There they were.
7
There were two females and one male, all sitting side by side with the male in the middle.
They sat in what I would have called thrones, but very plain, and very large. Like chairs made out of concrete. No decorations, no adornments, just massive structures to hold their massive bodies.
They were three or four times the size of normal vampires or humans. They sat exceptionally still, as if they were made out of concrete themselves. For a moment, I actually thought that maybe it wasn’t them but some sort of sarcophagus we were supposed to enter. But then they spoke.
“We see you’ve made it. As we knew you would,” they said, all three of them speaking in one voice, as if the three separate beings I was looking at were really just one entity.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to speak. I wasn’t even sure if this was really happening or just going on in my own mind.
“Speak for yourself, Victoria,” they said, and I thought they might be angry.
“Uhh, ughh...” I started, needing to clear my throat and gather my thoughts at the same time. I wasn’t often tongue-tied and for the first time ever, I felt like one of my own targets. “Why do you want to see me?”
I felt small. Very, very small in front of them. And not only because I actually was.
“You know why we want to see you. At least now you do.”
Their voices resonated together in an incredibly pleasurable way. I could hear the three separate voices, one for each being, but they were woven together so tightly so as to create a harmony. It was both frightening and alluring.
I looked up into their eyes, which I wasn’t sure I was allowed to do, but they had no irises, no pupils, just gold bulbs in their eye sockets, which faintly glowed, just like the rest of them.
“My gift,” I said, and I hated how nervous I sounded. “It changed.”
“Not changed,” said the left-hand female. “Just realized.”
I didn’t realize that they could speak by themselves and I was taken aback for a moment as I gathered up the courage to answer her.
“I don’t understand,” I said, and it was the truth.
“Knowers, in some sense, are never born, but made,” said the right-hand female. “You were given the gift at transformation, but knowers must realize what they are in order to use it consciously. Often it takes millennia. You’ve come along quickly—out of necessity.”
I wanted to tell them to take it back. That I didn’t want it, but I was too scared.
“Which is exactly why knowers must realize their gift, instead of having it handed to them. No one wants it. At least not at first.”
The male had read my thoughts, though I didn’t think I had communicated with him.
“No you didn’t. I just know,” he said.
“Why me?” I asked, feeling bolder in expressing myself, knowing they could simply read my thoughts. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I think you already know,” said the left-hand female, and I was beginning to pick up on the pattern.
“Dr. Ivy,” I said, not even fighting it.
“Yes,” she said. “The order must be put back into place. The scales are unbalanced.”
As she said it, an enormous golden scale appeared between us. One side was toward the sky and the other side toward the earth, as if it was weighed down by something very heavy although both trays were empty.
“What happens if they remain unbalanced?” I asked.
“Then the line between life and death becomes unclear,” she said.
“Which means what exactly?”
I was shocked to see the left-hand female get up from her throne.
“When an immortal becomes immortal, there is a price to pay for that immortality,” she began, towering in front of me. “If one being on this Earth becomes immortal, she must take the lives of many mortals to exist. That balances the scales.”
I thought that was awful, even though I understood the logic. Hell, I had practiced the logic, but it still didn’t sit right with me. It never had.
“But isn’t that wrong? To take the lives of others, just so you can be immortal?” I asked, feeling bolder with every moment that passed.
She shrugged her shoulders and I realized that her eyes had changed. They looked like normal eyeballs now with a pupil and an iris, and they were brilliantly brown.
“That is of no concern to us. We are only concerned with maintaining the balance.”
She was shrinking in size, so that now she stood next to me like any other vampire or human. The male and the right-hand female, however, maintained their size and appearance as they sat in their thrones. They seemed to be paying attention, though I couldn’t really tell.
“What would a city be like, overrun by immortals?” she asked, coming closer to me. Her body radiated warmth and power, and I was comforted.
I thought about it, and a thought popped into my head right away.
“There would be no food. But plenty of dead bodies,” I said, and almost laughed as if I had made a joke, but I stopped when she gave me no reaction.
“That’s right. It would be misery,” she said and paused, I assumed for dramatic effect. It worked. “Vampires are the result of an...agreement between Life and Death. We take advantage of a loophole.”
It had taken her a while to come up with the word “agreement,” and I wondered what it meant. In my mind, I saw a picture of two old, white haired men—one Life and one Death—negotiating a contract in a big conference room, and thought it was ridiculous.
“The only thing Life and Death require is that the scales remain balanced, so that the order may be maintained. Vampires...evolved with a special life force. One that could transform others, but which always needed to be maintained.”
She was choosing her words carefully. I had the impression that “evolved” was the best she could come up with, but it didn’t exactly explain the origin of Vampires either. I wasn’t sure I was following everything, but I was beginning to get a picture of what would happen if vampires—immortals—were not required to take life in order to maintain theirs.
“Alright, so what happens exactly? What happens when the scales remain unbalanced? When the line between Life and Death becomes unclear?”
