Chapter Three — Missing Pieces
If someone is chasing you, you better hope it’s not Charly. When Charly is hunting you, it’s more like a charging rhinoceros than a human or another vampire trying to catch you.
Charly has always been known within his vamp house in central Africa, the Ilunga House, as an indefatigable, incomparably puissant warrior. A little more than a century ago, he feasted on hundreds of Belgians when King Leopold controlled vast parts of central Africa as his own private kingdom in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Leopold claimed full ownership of a massive African nation called the Congo Free State that he carved out of the jungle. There was nothing free about the place. It became the nightmarish backdrop to books like Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness.
The only thing free about the Congo Free State was Leopold’s willingness to rip entire tribal nations and languages out of history books before historians had a chance to sit down and start scribbling. That, and his penchant for plundering the nation’s resources, turning valleys of gold into ruined gulleys full of blood, grieving widows, and broken, starving children.
The Ilunga House didn’t much care, but if they had any human allies in the region at all, it was the straggling survivors, not the invading Belgians. While the House feasted mostly on Belgians, they also kept the locals honest by occasionally feeding on them, too.
The Ilunga House, through feudal kings and their proxies, also convinced locals that central African vampires, the Banyana, were a side-effect of colonialism. This created a feigned alliance that made it easier for the Ilunga House to maintain significant landholdings deep in the jungle where the Belgians dared not tread.
Having a ten-thousand-year-old warrior (that’s Charly) as their knight in shining armor didn’t hurt. Charly ravaged entire Belgian settlements throughout King Leopold’s Congo strongholds. Europeans knew there was a fearsome power in the dark forests they tried to master, but they didn’t know what it was, or what to call it.
It was Charly.
Charly is one of the oldest living vampires on earth, if not the oldest. He’s one of the most ancient living creatures on Earth, too. He’s older than the giant sequoia trees of California, and he sometimes looms as large when he’s bearing down on you in a cold rain. He is powerful enough that he could have survived the Jurassic Age.
You don’t want a being like that chasing you.
He chased me to the SUV, where Owens was waiting outside with Cornelia, poised to fire her special bullets into whoever or whatever was pursuing me. Cornelia was a special gun, but as my legs pumped their way toward Owens, I wasn’t sure she could stop Charly. I was even more sure that I didn’t want her to.
“Don’t shoot!” I yelled. “It’s Charly!”
Owens steadied his aim anyway. He never listens to me.
“No! Owens!”
Two choices faced Owens as I neared him, my rampaging friend close behind. One, obviously, was to shoot Charly and hope it would at least slow him down enough for me to get into the SUV and get us out of there. Even under siege from Cornelia’s bullets, which were toxic to vamps, Charly would probably survive and heal quickly enough to hunt us down soon after falling. The other choice was for me to face Charly and appeal to what was left of his mind to end his attack.
By turning around in front of Owens and his beloved anti-vampire weapon, then turning my back on him to face Charly’s charge, I guess I was choosing option two for both Owens and me.
“Fuck, Atticus, what the fuck?” Owens blurted out into what was now a horizontal, freezing rain that sliced into our faces like tiny shards of shrapnel. Garrison jumped out of the SUV, too, holding a different kind of gun, maybe a Glock.
Charly reached me more quickly than I thought he would. I knew by his footfall that he was near, but he was upon me almost the instant that I finished my pirouette in front of Owens.
You might remember from my previous tale that I sometimes envied the short life of humans. At this moment in time, I was pretty sure that humans got a raw deal. I suddenly found myself wanting much more.
I thrust my hands in front of me in a feeble attempt to stop Charly from removing my head and launching it into the Appalachian foothills north of Atlanta. “Charly,” I said. “Wait, man, it’s me. Atticus.”
Charly’s laugh was uproarious. “I know that, you chicken shit.” His laugh thundered to the point where a pine cone from a nearby tree bounced off my head. He swatted my shoulders like the old friend he was. “I had to be sure it was you, bro.”
“The fuck?” said Owens.
“Yeah,” I said. “The fuck.”
“Long story, man.” His head bobbed around like a skittish bird on a cautious hunt. I wondered who he was worried about. Charly wasn’t afraid of anyone that I knew of.
“Well, fuck me, let’s get out of the rain.” I looked at Owens, then the SUV. “Will he fit in there, Owens?”
Owens laughed and opened the doors. We all climbed in, Charly last. Garrison took the driver’s seat and Owens the passenger side. Charly and I sat behind them.
“What was that all about, Charly?” I asked when we were all settled. I looked down. “I think I may have shat my pants.” I never tried playing the tough guy with Charly. Nobody did. And Charly knew better, anyway, than to think that I could think I could take him in a fight without a bazooka filled with magic vampire-killing projectiles.
