The Dream of Henry Sterns last night as a Human

Statistics for Henry Stern 1900

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.

Intro

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.

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The 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 thesein 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.

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Links

http://maierstorm.org/Vampire/index.php/London_-_Pax_Britannica#Clan_Toreador

https://www.historicalemporium.com/store/vict_mens_02.php

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