Nanowrimo - 15-16

“What have I just done?” I ask the distinguished gentleman in fine robes who emerges from the darkness on a Parisian street. “I don’t understand why I do this thing. I don’t want to kill people.” I stagger toward him, still delirious and high.

“Ahhh I know. But that is what has brought you to me. Come!” He reaches out his hand for me to take it. Following feels like the most natural thing, as if I have seen this face in dreams since I was a child. But the distrusting Englishwoman in myself rises up.

“Why should I follow you? Who are you, anyways?”

His eyes shift from side to side briefly before he answers in a hushed tone. “There are lots of people on this street who would love to know who I am but should not, so I will refrain from answering. And you should follow me because left to your own devices in these streets you will be in great danger very soon. You will call attention to yourself. So, take my hand.” He grabs my hand and puts it over his elbow. “And follow, now. See? Not so terrible.”

The streets wind around higgledy piggledy with none of them making a straight course between any two points. We turn left, then right, then up a narrow street, then left down a slightly bigger one, passing all manner of people. Beggars litter the byways with their gaunt bodies. Bakers sell bread from carts and stalls and crowds of the hungry lurk nearby, hoping for the seller to be distracted just long enough for them to procure a biscuit or two. There are groups of men, their bellies full with too much drink, raising their cups and carousing as they make their way home or toward their next den of iniquity. Hungry and tired, children cry and run about the street. Some clutch the skirt of a mother, but many are alone. The smell of the place is rotten.

At last, coming down a narrower and quieter lane, we come to a door, which he turns to unlock with a great key that dangles about his neck. “Come! Come now!” he takes my arm and pulls me through the door and into the darkness it has kept contained.

As my new companion lights a lamp the strangest scene unfolds around me. Brightly patterned carpets stretch across the floor. The furnishings seem a bit mis-matched but are all covered with the most exquisite fabrics. Objects strange and rare rest on every table or surface or protrude from every wall. Vases, paintings, fine swords, crystal, and some statuary too strange in form to identify, come from the darkness as he continues going about lighting lamps.

“Are you rich?” I can’t take my eyes from a metal form depicting a woman with four arms, large, round breasts and a cruel look upon her face.

“That is Kali, do you like her? She’s the goddess of death who dances in her drunkenness upon the blood of her enemies. I’m not really rich, I’m mostly just very very old.”

I peal my eyes from the statue to look back at him. “You don’t look old.”

“Ahh, there is much for you to learn. And to answer your earlier question, my name is ‘Zoltan’.”

In all my hours spent musing the contents of his home I’m not quite sure I was ever able to take it all in fully. “This does not even begin to scratch the surface, cheri. I have this house, I have a small fort in Transylvania, a cave in Persia as well as a catacomb in Rome taken out for the purpose of interring my dead body but, well, holding my body of goods, instead.”

“How do you have so many possessions? And why is it all so far away from you? It would take forever to get to Rome and Persia both, I would think.”

“Hm, I will answer your questions but, well, not in that order. I do not worry that my wealth is at a distance from my person. It may well require weeks or even months to journey to some of these places. No matter! I have PLENTY of time to make the journey. I like to have it all tucked away in neat little pockets so that no one may, at any time, get at the whole lot. Now, I have been around pack-ratting for quite some time so I have collected quite the lot of antiquities. It would simply be folly to have it all visible and in one place due to the risk of theft or nosy visitors. And all I own would stuff this building completely to the gills and make it all quite messy. Why, there would be no room for me to live in such a place! And to your first and last question, I have come to own much because I have simply been so many places and have been around for such a long time!”

“You can’t be that aged, you don’t appear to be so terribly old at all!”

“Well, there is much about your own self that you simply do not understand! I was born in the city of Babylon during the Chaldean times. I am, by the reckoning of the present calendar system, 2,383 years old! Now, that number is off by about 25 years because the engineers of the Gregorian calendar miscalculated grossly in their effort to center the counting of all time upon a nebulous historic event. But, let’s just say, I am quite old, do not plan to die soon, and tend to be easily bored. So, I travel from place to place and as I travel, well, things just come into my hands.”

He sits back in a chaise, arm draped out beside himself, relaxed and resplendent in his robes. This home is astonishing. From every corner fine fabrics and exotic forms beacon to my eyes with their sensuous marvel. But, this man is clearly insane. I have to get out of here. It is not at all proper for a woman alone to be in a strange man’s home. What was I thinking, coming here? I must leave at once!

My panic is barely verbalized as a cloud across my face when Zoltan raises his hand. “Stop. Do not run out of here into the night. You don’t know enough about yourself to survive and the attention you might attract will endanger more than yourself. Many like us live in this city and our secrecy must remain paramount. Stop, sit down, stay. You will soon realize that it is much more of a benefit than a danger to remain here.”

“How could I hurt them? Who are they?”

“Others here who share our nature, we are all connected deeply through intuition. Much more so than mortals. Living a life untrained would be psychic warfare upon our kind.”

“What is this nature you refer to, that which we share?” I slide into an ornate and slightly overstuffed chair.

He plays with his glass of wine, dipping a finger into the bloody liquid and tasting it in his mouth. “What you just tonight out there in the street. Did you understand it?”

“I know that I was overcome by a most uncontrollable urge. It felt as if I were being guided along by a force I did not understand to find that man, all alone. I felt, strange, as if I were not myself but somehow MORE myself than ever before. After I finish I feel the strangest elation, like nothing I’ve felt before.”

“You’ve done this before. I take it. I’m assuming that is why you left your native shores and thrust yourself onto the whims of chance.”

“Yes, I did. It was once, three years ago. I was at a ball with my husband when I found myself strangely attracted to a young man. But, when we were alone I found the strangest passion rising in me. I, well, I drank his blood from his neck. It was the most horrid thing, but also quite satisfying, quite elating.”

