Adrenaline

  I did them one small favour by killing a large rat that stumbled across me in the dark. It screeched a little before I sank my teeth into it and drank the foul liquid. It made the next hour less awful.

  When finally I found the courage to move again I offset the good karma of the dead rat by leaving them two less cats.

  There is precious little of the night that followed that I can remember. I fled from that farmhouse and have snatches of recall, a sliver of memory from different places as I moved about but what I was trying to achieve or hoped to find I don't know.

  I don't suppose it matters too much. What I know is what happened when I woke up.

  Chapter 26

  Roth has perfected stealth these past weeks. He has become shadow and gloom, has lingered and ghosted through the night-time hours invisible at will, like smoke in the darkness.

  Roth has entered and left houses with no trace. He has watched over people sleeping, or sat silent in the black recesses of houses or gardens as their inhabitants go on oblivious, unaware how close by their reckoning waits, how swiftly he could take them if he only chose to. All the while he is wrestling down the urge to feed again. Suppressing this new instinct.

  He is learning to control it just as he is learning to control all of these new facets of himself. He has learned for example, that he can walk into a church without fear and disregard a cross just as he has ever done. There is no power stored up in any religious symbol that can touch Roth, no more than garlic does anything other than repulse him. That strong overpowering flavour he has always loathed.

  He knows not just the limits of his strength, but the ways those limits can be pushed, and that they have yet to reach their zenith.

  When Roth chooses to feed he notes the changes and he notes every different sensation, each variation of experience. He can recall each one with clarity. Some offer so little resistance that it seems to him that they know what he is and that to fight is futile. Others resist him in their horror, frenzy and fury bursting forth at the dawning realisation that they are meeting their end and did not expect it to be this way. So squalid and wanton.

  It is those who try to deny him that teach Roth the most. It is not about the power it gives him anymore. Not about the feeling of domination or ownership of another human soul and their inability to stop him claiming them. Though that still excites him, it does not sustain him.

  In a very real sense, and different from before, it is their fear that feeds Roth.

  The blood is richer, somehow sharper when the terror in their eyes peaks and they fight with that final desperation. The hit is purer. The clear, keen shock to his system impossibly fierce and the satisfaction total.

  He lets it fade until the hunger builds again and now, each time, he will make the effort to build the fear up to a crescendo before he strikes, find ways to let them know what is happening to them, what is going to happen, who he is.

  What he is.

  He is fire and rage, irresistible and unquenchable. He is nightmare manifest.

  Chapter 27

  It was a disused horse box, the type that attaches to a truck, long and tall. Abandoned in the corner of some farmer's field, its usefulness or functionality long since outlived, it offered shelter and inside there was cardboard, hay and an old mattress which told me I was not the first to seek refuge here.

  Although I was the first that night.

  The sounds snapped me from my stupor. At least I thought so but later I recognised that my other senses were in tune to the presence as well.

  I had burrowed beneath layers of cardboard and hay and though the darkness was total with the doors closed behind me, I seemed intent on burying myself. I do recall through the fog of that last day as the heat seemed to press on the thin walls of the trailer, that I had come here to die. A coffin should not be so spacious, and I had sought to cocoon myself, isolated and undisturbed for the final, inescapable close.

  And then there was noise and I realised that the door had just opened and closed. There was movement inside the trailer and I knew it could not be an animal of any kind, not opening those heavy door. Then the sound of his breathing seemed to be so loud that I felt he must be on top of me and then I noticed the smell of him. The many different smells in fact, but past the filth and the sweat, the urine and the alcohol, I could smell something else which pulled at my stomach and filled my mouth with saliva.

  For a moment I could not move. The cramps and racking agony that had engulfed me had left me weak and barely able to shift my own weight where I lay but with each breath of that sharp, rich scent, my strength returned, the pain seeped away.

  When I emerged he stumbled back and in the darkness fell. A lighter flicked into life in his hand and he held it up and forward like a beacon and a warning.

  As he peered about him, trying to see beyond the feeble light in his hand he called and I heard his voice crack.

  It was like a switch had been flicked. The debilitating hunger in my belly, weaved through each fibre of my body, was suddenly heightened, as though all the terrible cravings of the last few days were packed into that moment.

  My own eyes were clear enough that I could see him cowering there and the moment that I stood and his lighter flame caught a glimpse of me he cried out and began scrabbling backward with his feet, pushing himself uselessly against the wall.

  All the pain and longing, the torment and the horror erupted from me then in an explosion of ravening intensity. I fell upon him as he squealed in fear and gripped and fought him as he bucked and writhed on the floor beneath me.

  I was abandoned to this roaring ferocity and could no sooner have stopped it than could the poor vagrant man screaming in my arms.

  As my hand grabbed and tore at his throat he stared at me, eyes wide and wild and my own expression was a mirror when my fingers tore into the flesh, into the vein.

