He said, “I love what you’ve done with your hair.”
Edna beamed. “Thank you, dear, and may I say I’m loving your look. Do you use herbal conditioner or is it merely fragrant?”
Kevin flashed a brilliant, slightly fangy smile at Edna before turning to inspect the Friendlies’ temple. He was still wearing the same skinny blue jeans that Sharon felt sure she’d seen him in at Magicals Anonymous. But his T-shirt had been swapped for a dowdy tartan shirt and a thermal jumper on which an old peeling sticker which read SAVE A LIFE–GIVE BLOOD had been proudly placed like a target over the heart. His black sports bag–his very large black sports bag–lay by the door, the zip partially open to reveal a huge array of toothpastes, sterile wipes and latex gloves. Kevin turned one more time through the room, examining its every feature, before concluding his wander and fixing Sharon with a questioning stare.
“You said you could like, put me in touch with a good lawyer? This doesn’t look like a solicitor’s office.”
“A lawyer?” murmured Rhys.
“Kevin wants to sue his dentist,” explained Sharon, her smile once more locked in the attack position.
“Really?” breathed the druid. “Well, that’s… that’s, uh… that’s very…” His words dissolved into hopeful gestures and a desperate grin.
Convincing the vampire to come to Tooting hadn’t been as hard as Sharon had expected. Certainly she’d lied a tiny bit, offering up promises of lawyers yet to come, and dentists whose practices would be ruined, and quite right too, for their discriminatory behaviour–but Kevin, it turned out, lived in Earlsfield anyway. And, as she suspected, like many in that part of town, he was so pleased and surprised to discover something happening nearby as compared to on the other side of the river, that far-flung place of wonders, he’d picked up his box of sterile wipes and come almost immediately. The revelation that actually there weren’t so many midnight-opening solicitors in Tooting had only slightly dampened his spirits.
“Edna here runs a group called the Friendlies,” Sharon hastened to say. “They’re very… uh… friendly, aren’t you?”
“Oh yes, dear, we’re definitely that.”
“And they can help me sue that gargling bastard?”
Sharon looked at Edna in an emphatic “Help me” manner.
“Um… I’m sure we can try, dear,” suggested Edna. “Tell me, is it nice being a vampire?”
“Nice? It is hard bloody work, pardon my language, that’s what it is. Everyone is always judging, which is so twelfth century.”
“On a different note,” Sharon tried desperately, “how are you at, like, tracking your prey and that?”
Kevin hesitated, suspicion blooming behind the indignation natural to his features. “What kind of prey? Is it NHS-certified?”
“We’re looking for a man called Derek,” offered Rhys. “He’s vanished. And so have half the spirits of the city. And so has Greydawn, She Who Divides the Night From the Day. And there’s this office called Burns and Stoke and the walls say, Help me.”
“What’s this got to do with my dentist?” asked Kevin.
“Um… well, see, uh…”
“I can’t be handling untested blood! No idea where it’s been.”
“This is more sort of the fate of the city we’re talking about here.”
“Do I look like I’m a fate-of-the-city kinda guy?” demanded Kevin. “You’re a shaman,” he added, waggling a hand in Sharon’s direction. “You know what to do; you fix it!”
“It doesn’t quite—”
“Aren’t you supposed to be a leader of your tribe?”
“And actually, babe, I wasn’t going to say anything, but I was like, expecting way more feathers in your hair, and this whole, like, ‘approachable but ditsy’ thing you’ve got going on, while kinda cute, isn’t really very shaman-like–just saying.”
There was a moment.
A long, quiet moment.
Not just Rhys, but even Edna looked afraid.
The world held its breath.
Kevin began, “Um—”
Then Sharon Li had seized his tartan-pattern shirt with both hands and was pulling so hard his tongue began to flop against his teeth. His feet arched up off the floor until he balanced precariously on tiptoe as she pushed her face towards his and snarled, “Stop. Telling. Me. What. I. Should. Know! Because if I don’t fucking know something it’s because you bastards, you moaning ‘Sharon do this,’ ‘Sharon do that’ wankers, haven’t fucking told me! Do you get that? No one tells me anything, it’s just ‘Sharon save the city.’ I mean, Christ! Burns and Stoke have been buying up buildings which have the souls sucked out of them, a mystery creature howls in the night, the city walls crumble and Our Lady of 4 a.m. vanishes, and you just freak out about your dentist and feathers in my hair! Pull yourself together and get vampiric on this shit!”
It was five minutes later.
Edna held open the bag of Derek, social secretary/high priest of the Friendlies, and said, “Do you think you can find him with this?”
Kevin sniffed. He wore latex gloves over his boney white hands and prodded the contents of the bag with the end of a pristine sharp pencil. “Multitools and greasy bits of tissue–do you know how much bacteria there is in here?” he whined as Edna rattled the bag hopefully.
“Focus,” barked Sharon.
Kevin’s sniff was both literal and pointed.
“Oh, this is so rank,” he exclaimed. “Do you realise that when you smell something, you’re basically just inhaling the thing itself? This Derek did keep clean, didn’t he? No fungal infections, no thrush?”
“He was–is–a very nice man!” retorted Edna.
“Have you got his scent?” demanded Sharon.
“Darling, I am not some yappy barking dog.”
“I thought vampires were all supposed to be brooding and cool and shit.”
“Babe, I thought shamans were supposed to know everything and look how wrong we both are.”
Sharon glowered but didn’t reply. Kevin pushed Derek’s old bag away with a curling lip of distaste. He pulled off the latex gloves with a loud snap and dropped them carefully into a yellow plastic bag stamped with a biohazard sign which was stowed neatly in the front pouch of his own large, black bag for future sanitary disposal.
His nose twitched.
He sniffed and sniffed again.
