Morpho

by Philip Palmer

  ‘No, ‘said Rothbury, coldly.

  ‘And you, you fraud. Arthritis be fucked. Your pubic hair is black, the colour of night. Don’t think I don’t notice. I look at you, in bed, when you sleep. It’s a long time since we – you and – but I still take a peek at what spills out of your Harrods jammies. You’ve a cock like a horse. The body of a gigolo. You pretend to be old, you’re not old. I’m old. I am old. Oh what is this, why all the lies? What are you drinking?’

  ‘Blood.’

  ‘Ah.’ Gwendolyn was shocked; though surely it was what she had expected. ‘So, we are vampires now, are we?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Come come come. You can’t deny what is self-evident. You’re a bloodsucking –’

  ‘I’m not a vampire,’ Rothbury said calmly. ‘Very well, you may drink the blood.’

  She was pleased: mission accomplished. Yet suddenly, existentially, afraid. ‘What will it do?’

  ‘It will make you young.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you offer it to me –’

  Gwendolyn began to weep. Rothbury’s heart turned to cracked stone.

  ‘– sooner,’ she sobbed.

  Rothbury kept his tone calm. ‘Because you are not of the Brotherhood. You are not – I don’t know, Gwendolyn.’

  ‘She cannot drink the blood, my lord.’ Marlowe said sternly. ‘We are so pledged.’

  ‘We are pledged, also, to be celibate,’ Rothbury chided him, with a wry smile. ‘Perhaps it is time we were a little less – narrow minded – regarding our vocation.’

  ‘If that is your decision, my lord, I yield to it,’ said Marlowe.

  ‘It is.’

  Rothbury stood and took a third glass out of the cabinet and decanted some of his drink into it. A finger, no more; but enough.

  ‘Blood of a virgin?’ Lady Rothbury said.

  ‘You are squeamish?’

  ‘I have morals.’

  ‘I know you do, my sweet. That is why I allowed you to – get so old.’

  ‘I understand that. I have understood that –’ She was weeping again, wheezily, each sob hurt her tiny bird-like chest: ‘– for many years.’

  Rothbury was intrigued. ‘When did you realise? That I do not age?’

  She laughed. ‘Look. Look around you.’

  On the walls, stacked like aeroplanes in a holding pattern, were the portraits of the nine generations of Rothbury dating back to the 1st Earl. Rothbury studied them.

  ‘All me,’ he conceded.

  ‘So, whose blood is this?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Is this a test?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  She took the glass. Her hand was trembling. She took a sip and gagged. It was not port; nor was it meant for drinking. She tried again. She drained it.

  ‘When will it take effect?’

  ‘Not for a while. A few weeks. The effects are cumulative. You should drink a glass a day every month for your first year.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then you will be young. But, dependent.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘On the blood. There must be a continuous flow. No matter what the price, you must have your blood.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And it must be aged. Placed in casks, hermetically sealed. It is not safe to drink blood that is less than ten years old. Else the consequences would be – quite terrible.’

  ‘Like wine, you mean? You have to lay it down?’

  ‘Not like wine. Not a bit like wine.’

  ‘I clearly have much to learn.’ Lady Rothbury clasped her hands together. Her taking charge gesture. ‘Hmmm,’ she said slowly as if that were an actual observation.

  Then she was silent for a while; both men knew not to interrupt.

  ‘However,’ she continued, ‘I ask again, now that it is too late for me to step back, now that I am committed – whose blood?’

  Rothbury stood. ‘Come with me.’

  Lady Rothbury couldn’t manage the stairs into the basement, so they had to walk back down the side passage then into the secret lift. She braced herself on her sticks and raised her jaw and waited as the lift chundered downwards.

  ‘This takes us to the wine cellar, does it not?’

  ‘To the sub-basement. Below the wine cellar.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had such a place.’

  ‘It was a feature of the original Victorian castle. A whole basement level that can only be accessed through secret corridors, or via this concealed pneumatic lift.’

