The Big Reap

14.

I woke in throbbing darkness. A subtle lessening as I opened my eyes, black shifting to orange-black. The effort hurt like you would not fucking believe. Like my lids had weights attached, and not with fucking glue, either. Barbed hooks, more like. Plus, the left side of my face felt like I took a sideways header into a fry-o-lator. I raised my hands to touch it. Meant to raise just one, but it turns out they were bound together with a leather strap. Hard to tell how many knots there were in the dark. But what I can say is my attempts to untie it with my teeth resulted in one fewer knot, and no greater mobility. The rest of the knots — two or three or ten, for all I knew — were pulled too tight to make any headway.

When I flexed my legs to make sure they were still working, I noticed they were bound as well.

I prodded at my meat-suit’s cheek and temple, wincing as I did. The skin was cracked and blistered and stung like a motherfucker. Plus it smelled like burned hair and under-seasoned pork. The realization of the latter made me queasy.

Then again, maybe that was the fact the world was rocking.

I closed my eyes, drank deep of the cool, subterranean air. Took stock of my situation.

It wasn’t the world that was rocking, I realized, just the boat.

I was lying face-up in the rowboat. The goddamn motherfucking no-good bitch-ass rowboat.

And as annoying as I found that fact, Yefi seemed to think it was hilarious. I could hear his laughter echoing off the walls and ceiling of the cavern, the sound my only indication said walls and ceiling were out there, for they were lost in the deep shadows of the flickering orange-black all around.

Guess my face failed to snuff out Yefi’s torch. Yefi’d better hope my bare, bound hands had as bad of luck when I wrapped them around his neck.

Or should I call him Grigori?

I sat up. Heavy-headed. Awkward. Not gonna lie, with my hands tied together, and a mental fog I’m guessing was borne of a concussion, it took a couple tries. And once I finally succeeded, the damn boat rocked so hard I thought I’d puke or fall out or both.

By force of will or maybe just dumb luck, I didn’t do any combination thereof. I wondered if maybe that meant my luck was on the mend. The very notion made me laugh. Laughing made my head hurt so bad, I damn near passed out. That sounded more like my kinda luck.

Now that I was sitting up, I realized I was bobbing in the center of the underground lake, water dark and still as glass all around. Yefi’s torch was a pinprick of orange against the black, its glow scarcely reaching me, but illuminating him well enough to see. At his feet, I saw a pair of oars, no doubt taken from this very boat. Looked like if I was getting out of here, I was gonna hafta swim.

“You’ve an odd sense of humor, Frank,” called Yefi. “I understand why I am laughing — I have bettered my opponent, and played him for the fool. You, on the other hand, don’t seem to have much cause.”

“Sam,” I called back. The volume of my own voice hurt my ears.

“Excuse me?”

“My name ain’t Frank, it’s Sam. Figured you oughta know.”

“I confess, I fail to see why that’s important at this juncture in our relationship.”

“Seems to me a fella oughta know the name of the guy who’s gonna end him.”

Not gonna lie, I said that partly cause it sounded badass. Also a little cause I meant it. But mostly I said it because I had to keep that fucker talking while I worked at the knot that tied my feet together.

“Really? Then by all means, do call me Grigori. Tell me, Sam, how do you propose you’re going to — as you so charmingly put it — end me? There are a few hundred tons of stone and earth between you and the nearest viable vessel, which might make locating it a bit difficult. And at present, you’re lying bound and adrift atop an underwater lake, while here I am, lounging comfortably on dry land.”

“For now.”

“Now is all that matters,” he replied airily. “Now is all I need.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come now, Sam. You don’t really think this was my master plan, did you? To leave you tied up in this place forever? Of course it’s not. I’ve had other plans in motion for quite some time, plans which will soon come to fruition. The fact is, I never expected you to find this little village of mine; its protections are not insubstantial. Your arrival forced me to improvise. To neutralize you for a time while my siblings held up their end of our bargain.”

“You mean Drustanus, Yseult, and Ricou.”

