Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (19 page)

Chapter Four

I sat down under a naked tree in the very centre of the courtyard, taking a few minutes to get comfy and sort the journals by date: nineteen-thirteen, nineteen-sixteen, two from the eighties, and one unlabelled. Eager as I was to read every part of David’s journey as a vampire, I thought it best to start at the beginning—nineteen-thirteen. The year he was turned.

They were quite thick for journals—enough that I needed two hands to hold the earlier ones—and not all of them were leather. Nineteen-thirteen was cardboard-bound, the spine peeling away from the binding, and when I cracked it open I thought for a moment that it ripped, but it just folded oddly against my palm. The pages were so thick they felt more like card, and the yellowing around the edges had slowly spread to circle the text. Other than that, they were in good enough condition to read without too much squinting. Although, David’s handwriting was quite cursive and almost impossible to make out—at first—and the ink was smudged slightly near the binding on each left page, where his hand had run across it before it was dry. I studied the letters for a moment, realising that the s’s weren’t actually r’s and that the letter I thought was a backward e was actually a z. It was beautiful, but I much preferred his modern hand.

As I brushed a few stray webs off the corners of the pages and began my descent into his past, I hoped with all my heart that the human version of David may have written in these pages before the vampire came to life.

Two pages in, I was sorely disappointed.

October:

Uncle Arthur sat in his study, a glass of warm brandy to mind his company, a fire crackling over the silence of his confusion. He pawed over those damn pages once again, searching for something. Always searching. I leaned against his armchair, asked him what he was looking for and, as always he turned to me and responded with:

“The answer to that which may never be found, but must be searched for in order to be known.”

I knew those words so well that I said them as he spoke.

He rose then, placed his glass aside slowly, and told me to be about my own business—that it was unbecoming of a young man to mock his uncle in his own study.

Mock him? Mock him, he says. Is it mockery to make an observation?

Mockery would be to brand one’s uncle the blind fool he is—searching for things he will never find. Of course, if my uncle had thought to share his adventures, perhaps the talents of myself, or my brother, might serve him in some way.

Jason has confessed an ability to hear a man talk without use of his mouth—that on a number of occasions he has heard Uncle Arthur say something, only to deny speaking at all. It worries him, the ability to read minds, but I am not so discontented. I have not yet shared this with anyone and I do not mean to. However, if my uncle would allow me entry to his circle of secrets, I might allow him to enter mine. Together, we could solve this mystery that ails him. If there is, in fact, a mystery at all. Perhaps t’is the madness in him—a madness that would have seen a mere mortal locked away after my aunt passed—a madness that, in the minds of those that do not die of a broken heart, will twist their thoughts until they eventually no longer make sense.

Uncle Arthur has gone mad. He is not the man I once knew. He is a bloody fool, and I am done with him.

The words at the base of the page were smudged beyond comprehension. I traced a brown stain with my fingertips and held the pages to my nose. It smelled sweet and buttery, with a tiny hint of alcohol.

I smiled, imagining him writing this in such an enraged state that he missed his lip as he sipped his drink. I could see him jumping back, wiping the page, cursing as the ink smeared across it.

On the next page he’d written the month and, beside it, what I imagined was perhaps a title:

The First Kill
.

Uncle warned me that the first one would be the hardest, but he did not say in what way it would be hard.

He had gathered my kills for me since the day I was turned, but with only weeks left until Jason and I leave for war, we had to become self-sufficient. Until now, I drank blood merely for the thirst. I’d been present once when Jason made love to a girl before killing her, but I’d had nothing more than a hard-on for the idea. I hadn’t crossed the line. Until now.

Her name was Mary. She was dark-skinned, pretty, with jet-black hair and eyes to match. She barely gave me a glance as she passed me in the street.

I had planned to make it quick. I planned to hold her and be kind, but her insolence irritated me, so I ravished the bitch before my dick had even gone hard.

Something about the stillness in her, as she lay dying in her bed, made the desire to feel her skin against mine unbearable. I tore the fabric away from her breasts and took off my own shirt, laying against her, and with death on her lips, a breath away from taking her last, she whispered for to me to make love to her.

She died as I ejaculated. She died and left me with a hunger so insatiable I abandoned her body and went in search of another. I craved not the blood or the sex, though. It would not be enough for me to lure them and bed them. Not anymore. Not after experiencing death and sex. For now, for the first time, I craved the hunt.

After that entry every one following was titled with a name. No more months. Just names. I flipped forward and read them, sometimes two or three per page. Bethany. Alice. Ginger. Fanny. So many. There were just so many.

So I went back to the first kill after Mary. I needed to know what led to David’s steady decline in sanity.

Caroline:

A beauty so fair it seemed a sin to kill her. Or perhaps a sin to allow her the passage of time—to age and wither as beauties often do. Her hair was blonde like my Aunt. Her lips red and so full, so soft around my dick that for a moment I reconsidered her death. Until I finished in her mouth. Until she looked up at me from where she knelt, sweet as a summer rose, expecting something more from me.

I brought her to her feet. I could feel her pulse in her wrist, see her blood moving through her veins. I had not used any kind of compulsion. I simply smiled at her, and she was putty in my dangerous hands.

Gently I cupped her neck, pressing the heel of my palm against the beat of her pulse, and it quickened. When I gripped her throat tightly it quickened in an entirely different way. I looked into her eyes then—saw the fear as she noticed the sharp fangs beneath my grin; felt the realisation as she recalled the rumours she’d heard—of a man, a killer, leaving his naked victims drained of blood.

