Young Blood

by Brian Stableford

  Before entering the house, though, I paused to look around at the marvellous landscape which stretched away to the mountainous horizon. It was very beautiful in its desolation.

  The desert sands were silver, but while the sun stood high in the sky its rays painted the dunes and wind-stirred waves with scarlet fire. The distant hills were verdant, but in this light the foliage of the evergreen trees was tinted purple and blue. The great fissures which streaked the escarpments of bleak rock were jet black even at noon, their empty depths quite unilluminable.

  I looked for the creatures which the owls had mentioned to me, and against which they'd warned me. Beware, they'd said, of the ancient idols; of the Hoggish Beasts; of the Destroyers of Souls—but know that you can tame them and defeat them, if only you can look them in the face, and know what they are.

  The owls were right. I found faces in the patterns which the red fire made upon the silver sands; in the uncertain slopes of the distant hills; in the dark fissures which descended to the heart of the world beyond he world. They were vile faces: cruel, bestial, lustful for violence instead of gentle love; but they were faces which could be faced, terrors which could be confronted, conditions of existence which need not make existence unbearable.

  I looked about for several minutes, and then I went into the house, easily parting the ragged strands of the ancient portcullis that had outlasted the rotted door.

  It was cold inside the vestibule, and seemingly hostile. The corridors were narrow, their imperfectly whited walls stained by patient fungus and by swirling trails of limescale left by the creeping damp. The windows which let in the light of the blood-red sun were little more than narrow slits. No army had ever laid siege to the house, and no archer had ever stood sentry by any of its windows, but the design of the house reflected nevertheless a defensive caution near to paranoia.

  I hesitated before setting forth to explore the corridors, knowing that I wouldn't have the advantage of the narrow windows for long. My path was a downward one, and I would soon be forced to depend on another kind of illumination, which I hoped would prove more prolific and more powerful. I carefully fastened the end of my silken thread to the doorway—not to one of the trailing strands of the broken portcullis, but to a huge iron plate from which the remains of an ancient rusted hinge still dangled uselessly. Then, steeling myself as best I could, I went on.

  As I passed downwards into the darkness, unreeling the fine thread, I switched on the torch. Its light was white and dazzling. The walls around me, which had seemed to press in on me threateningly, were ruthlessly exposed as the poor, dead things they were, every flaw and blemish of their surfaces starkly outlined. But I knew better than to feel unduly exultant. I knew, for I had been forewarned, how extensive and how treacherous the labyrinth might be, and how very difficult it might be to find my way to the centre. I knew, too, that the silken thread was of finite length, and that the white light of the torch would gradually fade to a dull yellow as the battery slowly exhausted its potential energy. I knew, because the wisdom which the owls had imparted to me was coldly honest, that there was danger in what I was doing. There was a possibility that I would go into the deepest parts of the house only to find that my thread would stretch no further and that my light might not last until I had retraced my steps.

  'Don't lose yourself in the darkness of the maze,’ the owls had told me. ‘From there, as from everywhere else, the earth is merely a single step away, but it's a step so difficult as to constitute an impossible stride. She who is abruptly wrenched from the heart of the maze instead of the threshold of the house risks madness, if not death itself; and she who remains, in darkness, holding the useless end of a broken thread, is at the mercy of the vampire's kin, who are rarely as inclined to be loving and gentle as he—in his uncertainly romantic fashion—sometimes is.'

  The owls might easily have left me this instruction as an arbitrary imposition, of the same vexatious kind as the instructions which countless heroes and heroines of legend and fairy tale had been given by their supernatural helpers. But they knew well enough that someone like me couldn't begin to believe in any wisdom that was couched in aphorisms and commandments, without reasons and explanations, and so they told me what patterns of correspondence and representation underlay my mission and its milieu.

