Fevre Dream (16 page)

“What’re you sayin’? You’re the one
told
me . . .”

“Yes, yes. Coffins full of dirt, soulless creatures that don’t show up in mirrors, things that can’t cross running water, creatures who can turn into wolves and bats and mists yet cringe before a clove of garlic. You’re too intelligent a man to believe such rubbish, Abner. Shrug off your fears and your angers for a moment, and
think
!”

That brought Abner Marsh up short. The mocking bite of Joshua’s tone made it all sound mighty silly, in fact. Maybe York did get all burned up by a little daylight, but that didn’t change the fact that he drank holy water and wore silver and showed up in mirrors. “You tellin’ me you
ain’t
no vampire now, or what?” Marsh said, lost.

“There are no such things as vampires,” Joshua said patiently. “They are like those river stories Karl Framm tells so well. The treasure of the
Drennan Whyte
. The phantom steamer of Raccourci. The pilot who was so conscientious he got up to stand his watch even after he’d died. Stories, Abner. Idle amusements, not to be taken seriously by a grown man.”

“Some of them stories is part true,” Marsh protested feebly. “I mean, I know lots of pilots who claim they seen the lights of the phantom when they went down the Raccourci cutoff, and even heard her leadsmen cussin’ and swearin’. And the
Drennan Whyte,
well, I don’t believe in no curses, but she went down just like Mister Framm tells it, and them other boats that came to raise her went down too. As for that dead pilot, hell, I knew him. He was a sleepwalker, is what it was, and he piloted the steamer while he was dead asleep. Only the story got exaggerated a mite goin’ up and down the river.”

“You’ve made my point for me, Abner. If you insist on the word, then yes, vampires are real. But the stories about us have gotten exaggerated a mite as well. Your sleepwalker became a corpse in a few years of telling stories about him. Think of what he’ll be in a century or two.”

“What are you then, if you ain’t no vampire?”

“I have no easy word for what I am,” Joshua said. “In English, your kind might call me vampire, werewolf, witch, warlock, sorcerer, demon, ghoul. Other languages offer other names:
nosferatu, odoroten, upir, loup garou.
All names given by your people to such poor things as I. I do not like those names. I am none of them. Yet I have nothing to offer in their stead. We have no name for ourselves.”

“Your own language . . .” Marsh said.

“We have no language. We use human languages, human names. Such has always been our way. We are not human, yet neither are we vampires. We are . . . another race. When we call ourselves anything, it is usually one of your words, in one of your languages, to which we have given a secret meaning. We are the people of the night, the people of the blood. Or simply the people.”

“And us?” Marsh demanded. “If you’re the people, what are we?”

Joshua York hesitated briefly, and Valerie spoke up. “The people of the day,” she said quickly.

“No,” Joshua said. “That is my term. It is not one my people use frequently. Valerie, the time for lies is past. Tell Abner the truth.”

“He will not like it,” she said. “Joshua, the risk . . .”

“Nonetheless,” Joshua said. “Valerie, tell him.”

Leaden silence for a moment. And then, softly, Valerie said, “The cattle. That’s what we call you, Captain. The cattle.”

Abner Marsh frowned and clenched a big, rough fist.

“Abner,” Joshua said, “you wanted the truth. I have been giving you a great deal of thought of late. After Natchez, I feared I might have to arrange an accident for you. We dare not risk exposure, and you are a threat to us. Simon and Katherine both urged me to have you killed. Those of my newer companions whom I have taken into my confidence, like Valerie and Jean Ardant, tended to concur. Yet, though my people and I would undoubtedly be safer with you dead, I held back. I am sick of death, sick of fear, endlessly weary of the mistrust between our races. I wondered if perhaps we might try working together instead, but I was never certain that you could be trusted. Until that night in Donaldsonville, that is, that night when Valerie tried to get you to turn the
Fevre Dream
. You proved stronger than I had any right to expect when you resisted her, and more loyal as well. Then and there, I decided. You would live, and if you came to me again, I would tell you the truth, all of it, the good and the bad. Will you listen?”

“Do I got much choice?” Marsh asked.

“No,” admitted Joshua York.

Valerie sighed. “Joshua, I plead with you to reconsider. He’s one of
them,
however much you like him. He will not understand. They’ll come up here with sharpened stakes, you know they will.”

