IV. Surviving Interpersonal Vampiric Entanglement

Vampires are burdened by a hideous gift, the paradoxical embodiment of desire, a mockery of life’s petulant and impetuous nature: always yearning, always asking, always needing - consuming. It was not long after our ancestors crawled out of the slime that this cloying noise of prayer, of wanting, was the only sound that Light could perceive. Lust and hate, life and death, pain and pleasure, are all that is and ever can be. Quivering ecstasy in one ephemeral moment when the eyes well up and glass over, become mirrors to nowhere.

For Dorian, every second trapped in the back seat of the Black Beetle feels like hours and every minute feels like days. A damp, imperious cold fills the interior of the car and penetrates his bones. Steam from his breathe lingers in the air. He keeps low enough to hide below the windows, crouched on the floorboards where a thin trickle of fog leaks in and pools around his feet.

All four doors unlock as one, perhaps by themselves, perhaps by the spiritual will of the Black Beetle’s ghostly resident. Dorian springs up, locks both doors to his sides then crawls over the front seats to secure the front. His task finished, he exhales a sigh of relief and crawls back to his burrow.

Then all four doors unlock again. Before my brother can react, a vampire shambles past, mouth slack, red eyes glowering ahead. The doors lock as mysteriously as they had unlocked before. A snarl, nails scraping metal, then a vampire’s maw slams against the window, its rancid gasps steaming the glass. Soon all resistance gives out and the beast crashes through.

Dorian kicks the vampire back, landing the ball of his foot on the its nasal mound. A sickening crunch underfoot, but the vampire shakes it off like a dog bopped on the snout. Its talons rip at Dorian’s pants, leaving thin red lines running up and down his exposed calves.

He delivers a second kick to the vampire’s jaw but his foot slips. The beast’s burning red eyes are wide as its mouth opens wider. Its elongated tongue snakes out and licks at the long, oozing cuts on Dorian’s leg. Its nails dig into his flesh, arms jerking erratically while he screams. Dorian kicks at the vampire’s hand with his free foot and plants his heel into its knuckles.

The vampire recoils to attack again but snorts and goes rigid. With an axle rattling clap its claws dig into the door. The Black Beetle violently jerks back and forth until the hinges to the car door snap. It, and the vampire, soar away into the mist.

Tendrils of fog creep in over frayed metal and shards of glass. My brother does not breathe, does not move, fearful that the slightest change may upset the delicate silence. Two bare feet descend and hover just above the hood of the Black Beetle. Then two human hands wedge into the steel body of the car and begin tearing the hood, canopy, all of it, off. Windows rupture as a hailstorm of daggers. The canopy folds into itself then goes sailing off into the distance, spinning as if it were light as a wad of scrap paper.

Hair matted with sweat and dirt, wispy black locks plastered to his face and shoulders, Marcel hovers in the air. He doesn’t blink, doesn’t move, all he does is stare directly at his prey: my brother. Fear is one of the sweetest pleasures of the world, wasted on those with the mortality left to feel it. Terror fuels the fire of the blood, its scent is the succulent aroma of life, of desire. The voiceless scream from beyond: I am.

Marcel sniffs the air and smiles, then glides effortlessly over the wreckage of the Black Beetle towards his mark. He lands in Dorian’s lap, pinning him down.

The boy smiles, and though his teeth are not sharpened fangs like the vampires, and though his eyes are a normal human brown, his contented grin makes my brother feel like a rabbit cornered by a tiger. He takes Dorian by the back of the head with one hand while tracing the outline of my brother’s torso with the other, leaving smeared trails of mud where his fingers were.

Perhaps it is the way that his gaze never breaks from Dorian, even when Dorian looks away then back at him again. Perhaps it is the way that Marcel’s thigh constricts Dorian’s breathing. In either case, my brother finds himself immobilized.

“What are you?” he asks.

