Young Blood

by Brian Stableford

  I could see that Dr Gray was enjoying himself. Usually he found tutorials boring, perhaps because he'd been going back and forth over the same arguments for thirty-five years, but he always warmed up when we left the syllabus behind and got on to something that allowed improvisation. I couldn't tell how good he really was as a philosopher, but I could see that he took a real pleasure in fanciful argument for argument's sake. It brought him to life.

  'But not all the ideas that have survived the supposed decay of magical beliefs are comforting ones,’ Cynthia objected. ‘Some of them are really very scary.'

  Cynthia, like Daniel, had a certain affection for oddball beliefs. She was apparently half convinced that technology, science and the kind of philosophy which Dr Gray taught were all by-products of the ruthless and insane male quest for domination. Once, when I'd vaguely mentioned what Gil did, she'd told me that science was just the mind-fucking aspect of men's ongoing rape of the world, but that had been well out of earshot of any of the lecturers. She'd never have had the nerve to say anything like that to Dr Gray.

  'Can you give me an example?’ Dr Gray asked her, in his best tutorial manner. That was my cue.

  'Vampires,’ I said, diving in before Cynthia could offer an example of her own. ‘Maybe people don't believe in them, but the idea is as powerful now as it ever was—maybe more so. Given all the books and films, it's obvious that vampires still have the power to scare people. People may say that they don't believe in anything supernatural, that it's all just fiction and fun, but there's obviously a fascination in the idea of vampires—something which makes people uneasy. Why, if it's not plausible, not comforting, and not rational, should the idea affect us at all?'

  It was the longest question I'd ever asked, and probably the best. Dr Gray looked at me approvingly through his thick-lensed spectacles, and I could feel the envy radiating from the other two. They probably thought that Dr Gray was easy on me because he fancied me, but I couldn't believe that.

  'It's an interesting example,’ he said, slowly, as though he were stalling while he thought of an answer, although I could tell that he wasn't. He really liked playing the game. ‘It's all the more interesting because the kind of vampires that fascinate us now aren't at all like the vampires that people used to believe in, when people did believe in vampires.

  'The vampire of folklore is a hideously unpleasant thing: a walking corpse. The vampire of folklore reeks of decay—and no wonder, when you bear in mind that many of his attributes are simply those which corpses acquire as they putrefy. Dead bodies, spared the embalmer's cunning artifice, undergo some pretty horrible changes. They swell up and become discoloured. Some tissues are liquefied and others give off gas, so that horrid stuff may leak from the mouth. A decaying body—especially when it's penetrated by a wooden stake—is likely to belch and groan. That's what the vampires people once believed in were like: dead people strangely animated by natural processes they couldn't begin to understand.

  'But the vampires we see in films aren't like that, are they? The vampires which fascinate us are rather different from the ones which used to terrify our ancestors. They're aristocratic, handsome, hypnotic ... and sexy. They threaten to drink our blood, as the old vampires used to do, but they don't threaten to drown us in filth and corruption. Theirs is a much more subtle threat, a nakedly sexual threat.'

  'So what?’ said Daniel. ‘That doesn't explain anything. It's just poetic licence.'

  'A lovely phrase, that,’ said Dr Gray, almost lasciviously. ‘Poetic licence. Who grants poets a licence, and why? Why did we allow Bram Stoker to make Dracula into a terribly charming—and I do mean terribly and charming—count, who had the power to turn innocent young Victorian maidens into ravening bloodthirsty monsters? Did you ever notice that Stoker's favourite adjective is “voluptuous", that he uses it over and over again when describing his female vampires?'

  I don't suppose any of us had. I certainly hadn't.

  'I still don't see ...’ Cynthia began, but stopped when Dr Gray fixed his gaze upon her.

  'The Victorians did tend to see sex as something monstrous,’ Dr Gray went on. ‘They tried ever so hard to believe that women didn't have any sexual feelings—or, rather, that all sexual feeling in a woman was unnatural. The idea of the sexually demanding woman, with an appetite to be fed, was something they tried to reject, and one of their strategies of rejection was demonisation. In fiction, female sexuality became the prerogative of lamias and vampires; in reality, the Victorians committed young girls to lunatic asylums for confessing that they wanted sex.'

