by A. D. Koboah
I took her into the woods, finding a beautiful spot that did not have too many distinguishing landmarks because, like Minny had said to me, Julia could be at peace now and I did not intend to blight her last resting place by returning to it.
It seemed as if it had been an incredibly long night that had no hope of ever ending. Surprising as it was, the sun began to rise, calling an end to the blood and terror I had unleashed during those long dark hours. The soft peach light it cast through the dense canopy of trees threatened instead of welcomed now I was no longer a man. I held tight to Julia, desperately eager to hold on to her even as the pain began to tear into my bones, urging me to get out of the way of the coming dawn. But in the end I could not bear to part with her, so I pushed through into the nothingness and re-materialised upright beneath the soil with Julia pressed tight to my chest, the two of us enclosed in earth.
I gave a heavy sigh, letting the earth close tighter around us as the pain began to lessen. I felt almost safe beneath the earth with my wife in our makeshift grave, the horror and despair lessening somewhat.
I allowed myself to sleep, wishing I could remain in this grave with her for all eternity.
But the sun could not continue to keep watch over the Earth indefinitely, and when it was chased away by the moon, I awoke, as did the demon within and the abhorrent hunger for blood that made me its captive.
Feeling as though my soul was being rent into two, I called the nothing to me. Julia and our grave disappeared and I burst into the woodland.
She was gone. I accepted that properly for the first time. The sun had not completely left the Earth to the moon, but the night was already alive as night creatures came out of their hiding places to scour the woodland and other predators took to the gloom to search for prey. As I, too, would do this night and every other night for all eternity. But first I bade goodbye to the sweet and gentle soul who had been in my mortal life for far too short a time.
I stood in the waxing twilight, which was bright before my unnatural gaze, and recited words I had said many a time before, but with none of the angst and grief I felt now.
“Julia. My darling Julia. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. May the Lord bless you and keep you, make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you, the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.”
I was all too aware of the fact that this was an abomination—a demon presiding over the grave of a righteous, God-fearing woman. But I said those words in all sincerity over her grave. And I suppose I spoke them for myself too, wanting to believe that Minny was right, that there was hope and perhaps God would give me the peace I knew was forever lost to me.
Then I watched the sun disappear completely into the horizon and night creep into being all around me. The thirst became overwhelming. I stood alone in the darkness surrounding me. It wept with its many secrets and with the atrocity it had been witness to when I slaughtered nearly every living thing on the Foster plantation.
Then with one last look at this peaceful spot which would be Julia’s resting place, I turned my back on it and looked into the night. Fear touched me for the first time. Her grave was the last thread of my humanity and now I was looking into the unknown, a void that stretched forth for an eternity.
But I wasn’t completely bereft. I had only the clothing on my back and three things to hold on to. A gold cross, and a child’s heartbeat which I had somehow heard amidst the blood roar which had consumed me. That had to be proof of God’s mercy. I also had the image of the beautiful darky and those three words.
Wait for me.
So I disappeared into the darkness, leaving behind everything that I was.
Chapter 10
How do I begin to describe those years in the wilderness? How do I describe the agony of existing in a void where my only hope was almost certainly an illusion born out of shadows?
I had been torn out of the land of the living and plunged into a world of never-ending sorrow and darkness. Darkness not only surrounded me, I was darkness. Fearing the light of the sun and that of a human gaze, I spent my nights wandering the land aimlessly, keeping to the shadows and the anonymity of the woodlands. My mind numbed by grief, my soul dying a long, slow, torturous death each time I left the safety of the woods to claim the life of another.
The power to hear the thoughts of others had been weak and fleeting in the beginning. But as the days passed, it became stronger, assaulting my mind and senses each time I came near humans. I remained in the shadows, but the lives of those around me reached me in the most intimate of ways.
I not only heard the thoughts of the mothers that were sold away from their children, I experienced it. I experienced the violence against the helpless, the rapes and murders. I also experienced the corrupted thoughts and triumphs of the slaveholders who had long sold their souls when they suffocated the voices of their conscience to trade in flesh and blood. Deep in the woods, in its dark heart surrounded by its silent weeping trees, I found respite from the lives of those around me. But all too soon, I was called back to the world of the living by the need for blood, to a world I both hated and coveted. Hated because of its violence and injustice. Coveted because it was as surely closed to me as the tomb I longed for.
And in this world of darkness, Avery Wentworth ceased to exist.
Summer soon gave way to a jubilant autumn, the trees dripping with dark gold leaves, the ground beneath my feet showered with those radiant offerings making me feel as if I were walking along a trail of gold. Then winter swept the land clean of the boastful autumn, leaving it a pastoral wasteland. I thought the Foster plantation, along with the burning field strewn with corpses, the magnificent sneering mansion a fiery glare against the Mississippi night sky, was long behind me. But the victims it swallowed in a festival of flame came back to find me. I could be moving swiftly through the ether, the winter countryside in all its morose beauty flitting past. Then their faces would assail me, bringing me to an abrupt halt, the frigid slumbering plains swirling into view all around me whilst remorse shuddered within.
