by Matt Haig
And this thought is stil with him as he turns the keys to 15 Lowfield Close, walks inside, and trudges up the communal stairs. Before he is even inside their flat, he senses something is wrong.
It seems too quiet.
“Eve?” he cal s, placing the keys down on the shelf in the hal , next to a red letter from Yorkshire Water.
There is no answer.
“Eve?”
He heads to her room, but she’s not there. Her band posters, her narrow bed, her open wardrobe, but not her living self. Al the familiar clothes on hangers like ghosts of her.
There’s makeup out on her dresser and the sweet chemical smel of hairspray hangs in the air.
She’s gone out. On a Monday night.
Where the hell is she?
He runs to the phone. He cal s her mobile. No answer. Then he spots the note on the living room table.
Dad,
Gone out to cinema with Rowan Radley. Sincerely doubt he’s a vampire.
Eve
Oh Jesus, he thinks.
Panic ambushes him from every side. The note drops and before it hits the carpet, he has his car keys in one hand and with his other he is at his neck checking for the little gold Jesus on his cross.
Outside, into the rain.
The smashed window. Eve had told him he needed to sweep out the car, but he hadn’t listened.
Stil , right now he has no choice and he is out of time.
He opens the car door, climbs inside without sweeping the little pieces of glass off his seat, and starts to drive fast toward Thirsk.
A Lost World That Was Once Her Own
It is not so much pain as a kind of dissolution. As though she is slowly losing her solidity and turning to liquid. Eve looks around, at the sinks and the mirrors. At the cubicles and their open doors. At the broken bottle and the pool of someone else’s blood. Her eyes are heavy and she wants to sleep but there is a noise. The automatic flush of the urinals, waking her up again, and she realizes who and where she is, and what has just happened.
He is gone now, and Eve realizes she has to get out of there and find help.
She pul s herself up, but it is hard, and she has never felt so much gravity weighing her down.
She is a diver treading through the remains of a sunken civilization. A lost world that was once her own. She reaches the door. Pul s it with al her strength and steps out on the carpet. Its pattern swirls below her like a hundred little whirlpools and across the foyer there is the box office attendant. For a strange moment she wonders why he is staring at her with such horror.
Her hand slips from her wound.
And then there is a strange creeping darkness, as though a ship is passing over her head, and she knows it is something terrible. She knows, in a second or two, that she won’t be knowing anything.
She is merging with it, the blackness.
Like salt in water.
Every grain of life slowly dissolving into something else.
Help me.
She tries to give the desperate thought a voice but isn’t sure if she makes it. She is weakening on every step.
Please, help me.
She hears a voice answer her with her name.
It is her father’s voice, she realizes, as the darkness is no longer at the fringes of her vision, but everywhere, crashing over her as a wave. She succumbs to its weight, and the only thing she is aware of is the vague knowledge that she is col apsing onto the carpet.
Baby
Jared Copeland had sped to the cinema in his car with wind and rain whipping in through the smashed window, little grains of glass moving in one concerted motion on the passenger seat.
Halfway there, just before the Fox and Crown pub in Farley, he had passed the Radleys’ car, with Peter Radley driving home alone.
The sight of him had made him speed up toward Thirsk, as he assumed Peter had probably dropped his son off. Once there, outside the cinema, he parked the car halfway up the pavement and ran up the steps and through the door.
And now he is here, inside the foyer. He sees a man in a white shirt, someone who works here, on the phone shouting and gesticulating.
“Hel o . . . we need an ambulance right away . . . yes . . . a girl’s been attacked or summat . . .
she’s bleeding . . .”
Then Jared sees his daughter and the blood and he understands. She has been bitten by the Radley boy. The horror speeds him up and he manages to become for a moment his old self and he moves beyond panic into a kind of hypercalm as he crouches down to check his daughter’s pulse. Every breathing moment of the last two years he has thought this would happen, and now it has, he is going to do the very best he can to save her. Two years ago he had panicked and screamed, and on hearing that scream, Wil Radley had dragged his wife toward the sky. So now he has to be efficiency in fast forward. I can’t fuck this up.
