Paper Children

by James Fahy

  But they were all, every large unit, crammed with Pale. I swallowed hard as I closed the last of the windows, feeling only minutely reassured that the doors looked sturdy and extremely well locked. There must be fifty of those things here. Maybe more.

  We always talk about the Pale being ‘outside the city’. We give ourselves the illusion that we are safe and snug within the walls, but this wasn’t the first time I’d encountered the creatures beneath our streets. I’d come face to face with them before. But never in these numbers.

  Moving on, deeper into the complex, I decided to be extremely careful what doors I passed through from now on.

  It took me maybe ten minutes before I found a door that was already open. There were many locked, though I didn’t pass any more prison cells full of living death. Countless twists and turns. I chose rights and lefts and random. Occasionally the flooring below would change from concrete to a metal grill, through which I could see further, deeper corridors on another level below me, my torchlight shining down into darkness. My boots clanked on these areas, echoing around me in the darkness and silence, and I passed over such stretches when I came to them as quickly as I can. I couldn’t shake the image my treacherous imagination kept giving me, of the grills beneath my feet dropping open like hatches, and small, childlike hands grabbing around my ankles, dragging me down into darkness below.

  Occasionally I hit a dead end and had to turn back. Here and there the tunnels had small series of steps up and down, as the floor raised and lowered to accommodate large pipes passing under them.

  My phone pinged only once. When I glanced at the screen it was a text from Chase.

  ‘Be careful. Found monitors up here. Not all CCTV working but some. Just seen Colonel Crispy stalking the halls up here. Going to try and find it. Watch your back’.

  A chill ran through me. Well that was fun. Dove’s vampire-ghoul was down here with us. He must have sent it to finish us off while he lorded it up in his deadly parade up top. I had to admire a man who could multitask.

  I took some cold comfort in the thought that it was up on Chase’s level, not down here in the deeper, darker bowels with me. But how long that might remain the case was questionable.

  This place was haunting and unsettling enough as it was. I didn’t like the idea of the grinning meatsack stalking us down here in the dark as well. It was just adding insult to injury.

  It felt more like an hour than mere minutes before I turned a corner, my torch playing across the damp pipes lining the walls like ribs, and saw a door half-ajar, with light spilling from the gap like a fingernail moon in the darkness. Approaching cautiously, I pushed open the door slowly.

  Chapter 32

  The room was white-tiled and brightly lit, a workbench filling one wall topped with various medical paraphernalia and apparatus, and what looked like a dusty pile of clothing. An observation window filled one wall, looking from my side like a large and spotted mirror. I saw myself reflected back, ghost-like in the hazy and misted glass. After the gloom of the tunnels, the harsh light made me squint as I looked around.

  Dominating the room was a large hospital curtain, the kind that hangs from a ceiling rail and which can be drawn around a bed. It looked old and discoloured, like the brownish, papery shed skin of a snake. From behind it, I could hear the soft beeping of machines and the unmistakable quiet and ragged noise of weakly drawn breaths, rising and falling.

  The door swung shut behind me with a bang as I stepped into the room fully, making me drop both my phone and my torch in surprise. They clattered on the floor.

  Before I could bend to retrieve them, I heard a quiet, sepulchral groan, which anchored me to the spot. Fuck-a-doodle-dandy, I didn’t want to be here.

  It smelled strongly of blood. I inched towards the curtain, pulling out my Taser from my back pocket. I heard the breath hitch and stop for a moment. Whatever was behind there had heard me. I froze, arm outstretched towards the mottled plastic folds that hung before me. My hand was trembling a little. When the breaths, shallow and strained, finally resumed, I swallowed hard, steeling my courage, and pulled back the curtain. It rattled along the rungs fixing it to the ceiling bar.

