The Dream of Henry Sterns last night as a Human
Contents
Intro
Stanis Nero, in an effort to meet with Henry Stern away from the the prying eyes of both the vampire population and those of the Technocracy created a dream world in which to meet Henry.
Description
The space opens up into a swirling room of people. Beautiful stone walls appear at the edges of the dream. People are moving to and fro in the room, all slightly out of focus. Henry is the center of the dream, so only he and the people he is talking to are in focus. Dr. Nero approaches him. While Henry realizes this is a dream, he also realizes in this space he is still human, and has not yet been changed to a vampire. As he looks around the room he sees important people from the art scene around him. He also realizes he can see Horace Holden, Lorna, and other vampires mingling in the room. Henry remembers this party at the Higgins Gallery, a well to do art gallery in London at the time.
The Mortal Dream
From the darkness of vampiric sleep grew a hazy illumination, pale white at first against a dimensionless background of black, then as the white glow spread like hoarfrost it traced first the outlines of the room followed by objects and then the shapes of people. The space took on three dimensions and the rooms occupants began to move in slow stuttering motions like the very first moving pictures shows. The room takes shape as a long gallery stretching a hundred feet in either direction, its ends lost in night bound gloom.
Activity coalesces centered on a constellation of sculptures which enshrine a man - Henry Jarod Stern - 6th Baronet of Coalbrook. He is a older man of athletic proportions with a hard jaw covered by a neatly clipped silvery beard and a close-cropped shock of white hair that falls into an angular aristocratic face. The only flaw to an otherwise Spartan face is an ugly scar surrounding Henry's empty right eye-socket which is covered by roguish black eye-patch and balances Henry's left eye which is cold and blue like arctic ice.
From the darkness which clings to the unformed corners of the exhibition gallery there comes a low baritone chanting something almost intelligible in Greek. As the details began to emerge the darkness recedes to reveal a background of floor length windows night darkened into black mirrors reflecting back the rhythmic and symmetrical movements of the dancers arrayed in the gallery beyond the zone of exhibition.
In the luridly illuminated foreground details multiply as if the light were an acid-wash dissolving a crude surface to reveal the elegant particulars which lay beneath. Without any apparent source gaslight plays over everyone and everything close to Henry who is seated in a Mahogany corner-chair at ease as London's elite review his latest, and as it happens, final masterpieces. They stop individually or as couples to offer their congratulations to the artiste, ladies in floor-length dresses of cage crinoline drift by like brilliant dirigibles and gentlemen in bleak colored suits stalked languidly like grim lions, and as they do so lifelike color spills over them emanating from Lord Stern like the spray of arterial blood and so infecting everything they touch with the hues of the age.
Like color, sound is initially muffled but begins to take on form, the melodies of an unseen piano pour out the likes of Chopin and Franz Liszt. The staccato rhythm of the dancers shoes pounded out the notes on a polished wooden floor accompanied by the swish of ladies' skirts, and the tinkles of wine glasses is accompanied by the low murmur of numerous but inarticulate conversations.
Weaving sinuously among the multitude of dancers and the throng of London nobility moved a masked quintet of men and women who glided with an ageless grace and centenarian eyes. They surrounded the elderly sculptor like a pack of hungry wolves co me upon a wounded stag. As a group they were flawless and elegant in both dress and deportment, but what drew the artisan's eye was their physical perfection, preternaturally pale skin like the finest alabaster whose idealized forms gave the impression of Greco-Roman deities having taken earthly embodiment.
But their eldritch forms were emaciated, with eyes and teeth that flashed bestially in the gaslight, and all were clothed by night. It was these latter observations or some other intuitive sense that must have triggered a change in the atmosphere, for the room swayed like the deck of a ship in the depths of a squall and the light seemed to dim as if clouds moved before the moon. In response to this Henry found himself standing alone in the center of the room as if he could quell this sudden strangeness like a captain at the helm.
It was in this state of startled awareness that Henry noticed one of the shadowed corners where the darkness seemed to recede with a crawling swiftness to reveal an ordinary red brick wall, where at first singly and then in growing numbers the bricks fell away into the infinite distance to reveal a dimly illuminated doorway and a man stepped through into the room. Then the brick wall was solid again and the teetering eeriness faded and was gone. Once more Henry found himself seated amid his masterpieces, the dancers to their steps and his admirers to their compliments. Of the pale Quincunx he only observed occasional flashes here and there among the crowd of guests.
