The Ghost of Winn Peterson

45. Vicar

When Igor Radcliffe finished reading, Vicar found that they both had tears in their eyes. It had never occurred to him, in all of his recollections and readings of the lives of others, that this man could feel, and hardly so intensely. Perhaps it wasn't the feeling that surprised Vicar, but the object behind the doctor's emotions. That the man could act in so horrific a manner, and yet still possess the passionate desire to sire his own family amazed Vicar.

Life was supposed to be easier than that. Villains were not complex creatures. Their flaws were obvious and predictable. Vicar's bizarre first encounter with the doctor, when he had been parading as a student at Pendragon-Hall, should have been the end of it. You hardly look a Justine to me. Wasn't Justine's life characterised by men and women who were evil simply because they could be? Sex, power - easy to spot, easy to understand.

Igor Radcliffe, he was learning, was not easy to understand.

Mere minutes after reading with relish his cruel treatment of Lord DeCourt, the doctor had nearly given up the effort of relaying Winn's last notes, so overcome was he with the image of his wife, dying in his arms. How difficult it was to believe - Igor Radcliffe loving someone!

And yet, he did. How plainly Vicar could see this, with every tear that trickled down the doctor's face. Every quake of his chest and tremble of his hand betrayed his everlasting grief at her passing. Vicar found that he cried for a different reason, one that only made him angrier at the doctor for having the gall to weep at all.

Vicar cried for Winn. Her journal had been simple, but no less moving and charismatic. Every small interaction she'd taken the time to record had left him with the impression that the world was a better place with her in it. Each harrowing detail, carefully noted down for her own sake, and then the sake of a person who might never exist, filled him with hope for more strong people, for people who refused to curl up and let destiny throw them away. Vicar didn't suppose the doctor would finish reading the journal (there were only a few pages left, at any rate), but he wondered where Winn had found herself in the end, where she'd taken the freshness of her pain and found the will to commit it to paper.

It was all of this that made the bile rise in Vicar's throat, that made his heart squeeze in an anger he had never known before. Just who was the man that sat in front of him? What divine hands had crafted him with such arrogance that he could dare shed tears over the death of a woman he had mistreated so cruelly, all while subjecting one of the purest people Vicar had ever known of to the horror of watching her die?

"You are a monster," he echoed, vision flashing white for a moment. When his eyes had focused, the doctor was looking at him with a slow expression. Was he expecting Vicar to embrace him, to retract his previous airs of disgust? Hardly would he, Vicar thought as he stood for the last time. "What do you want with me and my family that you ceaselessly find yourself torturing us to insanity!" Indeed, why else read out Winn's final entries, if not to push Vicar over the edge? Was it a method of control? Did the vampirism that finally revealed itself find a sick pleasure in anguish in its victims?

"I show you this to prove that I have only ever wanted one of you," the doctor whispered back. He looked down at his hands, folded over the journal. "I wanted a name, Vicar, that had not been bought with force. I wanted what you have."

"I don't have a family anymore. You made quite sure of that."

"No... no, for that, I am sorry." Igor looked up, face painted with newly formed lines of salt. "You must understand: I only wanted to make you, any of you, mine the way I knew how. Unfortunately, that way brings more death than it doesn't. Evelyn was not supposed to die, I was sure of it, but the stupid boy ruined everything. He weakened her!" The doctor jumped to his feet and began to pace around the table, tears giving way to scowls or recollection. "He slithered behind my back, proved I should have killed him when his mother pushed out her last breath bringing him into the world, and cursed his childish love with the same fate."