by Matt Haig
Maybe Peter should have gone back later, during the early hours of this morning, and smoothed the rough trail he would have made dragging the heavy body. Maybe they should do it now, before it’s too late. Maybe she should stop praying for heavy rain and get proactive.
Of course, she knows that if she had tasted blood last night she would be as relaxed as her husband and daughter about the whole thing. The cup would be half ful rather than half empty, and she would think there wasn’t a situation they couldn’t blood-mind their way out of, not with Wil here. No police officer in North Yorkshire would believe their daughter was a murderer, let alone a ful -blown creature of the night.
But she has not drunk any blood recently, and her worries stay flapping and pecking around her head like a murder of hungry crows.
And the biggest, hungriest crow of al is Wil himself. Every time she looks out the window and sees his camper van, she can’t help but see an advertisement for Clara’s guilt, for the guilt of every one of them.
After the evening meal, Helen tries to air these concerns. To remind everyone it wil soon be twenty-four hours since the boy went missing and that the police wil soon be asking questions and that they real y ought to get their story straight. But no one is listening, except Wil , who just dismisses them.
He tel s Helen and Peter about how much things have changed with the police. “Vampires got active around the midnineties. They mobilized. They set up a society to deal with the police. They have a list of people that can’t be touched. You know vampires. They get off on a bit of hierarchy.
Anyway, I’m on that list.”
This offers Helen little comfort. “Wel , Clara isn’t. And neither are we.”
“Yeah. And the Sheridan Society only lets you in if you’re hard-core, but hey, the night’s young.
We could go out and feast.”
Helen scowls at him.
“Listen,” Wil says, “it’s not the police you have to worry about. Wel , not just the police. There are the people you hurt. The ones who real y give a shit. The mothers, the fathers, the husbands and wives. They’re harder to swing around.” He holds Helen’s gaze and smiles in such a knowing way that she feels the secrets leaking from his pores and into the room. “See, Helen, it’s when you mess around with people’s emotions. That’s when you have to worry.”
He lounges back on the sofa, drinking a glass of blood, and Helen remembers that night in Paris. Kissing him on the roof of the Musée d’Orsay. Holding his hand and walking up to the receptionist of that grand hotel on the Avenue Montaigne and watching him blood-mind her into offering them the presidential suite. He stil looks exactly the same as he did then, and the memories his face brings remain as fresh and wonderful and terrifying as they always did.
These memories break Helen’s flow, and she loses the thread of what she is saying. Has he done that deliberately? Has he just gotten inside my mind and thrown a few things about in there? Fol owing this loss of focus, Helen is frustrated to find the evening descending into Interview with the Vampire, with Wil relishing his role as bloodsucker in chief as Clara asks question after question. And Helen can’t help but notice that even Rowan seems more engaged with Wil , more interested in what he has to say. It is only her husband who seems indifferent. He sits slumped in the leather armchair, staring at a muted episode of a documentary on Louis Armstrong on BBC Four, lost in his own little world.
“Have you kil ed lots of people?” asks Clara.
“Yes.”
“Right, so you have to kil someone to taste their blood?”
“No, you can convert them.”
“Convert them?”
Wil holds the pause and looks at Helen.
“ ’Course, you don’t just convert anyone. It’s a very serious thing. You drink their blood, then they drink yours. It’s two-way. And it’s a commitment. If you convert someone, they’l crave you. Love you for as long as you live. No matter how much they know that loving you is the worst possible thing they could do. They just can’t help it.”
Even Rowan seems to be hooked at this revelation. Helen notices his eyes sharpen as he contemplates such a love.
“What, even if they don’t like you?” he asks. “If you convert them, they’l love you?”
Wil nods. “That’s the setup.”
Helen is sure she hears her husband at this point whisper something under his breath. “Jazz”?
Could that have been it? “Did you say something, Peter?”
He looks up, like a dog who’s temporarily forgotten he’s got owners. “No,” he says, worried. “I don’t think so.”
