A Sadness Within (19 page)

I sucked in my breath. Will had hinted at that, but it was different actually hearing Celia say it. I rubbed my brow trying to make sense of this affirmation from her. The tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the corner acted as a metronome for my mind, slowly counting the seconds as they passed by.

“I’m sorry,” Celia said quietly. “I’m sorry that he got mixed up with you. I think it’s partly my fault. I thought he had changed… or was changing. I thought that he was discovering what was really important. Things like family and love.” She slumped next to me on the sofa and suddenly looked mu
ch older. I suppose she was. An old soul stuck inside a 16 year old body. I suddenly felt the need to comfort her, as she looked to be hurting as much as I was.

“Well, I didn’t know him before,” I said, tenderly putting my arm around her shoulders in a sisterly fashion, “but I knew how he was with me and I thought he was happy. He was kind and understanding. He was there when I really needed him. And, I
love
him.” I choked a little on the last few words. I hadn’t admitted that yet. Not even to myself. That despite everything, I still loved him. But, it was true. Just saying it out loud felt right.

Celia’s eyes opened wide, and I could hear her breath catch. She turned to me and smiled.

“You do? Even knowing what you know, you still . . .
love
him?”

I stopped for a moment and thought. Did I still love him? I knew that I did. I knew that he had helped kill someone or maybe many. Was he really a killer or just someone trying to survive? I felt that there had to be more to the story. There was still so much that I didn’t know, so many questions that I needed answered. Perhaps Celia was just the person to answer them.

“I do. So much that it hurts, but I have so many questions, so much that I don’t understand. I mean, you are so different from… me.” I breathed the air deeply and closed my eyes. When I opened them, she was looking at me quizzically. “Maybe you should tell me everything.”

“S
o, he told you what
we are, but he didn’t tell you about his life or about the disease and how we got it?”

“I don’t think I gave him a chance. Once he said what he was, I mean, what you all are, I jumped to my own conclusions and ran. I never let him explain. I just kept picturing images of Stoker’s
Dracula
and the blood and everything. It’s taken me a few days to make sense of it all. I guess I just had to process things…” Her voice trailed off and she was nervously wringing her hands, a habit I had begun to notice. Her gaze took her out the window, her thoughts turning somewhere else.

“We aren’t all like that, you know. Monsters, I mean. Some of us choose not to give in. That whole Dracula myth is a fallacy. And we aren’t vampires, by the way. Just strangely immortal.” She eyed me wearily and bit her lip. “I suppose I should start at the beginning. You have to know who we were and how we became what we are. Is that okay?”

Julia hesitated only slightly before nodding her head.

“Yes. I think, no, I
know
I need to know it all.”  She sat up straighter now, and I knew she was preparing. Bracing herself to hear the whole truth.

“Well, let’s see,” I continued. “It all started in 1905. We were living here in this very same house. My mother, father, brother, and I. We owned the fox farm that this neighborhood was built on. Business was good. The farm thrived, selling fox pelts. My family was happy and comfortable. We had more than enough money to live off of. Our family, especially my father, was highly respected in town. Things were going well until one fateful evening. My family and I were traveling by train from Chicago after spending the weekend there. The train was attacked.  Not by robbers. But by the diseased. They took no gold or jewelry; instead they bit and drank the blood of several of us. It was a massacre, but they made it look like a horrid train accident. Some of the bodies were taken from the train, and were never found, their identities erased from ever being on the train. The passenger log tampered with. Others were burned when they set the train on fire to hide the evidence. My family was presumed dead.

“Those of us that survived woke up feeling slightly under the weather. It was damp and we were in some dark place. At least at first. Within days, our symptoms progressed to sweating, fever, and finally, coughing up blood.

“Coughing up blood? Do you mean like Tuberculosis?” Julia interjected.

“Well, yes and no. Tuberculosis… or Consumption, is what it was commonly called to explain the deaths. No one really realizes that some survive and become a frozen shell of themselves. There is no blood left in our system, so we need to ingest blood to survive. Without the blood, we can’t regulate our body temperature and our organs don’t function. Everything has hardened except our heart, which beats very slow. We are basically immortal, unable to be harmed by injury or disease. That is not something easily explained by the medical field. I guess they just started calling it ‘consumption’ because it consumes the whole body.”

