Till You Drop

by Mat Coward

  Shrak laughed, and again Orlandus was reminded of overactive children he had seen on television. "Students!" said Shrak. "Almost! But better! Yes. Above ... " and he waved a clawed hand around his head like a cowboy with a lasso, " ... is a brothel!"

  "A what?" said Lanto.

  "It is a house," Shrak explained, "in which the Fearful pay each other for - "

  "I know what a brothel is," Lanto interrupted, recovering quickly. "I am just ... it is an interesting concept, is it not? One which I'm sure Cousin Orlandus finds most ironic. Ironic is one of Orlandus's favourite words, Cousin Shrak."

  "The Fearful," said Orlandus, "they have no idea what lurks in their basement?"

  "We do not lurk," said Shrak, his voice momentarily higher than ever. "I can't speak for bloodtakers, but I can assure you that moonhowlers do not lurk."

  "Of course," Lanto began, diplomatically, but Orlandus cut him off.

  "I can speak for bloodtakers, Cousin," he said, "and I can assure you that bloodtakers do lurk; sometimes for purposes sinister, and sometimes merely for effect."

  This produced the biggest laugh of the night so far from Shrak. Orlandus joined in, thinking that his new acquaintance was, without doubt, dangerously unpredictable - but, like so many such, undeniably good company.

  Lanto merely looked on, his face still. Let the young speak to the young, he thought, sagely. And: These two understand the common tongue of all youth in all lands. Idiocy.

  "To answer your question, Orlandus," said Shrak, with what Orlandus suspected might be a studied lack of ceremony, "the Fearful above have, of course, no knowledge of our realm below. The cellar is entirely sealed off from the house. The portal though which we entered just now is the only one, and is hidden from the view of those who are not seeking it. It can only be opened from the inside. The overground occupants don't even know there is a cellar, I'm sure. Quite sure! Yes! We've been here for decades, and only once in all that time has it been necessary to deal with a trespasser."

  Shrak smiled, and his two guests smiled back, to show that all understood the piquancy of his last sentence. Then he added: "Besides, we do not greatly fear discovery by our neighbours. They have more to fear from exposure than us."

  "How so?" said Orlandus.

  "This house has been a brothel several times before during its existence, but at the moment, and for some years past, it has been operated in a specialised manner. Specialised, yes! Its clients are rich men, and those who serve them are children of another tribe. Such sport is forbidden by the laws of the Fearful. Therefore none can approach this house - above or below ground, Cousins - without prior invitation."

  "An ideal home, indeed, Cousin," Orlandus congratulated him.

  "It suits us well," Shrak agreed. "Though the noises from above can at times be mildly distracting."

  "Will you present us to your kith?" asked Lanto.

  "It's not necessary," said Shrak. "You may speak to me; when you have left, your message will hang in the air, and the others will take its scent. And what a message it must be, Cousins, to bring bloodtakers willingly to a place like this ... "

  Lanto refused the bait. More and more he was becoming convinced that this was a time for old squabbles to be left behind. "It is not so much a message, Cousin, as a question: Orlandus and I feel that the union - the International Brotherhood of Fright and Dread, as it was once known - is in desperate need of resurrection. And our question is simply this - do you agree?"

  Shrak propped his back against a wall of the cellar; seeming not so much to lean, as to hang on invisible hooks. "The Monsters’ Union has meant nothing to us for as long as any of us here can remember," he said. "I have heard of it, of course, but it is not spoken of. Why should we speak of it now?"

  This was the difficult bit. Lanto and Orlandus had discussed this matter endlessly, and understood each other. But how to communicate what they thought to another?

  “You would agree, Cousin, that fear is an essential ingredient of human life, no less important than all the other emotions and experiences which make up what it is to be human?”

  Shrak shrugged. “I suppose so. The long life of a bloodtaker is perhaps, necessarily, filled up with speculation, and other diversions. For my part, I cannot honestly say I spend much time wondering about the needs of the Fearful.”

