Bloodshift

by Garfield Reeves-Stevens

  At least Helman felt he had a bit more control over the situation. He was no longer a pawn. Instead he had a function to perform to aid one of the more powerful players in this bizarre game. And he was relieved that Weston’s men would be looking after his sister. The only thing he was worried about, he thought as he slid the room key into the hotel door, was how the Conclave would react to the aborted assassination attempt the night before. Adrienne had told him what to say, but he wondered if they would give him a chance to say it. Even if they did, would they believe him?

  He pushed open the door. The Do Not Disturb sign was still in place and he could see by the unmade bed that the maids had not trespassed against it. The room looked empty. He slipped inside quickly and shut the door, locking it. He lay the package containing the Kevlar vest on the ground and reached inside his coat for the magnum that Weston had returned to him. He held it at the ready and checked for intruders.

  Everything was clear and untouched. He threw his coat down on the bed and went into the bathroom. He ran the water into the sink and splashed it up on his face. It was refreshing. He thought of swimming with Steven and Campbell in the New England summer. Sometimes it almost felt as if he were their father. He liked the feeling.

  Helman looked at his face in the mirror. The stress of the last four days was showing. He looked as unhealthy as the two teenagers he had seen walking through the lobby downstairs, the ones with the high turtleneck sweaters and the pale sunken faces. He would have to be careful if Adrienne’s plans included crossing any borders. He looked as if he were strung out on drugs. He thought of Adrienne; he wondered where she was sleeping now. Other thoughts came to him then. Mostly they centred around the look of sorrow that had been on her face when she talked of Jeffery. All that is different about me is that I have a disease. A woman with a disorder, he thought. A small one. One that had killed her and kept her alive at the same time. She had been dead, and Helman knew the dead. Yet she was given new life. A second chance. He wondered about second chances, about what would happen to them if they both survived. He thought about things that might happen until he angrily thrust the thoughts aside. He was thinking the impossible. He threw more water on his face and watched it as it splashed against the mirror above the sink and ran down like raindrops, streaking the glass like it had that morning. Streaks on the glass. He felt alarms go off inside of him. He had washed in the bathroom this morning. There had been streaks on the mirror. A crumpled washcloth by the side of the sink. Used soap in hardened bubbles in the sink’s indentation.

  The bathroom was now spotless. But the bed was untouched. Had the maids straightened up half his room? If they entered despite the Do Not Disturb sign, and found the room empty, wouldn’t they have cleaned everywhere? He looked around hurriedly. Other anomalies were present. His towel from the shower this morning was still stuffed over the towel bar. It hadn’t been replaced. The washcloth in the shower enclosure was also as he had left it. But the sink had been cleaned. He looked more closely at the surfaces of the bathroom. And the mirror. And the counter running around the sink. Had someone been here and spilled something?

  Helman was concerned, but couldn’t determine any sinister motive for anyone to have entered his hotel room to clean only his sink. And the floor too, come to think of it. The tiles had been wiped clean, the bathmat pushed to one side. The grouting between the tiles looked darker than he remembered, but he discounted that impression. He hadn’t been paying close attention in the morning, so it was not a valid observation.

  He turned off the water splashing into the sink and moved over to the toilet. He reached down and lifted the lid. And he knew what had stained the tile grouting. He knew what had been spilled and so meticulously cleaned from the bathroom floor and counter.

  Blood.

  The blood of the woman whose severed head now stared sickeningly up at him from the toilet bowl.

  It was jammed into place, lying a bit on its side. Dark hair, soaked with water and blood, snaked across the porcelain like cracks through fine china. One eye was submerged in the dark pink of the water, the other was pushed all the way to the side as though in her last moments she had sought help from beside her. The month was open. The water’s surface lay still within it. The severed head stared up at him.

  And Helman screamed.

