The Other Side Of Midnight

by Georgia Le Carre

  She presses the heel of her hand to her head in disbelief. “Oh God, you own humans?”

  “I don’t, not anymore, but my family and the others of my kind do.”

  She frowns. “How? I mean where are these poor people kept?”

  “In underground facilities.”

  She covers her gaping mouth, and shoots to her feet. “Jesus, I have to get out of here!”

  “You cannot run from this any longer, Autumn. I know you are shocked and horrified, but please sit down and let me finish. I have to tell you everything because you have to know everything, no matter how distasteful. It is the truth.”

  Slowly, she lets herself fall back on the chair.

  “When I say underground facilities, I don’t mean sordid little prisons dug into the ground. Earth is not a solid ball, it is more like Swiss cheese with many deep tunnels, and massive secret underground caverns, some are humongous with ceiling heights as tall as a New York skyscraper. Some of these spaces are owned by humans and called DUMBs (deep underground military bases), but they are mostly owned by Vampire families who bought up the land above these caverns a long time ago, then built homes with secret elevators that travel into the caverns underneath.

  “Some of these settlements are so big they are spread out over areas bigger than Hunter’s Cross. They are powered with electricity, have rail networks, and are fitted with sophisticated aqueduct and filter systems that purify and distribute water and air. There are schools, shops, offices, coffee shops, a bar, a club for the young, a Church, a Police station, and a clinic.

  “People live in comfortable units fitted with all mod-cons and have access to beautiful parks with tame birds and animals. Each person is given a hydroponic allotment garden where he/she can grow their own food if it so pleases them. They have no bills to pay, and food is plentiful so they have no need to work or produce anything of value, unless they want extra credits which will allow them to shop at the luxurious stores.

  They are free to spend their time on leisure activities; painting, sewing, making furniture, distilling whiskey, playing video games. There is no crime. The inhabitants fall in love, marry, bear children, and bury their dead. They have no idea about life on the surface of the earth and yearn for nothing. Once a month they go to the clinic and donate a pint of blood. They don’t know why they do it, but it has always been done that way.”

  She tilts her head and looks at me the way someone would if they rescued a stray kitten the night before and have walked into their kitchen and found a fully grown, hungry panther prowling around. “And your family has one of these... settlements?”

  “Yes. It is called The Parallel.”

  Chapter 55

  Rocco

  She looks at me intensely, her eyes shining. “Do the inhabitants of these settlements wear a thin leather anklet with a metal plate clasp that has numbers and letters inscribed on it?”

  I stare at her, surprised. “Yes. How did you know?”

  “I saw a naked girl wearing it in one of the rooms underneath the party you took me to. Were all those masked people vampires?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do the letters and numbers on the metal clasp mean?”

  “Not as much as you think. The anklet’s real role is only one. It signifies compliance. Any human that takes it off is marked as a trouble maker and quickly removed from the settlement before he can infect anyone else.”

  “I see.” She bites her bottom lip and looks down. Her face is troubled. “Is that girl dead now?”

  “Yes. If they are brought up from the settlements, they are to be used at blood drinking orgies or hunts.”

  “Hunts?”

  “Usually, reserved for trouble makers. They are brought up to homes, where they are allowed to think they can escape, then they are hunted down in the grounds and killed.”

  “Why?” she cries.

  “Because some of us are addicted to adrenaline soaked blood.”

  I see a shiver go through her and she hugs herself pitifully. “But you yourself don’t keep humans as livestock?”

  “No, but I did avail myself to The Parallel until the seventeenth century.”

  “Why did you give it up? What do you do for blood now?” she lashes out. I understand her anger. It comes from hurt. This is not what she wants to hear from me. Unfortunately, there is worse to come.

  “In the seventeenth century, I was living in Paris, in the court of Louis XV. There, I met a young girl, a maid. A simple country girl who had left her village to work at the King’s grand palace. She was only seventeen and she had the lowly job to light the fire every evening and take out the chamber pots every morning, but compared to pampered, powdered shallow creatures that populated the circle of aristocrats at the Palace she was special beyond compare.

  “She had rosy cheeks, clear blue eyes, and a laugh that reminded me of little bells in winter. She was honest and so innocent she went to bed with a little toy rabbit. And I wanted her. Really wanted her, which shocked me, because it was the first time I’d felt an emotion other than the intense lust for blood.

  “Suddenly, I saw humans in a different light. My upbringing had made me view them solely as a means of feeding my powerful need. Even though I befriended them, dined with them, played cards with them, and had amorous liaisons with them, they were never more than sustenance to me. I was a lion with a full stomach playing with baby kudus until I was hungry again.

  “Polly was the first baby kudu I wanted to keep for myself. To take care of and shower with all the wonderful things she had never known. I moved her into my castle in Bavaria. You will be surprised to know that it looked exactly like the castle on the rock you painted. The more I knew her, the more I began to love her. She was pure, everything I was not. One day she became pregnant.

