Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  'He loved me!’ I whispered. I wanted to say ‘loves’ instead of ‘loved', but he had let me down!

  'You made him love you, Anne. You imbued him with that love while you imbued him with solidity. You brought him out of the shadows as a demon lover, an answer to a perverse prayer. But you could not make him love your lover, or your lover's lover. His love is exclusive to you, Anne, but his hatred knows no bounds. You can summon spirits from the vast deep, Anne, and bind them to your whim, but you cannot reserve them to yourself, or forbid their true nature. Maldureve is a killer, Anne—a plague and a pestilence. Maldureve must be returned whence he came, or the world will be the worse for it. What the world needs is wisdom, Anne; what the world needs is enlightenment; what the world needs, in spite of their disquieting eyes, in spite of their sharp claws, is the owls.'

  'I wanted him.’ I told them. ‘I wanted him so much. If he's evil, so am I. If he's a destroyer, so am I. I wanted him and I want him still. I crave his love, his touch, his glamour. If he were only here, I would cleave to him and beg him to destroy you all. I am his mirror, reflecting his soul in mine. Were I to turn against him, I would be turning against myself.’ And yet, I remembered, when I required as much from him he let me down!

  'Desire springs from the shadows,’ the owls told me, gently and without anger. ‘Sometimes half-formed, sometimes fully formed, sometimes fine and sometimes monstrous. You need not be ashamed of misshapen desires, Anne. But desire is only desire, and cannot compel action unless the will capitulates. You must be the mistress of desire, Anne, and not its slave. Although you want Maldureve, still you must return him to his own place. All appetites require restraint, Anne, lest they make us bloated and surfeit-sick. To turn against an appetite which, if left unchecked, would bring you to disaster, is not to turn against yourself: it is merely to protect yourself. You must defend yourself against Maldureve, Anne, else he will destroy you, and much else besides. You must hunt down the vampire in his lair, Anne, else he will spill and spoil more innocent blood, and unleash more monsters on the helpless world.'

  'How can I believe you?’ I complained. ‘How do I know that what you tell me is true?'

  'We wear no cloak of darkness,’ they replied. ‘We live in clarity; we are the light. You may grant solidity to us as easily as you gave solidity to Maldureve; you may be our reflection as easily as you have been his. He is a dark idol, which forbids you sight and light. Cast him down! We are the emblems of the light, whose honesty is plain to see. Deliver him to us, that we may turn his evil into good. Only love us, Anne, as you have loved Maldureve, and we will fly with you to the true heights of ecstasy and show you the true blaze of glory. Only consent to love us, dear Anne, as you have loved the darkness of misshapen desire, and we will teach you wisdom: wisdom alloyed with ecstasy.'

  'I didn't do anything wrong,’ I complained. ‘I didn't deserve what happened. I didn't do anything wrong.'

  'The past is the past,’ they told me. ‘The future is still to be made. It always remains to make a new beginning. The light is always there, Anne; there to be seen and there to be chosen. There are those who hide in the shadows, afraid of the light, and there are those who open their eyes, to behold the glory. Choose the light, Anne. Choose wisdom. Deny Maldureve, the betrayer. Only learn to love the light, and the shadows can never claim you.'

  It was all rhetoric, of course. I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean. But locked in a cage of light as I was, it wasn't easy to oppose the flood of words, the entreaties, the power of the staring eyes. In the end, it simply wasn't possible. And they did begin, in their own bewildering way, to teach me the beginnings of wisdom.

  They made good their initial promises, of course, just as Maldureve had made good on his. They loved me, and made me delirious with love of them. They flew me to the promised heights of ecstasy, bathed me in the promised blaze of glory.

  I loved it. I even managed to convince myself that I understood. Pleasure is a powerful agent of persuasion, perhaps more powerful than pain. The owls had command of both, while I was in their world. What alternative did I have but to yield to their demands and their seductions, and to hope that when the time came, they wouldn't let me down?

