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Over Almost done. Almost over. Soon it will be morning, and the sun will rise or not. Leaning back against the wall, almost finished with, hollowed out and almost empty. For fifteen years I’ve had trouble with insomnia, have lain awake in the early hours, usually from three until five or half past, my brain shifting like a hamster in a wheel, endlessly turning. If I believed in such a concept, I would say that my heart was breaking. The pain is real enough, vivid enough, and the ache that I’ve carried with me ever since the police called me and broke the news, has become so profound that it alone might finish me. My heart beats so slowly and so slightly that I would need to put my own fingers to my throat or wrist to test for movement, and I cannot do that because my hands are occupied, because I’m still holding him so warmly and securely in my arms, and because I promised them that I would never let him go. It’s almost fifteen years since I’ve been home and yet the house remains so familiar to me that I was shocked to see my own reflection in the downstairs mirror. I expected to see myself fifteen years younger, and wide-eyed and shaken, as I was when I left here. Leaving here almost broke my heart, and now I’m back again, and it’s breaking for sure. None of my friends at school questioned my story, and later, when I was at college, I never touched on the subject of family until my friends began to assume that I was alone in the world. I wasn’t, but I will be soon, finally. His face when, he understood my intention, was radiant. I could not have done anything for him that would have afforded him more pleasure. When I opened my arms to him he came slowly toward me, and then was momentarily stiff and unyielding. I had gone into the room so quietly, and found him sleeping. I closed the door behind me and locked it, and put the key deep into a pocket. I sat and waited until he woke, knowing that he would wake, knowing that the fact of there being someone else in the room with him would seep into his dreams and colour them, and then wake him. When he woke there was a for an instant on his face an expression I could have read even without knowing all that had taken place. Floating across his consciousness went hunger, and loss, and an awful awareness of recent events. And then he saw me and for an instant I thought he would run wild, but then he saw that I posed no threat: there I was, sitting on the floor, a little cold from the long wait but unassuming, responsive, lonely. I put out a hand as slowly as I could, remembering how it had been with ever animal I had ever raised, or petted, or cared for. I knew that I must make no sudden movements, no loud noise, no action or sound that would frighten him into flight or… or anything else. He came into my arms like a child, like an animal ill-treated but still hopeful of affection. I had undone my shirt, loosening my collar, and left the buttons of my cardigan undone. I had chosen the softest clothes that I possessed and this clearly pleased him. He nestled against me and very slowly I put my arms more formally around him. Now his head rested against my shoulder and I could feel his breath against my skin. I felt the moulding of his skull as he leaned against my skin, and it seemed to me that I could hear his heart beating. I felt his mouth against my skin, nuzzling at first and then seeking, then hungry. I felt at last the same sensation she must have felt, before the pain, and it felt as if flowing through him there was remembrance of her; I might have smelled her upon him, I supposed, but there were tears in my eyes and my nose felt stuffy from the dust I had walked through on my way up the stairs and into the room. He bit me and then paused, hesitated for a moment, and I knew then that everything depended on his hunger. If he was still starved then it might not happen, it might not work. But if he was sated, as god knows he should have been, then he might take his time. I could feel how full he was, how tight was his skin, and I felt the warm curve of his stomach, soft as a puppy’s belly and equally snug. When I did not cry out, or flinch, though it cost me more than I had guessed to maintain a quiet calm, when he understood that I was not going to run, he began to drink, almost gently. There was pain, of course, but it was not as bad as hers had been and it dulled quickly enough. It felt as though he was pressing upon flesh already bruised. I felt his teeth sink in just a fraction more, and then there was pain, but the injection was already taking effect, and the pain was therefore bearable. I did not cry out. He put up his hands, then, the fingers so curled around that the little claws did not show, and pressed them, clenched, against me. I slid up one hand to the back of his neck and stroked him there, my fingers stroking him so gently that he was almost unaware of them. I felt his heart-rate change as the dawn came closer. I was aware of not so much pain as emptiness, which had to be physical but which felt only spiritual. He was pressed so tightly against me and he felt so warm. I hadn’t expected warmth; perhaps I had expected some bone deep chill, and all I felt was a growing heat, as my blood became his substance. I didn’t know if the old films had much truth to them, though like mud, throw rumour enough and some must stick. I believed that dawn might bring about some alteration, but I did not depend upon it. I believed that whatever toxin I had injected into my veins would slow and stop his heart just as it would slow and then stop mine. I had sometimes thought about coming home, inheriting perhaps one day only when my parents were old and I was at the very least middle aged. I had thought about the potential pleasure of possession, but not fantasied much about the shift in ownership. The only theme that had been missed entirely was my coming home only to die. I had tried to think around the problem, putting my nicely educated mind to work, thus employing the skills my education had made possible. Of course, I had been eager to learn; such knowledge cannot be forced, but I was aware of how much their money had assisted my progress. I had had everything I might have wanted in material terms; I had a pleasant flat in which to live, I had had a good education and money enough to travel a good deal, provided that I was never out of the country for more than two weeks. I used to wonder about that requirement but it never occurred to me to question it. I had to remain contactable, though they had never once called me to chat, to ask how I was, to ask me the one thing for which I had waited; the call to bring me home. He was kneading, now, and those little perforations hurt brightly, clearly, bringing me back to the moment with a sense of shock, and I shifted a little and almost dislodged him. He had begun to recoil but I was there with little sounds, murmurs that worked to soothe him. I wondered if my blood tasted sweet to him. I wondered again and again at how much smaller he was. I had never tried to imagine what he would look like, how he would be. I had been unprepared for him to be so small. I had been unprepared for how sharp his claws and teeth would be. But I had known he would be a monster. He drank on, perhaps a little impatient, perhaps the flow was slowing as my heart slowed, as