Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Four

I stayed with her until five in the morning when she lay down upon her small narrow bed. An alarmingly loud horn signalled the sun rising, and made me jump. I heard in the distance the sounds of doors locking and vampires howling. I paid no attention to this though, only to her. I placed my palm up against the glass as she seemed to drift off into a deep sleep, her body curled up tightly.

I was overcome with a sudden urge to touch her, just to feel her silky white skin, just to place one finger upon her. I tried the door, it was locked, so I pulled at the knob harder. It wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard I pulled. It drove me crazy that she still slept through this, I were to enter the room she wouldn’t notice. I placed my foot against the glass and pushed with my whole body, it still wouldn’t move. I didn’t make any movement to the wood, to the lock which looked so feeble to me. In my amazement I felt my eyes sting with tears. I just wanted to touch her so badly.

I threw myself at the door, I crashed my whole body against it, I beat my fists against it, and she still slept.

I fell to the floor in a heap, still feeble punching the door, but I realised there was no way I was getting through again. Not after the first time, that glorious moment when I breathed the same air as her, in the same room as her.

I got to my feet shakily and backed away, trying not to look at her, trying not to feel anything for her and trying to calm my heart. I remembered what I had wanted so many hours ago, the fresh air and the outside world. I make a decision to never seek her again, the way I felt about her scared me.

As I closed the door behind me the normality returned, a pleasant, sweeping sensation that spread all through me, right the way to my fingertips. I felt the craving for the outside world once more and I made my way to the huge main doors of the facility.

One of the grey dressed workers obliged by opening the heavy doors, he suppressed a yawn as I was admitted through but he nodded smartly to me, a business nod. The light hit me like a slap, I had to squint as I walked blinded into a sundrenched car park. A light breeze made me shiver, but also felt so good, soothing and healing as I walked into the world I had missed so much, away from myth and legend.

My eyes eventually got used to what they had needed so badly and I saw the building was an old, beautifully restored manor house, painted immaculately white. In the car park several pristine, new cars waited, clearly there was money in pretending you didn’t work here. I couldn’t read the golden plaque on the building’s entrance, but I was sure it would say something boring and official sounding.

Beyond Project Forty-Five was a small town, I saw a bakery and a tobacconist, set around cobbled streets, a large, old church was the centre of everything. The church, made of pale stone, looking medieval, gothic and imposing. It reminded me of a time when religion was the same as law. I walked through the village, hoping my red eyes and crumpled clothing didn’t attract suspicion.

There were few people out this early, but the ones I saw were far from suspicious, they smiled at me and waved enthusiastically, all trapping me in the beautiful picturesque wonder that had come over me, as I felt the sun warm my face and that sweet breeze carry the luscious sents of fresh bread and garden flowers, I realised I had a huge stupid grin spreading across my face.

It was like walking out of a nightmare, everything was clear and peaceful, the headache that had been building up over days started to melt. The only thing which slightly disturbed the experience was that Elizabeth’s softly smiling face kept threatening to cut through my thoughts. I shook her image aside and breathed in more of the sweet air.

Without realising it, I had ended up in the church yard. I stood directly in front of the impressive wooden doors that led into the enormous church. I took a deep intake of breath and walked inside, it seemed natural and calming,, to enter here, I felt as if this had been my destination all along.

Inside, the place had that earthy, slightly damp smell of all churches, despite how early it was, there were already candles burning at the altar, but I was alone here. The silence echoed out, no screams, so shrill demands from Lisa. I sat in one of the pews and gazed up at the scene depicted by the beautiful painted glass window behind the altar.

It was Jesus carrying the cross, the sun shone deeply golden behind him to illuminate his figure, the blue sky parted for him. All around the faces were dark and solemn, yet still angelic. I concentrated on the image, almost breathing in the colours. I wished for a moment that I had believed in something, that in my whole life I had thought of the possibility of God. Maybe, if I had, I would’ve been able to deal with this situation better.

Just because I was in a church and I had nothing better to do, I put my hands together and closed my eyes. I felt foolish as I cobbled a prayer together, I asked God, if there was a God, if he could forgive me for not believing in him all my life, and I asked him to be reassured that I would believe in him from now on, if he showed me a way out this mess. No matter how tightly I shut my eyes however, it didn’t work, I didn’t feel anything, it was quite tough in that moment to realise that I would never believe in a higher power, and I would just have to figure out my own problems. I sighed deeply as I stood up to leave.

Lisa was watching me. I scowled when I saw her, she couldn’t let me have one moment on my own. She was leaning against the heavy arched entrance of the church and watching me sceptically.

