Abner, of all that I heard and learned, that tale affected me most greatly. I doubt that any such vast underground city exists, doubt that it ever existed, but the very telling of such a story proved to me that my people were not the evil, empty vampires of legend. We had no art, no literature, not even a language of our own—but the story showed we had the capacity to dream, to imagine. We had never built, never created, only stolen your garments and lived in your cities and fed ourselves on your life, your vitality, your very blood—but we could create, given a chance, we had it within us to whisper stories of cities of our own. The red thirst has been a curse, has made my race and yours enemies, has robbed my people of all noble aspirations. The mark of Cain, indeed.
We have had our great leaders, Abner, bloodmasters real and imagined in ages past. We have had our Caesars, our Solomons, our Prester Johns. But we are waiting for our deliverer, you see, waiting for our Christ.
Huddled in the ruins of that grim castle, listening to the wind howl outside, Simon and the others drank my liquor and told me stories and studied me from potent, feverish eyes, and I realized what they must think. Each of them was hundreds of years older than I, but I was the stronger, I was bloodmaster. I brought them an elixir that banished the red thirst. I seemed almost half-human. Abner, they saw me as the deliverer of legend, the promised king of the vampires. And I could not deny it. It was my destiny, I knew then, to lead my race from darkness.
There are so many things I want to do, Abner, so many things. Your own people are fearful and superstitious and full of hate, so my kind must stay hidden for now. I have seen the way you war on each other, read of Vlad Tepes—who was not one of us, by the way—of him and Gaius Caligula and other kings, I have seen your race burn old women because they were suspected of being one of us, and here in New Orleans I have witnessed the way you enslave your own kind, whip them and sell them like animals simply because of the darkness of their skin. The black people are closer to you, more kin, than ever my kind can be. You can even get children on their women, while no such interbreeding is possible between night and day. No, we must remain hidden from your people, for our safety. But, free from the red thirst, I hope in time we can reveal ourselves to the enlightened among you, men of science and learning, your leaders. We can help each other so much, Abner! We can teach you your own histories, and from us you may learn how to heal yourselves, how to live longer. For our part, we have only just begun. I have defeated the red thirst, and with help I dream some day of conquering the very sun, so we can go abroad by day. Your surgeons and men of medicine could help our females in childbirth, so procreation need not mean death.
There is no limit to what my race can create and accomplish. I realized then, listening to Simon, that I could make us one of the great peoples of the earth. But first I had to find my race, before any of it could begin.
The task was not easy. Simon said that in his youth there had been almost a thousand of us, scattered over Europe from the Urals to Britain. Legend said some of us had migrated south to Africa or east to Mongolia and Cathay, but no one had any proof of such treks. Of the thousand who had dwelled in Europe, most had died in wars or witch trials, or had been hunted down when they grew careless. Perhaps a hundred of us were left, Simon guessed, perhaps fewer. Births had been few. And those who did survive were scattered and hidden.
So we began a search that took a decade. I will not bore you with all the details. In a church in Russia, we found those books you saw in my cabin, the only literature known to have come from the hand of one of my race. I deciphered them in time, and read the melancholy story of a community of fifty of the people of the blood, their woes and migrations and battles, their deaths. They were all gone, the last three crucified and burned centuries before my birth. In Transylvania we found the burnt-out shell of a mountain fastness, and in caves beneath, the skeletal remains of two of my race, rotten wooden stakes protruding from their ribs, skulls mounted on poles. I learned a good deal from study of those bones, but we had no living survivors. In Trieste we found a family that never went out by day, and were whispered to be strangely pale. Indeed they were. Albinos. In Buda-Pest we came upon a rich woman, a dreadful sick woman who whipped her maids and bled them with leeches and knives, and rubbed the blood into her skin to preserve her beauty. She was one of you, however. I confess, I killed her with my own hands, so sick at heart did she make me. She was under no compulsion from the thirst; only an evil nature made her do as she did, and that made me furious. Finally, finding nothing, we returned to my home in Scotland.
Years passed. The woman in our group, Simon’s companion and the servant of my childhood, died in 1840, of causes I was never able to determine. She was less than five hundred years old. I dissected her, and learned how very different, how very inhuman, we are. She had at least three organs I have never seen in human cadavers. I have only a vague idea of their function. Her heart was half again the size of a human heart, but her intestines were a mere fraction of the length, and she had a secondary stomach—I think solely for the digestion of blood. And more, but that is of no matter.
I read widely, learned other languages, wrote some poetry, dabbled in politics. We attended all the best society gatherings, Simon and I at least. Smith and Brown, as you call them, never did show much interest in English, and kept to themselves. Twice Simon and I went to the continent together on new searches. Once I sent him to India for three years, alone.
