A Love Like Blood Read online

  Also by Marcus Sedgwick

  Floodland

  Witch Hill

  The Dark Horse

  The Book of Dead Days

  The Dark Flight Down

  The Foreshadowing

  My Swordhand is Singing

  Blood Red, Snow White

  The Kiss of Death

  Revolver

  White Crow

  Midwinterblood

  She Is Not Invisible

  Raven Mysteries

  Flood and Fang

  Ghosts and Gadgets

  Lunatics and Luck

  Vampires and Volts

  Diamonds and Doom

  Magic and Mayhem

  Cudweed’s Birthday

  Cudweed in Outer Space

  Cudweed and the Time Machine

  Elf Girl and Raven Boy

  Fright Forest

  Monster Mountains

  Scream Sea

  Dread Desert

  Terror Town

  Doctor Who: The Spear of Destiny

  With Julian Sedgwick

  Dark Satanic Mills (a graphic novel)

  A Love Like Blood

  Marcus Sedgwick

  www.mulhollandbooks.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Mulholland Books

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Marcus Sedgwick 2014

  The right of Marcus Sedgwick to be identified as the Author of the Work has

  been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

  a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the

  prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any

  form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a

  similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real

  persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 75193 2

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 444 75194 9

  eBook ISBN 978 1 444 75195 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For MH

  Contents

  Sextantio, Italy

  ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  FOUR

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  FIVE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  SIX

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Acknowledgements

  Sextantio, Italy

  1968

  Dogs are barking in the night.

  He’s somewhere in the broken village on the hilltop opposite me. I can just make out the line of the rooftops against the dark sky.

  The air is hot and I am tired, but that’s not why I’m waiting. Nor am I waiting to mark any moment of reflection either. Not even to honour Marian.

  I’ve chased him for over twenty years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there have been many times when I could do nothing but sit and wait. Now I am only desperate for it to be finished.

  I am acutely aware of every minute detail of the moment. The grime on my face and neck, the smell of the still-warm grass around me, the throb I still get sometimes from my ruined hand, the weight of the knife in my right pocket.

  Many times, over the years, I was lost, alone, unsure how to proceed, not knowing where to turn next, but now I know, and I’m waiting for one thing only: for the right moment, so I can do what I’m going to do, unseen.

  Despite my concentration on the few lights in the village, on the sounds around me, on what I will do, I cannot help but remember some of the journey.

  This story begins a long time ago; twenty years ago at least; maybe more somehow, I see that now. Yet in another, fuller, sense, my story begins centuries, millennia ago, for this is a story that must go back to the moment when blood flowed from some ancestor of ours; hot, bright and red.

  For me, however, it began in August of 1944, in Paris.

  Still the dogs are barking.

  One is near me, somewhere on the hillside, shut in a farmyard, but across the valley in the dark town a dozen or more answer it, barking till they’re sore, till they choke and splutter, and then start again. It ought to be disturbing, but it isn’t. Nothing can break my concentration now, nothing can spoil my waiting, destroy my patience.

  I wonder what they’re barking at. At each other? Each being driven by the other into ever more frenetic howls and rages. I hear no voices, no shouts, no one seems to try to shut them up, and so they go on.

  They bark frantically, not even in anger, but in wild desperation it seems, on and on, through the night.

  ONE

  Paris

  August, 1944

  Demons that have no shame,

  Seven are they!

  Knowing no care,

  They grind the land like corn;

  Knowing no mercy,

  They rage against mankind;

  They spill blood like rain,

  Devouring their flesh and sucking their veins.

  They are Demons full of violence

  Ceaselessly devouring blood.

  Assyrian incantation against the Seven Spirits

  Chapter 1

  Paris was free, and I was one of the very few Englishmen to see it. I was twenty-five, a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, attached to 26 Field Hygiene Section, and were it not for the fact that our CO had a strange whim one afternoon, I would not have seen what I saw.

  For anyone who lived through the war, or who fought in it, or, as I did, found themselves in the fighting but did not fight, a thousand new paths through life opened up every day. Of course, many of those paths led to death, whether on the front lines, behind a
hedgerow in Normandy or at home under the fleeting shadow of a rocket bomb, and that instilled a certain feeling in many people, something new that few of us had felt before. I saw, time and again, what living with the quotidian possibility of death did to people; making them reckless, or adventurous, heedless that they had a future self, an older self, who was relying on them not to destroy their lives before they could become that person.

