Instead, he starts walking back down the hallway, not taking his eyes off the open door for a second. His heart skips a beat when he thinks he sees something moving inside.
He feels relieved when he turns the corner and spots a staircase nearby, closer than the one he came down. It doesn’t matter; he just needs to get out of here. He resists the impulse to run.
He hasn’t felt like this since he was a little boy afraid of the dark and his mother asked him to fetch something from the basement. It was like this different world within their house: a dark world with strange smells. He always ran up the stairs like a maniac once he found what he’d been sent there to get, certain a mummy’s hand would appear behind the steps, that sharp werewolf claws would rip open his back …
Göran puts a foot on the first step and hears the door in Marianne’s corridor slide open.
No, of course it’s not a monster, but there are plenty of humans to be scared of, and this could be a bloody madman. Who knows?
He glances back behind him. A man in his fifties is standing there in nothing but his underpants, glaring at him balefully. His body is hefty, shapeless. Furry belly, wild tufts of hair on his shoulders. Bloody vomit is caked in his chest hair. But the most frightening part of him is his eyes.
It’s as if all the things Göran was afraid of as a child have suddenly found him: here, of all places.
He bolts up the stairs.
The man follows.
An arm shoots out, taking Göran’s feet out from under him. He falls. Lands heavily on his back, tries to kick out at the man, but his ponderous heft slams down on top of him, pinning him down. Göran can hear his ribs breaking on the sharp edges of the steps. He doesn’t have enough air in him to scream.
The man’s teeth snap above his face, then comes burning pain, and Göran sees the man spitting something out.
He realises it’s his nose.
My nose is gone.
The man licks the crater in the middle of Göran’s face and bites him again, and in one horrible moment of clarity, Göran can feel the man’s teeth slide effortlessly through skin and tissue. He is afraid to move, afraid his face will come off. Blood is rushing down his throat, making him splutter. It feels like he is drowning in it. The man’s teeth scrape against his cheekbone. His broken ribs jab at everything they are meant to protect inside him.
Göran’s field of vision is blurring. The lamps in the ceiling are distant stars. The teeth sink into his throat.
But that too is far away now. Göran is no longer there. His flesh and his self are no longer one and the same. The two halves glide apart. He notes that his suffering body is being dragged back down the steps, into the dark cabin, but he himself doesn’t need to go with it. He is no longer trapped in his body; everything he is is on its way somewhere else, far away from here.
Dan
Dan has brought the boy into the goods lift and pushed the emergency button between two floors. It is rarely in use at this time of night, when both the tax-free shop and kitchen are closed. It was the only place he could think of where they would be able to talk in private for a while, without people overhearing, without CCTV cameras. The smell of blood from at least three different people wafts from the boy. And other smells: rotting flowers, liniment.
‘You are so new,’ the boy says, looking up at him, ‘and already so finished. I have never beheld anyone like you.’
The little boy is fascinating to look at, with his round cheeks, hair the kind of white-blond you only see in very young children, and yet such an ancient look in his bright eyes. And his way of speaking: like a character in one of the black-and-white films they run on TV in the afternoons.
‘You’re the man on the posters,’ the boy says.
Dan nods.
‘You have already fed,’ the boy says, and leans in closer. ‘A woman. Your own age. You turned while you were … with her.’
His eyes are definitely not those of a child now. Dan can only nod again.
‘And you liked it,’ the boy continues. ‘You liked it more than anything else and you already want more.’
‘Yes,’ Dan says. He can hear that he sounds breathless. Reverent. ‘Who are you?’ he asks.
‘My name is Adam. At least, that is what I’m calling myself now. It felt appropriate.’ He fires off a crooked smile. Yellow teeth can be glimpsed between the lips of his tiny rosebud mouth.
Dan can’t help feeling revolted.