Marcel’s lip crooks up in a snide little half crescent. He musses through Dorian’s pomade slick hair then explores various methods of unfastening my brother’s belt. When the buckle won’t yield, Marcel wrips the leather strap with one hand.

“Wait a second, you can’t–”

Before his captive can protest, Marcel places a finger over my brother’s lips. Stroking Dorian’s cheek, he asks, “Why are you afraid?”

Thus begins my brother’s lesson in the glamour, the Fallen’s hook into the minds of their mortal thralls. No matter how he may struggle, and however he may strain to escape from this trap, he will fail. Dorian’s body will not move, will not obey.

But he will be free to experience what comes next.

“What happens if I tell you?”

Marcel’s reply comes from his tongue and lips but without words. My brother is born anew in his arms. Never has a kiss felt so complete, never has helplessness felt so freeing, that even death at this man’s hands would be exquisite release.

Or so he is willed to imagine.

Every muscle in his arms and legs becomes so rigid that he begins to shake. Marcel sniffs at Dorian’s hair, then the nape of his neck, then makes a perfect line around Dorian’s throat with his tongue.

My brother is familiar with this gruff and impersonal courtship. It is the way of these men, when they attempt their perversion of creation, their blasphemous mockery of the Great Making. Passion without love, the seed of Eros carried on an errant wind to land upon fallow soil. A caress of the hand, a playful glance, all of these would betray the base carnality of a heart shackled to a discarded soul.

Marcel smiles. “I don’t want to scare you.”

Dorian knows that he should run yet he has no desire to move, no desire to stop gazing into the frantic, wide and unblinking eyes of his captor. I was the first and only human in recorded history to resist their glamour. I would never expect my brother to possess the strength to fight back. It is in avarice and lust that the Fallen ensnare their cattle. They yearn for it, feast upon it, but those chosen by the Light are beyond such base pleasure, immune to the wiles of the inferior.

Marcel’s fingers slide between Dorian’s and coil around his hands. “Expectation is your heart calling out to destiny. It’s what led me to you.”

He kisses Dorian again and time loses all meaning. Perhaps an effect of the curious mist which surrounds them, perhaps the destined bond of two hearts uniting after eons of yearning in secret. Magick has its own laws, its own physics, yet it is as unavoidable as scientific fact.

“I was so worried that you would never come. I tried to find you everywhere, in every city, in anyone. But it as you this whole time.” Dorian knows not from where these words come; they are not his. They are said without thinking, without reflection, as if some unseen force is drawing them out. It is the Fallen’s way with manipulation.

“I’m your star,” Marcel whispers in Dorian’s ear. “The one that knew you before you were born.”

What happens next exists within the boundaries between the seen and the unknown. The swirling fog around them spins away to reveal dried, cracked red rocks and gaping vents which spew out sulfurous cyan flames. Spires, towering black pyramids gather clouds of iridescent, sparkling lights which draw out of the earth and flow towards their tips.

I remember the first time I witnessed the Fallen and their kingdom. Acrid winds scraped my face with an ashen, noxious gas. Lush, verdant jungles in soil so fertile from excrement that the air burned my lungs. Barren, flat voids with howling skies above and titanous horrors with countless eyes and mouths that swallowed worlds below.

Laughter was all I could feel, mirth at the manifestation of mankind’s latent will. But my simple brother is not me, and what he feels is an overwhelming fear that he is soaring into another dimension. He is half correct, for it is an unknowable angle of the one, and only, universe.

There comes a deep and inhuman moan from the distance. Then another. Then a hundred. Countless voices crying out in exquisite torture. Crooked, barbed tendrils caging naked humans jut out of crevices in the parched soil like a garden. The blue flames lick at some while twisted, animalistic monsters torture and brand others with white hot irons. Their cages open hungrily as winged carrion raptors with arms and legs like men water the garden with new prisoners.

“My star,” Marcel says. “We’ll never be alone again.”