Rather suddenly a powerful sense of déjà vu threatened to overwhelm Henry, the weird air of the gallery, the perplexing way the guests seemed to become hazy or even insubstantial when he was not looking directly at them. The realization that he could predict who was going to approach him next, what they would say to him as well as his own replies, all these things he knew as if he were reading the script of a play. And yet there were blind-spots, moments when his had the sense something was supposed to happen yet did not, and moments when he was certain he had missed something critical because he had been looking the wrong way.
Of course, he had been quite drunk the night of the exhibition he recalled, that might account for the bizarre flow of events, or perhaps his memory for details had begun to dull after so many years, there might even be other explanations he rationalized to himself. Or he could be dreaming. He started slightly at the thought and noticed a dusty bottle of Port, one of his favorite mortal vices and the very wine he had drunk to excess the night of his Embrace. He had reached for the bottle with the intent of popping the cork and pouring a glass when the realization that at this point in the dream he was still mortal. A kind of melancholy came over him then and it stung him as he drank the sweet redness from a glass that had never been filled.
When he set the empty glass down and opened his eyes there was an old man dressed like a physician in a gray frock coat and a burgundy vest and holding an ornate black-wood walking stick which lay in the crook of his arm. Once again there was a faint sense of vertigo and then the room righted itself. He studied the man with interest because he knew everyone who was supposed to be here tonight, and this man was not on the guest list and yet he was compellingly familiar. Where had he seen this man before?
"Henry, it's Ostanes. I thought we could speak here in private, with no chance of us being observed. I have news about the rhakshasa." the doctor said.
With a rush of awareness, and another sway of loss of control, Henry was able to connect who he was speaking with while remaining solid in the memory being played out in his dream. The room listed and swayed, nearly throwing the doctor from his feet before Henry regained control. The gravity of the room rolled, and the walls solidified as it steadied. An orchestra played in the distance, Mozarts string quintet in G minor. The Wimple Street Quintet having been brought in to play the event. Henry shook himself and offered the good doctor a seat. Ostanes seated himself and glanced around. Beautiful women and well-dressed men floated by, gliding along swirling while dancing. To the good doctor the people were out of focus, with some edges and colors.
A woman came and sat down with Henry and Ostanes. She was dressed in a beautiful dress, of bright lavender and cream color. but her face was washed out, and seemed and empty shell under a out of focus frame of hair. And yet that description wasn't entirely correct, the woman was most akin to a dressmakers' manikin, her face devoid of feature much as if someone had pulled a clothe tight over her face hinting at the woman below without revealing the fine facial details that would give away her identity.
The overall effect of rendering a human being into little more than a simulacrum was surprisingly chilling and from the doctor's perspective it affected Henry to a much greater degree than himself and suggested that there was deeper emotion connection between the faceless woman and Lord Stern.
Ostanes stirred in his chair. "Henry tell me what you are feeling at this moment?"
But Henry barely heard the magician. His heart was beating so hard he could hear the blood in his ears, and it drowned out all other sounds. He realized belatedly that he held the woman's silk gloved hand tightly in his own, it felt like a dead fish in a sack, but despite his revulsion at her touch a charge of something traveled from their conjoined fingertips up Henry's arm and into his chest. An unspoken question tore its way through his mind: "Who is this enigmatic wraith that haunts my dreams?"
Henry did not realize he had spoken aloud until the rich foreign baritone of Ostanes penetrated the trance into which he had fallen.
"A woman for whom you felt something intense, but her macabre visage ascribes to her a mystery that you have yet to fathom, and there is such an air of horror which clings to her form suggesting a unfortunate fate. I would venture to guess that either something happened to her or you or to you both that has left you so completely traumatized that you are unconsciously repressing the experience which can only manifest in your dreams. All at once, one part of your mind is trying to save you from this pain while another part is trying to resolve that pain by forcing you to face it. These two opposing aspects of your unconscious mind are locked in conflict manifesting these surreal dreams."
Within Henry's mind awareness and reason crashed as these words sank in and in profound distress Henry asked: "How is that possible? If I loved someone that much, I would have sculpted her in stone or written her letters of love or have some inkling of her existence."
Around the two men the gallery had begun to dim, the music had taken on a frenzied tone as if the unseen orchestra were being tortured as they played, the half-seen phantom dancers were now screaming incoherently as they thrashed about in a frenzied bacchanal, and tremors shook the room as if it were located on a major fault line. Ostanes immediately understood the connection between Henry's emotional turmoil and the growing instability of the dream. If Henry's emotional distress continues the dream would dissolve into nightmare and such an experience could be psychically injurious to them both. The metaphysician sought to calm the suffering artist using one of the most common psychoanalytic tools therapeutic listening.
