Ad Eternum

ad eternum
Copyright © 2012 by Sarah Wishnevsky. 

All rights reserved.

Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2012 by Patrick Arrasmith. All rights reserved.

Print interior design Copyright © 2012 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.

All rights reserved.

Electronic Edition

ISBN

978-1-59606-606-9

Subterranean Press

PO Box 190106

Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com

When we’ve been here ten thousand years

bright shining as the sun.

We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise

than when we’ve first begun.

—“Amazing Grace”

Hymn originally by John Newton (1779),
additional verse first recorded by Harriet Beecher Stowe after an African-American oral tradition (1852).
Believed to have been adopted from another hymn,
entitled “Jerusalem, My Happy Home.” (1790)

New Amsterdam, New Netherlands,

United Democratic States of North America.

March, 1962

The wampyr called himself Jack Prior.

It was just a name, the latest of hundreds. A memorial, though almost no one alive would understand it. He had newly adopted it, to mark the end of yet another existence.

That he wore it on his first return in the span of a human life to New Amsterdam was merely the sort of ironic coincidence that one came to appreciate—to anticipate—in an existence bounded only by your tolerance for loss.

Travel was easier than the last time the wampyr had crossed the Atlantic. Then, it had meant weeks aboard ship or days in a dirigible. Now, it could be managed in a night, if you were willing to accept certain risks—risks which could be minimized by the careful selection of one’s airline.

The wampyr arranged his travel through a carrier headquartered in London. He embarked immediately upon completion of the state funeral for Dame Commander Abigail Irene Garrett, the legendary matriarch of the Crown’s Own, which had been held at the Enchancery after sunset. Such unconventional timing was out of unstated deference for those mourners who could not bear the light of the sun.

A lifespan in excess of a century was enough time to accumulate a great many strange friends.

It raised another irony—perhaps delicious, perhaps merely bittersweet—that despite the wampyr’s general lack of enthusiasm for mortal politics (or immortal ones, for that matter), it was the gratitude of politicians that made his travel so easy. In no small part due to his activities during the Great War, English aeroplanes were equipped to carry passengers of the blood. Sections of the cabin could be shielded by blackout curtains should the sun rise in transit.

It wasn’t
discreet
, but it wasn’t as if it were exactly illegal to be a wampyr in America anymore. Inconvenient, certainly. But the wampyr was inured to inconvenience.

The wampyr spent the long flight reading a lightly fictionalized account of a young soldier’s experiences with the American and Iroquois forces sent to relieve Pavelgrad during the Great War—and, when that grew too depressing, with knitting a particularly intricate pair of socks. The book—and the socks—aided him in pretending oblivion to the occasional curious glances of his fellow passengers.

The airliner chased the dark across the Atlantic, and in the cold of late winter there was plenty of dark to embrace it. He had no need to draw the curtains, and the stewardess had been kind enough to seat him by himself, so the nauseating smells from the other passengers’ dinners afflicted him less than they might.

It was the wampyr’s first experience in such an aircraft, and he could not help but compare it to the luxuries of an airship or passenger liner. The seats seemed comfortable—it was hard for him to tell, who required so little comfort now—and the stewardesses were attentive. He understood without asking that they were very like rail conductors or the stewards on ocean liners: the passengers might believe that the attendants were there to see to their needs, but their most pressing purpose was crowd control.

He found it a curiously comforting revelation. The technology changed, but the people and the purposes it served were unaltering. There was something very pleasant about the long, dark cylinder full of rustling, sleeping mortals—like a stable at night, or a cote full of dozy pigeons. He turned and gazed out the window, watching the stark beams of a swollen moon glance off the moving water.

New Amsterdam was a dazzle of lights out of the starboard windows as the metal bird dipped a wing and banked towards its final approach. The wampyr, seated by the window, turned to gaze out it as a tall man stopped beside his row.

He’d known the stranger was coming down the aisle, known that he was about to stop. He’d read the man’s intentions in the slightly accelerating heartbeat and conscious tenseness of his breath as he came up, and if there had been any scent of aggression, the wampyr would have made the usual tiresome preparations to defend himself. But while the stranger smelled of apprehension and his breathing indicated nervousness, there was nothing about him that would suggest he meant the wampyr harm.

“I’m Dr. Damian Thomas,” he said. The brush of fabric told the wampyr he had extended a hand. Over the tang of nervousness, he smelled clean and well-fed, a scent laced with the grassiness of some modern cologne. “May I sit?”

The wampyr turned. Dr. Thomas was indeed quite tall, stooped beneath the overhead bulkhead in a charcoal-gray Savile Row suit. He was not slender, like many tall men, but broad-shouldered and well-proportioned. A faint overtone of English university overlaid an accent the wampyr would place as mid-Atlantic American.

The knitting needles rested in the wampyr’s lap; he wasn’t wearing gloves, and in the warmth of the aircraft, neither was the other man.

Well, if he wasn’t going to pretend to be something he wasn’t, he couldn’t hold the curiosity of living men against them. It was a new world. In more ways than one.

“John Prior,” he said, and extended his fingers. “Call me Jack. Suit yourself.”

Dr. Thomas’s hand was ink-spotted and warm, the back brown as coffee-berries and the palm a yellow tan. He didn’t react to the dry-stick neutrality of the wampyr’s touch, confirming that it came as no surprise.

