Blood Vivicanti (9780989878593) (3 page)

So you can imagine his relief when the music stopped and he could think and feel and move once more.

Wyn and Aemilia had never seen anything move as fast as him.

Bullets and Tasers didn’t faze the Red Man at all as he leaped off the operating table and tried to hop into his spaceship.

Wyn afterward remarked that the Red Man looked as lost and confused as a wild silverback in a circus, and just as deadly.

In the end it was Aemilia who subdued the Red Man.

She took up her violin and began playing a moving performance of Bach’s
Sarabande in D Minor
.

The Red Man stopped almost instantly and stared at her in wonderment and awe. It seemed as though he had never heard anything so beautiful.

She approached him as she played.

He stood perfectly still, not budging an inch. He towered over her. His biceps were larger than her head.

The Kharetie did not design the Red Man to have any tear ducts. But he wished that they had: Listening to her play the violin filled his whole body with an urge to express his self in the most sublime way possible.

The Red Man fell to the ground in a kind of stupor, his eyes still open, still staring ahead of where he’d collapsed.

Aemilia played on, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

A replenishment of soldiers from Cellar-11 lifted the Red Man and strapped him back down to the operating table with leather belts and shoestrings and anything else they could find.

The power of Aemilia’s playing kept the Red Man in that strange state of waking sleep. She had moved on to Bach’s
Violin Sonata No. 3
. The piece had a slight pause in the change between the adagio and the fuga. She hadn’t thought about the consequences.

In that very brief musicless second, the Red Man gestured toward his egg-shaped spaceship, trying to teletouch the automatic pilot’s program, in the hope of returning the ship and Lowen back to Khariton.

But Aemilia was too quick for him. She started playing once again. The Red Man’s teletouch faltered right before he slumped back into senselessness. But his efforts accidently opened Lowen’s cell.

Lowen’s ghost escaped. He was really upset now, seething with that rare primeval urge on Khariton to break an egg.

Soldiers pushed the spaceship back into Cellar-6, power immediately restored in Cellar-7, and the music started back up too.

Bach’s music once again blared through the loud speakers. Aemilia ended her song. It kept the Red Man perfectly motionless.

But the music had no effect on Lowen’s ghost.

No earthling had ever before seen a violet ghost with red glowing eyes, so Wyn and Aemilia now gaped at Lowen in amazement.

Then the ghost hurled himself at the nearest living, breathing soul, which happened to be Aemilia, with the violin still at her chin, the bow still in her hand.

There was a second before Lowen shoved out her soul to make room for his own. She spent her last breath meeting eyes with Wyn and giving him a farewell smile. It was as if she knew what was about to happen to her.

Then she was gone.

Lowen was all that remained inside the shell of her once benevolent frame.

Lowen possessed Aemilia completely. He was so furious now that the heat of his anger burned through her. She decapitated thirteen soldiers before she made her escape.

The next day her face could be found on the FBI’s ten most wanted list.

The Government held Wyn in custody for questioning.

He convinced them to let him continue his scientific research on the Red Man. He hoped that the Red Man would help him find his wife and the ghost.

He worked night and day without rest.

He lived on coffee and chocolate.

Wyn discovered that the Red Man’s blood possessed an abundance of something very similar to Human Leukocyte Antigens. This inspired Wyn’s theory that a peripheral blood stem cell transplant might help him find Lowen and save Aemilia.

He didn’t tell the Government about this theory. He tested it by performing a Dr. Jekyll experiment on himself.

He stimulated the production of stem cells in the Red Man, transferred them from the Red Man’s circulating blood into his own, and they thrived inside his own circulatory system, dividing and producing red cells, white cells and platelets at a tremendous rate.

He didn’t become Mr. Hyde, however.

But in a day the Red Man’s peripheral blood stem cells did replace all of Wyn’s entirely. Once that happened, Wyn’s body began manufacturing Kharetie blood through his system.

Then his body mutated.

Wyn now possessed greater strength, speed, memory, and senses, as well as an urgent need to consume blood.

