Once Bitten Read Online Free PDF

nodded, my heart pounding in my ears. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. She pushed her middle finger between my lips and gently rubbed it along my teeth as if daring me to bite.
    She raised herself up on her toes and tilted her head to one side and pressed her lips against my neck, just below my left ear where I could feel a vein pulsing in time to the rhythm of my heart.
    She kissed me softly and I felt her tongue probe the skin. It rasped along my flesh as if it was the tongue of a cat and not that of a girl and then she shifted her head back as if waiting for something.
    “Once bitten,” she said and I could feel her breath with each word, and then she lunged forward,
    sharp teeth fixing onto my neck like a cheetah going in for the kill.
    I jerked back my head involuntarily and my eyes opened and I was in my bedroom, my legs tangled up in the quilt, the pillows scattered on the floor. My skin was bathed in sweat yet my mouth was dry and swallowing was an effort. I staggered to the bathroom and filled a glass full of water. I used the first mouthful to swill around, rolling it around my tongue and spitting it out into the washbasin. I switched on the light above the bathroom mirror and looked at my reflection.
    Bleary eyes stared back at me, deep set and worried, small red veins flecked through the whites, the pupils dilated as if I'd taken something. I hadn't. I opened my mouth wide and pulled back the skin on my face. It made me look younger. I relaxed and the wrinkles and the years came back. Thirtyfive going on fifty. I moved my head from side to side half expecting to see bites but the skin was unmarked. I rubbed my hand across my chin, feeling the stubble of growing hair. I could remember when all I had to do was to borrow my father's electric razor to shave the fuzz on my upper lip about once a month, then once a week, then daily. But it was only in recent years that the stubble would appear in the middle of the night. A sign of being an adult, I guess. A sign of age.
    Now if I was going anywhere in the evening I looked scruffy unless I shaved again.
    I took another mouthful of water and gargled with it and when I looked down to spit it out I saw that the first mouthful was red. Blood red. I turned on the taps and it swirled away down the plughole and the second time I spat it was clear, just water and phlegm. I checked out my mouth in the mirror and I couldn't see any cuts or abrasions. Just teeth, and metal fillings. Another sign of a decaying body. I filled my mouth and spat again but there was no more blood.
    I took a glass of water back with me to the bedroom and lay down on my side, facing away from the window, and tried to get back to sleep. Images of the girl and the alley kept filling my mind,
    her smile, her eyes, and the blood. I could hear my own heartbeat in my right ear which was pressed against the pillow. Durr-rum, durr-rum, durr-rum. The sound of my lifeblood coursing around the veins and arteries of my body, the tubes that were already silting up with chloresterol and fat globules and all the rest of the detritus that was floating around in my tissues. Durr-rum,
    durr-rum, durr-rum. The constant reminder of my own mortality, a fist-sized hunk of tissue in the centre of my chest upon which my whole being depended. Without its seventy-odd squirts of oxygenated blood every minute there would be no more Jamie Beaverbrook. I wondered what it must be like to have a heart attack, to feel the pump splutter and jerk and stop, and to know that the end was coming, that the brain was being starved of life-giving oxygen and that it would soon all be over. The empty blackness stretching ahead for ever more. No more Jamie Beaverbrook. The chain of thought depressed me, as it always did. The morbid thoughts of my own mortality usually came at night, when I was alone in the dark. I shifted my head to try to get my ear off the pillow so that I wouldn't have to listen to the accusing heart counting off the beats that