Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  'It's not as easy as that,’ I told her. ‘I need the library. Anyway, there are other things I have to do.'

  'What other things?'

  'I have to see Cynthia.'

  'I don't see why.'

  'And I have to go back to my room. I have to live in my room. I have to walk back and forth to Wombwell House, past the Marquis of Membury's Garden. I have to be able to do that.'

  'They've put up a fence,’ Sharon interjected. ‘As soon as the police finished, the workmen started.'

  'Locking the stable door, as usual,’ Mum said.

  'It's like one of those fences they put round electricity substations,’ Sharon went on. ‘Eight-foot metal struts, curled round at the top. It's incredibly ugly.'

  'It's not supposed to be pretty,’ Mum said critically. ‘It'll do the job it's supposed to do. They're putting in extra lights, too. You won't recognize it—it's quite different. You'll feel perfectly safe walking there, now. You should come home.'

  'I can't. Not yet.'

  She tried the delayed-shock argument, the not-looking-after-yourself argument and the not-realising-how-much-she'd-worry argument, but I stood them all off. Sharon helped, not because she didn't want me home but because the laws of sisterly loyalty demanded that she take my side against the common adversary.

  I meant what I said. I couldn't go home. Maybe for Christmas, for a few days of pretending, but not for any length of time. I didn't live there any more. I wasn't the same person who had left, no matter how little time had elapsed. And I did have work to do, I had a mission to undertake. I had a monster to hunt down.

  The one advantage in having Mum hovering around was that it helped to keep other people at bay. Her presence was a deterrent to the other patients, the doctors and the police. While she was listening in, they all had to stick to the rules. She even talked to a couple of the reporters, telling them that there was no point in talking to me, and giving them something they could print instead. Given a freer rein, I think, the curiosity of the patients and the police might have become more general, more intrusive and more problematic. Of course, she also inhibited people I'd rather have been able to talk to a little less self-consciously, like Dr Gray, who came to see me once, and Gil's father, whose embarrassment was quite bad enough without Mum's help. I was as kind as I could be, and I insisted that Gil couldn't have killed Janine Leigh even though I didn't have any real reason to be sure. At the end of the day, though, there's nothing at all you can say to a man whose son has cut his own throat and set himself on fire.

  Cynthia didn't come to see me, although I thought she might have done. Neither did Professor Viners, although he probably wanted to. He got Dr Hodgson to give me a note—which he passed to me almost furtively on one of the quiet occasions when Mum wasn't around. Dear Miss Charet, the note said, I would be greatly obliged if you could come to see me when you are able.

  'What's this about?’ I asked Dr Hodgson.

  'Mike and I go back a long way,’ the consultant told me, irrelevantly. ‘He's a good man. He's more than a little worried about all of this. Rumours are creeping round the campus, about viruses escaping from his lab. He asked me to run extra tests while you were unconscious, to make sure that you hadn't picked up any infection via your boyfriend. Apparently, he took blood from Gil Molari too, when the boy became convinced that he'd been infected. Nothing showed up—nothing at all. You can't blame Mike for being anxious. If he's shut down, it could wreck his career. People from the tabloids are fishing around, and they don't need much to set them off. We can keep them away from you while you're in here, but you won't be able to avoid them so easily once you're out. I think Mike just wants to ask you to be careful, to explain what it might mean if you were somehow to give them a hook to hang a scare story on. The ripper-on-the-loose story has already gone stale, and it only needs a spark to send them all haring off down some other melodramatic blind alley. Mike doesn't deserve that. Whatever happened to Gil Molari, it wasn't Mike's fault. All the tests were clear.'

  I wasn't in the least surprised that the tests had shown nothing. I knew that whatever had happened to Gil was my fault. It was my fault for feeding on his blood, even though I'd done it out of love. It was my fault for having delayed making my explanations until he'd be unable to deny them. I knew now that I ought to have told him what was happening, even though he'd have thought I was mad. That way, he wouldn't have been so ready to believe that he was going mad when the hunger grew in him. It was my fault, because I was the vampire and he was the victim. It was my fault, because I hadn't done enough to stop him believing that he was diseased and delirious.

