Chapter 19 The Sound of Unbecoming
Iris Beaumont
I was paralyzed, gazing at the empty spot where Clive had been just a moment earlier, after he left. The darkness enveloped him entirely, not in the manner of a predator, but as skin takes in a splinter, with a dreadful and close understanding. Despite the torch being shattered at my feet, my vision wasn't impaired. The walls emanated a gentle, throbbing red glow, casting an eerie "bloodlight" across the old room. The throbbing matched the rhythm of Clive's heart, though he was invisible. Five centuries of hunting had made me familiar with the sound of fear, but this sound was something else, something unnatural.
"Bring him back," I demanded, my voice oddly small in the vastness of the chamber. The words scraped against my throat, dry and useless.
The Archivist had pressed himself against the far wall, his parchment skin nearly indistinguishable from the ancient stone. His eyes, usually coldly observant, now darted wildly around the chamber, tracking movements I couldn't see.
"He cannot be brought back," the Archivist whispered. "What has begun cannot be undone."
I moved forward, and the ground vibrated as if it were a living creature. The dust particles drifted downward, absorbing the red light and appearing as a hazy veil of airborne jewels. It was as though the air tasted of copper, mixed with the flavor of something old, something that had never been exposed to the light.
"What has begun?" I asked. The practiced calm of centuries was slipping. I could feel my fangs lengthening with my agitation, pressing against my lower lip.
The Archivist's gaze finally settled on me, heavy with an emotion I'd rarely seen in his ancient eyes: pity. "The bridge is opening, but not as the prophecy foretold. It opens both ways."
A tremor ran through the chamber, stronger this time. The carved symbols along the walls began to twist, no longer static engravings but fluid, living things. They stretched and contracted like the muscles of some enormous beast, pulsing with the same crimson light that illuminated our faces.
"What does that mean?" I moved closer to the Archivist, my patience thinning with each beat of the absent heart that seemed to fill the room.
"It means," the Archivist said, sliding further away from me, "that the detective's mind is unraveling. The veil tears both ways. His consciousness now floods with memories not his own, identities that were dormant until this moment."
I laughed, the sound sharp and brittle in the throbbing chamber. "You expect me to believe Clive Morrow is possessed? I've seen Possession, Archivist. This ain't it."
"No." The Archivist's voice dropped lower. "It's more. The bloodline awakens."
Another tremor, violent enough to send small fragments of stone skittering across the floor. The symbols on the wall writhed faster, their red light intensifying until it hurt to look directly at them. And beneath it all, the steady, too-slow heartbeat continued, a rhythm my body recognized despite itself.
"What's happening to him?" I demanded, grabbing the Archivist by his frail shoulders. His thin skin yielded under my fingers with an unsettling softness. "I'm listening."
The Archivist didn't object. His voice was unnaturally smooth and practiced, as if he were reading aloud the pre-written ending of a tale. The reflection in his eyes when I looked at them was not fear or respect; it was satisfaction. "The prophecy foretold a link between universes, yet bridges are pathways for travel to and from."
I let him go, realizing the harm my grasp had done. Dust, light like sand, trickled from the minuscule tears in his weathered skin, rather than blood. "Is what you're saying that he's being inundated by something from the other side?"
"Yes," the Archivist stated, straightening and dusting himself off with an air of self-respect that was comical in light of our present troubles. "It's an overload for his system."
"Speak plainly," I hissed, my patience finally snapping. "What happens to Clive?"
It was as though the walls spoke before the Archivist could. From the stone came a low moan, stretched and distorted, that sounded unnervingly like Clive. The word it uttered was unfamiliar, yet its sounds evoked a long-forgotten feeling.
The Archivist finally spoke. "Should he survive, the man you remember will be gone."
I averted my gaze, overwhelmed by the conviction that I saw in his old eyes. The room kept throbbing steadily, and I suddenly understood that I was inside a giant heart. It wasn't a figure of speech; the room itself had transformed into a living organism, pulsing with the bloodlight that flowed through unseen stone channels.
The Archivist urged, "It's time for us to leave."
I didn't budge. After five hundred years of not being alive, I'd let go of a lot: my humanity, my home, and countless lovers whose names I'd forgotten. I had abandoned burning cities and plague-stricken villages, fleeing both witch hunters and vampire hunters. I had always viewed survival as my creed.
I couldn't abandon Clive. I was to bring him in, no matter the outcome.
"Go if you wish," I said, not looking at the Archivist. "I'm staying."
He cautioned, "You could lose it all."
I laughed again, but the sound was empty. "He is not human, Archivist."
The Archivist paused, the scarlet light reflecting on his skin, which made him appear lit from within. "If the veil is destroyed," he said in a measured, tranquil voice, "keep in mind that the entity which appears is neither friend nor enemy."
However, upon his turning, I observed it—a barely perceptible motion of his mouth, conveying words too low for me to discern. The room's pulse seemed to skip a beat, synchronized with us, as if acknowledging his direction.
Yet the heartbeat changed after he left—its rhythm altered, almost syncopated, as if responding to a conductor unseen. Somewhere in the dark, stone ground softly against stone. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the Archivist hadn’t gone anywhere at all—that he was still listening, somewhere beneath the skin of the chamber itself.
I sank to my knees in the center of the room, where Clive had stood before the darkness claimed him. The stone was warm beneath me, almost feverish, and seemed to give slightly under my weight, like flesh rather than rock. The bloodlight pulsed around me, throwing my shadow into sharp relief before swallowing it again in regular intervals.
