George Martin - Fevre Dream

I ran long and far that night, and passed the next day in the root cellar of a farmhouse that had been burned and abandoned.

I was twenty years old. Among the people of the night, a child still, but now coming into adulthood. When I woke that night in the root cellar, covered with dried blood and clutching the money belt to me, I remembered my father’s words. I knew what the red thirst was at last. And only blood will sate it, he had said. I was sated. I felt stronger and healthier than ever in my life. Yet I was sick and horrified as well. I had grown up among your people, you see, and I thought as you did. I was no animal, no monster. There and then, I resolved to change the way I lived, so such a thing might never happen again. I washed, stole clothes, the finest I could find. I moved west, away from the fighting. Then north. I took rooms in inns by day, hired coaches to travel from town to town each night. Finally, with difficulty due to the war, I made my way to England. I took a new name, determined to make myself a gentleman. I had the money. I could learn the rest.

My journeys had taken me about a month. My third night in London, I felt strange, sick. I had never been ill in my life. The next night was worse. The night after, finally, I knew the feeling for what it was. The red thirst was on me. I screamed and raged. I ordered up a fine meal, a great rich red slab of meat I thought would slake the yearning. I ate it, and willed myself to calm. It was no use. Within the hour I was out on the streets. I found an alley, waited. A young woman was the first to pass. Part of me admired her beauty; it burned in me like a flame. Another part simply hungered. I almost tore her head off, but at least it was over quickly. Afterward I wept.

For months I despaired. From my readings, I knew what I must be. I had learned those words. For twenty years I had thought myself superior. Now I found I was something unnatural, a beast, a soulless monster. I could not decide whether I was a vampire or a werewolf, which puzzled me. Neither I nor my father had the power to turn into anything, but my red thirst came on me monthly, in what seemed a lunar cycle-although it did not always coincide with the full moon. That was a characteristic of the werewolf, I read. I read a great deal on those subjects at that time, trying to understand myself. Like the werewolf of legend, I often tore out the throat, and I did eat some small amount of flesh, especially if the thirst was on me badly. And when the thirst was not on me, I seemed a decent enough person, which also fit the werewolf legends. On the other hand, silver had no power over me, nor wolfbane, I did not change my shape or grow hair. Like the vampire, I could only walk by night. And it seemed to me that it was the blood I truly craved, not flesh. But I slept in beds, not coffins, and had crossed running water hundreds of times, easily. I was certainly not dead, and religious objects bothered me not at all. Once, to be sure, I spirited away the body of a victim, wondering if it would rise as a wolf or a vampire. It stayed a corpse. After a while it began to smell, and I buried it.

You can imagine my terror. I was not human, but neither was I one of these legendary creatures. I decided my books were useless to me. I was on my own.

Month after month the red thirst came upon me. Those nights were filled with an awful exultation, Abner. In taking life I lived as never before. But there was always an afterward, and then I was filled with loathing for the thing I had become. I slayed the young, the innocent, the beautiful, they above all. They seemed to have an inner light that inflamed the thirst as old and sick people could not. And yet at other times I loved the selfsame qualities I was drawn to kill.

Desperately I tried to change myself. My will, so strong normally, was nothing when the red thirst was on me. I turned to religion with hope. When I felt the first tendrils of the fever in me, I sought a church, and confessed everything to the priest who answered my knock. He did not believe me, but he agreed to sit and pray with me. I wore a cross, knelt at the altar, prayed fervently, with the candles and statues all around me, safe in the house of God, one of his ministers by my side. Within three hours, I turned on him, and killed him right there, in the church. It caused a small sensation when the body was found the next day.

I tried reason next. If religion had no answers, then what drove me could not be supernatural. I slaughtered animals instead of humans. I stole human blood from a doctor’s office. I broke into a mortician’s office where I knew a fresh corpse had been taken. Each of these helped, they quieted the thirst somewhat, but they did not end it. The best of the half-measures lay in killing a living animal, and drinking its blood still warm from its body. It was the life, you see, the life as well as the blood itself.

Through all of this, I protected myself. I moved about England several times, so the deaths and disappearances of my victims would not be concentrated in one locale. I buried as many bodies as I could. And I finally began to apply my intellect to my hunting. I needed money, so I sought out wealthy prey. I became rich, and then richer. Money breeds more money, and once I had some, more came to me honestly, cleanly. I had become quite fluent in English by then. I changed my name again, styled myself a gentleman, bought myself an isolated house on the moors in Scotland where my behavior would draw little attention, hired some discreet servants. Each month I went away on business, always overnight. None of my prey lived anywhere near me. The servants suspected nothing.

Finally I hit upon what I thought might be the answer. One of my servants, a pretty young maid, had been growing more and more familiar with me. She seemed to like me, and not simply as an employer. I returned her affection. She was honest, cheerful, and quite intelligent, if uneducated. I began to think of her as my friend, and I saw in her a way out. Often I had considered the alternative of chaining myself up, or otherwise confining myself until the red thirst had passed, but I had never hit on a scheme to make it work. If I put the key in reach, I would use it when the thirst was on me. If I tossed it away, how would I get unchained? No, I needed the help of another, but I had always heeded my father’s warning to trust none of you with my secret.

Now I decided to take a risk. I dismissed my other servants and sent them away, hired no one to replace them. I had a room built in my house. A small windowless room with thick stone walls and an iron door as thick as I remembered from the cell I’d shared with my father. It could be secured from the outside with three great metal bolts. I would have no way out. When it was complete, I called my pretty little maid in, and gave her instructions. I did not trust her sufficiently to tell her the full truth. I was afraid, Abner, that if she knew what I truly was, she would denounce me, or flee at once, and the solution that seemed so close at hand would be gone, along with my house and property and the life I had built. So I told her only that a brief madness came on me each month, a fit such as epilepsy brings on. During my fits, I said, I would enter my special room, and she must bolt me in and keep me there for three full days. I would take food and water in with me, including some live chickens, to take some of the edge off the thirst.

She was shocked, concerned, and quite puzzled, but at last she agreed to do as I bid her. She loved me in her way, I think, and was willing to do almost anything for my sake. So I entered the room, and she locked the door behind me.

And the thirst came. It was frightening. Despite the lack of windows, I could feel when day had come and gone. I slept by day, as always-but the nights were a blur of horror. I killed all the chickens the first night, gorged on them. I demanded to be set free, and my loyal maid refused. I screamed abuse at her. Then I simply screamed, incoherent sounds like an animal. I threw myself at the walls, pounded against the door until my fists were bloody, then squatted to suck at my own blood eagerly. I tried to claw through the soft stone. But I could not get out.