Young Blood

by Brian M Stableford

  I don't say that I wasn't scared, but if you're not scared, how can you be a hero?

  In time, when my feet ached enough, and the thirst burning away inside my gut was fierce enough, and my face was scratched enough, and my eyes were red-rimmed enough, I came again to the threshold at which I had hesitated: the open doorway dressed with the gauze of spider webs, which taunted me with their insubstantiality while their dark and poisonous spinners lay in wait.

  'This time,’ I said to them, in Gil's voice, ‘it won't be enough. This time, I'm coming through.'

  The spiders stirred, uneasily. The shadows beyond the portal were even more restless, as though they already felt the beginnings of panic.

  I knew what to do; I had worked it out. To some, I suppose, it would have seemed to be a very conventional answer, perhaps even a cowardly answer, but it didn't seem to me to be entirely inappropriate. We have to make use of the resources which are given to us, you see. It's not wrong to exploit the opportunities inherent in the injustices which we find in the world. It's not wrong to call on the aid of whoever and whatever is ready to come to your assistance. You have to play the cards you're dealt, including the black aces.

  I got down on my knees and deliberately retched. I held my bloated belly as best I could with my cluttered hands, and I opened my throat as wide as I could, trying with all my might to vomit up the contents of my sick, strained stomach. It wasn't easy. It wasn't nearly as easy to bring him up as it had been to take him in, and it wasn't pleasurable at all, but I did it. I felt him flow from the coils of my gut and my stomach into my oesophagus, and up through my narrow throat. He wasn't much more solid now than he had been when I'd let him in, but still I gagged and gasped as he surged into my mouth and out into the world. He seemed to be absolutely enormous, and there seemed to be no end to his wriggling exodus.

  It was, I suppose, a birth of sorts; or a rebirth. The pain of it made me feel as if I were being rudely split in two, but in the end Gil's ghost came out, all wet with my blood, ready and eager to do what was required of him. He stood up, tall and strong and full of righteous wrath, and he laughed. He didn't say anything, but he laughed as though with the sheer delight of being in the world, and being capable of action.

  Without any hesitation, he leaped into the trailing nets of spider silk, laughing ever more uproariously as he tore at them with his feverish fingers.

  The spiders fell upon him in their black and horrid multitudes, avid for his destruction. They spewed their poison into him, and their digestive juices too. Spiders can only feed on what they first reduce to liquid; they must make the mead which they aspire to drink. But Gil was a creature of the shadowlands, and the solidity which I had donated to him was incorruptible by monsters as shabby and surly as these. Moving like lightning, he grabbed the spiders one by one as they came within his reach and stuffed them into his mouth, swallowing them down with rapid, greedy gulps.

  The meal was not the work of minutes, for there were so many, but I could bear to wait. It did me good to see him so happy, and to see him wax so fat on arachnid flesh.

  The spiders never relented in their assault. They never turned to run and hide. Spiders have neither courage nor cowardice; they are prisoners of instinct. Nothing disturbs or illuminates that dark non-consciousness which they have instead of true minds. It makes no difference to creatures of that kind whether they are predators or prey. They are, in the final analysis, simply the instruments of the strands of DNA which designed them: collaborative endeavours of communities of viruses; sacrificed pawns in the everlasting game of evolution. They have no chance at all against an authentic player.

  When the feast was over, Gil's laughter was reduced to a chortling giggle, and he scrupulously stood aside, beckoning me to cross the threshold. As I went past him he bowed like a pageboy, but he followed me quickly enough, eager to make merry with the shadows.

  I went into the centre of the room—the very heart of the innermost sanctum of my being. In my right hand I still carried the torch; in my left, the stake. The heavy torch, I knew, would readily double as a mallet. I felt that there was a certain propriety in using my source of illumination as a dual-purpose tool, in my coming to strike a fatal blow with a ray of pure white light.

  Maldureve was lying in his coffin, as I had known that he would be. He too was a prisoner of his nature, a captive of his role, a helpless instrument of legend. Vampires are bound by the imagination of their creators, and can only win partial release through the revisions of their summoners. At the end of the day they can only be what they are. They can only end as they must, because they aren't human. They have no part to play in the deceptive but ineluctable process which is the progress of mind and intelligence.

