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My name is J.P. Armitage. I am one hundred and sixty-one years old, and I have lived twenty-one of them. From this point on, the reckoning will become ambiguous. Given that the body into which I have been downloaded is that of a vampire, it is arguable that I will not ‘live’ any further years, but the semantics of unlife are of little concern when compared to disembodied existence in an existential madhouse.
I dislike ball games, and dissonant music, and René Descartes. I like cupcakes, and my friend LaFontaine, and blood. Cupcakes I liked in my previous life; my enjoyment of blood is a condition of my new body. I think I would have liked LaFontaine before as well, though I might well have found them strange.
It is pleasant to think like this, in small sentences and with plenty of pauses. When I was in the catalogue during the written years, my thoughts were constrained by the paragraphs and chapters of the written volume. I had to conform myself to their rhythm. Things were more interesting with the advent of the digital, but less quiet. My thoughts moved with the cycles of the chittering processors. The nearest I could come to rest was in idle cycles, and even these had a kind of running monologue: no-thought, no-thought, no-thought, like the clicking of a train running along smooth rails.
“What was Will like?” I ask Ms. Belmonde once I have stopped expecting her to eviscerate me on sight.
“You’ve seen the videos, bookworm,” she says. “Judge for yourself.” I think the nicknames might be a good sign.
“They don’t paint him in a very good light,” I admit. It is deeply unpleasant to know that it was my hands that abducted those girls even if I was not the one using them. Almost like being possessed – although I suppose if I'm honest that I'm the possessing one.
“He was a vampire, genius. Mother didn’t pry apart the jaws of death because she wanted a children’s entertainer.” She resumes flicking through her bundle of board minutes.
“So why, then? Did he have some particular skill as a human?”
She sighs. “I don’t know about skill, exactly. He was never very smart – but then we all pale into insignificance beside Mother anyway. I suppose he did take to being a vampire very enthusiastically. None of the tormenting angst,” her voice is mocking, “that poor Kitty keeps clinging to.”
I do not ask her about herself. “And when he wasn’t eating people?”
“Oh, he liked winning things. He liked running very fast, and jumping very high, and catching balls thrown very hard. Why do you think he got on so well with the Zetas?”
“So he had friends?” She shrugs - how does she manage to shrug with such contempt?
“Vampires and humans, digital boy. No doubt they amused him for a while. And he always was on the lookout for approval of some kind – probably why he was such a Mama's boy. Perhaps he enjoyed being cheered when he caught the base or put the goalie on offside or whatever it is those overgrown puppies get up to when they're not showering together.”
I do not push the matter. Perhaps it would be better to ask Kirsch, but that would involve rather more explaining my face than I'm quite ready for. After I've grown a beard, possibly.
“How's the bloodlust?” She smiles broadly as she asks this.
The blood is a real problem. I like it very much - and there is no way of disguising the fact that I do so because I now have a biology that demands I like it and will use every hormone, feedback loop and neural circuit to arrange matters. Of course, that's no worse in a sense than everybody's need for more conventional foods. Or more specific unregulated hungers such as Laura's impressive cookie habit. But still.
I am afraid of what might happen if the bloodbags run out for whatever reason. LaFontaine has told me the story – and I've seen the video evidence – of trying to starve information out of Carmilla.
Now that I'm dreaming again, I'm having nightmares. I remember from my first life that I used to have night terrors in which I was attacked again and again by faceless monsters. Now I have them in which I am the faceless monster doing the attacking. Perry, Laura, LaFontaine. I've even dreamed of feasting on the other vampires, which suggests my subconscious is not particularly incisive or hasn't received the memo about what can and cannot serve as vampire food.
I don't tell my friends about the dreams. I definitely don't tell Matska because that woman is a walking pre-emptive strike and I don't want to be inspiring too many ideas.
“Oh, I'm… coping.” I say instead, trying to ignore the smirk on her face. No doubt she knows or guesses much of my experience, but what is not said cannot be held against me.
“Not gone on any rampages? Shame.” She pouts.
“I thought I might save that for the desperate last stand,” I declare with as much bravado as I can manage.
She is severe in her reply. “The trick to surviving centuries, darling, is never to attend any last stand that's your own.”
“Other people's?”
“Other people's are fine, of course. Oh, the fun Mircalla and I had in the Paris Commune – do you remember it?” She gives a sort of shiver of delight, the way children do when they're excited by something.
“I saw it in the news, of course. Though I was only a boy at the time, and France seemed a very long way from Guildford.”
“You'd have liked it – a lot of libraries to loot. Although a lot of good restaurants were destroyed, which I thought unnecessary.”
LaFontaine is non-binary. This is one of the first topics I researched after I was connected to the internet.