The scream of a pig being slaughtered; drug by its hooves then strung up and split down the center, squealing and wriggling, rattling its chains as it bleeds out. Not out there, in the hellish inferno where cackling winged serpents torment their captives. Dorian hears it in his mind, forced to remember a sound with perfect clarity.

“We can be wherever you want to be,” Marcel says. “We can go anywhere you want to go. As long as you never leave me again.”

“I won’t.”

Dorian swears it, feels inextricably bound to Marcel with an unyielding loyalty. Now he knows that he wants nothing more than to follow this boy to the edge of the hellish inferno beyond.

Marcel leans, his mouth nuzzled on Dorian’s throat. His tongue plants on my brother’s flesh. He can feel the hot steam of Marcel’s breath. He knows this is the moment where he crosses the threshold from human to inhuman, living to unliving.

“Dorian!”

The blue flames and black obelisks recede. The grey-green clouds wash back in around them. All returns to the normal abnormal when he hears our sister’s voice.

“Who is that?” Marcel asks.

Dorian gasps as if he’s coming up for air out of ice-cold water. Before he can say another word, his breathing is stopped short by Marcel’s grip. All it takes is two fingers, thumb and pointer, to pinch my brother’s trachea shut. Dorian’s hands flail at Marcel’s forearm, but all of his struggling is for naught.

“My… sister,” Dorian cough.

Marcel glides up and perches atop the back of the passenger seat. He cranes his neck up to peer out into the fog. “She’s coming for you. I will return for you later, my star.”

He weightlessly springs from the trunk of the Black Beetle and soars off into the abyss.

#

Bravely onward flies my little light, and my sister gives chase behind. The fog separates as she heaves one foot down in front of the other, only to congeal back to a semi-solid barrier in her wake as if urging her forward. To Penelope, light is nothing more than the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation which can be observed by the human eye. Everything that we see is produced by light reflected off the surface of objects in the physical world, and this world another reflection.

But nothing in established scientific knowledge can explain how Penelope’s legs and arms stretch out further than the entire length of her body when she extends them into the murk, or how the world seems to rise and fall while the sky dips underneath it all. Why the haze pulses, breathes, lives. It does not explain how a ball of light the size of a baseball could lead a human along as if it saw her, knew her, and wanted to help her.

My beacon stops, flickers wildly in greens, golds, and lilacs, darts to my sister’s side, then careens away. Penelope is compelled to turn on her heel and follow. A split second after, a tangled mess of metal and cloth comes hurtling out of the fog. The canopy and upper body frame of the Black Beetle crashes where she was standing moments before.

Penelope wonders if it is possible that this ball of light foresaw impending danger, that it wanted to keep her safe. When the shimmering orb dips down to her ankles then swirls up to meet her at eye level as if nodding, she knows the answer is yes. She reaches out to touch the ball of light when it sings her name.

“Olivia?”

I wish that I could be the one calling to her, speaking to her, but this limited projection gifted with my voice must suffice. It has been two agonizing years, but her face brightens with recognition. My light twinkles and then soars away, slowing its pace only momentarily so that Penelope can catch up.

“Wait,” she calls out. “Olivia, don’t go–”

“Penelope?” Dorian asks. “Is that you?”

The brilliant orb recedes into the headlight of the Black Beetle, its top shorn off as if someone took a giant can opener to it. She is surprised that the battery still works.

“What happened to you?”

“What does it look like happened?” Dorian asks with a laugh, his voice cracking between words.

“Were you bitten?” Penelope asks, turning off the car. She pockets the keys then crawls into the driver’s seat, inspecting his neck. “There’s a mark here.”

“It’s not a bite. Not yet anyways.”

“What does that mean?”

“When the fog came in I locked the doors. I kept a lookout for you and Doc until I saw one of those… things. Then it attacked me.”

“It’s a good thing you survived,” Penelope says with a sigh of relief.

“I can’t say the same for the Black Beetle.”

