Sat, May 19 2012
| TITLE: | Sympathy for the Vampire |
|---|---|
| AUTHOR: | Odensdisir |
| CATEGORY/TYPE: | Drama, Romance |
| RATING/WARNINGS: | PG-13, Gen |
| MAIN CHARACTERS: | List any main characters or adult relationships |
| DESCRIPTION: | Write story summary here. |
| STATUS: | Complete |
| NEXT STORY: | Sympathy for the Vampire - Echoes |
My name is Angelo Rimini, Duke Rimini, if you like, and I was once the master of empires; wealth and power and influence were mine.
But that was before I met Miss Rebecca Fogg.
+ + + +
One evening when I awoke I found my bedside much more populated than usual. I had sensed a disturbance, but it was taken care of, there was no concern; the British Secret Service had destroyed my army but not the wealth of my lands and holdings, and I was well served, in those days. I rose up out of my bed and pulled aside the curtains and she was there, my beautiful angel, my queen for all ages, Rebecca Fogg.
"Count Rimini," she said.
There were guards with her, but to their credit they had known better than to interfere with her. She stood there serene and composed in a blue dress with her hands folded in front of her, her hands which are so strong, so capable, so powerful to move me with a single touch. Her head was lowered but her eyes level and straight, so that she gave the impression of a beloved and perhaps a little spoiled daughter facing her nursery-mistress in some controversy, which she would win.
"I am at a disadvantage, Rebecca." Have I not just said that my guards had known better than to offer her defiance of any sort? She was in my bedroom, and I in my night-gown. What do you say, night-shirt. No, of course not, why would you think that I would sleep in clothing, let alone evening dress? Fabric wrinkles. And it is not comfortable. That she who could reduce me to the state of a stammering schoolboy by her mere presence should stand in witness to my undress was not what I would wish. My feet are ugly. I have always found them so. Too bony, and too short for elegance, not like the feet of the beautiful saints in the chapel, with their long toes.
I do not know about Rebecca's feet but I am quite sure that they must be elegant.
"I'm sorry," she said. My valet came with my dressing-gown, and I was able to hide the shaming ugliness of my bare feet in carpet-slippers. "I have come so far. I need your help."
So far that she could not wait for me to dress; so needing of help that she could not waste a moment. "What is the cause that you should come to me for help, Miss Fogg, after your cousin and his friend behaved so ungenerously to me at our last meeting?"
It had almost been worth the loss of the hopes and dreams of centuries to have had that one kiss from Rebecca Fogg. She had said my name. But then she fled with her cousin Fogg, and I have been too proud ever after to seek her out once more in my reduced circumstances. It would be too extreme an insult to offer such a woman anything less than the empire of the globe, and I no longer had the hope of winning her great kingdoms; or of winning her at all.
"I think you are the only one who could possibly help me." She took three steps forward; I could feel the warmth of her living body, and smell her delicate fragrance of musk and violets and femininity. So elegant. So painful to me, who could never have her. "And if there is no hope I shall go mad. No. First I shall kill my cousin Phileas. And then go mad."
There was clearly too much pain within her to suggest she step outside and let me dress. My valet brought the screen. It was less difficult than I had feared to dress behind a screen and talk to her; my association with theater people, it had coarsened me.
"I am willing to assist you in killing your cousin. I myself bear a grudge. I admit it." But I didn't think that that was why she'd come. "Tell me, Rebecca. What do you imagine I can do? What has brought you here to seek me out, when you have said goodbye to me before, I thought forever?"
"Phileas," she said, with such pain in her voice that I hated him in an instant as I had not hated him before, no, not even for foiling my plans and carrying Rebecca away from me. "Please, Angelo. Something has got hold of him, he suffers terribly, and some Doctor van Helsing or another tortures him by day while he suffers by night. I can't believe it's as van Helsing says. But I am at the end of my rope, your Grace. If you can help me I beg you to do it, I would do anything to get him free of this."
I had heard about van Helsing. He was a widely-read man who unfortunately did not seem to ever make an attempt to sift the fact from folly in his reading; and as a result he was much misled, but also harmless to my kind by and large.
"Mister Phileas Fogg, victimized by a vampire?"
