by Matt Haig
She looks at him and realizes she has never found anyone more attractive in her entire life.
He gestures for her to step inside. “Welcome to the castle.”
“Who are you?” she asks him.
“My name is Wil Radley, if that’s what you mean.”
She’s not sure that she does, but she nods, then kneels her way into the van without a single worry about the red-brown stains on the mattress.
He is wondering if she is real y worth the effort. The trouble is, he realizes, you reach a point when even pleasure, the easy pursuit and attainment of things desired, develops its own routine.
And the trouble with routine, as always, is that it breeds the same boredom that everyone else—al the unbloods and abstainers—suffer.
She is looking at the bottle. This girl, this Julie, who has been so easily lured here, who is unlikely to taste even half as good as the woman he swigs back on—Isobel Child, the second-best-tasting vampire he’s ever known. But he can’t cope with Isobel tonight, or any of those police-fearing bloodsuckers tel ing him how to live.
“So, what do you do?” Julie asks him.
“I’m a professor,” he says. “Wel , used to be. No one wants me to profess anymore.”
She lights a cigarette and sucks hard on the filter, stil intrigued by the bottle. “What’s that you’re drinking?”
“It’s vampire blood.”
Julie finds this hilarious. Her head fal s back to release the laughter, and Wil has a ful view of her neck. Pale skin meeting paler makeup. His common preference. A smal flat mole sits near her throat. The turquoise trace of a vein under her chin. He breathes in through his nose and just about catches the scent of her, the rivers of nicotine-infused, il -fed rhesus-negative running through her.
“Vampire blood!” Her head fal s forward again. “That’s funny!”
“I could cal it syrup or nectar or life-juice, if you prefer. But you know what? I real y don’t like euphemisms as a rule.”
“So,” she says, stil laughing, “why are you drinking vampire blood?”
“It makes my powers stronger.”
She enjoys this. Role-play. “Oh wel , come on. Use your powers on me, Mr. Dracula.”
He stops drinking, recorks the bottle, places it down. “I prefer Count Orlak but Dracula wil do.”
She looks coy. “So, are you going to bite me?”
He hesitates. “I’d be careful what you wish for there, Julie.”
She moves closer, kneels over him, her lips charting a trail of kisses down from his forehead to his lips.
He pul s away, nuzzles his head into her neck, and inhales again what he is about to taste, al the time trying to obliterate the cheap perfume she’s wearing.
“Go on,” she says, whol y unaware it’s her final request. “Bite me.”
When Wil finishes with Julie he looks at her lying there in her blood-soaked uniform and feels hol ow. An artist gazing at one of his lesser works.
He checks his phone and hears the first and only message on his voice mail.
It is his brother’s voice.
It is Peter, asking for help.
Peter!
Little Petey!
They need his help because, from the sound of it, Clara has been a naughty girl.
Clara is the daughter, he reminds himself, Rowan’s sister.
But then the message stops. The line turns into a hum. And it becomes what it always is, just him sitting there in the van with some dead girl and bottles of blood and a smal shoebox ful of memories.
He gets the number from his cal records and dials it with no luck. Peter has switched off the cel phone.
Curiouser and curiouser.
He crawls over Julie and doesn’t even think about dipping his finger into her neck for another taste. The shoebox is parked between the driver’s seat and his most special bottle of blood, which he keeps wrapped up inside an old sleeping bag.
“Petey, Petey, Petey,” he says, taking the elastic band off the box to get not the familiar letters and photographs but the number written inside the lid—the number he’d copied down from a number written on a receipt, which had itself been copied down from Peter’s email, which Wil had read at an internet café in Lviv, where he’d spent last Christmas with some members of the Ukrainian branch of the Sheridan Society, en route home after partying in Siberia.
He dials. And waits.
The Infinite Solitude of Trees
Rowan goes downstairs to find that not only has everyone left the living room but his parents haven’t cleared away the bowls. Even the summer pudding is stil out.
Looking at the rich, dark red fruit juice oozing from its center, Rowan decides he is hungry and takes a bowl for himself. Then he goes into the sitting room and eats in front of the TV. He watches Newsnight Review, his favorite show. There is something about intel ectuals sitting in chairs arguing about plays and books and art exhibitions that soothes him, and tonight is no exception.
As they discuss a new S&M version of The Taming of the Shrew, Rowan sits there and eats his pudding. When he has finished he realizes that, as always, he is stil hungry. He stays there though, vaguely worried about his parents. Clara probably phoned them to get a lift. But why wouldn’t they have told him they were leaving?
The celebrity intel ectuals move on to a book cal ed The Infinite Solitude of Trees by Alistair Hobart, the award-winning author of When the Last Sparrow Sings.
Rowan has a secret aim in life. He wants to write a novel. He has ideas, but nothing seems to make it into writing.
The trouble is, al his ideas are a bit too bleak. They always seem to involve suicide or apocalypse or—more and more frequently—some sort of cannibalism. General y, they are set two hundred years ago, but there’s one idea he has that is set in the future. This is his happiest idea—
the one about the world’s imminent end. A comet is heading to earth, and after various intergovernmental attempts to stop it have failed, people are resigned to dying in a hundred or so days. The only chance of survival is to take part in a massive global lottery, in which five hundred lucky people win a ticket to a space station where they form their own self-sustaining community.
