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“Don’t be afraid. Start at the beginning.”
“I—”
Daniel paused. Something strange was happening.
“I don’t remember the beginning.”
He didn’t remember where he was either. There were eyes watching him. The room was dark, or his vision was dark. His fingers were cold, stiff and shaking.
“Don’t be afraid.”
Daniel felt warm, soothed, like sinking into a warm bath.
“Just start.”
Daniel could do that.
Alice was resplendent in purple. She was pretty in a strange sort of way, her nose was too big for her face and her bottom teeth were crooked. She had scarring on her cheeks from bad acne when she was a teenager. When she was standing still, she had a quality like a painting or a sculpture, a drama inherent in her flesh. When she moved, laughed, shook her head, she had a presence that filled a room and drew eyes towards her.
It was her directness that Daniel enjoyed. That enigmatic pull was interesting, at first he’d wanted to interview her, but as a journalist she wasn’t a challenge. She answered every question precisely, laser focused on the truth. He admired her. He had become accustomed to guessing, questioning, sleuthing to find half answers, and Alice would always tell him exactly what she thought, what she felt.
“I’m pregnant. Three months. It’s yours. I haven’t had sex with anyone other than you for a year.” She served it up just as everything else she had ever told him, plain, clear, and inarguable.
Daniel was a boy from a shitty little city in America, and there was only one option for boys like him that impregnated girls overseas.
The ring was light and small and delicate, and it was supposed to change his life forever. It was sort of funny, the way that it was funny when something didn’t make sense. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to marry Alice; he admired Alice. He liked to go places with her, watch the room’s eyes turn towards her. The sex was good. He thought she’d make a good mom, better than he’d be as a father, that he already knew, but he could do this one thing right, he could marry her and then she wouldn’t be the worst sort of social pariah that Modesto could conjure up: a single mother.
“Oh, Daniel.” He had never heard Alice be pitying before. And it was that, the “oh,” that preceded her rejection that hurt the most. Like she didn’t think he could handle her telling him flat out, when that was what he had always liked most about her. That she had to lessen the blow made it that much more incomprehensible, and inevitable.
His proposal to the mother of his child turned down in the city of love. What a fucking joke.
“What else Daniel?”
What else…
There was a man at the wedding that Daniel didn’t know. Or, that wasn’t right, there were many men, and women, that he didn’t know. He hadn’t met most of Alice’s family before the wedding, and that was to be expected. Alice was hardly close enough with all her extended family for them to be meeting without an event like a wedding to bring them all together. And there were plus ones that nobody knew, except whatever guest had brought them along. It was incredibly normal that there were people he didn’t know at his own wedding.
The man that was standing silent and still as a headstone by the abandoned, half-eaten cake, was someone he knew that he didn’t know, or he didn’t know that he knew him. It was giving him a headache. Or maybe that was a premature hangover setting in as he threw back champagne like he was hollow. He wasn’t sure where his new wife was, and he could only feel guilty that he didn’t care. Most of the guests were on the dancefloor, and most were at least as drunk as him. The grandparents had headed out, it was friends, cousins, and some particularly vivacious aunts left.
Who was this man? He was dressed in a lovely suit, the purple shirt he wore looked like it was made of silk. Was this a plus-one who had been abandoned? Daniel didn’t think he’d seen him at the ceremony, but he’d been in such a state of panic he wasn’t sure he’d seen anyone, just pew after pew of unidentifiable faces. Was he crashing their reception? There wasn’t even an open bar, just wine and champagne Alice’s parents had paid for.
Daniel skirted the edges of the room towards him, avoiding any group of chatting guests that might hold him back with their soppy congratulations. He landed on the other side of the table, and reached a hand over the remains of the cake towards the man.
“Hey, I didn’t catch your name.” Daniel grinned sloppily, holding his hand out.
The man looked at him. His eyes were orange. He tilted his head the slightest amount, and the room felt like it tilted with him. Daniel’s grin slid off his face and he dropped his hand to the tables edge to hold himself upright. He blinked stars out of his vision and when his eyes focused again the man was gone.
He dropped his eyes to the hacked up cake. Why had he come over here? He wasn’t hungry. It was too sweet anyways, saccharine. It left his mouth sore.
The orange eyes in front of him didn’t blink. He reached up a feeble shaking hand and it was grasped in one that was firm and cold, like a marble statue that had been covered in skin.
He retched and another hand stroked his face, his hair, the back of his neck. There was nothing coming up and he gasped in air.
“You’re doing well Daniel. Is there more?”
“Of course there’s more you psycho.”
The man laughed, indulgently, and Daniel coughed out a weak sound that could have been a laugh if you heard it at the right angle.
