The End
Woah, just woah. I started this fic when I was 16 way back when, and due to my inability to concentrate coupled with my refusal to force the words to come it has taken four years to complete. I am now nearly 20 years of age and here it is, finished at last. It may have not been one the best written pieces here, but I’m proud of it and I enjoyed myself writing it. I really hope you enjoy this rather long ending, but I can finally bring Ancient Wounds to an end. Thanks to everyone, it’s been one hell of a ride :)
Author: yours truly, ExMaverick aka Jess
Title: Ancient Wounds
Rating: PG
Summary: Prequel to my vampire fic Deepest Shadow. Ville recounts the events of his mortal life growing up in the poverty of 20th century Finland, wrought with grief, sex, romance, passion and abuse leading into his birth to darkness.
His lengthy tales are imparted to the sleepy mind of his young lover, but only in the seclusion of his own darkest thoughts does he begin to relive the greatest obsessions and deepest hurts rooted in his bygone and decadent time.
Warnings: sexual content
A/N: I have no beta, please excuse any mistakes herein
Pairing: Vam,Ville/Jonne, Ville/OC (in parts)
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5i, 5ii, 6, 7, 8, 9i, 9ii, 10i, 10ii, 10iii
11, 12i, 12ii, 13, 14i, 14ii, 14iii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20i, 20ii,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32i, 32ii, 32iii, 33,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41i, 41ii, 40iii, 42i, 42ii
Deepest Shadows
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Dedicated to all wonderful readers with their infinite patience, with so much love especially but in no particular order to-
lilithvalo
gonewiththecin
silver_sixpence
slasher48
snejinka
--------------------------------------------------------------<3
I arranged for a carriage to take me to the sea when the night fell to leave. My effects were packed and laced up by the trunk load. I wouldn’t actually take any of these things with me, save a small royal green briefcase containing a few memories and comforts. I thought of my ancient Finland, I her son so tragically fallen from her cruel and fertile grace to be cast out for crimes against her nature. I thought of many things on the cold night’s journey to the docks, replaying something Armas had said to me in his wise old age when I had doubted my strength so very long ago-
“Oh, there have been other actors, worse and better; other singers; other authors. There have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own imitable power; each of us comes alive with his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the mind of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment we can really understand: the kind of accomplishment which is the self-this self, if you will-is utterly whole and triumphant”
Such slight comfort recalling his words seemed to instill in me. I suffered, but I had lived for the moment in life and un-death. I had loved. I had needed and been needed in return. And despite the madness, the despair in it all, I had survived countless afflictions to my soul. Let this be the worst of it. Let it take me down and bear the hurt until it was swallowed up in me never to return. I would take it inside and make it a part of me, weave it into my being with his golden hair, her dark skin and his terrifying smirk. I would rise again when the sun set over the shores of the new world and my terror would be purged.
At some point I began to drift in and out of consciousness, never really mortal or demonic sleep but I was aware of the carriage, and the horses panting heavily outside driving through the wooded snow-covered hills. I was wrapped in a blanket and shivered, though I felt no cold and began to feel a lull of sickness rise with the motion of my confines. The flickering lights of the dock burned visibly ahead not an hour’s travel.
I knew from where this sickness stemmed and shuddered in it, feeling almost the inner heat of mortal fever. I suppose you realize by now that I have mentioned all the loose ends that needed tying but one. Let us retrace our steps the night previous so you might understand, and perhaps I in telling you may in turn fathom what I saw with my own preternatural eyes.
Back in Oulu for many years the black forest had been silent. The voices that had once plagued me and kept me at bay from that terrible place had not spoken to me in all my coming and goings with my Emmanuel, and indeed I did not sense any of their presence. It was not until one sleeping day my breathless rest spun me a vision of something violent and unspeakable, ringing screams through my thoughts and images of burning and decay. I saw my wicked brothers snatched away by some thieves in the night before they woke. I felt the licking of fire at my cold lifeless face. This chaos of the senses culminated in one final clear impression of Master Vuori gaunt and howling like and animal, dressed in the furs of a wild man and bleeding from a terrible wound to the wrists. In my mind I pictured him encircle an unearthed pit in the cellar floor of dirt and tile, something ancient and sacred and horrible to behold. I heard the chanting hollow language of the ancient people of the north, its rhythmic and dolorous hum calling out to me, the most powerful blood making trails where he walked. When I woke I awoke shaking and fearful.
When the time came that I mustered up enough courage I had returned to Oulu and listened into the darkness for some sign of them. But once again I heard nothing but silence, neither eerie nor unsettling but rather the lack of something I knew should have been present. Where I had once felt their beating demonic hearts I could feel nothing. I listened for nights, just listening until the time came that I knew I must look upon the place once again. I made my way through the blackness of the choking pine without a wrong foot. The smell of the winter cold was sterile and good. The trees watched over me from high above as the silent witnesses of centuries past.
Under some lay pheasants, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky , some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out-all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose torture had ended some hours ago by the inability of nature to bear more.
The wasted lives of hunters who had failed to recover some of their quarry, no doubt. Driven down at dusk to this place by some primitive shooting-party; and while those who had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before sundown had been carried off, many badly wounded birds had fled and hidden themselves away, or risen among the heaving boughs, where they had maintained their stance until they grew weaker with loss of blood in the chill and fallen to the ground. I recalled glimpsing such men in my mortal boyhood, peering above hedges at their pointed guns, strangely transfixed with a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.
I heard the wolves close by, smelled their untamed scent. Do not fear me brothers I smiled meekly, moving through the night tonight I did not come for you. I was at nature’s breast and glad to be so. Knowing this, with the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers, to this end with my own hands I broke the necks of as many birds as I could find. There I left them to the wolves, with the small relief that their pain at least, was over. If only I could kill all with such tenderness I remember thinking.
