untroubled by any fear of consequences, I have been successful in the great majority of our clashes.
But I regret to report that as yet there is no end to our conflict in sight. Sometimes I wonder: What would our father have thought, had he known the true nature of the burden he had placed on me, of responsibility for my brother? Had Father imagined that it might possibly continue for five hundred years and more?
No, I simply cannot imagine the paternal reaction to such knowledge. My mind simply boggles—as, I am sure, father's would have done. To the best of my knowledge, my esteemed parent had never even the least commerce with vampires—though he must have been aware of their existence. I cannot imagine the supposition crossing our father's mind that either of his sons, let alone both, would ever become vampires—certainly he himself had never been granted that wondrous transformation. Or perhaps he had deliberately declined it. I should not like to think that of my father.
Still, an oath is an oath. It was put to me as a matter of personal and family honor, and I as a dutiful son accepted it unquestioningly on its own terms.
Having survived a serious altercation with my younger brother in 1705—remind me to tell you, sometime, the full story of that remarkable encounter—having survived that, as I say, and having firmly reasserted my proper position as head of the family, I considered what course of action to take next. Honor, as we have seen, precluded my having the scoundrel put to death outright. But at the same time, duty and prudence alike required some drastic action.
The best compromise I could arrange with my conscience required devious and difficult arrangements. In the end, as we have seen, I had Radu put underground, alive (well, more or less alive. Just enough, as it seemed to me, to meet the minimum requirements of my pledge to our father.) in one of the quieter churchyards of London. The length of his confinement under these conditions was to be left to chance.
When I gave orders to certain reliable associates of mine, specifying in some detail how Radu was to be transported and put away, I had thought I might look forward to as much as five hundred years of peace. But alas, even though my orders were carried out with remarkable fidelity, that was not to be.
Whilst making the arrangements for this burial, I, as the responsible older brother, considered whether it would be somehow possible to arrange to be notified whenever my younger sibling should be awakened. But I could discover no way to make any such arrangement reliably, and in any case I was not really sure I wanted it. I have resolutely declined to spend my life looking over my shoulder.
The news of Radu's revival—first in the form of a rumor, and then in independent confirmation—reached me in the summer of 1792. Coming decades before I expected it, it struck me with a forcible shock.
Certainly I was disappointed to discover that the fiend was already above ground and prowling again; the punishment had not endured for even a hundred years. Oh, with any luck at all my younger brother might easily have remained inert, only groaning now and then in nightmare, for another fifty years or so. But though disconcerted I was hardly at all surprised. Luck was something that seemed usually to flow in my younger brother's favor.
No doubt you are already thinking that simply condemning a vampire to a long trance must not in itself qualify as punishment. And you are right—there must be additional conditions. Sometimes putting the subject in a trance deprives him of the opportunity to do something above ground that he badly wants to accomplish. For example, achieving the seduction of a certain breathing person, or persons. And there are other ways of arranging matters so that his long and enforced sleep is far from pleasant.
Here is one such possibility: Trance, as we know, is essentially a kind of sleep, and sleep is often stalked by dreams. A nightmare-filled catalepsy, which endures for a hundred years or more, is not at all the same as a long peaceful slumber. The specific details of the nightmare we need not go into here; I have no wish that my readers' own slumbers should be disturbed.
Does it seem to you that such an experience would inevitably drive its victim mad? If you think so, you do not know Radu.
As I started to explain above, before I wandered somewhat off the point, my arrangements for Radu's burial in 1705 included having his head cut off before he went into the coffin. This operation of course was performed, as I am sure you realize if you have kept up with me this far, with no intention of killing the dear boy outright. I made sure that his shortening was accomplished by a steel blade, with nothing in the least wooden about it. (In a later chapter we will have further occasion to contemplate the fact that if a vampire is decapitated by an irresistible force borne in metal—the very description of the guillotine—then the head and body are decisively severed, but not killed.)
Yes, it is virtually impossible for metal to inflict deadly harm upon a
With a wish to keep the whole business as thoroughly out of sight and mind as possible, I caused my brother's mortal parts, vitally dismembered but still undead, to be conveyed into a distant land for burial. This tactic put a broad girdle of the sea, twenty miles at least of salt, tide-flowing water, as a barrier between Radu and his homeland—and, as I had thought, between him and most of his breathing minions of that century. My oath required, of course, that a portion of our native soil sufficient to enable him to survive be buried with him. The logistics of it all were every bit as hard as you might think.
I relied upon hypnosis, aided by a judiciously measured dose of a certain peculiar substance left over from the Borgia pharmacology (at its most productive three hundred years earlier), to make sure that my brother was properly entranced. His mind was programmed, as it were, to experience a number of unpleasant dreams, or more precisely one dream only, repeated and repeated.
As for myself, my long immunity to fear in waking life has left me, ever since my childhood, proof against nightmares in the life of sleep. Radu therefore could not hope to impose upon his elder brother the same punishment of bad dreams that I inflicted upon him.
Of one thing I could be entirely certain: Radu was going to be terribly angry when he awakened after experiencing such a penalty. Constantia thought it necessary to warn me of the fact. But I shrugged, and reminded her that when my errant brother got out of his partitioned coffin, he was going to be murderously angry anyway, at me and at the world. Homicidal animosity was his ordinary state. And I could not make his state of mind my chief concern. Even had it been possible for me to disregard my oath to our father, simple justice required that he be punished for his misdeeds. Of course with authority came responsibility. Chastisement, sometimes severe, was not only permissible, it was sometimes required under the terms of my promise—with the proviso that any correction always stopped safely short of capital punishment.
Have I forgotten to mention that a beating with a wooden cane was also part of the just punishment inflicted? I had employed that method several times, on earlier occasions, and had gained no permanent advantage thereby. At each impact, my cowardly brother screamed unashamedly with pain and fear—the beating naturally took place at a time when his lungs were still connected to his mouth, and the nerves of his spinal column to his brain. At intervals between screams (well, he knew how I detested screams, and I am sure he meant them to annoy me!), he sobbed that he had seen the light, and was now determined on reform. Even had that claim been true—and I knew better than to believe it—it would have had no bearing on the justice of the ongoing punishment.
The chronic difficulty which I faced was that the culprit would heal with great rapidity from any physical punishment I might inflict—anything short of the ultimate and forbidden sanction of the great true death.
In any case, I found the news that Radu had returned to the world in 1790 vexing, to say the least.
Mentally reviewing my available options in dealing with my younger sibling, I found that they were, as before, severely restricted by the vow our father had extracted from me as an adolescent.
Father had been satisfied, even pleased, by my willingness to pledge my honor in the cause of duty.
Following my own version of the Golden Rule, I thought that for my own sake I had better locate Radu, if that was at all possible. Before he located me.
