My own attitudes had always been different. Even before Dr Gray had made an effective beginning on the troublesome task of turning me into a real philosopher, I had felt differently about such things. Maybe, I thought, that's why Maldureve had come to me. (But I knew in my heart that it was every bit as much a freak of chance as Gil's zeroing in on me at the freshers’ dance.) It was nice to think that there had been a good reason, that I'd been chosen because of what I was. And there was a sense in which, long before I knew what Maldureve was or what there was to want, I wanted him. But it was okay to have wanted him; it wasn't unnatural; it wasn't wrong. It was just a fact of life. I brought him out of the borderlands and made him something better than a shadow, and I wasn't mad, foolish or wicked to do it.
All of that, I decided. It all seemed perfectly clear.
The hunger of vampires posed no special moral issues —just the ordinary ones, which we all have to face every day of our lives, however dull those lives may be.
Just the ordinary ones!
11
I expected Gil to come round that evening, but he didn't. We hadn't actually arranged to meet—we'd been unable to agree anything when I left his flat because he'd been asleep—but I was a little bit hurt when he didn't show up, after we'd had such a special evening. I knew that he'd probably be busy in the lab, but I thought he might have spared half an hour at dinnertime to cross the campus and say hello. I didn't want to go up to the lab to peer at him as if he were something in an aquarium, beckoning him out for a quick embrace, so I watched TV in the Hall for a while and then made my duty call, using the new phonecard which Mum had thoughtfully enclosed with her most recent letter, to make sure I had no excuse for not phoning.
Mum was well; Dad was well; Sharon was well, except for the usual things. ‘Why anyone with naturally fair hair should want to dye it black I'll never understand,’ Mum complained, ‘and she makes herself up to look like I-don't-know-what.’ I knew what. I could still remember her former favourite tape, and hum the choruses of ‘All Women Are Bad’ and ‘The Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon'.
'I'm well,’ I assured her in my turn.
'No news?’ she asked, obviously suspecting that there was something I wasn't telling her, though she'd never in a million years have guessed what.
'No news,’ I assured her. ‘Just the usual sort of thing.'
On the following day, after lunch, I got tired of waiting for Gil to appear, and I went to his department in search of him. He wasn't in the lab, and neither was Professor Viners, but Teresa was in there, idly watching over a huge basin of some kind of gel. When I rapped on the window she put on a pained expression, but she strolled over to the double doors and unhurriedly let herself out.
'He's not in,’ she said. ‘He hasn't been in for two days.'
'Was he supposed to be?’ I asked, slightly bewildered. She was looking at me as if she were thinking: What can he possibly see in her? Her face was no prettier than mine, but she had bigger tits and wider hips than I had. Voluptuous, I thought, remembering Bram Stoker's favourite adjective. Does he fancy her, I wondered? What did they talk about when they were working late together? Did they talk about me?
'I don't know,’ she said. ‘He'd just finished a series of experiments; I don't know when he planned to start another.'
'Did he phone in to say he was sick?’ I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don't think so,’ she said. ‘He doesn't have to report to me. Mike didn't say anything. Maybe he's writing up.'
I wondered if she called Professor Viners ‘Mike’ to his face. She was putting on an act, making out that I was just an irrelevant nuisance, and that it wasn't worth her while to be out here talking to me. But she wasn't much older than I was, and she was only a lab assistant, even if she did work in a fancy goldfish bowl.
'Thanks,’ I said. ‘Sorry to drag you away from your animals.'
'You're welcome,’ she said, with blatant insincerity.
I was a little bit reluctant to go round to Gil's flat. I suppose that was an echo of Mum's ghostly voice whispering in the back of my mind, telling me how undignified it was for a girl to go chasing after a boy. But I set the reluctance firmly aside. After all, it wasn't just a matter of boy-meets-girl with Gil and me, and I didn't see why I should take any notice of the usual etiquette. I wasn't desperate, but I was hungry. I could have enjoyed a session in bed—and I couldn't quite understand why he wasn't avid for one.
