'Has it always been like this?’ she said, tiredly. ‘The world. Was it always this bad, or is it getting worse?'
For just a moment I set the words in the context of my own perceptions: the colour-blindness, the hunger. But she knew nothing about that. She only meant what Anne's mother had meant; it was the same sense of disappointment with the failure of other people to do unto her as she was disposed to do unto them. She yearned for a harmless, polite society of nice people. And why shouldn't she? Why shouldn't she want the kind of world in which she could live the kind of life she wanted to live, and bring up her daughter in safety?
I didn't answer the question. What was there to say?
'I have to go,’ she said. ‘Thanks for telling me the news. If you see Anne, tell her I sent my best wishes. Dr Gray's and Daniel's too. Tell her ... well, you know. Say goodbye, Janine.'
'Goodbye,’ said Janine, and flashed me a tiny smile as if to say that she meant it, in spite of having no choice but to say it.
'Bye, Janine,’ I said. ‘Best of luck with the dentist.'
When they'd gone, I relaxed again, although I hadn't been aware of becoming tenser. The ordinariness of the conversation had brought me back from the depths of my desperation, but the show of politeness I'd put on had been an effort. I wondered how long I'd have to continue doing that—passing for human when in fact I was beset by all kinds of bizarrely dehumanising circumstances.
I lifted my hand to stare at the palm, hoping to reassure myself that I was fully in control.
I wasn't. The hand was shaking. I was unaware of any alien intention with which my own will was in conflict, but I daren't dismiss the tremor as some random trick of the nerves, significant of nothing.
I'm possessed, I thought. The virus is like some medieval demon, tormenting me and trying to make me do things I don't want to do. Maybe Viners is right. Maybe all abnormal mental states are down to infections like these. Maybe there was a time when anyone could be possessed, as easily as they could contract smallpox. Maybe natural selection picked out those who were immune—except that there are always freaks, always throwbacks. Maybe it isn't the virus that's mutated. Maybe I'm just one of the unlucky ones, who get hit much harder than the rest. Maybe I'm carrying some recessive gene which lets delirium run wild in me.
I didn't scare myself. In fact, it was the other way around. My capacity to think about it in those terms, to draw up a new hypothesis and confront it squarely, seemed to be an invaluable proof of the continuing power of my reason, and the authority of my logic.
Possession isn't permanent, I told myself. This thing can be exorcised with the aid of patience, calmness and ruthless self-discipline. I'm a grown man and a scientist. This is the twentieth century, nearly the twenty-first. I can beat it. It can blind me to the beauty of the world, and turn the sun inside out, and fill me with unanswerable appetites, but it can be exorcised if only I don't weaken. My immune system is churning out vast armies of antibodies: hosts of avenging angels to slay the demonic virions in open combat. All I have to do is keep body and soul together, get my head behind my heart ... think, think, think.
My hand stopped shaking, and I turned back to look at the weird wood, determined to stare it down.
Maldureve was standing among the trees, looking back at me. As usual, there was nothing visible of his flesh but his head. Everything else was enveloped by that thick black cloak which melted into the shadows. His face was stark white—far whiter than anything else I could see—but his lips were black and the pupils of his eyes were pits of darkness rimmed with swollen blood vessels like thin ebony dendrites.
'We are always self-possessed,’ he said. He didn't move his lips, and the words seemed to arrive inside my head without disturbing my ears en route. ‘We are possessed in turn by all those who have intimate knowledge of us. Small wonder, then, that we are possessed by demons too. They are born in us and they live in us and they do not flee from our flesh until we die. Theirs is a restless and malevolent host which will not readily yield to the empire of reason.
'Our possessors move us and curse us. We struggle to make them captive by naming them and taming them, but they constantly evade our traps of meaning and our tricks of education. Who lays envy to rest by counting blessings? Who conquers wrath by placing it in the service of righteousness? Who slays lust by disguising it with the decorations of love?
'Everyone—and no one.
'Our inner demons possess our dreams and our desires. Our inmost souls are castles we cannot defend, no matter how sternly we set the features which we display to the world. We are possessed, and there is no limit to the number of our possessors.
