All of Them Vampires!

Paris, 1793

Paris, 1793The two finely dressed gentlemen who stepped out of the Palace of Versailles into the cold winters evening gave not the slightest impression that France was in the grip of a revolution. White particles of snow were already beginning to fall and Doctor Philippe Arnaud struggled into his warm woollen overcoat, pulling the collars to his bearded features. Past his sixtieth year, his body was crippled with rheumatism exacerbated by the making of many house calls occasioned by some of the hardest winters Paris had ever seen. This night his waning health seemed magnified by the uneasiness he entertained over his travelling companion. Although the journey to St. Cloud was not too far, the last person he would have requested to accompany him would have been the Marquis de Santigny. There was something about the man that both fascinated and repulsed the good doctor.

The Marquis certainly had the royal courtiers eating out of his hand at the Palace tonight. He was charm itself. Despite the interminable unrest in the country, the Queen, her ‘Madame Deficit’ title temporarily forgotten in de Santigny’s company, was transfixed. His dark smouldering eyes alone were enough to bring a flush to her young overly rouged cheeks. The King had spoken little at dinner, perhaps because the Queen and de Santigny had dominated most of the conversation. Arnaud considered de Santigny’s attire fashionable, though somewhat ill matched. A canary yellow waistcoat worn with red striped breeches, a white lawn shirt, over which he had thrown a black silken cape. With grudging steps Arnaud reached the waiting carriage before the other man. The driver, muffler pulled to his face, hat pulled low, occupied his box. In these uncertain days someone so irreverently masked could possibly be an anarchist; a revolutionary. The streets were empty, foggy with tiny flurries of snow that afforded the driver such concealment.

Arnaud, ever wary, had hidden a small pistol inside the pocket of his coat merely as a precaution. Dining with the aristocracy was enough to warrant the loss of one’s head. Dining with the King and Queen scarcely bore thinking about. The strutting peacock of a marquis in his ostentatious attire was conducive to sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb.

The discussion that evening had quite naturally turned to the revolution, which the Marquis was wont to view with his habitual derision but later Arnaud had overhead the Marquis warn the Queen that she should consider leaving Paris as soon as possible.

“Please my dear doctor...” De Santigny held the coach door open. It was obvious that the driver had no intention of alighting from his box. With a further brief glance at the latter Arnaud murmured his thanks and stepped into the carriage. De Santigny, closing the door quietly, sank his rather robust weight onto the adjacent seat.

“An inclement night, Monsieur” de Santigny observed, his full moon like features rosy from wine. In contrast Arnaud had drunk precious little. To be caught intoxicated by an anarchist would not be the wisest move that he could have made and if he had occasion to reach for his pistol then certainly intoxication would spoil his aim. Naturally he failed to confide in the bellicose marquis that he was thus armed. Anyway, de Santigny would undoubtedly have laughed at him. Nothing seemed to faze the man, except maybe the fear for Queen Marie Antoinette’s safety and that of the King of course.

“Yes it is rather” Arnaud agreed quietly. He was tired and had no real desire for conversation. Tonight was the second time that he had encountered de Santigny. The first had been a brief introduction at the home of Madame Lascelles in Chaville where her daughter had been taken ill. It seemed that de Santigny had somehow managed to cure her of her malady with some peculiar potion he had invented, rendering Doctor Arnaud’s presence somewhat superfluous. Perhaps it was that incident which caused the doctor to dislike him so much. It was not simply his arrogance, but the fact that he appeared to have a remedy for all ills. Tonight was no exception. The ladies including the Queen pressed de Santigny to tell them how, as he claimed, he could possibly turn simple metals into gold, not that the supercilious man required much persuasion. Arnaud had only half listened, but he was compelled to admit the man certainly fascinated him. Not only that. There was something else surrounding the Marquis de Santigny and his stories. His talk of something he called ‘time travel’ and how he had been at Cana when Jesus turned water into wine; how he had wept disconsolately when Joan of Arc was burned at Rouen. The drink and the talk had obviously gone to all their heads.

De Santigny urged the driver to depart. Lulled by the steady rhythmic clip clop of the horse and carriage Arnaud broached the subject of time travel.

“The Queen and her courtiers might believe all the nonsense you spouted tonight Monsieur but I am a sober man and heed nothing of your fairy tales.”

“But they are not fairy tales Monsieur I can assure you of that.”

“Don’t tell me you have knowledge of this ‘time travel’. I am not a gullible man. You would be hard pressed to convince me. If you can ‘time travel’ as you call it then you must have seen the future.”

A smile dancing about his thin lips, de Santigny leaned his be-wigged head against the soft rest of the coach. Arnaud reasoned he would cheer with the revolutionaries if this peacock of an aristocrat should fall foul of Madame Guillotine’s vicious blade.

“Oh no Monsieur!” The hint of excitement in de Santigny’s voice was not lost on the doctor while he entertained the idea that there was something imperceptibly cold and dangerous surrounding this man.

“Actually I do not have knowledge of the future. I only come from the past. I’m afraid I allowed you all to believe I’m a time traveller. It was all part of the act you see.” His excitement mounted.

Arnaud gritted his teeth. The night seemed to have taken on a strange and unearthly silence, afforded by the softest flurries of snow and the almost unbelievable slowness of the horses as they travelled through the streets. Arnaud heard a clock in the distance chime the midnight hour and he caught himself shivering suddenly. The half moonlight threw everything inside the coach into relief, and he became aware that the Marquis’ deeply seated brown eyes had grown intrinsically black and now completely filled the eye socket so that precious little of the white of the eye remained visible. Although taken aback, he believed his overwrought imagination and tiredness to be playing tricks. Doctor Arnaud had distrusted this man from the outset and now he trusted him even less, while the reassurance of the small pistol inside his coat was the only thing that prompted him to retort acidly “I knew you were all bluster Monsieur le Marquis. You may have fooled the others but not me. I distrusted you the first time I encountered your presence at Madame Lascelles. So what are you, some kind of charlatan?”

“It depends on how you look at things my dear doctor. I am an alchemist; that much is true. Yes I was at Rouen with Joan of Arc. And I journeyed to London in 1642 to obtain an audience with the King to advise him about inciting civil war with parliament. Of course, he refused to heed my advice.”

“What are you saying de Santigny?” Arnaud locked glances with the almost hypnotic orbs of the other man.

“How old do you think I am doctor?” De Santigny continued to smile insidiously, as if he were laughing at Arnaud. Maybe he was.

“How old? What kind of question is that?” demanded Arnaud. He was too tired for stupid guessing games.

“Please, guess my age” de Santigny insisted.

“Very well, if you must play childish games! Forty? Late thirties perhaps?”

“Then you would be very wrong my dear doctor. I was born before time, before what you know has existed. I am the Old One.”

“Now I know it’s all stuff and nonsense!”

“Is it Doctor? Is it?”

Marquis de Santigny’s teeth shone so inexorably white in the glow of moonlight that filtered into the coach.

“Let me show you how really old I am Monsieur le Doctor...”

Doctor Arnaud entertained a momentary contemplation of reaching for the pistol inside his coat but it was over; while his senses could not possibly concede; for his will abandoned him as he was compelled to sink deeper into his seat with the realisation that the coach had come to an abrupt standstill; the utter silence of the snow falling around them. The last thing he would ever see and feel before losing consciousness was the Marquis de Santigny’s sharply pointed white incisors sinking into the soft flesh of his neck beneath his coat collars; the sensation of wetness he realised to be his own blood coursing down his chest.