Books 1–4

by Nancy A. Collins

  The manor boasted twenty-two bedrooms, eighteen bathrooms, and a private library devoted to the fantastic. Ghilardi’s filing system, however, was an anal-retentive’s nightmare, with leather-bound first editions sandwiched between garish paperback novels, and secondhand book-club volumes thrust amongst rare Renaissance folios. Everywhere I looked, I found myself surrounded by fictionalized versions of my affliction. Ghilardi allowed me the freedom of his library, allowing me to examine whatever I wanted, but did not steer me in the direction of any one book.

  I searched myriad volumes for information, no matter how distorted, that might shed some light on my condition. I had access to Bürger’s Lenore, Goethe’s Bride of Corinth, Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, Byron’s The Giaour, all in their original editions, but met with nothing but frustration. There was no fictional counterpart for the likes of Morgan and Pangloss—much less myself. Rymer’s Varney the Vampyre was a penny-dreadful scarecrow and Stoker’s Dracula nothing more than a Victorian sex fantasy.

  I sifted through the works of Poe, Le Fanu, Machen, Lovecraft, and a score of others, and still came away with nothing. Whatever clues I did succeed in plucking from the morass were inevitably contradictory. Only after six weeks of fruitless searching did Ghilardi finally hand me the book.

  He was on the terrace, studying a storm building in the mountain tops. The lake had grown dark and choppy. When storms break on Lake Geneva, they are awesome testimony to nature’s potency, which Ghilardi enjoyed watching. “Did you know, my dear, that it was on the shores of this very lake, during a storm, that Mary Shelley first conceived the idea for Frankenstein?” He did not take his eyes off the darkening clouds as he spoke, a brandy snifter cradled in one hand. “I take it that you have not found what you are looking for in my library? Then, perhaps, this might be of some assistance.” He turned and handed me a slender hardbound volume s entitled Die Vorgeben Diejenigen: ‘The Pretending Ones’.

  I realized that this was the book Wallach had mentioned at Esel’s party; the one that ruined Ghilardi’s reputation, reducing him to the same level as von Daniken and Berlitz. As I read the book, I understood why he had been treated like a pariah dog by his former peers. If I didn’t know better myself, I would have dismissed the book as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic. But since I did know better, it soon became my Bible: the revelation on which I built my new life.

  Humans insist on defining reality by their standards. They are poorly equipped to do so, since they are selectively deaf and blind in one eye. They are beings with an insatiable need to categorize the universe that surrounds them, but demand that the facts reveal a universe suited for human cultivation and exploitation. Things must remain status quo.

  The creatures who call themselves Pretenders dwell in the cracks in mankind’s perception. To the untutored eye they are nothing to look at: beggars, cripples, prostitutes, and anonymous strangers. Their faces are unremarkable, their demeanor bland. They normally aren’t the types who like to draw attention to themselves. Although there are numerous subcategories, they all pretend to be human, hiding their demonic otherness behind a mask of carefully constructed banality. Only to those who truly know how to see do they stand revealed, their auras suffused with fearsome energy.

  Ghilardi was of the belief that mankind possesses a genetic trait for telekinesis, telepathy, clairvoyance, and all the other sixth-sense stuff. But eons of civilization and trickery by Pretenders have led to the gradual withering of these psionic powers, reducing them to the extrasensory equivalent of an appendix. Ghilardi was convinced he held the key that would awaken these dormant powers in any human, whether be were a sigma cum laude or fast food cashier.

  According to Ghilardi, Pretenders are the creatures found throughout human myth and legend: vampires, werewolves, incubi and succubi, ogres, undines and demons too numerous to mention, who have learned to escape detection by hiding in plain sight. The various Pretender species have only two things in common: they can pass for human, and they prey on them as well.

  As I read the book, I finally discovered how vampires—or what humans refer to as vampires—reproduce. Their bite alone is not what taints the victim, is the saliva—or, in some cases, their sperm—that triggers the transformation. Once the victim dies, the corpse undergoes radical physical and genetic restructuring, readying itself for its new occupant. Once the transmutation is complete, a minor demon enters the host body, but that is far from the end of the process.

