Fodschwazzle

After months of searching, the doctor cornered him. All of the recordings of incidents for hundreds of miles radiated from a single location in a rural European village with no recorded incidents of its own. The more the doctor's cohort looked at it, the more they knew it had to be the place. So they planned their attack, packed up and boarded a train to pay a vampire a visit.

The locals had called it a castle, but they were thralls under his influence and not very reliable as a consequence. It was more like a cave with a castle-shaped entrance. Immediately, the ornate tapestries and rugs and tile gave way to wet stone and guano and stalagmites. The vampire's lair was dark and dank, and the doctor regretted ever having to go there. To be as disarming as possible, he made the rest of his cohort stand by and await good news on the surface.

"Vampire, we need to speak with you. Show yourself!" the man entreated to the darkest bowels of the cavern. The showy bastard illuminated 14 sconces in pairs, with a brief pause between each pair of sconces, until the whole room was dimly illuminated in orange light. The vampire himself was laying in a coffin in the middle of a great pentagram in a sort of throne room, with his scarlet cloak drawn about his body.

Ah, another vampire hunter. You finally found your way to me, after such a long time. To what do I owe this displeasure? The voice, silky smooth and deep, rumbled off the walls.

"Enough with the showmanship. You know that I do not fear you. Your posturing is pointless."

You seek death, and I will endeavor to give it to you in whatever style I choose. What care I for the predilections of a dead man with regard to my presentation?

"I don't wish to be dead. I also don't want you dead. I want your help. I'm only a doctor, not a vampire hunter. You can plainly see I am ill equipped to kill you if I misjudged whether you would cooperate."

At that, he stirred. "Why would I, a dreadful, demonic, devourer of men, as your sensationalist news rags report, help you?" He had stood to his full height, no longer throwing his voice around the room. His eyes were the eyes of a man, not red, glowing meteors as others had warned. The doctor was actually about an inch taller than the vampire, but the countenance of the vampire definitely made him an overpowering presence.

"Because your habits have changed. Something has softened you," the doctor calmly replied. "It's been 20 years since you were last suspected of taking a life that wasn't a farm animal.  Although we have recorded that there are a large number of thralls in your service, their zealotry has diminished over time, making them able to live normal lives as long as you haven't been near them recently. You're also leaving your home a lot less than you once were. We haven't fully worked out how you manage to sustain yourself, but it does seem relevant that a local clinic is still practicing bloodletting even though that practice has fallen out of favor across most of Europe."

The vampire looked a little pale. Actually, the doctor was surprised at how red his face had been a moment before.

"I am surprised that you have done so much research into me. You are a far cry from the vampire hunters who have come before you, who perished before they really even understood what I was. You're mistaken, however, in your bravado. I would assume you are armed, though you look like nothing so much as an old sack of talking meat to me. Considering I know little about you or what task you endeavor to involve me in, why should I not kill you right now and all those with whom you are collaborating?"

"We are a humanitarian guild formed under the secrecy of numerous national governments. Our agenda is to discern the root causes of worldwide issues by pooling resources together."

"Is my presence one of the 'worldwide issues' you are trying to address?" the vampire asked, one jet black eyebrow raised incredulously.

"No. We have been aware of you for a very long time, but even at your worst, you kill no more than two people on a given night unless provoked. The threats we deal with can have cascading consequences if unresolved, growing from community issues into national problems, and we are not certain of their origins or how to mitigate them without personally investigating." The doctor wiped his hands on his trousers--for some reason, having to calmly explain himself and persuade the monster was more taxing than confronting it. He grinned a little to himself, realizing that he had spent a lot of time preparing for the worst and not a lot of time preparing for a civil conversation.

"You won't kill me considering that I offer you a chance to collaborate with us and to have multiple governments continue to overlook your presence. If you do choose violence right now, you will only kill a helpless old doctor. We will also leak information about you to the general international public, and they will be able to choose what kind of secrecy you will be allowed to exist within."

"You're assuming that would perturb me? Having people know that I can hunt them at night?"

"I know you know the world is changing, vampire. You will not be able to enjoy rest, night or day, with amateur monster hunters knocking on your door at all hours. There are no more communities you can cower in that won't know you're there from international news. We will make a celebrity out of you," the doctor said with a smirk.

The vampire huffed and said, "How will you guarantee that I remain a secret after my task is done, if I choose to assist you with this problem?"

