PART 4
CAPTURE THE TREMENDOUS
Chapter 15
Burke lowered his gun, and Kim slowly drew back from Elliot.
The studio was cold and silent about them. Beyond it, the men could hear the pings and creaks of slumbering refrigeration units deep in the plant, and intermittent creakings in the old, settling walls of the second floor.
They stared at one another in the stagnant gloom.
Elliot and Kim began to speak at the same time, then halted. Elliot nodded to Kim.
"Gentlemen, we must leave this place without delay," the artist told them softly.
"Why do you say this?" Barnabas countered. "What's going to happen here?"
Kim looked at him. "Here? Nothing," he said.
Elliot shook his head. "Kim, do you know why we came here?" he asked gently. "We seek a young woman, and we thought we'd find her here. Is that who you meant when you spoke just now of your portraits? She is the one who ruined them?" He lowered his cross. "Will you tell us about her?"
Kim regarded them, bit his lip, and then spoke.
"I know the one you mean," he whispered. "You are right to bring the cross. Let us leave here. There are no chairs here in the studio, and there is much to explain."
The others regarded one another, all a bit twitchy from the anticlimax of confronting Kim.
"Do you want that, Elliot?" Barnabas said.
"We're going someplace with this guy?" Burke asked, unconvinced. "We're sure he's not the one who attacked Liz?"
"Please," Kim said, looking exhausted. "I have harmed no one. And I have much to tell you, but if it is agreeable, gentlemen, we should proceed to Collinwood at once.
"Collinwood is at the bottom of all that has happened."
The great house was deserted and locked tightly. Barnabas excused himself and went around to the back. In less than two minutes, the waiting men heard him in the foyer, and then he opened the front door and he ushered them in.
Barnabas had his ways.
He got a fire going in the drawing room grate, and Elliot filled glasses for all of them while Burke kept an uneasy guard on the quiet Kim. The fire began gradually to warm the room.
Elliot handed Kim a glass and then seated himself among the others, adjusting his slacks at the knee. "We thought this morning that you were our vampire," he began in his low, gravelly voice. "You're obviously not, but you are connected with the one who is. I think the young woman in your portraits is the woman who spoke to my niece Hallie, and presented herself to Roger Collins last night."
"She did?" Kim blurted, eyes aching at this information.
"Yes. This woman had in her possession a scarf that Angelique Bouchard had been wearing." Elliot's voice roughened with emotion. His normally neat silver hair was tousled from the day's exertions. "Kim, who is she to you? We think this girl attacked Angelique, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Julia Hoffman. We also believe that she killed two young boys earlier this week. You realize that we must … find her. Can you help us? What is your connection to this woman?"
Barnabas assessed Jansing. He was lean and handsome, with shaggy blonde curls and haunted blue eyes. He was trying to make sense of the painter's pattern of speech. Was it mere affectation? Neither Roger, David nor Hallie had mentioned such a detail. What could explain it?
Jansing couldn't be from another century, could he? If he was, how had he come to 1970's Collinwood?
Kim hunched silently in his chair for a moment, then slowly raised bloodshot eyes to them. "I never thought I'd speak of this to any living person," he muttered. "Very well. I have chased her for years. I've pursued her all across Europe and North Africa. At some point, I realized that she had decided to come back here to America, to the Colonies. She has known for some time that I was following her, and I believe she has allowed me to do so. I felt she was marking the trail for me. It is my belief that she wants to be caught here, in this place."
The room was very quiet, with only the snaps of the fire.
"Who is she to you? Are you in love with her?" Barnabas asked gently. "This girl is your woman? Or perhaps your sister?"
Kim took up his glass and swallowed, eyes tearing in response to the strong brandy.
"No," he said.
"How old is the girl?" Burke asked, looking from one man to the other. "You said she's young. She can't possibly be his daughter, can she?"
Kim smiled faintly at Burke.
"Not my daughter," he uttered. He thoughtfully touched his mouth, and spoke.
"She's been a vampire for a long time. We have both been alive for more time than you might be able to understand." His blue gaze swept over them. "The concept of vampires is not something that men of this century readily accept, and yet here you are, hunting one. This tells me that your minds will be open to what I am about to relate. At the same time, I don't know whether you'll believe me."
