A Love Like Blood

by Marcus Sedgwick

  It hadn’t worked for Richard Hannay, but I knew I could make it work for me, and I headed north that very day. I drove into London and abandoned my old car in Rufford Street, part of the slums behind King’s Cross. It occurred to me to drive it into the Regent’s Canal, or even the Thames, and maybe someone would think I had drowned, suicidal after the death of my father. But I decided against it. It was too dramatic, too complicated. It would lead to investigations into my life, it would lead to Cambridge and it would create more fuss about me, not less. What I wanted to do was to slip away into obscurity, to hide from just one man, and that, I believed, was easy enough to do.

  I bought a ticket for the sleeper to Edinburgh, using a false name at the ticket office. I paid in cash, having visited a branch of my bank in Bloomsbury and taken out almost all of my existing savings.

  I spoke to no one; I didn’t emerge from my carriage until we reached Waverley, where I changed trains for Glasgow and headed for the west coast, simply because it was somewhere I knew nothing about, where I’d never been and, as far as I could be sure, had absolutely no connections with.

  I spent a few days catching local buses here and there, and, after making casual enquiries in the various pubs I stayed in, found a cottage to let on a local estate.

  The tourist season was over, and I was usually a lone figure in the bars, eating my evening meal early. I worried that I would draw attention to myself, but the landlords I met were a wonderful breed, who turned a hair at little, I guessed, and all it took was me to mention bird-spotting and they would leave me in peace for the most part.

  Once a month, I made the trip to Glasgow, staying overnight, to visit the bank.

  My first two visits were fruitless; on the third, as I asked the teller to produce a statement for me, I nearly passed out.

  ‘Is anything the matter, sir?’ the teller asked, tilting his head in a slight show of concern. I flicked my eyes back up at him, managing to pull them away from the paper for a brief moment.

  ‘No, no,’ I mumbled. ‘Everything is quite all right.’

  It was hard to believe the figure before me was correct, but it more or less matched what the solicitor had told Susan and me, minus sundry expenses and his fees of course.

  We, Susan and I, hadn’t even decided whether to sell the house or not, which alone must have been worth £20,000, an unbelievable sum. The number before me on the paper put my current wealth at close to one and a half million pounds.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘everything is fine. Thank you. I think I would like to speak to the manager. Please.’

  The teller almost gave me a smile.

  ‘Yes, sir. Very good.’

  I doubted the manager thought it so good, though, as I stayed in Glasgow for a few more days, making some new arrangements for my finances. Something told me to be careful. Something made me scared, protective of my wealth, because it was all I had now. I had no job, no friends, no security, and no weapons, apart from that of a ridiculously large sum of money in my bank, and I wanted to keep it. Safe.

  So I organised the transfer of sums, each of them vast, into various offshore bank accounts. I had them open accounts in the Isle of Man, and Jersey. I put the bulk of the money into long-term bonds, and still had plenty to transfer to a numbered account in Geneva, enough for me to live on for two lifetimes, I conservatively calculated.

  That done, I returned to Loch Nevis, to my croft, and I hid.

  Chapter 2

  I did not spend my time in Glasgow idly. While waiting for various formalities to be completed, for telexes to be sent to and received from Geneva, I had two other occupations.

  Firstly, I engaged the services of a private detective based in London. His name was Hayes and I found his meagre advert in the small listings in The Times. He said he would not accept any assignment unless we met face to face at least once. I told him it was not possible and that I would double his fee, which convinced him to reappraise his methods. When I told him the work would be abroad, he again refused me, but another doubling of his daily rate allowed us to reach an agreement.

  I was cautious. Someone, probably my father, told me never to get involved with such people. That they are all dishonest and will sell you down the river to the people you want them to investigate if the terms are favourable. This seemed entirely possible to me, so I gave a false name, and a Glasgow post office box as the only means of communication.

