Burns Night

by Amy Hoff

  “Well, it doesn’t exactly inspire fear in the hearts of men.”

  Despite its serious ugliness, there was something indescribably...cute...about it.

  “Well. It’s not the monster that gave me this scar,” she said, tapping the furrows on her cheek with a finger. She ducked to look under the bed. “How many monsters are under here, anyway?”

  She sat up again, and the monster started bouncing up and down a little, the way dogs do when they really want someone to throw the ball.

  “Does it...does it want to play?” asked Leah.

  “Looks like it,” said Robert.

  “Maybe we should take it to Milo,” Leah suggested. “He’ll know what to do with it.”

  “How are we going to get...that...to leave?” Robert asked her.

  Leah stood up and started making soft tch tch tch sounds while snapping her fingers. To her surprise, it jumped off the railing onto the bed and then scurried onto her shoulder, where it rubbed against her head and started purring, like the world’s most terrifying cat.

  “Huh,” said Leah. “Not much of a nightmare after all.”

  Robert, visibly balking as it turned black eyes toward him, smiled and nodded—though it was clear he felt exactly the opposite.

  ***

  Robert had been surprised to find that Leah lived quite near to him. He’d taken rooms on Byres Road, near the twinkling fairy light cobblestone quaintness of Ashton Lane. The buildings of the grand old university comforted him, a sweet reminder of his own past. He particularly loved the walk down behind University Gardens in the snow, as it reminded him of bygone days of mystery and magic.

  However, he’d taken rooms in that particular area for another reason.

  Robert had never been one for the consideration of women. His uncouth behaviour had gnawed at him for many years, and now that he had moved into Glasgow to be closer to Desdemona, he felt that he could start by repaying society for his sins. It had taken him a long time to come around to the idea that his behaviour had been ungentlemanly in the extreme. He decided the best course of action with the gift of his eternal life was to hunt men who preyed on women. This affair was something of the pot calling the kettle black, but he felt the urge to do something helpful for humanity. Where better to pursue this calling than a large university, where ungentlemanly behaviour was rife? He’d enjoyed spending evenings at the Hetherington Research Club before it was torn down, as everything in the place, right down to the décor, made him feel like he was in a gentleman’s club of yesteryear. Despite what modern popular fiction portrayed, vampires weren’t particularly interested in keeping with the times. Just like elderly folk, they missed the familiar old things that furnished the world they had known, and distrusted newfangled ideas and technology, regardless of how much easier it might make their existence.

  In practising this kind of dubious vigilantism, Robert fancied himself something of a hero, a saviour of women, a chivalrous creature using the resources he had to destroy what he considered the evil in the world.

  And yet, as a vampire, he was a murderer all the same.

  He was a creature built of blood and bone, of passion and obsession, of an endless, gnawing agony of love that had crawled into his still heart and stayed there.

  But now, that heart was beating again, the blood pumping warm in his veins.

  Now, his skin felt the cold damp of a Glasgow January night again.

  He saw the world, once more, with mortal eyes.

  And thus defanged, he began to wonder about the choices he had made, both in his mortal life and his immortal one.

  But the strangest part of all was that, even in his mortality, the name Desdemona burned at the centre of his soul, an emerald flame.

  If it was a curse, he thought, like everyone says – then why do I feel exactly the same way as I did all those years ago? If anything, my renewed mortality should be a gift, a release, if it had really been a spell, or some kind of enchantment.

  But nothing had changed at all. He still felt all the same intensity of love he’d always had for the creature that called itself Desdemona.

  Reassured that his uniqueness in the world was still something legends were made of, he grinned into the night, and turned his attention back to the matters at hand.

  He walked by Leah’s side, along Byres Road in the darkness, and while normally there would be all manner of folk on these streets, the scene tonight was utter confusion. People ran past them, pursued by nightmare creatures, while other people stopped stock still in the street and smiled among opium dreams. Cars parked, stopped, or crashed haphazard all along the road, and distant sirens filled the air.