‘What are you doing here?’ She asked.

I shrugged, trying to covey as much annoyance as I could with one shrug. ‘I just ended up here.’

‘Are you particularly religious?’

Again, she annoyed me so easily, why did she even care? I just wanted to enjoy one private moment. ‘No.’ I answered simply.

‘I knew that,’ she said, rubbing her chin in thought, ‘yet I knew you would be here.’

‘Why’s that?’

Lisa stepped towards me, whatever power the church had held for me, she seemed to be immune to it. ‘She’s got you,’ Lisa settled onto a pew.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Think for a moment,’ now she sounded frustrated with me, my heart sped up in anger. ‘Angelica, Heimlaug Gunderson, all the others, they all spent a whole lot of time finding religion before they were killed. Surely you remember that?’

I did, but it was one of the details that had been lost as soon as I discovered that vampires were real. ‘What does it have to do with anything?’ I snorted, it seemed so petty.

‘I thought it was important,’ Lisa went on, ‘so I asked Doctor Stewart. You have no idea how old the vampire myth is, ancient, but not as old as religion. As soon as we came down from the trees humans were trying to explain why the sun shone.’

‘What do the two have to do with each other?’

‘They’re so old they’ve blended,’ Lisa smiled triumphantly. ‘Vampire’s have no reason to fear crosses, but they do, because of how old religious symbols are, it’s ingrained in them.’

‘This is stupid,’ I snorted again, ‘where’s the evidence?’

‘Every culture has its monsters, what if those monsters have always been the same thing?’

‘What does that have to do with me going to church?’

‘This is the really mind-blowing bit,’ Lisa smirked. ‘We’ve evolved alongside religion, the church is our defence from monsters, we do it sub-consciously, that’s how buried in our culture it is.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ I said, though a creeping sense of wonder was overtaking me.

‘When was the last time you were in church?’

‘My cousin’s christening, three years ago.’ She smirked even more, I had never seen such a smug face. ‘But if that’s true why aren’t you going to church? You’ve been around them too.’

‘Not like you have,’ Lisa sighed, ‘you know what I mean.’

‘She’s attractive,’ I felt defensive, ‘that’s all.’

‘Where were you last night?’ Lisa asked sensitively.

‘It doesn’t matter, I just didn’t want to be around you anymore, sometimes you can be so intense, it’s a nightmare.’ I hoped that stung just a little. I settled back down in the pew with my arms crossed.

‘Has it always been this way for you?’ Her voice was still soft, as if she were talking to a dying person. ‘You always go for the unattainable girls? That’s what she saw in you, that’s how she hooked you.’

‘Can’t I have feelings for someone?’ I half shouted, ‘she could’ve attacked me and she didn’t, doesn’t that mean something?’

Lisa shook her head. ‘This isn’t some fantasy Disney Princess world,’ she said, ‘you don’t have ‘feelings’ for someone after one glance at them.’

‘Oh what would you know,’ I raged, ‘she’s not like the rest of them, not even Mark, she’s rational, and I knew she was happy to see me last night, I could feel it.’

‘So you spent all night with her?’ Lisa frowned. ‘And I know more about it than you think.’

I leapt out of my seat so fast the wood creaked on the stone floor. ‘But what do you know?’ I rounded on her, ‘everyone keeps telling me there’s more to you than there seems, but what is it? What are you hiding?’

She stared at her hands. ‘Okay, I’m sorry.’

‘Why are you sorry?’ I noticed the touch of triumph in my voice.

‘I never told you any of this before,’ she almost looked scared, still staring at her fingers, following them opening and closing. ‘I wasn’t in the Army Cadets,’ she sighed, ‘well I was, a long time ago, but I was also in Iraq.’

I gaped at her.

‘I didn’t serve very long,’ she went on, ‘not after what happened. I fell in love with my commanding officer.’ She said the word ‘love’ as if it were a horrible expletive. ‘Philips was, well, in the conventional sense he was gorgeous, in that stupid girly movie star way, but it was an instant thing for me, butterflies and all that bollocks.’ Her face was bright red.

‘He had this wonderful mystery about him,’ she continued, ‘he had worked his way up through the ranks really quickly, he was only a few years older than me. He was so well respected he only worked at night, it was his speciality, he had brilliant eyesight and the natural instincts needed for night watches, apparently. No one really questioned it, he was good at night, he was better than any of us at spotting unusual movements, even in the pitch black it seemed he could still see.’

‘You don’t mean what I think you mean?’ My breath was held.

