by Linda Nagata
Everything about her spoke of lightness. I wanted to keep her, and yet never to see her again. The thought of killing her sweetened my saliva and engorged my penis even as it repulsed me. I concentrated on the sunshine, which hurt my eyes.
I blinked. She smiled and I heard her inhale, a sharp, nervous sound that fluttered in the space between us like an invisible bird. I could almost hear her wondering whether she should say anything to me or not.
“Can I help you at all?” I said, making the decision for her. “Only you were looking a little lost.” A station announcer was warning me that my train would be leaving in five minutes, but I no longer cared.
“Oh, no thank you,” she said. “My cousin was meant to be meeting me here, that’s all, and there’s no sign of her. The train will be going in a minute. I don’t know what to do.”
Today’s technology would rewrite this scene. She would reach into her bag and take out her mobile, call the cousin, find out that the wretched girl was late leaving, or stuck in traffic, or shagging her boyfriend. She would wait, or not wait, but either way that look of dazed confusion would have been absent, replaced by its modern equivalent, a perplexed annoyance.
“Where are you going?” I said.
“Folkestone,” she said. “Just for the day. My grandparents live there.”
“In that case you’ve already missed the train.” It was not quite true, not yet, but it would be in ninety seconds. “I’ll make a bargain with you. We’ll wait for the next one together, and if your cousin still hasn’t turned up you’ll let me keep you company on the journey.”
“You’re not really going to Folkestone, though?” She gave a little laugh, more like a gasp, and I could feel her looking at me, examining me, as it were, for sharp corners or hidden threats. In my baggy cords and light tweed jacket I was dressed to look like what I was, that is, a student or young professor on his way to a lecture. I looked older than her, it was true, but not enough to make that fact worrying. My hair was sun-streaked and my eyes were bright. I looked, as she was to tell me the next time we met, like the young Hölderlin. What harm could there be in spending a half hour with such a person in the station buffet?
“Why not?” I replied. I did my best to sound cheeky and winning, a young loafer without a care in the world. “I fancy a day at the seaside.”
“All right,” she said, laughing again. “I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea.”
“What’s your name?” I said quickly. It seemed imperative that I learn it as soon as possible. I wanted to be sure, you see, that even if I never saw her again after that day I would have a label I could attach to her, a name for the feeling I had when I looked at her that distinguished itself from all other memories.
“Margaret,” she said. “I always think it makes me sound like someone’s aunt.”
“And are you?” I said. “Someone’s aunt?” The name sat on her oddly, too big for her somehow, bulky as a man’s overcoat. But it was beautiful all the same, clattering against my teeth like three heavy pearls.
“Mind your own business,” she said. I told her my name was Daniel, though she hadn’t asked. I felt sick and slightly dizzy, and for the briefest of instants I imagined leaving her where she was and going to a rooming house I knew just off Brick Lane. It was the haunt of whores, never the same girls twice. I could buy one for the day, then slaughter her in one of the goods yards at the back of Liverpool Street Station. No one would notice the body or care if they did.
My thoughts troubled me because they were so out of character. I rarely killed on impulse, if ever. To do so was the action of a fool.
Like a rat smelling petrol I understood that I was in danger. Not from Margaret as such, but from my feelings about her. I had known more beautiful women, certainly. I had known women who had got down on all fours and begged me to violate them.
I did not know what it was. Only that I wanted to be near her.
I found us a corner table in the restaurant and then went up to the counter to order our drinks. There was a cake under glass, a large yellow sponge with cream and strawberry jam squirting out of the middle. I ordered a slice of that too, thinking that Margaret might enjoy it. As it turned out, she did.
Her name was Margaret Alexandra Gensing and she was hoping to get into Cambridge the following year. Her cousin’s boyfriend Nigel was already there.
“They are engaged,” she said. “They’re going to get a house together and everything. But I don’t really like him.”
“Why not?”
“He’s studying Law.” She made a face, then put a hand to her mouth. “That sounds stupid. It’s hard to explain. It’s just that he and Emma seem so . . . fixed on things.”
“And you’re not? Fixed on things, I mean?”
“Not really. Not yet. I want to study English, the Metaphysical Poets, but my father says I should plan on becoming a teacher. It sounds so dull though, doesn’t it? I can’t imagine talking about those poems to anyone who didn’t really want to know about them.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more.” I told her that my own parents were abroad, and that I was hoping to land a junior research fellowship at Gonville and Caius. Until the position was certain I was having to lodge with my grandfather in Highgate.
“The place is a health hazard,” I said. “I’m surprised the council haven’t quarantined it.”
“You’ll get the fellowship, I’m sure,” Margaret said. A gentle flush had risen on her cheeks. “And if you don’t you can always teach.”
I laughed. There was, thank God, still no sign of the errant cousin, and by the time we boarded the train I was hoping—foolishly—that Margaret and I would be able to spend the rest of the day together. But when we arrived into Folkestone the cousin was there, waiting for us on the platform. It turned out she had been on the earlier train all along.
