Blood Loss

by Andy Maslen

  We took the kit inside to meet our backer. Ralph is an old friend. Too old now, really, for he is 93; though he is in good health, if a little deaf. He lost his wife to the lamia in 1983 and I attended her funeral. As he stood, alone, at the graveside, I approached him and explained who I was and what had really happened to Mary. At first he thrust me away from him, but I was persistent and eventually persuaded him to listen to me. He’d not been convinced by the autopsy report of massive blood-loss caused by knife wounds and as I spoke, I could see a light of belief flicker then catch behind his eyes. Since then, he has been a friend to the cutters, providing money, resources and shelter when we needed it. Ralph used to be a police officer. He also introduced me to some senior officers he played golf with. Explained who I was. To my great surprise I was not laughed out of their homes. They kept records of unexplainable deaths. Not “unexplained”, one female commander was at pains to point out; those were simply murders nobody could divine a reason for. “Unexplainable,” she said. “Off. Weird. Baffling. Corpses drained of blood, for example. There’s a room deep under Scotland Yard lined with filing cabinets stretching back to the very first days of the Metropolitan Police Service. They’re stuffed with all kinds of cases we never want the public – or the media – to know about.”

  So, Ralph has always helped us, and when I called him to explain what we were up to, he opened his house to us and told us he’d do anything to help. He left the back door open and met us in his kitchen. He hugged me first, then Lily, then Shimon, then Tomas. Sometimes I think he feels we’re the children he never had.

  “What do you need, Ariane?” he said.

  “A way out of the park after they lock the gates.”

  “That’s easy. My garden backs onto the park. There’s a dirty great fence that separates my land from theirs, but guess what?” He leaned closer, looking around rather theatrically. “I had my builder put a gate in. Nice combination lock and some barbed wire along the top to keep the riff-raff out, but it’s your way in. I’ll leave it unlocked and you can bring that, thing, back through the garden and round the side of the house to your car.”

  After a coffee and some sandwiches to fortify us, we entered the park. Normally, when we hunt, our search is for a suitable killing ground. This was different. We needed somewhere the public might conceivably stray that offered cover for three of us and a clearing for the goat. Yes, this is how we had come to think of Tomas: bait for the lamia.

  He was dressed very much in character: old clothes from a charity shop, still with that smell of sweat you can never erase, covered with a stinky brown raincoat – we forbore from asking him where he’d found it, though I had a shrewd idea. He’d been out on his own a couple of nights previously and I suspect he’d found it on a lamia’s kill. His stubble and unkempt hair completed the picture, and he’d purchased a half-bottle of whisky in an off-licence on the way over.

  “Over here,” Lily called. “I’ve found it. It’s perfect.”

  We had to work fast because the sun was already sliding behind the far hills. The spot was perfect, like she said. An open space of grass about 30 metres across, fringed with evergreen trees and scrubby bushes. It was in a hollow, well hidden from the path. The local council had dispensed with park rangers in a recent round of budget cuts so once the gates were locked, from the outside, we’d be on our own.

  Lily, Shimon and I hid ourselves in the trees, each armed with a crossbow. I retained the lamp for myself, Shimon carried the net. Lily’s role was to cover us as we netted the lamia. Tomas walked into the centre of the clearing and sat, like some disgusting, dirty Buddha, right in the middle. He unscrewed the whisky: it was so quiet, the thin crack as the metal seal snapped was clearly audible to me. He took a small sip, then tipped a quarter of the remainder onto his coat. From my vantage point I could smell the spirit as the breeze carried its aroma over to my hide.

  The sun had disappeared now and the temperature dropped almost immediately. I shivered despite my warm clothing. I had only killed lamia until that evening: our tradition does not include capturing the foul creatures, still less transporting them, alive, around London. Tomas began to sing. An old folk song from his native land. He has a beautiful, deep, mournful voice and it carried through the trees and seemed to fill the air around us. On and on went the song, through many verses. I do not speak Danish but it was clearly a song of unrequited love – what depressives those Scandinavians are.