He also grew a Probiscus – his bee stinger – on the tip of his tongue.

He was very surprised when he came to work the next day with a new distaste for coffee and a peculiar ability to hear the slow movement of the tectonic plate beneath his feet.

He called the Red Man’s glowing violet blood:
The Origin Blood
.

Lowen the ghost was also very surprised when he possessed Aemilia’s body. He had never guessed anything like that was possible. He’d never tried it before.

For a long time, he had been very content drifting here and there, watching the strange way people lived their lives, never enjoying game shows, yet always adoring new musicals.

But lately he had been feeling a kind of ennui, as if he had experienced everything there was in the world, and wondering if perhaps he should fly up to the moon.

But possessing Aemilia was a rush! It was giddying and it made him laugh with delight. It reinvigorated his love for life after death.

He went everywhere in Aemilia’s body. He bought a ticket to the zoo and fed the giraffes, he played hopscotch, he plunged into a cool pool on a hot midday summer, he had sausage links and sunny-side-up eggs and toast with both sides buttered, and he did much more – all the things that he’d been watching others do for years, yet could not do, being the ghost who had cracked the Great Harmony.

Aemilia’s body grew old and tired and fat and wrinkled very quickly.

Lowen did not like this at all. So he left her body and went to look for another.

All that remained of her was found in a New York dumpster, one shoe missing, discarded like a used cloth, all wrung out and dried up, a husk of the woman she had been in life.

Lowen the ghost went on a possessing spree. He hopped from body to body, going from woman to man, from man to child, from child to man to woman and all over again. He stayed in them until they grew old and then he possessed someone else.

He couldn’t get enough. He became a glutton for possessing people’s bodies.

He poorly treated the bodies he possessed. He was reckless in them. He dented most and scratched them all.

Sometimes he would stand in the middle of a lighting storm to feel the shock of a lightning strike. Other times he would dive from planes without a parachute. A few times he hung a millstone around his neck and sunk to the depths of the sea.

None of the bodies ever survived these ordeals. And he didn’t care. Lowen abandoned them like shells and he went in search of others that he might break.

He enjoyed living anew. But he enjoyed the sting of death even more.

Earthlings must have left an impression on his ghost, however, because in all the long years he haunted the universe, Lowen had never before wanted someone to talk with. Yet now he had begun to feel an extreme urge to share his experiences with someone who would listen.

He tried speaking with professional counselors, but they wanted to inject him with primitive pharmaceuticals when he told them that he was a ghost from the planet Khariton who liked possessing people.

He tried talking to ordinary people too, but they only wanted to talk about the things on their minds. And Lowen wasn’t interested in that.

So next he tried talking to special hotlines and bartenders and priests and anyone who might listen to how he had recently enjoyed the experience of being eaten alive by a crocodile.

But they would not listen to him.

The very few that did had chemically-imbalanced minds which told them that they had also been hatched on Khariton.

Lowen then got the idea of creating others like himself.

He took two ordinary people, shoved their souls from their bodies, and switched them.

One had been a girl named Nell. The other had been a boy, but Nell ate him, the way a sand shark cannibalizes its siblings in the womb.

Nell was not like Lowen at all. She seemed sleepy and uninterested in life. But she did have a great attachment to Lowen and she would do whatever he asked.

He called her his, “Sleeper Devil.”

Then he made more.

Nell had been his first. She was the model.

But Lowen was still a scientist, and like most scientists he tested the limits of his possibilities. He tried making Sleeper Devils in various ways. Sometimes his experiments were successful. Sometimes they were not.

Sometimes they had two heads. Sometimes three arms. Sometimes four legs like a dog.

Lowen had become a chef of experimentation and exploitation.

He made a small army.

They thought he was a god. They worshipped him.

He thought he was the cat's pajamas.

In the meantime, the Red Man’s blood had completely taken over Wyn’s system and his body pumped Kharetie blood.

He could lift a Volkswagen over his head. He could run faster than sound. He could leap over billboards and trains and he felt like
the Incredible Hulk
.