  He kept staring as his blood splashed my face, and I raised my hand to his eyes so that he could not watch me. His legs were still twitching when the door opened.

  Act III

  Entropy

  Chapter 28

  He is doing it because it is an experiment. He is doing it because there is time to fill. A lot of time.

  He has not really denied himself anything so far and has indulged his curiosities and lusts, has explored his new abilities and the possibilities they have awakened.

  But he doesn't know what will happen if he stops. In fact Roth has begun to wonder whether or not he can stop. Or more to the point, whether he needs to keep on with this.

  It has seemed right, all the way from the beginning, has felt natural and instinctual and he has no problem surrendering to that, has indulged himself with abandon.

  But he has not questioned it. Not the why. The what perhaps; he has wondered a lot about what has happened, what he is, what he can do. But why it happened, why he is doing what he is doing, has not given Roth much pause.

  Until recently, when someone had asked him. 'Why are you doing this to me?' she had said through tears and blood and though it were the last thing she said, it was the first time he had been confronted by it.

  Mostly they were pitiable in their begging or desperate in their resistance, or otherwise silent in their acquiescence. But not one had yet demanded an explanation of him.

  Perhaps it had been rhetorical. Perhaps she knew there would be no answer for her. But for Roth, he had realised he did not have one to give.

  So he was killing time instead now, waiting out the hours and keeping himself increasingly out of circulation. Proximity to people made it much harder to continue the abstention.

  He was beginning to notice differences. The gradual blunting of his senses, the unsettled sleep, the hotter days. He had felt some pangs of hunger in his belly that had been progressively more painful each time.

  He was getting restless too, fractious. Not the excitable restlessness of before, with the curiosity to be satisfied, the new things to try, t
o feel, to taste. This was more a tetchy, edgy sort of feeling. A sense of irritability and impatience that was settling on him, squirming beneath his skin.

  Those waking hours, vacant of violence, left him time to reflect, as did the sleeplessness. He thought about the lives he had taken, the change that had made him so utterly different from before, but that had seemed at the same time to have made him so much more the same. So much more concentrated, a more potent version of himself.

  He considered what possibilities might exist before him. Not just the things he had been doing here and now, the abilities he had been discovering, but the long term, the distant horizon. How would that be? Longer? Fuller? More complete than the future he had expected to see?

  But what of the short term, what of practical considerations? He was elusive and clever when he took them, but he would not be able to keep it up like this indefinitely. He would need to be smarter about where he stayed, where he went, who he took. If indeed he really had to take anyone.

  He wondered what his experiment would tell him and how he would feel if he discovered that none of it was necessary, that he had been taking life after life not from some unavoidable compulsion, some irresistible force within, but through misguided choices and appalling delusions.

  Often he wondered about the man, and the driveway with the tree. And he wanted more than ever to know what had happened to him there that night. Blake Roth wanted to ask somebody the same question that he had been asked and could not answer; Why are you doing this to me?

  Chapter 29

  They didn't have to enjoy it so much, sound so pleased. That made it so much worse. I'd have liked, oddly enough, to have heard some sort of reproach, some condemnation of what I had done but they stood there with the trailer doors open and Stanford laughed and clapped and Frost stood behind him with his hands in his pockets with a perversely smug smile on his face, like a driving instructor whose worst pupil has just passed his test.

  Stanford said, in a congratulatory tone, that he had never thought I had it in me and Frost stepped in then to assure me that he had retained his faith in me throughout.

  The vagrant was still warm in my hands and as I released him and stood, Stanford had climbed into the trailer to take a closer look.

  'First one is always hardest,' he said.

  When I punched him, it was with more force than I had ever mustered and felt more effortless, more slow and nonchalant than a wave of the hand. Stanford landed some feet behind Frost who ducked and then turned back to me, that smile broader and smugger and I moved toward him too then, full of intent.

  He held up a hand.

  'Spare yourself the beating.'

  The finality of the statement stopped me in my tracks. I did not believe for a single moment that he was bluffing and so I jumped down out of the trailer and began to walk away from them.

  Stanford was on his feet and when I looked over my shoulder he was rubbing his jaw and looked annoyed. But only for a moment, and then he smiled after me, then more gallingly, gave me a thumbs-up.

  'No questions?' called Frost. 'No pressing need for understanding?'

  'I have a pressing need to never see either of you again.'

  Two, three inches from my ear, Stanford said, 'That isn't really going to work.'

  I span around and he was right there, almost on my toes, still grinning. Frost strolled up behind him with a bemused look on his face.

  He stopped and said nothing. And then slowly, he leaned his head back and he looked up at the sky. The clear blue cloudless sky.

  Daylight. Broad and glorious and gently warm in the Autumn air.

  Daylight. Clear and bright.

  I was only vaguely aware of dropping to my knees but I stared and stared at that pure blue sky over my head, looking over every acre of it, each perfect square inch and flawless foot. I was more aware of the tears on my cheeks and I was very aware of the sobs that began to escape me as I looked up and I was aware too of the torrent of thoughts in my mind about what this could mean.