  I deposited what amounted to a month’s wages for him in his bank, and let him get to it. I didn’t give him much to go on. I had little, and what little I had I felt protective over. I didn’t mention Marian, or in fact anything to do with my suspicions of the man I had first known as Verovkin. I merely gave the two names I knew he had used, and the places and years in which he had used them, and said nothing of why it was I wanted to find him.

  Meanwhile, I devoted myself to some form of education. I wanted to know my enemy better, so I phoned Donald one evening, and had him point me in the direction of the best writing on the subject. I could remember a little of what he’d told me before, about the psychologically disturbed and their relationship to blood, but I wanted to read in more depth, and after some delay while he checked his notebook, he gave me a list of the names he’d mentioned that evening in London.

  ‘Look, where are you, anyway?’ he said after I’d taken notes for five minutes.

  ‘On the moon.’

  ‘Fancy a drink sometime? Catch up?’

  ‘Absolutely. Next time I’m in town.’

  ‘When will that be?’

  ‘Haven’t the faintest idea. Thanks, Donald. Look after yourself.’

  I looked at the list of doctors Donald had given me, and knew the bookshops of Glasgow would be of little use. But I made a day trip to Edinburgh, where my supposed status as a research specialist from Cambridge was enough to get me access to the university’s fine medical library.

  There I made notes from the small amount of work that had been done on what might be termed clinical vampirism.

  Some writers postulated that the manic desire to drink blood was of modern origin; a perversion adopted by the already insane having been exposed to the numerous vampire novels of the nineteenth century and, more importantly, the lurid and sexually charged films of the twentieth. Films like the one Hunter had mentioned, I supposed, and other, later ones.

  Something about this explanation immediately struck me as wrong. Something made me believe this was an older story, and one with roots in our deepest, oldest selves.

  For example, there was the case of Antoine Léger, who in 1824 not only murdered his victim, a young girl, but drank her blood. However, although Stoker’s monster did not exist at that point, Polidori’s did. So perhaps that was enough to set these fiends in action. But there were other, even earlier cases of such horrors; another French case, for example, from the Mayenne, of a man who murdered or attempted to murder several people, biting them in the attacks, and who killed a cow by bleeding it to death. This was 1791.

  One or two commentators attempted to define vampirism as a recognisable though rare mania, characterised by blood-drinking, an affinity with the dead, and a weak sense of personal identity.

  I read more, and I hunted for deeper psychological explanations of such things, but already I felt vindicated. Vampires are not real, of course, I told myself, but that does not mean that there are not certain lunatics in the world who perceive themselves to be just that.

  Various Freudians elaborated on intense oral-sadistic-libidinal needs. The ingestion of blood, I read, served as an attempt to restore some kind of energy or sense of self to the drinker that had been lost or perverted in childhood.

  Maybe, I thought.

  I read Freud, and his Totem and Taboo, and I read the sources Freud had read, most notably The Living and the Dead in Folk Belief, Religion and Saga, by Kleinpaul.

  If Kleinpaul believed that originally all the dead were vampires who bore ill-will towards the living, Freud was moved to wond
er how our beloved dead, for most deaths we encounter are of our loved ones, become demons.

  The answer, as so often with Freud, seemed to be one of ambivalence. That although we still love our dead, we fear them too, hate them, even. These ambivalent feelings of hate are inverted and projected on to the dead, so that it becomes they who hate us. And wish to do us harm.

  But this was getting me away from the idea that a real, though disturbed, person would come to associate with the notion of vampirism so greatly that they would begin to kill, to drink blood, in order to satiate themselves. Here my reading took me towards an understanding of the sadistic nature of such patients, how love became symbolised during infancy by the act of sucking, and hate by biting, which then became fused and combined in these individuals.

  But it was the work of Freud’s pupil Ernest Jones that interested me the most. In a brilliant paper of 1924 he showed how death is a reversal of birth. Rather than emerging from the womb, we are placed in the tomb. This ‘tomb = womb’ equation thus explains the vampire’s need to emerge each night from the ground. He is born anew, and begins anew his search for life-sustaining blood to be sucked from its donor.

