Part 1 : First Sight

Expectations can kill you. It doesn’t matter if it's your disappointment or someone else’s. It's as choking and bitter all the same. 

The worst pain of being human comes from those who feel ownership over you. 

The bonds of love. 

The complex loyalties and bruised personal histories that exist between parent and child or child and sibling. The closest ties the strongest bonds or the absence of them is the greatest pain. 

There’s no escape from this; it is the essence of the human condition. 

To be known is the greatest pain and the highest aim of human life. 

For most of my life I was taught one thing and expected to obey; while ignoring another. 

The obvious presence of the ghosts of my fathers and mothers past lives. 

Signals and signs of these were everywhere though, oddly, I was not curious for many years. I accepted the strange qualities of my life as ordinary the way young children do.

The strangely dressed men who would talk to my father in the street; they were friendly but he couldn’t seem to get away from them fast enough. The letters we received almost weekly in my early childhood which my mother would frown over and hide from him for days at a time until, unanswered they tapered off to once a year - consistently arriving just before Seollal. 

How I hated the unknown sender of that pale blue envelope. 

Souring all the anticipation and fouling my fathers mood; never stable at that time of year, spoiling all the decorations and lights and even giving the snow, framed by the cozily curtained windows a sinister quality. 

But my parents’ past and the Institute would not let us be. 

I gave up trying to please my father in my ninth year. 

He had of course been asked about his most famous work and so brought me into the library where he met with students.

He asked me to recite something for them but I froze. I couldn’t think of a single line. He had me reading something new every week from the time I could read, but it just didn’t stick. 

I’ve always found it difficult to learn useless things. 

Needless to say my father was disappointed. 

“You see my son has no poetry in his heavy child’s soul. He is a fighter not a lover”

They all laughed of course. My expression must have been funny. But it's hard to forget something like this. He smiled but I knew he was disappointed. 

Poetry to me was hiding from life. 

Why point out and pour over the minutiae of beauty and pain when the reality of your life is cheap porridge for breakfast and walking through the acid rainstorms and sitting in libraries smelling of dust?

A lifetime of near poverty and desperation in pursuit of what? Dead words. 

He was a man with no passion at all so why obsess over the dead musings of men who’d long since quit feeling anything and still had more vitality than he did?

My father's mind, that of an artist frustrated by the physical demands of living, and mine were too disparate. My artistry, my passion was all in my body. I had no patience for words. I could be what I felt in my hands and feet and spell it in the air around me far quicker and with more eloquence than I could ever write. But my father was wilfully blind to that older language. 

My father often complained loudly to my mother, so I and my sister could hear, that I could not keep still. Trinity could keep still. Eyes watching, reflexes quick but couched in graceful repose like a full grown person at twelve. 

It isn’t my fault I was born “with the energy of triplets.” A phrase my mother often repeated but the difference was that her admonition sounded more like praise, or at least a benign observation.

She loved me for who I was, not in spite of it. Her expectations were formed by my inclinations, not her own and not before my heart ever beat within her as my fathers were. 

“Stillness is overrated.” She would say simply, and I loved her for it, I agreed. 

We are alive. We are not meant to lean toward the sun passive as plants. We are meant to hunt to seek to express our divine animation. No one ever told me this. I certainly didn’t find it in a poem. 

I knew it from the time I could run. So how could such a thing be a sin? You see relations with my father were impossible nearly from the start. 

He wanted me to be like him. Studious and calm and deep. But what he neglected to tell me, a thing I could never completely forgive him for, was that this was only half his life. 

Up until the age I will be in one year and five months, my father was a man of action, a hunter, a purger of those who commit the grossest acts of parasitism and murder. 

The pride of the Institute. An Ace 1 hunter. The youngest in a hundred years to reach such status. 

He had that past inside him every time he looked at me- in every moment of criticism and the much rarer ones of laughter, so how could I alone grow up not knowing what my father was? 

When I turned twelve I was not poised like my sister. I was restless and angry. For another year I was given priceless first editions, this time Christina Rossetti, instead of the fee for the dance classes I desperately needed. 

I was still in the very earliest spring and he wanted me to bed down for an endless winter existence. 

To sublimate my burgeoning energy into the dry cold beauty of adult art. As if my impulses were sinful. 

As though paper could warm you like fire. 

So when he left for the extra evening classes he had to teach all year for us to subsist I looked through his things. The boxes I was not to touch - the cabinets of documents in the study that had glared down on mine and my sisters childhood like obelisks housing unfathomable mysteries of adulthood. 