Clara continues her inquiry. “So, have you ever converted anyone?” she asks her uncle.
Wil studies Helen as he answers. His voice causes her skin to tingle with anxiety and the involuntary excitement of memories. “Yes. Once. A lifetime ago. You close your eyes and you try and forget. But they stay there. You know, like some old song that you can’t get out of your head.”
“Was that your wife?”
“Clara,” Helen says, in a voice louder and firmer than intended, “that’s enough.”
Wil finds a smal triumph in her discomfort. “No, it was someone else’s.”
Black Narcissus
Hours later, when the other Radleys are in their beds, Wil flies west and south, to Manchester. He heads where he often goes on a Saturday night, to the Black Narcissus, and walks through the sea of bloodsuckers and wannabes, the old goths, young emo kids, and Sheridan Society vampires. He crosses the dance floor ful of cry-boys and sylvies and goes upstairs, past Henrietta and the little red sign on the wal : VIB ROOM.
“Henrietta,” he says, but she just blanks him, which he finds rather odd.
Bloodsuckers of every description lounge around on battered leather sofas, listening to Nick Cave and drinking from bottles and each other’s necks. An old German horror movie is being projected onto one of the wal s, al silent screams and unsettling camera angles.
Everyone knows Wil here, but tonight the vibe is distinctly less amicable than usual. No one stops to talk. But he doesn’t care. He just keeps on going until he reaches the curtain. He smiles at Vince and Raymond, but they don’t smile back. He pul s back the curtain.
Inside, he sees who he knew would be here. Isobel, along with a few friends, feasting on two naked corpses lying on the floor.
“Hey, I thought you weren’t coming,” she says, lifting her head up. At least she seems pleased to see him. He stares at her, trying to conjure his lust as he observes the BITE HERE tattoo stil visible amid the blood. She looks hot—a bit 1970s retro-vamp, a bit Pam Grier in Scream Blacula Scream. And real y, given the sight of her, he should be craving her a little bit more than he does.
“It’s good,” she says. “Go on, taste for yourself.”
The bodies on the floor don’t look as tasty as they normal y would.
“I’m okay,” he says.
Some of Isobel’s friends check him out with their blood-smeared faces and cold eyes, saying nothing. Sheridan blood sluts. Isobel’s brother, Otto, is among them. Otto has never liked him, or indeed any man who wins his sister’s heart, but the hatred in his eyes gleams stronger than ever tonight.
Wil beckons Isobel away to a quiet corner, where they sit on an oversized dark purple cushion.
The second-best-tasting woman he’s ever known. Better than Rosel a. Better than a thousand others. And he wants to know he wil be able to forget Helen again. To walk away, if he needs to.
“I want to taste you,” he says.
“You can get a bottle of me downstairs.”
“Yes, I know. I wil . But I want something fresh.”
She seems saddened by his request, as if worried about the cravings he ignites inside her. Stil , she offers her neck and he accepts, closing his eyes and concentrating on her taste. “Did you enjoy yourself last night?”
Wil wonders vaguely what she means and keeps on sucking.
“Alison Glenny’s been asking que
stions. About the girl at the supermarket.”
He remembers the goth girl—Julie or whatever she was cal ed—screaming and pul ing at his hair. He stops sucking on Isobel. “So?” he says, gesturing to the dead, half-devoured couple on the other side of the room.
“So, your camper van was caught on CCTV. It was the only vehicle in the car park.”
Wil sighs. If you are practicing, you are meant to play the game. You are meant to go for the easily explainable disappearances—the suicidal, the homeless, the runaways, the il egal.
Wil had never played that game. What was the point of fol owing your instincts if you couldn’t, well, follow your instincts? It just seemed so artificial, so fundamental y unromantic, to limit your desires to safe kinds of victim. But it is true he had once been a lot more careful at hiding the people he had kil ed.
“People are worried you might be getting a bit sloppy.”