It had to be what had brought her to me. And I could sympathize with her distress. Van Helsing was harmless to me and my people. To a living soul unfortunate enough to be fought for by van Helsing he could be ten times worse than any parasitism of blood-sucking. He insisted on transfusing, and he did not understand. Also he believed in the cauterization of the wound, so that Rebecca's worry for her cousin was very reasonable.
"I don't know, Count, I only half believe in vampires, even now." There was such an uncried sob in her brave voice that I wished to take her into my arms and comfort her, then and there. It was out of the question, of course. Rebecca Fogg was an Englishwoman. She had so much pride. "Will you come with me to Amsterdam. We mean to steal Phileas away from van Helsing's sanitarium, but we do not dare while he is still in the power of - whatever it is that has enslaved him."
My valet took away the screen. I fastened my cuffs, thinking about this fantastic situation. Rebecca Fogg brought me the means by which I might endear myself to her. She had said she would do anything. She was a woman of her word; I did not doubt her for an instant.
"Do we travel in the dirigible, then?" I had heard of the Aurora, though I had only seen it once. "Take me to your cousin. But be very sure of what you do. Because you know very well what I would have from you."
She met my eyes with matchless courage, and I remembered once again why she had won my deepest regard and passionate desire. "I would do anything to see my cousin safe and free," she repeated. "But I am not afraid, Angelo. If I am right about your true nature I stand in no danger from you. If I am mistaken then not even the pain of an eternity spent with a man so much the less than I had thought him will deter me from my goal. Phileas is the only family I have."
She was fearless and implacable. She frightened me; the incandescence of her soul was unmatched by any other in my experience, and my experience was far more deep and long than that of many.
"Then you offer me a bargain which is none. But let us go, Rebecca. There will be time enough to measure cost against price after I know whether I can offer any help."
My valet packed a bag. It would be near dawn or later before we would reach Amsterdam. I had a favorite hotel there; and doubted I could be of any help to Fogg until the sun had set once more upon the day. Not all of my kind are so ruled by the sun; only those of us who feed seldom and lightly. I myself can go about by day, but it is wearying, and the hunger that the exertion raises in my breast - the fierce slaughter I require to slake it - is not something to be courted without desperate cause.
The young Frenchman was there on the dirigible. He had a good heart; I did not mind so much that he was there. So long as he would pilot the airship I could talk to Rebecca, and my hunger for her voice was different from the burning thirst for sustenance but no less terrible in ways.
She told her story.
They had gone on a mission to the Crimea, and there were many hungry dead there in Crimea, it is always the case where there has been fearful slaughter even after it has been almost ten years. These are hungry dead without tradition, though, without knowledge of their roots, without respect. Without understanding. And the hunger is very savage because of the environment that gave them birth. Her cousin had come down with a fever as they had been leaving; and there had been a stow-away on board the Aurora, a young soldier named Gaspar, but the two facts were not connected in their minds until later.
Fogg had demonstrated a peculiar attachment to the young soldier, the stow-away Gaspar, and for a period of weeks Fogg's friends and cousin had not wished to speak to him about it because it was to do with a young man and the thing they thought was not a thing that they wished to believe or to discuss. But Fogg's fever did not improve. His health began to fail. The young soldier who had stowed away on board of the Aurora had vanished, but Fogg would not sit safe at home at night or go into society. Fogg would go out and seek the soldier among the pleasure quarters of the city, and every night came home more and more weak.
The valet had found stains, on Fogg's linen. The young soldier had got careless in the flush of prideful arrogance resulting from enjoyment of so rich a feast as that which could be found in Amsterdam. The valet found the stains on Fogg's collar; Rebecca had sought for professional help.
She seemed to know nothing about van Helsing's peculiar therapies, and I reserved the judgment till I should see for myself. Whatever van Helsing tried with Phileas Fogg it did not work. Fogg lay as a man near death all day, Rebecca said, and howled in torment through the night, tortured by the call of the dead soldier that he was prevented from answering. I know what such young dead are like. They are easy to anger, because they are children, and punish without a clear understanding of how terrible a weapon it is that they wield against the frailties of mortal flesh.
It did not sound encouraging.
But I had promised, now.
