Within a few days I was calmer. A drunken mistake: these things happen. I elected not to tell you about it—partly through self-serving cowardice, but more out of a genuine knowledge of how little it meant, and how much it would hurt you to know. The ratio between the two was too steep for me to say anything. After a fortnight it had sunk to the level of vague memory, the only lasting effect an increased realization of how much I wanted to be with you. That was the only time, in all our years together, that anything like that happened. I promise you.
It should all have been okay, a cautionary lesson learned, but then the first hunger pangs came and everything changed for me. If anything, I feel lucky that we’ve had ten years, that I was able to hide it for that long. I developed the habit of occasional solitary walks in the evening, a cover that no one seemed to question. I started going to the gym and eating healthily, and maybe that also helped to hide what was happening. At first you didn’t notice, and then I think you were even a little proud that your husband was staying in such good shape.
But a couple of years ago that pride faded, around about the time the kids started looking at me curiously. Not very often, and maybe not even consciously, but just as you started making unflattering remarks about how your body was lasting compared to mine, I think at some level the children noticed something too. Maddy had always been daddy’s girl. You said so yourself. She isn’t any more, and I don’t think that’s just because she’s growing up and going out with that dickhead from her college. She’s uncomfortable with me. Richard’s overly polite too, these days, and so are you. It’s like I’ve done something which none of us can remember, something small which nonetheless set me apart from you. As if we’re all tip-toeing carefully around something we don’t understand.
You’ll work out some consensus between you. An affair. Depression. Something. I know you all care for me, and that it won’t be easy, but it has to be this way. I’m not telling you where I’m going. It won’t be one of the places we’ve been on holiday together, that’s for sure. The memories would hurt too much.
After a while, a new identity. And then a new life, for what it’s worth. New places, new things, new people: and none of them will be you.
I’ve never seen Vanessa since that night, incidentally. If anything, what I feel for her is hate. Not even for what she did to me, for that little bite disguised as passion. More just because, on that night ten years ago, I did something small and normal and stupid which would have hurt you had you known. The kind of mistake anyone can make, not just people like me.
I regret that more than anything: the last human mistake I made, on the last night I was still your husband and nothing else. That I was unfaithful to the only woman I’ve ever really loved, and with someone who didn’t matter to me, and who only did it because she had to.
I knew she must have had a boyfriend—I just didn’t realize what kind of man he would be.
I can’t send this letter, can I? Not now, and probably not even later. Perhaps it’s been nothing more than an attempt to make myself feel better; a selfish confession for my own peace of mind. But I’ve been thinking of you while I’ve been writing it, so in that sense at least it is written to you. Maybe I’ll find some way of keeping track of your lives, and send this when you’re near the end. When it won’t matter so much, and you may be asking yourself what exactly it was that happened.
But probably that’s not fair either, and by then you won’t want to know. Perhaps if I’d told you earlier, when things were still good between us, we could have worked out a way of dealing with it. It’s too late now.
It’s time to go.
I’ll come back some day, when it’s safe, when no one who could recognize me is still alive. It will be a long wait, but I will come. That day’s already planned.
I’ll start walking at Oxford Street, and walk all the way back up, seeing what remains and what has changed. The distance at least will stay the same, and maybe I’ll be able to pretend you’re walking it with me, taking me home again. I could point out the differences, and we’d remember the way it was: and maybe, if I can recall it clearly enough, it will be like I never went away.
But I’ll reach Falkland Road eventually, and stand outside looking up at this window; not knowing who lives here now, only that it isn’t us. Perhaps if I shut my eyes I’ll be able to hear your voice, imagine you sitting inside, conjure up the life that could have been. I hope so.
And I will always love you.
CONRAD WILLIAMS is the author of nine novels: Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Loss of Separation, Dust and Desire, Sonata of the Dead, and Hell is Empty.
His short fiction is collected in Use Once then Destroy, Born with Teeth, and I Will Surround You, and he has edited the anthologies Gutshot and Dead Letters.
He has won the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award and the Littlewood Arc prize. Williams lives in Manchester with his wife and three sons.
Bloodlines
Conrad Williams
As the end of the 20th century approaches, Dracula finds himself incarcerated in a maximum-security prison . . .
Naim parked her Mini as the shadow of an armed guard swept over her. She was twenty minutes early and would have arrived even sooner if she had not stopped off in the park to calm herself down. This was the first interview Salavaria had agreed to since his incarceration. The authorities had green-lighted her application for a meeting first time round and she had been too busy getting her questions right, placating her editor and tying up the loose strings of other stories to fully appreciate the enormity of this liaison.
It was a stifling day. Naim rubbed her forearms gently through her jumper as she crossed the gravel forecourt to the gate. There were two more guards with Armalite rifles slung loosely across their shoulders; one of them was stroking the barrel as he watched her progress. The car that had shadowed her through the Bedfordshire countryside since she slipped off the M1 at Aspley Guise had parked a little distance back from her: a pair of blank faces tracked her from the front seats. Nobody was taking any chances with this gig.