He crooks an eye and leans forward. “You have a husband?”

“Yes, I deserted him in London. He wants nothing to do with me. I’m merely a female bauble to hang from his arm in public and to produce an heir. I wants nothing of me.”

“Produce an heir?” The pitch of his voice is getting higher with each question.

“Yes, in the fury after that – incident – I forced my husband to submit to me. As a result I had a son.”

“A SON!” He fairly explodes out of his chair.

“Yes, yes I had a little boy. My husband would not permit me to come near the child. Neither would he condescend to make the effort required to create another child. So, I left.”

“You left.”

“I left. I will not be missed.”

“Oh that is not true! Your husband may not miss you in his bed but his pride will miss you in his house! Did anyone else know you were leaving?”

I shake my head ‘no’.

“Did you share your plans to come to Paris with anyone? Even a maid?”

“No, I did not. I just left. I took boats to the coast and found a Scottish vessel to Calais. From there a series wagon carts brought me here.”

“Astonishing. Why here?”

“I heard talk at some of our card tables about the chaos in France as well as the upset over the King’s spending money to assist the North American colonies in leaving the crown. I, well I don’t know. It just sounded like it would be easy to disappear here, to be untraceable. And once I found French soil I was drawn to Paris.”

He sighs and sips his wine. “Well, you’re safer here than just about anywhere in Europe. For now. Oh it’s terrible the way that foolish young Louis bankrupted the coffers just for some spite of old King George. But those ‘Americans’ as they call themselves, they are quite interesting. The same liberté has, unfortunately, not been so extended to the French masses. This you no doubt saw in your journeys. Well, you will have to make a new name for yourself, just in case your inattentive husband decides not to play the wronged gentleman and comes on the hunt. Did you give anyone your name during your travels?”

“No”

“Good. Although my senses are telling me that the existence of this son will be problematic.”

I don’t need anymore guilt about abandoning my child. “You still haven’t explained to me what it is I am, or we are.”

“Ahh child. Amongst ourselves, we are called the ‘once born’, for we do not die. We can live forever on the material plain in vigorous health and vibrant youth. We possess the greatest strengths and intuition of all human kind. But, there is a caveat. Unlike other humans who live fifty or so years and then die, ‘mortals’ we call them, and who live by consuming the fruit of the earth, we must live by consuming the life blood of men.”

He notes the look of surprised horror across my face. “I know it sounds wicked, but it is true. We feed on our fellow travelers of Earth. But it is not so horrible. Mortals themselves survive by taking the lives of creatures.”

“But, this just can’t be true! I’m a normal person, I eat food! I am not such a wicked creature as this!”

“Now, now, listen to your heart. Listen to the silence whispering inside of you. In there you know that what I say is true. Think back to every dinner you’ve ever had, every supper plate in front of you. At the end of the meal was that plate empty? It was not, was it? Do you remember the taste of food? All through your journey from London to Paris did you once crave for a simple loaf of bread to stave your hunger? Tell me true. Did you eat so much as a morsel between London and Paris?”

“I did not.” I confess. “But then, what you are saying, that makes me a vampire! I am a monster!”

“No! No no, we do not use that term. That is their term for us and it comes straight from misunderstanding, fear and folklore. We are merely ‘once born’, and if you want to see a real monster, find yourself a tax collector and follow him about on his rounds. Watch how he mistreats the poor, old and sick. There’s your monster. We are not killing to murder. We are merely feeding to survive, just as God has appointed all creatures to do.”

“But, why me? Wherefore am I thus? Was it some sin of my youth? Was I not baptized properly? What has turned me into such a creature?”

“Stop with his theatrical nonsense! You need to think! Think back to your own youth. Were you ever a gregarious child with many friends? Did people warm up to you?”

“No, they did not.”

“Think back even further, you can recall your infancy, can you not?”

“yes, I remember being very small, in my nurse’s arms.”

“did anyone ever tell you that is not typical of children?”

“I was scolded several times for sharing memories that my mother insisted I would have been too young to know, yes.”

“That’s because our brains are more! We are the ultimate humans! God’s more perfect creation in his own image! Now those memories, do they include many scenes of loving care at the hands of your mother?”

“They do not. In fact, I was weaned quite young.”

“Some of them can sense it and they draw away. That’s the normal reaction of ignorants in the face of their superior.”

“But what made me into this? You didn’t answer my question.”

“Oh, you never became a once born, you were born as one. Possibly there was a latent gene in your lineage or another one such as us in your family.”

I sit pondering this silently for a length while a sphinx stares back at me. I dig back and back through memory to recollect a childhood gathering. My father’s brother, Uncle Robert, was a most strange man full of an oddly youthful vitality. As his siblings were showing signs of age with graying temples and fragile skin, Robert was not. His hair remained black and his complexion hearty. I remember father talking about him, in the one moment when I was able to extract some facts. “He did a lot in his life, most of which he ought not to have done.” A consistent and pervasive distrust of Uncle Robert permeated the family. Perhaps that is why I preferred him and he doted upon me. We were both just as rejected.

And then he disappeared. I was still not even thirteen and so my parents kept the details hushed. I only knew that suddenly my jovial Uncle was gone without trace or mention.

“Yes, I see him. I know there were more.”

“See? It’s not such a bad thing. Once you come to master your urges, you will find this life quite a pleasure. There is one other possible draw back to our state.” He hesitates and looks quite serious for a spell. “When you drink of a mortal, you gain more than just life and strength from their blood. Their life’s emotions become a part of you. Their feelings mix with your feelings. So…” he looks down at his wine glass, swirling the contents about “you might wish to refrain from feeding upon indigents again. Or else, your life will come to feel very long indeed.”