‘Your body is permanently transformed … It is dead,’ Adam tells him, ‘but you are more alive than ever. You can feel it, can you not? You feel more than you ever have before. Your senses have been flung open. You can harbour pain and pleasure at a pitch you have never experienced before.’
Dan nods: yes, that is exactly right.
‘What am I?’ Dan asks. ‘What are we?’
‘We have gone by many names. There have been stories about creatures who drink blood for as long as humans have been able to speak. Today we are called vampires.’
There it is: the word. As soon as Dan hears it he realises he has been waiting for it.
‘We have become myth. Fairy tales. Something to laugh at. The modern world has swept us away. And our own kind have let it happen, because it has been said that it is safer for us.’ The boy crosses his arms. His teeth flash again, too big for his mouth.
Dan sinks down on the floor so that he and the boy are level.
There are so many questions he wants to ask, but there is one he needs answered first.
‘Am I immortal?’ he says. ‘I feel immortal.’
‘No, but you will not grow old for a very, very long time. And you are practically invulnerable.’
Dan doesn’t like that word, practically.
‘You don’t have to worry about turning to ash in sunlight,’ Adam says with a smile. ‘You can cross thresholds even if no one invites you. You have no reason to fear crosses or holy water or any other superstition. Hundreds upon hundreds of years from now you will look as you do in this moment, more or less, anyway. And you will be as strong, as hungry for life, your own and others’.’ Adam’s eyes take on a religious sheen. ‘You have been given an extraordinary gift,’ he says.
Dan looks down at his hands: the strong hands of a man. The bulging veins, filled with Alexandra’s blood. He thinks about his dad’s hands, how they looked at the end, covered in age spots, fingers curled into talons. And then he looks at Adam’s hands: childishly chubby with little indentations like dimples at each knuckle.
‘How old are you?’ he asks.
A shadow passes across the boy’s face. ‘I was born around the turn of the last century. I have been locked in this body ever since.’
It is so absurd Dan almost bursts out laughing.
‘I lived in Stockholm then,’ Adam says gravely. ‘Me and my mother, we have been travelling around Europe and North Africa for more than a hundred years, constantly on the move so as not to arouse suspicion. Not that anyone would be able to fathom it … but they might ask questions. A child who never grows up, who never seems to develop. We have kept on the periphery, to ourselves, always been so careful. Only fed once or twice a month, when we absolutely had to. It has not been a life worth living. It has been a protracted punishment. Much longer than life imprisonment.’ He leans back against the orange metal of the lift door. His smile is bitter. Nothing like a child’s. ‘My mother thought she was saving me. I was afflicted with what was once called consumption. You call it TB. I do not remember it myself any more, but I have often wished she had let me die. What is the point of a long life, of becoming a superior being, if you have to live like a frightened animal?’
Dan knows something about being forced into an undignified existence. He knows something about wanting redress.
‘All because of ancient rules put in place when the world was utterly different,’ Adam continues. ‘It has been said that we have to be careful, because if our contagion spread across the world we would soon run out of humans. There
would no longer be anything for us to eat. But look at them: it is only a matter of time before they destroy themselves and this world. They don’t deserve it.’
‘No,’ Dan says, with a level of feeling that almost moves him to tears.
‘I am not going to adhere to the Old Ones’ rules any longer. I am going to make my own. And I would rather die tonight than live for hundreds, maybe thousands of years in fear.’
‘Better to burn out than to fade away,’ Dan says, and feels rapture rear up inside him like a big and mighty stallion.
‘The whole world will be talking about us tomorrow,’ Adam says. ‘They will fear and respect us again.’
A shiver runs through Dan. ‘How?’
‘I have created more of us here on board tonight. I believe the first one was the one who bit you.’
‘Yeah. I thought he was some kind of fucking psycho.’
The boy looks at him as though he has said something unforgivable, but then his features soften slightly. ‘It has already started spreading. Did you not notice something peculiar about the security officer we just met?’
Pia. Dan pictures her: her searching eyes on him and Adam.