“How adorable,” he replied. “You’re using their names to demonstrate to me you’ve done your homework. Of course, if your homework was worth a damn, you’d know Ricou hasn’t been in any state to make or keep bargains for quite some time.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning my dear brother is, to put it mildly, no longer home. He was the first of my kind to be driven mad by the cost of what we’d done; the lives lost to the Great Flood, and by the cold, dark reality of our eternal hunger. You see, my kind has a constant need for living sustenance. Blood, brain, or flesh will do, to varying degrees. Its life-force invigorates us and fuels our magicks, as well as our transformations. I’m sure you’ve noted in your hunting — for I hear you’ve been a busy boy indeed — that we Brethren have, shall we say, drifted from the norm of human appearance.”

I thought back to the freaky, patchwork hand-beast that was Magnusson; the spindly stick-bug beneath the desert floor, known as Jain; the half-glimpsed wolf-creatures of the Colorado wilds. “Yeah,” I said. “You could say I spotted that particular trend.”

“Do you know why?”

I sighed theatrically, as if annoyed to be playing along with his Bond-villain monologuing. In truth, I was through two knots on the leather straps around my feet, and my tweezing fingernails — cracked and bleeding — had just found purchase on a vulnerable loop of the third and last. “I suspect you’re gonna tell me,” I said.

“In fact I am. My old friend Charles-Louis Montesquieu once observed that if triangles had a God, they would give him three sides. A lovely sentiment, don’t you think?”

“Sure,” I said. “Pure poetry. The hell’s it got to do with your little pack of weirdoes?”

“Everything, my poor, dear Samuel. Everything.” His words had turned now. Where once was maniacal good cheer, now there was only naked menace. “You see, on that fateful day we Nine gathered to cast off our bonds of slavery to hell, we accomplished more than we dared imagine. We did not simply free ourselves, we made ourselves anew. We began that day as Collectors. We ended it as newborn Gods. No longer were we shackled by the confines of our Maker’s design. We were free to become something better. Something stronger. Something of our own design.”

“Must be why you’re all so pretty,” I said.

He shook his head. “I confess, not all of my siblings were strong enough to handle the gift that they’d been given. To control it, as I can. For with me, as with demonkind, you see only what I wish you to.” His form rippled, shifted, flickering for a moment past a twisted mass of naked flame-scarred flesh before settling once more. Now he appeared a gaunt, berobed man with high cheekbones, deep-set eyes, long black hair pulled back from his face, and a long scraggly beard to match. Another flicker past the nightmare beast beneath, and he was suddenly a squat, towheaded child, no more than ten years old. Yet another, and my own meat-suit stared back at me. And after one last, brief glimpse of monster, the man before me was young, handsome Yefi once more.

“Neat trick,” I said.

“And handy, too,” he replied, ignoring my biting tone. “Although it does have its limitations. Unlike demonkind, my power lies not in altering my own appearance, merely your perception of it. For that reason, reflective surfaces are to be avoided, for they reveal to the onlooker my true visage. And the ability to project the appearance of one’s choosing requires discipline, commitment — two traits some of my siblings seem to lack. In fact, their varied countenances have proved in many ways a window to their souls. Simon, who feared senescence, wound up a withered, aged husk of a man. Jain, Lukas, and Apollonia feared giving into their hunger, and became little more than animals. All but Drustanus and Yseult — and, one hopes, Thomed, though no one’s seen him in so long, it’s hard to say — ended up a slave to their urges, and those urges in turn shaped the beings they’ve become, Ricou most of all. As another great thinker once chastened, ‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’”

“Huh,” I said. “Wouldn’t have pegged you for a Vonnegut fan.”

“One benefit of eternal life is that it affords one no small amount of reading time,” Grigori replied. “It’s a shame your meddling in Brethren affairs will rob you of the pleasure of finding out.”

“I didn’t meddle in your goddamn affairs,” I said, “you all meddled in mine. I was minding my own fucking business when your brother Simon kidnapped me and tried to shelve my ass by drugging my meat-suit into oblivion.”

