Anna Marie Hart

Twelve Percent

It’s shocking to hear your life reduced to numbers.
I was 22 years old at that time.
I had been diagnosed with osteosarcoma at the age of 11 years, and then been declared cancer-free 3 years later. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable recovery. All I remember is that my early teenage years were one blur of chemo and surgery and haggard relatives. Cancer seemed to happen around me, and I was just the one caught up in the middle of it. And then, I came out the other side, and was told it was over and to go and live my life. I went into music, in the end, learned to play blues guitar at the age of 16, and started gigging at 18. I was good, too. I had fans in my city that had heard me play.
Later, I started hearing things. Voices mostly, but sometimes sounds as well. Sometimes I would become convinced that some minor sign- the crack in a mirror, perhaps, or the pattern my spaghetti made on my plate- somehow meant something, that the universe was trying to tell me something. I kept it to myself. I was crazy, I knew, but here’s the thing- it worked. Whenever I became convinced that a day was bad luck, my bus would crash or some drunk would try to mug me. I learned to listen to the messages in my brain.
Then, of course, it went bad. The voices became abusive, and I started hearing other, more horrible things. Eventually, I went to a psychiatrist about it. We had a chat, and she recommended I got some scans ‘just to be safe’.
It turns out there was a lump inside my head, restricting the flow of blood to my brain.
So there I was, 22 years old, sitting in the oncologist’s office, gently trembling in fear. I’d just been contacted by a little record company about putting an album out. I had a meeting about it in two days. None of that mattered any more.
Your life can be reduced to numbers. He said some stuff about ‘estimates’ and ‘diagnosis’ and so forth. I don’t remember it. I remember “malignant meningeoma”. I remember “12 percent chance of surviving a year. 3 percent chance of surviving five years.” It was unreal, to be honest. I was numb, uncomprehending. I walked home and carried on like I was in a dream and none of this was happening.
It hit me that night, when I sat down with a guitar and a tape-recorder quietly whirring. Suddenly, I realized what all this meant, and I just poured it out through my voice and my instrument. All that fear and rage and pain and regret just flowing through me to create twelve minutes of raw music.
Two days later, I had the man from the record label in my front room, and I played him the tape. I realized, a few minutes in, that I could hear myself quietly sobbing under the guitar.
He asked me what it was about. I told him I had cancer and would probably be dead in a year.
He blinked and went silent.
The next day, I had a record contract. I think they wanted me to produce the album before I died. We should be grateful for small mercies, I suppose.
A week later, the whirlwind started again. Chemo, mostly. It wasn’t working. Life was just one long stream of recording sessions and doctors and pills and grief-stricken friends and family.

Surgery

After three months there were no improvements. The voices were louder than ever, and I was a shadow of what I used to be. My flat was filled with week-old takeaways. I hadn’t spoken to anybody outside of the studio in a month. I think because I knew that I was going to die, I wanted to do something lasting before the end. So I threw myself at the music. Nothing else mattered to me, so long as I got this masterpiece out.
One morning, I had a telephone call. A surgeon had seen my case and thought he had a way to save me. Would I be interested, they asked? Of course I would. I was told to get to the hospital that evening.
It turned out that the surgeon in question- Doctor Snider-  was, to put it mildly, eccentric. Brilliant, definitely. Famous among some medical circles. But, not to put too fine a point on it, he was reckless. I was told this surgery might kill me, that there was a very high chance of it in fact. If I survived, I might experience severe memory loss and personality changes. But, they thought it could remove the tumors (by now there were four of them) from my brain. I accepted. Surgery was penciled in for the next week, just after dark.
I finished the album in four days. I don’t think I really slept or ate in that time. Shortly afterwards, I got the master copy to listen to. It was good, I knew that, but I hadn’t realized how good. I sat, letting the sound of my own music flow around me, and decided that this would be a good mark to leave on the world. It’s odd; at that point, I wouldn’t have minded if that was the end of it all.
When the night for the surgery came, I met Doctor Snider. He was already in scrubs, his face covered with a surgical mask and goggles. He shook my hand, and asked how I was feeling. His voice and his grip were like cold steel.
The surgery began. I was anaesthetized for it, of course, but I still remember things somehow. I remember the surgeon cutting into my head for the first time.  I remember feeling waves of anger and frustration coming off him when he realized it was going wrong. I remember him and his orderlies panicking as they tried to save me. But, my body had decided it had had enough. I had finished my life, and now, I remember deciding, it was time to let go. It felt liberating, almost. I was light, floating almost.
The surgeon ordered everybody out of the room. Somehow, they obeyed him. He crouched over my chest, peering down at me. I think my eyes were open, because I remember seeing him drawing a scalpel, and slicing open all the veins in my neck. I could feel, somehow, all the blood leaving my body, leaving me hollow and dry. And then he leaned in and fed something to me. Something cold, alien, malignant even, rushed into my body. Like wriggling oil, it forced its way into my arteries, commanded my heart to beat again, commanded my brain to think again.
I was dead, certainly, but that didn’t mean I was finished.

