by E M Gale
“I think I’ve made a breakthrough,” he said.
“Oh?” we chorused, leaning in further.
Rob leaned back and grinned. “Seriously, man”–he gestured so wildly that he slammed his hand into the table with a bang and I jumped–“this is it!” His voice rose above the music. He looked around himself and leaned in again, dropping his voice to a hoarse whisper. “This is total Nobel Prize territory!” Whilst Rob daydreamed about his acceptance speech, we all looked at each other.
“How’s it work?” I asked.
Rob just waggled his finger at me. “Tut, tut, tut.” He leaned in with exaggerated secrecy.
“I can’t tell you anything here,” he whispered to me, moving in much closer to me than usual. I wasn’t looking at him, but smelling him. Suddenly the world seemed more real, and I could smell his scent, a slight touch of fresh sweat, the endorphins of excitement, the blood pumping under the skin in his neck, so close, so tasty…
I jerked away from Rob, knocking the table with my knees, spilling beer from the top of full glasses and soaking the crisps.
“Sorry, I’ll be right back!” I ran, my hand covering my mouth, up the red corridor and crashed through the door to the bathroom.
I splashed cold water over my face, leant on the basin and stared at myself.
‘’So tasty’?’
“What the hell was that?” I said to my reflection. Then the check: teeth, still normal; pulse, still present. But everything felt far too immediate; the heightened senses hadn’t yet gone away.
In fact, I heard Anna’s footsteps coming up the corridor over the sound of the fan and the bass-distorted music from the bar. I was expecting her when the door to the toilets was flung open and she burst in.
“Are you OK?” she said.
I was very aware of her and the fact that we were alone, and even if I didn’t have the teeth, I was terrified at what I might do, at what I might want to do. I gulped air as I tried to take deep, calming breaths. She must have thought I was hysterical, because she came closer, a concerned look on her face.
“I’m fine,” I gasped. “I just need air, I feel faint.” I shooed her backwards and got myself under control. Or so I had thought, until my heightened senses told me that the taste of salt was tears running silently down my face.
Anna came close again and stroked my hair soothingly, saying my name and trying to calm me down. She caught her ring on one of my plaits and pulled a hair out, which hurt, although her intentions helped. I did calm down once I realised that I didn’t feel any need to drink her blood. I was in control, but still terrified.
I turned away from her and washed my face clean again. My eyeliner was smudged, so I looked a mess. Cleaning it all off helped calm me further whilst Anna continued to make soothing noises. Well, she said something, but all I heard were inconsequential noises. I glanced at my eyes in the mirror, wondering if they would go red after I drank blood, as one of the books had suggested.
Anna held up my handbag, which she’d helpfully picked up, so I took out eyeliner to reapply it.
‘Can other people see the troubles in my eyes? I see a young woman with makeup drawing attention to her eyes, but the eyes look haunted. There’s a look of fear in them–I can see it and I don’t like it.’
I deliberately turned my back on the mirror. I smiled at Anna. She didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about my expression.
“I’m OK.” I looked her straight in the eyes as I lied. “I just felt a bit unwell suddenly. I think I’ve got a bit of a stomach bug perhaps.”
“Do you want me to walk you to the station?”
“No, I’m fine.” I smiled briefly. She still looked sceptical. “And anyway, I don’t want to deny poor Rob his audience. I’m OK,” I repeated, nodding to make her nod too. “I’ll just have some water when I get back.”
“Clarke–” Anna hesitated.
“Shall we go back?” I suggested, smiling.
“I have no way to ask this, but…”
The smile vanished from my face.
‘Is she on to me?’
“Well… I’ll just come out with it then…” She looked around.
My mouth was dry. The enhanced senses seemed to have vanished again, leaving me definitely in my body. However, the fear made me more alert. Sweat dripped down my neck, my face flushed, my cheeks burning.
