In the Blood

by French, Jackie

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like me to come too?’ began Neil.

  ‘No. Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’d rather do this alone.’

  Chapter 45

  Theo sat at his desk. There was no sign of the Cat. I was grateful. This was going to be hard enough without its concentrated feline dislike.

  Theo stood up as I came in. He looked even older than the last time I had seen him. The wrinkles round his eyes shone white against the darker shadows.

  ‘Danielle,’ he said. ‘How good to see you.’ He sounded like he almost meant it.

  ‘Is it?’ I asked. ‘You know why I’m here.’

  Theo sat down heavily again and leant back in his chair. ‘Yes, I believe I do,’ he said. ‘But I wasn’t being polite. It is good to see you. You’re looking…happier. More at peace.’ He smiled, a real smile, even if thin and tired. ‘No, none of those quite fit what I mean. But I think things are better for you now.’

  ‘You may be right,’ I said noncommittally. I sat down opposite him and laid the papers on the table. ‘The medical records,’ I said, ‘of this community.’

  ‘Really.’ Theo gave them a single glance, then ignored them. ‘Were they useful?’

  ‘Very,’ I said.

  ‘I thought they would be,’ said Theo, ‘if anyone ever thought to call them up.’

  ‘Yes. You’re very protective of each other here at the community,’ I said slowly.

  Theo nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘That’s what a community is for. To look after each other. The maximum amount of care with the maximum possible freedom. I suppose if we had a motto that would be it.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen some Utopias in the last couple of days where that doesn’t seem to be the rule.’

  Theo shrugged. ‘Then they won’t last long,’ he said. ‘Why do you think humans have survived so long, when other hominids died out?’

  It seemed odd, sitting here talking anthropology when we both knew why I had come. But nonetheless I said, ‘Go on. Tell me.’

  ‘Because they cooperated with each other,’ said Theo simply. ‘It’s hardwired into us. As a species we help each other. And that means we survive.’

  ‘You may be right,’ I said. ‘I’m not a Truehuman, remember?’

  ‘Of course, you are,’ said Theo gently. ‘More human than most. What have you been doing the past few days except helping another human?’

  ‘So you can have a Proclaimed modification and still be human?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Theo simply. ‘Look at me.’

  I looked at him. ‘I also saw that child’s injuries,’ I said. ‘Do you still claim to be human after that?’

  ‘I didn’t hurt her,’ said Theo, even more gently. ‘You have to believe that, my dear.’

  ‘But you’re the vampire? It is you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m the vampire. But it isn’t as simple as that. Most things never are.’

  I pulled a cushion off the sofa and arranged it under my neck. ‘Just getting comfortable,’ I said. ‘Go on. Tell me why you’re a vampire but you don’t believe you hurt that child. Or do you just mean that because you’re a vampire you aren’t responsible for what you did?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Theo. ‘I don’t mean that at all. I am responsible. That boy Tam was responsible too. If you’re human, you have choice. We have to believe that or we’re just animals too.’

  ‘Then explain.’

  Theo pushed his chair back. ‘I don’t know where to start. At my birth, I suppose. No, my problem is not a side effect of a modification. It was a good theory, my dear. It just doesn’t happen to be the case.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘I was designed to be a vampire. I even have hydraulically operated fangs.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘They don’t protrude though. A good survival tactic. A vampire doesn’t want to be too obvious, not all the time at any rate. My designer obviously went to a lot of trouble. Humans aren’t always a very nice species. Sometimes we cooperate on the wrong things.

  ‘My owner wanted…well, I’m not sure what he wanted. Dracula, I suppose, a Prince of Darkness. Instead he got me, mild mannered with accountant tendencies. But also, of course, a taste for blood.’

  He looked up at me. ‘Not just a taste for blood actually. A need for it. I need a certain amount of human blood each week or I develop a form of pernicious anaemia. Not immediately fatal. But my joints swell. The pain is excruciating. I begin to have hallucinations.’ He stopped. ‘Well, enough about that. I can take it orally, true vampire style, or I can have a conventional transfusion, which is, of course, far more effective.’

  ‘And the method you prefer?’

  Theo hesitated. ‘Let me be honest,’ he said. ‘Part of me does prefer the clinical and detached method. The accountant side of me. But yes, I am truly a vampire. Part of me loves nothing more than to taste blood still hot and sweet from its owner.’

  I tried to control my shudder. I mustn’t have been successful because Theo shut his eyes. Then he opened them.

  ‘I grew up at the castle, as I suppose you guessed. I left when I was fourteen. I won’t go into my life there. It wasn’t a good life. But at least they were Citynet Linked. I had a Virtual life all my own, where I wasn’t a vampire, where I wasn’t ritually exhibited each full moon and expected to…’ he shrugged. ‘I won’t go into the details. Mostly though, I was ignored, an engineering failure. In some ways that was harder to bear than the other.

  ‘So I wandered, as teenagers do, from one Utopia to another. Most had Terminals. I was able to continue my studies.’