  If Lanto was slightly deflated by these words, only those who knew him best would have noticed. He nodded politely at the moonhowler, and continued. “For millennia, that fear has been provided by the various monsters who live at the edge of their consciousness and in the shadows of their world. I am attempting to look at this from the Fearful’s point of view, you understand. Today, the horrors that mankind creates for himself are taking over - overwhelming the subtle, symbiotic terrors of what they would call the demon, the zombie, the ghoul or the werewolf. My cousin and I - we feel that such a drift towards deregulated, purposeless evil must be halted, before it irreversibly and disastrously alters life for both the Fearful and the Nighthood.”

  Shrak’s silence was, perhaps, a hopeful sign. His expression - as far as Orlandus could judge it - was equidistant between puzzled, sceptical, and intrigued. Before the moonhowler could put his uncertainties into words, and therefore solidify them, Orlandus took up the argument.

  “What we’re suggesting, Cousin, is that human life today, their world today, is so systematically and relentlessly anxious, that the Fearful are moving beyond fear. There’s no longer any rhythm to their fear, no melody, they are just terrified, wide-eyed, looking over their shoulders all day and all night, every day and every night from birth to death.”

  “Anxiety has replaced fear?” said Shrak.

  “Yes! Yes, Cousin, that is it exactly - the Fearful haven’t got the time or the energy to react differently to a monster, than they would to joblessness or global catastrophe or mad neighbours. They are more worried about catching cancer from eating sausages than they are of being bitten by a vampire - even though the odds in each case are about the same. The truth is, many of them today would probably find one of us light relief, compared to their true fears. After all, everybody knows - I mean no offence, Cousin - how easily a ‘werewolf’ can be killed if you happen to be lucky enough to have a silver bullet and to strike it in the heart with your first shot. A lot easier to kill a werewolf than to kill paranoia, hypochondria, or lack of security.”

  “You can cut a vampire’s head off,” said Shrak, “but you cannot cut off a recession’s head.”

  “That’s it,” said Lanto. “That’s it, just so! Then you agree with - ”

  “All very well, Cousins, yes yes, all very well, but it is mist, it is smoke. It’s just an idea. You’re asking us to refound the Monsters’ Union - to hold meetings, elect deputies, to debate and organise and struggle, and spurt away our time and our effort - because it’s a good idea. Your words suggest changes amongst the Fearful, within their strange and ugly culture, which threaten our existence as a Nighthood. But that is only an idea! Ideas on their own aren’t actors, Cousins. Ideas alone can’t make changes.”

  Orlandus opened his mouth to contradict, but Lanto held up a hand to silence the younger bloodtaker. He asked: “What then are changes made of?”

  “Ideas plus events. You need a cause.” Shrak answered without pause for thought, and Orlandus suddenly had the feeling that this must mean that the thought had taken place some time before. Perhaps their arguments were falling on more fertile ground than had seemed to be the case.

  “We have a cause,” he said.

  Shrak rubbed at the fur on his cheeks, with all his claws at once. “No, no! No, you haven’t; you’ve got an idea - what you need is a specific cause, a spark. Yes yes, that’s it: a spark, bloodtakers. Contact me again when you have your spark. Then we shall continue this conversation.”

  “How shall we contact you, Cousin?” Lanto asked, and was unable to hide his surprise as their host produced a smartphone.

  “Oh, there are plenty of these
to be had on the Heath! They dangle like berries and need only plucking.”

  He handed it to Orlandus, who took care not to flinch. Where does a naked wolf man keep his phone? he wondered, and then wished he hadn’t, as he realised that the unidentifiable stains on the object he now held might have originated in the body of either its present or its previous owner.

  Details and farewells were exchanged, and Shrak escorted the bloodtakers back to the open Heath. They had gone only a few yards when the high, almost mocking voice of their host scampered after them: “But don’t leave it too long, Cousins dear - I have had thirteen winters already. I am old, old. Don’t leave it too long!”

  ***

  Discussing Restart, reporting back on Restart, being briefed on Restart: DI Pipe seemed to be spending half his time in meetings these days, a development to which his reactions were mixed. On the one hand, the meetings were always very long and very boring. But at least there were usually biscuits, and almost anything had to be more fun than cutting down ropetirements.