"There is a third-party already aware of your presence, under strict guidelines to report out if any of us involved with this project perish under any unnatural circumstances. However, they are not permitted to write down anything about you unless the contract is breached, and in fifty years, none of them will be alive to remember you."

"I am impressed by your coordination, blood bag. You have my attention."

"Follow us to the location, and we will explain more."

*****

Once they put the vampire in plain clothes, he looked a lot like the doctor, except definitely more pale. His scraggly black hair and dark eyes made him look perpetually tired, but the fact that they had to travel by train with the windows blacked out made everyone look rough by lamp light.

They were heading east, not more than ten hours from the vampire's home. Once they came to a complete stop, he vaguely recognized the tranquil countryside, surrounded by mountains and burbling streams. If one traipses across Europe drinking blood for long enough, places tend to blend together.

No, the vampire thought to himself, this place is definitely familiar. It was dusk, and safe for him to step outside of the train, but he guessed that the surroundings would be more familiar to him in the middle of the night, at the time of the hunt.

The problem was sickness. People in and around the village were suffering from an absurd array of conditions, including general fatigue, disordered thinking, vomiting, and yellowish splotches of skin along the arms and down through the torso. They had quarantined the village, but it didn't stop occurrence of symptoms in the vicinity of the village. They had labored to bring fresh water to the town, and nothing changed. Over ten years of research and no treatment had yet been devised that would last except that giving patients iron salts would slightly alleviate their symptoms for a short time.

"A few of these symptoms imitate something like anemia, but there seems to be some sort of root cause why there is a lack of iron in their blood."

Bemused, the vampire muttered, "Are you really asking me to taste their blood to see what I can discern from it?" 

The glint of the fading sun against the doctor's spectacles concealed the darkness in his gaze. "Yes. We have records of you avoiding places where disease outbreaks were beginning after your first couple of victims. We hope to know what you know about the course of illnesses like these, from the taste of the blood. You don't become ill when you bite sick people, do you?"

"No. My immortal curse seems to prohibit effects, injurious or otherwise, of things I can eat and drink. I can't become drunk, all food tastes bland to me, and relevant to your question, disease that exists within blood tastes off, like the blood sat outside of the body too long and became rancid."

"If you can tell a difference between sick blood and healthy blood, you may be able to better enable us to trace origin points for this sickness than we are able to do ourselves. Do you consent to helping us with this?"

"As you stated before, doctor, it has been some time since I preyed on men. Maybe a taste of these locals will take me back to those halcyon days, hmm? Certainly, I will do what I can." 

The doctor frowned but nodded.

*****

They housed the vampire within a surprisingly comfortable room in a small school that had been repurposed to a field hospital. The accommodations they provided to him were far more pleasant than he would have expected for himself, a monster.

While they gathered his first samples to try, which they were actually using something they called refrigeration to keep cool, he briefly fell asleep on the bed they had supplied. It made the vampire wonder why it was he had decided to sleep in a coffin within his own home, until he startled and sat upright in a sweat.

That's right, he thought, the coffin and sleep are as close as I can get to being dead, which is what I deserve.

The odd familiarity of the locale was still creeping into his subconscious. He had been here before, but when?

Before he consider the question any further, the doctor and an assistant came in bearing container holding about thirty small vials of blood. "We would like you to taste each one and tell us what you perceive from it. Anything that you understand about the person it came from, the condition they are in, anything. Understand that we will provide you no prior information about these samples, so that we can ensure your estimation of the patients is not unduly influenced. Is this fair?"

The vampire nodded, and then pointed to a steel bucket next to his feet. "I assume this is to spit the blood into if it is too unappealing to swallow?" 

The doctor smiled. "You are correct. Given your lack of love for blood bearing a disease, I decided this was a small favor I could give you for your service."

The doctor uncapped the first vial and gave it to the vampire. It was a trivial quantity compared to what he received from his local clinic or his victims before that. In one gulp, he downed it.

"This sample is from a child, a boy, age 14," the vampire reported. "He's a bit of a soft boy, doesn't really like to go outside very much, but he loves his mother. His iron level tastes adequate, and I perceive no disease."

 "Very good," the doctor said, clearly impressed. "Based on what you told us, I wonder if you could classify this as a type of blood? There are new theories about how different people, even in the same family, can have up to three different blood types."

"What if there are more types of blood than that? Do you have some way I can set these aside as I taste them so that we can categorize which is which type as best as I understand?"

