by Paul Magrs
Ah, the Demeter. Our merry little local. Brenda and I would steer well clear of the place, thinking it rough and not being, on the whole, very fond of real ale and folk music. But since you took me there and it became our regular haunt, I’ve developed a fondness for the place.
It’s where the Walkers congregate and do their nightly drinking. They always seem pleased to see me, as they did you. They hold no grudges. I believe they’re all pleased by their altered state. Confused at first, and wondering what it’s all about, but once they’ve joined the gang at the Demeter, the Walkers soon learn to live with their new condition, and even to relish it.
They worship you, of course. They revere you. And whatever I say, they don’t believe – they can’t believe – that you are gone for good, my love.
I am the merry widow. Propping up the bar after midnight, in the roughest bar in town, with all these men around me. Paying tribute to me and admiring my new looks. I’ve got the hot spicy blood of a young stoner swirling about my veins and giving me a becoming glow.
In the Demeter, the boys in the back room are telling me that Brenda and her man friend – the hated Cleavis – have been in.
I don’t know how they dare. After what they’ve done.
And the boys here. The Walkers. How could they let Brenda and Cleavis continue to live? Why didn’t they exact revenge?
‘He was tooled up,’ Eric the barman tells me. ‘Cleavis was protected. And so was his woman. Your friend. They had holy water. Crucifixes. The works. We couldn’t get near them.’
Brenda with a crucifix on? I hope it burns her stinking old flesh. I hope it gives her proper gyp. She’s as ungodly as any of us. ‘What were they after?’
The portly barman looks me dead in the eye. ‘They were asking about you, Effryggia. They wanted to know all about you.’
Oh, why can’t they just leave me alone?
Christmas Bloody Day
Dear Kristoff,
I’m here by myself. I don’t want to see anyone or think about Christmas or anything.
All I can think about is you, my dear. And what they did to you.
Here is what actually happened. Just a few nights ago. I’ll set it down here for posterity. Just in case . . . just in case you ever return and want to know.
You will want to know what they did, those two. My so-called friends.
They thought of it as a good night’s work, I know – and that’s the most hurtful thing of all. They just can’t see any wrong in what they did.
Why was I such a fool to accept their invite to the Casa Diodati that night? Making up a foursome. Going somewhere fancy-schmancy. Pretending that we were letting bygones be bygones.
‘You haven’t been yourself for weeks,’ Brenda told me, as we took our places in the elegant restaurant, out of earshot of the men.
‘Oh, Brenda, I have. I’m just the same as ever.’ I was distracted by the view from the upper bay window, across Church Street and the harbour rooftops. The private dining room was soft with gentle candlelight – very flattering.
Brenda went, ‘Hmmm,’ sceptically studying my expression, which I tried to keep neutral. She said, ‘This place is a bit lah-di-dah, isn’t it? I never even knew it was here.’
‘It’s nice to go somewhere a bit different,’ said I, sounding ever so stiff with her.
‘I’m a creature of habit,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with Cod Almighty.’
‘Indeed.’
‘But,’ she went on, ‘I think Henry wanted to take us somewhere a bit classier tonight. It’s important.’
I nodded, yanking my napkin out of my glass and giving it a sharp flick.
‘We aren’t having a falling-out, are we, Effie?’
I was wondering where those men were. Smoking outside on the cobbled lane. What on earth would they have to talk about? Plenty, I was sure, and none of it good.
Brenda was looking at me expectantly. I sighed. ‘Well, ever since Kristoff came back into my life, I think you’re the one who’s been a tad recalcitrant.’
‘Me!’ she gasped.
And then you were by our side, Kristoff, my dear. Silent and debonair. Grinning at me.
‘Here I am, ladies.’
Henry Cleavis was puffing up the stairs behind him. Stumpy, unkempt little man. I’d never thought much of him. His eyes were darting about and he reeked of cigar smoke.
We took our places and I thanked Cleavis for treating us all to this smart dinner.
