Michael Romkey's Weblog

Friday, March 26th

David Parker's Journal: 15

The wine in my glass was the deep purple of arterial blood in darkness.

I picked up the glass and breathed in through my nose. The complex aroma carried undertones of blackberries, chocolate, pepper. Not as intoxicating a bouquet as blood, of course, but delicious nevertheless.

I brought the glass to my lips, tasting with my eyes half closed, smiling.

Simple pleasures delight me.

Wine…

The lights on the far shore, sparling against the cold black waters of the Mississippi…

The candle’s soft glow on the tablecloth, freshly ironed white linen smelling faintly of starch and bleach…

I could be very happy if it were possible live a life strictly of the senses, enveloped only in sights, sounds, tastes, feelings – like the cool sensation of wine against my lips, liquor as soft and seamless as silk sliding across bare flesh.

Sensation is everything for me. It is thought that weighs me down, dragging me down, along with the regrets for what has been, or now is, or might one day be.

I have always had a tendency to be melancholy. Many musicians and other artists are manic-depressives, in my experience, and I think the label fits me well. I alternate between animated inspiration and inactive despair. The fact that I am a vampire only exaggerates my natural proclivities. The highs are much higher, the lows abysmally deeper. Everything is bigger, sharper, more extreme for the artist, and doubly so for the artist who happens to be a vampire.

And yet I never wish I were dead. Not even when I am at my lowest, when the Black Dog of despair has its teeth deep in my soul.

There are so many small blessings in life – the glass of wine before me, the comfortable feel of the fountain pen in my hand as I write these words in my journal, knowing full well that there may not be many entrees after this. In truth, this could be the last. The danger is great. I can feel it out there in the night, hovering in the darkness the way the chill hangs over water.

I may be a vampire who does not age or become ill, but I can still be killed. I could catalog the common ways of killing an immortal. Beheading. Burning the body to ashes. Complete dismemberment. Cutting out the heart. I have heard of vampires dying by having their hearts cut out, but it requires great strength to hold the victim still long enough to accomplish this grim purpose. Mortals could never accomplish the job. There is only one thing that can kill a vampire, the vampire’s only natural enemy: other vampires.

It is late. The lounge in the restaurant on the levee where I am sitting alone is empty but for the bartender, who is busy at the other end of the room with a crossword puzzle.

The exceedingly strange letter from William Benton is open before me on the table. I know it by memory and have since I first read it. The message is brief, and like all vampires, I have total recall.

“My dear Mr. Parker,

“If you are reading this – if, indeed, you have been born once to your mother and again to the Blood – then my power to see into the future has not deserted me entirely. You do not know me and no doubt will come by this message by some means that you will find disturbing and difficult to understand. Do not let this keep you from devoting your fullest attention to the dire situation facing you.

“Those who consider themselves the aristocrats of our race hold extreme views that put you and others in grave danger. The Sight tells me you are the only living Vampiri one who can stop them from what they are planning. Though I doubt you will have any inking of the conspiracy that has been growing from since before even my time, unless it is stopped, it will wipe out the greater part of our race.

“But allow me to get straight to the matter at hand: You, and the others whose names are not on the Napoleon List, will perish unless you do something bold. And by ‘you’ I mean you personally, David Parker.

“I wish to heaven the Sight would tell me what, exactly, you should do to stop this great crime from occurring. Unfortunately, I am unable to tell you if you even have a prayer of succeeding. The odds against you are overwhelming. Alas, the forces allied against me prevent me from seeing more. My powers are greatly weakened. The enemy is all about me, and my time grows short.

“Remember this last thing, my young friend. Though the vampires whose names do not appear on the Napoleon List are marked for extermination, these vampires are not necessary your friends. By the same token, is would be equally unwise to assume that all of those whose names do appear on the Napoleon List are your enemies.

“I have no choice but to pass over the rest of this in silence. It is up to you to decide how best to proceed. I wish you the best of luck and Godspeed.

“Your obedient servant, William Benton”

I waved at the bartender, signaling for another glass of wine, then picked up the letter from 1925 and slipped it into my journal. If I had any idea what this “Napoleon List” was, I might have some idea about what to do or where to start. Whatever the list was, it was obvious that my name wasn’t on it, and my life was in danger because of it.

Posted by Michael on 03.26.04 @ 05:26 PM CST [link]

Friday, March 19th

David Parker's Journal: 14

I pushed the mausoleum door shut and stood there, too stunned to move.

I had expected the interior to be like other crypts I have visited: A mostly bare, chill room with perhaps a bench for mourners, an urn or two either empty or filled with dead flowers, the family coffins hidden in walled recesses fronted by engraved plaques telling the names of those whose bones rested within, along with the dates of birth and death, the alpha and omega of mortal existence.