‘What will I do if she is on to me? Aren’t I supposed to keep the whole turning-into-a-vampire thing secret? It’s probably not something that you really want everyone to know. And if Anna knows, everyone knows.’
“OK, I have to ask…” She coughed nervously. “Are you pregnant?”
My mouth dropped open in surprise. I felt it go, but it took me a moment or two to recover and shut it again.
She was looking sympathetic, ready with the tissues and her opinion of what I should do if that were the case. “You ran out like you were about to be sick and…”
I dissolved into laughter. I admit, it had a slightly hysterical tone to it, but I managed to catch that and get it under control. I felt the whole world more keenly, my senses were stronger again and I was laughing at the entire world.
‘Crap.’
I stopped laughing.
‘These enhanced senses are coming on more and more, with smaller breaks in between.’
‘The worst thing is that I’m getting used to them, missing them when they go. Am I turning into a vampire? I get the enhanced senses experience more often than I get the feeling of being on the edge of an epiphany, but I’m starting to enjoy those senses.’
I shook my head. Anna seemed a little disturbed. Mentally replaying the last five minutes, I could see why. “Trust me, I’m not pregnant–”
‘–I’m a vampire… or soon to be one.’
“I’m fine,” I said out loud. “Really,” I added, wondering who I was reassuring. “I just have a bit of a virus, but I feel OK now.” I smiled weakly, but Anna seemed happy with that.
“OK, let’s wander back, otherwise they’ll send Jane in here too,” she said.
I nodded and we walked back. The carpet stuck to my shoes as we walked back to the seat. I was aware of where everyone was in the room and what they were drinking.
“Sorry, guys.” I sat down. “I just felt a bit sick then. I’ve felt a bit funny all day, actually.”
Rob had finished his sandwich, the crisps had gone, and he pointed at my cold, congealed, toasted cheese panini and grinned. “So, you don’t want that then?”
I smiled and gratefully handed it over. The smell had been making me feel sick.
“Are you OK now?” asked Anna quietly whilst the main conversation moved on without us. I swirled the wine around in my glass, letting the aroma reach me. I smelt its berry and tannin scents intermingling with Anna’s and liked it. I smiled and took a gulp of the wine.
‘What was I just thinking about?’
The shock scared off the heightened senses and I couldn’t smell anything except dank beer and stale sweat. I sighed and answered her. “Yes, I’m fine.” She seemed to believe it, which was good. I didn’t.
“Well,” said Rob, the last of my sandwich visibly moving around his mouth in a way that turned my stomach, “it’s about time, people. Drink up.”
I looked at my glass of wine: there was still the best part of a glass there. I took a gulp. It burned. I took another, then left the rest of the glass on the table, a testament of my existence to the uncaring world…
‘Now, that was an odd thought.’
We gathered up our bags and coats. I checked I had everything: keys, yes; purse, yes; pulse, yes; phone, yes. It was becoming a habit. I had noticed myself putting my hand up to my neck to check my pulse occasionally or tonguing my canines.
We followed Rob up the stairs and into the darkness. It had rained at some point earlier and the single fluorescent beer sign lit up the wet concrete, abandoned beer kegs and empty liquid nitrogen bottles. We headed across the courtyard to the physics departm
ent. Since Rob had a key, we could take the side entrance physicists used for their cigarette breaks, rather than the longer route via the main entrance. The department was quiet. When we walked past the undergrad computer rooms, there were a few students, ensconced in their chairs and ensorcelled by computer games.
We took the stairs down to the basement, Rob leading the way confidently with Anna following right behind him, waving her hands above her head to turn on the motion-sensitive lights. The corridor floor was highly polished and the colour of strained peaches, though I believed it had been white once. The basements of college were always the last areas to be renovated: it suited the college to leave them grimy, as they never brought tours down here.