When I finally reached the manor it was all but burnt to the ground, the smell still hanging in the air like an ominous figure all its own. What had once been imposing and grand was now charred black and lying in ruin. What in god’s name happened here? I remember asking myself. I walked among the skeletal remains of the place as if in a curious dream, knowing the places where the human servants slept and where I used to study. I found my bedroom. So many fine silks and antiques had been consumed by flame, only the ash of the bedpost and the carved desk still lingered. The strong stone of the cellar still held strong, and as I entered that hideous resting place underground through the night’s shadow I saw what remained of the hearth in my vision, that unearthed relic of the old times where god were worshipped and meals where cooked through the harsh winter. I saw what remained of a bear skin the master wore in his screaming. His mystical blood glittered dry on the floor stone, staining it possibly for all time.
They were all gone. Every last one of them. I had no hope of understanding what had happened that night but I had seen it in my sleep because Vuori had called out for me to save them. He had called on me and I had not answered.
I left as quickly as I had come, and god willing closing the darkest chapter of my childhood with it.
But now wracked with heat, restless in the night trampling closer to my destination, outside of humanity I had at present no fear. The scent of the ocean dominated the air as we arrived in the small port town some time later, and I fumbled through my at-hand articles for my travel documents. Jarno had wonderfully arranged a place in a fine small ship by the name of some female mantle or another, which would take me onwards some weeks until I reached my destination.
As for my disappearance thereafter, I had given it some thought. On arrival should I simply choose to just flee? Leave my belongings (save the aforementioned briefcase including some of my favorite books, my mother’s letter and my father’s ornate knife) and disappear into society, or would there be an enquiry from Jarno and the firm to find me? Surely that was likely, in that I had a book expected and I had no intent to meet with our sister firm contacted on the matter. I would require a way of covering my tracks were I to slip away and cut all ties completely, but there would be time enough to ponder this over the journey. And having decided earlier that I would be starving myself for the duration of it, I would indeed have not much else to occupy my mind.
I shan’t describe my travels in too much detail, for there is not enough time in the world to recall all those tears shed for the sake of tears alone, nor enough time for me to describe to you the finery of the strange floating little world it was, the stony cold nights awake at sea or the waves beneath me as I slept in the day. I remember the women most, dressed in their lustrous silks and flowing skirts, American girls who would walk the deck in their soft leather boots in the evening and talk about this book and that book. I enjoyed listening to their voices, the flow of the English words in their accented melody when something amused them. Some nights when their suitors permitted they would talk with me briefly about what reading took their fancy, and told me most positively that I would love America. I was warmed by them and happy to observe some social intercourse, though towards the last few days I dare say it made my fast more apparent to the beast in me.
Know that I hungered, but to kill was to face suspicion for a man whose nocturnal habits earned him enough rumors as it was. Days and days I became weak and sluggish, not thin or gaunt but a shadow of my former self. I began to dream strange tales with the delirium of it all, stories of the Saami-Lappish people of my homeland centuries before, the warriors my mother had sang me to sleep with as a child, and dreams about crystal empires with slender marble princesses. I intend to write these dreams down you understand, but when I do that tale will be for another time. The starvation however was taking its toll; I hadn’t denied myself for this long since the depression of my making.
But the ravaged thoughts of such denial did however give me a method by way to make my disappearance realistic.
Once arrived and baggage waiting to be loaded for transportation by carriage I would hunt, in the knowledge we would dock before the sun rose for morning. A porter being my witness leaving the ship I would slink away to find a man of my height and hue to be in my place, plant upon him my documents once he fell dead and dress in him in my waistcoat. My identity misplaced I would then take my leave to whatever place closest I might hide from the sun, and with this rather assuredly to all those overseas I would have been found dead, robbed for my money and possessions. It pained me to be so cruel to my loved ones who would have to hear of my end this way, but I knew it must be done.
As if fate transpired against me in this matter, all was not so simple. After many nights of caged sleep my vessel docked into the early spring morning of the new world, and I was in awe of it. I will not name the place, nor do I know much of what it like now, but in March of 1923 I walked into the balmy air of America and saw that it was good. So different from home, there were no ancient buildings, no decaying churches to behold. This was a land in its summer; this place was very much young. Such was the space of this town that I could sweep my gaze as far as it would extend and see great rolling expanses of make-shift pavement untaken up by the pedestrian hoards, the low humming of the night passersby of a place too big for its people.
Case upon case of my work were then loaded off the ship and entrusted to porters who would take everything towards carriages or to wherever one might be staying. This presented an issue of course as a carriage had already been allocated to me by the publishing sister firm and was nowhere to be found. And I had precious few hours before daybreak.
I was informed sometime thereafter that my transport was in fact late due to some administrative chaos and I had (apparently as far as they were aware) been scheduled to arrive the next day. A carriage would of course be sent out to fetch me on their behalf but I would be waiting until half-passed three new world time in the morning. My porter apologised profusely out of some misplaced duty to his foreign charge, and suggested I take rest in a nearby lodge and have drinks with the good local company still awake at this hour (completely at the expense of the carriage company who had made such a grievous mix up to such an honored guest, and even more so that they hadn’t a motorcar to offer me).
A young man of around nineteen years, I was taken by his accent and the song-like quality of his voice, his English different to that of the young women I had travelled with and my own well-practiced speak. I thought for one rather distressing moment that I should never hear my sweet Finnish again, and in addition be much less lucky to speak it. This of course was the least of my worries.
Moving further from the docks, I was directed towards a specific public house accredited by the porter about six minutes into town. I found the sheer unhindered scale of it all literally breathtaking, a strange unnerving feeling pouncing upon me as if a rug had been yanked from beneath me when confronted with a shanty blooming into a city so abruptly.