"Kim, we'll believe," Elliot assured him.
Kim ranged his glance from one man to the other, and made his decision.
"Then I will tell you," he began quietly, "that Ann was born in the year 1696. Often she refers to herself not as Ann, but as Scearlat. That was her maiden name. She is Ann Scearlat Comegys.
"And she is probably in this house right now."
Kim rolled his glass slowly and carefully between his hands, not looking at his listeners.
"Ann is my mother," he told them.
"I was born here," Kim continued, the red glow of the fire highlighting his good cheekbones, "right here. In Collinsport, on the parcel of land on which the Collins cannery is located. My father, Philip Comegys, owned a good portion of the waterfront.
"That is why I compelled Roger Collins to let me set up a studio in his cannery. My parents' marital home had been there, on that very location, and that is where they raised me. I thought my mother would come there on her return to the Americas, but I was wrong.
"As to Collinwood itself, my grandfather's home stood on this property, right here where Collinwood sits, and it was here my mother was born." He chuckled bitterly. "If the Collins family history extends as far back as Roger Collins claims it does, then it would appear his ancestors seized our land after we failed to return from Europe in 1733. I wish he were in the room now so that I could tell him that to his face. And yet, this is hardly his fault."
He hesitated, and Elliot softly redirected him. "You say that you were alive in 1733."
Kim shivered. "I was, and I believe I know why my mother has come to Collinwood. I doubt that she has been back to the Americas since we left in 1733. I feel that perhaps somewhere in her heart, she expected to find her father's home still standing. My poor mother."
He savagely wiped at sudden tears.
"Well, let me tell you my history, or our history.
"As a young man, I wanted to be a painter. I had the gift. My parents felt I should study seriously. We made inquiries and decided that I would try for the Hague Drawing Academy in the Dutch Republic—or the Netherlands, or Holland, whatever it is you call the place now.
"In 1733, I was twenty. My parents would accompany me to Europe and stay for some weeks while I settled in. They were loving parents.
"We crossed the Atlantic, traversed England, and made our way to the Hague. Travel was difficult but we were excited. We reached the city and found lodgings. The masters of the school agreed to see me. Everything was wondrous.
"The night before I was to go before the academy masters, we were set upon in the street. A man sprang out of the shadows and grabbed my mother. My father intervened but was instantly killed. I threw myself at the blackguard but was beaten unconscious. I remember my mother screaming for someone to help us.
"When I regained my senses, I saw that I was in a hospital. I dragged myself from there to the Dutch police. They knew of the event, had found my father's body in the street beside mine. No one had knowledge of my mother. Day and night I prowled the streets alone, searching for her.
"Need I tell you what happened next? I met her one night in a lonely alley. She bit my throat. She drained my body of blood. I do not remember my death. She had made me as she was; I suppose that she could not help it."
Kim halted his narrative, glancing at the listeners ringed around him. Even in the warm light of the fire it was evident that every man had gone pale. Perhaps Kim sensed the sudden apprehension in the room.
"Do not be afraid," he told them softly, looking from one to the other. "I am no longer a vampire, but a living man."
Burke blew out a heavy breath. "Glad to hear it," he said sardonically, looking quickly and almost comically at Elliot and Barnabas to see how they were taking this.
Kim continued, "My mother had been rendered a vampire by the fiend who attacked us. He had intended to have her as a mate, but she rose up and murdered him in my father's name. She told me that she now wandered the boulevards in the small hours, drinking the blood of whomever she came upon.
"I began to do the same.
"She had found a secret place to sleep by day. I also found a secluded place, but before very long, I was discovered."
August 3, 1733
The Hague, Dutch Republic
"I told you," Fedir whispered.
The Orenstein children stared down at the vampire in their father's business establishment.
In the furthermost shadowy corner of the long, cool room, laid out on scattered planks, surrounded by sawdust shavings, the thing slept as though dead. The sun was in the sky outside, so Fedir was fairly certain that they had nothing to fear from it—him. He couldn't hear them, or wake up, or defend himself. Not until nighttime. Sunset.
Herschel asked unhappily, "Did he come here to get a coffin?"
"No, I think he came in here because this part of the workroom is seldom used," Fedir answered. "He wanted a safe, deserted place. And it's so hard to see in here. The creature thought he would be safe."
