Z Diary 7

Z Diary 7 By S. Lei Pyke Late April I am Mary of Leeds, sometimes called Innocence. I can see by this diary that Janice has been keeping that she has been informing mortals about us. Not that it will matter in a few months anyway. And I will leave it to her choice to reveal what I will write. I would have it that she return to this, whether it is believed or not. I am fairly sure of her assessment—that most will account this as pure fiction. However, if things go the way that I am anticipating, it will soon matter, these events which humans will learn too late. Our way of life is already undone. And now, I am a spy in my own house. It makes me curse my bad planning. My flight has mutinied and abandoned me. I am not surprised. We are all, except for Sakura, older than the Human country we dwell in, and we are not currently bound by the need to coddle a fledgling. To them my judgments have been rash of late. I did not kill off the ghoul. I did not destroy Dominic. I invited other undead into the house. I suppose it was only a matter of time before they got over their need to amuse me, as after all though I am the oldest of them, I am only a part of their lives as their master. It does not hold the same connotation among mature vampires as it does for fledglings. Our free will, such as it is, becomes stronger over the years. Even before we put an end to the peace between us, I could not keep them here if they wished to leave. Though I orchestrated their option to mutiny, it hurts just a little that they actually leaped to that violent option rather than simply taking their leave. I am still healing a bit from the injuries they handed me in their determination. And so I let these grown children rebel, I let them think me weak, but only so that I can attempt the impossible.

And now, Caldwell Meyers has shown his true colors. He is a demon possessed abomination, and he has claimed my house after sensing our . . . argument. I don’t know how long I can last, hidden here, but I know that I have to do it for Janice and Abe and Tony. I have to free them from him. But I will have to do it alone. I was blindsided by Cal. He hid himself well. My flight would not stand for this latest betrayal. They have their own children that they set free in order to follow me, and now, I suppose the time has come for them to assemble their own flights once again. I believe I will continue this diary for a time. Humans will know about us soon enough. Perhaps long enough for them to realize our value. I hear on the short wave radio I keep about the spot outbreaks that are already happening. Here in Harlan, in Dubai, in Hong Kong, in Moscow, in New Delhi, in Baghdad, in Hanoi. . .minor incidents that will only grow. It is enough that the governments are keeping this under wraps. Typical human behavior. I think that this new strain is more subtle, or there would already be riots. I am, as always, a sucker for science. You do not understand the liberation that it promised us. I was there when the old human masters were there—Newton, Galileo, daVinci. I sat in the beer halls and listened to the philosophers. I even slept in the beds of numerous students of Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. How could I not? With the promise of Empirical science meant the end to our dependence upon mythology and magic. It gave us a hope of freedom from the unknown, and an escape from the inevitability of our damnation before the creator. With it we could emerge, not as the monsters of legend but as a legitimate species. We did not care if what animates us was parasitic, symbiotic, bacterial, viral. . . the product of alien gene splicing, radiation from extraterrestrial bodies, anything but as the inheritors of

an ancient contract with long hidden, powerful creatures beyond the comprehension of mortal kind or dark pacts with evil entities in locked in rebellion with an almighty creator that ensured our eternal damnation. I haven’t yet given up hope. Demons, though. . .they are real and they claim to have made our kind to mock the Almighty. I don’t personally believe a word of it. Why in the world would any sane being believe a creature that is known even in mortal circles to be a consummate liar? Especially when they say that they created something when their entire beings are, and you must excuse the expression, hell bent upon their crusade against order, humanity and sometimes against the very concept of life itself! No, there must be a scientific explanation for everything that we are. It must be, because only science can tell us that we are innocent until proven guilty, that there is no such thing as good and evil, that perhaps we are correct and right in our methods, that after all we are not human so the laws of humanity do not apply. That the agent that makes us what we are removes or changes our DnA. . .That we are merely slave to our natures by right of genetics, just as humans are, and not unholy passions at all. That even the demons can be explained if they would but subject themselves to testing. That there is no heaven, there is no hell, there is only right now, and the unknowable, but superficially discoverable depth and breadth of what has been. But now, I guard my thoughts and my power, not only to escape Meyers, but to protect myself from despair. It is not that I regret my condition, but that after a thousand years of despair, it is warming to have some sort of hope. . .or at least an excuse to deceive ourselves. No. It must be hope. Hope and faith in science, as if it were a religion that could offer such things.

