Chapter One
WHO I AM,
WHY I WRITE,
WHAT IS TO COME
When I was a small boy I had a terrible dream. I dreamt I held in my arms the severed
heads of my younger brother and sister. They were quick still, and mute, with big
fluttering eyes, and reddened cheeks, and so horrified was I that I could make no more of
a sound than they could.
The dream came true.
But no one will weep for me or for them. They have been buried, nameless, beneath five
centuries of time.
I am a vampire.
My name is Vittorio, and I write this now in the tallest tower of the ruined mountaintop
castle in which I was born, in the northernmost part of Tuscany, that most beautiful of
lands in the very center of Italy.
By anyone's standards, I am a remarkable vampire, most powerful, having lived five
hundred years from the great days of Cosimo de' Medici, and even the angels will attest
to my powers, if you can get them to speak to you. Be cautious on that point.
I have, however, nothing whatsoever to do with the "Coven of the Articulate," that band
of strange romantic vampires in and from the Southern New World city of New Orleans
who have regaled you already with so many chronicles and tales.
I know nothing of those heroes of macabre fact masquerading as fiction. I know nothing
of their enticing paradise in the swamplands of Louisiana. You will find no new
knowledge of them in these pages, not even, hereafter, a mention.
I have been challenged by them, nevertheless, to write the story of my own beginnings -
the fable of my making - and to cast this fragment of my life in book form into the wide
world, so to speak, where it may come into some random or destined contact with their
well-published volumes.
I have spent my centuries of vampiric existence in clever, observant roaming and study,
never provoking the slightest danger from my own kind, and never arousing their
knowledge or suspicions.
But this is not to be the unfolding of my adventures.
It is, as I have said, to be the tale of my beginnings. For I believe I have revelations
within me which will be wholly original to you. Perhaps when my book is finished and
gone from my hands, I may take steps to become somehow a character in that grand
roman-fleuve begun by other vampires in San Francisco or New Orleans. For now, I
cannot know or care about it.
As I spend my tranquil nights, here, among the overgrown stones of the place where I
was so happy as a child, our walls now broken and misshapen among the thorny
