'It's only an illusion,’ he said, insistently. ‘It won't last for ever.'
'I know it won't,’ I assured him. I was still thinking with artificial precision. My mind was running like a well-oiled machine. The inside of my head felt as smooth as silk. Everything seemed to be in place. I wasn't scared. I knew what the situation was, and how it would develop. I had the ample foresight of the good scientist, dealing with a problem where all the variables were known and quantified. Events would unfold with the perfect orderliness of a set of calculations. For me, there was no uncertainty left. For Viners, though, things would be different. For him, everything would be clouded with confusion, mystery and heartache.
'Maybe I should call the hospital,’ he said. ‘Admit you, just as a precaution. I have friends there, among the consultants—Hodgson and Maclaine. I can tell them what's happened, without any fear that they'll over react. They can do a full range of tests there, and keep a close eye of your condition. Perhaps that would be best.'
'No,’ I said, flatly. ‘No hospital. You can take blood from me now—as much as you want—to do your own tests. Then I'm going home. Don't worry about me. I'll take care of myself. The worst of it is over now. I'm one hundred per cent sure of that.'
He hesitated for a moment, and then said: ‘I'm sorry, Gil.'
'It's not your fault,’ I told him. ‘If anyone was careless, it was me. Neither of us could possibly guess that I'd react so badly. The important thing is not to be sorry, but to take the opportunity we have to learn from what's happened. You have to be on your guard now. You have to look out for yourself, for Teresa and for Anne, in case it's not over. What's done is done, but we have a responsibility to learn from it, to increase our understanding of what makes people tick and what makes people sick.'
I stood up, and began to roll up my sleeve. He stared at me for a few seconds, then he got up too. He left the room, to fetch a hypodermic in which to collect the blood that I'd offered him. He returned a few minutes later. The needle was packed in plastic, sterility guaranteed. He broke the pack carefully.
His was a practised hand, but for once he was a little clumsy. His fingers trembled. I didn't mind the pain of the insertion at all; it was dull and faint, almost as if it were happening to somebody else.
'Not much of a vampire, are you?’ I said, drily.
Neither of us laughed.
In my own eyes, my blood was jet black. In his, no doubt, it looked as red and healthy as ever.
When his analysis was complete, I figured, he'd know different. He'd know the extent to which my inner being had been polluted, and he'd know what that pollution had driven me to. I wished that I could make him a gift of my brain, so that he could track the corruption through all its phases, but I couldn't. He'd have to make do with the pieces of the jigsaw he already had, and those which time and circumstance would make abundantly clear.
12
Maldureve was waiting for me when I got back to the flat. He was sitting in the armchair, far more solid and substantial than he'd ever been before. He wasn't wearing his cloak, and for the first time I could see what shape he was. He wasn't much taller than me, but he was built differently—lean but muscular. His hands were pale and gnarled, much older than his face. He wore a black suit, cut in a modern style. He might have been an undertaker or an insurance salesman. There was no blood at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes looked normal. He'd shed the caricature aspect of his personality; now he simply seemed businesslike.
I wasn't afraid of him. I knew what he was and how to deal with him. I put down the can that I'd bought at the gas station on the corner, and put the bottle of bourbon that I'd bought at the liquor store on the table. Then I took off my coat, and hung it up on the hook on the back of the door.
'Don't do this,’ he said to me. ‘It's not necessary. You're one of us now. You don't need all this any more. You can live in the borderlands.’ His elegantly withered hand waved negligently as he said ‘all this'. He didn't just mean the flat and its furnishings. He meant all of it. He meant normality and humanity and colour and brightness and flesh and blood. He was offering me shadows instead. He was offering me the half-life of the undead. He was offering me old movies and outmoded ways of thought. He was offering me the opportunity to become the Typhoid Mary of infectious madness.
Some career move, I thought.
