‘I guess … I guess we should wait for Sanford,’ was my advice. ‘Sanford can give him a shot of something. To calm him down.’
Reuben sniffed. ‘If you say so,’ he spat, hustling Dermid towards the kitchen. ‘Personally, I’d give ’im a shotta lead in the brain. That would calm him down, all right.’
‘Reuben—’
‘I know, I know. Vampires hate violence.’ Adjusting his hold on Dermid, Reuben made his captive yip like a dog. ‘But isn’t Dermid a vampire now? And he tried to shoot you, Nina. I reckon he deserves whatever I can dish out.’
‘He’s not a vampire yet, though. Not quite. Not fully,’ I rejoined. ‘And when he is one … well, he’ll change. Like I said before, he won’t be the same person.’ After a moment’s inner struggle, I was finally compelled to admit the truth. ‘He might – you know, he might even be a better person. It’s possible. Becoming a vampire might improve his character.’
‘Well, he certainly couldn’t get any worse,’ Reuben muttered, pushing Dermid up the back steps. At which point somebody yelled, from the house next door, ‘Can’t you people keep it down, over there? My family’s trying to sleep!’
I recognised the voice. It belonged to one of our neighbours, Mr Kyrillis, who was leaning out of his bathroom window.
For at least five years, he and Mum had been engaged in a vicious feud about tree-roots. So he was never shy about complaining – not when he felt justified in doing so.
‘Oh! Sorry!’ I exclaimed. ‘Sorry, Mr Kyrillis! We’re just going in!’
‘Buncha drunks!’
The window above us slammed shut, as I tried to break free of Dave’s grip.
‘Hurry! Get inside!’ I whispered. ‘Before he throws something at us!’
But Dave wouldn’t budge.
‘So what you’re saying,’ he murmured, ‘is that I’m in with a chance. Even if I am a vampire.’
‘What?’ I didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that if you’ve changed your mind about vampires, then maybe you wouldn’t hit the roof after all,’ he said, leaving me none the wiser.
‘Hit the roof about what?’ I queried, in utter confusion.
Whereupon he swooped down and kissed me, full on the mouth.
29
Well, that was exactly one year ago, and a lot’s happened since then. In fact there have been so many changes, I hardly know where to start.
Perhaps I should begin with Nefley Irving, and move on from there.
Nefley is no longer our fiercest opponent. Instead, he’s our staunchest ally. I suppose it makes sense, because he’s one of those obsessive and single-minded people who can only make friends if they’re part of a campaign, or a club. The trouble is, he’s not interested in sport, or religion, or politics, or computer gaming. He is, however, interested in vampires. As a matter of fact, he now knows more about vampires than most vampires of my acquaintance. And he’s become an unofficial member of the Reformed Vampire Support Group.
Every Tuesday, he’s always the first to arrive at our 9.30 meeting. He’s taken to picking up Gladys and Bridget on his way in, and dropping them off on his way home. Sometimes he goes shopping for us. He’ll make guinea pig deliveries, on occasion, and he also tends to hang around St Agatha’s quite a bit when he isn’t at work. Father Ramon says that he likes to discuss the moral implications of avoiding death by becoming a vampire.
Nefley has a great many ideas about vampire websites, and vampire medical research, and vampire documentaries. He keeps raising these subjects at our meetings, only to be shouted down. In fact I can’t help worrying that Nefley might one day succumb to his own peculiar brand of loopy idealism, and launch some kind of Vampire Appeal, complete with newsletter, walkathon, and charity Christmas cards.
But that’s not going to happen as long as Reuben’s around. While Nefley has dedicated himself to the cause of vampire welfare, Reuben’s mission is to keep Nefley on a short rein. They spend a fair amount of time together, and it isn’t because Reuben enjoys Nefley’s rambling monologues about online support networks, viral mutations and medieval family trees. It’s because Reuben doesn’t want Nefley shooting his mouth off to other people.
‘Somebody’s gotta listen to him,’ Reuben’s said to me, more than once, ‘and he’s not the worst guy in the world.’ According to Reuben, Nefley won’t go spilling his guts over the Net while he has a werewolf to converse with. ‘He just needs to vent,’ is Reuben’s opinion.