‘What is money but for spending?’ he stammered. I saw at once that he hadn’t intended to pay for us all, but he couldn’t very well say that now. It served him right. He went on, ‘Brenda deserves treating. As do you, dear Effie.’
Brenda looked flushed. She was on her second glass of Pinot Noir. She burst out, sounding rather coarse, ‘Mind, it’s your Christmas box, lovey! Hahaha!’
Warily we all set about our repast. We gulped down thick tomato soup. I ordered a huge rare steak, which I ate with gusto. I could feel Brenda and Cleavis’s suspicious eyes upon me the whole time. I disdained a green salad. My love, you were picking at your dinner, I noticed. Bean shoots and noodles, very unlike you.
I glugged back the red wine, I’m afraid. I was feeling nervous. Under pressure. I was wishing we had never come out. The conversation was stilted and dull. None of us were free to talk about the things we really wanted to.
It was Brenda who blurted out a question about Angela Claus at the Christmas Hotel. Hadn’t I been seeing a lot of her lately? What did I think I was doing, hobnobbing with the woman who – when all was said and done – was actually one of our greatest enemies?
This, over the crème brûlée. Brenda was in her cups.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Angela Claus is a poor, lonely old thing. Not half so bad as she’s made out to be.’
‘We had a lovely time at the pie and peas dinner dance last week.’
Everyone looked startled at you, my love, piping up just then. We all stared at you. You grinned. Those teeth of yours glinted in the candlelight.
I said, chattily, ‘They had that cabaret knife-throwing and exorcism act on again. Denise and Wheatley. If we’d have thought on, we should have asked you, Brenda.’
‘Hmmm.’
Dessert wines and more awkward conversation. But then, all unannounced, you became loquacious, my dear. You took my hand across the immaculate tablecloth (immaculate but for the few spatters of blood from my steak. I’m not normally a messy eater).
Then you were telling them: ‘I went to hell and back for this wonderful woman. I hope you understand how much I feel for her.’
Brenda coughed in a vulgar fashion and glared at us both. ‘You didn’t go to hell and back, Alucard. You were sent down into hell. We chucked you down there, if you remember.’
Impasse. Henry Cleavis suppressed a snort of amusement. I could have got up and cracked their heads together. Smug pair that they are.
Brenda declined cheese and biscuits and coffee. Cheese and coffee were things that would keep her up all night these days if she had them too late, she said. She’d been having terrible dreams recently.
I told her, ‘You’re always bad with nightmares.’
She took on a martyred air. ‘I am.’
‘It must be your past memories. Lurking about under the surface of your mind. Coming back in the night to plague you.’
She raised both eyebrows. I could tell she thought I was being very uncaring. But I felt a bit uncaring, to be honest. She does bang on about those nightmares of hers, and how hard it is being her. It was getting on my nerves.
‘Really, you could have been or done anything, in all those past lives of yours,’ I went on blithely, siding up the dishes carefully. ‘You’ll never really know, will you?’
Brenda bridled. ‘Henry can help me recover pieces of my past. Through hypnosis and so on.’
‘Oh really?’
Cleavis nodded modestly.
‘Very interesting. I’m sure you’ll dig out some fascinating revelations about the past lives of our Brenda.’
Brenda was looking very piqued indeed by now. Her face was all squinched up at me.
Relief, then, that it was time to finish up and go home. I’d had enough. I watched Cleavis fiddling with his wallet and his many credit cards. He was lingering, I could tell, and giving us an opportunity to leap in and offer to pay our half. No flaming way.
You, my darling Kristoff, slid elegantly up from the table and offered to fetch our outdoor things from the cloakroom.
You said to Brenda and Cleavis – rather gallantly, ‘Thank you for this evening, my dears. I realise that we have an antagonistic history. But I hope you can learn to accept me and tolerate me, Brenda. I hope you don’t feel prejudiced at all against the undead.’
