by Matt Haig
Valencia. Rome. Kiev.
Sometimes they would sing that sil y tune they’d written as teenagers, for their band—The Hemo Goblins. He can’t remember the song though, now. Not quite.
But it was an unthinking, immoral way of living. He had been glad to meet Helen and slow things down a bit. Of course he never knew that he would stop drinking blood completely, fresh or otherwise. Not until Helen became pregnant and told him to get his priorities straight. No, he hadn’t seen that coming. He hadn’t seen this future of headaches and monotony and sitting in a broken swivel chair waiting for the door to open and another hypochondriac to enter the room.
“Come in,” he says wearily, the soft knock having sounded like a hammer.
He doesn’t even bother to look up. He doodles blood drips on his prescription papers until he notices a scent of something he knows, vaguely. He closes his eyes for a moment to savor the aroma, then opens them to see Lorna, ful of health in tight jeans and a floaty top.
If he were a normal man, with a normal hold on his cravings, Lorna would look to him how she actual y looks. Like a mildly attractive thirty-nine-year-old woman with manic, over-madeup eyes.
But for Peter she could have stepped out of the glossy pages of Helen’s Marks and Spencer catalogue. He gets up and kisses her on the cheek, as if at a dinner party.
“Lorna. Hi! You smel nice.”
“Do I?”
“Yes,” he says, trying to concentrate solely on the perfume, which was in fact overapplied.
“Meadowy. Anyway, how are you?”
“Told you I’d make an appointment.”
“Yes. Yes, you did. Take a seat.”
She places herself down in the chair. Gracefully, he thinks. Like a cat. A slinky Burmese cat, minus the fear.
“Is Clara okay?” she asks, in a sober tone.
“Oh yes, Clara, she’s . . . you know. Young, experimental . . . you know, teenagers.”
She nods, thinking of Toby. “Yeah.”
“So, what was it again?” asks Peter.
He half hopes she has an ailment that might put him off her. Something that would defuse the energy between them. Hemorrhoids or IBS or something. But her symptoms are so ladylike and Victorian they only add to her attractiveness. She tel s him she has been feeling faint, been getting blackouts when she stands up too fast. He thinks, for an egotistical moment, she could be making al this up.
Stil , he tries to be professional.
He wraps the armband from the blood pressure monitor around Lorna’s arm and starts to pump it up. Lorna smiles with flirty confidence at him, while he battles his desire at the sight of her veins.
Thin, beautiful streams of blue amid her peach-colored skin.
It’s no good.
He can’t stop himself.
He is lost now, trapped in the moment. He closes his eyes and sees himself leaning down toward her arm, causing her to giggle.
“What are you doing?” she asks him.
“I have to taste you.”
“Test me?”
She sees his fangs and screams. He sinks his teeth into her upturned forearm and, given the pressure on the veins, blood spurts everywhere. Over Peter’s face, over Lorna, the monitor, the posters.
“Are you al right?”
Her voice breaks the fantasy.
Peter, without any blood on him or anywhere else, blinks the hal ucination away.
Peter, without any blood on him or anywhere else, blinks the hal ucination away.
“Yes, I’m fine.”
He takes the pressure reading, undoes the strap, and tries to be serious.
“Everything’s normal,” he says, straining not to look at her or inhale through his nose. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious. It’s probably just that your iron levels are a little low. Stil , it’s better to be on the safe side, so I’l put you down for some blood tests.”
Lorna winces. “I’m such a girl about injections.”
Peter clears his throat. “You’l need to see Elaine at reception.”
Lorna is about to open the door but obviously wants to say something. She has a nervously mischievous look on her face Peter loves and fears simultaneously.
“They have jazz evenings,” she says, eventual y. To Peter, her voice is as smooth and inviting as the stil surface of a lake. “At the Fox and Crown out near Farley. Live music. Mondays, I think. I thought we could go. Mark is down in London on Monday, gets back late. So I thought, I don’t know, we could go.”