My respect for these mysteries had worn out. It was time I knew what they wouldn’t tell me. 

Anger made it easy for me to trespass and I found the article easily. 

One of my fathers greatest faults is vanity. He had an entire archive of his past life. 

He had even kept the report that described his final fight with the notorious vampire known simply as V even though it was the last public mention of him in active duty, even though he had almost died, out of a need to keep a complete record of his short but meteoric career. 

Despite my scant knowledge the mention of V made goose bumps rise on my arms. 

Because of him every child knew one vampire at least by name, even if we knew nothing else about him the fact that he was still out there, maybe even in K sector 2, and had evaded the institute for two hundred years was enough. 

Despite his failure to capture V my fathers last efforts were not in vain. Far from it. He’d exceeded their expectations. 

V was only the bait, the surest means of drawing his creator Semper 1 (my fathers true target- outdating V by two hundred years) out into the open, so he had found him. 

The report did not say how. I found it hard to believe he hadn’t been in communication with him, V would not be so careless as to be found by any hunter, even my father. 

I knew now, V was not even particularly violent, just very old and very smart and very good at evading the Institute. 

This was the knowledge I needed. Not more old books. If only I could have asked him how to lure a vampire out in the open. Surely this was what he needed to impart to his children as the ones to follow him. Tradition and family are not so easily put by. My sister and I were the children of the two greatest hunter families in Borea, my mother at least understood that this drive could not be put aside in one generation. Still he asked us to give up our birthright- even he had not done so without hunting for ten years and becoming a legend first. 

But of course I could not even breach the subject with him. 

I often wondered why I was being punished for following in his footsteps. The desire to protect me and my sister from the dangerous life he and my mother had led was a big part of it. 

But he could not protect me from who I was. Not forever. 

So somehow he had found or been sought out by V. 

And unaided, bleeding from a dozen wounds, he’d captured V’s creator. A vampire as old as any in living record. He had even been alive at the time of the enigmatic Shakespeare. Still a human being then. 

I wondered if he had appreciated poetry. 

He was rumoured among the more bombastic fringes of those aware of the Institutes true movements to be still alive somewhere in Lab A1. The original site of the first pioneering experiments after the general unveiling of unnaturals. 

Rumours like this made the Institute scary enough to be avoided and though they would not have succeeded rarely did any one try to break in to its desert facility. 

One of my fathers most popular classes, at least the one that was consistently full- was the one he taught at the private college one town over. 

He hated this class probably because most of the privileged students who took it had no interest in literature. They just wanted to meet a living legend. The hunter who faced V and lived. I pitied the ones who didn’t take the hint on my fathers face on the first day and asked their questions anyway. Typically they dropped the class by the second week. 

Early Western Literature, Whispers and Warnings : the unnatural in conflict with humanity. 

Of course they wanted him for it. Who else could have taught such a class. 

I’d even read a few of those immortal titles during a particularly boring summer break. 

Dracula, Olalla, Edgar Huntly, Carmilla, The Marble Faun

Instead of being fascinated by humanities instinctive imaginative curiosity about such creatures I was just frustrated by how stupid they’d been not to take the reports more seriously. 

Like Shakespeare’s unchallenged dominance in the expression of the human condition for 600 years I found the idea that we’d only discovered unnaturals and begun to do something about them as a threat in the last 250 to be incredibly embarrassing for the human race as a whole. 

He would have had better luck with my sister had he even considered it. She was balanced. Talented in soul and in body. She actually understood and could appreciate my fathers poems. Probably almost as much as my mother to whom they were all dedicated. All but one. 

To My Son. 

Four stanzas. He’d won a prize for it. All the more reason to hate it, though god knows we needed the money. But everyone that came through his classes or to our run down Victorian wanted to meet the boy who inspired the poem.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

How I loathed those words. 

They followed me like my albatross 

They were addressed to someone else. 

Not me. 

Written before I was even born. Written when my sister was two years old. 

I despised him for leaving her out. What was she? A trial? An exercise in parenting? A helper, a perfect example to be tolerated and ignored? She was the first born. A better student than me, a better hunter than me.

She followed him first in everything and still he ignored her accomplishments to brood over my failings. 

For his treatment of her alone I could have turned my back on him.

But what I found that day, alone in the house, surrounded by darkness and the boxes of documents heaved up from the basement and down from the attic was far worse a betrayal in my eyes. 

