Chapter One: Knock Knock

About a week after Harriet quit her job, the Institute Agents arrived. Of course, she had read about the shady men who worked for secret government agencies before she had learnt how to apply to work there herself, but part of her still hoped that the men in suits were part of the conspiracy theories rather than part of the conspiracy realities.

Some accounts of these agents say they phone you first before appearing inside your house. She wished this had been the case with her, as she had been asleep on the sofa in a mess of sickness and in no way prepared to host unexpected guests.

“Miss Crossley,” said one of them sharply, waking her up. There were two of them in black suits, with black sunglasses, and nothing to tell them apart. They were of a similar height and build. The woman scrabbled around to find her glasses and take a better look at them – the men had symmetrical faces which were eerie in their averageness, perfectly and precisely engineered to be easily forgettable. Some theories said they were robots, all built to look the same. Some said they were aliens, all cloned from one being. Some said they were robot aliens, or alien robots. Secret agents were there to act as a barrier between the paranormal world and the civilian world – Harriet’s department was fairly isolated and did not involve any interactions with civilians, so she had never had an opportunity to see them up close. It dawned on her that as they were here in her flat, she now counted as a civilian.

She sat up in her duvet cocoon. She was as bedraggled and ill-looking as one might expect, and she had used sanitary towels to construct a makeshift bandage that went most the way around her neck. She wore a sort of tiara around her messy hair; the front piece of which was glued to her forehead with some supernatural magnetic force, and occasionally it crackled with blue light.

She’d fallen asleep watching television, but the agents kindly turned it off.

“Are you here to wipe out my memories?” was the first thing the woman thought to ask. ‘Groggy’ did not even begin to describe her, blood loss had made her nearly delirious, and she just wished these men would go away so she could have some tomato soup and go back to watching daytime television.

“I’m afraid we cannot, the device made by Dr O’Neil prevents us from doing so.” Said the agent on the left.

“Oh, yes,” said Miss Crossley, touching the glowing jewel on her forehead. “I suppose it would.” She sounded disappointed. There were many things she would like to forget about her job.

“We are here to conform the official termination of your contract, as your resignation was not given in the form of a letter and did not follow proper protocols.”

“Ah. Yes. About that-”

“Due to your recent telepathic possession, we are here to confirm that you were speaking under your own will, and that you are ready for a full termination.”

The word ‘termination’ troubled Harriet. “Um, yeah I quit my job. I wanted to. Because of the whole mortal peril thing.”

The two agents exchanged a glance, then nodded. The one on the right said “As your mind is unable to be wiped, your severance from the Institute warrants-” he stopped, and the agents glanced at each other again. It lasted a moment, but the rest of the sentence sounded disjointed from the first “-an official warning to not seek outside help from the police or any medical facilities. You signed a nondisclosure agreement and we will hold you to that regardless of your affiliation with the Institute.”

“No help from outside medical facilities, what about-” she gestured at the makeshift bandage at her neck.

“That would be in breach of the nondisclosure agreement.”

“I could easily pretend it is a human bitemark,” she said quickly. “Surely if I lie, I’m not spilling any secrets?”

“You have already considered doing this, and yet you have not gone to the hospital.” Said the left agent.

She hadn’t gone to the hospital; she worried they might have questions about the device on her head. She refused to take it off, she needed it.

“Can I use the medical facilities at work?” she asked hopefully.

“You left the company. You no longer work with us. It would be inappropriate.”

“I thought as much.” She sighed. “So, I just hope this will get better on its own then?”

“Unlikely. It is infected.”

“It’s just a flesh-wound,” she said defensively. Then it dawned on her. “Wait… are you hoping I succumb to sepsis? Is that my termination?”

The agent on the left shrugged. “We have no further instructions regarding your case. Good day Miss Crossley.”

She was not too sure how they left, but they were suddenly gone.

As death threats go, being threatened by very stiff looking men reading from a sci-fi movie script was not as scary as it could have been. Part of her had feared they intended to kill her to ensure her silence, but the milquetoast warning of ‘don’t violate your nondisclosure agreement’ seemed to suffice.

The bite on her neck was infected with something, but it was unlikely to be sepsis, as it had been slowly festering all week and she had not gone into septic shock yet. The saliva of the undead had bizarre antibiotic properties, so whatever microbial mess was rotting her may be unique to vampire bites. If she still worked in the lab, she would have started trying to cultivate cultures from the wound to see what new bacteria would arise – that said, if she was still at the lab she wouldn’t have let it become infected in the first place.

