Once Bitten - Clare Willis

by Unknown

  I looked up from the book, pulling my coat around me as if it could offer some protection from the discomfort I was feeling.

  Nicolai was looking at me with the professional smile of a therapist, but his eyes glittered in the gaslight. “The term ‘vampire’ is one of the most misunderstood in human culture. The word has many connotations that are not strictly accurate. For example, vampires are neither immortal nor supernatural.”

  “So you’re saying they don’t actually kill people?”

  “On the contrary, they do kill people and many of them. One could certainly have killed your friend.”

  I was shocked. “You mean all the people at the House of Usher are murderers?”

  A deep sigh. “No, no, no. Those people are human, engaging in behaviors that are fulfilling to them psychologically. Many of them were abused as children and are drawn to the vampire myth as a means of achieving power, or being close to power, in their own lives. They drink blood when someone consents to give it to them, but they are not vampires. No, the true vampire is something far beyond them, something they will never comprehend.”

  Nicolai stroked the leather of the book. His fingernails were long and filed to sharp points at the tips, each one a tiny blade.

  “The vampire, while not immortal, lives much longer than a mortal life span, perhaps as long as two thousand years. Think of the redwood tree, the Komodo dragon. They breathe but their breath is cold; their hearts beat, but slowly. Like lizards, their body temperature adjusts to the ambient temperature. Naturally cold, they are warmed by blood, human contact, and warm environments.”

  I thought of Eric’s cold hands, warming when he touched my skin.

  “They require blood to survive, but the amount can vary, depending on the particular vampire. Some go for long periods of time without killing, while others, particularly in earlier centuries when it was easier to hide, vanquished entire cities.”

  “Nicolai, the things I’ve been experiencing…”

  “Yes, you’re wondering if you are becoming a vampire.”

  “No! That’s not what I was going to ask. I don’t believe in vampires. He could be doing this with drugs, with hypnosis…”

  Nicolai turned to stare at me, tiny fires reflected in each of his eyes. “Angela, let’s not waste each other’s time. Why have you sought me out, instead of the police, or a psychiatrist, or, what are they called, a cult deprogrammer? I’ll tell you why. Because you already know the truth, that only I can help you.”

  Unless you have experienced a religious epiphany yourself, any description of what I felt at that moment would be inadequate. What I had been denying over the last few days finally stood in front of me and blocked every other exit. Eric had been telling me the truth.

  Nicolai’s lips twitched into a smile, and he nodded slowly. “I see that you are coming into acknowledgment. This is good, for I have much more to tell you. The vampire is inducing a conversion in you.”

  “Conversion?”

  Before answering he pulled out another book. It was a decrepit, leather-bound version of Dracula, by Bram Stoker.

  “You have read this, I presume?”

  “Does seeing the movie count?”

  He sniffed in disgust.

  “I mean the one by Francis Ford Coppola. It was a very good movie. Keanu Reeves sucked, but still.” I was babbling to cover my nervousness.

  Nicolai flipped through the dusty pages and began reading out loud, squinting even more. “She was initially bitten by the vampire when she was in a trance, sleep-walking…and in trance could he best come to take more blood. In trance she died, and in trance she is UnDead, too.”

  He closed the book and a piece of its leather binding fell to the floor.

  “Bram Stoker was close to correct in his portrayal of Mina. An older vampire must induce the conversion over an extended period of time, during which he ‘visits’ the subject and induces what Stoker called a trance state. I would call it a euphoric state. What would you call it, Angela?”

  “Just go on, Nicolai, please.” I took a gulp of wine.

  “Very well. The body fluids of vampires contain a virus that causes the biochemical changes that produce another vampire. However, to become a vampire the person must have certain genetic characteristics that predispose him or her to vampirism, that is, the gene to which the virus attaches itself.”

  “I can see I should have stayed awake in chemistry class.”

  Nicolai continued, ignoring my attempts to lighten the atmosphere. “The gene, like all genes, runs in families. Famous powerful families, such as the Medicis in Italy and the British royal family, would make vampires within the family and discourage any ‘outbreeding.’ This also helped to limit the number of vampires in the world, which was important for its survival as a species. And the human species too, of course.”

  “So you’re saying I have a vampire gene?”

  “Yes. And it must be very strong in you if you are able to see your vampire’s thoughts. Are you able to read anyone else’s thoughts?”

  “Yes, my mother’s.”

  Nicolai nodded. “Of course. You would have inherited it from her.”

  My finger traced the outline of the face of Vlad Tepisch. “What, uh, other powers, might someone acquire if they became a vampire?”

  Nicolai clapped his hands together like an excited child. “An excellent question, Angela, and so very timely! In addition to the already mentioned longevity and clairvoyance with other genetically related individuals, there is superhuman strength and agility.”

  I closed my eyes and remembered Eric lifting me in his arms and moving me from the Hyde Street Pier to my apartment in Pacific Heights in the blink of an eye.

  I ran to the edge of town where I knew there was a cliff, a precipitous drop down to a river. I ran toward it and found that I could very nearly fly, my strength and speed were so great.

