Once bitten

by Stephen Leather

  Canonico didn't have that sort of a sense of humour. He would have broken the aerial off and slashed my tyres, that was more his style. I let the bat wave in the wind all the way home.

  The Nightmare The alley was dark, so dark you wouldn't believe it. It was narrow, so narrow that if I were to put my arms out to the sides like a crucified man my fingers would touch both walls. I looked up and the walls seem to go on forever, so high that they seem to meet in the air miles above. I couldn't see the sky, not even a strip of star-studded blackness, and I couldn't see the moon but I knew it was up there somewhere, lurking like a hunting leopard. There was a scuffling sound somewhere up ahead but I couldn't see anything. In the distance I heard the whoop-whoop of a siren and I turned around to look back along the way I'd walked but I'd come so far that I couldn't see the street lights any more. The scuffling was repeated, as if a rat was rooting through a trash can. The floor was uneven and littered with rusting tins and rotting fast food containers, and here and there were puddles of dirty water. I moved slowly down the alley, holding my hands out in front of me because I was worried that I might walk into something: something cold and clammy. There was a ripping noise, the sound of material being torn by impatient hands, and then something whacked into my legs and clung to them like a pleading child. I jumped back but it stuck to me and I kicked out but still it wouldn't let go. I reached down to grab it and my hands met wet paper. It was a newspaper, blown down the alley by the midnight wind. I shivered and pulled away the scraps of wet paper, crumpling them up into waterlogged balls and throwing them to the side.

  I could hear a slurping noise, the sound of an animal drinking. No, not drinking. Lapping. Like a cat feeding from a saucer of milk. Lap, lap, lap. My trousers had become damp below my knees where the wet paper had stuck to the material and rivulets of water trickled down to my ankles. I moved towards the noise, peering into the blackness, but all I could see were the trash cans and the untidily-stacked cardboard boxes waiting to be collected. High up above me I heard a window grate open and then slam shut but when I looked up there was nothing there, just two sheer, blank walls.

  Ahead of me I could finally make out a shape, a grey lump on the floor like a man in a sitting position, legs sticking out, bent at the waist, head slumped against his chest, the slurping noise coming from its throat as if he was having trouble breathing. I wanted to speak, to ask if he was OK, if he needed help, but the words wouldn't come and I walked forward. As I drew closer I realised I wasn't looking at one form but two, one lying down on the ground, the other crouched over him, with its back to me. I moved to the side and I saw that the figure on the floor – I assumed it was a man but there was no way of telling for sure because it was just a shape – with its legs pointing in my direction, one arm flung out to the side, the other obscured by whatever it was that was kneeling over him. The slurping was louder. It sounded less like a cat feeding and more like two lovers kissing, soft, wet, squelchy sounds and swallowing noises, the sound of flesh against flesh.

  Something within me wanted to cry out, to try to stop whatever was happening on the floor of the alley, but I wanted to see exactly what was going on. I wanted to get closer. The two shapes became clearer as I moved towards them. The figure on the floor was lying on its back. It was a man, wearing a suit of some dark material and shiny black shoes. His socks were dark but sprinkled with white triangles. The material around the knees of the trousers was torn as if he'd been dragged along the ground. The shape looming over his neck was wearing a glossy leather jacket with the collar turned up and jeans that could have been blue or black, and boots with silver tips on the toes. The heels of the boots were clearly visible because the figure was on its knees, bending over the head of the man in the suit.

  The snuffling noises stopped suddenly and the shoulders of the kneeling figure stiffened as if aware that I was watching. Its head began to turn slowly and I tried to move away but my feet seemed to be fixed, as if they'd sprouted roots that had wormed their way into the ground and were holding me fast. I saw a cheek first, alabaster white, a smooth curve from the eye to the chin, then a curtain of hair swung across and that was all I could see as the head continued to turn and then, as the figure began to rise and turn at the same time, only then did I see her face. Terry. She was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket zipped up to her neck, steel zips running at angle across her chest and others marking where the pockets must have been. She smiled up at me and raised her right hand to her mouth. There was a streak of something along her right cheek, something wet that glistened as she moved, and her fingers touched it, rubbed it, and then carried it to her lips.

