Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  It was what there was. It was life.

  I didn't believe in vampires, then.

  3

  At first, naturally enough, I thought Maldureve was a phantom of my own imagination. Even when I became convinced that he wasn't—which didn't take long—I knew that I would never be able to convince anyone else of the objective reality of my situation. I knew that he would have to remain a secret, not merely from Gil and Mum and Dad but even from Sharon. It was a pity, but there was simply no way around it.

  It is unfortunately true, as Dr Gray once observed in one of his little homilies, that there are facts which one person can know for certain, without ever being able to assemble evidence adequate to prove the fact to another. These are mostly of two kinds. One consists of external events which leave no unambiguous physical traces, to which one person is a sole witness; the other consists of events internal to consciousness, like thoughts, feelings, flights of fancy and dreams. Dr Gray went on to point out that people to whom events of the first kind are reported always have the option, if they wish to deny the fact while accepting the truthfulness of the believer, of suggesting that an event of the second kind has mistakenly been taken for an event of the first kind. He added, sarcastically, that it is fashionable nowadays to use this strategy to account for all sightings of ghosts and all accounts of abduction by alien spaceships. I knew that an encounter with a vampire would be treated in the same way, and that I would be thought to be at best deluded or at worst mad if I tried to tell anyone about Maldureve—especially Gil, and most especially of all Dr Gray.

  So I kept silent. I was powerless to do otherwise.

  It was difficult enough, at the very beginning, to convince myself that I was neither mad nor deluded. Mercifully, I didn't try too hard. Some people wouldn't have had the mental flexibility. Some people, in similar circumstances, could easily have convinced themselves that they were mad. Someone like that would have turned her back on Maldureve and refused to see him. Someone like that would have refused point-blank to help him emerge from the borderlands. Someone like that would never have known what she was missing.

  I take no credit for being different. It wasn't that I was unusually brave or unusually intelligent. It was just the way I was made: a quirk of nature. Everybody's different, one way or another. I just happened to be different in the right sort of way.

  I first met Maldureve in the curious little patch of woodland behind Wombwell House, which Dr Gray had called the Marquis of Membury's Garden. Given Dr Gray's account of its origins, the wood can't have been very old, but that wasn't relevant; Maldureve was neither an echo of some remote antiquity nor an effusion of the alien vegetation. He didn't need a time-hallowed tomb for a point of origin. He just needed someone who could see him.

  The stream which divides the campus into two runs through the wood from north to south. One of the footpaths connecting the two halves runs from east to west along its southern edge. That path is the most convenient one connecting the eastern part of the campus to Wombwell House and Brennan Hall, and is in almost constant use during the day, but at that time many students avoided it by night because it was so poorly lit. The lamps illuminating the pathway were discreet by comparison with those on the other paths; although they were electric, they were mounted on the same Victorian wrought-iron columns that once housed gas lamps.

  When I first arrived, I was inclined to avoid the path myself. Like most other people—boys as well as girls—I tended to walk from the Students’ Union to the Hall by way of the road which ran around the perimeter of the campus, unless I was in a group. Once or twice, though, I found myself taking the path, quite unthinkingly.

  I'm sure there was nothing sinister in this. I've always been the kind of person who can easily get lost in thought, and when you're not really paying attention to what you're doing you tend to be guided by habit. My legs trod the path often enough in daylight to take it automatically by night, if I didn't make a conscious decision to go another way. That's all it was. I wasn't drawn to the path. Maldureve didn't summon me.

  Usually, when I took the footpath by night, I realised what I'd done as soon I came to the dimly lit stretch by the bridge. Sometimes, if there was a group of people ahead of me or behind me, I'd hurry or dawdle in order to mingle with them until we reached the brighter glare of the sodium lights. When there wasn't—more often than not there wasn't—I'd just grit my teeth and carry on, walking quickly but refusing to be panicked into breaking into a run.

  The night I encountered Maldureve for the first time was only slightly unusual. I must have been tired and particularly deep in thought, because I didn't even notice that I was on the path until I was over the bridge and passing by the border of the wood, and I must have been moving fairly sluggishly, because when I looked up—when my attention was caught—there was no inertia to carry me on; I was practically standing still. There was a tune going through my head, just a chorus repeating over and over. It was something from Vision Thing, but I can't remember what. It died away when I realised where I was, fading out to leave me all alone.

  It wasn't a sound that had made me stop. There were always sounds in the wood, by day and by night: birds and animals in the undergrowth. Gil told me that there were rats and mice, and possibly weasels, but I'd only ever seen blackbirds. Maldureve made no sound at all—not to begin with. Even when he began to talk to me, he may not have made any actual sound, because his voice always sounded like a fainter-than-faint whisper, more inside the ear than out.

  That first time, he didn't say a word.

  He can't have caught my eye, either, though it was certainly what I saw that held me to the spot once I'd stopped. He was so very elusive to the eye, at that time, that it was easier to take him for a trick of the shadows than an actual presence. He wasn't a solid presence—not then.

