Once bitten Read online

  "Terry," I said. "Is that you?" Of course it was her and I know it was a stupid thing to say but I couldn't see a thing and for all I knew she could have been standing there with an axe in her hand. I knelt down and groped for the flashlight and shone it in the direction of her voice. She was sitting at the far end of the room in a leather wing chair and when the beam of light hit her face she threw up her hands to shield her eyes, blinking and turning her head.

  "Jamie, there's a light switch to your left. Why don't you just switch that on?"

  I did as she said and a series of recessed lights snapped on. She sat demurely in the chair, her hands back on her knees, her head on one side as she looked at me. She was wearing a black dress that I vaguely realised, then the I remembered that I'd never seen her in a proper dress before. I turned and looked at the portrait, the big one that had startled me when I first entered the room. It was the same dress.

  I looked back at her and she'd got to her feet and was walking towards me. I hadn't heard her move.

  "Do you think it's vain?" she asked.

  I shrugged. "They're beautiful pictures," I said. "I can see why you'd want to keep them."

  She held out her hand and I looked at it.

  "The flashlight," she said. "Give me the flashlight."

  I gave it her and she switched it off and handed it back to me, the keys jingling in the silence.

  "What are you doing here, Jamie?" she asked, brushing her hair behind her ears as she spoke.

  I thought of lying, I thought of saying that I'd come round to see her and found the garage door open, that I was hoping to give her a scare, but I knew there was no point because she'd caught me prowling around her apartment in the dark like some amateur burglar. No, I couldn't lie, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth, that I believed that Terry Ferriman wasn't her real name and that whoever she was she'd been on the earth for at least two centuries and probably a hell of a lot longer than that. The Egyptian artifacts worried me. I could just about cope with the concept that a girl could live for a couple of hundred years, but the possibility of thousands of years sent my mind reeling.

  "Well?" she said. She was standing less than an arm's length from me, her head tilted up and a hint of a smile on her lips.

  "Who are you?" I said, which wasn't exactly original but it was all I could come up with.

  "Who do you want me to be?" she replied, almost whispering.

  "You're not Terry Ferriman," I said, the words catching in my throat. "The real Terry Ferriman is dead."

  "Do the police know?" she asked, not denying the accusation.

  "Yes," I said. "They're looking for you now. I'm surprised they haven't been here already."

  "They know about the basement?" she said, frowning, and I realised that of course they didn't.

  De'Ath would have sent men around to her small apartment upstairs. Unless they were lucky like me they wouldn't discover that she owned the whole building.

  "No, you're right. I don't think they do."

  "How did you find out?" she asked, and I told her about her neighbour and my conversation with the real estate agent.

  "And how did you get in?" I explained about Dave Burwash and she laughed and reached up to touch my cheek. "Clever boy," she whispered softly. "So clever."

  "What's going on, Terry?" I said. "Who are you?"

  She dropped her hand from my cheek and took me gently by the arm, leading me to the door.

  She didn't speak as she took me along the hall and opened another door. She went in first and switched on the lights and I followed her. It was a long room with no windows but tapestries on the walls stopped it from feeling claustrophobic. The furniture was comfortable and obviously antique, there were wooden chairs with red velvet cushions, a chaise longue and two overstuffed sofas either side of a marble fireplace. The fire wasn't lit and there was a screen in front of it depicting a castle with a knight on horseback riding up to the portcullis. On a low oak sideboard there was a collection of photographs in silver and gold frames and as she guided me to one of the sofas I saw that she was in some of the pictures and that most of them were black and white.

  "Do you want a drink, Jamie?" she asked as she sat me down. "You look as if you need one."

  I nodded. I think I must have been in a state of shock. I felt as if I'd been hypnotised.

  She walked over to the sideboard where there was a group of bottles and decanters on a silver tray. "Brandy?" she said over her shoulder and I said that would be fine. At least I tried to, I'm not sure if the words came out or not. I watched her as she poured brandy from a decanter into a crystal glass. There was something different about her, and it wasn't the fact that she was wearing a dress for the first time. It was more they way she held herself, she was carrying herself like a woman and not like a gauche girl the way she'd been when I first met her. And there was something else.