  'Questions?' said Frost again flatly, the smile all gone. 'Now's the time.'

  *

  They told me everything I could think to ask, outlining all of it as though it were just a set of rules to some game and they wanted to share all their tips and pitfalls.

  Oddly, it was Stanford I found most useful. His gleeful manner in imparting to me the risks, the dangers and the type of horror and agony I could expect if I put a foot wrong were more effective warnings than the things Frost said. He made it sound as though this were some sort of extreme game show and the worst that might happen was disqualification.

  So I began to understand the burns from weeks ago - I had been lying in direct sunlight which was, under certain circumstances, not something I could tolerate. Not without 'replenishing' as Frost termed it.

  The stinking corpse in the horse box behind me was testament to my first successful 'replenishing'.

  Replenishing could cure most ills, they said, but failing to replenish would simply create them. That's why I had been in so much pain, why I had been compelled to tape the windows over and cocoon inside my sleeping bag. It had driven me to kill the deer, go raiding for the chicken, take the vagrant. It would drive me to do such things again if I did not seize control of it.

  But it would make me quicker, tougher, better in so many ways. It would heighten every sense and sharpen every instinct. The possibilities were almost limitless, they told me, if I embraced it. The limitations would suffocate me if I did not.

  The key, they said, was fear.

  'Because the fear clouds people's judgement? Makes them irrational?' I asked.

  'No. Because their fear is a drug,' Frost replied flatly.

  'What about the blood?'

  'Everything you need is in the blood. It will nourish you, sustain you. It will keep you from expiring. But it is no sort of existence. Miserable and meagre, you will eke your way through the nights, cower through the days, alone and isolated. Until the day comes when you simply surrender to the light and the flame and give yourself to ashes.' Stanford was growing on me with his straight talking, the unadorned simplicity of his truths. Frost seemed to have dipped his words in pity when he addressed me, but for Stanford there was no space for sentiment, no room to ease me into this.

  I was as far in now as I could be, not that there had been any option to turn back. I could no sooner reverse what had befallen me than the vagrant in the trailer.

  I either stayed the course, or ended this. Ended myself.

  Every answer they gave landed like a heavy blow. Each response was a thumbscrew tightening, the exits to a maze closing. It was like being made to sit and watch a prison cell built around you, so that you could see the robustness of the construction, the thick sturdy walls, the heavy iron door, the elaborate, unpickable locks. The meagre little window through which to view the real world beyond, the world you used to know.

  'You must do what you need to do, as often as you need to do it. Sometimes you will get it right so that the fear you feed on is such that it gets you through weeks on end. A month even if you really conserve it,' Frost tells me.

  'That should do you a fortnight if you watch yourself,' Stanford said, gesturing at the horse-box. 'Poor man was terrified in the dark there. No idea if you meant that but it worked.'

  'Surprise and stealth are talents you will be able to employ to hunt with, but it won't make them frightened,' said Frost. 'Whatever you do, you cannot fight it. It will not be ignored Mr Laing, you have to surrender to it.'

  'And if I don't?'

  'Mr Laing?' There is an inflection to his tone that suggests he cannot quite understand that I have not yet got it. 'Hell of course. You will burn.'

  Chapter 30

  Only later would I understand how I actually did it.

  Faced with the awful reality, forced finally to confront this inescapable fact, I had attempted to argue with them. I wanted there to be a way out, even as I
knew that there was none.

  I suppose I was going through those several steps that one encounters in the face of grief - denial had been a long and drawn out process, even here, pressed right up against the granite solidity of the truth.

  What were the others? I remember my mother detailing these in her clinical reaction to losing her father. She had ticked them off as she went almost. In fact, this makes me smile to remember, she actually said of the list 'Denial is usually the first, but I didn't have that.' Not a hint of irony, bless the woman.

  Anger was next, bargaining afterward and then depression preceded acceptance.

  In grieving for the life snatched from me I was now arriving at stage two and as they blocked each attempt to convince myself that this wasn't real, the fury began to boil up.

  It wasn't simply that they were responsible for this, something I did not even need to ask them, but what they were asking me to do.

  I would kill or be killed and if Stanford were to be believed - and all the evidence of recent experience said that he should be - then I would have to kill with cruelty.

  What abhorrence and grotesquery would I have to stoop to now in order to go on? What kind of a choice was that for a reasonable man to make? Who was I to decide who lived and died and then inflicted that death with as much terror and torment as I could muster?

  I would need to become without pity or mercy. I would have to seek to develop the darkest skills, the foulest techniques in order to glory in despair and take from people the one thing I could get nowhere else.

  This new addiction to a natural drug would destroy me or it would destroy others and I would need to make that same choice over and over. Each time surely it would be the same nauseating decision to make, whether I could continue to do that, just to continue.