Fevre Dream Read online

  The chain never gave, Abner. Yet I won free, and sought the safety of my cool black cellars, where I lay for more than a week, dreaming and burning and writhing in pain, but healing all the while. I turned on myself, you see. I gnawed through my own wrist and left my right hand lying there while I slipped the stump through the manacle.

  When I regained consciousness, a week later, I had a hand again. It was soft and small, half-formed, and it hurt. It hurt terribly. But in time the skin hardened. Then the hand swelled up, and the skin cracked and split, oozing a thick pale fluid. When it dried and peeled away, the flesh beneath was healthier. Three times that happened. The process took more than three weeks, but when it was over you would never have known that anything had happened to my hand at all. I was astounded.

  That was in the year 1812, which marked a turning point in my life.

  When I had recovered my strength, I found I had emerged from the ordeal with a great resolve; to change my way of life and that of my people, to free us from what my father had called the bane of the red thirst, to enable us to restore the life and beauty we drank from the world. To do this, I had first to seek out others of my kind, and the only others I knew of were my father’s vanished servants. Yet a search for them was not possible just then. England warred on the Empire of the French, and there was no commerce between the two. The enforced delay did not trouble me. I knew I had all the years I might require.

  As I waited, I took up the study of medicine. Nothing was known of my people, of course. Our very existence was legend. But there was much to learn of your race, so like and yet unlike my own. I befriended a number of doctors, a leading surgeon of the time, several faculty members of a well-known medical school. I read medical texts, old and new. I delved into chemistry, biology, anatomy, even alchemy, searching for insights. I built my own laboratory for experimentation, in the very room I had once used as my ill-fated prison. Now, when I took a life—as I did each month—I would carry the body back with me whenever I could, study it, dissect it. How I yearned for a cadaver of my own species, Abner, so I might see the differences!

  In my second year of study, I cut a finger from my left hand. I knew it would regenerate. I wanted flesh of my flesh for analysis and dissection.

  A severed finger was not sufficient to answer a hundredth of my questions, but the pain was nonetheless worthwhile, for what I learned. Bone, flesh, and blood all showed significant differences from the human. The blood was paler, like the flesh, and lacking several elements found in human blood. The bones, on the other hand, contained more of these elements. They were at once stronger and more flexible than human bone. Oxygen, that miracle gas of Priestley and Lavoisier, was present in blood and muscle tissue to a much greater degree than in comparable samples taken from your race.

  I did not know what to make of any of this, but it made me feverish with theories. It seemed to me that perhaps the lacks in my blood had some relation to my drive to drink the blood of others. That month, when the thirst had come and gone and I had taken my victim, I bled myself and studied the sample. The composition of my blood had changed! Somehow I had converted the blood of my victim into my own, thickening and enriching it, at least for a time. Thereafter I bled myself daily. Study showed that my blood thinned each day. Perhaps it was when the balance reached a certain critical point that the red thirst came on, I thought.

  My supposition left many questions unanswered. Why was animal blood insufficient to quell the thirst? Or even human blood taken from a corpse? Did it lose some property in death? Why had the thirst not come upon me until I was twenty? What of all the years before? I did not know any of the answers, nor how to find them, but now at least I had a hope, a starting point. I began to make potions.

  What can I tell you of that? It took years, endless experiments, study. I used human blood, animal blood, metals and chemicals of all sorts. I cooked blood, dried it, drank it raw, mixed it with wormwood, brandy, with foul-smelling medicinal preservatives, with herbs, salts, irons. I drank a thousand potions to no avail. Twice I made myself sick, so my stomach churned and heaved until I vomited forth the concoction I had downed. Always it was fruitless. Potions and jars of blood and drugs I could consume by the hundreds, but still the red thirst drove me forth to hunt by night. I killed without guilt now, knowing that I was striving for an answer, that I would conquer my bestial nature yet. I did not despair, Abner.

  And finally, in the year 1815, I found my answer.

