By Blood We Live

by Glen Duncan

  Grishma looked at his watch. “Mr. Olek will be with us shortly,” he said. “Can I offer you anything in the meantime? Tea? Something stronger?”

  I’d been led through an entrance hall of white plaster walls and a terra cotta floor into a library of floor-to-ceiling books. Furniture was three green leather Chesterfields, a large glass desk and a white, futuristic recliner, all on three or four big blue and gold-fringed Indian (or for all I knew Persian or Chinese) carpets of exquisitely intricate design. A huge benign asparagus fern on a dark wooden plant stand cast a stretched shadow the full length of the room in the last of the low sunlight. A tall art deco standard lamp stood in one corner, twin nymphs holding a glass globe. There was a book open face-down on one of the couches.

  “Just water,” I said. “Is it okay to smoke?”

  Grishma seemed calmly delighted at the idea. “One hundred per cent,” he said, and fetched an ashtray from the hall—a pretty copper dish on an ebony stand—which he set down beside the nearest Chesterfield. “I’ll bring your water,” he said.

  “Actually,” I said, feeling wulf giving my spine a wrench, “I’ll take a scotch as well, if you have one.”

  “Talisker, Glenmorangie, Oban, Laphroaig or Macallan?”

  Not bad for someone who didn’t drink.

  “Macallan, please. Straight.” Here’s to you, Jacob Marlowe. It’s a library, after all. Sorry I turned out to be such a lousy werewolf. It’s your own fault. You shouldn’t have died.

  Grishma was back in less than five minutes with a silver tray. He turned the lamp on. “I’ll leave you now,” he said. “Feel free to have a browse in here while you wait.”

  As in: Don’t leave this room, sister.

  I didn’t. I lit a Camel and picked up the book next to me on the couch. Browning. Men and Women. A first edition. Open at “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” I’d read the poem before, in college. For no reason I could think of, it reminded me of the dream. The vampire dream. The only dream I had, these days, these nights. I began reading.

  My first thought was, he lied in every word,

  That hoary cripple, with malicious eye

  Askance to watch the workings of his lie

  On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford

  Suppression of the glee, that pursed and scored

  Its edge, at one more victim gained thereby.

  “Marvellous, isn’t it?” a voice said.

  I looked up. I couldn’t have been reading for more than a few seconds, but somehow it was now completely dark outside. The lamp’s globe had brightened.

  Olek—I recognised the voice—stood in the doorway.

  Not what I’d been expecting, since like it or not I’d been expecting Omar Sharif. What I was seeing was a short, dark, plump, thin-moustached man in his mid-fifties (humanly speaking) with skin the colour of milk chocolate, mischievous black eyes and a full-lipped, currently smiling, mouth. His teeth looked unnaturally white. He was dressed in faded black jeans and a white cotton kurta. Green suede Adidas sneakers. Big gold and garnet ring on his left index finger.

  “To my mind one of the most remarkable poems in the English language.”

  “I don’t really remember it that well,” I said.

  He came closer, and offered me his hand. At which point I realised what I should have noticed straight away. He didn’t smell.

  Or rather, he didn’t smell of his species. He smelled of patchouli and toothpaste and lemons. He read my face.

  “Talulla—I may call you Talulla, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you must call me Olek, of course. No, I don’t smell as expected, I know. I’m delighted. I’ve put a lot of work in on olfactory inhibitors. But we can discuss that later. You don’t remember the poem much, you say? Please, please, let’s sit.”

  I’d stood up to shake hands. He waited for me to resume my seat, then sat himself on the industrial glass desk, legs swinging. No socks. Delicate brown ankles.

  “I remember it’s about a knight looking for the Dark Tower,” I said. I was yielding so easily to the casual madness of the encounter I wondered if they’d put something in my drink. “I remember a journey through a kind of nightmare landscape. I remember it’s long.”

  “Do you recall whether Childe Roland finds the Dark Tower?”

  I couldn’t see that it mattered, but I racked my brains anyway. “No,” I said. “I don’t. Does he?”

