The boy is lost now. The unwinnable battle is written on his face. His hand trembles, the knife wilts forward, then drops onto the counter.
“You wil open the til .”
He opens the til .
“Now, give me the money.”
A clutch of meaningless tens and twenties are handed across the counter.
This is getting too easy. Wil gestures toward the back of the counter. “You wil press that little button and unlock the door.”
The boy reaches under the counter and flicks a switch.
“Do you want me to stroke your hand?”
The boy nods. “Please.” A hand lands on the counter. Freckled skin and bitten nails.
Wil caresses his hand, tracing a smal figure eight on his skin. “Now, after I’ve gone, you wil tel the police it was al a mistake. Then, when your boss asks where the money has gone, you wil say you don’t know, because you won’t. But then, maybe, you wil understand it belongs to a better man now.”
He walks away, pushes the open door. Once in the van, Wil smiles as the boy puts his headphones back in his ears, completely oblivious to what has just happened.
Scrambled Eggs
“Don’t come here. Please.”
No one seated at the kitchen table hears Helen’s prayer, whispered down toward the scrambled eggs she stirs in the saucepan. It is safely drowned out by the drone of Radio 4.
As she keeps stirring, Helen thinks of the lies she has told. Lies that started when they were in nappies, when she told her friends from the National Childbirth Trust that she was switching to formula milk because the midwife was worried about “lactation problems.” She couldn’t bring herself to say that even before their teeth came in, they sucked and bit so hard they made her bleed. Clara proved even worse than Rowan, with Helen shameful y tel ing her breast-is-best friends she was resorting to bottle-feeding after only three weeks.
She knows Peter is right.
She knows Wil has contacts, and gifts. What is that word? Blood minding. He could blood-mind people. Blood-fueled hypnotic power. But there are things Peter stil doesn’t know. He doesn’t quite realize what he is playing with.
The eggs are more than done, she realizes, scraping them off the bottom of the pan and spooning them out onto everyone’s toast.
Her son looks at her, baffled at the pretense of normality.
“It’s Saturday, so we’re having scrambled eggs,” she explains. “It’s Saturday.”
“At home with the vampires.”
“Rowan, come on,” says Peter, as egg flops onto his toast.
Helen offers Clara some egg and she nods, prompting a scornful sigh from her brother.
“Now, me and your dad have been talking,” Helen says, when she sits down. “And if we’re going to get through this as a family and make sure we remain safe, then we have to act as we normal y would. I mean, people are going to start talking and asking things about last night. The police, probably, as wel . Although at the moment it won’t even be a missing persons case, let alone anything else. Not until twenty-four hours after . . .”
Her glance presses some support out of Peter.
“Your mum’s right,” he says, as they al watch Clara start to eat her scrambled eggs.
“You’re eating eggs,” observes Rowan. “Eggs are from chickens. Chickens are living creatures.”
Clara shrugs. “Enlightening.”
“Come on, she has to go back to her normal diet,” says Peter.
Rowan remembers his father’s casual tone, last night, as he listed famous vampires. And then Clara, this time last Saturday, explaining her veganism.
“What happened to the ‘chicken Auschwitz’ speech we had to listen to last week?”
“These are free-range,” says his mother.
Clara sends Rowan a sharp look. Her eyes, stripped of their glasses, gleam with fresh life.
Indeed, even Rowan has to admit to himself that she looks better than he’s ever seen her. Her hair seems shinier, her skin has more color, even her posture has changed. Her usual meek, heavy head and forward hunch have been replaced by a bal erina-straight back and a head which sits as light as a helium bal oon on top of her neck. It is as if she doesn’t feel the ful weight of gravity anymore.
“What’s the big deal?” she asks him.
Rowan looks down at his plate. He isn’t going to be able to eat anything. “Is this what happens?
You taste blood and lose your principles along with your glasses?”
“She needs to eat eggs,” says Helen. “That’s been part of the problem.”