Perhaps you see the conflict? We are creatures of conflict. We are consummate creatures of contradiction. The strange entity that escapes the fabric of human logic. Even Janice can be explained away, but not the essence of what we are. Or maybe not. Maybe we are entirely explainable, and I will that it be so, or maybe I am as my flight condemns me, an insane fool who has lived too long for her own good. Many of my kind are scientists now, as rabid and progressive as the alchemists of my time, and no longer dogged by the yoke of the church. I thought that empirical science had finally gotten clever enough to make this strain of undead without demon influence, but I have never been so badly wrong. When I found to my dismay that Meyers exhibited the classic symptoms of a ghoul, I should have known. I should have suspected him when it was already well known that his partner was more demon than undead these days. I should have picked up the fact that the Scions of Theiss were the first to respond to their need to escape. They serve the Morning Star, as always, though they believe they serve the higher power. It is like the man who bows before the shining light without looking first to see the figure next to the switch. It is still possible to save them, I believe, especially Janice. I am quite fond of that girl. I have been reading her letters and I believe that we have done some irreparable harm to her way of thinking. I have noticed that she has come to the conclusion and acceptance of the two words “evil” and “undead.” Her early letters made a mockery of those terms, but now, I think she starts to believe them. These two terms which have dogged me for all of my long existence should not continue in hers. I fear that she will regret killing, that she will lose that essence needed in a predator such as herself. That is the essence which I have fought to attain and hold these many years, that utter burial of our human morality. She had it when she

came to us. She was an innocent predator, unfettered by lingering tradition or morality. No. . .now that I think about it I must be honest. she is not like us, a predator, but a consummate scavenger—a hyena to our cheetah, able to exist both in the world of predators and to easily slip through the world of humans without much notice. Nobody cared about the rotten flesh she and her brothers craved. Nobody noticed her unless, like the hyena, she stalked in places where there was not yet death. She is a fledgling of science—the essence of innocence. This is why I like her term, why I find her to be so much like myself, the term that science has given to her kind: reanimated—a reanimate. Yes. That is a good word. Science has no term for undeath or unlife. The very concept is an absurdity. Rebirth? Inadequate to our needs. I want to be called a reanimate as well, all of our kind should be. Reanimated. By god what a perfect word for what we are. It has no pretensions, only the eventual promise of truth. By whatever means animates us, we are dead flesh brought back to motion and purpose. There is nothing but clinical precision in that concept. And then, we are not dead by the terms of science, but blessedly, differently, mysteriously alive. After all, do we not eat? Do we not function? Do we not even procreate, though asexually? The definition of life in science is so very, refreshingly simple. Soon, maybe one day, there will be no mystery. And then. . .and then an end to the darkness. Humans can cure cancer in time. We will cure our allergy to sunlight, our diurnal hibernation cycles. Yes I say hibernation, because it is much deeper and more serious than sleep; almost an affliction, a shadow of death itself, as if it were some personified thing that leadens our limbs and tacks our eyes upon the promise of dawn. We have even more time than humans, in an odd way. We never have to pass on our research the way that they do. After all, no

vampire has ever reached a natural conclusion to their lives. Our processes do not degrade. Properly trained upon a goal, we do not feel the stretch of time at all. In that we claim superiority over all other organic life, (I do not include the demons, who are not organic at all, of that I am fairly sure) but we are not immortal—that concept is as absurd as undeath. It is only that one day, like all predators, we will fail in our hunt and die, like the lion upon the horns of the buffalo, or we fail to separate ourselves from our human nature and go insane. No, we cannot forget that we were once human, any more than humans can forget that their ancestors were once insect, fruit and nut eaters and not omnivores at all. Their organ structure betrays them, just as our form betrays us. Ah, see here, trying to explain myself away as if I could, one long drawn out excuse to delude myself. Maybe I am a victim of religion, what Marx would call the “opiate of the masses,” an eternal addict, if you will, locked in the darkness and superstition that came with being a child in England of the first millennium, and reinforced through the centuries as a supposedly undead, theoretically immortal monster. Still, some part of me knows that I delude myself, that I chose to become the eternal monster and that I must accept the consequences of my self imposed damnation. Oh, yes, I chose, and I will never regret that choice. I must not, if I am to maintain my sanity, my separation between the human origin of me, and the creature I am now. No, I have never once, in all my centuries, wished to be anything other than what I am. Or perhaps I delude myself about that too. But. . .Janice. . .Abe. . .Tony. . . they did not choose, and yet they have accepted their biologically inexplicable lives with even more candor than a thousand of my own fedglings would even in three centuries. At least I do not think they suffer from regret. Janice, now

