Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  There was a short pause after he stopped speaking, while I waited to see whether he had anything more to say. Then I said: ‘Is that all? If it is, I'd like to go to the hospital to see her—if that's okay with you.'

  'Certainly, sir,’ he said. ‘There's a policewoman with her, and we've already notified her parents—I expect they'll travel down this morning. She's in the intensive-care unit, but that's just a precaution. They'll probably move her when she wakes up. I'm not sure that they'll let you in to see her right away, but if you'd like to wait ...'

  He trailed off, putting his head slightly to one side as though listening to some invisible voice which was telling him what to do next. He stood up, and said: ‘Do you mind if I have a look around, sir?'

  'Why?’ I retorted.

  'Just to set my mind at rest, sir. So that I can say that I did it, if it should ever become relevant.'

  I shrugged, not having to try too hard to seem insulted. ‘The knives are in the kitchen drawer,’ I said. ‘They haven't left the flat either.’ But even as I said it, I had a vision of him pulling open that drawer and finding a carving knife inside, still wet with Anne's blood. How could I be sure that there wasn't exactly such a spectacle awaiting discovery? How could I be absolutely sure?

  There wasn't. He looked, and found nothing, and had the decency not to look too hard, once he was reasonably sure in his own mind that everything was normal.

  'Sorry,’ he said, for once not adding the half-insulting sir. ‘I have to check everything, you see. She'll be okay—and we'll catch the bastard who did it.’ For the first time, there was no trace of any implication in his voice that the bastard in question might be me. He believed me. Unfortunately, I was just starting to wonder how strange and nasty the effects of the virus I'd caught might be. After Maldureve, I could hardly doubt that it was one of ours, and no mere cold in the head. All possibilities seemed suddenly to be open, including the worst.

  As the detective moved towards the door I was already asking myself whether I dared go out, fearing as I did that I might lapse into hallucination at any moment. I was guiltily aware that I had a secret that I must at all costs hide from Sergeant Miller and all his colleagues. If they found cause to doubt that I was in full control of my faculties, I'd certainly be back in place as a suspect.

  I almost had the door closed behind him when he suddenly turned back. Maybe he'd been watching too much television, or maybe it really had just occurred to him on the spur of the moment.

  'Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just one more thing. Miss Charet had a mark on her neck close to the wound. It wasn't inflicted by the knife. It looked rather like a lovebite. I'm sorry to have to ask, but were you responsible for that?'

  'No,’ I said. ‘She had this habit of rubbing and pinching a fold of skin, whenever she was nervous or concentrating hard. She did it herself. It was just a habit.'

  He raised his eyebrows slightly. ‘Do you have a similar habit, Mr Molari?’ he asked.

  'No,’ I said. ‘Why?'

  He looked genuinely puzzled—not, I gathered, by the no but rather by the why. As soon as he'd turned away, I went to the bathroom to look into the mirror. Sure enough, there it was: a mark on my neck, a little like a lovebite, exactly like the one that Anne had.

  I touched it gingerly. It felt sore.

  As I drew my fingers away, I saw the marks on the back of my hand: the psychosomatic bruises which my body had produced in response to my vision of the comic-book vampire who'd laid his icy hand on mine. They looked sufficiently similar to convince me that the mark on my neck had exactly the same origin—but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what they signified.

  5

  I didn't go to the hospital immediately. When I'd washed and changed my clothes I felt a whole lot better, and not nearly as weak as when I answered the door, but I did feel ravenous. I hadn't eaten anything for more than twenty-four hours, and my body knew it.

  I took the return of my appetite as a sign of returning health, and became convinced that once I'd filled my stomach the worst effects of the virus attack would be well and truly over. My throat still felt a little sore, but the rawness was fading, and I didn't need aspirin to soothe my head. I congratulated my immune system on the alacrity of its response, and even began to feel quite pleased with my flirtation with the escaped bug. One particularly vivid hallucination, experienced while I was literally incapable of taking any action, suddenly seemed to be something of interest, well worth the price of the minor symptoms and the momentary anxiety.

