Authors: Marcus Sedgwick
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 mug, 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.
Chapter 10
There was a way out, perhaps, but in order for it to work, I needed some patience, and some luck. I also needed to keep taking the blood they brought me every day, and I began to justify to myself that that was why I allowed myself to drink it, but the truth is this: I cared more about myself than about Giovanna.
I told myself she was already dead. Not literally, but that nothing could have been done for her anyway, even before he caught her and took her. And now that he had, she was already dead, for he would never let her go. So if I could survive long enough on her blood to make my escape, then it would justify my actions. Maybe I could even find her and save her. That’s what I told myself, but it was all lies. I just wanted to save myself.
I stared at the candlestick. Every day, when the sun went down, the driver would bring the enamel mug and put the candlestick on the floor. I stared at it closely. It was the traditional sort, made of tin, with a wide, flat base.
I only needed the driver to make one small mistake, and that was for him to leave it close enough for me to reach.
During the day, I had stretched out from the wall as far as I could. I had marked a small point in the dirt with my toe; the furthest I could reach. Then I sank back against the wall, making myself look as small and pathetic and immobile as I could.
Every time he brought the mug and the candle into the room, I watched, fixated on one thing only: where he would place the candlestick. I noticed that it varied, and finally, one day, he placed it just inside the limit of my reach.
That night I drank the blood, knowing it would be for the last time. If my attempt to escape failed, they would simply kill me, I was sure.
I waited a long time, counting away seconds and minutes to be certain I was not just imagining that time was passing, counting until I was sure the night was at its deepest, and then I stretched myself out, reaching with my bare toe to hook through the finger grip on the candlestick. I had misjudged it. It was not as close as I thought, and I pulled so hard that my hand started to be cut by the manacle again, stretching till I thought something would snap, and eventually I caught the candlestick with my toe, and eagerly hauled it back.
I sat up against the wall, and prepared for the operation. I knew I needed to do it fast. I was not a surgeon, but I had been a doctor, and I wanted to make the best of it.
I held my left hand with my right, and pulled it tight against the manacle. For what I was about to do, I needed to be sure. I needed to be sure what I was doing, and why, and so, although I had many times tried to squeeze the bones of my hand together and pull my hand out, I plainly saw what was stopping it: my thumb.
I stared at my left hand, at the thumb, and I tried to see it as not part of me, I tried to detach it mentally, because it was the only thing stopping me from getting away.
I tried not to think further after that.
I pulled the candle from the candlestick, and pushed it deep into the soil floor, then adjusted the chain so that a couple of the links were sitting directly in its small but steady flame.
Then I wedged my left hand, the bound one, up against the loop on the wall. It didn’t take very long before it started to go numb, but I waited a long time, for the links of the chain to get hot, for my arm to go numb, and while I did, I took the metal base of the candlestick, and tested it against the brick wall.
It seemed strong, and yet thin enough to do the job. I wished it was sharper, but there was little I could about that. I tried to hone one side of the base against the brickwork, and I managed to put a little more edge on it, but then there came a moment where I knew I was just wasting time, putting off what I did not want to do.
Finally, I pulled off my vest with my right hand, and using my teeth I tore a big section from it, to protect myself as I worked.
I laid my left arm down, so numb and yet it screamed with pins and needles, and felt strange and alien, which was what I wanted. Then with my right hand I took the candlestick base in the strip of cloth, and lined it up across the joint at the base of my thumb.