by Amy Cross
I wait for a reply, but she's simply staring up at the ceiling. One eye is bloodied and swollen shut, but the other looks undamaged.
“Madeleine,” I say firmly, “you have to tell me what happened. Did someone attack you out there?”
“They took a...”
She lets out a slow, pained groan.
“They took a what?” I ask.
“Swim,” she gasps, before starting to laugh and then wincing again. “Both of them...”
I wait, but her eyes are squeezed tight shut now and she seems to be caught in a moment of immense pain. Her grip on my arm is loosening, too, and I manage to slip free. I know I should go and find a doctor, but for a moment all I can do is stay by her side and hope that her injuries aren't as bad as they seem. Finally, just as I'm starting to worry that she isn't breathing, her eyes flick open again. She suddenly seems a little calmer.
“Madeleine,” I say after a few seconds, “if someone attacked you, that person is still at loose on the boat. They could -”
“They're gone,” she replies, her voice seeming more monotone again.
“What do -”
“I didn't think they'd catch up so fast,” she continues, turning to me. “They almost reached the ferry before it left Cherbourg. When I saw them on the quayside, I made the mistake of assuming they wouldn't be too bold. I went out onto the deck tonight just to reassure myself that they weren't still coming. I underestimated them, but that's not a mistake I'll make again.”
“You're delirious,” I reply. “If they didn't board the ferry, then they -”
“Read between the lines, Ben,” she gasps, sitting up and leaning against the wall. I swear, I can hear broken bones jostling and scraping in her chest. “It'll be a little more difficult for them this time. The water'll weigh them down, make it much harder to get into the air. I think I've bought myself some time. What I need now is a really good storm to wash the bastards a few hundred miles off course.”
“Madeleine, you...”
My voice trails off as I see the steely determination in her eyes. Everything she's saying right now sound insane, but I think she truly believes it all.
“How bad do I look?” she asks.
She stares at me. When I don't even manage to answer, she allows herself a faint smile.
“That bad, huh?” she continues. “Hell, maybe I shouldn't be so vain. Who cares how I look? At least I'm alive.” She sits up and moves to the edge of the bed, finally sitting next to me even though she has to clutch her chest. “I need to start getting my priorities straight.”
We sit in silence for a moment, but slowly I become aware of a persistent, faint crackling sound coming from Madeleine's body. I turn and look at her, but she's staring straight ahead, lost in thought. The crackling sound is getting louder, however, as if something very busy is taking place beneath her skin.
“Who are you?” I ask finally.
“You know who I -”
“What are you?”
I wait for a reply. When she doesn't answer, I get to my feet and take a step back. My mind is racing, and I'm half-certain that I'm losing my mind, but at the same time I'm starting to worry that I've gotten myself caught up in something I truly don't understand.
“You seem like a smart guy,” she says after a moment, eyeing me with a hint of amused concern. “Don't make me spell everything out for you.”
“But...”
“Just walk away,” she continues. “I'm sick right now, and weak, which makes it safe for you to be around me. That won't be the case for much longer. I'm exactly what you think I am, and the only reason you've been okay so far is that you kept inviting me into places. If I'm invited, I can't hurt you. But as I get stronger, that'll change.”
She pauses, before getting to her feet.
Flinching, I back against the wall.
“Now I almost kind of like you,” she mutters, limping past me and making her way into the cramped bathroom in the corner. She glances back at me. “Don't look so terrified,” she continues. “I just need a moment.”
With that, she pulls the bathroom door shut, leaving me almost trembling with shock as I try to make sense of everything that has happened in the forty-eight hours since I first met this girl. There's a part of me that's tempted to believe all the madness, but my rational side is pretty damn strong and I figure the whole thing is just some kind of localized hysteria. Madeleine's charismatic and attractive and persuasive, but I can't start buying into what's clearly a form of delusion. In fact, as she continues to bump around in the bathroom, I realize I have to get the hell out of here.
Turning, I pull the cabin door open and almost trip as I stumble out into the corridor, and then I race toward the steps at the far end. I don't even know where I'm going, and I sure as hell can't start babbling to anyone about what has happened tonight, but right now I need to get away from Madeleine. Suddenly it's abundantly clear that leaving the apartment in Stockholm didn't end the madness at all.
Madeleine's not real. She's just a figment of my increasingly fractured imagination.
Thirteen
There's no-one else in the ferry's seating area right now. I'm sitting at the far end, with my back toward the wall, watching the long open space as the first rays of dawn appear on the horizon. Nearby, fruit machines are blinking and flashing, but I feel as if I'm the only person who's awake on the entire boat. I've been here for a couple of hours now, just praying and hoping that I can make it all the way to Ireland without going completely nuts.
And then suddenly I see her.
She's at the far end of the seating area, a good fifty meters or so away, and she's staring at me.
“Go away,” I whisper, “please, just go away. Leave me alone.”
She stays there for a few minutes. I tell myself I can run, that I can go to the main desk at the rear of the ferry and ask the night-duty guy for help, even if that means gibbering in public like an idiot. There's something creepy about the way Madeleine is watching me, almost as if she's trying to assess whether it's safe to make her move.