  Nicolai was still speaking. “…scholars say that there is also superhuman intelligence, but my research indicates that this is probably simply the result of judicious use of the other powers, such as clairvoyance. Although if you believe the adage that with age comes wisdom, well, what vampire wouldn’t have an advantage over us there?”

  I remembered Eric’s nose, squashed in the parking lot and miraculously healing. From there it wasn’t that far a leap to my mother and her possible cancer. “Could a person, I mean a vampire, cure someone of an illness?”

  Nicolai nodded. “The vampire venom does have curative powers, for both the vampire and those he feeds on. As long as he doesn’t kill them, of course.”

  It was time to ask the most important question. “So,” I was so nervous I had to strain to make my voice work, “how does one actually become a vampire?”

  “The human being walks around in a semi-vampiric state for a period of several days or weeks, while the vampire visits them and feeds on them, injecting small amounts of venom each time. They may experience symptoms—headaches, nausea, sensitivity to light–which are hints of what is to come. If the fluid transfer stops during this period, the human most likely reverts back.”

  “And if they don’t revert back?” I asked.

  Nicolai pressed closer to me and I saw beads of sweat on his forehead. He was no longer smiling.

  “At the climax of the blood exchange the vampire-to-be must die. This is always a dangerous proposition because there is no way to know whether the vampire virus has ‘taken’ until you die. So if you wake up it was successful, and if you don’t…” Nicolai shrugged and held up his hands. “It’s a risk well worth taking.”

  “How do you die, Nicolai?” I whispered.

  “The vampire ends your mortal life, of course, by draining your blood.” Nicolai inched even closer and touched me on the arm. I felt his nails through my coat.

  “Angela, if you are being visited by a vampire and you are not dead, then you are a very special person. You have been chosen, don’t you see?”

  One of the sweat beads roll
ed from his forehead down his cheek. “The vampire only does this for one reason that I’ve been able to discern. To find a partner. I’ve been waiting for years to find someone like you, Angela. A vampire has chosen you, and now you are hovering on the precipice between life and conversion. For you, dying would be an opportunity of the highest magnitude.”

  “But I’d have to kill people in order to live…” The room seemed to have no air. The wine I had drunk threatened to make a return appearance.

  “How would I stop it?” I choked out the words.

  Nicolai leapt to his feet and slashed the air with his hand. “Stop it? Impossible! The only way would be to kill the vampire, and I’m sure you don’t want to do that, do you, Angela? Think of the possibilities you’re being offered…”

  “Nicolai, I have to get some fresh air…” I stood up.

  “Please don’t go, Angela, there’s so much more to say—”

  Nicolai clutched at me, but I brushed him off and left the apartment. In the street I leaned over a garbage can and threw up.

  I forced myself to go to bed when I got home, to at least pretend I was normal, but it was like trying to sleep while on speed (which I’ve only tried once, for the record). My mind raced, my hands and feet twitched, I felt jitters all over my body. Finally I gave up and sat in the living room with the TV on and the sound off. As infomercials for thigh machines and acne creams flickered across the screen, I stared out the window, wondering where in the darkness Eric was and whether he was thinking about me. Part of my jitters was caused by an acute desire to go out into the city and look for him, starting at his office and working my way through every inch of San Francisco’s forty-seven square miles until I found him and checked us into the nearest hotel where I could unbutton his shirt and run my tongue along the cleft of his collarbone, fill my nose with his aroma. The desire for him was a physical pain, like I’d swallowed hot rocks and they had burned their way down my throat and through my body.

  But still my rational mind, the famous McCaffrey cool head that had saved many a citizen from burning alive when my father and grandfather applied it to fighting a fire, told me to step back from my feelings and analyze the situation. Thanks to Nicolai, even my rational mind had accepted that Eric was something else, something not human. I didn’t want to use the V word, but he had powers far beyond those of a human, powers he paid for in all-too-human guilt and loneliness. Wasn’t loving him like loving the sun, so beautiful and warm, essential to life but deadly if you got too close?

  As I watched the light break over the horizon, a torpor came over my body that I could only compare to going under general anesthesia. The doctor says count backward from ten and by the time you get to eight you have as much consciousness as a log. But it couldn’t have been as bad as that, because I did hear my alarm clock, albeit two hours after it started ringing at seven.

  In the shower I washed my hair several times, forgetting after each time whether I’d done it. Getting dressed, a task I had always considered easy, became an agonizing chore because I couldn’t figure out which tops went with which bottoms. Outside it was cool and foggy, but the sunlight still hit my eyes so strongly I felt like I was getting a migraine. I stopped at a street vendor outside my office and bought three pairs of the cheapest, darkest sunglasses I could find.

  I stopped in at Steve’s office and found him with his head in a file drawer. As soon as he sat up I could tell something was wrong. His blue silk tie was loosened and the top button of his starched white shirt was undone. For someone else this would mean they were relaxing, but Steve was not a relaxed guy.

  “Angie, someone was in my office last night.”

  Chapter 18

  I looked around. Everything looked exactly as it always did. Steve’s San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mug was still sitting on his desk, filled with pens, his stapler and staple remover right next to it. His papers were neatly stacked in three metal trays labeled In, Out, and Pending.