  One question remained unresolved, as it had to. One question couldn't be answered, or put to the test, until I was returned to the world of objects and sensory perception. One question remained, upon which everything would ultimately hang.

  When it came to a matter of life and death, could the owls come to my aid, as Maldureve had failed to do? If and when I came under dire threat, would they do their utmost to save me? Would they serve me to the very limits of their courage and ability? Or would they, in the end, leave me to my own resources?

  I didn't know. I told myself it didn't matter, that I would be no worse off even if they failed me, as the powers of darkness already had. But I desperately wanted to believe that they wouldn't, that there was something I could rely on, something that would never let me down. Maybe it was a weakness in me, but I needed something.

  I needed hope—and hope, for me, was what the owls became.

  5

  The ward was never quiet, even at night. There was always someone moving or sniffing, always the sound of people shuffling back and forth. I could always hear the muffled footfalls of the people in the ward above, and porters shoving trolleys about the corridors. There was always something to be a nuisance, to prevent the ultimate fall of silence.

  I found, unfortunately, that in the matter of sleep I had gone from one extreme to the other. For days no one had been able to wake me, no matter how they tried; now, by contrast, I found it impossible to surrender my grip on wakefulness. At first I took the pills the ward sister offered me, but they only seemed to make me drowsy and restless; they didn't actually knock me out. I didn't like feeling that my head was full of cotton wool and that my legs wouldn't be comfortable no matter how I arranged them, so I eventually decided to let nature take its course and try not to worry about the insomnia. After all, I thought, what's so bad about being alert? Why not just lie patiently awake, appreciating the relative peace and absence of pressure?

  I'd never been the kind of person to be easily bored; I was always good at thinking about things, always an expert daydreamer. Anyhow, I had plans to make.

  The ward's indigenous shadows had a meeting place in the corner where my bed was. The nurse on night duty had her station at the far end of the ward, and the light on her desk was carefully hooded so that it wouldn't annoy anyone else. At first, when the other lights were switched out, the darkness around me would seem profound and absolute, but it didn't take long for the subtler shades to come creeping in, dividing the not-quite-darkness into an awesomely complex pattern.

  All through the first night of my voluntary insomnia, as I lay patiently awake, I kept wondering whether Maldureve would come, rising up from the shadow webs like a silent spider. I thought he might want to see me. I thought he ought to want to see me. When he didn't come, I wondered what his absence signified. Had he simply moved on to some other lover, some rich and untapped source of rich, sweet blood? Was he ashamed of the fact that he hadn't come to help me when I needed him so desperately? Did he know that the owls would have done their utmost to convert me to their cause and turn me against him? And did he know, if so, that they had succeeded? Did he lack the courage to plead his own case, to try to change my mind yet again? Or was he afraid that I'd leap up from my hospital bed, clad only in a white nightie, with a sharpened stake ready in my hand?

  It was all pure speculation. He didn't come. I didn't know whether I should be disappointed or glad. I didn't know whether I was disappointed or glad.

  Again, on the second of my lie-awake nights, I half expected something to happen. It didn't. On the third, I expected nothing; such is the determined perversity of circumstance that I was wrong again.

  At first, when the shadows stirred, I assumed that it was Maldureve, and made the effort to be ready to face hi
m. I simply took it for granted that anything trying to emerge from the darkness of the borderlands in my vicinity had to be my very own demon lover.

  I didn't try to help him. I just watched the shadows shifting, trying to become something more than shadows, trying to acquire mass and form. I figured that Maldureve deserved to struggle a little, to feel the drag of my indifference, to know that his welcome was withdrawn. I didn't suppose that it would stop him, because I knew full well that I couldn't take back the consent I'd already given him, the power I'd already lent to him, the blood with which I'd fed him. I knew that he didn't need me in order to be real; I just hoped that without me, he'd find it a little less easy, a little less comfortable.

  But I saw, in the end, that it wasn't Maldureve at all.

  'Anne!’ said a thin voice, which seemed to be borne on a slow and bitter wind from a very long way away. ‘Anne! For the love of God, Anne, help me!'

