The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Read online

  “It can be done,” Byron said. “It must be done.”

  “It will be done.” I gave him my word then and there. I wanted him to know I would suffer for him, I would starve for him, I would be human for him.

  22 September. — When Byron asked for the girl to be brought to him, I questioned his motives since her blood did not appeal to him. “Is that a good idea in your condition?”

  “I would like to speak to her,” he said. “It is the only way I can know what action to take. Scientifically speaking.”

  “Scientifically,” I said. “Of course.” I was not worried he would struggle to resist her, but I was still annoyed.

  It is difficult to explain why I feel insecure, why I doubt him. Perhaps it is because he has grown cold and distant, and hard toward me in ways. His affection is mute, if not dead, since nothing is left for him. We do not talk about it, and I do not want to bring it up. I am afraid if I raise the subject he will simply agree with me and that will be all of it. And I am not ready for that. For now, the memory of his becoming mine consoles me hourly. If Byron cannot await me in the realms of Hades, or at the gates of Paradise, this moment shall be our eternity.

  The gratitude he showed me at his vampiric birth is still a comfort. After I gifted him with my power, he took my hand in his and kissed it. He thanked me with a sincerity I had never known before. Few show appreciation for their transformation since regret is common. At the beginning, self-pity lingers and the novice may easily forget the miserableness of his mortal life, causing him to mourn a chimera. But not you, Byron—not you, my beloved. You caressed my hand at your revival, and touched me as though I were a god who redeemed you from hell. You understood this privileged life, this gift of immortality, from the start. You knew even before I came for you that the vampire is superior to all other life forms—human, especially. I will never forget that first night when you were still a bloodhungry man and I made you mine without a second thought because I knew you were worthy of me. From that first show of gratitude, my beloved, to this moment now, I have not lived without you. For a century and a half, we have been lovesick and debaucherous in our exceptional union, and you, my darling, forever the scientist, have explored your gifts with fervor. We could never resist the occasional bout of torture, though most were in the name of science, were they not?

  When the outbreak began, in fact, Byron was one of the first to experiment on the sick. “There is a cure,” he had said. I knew if that were true, he would find it. “I think it is simply a rapid growth of cells that attack the nervous system and eventually contaminate the brain, spreading almost instantly, like some accelerated version of Proteus syndrome.”

  “My darling, I am not quite as gifted in the disease department,” I had said. “Proteus syndrome?”

  “It is not a disease so much as an atypical bone growth caused by tumors. But this affliction seems to be developing on and around the spine and causing a type of deformation to the brain that makes it defunct.”

  “If they are braindead,” I had said, “how can they function?”

  “They are not braindead so much as automated.”

  “But what makes them desire to spread their affliction?” By then we had seen the bloodless attack the unafflicted and turn them, as they say.

  He smiled at me and winked. “Man at his very root is steered by malice, is he not?”

  At the time, Byron believed the plague was not simply a physical contamination but also a moral one. The bloodless were driven by a desire to find company for their misery. Like the fallen angel, they wanted to bring a barrage of cohorts down with them.

  “It is as if they suffer a social disorder,” he had said. “Some kind of narcissism that impels them to make reproductions of themselves.”

  We would have never called them bloodless if they had not wreaked havoc on our way of life. The affliction spread at incalculable speeds, taking only several weeks for the plague to be considered a full-fledged pandemic.

  Byron performed dissections on the few bloodless we could get our hands on. At the beginning, when we were still feeding easily and Italy had only a few reported cases, he insisted on experimenting. If there were scientific findings to be had, Byron would have them. Test subjects were not difficult to acquire, the stink of the bloodless was easy enough to sniff out. As I have said, when they are not in a swarm, they are harmless. A well nourished vampire is far stronger than an afflicted human, even if it has just turned.

  “I have a lead at Santo Padre Gio,” he had said one evening.

  “In quarantine?”

  “Yes, but Ernesto is there to let us in.”

  One of Byron’s human friends was a hospital orderly. He had been giving Byron blood, tissue samples and other sundry medical supplies for years. Byron had known one of his ancestors in medical school and used that as his introduction. He claimed his own great-great grandfather had been a friend of Ernesto’s ancestor. Since he knew so many details about the man’s family, it was easy for him to ingratiate himself with the human. How Byron resisted digging his fangs into the boy’s neck, I will never know. Every time I saw him that was all I wanted to do—he smelled delicious. We had an endless influx of specimen until things got worse and Ernesto disappeared. But the night we went to Santo Padre Gio, he was outside smoking a cigarette from the unending chain of tobacco he pumped into his system. He tossed the butt onto the pavement and pulled out a fresh fag before he let us in the backdoor. Down to the basement, he led us through a hallway and several locked rooms. “I made keys,” he said. “You’re on your own from here.”

  He pointed out the direction using the mallet he had on him for protection. The blunt hammer had become an accessory on his newly weaponized belt. With the unlit cigarette dangling from his bottom lip, he gave us his usual speech. “I’ve shut off the monitor but you only have a minute or two before someone shows up.”

  “Is she sedated?” Byron asked.

  “No, but she’s unconscious.”

