Read I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) Online

Authors: Tony Monchinski

Tags: #norror noir, #noir, #vampires, #new york city, #horror, #vampire, #supernatural, #action, #splatterpunk, #monsters

I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2) (5 page)

BOOK: I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)
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A genius, Fritz, in his own dark, troubled
way. Part of his brilliance lay in his ability to confront us
headfirst with matters that bore directly on our existence. Thus
his madman descends upon the marketplace with his message for the
villagers: God is dead, and he is dead because we have killed him.
God is dead—the sea is drank up; the horizon wiped clear as if by a
sponge. The metaphors—Nietzsche the poet.

God itself as a metaphor—the principal that
had ordered our lives gone now, evaporated. An imposition of order
on the universe that held fast and true, uprooted and cast aside.
Yet Fritz’s power lay not so much in his illustration of the
absurdities and whimsies of existence as in his demand that we take
responsibility for our lives and our actions.

God is dead and we have killed him:

Must
we
not
ourselves
become
gods
simply
to
be
worthy
of
it
?’ Do we have any choice but to become agents in
our own history?

Of course we must.

1882 was an important year in the great man’s
life. He would have been thirty-eight years old that October. He
had made the acquaintance of Lou Salome: summering with her in
Tautenburg; courting her unsuccessfully, his harpy sister Elisabeth
an ever-present chaperone. Fritz’s physical ailments were such that
he imbibed large quantities of opium and still had trouble
sleeping. 1882 was the year his
Gay
Science
saw
publication; the year the madman descended upon the market square;
the year Fritz asked us to consider the demon and the offer it
bore—

The eternal recurrence.

Would
you
not
throw
yourself
down
and
gnash
your
teeth
and
curse
the
demon
who
spoke
thus
?
Or
have
you
once
experienced
a
tremendous
moment
when
you
would
have
answered
him
: ‘
You
are
a
god
and
never
have
I
heard
anything
more
divine
.

If
this
thought
gained
possession
of
you
,
it
would
change
you
as
you
are
or
perhaps
crush
you
.
The
question
in
each
and
every
thing
,

Do
you
desire
this
once
more
and
innumerable
times
more
?

would
lie
upon
your
actions
as
the
greatest
weight
.
Or
how
well
disposed
would
you
have
to
become
to
yourself
and
to
life
to
crave
nothing
more
fervently
than
this
ultimate
eternal
confirmation
and
seal
?

Alas, that we should recognize all demons
that come before us.

That reveal themselves for what they are.

That tempt us.

That we should gaze upon even ourselves and
judge verily. For my part, I will not attempt to mask my disdain
for his sister Elisabeth. In his last decade, she exhibited the
great man like a circus attraction and sold his ideas—like
trinkets—to the National Socialists. A demon? Perhaps not, but a
bitch, yes, through and through. Better she had stayed in Paraguay,
but I digress and get ahead of myself.

Of her, I will have more to say.

I met my master again in St. Petersburg. This
would have been in the 1850s, well before the serfs in Russia
received their freedom; their manumission would not come to them
until 1861. They had built Petersburg out of the bogs, alongside
Swedish prisoners of war, laboring year after year, erecting the
port city on the Baltic. Together they died by the tens of
thousands, as had those toiling at the great Qin wall, as had the
pyramid builders.

Steeped upon this terrible human toll,
Peter’s eponymous city greeted the world as Russia’s imperial
capital for a brief period early in the eighteenth century, and
then again, from 1732 through 1918. It was during this later span
that my master found me where last he had left me, in this city on
the river Neva, built at the cost of untold lives.

In the mornings before dawn, I would stand on
the banks of the Neva, lost in contemplation of matters great and
small, concerns mundane and metaphysical. The waters flowed past
and I considered Heraclitus’ axiom, that one could never step into
the same river twice. That there were two million souls in Europe
alone at that time, a billion in the world. That for a generation
prior, the light and hope of a new world—declaring itself the
champion of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness—had been
subsumed by a conservative restoration of order encapsulated in
their founding document’s natural rights to life, liberty, and
property
.

Property, that bourgeois watchword—their
god.

That the true revolution, aimed at liberty,
fraternity, and equality, had collapsed back on the reign of one
man, a stunted general at that.

Above all, I wrestled with my own
existence.

My Master, Vinci, had turned me in the
Carpathian Mountains. He had taken me with him about the continent
and across the oceans to see the world. I had learned to feed. To
hide my existence from others. To survive.

When last we’d parted it had been in that
very city—
Piter
as it is called. The Neva flowed through the
center of the metropolis. In the winter months she would freeze,
not breaking up until April. At that time the mists rose off her
waters in the early mornings before the rise of that dreaded orb.
The mists hovered like a shroud within which spectral wraiths
gathered.

In truth, I was the thing to fear most in
that city. I, who fed off Petersburg’s denizens in the blackest
night. Though, unlike any ghosts feared to consort above the water
itself, I stood on the shore.

Winter is the best time for the vampire, with
its short days and lengthy nights.

The nights were made for hunting.

The nights, when I would awake, the thirst
for blood strong, my canines aching. The nights, when Petersburg’s
citizens would rest. I would visit them along the quays in the
maritime quarter; in the squalid sections of the Sennaya Ploshchad,
the belly of Petersburg; on occasion I would cross the Neva to take
my sustenance on Vasilevskiy Island.

I would visit them in their slumber, waking
them, lulling them with my gaze. I would ask entrance to their
domiciles and they would grant me such. In the morning they would
wake, fatigued and anemic, troubled by half-remembered dreams from
the night before. They would wake and I would sleep, sated and
content.

Vinci parted my company one night in the
1830s, there upon the banks of the Neva. It was our way between us:
he would appear and disappear at intervals, leaving me to my own
devices.