  Because, I supposed, it was an old age that might never arrive, in which case what use was there in protecting it?

  But there were other possibilities besides death, many of them. Other possibilities that led people to strange events or chance meetings that would determine their living destiny, or, as I was to discover, that led to an increase in fortune, or wealth.

  It seemed to me, even young as I was then, that I had merely shut my eyes one day. At the time, I was a newly qualified house officer at Barts, six months under my belt, Cambridge life still in my heart; I still thought of my room at Caius as my home, not the digs I’d taken in Pimlico. Without time to take in what was happening, I was called up and sent to Oxford to join an RAMC military hospital that was forming in the Examination Building. A moment later and I was on the Isle of Wight, for two weeks’ training on the Ducks. Then another brief moment, one of waiting, in the countryside above Southampton.

  When I opened my eyes again, I was on Sword beach, watching the troops run behind the tanks pawing their way up the sand, making for the tracks the sappers had laid, all the while trying to get my trucks off the landing ship, for we, of course, came last.

  I remember calculating that I was eighty-four days into my active service when I saw Paris. Less than three months, but already a lifetime, in that I felt I had changed, started to grow up at last.

  While I would like to pretend that I saved the lives of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred soldiers as the Second Army fought its way across Normandy, that I saw death daily and grew fearless of its presence, I cannot. That was perhaps the case for other men of the RAMC, but life in the Hygiene Section was a different matter. It was our job to find safe sources of drinking water, to purify it if necessary, to set up showers and dig latrines. In its own way, our work was vital, for without these things an army quickly becomes ill and unable to fight, but there’s no way of pretending it was a glamorous business.

  In truth, I saw little of the wounded, and though from time to time we would run across a field hospital, I saw very little blood, which is in itself a strange thing for an officer in the RAMC to report.

  Of course, I had seen enough blood during my studies; but of that, what can I say?

  Maybe I should here admit to the first time I saw blood. By which I mean not a smear on a grazed knee in the playground, or a few drops from a bleeding nose on the rugby pitch, but lots of it. Blood in quantity. Which I first saw as I observed a simple operation on a man in his fifties in the theatre in Trumpington Street. I can remember that moment well. There were very few medical students in Cambridge in those days and that particular day there were just three of us who watched: an emotionless intellect named Squiers; Donald, who would become a friend of mine, and who fainted as the first drops welled under the surgeon’s knife; and me.

  I watched . . . how can I describe it? It seemed to be a dream that I was in, and I watched from within it as if I was witnessing something secret. As if I was seeing something I shouldn’t; like seeing a couple making love. The colour, the sheer quantity . . . it seemed, quite literally, to be full of life, and I guess I began to understand something I have had much cause to consider since then: why it was that the ancients instinctively felt that life is in the blood. That blood is life.

  None of that was clear in my mind, then. Then, I just marvelled at it, wondering if my reaction showed to those around me.

  The surgeon and the nurses helping him barely stirred when Donald fainted – apparently that happened a lot – and neither did they seem to show much interest in the blood. I glanced at them briefly, reluctant to look away from the operation, and couldn’t understand why they didn’t seem to react to it, but were vaguely irritated by its presence, the awkwardness it gave to the procedure. Squiers was presumably making mental notes on the physiology, so I was left, taking in nothing medical at all, merely dreaming.

  And yes, after that day, in my medical training and in France, I occasionally saw large amounts of blood. But none of the other times remains in my memory, until what I saw in a hole in the ground in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

  Chapter 2

  Like most young people, I had always wanted to see Paris. I had never been out of England before; my parents, while they had the money to travel, were not the adventurous type, and my childhood holidays had all been on the British coast – Brighton, Norfolk, Cornwall, Ayrshire. Scurrying on to the Normandy sand amid a German bombardment was not how I had imagined my first trip abroad.

  Though we were there to fight a war, there is so very much of a soldier’s time that is idle. This idleness meant that I had plenty of time to watch, to observe what I found around me. I looked closely at the villages we passed through, at their inhabitants, and I even tried to speak to them when I had the chance, though my attempts at French were timid and faltering.

