Vigil (31 page)

Chapter Sixty-Nine

1916

The strange thing was, that evening when I went to the tavern down the street from the house I had taken for my own, I knew the story before it was told to me.

             
Rasputin had been poisoned. When that hadn’t worked he had been stabbed, beaten, shot, and thrown in the river.

             
I felt my head swim and I stumbled as I rose from my table. The tavern was crowded and I bumped into a few people on my way to the door.

             
I wondered if this was what being drunk was like. I was bouncing off people as I walked, and when I eventually made it outside there was no one there to hold me up, I slid down a wall and landed with a thump on my side. My head was swimming with images. It was like the dream, only I was awake. I knew what was happening. I even knew the date this war would end.

             
I wondered if I was being touched by God. Perhaps this was the way a mystic felt. Was this what Rasputin had felt when he found me?

             
I pushed myself weakly to my feet. I could not stay out in the night any longer. Even through my daze I could feel the cold biting my nose, my fingers. All too soon things would start to drop off.

             
I walked back toward my house in a kind of fugue. I only partway saw the streets as I stumbled on. People laughed at me, thinking I was well into my cups, but I had only had one slow drink in the tavern and alcohol had no effect on me. It was not like this, I was sure. I was having hallucinations. I saw another war, yet to come. I saw tanks, like those that were being used in this war, but this time they were effective. I saw planes flying through the skies, but with just one set of wings. I saw planes dropping things from the air, and I knew they were bombs. The soldier’s armaments were different. They did not carry swords, but pistols and rifles, but the rifles were repeating rifles. There were people dropping from the sky, floating down on big ballooning sheets, and I knew the name for these people, and that the sheets were called parachutes.

             
All this I saw through hazy eyes, overlaying the city streets as I walked on, largely unaware of where I was going.

             
Through this fog I saw a land I knew was the future. For the first time since I had dreamed during my long sleep I knew that this was not an alien world, or a world of my imagination, but the future to come, a vision of things that would come to pass.

             
How did I know this? How does a man know to breath? It was plain and irrefutable. It was not a fantasy, but the future of this world to come. These were visions of things I would see and know. But how did I know?

             
My head swam and for a few moments I think I must have passed out. I woke with my nose blackening from the cold and my fingers frozen so solid that they could not move.

             
I made it back to my home without further incident but surer than I have ever been in my life that I had a purpose. I had seen the future. I would not be granted such a vision if it were not for a reason.

             
That night I became sure that there was a presence in the world greater than myself. Greater than the whole of society. An overriding force that governs things, whether it be the hand of fate or the hand of God.

             
For the first time in my life I knew where I was going.

             
I spent the night warming myself by a roaring fire in the hearth of the house that I had taken for my own.

             
In the morning I visited a few of my old haunts and tried to find out where Rasputin’s body was being buried. I could not afford to take chances.

             
I had to make sure he was dead. I had a future and I could not see his hand in it. For the first time I had something to work toward. There was a future I must see. I was sure I had to make it to that future for the world to work. That was the purpose of my vision. To know where I must go. I was drawn toward it.

             
That was what I thought, then. Now I realise that I wasn’t drawn toward it. It was drawing me. I was so assured of my importance I thought I had choices, but this thing that I call my life is too powerful to be under my own control. Fate does not trust me to make the right choices. Instead, it puts me where I must be.

             
Can you imagine how futile a life would be if you had that knowledge from birth? Would a man move at all, or just curl into a ball and cry with despair? That is why no one knows just how futile it all is, or else the world would not work and the grand design would fail. Should that fail the future becomes uncertain. For time to unfurl and soar in all its grandeur it needs to follow its path.

             
If the path breaks, the world ends. Time will not allow such a thing to come to pass. Time itself is a force, and its will to live is what drives the universe forward. It will not allow itself to be broken.

             
At least, that is what I believe. But I am just an immortal being. I do not presume to know the mind of the immutable; time.

             
Is time the heartbeat of a God, the life force of the universe?

             
I do not know. All I know is that it calls me on. I am its chronicler. I am the watcher of the seasons.

*

Chapter Seventy

Tsarskoye Selo

1916

The burial was a secret. I thought I could take his body unobserved. I needed to burn him. I needed to make sure.

              I was so caught up in the small things that I failed to see the big picture. Rasputin was of minimal importance.

             
The empress had him buried in the Royal graveyard, among her ancestors. I watched from the shade of a tree during the ceremony. That night I returned with a silver chain and a shovel.

             
I dug up the body. It was in remarkably good condition. There was no sign of the autopsy that had been carried out.

             
I took his body onto my shoulder after digging him up and I carried him from that place and out into the woods.

             
I knew from carrying him that he was not dead. My hearing is phenomenal, but I knew what I was waiting for. That slow beat, his heart, keeping him alive even though he was all but killed.

             
The beat came, as I knew it would. It was sustaining him though he would no doubt sleep for years and years and be a different man once he dragged himself from the earth.

             
But I could not risk it.

             
I carried him for a long time but I am tireless and he did not weigh that much.

             
I found a place within a stand of trees and laid him on the floor, the chain around his neck to bind him should he arise before I thought he should.

