12.a, Going Deeper Underground
The march along the claustrophobic, candle-flickering corridor from my bedchamber to an as yet undisclosed destination seemed endless. The supernatural clamour came clambering at us in waves; it was never distinct, and often worklike, as if orders were being barked (and often met with reticent grumbles), but not all industrious.
You have to understand, vampire audio is something that humans can't conceive. Humans typically hear soundwaves up to 20,000 hertz. Dogs, on the other hand, hear up to 50,000 hertz; on paper, that's a 150% increase in noise. But that's like calling the Titanic iceberg incident 'a bit of a leak'.
We, all of us, can differentiate sounds by where they peak on the spectrum; each peak, we associate with a different event. A kettle boiling, the screech of brakes, the rumble of boots. Each noise is a complex composition of layers of waves, all peaking and appearing on the spectrum at their own resonance.
So when I tell you that vampires can hear up to a minimum of 60,000 hertz—some of the older ones 80,000, so I'm told—you get an idea of the complexity of sound we can hear. But the reality? Oh, you humans. You'll never get it.
The depth of nature all around you that you neither see nor hear; it's truly incredible. All you're conditioned to see is the trash humankind has built upon nature, the materialistic monstrosities that get in your way of seeing and hearing the beauty all around you.
The distractions, sounds of emails and text messages pinging, the flickering of notes from ATMs, alarm clocks to awaken you because you're so out of sync with nature, Earth's time, that you're more like aliens than an indigenous species. You walk around both deaf and blind to a world that could so easily send your souls soaring through the stratosphere!
And, yes, sorry. I was a typical human, just like you, and only a few days ago. My rant sounds hollow, hypocritical. But I make no apology.
Before my humanity leaves me completely, as I know it must, given the evidence I've seen so far amongst my new Brotherhood, I must relate how we hear so well so that you can at least aspire to hearing nature more precisely.
Like dogs, our motives for survival are simple. We rely on instinct, massively. There are those who rely on it wholly, retaining no human mental capacity whatsoever; these are amongst the hordes of rogue vampires, who we in the Brotherhood try to rein in as best we can. More of our methods in that regard, which are not pretty, will become evident to you shortly.
But for those of us vampires who do keep our wits (so far, so good for yours truly), a simplistic life frees up so much more of our brain's capacity, you would neither believe nor conceive. Two dimensional, some may call it. But it has its advantages.
We don't have to worry about the future, money, mortgages, viruses, how changes in the political arena will affect our sociological structure. That structure, which some less learned fellows may call facism, also helps to keep us free, to keep our minds open and our senses more acute than the best of the rest that nature has to offer on this planet.
It's this new power, the acute sense of hearing, upon which I was relying whilst walking down the dingy corridor in a castle whose location I could hardly hazard to guess. The voices I was hearing were not just from different social castes or levels of servitude, or even guests being waited upon. The chatter also contained echoes from different times, overlapping each other, all wrapped up in cacophonous whirlwinds that berated our advance.
Then a thought came at me from leftfield, blindsiding me for an instant. For all I knew, this was a trudge to the executioner's blade; the voices I heard were a gathering crowd drawn from across the ages to see the execution, a sacrifice, even!
But surely not! Hadn't Perveen already shown me too much loyalty, love, even, for me to truly believe that I was marching to my death? Yes, I believed-at that moment-that she had.
All I wanted was to get out of this dingy place; it felt more like walking along an underground railway tunnel than along a castle corridor. If we had suddenly come upon stalactites, it would have been no surprise. On second thoughts, walking along live tracks would have been preferable.
I'd begun to think the two goons Billy had left in charge of me had me walking on some unnatural treadmill, for all the progress we'd been making. But then the rectangle of light eventually began to grow perceptibly larger; at last we were making headway, this constant frogmarch at last had a purpose, a destination.
12. b, A Void
I could make out a great double doorway, but we were still a little too distant, and beyond the door frame far too bright, to discern anything concrete about what awaited on the other side.
With this part of the journey getting closer to closure, the tension at last began to slip from my neck, nape and shoulders like a heavy velvet cape slowly sliding away, slipping to the floor. I turned around to try to gauge how far we'd come and noticed, with something of a shock, that Billy's cohorts had disappeared; in their place trudged two hooded henchmen.
