The Mammoth Book of Dracula - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  “It’s no secret, Bru,” she said. “It was just a matter of getting the shit out of my system. I’m okay now—absolutely clean. Nobody hates me. I don’t go back there to rub their noses in it. They know I only want to help.”

  Saint Jennifer, reformed whore and would-be saviour of fallen women? he was tempted to say. All he actually said was: “Nobody’s absolutely clean.” He held up the coffee cup as he said it, to remind her that caffeine was an upper of sorts. The coffee was too strong for his own taste, and he noticed that she was drinking hers black, without sweeteners. She’d always liked it white before, with one or even two.

  She didn’t dignify his stupid correction with a reply.

  “The light in here is distinctly dismal,” Brewer observed, feeling that he’d somehow gone five points down in the game and hadn’t a clue how to start scoring on his own account. “I don’t wonder you feel the need to get out in the sun once in a while, even if you have to go back to your old haunts in search of a bit of company. Don’t you have new friends now? Or is your boyfriend the solitary type, outside of bed?”

  “You’d probably get on with him well enough,” Jenny told him, wryly. “You have lots of interests in common.”

  Brewer let his eyes travel over the loaded bookshelves. “He probably has interests in common with everyone who has interests,” he remarked. “He’s obviously a very interested man. Is that why you’re at a loose end? Is he out pursuing his interests?”

  “He doesn’t have a lot of free time at the moment.”

  “I know the feeling,” Brewer said. “Exactly what interests do he and I have in common?”

  “Biotech,” she said, shortly. After a pause, she added: “Quality control.” Now she was being deliberately enigmatic. Her blue eyes were looking up at him from beneath slightly lowered brows. She was fishing for a reaction. Brewer wondered whether she expected him to be flattered by the news that she’d picked out a man like himself once she’d been consumed by conformity and decency—if she had been consumed by decency and conformity, and wasn’t just a better class of whore than she’d been before.

  “Are you happy?” he asked.

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Just a question.”

  “Do you think I was happy before?” she asked, with some slight asperity. “Do you think I was happy when I knew you?”

  “You were sometimes,” he said. “I was the one who gave you the happy pills, remember. I make a good product. You were happy enough when you were under the influence. I just wondered if you were happy now that you don’t even take sweeteners in your caffeine-loaded coffee.”

  “What you’re wondering,” she said, “is why I invited you up here, and why I agreed to let you drive me home. You’re wondering whether you might possibly have got lucky, now that screwing me would count as getting lucky instead of trivial commerce.”

  “I never thought of it like that,” Brewer said, as equably as he could.

  “No, you didn’t. For me, trading sex for the stuff you had to sell was cutting out the middleman, but you really did think that it didn’t count as whoring if no actual money changed hands. I never quite understood that.”

  “I liked you,” he said, truthfully. “You were pretty, and sweet. Are you pissed because I never asked you to let me take you away from all the rest of it? I might have, if I’d thought you’d say yes—but you were the one who was just cutting out the middleman.”

  “I’m a lot prettier now,” she said, “but not nearly so sweet. I’m not so sure you’d like me now, once you got to know me.” The haunted note was sounding in her voice now.

  “I’m sure,” Brewer told her. He intended it as a compliment, but she didn’t seem to take it that way.

  “Because nothing else counts except the looks,” she countered. “Because getting to know me better couldn’t possibly change your mind, which you made up the instant you saw me in the Goat and Compasses. What were you doing there, anyway? I haven’t seen you in there before—not for at least a year.”

  “Looking up an old friend,” he told her. “You remember Simon, don’t you? Simple Simon.”

  “Oh, him” she said, as if the revelation explained everything.

  “He’s no worse than the old friends you were looking up,” Brewer pointed out. “Maybe a cut above, depending how you compare things. Either way, he brought us together again. It really is good to see you, and I really am pleased that you got out of the gutter and started reaching for the stars. Sure you’re happy. Who wouldn’t be? So why did you let me drive you home instead of calling me a shit and kicking me in the balls? If I was just a paying customer before, why give me the time of day now? If you don’t want to pick up where we left off and I assume you don’t—you must have some little itch of curiosity needling you. You must at least be interested to know how I am.”

  “I already asked you how you were,” she pointed out.

  “So what else do you want to know?”

  “How you really are. As you say, there’s just a slight itch of nostalgic curiosity. Do you know the one thing about you I missed, when you stopped coming round because I was too much of a wreck?”

  It wouldn’t have been diplomatic to say the pills so Brewer said: “My acid wit?”

  “Those little rhapsodies about the psychotropic revolution,” she said. “Not the acidly witty ones, the ones when you forgot yourself just a little, and actually half-meant what you were saying, about a world where biotechnology would save us from ourselves. It was all bullshit, of course, but it was nice that you believed in something, even if it wasn’t love or honesty or common decency. I was young then, of course. Too young. Do you still believe in it, just a little, or have you become just one more drug-peddler, dedicated to being rich and having a flash car with cunning anti-theft devices?”

