The Radleys (7 page)

“I want to know if you . . . love me.”

She is shocked at the irrelevance of this question to their current crisis. “Peter, this is not the—”

“Helen, I have to know.”

“Peter, I’m not playing your selfish games tonight.”

Her husband nods and breathes this in, finding his answer. And then there’s something, someone, ahead. Someone crouching in the bushes.

“It’s her.”

As Clara steps out into visibility, everything becomes real. The clean clothes she left the house in are saturated in blood. Her sweater and her corduroy jacket gleam with it, and it’s al over her face and glasses. She shields her eyes from the glare of the headlights.

“Oh God, Clara,” says Helen.

“Helen, the lights. You’l blind her.”

She switches them off, and they pul over as their daughter remains in the same spot, her arm slowly lowering. A moment later and Helen is stepping out of the car, glancing toward the dark field and the body she can’t see lying there. It is cold now. The wind is raw, having swept uninterrupted across the sea and the moors to reach them. Clara’s hair flies wild, making her face uninterrupted across the sea and the moors to reach them. Clara’s hair flies wild, making her face as whole and exposed and complete as a baby’s.

I’ve killed her
, thinks Helen, as she notices the numb expression which does more than the blood to lend horror to her daughter’s face.
I’ve killed our whole family.

The Dark Fields

The boy is on the ground, in front of Peter. Dead. His arms are raised above his head, as if in surrender. She has devoured his throat and chest and even some of his stomach. His open flesh gleams near-black, although there are varying degrees of the darkness indicating different organs.

His lower intestines spil out of him, like escaping eels.

Even in the old days, after the wildest binge, it was rare to leave a body in this kind of state. But he can’t deny it: he is not as appal ed as he could be. As an unblood would be. He knows that once Clara started she wouldn’t have been able to stop, and that in distorting her own nature they had caused this to happen. But the sight of the blood is fascinating him too, bringing on its old hypnotic effects.

Sweet, sweet blood . . .

He pul s himself together and tries to remember what he’s doing. He must carry the body back to the car, as Helen instructed. Yes, that is what he must do. Crouching down, he places his arms under the boy’s back and legs and tries to heave him off the ground. It’s impossible. He is too weak these days. The boy is built like a man. And a big man at that, with a strong, rugby-player build.

This is a two-person job, at least.
He glances over at Helen. She is wrapping Clara in a blanket, hugging her tightly. Clara’s arms hang limp by her sides.

No, he can do this himself. He’l just have to drag him and cover the tracks. It’s forecast to rain. If it rains hard enough, then the tracks wil be covered. But what about DNA? Back in the 1980s they never had to worry about that. Wil would know how to get around it. Why was Helen always so funny about him? What was her problem?

Peter grips the ankles and starts heaving the body across the ground. It’s too hard, too slow.

Stopping for breath, he looks at the blood on his hands. He had vowed to Helen never to contemplate what he is now contemplating. It shines, turning from black to purple. Headlights flicker through the hedgerow in the distance. The car is moving slowly, as if its driver is hunting for something.

“Peter!” Helen cries. “Someone’s coming!”

He hears her usher Clara into the car, then cal back to him. “Peter! Leave the body!”

The boy’s corpse is closer to the road now and, when the car passes, could easily be seen under the glare of what seem to be fog lights. He yanks desperately at the body, using al his strength and ignoring the shooting pains in his back. There is no way. They have seconds, not minutes.

“No,” he says.

He looks again at the blood on his hands before Helen reaches him.

“Take Clara home. I’l deal with this. I can deal with this.”

“No, Peter—”

“Go home. Go. For God’s sake, Helen, just go!”

She doesn’t even nod. She gets in the car and drives off.

Peter watches the advancing fog lights as he licks his hands to taste what he hasn’t tasted for seventeen years. And it happens. Strength rises through his body, taking away every little ache and pain. He can feel that quick, smooth realignment of teeth and bone as he transforms into his purest self. It is an incredible release, like undressing after years of being trapped in the same uncomfortable outfit.

