Home » Archives » January 2004 » David Parker's Journal: 4

01/02/2004: "David Parker's Journal: 4"

Music: A Little Night Music
Mood: In a trance

Tatiana…

The shock of seeing her in the corner of the darkened room staggered me backwards, when what I really wanted to do was run toward her and fling my arms around her.

It is said that upon dying the entirety of your life flashes past your eyes. If that is true, seeing my beloved after so many years was like death for me – sweet death. The angels Memory and Desire drove their fingers deep into my skull and heart and tore them apart, dragging out of the past a host of fractured remembrances.

Tatiana was dressed in the fashion of her time, which is to say the early 1900s. Her dress was black silk that shimmered in the febrile light spilling in through the window from the streetlamp. The skirt reached to the floor; the sleeves were long, the collar high, with one of those pinched-at-the-waste, vest-like tops associated with the Victorian era.

Tatiana was a child of another time. Still, the difference between us in years was insignificant compared to the even greater disparities in our background, experiences, and outlook on the world. She had been born a princess royal in Russia, the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas and Emperor Alexandra. While still a very young woman, Grand Duchess Tatiana had been give the Change by the family’s controversial advisor, Rasputin.

Another name from my past – Gregory Rasputin. Popular history would have us believe he was dangerous and subversive, a manipulative leech who attached himself to the weak-minded emperor’s household. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The so-called “mad monk” was in fact a vampire, and a very good one, which explained Rasputin’s famous powers of mesmerism.

History is written by the victorious. What they tell us about their enemies is what they want us to hear and nothing more. Rasputin was no more evil than you (I hope) nor I. The Illuminati summoned him from his hermitage on the steppes and commanded him to try to save the Russian royal family. Of course, much more than a single mortal family was at risk for the Illuminati, famous for their detachment, to have become involved. The wise men in the brotherhood rightly understood that Russia was on the brink of revolution, and that if history unraveled, there would be much blood and chaos, as there is whenever human affairs careen out of control.

Rasputin failed. Even after turning Tatiana Romanov, the most gifted of the Czar’s children, into a Vampiri protégé, he failed.

The Bolsheviks took over the country. The royal family was butchered. (Tatiana and Rasputin survived their supposed murders, but that is another story.) And after the revolution, repression, starvation, a second World War, millions of innocents slaughtered in battle or shipped of to die in the gulags; the world stood with the razor’s edge of nuclear annihilation held to its throat until the Soviet empire collapsed beneath the weight of its own mediocrity.

The fullness of time eventually brought Tatiana, a ballerina in a new life, to Chicago, the town where I was born.

At the time, I was an unhappy young lawyer with an unfaithful wife and an unhealthy affection for cocaine. How perfectly I remember the first time I saw her, a beautiful ballerina dancing alone at night beside a fountain on Lake Shore Drive. Later, as I was about to end my wretched life by hurling myself over a balcony at a concert, she turned around and looked at me, stopping me, saving me.

We fell in love.

The only think keeping me from being blissfully happy was the veil of mystery with which Tatiana surrounded herself. She was obsessive about privacy. It was obvious she had a secret – more than one, I was to discover. When I finally managed to work out who she was, and what she was, I begged her to give me the Change so that we might be together forever.

Against her better judgment, she did.

As it turns out, Tatiana knew better than I. I had trouble learning to control the peculiar urges that came with being a vampire, and an even harder time learning to keep my lusts and appetites in check.

In the end, the differences between us proved to be too much. Tatiana left me. I went into a downward spiral too depressing – and bloody – to detail here. I don’t know how many I killed for the Hunger and to obtain the powerful intoxication we vampires get from blood. I finally had what alcoholics call “a moment of clarity” and regained some measure of self-control … and self-respect. But by then, the Illuminati had cast me out. I was lucky they hadn’t sent someone to put an end to me. If I ever doubted the existence of grace, the fact that the Vampiri did not destroy me proved me wrong.