There is a moment when a kill sees their own fate and accepts it. The only fight they put up is to see that there is no sense in fighting, and they give in—allow themselves to die without the stress of hope. I saw this in her a second before she screamed, throwing me completely off guard.

I released her as men came running, dogs barked, and the quiet alley where I believed we’d be concealed was no longer a safe haven.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I told her, and her knees buckled as I slashed her throat cleanly open with a jerk of my hand.

As the grip of death consumed her last hope, her mouth fell open, losing the remains of the cum she’d clearly stored in her cheeks. The dirty whore hadn’t even the decency to swallow.

I twisted her head then, taking it off her shoulders, and threw it up the alley, as hordes of valiant knights came to aid the damsel no longer in distress.

I waited until the very last second before leaving, holding the wide gaze of an old man for just a moment long enough to reveal the true evil inside me, then leapt into the air and escaped over the rooftops.

I felt alive.

Sarah-Anne:

Arrived in the city today—a sack over my shoulder, eagerness for battle in my eyes, and with a brother on my right. He took in the tall buildings with boyish enthusiasm, smiling and nodding at each man who passed. The city folk were not quite as accommodating here as they were in our town, and by the time we settled at the barracks I knew Jason’s spirit was low. Until we met Drover: human, witty, downright arrogant, and just my sort of man. He’d travelled from Connecticut, leaving behind a mother, father and a wife that he’d married merely so he could fuck her. He wasn’t going back to that shithole town, though. As far as sweet Fanny was concerned, Drover aka John Prince was a dead man. And little did John Prince know, that slutty photograph she gave him settled her fate. Fact was, one of us would come home from this war alive and go to find her, and I was willing to bet my immortality it wouldn’t be him.

As I sat relishing in my own contemplations, drunk and dizzy at the back of a seedy bar downtown, in walks Sarah-Anne. Never a finer broad had I seen. She was fair-skinned, just the way I like them, dark-haired and… those eyes: purity, innocence. She viewed the world with a kind of naïveté I found instantly refreshing.

“Tom,” She said as she walked right up to the bar and slammed her money down. “That should cover anything he drank today.”

“Not likely, Miss. Still a week’s worth’a lager from last mon—”

“I’ll cover the rest later,” she said, wrapping a fat old man’s arm over her shoulder. “Just give me a week.”

“Allow me.” I appeared at her side, startling her a little, and relieved her fragile, feminine spine of the burden.

“Thank you.” She smiled, sweeping a lock of hair off her face—her whole demeanour changing.

“Not at all,” I told her, then paid the remainder of the tab, took her father home and considered, for a second—just a second—leaving this girl alive. But, it was no use. I wanted her blood as bad as I wanted her body. And she was mine, from the first breath she took to accept my offer, to her every last in her bed, two doors down from her sleeping father that night. He would wake to find his daughter mauled, naked, and used in her bed. And though I would love to have stayed to watch him find her, I had about three hours left at that time before I had to return to base.

I finished inside her—a sweet moment in her world where she hoped she might carry my child—and when she opened her mouth to kiss me, I leaned down and felt her breath on my face. It was hot and scented slightly with stale tea. But the warmth of her blood as our eyes met switched my focus. And like every other girl I’d come to love for a single moment, she was nothing then but a kill.

I stuffed my thumb into her throat, pinning her tongue down so she couldn’t scream, then sank my teeth into her flesh.

Oh, the blood. Even now as I remember it my mouth waters. My heart wants to beat, my breath moves my chest; my hands reach out to feel her soft skin.

But she’s no longer there. And that is my one and only regret: that I cannot go back. I cannot relive that kill—cannot relive her. She, of the hundreds so far, is my favourite.

I left her on the bloodied sheets, laid out like some piece of art: her hair softly splayed around her pillows, her eyes fixed and locked onto the ceiling, her tender, pale white breasts exposed—covered in blood. She was perfect. And she would forever be perfect in my memory that way.

Sarah-Anne, I say her name even now. Sarah-Anne—the loveliest kill.

I put nineteen-thirteen down and picked up nineteen-sixteen. It was as thick as the last one, but leather-bound, tied shut with a black rope wound three times around. I opened it up and, seeing there was another girl named Fanny in here, decided to start with her.

My brother died last week. I attended a service for him today in the town where we grew up. It pained me to return there—to see the graves of my aunt and mother—to stand over them and farewell a man I knew was not dead.

Uncle Arthur invited me for a drink to celebrate Jason’s first death. I declined. I had one thing in mind before I returned to duty—to wash out the vile taste of man. The flesh of man. The blood of man. It was all I’d eaten in nearly a year. We were not so lucky as to come upon a woman that I had time or chance to kill. I left the funeral and headed straight down to Connecticut. To Fanny. Dear, sweet Fanny.

Drover, only weeks ago, had laid in my arms, his legs blown from his torso, and pressed Fanny’s picture into my hand. I made a promise to him that day that I would go to her, and I would see that she did not suffer a broken heart. No suffering at all, I swore—ever again.

She is the first time I used a compulsion act. The first time I made a woman want me for the sake of the kill. And it will not be the last. She opened her legs for me and let me do things to her that no other girl has ever before, and as I drained the last of her blood from the soft flesh just beside her vagina, she moaned in ecstasy.

It was the perfect kill.

I have concluded that to kill a man is necessity; to kill a woman divine.

After Fanny I had enough of his earlier years. I needed to see some progression—some hope that he didn’t start and stay this evil—some hope that the man I fell in love with was quite changed
before
he ever actually touched me.

Nineteen-eighty seemed like a good enough leap.