  'The house is your own being,’ they told me, patiently and lovingly. ‘It's a kind of shadow, conceived as a structure because there isn't any easier way to conceptualise yourself. Your descent will be a descent into the hidden conduits of your own intelligence. The borderlands, you see, are the meeting place of the inner and outer worlds of your perception, where inner space is figuratively but accurately mapped. Maldureve is inside you, like a worm in the bud of your soul, and his power must be neutralised if you are ever to flourish and reach your full potential. If you are ever to come into your true inheritance, unfolding your inner being to meet the nourishing light of the crimson sun, you have to eliminate the cancer in your soul. This can only be done in the arena of allegory, according to the logic of dreaming. But you mustn't let yourself imagine that this decoding devalues what you must do. It's no mere story, no mere illusion, no mere adventure of the imagination. The inner world of thought and emotion, idea and imagination, is as real a dwelling place as the outer world of active objects and human community. It's every bit as actual, every bit as substantial, every bit as potentially hurtful and destructive as the world of blood and blades.'

  I understood that, or thought I did. I had the beginnings of wisdom, or thought I had. I knew that facing Maldureve, and his malevolent kin, wouldn't be easy. If things went awry, I could be destroyed. If things went badly, the blood of my being might be drained away, warm liquor for the absolute intoxication of evil.

  Bravely, though, I descended into the labyrinth, turning corner after corner, always unreeling the thread behind me. I heard creatures scuttling in the darkness beyond the light of my torch, fleeing from its illumination. Some scurried on four legs, others on six or eight, some perhaps on dozens or hundreds, but all of them were stricken by fear, forced to retreat before my steadfast tread. Sometimes, the white light was reflected redly back from tiny eyes nested in the darkness of cracks and coverts, but nothing came to menace me. At first I didn't bother to ask myself why not; I was content with the state of affairs, and eager to believe that it could be maintained.

  I walked for hours, but didn't easily become impatient; I was understandably apprehensive about the end of the journey, and I wasn't in a hurry. While I was still in transit, I seemed safe; there was a certain comfort to be gained from the fact that the moment of my destiny was not yet come. I knew that time was by no means on my side, and yet I was able to let it drain peacefully away. We're all well practised in that kind of self-deception, we human creatures.

  I did become very tired; my feet ached and my body was increasingly racked by that aggregation of petty complaints which is the inevitable legacy of restless exertion; but I knew that I mustn't stop. It was one thing to find an understandable contentment in the fact that the climax hadn't yet come; it would have been quite another to cause a deliberate and dangerous delay.

  I went down and around and around and down, never resting, not even for a moment. I understood, in a cerebral way, why a journey to the limits of my own being had inevitably to be long and arduous, but understanding didn't help to alleviate the pain of it. There was more irony than ignominy in the revelation that I could not plumb the depths of my own soul without my feet becoming blistered, but it seemed an unjust and irrational imposition.

  More than once I heard footsteps behind me, as if I were being followed. The first time, I quickened my pace, but the pursuer only quickened hers.

  'It's only an echo,’ I told myself, sternly. But if it was an echo, why did it fade and come again?

  The second time, I turned and shone my torch back, but when I stopped to turn the other footfalls paused too, and there was nothing there.

  'It is only a
n echo,’ I insisted. ‘It's not an actual doppelgänger.’ But as soon as I said it, I remembered something I'd heard quoted many years before, long before I ever suspected the existence of vampires: ‘He who sees his “going-double” must go himself.’ I knew then that I'd been lucky, and that if I'd seen the person who was following me—the other Anne—I'd have become like her, a mere follower.

  The third time I heard the footsteps behind me, I didn't turn round. I knew they'd never catch me up.

  Even so, I realised then that I was hiding something from myself. I realised that the emptiness of the corridors and the length of the journey were just evasions. I realised that I wasn't being wholehearted in my exploration, that there were things inside myself that I was still incapable of facing. I realised that there were nasty surprises lurking behind the corners of the labyrinth, awful spectres sealed in by the walls. I realised how necessary it was that I should now prepare the way for my second journey: a journey which would be more difficult and more dangerous. I realised that I'd have to arm myself with something more than a wooden stake. For the time being, I was only pretending to be brave. I wasn't quite ready yet to look myself in the eye and see into my heart.

