Blood

by K. J. Wignall

  “True, but in fact it leads deep underground. My chambers are beneath the city walls.”

  Her eyes blanked him out once more and he realized that she was swayed by the things she could see, but that every time he gave her more information, she became disbelieving all over again. He decided to move on quickly.

  “Second piece of proof. Why don’t you see if you can lift that slab?”

  Eloise looked at it and made a half-hearted effort to move it before saying, “Yeah, it’s heavy, fair enough. Just like you pulled that scaffolding apart. For all I know, you could be on that drug. What is it? PCP or something.”

  Will picked up the stone and raised it above his head, lowered his arms so that he held the stone in front of him, raised it above his head again, and then put it back on the floor.

  She looked irritated somehow and said scathingly, “So you’re strong, like I’d be impressed by that.”

  “That isn’t the proof.” He grabbed her hand, and even though she looked terrified and tried to pull it away, he pressed her fingers against the side of his neck.

  “Stop it! You’re hurting me!”

  He stared back at her and said quietly, “No pulse. I just lifted a block of stone above my head. Can you feel a pulse?”

  He felt her hand relax and took his own hand away. Eloise kept her fingers pressed against the side of his neck then, confused, moved them around, prodding the flesh, searching for the pulse that he knew she would not find there.

  Finally, her hand dropped to her side and she took a small step backwards. She tried to say something, but the words were lost somewhere between her thoughts and her lips. She looked down at the stone, the black hole that he’d revealed in the floor, then back at him.

  And without any more warning than that, she fainted. Will leapt forwards quickly and caught her before she hit the stone floor, which was just as well because he didn’t want her banging her head for a second time in one night. He lowered her gently to the floor before looking around and thinking through the logistics of moving her.

  He’d been concerned about how he would persuade her to follow him underground, but now at least that problem had been solved—he’d carry her. He only hoped that when she awoke, she’d remember why she’d fainted in the first place, and that the memory of it would prepare her for the equally extraordinary things he still had to tell her.

  12

  Will sat in his chair, close to the daybed on which Eloise now lay. It was late and he guessed that tiredness had overtaken her just as much as the shock of the things she’d seen and experienced. Her sleep had been troubled to begin with, but now she was lying peacefully, facing him.

  He sat looking at her, at the gentle landscape of her black-clothed body, at the pale beauty of her face, the soft pink of her lips. And he wished more than ever before that he could be fully human again, even for the simple pleasure of lying there with her, of falling into a human sleep, of waking with her in his arms.

  These were childish dreams, of pleasures that would never be his. Nor did he need to remind himself of that because there was still the distant, dull ache in his arm, declaring what he truly was.

  It was almost as if the creature who made him was calling to him from far away, reminding Will that he hadn’t finished with him. It troubled him more now, knowing that he might well be leading this girl into danger, but unable to stop himself.

  He rubbed idly at his arm, as if that could rid him of a discomfort that was in his soul, and without warning, he found himself dreaming. It happened rarely, and they were visions rather than dreams—a part of him was still conscious of the room about him, of its sounds and scents, and he wasn’t sleeping because he didn’t sleep outside the long, black nights of his hibernations.

  It was like a dream though, one from which he didn’t want to wake, inspired no doubt by the sight in front of him. Because he was walking among the ruins of an ancient building in the countryside. It was a summer afternoon, like the afternoons of his memory, a warm, blue sky dotted with harmless clouds, and he was walking with her, with Eloise.

  Neither of them was talking. They simply walked together among the fallen stone walls, and when she turned to face him, she smiled and he was stunned by her beauty, and saddened in the knowledge that this day could never be, in more ways than one.

  Then, as if a cloud had covered the sun, her smile fell away and Will became uneasy. He didn’t want her to speak now, but she did and her voice was full of sadness as she said, “Will you sacrifice me, when the time comes?”

  “No,” he said, aware that he’d spoken aloud rather than within the vision, but even as the dream shattered and left him stranded back in his dark chambers, he saw in the last glimpse of her face that she didn’t believe him.

  He looked at the daybed and, as if woken by his voice, Eloise stirred and lifted her face to look at him. It had been a dream, nothing more, but Will almost wanted to tell her again, the real Eloise, that he wouldn’t let any harm come to her.

  She stared at him for a second or two before cautiously pushing herself upright and leaning back against the wall. He’d been careful to light candles here and there so that she wouldn’t be too disturbed upon waking. Even so, her surroundings were still something of a shock to her.

  She looked around the chamber, glancing at the wooden chests, the bare stone of the walls, the dark openings into the other anterooms. With the exception of the bed and two padded wooden thrones, the candlesticks, and chests, there was no other furniture and no other decoration.

  He needed nothing else, and everything was stored in such a way that it would survive intact through the years of his hibernations, hence the wooden chests rather than anything more homely. But he could see how, to her, or to any normal living person, this would seem an unfriendly place, perhaps even the Gothic lair so beloved of storybook vampires.

  “Where am I?”

