Chapter Text
1872
If Hermann felt the need to sleep, or indeed even the desire to, he might have been alarmed to have been awoken rather unceremoniously by a shadowed figure suddenly toppling through his bedchamber window with a crash to the floor below, suspecting, perhaps, an intruder, a monstrous creature (for it was indeed the witching hour, at the height of the autumn harvest), or some other sort of person who might mean him harm; he might have shouted, and he might have incidentally alerted the whole of the household to the intruder, and someone would almost certainly have taken it upon themself to discern the source of the noise. It was then quite lucky for them both that, at the time of the incident, Hermann was sitting in his armchair by the fire with a large volume perched upon his lap, candlelight ablaze, and still donned up in his evening suit as if he meant to see to a prior engagement at a moment’s notice. He was quite awake. He did not so much as flinch, but rather said calmly, “We have a perfectly acceptable front door, Newton, that you would be welcome to use.”
He closed the volume and set it upon his footstool, folding and setting his eyeglasses upon it a moment later. Newton was still writhing in a tangle of limbs and heavy drapery upon the floor, having caught himself in Hermann’s curtains in his graceless descent from the windowsill. It was some time before he ultimately managed to emerge red-faced and with his clothing in bad disarray. It was difficult for Hermann to tell whether that was a result of his fall as well—Newton was often in disarray. It was one of his more charming qualities. Regardless, if someone were to investigate the commotion, perhaps they might find themselves in trouble after all. “Your father would never let me in,” Newton said. He was out of breath, presumably from his climb up the ivy beneath Hermann’s window, and was likewise dressed in his evening-wear, which was now streaked with dirt and torn in places. He made a welcome sight nonetheless. Newton was always a welcome sight to Hermann, who enjoyed little in the way of companionship outside of his absurd friend. “I’m sorry I didn’t think to send a note ahead.”
“It’s no matter,” Hermann said with a smile. “I tend to expect you most nights rather than not.” He had lit the fire with the express intent of playing host to Newton.
But Newton did not return the smile. “I’ve got to tell you something, Hermann,” he said. “It can’t wait.”
That would explain Newton’s strange choice in garb. They kept up very few pretensions with one another—evidenced, perhaps, by Newton’s choice of entry point into the Gottlieb manor, and the easy way their given names came to each other’s tongues—and on nights such as these Newton typically wore whatever was most conducive to holing themselves up in Hermann’s study for a meeting of minds. And, of course, other things. Newton looked as if he’d just retired from dinner, and had done so in a hurry. “Can’t it?” Hermann said.
He opened his arms in invitation: Newton came to him as obediently as if Hermann had willed him to do so himself, kneeling upon the footstool and edging Hermann’s book to the ground, yet he kissed Hermann only chastely, and when Hermann pressed a gentle hand to the back of his neck as he was so often fond of, thumb grazing against his pulse, it was to find Newton’s heart was racing quite badly. If Hermann concentrated, he could feel Newton’s marvelous brain working beneath him—feel the cogs turning wildly within it—and sense the urgency with which Newton had come to see him. His smile faded as he brushed back Newton’s hair from his forehead. Newton’s eyebrows were knit together. “Newton, what is it?”
“I think,” Newton said, “they know. Or—they’re starting to. Catch on, I mean, to—”
“Us?” Hermann said. Another, second thought suddenly chilled him. “Me?”
But Newton merely shook his head. “Both,” he said. “Neither. I haven’t heard—they haven’t said for certain—but, at dinner, they asked so many questions. About you. About us. About what people have been saying. They asked when I would find a wife. My episodes of melancholia displease them, too, as much as my bachelorhood. I think—” he sighed, “they might send me away, to stay with family God-knows-where.”
“Oh, Newton,” Hermann said. He touched Newton’s cheek soothingly. “They’ve threatened similarly before. I would not over-worry yourself.”
“It felt different this time,” Newton mumbled. “They said there were rumors in town that you’d—bewitched me. It sounds ridiculous now. I suppose you’re right.”
Newton allowed himself to be kissed again, soothed by Hermann’s gentle touches, but the truth of the matter was that Hermann suddenly found himself similarly troubled. The villagers had long been suspicious of the Gottliebs, and their dusty, decaying old mansion far out in the woods on the very edge of the town: a family of well-educated recluses, no household staff but a single old gentleman who saw to most of their deliveries, children without spouses, without heirs. How very little they’d aged (if at all) since settling in here—years and years ago, or so it went. How they were never to be seen about town until the sun had set. Hermann’s peculiarities seemed to frighten them the most; though his siblings allowed themselves to be courted and accepted dinner and dance invitations, Hermann put very little effort into pretending to care much about any such frivolities. He much preferred the company of his books and calculations in his dusty rooms to any of polite society. And the company of Newton, of course.
