The woman comes into focus, a fountain of long dark hair streams down her back and she’s wearing a simple combination of jeans, t-shirt, and running shoes. She runs like her life depends on it. Like the entire world depends on it. My heart is in my throat as I watch her race for survival. I care so, so much. But why do I care?
The answer presents itself a second later as a long, pale, slender hand reaches out and grabs the woman’s shoulder. It breaks her run, and she tumbles backward into the person who’s caught her.
Her face flashes in my eyes just before she falls. A face I have only properly seen in old photographs, but I remember it vaguely in my own memory too. The face of my dead mother.
The scene goes black, and for a second, just before the next picture presents itself, I feel as though I have ceased to exist. I’m not in this world in those few moments within which one scene swirls and contorts itself into another.
Now I see a room. Light cream walls. Pine wood floors. A cot, above which hangs a fairy mobile, it twirls around and around, as the wings of many colours pass by, by, by. It glitters and twinkles and catches the eye with its wondrous sparkles. A little baby coos from the cot, stands up in her lemon coloured romper suit, falls down, stands up again and grabs for the mobile. But it’s up too high. She’ll never catch it as it turns around and around.
The door opens, and in walks the woman who I now recognise as my mother. Am I that baby? I ask. Though the answer is quite obvious. I’d recognise that jet black hair anywhere. “Ma-Ma!” I call as my mother comes and sets a variety of objects down on the carpet in the middle of the floor.
“Hush, baby, hush,” she answers my call, in a voice so full of tender love and fierce protection that it makes me want to cry. Cry and cry and cry, until I’m a baby again and I can be with her. Stay with her. Never grow up.
She organises the objects into a circle on the carpet. A wide bowl containing a broth. Several smaller bowls containing different varieties of herbs. So similar to Rita’s spell. Wait a minute, is this the spell? The one that had been cast upon me all those years ago? Gabriel had been right. It had been my mother who’d cast it. Only her assortment of objects is different to Rita’s in some way. It takes me a moment to figure it out. There’s a small antique silver knife to the left of the bowl. To the right lies a glassy red stone. I wonder what the additions must mean. Also, she doesn’t have three people to form a circle, it’s just her all by herself.
After she’s finished setting out the components of her spell, my mother rises to her feet and walks over to my cot, lifts me out, then puts me down on the carpet with her magical ingredients. It shakes me to my bones. To see myself there, so small and vulnerable, amid things I don’t understand. I almost laugh, not much has changed. Even now that I’m grown I’ve found myself in a world of things I don’t understand.
My mother speaks, and hearing her voice is like all I’ve ever wanted. It flows and enunciates and entwines itself around me. Burns into my soul. I’ll never forget the sound of it. Somehow I know I’ll never hear it again. At least not in the world of the living. She invokes the Goddess, just like Rita had done. She asks her to watch over the proceedings, to shelter them from dark intrusions, and to be sure that her child is protected once she has finished her casting.
Unlike Rita, my mother doesn’t name and
explain each of the ingredients that she places into the bowl in front of her. Perhaps it isn’t necessary. Perhaps Rita only did it because I’m new to all this and need things spelled out for me. Or perhaps – well, perhaps my mother’s magic is unlike that which Rita uses. She picks up bits of leaves and flowers and berries and sprinkles them all in, with a kind of finesse found only in people so used to an art it has become second nature to them.
Then she lifts the silver knife, holds it to a blue vein that runs along the inside of her wrist. She presses down, hesitates a moment as though anticipating the pain, then with a violent quickness, she cuts. Long and deep, from her inner wrist to midway down the inside of her arm. She watches blood drip from the incision, holds it over the bowl, and lets it mix in with the ingredients. The greenish broth instantly turns a shocking shade of red as the first drop hits the liquid. Strange. One single drop is so potent it colours the entire bowl in a deep and all-encompassing scarlet.