I didn't sit down. I stood opposite him and looked down at him. It felt safer, being able to look down. Position implies moral authority. ‘I can't help being sick,’ I told him, ‘but I don't have to capitulate with my sickness. Just because you were born from the swampy depths of my own subconscious doesn't mean that I have to like you. When a man discovers that he has gangrene in his soul, he has to destroy it. He has to cut it out and cauterise it, or it spreads and spreads and spreads until it consumes everything. I'm not afraid. I'm a scientist. I understand the logic of surgery. I understand the necessity of intervention, the folly of letting nature take its course.'
'That's not the voice of reason talking,’ he told me. ‘You haven't recovered your sanity—far from it. Your state of mind is more unnatural at this moment than it was before. You mustn't refuse to recognize the actuality of the situation.'
'It's a straightforward matter of black and white,’ I told him. ‘You can't control me. Whatever you do, you can't control me.'
The flat was becoming darker by the minute. There were shadows everywhere, all around us. The whole world was turning to shadows, like an infinite mist of cobwebs. The light was dying, and the darkness was haunted by the scuttling ghosts of things that had once been bright and full of life. Maldureve was trying to fix me with his eyes, which were slightly luminous with wan white light. He was trying to make me concentrate, and make me forget.
'Anne loves you,’ he said. ‘She wants you to live. You can be together.'
'She's got an infectious disease,’ I told him. ‘It's screwed up her head. She doesn't know what she wants, if she's in any condition to want anything at all. But you can't get to her while she's asleep, can you? Unconsciousness is part of the body's defence mechanism. The odds are in her favour. It's a hundred to one that her immune system will fight off the virus, obliterate it from her system. In the meantime, she's safely immobilised. She has the good fortune to be a masochist. She automatically turned her delirium and her derangement against herself. She's safe now. She isn't going to hurt anybody. When she wakes up, she'll be better. It will all fade into a vague memory, the way everyday nightmares do. You'll lose her the way you lost Viners and Teresa. She's fighting free.'
'She'd rather find you waiting for her,’ he said. ‘She'd rather wake up to find that you and she can be together.'
'That's not possible,’ I said, flatly. ‘Not any more. I was too confident and too weak. I let it all get on top of me, and now there's only one thing left to do, for my own sake as well as anyone else I might turn on.'
'You've got it all wrong,’ he said. ‘You haven't been listening to me. You think you understand, but you're perverting everything to fit what you want to believe. It's your belief that's destructive, Gil, not the hunger. You think that you're an imaginative person, daring to think things which have never been thought before, but you're not. You're trapped in the morass of your convictions, imprisoned by the straitjacket of your assumptions. You haven't even begun to consider the real possibilities. Give yourself time, Gil. You can be free, if only you'll consent to learn the art of the invisible, if only you'll embrace the shadows. Possess yourself, Gil.'
'You're just some dissociated fragment of my personality,’ I reminded him. ‘You're just some nightmarish rag doll, avid to take over from the real me. Well, you can't. I'm in control now, and there isn't time for the hunger to grow again. For at least a little while, terror and confusion can't muster the force to enslave me or tip me over the edge. Neither threats nor persuasion can weaken that control, and by the time the hunger grows again, it'll be too late.'
'Wait for the result of Vin
ers’ blood test,’ he said quickly.
'Why?'
'It's clear. No antibodies at all. You haven't been infected by any of the experimental viruses. Viners was right all along.'
'Bullshit.'
'It's true. Teresa didn't infect you, and you didn't infect yourself. You didn't infect Anne. She passed the hunger on to you—the hunger she accepted from me. Accepted, Gil. She chose it, embraced it willingly. She wanted to be what she is—what we all are.'
'Vampires?'
'That's right. Vampires.'
'And who made you?'
'I came from the borderlands. Anne helped me. She saw me. She gave me substance by the force of her perception, and then she fed me, to make me independent of her sight and touch. That's why I can come to you now. I'm not an illusion, Gil. I'm real. I am what I appear to be.'
'If I prick you, will you bleed?’ I said, sarcastically. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the scalpel I'd brought from the lab. I stripped away the plastic sheath to expose the curved blade.
