The Mammoth Book of Dracula (77 page)

Especially not you.

We left an hour later. I sat a little apart from you in the cab, convinced you’d smell Vanessa on me, but I clutched your hand and you seemed happy enough. We got home, and I had a shower while you clanked around in the kitchen making tea. Then we went to bed, and I held you tightly until you drifted off. I stared at the ceiling for an hour, chilled with self-loathing, and then surprised myself by falling asleep.

Within a few days I was calmer. A drunken mistake: these things happen. I elected not to tell you about it—partly through self-serving cowardice, but more out of a genuine knowledge of how little it meant, and how much it would hurt you to know. The ratio between the two was too steep for me to say anything. After a fortnight it had sunk to the level of vague memory, the only lasting effect an increased realization of how much I wanted to be with you. That was the only time, in all our years together, that anything like that happened. I promise you.

It should all have been okay, a cautionary lesson learned, but then the first hunger pangs came and everything changed for me. If anything, I feel lucky that we’ve had ten years, that I was able to hide it for that long. I developed the habit of occasional solitary walks in the evening, a cover that no one seemed to question. I started going to the gym and eating healthily, and maybe that also helped to hide what was happening. At first you didn’t notice, and then I think you were even a little proud that your husband was staying in such good shape.

But a couple of years ago that pride faded, around about the time the kids started looking at me curiously. Not very often, and maybe not even consciously, but just as you started making unflattering remarks about how your body was lasting compared to mine, I think at some level the children noticed something too. Maddy had always been daddy’s girl. You said so yourself. She isn’t any more, and I don’t think that’s just because she’s growing up and going out with that dickhead from her college. She’s uncomfortable with me. Richard’s overly polite too, these days, and so are you. It’s like I’ve done something which none of us can remember, something small which nonetheless set me apart from you. As if we’re all tip-toeing carefully around something we don’t understand.

You’ll work out some consensus between you. An affair. Depression. Something. I know you all care for me, and that it won’t be easy, but it has to be this way. I’m not telling you where I’m going. It won’t be one of the places we’ve been on holiday together, that’s for sure. The memories would hurt too much.

After a while, a new identity. And then a new life, for what it’s worth. New places, new things, new people: and none of them will be you.

I’ve never seen Vanessa since that night, incidentally. If anything, what I feel for her is hate. Not even for what she did to me, for that little bite disguised as passion. More just because, on that night ten years ago, I did something small and normal and stupid which would have hurt you had you known. The kind of mistake anyone can make, not just people like me.

I regret that more than anything: the last human mistake I made, on the last night I was still your husband and nothing else. That I was unfaithful to the only woman I’ve ever really loved, and with someone who didn’t matter to me, and who only did it because she had to.

I knew she must have had a boyfriend—I just didn’t realize what kind of man he would be.

~ * ~

I can’t send this letter, can I? Not now, and probably not even later. Perhaps it’s been nothing more than an attempt to make myself feel better; a selfish confession for my own peace of mind. But I’ve been thinking of you while I’ve been writing it, so in that sense at least it is written to you. Maybe I’ll find some way of keeping track of your lives, and send this when you’re near the end. When it won’t matter so much, and you may be asking yourself what exactly it was that happened.

But probably that’s not fair either, and by then you won’t want to know. Perhaps if I’d told you earlier, when things were still good between us, we could have worked out a way of dealing with it. It’s too late now.

It’s time to go.

I’ll come back some day, when it’s safe, when no one who could recognize me is still alive. It will be a long wait, but I will come. That day’s already planned.

I’ll start walking at Oxford Street, and walk all the way back up, seeing what remains and what has changed. The distance at least will stay the same, and maybe I’ll be able to pretend you’re walking it with me, taking me home again. I could point out the differences, and we’d remember the way it was: and maybe, if I can recall it clearly enough, it will be like I never went away.

But I’ll reach Falkland Road eventually, and stand outside looking up at this window; not knowing who lives here now, only that it isn’t us. Perhaps if I shut my eyes I’ll be able to hear your voice, imagine you sitting inside, conjure up the life that could have been. I hope so.

And I will always love you.

<>

~ * ~

CONRAD WILLIAMS

Bloodlines

CONRAD WILLIAMS is the author of the novels
Head Injuries, London Revenant, The Unblemished, One, Decay Inevitable, Blonde on a Stick
and
Loss of Separation.
He has also written four novellas:
Nearly People, Game, The Scalding Rooms
and
Rain.

Williams is a past recipient of the British Fantasy Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He is the author of more than eighty short stories, some of which appear in his first collection,
Use Once then Destroy.
A new collection,
Open Heart Surgery,
is forthcoming from PS Publishing, as is the anthology
Gutshot,
which marks his debut as an editor.

The author lives in Manchester with his wife, three sons and a big Maine Coon cat.

As the end of the twentieth century approaches, Dracula finds himself incarcerated in a maximum-security prison ...