Ostanes had to raise his voice to be heard over the mad din: "But Henry this is your inkling. Your mind is trying to tell to you how important this memory is. Your pain has washed away her memory, but your desire to remember her has made of you a modern Prometheus, you are tied down by amnesia and your dreams are the eagles that consume you from within."
Ostanes made a grandiose gesture encompassing the room around them and spoke with a strangely compelling voice. "Henry tell me about this night! Why is it so important to you?"
The cacophony gave way to an eerie silence as all the phantoms stopped their insane behavior and turned collectively to observe Henry as a mute voyeuristic mass. Henry looked up slowly, his eyes were bloodshot, he looked haggard and worn. The faces of the phantom guests took on greater detail and form, as a group they were a collage of nineteenth century faces that leered with a malignant curiosity as if peering at the scene of a traffic fatality. Somewhere along the way the orchestra was replaced by a single harpsichordist whose rendition of Chopin's funeral march bore a queer reverberation as if it emanated from some subterranean salon where animated corpses played dirges in utter darkness.
Henry finally spoke, his voice rasping and dry, the words came slowly pregnant with regret.
"This building is or was the Higgins Gallery on High Holborn street. In 1861 it was a fashionable location for the Bohemian art crowd, and this is where I held my last exhibition after my return from the Continent. I had been invited back to London by a cabal of influential art collectors who offered me the opportunity to showcase my finest works before s select crowd of elite society. It was a heady night of praise and heavy drinking and I confess that I blacked out. When I woke the next evening, I was a vampire."
Dreams End
Ostanes froze. The psychological trauma of such a moment was evident. The doctor could see how there would be much pain and fear associated with a persons death and resurrection. His own experiences gave him a moment of dread. Henry turned to Ostanes and said in a strained voice “I am stuck here, I don’t remember what happened. Horace told me this is common, that the wonder of crossing over to be immortal is a huge strain on the human mind, and it takes time to become accustomed to the superiority of being a vampire.”
Suddenly the air within the room was sucked out. In the guttering gaslight Ostanes could see the guests ripped backwards into darkness, their forms evaporating like mist in a noon day sun.. Sound was distorted as Ostanes' ears popped and the dreams gravity rolled. There was a sense of disorientation, a gap in reality, a sense of instantly shifting time and space. The two men were no longer in the same place. The room looked different, smelled of cigar smoke, fine wine, and crushed roses. The room heated up, Henry experienced the wonderous feeling of being extremely aroused, but also morally afraid. A force like the hand of God pulled Henry down. To his shock he was staring at a plastered roof, done in fine wood grain. Somewhere to his left were the warm coals of a fire, and the floor was expensive ruby red carpet. Ostanes was yanked sideways and slammed to the floor next to Henry's supine form. Flat on his back Ostanes saw a figure, it’s form distorted, and bearing the shape of different people had Henry in a loving embrace. Henry, his face a mask of suffering watched in fascination as the figure fell on him, it’s form distorting and twisting. At once the figure of a thin boned man, then that of a wrecked, distorted monster claimed him, perfect alabaster fangs falling to his neck, his blood shooting everywhere. As his heart beat noisily slowed to a stop, the five guests closing in around Henry and himself. The five were all pale men and women and from Ostanes standpoint impossibly tall. They were dressed impeccably for the era and adorned with darkly stylized animal masks. The sense of helplessness and potential violation were like a musk that hung thick in the air stinging the senses and promising pain. Belatedly the magician realized the dream had already become a nightmare and so he called upon his power and channeled it through the amethyst orb he called the "Eye of the Beholder." There was a soundless flash of violet light as the wizards will froze the scene in mid-motion. Ostanes was not fool enough to believe he could hold back the full force of Henry's nightmare for more than a few moments, but it was more than enough for him to summon his exit and to propel Henry and himself through his dream-gate to safety.
The Bridge of Dreams
Henry's eyes watered as he gasped for breath. There was a vast darkness squatting on his chest driving his body into a floor that had the consistency of wet concrete. He thrashed like a wild animal caught in a metallic trap as he drowned in a tidal wave of blood that filled his mouth and throat and subjected his flesh to the endless piercings of needles and pins. As his head felt ready to explode, he sensed himself slipping away down a slight incline as if he lay at the top of a ramp slick with hog fat. Then quite out of place there came a brilliant flash of magenta light against the lid of his one good eye.
Then his last moments were interrupted by a litany of vile curses uttered in a variety of European tongues by a man's rich melodic baritone.