  The transition from the spiritual plane to the material world is a traumatic one. The newborn vampire enters the host body without a personality or past. Since it has no frame of reference, only raw instinct, the neonate monster uses the brain of the victim for its template. If the host is freshly dead—say, a day or so—the fledgling vampire resembles, for the most part, a normal human, complete with memories and intellect. However, if the resurrection takes too long, what arises is a shambling mockery that is severely brain-damaged. These hapless monstrosities are revenants, the idiot children of the vampire race. Humans call them zombies or ghouls. They are far more of them created than vampires, but their stupidity ensures their inevitable destruction. Many are so slow-witted they forget to hide during the day and end up greeting their final death, burned to the bone by the sun’s rays.

  True vampires of power—like the fictional Count Dracula and his Real World counterpart, Sir Morgan—are rare. Even under ideal resurrection conditions, all vampires are ‘born’ with imperfect brains. It takes decades for them to learn how to master their powers. Most end up killed, either by humans, rival predators, or their own ignorance, long before they gain enough experience to lay claim to being a Noble.

  Nobles are the ruling class of the vampire race. They are proud and arrogant, and rarely worry about being discovered. They can control the minds of others, possess immense physical strength and vitality, and practice a form of astral projection. By human standards, they are practically immortal. But the most interesting difference between Nobles and their wet-mouthed country cousins is that they do not simply feed on blood, but also on human emotion—the blacker the better. Nobles are skilled in summoning and manipulating the darker aspects of humanity, cultivating it so it provides them with an excellent vintage. Ghilardi claimed that Nobles were covertly involved with the Nazi death camps and the Stalinist pogroms as a means of providing their favorite ‘vintage’: human suffering.

  In his book. Ghilardi claimed that his key to discovering the Real World, as he called it, was an ancient grimoire called the Aegrisomnia or, loosely translated, Dreams of a Fevered Mind. I asked to see this so-called tome of forbidden lore, still uncertain whether or not what he claimed was true. He took me to his private study, where he kept the volume locked away from the others in his collection.

  “It is a most wondrous book,” he explained as he opened its glass display case. “I came across it while researching folklore of the Dark Ages. Shortly reading it for the first time, I discovered I could see things that had previously been hidden from me. That was ten years ago. I was hosting the Akademy’s little klatsch that year. When Herr Doktor Pangloss arrived, I...” He fell silent for a moment, and then glanced up at me. “I am told I suffered some kind of collapse. I do not remember very much. But after that, Pangloss did not attend the Akademy soirées again for a decade. After I recovered, that is when I began working on my book.”

  The Aegrisomnia was a large, awkwardly bound volume with metal hasps and an Arabesque lock that looked like a medieval teenager’s diary. The text was in Latin, although some passages appeared to be Greek. There were alchemical tables, conjuring diagrams, and what Ghilardi claimed were non- Euclidean geometric formulas. Every other page was covered in complex, multilayered patterns that, at first glance, resembled a child’s collection of Spirograph drawings. However, when I looked at them a second time, I detected words and pictures hidden amid the esoteric scribbles.

  Although my Latin was rusty enough to inflict lockjaw, I managed to decipher the op
ening line: “Greetings. You have regained that which was lost to you.” I had to rely on Ghilardi’s translation for the rest of the ‘secret text’, which detailed the habits of the various Pretender races, including discourses on the matriarchal structure of the vargr, treatises on the reproductive cycle of incubi and succubi, and an essays on the dietary habits of ogres.

  Ghilardi was convinced that the Aegrisomnia was a Rosetta Stone for viewing the Real World. Once exposed to its wisdom, the average human’s ‘inner sight’ would be awakened, allowing them to pierce the veil and see the Real World that surrounded them. Unfortunately, Ghilardi’s attempts to prove this theory all ended in disaster. Most of the hand-picked initiates he showed the book to saw nothing but meaningless scribbles. Those few who did see something would start screaming and wouldn’t stop until sedated. After the last person he showed it to deliberately blinded himself, Ghilardi decided it would be better if he kept the Aegrisomnia safely under lock and key.

