The Fall

Morning was upon them now, the sun appearing at an angle through the windows. Setrakian stood and suddenly grasped the back of Dreverhaven’s chair, tipping it onto its hind legs and dragging it through the bookcase to the hidden rear quarters, leaving twin scores in the wood floor.

“Sunlight,” Setrakian declared, “is too good for you, Herr Doktor.”

The strigoi stared at him, eyes full of anticipation. Here, finally for him, was the unexpected. Dreverhaven longed to be part of any perversion, no matter the role he might play.

Setrakian remained in tight control of his rage.

“Immortality is no friend to the perverse, you say?” Setrakian put his shoulder to the bookshelf, sealing out the sun. “Then immortality you shall enjoy.”

That’s it, woodworker. There is your passion, Jew. What have you in mind?

The plan took three days. For seventy-two hours, Setrakian worked nonstop in a vengeful daze. Dismembering the strigoi upon Dreverhaven’s own operating table, severing and cauterizing all four stumps, was the most dangerous part. He then procured lead tulip planters in order to fashion a dirt-less coffin for the silver-necklaced strigoi, in order to cut off the vampire from communication with the Master. Into the sarcophagus he packed the abomination and its severed limbs. Setrakian chartered a small boat and loaded the planter onto it. Then he sailed alone deep into the North Sea. After a struggle, he managed to put the box overboard without sinking the boat in the process-thereby stranding the creature between land masses, safe from the killing sun and yet impotent for all eternity.

Not until the box sank to the ocean floor did Dreverhaven’s taunting voice finally leave Setrakian’s mind, like a madness finding its cure. Setrakian looked at his crooked fingers, bruised and bleeding, stinging with the salt water-and clenched them into tangled fists.

He was indeed going the way of madness. It was time to go underground, he realized, just as the strigoi had. To continue his work in private, and to await his chance.

His chance at the book. At the Master.

It was time to repair to America.

The Master-Part II

THE MASTER WAS, above all things, compulsive in both action and thought. The Master had considered every potential permutation of the plan. It felt vaguely anxious for this all to come to fruition, but one thing the Master did not lack was conviction.

The Ancients would be exterminated all at once, and in a matter of hours.

They would not even see it coming. How could they? After all, hadn’t the Master orchestrated the demise of one of them, along with six serfs, some years ago in the city of Sofia, Bulgaria? The Master itself had shared in the pain of the anguish of death at the very moment it occurred, feeling the maelstrom pull of the darkness-the implacable nothing-and savoring it.

On the 26th of April, 1986, several hundred meters below at the center of the Bulgarian city, a solar flash-a fission approximating the power of the sun-occurred inside a vaulted cellar within fifteen-foot-thick concrete walls. The city above was shaken by a deep rumble and a seismic movement, its epicenter tracked to Pirotska Street-but there were no injuries, and very little damage to property.

The event had been a mere bleep in the news, barely worth mentioning. It was to become completely overshadowed by the meltdown of the reactor at Chernobyl, and yet, in a manner unknown to most, intimately related to it.

Of the original seven, the Master had remained the most ambitious, the hungriest-and, in a sense, the youngest. This was only natural. The Master was the last one to arise, and from whence it was created was the mouth, the throat, the thirst.

Divided by this thirst, the others were scattered and hidden. Concealed, yet connected.

These notions buzzed inside the great consciousness of the Master. Its thoughts wandered to the time the Master first visited Armageddon on this Earth-to cities long forgotten, with pillars of alabaster and floors of polished onyx.

To the first time it had tasted blood.

Quickly, the Master reasserted control over its thoughts. Memories were a dangerous thing. They individuated the Master’s mind, and when that happened, even in this protected environment, the other Ancients could hear too. For in those moments of clarity, their minds became one. As they once had been, and were meant to be forever.

They were all created as one, and, thus, the Master had no name of its own. They all shared the one-Sariel-just as they shared one nature and one purpose. Their emotions and thought were naturally connected, in exactly the way the Master connected with the brood it was fostering, and all that would spring forth after that. The bond between the Ancients could be blocked but could never be broken. Their instincts and thoughts naturally yearned for connection.