Fallen
Part 6
I know we’ve hit street level when the wind whips against my face. Carefully, Keller leads me to the car, and guides my head as I grope for the seat.
“Just sit back, and relax,” he says, as I hear him slide into the seat beside me.
It’s not exactly easy to relax when you have a vampire taking you on a mystery tour, and you realize that no one else on Earth knows where the hell you are.
We seem to drive forever, but I imagine it’s no more than an hour, when the car slows, and eventually stops.
Keller helps me out of the car, and places his hands on my upper arms, to guide me.
“Don’t remove the blindfold until I tell you, okay Toby?” he whispers.
“Yeah, okay,” I reply, like I really have a choice.
He leads me in a straight line for a while, then up a step. The ground moves beneath me, and I almost stumble, but Keller’s body is stopping me falling.
“Sorry!” I mutter, as I step on his foot.
“Any time,” he hisses in my ear, and damn it, I feel my skin prickle at the sound of his voice.
Eventually, we stop moving, and take a step forward, out of an elevator I’m guessing.
“Okay, Toby, I’m going to take this off now,” he says, and I feel his fingers brush across my hair, before the blindfold falls loosely around my neck.
My eyes take a few moments to adjust to the light, but when they do, I can’t resist a gasp of sheer awe. The place is incredible. It has high ceilings, carved and richly decorated; the walls are draped with tapestries older than anything I’ve ever seen, and the bookshelves are amazing; carved with images and symbols.
“Impressive!” I say, in my position of ‘king of the understatement’.
“This library is almost as old as time,” Keller smiles.
“But how can a place like this not be noticeable in a place like New York City?” I ask, “It’s so vast.”
“Who says it’s in New York City?” Keller asks.
“Hey, we drove for no more than about an hour, hour and a half, you can’t get much further than the city limits in that time?”
Keller shot me an unnerving grin, “Such linear creatures, humans,” he said with a chuckle. “Follow me, I’ll show you where the books are that we need.”
I follow him like a spaniel, still puzzling over what the hell he means by ‘linear creatures’. He pulls out several large, ancient volumes, and clicks the metal clasps open.
“There are a couple of rules here,” he instructs me like a first grader, “Never, under any circumstances, read the books aloud.”
“Why not?” I ask.
He cocks his head, and gives me a patient smile; “Because it’s a ‘bad’ thing to do,” he explains, “Secondly, take nothing from the place, not even a scrap of paper, or a pencil. The library knows if you do, and it gets pissed.”
I know I look skeptical, “The ‘library knows’?” I sneer.
Keller sighs, and folds his arms across his chest, “Oh yeah, it knows. Trust the word of an old vampire, who would rather stake himself than take a paperclip from this place.”
There’s something about the look on his face that convinces me, so I nod, and mumble ‘Okay.”
“If you come across anything that you can’t read, just ask, and I’ll translate,” Keller says as he opens one of the volumes and lays it down in front of me.
“Doesn’t that count as ‘reading out loud?” I ask.
“Not if you don’t use the old language, no, because very few translations are ‘literal’ and complete.”
I nod, not really understanding the difference, but I’m not about to let him know that.
The script in the book is old, and hard on the eyes, but I soon adjust to the language and the annoying way they used to use ‘f’ instead of ‘s’.
The book tells of tales from the Dark Continent where the dead are used as soldiers, sent in the night to slay their friends as they slept. It’s full of warnings and curses and I have to admit that it takes precious little time before I begin to glaze over. I leaf through another volume, which tells much the same tale, but it details which herbs were used in the spell, and how you can ward yourself, so that should you be killed, they won’t be able to reanimate you…all really cheery stuff.
Keller has told me that I can take books from the oak shelves, but not from the shelves made from black wood, because they’re also ‘bad’, though yet again, he won’t elaborate on the meaning of ‘bad’ in this case.
I begin to wander, and suddenly spot a book ‘Olde Worlde Daemons’ which for some strange reason just sings out to me, so I slide it from the bookshelf, and lay it down on the table.
Flicking through, I realize that a lot of it is written in Latin, but some of it has been transcribed into old English. It’s not until I spot the word ‘vampyr’ that my interest really piques; after all, you can’t have enough education when it comes to dealing with vamps.
I pick my way through the prose, which is heavy in the extreme, but I get the general idea; this is the story of how vampires were created:
Shemhazai, an angel of high rank, led a sect of angels in a descent to earth to instruct humans in righteousness. The tutelage went on for a many centuries, but soon the angels pined for the human females. After lusting, the fallen angels instructed the women in magic and conjuring, mated with them, and produced hybrid offspring: the Nephilim.
The Nephilim were powerful in stature. Their strength was prodigious and their appetites immense. Upon devouring all of humankind's resources, they began to consume humans themselves. The Nephilim attacked and oppressed humans and were the cause of massive destruction on the earth.
Eventually, damned by heaven and earth, these bastards were cursed to drink the blood of their mothers, and carry the burden of their fathers for all eternity, a curse they could pass on to those who were damned along with them.
