Spring 2013, Barry Island, Wales
Most people can’t get enough of life. To them, eighty years is simply not sufficient to do all of the travelling, experiencing, growing and living that they have planned. It is such a serious matter that it has become a near daily topic of conversation amongst many – marvelling at the shortness of life and the speediness of time – even though there’s nothing remotely new about this issue whatsoever.
For Henry Yorke though, this frame of mind was something quite foreign. In all of the five hundred years he’d been alive, (although ‘alive’ is a questionable choice of words,) he’d grown oblivious to the preciousness of time. He had seen cities, countries, and empires rise and fall; people being born, living and dying; the evolution of technology, science, language, music and art; war and peace; good and bad. You’d think, with someone who had lived so long and seen so much, that he’d have no regrets, but Hal was riddled with them: they consumed his every dream; his every waking hour. Yet although these regrets sometimes made him want to end it all, they often spurred him on; encouraged him to believe that, if he was going to continue this existence, it was important that he stay good – for good. And this was what he had to teach Ian.
Ian Cram was like Hal: a vampire. He too was battling with this tug of war between bad and good, and was keen – Hal hoped – to remain the latter. Ian was a new vampire with a fresh taste for blood and death but Hal had convinced him to try and come clean.
Over the years Hal had had various teachers who had assisted him in his struggles, and each of these teachers had put their own spin on the best way to keep Hal off the blood. Some had worked better than others, but combined, Hal hoped they would make an infallible system.
There was the routine and rotamethod, attributed to Hal’s late friend Leo – a method that Hal still adhered to more than any other. It involved obsessive compulsive levels of tidiness, cleanliness and rituals which seen in a human would be diagnosed as a disorder, but for a vampire who without them may just commit genocide, were obligatory. There was also the chair confinement method. This was first introduced by Mary, and Hal had decided to implement this for Ian during the night-time… and the psychological method. Involving a combination of will power, sheer denial of the hunger and also confronting any regrets head first, this method was all about the power of the mind. Hal hadn’t revisited this technique for a long time, but now, what with Ian needing all the help he could get, he decided to try it again.
“Think of it like meditation,” he said to Ian one afternoon in the badly-decorated living room of Honolulu Heights. “You just have to sit, clear your mind of any distracting thoughts, and then –”
“Remember all of the killing and guilt as if I don’t do any of that already,” Ian interrupted despondently.
Hal looked at him earnestly. “I know. I know it’s hard but we have to… keep an open mind.” Hal said this with a pang in his heart. He was repeating words said to him a very long time ago.
“Alright, alright. For the good of humanity, eh?” said Ian with a hopeful smile.
Just then, Alex, a tall, brown-haired, brown-eyed ghost with a fiery personality and a distinctively masculine taste in clothes and humour swung through the kitchen doors. She opened her mouth to say something, but Hal interrupted:
“Alex, Ian and I are going to be… busy in here attempting a form of meditative practise if that’s okay with you,”
“I’ll make myself scarce then!” she said, swivelling on her heels and lunging back into the kitchen, the laces of her Doc Martens trailing behind her.
Hal watched her go. Things had always been complicated between Alex and him. Their history consisted of a series of awkward encounters, squabbling, and misunderstandings, which most poignantly included Alex’s own death. And though she had initially taken to blaming Hal for her premature arrival into the spirit world, that resentment, to his delight, was beginning to fade.
“Are we gonna get started then?” Ian said from behind him.
Shaken out of his trance, Hal nodded. “Yes.”
He set up some incense around the room, on the counter; table; mantle-piece; making sure the base of the glass crucibles were exactly parallel to the edges of the surfaces they were placed on. It was painful to watch, this precise attention to detail, but Ian thought to himself that perhaps this was what made Hal so in control.
After he had finished and everything was in its place, Hal indicated for Ian to sit on the carpet with him. “Are you ready?” he asked, and Ian nodded. Unsure of how to lead, Hal began the only way he could think of.
“So, um, close your eyes,” he said quietly. “Breathe in and out deeply; concentrate on those breaths.” After a moment he continued: “Clear your mind of anything around you; of any other thoughts or distractions. Then, find something…” he struggled briefly; “Find a memory worth fighting for – something that will remind you how important it is to stay good and clean.”
There was silence for a long, long while. Hal took a deep breath, preparing himself for his own exploration. He wondered which face he would see; which memory would resurface. With a shiver of anticipation, he closed his eyes.
And it came like a tidal wave. A fresh slap to the face. He did not expect this. He nearly flinched with the shock of it. The memory of her brought him unimaginable agony: not pain in the same way he felt when he looked at Alex and felt keenly her loss; not pain akin to how he felt when he remembered Leo and how he’d been so cruelly taken away from him. This was a sort of mind-numbing, exhausting ache that made him want to crawl away and hide; lock himself in a room with no windows or light and just wither away alone, because, of all the reminders of how Hal had failed to stay good so many times, this was the most potent. With her, he had been so sure – surer than he had ever been, surer than he would ever be again – that he’d cracked it. He had been certain that he would stay sane for the rest of his existence, which was why, thinking now of how he had turned so suddenly and unexpectedly, it made him wonder whether it was worth continuing trying to be human at all. The end would always come.
Yet, this image of her face, her eyes, her smile, at the forefront of his mind though devastating was tangible. She was more real to him now than she had been for two hundred years, and that stirred something in him. It brought on an old greediness, and despite the guilt he felt he wanted to immerse himself in this long-lost sensation. He let his mind his mind wander, reaching back to the days when he’d never had more hope or happiness. Suddenly, it was as if Sylvie was alive again.
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only human
Fanfic{a Being Human fan-fiction, but can be read separately.} "She didn't look frightened or surprised: just disappointed. She told me not to blame myself, she said it was stupid of her to think she could change me. I agreed... and then I laughed." We a...