She felt ill and tired and just wanted to sleep all day. She worried that she had been getting worse and worse, but she had less and less energy to deal with it. She had been gone from work a week and already everything had unravelled. Her flat was a mess, she was low on food, and even low on sanitary products for using as bandages. As she pondered this, she realised she had not changed the wound’s dressing in a while.

Sliding off the sofa, she padded to the bathroom and carefully peeled the cottony mess off her neck. Underneath was a bloody hole, which she unsuccessfully tried to clean. The first bite she had received, on the other side of her neck, was now just a scar. It had been treated by her institute’s top medical staff, and the treatment had occurred the day she had been bitten. Her new bite had been left a week under poorly made bandages, with minimum effort made to keep it clean and bacteria-free. It stank, and after she had redressed the bite she had to spray the bathroom with deodorant to try and get rid of the smell of festering flesh.

Harriet knew, of course, that she needed stitches, or to pack the wound with sterile gauze, and she should have visited the doctors to get a tetanus shot, but she felt ill and miserable and just wanted to stay at home with her limited medical supplies.

She looked in the mirror at her tiara – the telepathy blocker. Blue gemlike studs attached to her skull and a circlet of red, yellow and silver wires. She wondered if Matt had meant it to look so much like a pretty crown. The main jewel crackled and flickered, but she assumed that was normal. She did not dare to ever take it off, which made it very hard to brush her hair, but as she was not leaving the flat anytime soon, she did not care.

She wandered back to the sofa. She would make herself some soup at some point, but right now she needed another nap. Food and water were problems for later.

 

She woke up in the dark before she realised someone was knocking at the door. She did not care how long she had been unconscious, but she was concerned that someone would be trying to get her attention at nighttime.

“Harry! Can you let me in?” said a voice which was clearly from a hallucination. If he was at her door, that meant he had escaped the underground top-security lab, which was of course impossible. She worried for a moment that hallucinations were a symptom of her deteriorating health, then realised that it was night, which meant this was a dream. Dreams were less worrying than hallucinations.

The dream or hallucination knocked again more persistently.

“Go away,” replied Harriet.

“Harry!” The voice sounded relieved. “Thank goodness you’re okay!”

“Piss off.”

“Listen, I know you’re in a bad way and I’m very sorry, I’m here to apologise and make things right.”

Harriet put a pillow over one ear to muffle the sound of her former test subject talking. Damn guilty conscience, making her hallucinate him! Why can’t she hallucinate something nice, like a hug from Matt or some ice cream. Her throat burned, ice cream would be nice. Her stomach growled in protest, letting her know if she dared to eat anything exciting she would throw up. The hallucination of the test subject kept talking through the door.

“…and I got you some supplies so if you don’t want to invite me in you can at least take them? I’d leave them by the door but I don’t want the milk to go off.” 

Oh? He’d brought milk? She lifted the pillow off her ear to hear better.

“…Harry?”

“Mmm, coming,” she said, sliding off the sofa. She tried to adjust her dressing gown, then remembered that the room was dark and he was blind anyway. Also, he was a bastard and she had no desire to impress him. She turned on the light, and it felt like getting hit in the head with the pommel of a flaming sword. She grumbled, trying to stand upright, then decided she could lean on the doorframe a little. Her head felt heavy. She opened the door, keeping it on the chain, and appraised the creature in the dark hallway.

The man was tall and gaunt and unhealthy-pale, with the sort of purplish mottled veins you’d expect to find on a corpse. He had a nervous smile with worryingly sharp teeth, and wore a loose grey shirt and loose grey pants, the same things he had worn as a test subject in the lab. He had stolen some shoes, but no socks. His eyes had a curiously milky appearance to them, like an early onset of cataracts. He certainly looked real, although it was uncanny seeing a test subject out of the lab.

Ah. “You’re… not a hallucination then?” asked Harriet.

“Er… no? Listen I’m sorry abou-”

She closed the door quickly. Fuck!

“I’m sorry about biting you!” he said through the door. “Really, really sorry! I brought you some food – you don’t have to let me in just please take the stuff.” It was definitely the test subject’s voice, dry and wheezing like he was recovering from a bad cough – death had not been kind to his throat.

She took a deep breath and opened the door again, appraising the vampire once more. Her eyes dropped down to the shopping he was carrying. It looked like around two weeks’ worth of food. She took the chain off, so she could open the door a little wider.

