Jacob, p.7
Jacob, page 7
Or did he? Did he throw himself into the center of it? Or did he hide away in some dark corner of the world where he wouldn’t be discovered? A place where he could feed at will?
How often did he feed? And how did he choose his … victims?
I suppose I should feel afraid, but I don’t. I passed fear a long time ago. Now, all that’s left is—
Jacob.
He leans back, breaking the contact. The waiter has filled our glasses again. I hadn’t noticed. I grab mine, not for wine, but for retreat. I’m as exhausted as if I’ve just run a marathon. Not physically exhausted—emotionally. As if we’ve just had the most intense sexual intimacy possible.
“What was that? What did you do?”
Jacob smiles. “I looked at you. That’s how Monsieur used to look at me. Call it the charmfield. The sparkle zone. Whatever. You feel it, yes? We are closer now.”
Slowly, I catch my breath. I study him intensely. And realize—there isn’t anything he could ask that I would say no to. If he asked me to bare my neck, I would. If he asked me to sleep with him, I would. If he offered me eternity—
I would.
But no. I’m not ready yet. He has to know that. He doesn’t want to make a monster.
“So, are you satisfied? Can we continue?”
He spreads his hands wide. “Ask.”
I put my glass down, I pop open my laptop, slide it into place. “Tell me. You were at school. Monsieur’s letters stopped. You came back to Seattle.”
Jacob nods. He steeples his fingers in front of his chin, remembering, considering, choosing where to begin. “I enjoyed the university, much more than I expected to. It was as much an adventure as our regular evening discussions—but this was a much larger exposure than those quiet focused chats. This time, this place, there were all those learned professors, and their aides, the graduate students, and my fellows as well. It was so much more high-spirited and free-wheeling. In some ways, I was the coarse bumpkin from the coast, but I was also an object of some curiosity as well—because I had lived on the frontier, they questioned me incessantly about what I had seen and done. Not just my fellows, but the instructors as well—they wanted to know about Seattle and San Francisco, the train ride east—did I see any Indians? Or buffalo? When they asked about my parents, I hesitated, I couldn’t tell them anything of that, of course. Not my past, not Monsieur, not anything.
“But Monsieur had foreseen the curiosity of the others. In the short weeks before my departure east, we created a cover story, close to the truth, but far enough away from the truth to avoid arousing suspicion. To my fellows at the university, I was the frontier orphan. My parents had died, but I had been raised by a devoted uncle who had raised me as his own son, provided me with skilled tutors and readied me for adulthood, finally sending me to Boston to complete my education. It was enough of a story to satisfy them, and after a while, as the pressure of the term set in, most of them lost interest.”
I was at university for seven years. I could have stayed longer. I would have stayed longer, if I could. There was so much to learn. I know Monsieur wouldn’t have minded if I had stayed forever, soaking it all in. Especially the music.
Let me tell you about the music. Boston in 1876 was a city of grand concerts. It was a golden age. We had Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Wagner and we were just getting Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos and his symphonies too. They were a sensation—oh, the marvelous arguments we had about all that clanging and banging on the keyboard, all the fire and fury of his symphonies. Later on, he even used cannons! What an audacious thing to do. Oh, what fun we had. We didn’t have that kind of music in Seattle. Not yet, not then. It was a banquet and I stuffed my ears with it. I had no idea such things were possible.
Monsieur had tutored me well, I knew how to play the piano and the clarinet, I could hold a violin and bow it correctly—but in Boston, I soared. I spent long hours in the night, not just practicing, but exploring the sounds and shapes of the instruments, all the different textures. The flavors of sound!
From time to time, Monsieur would recommend that I seek out one or another of his acquaintances in Boston, but not too often. I met several members of The Community, but I did not spend much time with them. Still, Monsieur wanted me to have knowledge of them in case I found myself in a circumstance where I might need assistance beyond my own means.
They were very much unlike The Community in Seattle, they seemed to have a fine patina about them, like a fine mahogany desk that had been polished until its surface shined as deep as a dark mirror. I had the feeling they regarded me as something of a coarse nuisance, but they were never impolite.
One in particular, Colonel Guignard, did express some curiosity about life on the west coast—I didn’t know at first if his title was honorary or fairly earned, at the time I suspected it was honorary. Later I found out that my first impression had been correct. In colonial and antebellum times, the title was given to men of the landed gentry for financing the local militia without actual expectations of command. So Colonel Guignard was that old—at least.
Over dinner, one night, he told me that he had owned property in Virginia and Kentucky, and most recently had enjoyed the cuisine of New Orleans. He did not go into detail, but the way he phrased it, I had no doubt there was a deeper meaning, he wasn’t talking of land, nor was he discussing the more common aspects of the groaning board.