  For the love of God? It seemed like an odd reason, a remarkably careless figure of speech. According to my understanding, the lovers of God are supposed to turn their backs on voices like that, refusing to hear them. The lovers of God are not supposed to play necromancer. I was a witch and a vampire, albeit one who had allied herself with the owls. A more rational plea would surely have been in order.

  I didn't recognize the voice—not at first.

  I was a little bit afraid, but in a peculiar sort of way. It wasn't like the first time I'd heard Maldureve, when momentary fear had transformed itself by magic into something warm yet secretly sinister, but it was just as strange and unexpected. I was afraid, because something was trying to come to me out of the dark borderlands: something kin to Maldureve and not to the owls; something which might easily reckon me an enemy and want to do me harm. But I also felt a surge of triumphant self-esteem, to hear it calling to me, begging me for help. I knew that it needed me in order to take shape, in order to put on substance, in order really to be. I knew that the plaintive voice might only be a means of seduction, or a shabby trick, but still I had to help it. It needed me.

  'Anne! Please! You have to help me, Anne! I can't exist without you, Anne! I love you, Anne! I love you!'

  The voice was so faint, so very near to the threshold of audibility, that there was no hope at all of recognising it, but the words told me who it was. He couldn't even give himself a name without my warrant, but he could identify himself by means of his feeling: the emotional core of his being.

  'Gil?’ I asked, very softly. I spoke the name aloud, but in the merest of whispers. There were others in the ward whose stertorous breathing was louder by far. No one standing at the foot of the bed could have heard me, but Gil was much closer than that, for all that he seemed so very far away.

  'Please, Anne! Please, please, please!’ No longer ‘for the love of God', not even as a figure of speech. For love of Gil, and that alone.

  'You're dead, Gil,’ I whispered. ‘They told me that you're dead.’ But I wasn't denying his existence. I wasn't trying to make the shadows be still by exorcising the spirit which was moving within them. I wasn't rejecting him at all. I was simply wondering. For those who have accepted the reality of vampires, the possible existence of ghosts can be taken for granted—and yet, I knew how empty of ghosts the world and its borderlands seemed to be. Even if one in seven of all the people who have ever lived are alive today, that implies that the spirits of the dead should vastly outnumber the living—but I had gone into the Marquis of Membury's Garden at dead of night a dozen times and more, to be partner to the creature of the shadows, and I had never seen the dead, or any evidence that their echoes still wandered the Earth. From the very beginning, I knew that if Gil was now a ghost, he was exceptional. His phantom state of being was not the common heritage of all the dead.

  'Help me, Anne!’ he begged.

  In life, he had been so confident, so strong, so casually dominant. All the advantages had been his: age, size, sex, even nationality. Everything about his living being had made him master over mine. It didn't matter that he was just a young man, uncertain, unwise and inexperienced. He was still so much greater and more competent than I. Living, he had been entitled to determine the form of our relationship, to steer it, to take command...

  Now that he was dead, it was a very different matter.

  I was alive, possessed of solidity by right; he was merely a shade, who came to plead for the thinnest, weakest semblance of solidity as a gift. More than that: I was a creature of the light, entitled to walk in brightness; he was a thing of darkness, a haunter of the night. I had learned not merely to live in light, but to glory in the sublimity of brightness. I was now a daughter of the owls. What was he, by comparison?

  'What do you want, Gil?’ I asked him. It was not as ungracious a question as it might have seemed. Of course I was glad to hear his voice, flattered to think that he had returned even from beyond the grave to see me and hear my voice. He had been called back from the infinite abyss by love, and that was a marvel in itself. I could understand well enough how mourning lovers, desperate with loneliness, might be entirely willing to grope about in the shadows which surrounded them, desperate for one last scarcely audible word or one last scarcely tangible touch, deeply grateful for the experience, not able to care whether it might be evidence of their supreme sensitivity or their incipient insanity. I was not ungrateful for Gil's attempt to manifest himself, nor scornful of the effort which it represented ... but I still needed to ask. I needed to know why he had come, and why he wanted me to grant him presence.

