The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (71 page)

A Maker of Destiny

“You wonder if she
was the enemy,” Vincent said. “I see your mind tossing in chaos. I have
mentioned so many names, too many characters to keep track, my poor Dagur, but
you must consider only one of them important, Laszlo Arros.”

Vincent had moved to
the ledge to admire the cobalt blue sky. When he evoked the muddling in my
mind, I put down the pen and turned to gaze on him. Our time together had softened
his features, or perhaps it was a trick, but I could see how Evelina might
desire him.

“Your sentimentality reeks,”
he said. “Put it away.”

I discarded her
image, and asked the question foremost on my mind. “Was Youlan your daughter?”

He grinned, and I
imagined a blush brightening his cheeks. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. “She
was made from me too, though she was nothing like Lucia.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lucia is a gift,” he
said. “Youlan a perversion.”

“Did you know Johann
Mendel,” I said, after searching for the family name on my sheet.

“Johann Mendel was a
genius,” he said. “Great men of science are hard to forget.”

“Why did you tell
her—”

“I did not know if
she spoke the truth.”

“How did she know him?”

“You have a lot of
questions, Dagur.” He rose and moved back into the shade of the room. “I am narrating
the story as I see fit. Your interrogation is unwarranted—and unwelcome.”

I waited, as he
stewed in the darkness. “I will die here,” I whispered.

“It is a test.”

“What is?”

He ignored me, and I
turned back to the sheets to re-read the last I had written. The seat sounded
with a creak in the corner, as Vincent gave himself to it. He released a low
groan, and then a growl, as though he were the nimrod on the fringe of the
colony.

“Johann Mendel,
Agáta, and Youlan,” he said.

I bit my tongue,
refusing to question him anymore.

“Agáta is the
surrogate.”

The chair creaked
again, this time with relief, as he rushed forward out of the darkness. My
heart jumped into my throat. He was steely, and prepossessing, and I grew warm.

“I am the maker of my
own destiny, Dagur,” he said, dragging the second syllable. “I am the maker of
yours, too.”

A tingle rose up my
spine, as he caressed my cheek with an outstretched hand, the tips of his nails
gently brushing past my nose. “You may be my last,” he said. “I plan on keeping
you to the end.”

Vincent pulled me in
with his gaze, and danger melted away. There was no nimrod, no vampire, no
plague, no settlers, no colony, just me and him. He smiled, and brought his
face close to mine. I must have shut my eyes because I don’t remember his gaze
so near. His lips brushed against my mouth and I tasted his salty breath, his
blood-soaked tongue, and the air from his lungs fused with the scent of his
last supper.

When he pulled his
face away, I opened my eyes and reached up to touch his fangs. He threw his
head back, as I drew close, and with a gravelly voice he said, “You cannot be
enamored yet.” He tapped my cheek and said, “In time, my boy,” and moved away.

“I grew sick and fed
up with it all,” he said, gesturing for me to return to the page. “Thetis could
not anticipate such weariness when she made me. She has lived forever. The thought
of my despising the world had never occurred to her. But she can shift, become something
else, while I remain this for all eternity.” He spread his arms and looked up.
“I watched too many come and go, yet nothing changed, an endless cycle of
mediocrity. Can you see it?”

I only saw him.

“Take this down,” he
said, backing away into the dark once again. He had to remove himself from my
line of sight if I was to return to my task. The kiss he had given me had
stolen my concentration, and I couldn’t think of anything else.

“An addendum to the whole,”
he said. “I had not planned on speaking of Mendel but I see I cannot get away
from him, a minor character, but important nevertheless. I visited Brno many
years ago …”

A Gift for
Johann
Mendel

As I roamed the
countryside, I met few of my kind. I often did in those days, our circles unlikely
to converge on such a vast plain. But perhaps fate had struck, putting Johann
Mendel in my path, leading me to the genetics that was, in fact, the first of its
kind. A brilliant man and a creature of faith, he was a friar pursuing
Augustine and botany with equal passion. His peerless faith piqued my interest
since he was devout unlike any of our kind, but also his reputation for
botanical crossbreeding had him struggling to beat the odds of nature. He, of course,
was as brutal as any of us when it came to the hunt, but he tried to deny his taste
for blood, and abide by a self-proclaimed manifesto.

I would take Johann
Mendel as a companion, and my mother—always near, always covert—would
see to it. She envisioned a future I could not, as my dispiritedness had already
shown. The age of enlightenment had passed, but had left me with a concreteness
too real to bear.

“You will not eschew my
gift, yiós,” Thetis had said when we met on a hillside in Greece decades earlier.
“You came through me,” she had said. “I know when you are thinking of death.”

“It is not death,” I had
said. “But the end.”

“There shall be no
end.”

“I am taxed and tired.”

“You need to find
love.”

“I love but one,” I had
said. “Myself.”

