by E M Gale
He opened the door and grinned at me like Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Jekyll or any other crazed scientist from a nineteenth-century Gothic horror. He had his lab coat on to help him look the part.
“I’ve been expecting you, Clarke,” he said portentously. Despite the fact that I got the feeling he’d practised the line and prepared the effect, I still had to work to repress a shudder. Behind him, his office was full of standard office equipment like a computer and a desk, along with scary medical paraphernalia that I couldn’t identify.
He stepped back into the room, away from the door and looked at me, grinning in a disturbingly eager manner. I hesitated and wondered yet again if there was any way I could get out of this. I’d already been doing my best to avoid it, but apparently I had to have a medical checkup like everyone else on the ship.
“So,” said Cleckley, grinning, “it’s true that you can’t enter a private room without an invitation then?”
“What?”
He smiled smugly. “Now I know for definite that vampires are not able to enter without an invitation.”
“You what?”
‘To be honest, I’ve not really tested it, but I don’t feel like there’s anything stopping me from entering. I’m pretty sure I can just step forward into the room if I want to. Anyway, if it is true, given how easy it is to test, wouldn’t it have been in the scientific papers?’
I was about to step through to prove it, then I paused.
‘If I can enter normally, it might be to my advantage that no-one knows that. Hmm, what to do?’
“Please come in,” said Cleckley, slowly and carefully enunciating the words as he waved his hand at the room.
‘Oh, well, I guess I won’t have to make that choice then. But, to be honest, I still don’t want to go in.’
“Come on, now, I won’t bite,” Cleckley said impatiently. I grinned at him, went in and sat in the chair that was placed in front of his desk for me. The desk was covered in little paper pads and plastic toys advertising nanotechnologies and rubber piping.
‘Urgh.’
“OK… Clarke,” said Cleckley as he settled himself into his chair. He grinned and picked up a lab book and pen.
“Yes?” I was gripping the arms of my chair.
“Age?”
“Um…”
‘This is a problem. If I tell him my age and he finds out about my future self meeting the major in the past, that may raise a few unhappy questions… but can I really pretend to be over two hundred years old?’ He looked sharply at me.
“It’s not polite to ask a woman her age.”
He frowned. “Oh, for goodness’ sake, remove that stick from up your arse!”
I was momentarily offended and then I laughed. “So tell me, what do you want to do with me?”
“Well”–he was leaning forward, looking at me over the top of his glasses–“you’re obviously not a normal vampire.”
‘Hmm, true.’
“I want to find out what sort of vampire you are.”
‘Oh?’
“Why’s that then?”
“You appear to be a living, breathing member of the undead.”
I stiffened at his choice of words. “I’m not d–”
“Finding you is an amazing discovery. I could get the Nobel Prize for this!”
‘Oh, no, not another one. I really need to stay away from wannabe Nobel Laureates. At least Rob’s discovery doesn’t involve cutting me up.’
“Well”–I got up at this point, scraping the chair back on the floor– “good for you. Have a nice day.”
“Wait, Clarke, please sit down.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to be anybody’s science project.”
“I won’t hurt you. Really, I won’t.” He looked guileless.
“Yeah, right. I’m sick of people only thinking about themselves and their chance at a Nobel Prize!”
“That happens to you a lot, does it?”
“You’d be surprised,” I said darkly.
He sighed and leaned back in to his chair. “OK, I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Please, sit down.” He gestured at my chair.
I tilted my head to the side and regarded him cautiously.
“I’ll just ask you some questions, do a few simple tests.” He caught my look of fear at that. “Taking your pulse, for example, nothing to be alarmed about. Don’t worry.”
I sat down. I did need his help.
“I would have thought that you would be more understanding, having been a scientist yourself in life.”
‘What? How the hell does he know that?’
He noticed my confusion. “Assuming that you are that Clarke?”
‘Uh-oh.’
“Which Clarke are you talking about?” I asked warily.