Somehow, Charly was already sweating. He wiped his big bald head as he said, nodding toward the house, “If I tell you what’s up in that place, you won’t believe a word of it.”
“At this point in the timeline, Charly, I’d believe a singing goat was the president of the United States. Try me.”
“Umm. Okay. But you’re not gonna like this.”
Owens couldn’t stop himself from blurting out, “Fuck’s sake.” It’s a disease he has, I think.
“Out with it,” I said.
“They cloned Daphne, man.1 They fuckin’ cloned her.”
“You’re right on both counts,” I said. “I don’t believe it, and I don’t like it.”
“And I had to make sure it was you out there in the yard, you know?”
“No, I don’t know anything. And it’s getting worse.”
Charly shook his head. He seemed genuinely shaken. “So,” he said, “I figured I’d give you a scare. I knew the real you would run like the chicken shit you are.”
I wanted to smash his newly formed smile, which had morphed into the size of a piano keyboard, into a million pieces.
“Charly,” I said. “Be nice.”
He was beaming. Pretty happy guy for a dude who was afraid of clones.
“You’re fucking proud of yourself,” I added. I was insulted, but I couldn’t deny it was a sound strategy when he continued.
“See,” he said. “A clone woulda stood its ground. No history, no real knowledge of me.”
I nodded. “I still hate you and I always will from now on,” I said in a deadpan voice. “But, shit. Tell me more.” I wasn’t ready to believe his wacky story about Daphne, but the truth was, Charly was the last person to have seen her that I knew of.
“I don’t know what the hell is going on in there,” he said, looking in the direction of the house again as a flash of lightning lit up the grounds with a double strobe of light.
“Sounds like a battle of apex predators to me,” sneered Owens. Balls of steel, still, even after all he knew about Charly.
Charly, though, no longer hated Owens, so he ignored the remark.
Calming down, breathing more slowly, Charly said, “I moved in there a few weeks ago. I lost track of Daphne in the woods about a month ago.”
“You mean, the jungle? In Madagascar?” I asked.
“Yeah, uh-huh. Whatever. We were hiding out with a Kalonoro clan. And another one, I dunno man, snatched her? I don’t know what else to call it.”
“Another Kalonoro clan?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah. Something like that. They have this thing about newly turned vampires.” Charly shrugged. “They think they have special powers or something. Just old tales, you know? These old little vampy asses ain’t the most sophisticated dudes on the planet. But if they believe ‘em, they believe ‘em, right? So, they snatched her.”
“You might have told me sooner, dude. I’ve been scouring the fuckin’ planet for your ass for the last month and a half.”
“I’m sorry, Jade. I just got here last week. I tracked every scent in that jungle for a month. Getting you involved woulda slowed me down. I was sure I’d find her.”
I wanted to smack him again, and he knew it. He grasped my shoulders and kissed my forehead. “There’s nothin’ I wouldn’t do for you,” he said.
“I know.” I could feel tears trying to squeeze out of my eyes. “But now you’re saying they cloned her? Or someone else? I mean, there’s a big window of information I’m missing here, Charly.”
“Yeah. Well, me too. I’ve been at that house about a week, renting a room. I tracked them down. You know how good I am at tracking, right?”
I nodded. “No creature better in all the land.”
“I knew for sure wherever she was, it was somehow associated with that house. I smelled her scent. It was unmistakable.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Always has been. But wait. Before you go any further. What’s with the eye thing?”
“Eye thing?”
“Yeah, dude. Your eyes were all glazed over and black and shit before you started chasing me. That’s what got me scampering, you asshole, not because I was afraid of you.”
I was afraid of him.
Charly laughed. “You were so scared.”
I shrugged. “Maybe a little. So?”
“An old Ilunga trick. Works every time.”
Owens broke in with, “Can you two lovebirds try to get to the central issue here? Old Garrison here is about to fall asleep.” Garrison responded with a dirty look.
“Can’t really be hurried, asswipe,” said Charly. It felt like old times.
“What is the central issue, Charly?” I asked. “Clones? Daphne being kidnapped? What?” I was thinking about the woman on the table Owens told me about. “I mean, Owens, that was Daphne your police report was talking about, right?”
“Ya think?” Owens said sarcastically.
“Wait, what?” asked Charly.
“That’s why it would have been nice for you to come forward, you know, the very fucking second you got stateside?” said Owens angrily. “You were carrying a lot of information we could have used.”