  “Oh, I still believe in it,” Brewer assured her. “I really and sincerely do. I only use the acid wit to cover up that fact. Always speak the truth in a sarcastic tone of voice, and no one will ever find you out.”

  “No one?”

  “Except you, of course. I let my guard down with you. I’m letting my guard down now, or hadn’t you noticed? It came crashing down the moment I saw you in the pub. I should be busy breaking Simple Simon’s legs, or persuading him that I might if he doesn’t shape up, but I never had the heart for that kind of crap, and the moment I saw you ... well, here we are. This is a terrible cup of coffee. How can you drink it black like that?” He put the cup down and moved closer to her, pretending that he was just pointing at her coffee cup.

  “Our tastes change as we mature,” she told him. She must have known that he wasn’t moving closer to point to her coffee cup, but just for a moment she hesitated about backing away. He took that as a green light, but when he reached out for her she froze. He’d gone too fast.

  “No, Bru,” she said. “It’s nothing like that. It really was just curiosity.”

  He didn’t believe her. He took hold of her anyway, hoping that it might be the kind of stall that could still be overridden, although he knew that the odds were against him, for the time being. He tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t be kissed. He held her more firmly, but when she stopped struggling it wasn’t surrender.

  “You’d have to rape me,” she said. “I don’t think you want to do that, do you?”

  He let go of her immediately. It certainly wasn’t what he wanted, and it definitely wasn’t his style.

  “There’s nothing I have to offer you any more, I suppose?” he said, not intending it to sound as bitchy as it did. “Nothing you want in return?”

  She didn’t look angry, but she didn’t look apologetic either. “This was a mistake,” she said. “It was silly.”

  “Not that silly,” he assured her. “Whatever you were looking for back there, you were more likely to find in me than in those tattered slags you were talking to. You still are. What were you looking for? Not just something to relieve the boredom, surely.”

&
nbsp; “No,” she said, positively. “Not just that. And you’re right—maybe I should have come looking for you in the first place. But it’s nothing to do with sex, Bru, nor with the stuff you peddle as synthetic happiness. It’s something else. You’d better go now.”

  “Why?” he riposted. “Is it time for your boyfriend to come out of his coffin? Oh, sorry—home from work, I mean. What exactly is it that he does?” He was almost tempted to make a crack about the plasma in the fridge, but he knew better. One of his golden rules was never to tell people he knew they had secrets until he’d figured out what the secrets were.

  “I wouldn’t like to keep you away from your own work for too long,” she countered. “All those haemorrhoid creams and heartburn tablets have to be kept pure, don’t they? And there’s always more happiness to cook up while the plant’s lying idle. You always were a busy man—that’s why your sex life consisted of brief encounters with cheap whores.”

  The insults were too far out of date to hurt. The new generation of pharmaceuticals was way past the haemorrhoid and heartburn phase.

  “I knew the acid wit was what you’d missed most,” he came back, as heroically as he could. “You obviously missed it so much you stole the recipe.”

  He left after that—as politely as he could, given the circumstances.

  It wasn’t easy to get the car out of the basement, but he managed it eventually. He drove it home, possessed all the while by an icy calm.

  He was sure that he’d see her again, even though he’d made such an unholy mess of things. He’d memorized the number inscribed on the phone in her hallway, and he knew she’d probably be on her own during working hours. Next time, he’d have a script ready, and he’d make up all the ground he’d lost.

  He had to; it was a matter of pride.

  ~ * ~

  Brewer made no attempt to put the pills or the plasma into analysis while his lab assistants were still on site. Even Johanna wouldn’t have known what he was doing, or why, and she knew better than to ask, but it was his habit to be discreet and he needed the equipment in the main lab to get the job done quickly. Johanna and Leroy weren’t in the least surprised that he was still there when they completed the last of their own assignments a mere two hours into time-and-a-half and dropped the results on his desk. They thought of him, half-admiringly and half-pityingly, as a workaholic night-bird.

  He bid them both a cheery goodbye, and switched on all the privacy screens as soon as they were clear of the building.

  Once he’d got the first set of analyses started his curiosity faded away into the methodical routines. It wasn’t until he was certain that it was a very exotic protein that a certain excitement began to force its way through his controlled state of mind. All proteins in the public domain were intrinsically boring; these days, one had to go a long way out of that domain to find anything really weird. This one was from way back in the wilderness.

  When the first sample had cleared the initial stage of analysis he set the replicated samples of the second compound going, but he held off on the plasma lest he get into a tangle. The first rule of good lab practice was to take things in order.

