The Radleys (33 page)

I don’t care
, he thinks to himself, with the stubborn clarity of a child.

He doesn’t want her blood.

He wants Helen’s blood.

Eve isn’t dead yet but she wil be. He watches her holding her neck as the blood trickles through her fingers and onto her T-shirt—for a band he hasn’t heard of—and he has never felt more empty.

He looks down at the floor and realizes he is the bottle itself, with al that matters having escaped.

She is leaning against the tiles, looking at him with fear and exhaustion.

All those things that happen on the faces of unbloods! All those pointless signals designed to
make you feel—what? Remorse? Shame? Pity?

Pity.

He hasn’t pitied anyone since he went with three other pilgrims to see Lord Byron dying alone in that cave in Ibiza. The centuries-old poet was pale, wispy, and ancient—almost a ghost of himself

—lying back on that rowboat with a candle in his hand. And even then, had that real y been pity or fear for his own fate?

No
, he thinks.

Pity is just another weakening force. Like gravity. Something designed to keep unbloods and
abstainers on the ground, in their little places.

The Note

Jared had stayed hidden amid the bushes on Orchard Land for over an hour, waiting for some confirmation that what Alison Glenny had told him had been the truth. That Wil Radley was going to be kil ed by his sister-in-law. For a while he saw nothing, although he was comforted to see a parked BMW he didn’t recognize at the top of the lane.
Glenny’s car,
he assumes. But then his hopes were dashed as he saw someone leave the house.

Wil Radley. Alive.

As he watched him first disappear into the camper van and then, shortly after, fly away, he felt sick to his stomach. For a moment he felt he could actual y vomit, given the quantity of garlic he’d consumed earlier, but there had been a brisk chil to the air, which had helped stave off the nausea.

“No,” he said, to the green leaves around him. “No, no,
no
.”

Jared had then disentangled himself from the bushes and headed homeward. When he passed Alison Glenny’s car, he had tapped on the window. “Your little plan didn’t work.” She had someone else in the car with her. Some paunchy, shaven bear of a detective he hadn’t seen before, staring in disbelief through the windscreen and up to the sky.

“We gave her until midnight,” Alison said, in a voice as cold as a pink slip. “We’re stil giving her until midnight.”

Her window had hummed itself closed and Jared had nothing to do but carry on walking, toward home.

“Proof of vampires is nothing but proof of your own madness,” Alison had once told him. The same woman who had said that if he mentioned anything about who he thought had kil ed his wife to anyone—even to his own daughter—he would be returned to hospital and kept there for the rest of his life.

He sighed, knowing Wil Radley would stil be alive at midnight.

It was al futile.

He was in the same vil age as Wil but absolutely powerless to do anything. He kept walking, past the pub and the post office and the deli sel ing dinner party nibbles he couldn’t afford even if he wanted them. A wooden-framed blackboard leaned against the inside of the il uminated window advertising Parma ham, Manzanil a olives, gril ed artichokes, and Moroccan couscous.

I don’t belong here.

This thought brought another one.

I have been unfair to my daughter.

He made a decision. He would go home and apologize to Eve. It must have been so hard for her, putting up with his strange behavior and strict rules. They would move somewhere far away, if she wanted, and he would give her al the freedom a level-headed seventeen-year-old deserves.

He remembered Sunday morning jogs with Eve, back when he had the time and energy for such things. She’d hit her teens and suddenly became a fitness fanatic for a year or so. But he’d enjoyed it, their little private space away from her mother to go and run along the canal, or on the old deserted rail track in Sale. They’d been real y close back then, when he’d been able to care for her without causing her to suffocate.

Yes, enough is enough.

It’s over.

If he, or someone else, kil ed Wil Radley, would it make him feel any better? He doesn’t know. It probably would, but al he real y knows is that it has gone on too long and he has put Eve through too much and now it must stop.

And this thought is stil with him as he turns the keys to 15 Lowfield Close, walks inside, and trudges up the communal stairs. Before he is even inside their flat, he senses something is wrong.

