Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

In the Midst of Life

Band(s): Panic-centric with appearances from members of other bands.
Pairing(s): Ryan/Brendon, some Ryan/Jon, background Spencer/Greta, Gerard/Lyn-Z
Rating/Warnings: NC-17
Summary: Victorian vampire au. In which Ryan and Spencer are most unhappy vampires and Gerard tries to help them.

Thank you very much indeed to stephanometra for beta reading.

The art for this fic can be found here, and the mix here

It is as if they glide down the street rather than walk, measured and slow, step by step. No one sees them, but there they are, illuminated for a moment as they pass under the light of a street lamp. The yellow light gleams off their hair, hiding the actual colour and showing only the dull sheen of it, loose to the shoulders on each. The black lace ruff round the man's neck is a clear silhouette, and the skirt of the woman's burgundy-coloured silk dress is kicked back into the pool of light just as the woman leaves it.

Ahead of them is a man. William and Victoria haven't yet compiled a personal description of any great detail, but his gait seems that of the youthful drunkard. His wispy hair becomes a bright halo of fluff as he too steps in and out of the intermittent light. Perhaps his meandering is not drunkenness. Perhaps he is rich, perhaps poor. No one here cares. Careful, steady steps take the two closer to him as they make their way towards him, much faster than he makes his away from them.

They are at his back now, and this is the lovely bit, when they grasp their victim by the shoulder, hard usually, though sometimes they might rest their hand on their shoulder with a tender flutter of fingers. Then they spin them round to face them so they sprawl, caught off balance. It is that first moment of physical overpowering that makes them feel like they are taking this person, like you might take a lover, the only lover for you, in some dream of ultimate bliss. Or like they are taken, in those wriggling, alarming dreams their unconscious fishes up from time to time. Just that one first touch, it's better even than what comes after, when they bite in and feel their mouth fill with blood.

Victoria holds the man against her, he and William swooning into her as William leans in and bites first. He gulps as the blood flows down his throat, full enough to choke, and trickles over his lips. Then he licks, careful to savour, like someone lingering over fine wine. William breaks off after only a little while, and Victoria moves her head down to the man's broken throat. He is quite adrift with terror. Sometimes when their victims are like this, Victoria and William are held in a dreamy kind of hypnosis by their own spell, though it is when they struggle and bite back like mad weasels that they feel they are perfect.

Victoria sucks at the wound for a while before raising her head. "Shall we have all of him? I really don't feel like finding another tonight." William hesitates. For all that this is what they do, sometimes they succumb to the temptation to make things easy. Wary of leaving an obvious trail of corpses in their wake, they usually feed from two or three people a night, which increases the amount of stalking pleasure, anyway. Sometimes though, a careless mood lights upon them and smothers that meticulous, pretentious pleasure. Nothing less than the thick, inebriating glee of drinking a person all up will do.

"Very well," says William, and unknown to the man, his chance at being abandoned to stagger on his drunken way blinks out, as William takes another turn. They pull away from him as a cab suddenly clatters through the street, but neither driver nor passenger seems to perceive anything alarming.

When the man has fled into the infinite beyond and there is only a corpse left on their hands, they don't resist further carelessness.

"We haven't left one behind for ages," William says, wheedling, though Victoria needs no coaxing.

"It's only cautious, actually," she says. "We can't be certain he doesn't know of that house. Better to leave a corpse where he might hear of it than find ourselves lumbered with it and faced with him."

They are pursued off and on themselves. It brings a certain element to – to life. They leave the man's body behind, sprawling across the pavement as Victoria and William wander off in search of their destination. It is nearby, but they feel more than a little heady and addled from the blood they've ingested. They've been walking peevishly up and down a particular road for some time before Victoria cries, "But this is the road it's in, isn't it?" They stalk the street with redoubled vim, peering at each house in turn. They have forgotten the exact location of their own house, one of many spares they keep in various countries. They haven't visited it in many years, and are sure only that they will know when they see it.

It is right at the end of the street, unattached to any other building, the derelict, unoccupied black sheep of a neighbourhood of large, grand houses. William and Victoria left an upstairs window open and all other entrances boarded up. Vampires are frail corpses, tenuously maintained, but then they also brim with harsh, barbarous strength and energy when replete, like cannibals who gain the qualities of their enemies when they take them into their bodies. These vampires clamber easily up the wall to the open window.

"It smells well enough," William says brightly. They use their houses as repositories for dead bodies, which is why they use a rotatary system and are only returning to this one after a long while. They go down to the dining room, where, without conscious irony, they had laid the corpses. They trot down the stairs, heads jerking stiffly from side to side in apprehension of their enemy.

"All down to bone!" Victoria says, twitching at the cloth-wrapped jumble piled onto the long table. Domestic concerns settled, William and Victoria trail around the ground floor. "I hope we stay in London for a while," says Victoria. "We might easily see them on the street."

"We would have to spend a great part of the night looking out," says William. "I know, I know, it is not as if we have much else to do."

"We should develop a system," says Victoria, "and obtain a map of the streets of London."

"I detest maps," William says with unwonted vehemence. The sixteenth century was an ill preparation for map-reading. He shifts topics: "I wish we could thread these teeth. If we pulled them out …"

"Whose – oh, them. We might, I suppose. What do you think about trying acid baths on the rest? It's beginning to work on my nerves having them squirreled away everywhere; we never remember which lot are at what stage. And it is such a tell-tale."

"If you like, though it seems very time-consuming."

"William, you just said we have not much else to do. What else are you going to do with your time? And what is threading teeth, if it comes to that? Though I would rather like to wear ropes of teeth around my neck. I should look like a savage goddess. Not much good to you with your ruff."