The place itself was cold compared with the outside, and was vastly empty even for this hour. This of course became blindingly obvious when I attempted to order a drink to keep up appearances. I was informed by the rather portly proprietor that alcohol in any form had been illegal here for the past three years. I found the whole exchange to be completely bizarre, to say the least. I also assumed my accent must not have been doing me many favors either. Setting me down a glass of water and rolling his eyes at an ignorant foreigner he turned away without a word. As memory recalls, it would be another ten years before a glass of wine or scotch gave me an excuse to haunt city bars again.
Sitting alone in the back, I thought the cold of the place was going to drive me mad. Surely, yes it was not the blistering cold of the Nordic countries, but the niggling draft made me crave something more substantial for my thick preternatural skin to actually feel. It’s what comes from me not having focus. I have always been prone to nerves this way. Of the few that came into the slate covered building at around 4am even fewer matched me in height or build. In finding a body to replace me it seems I hadn’t factored in the locals being vastly of Mediterranean or Italian stock.
Thus the waiting game began; I had one hour until my carriage arrived and only two hours until daybreak. And I had no idea where I would hide when morning came. Standing back outside in the warmer air with a cigarette it took all of my will to keep the sickly heat of panic from rising up inside me. You can imagine my luck when a tall slender male of about my stature appeared in the form of an Irish-sounding boy fresh off the street with an eye to rob a foreigner blind. He was dressed in a black tweed suite, a cheap cut thing bought no doubt to give the air or refinement or respectability. Over the top of thinning, clipped brown hair he wore a bowler slightly of center, and in his front pocket overflowed a lightly worn silk rose handkerchief.
I lured him in with the sight of my silver cigarette case and pocket watch, and let him get close to address me. I let him see the fine leather of my briefcase, I did all save the smile of a simpleton. Playing his game I allowed myself to be lead into some odious alleyway to unexplained ends, almost smiling as I answered his pointless questions in the most broken English I could muster. This man was a thief, but the experience was not completely dissimilar to my dealings with rent boys or drunkards. The trick in it was always to allow them the upper hand.
When he was sure we were alone he swiftly turned on me with something sharp, and I quickly in return crushed his throat against the wall he sought to pin me to. It was both anticlimactic and efficient for my purpose. Whether or not he deserved it was irrelevant, time was precious and I needed a corpse in my place. The problem came with his face. We looked absolutely nothing alike. This was indeed a problem.
Now, please understand when I assure you that I have never in my entire existence willingly mutilated a body for my own ends. Death is punishment enough. I have never denied anyone their dignity in their last sleep, often healing over incriminating wounds to give the impression of a more peaceful departure. This is why it pained me somewhat to do what I did. Though it took me mere minutes to complete the messy and disturbing act, by the time I left his body in that alley, dressed in my waistcoat and shoes, there was no longer a human face to see. I do not wish to speak on the matter any further.
Glory to the new world and its freedoms! The last act has been done, and now dressed in a tweed jacket and a bowler slightly off center I walked into the streets a new man. It was five in the morning and I desperately needed a place to hide. Something inside me told me this lack of decrepit buildings would do me little favor in this city, and the dawn was fast approaching. Did this place not have countryside? Surely that is where I must be to find somewhere away from the city and all its people, to hide away from humanity and live safe appeasing only my immortal needs and desires. My heart yearned for an old world church, a barn, a castle! But the sun would not hold off long enough to begin my search, and so swallowing my pride and kneeling to my basic needs, by the time the spring sun rose over the industrial new world city, I was not only dead to the world in more ways than one but taking refuge in its bowels, hidden deep in a sewer where the city met the sea.
As I tucked myself away in that stinking crevice and lay to rest I was once again wracked with dreamy visions in my sleep like so many mornings before. I became awash with the sensation of being mortally drunk, feeling the dankness of my hideaway melt immediately into a golden haze as sweet as the finest exotic honey without hindrance or warning. Thicknesses of silks in euphoric orange and deep reds flickered like fire in my eyes around the ankles of some unseen beauty, and the deep intruding scent of sandalwood filled my lungs to the point I believed could barely breathe. I heard a laughter, like a bell, percolating through a sensual rhythm that seemed to come from nowhere and yet everywhere at once. Build me a fire with your own hands, white one from the winter place came the bell-clear voice take wood from the dead trees to the west and build me a pyre, travel a mortal man’s night west, and I will give you sanctuary . Someone was kissing my face in the mania of colour before me as these words were whispered, my fingertips buried in the softness of perfumed curls I could not see while I shuddered against the undeniable sensation of warm breasts heaving against my back through thinly veiled cloth. When I woke that nightfall in the stench of the sewer and the ocean I was dripping with sweat and shaking uncontrollably and the many messages in sum I had received.
There were other vampires here. Of that I had no doubt in mind. There were others here and one was calling out to me to go to them where I had previously failed to heed the call of my own kind. The question was not now if the voice could be trusted but how long I could resist its chilling and erotic pull and keep away. I knew in my heart that staying in the dirt was no way to continue my existence and I was being offered sanctuary by some creature who might hold some understanding, a companion perhaps to weather all time until the end of things should come to pass. Travel a mortal man’s night west, past the artificial lights and sounds and join me in the hills and the forest, I will make you safe. Listen for me and I will guide you.
When I travelled that night I did so at breakneck speed, completely at ease with my surroundings as the urban erections faded away into country, like I had been in the pine forests of my homeland where nature spoke to me and I became a part of it. The sky was wonderfully black, the air warmer than I’ve ever known it to be living or otherwise. There was no breeze uncreated by my strides, just tranquility in the dark. The west fields and forests burst before me into hills choked with woods and I listened out for the beating heart or sound of her.