It seems too quiet.

“Eve?” he cal s, placing the keys down on the shelf in the hal , next to a red letter from Yorkshire Water.

There is no answer.

“Eve?”

He heads to her room, but she’s not there. Her band posters, her narrow bed, her open wardrobe, but not her living self. Al the familiar clothes on hangers like ghosts of her.

There’s makeup out on her dresser and the sweet chemical smel of hairspray hangs in the air.

She’s gone out. On a Monday night.

Where the hell is she?

He runs to the phone. He cal s her mobile. No answer. Then he spots the note on the living room table.

Dad,

Gone out to cinema with Rowan Radley. Sincerely doubt he’s a vampire.

Eve

Oh Jesus
, he thinks.

Panic ambushes him from every side. The note drops and before it hits the carpet, he has his car keys in one hand and with his other he is at his neck checking for the little gold Jesus on his cross.

Outside, into the rain.

The smashed window. Eve had told him he needed to sweep out the car, but he hadn’t listened.

Stil , right now he has no choice and he is out of time.

He opens the car door, climbs inside without sweeping the little pieces of glass off his seat, and starts to drive fast toward Thirsk.

A Lost World That Was Once Her Own

It is not so much pain as a kind of dissolution. As though she is slowly losing her solidity and turning to liquid. Eve looks around, at the sinks and the mirrors. At the cubicles and their open doors. At the broken bottle and the pool of someone else’s blood. Her eyes are heavy and she wants to sleep but there is a noise. The automatic flush of the urinals, waking her up again, and she realizes who and where she is, and what has just happened.

He is gone now, and Eve realizes she has to get out of there and find help.

She pul s herself up, but it is hard, and she has never felt so much gravity weighing her down.

She is a diver treading through the remains of a sunken civilization. A lost world that was once her own. She reaches the door. Pul s it with al her strength and steps out on the carpet. Its pattern swirls below her like a hundred little whirlpools and across the foyer there is the box office attendant. For a strange moment she wonders why he is staring at her with such horror.

Her hand slips from her wound.

And then there is a strange creeping darkness, as though a ship is passing over her head, and she knows it is something terrible. She knows, in a second or two, that she won’t be knowing anything.

She is merging with it, the blackness.

Like salt in water.

Every grain of life slowly dissolving into something else.

Help me.

She tries to give the desperate thought a voice but isn’t sure if she makes it. She is weakening on every step.

Please, help me.

She hears a voice answer her with her name.

It is her father’s voice, she realizes, as the darkness is no longer at the fringes of her vision, but everywhere, crashing over her as a wave. She succumbs to its weight, and the only thing she is aware of is the vague knowledge that she is col apsing onto the carpet.

Baby

Jared Copeland had sped to the cinema in his car with wind and rain whipping in through the smashed window, little grains of glass moving in one concerted motion on the passenger seat.

Halfway there, just before the Fox and Crown pub in Farley, he had passed the Radleys’ car, with Peter Radley driving home alone.

The sight of him had made him speed up toward Thirsk, as he assumed Peter had probably dropped his son off. Once there, outside the cinema, he parked the car halfway up the pavement and ran up the steps and through the door.

And now he is here, inside the foyer. He sees a man in a white shirt, someone who works here, on the phone shouting and gesticulating.

“Hel o . . . we need an ambulance right away . . . yes . . . a girl’s been attacked or summat . . .

she’s bleeding . . .”

Then Jared sees his daughter and the blood and he understands. She has been bitten by the Radley boy. The horror speeds him up and he manages to become for a moment his old self and he moves beyond panic into a kind of hypercalm as he crouches down to check his daughter’s pulse. Every breathing moment of the last two years he has thought this would happen, and now it has, he is going to do the very best he can to save her. Two years ago he had panicked and screamed, and on hearing that scream, Wil Radley had dragged his wife toward the sky. So now he has to be efficiency in fast forward.
I can’t fuck this up.

