by Matt Haig
So he walks down the hal way and into the kitchen. He opens the cupboard where he knows the medicine is and takes the ibuprofen out of the box. He studies the pure white plastic casing.
He wonders if there is enough to kil himself.
Behind a Yew Tree
They hear Rowan go into the kitchen. A cupboard opens and shuts. He then walks out of the house, and as soon as Helen hears the door shut, she can breathe again. But it’s only a temporary relief, which lasts until Wil , stil on the sofa, opens his mouth again.
“Could have been worse,” he says. “He could have found the letters. Or Pete could have been here.”
“Shut up, Wil . Just shut up.”
But her anger is contagious. Wil stands up and moves closer to Helen, talking al the time to a Peter who isn’t there. “You know, Pete, I was always surprised you couldn’t do the math. With al your qualifications. And a medical man too . . . Oh sure, Helen gave you the wrong numbers and I had fun frightening that consultant into lying, but stil . . .”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up.” She doesn’t think. She just lashes out at Wil , scratching his face and feeling the release this gives her. Wil puts his finger to his mouth, then shows it to her. She looks at the blood, blood she has known and loved like no other. It is there, before her, the taste that could make her forget everything. The only way to fight her instincts is by storming out of the room, but she can almost hear the happy curling smile in his words as he cal s after her.
“As I said, Hel, it’s just til Monday.”
Rowan sits in the churchyard, leaning behind a yew tree, hidden from the road. He has taken the whole packet of ibuprofen but feels exactly as he did half an hour ago, minus the headache.
This is hel , he realizes. To be trapped in the long and horrible sentence that is life for two hundred or so years without reaching the ful stop.
He wishes he’d asked his dad about how to kil a vampire. He’d real y like to know whether suicide is possible. Maybe there’s something in The Abstainer’s Handbook. Eventual y, he stands up and starts to walk home. Halfway back, he sees Eve stepping off a bus. She walks toward him, and he realizes it is too late to hide.
“Have you seen your sister?” she asks him.
She is staring at him so directly, with ful Eveness alive in her eyes, that he can hardly speak.
“No,” he manages eventual y.
“She just disappeared in Topshop.”
“Oh. No. I . . . I haven’t seen her.”
Rowan worries about his sister. Maybe the police have got her. For a moment this worry takes over the general anxiety he has talking to Eve. And this concern for his sister makes the chemical flavor in his mouth taste like guilt, as half an hour ago he had wanted to abandon his sister along with the whole world.
“Wel , it was weird,” Eve is saying. “One minute she was there and the next she was—”
“Eve!” Someone is shouting and running toward them. “Eve, I’ve been looking everywhere.”
Eve rol s her eyes and groans at Rowan as if he is her friend.
A reason to be alive.
“Sorry, better go. It’s my dad. See you later.”
He almost has the courage to smile back at her, and manages it when she turns.
“Okay,” he says. “See you.”
Hours later, in his bedroom listening to his favorite Smiths album— Meat Is Murder—he flicks to the index in The Abstainer’s Handbook and finds the fol owing information lurking on page 140.
A Note on Suicide
Suicidal depression is a common curse among those who abstain.
Without a regular diet of human or vampire blood, our brain chemistry can be seriously affected. Serotonin levels are often very low, while our supply of cortisol can rise alarmingly at times of crisis. And we are likely to act rashly, without thinking.
Added to this, of course, is the natural self-loathing which stems from knowing what we are, and the tragic irony for abstainers is that we hate our instincts, partly because we don’t act on them. Unlike practicing blood fiends, who are blinded by their addiction, we have the clarity to actually see the monster inside us, and for many this painful sight can be too much.
It is not a purpose of this handbook to pass a moral judgment on those who seek to end their existence. Indeed, in many cases—such as when abstainers might be thinking of going back to their old and murderous ways—it might even be advisable.
However, it is important to take on board the following facts: 1. Abstainers may live like humans but cannot so easily die like them.
