In the Blood

by French, Jackie

  ‘Danielle,’ said Elaine. Her face was white. I realised that even though she was a MediTech she was probably no more experienced in violent death than I was, and possibly even less able to cope with it. It had been Elaine’s training, or lack of it, after all, that had failed to keep the girl alive.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said numbly. ‘You did everything you could. You…we all tried.’

  ‘I’ll call Johnstone,’ said Elaine. ‘He makes our coffins. He and his boys will come up and fetch her, and take her down to the Hall. You’d better come down with us too. You don’t want to be alone here now.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘We’ve a spare room,’ said Elaine. ‘Really, you shouldn’t be alone.’ She sounded desperately tired suddenly, as though she couldn’t bear the weight of even the air around her any more.

  ‘I meant, no, please don’t call Johnstone and his boys,’ I said. ‘She should stay here tonight.’ I tried to gather my thoughts together. ‘She’s had a long journey. Just let her rest here a little while. Don’t move her yet.’

  Elaine nodded, as though too exhausted to argue. There was sweat on her forehead, and her lips suddenly looked as pale as the girl’s.

  ‘But you’ll come with us?’ urged Neil.

  I shook my head. ‘I want to stay with her. I’ll come over to you in the morning.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Neil shook his head. ‘I don’t like the thought of you staying here alone. How about I stay here with you?’

  ‘No!’ I said more sharply than I meant to. ‘No, I’m all right here. You said yourself that whoever did this is kloms away. No one will hurt me here.’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant,’ began Neil.

  Elaine touched his arm. ‘Neil, I need to get home. Please. Danielle is right. She’ll be fine here by herself tonight.’

  I watched them walk down the path together, Elaine almost staggering with weariness, Neil carrying the equipment, still glancing back dubiously at me, as though hoping I might suddenly call out, ‘No! Take me with you!’ or ‘Stay with me! Please! I’ve changed my mind.’

  I didn’t say anything. I stood and waved as they left. I watched the floater merge with the darkness and then I went inside and locked the door, then locked the back door and all the windows.

  Chapter 12

  No murderer arrived that night. No monster came to suck my blood. I brought my pillows down from upstairs, found more sheets and thermals in a cupboard and made myself a rough bed on the floor by the sofa. I think I even slept, or at least dozed. A scratching at the door woke me a short time before dawn.

  I opened the door slowly, ready to scream or run. It was the Wombat.

  He didn’t say anything. He simply brushed past me, padded into the living room and sniffed deeply, as though his nose could tell him what had happened here, as perhaps it could.

  He blinked at me. ‘Wombat stay,’ he said. His articulation was clearer than I’d ever heard it. ‘Stay here,’ he repeated. He clambered up onto an armchair, curled up so his head was on the armrest and shut his eyes against the light.

  He evidently intended to keep me company. I felt tears prick my eyes again. He knew that there had been violence and pain and death and blood. I was his friend and so he’d stay with me.

  I didn’t know what to do. So I just said, ‘Thank you.’ He didn’t respond. Perhaps he was asleep or just felt no need to answer.

  The door was still open. I left it open, in case he wanted to go out. If there was a murderer out there a locked door wouldn’t keep him away, not with a dozen windows with their fragile panes of glass.

  I turned off the light and lay down again. I slept better this time, waking only when the Wombat padded out again, back to his holehouse for daylight.

  I got up, took my makeshift bed upstairs, and showered, ate some toast and went out.

  Chapter 13

  Faith Hope and Charity looked as deserted as it had the last time I had seen it. The rectangles of orchards, the angles of roads and fences were all too neat against the irregularities of trees and hills, as though the inhabitants had straightened up the world then moved on.

  This time though the emptiness scared me, as though a monster had been at work here too, leaving the victims lifeless in the sheds and under trees.

  I tried to tell myself that it was nonsense, that all farms must look like this, the inhabitants at work hidden by the trees or in the sheds, then suddenly a group came out of one of the far-off sheds, gesturing and obviously debating some subject of keen interest. They walked into the nearest orchard, still gesturing, and I continued down the hill and up to the main building.