Here was my real inheritance. Here was the restless quality I had spent my entire childhood apologizing for. 

This was the thing that was avoided. This was the reason my mother and sister would sometimes stop talking when I walked in the room the summer she turned fifteen. 

Here was my true patriarchal identity, our matrilineal talent -the hunters children. The hunter's son. The hunter. 

Sitting there alone on the carpet, nauseous with guilt and anger a memory came back to me, I must have been very young no older than three, walking with my father in Old Seoul. A crowded temple town in summer, somehow I was alone in the crowd. A lady spoke to me - knelt and held my hand. Her eyes were strange, pale blue, I’d never seen eyes like this and I thought she was very beautiful. But when she touched my hand I started to cry. Something of the fear of that moment sixteen years ago, struck me anew. I recalled my fathers face the panic replaced with cold loathing when he saw her the way she melted away as soon as he appeared. The sea of softly glowing lanterns carried by the crowd, around me like a hundred red moons in the night as he carried me away on his shoulders. My tears stemmed by my father's presence I looked around for the beautiful lady with such cold hands but she was gone. 

And now I remembered this again because that feeling- the start of dread had hit me once more when I touched the glass that protected the folio. 

I’d felt it only once before and that’s how I knew who stalked me. That’s how I knew I was watched though they left no sign, made no sound, dropped no trace until they wanted to. 

Was this a message? 

If so the first mark of their presence was ironically, a book.  

Not just any book. The book 

The collected works of William Shakespeare. 

Out of fashion now but a paean of quality in my fathers and his students eyes. 

“No one no single person has ever expressed himself so effectively in English as this western man did 600 years ago.”

I found that statement more than a little depressing and told him so. As such I was banned from even touching the case that held the book. Until I learned some respect. So I did not expect to ever go near it again nor did I care. 

I have never agreed with the human practice of making legends of dead men. No man is more than a human being. I am a socialist in that.  

I’m not really, I know we aren’t all equal, I know Shakespeare was a brilliant man, I just wish that everyone with talent had the chance to develop it. Not just a privileged few. 

I simply want those with talent to be fostered. To use it for the common benefit. 

The book was under a heavy glass case, it probably cost more than all the furniture in our first floor. It had taken four movers to carry it in. 

Open to the front page to show the printers mark of the first folio, it was bound in handsome embossed red leather. Owned by a baronet and eventually sold off by his children years after they’d seen their ancestral estate in the hands of the UK’s national trust. What would they think of its ultimate resting place in my father’s study in the year 2223?

The leather was scandalous enough in the age of post animal farming. 

So when I saw it, open about halfway, flat on its ancient spine under the glass I paused for two minutes. 

Staring at it. 

The only person who had the key to the lid of the case was my mother. She kept track of the finances and all items of value in our home (few as they may be) as my father was notoriously absent minded about anything outside the classroom.

I knew one thing, the book had been opened to that spot only that day. My father walked through that room every morning on his way out the door and would have noticed. The only people who had access to the house after my mother and father left were myself and the maid. 

My mother working a double shift preparing for a banquet and my father at the university. 

I was alone in the house save for the maid. 

Our one concession to bourgeois status, my father assiduously forbade us to clean our own house. 

Our last blow-out fight had happened as a result of my asking him why it was ok for my mother to have cleaned up after strangers but not us. 

I listened for her heavy step on the upper floor and assured of being unobserved stepped into the room. 

And leaned over the case under its gallery light. 

A sonnet. LV. 55

Poetry again. 

I closed my eyes. Repeating the mantra that got me through the worst days. 

Once I get my license from the Institute I’m leaving this house and never even looking at another poem ever again. 

So I approached the disturbed artefact with double layers of reluctance. 

I stared in wide eyed disbelief for a minute. There halfway down the split page was a lonely passage. The limp scarlet ribbon rested in the crease of the binding. 

Unable to take in the meaning of the words in my agitation, I heard a sound overhead and quickly, on instinct took out my phone and snapped a steady picture despite my shaking hands. Thank god for auto- focus. 

Panic set in as I backed away. Of course I did not want to be present for the maids discovery of the compromised antique. My fathers prize possession. More precious to him than his awards for literary merit or possibly I thought at times, even me. 

How could I hide it? I touched the glass case that was too heavy for me to lift and felt a flash of fear. That cold breath of warning like when the lady with blue eyes touched my hand… but that was impossible… I dropped my hands at once. 

Absurdly I felt a deep plunge of guilt as if I were the one to disturb the folio. 