  ‘How enchanting. Hidden dungeons, in effect.’

  ‘That was the architect’s fancy.’

  The lift stopped, with an unsettling crashing noise. Rothbury slid back the metal grilles. Lady Rothbury stomped out on her sticks, like a spider with four legs.

  Down here the air was dense with a wailing sound: incessant, and distressing. Gwendolyn visibly braced herself. Rothbury walked ahead and pulled upon the stem of a gas lantern. The stem moved downwards, the sheer brick walls facing them slid slowly apart.

  ‘Very droll.’

  ‘This house is a sublime folly; that’s why I love it so.’

  Rothbury walked through the opening first, followed slowly by Gwendolyn with Marlowe taking up the rear; and as he entered Rothbury switched on a set of wall-mounted gas lamps which flickered dimly and turned Stygian night into visible nightmare.

  Beyond the concealed entrance was a huge cellar the size of a rock cavern with black brick walls and old stone pillars; and scores of emaciated men and women were chained to the walls, semi-clad for the most part, many with fabric pooled at their feet where their clothes had rotted off with age. They were connected by thin IV tubes to huge glass vials of blood; each of them blinking as the yellow light dazzled their eyes. From them the wailing emanated, like a tidal wave slowly travelling between continents, betokening endless pain.

  ‘These are our prisoners?’ Gwendolyn was truly shocked now, but she was too much of a lady to reproach her husband for keeping a dungeon full of starving slaves.

  ‘We think of them as guests.’

  ‘Are they free to go?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then they are prisoners.’

  He conceded the point. ‘We bleed them every day, to keep them weak. It gives us more blood than we need but when they are strong, they are really very strong.’

  ‘What if one of them escaped?’

  ‘They couldn’t escape. It’s not – it’s never happened.’

  Gwendolyn peered, tears in her eyes.

  ‘They are in such pain. It’s like – this is truly disgusting, Hugh. It’s not right.’

  ‘These creatures are not human. They have no rights. ‘

  ‘Devils?’

  ‘Hardly. They are from – another place.’

  ‘Which other place?’

  ‘Far far away.’

  ‘Just say it, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘Another planet,’ Rothbury told her.

  The wailing noise continued, unabated, like white noise; it was horrendous.

  ‘Planet?’ The word was said; the truth was known. She absorbed its implications.

  ‘This is what you must endure, if you wish to join me.’

  She nodded, firmly. ‘I can endure this.’

  Three

  Hayley opened her eyes and Liam was smiling down at her.

  ‘That must have been a hell of a night last night,’ she groaned.

  He was still smiling.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Four o’clock.’

  ‘I slept till four?’

  ‘You’ve been asleep for three days, honey.’

  Hayley woke up. She was in a big double bed. Ruched curtains. Wearing pyjamas. She never wore pyjamas.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘My place.’

  ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘Wrapped in a blanket. Took two of us to get you out. Boy, Hayley, when you
fuck up you really fuck up.’

  ‘I passed out?

  ‘You’ve been missing for three days. I had to kick in the door of your flat. The smell was – oh my God. You must be crazy.’

  ‘Yeah one crazy chick, that’s – three days?’

  ‘What was it? Heroin?’

  ‘’Huh?’

  ‘You went cold turkey on your own. Was it heroin?’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about this.’

  ‘If so, where are the needle marks?’

  ‘I’m so not talking about this.’

  Memories were coming back. The mortuary. The walking brain. The woman with the smashed in head. The egg exploding, the fog in her throat, choking her, filling her entire body with its dank presence...

  Staggering home and collapsing in the bathroom. All the disgusting stuff that followed. She had left her clothes in the bath and crawled into bed. Then she had dreamed.

  ‘You saved my life,’ she said.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Does Cheyney know?’

  Terrible terrible dreams.

  ‘Of course she knows! You think I’m not going to tell her that her sister almost died? You can’t do that shit on your own, Hayley. You should have had a babysitter. Or checked into a clinic. I’d have paid.’

