How do I begin to describe those years in the wilderness? How do I describe the agony of existing in a void where my only hope was almost certainly an illusion born out of shadows?
I had been torn out of the land of the living and plunged into a world of never-ending sorrow and darkness. Darkness not only surrounded me, I was darkness. Fearing the light of the sun and that of a human gaze, I spent my nights wandering the land aimlessly, keeping to the shadows and the anonymity of the woodlands. My mind numbed by grief, my soul dying a long, slow, torturous death each time I left the safety of the woods to claim the life of another.
The power to hear the thoughts of others had been weak and fleeting in the beginning. But as the days passed, it became stronger, assaulting my mind and senses each time I came near humans. I remained in the shadows, but the lives of those around me reached me in the most intimate of ways.
I not only heard the thoughts of the mothers that were sold away from their children, I experienced it. I experienced the violence against the helpless, the rapes and murders. I also experienced the corrupted thoughts and triumphs of the slaveholders who had long sold their souls when they suffocated the voices of their conscience to trade in flesh and blood. Deep in the woods, in its dark heart surrounded by its silent weeping trees, I found respite from the lives of those around me. But all too soon, I was called back to the world of the living by the need for blood, to a world I both hated and coveted. Hated because of its violence and injustice. Coveted because it was as surely closed to me as the tomb I longed for.
And in this world of darkness, Avery Wentworth ceased to exist.
Summer soon gave way to a jubilant autumn, the trees dripping with dark gold leaves, the ground beneath my feet showered with those radiant offerings making me feel as if I were walking along a trail of gold. Then winter swept the land clean of the boastful autumn, leaving it a pastoral wasteland. I thought the Foster plantation, along with the burning field strewn with corpses, the magnificent sneering mansion a fiery glare against the Mississippi night sky, was long behind me. But the victims it swallowed in a festival of flame came back to find me. I could be moving swiftly through the ether, the winter countryside in all its morose beauty flitting past. Then their faces would assail me, bringing me to an abrupt halt, the frigid slumbering plains swirling into view all around me whilst remorse shuddered within.
The first face to find me was that of Phillis. Her features impassive, dangerous emotion lurking behind her eyes as she carefully glanced toward the window and the wooden structure beyond. From then on, I always saw that face as it had been in death with drops of blood marring her smooth brown skin, her eyes forever drained of the emotion that had made her risk that furtive glance toward the window.
I did not allow myself to think of the darky girl during that first year, of that face and those mysterious raven eyes that had captured my heart. I wandered the land aimlessly. Alone. Treading a lonely path of despair, my thoughts repeatedly dancing between guilt and all I had lost. The first anniversary of Julia’s death found me miles away from the ruins of the Foster plantation deep within anonymous woodland, my thoughts on Auria, dark anger surging within. I now knew what evil, real evil, was. It had stood before me glittering in jewels and a gold gown, smiling at me with mirthless glee and cold, soulless eyes. I now not only knew what evil was; I was evil.
I held my hands up in a sickly vapid stream of moonlight that reached me through the dense woodland canopy. These ghostly white hands were capable of unimaginable strength and destruction. The faces of those terrified slaves as they sought to escape me swam before me along with the countless others I had slaughtered since then. There was the promise of a legion more of these bloodied, gasping faces if what Auria had said was true and I lived forever. That thought ran through my mind countless times leaving a well-trodden path of pain and despair. I was evil. Evil. The devil incarnate.
Evil.
The woodland abruptly disappeared, almost as if a hand had reached into the present and snatched it away, and I was standing in burnt orange sunlight in the ruins of the chapel I had fled.
I spun around and she was there, her image divided, one image staring down at the ground, the other looking up at me, joy and tears in her eyes when she gazed upon me.
Joy and tears.
I moved to kneel before her like a humble pilgrim and gazed into those raven eyes, my heart soaring at the sight of her and the promise I saw within the depths of those eyes. I reached tentatively for her face but could not touch her. Her full sensuous lips curved into a smile but her eyes still shimmered with tears. There was urgency in her words when she communicated with me again.
