Читать книгу Walking Shadows - Narrelle M Harris - Страница 7

A peak hour tram ride through inner city Melbourne with a hand in a bag is not the most relaxing way to end the working week. I spent the whole ride thinking that someone was going to notice.

From time to time I sniffed surreptitiously, trying to work out if the stew of close-packed bodies on public transport in summer was going to make the hand go off, despite the insulation and the peas.

Gary, pressed close beside me on the crowded floor, was no help. Mostly we took turns at glancing furtively at the bag, out the window and at the other passengers while willing the tram to hurry the hell up.

Finally, the tension got too much. My eyes were going dry from all that furtive glancing.

"Say something!" I hissed at Gary.

He blinked at me in his owlish way. "Like what?"

"I don't know. Anything. Distract me."

"Ah…" Of course, when anyone asks you to change the subject, you can never think of anything to change it to. Then he brightened. "I got a new film today. About a kid. I haven't seen it yet, and I bet it's all wrong, as usual…"

And he reached into the yellow plastic bag and plucked the DVD out. The DVD that had spent I don't know how long cover-to-palm with a severed hand. I stared at Gary as he held the box out to me, his response to my look of horror one of bewilderment. "It was on special," he said after a moment.

"Oh. Good," I replied faintly. I think I was supposed to take it out of his hands and inspect the cover and film notes with interest, but I couldn't bring myself to touch it.

He flipped it over to look at the back. "There are some special features. And. Um. A commentary."

"Who's in it?"

"That little kid from that film with that guy from the Lestat movie."

I have known Gary long enough for this sentence to actually make sense.

We stuttered through a conversation about this latest find for his collection until mercifully the tram reached Exhibition Street and we piled out with a stream of other commuters. From there it was a short walk down the shady side of the street to Chinatown. Gary wouldn't spontaneously combust if he walked in the sunshine - that had turned out to be one of the many myths - but the light itched like prickles under the skin, he said, and it affected things like his irritatingly acute hearing. Some of the stories were, after all, true.

Our path led us down Little Bourke Street to a familiar alley that dog-legged behind the Chinese Mission Church and a couple of restaurants and finally to a heavy door, inscribed with a yellow beetle. The Gold Bug. I wasn't used to seeing it in daylight. The sinister atmosphere the door generated at night was only partly diminished by being able to see the graffiti on the surrounding brickwork.

I rapped on the door. No reply. The hour was early yet, though someone would be here to watch for club arrivals soon.

"Is there a back way in?" I asked Gary. When you can clamber walls there is usually a back way in.

"Yeah, but Magdalene locks it when she's not around."

I pointed out that opening time would soon be upon us and that however busy she was, Magdalene was never going to keep her bar closed if money could be made from the punters. She'd been running public houses of one description or another since the Gold Rush and had Bar Management 101 down pat; whatever else her undead brain had trouble with. Gary agreed to check the status of the rear entry. This, unfortunately, left me literally holding the bags.

The yellow DVD bag was folded and I reluctantly stuffed it into my satchel. The insulated bag I held gingerly in my fingertips by the blue straps, as far from my body as I could manage. I watched Gary scramble up the side of the building like an ungainly multi-coloured beetle. I could never work out if it was creepy or comical when he did that. He disappeared onto the roof several storeys up.

Long silence. The loneliness of standing in front of a closed door at the end of three lengths of isolated Melbourne alley pressed in. I felt like a rat at the end of the maze, but a rat with a sudden certainty that it was electric shocks and not cheesy treats waiting when the gate sprang open.

Get a grip, Lissa Wilson! And if there is someone brandishing an electric prodder, just poke them in the eye and run like hell.

"Ah. Gary's little friend, I believe. What brings you here?"

My jolt of fear at the voice was certainly electric. I whirled right, left, around, looking for the owner of that silky voice, then remembered to look up. A large woman was poised on the side of a building, several metres above my head. One of her hands was firmly wrapped around a pipe, the other hand and her boot-shod feet giving her purchase in indentations I couldn't see.

I hadn't seen Magdalene for a long time. I had made sure of that. I realised now that I should have made it significantly longer.

"Ahh..." I'm not at my most articulate in the company of people who have previously tried to kill me.

Magdalene was dressed in her usual taffeta and silk gown, looking like a cherubic grandma with a sinful past who wouldn't hesitate to discipline you with a birch stick if necessary. She was all ruffles and generous bosom in the Victorian-era dress. She had a kindly exterior, but inside she was jagged and cold with a wide mean streak.