  “We share the same original core DNA as humans so children are possible, however our ancient rules are unambiguous and immutable. We are allowed to mate with humans, but progeny is strictly prohibited. The reason for it was self-preservation. Our ancestors knew we needed to keep our numbers carefully controlled. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Bringing irresponsible additions to our ranks would eventually mean the end of us all. I didn’t care. I was willing to break our most sacred laws and become an outcast. I was determined to marry Polly and have our child.”

  I turn away from Autumn because I don’t want her to see how furious I still am. I stare unseeingly out of the window. Time rolls back. I see her still body. Inside her my unborn child. I tore her belly open. I thought I could at least save the child. He was fully formed and beautiful, but his heart had stopped beating. I pulled his tiny wrinkled eyelid up, and his dead blue eye stared back at me. Grotesque. Grotesque. Grotesque.

  I clench my fists and continue speaking. “But it was not to be. My parents had her killed. They thought I would forget her and go back to being the way I was, back to my blood thirsty ways, but it was too late. The real reason the Council had forbidden breeding with humans was the fear of how mixed bloods will change the ideology of our kind. How could you drink the blood of a human, how could you kill a human, when your own son is half-human? I couldn’t go back to seeing humans as a great sleeping mass of throbbing hearts inside warm bodies.

  “The blood lust was still there, day and night, but I had changed. And irrevocably. In the same way a vegetarian decides not to eat meat. Not because the desire for meat is gone, but because the desire to protect animals is the stronger desire.”

  “Does that mean you no longer drink blood?” Her voice trembles with hope.

  I shake my head and see the disappointment in her eyes, but she has to know the truth. All of it. No more hiding. “I have become capable of going for months without blood, but I still need it or I feel my strength ebbing away. I get the blood from blood banks and drink it cold. That way, it does not excite the blood lust inside me.”

  “After all this time you still crave blood?”

  She would never understand
, and I never wanted her to understand the bottomless nature of the desire. I nod. “Yes.”

  She flinches as if I have hit her, but I note that she appears unafraid of me, and that is something to be positive about. “If the food you consume gives you no nourishment why are you so careful with what you eat?”

  “There was a time I could eat the same food as humans, but since the second industrial revolution the food humans consume has slowly become more and more polluted with pesticides, preservatives, additives, heavy metals, and toxins until they are literally poison. When I turned away from my true nature, I diminished myself. Though it may seem to you as if I am much stronger than any man you know, I am not what I should be. The others of my kind are stronger, faster, and more resilient than I am. Without blood as my main sustenance my body has become less mighty, and those pollutants will make me fatally sick.”

  “Garlic,” she says suddenly. “I’ve seen you eat garlic bread. It’s not true that it wards off vampires?”

  “Garlic has no effect on us, but the myth might have its roots in the fact that too much garlic makes the blood taste bitter. Consequently, it is not introduced as a food into the settlements.”

  “And the Christian cross. Is that a deterrent?”

  I shake my head. “No. The only deterrent is sunlight and fire. Nothing else.”

  She raises both hands and presses her temples. I watch her quietly. Then she stands and begins to pace the floor. She stops abruptly, and her hands make a chopping movement. “Okay. You and your family are vampires. I get that. That’s very clear. But what do you all want with me?”

  Chapter 56

  Autumn

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2hGmoWFzaA

  -Everybody hurts-

  He moves away from me and sits on the leather chair behind the desk. Swinging slightly away from me he leans back and stares out of the window. There is an expression on his face I cannot describe. Perhaps it is sadness, perhaps it is longing for something he cannot have.

  “It was written in our ancient book that a very, very long time ago an oracle had foretold the demise of our species. The vision warned that our corruption would become so boundless we would be unable to reproduce and we would slowly rot away. Ever since we have feared and waited for the prophecy to manifest. We didn’t know how or when it would begin, or what form it would take, but fifty years ago the revelation began to manifest.

  “At first the effects were slow to show, and they could be easily hidden, a sore here, a boil there, some signs of ageing, but as the years passed the decay became more and more obvious. In some cases, it was no longer even possible to hide or go out in public without attracting undue attention. The reason you were invited to a masked party was because some of us have become so unbearably hideous and repulsive it would have shocked and frightened you. Not only are our bodies breaking down, but recently we have also started to reek unbearably of decomposing flesh.”

  “Yes, I smelled that,” I whisper, remembering the nauseating stench coming from the man I met in the room below the party. “Why are you still beautiful and why do you not smell?”

  “When you witnessed me, in bed wrecked with pain, that was not a disease I caught in Asia. That started fifty years ago when all the others began to show symptoms of decline and ruin. I don’t know, I might still start to stink as the end comes closer. For the moment the worst signs of decay seem to be in those who partake in human hunts.”

  I stare at him transfixed. The things he is telling me is beyond belief. It feels as if I am caught in a fantastic nightmare. The thought of him as a vampire is too fantastic, too horrible, and yet every piece of the jigsaw puzzle that so confused me has neatly fallen into place. Now I can see all the parts I could not figure out. Knowing all of this doesn’t make me love him any less. In fact, I love him so much it hurts. Even so, I realize that I may not be as important to him as I thought. Perhaps, I am not important at all. He clearly just needs something from me. I am afraid to ask, but the words gather in my mouth and come out in a whisper.