The new duo still paced directly at my heel, one at each shoulder. And the air of mutual mistrust remained, a tangible dislike that was evident despite the two new guards wearing hessian sacks over their heads with x's charcoaled onto the rough material where their eyes and mouths should be. Their menacing appearance was reinforced by the pikes they each carried across their bodies, at least 7 feet tall, ending with a vicious point and razor-sharp blade, both of which glinted in the fluxing candle flame.
Even with the hoods and only the barest suggestion of signal activity from their brain, or aura or soul, or whatever it is we vampires read, one of the duo seemed familiar. True, I'd seen similar hooded forms at my sister's staged execution, that test of nerve Billy had set as part of the trial to assess my worthiness to become Brotherhood. But these two weren't any from that very first night whence my belief in the world beyond the veil had been vindicated.
Having now had a little time to think for myself, I had wondered about that rite of passage. At first, I had believed it simply to be an initiation into the vampire world. However, events since landing 'behind the veil' had progressed so far so quickly that I was convinced my place here was not just as a monotonous monster, or simple slave of the night.
I had tried several times, all without success, to read Billy's cohorts' minds. What were my chances of accessing whatever passed as the consciousness of these two new guards? To set my mind at ease yet further, I had to try to invade their minds.
The first thing I saw was that these were not vampires. Not fully. But they were not human, either. Again, not wholly (and definitely not holy!). Around their faces hung a vortex as black as night beneath those hessian hoods, impenetrable from here. What I could ascertain—which, as far as I knew, was the extent of my fledgling power—was that even though their bodies were here, their heads were off and away in another dimension.
Perhaps whoever had decided that these two would accompany me had used this fascinating bit of sorcery as a safety precaution. From what I'd learned from Perveen, the other dimension in which I believed their heads to be was not for the faint-hearted. Was it worth me trying to peer into this void to try to access their thoughts? Every sense told me, No!
This time, I obeyed my senses. I had by no means tested myself sufficiently; if there be monsters there—like the squid-vampires, or worse—I would be in all sorts of trouble. Yes, it might only be my mind that I sent out there, but who was to say that there weren't entities existing in that vortex who couldn't cripple you with just a glimpse of your psyche, your soul?
I satisfied myself with the knowledge that their heads being so far away accounted for their clunky mannerisms, the lack of inherent agility that fully-fledged vampires possess and, much to my later regret, the way that one of them seemed off-kilter.
Somewhere in my subconscious, I also associated their presence with this abiding sense of universal tilt, a state that I'd still not been able to shake since recognising it in my boudoir. Now, it seemed that everything that had purveyed since seeing Billy for the first time was somehow acted out against a thin theatrical backdrop.
I had first thought of this world as masking the world I'd been used to. But now I was beginning to feel that the facade was hiding something a lot less substantial beyond the paper thin cloth of its fragile, or even virtual reality. My personal sense of not belonging was heightening, as if I, and the one semi-familiar 'hoodie' now accompanying me, were from a distant life and did not fit or belong here.
As soon as that thought fully registered, the floor beneath my feet dropped away. To be more specific, our feet had risen from the floor. Within the same second, I was tilted backwards, as if being placed on an invisible sack truck. In an instant, we were on the threshold of the light. The doorway had still been some way off, and now we were there, in the click of a finger.
There had been no sense of acceleration on our part, just that odd fulcrum-shifting moment. Was it coincidence, or had the very world sensed my doubting in its substance and sped to greet us with a party trick to convince me of its reality? Well, it worked.
12.c, Here Comes the Sun
Stepping into the light after such a long while in the dark, dismal corridor, I was momentarily blinded, so bright was the source's countenance. What I saw once my eyes readjusted drove all previous thoughts from my mind. I was utterly speechless, breath taken, dumbfounded, petrified.
We stood at the head of an impossibly long, steep spiralling staircase. The ballustrade over which I took in the view and its banisters were the colour and texture of polished new ivory. The stairs swirled down before us into a cloud-like mist before disappearing from view all together.
Sitting snug in the curve of the first full circle of the staircase, easily 50 feet in diameter, hung a blistering ball of light, whose surface swirled and eddied, making it seem alive. Looking down directly at it was impossible; its rays were so bright and full of movement and energy, they made your brain hurt at just the merest direct glimpse.