She delicately pushed away from the wall and with vampire-borne balance and strength, landed lightly in front of me. With the end of the alley at my back, door to my left, brick wall to my right, there was nowhere for me to go.

She took a moment to smooth her hands over her gown, then looked me in the eye.

"I wasn't expecting to see you again. You have made it clear on your few visits that you do not approve of us, Miss…Watson, isn't it? Or, ah, Wilson, yes?"

"One of those." I tried for nonchalance, but my voice shook. I had no doubt her heightened senses could hear my racing heartbeat.

Her smile was sudden and terrifying as she leaned in close to me. She was slightly shorter than me and I was acutely aware that her mouth was close - too, too, too close - to my throat.

"Miss Wilson, I do not like you," said Magdalene, barely above a whisper. Yet I could hear every word. Piercing terror tends to heighten even human senses like that.

"I'm not that f-f-fond of you either." I'm not brave, but sometimes defiance is the only weapon you have left. Besides, I was hanging onto the hope that Magdalene, who normally had such good business sense, would not commit blatant murder at her own door. That would surely be bad for trade.

Magdalene tilted her head slightly, regarding me with cold displeasure. "Do you think," she said, "That you would be missed, should something unpleasant happen to you?"

"Yes," I managed, firmly, then my voice started quivering again. "D-do you think your volunteer blood d-donors would come back here if they found out you'd broken that p-particular rule?"

"How would they ever know?" Her smile grew uglier, revealing her teeth, displaying that expression that said I was nothing more than a potential, passing snack. Not even needed for nourishment or survival. All my blood would do for her is make her feel alive again for a little while.

Then the club door was opened by Becks, the whip-thin, professionally unimpressed door person. I hadn't yet figured out if Becks was male or female and reckoned that on the whole it didn't matter except to Becks and whoever Becks slept with.

"Gary said to tell you he's in the upstairs bar," Becks said, regarding me blandly from behind a long, black fringe. I couldn't tell if the look was tinged with contempt, like most of the looks Gary and I got here. Becks is hard to read in pretty much every way imaginable.

Door-person looked at Boss-lady, who had adopted a bored expression. "I will see you in my office," Magdalene said to Becks, with a sudden shift in tone to 'approving', resulting in the latter's inscrutability receding for a smug moment. Becks was, of course, a member of the Gold Bug and naturally considered it an honour to be a blood hit for the boss.

Magdalene ignored both of us and leapt high up the wall and followed the route Gary had taken to the roof, leaving me with what I suppose she considered the caterer's entrance. Belatedly, I realised I should have given her the damned bag and its grisly contents.

The opportunity to offload the bag passed as Becks also vanished, leaving the doorway empty. Leaving still looked like the smart thing to do, but I'd have to traverse a long, dark, dog-legged stretch of alley to get back to a busy street. My skin crawled at the idea of walking the distance on my own, even though it was still light. Bad things don't only happen in the dark, and there were vampires even worse than Magdalene out there. Several of them would be making their way to the Gold Bug for an early bite. Mundy, for a start, assuming he was still alive.

Despite our encounter, I decided that Magdalene wasn't immediately dangerous to me. She knew better than to go spooking the volunteers, who preferred their dangerous experiences to be thrilling without being fatal. It had taken months, according to Gary, for the Gold Bug to recover from the last drained body found in the nearby street.

Mundy, however, had less business sense than Magdalene.

The conclusion was that I would, perversely, be marginally less vulnerable in the club. At least there I could seek out Gary, hand over this awful bag to anyone who'd take it, and have Gary accompany me out of Chinatown.

Screwing my courage to the legendary sticking place, I went inside.

In Becks' continued absence, I darted down the stairs to the basement. The potential fire hazard candles no longer decorated the entry. I missed them. The much less volatile set of low lights embedded in the concrete steps lacked ambience and, more importantly, the potential for self-defence offered by a naked flame. Fire is not the vampire's friend.

This entry had once led to a private members club. Now the steps opened onto a regular cocktail bar designed in wood and red velvet to capture the lucrative custom of your bog standard wine-and-spirits crowd. Soft music played and irregularly placed shelves held up ancient curios. If my great-great-great grandmother had run a bordello, this is what it would have looked like, a strange combination of gentility and opulence with a suggestion of impropriety.

I hurried through the bar to a dark curtain at the rear which drew aside to reveal a long, narrow staircase. Dodging around the thick golden rope that would later bar it firmly from "non-members", I headed upstairs. I bumped into Jack, the skinny inner-sanctum bouncer, coming down as I ascended past the ground level and onto the first floor. Jack barely acknowledged my presence as I squeezed past him.

