George Martin - Fevre Dream

On the third day I grew clever. It was as if my fever had broken. I was on the downhill side now, becoming myself again. I could feel the thirst waning. I called my maid to the door, and told her it was over, that she could let me out. She refused, and said I told her to keep me confined for three full nights, as indeed I had. I laughed and admitted that was true, but said the fit had come and gone, that I knew it would not come again for another month. Still she would not unbar the door. I did not rave at her. I said I understood, praised her for following orders so well. I asked her to stay and talk, since I was lonely in my prison. She agreed, and we talked for almost an hour. I was calm and articulate, charming even, very reconciled to another night inside. We spoke so reasonably that soon she admitted that I sounded quite like myself. I told her what a good girl she was to be so conscientious. I enlarged on her merits and my affection for her. Finally, I asked her to marry me when I was free again.

She opened the door. She looked so happy, Abner. So very happy and alive. She was full of life. She came to kiss me, and I put my arms around her and pulled her to me. We kissed several times. Then my lips trailed down to her neck, and I found the artery, and opened it. I.. . fed… for a long time. I was so thirsty, and her life was so sweet. But when I let her go and she staggered back from me, she was still alive, just barely, bled white and dying but still conscious. The look in her eyes, Abner. The look in her eyes.

Of all the things I have ever done, that was most terrible. She will be with me always. The look in her eyes.

Afterward my despair was boundless. I tried to kill myself. I bought a silver knife with a handle fashioned in the shape of a cross-the superstitions still had a grip on me, you see. And I cut my wrists open, and lay down in a warm bath to die. I healed. I fell on my sword in the manner of the ancient Romans. I healed. I was learning more of my abilities every day. I mended so quickly, with only a brief time of pain. My blood clotted virtually instantaneously, no matter how gaping the wound I inflicted. Whatever I might be, I was clearly a wonder.

Finally I hit on the way. Outside my house, I attached two great iron chains to the wall. By night I donned the manacles, and threw the key as far as I was able. A very long way. I waited for the dawn. The sun was worse than I remembered. It burned and blinded me. Everything blurred. My skin was on fire. I think I began to scream. I know I closed my eyes. I was out there for hours, closer and closer to death. There was nothing in me except guilt.

And then, somehow, in the fever of my death, I decided to live. How, why, I cannot tell you. But it seemed to me that I had always loved life, in myself and in others. That was why health and beauty and youth drew me so. I loathed myself because I gave death to the world, and yet here I was, killing once more, though this time the victim was myself. I could not wash out my sins with more blood, more death, I thought. To atone, I must live, bring life and beauty and hope back into the world to take the place of all that I had taken. I remembered my father’s vanished servants then. There were others of my race in the world. Vampires, werewolves, warlocks, whatever they might be, they were out there in the night. How did they deal with the red thirst, I wondered. If only I could find them. I could trust my own kind where I could not trust humans. We could help each other conquer the evil that consumed us. I could learn from them.

I decided I would not die.

The chains were very strong. I had seen to that, fearful that I would seek escape from pain and death. But now I found a strength in my resolve greater than anything I had ever known, even when the thirst was driving me on. I determined to break the chains, to pull them from the stone walls where I had fastened them. I pulled and strained and yanked. They would not give. They were strong chains. I had been in the sun for hours and hours. What kept me conscious I cannot say. My skin was black and burned. The pain had grown so terrible I scarcely felt it any more. Still I worked at those chains.

Finally one of them broke free. The left. The ring set into the wall came out in a crumble of masonry. I was half free. But I was sick unto death, having strange visions. I knew I would faint soon, and once I slipped to the ground there would be no getting up again, ever. And the right chain seemed as strong and secure as when I had begun my struggle, an endless time before.

The chain never gave, Abner. Yet I won free, and sought the safety of my cool black cellars, where I lay for more than a week, dreaming and burning and writhing in pain, but healing all the while. I turned on myself, you see. I gnawed through my own wrist and left my right hand lying there while I slipped the stump through the manacle.

When I regained consciousness, a week later, I had a hand again. It was soft and small, half-formed, and it hurt. It hurt terribly. But in time the skin hardened. Then the hand swelled up, and the skin cracked and split, oozing a thick pale fluid. When it dried and peeled away, the flesh beneath was healthier. Three times that happened. The process took more than three weeks, but when it was over you would never have known that anything had happened to my hand at all. I was astounded.

That was in the year 1812, which marked a turning point in my life.

When I had recovered my strength, I found I had emerged from the ordeal with a great resolve; to change my way of life and that of my people, to free us from what my father had called the bane of the red thirst, to enable us to restore the life and beauty we drank from the world. To do this, I had first to seek out others of my kind, and the only others I knew of were my father’s vanished servants. Yet a search for them was not possible just then. England warred on the Empire of the French, and there was no commerce between the two. The enforced delay did not trouble me. I knew I had all the years I might require.

As I waited, I took up the study of medicine. Nothing was known of my people, of course. Our very existence was legend. But there was much to learn of your race, so like and yet unlike my own. I befriended a number of doctors, a leading surgeon of the time, several faculty members of a well-known medical school. I read medical texts, old and new. I delved into chemistry, biology, anatomy, even alchemy, searching for insights. I built my own laboratory for experimentation, in the very room I had once used as my ill-fated prison. Now, when I took a life-as I did each month-I would carry the body back with me whenever I could, study it, dissect it. How I yearned for a cadaver of my own species, Abner, so I might see the differences!

In my second year of study, I cut a finger from my left hand. I knew it would regenerate. I wanted flesh of my flesh for analysis and dissection.

A severed finger was not sufficient to answer a hundredth of my questions, but the pain was nonetheless worthwhile, for what I learned. Bone, flesh, and blood all showed significant differences from the human. The blood was paler, like the flesh, and lacking several elements found in human blood. The bones, on the other hand, contained more of these elements. They were at once stronger and more flexible than human bone. Oxygen, that miracle gas of Priestley and Lavoisier, was present in blood and muscle tissue to a much greater degree than in comparable samples taken from your race.

I did not know what to make of any of this, but it made me feverish with theories. It seemed to me that perhaps the lacks in my blood had some relation to my drive to drink the blood of others. That month, when the thirst had come and gone and I had taken my victim, I bled myself and studied the sample. The composition of my blood had changed! Somehow I had converted the blood of my victim into my own, thickening and enriching it, at least for a time. Thereafter I bled myself daily. Study showed that my blood thinned each day. Perhaps it was when the balance reached a certain critical point that the red thirst came on, I thought.