  It's tempting to say that my awareness of him must have been by extrasensory perception or some kind of sixth sense, simply because it was at first subconscious; but in retrospect, I think it was simply the odour of him that reached me. Our sense of smell is better than we think; it's just that we've lost the habit of paying attention to its signals. If you concentrate hard, it's possible to train your sense of smell to make very delicate distinctions between different perfumes or wines; so it's reasonable to assume, I think, that odours play a greater part in the business of recognition than we're consciously aware of. I'm sure, now, that it was that scent of Maldureve's, which I'd never encountered before, that made me stop.

  When I became more familiar with it, I virtually stopped noticing it, but it was easy enough to make myself pay attention long enough to search for a description. It was a subtle smell, more pleasant than unpleasant; it was sweet but not at all sickly, and flowery rather than musky. It wasn't the smell of blood, nor was it that slightly honeyish smell which sometimes hovers around diabetics. It had a kind of cleanness about it, but it wasn't sharp like ammonia or warm like menthol. That was what brought me to a standstill, and made me look around at the trees.

  It was mid-October. The weather hadn't yet turned cold. All the deciduous trees were losing their foliage, but there were evergreens mixed in with the others—some holly bushes and some kinds of pine or fir—and the pattern of shadows made by the various kinds of branches, so palely illuminated by the wan light trickling down from the tops of the old lampposts, was incredibly complicated. There was a light wind, which stirred the branches just enough to make the shadows quiver and quake.

  I saw him instantly—although, as I said, I wasn't sure at first that he was anything more than an optical illusion.

  He was tall, but it wasn't possible to make out how stoutly built he was because of the cloak he was wearing, or seemed to be wearing. The shapelessness of the hanging cloak was what suggested most strongly that he wasn't there at all—that he was just something my startled imagination had conjured out of a haphazard mess of shadows—but it was the face that I looked at, as anyone would. The face became clearer as I looked
at it. The eyes didn't disappear or dissolve as I tried to meet their gaze, as they would have done if he'd only been some caprice of the branches and their shadows.

  I looked at him and he looked back—not threateningly, mournfully, or any of the ways that a spectral creature is supposed to look, nor even lovingly, but simply interestedly, as though I'd caught his attention as surprisingly as he'd caught mine.

  There was one crucial moment when my startlement might have turned to shock, and my shock to fear. In a sense, that would have been the natural progression. The newborn fear could easily have fed on itself, escalating into panic, forcing me to run away. I think my whole life turned upon that single moment, because that entirely natural and rational process was somehow caught and held.

  I was afraid—more than a little—but there was no escalation, no further fear feeding on that first seed of alarm.

  Perhaps I should have panicked. Most people would have done, and I'd always been more than averagely frightened by everything to which one might reasonably react with fear. It would have been quite reasonable to be terrified—if there were a man in the woodland, at that time of night, lying in wait, then the overwhelming probability was that he was up to no good. A university campus, like a hospital nurses’ home, is the kind of place which draws would-be rapists and assorted lesser freaks like a magnet. Then again, there's nothing unreasonable about being frightened of the dark itself; the dark makes us vulnerable in every possible way, physically and psychologically.

  Perhaps I should have been terrified, but I wasn't.

  My lack of fear isn't just an incidental fact worth mentioning, an oddity to be noted. It's something more vital than that. Put yourself in my place: imagine yourself as a lightly built eighteen-year-old girl on a lonely, dimly lit pathway, at dead of night, with trees stirring in a light wind. You've been lost in thought, and now you've snapped out of it you're slightly bewildered, because you don't quite remember how you came to be there. You look round, responding to some signal you're not fully aware of, and you see a man—or what might be a man—looking back at you from the shadows, interestedly.

  And you find, perversely, that your heart isn't leaping into your mouth, that your throat isn't constricting in sudden anxiety. The single most astonishing, unreasonable, incredible fact about this situation is that you don't panic.

  The absence of terror seemed to me, as it would to you, like some kind of miracle, a liberation. It caught and held me much more effectively than the kind of terror which is supposed to root you to the spot.

  Now, looking back, it's easy enough to find in that perverse reaction some kind of echo or premonition of that intense intoxicating pleasure which was ultimately to be mine by virtue of my acquaintance—my intimate acquaintance—with Maldureve. Perhaps, even then, he had already reached out to touch something elementary and fundamental in my state of being. At the time, it was very puzzling.

  I suppose that if I'd had to put a name to it then, I would have called it a kind of tranquillisation, but it wasn't at all like the effect of the Valium I'd had to take when I first started having periods, and again before my A levels. Valium flattens out your feelings, but it's like a heavy roller ironing them out; it weighs down on you; you can feel the sinuses in your face; the moment you relax, you become drowsy. This was something light and airy, not at all oppressive.

  'Who are you?’ I said, uncertainly. I was uncertain because I wasn't sure that there was anyone there, not because I was afraid.

  He didn't answer, but I could see his face perfectly clearly, or the eyes at least, and I knew that he was really looking at me—really looking, at me.

  'I'm not afraid,’ I said. I suppose I'd have said the same if I had been, and I still was, just a little—but it wasn't the sort of fear to make me run; it was more like a thrill of pure excitement.