Finally I emerged into the upstairs lounge. It was decorated in solid, antique furniture, the back of the room divided from the rest of the space by a heavy black curtain. There were booths behind there, I knew, and a faint smell of old blood. Also several first aid kits, kept discreetly out of view. At the top of the stairs was a black-painted window which overlooked a dead end, Gary had told me. I'd once seen it from above, a debris-filled space between buildings, its ground level access long since cut off by the press of time and real estate.

Inside the lounge, a deep, low heartbeat reverberated through the top of my head and the soles of my feet. Just like it used to be, only two floors up.

Gary stood at the bar between two other people, his expression studiously bland. The very pale, unbreathing person on his right I recognised as Beryl. She cultivated the prim look of an academic and had a preference for the shy punters who came to the club. She was looking at Gary like he was a bad smell.

On Gary's left stood a man I knew as Mr Smith. He had a beating heart, technically speaking, but as he was the representative of Magdalene's shady business partners, I knew a pulse didn't make him any more trustworthy than her undead clients. Probably less. At least I knew what the vampires got out of this deal.

I thrust the bag at Gary, pleased to be rid of it. "I want to get out of here."

"What happened?"

"Magdalene tried to wind me up. It worked."

That's when Magdalene, with immaculately terrible timing, appeared from yet another staircase on the other side of the room. She had, I gathered, taken the private way to her ground floor offices then walked up to make her grand entrance.

Magdalene's eyes wandered dismissively past me, for all the world as though the alley incident had never occurred, and then she strode up to Gary. Despite the fact that she was shorter than he - and Gary is not tall - she somehow managed to tower over him. The unspoken "What the hell do you want?" radiated from her large, soft frame.

"You know Lissa's not a member, right?" Gary asked, a hint of defiant tension in his tone.

For a moment she tried to look like she didn't know what he was talking about. Then she said, "I know this, Gary."

"And you know that no-one can bite someone who's not a member. Volunteers only. Those are the rules."

"I know the rules," Magdalene snapped, "I made them."

"Good. Just checking." He nodded as though this settled the matter.

"Does this mean you have brought your little friend to join us, Gary?" Magdalene asked waspishly, "I can't imagine why else you would bring her here."

"This was at Mundy's place," said Gary, thrusting the bag at her, "I think it's his."

Magdalene arched an eyebrow at the offering.

"There's a hand in it," I expounded, since Gary had forgotten the important noun. I was also hoping to shock her, just a little. No such luck.

The arched eyebrow was turned to me, but eyebrows don't bother me particularly, no matter how arch they get. Magdalene turned and got Mr Smith to hold the bag while she unzipped it. She dropped the frozen veges onto the bar counter and pulled out the limb in question.

She raised it to her face and sniffed. "Smells like his," she concurred.

"I thought so, yeah," Gary replied.

"Why the bag?" asked Beryl, looking at the pale, all-wrong hand that Magdalene held so matter-of-factly in her own.

"Keep it fresh, of course," said Smith, "Is the old bastard around then?"

"Not at present." Magdalene was regarding the twisted stump of the hand speculatively, no doubt wondering, as I did, what could have torn it off.

The sound of excited voices floated up the stairwell behind me and Magdalene rapidly dropped Mundy's hand back into the bag. Smith swept the bag of peas on top of it. Beryl's head lifted like a cat sensing nearby sparrows and she moved away from Gary. Three steps took me into the gap beside him. He shifted slightly to allow me room and seemed to relax marginally.

"You should put that in the fridge," I told Magdalene, nodding at the bag, "in case Mundy wants it back."

"If he still needs it," she said carelessly.

"If," I agreed. "It'll be interesting if he does and you didn't look after it for him."

She gave me a sour look and turned to Smith. "Take it to my office."

She handed Smith the bag as the voices coalesced into a group of three young people - two girls and a guy. Just kids, really, enveloped in black clothes, dramatic make-up and an air of anticipation like they were off to a rock concert. The boy had a long, lanky grace that made me think, piercingly and painfully, of Daniel. My never-quite-a-boyfriend, not even a whole year buried. Drained of life so that a dead woman could pretend she still had feelings. Of everyone I knew who had died, the selfish bitch who'd killed Daniel was the only one I was wholeheartedly glad was properly, utterly dead.

The guy looked nervously excited while the other two offered words of encouragement. "This is so a-maz-ing, Hamish, honest. There's nothing like it. It's so..." the taller of the girls flailed her hands as a general indication of how so it was.