“Not if you are
thinking of ending the life I have given you.”

“All things must come
to an end.”

“Not those that are
immortal, not godly creatures, not you.”

“Why do you wish me
to live forever.”

“It is a gift, yiós.
My gift to you.”

So mythology becomes
history, I thought. The poets sang, more than three times Thetis tried to make
Achilles a god, burning away his mortality, each attempt its own failure. She,
who changed the fate of Zeus, raising Briareus to stand by her lightning bearer
to save him from oncoming threats. She, who made men crawl and women writhe. She,
who made me what I am.

“You are a thing of
beauty,” she had said. “You are a creature so powerful even my father, banished
to the depths of the seas, envies you.”

“Why do you cling to
dead gods?” I had asked with an acid tongue.

Her back rose with my
petulance and her aspect darkened, as a fire burst in her core and the chest of
the body she donned glowed. Endless and unchanging, despite her shift, Thetis never
settled into the stasis of another’s skin. She flung her hand across my cheek
and rattled my jaw. Her eyes scorched me where I stood and I witnessed my
heritage, my anger, my lust for blood wrapped up in the elegant body of a peasant
woman. My mother’s rage practically burst the seams of her human flesh.

“To say I came
through you is too mild,” I had said. “You made me with your bare hands, smelt
me from Greek earth and forged me in a glory hole as one does with molten
glass, liquefying me only to make me hard in the end, and the beast I am become.”

“I shall forgive your
sharp tongue, yiós,” she said.

Like anyone raised
with faith, Thetis spoke about her beliefs as though they were truisms. Named
for the ancient Greek word to establish, she had set up my destiny with the triplets
of Fate, making a fair exchange that steered my course. Centuries later, when
she saw me wrapped in sorrow, she intervened and planted my desire for Byron,
keeping me from death. But first she would pique my interest with science, and
Johann Mendel would be with whom it all began.

I worked to convince him
to follow me, to succumb to the world only I could show him.

“Why should I?” He asked.
“Saint Augustine said men travel to see the gargantuan mountains, the vast and endless
stretches of rivers, the circus of stars, but they pass themselves without
wonder. I am interested in men, not the scenery in which they live.”

“He also said, ‘The
world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.’”

Mendel considered my
offer long and hard, and still he refused.

“‘Faith is to believe
what you do not see,’ he claims.”

“And the reward?” I
asked, knowing the rest of the quote.

“‘The reward of this
faith is to see what you believe,’” he said.

“Have you seen what
you believe?”

“In most cases,” he
said, “except one.”

“Which is?”

“That life may come
at the hands of man, not simply his cock.”

“I do not see the
point,” I said. “Are you saying you are likened to a god because you forego the
use of your cock?”

“My cock is no use to
me,” he said. “Complete abstinence is far easier than perfect moderation.”

“Says Augustine.”

“I commune with man because
I must to survive, but I am not interested in sex, which isn’t to say I have
not devised other ways to procreate in the name of science.”

“How is that?”

“The botany of the
soul is a complicated and rigorous devotion, and one I am committed to expose.”

Mendel and I would often
discuss science in the gardens of the Church of St. James while smoking tobacco,
as we walked the rows of plants he had grown for his studies. But he would
speak of things beyond my understanding and expect me to accept them at face
value.

“Your desire to breed
children without sexual intercourse,” I said, “reeks of blasphemy, does it
not?”

“I do not see it,” he
said. “My ideal is to make an unwanted child, to use its organs to save those
God has forsaken in illness.”

His logic was unsound
and soon I saw the kind of madman he was. He did not torture those he took, for
finally I witnessed his feeding. He actually killed them and studied their
anatomy, as Byron had done with the woman on his table the night I came for
him.

“What is this
obsession about, really?” I asked.

“God judged it better
to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil existed.”

“Is that you or
Augustine?”

“Does it matter?” He
assured me they were words to live by.

Thetis befriended the
botanist too, seeing his potential and hatching a scheme to end my suffering. When
she discovered his willingness to test his crossbreeding on a human subject,
she made it a reality. Genetic coding remained a mystery until the
mid-twentieth century, but DNA identification and isolation were discovered a
century earlier. Johann Mendel had in fact made strides, a leader in his field,
his faith struggling to cloak his skin and bones of science. When Thetis tempted
him with a chance at human reproduction, his skin and bones won out. She found
his first subject, a peasant named Agáta, and supplied him with the male specimen.
How she retrieved my sample is no mystery. She simply took it, disguised as a
whore on the street.

I had come into some money,
and as was typical in those days, I visited one of the many public gaming houses
in the Moravian city. I placed the whole of my small fortune on a round of
backgammon I was sure to win. In all three rounds of play, my opponent rolled
exactly what he needed to bear off before me. I had not seen he was a shill,
posing as an amateur, until he foolishly placed a dice too close to the metal
clasp of the board. They were weighted, stuffed with a magnet he had controlled.
I let him have his victory, but followed him into the alley when he went to
meet his partner.