  Some of my mixtures had worked better than others, you see, and those I had continued to work with, improving them, making this change or addition, then that one, patiently, trying one after the other and all the time searching out new approaches as well. The compound I finally produced had as its base sheep’s blood in large measure, mixed with a strong portion of alcohol which acted to preserve its properties, I believe. Yet that description oversimplifies vastly. There is a good part of laudanum in it as well, for calm and sweet visions, plus potassium salts and iron and wormwood, and various herbs and alchemical preparations long disused. For three years I had searched for it, and one night in the summer of 1815 I drank it down, as I had so many other potions before. That night the red thirst did not come upon me.

  The night following I felt the beginnings of the hot restlessness which marks the onset of the thirst, and I poured a glass of my drink and sipped at it, half-afraid my triumph would be a dream, illusory. But the feeling faded. I did not thirst that night either, nor go abroad to hunt and kill.

  At once I set to work, making the fluid in large quantities. It is not always easy to get it exactly right, and if the mixture is not exact, it has no effect. My labor was painstaking, however. You have seen the result, Abner. My special drink. It is never far from me. Abner, I accomplished what none of my race had ever done before, though I did not know it then, in that hot flush of triumph. I had begun a new epoch for my people, and yours as well. Darkness without fear, an end to hunter and prey, to hiding and despair. No more nights of blood and degradation. Abner, I conquered the red thirst!

  I know now that I was extraordinarily fortunate. My understanding was superficial and limited. I thought the differences between our peoples lay solely in the blood. Later I learned how wrong that was. I felt that excess of oxygen was somehow responsible for the way the fevers of the red thirst coursed through my veins. Today I think it more likely that oxygen gives my race its strength, and helps it heal. Much of what I thought I knew in 1815 I know now for nonsense. But it does not matter, for my solution was no nonsense.

  I have killed since, Abner, I will not deny that. But in the fashion humans kill, for human reasons. And since that night in Scotland in 1815, I have not tasted blood, or felt the ravages of the red thirst.

  I did not stop learning, not then or ever. Knowledge has a beauty to me, and I rejoice in all beauty, and there was still much to know of myself and my people. But with my great discovery the emphasis of the quest changed, and I began to search for others of my race. At first I employed agents and letters. Later, when peace had come, I traveled on the continent myself. Thus I discovered how my father had ended. More importantly, in old provincial records I found where he had come from—or at least where he claimed to have come from. I followed the trail through the Rhineland, through Prussia and Poland. To the Poles he was a dimly remembered, much-feared recluse their great-grandfathers had whispered about. Some said he had been a Teutonic Knight. Others pointed me farther east, to the Urals. It made no difference; the Teutonic Knights were centuries dead, and the Urals were a great range of mountains, too vast for me to search blindly.

  At a dead end, I decided to take a risk. Wearing a great silver ring and a cross, which I hoped would be sufficient to dispel any talk or superstition, I began to inquire openly about vampires, werewolves, and other such legends. Some laughed at me or mocked me, a few crossed themselves and slunk away, but most gladly told the simpleminded Englishman the folk tales he wanted to hear, in exchange for a drink or a meal. From t
heir stories I took directions. It was never easy. Years passed while I searched. I learned Polish, Bulgar, some Russian. I read papers in a dozen languages, looking for accounts of death that sounded like the red thirst. Twice I was forced to return to England, to brew more of my drink and give some attention to my affairs.

  And finally, they found me.

  I was in the Carpathians, in a rude country inn. I had been asking questions, and word of my inquiries had passed from mouth to mouth. Tired and despondent, and beginning to feel the first twinges of the thirst, I had returned to my room early, well before dawn. I was sitting before a crackling fire, sipping my drink, when I heard a clatter that at first I thought was the storm rattling the frost-rimed windows. I turned to look—the room was dark but for the blaze in the hearth—and the window was opened from outside, and there outlined against the blackness and the snow and the stars was a man, standing on the sill. He came inside easy as a cat, making no noise as he landed, a cold wind whipping around him from the winter that howled outside. He was dark, but his eyes burned, Abner, they burned. “You are curious about vampires, Englishman,” he whispered in passable English as he shut the windows softly behind him.