The left-hand female strode through the cavern, moving just for the sake of movement, it seemed. She appeared almost to glide, which was increased by the fact that her robe covered her feet and streamed behind her.
She walked by Lola and Matt, who appeared frozen in place. At first I thought they might actually be frozen, but their eyes moved even if their bodies didn’t. They appeared terrified and I thought about how few vampires had ever seen The Three. The only reason I was holding up right now was because I was a knower.
She walked between them and smiled, the way an adult might smile at a child, and seemed to be enjoying walking around on the ground and being normal sized.
“It has been many, many years since I have taken this form,” she said, confirming my thoughts.
She came to stand directly in front of me again and cupped my face with her hands.
“How lucky you are,” she said, smiling.
Oh yes, how lucky, I thought.
“You’ll see,” she said, removing her hands. “You’ve been chosen by the order for this task. The chosen are always reluctant.”
I wanted her to get back to the point. I still wasn’t clear on what I needed to do.
“When you saw Ivy, what did he look like?” she asked, spinning around to face me, after making it most of the way back to her throne.
“He was rotting,” I said, after thinking about it a few seconds.
“Exactly,” she said. “That is what happens when the line between Life and Death becomes unclear.”
I didn’t really get it. It was nasty, but so what? So if there were vampires who wanted to follow him, they could just walk around like corpses and the rest of us could go about our own business.
If that’s what they wanted, it would become clear soon enough that that’s what they would get. And that would be their choice.
“But, Victoria, corpses are dead. Ivy cannot die. Therefore, he carries Death with him wherever he goes, but still lives. The line has become unclear.”
“But, so what? So he rots? So does anyone who follows him. But what does that have to do with the rest of us?”
“Because after what he has done, he is now a reflection of the state of the order. As he rots, so does it. As the scales remain unbalanced. Life rots. The world and everything in it will decay.”
“We’ll destroy ourselves,” I said, as the weight of her statement sank in.
Instead of answering me, she threw her head back and laughed the laugh of an insane person. It reverberated throughout the cavern so as it make it seem like a thousand of the worst villains cackled. I realized that the other two were also laughing, and I wasn’t sure what I had said.
“Victoria,” the left-hand female began, very slowly, “Life and Death can never be destroyed. As the order remains ruined, the world will begin to rot, vampires and humans alike, but without the release of Death. The worst of living creatures—disease, war, famine, violence, crime—will dominate, and it will be our cage. Forever trapped, forever decaying. Never moving on. Life will become an incubator of Death, the line between them lost.”
As if the severity of her message hadn’t sunk in enough, she continued with one last image.
“We will all be Ivy. Rotting in his immortal body. Forever.”
There was not a sound in the cavern. Not a droplet of water falling to the ground, not a draft of wind from some crack, not a footstep. It was silent.
“Of course, individual mortals will die, as they always have,” she continued, “but Life, Life itself, will be trapped in a cycle that never ends. Not as long as the scales are unbalanced.
I wasn’t sure what to say. I understood the problem. I understood I was here to do something about it. I just wasn’t sure what.
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked and sounded pathetic as I said it. I felt embarrassed to be in front of the most powerful creatures on Earth, sounding like a little girl.
“You have to rebalance the scales,” she said, waving her hand at the golden scale still in front of us, so that the higher tray moved lower and the lower tray moved higher. But as soon as they were balanced, they became unbalanced again.
“But Ivy has already drunk the blood of one of his creations. He’s already an immortal who doesn’t have to feed. What’s done is done. I don’t know—”
“Yes, you do,” she said, almost gently, like the way a mother speaks to her child. “Yes, you do. What is it you desire most?”
I was caught off guard by the question. It should have been easy to answer, and yet I didn’t have one. In fact, the more I tried to think about it, the more depressed I got. I wasn’t sure I had any desires. My favorite activity was more of a compulsion than a desire. I liked to read. I liked to eat, but I was pretty sure that wasn’t what she was asking for.
“I don’t have any,” I said, ashamed.
She laughed again, and there was something like joy on her face. Delight. Wonder. Admiration even.
“Find your desire, and it will rebalance the scales.”
I went to speak again, to ask another question, but she had already ascended her throne. Her body enlarged, took on the gold hue of the others, and the brown of her eyes disappeared. They spoke as one again.
“You’re done, Victoria. You know. Take your friends and leave here. Go back home. Go back to what you know.”
At that, a giant staircase appeared where the scales once were and ascended through the ceiling of the cavern.
But what did I know? I knew death and blood and sex and pleasure. I knew the weariness of immortality. And I knew the longing to be free. But did I know my desire? Did I know the way to rebalance the scales? No. And that I knew. They were wrong about me.
I went to speak again, to tell them they had made a mistake. That it wasn’t me. I wasn’t going to be the one to rebalance the scales and return the order to its natural balance. They had failed, and we would all rot.
But they were already gone.
