VII. Interrupting Vampiric Glamours

It has been almost fifteen minutes since Penelope ran off and Dorian is fuming. He paces back and forth outside with that ridiculous bonnet crushed between his bloodless knuckles. I can hear the raucous clatter of his emotions and thoughts, each one vying for supremacy. The shame of a little boy who will never be a man, the anger that there’s nothing he can do to overcome it. To the Fallen, it is an exquisite ambrosia, these feelings, but to me it is nothing more than metal scraping upon metal. The lament of the broken unwilling to be fixed.

It has a lingering aftertaste of disappointment. No fancy masks, the ominous gothic castle in the mountains replaced by an oversized cabin with an inaccessible second floor, and the fine clothing he was supposed to wear while being fawned over by his paramour is a little girl’s old night gown. More self-pity and the bitter hint of fear. Aleister Crowley, the man who was always in the headlines for his plots to ‘unlock the Enochian Gates of Destruction,’the man who traveled across the planet to ‘seeking Lost Powers buried by History,’ who openly proclaimed his personal agenda to ‘bring forth the Antichrist.’ Suspicion and doubt, something isn’t right, he must have ulterior motives this time.

Perhaps he always did, how could he have been so stupid to not see it?

“Shouldn’t you be in your room?” Herr Raubtier asks, returning to the porch with the Hrobars. “Where is your sister?”

“She ran off,” Dorian says. “She was following… She thought she saw a vampire.”

Mami Hrobar laughs. “And she decides to chase instead of staying behind barricade?”

“It fits her… mindset,” Herr Raubtier adds. “But there are dangers here at night other than vampires.”

“What, like gnomes?” Dorian quips.

Herr Raubtier lets out a condescending yet satisfied chuckle and shakes his head. “Or a wild lynx, ready to kill anyone stupid enough to get near her cubs. Wolves. Snakes, venomous ones at that. Especially where the grass gets deep. We’ve even seen wild bears on occasion.”

“Shouldn’t we go looking for her then?” Dorian asks.

“She seems adequately capable of defending herself,” Herr Raubtier says with a smile. “You should stay behind and wait for her.” He leaves the door open but walks back into the manor. The Hrobars follow swiftly behind.

Dorian gathers his pride relatively quickly. Penelope loves to complain about the burden of being an intelligent woman, how no one respects her theories and sees her as a child. But he wishes she could understand what it is like to be born a man with his voice, with his full lips and slender frame. Being an ambitious woman is one matter, being less than a man feels altogether different.

It disgusts me that I shared a womb with something so craven.

Dorian’s hair stands on end. Something in the back of his mind knows that he is being watched – someone s at the other end of the porch. He turns to see a dark shadow run behind the far side of the manor.

“Penelope,” Dorian shouts. “Is that you?”

Marcel has circled the manor at a silent, blindly fast pace and now stands a few steps behind him. He creeps towards my brother as though he is walking but his toes never completely touch the floor. His fingers and lips twitch like a cat ready to pounce on a baby bird that fell out of the nest while learning to fly, fecklessly squeaking for its mother.

Thin lines of blood seep out at the edges of the wounds on his arm.

“Penelope,” Dorian calls out again. He thinks he senses someone behind him, walking up the steps, but when he turns back no one is there.

Marcel grabs onto the wooden gutters jutting out from the roof and pulls himself up. He makes his way around the balcony railings, using his hands to shimmy across with his legs up in the air. Once Dorian walks past, Marcel swings down onto the porch bannister.

“Okay, Penelope. This isn’t funny.” Dorian clenches his jaws. “You shouldn’t be out at night with a vampire loose, you don’t know when he could come back.”

Marcel flows around the porch columns, swinging from one pole to the wreath of another then stops when he looms directly above my brother. Suspending the entire weight of his body with his legs and one hand, he runs the other through his hair, draping the locks over his shoulder.

“Your sister isn’t here, my star.”

Dorian leaps in the air and yelps at the sound of Marcel’s voice. My brother was born with an unerring charisma, a vivacity that draw others in. Girls, boys, it did not matter to him, he wooed them all the same and enjoyed every moment. I had always believed it to be his unthreatening and weak nature, a safe haven that the faceless horde of cattle sought comfort in.

His gentility did not become cowardice until later, after I disappeared, when he learned our life born of luxury came with duties he could not fulfill. It then that his confidence broke, that he realized how weak he truly was, how fickle and unreliable the hearts of mortals can be. Yet only now, under the gaze of Marcel, does he feel powerless, hunted – cornered.

“You aren’t happy to see me?” Marcel’s lips curl into a sneer and his brow clenches. The porch support beam begins to creak. “You don’t want me here?” he asks, slowly. Suspiciously.

