A Love Like Blood by Marcus Sedgwick

Author:Marcus Sedgwick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Horror, Historical
ISBN: 9781444751949
Publisher: Hodder
Published: 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

So I did ask a psychologist: Donald. I wrote to him, explaining what I was after, and we met in a pub in London one evening in September.

‘My God,’ he said. ‘What happened to your face?’

‘You should see the rest of me,’ I said, smiling weakly. It had been weeks since my double assault, and yet I still bore the scars. My nose had been put straight, but was still swollen, a few cuts had yet to heal.

‘What happened?’

‘I was hit by a car,’ I said. ‘Nothing serious. Look, what do you know? Did you find anything out?’

Donald looked at me oddly.

‘What’s all this about anyway? Something to do with your research? Got a screwy patient?’

I decided that was the easiest angle.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Something like that. So, what do you have?’

‘Not much. There have been a few papers written, no books. It appears that there are cases of certain people who have been found to … well, drink blood.’

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘Listen here, Charles, what is this about? If you have a patient with some disorder you ought to pass them on to the psychiatric unit. It’s not your—’

‘I know, I know. I just want to know what I might be dealing with before I decide what to do. What do you have?’

Donald seemed placated by that. He sipped at his drink, then sighed.

‘As I said, not much. Essentially, we have two types of blood drinkers. There are those with the desire to drink others’ blood. And there are those who drink their own. In this latter camp are some cases of patients who display factitious disorders; who want to maintain the fiction that they are ill, in order to seek attention. There’s some French guy, I’d have to look the name up again, who’s writing about cases of self-induced anaemia in young girls. The doctors were mystified until it was found how they did it. These girls were biting the backs of their own tongues and swallowing the blood in massive quantities. Very often they’d be sick, but the resulting anaemia was all too real.’

I listened to everything that Donald had to say, and felt sure that he was telling me everything he himself knew.

‘Do you think it’s possible,’ I asked, ‘that someone could become obsessed with drinking blood? Other people’s blood? Maybe thinking they are a vampire, or that they gain some power or strength that way?’

‘Yes, of course. Anything’s possible. And our mental institutions have plenty of cases of people who’ve done terrible things, without any idea that what they were doing was wrong.’

‘But could such a person seem normal otherwise? I mean, aren’t they all just raving lunatics? Climbing the walls, literally?’

‘Not at all,’ Donald said. ‘Many cases of psychosis go undetected for long periods of time for the simple reason that the sufferer appears, to all external appearance, to be utterly normal and rational.’

Donald told me the rest of what he knew. He’d asked around his colleagues and found that there were a couple of Americans who were about to publish on the subject of what they termed clinical vampirism.

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