Seam laughed and shook his head. “Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll drop by tomorrow afternoon and bring you that game.”
Barry brightened, maybe – just maybe – flicking back to sobriety in his distraction. If he did, he covered it well and let the alcohol wash back over him again. “Oh, right – yeah – cheers.”
Being restricted to the church during daylight hours and being rendered essentially penniless, Barry’s consumerism had suffered greatly. Old Father Bryant had brought a small television set into one of the back rooms for Barry to watch during the day when the whim took him, but it didn’t have very good reception. So far, on the whole, the radio worked better and was a more constant companion for the lonely Angel.
In life, however, and forgotten by just about everybody, Barry Dell had owned a Nintendo Entertainment System. Seam had ‘inherited’ the device after Barry’s death, but didn’t really play it all that much. Now, although it was unanimously agreed to be a terrible misuse of an Angelic afterlife and probably sacrilege of some sort, they’d arranged for Seam to ‘donate’ it to the church so Barry would have something to do during the day.
With a final wave, Barry stumbled into the old building and slammed the door, narrowly avoiding slamming his wings in it. Shaking his head and smiling, Seam backed his rumbling Holden out of the little carpark and headed for home.
VINCE, PETE AND ALAN GO TO CHURCH
I
Accompanied by three men who he was hard-pressed to describe as anything other than goons, Troy Haussman marched into Preston Point Anglican Church with a brisk, purposeful stride on Wednesday morning. The three goons followed, appearing ill-at-ease in the place of worship. Truth be told, the three goons seemed ill-at-ease wearing clothes. Troy fancied they would be far happier squatting in a cave-mouth somewhere, waiting for something to wander past that they could victimise with a gnawed femur.
The goons’ names were Vince, Pete and Alan. Not exactly inspirational or exciting names in any way, but Canon had minimal contacts on this side of the equator, let alone on this side of the country, so they had to make do with what they could find.
Vince, Pete and Alan didn’t know they were employees of Canon. Troy understood on an abstract level that they were technically part of some organised crime outfit or other here in Western Australia, and that Canon owned the Board of Directors of the corporation that owned the criminal overlords who called the shots in the depths of Vince, Pete and Alan’s muddy little pond. They’d been instructed to go with Troy and do as he told them, and to ask no questions – and, thankfully, they had not asked any so far. Probably, Troy had long since concluded, because they lacked the higher-level consciousness to think of any.
When they entered the little church and saw the figure sprawled on the floor between the pews, however, the massive sloping foreheads wrinkled, the stubbled and deep-cleft chins dropped, and the goons hesitated.
“What’s that?” One of them – Troy thought it was Alan – managed to express his confusion in as simple a question as possible. “Looks like a–”
“Didn’t your boss explain this to you?” Troy demanded. “He’s a common drunk, got a bunch of debts, he’s taking refuge with an old friend–”
“Never said anything about wings.”
“He hasn’t got wings,” Troy snapped. “They’re … I mean, of course he hasn’t got wings, that’s, uh, stupid. He’s wearing a costume, obviously.”
“Why?”
“I thought your boss told you not to ask any questions,” Troy said in irritation. “That’s two you’ve asked now,” he returned the goon’s deep-set and glittering stare. “You know ‘two’?” he asked. “It’s the one that’s probably the number of balls you have.”
Another of the goons, this one possibly Vince, suddenly seemed to realise he and his colleagues were being mouthed off at by an American teenager with pimples and a cardigan. He loomed in a way that was probably really intimidating to people who weren’t walking undead minions of the Lord of Darkness. “Now listen, kid…”
Vince trailed off, for no reason he could easily identify. Of course, he had no comprehension of the fact that his frail mortal shell was skateboarding blithely along a footpath between two lanes of the ravening peak-hour traffic of oblivion. He had no conscious knowledge that the look Troy Haussman was giving him was one electron separated from being a hearty shove at right-angles to that footpath. But, somehow, deep in Vince’s drug- and child-abuse-damaged brain, a frantic deputation of self-preserving hormones were squeezed off and managed to sever the connection between his ire and his primitive language centre.