  “This is my … my home.” He could tell that she was remembering, the stone lifted from the floor of the crypt, the steps descending into the darkness. “It’s safe. The city walls are directly above us.”

  She glanced up at the roof of the chamber.

  “You didn’t put anything in my drink.” It wasn’t a question this time, but a realization that none of this had been imagined or hallucinated.

  “No.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am William, the rightful Earl of Mercia. I was born in 1240, struck down by sickness in 1256 and I have been like this ever since.”

  “I know, you told me all that.” Eloise struggled to put her thoughts in order and said, “Okay, what I mean is, what are you? You’re not a ghost.” Before he could reply, an answer sprang into her head and, as if it should have been obvious from the start, she said, “You hypnotized me! You’re like that guy off the TV—you do all this mind control … You hypnotized me, to make me believe all this is real.”

  He shook his head gently, but instead of answering her directly, he said, “For a long time I had barely an idea of what I was myself. I knew only that I’d been buried alive, that when I stirred, nearly a hundred years had elapsed and yet my body was not a day older. I knew I had been bitten, I knew I needed blood, but in more than seven hundred and fifty years I have never met another like me or been given any guidance or explanation. Only halfway through that span did I first hear tales of beings that shared my habits, and only in the last two hundred years have I read enough to be certain that these stories refer to people like me.”

  “Oh. My. God. This is amazing,” Eloise said, and stared at him with her eyes so wide open that he became concerned she might be once again about to faint. But she sounded almost playful as she said, “You’re a vampire!”

  “I prefer the term undead.”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she was still teasing, even suggestive, as she said, “Are you going to suck my blood?”

  “Never,” he said, even though under different circumstances she would have made an ideal victim—unlo
ved, unmissed, alone.

  But Eloise appeared bizarrely unconcerned. She glanced around, saw her small black bag next to the bed, and reached down for it. She rooted around before pulling something out and turning to face the wall. It was a small mirror, the glint of the candles shining back at him.

  “I can see your reflection.”

  “Nor am I afraid of garlic, though I find its scent off-putting, and as you can see, I live beneath a church so, far from filling me with terror, the crucifix is a symbol of my one true refuge from the world. I can’t help the superstitions and the folklore. I can only tell you what I see of myself, and what I know to be true.”

  “Fire,” she said, perhaps thinking back to the blazing dog.

  “Yes, and light, sunlight most of all. A stake through the heart will weaken me, and incapacitate me for some time, but it won’t kill me.”

  Intrigued, she asked, “How do you know?” He opened his shirt and pointed to the faint scar in the middle of his alabaster-white chest. Amazed, she said, “Someone put a stake through your heart?”

  “That’s a story for another time. Anyway, it was a long time ago.”

  “Show me your teeth.”

  “I file them,” he said as he moved closer and opened his mouth.

  “Gross, why would you want to do that?”

  “It’s easier and cleaner to use a knife; it leaves a suicide, not a corpse with puncture wounds. It makes my appearance less conspicuous. I need to be able to walk among people without standing out.”

  Eloise swung her feet around and sat on the edge of the bed. Far from being terrified or disbelieving, she now seemed excited by what he was telling her, as if she’d been waiting to encounter someone like him her whole life.

  Little did she know either that his hopes rested on the possibility that she had been waiting for this meeting from the day of her birth, that it had been planned by fate and that she had a specific part to play in his destiny. He hoped for both their sakes that their meeting had not been an accident.

  “So how does this work? You rise by night and sleep by day, though I’m guessing it’s not in a coffin, right?”

  He was thrown by the lightness of her tone, by her apparently genuine interest in something that should have filled her with horror.

  “I rest during the day, but I don’t sleep. I hibernate for long periods, years or even decades, in there.” He pointed to the other chamber.

  “How often? I mean, when did you last hibernate?”

  “Nineteen eighty-nine.”

  At last, her thoughts stumbled, and after looking perplexed for a moment, she said, “Okay, so you’re sixteen, but you hibernated before I was born and emerged again … when?”

  “Yesterday, shortly before meeting you.”

  She took in the information and said, “So you would have needed blood.” Her tumbling thoughts gelled into a sudden, awful clarity and she blurted out, “You killed Jex!”

  “Who gave you the creeps, whose name you didn’t even know.”

  “True, but even so, you killed someone yesterday. Have you killed anyone today?”

  He shook his head. “I need to feed when I emerge from hibernation, but after that I need it rarely. I think it depends on the person, on how much life there is in them.”

  Eloise was insistent, saying, “About how often, on average?”

  “It’s impossible for me to say. Sometimes as much as a year, more commonly it’s measured in months, sometimes even less.”

  “So you might have to kill someone else before Christmas, or you might not, all depending on how good Jex’s blood was.” Her tone sounded light at first, but it was laced with a hint of anger, or at least outrage.

  “I’ve killed hundreds of people because it’s what I need to do to survive; it’s what I am. But you have to understand something else: I’ve seen millions die, and I will see millions more. In that regard, death is all I know.” She looked ready to respond, but he cut her off as he said, “Even you. Here we are today: in appearance we’re the same age, but you’ll grow up and grow old and die, as everyone you know will die, including your children, grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and through all those lifetimes I will remain as you see me now. You understand? Death is the backdrop against which I act out my life.”