2. It is theoretically possible to commit suicide through the consumption of pharmaceutical substances, but the quantity needed is significantly higher than for an ordinary mortal. For example, the average vampire would need to consume approximately three hundred 400 mg acetaminophen tablets.
3. Carbon monoxide poisoning, jumping off buildings, and wrist slashing are also highly impractical. Particularly the last, as the sight and scent of our own blood can spark an immediate desire to seek out fresh supplies from other, living sources.
Rowan closes the book, strangely relieved. After al , if he kil ed himself, he wouldn’t be able to see Eve ever again and the thought horrifies him even more than the thought of staying alive.
He closes his eyes, lies back on his bed, and listens to the noises from other rooms. His mum is whirring something in the blender downstairs. His dad is huffing heavily away on the rowing machine in the spare bedroom. And loudest of al , Clara and Wil are laughing together and listening to screeching guitars.
Rowan lets the other noises just blur together in his mind as he focuses on his sister’s laugh.
She sounds truly, unquestionably happy. Without a regular diet of human or vampire blood, our brain chemistry can be seriously affected.
And with it?
Rowan closes his eyes and tries not to think about the true and unquestionable happiness he too could be having.
He shakes his head and tries to swal ow away the thought, but it stays there, lingering like the sweet-sour taste on his tongue.
Water
Peter is on the rowing machine, pushing himself harder than usual. He was trying to make 5,000 meters in less than twenty minutes, but he’s wel ahead of himself. He checks the display screen: 4,653 meters in fifteen minutes five seconds. This is way faster than his usual time and clearly a result of the blood he took last night.
He can just about hear the music coming from Clara’s room.
Hendrix.
Preposterous, 1960s blood music, which Wil evidently stil likes as much as he did as a seven-year-old, when he danced around the barge with their father to “Crosstown Traffic.”
He hears Clara, laughing along with her uncle.
But he doesn’t let it distract him. He just looks at the buttons under the screen: CHANGE UNITS.
CHANGE DISPLAY.
Whoever made this machine knows the power of that word. CHANGE.
He thinks of Lorna and mumbles words in rhythm with the machine, as he pushes harder and harder through the last hundred meters.
“Jazz. Jazz. Jazz . . . Fuck. ”
He stops, watching the total rise on after him as the flywheel stil spins. It stops eventual y at 5,068 meters. Completed in seventeen minutes twenty-two seconds.
This is impressive.
He has cut his time wel down from a previous best about four minutes higher than that. Now, though, he is too tired to get off the machine.
With an incredible thirst, he looks down at the pumped-up veins on his forearm.
No, he tel s himself. Water will do.
Water.
That’s what his life is now. Clear, bland, tasteless water.
And you can drown in it just as easily as blood.
Clara listens to the ancient guitar music she has just downloaded on Wil ’s recommendation and doesn’t even pretend to like it.
“No,” she says, laughing. “This is horrible.”
“Thi
s is Jimi Hendrix,” he says, as if that explained everything. “This is one of the most talented blood fiends that ever lived! This is the man who used to play the guitar with his fangs. On stage.
And no one even noticed.” He laughs. “Our dad told me about it before he . . .” Wil stops for a moment, and Clara wants to ask him about his father but sees the pain in his eyes. She lets him carry on about Jimi Hendrix. “The unbloods just thought it was the acid they were taking. Never asked: why’s the haze purple? Course, it was never actual y a haze. “Purple Veins” was seen as a bit much. Prince had the same problem. But then he abstained and became a Jehovah’s Witness and it al went downhil . Not like Jimi. He just faked his death and carried on. Cal s himself Joe Hayes. H-A-Y-E-S. Runs a blood rock club cal ed Ladyland in Portland, Oregon.”
Clara leans back against her bedroom wal , hanging her feet over the side of her bed. “Wel , I’m stil not into guitar solos that go on for five centuries. It’s just like those singers who show off and run through whole scales before they finish singing a one-syl able word. It’s like get to the point.”