'We are bought and bartered a thousand times a day, seized as trophies and discarded as broken wrecks. We are precious and worthless, instrumental and detrimental, used and abused. We are without help and without hope. We are all possessed, every minute of every day, and there is no release from such slavery as this. This is the heritage of man.'
'You bastard,’ I said. ‘Leave me alone!'
I would have seemed insane to anyone who passed me on the path just then, but it was three or four minutes past the eleventh hour, and the students had vanished as though by magic, called to whatever appointments their timetables designated. All those bound for Wombwell House had been swallowed up by it; all those emitted by the edifice had passed on. I was alone, except for this perverse phantom of my imagination, who was trying to turn my ideas back upon myself, trying to twist my rational hypothesis into all kinds of knots, trying to make my attempts at self-discipline seem absurd.
I was determined to stop him, to fight him.
'Listen to me,’ he said, almost pleadingly. ‘We are all possessed, and it could not be otherwise. Our thoughts, our dreams, every facet of our existence is determined by our possessors. No one can resist or escape, unless by way of death. Feed the hunger, Gil. Live!'
'You're just a bad dream,’ I told him, speaking out loud. ‘Bad in both senses. You're an incompetent dream: a shallow cliché. Vampires don't terrify us any more—they amuse us. We laugh at them. We make jokes of our ancient superstitions, and conquer them with laughter. You're a joke, Maldureve.'
He looked back at me with open contempt, as though I didn't deserve an answer. He thought that he didn't need to answer, that my argument would simply run out of steam, and thus expose its own frailty.
It worked. I hesitated. I faltered. I couldn't suppress the fear that was building inside me. No matter how hard I fought, I couldn't suppress the fear. Again, I felt that I was possessed, that some raging demon inside of me was wrestling for control of my body and my mind. I was in turmoil, and I hated it.
'I won't do it,’ I said, though something in me turned my words upside down inside my mind even as I spoke them, mocking my inability to make them true. ‘I won't become like you. You can't make me do it.'
'Feed the hunger, Gil,’ he whispered. The whisper sounded loud and clear inside my head in spite of the fact that he was thirty feet away. ‘Anne loves you. She wants you to live. She wants you to be together. She'll never wake up if you can't wake her. That hunger inside you is hers, and it has to be fed. Feed the hunger, and save your life. Feed the hunger, and save her.'
'Fuck you,’ I said, in a shout no louder than a whisper. ‘Fuck you, Viners, and all your malign viruses.'
'It's time,’ said Maldureve. ‘It's time for you to feed.'
'On what?’ I said, helplessly. Immediately, I felt a rush of shame, an acute awareness of disgusting cowardice and failure. I didn't want an answer; I wanted to be rid of him. In response to the emotional surge which flooded my body I ran full tilt at the dark-clad figure, lifting my hands high as though to rake his face with claw-like fingers, as though to tear him into rags and tatters.
It was no good. Just as I came close to him and reached out to hurt him, he melted into the shadows with astonishing ease and appalling grace. He didn't have to fade away by slow degrees; he was a master of the art. The shadow
s were his natural home, his world.
Even as he departed, his final words echoed in my besieged consciousness. It was the answer that I didn't want to hear.
'Blood,’ he said, in a voice that was hoarse with unholy avidity and lust. 'Young blood!'
10
Frustrated by the vampire's disappearance, I lashed out at the wizened trunk of the nearest tree, but I did far more damage to my hand than to the unexpectedly sturdy tree. The pain which ran up my arm helped to clear my head and restore my equilibrium, and I turned around so that I could lean my spine against the uninjured trunk.
It was a quarter after eleven in the morning, but as far as I was concerned it was more like midnight beneath the spreading branches. I could feel the spirit stirring inside me—the greedy spirit which I'd earlier called a hunger, but which now seemed like an indwelling demon that had dispossessed my soul. I felt it move within me, and credited it in my imagination with a vague semblance of human form and human personality. It was somehow easier to see it in these terms, no matter how unscientific they might be. It was easy to imagine its glowing eyes and its rubbery, drooling lips.