  Glasgow had never been so eerily silent, even though people were in the streets, wandering aimlessly through the stores, or in the darkness of the Botanic Gardens. Soundless, they let their nightmares consume them, and the world was as nothing to the people of the city.

  “Not taking the subway,” said Leah. “Too dangerous. We’re going to have to walk to St. Enoch.”

  Normally, this kind of statement was meaningless; a long walk down Great Western Road, down St. George’s Road, a turn at Driftwood onto Sauchiehall, a turn at Buchanan Street, and down. A bit of a hike, but nothing to write home about.

  In a city where dreams and nightmares had come to life, this journey was another thing entirely.

  ***

  Halfway down the Great Western Road, the two of them arrived at Kelvin Bridge. The orange sodium lamps threw pools of light onto the pavement, and a light mist began to gather at their feet.

  Suddenly, two figures blew past them, thundering across the bridge and disappearing into the growing fog.

  “Come on, Watson!” the one in the cloak shouted to the other. “The game’s afoot!”

  Leah stared.

  And stared again.

  “Was that–” Robert began.

  “Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, yes,” Leah affirmed.

  “That’s strange,” said Robert.

  “Like standing on a bridge in Glasgow with vampire Robert Burns?” Leah asked.

  “Touche,” Robert conceded. “But what’re they doing here?”

  “Well, you saw the man running away from the giant loo roll?” asked Leah, and Robert nodded. “And the building made of melting Irn-Bru?”

  Robert nodded again.

  “Nightmares,” said Leah. “Like. Those are the kinds of things people have nightmares about. But I think it’s more than that.”

  You’re not a real detective, said a sinuous voice in Leah’s head. Not really.

  “You have nightmares...about Sherlock Holmes?” Robert asked.

  Leah sighed. The creature on Leah’s shoulder twittered and gave her what might have been a kiss, if his face hadn’t been entirely made of teeth.

  “Not nightmares,” Leah mused, lost in thought. “Well, not nightmares exactly. It’s just that I was trained as a folklorist, it was everything to me, my entire life. When I went into the polis because there wasn’t much work going for people in my field, I mean...”

  “You were afraid of being inadequate?” asked Robert. “Not a real detective?”

  Leah nodded, crossing her arms, her head down.

  “So does that mean these aren’t dreams and nightmares at all?” asked Robert.

  “Oh, I think they are,” Leah confirmed, looking up with a steely gaze. “But I think they’re also anxieties, things we love and fear, the kinds of worries that keep you up at night, about your place in the world, things you’ve lost in the fire, that sort.”

  “Regrets and fears,” Robert said. “Yes, I can see that.”

  “I mean,” said Leah. “it’s a monstrous thing to wish upon someone, isn’t it? May all your dreams come true?”

  Robert blanched.

  ***

  Desdemona once, in the barroom of some nondescript place in the back end of beyond.

  “It’s not exactly a fear, Robert,” she’d said, as she took a pull on her pipe, and
he swore he watched her tongue wind around the stem before he’d drawn his attention back to her words. “It’s the abject terror of becoming the thing you fear most, whether that’s mediocre or monster, famous or forgotten. It’s the opposite of desire, and that’s nightmare enough for me.”

  “What is it?” Robert asked. “Yours. Your...opposite of desire.”

  And Desdemona looked out, alone, in her mind and in her eyes, as if Robert was no company at all.

  “Becoming,” she said.

  “Becoming what?” Robert asked.

  “The thing that lives inside me,” she said. “The monster in us all.”

  She smiled, slight; a bright green glow suffused the room as her eyes lit up with an inner brilliance, more evidence of her inhumanity. The world always seemed emerald, with her.

  “But the monster in me,” she’d said, “more than anything else.”

  And what was Robert to say to this creature he loved beyond reason, whose greatest fear was itself?

  He’d had nothing, and remained silent, as Desdemona smoked her pipe.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MILO

  Deep in the underground laboratory of Caledonia Interpol, beyond the doors of the mysterious subterranean labyrinth, Dr. Milo McFintan was working.