“But, isn’t TB an airborne illness?”

“That is what they want you to think. True, many people in closed in areas would get sick. That’s how attacks occur. The entire group will attack, leaving several people dead or sick. The ones who become sick either die or become like their attacker. It depends on how their body reacts.”

“So there is no cure.” Julia’s voice was barely a whisper.

“No. There is no medical cure. At least not yet. My father has been trying to find a cure for years but to no avail. He’s convinced that since there is a chemical reaction within the body, there must be a way to reverse it,” I answered. I could see the hope drain from her face and all that was left was the sadness. I hadn’t noticed it before, but she had also changed since meeting Will. And now, I could see her face return to the same sadness that existed just a few short weeks ago. I felt the compassion in me rise and wanted to give her a hug, to comfort her, but I didn’t think she was ready.

“Oh.” Her brow furrowed in thought. “Is there more? I mean more about Will?”

“Yes. My entire family became sick. Days later, my mother died. Her body didn’t survive the change.”

“Your mother was affected, too?” she interrupted. “I thought she died alone of cancer or something after losing her entire family. Or is that simply the rumor that has been floating around for years?”

“No, she didn’t survive the exposure, and I’m sure that after all these years, people have speculated about what happened,” I answered and then continued with my story. “After a week, the fever broke and my father, brother, and I regained consciousness. We had survived the change, but it wasn’t long before we realized that we weren’t fine. We faked our deaths so as not to draw attention to ourselves. People were suspicious… first we disappeared for a while and then came back to bury my mother. There were questions that we didn’t want to answer.

“There used to be a barn on the property. We burned it and made it look like all three of us were caught inside. No one questioned the fact that our bodies were never found in the mess. We disappeared and the farm was passed on to a ‘relative.’ The taxes were still paid and that was all the city cared about.  My mother is buried in the cemetery right next to three empty graves.”

“I know. I saw.”

I looked at her in surprise.

“You saw them? But you didn’t know?” I was puzzled that she hadn’t said this before. I figured that would have been a giveaway for someone as observant as she was.

“That’s how I figured it out. Will started to tell me, and I looked down. He was standing near a headstone. A headstone that bore his name; all of your names.  It was then that I realized he was telling me the truth. That’s when I ran.” She looked exhausted, leaning back against the sofa and sighing deeply. “You happen to be buried near my brother.”

“Are you okay? Are you hungry or thirsty? I think I should stop and let you rest a minute.” I hadn’t noticed the dark circles that had settled under her eyes. It was almost as if my explanation was beginning to take its toll on her. This was a lot for one person to take in at one time.

“No, I’m fine. Just please tell me more.”

Her eyes pleaded with me and her desperation came through. I had no choice but to continue.

“We had to move away for several years. Too many people knew who we were in this town. We’ve been able to come back only once before this but in disguise, so to speak. This is the first time I’ve been able to actually enroll in school and try to be normal. My ever-cautious father finally thought it would be safe for us here.” I got up and walked to the window. My confessions to her were dredging up all sorts of memories of my own past. Some of them I didn’t mind, but some of them I would rather forget. Suddenly, I felt very old.

“And what about Will? What did he do? I mean, did he come back here with you?” Julia’s questions brought me out of my memories.

I paused and folded my arms in front of me. This was one of the memories that I didn’t necessarily like to recall. Thinking about our early years was painful.

“Will stayed with us for a few years. It was a struggle, learning how to adjust to our new life. My father, always the intellect, locked himself away in his study, trying to find a cure once he realized that we had been diseased. My brother and I were left fending for ourselves. I fought the urges and found that I was content with stolen blood from the blood bank. Will, on the other hand, was not.  He would disappear for days at a time. He discovered the thrill of live human blood. And, he was always restless, edgy, like he had to be doing something constantly. It wasn’t long before I noticed that he was different. There was something missing. Eventually, my father and I discovered that by not totally giving in to our urges, we were able to hold onto some part of our humanity. Our souls weren’t lost. I found hope in that discovery, but Will found nothing. Perhaps he was already too far gone.