“No, I do,” my brother lies when the ceiling begins to sag overhead. “You startled me, that’s all.”

Marcel lets out a relieved laugh and floats down to the floor. He wipes his hand on his ragged pants then embraces my brother. “I’m sorry.”

“You keep calling me your star.” Dorian squirms, his arms pinned to his side. “What does that mean?”

“Shem ha-Mephorash,” he whispers. “The wish made with your heart before you were born. The word for a hope that was forgotten. The love that creates what is to be. Finally, we have found each other.”

“…”

He licks Dorian’s cheek and giggles. “Why are you shaking?”

“I’m not.”

Marcel’s pupils engulf his irises. “Stop. Shaking.”

Dorian goes rigid and his hyperventilation ceases. His captor’s legs sway in to hug him so tightly that it hurts. “Thank you.”

Marcel presses his lips to Dorian’s. My brother wants to resist, even tries to, but despite everything within him struggling against what is happening it’s exactly what he wants. This does not feel compelled by the glamour. This does not feel like a lie. This is a compulsion born of desire is the semination of divinity.

Dorian’s feet lift up from the porch. All around him the sound of crackling fire and the rending, twisting of wood becomes cacophonous. Planks and poles holding the manor together begin to snap off from their joinings and soar up into the sky. Deep fissures run through the earth below them in a perfect grid pattern. The starlit sky with the full moon bright above him dissolves into a roiling ocean of black and red sand where waves of a howling nothing crash against the shores of oblivion.

He takes Dorian by the hand and soars up higher. A menacing, black obelisk looms in the distance, guarded by a palisade of iron and stone. Two-headed, eunuch giants with splayed open chests guard the walls, guided by patrol hounds with the heads of snakes and the faces of lions for bodies.

“Can you see them?” Marcel asks.

“…Yes.”

In the distance, a titanous humanoid figure so large that it nearly meets the ocean of sand above it, with seven arms the full length of its body and the spindly legs of a spider, shambles across the masses of fire and rock. Its head weighs heavy on its frail neck, burdened even more by horns that curl into one another. Shackled by geometry and biology, born purely free but tethered to a world of physical law.

“Are you frightened?”

The flesh on the giant’s torso is shorn off, revealing an uncountable number of ribs. Hollow, like a cage, it is filled with shadows that claw to get out. Perhaps they are simulacra, a reflection of humanity. Or, perhaps, this is the fate of humans who dare enter this world. When a bolt of black, red sand lashes at the giant’s back, it howls in fury and its chattel fall like rain from a stormcloud, their terrified screams and pleas for help imply the latter.

“Yes.”

Marcel cradles my brother’s head and strokes his arm. “You’ll never feel fear ever again. When we’re together, the Harvest can begin.”

The scent of sulfur and brimstone stings Dorian’s nose and a taste of ashes lingers from Marcel’s kiss. Something else is also there, something that tingles, something between a burn and electric shock that draws him back in. “What harvest? You mean the vampires, right? You and those… things.”

“I’m not a vampire.” Like humans, the Fallen prefer a different name than the one reality bestowed upon them. “Would this make me a vampire?” Marcel bits his thumb just hard enough to pierce the skin. A tiny red bauble wells up. He applies the blood to his lips, letting his tongue linger where his thumb was.

“Yes.”

He kisses Dorian again, letting him have a taste as well. When Marcel draws away, a thin smear of Dorian’s blood remains on his lips too. “Does that make you a vampire?”

“I… don’t know.”

He releases my brother and whatever mysterious power which kept him flying ends. Dorian falls back towards the fires and rocks below, unable to scream or move. Marcel swoops down and grabs him by the collar less than twenty feet from the ground.

“You want pain? You want heartache? That hollow feeling inside your heart is nothing compared to ours.” He starts to cry and then holds Dorian closer.

Humans do not fully understand pain. All they know is a lingering, unfulfilled want. The Fallen, trapped between being and not, tortured by the cruelty of providence, their lot is agony.

The giant screams at the sky and hurls chunks of rock from the ground. The boulders collide with the howling sands up above. A thunderous chorus of, “I am! I am! I am!” rings out as billowing clouds scatter and fall like black gobs of clotted blood that sizzles and bores into the earth like acid. Naked and disfigured human figures emerge from the dirt as it pelts their hunched, misshapen backs.

“What’s up there?” my brother asks.

“Everything,” Marcel says. “Nothing.”

The cyan flames and flat bedrock tiles fade as the Mathers estate reassembles, planks congealing out of the haze left behind of the nightmare that was. The watchtower in the distance flattens and bends into mountains, the tile grid teaming with wriggling limbs becomes ordinary grass and the dirt road, the black-red desert sky swirls and scatters, leaving only the moon and stars behind.

