Descendant

Days of Silence

I was taken by ambulance to East Grinstead, in Sussex, to the Archibald McIndoe Burns Unit, which had cared for so many young Spitfire pilots during World War Two. I spent six weeks there, recovering from my injuries, while August turned to September, and the sweltering heat of the summer became a memory.

My burns were mostly first-degree, although I needed a skin graft on the left side of my neck and two fingers on my left hand were permanently crooked. I broke my collarbone, too, when I hit the water, and fractured three ribs.

It was a peaceful, almost dreamlike time. Out of my window I could see a red-tiled rooftop and the top of a large horse chestnut tree, with bright green conkers beginning to ripen on it. The sky seemed to be the same pale blue every day, as if it were a child’s painting, rather than a real sky.

I had plenty of visitors, of course. Charles Frith came to see me two days after I was admitted, along with George Goodhew and a bespectacled woman from the Home Office, who said nothing at all but took pages of notes in Pitman’s shorthand.

Charles Frith brought me a large box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates, which he immediately opened and proceeded to eat.

“Hope you don’t like coffee creams,” he said. “They’re my favorite.”

“No sign of Duca, I suppose?” I asked him.

Charles Frith picked out another chocolate and shook his head.

“We’ve had Royal Navy divers searching the whole area,” said George. “They’ve even been diving as far away as Pilsey Island, where they found Commander Crabb.”

“Thanks to your efforts, Captain,” Charles Frith added, “I think we can safely say that Mr. Dorin Duca has had his chips. Not only that, we’ve tracked down three of your dead Screechers and given them polio jabs, too. Two in London and one in Birmingham.”

“Heads removed, bodies buried in consecrated ground?”

Charles Frith put his fingertip to his lips. “The Health Minister is going to announce to the press tomorrow that the Korean Flu epidemic has been successfully contained.”

“Isn’t that kind of premature? We still don’t know how many strigoi mortii there might be.”

“True. But when we do find them, we know how to deal with them, don’t we, thanks to you.” He stood up. “By the way, the police dug up the back garden at the Laurels. They found poor old Dr. Watkins, and his receptionist, and they found Professor Braithwaite, too, and his two assistants from the Royal Aircraft Establishment. All of them gutted like herring.”

He put another chocolate into his mouth, but promptly spat it into my wastebasket. “Ye gods! Pah! Turkish delight!”

On the afternoon of my third day in hospital, I phoned Jill. Her father answered, and he didn’t sound at all pleased to hear from me.

“Jill’s not here, Captain.”

“Is she OK?”

“I said, she’s not here.”

“Well, can you ask her to call me, please? I’d really like to talk to her.”

“I’m sorry, old man, but I think you’ve already caused us enough trouble, don’t you?”

He hung up. For a moment, I thought of calling back, but then I hung up, too.

I telephoned Louise every day, however, and on the third week she flew over from New York to see me. I was out in the hospital garden by then, in a wheelchair, with a thick plaid blanket wrapped around me. She came across the lawn carrying a large bunch of flowers and a shopping bag full of books.

Her hair was cut short and pixie-feathery, so that she looked even more like Audrey Hepburn than ever. She was wearing a smart lemon-yellow suit with white piping around it. She smelled of Chanel No. 5.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “You can’t kiss me yet. Risk of infection.”

She sat down on the green-painted bench next to me. “My God, Jim. Your poor face.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not so bad as it looks. My left hand got the worst of it.”

“Jean and Harold send you their best. So does Mo. When do you think you’ll be able to come home?”

“Soon as the doctors give me the all-clear. Three or four weeks, not much longer.”

“I wish you could tell me what happened.”

I laid my bandaged right hand on her knee. “I think it’s better if you don’t know. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.”

“You won’t have to do this again, though?”

“No. But it’s possible that I’m still at risk.”

She raised one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “I don’t understand. What kind of a risk?”

“Well. the people I was brought over here to deal with. they’re not very good at forgiving and forgetting. I think we’ve managed to catch up with most of them, but there’s always a chance that one or two of them might have slipped through the net.”

“Meaning what? That they’re going to come after you?”

“Something like that.”

“Even in the States?”

“They don’t give up easy, I’m afraid.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Move, I’m afraid. Go live someplace else, under a different name.”

“Move? Are you serious? Where? I can’t move. I have all my friends in New Milford. My work. Besides, I don’t want to move. And I happen to like the name Falcon.”

“Sweetheart. these people are very, very dangerous.”

“So why did you agree to get mixed up in this at all? Didn’t you spare one single thought for me?”

“I didn’t have any choice. I’m sorry.”

“Oh — you’re sorry? That makes it all right, then.”

Louise stayed all afternoon but I guess I already knew that our marriage had been torpedoed below the waterline. Louise lived for her social life — her dinner parties and her charity drives and her craft classes. She would never be able to tolerate a solitary existence in a strange city, under an assumed name, jumping every time the phone rang and checking every stranger who came knocking at our door.

But until I was sure that Duca’s remains had been quartered and beheaded and buried in holy ground, and until I was sure that every other strigoi mortii had been hunted down and destroyed, I would always have to live with the fear that they would be trying to find me.

The living Screechers I was less concerned about. Without a dead Screecher to guide them, and to give them the final drink of blood they needed to become immortal, they would soon decay so much that they would be beyond any hope of transformation. Their bodies would eventually be discovered in cellars, and attics, and under railroad arches, so extensively decayed that nobody would ever realize that they had once been vampires.

Louise flew home five days later. She was still advised by my doctors not to kiss me, and it occurred to me that I might never kiss her again.