He had loved Newton from the start. From the very moment five years ago when Newton had knocked upon the door of the mansion and demanded audience with the brilliant Dr. Hermann Gottlieb he’d heard lived here. (He had been familiar with Hermann’s work and had many opinions on the matter, which he was quite eager to offer up to Hermann.) He’d stayed Hermann’s companion through it all, even once having learned the awful truth about Hermann and his condition, and, when Hermann had made a confession of a different sort in practically the same breath, one which felt almost as treacherous as the other, Newton did not turn in disgust from him, but rather confessed himself a kindred spirit. Or so to speak. If Hermann recollected the events correctly, they had done rather a lot of kissing.
Newton was brilliant in his own respect, of course, in the messier sort of sciences he so loved, but he’d not had the breadth of schooling Hermann had had—for the quite obvious reason that Hermann had been alive for a great deal longer than him—and had not yet made a name for himself in the same way which Hermann had. Hermann did not doubt that he would in no time. He also did not doubt that, should they carry on as they were now, his own reputation might eclipse and tarnish Newton before Newton ever had the chance. And so he was of two minds at Newton’s confession of his fears: it would undoubtedly be good for Newton to be free from all the misery Hermann was sure to one day cause him, yet he could not bear the thought of being apart from him.
And of course, there was the other reason; that Hermann was a monster, and one day—if he was not careful—
“I would never allow anyone to part us,” Hermann murmured into skin of Newton’s neck. Newton’s pulse was a siren’s call beneath his cold lips. He envied Newton for the sheer amount of life in him, sometimes, the effortless pump of his hot blood, the rise and fall of his chest. “Not ever. No one shall ever take you from me, or me from you.” He did not tell Newton he was referring to himself as well, nor how fervently he wished it to be the truth.
In the weeks following their liaison in Hermann’s bedchamber, Hermann noticed no sudden marked change in the way their fellow townsfolk treated him, but rather something slower—the gradualness of poison, seeping into each harmless interaction, each stare cast in his direction when they surely thought he wasn’t looking. It was whispers at first. Then lingering, suspicious stares. Then, when he and Newton chanced a walk through the half-deserted streets of the town one evening, it was as if the few passersby about went out of their way to avoid them, as if even crossing their paths posed a threat. It bothered Hermann far more than it bothered Newton, though not for reasons which involved himself. It was about Newton, of course; it was always about Newton.
But Newton caught his sleeve laughingly, having noticed the shadow of fear crossing Hermann’s face, and tugged Hermann into an alleyway between two shuttered shops. Here, it was narrow and dark, and the cobblestones stank of the refuse of the street, but they were alone. Newton pushed him up against the wall with a smile. “They think I’m your familiar, or some other sort of supernatural nonsense, and that you’ve damned me,” he said. It was clear he had all but forgotten his misgivings of the other night; it was now but a game to him. He very often treated serious matters with infuriating light-heartedness.
“I wish you would not—joke about such things,” Hermann murmured.
“How can I not?” Newton said. “It’s absurd.”
“It’s the truth.”
Newton stared at him, long and hard. Hermann felt himself color.
“Er, to them,” Hermann amended. “And that’s as good as anything.”
“You’re so dramatic about everything,” Newton said with another laugh.
He twined his fingers about Hermann’s cravat, and tugged sharply upon it. He kissed Hermann as if he had not a care as to who might see them. “Take me to my rooms, and bewitch me further,” he said. “I want you.”
“By Jove,” Hermann said, and colored a deeper, brighter shade of red. “I shall never grow used to how—explicit you are with such matters, Newton.” But he raised his arm, wrapped it about Newton, and turned, in the particular style he’d learned to master some many, many years ago. In an instant they were gone from the filth of the streets and blinking in the comforting warmth of Newton’s chambers. Though Newton’s family was one of the wealthiest in their town and enjoyed the status and high standards of living that such a thing entailed, Newton hated the family manor with a deep, burning passion, and—the moment he had made himself a decent enough name within the scientific community—purchased himself a small set of rooms overlooking the forest, all for his own. Hermann’s forest, as Newton would playfully call it, for it was the very woods that shrouded the Gottlieb estate in its perpetual gloom and darkness. (Newton liked to pretend he could see Hermann milling about in his bedchamber at night, a tiny shadow moving across a pinprick of light; it gave him comfort, he said, to know Hermann was there, just beyond his reach.) Newton saw his mother and father but twice a week, if that much, where they would berate their son for his choices over dinner, and threaten all manner of things—banishment from the family line, a cutting off of his finances (which Newton cared very little about these days), even using their influence to sway others against Newton, namely his scientific peers. He was their only heir—their only hope at continuing the family name—which Newton cared even less about. Here, Hermann thought, was the one place Newton could be free of their hold; where he could be happy.
It was where Hermann found himself happiest, too. He was not overly fond of his own family.