Rowan sees it as a kind of greenhouse orbiting Venus. Then a boy, a skinny seventeen-year-old with skin al ergies, wins a ticket but eventual y gives up his place to spend seven more days on Earth with the girl he loves. The boy is going to be cal ed Ewan. The girl, Eva.
He hasn’t written a word of it yet. Deep down, he knows he isn’t real y going to be a novelist. He is going to sel advertising space or maybe, if he’s lucky, he’l work in a gal ery or become a copywriter or something. Even that’s a long shot, given how badly he’s likely to do in interviews.
The interview for his last job—doing silver service at the Wil ows Hotel in Thirsk for wedding receptions on Saturday afternoons—had been a total disaster in which he’d nearly ended up hyperventilating. Although he was the only applicant, Mrs. Hodge-Simmons had been very reluctant to take him on and had her doubts confirmed when Rowan ended up fal ing asleep serving at the head table and unconsciously poured gravy over the skirt of the groom’s mother.
He scratches at his arm, wishing he were Alistair Hobart: surely Eve would love him if he were debated on national TV. Then, as Kirsty Wark starts to wrap things up, the phone rings.
One of the handsets is lying out of its cradle on the table next to the sofa. He picks it up.
“Hel o?” He can hear someone breathing on the other end of the line. “Hel o? Who is it? Hel o?”
Whoever is there has decided not to speak.
“Hel o?” He hears a kind of clicking sound. A sort of tut maybe, which is fol owed by a sigh.
“Hel o?”
Nothing but the dial tone, humming ominously.
And then he hears the car pul up in the driveway.
Calamine Lotion
Eve sees a thin man marching across the field toward them. Only when he cals her name do
es she realize this man is her father. The embarrassment this causes has a kind of crushing effect on her, and she shrivels into herself as he approaches.
Toby’s also noticed him. “Who’s that? Is that—”
“My dad.”
“What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know,” says Eve, although she knows perfectly wel what he is doing. He is turning her into a social cripple. She tries to limit the damage by standing up.
She smiles apologetical y at Toby, before her father becomes too easy for him to see, with his il -washed Manchester United shirt and his unkempt hair. The father who has no visible connection to the dad she once knew, when her mother was stil around. Indeed, it was too much to expect for the world to see the man he once was, when she could hardly see him herself. “I’m sorry,” she says, walking backward across the grass. “I’ve got to go.”
Jared looks at her top and the naked skin it reveals. Skin he had once dabbed with calamine lotion after she fel in a patch of nettles on a family holiday.
The air in the car is tainted by perfume and alcohol. He knows any other parent would accept this as normal teenage stuff, but any other parent doesn’t know what he knows—that the line between myth and reality is drawn by people who can’t be trusted.
“You smel of drink,” he tel s her, sounding angrier than he wishes.
She stares at him, at the laughter lines which stay on his face, years after the laugh in question.
“I’m seventeen, Dad. It’s a Friday night. I’m al owed some freedom.”
He tries to calm down. He wants her to think about the past. If he can get her to think about the past, it wil anchor her there and help her stay safe. “Eve, do you remember when we—”
“I can’t believe you did that,” she says. “It’s humiliating. It’s just . . . medieval. You treat me like Rapunzel or something.”
“You said eleven, Eve.”
Eve looks at her watch. “God, so I’m half an hour late.” She realizes he must have left the house ten minutes after eleven.
“Just to see you there, just to see you with that boy acting like . . .” He is shaking his head.
Eve stares out at the hedges speeding by, wishing she could have been born something else, a little thrush or starling or something that could just fly away and not have to think about everything that is in her head.
“That boy is Toby Felt,” she says. “His dad is Mark Felt. He’s going to have a word with him.
About the rent. I told him you’ve got a job now and you’l be able to pay double next month, and he’s going to tel his dad that so everything’s going to be okay.”
Jared can’t help it now. This is too much for him. “Oh, so what did that favor buy him? Eh?”
“What?”
“I’m not having my daughter prostitute herself in some field on a Friday night just to buy us favors with the landlord.”
This infuriates Eve. “I wasn’t prostituting myself. God! Wasn’t I meant to say anything?”
“No, Eve, you weren’t.”
“And then what? We have nowhere to live and have to move and have al this crap again? We might as wel just drive to some slummy motel right now. Or find a cozy bus shelter we can sleep in. Because if you don’t wake up, Dad, and stop thinking about whatever crap you’re always thinking about, I’l be prostituting myself just to get us food.”
Eve regrets al this the moment she’s said it. Her father is nearly in tears.
And for a moment Eve doesn’t see the man who just shamed her in front of her friends. She sees instead a man who has suffered what she has suffered, so she says nothing and looks at his hands on the steering wheel and the infinite sadness of the wedding ring he wil never take off his finger.
Ten Past Midnight
Rowan is leaning against the tumble dryer while his mother attends to Clara in the downstairs bathroom.