"He's handsome," Carola whispered, troubled.
The vampire was a young man with fine cheekbones and an innocent face. Under level brows, long thick eyelashes reposed against cleanshaven cheeks. There was a faint cleft in his chin. His shaggy blonde hair had sawdust in it. They wouldn't be able to see the color of his eyes—not unless they leaned over him and pried open an eyelid, and Fedir wasn't ready to do something like that. The man's mouth was slightly open, revealing hellish fangs and white gums. Fedir noticed sharp, thin lines about the bloodied mouth. Laugh lines. Or perhaps lines of pain.
The most shocking thing about the man was that his skin was bluish white, with shadows of purple beneath the closed eyes. And yet, he had respiration, they could see him breathing.
Fedir studied him. Perhaps he wasn't even from the Netherlands. He didn't look Dutch, and anyway, his clothes were wrong. Maybe American. But here he was, in the rarely-used back workroom of the Orenstein Funeral Home.
The city had in recent weeks been terrorized by escalating vampire attacks. There were so many foreign workers in the city, so many people moving from place to place, so much business and traffic at the wharves, that a vampire could drink his fill here.
The police called the incidents murders; strange murders, where whitened corpses nearly bereft of blood were discovered with punctured throats, strewn in alleys like discarded dolls. But the townspeople read what was happening through the lens of age-old superstition and came to the correct conclusion.
Fedir had spotted this young man sneaking out of his father's back workroom entirely by accident one night just after sunset. Staring out of a window, he'd caught his breath at the stranger's startling paleness, but hadn't said anything to anybody. No one else seemed aware that the man was hiding back there.
Then the neighborhood had heard that Pieter Klerk had been found murdered.
Fedir watched the vampire leave the back workroom the second night, and when he was sure he wouldn't immediately return, crept into the dark space to look around.
He'd found Pieter's cap there in the hay.
Fedir turned away from the sleeping man, leaning heavily on his crutch. He was troubled.
"Let me think what to do," he told his brother and sister.
He was twelve. Carola was nine, Herschel only eight. Fedir knew how this type of creature was to be handled; a wooden stake through the heart. But who would pound the stake through? Not he; he was lame. Someone would have to hold him up while he did it. Carola would never be able to do it, and Herschel was too little, and would probably run off sobbing.
Could he tell his papa? He doubted his papa would listen to him. His papa was busy. And if by chance Fedir could actually get his father to take him seriously and come to look upon the sprawled vampire, he knew Papa would probably become hysterical, screaming and scrambling wildly to get away. Adulthood seemed to diminish one's capacity to approach paranormal matters with proper logic.
Fedir decided that they would handle this themselves.
Shimmel Orenstein was a quality carpenter who crafted beautiful coffins. Of late years, as the number of rich men in the Hague had grown, Shimmel had been called upon to sculpt more and more elaborate tombs for the dead and dying.
Working almost without ceasing, Shimmel had completed a spectacular coffin for the recently deceased Lodewijk van der Vlugt, one of the wealthiest men the city had ever known. This coffin was Shimmel's most luxurious creation yet.
The coffin had been months in the conception and the making. At the beginning of the year, the ailing magnate had ordered his coffin just in case. That morning, Shimmel had gotten word that the soul of the wealthy industrialist had departed his body. Thank goodness the coffin was done.
It had even been blessed in advance.
Sheets of pure silver that Shimmel had painstakingly poured and hammered lined every inner surface. It was a peculiar casket. Van der Vlugt had not been interested in lining the coffin with lead to slow the inevitable rotting of his corpse. All men turned to dust, so what was a lead-lined coffin to him? Silver, however, he loved. The delightful thought that he would be surrounded by it, side from side, head to foot, back and front of him, was a comfort in his last hours.
The evening before, Minister Groot had visited Shimmel's establishment to see the coffin. He had walked around it with disapproval. Calvinism had nothing against wealth, but did hold that those who had it ought to share it, and his parishioner had not done very well there. In fact, van der Vlugt was unanimously despised in the district, hated by his poorer neighbors, whom he had relentlessly cheated.