  Slowly and sensuously she licked the fingers with the tip of her tongue, one by one. I couldn't take my eyes off her and she smiled as if she knew how firmly I was trapped. I was in her power.

  Totally.

  "I knew you'd come," she said, and she took another step forward. For the first time I could see the head of the man lying on the floor. His mouth was wide open as if he had been trying to scream but I doubted that any sound would have managed to pass the drawn-back lips because the throat had been ripped messily open as if the flesh had been hacked and gouged with a dull knife. Or teeth. He looked dead and the eyes were blank and lifeless but there was blood pooling in the hollow of his throat and it bubbled and frothed as if he was trying to breath through what was left of his windpipe.

  "Look at me, Jamie," she whispered, and I found myself doing as she asked. "Forget him. He's nothing." She licked her fingers again and then reached forward and pressed them to my lips.

  They tasted salty and vaguely metallic. She stood up against me so that her jacket brushed against my chest. I hadn't realised until that moment how short she was, the top of her head barely reached my chin and she had to tilt her head back to see my face, the action stretching the skin taught across her cheekbones making her look impossibly young, a child with a smeared face. "You have to want to give yourself to me, Jamie. You have to want it deep within your soul. That's the way it works. You have to offer yourself. Nothing less. Do you understand?"

  I nodded, my heart pounding in my ears. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. She pushed her middle finger between my lips and gently rubbed it along my teeth as if daring me to bite.

  She raised herself up on her toes and tilted her head to one side and pressed her lips against my neck, just below my left ear where I could feel a vein pulsing in time to the rhythm of my heart.

  She kissed me softly and I felt her tongue probe the skin. It rasped along my flesh as if it was the tongue of a cat and not that of a girl and then she shifted her head back as if waiting for something.

  "Once bitten," she said and I could feel her breath with each word, and then she lunged forward, sharp teeth fixing onto my neck like a cheetah going in for the kill.

  I jerked back my head involuntarily and my eyes opened and I was in my bedroom, my legs tangled up in the quilt, the pillows scattered on the floor. My skin was bathed in sweat yet my mouth was dry and swallowing was an effort. I staggered to the bathroom and filled a glass full of water. I used the first mouthful to swill around, rolling it around my tongue and spitting it out into the washbasin. I switched on the light above the bathroom mirror and looked at my reflection.

  Bleary eyes stared back at me, deep set and worried, small red veins flecked through the whites, the pupils dilated as if I'd taken something. I hadn't. I opened my mouth wide and pulled back the skin on my face. It made me look younger. I relaxed and the wrinkles and the years came back. Thirtyfive going on fifty. I moved my head from side to side half expecting to see bites but the skin was unmarked. I rubbed my hand across my chin, feeling the stubble of growing hair. I could remember when all I had to do was to borrow my father's electric razor to shave the fuzz on my upper lip about once a month, then once a week, then daily. But it was only in recent years that the stubble would appear in the middle of the night. A sign of being an adult, I guess. A sign of age.

  Now i
f I was going anywhere in the evening I looked scruffy unless I shaved again.

  I took another mouthful of water and gargled with it and when I looked down to spit it out I saw that the first mouthful was red. Blood red. I turned on the taps and it swirled away down the plughole and the second time I spat it was clear, just water and phlegm. I checked out my mouth in the mirror and I couldn't see any cuts or abrasions. Just teeth, and metal fillings. Another sign of a decaying body. I filled my mouth and spat again but there was no more blood.

