The Radleys (14 page)

Just a dream.

Just the same old dream.

He grabs his knife and opens the door to see who is knocking. It is Helen. “I was just dreaming about—”

She is looking at the knife.

“Sorry,” he says, smiling apologetical y, “force of habit. Lot of VB in here. Some that’s quite precious. I got jumped by some blood fiends in Siberia. Big Danish fuckers. The old tusks are useless in such circumstances, as you know.” He beckons to her as she had beckoned him in his dream. “Come in, soak up the shade.”

Helen closes her eyes to dismiss the request. She then speaks quietly, so no neighbors can hear. “What Peter was trying to tel you is that he wants you to leave. We don’t need you.”

“Yeah, he did seem a bit stand-offish, now you mention it. You couldn’t have a word with him, could you, Hel?”

Helen is dumbfounded. “What?”

He doesn’t like this. Crouching Quasimodo-style in his van—it’s not a good look. “You’re real y used to that sun nowadays. Come in, sit down.”

“I don’t believe you,” she says, exasperated. “You want me to talk to Peter about letting you stay?”

“Just til Monday, Hel. Need to lie low a bit, real y.”

“There is nothing for you here. Me and Peter want you to go.”

“Thing is, I’ve been overdoing it. I need to be somewhere . . . quiet. There’s a lot of angry relatives out there. One, in particular.” And this is true, although it’s been the truth for a long while now. Last year he’d heard from trusted sources that someone was looking for “Professor Wil Radley.” Someone with a grudge stemming back to his academic days, he imagines. A crazed father or widower wanting revenge. He isn’t worried about him more than about Alison Glenny, but it is something else straining his relations with his fel ow vamps in the Sheridan Society.

“Someone’s been asking questions. I don’t know who he is but he’s not letting go. So if I could just

—”

“Put my family in danger? No. Absolutely not.”

Wil steps out of the van and squints to see birds evacuating a nearby tree in fear and Helen wearing an equivalent anxiety as she looks along the street. Wil fol ows her gaze and sees an elderly lady with a walking stick.

“Whoa, need some serious sunblock,” he says, blinking in the sunlight.

Wil is stil holding the knife.

“What are you doing?” asks Helen.

The old lady reaches them.

“Hel o.”

“Morning, Mrs. Thomas.”

Mrs. Thomas smiles at Wil , who casual y raises the hand holding the knife, and waves it. He smiles and greets her too. “Mrs. Thomas.”

It’s fun for him, agitating Helen, and sure enough Helen is aghast. But Mrs. Thomas doesn’t seem to have noticed the knife, or at least isn’t perturbed by it. “Hel o,” comes the friendly croak in return. She keeps walking steadily on her way. Helen glares at Wil , so he decides to wind her up further by pretending to be surprised that he’s stil holding the knife. “Oops.” He casual y chucks the knife back in the van, his face itching with the light.

Helen is looking over at the next-door house as Mark Felt comes out with a bucket and sponge to start washing his car. A man who, to Wil ’s amusement, looks a bit concerned about this ominous-looking character Helen is talking to.

“You al right, Helen?”

“Yes, fine, thanks, Mark.”

As this Mark character starts sponging the top of his expensive car, he looks at Helen with mild suspicion. “Is Clara okay?” he asks, almost aggressively, as the foamy water spil s over the windows.

So, what did they tell the neighbors?
Wil wonders, watching Helen’s nervy performance.

“Yes, she’s fine,” she says. “She’s fine now. Just teenage stuff, you know.”

There is another fun moment when Helen realizes she should introduce Wil to Mark, but she can’t bring herself to do so. As she struggles to fool her neighbor, Wil wonders at her the way he’d wonder at a familiar book translated into a foreign language.

“Good,” says Mark, not looking very convinced. “I’m glad she’s fine. What time’s Peter finish at the clinic?”

Helen shrugs, clearly wanting the conversation to end. “It depends, on a Saturday. About five.

Four, five . . .”

“Right.”