  It was a frightening moment, Abner. Perhaps it was the chill from outside that filled the room and made me tremble, but I think not. I saw this stranger as so many of your people had seen me, before I took them and feasted on their life’s blood; dark and hot-eyed and terrible, a shadow with teeth that moved with a sure grace and spoke in a sinister whisper. As I started to rise from my chair, he moved forward into the light. I saw his nails. They were claws, grown five inches long, the ends black and sharp. Then I looked up and saw his face. And it was a face I had known in childhood, and as I looked on it again the name came to me as well. “Simon,” I said.

  He stopped. Our eyes met.

  You have looked into my eyes, Abner. You have seen the power in them, I think, and perhaps other things as well, darker things. So it is with all of our race. Mesmer wrote of animal magnetism, of a strange force that resides in all living things, in some more strongly than others. I have seen this force in humans. In war, two officers may order their men to the same foolhardy course. One will be killed for his troubles by his own troops. The second, using the same words in the same situation, will compel his men to follow him willingly into certain death. Bonaparte had the power in great measure, I think. But our race, we have it most of all. It resides in our voices, and especially in our eyes. We are hunters, and with our eyes we can captivate and quiet our natural prey, bend them to our will, sometimes even compel them to assist in their own slaughter.

  I knew none of this then. All I knew was Simon’s eyes, the heat of them, the rage and suspicion there. I could feel the thirst burning within him, and the sight of it woke my own long-buried bloodlust dimly, like calling to like until I was afraid. I could not look away. Nor could he. We faced each other silently, moving but slightly in a wary circle, eyes locked. My glass fell and shattered on the floor.

  How much time passed I cannot say. But finally Simon looked down, and it was over. Then he did something startling and strange. He knelt before me, and bit open a vein in his own wrist so the blood flowed out, and held it up to me in submission. “Bloodmaster,” he said in French.

  The flowing blood, so close at hand, woke a dryness in my throat. I reached out and grabbed his arm, trembling, and began to bend toward it. And then I remembered. I slapped him and spun away, and the bottle was on the table by the hearth. I poured two glasses, drained one and thrust the other at him while he looked on, uncomprehending. “Drink,” I commanded him, and he did as he was told. I was bloodmaster, and my word was law.

  That was the beginning, there in the Carpathians in 1826.

  Simon had been one of my father’s two followers, as I had known. My father had been bloodmaster. With his death, Simon led, being stronger than the other. He brought me to the place he lived the following night, a snug chamber buried in the ruins of an old mountain fortress. There I met the others; a woman whom I recognized as the other servant of my childhood, and two more of my people, whom you call Smith and Brown. Simon had been their master. Now I was. More, I brought with me freedom from the red thirst.

  So we drank, and passed many nights, while from their lips I began to learn the history and ways of the people of the night.

  We are an old people, Abner. Long before your race raised its cities in the hot south, my ancestors swept through the dark winters of northern Europe, hunting. Our tales say we came from the Urals, or perhaps the steppes, spreading west and south through the centuries. We lived in Poland long before the Poles, prowled German forests before the coming of the Germanic barbarians, held sway over Russia before the Tartars, before Novgorod-the-Great. When I say old, I do not speak of hundreds of years, but of thousands. Millennia passed in the cold and the darkness. We were savage, the stories say, cunning naked animals, one with the night, swift and deadly and free. Long-lived beyond all other beasts, impossible to kill, the masters and lords of creation. So our stories go. All that walked on two legs or four, ran in fear of us. All that lived was but food for us. By day we slept in caves, packs of us, families. By night we ruled the earth.

  Then, up from the south, your race came into our world. The day people, so like us and yet so unlike. You were weak. We killed you easily, and took joy in it, for we found beauty in you, and always my people had been drawn to beauty. Perhaps it was your likeness to us we found so captivating. For centuries you were simply our prey.