Walking as a man might do among the heaving boughs of oak trees I heard the dead dry ones creak as if they were whispering. The hills were utterly silent except for the bell voice that muttered incomprehensibly in the shadows. Walking as a man might do I could hear and see nothing but the forest lit under the waxing moon, straining to hear a voice that would no longer speak directly to me again. I knew the hum of a smaller city not twenty miles down eastwards, too quiet to notice. Something was overgrown my ivy not yards in front of me, and it was far too vast to be a tree.
Built into the hillside were the decrepit bones of an old villa, built centuries passed in fine worn marble that must have shined beautifully polished in the sun in the decades before my birth. The surrounding forests had no doubt overtaken a vineyard that would have surrounded it when the place had been deserted. Rose bushed choked the perimeter of the place, their angry thorns barricading intruders entry. The size of the place was immense, a summerhouse most worthy of royalty in its heyday. Pushing through the undergrowth the briars and thicket tore into my cheap tweed and at my face, but I wanted to feel it. I lay my hands on the wall to find it freezing and wonderful to touch. And though I listened patiently for a sign I would not get, still inside the place I found her.
The place was filthy and choking with dust and it was only because of the sunken tub set into the centre that I even knew it had once been a bathing room of sorts. Imagine my surprise when I found her curled up inside it, her small knees pinned lifelessly to her chest, a mere child of ten and quite long dead. Though she looked as if she were merely asleep, the poor child had in fact been dead for at least some years and breathed no more immortal breath from her fragile lungs. But she had called out to me in my dreams, yes she had, but that’s what I came in time to understand. My dreams were in fact those calling out to me by the strength of their will, out of need through time and expansive spaces.
Some were living, some undead and some, like her, were somewhere between worlds. Vuori had called out to me before his death, the tribes from hundreds upon hundreds of years before and crystal empires of the future, as this child vampire had called out to me now. I was dead and walking and as such no physical law would control what would pass through me while I lay open to channels in my sleep.
I looked upon her small face and thought that she must have been incredibly doll-like, looking at the tiny delicate bones remaining of her-she couldn’t have been much older than ten or eleven when she’d been given The Blood. She was beautiful. I knelt aside the sunken bath and ran my fingers over the tatters of her red silk dress I suddenly understood how she’d come to rest.
She’d lived here with her vampire lover and Maker (which explained the lack of many windows in the place, how the house was so perfect for our kind to have lived in) a gorgeous female vampire far older than myself of even he who made me. She, like the child, has been dark of skin and no doubt dazzling eyes, dressed in silks from their homeland deep in Asia. Indeed, something inside me told me she the girl had lived millennia when our kind had been worshipped as gods of the old world. A beauty who had masqueraded among the living as one of royal blood accumulating immense wealth to lavish upon her child bride, she kept the little one hunting at her side in the guise of a daughter. How romantically perverse, and for its ending so tragic. It was images of the beauty of her Maker she had sent me in my sleep to lure me here, I thought how delicate and cunning she must have been for one so small .
Somehow the rich mistress has found herself badly with a group of others of our kind, and had one nightfall set the child down where she now lay with the promise of her return and an armful of fragrant roses clasped in the pleats of her skirt. The young beauty had waited in that spot night after night for her lover but she never returned. The dainty little flower had not moved, and never stopped waiting for her beloved, and so after sometime must have passed away from starvation or more poetically a broken heart.
It didn’t matter now though as moved to scoop her up in my arms gently, she was emaciated, her preternatural flesh was still as if she has slept. The roses (which were now mostly dust) were the only indicant of her body had been here. She had called out to me to burn her, as our flesh can only be destroyed by flame. I must build her a pyre from the dead trees behind the villa and return her to her beloved she had wooed me with visions of. I would keep the roses that grew wild outside in her memory, and live here once she’d been put to peace. In return for my deed she had given me sanctuary, a place safe from the sun and a land to sustain myself on. I would light the fire at the foot of the hill, and remain here with the blessing of an unnamed child vampire long dead.
In the springtime of 1923, for a short while, my life came to a stop. I lived without event or disruption from the waking world, and nothing of great significance would befall me for seventy-three years. But that of course is another story. I cleaned the house, collected furnishings I stole from rundown buildings that suited my fancy bothering no one. I fed off the living and became one of them only when I stalked the ballrooms and taverns, which over the decades gave way to nightclub dance floors and bars. I marked my skin permanently with ink to decorate it like mortals did at the time. I still heard the calls of others, immortal and mortal alike in my sleep, but I never answered them save one. But that is enough of me, shall I tell you what became of the others?
My brother’s descendents flourished across Scandinavia. Many of my family are still alive today and are scattered across Europe and many foreign lands I cannot number. Ville Tobias Valo, my nephew, became a wondrously kind gentleman who raised many sons and in 1943 championed the help for the poorer rural folk who grew up in icy cottages not so unlike how I had over one-hundred years ago.
Suvi died an old woman, who from the day of her marriage vowed never to wear a dress again, and throw off the garments of oppression she had known first in slavery and then in womanhood. A woman of business, wit and charm, she had become everything I knew she was destined to be.
I have had a suspicion as to the exact events that lead to the deaths of Vuori and my brothers, but they will surely come clearer with time.
As for my beloved stable boy, Jonne ‘Emmnuelle’ Liimatainen whom I loved until the day he died, a good life had been given also. His daughters bloomed into beautiful women, who married well and travelled far and wide. Which brings us to the end of our epic tale spanning some one-hundred and six years. Somewhere in America the blonde haired-blue eyed great, great granddaughter of Emmanuelle and Mina Liimatainen had settled down in a quiet suburb. In the Autumn of 1979 she would give birth to her second son, he would come screaming healthily into the world by the name Brandon Cole Margera.
