Entombed for almost a century in the corpse of the Titanic at the bottom of the icy north Atlantic, the Vampire is finally released by a treasure-hunting expedition--that never makes it back alive.
OVERCOME WITH BLOODLUST
In a small South Carolina town, a stranger calling himself Charles Gabriel seeks desperate help from a beautiful psychiatrist. But while irresistible sexual passions are stirred by supernatural powers, the town falls victim to a horrifyingly rampant surge of an unearthly evil.
THE VAMPIRE HUNTER
Torn by his loyalty to a centuries-old, unholy brotherhood, the Vampire longs to be freed from his hunger, but he has become the prey of those who seek vengeance against him. Now the only escape is Death. . . .
Release date:
December 22, 2010
Publisher:
Fawcett
Print pages:
320
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DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI awoke to the sound of an animal shriek coming from the darkness.
He sat up and looked around, blinking dumbly, his mind a jumble of feverish images and pieces of dreams, unable to remember where he was or how he’d come to be there. His shirt was soaked in sweat, his mouth too dry to swallow. His eyes burned in their sockets, and his bones throbbed with dull pain. His fingers came automatically to his neck, but they found no trace of a wound—no evidence of the twin punctures that had thrice cannulated his jugular vein, no hint of tenderness in the skin or underlying musculature.
The animal screamed again, an inhuman howl that began as a tremulous cry and ended as a whimper.
A jackal.
Recognizing the inhuman cry brought the puzzle pieces tumbling back into place in Rossetti’s mind. They had left London on a hazy August day in 1870, journeying across France by coach. They rode by horseback through Italy, pausing in Rome long enough for Rossetti nearly to die. When he was well enough to travel again, they boarded a Venetian sloop and crossed the Mediterranean, making for the Nile delta and the ruins of ancient Egypt.
They sailed up the Nile from Alexandria, making camp near the ruined temple of Amon at Luxor, the ancient city of Thebes. There, surrounded by images of fallen glory, Rossetti took the final of the three sacraments. He planned to put his past behind him, exchanging his human heart for an immortal organ he prayed would prove more indifferent to disappointment and pain.
The canvas tent walls trembled in the desert wind. Rossetti listened to the soft rustling of sand and the crackle of fire. He could hear the murmur of voices huddled around the fire, whispering in Arabic. Lower still, the quiet rush of water between the Nile’s banks came to him, delivering the kiss of life to a thin ribbon of vegetation in the midst of the hostile, sun-blasted wasteland.
The darkness was nearly absolute in the heavy canvas tent, but his eyes, like his hearing, were preternaturally acute. He could perceive hues in the darkness, but faintly, as if he were looking at a faded watercolor painting. The skin on the back of his hands was drawn, shrunken around tendons, veins, and bones. The fever had spent the last of his body’s reserves. He’d never imagined he could be so sick. Not even in Rome, ill unto dying with typhus, had he suffered so severely.
The animal cried again.
“Bloody jackals,” he muttered. The cowering animals had dogged them wherever they went, slinking along in the dust, loitering at the edge of camp, more oppressive; even than the legions of beggars in Alexandria.
Rossetti swung his legs slowly out of bed. His movements felt curiously disembodied, as if his limbs belonged to someone else and he were but the puppet master. He pulled on his Wellington boots and stood up tentatively, his balance uncertain. He brushed his head against the canvas roof. He wore his chestnut hair long, but it seemed to have grown six inches or more during his fortnight of delirium. He looked around briefly for a ribbon with which to tie it back, but finding nothing, he satisfied himself by pushing the thick, curly locks behind his ears.
The brilliance of the light when he pushed back the canvas door momentarily blinded him. The porters had built a bonfire at the far end of the camp, flames licking into the air. Behind the fire, overawing them, the gargantuan stone head of a nameless pharaon lay over on one side, staring at them blankly. The guards stood aloof from the others, cradling their antique flintlock rifles, barefoot silhouettes dressed in Egyptian cotton caftans.
None of the servants moved a muscle to help Rossetti. They were a skittish lot, superstitious about ghosts and the old gods said to be haunting the ruins. The porters stared at Rossetti—newly bearded, hair wild, cheeks sunken, and eyes that still burned as if with fever—with undisguised fear. He might have been the falcon-headed sky god Horus, materialized out of the ether to revenge himself for Osiris’s murder, and not some sad and wasted Englishman, disoriented after two weeks of burning up with fires of the change.
