by Will Hill
“Sorry?” he said.
“I asked if you were ready for this. I think I just got my answer.”
Jamie felt a warm blush rise in his cheeks. “I am ready,” he said. “I am. Tell me what I need to know.”
Frankenstein gave him a long look, then began to talk.
“Most vampires in the world are not like Alexandru, or Dracula, or any of the others you may have seen on TV. The idea of an elegant, mysterious race of civilised monsters makes for good drama, but it’s not the reality. The reality is that there is a vampire society out there that mirrors human society, with every type of lifestyle represented. There really are vampires who live in stately homes and wear suits and dinner jackets and drink from crystal glasses, just as there are humans who live that way. But there are also vampires who live in cul de sacs and on council estates, who live in family units and avoid attention at all cost, who live the same anonymous lives that millions of humans do. There are vampires who live on the edges of society, on the borders, the same dark places that many humans find themselves. There are vampires who have sworn never to take a human life, or taste human blood, just as there are vampires who will feed on nothing else, who will kill and torture for the sheer pleasure of it. Some have been driven mad by the hunger, others hate themselves for what the hunger compels them to do but aren’t strong enough to stop themselves.”
On the screen the English countryside flew past, but Jamie didn’t notice; he was focused on the man in front of him.
“The point I’m trying to make to you is that every vampire is different, and every single one needs to be approached with extreme caution. Do you understand me?”
“I think so,” replied Jamie.
“Make sure you do. The vast majority of them will kill you without a second thought. They are still monsters, no matter how harmless or pathetic they might appear.”
“You hate them, don’t you?” said Jamie quietly. “The vampires.”
“Most of them,” Frankenstein replied. “They are an aberration, a violent, dangerous aberration. They don’t belong in the world.”
Jamie eyes widened, involuntarily, and the monster saw them. He leant nearer to Jamie’s face. “Do you want to say something to me?” he asked.
Jamie shook his head, and Frankenstein sat back in his seat. “I know what you were thinking,” he said. “But I was created with free will. The things I’ve done – some of them terrible, unforgivable things – I did because I chose to. Vampires have a compulsion to feed that makes violence and suffering inevitable, and most of them are not strong enough to resist it. Many of them don’t even try.”
Jamie said nothing. He looked at the moulded locker standing beside Frankenstein’s seat, and saw that it contained the weapons he had been forbidden to touch in the Playground, the small black cylinder and the black metal spheres.
“What are those things?” he asked, pointing. “Terry wouldn’t tell me.”
Frankenstein followed his finger. “Why wouldn’t he tell you?”
“He said I didn’t need to know.”
The monster laughed, shortly. “He’s right. You don’t.”
Jamie stared at Frankenstein, without expression, until the monster rolled his eyes and lifted the cylinder and one of the spheres out of their housings.
“All right then, if you must know absolutely everything. This is an ultraviolet beam gun. It fires a concentrated beam of UV light, like a powerful torch. It will ignite any vampire skin it touches. This is a UV grenade. It fires a high-powered UV beam in every direction at once, for five seconds. Happy now?”
“Why wouldn’t Terry just tell me that?”
“Because he probably thought it was more important to teach you about the things that might actually keep you alive. Neither of these weapons is lethal, all they do is buy you time. Stick to guns and your T-Bone, and try to remember what he did teach you, instead of focusing on what he didn’t. Now, no more questions. We’ll be there soon.”
“Where are we actually going?” asked Jamie.
“We’re going to see a vampire called the chemist. He produces something called Bliss,” replied Frankenstein.
“Bliss?”
“A drug for vampires; very addictive, very powerful. The chemist has a supply network that covers the entire country. If he hasn’t heard anything about Alexandru, it’s because there has been nothing to hear.”
“So you know where he lives?” asked Jamie.
“That’s right.”
“So why don’t you stop him?”
Frankenstein looked at him.