Tatiana …

I loved her as much as I ever had – which is to say more than life, more even than music, which without Tatiana was my only reason for being.

Now she had come to me, in the city of my self-imposed exile beside the Mississippi River. It was an improbable place for us to be reunited – a yoga school on the third floor of an 1850s Irish social hall, which at some time in its past had been the haunt of Freemasons, those fellow-travelers of the Illuminati.

“I’ve missed you, my beloved,” I said, emotion making my voice shake. I took a step forward, my hands outstretched.

“Stop!”

The sharpness in her voice stung me.

“Alright,” I said, feeling the hope drain out of me. “I supposed I can’t blame you.”

She looked back at me and said nothing.

“Why have you come?”

A green glow illuminated Tatiana’s face from below, as if someone had turned on colored footlights before a darkened stage. Two jets of emerald-colored flames materialized out of the air and began to race around her feet.

I felt a flash of panic. A fire in an old building with only one way out is a frightening prospect, even to a vampire. I’d only just seen the fire-damaged antique store next door.

Tatiana did not take her eyes off me as the flames described a circle around her, leaving her exactly in the middle. Vectors shot across the circle at angles and sketched in a five-pointed star – the classic geometry of pagan sorcery, a pentagram. The fire did not burn the hardwood floor, but hovered an inch above the surface. It was only than that I realized that Tatiana’s feet did not touch the oak floorboards, either.

I have seen many strange things as a vampire, but nothing to compare to Tatiana surrounded by a pentagram of green fire. Vampires are only supernatural creatures in the minds of those who don’t understand there is causality behind us, the same as there is with everything in the universe, and laws governing our behavior.

Perhaps I was dreaming. I bit the inside of my bottom lip and tasted blood. This was no dream.

A low hum grew louder in the room, like an electric transformer about to short circuit, but it was nothing that simple. The audible flow of energy rose and fell as it coursed through its cycles, but it was not the sort of energy that people could trap within copper lines strung between utility poles. The Masonic symbols long painted over in the ceiling, walls and floor began glow with the same weird emerald green light of the flames in the pentagram Tatiana floated above.

“What is going on?”

Tatiana ignored the question. Her hands were at her head, fingers busy. She lowered a veil over her face, a formal, ritualistic gesture.

“You have been shunned by the Illuminati, Dah-veed Parker.”

“That’s not news. Have you come to destroy me?”

She stared back at me.

“What is all this …” I gestured with my arm at the room around me. “… melodrama? We are creatures of reason and art -- at least when we're sane. That is what you, Rasputin and Mozart taught me. A display like this might impress a mortal, but I am a vampire, like you, Tatiana. I know there is no magic in the world beyond the quiet magic of life."

I could see her smile beneath her veil, a smile that gave no comfort.

“Do not show disrespect, David. You never progressed beyond the first degree of initiation in the Illuminati. You have no conception of the mysteries and secrets that exist beyond your understanding.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“For tonight, there is only one thing you need to know, Dah-veed.”

“The only thing I want to know is how I can get back with you, Tatiana.”

“The entity that burned down the antique store…”

I waited. I had no idea what she was talking about.

“It picked the wrong store,” she said after a pause.

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

I must have blinked in the course of asking the question, and in the fraction of a second it took to close and open my eyes, Tatiana was gone and with her the rest of it – the levitating pentagram of green fire, the bizarre energy hum, the ghosts of Masonic symbols glowing weirdly from beneath many layers of paint.

My first inclination was to think I’d hallucinated the entire incident. I was going mad, dangerously mad, again.

But then I heard the Blood whispering to me, and I knew.

Tatiana had been there. She’d come for a reason, and it had to be important or she wouldn’t have violated the Illuminati’s shunning of me.

I thought of the pentagram of green fire and shivered.

If I had any hope of being reunited with Tatiana, I needed to act on the visitation, although I had not the slightest idea what any of it meant.

I looked around in the darkness. There were no answers for me there, but only the night.