Finally, barely two years ago, we found Katherine, living in London, right under our noses. She was of our race, of course. But more important was the story she told.
She said that around 1750, a sizeable group of our people had been scattered over France and Bavaria and Austria and even Italy. She mentioned some names; Simon recognized them. We had searched for these people unsuccessfully for years. Katherine told us that one of their number had been tracked and killed by police in Munich in 1753 or so, that the others had grown very frightened. Their bloodmaster decided that Europe had become too populated, too organized for safety. We lived in the cracks and shadows, and those were fewer and fewer, it seemed. So he had chartered a ship, and all of them had departed from Lisbon, bound for the New World, where the savagery and endless forests and rude colonial conditions promised easy prey and safety. Why my father and his group had not been included in the migration she could not say. She was to go with them, but rains and storms and a broken carriage wheel plagued her trip to Lisbon, and when she arrived they had departed.
Of course I went at once to Lisbon, and pored through whatever old shipping records the Portugese had preserved. In time, I found it. The ship had never returned from its charter, as I had suspected. At sea for all that time, they would have had no choice but to feed on the crew, one by one. The question was, had the ship ever arrived safely in the New World? I could find no record of it. But I did find the intended destination; the port of New Orleans. From there, via the Mississippi, the whole continent would be open to them.
The rest should be obvious. We came. I felt certain I would find them. It seemed to me that by having a steamboat I would enjoy the luxury I have grown accustomed to, and the mobility and freedom I needed for my search. The river was full of eccentrics. A few more would not be noticed. And if tales of our fabulous boat and the strange captain who only came out by night spread up and down the river, so much the better. The tales might come to the right ears, and they would come to me as Simon did so many years ago. So I made inquiries, and we met one night in St. Louis.
You know the rest, I think, or can guess it. Let me say one other thing, however. In New Albany, when you showed our steamer to me, I did not feign my satisfaction. The Fevre Dream is beautiful, Abner, and that was as it should be. For the first time, a thing of beauty is come into the world because of us. It is a new beginning. The name frightened me a bit—fever has been another word for the red thirst among my people. But Simon pointed out that such a name would likely intrigue any of our race who might hear it.
r /> There is my story, almost all of it. The truth, which you insisted on. You have been honest with me, in your way, and I believe you when you say you are not superstitious. If my dreams are to come true, there must come a time when day and night clasp hands across the twilight of fear that lies between us. There must come a time for risk. Let it be now, with you. My dream and yours, our steamer, the future of my people and your own, vampires and cattle—I give them all over to your judgment, Abner. What will it be? Trust or fear? Blood or good wine? Friends or enemies?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Aboard the Steamer Fevre Dream,
New Orleans,
August 1857
In the heavy silence that followed Joshua’s story, Abner Marsh could hear his own steady breathing and the thump of his heart laboring in his chest. Joshua had been talking for hours, it seemed, but in the black stillness of the cabin there was no way to be sure. Outside it might be getting light. Toby would be cooking breakfast, the cabin passengers would be taking their morning strolls along the promenade on the boiler deck, the levee would be bustling with activity. But inside Joshua York’s cabin, night went on and on, forever.
The words of that damned poem came back to him, and Abner Marsh heard himself say, “Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day.”
“Darkness,” said Joshua, softly.
“And you’ve lived in it your whole damn life,” Marsh said. “No morning, not ever. God, Joshua, how d’you stand it?”
York made no reply.
“It ain’t sensible,” Marsh said. “It’s the goddamndest story I ever sat still for. But damned if I don’t believe you.”
“I’d hoped you would,” said York. “And now, Abner?”
That was the hard part, Abner Marsh thought. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “All them people you say you killed, and still I kind of feel sorry for you. Don’t know if I ought to. Maybe I ought to try to kill you, maybe that’s the only damn Christian thing to do. Maybe I ought to try to help you.” He snorted, annoyed at the dilemma. “I guess what I ought to do is hear you out a little more, and wait before I make up my mind. Cause you left somethin’ out, Joshua. That you did.”
“Yes?” York prompted.
“New Madrid,” said Abner Marsh firmly.
“The blood on my hands,” Joshua said. “What can I tell you, Abner? I took a life in New Madrid. But it was not as you might suspect.”
“Tell me how it was, then. Go on.”
“Simon told me many things of the history of our people; our secrets, our customs, our ways. One thing he said I found greatly disturbing, Abner. This world that your people have built is a daylight world, not easy for us to live in. Sometimes, to make it easier, one of us will turn to one of you. We can use the power that dwells within our eyes and our voice. We can use our strength, our vitality, the promise of life unending. We can use the very legends your people have erected around us, for our own purposes. With lies and fear and promises, we can fashion for ourselves a human thrall. Such a creature can be very useful. He can protect us by day, go where we cannot go, move among men without suspicion.