“Thanks for opening the door,” he said, sounding relieved.

She held out a hand and he took the hint, passing her the bags. She took them one at a time and dumped them on the floor. They fell over, the contents coming loose and merging with the existing mess. She turned back to him, and he fidgeted with his hands. She frowned. “Did you escape?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“It’s a long story.”

Her headache continued to pound. She closed her eyes. She wanted this bizarre dream to end. “I don’t care enough to hear it,” she said honestly. “I’m not working with the Institute anymore, go somewhere else.”

“Harry…”

She shot him a glare. He couldn’t see it, but it was felt.

He quickly corrected himself, addressing her without the nickname this time. “Harriet, we’ve all escaped. Couple of days after you left: the Institute’s a mess. The other vampires don’t know where you live yet, so I am here to warn you, and maybe… offer you some protection?”

Her stomach churned at the prospect (or was churning anyway…). “Good job, you’ve warned me. Go away now. I don’t want your ‘protection’.”

She closed the door on him. She pondered what he said briefly then opened the door again.

“Wait, did you all escape?”

He nodded.

“Oh fuck.”

“They’ve got eyes all over the city, thralls everywhere. They can see and hear everything that happens, they’ll know where you live soon enough, and they’ll be out for revenge.”

“…and you’re not out for revenge?”

He itched his neck nervously, mirroring where Harriet’s bitemark was. “Er, no, I’m good on the ‘revenge’ front, moved on to apologising and feeling guilty. I’m really sorry.”

“Apology not accepted.”

“Okay! Understood! Sorry.”

“You can leave now,” she said sharply.

“Um. Well… I don’t have anywhere else to go, really. If I was here, I could protect the flat while you slept. Or when you were out. I’m worried about you: vampires can’t enter your home unless invited but thralls…”

“What are they going to do? Bite me?” she said scathingly.

He winced at that.

Harriet weighed her options. The vampire before her was provably dangerous, having bitten her twice in the time they’d known each other. However, he had not killed her either time – he had never wanted to kill her. The other two test subjects called for her death every day, and now they were free they would have a chance to act upon those threats… It would be her versus an army of thralls and two vampires hellbent on killing her unless she accepted this bastard’s help. Thinking about this was hurting her head.

The vampire watched her deliberate for a while. “…So… May I come in?”

Harriet bit her lip. “Okay but you’d better not make a mess.” She stood to one side and flourished her hand. “I invite you in.”

The vampire grinned. “Thank you very much!”

He took one step into the flat before realising the floor was full of trip hazards. He nudged his feet around gingerly trying to find safe places to stand. Harriet closed the door behind him, watching with some fascination as he wobbled his way across the room. It was like watching a heron wading in thick mud, slowly and carefully pulling its leg free before struggling to find where to place it next. She picked up the shopping and mooched over to her kitchenette to put it away.

For someone that did not consume food or drink (aside from the obvious vampire-friendly liquid), the creature had supplied her with plenty of bread, soup, ready-meals and snacks, alongside sanitary products, anti-septic creams and painkiller medicine, as well as every flavour of herbal tea under the sun. She was a fan of tea. She put the yoghurt and milk in the fridge.

She tried to work out what agenda he had, bringing this much food to her home. Fattening her up before finishing her off? He clearly needed to be invited into her house, if she remembered to rescind the invitation before he got too bitey, she should be safe. She wished there had been a way to test the full limits of the ‘vampire invitation’ rule at the lab, but there was no way to conduct such experiments in the laboratory.

He found the sofa and sat down on it. Harriet’s head was still pounding so she fumbled with the painkiller tablets and took some with water. She looked back at the vampire, and he idly tapped on his knees and tried to look innocent. Her flat was very messy, so the only other place to sit was on the sofa next to him. Great.

“How did you all escape?” she said, pulling the duvet and blanket off the seat to make room to sit down.

“Matt had a key card, and Giles had Matt,” said the vampire simply.

“And you aren’t with your little friends because…?”

He pulled a face. “They did not want to be my friends anymore.” He pulled up his shirt to show a mess of bruises. “I took too long with the escape plan for their liking, and I didn’t kill you when I had the chance.”

Harriet turned cold. “But if you killed me now… that would make it up to them, right?”

He laughed, “Oh god no, no, they hate me,” he gave a nervous chuckle.

“What if I hate you as well?”