“Yes,” adds Peter, with a strange kind of relish. “Eggs. And bram.”
Rowan strokes his hair away from his eyes. “Bran?”
“No. Bram. It stands for—”
Helen glares at her husband. “Peter, do they need to know every single bit of abstainer jargon?”
Rowan shakes his head, cross with both his parents. Then studies Clara, chewing away. “But she doesn’t even seem bothered.”
Helen and Peter share a look. Rowan has an undeniable point.
“Now, please, Rowan, this is important. I know you’ve had a lot to take in, but we’ve got to try and help Clara get over her attack,” says his mother.
“You make it sound like asthma.”
Peter rol s his eyes at this. “Helen, she had a lot of blood. It’s a bit much to think we can just do everything as if this hasn’t happened.”
“Yes, it is,” she admits, “but we wil do it. We’l rise above this. And the way to do that is to carry on. Just carry on. Dad wil go to work. On Monday you’l go to school. But maybe today Clara should stay in.”
Clara puts down her fork. “I’m going out with Eve.”
“Clara, I—”
“Mum, it was planned. If I don’t go, it wil look suspicious.”
“Wel , yes, we should act completely normal, I suppose,” says Helen.
Rowan raises his eyebrows and eats his eggs. Clara, though, seems to be troubled by something. “Why do we always have Radio Four on when we never listen to it? It’s annoying. It’s like to prove we’re middle-class or something.”
Rowan looks at this person inhabiting his sister today. “Clara, shut up.”
“You shut up.”
“Oh my God. Don’t you feel anything?”
Peter sighs. “Guys, please.”
“You hated Harper anyway,” says Clara, studying her brother as if he is the one acting out of character.
Rowan picks up his cutlery only to put it straight down. He is exhausted, but his anger is waking him up. “I don’t like lots of people. Are you going to wipe out the vil age for me? Is it done on a request basis? Is that how it works? Because I was shortchanged by the woman at the Hungry Gannet the other day . . .”
Helen looks at her husband, who tries again to simmer things down.
“Guys . . . ,” he says, raising his hands to show his palms. But Rowan and Clara are lost in the row.
“I stood up for myself. You know, if you weren’t such a wet lettuce, you’d be a lot happier.”
“Lettuce. Great. Thank you, Countess Clara of Transylvania, for your thought for the day.”
“Fuck off.”
“Clara.” It’s Helen this time, spil ing the orange juice she is trying to pour into her glass.
Clara scrapes her chair back and storms out. Something she has never done in her entire life.
“Al of you, fuck off.”
Rowan leans back in his seat and looks at his parents. “Is this where she turns into a bat?”
The Lost People
S o here we are. The Seventh Circle of Hell.
As he drives into the place, Wil absorbs the sights the main street has to offer. A purple-painted children’s shoe shop cal ed Tinkerbel ’s. A tired-looking pub and a polite little deli. A sex shop?
No. A fancy-dress place for self-hating unbloods who think a night in an afro wig and glittered flares wil al eviate the pain of their existence. And a drugsto
re, as a plan B. Even with a token hoodie walking his cowering psychodog, everything has a suffocating coziness about it, an air of life lived at the lowest possible volume. He stops at the lights to let an old couple cross the road.
They raise slow and frail hands in thanks.
He drives on, passes a one-story building. It is tucked back from the road and half hidden by trees, as if ashamed of its relative modernity. A doctor’s clinic, the NHS sign outside tel s him. He imagines his brother in there, day after day after day, surrounded by diseased and unbitable bodies.
“Through me is the way to eternal suffering,” he thinks, remembering that passage of Dante.
“Through me is the way to join the lost people. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
And there it is. A little black-and-white sign nearly covered by green leaves from some overabundant bushes.
Orchard Lane. Wil slows the van and takes a left turn, flinching as the low sun greets him from above the expensive houses.