“Are you hungry for dinner?” Newton asked casually, shedding his waistcoat and loosening his collar in a far-from-subtle method which left the column of his throat, and the sharp bones protruding beneath it, fully on display. “We could have something sent up. Or maybe I could find something around here.”
Despite himself, Hermann grinned. “You’re a wretch.”
Newton finished unbuttoning his shirt and dropped backwards onto his bed. He held a hand out to Hermann, and gazed at him with a lazy smile, his eyelids heavy. His legs were splayed apart. “Come on, my man.”
The swiftness with which Hermann moved was often underestimated by others, owing (presumably) in part to his cane, as well as the rather sickly, malnourished look about him, but never by Newton; he was upon Newton impossibly fast, and Newton began shedding Hermann’s clothing for him with an equally astonishing swiftness. “Say it again,” he breathed, as Hermann began to kiss his soft, hot mouth and press his hands to Newton’s soft, hot skin. “What you told me, last time. Tell me how we’ll always be together. Do you mean it?”
“Yes, darling,” Hermann said. He dragged his fingers up and down Newton’s body, his nails sharp enough to scrape the skin, but not break it. Newton squirmed, parting his mouth in a silent gasp, and Hermann pressed into it with his tongue eagerly. Newton smelled of a cloying sweetness to him, almost intoxicatingly so: it was as if Hermann could not, could never, get enough of him. He lost himself around Newton sometimes. He kissed Newton again and again. He was getting excited, over-eager, tearing Newton's clothing in his hastiness. “Nothing shall ever take you from me; nothing ever.”
“Then make me like you,” Newton begged. “I want to be with you forever, really forever. I don’t want—” He moaned when Hermann nipped at his lower lip, drawing blood that Hermann licked away eagerly. “Please, Hermann, I want to be like you.”
It was fruitless to convince Newton he didn’t—would never—want such a thing. He posed the question to Hermann so frequently that Hermann had long since given up on it, and, instead, endeavored to distract Newton when the unfortunate thought came into his head. He bit down harder at Newton’s lip, moaning himself when he broke the skin and tasted the sweetness of Newton’s blood, and Newton began to pull at his clothing more insistently. “I love you,” Newton said, and he sounded almost angry about it. “I want to—”
“Hush, my love,” Hermann said. “We shall discuss it on a later occasion. Let’s not have this old fight again.”
Newton hesitated; but he nodded. He pushed Hermann’s head down to the crook of his neck. Hermann ran his tongue over the purpling bruises left there from so many nights passed as this one. They had chosen the spot together: just out of sight beneath the high collars of the modern man’s fashion. The skin there, and the two small puncture wounds, were tender and sensitive to the touch, and Newton shuddered when Hermann kissed across it. “Please,” Newton moaned. “Do it to me, Hermann.” Hermann pulled back his lip and unsheathed the full length of his fangs: their sharpened points grazed Newton’s skin. It was strange the ease with which drinking from Newton came to him now. In the early days of their love, when Newton first began offering himself up (ever the bold one), Hermann would do so shyly—hesitantly. He had been loath to hurt Newton by inadvertently taking too much from him, for Newton tasted as if he were a fine vintage, and Hermann found it difficult to stop once he’d begun.
He teased the bruises with his tongue, enjoying the way Newton writhed and clutched at him. Then at last he bit down upon the spot—his spot—and began to drink. “Oh, Hermann,” Newton whimpered. “Yes, please—”
He pressed Hermann’s body tightly against his. He was hard with arousal within the confines of his indecently tight trousers, and, with each mouthful of blood Hermann swallowed down greedily, Hermann grew harder, too. He pushed his hips forward in a clumsy effort at rubbing against Newton, a deep growl rumbling up from the back of his throat. Newton dug his fingers into Hermann’s shoulderblades, the pulse in his wrist pounding, even through the layers of Hermann’s remaining clothing, as powerfully as a drum. “Make me like you,” Newton begged again, within another whimper. Hermann felt mad with hunger and lust. “We can be happy, together—”
And perhaps Hermann might have; it was difficult to think clearly, with Newton clouding his senses and making such marvelous noises as he was, with Newton’s blood coursing through his body, and stirring life back into his skin—his limbs. Turning Newton would ensure they would never have to part, not ever. He drew his mouth from Newton’s neck: his lips were wet, and crimson with Newton’s blood, and he had pressed his hand to grope blindly at Newton’s throbbing arousal. Newton looked all the part of a poor ailing damsel beneath him, his head tossed to the side on his pillow, throat bared and welcoming, mouth gaping wide open as he panted. He was beautiful, and Hermann could have him forever. But it would not be as this. It would be wrong. “I—” he began.
The door to Newton’s rooms burst forward with a clatter.