“Because Bliss is useful,” he replied. “It keeps a large section of the vampire population docile. When they’re worrying about where their next fix is coming from, they’re not thinking about hurting people. But of course, from an official standpoint, Blacklight is unaware of where Bliss comes from, or who makes it. Do you understand?”
“It sounds like you’re saying you look the other way,” said Jamie.
“Good. Now be quiet.”
An hour later the van drew to a halt outside a farmhouse on the edge of an expanse of moorland. The rear doors slid open and the smell of wood smoke drifted in from the clear night sky.
Jamie stepped down from the vehicle. They were on a narrow country road, lined on one side by a row of trees, on the other by the open expanse of Dartmoor. The farmhouse, a rambling two-storey building made of pale stone, sat behind a rock wall, the forest quickly thickening into a solid mass of black beyond it.
Frankenstein was waiting for him at the side of the road. When Jamie reached him he pushed open a wooden gate. They walked up the neat path together, a pair of mismatched silhouettes in the dark. Before they reached the red front door to the farmhouse, it opened, and a tall man, with the grey hair and lined face of late middle age, smiled at them.
“Please,” he said. “Follow the path to the back garden. I’ll meet you there.”
Jamie smiled a bemused smile as they made their way round to the garden; the warm, friendly welcome was not what he would have expected from either a vampire or a manufacturer of illegal drugs, and certainly not from a creature that was both. The scent of fallen blossom filled the air as they stepped carefully along a narrow path that ran along the side of house, and when they emerged into a wide, beautiful night garden, the grey-haired vampire was waiting for them beneath an apple tree.
A wooden path ran down the centre of the garden to a sturdy-looking gate at the far end, splitting halfway along to pass round the wide trunk of the tree, then joining back together. Two wide semi-circles of lawn stood either side of the path, and the rest of the garden was filled with a series of overwhelmingly beautiful flowerbeds.
Great sprays of angel’s trumpets and moonflowers bloomed in the darkness, as the scents of lavenders and hyacinths mingled in the air. Creeping clusters of Jacob’s ladder and Adam’s needle shone in the pale moonlight, the white lines standing out brightly, the grey leaves shimmering silver. Jamie looked around, overcome, as Frankenstein watched him, a smile threatening to emerge on his lips.
“Do you like the garden?” asked the chemist, as Frankenstein steered the gawping teenager towards the tree.
“It’s… magnificent,” Jamie said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“That’s because you sleep through the most beautiful part of the day,” said the chemist, a smile of pride on his face. “The darkness hides flaws, and sins; the moon illuminates only the delicate, and the elegant.”
“Who said that?” asked Jamie.
“I did,” grinned the chemist. “Colonel Frankenstein, always a pleasure. Follow me, please, we’ll talk in the lab.”
The vampire floated down the garden, and the two men followed. They walked through the gate, which the chemist opened using a small touchpad concealed behind a curtain of ivy, and stepped on to a concrete path as smooth as a bowling lane. Orange lamps hung in the lower branches of trees, illuminating their destination.
At the end
of the path was a long metal building, with flat ends and a rounded canopy that emerged from the ground on both sides. It looked as though someone had buried an incredibly long tin can in the ground. Electric light shone through narrow windows cut into the walls, bathing the surrounding trees in pale white. The vampire turned a handle on a door at the front of the building, held it open, and the two visitors entered the lab.
It was much louder than Jamie had been expecting. The laboratories he was used to were quiet places, with oddly shaped glass beakers bubbling above Bunsen burners.
This room was more like a small factory.
Large extractor fans ran the length of the building on both sides, humming loudly. The chemist passed pairs of plastic goggles to Jamie and Frankenstein, and led them to the end of the room.
Next to a large, vibrating extraction unit stood a bench covered in rectangular blocks of yellow-white powder.
“What’s that?” Jamie asked, inquisitiveness getting the better of him.
The chemist appeared at his shoulder.