Rossetti’s eyes ranged over the scene. The frightened Egyptians stared at him through the dancing tongues of the fire. The starkly illuminated face of the ancient colossus loomed over them from behind, swathed in shadows that suggested the presence of an incomprehensibly vast and menacing mystery beyond the circle of illumination cast by the fire.
A fight came into Rossetti’s dark eyes, an expression of rapture. Ever since childhood he had been subject to what he thought of as “visions”—moments of ecstasy released in his soul by a particularly pleasing arrangement of light and shadow, by a rich or unexpected combination of colors and textures, by an elegant fine of poetry. These visions had been virtually lost to him near the end, visiting with decreasing frequency until they ceased to come at all. The wall Rossetti had built to separate himself from his pain had also closed him off from his passion. Now, he realized with a feeling of happiness that approached bliss, that this inner barrier, along with the other infirmities, sorrows, and limitations of mortal being, had been miraculously transcended.
Ignoring the Hunger gnawing at his vitals, Rossetti ducked back into his tent to rummage for his sketchbook and pencil. The strange tableau was still there when he returned on unsteady legs. He sketched as quickly as he could, afraid the spell would be broken before its essence was distilled to paper. The artist envisioned a vast oil canvas, rich Rubinesque golds, reds, and browns at the center, emerging from a darker chiaroscuro shadow painting. Footsteps approaching him from behind did not distract him. In another few minutes he was finished, the pad and pencil hanging from the ends of his spent arms like lead weights.
“Permit me,” a familiar voice said, taking the drawing from him. Byron tilted the drawing toward the firelight and smiled. “Bravisimo!”
“It is but a quick study,” Rossetti said, though his work pleased him full well. It had been years since his art had breathed with such inner power.
“You learned much from the Dutch masters.”
Rossetti bowed his head slightly by way of agreement. He had been tarrying in Amsterdam, ostensibly studying the works of Rembrandt, when Lord Byron had found him. In truth, Rossetti had been spending most of his time in his hotel on the Grand Canal, devoting most of his energy to his drug addiction.
Byron had admired Rossetti’s art—more so than he did Rossetti’s poetry—and had decided to seek out his acquaintance because of an old connection he had with a member of Rossetti’s family. Through one of those strange coincidences, Rossetti’s uncle, Dr. John Polidori, had once been Byron’s physician and companion. Byron and Polidori had spent the summer of 1816 together on Lake Geneva, sharing Villa Diodati with Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary. When the weather proved stormy, Byron decreed that they would each write a ghost story to pass the time. Polidori’s modest effort, The Vampyre, was published in London in 1819 and quickly forgotten, unlike Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Rossetti owed his life to Byron. He would have died in Amsterdam if the vampire hadn’t come to his aid.
“How perfectly you capture the flames prancing in the darkness, illuminating the toppled statuary,” Byron said. “And the fear in the porters’ faces. How greatly it contrasts with the serenity in the statue’s stony eyes. The men of our company seem small and pathetic before the evidence of ancient glory. What will remain of them two thousand years from tonight?”
“It puts me in mind of—”
“I know,” Byron interrupted. He could read Rossetti’s thoughts, when he wished, though Rossetti found this unpleasant intrusion of his innermost ruminations unworthy behavior for a British gentleman. Byron ignored his irritation, as he was wont to do, and recited:
“I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The porters gaped at Byron as though he were chanting an incantation to bring the dead back to life rather than quoting Shelley.
“Percy had it all wrong, poor lamb. These ruins leave me mute with wonderment. What must it have been like, to breathe the rarefied air that sustained such culture? And so strange a culture, dedicated with such fierce passion to art and death equally. I confess to a certain kinship.”
“I did not think death much occupied your thoughts.”
“My dear fellow,” Byron said, taking Rossetti by the arm, “even as Vampiri we are never more than a step away from death. It is always there, just behind us, within the shadow.”
Rossetti followed Byron’s gesture. The shadows of their bodies moved slightly from side to side in the flickering light with a simulacrum of life.
“You are weak,” Byron said solicitously.
Rossetti nodded, reluctant to acknowledge his mounting need.
“A little of the fever remains in you, I see. Your face has an almost tubercular glow. Come,” his mentor said, taking his arm. “We must find you nourishment.”
“I do not know whether I can make myself—”
“Leave everything to me,” Byron interrupted, his tone brooking no disagreement.
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