Helen nods and smiles, but Mark hasn’t finished yet. “I want to bring those plans over sometime too. Might be best tomorrow though. Golfing later.”

“Right,” says Helen.

Wil tries to keep his smirk under control.

“Let’s do this in the house,” she whispers.

Wil nods and fol ows her toward the front door.
Bit forward, but okay. You’ve wooed me.

Paris

A minute later, he is in the living room, comfortable on the sofa. Helen is turned away from him, looking out to the patio and the garden. She is stil unknowingly gorgeous, even though she’s decided to switch to a fast-track mortality. But then she could be old and wrinkled as a walnut, he would stil want her.

He thinks of her as a Russian dol . This tense, vil agey outer casing contains other, better Helens. He knows it. The Helen he once flew over the sea with, hand in blood-smeared hand. He can smel the lust for life, for danger, stil pumping through her veins. And he knows this is the time to prod her, to force her into remembering her better self.

“Remember Paris?” he asks. “That night we flew there and landed in the Rodin Gardens?”

“Please be quiet,” she says. “Rowan’s upstairs.”

“That’s his music playing. He won’t hear anything. I just wanted to know if you ever think about Paris.”

“Sometimes, yes. I think about lots of things. I think about you. I think of me, how I used to be.

How much of myself I’ve had to sacrifice to live here, with al these normal people. Sometimes I just want to, I don’t know, give in and just walk naked down the street to see what people say. But I’m trying to rub out a mistake, Wil . That’s why I live like this. It was al a mistake.”

Wil picks up a vase and stares inside at the dark sculpted hole.

“You aren’t
living
, Helen. This place is a morgue. You can smel the dead dreams.”

Helen keeps her voice low. “I was with Peter. I was
engaged
to Peter. I loved him. Why did we have to change that? Why did you come after me? What was it? What’s in you that wants to come in like this demonic nightmare and ruin everything? Sibling rivalry? Boredom? Just plain old insecurity? Make everyone else in the world dead or miserable so there’s no one to envy anymore. Is that it?”

Wil smiles. He’s seeing a trace of the old Helen, her unmatchable vim. “Come on, monogamy was never your color.”

“I was young, and stupid. Real y
fucking
stupid. I didn’t understand consequences.”

“Stupid was big that year. Poor Pete. Should never have started that night shift . . . You never actual y told him, did you?”

“Who?” she says.

“Let’s stay with Pete.”

Helen’s hand is over her eyes now. “You understood.”

“Nineteen ninety-two,” says Wil , careful y, as if the year itself was something delicate and precious. “Vintage year. I kept our souvenir. I’m sentimental, you know that.”

“You kept my—” Helen’s eyes are wide in horror.

“Why, of course. Wouldn’t you have done the same?” He starts to speak theatrical y. “Dwel I but in the suburbs of your good pleasure?” He smiles. “It’s a rhetorical question. I know I’m the center of the city. I’m the Eiffel Tower. But yes, I kept your blood. And I’m pretty sure Pete would recognize it. Was always quite the blood snob. Oh, I kept the letters too . . .”

Wil places the vase delicately back on the table.

Helen whispers, “Are you blackmailing me?”

He flinches at the accusation. “Don’t cheapen what you feel, Helen. You used to be so nice to me in your letters.”

“I love my family. That’s what I feel.”

Family.

“Family,” he says. The word itself sounds like something hungry. “We bundling Pete in there or sticking with the kids?”

Helen glares at him. “This is ludicrous. You think I stil feel more for you because you converted me before he did?”

And right as she says this, Rowan is walking downstairs, unheard but not unhearing. He doesn’t hear the words as such, but he hears his mother’s voice, its urgency. Then he stops to hear Wil .

The words are clear now but make little sense.

“Before?” Wil is saying, in a voice approaching anger. “You can’t get converted
twice
, Helen.

You real y are rusty. Perhaps you’d like a refresher—”

Rowan’s weight shifts to his left foot, creaking a floorboard. This causes the voices to stop, and for a second or two there is nothing but the ticking of the smal antique clock by the phone.