  Steve said, “They weren’t trying to make a mess. They were trying to find something, unobtrusively.”

  “And did they?” I asked.

  Steve nodded, his face ominous.

  “That brochure you gave me is gone.”

  I shook my head in disbelief. “Why would anybody want that?”

  “Good question. By the way, I still have a copy. I had faxed it to a couple of my friends, so one of them just faxed it right back.” He waved some fuzzy copies at me. “One of my travel agent buddies called this place up and pretended to have a client interested in these, uh, recreational activities. When you talk to the agents in Asia they use a very practiced script that leaves out anything that might be construed as illegal, but you can get the gist of things. This agency specializes in very young girls, ten, twelve-year-olds, purportedly virgins. Virgins are big business in the sex industry.”

  I shuddered at the grotesque image. “Did you find out any connections we might have with this company?”

  “I was limited in my ability to search, since I couldn’t get a customer list without a police search warrant.”

  “But maybe it’s not the clients that are the issue for us, maybe it’s the owners.”

  “Exactly. I started looking into the ownership of the agency. And I came up with something very interesting.” Steve raised his eyebrows at me, then pushed the blurred photocopy over. He pointed to the address on the back: Jad Paan Travel Agency, Charoen Rat Road, Bangkok, Thailand.

  “This little company is owned by a larger Thai company, translated as the Royal Orchid Company. They own a number of businesses in the travel industry, such as hotels and tour companies. This took some digging to find out, but the Royal Orchid Company is owned by Tangento Corporation.”

  Steve leaned back in his chair and smiled, proud of himself for finding the answer I was hoping he wouldn’t find. Brouhaha in Asia, indeed.

  “What can we do about this, Steve? Whoever sent me this brochure must have wanted me to do something.”

  “Well, this is a problem. Prostitution is illegal, even in those countries, so Tangento owns a company that owns a company that is engaged in illegal activities. The connection is awfully far down the line, though, and far away. We’d be hard pressed to get someone in Asia to break down doors and start arresting people for something that is well known and widely tolerated.”

  “Well the least we could do is fire Tangento as a client, right? Or expose them here in the United States?”

  Steve shook his head. “I don’t know if anyone here would even care, Angie. The public already knows that Proteus shoes are made by six-year-olds in Pakistan, don’t they? That doesn’t stop them from paying $150 a pair for them. Why would they care about this?”

  “Oh, Steve, that is so depressing. We’ve got to do something.”

  “I’m with you, Sojourner Truth. Let’s free those slaves. Just tell me the game plan.”

  I picked up the photocopied brochure and Steve’s handwritten notes. “Let me think about this for a while. I’ll get back to you.”

  When I got to my office I saw a Post-it note stuck to the face of my computer, which read:

  10:30 A.M. Please come to my office as soon as you get in.

  —Dick

  I checked my watch. It was already 10:50. I scurried over to Dick’s office and looked in the window. Seated next to Dick at the conference table was Kimberley, wearing a white skirt and a pink sweater with a collar that appeared to be made of cotton candy. A man was sitting next to her. His face was turned away from me, but from the size of his shoulders and the wave of his dark hair, I recognized him as the man Kimberley had been talking to the night of the Bennetts’ party.

  I knocked, but opened the door without waiting for an answer. The stranger stood up, an act of chivalry virtually unheard of in the egalitarian halls of HFB. Dick seemed perturbed, half stood, then sat back down again. Kimberley smiled and patted her collar. The man looked like a model from the classic Arrow shirt advertisements, or the father on
a 1950s TV show. He had blue eyes under thick straight brows, a square jaw with a cleft chin. His thick brown hair waved expertly back over his head with no part in sight. He was dressed in a starched Oxford shirt with an open neck tucked into beige Dockers. A slight thickening around the middle was his only concession to having left his college days behind. He held out a hand twice the size of mine.

  “Hello, Angie, I’m Barry Warner. Let me say again how terribly sorry we were to hear about Lucy. All of us at Tangento were shocked when we heard the news.” When he smiled he displayed two rows of gleaming white teeth. He could have eaten an elephant with those teeth.

  “Please sit down, Angie.” Dick sounded pained, but that was nothing new. I wondered if this meeting was scheduled and I had just forgotten it in the chaos of the last few days.

  “I’m so sorry to be late,” I said quickly. My mind was spinning. Kimberley had been threatening Barry at her parents’ party on Saturday night, asking him to give her a “helping hand” in exchange for her forgetting about something. I was about to find out what Kimberley had asked for.

  “Barry called me this morning,” Dick began, “and asked to convene the team working on the Tangento account. He has an announcement he’d like to make, so, uh, Barry, now that we’re all here, why don’t you commence?”

  Barry beamed his huge smile at each of us. “I’m afraid I made y’all jump through hoops this morning to get together and meet with me. When I got the news about Lucy, well, you know the higher ups got a little antsy, and they wanted me to get on in here and find out what the game plan was going to be. We’ve all been very pleased with Kimberley and Lucy’s work…” He paused, and had the decency to look chagrined at having to talk business at such a time.