How the giant globe was suspended (and powered) must have been at the behest of some secret sorcery, of which I was as yet unaware; no ropes, nor chains, nor electrical cords appeared to be attached at any point. Yet there it hung, radiating light in all directions as far as the eye could see, up or down.
Looking up above also bent my mind. The cavernous ceiling was incomplete, a hole like a chimney spouting upwards at its centre. I say chimney; you could have probably driven a small submarine down it.
Rugged, grey- and charcoal-coloured rock formed the inner wall of the chimney, spiralling up and away where the ornate ceiling decoration, in cornflower blue to mimic a sky, simply stopped. Thousands and thousands of gemstones glittered from within the rock in which they were encased, and had probably been for millennia, as they peeped into the bristling rays of light.
But it was the chimney itself that was mind bending. It stretched so, so far up and away that I could not determine its end. But thanks to the globe below lighting up the gems in their seemingly infinite ascent, I could at least suppose that we were underground. Yet here we were, above an obvious light source at the head of a gargantuan set of stairs, looking down onto clouds. Everything was the wrong way up. No wonder I'd felt off kilter!
Whoever lived here, vampires, I assumed, had created their own sun, albeit an artificial one. Were they to bask in its rays, it might neither shrivel their skin like parchment, boil their borrowed blood into steam nor blaze their bones to ash as the real thing is wont to do.
After looking down, then up again one more time, a sense of unease began to finger walk up my spine, sending a metaphorical shiver through my mind. I conjected that one would not be able to discern that there was a chimney leading up from the ceiling at all, if looking up from the bottom of this staircase (wherever that was) from beneath this ethereal source of light. One may glimpse the gemstones' reflections and think them stars, or the sky on the semi-ceiling if one looked closely enough, perhaps. But the globe's sheer luminescence would prevent anyone beneath from seeing much beyond its aura of iridescence.
Although this was a magical sight to behold, it confirmed my conviction that all was not as it seemed. How this new piece of the puzzle fit into that overall sensation, I could not yet tell. But that sense of the skewiff was mounting, gnawing at my very core.
From behind, a nudge in the back got me going again. Down. We were going down through the clouds and into whatever world awaited there. It was thence that the voices originated; as the cloud began to thin, the true volume of that din began to permeate the air.
Looking over the rail out of absolute curiosity, the mists parted as if for my sole (soul?) benefit, offering a view of the source of the excitement that had bathed us in chattering chitter as we'd trudged the never-ending corridor. Approximately 150 feet below, maybe more or less, allowing for the bright light's distortion, a whole community was darting to and fro about what looked like an ancient Grecian courtyard.
The whole vista was suddenly bathed in light as the mists parted, the 'sun' creating and chasing shadows across the frantic scene before my eyes. The creatures beneath halted as one, pale faces and red eyes all looking up towards their 'sky' in unison, silence falling across the crowd.
It seemed they had been waiting for something to happen; I looked on aghast as every single being down there knelt on their one knee and thumped their left breast with the inside of their right fist, exactly as Billy had when he'd taken me to Perveen. Was my presence what they'd been awaiting?
But that was to Perveen, an established vampire with wondrous powers. Surely they were not saluting me? What had I done yet worthy of such obedience or adulation? Or maybe the pose had a double meaning, or was somehow different and I should be more concerned than I felt? Given the distance from me up here to them down there, it was hard to tell exactly.
What I knew for certain was that I would find nothing out waiting around up here. I turned around to the two hoodies for affirmation, both of whom hung at my shoulders like parrots waiting for permission to land on their perch.
They moved together as if drawn by an invisible string to block off any chance of me retreating back into the corridor. Not that I was even thinking it, but that did tell me one thing: whoever or whatever these two were, they hadn't got the clairvoyance gift and were unable to read my mind.
They poked the tip of their pikes into my breasts just to underline the point; I guessed that was my cue. I set off down the ivory staircase, heading even deeper underground. I was about to find out just how big the metropolis of Subterranea really was. Nothing could have prepared me for what I found, not even if I'd had the blueprint.
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Updated 20th May, 2020
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