I felt the pressure of the kiss which the doppelgänger visited upon her lips: the tender, gentle kiss which she welcomed and returned, hopelessly unaware of the significance of her own nascent and precocious desire.
I felt my body hug her to me, and the pressure of her frail arms against the back of my neck. I felt my face nestle into the corner between her shoulder and her cheek, felt my lips seek out the pale white skin to the left of her throat, where the excited pulse of the carotid artery was perceptible. All of this was as sharp and clear to me as if I had been in full possession of my faculties. There was no colour in it at all, but it was as sharp and clear as a photograph.
Then things fell apart, and chaos came again.
I felt my lips press themselves greedily to her neck, and I felt her flesh shift and flow under the pressure, becoming soft and almost liquid. I felt something drawn into my mouth: a sudden cascade of blood, which tasted unbelievably sweet.
I felt, absurdly, as if my rebel soul fused with that of the little girl, so that our sensations were joined. I knew that she felt no pain, but only joy. Whatever possessed me possessed her also, and dragged us both down into a whirlpool of orgasmic luxury. Neither of us had ever known or suspected that such extreme sensual pleasure could exist.
There was no sound at all, and no light. My eyes were shut now, and I was alone with the splendour of my sensations—our sensations. My other self, my demon anima, drank the child's blood, and drank the child's soul. There was no element of caricature in it, no horror-film cliché, no comic-book parody. Any ability to laugh and sneer at vampires which my true self might have had was banished now; here there was only lovely lust and sybaritic satisfaction. Here there was only delirium, of a kind which made mockery of all the rewards accessible to sane, staid consciousness. Here there was only ecstatic madness, drowning mere reason with its purity and fury.
To say that the alien hunger which had plagued me was answered would be a ludicrous understatement. All its discomfort, unease and pain was converted by that sustaining flood into its opposite, and the fulfilment was incredibly luxurious.
From the borderlands of my being, my true self might have raised a cry of protest—but the cry, and the reason which formed it, were lost in the silence of infinity.
If only my reason might have remained lost, never to return...
But it did return. It had to return. It wasn't permitted to hide itself away, to deny what had happened.
In being answered, the hunger died. The glorious explosion of sensation dispersed the hunger and the pain and the anguish, to leave a black void in my heart, into which my reason was helplessly drawn and compelled to fill. My doppelgänger vanished into shadow, as he had been bound to do, and contemptuously restored me to myself.
I set the little girl down, as gently and as reverently as I could. She was very light, far too thin for her height and age. She was limp and lifeless, and I knew already that this was no mere sleep or coma. I knew how deeply I had drunk of her blood and her being, and it did no good at all to cry out in the dark night of my frightened mind that I had intended no harm, that everything I had done I had done for love, for innocence, for life.
In the side of her neck there was a great jagged wound: a huge rip which looked as if it were the work of an enormous claw. It was black and sticky, like a great gaping vagina, but no liquid blood fountained from it. Her heart had ceased to beat, and there was no pressure in the artery to force out whatever blood might still remain within her slender body.
The black blood which stood upon the edges of the wound didn't look real. It didn't look like human blood at all. It was all just a movie, just an ancient black-and-white movie. I wasn't really there and neither was she. It was all just make-believe.
Her black eyes were open and sightless, staring blindly into nowhere. Her mouth hung open too, and I could see her tongue within, quivering reflexively.
I knelt over the body, tears welling up in my eyes as I saw what had been done to that lovely, precious child. I felt sick with horror and despair. I knew that in some sense, I had died with her—the explosion of sensation which had consumed her had consumed me too, but had left the mere shell of me ironically unscathed. I knew that I was dead, that I was no longer myself, that I was just a ghost. I knew that everything I had been before was obliterated from the record of real time, leaving only the monster which had possessed and dispossessed me, discarding me as casually as if I were a rag doll.
I could run, now. But there was nowhere I could possibly run to, nowhere I could possibly hide. Wherever I went, people would know me. They would know me for what I had become.