22nd March 2010, 11.15pm
Author: yours truly, ExMaverick aka Jess
Title: Ancient Wounds
Rating: PG
Summary: Prequel to my vampire fic Deepest Shadow. Ville recounts the events of his mortal life growing up in the poverty of 20th century Finland, wrought with grief, sex, romance, passion and abuse leading into his birth to darkness.
His lengthy tales are imparted to the sleepy mind of his young lover, but only in the seclusion of his own darkest thoughts does he begin to relive the greatest obsessions and deepest hurts rooted in his bygone and decadent time.
Warnings: sexual content
A/N: I have no beta, please excuse any mistakes herein
Pairing: Vam,Ville/Jonne, Ville/OC (in parts)
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5i, 5ii, 6, 7, 8, 9i, 9ii, 10i, 10ii, 10iii
11, 12i, 12ii, 13, 14i, 14ii, 14iii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20i, 20ii,
21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32i, 32ii, 32iii, 33,
34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41i, 41ii, 40iii, 42i, 42ii
Deepest Shadows
Previous Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17
Dedicated to all wonderful readers with their infinite patience, with so much love especially but in no particular order to-
lilithvalo
gonewiththecin
silver_sixpence
slasher48
snejinka
--------------------------------------------------------------<3
I arranged for a carriage to take me to the sea when the night fell to leave. My effects were packed and laced up by the trunk load. I wouldn’t actually take any of these things with me, save a small royal green briefcase containing a few memories and comforts. I thought of my ancient Finland, I her son so tragically fallen from her cruel and fertile grace to be cast out for crimes against her nature. I thought of many things on the cold night’s journey to the docks, replaying something Armas had said to me in his wise old age when I had doubted my strength so very long ago-
“Oh, there have been other actors, worse and better; other singers; other authors. There have been a million since and a million will come after this moment. But each of us shines with his own imitable power; each of us comes alive with his own unique and dazzling moment; each of us has his chance to vanquish the others forever in the mind of the beholder, and that is the only kind of accomplishment we can really understand: the kind of accomplishment which is the self-this self, if you will-is utterly whole and triumphant”
Such slight comfort recalling his words seemed to instill in me. I suffered, but I had lived for the moment in life and un-death. I had loved. I had needed and been needed in return. And despite the madness, the despair in it all, I had survived countless afflictions to my soul. Let this be the worst of it. Let it take me down and bear the hurt until it was swallowed up in me never to return. I would take it inside and make it a part of me, weave it into my being with his golden hair, her dark skin and his terrifying smirk. I would rise again when the sun set over the shores of the new world and my terror would be purged.
At some point I began to drift in and out of consciousness, never really mortal or demonic sleep but I was aware of the carriage, and the horses panting heavily outside driving through the wooded snow-covered hills. I was wrapped in a blanket and shivered, though I felt no cold and began to feel a lull of sickness rise with the motion of my confines. The flickering lights of the dock burned visibly ahead not an hour’s travel.
I knew from where this sickness stemmed and shuddered in it, feeling almost the inner heat of mortal fever. I suppose you realize by now that I have mentioned all the loose ends that needed tying but one. Let us retrace our steps the night previous so you might understand, and perhaps I in telling you may in turn fathom what I saw with my own preternatural eyes.
Back in Oulu for many years the black forest had been silent. The voices that had once plagued me and kept me at bay from that terrible place had not spoken to me in all my coming and goings with my Emmanuel, and indeed I did not sense any of their presence. It was not until one sleeping day my breathless rest spun me a vision of something violent and unspeakable, ringing screams through my thoughts and images of burning and decay. I saw my wicked brothers snatched away by some thieves in the night before they woke. I felt the licking of fire at my cold lifeless face. This chaos of the senses culminated in one final clear impression of Master Vuori gaunt and howling like and animal, dressed in the furs of a wild man and bleeding from a terrible wound to the wrists. In my mind I pictured him encircle an unearthed pit in the cellar floor of dirt and tile, something ancient and sacred and horrible to behold. I heard the chanting hollow language of the ancient people of the north, its rhythmic and dolorous hum calling out to me, the most powerful blood making trails where he walked. When I woke I awoke shaking and fearful.
When the time came that I mustered up enough courage I had returned to Oulu and listened into the darkness for some sign of them. But once again I heard nothing but silence, neither eerie nor unsettling but rather the lack of something I knew should have been present. Where I had once felt their beating demonic hearts I could feel nothing. I listened for nights, just listening until the time came that I knew I must look upon the place once again. I made my way through the blackness of the choking pine without a wrong foot. The smell of the winter cold was sterile and good. The trees watched over me from high above as the silent witnesses of centuries past.
Under some lay pheasants, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the sky , some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched out-all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones whose torture had ended some hours ago by the inability of nature to bear more.
The wasted lives of hunters who had failed to recover some of their quarry, no doubt. Driven down at dusk to this place by some primitive shooting-party; and while those who had dropped dead under the shot, or had died before sundown had been carried off, many badly wounded birds had fled and hidden themselves away, or risen among the heaving boughs, where they had maintained their stance until they grew weaker with loss of blood in the chill and fallen to the ground. I recalled glimpsing such men in my mortal boyhood, peering above hedges at their pointed guns, strangely transfixed with a bloodthirsty light in their eyes.
I heard the wolves close by, smelled their untamed scent. Do not fear me brothers I smiled meekly, moving through the night tonight I did not come for you. I was at nature’s breast and glad to be so. Knowing this, with the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred sufferers, to this end with my own hands I broke the necks of as many birds as I could find. There I left them to the wolves, with the small relief that their pain at least, was over. If only I could kill all with such tenderness I remember thinking.