PART SEVEN
1
After we had returned home, I thought I would feel different. That my gift would become clearer and I would be able to use it with purpose. That now I would be a full-fledged knower.
But I felt exactly the same.
After a few brainstorming sessions with Lola and Matt, I tried to go about my activities in a more purposeful way, keeping an eye out for Ivy, trying to sense what I might need to do, trying to know. But nothing came to me.
After a few weeks, I got frustrated. It was the same as it had always been.
Hunting, eating, reading, eating human food, being with Matt, hanging out with Lola. You know, the same things I had always done.
For a savior, I felt like a complete failure.
Matt tried to make me feel better. So did Lola, but I felt like they kept expecting me to do something. Something spectacular and out of the ordinary, now that I was a knower, and instead I felt even more ineffective than I was before.
There were no signs of Ivy, but there was something... in the air. Lola picked up on this, and even Matt did.
Every vampire I ran into seemed on edge, and not just near feeding time. There was an aggravation in the air. Like everyone had a pebble in their shoe, rubbing against their foot. Unable to pick it out to remove it.
Vampires, who are usually not aggressive with each other, became unusually protective of territory and feeding grounds. It got to the point where whenever Matt and I needed to hunt we had to take Lola with us, to locate us to a spot far from other vampires.
Also, and this I found very interesting, the vampire numbers in our city, which had been very stable ever since I had been here were slowly increasing.
Lola picked up a different count every day, and the total was now at thirty-nine.
This worried me. Too many immortals in one place—especially a concentrated place like a major city—was never a good thing. Maybe this is why people seemed so territorial. The food was getting a little sparse. If numbers got much higher, the body count would be hard to ignore. I wasn’t totally sure what would happen, but I had an idea.
I asked Lola if she thought this was the result of migration or of transformation, and she wasn’t sure.
I had a—I don’t know if vision is the right word—but a sense, that Ivy was on a creating-spree, but why I didn’t know.
It didn’t quite make sense. Granted, he could be stocking up on vampires of his own creation, but he didn’t need one of those too often. And, in all the years he had been around, I just figured he had proliferated quite a few times, but I didn’t know.
I wondered how many immortals he had already fed on. How many lay encased in their own bodies? Conscious, but unmoving. Dead for all practical purposes, but still aware. The vampire version of being buried alive.
With all of the frustration and all of the weird stuff going on, I became depressed.
I didn’t have the energy to feed, and I would become weak as days went on after I first felt hunger pains. It takes quite a while for a vampire to fall into sleep from not feeding, and I never got there, but I would do nothing but lie around my apartment for days, not reading, not talking, not having sex, just lying there with my eyes open, feeling numb.
I don’t know how or where, but Matt and Lola had gotten some equipment to gather human blood. I never asked, but I got the feeling that when they would go out to feed themselves, they would draw some blood from their victim and bring it back to me in one of those bags.
Drinking from plastic was God-awful, but I was feeding myself and therefore staying awake. I would become painfully aware of myself and my life right after, with the surge of energy and vow never to feed again, but then I’d get another blood delivery and it would start all over.
/> Something odd was happening. The longer I went without blood, the more insights I would get. The world was changing outside of my apartment while I was stuck inside, but I knew exactly what was going on.
When I would go out to the balcony in the middle of the night to sit and feel the cool air, I would hear screams, but not with my ears.
The city screamed its way through the night, and I knew mayhem was taking hold. Maybe they were from the bodies needed to sustain the growing immortal population, but I wondered why I had never heard them before.
The thing was, I enjoyed it.
It made me feel sane. Gave voice to the malaise I felt and also voiced my powerlessness.
It’s what I wanted to do, if I had any energy. It was the screams of thousands of immortals, trapped inside themselves, but given everything of value in the world. It was a joke, and a horror film.
I listened and I listened and then one night they were gone, and so was my depression.
We needed to go see Raven again, as much as I didn’t want to. That much I was sure of, though everything else for me was like a cloud of confusion.
Even my relationships with Matt and Lola seemed odd. They had become...my helpers in a way, my servants even, not my best friend and my lover. (After all these years, boyfriend just seems odd to say, I mean, I haven’t had a significant other in three centuries.)
I told them what we needed to do, and Lola seemed pleased. Matt was completely neutral.
I suddenly wondered why Raven affected me so much. Lola had always liked her and Matt seemed completely unmoved by her either way. Why had I always reacted to her so strongly? Maybe I would find out when we paid her a visit.
We drove out to her place and I expected the usual chaos, but what we found surpassed even my expectations.
Her house, both inside and out, looked like a tornado had gone through it. Hell, maybe a tornado had gone through it. Magics can make all kinds of things happen, so it was within the realm of possibility.
When we pulled up, we saw Raven right away, running through her yard with a small tree branch in her hand, her hair in a state that I had never seen it, moving with her as she ran about. She shouted things into the wind and waved the branch around like she was either blessing or cursing something.
Bored To Death: A Vampire Thriller Page 13