The Colonel had retreated north shortly after the rail lines were completed, he did not say why. He had not returned to the south since then and apparently had little desire to do so. He had a curious lack of affection for the region, he said that its culture was a perfumed illusion, a bit of crinoline hiding a degenerate culture. Likewise, he found the northeast stifling, too wrapped up in business and industry.
Being in The Community, Colonel Guignard said, a man must be prepared to move at least once a decade. The west seemed promising and he wanted me to tell of my adventures. I did not feel comfortable revealing the sordid aspects of my boyhood, so I discussed only my time with Monsieur and that seemed to satisfy him.
In return, I asked Colonel Guignard for more information about The Community. He shook his head politely and said that information was reserved to actual members of The Community, but he did understand my curiosity. And my service to Monsieur was well-regarded.
After the first few evenings, we did not meet often, and I got the sense that Colonel Guignard was already preparing for his next move. I felt somewhat relieved about that, as I had by now begun to develop some of the skills necessary for success in the academic world. I began to feel, shall I say it—comfortable. I was an effective student because I enjoyed the journeys of knowledge.
Because of that, or because of my occasional meetings with various gentlemen of the town, acquaintances of Monsieur, my fellows at the university found me distant and removed. I didn’t mind. I had spent too many of my formative years on the underside of life, now I was on the brighter side, discovering the joys. I was, perhaps, enraptured by the wealth of ideas and knowledge available to me. I was drunk on the adventure.
As I said, it was the music that first entranced me. You cannot imagine what it was like then. You have everything too easily available, you have all of your favorite recordings at your fingertips, all you have to do is plug in your earbuds and tap the screen. Your technology has spoiled you. By making it all so easy, you have become separated from your own ability to appreciate the efforts of composers in orchestras.
In those days, we had no movies, we had plays. We had no records or radios. So a concert was an event. It was special. It was an opportunity to experience something glorious that was not possible except as a grand cooperative effort. There were concerts every week, performers of all kinds came through the city—to me, it was magic, it was wealth, it was the ultimate expression of the human soul. Music is such pure emotion, I used to sit there with my eyes closed, letting the textures and melodies paint pictures in my imagination—I doubt you will ever understand. Electricity has spoiled you.
But the music led me inexorably, inevitably to a broader appreciate of everything else—painting was next. The impressionists were starting to make their mark in the art world, Monet and Renoir and some strange red-haired wild man in the south of France. The romantic composers were challenging the comfortable forms of the symphony with liquid rhapsodies and melodies that flowed like wine, they were reinventing music—so were the bold and bizarre painters of this new impressionist movement changing the nature of art, exploring the ways that human beings perceived light and color—not trying to recreate the world as it is on their canvases, but the way we experience it. It was a most remarkable time—unequaled for a century. Yes, I can say that. I was there.
I wrote long letters to Monsieur, describing everything. Sometimes I sent him photographs and prints and sheet music, but I wish the phonograph had been invented sooner. I wanted to send him the sound of the orchestra as well.
Monsieur wrote back, once a month. We both wrote the most carefully coded letters, innocuous to any casual reader, but laden with meaning to both myself and him. We referred to our separate companions only by initials. Monsieur would write that D. was thinking of relocating to New York and I would write back saying how much I admired D. and if he moved to New York, I would be happy to visit with him. Sometimes we wrote about the doings of people who did not even exist. K. has begun courting a lovely young heiress. R.’s father had suffered a terrible financial loss and R. might have to leave the university.
Monsieur believed that the public mail had no great degree of privacy. Therefore our exchanges must seem as innocuous as possible. Occasionally, he would recommend a book for me. Occasionally, I would write about what I had read. While he and I both found these exchanges useful, I’m certain they would have been boring to anyone else. But as much as I enjoyed sharing my studies with him, I missed our evening conversations, our discussions in depth.
I told him that, and he told me that he missed my companionship as well. But neither of us dared to be any more expressive than that. Mostly, Monsieur continued to acknowledge my enthusiasm for learning and the insights I shared with him. He always began by telling me how happy it made him to receive my letters and how proud he was of my progress—the evidence of my education was apparent in every sentence. No, not the facts I was learning—but the ability to consider what they represented, what they meant, what they suggested—everything they pointed to. His careful praise was the fuel for my drive, my passion. I realized then how much I was falling in love with him, how much I missed him, how much I wanted to see him again.
Because.
Because I was beginning to feel ready.
It wasn’t that I wanted to join The Community as much as I wanted to be worthy of it. I told him so. I didn’t use the exact words. I said, “I want to be worthy of you.”
And he wrote back, “You are earning your place in history. Of that, there is no question. But first you need to complete your education in the areas of business and finance and mathematics. These are skills that will be critical in your future.”
I admit, at first I found those studies dry and tiresome, but soon I realized there was the same beauty in numbers that there is in music—and the geometrical ratios were part of our perception of beauty in painting and architecture and sculpture. There’s a beautiful understructure of logic to be explored.
