Blood Vivicanti (9781941240106) Read online

  The

  Blood

  Vivicanti

  Part 5

  Lowen the Dark Man

  created by

  Anne Rice and Becket

  written by

  Becket

  The Blood Vivicanti

  Becket

  Copyright © 2014 Becket

  All rights reserved.

  Smashwords Edition

  ISBN: 1-941240-08-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-941240-08-3

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the imagination of the creator(s) or are used fictitiously.

  Under copyright law, if you are not the copyright owner of this work, you are forbidden to reproduce, create derivative works based on this work, download, distribute copies of the work, decompile this work without Becket’s express written permission.

  Becket’s note

  In 2011, Anne Rice and I began talking about the development of a new breed of blood drinkers.

  The first ground rule was that they had to have an entirely different cosmology from her other supernatural stories.

  She and I spent many weeks emailing back and forth, sharing copious detailed notes. We had several energetic lunches and dinners, whence we discussed the foundation and framework of the story you’re about to read. We swapped ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of these new blood drinkers, ideas about the characters themselves as well as their back-stories, and more ideas about potential narrative devices.

  One of the amazing facets of Anne’s writing method is that she seems to devote almost as much time to selecting the right names for things as she does to carefully crafting the narrative. Both go hand in hand, I’ve learned from her. She’s taught me much. The right name is as important as le mot juste.

  But what name would we call our new blood drinkers?

  One day, after we’d spent weeks thinking about what to call this new breed, I came into her office as she thumped closed a Latin textbook. She beamed at me with her irresistible smile. She told me she knew what to call our blood drinkers. She had not chosen a Latin word, but had developed a new word from Latin phraseology.

  What was the new word she’d developed?

  “Vivicanti,” she said as her smile broadened.

  I loved the word instantly!

  “Our blood drinkers will be called,” Anne Rice announced: “The Blood Vivicanti.”

  Then it was my job to write the story.

  My anger against you will rest. My jealousy shall depart from you. I will be calm and will be angry no longer. Because you have not remembered the days of your youth, but have enraged me with all these things, I have returned your deeds upon your head.

  —Ezekiel 16:42-43

  The Blood Vivicanti

  Part 5

  Lowen the Dark Man

  Wyn and Ms. Crystobal stood before the Black Building. It was night. They were wearing dark sunglasses, gray clothes, and black overcoats.

  They looked confident. They looked cool.

  The Black Building was Lowen’s. It was 150 floors from ground to top. More floors delved deep underground – like the Mines of Moria.

  Balrogs were thankfully absent.

  Lowen the Dark Man had stolen the Black Building through manipulation, trickery, and by twisting almost an entire city into his little army of Sleeper Devils.

  His Sleeper Devils were not zombies.

  And it would not be accurate to say that they were entirely mindless. They had minds. They were simply forbidden to use them often.

  For some, it was not a big change.

  Lowen would let his Sleeper Devils think of him, and not much else. They thought of him and they worshiped him, as if he were King Nebuchadnezzar at the outset of his madness.

  Wyn and Ms. Crystobal entered the Black Building.

  The main lobby was packed with Sleeper Devils.

  Wyn and Ms. Crystobal had been prepared for a good fight. So they were a little surprised and a lot cautious when none of the Sleeper Devils tried to stop them.

  The Sleeper Devils watched Wyn and Ms. Crystobal enter. They gathered around the two and moved with them through the main lobby.

  Playing in the background was an elevator music rendition of Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

  Wyn and Ms. Crystobal walked toward a corner of the lobby where there were stairs, elevators, and the security office.

  Two very large Sleeper Devils blocked the way. Their skin was ashy and they smelled like rot. One was wearing a tattered suit. The other was wearing a grocer’s uniform. They might have been simple and kind people in life, before Lowen turned them into cannon fodder for his personal host of slaves. Now they were decaying versions of the good things they had been.

  They would not let Wyn and Ms. Crystobal pass because Lowen was screaming inside their heads that he would never let them die if they disobeyed him.

  Lowen’s power over them was not to threaten them with death. Death would have been the release.

  The reflection of the two Sleeper Devils glinted in Wyn’s sunglasses. His expression was unflinching and fearless.

  Ms. Crystobal smirked.

  Wyn moved faster than sound. He flung the two Sleeper Devils into a nearby pillar. Their bodies crumpled. Their souls released.

  Ms. Crystobal held out her hands. Energy in the shape of blue swirling light hovered over one palm. Over the other hovered black droplets of something she called, “The Ink Mass.”

  She flung the light at a group of Sleeper Devils. It scattered them to atoms.

  She flung the Ink Mass at another group. Those Sleeper Devils all tumbled backward like ragdolls, spilling into a dimensional portal that opened up into the heart of the Mojave Desert.