“You hate me less,” he said with far more conviction than he felt.

Harriet felt a churning in her stomach. She’d been feeling little bits of nausea all week, but had not thrown up yet. “Victor, you can’t stay here,” she said. “If they hate you, they’ll come looking for you, and I don’t want to deal with that.”

“But they’ll come looking for you anyway, we can fight them off together.”

“I don’t care, I’m ill, I don’t want you turning up at my door at two in the morning every night luring a merry band of vampires to me.” Her throat was feeling tight.

“I mean, if I wasn’t going in and out of the flat, if I like, stayed put, in here, lying low, they’d never know we were here, and I could help you while you’re feeling ill.”

“I’m not that ill,” she said indignantly, the nausea rising.

“Are you sure? Because it turns out, even with the thought jammer on, you and I still have, er, some sort of psychic link?”

He started to prattle some nonsense but Harriet was finding it hard to concentrate as she felt more and more sick, hot and flushed, and when she opened her mouth to tell Victor to shut up, she projectile vomited across the room.

“Harry… are you okay?”

She flipped her middle finger at him as another wave of nausea prevented her from talking. She got up and started stumbling to the bathroom, but the room was spinning so much that she fell over. The vampire helped her stand, and herded her into the bathroom. What followed was messy and unpleasant, but eventually she stopped throwing up.

Victor put one of his bony hands to her forehead, which was slick with sweat. “You’re very hot,” he said in alarm, “what do I do?”

“Keep me warm,” she croaked. “Fever. I need to sweat it out.”

She couldn’t remember much of what happened next, but she was lying in her bed under a mountain of blankets, uncomfortably humid.

“The crown thing won’t be helping,” said the vampire, tugging at the metal wiring around her head. “Do you know how to remove it?”

“No,” she groaned, meaning ‘I do know how to remove it, but I really don’t want to.’

His fingers found the catch around the central node of the device and he fiddled with it.

“No,” groaned Harriet a little louder, trying to swat him away.

“You’ll feel better once this is off,” he said, “trust me.”

“You need a password,” she said, pushing at him feebly.

He leant in and started speaking at the node – “Password? One two three? Zero zero zero? Activate? Deactivate?”

“Fuck off,” said Harriet, pushing at him with sweaty, clammy hands. She felt disgusting and tried to push the blankets off too, or at least remove some of the hot water bottles he’d piled in with her.

She woke up again, not remembering how she fell asleep, and coughed up some phlegm. She felt freezing, and huddled deeper in her cocoon of blankets. Victor came in and slid another hot water bottle under the duvet, which she gratefully accepted.

“Are you feeling better now?” he asked.

“I feel shitty,” she admitted.

He nodded sympathetically. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

“No,” she said, and wiggled back under the covers. “Leave me alone.”

The vampire sighed and stood up. “As you wish,” he muttered to himself.

He was glad she was no longer feverishly panting and flailing around, she seemed to be recovering. He left her in the bedroom and wondered into the living room, picking up various blankets and discarded clothes which were covered in sick to bundle into the washing machine. Things would be much easier if Harriet removed that damn thought-jammer science-fiction gadget from her head – it was disrupting the natural order of things. He was a vampire, she was his thrall; yes, he’d do a few chores around the house while she was feeling sick, and yes, he was deeply concerned for her wellbeing, but he felt in his gut that she should be at least a little happy to see him?

When a vampire bites, he has the choice to either drain the victim until death, or to make them his thrall – he can read their mind and move them like a puppet. Thralls may have good eyesight, or can walk in sunlight, or have the key to the secret underground prison the vampires are kept in… There were plenty of benefits to having thralls, aside from a ready and willing supply of blood.

And it’s not like Harriet would have the rough end of the deal – Victor was stronger than her and could protect her. With a little medical know-how, he would fix that hole he had made in her neck, the infection would go away, and in a matter of hours she would thank him and they would be the best of friends again. But having the knowledge on how to make her better was the tricky part: living in an underground laboratory had given him next to no first-aid experience, and the rest the knowledge he had access to was locked away inside Harriet’s mind.

Victor fumbled in the dark for the box of laundry detergent. His vision was very blurry thanks to his thickened corneas, and the last time he had done laundry in Harriet’s flat he had been possessing her body. Everything felt so small in his large, long-fingered hands; he had not anticipated the size difference between the two of them would make Harriet’s flat seem tiny. It was disorientating.