He hears the attendant speaking as his daughter’s pulse ticks faintly against his finger. “The Palace Cinema in Thirsk. She’s unconscious. You’ve got to come now.”
Jared checks the wound and the steadily leaking blood. He knows it won’t even start to heal. He knows no hospital in the country wil know what to do with her. If he tries to fol ow any normal type of emergency procedure, he knows she wil be dead.
The attendant is off the phone now.
“Who are you?” he asks Jared.
Jared ignores him and picks his daughter up off the ground. The same daughter he’d held as a six-pound newborn baby, whom he’d fed with a bottle on nights when her mother had been exhausted, whom he’d sung “American Pie” to night after night to get her to sleep.
Her eyes flicker open momentarily. She revives enough to tel him “I’m sorry” and then descends back into unconsciousness.
The attendant tries to block him. “What are you doing with her?”
“This is my daughter. Please, hold the door.”
The steward looks at him, then at the blood stil dripping on the carpet. He stands in front of Jared. “I can’t let you take her, pal. I’m sorry.”
“Get out of my way,” Jared says, pressing the point home with his eyes. “Get out of my bloody way.”
And the attendant steps aside, letting Jared back out the door as he tel s his daughter and himself over and over again, “It’s al right. It’s al right. It’s al right . . .”
Up and Up and Up
Toby leaves Miler’s fish restaurant with a meal for one wrapped up in white paper and starts to bike home. He smiles, thinking of al the money stil left in his pocket, and how stupid Rowan must have been to slip it through the mail slot. And as he thinks this, he has no idea he is being fol owed from above.
He turns left, takes the footpath across the field ful of horses he knows is a shortcut to Orchard Lane.
The horses gal op away in terror, not from the boy on the bike but from the boy above, getting lower and lower.
And Rowan realizes, as he descends, that it is al over now.
He can’t have Eve.
He’s a freak.
Total y alone in a world ful of liars.
His father’s child.
He is Rowan Radley. A monster, flying through the night.
Toby looks up and can’t believe what is there. The greasy fish and fried potato slide from under his arm onto the ground, spil ing out of their paper.
His face is pure fear.
“No!” he says. “What the—”
He pedals hard and fast over a path made for slow and elderly Sunday strol ers.
And Rowan soars ahead, less angry now, his head clear and kestrel calm, swooping down and watching the panic on Toby’s face as he tries to brake and turn. But he has no time. Rowan has grabbed the front of his jacket and is pul ing him high up into the air with ease even as Toby holds tight to his handlebars and drags the bike up with them.
“You’re right,” says Rowan, ful -fanged, as the horses become moving dots below them. “I’m a freak.”
Toby could scream,
but terror has silenced him. He lets go of his bike, which lands on the road below.
Rowan’s plan is to kil him. To prove to himself he real y is a monster. If he is a monster he won’t feel pain. He won’t feel anything. He’l just kil forevermore, moving from place to place like his father. A dot-to-dot of thril s without guilt or human emotion.
He carries Toby higher.
Up and up and up.
Toby is urging himself to speak, even as his own urine gushes warmly down his leg. “I’m sorry,”
he blurts.
Rowan stares into his neighbor’s face as they keep rising fast through the air.
A frightened, vulnerable face.
A victim’s face.
No.
He can’t do it. If he’s a monster, he’s a different kind from his father.
He shouts against the downward wind.
“If you say anything about my family or Eve ever again, I wil kil you. Anything. Okay?”
Toby manages a nod, struggling against gravity.
“And you wil be dead if you even so much as think this actual y happened. Okay?”
“Yes,” he whimpers. “Please—”
It’s a risk, either way. Kil ing him. Not kil ing him. But Rowan isn’t going to lose whatever goodness he has left inside him for the taste of Toby’s bitter blood.