From there, I tumbled sideways into studies of physics and astronomy. Newton and Copernicus were the recognized landmarks, but there was so much new work being done, it was hard to keep up. But I wanted to know if an iron submarine could really float. Would heavier-than-air flight ever be possible? These were marvelous questions to consider. It was all about math and physics. Monsieur approved of all these tangents, of course, but he always pointed me back toward the mechanical aspects of survival as well.
I kept up my studies in every area he suggested, I learned how the stock market worked—that was useful too—but I began to wonder about the nature of The Community as well, so I began taking courses in biology.
Oh my, I had not realized there was so much to learn. Gregor Mendel’s study of genetics and Charles Darwin’s book on The Origin of Species. The arguments we had about what this might mean—about race and inheritance and everything. It left me stunned. Who are we? What are we?
It was as if the very ground beneath our feet had abruptly evaporated, leaving us adrift in a chaotic sea of uncertainty.
I must interrupt myself here—I don’t know if Monsieur intended it or not, I always felt that he was comfortable with the circumstances of his situation, he did not question it, at least never in my presence—but as I began to research the workings of the human body, the diseases and disorders that afflict us, it became apparent to me that men of The Community were bound together by a commonly-shared affliction, the symptoms of which were not supernatural in nature at all, but might eventually be understandable as a specific physical disorder.
Because I suspected it was most likely a condition of the blood, I directed my studies toward that area—I started with malaria, also an illness of the blood, and worked outward from there. But while I was able to identify the occurrence of similar symptoms in other ailments—like the extreme sensitivity of the skin to daylight that occurs in certain diseases we now call porphyrias, the cutaneous porphyrias which cause blistering or necrotic reactions to sunlight—or the prolonged periods of sleep-like unconsciousness that narcoleptics experience, these symptoms were also found among the porphyrias, including muscle weakness, coma, and even psychosis—but try as I might, I could not find any common factor linking these conditions. The conditions were so rare, there had not been any significant studies.
Frustrated, I realized I had to look elsewhere. Again, I considered the symptoms. Enhanced hearing occurs in those who have lost their sight, as well as a superior sense of smell. Moments of superior strength sometimes occur in periods of extreme emotional stress. And the urge to feed on human flesh—well, that is a mental disorder of the worst sort, beyond the comprehension of rational men. But again, I found no common denominator.
Whatever the cause of Monsieur’s condition—and the other men of The Community as well—it was beyond my current ability to discover, certainly not without specimens to examine. In my youthful naivete, I began to believe that here was a new frontier of medical science, and that if I could analyze, explain, and perhaps even cure the condition, I would immediately make a name for myself as a great doctor of medicine.
I requested an evening meeting with Colonel Guignard and broached the subject politely. As carefully as I could phrase it—I presented my concerns to him. Without ever using either of the words disorder or disease, I told him I had become curious about certain biological processes and conditions, how they occurred and whether or not they could be reversed.
After some back and forth, the Colonel finally understood what I was referring to. He stiffened immediately. Even before he spoke, I saw that he was visibly disconcerted at the idea of subjecting himself to any medical examination, and he did not think any other member of The Community would ever assent to such an invasion.
It was understandable, of course, but it allowed me enough of a glimpse into his thinking to recognize that merely being a member of The Community did not automatically grant wisdom or enlightenment, and possibly not even curiosity. Colonel Guignard, and probably all of the rest as well, had brought their own prejudices and apprehensions with them, even as they joined the company of Nightsiders. It was a small awakening for me, a moment of insight.
But apparently my request had seriously offended Colonel Guignard, and except for a few brief exchanges after that, I saw him no more. Later on, I heard that he had left Boston. I assumed he had headed west, but no one in The Community seemed to know—or they deliberately chose not to share that information with me.
Indeed, after that, my contacts with members of The Community in Boston became less and less frequent, until they became invisible even to me. I wrote to Monsieur of this, saying only that in my innocence, I had somehow offended Colonel Guignard and his acquaintances, and I hoped that it would not reflect badly on him.
When Monsieur wrote back, he told me not to worry myself unduly. Sometimes men of age become fossilized in their thinking, unable to deal well with the changes that occur with the passage of time. I should not let myself be discouraged or dissuaded from my studies. Knowledge isn’t just power, it’s freedom as well.
Nevertheless, I realized I had reached the limits of the medical knowledge of the time—and what was known about those forced to live nightside would continue to be confabulated with superstition and fear. Perhaps Monsieur and I could discuss this at length at some future time. Or perhaps, if I were ever to join The Community, I would not only experience the changes myself, I would have sufficient medical knowledge to begin a genuine inquiry.
Consequently, with that end in mind I began to study the chemistry of the body’s processes—especially the enzymatic processes, so that I would be able to bring a superior insight to my own eventual transformation. It seemed likely that would be the only avenue of understanding available to me.