  Theo was at his desk in his office when I arrived, a Terminal glowing at his fingertips, the Cat coiled again on the tatty sofa. It uncurled itself as I entered, glared at me, then pranced past my knees into the corridor, its tail erect and waving slightly at the tip.

  ‘She doesn’t like me,’ I said.

  Theo shrugged, not denying it. He looked into my face.

  I sat down. The sofa was warm from the Cat’s body.

  ‘I’m sorry about the girl’s death.’ He looked as though he might come round the desk to me, then changed his mind.

  ‘Don’t be. You all did everything you could.’

  ‘Did we? You still had to take the brunt of it.’

  ‘She landed on my doorstep. She was my responsibility.’

  Theo gazed at me for a moment. ‘Really? Why?’

  I frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What was it you said a few weeks ago? I’m Forest, not a Tree. She wasn’t one of your kind, but you helped her.’

  I stared at him. ‘It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.’

  Theo smiled slightly. ‘I’m glad you understand that.’ He switched off his Terminal. ‘Well, it’s over then. Almost over. If you’d like…if you have no objection, she can be buried here.’

  ‘Thank you. I’d like that. She…I mean it makes no difference, but I’d hate to see her buried alone now. At least here she’ll be with other people.’

  Theo nodded. ‘I’ll send a party over to pick her up this afternoon. We usually have a ceremony…’

  ‘Whatever. It doesn’t matter. As long as there’s something. I take it no one knows who she might be?’

  Theo blinked at his Terminal before he spoke again; the shivering Web shut off. ‘No. Elaine and Neil have asked everybody. Neil and I have been on the Net all morning. No one near here saw a girl of that description, or any strange girl for that matter. We’re pretty much off the beaten track for wanderers here.’

  ‘So Elaine told me. I just wish…I hate the idea of her being buried without a name.’

  ‘Do names really matter? A label, that’s all.’ He glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘It’s nearly lunchtime. Will you join us? You really shouldn’t be alone for a while.’

  ‘No, wait…’

  He raised an eyebrow at the urgency in my voice. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It can’t just end here. We can’t just leave it at that.’

  ‘But my dear, what else can we do? You did all you could to save her…’

  ‘But we don’t know how she died! We don’t know who killed her!’

  ‘Someone far away from here, at any rate,’ said Theo gently.

  ‘No. That’s not good enough. Theo, listen, please. It could be important…’

  He sat down again, the bony hands folded on the desk. ‘Go on.’

  I tried to collect my thoughts. ‘She didn’t just die because she had been slashed across the throat and wrist.’

  ‘But Elaine told me—’

  ‘They were the injuries, yes. But did Elaine also tell you that the girl said someone had sucked her blood?’

  ‘What?’ he frowned at me. ‘Good God. No, she certainly didn’t tell me that. You’re not serious. Elaine said the girl was incoherent.’

  ‘I’m very serious. And no, I’m not mistaken. I may not be a doctor but don’t forget I do have so
me knowledge.’

  ‘I don’t forget, my dear,’ Theo said gently.

  For some reason tears stung my eyes. I ignored them. ‘The injuries just weren’t enough to lose all that blood. They were just thin cuts. Small ones. When I found her she was hardly bleeding at all…and she was so insistent too. She kept repeating it: “He sucked my blood.” Despite the warmth of the sofa, I shivered.

  ‘But Elaine said she was only semi-conscious,’ said Theo slowly.

  ‘Most of the time. Never properly conscious…’ My voice shook, and I bit my lip. ‘I think she’d been imprisoned somewhere and broke free.’

  ‘Where? Near here?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. She came on a dikdik. I looked at the fuel cell. It was almost discharged. Of course it might have been almost empty when she took it. But she might have come some distance too.’

  ‘What’s the range on those things?’