  I took a glass of water back with me to the bedroom and lay down on my side, facing away from the window, and tried to get back to sleep. Images of the girl and the alley kept filling my mind, her smile, her eyes, and the blood. I could hear my own heartbeat in my right ear which was pressed against the pillow. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. The sound of my lifeblood coursing around the veins and arteries of my body, the tubes that were already silting up with chloresterol and fat globules and all the rest of the detritus that was floating around in my tissues. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. The constant reminder of my own mortality, a fist-sized hunk of tissue in the centre of my chest upon which my whole being depended. Without its seventy-odd squirts of oxygenated blood every minute there would be no more Jamie Beaverbrook. I wondered what it must be like to have a heart attack, to feel the pump splutter and jerk and stop, and to know that the end was coming, that the brain was being starved of life-giving oxygen and that it would soon all be over. The empty blackness stretching ahead for ever more. No more Jamie Beaverbrook. The chain of thought depressed me, as it always did. The morbid thoughts of my own mortality usually came at night, when I was alone in the dark. I shifted my head to try to get my ear off the pillow so that I wouldn't have to listen to the accusing heart counting off the beats that represented the time I had left. Seventy beats a minute, 4,200 every hour, one hundred thousand or so every day. What was that a year? More than thirty-five million beats. So how many did I have left if I lived for fifty more years? I did the sums in my head and it came to about 1.8 billion. Durr-rum, minus one.

  Durr-rum, minus two. Durr-rum, minus three. This wasn't like counting sheep and easing myself into sleep, this was chipping away at my life bit by bit, alone in a double bed, and the thought filled me with cold dread.

  I moved my head again and this time I felt my right shoulder grate as the arm moved in the socket, the sign of cartilage wearing thin from too many games of tennis and squash. It never used to make that noise, the sound of bone against bone, or maybe it was only recently that I'd noticed it.

  The cartilage in my knees made cracking noises when I got up and occasionally my hips would pop if turned suddenly. Please God, I prayed, don't let me get old and don't let me die. Let me stay as I am right now. Or if you're feeling extra merciful, let me stay as I was five years ago, when I was in my prime. When I was young. I took a deep breath and I could hear the air rushing down into my lungs and when I breathed out it made a wheezing noise like the wind whistling through the branches of a dying tree. What must it be like, I thought, to stop breathing? That was the way people usually went when they died, I guess, the lungs stop functioning first, then the heart, and only then would the brain start to realise that it wasn't getting freshly-oxygenated blood like it was supposed to, like it had been for the past God-knows how many millions of heart beats. Would the body panic, or would it go quietly and surrender peacefully to the infinite oblivion?

  I tossed and turned but I couldn't sleep, not because I wasn't tired but because dark, depressing thoughts kept slipping into my mind and pushing out everything else. Thoughts of sickness, of aging, of death. I switched on the television at the foot of the bed and watched a detective show where two young women private eyes in expensive convertibles cornered a drugs ring, survived two car chases and a shoot-out without smudging their make-up. It depressed me even more so I went to the kitchen and got myself a Budweiser and drank it in bed, propped up with pillows because I didn't want to lie down and listen to my heartbeat any more.

  The Apartment I don't remember falling asleep but I must have done because the next thing I remembered was waking up with my neck at a painful angle on the pillow and two empty cans of Budweiser on the bedside table. The television was on and a blonde with blow-torched hair was telling me that there had been seven murders in downtown Los Angeles and the police were expecting more, what with it being a full moon and all. It was seven o'clock in the morning, an hour or so before I normally got up, but I showered, shaved and dressed and sat down at my desk with a cup of coffee and a couple of apples. My briefcase was on the desktop where I'd left it the night before and I opened it and took out my laptop computer and ejected the floppy disc on which was stored the data on Terry Ferriman and Henry Kipp. I normally write up my reports in my office but I wanted to make an early start because it wasn't going to be too long before the phone rang, not if there had been seven homicides overnight. I was one of four psychologists employed by the LAPD, but one was in hospital having her breasts lifted and another had gone skiing in Aspen which meant double the workload for me and the other guy left behind, Anton Rivron.