William wears his ruff to cover his neck, badly scarred after being Turned with savagery. "I could braid them in my hair," he says.

"If you like to look a perfect idiot."

* *

In London, not particularly near William and Victoria, is an attic. It is not the kind of attic that is treated like a respectable part of the house, nor has it ever been. It doesn't have a proper ceiling, just a few haphazard beams and planks criss-crossing a couple of inches above head level – if one doesn't happen to be tall. The walls are brick on one side and stone on the other, not plaster. Most of the floor space is taken up with heaps of household jumble no one will find a use for again, towering up to poke through the planks. Behind a barrier of boxes and upturned furniture, and in front of the window, are two crumpled heaps of blankets. A young man lies curled up in one, a peevish line between his eyebrows; the attic is chilly on this not particularly warm spring night, and his hands are mottled yellow and pink with poor circulation as he rubs them together for warmth.

Now something mars the dark window's reflection of the room and Ryan himself. The vision of another young man's head, bearded, briefly swims behind it before the sash is yanked up and the man rolls onto the floor.

Without speaking, Spencer brandishes the stone hot water bottle he is clutching – the largest container they have - and Ryan sits up, clasping his knees. There are a few glass bottles scattered about the blankets; Spencer takes one, uncorks the stone bottle, and he and Ryan watch unenthusiastically as the blood glugs into the other bottle. When it is full and not before, Ryan pushes his own bottle at Spencer. They sit for a while, breathing in as if in preparation before drinking. It's something that takes almost a quarter of an hour, off and on, shuddering and bowing heads before another bout. The blood is from a butcher's shop Spencer has an agreement with, and it is clotted, not particularly fresh, and cold. Sometimes they try to make a little fire to warm it through, but these little fires are dangerous, firstly because they find them difficult to contain, and secondly the smoke might seep into the rest of the house and alert someone to their presence. They can never get the blood anything more than tepid anyway, so it hardly seems worth the risk.

There is plenty of blood left in the hot water bottle, but Spencer replaces the stopper,and neither of them take any more. They can never bring themselves to drink quite enough, and it makes them cold and languid. They both look as if they are waking up now, though, as Ryan gets out a sticky paper bag with two buns in it they'd saved. They sigh with satisfaction at biting in; they can digest food when full with blood but don't need it, where they do need blood. It is really only the promise of the bun afterwards that keeps them drinking; they might easily let it slide, otherwise.

After eating, they huddle back down into their blankets, propped up on their elbows. When finally they speak, it is to play a game. They undertake to talk about boots, their conversation constricted by alphabetical considerations.

"Leather is such a familiar smell, yet it would not be if boots and shoes were not made of it."

"Many boots make the noise that can be heard when many people march together, rather than the feet marching inside them."

"Never wear boots that are too small, it is very bad for you."

"One thinks of the boot as an item of itself, and never remembers that it is comprised of pieces sewn together."

Outside, the attic window glows dimly in a dark house, the small circle of wavering light inside a vaguely apposite metaphor for the littleness of their lives – sickly little corpses, the spirit in them guttering low.

* *

The house below them is a boarding-house; the proprietor, one Gerard Way. It is certainly not the least shabby, dismal and haphazard establishment in London: when wondering if it is the worst, one must remember that contrary to facile proverb, things can always get worse. A great deal of the explanation for this state of affairs lies in the fact that Mr Way thinks of himself more as another lodger in the place than its landlord. Mr Way the younger, his brother, could also be considered its landlord – he does do a few things about the place – but again, he has his own concerns. There are also a cook and a maid, but neither of them are very good at their own jobs, let alone taking on further, proprietary duties.

At this moment, Gerard is at a house a great deal grander and more pleasant than his own, about to take part in a séance. He is the medium, and he feels both the anticipation of challenge and an edge of dis-ease. Yet inside the fear, there is also the anticipation of pleasure – enjoyment, like a flower blooming within the wrapping around its stem. Gerard's mind feels as if it ricochets through attitudes, unable to settle. He doesn't know if he sits down only to venture off on a childishly indulgent adventure inside his mind, entirely self-interested, or to make grand ethereal connections with the bourne from which no traveller returns. He doesn't know, yet there is a world (worlds) of difference between. Thus Gerard might be in the Sanders' drawing room, but he doesn't know where he is.

"Do you use spirit controls?" Mr. Sanders asks him curiously.

"Oh yes." Several people in the room answer for him. Most of the people here, though not his hosts, are familiar with his séances.

"There's a wolf and a little girl," Gerard says, and as always he wants to roll up his eyes with exasperation at the sound of his voice in this setting. He tries to make the sound deeper and clearer, rounding the vowels instead of stretching them, and tapping all the consonants, but it is still the nasally sound of all pretentious, common little men. He always wonders why they do not take him for a charlatan.

"I cannot discover their names. I do not think the child was ever a real child, or the wolf a real wolf. I speak to the little girl, mostly, and when I am deeply entranced, as the wolf. I believe the wolf is representative of the wilder, deeper, more inhuman regions of death. What he says may seem nonsensical, but it will be true. The little girl is tricksier."

"It is she who brings unruly spirits," someone says.

"I speak to the dead through her, and they are often inane and innocuous except for those listeners who feel a chill of recognition. But things can take a vicious turn."

"She often expresses herself through writing" – someone else, quite unable to remain quiet when they know the answer.

"And you do not experience manifestations, is that correct?" asks Mr. Sanders.