She tried to refocus her mind: she needed to be as unruffled as possible if she were to come away from the interview with a good story. Her mind flitted over the bloody half-decade of Salavaria’s reign of terror prior to his capture at an abandoned railway station in North Yorkshire last winter.
Salavaria, she thought. She had seen the pathologist’s photographs. They had followed him through the deep snow, the tracker dogs and the police, to a crumbling stone platform where they found him trying to swallow the heart of ten-year-old Melanie Cartledge, whose body lay in the snow nearby, ringed with an ugly spattered circle of blood and feces. He had attempted to set fire to her corpse but her clothes were too damp. Her singed hair sent an unbroken line of thin smoke into the sky.
“Shoot me,” he had begged them.
A constable from the Yorkshire police had been suspended for six months for trying to brain him with his truncheon.
“Good morning Ms. Foxley.” A voice touched by synthetic crispness darted at her from the steel doors. There were no windows here.
“Morning,” she returned. “I’m here to see—”
“Gyorsy Salavaria. Yes, yes, we know all about that. Could we take you through GeneSync security please?”
She pressed the back of her hand against a matte plate on the door. The plate hummed lightly against her flesh as an IntraScan assessed her DNA. Before it had stopped humming, refreshed its lenses with a self-cleaning spray and disappeared into its housing, the door was opening, sliding down into a socket underground. Three armed guards surged toward her from the inner gloom, and motioned for her to climb on to their Magnabike. After stop/start passage through a series of inner gates, they glided in silence past featureless black walls that seemed to boast a join neither with floor nor ceiling. Large red numbers were stenciled at intervals, interstitial globes breathed pale light against the dul
l sheen of metal. It was cold in here. She thought she heard a moan.
“Are these the cells?” she asked.
One of the guards regarded her through his black plastic facemask: she saw her own features, tiny and distorted, in its sheen. He nodded and faced front. She followed suit, noting the driver—fused with the cockpit as though he was of its design rather than merely its pilot—bathed in thin green light from the controls. By the time they drifted to a stop, she was thinking of insects.
She stepped on to a bay floored with a Perspex-covered grille. It was under-lit by brilliant white light. Once her eyes had readjusted to the glare, she could see that the space below the grille fell away hundreds of feet. There were passageways down there; guards walking them like ants in a catacomb.
“This way,” motioned a guard.
She was led into a seam in the blackness which opened out into a walkway punctuated by pools of water and potted plants. A man in a red robe waved at her from the walkway’s end. His glasses flashed intermittently as though he were trying to signal her a covert message.
“Miss Foxley,” he called. “Quite a ride, isn’t it? I reckon we should open to the public.”
“Professor Neumann?” she extended her hand.
“’Fraid so,” he smiled and took her arm. “This way.”
His office was accessed via a short elevator ride—the only way in or out of the room, apparently. He seated himself at an expansive desk that supported nothing greater than a chewed pencil, a mug bearing the legend I’VE GOT PMT and an ornate block of slate with Professor K Neumann engraved upon it.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee, tea . . . I’ve got some Exta-C Lite?” He fingered the ornate whiskers that bracketed his face.
“Nothing thanks.” Maybe it was the imminent introduction to Salavaria or the office’s Spartan appearance that was getting to her, but she couldn’t stop shaking.
“Camera six!” called Neumann, stroking his ponytail. A screen, the size of the far wall, fluttered into life.
“I’ll be watching the interview, of course,” he said. “You’ll be perfectly safe. If Gyorsy tries to rise from his chair the seat will inject him with a small dose of fentanyl.”
She could hardly hear him. Her eyes were fixed on Salavaria. He was no longer the strutting, plump monster that had glared from every front page the morning after he was arrested; here was a meager scrap of flesh, his clothes hanging from him like giant folds of loose skin. His hair had either fallen out or been shorn close to his scalp: the planes and angles of his head stood out in painful detail. What happened to him?” Naim asked, approaching the screen.
“Guilt, I would imagine, although your guess is as good as any other—and will probably be worth much more in an hour or so. None of us have been able to get a word out of him.”
“What? Nothing?”
Neumann shook his head. “Although, he does talk in his sleep. We’ve got a VA mic in his cell. There are tapes if you’d like to listen.”
“Not just now. I’d like to be free of anything that might influence any conversation.” She thought of the forensic pictures of Lisa Chettle, his first victim, her remains flapping in the branches of a tree like strips of cloth. “Well, as free as I can make it.”
“I understand. I’ll give you a copy of the tape to take away. But you’ll have to sign a legal waiver agreeing not to reproduce the material in anything you write.”
He joined her in front of the screen. He was wearing a sweet, expensive aftershave; it had brought his skin out in reddish bumps. When he spoke again, it was in a conspiratorial murmur as though this room, as opposed to Salavaria’s cell, was being bugged. Perhaps it was.
“Before you leave, I could show you my quarters. It might be amusing.”
Naim looked up at his florid face and felt a wave of nausea wash through her. She guessed it would be anything but amusing.
He became more animated when she entered, but not much more.
“Gyorsy? Hello. My name’s Naim Foxley. Uh, can I call you Gyorsy? You agreed to speak to me?”
“Don’t talk to me as if I were an idiot. I know who you are. My brain works okay. Sit.”