The police would come after me, now. There was no escape. They would call me mad, but they would never, ever forgive me.
How could they? I was damned.
How could I ever forgive myself? Ghost or not, how could I possibly live with the memory of what I had done?
11
Now that the hunger was finally gone I felt much calmer inside. In fact, I was unnaturally calm. I felt that my body and its actions had become mechanical: robotic, inorganic, dead. There was no blood on my hands or around my mouth, and none on my clothing. As soon as I had turned my back on the dead girl I was able to put the awareness of what I had done to the back of my mind, secreting it away. I ceased actively to think about her, lest the horror of it overwhelm me. I gave no thought to the possibility of trying to conceal what I had done. I accepted that I couldn't escape the consequences of the act, and shouldn't even try. My aim now was to take control of those consequences, to make sure that everything was done neatly.
I had to put my affairs in order.
I retraced my steps, passing the doors of Wombwell House and the bridge over the stream. There was no one about. No one saw me emerge from the wood, unless someone happened to be looking down from the upper windows of the house. I walked unhurriedly, with a precisely measured stride. I felt empty and deserted; the doppelgänger which had haunted me was no longer in evidence, inside or out. It had vanished, or become one with me.
The world was still black and white, without any vestige of colour, but the sun was no longer a black pit sucking up the light from the sky; it was too white to look at, shooting forth its pallid rays in profusion, although there was no warmth in it at all.
There were lights on inside the science buildings, even though it was as bright outside as it ever was in December. The biochemistry and physiology departments shone like beacons; psychology was more discreet, but gave forth radiance nevertheless. There were always lights on in the buildings on that part of campus; their labs and lecture rooms harboured many inquisitive souls who could never be satiated by natural enlightenment, who needed more precisely controllable conditions in order to run their experiments and their lives.
No one gave me a second glance as I went up the stairs to Professor Viners’ lair. I was in my natural element, entirely at home in the environment. There was no blood on my hands, and my movements were meticulous. The fact that I was now a murderer and a madman did not show at all in my face or my bearing. The mark of Cain was inside me, secret and invisible. I was a monster in mechanical disguise.
I went into the high-security lab before I returned to Viners’ office. Teresa looked up as I came in, and said: ‘Hi! Feeling better?’ But she looked at me oddly. I knew that Viners must have said something to her after I ran from his office—something enigmatic and uncommunicative, no doubt, but something.
'The symptoms have just about cleared up,’ I told her, matter-of-factly. ‘I think I'm coming to the end of it. But I only came in to pick something up. I'm not staying.'
She didn't say anything else, but she looked at me expectantly. I didn't know what she wanted me to tell her. She might only have wanted me to explain what it was that I had come to collect, but she might have been fishing for something more. Perhaps, now that she'd deigned to visit me at home, she was expecting an invitation, or at least an acknowledgement that there now existed a rel
ationship which she had not permitted before. Perhaps she wanted to move in with me. She was as unfathomable as she was unpredictable. I'd never known anyone who could switch herself on and off the way she did. And she did it all by herself, without a demon or a doppelgänger to help her.
I went to the instrument cabinet and unlocked it. Then I pulled out one of the shallow drawers and inspected an array of stainless-steel scalpels. I selected one with an evenly curved, sharply pointed blade. I put a plastic sheath over the business end, and placed the instrument in the pocket of my flying jacket.
Teresa could not have seen what I'd taken, but she could see which drawer I had opened. She raised a dark eyebrow, but all she said was: ‘You'd better bring it back when you've finished with it. I'm responsible for all that equipment.'
'It's okay,’ I assured her. ‘Everything is under control.’ I picked up my lab book from the bench and weighed it in my hand, but it was too big to go into my pocket. Anyhow, I decided, it would be better left where it was, as a record of my discoveries and my adventures in ideas. Viners might need it one day.
'Gil?’ said Teresa, uncertainly. But she didn't know what to say next.