  As soon as Brewer had an amino-acid map of the first compound, and while he was still waiting for its 3-D configuration, he checked the newest edition of the encyclopedia. He knew that the unknown wouldn’t be on file—these days, nobody ever filed anything until they were sure it was worthless, and that usually took a long time—but he expected the book to throw up a few probable template-molecules based on common base-clusters. Practically all novel proteins were designed by computer programs which tried to juggle known activity-sites into more interesting or more economical configurations, so it was usually possible to guess what kind of base an innovation had started from and what kind of effect the designer might be trying to enhance.

  It didn’t take him long to figure out that he wasn’t dealing with any of his usual fields. Whatever pill number one was supposed to do it hadn’t any obvious potential to mimic or interact with neurotransmitters or amygdalar encephalins. Nor had it any detectable kinship with the currently favoured avenues of research into cell-repair and tissue-rejuvenation. That probably meant that it had nothing to do with Jenny’s new look—but if it had, then it really must be something odd, something unexpected.

  It didn’t take long to find out that the same was true of type two—by which time Brewer’s instincts were beginning to detect a suspiciously natural ambience.

  Brewer was not at all enthused by the thought that the samples might be nothing more than lumps of raw-material churned out by DNA of unknown function that had been cloned from some obscure plant or bacterium in the faint hope that it might turn out to be interesting. Computerized design hadn’t quite driven the old pick-and-mix methods to extinction and there wasn’t a nation in the world that didn’t have its own mock-patriotic Ark project dedicated to gene-banking as many local species as could be identified, in the faint hope of preserving data that would otherwise be lost to the attrition of routine extinction.

  The trouble with natural proteins, of course, was that they might be geared to functions which had no relevance at all to human beings, slotted into biochemical systems which had long been discarded by the higher animals—or, indeed, all animals of whatever height. The majority of exotic natural proteins sufficiently stable to be incorporated into pills were structural materials devoid of any real physiological significance. Brewer tried to console himself with the thought that nobody would keep those kinds of samples in his bathroom cabinet, but it wasn’t until he had the 3-D configurations, and could trace the pattern of active sites, that he became morally certain that he wasn’t dealing with any mere building-blocks for fibres or cell walls.

  Unfortunately, it still wasn’t clear exactly what the relevant physiological activity might be. The proteins certainly weren’t psychotropics, and if they were cosmetics of some kind they were no common-or-garden patent-avoiders.

  When he decided that it was time he put the plasma-like stuff into the system he had been studying his screen intently for at least twenty minutes, virtually oblivious to his surroundings. While he reached out to pick up the specimen bottle containing the straw-coloured liquid his eyes still lingered on the screen. It wasn’t until his groping hand failed to make contact with the bottle that he looked sideways, and then up.

  There was no way to tell how long the invader had been standing there, not six feet away, watching him. Brewer had never been so startled in all his life—but he had never before been confronted by anything so nearly impossible. His electronic defences were, as he had assured Jenny, glorious in their subtlety. How glorious, therefore, must be the subtlety of the man who now stood before him, having hacked his way through the undergrowth of passwords and booby-traps?

  There was nothing particularly striking about the invader himself, apart from his lustrously pale skin, his remarkably dark eyes and his astonishing aptitude for silence. He didn’t seem unusually menacing, although there was a peculiar glint in his near-black eyes which suggested that he might become menacing if crossed.

  Brewer desperately wanted to say something that would save a little face, but he just wasn’t up to it. All he said, in the end, was: “Who the hell are you?” He was uncomfortably aware of the fact that it was a very tired cliche.

  “You’ve seen me before, Mr Brewer,” the unwelcome visitor told him. “Several times, in fact.” He had a slight accent of some kind but it wasn’t readily identifiable.

  Brewer stared hard at the invader’s face, certain that he would have remembered those coal-black eyes and that remarkable complexion. He had method enough left in him to realize that if that were so, those were exactly the features he must set aside, in order to concentrate on the rest. When he did that, he got a dim impression of where he had seen the man—but, not, alas, the least flicker of a name.

  On the other hand, Brewer realized, given what he was doing and the way his uninvited guest had taken the troub
le to sit around and wait for him to look up, there couldn’t be much doubt about the invader’s purpose in coming to call.

  “Jenny said we had interests in common,” he said, knowing that there was far too much lost ground to catch up but feeling that he had to try. “You see so many people, though—all those seminars, all those cunningly contrived meetings where clients try to whip up competition in order to drive the tenders down. We were never formally introduced, were we? Funny how we can have so many mutual acquaintances, and not know one another at all.”

  “I know you very well,” the stranger said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you, one way and another.” There was suddenly something about his eyes that seemed profoundly unsettling, but there was as much sadness in it as threat.

  Brewer, desperate to know exactly how much trouble he was in, tried to fathom the significance of one way and another. One way was obviously Jenny—but who was the other? The people Brewer met at conferences and the people he met in the course of his legitimate business had little or nothing to tell. He put two and two together and hoped he wasn’t making five.