Cousin Emma was large and golden, resplendent as a sunflower and utterly uninteresting to me. As we stepped down from the train I asked Margaret if I might have her telephone number. She tore a leaf from a little notebook she had in her bag and scribbled it down.
“Afternoons are the best time to call,” she whispered. “My father’s always out at work then. You’d like my dad if you got to know him, I know you would. But he can be a bit funny around strangers.”
He has a right to be, I thought. I didn’t like to see Margaret walk away, so I helped an elderly woman off the train instead, hooking her hideous quilted handbag over one arm while she fussed with her walking stick.
I wandered around the Old Town, then walked for a mile or so along the sea front, hoping I might catch sight of Margaret again, but finding no sign of her. The sun was strong overhead, making me disorientated and prone to visions, but I didn’t care.
The hirudin, for the most part, are born, not made; beyond the usual weakness and nausea that accompanies any sudden blood loss, a human who has been bitten but left alive will suffer no immediate physical harm. In most cases he will resume his normal life as if nothing has happened.
It may be as much as twenty years before the onset of the malaise that will inevitably kill him. And even so it is a gentle demise, a slow thickening of the blood for which the human doctors have as yet found no cure and put down to one of the rarer minor variants of leukaemia. In all likelihood he will die of something else before it even has a chance to take hold.
There are instances of natural human immunity but these are rare. Rarer still are those cases where, by some freak of nature, the blood of the human host is chemically altered and the human becomes hirudin. One time in a thousand, perhaps fewer. And yet it is these outlandish cases that form the basis of ten centuries of human mythology.
The fully adult hirudin is, as I have said, a solitary creature. It is true that I have formed friendships, intellectual and sometimes emotional alliances that lasted a decade or more. But the ending is always the same: a boredom that finally becomes so oppressive that I am driven to fabricate some feud or schism that explodes the
relationship apart. Occasionally and after a suitable cooling off period such friendships may be resumed, but I am bound to admit that some of my closest friends are now my enemies.
In the case of sexual attachment the runtime is considerably shorter and in my experience at least there is no way back.
I knew from the start, from the first moment, that a relationship with Margaret that tried to become anything beyond that one meeting, was both physically and logistically impossible. To form an intimate connection with a human being that held any dynamic other than that between hunter and hunted would be to lay myself open to risks that were not only unacceptable, they were stupid, too.
I knew I should not phone her, that I should shred the scrap of paper with her name on it and throw it into the nearest gutter.
What was I hoping for, exactly? The answer that drummed in my head was: simply to see her again.
It was three weeks since my last kill. Normally I would have been starting to get edgy, prowling the streets on the lookout for potential victims, but I did not feel hungry. I felt the way I felt right after feeding: careless, almost drunken, replete with new energy.
I knew I should not ring her, but I did.
The hirudin are mimics, adopting the attributes of our human hosts with uncanny exactitude. We are thus able to move among them unnoticed, wolves in sheeps’ clothing. The majority of humans we encounter, we encounter peaceably. The world at large is unaware of our existence.
Two centuries of rank obscurity can prove dull, however, and I have known plenty of hirudin who indulge in the sport of police-baiting. Carrying out a series of killings that appear to form some sort of pattern is guaranteed to keep the cops on their toes and generate acres of gaudy press coverage into the bargain.
Personally I find such games childish as well as risky and I prefer to spend my time in other ways. But I cannot deny the fascination that such crimes hold. I read the papers just as you do, and like you I am inevitably drawn to those reports of murders that diverge from the run-of-the-mill wife-torchings, gangland shootings and fatally botched robberies that make up the majority of news stories.
What I’m looking for, I suppose, are signs of family activity, and I’m not talking about the mafia. I’m not immune to gossip. I like to know what people are up to.
At the same time I pride myself on the fact that my own killings never amount to anything beyond a statutory police report tucked away on the inside pages amongst that day’s crop of domestic politicking, pets-in-peril and UFO sightings.
Human beings tend to take things as they find them. The miraculous confuses them. When faced with something out of the ordinary most people would rather deny what they have seen than run the risk of being laughed at.
Some humans, of course, are used to being laughed at and so they cease to notice. Poets and idiots, madmen and freaks, junkies and whores, our closest human relatives are human outcasts.
Occasionally they recognise us. Luckily for us they are seldom believed.
Martha Gensing kept filling my plate.
“You’re too thin, Daniel,” she said. “I know what you students are like.”
She was a doctor, a junior consultant at King’s College Hospital. What you have to understand is that I had never been a guest in anyone’s home. I had been in people’s houses, yes, many dozens of them. But the circumstances for my being there were hardly conducive to relaxation. The abandoned flats and warehouses I was accustomed to inhabiting were less than nothing, the ghosts of homes. As for possessions, the few items I thought of as mine could be comfortably accommodated inside a medium-sized suitcase.
I’m not complaining. The encumbrances of a human life, the petty attachments both emotional and material, have always been distasteful to me. But in the Gensings’ large and comfortable house in Camberwell I felt able—almost—to imagine a life of looking out rather than in. A life in which a Murano bowl, British moths arranged by species in long wooden trays and a red Turkey carpet with a small cigarette burn to one corner were all symbols of something greater and more intimately meaningful than their material substance.
