Young Blood by Brian M. Stableford

Author:Brian M. Stableford [Stableford, Brian M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781480496309
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1992-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

9

Viners didn't try to follow me out of his office, let alone out of the building. I didn't go past the isolation lab, so Teresa never saw me. I passed more people on the pavement when I got out into the cold, clean air, but they moved out of my way easily enough. I was just a person in a hurry, no big deal.

I could have slowed down once I was away from the building. The urgency had gone out of my flight, but I didn't try to stop until I was a couple of hundred yards away, away from the looming black towers.

It was still a clear, bright morning but to me it was grey and dark and full of grotesque shadows. The sky was sullen and the sun, which ought to have been a blaze of white light, was like a dark pit sucking the light and colour out of the world. Nothing made sense; although I knew that it was me who was out of sensory step, I couldn't help feeling that it was the world around me which had changed and become alien.

I continued moving, but only at walking pace. I didn't go towards the road and the town but in the opposite direction, towards the wilderness which lay at the heart of the campus.

I slowed down again as I approached the bridge over the stream, and finally stopped there to catch my breath. My heart was hammering and it was difficult to suck air into my lungs. I had a pain in my side which folded me over, but it didn't last long.

As soon as I felt able to do so, I walked on, past Wombwell House. There were students passing in and out, laughing and gossiping. I went past the main door. My hands and feet seemed to belong entirely to me again—I was back in control. My eyes wouldn't see straight, and the hunger was still stirring inside me, but the fit of pure madness that had seized hold of me in Viners’ office had subsided. I'd run it off. I stopped again, to lean against one of the ancient lampposts on the path which ran alongside the stand of trees where Anne had been attacked.

To me, the woodland was lightless and sinister, every bit as menacing as it must have seemed to Anne as she'd tried to walk past it on her way home. To everyone else it, it must have seemed to be at its mildest and most ordinary.

I stared into the unnatural darkness, at the black, leafless branches. They captured and held my gaze. Somehow, they seemed pregnant with life, as though half-formed shapes were stirring in every problematic shadow, trying to capture my attention.

Here, I thought, here are monsters.

'You're Gil Molari, aren't you?'

I started, and turned abruptly to see who had spoken.

It was a woman in her early thirties, wearing a shapeless sweater—apparently grey, although it probably didn't look that way to her—and baggy black slacks which presumably were black in actuality.

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