Blood of Others (13 page)

Eugene
Vryke
sat in the soft leather sofa of the large office of one of the country’s top
neurological specialists.

Vryke was awaiting the verdict on
the series of tests the specialist had performed on his brain over the past few
days. The doctor had kept his office lights low during his appointments. Vryke
disliked bright rooms. He took comfort in the gurgling water of the hanging
wall fountain. Its soft blue light was soothing as Vryke looked across
Manhattan from thirty-nine stories.

The doctor entered, holding a
clipboard, closing the door quietly behind him. He deposited himself slowly in
the sofa beside Vryke and removed his glasses.

“There is no easy way to tell you
what the tests show us.” He looked at Vryke with compassion. His cushion made a
leathery squeak as he positioned himself to deliver the news. He had a trace of
a Swiss accent. “Given the rate of deterioration, advancing cell and membrane
destruction, accelerated by each convulsive event, I fear --”

“How long?”

The specialist knew when a
patient needed to be told point blank. “One month. Six weeks at most. It is an
absolute. No treatment exists.”

Vryke stared at the fountain.

“I am deeply sorry,” the doctor
said. “Perhaps I should give you a moment to collect your thoughts?”

Vryke did not respond.

“You must consider how you will
inform your family.”

“There is no one.”

“A girlfriend, colleagues,
business associates?”

“There is no one.”

The specialist thought this case
profoundly troubling, given that his new patient was in his early forties,
possessed an exceptionally high IQ, and was otherwise in fine health. He
flipped a page of the file. “I observed that you said the pills no longer help
control the painful convulsions.”

Vryke closed his eyes and nodded
once.

“We have developed something for
you more powerful to ease it.” The doctor reached into the pocket of his white
coat, retrieving a small rectangular plastic case. He opened it. It held
several vials of clear fluid and a hypodermic needle with a pistol-styled handle
and thumb mechanism. “This can be easily self-administered, as you have done
previously in your history. At the advent of an episode, make an injection. The
precise volume is noted on each container. You must not exceed it.”

The specialist leaned forward
touching his forefinger behind Vryke’s ear on the point where his neck met his
jaw. “Make the injection here,” he said. “Relief should be instantaneous, but
you must not exceed the prescribed maximum. To do so would prove immediately
fatal. You understand my instructions?”

Vryke knew exactly what the
doctor was telling him.

The older man offered a gentle
smile and after they let a few moments pass, watching and listening to the
fountain, he said, “Go now, my friend, and take care of the final things while
there is still time.”

Vryke slipped on his dark glasses
and ball cap. Taking the elevator down, he decided to walk back to his hotel on
West Sixty-Third Street by way of Central Park South. It was dusk. Sirens
wailed amid the fading din of mid-town traffic as he lost himself in the park.

One month.

It confirmed the inevitable. He
had met the New York specialist for the first time a few days ago after
securing an emergency appointment. He would never see him again, as was the
case with the doctor he had seen six months ago in Boston and the specialist
nearly two years ago in Chicago. All three were leading neurological experts.
All three had told him what he had suspected. His condition had nearly run its
course.

Approaching the hotel, he took
his usual precautions, slipping on gloves. He always wore hats and glasses,
kept his head lowered from security cameras. He had been very careful while in
New York. He never used the bathroom in his hotel room. He showered, brushed
his teeth and shaved using the public facilities at the hotel pool. Citing
allergies, he requested the linen in his room be changed daily and the carpet
vacuumed in the morning and at night. He left no garbage in his trash. He ate
at fast-food places, crowded restaurants, or on the street at hot dog stands.
He had dozens of credit cards in dozens of names. He had charged this room to a
Mr. Frederich H. Boller, using acquired account numbers belonging to a huge
multi-national corporation that used the hotel daily and would never question
the expenses when they came thirty days later. Vryke knew that three different
executives named Boller had used the hotel in the last nine months. All of
Vryke’s medical records in the New York doctor’s system were under yet another
assumed named, as they were with the other doctors. He would see to it that
vital information would be changed in the clinic’s data bank overnight without
detection and that all tissue and blood samples would be automatically ordered
destroyed. The file would vanish within days.

He left no trace. No one would
remember him. He was a ghost.

Vryke entered his darkened hotel
room. It was lit only by the screens of his laptop computers. He had built them
himself.

He stood alone in the dark,
statue-still, assessing his quest, reducing his breathing, his heart rate,
letting the magnitude of his terminal condition take him to a higher plane of
existence.

The clock was ticking.

This is a lost world awaiting
a message.

Vryke was the messenger.

In the mystic visions arising
from his painful episodes, it had been revealed. Vryke’s purpose on earth was
to emerge from his dark lonely chamber and enlighten the world before he left
it.

In recent years it became
increasingly clear to him that this was his fate as he reflected on his past.
He had been rejected by his mother at birth, disfigured as a child, and cast
into a life of solitude, never understanding, until recently, that it had all
been preordained. It had all happened for a reason. He had been chosen to
create an everlasting message for the world by finding the One True Heart who
would wash away his sins, purify his soul, then accompany him into immortality.

One True Heart.

He had been searching for so
long. At times he wondered if he was hunting effectively. Did she exist, or was
she merely an ideal, a dream? That could never be. She
had
to be real.
She
was
real. She
was
out there. It was his destiny to find her,
to release her for the journey.