  Surrounded by bubbling liquids and noxious vapours in the darkness, Milo examined the dead. He was, at once, the forensic anthropologist to the monster police, and also conducted his own curious and offensive experiments. Down here, there was no one to see him work. Not that he wanted them to, he often told himself when he was in a huff. They wouldn’t understand. He was the kind of scientist that other people usually called mad. Judgmental people, anyway.

  The gill slits along Milo’s neck flexed as he breathed in and out. He wore his white lab coat open, exposing a finely-muscled chest, revealing orange-and-yellow scales interspersed with his skin, and breaking many rules about proper lab safety protocol in the process. His long orange tail rested in a bucket of water next to the wheelchair he used; unlike other merpeople, Milo’s tail stayed exactly as it was, whether he was in the water or on land.

  Milo glanced up at his only companion in the lab these days, a ghostly witch named Hazel. He’d previously had an assistant, a mild-mannered young man named Geoffrey—but Geoffrey had turned out to be Sebastian, hiding under all that innocence. Hazel, Sebastian’s former wife, had been murdered by Dorian Grey’s brother, Magnus, who continued to live out his sentence in the Deeps, the magical cells beneath Interpol. Hazel had come to work for the Fae police after working a case with them, when her own half-resurrection had come in useful, and she had been offered a permanent post.

  Right now, however, Hazel wasn’t sure she’d made the right choice. Her position mainly consisted in working what came down to magical tech support with the elderly Fae who were wilfully ignorant of modern magic. Hazel had once been a popular fashion designer during London’s swinging 60s; she thought she’d seen enough to test her patience back then. However, it was nothing compared to modern-day dealings with Faerie’s less-than-savvy set.

  Milo was gruff with her, but privately had taken quite a shine to the marvellously-Mod witch, whose eternal youth in death matched Milo’s own long lifeline.

  Not that he’d ever tell her, or anyone else, of course. He had a reputation to uphold, after all, and creepy mad scientist had been his position for a long time. He wasn’t about to ruin all that hard work.

  He was staring at her with an absentminded, soft smile when the door opened. Leah and Robert entered the room, having braved the Labyrinth with the help of the Minotaur.

  Milo sat up straight, busying himself with some paperwork, and pretended that he hadn’t noticed them come in. He knew that Leah had an eagle eye and was hoping she hadn’t seen anything.

  “Hello, Milo,” said Leah. The strange creature from underneath her bed was standing on her shoulder like a deranged parrot.

  “Leah!” Milo cried out when he looked up, anxiously pretending distraction. “Good to see you both. This experiment isn’t really working. Needs more ginger, I think. I’d go out for it myself, but the limitations of being a merman on land, well, you can imagine.”

  He gestured at his tail, and his wheelchair.

  “Well, I wouldn’t be going out there just yet,” said Robert with feeling, looking a little wilder around the edges than he had in years.

  “Oh?” Milo said, mildly intrigued. “Do tell.”

  “We’re not really sure what’s going on,” Leah said. “The city’s gone crazy. Crazier than usual, I mean. We think people are trapped in their own dreams. And nightmares.”

  “Fascinating!” Milo enthused, glad to have something that would actually distract him. “You could take Hazel with you. As a ghost, she probably wouldn’t be affected.”

  “Don’t you give me more work to do, Milo,” admonished Hazel, covering the phone’s receiver.

  Leah turned to Hazel.

  “You were a witch when you were alive, right?” she asked. “Any idea what kind of spell might have caused this?”

  “Am a witch,” Hazel corrected her. “Responsibility didn’t end when I was killed. And no. Whatever’s going on out there isn’t magic. Well, it’s not a spell, anyway. You’re on your own.”

  She put her ear to the phone again.

  “No, I’m sorry, I was speaking to someone else,” said Hazel, clearly trying to be patient. “What do you mean, the lights have gone? The – okay, go ahead and get a torch, I’ll be here.”