Groot sighed. Nobody was aware that he carried holy water with him. Holy water was not something his church ordinarily used, but he had made certain to secure some today. He had asked Shimmel Orenstein if he could sprinkle the water onto the metal insides of the coffin, and Shimmel had had no objection. The water couldn't hurt the silver, and where this silver was going, it wouldn't matter.
Groot anointed each inner surface, sides, head, foot, and the silver sheet on the inside of the lid, with the blessed water. He used his palms to spread the water all over the silver rather than simply sprinkling. After that, he flicked more of it onto the beautiful wood carvings of the outer box.
There was a rumor that van der Vlugt had not been baptized in infancy. This uncertainty had bothered both communicant and priest and had led to Groot's actions today.
The minister felt that God would look kindly on his efforts on behalf of his parishioner.
The following day, a cart had arrived at Shimmel's establishment, with the bodies of three recently deceased paupers in the back, neatly wrapped in white sheeting. The burial of paupers in communal graves was another service offered by Shimmel Orenstein's funeral home. He handled burial for any of the poor who had died on certain days, his competitor taking the rest. The arrangement cleared the way for Shimmel's Sabbath and left his Protestant counterpart free on Sunday.
The city provided community graves for paupers.
Often the bodies of the poor piled up, waiting to be delivered by one funeral home or the other to a final resting place.
Van Der Vlugt's princely coffin sat in the wagon, ready to be dropped off at the church for his flamboyant evening burial ceremony and feast. The bodies of the sheeted paupers ranged behind it. Fedir's papa ate a quick supper inside the house.
"Geert," Fedir called, waving, and the big man came, dusting himself off.
Geert was a favorite with the town's children. He could neither speak nor hear, and he wasn't the smartest man in the Republic, but he was strong as an ox and deeply kind. The Orensteins used him for any number of services.
"Can you unhitch the wagon and push it into the barn?" Fedir asked, staring hard into Geert's eyes to impress on him how important this was. Geert read the boy's lips and looked faintly curious, but walked to the wagon and disengaged the horses. He pushed the wagon into the dark of the barn.
"Can you help us, Geert?" Carola whispered, taking the huge man by the sleeve and pointing.
A blue-white body rested on a hay bale, a rope cinched under the arms and over the chest.
Geert shook his head, marveling.
"Can you run the winch, and swing this body into the wagon? We have to get it, uh, up there. On the wagon." Carola gestured and pointed.
Geert shook his head again. He was starting to feel that there might be something wrong here.
Fedir came forward on his crutch, his brown eyes burning. "Please, Geert! We're supposed to do this for papa. Please!"
The sun wouldn't set for two or three hours yet, but Fedir was edgy.
Geert shrugged and took hold of the rope that hung from the winch. He worked the device, his muscles flexing beneath his shirt, and the body slowly lifted from the bale and gently spun in the dark of the barn. Geert maneuvered it over the wagon.
"Why don't you lower it into the coffin," Fedir suggested, his eyes bright. "Go ahead, Geert."
The man did so. The children asked him to walk the horses into the barn and re-hitch them there in its shadows. Then they dismissed him with thanks.
Fedir had envisioned trying to get Geert to drive a stake into the vampire's heart, but right away knew it wouldn't work. Geert wouldn't do such a bloody thing. The likeliest event was that he would angrily turn on his heel, hurry to the house and bring papa back with him. Besides, there was something poetic about snatching this particular coffin from its owner.
The vampire's body rested half-in and half-out of the splendid coffin. Herschel and Carola climbed up into the wagon beside it as Fedir struggled to follow them with his bad leg.
The wealthiest man in town, Lodewijk van der Vlugt, had been stripped of his vestments and expertly wrapped up in sheets among the other pauper dead. Even Carola had helped to pull the tycoon out of the casket, out of his clothes, and hustle him into the sheets.
The children quickly dressed the sleeping vampire in van der Vlugt's elegant burial clothes, straightened his limbs and properly situated him in the casket on the cushiony bedding inside. Carola laid van der Vlugt's richly embroidered handkerchief gently over the vampire's sweet face.
And then the man who two centuries later would call himself Kim Jansing was locked into the silver coffin by the Orenstein children.
