by Linda Nagata
Human beings, you will assure me, have no such worries, at least until their anthill attracts the attention of some superior race. Unless or until that happens, Homo sapiens remains free to build, destroy or subjugate as he sees fit.
Things are not that simple, however.
My childhood lasted eight years. Since then, contact with my mother has been intermittent, and though I have never ceased to admire her as a woman, her importance to me as a parent quickly became irrelevant. In habits of child-rearing, the hirudin are less like worker ants than solitary wasps. For the hirudin woman there is none of the troublesome business of preparing her offspring for life as viable economic units. Once her children can feed for themselves, her job as a mother is done.
The children, little leeches, need no second bidding.
My mother, Michaela Olsen, is ravishing, skittish and shy. The first stage of our relationship came to an abrupt end on the night I crawled beneath the bedclothes and attempted to rape her. As I said, she is a beautiful woman, and it is perfectly common and normal for hirudin to engage in sexual behaviour as early as six years old, although the females cannot actually reproduce until their early teens.
Michaela snapped awake in less than a second. She seized me by the scruff of my neck and threw me out of the bed on to the floor.
“You filthy demon!” she screeched. “Get your pathetic little dick out of my sight.” Her hair, corkscrewed and fine as my own, boiled wildly about her face.
I spent the remainder of the night in the garage and thought of it as my first adult adventure. I woke the following morning to find my mother had moved on without me. I was surprised though not overly distressed and quickly adapted. I understood later that it was not the prospect of incest that had so offended her but my maleness per se. Michaela Olsen usually disdained sexual contact altogether but when she relented she preferred the company of women.
Humans she hated. She fed like a hungry gannet, and always killed. I still see her from time to time. We don’t talk much but we enjoy a game of chess together. She is still as lovely as ever, and although she possesses the muscular strength of tensile steel the unfair biological fact is that I am now stronger. As we slide our opposing armies across the varnished surface of the chessboard I imagine wrapping an arm about her throat and shafting her up to the hilt in her tight little arse.
I get hard just thinking about it, but content myself with winning the game of chess.
What you have to understand is that the hirudin are a different species. I kill on average ten times a year; contrary to popular belief I feel no remorse whatsoever. Would you feel remorse for destroying an anthill? Would your pet cat feel remorse for tormenting a rat? For the hirudin, humans are like mayflies: they are going to die anyway, and soon. I am less gratuitously vicious than my mother, but this has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with my own everyday comfort and convenience. Every time you kill you leave a mess, and a mess of that kind is always going to draw unwelcome attention to its perpetrator. The fewer people I kill, the easier it is for me to pass unnoticed.
Some hirudin enjoy notoriety and actively court it. I’ve never understood that myself, although a friend of mine once told me it’s no different from chess, and I understood that well enough.
Perhaps, I said to him. But at least with chess you don’t end up with the cops out looking for you.
You’re clearly not all that into chess then, he said. We both laughed at that.
We are not immortal, thank God, though our lifespan is generous. If I am lucky and take proper care of myself I should expect to live a good two hundred years. I have known some live longer, broken-down, crazed old geezers of two-hundred-and-fifty or even more, but such longevity is not desirable. When we are young we shake off disease heedlessly, carelessly as a dog thrashing rainwater from its coat. But as age creeps up on us the process of cellular regeneration that is the mainspring of hirudin biology begins to slow, and we ourselves begin to slow as a result. It becomes more difficult to feed in safety, and although a healthy hirudin adult can go a full six weeks without feeding and suffer no ill effects, in an older individual such prolonged deprivation will induce further weakness, and so a cycle of slow starvation begins to set in.
In the end we die like cockroaches, spent husks, crouched behind dusty wardrobes or holed up in understairs cupboards, so depleted you could sweep us out with the morning rubbish. It is disgusting and pitiful and I do not like to think about it. But it is still better than the foul and stinking, rotting-meat death of the exhausted human. There is comfort in that, at least.
The hirudin are parasites. They make use of the human economic infrastructure that surrounds them in the same way that a cuckoo will pressgang birds of different species into rearing its young. I know a hirudin woman who posed as a human doctor for seventy years. She kept practices in two different cities, and when things began to get tricky she packed her stuff and began again in a third.
Making a life as a perpetual student is somewhat less arduous.
We have no doctors of our own, no lawyers, no teachers. To be able to flourish, such professions require a measure of social complacency, and for the hirudin, community is just another word for trap. Our longevity makes us egotistical, poetical, philosophical by nature. Some—my mother, for instance—are simply mad.
We can go about in daylight, be reflected in mirror glass, cross running water or any threshold not physically barred to us. We can even digest small amounts of cooked animal or vegetable matter when necessary. Most of the human mythology relating to the hirudin is rubbish, the dreams and nightmares summoned up to explain the inexplicable or the misunderstood.
I detest the term vampire.
I have never cared for any human, except once.
The hirudin is by necessity an urban creature. I have taken sojourns in most of the cities of Europe—partly from curiosity, partly from the demands generated by circumstance—but I always return to London in the end. I love this city in the miasmic, dust-polluted afternoons of mid-August and the rain-slicked, mud-grey mornings of late November. I love London even when I hate it. It is the closest thing I know to a proper home.