The car is stil approaching.

He scoops his hand down into the boy’s leaking throat, licks the rich, delicious blood. Then he picks him up, hardly noticing the weight, and soars upward, over the dark fields.

Faster and faster and faster.

He tries not to enjoy it, to stay focused on what he must do. He keeps flying, steering himself by thinking alone.

That is what the taste of blood does. It takes away the gap between thought and action. To think is to do. There is no unlived life inside you as the air speeds past your body, as you look down at the dreary vil ages and market towns—now transformed into pretty clusters of light—and head beyond land and out above the North Sea.

And it is here, now, he can let the feeling take over him.

That exhilarating rush of being truly alive and in the present, fearless of consequences, of the past and the future, aware of nothing but the speed of air and the blood on his tongue.

Miles out at sea, with no dark shadows of boats below, he releases the body and circles the air as he watches it fal toward the water. Then he licks his hands once again. He real y sucks at his fingers and closes his eyes to savor the taste.

This is joy!

This is life!

For a moment, in the air, he almost thinks about carrying on. He could go to Norway. There used to be a big vampire scene up in Bergen, maybe there stil is. Or he could go somewhere with lax policing. Hol and, maybe. Somewhere without secret crossbow units. He could escape and live on his own and satisfy whatever cravings came along. To be free and on his own. Wasn’t that the only real way he could live?

He closes his eyes and sees Clara’s face, the way it was as she stood by the road. She had looked so distraught and helpless, wanting the truth he’d never given her. Or at least, that’s what he had chosen to see.

No.

Even with blood inside him he is a different man from the one he left behind somewhere in the black hole of his twenties. He wasn’t his brother. He doubts he ever could be.

Not now.

As he arcs in the cold air, he admires the ocean, a vast steel sheet reflecting a fractured moon.

No, I am a good man
, he tel s himself as he drags himself and his heavy conscience back toward home.

As Helen drives, she keeps checking her daughter, numb in the passenger seat beside her.

She has dreaded something like this happening. She has tormented herself many times imagining similar scenarios. But now it has actual y happened, it doesn’t feel real at al .

“I want you to know that it’s not your fault,” she says. In the mirror the car is stil there, its fog lights gleaming. “You see, it’s this thing, Clara. This
condition
. We’ve al got it but it’s been . . .

dormant
. . . for years. Al your life. Al Rowan’s life. Your father and I, Dad and me, we didn’t want you to know. We thought if you didn’t know, then . . . Nurture over nature, that’s what we thought . .

.”

Helen knows it’s her duty to keep talking, explaining, offering her daughter words on top of words. Bridges over the silence. Veils over the truth. But she is crumbling inside.

“But this thing . . . it’s strong . . . it’s as strong as a shark. And it’s always there, no matter how stil the water is. It’s there. Just below. Ready to . . .”

In the rearview mirror, the fog lights stop moving and switch off. Helen finds some slight relief in knowing she is no longer being fol owed.

“But the thing is,” she says, gaining control of her voice again, “it’s al right. It’s al right because we’re strong too, darling, and we’re going to get over this and back to normal, I promise you. It’s

—”

Helen sees the drying blood on Clara’s face, streaked around her mouth and nose and chin.

Like camouflage.

How much blood did she use?

Helen feels such pain, now, as she wonders this. The pain of having built something up, something as careful y constructed as a cathedral, only to know it wil fal apart, crushing everyone and everything she cares about.

“What am I?” says Clara.

It is too much. Helen has no idea how to answer this. She wipes tears from her eyes. Eventual y she finds the words. “You’re who you’ve always been. You’re you.
Clara.
And—”

A random memory intrudes into her mind. Patting her daughter to sleep as a one-year-old, after another troubled dream. Singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” about a hundred times over to calm her down.

She wishes for that moment again, and for there to be a right lul aby to sing.