The eccentric faux Egyptian exterior should have prepared me to expect something outlandish inside William Benton’s tomb, but even if it had stopped to think I never would have guessed the setting would be so bizarre.

Except for a small landing of perhaps three by four feet, the floor fell precipitously away to a reveal a subterranean rotunda roughly twenty-five feet deep and equally wide. The above-ground part of the mausoleum was the proverbial tip of the iceberg, a small visible sign giving no hint of the far greater mass lurking below. The walls and floor were built from blocks of the same unpolished white marble used for the exterior. The stairway down was stone and built to follow the curving wall in a counterclockwise direction, ultimately reaching the tomb’s lower level directly beneath the entry.

Suspended from the ceiling from three golden chains was a crystal prism as wide across as a basketball. The crystal possessed, either through the blessings of nature or ingenious engineering, the power to gather the dim light coming through the stained-glass windows on the three walls, magnifying it until the illumination was many times brighter than the original sources. The prism directed the light downward, refracting primary colors that came together about six feet from the bottom, focusing a clear, bright circle of light on the single coffin centered below on a bier ornately carved from gleaming black marble that appeared to rise up organically out of the earth.

William Benton’s silver coffin was carved with Masonic and Egyptian symbols and complex geometric decorations. I realized after a moment that part of what I had taken for rococo filigree box was in fact an elaborate mechanism for locking the casket shut. In the center of the coffin was inlaid what seemed to be a ceramic oval decorated with the interlocking “WB” initials of Benton’s name.

The unreality of the scene rooted me where I stood inside the door. It was as if I had found myself in the midst of dream at the precise moment when the innocuous and meaningless fantasy turns suddenly ominous and morphs into nightmare.

My natural inclination was to go back out the door, get in the Audi and drive away fast. But I had already come too far for that. The solution to problem Tatiana had set before me was, it seemed, at hand. And even if it wasn’t, the mystery had its hooks set in my soul too deep for me to pull away now.

The sound of shoe leather scraping against stone echoed through the manmade cave as I began my descent. I wondered how Benton had built the strange tomb. Had he had the lower level excavated, then built the more-typical crypt over the top as an entry chamber? Or had he built the top structure first, and then ordered his workers to dig deep into the earth once the work would be hidden from curious eyes?

I found myself wishing I had known Benton, who must have been as eccentric as he was brilliant. The Roaring ’20s industrialist reminded me of da Vinci, with the strange mingling of art, engineering and the esoteric in his life. But then Leonardo was a vampire, while Benton had been an ordinary mortal…

I stood looking down at the coffin. The mechanism locking it tight looked ingenious. You couldn’t get in with a pry bar and hammer. I doubted anything short of cutting the metal casket open with a blowtorch could reveal its secrets.

Musing on the problem, I lightly ran my fingers across the surface, as if to confirm the evidence of my eyes and be certain that I was not back in my house, in a feverish sleep after drinking my fill of blood.

A soft click sounded somewhere within coffin beneath my fingertips. A scarab beetle cast into the metal surface filled from within with a ruby-colored glow – the same weird phenomenon I'd seen in the bronze door above that had signaled me to enter the mausoleum. I touched it without thinking, feeling the warmth of whatever strange energy throbbed within the metal. There was another click, this time louder, as an invisible mechanism drew the scarab downward. A prolonged series of metallic snaps and clicks followed as I backed slowly away.

The coffin was unlocking itself.

There was a rush of air as the lid began to open, equalizing the pressure after being sealed for three-quarters of a century. I half expected to see a skeletal arm pushing the lid up, but the device seemed to be operating of its own mechanical accord. The dry smell of roses turned to dust rose filled the air.

It took a concerted act of will to make myself move forward and peer down into the coffin. I have seen many grim sights, but I was far from sanguine about the prospect of viewing William Benton’s corpse – or what remained of it – after eighty years of rotting in an air-tight crypt.

The coffin was empty.

“What the hell is happening?” I said out loud, the words echoing back to me, sounding frightened and far away. Was I losing my mind – or was I merely the victim of others who had already gone insane?

There was an ivory-colored envelope propped against the satin pillow within the casket where, it seemed, no one had been buried in 1925. The enclosure was shut with red sealing wax stamped with the familiar “WB” that must have also graced Benton’s signet ring.

I picked up the envelope. The paper felt dry and brittle with age. I turned it over to read the writing on its face. The return address said in elegant blue ink cursive, “W. Benton, 1925.”

The letter had been placed in the casket and locked away in the tomb years a decade before my father was born.

In the center of the envelop, in slightly larger lettering, was the simple address: “To David Parker, Esq.”
Posted by Michael on 03.19.04 @ 03:04 PM CST [link]

Friday, March 12th

David Parker's Journal: 13

It was my kind of cemetery.