He carries him back down, drops him a few feet above ground.
“Go,” says Rowan, as Toby scrambles to his feet. “Just go and leave me alone.”
Rowan lands on the ground and watches Toby flee. Behind him, someone is clapping.
Wil .
There is a smear of blood around his mouth, curving down as if he’d painted a tragedy mask onto his face.
“Very good, Pinocchio,” Wil says, stil clapping. “You’ve got the soul of a real human boy.”
He hadn’t seen Wil in the air. Had he been watching the whole time? Rowan wonders about the blood on his face.
Wil steps forward. “Except I have to say, your conscience took a right turn back in the camper van.”
He is close enough for Rowan to catch the scent of his breath, although it takes a moment for him to realize what exactly he is smel ing.
“Stealing,” Wil says. “That’s a big cross in the box. But don’t worry, I leveled things out. See, you stole my blood, I stole yours. It’s yin and yang, my son.” Wil ’s eyes are wild. A monster’s eyes.
“I’m not like you. I stopped listening to my conscience quite a while ago. It was just noise. Just a buzzing cricket in my ear.”
Rowan is trying to make sense of what he is saying. He realizes whose blood he is smel ing, and the knowledge is a punch in his gut.
“I only did what you wanted to,” says Wil , reading his son’s thoughts. “I took her and I bit her and I tasted her blood. And then . . .” He smiles, saying anything he can to coax violence out of Rowan.
“I kil ed her. I kil ed Eve.”
Rowan thinks of Eve passing him the note in English class earlier. He thinks of the little smile she gave him and the memory makes him even weaker, almost knocks him out. This is his fault.
He left Eve and let this happen.
A cool breeze caresses his face. The breath of ghosts.
“Where . . . is . . .”
Wil shrugs, as if he’s just been asked the time. “Oh, I don’t know. About seven nautical miles out at sea,” he lies. “Somewhere near the bottom by now, I should think, scaring the fish. Although red is the first color to disappear underwater. Did you know that? It’s interesting, isn’t it? Those poor dul fish. Trapped in a world of blue.”
Rowan can’t think straight. The devastation going on in his mind is so immediate and total that he can do nothing except crouch in a fetal bal on the ground. Eve is dead.
Wil , on the other hand, has never felt less weakened by morality than he does now, with his son crouched there like a stringless puppet. A pathetic, disgusting sight.
He leans toward him and gives him a piece of pure truth. “That wasn’t simply your mother’s blood, Rowan. That was a dream of how things could have been if you’d never been born. See, the truth is, I never wanted you. I am allergic to responsibility. Just the idea tastes putrid. Like garlic. Seriously, it gives me a rash, and you know al about rashes. They make you uncomfortable in your own skin.” He pauses, breathes deeply, then spel s out his point. “I wanted Helen, but not with al that extra baggage.”
Rowan gets his weakness from his mother, Wil deduces, as he watches the boy mumbling to himself. She made him like this. All those lies all that time. How could the boy get his priorities straight amid all that bullshit?
“She’s forgotten who she is,” Wil tel s him. “She’s forgotten how much she wants me. But I’m not like her and I’m not like you. I fight for what I want. And if it’s not given to me, I just take it.”
Wil nods to himself. It is so clear to him now, knowing there is no morality or weakness left to stop him. I am pure. I am a higher breed. I am above all those unbloods and abstainers and timid, lying souls out there.
Yes, he thinks, laughing.
I am Lord Byron.
I am Caravaggio.
I am Jimi Hendrix.
I am every bloodsucking descendant of Cain who ever breathed this planet’s air.
I am the truth.
“Yeah, I just take it.”
He leaves his son on the ground, bowing to gravity and al its associated forces. He flies fast and low across a field, seeing the earth at the speed it real y travels.
