BANG!
The collective blast of a firing line impacted his ears like thunder splitting the sky. The head of the killer snapped back, and as if in slow motion, Galen watched his body bend in half and fall to the wet grass with a quiet thud. Blackwood was dead.
Mouths moved and the doctor had the inkling he was asked to verify death over the ringing in his ears. Dazed-like, he drifted over to the bloodied body and reached down. With his fingers pressed against his still-warm neck, he felt for that fluttering proof of life. Nothing. He didn't need to search for a pulse to know it though, as Kane had seen the slack face and hollow-eyes of the dead so many times before. It was something he just knew.
"Dead," he said, confirming it. "He is dead."
Dr. Kane climbed back to his feet and faced the lawmen who had executed the man. Their faces told the story, each with their own perspective. But they continued to stare at the doctor, as if waiting for his answer.
"I said, he's dead." But their faces did not change. "Can you hear me?" Kane took a step closer to them and their faces twisted to fear. They recoiled. "Hello?"
The ringing in his ears grew louder. He felt like he was drowning. Choking. Choking on blood, on rotten earth. He heard gasping and croaking as he gripped his throat. He saw their eyes looking through him and he turned around to face the subject of their terror: Blackwood's corpse, pale and vermiculated, half exhumed from his grave, pale eyes wide upon the storm clouds that gathered above, as all manner of vermin crawled forth from his gaping, screaming mouth.
The doctor, too, should have screamed, but he found himself transfixed in horror, frozen in the cold grip of the scene before him. "He is DEAD!" He tried to utter, to affirm his own facts and ground himself in the known and reasonable, but still the corpse writhed as inch by inch he pulled himself free. And as his empty pearlescent eyes met Galen's, the rasping words of the damned rolled off his rotten tongue.
“YOU THINK YOU KNOW DEATH? I WILL SHOW YOU!”
My eyes shot open and I gasped for breath. My pillow was cold against my face, soaked through with sweat. My heart pounded in my chest like a wild bird gone mad in its cage. Sleep would not find me again tonight.
I threw my legs over the side of the bed and sat in the dim apartment room for a moment as the sensations of my nightmare faded into memory. My first thought was of the relief I'd gain by sliding into the caress of my old chemical companion. With cocaine unavailable, all I had was the morphine and the Cocalixir. Fuck it.
I crossed the room to the writing desk and lit my oil lamp. Inside the drawer I found a clean syringe, which I used to draw up an appropriate amount of morphine from my personal stash. Don't think. Just do. I told myself, to absolve myself of guilt, for I would give myself no time to ruminate on the consequences of my choices. I exhaled as ecstasy cleared my thoughts of worry. The sky was relatively clear tonight, and while it was the middle of the night and the city was asleep, a stroll through amber-lit streets called me to don my shoes and coat and step outside.
The nighttime air cooled the perspiration on my brow and dried my dampened hair. I wandered up and down the streets I knew so well until I'd wandered into an alley that I realized was unfamiliar to me. Something unsettled me about it as it seemed somehow colder than the rest. Instinctively, my hand went to my waistband to retrieve my gun, but found none there, as of course I had left them behind. My conscious mind ordered me to turn 'round and go back the way I'd come, but some quiet curious part of my mind ushered my feet onward, one after another, until I had been utterly swallowed up by that narrow space between the edifices.
What power called to me, I do not know, but I was like a snake to a charmer -- enthralled and afraid and unable to deny it.
"Hello?" I called into the dark and I realized I could not see as far ahead of me as I once had. The once clear night had become heavy with thick mist, and still I plunged onward into it. "Hello? Can you hear me?" I asked as if expecting an answer, as if expecting someone to be there. I passed a brick archway and stepped into what must have been a courtyard, for I heard the rustle of tropical plants and the faint echo of dripping water off closed-in walls.
"Hello--" my voice caught in my throat, my body seized. An icy hand gripped my shoulder and dug its claws into my skin like knives. "AAghh!" I cried out, but despite my instincts to run, my feet were made of iron. A nightmare, it had to be! And I willed myself to wake.
The visage that had appeared from the darkness was terrible and otherworldly. Its wormy grey skin clung tightly to its sunken features. Its eyes were deep and black, and I would nearly say they were missing from their sockets all-together were it not for the glint of moonlight that caught their glassy surface and reflected back to me in milky phosphorescence.