  She gave Liam a hate-filled glare. ‘I don’t want your fucking money.’

  ‘You’re better off taking my fucking money than drowning in your own vomit, darling,’ he said, mildly.

  Oh shit. I’ve missed –

  ‘The wedding. I missed the wedding.’

  Liam shook his head.

  ‘I didn’t miss the wedding?’

  ‘We postponed it a week.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘We did that.’

  ‘But it’s all booked – it would cost a fortune to –’

  ‘I’m good for it. Me with all my fucking money, remember. My ill-gotten gains.’

  Hayley was furious. He wasn’t even embarrassed about it!

  Liam was a career criminal. It wasn’t just a rumour – all the crime reporters knew his rep, and they wrote regular features about him as if he was a local celebrity. Armed robber. Loan shark. Dodgy property deals. Hayley despised him for it. But no one seemed to care – good looking Irish bloke, lots of money to throw around, what was the problem? But for Hayley it was all wrong. Her baby sister deserved better than this – fucking – gangster.

  ‘Shit, you would do that, for me?’ Hayley said.

  ‘Cheyney would.’

  ‘I feel so bad.’

  ‘Don’t feel bad.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Okay then, feel bad.’

  ‘I feel shit.’

  Not my fault! I’m not a junkie! I didn’t go cold turkey! And it’s not my fault that I was infected by – infected by – infected by –

  She realised, it was better to admit to being a junkie that try to explain all that stuff.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘So am I. Let’s go eat.’

  Billy watched them leave the Irishman’s house. He waited until they were out in traffic then eased out of his parking space. He kept his car as far away as he could, with five or six vehicles between them. The Irishman was a careful driver, his signalling was good, so Billy had no trouble keeping up.

  The car was stolen, Billy was adept at that. And he guessed he had three or four hours before he’d have to ditch it and find a clean vehicle. He’d robbed an ATM two nights ago by ripping it out of the wall, which was risky but he had no contacts here. No ID. No legal way of accessing cash. Jane had always had a knack of getting money out of men in expensive hotel rooms, but Billy couldn’t face the idea of whoring himself, and he didn’t know how to bribe the concierges. He was lost without her.

  And afraid.

  Billy was used to being afraid. In some ways he found it comforting when he was in pain or being tortured, because then there was nothing to be afraid of – the worst was already happening. But when he was free, and safe, fear consumed him. An unceasing low level panic that was worse, well, than being buried under a mountain of plague-infested bodies.

  As a boy, Billy had been feisty and fearless. A peasant lad who would say anything to anyone. But the more his ‘powers’ had grown, the more fearful he had become.

  Jane had tried to explain to him why this was so. She told him their kind were two distinct beings in one body. There was the human Billy and the other Billy. The human Billy didn’t give a shit, you couldn’t scare him. But the other Billy, the immortal Billy, that was where the fear came from.

  Jane was bolder than he was. But even she felt it – the oppressive presence of an immortal creature in her body and her mind that was sentient, but not truly ‘conscious’. A hive-mind entity that would not fight and would not build, and loved nothing and cared for nothing, but was blindly and fearfully determined to survive.

  A parasite, in other words.

  Parasites by their very nature are exploiters. They are thieves which lurk in or upon their host body and pillage and destroy. They do not stand and fight; they do not know how to fight. And when they kill they do so slyly and thoughtlessly. Usually by bursting out of their host creature’s body in a variety of appalling ways.

  Billy knew these truths about himself: he was a parasite and a coward and he was not able to defend himself and the people he loved.

  But now his wife was dead, her remains taken away (or so he presumed) by the DOH. And he knew the identity of the killer. For he had been told it, by the best eyewitness possible – Jane Carter herself.