“Finally, my father figured out what he had been doing. They had a huge argument, and my father threw him out. He had been trying so hard to keep us together and Will had done nothing but make a mockery of it. He had become a monster. Someone who took pleasure in other people’s pain and torment.”

“Do you have to… drink it?” she asked. “Does it have to be fresh?”

“Yes unfortunately. It absorbs into our organs better. The veins are too hardened for it to actually flow through, so giving ourselves a blood transfusion doesn’t really work. As for it being fresh, just like with food, fresh is always better, but we can survive just the same on blood bank donations. And we don’t have to take all of their blood and kill them. That’s where the group in Chicago has got it wrong.”

She seemed to think about this for a minute, perhaps reconciling her previous ideas with what I was telling her. I gave her the time and space she needed, choosing not to speak again until she asked for more. 

“So how did he happen to find the others in Chicago? How long has he been living there? Is your father still mad at him?” Julia questions came quick and resolute. It was an indication that she really did care… something that made me smile.

“Sorry,” she continued, realizing how much she had asked. “I suppose I should let you answer one at a time.”

“Well, the big fight between Will and my father was about 70 years ago.  I begged and pleaded for Will to stay, but he wouldn’t listen. I had already been feeling him slip away and I feared that if he left, I would lose him for good, and I had already lost so much. It was selfish, really. I cared more about being alone than I did for my brother’s soul.

“He disappeared one night and I didn’t hear from him for a long time. Finally, one day I received a letter addressed only to me. There was no return address, but it was postmarked Chicago. It was from Will. He told me all about a group he had found there, and how they had taken him in. They weren’t like my father and me, and instead preferred to kill others, feasting on fresh blood, taking advantage of the desperate and downtrodden. He begged me to come join him, telling me that this lifestyle was who we really were. He said he would come find me soon and then I could come. But, I didn’t want to. As lonely as I was, I had come to terms with who I was and knew what I had to do for myself to survive. I had found my little niche with my father, even if we were moving around often. And I still held onto what little hope my father had given me for a cure.”

“Did he ever come back for you?” Julia asked.

“Yes, about a month later, he came to find me. He snuck in to avoid my father. I told him that as much as I didn’t want him to leave again, I didn’t want to go, either. We argued for a bit, and then my father walked in. I expected my father to throw him out again, but he was hoping that Will had changed his mind. His reasons for coming were soon evident, and I could see how disappointed it made my father, especially since Will seemed to care even less about life than before. Finally he ordered Will out for good. I knew that I would never see Will again, so I begged and pleaded with my father to please let him come back once in a while. He and my father came to an understanding. Will could live in Chicago and do what he wanted, but he could still come home to visit occasionally. He just had to live by my father’s rules when here. If enough time passed, my father would ask him to come home for a few days, saying that he just wanted to visit with us, or some other excuse. Really, it was to make sure that he hadn’t totally lost his soul. I’m sure now that he did it for me.”

Julia seemed to consider all that I had said, although I hadn’t really told her about all of the bad stuff that Will had done, at least not in any detail. I figured she needed to know as much about this disease first, in order to understand why Will chose the life he chose.

It was starting to grow dark outside, the evening light creating shadows, and I squinted to try to see the lake in the distance. Julia stood up and paced back and forth quietly before walking over to the grand piano in the corner.

“Do you play?” she asked quietly, running her hands lightly over the keys.

“Not really. I took some lessons as a girl but I’m not very good. It was my mother who played for us. My father keeps it around more for sentimental reasons.”

“Do you mind if I play?” she asked. “Music helps me process things.”

I nodded. The ancient bench sighed with age as she sat. She placed her fingers over the keys and closed her eyes. A melody emerged, something I recognized. “Moonlight Sonata?” I couldn’t quite remember. She nodded an affirmation. I could hear the pain and emotion in her playing, and I knew instantly why my brother was drawn to her. I didn’t know how anyone couldn’t be drawn to her.