In London, no one questions what you do, and in a city with such a large transient population—prostitutes, immigrants, terrorists on the run—it can be weeks before a missing person is actually missed. Where there are missing persons there are empty properties and so long as you’re careful and don’t mind roughing it, finding somewhere to live presents little difficulty.
At the time the following events took place I was living in a flat above a disused warehouse in New Cross. I kept those lodgings for almost two years, and had electricity and running water throughout my stay. I was comfortable there, and it was most likely that very quiescence that almost did for me. Having somewhere permanent to live meant that less of my time and energy was taken up in matters of day-to-day survival, and it was certainly around that time that I was able to start taking my philosophy studies more seriously. As well as attending classes at UCL I travelled regularly to both Oxford and Cambridge and was privileged to hear many of the national and European luminaries of the time. I attended lectures by Russell and Steiner, Koestler and Canetti, and was, I believe, as stimulated as any other student by the climate of intellectual freedom that prevailed. Oxford I knew already because I had lived there for a while; Cambridge was still quite new to me and at first I found it to be a strange place, an exposed and lonely island in the barren sea of East Anglia. But I soon discovered that in May Week or at the start of Michaelmas there is no place on earth more enchanted: a nexus of nerves and nature and nascent ambition with its very isolation making that heady mixture still more potent. I think I fell in love for a while. Not just with the idea of myself as a young scholar but with the music of my own thoughts. I felt invulnerable and so I took stupid risks, did things that seemed rational at the time but that I look back on with impatient displeasure.
It was during that period of
madness that I met Margaret. She is seventy years old now, a grandmother to three children. I still think of her. I wonder if she ever thinks of me.
I prefer to kill people in their own homes. There is no need to hide anything or cover my tracks, and the chance of being disturbed is reduced significantly. I can have a wash and a change of clothes and usually stock up on cash as well. Things are much simpler all round.
The police come in the end of course, but I’m long gone by then. No doubt you’ll be surprised when I tell you that there really isn’t much for them to go on. There is no motive, no discernible clues, no weapon. The DNA we leave behind us is confusing, to say the least.
Did you know that a man can lose consciousness in less than ten seconds if the flow of blood from the jugular is significant enough? Slitting one’s own throat is not a popular method of suicide among human beings. It takes an unusually high level of psychotic derangement—not to say courage—to do it. If suicides knew how quick it was, how relatively painless, and how effective, I have no doubt the statistics would change.
I am lucky in being attractive to both men and women. My slight ungainliness makes me appear defenceless. My articulacy makes me seem bohemian rather than scruffy.
For these reasons and more I have always found the business of killing laughably easy.
My most recent victim was a fifty-five-year-old Polish office cleaner named Paulina. I watched her for a fortnight before taking her, shadowing her from the six-storey office block in Bayswater where she worked to the basement flat in Shepherd’s Bush where she lived. I also called at the flat a couple of times when I knew she was out—enough to be reasonably certain that she lived alone, not enough to get myself noticed by the neighbours.
At the Bayswater end I did the opposite, passing close by her on the street as she clocked off from work, even smiling at her once or twice, implanting my features and friendly presence into her memory. I wanted her to feel she knew me somehow: from her young days in Warsaw perhaps, or as the son of a friend who had since vanished from her life.
On the last day I went into the Tube with her. When she got off at Shepherd’s Bush I let her get well ahead of me going through the barrier and then ran to catch up with her as she was about to cross the street in front of the station.
“Hey, Auntie Jan!” I yelled.
She turned around at once, as I knew she would do. I did not know her name yet, but it made no difference. My careful preparations ensured that at some strange subconscious level she was inwardly attuned to my presence. She responded to my voice automatically, even though she had never heard it before.
As her eyes met mine I arranged my face into an expression of disappointment, followed almost immediately by an embarrassed smile.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I thought you were my aunt. You look exactly like her from behind.”
Paulina raised both eyebrows. I discovered that she did that a lot.
“What about from the front?” she said.
“Younger,” I replied. “You, I mean.” I smiled at her again, more confidently this time and with just a trace of flirtatiousness. She did have a nice face, actually. The flesh of her cheeks had fallen slightly, and her hair had gone grey, but her bone structure and upright posture gave the impression of someone who had been beautiful in her youth. Her accent reminded me of women I had known in Berlin. I even felt a trace of sadness, that human women age so quickly, that so much of their lives are spent in ugliness. In some ways I would be doing her a favour.
“Does she live around here, your aunt, then?” We were heading away from the station by then and walking side by side along Uxbridge Road, just a surrogate auntie and nephew enjoying a chat. I named the street that formed a T-junction with the one she lived in. She exclaimed her surprise.
“Life is full of these strange coincidences,” I said. “That’s what they teach us on my course, anyway.”
“You are at college?”
“UCL. I’m reading Philosophy.”
It turned out she had a degree in Material Sciences from Warsaw University. Ten seconds later she was inviting me to have lunch with her.