"Indeed," says Gerard. "I am afraid that my psychical powers do not allow the strain. The one occasion on which I attempted this feat, I succeeded but briefly – or at least, a glimmering white figure appeared, but it knocked over the table and I fell entirely unconscious. According to reports, the figure then tipped up its face to Heaven and slowly rose through the ceiling in imitation of the Virgin's ascent to Heaven, leaving behind a cacophony of hideous shrieks. Emanating from no visible source," he adds.

This lack of manifestation constitutes part of Gerard's mediumistic appeal. His patrons never have to deal with the complicated business of locking him in a cupboard so all parties might be satisfied there was no trickery afoot. The air of suspicion that pervades spiritualism these days is so vulgar, and despite all precautions there are so many rumours of deceit and sometimes outright discovery. And the medium is really the focal point of the affair; the audience wants to know what they are doing, what people look like when they grapple with the ineffable. Gerard's repetoire lacking manifestations, what remains was mostly the ineffable. That leaves aside the issue of physical proof, which is the crisis point of the whole exercise, and therefore something to at once hunt down and shrink from.

Of course, Gerard would have liked to conjure ectoplasmic phenomena for his audience, but he could not for the life of him fathom how. If one were shut up in a cupboard, hands bound, with a crowd of people in the room beyond presumably gazing hard at said cupboard, he could not imagine how one might then get out and flit about draped in reams of white fabric, giving one's audience the impression that one were a real live ghost. And then there would be the business of getting back in one's cupboard when they came to open it, still bound, and no cheesecloth in sight. Gerard thought his heart should burst if he did know enough to attempt it. But he can't help but dwell on such antics, because they seem so much to represent "real" spiritualism to so many people.

There was obviously some secret sect of mediums where this information was discovered to initiates, but Gerard had certainly never gained admittance to any such society. He fell into spiritualism at random, through a woman who had struck up conversation with him at church. (It had been Christmas, and she'd thought he looked in need of enlightenment.) This is probably why Gerard never feels as if he knows what he is doing. Sometimes he wonders if it is only the ones who are caught who are guilty of artifice. Sometimes he wonders if all the other mediums believe that none of it is true. Both of these thoughts make him despair, in a way that doesn't alter the fact that he also feels, defiantly, that perhaps it is a good thing he cannot quite determine which category he falls into. He need not be forced to deal with the implications of either.

"Are you sure you did not attempt more than once?" asks Mrs. Sanders. "I am sure I have heard of similar incidents when something was upset . . ."

"Er, no," says Gerard. "On a couple of occasions, I did become over-excited and knock the candle over. Which did create some confusion. Now I request that we sit in darkness, or place the candle on some other surface."

Another thing that creates a niche for Gerard is that he is a man. Almost all mediums are women, young attractive ones at that. Some people, who feel their interest to be a little more scientific, or at least less prurient than most, wish to avoid the usual spectacle. The appeal of that spectacle lies in dealing with a young, pretty girl, who might in another life have been an actress, in contemplating her otherworldliness and thinking of her contending with both dangerous forces, so much stronger than herself, and the sweet serenity possessed by the dear departed. With Gerard, a shabby young man the social inferior of all other parties involved, unpolished in every way, the focus is only on what he does. He makes people feel as if they are afloat the raft of earthly life, the sea of the great beyond around them and beneath them, as he tells it. The fun of yearning for the supernatural is served plain.

Eventually the company all seat themselves around the large, glossy round table. The lights are put out, one candle left alight which Mrs. Jessett, a veteran of Gerard's séances, holds carefully aloft while everyone shuffles about, making sure they are quite settled. Then she blows out the candle and everyone links hands in the dark. The next moment they all burst out into the Hallelujah Chorus, which Gerard always makes them sing at the beginning of séances. He says the way the sound of the word Hallelujah swells makes his sense peel adrift from his body. Also, it distracts them from Gerard in those getting-started moments. He likes the pleasure they take in singing it; the merry fluting of those who have always been told they have a fine voice, the joyous blarings of those not usually allowed to sing, and the ones self-conscious about the sound they make. The last make themselves conspicuous by saying the words instead of singing them, falling like cold drops of water into the rippling circles of the group's voices.

Gerard is sat next to Mrs. Sanders and a young man named Walter Panderson. Mr. Panderson is enjoying his own rich baritone. He clasps their hands and mouths the word "Hallelujah" to himself a few times. He is laughing inside, yet ready and waiting for sincerity. Today he decides not to do the table-rapping and so on, at least not at once. Table-rapping is fraud, plain and simple, though he is always hopeful something will move before he moves it. He can't bale out entirely the flood of craven self-indulgence that wonders how he would know if his impulses were being borrowed. With the other things, the automatic writing and the channelling, Gerard does not know. He tries to know and it exhausts him; grubbing about in his head and as far as he can get outside it for any sign.

"Words falling through me," Gerard mutters. "Something is finding me . . . it is beautiful but it is all gone . . . no it isn't, I can see it from this angle."

This is what he always does; he reaches out with a determination born of playacting the conviction he will find something. There never seems to be enough space between his call, when he says he can see something, and its answer, when he can see something and people seem to know what he means when he tells them about it. Gerard cannot discern whether it is merely something that dwells in one cell of himself calling back in response to something it hears through the walls. His perturbation on this varies according to what he comes out with. Sometimes things are disturbing enough to make him hope that he is not their source. More often it appears that either he or the dead are astoundingly dull – really, he would not have guessed either had such a preoccupation with spoons and vases. He hopes death has more to offer than a vantage-point over earth, from which to watch one's loved ones and their vase related activities.

