Vicar held the journal in his hands and watched the pages flutter slightly as he trembled. It was no tremble of fear; he'd simply been without food for just a little too long. Food, however, was downstairs. He would suffer through his shaking just a little longer, and besides, this peculiar journal posed far too many questions to be ignored for something as petty as sustenance.

Who on Earth was Winn Peterson, and why was her journal in the attic of his brother's house? As far as Vicar knew, the Andrews' residence was not located on a cliff in Dorset, but a multi-tiered townhouse crammed between a hundred others on a crowded street in the much farther north-east of Cambridge. Granted, most of the other houses were empty, but that was the way the Andrews' had always liked it - isolated and nearly excommunicated from the rest of the people. There was absolutely no reason an American's diary from a sea town should have been in this attic; yet, there it was, almost breathing in Vicar's hands. He took a deep breath and set the book down for a moment, wondering if it could have been fiction. Nobody in the family had ever written anything fantastical, even with Gaston's predisposition to telling stories to Vicar, so that was primarily unbelievable. Nevermind if an Andrews wrote it, what Vicar found most curious about it all was the American bit. What a curious coincidence, that he should have made his secondary home across the sea in the Land of the Brave, as he often heard in the confusingly patriotic country, and upon reuniting with his homeland, he invariably meet with someone in the exact opposite situation.

"What did you think of our humble land?" he asked the journal, stroking the hard leather cover with a finger. "Will you leave it as I did, or revel in the mysteries we pretend hide in the very soil?" He wanted very much to continue reading (already, he was thoroughly invested in whether or not this eager little Winn succeeded in maintaining a garden, or even a housemate), but the footsteps of before sounded at the attic door and a voice soon followed.

Vicar held his breath and stared in horror at the crack of the attic door. How he wished there were a ladder, to better dissuade visitors, or something he could perhaps kick in the way. Would willing it hard enough to stay shut work?

"It's nearly suppertime, Vicar. You must come down and eat!" The voice was kind and understanding, but in the way one's words are when they feel sorry for the subject of conversation. Pitying. Vicar shuddered in disgust, though the mention of food almost broke him. Pity was for people without purpose and Vicar had plenty to do in the twilight hours of his brother's funeral.

"I won't!" he called, forgetting to ask how they knew he was up there.

"You are not some child! You must come and face this. At least eat something, please!" Holding his breath, Vicar refused to answer again. If they wanted him so badly to reenter society, they would have to break down the door, answer the mystery of Winn's fate, or bring his brother back to life and he was entirely certain none would happen. He only had to wait a few moments longer before a heavy and prolonged sigh sounded at the door, and then faded away down the hall. The presence of the living gave Vicar a scare, reminding him unconsciously that he was wrapped up in the inconsequential life of someone no longer on the Earth. Caught in the web of his brother's past, all haphazardly jumbled up in these forgotten boxes, Vicar began to wonder if he would forget how to live himself. Well, almost thought. As soon as the words began to form in his distressed and easily distracted mind, he caught the faintest glimpse of a glittering box across the attic from the window. Amber shimmered on the corner of it, illuminated only by the briefest moment possible as the sun shifted just a little lower on the horizon beyond the Andrews house.

Curiousity piqued at once, Vicar stood and made his way over the sheets and lamps guarding the path to the mysterious object. Upon picking it up, he realised he was holding a pen case, and within was a handsome fountain pen, quite old looking and worn around the base, despite the care obviously bestowed upon it. Something was scrawled on the box, barely legible even to Vicar, who had made a career (well, it had been a career, but he shook his head at that) out of deciphering old text from even older sources. Straining his eyes was more of a task than he would have liked, so he shifted over to the stained glass window and lifted the box aloft.

Gioaur, it read, in beautifully wrought golden filigree. The light sparkled on it just so, bringing to life the intricate, and yet very faded, lines of the letters. The name filled within Vicar a fierce frustration, for the almost annoying amount of vowels crammed together tickled his memory without quite aiding it. Giaour. Where had he heard such a word? It was not one easily forgotten, but there, it seemed as though Vicar had indeed forgotten.

