Sunlight-Colored Roses

I felt so very weary. I had toiled for nearly a century in my work. I couldn’t believe that my face in the mirror was the same. Over the past decades, I felt I had acquired the weight of the world on my shoulders.

However, since I was a vampire, my face would never age.

In the laboratory bathroom, I capped my tube of red lipstick, returned it to my cosmetics bag, and closed the bag’s zipper. I gathered my purse and keys and coat to leave.

The time in which I had fought for my life against Rose felt like a story I had read about someone else. After Rose had converted me, it was as though frost lay between myself and the rest of the world. My forced conversion to this form had happened in winter. I remember that my days of captivity in that house felt endless.

I remember the distant sun streaming into the room, its light crawling across the floor while I suffered for days. I watched the shadows grow long, signalling the arrival of evening. Then, Rose and the other vampires would return and inflict unimaginable pain on me. The memory of their brutality, tearing my flesh and draining my blood, is my most vivid and enduring memory. As I grew closer to becoming immortal, the threshold of my endurance must have lengthened. The wounds from which my blood drained no longer seemed to threaten my life.

Now, I am stronger than any human. However, my skin is, if anything,  more sensitive than when I was human, even if its healing properties render me immune to almost any violence. As I left the laboratory, the winter’s chill bit into my skin.

In his poem “The Wasteland,” Eliot said that April is the cruelest month, stimulating us to the pain of life as it mixes “[d]ull roots with spring rain,” while winter comforts us “in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers.” Winter is the only season when the sun is far away enough from the earth that I can go out, at times, in daylight, without being burned. It is only at this time of the year that I may experience “[a] little life” from the muted source, without the painful effects of closer rays.

In the laboratory parking lot, I started the car and pulled out of the parking space. Feeling swamped by my thoughts, I did not turn on music. I was unsure what had resurrected painful memories from decades before on this morning. I felt trapped not only by the hurt that emanated from memory but also by a vivid longing that came from another place in me.

Where were the others who had been as I once was?

Before I became a vampire, I was not an ordinary human. I was constituted partially from a restricted genome, which meant that I was not a legally recognized human. Jude Thorn, the scientist who had brought me to life in the form I remember, if distantly, as my human form, raised me as a ward and, later, a junior scientist. At twenty, learning the truth about my existence, I was forced into hiding.

The other person with the restricted genome was Ophelia Cambriel, believed now to be dead. However, I am not sure that she could die. Even before I became a vampire, I had a resistance to environmental damage. My telomeres, the ends of my DNA strands, had not shortened over my years under Jude’s observation, which is a sign that I was not aging like a normal human. However, I was only twenty before I became a vampire, which changed my DNA, making it impossible to determine if my aging was truly delayed. I do not know why the genome with which I and Ophelia were constituted was illegal, but I suspect it was that of a nonhuman. The Cristalle state considers all human-like nonhumans, such as vampires, threatening. The state tolerates me, a vampire, because I am seeking in my research to eradicate vampirism.

ENDED HERE

But there was a third clone. The information had been leaked when the university network was hacked, and a copy of the original genome had been stolen to make a third artificial woman.

Ophelia was believed to be dead, but I was not sure that it was possible. Before I had become a vampire, I had shown signs in my telomerase levels of unnatural resistance to age and environmental damage. However, if Ophelia had been killed by governmental agents, as I nearly had been, then that natural means of preservation was irrelevant.

I wondered deeply about the first woman, the one from whom we had been cloned. Her name was Cambriel, and she had committed suicide, were the most outstanding facts. It was never completely out of my mind, when I considered myself, that I was cloned from someone who had killed herself.

Both Shelley and Jude had used host bodies for Cambriel’s genome and in both cases the host’s DNA had usurped Cambriel’s original phenotype. Ophelia and I looked more like sisters than twins. We did not even have the same hair color: hers was strawberry blonde, and mine was jet black.

Learning the truth about myself had been a long journey, and I had to release the notion of having my own original personality. After my abduction by Jade in my early twenties, when I had been held captive at Rose Mansion, the abandoned Southern home where I had been made a vampire, memories of Amelia’s life had begun to reawaken in me. I learned that Amelia had been a servant in Jade’s home, where she had uncovered clues that the twins’ nursemaid Rose was turning Jade and his older brother into vampires.

Amelia had fallen in love with Jade, but it was difficult to say if he loved her back. He flirted with her, and eventually attacked her in the forest, where she nearly died. Jude found her there and used her for his project, much in the same way Shelley had found a murdered trapeze dancer, Valentine, and used her body for the insertion of Cambriel’s genome.