  Tomas had just started a new song, an altogether livelier tune with a chorus of “rumpa-doo-delay” or some such nonsense when there was a rustle in the bushes behind him. Not from Lily or Shimon; they occupied different hiding places. He sat up straight, or as straight as he imagined a drunk would manage and called out.

  “Who’s there? What do you want?”

  Then, crawling out from under the bush’s black leaves, came the lamia. A female. We still do not know why they prefer to hunt naked, but there she was, stalking closer to Tomas like a hairless white ape. We needed to make sure we could surround it and throw the net without scaring it off. But my heart was beating so fast: I have never lost a member of my chapter and I didn’t intend to start this night. The lamia was hissing – that disgusting sound they all make before feeding. It shook its head and gaped, unhinging its lower jaw and exposing those revolting, pink, fleshy mouthparts. One more second I wanted to wait. When the fangs erect and the eyes begin to fill with blood, the lamia are at their most vulnerable.

  Tomas was doing a credible acting job, scrabbling backwards on hands and heels and pleading, “No, please, no” to the lamia. He had no crossbow, though I’d insisted he carry his salcie usturoi-smeared hunting knife under his coat. Then I saw them. Those hideous long teeth that look as if they are made of glass.

  “Now!” I shouted and hit the lamia full in the face with the beam of the lamp.

  Tomas rolled away and shielded his eyes with his arm but the lamia was caught directly in its beam. It shrieked and flailed its ropy arms in front of its face, eyes squeezed shut against what I hoped was immense pain. Shimon ran towards it from his hide and threw the net over its head. The net spun into a circle as it flew and dropped to the ground around the lamia’s clawed feet. With Lily covering him with her crossbow, he ran in and smashed the lamia on the temple with the butt of his crossbow. Blows, even those delivered with as much force as my 18-stone friend can manage, do very little to damage the lamia, but Shimon’s knocked the lamia to the ground. I ran to join the others in the clearing, keeping the lamp fixed on the lamia’s screwed up eyes. Tomas had stood up, although he was partially blinded as the beam had hit him in the eyes briefly, and was holding onto Lily’s shoulder for support.

  The creature was squealing and hissing – an unearthly sound that still makes the hairs on my body stand on end. I commanded it in the old tongue to be still or join its sisters in hell. I pointed the beam away from its face and it unscrewed its eyelids enough to peer up at me, taking in my crossbow and those of Lily and Shimon. Its jaw was back in place and it spoke.

  “Why, cutter? Why haven’t you killed me? Mother will find you and she will kill you for this. I will make sure of it.”

  “I have someone who wants to see the truth with her own eyes. That the daughters of Peta Velds exist. That lamia exist. Don’t hold out your hopes of being saved. You are alive at my whim, and will soon be dead.”

  “Mother will come for me. She will sense me. I feel her coming. Run, cutter. She will take her time with you.”

  “Enough!” I levelled my crossbow at the creature’s face. “Quiet, or I will despatch you now and find another to replace you.”

  The survival instinct is as strong in lamia as in humans and this final threat had the effect I sought. The lamia closed its mouth and contented itself with thrashing about in the net, though this motion succeeded only in entangling it more firmly in the blue nylon loops and knots.

  It took all four of us to drag the creature back to Ralph’s garden gate. He was waiting and
opened it as we approached.

  “Bring it through the side passage,” he said. “I don’t want its pollution in my house.”

  As we struggled with the still-twisting lamia it looked straight into Ralph’s eyes. And spoke again.

  “You lost your wife to us, old man. But don’t worry, her blood still pulses in our veins.”

  Then it laughed, a breathy, coughing noise such as a dog makes when it has a bone lodged in its throat.

  “You bloody—” Ralph began, shaking his fist at the thing in the net. Lily placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Don’t worry, Ralph,” she said. “Mary is in Heaven and this ill-begotten thing will soon be as far from her as it is possible to be.”

  He contented himself with a jab from his brass-tipped walking cane then turned and went inside.