  When I placed the point of the stake above his heart, he woke up. I knew that he would. I wanted him to. I wanted us to be able to look one another in the face, to be honest about our relationship, to understand why it had to be this way. I wanted to be able to feel sorry for him.

  He reached up with his right hand, and gently stroked my cheek.

  'My dearest Anne,’ he said, ‘you don't need to do this. It's perverse to argue that each must kill the thing she loves. You loved me, Anne, with all your heart, and knew that I loved you. You didn't care that I was born of shadows and remained a creature of the dark. That was part of what you loved in me, I know. That was what thrilled you: the ecstasy of reckless surrender: the relentless surge of the eager, innocent blood. It isn't too late to forgive and forget, Anne. It isn't too late to choose my way. We can hunt together, you and I. We can share eternity.'

  Gil was no longer inside me. I couldn't speak with his voice. I couldn't talk to Maldureve the way Gil had, because I had never learned to see him in the way Gil had. I had always looked at Maldureve with love, and thought of him with fondness.

  But he had let me down.

  'I have to go my own way,’ I told him. ‘I'm sorry, but that's the way it is. I wish I could simply walk away, but I can't. You're part of me, and I have to master you if I'm ever to be free.'

  'Don't do it, Anne,’ he said. It didn't seem as though he were begging or pleading. He still had dignity, and he still had style. ‘Come closer, and let me taste your blood. Let me drink, one last time.’ He smiled as he said it, with conspiratorial slyness. He knew that I knew well enough how fatal such a compact would be.

  'I don't want you to hate me,’ I told him. ‘I don't want you to be angry. I want you to understand. I know how much you fear the owls, but that's what I am, really. There's far more owl in me than bat, at any rate. There's far more light than darkness. I need the light, my love. I need the spaces of the real world, the cold of winter and the comfort of clarity. If you truly love me, you'll let me go, willingly. If you truly love me, you'll sacrifice yourself for me now, and make up for the fact that you let me down before.'

  He took back his hand, as though I'd hurt him.

  'What does love have to do with it?’ he asked, bitterly. ‘It's just a word we use when we try to make people do what we want. It doesn't mean anything.'

  'Yes it does,’ I told him. ‘I loved you, and you loved me, and that's all we have left.'

  'It doesn't make sense,’ he complained. It couldn't, to him. He was kin to the poisonous spiders and the swinish faces and the filthy mouths. He didn't have the wisdom of the owls to help him to understand. No matter how hard I tried to make him understand, he couldn't and wouldn't see sense. If he'd been able to, he would have leaped up from his deathbed to tear out my throat and feed upon my liquid soul. But he couldn't. He was a prisoner of legend.

  In legend, evil always has that crucial moment of vulnerability, where it lies naked beneath the killing force of a deus ex machina. That was precisely what I held in my two hands, the god in my right and the machine in my left. All that was necessary was to bring them together, to strike one final, fatal blow.

  Maldureve looked about him in panic. He was imploring the shadows for help. He was looking to othe
rs of his own kind to surge forth from the restless darkness: an irresistible legion of ghouls and goblins. But wherever the shadows were, Gil was too. He was dancing and laughing and playing the fool, in a way he never had when he was alive. He was all California sunlight, all California irreverence. In the bottomless pit of my being, he was indestructible.

  'None of it makes sense,’ said Maldureve again, despairingly. It was the last and weakest argument in the world, and it was wrong. That was what the owls had taught me. Things always make sense. You might not always like the kind of sense they make, but they always make sense, if only you can put them in the right light.

  'Never mind whether any of it makes sense or not,’ I told him. ‘Just tell me that you love me. Tell me that you understand what I have to do. Lie, if you have to. Just tell me.'

  'I love you,’ he said, faintly.

  I smashed the heel of the torch against the end of the stake as hard as I could. It penetrated easily, driving in between Maldureve's ribs, passing clean through his heart and his left lung. The vampire gasped, as if in astonishment—and then he smiled.

