The Cemetery Diaries
The Second Death
I close my eyes and think of the bright, shining sea, sky spilling onto the ocean through the clouds. I wish I could be there now, away on the waves, with the sea breeze to tousle my hair and loosen my cares. But here I stand, stranded on solid ground, without anything to melt or dive into, and just as much salt to get in my wounds. So, you want to know about Viggo. Well, I’ll tell you. Viggo was a vampire I knew, a hundred and fifty years ago. He was the first of my kind I found on dry land, once I had wandered into Rookwood cemetery and discovered that the trade in spare body parts was prospering. Viggo Patterson was the head of his racket, a motley assortment of human odds and ends who called themselves the Pack Rats. All of their number wore their hair in thick, tawny braids, which they referred to as ‘rats’ tails’.
Nevertheless, Viggo was like you and me, as much as it is possible for vampires, the night’s lone children, to hold things in common. Underneath his projected identity as a physician, he was one hundred percent bloodthirsty and unruly, haven taken up residence in the tallest tower of Sydney’s oldest sandstone university, in a room that the academic staff firmly believed was haunted. Despite his crew’s business in selling off cadavers to biologists, he frequently brought bodies there– bodies that were more living than dead.
Viggo was a monster, make no mistake. He was one of the worst that history has seen. Fallen humans are always so much worse than born demons, because of the depths they sink to and the lengths to which they will extend themselves. And yet, I am not ashamed to say that Viggo was also my friend. The lost have to cling to each other in the looming shadow like so many survivors of a shipwreck. Never forget what I am, and what we are, Tiger Lily. I’m just an addict, drowning in the gutter, circling the drain. Stars are in my veins, and all my friends are ink and paper, even you. Nothing we have is made to last, except our damnation.
When Viggo first turned bad, the rest of suspected nothing more than a natural souring of the soul. Things like morals tend to go off, stinking badly, when the use for them expires. Being a vampire is no happy existence. It’s horribly lonely, and nobody helps you. In the end, you find that walking is lighter when you have hollower insides. As you grow in your phantasm, you become more like a shadow, more like a ghost. You can slip easily among dark things, and you find that your path collides less often with those paths taken by mortals, for you walk on the devil’s road. This is what I supposed was happening to my old acquaintance, the more distant and vigilant he become. After all, the more I learned about myself in those days, the more I felt I was a stranger, and the stranger the world became to me. Eventually, the cosmos and all its people were a single, confused ball to be spoken to and hidden from. Mine, I was satisfied, was not a unique experience.
But I was wrong. Something worse was happening, something much worse indeed, and I was to catch only glimpses of its furthermost tendrils as it strayed, cold-fingered and creeping, like chill breaking into a tomb. I couldn’t sleep, I found, not even in the daytime. I had a bed of sorts down in my crypt, but I only ever used it to lie on my back, staring at the blank ceiling, feeling awake in every inch of my body. That was when I started writing for the first time. It was unambitious writing that I mastered, simple and straightforward. I was not a secret owner of the universe, capable of ensnaring reality in single pearls. I wrote merely to catalogue the strangeness around me, strangeness that, I was beginning to suspect, nobody else was in a position to record.
And capture I did. I wrote of Viggo’s belltower comings and goings, of the robe he adopted like a piece of the night, the better to be his camouflage. I wrote of his raids on cemeteries, and the skewed angle that his business took as it edged itself out of the stream of supply and demand and into the territory of compulsion. My friend unearthed corpses obsessively, and was frequently observed alone, lugging anatomies that could not have been entirely still. Then, one day, my writing was stolen. It was returned to me a while later, complete with added marginalia and warnings about something grown in a coffin, something that embraced a living rot. I did not hear from Viggo for some time. When I next learned of his whereabouts, he was here, in the city, and he was destroyed. Nothing more than a pile of ashes remained. I have since suspected the cause of his second death, but I have nothing to back my theories up. I am convinced that I will find the evidence still, and it will be unwelcome.
Nevertheless, Viggo was like you and me, as much as it is possible for vampires, the night’s lone children, to hold things in common. Underneath his projected identity as a physician, he was one hundred percent bloodthirsty and unruly, haven taken up residence in the tallest tower of Sydney’s oldest sandstone university, in a room that the academic staff firmly believed was haunted. Despite his crew’s business in selling off cadavers to biologists, he frequently brought bodies there– bodies that were more living than dead.
Viggo was a monster, make no mistake. He was one of the worst that history has seen. Fallen humans are always so much worse than born demons, because of the depths they sink to and the lengths to which they will extend themselves. And yet, I am not ashamed to say that Viggo was also my friend. The lost have to cling to each other in the looming shadow like so many survivors of a shipwreck. Never forget what I am, and what we are, Tiger Lily. I’m just an addict, drowning in the gutter, circling the drain. Stars are in my veins, and all my friends are ink and paper, even you. Nothing we have is made to last, except our damnation.
When Viggo first turned bad, the rest of suspected nothing more than a natural souring of the soul. Things like morals tend to go off, stinking badly, when the use for them expires. Being a vampire is no happy existence. It’s horribly lonely, and nobody helps you. In the end, you find that walking is lighter when you have hollower insides. As you grow in your phantasm, you become more like a shadow, more like a ghost. You can slip easily among dark things, and you find that your path collides less often with those paths taken by mortals, for you walk on the devil’s road. This is what I supposed was happening to my old acquaintance, the more distant and vigilant he become. After all, the more I learned about myself in those days, the more I felt I was a stranger, and the stranger the world became to me. Eventually, the cosmos and all its people were a single, confused ball to be spoken to and hidden from. Mine, I was satisfied, was not a unique experience.
But I was wrong. Something worse was happening, something much worse indeed, and I was to catch only glimpses of its furthermost tendrils as it strayed, cold-fingered and creeping, like chill breaking into a tomb. I couldn’t sleep, I found, not even in the daytime. I had a bed of sorts down in my crypt, but I only ever used it to lie on my back, staring at the blank ceiling, feeling awake in every inch of my body. That was when I started writing for the first time. It was unambitious writing that I mastered, simple and straightforward. I was not a secret owner of the universe, capable of ensnaring reality in single pearls. I wrote merely to catalogue the strangeness around me, strangeness that, I was beginning to suspect, nobody else was in a position to record.
And capture I did. I wrote of Viggo’s belltower comings and goings, of the robe he adopted like a piece of the night, the better to be his camouflage. I wrote of his raids on cemeteries, and the skewed angle that his business took as it edged itself out of the stream of supply and demand and into the territory of compulsion. My friend unearthed corpses obsessively, and was frequently observed alone, lugging anatomies that could not have been entirely still. Then, one day, my writing was stolen. It was returned to me a while later, complete with added marginalia and warnings about something grown in a coffin, something that embraced a living rot. I did not hear from Viggo for some time. When I next learned of his whereabouts, he was here, in the city, and he was destroyed. Nothing more than a pile of ashes remained. I have since suspected the cause of his second death, but I have nothing to back my theories up. I am convinced that I will find the evidence still, and it will be unwelcome.