V-Wars

Fayne nodded again.



“Was that the truth?”



“Yes.” Fayne’s voice was totally normal now, though it was small, almost childlike in a lost and broken way. He closed his eyes.



“We have to discover how this happened. When it happened,” said Swann, “and why.”



With his eyes still shut, Fayne shook his head in disgust. “Well, gee, man, you think I haven’t thought about that? You think if I knew how this shit started that I wouldn’t have told you? And told everyone? Christ! You think I was bitten by Count frigging Dracula?”



“No. Dracula is fiction, and what’s happening to you is real.”



Behind him he heard Max quietly whisper to Feldman, “The hell is he talking about?”



Feldman shushed him.



“If it’s real,” Swann went on, “then it must have an explanation. There will be physical evidence. I mean … you know that there are changes in your body.”



“Yes.” A single word, hissed out like a curse.



“Then those are symptoms of something real, something measurable. Dr. Feldman has a top team here. She wants to re-do the blood work they did when you were first arrested. She’ll do that a lot more. She’ll do everything, Michael. CT scans, DNA tests. Everything. She’ll be looking for something that could tell us what’s going on.”



“Like what? Little bats fluttering around in my bloodstream?” sneered Fayne.



“No,” said Swann. “Something much more practical. A bacterium, maybe. Or a virus. Some infectious agent, some genetic anomaly.”



Fayne finally opened his eyes. The sclera was nearly white again and spots of ordinary brown showed among the brick red. Swann’s hammering heart slowed by a single degree.



A frown of doubt twisted Fayne’s features. “What are you saying? Are you telling me that this is something I caught?”



Swann forced a smile onto his mouth. “Why not?” he asked.



“That’s stupid. You know what I am.”



“No, Michael … that’s just it. We don’t.”



“I’m a vampire!” Fayne said, but instead of shouting it, he whispered it, like a secret they all shared. Like a curse that was only real and powerful if spoken aloud. Like a sinner confessing his greatest transgression. “A vampire.”



The orderlies and Detective Schmidt shuffled uneasily. Dr. Feldman, whose nose had stopped bleeding, stood with a handful of crumpled, blood soaked tissues. Swann glanced at them and then back at Fayne.



“Okay,” he said, “but what does that mean? I mean … really. What is a vampire?”



“I …” Fayne began, but he had nowhere to go, so he shook his head.



Swann looked around the room. “Do any of you know? If vampires are real, do any of you believe that they’re supernatural?”



No one responded. Not even a shake of the head.



“That’s just it,” said Swann emphatically, “no one knows. If vampires are real, and if that’s what you are, Michael, then we have to be smart and practical about how we look at this, and we can’t start with the supernatural. We can’t. We have to start with common sense, with what we know to be true. With what we can touch and weigh and measure and photograph. That’s science. That’s practical.”



He drew in a breath as his audience, the man tied to the bed and the others shackled to Swann’s every word, listened. “I’ve been studying vampires my whole life. I’ve written more books on the subject than anyone. The police called me in because what they were seeing, both in the, um, murder victims and the suspect tilted them toward the concept of vampires. Okay, sure, we can all freak out about that. But we can’t stay freaked out. Not even you, Michael. If you were some kind of supernatural monster then how could we hold you here?”



Doubt flickered across Fayne’s face, and for him, doubt was a lifeline.



“In stories, vampires can turn into mist, or change in animals. You can’t do that, right?”



“I — don’t know,” said Fayne.



“Sure you do. If you could, then you’d be out of here already. You’d have turned into something else that couldn’t be held down by restraints.”



Fayne said nothing, waiting.



“No one’s using a magic charm to hold you here. No holy relics, no charms made from rosewood or garlic. None of that is happening.”



“No,” said Fayne softly.



“Jesus,” whispered Max and Swann shot him a quick look and gave a small warning shake of his head.



Swann sat down on the edge of the bed. It was a calculated move on his part, a show of confidence to the orderlies, but more importantly a message to Fayne that he wasn’t afraid.



However, he was afraid. Terribly afraid, and like everyone else in the room he was grasping at the words he spoke to pull him back into a world that made sense.