Finally, she starts walking this way.
I flinch, ready to run, but suddenly I notice that as she passes the mirrored walls, she has no reflection. I wait, convinced that there has to be some kind of optical illusion, but there's absolutely no hint of her as she makes her way slowly, calmly toward me.
“You're not real,” I whisper, closing my eyes in the hope that she'll vanish. “You're in my head.”
I pause for a moment, and then I open my eyes again.
She's standing just a few feet away, with one of the flashing casino machines right behind her. She stares at me for a moment longer, with those same dark, ringed eyes, and then she takes a seat opposite. Already, she looks less badly hurt than before, as if her injuries have begun to heal.
“Those two men were after me,” she says finally, “because of what I am, and because I did some bad things a while back.”
“I know what you are,” I tell her, my voice trembling with fear.
She nods. “Good. But if -”
“You're an illusion,” I stammer. “You're in my head.”
She raises a skeptical eyebrow.
“Don't even try to deny it,” I continue, through gritted teeth. I glance around, to make sure no-one can see me arguing with myself, and then I turn to her again. “Just leave me alone!”
“The human lifespan is, what, seventy or eighty years?” she continues. “It's pretty easy to be a good person for seventy or eighty years. But when you've lived as long as I have, it gets much harder. People like me, we can't...” She pauses, and then she sighs. “I'm making excuses. Of course we can be good, we can stay good, but it's difficult. There are things we need, things we have to have in order to survive, and sometimes we just have to take those things. Do you understand?”
I swallow hard. My throat is so dry right now, it actually hurts.
“I was lucky this time,” she adds. “I managed to get a drop on them
and toss them in the water. It was a miracle, really. The time before... Let's just say that they damn near got their job done about a week ago. If they'd just killed me when they had me, it'd all be over by now, but instead they let their natural proclivities take over. They held me captive, they tortured me, they tried to make me suffer. And all the time they were torturing me, I was working out how to get away.”
We sit in silence for a moment. She's going to disappear at any moment. She has to.
“When you met me,” she continues, “on that coach, it was about thirty-six hours after my escape. I'd spent most of that time hiding in the bushes in a nearby park, waiting for my body to recover enough that I'd be able to keep moving. My mind was shot, I barely remember what happened next, but I think I...”
Her voice trails off.
“I'm pretty sure I grabbed a woman and dragged her into the bushes,” she says finally. “I fed. I needed to feed, it was the only way to gain some strength, and then I stole her clothes too. And then I staggered out into the city center, into Hamburg, and I knew I had to get away. I still don't quite remember how I ended up boarding that coach, and to be honest I don't recall very much until the next day, when I was in Paris and I'd started hunting you.”
“Hunting me?” I ask, feeling a flash of fear in my chest.
“See?” she replies with a faint smile. “I told you I do bad things sometimes.”
Again, silence falls.
“I came to your hotel room to kill you,” she continues. “To feed. I chose you because I recognized your scent from the coach, and because my head wasn't quite straight yet. You're lucky, though. For one thing, I managed to feed just before I knocked on your door. The man at the front desk was drunk but very talkative, and it didn't take much to lure him into the alley behind the building. I'm sure someone has found his drained corpse by now. For another thing, you invited me into your room, which earned you a certain degree of protection. By the time I was free to feed from you, I'd begun to like you.”
“You're not real,” I say firmly. “You're just in my head!”
She laughs. “You're cute.”
“Vampires aren't real,” I continue, “and neither are ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” She frowns. “Who said anything about ghosts?” She tilts her head slightly, and it's clear that she's amused by me. “You're not well, are you? You've been through something traumatic. Tell me, what did you see?”
“Nothing!”
“Not long before you met me. You saw something, something that -”
“I didn't see anything!” I shout, before realizing that I need to keep my voice down. I glance around, but fortunately no-one else seems to be up and about yet.
“I want you to know that I'll leave you alone once we get to Ireland,” Madeleine continues. “I don't want to put you in danger, so I'll head off on my own. I'm more or less healed now, and I can look after myself just fine. I still have a long way to go before I'm fully recovered, and I'm sure you've got your own plans too. Let's just consider this to have been a happy little accident. I hope you won't look back on me as a complete monster.”
She waits for me to reply, but she seems a little amused by my state of absolute, frozen panic.
“Do you still not think I'm real?” she asks.
“I know you're not! I know you -”
“Someone died,” she replies, interrupting me. “Someone important to you.”
I freeze. Did I already tell her that? No, wait... She knows about Sonja because she's part of my imagination. That's the only explanation.
“You had a dream about her,” she continues. “That night in the hotel room, in Paris. I took a little look around your dreams. You fished her out of a bath, huh? She killed herself.” She pauses. “I guess that's the ultimate mortal act. Unnatural, too. All life should want to persist, to survive. For life to seek its own destruction... That's pretty messed-up, don't you think? I mean, for a member of my species, death is humiliating. Embarrassing. It's very hard for a vampire to die, there are only a few rare circumstances in which it -”
“Shut up!” I snap.