Brenda gave you a sickly smile and nodded graciously. You turned on your elegant heel and slipped off to the cloakroom. Once you were gone, Brenda said, ‘I suppose he really means that he wants to use the lavatory. What a silly ruse! Mind, I don’t think about Alucard using the toilet. I don’t really want to. But I suppose he must do, same as anyone else, eh, Effie?’
I looked at her beadily. She was talking nonsense.
I made a concession. I thanked them both. Said I was glad we had thawed the recent chill between us.
I was startled by the sloppy, beaming smile on Brenda’s face all of a sudden. She said, ‘Ooh, Effie. It means so much to me that we’re getting on again. You’re so important to me. You’re my best friend. I want you to be happy. And safe.’
‘Excuse me,’ said Cleavis, waving the bill and his credit card about, and he slipped from the room as well.
Brenda distracted me for a few moments with some inconsequential chat about Robert. About how he’d helped her put up her Christmas tree earlier that evening. And then some guff about this Limbosine business that they were apparently investigating together. Well, I had no interest in that. Let them go looking into whatever macabre nonsense they wanted. I was finished with all of that stuff.
I realise now that she was deliberately holding me back. She kept me there, standing by the bay window in the private dining room of Casa Diodati for a few moments. A few crucial moments.
I could strangle her. I really could.
I thought she looked a bit shifty and sweaty. I thought that was just all the drink.
It was as we were leaving the room and following after the men down the narrow, twisting staircase that the immortal words came ringing out:
‘Die, you fiend!’
Brenda grabbed my arm. I thought it was shock. I thought she was after support. But again, she was keeping me back. She was clamping hold of my wrist. Both my wrists. Preventing me from bustling past her.
I was filled with confusion. All this noise coming up from the cloakroom. Pounding and thumping . . . and Cleavis yelling out, again and again, ‘Die! Die! You monstrous fiend!’
And all of a sudden I knew what was happening.
I used all my strength to push Brenda out of the way. She shrieked as she toppled down the staircase, sliding heavily along the smooth walls, bringing down a set of sailing prints with her.
I came hurtling down just in time to see her wicked fancy man, Henry Cleavis, standing triumphantly with his bloody mallet raised above his head.
My love, you were supine at his feet. There was a sharpened stake in your chest.
But there was precious little left of you.
Cleavis gave one more inarticulate grunt and brought his hammer down a final time.
Clunk. Thud.
POUFFF.
I caught a glimpse of your grey, contorted face before you vanished in a puff of smoke and ancient dust. Your hands were grasping and scrabbling the air above you. And then you were gone.
Like a dandelion clock, my love.
I heard Brenda cry, as she heaved herself up on her hefty knees, ‘You did it, Henry! You actually did it!’
She had dusty fragments of you stuck in her beehive, I noticed.
I was frozen on the spot. I couldn’t even breathe. Your ashes tickled my nose and lined my throat. If I’d given vent to the screams welling up inside me, I’d have choked, I think.
Henry Cleavis swung his dusty mallet about in a very self-satisfied way. ‘Hmm. Last we’ll see, I should think. Of that, erm, abomination.’
I’m ashamed to say, my dear, that at this point I fainted.
They took me home. I woke up in our bed.
They left me there without you. I don’t even know what happened to your remains.
Happy bloody Christmas to us.
Boxing Day
Dear Kristoff,
Brenda has gone way beyond the pale, and we are friends no more. Which is a shame, given that it was just a few days before Christmas – especially since the two of us had, as usual, made such elaborate and involved plans for the Yuletide season. But that’s how things go sometimes – especially when your best friend facilitates the staking of your man friend through his heart.
I woke up the next morning with my head spinning. At first I couldn’t take in what had gone on the night before.
I got ready for the day and drank a single, bitter cup of tea. Today I wouldn’t open the shop downstairs. I was in mourning. I looked around my home – its many floors and rooms, all stuffed with antiques and books and gewgaws, more things than I would ever need – and it seemed like some terrible mausoleum.