“Listen to me, Michael,” Swann said gently, “one of the things we academics are good at is finding very rational and occasionally deeply boring explanations for everything. We balance folklore and science as a way of understanding why people believe what they believe. A lot of what’s in vampire legends is distortion because these beliefs were created by people trying to understand things that were beyond them, beyond their understanding of the world as they knew it.”



He fished for an example. “Take SIDS — Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Imagine trying to make sense of that in the twelfth or sixteenth century. Parents put a healthy baby down for the night, and in the morning the baby is dead. There are no marks, no signs of disease, no bites from night predators or insects. There’s nothing, but the baby is dead. It died in the dark of night.



“Now, put yourselves into the heads of those people. Villagers living in pre-industrial times. Deeply religious people who expected God and His angels to look after innocent babies. They cannot — simply can not — accept that God would take this child’s life, or allow it to die of anything approaching ‘natural’ causes. Their entire belief system would shatter if they believed that, or if they believed that it was completely random, that ‘these things just happen.’



“So, in order for the world to make any kind of sense, there had to be something deliberate which caused the child’s death. Some malevolent force, some creature of evil who stole in during the night and stole the child’s life. The priest of their church would agree with this, perhaps even suggest it. The people would pray for protection against such a monster, and since SIDS rarely strikes the same family twice, the next child would be born and would grow up, safe and healthy. What’s the result? They believe that their prayers protected the new baby from harm, which both reinforced their belief in God and their belief in evil monsters.”



“But how does that explain this?” asked Schmidt.



Swann shot him a shut the fuck up look. Schmidt said nothing else.



“Most of the monsters we believed in can be explained away by science. Even the word ‘nosferatu,’ which Bram Stoker incorrectly translated as ‘undead’ in Dracula, doesn’t mean that. It means ‘plague carrier.’ Most of the great plagues have been associated with increases in beliefs of vampires and other monsters.”



Fayne’s eyes were almost completely normal now. “He’s right,” he said, ticking his head toward Schmidt. “That doesn’t explain me.”



“No,” said Swann, “but it clears the board of almost all of the supernatural elements of vampirism. It removes ninety-nine percent of the vampire myths.”



“What’s left?” asked Fayne, clinging to Swann’s words.



Swann said, “Well, let’s look at a parallel first. For years there were beliefs of a tribe of tiny, savage predators. They stood about three feet tall — smaller than pygmies — and they attacked under cover of darkness and stole babies to eat. Monsters. Science dismissed all of this as myth, just as science dismissed most ‘monsters.’ It was bad reportage from people who didn’t understand what they were seeing. Or whisper-down-the-lane tales that had been blown out of all proportion. But in 2003, Australian and Indonesian scientists found a cave on an island east of Bali with the bones of creatures that matched the descriptions of these monsters exactly. Not closely — exactly. The Ebu gogo. National Geographic did a whole story on them. These little people are now known as the Homo floresiensis scientists nicknamed them ‘Hobbits’ after the little people in Tolkien.”



“Yeah,” said Fayne, nodding, “I saw that special. Little people. They found bones.”



“Bones, tools, all sorts of things.”



“But — how does that …?”



“The scientists determined that the Ebu gogo were not myths but rather an offshoot of homo sapiens. Just as Homo heidelbergensis, Orrorin tugenensis and Homo ergaster were different genetic lines from what became homo sapiens. Different evolutionary paths.”



The silence almost screamed as everyone digested this.



Swann continued, “Science had been trying to figure out what happened to the Neanderthals. Why’d they suddenly vanish? What happened to them? Well, thanks to programs like the Human Genome Project, we now know that our cousins didn’t just die out, and Cro-Magnon didn’t slaughter them all. We intermarried, interbred. They became part of us. Everyone whose family line never left Africa has some Neanderthal DNA in them. Everyone.”



“But —”



“So,” said Swann, “what if vampires are the same”



“They’re … Neanderthals?” asked Max.



“No,” said Swann, “what if vampires were a different branch of human evolution? What if they really existed? Not as supernatural creatures, but as different kinds of humans? What if they existed, and over the years they died out as a separate line?” He touched his chest and then touched Fayne’s. “We could both have the DNA for vampirism. For whatever it is that makes a vampire.”