  “There has to be a minimum standard of self-cherishing,” someone from the government was explaining. “In a fair society, those who choose not to take sufficient care of themselves, for instance through inappropriate lifestyle choices, can surely not be permitted simply to unload their share of the burden of labour onto others - people who have worked hard all their lives, looked after their bodies, lived sensibly. No-one’s going to say that’s fair.”

  Pipe ate another biscuit. And then, because the biscuits were beginning to run out, he ate four more.

  “The next phase of Restart, therefore, will concentrate on establishing the criteria under which it is deemed that a person has died before their ReAlSpa - that is, their Reasonable Allotted Span. Let me give you a concrete example.” The woman from the ministry clicked up an outline image of a man, and with a few more clicks lit up a variety of pie charts and graphs around him.

  “Excuse me?” Pipe raised his hand. “Are there any more biscuits?” Someone passed him a plate of biscuits. He nodded his thanks, and ate three: one ginger, two chocolate-dipped.

  “Now, if we give this man certain demographic details - date and place of birth, occupation of parents, genetic health inheritance, and so on - we can see that he has a ReAlSpa of eighty-four. Just to be crystal here: that’s the age at which he might reasonably be expected to die, if he took sensible decisions throughout his life in matters such as educational attainment, choice of occupation, health consciousness, personal habits, that kind of thing.” She clicked up an overlay. “But as we see from this display, our man has not done so: he chose not to go to university, for instance, he has a fondness for fatty foods, his leisure activities are sedentary. And when we’ve added this data to his profile - there! We see that his actual lifespan drops to a mere seventy-eight.”

  This was met with a chorus of tuts and moues and headshakes from the assembled civil servants, politicians, and businesspeople.

  “In other words,” the official continued, “he has cheated the community of six years of work. He owes the community six years of work. All we’re proposing is that he should be required to pay back those six years, via the liberating technology of Restart.”

  Amid the applause, Pipe raised his hand again.

  “No, said the chairman, “I don’t think there are. I think you’ve eaten them all.”

  Pipe shook his head. “Different question. Just wanted to be sure I’ve got this crystal. We’re saying that, when this next phase goes ahead, you could get a bloke who is deemed to have killed himself, effectively, before his time - say by drinking a bottle of whisky a day for twenty years?”

  “Yes,” said the official.

  “And you could restart him, and put him to work?”

  “Yes,” said the official.

  “Driving a train, something like that?”

  “I’m sure,” said the official, “that appropriate work can be found for each individual, based on his or her profile.”

  “Fine, thank you,” said DI Pipe. “Just wanted to be sure.” He didn’t ask When everyone’s working without pay, who will buy what they produce? Because economics, after all, was his hobby. It did not form part of his remit.

  The rest of the meeting was very dull, Pipe thought. No biscuits at all. Really, to be fair, he should have paced himself better.

  ***

  “Shrak didn’t say no,” Orlandus reminded his cousin. “He didn’t say he disagreed with us. He just said -”

  “He couldn’t agree or disagree with us, because we ourselves didn’t know what it was we were actually saying.” Lanto had come away from the meeting with the moonhowler feeling that he had been made a fool of. Even worse, that the one doing the fool-making was himself. It was a feeling which had grown, and continued to grow. “And the monster was right, wasn’t he? Our concerns are the very definition of vague!”

  “No,” said Orlandus. “They’re not. Our articulation of them is vague - granted. But the feelings, the experiences behind them are real. They are solid.”

  Lanto seemed to take some comfort from that. He stopped pacing, at least, and sat down. “All right,” he said. “So what is it that we are trying to say, through the barrier of our tongue-tied inarticulacy?”

  Orlandus made a Bela Lugosi face. “It’s the fangsh, Coushin, the fangsh get in the way!”

  Lanto chucked a cashew at him. “Shut up, you idiot.”

  Orlandus caught the cashew, and ate it. “Is it possible that demands are shaped by struggle - not the other way round?”

  “So we won’t know what we want until we get it?” Lanto frowned. “That sounds most unsatisfactory.”

