Chapter 177 The Club-House
POV: Marcus | Mordaunt's Blood Club, Kensington
My name was Marcus before I forget again, so I am saying it now: Marcus. Marcus Aldridge. Twenty-six years old, born in Hammersmith, studied chemistry at UCL for two years before I ran out of money and started bartending, and that is the last thing I know about who I was before the venom.
I have been a donor at the Crimson Gallery for seven months.
Seven months is not long compared to some of them. Clara was here four years before she died last week, and the woman who has taken her room, who I know only as Penny, has been here two years already, which means Penny has already crossed the line I can still see from where I am standing, the line between choosing this and not being able to choose anything else.
The Gallery operates as a gentlemen's club in the way that a trap operates as furniture. From outside it is exactly what it claims to be: an invitation-only establishment in a Kensington townhouse, discreet, expensive, the kind of place that has existed in London in various forms since the eighteenth century. The vampires who come here pay for access to willing human donors. The humans who come here are described in all the Gallery's documentation as willing.
The documentation is accurate in the technical sense that no one is here in chains.
Morning shift starts at six. I wake up in my room on the third floor, which is a real room with a real bed and decent linen, because the Gallery takes care of its donors the way you take care of anything valuable and replaceable, and I dress and go downstairs to the waiting area where six of us sit in comfortable chairs and wait to be called.
The vampire who calls me is one of the regulars. He has been coming to the Gallery for the three years it has been in operation and he has a preference for my vein specifically, which I know because the staff noted it in the donor records. He feeds efficiently. He is not cruel. He gives me the venom in the standard dose when he is finished and I feel it move through me like warm water replacing cold water, the specific full-body relief that I have not been able to replicate with anything else in the seven months I have been trying to replicate it with anything else.
This is the architecture of it: the venom feels like everything that was wrong with you being temporarily corrected. The first time it happened I understood addiction in a way I had not before, not as weakness but as pharmacology, as a body that had been given something it interpreted as exactly what it needed and then had that thing withheld.
By the second dose you want it. By the third dose you are rearranging your life to be near the person who has it. By the time you are seven months in you are sitting in a waiting room at six in the morning wearing clothes someone else chose for you, thinking about the dose you already know is coming.
Penny is in the waiting room when I come back down. She had a bad night. I can see it in the way she is sitting, the tight uncomfortable posture of someone whose body is in early-stage withdrawal, a few hours past her last dose. She looks at me with the expression that means she knows I just got mine and she is not angry, exactly, she just cannot help the fact that her body is tracking the venom in the room.
"I'm fine," she says, before I say anything.
"I know."
"I chose this."
"I know," I say again, and I say it the way I say everything now, which is carefully, because I have learned that truth in the Gallery is a door you open slowly or not at all.
The woman in the room across from mine has been here since the Gallery opened. She was a nurse, before. She told me that once, in the early weeks before she stopped talking about before. She is the one who told me about Clara, and who told me the thing about the crossing-over line, and who told me, three months ago, that she had been trying to get out and that withdrawal was killing her and that the Gallery's medical staff had told her the withdrawal symptoms were her own fault for not pacing herself.
Last Tuesday she grabbed my arm in the corridor and she was not well, anyone could see she was not well, and she said it to me in the urgent hoarse voice of someone running out of time:
"Don't let them do this to anyone else. Please. Tell someone what happens here."
She died on Thursday. Officially she had a heart condition. The Gallery's documentation on her cause of death will be correct in the technical sense, the same way the word willing is correct in the technical sense.
I am standing in the corridor outside her empty room and thinking about Marcus Aldridge, who studied chemistry at UCL, who chose this voluntarily, who still has his name if nothing else.
I am thinking about what she asked me.