Henry opened his eye and looked upon a tableau out of hell. Dark figures stood frozen in a capering dance macabre as the faceless monster groped for his cooling flesh, it’s empty gnashing teeth poised to lunge at him. The chamber was subterranean dark with the figures of the manikin and five others dressed in freakish animal masks highlighted by shimmering plum light that came through a nearby doorway. He lay on his back as he was being dragged by his feet across a stone floor layered in viscera and pools of congealing sticky blood. Then he was hauled forcibly to his feet and hurled towards the dazzling doorway.
He had one last glimpse of a white-haired old doctor as his feet left the floor and he sailed into the wine-colored light. Ostanes appeared out of phase, his frame superimposed over that of other men. Henry could see at least four other men crowding the space, headed different directions, doing different things. At the edges of his aura, Henry could see a huge figure fading in and out, flitting around Ostanes. It was unsettling and made Henry’s eyes hurt. Time stood still as light the color of purple orchids enveloped him. With infinity to think Henry realized that he shouldn't even be able to see colors let alone such a variety of purples. He had just been Embraced and would not have been in possession of the Cerulean Star until 1872, that was eleven years after his first death, and from birth through undeath he had been colorblind.
This multitude of musings ended with his exit from the doorway of light, it happened quite suddenly, he found himself sliding down a smooth slope at about a ninety-five-degree angle. The force of his exit and the strange angle of his incline left him skidding at significant speed down a steeply sloping road, he could just see flashes of gaslight-lamps at regular intervals when he came to a stop near the bottom of a hill in a pile of winter cherry blossoms that surrounded him as he lay on his back. As he sat up, he looked around in bewilderment, he sat upon a roadway or bridge, but the surface of same was warped out of true like ribbon-candy. Standing he began brushing the flowers from his habitual raiment: a walking frock-suit of black wool, matching pants and black laced-up leather shoes shiny as Egyptian beetle carapaces. His second wife Gabriella had often remarked that Henry's mode of dress made him look more like an undertaker than a member of the peerage or a would-be artist. This remembrance of that past and unresolved relationship made the beauty of these alien vistas all the more poignant and he regretted that his second wife was not with him to see such astronomical majesty.
When he looked up from the mound of flower petals he sat upon a stone bridge poised between a night sky of kaleidoscopic constellations and a mirror flat ocean that reflected the myriad stars like pinpricks in the curtain of night. Henry was forced to look upon the dizzying bridge alone or become hypnotized by the radiant horizons. The bridge bore an uncanny resemblance to Westminster Bridge that traversed the river Thames between Lambeth and Westminster. The Westminster Bridge was one of the most famous bridges in the great city of London for its proximity to the Palace of Westminster and its elegant design.
But as his thoughts returned to the present he realized this bridge only superficially resembled that more mundane Victorian construction. While this bridge had a similar verdigris cast and the familiar tripartite configuration of gaslights, it also stretched out into a straight line to the horizon whereas it's earthly counterpart was a mere seven spans. A straight line? Had not the bridge been looped and twisted like saltwater-taffy upon his arrival? Henry shook his head and wondered if he had been drinking. His thoughts all seemed to be running around like aimless children and his memory came and went in a peculiar way.
Henry well remembered the first time he had strode across it in May of 1862 fearing the old superstition about vampires and running water. How Horace Holden had laughed at him and his fledgling naivete that night. And as if summoned there stood Horace Holden in a walking-frock of burgundy velvet forty years out of date, a clean-shaven man in his late twenties with eyes like emeralds that peered out of a porcelain mask at once intensely masculine and yet sultry and seductive. The Embrace had even enhanced his mop of dark blonde hair with highlights of rose, saffron and mahogany. And once again his sire was laughing with rich and vivacious mirth at Henry.
"Henry, that old myth about running water and vampires is pure bosh, nor do you need an invitation to enter an unfamiliar residence or are you likely to be repelled by garlic unless it is upon the breath of a dirty Italian."
In the past, Horace and Henry had walked around the deserted streets of London's old town discussing what was possible for vampires and what was superstition. Horace had been uncharacteristically informative and almost genial, it had been one of the few nights he had acted like a sire should, and it was one of Henry's few fond memories of Horace that he cherished. Before the memory could play itself out, there was a violet flash behind him, and he could almost feel a wash of force at his back and then Ostanes voiced a command in archaic Greek and the memory of Horace froze in place.
The rich baritone was more like a growl as the magician approached.
"Henry, we do not have time for Memory Lane today. Time is short enough as it is without letting your mind wonder hither and yon."
The wizard's condescending tone grated at Henry's nerves and as his temper flared it opened a door for the Beast. His fangs were distended as he snarled back.
"I neither need nor asked for your opinion magician!"