'Sorry,’ I said. I left it there. Sorry is a word that has to carry an intolerable burden, but you have to have a word like that, where the buck stops.
I went through the first of the two doors which connected the lab to Viners’ office, and knocked on the second. He seemed surprised to see me when I walked in; he must have assumed that it was Teresa.
'Gil!’ he said, hitting the exit button on his keyboard. ‘Are you all right? What happened?'
All he'd seen, I remembered, was that I'd gotten a fit of the shakes. He might not even have heard the curse that had escaped from my lips before I left.
'A new symptom,’ I told him. I sat down, uninvited, and he sat down too, slowly and slightly warily. ‘Cold shivers and ants in my pants. I had to get out. I'm all right now. But there's something we have to clear up before I go home.'
'I've been thinking about what you said,’ he told me. ‘I think we do have to assume that you've picked up one of the experimental viruses, and that it's hit you rather badly. Viruses are tricky—they don't take everyone the same way.'
I didn't feel the slightest impulse to laugh at the margin of understatement.
'What we have to do now,’ he continued, after a pause, ‘is to work out how best to handle the problem.'
'I think I know how to handle my problem,’ I told him, drily. ‘But there are wider implications. If anyone outside figures out that your experimental material has run out of control, even in a single instance, the vice chancellor will put a stop to the entire operation. They'll send in men in diving suits to sterilize every inch of the lab. If they discover that the escaped material is dangerous, your whole subject area is likely to be taken over by ... what do you call the local equivalent of the Pentagon?'
'The Ministry of Defence,’ he said, mechanically. ‘But I doubt if any of my infective agents are dangerous enough to interest them, given that they're having so much fun with HIV and anthrax and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. You're right about the VC, though. He's very conscious of public relations difficulties. What exactly are you trying to say, Gil?'
'What you're doing is important,’ I told him. ‘I wouldn't be here if I didn't think so. The biochemistry of mental aberration is something we need to know far more about, and the fact that its exploration raises practical and ethical problems of a particularly thorny kind shouldn't be allowed to kill off research—especially research like ours, which the Establishment regards as highly speculative. You and I both know that in a field like this, only the highly speculative research is likely to turn up anything valuable or exciting. Only men with guts and imagination have a chance of making a real breakthrough.'
They might have been his own words echoing. Most of them were. He nodded, still waiting for me to tell him what I was leading up to.
'I'm probably an unusually vulnerable individual,’ I said. ‘It was probably just a freak of chance which made me react so badly to infection. Like you say, that's always a problem with medical research—different subjects react differently to the same treatment. But in future, Professor Viners, you're going to have to be more careful. The ability to induce spectacular insanity in previously normal people would certainly prove your pet hypothesis about the possibility of there being causal links between viral infection and mental illness, but it's a very costly proof.'
'If I thought that there had been any possibility ...’ he began. Then he stopped, and began again. ‘Let's not overreact, Gil. I don't know how you became infected, but it was an accident. We'll tighten up our sterile procedures, and I'll do those tests I mentioned before. You'll recover, Gil—please don't doubt that.'
'That's not a problem,’ I assured him. ‘The question that disturbs me is whether you made a full recovery from the infections to which you exposed yourself.'
He looked pained. ‘Don't make this into a cheap melodrama, Gil,’ he begged. ‘We're involved in serious scientific research, not a remake of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I suffered mild delirium, not a personality change. Of course there's a possibility that the viruses I've isolated affect some people far more profoundly than others, but epidemics of wholesale insanity are a mercifully rare phenomenon. Even if you've been very unlucky, there's every reason to think that you'll be perfectly all right in two or three days’ time. Let's not get sidetracked. Let's not make up our minds about what's happened to you until we've got some hard data.'