  Again, he said nothing, but he was still looking. It didn't seem that he was staring, but he didn't look away. I could see the line of his shoulder quite clearly, and I could make out the texture of that dark cloak. It was a long cloak, jet black in colour and very plain. It was the cloak, and only the cloak, that made me think of vampires—I did think of vampires even then, but I didn't think he was one, only that the cloak somehow made him seem like one. But the cloak didn't seem anachronistic—it didn't make me think that he might be a refugee from some other time, like the ghost of someone long departed.

  I don't know how long I stood there, watching him. Perhaps it was only a few seconds. Our memories of time are so easily distorted, and common sense suggests that the whole thing must have been over very quickly; though common sense, I suppose, would also be likely to declare that nothing happened at all. It seemed like longer. It seemed like four or five minutes, at the very least.

  Why should I stand so long, watching a man who was too impolite to answer my questions? Because I wasn't terrified. The sensation of not being terrified, because it was so very unlikely and inappropriate, was both a mystery and a luxury; it was a state of mind I wanted to savour, to cling to, to practise. I felt that if I rushed away, behaving exactly as I would have if I'd panicked, I'd lose the feeling for ever, and never find it again. So I stayed, and I looked at the man in the dark cloak, and I let him look at me. I hoped that I'd see him again, even before I decided that it was all too absurd, and that I had to go.

  'I'm sorry,’ I said to him, out loud. ‘It's late, and I have to go.'

  He didn't say a word, but I had the impression that he accepted my apology. Perhaps he bowed, ever so slightly. Perhaps he dropped his gaze, just for an instant. Perhaps he became slightly less distinct, even before I turned away.

  Then I walked on. After twelve or fourteen paces—slow, unhurried paces—I looked back, suddenly quite uncertain of what I'd seen. There was no sign of him, but that wasn't surprising. The angle was different, the light was different, the shadows were all over the place. If he'd been as solid as I was, and still standing there in the same place, watching me walk away, I might easily have been unable to see him. I knew that. I also knew that something had happened, because I was only just, by degrees, becoming anxious again. My very ordinary, very understandable fear of the dark was beginning to come back.

  The tune I'd briefly lost started repeating again in my head, as though the band had come to play a concert in the privacy of my head. I could hear the voice of Andrew Eldritch, the lead singer of the Sisters of Mercy, and even though I knew that he was only a memory impressed upon my mind by Sharon's tape during the lazy weeks of summer, he seemed almost to be there, singing just for me. My heart was thumping like a drum—which was oddly appropriate, in a way, because Sharon had told me more than once that the person who played the drums for the Sisters of Mercy wasn't really a person at all. He was a machine called Doktor Avalanche.

  The song that the man in my head and the machine in my heart were playing together was called ‘I Don't Exist When You Don't See Me'. But they did exist. They came from Leeds.

  By the time I got back to the Hall, the cold unease of my everyday anxieties had fully returned, but its presence only served to make me aware of how remarkable and how exciting it had been to be without it, even for a few moments.

  Perhaps I'm making too much of a mere absence, a state of mind, but I don't think so. There's probably nothing in us that is further from conscious control than fear. Like pain, it's an irresistible sensation, a dreadful monster which lives in the darkness within, emerging whenever circumstance calls it forth to torment us. Like pain, it can be anaesthetised, but only by such brute force as will simultaneously deaden our thoughts and our spirits. The other emotions aren't really like that, although we sometimes pretend that they are. Loving, and even grieving, are things that we have to do, even though their force is sometimes compelling. Fear, on the other hand, is something that just happens to us; it surges up, and may render us utterly helpless as easily as it forces us to panic-stricken action. Brave men may learn to live with fear, and fools may blind themselves to some o
f their own dangers, but no one—no one—can tame and domesticate fear and render it impotent. There's nothing quite so frightening as fear itself. I really believe that.

  I had always been a fearful child—always small, thin, shy, lonely. When I was very small, I thought I was a coward; but the older I got, the more I came to suspect that other people knew fear far more intimately than they ever had the courage to admit. I began to see evidence which told me that my mum knew fear, that my dad knew fear, that even the bullies in the schoolyard and the heroes on the TV news knew fear. Maybe they coped better than I did, but they knew.

  You know, too, and I know that you know. So you ought to understand me when I tell you how good it felt to be in a situation where any ordinary mortal would have felt sheer terror, and yet to be unclaimed and unhurt by fear. And you ought to understand, too, how I knew that it was real, and not just a figment of my imagination, not just an optical illusion taken for reality by mistake. If it had been a product of my own disordered, frightened mind, I couldn't possibly have confronted it as I did, quite calmly.

  I didn't accept that conclusion readily; I told myself that what I had seen was only an illusion and that my reaction had just been folly, but I think I knew deep down, even then, that the man in the cloak had to be real, and powerful—powerful enough, and magical enough, to make me unafraid.

  People take it too much for granted that encounters with the supernatural are terrifying. Actually, there's nothing more natural than terror. It's when the terror doesn't come, when the seed of fear is containable and thrilling, that you have good reason to believe that you've entered the borderlands, or glimpsed something in there, which might—with the proper encouragement—come out. I know this now, and I was on my way to this understanding from the crucial moment of that first brief encounter.