  Hazel covered the phone again, rolling her eyes.

  “I’m telling you,” she said. “Some of these Fae, if they’d just read the instructions in the grimoire, but oh no, there were no instructions in my day, dearie, you killed someone and buried them under the stoop and that was that, but what do they know about sentient-beings-rights movements and the–”

  Everyone was staring at her. She shut her mouth abruptly and offered a quick, tight smile.

  “Did you finish the potion I needed for the experiment?” Milo asked Hazel.

  The young witch favoured the merman with a tender look. Leah hid a smile and tried to elbow Robert, but he had his nose buried in a book. It was called The Complete Works of Burns, and he had found it on one of the laboratory shelves. In his pursuit of all things Robert, and the esteem in which he held himself, he never once entertained any suspicion about why a monster like Milo, known for his interests in other monsters and vivisection, would have a book about Robert Burns on a shelf in his laboratory.

  Such is the arrogance of man, and most especially, the arrogance of Scottish poets who are just a little bit too handsome for their own good. But no one else paid him any mind, least of all the two working in the lab, completely oblivious to each other’s affections.

  “Yes. You had the wrong ingredients in the last one,” Hazel was saying, a certain fondness softening her tone as she smiled down at him. “What would you do without me?”

  As if surprised that he had feelings, Milo stiffened and turned away from her – but not by much.

  “I can survive just fine in the lab without you,” Milo sniffed haughtily, but not nearly as haughtily as he might have. “Shove off.”

  The other two couldn’t help but notice, however, that he still angled his wheelchair a little closer toward her as he said it.

  “Dorian and Desdemona have gone missing,” Leah interjected, changing the subject.

  “Yes, I’d heard,” said Milo, turning his attention back to her. “I’m not sure that there’s anything the two of us are going to be able to do to help, I’m afraid.”

  “Well,” Leah said, “I found something that you might find interesting.”

  “Oh?” asked Milo.

  “This!” Leah said, pointing at the strange creature on her shoulder Milo hadn’t noticed yet, being distracted by the effort of pretending disinterest in Hazel.

  “Marvellous!” Milo shouted, when he finally noticed the creature perched there.

 
; For a scientist, he may not have seemed very observant. He was usually quite astute.

  Love makes us do foolish things, as Robert could have told him.

  As with all other aspects of his life these days, Milo turned to his companion for an opinion.

  “Will you look at this, Hazel?”

  Hazel was already deep into a spellbook and didn’t even turn around.

  “That’s nice, Milo,” she said absently.

  “Ah, what do you know,” said Milo, dismissing her with a wave. “Where did you find it, Leah?”

  “Under my bed?” Leah said, just as the creature nuzzled her face again. “Something attacked me and gave me these scars when I was little. The monster under my bed. And then, in a dream...I found this.”

  “We really need to set up an outreach programme for human children,” said Milo, almost to himself, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Who knows how many other species are still waiting to be discovered?”

  “You mean I’m not the only one with a monster under my bed?” Leah asked, surprised. Somehow, she’d always believed that she was the only one.

  “Oh, no, not at all,” Milo said. “There are multiple gestation areas for a wide variety of different monsters. In the closet, under the bed, you get the idea. You know how all folklore has a grain of truth in it? Some stories are truer than others.”

  The creature chirped and cuddled up to Leah again.

  “It seems to like you,” Milo observed. “Perhaps you should keep it.”

  “Can’t you keep it?” Leah asked, her voice raising into a higher register. Then added, “And try not to experiment on it?”

  Milo sat back, offended. He also simultaneously pushed a small table out of view, which held the partially-dissected body of a goblin.

  “I don’t experiment on everything here,” he said. “Besides, this isn’t a zoo or a kennel. There isn’t really any room.”

  “But I don’t know how to take care of – of – whatever this is!” cried Leah.

  “Neither do I,” Milo countered. “We’re both in the dark. I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”