"Awesome," the shorter one supplied enthusiastically, light brown roots showing under black-dyed hair, "We'll find you someone perfect. Thomas is kickass. I could just die. And Mundy!" She clasped her hands over her heart and mimed it beating out like a cartoon character in love. Like Mundy was some kind of heart-throb movie star. She caught a look of uncertainty on the boy's face. "Oh, you'd prefer a girl, huh?"

"I don't mind," Hamish said, attempting disdain at such petty distinctions.

"It'll be cool," the tall one reassured him.

Magdalene put on her sweet-as-dumplings persona to greet them. The three of them smiled, dazzled.

Idiots.

I hadn't yet been able to work out why so many people came here to voluntarily let the undead drink their blood. It might have been the attraction of the taboo, the sexiness of the danger, the life-affirming thrill of seeing someone come alive with your own hot blood running in their veins. The dizzying physical combination of adrenalin and blood loss. Mostly I figured that people are perverse and this was just another example of how self-deluded we can be.

They weren't all young volunteers either, nor all Goths. One of the regulars was a man of 50-odd, who skipped his blood pressure medication for three days before coming on his monthly visit, knowing that 'his friends' didn't like drugs messing up their experience. I suppose that was one thing about the Gold Bug. It was a proponent of Hugs Not Drugs. Yay them.

The undead I could understand. Blood gave the vampires the buzz they needed to feel almost-alive again, without having to do any killing. Not that they objected to killing but it was all so damned inconvenient these days, having to cover it up and so forth. This was easy and accessible and did not lead to enraged mobs with pitchforks and burning brands.

The whole place creeped me out. I had not been back since I had come last year looking for answers to Daniel's murder, yet a certain worrying attraction lurked at the back of my mind. Sometimes, the idea of coming here seemed therapeutic, for a little of the same reason that helping Gary catalogue his collection was soothing. It might put the horrors I couldn't hide from into their place. Labelled, catalogued, shelved neatly in my head, and that would made them controlled. Sort of.

People do stupid things, thinking it gives them control. I never quite succumbed to that particular folly, though.

The newbie was looking at Beryl the way a nervous debutante in an Austen novel eyes the dashing yet slightly scandalous regimental captain. Beryl, for her part, was eyeing the newbie like the lad was a particularly appetising hors d'oeuvre at the same soiree.

As hideous as I found the whole thing, at least I knew that Beryl was generally very careful in her appetites. The primness wasn't a mere affectation. She tended to be precise and tidy beforehand, but a little kinder once the blood filled her, talking to them while they sipped nourishing liquids and recovered.

Thomas, who the short girl had mentioned, was another matter. He was slick, sleazy and sly, covering it with calculated charm. He had bitten me on my first visit to The Gold Bug, not caring whether I was a member or not.

I considered giving Hamish and his friends a lecture on their idiocy, but I'd tried that before, with predictable results. Scorn and hostility, on behalf of both vampires and suck-buddies. So the anti-blood diatribes went the way of the anti-drug ones, years before. Besides, Beryl had taken her new friend behind the curtains already and the moment was gone.

Gary leaned in close and said quietly into my ear, "Do you want to go now?" I dragged my eyes away from the Jane Austen meets Bram Stoker tableau and nodded vigorously. "We could see a film," he suggested with half a smile, "There's a new one with giant robots in it."

That made me grin. Who doesn't love a film with giant robots? "Sure."

"Kate's not expecting you home?"

"Nah. She's gone off for a long weekend." With her newish boyfriend, the Lovely Anthony, of whom I so far approved.

I was suddenly aware of a large, silk-clad bosom looming in our vicinity. "A date now, is it?" Magdalene managed to put a lot of venom into the query. "Really, Gary, this is no way to conduct yourself."

His brow furrowed with puzzlement.

"While it is pleasing to see that you have finally come back to our way of thinking, you really should vary your sources. There is no point in getting too attached to only one. They wear out after a while. Look at Alberto."

Gary frowned more deeply still at the cryptic comments, before comprehension dawned. "It's not…we aren't…I don't."

"Of course you do," Magdalene said scornfully.

Gary stared at her, slack-jawed for a second, before closing his mouth on whatever response had occurred to him. Magdalene's tight-lipped smile contained a tinge of triumph that made no sense to me.

"What?"

"Later," Gary muttered, "not here."

Fine by me. I let him take me by the elbow and guide me back towards the stairs.

That was when the window at the top of the stairs smashed inwards and a smoking body, smelling of burnt cloth and charred meat, tumbled onto the floor in a shower of glass.