Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (26 page)

Big Man watched Paul with a startled curiosity, then
trepidation, then outright defensiveness. He switched from being hard and
fierce to looking frightened.

Paul stretched out his arms as he approached, feeling
more and more emboldened by the look of fright on Big Man. He moved forward in
a slight stoop, his arms wide as though he was imitating a swooping bird. Big
Man reached into his pocket and pulled out a brightly reflective silver object.
For a moment it dazzled and danced with light. It was a knife, a balisong
folding knife and Raul seemed to be an expert at showing it off, flicking it in
every direction for a few seconds before it landed square in his fist, ready to
use.

Paul continued his encroachment, strafing left as
though he was going to encircle them, stooping forward, arms out wide. Raul
started to look more and more fearful. He grabbed Boy and pulled him forward by
his collar, barricading himself with the kid, using him as a human shield. Then
Paul noticed just how terrified Boy looked too; he was wailing, holding his
hands to his face in terror, trying to move away from the knife blade that was
inches from his cheek. The pair of them were caught off guard and frightened to
be caught off guard.

This is my chance, Paul thought. Get them whilst
they’re scared.

Without thinking it through or making a plan, Paul
rushed towards Raul determined to fuck him up six ways from Sunday. He had
brought Boy, a child, to molest and abuse. Raul deserved to be fucked up.

There was a flash of panic over Raul’s face, even more
over Boy’s face. Paul rushed. Raul threw Boy forward. Boy screamed as he
careened into Paul. There was an arc of blood that hovered in the air for a
moment that seemed to come from nowhere. Paul saw as it flicked against the
snow beside him just before Boy bounced against his chest.

Raul was running fast and hard downhill. Paul wrestled
with Boy for a moment to push him aside but the child had bought Big Man Raul
the precious few seconds he needed. Being so huge his strides were enormous as
he pounded downhill, throwing up wide arcs of snow from his heels.

Paul ran only a few strides and gave up. The chase had
ended in the distraction. Boy had blocked his path and aided Raul’s escape.
Another time, Paul thought. We’ll finish this another time.

As he followed Raul with his eyes, he spotted someone
coming the other way. It was Ildico, still far down the hillside. She stopped,
frozen in place, watching Big Man run towards her. Then he passed and after a
few seconds of watching him flee, Ildico turned back and started up the hill.
It didn’t appear to Paul that she could see him standing at the top, but she
was heading in the right direction. She was probably following Raul’s footprints.

Paul’s heart was beating fiercely and he was suddenly
burning with heat. He slipped his coat off and was unbuttoning his shirt,
trying to let some of the cool air get to his skin when he heard a soft and
slow wail from behind him. Boy.

The kid was kneeling in the snow and looked to be
praying. A moment later and Paul noticed that his clenched hands were crimson
and blood soaked. He ran to him to help.

As he dropped to his knees beside him the child
flinched and held the same look of terror as earlier.

“It’s OK,” Paul said. “OK... I won’t hurt you.”

Paul took hold of the child’s bloody hands and
separated them. There was a clean slice across the back of Boy’s right thumb
towards the back of his hand. With the blood flowing he couldn’t quite tell
where the injury ended and pushed the cuff of Boy’s filthy jacket back to
reveal his forearm.

Needle marks. Lots of them. Lots. Scabs and scars
along the veins, the most recent punctures at the centre of bruises.

Paul felt a swell of anguish burst from his heart. He
remembered the kid doubled over in pain in the bins, crying. The kid was a
junkie, autistic, twelve years old, sexually abused and addicted.

“Put pressure on the wound,” Paul said as though the
kid could understand. He took hold of Boy’s left hand and pressed it over the
wound and wrapped his own hands around the boy’s clasped fist.

The poor kid. This poor forsaken soul. Lost, not
understanding. Taken under the wing of those two loathsome, disgusting men.

