Path of the Vampire forum

The night was deaf and the darkness was blind, and so nothing remained to tell the story but the clotted handful of the murderer's hair which the police took had taken from the rigid fingers of his victim. Before the corpse had been wheeled down to the morgue for the autopsy, however, investigators had gathered all the information they could about the subject and the events leading to his demise; consulting medical records, doctors, and family members, and examining the location and circumstances of death. However, nothing was immediately obvious and all documentation appeared to be missing and/or corrupted. There was no certification of birth, no sign of a passport, no other form of ID, and his appearance - despite being particularly overt and unusual - was not known by any police database. As far as Harper Rock City’s authorities were concerned, this was just another John Doe of the state who had died of uncertain and unnatural circumstances.

The external examination had revealed basic information; the subject was Caucasian, male, in his mid-twenties, 5’10”, 57kg, with pewter eyes and bleached platinum hair, but was a natural brunette. There was no apparent trauma to the subject’s body and all scars appeared to be decades old. When found in an abandoned house near Westwall train station, he had been wearing a sheer black Victorian blouse with a ruffled neck bow tie and sleeving, leather shorts, and floral netted tights. The subject had no footwear and did not appear to be the victim of a mugging as many items of silver and crystal jewellery had been recovered with his belongings. Analysis of the subject’s clothing revealed traces of blood - which did not belong to this subject - as well as the subject’s saliva and traces of pentothal and dextroamphetamine. While the cause of death was unknown, it was suspected that the subject expired from an overdose.

Wavy, white hair fanned out beneath his head and dripped like gossamer down the sides of the metal table. Pewter eyes were deathly-still beneath the petal-thin skin of eyelids, but lacked that cloudy carapace that covered the pupils just 3 hours after death. In fact, his body looked perfectly immaculate; the subject’s skin was naturally pale and presented no sign of decomposition or blackening as the blood pools and stains the skin. Rigor and livor mortis had yet to set in despite it being nearly 48 hours since the corpse’s discovery, and so it looked as though, despite no respiratory or circulatory activity, that the unidentified male was simply sleeping. There was no expected odour of rotting meat emanating from the subject either as the body’s inner organs should be beginning to decay and liquefy.

The scent of formaldehyde and bleach was heavy in the air and sat on the stench of rotting meat like a fat toad squatting on a patch of mushrooms. Unlike many of the other morgues in the city, the industrial steel walls and tiled floors of the building were scrubbed and hosed down regularly. There was a single pathologist and mortuary assistant working at this location and all documentation and evidence had been handed to him to make the final words on the investigation. Unfortunately for him, Sleeping Beauty wouldn’t sleep all night...

The scalpel sheared through his white skin as quick as paper sending ruby liquid swelling up from where it touched. The first of many tributaries pooled into the triangular cleft between his clavicle and trachea, and as it filled the shallow well, the blood began to drip down the sides of his throat. Myk’s pewter orbs fluttered behind his eyelids, but remained closed. As his blood cooled quickly, it stained his porcelain skin a shade of raw, aching pink and made the surroundings flare with goose pimples as if he was stuck in a fever dream. He was a million miles away from the pain that blazed up his breast, and even though his body responded on the very basic of levels, it couldn’t summon him from the depths of sleep.

All the while, the Telepath dreamt of ineffable machines.

There were brass cogs that squealed as they turned, as if each revolution was tightening a noose around a swine’s throat. Steam jutted out from the void between the wheels and the gears that surrounded him on all sides. It was like being stood in a hall of mirrors without his reflection, as every surface showed a wall of metal parts grinding together, turning, whizzing, whirling, and buzzing in apparent unison. If this vision was a grand and abstract representation of a life event, then the Telepath required much more clues in order to tie it to one event over another. As it stood – an amalgamous mixture of metal and movement - he would have likened it to any political or cultural mechanism that churned on endlessly and with no visible outcome. It was an over-simplified symbol, but it worked.