‘Aside from her not leaving us the fuck alone?’ Dan says.
It is an attempt at a joke, but Adam doesn’t smile. Dan pulls himself together. Tries to figure out what Adam is getting at. He hadn’t been particularly focused on that butch old bitch. But there had been something about her.
‘She was afraid,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ the boy replies. ‘She is becoming one of us, but she has not understood it yet. It has not progressed very far. It may have been a superficial wound. All she knows is that something is wrong and she is trying to fight that realisation.’
‘He must have bitten her too,’ Dan says. ‘The guy who bit me.’ He thinks back to when the security officers dragged the man out of the karaoke bar and a peal of laughter threatens to bubble up inside him. Does this make Pia and him some kind of vampire siblings or what?
‘That may be. There are more like him on board,’ Adam says. ‘At the moment, they are like newborn infants: nothing but emotions and instincts. They are hungry. They need blood. It can take anything from hours to months before they become sentient creatures again.’
Dan looks at him, lets his words sink in. ‘It’s going to be bedlam,’ he says, picturing it. Hundreds of them. The screaming. The panic. The snapping teeth.
‘Exactly,’ Adam says, and smiles, wider and wider. Delighted. Excited. ‘But you, on the other hand, you have already left the infant stage. You were made for this.’
Dan nods. He knows in his heart, which is no longer beating, why he got through it.
Unlike Pia and the bloke who bit him, he welcomed the change. He wasn’t afraid. He didn’t fight it. He simply rode the wave.
‘I could never have hoped for someone like you,’ Adam says. ‘If you help me, we can establish a new world order tonight. We can become a proud race again: walk with our backs straight and our heads held high through the ruins.’
‘What do you want me to do?’ Dan says without a moment’s hesitation.
‘You know how this boat works. I want it to take us all the way to port. Like when the Demeter reached England … It would be poetic, don’t you think? To have life surpass art?’
Adam laughs, displaying the teeth that are more than a hundred years old, and Dan tries to look as though he knows what he is talking about.
‘Then chaos will engulf the whole world in a matter of weeks,’ Adam says.
Dan lines them up in his mind, all the people he hates on board. Filip. Jenny. Captain Berggren. Birgitta from Grycksbo. The security staff. All those goddamn old hags in their white-and-blue striped jumpers.
An army of newborns. The living dead. Afraid, desperate, hungry.
He and this boy who is not a boy will lead them.
A new world order.
All his life he has known he was meant for something special. And here it is.
Dan has gone through the same safety drills as everyone else who works aboard the Charisma. He knows the emergency routines. If something goes badly wrong, the captain sends a distress call to port demanding a rescue.
There is no time to lose if they want to remain undisturbed and glide into in Åbo Harbour like a big fucking bomb.
I saw a ship a-sailing.
Adam looks at him with his big eyes.
‘I know what we need to do first,’ Dan says.
The Baltic Charisma
In a cabin on deck nine, a young girl named Lyra is leaning on the bathroom sink, squeezing her hands against the porcelain. Crying without tears. She spits, and a handful of bloody molars land, roots and all, on top of her other teeth. She gingerly tongues the white shards emerging from her gums. They are so sharp they cut the tip of her tongue. Her blood tastes sweet and metallic and she knows she should feel disgusted, but she doesn’t. It tastes like life, she thinks, and panic swells inside her. Who was that boy? What was he? She tries to cling to consciousness, link one thought to another, but it is difficult to hold on. He came in. He was cute. So cute. Those eyes. He was a child, but not. He took my hand and bit me. Not too hard, not as hard as he could have. He could have bit straight through but he didn’t.
Her heart is beating ever slower. She feels like she is on a rollercoaster. Down in the deepest dips between each beat. He didn’t want to kill me. But what did he want? This. He wanted this.
