The Cemetery Diaries
Shadows in Disguise
I’ve never been a big believer in luck, but I don’t know what else could be hunting me. I feel like something is catching up with me, something stronger than I am. The past? A legion of my former selves and deeds? I can’t think of an undead older than I am. Well, that’s a lie. I can think of one. My mind wanders back to the seasick era, when English settlement was trying to right itself in Sydney, rocking to and fro on tides of chaos, back when I was just a head of tousled, ink-black hair in a world where the sea was the landscape and the kraken was king. That was a time when I hung from coarse ropes, the four winds flapping sails and open shirts alike. It was a time when the breeze was cool and salty, before I knew heatstroke or disease, and least of all the final sickness that left my body pale and pulseless.
After that time came the brief calamity of the storm, a concentration of all my closeted fears and desires thrown open, of my wish to meet death. I offered myself up as a sacrifice, tied to the wheel at the ship’s helm, was struck numb by lightning and woke up drenched and rejected. No devil claimed my soul that night. No god or angels took me up to heaven. Something flickered on inside me, a dark, consuming something that soon extinguished everything else I had ever known about myself. That something was a piece of him.
He might have been a Count. He might have been a Lord. Or maybe his only title was a title he took, bestowing it upon himself. He was cloaked and high-collared, clothed in all the silks and velvets he kept from his coffin. He must have smuggled himself inside the boxes of earth, the mysterious cargo that I was forbidden to question. I had no doubt that he had paid handsomely for his concealment. Perhaps he had even paid with the money and lives of others. I saw but a brief silhouette of him, thrown into relief by the lightning of another storm as our ship rammed into the jagged shore, becoming a wreck. He threw himself into the sea as the teeth of the bay closed in. Evidently, he was strong or fearless enough to have no enemy in the waves. Though I wandered far and wide in the years that followed, I never met him again, nor any other vampire who predated me. If he created me, as he must have, then he must also have been senior in power and experience. Perhaps he has returned to haunt me. I only have you, my all and my nothing, to listen to my anxieties.
Everywhere I travel now, destruction seems to follow. I still see the afterimages of this new, weatherless storm, my two most recent creations sprawled and bent, limbs jutting terribly from their bodies, grace and magic wasted. I see the dead fairy, stabbed by something too fast to have been captured, something that left a mark on my heart the exact shape and size of a bloodied hand. Other deaths have followed, ordinary deaths, mostly, but unwelcome deaths that dog me like a stench. There were the deaths of two policemen, only reported, and not remembered by me personally, though they happened not far from my crypt. There were more deaths around the old churchyard than I ever made the decision to cause. I’ve begun to think that it could not be the work of only one individual. It must be a group working together. It must be an army.
I have to get away, and so I’ve chosen my fate. I’ll go inland, to a crumbling farmhouse I haven’t seen for a hundred years. There my mother lived with my uncle, who left a few things behind when he died, the last of my line. He did not realise he had left an heir, albeit not one who survived him. In death, I inherited a few things from him– a stopped clock, pictures of people I don’t remember, and enough books to furnish a small bookshop. He also left behind a writing desk, cross-hatched with pen marks, scratches and gouges, and an impressive collection of wines. Cornelius had been a writer who dreamed of esteem. Every writer aspires to be a famous alcoholic.
All of this, I discovered when he was gone. As a shadow in disguise, I attended his simple funeral and walked back to his abandoned home, there to turn over a few dusty relics before shrugging off my ties to humanity and heading back to the city that was a better place for me, a place that lived and breathed decay. Now, I forsake my hunting ground again to go back to where the earth is rural and rustic. That house still lies in ruins, I know. None inhabit it. It shall be mine again.
After that time came the brief calamity of the storm, a concentration of all my closeted fears and desires thrown open, of my wish to meet death. I offered myself up as a sacrifice, tied to the wheel at the ship’s helm, was struck numb by lightning and woke up drenched and rejected. No devil claimed my soul that night. No god or angels took me up to heaven. Something flickered on inside me, a dark, consuming something that soon extinguished everything else I had ever known about myself. That something was a piece of him.
He might have been a Count. He might have been a Lord. Or maybe his only title was a title he took, bestowing it upon himself. He was cloaked and high-collared, clothed in all the silks and velvets he kept from his coffin. He must have smuggled himself inside the boxes of earth, the mysterious cargo that I was forbidden to question. I had no doubt that he had paid handsomely for his concealment. Perhaps he had even paid with the money and lives of others. I saw but a brief silhouette of him, thrown into relief by the lightning of another storm as our ship rammed into the jagged shore, becoming a wreck. He threw himself into the sea as the teeth of the bay closed in. Evidently, he was strong or fearless enough to have no enemy in the waves. Though I wandered far and wide in the years that followed, I never met him again, nor any other vampire who predated me. If he created me, as he must have, then he must also have been senior in power and experience. Perhaps he has returned to haunt me. I only have you, my all and my nothing, to listen to my anxieties.
Everywhere I travel now, destruction seems to follow. I still see the afterimages of this new, weatherless storm, my two most recent creations sprawled and bent, limbs jutting terribly from their bodies, grace and magic wasted. I see the dead fairy, stabbed by something too fast to have been captured, something that left a mark on my heart the exact shape and size of a bloodied hand. Other deaths have followed, ordinary deaths, mostly, but unwelcome deaths that dog me like a stench. There were the deaths of two policemen, only reported, and not remembered by me personally, though they happened not far from my crypt. There were more deaths around the old churchyard than I ever made the decision to cause. I’ve begun to think that it could not be the work of only one individual. It must be a group working together. It must be an army.
I have to get away, and so I’ve chosen my fate. I’ll go inland, to a crumbling farmhouse I haven’t seen for a hundred years. There my mother lived with my uncle, who left a few things behind when he died, the last of my line. He did not realise he had left an heir, albeit not one who survived him. In death, I inherited a few things from him– a stopped clock, pictures of people I don’t remember, and enough books to furnish a small bookshop. He also left behind a writing desk, cross-hatched with pen marks, scratches and gouges, and an impressive collection of wines. Cornelius had been a writer who dreamed of esteem. Every writer aspires to be a famous alcoholic.
All of this, I discovered when he was gone. As a shadow in disguise, I attended his simple funeral and walked back to his abandoned home, there to turn over a few dusty relics before shrugging off my ties to humanity and heading back to the city that was a better place for me, a place that lived and breathed decay. Now, I forsake my hunting ground again to go back to where the earth is rural and rustic. That house still lies in ruins, I know. None inhabit it. It shall be mine again.