By Blood We Live (37 page)

“Sleep well,” Mia said, and a moment later she was gone.

Leaving me to face sleep—and the dream—alone.

I
WASN
’
T SHOWN
or told “the method.”

“After you’ve seen the proof,” Olek said. “Believe me, it’ll sound too incredible without it.”

He was a little tedious. This was his show, so he would have it played his way. He did, however, tell me what he wanted from me. I followed him back up the stairs to minus one, and through the first two rooms of the lab. Another vault door (where the fuck did he
get
these from? did he have them airlifted in?) opened onto a third room, similar to the first, although more obviously the site of physical experiments. There was unfathomable kit here, in glass and steel, but plenty of minimally winking hardware too. Also a single very large—keypad entry, again—refrigeration unit.

“WOCOP, as we know,” he said, “is no more. It was always a sloppy, unwieldy organisation—in fact ‘organisation’ was a misnomer—but in its death throes it was in chaos. Total
chaos.
I don’t know whether you know but we bought pretty much all the research material they had, all the science. Outbid the
Militi Christi
on the lot. The Directors were simply flogging everything for cash.”

He was turning the gold and garnet ring on his finger as he spoke. It looked very glamorous against his dark skin.

“Their science division was all over the place,” he went on. “They’d had so many personnel changes, conflicting directives from the suits, people running for the hills. Murdoch—whom you knew, of course—was operating as a law unto himself … Well, I shan’t bore you with the details. The long and short of it is that by the time the whole thing fell apart they didn’t even know what science they had. They’d spent God only knows how much money and time on lycanthrope research. Which also happens to be one of my areas of expertise.”

He hit the keypad buttons and the fridge door gasped open. Colder than a regular icebox, I gathered. The little wisps of expanding air cleared
in a moment, to reveal several shelves of black canisters. He beckoned me over. In among the black was a single white flask.

“I won’t take it out,” he said. “Can’t afford a significant temperature drop until we’re ready to use it.”

Pause. For dramatic effect. He couldn’t quite suppress a smile.

“Okay,” I said. “I give up. What am I looking at?”

The smile broadened. “Haven’t you guessed? It’s the virus.”

He didn’t say anything else. Just let me put two and two together. Then he closed the refrigerator door.

“They had all the bio-chemistry they needed to synthesise it. It was all there in the notes, in the samples, in the data. They were just too dumb to see it. A simple business of joining the dots. I hate to lean on a cliché, but you really can’t make this shit up.”

I felt tired. My ex, Richard (my
human
ex), was annoyingly fond of the French saying
Plus ça change (plus c’est la même chose).
The more it changes, the more it stays the same.

“And you want to infect me with it,” I said. “Again. Are you serious? Actually, scratch that. I know you’re serious. I’ve got depressingly good at knowing when people are serious.”

“Of course I’m serious,” he said. “Vampires bitten by a werewolf carrying the virus show increased sunlight tolerance. Do you know how old I am, Talulla?”

“You know I don’t,” I said.

“I was born as a vampire more than seven thousand years ago. I’m old, even by the reckoning of my kind. I know I don’t have much longer. Even in a world as perversely fascinating as this one fatigue sets in. Plus, I know I’m not what I once was. There are signs of … Well. Let’s just say everything I’ve learned tells me I’m not going to live forever. Do you read Bowles at all?”

“Bowles?”

“Paul Bowles. The novelist. I saw him in his last days, in Tangier. Charming man. Do you know he and his wife once shared a house in Brooklyn with W. H. Auden and Gypsy Rose Lee? Dalí was there for a while, too. What evenings they must have had! Apparently they took turns cooking. You will perhaps have seen the movie,
The Sheltering Sky
?”

I had seen it. With Richard. In the old life. Debra Winger. Bedouin. Sex. I couldn’t remember much more about it. It was a movie that didn’t encourage you to read the novel. I was annoyed (why not?) by his assumption that I was more likely to have seen the movie than read the book. Especially since he was right.

“Bowles himself makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film,” Olek said, “where he gives a famous little speech in voiceover. It’s from the novel, obviously. He says: ‘Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.’ ” He smiled again. To my astonishment, his eyes had tears in them. “I want to see the blue of the ocean again, Talulla,” he said. “I want to see leaf-shadows on green grass. I want to watch the sun rise. You will forgive the whiff of portent, but I feel the finiteness of my days.”

Well. Surprise. Was there anything other than sunshine a vampire ended up wanting? Is there anything other than what we don’t have that we all end up wanting? Who knew that if not me?

“It costs you nothing,” he said. “You’ve had the virus before. You carry it, you bite me. We go our ways. I’ll even throw in a shot of the anti-virus, too, so you don’t have to be a carrier any longer than you like. Everyone wins. And in return, your children get a normal life, free from persecution. You, too, if you want. Your face is known, certainly, but I know several very good plastic surgeons. The identity paperwork will be your own business, but you have the contacts and the resources for that. I’m offering you a door back into the life you lost.”

He sounded eminently civilised. Eminently sane. I wondered again if I’d been drugged, or if he was pulling some boochie mind-trick, since I felt lulled by the simplicity of the equation. I had an image of picking Zoë and Lorcan up from a school in Manhattan. Books. Homework. No more care (except the benign aesthetic one) for the next full moon. No more
blood on our hands. Were they young enough to forget? Could I tell them it had all been a dream?