  'I have to tell you,’ he said, his voice half strangled by effort. ‘I have to tell you about the girl ... about Maldureve ...'

  What better reason could there be? I thought.

  I tried with all my might to see him. I stared into the uncertain shadows with all the intensity I could muster, trying to perceive his shape, trying to find him and bring him forth from dreary obscurity. I wanted him to feel the warmth of his own dear flesh about him; I wanted him to be sensible of the beating of his poor ghostly heart.

  With my help, he was eventually able to come and stand beside me.

  I could understand why people who have seen ghosts—actual or imaginary—are commonly frightened by them. It is not that they wear the image of something terrible, but that they defy the most basic suppositions which we have about the order of things. They are here and gone; dead and alive; present and absent. They are insults to the principle of the excluded middle. They are more difficult to believe in than vampires, which merely have to be added on to the world we know, at its mysterious fringe. Ghosts violate our most fundamental frameworks of understanding; they are implicitly terrifying. Even to suspect their existence is to entertain a uniquely deep anxiety, a profound sense of the world's malaise.

  I was afraid, but I was also proud. I smiled.

  'You love me,’ I said to him. I was no more sure of that, really, than most people are about the protestations of their living lovers, but I felt fully entitled to say it, to make my claim.

  'I killed her, Anne,’ he said, evidently under some pressure of urgency. ‘I killed that child. I couldn't help myself!'

  He killed her, but he couldn't help himself. That's what they all say, of course. The rapist with the knife and the filthy gloves might well have said the same thing. How can we ever tell which ones, if any, are telling the truth, and which ones are simply cynical, or desperate?

  'You have to understand,’ he said, in a voice which was still as thin as the susurrus which always surrounds us when there are others sharing the same space as ourselves: the ever-present susurrus which screens out the beating of our own hearts and the babbling of the blood in our veins. 'I want you to understand.'

  'I do understand,’ I told him. I thought I did. I knew that it must have been the hunger. I hadn't been there to help him. I should have explained, even though I knew that he wouldn't believe me at first. I should have been there to guide him, to help him to be a loving vampire, to teach him to drink with
care and consideration and maybe even love. How could he help but become a slave to his exotic passion, when he didn't know?

  'It was the virus,’ he told me. ‘I think I understand what happened now. It was weirder than even I could imagine, at first, but I think I understand. My immune system didn't form any antibodies. The virus became integrated into my own DNA. It didn't act like a virus at all; it just took up residence, probably in the brain tissue. It's like a jigsaw; you have to have the slot which fits the projection, the curve which matches the curve, but if you have, you can just incorporate the viral DNA. It replicates, but it replicates under control. It doesn't destroy the cells. Teresa's probably just a carrier ... maybe Viners too. You have to tell Viners, Anne. You have to make him understand. But above all else, you have to protect yourself. I don't know whether it can incorporate in you, or what it will do to you if it can, but you have it too.'

  'Never mind all that,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘Tell me about Maldureve.'

  'He's a product of the virus, Anne. He's the way my mind conceptualised the virus ... symbolised it. You can't sense a virus directly. You can't see or feel it, but you can translate its presence, its action, into images. That's what delirium is ... maybe that's what all dreams are. It's all part of the underlying chemistry of consciousness. You have to tell Viners what's happening. You have to make him understand. The virus he and Teresa are carrying is dangerous. It needed a lock to fit its key, but when it found one, it began to create monsters. I don't know what the odds were against the viral DNA finding the appropriate matrix, but once the key was in the lock, the whole thing became a different ballgame. For the love of God, Anne, you have to explain to him what happened. It made me kill the little girl. It made me kill myself. He's got to destroy it, wipe it out. First, you've got to make him understand. He's got to know what's happening here. I thought it would be enough to give him the blood, but he only looked for the antibodies. He thinks we're both clear, but we're not. Anne, we have to fight it. We have to make Viners understand.'