She holds it there for a long minute, longer than necessary, as if questioning her reasons for carrying out the spell. Soon she withdraws her arm and presses down on it with a cloth to stop the bleeding. Then she picks me up, places me on her lap, and plucks something shiny up from beside the bowl. Something almost invisible, that I hadn’t noticed before. A little silver pin, or a sewing needle perhaps.
My mother takes my little baby hand in her big mother’s hand. Strokes her fingertips over the soft pudgy centre, then she grips the needle in her other hand, and pricks the centre of my palm with it. I let out a small squeal and a pause before I begin to cry. My mother rocks me and soon I fall silent again. She lifts my hand, holds it over the bowl, and allows just one drop of blood to fall into the mixture.
A flash. Like lightning. My mother’s voice booms within the small room. “I bequeath you Goddess! Take this blood curse from my child and hide it deep, deep within her so that no nosferatu will ever find it. Let them never hunt her like they hunt me. Let die Äußerste Macht in her blood be concealed forever so that she may live a life of freedom, without running and hiding from the nosferatu. Make it so that she never knows the suffering of her mother,” her voice is weak now, no longer strong and booming, and a white light shines down upon the bowl containing her potion. It shines so brightly that it bleaches out the red, until it is no longer a thick, viscous liquid, but a clear, see-through fluid. My God. It’s suddenly turned to water.
Tears stream out of my mother’s eyes, and she weeps as she sighs, “Oh thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much.” And she hugs me to her as she cries. I watch in stunned amazement, and for a second I understand everything even though I still understand nothing. Quiet falls as the scene from my past slips away. Darkness descends as I’m pulled and pulled, back to the present, and just before I reach Rita’s kitchen, that voice from the forest tells me. She thought she could save you, but nothing can save you now, little treasure, and then it’s gone. And I’m back.
We’re back.
Chapter Twelve
Let Me Show You Who You Really Are
It’s a struggle to open my eyes, they feel as though they’ve been glued shut after many years of slumber. The room shakes, and a shelf on the other side of the room breaks and falls to the floor, the cups and plates that had been on it smash to pieces. The noise is like a little shock of the mundane, and it centres me back to reality.
Rita rubs her eyes and Alvie simply blinks several times before gaining focus. Wide-eyed I stare at the smashed up plates in shock as though I’d actually gotten up from my seat and broken them myself. Little bits and pieces, red and blue and white.
I look at Rita, and for the first time I realise that she’s staring at me with a strange mix of fascination and horror. It’s stupid of me really, but while I was watching the magically induced reconstruction of my mother, I’d thought I was alone in my voyeurism. Though seemingly, I wasn’t.
“You saw all that didn’t you,” I say in a raspy voice. “Both of you did.”
Rita actually stutters. “Y-yeah, we, um, we did.”
I shake my head. “Well, you look like you know what it meant, and as per usual I’m as lost as ever. What was that – that spell my mother performed?”
“It’s, well, it’s something very old, and very hard to do. I couldn’t have done it,” says Rita, still a little bit in shock.
“Which is…” I prompt.
Rita glances at Alvie, and he shakes his head as if to say, This one is all yours, Reet. She sighs and rubs her arms as though trying to rid herself of goose pimples. She opens her mouth, closes it, thinks a moment, then says, “This isn’t my area of expertise. It’s more of – well it’s more of a historical issue. A vampire related historical issue to be exact. Your mother mentioned die Äußerste Macht, that’s German for the Ultimate Power, or some people call it the Extreme Power.” She pauses, and I’m still lost so I nod as a sign for her to continue.
“Well, my mum told me all about this years ago because it goes down as one of the biggest discoveries in vampire existence. I’m a little rusty on the facts, but I’ll fill you in as best I can. Back in like the late 1800’s there was a vampire scientist living in Dresden called Dr Emeric Beckenbauer. He carried out all sorts of experiments on both vampire and human subjects, trying to discover how one evolved from the other, what the biological differences were. The story goes that one night while out prowling for a new human subject, Dr Beckenbauer came across a young woman with a blood scent more powerful and alluring than any he had ever encountered before.”