When I finally reached the manor it was all but burnt to the ground, the smell still hanging in the air like an ominous figure all its own. What had once been imposing and grand was now charred black and lying in ruin. What in god’s name happened here? I remember asking myself. I walked among the skeletal remains of the place as if in a curious dream, knowing the places where the human servants slept and where I used to study. I found my bedroom. So many fine silks and antiques had been consumed by flame, only the ash of the bedpost and the carved desk still lingered. The strong stone of the cellar still held strong, and as I entered that hideous resting place underground through the night’s shadow I saw what remained of the hearth in my vision, that unearthed relic of the old times where god were worshipped and meals where cooked through the harsh winter. I saw what remained of a bear skin the master wore in his screaming. His mystical blood glittered dry on the floor stone, staining it possibly for all time.
They were all gone. Every last one of them. I had no hope of understanding what had happened that night but I had seen it in my sleep because Vuori had called out for me to save them. He had called on me and I had not answered.
I left as quickly as I had come, and god willing closing the darkest chapter of my childhood with it.
But now wracked with heat, restless in the night trampling closer to my destination, outside of humanity I had at present no fear. The scent of the ocean dominated the air as we arrived in the small port town some time later, and I fumbled through my at-hand articles for my travel documents. Jarno had wonderfully arranged a place in a fine small ship by the name of some female mantle or another, which would take me onwards some weeks until I reached my destination.
As for my disappearance thereafter, I had given it some thought. On arrival should I simply choose to just flee? Leave my belongings (save the aforementioned briefcase including some of my favorite books, my mother’s letter and my father’s ornate knife) and disappear into society, or would there be an enquiry from Jarno and the firm to find me? Surely that was likely, in that I had a book expected and I had no intent to meet with our sister firm contacted on the matter. I would require a way of covering my tracks were I to slip away and cut all ties completely, but there would be time enough to ponder this over the journey. And having decided earlier that I would be starving myself for the duration of it, I would indeed have not much else to occupy my mind.
I shan’t describe my travels in too much detail, for there is not enough time in the world to recall all those tears shed for the sake of tears alone, nor enough time for me to describe to you the finery of the strange floating little world it was, the stony cold nights awake at sea or the waves beneath me as I slept in the day. I remember the women most, dressed in their lustrous silks and flowing skirts, American girls who would walk the deck in their soft leather boots in the evening and talk about this book and that book. I enjoyed listening to their voices, the flow of the English words in their accented melody when something amused them. Some nights when their suitors permitted they would talk with me briefly about what reading took their fancy, and told me most positively that I would love America. I was warmed by them and happy to observe some social intercourse, though towards the last few days I dare say it made my fast more apparent to the beast in me.
Know that I hungered, but to kill was to face suspicion for a man whose nocturnal habits earned him enough rumors as it was. Days and days I became weak and sluggish, not thin or gaunt but a shadow of my former self. I began to dream strange tales with the delirium of it all, stories of the Saami-Lappish people of my homeland centuries before, the warriors my mother had sang me to sleep with as a child, and dreams about crystal empires with slender marble princesses. I intend to write these dreams down you understand, but when I do that tale will be for another time. The starvation however was taking its toll; I hadn’t denied myself for this long since the depression of my making.
But the ravaged thoughts of such denial did however give me a method by way to make my disappearance realistic.
Once arrived and baggage waiting to be loaded for transportation by carriage I would hunt, in the knowledge we would dock before the sun rose for morning. A porter being my witness leaving the ship I would slink away to find a man of my height and hue to be in my place, plant upon him my documents once he fell dead and dress in him in my waistcoat. My identity misplaced I would then take my leave to whatever place closest I might hide from the sun, and with this rather assuredly to all those overseas I would have been found dead, robbed for my money and possessions. It pained me to be so cruel to my loved ones who would have to hear of my end this way, but I knew it must be done.
As if fate transpired against me in this matter, all was not so simple. After many nights of caged sleep my vessel docked into the early spring morning of the new world, and I was in awe of it. I will not name the place, nor do I know much of what it like now, but in March of 1923 I walked into the balmy air of America and saw that it was good. So different from home, there were no ancient buildings, no decaying churches to behold. This was a land in its summer; this place was very much young. Such was the space of this town that I could sweep my gaze as far as it would extend and see great rolling expanses of make-shift pavement untaken up by the pedestrian hoards, the low humming of the night passersby of a place too big for its people.
Case upon case of my work were then loaded off the ship and entrusted to porters who would take everything towards carriages or to wherever one might be staying. This presented an issue of course as a carriage had already been allocated to me by the publishing sister firm and was nowhere to be found. And I had precious few hours before daybreak.
I was informed sometime thereafter that my transport was in fact late due to some administrative chaos and I had (apparently as far as they were aware) been scheduled to arrive the next day. A carriage would of course be sent out to fetch me on their behalf but I would be waiting until half-passed three new world time in the morning. My porter apologised profusely out of some misplaced duty to his foreign charge, and suggested I take rest in a nearby lodge and have drinks with the good local company still awake at this hour (completely at the expense of the carriage company who had made such a grievous mix up to such an honored guest, and even more so that they hadn’t a motorcar to offer me).
A young man of around nineteen years, I was taken by his accent and the song-like quality of his voice, his English different to that of the young women I had travelled with and my own well-practiced speak. I thought for one rather distressing moment that I should never hear my sweet Finnish again, and in addition be much less lucky to speak it. This of course was the least of my worries.
Moving further from the docks, I was directed towards a specific public house accredited by the porter about six minutes into town. I found the sheer unhindered scale of it all literally breathtaking, a strange unnerving feeling pouncing upon me as if a rug had been yanked from beneath me when confronted with a shanty blooming into a city so abruptly.