  "I think you'll like this," she said as she carried the glass over to me. I realised then what it was, what it was that had changed. Her voice. Or rather the way she was speaking. Gone was the "gee whizz" breathless Valley Girl voice and in its place was the soft but confident tones of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. She'd dropped an act and I knew with a cold certainty that I was about to have the real Terry Ferriman revealed to me. It wasn't knowing the truth that frightened me, though, it was not knowing what she planned to do after she'd told me. I'd fallen in love with Terry Ferriman, not the person who sat gracefully on the sofa next to me with her hands folded in her lap and watched me sip the brandy in the way that a cat watches a mouse it has cornered.

  "Good?" she said.

  "Very good," I said though if the truth were told I couldn't taste a thing as a warm glow spread down through my chest.

  She smiled. "That brandy was laid down in 1802, Jamie," she said. "Three years after Napoleon took power in France."

  "Really?" I said, eyebrows raised. I took another sip but I still couldn't taste it. The glow was spreading to my stomach, though, and I felt a little light-headed.

  "It was," she continued, "a very good year."

  "For brandy?" I said.

  "For many things," she said. "It was a glorious summer."

  My head swam and I shook it to try and clear it and I panicked, wondering if maybe she'd drugged me. I remembered the dream, her crouching over a body, blood on her mouth, and I remembered the feel of her warm lips against the skin of my neck.

  "Drink your brandy and relax, Jamie," she said. "And don't worry. I'm not going to hurt you.

  Trust me." Her voice was as soothing and as warming as the brandy but part of me felt that she was talking to me like a doctor talks to a patient. How could I trust someone who'd lied to me in the way that she'd done. Hell, nothing I knew about Terry Ferriman appeared to be the truth. I swallowed the rest of the brandy in one gulp.

  "What were you looking for, Jamie?" she said, taking the empty glass from my hands. She rubbed it between her palms as she watched me.

  "I don't know. The truth I suppose. I guess I wanted to know the truth. Does that sound banal?"

  "And did you find it?" she asked, ignoring my question.

  "I saw the files," I said. "I saw the dead files, the identities you've used. And I saw the ones that you'll be using in the future. How old are you Terry? Who are you?"

  "You really want to know?" she asked. "Do you really think you could deal with it, Jamie? You say you came here to discover the truth. But is that what you really want? Think about it, Jamie.

  Think about what the truth means."

  Greig Turner flashed into my mind, the shrivelled husk of a human being, decaying while the girl he loved stayed the same. What was worse, knowing that he was dying, knowing that he'd lost her, or knowing that she would still be around long after he'd been buried or cremated or whatever they did with the bodies of faded-out movie stars. Would he be happier if he thought she had died, or that she too was living out her final years in a wheelchair in som
e hidden-away nursing home? I remembered the look of horror on his face when I'd told him that the photograph of Terry Ferriman was a recent one and not an old picture of Lisa Sinopoli, the girl he'd married and lost.

  "Greig Turner," I said. "Did he know?"

  "No," she said emphatically. "Not then he didn't."

  "I went to see him," I said. "He knows now."

  "He knew before you went to see him, Jamie. Or at least he suspected. That's why he hired a detective to track me down."

  "Matt Blumenthal."

  "Matt Blumenthal," she repeated.

  "You killed him here, didn't you?" I said. "In this basement."

  "He died here. But I didn't kill him."

  "Who did?"

  "That's part of knowing the truth, Jamie. First you've got to decide if you want to know everything."

  "Why did you have Turner's photograph in your apartment upstairs?"

  "He was my husband. I always felt close to him. I wanted his picture around." She went over to the sideboard to refill my glass.

  "So why didn't you stay in touch with him? Why did you leave him?"

  "You saw him. Doesn't that answer your question?"

  "You left him because he was old? You wouldn't see him because he's dying and you're still young?"