Was it possible, I wondered, that he'd slept right through the most wonderful experience of his life? Or did he think it was all some kind of dream conjured up by his own imagination, and nothing to do with me at all?
The most worrying possibility, it seemed to me then, was that he hadn't felt anything remotely like the pleasure I'd felt when Maldureve fed off me. I didn't want him to be incapable of that kind of joy. I didn't want to be incapable of giving it.
When I knocked on the door of the flat there was no answer. I knocked again, and then I tried the handle. The door was locked, but somehow I couldn't be satisfied with that. I didn't think he could have gone away without telling me.
'Gil!’ I called—not too loudly, but loudly enough to be heard. ‘Gil, it's me. I know you're in there. What's the matter?'
I waited. Ten or fifteen seconds slipped by, but then I heard someone moving in the flat, and I knew he was coming to the other side of the door. Still he didn't say anything.
'Let me in, Gil,’ I said, in a normal voice. ‘I know you're there—why won't you let me in?'
'Sorry, Anne,’ he said, finally. ‘I can't let you in.'
'Why not?'
'I'm not well. It's nothing—just a cold—but I don't want you to catch it. I'll be okay in a day or two. I'll come see you as soon as I'm sure I'm okay. I'm sorry I couldn't get in touch.'
'You don't sound as if you have a cold,’ I said. It was true. His voice was normal. His ns didn't sound like ds, and his ms didn't sound like bs.
'It's not that kind of cold,’ he said. ‘It's in my throat and on my chest.’ He coughed, but it sounded like a forced cough to me, put in to add plausibility to his claims.
'It doesn't matter what kind of cold it is,’ I told him. ‘I'm bound to catch it anyway, aren't I? I've probably got it already.'
'No point in taking the risk,’ he said, but quickly added: ‘Do you have a cold? Have you a headache or a sore throat?'
'No,’ I said. ‘I feel fine.’ Just hungry, I added, silently. Lusting after your sweet red blood. And then I remembered what I'd asked him before, and belatedly realised what he meant—what he must be thinking. He'd misunderstood completely what had happened after we made love. He'd misinterpreted the feelings he'd experienced while I sucked his blood. It seemed terribly unfair.
'You think you've been infected, don't you?’ I said, faintly. ‘You think you've picked up one of your psychotropic viruses.'
I wanted to tell him that it wasn't true, that what he'd felt when I sucked the blood out of him, and what he felt now, had nothing to do with his sliced brains and crazy rabbits, but I realised that he wouldn't believe me. He'd cling to his own interpretation no matter what I said now to try to persuade him that it was all very different, and not at all what he imagined.
'No,’ he said. ‘Hell, I knew we shouldn't have had that stupid conversation. Now, every time I sneeze you're going to think I've infected myself. It's all perfectly safe at the labs, Anne. We really are very careful. Nobody can get infected. It's just a cold: a perfectly ordinary cold. Hell, Anne, it's December and I'm in a foreign country—I don't have any stored-up immunity to your local bugs. All Americans get colds when they come to England in the winter.'
'If I'm immune,’ I said, ‘then there's no reason why you shouldn't let me in.'
'It's a senseless risk,’ he said. ‘Hell, Anne, I don't mean to be difficult, but I really don't feel very sociable right now. I hate being ill—it's so yucky. Let me get over it, please. I'll see you very soon. It'll be two
days, three at the most. Please, Anne. I'm sorry.'
It was the please that did it. It made me feel that I had to go, no matter how unreasonable or hateful he was being. I felt hurt. Whatever the truth was, I thought, he shouldn't turn me away. He shouldn't shut me out. He had no right to do that, considering what we were to one another. Even if it had just been the sex, he shouldn't have shut me out. It wasn't nice. But he'd said please, and I went away.
I hadn't been particularly hungry before, but appetites always become fiercer when the thing you need is no longer within reach. I'd thought that I could have his blood any time, just by letting him screw me, and I'd taken it for granted that he always would want to screw me, maybe not every night but at least twice a week. I'd never thought that he might simply go off me—and if it had ever crossed my mind that there was any danger that he might eventually have had enough of me, I'd simply have assumed that the danger would evaporate once he was introduced to real pleasure, to true and unadulterated ecstasy.