Though Hermann disliked Newton’s mother and father as well as Newton did, he would admit (albeit begrudgingly) that the situation in which they had found Newton and Hermann had been unfortunately quite damning for them both, though particularly Hermann; and, were Hermann to stumble upon a similar situation between Newton and another monster of the night, he hardly thought his reaction would have been any better. (Though this interruption in question was hardly by happenstance. He found out, later, that they’d stationed a man, one of their household servants, beneath the window of Newton’s bedchambers, with specific instructions to alert them should Newton return with Hermann in tow, and he had seen their shadows moving across the drawn curtains.) In short, Newton was taken from him—taken from the town, from his rooms, from his laboratory, from all he knew, and sent off to stay with distant relatives in America, far from the influence of undesirable company. As for Hermann, he considered himself quite lucky they’d been too terrified to attempt any violence against him, or do much beyond threaten to expose his monstrosity to the whole of creation if he did not leave their poor, innocent Newton alone. He imagined there was not much they could do to harm him beyond that. But it hardly mattered—being without the tender warmth of his beloved was violence enough. Knowing that Newton was suffering (a vast ocean away, undoubtedly locked up in some cold and lonely rooms) because of him was violence enough.
He debated often, throughout that first month, if he might not attempt to will himself to Newton’s side with his monstrous powers, as he would so often do at Newton’s request in their happier days together, but typically thought the better of it. He had never tested them at so great a distance, and he did not want to risk stumbling upon Newton at an inopportune moment (which was likely to be all of them, for, if his mother and father’s words that last day rang true, Hermann knew him to be under the near constant surveillance of a rather severe aunt and uncle) and worsening their situations. Indeed, he was not even sure it would be possible for him to will himself to Newton’s side, having not been explicitly invited to do so in the home of his uncle.
At the thirty-fourth day without Newton he sincerely began to consider it and might have taken the chance if a letter had not arrived for him in the post. It was addressed to not a Dr. Gottlieb, but Hermann, and though it bore no return address or signature, the handwriting was distinct enough that Hermann suspected he would know it anywhere. The note was brief (scarcely a few lines) and had been scrawled out quite messily, as if its writer had been in a great hurry. It was from Newton, of course. The relief Hermann felt at hearing from him at last almost outweighed the bleakness of its contents.
Dull as anything here without you. Being watched all the time. I’ll write again if I have the chance. I love you, always.
Hermann did not need sleep, but that night he wished for the welcoming embrace of exhaustion (that simple luxury denied to him, and so taken for granted by mankind), so he might clutch Newton’s missive to his chest and dream of him as a proper lover should. But he did not sleep, and he did not dream, and he found no such comfort. Instead he lit a taper in his lonesome chambers and set to work writing a missive of his own. Upon his desk he set a single photograph he had of himself and Newton: one of Newton turned away from their photographer to smile cheerily at Hermann, taken at a dinner party hosted by an academic whose work they in parts admired and disparaged, which Newton had coaxed him into attending. His hand was tucked about Hermann’s waist. Moments before posing for the photograph, Newton had been kissing him in their host’s rather grand library. It made Hermann smile to recall the evening.
The weeks without Newton crawled by until they turned into months. They did not become bearable by any means, but they were not as terrible as they might have been without the new avenue of contact between them. Newton and Hermann wrote each other as frequently as the ocean between them would allow it: Newton railed against his family, about losing the freedom to go about as he pleased, about being ripped from the world of scientific inquiry he had only just begun to make a name for himself within. Hermann wrote of his continued studies into mathematics, of the slow change in seasons and ominous encroaching of winter, of how deeply he desired to have Newton in his arms again. He did not write about the town they called home—he did not disclose that Newton’s parents had not wholly kept their word, that he was all but shunned as he walked the streets at evening time, that mothers swept their children more closely to their sides and people alike leveled him with fearsome, ugly stares as he passed, and that Newton’s gentle letters of love were a mere fraction of the post he received these days, most of which, if not all, called him some variation of monstrous.
But most concerning of all was not the stares nor the venom sent his way, but rather a singular line in Newton’s most recent missive, tacked on at the very end as if Newton had hoped Hermann might miss it: If you won’t make me be like you, then I will find a way to make you be like me. Therein, Hermann thought darkly, laid a realm of science which intermixed dangerously with superstition. The simple promise filled him with a cavernous sense of foreboding; he was certain nothing good was to come of it.