Graveyards are like cities: each one has its on character, its own – I’m tempted to use the word “charm,” which it seems inappropriate for a place where the dead are laid to rest, yet there is some ill-defined thing about cemeteries that imbues them with sad charm.

My grandparents are buried in a suburban utterly devoid of character. There are no tombstones, only flat bronze nameplates flush with the ground that make it easier – and cheaper – to cut the grass. If you want to wait Judgment Day in the midst of what looks like a golf course, it’s a great place to be buried.

Oak Knoll Cemetery is the other sort of cemetery – a graveyard with character, with charm.

I entered through a pair of tall gateposts, past wrought-iron gates swung open during daylight hours and chained shut at night. The topography is hilly, with the tallest of the landscaped terraces rising high in the middle, like a fortress a strategic promontory. The hills are heavily wooded with oaks, as one would expect of a cemetery called Oak Knoll.

The trees, bare of leaves in winter, stretched out skeletal arms and fingers over a collection of tombstones that changed with the fashion of the time. From the entry drive, I looked across the memorials and easily saw the oldest sections, with 19th century tombstones of white stone bleached bone-white by more than a century of standing at attention beneath the sun and moon, season after season, year after year.

Oak Knoll had a good selection of mausoleums, fin de siecle masterpieces that could have been miniature Greek temples teleported from the Acropolis to the Midwest.

I drove slowly around the pond, where in n summer swans glided, the surface now choppy from the wind, the water reflecting only the dull gray light of an overcast sky. The rose garden was a litter of dead leaves and withered vegetation. The dead earth was awaiting its resurrection when the sun returned from the nether regions.

At the far side of the pond, following the drive’s arc around a stand of evergreens, I caught my first glimpse of the startling tomb I knew could only belong to William Benton.

Benton died in 1925, which would have been right for the mausoleum’s style – a bizarre cross between the art deco and ancient Egyptian that, against all odds, was a design that worked.

The walls angled inward as they went upward, like hands folded in prayer. The walls made appeared built of unpolished white marble that remained egg-shell white after more than seventy-five years of weather, though without the shiny, almost prissy gleam stone gets when buffed until the surface is no longer porous but smooth and glassy.

At first glace the tomb seemed appeared to be more plain that it really was, but as I pulled to a stop below the stairs leading to the entry, I noted the ornate cornices. The pillars framing the entry were inscribed with ankhs and other Egyptian symbols. The bronze door – turned a deep hue of green from years of wind and rain – led the eye toward a winged sun bracketed by two cobras carved above a simple one-word inscription, “Benton.” A smaller version of the same icon was repeated immediately above the door.

I sat with my foot on the brake, thinking about what an eccentric old Benton must have been. Where his contemporaries offended at the strange design, seeing how it clashed with the bland neo-Classicism of the other mausoleums in Oak Knoll Cemetery? Or did they respect Benton as a visionary industrialist who had his own unique style? Knowing people (the God-damned human race, as Twain bitterly called us – or should I say “them”?), my guess was the former.

The tomb was interesting, mainly due to my affinity for the offbeat and weird, but not especially helpful in my quest to figure out whatever message Tatiana had been trying to deliver when her psychic-projection directed me to the antique store and old book from Benton’s library, with its bookplate decorated with ornate Masonic images.

I took my foot off the brake. The Audi began to roll forward when something caught my eye. For a brief moment the bronze door began to shine. I looked over my shoulder, thinking the sun had broken through the clouds, but there was no opening in thick blanket of steel-colored overcast.

Glancing back at the door, I saw it again – a distinct glow that grew brighter and more translucent, until it was as if I were looking at an emerald held up to a candle.

I turned off the engine and was up the stairs in a shot. The strange light had disappeared, but it had already done its summoning work.

There was dirt and pine needles wedged against the bottom of the door. The crypt probably hadn’t been opened since Benton’s funeral in 1925. I put my hand on the metal handle, feeling the cold of a winter’s day against my bare flesh. I sensed the stiff gears within the lock mechanism, frozen not from the temperature but years of disuse.

Though there isn’t a shred of vandal in my soul, I had become tired of the game I’d been drawn into, against my will. Feeling the anger well up inside, I jammed the handle sharply downward without thinking. Much to my surprise the handle broke free, the entire mechanism failing.

I didn’t know my own strength – not a good thing in a vampire.

I pushed against the door.

It opened an inch or two and shuddered to a stop with the groaning scrape of metal against stone. Putting my shoulder in it, I forced the door open and steeped into the crypt, utterly surprised at what I found there.

Posted by Michael on 03.12.04 @ 04:15 PM CST [link]

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