“Rowan?”

His mother’s voice. Rowan wonders whether to speak. “I’ve got a headache,” he says eventual y. “I’m going to take a tablet. And then I’m going out.”

“Oh,” his mother says, after another long pause. “Okay. Right. When wil you be—”

“Later,” Rowan interrupts.

“Later, right. I’l see you then.”

She sounds false. But how can he know what is false anymore? Every real thing he has ever known is pretend. And he wants to hate his parents for it, but hate is a strong feeling, for strong people, and he is as weak as they come.

So he walks down the hal way and into the kitchen. He opens the cupboard where he knows the medicine is and takes the ibuprofen out of the box. He studies the pure white plastic casing.

He wonders if there is enough to kil himself.

Behind a Yew Tree

They hear Rowan go into the kitchen. A cupboard opens and shuts. He then walks out of the house, and as soon as Helen hears the door shut, she can breathe again. But it’s only a temporary relief, which lasts until Wil , stil on the sofa, opens his mouth again.

“Could have been worse,” he says. “He could have found the letters. Or Pete could have been here.”

“Shut up, Wil . Just
shut up
.”

But her anger is contagious. Wil stands up and moves closer to Helen, talking al the time to a Peter who isn’t there. “You know, Pete, I was always surprised you couldn’t do the math. With al your qualifications. And a medical man too . . . Oh sure, Helen gave you the wrong numbers and I had fun frightening that consultant into lying, but stil . . .”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up.” She doesn’t think. She just lashes out at Wil , scratching his face and feeling the release this gives her. Wil puts his finger to his mouth, then shows it to her. She looks at the blood, blood she has known and loved like no other. It is there, before her, the taste that could make her forget everything. The only way to fight her instincts is by storming out of the room, but she can almost hear the happy curling smile in his words as he cal s after her.

“As I said, Hel, it’s just til Monday.”

Rowan sits in the churchyard, leaning behind a yew tree, hidden from the road. He has taken the whole packet of ibuprofen but feels exactly as he did half an hour ago, minus the headache.

This is hel , he realizes. To be trapped in the long and horrible sentence that is life for two hundred or so years without reaching the ful stop.

He wishes he’d asked his dad about how to kil a vampire. He’d real y like to know whether suicide is possible. Maybe there’s something in
The Abstainer’s Handbook
. Eventual y, he stands up and starts to walk home. Halfway back, he sees Eve stepping off a bus. She walks toward him, and he realizes it is too late to hide.

“Have you seen your sister?” she asks him.

She is staring at him so directly, with ful Eveness alive in her eyes, that he can hardly speak.

“No,” he manages eventual y.

“She just disappeared in Topshop.”

“Oh. No. I . . . I haven’t seen her.”

Rowan worries about his sister. Maybe the police have got her. For a moment this worry takes over the general anxiety he has talking to Eve. And this concern for his sister makes the chemical flavor in his mouth taste like guilt, as half an hour ago he had wanted to abandon his sister along with the whole world.

“Wel , it was weird,” Eve is saying. “One minute she was there and the next she was—”

“Eve!” Someone is shouting and running toward them. “Eve, I’ve been looking everywhere.”

Eve rol s her eyes and groans at Rowan as if he is her friend.

A reason to be alive.

“Sorry, better go. It’s my dad. See you later.”

He almost has the courage to smile back at her, and manages it when she turns.

“Okay,” he says. “See you.”

Hours later, in his bedroom listening to his favorite Smiths album—
Meat Is Murder
—he flicks to the index in
The Abstainer’s Handbook
and finds the fol owing information lurking on page 140.

A Note on Suicide

Suicidal depression is a common curse among those who abstain.

Without a regular diet of human or vampire blood, our brain chemistry can be
seriously affected. Serotonin levels are often very low, while our supply of cortisol
can rise alarmingly at times of crisis. And we are likely to act rashly, without thinking.