  They blinked in surprise, suddenly surrounded by a pack of hungry coyotes.

  All the other Sleeper Devils now swarmed around Wyn and Ms. Crystobal.

  He fought them fast and mercifully.

  She decimated the rest with a blast of violet energy.

  She and he fought with all the graceful movements of ballet dancers in Swan Lake.

  More Sleeper Devils poured out of doors along the walls, more came down from hatchways in the ceiling, and more crawled up from trapdoors in the floor. More came in, and more came in after them, and more and more and more came in after them.

  Wyn thrust his way into the security office.

  It was full of monitors displaying greenish images of the hallways and rooms and toilets. Each image was filled with Lowen’s Sleeper Devils. Not one floor was free of them – except the 120th, where Lowen was keeping the Red Man.

  It seemed as open and spacious as the surface of the moon.

  Wyn studied the computer layout while Ms. Crystobal remained outside, turning Sleeper Devils into motionless piles of bones and bile.

  Wyn leaned over one computer console and quickly hacked into the system and reprogrammed the music to play Mozart’s Requiem – “in honor of Aemilia,” he said softly to himself.

  Wyn quit the security office.

  Fifteen Sleeper Devils were standing outside the door waiting for him.

  He turned them into pulp in 3.14 seconds.

  “Easy as pi,” he said to himself.

  Meanwhile a chorus was screaming through the loud speakers, “Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla.”

  It translates as: Day of wrath, day of anger will dissolve the world in ashes.

  Ms. Crystobal flung seventeen Sleeper Devils through a portal toward the Draco Dwarf Galaxy.

  She tossed twelve more through a portal toward the bottom of the Mariana’s Trench.

  She hurtled twenty-two more through the nearest wall.


  Just who exactly is Ms. Crystobal?

  I must admit that she is still a mystery to me, even though she and I have become much closer than I’ve ever been with anyone, except for perhaps Theo, and not to mention the Red Man.

  A while back, when I was in Idylville’s forest, spying on Joe and his family, Lowen and Ms. Crystobal appeared. Behind them were doors. Above his had been the words: Happy Now. Above hers had been the words: Knock to Find.

  Later, I asked Ms. Crystobal what the doors meant.

  She told me they were portals.

  “Portals to where?” I asked.

  She told me that Lowen does not have the power to open a portal to anywhere, “except death,” she said.

  “But the portal I opened for you,” she added, “led to some thing after this life.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Peace,” she said, “I believe.”

  Now in the Black Building, the lobby was mostly empty.

  Wyn and Ms. Crystobal had completely decimated Lowen’s Sleeper Devils.

  The only things still moving were body parts – a few heads, some arms, some twitching, some scratching.

  The souls of those poor Sleeper Devils released.

  “Be at peace,” Ms. Crystobal whispered to them.

  She opened a portal into space and she blew their remains through it as if they were brown winter leaves.

  She and Wyn went to the elevator. He pressed the button. They waited.

  “How was the game?” she asked.

  “I don’t watch sports,” he said.

  “Please.”

  “Space Invaders?”

  “Of course.”

  “New high score.”

  Ms. Crystobal cleared her throat.

  Then she said: “Bet I can beat it.”

  The elevator doors opened.

  Ms. Crystobal rubbed her hands together for a moment. She opened them.

  Now over her palms was a glowing speck of light, as small as a pinprick of starlight.

  She blew it from her hands. Gently it floated inside.

  Wyn pressed the 120th floor. The elevator doors closed.

  The two went to the stairs, as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “I hit everything I see, Tweedledee,” said Wyn whimsically to himself.

  A minute later:

  An explosion shook violently the whole building with the force of an earthquake.

  Wyn smiled.

  He and Ms. Crystobal looked down the stairwell. They were on the ground level, but the stairwell wound just as far down as it did up.

  Ms. Crystobal leaped up the stairs as silently as a cat.

  Wyn leaped down the stairs, no less stealthily.

  They didn’t say goodbye to one another. That would have been crossing into the undiscovered country of intimacy – from whose bourn no traveler returns.

  It took about fifteen minutes before Wyn finally came close to the lowest level. He paused to study the bottom. It was a very far drop.

  A troop of Sleeper Devils was waiting for him. They were walking around in a melancholy circle. Two were in the middle, slouching.

  Lowen was blaring his message of misery and hate inside their heads. But it would be a mistake to think of him in Orwellian terms. He was not the Thought Police. He was not Big Brother.

  He was just a bad parent.

  And the earth was quite used to his kind by that time.

  Wyn leaped down the rest of the way.

  In the second before he landed, he grabbed the two center Sleeper Devils and slammed them into the floor.

  It cracked beneath his might.