I’m coming. Wait for me. Wait for me.
I was alone once more in the woodlands.
She was real. She had to be. I’m coming, she had said. Wait for me. I didn’t even know what this being was or why she had come to me. All I knew was that she was powerful and that she meant salvation. All I had to do was wait. Wait and she would find me. All I had to do was wait.
***
So I waited. The years mounted but I did not count them, for time meant nothing in this wilderness or in the life of an immortal. Night after night I was left with a corpse in my arms, and with each kill my devastation increased until I decided I would simply stop. I would not give in to the urge to kill.
So I left my daily grave and kept to the woods, trying to ignore the call for blood and death.
The first night it was as if war fought within my flesh. But I continued to resist the evil, and when morning came, I went to ground feeling only marginally triumphant that I had fought the demon that thirsted for blood and won, for there was a field of dead slaves, and many more deaths, I could never take back.
That evening I awoke long past dusk. My limbs felt sluggish and I was moving much slower than normal, but I still felt I could resist the blood. I went to ground earlier than usual, long before the sun was due to return and breathe life over the land.
A few nights later, and I could not call the ether to me. Instead of discouraging me, it gave me hope. I was in physical pain constantly, the same pain I felt when exposed to the sun, but I welcomed it. Perhaps it meant the supernatural power was leaving my body and I would become a man again. Although I was weak, I felt overjoyed by this thought. I looked out over empty grassland for miles around, sweet joy filling my soul. A single tree was all that blighted the clean emptiness around me, the sky above a sultry mix of violets and deep blues, the waning moon almost hidden. I sat back against the lone tree, letting my eyes flutter shut for a few moments. When I opened them again, Onyx was before me wearing the gown Julia was wearing that fateful evening.
Avery, Avery.
I sprung to my feet and pressed myself against the tree. She moved closer until we were almost touching, concern in her eyes.
Surely you know my voice, she beseeched.
She reached a hand to my face and I squeezed my eyes shut. It was a few moments before I could open them again.
I was alone in the grasslands. There was nothing at all to suggest Onyx had actually been there, and no one else’s scent. I sank to my knees in the dirt. The pain was almost unbearable now, but I was determined I would not kill. I went to ground not long after, having to dig a hole for myself. It was not deep, barely three feet, and I lay stretched out in it. I was able to use my telekinetic power to move the dirt over myself to provide a blanket of soil, and slept a restless, fitful sleep, often waking to see Auria’s corpse in my arms as Julia’s had been the day I had slept with her in her grave.
A week and a half after I decided not to kill, I knew I had to have blood. I did not care if denying myself blood killed me, but I could no longer endure the pain or the maddening hunger. Weak and blind to everything but the search for a victim, I crawled through dark woodland until thin wisps of human minds in sleep reached me. I kept on until I saw the outline of a farm through the trees. I tried to get to my feet, but was pulled down by the weight of my weakened body. On my knees, I reached out to the sleeping minds within the farmhouse, too weak to know whether or not any of them heard and would answer my call.
I thought I would have to crawl to the house and find another way to lure someone out of it, when I heard the sound of bare feet treading carefully in the undergrowth. Invigorated by the scent of warm human blood drifting through the air toward me, I pulled myself to my feet, the pulsing pain driving me forward in anticipation of the feast I had denied myself for over a week. Then a little girl in a long white nightgown appeared out of the gloom. She was no more than nine years old and had red hair, which was tied up in two bunches. She stood in the dark woodland gazing up at me and I felt her fear through the crimson mist that had overwhelmed me.
Don’t be afraid—you’re safe, I commanded.
Her fear evaporated.
I had never murdered a child before, and I wanted to send her back. But it was proving a struggle to stop myself from lunging at her as the demon I had denied for over a week set my limbs aflame. What it craved was within reach now, and there could be no denying it. I desperately searched the child’s thoughts, already feeling the crimson mist taking over. Thankfully, a pleasant memory was not far from her mind, one of her slave, Cassie, a woman she loved much more than her own mother. She smiled in the daze I had induced, thinking about Cassie, a woman she wasn’t even sure liked her at times.
