SCROLLS OF THE DEAD-3 Complete Vampire Novels-A Trilogy (42 page)

Who am I? he wondered. What has become of me? I am not an animal. I am not a man. I am a new creature under the sun and as God made all creatures, I am one of them. But if that is true, then for what purpose have I been made? Need there be a purpose? There must be, he wailed to the heavens. I must have a purpose!

He knew instinctively that it was not just to maraud among London's poorest, taking life wherever it presented itself to him. Why, he'd even killed a child, a little boy no older than five who had wandered too near the cellar steps chasing a small carved wooden ball. And he had taken him gleefully, laughing uproariously afterward at the hot sweet taste lingering in his mouth and the feeling of bright steely energy flooding all through his sleek body.

For now, yes, after feasting so long and so well, he was sleek and beautiful, his gaze bewitching to male and female alike. They did not appear to notice his tattered and bloodstained clothing, or his tangled, uncut hair. They were captured in an instant by his gleaming eyes and his smile, that hauntingly beautiful smile that held out such promise.

He had murdered too many to remember. Old, young, male, female, crippled, virile. He had done it because it was his nature to do it and until he was completely satiated, he had not been able to think about the consequences to his soul.

Once he did, he was appalled. He had been studying religion before his death, stealing books and parchments from the rich by invading their homes when they were away or when they slept. Early on, he had found someone to teach him to read, lying in her bed each night in his fifteenth year, resting after his sweaty service, bending close to the letters and struggling with the words.

His lover was not a good woman and only gave him the lessons because he would do her will for nothing else. She was heavy, a woman whose fat rolled from her belly and her thighs as he climbed on top. She was always perfumed, but beneath the fragrant scent she still reeked of scorched potatoes and of goose dripping yellow fat, these items being among her favorite dishes.

He had been a man in search of holiness, despite what he'd had to do in order to learn to read and in order to find material in the ancient texts he wanted. At least in his own regard he believed he searched for perfection of the spirit and a rapport with God. His family thought him overly ambitious from the beginning with his crazy hope to rise from the class into which he'd been born.

"Nothing good will come of it," his mother said, brandishing a wooden spoon about his head and whacking him on the ear when he least expected the spoon to descend. "You need to find work, to find work and feed us before we starve, that is what you need to do! Why don't you have your stumpy woman in her fine costumes give you a handful of coins, for pity's sake? Does she not love you enough?"

No, she did not love him, but she loved his finely timed and exquisite abilities lavished on her in the private quarters of her great mansion. Though she would tire of him before he tired of learning, he would have no more asked for coin than he might have begged for a morsel from her overladen table. Hunger at that time did not drive him, as it did most of his family. They worked and sweated and went into servitude only to fill their bellies. Love did not drive him, as he had never loved yet and knew nothing of the glory of it. What drove him was his quest for God, as if he were God's bridled prize stallion and all he wanted to do was to find a way to slip from the meanness and degradation of his life into the robes of the Holy Church.

His mother understood none of that, nor did any of those who lived around him. Love God, yes, believe in His righteous anger, yes, but to think one of their kind could ever hope to attend a place of higher learning or don the robes and bear the chalice, no, never, ever, never.

So it was when he came to himself and remembered God's holy edict against taking life, and he found himself surrounded with the brutal evidence of his bloodthirst, he cried out piteously and buried his head in his arms. He was lost, dear God in heaven, he was set for the furnace of hell, just where his misguided family believed he'd come from when he returned from the dead. Perhaps he was possessed by demons or his body and mind were substance to clothe the devil himself. How else had he caused such great destruction and suffering without guilt until now, this moment months into the mad bloodletting rampage?

He could not bear to be alone with himself. He could not stand to hide like an animal in the burrow of his dank cellar stinking of corrupted flesh turned gray and falling from bones. He rushed up the stairs, sprawling a time or two as he went in his haste, yearning for the sky and clean, fresh air not redolent with his misdeeds.