“I hope not,” Joshua said. Then, to Marsh, he said, “She is afraid, Abner. This is a new thing I propose to do, and new things are always dangerous. Hear me out and do not judge me, and perhaps we can have a true partnership between us. I have never told the truth to one of you before . . .”

“To one of the cattle,” Marsh grumbled. “Well, I never lissened to no vampire before neither, so we’re even. Go on. This here bull is lissenin’.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Of Days Dark
and Distant

Listen then, Abner, but first hear my conditions. I want no interruptions. I want no outraged outbursts, no questions, no judgments from you. Not until I am finished. Much of what I have to say you will find grim and terrible, I warn you, but if you let me take you from the beginning to the end, then perhaps you will understand. You have called me a killer, a vampire, and in a sense I am. But you have killed as well, by your own admission. You believe your acts justified by the circumstances. So do I. If not justified, then at least mitigated. Hear
all
I have to say before you condemn me and my kind.

Let me begin with myself, my own life, and tell you the rest as I learned it.

You asked my age. I am young, Abner, in the first flush of adult life by the standards of my race. I was born in provincial France in the year 1785. I never knew my mother, for reasons I shall reveal later. My father was a minor noble. That is, he granted himself a title as he moved through French society. He had been in France several generations, so he enjoyed a certain status, though he claimed to be of Eastern European origin. He had wealth, a small amount of land. He accounted for his longevity by a ruse in the 1760s, whereby he posed as his own son and eventually succeeded himself.

So, you see, I am some 72 years old, and I did indeed enjoy the good fortune of meeting Lord Byron. That was some time later, however.

My father was as I am. So were two of our servants, two who were not truly servants but companions. The three adults of my race taught me languages, manners, much of the world . . . and cautions. I slept by day, went out only by night, learned to fear the dawn as children of your race, having been burned, learn to fear fire. I was different from others, I was told, superior and apart, a lord. I must not talk of those differences, though, lest the cattle fear me and kill me. I must pretend that my hours were simply a matter of preference. I must learn and observe the forms of Catholicism, even take communion at special midnight masses in our private chapel. I must—well, I will not go on. You must realize, Abner, I was only a child. I might have learned more in time, might have begun to comprehend the why and the wherefore of those around me and the life we led, had things continued. I would then have been another person.

In 1789, however, the fires of the Revolution changed my life irrevocably. When the Terror came, we were taken. For all his cautions, his chapels and his mirrors, my father had aroused suspicion by his nocturnal habits, his solitude, his mysterious wealth. Our servants—our human servants—denounced him as a warlock, a satanist, a disciple of the Marquis de Sade. And he called himself an aristocrat as well, the blackest sin of all. His two companions, being seen only as servants themselves, managed to slip away, but my father and I were taken.

Young as I was, I have vivid memories of the cell in which we were imprisoned. It was cold and damp, all rough stone, with a great door of iron so thick and heavily barred that even my father’s great strength was no use against it. The cell stank of urine, and we slept without blankets, in filthy straw scattered over the floor. There was one window, but it was far above us, slanting through a solid stone wall at least ten feet thick. It was very small, and the outside was heavily barred. We were actually below the ground, I think, in a sort of cellar. Very little light filtered down to us, but of course that was a blessing in disguise.

When we were alone, my father told me what I must do. He could not even get to the window, the gap in the stone being so narrow, but I could; I was still small. And I had the strength to deal with the bars. He ordered me to leave him. He gave me other advice as well. To wear rags and draw no attention to myself. To hide by day, and pilfer food by night. Never to tell anyone how I was different. To find myself a cross, and wear it. I did not understand half of what he said, and soon forgot much of it, but I promised to obey. He told me to leave France, and to seek out the servants who had fled. I was not to try to avenge him, he said. I would have vengeance enough in time, for all these people would die and I would live. Then he said something I have never forgotten. “They cannot help themselves. The red thirst is on this nation, and only blood will sate it. It is the bane of us all.” I asked him what the red thirst was. “You will know it soon enough,” he told me. “It cannot be mistaken.” Then he bid me go. I squeezed up the narrow aperture to the window. The bars were old and rusted through. Since it was impossible to get to them, no one had given thought to their replacement. They broke away in my hands.