  For much of that time we were stationed in Plumetot, right by the Canadian Air Force base. The local people rewarded us with bottles of Calvados at almost every opportunity. Our CO, in return, attended to the medical needs of the villagers, something they were most grateful for. For the most part things were quiet. We watched the Engineers roll out a new asphalt landing strip alongside the existing grass one; we found supplies and purified drinking water. Of course, we never forgot the war; for one thing the German lines came very close to the far corner of the airstrip, from where snipers would take occasional potshots.

  Once the German armies were routed in the Falaise, however, things suddenly sped up, and we decamped and began to move east rapidly.

  Then, towards the end of August, we were about thirty miles to the north of Paris when we heard on the BBC that the city had been liberated. It’s hard to explain how important it seemed, a cause for great celebration, a turning point; someone on the radio said it was the greatest day for France since the fall of the Bastille, and maybe it was.

  That evening, our CO, Major Greaves, called me over.

  ‘Ever seen Paris?’ he asked. Clearly he knew that I had not. I don’t know how old Major Greaves was. From the viewpoint of my youth I supposed he was ancient; from where I sit now I would guess he was in his late forties. I didn’t know him very well, despite the time we’d spent together since grouping before D-Day.

  He was a little shorter than me, with a slightly plump face, and there was always a little look in his eyes as if he’d rather be far away, doing something else, which I could easily understand. It showed in his voice, too, not really in the words he used but in the way in which he said them. I knew he’d fought in the First War too, and he must have been young then, and not a major. He would have seen some fighting.

  ‘No, sir,’ I said, anticipating what was coming next.

  ‘Well, you’d like to?’ he said, and I of course told him I would. ‘Good. We’ll take half the unit in tomorrow, you and I will stay overnight, and the other half will go in the day after.’

  He stopped and waited for me to speak, but I didn’t.

  ‘Well? What do you say to that?’

  I couldn’t help the smile that suddenly burst out of me from nowhere.

  ‘I’d say that was wonderful, sir,’ I said. ‘Really wonderful.’

  ‘Well, we have some time to spare. We can either spend it here and stop the men from picking holes in each other, or we can give them a treat. I’ve made some arrangements. You sort out who’s going on which day.’

  I did, dividing the men more or less at random, and the next day I climbed into the Major’s jeep, a private at the wheel, and we led one of our trucks with the men into the city through the Porte de Clignancourt.
<
br />   It was unbelievable. Of course, I knew London well enough then, but Paris seemed something else. We rolled down from Montmartre, towards the opera house, looking for the hotel where the Major and I were to stay. The city was quiet, the streets almost empty, with very few vehicles on the roads. Occasionally we saw American or French soldiers, who seemed amazed to see our RAMC truck with its red cross on the side, and they waved at us. When I waved back, the Major kept looking straight ahead, but I could see there was a twinkle in his eye.

  There were local people on the streets too, and I was amazed at them. I don’t know if I’d been expecting scenes of starvation or desolation, but we didn’t see them. Of course, the city was damaged in places, but nothing like the destruction of London. And the people had their dignity, seemed well enough fed, while the girls looked stylish to us and every one we passed attracted cheery whistles from the men, returned for the most part with equally happy smiles.

  We trundled along the Seine that afternoon, seeing the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées, down which, just two days before, de Gaulle had marched triumphantly after von Choltitz’s surrender. We learned later there’d been shooting from some high windows, no one knew who it was, but de Gaulle had just kept on striding along. I think we all felt like that; that the joy of the liberation made us all immortal, immortal for a short time. It was a strange visit, as if the war had never happened, was not still happening elsewhere, and yet it so obviously had, and was.

  That evening, after we’d packed the men off to the rest of the unit, the Major and I headed back up towards Montmartre to see some nightlife. A couple of American soldiers we spoke to told us to try Pig Alley, which we soon learned was what they called Pigalle.

  I had never seen anything like it. Here was life! Though it was of a rough and dirty kind, that didn’t matter to us, we were simply glad to find that people were alive and having fun. Nor had I ever seen such things as the women standing on street corners and sitting in open first-floor windows, or such blatant drunkenness in the streets. Nothing had prepared me for these sights, but it only made me wonder, and the Major let a half smile spread across his face as we looked for somewhere to have a drink.