  Ghilardi was of the opinion that I was a fluke, a freak even by Pretender standards. I was evidence of modern man’s tampering with the ancient reproductive cycle of the vampire. Human technology had interfered in the unnatural order of things. Morgan had left me for dead in the gutter—and by all rights, I should have died, and perhaps I did, for a few moments. But new blood had been forced into my veins, diluting, if not completely neutralizing, the vampiric taint polluting my flesh. The new-born demon was trapped inside a living host, not a piece of dead meat. Since I never died and my brain was in perfect working order—well, almost—I was evolving into a Noble at an unheard-of rate of development. Ghilardi was thrilled by the prospect of documenting my progress, as I was to be his proof that he wasn’t a crazy old fool.

  He also had other, far less academic plans for me. Ghilardi had spent his entire life steeped in the romance of the occult investigator, and fancied himself a real-life Professor Van Helsing. For years he had yearned to track down the scourge of humanity and drive a stake through its undead heart at cockcrow. But he was far too old and infirm for such heroics, and he knew it. It wasn’t until much later that I realized how insanely brave his attack on me at Frau Zobel’s had been. Ghilardi had stepped into that room expecting to be killed, yet remained determined to play the role of fearless vampire hunter to the very end. Now he had the chance to vicariously experience the danger and adventure of stalking and disposing of the living dead through a proxy ideally suited for such a job.

  But first, he wanted to try and make contact with the vampiric entity he was certain dwelt somewhere within my psyche. Upon reflection, I should never have allowed him to do it. The entire undertaking was extremely dangerous. Neither of us had done anything like this before, and had no idea of what the consequences might be. But I had come to trust Ghilardi as a wise man, and if he wanted to hypnotize me... well, who was I to tell him no?

  It didn’t take long for him to put me in a trance. I was surrounded by red darkness and it felt as if I was sliding down the throat of a huge animal. Part of me started to panic as I felt control of my body begin to slip away, and I realized I’d made a horrible, horrible mistake. But it was too late to do anything but fall into the nothingness. As I did so, I thought I heard something in the darkness begin to laugh.

  I regained consciousness thirty seconds later.

  Ghilardi kept insisting what happened wasn’t my fault. Maybe he was right; maybe it wasn’t me who broke his arm. But they were still my hands. The bones are so brittle at that age—so fragile, like a bird.

  I’m sorry. I’m so very, very sorry. Wherever you are, Erich, please forgive me. Forgive us.

  From that moment on, The Other was my constant companion. It had always been there, of course. It had simply been too weak to assert itself, except during times of extreme stress, or life-and-death situations. For years it had been my silent, parasitic partner, feeding on the emotions generated by my clients. But now my intangible conjoined twin, joined at the medulla oblongata, was fully awake, and I could no longer ignore its existence.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Since Ghilardi deemed it wise to avoid a ruckus in our own backyard, my first outing as a vampire hunter was in Frankfurt.

  The neighborhood was a ghetto before the Nazis emptied it. Then the Allies bombed it until nothing remained but the cellars. Although rebuilt after the war, the neighborhood’s soul had never recovered to the wounds dealt it. The nice new apartment towers that were built to replace the lost buildings all quickly withered, gradually transforming the district into a slum. There was so much despair permeating the area the half-life would last for another thirty years. Perhaps that’s what attracted the derelict in the first place.

  I watched him from a distance, both fascinated and appalled by what I was seeing. How long? I wondered. How long had I been walking among the dead?

  The thing huddled in the doorway was as far removed from Morgan and Pangloss as homo sapiens is from homo erectus. To the human eye he was nothing but a starveling junkie, shirtless and barefoot, shivering on the doorstep of an abandoned building.

  The vampire was newly made, and literally still had grave dirt behind his ears, and had yet to master the basics, such as breathing all the time. This one didn’t look too zombed-out, although he was far from MENSA material. He wore the body of a white male in his mid-thirties, and stood in the shadows of the doorway, thin arms wrapped around a narrow, sunken chest that did not rise or fall. His clothing consisted of a pair of ill-fitting pants held up by a length of rope and an old greatcoat the color of smoke. The uninformed would have attributed the derelict’s shivering to the cold, but I knew better. He was a junkie, alright, but it wasn’t smack he was hurting for.