  “Come and see me, Ariane,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Then he was gone and we fell to our task of dragging and heaving the resisting lamia into the loadspace of the car using the steel hawsers. It kept its silence after insulting dear Mary’s memory, though it sported a sneering smile and kept unfurling its tongue and licking all the way around its mouth. Tomas had recovered his sight by this point and slammed the hatch down, sealing the lamia inside the car after throwing a blanket over it to deter prying eyes.

  An hour later we were back in Bloomsbury, parked at the back of our house. Even with three loops of braided steel wire around its neck, the lamia still exhibited great strength, but the net restricted its movements sufficiently for us to drag it through the rear entrance to the house. Negotiating the stairs to the basement was even more trying, as the creature’s lunges brought its disgusting mouth within spitting distance of our faces. Eventually we settled the matter by arranging ourselves in pairs – Lily and Shimon behind it, myself and Tomas in front – and paying out the lines until they were tight. Tomas and I were at the foot of the staircase on one line, and we dragged it down the stairs with Lily and Shimon keeping their lines taut as they followed. In this way we reached the basement.

  The cage stood, door wide open, ready to welcome its latest inhabitant. Tomas had greased the hinges before we left for Richmond, and fitted the largest padlock we could find from a hardware shop on Theobalds Road – stainless steel, at least five inches across and, so said the shopkeeper, “strong enough to keep a lion at bay”. I prayed he was right.

  Now for the most dangerous part of the operation: removing the hawsers and the net and forcing the lamia into its new home. I realised we had failed to think this aspect of the capture through. With all four of us engaged on the three hawsers, we couldn’t reach a weapon and I truly believed it was only our combined strength that enabled us to hold the lamia still.

  “What are we going to do?” I said.

  “Let me out of these and I’ll go in on my own,” the lamia said. It stood quite still and held its hands over its pudenda.

  “Quiet, beast,” Tomas said. “I have a better idea. Lily, Shimon, enter the cage and tie off your wires onto the back bars.”

  They complied, then, realising what he had in mind, scooted round to the back and freed the wires again. The four of us could simply pull the lamia into the cage, maintaining tension around its neck and keeping it fixed at a safe distance between us. Now it knew it was unlikely ever to go free it began hissing and screeching, cursing us with obscenities that Vlad Țepeş would have approved of. The net prevented its gaining any leverage with its feet and it stumbled and hopped closer and closer until it was fully inside the cage. Then Tomas and I wound our hawser into a loop until I was close enough to slam the door with a satisfyingly loud clang, and close the padlock.

  We let the hawsers drop and at once the lamia ripped them over its head and began struggling out of the net. We used its anger against it, retrieving the ends of the wires and drawing them out through the bars of the cage – it does not do to give a creature as intelligent and strong as a lamia anything that it could conceivably use as a weapon or resource of any kind. As the net dropped to the ground at its feet, Tomas hooked it through the bars with a crowbar and threw it into a corner.

  The capture was complete. For the first time in my career as a cutter – for the first time in my life – I had a live lamia under lock and key. As our normal approach is to hunt them down and despatch them with as much haste as possible, I found myself unaccountably drawn to the creature. What an opportunity! We could study it at our leisure, starve it to the point of weakness and perhaps even discover some new flaw in its makeup that had eluded all our predecessors.

  We four stood around the cage, out of reach of those grasping hands harbouring who knew what organisms under the talons, panting from our exertion, but also looking at each other with triumph gleaming in our eyes. Then the lamia spoke to me in a quiet growl.

  “She knows I am here. Mother knows. You will bring her to me just as surely as a wounded deer brings the wolf. And then, cutter, you will feel her kiss. She will take her time with you, but, yes, Mother will take your blood and she will take your soul.”

  “How does she know, lamia? How?”

  “Don’t you know? Oh, dear! The great Van Helsings, slaughterers of so many of our family, ignorant of our secret. Well, I shan’t tell you, bitch. Perhaps Mother will, just before she kills you.”

  “She’s lying,” Lily said. “How could Velds know we have her? They’re not telepathic, just animals.”

  The lamia spun in its cage and cocked its head to one side as it glared at Lily.

