Читать книгу Walking Shadows - Narrelle M Harris - Страница 6

"It's a severed hand."

A blunt observation, but certainly the most pertinent one.

"You've brought me a severed hand. In a bag." I thought it bore repeating, given Gary's lack of response.

"Yeah. Sorry, Lissa" said my undead friend. "I meant to tell you before you opened it, but you were a bit quick off the mark."

"You've brought me a hand in a bag." I jabbed my finger in a tiny, tense gesture at the bright yellow plastic bag on the counter, hoping none of my colleagues would notice.

"I didn't have anywhere else to keep it."

"So you brought it to my library?"

"Um…"

"There might be a time and a place for severed human hands in plastic bags, Gary, but that is never, ever, ever in my library."

"There's a DVD in there as well," Gary pointed out.

"Yes. Yes, I saw that." I kept my voice calm. When he'd placed the bag with its distinctive logo on the counter, I pounced, assuming he was showing off the latest addition to his film collection of trashy vampire flicks. And that's a zero score for Lissa Wilson.

"I had the DVD first," he continued, "I mean, I didn't go shopping after I found it."

Because that would, you know, be crazy. Unlike bringing the thing to me at work.

"It wouldn't fit in my pocket," Gary continued, as though he'd actually tried to. He can't help it, I suppose, being equal parts socially-awkward nerd and socially-awkward vampire. I'm mainly socially-awkward librarian, which is one reason why we get along. When he's not bringing me hideous and inappropriate gifts. Like a severed hand.

I was clearly having a lot of trouble letting that go.

"Lissa, I need to talk to you," said Gary.

"I can't talk now," I said tightly. Not while a severed hand in a shopping bag is sitting on my library counter.

My boss Beatrice noticed us at last. Gary was dressed as usual in an eye-wateringly colourful shirt, so it was inevitable. She eyed us with concern. I was probably almost as pale as Gary. "You okay?" she called out from her end of the counter.

"I'm fine," I called back. "My friend is playing a practical joke."

"It's not a giant rubber spider in there, is it?"

"Yes," I said, voice strangled.

"You shouldn't do that to arachnophobes," Beatrice said to Gary in a tone that suggested she thought it was a good gag. He nodded solemnly.

"Sorry, Lissa" he said earnestly, "I didn't mean to shock you like that."

"How did you think I'd react? No, wait," I took a deep breath. "Can you give me five minutes? I need to finish up." And rediscover my equilibrium.

"I guess. It's not going anywhere," Gary said with a grimace.

"I won't be long."

He stood aside to let me cater to the library patrons who were queued up behind him. I tried to quell my shaking hands so I could scan books, and kept dropping either the books or the scanner instead. Gary loitered by the desk, edgy and impatient. Beatrice gave me a questioning look and I tried - in vain - to look unconcerned.

The minute we were done I grabbed my satchel from the staff room, collected Gary by the elbow and drew him outside, leaving the boss to lock up.

Out in the warm evening air, I took several more calming breaths. And then, because I couldn't believe what I'd seen, and I am a glutton for stupid, I tapped Gary's knuckles for him to open the bag again. He obliged.

A bloodless hand lay in the bottom of the yellow bag, next to the shrink-wrapped DVD. The bright summer sunlight filtering through the plastic made the hand look even sicklier than I remembered.

There was no mistaking it for a rubber prop. The hand's reality was in the texture of the pale skin; the detailed criss-crossed lines of the palm; the gentle curl of the elegant fingers; the fine hairs along the back of the hand; faintly dirty fingernails, as though the grime was old and permanent; the dried-raw-meat texture of the stump; and the ivory of the bones protruding from the truncated wrist, angled as though the hand had been not cut but twisted off.

Another factor in the not-a-fake analysis was Gary. His sense of humour doesn't run to macabre practical jokes. That's the forte of the rest of Melbourne's ghastly undead community. Mercifully, at this point, he closed the bag. What a pity the image was now burned into my brain.

I struggled for something useful to say. "Whose is it?" I managed at last.

"I think it's Mundy's," said Gary, "It smells like his."

That was repulsively more information than I required. Mundy was Melbourne's oldest vampire, a vicious bastard with the musty air of the 17^th century still clinging to his speech patterns.

I sought more mundane details, if that's what they could be called. "How did you end up with it?"

"Mundy wrote and asked me to visit him."

I noted the 'wrote' - neither Gary nor Mundy had a phone.

"So I..." Gary continued.

"Hold on."

Beatrice had stepped outside. We waited while she locked the library. A car pulled up and Beatrice's wife, Jean (otherwise known as Mrs Beatrice) leaned across the seat to open the passenger-side door. They kissed, a little spousal peck, and they both waved in that partly-bashful, partly-smug manner of the newly wed. I waved back.

Their utter adorability had a galvanising effect on my courage. The fact that I had to know about vampires was bad enough. I was going to keep Beatrice, Jean and everyone else I knew as far from all that undead malarkey as I could manage.

After they had driven out of sight I turned to Gary. "Right. So then what?"

"So I went to Coburg to see him."

"What was he doing there?" Mundy was up to no good, obviously, no matter where he was. Mundy was always either up to no good or contemplating no-goodness to get up to.

"Nothing. That's where he lives now."

"What happened to his squat in Casselden Place?" I couldn't imagine the old terror moving unless he had to. He had seemed right at home lurking in the gloom of the heritage-listed but otherwise neglected cottage in the city's back alleys.

"What's that expression you use? Gentrified all to buggery. That part of the city has been renovated as offices and lunch bars, and the Heritage Council restored the cottage. There's a plaque there now, all about its historical significance."