  The department insisted that all homicide suspects were examined by a psychologist as soon as possible, and had done since the early nineties. It was supposed to be in the interests of justice and all that fair play crap, but it was little more than a cost-saving exercise. There was no point in mounting a full Homicide investigation if the perp turned out to be insane. It was far easier, and cheaper, to set the shrinks on him and have him locked away in a secure mental institution and throw away the key rather than trying to pin down a motive and opportunity and all that sort of stuff they do on television. And if the perp wasn't mad then it was important to get a psychologist's report on him in the file right from the start of the investigation, so that when the Homicide detectives had finally put a case together the defence didn't simply try to con the jury into believing that the perp had been temporarily a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It used to happen a lot, the perp would sit in his cell and wait until the Homicide boys had put together a watertight case and then they'd start talking to themselves and rolling their eyes or claim to have amnesia or any one of a dozen tricks that they thought would get them out of prison and into a mental hospital where they'd stay until they could either persuade the authorities they were cured or they could manage to escape. And the waiting was a hell of lot more comfortable in a hospital than it was in a high security prison.

  What the department needed was someone who could make a snap, but accurate, decision on the mental stability or otherwise of suspects which would tell the detectives the best way of proceeding with the case. They'd headhunted from England me to set up the system and recruit the three psychologists who worked with me on a consultancy basis. I'd been working at the University of London on a computer system which could assess a person's sanity and compare it with models of various mental disorders. I'd first got interested in the field after following the work of Professor David Carter at the University of Sussex who the British police called up whenever they had a serial killer or multiple rapist they couldn't catch. He'd come up with a way of drawing psychological profiles on computers based on the clues found by police. By giving the police the profile of the man they should be looking for, he made their job a hell of a lot easier. I started to get interested in what happened at the other end of the investigation, after they'd been caught. For my doctorate I developed computer models of various mental disorders and criminal tendencies based on the better part of a thousand interviews I carried out in prisons and mental hospitals in the United Kingdom and then I began working on a computer program which from simple questions and answers could be used to ascertain a person's mental state. It took many years of work, but eventually I worked it up to the point where it could be used with a considerable degree of accuracy. I produced several well-received scientific papers and went on a couple of lecture tours and then one day I got a phone call from the London office of an
American headhunting firm and three months later I was in Los Angeles earning five times what I had been paid as a post-doctorate researcher.

  The move to Los Angeles made a lot of sense, both from a personal point of view – I'd always been an Americophile – but also because it was the perfect place to research into sociopaths and psychopaths and a host of other mental abnormalities. Put simply, there were more lunatics per square mile in Los Angeles than anywhere else on God's green earth, and I reckoned that while drawing an obscenely high salary I'd also be able to churn out a fair number of research papers.

  That's the way it worked out, too. Mind you, there was a downside. My wife left me and I lost my daughter and she set a lawyer on me who had all the sympathy of a Rotweiler with an exceptionally low IQ. And I picked up a nickname. Jamie D. Beaverbrook, the Vampire Hunter. Don't you just love America?

  I did the Kipp report first and printed it out on the laser printer. I slotted the sheets into a blue cardboard folder and wrote Kipp, H, on it and then went and got another cup of coffee from the kitchen. I put the cup on the desk and then I went to fetch the morning paper and I sat on the sofa and begin to read it and then I realised that my subconscious was playing for time, trying to defer the moment when I'd start to put together the report on Ferriman, T. Why was that, I wondered.

  Because she was so pretty? So young? Because she looked so helpless, and yet, at the same time, so in control of herself?

  I flipped the paper closed and sat back at the desk and called up her file on the computer and went through the answers she'd given. They were the answers you'd expect from any well-balanced young woman, not too aggressive, not too self-centered. The sort of girl who'd make a good friend, or lover. It took me twice as long to finish the report on her than I'd taken over Kipp. It wasn't that she was a more complicated case, it was more that I was finding myself trying to always portray her in a good light, then realising that it might look as if I was being biased in her favour so I'd go the other way and be too hard on her. The whole point of the Beaverbrook Program was that it was supposed to take the emotion out of the judgment, the verdict should be totally objective, and it almost always was, yet in her case I was having to constantly force myself to be neutral. And all the time the image of her in my mind was the girl in the alley in the black leather jacket, her lips against my neck. No, I didn't mention the dream in my report. Once bitten…