  'But we don't think like that,’ said Daniel, aggressively—Cynthia, I suspect, wasn't so sure—‘and yet Dracula is more popular now than ever.'

  'And more attractive now than ever,’ Dr Gray countered. ‘You're quite right, of course. There must be something deeper, mustn't there? There must be something else which sustains the vampire myth so powerfully in an age of non-belief. What can it possibly be?'

  He looked around, hopefully, the way he sometimes did—but nobody had any ideas. Not even me.

  'I wonder,’ he said, putting on his most teasing expression, ‘whether it might have anything to do with the fact that each and every one of us actually begins life as a vampire, sustained in the blissful safety of the womb by the constant flow of our mother's blood? We had no teeth then, of course, but I rather think that the vampire's fangs are just for show, don't you? We can all see that Christopher Lee's canines are at least two inches apart, and the two holes in the girl's neck are never more than half an inch from one another—there's no real pretence, is there? But the silk-lined coffin in which the vampire is required to rest, upon the soil of his homeland—isn't that rather reminiscent of the womb?'

  Is it? I wondered. Maldureve had no silk-lined coffin, so far as I knew. Nor had he any fangs.

  'Even after we're born,’ Dr Gray continued, thrilled to bits with his own ingenuity, ‘we continue to suckle at our mother's breast, drawing her to us magnetically with the power of our cries. Perhaps—just perhaps—what we see in the literary and cinematic vampire is an echo of ourselves: imperious, irresistible, locked into an unsurpassable intimacy with our loving victim. And perhaps we can't help feeling disturbed by the confrontation with what we once were; perhaps we're guilty, uneasy, unwilling to look ourselves in the face. Vampires are invisible in mirrors, aren't they? Perhaps that's because, when we look into the mirror, we only want to see ourselves as we are, and are intent on refusing any confrontation with our tiny, incestuous, vampiric selves, lest we should feel desperately nostalgic for that lovely limbo of pre-consciousness which was the womb.'

  I hadn't expected to hear him say anything like that, and it sent all kinds of shivers up and down my spine. He was wrong, of course. Completely wrong. Maldureve wasn't me, and I wasn't trying to be my own mother. Whatever that bliss was which possessed me when he fed on me, it wasn't the syrupy liquidity of the womb.

  All in all, though, I had to admit that it was still a hell of a theory.

  It left Daniel and Cynthia completely cold, though. I was the only one who got a buzz out of it, and I think Dr Gray knew it, though he couldn't have begun to understand the reason. He wasn't so gross as to wink at me, but if it's possible to twinkle an eye deliberately he twinkled his at me while the others gave their verdict.

  'That's sick,’ said Cynthia. ‘It's utterly repulsive.'

  'It's ridiculous,’ Daniel agreed. ‘Crazy.'

  'I'm glad you think so,’ said Dr Gray smoothly—no Parthian shot, this—‘because, you see, the argument couldn't possibly be true unless it provoked exactly that kind of alarm and unease. If you were able just to say ho hum the way you can a dozen times in every other tutorial, I'd have to concede that I was wrong, wouldn't I? If I were right, you'd have to consider the idea sick, ridiculous, repulsive, crazy. You'd have to thrust it away from you violently, because you couldn't bring yourselves to contemplate it with equanimity. Maybe, if you could accept it, you wouldn't find
anything to move you, disturb you or frighten you in horror films. All the real horrors, you see, are inside us—but it's so dark inside us that we can only really see them, and get them in focus, by imagining them outside, and then trying to deny that they mean anything at all. Do you have your essay topics for next week?'

  It was world class—an easy gold in the freestyle section. But it wasn't, in the end, much help to me. I remember thinking then that that was the trouble with philosophy—it was so impractical. Everybody thinks that, when they're only just beginning to get the hang of it.