It interests me a lot, but they are still coming to terms with it themselves, so I try not to question them too much. And Perry is still having difficulty understanding it and I don't want to make things between them more awkward than they already are.
I have been without a body for most of my existence. And in one sense, of course, it was a sheer coincidence that I was returned to the flesh in a body of the same sex as the one that turned to dust more than a century ago. I find myself looking at Carmilla and wondering how things would have emerged had her personality been exchanged with that of her brother. Would Will now be slumped on the sofa with his arm around somebody (somebody not Laura, I suppose), with me looking on out of Carmilla's dark eyes?
The idea is not terrible.
“You know, you're learning the modern world pretty fast, J.P.”
I shrug. “Half of learning is unlearning what you thought you knew before. And I've had a lot of time to unlearn things.”
“Very Zen.”
“For now.” I cough. “Do you think I will ever manage to forget things?”
They pause in the middle of restacking the bookshelf from last night's fruitless research. “Are you not forgetting at the moment?”
“The photographic memory seems to still be... happening. Perhaps it is too early to tell, but I'm not sure that I can forget things any more.” I retrieve a heavy volume from the place it has fallen behind the sofa. The binding is a thin but carefully tanned leather – human skin. I can tell.
“Anything at all?” They bite their lip. Nervous.
“Presumably there are things I don't remember in the first place because I haven't perceived them.”
“Huh. I don't know, Jeep.” They pause. “I also don't know what's in this jar. Any ideas?” They wave a glass jar with a heavy glass lid wired on. There is a dust-free patch on the shelf where it had stood. Inside is green and gloopy.
“Knowing the Dean, something ghastly. Bile?” I offer. They shrug.
“Lid seems to be stuck. Come on, vampire strength!” They hand the jar to me.
When the pressure explosion has died down, I put the jar carefully back on the shelf and try to use my handkerchief to nudge the bile away from my mouth.
“Yuck.” LaFontaine wipes their hands off on my waistcoat. “What? It was dirty already. Get yourself cleaned up.”
I am surprised by how happy I am to be reunited with baths. A great advantage of humanity is to be able to enjoy the solutions to problems. Germs, dirt, spills, smells. And therefore also hot water and soap and shampoo and a little rubber duck that for some reason makes the whole experience complete.
There is a scar on my chest where Perry staked Will. She staked him for what he did, and I am the one who feels it pull when I stretch my arms upwards. But on the other hand, Will did the work and now I have the well-exercised arm muscles, so perhaps it's fair. I think I shall do more exercise than I did in the nineteenth century, since I might as well maintain them now that I have them. I assume I keep the vampire super-strength whatever I do, but there is the aesthetic dimension to consider.
I have chosen to keep the beard, because I have never had one before and neither had Will. Also, I'm not quite sure what would happen if I were to cut my face when shaving now that I am a vampire. Drinking from my own veins would seem a little pointless and yet I'm not sure I would quite be able to resist. Nor have I yet plucked up the courage to ask Carmilla whether she has this problem with regard to shaving her legs. If indeed she does. This is not an area in which I am expert, and I think my very little experience might now be out of date.
Carmilla is deep in her book. She reads slowly, with great concentration. Whenever she turns a page she pauses for a moment to look out of the window at the sky. Only a fraction of sky is visible from this room but the stars are out. I wonder if she likes the stars so much because she went so long seeing only the blackness of a coffin lid above her.
“Did you mean to say that out loud, lackwit?” she asks. I stammer some kind of apology. The distinction between thinking and speaking is still taking some getting used to.
“Thinking before you open your mouth might be a survival skill out here, flash drive,” she continues. “No Undo button in the real world.”
“What was it like?” I ask after the awkward silence has gone on for a few moments and she is about to turn her attention back to Kierkegaard.
“I’m sorry, why are we still talking about this?” There is a harsh overtone to her voice. I don't want to push her, but-
“I was… interested,” I mutter.
“Well don’t be. You have no idea what it felt like, and I won’t be having a heart-to-heart about it with-“
“-someone who spent over a hundred years in the sensory deprivation tank of the library catalogue?” I finish for her. She looks lost for words for the first time since I have known her.
“What was it like?” she asks, after a pause. Soft now, no barbs in her question.
“It was… difficult to describe,” I say. “It was an entirely different mode of being conscious. I didn’t have to read books because, well, they were always with me”
“Before your eyes?”
“No, I didn’t have eyes. Or any senses at all really.” She is looking at me intently now, so I try to explain. “You know how you can’t see out of the back of your head? But it’s not blackness either – it’s not like being blindfolded or in the dark. There’s just nothing. Nothing to see, but also nothing to not see with.” She nods, wait for me to continue.
“And I could only think. When LaFontaine found me in the library, I was happy. But I didn't feel happy. I… thought happy.”