Much the same biological processes that made Vince breathe in and out had managed to keep him alive to spend another day in the service of Canon and his new business partner.
Pete and Alan saw Vince falter, and they placidly took their cues from him without being privy to anything that was happening beneath the surface. If Vince wasn’t going to get aggro, then they weren’t either. It was just easier that way.
And so no further hormones were wasted that morning.
“Pick him up,” Troy instructed, standing back and gesturing the three goons forward. They approached the motionless form, and Vince reached down and grabbed the figure under the armpits. He grunted and swore as he lugged the body to chest-height. The unconscious man’s head flopped face-first against the goon. There was a jingling of gold chains as the limp head disturbed Vince’s decorations. Immense wings dangled nervelessly to the slate floor.
“He’s heavy as a bastard,” Vince observed with surprise. “Gimme a hand, Pete.”
The two huge men heaved the comatose body between them, face-down. Alan stepped up and grabbed one of the wings experimentally, then squinted at the muscular complexity where they vanished into the ripped shirt and presumably attached to the man’s back.
“I can pull these things off, it’d make it easier to carry him,” he said, and tugged on the great feathered limb. He frowned, and tugged harder. Vince and Pete staggered as their burden was jerked away from them.
“They’re stuck on there good,” Troy said impatiently. “Just do the best you can.”
The goons started toward the door.
“D’you reckon you could just grab that other, er, wing?” Alan suggested. He had hold of one, but the other was still dragging along the floor, occasionally getting under the clumping feet of Pete, who had the body by the legs. Haussman shook his head and put his hands behind his back.
“I’m not touching it,” he said, then corrected himself. “Him. I’m not touching him.”
Despite the weight and ungainliness of the motionless figure, the three goons managed to get him out of the church and into the waiting car with relative ease. Throughout the transaction, Barry Dell hardly made a noise. His eyes opened once, and looked back and forth in slow-motion. If the movement of his eyes had been sped up a few orders of magnitude, you might imagine he was looking around wildly, frantic with terror. As it was, nobody noticed aside from Troy, because the goons were carrying him with his face angled away from them. When Troy held the door open for the three labouring goons, a slight moan of apprehension drifted from the prone figure, but it was ignored in the general shuffling and heaving.
Pete and Alan propped Dell up between them in the back seat of the inconspicuous Holden Commodore.13 Vince took the wheel, and Troy climbed into the passenger side. The car accelerated away from the church, and towards the big, gleaming nightclub on the other side of Fremantle. Just this week, the nightclub had been renamed Das Wampyr’s. Canon had precious little respect for the intelligence of anybody who might investigate a wealthy young man who only conducted business at night and wore trendy sunglasses a lot.
The club had promptly been unofficially re-named Dwamps by the locals of Fremantle, who had even less respect for fruity foreign names.
As of Monday morning, the twenty-seventh of August, the nightclub had belonged to Canon. It had actually belonged to him – on paper, at l
east – for some decades already since he made a point of having several lucrative fallback locations available to him in each territory. His acquisition of the property, as a matter of historical interest, had been the point at which The Old Town Hotel had become The Port Hotel, and a few years after that it had started down a profitable but nondescript line of pubs and nightclubs. Ramping it up for a reopening and sending out invitations had been the work of three phonecalls. Troy was glad he’d found such a good forward-thinker to team up with, even if he was a bit of a stodgy old pervert.
Just like dad, Troy thought randomly as the Commodore cruised casually through the morning rush-hour traffic.
II
Back in the church, Laetitia lay forgotten in her delicate little coffin. An hour or so later, the elderly Father Bryant arrived and clucked to himself at seeing the church door wide open. It was a comment on how thoroughly Barry had ingratiated himself with the old man, however, that Father Bryant saw nothing amiss with the situation inside his church. He didn’t notify the authorities – for indeed, there was nothing missing, apart from the Angel and Father Bryant was fairly sure he couldn’t report that.
He noticed the coffin, but vaguely remembered something about the Angel assuring him it was all under control, and not to worry about a thing. So obviously Father Bryant didn’t worry. It was more or less his job to do what Angels said.
