Chapter 18 – Valtu
Valtu
This is where writing in my journal gets harder.
Throughout my years, I’ve learned more about the human mind than most, and a curious thing I learned was selective memory bias.
This is where the human mind (and for all intents and purposes, the vampiric mind) has a tendency to not remember things as they are but how they want to remember them.
It’s why people may look back at an awful period of their life and only remember the good times peppered through, such as when looking back at a relationship and thinking it was better than it actually was.
Being aware of this doesn’t change my feelings about this part of my life.
There is nothing happy about this part. Yes there was joy and love, but my mind won’t rewrite the truth, it won’t hide the sorrow, and so it’s easiest just not to think of this at all.
But by writing down the pain I am forced to remember what really happened.
The memories flood my brain and leave as tears.
THE VICTORIAN AGE
London – 1890
“How is she?” I asked Doctor Van Helsing for the umpteenth time that day, my cyclical pacing in the sitting room coming to a stop.
He gave me a faint smile as he came into the room and took off his glasses, rubbing them along his handkerchief.
With perfect vampiric eyesight, he never needed glasses, the lenses were clear and he wore them because “It makes me look smarter.” But he never needed any help in that department either.
He didn’t have to say much. I could feel it off him, the dread of having to tell the truth. I braced my heart, my hand pressed against it as if to keep it in place, but I already knew.
“It doesn’t look good, Val,” he said to me with a shake of his head.
“Is the baby…” I couldn’t even finish the sentence.
He swallowed thickly, taking a measured pause. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m sorry.”
I closed my eyes and sat down on the couch, like the weight was too heavy for my chest. “I don’t understand.
The baby would be a vampire.” My eyes darted to the ceiling, to the bedroom above where Lucy was with the midwife and the nurse but they couldn’t hear me from down below. “Vampires can’t just die.”
“You’re only a vampire when you turn thirty-five,” he pointed out. “Until then, yes we can and do die. In this case, I’m sorry Val but the baby didn’t make it. There is no heartbeat from it. It died in the womb. Stillbirth. And…”
“And?” There’s more? How can there be more? What can be worse than losing my child before it’s even born?
“We’re going to need to do an operation if she doesn’t go into labor. She should have at least had the signs already. We will try to induce but…”
“But?”
“If we can’t, we will have to take it out via caesarean.”
I nodded, biting my lip. “Okay…”
He gave me a grave look. “Lucy is weak, Valtu. She was never in great health to begin with. There is a chance she might not survive the operation, and if she does, she may succumb to puerperal fever.”
I stared at him. Just stared. I couldn’t come to terms with it. I couldn’t go from losing the baby to losing her. Not when I felt our lives were just getting started, not when I just got her fucking back.
“She will survive,” I growled at him. “You will do all in your power to make sure she does.”
He promised he would try.
After that, I went up to the room to be alone with my wife. I told the nurse and midwife to leave. I had some things I had been dying to say and I needed to say them before it was too late.
Lucy lay on top of the bed, a thin sheet covering her large belly. The sight of her, knowing that our child inside was dead, nearly brought me to my knees right there and then but I managed to keep going, to hold it together for the sake of her.
I walked to her side of the bed and sat on the chair across from her. Lucy’s head was to the side, her hair a wild storm of red. She opened her eyes and looked at me, tears dried on her pale cheeks. “Val?” she whispered.
“I’m here, my dove,” I told her, taking her hand in mine and kissing it. Her hand was so small, so frail and cold. She was almost a vampire herself.
“The doctor told me the news,” she managed to say weakly.
“I know,” I said to her, trying to sound brave. “He told me the same.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, closing her eyes. “I know how badly you wanted a child.”
It’s true that I did. We had been married for two beautiful years.
Two years of having my Mina back, though now she was Lucy with her own interests and personality.
The same, but different. I had been meaning to tell her who she was in her past life but I was waiting for the right time.
I had also been wanting to tell her that I was a vampire.
It had been a real pain in the ass to keep hiding my feeding sessions.
The problem with vampires is that they know they have all the time in the world, so they assume everyone else does too. But with Lucy, that time suddenly became very narrow and very clear.