‘I didn’t know,’ Lisa stared determinedly at her feet, ‘how was I supposed to? Someone only works at nights your first reaction is not Vampire. Rational minds don’t think that way, and I loved him, Lawrence,’ she sounded almost tragic, ‘I only met the bastard twice but somehow I loved him, I took as many night patrols as I could just to be around him.

‘One night a woman just came running towards the camp, we couldn’t stop her and she wasn’t afraid of the guns at all. Nobody wanted to hurt her, she had a small child with her, I remember his massive staring eyes out of a tiny face. He must’ve been two years old, too young to understand that his country was at war, just hungry and scared.

‘We housed them in a tent, just to keep them safe, had a medic look over them. The woman was so scared, but we didn’t know what of, even the translator couldn’t distinguish proper sentences through the babble.

‘I knew he was busy, but I ran to get Philips, of course I volunteered to find him. When he got there, well, the situation just got a whole lot worse, she grabbed her child, screamed, tried to tear at the canvas just to get away. The little boy just stared at us with those huge eyes, he didn’t say a word, he barely even blinked.

‘The obvious thing was that she couldn’t leave, it was too dangerous, and the way she was behaving, we thought if she could calm down we could get some useful information from her, she was so scared of something and we wanted to know what. To be honest we were excited, we figured it was a bomb, that she was scared for her child’s life. If the bomb was going to hit, we would be warned so far in advance we could move the whole camp.

‘Then, later on in the night I heard gunshots. They came from the tent which housed the woman and her son.’

Lisa put her head in her hands and started to shake. She didn’t cry, but she was shivering as if she were frozen solid. She looked like she wanted to push herself into the ground, make herself disappear. She shrank away as her head reached her knees.

‘They were dead?’ I whispered.

Lisa’s head snapped up so harshly I jumped back a step. ‘I never saw the bodies,’ she said in a dry raked voice, ‘but I saw him, I saw his mouth was red. We all woke alert after the gunshots but I was the first there, and I know he saw me, he looked right into my eyes, a smile on his face like a challenge, a challenge for me to tell anyone what I had seen. I saw the blood dripping from his-’

She collapsed into tears.

‘The little boy too?’ I slid further down in my seat.

‘They gave me a lot of money to cover up what I had seen,’ even her voice was shivering, ‘I tried to spread the word, but they told me Philips had had a lot of problems, that he was moved to-’

‘A rehab facility in France?’ I finished for her.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Is he still-’

‘No,’ she said without emotion. ‘He died. He killed a nurse and they had to, well, I’m told it hurts, at least.’ She attempted a smile but gave up half way through. ‘I saw him though, after all the officers and those mysterious people from France had finished with me, he looked disappointed. I know now, he had picked me out, he was disappointed he never got to finish with me, that I walked out alive.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘I didn’t know what I saw,’ she answered, her voice still quivering. ‘I thought he was crazy, a murderer, but a Vampire?’

‘But once things became clear,’ I tried again, ‘when you saw it was happening again?’

‘I couldn’t tell you!’ she almost wailed, I had never heard her like this. ‘They made it clear that no one would believe me if I did, that it would be an international scandal and they would blame me for everything!’

‘Just what we were told,’ I realised. ‘It must be a huge conspiracy, to keep this all quiet, the government, the military.’

‘Part of me wonders if that’s why they let him rise so quickly,’ she half whispered, ‘they knew he would be ruthless.’

A well placed gust of wind made us both jump, a few worshipers made their way into the church.

‘I always wondered how you know the things you do,’ I was speaking wistfully, as though of simpler times. ‘The tracking people, the way you climbed that school fence.’

‘None of that matters now,’ she whispered, frowning. She was obviously ashamed, she was still blushing, still blinking back tears.

I reached out and touched her hand, she snapped it back, ‘Lisa-’

‘I’m worried about you,’ she said, the frown deepening, ‘I see it all again, when I… I loved him, I prayed every day. I hadn’t been to church since I was a child, I made my decision not to follow my parent’s beliefs, but I was there, wearing a cross and remembering all those old hyms.’

‘That’s not like me,’ I said with guilt bubbling in my stomach. I thought of the way I had ferociously tried to get through the door. She might be right, but it didn’t feel like I was being had, it just felt wonderful. I had the sweet feeling of excitement bubbling in my stomach when I remembered she was just a few hundred metres away. My resolve not to see her again melted away.

‘Please,’ Lisa took my hand this time, and she had an annoying motherly look on her face, ‘please don’t see her again.’

With that guilt building up like acid I nodded slowly.