  Olek smiled again. He had an immensely likeable face. So likeable that if this were a movie he’d have to be a psychotic villain. “I shan’t spoil it for you,” he said. “You must take that volume to bed tonight and see for yourself.”

  Madder and madder. Browning for bedtime reading at a vampire’s house. In India. Okay. Why not?

  “But you’ll want to freshen up, perhaps? You won’t be wanting anything to eat, obviously.”

  I stubbed the Camel out in the ashtray. Mentally gave myself a slap.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t mean to be rude, but why don’t you just tell me what I’m doing here?”

  “You’re here because I have a cure for your condition,” he said, not missing a beat. “Or I dare say more importantly a cure for your children’s condition. You’re here because they’re still young enough to slip through the world’s tightening net. You saw the footage. Hardship, one way or another, is coming to your species. Most likely to mine as well. Your face is known. Your children still have a chance.” He paused. I caught a sudden full stink of vampire.

  “Mikhail, Natasha, come and join us.”

  I looked past him. Konstantinov and Natasha were in the doorway. Konstantinov looked exhausted.

  “Mikhail hasn’t slept,” Olek said. “Despite my best efforts to reassure him he insisted on sitting up all day, staring at the monitors.”

  It had been almost a year since I’d seen them, but apart from Konstantinov’s obvious lack of sleep he and Natasha looked—of course—unchanged. As, visibly, palpably, was the love between them. Utterly sufficient and self-contained and above any law, human or otherwise. Their love made them their own law. I hadn’t realised how afraid I’d been until I felt the relief of seeing them.

  “I’ll give you a little while alone,” Olek said. “Please, Talulla, help yourself to another drink.”

  When he was gone, Natasha, Konstantinov and I looked at each other.

  “Can you stand a hug?” I said.

  We embraced, holding our noses, laughing—but the mutually repellent odours were no joke. Rolling her eyes, Natasha broke out the nose-paste. “He offered us something instead of this,” she said. “But we couldn’t take the chance. Sorry.”

  They’d been here for two days.

  “The place is CCTV’d,” Konstantinov said. “And there were guards, but we told him they had to go.”

  “How could you not have slept?” I asked.

  “Monitors are downstairs,” Konstantinov said. “Underground. I needed to be sure. I’m fine. One day I can manage.”

  When he spoke, Natasha looked at him with calm certainty. The delight in each other Jake and I had had. As opposed to the almost delight between Walker and me. That would be an awkward conversation to have with these two, I realised, with a small detonation of dread, the one that would begin with one of them saying: How’s Walker?

  “So what’s the story with this guy?” I said, preemptively.

  Between them, they told me what they knew. Olek was old. Very old. He was also the nearest the species had to a Chief Medical Officer. “There are illnesses, apparently,” Natasha said. “But don’t ask me.”

  “I think you’ve got to have been alive for a long time to get them,” Konstantinov said. “But anyway, he’s a scientist. He’s the scientist. Physically, there’s nothing he doesn’t know about the species. When WOCOP dissolved, the Fifty Families bought a lot of the research. All of it went through him. He was with the Helios Project from its inception. He says he’s retired from that now, but who knows?”


  The Helios Project was the vampires’ ongoing attempt to find a cure for nocturnality. To which, inadvertently, werewolves had for a while become integral. The virus we had until recently carried had stopped the Curse passing to human victims who survived the bite. But to vampires who got bitten, it gave an increased tolerance to sunlight.

  “And the cure for what ails me?” I asked.

  “God knows,” Natasha said. “He’s refused to discuss it. It’s for your ears only. The only thing he says is that it’s completely unscientific. What does he want from you?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. Nothing that I’m going to want to give, I’m guessing.”

  “Do you remember Christopher Devaz?” Olek said. He was back in the doorway, hands in pockets. All three of us looked up.