  ‘On that model five hundred kilometres, standard load. Maybe more. She wasn’t…she wasn’t very heavy.’

  ‘My dear, that’s a large radius to search. And you’ve only got the ramblings of a delirious child to go by. We’ll report her death to the City, certainly. But after that…well, if a crime has been committed, the authorities will deal with it.’

  ‘But don’t you see? They won’t! What’s another death in the Outlands? They won’t see why it’s important.’

  ‘Why is it important?’ His voice was very soft.

  ‘It’s not the fact that she was killed—it’s the WAY she was killed. Like a vampire.’

  Theo made a choked sound. ‘Vampires? My dear girl, you must be joking. In this day and age—’

  ‘You don’t understand!’ I was nearly shouting now. ‘It’s happened before.’

  ‘Vampires?’

  ‘Not vampires—not the sort that don’t reflect in mirrors, that can’t stand garlic and all the rest of it. But vampirism. Modern day vampirism.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, sitting back and watching me carefully.

  ‘I came across a reference a few months before…before I came here. I was doing a vampire Reality. I know that sounds hackneyed, but this wouldn’t have been. Did you know that just about every culture has a vampire legend? The European legend is of a human–bat vampire, but in Africa they have vampire dogs, and in South America vampire seals.

  ‘Anyway, I scanned every reference I could find. It’s what I always do when I start a subject. It doesn’t…it didn’t take long, not the way I was able to do it. And then Mel—she was Forest too—offered to get me any recent references. Mel was Genetics B. She had access to databanks that I didn’t.

  ‘I didn’t expect to find anything on vampires as such. As you said, not in this day and age. But I thought I might find references to fear of vampires. It’s something that seems to go very deep in the human psyche. If I could pin down what modern audiences found fearsome or fascinating about the vampire legend, it would help me to—well, that doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘I take it that you did find a modern vampire?’ Theo’s voice held carefully suspended disbelief.

  ‘Not exactly. I came across a modification trialled about thirty years ago. It was meant to increase blood density, be efficient in its utilisation of haemoglobin…the details don’t matter. The recipients would have greater physical stamina, greater resistance to disease, cope with high altitudes. It was a good idea but…but there were unexpected side effects.’ I tried to stop the bitterness in my voice. ‘There sometimes are.’

  ‘There sometimes are,’ Theo echoed. ‘Go on, my dear.’

  ‘It became apparent when one of the first children to be modified was three or four years old. It was at creche—a child fell and cut her knee. Just one of those common childish accidents. But what happened next wasn’t common at all.

  ‘Another child, the modified child, was curious. The report said he felt the blood with his finger. Then he smelt it, he put his finger to his mouth. Then he pressed his lips to the cut and began to suck…

  ‘The creche mother separated them, of course. It was horrible, but kids do perverse things sometimes, just to see what will happen if they do. Curiosity, innocence, nothing more was thought of it. It was only two years later, when the same child was five or six years old, that the first incident was remembered.’

  ‘The first incident?’

  I nodded. ‘This time a child was found drained…’ I swallowed. ‘Drained of blood. His throat had been cut and…’ I found I couldn’t go on.

  Theo’s voice rescued me, as calm as if we were discussing the apple harvest.

  ‘I take it the modified child was responsible?’

  ‘Yes. Of course, it might have been just an aberration, nothing to do with the child’s modification at all. But then other children with the same modification showed the same symptoms. The same craving for blood, the same absence of conscience in acquiring it.’

  ‘It sounds a little…incredible,’ he said softly. ‘I’m eighty-four and I don’t remember hearing anything about it.’

  ‘It wasn’t publicised. It’s in the records, but not the public records. You’d need to have access.’

  ‘What happened to the children?’

  ‘You can’t change a modification like that. The process was stopped at once, of course. The affected children were institutionalised. I suppose they still are.’

  ‘But you think one of them might have escaped?’

  ‘It fits doesn’t it? But that’s not what’s worrying me—not what’s really worrying me.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Modifications have side effects. What if it’s happened again with another modification?’