“Well, I didn’t know who you were, so I spoke to the major. I’m not big on military history”–he smiled self-deprecatingly–“but you do have a doctorate in theoretical physics, don’t you?”
‘Oh… so I go back to when I came from and for some reason finish that damned PhD. Why do I bother?’
“Hmm. You want I should solve some differential equations for you?” I asked.
He chuckled. “If you did, I wouldn’t know if you’d solved them or not.”
‘This is interesting. So Cleckley knows I am a physicist.’
“What else do you know about me?” I asked curiously.
“Nothing interesting.” He shrugged. “You did a PhD, became an academic, then were outed as a vampire at the start of the first Orc-Vampire War. There’s nothing about how you became a vampire and why you have a pulse. Vampires aren’t supposed to, you know.”
‘Huh, ’nothing interesting’? He’s telling me my future, it is interesting to me. Although none of that tells me anything new, other than I somehow go back to the time we came from and then go on with my life. Unless I never go back, but the universe is strange and time travel results in two of me existing. That is always possible. I think.’
At this point in my musing he reached over and took my wrist in his hand.
“Hmm, warm,” he commented. I stared at him. He counted, looking off into the middle distance. After about a minute he announced: “Fifty-five beats per minute. It’s low, but not outside the realm of normal for a human.”
“Oh.” I looked at my wrist.
‘Does that mean I am a human then?’
“Is that good or bad?” I looked up at him.
He shrugged. “Do you feel sick or unwell?”
I thought for a moment.
‘I feel pretty damn good, actually. Other than being freaked out by being in a doctor’s office, of course.’
“I feel fine.”
“Well then”–he smiled, spreading his hands on the table– “if you feel fine, you probably are. Even the undead have instincts.”
I raised my eyebrows. “That’s your esteemed medical opinion? After ten years of schooling, that’s the best you can do?”
He grinned at that, but ignored the slight. “OK, now I’m going to take your blood pressure.” He pulled out one of those machines with the pumps. I would have thought that they would have invented a better way to do this in two hundred years.
“I hate those machines.”
Cleckley leaned forward. “Really? Why?”
“Well, y’know, the pump will probably break my weak vampiric body, ripping my arm off, spewing blood all over the place.” I shook my head, affecting a faint horror on my face. “Nasty.”
Cleckley’s eyes went wide.
‘OK, it probably won’t do that at all. I saw that in a movie, and it was a zombie movie too, not even a vampire movie.’
“OK, then.” He sounded disturbed as he put the pump down.
“It’s not nice,” I said.
“We won’t do that, I think.” He leaned back in his chair and regarded me. I smiled. “I want to take a blood sample.”
“No,” I said, still smiling.
He di
dn’t look that surprised, but he endeavoured with the subject. He leaned forward, causing the chair to creak. “I want to see how vampiric you are. Perhaps your blood is some sort of mix.”
I stopped smiling. “No.”
“What if you have an accident? We’d need to know which type of blood to give you.”
‘Oh, they still do transfusions in the future?’
“From my experience–”
‘which is not very wide anyway,’
“–any type of blood is good.” I grinned.
He looked perturbed.
‘Why do my grins freak people out?’
I matched his posture and leaned forward, perching on the edge of my plastic chair. “Look, Cleckley, I’m grateful to you for the job and everything, that’s why I agreed to go through this medical checkup–”
He interrupted me: “Actually you’ve done everything you could this last month to get out of it.”
‘True.’
“OK, so I’m not stupid.” I lifted my index finger up. “However, I am co-operating, but there are boundaries.”
“So… no blood test. But do you mind if I ask why?”
‘Hmm, well…’
“If you have my blood, then you can create vampires without my permission.”
‘I think. I’ve not exactly tested that or anything. In fact, can I make vampires? Maybe I can’t if I’m only a half-vampire?’
He looked thoughtful at this. “I have no intention of doing that.”
‘Yeah, right.’