Now, though, Gerard is coming upon something different.

Gerard can see something that is beautiful but all gone; a great flare of deep red. The red is so vivid and biting it makes him think of pain, yet there is something of feminine beauty in it. It is performing some passionate action in existing, this bright flare – it is like red skirts gathered up and spinning out in a wild dance, but what it is really doing is burning away – it has burnt away, what Gerard is seeing is the crisis point of its immolation. Only then it seems to wring itself out, so that another layer flutters in spirals around the burning, red petals or perhaps autumn leaves in pretty pointed shapes.

"It hurts, but it wants to – it makes me feel like a grand, existing thing – I want to tell Walter!"

Walter's hand jerks in Gerard's. "I only know one dead person," he whispers, and it is plain he is not sure he wants to talk to that person.

"I never said anything to you, Walter; I didn't tell you, and now I have nothing to tell you with. I wanted so much to flaunt myself in front of you, for you to look at me and see me. My words are rising up out of death to reach you, like skeletons struggling out of their tombs. My love, and my words still in my mouth, they reanimate even what is not there. My love is inside my words like bone inside the skin . . . I used to think about your bones, your ribs . . . if you took your clothes off there would be those solid curving strips of bone, in between the hollowness and over your heart. And your skin would cover them almost smoothly but there would be shadows where the birdcage showed through, and I could have traced them with my tongue. My love hangs off me like water, but it is frozen, like icicles welling off my fingertips. I need you to feel my skin, because my love isn't selfless and disinterested like it ought to be. I conjure you to see me, to know me, to have me . . . I'd spread my legs for you, you know . . .This is Marigold, by the by, but I'm sure you knew. But I have no skin –" "Well, she might, Gerard could not help thinking. Granted, she didn't have it with her. "-and I can't do what I am for and I am run mad with it. My darling, my lamb, my dove, my love, I can't tell you how I envy you your skin, and your life. You have time, something to step out onto, to do things differently with, and I am all alone here, and I am a pretentious nothing saying I, because I am not anything ... and no matter how I try, I cannot reach you, because I have lost myself and I am terrified."

Gerard is banging his fists on the table; he realises Mrs. Sanders and Mr. Panderson are wincing and trying to free their hands, and ceases. The voice – his voice? – had been ardent, strident and thick with longing. The last words, however, had been high, thin and shaking. The circle looks around itself big-eyed, a little frightened and shocked but exactly satisfied. This is what they came for, to hear from the land of the dead what might not be said in the land of the living. But Gerard is wondering for the first time what good it can do the dead to speak, at least when it is the living they have business with.

"Was that the wolf or the little girl?" asks Mr. Sanders.

"I don't know," Gerard says through numb lips. "I don't usually speak as spirits."

Mr. Panderson sits hunched forward, his hands cupped round his mouth and his face blank.

"Would you like some wine?" Mrs. Sanders asks Gerard.

"Water," he says. Mr. Panderson drinks from a glass of water, too, and he and Gerard depart almost together, leaving the others to talk tentatively among themselves.

Gerard walks home. Nothing like this has happened before – he is quite certain that all that was this Marigold person. He is overwhelmed by this proof that such enormities are real. Gerard is a different person now, from who he thought, because he has called a dead person from the abyss to speak their words through him. He is a person that can be used that way. Gerard thinks he likes that, but he also wishes Marigold had left him alone. She affirms everything he ever thought about dead people, why he does this, but he would now not feel so shocked if that veil had not been blown aside. He feels passionately for dead people, because they are pinned by their lives – nothing can now be changed. They are pinned but they are also cut adrift and lost. Lethe, Gerard thinks vaguely. Now one has bobbed up, drowning and waving and choking at him in personal appeal to Walter, if not to him. He'd wanted to give them the chance to bob up, but now he doesn't much like being used for such hopelessness. How can anyone palliate death? What could the hapless Walter do for Marigold the dead?

When he arrives home, he sits in the dining room to think some more. One of the boarders comes in to search for his pen, and startles him. It is one of the young men come to London to seek their fortune, and may yet do so, but is at present he is the sort of person who boards here. The young man finds his pen; an inveterate letter writer, he left it at the table at breakfast at breakfast. After complaining about the maid, as do all the boarders on sighting the Ways, he says, "I can hear something moving around in the attic. Rats, I suppose, or pigeons. Perhaps you would be so good as to investigate, and set a trap? It disturbs my sleep."

"Perhaps I would," says Gerard. He sits some more after the lodger leaves. Then Michael and Gabriel Saporta come through the dark dining room, and he starts.

"I forgot you were out for the night."

"Why are you sitting in the dark?" asks Michael. "Come and have some cocoa."

"I had a difficult séance," says Gerard, but Michael and Gabriel are more interested in their own escapades with the dead. They go into the kitchen and find Clara, the maid still up, having put off the washing till the last minute.

"Why don't you go to bed?" Michael says, anxious to free the kitchen for conversation. She protests that she'd only have to do it in the morning, and he promises to do it for her.

"They are certainly back in the country," says Gabriel, when she has gone. "Michael tripped over a body! We were the first to find it." He speaks most smugly, and as if Michael had done something clever. "Strange how providence connects us, is it not?"

"You're sure it was a vampire's doing?" asks Gerard, who doesn't much feel like listening to Gabriel's breathless retelling of the epic story of pursuit he considers to be his life.

"Oh yes. A layman would almost certainly say he had had his throat cut, but the wound was particularly wide. The real sign is that the wound was a little gummy with blood, nothing more, and the body in general seemed drained." Gabriel disappears into the pantry to retrieve the milk, and sniffs at it suspiciously before deciding to use it.

