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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307761897 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2011 |
| Series: | I, Vampire , #2 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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PART I
New York City
I
Kewpie Doll
CHRONICLE NOTES: He called himself “Becker Thorne” in New York City. His real name would have attracted attention even from those who did not know about the Vampiri. The following excerpts are from “Thorne’s” diary.
—Editor
This city has magnificent Neon.
I read tonight about a gallery near the Plaza Hotel where an entire showing has been devoted to Neon sculpture. I have not been there yet, but my soul quivers with the anticipation of visiting such a Holy of Holies. Imagine the epiphany of being surrounded by the divine hum and glow of creation, like a butchered martyr borne Heavenward upon the snowy doves’ wings of angels!
I must wait until the proper hour has come around before I put off my shoes to worship in the presence of my angry god. I will visit the sacred place after midnight, when the others have gone. I dare not go with others present, for I might find it impossible to control myself amid the bliss of such Revelation. Afterward, filled with inspiration, I will give myself completely up to bliss and joy. I shall stroll through Central Park. There is a new pastime in America called “wilding.” I am keen to try it! After drinking from the Neon fount of inspiration divine, I shall be in precisely the right frame of mind to establish a new standard of wilding savagery. These children know nothing of Neon, of the abandon and power it brings.
I will always remember the Grace I experienced the first time I saw Neon and knew it. It was in 1928. I’d returned from our first long stay in Europe. I bought a bloodied Auburn and set off for the drive to Mississippi. I’d just come around a curve. There it was: the shivering electric vision! Oh, hallowed moment! I knew then how Moses must have felt when he went up on the mountain and beheld the burning bush.
The Neon flamingo sat atop a roadhouse on a deserted stretch of highway. It was a magnificent electric creature, wondrous and terrible. And I knew deep in my soul, in a place beyond words, that I was in the presence of a seraph—or some similar angelic being, for the heavenly apparition was unlike any of the ten families of angels I’d learned about when I was but a sweet and innocent babe, sitting on dear Mother’s lap, learning to read the Bible. No, this was a new kind of angel, an angel of the Neon, come to Earth to give me God’s sign.
And I knew that only I could see the messenger. Only I could understand what it signified.
Trembling, I pulled the car to the shoulder and turned off the motor.
God’s messenger stared down at me with its chilling gimlet eye—an eye the incandescent red of Hellfire. And the Neon spoke:
Bold hunter, brave warrior,
You have been chosen as My Fury.
I heard the words not with my ears but with my heart. I fell down across the seat of the automobile and hid my face, prostrating myself before the messenger of the Lord. I was unworthy—yet, I, who had suffered so much, who had wandered more than sixty years in the wilderness, struggling to develop my hunter’s spirit, had been chosen! Miraculous be the ways of Neon!
I cried with disbelief, not daring to raise my face, fearing some terrible mistake. I wanted to ask why, yet I didn’t have the courage to question God. But knowing all, the Neon saw the doubt in my heart and answered.
Your vengeance knows no mercy.
Which I knew was true.
Go to Jerusalem, My Fury.
The daughters and sons of the wicked must be punished.
And then I understood! I was the Neon’s Fury. My work was filled with wrath, and because it was righteous, it found favor in the eyes of Neon.
I stayed in that car late into the night, crying and singing hymns of praise, humbling myself before the Neon’s mighty power.
The roadhouse closed.
The electricity that connected the Neon messenger with the Beyond was shut off.
A man—I remember he was fat and balding, with greasy eyes and a bartender’s apron still tied around his tremendous waist—came out the front door. He turned and locked the door, eyeing me suspiciously as he waddled toward his battered Ford. I looked into his porcine mind and knew that he carried the evening’s cash register receipts in one back pocket and a revolver in the other. I could see the gun jutting out from his hip, looking in silhouette like the tail on the rump of a hog.
I looked up again at the sign. The Neon was invisible without electricity to make it glow, but it wasn’t gone. It was hiding—inside of me! I could feel the Neon’s icy hot fingers probing my bowels, lacing up through my organs and veins until it touched my heart and made me think it would freeze in midbeat.
I knew at that moment that I was forever at one with the Neon.
“Hallelujah!” I screamed.
The fat man, alarm evident in his eyes as he glanced at me over his shoulder, threw the Ford into gear, throwing gravel as he sped away.
Neon, the blood of Creation, was in me and with me. Blood and Neon intermingled as one in my veins, for I was the Fury of the Lord. I had been called to smite the wicked and punish the transgressors—and their children, and their children’s children, and their children’s children, down through seven generations. For so it has been written, for so it shall be done.
I had become the instrument of a divine and terrible justice. I knew exactly what I had to do.
If it hadn’t been for the pyromaniac Isaiah Buchanan—and her meddling interference—I would have killed them all in 1928 and been done with it. As it turned out, another six decades passed without Jerusalem’s punishment. But now I have returned again to America. My work in New York City is almost done. Then I will return to Mississippi and make the sinners pay. I will bring down the temple and all of them with it, so that no one will ever utter the name of that accursed place without remembering the price its people paid for their transgressions.
I hear mortals talk about the night.
“A beautiful summer evening.”
“It’s lovely, if a bit humid.”
But the fools know nothing about the night. I know. I can see perfectly into their minds, although “mind” is a generous word to describe the receptacles that hold their muddy, petty concerns and fears. Their feeble brains can barely comprehend the stars and the moon and the darkened woods where the whippoorwills cry lonely over the lost, unmarked graves of Confederate soldiers. They do not understand the holy hours between sunset and sunrise that are most truly lighted by Neon’s glow—that Neon and blood, two manifestations of the same Universal energy, bind the world together in the darkness.
When I set out on my long nightly rambles, I navigate by Neon reflected on the rain-slick streets where I hunt alone. Old signs are the truest—Hamms, Rolling Rock, Schlitz. These harbingers shine out in the darkness like beacons to the solitary traveler, never failing to bring me good sport. A blinking script advertising “Maid Rite Eats” must, of course, be obeyed, even when the quarry is unattractive.
Yet the most sacred of Neon’s messengers (so much so that I have adopted it as my personal emblem) is the winged horse Pegasus. The burning winged horse—its outline glowing red in the darkness, a magnificent messenger flying out of Hell to carry its avenger on his mission of divine retribution against the damned—is a sign that promises me especially exquisite pleasures somewhere ahead in the night. Whenever I find Pegasus, or the bloody seraph finds me, I forget caution and abandon myself to a Bacchanalian orgy in worship of the great and glorious Neon.
The high brittle buzz; the mysterious, twisting hollow glass tubing that would be utterly transparent were it not for the pulsing, glowing opalescence of the magical gas held within. Neon communicates directly with my blood. It is my blood. When I take a life now, it is not merely for pleasure, as it is with her. It is a sacrament.
I have been born again as the Neon’s Fury. I have baptized myself in the blood. I have been chosen to mete out divine justice for timeless sins. It is as it was told to me by the Neon, as it was prophesied in the holy Book of Revelation:
Clad in a robe dipped in blood …
Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense,
to repay every one for what he has done.
Guided by Neon, I have punished many strangers for their secret wickedness. But I will also punish those sins I have sworn to never forget—my oath for revenge burned into my soul with a white-hot iron heated in the fires of Hell.
As if I could ever forget …
Events have the power to melt down your life and recast it in a form of their own making; once the cast is removed, the shape remains forever.
I could never forget.
If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.
I will never forget you, Jerusalem, Mississippi, or what your sons and daughters did to me. So prepare yourselves, children of Jerusalem. The Fury will return to Jerusalem, and justice will be done.