             
I built a pyre and put Rasputin in the centre where the flames would be hottest. The wood was frozen and would not burn easily, but someone brought some fuel.

             
We doused the wood and I set the match to the pyre.

             
The flames were slow to rise but soon there was an inferno.

             
Rasputin sat up in the fire and screamed. I knew he could not have the strength to break free. It was just an automatic response, his body fighting death even though his mind was absent.

             
I calmly took a revolver from my holster that I had taken to wearing and shot the devil through the skull. A portion of his skull and hair and brain flew from the back of his head and his body fell back into the fire.

             
I watched as the flames licked about his body. The night was chill so I stepped closer to the fire for the warmth.

             
Many things served to undo me throughout my life.

             
For a few years I thought it was the crackling of the flames, the smell of his roasting flesh and charring wood, the wind blowing the wrong way. It did not matter how it happened, but they were stealthy.

             
They were not as strong as me, but his children had the benefit and the fearlessness of youth. He had taught them well.

             
They snuck up behind me and cracked me over the head hard enough to knock me out. It wasn’t hard enough to cause any lasting damage, but it knocked me unconscious for long enough for them to bind me and take me from that place.

             
I was a captive once again.

             
Unlike my first captivity, in some ways benevolent and learning, under Radu, many hundreds of years ago, this was a ticket to a dark place, and in many ways the end of my innocence.

             
I came to realise just how sadistic a vampire could truly be.

             
I thought, sometimes I was a dark knight. In many ways, compared to Rasputin’s children, I was a saint.

             
Russia was in dread hands.

*

Chapter Seventy
-One

Unknown

I knew nothing. I was nothing. Afloat in a dark sea, abandoned by reason, I slept and was held under by a nightmare from which I could not wake.

             
I screamed in my sleep. Demonic hands cut away my flesh and sawed at my bones. First one hand, then the other, removed. Before my eyes, held open, even though I slept, I saw them wither, decomposing while I was forced to watch.

             
A man I knew as Gregori, although that man was long dead, spoke to me. His voice was rough and low and he whispered in my ear for what seemed like years. I did not question a dream that lasted for decades. I was a vampire. My cycles have ever been slower than those of a mortal. I did not question that this dream demon could speak to my sleeping mind.

             
A nightmare, I reminded myself, as they burned a hole through my abdomen with something that was not fire, but still the flesh smoked and I screamed and in that dream I could hear myself pleading, begging them to die. But I am a vampire. I was made complete again when a young girl was bled into my mouth while I lapped in idiot hunger. Even though I had no stomach (I remembered that, although my head seemed bound and I could not move to see) the blood took away the hunger, the pain subsided, until the next time.

             
I dimly felt a large saw, and thought to myself, someone is sawing through my torso, but I could not see that happen.

             
After came a torrent of blood, and a tingling that grew from my stomach to my hips, spread to thighs and knees and ankles and toes. The tingling became a maddening itch but in my sleep I could not scratch it. You cannot move in a nightmare. You peddle your legs but can move no faster while fearsome creatures chase you. You run on in nightmares, but your waking body just scissors its legs and you cry out. You cannot hear yourself scream when you are asleep.

             
But I could hear myself scream.

             
Gregori did not return one day. It may have been a day. It may have been a week, a year, a decade.

             
Others came. Still I screamed. Gregori had been my most inventive tormentor. This was the dream before waking.

             
I was burned. My eyes were put out and for a time I dreamed in darkness, although I told my torturers I could still see, though it was more like smell and when my eyes grew back I was not surprised to see that the creatures that tormented me looked exactly how I had imagined.

             
I was fed sporadically. They knew the blood was necessary, because, after all, the demons that populated the strange and terrible landscape of my dream were like me. They were my children, once removed. A grandchild, I imagined. Then they came no more. Others came. They too slowed down. I noticed sores on their faces. They had lesions that wept pus and fingernails that were falling from their fingers. They were slowing, until, slowing completely, my visitors ceased to come.

             
When I awoke much of my body was new. I could feel that there was little that remained unscarred. My head was mine, largely. My spine, between my torso and my head. My chest, my heart, were mine. They knew that to take my heart would have killed me. To remove my head would have done the same.

             
I cried, alone in a dark room that had been the only view during my long dream, and my prison, and my hospital bed. I could smell flies and decomposing flesh and the other odours of a battlefield or a hospital.

             
I think I cried for perhaps a year. I did not know where I was. I could not see a way out. Now, awake, I understood that if I was not found I might be here in this dark room, on this stained and rusted bed stripped of all cloth for the rest of eternity. I understood now just how resilient my body was, the extent of the injuries that I could withstand.

             
I wished I had not. I heard loud crashes from overhead. They were explosions, louder that anything I had heard before. I heard chattering, popping sounds and I thought that this was the angry muttering that a rifle made, although for the sounds to be so close together it must have been a fusillade. It was the sound of repeating rifles, machine guns, once huge machines with many barrels now small enough for a man to carry.

             
To carry into war.

             
But I did not know then what I know now. But then, isn't that true of everyone?

*