  But changes came with time. My race was very long-lived, but few in number. The mating urge is curiously absent in us, while in you humans it rules as surely as the red thirst rules us. Simon told me, when I asked him of my mother, that the males of my race feel desire only when the female enters heat, and that happens but rarely—most frequently when male and female have shared a kill together. Even then, the women are seldom fertile, and for that they are thankful, for conception usually means death for our females. I killed my mother, Simon told me, ripping my way out of her womb, doing such damage inside that even our recuperative powers were of no avail. So it is most often when my people enter this world. We begin our lives in blood and death, even as we live them.

  There is a certain balance in that. God, if you believe in him, or Nature, if not, gives and takes away. We may live for a thousand years or more. Were we as fertile as you, we would soon fill this world. Your race breeds and breeds and breeds, swarming in numbers like flies, but you die like flies as well, of little wounds and illnesses my kind shrugs off.

  It is no wonder we thought little of you at first. But you bred, and you built cities, and you learned. You had minds, even as we did, but we had never had cause to use ours, so strong were we. Your kind brought fire into the world, armies, bows and spears and clothing, art and writing and language. Civilization, Abner. And, civilized, you were no longer prey. You hunted us down, killed us with flame and stake, came upon our caves by day. Our numbers, never great, diminished steadily. We fought you and died, or fled you, but where we went your kind soon followed. Finally we did as we were forced to do. We learned from you.

  Clothing and fire, weapons and language, all of it. We never had our own, you see. We borrowed yours. We organized as well, began to think and plan, and finally melted into you entirely, living in the shadows of the world your race built, pretending we were your kind, stealing out by night to slake our thirst on your blood, hiding by day in fear of you and your vengeance. Such has been the story of my race, the people of the night, through most of history.

  I heard it from Simon’s lips, as he had heard it years before from those now slain and gone. Simon was the oldest of the group I had found, claiming almost six hundred years.

  I heard other things as well, legends that went beyond our oral history back to our ultimate origins in the dim dawn of time itself. Even there I saw the hand of your people, for our myths were taken from your Christian Bible. Brown, who had once posed as
a preacher, read me passages from Genesis, about Adam and Eve and their children, Cain and Abel, the first men, the only men. But when Cain slew Abel, he went forth in exile and took a wife from the land of Nod. Where she came from, if the others were the only people in the world, Genesis did not explain. Brown did, however; Nod was the land of night and darkness, he said, and that woman was the mother of our race. From her and Cain are we descended, and thus it is we who are the children of Cain, not the black peoples as some of your kind believes. Cain slew his brother and hid, and so it is that we must kill our distant cousins and hide ourselves when the sun rises, since the sun is the face of God. We remain long-lived, as all men were in the first days described by your Bible, but our lives are accursed and must be spent in fear and darkness. So many of my people have believed, I was told. Others held to different myths, some even accepting the vampire tales they had heard, and believing themselves to be undying avatars of evil.

  I listened to the stories of ancestors long vanished, of struggles and persecutions, of our migrations. Smith told me of a great battle on the desolate shores of the Baltic a thousand years before, when a few hundred of my race descended by night on a horde of thousands, so the sun came up on a field of blood and corpses. I was reminded of Byron’s “Sennacherib.” Simon spoke of splendid ancient Byzantium, where many of our race had lived and prospered for centuries, invisible in that great teeming city until the crusaders came through, plundering and destroying, putting many of us to the torch. They bore the cross, those invaders, and I wondered if perhaps that was the truth behind the legend that my race fears and abhors that Christian symbol. From all lips I heard a legend of a city we had built, a great city of the night, wrought in iron and black marble in some dark caverns in the heart of Asia, by the shores of an underground river and a sea never touched by the sun. Long before Rome or even Ur, our city had been great, they avowed, in flagrant contradiction to the history they had told me earlier, of running naked through moonlit winter forests. According to the myth, we had been expelled from our city for some crime, had wandered forgetful and lost for thousands of years. But the city was still there, and some day a king would be born to our people, a bloodmaster greater than any who had ever come before, one who would gather our scattered race together and lead us back to the city of the night beside its sunless sea.