  She didn’t respond at first, but looked around the chamber again and said, “Did you do all of this or was it already here?”

  “It was prepared for me.”

  “By …?”

  “I wish I knew. I’ve always presumed it was the one who bit me, but I don’t know, and have never met that person.” He’d never met him, that was true, but he felt uncomfortable not telling her the whole truth of what he suspected was happening now. He could see Eloise’s next question forming and jumped in first, adding, “And no, I don’t remember being bitten.”

  “But that suggests you weren’t just bitten by accident, doesn’t it? Surely it suggests you were bitten for a reason.”

  “It does, but for the better part of a thousand years there hasn’t been any indication of what that reason might be, until now.”

  Jumping ahead, she said, “You think it’s something to do with me, don’t you?” She seemed excited and didn’t wait for an answer. She leapt from the daybed and knelt in front of him, holding on to his arm. “Will, make me a vampire—make me like you.”

  He was shocked, hardly believing he’d heard her correctly. He stared deep into her eyes and he could see that she wanted this, but that she hadn’t even begun to understand what “this” was. Her own life seemed bleak to her right now, bleaker than he’d imagined, but this would be no solution, even if it were something he had within his power.

  He put his hand on hers and said, “I tried once before, when I was much younger.” Her eyes looked full of hope, and he was transfixed by them, a blue he could easily imagine himself staring into for another thousand years, even as he knew it wasn’t to be. “It didn’t work. She died, but if I’d understood the curse I would have been inflicting, I wouldn’t have done it anyway.”

  Eloise looked deflated, and he could tell that part of her didn’t believe him, a part of her that thought he was simply testing her determination. “You don’t understand, it wouldn’t be a curse, and we’d have each other as company, and I wouldn’t be losing anything.”

  By her own admission, she’d led a privileged existence, albeit one devoid of love, so he could only assume she was being reckless, that she didn’t even understand what she was asking of him. Kate’s had been a reasonable gamble, but he couldn’t believe Eloise’s life was empty enough to make his existence seem attractive to her.

  “Eloise, you won’t be sixteen forever. Even if I could, I wouldn’t deny you that.” He saw that she was ready to argue again, so he added quickly, “Besides, if I’m right, I think I need you, and I need you alive.”

  It seemed to do the trick and she was sidetracked enough to ask, “Is this because of Jex’s notebook?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She nodded in resignation, and looked on the verge of speaking again, but she was stopped short by a dull clanging noise, the sound of metal hitting stone. They both looked at the stone blocking the entrance to his chambers because the noise had come from the other side of it.

  Eloise whispered, “Someone must have followed us.”

  Will shook his head as they both stood. He knew they hadn’t been followed, just as he knew that the tunnel from crypt to chamber led nowhere else and that no one but him had been there in nearly seven hundred years.

  The noise sounded again, the metal pounding against the outside of the stone as if someone was trying to smash through. Will moved silently over to the largest chest and opened it. He drew the sword from a sheath that lay diagonally down the side of the chest.

  He didn’t know if the sword would be any use, but he wanted to be armed, particularly after the attack by the burning dog—even the thought of fire was enough to send a ripple of fear through him. He did
n’t know what was beyond the stone door, whether spirit or demon, but he was certain of one thing, it wasn’t human.

  “Who do you think it is?”

  He shrugged and said, “A demon attacked me in the church last night, in the guise of a woman who’d tried to throw me out. It attacked me again tonight in the form of Jex’s dog. I fear this is another such assault.”

  He didn’t bother telling her that the attacks were becoming more frequent, probing his weaknesses, and that he needed to find a way of putting a stop to them soon.

  “And does this happen a lot?” Eloise sounded as if she needed reassurance, as if this was something he was quite used to.

  But he shook his head. “As I said before, everything seems different this time—Jex, you, this demon.”

  “But surely it can’t get in? That stone looks …”

  As if in response, the stone shuddered as it was hit with another clang, the sound hovering this time like the ringing of a cracked bell. Rubble clattered down on the other side of it. Will turned to Eloise and gestured with his hand for her to stay where she was.

  She backed against the wall and said, “You’re not going to open it!”

  “It’s always better to face danger head on.” He was sounding braver than he felt because he had no idea who or what was outside. Even so, he slid the sword through his belt and lifted the huge stone to one side.

  He stepped back, drawing his sword again and preparing for an attack, hoping only that he would be able to fend it off. He sensed the distortion in the air immediately, and yet he was still shocked when the person on the other side stepped calmly into the chamber.

  Will heard Eloise gasp, and then with a mixture of shock and suspicion, she said, “I don’t … I don’t understand. What the hell’s he doing here?”

  13

  Taz! There he stood, the ringleader of the boys who’d harassed Eloise by the river, his clothes still dazzling white, a metal pole held casually at his side.