  On that evening, the evening Jane had died, Billy had arrived at the hospital at about five in the morning. There he found that the doors had been forced open. When he went inside, he sensed that a battle had taken place in the mortuary, and he could see that some of the jars and test tubes had been smashed. The floors and surfaces had been thoroughly cleaned, but even so he could detect tiny shards of her brain in the sink, and on the wall. And when he went out of the back entrance of the mortuary he could smell her there; microscopic particles of her alive in gobbets of oxygenated blood, somewhere nearby.

  And so he’d spent the next hour hunting for her blood, like a dog searching for a scrap of buried meat. And then he’d found it: a bloodied T-shirt and bloodied plastic coverall, thrown into a rubbish bin. Rich in the aroma of the one he had loved. And when he breathed in her scent, rich in her signalling molecules, she came alive again. For just a moment; a few precious moments.

  And thus Billy had inhaled the last few shreds of life in the blood of Jane Carter, his beloved wife.

  And then he knew everything. The pain of her post mortem. Her attempts to communicate with the woman in the mortuary. And her subsequent brutal murder.

  Billy could remember the scene as vividly as if he had been there himself. The crazed face of the woman with the purple hair and the tunnel piercings and the mad staring eye, hacking at Jane’s brain, slashing her body, then smashing her skull to pieces with a fire extinguisher. And, finally, taking away the last living remnants of Jane away on the T-shirt: the droplets of blood that contained the sentient essence of the parasitical entity that had once co-existed with the soul and mind of his wife.

  Then the blood on T-shirt staled, and Jane passed on to nowhere. There was no afterlife for parasites.

  And Billy was left with nothing but his own anger. Burning rage at what this vicious purple-haired woman had done, her cruel slaughter of his wife and unhatched egg.

  Yet what should he do now? Seek out the purple-haired woman and wreak his vengeance? Kill her? Or torture her, so she had time to repent of her cruelty, and then kill her?

  Just the thought of such a decisive action made him twitch with terror. His kind could not comprehend revenge. They had not evolved to hunt and kill. They just stole whatever they could, by whatever means were at their disposal.

  They were like the nematode that gestates in the body of a pregnant mayfly and the
n explodes out of its abdomen, ripping the creature apart.

  They were like the Sacculina parasite that fills the body of its host crab, wrapping its roots around the creature’s eyeballs.

  They were like the guinea worms that hatch their eggs in a woman’s uterus, then crack the womb, and create burning lesions to make her seek cooling water; before finding their escape route out of her body into the water, through her vomit.

  And in many ways, they were most akin to Earth’s most prevalent parasite, the virus; that ever-mutating shred of life that infects its host and subverts its immune system, turning a living creature into a walking foodstore.

  But now, defying his own biology, his own genetic legacy, the young man with the ponytail felt a terrible rage sweep over him.

  He sat parked outside the greasy spoon where Hayley and the Irishman were laughing and chatting – watching them through the plate glass windows. And he made a solemn vow to the memory of his wife and their unborn child.

  I will make her pay, my love. I vow it. That evil bitch shall die in pain and torment for what she did to you.

  ‘Boy, you can eat,’ said Liam, marvelling.

  Hayley was on her third cooked breakfast. Hollow legs, was what her Mam used to call it. But she didn’t feel bloated. She felt fresh. Alert. Two men at another table were watching them, covertly, and Hayley guessed they knew Liam by repute.

  ‘Are you paying for this?’

  ‘Do you have money on you?’

  ‘Nah.’ Hayley was wearing clothes that Liam had foraged from her wardrobe. She realised that he, or someone, must have stripped her and wased her. The thought gave her a tingle, but not a good one.

  ‘Then I’ll pay. You don’t like me much, do you?’

  ‘Why would I not like you? You’re the evil thieving bastard who’s going to break my sister’s heart.’

  ‘Ah, now there you’re wrong.’

  ‘She told me you weren’t having a stag night.’

  ‘We did agree that, yes,’ said Liam, taken aback.

  ‘But you did have a stag night, didn’t you?’

  ‘Course not!’

  ‘You and a bunch of mates, getting pissed, drinking till the early hours in Red Leopard dancing with the lapdancers. That’s what I heard.’