“My pleasure.” He seated himself, sliding a small carry-on bag beneath the seat.

The wampyr began tucking his book and his knitting away. “Medical doctor?”

“Doctor of Thaumaturgy,” Dr. Thomas said. “Oxford, ’57. And what do you do?”

Before he remembered himself, the wampyr said, “I’m a private detective.”

“I thought you might be.” Dr. Thomas left it at that—
I know who you are, and I respect your desire for privacy.
A gold ring on his right hand glinted as he fastened his seatbelt.

The wampyr wondered,
Widowed?

“I noticed you were reading Vonnegut. Any good?”

The blood are only so strong as their courts
, the wampyr reminded himself.

“Troubling,” he said. “But not untrue.”

They said the aeroplane “touched down,” but it was nothing like the feather-soft alighting of an airship. Instead, the wheels struck tarmac and bounced up—not hard, but hard enough that the wampyr set a hand against the back of the seat before him. Electric floodlights glazed the rough ground rushing at incredible speeds beneath the landing gear. Banks of dirty snow littered brown earth along the runway’s edges.

“Well,” Dr. Thomas said. “Survived another one. Is this your first time in New Amsterdam?”

“I haven’t been back in a long time,” the wampyr answered. It was the sort of non-answer that became second nature after a few hundred years, and spared explanations—and even if you weren’t trying to hide what you were, it did not take very long at all for those explanations to become excruciatingly tedious. “I imagine everything has changed.”

Dr. Thomas reached into his breast pocket and offered a card. “Perhaps we can be of service to one another at some point. Please do keep in touch.”

“Perhaps.” The wampyr slipped the card into his pocket. “I’m afraid I can’t yet return the favor—but in the interim, I can be contacted via the Hotel Aphatos.”

Dr. Thomas’s eyebrow rose. “I see.”

“I did not think you would be surprised.”

“Not…surprised. Or rather, not shocked. Or outraged. But perhaps a little surprised that you are so willing to trust a stranger.”

“I have nothing to hide,” said the wampyr. After a few moments too long, he remembered that this was when he was supposed to smile.

And to keep his lips closed.

When the wampyr last resided in this city, there had been no such institution as the Hotel Aphatos. He had been the only one of his kind in New Amsterdam; possibly the only one in all the English possessions in the New World. He had come here for a fresh start then, as well.

Perhaps it was a pattern. It was hard to avoid repetition, after the first few hundred years.

Now New Amsterdam had a club devoted to serving the special needs of the blood, and that would make the wampyr’s transition back to residency simpler. But before he went to the hotel, he had other matters to attend to.

As the passengers crossed the tarmac to the gate, the wampyr noticed a number of men and women gathered behind wooden sawhorses, presumably awaiting their loved ones or those to whom they felt a duty. However, there were a few others whose ready cameras and elongated notepads set them apart.

I am anticipated
, he thought, even as the first cries of “Doctor Chaisty!” and “Don Sebastien!” reached his ears.

“Pardon me,” the wampyr said in excuse to his temporary traveling companion. As the first camera flashed, he stepped out of line and let himself fade into the darkness. Ignoring the passenger walkways, he moved with speed around the waiting crowd—before they were even sure what had happened—and toward the exits.

He had no luggage—he had shipped trunks ahead. When he saw the line of picketers arrayed near baggage claim, he was grateful to have avoided it. They carried signs bearing such legends as Blood For The Living and God Hates Vamps.

It was a step up from mobs armed with torches and farm implements. He would have preferred to arrive unheralded, but it appeared he had reckoned without the good offices of the Transatlantic cable.

He found a checkered taxi at the stand in front of the airport. The hack—a slick-haired Italian who hid a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s
The Modern Prometheus
under a half-completed crossword puzzle—loaded the wampyr’s carry-on in the boot…in the
trunk
.

Seated in the back, the wampyr paused before giving the driver directions to an address fronting Jardinstraat. “On the island of Manhattan.”

The hack’s glance in his rearview mirror told the wampyr that his specificity was unwarranted. “Nice address. Just let me get through this mess…”

The protestors, apparently having determined that their quarry had eluded them, spilled into the drive near the doors from baggage claim. The wampyr noted that they did not adhere to the marked pedestrian crossing zones.

The wampyr leaned back and closed his eyes. “What’s going on?”

“Some famous vamp supposedly coming in from England or something,” the hack said. His shirt rasped on vinyl as his shoulders rose and fell against the seat. “It was in the
Manhattanite
.”

That was a new paper. The wampyr had been familiar with the morning papers—the
New Amsterdam Courant
and the
New World Times
—and the afternoon papers, the
Record
and the
Gazette
.

“No doubt the very nonpareil of reasoned journalism,” the wampyr said.

The hack snorted. “It’s got the best comics, what can I say.”

“Wait—” the wampyr said, holding a hand across the back of the driver’s seat. “—take me through the city. Please.”

“First time in New Amsterdam?”

The wampyr didn’t answer, just leaned away and turned his head to gaze outside. He stretched his shoulders against the seatback and cracked the window so he could scent the night air. “Just have me at the house by five a.m.”

Wistfully, the hack said, “There’s a great spot to watch the sun come up over the Hudson Channel Bridge—”