  “Unsatisfactory?” Orlandus laughed. “Well, Cousin, if you ever meet an incarnation of History, you can tell her!”

  Lanto didn’t seem to hear. He was pacing again, though this time thoughtfully more than fretfully. “We can’t be saying that humanity has never before acted towards itself in ways that are awful - or even that current practices are the most appalling ever.”

  “No, indeed,” Orlandus agreed. “That would be to overlook the slave trade, the poorhouse, the systematic genocides.”

  “Then what?” Lanto demanded. “What is different this time?”

  It was the sort of question which required deep and prolonged pondering, so Orlandus deliberately answered without thinking: “Could it be simply a matter of demarcation?”

  Lanto shook his head. “I’m not sure I know that word …?”

  “Impressed you with my vast vocabulary, have I? Well, there’s one small, lifelong ambition realised. I’ve been reading up, Lo.”

  “On Fearful jargon? You must have been bored.”

  “No,” said Orlandus. “On the history of Fearful trade unionism. If the International Brotherhood was founded in imitation of human unions, then - ”

  “Yes, yes, that makes sense. Good, Orlandus, good. And this demarcation …?”

  “I mean that the Fearful are infringing absolutely specifically on - well, on our work, for want of a better word. When they bomb each other to death by the hundreds of thousands, well - it’s all very distasteful to civilised, superior sorts like us. But it’s not actually any of our business. Literally.”

  “Our business being …?”

  “We frighten people,” said Orlandus. “Or rather, we frighten persons. As individuals, not as masses. Nations are not afraid of being bitten in the neck and having their blood stolen - persons are.”

  “We offer a bespoke service,” said Lanto.

  “Well, I’m not sure we offer it, as such …”

  “You’re on to something,” said Lanto. “You haven’t got all of it, but you’ve got part of it there I’m sure. But that makes us sound merely self-interested.”

  “I’m not sure empathy or altruism or doing the right thing can ever spring from any other well than self-interest. Surely self-interest must be the start of all great progress? You know - I’d be a lot better off if we did
it this way instead of that way; and come to think of it so would my friends and neighbours. I must ask them if they feel the same … ” He broke off as his phone chimed an incoming message. "Well, I never," he said, showing the screen to Lanto.

  "The spark," said Lanto. "Does this mean the spark has arrived, after all?"

  "I suppose it always does, eventually," his cousin replied. "That’s how history works."

  ***

  Ngggg had heard humans use the expression to walk out, and he had remembered it. It struck him as such an elegantly simple form of dissent: not to riot or revolt or go to war, but simply to walk out. Who would have thought the Fearful capable of such extravagant subtlety?

  And walking, of course, was very much at the heart of what the greymen did; of what they were. Some called them stumblers, but that was a name born in ignorance. You couldn’t say a spider stumbled because it did not run as fast as a cat. A spider moved as a spider moved; a greyman as a greyman.

  Every hundred years or so, the greymen would eat the brains of a human, because if a thing was never done, or done too often, it could not be properly feared, but most of the time what greymen did was walk: in and between their ever-shrinking unnatural habitats, the plantations of bamboo and Christmas trees and woods-gone-wild all across the country.

  So when the stink of the not-now-dead reached his own undead nostrils - and when he had followed the scent and seen the resurrected humans, the stumbling humans, and understood what they signified - Ngggg had called together his Cousins, and told them what he’d seen, and told them of the walk out, and asked them to vote; not by show of hands, for not all greymen have hands, but by show of intent. All greymen have intent.

  And they walked out.

  ***

  This time, Lanto and Orlandus travelled to Tunbridge Wells by the fastest means available to bloodtakers.

  “When you’re really in a hurry,” said Orlandus, “nothing beats a stolen motorbike.”

  “Borrowed,” his cousin corrected him. “We’re taking it back.”

  Orlandus dismounted, and stroked the bike’s flanks. “It is a nice machine, though.”

  “Borrowed,” said Lanto.

  They weren’t sure what they expected to see, but - panic, perhaps? Horror? They hadn’t really thought of contempt.