A Love Like Blood

  ‘Was it just chance that brought you back to Paris? It must have been, because you cannot possibly have guessed that I was still there, making a comfortable living from certain items and enjoying certain girls. You came and made my life awkward. I was starting to educate Marian. Showing her the pleasure that can be had from blood. I had moved her to a place where she let me cut her, willingly, but then she began to pull away.

  ‘Because of you. You said something, I know it. You scared her, made her frightened, and she began to pull away. So that finally, one night, she tried to resist me, and I had to kill her.

  ‘You forced me to move, and you forced me to kill the American girl before she said something that would put me in danger. Were you in love with her? Were you? I think that’s true. You loved her. Then you should know that you killed her. By trying to warn her about me, you are the one responsible for her death. You.

  ‘I think it was then that I began to hate you, as you seemed to hate me. You had interrupted me twice, taken what I wanted from me, and I would have had you killed in Avignon, but for that captain. I had my comfortable life disturbed once more, by you. Things were easy in Avignon. It is a dirty town, and there were many willing to join me. I told them it was a religion, a true religion; a more honest form of that ridiculous play-acting the Catholics do, and it was easy to find men and women eager to join me. Yet you spoiled it for me.’

  All this while he stood in front of me, above me. He was tall, I’d forgotten that. And strong, despite his age. He stood with his feet slightly apart, his weight evenly balanced, showing total command of the situation, of everything around him. Of me. And yet I noticed one thing: he had chosen a spot to stand, and that stand was outside my reach. Even broken and feeble as I was, it gave me a little courage to see he kept his distance from me.

  But he wasn’t done speaking, not by a long way.

  ‘So, all this time, I have been wondering about you, Charles Jackson. From that moment, the first moment, in Saint-Germain, when I saw the look in your eyes.

  ‘There was fear, I saw it. Fear, of course, but there was something else. Curiosity. Is that how I should put it? Curiosity, wonder? You wondered what I was at, even though you knew it well enough. I was drinking the warm blood of the girl I had just killed when you found me, and in the same moment that you turned away, you wanted to stay, too, and watch what I was doing.

  ‘So what does that mean? What does that make you, Dr Jackson? Are you guilty? You should be. You could have saved that girl, but you merely let yourself become guilty.

  ‘What were you doing, coming back to Paris? Why did you come to Avignon? Why did you come here? I understand, since you followed me with a gun in your hand, that you intended to kill me. You think I should be killed, because of what I’ve done. Maybe I should, but I don’t care to think about that. I do what I do because I like it, and because I can.

  ‘Do you think I am evil? Is that why you wish to kill me? Do you wonder why I do what I do? Why? Because it excites me. I worship it. I crave it. I do it because I can. You think it’s evil? To feel human blood pass across my lips? Have you never wondered what it would be like? Did you never kiss a woman, and think about the blood in her lips? Did you not push your mouth on to her neck, and feel the pulsing there? Did she never stretch back her head and offer you her neck, and beg you to kiss her there? To bite her? Gently, yes! She wants you to bite her, and you do, but you both know what is really happening. You are playing the monster, and you nip her skin with your teeth to excite yourself. And her.

  ‘You think I must have used violence on the women. You think I tricked them and captured them and used violence against them to get what I wanted, but you are wrong. There was always violence in the end, but in the beginning, there was no violence. I met them, I took them, I spoke to them, I told them what I wanted, and I led them to a point where they came to me willingly. Every one of them gave me their blood willingly. At least, they did at first. And the blood rushes, the blood rushes.

  ‘All down the years, there is the rushing of blood inside us. It spills out of us so easily, so feeble are we. You must have seen much of that in the war. I saw much of it. I saw so many things. I saw how men looked without heads. How much blood there is inside a man. How long it can take to die, and how fast. How a shell could go off beside you and leave you untouched but coat you in the body of the man you had been whispering to but a moment before.

  ‘Blood. We are born in blood as we slide from the mother, covered in it, and it never leaves us, it rules us and we should worship it. All of us. Some of us do.

  ‘You remember, I’m sure, what happened in Rome? I set you a trap, and you dutifully flew into it, and you took that girl without even wondering how old she was. I’m right. I forget her name now, but she was an interesting one, for sure. She relished what she did to you, I barely had to pay her. She told me she was bleeding when she took you. She told me how you reacted.

  ‘Blood! You were excited by her, and you made my life so very easy, until . . . Did something scare you? You returned to London that evening, when you were supposed to see the girl again. Then I didn’t know what to do about you. I thought often about killing you, but I had those photographs taken of you with her to offer me a more interesting idea. The chance to destroy you, completely.

  ‘So I had your house watched. We saw that man come and go. Collecting your letters. We followed him. We killed him. We found your false name. Your address in Scotland. But by the time we got there, you had moved on again. What made you move on? You can have had no idea, no warning, that we were coming.

  ‘So I still needed some way to get to you, to find you. Then along came the Italian girl, and I knew you wouldn’t let me down. So now I will do it.

  ‘I will reduce you to nothing. And if you beg me hard enough, one day I might walk in here and shoot you. But not yet.