  For one timeless instant, as his heart literally jumped in his chest and his eyes stretched open and refused to focus on the horror before him, he had seen the face of his sister and his stomach had convulsed and the bile burned in his throat The scream had come with the shocked recognition that the face was the face of a stranger. And his stomach churned again and he fell toward the sink, his legs collapsing under him and he vomited as if he were exorcising the demons who had caused the monstrosity he had seen.

  His breath came in hoarse gasps. But the shock was numbing him, giving his mind back its control. He reached over and flipped the toilet lid down, entombing the horror with the clatter of plastic. He stepped out into his room holding onto the doorframe.

  Helman went to the bed and sat upon it. He concentrated on making the shudders he felt diminish and go away. His foot hit something solid behind the bedspread. Something was under the bed. He reached out, grabbed the corner of the spread and pulled.

  A hand flopped out. A woman’s lifeless hand. Helman knelt at the side of the bed. The rest of the woman was there. The rest of her except her head.

  There was a pounding on the door.

  “Mr. Osgood! Are you alright, sir?”

  Helman said nothing. There was more pounding. Then he heard a key being jiggled in the lock. He hadn’t fastened the chain.

  “Who is it?” he yelled as he threw the bedspread over the bed, letting it hang down low where the headless corpse was visible.

  “House security, sir. The maid said she heard screaming. Are you all right, sir?” The jiggling in the lock had stopped, for the moment.

  “Yes, yes. I’m fine. Just a nightmare.” It was four o’clock in the afternoon.

  “I’d like to make sure you’re okay, sir. Nothing broken or anything like that. Will you let me in, sir?”

  Helman heard the key in the lock again. The security man was coming in no matter what Helman said.

  “Sure, sure you can come in. Just a second.” Helman grabbed his magnum from the other bed, went to the bathroom and wrapped a towel around it, and said, “I’m coming. Just a second.” He shut the bathroom door and held the towel-wrapped gun against his head as if it were a compress.

  He opened the door.

  The security man was young. The kind of person who looks scary when wearing a police uniform because how can they give a gun to someone who looks so much like a kid. This kid, noted Helman, was carrying a handgun in a shoulder holster poorly hidden under a gold-coloured hotel blazer which hadn’t been tailored for weapons. A concealed handgun was unusual for Canada. Helman realised the maid might not have heard him scream at all. He might be in the middle of a set-up.

  The man with the gun was young, but he wasn’t nervous. He walked in past Helman and moved to the middle of the room. Helman saw his face matched the one on the employee photo badge he wore over the blazer breast pocket. He wondered if vampires could have their pictures captured on film. But the sun was still shining. He had nothing to worry about from the Conclave until sunset. Could the Jesuits be behind this butchery?

  The man looked around. His badge said his name was McIlroy. “Windows all okay are they, Mr. Osgood?” he asked.

  Helman rubbed the towel against the side of his head. Perhaps he wasn’t being set up. Perhaps the hotel was keeping an eye on their peculiar guest who seemed to have broken his glass door from the outside in, the night before.

  “No more trouble with ice, if that’s what you mean Mr., ah MacKilroy?”

  The security man corrected the pronunciation of his name. “That’s Mackleroy. You have nightmares at four in the afternoon often, Mr. Osgood?” He was peering around the edges of the beds.
Helman rubbed the towel a bit lower.

  “Jet lag,” he said. “Still haven’t caught up.” He tried to smile, but he was preparing himself to kill this boy who had a gun hidden beneath his gold jacket.

  Mcllroy looked straight at Helman. “Registration says you’re from Buffalo. Not much of a time difference between here and Buffalo, is there?”

  Helman knew the man wouldn’t have had time to check the registration of the room between the time the maid called and he arrived. They were keeping a close watch on him.

  “Just spent a month in Japan. Caught the flu or something. Feel pretty sick, actually,” he said, returning McIlroy’s stare.

  Mcllroy started to walk towards the door. “Want housekeeping to straighten out in here?” he asked.

  Leave damn you, thought Helman. “No, I’m going to try to catch a few more hours, I think,” he said.