“Too big a risk.”
He sighed. “Right then. Next: reflexes.”
He tested them and seemed quite impressed. It seemed I could move faster than a normal human. I did some weight-lifting as well and apparently I was in the upper range of strength for a normal human woman; I didn’t seem to have any amazing strength. After those non-invasive tests, I sat back at the desk. Cleckley grinned at me.
“OK, another test.” He opened a drawer, took out a jar and put it on the desk. It contained blood, and not medical issue blood either, it was lumpy and congealing.
‘Yuk.’
I wrinkled my nose at it.
He gestured at the jar. “Genuine cow blood. Without anti-coagulants.”
“I can see, that’s why it’s lumpy. Lovely.”
He smiled. I wondered if he was picking up on my distaste. He got up and removed a tube, aerator and a small gas cylinder marked ‘NO’ from one of the cupboards.
“Let me guess, you want me to drink this”–I pointed at the vile bottle–“before and after you aerate it with nitrous oxide, so you can test whether vampires need fresh blood and whether charging it with nitrous oxide will turn old blood fresh?”
He looked disappointed. “How did you guess my experiment?”
“Tell me, is transfusion blood aerated with nitrous oxide before transfusion?”
“Yes, of course, it’s standard practice.”
‘Ah, it was experimental in the 2000’s.’
He looked confused. “You seem to know some medicine,” he commented, sitting back in his chair.
“No… not really. I didn’t like human biology; it was too soft and squidgy and you could never get a correct answer, that’s why I did physics instead.”
He raised his eyebrows at the phrase ‘human biology’, but I didn’t know why. Still, I was curious. The blood looked disgusting. I picked up the bottle, swirled it round a bit, looking at the clots floating in a sickening way. I unscrewed the cap and let the scent reach me.
‘Hmm. Blood, decay, viscera, rotting.’
It reminded me of biology dissections I’d done. I didn’t find the smell particularly unpleasant, I’d never freaked out at the smell of blood. Then again I didn’t find the smell appetising either. I certainly didn’t want to drink it. I wondered how long it had sat there rotting in that bottle. Somehow I could tell from the smell that it wasn’t human blood. And on top of all that, it was cold.
‘Yuk.’
I put the lid back on, wrinkling my nose up.
“You don’t want to drink it?” Cleckley asked.
“Nah, not my thing.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Blood’s not your thing?”
I laughed at that. “That would make me rather odd, wouldn’t it? No, I’m not keen on cold, rotting cow’s blood. Bleurgh.”
“Don’t you need to drink blood to live?”
‘Well, that is an interesting question. I don’t seem to need it, but I haven’t really gone that long without it so far.’
“To live maybe, not to survive, I think.”
“You can eat and drink? Normally?”
“Yeah.”
He looked confused.
“You’ve seen me drink.”
“So why do you drink blood?”
‘Have I at any point said that I do? I have the teeth, but that doesn’t mean I use them.’
“Who says I do?” I said, eyeing him sidelong.
“Clarke, I spoke to Richard,” he said with a sigh in his voice.
‘Richard? Oh, Hemingway, the major. Ah, Hemingway’s not secretive, then. So much for protecting a lady’s honour, but then again I guess I’m no lady.’
I smirked a little at that.
“So… why do you drink it?” asked Cleckley.
“For fun?” I suggested with a shrug. “It is fun.”
“But there must be some biological reason.”
‘Well, he has a point there.’
“Probably, but I don’t know what it is. Maybe you’re right, I’m some sort of half-caste for whatever reason and the blood-drinking is how vampires eat. Perhaps I do it because I’m half vampire, but maybe I don’t need to because I can eat. I don’t feel hungry for it, you see, it’s more of a sex thing than a food thing.”
Cleckley looked surprised. “Wow, so you can communicate when you choose to,” he said.
“No need for sarcasm.”