  I admired his glibness. Her unconscious state meant that she was about to change and would soon be reanimated. He should have been frightened since his mallet was no match for the bloodless. “You never saw me,” he said, as he headed back to his smoking section outside.

  “Come Vincent.”

  I followed Byron through the hall to a door at the end. I was surprised how empty the world looked; there was not another soul to be seen. Byron unlocked the door and we slipped in. We had already made a plan to get her out of the building unnoticed. I would toss her over my shoulder and we would creep through the halls with the speed only we could attain. We would be out the door within seconds.

  We found the girl chained to a bed, her arms and legs in irons. Ernesto had given us keys for the shackles and Byron raced to set her free. She remained senseless, as I carried her out. I wondered how such things were possible; I could not imagine this young girl transformed into a beast suddenly upon waking. She seemed weak, and I was strong. I still recall it vividly. I was not convinced these things were a threat to us; their smell of illness and death was too pungent for any vampire to desire, and so feeding off them was out of the question. I had not thought of the other difficulty they posed, the one we face now.

  When we got back to our lab, I assisted Byron. I placed straps about her limbs and head, as she stirred. She squirmed a little and tried to resist the force of my hands, but failed. When she was safely locked down, her legs twitched and her torso contorted as though she attempted to ply herself free. When her face began to morph, her lips and nose peeling inward, making her teeth jut out, I could hear her jaw and cheekbones crack. Her teeth looked like any other, but they were backed by an almost superhuman strength.

  One of the affliction’s side effects, what Byron calls its X factor, is the resilience and strength of the atypical bones. A wolframlike hardening occurs with the heating of their fevered bodies. The power of their jaws is like that of a crocodile’s, and they can snap their blunt teeth shut with enormo
us force. I wondered if her lack of fangs enfeebled her and stuck my hand in her open mouth. She snapped down on one of my fingers but could not gain a grip on my hardened flesh.

  “Do not play,” Byron said.

  “She is too weak to be any kind of threat.”

  “For now.” He looked at me intensely.

  “Are they getting stronger then?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “But we may weaken.”

  His words stung, as he predicted something I did not foresee. The plague was insidious, and not just for what it did to humans, but because it robbed us of our natural resource. At the time, I could not understand why he was so interested in finding a cure for the humans. But now—of course now—I do. Now I see everything. He was not working to save them; he was doing it to save us.

  As I walked down the cathedral’s corridor to fetch the pregnant girl, I thought of the afflicted one. As it went, she was only the tip of the iceberg. After dozens of experiments, Byron had still not made any progress. He was convinced he knew how the disease affected the humans but not what would prevent it. He was frustrated with his lack of advancement in the end. He had dissected spines of active bodies, as they lay on his table; he had cut off the top of that girl’s head, peeled back her scalp, and studied her reactions, as he touched different parts of her brain through a deformed cranium. Byron had done his best, and had gotten ill over his obsession. He skipped out on feedings and unless I brought him fresh blood, he would neglect to recharge himself altogether. He was already weak when the rations ran scarce. I blame myself for letting him become so engrossed in the dying that he forgot how to live. Why did I not force him back to health sooner—why did I let him obsess so?

  My heart was heavy when I reached the girl’s chamber, and I sent Stephen to check on Veronica before I entered her room alone. We had set them up rather civilly, deciding it was useless to treat them as prisoners. We fed them and gave them simple necessities such as access to a lavatory, soap, fresh clothes, and medical attention. We would not resort to savagery just because the world had ended—we found ways to continue simple luxuries like running water. Jean had tended to the man’s dislocated shoulder, putting it up in a sling after snapping it back into place. He found it difficult to resist the human, but he was, as we all were, aware of the greater good of our actions. Besides, we are not so incapable of abstaining, even as we starve. We are far more disciplined than humans; our cruelty has some limits.

  When I entered the chamber, the man rested on the bed with his eyes closed and the girl sat on the settee with a paperback copy of Paradise Lost propped in her lap. She looked completely different. She was revived and pleasant, appearing fresh and clean in one of the long robes we found in the nunnery. She had washed and combed her hair and wore it down and pulled over one of her shoulders. She smiled when she saw me.

  “Hello,” she said.

  I asked her to come with me.

  “Is everything okay? Are we still safe?” Her naiveté was refreshing.

  “You will not be harmed.” I spoke with a soft tone, an attempt to reassure her, but I could not know if she trusted us yet.

  “Marco,” she said.

  He opened his eyes and then snorted, as he bolted up.

  “Just you,” I said.

  I smiled at her with a closed mouth, not wanting to risk exposing my fangs, especially since the aroma in the room teased them. My teeth were itching to drop.

  “I can come too if you want,” Marco said.

  “Just her.” I held out my hand for the girl. She got up from the settee and gently placed her book to the side. She came toward me and hesitated before taking my hand. When I touched her skin, mine tingled. I could feel the blood pulse through her veins. Pulse-pulse, it cried. Her smell intoxicated me; that candied serum had come alive with the nourished baby inside her. She put her hand on her belly, as though she knew my thoughts, and looked me straight in the eye when she spoke. “Thank you for saving us.”