“And I’m sorry, darling,” she says, as dark trees slide by the window, “but it’s going to be al right. It is, it is. I promise. It’s going to be al right.”

My Name Is Will Radley

In a supermarket car park in Manchester, a woman is staring with untold longing into the eyes of Peter’s brother. She has absolutely no idea what she is doing. It is God-knows-what time and she is in the car park with him, this incredible, hypnotical y fascinating man. Her last customer of the day, he had come to her register with nothing but dental floss and wet wipes in his basket.

“Hel o, Julie,” he had said, checking her name badge.

He had looked terrible on the face of it, like a disheveled rocker from some outdated band who stil thought the shabby raincoat was a sound fashion statement. And he was obviously older than her, but when she tried to guess his age she couldn’t.

Yet, even at that first sight of him, she had felt something wake up inside her. The self-wil ed semicoma she fel into at the start of her shift—which lasted through every shopping item she swiped and every receipt she tore out of the til —suddenly left her and she’d felt strangely alive.

Al those clichéd things a more romantical y inclined person believes in: the quickening heart, the giddy rush of blood to the head, that sudden light warmth in the stomach.

They’d had a flirtatious conversation about something, but now that she was out here in the car park she couldn’t remember much of it. Her lip stud? Yes. He’d liked that but thought the purple streaks in her dyed black hair were probably a bad idea, on top of the lip stud and pale makeup.

“The goth thing would stil work for you if you took it down a gear.”

She never took crap like that from Trevor, her boyfriend, and yet she had taken it from this total stranger. Had even agreed to meet him ten minutes later, on the bench outside, risking being seen by al the gossipmongers she works with as they knocked off for the night.

They talked. She can’t remember what about. Never wil . They stayed sitting there as the cars left, one by one. It seemed like a few minutes but it must have been way over an hour. And right now, without warning he stands up and gestures for her to do the same and they walk aimlessly across the tarmac. And now she finds herself stopping and leaning back against a battered old VW camper van, about the only vehicle left in the whole car park.

She should be with Trevor. He’l be wondering where she is. Or maybe he won’t. Maybe he’s just playing World of Warcraft and not thinking of her at al . But it doesn’t real y matter either way.

She needs to keep hearing that voice. That rich, confident, devilish voice. “So, do you like me?”

she asks him.

“You make me hungry, if that’s what you mean.”

“You should take me to dinner. I mean, if you’re hungry.”

He smiles shamelessly. She realizes he isn’t the kind of guy who takes girls out to dinner. “I was thinking you should come back to my place.”

As his dark eyes study her, she forgets the cold, forgets Trevor, forgets everything you are meant to remember when you are talking to strangers in car parks. “Okay. Where’s your place?”

“You’re leaning on it,” he tel s her.

She laughs at this, and keeps laughing. “O-
kay
,” she says, patting the side of the van. She’s not used to this much adventure after work.

“O-
kay
,” he echoes.

She wants to kiss him, but she tries to fight it. Tries to close her eyes and see Trevor’s face but he is not there. “I should probably tel you I’ve got a boyfriend.”

The man seems nothing but pleased by this news. “I should have invited him for dinner.” He holds out his hand, and she takes it.

His mobile phone starts ringing. She recognizes the ringtone: “Sympathy for the Devil.”

He doesn’t answer it. Instead he walks her round to the other side of the van and slides open the door. Inside is a chaos of clothes, battered books, and old cassettes. She glimpses empty and ful bottles of red wine, lying by a sheetless mattress.

She looks at him and realizes she has never found anyone more attractive in her entire life.

He gestures for her to step inside. “Welcome to the castle.”

“Who are you?” she asks him.

“My name is Wil Radley, if that’s what you mean.”

She’s not sure that she does, but she nods, then kneels her way into the van without a single worry about the red-brown stains on the mattress.

He is wondering if she is real y worth the effort. The trouble is, he realizes, you reach a point when even pleasure, the easy pursuit and attainment of things desired, develops its own routine.