He grinned at that. “OK, try this.” He put a plastic bag of blood on the table. It looked exactly like the blood transfusion bags I’d seen on TV, so I guessed that that was exactly what it was.
I picked up the bag and sloshed it around; this blood wasn’t lumpy.
“Transfusion blood, complete with anti-coagulants. You can drink it if you want.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Why? Don’t you need this stuff?”
“Yes, of course, but you can have that bag in the interests of science.”
That seemed an odd thing to say, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted the blood yet or not. I sloshed it around. I was fascinated. It wasn’t something I saw very often, even if I did drink it. I carefully unscrewed the cap at the top. Cleckley looked like he was about to stop me. I knew that this wasn’t the way you were supposed to use the bag. I took a sniff, then another sniff. This was nice. It still smelt like blood, but less like the rotting cow’s blood and more like fresh blood.
I liked it and wanted to drink it.
“A-ha!” yelled Cleckley, leaping across the desk to force my head back and open my mouth. I was careful not to spill the blood.
“Gah! Gwhat geh ghell gyou gdoing?” I asked, with some difficulty since his hands were in my mouth.
‘Ah, that’s it, he wanted to see my teeth. I suppose that he doesn’t know that I don’t need to be given blood to make my canines grow.’
“Ah, they’re retractable,” he said.
“Gargh’ll bite gyou,” I gurgled.
“Can you push them back?” Cleckley wondered aloud, pushing at one of my canines, which was dumb, as he ended up cutting his thumb on it. The taste of his blood flooded my mouth, tempting me to bite down.
He withdrew his hands and looked at his thumb in horror. I tongued my canines. I could have sworn that they felt wobbly, but I thought that was my imagination. I was about as keen on dentists as I was on doctors and, weirdly enough, hairdressers. They always wanted to cut annoying layers or fringes into my long, curly hair, and the one time I’d relented I’d e
nded up looking like a poodle.
“Your dentistry skills lack a certain something,” I commented.
Cleckley was swabbing something that smelt like a solvent on his thumb.
‘Honestly, it’s a tiny cut. Oh, I guess he’s worried he’ll become a vampire.’
I laughed. He looked at me in horror, which made me laugh more.
“Cleckley, you’re fine. You’ve not caught anything like vampirism or zombieism or whatever.” I screwed the cap back on the transfusion blood. I looked at the pipe thing that came out of the other end. I knew it was for attaching the blood to an I.V. line, but for some reason I thought it looked like a straw.
“I won’t become a vampire then?” asked Cleckley, looking pale.
I looked at the I.V. line attachment in puzzlement.
‘How do I wrap my teeth around that? I suppose I could put the end in my mouth and suck, but then I’d end up cutting my lips on my teeth. Hmm.’
“No,” I replied to Cleckley, still looking at the blood.
I ran my tongue over the outside of my teeth, considering. I wanted to drink it. I lifted the bag up to my mouth, puncturing it with my teeth and squeezing the blood into my mouth. It was nice, not quite as nice as drinking it from someone–for starters it was cold–but I liked the flavour.
I finished the blood and was thinking about opening up the bag up to lick out the inside when I looked up at Cleckley. He looked midway between fascinated horror and sick to his stomach.
‘Oops.’
I grinned at him, purposefully not retracting my teeth. “This stuff’s OK.”
“Right…” said Cleckley, still looking worried. “So you really are a vampire?”
I was confused.
‘Did he not believe it until then?’
“Or a half-vampire, a living vampire,” he mused. I raised my eyebrows. He smelt slightly scared.
‘Hmmm, maybe it’s time to do the experiment that most interests me, before he totally freaks out and orders me out of his office.’
I leaned forward, closer to him. He leaned back.
‘Careful, Clarke, don’t scare him!’
“Cleckley,” I said in a serious tone of voice, “do you want to… hurt me? Kill me?”
“No! I told you that.”
“I mean, I am an unnatural member of the und… Ah, y’know…” I finished weakly, waving my hand around the word ‘undead’.