A breath later and he is at the door to number 17 Orchard Lane. He pul s out his knife from the inside pocket of his raincoat. His finger on his other hand makes a little circle in the air, hovering above the doorbel like a fencer’s sword waiting to thrust forward. Then it descends, and he presses the bel four times in fast succession.
I.
Just.
Take.
It.
Out of the Wet, Dark Air
Clara has been online for hours now. She started off trawling Wikipedia for facts about vampire culture but she didn’t get very far, as contributing to online encyclopedias is general y a hobby unique to unbloods.
She did, however, somewhere deep, deep down in the Google search listings, come across an interesting Facebook clone cal ed Neckbook. It seemed ful of rather intel igent, artistic, good-looking, if very pale-faced teenagers who spoke almost exclusively in a language made up of obscure slang, acronyms, and smileys she had never seen in any text or online message before.
She had seen a particularly gorgeous boy, with a mischievous pixie smile and hair so black it almost seemed bright. On his profile, underneath his picture, she had read: Midnight boy—ful -time Vera Pim, seeks nonsirking vert/longhaul chica/o for lovebites, b-cruising, plus gal ons of BVA.
Clara felt frustrated. She was a vampire, but the whole bloodsucking community seemed alien to her. She decided to give up and mosey over to YouTube to watch clips from some of the films Will had told her about. Bits from Les Vampires, Dracula (the 1931 version—“It’s the only one directed by an actual vampire,” Wil said), Near Dark, The Hunger, and, best by miles, The Lost Boys. Yet suddenly, right now, just as noodles turn into maggots on the screen, she senses something is wrong. It’s a strange sensation in her stomach and on her skin, as if her body knows it before her mind.
And then it happens.
The doorbel goes and her mother answers.
Clara hears her uncle’s voice but not what he is saying.
Her mother screams.
Clara runs downstairs to find Wil pressing a knife against her mother’s throat in the hal way.
“What are you doing?”
He gestures to the watercolor on the wal . “Turns out the apple tree has poisoned roots. Time to chop it down.”
Clara has no fear. None at al . She thinks of nothing but the knife. “Get off her.” She steps forward.
“Uh-uh,” he says, shaking his head and pushing the blade down onto Hel
en’s skin. “No can do.”
Helen’s stare presses into her daughter. “Clara, don’t. Just get away.”
Wil nods. “Your mother’s right. Just get away.” There is an absolute madness in his eyes which says he could go anywhere, do anything.
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re nothing, Clara. You’re just a naïve little girl. Do you think I came here to help you out?
Don’t be stupid. I don’t care about you. Open. Your. Eyes.”
“Please, Wil ,” says Helen, as the blade brushes against her chin. “It was the police. They made me—”
Wil ignores her and carries on talking to Clara in the same venomous tone. “You’re a mistake,”
he tel s her. “The sad little product of two people who were too weak to realize they shouldn’t be together. The result of your parents’ thwarted instincts and self-hatred . . . Go, little girl. Go back to saving the whales.”
He pul s Helen backward out of the open door. Then, in a fast and frantic blur, they are gone.
Clara gasps, realizing what has just happened. He has flown away with her mother.
Clara runs upstairs, opens her bedroom window, and leans out into the rain. She can see them flying farther and farther away, directly above her, slowly dissolving into the night. She tries to think how to solve this. As only one idea comes to her, she grabs the empty bottle of VB lying under her bed and angles it back against her lips. A drop reaches her mouth, but she has no idea if it wil be enough.
Knowing this is the last moment she can save her mother, she pul s herself out onto her windowsil , bends her knees, and dives forward into the rain-streaked air.
“Let’s go to Paris, Helen. Let’s go and relive the magic . . . Or let’s just aim for the moon.”
He drags her upward in a near-vertical line. Helen watches with fear as the house shrinks below her. She presses her neck against the knife blade, just enough to bleed.
She touches the blood.
Tastes it. Her and him together.
And then she fights.