“Ben -”
“Leave me alone,” I say firmly. “For the love of God, just... Stop!”
She pauses, before getting to her feet.
“Once the ferry docks,” she replies, “you'll never see me again. Even if we're both in Dublin for a short while, I'll steer well clear of you. Although you might want to go to the national museum and check out their permanent exhibition on the Irish famine of the mid-nineteenth century. If it hasn't changed, there's a photo of some people in hall C that you might want to see. Right down in the bottom left corner of the photo, there's someone you might recognize. Proof, if you like, that you're not losing your mind.”
“Promise me you'll go and look at that picture,” she adds.
I shake my head.
“Why not?” she asks. “Because you're scared? Because you know that if I'm real, maybe that ghost was real too?”
“Get out of my head,” I tell her. “Now!”
With a faint smile, she turns and walks away, although she stops in the doorway and glances back at me.
“I'm sorry for the times I entered your mind without permission,” she tells me. “I think maybe I disturbed you more than I'd realized. I didn't want to be alone after that night in Paris, so I'm afraid I nudged you to invite me on this trip. I also entered your dreams and...” She pauses. “I told you before that death is humiliating for a vampire. It goes against everything we're supposed to be. That's why it's so hard for me to accept that it's happening to me.”
“You're dying?” I ask, shocked by the suggestion.
“I'm thousands of years old,” she continues, “and I thought my life would never have to end. And now here I am, facing something that shouldn't be happening to me. I'm afraid I'm not handling it very well.” She pauses again, and this time there seem to be tears in her eyes. “Well, you don't need to know all of that, not if you think I'm just a figment of your imagination. Goodbye, Ben, and thank you for everything.”
And with that she's gone, heading out toward the stairwell, leaving me to sit in stunned silence. A few minutes later, a cleaning lady arrives and starts vacuuming the seating area.
***
Two hours later, once the ferry has docked, there's no sign of Madeleine on the bus that takes foot passengers from the boat to the terminal. When a couple of police officers come onboard to check passports, I realize that there's no way she could have simply slipped away without being noticed. There's now no doubt in my mind at all.
She wasn't real. I've been hallucinating.
Fourteen
“Man, that must have been rough,” Davey mutters as he swirls another chip through a dollop of ketchup. “When I heard about what happened to Sonja, I just thought... Fuck it, dude, I feel for you, really I do. It's good to see you're doing okay, though.”
“I'm fine,” I mutter, although I can't help glancing over my shoulder and looking across the crowded Dublin pub, just in case there's any sign of Madeleine. Deep down, even forty-eight hours after leaving the ferry and arriving in the city, I find it hard to believe that she simply went away and left me alone. I'm sure madness doesn't clear so quickly.
“So what are you gonna do now?” Davey asks. “You said you're done with Stockholm, so are you gonna head home to London for a bit?” His eyes brighten suddenly. “You're always welcome to stay here for as long as you want. Dublin's a great city, man. I can introduce you to some people, and you can crash with me, it's no problem.”
“I've got a ferry booked to London in a few days,” I tell him, glancing the other way across the pub, “but... Thanks for the offer.”
I continue to scan the crowd, and after a moment I turn back to Davey and see that he's eyeing me with a hint of suspicion.
“Are you sure you're okay, man?” he asks finally. “No offense, but you seem jumpy as hell, like you're expecting the Devil himself to come bounding up behind
you.”
“I'm fine,” I reply, “I just had a -”
I pause, wondering whether it's safe to tell him about Madeleine. Davey and I are old friends, and it might help if I told him about the crazy hallucinations I've suffered over the past few days.
“I met this girl,” I continue finally, “on the journey here. Or at least, I thought I did. She was a little weird, that's all. She said some...”
My voice trails off, and suddenly I pull my phone out and bring up a web browser.
“Just give me a moment,” I mutter, searching for the name of the hotel where I stayed for that one night in Paris. I immediately find some news stories in French, and when I run them through a translator I feel a rush of panic in my chest.
“What's up, man?” Davey asks. “You look kinda pale over there.”
Reading the translated story, I find that police have discovered the body of a man named Mathieu Rohmer, a twenty-eight-year-old who until recently worked the night shift at the hotel. According to the story, Mathieu's body was discovered in the alley behind the hotel, and police are refusing to comment on claims that he'd been completely drained of blood via two puncture wounds to the neck. Just like Madeleine said.
My hands are shaking as I set the phone down.
“I need another drink,” I stammer, getting to my feet and heading to the bar. I know Davey probably thinks I'm a complete lunatic by now, but my mind is racing and I feel as I might be on the verge of a real breakdown. I've been trying to hold it together so far, but when I get back to London I'm going to try to find a psychiatrist. I need to talk to a professional about all of this.
Reaching into my pocket to find some cash, I feel something cold and sharp bumping against my fingers. To my surprise, I find that somehow I have Madeleine's necklace. I don't know how it ended up in my pocket, but I can't deny that it's here now, and that it definitely exists.
I can't quite work out which parts of this madness are all in my head, and which parts are rooted in something real.