Armand belonged in the museum. The light from their stolen flashlights lit up the planes and angles of his face, making his cheekbones sharper, his jawline firmer, transforming his model looks into the work of an old master.
“Do you have a favourite?” Armand was gesturing to the oils on the wall. Renaissance portraits. The only one Daniel recognized was a Rembrandt.
“None of them are as beautiful as you.” He could be romantic, occasionally.
Armand smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes.
“Some of them are me.”
“What seriously?”
“Yes.”
“Which ones?”
Armand pointed to one of a white boy in a purple robe, with a shepherd’s staff and a pleading expression.
“That’s supposed to be you?”
“Yes. I modelled for it for weeks. He was quite proud of the finished product.”
Daniel wasn’t sure what to say. He guessed it was normal for the time to paint only white men, but Armand seemed to go somewhere when he talked about it that Daniel wasn’t convinced he would be able to follow. Instead, he tried to deflect with a joke.
“I always knew you should be a model.” But it fell flat. Armand was lost to the past, staring up at that huge painting. Daniel felt incredibly small and young, an insignificant boy whose lopsided charm and shoddily written interviews would never stand the test of time like these paintings, like this ancient god standing next to him.
He really does belong in this museum.
Daniel watched Armand, unmoving, inhuman, staring into the face that was him, his face, painted over 400 years ago. Not with me, whispered the little voice in Daniel’s head, the one that lived in the real world, not in this fantasy he and Armand had been constructing together. This fantastical world of vampires and private islands, of magical blood that made him higher than any substance from the real world, where a stupid boy from Modesto could be companions with an ethereal, ancient monster.
This time the pain was so bad he couldn’t breathe. And when he stopped breathing, he couldn’t start again. But it wasn’t making the room get darker, the room was getting brighter, shimmering. The dark hair of the man in front of him was illuminated like a halo.
Panic gripped him. Something wasn’t right, why wasn’t he breathing?
“Shh,” the man’s accent was difficult to place, an amalgamation. “Don’t be afraid. What happened next?”
I don’t think this is the right order.
Daniel was surprised the man didn’t respond to the thought, he just kept stroking Daniel’s face and hair and making soft shushing noises, like Daniel was a small child.
This is the room I am going to die in.
20 years old and foolhardy, Daniel had thought with a vague, unexamined certainty, that he was going to live forever. All of the drugs and the drinking, the going home with strange men and walking alone at night past almost corpses and nearly killers, had steadied him. Surely if nothing had happened yet it never would. Stupid.
The world would exist without him. It felt impossible but it was so real, every breath he took felt sharper than it ever had, tangible, like ice water sliding into his lungs. This was nothing like a nightmare; he felt the chair under him, the sticky stale warmth of the room, the cool dry grip of his murderer’s hands. He had met a vampire, two in fact, and now he was going to die.
He did not want to die. The foundation of life was to reject death, it was deeper than his desires for stories, for sex, for drugs. It was primal and it screamed wordlessly in his lungs, his liver, his spleen. He couldn’t accept this monster’s decision. The monster knew, of course it knew, and it didn’t care, he was a lamb and the man in front of him was no man at all. But he had to say it, to make it real.
“I don’t want to—”
“To die? On that item, I think I know something you don’t.”
He whimpered, and the world dissolved.
This is the room I am going to die in. Again.
Daniel choked on a laugh. It was hysterically funny somehow, that he was back here, back in this monster’s arms, and he was dying. He was dead. Or was he?
“Speak beloved. Your mind is closed to me forever.” Those words, elegant with an edge of desperation.
“Armand,” Daniel speech slurred, as the room shimmered.
Daniel’s eyes focused on the bright orange irises staring down at him. He could see tiny individual points of gold glittering in them alongside streaks of rich, black coffee. It was hard to focus on speech when the world had taken on such fascinating appeal. When hunger seized at his stomach like nothing before, nauseating in its intensity. Still, he had had his primal urge to live overwritten with a desire to seek out the truth over 50 years ago. It had taken him this far.
“Is that all?” He asked.
Armand’s face swirled with colour. His skin wasn’t just brown, it was earth, water, sky, fire, it shimmered and glowed. The blood on his teeth was strawberries, wine, sex, birth, slaughter, desire. The sensory input Daniel was experiencing was outside of human senses, he had tuned in to a layer of reality that had always been there, just out of reach. Armand’s smile was the moonrise, the howl of the pack, the safety of houses, and a million things Daniel hadn’t seen yet, stretching out into the future for millennia.
“No. It will come back in time.” Armand’s lips shaped the words, musical, sweet, terrible.
Daniel reached his hand up, the movement shifting the air particles, sending them swirling. He placed his palm on Armand’s cheek. His murderer, his maker, and so much more he was only beginning to understand.
“Start at the beginning.”