I wasn’t running out of it, but she was.
And I had wanted a child, maybe more than she did, because even when Lucy would have to inevitably go one day, her legacy would live on in our offspring. I would have them with me for life, a way of keeping her alive.
But now it looked like I was not only going to lose the child, but I could lose her as well.
So it was time for the truth.
“Don’t be sorry,” I plead, kissing her hand. “This isn’t your fault.”
“The doctors, they warned me when I was younger,” she said. “My sister died during childbirth. The same thing almost happened to my mother when she had me. They say we’re cursed.”
“You’re not cursed,” I told her, but those words rang false. It was enough that she looked at me sharply, as if she knew.
Then she surprised me. “I remember you.”
I could only stare at her in response.
She nods, squinting slightly as she licked her dry lips.
“I know you remember too. I remember who I was. I loved you so, as I love you now. But my name isn’t Mina anymore.
I died. I remember so clearly how I died.
But you…you never died, did you?” She coughed, pink going to her cheeks. “You are still Valtu. How?”
I couldn’t help the smile on my face, the way her words opened up a whole new world for me. I wouldn’t have to get her to remember, she already did. She already knew who we were to each other.
“When did you start to remember?” I asked, unable to hide my excitement. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She gave me a look, like she was aware that I just skirted over her question with more questions.
But she answered. “I think on some level I always knew. When I first met you in the museum, I thought that I knew you from before. I told my friends that but they thought I was just silly. When we first made love, I submitted myself to you in a way I thought I never would, because deep down I knew how to be with you. There are so many examples that I would brush away, thinking I had no explanation.”
She paused and gave me a weak smile before taking in a few shallow breaths.
“And then the day I found out I was pregnant, I remembered being Mina. I remember how I felt when I learned I was going to have a baby, that it was going to be yours. It brought it all together.” Her eyes closed and a tear spilled out.
“Oh, and that’s when I knew this baby wouldn’t live. I am cursed, Valtu, don’t you see?”
Tears pricked at my own eyes and I managed to hold them back. “No, no,” I said adamantly, reaching forward and brushing her tear away. “No, you are not cursed. We will be okay. We will have another.”
The truth is, I was the one who was cursed.
And deep down I knew there would be no other.
And she knew this too.
“Valtu,” she whispered to me. “Please tell me the truth. Why are you still you? I know you didn’t wake up one day and remember, I know you’ve known all this time. How is this possible?”
Back then, the concept of a vampire wasn’t as known as it was today. The Vampyre and Carmilla were two books about vampires that had come out before Dracula , that naturally I had already read, but I wasn’t sure how much Lucy knew other than it being Eastern European folklore.
“What if I were to tell you that I can’t die,” I said, “would you believe me?”
She nodded. “Yes. I can see that you haven’t yet. You are the same man I knew back then. Perhaps a better dresser now.”
“Well that certainly makes this easier.” I gave her a warm smile, suddenly enveloped by how much I loved her. “Lucy. I am a vampire. Do you know what that is?”
She stared at me for a moment, processing it. Then she said, “You are a vampire. Of course you are.” She sat up a little in the bed as if having a sudden burst of strength, and looked me over, her long red hair falling over her shoulder. “The undead.”
“In my case, I never died,” I explained, a little shocked that she was taking this so well.
“I was born a human but turned into a vampire the day I turned thirty-five, which happened to be the day you died as Mina. I never knew, of course, and I often wonder why God couldn’t have had me turn just moments earlier.
I could have saved you from your death. You and the baby. ”
She frowned. “You are a vampire and you still believe in God?”
I shot her a puzzled look. “Who else is there to believe in?”
She gave her head a weak shake and gently rested her hands on her belly, the motion making my heart wince at all the loss. “Could you turn me into one? Is that not how it works? I read a story in a woman’s digest and they said vampires can turn humans into vampires too.”
She sounded so hopeful it broke my heart to tell her no.
“I can’t do that,” I told her. “But our child would have been a vampire, or at least would have turned into one at the age of thirty-five, if a boy, or twenty-one, if a girl, when they would become immortal, living solely on human blood.”
Her upper lip curled. “So that part is true.”