“In New Madrid there had been a killing. At the very woodyard where we stopped. From what I read in the newspapers, I had great hopes of finding one of my own race. Instead I found—call him what you will. A slave, a pet, an associate. A thrall. He was an old, old man. A mulatto, bald and wrinkled and hideous, with a milk-glass eye and a face terribly scarred by some ancient fire. He was not pleasing to look at, and inside—inside he was foul. Corrupt. When I came upon him, he leapt up, brandishing an axe. And then he looked at my eyes. He recognized me, Abner. He knew what I was at once. And he fell to his knees, crying and blubbering, worshipping me, groveling as a dog to a man, begging me to fulfill the promise. ‘The promise,’ he kept saying, ‘the promise, the promise.’
“Finally I bid him stop, and he did. At once. Cringing away in fear. He had been taught to heed a bloodmaster’s words, you see. I asked him to tell me the story of his life, hoping he might lead me to my own people.
“His story was grim as my own. He was born a free man of color in a place called the Swamp, which I gather is a notorious district of New Orleans. He lived as a pimp, a cutpurse, finally a cutthroat, preying on the flatboatmen who came down to the city. He’d killed two men before he was ten. Later he served under Vincent Gambi, the bloodiest of the pirates of Barataria. He was overseer to the slaves Gambi stole from Spanish slavers and resold in New Orleans. He was a voodoo man as well. And he had served us.
“He told me of his bloodmaster, the man who took him in thrall, who laughed at his voodoo and promised to teach him greater, darker magic. Serve me, the bloodmaster had promised, and I will make you one of us. Your scars will heal, your eye will see again, you will drink blood and live forever, never aging. So the mulatto had served. For almost thirty years he did everything he was bid. He lived for the promise. He killed for the promise, was taught to eat warm flesh, to drink blood.
“Until finally his master saw a better opportunity. The mulatto, old and sickly now, became a hindrance. His usefulness passed, so he was discarded. It might have been merciful to kill him, but instead he was sent away, upriver, to fend for himself. A thrall does not go against his bloodmaster, even if he knows the promise made him to be a lie. So the old mulatto had wandered on foot, living by robbery and murder, moving up the river slowly. Sometimes he earned honest money as a slave catcher or laborer, but mostly he kept to himself in the woods, a recluse who lived by night. When he dared, he ate the flesh and drank the blood of his victims, still believing it would help restore his youth and health. He had been living around New Madrid for a year, he told me. He used to chop some wood for the woodyard man, who was too old and feeble to do it himself. He knew how seldom anyone visited that woodyard. So . . . well, you know the rest.
“Abner, your people can learn much from mine. But not the things that he had learned. Not that. I felt pity for him. He was old and hideous and without hope. Yet I was angry as well, as angry as I had been in Buda-Pest with the rich woman who liked to wash in blood. In the legends of your race, my people have been made the very essence of evil. The vampire has no soul, no nobility, no hope of redemption, it is said. I will not accept that, Abner. I have killed countless times, have done many terrible things, but I am not evil. I did not choose to be the way I was. Without choice, there can be no good nor evil. My people have never had that choice. The red thirst has ruled us, condemned us, robbed us of all we might have been. But your people, Abner—they have no such compulsion. That thing I encountered in the forest beyond New Madrid, he had never felt the red thirst, he could have been anything, done anything. Instead he had chosen to become what he was. Oh, to be sure, one of my own race shares the guilt—the man who lied to him, promised him things that could never be. Yet I can understand the reason for that, much as I might loathe it. An ally among your people can make all the difference. All of us know fear, Abner, my race and yours alike.
“What I cannot understand is why one of you would lust so after a life in darkness, would desire the red thirst. Yet he did desire it, with a great passion. He begged me not to leave him, as the other bloodmaster had done. I could not give him what he wanted. I would not, even if it had been possible. I gave him what I could.”
“You tore his damn throat out for him, didn’t you?” Abner Marsh said to the darkness.
“I told you,” Valerie said. Marsh had almost forgotten she was there, quiet as she’d been. “He doesn’t understand. Listen to him.”
“I killed him,” Joshua admitted, “with my bare hands. Yes. His blood ran off my fingers, soaked into the earth. But it did not touch my lips, Abner. And I buried him intact.”
Another great silence filled the cabin while Abner Marsh pulled at his beard, and thought. “Choice, you said,” he volunteered finally. “That’s the difference between good and evil, you said. Now it looks like I’m the one got to make a choice.”