  ‘First of all, I am going to find out what it is about you. What is inside you. I believe you have a connection to blood, just as I do, and I am going to make you find it. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there. You are as fascinated by blood as you are scared by it.

  ‘I’m going to leave you now. We will begin tomorrow. But it’s important you know one more thing before I start. I have the girl upstairs. The young Italian girl. Remember that.’

  Chapter 6

  He left, and then the anger came. I pulled and pulled at my chain until my wrist began to bleed, but I didn’t care. I kept struggling, screaming soundlessly, and I could almost feel the hot blood in my brain driving me to madness, but it was a madness that wouldn’t come, no matter how much I prayed for it to come and take me away.

  Eventually I stopped struggling, and kicking out at the air, and I collapsed on the ground, panting hard, gasping. But despite everything, I remained lucid, and I knew, as much as I hated it, that I was still logical enough, still alert enough, to have focused on the most terrible thing he’d revealed to me.

  He’d killed Marian because I’d tried to warn her. He was right. It was my fault. It was so long ago, so many years ago, but I wanted to scream at my younger self for my lack of control. I’d made the wrong decision, after all, and that weakness had led him to kill her, as she’d tried to resist him. I saw it all; I imagined his luxurious apartment in Saint-Germain; how he’d kneel before her, holding a small surgical knife in his fingertips, or maybe some authentically oriental knife, and make a small cut in her wrist. I saw it, I saw it all, and I saw Marian refusing. One night, she refuses, and he grows angry, and then she knows I’m right. That she is in danger. But it’s too late, because he’s already locked the door and hidden the key. He’s already turning towards her from the table where he keeps larger knives. No, he’s picking up something less subtle, something that will be worse for her, and more innocuous for him; a table knife, as to be found in any brasserie on any street in Paris.

  She goes down, now he towers over her, and when it’s done, and his anger goes, he stares, looking around him at th
e mass of blood that’s spreading over the varnished floorboards of his consulting room, and his head hangs, because he knows there will be much work to do before the night is over.

  I killed Marian. And I killed Hunter, therefore, too.

  They’d tracked him down in Cambridge, found that note I’d written to him with my address, and only the fact that Hayes had been so clumsy had, by chance, made me move on again before Verovkin and his men arrived in Scotland. Hayes had nothing to do with it; nothing to do with Hunter, or Verovkin. In fact, his greed had saved me, but poor Hunter, I thought. Poor Hunter.

  I knew then that Verovkin had beaten me. It was hopeless. I didn’t know what he meant by We will begin tomorrow, and I didn’t want to.

  I hated him, and in the night I found out why.

  I no longer cared who he was, or where he was from or what he’d done before the war, or how he came to be who he came to be. I didn’t care that I couldn’t understand how his English was perfect, as good as mine, and yet he had some strange mix of accents that I couldn’t untangle. I didn’t want to shout at him or argue with him. I just wanted him to be dead.

  I already knew that I hated him for what he’d done to Marian. I knew that there had been many girls. The girl in the bunker whom he referred to only as French, and Marian, and presumably Arianna, and who knew how many others he had lured into some twisted mess of sex and blood until he’d had enough of them and moved on. And now he had the Italian girl, somewhere in the house, and presumably meant to do her harm too.

  I hated him for all those reasons, but I hated him most of all for starting my mind working, and working, until it made a connection that it had been trying to keep hidden from me for years.

  I have said that my marriage to Sarah was loveless and functional, but there was something else. There was a little more to it than that, and that, I now realised, had everything to do with blood.

  Sarah didn’t love me, not in the end, but I think she loved me once, and I her. And I think she married me because I was what people used to call a good catch. I was a young doctor, I had become a specialist at a very tender age, and my prospects were good. Yet if Sarah loved me, she did not desire me. But that is not to say that she did not want to have sex. She just didn’t want to have it with me.

  In the early days of our marriage, we made love, infrequently, and though I did all I could do make her excited I never got the feeling I was succeeding. I never once gave her an orgasm. The details of how I found out she was having an affair are as mundane as they are irrelevant, but when I discovered she was sleeping with a young student I was devastated. I accused her one evening, and she did not deny it. She almost seemed proud of it, and I grew angry, I made her tell me all the details, every nasty and sordid little fact. And here was the thing: on the last night I had tried to have sex with her, and was refused, she’d used the excuse that she was bleeding. That same night, I forced her to confess, was the night when she’d come home late, from a party, she said, but it was in fact the first night she’d taken her student to his student bed. Despite her blood, which was presumably left behind, smeared on him, like the blood on Bluebeard’s key.

  I, a doctor, knew as well as anyone that there is no medical reason to avoid sex during menstruation. It is a matter of taste, of taboo, and the idea has been spread that it is, in some very unspoken way, wrong. Certainly Sarah would never let me near her for a week either side of those few days, and yet she stood before me in our new house on Hills Road and defiantly told me that was just what she’d done with her lover.

  Damn him, and damn the man who had locked me in a cellar to rot with my hate, for it was he who had shown me why Arianna had excited me so much; she had relished the blood from inside her and let me relish it too, in a way that Sarah never had. I wanted from my wife what that student had had.