Wil shakes his head, almost in sympathy, then swigs back on a bottle of blood he’s taken from his van. “Mmm. Forgot how good she tastes.”
“Who?”
He shows her the handwritten label. Second bottle of the evening. The first—ALICE—having been gulped back by Wil in seconds flat and left under Clara’s bed. ROSELLA—2001.
“Now, this one . . . she was beautiful. Una guapa. ”
Clara is only mildly concerned. “So, you kil ed these people?”
Her uncle pretends to be shocked. “What do you take me for?”
“A murderous bloodsucking vampire.”
Wil shrugs as if to say, fair point. “Human blood ages badly,” he explains. “Goes metal ic, so there’s no point bottling it. The hemoglobin in vampire blood never changes. And that’s where the magic happens, the hemoglobin. Anyway, Rosel a, she’s a vamp. Spanish. Met her on a flying visit to Valencia. Vampire city. It’s like Manchester. We hung out. Swapped souvenirs. Taste her.”
Wil hands the bottle to Clara, watches her deliberate for a second.
“You know you want to.”
Eventual y Clara succumbs and takes the bottle, places it under her nose and sniffs it, to smel what she’s about to taste.
Wil finds this amusing. “A hint of citrus, an oaky underflavor, and just a whisper of eternal life.”
Clara takes a swig and closes her eyes as she enjoys the sweet rush the blood gives her. She giggles afterward, and the giggle builds to a raucous laugh.
Then Wil notices the photograph on Clara’s bul etin board. Sees a pretty blond girl standing next to Clara. And he has the troubling thought that he recognizes her from somewhere.
“Who’s that?”
“Who’s who?” says Clara, calming down.
“Olivia Newton-John.”
“Oh, Eve. She’s a star. Messed her about a bit today. Ran out on her in Topshop. I got scared I might do something, in the changing rooms.”
Wil nods.
“An OBT attack. You’l get used to them.”
“OBT?”
“Overwhelming Blood Thirst. Anyway, you were saying . . .”
“Yeah. She’s new. Just moved here.” Clara takes another swig. She wipes her mouth and laughs again as she thinks of something. “She’s Rowan’s wet dream. She’s in his year at school, but he can’t even talk to her. It’s pretty tragic. Her dad’s got issues, though. She’s seventeen and she has to, like, apply every time she wants to leave the house. She lived in Manchester before.”
She hardly notices his serious expression.
“Manchester?”
“Yeah, they’ve only been here a few months.”
“Right,” he says, and looks to the door. A second later it opens to reveal Helen, aproned and furious. Her mood stiffens the air as she walks into the room, and her jaw visibly clenches as she spies the bottle of blood.
“Please could you take that, and yourself, out of my daughter’s bedroom.”
Wil smiles. “Ah, good. You’re here. We were worried we might be having some fun.”
Clara, stil giddy, stifles a laugh.
Her mother says nothing, but her face makes it clear she has no patience with either of them.
Wil pul s himself off the floor. As he passes Helen, he leans in to whisper something Clara can’t hear into her mum’s ear.
Something that makes Helen look very worried indeed.
“Hey,” says Clara. “No secrets!”
But she gets no response. Wil has already left the room and Helen is riveted to the carpet, like a waxwork of herself.
Behind her, Clara sees Wil talking to her dad. He is sweating and red-faced from his workout, and his brother offers him the bottle of blood.
“I’m having a shower,” Peter responds crossly, and storms off to the bathroom. “God,” says Clara, to her waxwork mother. “What’s his problem?”
Crimson Clouds
One of Peter’s problems is this.
When he was eight years old, back in the 1970s, Wil saved his life. Two men, whose identities and grievances they never knew, had broken into the canal barge where they used to live with the deliberate intention of piercing especial y sharpened pieces of hawthorn wood through their parents’ hearts.