My mind rapidly flew to the conclusion that there was nothing I could do. The key was safely on my mothers person as it always was. She was miles away. Working overnight at the catering company. Like a shadow I left the house feeling a coward though I’d done nothing wrong. 

I would not return home that night. 

When the sun rose I woke up, because it was still summer the warehouse was warm enough to sleep. The sun slanted through the broken windows rosy and gold though much of the distant ceiling hanging with chains and networked with scaffold remained dark at all times. 

I had a bed there of sorts, but mostly it was a place to dance. Far enough away from inhabited areas that the illegal music wouldn’t be overheard, and derelict enough to prevent anyone breaking in so that it made an effective storehouse for the weapons I inherited from my father. Because these were valuable relics from his family he could not throw them away before I was born as he had wished to but keeping them in the house would have been too much for him to stomach. 

Wooden bullets and the silver gun engraved with our family mark, crossbows, knives. All of it should have been my sisters maybe, but she preferred our mothers weapons. 

It was not only the sun that woke me. An alarm chime echoed in the cavernous space from the rectangle of sunlight where my bed and the spool that served as a table sat. 

Come home Junsang. Dads freaking out. 

With my sister on contract my parents wanted me to spend as much time at home as possible before I moved into the dorm at the institute or went on assignment. 

Oh god. The folio. I sped home on my motorbike praying she wasn’t getting blamed for moving it, illogical as that would be, it would take four people to open the case. 

With my back up, ready to fight with my father to defend her I dumped my bike and went straight for the case in the passage between the library and the vestibule then stopped short, my heart dropping. 

My father stood with his back to the door, looking down at it. 

Without turning around he spoke 

“Where did you spend the night?”

I didn’t answer right away so he went on

“Have you a young woman to hide from us? Court someone in the open. Bring her home to meet us.” 

I stepped up beside him feeling like I was mounting the scaffold. 

But the folio was back to normal inside the case!

I had only a moment to confirm, glancing at it in amazement before he turned on me

Stunned with relief I replied

“I can’t court anyone without a licence of employment as you well know father.”

“You’d have had one from the university last year Junsang.” he frowned at my suddenly relaxed posture

“I’m reporting to the Institute by September.” and just like that I was tense again. 

“You’re too young to make your first kill” his voice has maddeningly calm

“Trinity made hers when she was sixteen! God knows when you made yours because you won’t talk about it. How can I be too young to hunt and old enough to teach?”

“Your sister is a prodigy.” came a cool calming voice from behind them just in time to stop a fight from getting off the ground. MY mother stepped inside with her bags, she just got home- and there was the key glinting at her neck!

Trinity appeared from the kitchen to kiss her and take the bags of groceries. 

His father smiled at her, all tension forgotten. She was the peaceful influence in our house. Keeping them together but as I had often wondered before what was the effect on her? It can’t be easy to keep the peace all the time. 

My sister shot him a quick look that said we’ll talk later and retreated back into the kitchen. Whenever she came home she cooked because mom spent all her time cooking for others at work. 

After dinner I waited until they had all left the room and my mother went to lie down. 

Stealthily I approached the case. 

There it was, open to the first page as usual the tribute of Ben Jonson clear black against the ivory page. 

“My Shakespeare rise; I will not lodge thee by / Chaucer or Spenser, or bid Beaumont lye / A little further, to make thee a roome: / Thou art alive still, while thy book doth live, / And we have wits to read, and praise to give!” 

I relaxed. Strange as this was, my father had not taken the folio out in my memory more than twice.

My mother never opened the case unless they had some visitor to whom my father wished to show off. 

Tentatively I touched the case again. The lightest chill made the hair on my neck stand up. 

There was no doubt in my mind now. 

A cool breeze came up from the river to the rotting wraparound porch and in through the window. 

Still weak-kneed with relief I took some thread out there to repair one of my gloves which had ripped in a fight with a drugged out guy I’d mistaken for an unnatural. 

I’d dropped him off at the state funded hospital to de-tox and driven the embarrassing incident from my mind. 

Its alright. I told myself, calmed by the act of sewing. I just need to get out of the city. Its too easy for them to hide in the city. I’ll find a real one soon, and perhaps I already have…

Although once I was sponsored by the Institute and accepted as a full status hunter my assignment would most likely be helping to clear out the city. It had become very easy for V series to pretend to be human. The intelligence that came with extended lifespan was hard to combat. 

Half the buildings were abandoned and only half of those regularly policed. 