  He, Lippe, Verovkin, couldn’t possibly have known any of that, of course. It didn’t matter; the effect on me was the same, and I lay on the cold earth of the cellar as if a worm was chewing slowly but steadily through my brain, eating away what little peace I had left.

  Somewhere in the night, I slept. My dreams cannot bear repeating, but they were as nothing to what began the following morning. Because when I woke, on the floor in front of me, within my reach, was a cup of blood, and I knew from where it had come.

  Chapter 7

  I was hungry, and desperately thirsty. I think at least two days had passed since I had drunk anything, longer since I had eaten.

  Already I felt weak and nauseous, and I knew at once what he was trying to do. He wanted me to drink the blood of the girl, and he was going to starve me to make me do it.

  But I wasn’t going to.

  I had a little freedom of movement from the chain. I could either sit up against the wall and let my arm hang down by my side, or I could lie down and stretch my legs out. If I did that, I could move my right arm out into the room a short way, and the cup, a white enamel mug, was within my reach.

  I took one look at it, and kicked out as hard as I could.

  The day passed. I lay still, moving only when I felt a need to urinate, which I was trying to do as far to one side of me as possible. Nevertheless, I was already aware of the smell I was creating, and the smell of the girl’s blood was lost amongst the other odours already present.

  Evening had come by the time the driver came back into the room. He picked up the enamel mug from where I had sent it sprawling, and placed another identical one down, again within my reach.

  I glowered at him from where I lay weakly on the floor, and he didn’t say a word.

  He left me, locking the door behind him, and I stared at the mug as I lay on my side, stared at it long and hard.

  I edged over, and my fingers closed around it. I picked it up, and dragged myself back to the wall, where I sat upright, breathing hard.

  Then I lifted the mug and with all the strength I had I threw it at the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling, trying to smash it.

  I missed, and the cup hit the far wall. A trail of blood led across the room from me to the impact there, and the light bulb hung, still intact, but once the idea was in my head, I couldn’t stop. I felt around on the floor and found three lumps of the coal in the dirt. With my second throw I hit the bulb neatly and with a fizz the room was thrown into darkness.

  I lay back in the dirt, closed my eyes, and let the weakness take over.

  Chapter 8

  When I woke it was still dark, but before me, in the centre of the room, was a candle in a tin candlestick, and also on the floor, and once more within my reach, a white enamel mug.

  I hung my head.

  Chapter 9

  I think I managed to push the mug away from me twice more, and twice more it reappeared at some point whilst I slept. It was unnerving and eerie the way it appeared. I had only once seen the driver bring it in and set it on the floor; every other time they must have waited for me to pass out, and then brought it back, so that it appeared like some evil magic, as in a nightmare where you cannot escape your demon, as in a fairy tale where the guilty blood cannot be washed away. The mug kept appearing and reappearing, and each time it did, there was fresh blood inside it.

  I couldn’t do it. Somewhere in the house was that girl, Giovanna, and somewhere they were taking her blood and feeding it to me. I knew I was dying. I knew the blood could save me, but I knew he would have destroyed me if I drank it.

  But the day crawled by, so slowly, and I grew so weak I no longer thought, could no longer function, could barely even breathe. My head was pounding, my eyesight was feeble, my stomach screamed at me, and so it was that my fingers closed around the mug, and I drank.

  I drank it all, desperately, horribly, greedily, and when I had, I sat still for the length of a heartbeat, and then, retching, I vomited it all back up.

  I howled in anger and shame and threw the mug across the room again.

  This time I was awake as the door opened, and the driver returned with another m
ug, which he set carefully down within my reach. He collected the other, empty one, and left. I glared at him as if I was a beast, and just as he turned to close the door behind him, I saw him smiling with satisfaction.

  Even the tiny amount of blood that was left inside me after I’d been sick must have done me some good. Very slowly I felt a little energy creep back into me, and I stared at the mug in front of me again.

  I would like to be able to say I hated myself then, but I didn’t. I was too weak, too feeble of mind to even know what I was doing. The hunger pawed at my brain, and I was more animal than human; I had little control. Or so I tell myself now.

  I stared at the cup of blood, and I pulled it towards me again, and this time, I took small mouthfuls. I held my breath as I swallowed, and I waited a long time between each sip.

  With what little control I had left, I tried not to think about what I was doing, but I knew it was the only way I was going to survive, and so it was that I finally tasted blood, salty and thick.

  I would also like to be able to remember something else, by which I mean I would like to misremember something else. I would like to recall that it was only after I’d begun to see a way out of the cellar that I drank the girl’s blood; that it was only then, with the possibility of escape, that I allowed myself the shame of that. But that too would be a falsehood.

  In fact, it was as I slowly drank, and very slowly felt a little recovery, as I stared at the candle in the candlestick, that I realised there was a way out of the cellar. It was not a way I relished much, but it was a possibility, though that’s irrelevant here. The point is that he had won. He had beaten me. He had lowered me to the point where I drank the blood, and maybe even worse than that was this: I didn’t care.