“What happens now?” Dorian asks.

Marcel’s pleasant sigh fills Dorian with more dread than any of the horrors he just witnessed. “There were people in this land who were called vampires once. One was a princess who bathed in the blood of her servants, it kept her body young and vital. Some claimed she was a sorceress.” Marcel taps the end of Dorian’s nose playfully. “Would that human be less terrifying to you than me?” His tone becomes cold and bitter. “The vampire?”

“I never said–”

“I could string you up over our bed, make a canopy of your intestines and sway with your head in my hands.” He holds my brother close and nuzzles the nape of his neck. A silence hangs over them, hovering motionless above the porch with the full moon above.

“They sealed her inside of her own castle,” Marcel says. “The walls, the halls, every door and window, all mortar and bricks. Imagine if she had truly been an immortal witch. All those virgins sacrificed for eternal youth only to spend it trapped forever in some castle far away in the mountains.”

Marcel freezes, a bittersweet realization dawning upon him. “Locked up in some dank, mold infested tomb, alone. That would be the worst part.” He releases Dorian from his clutches and his glamour, and my brother falls flat on his back. “We won’t have to worry about that. I could show you, what it’s like… to be together.”

“Shuh… sh-show me?”

Marcel hands glow with cyan fire from the other world. An electric jolts surges through Dorian’s body the moment Marcel’s fingertips touch his chest. Except now that crackling, seering, iridescent vitality flows out of his body, pools in the spot where Marcel’s hand lays, and then drifts away. Fatigue and fever come next, wave after concussive wave that strike Dorian near catatonic.

Sweat pours from his face and his heart beats so fast that it could burst at any moment. Fear and excitement come next, like his blood has been replaced by adrenalized euphoria. A gelded pleasure he has only known in dark alleys, abandoned washrooms, and reeking with self-loathing.

“Am I dying?” my brother asks with a smile. His vision becomes blurred. Exquisite joy recedes to a warm numbness, as if drifting into a hypothermic sleep. Brilliant flashes of pink, blue, yellow, and gold light, like an oil slick on the surface of the world, spill out from his body and pool under him.

“Devil!” Mami Hrobar’s deep bellow snaps my brother back to consciousness. Brandishing a broom soaked in pitch and lit like a torch, she bursts through the open doorway and makes a forceful swipe at Marcel. “Begone, demon!”

Marcel somersaults backwards, gliding underneath Mami Hrobar’s swing. Bapo Hrobar storms out from behind her with his shovel ready to strike. Marcel hisses at the lumbering Moravian giant when he raises his spade over his head and brings it down like an axeman splitting firewood. His quarry rolls away as the blade slams into the wood of the porch where the nape of Marcel’s neck was moments before.

Mami Hrobar shimmies down the porch steps, her skirt up with one hand and the flaming broom in the other. Marcel swoops over her, iridescent trails fanning from his hands. When he closes his eyes and clenches his fists, a strong gust of air blows the smoke from her torch away, along with most of the broom, leaving her with a crumbling mass of wirey embers on a stick.

He swings around in the air then dives for her. She counters with the other end of the broom and delivers a solid blow to his forehead. The handle snaps in half as if she struck a boulder and Marcel flips backwards, shakes his head, then snarls.

Bapo Hrobar charges for the boy, wielding his old rusty spade like a javelin. He digs his heels in and makes his toss. Marcel sweeps it away with a kick.

“I’ll be back for you, my star,” He says with a confident chuckle before soaring away.

Mami Hrobar discards the remnants of her broom and rushes to Dorian’s aid. He sits up and she coos, “Do not move! …is fortunate you survived. Where did he bite you?”

“What… happened?”

“You were attacked by vampire,” Mami Hrobar says. “Let me see your neck.”

Dorian feebly slaps at the old woman’s hands as she tries to maneuver his neck into the lamplight. “He didn’t bite me,” he says. “He… put his hand on me. There was a light and…” Dorian looks down at his chest. It’s hard to see in the dim glow of the lanterns from inside, but there is one tiny hole where Marcel touched him, a bump, like inflamed mosquito bite slowly welling up on his skin.

The porch steps creak and Bapo Hrobar joins them. “Wards did not work.”

“Nonsense,” Mami Hrobar says with a wave of her hand, rattling her jewelry. “My wards are perfect, is old tradition. Is because of perverts and heretics that God abandons us.”

Bapo Hrobar sighs. “Yes, wards always work.”

Dorian’s head reels. Fatigue bears down on him as though he is twenty feet under the sea and an undertow is dragging him deeper down yet. The mere act of remaining awake becomes arduous. “Water…” he moans.

“Now we carry pervert boy inside. We must examine. If he is cursed, he is locked up with others.”