Blood Type: An Anthology of Vampire SF on the Cutting Edge

by Watts, Peter

  Two humans, perhaps three, hidden in the darkness.

  One consumed with anger.

  Another more uncertain; almost concerned.

  “I know you’re there,” she called, tapping a fingernail against the glass, trying to determine its strength. The glass was an inch thick. Not even a vampire could punch through it.

  The humans had built a cell specifically to hold a vampire.

  She was a prisoner. At least until one of them was stupid enough to open the door. Then, once she had the chance, she would kill them all.

  A light went on behind the glass, revealing a trio of figures standing in the small room beyond. The first was an older woman, with grey hair and tired eyes, wearing a white medical lab coat. Hidden speakers hissed static for a moment, before a tinny, lifeless facsimile of her voice punctured the silence.

  “What is your name, please?”

  Molly shook her head. She had no intention of helping them. She leaned closer to the window, noting the position of a small microphone set on her side of the glass.

  “Why am I here?”

  The second figure, a heavy-set man in a police uniform, gently moved the older woman to one side and leaned in towards the microphone. He was the same officer that had ordered her hooding, abduction and imprisonment.

  “You’re responsible for the deaths of at least eight people this year.”

  Eight? Had she really been so careless, letting them track her for that long?

  The police officer pointed at a wall of photographs behind him, which had eight faces prominently on display, surrounded by other images of their bloodless, lifeless corpses. Were these her victims? They could be, but it was difficult for her to remember all the faces, as so many had come and gone over the last one hundred and fifty years that very few now stuck in her memory. They were just meals.

  “If I am accused of murder, then surely I should be in a courtroom?” She tilted her head, playing the fool, making them talk, while she revealed nothing.

  “Courtrooms are for human beings,” the police officer stated coldly. “Not monsters.”

  “Enough, Superintendent Carter.” The old woman subtly shook her head.

  “And this little loophole will be your excuse for what, exactly?” Molly asked the question, not to get an answer, because she already knew the story of Edmund Bingley, but because she wanted them to say the words; humans had a morality, which was easily shaken when you made them face up to what they were doing. They were weak, fickle, flickering ephemera that passed from the world, before they even have a chance to realise what they were.

  “We want you take part in a study,” the old woman replied, taking note of Molly’s unimpressed reaction. “If you do so voluntarily and co-operate whole heartedly, and are found to be anything other than a monster, then you will be accorded your full human rights.”

  Molly almost laughed.

  “And if I refuse to take part in this charming and educational study?”

  “Then we’ll put you down,” Superintendent Carter replied, his eyes glimmering darkly. “Just like we would any other dangerous animal.”

  There was a real malevolence in his voice, an unbridled hate, which made the old woman flinch with discomfort. He was not hiding his intentions. He wanted her dead. Such hate in humans was usually caused by a personal loss. Perhaps she had killed someone he was close to?

  Molly’s eyes flicked to the third figure behind the glass, a bland middle-aged man in an old suit, who had been watching her intently through his thin-framed glasses. He had given nothing away. He had not said a word. Given the proposal that had just been made, this was undoubtedly his task; he was there to study her, and he was doing it with a calm, clinical detachment.

  The police officer slammed a palm against the glass, directly in front of her face, clearly offended that her attention had drifted away from him.

  “Your life is in our hands.”

  “You think I can’t overpower you?”

  The human needed to be taught his place, reminded that despite the fact that she may look like a teenage girl, she could easily snap his neck.

  “Try it,” the Superintendent grinned. “Even if you win, this whole laboratory is rigged for decontamination by fire. If anything goes wrong here, it takes just one of us to push the button and everything burns. And rest assured; I’ll be the one with his finger on the button.”

  Molly nodded.

  “I guess I’d better play your game then.”

  “To start with, we have some questions that you must answer." The challenge was clear in the rigidness of the woman’s voice and pointedness of her words; Molly had to co-operate fully, give honest and open answers, or she would be sacrificing her existence. “What is your name, please?”

  “Mary Whitlock. Molly, to my friends.”

  The old woman wrote the name down on the form.

  “And when and where were you born?”

  “I was born Fifth of February, 1832, in the town parish of Chipping Barnet.”

  The old woman added this information, and then dropped the clipboard and pen into a tray beneath the window, which she pushed into a cell.

  “Sign.”

  Humans were ridiculous. Did they really believe that just because she put her name to a piece of paper that it would bind her into obeying their agreement? Vampires lived above human law. Did they not know that the moment they opened the door her fangs would be in their throats?

  She signed the paperwork and returned it to the tray.

  Her name was the only word she knew how to write. During her human life she had been given only a basic education by her mother, which did not include literacy, and somehow in the last one hundred and fifty years she had never quite managed to find the time to acquire the skill that almost every human in the country now possessed.