But why Cambriel? She had been a young orphan trying to care for her younger brother Johnny, who was dying. When Shelley considered Johnny incurable he began to use him as a host for experimentation, unknown to Cambriel. In the meantime, he courted Cambriel and she began engaged to him. After Johnny died, and she saw the desecrated state of his body, she succumbed to grief and committed suicide.

It seemed that Shelley had tried to bring Cambriel back to life out of love or a desire for redemption. However, neither Ophelia nor I exhibited the characteristics of previously cloned humans. Others experienced an early onset of age-related health problems and a shortened life span. We were nearly invincible.

While I had regained the memories of Amelia and was cognizant of my previous ties with Jade and Jude, I still didn’t know much about Cambriel. Her memories in me were dormant, but I sensed that they exerted control over me subconsciously. Ophelia had held the memories of Cambriel and had been driven nearly mad by them. Her mind had been tortured and fragmented, her thoughts centered around despair and violence.

I looked over the frost-covered fields becoming lighter with dawn. Somewhere, perhaps even in the wilderness of Drommende, she might live, if she lived at all: the third clone. Within her might lay the key to immortality for the human race. My genome was now that of a vampire. I could not uncover the truth in my own DNA. But that for which Shelley and Jude yearned might be so close. If only I could find a way to continue their research.

I was restless. Today was just like all of the other days, but it was not. The mood in the laboratory was sluggish. Only seeing and interviewing patients, those afflicted by the blood disease of the vampire, lifted my spirits. They were people just like human people, searching for meaning and purpose in their existence.

The issue that concerned me most about our existence was how to handle the psychological effects of immortality. Our minds were still those of humans. Would we acquire the wisdom of ages, and become increasingly sage with years? Or would be become decentralized by our own traumas and unresolved issues?

The root fear of human beings was the fear of death, I believed. The survival mechanism had led to centuries of war, strife and hoarding which ultimately hurt all humans. Just now the earth was war-torn, the population massively reduced and scattered. If we could eliminate this fear, given the limited number of humans, what might the earth become? I envisioned spiritual beings, like the angels who were said to have come to earth thousands of years ago, imparting power and magick.

The mist that shrouded the gray fields behind the laboratory formed tears which slid down the windowpane. I realized I wanted to weep, but I had not wept since I had become a vampire.

I had followed Jade to that old mansion years ago, believing him to be my savior. I never guessed what he had planned for me. But beneath that legacy there lay a darker one whose real nature remained hidden to me. I could not even uncover Cambriel’s memories through dreams. My dreams were shallow and inane, and infrequent.

“Dr. Thorn.” My newest employee was standing in the door of my office. My gaze involuntarily slipped to the dark stain at the rug at her feet, where she had spilled dye on a previous visit to my office. She colored and looked abashed, but I averted my eyes from her quickly.

“There’s a new patient to see you: Robert Hesse.”

I nodded and collected pages for his file. When I entered the examination room he was seated by the window.

His hair was burnished even in the cold light, and I guessed in sunlight it would have looked the color of oak wood. When he turned to me I saw his eyes were a very deep sapphire color. His face was fair and stern, with Germanic features. But it was very familiar to me.

Suddenly I was rooted to the spot.

I knew he recognized me too.

“You were one of the four who turned me into a vampire.” I remembered being strapped to a narrow bed and my blood drained, my wrists slashed, atrocities only a half-human could endure and live, for seven days.

The people around me knew cold, impeccable Scarlet Thorn, daughter of Jude. I felt a sense of release in the way I was catapulted into the past, at the tender moment when I had been human, or at least close to it, for I had never been a true human. When I remembered myself that way I felt vulnerable to emotions, and even as I feared the rush I craved it.

“You took a great risk in coming here. I assume you have covered your tracks well. You and your kind who do not live under the laws of Cristalle are subject to punishment, if you are recovered.”

“I am not interested in your dogma.” He smiled slowly. “I came for you, Scarlet, to take you back to Rose Mansion. Don’t you remember the place?”

I had spent two lifetimes at Rose Mansion: my time of torment as a half-human, and my previous life as Amelia, the maidservant who had been unfortunate enough to fall in love with Jade. “I believe my fate lies elsewhere, Mr. Hesse.”

“You are just spinning your wheels here. You are not living your life.”

“I am a great threat to your little band, no doubt,” I replied. “I represent an opportunity for those afflicted with the vampire disease to live proper, blameless and healthful lives. It makes you look all the worse for what you do.”

He rose and studied me. As I met his gaze I felt faint. Those eyes, cold and pitiless, had stared into mine before, at my time of deepest vulnerability. “I am my own law,” he said.