So they set up a series of small bins to place empty vials in as they were tasted. Each new type received a new bin. A few samples contained animal blood, and the vampire found those distasteful but still bearable.

Then he opened a vial that contained the disease, and he knew it as soon as the blood touched his tongue. The world went dark and the sky came spinning, crashing down upon him. "What is this?" the vampire screamed. "I know this taste! I've tasted this before!"

But he was no longer in the room with the doctor and the assistant. He saw a vast tree, with branches made of blood, arching out in front of him in a great void. Light pulsed through each limb of the tree, and for the first time in twenty years, the vampire could hear and feel his own heartbeat in response. It was not a source of comfort. The pounding of his heart, drowning out everything else, slowed gradually revealing a little bit more of the real world each time it pulsed. The vision of the tree started to fade away, and the vampire realized that he had fallen off the bed and was staring at the ceiling, having sputtered the blood from the vial on himself.

"What? What happened?" he asked.

"You started screaming and then cursing, and then at last you laid still," the doctor replied. "What did you see?"

The vampire eyed him warily. "This blood is really different. Now that the odd vision I had has passed, I can taste that this also comes from a young man, about fifteen years old. The blood has a clear type too, one of the ones we've already classified, but I almost missed it because the presence of the disease or whatever this thing was was so strong."

"Before you slipped off the bed, you said that you tasted this before. What did you mean?" the doctor asked.

"Everything about this town has seemed so familiar but..."

"But..." the doctor said, patiently waiting.

"I had almost forgotten this place. I've been here before, haven't I?" the vampire asked.

"Yes. You haven't been here in about twenty years. This was the last place you went before you disappeared from the record of people dying due to bite marks."

"Strangely, I can scarcely remember that."

The doctor uncapped another vial and gave it to the vampire. "Maybe you will remember better with more samples."

*****

It was a long night of drinking tiny tubes of blood. The same illusion of a blood tree rushed into the vampire's vision with each new sample he consumed, as long as it was a sample belonging to someone impacted by the disease. 

Indeed, with each sample he consumed, a wave of euphoria washed over him, like he was remembering what drove him to hunt humans in the first place. They brought out additional vials after a rack was done, and the illusion became less disconcerting with each new sample. The doctor refused to elaborate on the vampire having been in this small town twenty years before, saying that he would fully explain the situation only when all of the samples had been processed. Were it not for the thrill that the vampire was feeling with each new drink, he would have tried to press the issue.

He didn't notice that the blood tree was shrinking, one branch at a time, until the very last vial.

When his vision cleared after the last vial, he found the doctor alone in the room with him and his body bound to the bed in braces.

"What is the meaning of this?!" the vampire shrieked.

"Twenty years ago, my mother was your victim," the doctor said, rolling up his sleeves to see that his own yellowed skin was starting to quickly regain color. "But you couldn't finish her off because she took it willingly. She took your whole curse into herself. By the time you left her, near death, she had robbed you of your drive to hunt humans and to even exist within your own skin."

The vampire could only vaguely recall the circumstances of how he had once crept through someone's bedroom window and had stopped before delivering death to his victim. How he left the victim after and had to stagger back to the train, befuddled and lost and empty. "How did she do that? Even religious people are shocked to find how worthless their crosses and holy water are at stopping me! How did someone simply choose to take my whole curse?"

"With a smile. She loved everyone everywhere so much, vampire. Your bite did wind up killing her, but not before I promised her that I would find someway to resolve this terrible curse she shared with us all. I wish you could know what that is like to have a mother like her, but we decided that it would be best if we gave your curse back. We were her children, grand children, family members. We already tested giving blood to each other, but it was too much for our own bodies to tolerate. We all grew sick due to exposure to this terrible thing you fostered inside you. But now that we have all of our respective blood types sorted out, we can actually try helping each other with giving each other blood that matches our needs. We may finally be able to treat any residual effects of the ailments that have been plaguing this community for years. At last, that blood tree you envisioned brought all of the curse back to the source."

"And now what?" the vampire asked, a slight quaver perceptible in his voice.

The doctor laughed. "We find out just how sensitive you are to sun exposure and go from there. Live through this, and we'll find a way to get you yet. We've heard so many things about you, vampire. Tell me when and where it hurts." And they carefully wheeled the bed out into the dawn light, shrieking vampire and all.