Rob unlocked the thick metal door to his lab. We all filed in and stood just inside the doorway, the light from the hallway defining odd shapes in the darkness that sprang into only slightly more recognisable shapes as he flipped the banks of lights on one by one. Anna gasped. Given I was supposed to at least be able to guess what all the machines did and I still found this lab magical, I could only guess how she saw it.
The ceiling was covered in pipes bent at strange angles with water and gas audibly sloshing through. The pipes, ceiling and walls were painted with that industrial magnolia colour that schools, hospitals and prisons seemed so fond of. Personally, I preferred the blank-slate type of walls to the parts of the university that they had tried to spruce up with awful, bright primary colours.
In front of us was a bank of computers, which were linked up to the Tesla coil in the centre of the room. The brightly coloured leads were bundled together and taped to the floor with gaffer tape in a way that made me think of an umbilical cord. The actual Tesla coil couldn’t be seen. There was a plastic framework built over the top, with various instruments precisely attached to the framework and kept alive by their own brightly coloured power cables. In the heart of the machine was a platform that could be moved in and out of the Tesla coil, allowing Rob to perform the experiments on exotic materials that were his job.
He shrugged on his lab coat, but was too cool to do it up. He shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels and watched us with glee as we all dumped our coats and bags on the floor and gazed at the equipment. I broke the silence, since I had the prerogative again.
“So now that we’re not surrounded by hordes of evil academics out to steal your idea, what have you found?”
He smiled at me, a twinkle in his eye.
“Behold, my great machine!” He waved at the Tesla coil, swooshing his lab coat as if it were a cape.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have bought him a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo for his birthday.’
“Now, many people have tried to do cold fusion, but no one has really managed it–”
“Well, there were those people with the water and the sonicator who reckoned that they had made small amounts of deuterium oxide,” I said.
He waggled his finger at me, grinning. “Not good enough, was it? No one was impressed by that, now were they?”
‘I was impressed. It was such a simple experiment, cold fusion with things you can find in any moderately well-stocked chemistry lab. So what if the yield was minute? It was there, and as a theorist I don’t care how well things work, just whether they do. Or, more accurately, if it would be cool if they did.’
“No, not impressive at all,” he continued, grinning. “But people have looked at trying to contain a fusion reaction using magnetic fields.”
‘What’s wrong with using good, old, easy-to-source water? Why do people want to try to make tiny suns when a beaker of water and a sonicator will do it better?’
“But”–and here he gestured to a few new pieces of equipment that I’d not seen before, or, more accurately, I’d not seen here before. It looked like a microwave transmitter and a glass jar taped to a board. The glass jar was full of water and, for some reason, had some tin foil floating in it–“what if you try to stabilise, say, ball lightning, in a magnetic field with an electric field at ninety degrees to it?” His eyes shone.
“So that’s a ball lightning generator, isn’t it?” I said, pointing at the new equipment.
“Yes.”
‘Is that why you’re not supposed to put metal in a microwave? It makes ball lightning? Cool!’
“OK, well, what happens when you do that and shove it in your Tesla coil?”
He looked disappointed. I had stolen about ten minutes of buildup from him by guessing his idea. “Well, I’ll show you.” He frowned at me. “But first, I’ll tell you how I came up with it!”
“Yes, do,” said Anna. Rob grinned at her. He liked to have an appreciative audience. “I don’t know any physics, so can you explain it simply?” She batted her eyelashes.
Rob smiled and started his explanation again. I let my mind wander. I was curious to know if I could sense anything different in here; would my heightened senses feel the magnetic field? I hadn’t noticed anything before, but now I tried to probe the machine. I tried to concentrate and let everything crowd in upon me, and that made my heightened senses come back.
I was aware that Rob’s eyes kept flicking back to Anna. I picked up on my friends’ individual scents. I heard the din of all the computer fans, the noise of things rushing through the pipes, the hum of the Tesla coil, the ceramic click-click of hard drives spinning up. It was pure noise. I tried to separate out everything from the machine, but when I tried to concentrate on that, the scents of people distracted me. I gave up and tried to pull myself out of the sensing state.