I glanced away. Foolish to be so haunted, and so drawn to, the experience which had destroyed my existence as a half-human. “I think, deep in your heart, that you are ashamed of what you did to me.” Perhaps I had only imagined the glimpse of sorrow in his eyes when he beheld my suffering, bleeding form.

It was all a blur. Myself lying on a pallet dressed in gauze surrounded with a thousand winking candles while my blood drained. I had felt a curious sense of release and surrender as my life drained away. After those hours all that I could remember of life had been pain. The pain itself had broken me away from all that I had known before, to a place of feeling where the intellect was not operational.

Robert was right that I lived a lie. My intellectual pursuits after becoming vampire had felt false to me. I was constantly aware of the reality beneath the surface of all governmental laws and regulations, and much of it was evil. Yet what of the vampire’s actual nature was good?

He met my gaze and I saw it again, a tremulousness in his deep eyes. If he was honest about what he felt to himself, he would not share his regret with me. “You have changed,” he said, looking me over carefully.

I laughed drily. “I was never pretty,” I said. I would never be so. Even though vampires did not age physically, they could be said to be neither young nor old. I would always be so, physically.

“You do not know yourself,” he said. “You have great beauty.” He extended his hand to me. “Come with me.”

“No. You and your kind have abused me. As an immortal I must protect my mental solidarity.”

He laughed softly. “A scientist. A humanitarian. No, it isn’t you. None of it. I tell you again, you do not know yourself. The only way through is through us.”

I went for the door. He blocked me. Then his hands were around my throat, before I could cry out. He strangled me till I was unconscious.

“Where is Miss Thorn?”

Cassandra looked at the other assistant scientists, who were being idle. She had just finished cleaning all of the glassware and was blinking at them, belatedly realizing she had been the only one working all afternoon.

They merely shrugged.

Cassandra went back to Miss Thorn’s office and stood in the doorway. The window was open, and she could feel the wet breeze from the misty meadow. She shivered in the coldness and closed the window.

She had been hoping for the opportunity to speak to Miss Thorn today about her stepmother, Joelle, who was ill and living in one of the towers in abandoned Drommende. Even though she was not a vampire, Cassandra believed Miss Thorn could help her. Now that she had grown familiar with Miss Thorn’s wisdom and compassion she was certain that she could help.

She sighed deeply and went out onto the back steps of the laboratory to look at the misty fields. It was cold and dismal, but she wanted the fresh air. The sky was unusually bright, and she thought she saw a glimmer through the clouds.

As she continued watching, she saw a large white thing, like a bird, dart between the clouds with great pale wings. Then a scent came to her on the wind. Scarlet’s scent. She looked around the room, wondering why she had not sensed it before. Scarlet had been afraid.

She saw the file that contained the beginnings of Robert Hesse’s record. It had not been completed, and the file was just lying on the floor, abandoned.

I was in a coach trundling over rough road in the dark. I blinked but only a trace of light entered the coach. The only occupant was myself. I threw myself at the door, but it was locked. I was too weak to break the door or the windows, but I battered at them until I was exhausted.

Then I slept again.

When I woke I was in the middle of a forest. Robert opened the door of the coach and drew me out. I sagged weakly against him.

“You have not fed in a while,” he said.

“I feed from neither humans nor animals,” I retorted. “You will have to carry me unconscious to wherever it is you will go. I have no strength left.”

“That isn’t so,” he said. “Your instincts will take over, and you will take my blood. Don’t be so self-righteous. Your self-preservation instinct won’t let you die.”

He gathered me close, and when I smelled his flesh I scented his blood. It mingled with the scents of the damp leaves and earth and I found myself aroused sensually in a way I hadn’t known. He wanted me to take him; I could feel that, too, and in the darkness, when everything was hopeless, no, there really didn’t seem to be any point to my morals.

I fed from Robert, and it was the first time I had fed from a person in years, since I had gained mastery over myself and invented my own standard of living. I did not want to live according to this wild law, where I could kill another.

But Robert was strong. He lost nothing when I took his blood. As I sat in the carriage, staring dully into the darkness, I refused to acknowledge the other sensations I had felt: the way I felt alive for the first time. My eyes followed his form. I thought of him as a man, and myself as a woman. For years I had thought myself dead and dried. Now something deep within me was alive, though my exterior seemed to me so shriveled.

After the first night, I no longer resisted our passage, and Robert did not confine me anymore. I did not know where we were anyway. I did not know how to get back to Cristalle, at least. But the road was familiar, and I knew it would lead to Rose Mansion.