Peter had woken to their agonized screams and stayed under sheets covered in his own fresh urine. The men had then gone into Peter’s tiny bedroom, not with stakes but an Oriental-style sword.
He can stil picture them now—the tal , skinny one in the brown leather jacket with the sword, and the fatter, greasier one in the “Enter the Dragon” T-shirt.
He can stil remember the absolute terror of knowing he was about to die and the absolute relief when he saw the reason why the tal one suddenly began howling in pain.
Wil .
Peter’s ten-year-old brother was clinging bat-tight to his back, biting into him and sending blood al over the Hendrix and Doors LPs lying on the floor.
The second kil was real y where Wil proved his brotherly love. The oversized Bruce Lee fan had picked up his friend’s sword and was pointing it toward the ten-year-old boy sliding through the air above him.
Wil was making gestures to Peter. He was trying to get him to make a bolt for the door so they could fly out of there without Wil having to risk doing battle with the sword. But fear clung to Peter along with the damp sheets and he did nothing. He just lay there and watched as Wil danced around like a fly in the face of a swatting samurai, getting a nasty gash in his arm and eventual y sinking his fangs into the man’s face and skul .
It was then Wil who got Peter out of bed and led him across the blood-soaked floor, over the bodies, through the narrow gal ey and up the stairs. He told Peter to wait on the riverbank. And Peter did so, as the gradual realization his parents were dead caused tears to flood down his face.
Wil set the barge ablaze and flew them both out of there.
It was also Wil who, a week or so later, contacted the lady from the Orphaned Vampire Agency and found them a home. Arthur and Alice Castle—two mild-mannered, crossword-loving, suburban abstainers whom Wil and Peter always vowed they would never turn into.
But, of course, Wil wasn’t the best of influences.
He spent his teenage years corrupting his younger brother, encouraging him to take a bite out of a French exchange student cal ed Chantal Feuil ade, a girl they hated and fancied in equal measure. And there were the red hour trips to London. Watching vampire punk at the Stoker Club.
Shopping in vampire shops like Bite on the King’s Road or Rouge in Soho, the youngest customers by years. Playing drums with his brother in the Hemo Goblins. (And being McCartney to his Lennon in coming up with the lyrics to their only self-penned song, “When I Taste You, I Think of Cherries.”) Drying their own blood, then smoking it, getting high inside crimson clouds before going to school.
Wil had certainly led him astray, but he had s
aved his life, and that had to count for something.
Peter closes his eyes under the shower.
He is in the memory.
He sees a flaming barge on the water miles below him, getting farther and farther away as they rise through the air. It shrinks and fades out. Like the golden light of childhood against ever-encroaching darkness.
Creature of the Night
Helen is getting increasingly worried. Tomorrow they wil have the dogs out searching for the boy. They could have whole search units, trekking across every field between here and Farley.
They might find blood and traces in the earth. And even before they do, tomorrow morning perhaps, the police wil be round here asking Clara about what she knows. They wil be asking the other partygoers too, and Helen hasn’t real y managed to find out from Clara what they might know.
Only three things give her any comfort.
One, nobody in their right mind would suspect a smal , slender-framed fifteen-year-old vegan who has never had so much as a school detention of murdering a boy twice her size.
Two, she saw her daughter naked in the shower yesterday and she knows there wasn’t a scratch on her. Whoever’s blood they find, it won’t be Clara’s. True, there wil be traces of her DNA out there. There wil certainly be traces of her saliva mixed with his blood for a start, but it wil stil take quite an imaginative leap for anyone to believe Clara kil ed this boy without any kind of weapon and without herself losing any blood.
And three, the boy’s body—the only ultimate proof of what happened—is never going to be found, as Peter assured her he flew a long way offshore before letting him drop.
Hopeful y, these things combined wil stop the police from ever suspecting Clara of being a vampire.
Yet Helen can’t help thinking it’s a very messy situation. There had been no time last night to clear away the tire tracks, something they would have never neglected to do in the old days.