The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) Read Online Free Page B

is difficult to explain why I feel
insecure, why I doubt him. Perhaps it is because he has grown cold and distant,
and hard toward me in ways. His affection is mute, if not dead, since nothing
is left for him. We do not talk about it, and I do not want to bring it up. I
am afraid if I raise the subject he will simply agree with me and that will be
all of it. And I am not ready for that. For now, the memory of his becoming
mine consoles me hourly. If Byron cannot await me in the realms of Hades, or at
the gates of Paradise, this moment shall be our eternity.
    The gratitude he showed me at his vampiric
birth is still a comfort. After I gifted him with my power, he took my hand in
his and kissed it. He thanked me with a sincerity I had never known before. Few
show appreciation for their transformation since regret is common. At the
beginning, self-pity lingers and the novice may easily forget the miserableness
of his mortal life, causing him to mourn a chimera. But not you,
Byron—not you, my beloved. You caressed my hand at your revival, and
touched me as though I were a god who redeemed you from hell. You understood
this privileged life, this gift of immortality, from the start. You knew even
before I came for you that the vampire is superior to all other life forms—human,
especially. I will never forget that first night when you were still a
bloodhungry man and I made you mine without a second thought because I knew you
were worthy of me. From that first show of gratitude, my beloved, to this
moment now, I have not lived without you. For a century and a half, we have
been lovesick and debaucherous in our exceptional union, and you, my darling,
forever the scientist, have explored your gifts with fervor. We could never
resist the occasional bout of torture, though most were in the name of science,
were they not?
    When the outbreak began, in fact, Byron was
one of the first to experiment on the sick. “There is a cure,” he had said. I
knew if that were true, he would find it. “I think it is simply a rapid growth
of cells that attack the nervous system and eventually contaminate the brain,
spreading almost instantly, like some accelerated version of Proteus syndrome.”
    “My darling, I am not quite as gifted in the
disease department,” I had said. “Proteus syndrome?”
    “It is not a disease so much as an atypical
bone growth caused by tumors. But this affliction seems to be developing on and
around the spine and causing a type of deformation to the brain that makes it
defunct.”
    “If they are braindead,” I had said, “how can
they function?”
    “They are not braindead so much as
automated.”
    “But what makes them desire to spread their
affliction?” By then we had seen the bloodless attack the unafflicted and turn
them, as they say.
    He smiled at me and winked. “Man at his very
root is steered by malice, is he not?”
    At the time, Byron believed the plague was
not simply a physical contamination but also a moral one. The bloodless were
driven by a desire to find company for their misery. Like the fallen angel,
they wanted to bring a barrage of cohorts down with them.
    “It is as if they suffer a social disorder,”
he had said. “Some kind of narcissism that impels them to make reproductions of
themselves.”
    We would have never called them bloodless if
they had not wreaked havoc on our way of life. The affliction spread at
incalculable speeds, taking only several weeks for the plague to be considered
a full-fledged pandemic.
    Byron performed dissections on the few
bloodless we could get our hands on. At the beginning, when we were still
feeding easily and Italy had only a few reported cases, he insisted on
experimenting. If there were scientific findings to be had, Byron would have
them. Test subjects were not difficult to acquire, the stink of the bloodless
was easy enough to sniff out. As I have said, when they are not in a swarm,
they are harmless. A well nourished vampire is far stronger