  Her voice was barely above a whisper, and though I knew she meant Marco, her hand on her belly was fitting all the same. She did not show yet, and may not have known she was pregnant. I released her hand once we exited the chamber and headed to see Byron. When we entered, he was poised at his desk, making on he was human I suppose. I had not seen him sit there for weeks. Though we would normally be in the shadows, he wanted to make her feel welcome and had lit candles all around his room.

  “Good evening, my dear.” He greeted her with warmth, and I thought it was the physician in him that held regard for human life, something he had struggled with when he first became a vampire. All that killing, all those abuses against his Hippocratic oath, made him feel guilty for using man so selfishly. “Please sit,” he said.

  She could not be more than fifteen; she looked like a child.

  “Thank you for saving us,” she said.

  “It is our pleasure, my dear.” He smiled with his mouth closed, wanting to keep his fangs from showing too, no doubt.

  We had decided against sharing our true nature with them; we assumed they did not suspect us of being anything other than human since they had not seen us do anything that would give our nature away.

  “Are you comfortable,” he said. “Do you have all you need?”

  “Oh yes, sir, thank you.” She shivered, as he sat down beside her.

  Byron must have frightened her. He looked like a corpse; pale and skeletal, his eye sockets sunk into his skull. The handsome man I once knew was gone.

  She looked up at me several times during their conversation. She smelled so good I had to stay as far away from her as I could. I practically hugged the door by the time she sat down. Byron could see my difficulty. “Vincent,” he said. “You may leave us if you have more pressing things to tend to.”

  He gave me the exit in kindness, but I refused to leave him alone with her. “I am fine.”

  He dismissed my unease and returned to the girl. “My dear, we drew your blood because we had to run some tests. I am a doctor, you see.” She smiled at him and nodded. “I hope we did not cause you any grief,” he said.

  “Umm,” she said. “We were a little scared at first. After what happened at the trattoria and all. We didn’t know there were still decent people out there.” She looked at me and smiled again. “We’ve seen some horrible things,” she said. “Just horrible things going on out there.” I suspected that comment did not refer to the bloodless alone.

  “Have you come across other people?” Byron asked.

  “Several,” she said. “Yes.”

  Byron waited for her to continue. He hoped she knew where we could find others.

  “We were actually hiding from some of them when you found us.” She glanced over at me and then back at him. “The three of us—” She stopped herself, uneasy about what happened to her missing party. “I mean, there were three of us and then when we got here there was just Marco and me.”

  “What happened to your friend?” Byron asked.

  “I don’t know really,” she said. “The last thing I remember is your voice.” She looked at me again. “Your soft voice,” she said to me. “It sounded like we were going to be safe. Your voice just stuck in my mind and then I, well, I … I guess I fainted.”

  “I see,” Byron said. He was as relieved as I that she had not seen the three of us gorge on her friend. “Who was the other?” He asked.

  She took a deep breath and sighed. “I didn’t know him really well,” she said.

  “And Marco?”

  “He’s my stepdad.” She wriggled in her seat, her admission making her uncomfortable. Perhaps she was lying, or perhaps she was ashamed of something else entirely.

  Byron put his hand on hers, causing her shoulders to quiver. “My dear,” he said. “Do you know you are pregnant?”

  She looked stunned for a moment and then closed her eyes. “Uh-huh.” She covered her face with her hands and fell into Byron’s lap. He looked up at me, as he petted her freshly washed hair.


  “Shush,” he said, soothing her with his strokes.

  The sting of jealousy touched me—just a dart, pricking my side with the force of a pushpin. It was ridiculous really but the sincerity in his voice and his tender touch on the girl’s hair made me rage. He was honest in his sympathy for her. His affection for the human had gotten the better of him and I saw him crumble beneath it. I left the room, stifled by the show of emotion and the sickeningly sweet smell of the human.

  26 September. — This day. Today … Today … To … Day … T … D … Y … Byron is gone and I cannot weep, I cannot die. My reality hit me when he locked himself in the sarcophagus. All I could do was sit by him, as he writhed inside. Only when the movement stopped, when the thrashing ceased, did I open the lid. Nothing but ash remained. Ashes, I want to consume. I will consume—his ashes—tonight—this night! This night … I will make him mine again.

  … — It feels as though the days escape me, as though there is no more reason to keep track of time’s passing. All feels lost, though I will go on. I will go on for you, Byron. I will push aside the feelings of pointlessness and come out from your ashes. We lay together in your sarcophagus for long enough. The only thing that can save me from this pain is my responsibility for the others. They need me.

  29 September. — The situation is hopeless. We are forced to the lowest means for survival, culling blood piecemeal as though we could stand to live this way. The little taste we consume barely gives us vigor, let alone satisfaction.

  My sweet Byron! How my heart aches for your passing. I know you were unable to carry on. I could only hang my head in misery, as I watched your graceful form disintegrate—bloodstarved. You became dust before my eyes and I will mourn you until the end of time. You were my first and only companion, and so you shall remain.

  Adieu, sweet Byron. May I see you always in my memory as you were in your moments of splendor—gallant, charming, vampiric, a villain for the ages!