As I walked numbly across campus, I began to wonder whether he'd even liked it. Maybe, I thought, it was different for men. Maybe it was different for those who didn't go into it with open eyes—those who didn't choose to offer their blood to be drunk. I tried to remember the way he'd looked, and wondered whether I could possibly have made a mistake in reading his expression.
Without even meaning to, particularly, I wandered into the Marquis of Membury's Garden, and stood leaning against the trunk of a tree, waiting. It was only an oak tree, just like any other oak tree, nothing strange or tropical. The sky was a uniform grey, and I felt that the whole vast blanket of cloud was pressing down on me.
'Maldureve,’ I said, softly. ‘Where are you, Maldureve?'
There was no whispered answerer, no black-cloaked figure in the shadow of the evergreens.
I knew that I had to resist linking the two events. It was daylight, after all, and there were plenty of people on the path not thirty yards away. In any case, Maldureve must have a life of his own to lead—projects of his own to occupy his time. I knew that I mustn't start wondering if he'd deserted me, just as Gil had—because, after all, Gil hadn't ... not really.
I stayed there until the cold began to seep through my anorak and my sweater, and made my blouse feel like a sheet of ice against my shoulder blades. By that time, the light had faded from battleship grey to the sombre colour of Dad's best suit. I resumed walking before the lamps lit up, knowing that I didn't want to have to look up at them when they came on pink and slowly brightened to orange. I knew that the owls would be lurking in the heart of every electric bulb, and I didn't even want to be on my own in my room, where the light was cleaner and more even and not threatening at all.
I had my evening meal, as usual, in the dining room, but I couldn't eat much and what I did eat didn't do anything at all to soothe my hunger. Afterwards, I went to the common room and watched TV, even though it was only soap-and-sitcom hour and I couldn't concentrate at all.
What will I do, I thought, if Gil doesn't want to see me any more? What will I do for blood?
When I really thought about it, though, I realised that it wasn't a problem at all. The campus was full of boys so desperate for a score that they'd screw anything with a wet slit between its legs, whether it was thin or fat, whether or not it would look better with a bag over its head, whether there was joy in it or whether it was just like eating a packet of crisps. I realised that I could feed to my heart's content on every blood group known to man, and that once the word got around that I was a slag who'd screw anything, they'd be queuing up outside my door.
I didn't need Gil; I didn't need anyone special at all, and if I didn't bother to have anyone special I didn't even need to confront anyone with the choice of living or dying. I could feed and feed to my heart's content, and nobody would get hurt. There'd be a minor epidemic of anaemia, but iron tablets were cheap enough.
It's nice to have someone special, I thought, but you can live without niceness if you have to.
Even without niceness, I realised, it still wouldn't be wrong. They'd all be begging for it, and they'd all be grateful when they'd had it. They wouldn't know what it was, but they'd know that they liked it, and I wouldn't be doing them any harm—not really.
I didn't want it to be that way. I wanted to have Gil, not because I loved him—I didn't, much—but simply because I'd chosen him, or had been chosen by him. I had at least formed some bond with him, which made me want his blood rather than another's, and made me want to give joy to him rather than to another. We meant something to one another. But if I couldn't have Gil...
I could have anyone I wanted.
There was no shortage of young blood. Not here—not anywhere.
I sat in the darkened room, hiding in the shadows, watching the glimmering TV screen, and realised that there were potential victims to my left and to my right, in front of me and behind me. All I had to do was let one of them buy me a drink, and smile, and let him get deliriously high on the idea of taking me back to his room.
It would be easy.
After a while, I went back up to my room, on my own. The urgency had gone out of my hunger again, now that I knew how simple it would be to answer it. I could have done some work, but I didn't want to. I tried to read for a while—just an ordinary novel, nothing heavy—but it was flat and tasteless, and I couldn't help wondering whether Gil was lying on his bed, feeling bad. I couldn't help thinking about Maldureve, either, and how utterly good it would be to offer him my blood, to have him stroke me and liquefy my flesh and thrill my soul.