Blood ran through Paul’s fingers. He watched it feed
into and around the micro-fine wrinkles of his knuckles. He watched it pool at
the lowest point and drip into the snow. Bright red blood drops burning holes
into pure white snow. His hands were smeared with the blood of a child. He
could feel the warmth of it. He could almost smell it.

There was no thought to the action. It was purely
spontaneous.

Paul separated the child’s hands to expose the wound
and pressed it to his mouth.

Hot. Gently saline.

The action was no different from when a child pricks her
finger and a parent puts that finger in their own mouth. This wasn’t Paul’s
child. He wasn’t the parent. The wound was more than a prick. But it felt just
as easy and natural.

He couldn’t say how long he’d been like that, with his
lips clasped over the wound. But reality seeped back in the moment he heard
someone coming up behind him. It really clicked in when he heard Ildico crying
out in a sound of fear, horror and revulsion all rolled into one.

He lifted Boy’s hand away from his face seeing his own
blood stained hands tremble. He knew he would have blood around his lips and
mouth.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

What have I just done?

Ildico stood for a moment, startled, taking in the
scene. Paul stared at her desperately, pleading with his eyes as though crying
out the words, ‘help me’.

Ildico took hold of Paul’s shoulders and guided him to
stand. “Wait over there.” she said pointing to where he’d dropped his coat.
Paul managed to comply as though he was on autopilot. He shuffled to his
discarded coat feeling hotter and hotter. He unbuttoned his shirt to let the
cold against his chest and dropped to his knees.

“What have I done?” he mumbled. “What am I doing?”

The heat in his chest started to feel unbearable and
he scooped some snow in his bloodstained hands to rub on his skin. He tried to
rub at the bloodstain on his hands but it had dried. Even rubbing it with snow
didn’t wipe it away as simply as he expected. The patches that had dried seemed
as stubborn as paint stains and would need scrubbing with soap.

Behind him he heard Ildico and Boy talking. It sounded
as though Ildico had taken charge of the situation. He’d begun to notice that
despite her weaknesses and frailties, she was good in a crisis. Boy was talking
about him. He said the word ‘vampire’ several times and by the third mention of
the word Paul found himself crying. His body slumped under its own weight, his
knees pressed into the snow and he felt the cool of ice water begin to soak
into his jeans. A tear fell from his face and landed on his hand, then another
and another. He hadn’t any energy or impetus to try and stop it.

From behind him he heard Boy say, “El este un vampir.”
Even without knowing Romanian he picked out the intonation to understand it
perfectly. ‘He is a vampire,’ the Boy had said. He didn’t ask it as a question,
he said it as a declaration.

“Da,” Ildico replied in affirmation. Paul felt his
stomach tie into a knot as she confirmed it. He knew what he was, the Boy knew
what he was, but hearing Ildico confirm it was devastating. It was crushing, it
was soul destroying. Paul didn’t trust his own judgements, but right now, here,
he trusted Ildico’s more than anything in the world.

El este un vampir.

‘Da,’ she had replied. ‘Da.’

----- X -----

The
walk home felt like someone had died. Not in a murderous, monster, horror way,
but in that walking away from the hospital feeling after someone close has
passed. It was sad, the tears had been shed and there was no more to give, and
the mood had been dialled permanently low and miserable.

Ildico talked with Boy for the whole journey and held
Paul’s hand throughout. A few times Paul noticed Boy was trying to look at him
discretely. For his part Paul hadn’t the energy to lift his head and shuffled
home looking at his shoes. Even when Boy was trying to look at him, Paul could
barely find the energy to hide his face.

“El este un vampire,” the child said several times as
though locked in a compulsive loop of dialogue.

“Da. Spune nimic.” Ildico had replied each time. It
sounded as though she was telling him not to tell anyone but the kid obviously
had some kind of mental deficiency and Paul could see it was impossible for Boy
to keep a secret. If he was lucky, people would ignore the ramblings of an
autistic child who talked of English vampires; but there was no way to avoid
this. If the kid didn’t talk then Big Man Raul might.

