Saturday 23 June 2012

Billy Came, Chapter 4

4.a, A Taste of Things to Come

…the Gibben axe spliced my wrist, nicking the skin and the vein beneath, which panic had set pulsing in great glugs.  What skill and instinct did Billy possess to command such strength and precision?  Was it honed, derived from centuries of practice?  Or were such accuracy and wits other essential parts of 'the gift'?  I was yet to comprehend, but that ignorance was soon to be satiated.

He strode over the little space between us, placed one spade-like hand on my shoulder, while the other retrieved the axe from the mess it had made of the wall in the 'ice bubble'.  He looked deep into my eyes as if trying to reach down to my very soul.

This was it: do or die.  His eyes gave me the choice: accept this new life or die here and now.  I've always had an aversion to death.  Especially my own.  So, all things considered, I nodded consent, then tried to close my mind off from whatever was going to happen next.


As when administering the Rite of Passage, Billy's eyes rolled upwards leaving just the blood-veined, opaque whites, until they shut completely.  He sank to his knees beside me, blocking out the view of the cavern beyond us, then suckered his mouth onto my wrist's weeping wound.  Did I imagine the previous exchange overwhelming?  It was nothing compared to this next encounter, which not only stole what little remained of my mortal soul, but also my consciousness, will to resist and the lingering remnants of humanity that hung about me like a shabby cloak.

Just before I passed out, I felt Billy spasm; then, a million of his memories gushed through my veins, invading my mind's dream-like state, brutally forcing many of my memories into the background to make way for his own.  These new horrors drove me to the edge of madness, even further than my own imaginings had taken me during those years I'd awaited, nay, craved this moment.

The next instant, those terrible memories were counteracted by visions of such breathtaking beauty that they dragged me back from the precipice, sent my soul soaring, ripping out of my body, beyond the ceiling and up, up, up above the clouds.  The world below glittered in its nakedness, its synthetic shenanigans stripped clean.  I.  Was.  Free!

But that freedom came with a price.  It's oft said that humans only use ten percent of their brains; I contend that, and with reason, and table the notion that it grows exponentially as we learn.  Within minutes, my mind reached full capacity, physically unable to accept or store any more information.  It felt like someone was blowing up a lead balloon in my skull, expanding, cracking my cranium, trying to escape.

My inner vision—that fabled third eye (which, I can now tell you, may have roots in legend, but is very, very real…and powerful!)—was scrambled.  I lost control of my limbs and extremities as my nervous system began spasming of its own volition, leaving me fitting on the crystal and granite floor.  The troughs and peaks of the visions that Billy had imparted, now part of my new memory, first plunged my psychosis deeper than the ocean's unexplored canyons, then, ignoring how G-force crushed my psyche, sored upwards, finding ecstasy on the very edge of the ionosphere.

Even subject to these extremes, cutting through the quagmire of my mind was an image of Billy fighting with himself.  Through our blood connection—his tiny fangs in my artery—I knew he was losing the battle: to drink me dry and suffer the consequences or do as he was bid, and deliver me fully changed to his master.  For what purpose the master wanted me, or even who he was, I was unsure.

Apparently, fear of his master was greater and won in the end.  But the instant he withdrew his fangs and broke our connection, I began to fade.  Oblivion beckoned; in my current confusion, that was an utter blessing and I welcomed the bottomless blackness.

As I was falling, caring not whether I lived nor died, the breath of a whisper comforted me.  It was the sobbing and sighing of my sister, singing her soft soliloquy in her isolation.  Whatever madness she had encountered, she had survived.  Urgency to survive ripped at every nerve that remained at my command.  How selfish was I, succumbing without a fight after what had occurred so recently in the cavern?

I had believed her part in this drama to be over, or wished it.  I'd hoped that she would be delivered home to her children, safe and sound before they awoke, never knowing the part their mommy had played in their uncle's demise.  If there was a God, I'd hoped that my sister wouldn't recall the events, either.  But her distant distress signal—which did seem to have travelled an age by the time it reached my faltering senses—burst that bubble of hope, and, simultaneously, my apathetic submittal to death.

I had to stay alive (or at least undead) to right the wrongness I'd wrought her, not just in the cavern, but the many during the olde life, too.  Being the 'kid in the middle' had, on occasion, made me resentful, petty and spiteful, even.  I sent my mind out there and grabbed onto whatever there was that would stop me drowning in lethargy and self-pity.  But like everything else, it was a little, too late.  As I succumbed to oblivion, still falling, not looking at all forward to the landing, when and wherever that would eventually happen, I cried my last ever tear.

4.b, The Point of No Return

I regained consciousness at twilight the following evening, June 22nd.  The memories stealthily crept back and, as at least half of those recollections were alien, hostile, even, I thought it all to have been an awful, if not spectacular, nightmare.

But my aching body, acute soreness in my arm where a welt like a hashtag stood proud on my wrist, said otherwise.  There were also the single feeler-bristles protruding from each canine, each the equivalent of a stylus on a record player.  And the brightness, the clarity of…of it all.  The incredible sharpness of edges, vividness of colour, notes and melodies in the cacophony that was life's new soundtrack, the smell of ancient dust and imminent birth.  But still, the sun.  Why?  How?

From a long way off, I heard a muffled commotion, the sounds growing clearer as a group approached.  Once again, Billy was there.  I turned, looked through the old dark wood gothic doorway.  Down the corridor, the group was approaching, half in shadow. One side of the corridor was lined with low balustrades, which opened up onto a huge reception beneath, but a reception to what, I didn't know. All was bathed in the half-light of day, laying the path for glorious night to come and steal in, to purify the world and hide mankind's misdemeanours against Mother Nature.

The two cohorts who'd been there at the cavern were dragging my brother, one hand each beneath his armpits, their other beneath each of his elbows.  His toecaps left meandering railway-lines in the egg-washed dust between the cohorts' perfunctory strides. Aside from the occasional convulsing, he was unconscious, motionless.

Was this another attempt by Billy to mess with my mind? Or had he also tried to bring my brother with us into our new nightbreed family?  Either way, it seemed that, for perhaps the first time in my life, my strength was mightier than that of my eldest sibling.  Even taking into account his drowsiness, my brother looked in dire health; his fate would be whatever Billy decided it would be.

Billy turned back to me, bade me lie back, accept this natural course of events.  Whatever those events turned out to be, it was my soul that Billy had courted; I, for a hitherto unknown reason, was the key link in this chain.  Was I then to assume that my siblings were expendable?  The sliver of humanity that remained in me hoped not.

Of a sudden, from some unknown quarter, a newsflash hit me: now was time to complete the third and final ingratiation into the Brotherhood of the Night.  Without a word, Billy rolled up his sleeve to just beneath his shoulder to expose the wound in his bicep from the previous evening, which was all but preternaturally healed.  He sighed, an ambiguous expulsion of breath and emotion, and reopened his wound with his knife.

Unsheathing the throwing axe within the flash of an eye, he flung back that powerful arm, his great coat flapping back- and outwards like leather stage curtains closing on the final act.  The axe's blade did its job on my wrist again, too fast even for my keener eyesight to follow.  To the naked eye, the new wound it scored was in exactly the same place as its predecessor earned in the crystal chamber the previous evening.  No dalliances, parlour tricks nor even indulging in pleasure accompanied the act, this time: he gave and he took, eternal life for my mortal soul, the oldest bargain in the world.

There was no going back, now.  I was, without doubt, made vampire, just as the sun set through the huge picture window that I could only see through the eyes of the cohorts, vainly holding up my brother in the elongating shadows…

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  2. Edited and republished 24th April, 2020

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