Isobel really knows how to spoil the mood.
“People? What people?” He sees her sly-rat brother, Otto, glancing at him from above one of the corpses.
“You mean Otto wants to take me off the list.”
“You’ve got to be careful. That’s al I’m saying. You might get us al into trouble.”
Wil shrugs. “The police don’t care about lists, Isobel,” he says, knowing this is a lie. “If they wanted me, they’d get me. They don’t care about who’s friends with who.”
Isobel gives him a stern look, the kind more usual y seen on morality-addled unbloods. “Trust me, Glenny cares.”
“I have to tel you, Isobel Child, your pil ow talk isn’t what it used to be. What do you want me to do? Erase my past? Never wanted to start georging this early, to be honest with you.”
She strokes a hand through his hair. “I’m just worried about you. That’s al . It’s like you want to be caught or something.”
As she kisses him, he contemplates another bite of her.
“Go on,” she says, her voice seductive again. “Drain me dry.”
But it’s the same as it was five minutes ago. It’s doing nothing for him.
“Hey,” she says softly, stroking his head again. “When are we going to Paris? You’ve been promising me for ages.”
Paris.
Why did she have to say that? He can’t think of anything now but kissing Helen on the roof of the Musée d’Orsay. “No, not Paris.”
“Wel , somewhere,” she says, concerned for him, as if she knows something he doesn’t. “Come on. We could go anywhere. You and me. It would be fun. We could leave this shitty country and live somewhere else.”
He stands up.
He has seen the whole world, in his time. He has spent weeks on the pristine, frosty shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He has drunk himself stupid in the fairy-tale blood brothels of old Dubrovnik, lounged in red-smoke dens in Laos, enjoyed the New York blackout of 1977, and, more recently, feasted on Vegas showgirls in the Dean Martin suite at the Bel agio. He has watched Hindu abstainers wash away their sins in the Ganges, danced a midnight tango on a boulevard in Buenos Aires, and bitten into a faux geisha under the shade of a shogun pavilion in Kyoto. But right now, he doesn’t want to be anywhere but North Yorkshire.
“What’s the matter? You’ve hardly had anything,” she says, padding a finger on her already healing neck.
“I’m just not that thirsty tonight,” he says. “In fact, I’ve got to go. I’m staying with some family this weekend.”
Isobel is hurt. “Family? ” she says. “What kind of family?”
He hesitates. Doubts Isobel would be able to understand. “Just . . . family.”
And he leaves her on the plush velvet cushion.
“Wil , wait—”
“Sorry, got to go.” He glides down the stairs toward the cloakroom, where he picks up a bottle of the blood that he can stil taste fresh on his tongue.
“She’s upstairs, you know,” says the scrawny, bald-headed cloakroom attendant, confused by the choice of purchase.
“Yeah, Dorian, I know,” Wil says, “but this one’s for sharing.”
Pinot Rouge
In Manchester, among its considerable vampire population, there has been talk about Wil Radley for months. And the talk hasn’t been particularly good.
Whereas previously he had been highly respected as a fine example of how blood addicts could get away with murder, by general y sticking to the right kind of unblood, he was now taking a few more risks, taking unnecessary gambles.
It had started with the mature student who had been the wife of a police detective. Of course, he had gotten away with it at the time. The Unnamed Predator Unit, that technical y nonexistent branch of Greater Manchester Police, had made sure that even though a detective inspector had witnessed his wife’s murder, which they dressed down as a missing person case, he would never have been taken seriously.
Yet the careful relations that had been built up between the police and the vampire community—
relations which centered around dialogue between the UPU and the Manchester-based UK wing of the Sheridan Society, the loosely structured vampire rights organization—were put under phenomenal strain as a result of the whole Copeland affair.
However, for a while support for Wil among fel ow bloodsuckers did remain strong, and none had caved in to police pressure to finish him off. His blood-minding talents were legendary, and his insightful studies of the vampire poets Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (published on the black market by Christabel Press), were wel received among members of the Sheridan Society.