I went to bed earlier than usual, but it was difficult to sleep. There were too many other rooms above and below me, and a corridor outside my door along which people were for ever passing back and forth. I could hear Karen's excited voice echoing from the wall between our rooms. Although I had my curtains drawn, the coarse fabric was all aglow with the yellow light of the electric bulb that was no more than a dozen feet away from my window ledge.
At first I was careful to keep my eyes shut, so that they wouldn't be drawn to that glow, because I was afraid of what might be lurking within it, hiding there ready to pounce. Eventually, though, I opened my eyes and I deliberately looked at the curtain, curious to know what would happen. After all, I told myself, I could hardly avoid looking into the light for the rest of my life, and this was such a faint, diffuse light that it surely posed no threat. Could the owls really be so fearsome, I asked myself, given that they had so far done nothing but stare at me and tease me?
It wasn't particularly brave of me to look into the light, because it was a very dull, subdued light, and I wasn't particularly scared; in the space of four short weeks I had become a braver person, and a more curious one. So I looked at the glow behind the curtain, and didn't make any effort at all to prevent myself looking through the curtain, into the heart of the light. I remember telling myself, quite punctiliously, that if the worst did come to the worst, I could always practise the other skill which Maldureve had told me I would now be able to cultivate: the art of fading away into the shadows, of dissolving myself into darkness.
From the heart of the light, the mysterious eyes stared back at me.
I was alarmed, at first, by the penetration of their stare, and their apparent hostility. But then I began to wonder whether they were really as malevolent as they seemed, or whether it was just mere appearance. Given that they weren't human, why should I assume that I could read their expressions accurately? There were the claws, to be sure, which seemed to be reaching for me just as they had done two nights before—but even that reaching out seemed less vindictive, less contemptuous, less threatening now.
'You can't touch me,’ I whispered, not knowing whether they could hear me or whether I ought to hope that they couldn't. ‘I'm invulnerable. I'm a vampire, and I can't be hurt. Not any more. I have everything I need, even if I can't have everything I want.'
The owls didn't reply. In fact, they faded away. They had no substance.
I felt a bubble of gas burst in my gut, and cursed the embarrassment it made me feel. The hunger was still there, constant and unsatisfied. It wasn't hurtful, just there. It didn't prevent me from drifting off to sleep in the end, but it sent me disturbing dreams.
12
Although the dreams faded from my memory within minutes of waking, they left a sour legacy. I knew that they had not been true and terrifying nightmares, but they had been uncomfortable. I felt awkward and annoyed, because I was sure that they had been embarrassing in their surrealism, as lurid dreams so often are.
I woke up with a headache, which didn't go away as I washed, dressed and brushed my teeth. I went down to breakfast, but I couldn't eat anything except for cornflakes and cold milk.
It took a surprisingly long time for me to guess that I might have caught Gil's cold. Somehow, I had assumed that becoming a vampire would make me invulnerable to vulgar illnesses. Either the assumption was wrong or I was not yet vampire enough.
When I did realize what was wrong, my feelings were strangely mixed. Usually, I loathed having colds, because I could never seem to shake them off, and the misery sometimes extended itself over ten or twelve days; but the thought uppermost in my mind just then was that Gil would now have to let me in. Now that we were both infected there was no earthly reason for him to tell me to go away. Anyhow, it didn't seem to be a particularly bad cold.
The cold weather had abated, as the weather forecast I'd seen on TV the evening before had said it would. A ridge of high pressure was pushing up from the south behind a rapidly moving low, and the wind was dragging warm air from somewhere around the Canary Islands. There were still clouds about but they were white and fluffy, and the sky behind them was peacock-blue. I sweated in my coat as I crossed the campus, but I couldn't tell whether that was the effect of the unseasonal weather or of the virus I'd picked up. The streets seemed brighter than I'd ever seen them before.
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