“I hope you won’t think this too strange,” she said. “But it would be lovely to share your company. I don’t really see anyone, not these days. I miss my friends from Poland.”
After that it was easy. I sat at her kitchen table and talked to her about a recent lecture I had attended on Schopenhauer while she bustled about putting rye bread and salami on to plates. By then I was so nerved up with what was going to happen that my teeth were chattering, the hairs on my forearms standing on end as if I had just received an electric shock. Paulina was enjoying herself too much to notice. I ate as much of the bread and meat as I could manage then said I would be glad to help her with the washing up. As she turned away from me to start clearing the table I placed both my hands on her hips and drew her gently backwards, pressing her buttocks against my groin where (as I hoped she would feel) I was rock hard.
This was the moment of most risk for me, but even so it was not as risky as you might think. Had she turned on me or started to scream I would have simply apologised for my ‘mistake’ and made a quick exit. As it was, she tensed slightly just for a second then relaxed again, her shock already turning—I could smell it—to a slow excitement.
She probably thought that this was my way of paying for the food.
Her bedroom overlooked a walled courtyard, and the curtains were drawn. I stepped out of my jeans and underpants and guided her hand to my cock while I set about removing her blouse. Her body was tired, the sagging breasts pendulous, the wads of fat around her midriff crisscrossed by the indentations of her undergarments. None of this mattered to me. I eased her back on to the bed, her loosened hair cascading over the pillows. As I slid into her she emitted an audible groan, and I wondered how long it had been since she’d last had sex.
There are hirudin who do still make the first strike with their teeth—my mother, for instance—but I myself have not done that since I was a child. It’s the least efficacious method, and so clumsy that the element of surprise is completely lost. There’s a thing you can buy, a steel thimble-like object tipped with a razor blade that fits over the thumb or index finger, and there are those who swear by that, but I’ve always felt that although it makes a highly effective display the blade itself doesn’t cut deep enough. I use a spike, a neat stainless steel stiletto that ensures penetration directly into the artery. It can be tricky to get the hang of—you have to slam it in hard and in exactly the right position or the whole thing can get very messy—but so long as you know what you’re doing it’s virtually foolproof. If you’re skilful the victim never even knows what’s happened.
Paulina jerked just once in my arms as I drew out the spike, but by then I was holding her down so firmly she couldn’t have struggled much in any case. I moved in to catch the fountain of her blood as it erupted, then bit down hard, widening the opening. My tongue and lips and the inside of my throat were immediately coated with the luscious, blue-black juice of the aorta. As my mouth filled up with her blood I emptied myself into her, coming so hard I could feel my spunk flowing backwards out of her cunt and encrusting my belly.
I like to think that this was the last thing she was aware of: the true and certain knowledge that she had given me pleasure.
Once I was sure she was dead I loosened my grip on her shoulders and began feeding in earnest. An hour later and after a short nap I took a shower and put my clothes back on. I made a quick search of the flat, a worthwhile delay, as it turned out, because Paulina had almost five hundred pounds hidden inside a glove at the back of her underwear drawer.
Then I left. No one saw me, but it wouldn’t have mattered if they had. I was not known in the area, and wouldn’t be visiting Shepherd’s Bush again any time soon.
I walked for miles and for hours, cutting up through Ladbroke Grove and Kensal Green to the crumbling maisonette in Kilburn where I currently live. I threw my
self down on the grimy mattress that serves for a bed and fell asleep in under ten seconds. I awoke just as it was getting properly dark. I arose from my bed and walked the streets of North London until dawn. The old stones seemed to smile down at me, accepting me as one of their own. I have never seen the city more beautiful. I have never felt more alive, or more free.
On the concourse at Charing Cross Station. Sunshine, like liquid crystal, dappling her arm.
She was standing by herself, a straight-backed, willowy girl, staring at the ranked ticket windows as if they presented some insurmountable obstacle, or as if she had temporarily forgotten where she wanted to go.
Sunlight streamed through the glass roof of the station, drifting downwards towards the ground, where it came to rest in a heap of overstretched, irregular trapezoids. Like melting honeycomb, I thought. I don’t like honey, and I don’t like sunshine either, but something about the way it looked on the girl’s skin, light as pollen or dandelion seeds, made me come close to forgetting about the train I was rushing to catch.
That was my first sight of Margaret. She had a high, clear brow and light brown eyes. Her hair, which was the colour of dry dirt, was straight, and came to just below her shoulders. She was wearing a pink dress. Its colour reminded me of roses in late summer, when the blooms become overblown and the petals fall. She was neither short nor tall. I guessed she was in her late teens. Twenty perhaps, but no more.
She turned to look at me. My staring must have alerted her somehow, as persistent staring often will. I felt that I could look at her for a long time, as I might look at a rainbow or a spider’s web or a sea anemone, those quieter wonders of nature that are nonetheless compelling. At the same time though I wanted to get away from her, or rather to get her away from me, to remove her from my sight and from my sensing, as if even to look at her was to somehow expose her to danger.