SOME MANY NIGHTS PRIOR
It had not been Hermann’s original intentions to divulge the specifics of his illness, his condition—his curse, if you will, for that was the way Hermann often thought of it, in his lonely, brooding hours—upon Newton when the strange little man originally forced his way into Hermann’s life. Newton was too intelligent to fool about those sorts of things, perhaps too intelligent for his own good. Hermann watched (felt, perhaps) the cogs of machinery churning in Newton’s brilliant head for weeks, watched his clever eyes track Hermann’s idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies, tack on each to an endlessly unfurling mental scroll of a list, one after another, until he began to formulate hypotheses, eventually a singular conclusion. Hermann was unsure what had ultimately made the fatal crack in the dam. Was it his refusal to meet Newton out from beneath the veil of darkness? His avoidance of taking supper with Newton? The utter lack of rodents and other such vermin in an estate as old and crumbling as the Gottliebs’? Hermann’s murky history, indeterminable age, and impressive history of scientific accolades, despite his obvious physical youth? The bloodless chill of his skin and motionless heart, which surely Newton felt when (on occasion) they would accidentally (or perhaps it was not so accidentally) brush against one another?
Perhaps Hermann had been careless, for he had certainly wished, desperately, for Newton to learn that one secret part of himself, to share in it with another for the first time in his life, and be treated no differently for it. He longed to hide nothing from the man whom he held in such high esteem—in truth, whom he was quite infatuated with. For how could he not be infatuated with Newton?
They were in Hermann’s study, some months following their meeting, and enjoying a rather quiet evening in each other’s company when Newton found it fit to broach the subject. He was drinking a wine Hermann which had retrieved from the damp cellar of the estate, and his lips were stained purple with it. Perhaps it made Newton bolder. Perhaps it made Hermann bolder, too, knowing that they both might feign drunken forgetfulness after the fact, should Hermann disclose anything unsettling. Newton watched Hermann with heavy eyes in the dim light of the fireplace, clicking one finger against his heavy crystal glass. It was an antique, as old as the estate itself; all of Hermann’s belongings were antiques. Flames danced in the reflection of his eyeglasses.
“I hope I won’t offend you,” Newton began. “I mean no judgement—only curiosity. It’s only—” He shifted in his seat (a large, plush indigo armchair, his favorite of Hermann’s leisure furniture), “well, Hermann, I must admit there’s something queer about you.”
Hermann drew in a shaky breath. “Queer?” he echoed, in a quiet voice.
“Different,” Newton said. “Off.”
“Wrong?” Hermann said.
“Not wrong,” Newton said, and he gave Hermann a small smile. “Just different. I could sense it, I think, from the day we met—something so different about you than almost any I’d met before.”
Hermann swallowed heavily; the words spilled from him before he could help it. He was desperate, yes, for Newton’s acceptance, but he was also (far more dangerously) hopeful, at the way Newton’s eyes often lingered at his mouth and the exposed flashes of his skin, at Newton’s bachelorhood and his seeming lack of interest in remedying it. “It does no good hiding these things from you, Newton; you are far too clever, far too discerning,” he said. “I will then admit to what I know you are insinuating. Yes; I have—improper sorts of thoughts, about other—er—others of our kind, so to speak. Other men. Thoughts of—the amorous, passionate sort. I believe I always have.” He turned away from Newton with a heavy sigh. “I would not fault you, my dear friend, if you no longer wished to consort with me, only I beg you to keep my private affairs as just that—private.”
“What?” Newton said. His hand had gone slack around the crystal, and a droplet of wine threatened to stain the blue upholstery. “That’s not— I meant the vampire thing.”
Hermann rose to his feet with a start. “I—I beg your pardon?!”
But Newton did not look as if he would recoil from Hermann in any sort of disgust, or sound the alarm for rioters with wooden stakes to come parading through Hermann’s parlor; he merely gave a bewildered laugh, righted the wine glass upon a polished end table, and crossed his legs. “Well, you are a vampire, are you not? It’s somewhat obvious. To me, I mean,” he added hastily, for he must have noticed Hermann’s features contort in alarm. “As your intimate friend; I can’t speak for anyone else.”
“I—” Hermann began to stammer.
Newton’s gentle smile returned. “You can sit back down. You should know me well enough by now, and how well I love all the oddities of the world, to know that I’m not going to—I don’t know, pelt you with garlic.” And Hermann, after hesitating, and against his better wishes, did as Newton suggested. “Okay, good.”
“How?” Hermann whispered.
“Truly, Hermann?” Newton said. “I have never once seen you in the light of day, your skin is as frigid as the dead of winter, and you have routinely talked about a dark, evil curse placed upon your family which you refuse to ever elaborate upon. Among much else. Shall I go into more detail, or will you allow me a how of my own?” He uncrossed his legs and leaned in towards Hermann, until Hermann could hear the steady beat of his heart and the excited hitch in his breath. “How is it possible? How did it happen? How do you sustain yourself—what I mean is, do you drink…? My God, Hermann—how could you keep such a thing from me?! It’s amazing—incredible. What I mean is you are amazing.” He would have said more, perhaps, if Hermann (so grateful to have not lost the only person he had ever called a friend, and bolstered at Newton’s words of flattery) had not been gripped by a sudden fit of passion—and, perhaps, momentary madness—and seized Newton by his rumpled collar to draw him in for a kiss.