I plucked the blackberries that grew on the forest floor and sucked at them. It was an idle pleasure, but Robert’s blood had brought my senses to life, and I craved sensation now. At night I swam in the lake and threw myself backward in it. The tides and eddies swirled around me like angel wings. I exhaled and sank to the bottom of the lake till my limbs tangled in the weeds there.

In the moonlight I opened my eyes and saw my white arms and legs drifting in the murky gloom. Robert dragged me up. We broke the surface with a gasp and he held me close.

“Are you trying to kill yourself?” he asked.

I laughed, still drifting in a pre-thought realm. It was the realm I had known when I was becoming a vampire, when my mind was shielded with pain, but now there was no pain, only feeling without intellectual justifications.

“The lake. The angel.” Suddenly it came to me in an instant, and I stood there, clinging to him, staring into space.

“What do you mean?”

“I had a dream.” There was awe in my voice. “Last night I dreamed, truly, for the first time. A pale angel crashing into the water. Crashing hard and washing up on the shore, amidst the jagged rocks. A doctor found her.”

I clambered up onto the banks and looked out over the lake, which had grown still and peaceful again in the moonlight. “It’s coming to me.”

Then I looked back at him. “Don’t you care about remembering yourself?”

“But I am myself. What is there to remember?”

“You have no past? What of your life as a human?”

He drew me against him on the bank. “I have no desire to remember it. But I do not seek to run from who I am. I was a young boy when converted, a servant with a sunny disposition. There was another side of me I did not know. When I became a vampire, all of my nature was inverted. I became whole. I was never meant to be a human.”

Looking at him, I realized that he accepted all of this in a way I did not. I condemned the qualities of cruelty and violence that induced me to take another’s life blood. I had believed that my life was whole and full of promise before I became a vampire. But perhaps that wasn’t so. Maybe it only seemed so looking back. I was only twenty-three, and I didn’t see all the red tape and glass ceilings yet.

“And what of you? There is still a part of yourself you withhold from me. I can sense it.”

“There is a part of myself I don’t know, don’t remember. I want to remember. At the same time, I want to forget. I want to stay this way forever.”

We spent two more days in the forest. The air was warmer than it had been in the city, and mornings were balmy. I knew we were coming closer to the old mansion, which had lain on the outskirts of southern Drommende, one of the oldest dwellings remaining of the previous human era.

The night we returned to the mansion all the candles were lit. The rooms flickered with light, and the chandeliers glittered. The gilt frames of old portraits and the burnished railing gleamed in the candlelight. A sumptuous table was laid, and there was a vampire gathering of revelers crowding the mansion.

My senses swam. My heart beat wildly. I had been a servant in this house, in both lifetimes, cleaning up after the revelers and hiding as well as I could after the sun went down. For the first time I was approaching the mansion as one of them, and this time I had nothing to fear.

Robert had brought a trunk of clothing with him. We parked the coach and dressed in the darkness down near the old orchard. As I heard the leaves rustle I remembered a clothesline here. I remembered Amelia dressed in a large white apron pinning linens, feeling the cloth ripped from her hands, felt the onslaught of Jade’s embrace as he pulled her toward the woods.

There were so many memories here. I wanted to escape the memories, but they were like the wind and the rasping leaves, I could not block out their sensation, even if I could block the physical thought.

“Why have you brought me here?” I asked, after dressed quickly and discreetly in the shadows. I watched him tie his cravat without a mirror, by feel.

He looked at me in the darkness. “I could not forget you,” he said. “Because part of me is still a man, and I must pursue what I truly desire.”

“It could not be me,” I said.

“Hasn’t anyone told you how beautiful you are? You are elegant and desirable.” He took me to the lake, and I looked at my wavering reflection.

I wore the white satin gown he had provided, closely fitted, in a vintage mermaid-style with a kick train. I wore the matching gloves, and my hair was loose, curling from the humidity, and slung over my shoulders in a black mass.

“I see nothing,” I said. I could see my reflection, but it meant nothing to me. I was intangible as a dream. “I am not like you and the others. I will not be able to enjoy myself at this party.”

He drew me close, and I could feel the warmth of his skin. I smelled the cologne at his collar and even imagined I could hear his rushing blood. I pressed my cheek weakly against his.

Then we entered the old mansion and were crowded among bodies. They were all vampires. I recognized their physical signs and characteristics,the subtle changes in the face and body as humanness was lost.

All of a sudden in the midst of the crowd they were holding up a young woman. She was brought up amidst the smouldering candlelight, and her gray satin gown gleamed like pearl. She was screaming, her shoulders and arms bared, as she was restrained, her head held back by a rope of her own gleaming hair twisted around wrists. Her eyes and lips shone in the unearthly glow as she continued screaming and looking up with terror.

