This Same Earth

“Sense anything?”

His nose twitched. “I smell guava. Coffee. No vampires.”

She could feel the clench in her chest, but she continued to walk toward the house. They stopped in front of the green door, and Giovanni shot her a sad look as he took a fist and punched, splintering the frame near the lock and pushing it open.

Beatrice stepped into the dim cottage, immediately hit by the musty scent that clung to the room. She reached to flip on the lights but Giovanni’s hand stopped her.

“Not a good idea. Better not to draw attention to ourselves, even if it is a quiet location.”

“Okay.” She pulled out her mobile phone and turned on the small flashlight.

“I’m afraid no vampire has been here for many months, Beatrice.”

She sighed. “I was getting that feeling.”

They both walked around the small living area, and she noticed the lack of dust on the surfaces, and the quiet hum of the refrigerator and air conditioner.

“Appliances running.”

Giovanni sniffed again. “I do smell a human. Older. He smells sick. Cancer maybe.”

“A caretaker?”

“Possibly. If he planned on leaving, it’s something he might have arranged.” He lingered in front of the wall of bookcases that lined one side of the room. “And these books are not molded. In this climate, they would be unless the air conditioner was usually on.”

“So why the musty smell?”

“Just the perils of a closed house by the lake, I imagine.” He was already lost studying the texts in front of him.

Beatrice roamed through the small house. There was nothing in the modern kitchen, not even any canned food. A drip coffeemaker sat on the otherwise empty counter, and nothing was in the refrigerator. There were no indications of life anywhere.

She pushed open the door to the bedroom and was surprised to find traces of the man she remembered. A pair of shoes sat at the end of the bed where he would kick them off. A pile of books lay on the bedside table, and there was a note propped on top of it. Heavy curtains were pinned around the large French doors, and one window was covered with carefully cut plywood.

Picking up the note on the bedside table, she noticed it was written in Portuguese; the signature read, ‘Maria.’ She tucked it in the pocket of her jeans and went to the small desk on the other side of the room.

Under a sheet of glass were several pictures of her and her grandparents, along with blank spaces where some had been removed. There was a finger painting she remembered had been tucked into a childhood scrapbook, along with a poem she had written when she was ten, signed by a juvenile hand.

Beatrice sniffed and rubbed at the tears on her cheeks. She pulled open the single drawer and began to look through it. There were receipts and scraps of paper; most of the notes had been written in Portuguese. Spare change rattled around the bottom of the drawer. Occasionally, she would find something that looked more personal. A single cufflink. A disposable lighter. A rosary twisted into knots.

She heard Giovanni approach and relaxed a little as his arms encircled her waist. She turned and buried her face in his chest, breathing in the comforting smell of wood smoke and whiskey.

“He’s not here, tesoro.”

“I know,” she whispered.

He tilted her face up and she was struck by the anguish in his expression.

“I was wrong to stay away from you for so long. I didn’t know. And I hurt you. This is my fault.”

“We don’t know if we would have found him even if we had been together.” She ran her hand up his chest and into the hair at the nape of his neck. “We don’t know. He may have left before we could get here years ago. There’s no way of knowing.”

“I think you need to see a few things on the bookcase.”

She sighed and hugged him closer. “Just give me a minute.”

They stood holding each other for a few more minutes in the empty bedroom. She heard the trickle of a stream running outside the terrace doors. Eventually, she took Giovanni’s hand and walked back out to the living room and the wall of books.

“Here.” He pointed toward a corner of the room. “These are textbooks for the study of old Arabic and old Persian. It appears he taught himself how to read both.”

“Why?”

“Alchemy. Remember what Tywyll said? The manuscript was about alchemy. Much early medieval alchemic work was done in the Middle East, so if he wanted to learn more, he might have started there.”

She paged through the books, looking at her father’s familiar scrawl in the margins of each volume. Most of it, she couldn’t understand.

“Aristotle,” Giovanni murmured, dragging his finger along the spines. “Zosimos, Mary…did your father read classical Greek?”

“A little,” she muttered, paging through a dense history of the burned library of Alexandria in Egypt.

“He appeared to be well-versed in Greco-Roman roots of alchemy and was studying the work done in the Middle East. Khalid ibn Yazid. A lot of Geber.”

“Who?”

“Ah…he was known during my time as Geber, but he was a Persian, possibly Arab, medieval alchemist. Jabir ibn Hayyan was his Arabic name. It also appears he was looking into Bon, Spagyric-”

“What?” she asked with a frown. “I haven’t even heard of those.”

“Bon is an ancient Asian belief system. I’m only familiar with it through Tenzin. Spagyric refers to a subset of alchemy, plant alchemy. Again, Tenzin studied it at one point.” Giovanni stepped back and shook his head as he surveyed the wall of books. “What were you up to, Stephen?”

She looked through the section in front of her. “I’m also seeing stuff on Newton and Boyle. I know Newton, who’s Boyle?”

“Early modern chemistry.” He walked slowly, his head cocked to the side as he moved down the wall.

“So, chemistry, languages, philosophy, religion…what wasn’t he studying?”

He snorted. “Alchemy is a very twisted subject. It blurs lines between science and superstition. Chemistry and magic.” He heaved a sigh, and she could see the air stir in the light of her small flashlight.

“Gio?”

“Si, tesoro?” he asked, absently bending down to the far corner where something appeared to have caught his eye.

“Why don’t we-”

“Beatrice, look at this.”

She walked over and knelt down next to him.

“What?”

Giovanni pulled out a small book. It was a black and white composition book, like the ones she remembered using in high school. It had no label, only the number “1” written on the front cover in black marker. She pulled it from his hands with trembling fingers, knowing somehow that this book was different from the others.

Beatrice sat on the floor, cross-legged in the corner as Giovanni knelt next to her. She opened it to the first page.

“‘August 20, 1996,’” she read in a shaky voice. “‘Dear Mariposa, I had to say goodbye to you tonight-’” She choked on the sob that tore from her throat and before she could blink, Giovanni had picked her up and was rocking her in his arms on the floor of the lonely cottage.

Beatrice wept, deep, gut-wrenching sobs that tore at her heart and shook her small frame. Giovanni held her as she emptied her sorrow, fear, and frustration into his chest. He didn’t try to calm her, only stroked her back as she let six years of anger and grief pour out into the still night air.

“Why isn’t he here?” she finally choked out. “Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is he dead? Is he hiding again?” She shook her head and clutched at his neck. “I want my father! I want all