Next evening when I awoke again I was in my hotel in Amsterdam; the young Frenchman was there. They had checked me in and themselves with me, as we had arranged. Rebecca had already gone ahead to van Helsing's sanitarium, and as I knew what pain was in her heart I dressed somewhat more quickly than I was wont to do and left the hotel with young Jules Verne during the long late afternoon twilight to join her.
It was amusing to be in van Helsing's sanctuary and be treated like the foreign doctor Rebecca had explained I was, a vampire in the heart of a vampire-hunter's lair. The orderly took us to join Rebecca in the cell of Phileas Fogg - for cell it was - and I knew before I crossed the threshold that a crisis was too near.
Rebecca Fogg stood at the door, and Phileas Fogg was screaming. Cursing. Begging, swearing, threatening, but most of it was only pain; he did not have much strength left to torment her with his ugly words. I could sense the depths of his pain, the willful and irresponsible pull of the young one who had taken Fogg. I could detect no understanding in the smell of the dead soldier that surrounded Fogg that Fogg was not obeying because Fogg was prevented.
There is no rational sense in torturing a man for no reason, but it is as I said, the new undead have no understanding. It takes time to learn to read the bond between you and your provider. This young hungry dead too clearly did not know, or did not care, that all that was accomplished by such unremitting demands was to wrack his prey with agony and bring him closer to death by the moment.
Let me pause to speak about this thing. There is so much misunderstanding in the world, and it is all so unnecessary. The living and the not-dead need not be enemies; I have - or I have had - mistresses a-plenty whom I enjoyed for years, and who lay dead now as the corn-straw in the fields lies after harvest. Truly dead. It is only when the vampire kills his prey that the prey in turn may rise and walk, and even then it is not a certain thing, there are aspects and elements that require scientific research before we will fully understand them. Perhaps in time.
The only way to make the hungry dead is to be killed by one of the hungry dead, or to be killed sometimes amidst so much wasted death that the collective protest of the wasted lives invests the least-dead shell that can be found and festers there in resentment and outrage.
This young soldier was killing Phileas Fogg, and that was not all of it, because Rebecca had found out about the cautery of van Helsing's treatment method. Fogg's throat was bandaged, but I could smell necrotic tissue. It is all so unnecessary. To touch a white-hot poker to the wound that the teeth make does nothing but increase the suffering of the victim and make feeding a so much more unpleasant process.
Perhaps that is why van Helsing thought it worked.
Consider for yourself, if you could taste of a piece of fruit that was sweet and whole and unblemished or one that had been bruised and had started to rot - which would you chose?
"Angelo," Rebecca said, and she was so near to collapse that she permitted me to hold her, and escort her to a chair in that black cell. "Angelo. See what they've done to him. Angelo, please, help him, help us, help me."
There was a narrow cot, a thin mattress, a soiled and threadbare blanket. No one had seen to Fogg's person for days, it seemed; the valet was in the room, though, and in so much distress that I could guess it had not been for lack of will on the valet's part. I had no particular image in my mind at that time of Rebecca's cousin, but the man in that cell was a pitiable sight. Pale. Sweating. Wearing soiled linen. His body chained down to the bed, a very unsanitary practice, and his throat bandaged to cover a wound I did not need to see to understand too well.
And, yes, dying.
Dying in agony, with anguish in his voice that would have melted the heart of a man of stone, so long as Fogg had not been his enemy. Or perhaps even if Fogg had.
"Help me, Angelo," Rebecca said again. "Oh, God. Anything. Anything. Help him."
Yes, I could help. I am old among my kind, and powerful.
And still she did not know what she was asking. "I will take you with me, Rebecca. I will make you mine, and you will serve me for all eternity, not as my wife - it is too late for that - but as my slave, my whipping-boy. Forever. Is it really worth such a sacrifice, for him?"
The young dead soldier sent out a call so harsh and unforgiving that I felt a moment's pity for Fogg. Only a moment. My pity was all for my beautiful Rebecca, whose moan to hear Fogg whimper in his pain was almost too deeply buried in her heart to be heard at all, even by the sharp and acute ears of a vampire.
"I would trade eternal torment for my cousin's life." She would. It was no dramatic exaggeration on her part. "I can't stand to see him in so much agony. I can't. Please, Angelo. Even that. If only you can help him."