  I still had a lot to learn. Maldureve had taught me a lot, and even Dr Gray had taught me a little, but I'd hardly begun to cultivate wisdom. I didn't yet know what it would take to make that beginning.

  8

  Deciding to live instead of dying wasn't a momentary thing. I didn't sit down to think it over, listing the pros and cons on a piece of paper, and then suddenly stand up at the end of half an hour's intensive brooding, with the opening chords of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra playing in the background of my imagination, and say: ‘I've decided—I'm going to be a vampire. I'm going to live!’ Life doesn't imitate art to that extent.

  It's not that there weren't pros and cons to be weighed up; it wasn't as easy a decision as you might think. The mysterious owls of which Maldureve had spoken with trepidation hardly figured in my calculations at all, but when I coolly and honestly tried to weigh up the advantages of life vis-à-vis death, I found disincentives as well as pluses. I'm not one of those people who think suicide is always a cop-out or a symptom of insanity; I'm always surprised that more people don't do it.

  First of all, I had to get past the idea that there was something intrinsically romantic about dying. Sometimes, when I used to look at myself in the mirror—and this was long before I came to university or met Maldureve—I used to think: there's the face of someone who was born to die young. When Miss Lawrence, the English teacher, told me I had authentic talent as a writer, what the word ‘talent’ conjured up for me was the idea of Sylvia Plath and Stevie Smith, making art out of despair. That was before Miss Lawrence started being sarcastic about the ‘myth of tragic beauty’—I wonder what Dr Gray would have to say about that!—but it wasn't really the beauty bit of it that was important to me; I've never been more than averagely pretty. I think it had more to do with ideas of innocence. When I was fifteen, if I could have been anyone in the entire history of the world I'd have chosen to be St Teresa of Avila. I'd grown out of that, but not entirely.

  Maybe if I'd still been a virgin, in the stricter sense—meaning that Maldureve didn't count, only Gil—when my chance came to fade gently into oblivion, buoyed up by the ecstatic tide of Maldureve's intimate attentions, I might actually have decided to die.

  But I wasn't, and I didn't.

  Even if it had just been ordinary life I was choosing, with all its shabbiness, dirt and stress, and all its petty obligations, indignities and anxieties; even if it had just been sleep and alcohol, shitting and periods, tutorials and phoning home, sex and kissing, vegetarian salads and iron tablets, I think I might still have carried on. What really clinched it, though, was that life had become much more than that, for me. It wasn't just the way Maldureve made me feel, because I knew that would be a temporary thing. I had figured out, without his having to tell me, that once I became a full-fledged vampire myself, he'd have no further use for me. I knew my affair with him was doomed whatever I did. But I was gradually becoming excited by the prospect of turning into something like Maldureve, of becoming a haunter of the dark, a creature of the borderlands: a vampire.

  The prospect of being able to enter the borderlands, whatever perils might be lurking in wait there, and being able to hide, dissolved in shadow, was very attractive to me. Even more attractive, above all else—above all else—was the prospect of being able to find donors of my own.

  I had no idea, then, whether Maldureve felt the same emotions I did when we made love. I had no guarantee at all that becoming a vampire myself would compensate me for the loss of that special ecstasy, but the idea was incredibly thrilling anyway. I wanted to be able to bring about that miraculous transformation of the flesh: that magical lovebite which created an interface between body and body, essence and essence, soul and soul.

  Essence and essence, soul and soul. That was how I represented it to myself. I knew that Dr Gray would disapprove of the empty concepts but I also knew that sometimes you have to use words to reach out beyond the concepts you can fill, to capture a little something of that elusive world-as-it-is which lies beyond the grasp of our enfeebled powers of perception. I knew that it was possible to be something more than human, and I believed that in being something more than human there was a very precious kind of joy. I wanted that. I wanted to leave my old self behind, but not just to let it wither and decay. I wanted to make use of the potential that was in it, and had somehow never managed to flourish and mature.

  So, weighing everything in the balance, I decided that I had to choose life instead of death.