Rage and indignation and disappointment surged through Henry as he rounded on the sorcerer. Ostanes wanly smiled and offered an unusually empathetic rejoinder.
"Horace Holden is a self-obsessed and self-serving fop Henry, but I was not making fun of your special moment nor trying to steal a balmy memory after your nightmare ordeal. I am sorry for the pain caused by rushing you through this new experience, but time is of the essence and there are things you need to learn now and only I can teach you. If it would satisfy your baser instincts, you can rip this phantasm to shreds and drink its phantasmal blood, but I doubt it will serve any useful purpose. Shall we continue?"
As Henry glanced back over his shoulder he caught sight of the wizard just in front of a wall sized mirror. The mirror hovered a foot off the surface of the bridge and it was upheld by nothing, it just floated there. The mirror itself was almost irrelevant, just a gilt-edged wall mirror as tall as a man and no more than two feet wide, more compelling was the fluid surface of the mirror that still rippled with Ostanes recent passage. The surface was like luminous plum wine which held a distorted reflection of both Henry and Ostanes. But it was neither the luminous looking-glass nor the wizard that drew Henry's attention, rather is was the sight of the bridge as it spooled outwards behind the sorcerer like ribbon from a spindle, it looped in slowly widening gyres as it reached miles outward and upward to a vast city suspended above them.
Ostanes spoke again. "Henry, try to focus on me, look at my face. Steady now..."
Henry stood rooted in place as he took in the immensity and intricacy of the city above and he felt an unexpected vertigo as the bridge seemed to twist and turn beneath his very feet. At first he could not recognize many details, it was a city at night and upside-down, but certain patterns of streets and the black flowing river that slithered its way through the heart of the vast metropolis triggered a memory. It was London! He has seen numerous survey maps detailing the capital as if seen from above, but this was nothing so crude as a map or even a scale model, when he sharpened his preternatural senses he could see the movement of traffic and the play of light on the night darkened Thames.
In that moment the Beast loosed its hold on Henry and the vampire found himself facing the magician. Ostanes stood very close to Henry, so close that the vampire could smell his blood. His low voice held a strange reverberation that made Henry feel relaxed and at ease.
"Henry, I deeply regret exposing you to Demosoneiron, the world of dreams without proper preparation. Children aren't threatened by the unpredictable and fluid nature of this realm. But older minds often struggle to let go of mundane preconceptions and simply accept what would be impossible in the waking world. Of course seen through the prism of pragmatism, dreams are just an altered state of consciousness that everyone passes through while the body rests, this commonplace conceit allows the masses of humanity to go about their daily lives safely unaware that each time they sleep they are transported to an alien realm just as real as Earth."
Henry never felt the old sorcerer take his arm and when next he became aware they were strolling arm-in-arm along the bridge as it revolved like a barber's pole suspended between the empyrean sky and the dreaming depths. Some modicum of clarity had returned to Henry's mind and following an urge he tugged out of Ostanes grip and made his way for the bridge's railing. As he reached the handrail he looked out over the sea, in the far distance occasional flashes of rainbow hued lightening revealed the approach of a storm, between the bridge and the storm were shadowed structures rising out of the waters at various points further out. Distance was hard to gauge in Demosoneiron, but Henry guessed from the apparent size of the structures that the nearest was several miles away, and the buildings were scattered haphazardly in proximity to the bridge.
As he focused on one particular building it seemed to swim closer into his near field of vision, a Hindu temple he thought by its ornate foundations and square pillars and high peaked roof, but it was the statue of a nude woman with eight arms, each holding a weapon of some sort that made him feel certain of his guess. For a minute there was recognition and involuntarily the vampire reached up to touch the eye-patch that covered his ruined socket and its contents. Just then and close at hand a brilliant flash of chartreuse lightening revealed the largest steam ship Henry had ever seen, the ship looked like a passenger ship, but having broken in half both ends were sinking and as he focused on it the dying vessel leaped closer. Along the prow was stenciled the ship's designation, but Henry had to wait for another colorful flash to read the name correctly: Titanic. Shaking his head as if to clear it he saw something familiar in the growing number of flashes, just beyond the bridge rose a 17th century manor house seeming dredged up from the sea bottom, water and seaweed still sluiced down its walls and windows, but he recognized it immediately as Coalbrook Manor - the home of his mortal childhood. Henry was momentarily overwhelmed by pangs of remembrance
Watchtower of Solace
Links
http://maierstorm.org/Vampire/index.php/London_-_Pax_Britannica#Clan_Toreador
https://www.historicalemporium.com/store/vict_mens_02.php
