Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  I'd never seen her with all her clothes off before, nor kissed her on the mouth, nor entwined my limbs with hers the way that lovers are supposed to do. Because of all that, it seemed like the first time. It was the first time, not just in terms of what we did but in terms of being intimate—except that we weren't really very intimate. She was silent, eyes closed, concentrating on her own sensations; I was even more self-enclosed than usual, lost in a confusing morass of sensation which became more and more chaotic by the minute.

  Whatever excitement I'd started with soon ebbed away. I didn't cop out, but I began to feel that I was just going through the motions. The feel of her body was good, and I should have been building up some pressure, but I felt that the stream of my emotional energy was somehow being diverted.

  The hunger didn't go away, and it came no nearer to revealing its true nature. It seemed perversely determined to prevent my knowing what I hungered for. Such sexual excitement as there was couldn't begin to displace it, and seemed instead to awaken painful echoes in my head and in my heart. Almost as soon as I'd started I knew that I wasn't enjoying it and wasn't going to enjoy it, but by then I couldn't bring myself to stop. It wasn't Teresa's fault; she was doing what she always did, and she felt fine—much softer than Anne, more voluptuous, reasonably enthusiastic in her introspective fashion. Another time, it might have been very good; this time, it wasn't.

  This time, as I surely should have anticipated, it gradually turned into a nightmare.

  Visions began to come into my head: not controllable fantasies, or memories, or any of the kinds of images that ordinarily came into my head while I was screwing. These were both vivid and sick, and I identified them immediately as products of the virus that was still inside me, fighting back against the antibodies I was forming against it.

  The images were jumbled and fragmentary, like a series of jump cuts in a movie, played so fast as to be almost subliminal. It was impossible to make sense of them in terms of any kind of temporal sequence or alternation of scenes, and they resisted all the reflexive attempts of my mind to knit them together into any kind of coherency, but they did have a theme of sorts, and that theme was the consumption of human flesh.

  Sometimes, I would seem to be a naked savage among others of my kind, tearing at the raw flesh of a dead companion—a woman or a child. My hands sometimes didn't seem to be hands at all, but clawed talons—and at other times, indeed, I seemed to be a vulture or a raven perched atop some putrescent corpse, dipping a greedy beak into the lacerations which my talons made. Sometimes it would not be a beak I was dipping, but a snout and a gaping mouth armed with huge canine teeth, or the multitudinous tiny teeth of a carnivorous fish.

  More bizarre still were the moments when I seemed to be inside a human body, devouring from within, as though I were a hookworm clinging to the wall of the gut, or a burrowing tick. In these moments the sensations became entirely tactile, and yet they had strange visual illusions connected with them—illusions based on TV programmes I had seen in which tiny cameras were intruded into various parts of the body.

  Sometimes, I seemed to be even smaller: to be virions spilling from a ruined cell into the busy bloodstream. Here too there were visual illusions, based in textbook diagrams and electron micrographs, eccentrically extrapolated into virtual reality.

  There was nothing in these images to boost the level of my sexual excitement in the way that images of fetishistic cruelty might have done; nor was there anything in them to satisfy the awful cravings I felt, although I could only presume that it was those inner cravings that were conjuring them into being. All of it seemed to be happening deep inside me, having little or no connection with the rhythmic motions of my body. I felt no impulse or temptation to bite Teresa; it was not her flesh that I desired.

  I came as quickly as I could, but it wasn't easy to get there, and it wasn't quick enough for me. Released from my observations by the belated orgasm, I immediately pulled away and rolled over on my back. I brought my hands up to cover my face and grip my pounding head, and I tried desperately to shut out all pain, all discomfort, all terror.

  For a brief moment the flickering images held their inner ground, persisting in spite of my determination to be done with them and to be done with everything, but then they died. The colour went out of them, and all the energy. They faded away into one last monochrome slow-motion impression, in which I was a sleek black leech drawing warm blood from some vast hairy expanse of human skin.

