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 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 a 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 definitely 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' manakin, 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 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 female and Lord Stern.

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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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