There was something wrong, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Gideon used his years learning how to observe the Dragon to try and figure out what was odd about the situation:
Firstly, there was the issue of his frame. He was thinner, skinnier than usual; this was more like how he was in his…maybe his twenties? Also, Gideon noted he was barefoot. He hated being barefoot, the sensation reminded him of childhood—the less thought about those days, the better.
Second: he was walking. Walking on… a bridge. Already he’s narrowed this dream-memory down to one incident in his life, but he looks around to be sure. And he notices now—hard to believe he didn’t notice before, even if this was a dream—that he’s surrounded by people. Hundreds that become thousands. But one of them is truly important. Just a few feet away, almost in arm’s reach (that’s not how it happened it’s not I hardly even saw him that day)
is the Doctor, Doctor King, and he is singing the Doctor is singing they are all singing “We Shall Overcome,” and part of Gideon (a part that is buried very deep and hardly acknowledged these days) remembers the pride he felt in being there that day, and how that pride turned to horror as the decade wore on and things… started… going wrong. For everyone.
Even as he thinks it, the dream changes; it becomes night, and the crowds melt away, until it’s just Gideon and Dr. King walking alone together. As the Doctor begins to slow, Gideon does also, until they stop moving. Gideon looks around, and instead of being in Alabama they are in Sacramento. Nearby he sees one of the nightclubs of the Rack—Avalon, the place is called—and this night spot that is usually bustling with life seems dead and empty tonight. But he can see familiar figures around the building; while looking, he determines that several of them are Kindred of this city, whom he recognizes, although their features seem a little off. Dream-forms of them, no doubt altered by a hidden symbolism in his subconscious that he cannot figure out as yet.
Gideon pauses, then takes a faltering step towards the Avalon, to speak to these dream-avatars of his fellows—but the Doctor speaks to him. He turns back to Dr. King to listen; when he looks over his shoulder again, the Avalon and the Kindred around it are gone.
“You shame me, Gideon,” Doctor King says, but it’s not his voice—not the voice of the great speechmaker at all.
“Father?”
As he thinks this, Gideon takes a step back, away from Doctor King—although the form has begun to flow, and change, and Gideon’s afraid that when it solidifies it will be his father he’s looking at. But it speaks again, and now the voice is not his father—it’s his Sire, a doctor of a different sort, undead for a century in Kentucky.
“You have shamed the Great Work I have set you upon,” this viscuous mass says to him in the voice of the one who gave him the Embrace. Gideon backs away from it and comes up short as his back slams into a wall that wasn’t there just a moment ago. The wall is made of bone, ribs and grasping hands and pelvises, the flesh picked clean. He tries to shuffle sidewise to keep away from the advancing form in front of him.
The Sire-Father-Doctor Thing continues to shift. A mouth opens in its chest, and an unfamiliar voice says, “I have given you the tools to transcendance, and you have ignored them and pushed them aside for petty things.”
Gideon stops his retreat, momentarily confused, and the thing lashes out a claw—more like a bird’s talons than anything else—which grips him by the shoulder. Gideon shrieks as it pulls close, and he realizes what the voice is. That’s how Dracula sounds when I read the Rites, in my head that’s his voice, that’s how he always sounds
The flesh on the creature begins to take a solid form, a familiar one, and Gideon beats against it in futility as his own voice comes from it. He’s looking into his own face, now, and what he sees on it is rage, pure unending rage.
“YOU. HAVE. SHAMED ME,” his doppleganger says to him, and Gideon—the true Gideon, or at least he thinks he is—wails in fright, and beats his fists against the thing, and by the time he realizes the dream is over and he has rolled from his bed and is senselessly beating the floor, he is crying.
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