  In the end, though, I came to the heart of the maze. I'd always felt morally certain that I could and would, in spite of my failings. I knew that I could come to the threshold of my fears, and get a clearer sight of them. That, for the time being, would have to be enough.

  Like the first doorway, this one had no door in it, but there was still a barrier separating me from the chamber where Maldureve—and perhaps many others—lay asleep. There was a multilayered curtain, made of half a hundred cobwebs strung from jamb to jamb and from lintel to floor.

  And within the folds of that complex curtain, huge spiders lurked.

  Only one or two were moving, with painstaking slowness, across the delicate bridges they had spun. The rest waited patiently in the shadowy corners. They weren't as monstrous as they might have been. Not one that I could see was more than a handspan across in the body, and their hairy, many-jointed feet weren't much longer than pencils or kitchen knives. They were large by the standards of spider-kind, but only by those standards. It seemed that the constraints of nature applied here as they applied on Earth, save for the fact that such webs as these could serve no ordinary predatory purpose. These webs were not cast to catch unwary flies or beetles; these webs existed in order to form a maze within the greater maze, all the more treacherous for being more delicate.

  I didn't doubt for a moment that the spiders could bite, and that their bite would be poisonous. Nor did I doubt that the moment I touched one of the dust-sprinkled webs, however lightly, the spinner of that particular web would come hurtling from its station, eager to claim its prize.

  I had the same fear of spiders which most people have: an anxiety leavened by repulsion, unreasoning and yet profound. I wasn't hysterically arachnophobic; the spiders hadn't any particular terror for me. But that didn't mean that I could simply take myself in hand and walk towards the doorway. No one could have done that, except perhaps for a professional arachnologist who hadn't merely taken the trouble to desensitise herself by constantly handling such creatures, but had also learned to hold them in that purified, academic affection which is reserved for the platonic affairs of the wisest among us.

  Perversely, I'd expected to find something worse. I'd expected something much more particular to my own anxieties, much more precisely geared to my own individuality: an Orwellian Room 101, whose contents would affirm by terrorism the uniqueness of my most intimate soul. This was almost an insult, almost a joke. But I had the beginnings of the wisdom of the owls, and I could recognize in the legend 101 a mere symbol of the female genitalia—labia and vagina—and I had the common sense to recognize that even in our most intimate souls we're not, after all, so very different from one another. We're more alike than we sometimes like to pretend.

  Anyone would have had difficulty in going through that doorway. Anyone, no matter what courage they carried with them, or what foolhardiness, would have hesitated. Anyone could have found themselves rooted to the spot, unable to proceed.

  Anyone at all.

  I was brave; I knew that. But I couldn't step into that arched doorway. Maldureve didn't need anything extra-special, anything so very extraordinary, to keep me at bay. He only needed to play, casually, upon a commonplace fear that everyone has. Perhaps the most difficult thing of all to imagine, and to accept, is that when we come to the innermost core of our being, we will find nothing but a cliché.

  I didn't despair. I knew what I had to do. I had at least to look through the doorway into the shadows beyond. I had to stand still and familiarize myself with it. I had to fix it in my mind, so that when I came back into the waking world I'd be able to remember it, think about it and come to terms with it. I had to work out a strategy for getting through it. I had to work out a plan. It didn't matter if the task proved difficult, because I could come back. I could come back time and time again, if I had to, until the time came when I could do what I had to do.

  So I looked into the darkness. I looked through the maze of spider webs, into the core of my being, the secret fundament of my soul. I looked, trying my hardest to see, to be brave and to understand. I looked, knowing how useless it was to ask ‘Who am I?’ or even ‘What am I?’ and expect an easy answer. I was still in the process of becoming, still en route towards the enlightenment of the owls. Maldureve was in there somewhere, but he was in hiding, like so much else.