  “Okay with me,” He was by the bathroom door. He noticed it was shut tight. “Mind if I use your bathroom, Mr. Osgood? Haven’t had a break in a while.”

  “I’d rather you—” Helman began, but it was too late.

  Mcllroy’s hand was already on the doorknob, pushing the door open.

  “Just a second,” he said and walked in, closing the door behind him.

  Helman frantically unwound the towel from his magnum. The door opened. Mcllroy’s face was wrinkled up in a bizarre expression. Helman lifted the gun behind the loosely hanging towel.

  Mcllroy waved his hand in front of his nose. “Whew, you really are sick, aren’t you?” Helman’s vomit was still in the sink. “I’d put the fan on in there for a while before you go in. It stinks to high heaven.”

  A split second from an irrevocable act, Helman’s finger eased off the Magnum’s trigger.

  “You can get the house doctor by dialling the switch-board,” Mcllroy said. And then he was gone through the door and into the hallway.

  Helman, his fingers trembling, clicked the door shut and fumbled with the chain.

  He stumbled back from the tiny hallway. This time he stayed away from the beds and collapsed in an upholstered chair in the corner by the window farthest from the bed with the body stuffed under it.

  He sat there a long time, watching the long shadows of sunset move against the fake grass cloth-covered walls. He held his gun loosely in his hand. Slowly the sun disappeared. Slowly his trembling subsided. He didn’t think he had too many of those close calls left in him. Someday soon he felt that he might just start shooting. And shooting.

  But for now, he was calming. He sat without thinking.

  The sun set.

  The phone rang.

  This is their time, he thought.

  He answered the phone. He recognised the voice.

  It was deep, sibilant, and this time it suggested a trade: “a head for a head, Mr. Helman.”

  This was their time.

  Chapter Seven

  AS THE SUN sank near the horizon, bringing on the lifegiving night, Adrienne St. Clair slowly awoke in her sanctuary. She knew the time instinctively. A few more minutes and the killing radiation of the sun would be safely hidden behind the curve of the earth and she could arise.

  Years before, she and Jeffery had worked to determine just what it was about the sun that was deadly for their kind, and how they could be aware of its presence in the skies above, even though they slept in deep basements or caverns. That had been in the good times, when they both were accepted by the Conclave and the community of yber. Lord Diego had been their friend. He had even co-operated with them.

  His familiars had provided a yacht, and he and they had voyaged off around the world. They had been deliriously happy months. She and her love had walked the beaches of far-off islands, watching the moon sparkle on the crashing crests of waves. They had walked through the brilliantly fit night streets of giant cities in many lands where Diego had had business to conduct with local yber. And through it all they had been together. Secure in their love as no humans could be. Because the islands would inevitably sink beneath the seas; the cities would crumble or be torn down and rebuilt until they were unrecognisable; and even, she had heard, the moon would slowly move away from the earth and millennia from now would be no more than a bright star; but she and Jeffery would still be together, walking new beaches, seeing undreamt-of cities, and still they would be in love.

  In those days, she did not dwell on the horror of her Communion, nor the nightmare of her first months of night scavenging. Her new life started with Jeffery in Geneva. And until the night they had come and taken him away from her, she had not regretted what her life, and her First Death, had brought.

  The voyage aboard Diego’s yacht had been a whirl-wind of discovery. At first they had thought that the yber response to the sun was like a circadian rhythm, the inner time sense that enabled plants to open and close in response to the days, and zoo animals to know when their feeding time was approaching. Such rhythms were thrown into confusion by time zone changes, yet on the voyage, all the yber present responded exactly to the setting of the sun, no matter how their time sense had slipped because of the journey.

  When, at last, they had returned to Spain and the lands and villas Diego shared with them, she and Jeffery had tried an experiment that both were surprised had not been tried before. Diego had told them why it had not been attempted, or if it had, why the results were not generally known. The Conclave said that since the yber were of the Devil, and the Devil had more power in the absence of tight, thus the yber responded to the night through the supernatural influence of Hell. The yber had their answer for the phenomena, there was no need to look further.

