George Martin - Fevre Dream

My supposition left many questions unanswered. Why was animal blood insufficient to quell the thirst? Or even human blood taken from a corpse? Did it lose some property in death? Why had the thirst not come upon me until I was twenty? What of all the years before? I did not know any of the answers, nor how to find them, but now at least I had a hope, a starting point. I began to make potions.

What can I tell you of that? It took years, endless experiments, study. I used human blood, animal blood, metals and chemicals of all sorts. I cooked blood, dried it, drank it raw, mixed it with wormwood, brandy, with foul-smelling medicinal preservatives, with herbs, salts, irons. I drank a thousand potions to no avail. Twice I made myself sick, so my stomach churned and heaved until I vomited forth the concoction I had downed. Always it was fruitless. Potions and jars of blood and drugs I could consume by the hundreds, but still the red thirst drove me forth to hunt by night. I killed without guilt now, knowing that I was striving for an answer, that I would conquer my bestial nature yet. I did not despair, Abner.

And finally, in the year 1815, I found my answer.

Some of my mixtures had worked better than others, you see, and those I had continued to work with, improving them, making this change or addition, then that one, patiently, trying one after the other and all the time searching out new approaches as well. The compound I finally produced had as its base sheep’s blood in large measure, mixed with a strong portion of alcohol which acted to preserve its properties, I believe. Yet that description oversimplifies vastly. There is a good part of laudanum in it as well, for calm and sweet visions, plus potassium salts and iron and wormwood, and various herbs and alchemical preparations long disused. For three years I had searched for it, and one night in the summer of 1815 I drank it down, as I had so many other potions before. That night the red thirst did not come upon me.

The night following I felt the beginnings of the hot restlessness which marks the onset of the thirst, and I poured a glass of my drink and sipped at it, half-afraid my triumph would be a dream, illusory. But the feeling faded. I did not thirst that night either, nor go abroad to hunt and kill.

At once I set to work, making the fluid in large quantities. It is not always easy to get it exactly right, and if the mixture is not exact, it has no effect. My labor was painstaking, however. You have seen the result, Abner. My special drink. It is never far from me. Abner, I accomplished what none of my race had ever done before, though I did not know it then, in that hot flush of triumph. I had begun a new epoch for my people, and yours as well. Darkness without fear, an end to hunter and prey, to hiding and despair. No more nights of blood and degradation. Abner, I conquered the red thirst!

I know now that I was extraordinarily fortunate. My understanding was superficial and limited. I thought the differences between our peoples lay solely in the blood. Later I learned how wrong that was. I felt that excess of oxygen was somehow responsible for the way the fevers of the red thirst coursed through my veins. Today I think it more likely that oxygen gives my race its strength, and helps it heal. Much of what I thought I knew in 1815 I know now for nonsense. But it does not matter, for my solution was no nonsense.

I have killed since, Abner, I will not deny that. But in the fashion humans kill, for human reasons. And since that night in Scotland in 1815, I have not tasted blood, or felt the ravages of the red thirst.

I did not stop learning, not then or ever. Knowledge has a beauty to me, and I rejoice in all beauty, and there was still much to know of myself and my people. But with my great discovery the emphasis of the quest changed, and I began to search for others of my race. At first I employed agents and letters. Later, when peace had come, I traveled on the continent myself. Thus I discovered how my father had ended. More importantly, in old provincial records I found where he had come from-or at least where he claimed to have come from. I followed the trail through the Rhineland, through Prussia and Poland. To the Poles he was a dimly remembered, much-feared recluse their great-grandfathers had whispered about. Some said he had been a Teutonic Knight. Others pointed me farther east, to the Urals. It made no difference; the Teutonic Knights were centuries dead, and the Urals were a great range of mountains, too vast for me to search blindly.

At a dead end, I decided to take a risk. Wearing a great silver ring and a cross, which I hoped would be sufficient to dispel any talk or superstition, I began to inquire openly about vampires, werewolves, and other such legends. Some laughed at me or mocked me, a few crossed themselves and slunk away, but most gladly told the simpleminded Englishman the folk tales he wanted to hear, in exchange for a drink or a meal. From their stories I took directions. It was never easy. Years passed while I searched. I learned Polish, Bulgar, some Russian. I read papers in a dozen languages, looking for accounts of death that sounded like the red thirst. Twice I was forced to return to England, to brew more of my drink and give some attention to my affairs.

And finally, they found me.

I was in the Carpathians, in a rude country inn. I had been asking questions, and word of my inquiries had passed from mouth to mouth. Tired and despondent, and beginning to feel the first twinges of the thirst, I had returned to my room early, well before dawn. I was sitting before a crackling fire, sipping my drink, when I heard a clatter that at first I thought was the storm rattling the frost-rimed windows. I turned to look-the room was dark but for the blaze in the hearth-and the window was opened from outside, and there outlined against the blackness and the snow and the stars was a man, standing on the sill. He came inside easy as a cat, making no noise as he landed, a cold wind whipping around him from the winter that howled outside. He was dark, but his eyes burned, Abner, they burned. “You are curious about vampires, Englishman,” he whispered in passable English as he shut the windows softly behind him.

It was a frightening moment, Abner. Perhaps it was the chill from outside that filled the room and made me tremble, but I think not. I saw this stranger as so many of your people had seen me, before I took them and feasted on their life’s blood; dark and hot-eyed and terrible, a shadow with teeth that moved with a sure grace and spoke in a sinister whisper. As I started to rise from my chair, he moved forward into the light. I saw his nails. They were claws, grown five inches long, the ends black and sharp. Then I looked up and saw his face. And it was a face I had known in childhood, and as I looked on it again the name came to me as well. “Simon,” I said.

He stopped. Our eyes met.

You have looked into my eyes, Abner. You have seen the power in them, I think, and perhaps other things as well, darker things. So it is with all of our race. Mesmer wrote of animal magnetism, of a strange force that resides in all living things, in some more strongly than others. I have seen this force in humans. In war, two officers may order their men to the same foolhardy course. One will be killed for his troubles by his own troops. The second, using the same words in the same situation, will compel his men to follow him willingly into certain death. Bonaparte had the power in great measure, I think. But our race, we have it most of all. It resides in our voices, and especially in our eyes. We are hunters, and with our eyes we can captivate and quiet our natural prey, bend them to our will, sometimes even compel them to assist in their own slaughter.

I knew none of this then. All I knew was Simon’s eyes, the heat of them, the rage and suspicion there. I could feel the thirst burning within him, and the sight of it woke my own long-buried bloodlust dimly, like calling to like until I was afraid. I could not look away. Nor could he. We faced each other silently, moving but slightly in a wary circle, eyes locked. My glass fell and shattered on the floor.