Yet there was distance between their chairs still, misjudged badly by Hermann, as well as he misjudged his inhuman strength in the face of a rather small man like Newton, and Newton fell to his knees upon the floor; the kiss was severed, and Hermann recoiled in horror. “By Jove,” he said. “Oh—Newton—you must forgive me—I swear I do not know—”
Newton righted himself with two hands upon Hermann’s knees and foisted himself up onto Hermann’s chair, at the center of Hermann’s spread thighs, and curled his hands in the front of Hermann’s waistcoat. His breaths came from his parted pink lips in sharp, excited bursts. The ends of his hair looked fiery in the glow of the hearth. “Do it again,” he said. He rubbed one of his sturdy thumbs against a button on Hermann’s waistcoat, and Hermann felt something hot stir and coil about itself deep within him. He wound his arms about Newton and drew him near.
It was the first time, Hermann thought, that he had used the bed in his chamber for a very long while, if not simply the first time, for Newton insisted upon it so as not to cause discomfort to Hermann’s temperamental hip. As they lay together afterwards, he disclosed the whole of his history and that dark familial curse to Newton. For there was nothing for it to be deemed but a familial curse; his father, foolish and selfish as he was, and wary of the sudden outbreak of consumption which was then ravaging the small German village wherein Hermann had lived out his human days (much, much longer ago), which had already claimed the life of his wife (Hermann’s mother), had sought a way to extend his life and influence, and had chased rumors of dark covens who met under the veil of night in the woods. With them he had struck a deal: they would transform him as they would others before, and he would enjoy everything immortality and invulnerability entailed, but in return he must offer up his children for their ranks. Naturally he had accepted those terms. (Hermann’s father had never been a paternal sort of man.) He had not understood precisely what they entailed until some time later. It was as if something from a fairytale, Hermann thought bitterly—an old folk tale told to scare children off from venturing into the dark alone.
Hermann did not recall much of being human. He supposed, however, that he had always been a solitary creature—always a strange, abnormal soul, who did not quite feel the way he supposed he ought to, who could not quite connect to others the way he knew he ought. He had always favored the cool, comforting notions of mathematics and machinery to much else. Yet he could recall his transformation; how could he not? He imagined he always would. A shape above him in his too-still, too-quiet bedchamber, waking him from slumber. The harvest moon high in the night sky, casting it, him, in a scarlet glow through the window-panes. The pierce of fangs like hot knives upon his skin—the poison coursing through his veins which soon followed.
If he could dream, he supposed it would be of that.
Newton pressed Hermann’s hands to his mouth and did not flinch away at their chill. Indeed, Hermann wondered if they were perhaps not chilled at all; the enveloping comfort of his bedclothes (dusty as they were), the hearth, and of Newton’s half-nude body, draped against his own, warmed him so he might almost feel he was human again. He suspected this was mostly Newton’s doing. He pushed his fingers back through Newton’s mussed hair, twirling an errant strand about his index finger. “That’s awful,” Newton said.
Sea creatures inked in vibrant hues wound their bodies about Newton’s forearms—received, so Newton had explained, on a sailing voyage he had once taken some many years prior, wherein he studied some of those very creatures he had since immortalized in greens and blues—but Hermann now saw for the first time that they crept upon his bare chest as well. He fixed his eyes upon a many-armed octopus, which was coiled atop Newton’s heart. “I—I do not think of it, much,” Hermann lied. The octopus swelled with each of Newton’s inhales. “Not when there are much more pleasant things to dwell upon. Such as yourself, my friend.”
“Then you’ve never,” Newton began. “I mean—you have never made—another, like yourself?”
There was an edge to his tone which unnerved Hermann, something which dipped far too deeply into curiosity for his comfort. He pressed Newton against his chest with a protective hand to the small of his back. “No,” Hermann said. “I would never spread my curse—my disease. It is a foul, evil thing. Please do not ask me about this again.”
“Understood,” Newton said quickly.
He fell asleep in Hermann’s arms not long after. When morning came, he stayed with Hermann, peppering Hermann’s face with kisses until Hermann sunk into a hazy rest of his own—another first, to have someone stay with him in such a fashion, to hand himself over to semi-sleep at all, but of many to come.
1873
The gaps between Newton’s letters grew, only a mere small amount, a difference or days or perhaps a week at most from what Hermann was used to. It was easy enough to chalk up to delays in the post, or perhaps Newton’s aunt and uncle turning a more watchful eye than usual upon their charge (hardly to be unexpected, seeing as Newton evidently spent a majority of his time holed up in his bedchamber writing and paying a delivery boy in secret to take his letters and see to it that his and Hermann’s correspondence remained uninterrupted). Yet Newton made no reference to this, nor gave any excuses for it, in his subsequent letters, and Hermann found the exclusion unsettling—even worrying. Even more worrying was Newton’s refusal to elaborate upon his promise to find a way to make you be like me. Hermann had pressed him numerous times since then to no avail, but he knew within himself that it almost certainly was the cause of those minuscule gaps.