‘Maybe if I do this too much I’ll turn into a vampire sooner.’
As that thought occurred to me it had an undeniable ring of truth to it, like I’d understood something that ought to have been obvious. I had the sudden sensation of being on the edge of an epiphany, as I’d had before. I visualised a door and visualised my hand reaching out to open it. I wasn’t scared. I felt the door. I turned the handle and pushed it open. Inside was a thought but I couldn’t understand it. Then I realised what I was doing; following that line of thought would probably turn me into a vampire faster as well.
I didn’t know anything for sure, but I visualised the door slamming shut. I tried to draw back into myself. The feeling of clarity drained away and I was left with a cold, dark terror.
I shook my head, forcing everything away from me, and the enhanced senses disappeared too. The others were listening to Rob’s explanation but I had lost all interest in his idea, so I let it all wash over me whilst I tried to fight the fear deep in my gut.
‘What does that mean? Do I even want to become a vampire?’
“–then when I put the ball lightning in the Tesla coil, I should be able to hold it there for quite a while.” Rob had placed the microwave setup in the Tesla coil.
“Cool,” chorused the others dutifully. I think he’d been going on a while.
“You all ready?” Rob was grinning, Cheshire cat-style. I was frowning, but I nodded along with the others.
He threw a switch and his machine produced ball lightning in the middle of the Tesla coil where it hovered. We watched it from behind a thick, eyesight-saving dark plastic screen. Ball lightning was a strange phenomenon and I’d never seen it before. Thankfully, it distracted me from my terror. The lightning was pretty! It moved in an odd way, bouncing around inside the machine, held in place by the electric and magnetic fields.
“Amazing,” said Jane.
“Wow!” echoed Anna and Mark.
Rob was in his element. He loved playing the showman and was wasted running samples for his boss in the dark, dank lab all alone. He would have done better as a Victorian magician or even a Victorian scientist, back when scientists could display their findings the same way magicians pulled off their tricks.
“And I haven’t tried this yet, but I think I might be able to start off cold fusion from here. I’ve set up a laser which I think will trigger it,” said Rob, grinning.
‘Uh-oh, now I have misgivings.�
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“You’ve not tested it yet? Don’t you think we should simulate it first? I could knock up a program for you in a week.”
‘I don’t like experimental science, that’s why I do theory. Untested science I’m OK with, but with Rob, I worry. Lasers can blind you, ball lightning can burn you and fusion doesn’t sound that fun either.’
Rob regarded me with a look that plainly showed he thought I was a lesser creature for suggesting such a thing. “In a week? This is cutting-edge experimental science here! How are you going to model it? You theorists can’t even solve the Schrödinger equation for three atoms, how will you cope with this?”
‘OK, he has a point and I look like an idiot.’
I couldn’t model it and plasma physics wasn’t really my field.
“Who knows what this will do, but there’s only one way to find out!” he exclaimed. A light was glinting in his eyes, a visionary light, a manic light.
I tried to sense everything around me, but the heightened senses had left me completely and I couldn’t feel anything outside of the normal.
‘That will teach me to rely on things like that.’
“Are you sure, Rob?” said Mark. “Maybe we should be careful about this.” It seemed that my misgivings hadn’t fallen on deaf ears.
“Careful? No one does great science by being careful!” Rob yelled. “Except maybe the cowardly theorists who only deal with ideas. Ideas can’t hurt you. Equations can’t hurt you. But can they reveal to you the hidden secrets of the universe? No!”
“Now hold on,” said Mark, with a sideways look at me, “that’s a bit strong…”
“Maybe you should calm down,” said Jane, no doubt worried I would soon be running from the room in tears, but I didn’t feel upset, just scared
‘After all, the experiment probably won’t work.’
“Perhaps Clarke is right,” said Anna.
I think the fact that everyone else agreed with me antagonised him.