  She shook her head. "No, that's not it at all. It was for his sake, it was his feelings I was trying to protect. How do you think he'd feel knowing that I'm the way I am and he's the way he is? I thought it was better that he thought I was dead. And if he hadn't hired that detective, and if you hadn't gone to see him, then maybe he'd have died a lot happier than he did." She came back with the glass and held it down to me. My right hand was shaking as I took it and I used both hands to hold it to my lips.

  "You know he's dead, then?" I asked after I'd swallowed.

  "Yes, I know he's dead." She sat down next to me and put her hand on my knee.

  "What do you want from me?" I asked.

  "To spend time with you," she said. "To be with you."

  "For how long?"

  "For ever," she said and looked at me steadily. I could feel myself beginning to drown in her bottomless black eyes and I had to pull myself back.

  "That's not possible and you know it," I replied.

  "It's possible," she said.

  "How?"

  "That's part of knowing the full truth, Jamie. First you've got to decide if you can handle it. If you really want it."

  "Didn't Greig Turner want it? Didn't he want to stay with you for ever?"

  Her hand clenched on my leg and I felt the nails bite into the cloth of my trousers and pinch the skin underneath. "I didn't leave Greig because he was getting old. He left me. He was the one who betrayed me, he's the one who couldn't keep out of other women's beds. I loved him, I begged him not do it, but he wouldn't listen. He threw it away. And by the time he realised what he'd lost, it was too late. He wasn't trying to get me back, that's not why he hired Blumenthal. He found out that I'd been paying his bills at his nursing home in Big Sur. I think he suspected then that something was wrong. He didn't want me back, Jamie. He just didn't want to die."

  "Nobody does, Terry. Shit, do I still call you Terry, or what? What name do you use?"

  "Terry is fine."

  "What was your original name?"

  "The first?"

  "Yeah, the first."

  She laughed. "It was such a long time ago," she said and then she said something that sounded like "Malinkila" and I asked her to repeat but I still couldn't make my mouth form the sounds.

  "Egyptian?" I said and she nodded and we both knew then that I'd reached the point of no turning back.

  "You're ready?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes."

  "Then ask." She settled back in the sofa and waited while I tried to get my thoughts in order.

  There was so much I wanted to know. I wanted to know who she was, how old she was, who had killed Matt Blumenthal, why she had been found with his body, and what she meant when she said she wanted to be with me forever.

  "How old are you? What are you?" I asked.

  "I'm not quite sure, that's the answer to both questions, Jamie. I think it's been between four and five thousand years, but for a long time I wasn't counting, if you know what I mean. Time didn't have the same meaning back then. I was just living, surviving. Moving from place to place, from country to country."

  "But you were born in Egypt?"

  "Yes."

  "Four thousand years ago?"

  "Or thereabouts. I remember the Great Pyramids being built at Giza, and the Sphinx, and I guess that was about 2,500 BC. It took me a long time to get my head straight too. You can imagine what it was like, when all around me were getting older and I stayed the same, exactly as you see me today. For centuries I lived as an outcast, scared to live near people for too long because they always turned against me in the end." She said it the way I once told a nephew that I remembered the days before colour television and push-button telephones. That piece of news was greeted with an eight-year-old's gasp of amazement but that was nothing to how I felt at her matterof- fact revelation. "As to what I am, I'm not sure how to describe it."

  "Vampire?" I said and she threw back her head and laughed. Her neck was long and pale white, unlined and unmarked. The neck of a child.

  "Jamie, do I look like a vampire?" she asked.

  I looked at her flowing black dress, her black eyes, the white, perfect teeth and the glistening hair and a small voice inside said yes, that's exactly what you do look like, and what else do you call someone who's as old as the pyramids and who was found over a corpse in an alley with blood on her full, red lips?

  "Well?" she pressed.

  "I guess not," I said.

  "There are gaps in what I remember," she said. "That's why I'm a bit vague about actually how old."

  "You remember your parents?"