It was verging on a year after that dreadful day in Newton’s chambers, a year of scrutiny and loneliness the likes which Hermann had never felt before. (And how strange it was that he should miss Newton so! A year of Hermann’s lifespan—as lengthy as it was, and would be—should be a mere droplet in a bucket of water, a blink of an eye. But he ached with his whole heart, his whole being.) Yes, a year later, when he received a short note directly to his study in the Gottlieb house after a longer than usual silence from his friend: Meet me at my rooms.
It was penned in Newton’s hand, and the corner bore the address of Newton’s long-vacated rooms which overlooked the forest. But how could it be from Newton? He was gone—an ocean away from Hermann. Had he snuck back? Bribed his way into passage on a ship, perhaps, and set sail? But why had he waited until now to inform Hermann of his plans?
Hermann wasted little time in readying himself to see his love again, scarcely finished fixing his cravat and gathering up his cane with a fumbling hand before shutting his eyes and willing himself to Newton’s rooms. Vacant though they had been for the past year—Hermann had often wandered by them wistfully on his lonesome nighttime strolls, and sighed in longing as he gazed at the darkened windows—they burst with life now. A fire blazed in the fireplace, and in the dusty tapers Newton had set up upon the mantle and cluttered tables. There was a large leather trunk deposited directly in the center of the room, half-open, pieces of Newton’s clothing and ink-splattered papers scattered about it. And, sitting at his desk himself, near-unchanged and as handsome as ever—
“Newton,” Hermann breathed out, and Newton rose to his feet with a broad smile.
They met at the center of the room, nearly colliding and toppling over with the excitement of their reuniting. Newton pressed Hermann’s face into the crook of his neck as he had so often done before, though Hermann felt no desire to feed from him just yet—he merely breathed in the scent of his friend, his sweat, his sweet, hot blood pounding just below the surface of his warm skin. Newton pet as his hair with a soothing hand, and he grazed a hand across Hermann’s cold, pale cheek. “Hello,” he said.
Hermann kissed him eagerly. “Why didn’t you inform me you were set for home?!”
“I wanted it to be a surprise,” Newton said, and his smile twisted into something more sly, more mischievous. He thumbed at Hermann’s upper lip, drawing it back very slightly to graze over one sharp fang. He punctured his skin upon it, and Hermann nearly moaned at the taste of the small droplet of blood that beaded upon it. A year of feeding upon street vermin made Newton before him again all the more alluring. “Hermann,” he continued, “there are other people like you. Not merely here—in America, too. I made it my business to learn their secrets.”
Hermann felt a chill settle upon him. “You did not…?” But no—it was an impossibility. Newton’s pulse pounded as well and strong as any other living man’s, and he breathed, and he bled. (Unlike Hermann.) And—here, Hermann was embarrassed to admit it—it was almost taboo for another of Hermann’s kind to venture to claim Newton in any way, for Hermann had long since marked Newton as his. The bruises upon his neck were proof of this. Newton shook his head.
“Of course not,” he said. “I sought a cure for you. I sought to make you human—so we can live out our lives together, the proper way.” He laced his fingers with Hermann’s and drew them to his mouth, pressing his lips against them, chaste and unmoving. “It’s what I’ve been doing, Hermann, this whole time. And I think—I think I may have—”
Hermann silenced Newton with another kiss. He always loved seeing Newton so bright-eyed and animated—so clearly excited at whatever his newest research obsession was—and it was a far cry from the bouts of melancholia into which Newton often found himself sinking. Yet it worried him to hear Newton talk this way about such matters, and with such passion. Almost obsession. Certainly the prospect of curing his loathsome illness and running off with his beloved, to spend the remainder of their wholly natural days in peaceful solitude somewhere, appealed greatly to Hermann, but to set such stakes in it as Newton had seemed folly—dangerous folly. What if it should not work? What if it killed Hermann, instead of merely curing him? What if it only worsened his illness and made him unrecognizable? He would hear of Newton’s research on the matter tomorrow, but for now… “Let’s not think on such things tonight, my love,” he said, soothingly. “It’s been too long. I wish to be near to you.”
“But you will hear it tomorrow,” Newton said. It was not a question, but a statement, perhaps a challenge.
“Of course,” Hermann said.
He drew Newton into the comfort of his arms, and they spoke no more of such matters that night.