"What I think will happen is this," Fedir told them as they rested in the hay. "He'll be buried in the ground, and when he wakens at sunset, he'll find himself stuck in there. I don't think he can get past the silver, and then Groot was over here with that holy water. What a piece of luck for us. The vampire will be stopped cold, and we didn't have to drive a stake into him or do anything bloody."
"I wouldn't have wanted to hurt him," Carola mused. She considered that tonight sometime the poor man would wake up frightened and sad to find himself trapped in a coffin. Her eyes welled with tears.
But by the time the hour came, Carola had forgotten the morning's events.
The vampire attacks continued in the Hague, and Fedir realized that the monster must not have been working alone.
Fedir Orenstein ultimately lived to be one hundred years old—and still he did not outlive Kim Jansing.
Vlissingen, Zeeland, Dutch Republic
Hunger woke him as usual, but he found himself trapped, closed inside a coffin. Someone had entombed him while he slept. He should have been able to break out as easily as a baby swatting at a feather, but could not. This coffin resisted his utmost efforts of escape. Not only that, but wherever he touched the narrow metal walls that held him, he was struck with agonizing blasts of an invisible jumping fire. Metal walls, slick and sweaty. The coffin did not seem to be made of wood. Kim tried to shrink away from contact with the surfaces enclosing him. He could not understand. Perhaps the coffin had been splashed with holy water? Or had he been placed under a spell? He could find no answer. And there he was, imprisoned.
He could hear very little. After a time, his coffin was moved about. Clods of dirt slapped down on the lid above, and he understood he was being buried in the earth. He could do nothing. A long time passed and nothing further happened. Grieving, he slept.
He was in a narrow seaside cemetery called Arme Anjers Plaats, or the Place of the Poor Carnations. At the time Kim was buried it had borne a more illustrious name or would never have received the coffin of Lodewijk van der Vlugt in which Kim reposed. But time was passing. As the centuries rolled by, the burial place became antique and seedy. The ocean embraced it. Ships sailed past it, coming in and out of Scheveningen, the city's seaport, for commerce or in response to war. Nude beaches pressed against the old cemetery's limits. Using crowbars, tourists tried to pry up the flat grave markers of the watery Poor Carnations burial ground for souvenirs.
May 10, 1966
Later, Kim didn't know when, there was a grinding, and a long, deep shriek that cut into his sleeping head. The next he knew, something slammed into his prison. His coffin was driven and shoved. He, of course, was flung against every electrified surface of its interior and screamed insanely, his flesh blistering. The coffin spun and then seemingly leapt against a force at once hard and yielding, rolling him about in slow motion. Gravity pushed him this way and that against the murderous surfaces of his tomb. He felt wetness on his legs. His box was filling with water.
All he could think was that the earth had cracked open, the sea smashing into every crevice.
His coffin's hinges were shattered on one end, and in poured the ocean. Very quickly, he was drowning. He didn't suppose he truly would have drowned, since he was a vampire, but nevertheless, he was livid with fear. Kim used the breach of his coffin to his advantage by pressing with all his might against the damaged side. His tortured skin popped and sizzled as he braced against the walls of his tomb, and he wept in agony, but the coffin busted apart.
He was free! But here he was, fathoms deep in the ocean. And he didn't know whether it was day or night!
The splintered coffin slowly twirled away from him into the depths. The watery world shut him in. He managed to reach the surface, choking and shuddering. Water flew at him from every direction. Tossing the hair out of his eyes, he realized that the ocean was rocking in mighty swells. Cold air blasted him hard, driving sheets of raindrops against his face. He instinctively strove for breath as the sea lifted him high and then dropped him low again.
There was an object in sight—a tremendous sailing ship, fairly close to him. Oddly, it did not move with the waves. Kim squinted stinging eyes and saw that the ship had run aground, its bow partially embedded in the land. It was stuck fast. He heard faint shouts from the deck.
Gigantic surges of water lifted him up and down. With a violent shake of his head to throw water from his eyes, Kim blinked with disbelief upon the ship. Its hull looked to be of iron, which was hardly credible, and it seemed big enough to house perhaps five hundred men.
Impossible ship! It could not be real. Had the rupture that had demolished his coffin shoved him through a crack in the universe, away from humankind, into a world of futuristic creatures who built such terrifying galleys?