“Well,” he said at last, “I don’t want to crash your party or pop your balloon or anything like that, but I gotta tell you I’m getting a lot of death.”
Edna gave a short sharp cry, immediately stifled beneath her hand.
Kevin sniffed again. “Yep. Once you get through the tasteless incense and the frankly pungent body odours of all assembled–no offence, darlings–your Derek bloke’s scent is coming over distinctly ex.”
“Can you track it?” demanded Sharon.
“Babes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s nothing to track. I’m getting, like, death right here, right in this room, and it’s a bit… uch, it’s very last week’s roadkill actually. I mean, Jesus.” He fumbled again for his bag and pulled out a pack of white face masks, each in its own sterile wrapping. “Want one?” he asked, slipping the elastic band over his head.
“What the hell are you doing?” demanded Sharon. “You’re supposed to be tracking Derek!”
“Babes, there’s like, serious death in this room and I can’t be doing with that! Do you know what happens to bodies once they start to decay? It’s like, hello, plague and rot and–God, airborne contaminates.”
“But, um, excuse me?” hazarded Rhys. “There isn’t anyone dead here. I mean, not to question you, Mr Kevin sir, but there’s just not.”
“Darling, you got the vampire in to do the vampire thing and now you’re like, questioning the expert!” retorted Kevin, hands flapping indignantly. “You asked me to sniff this Derek’s stuff–I’ve sniffed this Derek’s stuff and, based on the sniffing, I’m telling you he is one dead chicken.”
Edna suppressed a wail. Rhys edged towards her nervously, wondering how best to offer comfort. Sharon looked round Edna’s salon and wondered what Sammy the Elbow would do… When had a goblin become her role model?
“You just hold that thought,” she said and, turning away from Kevin, she walked.
It was easier now, and took only a few paces to find that thin point in reality where she became invisible, and invisible things became clear. Evidently practice was good for something. She slipped into that grey place where the shadows began to move and heard, a long way off, the sound of Kevin’s voice:
“Uh, did anyone else just see her disappear?”
“She does that,” offered Rhys. “It’s a shaman thing.”
Sharon turned, still slowly moving because she couldn’t yet pull off invisibility while immobile. She drifted round the room, sensing that place where she was at one with the city, and the city was at one with her, and thus no one would bother to notice her.
Rhys, looked at from this side of perception, seemed a little brighter to her eye. She circled round him as he vainly tried to comfort Edna; and saw threads of light running through his skin and in his blood, a faint tangled mass just beneath the surface like glowing circuitry. Kevin, on the other hand, was even more obviously vampire than in daily life. The gauntness of his face, the pallor of his skin, the redness in his eye, the protrusion of his teeth, all were enhanced; and as she circled him there was the faintest taste of blood and the overwhelming smell of sterile swabs.
She turned towards the altar, and it was a bright glowing heart in the gloom of the shadow walk. Echoes of the men and women who’d made their offerings to a now-vanished goddess were still drifting round it like eddies in incense. The votive trinkets held memories strong enough to be still faintly visible, and as Sharon’s fingers rolled over them they were
the rolled up newspaper I had in my hand when the man tried to mug me and I hit him over the head at 5.15 on a winter’s morning
the sandwich packet that held the last bit of bread in the machine at 3.54 a.m. when I hadn’t eaten for a day and a night
the batteries that powered the torch that kept me safe when the power failed
the shard of glass from the broken window of the bus shelter that protected me from the rain as I waited for a night bus in the pouring dark.
They were the memories of the night workers and the dead-hour shifts, of the lonely travellers who’d waited by themselves and, in that time, known that they were not alone.
“That’s what Greydawn is,” said a voice behind her, and she didn’t need to look to know it was Dez. “That’s what they mean when they say she walks beside.”
“Go on then, spirit guide,” sighed Sharon. “Guide me.”
“Watch where you step,” he replied, and she looked down.
The floor beneath her feet was gleaming with an unnatural sheen. She backed away from the centre of the glow, and her feet slopped and slipped as they moved. The concrete by the altar was turning to liquid, a spreading patch of grey thickness, bubbles popping to the surface from beneath her feet. She scrambled back as the surface of the floor began to shift and wobble, and there was something moving beneath it, something round and smooth, something that was covered once with human hair.
She caught her breath and retreated further, bumping into a wall and slamming back into reality hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. Rhys was by her side instantly, the quiet distress of Edna forgotten as Sharon reappeared on the floor–the now solid, mundane floor.
“You all right, Miss Li? You okay?”
“He’s… down there,” Sharon rasped, pointing at the solid floor. “I’m sorry. He’s been buried beneath us.”
Four pairs of eyes examined the undisturbed-looking floor. Kevin said, “That is totally gross.”
“He can’t be,” stammered Edna. “We haven’t had any work done to this place for years. I’d know about it! And who’d want to hurt Derek? I don’t see why—”
“Maybe the same people,” suggested Sharon, “who’d want to own all those places where the spirits have vanished. The same guys who buy up shops and factories and homes which then fall dead and rot. Maybe it’s—”
The voice came, not from Sharon nor Rhys nor any of the four assembled there, but rather from a new figure, a man framed in the door of the salon, a man in a badly tailored black suit and white shirt, who smiled radiantly at them all and proclaimed, “But of course yes, and why not? In these difficult times people do require someone to blame. I understand, naturally I understand. These complex human emotions you struggle with–envy, resentment, jealousy–I think I am in the area, yes? They become so… confused in your little minds that we should not be surprised that you–” a finger uncurled, pointing towards Sharon “–you would look at men like us, Burns and Stoke, and say, ‘I do not understand that thing, so why don’t I simply call it evil?’ ” Mr Ruislip smiled, adjusting his tie as he stepped further into the room. “If ‘evil’ is the word we are looking for, of course.”