Personally, I think there’s more to it than that. I think that Nefley hasn’t done anything ill-advised because he’s a little scared of Reuben. We all are, really; there’s a dangerous quality about Reuben that can’t be expunged by a quiet, regular, nine-to-five existence. Although he’s doing his best to live a normal life, working as an apprentice mechanic as he finishes high school, Reuben has a wild and hard-edged side to him that keeps everyone off-balance. For one thing, he’s moody – especially during the waxing phase of the lunar cycle. For another thing, he can’t always control his temper. Despite the fact that he manages to keep pretty cool most of the time, certain people invariably set him off: like his brother Dane, for instance.
I don’t know if you remember Dane. He’s the brother who made a home for Reuben after their mum died. Dane was understandably shocked to hear that Reuben wasn’t dead after all; it’s perhaps not surprising that Reuben’s vague remarks about ‘going off to find himself’ and ‘getting hooked up with the wrong people’ weren’t good enough for Dane. I keep telling Reuben that you can’t blame his brother for getting angry – that our need to keep the whole werewolf business under wraps has inevitably made Reuben look like a bit of a selfish bastard. ‘Consider it from Dane’s point of view,’ I pleaded, just the other day. ‘He must have been devastated when you disappeared. He must have thought you’d been murdered. And now he’s hurt because he thinks you wandered off without trying to contact him. He doesn’t know that you couldn’t contact him. So you can’t expect him to be entirely sympathetic, can you?’
Unfortunately, Reuben seems to have anticipated a prodigal-son kind of welcome from his family. He’s suffered so much that his perceptions are slightly skewed, and he can’t understand why Dane won’t simply forgive and forget. Dane’s disapproval came as an enormous shock. It hurt Reuben almost as much as his apparent disloyalty must have hurt Dane. So there was a huge fraternal row, and now the two brothers aren’t talking to each other. In fact you can’t even mention Dane to his brother, at the moment. If you do, Reuben will practically burst a blood vessel.
We have to keep him well away from the McKinnons, too. It doesn’t matter that they’re sick, and skinny, and shell-shocked. It doesn’t matter that they’re having a hard time adapting to their supplements. The minute Reuben lays eyes on their bleached and bony faces, you can see the wolf unleashed inside of him. His fingers curl, his colour changes, his breathing speeds up. He’ll bare his teeth when he talks, and his voice will take on an oddly gruff timbre. That’s why we never see Reuben at our Tuesday meetings. Even Father Ramon agrees that the McKinnons aren’t safe while Reuben’s around.
It’s a pity, because those McKinnons aren’t the men they once were. If Reuben would just put himself in their shoes, for three seconds, he’d soon understand that. Their lives have been completely overturned; they’re even living under assumed names. (Though not because they should have been dead years ago, like some of the other vampires in our group.) Barry and Dermid are in hiding because they’re on the run from Forrest Darwell – who seems to be under the impression that they were involved in a police conspiracy against him. Although he wasn’t actually arrested, Forrest can’t have been thrilled at the way he was expelled from the country. So it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s made the McKinnons his target. When Father Ramon returned to Wolgaroo – in order to retrieve the hired van from its hiding place inside an old mine shaft – he found Barry’s house ransacked. Cushions had been ripped open and linoleum torn up
. The whole place had been thoroughly searched, no doubt in the hope of finding some clue as to where Barry and Dermid might have gone. Clearly, Forrest Darwell is very nervous about their intentions. He must be wondering if they’re about to blow the lid off his entire werewolf-fighting racket.
They aren’t, of course. They couldn’t risk attracting that kind of attention. In fact they can’t even rent out their property, since the underground cells are bound to make people curious. There’s been a lot of discussion about turning those cells back into water tanks. Meeting after meeting has been devoted to the thorny issue of how this might be done without hiring nosy contractors. But the problem remains: where would the McKinnons sleep, if they didn’t have underground cells any more? And what if Forrest Darwell is somehow keeping an eye on their old address? And how will they cope with all that physical labour if they feel like death warmed up most of the time? As it is, Barry’s had to miss a lot of meetings. His transformation was especially hard – perhaps because he was infected by a blood relative. He can barely stand up, let alone pour concrete, or wield a nail gun. That’s why he and his son are both living with Sanford, at present. They need constant medical supervision.