"How do you know it was Victoria and Walter, and not another vampire?" asks Gerard.

"William," Gabriel corrects irritably.

"I said that," says Michael.

"I am sure it was they. I tell you, somehow I always come to know when they are about." Gabriel sips his cocoa, face serene. He is not long returned to England after undertaking an incidental Grand Tour of Europe, as these two vampires desperately tried to shake him off. They finally succeeded, and Gabriel returned home, maddened but sure William and Victoria would slink home when they thought it might be safe. They seem to have an attachment to England.

Michael assures Gerard that Gabriel is very frivolous in company, but he usually seems morose and brooding to Gerard. Now he seems positively to glow at the notion that he might catch these particular vampires, and drive the last vestiges of life in their bodies out with a stake. Gerard can remember when Gabriel hunted vampires in general, to save humans from their clutches. Then he became fixated on two especially vicious vampires and developed a peculiarly personal relationship with them from a distance. Gerard thinks of vampires, so nearly dead, hunting for life while Gabriel hunts them. As if Marigold would not drink blood and leave people dead, if it kept her in this world and not put out wherever she was now, where she seems to be getting on as well as if she'd been turned out into the snow in her nightgown. (Or rather her shroud, not that she had that with her either.)

"Don't you feel sorry for them?" asks Gerard. "Surely they're not actually evil. For instance, you could give all your money to poor people, but then you'd be poor. They could stop killing people, but then they'd be dead."

"It isn't as simple as that. They don't die very easily," says Michael, who helps Gabriel hunt vampires for want of something better to do, and to keep Gabriel company. The way their existence falls like dust through their fingers is the only thing that genuinely intrigues him about the business itself.

"The vampiric state is evil," says Gabriel. "It is a kindness to free them of it." He is nonchalant and uninterested in taking offence.

"But kindness has mercy," says Gerard. "It doesn't stick stakes through peoples' hearts for their own good."

"Dead peoples' hearts," Gabriel reminds him.

Gerard can't really explain that he is suddenly suffused with charity and the spirit of amnesty for all dead people, and has a need to console that has no expression. Michael and Gabriel look so pleased with themselves, besides.

Gabriel soon leaves, and Michael goes to bed. Gerard feels stirred up and restless, unready for sleep. Deciding to investigate the attic, he takes a mousetrap and goes to see if it is rats or pigeons up there. The way up to the attic is in a cupboard, in which there are steep wooden stairs going almost straight up like a ladder. There is a very small landing at the top of these stairs, and the attic door. Gerard has already twisted the handle a little, prepared to struggle with it, when he hears voices from the other side. He thinks the phase "other side" to himself, briefly wonders why it brings with it a wash of uncomfortable thoughts, and hastily substitutes "from the attic".

"I'm thinking of something."

"Is it a place?"

"No."

"Is it something useful?"

"Not particularly."

"Is it something for fun?"

"Not particularly."

Gerard tugs about at the door as quietly as possible and steps a little way into the room.

"Can you wear it?"

"Maybe a little bit of it."

The voices are coming from behind a wall of miscellany. Gerard tiptoes to the furthest extent of the wall, and discovers a large hollow between it and the window. There are two people lying down in it, one speaking languidly with blankets pulled up over its face. Gerard can see the other, a young man not facing his way. His mouth open in speech, Gerard sees the small glint of long, sharp canine teeth. The pallor of his face. The bloodstained bottles littering the floor.

"Are you Victoria and William?" Gerard asks stupidly.

The young man sits up and turns to face him; the other person pulls down the blankets and Gerard observes the beard.

"Mr. Smith and Mr. Ross!" says Gerard, perfectly astonished, because he recognises them; they are boarders who vanished a couple of years ago. They left without paying their bill, but it seems now that this was far from the most significant fact concerning their disappearance.

The two of them crouch in horror before squinting at him as he says their names. They look as though they are not so sure they know who he is.

"You're the landlord, aren't you?" Mr Smith says. Admittedly, Gerard had not been much of a prominent household figure the last time they were downstairs.

"You've become vampires!" Gerard exclaims. "But this is such a coincidence – my brother hunts them and here you are in the attic – and I was – I was thinking about dead people, and here I find you in the attic!"

The vampires gape at him a little. "Mr Way . . ." says Ross.

"Way hunts vampires?" says Smith.

"He helps a friend of his. Please don't attack me, I'm sure Gabriel will wreak vengeance for me," says Gerard, the notion of personal attack just dawning.

"We won't attack you," says Ross. "Look at these bottles. We drink blood from the butcher's. We don't do anything." He picks up a bottle and waves it, looking anxious.

"I will tell you what," says Smith, getting to his feet with great determination. "Now you've found us, we are going to go down in the kitchen and boil this blood up. We have to have it cold, so we never drink quite enough. We're always cold."

Gerard follows him down the stairs. Ross, close behind him, grips his coat and says, "You know William and Victoria." Gerard ploughs into Smith, who has stopped dead. Stalled on the stairs, he becomes conscious of the mousetrap in his hand, digging in to his palm where he's been gripping it. He takes advantage of the opportunity to lay it on the step.

"I know of them," he says. "They're the ones my brother's friend wants to catch."

"Ah! You mean he might kill them?" asks Ross.

"He might," says Gerard. "Though they're his match, if you ask me."

"We hate them," says Ross. "We're terrified of them finding us and trying to make us be like them. They were the ones who made us vampires. We think they want to take us to live with them, as though they want to be our parents or something. But they're just . . . disgusting."

