Looking for Jake and Other Stories

not bring themselves to touch him, they could not. And then the light was gone, and he was left only the afterimage.

Sholl was strengthened by their anxiety. He dazed the imago beneath him with another brutal blow and stood, rescuing his shotgun, refilling it. Sholl dragged the half-conscious vampire back the way he had come, toward the little light. It began to wake, and he hauled it high enough that it could crawl, and took it around corners until he saw the bottom of the spiral stairs, with the torch at their foot.

The vampires came with him. They followed Sholl and his captive, keeping a few feet away but becoming visible as they turned in to the fringes of torchlight. They kept reaching out with that unconvincing motion, not committing but terrified of this capture that they witnessed, distressed by what they were watching. They moaned.

Sholl locked the vampire’s arms to the banisters before it came to. He used two pairs of cuffs. That would not hold any imago at full strength, Sholl knew, but not all the invaders were so uncannily powerful, and he hoped that this one’s injuries would keep it weak. He beat it twice in the face with his shotgun, watching the blood come up under the skin, and out, with satisfaction.

He shone his torch into the bleary face. The stitchwork of scars marred features that would—with normal feeling animating them—be pleasant enough, Sholl suspected. Beyond the illumination, the other vampires watched anxiously, but they would not come closer.

When the vampire had strengthened a little, its head rolling less, moving with more certainty, Sholl clicked his fingers until he caught its eye, and as it began to snarl and strain against the chains, he put his shotgun to its neck, and pushed hard enough to bruise.

“I don’t know,” he said, “how bad it’ll be for you if I fire.” In the tunnel so far underground, his voice was stark. “I don’t know what’ll happen to you, or how long it’ll take for you to fix.”

He looked carefully at the worm-white face. It moved constantly below the skin, as muscles worked.

The vampire strained but the doubled handcuffs held. The other vampires waited.

Nervously, Sholl let his captive try and fail to break free.

“Why did you touch me? Why won’t they touch me?”

He did not like to speak it, as if doing so would break whatever power he had, but in any case the vampire did not reply. Sholl prodded its neck again. He knew he did not have long, and he thought quickly for other tactics. He could not bully this thing into speaking, but perhaps he could make it think that there was no point to its silence.

Even with an enemy so opaque, so alien as the imagos, even with the fog of war, it had been possible to learn a great deal about their campaign. In the early days of the conflict, the vampires had seemed much more like humans. They had lived among humans for years, sometimes centuries, and they had picked up habits. In the first weeks of the war they had often—standing at the head of the incoming force, on some terrible machine, taking stock of the aftermath of a massacre—taunted the defeated armies, had raged about their own oppression, and crowed that it was coming to an end.

As they had passed time back among their own kind, that mimicked behaviour had died, replaced with increasingly incomprehensible actions, without analogue or meaning in human terms. (The vampires had become pathetic. Trapped in the bodies they had loathed for centuries, the imago spies, who had perhaps been key to freeing their kind, could not become themselves. They were stuck, pretend humans and now pretend imagos.) But Sholl had listened very carefully in those early days, and had talked to others who had heard things, sometimes demanding information of them as they died. To his captive audience, now, Sholl showed off what he had learnt.

He told the tethered vampire when and how the imagos had been enslaved, at the hands of a myth, an ancient human thinker-king. He told it how it and its comrades—the vampires who called themselves patchogues, the spies, those-who-cross-over—had been the advance guard. How the unfettered imagos that had at last broken out had become their generals, all answering to one, their forms melting away gradually from anything recognisable to human eyes, as they regained their own dimensions, leaving the patchogues behind.

At the head of them all was their over-power. The military genius who had won the campaign: a champion. The imago they called Lupe, the Fish, or the Tiger. Waiting here, in London, at the heart of the campaign, as its troops finished off the last resistance. Sholl told his captive that too.

The vampire’s face did not change, and neither did any of its fellows’. Sholl had reached the point of his interrogation.

“I have something,” he said. “For the Fish of the Mirror. Where is it?”

Nothing spoke.

“Where is the Fish of the Mirror?”

Sholl punched the barrels of the shotgun hard into the chained patchogue’s temple, making it rock and snarl. When Sholl spoke, though, it was as if he had been conducting a quiet discussion.

“What can I do? You’re not scared of me. None of your siblings are scared of me. Lupe won’t be afraid. What can I do to it? I can’t hurt the Fish of the Mirror, can I? I want to give it a gift. Where is it?

“I want to give it a gift. ” His captive stared at him. Sholl was beginning to rage. He hit the vampire in the face repeatedly as he spoke. Each time, its head snapped quickly back and it stared at him full on again, without fear, uncowed. “I want to give it a gift. I’ll fucking give it something. Don’t you want it to have something it can’t fucking forget? A present. Where’s the Fish of the Mirror? Where? I’ll give it something. I have a fucking gift for it, something it can’t refuse. Where is it? Where is the Fish of the Mirror? Where? Where is the Fish of the Mirror? Where is the Fish of the Mirror? ”

And suddenly, in a voice that was shockingly human, the captive told him. It took full seconds for Sholl to realise what had happened. He began to smile. Of course.

He had won. The vampire did not believe he could hurt the Fish of the Mirror. What did it matter if he knew where it was? Perhaps it was the vampire’s alien psychology, that made it give in to his taunts, or perhaps it wanted to see what he would do with the information—what betrayal he would attempt, and fail at. It would not believe he had no plan.

But Sholl saw that his captive seemed to have shocked its comrades. The other vampires were twitching nervously, and rolling their heads on their necks like sick dogs. Here and there Sholl heard them howl.

He looked up, directly up, watching the black coil of the stairs disappear over his head, hearing the silence and the little drips and scratches of underground sound, and the mouth-noise of the vampires. He became terrified, very suddenly, and when he directed the torchlight into the faces of the things that surrounded him, picked them out one by one and saw them watch him unblinking, their mouths slack or grimacing, he was weak.

“Why don’t they touch me?” he whispered. He hated his plaintive voice. “None of them. No imago in London. And why do you?”

He looked back down at the chained creature below him, and let out a cry as he saw that one patchogue braver than the rest had crept closer, close enough to touch, and that it was reaching out now and grasping the handcuffs. Sholl stepped backward and levelled the shotgun, but he was too slow: the vampire had burst its comrade’s chains and it ululated briefly as it hauled the bloodied captive onto its shoulders and rescued it, loping at ridiculous speed into the dark corridors.

Sholl fired into the shadows, and in the brief hot light he saw the pellets tear open several of the vampires, sending them screaming into one another, but he knew that he had missed his attacker and its rescuer. They had gone much quicker than he could follow, becoming invisible in their siblings and the dark.

The smell of sulphur was rank on him. After their first screech, even the wounded vampires were silent.

The ranks closed, and all that had changed was that now the faces closest to his, staring at him, were splashed with their neighbours’ blood.

In the darkness under the earth, Sholl stared at them, and waited for them to come at him, but still they did not.

It took Sholl less time to come up than it had to descend. Then he had walked in terror of where he was going—now he wanted passionately to get out.