Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
‘Please,’ I begged, ‘please. Don’t.’
They showed no sign that they’d heard me, and then they knelt down, pulled my shoes from me, and cut my clothes off, leaving me in my underwear and vest.
They left, and I lay in the dirt, too scared to feel the cold, or the ache where my arm was held awkwardly by the chain, or the rough floor beneath me.
I began to cry, curling up into a ball, and then, somehow, I slept.
Chapter 4
I don’t know how long he’d been standing in the doorway, looking at me, but when I woke he was there.
Behind him, through the open door, I saw a dirty corridor, filled with a weak daylight, and a little more spilled through the narrow brick vent that allowed a small amount of fresh air to filter down to me.
As I stirred, he tilted his head to one side, and then walked into the room. He didn’t close the door, but walked over till he was directly underneath the bare bulb, which cast a faint orange glow over his skin.
I saw he was holding something out towards me, but it took me a while to see what it was. My sight was bad, maybe from the blow to my head, or the dust in the room, or from hunger, but things were fuzzy, and it was still almost dark.
Then I saw that he had my gun, the revolver I’d taken from Hayes, and he was pointing it out towards me.
At first I cowered, waiting for him to fire, but something told me he wasn’t going to pull the trigger. Why drag me across what felt like half of Europe in the boot of a car if all he wanted to do was put a bullet in me? There must have been a hundred lonely spots on forest roads where he could have done that. So I stopped shaking and stared back at him, saying nothing, yet almost daring him to do it.
Finally, after a long, long pause, he lowered the gun and put it in his pocket.
He didn’t say anything.
He left.
Chapter 5
What was it that had led me from one hole in the ground in Paris to another, to this cellar?
It was him, and it was what he’d done to Marian. It was my desire to set things right, to punish him.
Over the years I had probed and pushed and wondered and sought to find out who he was and what made him behave the way he did, and now that he had me, trapped, I shouldn’t have cared about any of that any more. Yet I did. Even as I lay on the earth in the cellar there was still room enough in my mind to be fascinated, to wonder at his terrible ways.
There was huge anger in me, yet I couldn’t feel it. It lurked, somehow trapped inside me. I should have been able to let it out, but it would not come, and I felt unsure of my feelings as a result, uncertain about many things.
I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to live, but I did know one thing clearly: that I wanted him dead.
And so it was he came before me again, later that day, for the daylight had stolen away from the vent, and I had only the weak bulb for illumination.
The door opened and he came in.
Once again he left it standing open, for there was no chance of escape for me. I had been pulling at the manacle closed around my wrist, but it was tight, there was no way of loosening it, and the metal loop that was set into the wall was heavy and solid.
Then he spoke. Aside from a few words he’d muttered in the church, and then under the bridge in Avignon, I had not heard his voice. And now he spoke as if he was making up for all the years that had been lost between us. He spoke, and he spoke, and the strange thing was that I did not reply. Not once. Not even when he told me things that made me churn and rage inside. Something made me hold my tongue, and merely watch him, unblinking, as he told me the story of my life, of
our
life.
‘Charles Jackson. Dr Charles Jackson. I confess it took me some time to understand. At first, I did not know you. But now I do. I met you in Paris. There was that girl . . . The American. Marian. Marian Fisher. You knew her. She spoke about you. She told me your name, as well as, I might add, a few other things that were useful to know.
‘But I did not then connect you with the war. You were the one who saw me in Saint-Germain, were you not? You saw me there, and ran away! Coward! You saw me at that French girl in the hole, and you could have stopped me then, but you ran away. Why? Why did you run? You could have fired upon me, you were an officer, I could see. You must have had a weapon? Yet you fled the bunker and gave me time to push the girl over the wall of the park and into the brush below. Gave me time to get away.
‘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 the 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.