  Thus, according to some, the origin of the word itself: vampire. The pi- stem, from the Greek verb meaning to drink, for the drinking of blood is the sine qua non of the beast.

  I returned to Glasgow with my head in strange places, and I shunned the company of people. I ducked along the streets, unwilling to make contact with anyone, even the merest look, and I spoke as little as I could in my hotel, or to the people in the bank.

  I felt exposed. The readings I had done had touched something inside me that was frightened, and all the horror of Marian’s final moments assaulted me whenever I even so much as glanced at the female forms I saw around me, in the hotel or out in the city.

  I looked at a woman walking towards me in Sauchiehall Street. She had no resemblance to Marian, except for her hair, which was almost identical. She made eye contact with me briefly as she passed, but looked away immediately, scowling, as if she’d seen what I was seeing in my mind: not her, but Marian. Marian hurt, being hurt, being attacked; the knife breaking her skin, the horrible wounds emerging all over her body in some supernatural way. Verovkin was not there, I didn’t see him at all, just the results of his work, messy and red.

  There were other visions, repeatedly; something would trigger a memory of Marian and similar horrific images would play through my mind. I began to feel I was being haunted by living ghosts, these people all around me in the city, the women whose forms would remind me of Marian, again and again.

  I began to fail to see people as people. They were bodies, in which the blood was contained in veins; the existence of their minds inside their heads seemed to have disappeared for me; they were not people, but merely walking flesh and blood, and I feared for them all, as I knew how easily Verovkin could make their blood flow for his pleasure, were he here. I thought I saw the way he saw; what a terrible temptation the world must have presented to him, with frail, delicate victims around him continually, each and every one with the potential to excite his desire, and satisfy it.

  After each excursion to the city I felt sick, and time and time again I hurried back to my bed, and I wept.

  Chapter 3

  The exclusion and isolation of my lochside home seemed to help. I didn’t feel lonely at all, though I rarely spoke to anyone beyond buying food and other provisions. Somehow it seemed to be healing me, to have taken myself away from everyone and everything, and I let the landscape and the weather into me, replacing the horrors that had been there before.

  Finally, feeling much stronger, I returned to Glasgow, taking the train down the coast on a bitter winter’s morning in order to check my post-office box for any communication from Hayes, the detective.

  There was nothing.

  I had been brooding over the way things had been with Hunter. I wrote him a short note, giving him the assumed name I was using, and the box number, and asking him to tell it to no one else, not even Susan. Since he had a key to my house, I asked if he’d forward any important post that came for me. I asked him if he’d mind checking once a week or so. And I told him I was sorry for our disagreement, and sorry that I’d been angry with him.

  I was disappointed over Hayes’ lack of progress, and had nothing to go on, nothing at all. I wondered if I was wasting my time, hiding away in the wilds of Scotland like a frightened lamb, sending this flatfoot out to do my work for me, because I was too afraid.

  Just as I was about to leave Glasgow, I paid one more call to the post office, and found a letter that had arrived that day.

  He said he had reached the end of his investigations, that he had been unable to find out anything about the man called Verovkin or Lippe, and that he therefore resigned from the case. His wording was strange, the note unusually brief.

  I wrote back immediately, doubling his fee for a third time, and sent it off to London.

  I went back to Glasgow for the next two weeks, but there was nothing from Hayes. He had simply stopped replying to me.

  There was nothing from Hunter either.

  Chapter 4

  On my final trip to Glasgow, a more sinister interpretation occurred to me. The idea was triggered as I stepped aboard my train back to Loch Nevis, because as I did so, I saw, two carriages along, a man climbing on, a man whom I was sure I’d seen at the post office.