  By the time I got it straight in my mind, my body had already made the decision to grow stronger. It hadn't bothered to wait for that silent speaker, my conscious mind, to get up on an imaginary podium and make its declaration of intent. I was already getting stronger. In fact, by the time I was settled in my mind I felt so healthy that I wondered whether that silent speaker might not be just like all politicians and other such monsters of ego, eager to credit itself with an authority it didn't really have. Perhaps, I realised, the decision of the flesh had come first and the decision of consciousness had merely fallen into line. I knew what it was that I was deciding, but the actual decision was made somewhere deep inside me, at a gut level. It was my gut that sent my mind the message confirming that the decision had been made.

  It had to be my gut, because the result of the decision was hunger.

  I'd never been a hungry person. Appetites are very variable, and mine had always been on the low side. There had never been anything courageous about my thinness; it hadn't been won by means of some heroic struggle against the ambitions of my body to grow fat. My body had never wanted to be fat, and was never very enthusiastic about being fed. Mostly, I didn't care at all whether I ate or not.

  'You're lucky,’ Sharon once told me. ‘You're easily satisfied. I'm not. I could stuff myself to bursting, and still have greed-lights in my eyes. You're so lucky.'

  I knew that she meant it, but I wasn't grateful. I didn't feel lucky. I always envied Sharon her appetites, because I always suspected that she found so much more pleasure in things than I could.

  I suppose it was the same with my sex drive. Some of the girls at school were knocked for six when puberty hit them. My friend Mary told me once that she could wet her knickers with desire just sitting on a bus, when the hormones got to work on her. Sharon was the same when the curse descended on her. Wild music, black hair, pill parties and giving it away against the garden wall. ‘Young blood,’ Dad said, with a mournful shake of the head, never knowing the half of it. He'd never said that about me. I was always a stranger to greed and a stranger to lust. I never had that kind of trouble at all.

  That's one of the reasons why I did so well at school, I suppose. A lot of the girls couldn't concentrate once they were swamped by all that sort of stuff. I think boys are better able to divide their attention, thanks to the nature of their equipment, but a lot of the girls just switched their minds off and gave themselves over to obsession. Not me. The hormones didn't bother me at all. I got far more of a buzz out of writing stories. Not that writing was any kind of substitute or sublimation. I was certainly never hungry to write. It was just that making things up was the only buzz I had. No greed, no lust; just imagination.

  'I wish I had your imagination,’ Sharon said to me once. But that was just because I was her big sister. She wished that she had everything of mine, from time to time.

  Even with Maldureve, and all the glorious feelings I had when we made lov
e, I never became physically hungry for more. My desire for Maldureve never became the kind of appetite which would build up and up and up if it wasn't satisfied, until it became desperate. The joy I had with Maldureve was a purified joy—infinitely desirable, but not in any sense a physical addiction. I wanted it, more than anything else in the world, but I didn't need it.

  I always told myself that my way was best, even though I didn't feel lucky. I told myself that if only everyone were like me, the world wouldn't be such an awful place. Mum and Dad were like me, I thought, and Sharon would be too, when her young blood matured. It was the best way to be, even if it was dull. I still told myself that, even after I first met Maldureve and realised how many more things there were in Heaven and Earth than I'd dared to dream of. On the other hand, I could see well enough by then why natural selection had taken such care to booby-trap all creatures great and small with ferocious hungers and souped-up drives. We weren't timetabled to do Schopenhauer until the second year, but I'd read enough in the textbook to have every sympathy with his comments about the necessary absurdity of the inbuilt will to live.

  So I understood, at least in an intellectual sort of way, the kind of hunger which I acquired, for the first time, when I decided to live.

  The new hunger wasn't any ordinary hunger, and there was never any possibility or danger of soothing its pangs in any ordinary or compromising fashion. I didn't have the least desire to abandon my vegetarian salads in favour of undercooked steak. The kind of blood which is let in abattoirs wasn't of any interest to me at all; my hunger was very specifically focused.