In Noua they kill vampires and bury them in the
forest. Paul knew that was the ultimate truth. Big Man would say he was a
vampire. Boy would say he was a vampire. The people of Noua would come for him
and kill him and bury him in the forest.

He needed to go home to London. Quickly.

----- X -----

It
was difficult to do anything once back at the apartment. Scrubbing the blood
from his hands took almost an hour. It was difficult to remove but he was slow
going also. He had no energy to do anything. He had blood soaked into his shirt
and jeans but had nothing to change into. All his clothes he’d hand-washed and
hung on a line outside to drip-dry. He’d forgotten about them when he went to Brasov. Now the moisture in the clothes had frozen and they couldn’t be worn until they
had been defrosted and dried properly. Ildico helped with that, hanging
everything on hangers in the kitchen and turning on the oven to heat the place.

Paul was scrubbing his hands under running water which
was helping him cool down. He’d removed his shirt as he’d felt overbearingly
hot and noticed that he looked swollen. He was of an average athletic build
normally but right now he looked like he’d just finished a major gym workout.
His muscles were pumped and inflated, his skin was flushed pink with blood
close to the surface. He looked like he’d been working out for years but it was
all an illusion. His muscles may have looked bigger but it was swelling, not
strength; he wasn’t any physically stronger, he just looked it.

Paul slipped off his jeans and socks to be naked
except for shorts. His legs looked powerfully muscled and had that same pink
flush to them. He walked to the bedroom to see himself in the long thin mirror
of the wardrobe door. It wasn’t quite wide enough to show his full body but
what he saw looked so different to his usual physique he barely recognised
himself.

When he examined his face he no longer felt as though
he was seeing himself, rather he was trapped in a different body inside the
mirror and looking out to the impostor in the real world. His cheeks were
bruised and swollen, his lips were scabbed from the beating, there were bruises
around his eyes, there was a wide plaster from his collar bone across his
trapezius muscle to his back. But the real change was his eyes. Gone were the
colourful green and brown irises on perfectly white eyeballs; in their place
were two wide and lifelessly black pupils floating on bloodshot pink eyeballs.
Black eye holes in pink eyes on a pink face surrounded by cuts and scabs and
bruises.

Paul didn’t know what this thing was that had replaced
his physical self. Nor could he comprehend what it had done. Why had he chased
Raul? The guy was twice his size, yet without thinking he had charged up a hill
in the hope that he would find reason to fight with him. He did hope for that,
he could see it now. Removed from the situation he could see how desperately he
wanted to find Big Man abusing Boy. He wanted a reason to unleash the vampire.
It was all subconscious, beyond his control. This thing in the mirror was a
partial manifestation of it, clawing at him from the inside, trying to get out
through whatever situation it could encourage.

It was all becoming so clear. Paul had dreamed of
murdering Nealla to prepare him mentally. Today was a way to physically
manifest that mental preparation. He could take Big Man on without fear because
he was stronger. Just look in the mirror and see. Powerful, muscled, fearless.

“I am,” Paul whispered to his reflection.

Ildico was behind him, he caught sight in the mirror
and turned sharply.

“I’m sorry,” she said averting her eyes at his state
of undress.

“It’s OK,” He replied. His voice sounded deeper,
gravelled, but the words came out with a tone of sadness.

Ildico didn’t return his gaze, she seemed embarrassed.
“I know we won’t go to Brasov today like you wanted.”

“Don’t worry,” Paul said, his voice lowering even
deeper. “I can go tomorrow.” It was almost a lie. Somewhere his logical mind
was screaming at him, telling him to do it now, to pack his bags and take them
with him to Brasov before taking a taxi to Bucharest. Better still, take a taxi
to Bucharest right now and arrange the flight at the airport. Get out now. Go
before they come for you. But going now only avoided the confrontation. The
challenges here could be met head on now that he was stronger.