He was an easy target
and I satisfied myself with a pull on his juiciest vein after his partner left
him with his cut. She was a woman of the night, marked with a corn poppy on the
lapel of her dress. I found her without effort, as she lingered at the entrance
to the forbidden alley. She approached me for a tidy trick, and we ducked into
a portico to make the exchange. The shill’s blood had stimulated me, but hers
was frighteningly taut. I retrieved my purse, as I sucked up her goodness, too
engrossed in my high to notice when she pulled on my hair, plucking a sample. She
clasped the strands in her hand even as she lost consciousness. Before I left
her to her blackout, I tossed a coin on her chest and stole the corn poppy.

Thetis eventually fessed
up to the trick, her disguise as the whore, but only after I changed the course
she had set.

My relationship with
Mendel grew strained, as he continued his pursuits to extremes, taking Agáta
into his home, assuring me she was simply a servant girl. She became an object
of desire, even as her belly grew engorged. My hunger swelled to unbearable
portions, and I gave in.

One evening, I waited
for him to disappear into his library, a pattern I had witnessed for months on
end. We had taken up residency together, as companions often did then, but we
lived separate lives, my keeping to a nocturnal schedule that had me gaming at
the Moravian tables between the shade of the oil lamps and the lulls of the
gutters. But that night, I feigned leaving and snuck up into the attic where
the blooming Agáta kept her home. She was soaking in a steamy, lavender-scented
bath when I approached, her belly the first thing I saw above the waterline. I
stood at the rim of the tub, waiting patiently for her to come up for air. She
wanted to scream but I kissed her hard and stole the cry from her lips. My
attack set off her labor, but the sugary savor of her blood assured her and the
babe in her womb certain death. I could not stop myself and pulled everything
up into me as though I would never taste blood again. I left her tepid body in
the bath, soon to grow cold, and fled into the night, far from my Brno home,
never to return again.

Mendel did not pursue
me. It was not his style. A man of science more than religion, he would turn
Agáta’s death into a positive, culling data for success with his next trial.

So it was, and when Youlan
reminded me of Mendel, I pulled him up from the mental depths into which he had
sunk, in-between the folds of my mind, hidden even as I woke in a cell at the
facility, my body having regained movement.

The prick in my neck was
the only reminder of the lethargy to which I had succumbed at Youlan’s claw.

“Finally your
return,” she said, speaking my ancient language.

“Why speak Koiné
Greek?”

“I shall embrace my
heritage,” she said. “For you.”

She stood before me
as though a figment of my imagination, but touched my cheek to show me she was
real. “I am here.”

“Where am I?”

“In the hub of his
matrices.”

“Where is Laszlo
Arros?”

“He will be arriving
soon,” she said. “But first I must show you Mendel’s attempt wasn’t a failure.”

“Agáta died,” I
scoffed.

“I stand before you
as proof,” she said, “I did not.”

“How many attempts
did it take to make you?”

“You left Agáta for
dead,” she said. “But you didn’t consider the endurance of her child, the
chosen seed planted in her womb—your seed wouldn’t die so easily.”

“No infant could
survive my draining.”

“Why not?”

“I left her dead,” I
said.

“A newborn will fight
to survive,” she said. “It’s instinctual. Johann Mendel found my mother before
it was too late.”

“Bull,” I said. “You
are no child of mine.”

“He saved me after he
tore me from my mother’s womb, putting life back into me.”

“Impossible.”

“Let me show you I am
yours.”

“You have no proof.”

“See how similar we
are.” She clung to the wall of the cell as though waiting for me to call her
forth.

“We are nothing
alike,” I said.

“Not you and me, she
and I.” She pointed to the small bundle in the corner. “Pick her up.”

“Lucia?”

“Yes,” she said.
“Pick her up.”

I flew to the infant,
despite the trick. The swaddling was not real, but a delusion of the
underground facility set off by the quicksilver I walked through upon entering.
Youlan’s dart, laced with hallucinant, numbed my brain.

“Kiss her,” a strange
voice said.

“Who is here?” I
asked, turning about the room. Youlan had gone.

“Finally we meet.”
The voice sounded in my head. “Do you remember me?”

“Show yourself.”

The voice clipped and
silence returned. The infant cooed, and my attention fell to her.

“Do you see Youlan’s
face in hers?” The voice became clear and I recalled Mendel’s lilt. I shook the
sound from my ears, a mere voice in my head. “You have played with genetics,
too.”

“Come out,” I said.
“Face me.”

“I am with you.”

“Who are you?”

“I am you.”

I stared at the child
in my arms, beginning to wonder if she spoke to me, channeling Mendel’s voice, but
she simply made gurgling sounds.

“See her for what she
is,” he said.