  She had often thought that this, combined with her adolescent looks, could well be the reason why she struggled in a society where other vampires thrived.

  The old woman checked the papers and then glanced at the quiet man in the corner.

  “She’s all yours, Peterson.”

  The old woman left the room. Superintendent Carter, shaking his head with derision, followed her out the door.

  “So, are you going to come in and take skin and blood samples then?” Molly asked with a grin, hoping he would try.

  Peterson shook his head.

  “You misunderstand the nature of the study. It’s not biological, it’s sociological. I’m a behavioural psychologist.”

  This time Molly could not contain her laugh.

  “You’re here to analyse me?! That’s ridiculous!” She let herself rise up off the floor. Levitation always scared humans, as it defied all their beliefs in how the world worked. The middle-aged scientist’s eyes widened, as she casually defied the laws of physics. “Vampires are far beyond the understanding of mortal men.”

  He quietly jotted several words down on the noted pad. These humans really liked their paperwork. It unnerved her; in many ways she preferred the simple, honest bloodlust of the police officer, which at least she understood.

  “My job is to determine the nature of vampire psychology,” he lowered his notepad and met her eyes. “Are you an intelligent, self-aware creature, potentially capable of functioning as a normal member of human society? Or are you an animal, which acts purely on its base desires? Or are you something else, something truly soulless and evil, something that is beyond our rational understanding? Or are you something else entirely?”

  Molly gently lowered herself to the floor, letting gravity take its grip on her.

  In one hundred and fifty years she had never stopped to consider her own nature any further than an understanding of the name it was given; she was a vampire, was that not all the explanation that was required? Everyone knew what vampires were. She had always known what this meant, but now he was casting doubt upon it.

  “Which do you believe to be the case?” he asked.

  She
shook her head.

  “I am vampire.”

  “You’ve killed at least eight people in the last seven months.” He put down his note pad, and unpinned a photograph from the wall and held it up against the glass. It was an image of a seven-year-old boy with sandy hair and a gap-toothed smile. “Jack Bradshaw. You abducted him from outside his primary school in West London, and left his corpse in the nearest tube tunnel.”

  Molly nodded.

  She remembered being interrupted by over-all clad tube workers, having to rush the feed, abandon the body and run. She had hoped they would miss the body in the darkness, but clearly they had not.

  “I remember Jack,” she said, as she stared at the photograph. “He was sweet.”

  “Then why did you kill him?”

  “I mean he tasted sweet.” She turned her vision away from the dead boy and onto the man with the glasses. “The young always do.”

  “And you don’t consider such an act to be abhorrent? This for most people would be the very definition of evil.”

  “I needed to feed. The young are easier prey.” Molly shrugged and moved away from the glass, turning her back on the psychologist, not enjoying how his gaze seemed to penetrate her. “How do you think lambs view the human race? Are you a soulless murderer, just because you enjoy a tender chop?”

  “We’re just a form of cattle to you?”

  Molly nodded. That was exactly how she had always thought of humans. Cattle.

  “I need human blood to survive. You’re just a meal. Mankind is just not as high up the food-chain as you like to believe. I guess, by your definition, this just makes me a dangerous animal?”

  Peterson did not respond to her question, instead he asked one of his own.

  “Who was your very first victim?”

  “My mother.”

  The psychologist’s pen went frantic; he must have scribbled down half a page before he noticed that Molly had stopped talking.

  “Why her?”

  “I went to her for help.” Molly shrugged. “She betrayed me to the local vicar. They came after me with a wooden cross.”

  Molly shuddered. She had spent most of the last one hundred and fifty years trying to forget about that day, about slaughtering everyone in the house, and then being trapped alone with all the corpses, because she could not venture out into the daylight without burning. Eventually other visitors had come to the house and discovered the bodies of her family. That night she had fled, with a mob at her heels.

  She told Peterson all of this, including all the graphic, bloody detail.

  She expected him to be shocked, but instead he calmly noted everything down on his notepad and then asked another simple question.

  “What help did you hope your mother would provide?”

  “A way out. A way to cope with what I had become.” Molly could feel the edge of sadness break in her voice, as long forgotten memories surfaced, seeming more fresh and clear than anything else that happened to her in the last one hundred and fifty years. “She always gave good advice.”

  “You tried to be something other than a killer?”

  Peterson’s voice had shifted. There was a tremor of doubtful hope rising in his voice, finally revealing his beliefs, that he wanted her to be a sympathetic and redeemable figure, but for some reason was already resigned to disappointment.

  “Humans can’t understand. Sooner or later they always become scared of us, or we have to feed, and they end up dead.”

  “You had no choice?”

  “I often choose to run. You’d be surprised how often they follow.”

  Peterson made another note.

  “But with your family, you had no choice?”

  “They were trying to kill me. They wouldn’t stop.”

  “Are you sure you had no choice?”