That’s also why they have to be kept away from Reuben Schneider. These days, Reuben could cripple them with sharp glance, never mind a sucker punch. We’re far more worried about what Reuben might do to them than we are about what they might do to Reuben.
Gladys maintains that Reuben’s a threat to the rest of us, too. She continues to distrust the werewolf in our midst, despite the fact that there hasn’t been a single unfortunate incident since we met him. What we’ve found is that it’s easy enough to deal with a werewolf, if you have access to a bank vault. Reuben simply spends every full moon locked in Sanford’s windowless concrete vault, behind a reinforced steel door. Though poor old Reuben will occasionally emerge looking bloody and defeated, the vault itself never suffers very much damage. And Father Ramon has confirmed that you can’t hear a thing from outside. Not even when you’re directly overhead, in what was formerly the manager’s office.
Needless to say, this means that Sanford and the McKinnons have to sleep somewhere else for a night every month. But they don’t mind. They simply move in with George, who’s grateful for the company. It’s been pretty lonely for George, I’m afraid. Though he might not be especially talkative, and his favourite activity is watching television, and his guinea pigs occupy a lot of his waking hours, he still misses Horace.
Things have been tough for George since Horace was interred.
It was Sanford who closed the lid on Horace. Nobody else would have had the stomach for it. Even I couldn’t help thinking: there but for the grace of God – and I’m positively pitiless, compared to some of the others. Bridget doesn’t believe in judging people for behaviour that is, essentially, the symptom of a chronic disease. George is under the impression that Horace only fanged Dermid in self-defence, though I’ve insisted over and over again that Dermid was asleep during the attack. Dave’s too soft-hearted to approve of someone being forcibly detained for a day, let alone a decade. And Gladys feels that, if Horace has to be punished, then Dermid should suffer the same fate – since he fanged his own father.
‘I don’t see why Dermid should get away with it,’ she’s often remarked, in the presence of both McKinnons. Nothing that Sanford’s said about the physical effects of the transformation process has made the slightest difference to Gladys. She still doesn’t agree that Dermid’s disoriented state, at the time of his blooding, can be offered up as any kind of excuse. ‘We’re all of us sick,’ she’s complained. ‘We all feel dizzy and tired and confused – Dermid’s not the only one. But that doesn’t mean we go around fanging people, does it? If you ask me, we should either let Horace out or stick Dermid in there with him.’
Sanford disagrees. He’s overruled Gladys. Nevertheless, Dermid must be frightened that Gladys will one day prevail, because he’s lodged his own objection to Horace’s interment. No doubt Dermid is willing to put up with anything – even the company of his attacker – in preference to ten years underground. ‘If I’ve forgiven Horace, I don’t see why everyone else can’t,’ he’s declared, in fretful tones.
As for Barry, he’s far too sick to contemplate anything as hideous as being buried alive. Right now, Barry can’t look at a freezer full of dead guinea pigs without throwing up; the mere thought of what Horace must be going through, trapped in his subterranean casket, has more than once sent Barry rushing to the toilet.
I have to admit, I’ve suffered the same reaction myself, occasionally.
It’s lucky that I don’t dream when I go to sleep. If I did, I’d be having nightmares about Horace. I know that what he did was a terrible crime. I know that the deterrent has to be harsh, because the urge is so strong. I know that Horace will survive his sentence, and that, with any luck, it will transform him into a wiser, humbler, less dangerous vampire (who won’t dress in black leather and purple satin anymore). Nevertheless, even after a year, I’m still haunted by feelings of guilt and dread. I can’t help wondering if Horace was somehow influenced by Zadia Bloodstone.
Dave tells me that I’m being foolish. He insists that Horace would have fanged Dermid no matter what. According to Dave, Horace was only using Zadia as an excuse to justify his actions.