I never saw my father again, but later, after the Restoration that followed Napoleon, I made inquiries after him. My disappearance had sealed his fate. He was clearly a sorcerer as well as an aristocrat. He was tried, convicted. He lost his head to a provincial guillotine. Afterward they burnt his body, because of the charge of sorcery.

But I knew none of this then. I fled the prison and the province and wandered to Paris, where survival was easy in those days, so chaotic was the situation. By day I took refuge in cellars, the darker the better. By night I came forth and stole food. Meat, chiefly. I had little taste for vegetables or fruits. I became a proficient thief. I was fast, silent, and terribly strong. My nails seemed sharper and harder each day. I could claw through wood when I had a mind to. No one noticed me or questioned me. I spoke good, cultured French, fair English, and a smattering of low German. In Paris I picked up the gutter tongue as well. I searched for our vanished servants, the only others of my race I had ever known, but I had no clue how to find them, and my efforts came to nothing.

So I grew up among your people. The cattle. The people of the day. I was clever and observant. Much as I looked like those around me, I soon realized how truly different I was. And better, as I had been told. Stronger, quicker, and—I believed—longer-lived as well. Daylight was my only weakness. I kept my secret well.

The life I led in Paris, however, was mean and degraded and boring. I wanted more. I began to steal money as well as food. I found someone to teach me how to read, and thereafter I stole books whenever I could. Once or twice I was almost caught, but I always got away. I could melt into shadows, scale walls in the winking of an eye, move as quietly as a cat. Perhaps those who pursued me thought I changed into a mist. It must have seemed that way at times.

When the Napoleonic Wars began, I was careful to avoid the army, since I knew they would require me to expose myself to daylight. But I followed behind them in their campaigns. I traveled through Europe in that fashion, saw much burning and killing. And where the Emperor went, there was loot for me.

In Austria in 1805, I saw my great chance. On the road by night, I chanced upon a wealthy Viennese merchant fleeing before the French armies. He had all his money with him, converted to gold and silver, a fabulous sum. I stalked him to the inn where he spent the night, and when I was sure he was asleep, broke in to make my fortune. He was not asleep, however. The war had made him afraid. He was waiting for me, and he was armed. He pulled a pistol from beneath his blankets, and shot me.

Shock and pain overwhelmed me. The blow drove me to the floor. It had caught me in the stomach, square, and I bled profusely. But then, suddenly, the flow began to ebb, and the pain lessened. I got up. I must have been a terrible sight, pale-faced and covered with blood. And a strange feeling came over me, one I had never felt before. The moon was coming in through the window, and the merchant was screaming, and before I knew quite what I was doing I was on him. I wanted to silence him, to clamp my hand over his mouth, but . . . something took hold of me. My hands went to him, my nails—they are very sharp, very hard. I tore open his throat. He choked on his own blood.

I stood there, trembling, watching the black blood spurt out from him, his body thrashing on the bed in the pale moonlight. He was dying. I had seen people die before, in Paris, in the war. This was different.
I
had killed him. A great passion seemed to fill me, and I felt . . .
desire
. I had read often of desire in the books I stole, of lust and the carnal urges to which man is heir. I had never felt any of it. I had looked on naked women, on men, on couples locked in sexual congress, and none of it had touched me. I could not comprehend all this nonsense I read of uncontrollable passions, lusts like fire. But now I knew them. The blood flowing, this fat rich man dying in my hands, the noises he made, his feet beating on the bed. It all excited some animal deep within me. The blood drenched my hands. It was so dark and hot. It steamed as it came from his throat. So I leaned forward and tasted it. The taste made me mad, feverish. Suddenly I had plunged my face into his neck, ripping with my teeth, sucking up the blood, tearing, swallowing. He stopped thrashing. I fed. And then the door opened, and there were men with knives and rifles. I looked up, startled. How I must have terrified them. Before they could act, I was through the window and gone into the night. I had the presence of mind to grab the money belt as I went. It had only a fraction of the man’s fortune in it, but it was enough.

I ran long and far that night, and passed the next day in the root cellar of a farmhouse that had been burned and abandoned.

