The first thing that Arthur became aware of when he came to consciousness was the ceiling.
It was an ugly thing, cracked plaster, yellowed with age and stained with a dampness that invited the growth of mildew and mould. Arthur stared at it for a long moment, his chest rising and falling in shuddering gasps, like a man who had broken through the surface of water after nearly drowning.
Huff…huff...huff…
His hand flew to his chest on instinct, as the reality of what he was seeing slowly settled into his mind, and with it came the panic rising through him like floodwater, threatening to consume him whole. His fingers probed beneath his shirt, slipping through the scorched bullet hole in the fabric and pressing against his sternum, searching desperately for something that should have been there but wasn't.
There was no hole. No evidence, no wound that he had shot himself.
He sat up with a startling speed as he wrenched his shirt over his head. The skin beneath was smooth, pale and unblemished not even the hint of a scar that something might have penetrated it earlier was visible. He could feel his ribs, the architecture of his bones beneath flesh, all of it precisely as it should be, as if nothing had ever happened. As if he had not pressed a revolver to his heart and pulled the trigger in this very room.
The revolver!
Arthur's eyes swept to the revolver that lay beside him on the bed, cool and indifferent.
As if the thing had never been fired just a few hours earlier.
"This is madness…" Arthur felt hollowed out. Wrung clean of all forms of expression like a damp cloth that was twisted until not even a single drop of water remained. The old man, quiet as a dead person, still remained slumped in his armchair, and Arthur watched him with the detached expression of someone who had simply run out of the capacity to process any further horror.
Inside however, was a different story. A dangerous churning cocktail of everything that had happened until now, the memory of the terribly sweet blood flooding his mouth, the dying thoughts of the police officer. It all pressed against the walls of his composure like water threatening to destroy an already crumbling dam. And he could feel it, the terrible beast that now resided in his consciousness clawing its way back in sensing his emotional turmoil like a shark attracted to blood.
He breathed in and out, even though he suspected that he was no longer needed to. He had to stay calm, he couldn't afford to lose control again.
He didn't quite know when he started laughing, but he was now. It was maddening, all of this was too maddening for his human mind. How could all those protagonists do it? How could they acclimate so quickly and so easily?
His inner mind answered: it's fiction, and if the author spent too much time on it, it would be boring. An answer he already knew. And yet he let it settle and tried to dissociate and compartmentalize, after all, he was very good at it. He fell back against the mattress and laughed at the ceiling, at the spider's web, at the corpse in the armchair who had a very good sense of humor to die when he wished to.
"Did you see that, old man?" he asked the ceiling, gasping between fits of laughter. "Did you see it? I put the gun right here—" he shaped his hand like a pistol, thumb cocking back like a hammer before tapping the center of his sternum. "—right here, and I pulled the trigger. I did. Believe me."
"And then—Boom."
"You should at least try to appreciate the commitment." Another helpless, angry laugh tore loose from his throat.
The laughter died as suddenly as it had begun, bringing with it to the front of his mind all those things that he did not want to be real, things he couldn't stop thinking about no matter how hard he tried.
It didn't work at all.
It wasn't that he had failed to recognize his situation. No… he had known it, from the moment that he had opened his eyes, in this world, that something was wrong. He felt it deep in his bones. And yet the knowing and the admitting were two entirely different things. The rational part of him, the stubbornly, exhaustingly human part of him, had been fighting against the admission with everything it had. Fighting against the acknowledgment that something unknown and supernatural had occurred. That this was not some fever dream or dissociative episode, simply caused by his stress as a med student.
He knew with absolute certainty that he had transmigrated. No… that's not the correct term, transmigration means the passage of a soul into another body or form of life after death, often synonymous with metempsychosis or reincarnation. But he hadn't really transmigrated. He still had his body, his mind, even his clothes, nothing about him had changed other than the fact that he was now a vampire.
So it was something else. Something closer to being teleported, except that instead of moving between two known places, he had been deposited into an entirely different reality altogether.
He pressed his fingers to his throat.
No pulse.
He pressed two fingers to the inside of his wrist as well, just for surety, and held them there for a full minute, counting the seconds as the minute hand ticked softly from the mantle clock in the background.
Nothing.
Undead. The word appeared in his mind without much ceremony. He was undead, a vampire by every observable evidence: the aversion to sunlight, the impossible speed with which he moved, the hunger that operated on its own logic entirely divorced from his consent, the regeneration from a bullet through the heart. Though that last one had surprised him. He'd always assumed the heart was the weak point, the definitive end. But apparently not, or perhaps it simply required a stake to finish the job. Either way, he had no intention of testing the theory further. He had no plans to die. Not yet. He still needed to know where he was, and he needed to find a way home.
He looked at the boarded window. A sickly, pale gray light threaded through the cracks, dying out just before it reached the foot of the old man's bed. The candles had burned down long ago into nothing but small collapsed puddles of wax. He looked at this room, at this era, as his gaze drifted to the nightstand.
There was a diary there.
Maybe there would be some answers in it.
He picked up the diary and opened it.
16th May,
We left Feynapotter before dawn. I did not look back for long. After all, a man should not stare at the field he burned himself.
Debts follow quicker than hunting dogs. And I don't think this time even the cathedral could have saved me. Cards and dice are the worst.