He came out into the sun, shading his eyes. He saw people shy from him the way they did when he was ill and showing all the outward symptoms of his dread disease. Women spoke to one another behind their hands, clutching their market baskets to their breasts. Children hushed and clustered together for comfort, seeking an adult for protection. Men opened wide, frightened eyes at him and hurried along, almost running to be away.

He must look a monster. No longer lit from inside with the power that produced a beauteous gaze to entrance his prey, he was now simply a wrecked creature deep in the mire of guilt, fearing for his soul.

He slunk along the side of the buildings, shading his eyes, hiding his face until he came upon a dirt path leading from the city. He took it gratefully, hurrying now with all the preternatural speed he possessed at this point in his vampiric development. He hurried headlong into some oblivion away from humankind where he would not do them harm; where they would not stare at him and see him for the terrible, blasted revenant he had become.

He hurried for days uncountable, haunted by despair that he, a man questing after God, had done such despicable things against men, women, and even children. He wept and let the blood drip and dry on his ragged shirt. He slept where he fell, whether it was a ditch or a hummock off the road, and woke in a frenzy to get away, get away fast. He didn't know where he was going. It didn't matter. He hadn't the insight to realize he ran from nothing less than the shred of human conscience which still beat quietly as a tiny bird fluttering within the iron cage of his vampire body.

He might have been on the road wandering for a month or longer before one day, beside himself with recriminations that kept sweeping over him like a filthy ocean on a ruined shore, he came to a place in the road where a footpath led into the forest. The gloom called to him, whispering of darkness and surrender. That was where he belonged, he thought. With the wild animals he so much resembled.

He sped down the path, embracing the pinpricks of pain sent through his arms from bramble bushes growing close to where he walked. His wounds healed quickly, he noted with surprise, but the pain lingered with phantom twinges.

Low limbs swatted him in the head and bounded back again to knock with bony hands against his fleeing back. He didn't bother to duck or to move aside, welcoming the pain. As he plunged deeper into the forest gloom, a clarity began to steal over him like none he'd had before, even when human.

He was a killing creature and must face it. The world was full of murderous beings, whether animal, fish, fowl, or human. All of recorded history spoke of the monstrous acts men had perpetuated against men. In South Africa when the dawn of man brought forth a thinking being able to feel some small remorse for his actions, he, too, must have felt something akin to regret about the beasts he murdered.

That he had turned to feast on his own kind was not so remarkable. There might even be some way to avoid it, as he'd done during his days of forced march away from London. He had taken small furtive animals and drained them of their blood, but he had not tossed the lifeless shells. He had buried each and every one, every muskrat and weasel, every wild pig and cat and horny goat.

He had not even been tempted to touch another human, horrified at his past senseless actions that drove him now from the madness of murder to the madness of flight.

He stumbled on and noticed the gloom giving way slowly, by tiny increments, to sunlight. First it dappled the pathway through the forest canopy, and finally it shone with brilliance straight down between the rows of trees bounding each side of the path. He slowed and looked around, noting the brambles were gone and in their place grew heather green and low to the ground, tiny bluebells nodding within taller grass, and wild peace lilies with their striking white heads bending down in prayerful solitude.

Where was he and what sort of place was this? He had lived all his life amid the hovels and streets of London where the multitude clogged the arteries during the day and crawled back to their miserly tenements in the dusk. There they cooked cabbage and ham bones with precious little meat still fastened to them, cuffed their children about the ears, made noisy love, and snored into the new dawn.

He had not seen a lily except in the flower stalls in the better part of London. He had heard of bluebells from country kin, but never spied one. He marveled at nature and the wild profusion of beauty it had created in this lonely wood.

As he walked softly now over velvet sod, he came to a clearing that spread out from the meager path to encompass an almost perfectly round pond fed by an underground spring. Rocks ringed the pond and the forest stood back, drooping limbs over the pool so that the reflections of green were deeper than the pure, sweet aqua green of the water itself.