that I really read what she has written about her past, surely does not. About discovering that she, in her first frenzy, had consumed the remains her own children? Initial horror, yes. Revulsion at the initial realization between the monster she had become and the human she had been, of course, but no real regrets. I am not human anymore, but that still seems troubling to me. There are things in my long life that I regret most thouroughly, but she, they, do not at all. The way janice writes it, that is as if there was no concern, as if it were only natural. Absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything about them is human and inhuman at the same time, even more so than we are. I cannot contact their minds. I cannot know apart from what they tell me, just what tumbles in their heads. To vampires that is astoundingly frustrating. To me, spoiled for a thousand years without a veil shrouding any organic thought, that peaked my curiosity. All predators are innately curious. I want to fathom her candor, discover how I might apply it to my own existence, and through it live longer and fuller than ever before. And that is why I hate Dominic for his violation of her. Of someone whom I account as innocent to suffer that violation of individuality . . . in my life I have done similar things to thousands, maybe millions of men and women in my existence, but seeing her at his mercy, of finally sensing every thought as she absorbed his blood and manifested his traits, that tearing of the veil between their clinical, basal world and our grudgingly magical, musty and mysterious one. . . What saved his life was Cal; ultimately, spotting the hemolytic disease which she gave to him. How ironic, and how fitting for a vampire to succumb to such a disease. I will enjoy his suffering. It sort of is a relief that he is diseased. Ah, it makes us more alive for all of his pain.

It is the promise that we are alive and not undead or immortal after all. And you know, some part of me rejoices that it was him to experiment with their blood and not me. I have no doubt that one day I would have tried to seduce one of them in my own experimentation. I wonder what it would do. Dominic is not like me. He craved death, and he received it. I crave something else, something that humans and animals of the known world can give, and something I don’t think they are capable of anymore. But Dominic is now closer to them than to us. Down there in the cells we use to house the fledglings, he rots where he can see everything, be a part of everything. He can be next to the demon—the demon named Paishel wearing the garment of Caldwell Meyers while I am locked in my self imposed imprisonment to him. I did not leave the house when I was told. I do not follow the instruction of ghouls. They are an older race than we, but not a nobler one. When the demon showed his eyes to me, though, oh, oh! I could not let my flight stay. They did not know, none have ever faced such a creature in all of their long lives, but I have. My own sire was killed by one of these. I guess it is fate, if such a thing exists, that I, too, am destined to face one. Can I defeat it though? There is an ancient saying that only a Human may kill a monster, but this I will contend. I was human once. Perhaps some long buried part of me still remembers. I endured their mutiny; let it be their own idea, knowing that it was for the best. Though I am here, I know I am a fool for even bothering. No vampire can hope to face a demon. Something about our transformation changes that quality—the unique quality that humans have that allows them to repel, if not destroy demons. No. . .I waited for him to be distracted and I snuck into my house. I hope to free them and run, but they are in its thrall. Paishel would have me or kill me if he willed, but I have hidden myself well. Only my damnable

need to drink will betray me, but I am willing to try to stave that eternal necessity. It has been a long time since I have been face to face with a possessed undead. It is not that demons couldn’t just inhabit our bodies, you know, we have no protection from them the way humans do. We cannot cast them out, we cannot harm them. We can destroy the shells they dwell in, but that does not matter. Most of the time, it just makes things worse. It is usually more prudent to simply hide and wait until it gets bored or until some human discovers its nature and decides to be a hero. It is risky to tackle something that could hijack your entire being without as much as a by-your-leave. It is always shocking to see this, let alone be of a mind to face it. It actually goes against our every instinct to fight them. Most of us usually run. The truth is that demons do not usually bother with us, though sometimes they hunt us as we hunt humans. The traditional explanation is that we bore them. Since we are already condemned by our very nature and because of our nature as destroyers of humankind, there would be no point in possessing us. Besides, their abilities override our own. A possessed undead is no better than a possessed human, really, and sometimes much weaker. I have to know what it wants, what it is trying to do. Possessed, Meyers’s mind is a whirl of guarded silence. It is not the stony silence of Janice’s mind, but the carefully practiced warding similar to that which I use to guard my own thoughts from others. Naturally, it is more potent and more controlled than mine could ever be. And now listen to me, drunk on the possibilities, when I should be railing against the inevitabilities! It is coming, these plagues. As if the writings of the end were true, they will come, and humans, as usual, have prevented the only method that they had to protect themselves, form stopping its advance. Never before have I needed to protect humanity so much. Never before have I wanted to.

They would rob me of my rightful prey. They would end the lives of all of my children to so diminish the human population, and yet I would not begin to fathom the end of my kind at the fate of mortal man. We are all tied—predator to prey. And so I must, beyond all reason, try to be the hero, because there is no human who can. And the fate of those three will determine the outcome of this coming disaster, of that I am fairly sure. They are aware, but unable to free themselves from the demon that has overtaken their master. None of my kind would be able to act and comprehend what I face, or wish to face what I can see before my eyes, and so I must act alone. I cannot possibly hope to entangle a living human in this conflict. The threat is immediate in its current secrecy, and there is no alternative in my mind. I have lived a long enough life.