Regardless of the origin of such a peculiar set of letters, he strove to investigate further why this pen, so ancient in design, was sitting in the attic, not even tucked away in the safety of a bigger box. Taking care not to upend the pen from its place, he turned the box over in hopes of finding more ownership clues, but was greeted only with the discolouration of wood. It could very well have been his brother's, collected from an estate sale (one of Gaston's favourite pastimes, as it was impossible not to find something bizarre locked away by a forgetful resident before their passing), or given as a gift for some scientific paper, penned by Gaston in a moment of disciplined lucidity. Vicar snorted to imagine his brother writing anything seriously. Always with some cleverly disguised jest, delivered to make his peers happy. Fantasy had woven its way seamlessly into Gaston's life, and that was precisely why Vicar thought the man had died. He didn't know all of the details (he was sure the guests did, at this point - all they'd had time to do today was gossip about the grisly and strange demise of the heir to the Andrews' home), but what he had been unfortunate enough to overhear made Vicar convinced his brother had died in the same way he'd lived - in jest.

This was an excellent and very large reason for his not wanting to attend that dreaded funeral, and one he could hardly tell the Andrews cousins who begged him to join so badly. Nothing made a family so upset as hearing their loved one died as a joke.

Not wishing to feel badly for any more than he already did, Vicar hugged the pen box to his chest and returned to his seat on the trunk where he'd found Winn's journal. Armed with the pages of the past and the pen of unknown origins, he felt determined to learn why Winn Peterson's journal was in this house. The thought struck him that perhaps he would never learn why, and this was simply a random item in an even less specific location. Was he wasting his time? Should he be grieving as normal people did? This made him feel at once irked - he was not like normal people, and would refuse to bow to any actions or decisions they deemed appropriate or necessary. At any rate, Gaston likely would have found it amusing to know Vicar was reading, above all things, at his funeral.

Content with his decision, Vicar bent his head and opened the journal once more to the details of Winn's life, seeing the now-familiar days in the middle of August noted. As he started on the sixteenth day of the month, the name on the pen box came back to him, and the origins of the word smacked him in the head quite suddenly.

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life;

Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corse.

It had been so long since the words, those hypnotic rhymes, swirled around his head that Vicar wasn't even sure what made him remember. "Heavens, that must have been three years..?" He looked up and tapped the box against his chin, pondering his school days. Yes, he could see it clearly, now - that familiar library, before he'd reduced it to ash, at night. No candles, no lamps, no electricity at that hour. The quiet hum of the train outside, shaking the walls like a bee on its way to the hive. As quiet as it was, there was still the noise of pages turning. Vicar had always been able to count on the Latin students to be awake. Chattering some nights in the dead language, silently sharing their notes the next, hardly a day went by where Vicar didn't see the four of them hunched over a textbook in the library. What such an old language required that much research for, Vicar hadn't any idea. Latin was dead for a reason, and his area of expertise lay in the French and German books of the world.

Regardless, the group had been unusually vocal one night, as he scribbled away at a translation that needed to be completed by the next morning. He could hear their voices, individually. The older of the group was trying desperately to be heard, and repeated the same observation several times, before the bespectacled one with the messy hair finally took pity and listened. Vicar lost track of what it was, trying to determine the proper tense for an apple in the given context, but what he did hear next bade him put down his pen and stare intensely at the group.

"Yet loathe the banquet which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corse!"

"This explains the rumours! Why else would Archibald be so obnoxious, if not spite for his own position?" Vicar blinked and rubbed his ears. The words made no sense, not at all. Who was Archibald, and what did his obnoxious nature have to do with feeding his own corpse? His question was not answered, as he hoped eavesdropping a little more would help with, but the nature of the lyrics was when the elf of a woman on the edge of the table explained to the confused fourth.

"Byron, you sweetheart, Byron. His entanglement with the Shelley's was very well known, to include his illicit passions."

"Yes, I understand that, but why the Giaour?"

This question was apparently quite offensive, as two of the remaining three friends began shouting about the undead and the intense aversion to religion the Shelleys displayed. Vicar still didn't understand, but the shouting was problematic not only to his work, but the sanctity of the library, and he was forced to intervene.

"Excuse me," he remembered having said, and the looks of surprise he received were almost amusing. Did they forget that someone worked out here? "I am afraid I must ask you all to be... quieter." As he made his request to the group, his eyes fell on the subject of their dispute, and inspired his current self to exclaim in recognition of the Giaour, scrawled on a parchment older than the building.

Vicar felt, on his seat in the present, deeply unsettled. Why had the poem, topic of a seemingly random debate between students who studied an entirely different subject, be connected to his brother's belongings in an attic? Vicar wished he knew the entirety of the poem, but even as he stared at the journal, he could see the beginning of the stanza, the start of the words from the parchment, in the same elegant script the pen held:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,

Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:

Then ghastly haunt thy native place,

And suck the blood of all thy race.

Whatever the connection, Vicar was positive it was no longer fantasy or jest.

Vicar

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