  When I got out, I knew, I was going to have to make amends for that. I was going to have to make amends for everything, if I could. With the aid of what the owls had taught me—their powers, and above all their wisdom—I thought that I could do it.

  At least, I intended to try.

  'I'd really like to get out,’ I told Dr Hodgson, in as sweetly reasonable a fashion as I could contrive. ‘I feel fine, and I don't see that this observation business is achieving anything. If nothing showed up on my tests, surely there's no reason for me to be here.'

  'It isn't quite like that,’ the consultant said. ‘It's because nothing showed up on your tests that I'm wary. You shouldn't have been unconscious for so long. It wasn't really a coma, though we call it that for convenience. Maybe narcolepsy would be a better word, but giving a thing a name doesn't mean we understand it. Something might still show up. I'm afraid that if you leave, you might just slip back into unconsciousness—and if you did that after I'd discharged you, your mother and the tabloids would be after me. You wouldn't want me to get into any trouble, would you?'

  There was no point in telling him that I understood perfectly well why I'd been unconscious for so long. Coma and narcolepsy might be just fudge-words, but they were respectable fudge-words. Re-education by the owls was beyond the limits of the medical imagination.

  'You know, Anne,’ said Dr Hodgson, sitting down on the bed, ‘I think your weight problem may have had something to do with your being unconscious for so long. I know you're not anorexic, and I'm not accusing you of consciously dieting too hard, but it really doesn't do any good to be too thin. Your thyroid isn't hyperactive, but you have a pretty fast-paced metabolism. Every model in the world would love it, but you're not a model and you haven't quite stopped growing yet. Try to make sure that you get lots of protein. It's not easy to eat well on a student grant, I know, and I suppose the Hall food is mostly stodge, but do what you can, okay? I wouldn't prescribe bacon-and-egg breakfasts to everyone, but in your case ...'

  'I feel fine,’ I told him. ‘I eat enough. I'm just naturally thin.’ There didn't seem to be any point in observing that the hospital food was worse than the food in Hall, and that I certainly hadn't put on any weight while they'd been feeding me by intravenous drip and draining my waste fluids by catheter. I hadn't any complaints to make about that. I didn't feel hungry.

  I didn't feel hungry at all.

  Mum, of course, agreed with the doctor. ‘If you came home,’ she said, ‘I could make sure you got whatever you need. It'd be the best thing all round.'

  There was no effective defence but simple stubbornness. ‘I can't,’ I said, over and over again. ‘I have work to do. I daren't get too far behind, or I'll never catch up. If I run home because of what happened, he really will have hurt me. He'll have wrecked things for me. I have to carry on as if nothing happened. It's the only way to win.'

  Even Sharon, when she got a chance to be alone with me, wasn't so certain that I was right.

  'You could ease up on yourself a bit,’ she said. ‘It doesn't hurt to take a time-out when the going gets rough.'

  'You've been watching Channel 4 sport again,’ I said. ‘This is England. You don't have time-outs in netball.'

  'You haven't played netball since you were in primary school,’ she pointed out. ‘You're in the big league now. You have to be tough, but not that
tough. You nearly got your throat cut, your boyfriend is dead and your friend's daughter was murdered. That's a lot of grief. It's not like falling off a horse and having to get right back up again.'

  'You never rode a horse in your life,’ I said. ‘Or any of the rest of it. I've got to get out of this place, and I couldn't stand convalescing at home, with all the fuss. Anyway, I told the police I'd recognize the man's voice. They'll need me, if they catch somebody.'

  'There are trains,’ she pointed out. She was only putting up a show. She knew it was all decided, and that I'd have my own way. Only their little sisters know how stubborn people can be, when they really decide to dig in. She knew I'd win in the end.

  'I did it, though, didn't I?’ she said. ‘I woke you up. I knew it would work. Detonation Boulevard—bang bang.'