Wow, so that’s how vamps originated? I flick over some stuff in Latin, until I get to a series of etchings. I always was more comfortable reading books with pictures.
The pictures show effigies of the supposed ‘Nephilim’, and to be honest, they don’t look so scary.
Until I get to the bottom of the page.
Holy fuck!
Suddenly someone grabs my shoulder, and I almost crap my pants.
“What you got there, Toby?” Keller drawls in my ear, and then he goes deathly still.
I’m looking at a picture of him, in a book so old, God could have written it.
“You?” I mumble, “This is fucking you?”
“Where did you get that?” he growls
“This is you, isn’t it?” I turn and look into his eyes; suddenly I can see to the end of time.
“I told you not to meddle, Toby,” he says turning and walking away.
“How?” I stutter dumbly, not really registering his barely concealed threats.
“You wanna know how?” he asks, “You want to know the real me?”
“Yes!” I reply, and then wonder if I really do?
Keller sighs and folds his arms across his chest, and seems to consider his words carefully. “We were the children of gods, we had everything; power, strength, and the ability to breed with humans,” he shoots me a grin, and I find myself returning a nervous smile. “The earth was young and we were powerful, inevitably, we abused that power. When we were damned, there were many of us, we cut a swathe through humanity that made the gods tremble in fear, but with our damnation came the curse you now know as vampirism. Soon, humans learned how to destroy us; a frightening prospect for demigods, and they almost wiped us from existence. A few of us escaped into the darkness, and took the night as our cover. Unlike the children we bore, we could still walk in the sun, eat human food, do all the things that make you human, but our hunger for blood would become so powerful, we would soon crawl through the filth like animals. Our offspring grew less able to tolerate all the things that make life bearable, until all that was left was the monster inside.” He has a look on his face that I just can’t describe; like all the troubles of the world are resting on his shoulders. Damn it, I pity him.
“So you see, Toby, there’s nothing I won’t do to protect my people from this creature tearing through our lives.”
“What are you not telling me?” I ask, because I’m getting that fuzzy feeling just at the back of my neck, like I always do when someone’s bullshitting me.
He cocks his head to one side and looks at me like I’m a naughty child, “Oh, Toby!” he scolds.
“Hey, I’ll stop treating you like a monster, if you’ll stop treating me like a fool?”
His smile makes me shiver, “Deal,” he laughs, looking me up and down like he just acquired a new concubine. “Very few people know who, and what I am. Most of my own people don’t even know, just a few…’chosen’ members of my community; those I can trust, who have a blood oath to me. Yet it appears that whoever is attacking me knows that I have ‘knowledge’ beyond that of an average vampire, knowledge that could be used to make someone very, very powerful, that could destroy vampire-kind.”
I know I gasp, I hear my own voice, and yet I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
“I think I have a traitor in my ranks, and I’m really pissed about that!” Keller snarls. “You gotta be strong to break a blood oath, strong and dangerous, Toby, and you can’t let anything stand in your way, because once it’s broken, there’s gotta be blood,” he moves closer to me, until he’s almost touching me, “Lots of blood,” he whispers.
“We need to start checking out your people,” I croak through a dry throat.
“*I* need to check out my people.”
“Hey, we’re in this together!” I bluster, “I’m not having you going off half-cocked, slaughtering vamps all over town!”
Keller’s smile widens, and he laughs, a hot, dirty laugh, “Well, ain’t that statement just *full* of innuendo?” he chuckles.
I know my cheeks flush, and I let out a long sigh, “Cute, very cute,” I hiss.
“Ya think?” he runs his hands down his body seductively, “Why thank you, Toby!”
“Won’t work!” I insist, and he gives me that innocent look, like he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, “We work on this together and we do it by the book.”
He shrugs, and smiles, “Anything you say, officer,” he purrs, “You always this dominant, Toby?”
“D…dominant?” I stutter.
“If you were vampire, I’d be worried that you were looking for power, looking to be a threat. There are few who would challenge me, human or vampire, knowing what I am?”
“Is this a problem for you?” I ask, not knowing what the hell I’m supposed to say?
Keller rubs his chin with his hand, and then reaches out to touch me. His fingers are cool against my face, but soft and smooth like silk.
“No, no problem,” he replies, “no problem at all.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After a blindfold journey home, Keller leaves me at the door of my apartment, and it takes a few moments for it to sink in that he knows where I live. I know I never told him, but he already knows.
There’s so much spinning through my head that I just don’t know where to start looking for this traitor.
I grab myself a drink and sit down at my desk. I feel tired, but there’s so much new information racing through my head, I couldn’t possibly sleep. I open my old family bible, and search for the passage that describes what Keller is;
"The Nephilim were upon
the Earth in those days and thereafter too. Those sons of the gods who cohabited
with the daughters of the Adam, and they bore children into them. They were the
Mighty Ones of Eternity, the People of the Shem."
- Genesis 6:4
Holy fuck!
It’s hard to describe just how seriously freaked I feel, knowing I just met someone described in the fucking bible!
And he’s so damned hot, too.
No, I didn’t think that. I really didn’t think that.