  ‘How did you feed?’

  ‘You mean how did I get my blood? In the true vampire tradition, the only difference being that I couldn’t hypnotise my victims to ignore me. But as long as I didn’t take too much, and only in what might be mistaken for the throes of passion, I could get away with it. And if I didn’t, if someone grew suspicious, I just moved on.

  ‘Then I met Elaine. I was seventeen. She was twenty-five, already the community MediTech, though her prac teacher was still alive then too.

  ‘I was careless. I liked the place. I stayed here too long. One of my victims went to Elaine, and Elaine came to talk to me.’ He smiled reminiscently. ‘She was the first person to see it simply as a medical problem, not as part of the horror of or the fascination with vampires.’

  I nodded at the papers on the desk. ‘So she gave you weekly transfusions.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘Twice a week actually. It meant ordering regular blood stock from the City, far more than we’d normally need, as you discovered. I admire you, my dear. It was all there in the databanks, but it took skill to discover it. At first she used her own credit. Then, later, when I took charge of the community accounts I was able to hide the expense under general medical requirements.’

  ‘And you gave up blood sucking?’

  Again, a faint smile. ‘More or less. What we do in the privacy of our bedchamber is no business of yours, my dear.’

  Again the shiver ran though me, but whether it was horror or unwilling fascination I couldn’t tell. ‘But Doris is my business.’

  ‘Ah yes. Doris.’ Theo shifted uncomfortably. ‘She came here because of me,’ he said flatly. ‘She’d found the records at the castle. She’d made a…let’s say, a hobby of vampires. I wasn’t the first she’d tracked down. Yes, there were others, just like me.’ He smiled. I tried to see which of his teeth might be the fangs, but they all seemed the same.

  ‘You know, it’s funny. She said all of us—all of us!—were much like me. You talked about unexpected side effects of modifications. Well, that’s what happened to us. A side effect of genetic vampirism seems to be a tendency to be meek, mild and hardworking.

  ‘But she didn’t give up hope. Not our Doris. She came here determined to tempt me…’

  ‘Oh, really, Theo,’ I said. ‘The woman tempted me, m’lud.’

  ‘It’s t
rue,’ he said, and I saw sincerity and something that might be pain in his eyes. ‘She arrived that afternoon. I was alone here. Elaine was away, the others had finished work for the day, it wasn’t music night or community vid. I told her where the guestrooms were. Doris asked me to come with her, she had to speak to me, she had a message for me in her pack. Well, really, my dear. I’m eighty-four and young and attractive men aren’t scarce—I took her at her word.

  ‘When I got there she smiled at me. She knew just what she was doing. I think she had done it many times before. She had a little pin thing in her hand. She told me she knew what I was, what I liked and then she ripped her wrist with the pin and then a vein at her throat.

  ‘There was blood everywhere. So much blood…’ For the first time, his voice trailed away. ‘I was going to say, “I’m only human”,’ he said. ‘But, of course, I’m not, am I?’

  ‘Perhaps you are, Theo,’ I said, more gently than I had intended.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘I fed. And she loved it. But then she grew weaker. It had been such a long time for me and she was…she was young and very beautiful and it brought back memories I thought I’d lost, and the memory was perhaps the most powerful urge of all.

  ‘She became scared, then terrified. She hadn’t intended me to kill her. Or perhaps she had and found that death wasn’t the great thrill that she thought.

  ‘I came to my senses too. There was blood everywhere. She was floating in and out of consciousness.

  ‘I did the only thing I could think of doing. I used the dikdik she’d come in. I rode behind her, holding her, to your place and left her there. I knew you took a walk in the evenings. I hoped…I was sure…you’d find her and that you’d help.

  ‘Then I abandoned the dikdik and walked back here…’

  He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘She wasn’t a nice girl, my dear. But of course that doesn’t excuse what I did to her. It doesn’t excuse anything at all. I was the adult and in most ways she was still very much a child. Nineteen perhaps, but still with a child’s habit of saying, “I want!”, without thinking the consequences through.’

  ‘Or maybe,’ I said slowly, ‘she half believed she was still in Virtual, where you can flash back to Reality and all the pain has gone away.’

  Theo shrugged.

  ‘Does Elaine know?’ I asked. ‘She must, mustn’t she.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Theo. ‘She knows.’

  ‘What does she think about it?’

  Theo shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Yes, I do. She is disgusted. Horrified. She can’t stand me to touch her, not yet. Perhaps in the months to come, perhaps one day…but she says she is still my wife and she loves me.’

  What goes on in someone else’s bedchamber is no concern of mine. His words echoed in my head. Or were they his words? I had heard too much. I was too confused to work it out.

  ‘What now?’ asked Theo gently.

  I looked up. ‘I should ask you that question,’ I said.

  ‘Me? It’s not up to me, is it? I can assure you it will never happen again.’ He smiled briefly. ‘I, Theo, do solemnly swear I will never suck another child’s life blood.’ The tears were running down his cheeks.