I remembered the murders. I remembered no matter where I hid in the mansion how I could hear the screams.

I fell into step next to Robert. I waited till the last. Then, as they moved forth on the girl, I pulled a heavy blue velvet drapery down into the candlelight. The dusty fabric caught flame instantly, and the heavy rod thundered down in the middle of the dining table, shattering glass and sending dishes crashing to the floor.

In the chaos I caught her and covered her body with mine. Though she was the same size as me she was drugged, and her limbs were heavier than they should be.

I remembered the trapdoors and passageways, and I pulled her into the kitchen, her body hidden with mine, and rattled at the hidden door which led to the cellar.

Together we tumbled down, the half-senseless girl, and I.

On the dirt floor we both sat up, and I struck a match from the fireplace and held it up. As I looked at her face I saw it was identical to mine. My heart pounded wildly as I realized I had found the third girl.

“It’s you,” I said, great waves of thankfulness rising up from my heart. “Oh, I pray, I pray I am not too late.”

Before I saw it coming I felt the blow to my face that sent me down. She rose above me and restrained me with fingers emboldened with fury. Her eyes gleamed green in the moonlight, her dark hair restrained with a network of strings of pearls. I knew it was the true face of Cambriel I saw.

Then her fangs lengthened and she lowered her head, piercing the skin of my throat. She drank my blood until I became weak and oblivious.

A silver-gray wolf climbed into the room through the shattered window and prowled gracefully over the overturned and broken dishes on the tables. She leaped to the floor and slipped among the shadows while the revelers beat frantically at the fire.

It was Scarlet’s scent she had, and another, too, as familiar as her own.

In the cellar the wolf saw two prone forms, women in evening gowns, and blood streaked across them. The woman in the gray satin gown looked at her, her eyes pale with fury.

The wolf growled and her back rose. She lunged at the woman over Scarlet, but met with gray, cold mist. The vampire’s form had vanished.

Down by the water’s edge Scarlet lay in a light cotton gown, on a flannel blanket to dispel the ground’s early spring chill. Cassandra knelt by her and unfastened her pendant.

“I wanted to give this to you. Long ago, when my sister began to grow weak and ill, I took samples of her blood. I used preservation enzymes in the lab to conserve the telomerase in her DNA. I had hoped you could find a cure for her. I knew if anyone could save her, it would be you. But when you left suddenly, I scented danger.”

Scarlet smiled weakly. “Whether I had gone or stayed home, I would have found what I sought. Our destinies are twined, the clones. And you, a werewolf. I never guessed it.”

“My sister too is a wolf. But if you sequence her genome, and compare it to yours, you may find the answers you seek. Enough of Cambriel’s original genes may be preserved between both genomes.”

“It will help partially. But I think I have already found another way, too.”

I was on the shore in northern Ireland. It was bitterly cold, and I felt as I stood at the rocks that I had reached the end of the world. My cloak blew in the high wind. I touched the charred remains of the stake which had been constructed, and I could smell, eerily, the ashes on the wet wind.

Robert stood behind me, waiting. I turned back to him, my black hair flying like a banner in the wind.

“I have found her,” I said. “She is here.” I held out my arms and he came to me, and we looked out over the sea. “Long ago, my grandmother fell to earth, an angel washed up on these rocks. She married a human man, a doctor named Stephen. She taught Stephen, his family and the village about other worlds and other beings, to give them a broadened perspective. However they feared her, and eventually condemned her as a witch. She was burned on this stake.”

Robert knew these things, because we had found the records in the village together. But I needed to say it for myself. Eithne’s grief and fury still burned in my heart, a flame beneath a shadow covered by time and forgetfulness and other lifetimes’ memories, but still living.

We had found my grandparents’ belongings in their cottage. The village had been forsaken and cursed as a place haunted by demons for centuries. No one lived here now.

“I wonder about the other worlds. I wonder if Ophelia and Shelley went to one of them. It is said that Shelley transformed into a white horse and lived by the sea. Ophelia found him, and when she climbed into his back, they rode into the waves together. Ophelia was thought drowned by this, for Shelley was an immortal. But perhaps they went to another world together, in the depths of the sea.”

My world, which had felt so small, was now vast and limitless. There was so much I yearned to know and experience. I realized I had feared that which I desired most: which was to belong nowhere. Robert and I possessed no home, only places where memories had gathered. Places like Rose Mansion, where we could visit again.

But we slept beneath the stars each night, and each day we looked for the other worlds.