Mentor, known then by another name, came to a halt. He sat down on a stone and stared into the pool's depths. It burbled slightly in the center, and he knew if he were to dive deep down into the water and open his eyes, he would see the source of the spring—a fissure in the earth, out of which the pond flowed. On the other side of the pond he saw a small creek, barely more than a rivulet really, easing through the forest and going . . . he did not know where. To a river, perhaps, or another pond or lake or stream.

He firmly believed he'd arrived at a sacred place. A place meant to house him until he could return to the world. The place itself was peaceful and beautiful, yes, but it wasn't just that. It was set off from the world, brighter than it should have been, quieter than the tomb. A place to find relief. A place to drop the burdensome rock of guilt and the baggage of past sins.

This was where he stayed until he was sane. He came to understand that there were mysteries in life, untold thousands of mysteries, of which his existence, against all usual understandings of nature, was but one. He believed when in future times of agony, remorse, or need of redemptive balm he would find places on Earth like this, where he could lay down his pain and go on. Not as he had before, but better, with more purpose and a surer footing.

Just as he thought, so it was. Over years and tens of years and hundreds of years. He might not know where the sanctuary lay hidden, but if he set out boldly and with faith, he knew he would find it, and he always did.

That is how the monastery in Thailand, their prison for the unquiet monsters, came to be. He had been searching for something after his wife's death and thirty years of desolation in a cold Swedish fortress. He yearned for a sacred place to give him some reason to go on, and he had come upon the crumbling cells and chapel and underground corridors of the monastery, long abandoned by its earthly order and fully forgotten. The jungle had overtaken it, vines wrapping around towers to bring them tumbling down. Doors were riddled with wormholes and soft sodden spots that gave way at a touch. Stones in the halls and cells had been pried and lifted out of place, taken for who knows what purpose—maybe to build a hut or to top a grave.

But . . . it was sacred. He could feel it like a silken cloak laid upon bare skin. It was a place that enveloped him and stilled his frantic, tortured mind. It had been made sacred three hundred years before Mentor happened upon it and, though abandoned, it held that sacred peace in trust for the next weary traveler who needed to find succor there.

There were other places, too; some hidden away like the spring-fed pond in the English countryside and the jungle-entombed old monastery. Some were open to the public, people tracking through these places daily with little Japanese cameras and notebooks and pens. They fondled the stone or glass, leaving behind their imprints, their oils that could corrode. On occasion they unavoidably passed gas, made lewd remarks or gestures, drank from secret flasks, slipped illicit and spellbinding pills beneath their livid tongues—never dreaming they were in jeopardy of desecration. Sometimes couples stole kisses and made promises they'd never fulfill.

One such public place was the Taj Mahal, the grand monument built by one man to one woman, a magnificent expression of depthless love. In there, in the dark when the place was closed and quiet and tomblike, Mentor could sit and ponder the hardest questions and confirm the best actions to take. Or he could just rest, as he needed—and he needed rest almost as much as he needed blood.

Some public places he'd found to be sacred were surprising, even to him. It was easily understandable if he found a pew in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral to be a place of rest, but who would have imagined that the ward in a children's institution in Athens, Greece, was another? He'd happened on it by chance, as he did all the best havens.

He'd been summoned by the strident plea from a child halfway across the world. It was the millennial year, 2000, and he had been sitting quietly in his own home, reading. He seldom interfered in matters off his own continent, but this cry for help was heard around the world, and other vampire mentors—for there were a few more—were too engaged to take leave from their stations. By telepathic means they all urged Mentor to go to the young vampire screaming for someone, anyone, Help!

The child was a boy, around eight years old, who had been mercilessly taken as he hobbled along an Athens street at night. The boy, Justin, had a clubfoot and some slight mental retardation. His family had left him to die. Unable to keep him when he was much younger and displaying an inability to walk because of his misshapen foot, they took him out into the arid lands bounding the city. It was such a disgrace in Greece to have borne a handicapped child that engagements were broken on the basis of a baby born with disability to anyone in the family. Most of these babies were given away young to institutions, but some, like Justin, were dumped on the mercy of the world to die beneath the harsh elements.