The first face to find me was that of Phillis. Her features impassive, dangerous emotion lurking behind her eyes as she carefully glanced toward the window and the wooden structure beyond. From then on, I always saw that face as it had been in death with drops of blood marring her smooth brown skin, her eyes forever drained of the emotion that had made her risk that furtive glance toward the window.
I did not allow myself to think of the darky girl during that first year, of that face and those mysterious raven eyes that had captured my heart. I wandered the land aimlessly. Alone. Treading a lonely path of despair, my thoughts repeatedly dancing between guilt and all I had lost. The first anniversary of Julia’s death found me miles away from the ruins of the Foster plantation deep within anonymous woodland, my thoughts on Auria, dark anger surging within. I now knew what evil, real evil, was. It had stood before me glittering in jewels and a gold gown, smiling at me with mirthless glee and cold, soulless eyes. I now not only knew what evil was; I was evil.
I held my hands up in a sickly vapid stream of moonlight that reached me through the dense woodland canopy. These ghostly white hands were capable of unimaginable strength and destruction. The faces of those terrified slaves as they sought to escape me swam before me along with the countless others I had slaughtered since then. There was the promise of a legion more of these bloodied, gasping faces if what Auria had said was true and I lived forever. That thought ran through my mind countless times leaving a well-trodden path of pain and despair. I was evil. Evil. The devil incarnate.
Evil.
The woodland abruptly disappeared, almost as if a hand had reached into the present and snatched it away, and I was standing in burnt orange sunlight in the ruins of the chapel I had fled.
I spun around and she was there, her image divided, one image staring down at the ground, the other looking up at me, joy and tears in her eyes when she gazed upon me.
&
nbsp; Joy and tears.
I moved to kneel before her like a humble pilgrim and gazed into those raven eyes, my heart soaring at the sight of her and the promise I saw within the depths of those eyes. I reached tentatively for her face but could not touch her. Her full sensuous lips curved into a smile but her eyes still shimmered with tears. There was urgency in her words when she communicated with me again.
I’m coming. Wait for me. Wait for me.
I was alone once more in the woodlands.
She was real. She had to be. I’m coming, she had said. Wait for me. I didn’t even know what this being was or why she had come to me. All I knew was that she was powerful and that she meant salvation. All I had to do was wait. Wait and she would find me. All I had to do was wait.
***
So I waited. The years mounted but I did not count them, for time meant nothing in this wilderness or in the life of an immortal. Night after night I was left with a corpse in my arms, and with each kill my devastation increased until I decided I would simply stop. I would not give in to the urge to kill.
So I left my daily grave and kept to the woods, trying to ignore the call for blood and death.
The first night it was as if war fought within my flesh. But I continued to resist the evil, and when morning came, I went to ground feeling only marginally triumphant that I had fought the demon that thirsted for blood and won, for there was a field of dead slaves, and many more deaths, I could never take back.
That evening I awoke long past dusk. My limbs felt sluggish and I was moving much slower than normal, but I still felt I could resist the blood. I went to ground earlier than usual, long before the sun was due to return and breathe life over the land.
A few nights later, and I could not call the ether to me. Instead of discouraging me, it gave me hope. I was in physical pain constantly, the same pain I felt when exposed to the sun, but I welcomed it. Perhaps it meant the supernatural power was leaving my body and I would become a man again. Although I was weak, I felt overjoyed by this thought. I looked out over empty grassland for miles around, sweet joy filling my soul. A single tree was all that blighted the clean emptiness around me, the sky above a sultry mix of violets and deep blues, the waning moon almost hidden. I sat back against the lone tree, letting my eyes flutter shut for a few moments. When I opened them again, Onyx was before me wearing the gown Julia was wearing that fateful evening.
Avery, Avery.
I sprung to my feet and pressed myself against the tree. She moved closer until we were almost touching, concern in her eyes.
Surely you know my voice, she beseeched.
She reached a hand to my face and I squeezed my eyes shut. It was a few moments before I could open them again.
I was alone in the grasslands. There was nothing at all to suggest Onyx had actually been there, and no one else’s scent. I sank to my knees in the dirt. The pain was almost unbearable now, but I was determined I would not kill. I went to ground not long after, having to dig a hole for myself. It was not deep, barely three feet, and I lay stretched out in it. I was able to use my telekinetic power to move the dirt over myself to provide a blanket of soil, and slept a restless, fitful sleep, often waking to see Auria’s corpse in my arms as Julia’s had been the day I had slept with her in her grave.
A week and a half after I decided not to kill, I knew I had to have blood. I did not care if denying myself blood killed me, but I could no longer endure the pain or the maddening hunger. Weak and blind to everything but the search for a victim, I crawled through dark woodland until thin wisps of human minds in sleep reached me. I kept on until I saw the outline of a farm through the trees. I tried to get to my feet, but was pulled down by the weight of my weakened body. On my knees, I reached out to the sleeping minds within the farmhouse, too weak to know whether or not any of them heard and would answer my call.