  Teresa grabbed one of my hands and yanked it down to her moist slit, unceremoniously demanding that I help her finish off. I began to move two fingers mechanically back and forth while she held on to the hand, adjusting its position. She came within a couple of minutes, and I drew my sticky fingers away with profound relief.

  'Sorry,’ I murmured. ‘Not quite up to my best.'

  'Not quite,’ she agreed, ruefully but not brutally. ‘But it helps, doesn't it? It takes your mind off what you think you've got.'

  She really did think that she'd been offering therapy, doing me good. She thought that she'd been helping to soothe my irrational fears about what had got into me, even though that wasn't her main motive. But she hadn't. If anything, she had given me further evidence to support the hypothesis that alien psychotropic DNA was having a ball inside my brain. I couldn't believe that what I'd experienced could possibly be the result of some glitch in my own subconscious, taking advantage of my disconcertion to unbalance me.

  Anyhow, I thought, if Mike Viners was right about all our dreams and neuroses being rooted in the activity of psychotropic DNA, domestic or alien or both in collaboration, what difference did it make where the ultimate source of my trouble lay? Whatever else might be in doubt, I was one hundred per cent certain that my head was far from straight. I was sick.

  I didn't move when Teresa hauled herself up and clambered over me to get off the bed. I kept one hand over my eyes, protectively, while she went into the bathroom. When she came back and began putting on her clothes, I watched her through the gaps between my fingers. I didn't feel able to remove the hand altogether.

  The light was still on—the main light, not just the bedside lamp—but there was something strange about the quality of its illumination. The room was the wrong colour, dimmer than it should have been. It was as if someone had surreptitiously removed the hundred-watt bulb and substituted a sixty, or maybe even a forty. I knew, of course, that it had to be my eyes and not the bulb at all, but I couldn't feel anything in my eyes to confirm the knowledge.

  While I watched Teresa take down her coat, all the while continuing to shade and shield my eyes, the room seemed to grow even dimmer and more colourless, as if it were being invaded and gradually filled up by discreet shadows.

  'You still look a little rough,’ she observed, when she was all ready to go. ‘Is my face okay?'

  She meant her make-up, which she'd renewed while she was in the bathroom. It looked as okay as it ever did.

  'Fine,’ I said. ‘Look, I'm sorry. I'll see you in the lab—probably Monday.'

  'Take your time,’ she told me. ‘Invest in a few cloves of garlic to keep the vampires out.'

  I remembered what she'd said about her own dreams featuring animals with lots of teeth. I wondered whether she'd diplomatically censored out any reference to what the animals were doing. But what could it prove, either way? I didn't ask.

  'You'll be okay,’ she told me. ‘I was. I'd stay, but Mum's expecting me. She's bound to have heard about the attack. She worries when I'm working late. If I didn't have to spend money on those damned taxis I'd be better able to save—sometimes I could swear she makes me take them just to keep me at home. I have to get my own place soon. This is no way to run a sex life, is it?'

  I didn't know how to reply to that, but it seemed to be a rhetorical question. She didn't come back to kiss me goodbye; she just gave me a wave from the doorway.

  'Hang in there,’ she said, grinning because she thought it was an authentic American
goodbye. It could have been worse. She could have said ‘Have a nice day.'

  I intended to get up as soon as the door closed behind her. I intended to get dressed and make coffee. I intended to eat something, for want of any better response to the hunger which I still felt, and to take some aspirin for my bad head. I didn't do any of that, because the room wouldn't stop fading. It didn't become pitch dark, but it lost every vestige of its colour. It was as if I'd been suddenly stricken with partial blindness.

  I finally took my hand away from my face, as if this were the moment I'd been waiting for all along.

  I didn't see how Maldureve came in. Maybe he didn't come in at all; maybe he just coalesced out of the gloom. I wasn't surprised to see him, and I wasn't entirely displeased, either. The opportunity to confront some part of my recalcitrant nightmare face to face was perversely welcome.

  'You don't exist,’ I told him, assertively. ‘You're just a phantom, born out of the interaction of my own powers of imagination with some stray DNA. You're damned. You'll burn to phantom ashes when my antibodies really get to work. From nothing you came, and to nothing you'll return, scattered by the bracing wind of rational thought.'