  "Sort of. I remember that they'd have nothing to do with me after my twenty-third summer.

  People had shorter life-spans then, and they aged faster. I never got sick, and I showed no signs of aging. They made me leave. I don't remember what they looked like, but I remember how it felt to be rejected by them. I've never forgotten."

  I shook my head in bewilderment. "Four thousand years," I said. "It doesn't seem possible.

  How did it happen? How many more like you are there?"

  She shrugged. "I don't know how it happened. Genes, I suppose. It's a mutation. As to how many more there are, just a handful, I think. I know of six. It's not hereditary, if that's what you're getting at. My mother and father and my four brothers were all normal. They all died before they were forty."

  "The others, are you all in contact?" I was aware that the questions I was asking weren't following any logical progression, I was asking things at random. If I was going to get anywhere close to understanding her and what she was I was going to have to take a more scientific approach.

  God, I wished I had a tape recorder with me, or at least a notebook.

  "Not all the time. You have to remember that it's not easy for us to live in normal society, Jamie. We have to keep on moving, we can never stay in one place for more than ten years in case we are discovered. And once we've moved on we have to wait at least fifty years before we move back. But yes, we do meet, we do help each other whenever we can. We have to. We're all we've got."

  "You say you had to keep moving. Where have you lived?"

  "God Jamie, you'd be better off asking me where I haven't lived. My first memories are of Egypt, then when Egypt went into decline I moved to Greece and then to Rome. When Rome was sacked, and that was what, 476AD, then I moved to Byzantium. I was in what's now called the Middle East round about 800AD, then went to China and on to Kiev when it was the cultural centre of the Slavic empire. I moved out when Ghengis Kahn moved in, I was in Constantinople when it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. I was in Florence during the Renaissance, in London w
hen the Great Plague swept through Europe, in Paris during the Revolution, in Switzerland during the First World War and I've been in the States since the 1920s."

  "And how many identities have you used?" The questions still had no logic and I knew that I was asking them just to keep talking while I tried to get my mind around the basic premise that she'd laid before me – namely that Terry Ferriman was immortal. By asking questions, no matter how banal, I was at least helping to convince myself that she was telling the truth. But still the question that lurked uncomfortably at the back of my mind was what the hell did she plan to do with me, and was I going to end up like Matt Blumenthal lying flat on my back in an alley somewhere, drained of my lifeblood?

  She laughed and shook my shoulders. "Jamie, for God's sake, how should I know? It's only in the last few centuries that I've had to keep records, and you saw how much space they took up in the filing cabinets. Hundreds, thousands maybe. In the old days, in the real old days, all I had to do was to move to another country or even just another town and change my name. This business with assuming new identities and applying for passports and driving licences and social security numbers and bank accounts is relatively recent."

  "And you've never been sick?"

  "Not even during the Great Plague. Never. But you saw how I'm allergic to sunlight. We all are. And we do have another what you might call a weakness."

  "A weakness?"

  "We think it's connected to the gene that makes us immortal. We are missing the enzymes in a couple of crucial biochemical pathways, which means we must periodically ingest certain proteins which we are lacking."

  Realisation broke over me like a tropical cloudburst. "Blood," I said. "You have to have blood.

  Human blood."

  "Not necessarily blood, but that's just about the most efficient way of ingesting them, yes."

  I stood up and felt my knees buckle slightly. I didn't know if it was the fear or the brandy, but I locked my legs and fought to keep my balance. "And you say you're not vampires? What else would you call it? You live forever and you drink human blood? Oh God, I don't believe this, I really don't…"

  I guess I must have passed out then because when I woke up I was lying on my back on a black leather couch and looking up at a white-tiled ceiling. I raised my head and saw that I was in some sort of laboratory, grey-speckled linoleum and lots of white Formica working surfaces and I recognised some of the equipment there – a centrifuge, what looked like a scintillation counter and a pair of electronic scales. There was a whole lot of stuff I didn't recognise, though. When I lifted my arms I half expected to meet resistance but there were no thick leather straps holding me down.