  Ghilardi wrinkled his nose in disgust. “Mein Gott! I can smell him from here.”

  I nodded, never taking my eyes off him. “He was probably homeless to begin with. The district’s full of them; they sleep rough in the public areas throughout the city.” I reached into my coat pocket, caressing the silver blade Ghilardi had given me in Geneva, in anticipation of our first kill. “Stay put, verstadt?” I told him, motioning to his arm resting in its sling. “I don’t want you getting hurt anymore than you have already.”

  As I walked across the street, I prayed the old man would not try to interfere. If anything else happened to him ... I suppressed the thought. I was going into battle and I needed to concentrate my attention on my prey.

  The vampire straightened as I drew near, his eyes gleaming hungrily. “You look like you’re in a bad way, friend,” I said in German:

  The undead thing nodded. He still wasn’t breathing. Bad camouflage: the creature was seriously ignorant of the laws of supernatural selection.

  “I can fix you up, if you can meet the price. You do have it, don’t you?”

  The vampire stuffed a pale hand into his coat pocket and his fist emerged bristling with Deutsche marks. Apparently following a dim memory from his previous existence, he rolled his victims after draining them. He seemed to have no intrinsic understanding of money, except that it made good bait.

  I smiled and nodded in the direction of the alleyway. The revenant complied, his movements disturbingly insectile.

  Once we were in the solitude of the alley, the vampire hissed, his pupils dilating rapidly until they swallowed the entire eye. He expected me to scream and try to escape. Instead, I grinned, baring fangs as sharp as his own. The growl percolating in his chest became a confused whine. This had never happened before, and he was unsure as to how to proceed.

  “C’mere, dead boy,” I snarled.

  The derelict tried to flee, but I grabbed a fistful of his greasy hair and jerked him back into the alley. There was a wet tearing sound and I found myself holding a piece of dripping scalp. The vampire fell among the overflowing garbage cans, disturbing a foraging rat, which he hurled at me. I batted aside the writhing bag of fur and teeth as if shooing away a fly. The undead derelict leapt at me, shrieking like a tea kettle. His ragged nails raked my fac
e, leaving wet trenches in their wake. I stumbled backward and instinctively tried to shield my face with my forearm.

  The vampire grabbed my wrist in an attempt to throw me off-balance. I lunged forward, slamming him against the cold brick wall. Pressed belly-to- belly amid heaps of rubbish, we resembled low-rent lovers enjoying a sleazy tryst. I kept my left forearm wedged under his chin, forcing his fangs away from my face. The beast reeked of clotted blood and dried feces. The derelict whined piteously upon seeing my knife, its silver blade resembling a frozen flame. I realized then I was grinning in triumph.

  The blade went in easy, piercing skin and muscle like rotten sailcloth and sliding home between the vampire’s fifth and sixth ribs, puncturing his undead heart as if I’d just jabbed a pin into a toy balloon.

  The revenant yowled and thrashed like a landed fish, but showed no signs of dying. Genuinely frightened for the first time since the fight began, I stabbed his chest three more times. Nothing. Obviously the old legend concerning impaling a vampire’s heart was unreliable. I began plunging my knife into every organ I could think of, clinically, at first, but with increasing frenzy as I realized I was beginning to tire. The Other laughed at me as I stabbed the struggling revenant.

  A voice spoke inside my head then, sounding so close and so real, it seemed as if someone was standing behind me and speaking directly into my ear: Don’t take it too badly. The first time is always messy and clumsy.

  “Get out of my head, damn you!” I growled as my knife buried itself in the derelict’s neck, severing the spinal cord.

  The screams stopped as if I’d pulled the plug on a stereo system. The vampire’s eyes disappeared into their sockets, retracted by withering eye stalks. Repulsed, I stepped back and let the thing fall as its limbs curled inward, like the legs of a dead spider. I moved away quickly, clapping a hand over my nose and breathing through my mouth. It didn’t help.