There was something off in the air the next morning: a chill that set even the perpetually frigid Hermann’s teeth on edge, a hint of winter come early at last. Though Hermann could not stand the touch of sunlight upon his skin, he did on occasion still find it within himself to enjoy the fresh air, and he watched (from his usual seat at the fire) while his heavy velvet curtains blew with each gust. He had been reluctant to leave Newton’s side the previous evening. Indeed, he was always reluctant to leave Newton’s side, but to be parted from him so quickly after such a short reunion was almost cruel. They agreed it was for the best, however—what if someone should learn of Newton's flight from America and discover them in the same fashion as the last time, and Newton should be sent away again? Hermann did not think either of them could be able to bear it. Perhaps him especially.
So they parted with the tenderest of touches, and Hermann swept himself from Newton’s rooms before either of them could change their minds.
He began to wish he had changed his mind. The curtain of night, bringing with it Newton, could not fall soon enough. A great fear had gripped him and robbed him of his senses: he felt certain some great, horrible thing would befall Newton—a premonition, perhaps, if he was feeling rather superstitious. He paced his rooms, and his curtains blew in the wind, and somewhere, in his small rooms at the edge of the forest, Newton did whatever it was he did under the comfort of the watery autumn sunlight.
The messenger arrived just as the last tendrils of the day slipped beyond the horizon. He was the same lad Newton employed specifically for the purpose of carrying his post to Hermann and Hermann alone, grown a year older in Newton’s absence, but still recognizable; he rapped on the door of the Gottlieb manor to slip Hermann a small, sealed envelope, exactly as he had done the night before, and so many other nights before. Yes, it was so typical as to be expected, yet Hermann tore into it with shaking hands, feeling not the eager tremble and fluttering heart of being handed a love letter from his beloved, but rather a sickening sense of dread. It curdled within him; had he the ability to do so, he might have retched.
Newton’s missive bore two short, simple sentences: I have figured it out. Come to me at once.
It was difficult for Hermann to discern exactly what the chaotic scene before him was when he willed himself to Newton’s rooms: furniture overturned, papers scatters, bright vials of liquids smashed upon the ground or boiling over. It was as if the very room had exploded. He found Newton at the epicenter of it all, sprawled out upon the ground with a hand tossed carelessly across his face. Hermann’s mind raced wildly. Newton was sleeping, he thought; or he’d been knocked unconscious by intruders, who robbed him of what little he had, and destroyed the rest. He was pale, and his chest was rising very slowly, as if it pained him to breathe. His heartbeat was but a wobble. His eyes were shut behind his eyeglasses, and the right lens was shattered.
Hermann’s senses seemed as if to flee from him. His cane clattered aside as he fell to his knees, and he winced as he landed too heavily upon the left, but the pain was distant—almost as if it were someone else’s. He pressed a hand to Newton’s neck (over the faint scarring left there by Hermann’s own fangs), and felt desperately for a pulse. It was there; it was weak. It was weakening. Newton’s eyelids fluttered at the touch. “Hermann,” he gasped.
“Oh, God,” Hermann said. He pressed the back of his hand to Newton’s forehead—too cool—and Newton reached up to clutch weakly, feebly at Hermann’s sleeve. “Oh, God, Newton, what has—what has happened to you?”
“I thought,” Newton said, and he took a deep breath, “I had it.”
His hand fell away from Hermann. “What have you done?” Hermann half-sobbed.
“A cure,” Newton said. Every word seemed as if to be a great labor for him; he breathed in again, and his eyelids fluttered. He was so very pale. “I tried to—to test. I didn’t want it to hurt you. I just didn’t want you to be alone. Hermann, in my pocket—” He winced with the effort of patting his waistcoat. A thick, sealed envelope jutted out from his inner pocket. He had written Hermann a letter—a final letter—as if he knew something might—
“You damned fool,” Hermann said. “Newton, you—” But Newton had shut his eyes, and with each second that passed, his skin grew colder, his pulse fainter. He wore the pallor of death upon his face. Yet it was impossible—inconceivable, even—that Newton should die, after spending so terribly long apart, after pledging themselves to each other so newly. He had sworn to Newton they would be with each other always. He would make good on that promise. He would do now what he had resisted for so long. “Darling,” he said, and shook Newton frantically, “Newton, Newton. You must drink from me, before it is too late for us—for you.” He dug his thumbnail into his wrist and made a small wound in his skin, enough for blood to bead. It splattered in fresh red droplets among the cracked lens of Newton’s eyeglasses. “Please, Newton. You shall be like me—we shall never be apart, not ever.”
Newton stirred feebly. Hermann’s blood fell upon his lips, yet he did not swallow. He gave Hermann the ghost of a smile. “Hermann,” he said.
His head lolled to the side.
He was stiff in Hermann’s arms when the door to his chambers swung open at last; word of his arrival had at last spread about town. Hermann laid his love gently down upon the ground, tucking Newton's final missive into his pocket, and willed himself back to the Gottlieb estate—for he knew there would be but one conclusion to be drawn at such a sight as this.
He was gone when they sought him out at the estate later: vanished into the night.