  'You did it,’ I agreed, not really thinking that she had. ‘You brought me back to the land of the living. I'll be sure to remember you in my will. Let me know what tape you want for Christmas. Something loud and dark and gothic, just like the world.'

  4

  When the man with the knife attacked me, I desperately wanted Maldureve to come. I wanted him to save me. I knew that our relationship had changed when I decided to live, and that once I became a fully-fledged vampire he would no longer be my lover and protector in the way that he had been before, but I hadn't yet got through the phase of wanting him and needing him and looking to him for succour and support. When he didn't come, I felt betrayed.

  In fact, it was far worse than that. While I was fighting the man with the dirty gloves, and most especially when the blade of his knife cut into my neck, I was sick with anger because Maldureve wasn't already there. It wasn't just that he didn't come when I needed him; the Marquis of Membury's Garden was his place, and he should have been there already, lying in wait for the stupid predator who had borrowed his shadows for a hiding place.

  It shouldn't have been me who was attacked at all; it should have been the monster, the vile thing who was lying in wait. Maldureve should have been there to sweep the thing into the folds of his cloak and rip its throat out. Why else had I granted him the gift of solidity? Why else had I made the supreme effort to see him, to help him emerge from the borderlands, to bring him into the narrow, ordinary, everyday world? Why should anyone welcome a vampire to existence, unless the vampire is prepared to play the hero's role, to be the ultimate lover in every respect?

  Maldureve let me down. He let me down badly.

  It was bad enough that the owls came hurtling out of the borderlands in a cataract of light. It was bad enough that they seized me with their wrathful claws and seared me with their awful vision. It was bad enough that they bore me away to the cage of light, to imprison me with my awful hunger, to break me of my addiction to young blood. It was all quite bad enough without the sensation of having been abandoned and betrayed, sold down the river, left to rot.

  I knew that Maldureve was scared of the owls, although I didn't understand why, but I hadn't expected him to be a coward. No matter how scared he was, I thought, he should have come to help me. No matter what danger he himself was in, he should have been brave. He owed me that much. You have to have more from a lover than sexual thrills, or he isn't really a lover at all.

  It was because of that betrayal, more than anything else, that the cage of light was the abyss of Hell so far as I was concerned. After the initial shock, the claws didn't hurt. However bad the hunger became, it would have been bearable if only I hadn't known that it was Maldureve's hunger, given to me by him so that I might suffer in his place, as he would surely have suffered, in the confines of that dreadful cage.

  In a way, though, the pain of that betrayal might have helped me. It made me bitter and it made me angry, and it hurt me, but it helped me to be even more determined not to die, not to fade away into the light until there was nothing left of me but a faint flickering shadow. When you're undead, you can't just let go of life. You fight.

  If that creature of wool and slime and muscle had grabbed me six weeks earlier, before I first encountered Maldureve, I think he would have killed me. At the very least he would have raped me. I think I would have let him. I wouldn't have been able to fight back, and I would have been so utterly humiliated that I wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation to die. I don't know what he would have done—whether he'd just have raped me and run away, or whether he'd have panicked and stabbed me in the heart—but I would have wanted to die. I would have been so utterly sick about myself, so sick about the world and its treatment of me, that I would have wanted to die.

  I would have died, for want of any substantial will to live. My strength would have drained away; my heart would have stopped. I would have made a tragic, beautiful corpse, all the more tragic and beautiful for having been spoiled and crushed and violated by that animal. That, after all, is how voyeurs see rape: as a tragedy of beauty and innocence despoiled—and before I met Maldureve, I too was just a voyeur, a spectator of my own life, a keening mourner at my own slow funeral.

  Because I'd met Maldureve, and because he'd let me down, I couldn't be content to die. I had to continue to live, even when I found myself in Hell. I'd supped enough young blood to make me truly young, and truly sanguine.