The place itself was cold compared with the outside, and was vastly empty even for this hour. This of course became blindingly obvious when I attempted to order a drink to keep up appearances. I was informed by the rather portly proprietor that alcohol in any form had been illegal here for the past three years. I found the whole exchange to be completely bizarre, to say the least. I also assumed my accent must not have been doing me many favors either. Setting me down a glass of water and rolling his eyes at an ignorant foreigner he turned away without a word. As memory recalls, it would be another ten years before a glass of wine or scotch gave me an excuse to haunt city bars again.
Sitting alone in the back, I thought the cold of the place was going to drive me mad. Surely, yes it was not the blistering cold of the Nordic countries, but the niggling draft made me crave something more substantial for my thick preternatural skin to actually feel. It’s what comes from me not having focus. I have always been prone to nerves this way. Of the few that came into the slate covered building at around 4am even fewer matched me in height or build. In finding a body to replace me it seems I hadn’t factored in the locals being vastly of Mediterranean or Italian stock.
Thus the waiting game began; I had one hour until my carriage arrived and only two hours until daybreak. And I had no idea where I would hide when morning came. Standing back outside in the warmer air with a cigarette it took all of my will to keep the sickly heat of panic from rising up inside me. You can imagine my luck when a tall slender male of about my stature appeared in the form of an Irish-sounding boy fresh off the street with an eye to rob a foreigner blind. He was dressed in a black tweed suite, a cheap cut thing bought no doubt to give the air or refinement or respectability. Over the top of thinning, clipped brown hair he wore a bowler slightly of center, and in his front pocket overflowed a lightly worn silk rose handkerchief.
I lured him in with the sight of my silver cigarette case and pocket watch, and let him get close to address me. I let him see the fine leather of my briefcase, I did all save the smile of a simpleton. Playing his game I allowed myself to be lead into some odious alleyway to unexplained ends, almost smiling as I answered his pointless questions in the most broken English I could muster. This man was a thief, but the experience was not completely dissimilar to my dealings with rent boys or drunkards. The trick in it was always to allow them the upper hand.
When he was sure we were alone he swiftly turned on me with something sharp, and I quickly in return crushed his throat against the wall he sought to pin me to. It was both anticlimactic and efficient for my purpose. Whether or not he deserved it was irrelevant, time was precious and I needed a corpse in my place. The problem came with his face. We looked absolutely nothing alike. This was indeed a problem.
Now, please understand when I assure you that I have never in my entire existence willingly mutilated a body for my own ends. Death is punishment enough. I have never denied anyone their dignity in their last sleep, often healing over incriminating wounds to give the impression of a more peaceful departure. This is why it pained me somewhat to do what I did. Though it took me mere minutes to complete the messy and disturbing act, by the time I left his body in that alley, dressed in my waistcoat and shoes, there was no longer a human face to see. I do not wish to speak on the matter any further.
Glory to the new world and its freedoms! The last act has been done, and now dressed in a tweed jacket and a bowler slightly off center I walked into the streets a new man. It was five in the morning and I desperately needed a place to hide. Something inside me told me this lack of decrepit buildings would do me little favor in this city, and the dawn was fast approaching. Did this place not have countryside? Surely that is where I must be to find somewhere away from the city and all its people, to hide away from humanity and live safe appeasing only my immortal needs and desires. My heart yearned for an old world church, a barn, a castle! But the sun would not hold off long enough to begin my search, and so swallowing my pride and kneeling to my basic needs, by the time the spring sun rose over the industrial new world city, I was not only dead to the world in more ways than one but taking refuge in its bowels, hidden deep in a sewer where the city met the sea.
As I tucked myself away in that stinking crevice and lay to rest I was once again wracked with dreamy visions in my sleep like so many mornings before. I became awash with the sensation of being mortally drunk, feeling the dankness of my hideaway melt immediately into a golden haze as sweet as the finest exotic honey without hindrance or warning. Thicknesses of silks in euphoric orange and deep reds flickered like fire in my eyes around the ankles of some unseen beauty, and the deep intruding scent of sandalwood filled my lungs to the point I believed could barely breathe. I heard a laughter, like a bell, percolating through a sensual rhythm that seemed to come from nowhere and yet everywhere at once. Build me a fire with your own hands, white one from the winter place came the bell-clear voice take wood from the dead trees to the west and build me a pyre, travel a mortal man’s night west, and I will give you sanctuary . Someone was kissing my face in the mania of colour before me as these words were whispered, my fingertips buried in the softness of perfumed curls I could not see while I shuddered against the undeniable sensation of warm breasts heaving against my back through thinly veiled cloth. When I woke that nightfall in the stench of the sewer and the ocean I was dripping with sweat and shaking uncontrollably and the many messages in sum I had received.
There were other vampires here. Of that I had no doubt in mind. There were others here and one was calling out to me to go to them where I had previously failed to heed the call of my own kind. The question was not now if the voice could be trusted but how long I could resist its chilling and erotic pull and keep away. I knew in my heart that staying in the dirt was no way to continue my existence and I was being offered sanctuary by some creature who might hold some understanding, a companion perhaps to weather all time until the end of things should come to pass. Travel a mortal man’s night west, past the artificial lights and sounds and join me in the hills and the forest, I will make you safe. Listen for me and I will guide you.
When I travelled that night I did so at breakneck speed, completely at ease with my surroundings as the urban erections faded away into country, like I had been in the pine forests of my homeland where nature spoke to me and I became a part of it. The sky was wonderfully black, the air warmer than I’ve ever known it to be living or otherwise. There was no breeze uncreated by my strides, just tranquility in the dark. The west fields and forests burst before me into hills choked with woods and I listened out for the beating heart or sound of her.