  'You can't win,’ I said to him, very softly. ‘This is my house, and no one can live in it, except on my terms. You tried to make me into a seed of evil, a monster and maker of monsters, but I'm going my own way now. I don't want to be your instrument, I want to be me. I will be me. I can do it. Even my own anxieties can't stop me. They're not strong enough. They're just ordinary, everyday fears. I can face them. And in the end, the house will be mine again—entirely mine. I'll build it better than it ever was before. I'll make it into a palace. I'm a Charet: a witch-finder and demon-hunter. I'm Anne Charet, and I don't need a disguise to walk about in my own world. All kinds of things can hurt me, injure me, destroy me—but you aren't one of them. I have the beginnings of the wisdom of the owls, and I'm in charge of my own destiny. It doesn't matter what you do or where you hide; you can't win. I'm going now, but I'll be back.

  'Depend on it, Maldureve: I'll be back.'

  11

  I was hard at work when Cynthia knocked at my door. There were open books all over my desk and half a dozen odd bits of paper on which I'd scribbled notes scattered hither and yon; but the sheet on which I intended to start my essay was still virgin, because the issues and the arguments hadn't yet coalesced into a proper beginning. I wasn't pleased to be interrupted, because it was already late afternoon and the December twilight had begun to fade. I knew only too well that I didn't really have enough time to get the essay done, but there was nothing I could do. Cynthia was far too obviously in distress to be turned away.

  'Have you heard?’ she said, throwing herself down on the bed. ‘They've arrested someone—it was on the TV, in the local bit after the main news. There's nothing in the papers—not the Observer, anyway—but the newsreader said that he'd been in custody since yesterday. They've charged him with attacking you, and there was something vague about the possibility of further charges.'

  'I know,’ I said. ‘A policewoman came ‘round yesterday.'

  'What? They didn't send anyone round to see me, the bastards. I don't count, I suppose. I'm only a lesbian mother.'

  'It's not like that,’ I said, slightly surprised by her vehemence. ‘They told me that he didn't kill Janine—that he had an unbreakable alibi. He confessed to the attack on me, but he was at work when Janine was killed. The other charges are for other rapes. The policewoman said they were still waiting for the genetic fingerprint evidence to be checked. They probably didn't send anyone to see you because the arrest wasn't releva
nt to you—or only relevant in the sense that it proved the lack of connection between the two cases.'

  'Oh!’ she said, startled. ‘I just assumed ... you mean it was all just a coincidence?’ The thought evidently seemed quite horrible to her. I guessed that the horror of it was not simply her inference that there was still a murderer on the loose, but rather that the idea of a complex coincidence of evils seemed intrinsically macabre and sinister: incontrovertible testimony to the implacable malignity of the universe. Like my mum and dad, Cynthia would doubtless have preferred to think that all the things which went dreadfully wrong with the world were the acts of a few insane individuals, who only had to be caught and contained. I could see their point of view.

  She leaped up again, as abruptly as she had thrown herself down, and scanned the papers on my desk.

  'Oh, God!’ she said. ‘You're working! How can you? Oh—I know it's the right thing to do, the only thing to do, that life has to go on and that it's far better to be doing something than moping around feeling dreadful, but I just don't see how people can. I wish I was half as clever and half as strong as you—then maybe I wouldn't just go to pieces. I don't think I can carry on, you know, quite honestly ... I just don't think I can do it. I don't know that I can go back to Wombwell House. I'm frightened of it ... I'm frightened of what just being there will do to me. I know that it isn't the least bit of good staying away, but I just can't cope. I just want to crawl into a hole and never come out again. I don't know how I'm going to go on living, let alone trying to take up where I left off. I don't think I can stay on the course ... it's all too awful. I feel as if my entire existence has just run into a brick wall, and there's no way on earth to get to the other side, even if there's another side to get to...