  I thought, for a while, that I went to Hell when the owls took me. I thought that I went to a place of punishment with no hope of redemption. I thought that their cage of light, which held me immobile and burned me with its intensity, was dreadful beyond my wildest imaginings. But I was being stupid and childish. It wasn't like that at all. The cage of light ceased to be Hell within hours, maybe within minutes, and became life. Just life.

  I knew that I was in the borderlands, lost in the interstices of everyday experience, out of touch with the world of objects and sensory stimuli, but it was just a matter of being there, of getting by. There was a lot to learn, but I had my mind and my intelligence.

  I wasn't dead. I wasn't defeated.

  I wasn't, in fact, in Hell at all.

  I got used to the eyes. It isn't so bad to be stared at, once all the suspense is exhausted. It isn't so bad, even when you know that the eyes which are staring at you can look into your heart and your mind, because your flesh and bones aren't mask enough to keep them out. It all becomes quite tolerable, once you understand that you have something to say about it, and that you can get answers in return to your questions.

  A stare can't be menacing for ever, and once it isn't voiceless any more, its power to make you paranoid is much reduced.

  The hunger wasn't so easy, because it was inside and not outside. But there comes a point where hunger can't get any worse, and after that it begins—slowly—to get better. Even real hunger is like that; even pain is like that. A vampire's hunger for blood is, in the end, only another kind of addiction. It doesn't have to drive you crazy, if you don't let it.

  I was in pain with the hunger, sick with the hunger, desperate with the hunger ... but I outlasted it, as the owls knew I could, as the owls knew I would. And when I'd done that, there was only the betrayal left to hurt me.

  That was the hardest thing of all to come to terms with, although it wasn't nearly as painful as the hunger, nor as intimidating as the eyes. To master the memory of betrayal, I needed the owls. To get past that desolate sense of disappointment, I needed re-education. To learn to trust myself again, I needed my extended remand to the prison of light.

  'You should not have brought Maldureve out of the shadows,’ the owls told me, in their softly sincere voices. ‘His kind is dangerous.'

  'I needed him,’ I told them, truthfully enough. ‘I needed to be loved. I needed to be brought out of myself. I needed a better reason than I had to perform the empty rituals of everyday life. I needed excitement. I even needed the horror of him, the darkness, the threat. I needed the unease. I needed a vampire, and nothing less would do.'

  'And he needed you,’ they reminded me. ‘The meeting of mutual needs is one of the fundamental processes of evolution
: symbiosis is the beginning of integration, the first vital step in the quest for adaptation. But the coincidence of needs is never simple, never symmetrical. You have other needs, which Maldureve cannot meet; he has other needs, for which you are inadequate. The meeting of your needs has consequences for others, as does the meeting of his. You met your need by bringing the vampire from the borderlands, but now he is free and not all his victims will thrive on his attentions as you did. His freedom has consequences for our kind, too, for we are competitors, his kind and ours. That is the other fundamental process of evolution: competition and selection; the survival of the fittest. Love is as much a weapon in that war as hate. Love is a fallible yardstick, Anne: nothing is right because it feels right; nothing is true because it is beautiful.'

  'I am one with him now,’ I told them. ‘I am of his kind. My commitment is made.’ But he let me down!

  'All your choices remain to be made,’ they told me. ‘You can be mistress of the blood without becoming slave to the blood. You have not sold your soul, and you owe him no debts. He needed you as much as you needed him, and now you are both different, both transformed. Sometimes, Anne, we must slay what we have summoned. Sometimes, we must take arms even against our own bodies and our own minds, when they threaten to destroy us. Although our appetites would let us starve, still we must eat. If a limb becomes gangrenous, it must be severed. If we have given solidity to that which is dangerous, and have thereby loosed evil upon the world, we must repair what we have done.

  'Maldureve must be dissolved again into the shadows. Either his too solid heart must be staked, or his too sturdy flesh put to the torch. He must be made captive, Anne. Only you can do that. Only you can send him back across the borderlands, confine him once again to the realm of unbeing. Would that you could send him back to the land of never was, for his evil is spreading like a cancer, and more will die if he is not stopped.'