these were things they could understand, could hold on to and relate to. Not girls who healed before their eyes, then tore their son’s throat out on their back lawn, before soldiers told them it had never happened, the implicit threat obvious to all.
The darkness the world contained had been thrust upon them; they had not looked for it. And now that the darkness had receded, now that their son had been returned to them and they had been able to largely rebuild the lives they had been living before, they were gradually allowing themselves to believe it had never happened at all. He understood their position, and didn’t judge it. It was fine for them.
It was not fine for him.
Matt’s brain swooped and swirled round new ideas, gravitating hungrily towards anything he didn’t know; it was an all-consuming thirst for knowledge, for all knowledge, from how his mother’s Dyson worked to what would happen if you were able to stand on the event horizon of a black hole. In his mind, there was no distinction between the two; knowledge was knowledge, every bit of it as valuable and satisfying as the next.
To call him intelligent would be insufficient; Matt Browning was possessed of an intellect so powerful it would technically be classified as genius. He was as skilled at hiding this intelligence from his family as he was from the bullies at school, who he knew would target him even more viciously if he revealed how much cleverer he was than all of them. He yearned for a time, which he fervently believed would one day come, when he would no longer need to hide who he was, when his intellect would be admired rather than reviled.
Without his parents’ knowledge, he had submitted an application to Cambridge the previous autumn, and received an unconditional offer to attend after a phone interview he had also kept secret. He was due to begin his studies in less than a year, and it had become the only thing that mattered to him, the only thing that kept him getting out of bed every morning. Until the girl landed in their garden, and he woke up in a hospital bed, with his throat bandaged and his head full of vampires.
He was now consumed by a burning need to understand what had happened to him. It felt like his entire view of the universe had suddenly been revealed to be a peephole in a hotel room door, a door that had suddenly been flung open in front of him, making him realise how tiny his understanding had been, how small his world really was.
From an encyclopaedia page he learnt about the origins of vampire mythology, learnt the cultural and social theories that had been applied to the idea of such a creature in the centuries since Bram Stoker had crystallised the legends and folk tales of eastern Europe. He read scientific theories, proto-feminist theories, theories of vampires as a metaphor for AIDS, deconstructionist theories, Freudian and Jungian theories, and an American professor’s theory that vampires represented the nascent anti-Semitism in the western world.
He read Dracula, marvelling at its epistolary structure even as the story thrilled him; he held his breath as Van Helsing staked poor doomed Lucy Westenra, as Renfield’s madness offered clues to the Count’s whereabouts. He felt his heartrate surge as the heroes chased Dracula into the Transylvanian mountains, felt triumph as the evil monster was stabbed through his undead heart, and a terrible sense of loss as Quincey Morris made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of his friends.
He read what felt like hundreds of adolescent vampire websites, where teenage girls called themselves Raven and Bloodwynd and wrote excruciatingly lustful prose about pale, mysterious, uniformly beautiful boys who could make them live forever with a single kiss from their wine-red lips.
He read blogs by people who genuinely believed they were vampires, people who claimed to drink blood and eat no food, who claimed to be able to influence people and animals to do their bidding, and even on occasion claimed the ability to turn into a bat or a wolf. These had piqued his interest for a short while, until it became clear that in almost every case the author was either desperately lonely or mentally ill, in some cases obviously quite severely.
He read dozens of websites created by people who believed vampires were real, believed it with such longing and such desperate hope that he found their sites almost painful to read. He scoured page after page of alleged sightings, of shadows in graveyards and alleyways, of people who appeared to be casting no reflection in a shop window at night, of neat pairs of circular puncture wounds, of strange men and women with pale skin who appeared to float above the ground.
He read, and read, and read, and he found nothing that in any way resembled what had happened in his garden, or the place he had spent a month of his life.
Matt finished his water and placed the glass on the draining board. He was physically exhausted but, as usual, his brain would not stop whirring. He was sure that somewhere out there was what he was looking for, something that would reinforce what he had been through; he just had to find it. He would get some sleep, and start again in the morning.
He walked back up the stairs and into his bedroom. His computer monitor glowed in the dark, and he was about to reach over and turn it off when he saw an instant messenger box in the bottom right corner of the screen. He clicked on it, watched it expand into the middle of the monitor and read the contents.
| Sent by: | Anonymous |
| At: | 23.52 GMT |
| Subject: | http://23455.998.0904.3240.com |
| EH87989KMD090 |
Matt’s heart leapt in his chest. He quickly clicked REPLY, but whoever had sent the message was no longer online. He clicked the link in the subject line, and his browser filled the screen, loading a white page with four lines of text and a grey box with a SUBMIT button next to it. He read the text, trembling slightly with excitement.
ATTENTION: If you have arrived at this page in error, please click BACK on your browser immediately. If you have been directed to this page, do NOT submit your password. Leave this page immediately, enter the URL into an IP masking service and then enter your password.
Matt could hardly contain himself.
This was the most promising lead he had found in almost two solid months of searching, a page that told you to hide your whereabouts before entering it, that insisted you leave if you had not been invited.
Why would they want us to hide our IP addresses, unless they’ve got information they don’t want anyone to be able to trace?
Matt closed the window, then opened a new one and typed in the URL of a site that allowed you to browse the internet under a fake IP address; he had used it in the past to watch TV shows that were restricted to the US, and within a minute he was safely behind a dummy IP that would make him appear to be a user from Charlotte, North Carolina. He pasted the link from the message into the browser and hit ENTER. The same white page with the warnings and the empty white box appeared; this time he entered the string of letters and numbers that had been sent to him, clicked SUBMIT and waited. The page loaded, and Matt audibly gasped in the darkness of his bedroom.
The site that opened up in front of his eyes had no title, had wasted no time on fancy designs or technology, but its purpose was immediately obvious; it was a site devoted to the belief that vampires were real, and at large in Britain. At the top of the page was a greeting, and a warning.
Welcome. If you are here, it is where you are meant to be.
We recommend that you vary the IP masking service you use, and delete your browser’s history and cache each time you visit us. It is no exaggeration to say that they are watching – it is up to you to minimise how brightly you appear on their radar. Click here to learn more about Echelon, and how you can work around it.
Matt was about to click on the link, when he noticed the headline in the site’s main panel, and a chill ran through his body. Below the greeting was a menu, simple black text on a white background, like the rest of the page.
HISTORY SIGHTINGS COVER-UPS THE MEN IN
BLACK ETYMOLOGY PROTECTION
Beneath