How could I stand against her?
She was as terrible as an army with banners.
I had once thought to seat her at my side, my queen, co-equal mistress of the breathing and unbreathing world alike, and now I understood that I had been too arrogant in such a wish, because within the span of a few moments she had mastered me.
I realized that I was no more her equal than the herding-dog is equal to the shepherd. She was truly regal. And to such majesty as she had within her I could only bow, no matter what the cost.
"Then you will all go out," I said. I had decided. "All of you. Away. And leave me to do what I must. Interfere and he is not only dead but damned, pledge me your word, Rebecca."
I put out my hand to Fogg's forehead as I spoke, to rebuke the young dead soldier and quiet Fogg's distress.
Reluctant as Fogg's friends were to accept such a devil's bargain - not knowing what I meant to do - the fact of Fogg's quieting seemed to convince them.
"Anything," Rebecca repeated. "Help me, Angelo."
She left.
The door was closed.
The voice of the young dead soldier through the aether was confused, but still demanding. I would have to deal with him later. Young spirits who do not learn grace and moderation are a hazard to us all, and must be put to rest for the good of all. Are you surprised that vampires kill vampires? I am of the nobility, one is obliged to protect one's own, and it is best we discipline ourselves.
I summoned up the privileged space, the protected space, and shut the cell away from the whole world, and Fogg in it.
His body relaxed.
He was so weak.
It would take almost everything to save him; and as much as I was reluctant to face such a disgusting sight I opened up the bandage at Fogg's throat.
The cautery was three days old, and stank. Van Helsing would be the death of Fogg if the young dead was not. The smell of rotting meat is no more appetizing to me than to you, and yet I did not have much choice but to feed at that wounded throat.
Fogg whimpered when I tasted him; I could tell how much it hurt. I sent him ease as soon as I could manage, as soon as I could sup enough of him to make the connection work. It was a near thing. His heart worked hard and valiantly, but his blood had been so much depleted that almost I despaired of being able to make my plan succeed.
Very slowly, very carefully I tasted him, because it hurt him so much and I could not ease his pain until there was enough of him in me to send him strength.
I wanted to vomit. The horrid feeling of his raw flesh against my lips was nauseating. And yet it was the only way, and I dared not give in to any such impulse and lose what little food I could consume from him to make the healing work.
The wound began to stink less horribly.
I could feel mending; from the inside out tissue regaining its integrity as I backed away out of the wound with care. Too soon and the flesh would not heal at once. Too long and it would mean another kind of torture, for Fogg - and for me as well.
The wound began to shrink, to retreat, to un-wound by degrees.
Carefully.
I don't know how long it took. I know that the floor of Fogg's cell was hard and uncarpeted, and the effort took so much strength from my body that I was stiff and sore from holding him up in my arms so that he could breathe more easily while I fed from him.
When we were finished, though, Phileas Fogg and I, he was healed in the wound of his throat, and safe from the young dead. Opening his eyes he looked at me with dazed confusion, but he was still weak and closed his eyes again almost at once.
Rest, Fogg. Rest and heal. No one of my kind will touch you ever again. Now that my mark is on you, you are safe - from all of them but me.
Rebecca could not know what she had asked. She had only wanted her cousin to be saved.
I opened the door and beckoned for the valet, sending him away for a wheeled chair. Because nothing I had done could save Fogg's life if van Helsing were to be permitted to continue to treat him. Van Helsing was a dangerously misguided - if well-meaning - man; he still is, for all I know, but van Helsing is not my problem.
Rebecca's eyes never left my face, but I dared not speak to her until we were safely away. I could cast the confusion in the minds of van Helsing's people, true enough, but I was weak - so weak - and did not like to take any unnecessary risks. The confusion of which I was capable that night as we took Phileas Fogg out of asylum was no more than a pale imitation of the invisibility that I had once showed Rebecca, but it served us well enough.
Rebecca was heartened to see her cousin quiet and resting. She concentrated all of her energies on getting Fogg safely back to the airship Aurora. I was counting on them to get Fogg back to England before sunrise; but I knew that I would have to settle my accounts before they left.