'I won't let you prick me,’ he said, shaking his head slowly. ‘I can't afford to bleed. The owls are hunting me across the borderlands, and I have to keep close company with the darkest shadows. I can't let you hurt me, just for the sake of proving what I say. You have to believe me, without that kind of proof.'
'What other kind have you got to offer?'
'You have to wait. Anne may wake up at any time. She really was attacked and traumatised, but she will wake up. The hunger will wake her, if nothing else does. She has to feed, Gil, and she may need help. Only wait to hear what she has to say, and she'll confirm everything. She knows, Gil. She knows what's really happening.'
'Bullshit,’ I said, again. I didn't doubt for an instant that I was right. It was all as plain as day to me; there was no lingering uncertainty to haunt and harass me. My mind was crystal clear, and my thoughts were in perfect order and delicate balance, like some intricately wrought watch mechanism.
'Listen to me, Gil,’ he said. ‘You think you're being clever, being rational, being scientific—but you're not. You think that this can all be translated back to biochemistry, but it can't. Science is fine, when all it has to deal with is the world of dead objects and forces, where everything is measurable and all transactions can be represented by equations which proceed with mathematical relentlessness. The world of the mind isn't like that, Gil, and the psychologist's hope that the world of thought and emotion can ever be reduced to simple biochemistry is just a delusion. The world of the mind is frankly and essentially mysterious; it evades all attempts to make models of it, to build theories about its workings. Science can never account for dreams, Gil, no matter how hard it tries. It's pure folly to think that dreams and mental aberrations can be explained simply by inventing hypothetical viruses. The world of the mind is magical—literally magical—and in the borderlands where mind and matter meet there's a vast well of potential. Those borderlands can be crossed, Gil. People who have the talent, or the strength of will, can draw entities out of the borderlands, or learn to enter the borderlands themselves. There are people who can master the art of becoming, who can make a gift of that art to those whom they love. Anne has that gift, Gil. She wants to make a gift of that art to you, because she loves you. If only you can wait until she wakes up, you and she can explore the art together. You can be and become anything you want to be: vampires, magicians, gods.'
'Murderers,’ I said. ‘Monsters.'
'Only in the eyes of the human herd,’ he said. ‘Those who cannot be anything other than they are will always fear those who can become. Those who have no magic will always strive to destroy those who have, out of envy and out of the fear of being superseded. You're no longer of their kind, Gil. You owe them no more than they owe their cattle; your loyalty now is to a very different community. You have the potential in you to become powerful, to be something more and better than human. You drank more deeply than you needed to from the little girl, but you had let the hunger go unanswered for too long. You must learn to live with your hunger, Gil. You must learn to be its master and not its slave. Anne will teach you, when she wakes. Anne has the gift, the talent, the artistry. I will do whatever I can to help you both. Together, we three will be immensely stronger than any one of us could ever be alone. Together, we might even resist the predations of the owls.'
'It's no use,’ I told him, patiently. ‘I know what you are. More to the point, I know what I am. I couldn't help myself, but I know how feeble an excuse that is. People ought to be able to help themselves. They have to be able to help themselves, if they're to live together in civilised society. I'm not prepared to become a creature of the borderlands, nursing and nurturing my madness like some deformed but perversely loved child. I won't do that. It's not just the hunger. I really believe that I could cope with that. It's also the fact that I might infect other people—other people as vulnerable as me. I'm dangerous, and the fact that it's no fault of my own doesn't really enter into the equation. I have to be destroyed. You must see that.
'I'm a fucking vampire, for fucking Christ's sake!'
I hadn't meant to shout. I had intended to demonstrate that I could be calm and perfectly logical, in spite of everything. I had intended to keep my voice perfectly level, my manner perfectly reasonable. No hysteria. I wanted everything to be done properly. I wanted to be in control. I was in control, even though I was a vampire.