  I resolved to write an exhaustive account of the entire episode when I had time, but it didn't seem urgent. However awful delirium seems at the time, it fades quickly from the memory once the system is up and running again. The better I became, the better able I felt to look back on my experience and laugh.

  I ate a bowl of cereal, then finished off the rest of the fresh milk that had been delivered that morning, but I still felt hungry. I knew that there was a burger bar on the corner of St Saviour's Square which served ‘all-day breakfasts', so I put my jacket on and went for it, full speed ahead. My step was still a mite leaden, but the thought of hot solid food pulled me through. It was an English imitation burger bar, not a real McDonald's, and it served a thoroughly English breakfast—thick sausages, greasy bacon, eggs sunny side up, glutinous fried bread and thin strings of black pudding—but the whole thing looked like the fruits of paradise to me. I washed it down with tea so strong that the metallic taste of tannin stung my tongue.

  When I finished, I felt full—not entirely satisfied, but full. I leaned back in my chair, and remembered what the creepy guy in the old-fashioned cloak had said.

  'When the hunger comes, feed it.'

  'Right on,’ I murmured. ‘You got it, brother.'

  A slight tingle ran up and down my spine, but it was just a momentary awkwardness kicked off by my deliberate dalliance with an uncomfortable memory. The guy with the eyes had promised me that he would be back, but I couldn't believe it.

  'You're history, brother', I told him, silently. ‘You got chewed up and spat out by Molari's Marauders, the greatest antibodies in the world.'

  It was childish, but it served its purpose. No more shivers crawled along the length of my spine.

  There was a post office next to the burger bar and I went in to buy a phonecard. I bought Mercury because the Mercury phones in the square hardly ever got a visit from the local vandals and there was never a queue to use them. I rang the department and got through to Viners.

  'Professor Viners?’ I said. ‘This is Gil Molari. I thought I'd better ring to explain why I haven't been in for a couple of days. I picked up some kind of virus and it really laid me low. I don't have a phone in the flat and this is the first time I've been out in three days.'

  'Did you have any experiments in progress?’ he asked, as businesslike as ever. Not ‘What kind of virus, Gil?’ Not ‘How are you feeling now?'

  'No. I was going to set up another run on Wednesday, but it can wait. Look, Professor, I don't think I'll be in today either. My girlfriend was hurt last night. She's in the hospital. She was attacked in the wood near Wombwell House—maybe you heard about it?'

  'I heard about the attack,’ he said, in a markedly different tone. ‘Was she badly hurt?'

  'I don't know. The policeman who quizzed me about it said not. She got stabbed and lost some blood, but they gave her a transfusion and stitched her up. Apparently she's expected to come round any time. I ought to be there. Her parents live way up north and they probably won't be able to get here until this afternoon. Somebody ought to be there.'

  'Of course. Is there anything at all that needs to be done here? Teresa can take care of it, if it's only routine.'

  Teresa can take care of a lot of things, I thought, uncharitably.

  'No, it's okay. I'll be in tomorrow to get things going again.'

  The digital display on the phone was running through the units on the card with cruel precision, and it was hinting ve
ry strongly that I ought to ring off if I wanted to preserve its usefulness for another day. But Viners wasn't quite ready to say goodbye.

  'There's no rush, Gil,’ he said. ‘I don't want you to come in until you're fully recovered. Given the kind of work we do, we can't afford to import infectious agents into the lab.'

  It struck me as a peculiarly bizarre comment, though it shouldn't have. I wondered whether he was worried about our viruses catching something, but I knew even as I formed the thought that it wasn't what he meant. We had an awful lot of animals around, and tissue cultures specifically designed to play host to viruses. Sterile technique is supposed to work both ways, but it's easy to get careless with things that aren't part of your present experiment.

  'I'm fine,’ I assured him. ‘It was just one of those short-lived things. Hasn't anyone else had it? These trivial things usually go round like wildfire.’ I tried, perhaps too hard, to sound matter-of-fact.