And there lies the trouble with the 21^st century in a nutshell, for the likes of Mundy. Gentrification uses up all the best abandoned real estate in Melbourne, eventually. Pretty soon it's all smart, cutting-edge new media companies and bright young things seeking out the latest avant-garde venues. Vampiric skulking isn't half so effective when you have to weave among the 24-hour suits and hipsters.

"You went to Coburg," I prompted.

"Yeah. He's living in an abandoned funeral home there."

"Seriously?" Mundy had a morbid sense of humour, but even this seemed clichéd for him.

"It's got most of a roof still, and it sort of looks like one of those Spanish houses. A hacienda." Gary said, as though that explained everything. Which maybe it did. Obviously, Mundy would prefer a home with a modicum of class, or at least of furniture, but any place would do in a pinch.

Vampires turned out to be very bad at making or keeping money in the long term and few of them had skills that translated to the modern economy. Refusing to pay rent was one thing, but these days you couldn't just keep eating the bailiffs. Someone was bound to notice. Gary was lucky he had inherited his own home, and some canny investments, from his parents after they died.

"Anyway," Gary returned to the story, "When I got there, Mundy didn't answer the door, so I climbed in through the hole in the roof. The place was a mess. The furniture was smashed to pieces. A couple of the walls had caved in, and the floor, in places." Gary sounded awed by the level of destruction he'd seen. "Then I saw the hand. I picked it up in case I could find Mundy in time for him to stick it back on."

A new and freakish idea - one I couldn't bring myself to explore. "Are you sure it's his?" I asked faintly.

"Pretty sure," said Gary, "I took it to Magdalene's. No-one was there either. The club's not open yet." He shrugged helplessly. "So I came to see you."

He looked at me like I'd have the answers. Me and my amazing living brain, so much better at thinking than the undead variety, which struggled to learn new skills, let alone come up with new ideas. Only I couldn't think what to do either, except to keep breathing without hyperventilating. That was taking up a lot of my thought processes just then.

Right. Short term: keep the damned hand on ice in this summer heat. Memories of dozens of medical shows about reattaching limbs after industrial accidents made that a good start, even if I didn't know exactly how it applied to the undead. Next, get it to the club the instant the door opened and let Magdalene keep it in her own fridge until Mundy showed up.

As horrors go, this wasn't as bad as some I'd experienced, but the awfulness was rendered more distressing by the thoroughly pleasant and satisfying day that had preceded it.

The day had been great, actually. I'd helped a lot of people find the books they were after and introduced some teenagers to the works of Gaiman, Bujold and Willis. And Mrs Pendleton, 83 years old and deeply cool, had completed her first blog post with my nominal assistance.

I'd spent a blissful afternoon cataloguing a box of new books, including a book of Gothic art inspired by the legend of Dracula. I'd amused myself for a moment by considering whether to file it under Life Sciences or somewhere in Anthropology. Or, given that most vampires I know have a foul sense of humour and a penchant for biting people, a slot of their own in Social Problems in the 360 range.

"Lissa?"

"What?" I snapped and was instantly contrite. My brain goes off on its own sometimes when I'm stressed. "Sorry, Gary. I'm a little spun out."

"I shouldn't have come. I just didn't know what else to do." He stared down at the plastic bag, caught between frustration and self-disgust. "My brain got stuck, and I thought you might be able to..."

I could see him trying to figure what the next verb should be.

"Never mind. I'll wait at the Gold Bug."

"We'll wait at the Gold Bug," I offered firmly. Hope made a reluctant return to his expression. "That's what friends do for each other," I informed him. Yeah, right. We bring each other body parts and conspire to get rid of the evidence.

Gary grinned sheepishly. "You have some weird friends."

"I surely do." I patted his cold hand and then ran my fingers through my hair, which sprang out into long, dark, devil-may-care wildness - which it does at the slightest provocation, despite my best attempts at grooming. "First things first. We need an insulated bag and some frozen peas."

"Peas?"

"Nanna used to use frozen peas as an emergency ice pack when we were kids." My brother Paul was the most common recipient of Nanna's frozen-vege first aid, usually as a result of knockabout football field hijinks or failed tree climbing expeditions.

That was a long time ago, when I'd still had a whole family. Before my eldest sister died at the age of 12, and everything fell apart. Before our parents became useless with loss, and Paul fell into drug addiction and death, and Nanna wore herself out to the point heart failure trying to keep us all together.

And Mum? Well, she had chosen to become a vampire. Then she tried to turn my sister Kate and me. Not exactly a parenting paragon, my mother.

Only Kate and I were left now, really, if you didn't count our alcoholic father. Which I usually didn't.

"Peas and a bag, you reckon?" said Gary, sticking to the present.

"An insulated bag, a bit like a floppy esky," I elaborated.

"Where do we get those?"

Gary followed in my wake as I strode to the nearest supermarket. I paid for the necessities and stood sentinel while he packed the incriminating evidence into the blue padded bag, stacked the peas around it and zipped it up.

Afterwards, Gary stood with a blue bag in one hand, a yellow DVD bag in the other, and a relieved expression on his face.

I felt anything except relieved. I hoped to high heaven that Mundy would be at Magdalene's club to take delivery.

Fretting for that old bastard's wellbeing was absolutely my last concern, but damn. His hand had been literally torn off. His place had been utterly trashed. Mundy himself was missing. I had no idea what had the strength to do that to a centuries-old vampire. It was terrifying to contemplate, let alone consider what it might do next. And there would be a 'next'. There always was.

The best thing that could be said about this whole situation was that the lack of accompanying buckets of blood was a sort-of-nice change.

Of course, the blood would probably come later, along with the mandatory running for my life.