“You have a lovely home, Mrs. Gensing,” I said.
“Thank you, Daniel,” she said. “Margaret knows her friends are always welcome here.” She coloured slightly, and I realised she found me attractive and felt guilty about it. She was different from Margaret, more robust, and her body odour hinted at a deep sensuality. Her large, reddened hands were more like a butcher’s than a doctor’s. I wondered how things were in the bedroom between her and the more diffident Lionel. My expression must have betrayed something of my thoughts, because she looked away from me quickly and shortly afterwards she made some excuse and left the table.
Lionel Gensing worked for a bank, was what is now called something in the city. He was taciturn but seemed perfectly prepared to accommodate my presence in his home. Margaret’s brother Stephen was twenty-one and looked so like his sister they might have been twins. He spent most of the mealtime running a small cast-iron replica of a steam engine back and forth across his portion of the tablecloth. I gathered he was either retarded or a genius but, in true English fashion, no one was going to discuss that at the dinner table.
I have to say that Stephen unnerved me a little, even then. He would not look at me directly, but I could sense his interest in me, a furtive prickle of mental white noise on the periphery of my perception. I had encountered savants before, but not for a long time, and I was discomfited. I tried to tell myself he was probably like that with all strangers.
Later, when she was walking me to the Tube, Margaret told me that Stephen had a photographic memory for some things—he could draw a car engine or the inside of a grand piano with all the pieces accurately in place after only one viewing—but that he hardly ever spoke except in monosyllables and sometimes refused to eat for days at a time. Brilliant but damaged, the doctors called him. They had long since abandoned hope of any improvement.
“Improvement?” I said. “Perhaps that’s just the way he’s meant to be.”
Margaret came to a standstill on the darkened pavement and gave me a short, fierce hug. The world is cruel to people like Stephen Gensing. I wondered what would become of him once Martha and Lionel Gensing were both dead.
Perhaps it was all my fault. I don’t dwell on the whys and wherefores, because there’s no point. You could argue it was going to happen anyway, that maniacs, like hirudin, are born, not made.
The thing with the spike was careless though. I still don’t know how I came to mislay it. What I remember is the way my stomach dropped—as if I was falling from a great height—when I realised that its familiar, cold-centred weight was missing from my pocket. The spike, you will understand, is the one essential possession I always keep with me and I suppose you could say I am superstitiously attached to it. I feel it as a part of myself, and so its absence sparked a frisson, a tangible hiatus, almost a pain.
I told Margaret I needed the bathroom (we were together in the upstairs sitting room when it happened, sorting through some books she had bought at an auction sale) and crept back downstairs to look for it. Martha Gensing was in the garden watering her roses, and Lionel Gensing was out also, his presence required at a meeting of local councillors. I knew that Stephen was around somewhere, but I was startled to come upon him all the same, sitting by himself in the empty dining room, rolling my spike backwards and forwards across the table. It made a small rumbling sound as it went, rotating beneath his outspread fingers like a miniature axle, and I was reminded of the first time I saw him, running the model train over the tablecloth and refusing to look at me. His mouth was set in a straight line, his green eyes open but unfocused. His scent was yellowish, astringent and rancourous, more like a civet cat than a human being.
He made an eerie sight. Quite suddenly I had the sense that he knew things about me that I had no wish for him to know, and it occurred to me that I had not dropped the spike at all, that Stephen Gensing had somehow stolen i
t out of my pocket.
It took all the will I had to restrain myself from reaching out and grabbing his wrist. He was lightly built just like me, just like Margaret. I could imagine the sound his bones would make as they broke: a wet splintering, like young spring wood.
“Hello, Stephen,” I said. “That’s mine, I think. Thank you for looking after it for me.” I reached forward and grasped the spike, halting its lumbering progress across the table. I had it by the sharp end, and it scratched me a little. A fine scarlet line etched itself across the ball of my thumb.
Stephen stiffened to a waxwork stillness. I felt his eyes lock on my fingers, watching, no, examining what I was doing as if I was some fascinating but repellent creature under a microscope. I slid the spike from his grasp by slow increments, all the time expecting him to turn on me, to lash out in some way, but he remained motionless, rigid as wire. An insane thought bubbled up in me, that Stephen Gensing was not human after all, he was a manikin set up to fool me, that all the Gensings, Margaret included, were in on the joke.
Finally the spike came free. I slipped it back into my pocket, sighing my relief as it settled there, that gentle downward tug, nugget-heavy, lethal, mine.
“I know you’re one of them,” Stephen said. They were the first and only words I ever heard him speak. The sound, after the intense silence of our struggle, was so unexpected that I started backwards, knocking my right elbow painfully on the open door.
“What did you say?” I said. Once again I found myself having to resist the urge to grab hold of him. I realised with dismay that my hands were shaking.
I heard footsteps in the hall outside and a shadow fell head first over the table. A moment later Margaret entered the room.
“Here you are,” she said. “Is everything all right?”