I was twenty years old. Among the people of the night, a child still, but now coming into adulthood. When I woke that night in the root cellar, covered with dried blood and clutching the money belt to me, I remembered my father’s words. I knew what the red thirst was at last. And only blood will sate it, he had said. I was sated. I felt stronger and healthier than ever in my life. Yet I was sick and horrified as well. I had grown up among your people, you see, and I thought as you did. I was no animal, no monster. There and then, I resolved to change the way I lived, so such a thing might never happen again. I washed, stole clothes, the finest I could find. I moved west, away from the fighting. Then north. I took rooms in inns by day, hired coaches to travel from town to town each night. Finally, with difficulty due to the war, I made my way to England. I took a new name, determined to make myself a gentleman. I had the money. I could learn the rest.

My journeys had taken me about a month. My third night in London, I felt strange, sick. I had never been ill in my life. The next night was worse. The night after, finally, I knew the feeling for what it was. The red thirst was on me. I screamed and raged. I ordered up a fine meal, a great rich red slab of meat I thought would slake the yearning. I ate it, and willed myself to calm. It was no use. Within the hour I was out on the streets. I found an alley, waited. A young woman was the first to pass. Part of me admired her beauty; it burned in me like a flame. Another part simply hungered. I almost tore her head off, but at least it was over quickly. Afterward I wept.

For months I despaired. From my readings, I knew what I must be. I had learned those words. For twenty years I had thought myself superior. Now I found I was something unnatural, a beast, a soulless monster. I could not decide whether I was a vampire or a werewolf, which puzzled me. Neither I nor my father had the power to turn into anything, but my red thirst came on me monthly, in what seemed a lunar cycle—although it did not always coincide with the full moon. That was a characteristic of the werewolf, I read. I read a great deal on those subjects at that time, trying to understand myself. Like the werewolf of legend, I often tore out the throat, and I did eat some small amount of flesh, especially if the thirst was on me badly. And when the thirst was not on me, I seemed a decent enough person, which also fit the werewolf legends. On the other hand, silver had no power over me, nor wolfbane, I did not change my shape or grow hair. Like the vampire, I could only walk by night. And it seemed to me that it was the blood I truly craved, not flesh. But I slept in beds, not coffins, and had crossed running water hundreds of times, easily. I was certainly not dead, and religious objects bothered me not at all. Once, to be sure, I spirited away the body of a victim, wondering if it would rise as a wolf or a vampire. It stayed a corpse. After a while it began to smell, and I buried it.

You can imagine my terror. I was not human, but neither was I one of these legendary creatures. I decided my books were useless to me. I was on my own.

Month after month the red thirst came upon me. Those nights were filled with an awful exultation, Abner. In taking life I
lived
as never before. But there was always an afterward, and then I was filled with loathing for the thing I had become. I slayed the young, the innocent, the beautiful, they above all. They seemed to have an inner light that inflamed the thirst as old and sick people could not. And yet at other times I loved the selfsame qualities I was drawn to kill.

Desperately I tried to change myself. My will, so strong normally, was nothing when the red thirst was on me. I turned to religion with hope. When I felt the first tendrils of the fever in me, I sought a church, and confessed everything to the priest who answered my knock. He did not believe me, but he agreed to sit and pray with me. I wore a cross, knelt at the altar, prayed fervently, with the candles and statues all around me, safe in the house of God, one of his ministers by my side. Within three hours, I turned on him, and killed him right there, in the church. It caused a small sensation when the body was found the next day.

I tried reason next. If religion had no answers, then what drove me could not be supernatural. I slaughtered animals instead of humans. I stole human blood from a doctor’s office. I broke into a mortician’s office where I knew a fresh corpse had been taken. Each of these helped, they quieted the thirst somewhat, but they did not end it. The best of the half-measures lay in killing a living animal, and drinking its blood still warm from its body. It was the life, you see, the life as well as the blood itself.

Through all of this, I protected myself. I moved about England several times, so the deaths and disappearances of my victims would not be concentrated in one locale. I buried as many bodies as I could. And I finally began to apply my intellect to my hunting. I needed money, so I sought out wealthy prey. I became rich, and then richer. Money breeds more money, and once I had some, more came to me honestly, cleanly. I had become quite fluent in English by then. I changed my name again, styled myself a gentleman, bought myself an isolated house on the moors in Scotland where my behavior would draw little attention, hired some discreet servants. Each month I went away on business, always overnight. None of my prey lived anywhere near me. The servants suspected nothing.