the drug began to take effect. I had never expected them to do what I was doing, and they had never asked me to make this final act of filial devotion. Had the little girl not been taken I don’t think they ever would have contacted me, but with her death and her parents’ horror and grief had come an end to their time on the planet. They had brought a monster into the world and they could not destroy him. I knew that they had thought he could not get out of the room in which he had been imprisoned for so long, but they had of course been wrong. He had been small enough to crawl through the skylight window, across the roof and down. He had been small enough to crawl away, to do the thing they had most dreaded, and small enough, though full, and heavy, to crawl back. I hoped that she had not suffered badly, though I imagined that her death had been as horrible and shocking as any she had ever considered in her nightmares. I could imagine his small face pressed against the glass in her skylight window, looking down on her as she slept, and watching the pulse throb in her throat until hunger and need overwhelmed him, and he had unhooked the catch with little clawed fingers and slid down to join her. I could not imagine how they must have felt when the girl’s parents went to wake her, and found that they could not. I cannot begin to comprehend the horror of their seeing those marks, bigger than punctures and frayed and torn by his avid feeding, while his paws opened and contracted, and his little claws insinuated their way into her flesh. The phone call that brought me back was like a hook on which I now hung. The words of the police, stunned and incomprehensible and incomprehensive: how were they to explain to me what had taken place in the house? I could imagine this better than the loss of the child; I could imagine my own parents, with their shock and pallor and words of shock and sympathy to their neighbours, their friends. My own parents closing the door and looking at each other and then going up the stairs to stand outside the room in which he had been contained for so long and then being unable to take the final step and to turn the key and go inside and know for certain what had happened. And in a safe place I had found all the things that they had left for me: the syringe; the letter. The information given to me so late in the day, the information that I had not honestly needed was there waiting for me: I had had years to piece together the strange tapestry of horror and confinement. There were things I could remember even though I was a child when they began, like her altered mood and shape and the nebulous knowledge that life was about to change for us all. They had done their best to keep me safe, and they had done their best to compensate me for having sent from home and never allowed back. I could almost remember the night before they had sent me away: memories of the heat of the night and the skylight window open even though I had been told to keep it closed. The knowledge hanging over me that the event we had all anticipated had somehow gone terribly wrong, and that the promise held out to us had been a curse in waiting. I had been so happy at the idea of having a brother. That I might have had a sister had never occurred to me, so naturally I was delighted when he was born, and I waited outside the door to see the new arrival, not understanding then that there was nothing right in my doctor father’s home delivery of him. I might have been a child but my life had not been sheltered: I had seen enough to know that pregnancies of such length do not take place, and that it is not common for everyone to close ranks and to lie, and yet when it happened I accepted and I lied, just as they did: she had had a miscarriage and it was all very sad. We were all sad; we were downright dismal, grey with tears of loss and of confusion. Skin so dark and sleek like an otter’s or a seal, and eyes the colour of marbles, and fingers with little claws, and little teeth with points, teeth with which he had been born. A little thing that slept tucked into a ball, and which did not speak but only hissed. It seemed natural that we would keep this oddity to ourselves; that we would all mourn the loss we had suffered, as if the loss itself had flesh and had been ripped away from us and buried in a little white coffin like the one they will – no doubt – use for the neighbours’ little girl. We mourned naturally and thoroughly the child that had not been, while all the time the thing had been, and which was, filled up a negative space, and grew there. I did not resent their actions; in their place and with sufficient drugs at my disposal I might well have done the same, had my shame and my flesh crawled out into the night and fed, and fed, and emptied. I was too numbed by the news to want to argue with the decision and the parents already dead: I was just grateful that they had left me enough of the drug to take for myself. That I was now sharing that particular communion with him seemed only fitting; it seemed entirely right. And when it was finished, and it would be finished soon, for I could feel a sensation of tugging at my heart and lungs, as if by drawing my attention to their sapping I might do something to help them, then the sunlight could fall through that bloody window and rest upon us both. What would be made of our remains was something I need not think upon: no-one knew that we were there, and the house was seen as unoccupied, empty since the joint suicide of its former owners. We might be left long enough to fall to dust in this strange little cell. Once he had been established I had managed to stand up, holding him onto me all the time like a vulnerable primate or a sucking kitten, and to pull shut and bolt the skylight window. All that time I had soothed him and talked to him, murmuring the meaningless babble of reassurance and affection; indeed it was possible that I really did love him: he had responded to me with more need than anyone else ever had, or ever would. His need of me was finite. It mattered to me very much that he did not know, would not know, that every drop he took from me was lethal. When the sun came shining through the window, and blazed down upon us it felt like a benediction as profound as the morphine derivative that I had injected into my veins and which he continued to drink. Now he was slowing, and he leant further into me, pushing me back against the wall in a posture that would have hurt me had I felt it. The tears that were sliding gently down my cheeks touched him and made him squirm a little and to make a little growling sound that was only half serious. And the heart that I heard beating against the diminishing thud of my own had become, in the course of the night, as dear to me as if he had loved me back. The sunlight felt so warm to me because I felt so cold. I must have slept a little, or flickered in and out of coma, because I had not known that he had stopped feeding from me. His eyes were closed, for which I was grateful: I might be dying but I could not bear to see any facial expression of accusation or loss. His little claws retracted, leaving behind punctures that could not bleed, and I put up a hand to touch the tiny razor points of his teeth. He sagged against me and I did my best to pull him close to me, so that we could share the moment of dying. |