I told myself that its hunger was not my hunger, and that was why I had been unable to assuage it or even figure out what its object was. But once I'd conceded that, I couldn't help remembering what Maldureve had said—that its hunger was Anne's hunger, mysteriously displaced from her sleeping body into mine, as though injected into me by her loving kiss.
I confronted and was carried away by the notion that what possessed me was some fragment of Anne, encapsulating the shadow of her being: her love, her lust, her hope, her hunger. It had darkened my sight, but not for ever ... if its needs could only be answered, Anne would awake, and the glory of light and colour would be restored to the world...
'Stop it!’ I said aloud, desperately trying to stem the flow of madness. I tried with all my might to reimpose the authority of my sceptical intelligence, the empire of my scientific training.
'These are nothing but my elemental fears,’ I told myself sternly, not speaking aloud but forming my silent words very deliberately, moving my tongue and my lips as though to whisper them. ‘These are primitive terrors, bursting free from that stratum of subconsciousness to which mental discipline long ago confined them. The virus is unbalancing me, bringing the maleficent chaos of dreams into my waking life, but it has no intelligence of its own, no will of its own, no purpose of its own. This dark caricature which appears before me in order to haunt and torment me is nothing but a doppelgänger—the antithetical echo of my own reason. It can tell me nothing but lies, and the truth will help me be free of it, if only I can cling to the truth. I am my own master.'
But the light didn't come flooding back; colour was still banished from the world's false night. No matter how hard I insisted that I was in control, the world refused to yield.
'Are you all right?'
The words cut through my introspective fugue like a scalpel. I tried not to jump with alarm, and I tried not to scare the person who had spoken as I turned to look at her. I was afraid that I might suddenly have acquired the petrifying power of a gorgon.
It was Cynthia Leigh's daughter Janine.
'What are you doing here?’ I whispered, trying with all my might not to sound angry or threatening.
'I didn't want to go to Mummy's lecture,’ the child explained, painstakingly. ‘She said that I could stay with the secretary, but the secretary was typing and talking on the phone, both at the same time. It was boring, so I came out. I saw you run into the trees.'
'You shouldn't wander off on your own like that,’ I said. ‘Not here, of all places. You'll make your mommy very anxious. One of her friends was hurt, right about here. You mustn't do things like this.'
'I'm not on my own,’ said the girl. ‘You're here.'
I looked at her helplessly, wondering how I could possibly explain the awful folly of what she was doing without frightening her. But I could see that she was old enough to understand, old enough to know better than to do what she had done. She had done it deliberately, almost provocatively.
'I'm all right,’ I told her. ‘I'm not feeling very well, but I'm all right. I've got a cold, and it gives me a headache. You'd better go back. I don't want you to catch the cold.'
'I get colds all the time,’ said Janine dolefully. ‘Mummy thinks I do it on purpose, but I don't. She thinks I don't like going to school because I don't have a daddy, but that's not why. I don't like the dentist either. I don't like the way he pokes things into my mouth, trying to find soft bits in my teeth. His breath smells, and when he tries to see right inside my mouth it makes me want to throw up.'
She was looking up at me from underneath her eyebrows, putting her head on one side in a slightly teasing fashion. She was teasing. She knew how pretty she was, how cute; she knew what effect she could have on people if she tried—especially men. It was utterly innocent—just something she had learned by trial and error, as a means of making people like her—but it was nevertheless a sly appeal to sexual attraction. She was flirting, as only a ten-year-old could flirt.
My mouth was dry. I was uncomfortably aware of how it might look if we were found here together.
'We have to go back,’ I told her. I wanted to reach out and offer to take her by the hand, but I didn't dare. I wanted her to go away, but she showed no sign of doing so.
'I don't want to,’ she said, pouting. The thought of a trip to the dentist was making her irresponsible; suppressed fear was making her reckless. She was trying to enlist me to her cause, knowing it couldn't work but not really caring.