  Devaz was one of the WOCOP guards I’d Turned when I’d been detained at their pleasure three years ago, a fruity little Goan fattened on maternal love who’d been easy to seduce with a paradoxical (and not wholly invented) posture of moral reluctance and libidinal need. Turned, he’d had no choice but to help me get out come full moon. He hadn’t been happy about it, not surprisingly.

  “Yes, I remember him,” I said. “What about him?”

  “Christopher Devaz is no longer a werewolf,” Olek said.

  I looked at him for signs of bullshit or strategy. There weren’t any. He just looked straight back at me.

  “Because you cured him.”

  “Because I cured him.”

  The terrible thing was I knew he wasn’t lying. It didn’t help. It made me feel exhausted. Sitting there, it was as if all the miles and hours had gathered on me, suddenly, had hung themselves on me like … yes, giant vampire bats. And the tireder I was the more wulf tried it on. Watch it, fucker, I thought. There’s a cure for you here. Apparently.

  “Would you like to see him?” Olek said. “He’s downstairs.”

  65

  THERE WAS A laboratory, of course. And two basement levels. Lab on minus one. I only saw part of it. Guessed it occupied the building’s entire footprint. Not that what I saw told me much. A wall of bottled and jarred chemicals. Three big refrigerators. A lot of things that looked like slimline VCRs or DVD players, with, I intuited, technical clout inversely proportional to their number of blinking lights. (In the twenty-first century the gizmos to be scared of are the ones that look like they don’t do much.) In addition several desk monitors, a pair of open laptops, shelf after shelf of zip-drives. Cable management and a cloying medicinal smell that whether I liked it or not evoked my high school chemistry lab, my best friend Lauren, and her one-semester obsession with homemade explosives. Two doors led off. Through one I glimpsed more stacked gadgetry and the corner of a brushed steel table.

  “Down another flight,” Olek said. “I hope you don’t mind accompanying me in private for this. But this part is for you alone.”

  Konstantinov and Natasha had protested, but in the end my own impatience had settled it. The house, they conceded, was empty but for the three of us and Grishma, and whatever it was Olek wanted from me it plainly wasn’t my life.

  The next flight down took us to a door that opened onto a more complicatedly divided space. Corridors, floors, walls and ceilings tiled white high-gloss. A hospital cleanliness that would have made the sight of two or three drops of blood on the floor particularly ominous. There were none, however. All the doors were steel—one very heavy. The air down here had a failed feel, like the air in an airplane toilet. There was a new etherish smell that made my nostrils fizz and that wulf didn’t like at all. I thought of the sneezing tracker dogs in Cool Hand Luke.

  Olek, a couple of paces ahead of me, moved with loose-limbed ease, but I could feel his aura hotting-up. A slight odour of his species crept out of him now, forced by tension, exacerbated by the smaller space.

  “In here,” he said, opening a door to our left.

  “In here” was, in effect, one of the rooms you see in movies (but which I’ve always suspected don’t exist anymore, if they ever did) where a victim gets to look through one-way glass at a line-up of suspects.

  “He can’t hear us,” Olek said. “Or see us, obviously. This is just so you know it’s him.”

  Devaz, on the other side of the glass, was lying in the foetal position on a fold-out bed, staring at nothing. He was barefoot (the pale soles of his brown feet affected me with a curious dreary sympathy) in sky blue pyjama bottoms and a white cotton singlet. He didn’t look injured. Just unbearably sad. Aside from the bed his small room was empty.

  “He’s not in any discomfort,” Olek said. “And he won’t be obliged to remain here much longer. But I do need to know that you recognise him. Do you need to hear his voice?”

  There was an emptiness to the man on the bed that made me strangely angry, although angry at whom or what it wasn’t clear.

  Olek hit the intercom. “Christopher?” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  Devaz had started at the voice, slightly, but he didn’t get up. Just curled a little tighter on the bed. I tried to go out to him, mentally. As the one who’d Turned him it ought to have been effortless and immediate.

  DEVAZ?

  Nothing.

  DEVAZ. IT’S ME.

  Still nothing. I might as well have been reaching out to a bucket and mop.