The slow and quiet world suggested by the main street is even slower and quieter here. The detached Georgian and Regency houses, built before Byron faked his first death, al have shining and blandly expensive cars sitting in their driveways. They look designed for just sitting there, going nowhere, as if happy to brood on their own technological souls.
One thing’s for certain, he thinks to himself, a camper van as old as Woodstock is going to be one hell of a sore thumb around here.
He parks opposite the house on a narrow grass verge.
He looks at number seventeen. A large, tasteful house, detached and double-fronted, but stil struggling to compete with the even bigger one next door. He looks at the Radleys’ SUV. Just the vehicle for a normal, happy family. Yes, from the outside they’re real y keeping up the right appearances.
Maybe it’s the sunlight, but he feels weak. He is not used to being awake at this time. This could be a mistake.
He needs strength.
So, as always when he gets like this, he reaches behind him and grabs the rol ed-up sleeping bag. He reaches into its warm center and slides out a bottle of dark red blood.
He caresses its label, looks at his own handwriting. THE ETERNAL—1992.
A whole and perfect dream in a bottle.
He doesn’t open it. Hasn’t ever. There’s never been an occasion special or desperate enough.
It is enough just to look at it, touch the glass, and think of what it would taste like. Of what it did taste like, al those thousands of nights ago. After a minute or so, he tucks it inside the sleeping bag and puts it in the back.
And then he smiles, and he feels a tender kind of joy as he realizes that in a moment he wil see her again.
Pretty
Clara looks at the posters on her wal.
The tragic beagle.
The monkey in the cage.
The model in a fur coat trailing blood down the catwalk.
They are sharply in focus. She looks at her fingers and can see the half-moons at the base of each nail, can count the creases of skin over the joints. And she doesn’t have the slightest sense of nausea.
In fact, she is energized. More awake and brimming with life than she has ever been. I killed Harper last night. It is a shocking fact, but she isn’t shocked. It is just a natural fact, as everything is a natural fact. And she can’t feel guilty about it either, because she hasn’t done anything deliberately wrong. And what is the point of guilt, anyway? Al her life she has felt guilty for no real reason. Guilty for worrying her parents about her diet. Guilty for occasional y forgetting to put something in the recycling bin. Guilty for inhaling carbon dioxide and taking it from the trees.
No. Clara Radley isn’t going to feel guilty anymore.
She thinks about her posters. Why did she have such ugly things on her wal ? Why shouldn’t she put something more attractive in their place? She kneels on her duvet and takes them down.
Then, once the wal is bare, she has fun in the mirror, transforming herself, watching her canine teeth lengthen and sharpen.
Dracula.
Not Dracula.
Dracula.
Not Dracula.
Dracula.
She studies her curved white fangs. She touches them, presses the points into the pad of her thumb. A fat blob of blood appears, shining like a cherry. She tastes it and enjoys the moment before making herself look ful y human again.
She is attractive, she realizes, for the first time ever. I am pretty. And she stays there, upright and smiling and proud, savoring her own good looks, with antivivisection posters crumpled around her feet.
One of the other changes she has noticed is that she feels so light. Yesterday, and every day before it, she had always been aware of a weight on top of her and she had slouched around and annoyed teachers with her slumpy shoulders. Today though, she feels no weight at al . And as she focuses on this helium-like lightness, she notices her feet are no longer on the carpet but above it, floating over the wrinkled posters.
Then the doorbel rings, and she lowers herself back onto the carpet.
Never invite a practicing vampire into your home. Even if he is a friend or a member of your family.
The Abstainer’s Handbook (second edition), p. 87
Fences
Helen just stands in the halway and lets it happen. Lets her husband invite him into the house and hug him. He smiles and looks at her, with a face that has lost none of its power.
“Yes, it’s been a long time,” Peter is saying, sounding farther away than he actual y is.
Wil keeps his eyes on Helen as he keeps the hug going. “Hel of a message, Pete. ‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.’ ”
“Wel , yes,” says Peter, nervously. “We had a bit of a nightmare, but we’ve sorted it.”
