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“Thank you, Guido,” I tell him. “And please, call me Valtu,” I add with a wink.
I’ve been telling Guido to call me Valtu ever since I started at the music conservatory. I’ve been here for ten years and it’s time for me to finally move on. It was always part of the plan, anyway. As a vampire you need to move every so often to avoid superstition over your lack of aging. The funny thing is, the last couple of years I do look like I’ve aged. I have dark circles where there weren’t any before, and while I don’t have any lines, I look tired. Like all the life has been drained from my face. It doesn’t matter how much blood I have, nothing seems to nourish me anymore.
Not since I killed Dahlia.
I’m surprised I have stayed in Venice as long as I have. My first instinct after the showdown in Poveglia was to get out of town right away. Leave my job and the Red Room behind, take off with the book and do what I could to try and crack the code.
But as crazy as it sounds, the book wanted me to stay in Venice. Every time I thought of leaving, I felt its weight like an anchor to this city.
And so I stayed.
I tried to shift through the rubble of my life and piece together something that resembled the person I was before I met Dahlia. I had been happy, hadn’t I? I had lost her before, but the years passed, and I went on. I moved on. I had a life.
Then suddenly I didn’t.
I spent my days teaching, going through the motions as music no longer soothed my soul. I went into the Red Room often to unleash my most depraved self. I fucked, I drank, I even hurt people for the sake of causing pain. I did all I could to try and channel my feelings, my most hated self, into some other place.
And the nights I spent with the book.
Pouring over the pages, trying to learn everything I could.
Everything it would allow me to learn.
The book has a mind of its own, you see. What it wants me to know, it shows. What it doesn’t, it hides, the ink buried in the fabric of the paper, invisible to the eye. Every once in a while, I’ll notice a page filled with ink that had been hidden before, and I dutifully learned the spell whether I thought it was relevant or not. Sometimes it was something bold, such as erasing someone’s memory for a passage of time, almost as if someone was awake and yet under general anesthesia at the same time. Other times it was something as simple as creating light with a simple flick of the fingers. I already had knowledge of magic thanks to Solon, but it further solidified it.
And yet the spell I wanted most of all didn’t seem to have a home in the book—or it’s still being hidden from me. The spell of necromancy. The whole reason I took it. An attempt to get Dahlia back. It didn’t matter how much time I spent flipping through the endless pages, looking for that particular spell, waiting for it to appear—it never did.
There have been some other complications with the book as well. Side effects, if you will.
The book has its own guardians.
I feel they are here to protect me too, since they haven’t tried to do me any harm, but at the very least, they are here to protect the book.
One of the guardians is the bad thing, the infamous demon that killed Aleksi and practically handed me the book, and the same demon I had seen with Dahlia, that had been terrorizing Venice for a while there (people explained the murders as being the work of a serial killer who moved on to another area). Now the demon hangs around my villa, which is something I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to. It doesn’t make any noises, it doesn’t say anything, it doesn’t do anything except lurk in the shadowy corners, or sometimes lie flat against the ceiling. But it’s always there, giving me the motherfucking creeps.
There are some other creatures or beings too, though I am unsure if they are guardians or just things I have inadvertently conjured with my usage of the text. They may even be leftovers from Saara and Aleksi when they opened a portal to the Red World.
One of them I call the pale man has an outstretched mouth and tiny black dots for eyes. He likes to appear in the corner of my eye, though he always disappears when I turn to face him. The other is harder to explain. It’s always changing. I’m starting to think it’s a physical manifestation of whatever you fear or are trying to escape from. Sometimes I see Dahlia’s waterlogged corpse floating above my bed, her matted hair mixed with seaweed, eels coming out of her eye sockets. Other times I see a bloody, mutilated baby, crawling toward me with sharp snapping teeth. I often wonder if it represents the babies we had lost.
After I finish saying goodbye to others at the conservatory, I leave the building and step out into the streets of Venice. It’s raining and it’s February, as good a time as ever to leave the city when the crowds have descended for Carnival andacqua altahas flooded the streets. I manage to slide past tourists wearing festival masks, sloshing through puddles in their boots, before I get over thePonte dell’Accademia. Normally thePonte di Rialtois quicker, but that would mean walking straight through the heart of the tourists and I don’t want to expose myself to that at the moment, not when the streets are so narrow already and so many of them have flooded.
So I ascend the quieter bridge and take a moment to look over the Grand Canal. With thevaporettosand gondoliers and motorboats sloshing through the gray waters, a dark mist swallowing the tops of the buildings and snaking through streets like smoke, Venice is at its most gothic, its most beautiful.
I will miss this place dearly. I think Venice will always have a piece of my heart. One day, when all who would remember me have died, I am sure I will come back. The world is small and my life is long. The only thing that worries me is that Venice might not be there when I do. At the rate the water is rising due to climate change, it’s possible the city will be underwater by 2100. For the humans that exist today, it won’t be around for their great-grandchildren and that makes me unfathomably sad. It’s times like this that I feel immortality is a curse, particularly on this planet. To witness so much change and death and dying can take a toll on you.
I should know.
But tonight, tonight I have a plan. A solution to erase part of that toll.
It revealed itself to me a week ago as I sat by the roaring fire, the only light in the room. I was flipping through the book as I always do, filling that obsessive need to read it, touch it, be immersed in it. I know the demon was sitting on its haunches in the corner of the room, red eyes occasionally shining through the dark and I felt as if it were waiting for something. Suddenly, as I turned to a blank page, I watched it come to life before my eyes, the ink seeping up through the fibers.
A spell of erasure.
A spell for forgetting.
Tabula Rasa.
Blank slate.