‘You know how often we’ve talked about this in group,’ Dave said to me, a few months back. We were in his living room, at the time; I was opening his mail while he picked out tunes on his guitar. ‘Sanford never stops talking about it. You can come up with a million rationalisations: they deserve it, they asked me to, they were about to die, it was self-defence—’
‘Yeah, yeah. A million rationalisations, and not one good reason.’ I was quoting Sanford. ‘But I still think Zadia influenced Horace. The whole crime-fighting scenario—’
‘Was his excuse for chewing on someone’s neck,’ Dave finished. He set aside his guitar, before coming to sit beside me. ‘Horace was thinking like a vampire, Nina. He was thinking about himself.’
‘Are you sure?’ Because I wasn’t. ‘I mean, what would have happened if he hadn’t done it? How would we have handled the McKinnons? What if we’re all better off, thanks to what Horace did?’
Dave snorted. ‘Are you kidding?’ he rumbled, with a sideways look. ‘Nina, we’ve had to sit through something like ten hours of Dermid’s childhood traumas—’
‘I know.’
‘Maybe you’re enjoying it, but I’m not.’
‘I just worry that Horace might have been punished for doing something helpful.’
‘There was nothing helpful about it,’ said Dave. He put his arm around my shoulders. ‘The police had been tipped off, remember? Reuben’s plan would have worked out fine.’
‘You really think so?’
‘Yup.’
‘And you don’t feel bad?’
‘Not any more,’ he replied, then gave me a squeeze.
It’s true that Dave’s much, much happier now. He’s beginning to write songs again, for one thing. And he cracks a lot more jokes than he used to, despite having to put up with Dermid’s childhood traumas, Nefley’s over-enthusiastic friendship, and a lingering sense of unease about Horace. Sanford claims that it’s a natural progression: that Dave has moved on from the ‘depression’ to the ‘acceptance’ stage of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle. But the explanation is much simpler than that.
For a very long time, Dave was convinced that I hated vampires. All vampires. And now he knows that I don’t.
You won’t believe how much more cheerful he’s become, since making this discovery.
I can’t deny that I’m in pretty good spirits myself. It was such a relief to find out that Dave was actually pining after me all those years, instead of his former girlfriend. But I’m still not quite as upbeat as he is. I keep worrying that Zadia’s melodramatic existence might have exerted more of a negative than a positive influence on the world. In fact I’m starting to wo
nder if Sanford might be right after all. Perhaps Zadia always was an act of repudiation. Perhaps she was my attempt to deny the truth.
That’s why I’ve spent the last year writing this memoir: because I want to set the record straight. Not that everything in this book is accurate. I have to protect the anonymity of my family and friends, so you won’t find an Estelle Harrison living in Surry Hills, or a Wolgaroo Corner near Cobar. Nor will I even hint at the current location of Horace Whittaker; there might be someone out there who could track him down, if I carelessly let slip a single clue. But I’ve done my best to be clear, and honest, and straightforward. I’ve told as much of my story as it’s safe to tell. I’ve given you an unvarnished account of what it’s really like to be a vampire, so that you’ll know enough to discount just about everything else you might hear on the subject.
At our last meeting, I finally mentioned this book to the others. I’d been keeping the whole project a secret, because I wasn’t sure that it would ever be finished; even Dave wasn’t told until yesterday. Having reached the final pages, however, I decided to come clean. So I told everyone that I’d been writing an autobiography.
The immediate response was a stunned silence – which Gladys was the first to break.
‘What do you mean?’ she whined. ‘How could you be writing an autobiography? You haven’t done anything.’
‘Yes, she has,’ said Dave. ‘She’s done lots of things. She rescued Reuben. She was nearly shot by Dermid—’
‘No she wasn’t,’ Dermid objected. ‘That wasn’t me. That wasn’t really me. I was in a semi-schizoid state, remember? Sanford said so.’
Dave rolled his eyes, as Father Ramon interjected soothingly, ‘We’re not blaming you Dermid. No one’s blaming anyone, here. This is a blame-free zone.’