“That’s recrystallised heroin base,” the vampire replied. “It’s what my shipments arrive as. I treat them with—”
“He doesn’t need to know the details,” said Frankenstein from behind them, his voice tinged with warning.
Jamie shot him a look full of wounded independence. “I want to know,” he said.
Frankenstein shrugged, turned away, and examined the wall of the lab, where a map of the UK had been hung. It was covered in yellow circles, some of them overlapping each other, that covered almost every inch of the country.
The chemist smiled at Jamie. “It’s heartening to see a boy who wants to learn about the world,” he said, then guided Jamie to a second bench on which sat six shallow plastic bowls. Two were half full of a clear liquid; the other four contained a thick white solution.
“This is sulphuric acid,” he continued, motioning at the clear liquid. “The heroin is dissolved into it, then we add methyl alcohol, then ether, and that leaves us with this.”
He gestured to the tanks with the white liquid in them.
“The mixture stands until it begins to crystallise, then I add more ether, as well as... the final ingredient... and then leave it until it becomes solid. What you’re left with is Bliss, about 75% pure.”
“The final ingredient?” asked Jamie.
The vampire smiled, and guided Jamie to a third bench, which held seven large plastic containers filled with a dark red liquid. “This is what makes Bliss into Bliss,” said the chemist, with obvious pride.
“Blood?” said Jamie.
“Of course,” smiled the chemist. “Human blood, mixed into the heroin before it solidifies. Seven different types, for seven different drugs. A, AB, B and O; the basics, the cheap stuff. O negative, A1 negative and OB positive for my premium customers.”
“What’s so special about them?” asked Jamie.
“They’re rare,” said Frankenstein, his voice booming in the enclosed space. “They’re not so easy to acquire.”
“Easier than you might imagine,” said the vampire, smiling oddly at the monster, before returning his gaze to Jamie. “The last batch of the day needs to go into the acid,” he said. “Would you care to do the honours?”
Jamie could feel the disapproving heat of Frankenstein’s gaze on the back of his neck, and knew the monster was watching him, waiting to see what he would do next.
“Cool,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
The vampire supervised as Jamie lit the burners under the two bowls of acid, then carefully spooned the yellow-white powder into them, being careful not to drop it from a height that might cause the liquid to splash, putting each spoonful into a new bowl so none of them were overfilled. Once the bowls were bubbling away gently, the question that had been nagging at Jamie for several minutes burst to the surface.
“Where do you get all this stuff? If it’s just you out here on your own, where does it all come from?”
The chemist smiled at him.
“An excellent question, young man,” he replied. “The heroin base comes from Myanmar, and the blood comes from the National Health Service of this fine country of ours. As to how it all arrives here, unmolested, so to speak, I suggest you ask you partner.”
Jamie turned to Frankenstein, who flinched, ever so slightly. “Not now,” he said, sharply. “There are more important things to discuss.”
The chemist raised his hands, deferentially. “By all means,” he said. “I so enjoyed seeing someone take an interest in my work that I forgot to even ask you why you were here. I presume you are looking for information of some kind?”
Frankenstein nodded. “Alexandru,” he replied. “We need to know where he is. I thought you might have heard something, from one of your dealers, or your customers.”
He almost spat the final word, his face drawn into a grimace of distaste, and the chemist’s mouth narrowed.
“I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything,” the chemist replied, and it felt to Jamie as though the temperature in the lab had lowered by several degrees.
On the bench next to Jamie, one of the bowls of sulphuric acid began to bubble violently. The chemist moved towards it, and Frankenstein’s hand slipped to the handle of the T-Bone on his belt. The vampire stopped and stared at him.
“I don’t believe you,” said the monster, evenly. “I wonder why that is?”
“Perhaps it’s because of your suspicious nature,” replied the chemist. “Or perhaps it’s because you’re not stupid, and you know full well that anyone who knows anything about the three brothers is going to lie to you.”