He hesitates, remembers her foot pressing down on his last night. Remembers the taste of blood, shortly after, washing away his guilt. Feels the frustration of al those unreturned “I love you’s” he has sent to his wife over the years. It takes every bit of strength he has inside him to softly shake his head. “It’s . . .”
She chews on her bottom lip, nods, then her mouth widens slowly, like the wings of an injured bird, into a kind of smile. “Okay. Bye, Peter,” she says, unwil ing to wait for the ful rejection.
And the door closes and regret drowns out his relief. “Bye, Lorna. Yeah, good-bye.”
A message to the converted: NEVER GAIN CONTACT WITH YOUR
CONVERTOR. The emotions you feel toward the individual whose blood caused such a profound change in your nature will always be difficult to ignore. But to see this individual in person may provoke an avalanche of emotion from which you might never be able to recover.
The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 133
The Oarless Boat
One of the wel-known consequences of excessive blood drinking is that it has a profound effect on your dreams. General y, this effect is good and the average practicing vampire enjoys lush and pleasure-fil ed sleep movies, brimming with luscious nudes and exotic details which change from dream to dream, and Wil Radley used to be no exception. His dreams would conjure the richest details of places he had visited—and he had visited everywhere (if only at night)—and add a few more from the outer reaches of his imagination. Recently though, he has been having nightmares, or rather the same nightmare, over and over, the location or events only changing in the minutest detail.
He is having it right now, this Saturday.
Here is how it goes.
He is in a rowboat, with no oars, floating on a lake of blood.
There is a rocky shore, al around, and there is a beautiful woman, standing barefoot on the rocks, beckoning him.
He wants to join her, but he knows he can’t swim, so he uses his hands as oars, splashing through the blood, until he hits something.
A head rises up. A woman with her eyes rol ed back and mouth open emerges out of the red water.
Today, this woman is Julie, the checkout girl from last night.
He sits back in the oarless boat as other dead faces emerge, al white-eyed and wide-mouthed, with fatal y wounded necks below them. They are al the men and women he has kil ed.
Hundreds of heads—speed-daters, Croatian waitresses, a French exchange student, hangers-on from the Stoker Club and the Black Narcissus, Siberian goatherds, swan-necked Italians, infinite Russians and Ukrainians—bobbing like buoys in the blood.
The woman on the shore is stil there, though, stil wanting him to come to her. Only now he sees who it is. It is Helen, seventeen years ago, and now he knows this, he wants to be with her more than ever.
A wet noise.
Someone swimming in the blood. And then someone else, splashing in a desperate front crawl.
It is the bodies. It is the dead, coming for him.
Julie is the closest. He sees her dead eyes rol forward and her arm reach out of the lake as she grasps onto the boat.
Then, as she pul s herself on board, he hears something else. Someone is under the boat, knocking on the wood, trying to break through.
He looks to Helen, on the shore. She is gone. In her place is Alison Glenny—the smug, crop-haired deputy commissioner who runs the police’s countervampirism operations. She nods, as if everything is going ac
cording to plan.
The bodies are al around, joining Julie as their arms reach out of the blood and onto the boat and the knocking gets louder and louder. The arms are about to reach him, but he closes his eyes, then opens them, and he is in his camper van, with the blackout blinds pul ed down.
Just a dream.
Just the same old dream.
He grabs his knife and opens the door to see who is knocking. It is Helen. “I was just dreaming about—”
She is looking at the knife.
“Sorry,” he says, smiling apologetical y, “force of habit. Lot of VB in here. Some that’s quite precious. I got jumped by some blood fiends in Siberia. Big Danish fuckers. The old tusks are useless in such circumstances, as you know.” He beckons to her as she had beckoned him in his dream. “Come in, soak up the shade.”
Helen closes her eyes to dismiss the request. She then speaks quietly, so no neighbors can hear. “What Peter was trying to tel you is that he wants you to leave. We don’t need you.”