  There, lay atop what looked like a stripped hospital bed, a bare mattress, and entangled in a nest of snaking wires and intravenous drips, lay an emaciated corpse. It looked like an old man, a very old man, most of his face hidden behind a misty oxygen mask which was strapped to his jaw. The withered, pitiful thing was covered at the waist with a thin blanket, but was otherwise naked, as pure white as marble, and almost skeletal in frame. I could see every rib, the thin bones of his arms and legs like pale twigs, his collarbones jutting obscenely out of his powdery skin, hipbones framing the sunken hollow of his stomach. Atop his head was a stringy mop of black hair, greasy and unkempt, plastered to his skull. It looked like a nest of wet black worms. He could have been something unearthed, an Egyptian mummy, bleached as white as flour, except that somehow, this corpselike ancient thing was alive. I could see the hitching, pained rise and fall of his chest. His thin skin stretched so painfully tight, like brittle dry paper against the cage of his ribs, that beneath them I could see the pulse of his heart beating.

  Wires and tubes pierced his veins, on both arms and legs. The skin around them was bruised and angry, and they snaked away to drips hung on either side of him. Some of the hanging bags seemed filled with blood, others with a clear liquid. His sunken, bird-like torso was studded with small electro-adhesive pads, wired and monitored to the machinery and apparatus that surrounding the bed, recording his pulse, blood pressure, and other signs that, however unlikely it might seem, this thing was alive. And also restrained. Strapped to the bed with thick, dark brown leather buckles at stick thin wrists and sunken ankles. It seemed ludicrous. Surely even without restraints, this man would be too weak, too fragile to raise even his head, let alone escape the bed.

  Finding such a creature, entombed down here in the dark, clearly suffering, filled me with a silent horror.

  Tentatively, I moved within the circle of the curtain.

  “Can… can you hear me?” I whispered. Surely not, I reasoned. This thing must be in a coma, or too weak to be lucid at any rate. How long had it been here, alone in this room deep underground? Coldwater has the old Seraph files, stolen from PAPER. The sisters in the woods had told us their old abandoned research was continuing and here, in their long unused labs, the evidence of that lay before me. What was Coldwater doing with it down here? With him? I tried to imagine spending even an hour in this feeble state, in this horrible room, out of sight of the world, out of reach of any help. Buried in this hellish tomb. In pain and alone. Just the thought of it made me feel nauseous, anxiety rising like bile in my throat.

  “I… I want to help you… the people who did this to you, a woman, and a vampire, right? I’m not with them… I promise. I’m trying to stop them.”

  Beneath the oxygen mask, the dry cracked lips were twitching, peeled back from the gums. The withered thing was trying to speak. So it could hear me after all. Encouraged, I moved to the side of the bed.

  “Hey, hey, you can hear me right?” I said softly. “It’s okay, I’ll help you.” I glanced around at the many wires connecting the corpselike creature to the bed, wondering to myself how the hell I was going to do that. I had no idea if I could even take him away from these machines without killing him outright, he was so weak. And even if I could, then what? He was clearly in no state to walk. Was I going to give this living corpse a piggyback through the corridors, up steep and twisting stairs and past the Pale holding cells I’d come across, sneak him out of here while Dove’s burning ghoul was out there prowling the facility hunting us? It didn’t seem likely.

  I placed my hand over his. Even his fingers were thin, the knuckles protruding from the whiter-than-white, bloodless skin like gnarled knots in twigs. I wanted to reassure him, somehow. Basic physical contact, a human touch. For some reason I had expected his hand to feel clammy, sickly, but
it was dry and soft, as cold as ice. Slowly, he turned his hand, feebly flitting his fingers against mine. His eyes were still closed, sunken in the sockets of his skull, his lips still moving.

  “You’re… not human, are you?” I realised at his icy touch. The thought had crossed my mind, when I had first seen him, that perhaps he was one of the Pale, somehow sedated enough to be calm. The skeletal frame was similar enough to their physiology. But I had never seen one of the Pale with even a single hair on its head, or an entire face still intact, no matter how lined and pruned. They went in for self-mutilation in a big way. Most of them didn’t have noses, many had chewed their own lips away long ago. This ancient dried up husk of a thing, however withered it might be, was still at least in one piece.

  He managed to weakly lace his fingers with mine. With my other hand I tentatively reached out and lifted the oxygen mask slightly away from his puckered, sunken mouth. Just enough to see beneath. The thin, dry lips were cracked and receded, but its teeth looked strong, and the canines were sharp.