  'It's only natural to be anxious,’ he said. I knew he was talking about my anxieties, not his. ‘I've had half a dozen colds since I first brought the experimental bugs into the lab. I always start keeping track of my symptoms, studying my dreams. It wasn't easy training Teresa to cope with those kinds of fears, but I finally managed to persuade her that she was producing her own symptoms under the spur of her suspicions. I know what you've been thinking, Gil, and there's no need to be ashamed of it. You seem to have coped very well. Come in when you're sure you're one hundred per cent, and not before.'

  He was being kind, and there wasn't the slightest reason to doubt his sincerity in spite of the colourlessness of his tone. Even so, my instinctive reaction was resentful. Clever bastard, I thought. But it was the resentment of a man who had an uncomfortable feeling that he'd been found out. An hour before, I'd been certain that I'd had a close encounter with an authentic psychotropic virus. Now, the doubts had come back. Maybe, I thought, I had manufactured my own symptoms. Maybe I'd seen the comic-book vampire because I'd expected to see something, and he had been all that my subconscious had been able to come up with on the spur of the moment.

  'I'm okay,’ I told him, dully. ‘I have to go now, Professor. I have to go to the hospital.'

  'Goodbye, Gil,’ he said, as precisely as ever. ‘Thanks for letting me know.'

  It wasn't until I'd hung up and retrieved my card that I suddenly homed in on what he'd said about Teresa. I had a sudden vision—entirely the product of my own imagination—of Teresa sitting in Viners’ office, tearfully telling him how convinced she was that she'd infected herself, and what terrible hallucinations she'd been having. It didn't take a genius to work out exactly how Viners would reply to her, and what tone of voice he'd use. It was a little more difficult, but only a little, to visualize Viners talking to himself, telling himself very precisely that whatever he'd experienced was only a dream, easily accountable in terms of self-induced fears.

  I knew that the scenes would both have run in exactly the same way whether the two of them really had picked up one of the experimental viruses or not. They could have infected themselves without ever admitting it. Either or both of them.

  It was a cold, sunny day and the square was crowded with shoppers. I was full to the brim with traditional English breakfast. Maldureve was fading fast into the uncertain mists of memory. It could happen to anyone, I thought. Anyhow, every damn virus has some psychotropic effects. Even if a virus did hook into my inner dream-machine to cook up something out of the ordinary, it doesn't prove that it was one from the labs. But then I touched my fingertips to my neck, and looked at the bruises on the back of my hand. The stigmata were still there.

  There wasn't any way out of the maze of uncertainty, I realised. Psychosomatic bruises were no proof of alien intervention; nor was the clear sight and sound of a creature who was so obviously based in a camp fictional stereotype. No matter how hard I thought about it, I couldn't reach any kind of conclusion. The sensible thing was to stop and tell myself that it didn't really matter, at the end of the day, whether the virus I'd caught had been one of ours or not. Either way, it had to be something in my own psyche that had shaped the particular hallucination. The virus wasn't some kind of prerecorded videotape, and it had never read a comic book in its life. Maldureve had to be mine, no matter what had provoked his enigmatic appearance. If he were to be explained, he had to be explained in terms of what he symbolised and signified in the context of my memories and fears, not in terms of the origin of the DNA which had invaded my bloodstream and my brain chemistry.

  I resolved to give the matter further consideration when I had time to do it.

  I had to check the route map in the bus station to figure out how to get to the county hospital, but it wasn't far and the relevant bus didn't leave for a quarter of an hour. I set out to walk, figuring that the exercise would do me good. Maybe it did, but I didn't feel it. I got tired very quickly, and even though breakfast was still sitting on my stomach like a sack of beans I had also gotten hungry again with remarkable rapidity. By the time I arrived at reception to enquire where Anne was, I needed to sit down.

  That was perhaps as well, because they told me unceremoniously that she hadn't come round yet, and that I couldn't go in to see her until she did.

  I went where I was told to go, and ended up on a wooden bench, whose only other occupant was a very bored policewoman. At first she just glanced at me, but then she suddenly perked up.