Wil ignores this and concentrates on Helen, for whom the hal way has never felt narrower. The wal s and watercolors press closer and closer, and she’s about to combust with claustrophobia as Peter shuts the door.
Wil kisses her cheek. “Helen, wow, seems like yesterday.”
“Does it?” she responds tightly.
“Yes, it does.” He smiles and looks around. “Tasteful décor. Now, when do I meet the kids?”
Peter is weak and awkward. “Right, wel , now, I suppose.”
Helen finds herself unable to do anything but lead him into the kitchen, realizing she must look as somber as a pal bearer. Clara isn’t there, but in a way Helen wishes she were, if only to give her a way to divert herself from Rowan’s questioning face.
“Who is it?” he asks.
“It’s your uncle.”
“Uncle? What uncle?”
Rowan is confused. He has always been told his parents were only children.
And then his dad and the mystery uncle appear. Peter smiles sheepishly. “Okay, this is my . . .
brother, Wil .”
Rowan is hurt and doesn’t respond to his uncle’s smile. Helen imagines what he’s thinking: One more lie in a life brimming with them.
To her dismay, Wil sits himself down in Peter’s chair and looks at the exotic landscape of cereal boxes and cold slices in the toast rack.
“So, this is . . . breakfast,” says Wil , with poorly concealed disdain.
Helen looks in desperation at the scene before her. She is desperate to say a mil ion things to Wil , but she can’t utter a word. He has to go away. Peter has to get him to go away. She tugs on her husband’s shirt as she walks out of the room.
“We have to get him out of here.”
“Helen, calm down. It’s al right.”
“I can’t believe you left that message. I can’t believe you did that. I mean, how stupid.”
Peter is angry now, a hand kneading his forehead. “For Christ’s sake, Helen. He’s my brother. I don’t get it. Why do you just unravel like this when you see him?”
Helen tries to slow her voice to a normal pace as she peeks through the doorway. “I’m not unraveling. I’m raveled. It’s
just . . . God, the last time we saw him we were . . . you know. He’s our past. He’s the rot we left behind when we moved here.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. Listen, he can help. With al this Clara business. You remember what he’s like. With people. With the police. He can persuade people, charm them.”
“Blood minding? Is that what you’re advocating?”
“Maybe. Yes.”
She looks at her husband and wonders how much blood he had last night.
“Wel , right now he’s under our roof charming our vulnerable son. He could tel him anything.”
Peter looks at her like she’s hysterical. “Helen, come on. Vampires can’t blood-mind vampires.
He can’t make Rowan believe anything that’s not true.”
This only seems to make Helen more agitated. She shakes her head furiously. “He’s got to go.
He’s got to go. Go. Get rid of him. Before he—” She stops, remembering how little Peter real y knows. “Just get rid of him.”
Rowan watches his uncle bite into a cold piece of whole wheat toast.
There is a slight resemblance to his father, he realizes, but he has to do quite a lot of Photoshopping in his mind to real y see it. He has to take away the three-day beard and the raincoat and the battered black biker boots. He has to add quite a bit of weight to Wil ’s face and stomach, and age his skin a decade or so, and imagine him with shorter hair, and exchange the Nico T-shirt for a shirt with a col ar and put a dul gleam in his eyes. If he did al that, he would get someone vaguely similar to his father.
“Carbohydrates,” says Wil , referring to the toast he’s eating. He makes no effort to close his mouth. “I tend to neglect them, as a food group.”
The awkwardness Rowan feels, sitting at the breakfast table with a wild-looking stranger who is also a blood relative, just about keeps a lid on the anger.
Wil swal ows, waves the slice of toast vaguely toward him. “You didn’t know about me, did you?
I could tel by your face when I walked in . . .”
“No.”
“Wel , don’t be too hard on your mum and dad. I don’t blame them, real y. There’s a lot of history there. A lot of bad blood. And a lot of good blood too. They didn’t always have principles, you see.”