The last candidate had held so
much potential. They had grown so close.
Before her betrayal.

Vryke pulled on his latex gloves
and sat before his computers. Two were connected to satellite phones with
encryption devices he had built and small dishes positioned near the window
where pigeons cooed on the sill. The third computer was connected to a powerful
black box Vryke had built and set up between one of his systems and the hotel’s
switchboard.

He sat in silence before his
machines, tapping his lip.

“The
San Francisco Star
newspaper, please,” he said to one of his computers.

It beeped, then displayed the Web
site of the
San Francisco Star.

“Articles on Iris Wood, beginning
with the most recent, please.”

The computer beeped, then
displayed Tom Reed’s long feature on her life and unsolved murder at Forever
& Ever. Her smiling face in the insurance office photograph staring at
Vryke from the newspaper’s Internet display. Vryke read the article, more
interested in what police knew than the biographical aspects of her sad life.
No one knew more about her than he did.

You’re a liar, Iris. Excuse
me,
were,
a liar.

I thought you were
The
One.

He had found Iris while he was
lurking among the free and the commercial on-line lonely-hearts, dating, and
matchmaker sites. She had also surfaced on one of the several dozen sites he
had created and set out in cyberspace, like global drift nets.

Vryke’s white-gloved fingers went
to another computer and he entered a sequence. Words began to swim by. Screen
after screen, saddening Vryke because Iris had held so much potential. Her file
was all there as he quickly reviewed excerpts of his interview process with
her.

What do you look for in a man?
he had asked.

Honesty.

That was a fine answer, just like
the others. So he had engaged her.

Are a man’s looks important to
you?

Not really.

On that point, Vryke came back to
her several times over several days from different angles to solidify her
answer. It was consistent, so he took their relationship further, delicately
encouraging her to open her heart to him.

Iris had, describing over time,
and through self-depreciating humor, wit, intelligence, a life filled with low
self-esteem, self-doubt, shyness, loneliness, and a yearning for someone to
love.

You know,
Iris had
written,
it is sooooo good to have another shy heart to talk to. It’s like
having a best friend at the keyboard.

Vryke nudged her to step out,
join a club, talk to men.

Be brave. Be bold. Make your
star shine.

Thank you, whoever you are.

Iris promised to take his advice,
saying that it was time because, as she joked during one exchange, she was so
pathetic she was telling colleagues in the office that she lived with a man
named Jack, who in reality was her cat.

Can you believe that!?!?
she had written.

Then, during a particularly
heartfelt exchange, Iris revealed how she found comfort in the Bible, and had
wept at the fear of possibly never having children; how she had fantasized
about being like the beautiful brides on display in the wedding dress shop near
her downtown office. How she sometimes had dreamed of the special day when she
would enter it to select her gown.

Do you think it will ever
happen for someone like me?

Sooner than you think. I am
convinced you will meet somebody soon.

I can hardly wait!

Later, it had been time for him
to ask a critical question.

Say, if you found the right
man, could you forgive him the sins of his past life?

Yes. If he was truly sorry for
them and loved me. And he would because he would be the right man.

You are certain you could find
such capacity in your heart?

Yes.

At that Vryke believed he had
found his One True Heart. He had moved Iris to the top of his list.

He grew anxious with
anticipation, knowing the time for him to accept his fate had come. Vryke had
commenced preparations, learning through his computers that Iris Wood lived in
San Francisco, in a second-floor apartment in the Western Addition. He had
obtained her home address, her telephone number, information about her job at
American Eagle Federated Insurance, her position, salary, desk location,
extension and designated employee parking spot number. He knew she drove a Ford
Focus. How much her car insurance and car payments were. Knew what she looked
like, had obtained her photograph, her height, weight, hair and eye color, date
of birth, shoe, dress, and bra size. He had access to her medical records,
banking and credit card accounts. He knew where she shopped, what she ate, what
movies she rented, and what size and type of pizza she ordered. He even knew
what her cat ate and when it had last been examined by the vet.

In fact, given that she had
confided her innermost feelings to him, there really was nothing Vryke did not
know about Iris May Wood.

He knew she had enrolled in an
astronomy course at SFSU. Knew the time and location of the first session, that
she was nervous about driving that far south at night. He knew where she would
park. He knew what time the course ended, knew the weather called for fog that
evening. He had studied street maps and had researched the patrol patterns of
the SFPD in the area.

Vryke had flown to San Francisco
days in advance, checking into a cheap motel near the airport, to plan their
meeting.

His intention was to keep her
with him until he could complete their departure. But in her last message he
found she had deceived him.

You know, on that forgiveness
thing, I have to qualify it, because some sins can never be forgiven, they are
just too painful to overcome.

He could not respond. This was a
betrayal.

Liar.

She had probably been laughing at
him.

Vryke’s fingers typed and his
large laptop screen had filled with the face of Iris May Wood. Clear. Crisp.
Full color. She was moving. It was a recorded movie, its flickering lights
alive, dancing across the scars carved deep into his face as he revisited the
terror in Iris Wood’s eyes. A section of silver duct tape covered her mouth.
Wearing the Carruthers slipper satin ball gown. Her size. A nice fit. Bound to
the heavy steel rods with their heavy metal bases. The curtain dropped in the
display window of Forever & Ever. The security systems in the area put to
sleep without so much as a blip at the master panels.