I thought I would have to crawl to the house and find another way to lure someone out of it, when I heard the sound of bare feet treading carefully in the undergrowth. Invigorated by the scent of warm human blood drifting through the air toward me, I pulled myself to my feet, the pulsing pain driving me forward in anticipation of the feast I had denied myself for over a week. Then a little girl in a long white nightgown appeared out of the gloom. She was no more than nine years old and had red hair, which was tied up in two bunches. She stood in the dark woodland gazing up at me and I felt her fear through the crimson mist that had overwhelmed me.
Don’t be afraid—you’re safe, I commanded.
Her fear evaporated.
I had never murdered a child before, and I wanted to send her back. But it was proving a struggle to stop myself from lunging at her as the demon I had denied for over a week set my limbs aflame. What it craved was within reach now, and there could be no denying it. I desperately searched the child’s thoughts, already feeling the crimson mist taking over. Thankfully, a pleasant memory was not far from her mind, one of her slave, Cassie, a woman she loved much more than her own mother. She smiled in the daze I had induced, thinking about Cassie, a woman she wasn’t even sure liked her at times.
“She does love you,” I said.
It was a fight to hold out against the crimson mist long enough to make sure her mind was numb to pain. I gathered her tiny body to me and bit into her pale, fragile neck. At first she cried out as panic overrode the control I had over her mind, but then she fell silent. The roar of the crimson tide overwhelmed me, throwing me out into deepening waves of mindless euphoria.
Then there was just the dead child in my arms.
I took her home and placed her at the door of the farmhouse where the first person to find her was bound to be Cassie, the slave that had become a surrogate mother. There were tears sliding down my cheeks, but they were the proverbial crocodile tears because her blood was still singing through me and I wanted more.
Strangely enough, I was reluctant to leave her alone in the cold. I touched her face. She had been so young, and some of her memories came back to me of the affection she used to lavish on Cassie. She was always finding little gifts for her—sometimes a flower, or she would save the last of her treats and they were always for Cassie.
In that moment, the weight of all that had been taken away from me almost crushed me. I had been robbed of so much. Of the chance to bear children of my own and the second heartbeat Onyx had spoken of came back to taunt me as vicious and merciless as she had been in life. Would my little girl have had Julia’s eyes? Her gentle courage and the ability to empathise? Would my daughter have had the insight to look at an evil like slavery, and the Negroes themselves, and see it for what it was? All of these things tormented me because I would never know. Placing my fingers over the dead girl’s eyelids, I tenderly closed her eyes and fled.
I ran through the woods, the trees around me a dark blur, sensing the woodland creatures and the fear my presence elicited. I ran, but the thing I had been unconsciously running from found me anyway. A faint, horror-filled cry reached me over the distance I had placed between myself and that farm. I stopped immediately, materialising in the damp darkness on my knees. There wasn’t a repeat of that sound and I couldn’t even be sure I had heard her cry from that distance, but in my soul I knew it had been Cassie, who had probably been startled out of sleep by some sixth sense and ventured outside to find her beloved Mandy.
It felt as if my mind was going to break, the horror of that senseless killing, all of those deaths over the years and the pain I had caused to so many. It felt as if I was drowning in it. The faces of the dead overwhelmed me, those of the fleeing slaves I had slaughtered in that cotton field all but drove me to the brink of insanity. I had to end this. I had to bring an end to this life and with it would come an end to the murders, the pain and destruction. I had to end...
...Then I was standing in the chapel. For a brief moment I felt elation and euphoria. She had come to me again after so long. But then shame descended for she would surely know. But I couldn’t stop myself from facin
g her, as I had to glance at that beautiful face or be driven insane.
She was staring at me as if she, too, were savouring the luxury of laying eyes on me, but there was a subtle change in her expression. She was looking at me reproachfully and some old anger lingered in her eyes.
She knew. Of course she knew what I had done. Shame and self-loathing filled me again. That she would see me like this, see such lowly depths as the one I had been cast into that night they turned me into a vampire.
But then another miracle unfolded before me. The reproach I saw wasn’t for the reason I had assumed it to be. How she communicated this to me I do not know, for she uttered not a word. But I knew the anger was for those thoughts I’d had before I found myself transported here. The desire to end my life along with my suffering. As understanding, along with sweet relief, flooded me, I knew if there was even the smallest hope she was real, then I would wait for her until the world ceased to exist. Some of the anger in her eyes seeped away then and compassion came in its stead along with...love. I felt it there in that moment.
Love.
Her smile was laced with sorrow and I again heard those words which were now tethered to my soul.
Wait for me, I’m coming. Wait for me.
She was gone and I was anguished, but I moved on through the darkness with hope in my heart lighting a way forward.
A strange thing happened whenever I had a vision of Luna. Time seemed to shift, or quicken. That morning after killing the little girl, I went to ground and left behind the golden haze of a ripe summer morning. When I awoke that evening, the world was silent and empty; winter its sullen guest. Thin, naked trees cut a stark silhouette across the landscape. I knew I had not slept through that entire summer and autumn, because on my coat lapel was a lone pink petal from a redbud tree, fresh and bright as if it had just fallen.