  “Christopher, you’ll be out of here in a couple of days, I promise you,” Olek said.

  No response. Devaz just stared.

  “Christopher?”

  “Please go away,” Devaz said, quietly. “Please.”

  I did recognise the voice. If it wasn’t the real Devaz, it was a very convincing impersonation.

  Back in the white corridor, I said: “Okay, fine, it’s Devaz. Now what?”

  “Now,” Olek said, hands in pockets, “we wait for the full moon to rise. At which point you’ll see that Christopher is no longer under its spell. You’ll see, not to put too fine a point on it, that he’s human again. Ergo, the method works.”

  And makes you suicidal, apparently.

  “Now,” Olek said. “The method. Follow me.”

  Back down the corridor to the heaviest of the doors. Vault or submarine-hatch thickness. Numbered keypad entry. Inside, another of the steel tables. On it, a black metal container a little bigger than a briefcase, also with a numbered keypad. Olek tried not to make a show of not letting me see the code and I tried not to make a show of not trying to see it. Wulf, to my surprise, had gone completely still.

  A small hydraulic hiss and the sound of a precision mechanism—then the case was unlocked. Olek opened it. “Take a look,” he said.

  The container’s interior was foam padded. In the middle of the cutaway was a flat piece of whiteish stone—the sort of thing I imagined the Ten Commandments being written on—with two pieces missing, one from the bottom left corner, one from the right-hand edge. There was a rough circular hole the size of a tennis ball in what looked like its exact centre. It was covered from top to bottom in carved symbols—a script of some kind—and stained with (my nose confirmed the visuals) human blood. Weeks old, the blood. Weeks. Not millennia.

  “You’ll remember,” Olek said, “that along with Quinn’s journal went a stone tablet. This is it.”

  I didn’t touch it. I was thinking of all the times I’d seen ancient things in museums. Arrowheads. Pottery. Mummies. Always under glass. Even under glass the objects gave off a calm, clear, mute energy that collapsed the space between your time and theirs, that astonished you with the proof of time itself, that it really passed, that not just individual people but whole civilisations came and went. Millions were born and lived full lives and died and some little bit of stone or clay that had lain untouched through it all testified that there had been a time before any of that had happened. The air around them had a different silence, one that had never been passed through by the racket of modernity.

  … but it was not until people returned to the banks of Iteru that

  “You know,” Olek said
, “I’ll be honest with you. I did this as an experiment. I had absolutely no belief in it. It was, as far as I was concerned, risible, pure fucking mumbo-jumbo, contrary to every principle I hold dear. I’d like to be able to take the scientific line and say that just because a phenomenon is unexplained at the moment doesn’t mean it’s terminally inexplicable. I’m an adherent of Ockam. All things being equal, look for an explanation in the terms you already have. Don’t start inventing phenomena to explain a phenomenon. But I have to say, this has rocked me. This has rocked and confounded me. If it’s as it seems to be, frankly, it changes everything. I still can’t really believe it …”

  He was off on the little journey of his own amazement. He hadn’t been able to leave it alone, since it had happened (whatever it was that had happened); he hadn’t been able to get over it.

  I realised that until now I hadn’t taken the possibility of reversing the Curse seriously. Or no more than half seriously. It wasn’t belief in a cure that had led me here. It was the feeling of answering something calling from behind the surface events. As if something were asking for my help in bringing itself about. As if I was—oh, dear God—a necessary part of a story. Ever since the night the vampire came to call. I’ll see you again. When I opened my mouth to say what I said next, sickness, excitement and weariness rose up in me like a wretched Trinity.

  “Not that Devaz is any kind of advertisement,” I said, “but how does it work?”

  66

  Justine

  ANOTHER NEAR-MISS AT the hotel in Bangkok. I got there less than an hour before sunrise. I was in such a fucking state I gave the cab driver the equivalent of $100 and didn’t take the change. Just ran straight into the lobby.

  “You don’t look well,” a voice said, behind me, while I stood in line for the desk, trembling. “Can I be of assistance?”