  He shook his head. ‘It still seems too incredible. Vampirism?’

  ‘It’s not incredible at all. It has happened many times, even before humans started tinkering with DNA. It’s almost as though humans have a…basic tendency towards vampirism, a recessive tendency if you like.’

  ‘You mean something more than folklore?’

  I shut my eyes. I always found information retrieval easier with my eyes shut, and building data patterns too. The others used to laugh at me. ‘Locking herself in the machine,’ Michael used to say. And then Mel would…

  I forced myself into the present, my mind to the data. ‘France, 1826. An outbreak of what was thought to be smallpox. The survivors weren’t scarred, as usually happens after a smallpox outbreak. But the disease did have other long-term effects. Daylight made the survivors nauseous. According to chroniclers of the time, the entire surviving village “became ghouls of the night” tearing both children and animals apart for their blood.’

  ‘Dear God,’ said Theo. ‘What…what happened to the village?’

  ‘There is no record of it after 1827. I would imagine either the authorities—or their neighbours—took action. Do you want to hear more?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Theo quietly.

  ‘Wassingham, England, 1782, a similar epidemic, a similar outcome. The army had to be called in. A village in Denmark the same century. Another possible incident recorded in fourth century BC Athens, although the date of the actual event is probably much earlier. A village near Athens was haunted by the survivors of a strange disease. But this time they drank horse blood, not human.

  ‘More? Victorian London: police records of a mysterious assailant who left his victims drained of blood. It was probably one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.’

  Theo looked at me with amazement. ‘So much detail?’

  I sighed. ‘If I’ve scanned something, I remember it. And I was able to scan very fast indeed. The contents of an average databank would take maybe three days.’

  ‘But to remember it!’

  I shrugged. ‘I’m young. Perhaps there would have come a time when my brain simply filled up. Or I became lost in the sheer complexity of data. We’ll never know, will we?’

  Theo bit his lip, then returned to the matter in hand.

  ‘Surely…surely the rec
ords you’ve quoted are dubious. Might have been misinterpreted.’

  My mind latched on to data again. ‘The best documented vampire event was in 1947 in East Germany. Over three hundred people in a small rural area were affected. There was a slight fever, lasting for three to four days, and then a loss of consciousness. When the victims revived, several hours later, they had to be restrained with ropes or chains, and even then made every effort to tear out the throats of any who came near.’

  ‘Good God,’ said Theo. ‘What happened to the poor people?’

  ‘The vampires or their victims? The victims almost invariably died of blood loss. The few cases that survived appeared to have caught the virus, if virus it was. In each case it appears that it was transmitted by bodily fluids: an almost one hundred percent transmission from blood and saliva and sexual intercourse.’

  ‘How can you possibly know?’

  ‘If one spouse was infected, the other almost certainly became ill too. Their children, however, had only the same rate of infection as the rest of the district. None of the medical or security teams became infected, apart from one orderly who admitted having intercourse with a local girl four days before fever symptoms appeared.

  ‘In the East German incident the fate of those infected isn’t recorded. There are unsubstantiated accounts, though, of work on a “vampire virus” by a defecting Russian scientist shortly before the break-up of the USSR. No supporting evidence was ever found.’

  ‘So you think the same virus was involved each time?’

  ‘No. That’s just the point. While the symptoms in the European villages between about 1600 and 1850 are similar, the other accounts give a picture of quite different diseases. There are others, Theo…a five-year period in New York, beginning in 1972 when—’

  He held up a hand. ‘No. Enough.’

  ‘All right then. No, I’m sure a different virus was involved each time. Why? Because each time a relatively inbred village was involved and the virus didn’t spread beyond it. It’s as though vampirism is a rare but recurrent form of human behaviour, triggered by various viruses at various times. Not necessarily the classic Dracula who can turn into a bat perhaps, or the South American sealwomen who drink from sailors’ throats. But over and over there are cases of humans who have the taste—no, the desperate need, for blood.’