“Yeah, he did seem a bit stand-offish, now you mention it. You couldn’t have a word with him, could you, Hel?”
Helen is dumbfounded. “What?”
He doesn’t like this. Crouching Quasimodo-style in his van—it’s not a good look. “You’re real y used to that sun nowadays. Come in, sit down.”
“I don’t believe you,” she says, exasperated. “You want me to talk to Peter about letting you stay?”
“Just til Monday, Hel. Need to lie low a bit, real y.”
“There is nothing for you here. Me and Peter want you to go.”
“Thing is, I’ve been overdoing it. I need to be somewhere . . . quiet. There’s a lot of angry relatives out there. One, in particular.” And this is true, although it’s been the truth for a long while now. Last year he’d heard from trusted sources that someone was looking for “Professor Wil Radley.” Someone with a grudge stemming back to his academic days, he imagines. A crazed father or widower wanting revenge. He isn’t worried about him more than about Alison Glenny, but it is something else straining his relations with his fel ow vamps in the Sheridan Society.
“Someone’s been asking questions. I don’t know who he is but he’s not letting go. So if I could just
—”
“Put my family in danger? No. Absolutely not.”
Wil steps out of the van and squints to see birds evacuating a nearby tree in fear and Helen wearing an equivalent anxiety as she looks along the street. Wil fol ows her gaze and sees an elderly lady with a walking stick.
“Whoa, need some serious sunblock,” he says, blinking in the sunlight.
Wil is stil holding the knife.
“What are you doing?” asks Helen.
The old lady reaches them.
“Hel o.”
“Morning, Mrs. Thomas.”
Mrs. Thomas smiles at Wil , who casual y raises the hand holding the knife, and waves it. He smiles and greets her too. “Mrs. Thomas.”
It’s fun for him, agitating Helen, and sure enough Helen is aghast. But Mrs. Thomas doesn’t seem to have noticed the knife, or at least isn’t perturbed by it. “Hel o,” comes the friendly croak in return. She keeps walking steadily on her way. Helen glares at Wil , so he decides to wind her up further by pretending to be surprised that he’s stil holding the knife. “Oops.” He casual y chucks the knife back in the van, his face itching with the light.
Helen is looking over at the next-door house as Mark Felt comes out with a bucket and sponge to start washing his car. A man who, to Wil ’s amusement, looks a bit concerned about this ominous-looking character Helen is talking to.
“You al right, Helen?”
“Yes, fine, thanks, Mark.”
As this Mark character starts sponging the top of his expensive car, he looks at Helen with mild suspicion. “Is Clara okay?” he asks, almost aggressively, as the foamy water spil s over the windows.
So, what did they tell the neighbors? Wil wonders, watching Helen’s nervy performance.
“Yes, she’s fine,” she says. “She’s fine now. Just teenage stuff, you know.”
There is another fun moment when Helen realizes she should introduce Wil to Mark, but she can’t bring herself to do so. As she struggles to fool her neighbor, Wil wonders at her the way he’d wonder at a familiar book translated into a foreign language.
“Good,” says Mark, not looking very convinced. “I’m glad she’s fine. What time’s Peter finish at the clinic?”
Helen shrugs, clearly wanting the conversation to end. “It depends, on a Saturday. About five.
Four, five . . .”
“Right.”
Helen nods and smiles, but Mark hasn’t finished yet. “I want to bring those plans over sometime too. Might be best tomorrow though. Golfing later.”
“Right,” says Helen.
Wil tries to keep his smirk under control.
“Let’s do this in the house,” she whispers.
Wil nods and fol ows her toward the front door. Bit forward, but okay. You’ve wooed me.
Paris
A minute later, he is in the living room, comfortable on the sofa. Helen is turned away from him, looking out to the patio and the garden. She is stil unknowingly gorgeous, even though she’s decided to switch to a fast-track mortality. But then she could be old and wrinkled as a walnut, he would stil want her.
