The Monster Man of Horror House (31 page)

Until
the next day.

My
night with Rachel wasn’t like that though. I couldn’t remember any fighting and
I couldn’t remember any pain. In fact, I could hardly remember a thing, which
meant it was probably an uneventful night. It was certainly one of the most
relaxing nights I’ve ever had as the beast. Normally stuck in this basement as
I am I give myself a few cuts and bruises trying to claw my way out, but the
next morning when I awoke, I was tranquil and unscathed. Rachel sat nearby
playing Patience and she looked unflustered too.

“What
happened?” I asked, desperately racking my brains for some kind of an image.

“Nothing,”
she shrugged without looking up. “We just fucked all night.”

Happily
Rachel was only teasing, but she'd been right about one thing, she did indeed
have a way with animals, particularly supernatural ones it seemed, because she’d
held me in her sway all night long, talking me through my transition and even
pampering me like a prize poodle when I was changed and I’d not gone for her
once, not even when she’d started to groomed my thick mane.

Three
pink ribbons remained tied in my hair and another ten lay on the floor around
me to testify to this fact.

“Good
doggy,” she smiled.

I
transformed again another three times over the coming nights and Rachel stayed
with me each time. On the final night Rachel asked if she could take me out to
the woods to transform. She said it would do me good to feel the bracken
against my skin once more and she promised to keep me on a tight rein but I
steadfastly refused. Rachel couldn’t even keep herself on a tight rein; that
was why she was here. I shuddered to think what might’ve happened if the pair
of us had encountered a Girl Guide camping party.

She
sulked that evening and the next morning I woke up with two black eyes and a
swollen lip.

Rachel
never cared to explain.

iv

The next day I set out to solve Rachel’s feeding problems. I visited an
abattoir and got the guy to sell me a couple of pints of blood, telling him I
wanted to make my own blood pudding with it. And then I drove to Norwich and enquired
as to where I went to give blood. They gave me the address of the local clinic,
so I went along and checked it out, but stopped short of giving any of mine up
for scrutiny.

Back
home Rachel baulked at the cow’s blood and tossed the lot back in my face
– literally – though she seemed more receptive to the idea of the
blood bank, so that night I drove her to Norwich and parked up outside, around
the back of it. I didn’t need to help Rachel break in. She was already an adept
burglar in her own rights and successfully raided the fridge, bringing back
with her a holdall full of blood bags to feed on over the coming nights. When
we got home I noticed that most of blood she’d taken was of the rarer variety
– AB positive and negatives.

“Does
it taste better than the more common types then?” I asked.

Rachel
shrugged. “Not really. But it’ll fuck them up more losing this stuff than a
load of boring O.”

I
was coming to learn that this was Rachel all over. Given a straight choice
between benign and malignant, Rachel would go malignant every time. It wasn’t
even a conscious reaction to events; it was part of her character. She was at
core a bad person. And the fact that she was a vampire too was just too bad on
the rest of us. Rachel was the darkness that couldn’t escape itself.

I
wondered why she was even trying.

Rachel
had come from a terrible childhood. Some might argue she hadn’t come very far
but not I – at least, not to her face. Her mother had been an East End
harlot in the last days of the old Queen and Rachel had been just one of twelve
occupational hazards to befall ‘Happy Sue’, as she was universally known back
then. Rachel’s eleven siblings had found the Workhouse or the cemetery within a
day of arriving in this world, but when Happy Sue came knocking with number
twelve, the Workhouse decided she’d spread quite enough happiness for one
person and refused to take her new daughter. Under normal circumstances Rachel
might’ve ended up in the river before the day was out, but the Workhouse Master
was a vociferous champion of lost causes and warned Happy Sue to present
herself and her daughter at the end of every month or else she’d find herself
kicking air at the end of a rope. Obviously keeping a baby alive in those
Victorian slums back then was no mean feat, but the Master insisted that even
if little Rachel were to succumb to one of the many popular illnesses of the
day, her body was to be brought to the surgeon for examination immediately.

Or
else.

As
you can imagine Rachel caught – and much to her mother’s dismay recovered
from – pretty much every illness known to medical science, but nothing
could tear her from her mother’s breast. And so for eight years Happy Sue
played unhappy families to the most unwanted millstone in Bow and the pair only
finally parted company in Christmas 1899 when Happy Sue was caught stealing a half
a crown from her landlady’s purse and broke her head on the stairs trying to
flee.

Rachel
saw this happen right in front of her.

And
she barely cared.

I
thought of the parallels with my own father. Compared to Rachel’s upbringing,
mine had been one long smoochy kiss after another, but both of our parents had
played an important role in shaping our lives. For me, if I hadn’t gone to sea
to escape the consequences of my father’s actions I wouldn’t be the man (nor
beast) I am today. But with Rachel it ran deeper. Her mother had moulded her very
soul with contempt. I’m not sure Rachel even knew why she was so full of
hatred, but it infested her like a cancer and it had nothing to do with her
vampirism. If she’d been a normal kid I could’ve sent her for counselling but
she was eighty years past that – although interestingly I didn’t think
she’d grown up at all. Her body was stuck in time and I finally got the sense
that her mind was too. She may have been around since the last century but she
had none of the emotional maturity or wisdom that should’ve come with age, just
eighty years of bile. Her remorse was not for her victims – never for her
victims – it was always for herself and for the way she felt afterwards
during her post-kill comedowns. She dressed this self-pity up as regret because
it was more attractive that way and wore it like a tragic curse, but really the
anger was there long before the claws had been.