On board of the Aurora the valet and the young Frenchman alike carried Fogg up to his cabin and laid him down on top of his bed. The valet started to undress Fogg right away, and Rebecca stood in the doorway and stared hungrily at the sleeping body of her cousin until the valet became uncomfortable and closed the door with an apologetic bow.
Modesty.
We went downstairs, Rebecca and I, and at the foot of the staircase she turned to me and looked into my face with her eyes that are as wonderful as sapphires; and asked the awkward question.
"Angelo. What did you do?"
It was not an accusation, but it was soon to become one, I was sure.
"I had only one chance to save your cousin, Rebecca," I said, as gently as I could. It was difficult, because my own grief nearly crippled me, and yet I had to take care for her sake. "You must believe me that it was the only way."
She knew.
Before I had half-finished the first sentence, Rebecca knew, and her face changed. She was a Valkyrie. She was the Black Mother of the Hindus re-incarnate. She was Nemesis and the Avenging Angel, and it was I who was the target of her divine and implacable wrath.
"Had I not found you I meant to kill him," Rebecca said. "With the stake and decapitation. Now I will have two of you to kill. You might have kept yourself from this, had you but admitted the truth to me from the start."
Yes. She would have murdered her own cousin. "Have I ever dared to lie to you?" I had to hope that she would listen to me, or there would be needless tragedy, and I had already given everything to avoid that. "On the love I have for you, beautiful and cherished, I - Angelo Bonaventura Rimini - I swear this. You will not need to kill your cousin. He is safe. You will not I hope feel called upon to kill me, because I have done him no harm, and saved his life."
"No harm?" Her eyes had become lights of powerful intensity, glittering as though from a very far way off; they were twin suns. "You have ravished him, Angelo, as he lay helpless, have you not said so? If I don't kill him Phileas is damned."
I blame people like van Helsing for the propagation of such hurtful prejudices. "Not so, Rebecca. He need never even know. No other of my kind will touch him, ever, and that means he will die like any other and be dead, or gone to glory. It is only necessary - "
I had known from the moment when I had realized what I must do.
Why was it so difficult to put words to, now that the thing was done?
"Speak to me," Rebecca said, in her voice that was like the Archangel Michael with the flaming sword that bars the way back into the Garden.
"It is only necessary that I should never see him again, so long as he may live. Nor you. Nor your friends. No any such close acquaintances. The bond will sleep and in time it will fade, but only if it never once awakens. Rebecca, you must go now, leave Amsterdam until such time as I have had a chance to get away from here."
Oh, children, to see the look on her face, the light in her eyes as she understood what I had done and what it meant to me. It was a look to hazard empires on. That moment when Rebecca Fogg loved me was worth the pain of the decision, it will comfort me forever and warm me still when all the stars have died. In that moment Rebecca Fogg looked into my heart and soul and called me her beloved, in honor of the sacrifice that I had made for her.
"Angelo."
She put her hand up to my face, she took me in her arms and kissed me, children, as though the centuries of love that we would never share were all within that kiss and that one moment. "Oh, thank you. I was not mistaken in you. I will remember this, my Angelo."
And I had to go.
If I had stayed -
I had to go.
I fled from the Aurora like a man from a burning building, and went to ground that night in a small place where none of Fogg's people could have found me should they have been so misguided as to have come looking. I did not dare risk a single chance that my action with Phileas Fogg might create complications, and that meant as I had said that I would never see Rebecca Fogg again. Would never dare to be so near to Phileas Fogg that some accident might bring us face to face. It all depended upon that, you see. And I had given Rebecca my promise.
That is how I came to this wild and forsaken place, my children, to wait out the natural life of Phileas Fogg. And it is true that he might come here someday, but I will know that he is coming long before the hunger wakes in him, and will be able to escape into these mountains; so that the hunger will sleep in him forever.
Yes.
It may seem to be a barren and a joyless existence for one long used to the life of the city, music, art. I assure you that it is not so, no matter how it seems. I have seen love in the eyes of Miss Rebecca Fogg. I have heard her speak to me as though I were her lover.
None of the gilt trappings of wealth and power can compare to such a treasure as I cherish in my heart.
My name is Angelo Rimini, Duke Rimini, if you like, and I was once the master of empires; wealth and power and influence were mine.
But that was before I met Miss Rebecca Fogg.