"Clive," I whispered, pressing my palm against the ground. "Can you hear me?"
Nothing answered but the endless heartbeat and the occasional sigh of settling stone. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the crimson glow, and found myself remembering the first time I'd seen him. Not at the crime scene, as I'd told him, but weeks earlier, in a café near the precinct. He'd been alone, reviewing case files, a cup of coffee cooling forgotten at his elbow. Even then, something about him had drawn my eye—a stillness amid motion, a depth beneath the surface that reminded me of predators far older than myself.
I had watched him for hours, curious about this human who wore solitude like a second skin. It wasn't until later, when his investigation brought him dangerously close to the Coterie, that I'd arranged our "accidental" meeting at the crime scene. By then, I'd already decided he was a threat to be managed rather than eliminated—a decision the Coterie had questioned repeatedly.
Now I wondered if some part of me had recognized what lurked beneath his human exterior. If the predator in me had sensed a kindred spirit, not in what he was, but in what he would become.
"This is my fault," I said to the empty chamber, my voice echoing oddly in the pulsing space. "I should have let the Coterie eliminate you when they first suggested it."
But I hadn't. And now Clive Morrow—detective, hunter, bridge between worlds—was gone, absorbed into stone and shadow, his consciousness unraveling into something ancient and terrible.
For the first time in five centuries, I felt the sharp sting of guilt—not for the lives I'd taken to sustain my own, but for the one I'd tried to save.
The walls moaned again, the sound lower this time, almost subsonic. It vibrated through my bones and teeth, setting my nerves alight with a sensation that was neither pain nor pleasure but something unsettlingly between. The symbols along the walls writhed faster, their shapes reminding me of words in a language too old for even my long memory.
"Iris."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, echoing through the chamber with terrible familiarity. It was Clive's voice, but wrong—deeper, layered with other voices beneath it, as if a crowd spoke through a single throat.
I rose to my feet, turning slowly to scan the chamber. "Clive?"
"Not exactly."
The bloodlight pulsed brighter for a moment, then concentrated, flowing like water toward the center of the room. It pooled at my feet, then rose, taking shape—a vague suggestion of a human form, tall and broad-shouldered like Clive, but with limbs that bent at impossible angles and a head that seemed to shift between different shapes with each pulse of light.
"What are you?" I asked, taking a step back despite myself.
The figure drifted closer. Where Clive's face should have been, there was only a swirling void of crimson light, yet somehow I knew it was looking at me.
"I am many," the voice replied. "I am the vessel and what the vessel contains. I am the bridge and what crosses it."
"Is Clive still in there?" I demanded, my hands curling into fists at my sides.
The figure tilted its head, the motion unnaturally fluid, like smoke rather than flesh. "Clive Morrow was never fully here," it said. "The human life was a shell, a chrysalis. Now the becoming has begun."
The heartbeat quickened, and with each pulse, the figure grew more solid, more defined. Features began to emerge from the swirling void—a suggestion of Clive's strong jaw, the curve of his cheekbones. But the eyes remained empty pools of crimson light, depthless and burning.
"He remembers you," the figure said, and now its voice was more recognizably Clive's, though still layered with those terrible other voices. "The shell remembers the hunger in your eyes when you bent to his throat. The desire to consume. To possess."
Heat flared in my chest—not embarrassment, but anger. "He was dying. I tried to save him."
"You tried to make him like you," the figure corrected. "But he was never meant for your kind of hunger."
It moved closer, and I found myself unable to retreat further. The bloodlight pulsed between us, connecting us like an umbilical cord of crimson luminescence.
"What was he meant for, then?" I asked, forcing strength into my voice.
The figure raised a hand—more defined now, with fingers that looked almost human except for their impossible length. It reached toward my face, stopping just short of touching my skin.
"To devour," it whispered. "To absorb."
Another tremor ran through the chamber, violent enough that I had to brace myself to remain standing. Dust and small stones rained down from above, and for a moment, I feared the entire structure would collapse around us. But the chamber held, though the walls now seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting with each beat of the omnipresent heart.
"If Clive is still in there," I said when the shaking subsided, "tell him I'm not leaving."
The figure's head tilted again, that same unnervingly fluid motion. "He hears you," it said. "But he cannot return to what he was. The shell cracks. The bridge widens."
Its form rippled, briefly taking on a more solid appearance—Clive as I had known him, amber eyes reflecting the bloodlight, expression grave and intent. For a moment, I saw recognition there, a flash of the detective who had pursued me with such determination.
Then it was gone, and the figure was once again a swirling mass of crimson light, vaguely shaped like a man.
"The hunger comes," it said, and now there was urgency in its voice. "The emptiness between worlds must be filled."
Before I could respond, the figure began to dissolve, the bloodlight flowing back into the walls of the chamber. The heartbeat accelerated, becoming a frantic drumming that shook dust from the ceiling and rattled my teeth in their sockets.
"Clive!" I called, reaching for the dissolving figure. My fingers passed through empty air.
As the last of the bloodlight seeped back into the walls, a final whisper echoed through the chamber, so faint I almost missed it:
"Run."
Then darkness descended, complete and absolute, swallowing even my vampiric vision. The heartbeat stopped. The chamber fell silent.
And I stood alone in the dark, listening to the terrible nothing that had replaced Clive Morrow.
A breath, faint and papery, brushed my ear—too close, too human.
“He’s becoming what he was always meant to be,” the Archivist whispered. “And so will you.”