In my early days I was his constant companion
and pupil, learning what it meant to be a child of the night. As
the decades passed his departures commenced, first for days, then
weeks and months, and finally years. We consider with antipathy the
parent who abandons its child for any length of time. And I would
come to have reasons to hold my Master in contempt; however, his
absences did not count amongst them.

Time—and you must always remember this,
Boone—time means something different to the vampire, as it means
something different to a child as to an adult. Not long after my
metamorphosis I was independent, fully capable of surviving on my
own. I was an apt pupil and my Master had taught me well.

We stayed together as long as we did for each
other’s company and comfort. Vinci left in the 1830s, without a
hint as to his destination, returning just as unexpectedly in
1859.

Much had changed in the intervening
years.

Industrialization had begun in England a
century prior, spreading like wild fire across Europe. It was an
age of invention and deprivation, an age of labor and capital. Marx
himself recognized the bourgeoisie’s crucial revolutionary role,
casting off the feudal fetters that had bound man to land and lord.
If capital and its servants had succeeded in “
drowning
out
the
most
heavenly
ecstacies
of
religious
fervor
,” they did so by
substituting a new god: the market.

The seeds were planted and taking hold, a new
faith based on “
egotistical
calculation
” and economic
liberalism. A faith at once at ease with a heretofore never
imagined affluence; wealth alongside and owing to an exploitation
“naked, shameless, direct and brutal”—Marx’s words. The great rifts
in society were exacerbated, the haves and the have-nots staring
out at each other across a widening chasm. The one ever scrambling
to cement and retain its foothold in the upper stratums, the other
gazing longingly towards the heights, despising those of their own
station. Aside from a few perspicacious souls, neither side
questioned the dichotomy, accepting it as given.

These changes and more were at work in the
world. On a more mundane level, changes were afoot in my life.

I had met a girl.

First, a word regarding appearance.
Continental fashion in the early nineteenth century encompassed
hair wax and mutton chops; pantaloons and trousers with straps
beneath the shoes; linen shirts and tall standing collars. Hessian
boots I remember well. This was the dress of a gentleman.
Gentlemen, of which there were more and more in Petersburg each
day. This was the age of the clothes-obsessed dandy, he that would
come to be lampooned in the novels and ephemera of the day.

The contrast was stark: there were peasants
where I lived who wore little more than potato sacks cinched about
their waists.

But enough of the habiliments of an age.

I had seen nine years when my Master turned
me, and it was as a nine-year-old that I appeared for the majority
of my existence. Thus it was in the 1850s I appeared as I had in
the 1830s and would in the 1870s: a child, tow-headed and thin.
Somewhat pallid perhaps, I was in fact quite hearty and hale.

And my dress, though fairer than the majority
of the Russian peasantry, was in no way ostentatious. If anything,
my raiment was a nod to the later years of the previous century,
indicative of my admiration for the French: snug leather breeches
with buttons at the knee, a cropped riding coat over a white
waistcoat. I wore my hair cropped as well, cropped and unpowdered,
in the style of the 5th Duke of Bedford.

We had come to Petersburg half a century
prior. My master was a man of means and as such we never wanted for
material goods. Wherever we lived we lived as gentry so long as
doing such did not draw unwanted attention. In the early nineteenth
century, my master had invested in a property in the eastern part
of the city, a comfortable manse not far from where the Anichkov
Bridge crosses the Fontanka.

And it was to this residence that we always
returned.

Given our nocturnal peregrinations and
solitary manner, we had little intercourse with any neighbors. A
caretaker was employed to watch over the property when we were
absent. He and his sons—for his sons succeeded him in this
task—were paid to be elsewhere when we were present. All
arrangements were conducted prior to our arrival via the post.

In the instances where parlay with neighbors
or others was unavoidable, I was presented as nephew to my master.
A generation later we continued the ruse, my master assuming the
role of my earlier self now grown. And again, I was a nephew, son,
or ward.

Long before I had abandoned my own name.

In the streets of Petersburg and other
Russian cities I went by Leonid Mikhailovna Duorzhetzkii.
Duorzhetzkii, a surname of my creation, unrelated to my past life.
Mikhailovna, our patronymic—Mikhail, the name of the human man who
had sired me. And, finally, Leonid: the name of my stout-hearted
eldest brother. Though it had been the better part of a century and
a half that he had perished at our father’s side, I had never
forgotten my brother or his last act of courage—

“Bore—ing,” Boone stated.

“Pardon?”

“Boring—boring—boring!”

Rainford had stopped pacing the room and
stood in place, narrowing his eyes.

Wells retrieved the whip from the floor.

Boone assumed his worst Bela Lugosi Dracula
accent: “Yoooou dooo not vant to-fuck, vit-me!”

“Do you have something you wish to
convey?”

“Do
you
?”

“Your point?”

“No—
yours
. Is this story going
someplace? Well then,
shit
, get to it. Goddamn…”

“Can I hit him?” Wells hefted the scourge.
“Just once?”

Rainford ignored Wells, holding his gaze on
Boone until the man on the rack had quieted down. The Dark Lord
resumed his tale. “But where was I?”

“A girl.”

“Ah yes, a girl…”

I fed in the dark hours, but my appetite was
never such that I needed to feed every night. Indeed, many evenings
I wandered Petersburg, content to take in the city and its sights,
admiring its canals and bridges, its museums and palaces. The
Anichkov
most
—the bridge nearest my home—was
decorated with bronze sculptures of men taming wild horses. The
Trinity Bridge connecting Petrogradskaya to the rest of the city
had not yet been built. One evening I had wandered quite far afield
westward, to the Lion Bridge, so-called owing to its two pair of
cast iron lions, the bridge’s cables anchored in their mouths.

BOOK: I Kill Monsters: The Revenants (Book 2)
2.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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