  He gasped, I suppose, with tremendous surprise and a little delight, and smiled with more than a little gratitude. He had finally lost the stern and sterile virginity of his undeath. I, on the other hand, felt an enormous sense of relief and peace.

  The gloomy room was filled with white light, and the owls filled the air with their raucous cries of triumph.

  It was all over. The crisis had passed.

  I was free.

  Then, shading my eyes from the dazzling light, I reached out again with my left hand. I grasped the end of the stake which I had hammered into Maldureve's heart, and I slowly pulled it out. The light which had brought the owls flickered and flashed, like lightning in a storm. The owls screeched and screamed, all their triumph turning to rage.

  'No!’ Gil howled. ‘No! No! No!'

  They didn't understand.

  I placed my hand upon the wound that I'd made in Maldureve's heart: the ragged, gaping wound from which blood was gushing in a hideous red flood. With the palm of my hand I stemmed the flow, and when the flood had slowed to a trickle I reached inside the wound to the vampire's ruined heart. I began to massage it gently and soothingly, and I felt the flesh begin to liquefy beneath my magical touch.

  He wasn't dead. Vampires can't really be destroyed, they can only be banished from the world, made to lie quiet and impotent in tombs of shadow. Vampires can always return. They can also be transformed.

  Nothing is beyond the power of transformation. Nothing ever can be. Change, not death, is the one and only certainty of life. We don't crumble to ashes and to dust, as the god-fearing pretend; our flesh becomes the flesh of others, and may in time return full circle to be incorporate once again in human beings. Nothing is ever lost while life goes on.

  With the power that he himself had given me, I healed Maldureve's heart. And with the wisdom that the owls had begun to impart, I healed his soul. When I eventually took my hand away, I bent low over his cradle, and offered him my throat. I offered him my blood to drink, so that he might become whole again, so that he might begin to grow.

  I wasn't afraid.

  I wasn't afraid of dying, and I wasn't afraid of the hunger. I believed with all my heart that I knew what I was doing. Maldureve had loved me, and I had loved him. I had called him forth from the shadows within my soul, and had made him welcome. How could I betray him now? How could I use my power to obliterate him from my being? How could I erase him, when he had signed his name across my heart?

  After all, I had let it all happen. I hadn't been under any kind of magic spell, and I hadn't been mesmerised. There was no point in fudging the issue. I had let it happen, because I had wanted him more than anything on earth. He was part of me now.

  He was part of me, always and for ever.

  Aftermath:

  Rehabilitation

  1

  I knew that it would be a lot of work, and a big change, but it was what I wanted to do. It was the only thing I wanted to do. I had every reason to feel that it was important work, and that nobody had more right to be part of it than me. I think Professor Viners knew that too, the first time he talked to me about the possibility. I hadn't taken my finals then, but the rules said that I had to put my application form in ahead of time and he called me for interview right away.

  'I'd normally be looking for someone with a degree in the biological sciences to do this kind of postgraduate work,’ he said. ‘It isn't a departmental requirement, of course, but that's beside the point. You don't even have an A level in psychology, let alone biology. I'm not saying that your philosophy degree is worth any less than a biology degree, in abstract terms, or even that it isn't relevant, but you'd have to do a lot of reading in biochemistry. You'd probably have to take a few undergraduate courses alongside any research projects you undertook. It would be hard going.'

  'I know what I'd be taking on,’ I assured him. ‘But I'm doing my BA dissertation on the Philosophy of Biology, and I've done a lot of work on the Philosophy of Mind course. I understand that the work you do in the laboratory is very practical and down-to-earth, but its implications aren't. I want to work at the interface where philosophy, psychology and biochemistry meet, and you can only move into academic borderlands of that kind by starting off in one discipline and picking up the others later. I know that I'll have a lot of book-work to catch up on, but I'm eager to do it.'