  “How do I figure in all this?”

  He turns his beautiful eyes towards me, and I can see now there is no longing for something he cannot have in them. There is only a quiet resignation and a great sadness. He looks exhausted. There are blue shadows under his eyes. How could I have missed how tired he looked? The thought of him dying fills my heart with terrible pain.

  “The ancient texts give us a way to stop the decay,” he says softly, his eyes never leaving mine. “It was long foretold that before the next EMPOC comes, a child will be born, a human child, and she will hold our destiny in the palm of her hand. It is the law of this world. As you have sowed you will reap. Just as we have held the lives of so many humans in our heartless hands she will decide the extinction or salvation of our species.”

  For a second my eyes go blank. It cannot be. Surely, he doesn’t mean me, but his eyes, his eyes tell me I’m not wrong. The word shoots out of me and hovers between us, “Me?”

  He nods slowly. “Yes, you. Little, unassuming Autumn., you. You and you alone have the power to decide whether to preserve my kind or stand over their demise.”

  “How can that be?” I blurt out incredulously. “It must be a mistake. It can’t be me. I have no powers at all. I’m nothing.”

  “It is not a mistake. It is you. The power is in your blood.”

  “What?”

  “Yes, you carry something in your blood, a little genetic aberration that could regenerate my entire species.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “There is something else about me you do not know. I bear the title of Count in the human world, but in our world, I am a Prince. One day I will be King. It was foretold that it would be me who would lead our kind towards salvation and redemption, or termination. For hundreds of years I looked for you. I would close my eyes and search for your blood. One day, I locked in on you. You were two years old then. Ever since that day, I’ve watched you, taken care of you, and protected you from the shadows.”

  My mouth feels dry and my voice sounds hoarse and rough. “What exactly do I have to do?”

  “You must be willing to offer your blood to me in a ritual, but it is not as easy as it sounds. I must warn you that if you do, there is no turning back, you will become one of us, immortal but forever cursed with blood lust.”

  I walk to the chair opposite him, the horrendous weight of his words is too much to bear. I slump into it. “I will become a vampire?”

  “Yes,” he says simply.

  “And if I say no?”

  “Nothing will happen. No one can force you, Autumn. It is our immutable law. We can trick, lie, and cheat humans into interacting with us, but we must obtain their permission before we take anything from them. If your blood is acquired by force it will be of no use to any of us.”

  I nod slowly, even though there is nothing to nod at. “What will happen to you without my blood?”

  He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. I have now told you everything. I have done the right thing, my duty to you and to my species. You must think about what you want to do and tell me your decision. Until I have your answer, I suggest you do not leave Ze Dem Adelar. Some of my kind do not seem to understand the concept of ‘willingly offer’. William has prepared your room for you. I bid you goodnight, Autumn.”

  Then he stands and walks away without looking at me as if he thinks I find him too deplorable to look at. There are so many questions in my head, but I let him go. I let him go because I don’t want him to see me cry. When I hear the door close, the tears fall. Now I know he never cared about me. It was all about my blood. It’s the creed by which they live. They can trick, lie, and cheat humans into interacting with them as long as they ask for permission. Never in a million years did I ever think I would be in a position like this. I don’t even have Sam to call and talk to. I feel so horribly, horribly alone.

  For a long, long time I just sit there, my mind playing back all the incred
ible, fantastic, unbelievable things he had said to me. Then I stand and go up to the observatory. The house is utterly silent and my shoes echo. I walk past a large painting of a stern man from a past century who it seems to my fevered imagination to malevolently stare down at me.

  I know exactly where he is. Not because I am guessing but because I can feel him. I can feel him.

  I run quickly and lightly up the circular staircase until I arrive at the observatory. The circular roof is open and Rocco is sitting on the pedestal. There is a bottle of wine and a glass half-filled with red wine next to him.

  He turns to look at me and I feel something inside me break.

  Chapter 57

  Autumn

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YxaaGgTQYM

  -Bring Me To Life-

  “Would you like some wine, Autumn?” he asks politely, distantly. It is as if we are strangers. As if New York never happened. Or he never held me through the night when my heart was shattered by Sam’s passing.

  “No thank you,” I say equally politely. “I want you to tell me the ending of the story of the hawk and the pigeon.”

  “The man chose the pigeon. He had loved it for too long to sacrifice it.” His voice is deliberately flat. It’s impossible to believe that he is thousands of years old. He looks so young, so beautiful… so human.

  I walk up the pedestal as he takes a sip of wine and sit next to him. “Tell me what will really happen to you if I say no.”

  “You shouldn’t concern yourself with that. I will probably outlive you.”

  “You don’t understand. I want to help you, you will never know how much I want to… to be honest I don’t even care about the blood lust thing, if you can do it, then so can I, but it goes against everything I believe in to make your sister, Daniel, your parents, and all those people at the party strong and powerful again so they can go out and hunt more humans.”