“No butterflies in the stomach when your knight in shining labcoat came to get you?” There is a twitch of a smile on her face. I think she feels better when she can mock me.
“I didn't have a stomach to have butterflies in,” I nod.
“I still had my senses,” she says slowly. “But nothing to do with them. Just an endless roaring blackness assaulting me. Like being smothered.”
“How did you stand it?”
“It's amazing what you can survive if you haven't a choice.” She drums her fingers distractedly on the cover of her book. The Concept of Anxiety, says the cover. It was added the library in the 1890s, I recall.
“Did you dream?” I ask.
“Didn’t you?”
“Dreams are enacted on a substrate of firing neurons. I had no brain, therefore I did not dream. Or sleep.” Her expression is unreadable.
“I dreamt a lot. It was the only thing that kept me sane. Of the world outside. Of forests, and shores, and cities I had been to. Of people I had been there with. In the absence of anything meaningful around me, my dreams were my life.”
“You know the story of Chuang-Tzu and the butterfly?” I ask.
“Of course, Encyclopedia Brown. He woke up, having dreamed he was a butterfly. And he wondered how he could be sure he wasn’t just a butterfly dreaming of being Chuang-Tzu. But you can’t scare me with that one. I never dreamed of being in a coffin underground, because there was nothing to dream about.”
“So you don’t dream about it now?” I ask, but her expression changes and she picks up her book again from where she let it fall.
“Ask Laura,” she mutters, and returns to reading.
I am watching Perry rub cubes of butter into a bowl of sifted flour. She takes a cube in each hand between her thumb and first two fingers, rolls them in the flour and rubs until they fall apart. She keeps doing this until all the cubes have disintegrated, and then begins to rub in the fragments of cubes in the same way, and then the fragments of fragments. Slowly the distinction between butter and flour is eroded. The chunks become smaller and smaller, and the grains clump together until the bowl is full of an even mixture. She runs her long fingers through the mixture and takes the bottle of milk.
She does not measure it, but pours in a little at a time, mixing with her free hand as she goes. The powder clumps together as she folds it over and over. There is concentration in her face but no tension. I have never seen her this calm before, I realise. The tightness in her shoulders which usually pulls her arms upwards is gone.
“There” she says when she is finished and the dough is blended smoothly. She dumps the lump of brioche dough onto the dusted surface to her left and begins to knead. Lift and fold and push down with the heel of her hand. Then turn, and lift and fold and push.
“Never have got the hang of kneading,” LaFontaine observes from her other side. They have been acting very polite towards Perry since the two of them reconciled.
“That’s because you don’t practice,” replies Perry. “I was rubbish when I started. Remember the bread I tried to make for our picnic in Mainz?”
“One of my milk teeth came out. Not even a very wobbly one.” The two of them laugh.
“How do you know when it’s ready?” I ask.
“It just… feels ready,” she says. “My hands know.”
“Your hands know?”
“Yeah. It’s not like… you know when you’re doing something new and you have to keep stopping to think about what you’re doing?” We both nod. “That’s how it was at first. I had to keep asking myself if the dough was dry enough or wet enough or whatever. But now my hands just remember how to do it properly themselves.”
“Muscle memory,” puts in LaFontaine. “The consolidation of a task into memory without the need to involve conscious thought.”
Perry throws a piece of dough at them.
“Know-it-all!”
“Play nice, everyone!” This is Laura, emerging into the kitchen. She steps into the pantry and rootles around until she turns up with an apple from the haul that Danny brought over.
“How are our… lost little kittens?” LaFontaine asks her. She sighs dramatically.
“Scratching each other's eyes out over who gets the blanket in front of the fire. And I really wish that was part of the extended metaphor.”
“Maybe I'll do them a bowl of treats later if they're good,” Perry mutters. There is a sarcastic coldness to the way she speaks of the vampires recently, especially Matska. But then they did try to kill each other, so that's understandable.
“Talking about us, darlings?” Matska sweeps into the kitchen, Carmilla trailing behind her. She sniffs. “Smells good, Lola. Apple muffins?” Perry nods, not meeting her eyes.
“And brioche just going in now? What would we do without you?”
“Are you eating an apple?” Carmilla asks incredulously of Laura, who huffs a little. I turn away so that she won't see me smiling at that.
“Where did these come from?” Matska asks.
“Danny brought them round,” says Laura. I don't need to see Carmilla's face to know that she is rolling her eyes.
“Turns out Big Red is useful for something,” Carmilla says from behind me. “Hey, bookworm! Think fast!”
I blink, and then find I have suddenly turned around to face them and that my arm is already extended. The apple hits my palm with a thunk and my fingers tighten around it.
“Nice catch, little bro,” says Mattie.