The front passenger tire ruptures, slowly expelling air in a final dying gasp. Perhaps it is the long imprisoned undead spirit haunting the vehicle released into the hereafter, perhaps it is an insurance claim that will require careful phrasing. Ours is a world of uncertainty.

“At least you had your gun.”

“Yeah, about that,” Dorian says. “I… don’t.”

“You what?” Penelope asks, blinking. “What do you mean you ‘don’t’?”

“I don’t have it,” Dorian says with the inflection of a question. “I couldn’t find a way to hide it in my coat without it bulging out.”

“That’s what holsters are for.”

“I am a not a cowboy.”

“This isn’t about how you ‘look,’ it’s about not getting killed when we investigate dangerous mysteries,” Penelope says. She nudges him with her elbow, “You said it yourself, ‘junior detective’.”

Dorian hiccups then makes a choking sound. After some brief hesitance he lowers his fist and lets out a sigh.

“Egyptian frog curses, now vampires and magic.” Penelope draws her legs in towards her chest and rests her chin on her knees. “What else has been supernatural this whole time and I didn’t realize it?”

“I think… I’ve seen it before,” Dorian says. “When we were–”

“Nosferatu,” Penelope interjects, recalling the silent film. “When we were with Olivia. These vampires almost look like them.”

“Not the one who got me,” Dorian says. “It was that boy.”

“Oh, you mean the one with ‘muscles’?”

“Don’t be coy; I almost died.”

“I’m not– …I’m glad that you’re safe.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. He called me his… he said he chose me.”

“What did you expect?” Penelope asks. “You said ‘The Wallachian Waif’ was–”

“Honestly? I was expecting this would be one of those cases where you were right and all of this was… I don’t know, a bunch of bumpkins in east Europe convinced a hot, weird guy was a monster. But… that wasn’t the worst part. I was terrified, I tried to run, I tried to push him off of me but I… I couldn’t.”

“Vampire strength, that was Dracula,” Penelope says. “No, maybe Nosferatu had that, Dracula could turn into a bat. Maybe the Wolf Man?” She considers that for a moment while Dorian glares at her. “But I’m still convinced that one was the bank manager in a wolf costume.”

“Are you listening to me? Look around, he tore the top of the car off and tossed it away like it was nothing! But his strength wasn’t what was keeping me here. It was his… eyes. Dracula, by the way, that’s a Dracula power. But Dracula’s glamour is soothing and alluring. The one I was under wasn’t. It was like he was controlling something underneath my mind.”

“In your subconscious?”

“It was like he made me want everything he said he would do to me, and I could hear how awful everything he was saying truly was, but something in the way he looked at me made it sound enticing, inviting, like I wanted to die.”

“We should leave,” Penelope says. “We don’t know when he could come back. It’s safer with the others… hopefully.”

“How do we get anywhere in the fog?”

“We’ll need a light,” Penelope says. She leaps down from her seat and makes for the trunk of the Black Beetle.

“How will that help us?’ Dorian asks.

“You weren’t the only one who was saved by one of the villagers. We were saved too – the spade swinging giant with the bad eye.” Penelope unlatches the trunk but has to force it open with both hands, using all of her weight as leverage. “He said light travels further in the fog. It’s how they find each other. Fire too.”

“We don’t have any torches.”

“We have something better,” Penelope says. “We have science.”

She digs into the mess inside the trunk and finds one electric lantern intact, ensconced within a cushion of dirty shirts and an old tent. My sister turns the dial and white light floods the space around them. The green-grey gloom becomes pallid like dead flesh.

But when Penelope spins around to survey her surroundings, she notices that the light creates ripples in the fog. She shakes the lantern again. The air curls and bends like it is the surface of a pond that she skipped a pebble across.

“Dorian,” Penelope says. “Come look at this.”

She jostles the lantern again and concentric haloes swell out from it.

“I don’t get it.”