  “I’m lying, am I? Well, I could be at that. But you will find out soon enough.”

  “Come on,” I said, eager to leave the creature before it took control fully of the conversation. “We’ll leave it here until we can bring Caroline.”

  Over the hissing screams of the lamia, we trudged up the stairs from the basement and I double-locked the steel-bound door from the other side. We had our proof.

  17

  Caroline Murray’ Journal, 18th October 2010, recorded on my phone and transcribed later

  Caroline Murray: Ariane is taking me down the hallway to a door. It leads to the basement. I can hear a sound. Snarling. Like an animal. A dog or something. Now it’s hissing and it sounds like speech but I don’t know the language. I don’t like the smell coming up from the basement. It smells bad. Like dustbins at the back of restaurants.

  Ariane Van Helsing: Please go in, Caroline. You are safe. Nothing can hurt you on the other side of that door.

  [sound of keys in locks and heavy door opening]

  [CM] There are three people. Two men and a woman. They are older than me. They have grey hair, the men. The woman is not so old but she looks like them. Not English. Their eyes are very dark. They are looking at me and then at a cage. There is a big cage in the middle of the room. They’ve got someone in there. I don’t want to look. I want to go. Please I want to go.

  [AVH] You can go whenever you really want to, Caroline, but please stay just for another few minutes just to see your proof.

  [CM] It’s a young woman. She is about 22, maybe, or 23. She is naked. I don’t know why they are keeping her like this. Poor thing looks frightened. The woman has a sword. Long. Pointed. Old fashioned. She is pushing it through the bars at the poor thing. Why? Why are they keeping her like this? Oh! She stuck the sword into her. She’s screaming. No, snarling. Hissing. She was the one making those noises. Ariane is shouting at her. Getting her to turn and look at me. No. No. I don’t want to look at her face but Ariane says I must. Her face is pretty. Her eyes are blue. No, not blue. They are changing. They are filling with blood. They are red and, oh, my God!

  [CM gasps, breathes rapidly]

  [AVH] Caroline, calm down. You are safe. You are completely safe. You can look. She won’t hurt you, can’t hurt you.

  [CM] Her mouth. She opened her mouth and teeth came down. They came from the roof of her mouth. Long and thin like a snake’s. Stuff is dripping out of them, like spit. Stringy stuff. She’s
holding the bars and pressing up against them to get to me. Her tongue is out. It is very long. She smells very bad. Like Mummy’s dog when we found her behind the shed. The girl smells dead. What are you carrying, Ariane? It’s a bottle of wine. No. Not wine. Blood. She’s pouring it out into a bowl. It’s making a horrid sound. I don’t want to watch. I know what’s going to happen. She’s putting it by the cage. The, the, thing wants the blood. It’s stretching out its hand. No, not. No, her hand. She is scooping it into her mouth, slurping it like soup. It is going everywhere. Down her neck, onto her front. She is mewling like a cat. Her nipples are erect. Oh ... no!

  [CM screams]

  [end of recording]

  18

  Diary of an Actress: the Life of Lucinda Easterbrook, 20th October 2010

  The strangest thing happened yesterday. Peta Velds called and said she wanted to meet me. She left me a voicemail. Me! I mean I’ve met the odd A-lister – it’s hard not to in my line of work – but Peta Velds? Bloody hell! She said she wanted to learn more about me as she’s producing a film. She said we’d go to a bar in Soho called the Lotus House.

  “How will I recognise you,” I said.

  “Don’t worry Lucinda, you won’t have any trouble. I’m very noticeable.”

  She was right. As I came up the stairs from Leicester Square tube and onto the pavement, a woman in a black fur coat that reached all the way down to the pavement turned to face me. Really pale skin. And, if I’m honest, not that much of a looker. Tall though.

  “You must be Lucinda,” she said. “I always recognise those I am meeting.”

  The dress under her coat must have been vintage – long sleeves and full, floor-length skirt – but I could see why she wore it: the black brocade fabric highlighted her pale skin, making it seem almost translucent. She took my arm, and we walked through Leicester Square towards Gerrard Street.