“Ah, Simon, you damned fool,” he said, voice tinged with wistful exasperation. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved the man, but we never did see eye-to-eye. He was infatuated with modernity, whereas I prefer the old ways: magic, not medicine; influence, not outright power. Hell, I haven’t even seen Simon since that glorious summer we spent together in Geneva, feeding, dancing, laughing. 1816, this was, before the world caught wind of our kind. It was Simon’s idea to burnish our legend by filling our fellow revelers’ heads with such wild dreams of our exploits. I rather hoped one of the poets with whom we whiled away our days — Byron or Shelley — would write of me, but instead my tale was told by that damn-fool doctor Polidori. Simon, for what it’s worth, fared better. Who knew Percy’s wife would prove such a writer? And anyways, that Stoker fellow embellished upon the idiot doctor’s mangled version of my story quite nicely some years hence. Still, I’ve always regretted giving in to Simon’s insistence that our stories should be told. It’s proved more trouble than it was worth, and more embarrassment, as well. If you ask me, the modern iteration of my own myth is downright shameful. I mean, look at me. Do I appear as though I sparkle to you?”

“Only your personality,” I replied.

“Funny,” he said. “But really, the thought I’d go all moony over some mopey teenager, when to me humans are nothing more than cattle to be slaughtered. For years now, I’ve suspected Simon of inciting that preposterous tale of vampiric emasculation just to goad me. It would be just like him.”

“Yeah, that guy was a total douche,” I said.

“You’d be wise to watch your tongue, Collector. Simon was still my brother, and I loved him as such. His death was devastating to me. I mourned his passing for weeks after I heard the news. I merely told you what I did so that you’d understand I’m not surprised to hear he brought this down upon us all. And to hear that he intended to drug you to induce a coma is the icing on the disappointment cake. I haven’t the faintest idea why he doggedly insisted on solving all of life’s problems with science when he had magic at his disposal. It’s like trying to tie a bow with one’s feet.”

“Yeah, the fact he tried to dope me up instead of abracadabra-ing my ass was the source of my objection, too.”

“So now what?” he asked. “My dear brother tries to shelve you, and now you’re hellbent on revenge? Because I assure you, whatever else my other siblings have done, they’ve had no quarrel with you — not until you gave them cause. You have no one to blame for your current predicament but yourself.”

“This ain’t a revenge trip for me, pal — it’s an assignment. Once the truce between heaven and hell crumbled, you and your kind were no longer protected. And when they found out thanks to your brother’s botched attempt to shelve me you could be killed, they decided it was open season on the Brethren. Hence the raid at your Riviera place.”

Grigori smiled. “And how very well that went for hell. I would have thought that my message of displeasure at having been targeted would have been well and truly understood. After all these centuries, to target me and my kind now seems arbitrary and ridiculous, and as I demonstrated, foolhardy at best. Still, it’s a shame I had to give up the house in Nice; it had such stunning views. And believe me when I tell you, Frenchwomen are delicious. One assumes it’s all the wine and clement weather.”

“Bummer.”

“You mock.”

“Just seems kinda bourgeois for a guy with his own damn castle — his own damn town — to bitch about how hard he’s got it.”

“And it seems a tad presumptuous for one’s captive to taunt one’s captor,” he said, “but I digress. The fact is, Nevazut has long been my option of last resort, for my existence here is both lonely and tenuous. Yes, the townspeople hold their master on the hill in fearful reverence, but he is a folktale to them, nothing more — glimpsed only in dreams, or in the case of those whose blood I taste, in the thrall of my most powerful obfuscatory enchantments. To allow them any greater access to my physical person would only serve to deflate the myth, and provide a target for any potential rebellion should human nature’s more violent tendencies one day insist on asserting themselves. Which is why I only ever pass among them in the guise of Yefi, a man of God they both tolerate and largely ignore. For their master on the hill is the only God they know or care to.”