“You know how light works, right?” Penelope asks. “We see light when it reflects off of something else.”

“What about when it shines directly into your eye?”

“It reflects off your retina, that’s how your brain – look, the point is that light is special,” Penelope says. “And after what that old villager said and what I’ve seen here, my hypothesis is that the reflection disrupts the fog.”

“Ok… how?”

“No idea – yet.” Her lantern has a canopy hood, and Penelope closes it to focus the light in a straight line. When she holds it out in front of her, the beam penetrates deep into the hoary abyss with curled tendrils of the fog ebbing around it.

Further down the line something strange occurs. The beam abruptly ends then, about seven meters to the left and half a kilometer up, the beam reappears and shines in the opposite direction where it cuts off again. She pivots on her heel and shines the light to her right. Now it ends a few inches from the lantern.

“How is that possible?” Dorian asks.

Penelope spins around, shining the light on his back. “What happened?”

“I saw the lantern light, over there,” Dorian says, pointing far off ahead of him. “It was like a solid line on the horizon.” He holds his arms out to their full span. “But it ended about there and there.”

“Fascinating.”

“Why?”

“Wait there,” Penelope says. Hands trembling, she walks down the line. Approaching the end of the beam, she can see the point where it ends, where the fog becomes solid again.

“How in the,” Dorian gasps. “How did you get up there?”

Penelope turns in place. “What?” she asks, hovering upside down and in mid-air where the beam appeared in front of him.

“You’re all the way over there now, how is that possible?” Dorian asks.

“And upside down I wager,” Penelope grumbles, although from her vantage point it appears as if she is on the ground and Dorian is the one dangling by his ankles in the mist. “I’m coming back. Stay there.”

“I’ll follow you.”

“No,” Penelope commands. “Stay. There.”

It takes decades of training for the most potent of magicians to command others with such pure Will, but for my sister that power is as natural as breathing. It is the intuitive gift of those blessed with her insight, knowledge that this world is a carnival ruled by imbeciles and performed for decrepit and inept.

“Good,” she says, emerging from the fog. “I think I know what’s going on here.”

“What?”

“This space, it’s Non-Euclidean.”

“You say that like it’s a word people know.”

Penelope rolls her eyes and lets out a frustrated groan. “Let’s say you’re in a room. You see a door on one wall. You want to leave, so you walk to the door–”

“What about the windows?”

Penelope’s eyes flare open and she clenches her teeth. If there is anything my sister despises, it is when people fixate on irrelevant data. It is what sets her apart from the horde of humanity, the hungry mouths and impulsive hearts for whom thought is an impossibility.

“Forget the windows, there are no windows.”

“Who builds a room without windows?”

“If you want to leave the room you have to use the door. And if you walk to the door in a straight line you know that you will reach it, right?”

“Obviously.”

“That’s assuming in Euclidean space. In non-Euclidean space none of that is true. Imagine you take three steps towards the door then, suddenly, you’re standing in the corner of the room furthest from the door. You start walking to it again but the next thing you know you’re standing in the middle of a different room, in a different building. You go to that door, but when you open it, you aren’t in the hallway, you’re in the park that’s all the way downtown… we have to get out of here, before any more Nosferatus come.”

“Are we really going to call them that?”

“You wanted to compare everything to stories.”

Penelope takes our brother by the hand and leads him behind her. Doing her best to keep the lantern steady, she walks in a straight line, keeping the beam solid as she can. Once that path ends, she spins in place until a new one appears then continues in that new direction. Left, right, up, down, none of that applies in the fog but, this way, she knows that they are walking a straight path.

“Do you know where–”

Dorian comes to a stumbling halt, and our sister thereafter, when the piercing shriek of the Aztec Death Whistle penetrates the stillness. The horrid blume quivers with anticipation and fills with an alien, infrared light. Demonic hunger manifests as fear when, staring back at them, are countless eyes, each one the red neon glimmer of the Nosferatu.