Dave Fawcett. October 2006

 

 

A noise awakened Malachai from the lethargic slumber that had settled upon him. Someone or something was moving around in the ruin above where he lay.

Malachai was old and he was ill; very ill. He was certain however that the two facts were not linked. He had been old for a very long time and illness was not something that he should suffer from. His illness had begun some time previously and for a long time he had not been able to work out why it should have begun when it did. The only substance that could (should) affect him was tainted blood or blood from a body that was dead. He knew that he had not feasted on bad blood in two hundred years.

His illness had prevented him from feeding properly. The blood of rodents and other small animals, while it blunted the knife edge of hunger, did nothing to assuage his more physical needs. He needed real food; human blood if he was to recover or even survive.

Malachai struggled to his feet, grasping the wall to support himself, and staggered across the cellar towards the ladder. At the bottom he stopped to listen, and to get his breath back. For a moment he thought that he had imagined the noise but then he heard it again, a slight noise as if someone or something was shuffling about.

Heaving himself painfully up the ladder Malachai hobbled as quietly as was possible across the floor, glancing constantly about him. The sounds were very slight but close; someone was sobbing but trying to control it. It was loud enough however to mask any sound that he might inadvertently make in his search. Normally Malachai would have made no sound at all but in his current weakened state some noise was only to be expected. Although his senses were heightened by extreme hunger, physical control of his body was not as rigid as usual.

The sound was coming from a under a bundle of rags in the corner of the room. Malachai moved across and gently twitched a corner of the cloth aside, revealing a small, grubby and tearstained face. It was a young boy no older than five or six, clothed in a few filthy rags and stinking of pig-sties. Momentarily, Malachai was puzzled. In the modern world on whose fringes he existed children were usually well scrubbed and tidily dressed even in this remote mountain area. The modern magic of television and, more recently, the internet had made for ever increasing uniformity in fashion, culture and belief. His own existence was no longer accepted by any but the poorest and most ostracised of the people. This child had to be a gypsy.

Malachai moved close to the child and, kneeling down he fed quickly and greedily on fresh young blood. Temporarily sated he glanced at the sky through the broken and sagging roof of the barn. The sky was beginning to fade from black but he sensed that this night he had enough time to return to the chateau he called home. The previous night he had failed in his hunt for food and by the end of the night he had been too weak to make the journey home; not for the first time either. The barn had become something of a bolt hole for him in the previous months and this time he had slept the full day and half the night cocooned in a nest of junk and filthy straw.

Before leaving he quickly checked the child hoping for another brief drink to sustain him on his journey. The boy was dead! Even in this most basic of techniques his sense of delicacy had deserted him. Over the last year he had lost most of his natural powers. Lightning reflexes were no longer his to command. His climbing skills sere gone. The darkest art of all no longer aided him. The wolf pack no longer obeyed him; indeed he suspected that it now regarded him simply as new quarry and his age old ability to assume the shape of the bat had failed him. He knew that he was dying but he still did not know why.

Malachai had first suspected a malady within him about two years earlier though at that time he had not yet succumbed to any symptoms or even comprehended that anything was wrong. He had noticed rather a change in his donors. He had always been fastidious and preferred to return to the same sources time and again as one would return to certain favourite restaurants in preference to trying new places rather than feeding randomly from strangers . He had kept a larger than usual coterie of favourites in order to feed sparingly from each one thus minimising damage and keep them healthy.

One evening about two years before he had visited Stefan, a gilded youth of fifteen and one of his most superlative feeds. Biting gently into the boys jugular he had tasted not nectar but a foul bile; bitter and sour. Withdrawing quickly he had broken the youth’s neck and crashed from the house. Storming across town he had fed angrily from another donor, drinking brutally and leaving another of his favourites drained and dead. For some days following the unfortunate incident he had fed carefully, tasting gently before drinking his fill. There were no further mishaps and in the following weeks he almost forgot Stefan and the vile taste, explaining it away as something the boy had eaten.

The second incident could not be dismissed so easily though. For some time Malachai had been seeking a new companion; an intellectual equal who could dispel the ever increasing ennui of centuries of existence. He had found her in; of all places the town library. As head librarian Dagda was cultured, intelligent, witty and above all obsessed with the legends and myths of the area. It had taken no time to persuade her that at least one myth was rather more than that. One bite had in fact been sufficient.

After a period of ‘courtship’; for Malachai was a traditionalist in such matters; he had decided that she was the perfect companion for him. One night he had opened a vein in his wrist and allowed her to drink his blood as he drank hers. Within two days she was dead, killed by what appeared to be a nasty chest infection. Moreover the wound in his wrist had failed to heal properly and had left a feverish scar; a thing unheard of in vampyre history. Wounds that did not kill were supposed to heal quickly and cleanly and a vampyre with scars simply was not in the lexicon.

It was at this point that he realised something had changed. Malachai knew that the rules governing a vampires existence were not immutable. He remembered his history. The last great change had been during the time of the Roman Empire when his race had been forced to abandon the light following a viral induced mutation that had swept his people with incredible swiftness. For many thousands of years vampyres had been blessed with the ability to adapt and evolve very quickly to a constantly changing world. Unfortunately this ability carried with it the ever present possibility that such an evolutionary change could be regressive as well as progressive.

Malachai had quickly decided that he must seek out the Grand Council and tell them of his experiences. But where to begin? He had never had dealings with the Council in the 700 years of his existence and had no clear idea where they might be located. His only chance was to seek out John Dee, a vampyre he had known once centuries before in London. At that time Dee had masqueraded as an alchemist and was a confidante of Elizabeth, the virgin queen but he had heard some time ago that Dee was now living in Rome, in The Vatican of all places.

Malachai found Dee, not in The Vatican but in Castel d’Angelo, the ancient Papal castle close by. Dee was ensconced in rooms deep under the ancient edifice in secret chambers carved from the living rock under the guiding hand of Leonardo da Vinci many centuries earlier.

Dee the alchemist had, over the centuries transformed himself into Dee the scientist. The man himself remained as Malachai remembered him with the thick black beard that he knew so well but his laboratory was well equipped with the most up-to-date equipment.

Dee welcomed Malachai as an old friend and listened for a while as he outlined his problem. Stopping him before he had completed his story, Dee told Malachai that he knew what was wrong.

“Some years ago” he said, “ a new disease swept the world of man. No one knows where it came from although there are many theories. Some say it began as a mutation of a virus common in apes; others say it was a genetic mutation created in the laboratories of America. Whatever the theories two things are certain. It is the most virulent plague since the Black death in Europe in the thirteenth century and it has nothing to do with apes or genetic creations or any of the other so called scientific explanations. The truth is that I created it on the instructions of the Grand Council. For many years I have been searching for a genetic mutation that would reverse the ancient curse and enable our race to live in daylight once more. I thought that I had found the answer but what I created will, in the end, prove to be the death of all of us”.

Malachai looked at John Dee in horror. “What is this disease called”? he whispered as realisation of the truth hovered on the edge of his consciousness.

“We have no name for it” Dee answered softly. "Mankind calls it the Human Immunodeficiency Virus! I have given the world the plague of HIV”.