“I’m extremely confused,” he says through the door.
He is understating the case. A short while ago his mother arrived back with his sister, who was covered in what looked like blood. And she real y was covered, the way a newborn baby is, and hardly recognizable as herself. She had seemed so blank and impassive. Hypnotized almost.
“Please, Rowan,” his mother says, as the shower is switched on, “we’l talk about it in a bit.
When Dad comes home.”
“Where is he?”
His mother ignores him, and he hears her talk to his blood-stained sister. “It’s stil a bit cold.
Okay, it’s coming through. You can get in now.”
He tries again. “Where’s Dad?”
“He’l be here soon. He’s . . . had to sort something out.”
“Sort something out? What are we, the Cosa Nostra?”
“Please, Rowan, later.”
His mother sounds cross, but he can’t stop the questions.
“What’s the blood about?” he asks. “What’s happened to her? . . . Clara, what’s going on? Mum, why isn’t she talking? Is this why we’re getting weird phone cal s?”
This last one seems to do it. His mother opens the bathroom door and looks Rowan straight in the eye.
“Phone cal s?” she asks.
Rowan nods. “Someone cal ed. Someone cal ed and didn’t say anything. Just before you came back.” He watches anxiety spread over his mother’s face.
“No,” she says. “Oh God. No.”
“Mum, what’s going on?”
He hears his sister step into the shower.
“Light the fire?” his mother says.
Rowan looks at his watch. It’s ten past midnight, but his mother is adamant. “Please, just get some coal from outside and light the fire.”
Helen waits for her son to do as he’s told and wishes the coal shed were farther away, so she could have time to work this al out. She goes to the phone to retrieve the number. Already she knows who it was. She doesn’t know the number the machine gives her, but she knows, when she cal s it, she wil hear Wil ’s voice.
Panic beats in her head as she dials.
Someone picks up.
“Wil ?” she says.
And then he’s there. His voice as real as it always was, sounding young and ancient al at once.
“Now, I’ve had this dream five thousand times . . .”
In a way, this is the hardest thing of the whole night. She has fought for so long to cancel out thoughts of his existence, of speaking to him, of feeling his deep voice quench some hidden thirst inside her and course into her soul like a river.
“Don’t come here,” she says, with whispered urgency. “Wil , this is important. Don’t come here. ”
Rowan wil have fil ed the coal bucket up by now and be heading back to the house.
“Normal y it goes a little differently,” says Wil . “The dream.”
Helen knows she has to get through to him, has to stop it from happening. “We don’t need you.
It’s sorted out.”
He laughs, crackling the line.
She could col apse. She looks at one of her paintings in the hal way. The watercolor of an apple tree. It blurs and she struggles to bring it back into focus.
“I’m splendid, thanks, Hel. You?” He pauses. “Ever think of Paris?”
“It’s just better if you stay away.”
The shower stops. Clara must be getting out. There’s another noise too. The back door. Rowan.
And stil , the same demonic voice in her ear. “Wel , now you mention it, I’ve missed you too.
Seventeen years is a lot of lonely space.”
Her eyes are closed tight. He knows what he is capable of doing. He knows he can pul gently at a single strand and cause everything to unravel. “Please,” she says.
He says nothing.
She opens her eyes, and Rowan is there, with a ful coal bucket. He is looking at the phone, and at her, at the fearful prayer that is her face.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” says Wil .
“I’ve got to g
o,” she says and presses the red button.
Rowan looks half-suspicious, half-confused. She feels naked in front of him.
“Could you go and start the fire.”
It’s al she can say. But her son stands there, not moving or saying anything for a good few seconds.
“Please,” she says.
He nods, as if understanding something, then turns away.
A Certain Type of Hunger
The night moves at the speed of panic.
Peter comes home.
He burns his and Clara’s clothes on the roaring fire.
They tel Rowan the truth. Or half of the truth, and even that he can’t believe.
“She kil ed Harper? You killed Stuart Harper? With your teeth?”
“Yes,” says Peter, “she did.”
“I know this al seems very weird,” adds Helen.
Rowan groans in disbelief. “Mum, it’s over the hil from weird.”
“I know. It’s a lot to take in.”
Peter only has his trousers to go. He screws them into a bal and throws them on the fire, pressing the cotton fabric down with the poker to make sure there is nothing of them left. It is like watching a whole other life disappear.
And it is about this time that Clara decides to speak, in a smal but steady voice.
“What happened to me?”
Her parents turn to look at her, sitting there in the green dressing gown they’d bought her when she was twelve or thirteen but which stil fits her. She looks different, though, tonight. Something’s gone and something else has taken its place. She’s not as frightened as she should be. She lowers her glasses down her nose, then lifts them back up, as if checking her eyesight.
“You were provoked,” Helen tel s her, as she rubs a soothing hand on her knee. “That boy provoked you. It brought out something. You know, this is why you’ve been il . Not eating meat. You see, this il ness, this condition, we passed it on to you. It’s hereditary, and it brings out a certain type of hunger which has to be very careful y managed.”
The words jump to attention inside Peter’s mind.