They troop soberly through the house to the kitchen. Smith pours the blood into a saucepan to boil and he and Ross stand around it with an air of excitement.

"We've never had it hot," Ross says. "It's sure to be a disappointment."

"It must be horrible sitting in the attic all day with only that dreadful blood to eat and drink."

"We have buns sometimes. We can eat when we're full of blood, otherwise we can't digest," says Smith. Without being invited they make for the pantry and bring back a cold pork pie.

Gerard finds two cups for them. He realises Michael had only got through half the washing up, and debates doing it himself.

"Yes," says Smith. "It is horrible. We get very bored."

"Well, you can't stay in the attic. This is obviously why I found you." They stare at him coldly and then glance at his hands warily as he pours their blood out into cups. Gerard hands them them their cups, and they sip tentatively. "How is it?" he asks.

"It makes it bearable, and that is a great thing," Ross says, gulping it down.

"Do you feel as if you have lost yourselves? Do you feel bitter against the living that they have a life and time to step out onto, that they can change, where they can be seen? Because that is what makes you feel dead, when you feel nothing you do goes further than yourself, that you have no power to take part in the world or make people see you." Gerard has discovered one of the things that upset him about Marigold; she reminded him of his worst fears regarding himself.

At this moment he is happy. He is thinking that there is a conjunction between him, Marigold, and these freezing, half-starved vampires. Gerard is the living, he must be the active agent at work on the other elements. To Gerard that makes it seem as if everything might be going to make sense. He reminds himself that he need not feel as if he has anything to do with Marigold, because tonight has been most generous in providing a sense of purpose and the proof that he can be of some help. Despite the shifts in his own stability he is certain that other people are all the better for him if only he can manage to bestow himself on them. (Trying to bestow is where so many of the problems start.) He demands as his native right to be the person who can remove the stubborn lid to the jar.

Ross and Smith look at each other. "We're fed up to the back teeth of sitting in that attic," says Ross.

"We're very stoic," says Smith. "We try not to think about things too much."

"That's the desolation of giving up. I know it exactly. When everything there is that you don't have might as well not exist. I've felt like I was sitting in a pond and I couldn't bring myself to get out of it, like when you're drunk and you fall down. And I've felt like I was living in the pond, and I got used to being wet, and having my fingers caught in slimy weed. I made friends with the toads and newts, and expected them to come and visit me. Like rats and prisoners."

"I'd have liked to live in a pond when I was a child," Smith says. "And we've become quite fond of our rats, except they're mice."

"It's a matter of principle," says Ross. "We can make friends with mice but not rats."

"It's very difficult to find the courage to really live, but it has to be done," says Gerard, feeling as if they are wandering off course.

"We're really dead, not metaphorically dead," Ross says warily.

"Who knows what death is?" cries Gerard. "Mayhap it is only a state of mind!" The "mayhap" makes him realise he is straying into his more esoterical séance-talk, and he flushes. "Be defiant! You are still in this world, you still have the power to take action and see its effect. Marigold would do much if she was you." Succubus-like activities, most likely, he reflects.

"You sound like you want to send us down the Congo on a mission," says Ross.

"Oh," says Gerard, abruptly dropping the pomposity of responsibility, "I got you out of the attic, what more do you want?"

Now that they are out of the attic, Gerard ensconces them in a spare room (there are many). "I'll get you as much hot blood as you like tomorrow. If only I can boil it up without anybody noticing. Or will you be asleep? Are you nocturnal?"

"I don't know," says Smith. "We sleep a lot. The only thing is, direct sunlight hurts our eyes. I obtained tinted spectacles for us – could you fetch them from the attic?" Gerard does, and catches his foot in the mousetrap on the stair.

* *

Gerard wakes up to red beating through his eyelids. At first he thinks it is a ray of sunlight aimed at him, but when he opens his eyes the glow vanishes and he remembers Marigold. He gasps as he remembers the way she felt, reaching out even while mired in annihilation. Then he remembers the boarders, shoved over the cliff off life and huddled on a little shelf some way down, all indignation and despondency. Thinking about them, Gerard is filled with the urge to tear open their curtains and yell "Rise and shine!" If he did that, he had better have a breakfast tray with him, and he has an ingenious thought on how to prepare a vampire's breakfast disguised as a human's.

He rushes round to the butcher's and comes back with a jug of pig's blood and some fat. The boarders ought by now to be into the full swing of breakfast in the dining room but the meal is still at the kitchen stage, partly because of the washing up situation. Clara is almost at the point of a full-out yelling row with one of the lodgers, and when Gerard commandeers kitchen space with his jug, she and Cook turn on him, and Clara smashes the sugar basin in her exasperation.

She starts to rummage through the cupboard under the sink to see if they have another, but that is where all the black beetles live. Disturbed, they begin to swarm across the floor. Gerard and Clara scramble onto table and chair in disgust, but it is only when Mrs. Williams, the cook, starts stamping on them, vigorously grinding them into the floor, that they cannot contain their screams. Clara does what she can do assist with meal preparation from her vantage point, and makes flying leaps into the hallway when she needs to take something into the dining room.

Serving breakfast is one of the things Gerard ought to do, but which never occurs to him, not even to the extent of getting up in time for it. It is one of the things that explain the way the establishment fails to fulfil its purposes. Now that he is actually here, he is instead mixing up a black pudding for "some rum new boarders." Still standing on a chair, with a bowl of blood and fat, Gerard adds oats for a reason he will not later recall. Cook suspects nothing – it would be quite useless to ask her to prepare anything extra for breakfast. If Gerard wants to keep these boarders, and they want black pudding, he had certainly better make it himself.