“Why didn’t you just use Devaz?” I said. For all Olek’s suavity the vision of his other guest’s despair was fresh. “You’ve got your werewolf right there. I’m sure he would’ve obliged. He’s probably broke. He’d probably have done it for fifty bucks.”

Olek nodded. “He would have,” he said. “When I found him he’d have done it for a pack of cigarettes or a decent pair of shoes. But back then I was still missing several vital pieces to the puzzle. And I’m afraid my curiosity about the cure got the better of me. I can’t tell you how much the timing depressed me. But I must repeat, when I tried the cure on Devaz it was in a spirit of complete scepticism. I simply wasn’t expecting it to work. Well, that was a lesson!”

The refrigerator hummed. As far as Olek was concerned, he’d said all he needed to say. The opening line of “Childe Roland” came back to me.
My first thought was, he lied in every word.

“Let’s go up,” my host said. “I don’t expect you to answer until you’ve seen proof of the cure, obviously. Besides, I don’t want Mikhail and Natasha to start worrying I’ve done something unpleasant to you.”

On the last landing before the living quarters, he stopped and turned: “Before we rejoin your friends,” he said, “let me reassure you, since you’ve been too polite to ask, that your feeding needs have been provided for. All you’ll need to do is walk fifty metres into the trees beyond the garden. Acceptable?”

Only because it was the simplest thing to do, I nodded.

“Very good,” Olek said. “Now, let’s rejoin the company.”

A
BSURDITY HAS A
momentum you can surrender to. As does exhaustion. Olek left Konstantinov, Natasha and me at our leisure to “catch up” (throughout which Walker was the invisible fourth person in the room, loudly not mentioned by any of us; he must have short-versioned it to Konstantinov over the phone—and really, what was the long version?) but by two in the morning jet-lag and tantrumming
wulf
had me at my limit. I gobbled four codeine and took a large Macallan with me upstairs to my quarters. These were a cedar-scented sitting room of dark wooden panelling, Indian silk paintings, a lute, a statue of Krishna, and a bedroom of soothing pale walls with one huge framed mandala over the bed, carpeted with at least twenty more of the fabulous fringed rugs. An en suite with a free-standing tub and a walk-in shower, mosaic tiled in a dozen shades of blue, frangipani incense sticks burning in a tiny brass pot. I was escorted there—with impeccable deference—by what looked like a freshly scrubbed and hair-oiled Grishma, who handed over matching white towels and robe that had plainly never been used before. Sensuous pleasures present themselves regardless of circumstances, and I was tired and unhinged enough to let them in. An hour soaking in the tub to allow the pills and booze to take off what edge they could, then I undressed and got into a large double bed that recieved me like a lover who’d been waiting for my body for a thousand years.

Which was when I noticed the copy of Browning’s
Men and Women
, open at “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” on the ebony nightstand.

Everything in me that could send its message sent:
sleep.

But of course I picked it up anyway.

The speaker is the knight (or “Childe”) Roland, last survivor of a gallant band whose lifelong quest has been to find the Dark Tower. Following the satanic old cripple’s directions (which he both believes and despises), Roland sets off into a weird landscape of deformity and horrors.

It’s a long (thirty-four stanzas) journey through a lonely phantasmagoria. Among other horrors, Roland comes across a wretched horse:

Mutilated horses, stunted trees, turf that looks “kneaded-up with blood,” a stream the knight’s forced to ford, convinced he’s treading drowned corpses underfoot. Halfway across he sticks his spear in to test the stream bed:

I stopped reading.

I’d heard a baby cry.

Not a cry as in
crying
—but the start-up or preamble to crying proper, the perilously narrow window which, if you can get in—with the feed, the diaper, the lullaby, the kiss—might just stop the real crying from starting.

I sat up.

Silence.

Not quite silence; the bathroom’s cooling pipes and the ambient rasp of the garden’s cicadas.

But no human sound. No baby.

I was more than willing (more than enough whacked, Macallaned and painkillered) to write it off as … As whatever. Aural hallucination. As nodding off. As ludicrous,
Northanger Abbey
paranoia. But in spite of myself I got out of bed and went through the panelled sitting room to the door. Opened it a crack.

Only the low murmur of Kostantinov and Natasha talking downstairs. I listened past it. Sent strained hearing out through the house’s packed atoms.

Nothing. No baby.

You dismiss things.

I closed the door and went back to bed. Back to the poem.

It gets worse for Roland, mile after hellish mile all alone. He tries to comfort himself by remembering his virtuous friends—the other knights who shared his quest—but the visions his memory calls up are grotesque and wretched: all his companions died in shame and disgrace.

On he goes, without hope. The whole poem is this going-on without hope. Stanza after stanza. You get lost in it. The landscape gets increasingly hideous:

Was
it a baby?

I seemed to come-to, suddenly. Must have fallen asleep reading. There’s
a part of you finds it funny, fascinating, consciousness just dipping out and wafting back in like that.

There was that scene in
Dracula
, I thought, when the Count brought the baby for the three vampire women to feed on.

There was the night I held a baby in my big dark cradle hands, wondering if I could kill and eat it.

The subject is prone to anxiety about infants
, my inner therapist said, bored. Boredom for the therapist is the end-point of all therapy.