“Thank you. I—look, I can’t pretend . . . I’m a little nervous. I’m a lot nervous. I’ve never . . .”
“Never what? Passed the time of day with a serial killer before? Is that what you were going to say? Or something more emotive. A pervert, yes? Or better: a psycho. A ding-dong fucking psycho.”
“Prisoner 2433249. Code breach. Any more of that, Sally, and you’ll be on bread and water for a week.”
He looked up, then closed his eyes and smiled. “Apologies Professor. I was not thinking.” His gaze leveled with hers once more. It was not, she noted with some discomfort, unpleasant. “And apologies to you too, Ms. Foxley . . . Bread and water, though, that’s for your benefit. Prison brutality is not dead, you know. I’ll be scarred before the day is out. Batons are still the favored weapon, even as we reach the end of the century. You’d think they’d come up with something a little more modern. A little more Star Wars.”
He shrugged her toward the chair opposite. “I’d offer to make you some tea, but I’m not allowed near the kettle,” he said. His voice carried some of the authority she’d missed in his physique.
“I’m not thirsty,” she said, through a mouth that had become powder dry.
They sat silently, his eyes sad, absent of any mocking of her as she fumbled her interview materials on to the table.
“Where do you come from?”
“Cusmir, in the south of Mehedinti. Romania. Although I lived a great part of my life in Hungary before moving here. In a village, Bitcse, with my grandparents.”
She had a bunch of questions ready to recite, designed to bring him out of his shell. What shell? He knew why she was here, his glittering eyes said so. The questions were there for her. They were a runway for her to gather pace before she launched herself at the big one. Now she saw she didn’t need it. “Why?” she mouthed, unable to summon a squeak of sound.
“Do you know what it is like to float in a bath of blood?” he whispered. “To sleep in a bed with corpses that cannot close their eyes? Do you know the feeling, when you take something incontrovertibly positive as a life and turn it, with your own hands, against everything that is outlined in its code, to oppose what nature intended?”
There was no gloating in his revelations, no theater. His voice became drawn and robotic, reciting the delusions of his psychosis as though they’d been scripted for him. She was grateful she didn’t have to ask any more questions; he guided her through the misery without prompt. He began to quietly cry through his words, a wetting of the bluish skin beneath his eyes. He looked pathetic, not the man who had torn an unborn child from the womb of Emily Tasker and partially devoured its face while the mother bucked in the throes of hemorrhage.
“I didn’t do it for me. I didn’t do any of it for me,” he said. “I was trying to atone for the actions of my forebears and trying to lay a safe passage for the family I once thought I might have. Imagine,” he snorted, twisting his face, “me, The Leech, fathering children. The press would think the pram I sat them in a snack bucket.”
She recoiled from the image before it had a chance to solidify. She noticed she had neglected to switch on her Dictaphone; her notebook was bare, the point of her pencil lead sharp. It did not matter—his words were scarring her. She would not forget.
The interview swayed between them, like the pendulum of a clock. Time seemed to condense, become syrupy, as he wove his bland, bitter narrative. At times, he swung in so close she feared she would smell the mealy stench of raw corpse on his breath: she almost cried with relief that he smelled of Potter’s throat pastilles. Only when the guards moved in with their weapons cocked did she realize that Salavaria was touching her; she did not have the strength to pull away. When she did, she was aware of a tablet of paper tucked between her fingers.
“I hope I’ve done enough,” he
said. “God knows I’m not safe here if I haven’t.”
“What do you fear?”
“You’ll discover that soon,” he said, and nodded. “The bureau.”
She clenched her hand.
In the relative sanctity of her car, Naim allowed herself a long, whooping exhalation. She had to try three times to fit the ignition key into the fascia but her hands were still shaking. She had forgotten about the piece of paper but now she unfolded it. How had Salavaria been allowed pens, even paper? She had reported on suicides achieved with both. But then she saw that the paper was an ancient bus ticket, small enough for him to have lodged it beneath a fingernail. The message, such as it was, had been written in blood, a spidery trail guided, it seemed, by a nib no broader than the end of a hair. Before she had even recognized the words as a London address, she found herself wondering who had spilled the ink that formed them.
Naim disembarked at Euston and took the tube to Holloway. There, she crossed the street and walked down Hornsey Road to a mini-roundabout. Gripped by an unease which had come on with the speed of her arrival—she could be gazing upon Salavaria’s secret London garret within five minutes—she stopped at a corner café for a cup of tea. The address burned against her thigh. She watched as a fat, slow fly landed on a cake by the counter.
While the tea was doing its job, she slipped the tape into her Walkman and pressed the play button. A male voice—Neumann’s—cut in with its cool, precise tones. “Night one. Recording starts 03:45 A.M. 2nd of December 1999.”
There was a thick, ruffling noise possibly Salavaria moving around beneath his blanket and then a short span of silence broken by his moans.
“Jesus, no,” he whispered. “Lord of Darkness, I beg you, spare me. Spare me. All I did was as an offering for you. It was all in the way of atonement. Leave me in peace . . .”
In the Footsteps of Dracula Page 53