  'Your references are very good,’ he conceded. ‘And I suppose that anyone who can disentangle the arguments in philosophy textbooks has sufficient reading skill to cope with any kind of book-work. Provided that you get a good enough degree, Miss Charet, I think I'd be happy to recommend to the faculty that I take you on. After all, there isn't exactly a queue of high-flyers with good biochemistry degrees waiting to see me. All the competent biochemists we turn out these days want to go into biotechnology and make fortunes as genetic engineers—not that I can blame them for that. It's been two years since I had money to take on a research student, and now I'm having difficulty finding anyone to give it to.

  'Having said that, though, I have to confess to a slight uneasiness about your motives. Why, exactly, do you want to come to work here? I suppose it has something to do with Gil Molari, but I can't quite see why you should want to follow in his footsteps.'

  I could tell that the professor still had a reasonably clear memory of the last time we'd talked, two and a half years before. He certainly remembered asking me not to give the press any ammunition to use against him or his work, and the knowledge that he owed me a debt of gratitude for that was probably contributing in some small measure to his discomfort. He was presumably more discomfited, though, by whatever memory he retained of what he had told me about what Gil had recorded in his lab book. He was worried in case I still had those wild ideas at the back of my head. He was anxious that they might have given me a false impression of what his work was all about, and what it might one day achieve.

  He had every reason to be worried. My ideas, like Gil's, were really wild, and it was indeed their wildness which had drawn me here. But I wasn't going to let him know that. Not yet. Not until he knew me a lot better.

  One day, I knew, he would know me a lot better. He wasn't so very old, and it wouldn't have mattered even if he'd been pushing sixty, like poor old Dr Gray. Age gaps are no barrier to seduction, as long as they're the right way ‘round. In fact, to be perfectly honest, when as you're as good-looking as I am there are no barriers at all; you can have anyone you like, young or old. It's an unfair world, in more ways than you might imagine.

  One day, I thought, I might get pregnant by Professor Viners—always provided, of course, that his acquired immunity could be dismantled. It would be worth taking the trouble; there's no point in going after young blood for young blood's sake. An educable mind is essential, and one which has already accumulated its fair share of the wisdom of the world can be reckoned a good catch. I knew th
at it was worth taking trouble over Professor Viners.

  'I haven't forgotten Gil,’ I told him, soberly. ‘But I'm not hung up on him in any way. He was my first real boyfriend, but he was only the first of several. The way he died was so awful, and so terribly pointless. I thought for some time that it was partly my fault, but it wasn't. It wasn't anyone's fault—it was just a failure of understanding. Yes, it's because I knew him, and was close to him, that I first thought of taking up where he left off, of taking his place—but not for any silly or melodramatic reason. It's because when he told me what he was doing, and why, it made sense. I saw why it was so important, not just to him, but in a general way. And then, when I talked to you, Professor Viners, after Gil was killed, what you said made sense too.

  'I don't want to sound silly or sycophantic, but what you and Gil showed me was that biochemistry is the truly important modern science, much more so than physics or geology, and that the reason it's of such central importance is that it bears on the most interesting and most intimate questions that we can ask about ourselves as human beings. I went into philosophy partly because I thought it was the best way to learn about who and what I am, but when I met Gil—and you, Professor—I began to realize that no one ought to be content with just one approach to that question. If we're ever to find answers to questions of that kind, we have to approach them in a multidisciplinary way. What I want to do now is supplementary to the work I've already done; it's the necessary next stage in my education. That's the way I see it, anyhow.'

  He smiled at me. I'd hit exactly the right note. He was a pushover.

  'Gil was a good student,’ he said, reflectively. ‘It was a sad loss. I have to admit that I've been a little anxious about taking anyone else into the lab since then. He seemed such a sensible chap, for all his extravagant ideas. Steady as a rock, I thought ... but I suppose all Americans tend to project an image of great self-confidence and sociability, even if they're every bit as unsteady and insecure inside as the average Englishman. I've been very lucky with Teresa—did you meet her? She really has been as steady as a rock. I don't mind telling you that if you were as shy and nervous now as you seemed to be two years ago, I'd be very reluctant indeed to take you on, but you've really blossomed during your time at the university, haven't you?'