He is DEAD! I screamed internally, for I had seen a corpse so many times, it was just something I knew, but this attempted utterance did not ground me in the known or the factual. My mind was swimming in the gulf of the impossible and unnatural. And as I writhed and twisted to pull myself free, his empty pearlescent eyes met mine, his lips parted, and the scent of the grave rolled off his rotten tongue. His sharpened teeth were plain even in the inky darkness that consumed me as his jaws cracked open wide. I felt the icy sting of his thumb pressed against my neck, the pulse of hot blood in my carotid, the pounding of my heart like thunder in my ears.
You think you know death?
I heard the voice in my brain like train wheels screeching on the rails. The creature's cold tongue lapped at me and I felt my body go numb. Dead. Dead. Dead dead dead dead.
Even now, not enough to feel the throb of irons every waking moment, not enough to leave a man to his regrets, but to torment him with the ceaseless hunger of ambition? You are cruel indeed, but I understand. I understand. You feel, multiplied by millions, the same ecstasy that brought that corpse to the office. We are all slaves to vice, aren't we?
My voice, my thoughts. What are you doing?
THERE IS SOMETHING OUT IN THE SWAMP THAT INTERESTS ME. REPORTS OF SOMETHING "EVIL." PERHAPS THIS IS ONE OF YOUR CREATURES YOU HAVE TOLD ME OF? I WILL LOOK INTO IT, AND EMPLOY WHAT YOU'VE TOLD ME.
Creature... are you.. what I...
The man in the mud, found last night by Clancy Alexander. The man's pinstripe suit was of the finest quality. His shoes were clean, indicating he had likely been carried there and left, already dead. His white gold watch chain still had the watch connected, and sterling silver buttons with custom design were still affixed to his waistcoat. This was no robbery. There were no signs of struggle nor violent manner of death, no bullet wounds or perimortem bruising. What there was, however, was a distinct greyness to the skin and dryness of his veins that indicated significant loss of blood, and a wound to the neck as if a giant snake had bitten him.
Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead.
"Because he was a vampire, Mr. Keane," the bespectacled teen said, sitting down at a chair and crossing his legs. He wore a white doctor's coat. "Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to dissect him before the Brotherhood spirited him away. Regrettable. It would have greatly furthered my studies. It isn't often you run across an Ekon of such quality.
Get out of my head!!
Somewhere, hidden between the annals of mythos, alchemy, and religion, and the libraries of modern science were the answers to life itself, that singular thread that would unravel the mysteries of God's greatest Work.
God... No, devil! Immundovulnus!
My body was cold, limp, held up by the bony corpse that embraced me. And still he supped.
My bitter portfolio and scarlet-penned record is but a narrow view of a greater whole. The scalpel and the serum are no more than tools of the trade -- I am to medicine as you are to the law -- the hand, the weapon, the mechanism through which a greater will is manifest. But then, I do not write to you to convince you of my innocence. I write to you to convince myself, perhaps in some vain effort to keep me honest.
What do you want?
I think their eyes met, and in the victim's eyes I see myself reflected. What power, what sorrow, what utter emptiness he must have felt when he cut him. What ecstasy and regret. The poems are so mournful, so troubled. I do not know why he writes to me in the hour of his sinful sacrament.
We are all slaves to vice.
In the dark he saw wild scrawling on the walls. Not just poems of introspection and self rebuke, but cryptic messages about perfect stars, ashen maidens, and immortality. Blood-soaked walls in crimson lust. The dying light in darkened eyes. Dominica.
The writing on the walls...
For weeks now, I have been tracking a blood-drinker of some higher order. I have found 5 messages left by the creature detailing its obsession with blood and intent to kill. There is a well-established superstition amongst the populace here of a "Vampire of St. Denis." I believe this singular ekon is the source of the legend. Baron Von Bruegal, for all I can tell, was a normal man ten years ago, with a family and a love for mountain climbing. I believe he was turned by this ekon, but due to either some biological incompatibility or a weak inheritance, he became a skal instead. Skals, as we know, can feast on the corpses of living and dead and are not obligate predators of man. But where there is one...
Yes. The violent voice answered me, knowing my question before I could ask it.
I know death only by measuring the shadow it casts, by knowing the value of life. And yet, in truth, no living man knows Death. For to know it, is to become it. To know Death is to die.
You think you know death?
Get out of my head!
I will show you.