He drank a pint of blood a week and the Blood Memories of his victims gave him a weeklong boost of new knowhow.

Wyn started calling himself, “The Blood Vivicanti.”

He thought it sounded great – just like a comic book superhero.

Then he got the idea to make others like him.

Wyn had the Red Man’s Blood Memories too. He knew about Khariton and the Great Harmony, he knew about Lowen and the Noise, and he knew that the Red Man’s name was Silent.

Wyn inherited Aemilia’s fortune. He used a minuscule portion of that inheritance to remodel the mansion. By comparison, his new mansion would make the Winchester Mystery House look like Old Mother Hubbard’s shoe. He was especially excited about the batcave he would have built beneath the library.

Wyn the Blood Vivicanti then stole the Red Man from Cellar-7, and his spaceship from Cellar-6, and he hid them in his mansion.

Then he quit his job with the Government and gave an anonymous tip to
The New York Times
that the Government was running secret experiments out of a hidden base called “the Cellars.” He provided an address and phone number.

Wyn kept the Red Man senseless by fitting his ears with earbuds and playing Bach’s
The Art of Fugue
.

He thought about waking him. But he felt he had to find Lowen first. He wanted to take things one step at a time.

Wyn missed Aemilia very much. He mourned greatly when he discovered the horrible things that Lowen had done to her body.

In his outrage he flung a manhole cover like a Frisbee into space.

Wyn soon discovered Lowen’s location and he observed his behavior.

Lowen was making others like Aemilia and calling them his Sleeper Devils.

Wyn also observed how Lowen had perfected his process for leaping from body to body. He likened Lowen to Legion – the evil possessor of people and pigs.

At that time Lowen was crouching inside the body of an old women. In life she had been quite young and beautiful and hopeful. But the presence of the evil ghost inside her had shriveled her and twisted her into a vile-looking witch.

Wyn observed as Lowen the witch searched for a new host body.

Lowen went looking for the darkest soul imaginable. He had an itch to do something really awful.

He found a priest.

The priest had actually been quite kind in life, not dark at all. He exercised, he ate well, he prayed and gave short sermons, and he had a predilection for Laurel and Hardy movies –
The Lucky Dog
being his favorite.

But as is the case with most horrific circumstances in life, it takes only a push and a punch to make the light go out.

Nell the Sleeper Devil stood by the side of Lowen the witch. She helped her sneak up behind the priest.

The violet ghost emerged from the witch and swathed the priest before seeping inside.

His presence in the priest was so potent that there was no life left of the once good cleric. Only the powerful presence of the ghost remained.

The priest was dead.

Lowen the Dark Man had been reborn.

The witch was not dead yet. But she was dying quickly without Lowen inside her.

The Dark Man now turned to watch her die. On his face was an expression of bored fascination.

The witch’s expression, however, went from a second of sheer horror to the last gasp realization that she was a human being again. The next second her body surrendered and she was dead. Her wizened body crumpled into a heap of old skin and brittle bones on the ground.

Wyn was too horrified to move as he observed this. His mind was likening the witch’s death to his wife’s. He could practically see Aemilia gasping the same way the witch was, like some unfortunate trout out of water.

Lowen the Dark Man and Nell then left.

Wyn could finally move his shocked body around midnight. Then he punched a hole through a sequoia.

Wyn caught up with Lowen in the hills of Los Angeles. Grief over Aemilia’s death fueled his anger. He tried to attack Lowen, but the Dark Man had by then made a small battalion of his Sleeper Devils, and he used them now as cannon fodder in the path of Wyn’s wrathful vengeance.

But not even such a battalion of Lowen’s Sleeper Devils could best a Blood Vivicanti – especially one who had drunk the blood of a heavy weight boxer and was teeming with the Blood Memories of jabs and left hooks, straight rights and uppercuts and haymakers.

With Wyn distracted, Lowen the Dark Man escaped with Nell by his side.

Lowen had never seen anything like a Blood Vivicanti before. He never knew that a human could move so fast or so gracefully or be so timeless and powerful.