“If that’s true — if these people are so thoroughly in the tank for you — then why worry about rebellion?”

“Because humankind is locked in an unending cycle of subservience and rebellion. Given long enough, even the happiest of subjects will rebel eventually. They always do. They did at my castle in Wallachia some centuries ago, when I lived as Wladislaus Dragwlya — Vlad Dracula, to your vulgar American ears. Such glorious times, with heads on pikes and blood running freely betwixt the courtyard paving stones, at least until they came for me, and I was forced to flee into the forest with naught but the armor on my back. It was then I decided a more subtle form of influence might prove expedient. And that policy proved wise indeed, at least until St Petersburg, 1916, when it was decided I had perhaps more influence over Tsar Nicholas — and his lovely, not to mention delicious, wife Alexandra — than any peasant should. I was living then under my given name once more, but in keeping with my newfound dedication to anonymity, I’d adopted the common Russian surname of Rasputin. You’re no doubt aware how spectacularly I failed at maintaining the low profile I so desired. Those so-called nobles stabbed and poisoned and shot and beat and drowned me into unconsciousness. I woke to the crackling sounds of my own funeral pyre lighting. I understand I frightened no shortage of onlookers when I sat up amidst the flames, which thankfully soon engulfed me so thoroughly I was able to escape unnoticed as they scattered.”

“Why tell me all this?” I asked to cover the sudden knock of my left leg against the boat’s side as I finally released it from its leather binding. The boat rocked precariously for a moment and then settled. “Why not just kill me or leave me or whatever it is you plan to do?”

“Because I’m lonely,” he answered. “Because I’m tired of all this fighting. Because I think that if you could only understand where I’m coming from, you’d realize we two have more similarities than differences.” He paused and smiled. “That is the sort of thing you wish to hear, is it not? Alas, I fear the truth’s far more mundane.”

“Oh, yeah? What is it, then?”

“I was simply killing time until my brother woke. You see, it won’t do to have you following me as I leave this place for what may well prove the last time. And while I spared no expense to capture and transport my poor, feral brother Ricou here from the dank South American lagoon he called home in an attempt to keep him from your grasp, I find I now have no better method for neutralizing you than to offer you up to him, much as I’ve offered up so many of the village’s children these past few weeks. You see, Ricou, though no longer human, is not quite animal, either. He seems to take sadistic pleasure in playing with his food. Apparently, fear is quite the seasoning. My guess is he’ll keep you alive for days before he finally kills you and evicts you from your current vessel. One poor girl lasted the better part of two weeks, although she was quite mad by the time he finally ripped her in two. Once he’s finished with you, Dru and Izzie and I shall no doubt be prepared to take you on in earnest as we’d initially planned. So you see, it wouldn’t do to let you escape before he had his crack at you. And yes, I know you must have slipped your bonds by now, so I elected to keep you company until he rose from his slumber. Unless my ears deceive me, he now has.”

I listened hard, and heard a strange noise in the darkness, somewhere between a click and a low growl. Then a rasp like fine grain sandpaper on a two-by-four, or scales sliding across cold rock. Then a splash, as whatever we’d roused from slumber in the darkness dove into the water and disappeared beneath its surface. My stomach dropped. My mouth went dry. Adrenaline prickled on my tongue, and my heartbeat began to speed.

“Until we meet again, Samuel,” he called, and then he tossed the torch into the water, where it extinguished with a hiss.

His footfalls echoed through the cavern as he retreated back toward the cemetery door. Minutes later, I heard the grind of stone on stone as it slid shut. I knew that even if I could get back there, there was no way I could open it on my own.

I mouthed a silent prayer, hoped to God that I’d get the Frank meat-suit out of here alive. That he wouldn’t wind up Ricou’s next meal. Thought to myself: This is why you don’t take living meat-suits, fuckball. One of ’em kicks, and it’s on your conscience forever.

But I didn’t upbraid myself for long.

I didn’t have the luxury.For in the darkness, beneath the surface of the water, Ricou approached.