  He smiled. He still had smudges of blood at the corners of his mouth, but I knew that they were fake. As special effects go, they were distinctly second-rate. His whole image was pathetic. He was strictly low-budget, more camp comedy than real horror.

  'You might die,’ he said, levelly. ‘In the space of an hour, some time tonight, or the next night. They'd call it meningitis. It could ruin Professor Viners, if they tracked it to his laboratory. His whole career could be destroyed. Anne doesn't want you to die, and nor do I. Anne wants me to exist, to be real. She helped me to put on frail flesh and live. Anne was taken by the owls, but you might save her. I can't, but you might. Feed the hunger, Gil. Feed the hunger, and live.'

  The pressure of his words built up as he talked. It was as if he were turning some kind of screw that bit deeper into my flesh with every twisting sentence, every revolutionary thought. I couldn't taunt him any longer; I didn't have the strength of will to deny him, to prophesy his extinction, to disqualify him from true existence as a mere thing of shadow. I couldn't even dismiss him as a silly caricature.

  The stereotypes of comic-book fiction can become stereotypes only if they have something to refer to—something already inside us, about which we feel desperately uneasy. He was a joke, but he was a joke with all the underlying nastiness and savagery that underlies so many of our jokes. A sick joke; a black comedy. The fact that he seemed so ridiculous only reflected on me, not on him.

  'I can fight this thing,’ I whispered, more to myself than to him. ‘It's not like HIV; it can't take up permanent residence. It's too weak.'

  I wanted to believe all that, but I knew that I couldn't be sure. Some viruses can't ever be dislodged. Some viruses can even become integrated into a person's indigenous DNA. Mike Viners thought that some cases of chronic mental illness might be accountable in those terms. I'd formed wilder variants of the same hypothesis, and written them down in black and white in my lab book. I couldn't turn my back on my own ideas and deny that I'd ever had them.

  There was a real possibility that I might be going mad.

  If I did, there was a real possibility that I might never recover my sanity.

  And if I couldn't get back to home base, to normality, I might have to live for ever in the world where vampires were, and where my hunger could never be satisfied.

  'Do what you must,’ said Maldureve, his staring bloodshot eyes contriving to seem baleful and pleading at the same time. ‘There's no way back, but there is a way forward. If you can't become as we are, you'll die ... and if you can't become as we are, the owls may do whatever they please with Anne.'

  'What the fuck are the owls?’ I demanded harshly, no longer content to lie there and let his nonsense spill over me. ‘And what the holy fuck are you?'

  'We're the creatures of the borderlands,’ he told me, as though it were a serious answer to a serious question, and not mere obfuscation. ‘We're those who lie beneath the cutting edge of evolving perception. We're the inheritors of the world, whose advent has been long foreseen. You must join us, if you have any ambition to belong to the future of the world. If you can't become as we are, you'll die. Few will have the choice, but you do.'

  'Bullshit!’ I said. ‘Stupid fucking bullshit!'

  'Feed the hunger,’ he retorted, losing his smile as he did so. ‘Feed the hunger, or cut your stupid fucking throat.’ His mouth was twisted into a taunting sneer, as though he held me in utter contempt. I suddenly caught the stink of him, like a cellar filled with mould—but he was still in black and white, like something out of a very old movie. The obscenities sounded entirely out of character. It was as if the actor playing the vampire had suddenly spoken with his own voice, cutting through the script with cynical contempt.

  I knew that I, and nobody else, was the actor, and the scriptwriter too. I was taunting and tormenting myself. The virus had turned me against my own flesh.

  'Go away,’ I said, softly. ‘Just go, and leave me alone.'

  He was already gone, like a shadow betrayed by a trick of the light.

  I expected the colour to come flooding back into the room then. I expected the electric bulb to regain its normal power of illumination, and spread the healthy glow of normality over the carpet and the furniture, the bedclothes and my own naked flesh. I waited for it to happen, for ordinary experience to come creeping back.

  It didn't.