  That in itself proved little, but I was worried. I stumbled into an empty compartment and put myself by the outside window, glancing at the corridor. Supposing Hayes had strayed outside his brief? If he’d made contact, he might have been rumbled. If so, Verovkin might have extracted Hayes’ purpose from him. Of course he only knew my false name, but to a man used to using aliases of his own, it wouldn’t take long to work out that it was probably I who’d hired a detective.

  I thought about Hayes’ last note, and wondered if he’d actually written it, and as I remembered that it had been typed, I felt the urge to be sick. All his other letters had been handwritten.

  They’d got to him.

  They’d got to him and most likely he was dead now, but not before he’d told them the little information he had on me. My false name, my post-office box number. They wouldn’t have known he’d written by hand before, and had typed his resignation letter to allay my suspicions.

  I sat, breathing hard, still staring at the corridor, and was about to leave the train when it began to slide out of the station.

  An elderly couple came into the compartment and smiled at me as they settled themselves in, carrying such a quantity of shopping baskets that it made me think they were going a long way. Just as they sat down, the man from the post office came past.

  He didn’t stop, he didn’t even glance round, but I knew it was him. He looked hard, and strong, possibly Eastern European. He stole along the corridor, and there was something of an animal in the way he walked. I grew afraid.

  ‘Christmas shopping,’ said the lady across from me.

  Startled, I looked over and saw her shaking her head at their baskets.

  ‘We’ve left it too late, as always.’

  She laughed and I nodded, trying to smile. Her husband’s eyes twinkled as she patted his hand, and they settled down to some sandwiches that she produced from some wax paper.

  The train began its long steady journey up the west coast, and with every stop I grew more and more alarmed. At each halt I leaned from the window cautiously to see if the man got off, but he did not.

  It was dusk now, but the train was not busy and it was easy enough to see the few faces walking briskly along the little platforms, hurrying into the dark.

  ‘Are you not local?’ said the old lady.

  I sat down, wondering what to say.

  ‘Are you afraid you’ll miss your stop? Where are you going, dear? We can tell you when to get off.’

  ‘Unless he’s voyaging beyond Arisaig,’ said her husband, holding a forefinger up th
eatrically. ‘That’s where we alight.’

  He twinkled at me and I didn’t know if he was deliberately being quaint or if this was how he really spoke.

  ‘You’ll be for the island, mebbe?’ he added.

  I was still too confused to answer, unsure what to say, as the man who I was now sure was following me passed the compartment again.

  This time he walked slowly, and this time he did look at me. Deliberately, I could see. He half smiled as he saw the old couple, and walked on, and as he went out of sight, I grew more afraid.

  ‘Where do you need to get off, dear?’ said the old lady again.

  ‘Mallaig,’ I stumbled out.

  ‘So! He’s for the island.’

  ‘That’s two after us, dear,’ the lady said, addressing me again. ‘But it’s the end of the line, so you can’t miss it. Where’s your bags? You’ll be on Skye for the holidays? A schoolteacher, I’m guessing. Yes? Well, we have everyone coming this year. So much shopping . . .’

  She spoke on, and on, and I was glad of it, because it meant I had to say very little. Her husband sat with his eyes twinkling, rocking gently as the train sped along into the night, the stops fewer and fewer.

  Before I could think further, we had reached Arisaig, and the old couple gathered all their things together and made a great display of leaving the train.

  As the door closed, the man nodded at me.

  ‘The compliments of the season to you!’ he announced, and they left.

  I tried to calm myself, but as the train rolled on, I knew I had less and less time to make a decision. There were two stops left; Morar, and mine: Mallaig, the end of the line.

  The man had not reappeared, and I wondered if he’d got out at Arisaig when I’d been occupied helping the old couple with their Christmas shopping.

  I made a decision, and as the train pulled into Morar, I readied myself. I waited for a few seconds, and heard one or two doors slam further along the train. I opened my door and stepped out, looking first up and then down the platform. A second later, the man got off, just a carriage away.