The air already feels wrong the closer we get to our destination.
Arthur frowned as he read. The name Feynapotter felt oddly familiar, he couldn't quite place where he had seen it, only that he had. Curious, he decided to continue reading.
17th May,
We arrived at Backlund.
He stopped.
The name hit him like a slap across the face. Backlund. As soon as he read that line, something clicked. He knew this city. He knew this world. He had read about it, and now he was standing inside it, in a dead man's room, holding a dead man's diary.
He didn't want to believe it. But the room around him was real. The wax was real. The gray light was real. Everything was real.
He had been dropped, through some inexplicable means, into the world of The Lord of Mysteries. That revelation was profound and mind-shattering but he couldn't think about Them. Thinking about Them might be too dangerous and might attract Their attention. So instead he ignored all those background thoughts, emptied his mind, and kept reading, as if it was the only thing that existed.
...and are lodging in an apartment in East Borough for now. The air here is heavier than I expected. Wrong in a way I cannot name. In Feynapotter the mornings smelled of grass and wet soil. Even in winter the air was something you could breathe deeply and feel clean for having done it.
18th May
I dreamt of fences again. Long lines of them stretching to the horizon.
I remember walking them at sunrise after storms, looking for breaks.
Strange, what a man misses.
19th May
My boy says the streets here never sleep. He likes it. Says there's work everywhere if you look hard enough.
He is young. I hope he doesn't walk the same road I did.
Several pages were blank after that.
25th May
My son found work. Assistant clerk to a gentleman who keeps records and correspondence. Counting. Carrying papers.
He came home smiling today.
We had mutton for dinner. I thanked the Earth Mother tonight.
27th May
The coughing has gotten worse. The smoke sits low between the houses here. Even when it rains it doesn't really clear.
I miss the open pastures. You could see storms coming hours before they arrived. There was enough sky for that.
Here it is always raining and you never see it coming.
Several more pages were blank.
2nd June
We worry less now. Our son earns more. We have a two-story place to call our own.
3rd June
Sarah has befriended some strange women.
Another cluster of empty pages.
11th June
I attended mass at the Harvest Church.
Praise the Earth. Praise the Mother of All Things.
20th June
My son did not come home.
21st June
I went to his workplace today.
I had never visited before. It is a very fine place. They said he left early yesterday.
Mother. I hope he is alright.
22nd June
The police came. Questions were asked. I could not follow half of what they said.
23rd June
They found his body.
Sarah didn't cry. I don't know what to make of that.
25th June
I killed her.
She had gone mad. I am certain of it now.
26th June
I cannot carry this.
If anyone reads this — there is a safe beneath the floorboard. The code is written at the very back of this diary.
I hope whoever finds it lives well.
May the Earth Mother bless all.
Arthur turned to the final page and there it was four passage.
Four posts by the south gate.
Nine along the bend where the ground dipped.
Two goats near the old statue.
Seven sheep still grazing.
He stared at the numbers for a long moment before he finally understood. It was simple.
4927
Of all the fictional worlds one could be dropped into without consent or preparation, he could imagine considerably worse. He thought briefly of Warhammer 40,000 — and with a feeling of profound personal gratitude, dismissed it. The existential horror alone. The politics. The xenophobia baked into the very architecture of civilization.
No. This was much more manageable. Relatively speaking.
Though he would still need to leave. Soon. The world he now inhabited was ruled by hidden things: secret organizations, ancient churches, existences so vast and so old that knowing their names was itself a form of danger. And as whatever he currently was a vampire by every practical definition, though not of this world's kind, for this world's vampires, or Sanguines as they called themselves, were inherently different, but but very similar. He should be particularly careful around churches. That much seemed obvious even without a full accounting of his situation.
He tried to take stock of what he actually knew. It wasn't much. The broad shape of the story. A handful of Pathway formulae, a few complete, but most incomplete. The names of factions he understood only in outline. The Nighthawks, for instance, he knew enough from the donghua and Klein's own monologue around chapter 214 to be wary and afraid of them, but not quite enough to be usefully afraid of them, which was the worst possible position to be in.
And then there was last night.
He closed his eyes and ran the memory back with the detached precision of a man reviewing footage he would rather not watch again. The alley had been dark. He had moved fast, faster than he'd known he could, faster than anything human had a right to. One of the gang members had presumably died, and so had the constable.
The blood on his face would have made him unrecognizable to anyone who hadn't known him before, and those men had not known him. That was something.
It was a thin something.
A lawman killed in the street near dawn.
Arthur thought of the constable dying and grimaced, feeling disgusted with himself.
The Nighthawks would already be looking. They would find no natural explanation, because there wasn't one — a figure that moved like that, that fed like that, that left the marks it left. They would know what they were looking for even if they didn't yet know who.
He could not be caught. Not now. Not before he understood anything. Even if they offered mercy — and he had no particular reason to believe they would — he could not afford to test that assumption. He needed to be paranoid. He needed to act like the supernatural creature he apparently now was, because that was what he was.
Arthur exhaled slowly. He looked at the old man's corpse one final time, at the stillness of it, the particular quiet of a room that had held a death, and then turned and made his way to the bathroom.
He needed a bath. He needed to wash the blood off, clear his head, and think clearly. Everything else could wait until he was clean.