  Nothing changed. I was still peculiarly colour-blind, condemned to inhabit a world of gloomy shadows.

  I suspected even then that there was going to be no way back for me, but I didn't want to believe it. I wanted to do everything I possibly could to avoid believing it. I was determined to avoid ever having to admit that it had all gone too far, and that whatever else Maldureve was lying about, he was telling the simple truth when he said that I might die.

  I rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, but it did no good. It was as though I'd already slipped halfway out of the world, and half dissolved into shadow.

  'Fight it,’ I said, to my oh-so-heroic antibodies. ‘Get in there, and blow the bastard virions to kingdom come. You can do it. Do it for me. Please.'

  I hadn't expected an answer, and I didn't get one. They were too busy to come to the phone. They had a job to do. I had to let them get on with it.

  There was no other way.

  8

  As soon as I'd had breakfast I phoned the hospital, but there was no news, and it didn't seem to me that this was one of those occasions when no news could be reckoned good news. Anne was still asleep, still in the coma which wasn't a normal coma. I wondered whether there was any colour in her world, to dazzle and amuse her rapid eye movements, or whether she too had been relegated to some half-world within which life looked like an ancient B-movie.

  There might, I supposed, be compensations in being asleep while the virus made play with her imagination, if that was indeed what was happening to her. Being asleep in hospital might ensure that her body was safe, or as safe as it could be.

  I still had bruises on the back of my hand, and the lovebite-like mark on my neck hadn't completely faded away. I didn't feel too bad. I had no headache, no sore throat, and I was growing accustomed to the hunger, which now felt muted, but there didn't yet seem to be any grounds for hoping that the worst was over. My eyes had forgotten how to see colour, and it seemed that they barely remembered how to react to light.

  The new day was as crisp and bright as anyone except me could have wished, but for me the clear sky was black instead of blue, and the people who moved through the streets around St Saviour's were like the shades of the dead, clinging dumbly to their routines because they did not know yet that the grim reaper had scythed them down.

  There was only one place I could go, so I went.

  Professor Viners looked across his desk at me with faint disapproval. ‘
I advised you not to come in again until you were better,’ he said. Advised, not told. He was criticising me for not being sufficiently responsible to take advice, hinting that people who couldn't take advice ended up having to take orders.

  'I couldn't,’ I told him. ‘I need a ... what do you call it here? ... a tutorial.'

  He frowned. He didn't like to think that someone might be mocking him. I wasn't. I had simply forgotten the word for a moment. Aphasia or just a slip of the memory? Paranoia was so easy, now I'd got the hang of it. Easy to do, difficult to resist—like smoking.

  'I'm sorry, Professor,’ I said. ‘I know that I'm not going to be able to persuade you, but I'd like you to listen anyway. I'm not saying that what I'm going through is caused by one of your little pets, and I don't mind at all if you want to believe that it's all in my mind, that it's something I'm doing to myself. I can accept that. But even if that's so, it warrants description. It needs to be recorded, for later reference. If I'm fit and well again by Monday morning, I can ask you to forget the whole thing, but you need to be told what's happening, whatever the outcome is. Will you hear me out?'

  The frown was still there, but now it was only puzzlement and apprehension, not annoyance.

  'Of course,’ he said, as if there could never have been any doubt about the matter. He was an Englishman, after all.

  'I've gone colour-blind, and my eyes have lost most of their light-sensitivity.’ I said. ‘It may be psychosomatic, I guess, but the symptoms are real. I have this strange feeling—I keep thinking of it as a hunger, but that's only for want of a more accurate word—which won't go away. It's a dull, fierce need. It's a little quieter now than it has been, but it's driving me crazy because it stubbornly refuses to let me know what I'm hungering for. That's the physical side of things. I'm also hallucinating: I've been visited twice by a schlock-horror vampire in a cloak who keeps telling me things that don't make any sense but somehow feel as if they ought to. I don't want to be humoured and I don't want to be reassured. I want to be taken seriously. I want to hear some hypotheses—not about what might be happening, because we both know all the alternatives—but how and why I'm being affected this way.'