It is not really such a good solution; Ross and Smith look quite horrified when faced with the pudding – Gerard does not after all yell "rise and shine!" at them.

"I don't think that's a proper pudding," Ross tells him. "I never did like blood pudding but I suppose it might have been alright. But that isn't a proper pudding. It would have been better to drink it cold."

He and Smith look very disappointed – they were looking forward to becoming accustomed to regularly served hot blood. Gerard pokes at the mess in the bowl with a spoon and lays it down on the chest of drawers with a sigh. "I suppose it defeated the object," he says.

There is a pause for decency, and Ross says, "Are you going to get us some more? You see, we would usually be asleep, and now we're not."

Gerard does visit the butcher's again ("I dropped it."), and the baker's too. It is a cross little outing, but while he is making it he decides that he will stuff Ross and Smith with more blood and food than they could think to ask for, and it had better bloody brighten them up.

When he gets back, Mrs Williams, Michael and Gabriel are all in the kitchen when he enters it, having hidden the jug of blood behind the curtain of the hall window while he went to look.

"Gabriel's coming to stay," says Michael.

"Why can't you go and stay with him?" asks Gerard. He can see that the servants in Gabriel's fine town house might find Michael odd company for their master to keep – Gerard doesn't even know how they became friends.

"I find it more cheerful here," Gabriel says, waving his hand in a light-hearted manner at the kitchen to prove it. Mrs Williams and Gerard gaze at him with impolite venom. Gerard is not certain whether the mood he feels rolling in on him is a period of blackness or brightness, and feels Gabriel will crash in on it with discordant effect either way.

"Oh dear, there's black beetles all over the floor," says Michael, just noticing.

"Gerard doesn't want me to come and stay," says Gabriel. "I don't know why, I'll pay rent. I'll try to put your black beetles away for you if you like. Do you think if I tried to put them back, all the beetles in the cupboard will run out?"

"I think all the beetles in the cupboard will run out," says Michael.

Gerard goes to sulk in his bedroom. He doesn't feel like going up to Smith and Ross without the blood, and he feel suddenly as if he is living in a halfway-house, surrounded by the wilds of No Man's Land. This isn't quite what the new-leaf Gerard was supposed to be like; living for the fuss of séances and now all this worrying about dead people and fussing about with jugs of blood and black beetles and people. The feeling accumulates through the next couple of weeks, though he does find a way to make it easier to prepare hot blood.

"Marigold's in the kitchen. She's unquiet and I have to be alone to wrestle with her. Out you go," announces Gerard several times a day. He doesn't do it when Michael is there, because he might want to know what Gerard is talking about, where nobody else should care whether or not they know. Or, well, nobody but Gabriel, who seems quite interested in who or what this Marigold might be, but Gerard ignores him. Actually, Gerard has to spend a rather bothersome amount of time ignoring Gabriel, because Gabriel takes to hovering around Gerard whenever Michael is not there – most likely gone to see Alicia from round the corner.

When Michael is there, he and Gabriel tend to sit about in various locations throughout the house, playing cards. To Gerard there seems something melancholy in the tableau they represent. They lean their faces against their elbows and sigh thoughtfully, and they seem cheerful enough, but somehow they also seem like they will always sit there, and always have been. They don't play for money – that would be difficult – but for words Gabriel cut out of a dictionary. It is actually Gerard's dictionary, bought when he was interested in poetry. Not that he became uninterested in poetry, but now he knows a great deal by heart and it seems like he has as much as he needs for the moment. Gabriel and Michael pronounce the words in low voices as they play - beloved, drear, bright, dull, boon, damp, bloom, decay . . . There are two sets of words, and the more you have of one set, the richer you would be if there was money involved, while the more you have of the other, the poorer you would be.

Ross and Smith also appear to have little conversation beyond word games. Gerard goes and sits with them often, bringing regular supplies of blood and food. He talks to them about the pond often too, growing attached to the words he uses as if there is some kind of charm in them that will eat misfortune and unhappiness. They do look back at him with newly bright eyes when he talks. They play a lot of I-Spy, Smith and Ross sitting cross-legged on one bed, Gerard lying on his back on the other. All three of them are good at Spying things the others don't guess, but that means two out of three are always irritated. The vampires constantly get up to flit about the room and tap their fingers along the surfaces. The house feels as if it is whiling away its time.

Gerard is whiling away his until his next séance. He is anxious to get to it; he needs to know if anything (or anyone) is going to happen to him again. Gerard is horribly flinching at the idea that anything will occur, and can already feel the sick disappointment of trying hopefully to communicate and finding nothing. He plans to keep matters on as shallow a level as possible. It is just that he is so anxious to see if this will prevail, or if spirits will gather like a storm in the Sanders' drawing room, now they know there is a place for them there.

* *

So he goes to the Sanders' house, for the Sanderses are again playing host. All is much as it was the last times, and all the other times before that. Most of the people are the same. Gerard would have been taken aback if Walter Panderson had dared, or cared to attend, and it appears he has not. As if in his stead, there is a large, handsome woman in her middle years who Gerard has not seen before. She sits back from conversation and surveys Gerard with oppressive intensity. Gerard feels a durable look of mystic beatitude settle itself obstinately upon his face, as he trains his gaze at something hovering in the air between them.

When they get down to business, Gerard cries, "Are the spirits with us tonight?" loud enough to be heard over the Hallelujahs. He feels as if he were forcing his way into himself today, rather than out as he does sometimes. He seems to have his hand held out, as he always does when asking this question, to test whether something is wet or dry. Gerard cannot discern for a long while, but eventually he determines on wet. "They are with us," he says.