  'You're her boyfriend, aren't you?’ she said. She didn't sound accusative—if anything, she sounded glad to have someone to talk to.

  'Yes,’ I said, shortly. I didn't want an action replay of what I'd been through with Detective Miller.

  'She'll be okay. I saw the wound—it wasn't deep, just ragged. It's just a matter of waiting until she wakes up.'

  'I know.'

  'DS Miller's seen you?'

  'That's right.'

  'He had to question you,’ she said defensively, having inferred from my tone that I hadn't much enjoyed making Miller's acquaintance. ‘It's nothing personal. We're pretty sure that rape was the motive for the attack, and statistically speaking most victims of attempted rape know their attackers. Even though this one followed a classic pattern, we had to look at all the possibilities.'

  'I realize that,’ I admitted. I made an effort to relax. The policewoman seemed sincere enough.

  'I'm WPC Linton,’ she said. ‘What's your name?'

  'Gil. Gil Molari.'

  'You're American.'

  I was briefly tempted to be sarcastic and award her full marks for observation, but I bit it back, because she didn't deserve it, and just said: ‘Yeah. I'm over here doing postgrad research.'

  'She's a pretty girl,’ said the policewoman, reflectively. ‘Very frail, though. Must have taken guts to fight back against a man with a knife. The standard advice is not to fight, not to get hurt—but getting raped is getting hurt, and letting it happen can get the hurt all confused with guilt and shame. I think she did the right thing. When she wakes up, you be sure to tell her what a brave girl she was. You make her feel good about herself, okay?'

  'I'll do what I can,’ I promised. ‘I'd have been with her if it hadn't been for this damned virus I picked up. It should never have happened. I told her to stay home. She shouldn't have taken that path when she was on her own. Not at night.'

  'Don't tell her that,’ said the policewoman. ‘Don't say anything that might make her blame herself. She'll need some help to get over this, and you mustn't make things more difficult than they are. I'll try to take things gently, but I have to get answers to some questions. It'll be up to you to make her feel better. Do you see what I'm saying?'

  I did see. I could see perfectly clearly.

  'How many of these guys do you actually catch?’ I asked. My throat had gone dry, and the tiredness induced by the walk seemed to be spreading slowly through my body.

  'It depends,’ she said. ‘This time, we have a good chance. The attacker must have got blood on his clothes, you s
ee. There's every chance that someone saw him before he could change. And if we do find him, there'll be stains somewhere—something we can use for evidence. Are you all right, Gil?'

  I wasn't. I'd lost track of what she was saying. I didn't want to listen to any more, but there was nowhere to go.

  'Sorry,’ I said, faintly. ‘Aftereffects of the virus, I guess. I'll be okay in a minute.'

  Embarrassed because I was under observation, I let out a deep breath, putting my tiredness on public display. Then I tilted my head back, looking up at the neon strip-light which lit the corridor. I didn't shut my eyes against its glare; I wanted to be dazzled. Miniature suns exploded in my eyes as the receptor cells in my retina were overloaded, blinding me. Then I looked away, knowing that the sunbursts would linger, blinding me for ten or twenty seconds.

  Something suddenly came hurtling out of the clouds of light—something which couldn't possibly have been there. There were shapes made out of coloured light, flying things with flaming feathers and huge round staring eyes, things with claws which reached out for me avidly and angrily.

  I shut my eyes, hard, but that had no effect at all. The things were already inside me, and it was all I could do not to gasp in terror.

  The sunbursts were dying away, and the shapes died with them, but I couldn't suppress the feeling that they'd flown into the dark recesses of my mind, to hide from consciousness until the opportunity came for them to surge forth again to rend me and lacerate me with those claws.

  'Are you sure you'll be okay?’ asked WPC Linton.

  'Sure,’ I lied. ‘Just a twinge.'

  It wasn't until I'd said it that I realised that my hand, as if impelled by some unsuspected reflex, had gone to my neck, and that my fingers were plucking nervously at the mark which had somehow appeared there during the last few days, just as Anne's fingers had so often plucked at hers.