She drops to her knees and rests her head against the cool sink. It feels nice. Her headache has faded to almost nothing. Lyra waits for her next heartbeat, but it never comes. Her body is still. Quiet. The cabin door opens. Mum. Dad. Lyra can smell their scents; they intermingle. Like when you mix all the colours and it just turns brown. She wants them to hold her. She wants them to leave. Something terrible is about to happen.
Must. Warn. Them.
Lyra’s mum opens the bathroom door and starts screaming when she sees the blood, the teeth in the sink, her pale daughter on the floor.
*
Not far from there, Dan closes a door behind himself and Adam and walks down the corridor to the bridge. The little boy’s arms are wrapped tightly around Dan’s neck. His frail body is virtually weightless, but Dan has just witnessed what Adam is capable of. Every drop of blood spattered on the walls of the engine room is proof of it. The screams are still ringing in Dan’s ears; they are singing in his blood, their blood, which belongs to him now, filling him and making him stronger. Every time his heart contracts, he can feel the blood shifting, waves of life being pushed through his body.
Adam tells him his mother is going to try to stop them when she figures it out.
‘Then we will stop her,’ Dan whispers, lifting him up higher on his hip.
‘You mustn’t hurt her,’ Adam says.
Dan makes no reply. He walks up the narrow staircase. The officers turn around when they hear them. Adam takes in all the screens, flashing lights and blinking buttons of the bridge.
‘Berggren wanted to see me,’ Dan says. ‘I can talk to him now, if someone would go get him.’
*
On deck two, Olli the lorry driver is lying motionless in his cabin. Göran is sprawled next to him, an almost imperceptible twitching of one of his hands the only movement. His eyes, which Marianne liked so much, are closed.
Marianne
He is no longer studying her with that searching gaze, so she dares to glance at him from time to time. He is handsome, almost too handsome: he cuts a figure that would not look out of place in a classic film. Aside from the tattoos, of course. She wonders what they will look like when his skin starts wrinkling. On the other hand, men age more gracefully. Yet another example of life’s little injustices.
They have sat down in McCharisma. It is relatively quiet here; the real carousers have made their way to the dance floors. Outside the pub doors there is a steady flow of people going to and from Charisma Starlight.
‘What were yo
u really doing out on deck?’ he says.
She swallows and tries to think of something to say.
‘You seemed to … to have a lot on your mind,’ he continues. ‘I almost thought you … that you were going to do something stupid.’
And it suddenly becomes clear to her why he insisted on having a drink with her. Shame makes her cheeks glow.
It takes considerable effort to appear unperturbed. She has longed to break out of her invisibility, but had forgotten how unpleasant it can be to look at yourself through the eyes of others.
‘I wasn’t about to jump, if that’s what you’re asking,’ she says curtly.
But she had been toying with the idea. What does that say about her? Enough for her to know she had better keep her mouth shut. ‘I was just trying to think about some things more clearly,’ she goes on. ‘Myself mostly.’
‘Me too, I suppose,’ he says with a sad smile.
She takes a sip of her Rioja.
‘Any luck?’ she asks. ‘Because I have no idea what I’m doing.’
His smile widens. Had she been thirty, forty years younger, that smile would have set her heart a-fluttering.
‘I thought age brought wisdom,’ he says.
‘The only thing that age brings you is more decisions to regret.’
The force of his laughter surprises her and she catches herself smiling back.
‘Vincent,’ he says, extending his hand.
‘Marianne,’ she says, and takes it.
She notes the ring on his left index finger. Hammered silver or white gold, she can’t tell the difference. It is thick. Must have been expensive.
Vincent notices her glance, because he holds his hand up and studies it. ‘I said yes at first, because I didn’t know how to say no.’
She takes another sip and waits.
‘There were so many people there, and I didn’t want to be hurtful. But of course I was.’
‘At the end of the day, it’s probably more hurtful to marry someone just to be nice,’ she says. ‘And you don’t get a medal of valour for self-sacrifice either. That I can vouch for.’