“She does love you,” I said.
It was a fight to hold out against the crimson mist long enough to make sure her mind was numb to pain. I gathered her tiny body to me and bit into her pale, fragile neck. At first she cried out as panic overrode the control I had over her mind, but then she fell silent. The roar of the crimson tide overwhelmed me, throwing me out into deepening waves of mindless euphoria.
Then there was just the dead child in my arms.
I took her home and placed her at the door of the farmhouse where the first person to find her was bound to be Cassie, the slave that had become a surrogate mother. There were tears sliding down my cheeks, but they were the proverbial crocodile tears because her blood was still singing through me and I wanted more.
Strangely enough, I was reluctant to leave her alone in the cold. I touched her face. She had been so young, and some of her memories came back to me of the affection she used to lavish on Cassie. She was always finding little gifts for her—sometimes a flower, or she would save the last of her treats and they were always for Cassie.
In that moment, the weight of all that had been taken away from me almost crushed me. I had been robbed of so much. Of the chance to bear children of my own and the second heartbeat Onyx had spoken of came back to taunt me as vicious and merciless as she had been in life. Would my little girl have had Julia’s eyes? Her gentle courage and the ability to empathise? Would my daughter have had the insight to look at an evil like slavery, and the Negroes themselves, and see it for what it was? All of these things tormented me because I would never know. Placing my fingers over the dead girl’s eyelids, I tenderly closed her eyes and fled.
I ran through the woods, the trees around me a dark blur, sensing the woodland creatures and the fear my presence elicited. I ran, but the thing I had been unconsciously running from found me anyway. A faint, horror-filled cry reached me over the distance I had placed between myself and that farm. I stopped immediately, materialising in the damp darkness on my knees. There wasn’t a repeat of that sound and I couldn’t even be sure I had heard her cry from that distance, but in my soul I knew it had been Cassie, who had probably been startled out of sleep by some sixth sense and ventured outside to find her beloved Mandy.
It felt as if my mind was going to break, the horror of that senseless killing, all of those deaths over the years and the pain I had caused to so many. It felt as if I was drowning in it. The faces of the dead overwhelmed me, those of the fleeing slaves I had slaughtered in that cotton field all but drove me to the brink of insanity. I had to end this. I had to bring an end to this life and with it would come an end to the murders, the pain and destruction. I had to end...
...Then I was standing in the chapel. For a brief moment I felt elation and euphoria. She had come to me again after so long. But then shame descended for she would surely know. But I couldn’t stop myself from facing her, as I had to glance at that beautiful face or be driven insane.
She was staring at me as if she, too, were savouring the luxury of laying eyes on me, but there was a subtle change in her expression. She was looking at me reproachfully and some old anger lingered in her eyes.
She knew. Of course she knew what I had done. Shame and self-loathing filled me again. That she would see me like this, see such lowly depths as the one I had been cast into that night they turned me into a vampire.
But then another miracle unfolded before me. The reproach I saw wasn’t for the reason I had assumed it to be. How she communicated this to me I do not know, for she uttered not a word. But I knew the anger was for those thoughts I’d had before I found myself transported here. The desire to end my life along with my suffering. As understanding, along with sweet relief, flooded me, I knew if there was even the smallest hope she was real, then I would wait for her until the world ceased to exist. Some of the anger in her eyes seeped away then and compassion came in its stead along with...love. I felt it there in that moment.
Love.
Her smile was laced with sorrow and I again heard those words which were now tethered to my soul.
Wait for me, I’m coming. Wait for me.
She was gone and I was anguished, but I moved on through the darkness with hope in my heart lighting a way forward.
A strange thing happened whenever I had a vision of Luna. Time seemed to shift, or quicken. That morning after killing the little girl, I went to ground and left behind the golden haze of a ripe summer morning. When I awoke that evening, the world was silent and empty; winter its sullen guest. Thin, naked trees cut a stark silhouette across the landscape. I knew I had not slept through that entire summer and autumn, because on my coat lapel was a lone pink petal from a redbud tree, fresh and bright as if it had just fallen.