  My heart thudded with realisation. “You’re… a vampire?”

  Finally, the old man’s papery eyelids fluttered open, his fingers giving mine the weakest of squeezes, as though confirming my guess. Blearily, he looked up at me, his eyes meeting mine.

  His sharp, grey eyes.

  I almost cried out. Staring out at me from within this tortured, nightmarish old thing… my brain couldn’t process it.

  He blinked at me, slowly, as though even this took effort, and although he didn’t speak out loud, I heard his voice quite clearly in my head.

  “You came,” it echoed in my mind. “You found me. Are you… really here?” He sounded hopeful, but terribly cautious too, as though he didn’t really trust himself to believe that someone had come to release him from this.

  I knew the voice as well as I knew the eyes. My hand was trembling with shock, cradled in his. I stared, speechless with horror, as he whispered directly into my mind again.

  “I knew you would come. My… Phoebe.”

  I found my voice at last, my words coming in a shaking whisper.

  “Allesandro?”

  He blinked again, slowly, confirming my horror. This creature, this tortured, hollow husk, was my vampire. My mind recoiled from it. But I made every effort to keep my face calm. I didn’t want those grey eyes looking up at me, perhaps the first friendly face he’d seen in a long time down here in hell, and seeing fear.

  “What has she done? What… what the fuck has Coldwater done to you?” I said shakily, staring. His hand squeezed mine again, as though he was terrified of letting go, as if I might disappear if he didn’t hold on.

  I reached out with trembling fingers and smoothed the damp, matted hair gently from the skull-like temples of his head.

  “Starved…” he whispered in my mind. Even telepathically, he sounded weak, distant, as though he wasn’t speaking even in a whisper. It felt more as though I was remembering words rather than hearing them, repeating it softly in my own head. I was staring at him afresh, at this living cadaver, though my eyes had welled up and he had become blurred.

  “Jesus…” I heard myself say. “You’ve… all this time, you’ve been here? Like this?” A wave of fresh horror and guilt came crashing over me. Months. It had been months since I’d last seen him, since I’d been told he had ‘left’. Months since that night up on the wall, when Cloves and Kane had found us buried together. Things had gotten complicated fast after that. I had been furious that he’d apparently abandoned me then, in the middle of that horror-show. And then to be told by Elise that he had gone wandering, left the city. Ever since, this whole time, while I’d been living my life up there on the surface, resenting his arrogant absence, sneering at the mention of his name, and convincing myself that I was better off without him around. Had he been here? Alone down in this awful place? Getting weaker, wasting away in agony? I felt nauseous. I was going to be sick.

  “Don’t look… my best,” his voice whispered in my head. “I tried to look better… in your… head.”

  In all my waking visions he had been smartly dressed, irresistibly smooth as always. When I had seen him tied to my bed, flickering between the illusion of him and Dove, and when, for a moment, his efforts had slipped and I had glimpsed him drenched in blood, looking agonised.

  “Hey…” I forced my voice to sound less horrified, controlling my internal screaming to urge jocularity into my tone. “You know what they say, right,” I smiled at him, at the horror bound to the bed before me. “If you can’t handle me at cadaverous… you don’t deserve me at glamorous.”

  His chest hitched and shook a little. For a horrified moment I thought he was going into cardiac arrest, but then I realised, listening to him wheeze, that he was laughing.

  “Fuck, Allesandro,” I whispered quietly, my voice cracking. “I’m so sorry.”

  His eyes flicked to mine again. Even sunken in his bone white, unrecognisable death’s-head of a skull, they were the same as ever. Eyes don’t change. But, familiar as they were, they were sliding in and out of focus, trying to keep me in sight. I could tell he was struggling to stay conscious.

  “Don’t be sorry, Doctor,” I heard him distantly in my head. “Be useful.”

  “What can I do?” I asked, urgently. “What do you need?”

  But his eyes had rolled up and his papery eyelids closed. I stared at him for a moment, wiping my eyes with the back of my shaking hand. His fingers had loosened their grip around mine, had gone slack in my hand.