At
her core, she was still a kid – eighty years plus and as dangerous as a
tiger, but she was still a kid nevertheless. For Rachel it was all about tits
and pubic hair and I eventually concluded she was right about the problem, she
was just wrong about the region.

Naturally
I played my cards pretty close to my chest as the weeks ticked by, because if
there’s one thing that upsets an emotionally retarded psychopath more than
anything else it’s telling them that they’re an emotionally retarded
psychopath, so instead I figured out a plan to help her.

First
off were her material needs because we couldn’t escape the fact that she drank
blood to survive, no matter how many fluffy bunnies I lined her coffin with. So
I researched all the hospitals within a one hundred mile radius and we agreed
to systematically break into each over the coming months – not to ransack
them, but just to take as much as we thought wouldn’t be missed, because it was
vital to Rachel’s treatment that she no longer killed when she fed.

Rachel
agreed and so once a week we would go on in the car, I would park up nearby,
and she would scale the clinic walls to steal her supplies. She agreed to bring
back only O and A+, and not to wreck the rest of the stock for her own private
amusement and she even agreed not to kill anyone if she was disturbed, which marked
something of a breakthrough for Rachel. However saying all these things and
doing them are two different things, and I would bite my nails down to the
quick waiting for Rachel to return, but to my relief she kept her word and really
did just steal what she needed, giving us both half a chance to turn her life
around for real.

And
so to the second part of her treatment: Rachel had never known love nor warmth
in eighty long years. Not the love of a parent nor the warmth of a friend.
She’d only known resentment and fear and so as a result she only knew how to inspire
resentment and fear in others. It probably ran deeper than that, of course, but
this was my best amateur psychiatrist guess and so the answer was obvious. I
had to be both a parent and a friend to Rachel. I had to show her all the love
and the warmth she’d missed out on for almost a century and I had to reconnect
her with humanity. She may have been a predator and preyed on humankind but
that didn’t mean she had to hate them too.

So
we began at the beginning.

We
began with
Peter Pan.

I
have to admit, it wasn’t the subtlest of therapies – a boy who couldn’t
grow up flying about an enchanted island having magical adventures – but Rachel
lapped it up and had me read each of J. M. Barrie’s books to her over and over
again until they were tattered and dog-eared. Rachel couldn’t read herself and
no matter how many times I tried to teach her, she couldn’t even grasp the
basics, so I remained her only window into Neverland and as a result I became that
much more precious to her too. It was a little step forwards, not a massive one,
just a little one, because these newly found emotions were still strictly
speaking serving her own needs, but at least it proved there was something
there to be worked with. All I needed was time.

All
I got was two months.

v

For the third week running we returned to the same blood bank on Rachel’s
insistence. She told me it was the best stocked blood bank she’d raided over
the last couple of months and it was also the easiest to get into, so it could
sustain the losses better than the others and there was less of a chance of her
running into anyone whilst robbing it. These seemed like all the right reasons for
returning and so Monday after Monday I drove the fifty miles down to Colchester
and parked up opposite the General Hospital while Tinkerbell went and got her
dinner.

It
wasn’t until the third week that my suspicions finally kicked in after she
didn’t return for almost two hours. Not what you’d expect from “the best
stocked and easiest blood bank to break into”. And now I noticed specks of
blood on her nightgown when she got back into the car despite the blood bags
being completely sealed inside her holdall.

I
didn’t say anything at the time, but the next morning I returned to Colchester and
looked around for myself. The hospital was exactly as she’d described it and no
one reported seeing any intruders when I flashed them my bogus police badge. I
took a further snoop around the grounds and traced the steps Rachel would’ve
taken from the car to the blood bank window, scouring the ground for signs of violence,
but there was nothing.

I
widened my search and found a couple of acres of wooded parkland just behind
the hospital, so I crossed the park to see what was on the other side. It turned
out to be a large Victorian building set in its own grounds. It was three
storeys high and about ten windows wide, and it had the air of an institution
about it. A sign next to the front door read COLCHESTER CHILDREN’S HOME.

Two
police cars sat out front.

It
seemed for three weeks Colchester Children’s Home had been infected by a
mysterious plague. The children on the top floor began to systematically self-harm,
slashing themselves with razor blades or throwing themselves out of bed and
down the stairs in the middle of the night, claiming not to know how they’d got
there. A couple of the children reported having terrible nightmares about an
evil spirit who'd attacked them in their beds, but most denied all knowledge of
what happened or why, causing the staff to suspect it was some kind of bizarre
pact dreamed up by the children to create a stir. They clamped down on it as
much as they could, but no matter how tight a watch they kept on the children,
each Monday night one of them would always go loopy and half-kill themselves at
the first opportunity. At least that was until seventeen-year-old Rhiannon had
gone the whole hog and thrown herself off the roof and onto the railings below.
A terrible tragedy in itself but one that the staff simply could fathom,
because Rhiannon was a trusted helper and had volunteered to watch over the rest
of the children on the top floor herself. It didn’t make any sense.

At
least, not to them it didn’t.

To
some of us, the events had an all too familiar ring to them.

vi

“I won’t be long,” Rachel promised, slipping out of the car and giving me a
twirl of excitement as she slammed the door and hurried off into the night.

I
started the car the moment she was out of sight and floored it, haring around
the ring road that skirted the edge of the park until I came to the Children’s
Home on the other side.

I
jumped on the brakes and leapt out of the car fifty yards short of the home,
plucking my bag from the boot and running towards the front door with a
sledgehammer hanging over my shoulder. I crashed through the door in one,
shattering wood, glass and steel with a single swing and I let the hammer clatter
where it fell as I charged for the stairs.