I let it float to the ground where it remained, the only speck of colour in this grim, grey winter landscape. I moved on into the bleakness, searching for signs of life and the blood that was my keeper.
Was I aware of what was happening at the time? It was hard not to be, but somehow, my mind turned away from the fact that something extraordinary was happening. But what did it mean? Did she have the power to make me skip over the years, bringing me closer to the day when I would come across her? Did anything on this Earth have the power to do that? Or was it merely my mind that had skipped over that empty period of time, like anaesthesia, to numb me to those long, desolate years? I do not know. Not even she knows what or how she was able to do what she did. I only know that somehow she protected me during those years and caused me to skip through large amounts of time, bringing me closer to the day when I would see her face in the flesh.
***
For many years, I did not gaze upon my reflection. But one night, after having attacked a young man, bringing him down off his horse and dragging him into the woodland to a small pond whilst he screamed and struggled in vain, I came upon the wretched sight I had become.
I drank my fill from him and was alone once more, with not even his screams for mercy to remind me of the living here in the dense woodland. I shoved the corpse away from me and it fell into the pond, scattering the perfect image of the moon and the ghostly fingers of branches that seemed to stretch toward it. When the water settled, I was left staring at my reflection.
To human eyes, the image would have just been a dark silhouette, but my enhanced vision concealed nothing and I stood aghast as I stared at what had become of me. My hair was well past my shoulders now and tangled, but it was the state of my clothing that caused the angst I felt now. The white necktie was now black, stained with dirt and blood and it was literally rotted. It disintegrated in my hand when I pulled it away from my neck. A large tear along the shoulder of my coat and the shirt beneath exposed most of the top half of my chest. It was also caked with soil and, of course, blood.
I kept myself hidden and my appearance did not matter to anyone who laid eyes on me, for it was likely to be the last thing they saw. But I was aghast. It was the physical manifestation of the unfathomable moral decay into which I had fallen.
With something akin to the grief that had consumed me when I left Julia in the earth and leapt into the wilderness, I slowly peeled off what was left of my clothes. What lay at my feet were little more than rags, but they symbolised so much more. It was as if I were giving up the last vestiges of my soul along with any hope I held regarding my fate.
I was naked in the moonlight, and only the gold chain and cross Minny had urged me to take hung around my neck. I took it off and stared at it as it glinted in the moonlight. I wanted to throw it away, but in the end I couldn’t, the faded memory of her conviction as she urged me to take it staying my hand. The only option left to me was to either remain naked, or strip the corpse. Resigned to all that I now was—the wretchedness of my condition and whatever remained of the man I once was—I removed his trousers and coat. I had long ago discarded shoes so I left his, my indestructible body needing no protection from the hard terrain. I carefully placed the crucifix in the coat pocket. Perhaps I could touch it, but it no longer gave the comfort I had derived from it during my mortal years.
With my hunger sated, the night lay ahead with nothing now to distract me from the endless loneliness and sorrow. I moved away from the corpse and the pool, darting through the trees swiftly and silently, the only constant in these endless nights the moon and my all-encompassing sorrow.
***
It was a cold, dark, frosty night in Louisiana. I do not know how long I had been in the wilderness by that time, a decade maybe. Time had lost all meaning. I skipped in and out of the ether through a small town. Its streets were empty, completely deserted as people kept to the warmth and light their homes afforded. But for me the night, as every other night, was awash with eerie light my preternatural sight took from the elements, but everything remained bleak. The natural exuberant flora of the south had been decimated by the winter and the dark trees were naked and silent, defenceless against the harsh weather, the vegetation withdrawn in alarm at the unrelenting cold.
I did not feel the cold I dipped in and out of as I travelled through the night on my endless journey to nowhere. The lack of feeling—numbness and immunity to the whims of nature—elicited a deeper chill within my soul and I yearned deeply for the world and a life that was forever out of my reach.
It was in this state of numbness that I came across a lone mansion on the outskirts of the town. I paused outside it, its neglected forlorn appearance appealing to my soul and the inner decay that had long overcome me. Two large oaks on either side of the mansion leaned menacingly over it. Its aged rooms were empty bar the master bedroom on the top floor, its walls illuminated by a large fire before which sat an old white woman.
