatively fresh in my mind.
Then, at a Paris dinner party in 1843, I met Constance Berthier, a most beautiful courtesan, with raven black hair. She plied her trade in the highest of circles, and it took me some time to accumulate the contacts to speak to her, but when we first kissed, a thousand fireworks exploded at once.
Alas, I could not keep her to myself no matter how I tried, she proved far too wild. I shared her attentions with many men, authors, playwrights, and princes.
I considered taking her and turning her to the Order, but I feared a backfiring of her love, and stayed content in the few nights we shared. I watched her from afar, even after she married and moved to Florence. One evening, as I passed close to their large house, I heard her scream.
It could be no other.
I ran around the walled garden, to find a gruesome scene in the alleyway. Constance lay, thrown against a rough mound of coal. A dark figure crouched over her, and I had no doubt of the purpose of his attentions. I launched myself at him, and hit him with such force, that he flew out of my sight, landing with a crash many yards away.
I knelt at her side, but my Constance lay dying before me, her throat torn asunder by the assailant. I went to lift her, then felt her distended stomach. Surprised, I set her down again, and she groaned loudly, her cry echoing in the dark alleyway. Blood now flowed freely from the wounds on her neck, showing black in the evening shadows. Having no other recourse, I savaged my own wrist and put it to her mouth.
“Drink, my love,” I urged, pushing my arm past her teeth. “It will save you…and the baby.”
But she had hardly begun to drink from my wrist when she swooned in my arms. Unconscious, her body began to convulse, and I knew that the birth had begun. I held her as her body pushed the baby from her womb in seconds.
Once clear of its mother, the baby cried loudly, its cries alerting the servants to our presence. Faced with immediate discovery, and implication in what would surely be Constance’s murder, I swiftly bit through the baby’s cord and whisked my love away from the scene.
Constance remained lifeless for a whole day, her body close as I continued my speedy escape north, making the foothills of the Alps before the next morning.
Under my constant supervision, she convalesced on the shores of Lago d’Iseo in the small hamlet of Sulzano. I calmed her first days, then explained what had happened to her and her fallen infant.
Initially she blamed me for bringing the Order to her door, but within weeks seemingly came to an understanding within herself.
At times I found her in deep contemplation, rocking back and forth, as if she coddled a baby.
Because of her ties with the aristocracy in France, I presented her to a full meeting of Elders later that year. It would be the last time I would ever see my Constance again.
I walked from the grand castle in Transylvania and vowed to leave my native lands, making for Zagreb, then the port of Trieste. Taking the first passage west, I encountered the Ivory Coast of Africa, then for some wild notion, determined to sail round the world.
At each stopping point, I met vampires, but the further I travelled, the stranger their customs would become. In some countries, the vampire groups welcomed me and I settled for many months. But in others, the Dutch East Indies in particular, the vampires despised my ‘oldness’, and I was chased from the islands, fearing for my life.
After staying in Japan for two years, I received a letter from the Elders that changed my direction.
Ivan,
I hope that one of my missives reaches you.
Travel to San Francisco, California, North America.
There, contact an Asian diplomat by the name of Chin Loo.
He has a new assignment for you.
Bris
1872
The letter, apparently three years old, gave me direction in my rather haphazard life. I made my way sedately to the United States, perfecting my English as I travelled.
I had no idea of what awaited me in this blank slate of a country.
In the spring of 1876, I arrived in the bustling port of San Francisco, and began to make enquiries of the oriental gentleman.
It seems that wherever one travels in the world, home is a difficult thing to shake off. The Chinese seemed to have perfected the transform
ation. Wherever they went, they took home with them, building ‘small Chinas’ wherever they settled.
San Francisco lay a case in point.
‘Chinatown’ proved more than a place filled with Orientals; it was a fortress within a city that held dangers for the unwary.
“I seek Chin Loo,” I asked at many stalls and establishments, always guided deeper into the colorful inner city. At last, I sat in the waiting room of an acupuncturist, where I sat for an hour. A small girl attended me with cups of weak tea, until I eventually got invited to meet the man.
For all the old decoration and lighting, all the image of ‘oldness’, Chin Loo sat behind a huge desk, dressed in a modern business suit.
He invited me to sit, and I did so, waiting on his attention.
“I am Chin Loo Min,” he said. “What do you want of me?”
His voice sounded like he had spoken through some strange musical contraption, his words light and melodic.
Regardless of his demeanor, however, Chin Loo held one other attribute.
He smelled of vampire.
I handed him the letter. “I am Ivan Vyhovski. I am of the Order.”
Chin Loo gave me a strange, almost menacing look. He stood and walked slowly round his desk. “Excuse me,” he said, as he placed his head near mine and sniffed loudly. Maintaining the puzzled expression, he returned to his shiny leather seat.
He leant back and laced his fingers together. “You are indeed of the Order, but you hide it well.”
“I was trained in 1666 by an Elder who knew of the subtleties of the Order.” I nodded across the table at my letter. “Do you have instructions for me?”
“I have been given instructions to hand this mission to the first member of the Order who presented himself here.” Chin Loo observed me for a moment. “I have had these instructions for five years. Do you know of a partnership called ‘The Two Clerics’?”
I shook my head.
“It is hardly surprising. They have been quite discreet in their dealings, but nevertheless, news of their actions has come to our attention. You are aware, are you not, of a certain diminishing of discipline in the Order?”