He was attempting to do laundry using second-hand memories from Harriet. If she would take off the telepathy blocker for just for a few hours, he could rummage around her mind and look up how to use the kitchen appliances and would have finished cleaning up ages ago. But she was foolish and stubborn.

He was unable to read the symbols on the washing machine dial, so he clicked it around until it felt ‘right’. He did this a few times, just to be sure, before pressing ‘start’ and letting the machine rumble into life. He reminisced about how his thrall was indeed foolish, but also smart. He smiled to himself. Having access to her mind was so convenient, she knew so much stuff. Before you could even think of a question she would have the answer – she was quick with numbers and chemical formulars and naming things in Latin. He liked having her brain come up with random trivia.

In the dark he let his hands trace over the kitchen counter, encountering the huge pile of unwashed dishes – his hands recoiled when he touched something fuzzy. How long had these plates been here?

He found a plastic tub filled with cold water, sludge and teaspoons. He washed this out and turned on the hot tap, and, just for the sheer sensation of it, stuck his hand under the hot tap. One thing he liked about Harrie- his thrall – was that she radiated warmth. What he didn’t realise is that warmth could literally come out of a tap. He grinned to himself as he added soap to the hot water. This was going to be a good night.

He had to feel every plate and cup for bits of grime as it was impossible to see, but he quickly filled up the drying rack, then went in search of a drying towel. Navigating the kitchen in the dark was difficult, but he managed to find the correct cupboards using a mix of Harriet’s memories and some exploratory prodding.

His thrall had treated dishes and laundry as such unpleasant tasks, but after a lifetime of sitting in a cell like a caged animal drinking blood from plastic bags, having the freedom to perform simple duties without being observed and monitored was joyful. The countertops were grimy as well, so he wiped them down. They felt good when they were clean. He washed his hands frequently, enjoying the hot water on his skin, and tried boiling the kettle and pouring boiling water into a cup a few times, just in case he needed to make his thrall some tea. He knew she liked tea.

Tea smelled good – not like blood, it did not satisfy him like the smell of blood, but it smelled pretty. And Harriet had many flavours of pretty smells. He played ‘identify the tea flavour’ for around twenty minutes before he thought that his thrall might not appreciate finding him sniffing handfuls of tea bags. He put them back quickly and tidied them away.

After he had mastered pouring water from a kettle into a mug without spilling boiling water on the countertop, he then moved on to working out how the toaster worked. As it turned out, they worked largely automatically. Wonderful. Now he had eight slices of toasted bread and no way to eat them. He put the toast on a plate in the fridge (he remembered from Harriet that this is how excess food was treated).

Now… medicine… His thrall was going to need medicine and, as it turned out, putting one’s hands in a drawer full of papery cardboard boxes and hoping there was a way to tell one medicine from another was impossible. He found the boxes had tiny bumps on their surfaces, perhaps a way for blind people to tell boxes apart? Useless when no one had taught him what the little bumps meant. He gave up trying to find the correct pills in the end.

He made another hot water bottle for Harriet, this time finding her fast asleep. Did this mean she was getting better or worse? Her breathing was heavy, but regular. He patted the mound of blankets gently before returning to the main room.

There were so many things in his Thrall’s flat – objects and items which just weren’t found in the Institute laboratory. She had actual coats hanging by the door, not lab coats, and there were knives in the kitchen drawer (sharp objects were kept away from test subjects for obvious reasons), and there were purposeless knickknacks everywhere. A small wooden giraffe? Some sort of glass sphere filled with liquid? The vampire delighted in exploring everything as he swept dust off shelves.

As he went, he picked items up from the floor. Snotty tissues for the bin, clothes and blankets for a pile of laundry he put next to the washing machine. He gathered mugs and plates and washed them, and after a concerted effort the floor was easy to walk over. He still bumped his shins on the coffee table more often than not, but the towers of books and DVDs had been returned to the shelves and he was fairly certain that he was not going to break anything precious underfoot as he navigated his Thrall’s home.

Through his blurry vision he could sense the room getting lighter. He checked the blinds in the kitchenette were firmly closed, experimentally letting his hand touch a sliver of sunlight from around the edge. It was hot, like holding his hand through a candle flame, so he flinched. He stood in the shade behind the blinds, and for a moment let himself relax. He was not out in the streets anymore, he was safe, indoors, in the dark. Grateful for the shelter, he decided to lie down on the sofa and sleep.