I was kept from leaving the mansion by the profusion of her thoughts, which were like tiny darts spitting at me along with a deep-seated rage.
Rage.
This was something that had long ago died within me and I drifted closer to the mansion, stepping over a dead field of Queen Anne’s lace, longing to feel that anger, to feel something—anything—aside from the numbness, that emptiness which was only ever kept at bay when I fed the frenzied blood lust holding me prisoner.
She sat before the roaring fire, angry at life and all it had stolen from her, leaving her a lonely old spinster.
Her name was Helena and her life should have, and would have been, far different from the pitiful existence that was now hers. Hers had been a charmed life in the beginning, the birthright of someone born with wealth, beauty, breeding, and, most importantly, the inherent superiority of her race.
Her father was a lawyer and when he made the decision to purchase slaves with the idea to turn some of their land into cotton fields, life would only continue to throw the best it had to offer at her. Instead, becoming a slaveholder had ruined him because of one crucial element. He chose to see and treat his slaves as human beings instead of what they were: niggers. And he began to teach them how to read, write, and sustain themselves with the intention to eventually free all his slaves.
This had not been received well by the rest of the town and people began to stop coming to his practice. Then Pierre, along with the rest of Helena’s suitors, stopped calling.
All the luxuries she had taken for granted were gone as poverty replaced wealth. The beautiful clothes, even something as essential as sugar, became a scarcity. When her parents died she had been left with nothing, only this mansion, which had already begun to fall into disrepair. Of the slaves he had purchased, and then freed, only two remained after the death of her father. And they had continued to care for her all these long years out of pity for her and also loyalty to her father, the man who had ruined her life.
She sighed, her anger diminishing for a moment. The years had been so long and so bleak that she yearned for death. She sighed once more.
Oh, to be in the past dancing in Pierre’s arms once more.
She sat staring morosely at the fire, her mind stuck in the past. Lulled by those images, she slowly slipped into sleep.
I remained outside, at the door of the mansion, feeling all the more lost now her anger no longer burned brightly, entrancing me. Death was something I, too, had yearned for, since the night I was thrown into this wilderness. And I could give her that wish. It was a sincere wish, I knew, for the force which should have forbidden me entrance to her home was gone.
I moved into the ether and entered the mansion, materialising in the bedroom. She awoke immediately when I moved to stand before her. She peered up at me, her gaze foggy and her mind clouded with sleep and the images of the past she had clung to all these years. I caught the strongest and brought it to life before her gaze.
She was no longer in this room lit by the angry glow of the fire, but was in the drawing room downstairs as it had been in her youth. But she took absolutely no notice of the room around her and merely stared ahead in surprise.
“Pierre?”
I held out my hand, but she saw Pierre reach for her hand, looking exactly as he had the last time he had been at the mansion.
A smile lit up her face, pushing back decades from her features. She took my hand and got to her feet, staring lovingly into my face but seeing only the man she had been pining for all these years.
“You’ve come back for that dance I promised you,” she said.
A part of her knew what she was seeing couldn’t be real, but she grasped the fantasy anyway, holding on to it so ardently it took very little effort for me to maintain what she saw.
When I held out my arms, she glided into them.
It was a macabre dance, the old, frail, desperate woman clinging on to a fantasy of her youth. I waited for as long as she wanted the fantasy to play out. I had all of eternity stretched out before me and there was no need for me to rush this moment and its ultimate conclusion.
Toward the end of the dance, as the fire burned low now, the deception wavered for a few seconds and she saw me instead of Pierre. She came to a stop abruptly, but there was no fear or anxiety in her mind, so I let it fall away completely, bringing her gently back into the dark room. As the brightly lit drawing room receded from before her gaze, she moved out of the circle of my arms but kept her gaze on my face, her expression one of complete rapture.
“Oh my.” She reached for my face, gently holding it between her small, papery hands. “I don’t believe I’ve ever laid eyes on a man as handsome as you. There was no need to hide your face from me.”