He thinks of her as a Russian dol . This tense, vil agey outer casing contains other, better Helens. He knows it. The Helen he once flew over the sea with, hand in blood-smeared hand. He can smel the lust for life, for danger, stil pumping through her veins. And he knows this is the time to prod her, to force her into remembering her better self.
“Remember Paris?” he asks. “That night we flew there and landed in the Rodin Gardens?”
“Please be quiet,” she says. “Rowan’s upstairs.”
“That’s his music playing. He won’t hear anything. I just wanted to know if you ever think about Paris.”
“Sometimes, yes. I think about lots of things. I think about you. I think of me, how I used to be.
How much of myself I’ve had to sacrifice to live here, with al these normal people. Sometimes I just want to, I don’t know, give in and just walk naked down the street to see what people say. But I’m trying to rub out a mistake, Wil . That’s why I live like this. It was al a mistake.”
Wil picks up a vase and stares inside at the dark sculpted hole.
“You aren’t living, Helen. This place is a morgue. You can smel the dead dreams.”
Helen keeps her voice low. “I was with Peter. I was engaged to Peter. I loved him. Why did we have to change that? Why did you come after me? What was it? What’s in you that wants to come in like this demonic nightmare and ruin everything? Sibling rivalry? Boredom? Just plain old insecurity? Make everyone else in the world dead or miserable so there’s no one to envy anymore. Is that it?”
Wil smiles. He’s seeing a trace of the old Helen, her unmatchable vim. “Come on, monogamy was never your color.”
“I was young, and stupid. Real y fucking stupid. I didn’t understand consequences.”
“Stupid was big that year. Poor Pete. Should never have started that night shift . . . You never actual y told him, did you?”
“Who?” she says.
“Let’s stay with Pete.”
Helen’s hand is over her eyes now. “You understood.”
“Nineteen ninety-two,” says Wil , careful y, as if the year itself was something delicate and precious. “Vintage year. I kept our souvenir. I’m sentimental, you know that.”
“You kept my—” Helen’s eyes are wide in horror.
“Why, of course. Wouldn’t you have done the same?” He starts to speak theatrical y. “Dwel I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?” He smiles. “It’s a rhetorical question. I know I’m the center of the city. I’m the Eiffel Tower. But yes, I kept your blood. And I’m pretty sure Pete would recognize it. Was always quite the blood snob. Oh, I kept th
e letters too . . .”
Wil places the vase delicately back on the table.
Helen whispers, “Are you blackmailing me?”
He flinches at the accusation. “Don’t cheapen what you feel, Helen. You used to be so nice to me in your letters.”
“I love my family. That’s what I feel.”
Family.
“Family,” he says. The word itself sounds like something hungry. “We bundling Pete in there or sticking with the kids?”
Helen glares at him. “This is ludicrous. You think I stil feel more for you because you converted me before he did?”
And right as she says this, Rowan is walking downstairs, unheard but not unhearing. He doesn’t hear the words as such, but he hears his mother’s voice, its urgency. Then he stops to hear Wil .
The words are clear now but make little sense.
“Before?” Wil is saying, in a voice approaching anger. “You can’t get converted twice, Helen.
You real y are rusty. Perhaps you’d like a refresher—”
Rowan’s weight shifts to his left foot, creaking a floorboard. This causes the voices to stop, and for a second or two there is nothing but the ticking of the smal antique clock by the phone.
“Rowan?”
His mother’s voice. Rowan wonders whether to speak. “I’ve got a headache,” he says eventual y. “I’m going to take a tablet. And then I’m going out.”
“Oh,” his mother says, after another long pause. “Okay. Right. When wil you be—”
“Later,” Rowan interrupts.
“Later, right. I’l see you then.”
She sounds false. But how can he know what is false anymore? Every real thing he has ever known is pretend. And he wants to hate his parents for it, but hate is a strong feeling, for strong people, and he is as weak as they come.