Rebirth
I remember how the lights in the surgery panicked me. I jerked myself up from the surgeons table, and tried to escape. No such luck. That monster of a surgeon caught me in his gaze and somehow, I don’t know how, just froze me. There was a flicker of movement, and I felt something hard and sharp and deadly piercing my ribcage. Then, nothing but the foul thing now living in my veins.
When I was roused from my stupor, I found myself in a well-furnished office. It seemed I was cable-tied to my chair, and my surgeon was sat facing me, still in his scrubs and mask. I don’t think I ever saw him without that mask, actually. Damn freak. As I tried to make sense of what was happening, he began, falteringly, to explain what he’d done.
I was now dead, but not dead, apparently. I was cursed by God, but that was okay because the surgeon was part of a secret society dedicated to achieving a higher state of being. You can imagine, it took a while for me to take it all in.
In time, he unbound me from where I sat. Over the coming nights, I was given more freedom to move about his haven, and then after a while slowly introduced to the remainder of his coterie. I was taught how to exist as undead by them- how to hunt, how to hide myself, how to cope in the dance macabre. As weeks turned into months, they began to introduce me to the Ordo Dracul and its philosophies, and in time I became another Dragon’s slave in the city.
Evolution of the Soul
When the black oil replaced my blood, I was aware that I was losing something fundamental. It think that’s why I frenzied out when I was able. With reflection, I realized what it was. I was dead and decaying now. I bought a copy of my album a little while after I was embraced, and listened to it as I lay in my little haven. I could hear the blues washing over me, I could understand what I was playing and why. I could feel the music. But, when I tried to sing… nothing. Whatever it was inside me that made me an artist had been snuffed out. And whatever had been in my head, guiding me and abusing me and driving me mad, I realized that that was gone too. There was no inspiration, no upwelling of emotion that I could pour out through my music. I was dead, sterile, unable to create anything beautiful anymore. This was when I properly realized what I had been made into.
I raged, smashing the tape player in my fury, howling madly against the master who had done this to me. Eventually, it passed, and I left the wreckage of my haven and sought out my master. He saw my distress, and asked me what was troubling me. I told him that my soul was a dead thing, and that this would not do. He spoke to me, soothing me, explaining that, yes, it was unjust, and yes, I was right to be enraged by what had been done to me. And then he explained that it need not be that way. That the kindred soul was… mutable. That with work I could fix the break in my soul.
It was obvious he was working up to a pitch, but I was enraged and desperate. And, smooth as you like, the masked bastard made the offer. An associate of his in another city had developed a process- a ‘coil’ he called it- to heal a kindred’s damaged soul. It was experimental, and untested, I was told. He needed experimental subject to undertake this procedure, and see how it affected their souls.
Well, of course, I went for it. I needed to feel that upwelling of music from inside me again.
There were, in the end, three volunteers to develop the new coil. All hand-picked neotates like myself. I still don’t know if my embrace was just a convenient, spur-of-the-moment thing from the masked bastard, or if I was made purely to test this thing. The other two testers were… broken… by what they did to remake their souls. They became degenerate, mad, things. Clawing and shrieking, and they were put down as the animals they had become. But myself? I learned, and in that hot red chrysalis that they inflicted on me, I took hold of my soul, and began to reshape it.
I was one of the earliest Kindred to learn the Coil of the Soul, although not the first. It worked wonders for me. I became something of a celebrity in Ordo circles. But, the music was still dead.
So, this is the work of my requiem- to return my soul to it’s vibrant, live state. To undo the stagnation that’s been inflicted on me, to hear the voices and the music again. It’s been a decade now, and I’m still working on it. But, I will fix this. Nothing’s going to hold me back. Cancer didn’t stop me, undeath isn’t stopping me, and I doubt that God himself could stop me if He tried. I’m going to become something greater than this, you’ll see.