It took all of the effort of the city crews to maintain the inhabited buildings. Nothing new had been built inside K sector two in fifteen years. Only the desert energy brokers and the parvenus with money built, out in the desert where they flaunted water like gold, building a prodigal oasis like the ancient city of Petra carved right out of the orange stone. 

The thread was a pretext. As I sat safe just on the edge of the gathering grey storm acid rain just dusting the jutting edge of the peeling floorboards I took out his phone to examine the picture of the folio.

Now that I was out of the woods I could relax and examine it. 

I read the passage through several times. A single sonnet alone on the page, the letters large and clear on the vellum. A gentleman’s book. No crowded yellowed socialist paperback. 

LV

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;

But you shall shine more bright in these contents 

Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry, 

Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living record of your memory. 

‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity

Shall you pace forth ; your praise shall still find room 

Even in the eyes of all posterity 

That wear this world out to the ending doom. 

So, till the judgement that yourself arise,

You live in this, and dwell in lover’s eyes. 

A love sonnet. Shakespeare. It wasn’t our history it wasn’t our belief system it was written in an archaic English that though I understood as clearly as my own spoken language, was painful to me- wrought with hazy memories of tears and stubbornness, of my fathers impatience and my wilful resistance.  

Still after years of being surrounded by such words, I had absorbed it and mostly, I understood it. 

I was torn between the interpretation of it being addressed to the embodiment of love itself which seemed most likely, but for the second last line that invoked the Christian concept of the last judgement; the resurrection of the bodies of all the faithful dead on earth. This conceit made it personal. A physical body implied a specific human life. A specific subject. 

Another possible flaw in the Venus argument were the masculine images, princes, the god of war; Mars. If he had simply meant war he could have kept the symbols feminine and used Athena and Aphrodite. There aren’t many ancient monuments in stone to women. Most are men; emperors and kings and presidents and gods, aside from queens like Boadicea and Victoria and Elizabeth… Nefertiti, Cleopatra… the korai of ancient Greece. 

Junsang sighed. Whether this poem was a message or not was unimportant. 

The poem, the folio was not the message, only the means.

No one in the household had moved the folio. Or seemingly, noticed its being moved. If the book had not been replaced before my fathers return I would have assumed the message was for him, some dark intruder with ties to my father in his youth as a hunter… but no.

I was the one who found it. Without any real proof I knew, it was a message for me alone. 

The real message was the fear the intruder had been able to induce in me, and so simply, just by opening a book. 

Anger replaced my relief.

Even in the eyes of all posterity… despite myself this gave me chills. Because here I am, 600 years later reading the words that promised the beloved they would be remembered if only through these words. 

I turned off the screen, disturbed. 

How could he have known it would last? And even despite the wonder that it had, its such a tentative hold on eternity.. Is this all we have to look forward to? The best pinnacle to hope for? To be remembered in words written by someone who loves us? Most don’t even have that. 

To My Son. 

The sky darkened and he shivered. 

No matter what happens that goddam poem will not outlive the memory of what I do. 

It didn’t matter, he had no fears for his future among what they were already calling the last generation of hunters at the Institute. He’d make his first kill soon. Because unlike his sister whose talent was already famous, (name) was 99 percent sure he had the sense.

It came and went but he knew it was there. 

The mysterious power of the males of his fathers family that had passed him by to his infinite bitterness.

The power to feel unnatural presence as surely as a shift in the temperature of the room. Unexplained after thousands of years and unlikely ever to be delved into much further. 

Melius est non cognoscere omnia; it is best not to know all things - the Institutes motto. Ironic when they hunted down unnaturals ruthlessly to cut them open and sustain them as long as possible to experiment on them for years. Documenting and committing this terrible knowledge to the archives. 

The archives allegedly kept in sure for future generations, yet no one outside of the Institute had ever had access to them. The Institute operated for the good of mankind but they operated alone and had, for much of their existence, done so in secret wielding an organized power that simply could not be overtaken by normal people.

Eradicating the evil races one by one. 

Werewolves had been wiped out before his fathers birth. The unveiling of the Institute was an unavoidable result of the massacre following the end of the war. 

The last and hardest to wipe out were the V-series 

The parasites in human form. 

Once my fathers speciality and now his singular, consuming focus. 

He need not worry about luring one out of hiding, because one had come to him. 

And he was ready. 

The only creature strong enough to lift that case alone. Cunning and vile enough to send a message this way. 

Here I am. I can reach you where you live. 

A vampire.