Walking as a man might do among the heaving boughs of oak trees I heard the dead dry ones creak as if they were whispering. The hills were utterly silent except for the bell voice that muttered incomprehensibly in the shadows. Walking as a man might do I could hear and see nothing but the forest lit under the waxing moon, straining to hear a voice that would no longer speak directly to me again. I knew the hum of a smaller city not twenty miles down eastwards, too quiet to notice. Something was overgrown my ivy not yards in front of me, and it was far too vast to be a tree.
Built into the hillside were the decrepit bones of an old villa, built centuries passed in fine worn marble that must have shined beautifully polished in the sun in the decades before my birth. The surrounding forests had no doubt overtaken a vineyard that would have surrounded it when the place had been deserted. Rose bushed choked the perimeter of the place, their angry thorns barricading intruders entry. The size of the place was immense, a summerhouse most worthy of royalty in its heyday. Pushing through the undergrowth the briars and thicket tore into my cheap tweed and at my face, but I wanted to feel it. I lay my hands on the wall to find it freezing and wonderful to touch. And though I listened patiently for a sign I would not get, still inside the place I found her.
The place was filthy and choking with dust and it was only because of the sunken tub set into the centre that I even knew it had once been a bathing room of sorts. Imagine my surprise when I found her curled up inside it, her small knees pinned lifelessly to her chest, a mere child of ten and quite long dead. Though she looked as if she were merely asleep, the poor child had in fact been dead for at least some years and breathed no more immortal breath from her fragile lungs. But she had called out to me in my dreams, yes she had, but that’s what I came in time to understand. My dreams were in fact those calling out to me by the strength of their will, out of need through time and expansive spaces.
Some were living, some undead and some, like her, were somewhere between worlds. Vuori had called out to me before his death, the tribes from hundreds upon hundreds of years before and crystal empires of the future, as this child vampire had called out to me now. I was dead and walking and as such no physical law would control what would pass through me while I lay open to channels in my sleep.
I looked upon her small face and thought that she must have been incredibly doll-like, looking at the tiny delicate bones remaining of her-she couldn’t have been much older than ten or eleven when she’d been given The Blood. She was beautiful. I knelt aside the sunken bath and ran my fingers over the tatters of her red silk dress I suddenly understood how she’d come to rest.
She’d lived here with her vampire lover and Maker (which explained the lack of many windows in the place, how the house was so perfect for our kind to have lived in) a gorgeous female vampire far older than myself of even he who made me. She, like the child, has been dark of skin and no doubt dazzling eyes, dressed in silks from their homeland deep in Asia. Indeed, something inside me told me she the girl had lived millennia when our kind had been worshipped as gods of the old world. A beauty who had masqueraded among the living as one of royal blood accumulating immense wealth to lavish upon her child bride, she kept the little one hunting at her side in the guise of a daughter. How romantically perverse, and for its ending so tragic. It was images of the beauty of her Maker she had sent me in my sleep to lure me here, I thought how delicate and cunning she must have been for one so small .
Somehow the rich mistress has found herself badly with a group of others of our kind, and had one nightfall set the child down where she now lay with the promise of her return and an armful of fragrant roses clasped in the pleats of her skirt. The young beauty had waited in that spot night after night for her lover but she never returned. The dainty little flower had not moved, and never stopped waiting for her beloved, and so after sometime must have passed away from starvation or more poetically a broken heart.
It didn’t matter now though as moved to scoop her up in my arms gently, she was emaciated, her preternatural flesh was still as if she has slept. The roses (which were now mostly dust) were the only indicant of her body had been here. She had called out to me to burn her, as our flesh can only be destroyed by flame. I must build her a pyre from the dead trees behind the villa and return her to her beloved she had wooed me with visions of. I would keep the roses that grew wild outside in her memory, and live here once she’d been put to peace. In return for my deed she had given me sanctuary, a place safe from the sun and a land to sustain myself on. I would light the fire at the foot of the hill, and remain here with the blessing of an unnamed child vampire long dead.
In the springtime of 1923, for a short while, my life came to a stop. I lived without event or disruption from the waking world, and nothing of great significance would befall me for seventy-three years. But that of course is another story. I cleaned the house, collected furnishings I stole from rundown buildings that suited my fancy bothering no one. I fed off the living and became one of them only when I stalked the ballrooms and taverns, which over the decades gave way to nightclub dance floors and bars. I marked my skin permanently with ink to decorate it like mortals did at the time. I still heard the calls of others, immortal and mortal alike in my sleep, but I never answered them save one. But that is enough of me, shall I tell you what became of the others?
My brother’s descendents flourished across Scandinavia. Many of my family are still alive today and are scattered across Europe and many foreign lands I cannot number. Ville Tobias Valo, my nephew, became a wondrously kind gentleman who raised many sons and in 1943 championed the help for the poorer rural folk who grew up in icy cottages not so unlike how I had over one-hundred years ago.
Suvi died an old woman, who from the day of her marriage vowed never to wear a dress again, and throw off the garments of oppression she had known first in slavery and then in womanhood. A woman of business, wit and charm, she had become everything I knew she was destined to be.
I have had a suspicion as to the exact events that lead to the deaths of Vuori and my brothers, but they will surely come clearer with time.
As for my beloved stable boy, Jonne ‘Emmnuelle’ Liimatainen whom I loved until the day he died, a good life had been given also. His daughters bloomed into beautiful women, who married well and travelled far and wide. Which brings us to the end of our epic tale spanning some one-hundred and six years. Somewhere in America the blonde haired-blue eyed great, great granddaughter of Emmanuelle and Mina Liimatainen had settled down in a quiet suburb. In the Autumn of 1979 she would give birth to her second son, he would come screaming healthily into the world by the name Brandon Cole Margera.
22nd March 2010, 11.15pm