  Molly did not answer him. One hundred and fifty years of killing all started on one night, with the death of her family, when she was seeking a way to become something else. She had never dared look back. Had all those countless deaths been inevitable, or had there been another choice?

  Both options left her feeling numb.

  “I don’t know.”

  She was unsettled. With half a dozen queries this man had undone her entire world, suddenly making her question everything about her very nature.

  How had she never asked these things of herself?

  Peterson quietly filed away his notes in a bag.

  “I would like Doctor Langley to run a series of neurological tests, using an MRI machine, to determine if any of your behaviour has physiological cause.”

  Molly stared at him blankly.

  “I was born in 1832, over a hundred years before the television set was invented, when the light bulb and the flush toilet were the pinnacle of invention, do you think I have the faintest idea what any of those words mean?”

  Peterson smiled.

  “I want to use a machine, to see what your brain is doing.” He paused. “Will you murder me if I open the door?”

  Molly smiled.

  “Well, that would rather depend on whether I’m a demonic monster, a trapped animal, or a person who is intrigued to understand their own nature, wouldn’t it?”

  Peterson raised his eyebrows, obviously a little surprised by her words. What had he expected? A simple no?

  “I’ll be around shortly.”

  She was surprised. He was unexpectedly confident.

  He clearly believed that she would not kill him.

  But she might.

  Peterson turned the light off, plunging the room beyond into deep, empty blackness. With the room gone, she could see her white-walled cell reflected in the glass, with the space where she stood seemingly empty.

  Vampires have no reflection, but to her knowledge there was still no scientific explanation as to why, and like the levitation and immortality, it was just another trait that set them apart from the rest of the natural world and made them something to be feared.

  What would she do when he opened the door? Earlier she had been committed to killing them all and escaping, or becoming dust in the attempt, but was she now giving serious consideration to voluntarily staying?

  Was she curious about what their study would discover?

  She heard the lock disengage and watched as the door opened.

  No, she was a prisoner, and no good would come of participating in their experiments. Her first and foremost desire was to escape.

  She did not want to speculate about what that made her.

  She did not care.

  Given the threats stacked against her, particularly the danger of the decontamination fire, she would have to play along for now.

  Peterson beckoned her out of the room and into the corridor.

  She obediently followed.

  The old woman in the white lab coat was waiting for her in the room beyond.

  Neither human seemed as scared as Molly would have expected. Normally humans always tended towards fear once they knew what she was, but these two seemed unexpectedly confident that she would be compliant. Perhaps they understood her nature even better than she did? But how was that possible? How could they know anything about vampires?

  Molly moved into the room, which was dominated by a massive circular MRI scanner. She had seen such devices before, during her visits to hospitals, which she frequented regularly to find weak victims, or to steal pre-packed snack bags of blood.

  The old woman, Doctor Langley, gave her a long and complex explanation about how the machine worked. Molly only half listened; she was too busy studying the room for some means of escape. No windows. Another heavy, pressure-sealed door, with no operating mechanism on her side. There was also another dark observation window, implying that someone may be sitting in darkness watching them; she could take the two doctors hostage, try and negotiate her way out, but this would most likely end with the flames that Superintendent Carter had warned her about. In fact, he was very likely the one on the other side of the glass, w
atching her now, his finger poised on the button.

  She glanced at the black surface.

  She sensed the human mind hidden in the shadows, watching her with disgust and hate.

  There was no way out.

  She soon found herself lying back in the machine, staring at a series of images, as lightning-like flashes banged around her. She had understood the basics of Doctor Langley’s explanation, the images were supposed to induce an emotional reaction in her brain, which the machine would take a snap-shot of, somehow revealing to them something of how her mind worked.

  A field of flowers in bloom.

  A partly undressed young woman, blushing.

  A baby crying, alone.

  A teenage boy firing a gun in the air.

  A gravestone.

  The process took hours, and left Molly feeling increasingly hungry and tired. She was growing bored with playing nice.

  Then she felt it. Another presence.

  Somewhere beyond the room was another mind.

  She could sense another vampire, just beyond the walls. No, more than one. A dozen or more. All imprisoned. All angry.

  One of them was in agonising pain.

  Edmund Bingley.

  It was Edmund Bingley. He was still alive. After twenty years of experimentation, they still had him locked up, in perpetual agony, just metres away from her.

  As the machine was shut off, she looked at the tired old woman and the bland man in his spectacles and old suit, and noted how dispassionate and resigned they were in their work. They had done this before. Countless times.

  That was how they had been so sure she would not kill them; they had played out this scenario before with numerous other vampires, they knew the threat of fire was enough to keep their prisoner’s actions in check.

  “How many vampires do you have here?”

  Both the doctors froze.

  “You can sense them?” The middle-aged man frowned, clearly curious. “We’ve never encountered a vampire with that level of telepathy before.”