She suddenly seemed very like Anne, and I realised that it was not so much because she looked like Anne as because Anne's behaviour sometimes seemed just as innocently provocative, just as defiantly helpless. Their faces would not have been so similar but for the fact that Anne didn't eat; their figures would not have been so similar but for the fact that Anne was trying with all her might not to grow up, subconsciously insisting on remaining a little girl, eligible for protection.
I couldn't help finding the little girl attractive, not just because of her amateurish flirtatiousness, but also because of what she was. I was attracted by her bony features, by her slim body. There wasn't anything sinister in the attraction, or anything abnormal. She was attractive—a creature capable of awakening lust no matter how inappropriate an object of lust she might be. Youth is itself attractive; so is innocence; so is helplessness.
I wanted to help her. I wanted to help her.
'Please,’ I said, plaintively. ‘You have to go back to Wombwell House. Your mommy would be very upset if she thought you'd come into the woods. Just because your mommy spoke to me, it doesn't mean I'm not a stranger. You shouldn't have followed me. You shouldn't have come after me the way you did. You have to be more careful, Janine, for your mommy's sake as well as your own.'
'Mummy's a lesbian,’ she said, as if the revelation were somehow relevant. I remembered that I knew it already. Anne had told me about Cynthia in slightly hushed and nervous tones, determined not to seem judgemental.
'You shouldn't be talking to me like this,’ I told her, fighting to keep my voice steady. ‘It was kind of you to worry about me, but these woods really aren't safe. Your mommy's friend was hurt right about here.'
'That was at night,’ Janine pointed out. ‘It's the middle of the day now.'
Not for me, I found myself thinking. I've been banished from the light of day, sentenced to live in eternal night until...
I cast aside the train of thought, fearful of where it might lead.
I tried hard to suppress the lust that was infecting my gaze as I looked at the child—not because it was cruel lust, unleavened by authentic affection, but because any kind of lust was dangerous, so unendurable that it had to be repressed. I couldn't do it. There was too much virus in me, lending support to the dark doppelgänger. I wasn't sufficiently self-controlled, not entirely self-possessed. I couldn't help but look
at her with longing, with excitement, with desire.
I wanted to run, but I couldn't move. Now, when I most needed the motive force of panic, panic wouldn't come.
'I'm sorry,’ I told her. ‘I'm not well. You mustn't come any closer, or you might catch it.'
'I don't mind,’ she said, coming one step closer. ‘I get colds all the time. I don't mind.'
She reached out her hand, generously and tenderly. There was a curious expression on her face, as though she sensed that she was somehow in control of the situation, although she didn't know quite how or why. She liked the sensation. She couldn't even begin to understand how foolhardy she was, what terrible danger she was in. I wasn't myself. I was possessed.
She held out her hand towards me, submissively inviting me to take it in order to lead her back to Wombwell House. She wanted to be led; she wanted to go back with me. She wanted me to be involved, to be on her side. She didn't know, and couldn't begin to imagine, what I was feeling. She was innocent, unknowing, blind to the true nature of the world of human thought and desire. She could see the colour and the brightness in the world, and was blind to its darkness. She had no idea what kind of world I was living in, or what kind of forces were moving in me, unvanquished as yet by my inner legions.
Something in me reached out and took her hand. That shadowy demon, the Anne-thing, reached out to its tiny counterpart, and took her by the hand. Then it bent down and opened its arms wide in an invitation to embrace ... and the little girl accepted the invitation, gladly. She liked me. She was attracted to me, although she didn't know the true nature of her immature, submerged attraction.
The touch of her hand and the warmth of her body triggered some reaction which drove me back from the heartland of my own being, dispatching my true will into the mysterious borderlands of my soul, where it was withered by cold and rendered impotent by darkness.
The doppelgänger which took possession of my body—so very smoothly, as though equipped to do so by long and manifold experience—picked the little girl up and lifted her until her face was level with mine. From a great distance, I looked deep into the jet-black pupils of her eyes, rimmed with misty grey, and I saw myself reflected there: smiling, loving, animated by amusement.
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