'I'm not jumping to any premature conclusions, Professor Viners,’ I assured him. ‘And I'm honestly not worrying about myself. First and last, I'm a scientist. I'm worrying about the wider implications. That's why I wanted to come work here—because I'm fascinated by the wider implications of the work you're doing. I found it very exciting to think that I might be working in an area like this, where all kinds of wild and crazy ideas have a chance of turning out to be true: the possibility that our dreams—our routine, every-night dreams—may be the product of stray DNA and not our own brains; the possibility that certain kinds of insanity might be literally infectious; the possibility that the creative imagination of some artists might be affected by resident viruses. I always knew better than to believe those kinds of ideas in advance of any real evidence, but the mere possibility that they might be true, and that I might be in on the work which proved them true, was enough to bring me halfway across the world. There were wilder ones, too—ones so wild I never told them to anybody. You can read about them in my lab book, if you can decipher my handwriting.
'Don't get me wrong—I knew what the actual work would be like. The tissue cultures, the cats and the rats and the rabbits, the endless chromatographic and electrophoretic analyses. I knew that it would be like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with ninety-nine out of a hundred pieces missing. I knew it would be hard and frustrating work. But the sense of being connected, however weakly, with big ideas, big theories, big possibilities—that was what made it all worthwhile, for me. I would have volunteered to be a guinea pig, you know, if there seemed to be a real need, and a real possibility of a breakthrough. I'm not blaming you for what's happened. I'm not here to accuse you of anything. I'm here to forewarn you, to give you advance notice that you can expect a sudden and confusing proliferation of data in the near future. You'll probably be the only person who can begin to understand what's happening, and you may have to make some hard decisions about whether or not to go public with what you know.'
'It's the girl in the hospital that you're worried about, isn't it?’ he said, uneasily. Conclusion-jumping wasn't his forte, but he was no fool.
'Among other things,’ I agreed. ‘If she has been infected, and I think she has, she may need expert help to understand and to sort herself out. She knows what line of research I'm in, and the fact that she doesn't understand the chemistry won't prevent her suspecting that these labs are the source of the infection, so she might try t
o blow the whistle on you. There are going to be problems, Professor, and you have to be ready to meet them, or everything you've ever done will simply go to waste.'
'I see,’ he said, although, like the proverbial blind man, he really couldn't see at all. Not even in black and white.
'We can never know for sure,’ I told him, carefully, ‘what proportion of all the ghosts and demons which have ever haunted the human imagination have been the products of psychotropic DNA. It would be too convenient by far to discover that they all were. It's likely that by far the greater number originate inside of us, born of entirely natural fears and anxieties, incarnate in all the impulses which we have to repress in order to live in a semicivilised society. But it's also likely that those ghosts and demons can be fed and nourished by the kinds of DNA you're interested in, amplified by infection to the point where they can literally possess us and take us over. Most of us are strong enough to throw off the infections before they reach that stage, but some aren't. Most of us will never be conquered by our nightmares, but some can only succumb. You have one of the keys to the mystery of mental aberration, Professor; it needs to be studied and understood to the best of our ability. I know that, and I care about it. That's why I came back. I had to warn you. There'll be some real heavy stuff coming down during the next few weeks, Professor, but if you can survive it, and come out wiser, it won't all have been for nothing.'
'Is that what you feel, Gil?’ he asked, full of genuine concern—for me, not for himself. ‘Do you feel that you can't cope? Is that what you mean by being possessed?'
'That's what I feel,’ I agreed. ‘That's what I mean.'
'It's only an illusion,’ he said, insistently. ‘It won't last for ever.'
'I know it won't,’ I assured him. I was still thinking with artificial precision. My mind was running like a well-oiled machine. The inside of my head felt as smooth as silk. Everything seemed to be in place. I wasn't scared. I knew what the situation was, and how it would develop. I had the ample foresight of the good scientist, dealing with a problem where all the variables were known and quantified. Events would unfold with the perfect orderliness of a set of calculations. For me, there was no uncertainty left. For Viners, though, things would be different. For him, everything would be clouded with confusion, mystery and heartache.
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