  The two of them, with an entourage of familiars, had travelled to France and a deep system of caverns. There they had attempted to free themselves from the constraints of sunset and sunrise, and they had succeeded. It was difficult at first, a growing weariness enveloped them as the earth turned toward the sun. And an hour or so after the sun had risen above on the surface, a crushing torpor would seize them and they would collapse into sleep. But after a week or trying, they seemed to have broken the old habits. They could stay awake and function though the sun blazed away outside the caverns. A new dimension had been added to the lives of the yber. Even Diego was pleased, though it took a long cautious time before he broached their accomplishment to the other members of the Conclave.

  Soon, though, it had become a standard practice throughout the world of yber. In Zurich, she knew, whole offices had been built without windows and special light locks were constructed around entry ways. The yber who controlled the amassed fortune of generations of investment and accumulation were now able to work during the same hours as the bankers who arranged for the transfer of funds. Fewer humans had to be brought into the suspicious conditions of dealing only at night with pale men who spoke in dry whispers. The yber became wealthier, and more secure, because of Adrienne’s and Jeffery’s work. But the Conclave was concerned about how far they would go.

  Eventually, she and Jeffery applied themselves only to the analysis of their special talents. Their villa became filled with equipment of science. They requested permission to enlist doctors as familiars. The Conclave turned them down without debate or explanation. Diego came under censure for allowing such activity in his domain.

  Then they had taken the risk which had brought their ruin. Despite the Conclave’s ruling, they had enlisted scientists. It was impossible to keep that knowledge from the Lords of the Conclave. Diego was furious. He had their equipment destroyed, their new familiars vanished during the day. Diego said he was trying everything he could to keep the Conclave from sentencing them to the Final Death. He wanted them to leave his domain.

  Adrienne and Jeffery made up their minds. They were on the brink of miraculous revelations. They knew even more of the changes that occurred in an yber body; they had x-rays of their new internal configuration. They were sure the yber responded to the sun’s disruption of the ionosphere, the same daily phenomenon that altered the tra
nsmission of radio waves. And most importantly, they were succeeding in breaking down the yber nutritive needs. There might soon come a day when the yber would no longer require the living blood of humans for survival. With that discovery would come the night that the age-old conflict between hunter and prey could finally end. On that night the yber could come out of their centuries of hiding and take their place beside the humans from which they had so long ago arisen.

  With this Knowledge, they approached other yber. Word of their heresy spread quickly. Within a week the Conclave had reacted, and in one terrible night, Jeffery was taken from her and bound to the rock to wither before the rising sun. From that moment on, Adrienne was hunted. By the emissaries of the Conclave, and, as all yber were, by the Jesuits,

  One by one her familiars were sought out and destroyed. She learned that Lord Diego himself, his position precarious because he had originally supported their work, was leading the hunt himself.

  Adrienne knew she could not elude him for long. Knowledge of the Ways was imparted in special ceremonies, most occurred in the first year after Communion, but other ceremonies still remained to come as the new yber matured; ceremonies which took place at fifty-year intervals. Adrienne had not experienced even one of those advanced rituals of knowledge. Diego had been through eight.

  He had the abilities to track her down no matter where she ran. It was just a matter of time.

  So Adrienne set her course. She could not let Jeffery’s and her own, inevitable Final Death, be meaningless. She had to find someone to whom she could impart her knowledge. She had to find someone who would help her, in the time that remained, finally perfect the substitute for human blood. Once that was accomplished, she would arrange for the formula to be given to other familiars and yber. Perhaps even to the Jesuits who could no longer accuse the yber of being blood-drinking monsters. Even if Diego destroyed her and her work utterly, he could not destroy the knowledge she would spread. It would grow through the world of the yber. Despite all the Conclave’s efforts, their years of rule would be at an end. Even in her Final Death, she would be victorious over them all. And in her victory, she would once again be with Jeffery. Once again their love would be eternal.