“I was scared,” Charly said. That kind of comment wasn’t going to elicit a response even from Owens because it fell so far outside the zone of probability that it was impossible to react. Charly looked at me. “Scared for you. My best friend, ever, in all this world, and in all my years.” That was saying a lot for someone who’d lived 10,000 years. “I didn’t know what was wrong with her. Still don’t, man.”
“Wrong with her?” asked Owens.
“Yeah, man. I finally found her in the basement of that shithole. Lying on a fucking metal table. Staring straight up into the sky, saying nothing, her eyes wide open, no reaction to my touch. Nothin’. Until then, I heard or saw nothing from her. That’s why I didn’t tell you dudes. I mean, Jade, man, I was thinking that me coming back and telling you she got snatched right from under me would be worse than anything for you.”
“Let me handle my feelings, Charly. But go on.”
“Yeah, man. I know. I can be a dumbass sometimes.”
“Should be your fucking middle name,” said Owens. Balls of steel, that man.
Charly continued: “But I followed the wrong scent, Jade. The wrong fucking scent. That wasn’t her. Just, you know, smelled like her. And looked like her, except for the vacant, blank, comatose look.”
“So, this clone,” I said. “Is it in that house right now? While we’re yappin’ about it?”
“Uh huh.”
“Fuck me,” I said.
Owens was still pissed. “Who’s Chevalier?” he asked.
Charly looked at Owens. “So you dudes been tracking him, too?”
“Nope,” said Owens. “We just discovered how much we love sitting in SUVs for hours in Midtown neighborhoods eating donuts together in the freezing fucking rain. Fuck, man? How have you lived so fucking long with all that salt in your head?”
“Owens,” I said. “We were here for like, five minutes.”
Owens was pushing Charly pretty hard. Hard enough to make me wonder if Owens thought that maybe Charly was a clone. They always had an antagonistic relationship, but Charly reached a point during the Jerrold Mountain battles with the Wurdulac where I knew he’d throw his body in front of a train to protect Owens. Not that a train could hurt Charlie.
But this was a risky test, one that, if the clone responded by taking Owens out, would only prove that Owens was a smart dead guy.
But Charly was smart, too. Smarter than Owens knew. He smiled at Owens. “I see what you did there. These clones, dude, they have no personal history. You wouldn’t be able to piss it off this way”
Owens just stared.
“Good thing, too,” said Charly.
“Yeah, well,” said Owens. “That’s assuming I believe all this clone bullshit. But after Longtooth, I guess I’ll buy anything for now.” He still had a fresh scar in his hand from his coffee house encounter with Longtooth.
“And the Mouras Encantadas,” I said.
“Yeah, no shit,” said Owens.
Garrison then broke into the conversation. “Can we assign blame later?” he asked. “We need to sync up our stories. Charly needs to know everything we know, and we need to know everything Charly knows. Right now, it’s like we’re standing around shooting bullets into the air.”
Owens raised his hand. “I’ll go first. But first we need to decide what we should do about the Daphne clone, because she might not be a clone. Mr. Apex here might be wrong about everything.”
“It’s not her,” said Charly.
“You might be betting a friendship on that statement,” warned Owens, looking at me.
I shook my head sadly and choked out, “It’s not her.”
Owens nodded. “Then we should sit somewhere more comfortable and figure this shit out.”
The rain had dissipated, so after checking a weather app, we decided to drive up into Gwinnett to a steakhouse near Truist Park that Garrison knew well.
On the way there, Owens told Charly everything he had told me about the police report, and I covered everything I knew about the rest of it.
There were pieces to our version of the story that we knew were just sort of flying around loose with no connection to anything, especially the title frauds. But somehow, we knew everything was connected.
By the time Charly was finished with his side of things, some of it began to fall into place.
But I began to wonder if I’d ever see Daphne again.
Author’s note: Raw and unedited (mostly).
It’s my habit to make about 1,000 edits, rewrites, etc when writing a novel.
This is a first iteration. There may be many more, but this will be the only public viewing of this work in progress.
The title is a working title and has a good chance of changing.
In other words, this is raw, unedited, and almost certain to change, possibly in major ways.
It helps to be familiar with characters from the first book in this series, Psalm of Vampires, but my goal is for this second novel in the series to stand on its own.
Question for readers: If you haven’t read Psalm of Vampires, are you reaching the point where it doesn’t matter? Or are you lost? Are you getting any sense of the characters? Or are you lost? Thanks for all and any input!
All feedback is welcome. If you enjoy this and enjoy the process of following a constantly changing work in progress, please restack and share with others who enjoy this kind of fiction.
Here’s a standalone short story, a noir romance, about Charly:
Thanks for reading!
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Footnotes
I would be lying if I denied snatching this from the somewhat funny movie, “They Cloned Tyrone.”