After he resigned from his post at Manchester University, however, his behavior became increasingly hard to defend. He was kil ing more and more on the streets of Manchester. And while a lot of these kil s made simple additions to the missing persons register, the sheer quantity was alarming.
It seemed that something was going wrong in Wil ’s psyche.
Of course, most practicing vampires drain the life from an unblood once in a while, but most make sure they have a careful balance between kil s and the safer consumption of vampire blood.
After al , in terms of quality the taste of vampire blood is general y more satisfying, more complex, and bolder in its flavor, than that of a normal, unconverted human being. And the most delicious blood of al , the pinot rouge every blood lover knows is the best on offer, is the blood taken from someone’s veins the moment after conversion.
But Wil didn’t seem to have any interest in converting. Indeed, the rumor went that Wil had only ever converted one person in his entire life and for whatever reason couldn’t bring himself to convert any more. He stil drank standard vampire blood, however. In fact, he was drinking bottles and bottles of the stuff, alongside sucking on the neck of his on-off girlfriend, Isobel Child.
Yet his thirst was becoming insatiable. He would go out on a night and take a bite of anyone he fancied, vampire or otherwise. Without a regular day job, he could sleep longer and have more energy to do what and go where he wanted. But it wasn’t a question of energy. Wil ’s reckless behavior—his indifference to being caught on camera midkil , for instance—was seen by many to be a manifest symptom of a self-destructive frame of mind.
If anything happens to him, people were saying, it will be his own fault.
However, despite mounting police pressure, most members of the Sheridan Society believed he would be protected by them because Isobel Child held him in such affection. After al , Isobel was very popular within the community, and her brother was none other than Otto Child, overseer of the list.
This was the list of untouchables—practicing murderous blood addicts whom the police couldn’t touch without losing al trust and correspondence with the society, and therefore with the vampire community en masse.
Of course, no vampire-related death had ever resulted in an official trial, let alone a conviction.
There had been cover-ups for the greater public good since the earliest conception of the police force. Yet action had been taken even th
en. Traditional y, such action had been carried out by those few police officers trained in the precise and advanced crossbow skil s needed to exterminate the bloodsuckers. Vampires simply disappeared off the map. But the zero tolerance approach had only succeeded in rapidly increasing conversion rates, and the police began to fear an expansive and very public battle.
Therefore the police offered a carrot alongside the stick: protection to certain vampires provided they abide by specific rules. Of course, there was an ethical dilemma to al this regulation. After al , by working with the Sheridan Society, the police were in effect rewarding the most notorious and bloodthirsty vampires, while abstainers and more moderate neck nibblers were left unprotected. But the police logic was that by granting immunity to some of the most depraved, they were able to exert an influence on them and curb some of their activities.
And this meant a legitimate kil ing was one that wasn’t caught on camera, that didn’t involve a body turning up anywhere, and that involved a victim who was unlikely either to gain the sympathy of tabloid newspaper editors or arouse too many questions among the tax-paying masses.
Prostitutes, drug addicts, the homeless, failed asylum seekers, and bipolar outpatients were safely on the menu. Wives of CID officers, speed-daters, and even wage-slave checkout girls were not.
The trouble was, although a longtime member of the Sheridan Society, Wil had never fol owed these rules. He couldn’t mold his lusts to fit a social y acceptable, police-endorsed framework. But it was the sheer sloppiness of his most recent kil ings that had put extra pressure on the Sheridan Society.
Fifteen days ago Greater Manchester Police’s deputy commissioner, Alison Glenny, received a phone cal while briefing a new UPU recruit. The cal was from a man whose familiar, cold, tired whisper told her that Wil Radley was off the list.
“I thought he was a good friend,” said Alison, staring out of her sixth-floor Chester House window at the rush hour traffic, the cars sliding and stopping like beads on an abacus. “A friend of your sister, at least.”