Despite his plunging terror, he tried to get hold of himself. A quick reconnoiter told him that he was not far from land, and that, mercifully, the light in the atmosphere was low. He realized that he was not being destroyed from exposure to the sky; it was somewhere between twilight and sunrise, then.
He struck for the coast.
After a struggle, he felt shoreland beneath him and slogged along on heavy legs to get out of the water. His shins struck oblongs of stone that he was forced to clamber over. They were broken and strewn about on the shore and in the surf, each oblong a little smaller than a stretched canvas. He couldn't identify them and didn't care what they were. He dully noted wooden caskets bobbing along, several feet from the shore. Thank God nobody was around to see him. There was a gale going on, and water and rain flew everywhere. He was soaked, disoriented, horrified. Desperately hungry.
Kim shambled to the sand, clothes streaming, and collapsed onto the cold beach. The massive ship towered over him, immobile, and the rain spiraled down.
He could hear cries and groans on the ship's deck, so high above him, as the crew tried to take in what had befallen the ship. The name painted on the side of the massive edifice was the S.S. Fencrook. Scrubbing his clammy face with his hands, Kim turned and cautiously surveyed the shore for any people.
Just in front of him was a submerged cemetery. Kim saw that the chalky oblongs of stone were grave markers that had been broken on impact when the ship crashed into the sands.
So that is what happened, he realized. Evidently, I was buried here in this seaside graveyard and now this ship has gone aground, smashing right into the middle of the dead. The immense bow of the vessel cut into the earth and uprooted my casket, breaking it open, and then I suppose I got sucked out in the ship's strong backwash, and ejected into the sea.
He struggled to his feet and began to stumble away from the giant marooned ship.
As he staggered, he surveyed his surroundings. Strange things were before him. For example, far ahead in the filmy distance, endless sets of twin lights chased each other over some monstrous track as wide as the world; car headlights on motorways. Kim had no words for them. And within a league of him were millions of unmoving boxed flames, stacked one atop the other very neatly, extending terribly high above the earth, silent in the rain. They were the lights of apartment buildings, homes, and other structures.
Nothing he saw made sense to him.
The very universe had apparently been transmogrified while he was trapped in the earth.
"To this moment, I still can't explain who buried me," Kim continued, "or what magic bound me in the coffin.
"I won't speak of the first victims I took in this awful new world—it's too painful to recall. It was horrible. I killed men, mainly because I needed their clothes to wear. I didn't leave lingering victims, I killed outright. I … took precautions to ensure that they would not rise from the dead." Kim wiped his mouth.
"The hunger was incredible, and my famished body couldn't catch up. The crazy joy I'd felt at being freed quickly turned to regret that my coffin had been disturbed at all.
"At night, I paced the streets of the Hague, looking for my mother. Could she possibly still be living? Time had gone by; the year was now 1966. At first, I furiously rejected this reality, but as the nights passed, I began to acclimate to life in this ugly new future.
"It was summer again as it had been when my poor family had so expectantly come to the city in 1733. I sat in cafes drinking espresso in the evenings, watching the people go by in their ridiculous clothes.
"As the months passed, I thought I sensed her near me. I must have been wrong. I strained all my faculties and every instinct I had, trying to isolate her face amid crowds. I dreamed of finally meeting her eyes, staring at me from some street corner.
"It had occurred to me to search through the libraries to see whether I could find any record of my mother's … career."
"I found books that detailed what were thought to be vampire attacks reported throughout Europe during the time I was trapped in my coffin. I discovered that the Hague itself had been stalked by a killer from 1733-37, one who drank blood and slayed viciously. Then the spate of murders ended. The following year, the city of Utrecht reported identical attacks; that lasted a few years, then stopped. After that, the bloody murders began in the city of Eindhoven.
"And on and on, throughout the Republic.
"Newspapers I located on microfiche revealed similar vampiric incidents that had been happening as lately as this very century, in cities of Belgium, Germany and Austria—but never simultaneously. A series of attacks would begin and escalate in one location, then mysteriously end, only to begin later in another part of Europe. It looked like the work of one roving murderer. My mother?
"Perhaps she had survived, perhaps she was the vampire I was reading about across the centuries. I was filled with sorrow. How would 233 years of bloody murder have affected her mind? Who was she now? What if I ran into her some night?