Just recently it had been filled with light and laughter. You, Kristoff Alucard, had made me feel young again, and silly and loved and reckless.
27 December
Dear Kristoff,
Since you went, my aunts have wasted no time in telling me how glad they are.
They’re relieved. They come clambering out of their portraits and the swags in the old curtains and their hiding places in the dark shadows of the attic. They come drifting and sweeping about the upper rooms of my home.
Aunt Maud is cock-a-hoop that you’ve been snatched out of my life. That grand old lady is aware that I’m upset and that I’m not going to get over this any time soon. She stands over me as I sit there despairing. When I sob and shake, she thunders and proclaims, ‘You’re best without a fiend like that, Effryggia.’
I won’t listen. I hate listening. I’m sick of these old harpies. All my life I’ve had generations of these witches louring over me. Telling me what’s best for me. Right now I don’t want to hear any of it.
‘How could you bring him in here? How could you invite him over our threshold, a creature like that? You have sullied our home. It will take many years to rid this place of the carrion stench of that man.’
My heart flares up with anger. ‘And me? What about me? If he stank of carrion and blood, if he was evil, then what about me? He taught me to hunt . . . he . . . he bit me . . .’
At first Aunt Maud and the others have no reply to this. They hang their heads and stay silent. They vanish for a while, whistling back off into the ether.
‘Where are you? Where have you gone? Aunts . . . !’
They are ashamed of me.
They can’t even talk about the fact that I allowed myself to be bitten by him. That I let him inculcate me, and change me for ever.
Sometimes I am frightened of what I have done. I can hardly credit it. I go to the mirror to splash cold water on my face and expect to see the same pinch-faced old lady looking back at me.
But she’s not there any more. Not on the surface, at least. You can’t see that acidic old hag in the sparkling green eyes or in the pink cheeks and the unlined brow. I know she’s there, though. She’s there, under all the blooming health and youth. Still old and haggard and bitter as hell.
Oh, dear. What have I let myself in for?
I’ve given myself up to evil.
I am evil. I have killed. Or rather, rendered undead. But that’s just splitting hairs. What have I done to myself? No wonder Brenda looks at me askance. And Cleavis. He’s
ruthless. Does he know what I am? I belong to a race he has sworn to vanquish and stamp out. I will be next on his list for staking, no doubt about it.
And what will Brenda do then? Will she stand happily by and watch him? Will she help him? Hold the stake straight in my chest as he readies his mallet? Will she chop off my head and stuff my neck with garlic, like she was preparing a Sunday roast?
I see at once that I have to move away from here.
Even without you, my dear, taking me elsewhere and showing me the wider world, I must leave this place, my home. I must start alone elsewhere. My days here are numbered, either way.
Fine Christmas this is turning out to be.
The days inch and slither by. It’s the indeterminate period before New Year, when all the days merge into one long twilight. My sense of time is going peculiar too, as an effect, probably, of my solitariness.
I go out as little as I can. I’m stewing in my own dark, despairing thoughts. I can hear the folk out on the street meeting each other and calling their greetings and asking how their Christmases have been. I venture out for a few sundry things. Supplies.
My one source of happiness comes when I lure a young man or two into an alleyway. I can’t help myself.
I don’t drain anyone. I give them a little nibble. These youngsters seem startled. Some enjoy it. Some of them become Walkers. I try not to kill.
When I hurry home, with my veins all lit up inside me like the town-centre Christmas tree, I start to feel a bit of remorse. Not much. I’m a survivor. I have to do what I need to, to survive.
Everything has changed so much. My senses are heightened. Ironic, that: now that I’m spending so many days in solitude, locked indoors, my appreciation of the sounds and smells of everyday life has improved a hundredfold. Now more than ever my body seethes with energy and a desire to be out and about. Smelling and tasting and being close to the throb and pulse of real life.
