Stephen Leather - Once bitten

Something within me wanted to cry out, to try to stop whatever was happening on the floor of the alley, but I wanted to see exactly what was going on. I wanted to get closer. The two shapes became clearer as I moved towards them. The figure on the floor was lying on its back. It was a man, wearing a suit of some dark material and shiny black shoes. His socks were dark but sprinkled with white triangles. The material around the knees of the trousers was torn as if he'd been dragged along the ground. The shape looming over his neck was wearing a glossy leather jacket with the collar turned up and jeans that could have been blue or black, and boots with silver tips on the toes. The heels of the boots were clearly visible because the figure was on its knees, bending over the head of the man in the suit.

The snuffling noises stopped suddenly and the shoulders of the kneeling figure stiffened as if aware that I was watching. Its head began to turn slowly and I tried to move away but my feet seemed to be fixed, as if they'd sprouted roots that had wormed their way into the ground and were holding me fast. I saw a cheek first, alabaster white, a smooth curve from the eye to the chin, then a curtain of hair swung across and that was all I could see as the head continued to turn and then, as the figure began to rise and turn at the same time, only then did I see her face. Terry. She was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket zipped up to her neck, steel zips running at angle across her chest and others marking where the pockets must have been. She smiled up at me and raised her right hand to her mouth. There was a streak of something along her right cheek, something wet that glistened as she moved, and her fingers touched it, rubbed it, and then carried it to her lips.

Slowly and sensuously she licked the fingers with the tip of her tongue, one by one. I couldn't take my eyes off her and she smiled as if she knew how firmly I was trapped. I was in her power.

Totally.

"I knew you'd come," she said, and she took another step forward. For the first time I could see the head of the man lying on the floor. His mouth was wide open as if he had been trying to scream but I doubted that any sound would have managed to pass the drawn-back lips because the throat had been ripped messily open as if the flesh had been hacked and gouged with a dull knife. Or teeth. He looked dead and the eyes were blank and lifeless but there was blood pooling in the hollow of his throat and it bubbled and frothed as if he was trying to breath through what was left of his windpipe.

"Look at me, Jamie," she whispered, and I found myself doing as she asked. "Forget him. He's nothing." She licked her fingers again and then reached forward and pressed them to my lips.

They tasted salty and vaguely metallic. She stood up against me so that her jacket brushed against my chest. I hadn't realised until that moment how short she was, the top of her head barely reached my chin and she had to tilt her head back to see my face, the action stretching the skin taught across her cheekbones making her look impossibly young, a child with a smeared face. "You have to want to give yourself to me, Jamie. You have to want it deep within your soul. That's the way it works. You have to offer yourself. Nothing less. Do you understand?"

I nodded, my heart pounding in my ears. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. She pushed her middle finger between my lips and gently rubbed it along my teeth as if daring me to bite.

She raised herself up on her toes and tilted her head to one side and pressed her lips against my neck, just below my left ear where I could feel a vein pulsing in time to the rhythm of my heart.

She kissed me softly and I felt her tongue probe the skin. It rasped along my flesh as if it was the tongue of a cat and not that of a girl and then she shifted her head back as if waiting for something.

"Once bitten," she said and I could feel her breath with each word, and then she lunged forward, sharp teeth fixing onto my neck like a cheetah going in for the kill.

I jerked back my head involuntarily and my eyes opened and I was in my bedroom, my legs tangled up in the quilt, the pillows scattered on the floor. My skin was bathed in sweat yet my mouth was dry and swallowing was an effort. I staggered to the bathroom and filled a glass full of water. I used the first mouthful to swill around, rolling it around my tongue and spitting it out into the washbasin. I switched on the light above the bathroom mirror and looked at my reflection.

Bleary eyes stared back at me, deep set and worried, small red veins flecked through the whites, the pupils dilated as if I'd taken something. I hadn't. I opened my mouth wide and pulled back the skin on my face. It made me look younger. I relaxed and the wrinkles and the years came back. Thirtyfive going on fifty. I moved my head from side to side half expecting to see bites but the skin was unmarked. I rubbed my hand across my chin, feeling the stubble of growing hair. I could remember when all I had to do was to borrow my father's electric razor to shave the fuzz on my upper lip about once a month, then once a week, then daily. But it was only in recent years that the stubble would appear in the middle of the night. A sign of being an adult, I guess. A sign of age.

Now if I was going anywhere in the evening I looked scruffy unless I shaved again.

I took another mouthful of water and gargled with it and when I looked down to spit it out I saw that the first mouthful was red. Blood red. I turned on the taps and it swirled away down the plughole and the second time I spat it was clear, just water and phlegm. I checked out my mouth in the mirror and I couldn't see any cuts or abrasions. Just teeth, and metal fillings. Another sign of a decaying body. I filled my mouth and spat again but there was no more blood.

I took a glass of water back with me to the bedroom and lay down on my side, facing away from the window, and tried to get back to sleep. Images of the girl and the alley kept filling my mind, her smile, her eyes, and the blood. I could hear my own heartbeat in my right ear which was pressed against the pillow. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. The sound of my lifeblood coursing around the veins and arteries of my body, the tubes that were already silting up with chloresterol and fat globules and all the rest of the detritus that was floating around in my tissues. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. The constant reminder of my own mortality, a fist-sized hunk of tissue in the centre of my chest upon which my whole being depended. Without its seventy-odd squirts of oxygenated blood every minute there would be no more Jamie Beaverbrook. I wondered what it must be like to have a heart attack, to feel the pump splutter and jerk and stop, and to know that the end was coming, that the brain was being starved of life-giving oxygen and that it would soon all be over. The empty blackness stretching ahead for ever more. No more Jamie Beaverbrook. The chain of thought depressed me, as it always did. The morbid thoughts of my own mortality usually came at night, when I was alone in the dark. I shifted my head to try to get my ear off the pillow so that I wouldn't have to listen to the accusing heart counting off the beats that represented the time I had left. Seventy beats a minute, 4,200 every hour, one hundred thousand or so every day. What was that a year? More than thirty-five million beats. So how many did I have left if I lived for fifty more years? I did the sums in my head and it came to about 1.8 billion. Durr-rum, minus one.

Durr-rum, minus two. Durr-rum, minus three. This wasn't like counting sheep and easing myself into sleep, this was chipping away at my life bit by bit, alone in a double bed, and the thought filled me with cold dread.

I moved my head again and this time I felt my right shoulder grate as the arm moved in the socket, the sign of cartilage wearing thin from too many games of tennis and squash. It never used to make that noise, the sound of bone against bone, or maybe it was only recently that I'd noticed it.