He took another step towards Jamie, and Frankenstein pulled the T-Bone from its holster, letting the weapon hang by his side. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed still,” he said, his voice rumbling.
Jamie looked back and forth between the monster and the vampire. Then the bowl of sulphuric acid convulsed in a huge bubble, spraying boiling liquid into the air of the lab, and sizzling on to the exposed skin of Jamie’s neck and jaw.
He screamed in pain, and both Frankenstein and the chemist ran to him. Jamie clamped his gloved hand over the wounds, and the fabric began to smoke. The pain was beyond anything he had ever felt before; it was as though a million tiny knives were cutting into his flesh. He screamed again, as his skin began to melt.
The chemist flew to the corner of the lab, opened a small metal fridge, and returned to Jamie’s side with a bottle of purified water. Frankenstein had picked him up and carried him out of reach of the bowls, and was holding him still with one hand while trying to pry Jamie’s hand away from his wounds so he could inspect the damage. The chemist’s pale hand shot between them, gripping Jamie’s wrist and pulling his hand clear of the burns. Jamie’s head was thrown back, the cords in his neck standing out like ropes, his teeth clenched together in a grimace of agony.
The vampire flicked the top off the bottle and tipped water over the burns, irrigating the wounds. They gushed smoke as the liquid flushed them clean, and Jamie bellowed. Then the wounds, a bright red patch of at least ten individual burns, stretching from the collar of his uniform to just below his right ear, began to bleed.
The chemist’s eyes turned red.
Frankenstein saw it happen, and fumbled for the T-Bone, which had fallen to the laboratory floor. But before he could reach it, the vampire threw himself backwards into the air, away from the fallen teenager and the crouching monster, and hovered by the door that led back to the garden.
“Bring him into the house once the bleeding has stopped,” he said, his voice guttural and full of lust. “There is a first-aid kit above the fridge.”
And with that he was gone, opening the door and swooping through it and into the night.
Frankenstein left Jamie, who was staring at the ceiling, his face white, his eyes wide, and pulled a green box down from a shelf above the fridge. He made his way back across the lab, turning off the gas rings beneath the bowls of acid as he did so, and cr
ouched down next to the teenager, who looked at him with eyes that were starting to regain their focus.
“Are you all right?” asked Frankenstein.
Jamie was shocked to hear the monster’s voice so full of worry. “Fine,” he croaked in reply. “I’ve... I’ve never felt anything like it. I couldn’t breathe, it hurt so much.”
“Does it still hurt?”
Jamie nodded. “But not like it did,” he said. “It feels like a normal burn now.”
Frankenstein wiped the blood from the boy’s skin, then pulled a gauze pad from the first-aid kit and gently placed it over the burns. Jamie winced, but did not protest. The monster unrolled a strip of white bandage, laid it over the gauze, and fixed it in place with surgical tape. Jamie pushed himself up into a sitting position as Frankenstein closed the kit, took it back across the lab, and replaced it on the shelf it had come from. When he turned back, Jamie was looking at him.
“He was going to turn the gas off,” the teenager said, slowly. “He knew what was going to happen.”
“I couldn’t have known that,” replied Frankenstein, walking back to the boy.
“I’m not blaming you,” said Jamie, his face full of pain. “I was just saying.”
“All right,” said Frankenstein.
“Help me up?” asked the teenager, and the huge man reached down a misshapen hand. Jamie gripped it, and pulled himself to his feet, wincing as he did so.
He hesitantly touched the bandage on his neck, then looked up at Frankenstein. “I want you to let me do the talking,” he said. “In the house. OK?”
The monster looked down at him. “Fine,” he said, after a pause. “Do whatever you think is best.”
The back door was open when they reached it, and they stepped through into a warm, ramshackle kitchen. A kettle was boiling on a huge Aga, and the chemist was sitting at a wooden table in the middle of the room, looking uneasily at the two men.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t tasted human blood in more than a decade, but I can’t control my reaction to it.”