~ * ~

NAIM PARKED HER Mini as the shadow of an armed guard swept over her. She was twenty minutes early and would have arrived even sooner if she had not stopped off in the park to calm herself down. This was the first interview Salavaria had agreed to since his incarceration. The authorities had green-lighted her application for a meeting first time round and she had been too busy getting her questions right, placating her editor and tying up the loose strings of other stories to fully appreciate the enormity of this liaison.

It was a stifling day. Niam rubbed her forearms gently through her jumper as she crossed the gravel forecourt to the gate. There were two more guards with Armalite rifles slung loosely across their shoulders; one of them was stroking the barrel as he watched her progress. The car that had shadowed her through the Bedfordshire countryside since she slipped off the Ml at Aspley Guise had parked a little distance back from her: a pair of blank faces tracked her from the front seats. Nobody was taking any chances with this gig.

She tried to refocus her mind: she needed to be as unruffled as possible if she were to come away from the interview with a good story. Her mind flitted over the bloody half-decade of Salavaria’s reign of terror prior to his capture at an abandoned railway station in North Yorkshire last winter.

Salavaria,
she thought. She had seen the pathologist’s photographs. They had followed him through the deep snow, the tracker dogs and the police, to a crumbling stone platform where they found him trying to swallow the heart of ten-year-old Melanie Cartledge, whose body lay in the snow nearby, ringed with an ugly spattered circle of blood and faeces. He had attempted to set fire to her corpse but her clothes were too damp. Her singed hair sent an unbroken line of thin smoke into the sky.

“Shoot me,” he had begged them.

A constable from the Yorkshire police had been suspended for six months for trying to brain him with his truncheon.

“Good morning Ms Foxley.” A voice touched by synthetic crispness darted at her from the steel doors. There were no windows here.

“Morning,” she returned. “I’m here to see—”

“Gyorsy Salavaria. Yes, yes, we know all about that. Could we take you through GeneSync security please?”

She pressed the back of her hand against a matte plate on the door. The plate hummed lightly against her flesh as an IntraScan assessed her DNA. Before it had stopped humming, refreshed its lenses with a self-cleaning spray and disappeared into its housing, the door was opening, sliding down into a socket underground. Three armed guards surged towards her from the inner gloom, and motioned for her to climb on to their Magnabike. After stop/start passage through a series of inner gates, they glided in silence past featureless black walls that seemed to boast a join neither with floor nor ceiling. Large red numbers were stencilled at intervals, interstitial globes breathed pale light against the dull sheen of metal. It was cold in here. She thought she heard a moan.

“Are these the cells?” she asked.

One of the guards regarded her through his black plastic face mask: she saw her own features, tiny and distorted, in its sheen. He nodded and faced front. She followed suit, noting the driver—fused with the cockpit as though he was of its design rather than merely its pilot—bathed in thin green light from the controls. By the time they drifted to a stop, she was thinking of insects.

She stepped on to a bay floored with a perspex-covered grille. It was underlit by brilliant white light. Once her eyes had readjusted to the glare, she could see that the space below the grille fell away hundreds of feet. There were passageways down there; guards walking them like ants in a catacomb.

“This way,” motioned a guard.

She was led into a seam in the blackness which opened out into a walkway punctuated by pools of water and potted plants. A man in a red robe waved at her from the walkway’s end. His glasses flashed intermittently as though he were trying to signal her a covert message.

“Miss Foxley,” he called. “Quite a ride, isn’t it? I reckon we should open to the public.”

“Professor Neumann?” she extended her hand.

‘“Fraid so,” he smiled and took her arm. “This way.”

His office was accessed via a short elevator ride—the only way in or out of the room, apparently. He seated himself at an expansive desk that supported nothing greater than a chewed pencil, a mug bearing the legend: I’VE GOT PMT and an ornate block of slate with
Professor K Neumann
engraved upon it.

“Can I get you anything? Coffee, tea ... I’ve got some Exta-C Lite?” He fingered the ornate whiskers that bracketed his face.

“Nothing thanks.” Maybe it was the imminent introduction to Salavaria or the office’s spartan appearance that was getting to her, but she couldn’t stop shaking.

“Camera six!” called Neumann, stroking his ponytail. A screen, the size of the far wall, fluttered into life.

“I’ll be watching the interview, of course,” he said. “You’ll be perfectly safe. If Gyorsy tries to rise from his chair the seat will inject him with a small dose of fentanyl.”

She could hardly hear him. Her eyes were fixed on Salavaria. He was no longer the strutting, plump monster that had glared from every front page the morning after he was arrested; here was a meagre scrap of flesh, his clothes hanging from him like giant folds of loose skin. His hair had either fallen out or been shorn close to his scalp: the planes and angles of his head stood out in painful detail.

“What happened to him?” Niam asked, approaching the screen.

Conrad Williams                                 
427

“Guilt, I would imagine, although your guess is as good as any other—and will probably be worth much more in an hour or so. None of us have been able to get a word out of him.”