I didn’t answer, just let her continue to stare at me as if she wanted to commit every inch of my features to memory along with the others she had cherished for so long. Seemingly she had achieved this objective for she exhaled.
“Now take me home...to...to Papa.” Tears filled her eyes. “He...he was a good man, and it’s only now, at the end, that I can see it and be proud of what he did.”
I held my arms out again and she came into them.
I held her for a few minutes, using my powers to lull her gently into a state of sublime bliss and contentment, and then a deep sleep. I bit into the soft, fleshy folds of her neck, tearing into the rigid carotid artery which released the warm, sweet gush of blood instantly. She was far away in her fantasy world and so felt no pain as I drew on her blood, consumed with that arousal and all the pleasures that the body yielded in a gushing, single flow of blood. I pressed her deeper into my arms, hearing her ribs crack from that faraway place. But she was long gone by then.
I drowned myself in the crimson tide until there was nothing left and I was brought back into the room. The fire had died out completely.
I placed the corpse on the bed and left the red velvet bedroom to return to the numbness and the night.
I ran from that town, having no fantasies to take the edge off an existence that was nothing but bile. There was nothing for me but the endless hunger.
I eventually left that mansion far behind me and came to a stop in the middle of grassland. I gazed up at the single shimmering eye of the moon, the only witness to my moral annihilation.
Then I was standing in the clearing beneath the light of the moon and the chapel was before me. And beyond it, kneeling by the stream with her back to me, was the darky girl. She looked over her shoulder at me and my heart soared. I broke into a run.
Her alluring smile and the way she lowered her eyes seduced me as nothing ever had. I ran, hoping that this time she wouldn’t disappear and the moment had come when I could be with her. As I neared, she met my gaze again and the smile faded. I saw sadness and her yearning was deeper this time. I felt it so keenly it was like a physical tug.
I struggled to speak, knowing she would soon be gone.
Your name. Tell me your name.
She smiled sadly, her eyes filling with tears so they appeared luminous in the silvery light cast by the moon. Instead of answering, she merely lifted her head to look up at the moon.
Then she was gone, and I was alone in the wasteland with only the mournful eye of the moon.
I sank to my knees and wept, my anguish was so complete. So, so many years had passed. Would I never see the end of these dark, lonely nights?
I sat in the grass for the rest of that night staring at the moon until the sun claimed the land and I was forced to flee from it and below to darkness.
I passed the mansion numerous times over the years. It stood abandoned, slowly decaying, the foliage that the two Negroes had tried to keep from devouring the place gradually rising up to dominate the area. No one ventured near it or the surrounding area now. And it lay as a grim reminder of the desolation and social ostracism that befell those that tried to go against the social order as the lawyer had done when he chose to let his conscience, and not his wallet, direct his path in life.
***
I did not see a vision of Luna for many years and it seemed all hope was lost. So why did I wait? Why did I continue to exist in that fashion year after year, page after page of this never-ending book? Because I had seen salvation. It was there in a pair of mysterious dark eyes and in those three simple words:
Wait for me.
It was like the siren’s call of long ago which led many a hapless sailor to their doom. And whether it led to life or death, I would continue to follow it for as long as it took for me to find her.
But after so long in this wilderness, this Lodebar I had been exiled to, I had all but lost hope. That was when I began to regret my harsh judgement of Auria, Onyx, and Emory. In my loneliness and despair, I longed for companionship, even if it was theirs. I did not know if Auria and Onyx had survived the fire, but I began making my way periodically back to the chapel in search of them. The plantation had new owners now and was once more home to many slaves who would be worked from morning till dusk for as long as they lived.
Auria would probably kill me if I came upon them, but at that stage it didn’t seem to matter so much. At least I would be free of this irrational belief in the vision of the darky girl and the love she seemed to have promised me. So I searched for Auria, but deep in the recesses of my heart and mind, I held on to the image of the darky girl and hoped that one day I would see her face again, if only for a moment. I would exist, wandering in this wilderness for all eternity if only I could see her face once more.