"Do the spirits mean well?" asks Mrs. Jessett. She isn't quite sure whether to address herself to the spirits or to Gerard, and her voice is hollow, while her intonation rises with garden party lightness.

There is a pause. "The child could not say, to be sure. You will just have to ponder whether you merit well or ill."

"Is my husband there?" asks Mrs. Jessett.

"Oh yes, dear old Robert is here. Couldn't keep him away, rain or shine. Bless faithful old Robert. He can't complain, doing marvellously, missing you and the girls, but he would like to share his doubts regarding the gardener. He feels the man does more harm than good, and is liable to get worse."

Gerard does feel perfectly familiar with Robert, along with all the others who pop into his mouth between teeth and tongue at these moments. He hopes again that they are other people's phantoms and not his own. Apart from anything else, it would be such an absurdly mundane way to run mad. If the dead are truly restless, and capable of communication, Gerard would expect a riot, a revolution, squeaking and gibbering in the streets! But maybe death does not recreate souls as something rich and strange, and most of the dead like such stuff as much as the living. God only knows who the little girl is, but she seems to find them dull also. The séance-goers willingly run the gauntlet of her flippancy.

Everything is much as usual. Gerard is unwilling to bring the wolf into play. He always thinks of him as delving deeper, for all that he usually rambles with little sense, only a general effect of eeriness.

"Is there anyone here who wishes to communicate with me?" asks the strange woman. Gerard is sure she has come to chase up Marigold. He feels angry and alarmed at this stirring of the mud at the bottom of the pool. His alarm jumps into something else when there is a heavy thud from ahead. The company is obviously made of milk and water, and, already half expecting Marigold to descend upon them somehow, they scream their heads off. This is when the chandelier above Gerard's head parts company with the ceiling.

* *

A few minutes later Gerard's eyes flutter open a little. He sees a few people clutching at the doorframe and calling anxiously into the room. The frightening woman tells them with the voice of authority to "go into the other room and calm down."

"Is anyone dead?" murmurs Gerard. The dark figure above him leans down.

"Look into my eyes," says Mr. Sanders. "Think only of my eyes and leave behind all disturbing experiences."

Gerard does look into his eyes, because there is nowhere else to look.

"Do make him stop," says Mrs. Sanders with great irritation. "He has no mesmeric skill, none at all."

Then the room is emptier, and on further inspection Gerard sees that it is empty of anyone except him and that woman. He realises that he is still in his chair, only his chair is on the floor. Gerard feebly waves his legs, which are already in the air, and, after considering, rolls sideways to free himself.

"I am Walter Panderson's aunt," the woman says. "My name is Mrs. Urie."

Bobbing up from his crouch, Gerard catches sight of himself in a mirror, and, as he sinks onto a sofa, he keeps on looking. His face is deathly pale and he has cut his temple, besides the back of his head being badly bruised. One side of his face is streaked with blood like ritual markings, the other side is bright and wet with it, his hair smeared into it. Gerard thinks about Snow White. Her mother was right; there is something pretty about the colours together.

"You are purveying a lot of nonsense," says Mrs. Urie. "You may be malevolent or simply misguided, I don't know. But I would like to know how you justify such mischief as this meddling in private lives. My nephew was most unsettled by your allegations."

"I don't mean to make any allegations," says Gerard. He gazes on the chandelier, resting in the nest created by the overturned table, wrought curlicues surrounded by a welter of smashed glass. "I didn't make any allegations. Did something just happen?"

"A servant dropped something upstairs. I daresay that was why the chandelier came down. You besmirched a dead girl's reputation, and disturbed my nephew's peace of mind," says Mrs. Urie, severely explanatory as yet, rather than simply severe.

"It was the dead girl's decision, not mine. I won't stifle the dead if they are unquiet. It's not my job to tell them to sit down and shut up if they start rabble-rousing." Gerard is thinking that this is going to be bad, if Mrs. Urie wants it to be. If the people in these houses turn against him, that is it, and what will he do then? His enterprise depends entirely on their co-operation.
Mrs Urie pauses and sits down before she speaks. "The dead do not do anything. They will not speak to you; that is not how it is. People need to learn that and stop battling against the ways of God."

"But when they leave things undone—"

"Then they will remain undone. They don't matter anymore."

Gerard seems to see into a well of death deeper than any he's looked into before.

"Things will always matter, as long as people still have their souls."

She narrows her eyes. "You are argumentative with me, and these – séances – are argumentative with the Lord and the way he laid out the world. Spiritualism is unholy, unhealthy, and you have used it to wreak great harm. I don't know what your motives are –"

"They are entirely pure," Gerard cuts in."

"—But you have no right to tell my nephew these immoral things."

"You can't seal my mouth. I didn't say anything immoral. Marigold needed to speak to Walter."

"The dead don't speak. This is a shameless mockery of the dead and the living."

"You've probably got the wrong impression from all that panic. These occasions are usually perfectly calm, and as serious and respectful as you could wish," says Gerard, taking a little license here. "Marigold is the most startling thing that's ever occurred." And is, moreover, a connection of this woman, so it seems a little galling that she is the one turning up to complain about her behaviour.

They go on aimlessly for some time before they lose all reserve and end up hissing back and forth like a Punch and Judy show.

"You may have power over your nephew, but you have none over me," says Gerard, who doesn't really even know what this woman wants.

"I think you are a madman, Mr. Way," she says, and leaves the room.

In the Midst of Life 1/5