'Yes, you are,’ said Maldureve, stubbornly trying to fight calmness with calmness, true sanity with the appearance of reason. ‘You're already becoming detached from the world, already edging into the borderlands. My hope is that you won't really be able to stab yourself with that ridiculous little knife, any more than you could drive a wooden stake through your own heart. My hope is that your flesh will simply fade into the shadows, as mine would—and perhaps will—were you to try to destroy me. If you have any gift at all, that may well happen. You may not be able to kill yourself. But if you haven't even talent enough to protect yourself from your own rebel conscience, perhaps you aren't worth having. Perhaps Anne and I will be better off without you. There will always be others, you see. There's never any shortage of young blood. Whatever you do, it can't make any real difference to the rest of us, or to the world at large.'
'You're wrong,’ I told him, confidently. ‘You're just a doppelgänger. When I go, you go with me. I know you can't admit that. Maybe, if you have any independent existence in the bottomless pit of my mind, you don't even know that it's true. Maybe you think you do exist. But this is the boss speaking. This is the voice of consciousness. This is the real me, the guy who has to take responsibility for everything ... even for shit like you. You're dead, Maldureve. You're history.'
'You can't kill a vampire that way,’ he assured me, silkily. ‘Anne and I will go on, whatever happens to you. We were lovers, you know. That's why she went down to the garden at night—to meet me. She gave me substance in order that I could become her lover, and I was a better lover by far than you could ever be.'
'Was,’ I said, seizing upon the operative word.
'Was,’ he agreed. ‘We don't need that any more. We've passed on. Our relationship has entered a new phase. We still love one another, but we're more like brother and sister now. One for all and all for one.'
'Just good friends,’ I said. ‘Vampires together, cruising the shadows in search of prey.'
'It's you who keep trying to turn me into a caricature,’ he said. ‘It's you who keep trying to pretend that I'm only a joke, unworthy of belief. If you could only allow yourself to see clearly, to admit the truth ... but you insist on hiding behind that shield of false belief, that absurd idea that I'm just a hallucination brought on by a fever. You're your own worst enemy, Gil. If you weren't, you wouldn't be so determined to kill yourself. If you were really in control, you'd understand that.
'Please, Gil, think about this. At least consider the possibility that what you now think of as control is actually the opposite. You're bein
g controlled, Gil. You've made yourself into some kind of clockwork toy, because you think it's the only way of keeping doubt and confusion at bay. At what cost, Gil? Doubt is healthy. Confusion is simply a recognition of the fact that the real world has borderlands, that there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in Professor Viners’ philosophy. Accept what you are, Gil, and accept the legacy of what you might in time become.'
'You're just a cold in the head,’ I told him. ‘You're just a fever dream, which has to be disposed of. You don't exist, and you don't deserve to exist. I'm going to X you out of existence, cut you out of my soul. You can fade into the shadows if I lash out at you, but you can't escape if I turn the knife on myself and let my own blood flow. When I drain my own veins, vampire-fashion, you drain away too.'
'That's not true,’ he said, as if he felt truly sorry for me. ‘You can't get rid of me that way. The only person you can hurt is yourself. It's pointless, Gil. You'll realize that, afterwards. I only wish I could make you understand how pointless it is.'
'You're history,’ I told him again.
'Of course I'm history,’ he said. ‘I'm history and myth and nightmare. I'm the wickedness of the dream, Gil. I can't be banished, destroyed or forgotten. Nobody can control their dreams. The most that anyone can hope for is that their dreams will consent to leave them unharmed. Everyone knows, deep down, that their dreams have the power to disturb and distort and distress them, and to tear their fugitive self-confidence to shreds. We're all possessed, Gil—it's just that some of us have absentee landlords and quiet tenants.'
'We?’ I echoed. ‘Are you one of us now?'
'We have dreams too, Gil,’ he said. ‘You have no idea what nightmares possess our kind. But you soon will. Believe me, Gil, you don't want to find out. Not until you're ready for it.'
I picked up the can which I'd earlier put down, holding the handle in the same hand as the scalpel. I used my other hand to unscrew the cap. The odour seemed to fill the room, driving away the noisome odour of the grave which Maldureve exuded.
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