  I didn’t need him to answer me. Of course I knew what he needed. What do any of them need?

  Gently, I removed his oxygen mask altogether. Setting it aside and sitting on the bed beside him. He looked dead. He looked long-dead. There was nothing I could recognise in his appearance. I leaned over the nosferatu-like abomination in the bed, opening his mouth by pressing my fingers down gently on his chin.

  I had always promised myself I was the anti-Helsing. No vampire would ever drink from me, not willingly. I had tasted his blood before, it had brought me back from death once, and from madness the second time. I knew full well everything he had told me. How this had formed the bond between us, the psychic link. I had refused to let him taste me in return, knowing it would only make that bond stronger, seal some dark pact in ways I didn’t really understand.

  Knowing all this, I lowered my wrist into his mouth, grazing the inside against his sharp teeth.

  “Take it,” I breathed. He didn’t move. As still as a corpse. I pushed the flesh of my wrist against his teeth, hard. “Take it,” I repeated, more forcefully. “Come on, you stubborn arsehole. You’ve been wanting to drink me since we first met, right?” My eyes roamed his face. There was no sign of life. “What? Now it’s on the table, you’re not interested anymore?” I spoke a little louder, trying to elicit a response, trying to wake him up. Trying very hard to stop my voice from cracking again. “Drink,” I told him. “Take it. Take me. Just don’t fucking die.”

  I pushed my wrist against his teeth. They were sharp, much sharper than a human’s, and I felt the pinprick sting of breaking skin.

  Blood welled at the puncture points, dribbling down my wrist, and a few drops fell into his dry, open mouth, landing on his dehydrated, sandpaper tongue. I made myself make a fist, pushing my wrist down and covering his mouth completely, sealing my skin against it. I could feel his tongue dampen with my blood, could feel it running down his throat. I stared, wide-eyed, at his silent, still figure, in this antiseptic dungeon amidst the wires and softly humming machinery. I willed him to move. My shock was being replaced with a cold anger. I would make Coldwater and Dove pay for this. I would make them suffer.

  For a moment, nothing happened. I sat, leaning over the bed, feeding my blood to this terrifying corpse beneath me, feeling trapped in some dark nightmare here far below the earth in this oppressive place. It was so quiet I could hear the drops of blood hitting his throat in a swift patter.

  And the
n his tongue shot up and licked my skin, making me flinch in surprise. His mouth closed around my arm, and a low raspy moan came from somewhere deep in his frame.

  “That’s it,” I breathed, encouraging. “Just…drink,”

  He seemed to come to life beside me, jolted as though by electric shock, his thin and withered frame rattling. Suction increased on my wrist, as he began to greedily slurp, breathing hard and ragged through his nose, eyes still closed, but now scrunched up in effort in their hollow sockets.

  The sensation of blood being drawn from me was an altogether different one from simply bleeding freely. I felt the pull of it in my veins and he gulped and sucked. Felt the pressure move down my arm as I fed him from my wrist, his mouth now tightly clamped around my skin, his tongue roving hungrily over and over the wound inside his mouth, more urgent by the second, stronger and more forceful by the moment.

  I gasped a little at the pull. “Ah… slowly.” I managed. A low, thrumming tingle running through me.

  It was not an unpleasant feeling.

  I heard him swallow, again and again. How long he had been starved down here, kept alive by whatever the hell was in these bags, but deprived of the one thing all vampires need to live. His body turning on itself, eating away at itself in a desperate effort to stay alive. But he wasn’t going to die. I’d said I would find him. And I had. And now I said he was going to live. And my blood was going to save him.

  He moaned, for the first time not sounding quite like the dry and raspy creature I had found. A wet gurgle deep in his throat, a hungry urgency. Somewhere beneath that noise, he sounded himself.

  And still he fed from me, pulling the blood from me in deep swallows, over and over, the pulsing pressure making my arm jerk and my breath hitch. The feeling of being drawn, of being taken out of myself and into him, had spread from my arm, like delicious warm water across a cold body, it was flooding into me, in ever-stronger waves, across my chest and down my spine, a network of blood and nerves within me, all firing, all spreading.