  Their black blood bespattered his sunglasses. One died instantly. The other exhaled one last word before death.

  “Thanks.”

  Elsewhere in the Black Building…

  Lowen the Dark Man had been on the uppermost floor the whole time, watching this scene play out through the eyes of his Sleeper Devils.

  He could see and hear their thoughts as if they were his own. They always thought about him. His power over them made them do so.

  The nigh-life of a Sleeper Devil was to always think of Lowen, of doing his will, of loving him – if you could call that love.

  His power made them think that their nigh-life was perfectly natural. They thought it was unnatural to disobey him. They could not imagine living their nigh-lives without the echo of his voice always inside their heads and penetrating their hearts.

  He was like that jingle that gets stuck in your head – only his jingle was the torpid twinkling sounds of death always on the horizon, death that never quite dawns.

  Lowen the Dark Man was in a room that he had made to be as much like Khariton as possible. Everything was egg-shaped in some way: The desk and the computer, the tables and the chairs and the sofa and television monitors.

  The only object that was not ovular was the operating table in the middle of the room. It was shaped like a T.

  Theo was clamped to it with very strong metal bars. He was sweating from suffering pain recently and he was shivering from the cold air. His body lay along the length. His arms were strapped to the sides.

  Theo looked like the Son of God on the Cross.

  Lowen did not know how to make a Blood Vivicanti: He did not know how to do a peripheral blood stem cell transplant.

  But he did know how to possess a human. For years he had known how to brutally Guantánamo souls.

  He had been trying to possess Theo that night. But his usual method was not working.

  Normally his violet ghost would have issued out from his host body like a mist rising from the skin. After that, his ghost would have enshrouded his next victim like a thick cloud and he would have seeped into their bodies, shoving out their souls.

  But the body of a Blood Vivicanti was protected somehow – perhaps by the mind, perhaps by some sheer indomitable willpower.

  Lowen could not shove out Theo’s soul. He could not make room for himself. And he found this both annoying and impressive. That made him even more desirous to possess the body of a Blood Vivicanti.

  He was like an addict when the pleasure stops and the pain of dependence kicks in.

  Lowen had already learned from Theo everything that Wyn had told him about the Red Man: That the Red Man had been scientifically developed on Khariton, that his name was Silent because Kharetie scientists would not give him a voice to add to society, and that he had come to take Lowen’s ghost back to the planet to potentially fix the cracks in the Great Harmony.

  Lowen laughed at that. He laughed to think of his note of discord being so powerful that it cracked the planet’s once commonplace life.

  But he also wept that the Great Harmony was now called “the Noise.” He had fond memories of harmonizing with someone else.

  Lowen could relate to the Red Man as I could relate to Nell.

  Those who are misunderstood and ostracized by society usually do feel that peculiar bond of fellowship.

  But the Dark Man felt no bond with Theo whatsoever. In fact, he already considered Theo to be his private property. The Red Man’s blood – Kharetie blood – was flowing through Theo’s veins. And who else should have Kharetie blood but a ghost from Khariton?

  But the problem of Theo’s soul prevented Lowen from taking full ownership of his body. He would not torture Theo because he would not damage the thing he wanted to possess.

  So he had been torturing Theo’s mind and heart instead.

  He thought about killing Theo, releasing his soul, and then slipping in. But that peculiar idea had no guarantee of success. He might not be able to slip inside. And if he did, the body would have to be revived somehow. And if it were, would he be worse than his Sleeper Devils? A zombie? An undead? All the while Theo’s body would be decaying.

  Lowen shuddered to think of himself trapped in a decaying body.

  Moreover, he had no idea how to kill a Blood Vivicanti – or how to revive one either.

  Lowen studied Theo’s
Probiscus and he had an idea.

  The Red Man – the Origin Blood – had been scientifically programmed to communicate himself by means of jabbing the stinger at the tip of his tongue into someone’s neck, by drinking their blood, and by filling them with his venom.

  In life, Lowen had been a scientist on Khariton. He understood the science behind the creation of the Red Man. And now he theorized that he might be able to communicate his self – his being, his soul – into someone else if he reverse-engineered the same Kharetie procedure on his human host body.

  He smiled as he planned to outfit himself with a humanoid Probiscus.

  Elsewhere in the Black Building…

  Wyn defeated the small band of Sleeper Devils on the bottommost floor, far underground.

  Then he went to the electrical room. His job was to sever the power to the building, in the hope of lowering Lowen’s defenses. Wyn suspected that he might be up against alien technology, but he could not have guessed that he would be dealing with Lowen’s latest recreation of the human race, a new cybernetic life form.

  This thing he now confronted had once been a group of people and a power generator. But now it was a horrible mingling of people sewn together and interwoven through a machine.