"The Hague was lovely, and I began to enjoy the city. It was devilish hard acclimating to the brutal nineteen-sixties, but eventually the shock softened. I had to make changes to myself in order to pass as a twentieth-century man. Dirty up my speech, for example. Compared to modern day people, my good manners and formal wording had me sounding like a mincing nancy. I looked at pictures in magazines and stared at television ads. I began to learn how I was expected to look and behave in this new world.
"And there were so many stunningly beautiful young women, all of them liking to expose their skin. Right on the street! Oh, that was heavenly, I enjoyed that.
"I didn't own a television. When I'd see them behind store windows, they were carrying on about war and mayhem, and I couldn't bear it. And I didn't look into the history of the times I'd missed. I'd started to, but gave up, harassed and overwhelmed. I figured that my reading of world history would keep. The music I heard in the streets left me ill; I remembered when music was lyrical, refined. I drew back from all raucous noise.
"And I became Kim Jansing. That was the name of one of my first victims of 1966, and since we shared a Christian name, I decided to become him. I suppose I could have kept my family name and been Kim Comegys just as easily; it would have made no difference. But I wanted to pay tribute to at least one of the people I had killed. I don't suppose the man would have appreciated it very much.
"All this took some figuring, but I finally found black market people to provide the false identity. I wanted identification in case I wished to travel. In this 1960s European world, one required papers.
"I took a basement flat in an old building with inattentive landlords. I was out all night, of course, and asleep all day. I told them I had a night job.
"But naturally, I didn't work at all. I lived off monies garnered from those I killed. If they had bank accounts and checkbooks, I'd make out checks to myself and clean them out. After a time, I had three or four identities that I secured from different bureaus, the accounts of my victims supplying each with cash.
"Nineteen sixty-six turned into '67. Life was looking a lot more possible to me than it had the week I'd found myself floating in the ocean. And one evening as I sipped my espresso at my favorite sidewalk café, I looked up and saw my mother across the boulevard, staring at me.
"It was she. She was beautiful. I was twenty when I became a vampire, my mother 35 or 36 when it took her, but she looked as though she were barely out of her teens. The life agreed with her.
"I remained seated, and she didn't move, either. We continued to gaze at one another as people passed in the gathering dark, and I saw love in her eyes.
"She turned and was gone.
"I erupted from my seat, dropped coins on the table for my coffee, and tore off after her, but I could find her nowhere.
"This happened again and again, and I thought I'd die of frustration.
"And then, I read of vampiric murders starting up in Belgium! It was she! I would have to follow.
"Not very long after I had reached whatever city she had chosen to prey upon, the deaths would cease, only to start up weeks later in another city or even another nation.
"From Belgium I tracked her to France and then into and across Germany, city after city.
"I never caught her.
"Something was happening to me. I began to feel that the life of a murderous vagabond really appealed to my mother. She had lived so long as an evil being that it had become natural. I had to presume that she loved what she was doing.
"But I hated it. I hated killing. I tried to hate the taste of blood, but that I couldn't do. I loved it, but it grieved me. Not being able to meet my mother, to throw myself into her arms and weep for both of us and just be held by her, was taking its toll. I tried to figure out how to stop, or commit suicide, but recoiled in dread at the solutions that filled my mind.
"I couldn't kill myself without help.
"I'd chased my mother all the way to West Berlin, and it was in that city I realized that I couldn't continue any longer. What I wanted was a way to end my existence. I yearned to go into a church and beg for help, but of course, my body wouldn't let me enter. On approach to a holy place I would get just so close, and then freeze in revulsion with the feeling that my head would shoot right off my body. I did try, but there was no way I could approach. Then I thought about catching a holy man outside of the church and speaking with him that way. But I realized, of course, that I wouldn't be able to get anywhere near him. He was under the blessing of God, and I wasn't. There didn't seem to be any hope.
"But there was one sacred establishment in West Berlin that I thought I might be able to penetrate: the Buddhist temple complex in Frohnau. I knew Buddhism was an ancient faith and thought perhaps if I dared to come right out and tell them the truth about myself, the Buddhists would hear me out and be able to advise.
"One night, I gathered my weary courage and went to them.
"They let me inside. They talked with me.
"And they killed me."