  I stood up and moved around the desk and put my arms around him. ‘Theo, don’t. Please don’t.’

  ‘I am so ashamed,’ he whispered. ‘It’s so inadequate isn’t it? I am so very much ashamed.’

  ‘I’m not going to give this information to anyone,’ I promised. ‘I’m going to let Michael think that Tam was the vampire.’ And if he thinks I’m hiding something, I thought, well, Michael owes me, and he knows it. Besides, he trusts me too.

  ‘I do trust you, Theo,’ I said softly. And, anyway, I thought, you’ve several guardians around you now, including me. And you’re eighty-four. Eighty-four-year-old vampires grow less and less a threat. Unless they have eternal life, of course, and even regeneration is impossible for you.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Theo.

  I wanted to kiss his cheek but I found I couldn’t do it. Like Elaine, perhaps one day, when the memory of Doris had faded…

  ‘Take care, Theo,’ I said, using the words that Michael had used to me.

  I left him sitting at his desk, the tears still on his cheeks, and went out into the sunlight.

  Chapter 46

  Neil was inspecting a tree leaf. He turned as I approached.

  ‘What are you looking for? Two-spotted mites, woolly aphids…’

  He grinned, a little warily. ‘Trace-element deficiencies. It’s automatic.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Neil stepped closer to me. ‘You saw Theo?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I told him what I had told Theo. ‘You knew, didn’t you?’

  ‘I guessed.’ He took my hand and we began to walk up the track.

  ‘Did you know all along?’

  ‘No,’ he frowned. ‘I should have. But it’s not something you think to look for.’

  ‘When did you guess?’

  ‘I began to suspect at the first clinic. I don’t know…something about the smell, echoes of my childhood, things I didn’t understand then, that suddenly fell into place. Later at the castle—Theo has never said much about his childhood. But there were bits, and the bits fitted what we saw, and more bits fell into place. He’d even mentioned a Big Veronica and a ModPlod called Banana once or twice. I should have told you when I first suspected it. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘I was too happy,’ said Neil simply.

  I looked at him, all blond and big-boned there in the leaf dappled sunlight. It suddenly struck me that Neil had a great talent for happiness.

  ‘Woof,’ said Neil.

  I started. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said “woof”. When you get that look on your face it’s as though I’m a pet dog you’re wondering whether to pat or tell, “Go home, boy!”’

  We had nothing in common of course. Not our backgrounds, not our passions. Except sex, of course. And possibly the life we’d both like to lead from here would be the same.

  Simple is not the same as stupid. You can be innocent as well as wise.

  I grinned at him, my funny silly saviour. ‘Let’s go home, boy!’

  It was a good house that they had given me. And we were happy.

  About the Author

  Jackie French’s writing career spans ten years, 32 wombats, 80 books for kids and adults, seven languages, various awards, assorted ‘Burke’s Backyard’ segments in a variety of disguises, radio shows, newspaper and magazine columns, theories of pest and weed ecology and 27 shredded back doormats. The doormats are the victims of the wombats who require constant appeasement in the form of carrots, rolled oats and wombat nuts, which is one of the reasons for her prolific output: it pays the carrot bills.

  Her critically acclaimed book, Hitler’s Daughter, won the Children’s Book Council Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers in 2000.

  ‘It is a mark of French’s genius that she can weave deep moral issues into an engrossing, fast moving story.’ Stephen Matthews, Canberra Times

  Other Books By Jackie French

  Fiction

  The Roo that Won the Melbourne Cup • Rain Stones

  Walking the Boundaries • The Boy Who Had Wings

  Somewhere Around the Corner

  Annie’s Pouch • Alien Games • The Secret Beach

  Mermaids • Mind’s Eye • A Wombat Named Bosco

  Summerland • Beyond the Boundaries

  The Warrior – the Story of a Wombat

  The Book of Unicorns • Dancing with Ben Hall

  Soldier on the Hill • Daughter of the Regiment

  Stories to Eat with a Banana • Tajore Arkle

  Hitler’s Daughter • Missing You, Love Sara

  Stories to Eat with a Watermelon • Lady Dance

  Stories to Eat with a Blood Plum

  Non-fiction

>   How the Aliens from Alpha Centauri Invaded My

  Maths Class and Turned Me Into a Writer…

  How to Guzzle Your Garden • Book of Challenges

  Stamp Stomp Womp & Other Interesting Ways to Kill Pests

  Seasons of Content • The Best of Jackie French

  Earthly Delights

  Visit Jackie’s website

  www.jackiefrench.com

  Copyright

  Angus&Robertson

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia

  First published in Australia in 2001

  This edition published in 2011

  by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

  ABN 36 009 913 517

  A member of the HarperCollinsPublishers (Australia) Pty Limited Group

  http://www.harpercollins.com.au

  Copyright © Jackie French 2001

  The right of Jackie French to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

  This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  HarperCollinsPublishers

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  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  French, Jackie.