He hears the attendant speaking as his daughter’s pulse ticks faintly against his finger. “The Palace Cinema in Thirsk. She’s unconscious. You’ve got to come now.”

Jared checks the wound and the steadily leaking blood. He knows it won’t even start to heal. He knows no hospital in the country wil know what to do with her. If he tries to fol ow any normal type of emergency procedure, he knows she wil be dead.

The attendant is off the phone now.

“Who are you?” he asks Jared.

Jared ignores him and picks his daughter up off the ground. The same daughter he’d held as a six-pound newborn baby, whom he’d fed with a bottle on nights when her mother had been exhausted, whom he’d sung “American Pie” to night after night to get her to sleep.

Her eyes flicker open momentarily. She revives enough to tel him “I’m sorry” and then descends back into unconsciousness.

The attendant tries to block him. “What are you doing with her?”

“This is my daughter. Please, hold the door.”

The steward looks at him, then at the blood stil dripping on the carpet. He stands in front of Jared. “I can’t let you take her, pal. I’m sorry.”

“Get out of my way,” Jared says, pressing the point home with his eyes. “Get out of my bloody way.”

And the attendant steps aside, letting Jared back out the door as he tel s his daughter and himself over and over again, “It’s al right. It’s al right. It’s al right . . .”

Up and Up and Up

Toby leaves Miler’s fish restaurant with a meal for one wrapped up in white paper and starts to bike home. He smiles, thinking of al the money stil left in his pocket, and how stupid Rowan must have been to slip it through the mail slot. And as he thinks this, he has no idea he is being fol owed from above.

He turns left, takes the footpath across the field ful of horses he knows is a shortcut to Orchard Lane.

The horses gal op away in terror, not from the boy on the bike but from the boy above, getting lower and lower.

And Rowan realizes, as he descends, that it is al over now.

He can’t have Eve.

He’s a freak.

Total y alone in a world ful of liars.

His father’s child.

He is Rowan Radley. A monster, flying through the night.

Toby looks up and can’t believe what is there. The greasy fish and fried potato slide from under his arm onto the ground, spil ing out of their paper.

His face is pure fear.

“No!” he says. “What the—”

He pedals hard and fast over a path made for slow and elderly Sunday strol ers.

And Rowan soars ahead, less angry now, his head clear and kestrel calm, swooping down and watching the panic on Toby’s face as he tries to brake and turn. But he has no time. Rowan has grabbed the front of his jacket and is pul ing him high up into the air with ease even as Toby holds tight to his handlebars and drags the bike up with them.

“You’re right,” says Rowan, ful -fanged, as the horses become moving dots below them. “I’m a freak.”

Toby could scream, but terror has silenced him. He lets go of his bike, which lands on the road below.

Rowan’s plan is to kil him. To prove to himself he real y is a monster. If he is a monster he won’t feel pain. He won’t feel anything. He’l just kil forevermore, moving from place to place like his father. A dot-to-dot of thril s without guilt or human emotion.

He carries Toby higher.

Up and up and up.

Toby is urging himself to speak, even as his own urine gushes warmly down his leg. “I’m sorry,”

he blurts.

Rowan stares into his neighbor’s face as they keep rising fast through the air.

A frightened, vulnerable face.

A victim’s face.

No.

He can’t do it. If he’s a monster, he’s a different kind from his father.

He shouts against the downward wind.

“If you say anything about my family or Eve ever again, I wil kil you.
Anything
. Okay?”

Toby manages a nod, struggling against gravity.

“And you wil be dead if you even so much as
think
this actual y happened. Okay?”

“Yes,” he whimpers. “Please—”

It’s a risk, either way. Kil ing him. Not kil ing him. But Rowan isn’t going to lose whatever goodness he has left inside him for the taste of Toby’s bitter blood.

He carries him back down, drops him a few feet above ground.

“
Go
,” says Rowan, as Toby scrambles to his feet. “Just go and leave me alone.”

Rowan lands on the ground and watches Toby flee. Behind him, someone is clapping.