In the afternoon, a considerably less Angelic but still polite young man, nervously introducing himself as “Seam, uh, Dale, Dale Waddington, Father,” showed up at the church to deliver a video game. He seemed much shaken by the fact that the Angel had gone – in fact it took a great deal of repetition and strange-question-answering for the vicar to actually assure Dale that Barry was indeed not on the premises. Dale looked deeply troubled, but hooked up the video game to the television and wandered back outside with a wince for the over-bright sunshine.
The elderly vicar tried to play the video game, but found it baffling and gave up after ten minutes of bleeps and bloops.
THE WEDDING
Canon moved through the happily babbling crowd like a shark through a school of valium-dosed fish. He was a stranger at the expensive hotel, but nobody questioned his presence. He nodded and smiled in a familiar manner to selected people, and that seemed to be enough for everybody.
The foyer of the glitzy14 Parmelia Hilton had been booked that evening for the wedding reception of some happy pair of human beings, at least one of whom had been lucky enough to be born into a relatively wealthy family. From snatches of conversation overheard, Canon had gathered it was the young man who formed the wealthy side of the new family, and he was marrying some unknown young lady from nowhere in particular, and a fair few of the relatives did not really approve. That was more than Canon needed to blend with the crowd. It was such a familiar wedding-story, it was almost dull. If it weren’t for their infinite tiny variations, the endless cycle of human societies would have become deathly boring by now.
Within half an hour of arriving – and the ultra-polite, besuited thugs at the front desk had barely raised an eyebrow at his appearance – Canon was able to tell the bride’s side of the family from the groom’s, and had a solid gauge on how the atmosphere was developing. There was far more of the groom’s family, and they were stylishly and expensively dressed, of course. It was the ease with which they managed to look stylish that gave away their social standing, however.
At first glance, all the people in the foyer were dressed the same, and were all of the same class. Canon was not fooled. The men and women on the bride’s side of the family weren’t comfortable dressed as they were. They were in their special party clothes, and it showed. The fingering of a collar, the tugging of a sleeve, the hasty rearranging of a bosom were all the signs the Vampire needed. These people wanted to be wearing jeans, lumberjack shirts, and elastic-sided Country Blues. Maybe they weren’t rural chimpanzees, but they were close enough. They thought they – and the rest of the people in the assembly – were dressed up like a bunch of toffs.
Of course, to Canon they were all apes.
He was engaging in one of his favourite pastimes. This was more entertaining than watching a movie, more exciting than chasing down a street kid and feeding, more interesting than sex, more intellectually stimulating than a hundred books of philosophy. This was humanity at its most intricate, its most incomprehensibly enlightened, and its most crapulent. His preferred observing sites were – obviously – pubs and nightclubs, but he was staying away from Das Wampyr’s for the time being. The arranged party on Saturday night would be more than enough to look forward to, the building itself was still undergoing the sort of intensive renovation only unlimited money could buy, and in the meantime, these over-civil get-togethers were vastly entertaining in their own way. It was like a very slow war, fought with meaningful looks and polite conversation rather than maces and broadswords.
He insinuated himself into a ring of people who all seemed to be of the groom’s family. Taking a drink from a passing waiter, he smiled at the few conversationalists who noticed his arrival, and listened politely until he’d ascertained the topic of the day. Then he waited for most of the main players in the circle to shut their mouths for a few moments. This was a delicate game, because most of the others were also waiting for enough people to stop talking so that their own words could be stuck into the social psyche. He gleaned – or rather confirmed, as it had been his assumption from the start – that there were at least a couple of semi-functioning alcoholics on the bride’s side of the family and the newlyweds were headed to the airport early Friday morning which was why the wedding was being held on Thursday evening.
It was widely considered to be poor form not to give wedding guests a weekend in which to nurse sore feet and hangovers. A Thusday night party – what good was that?
Finally, he got his chance to speak.
“Well I never met her either,” he offered in a wonderfully self-important voice that he saved just for such occasions. “I mean, not that I’d have expected it, but I’d have thought I’d hear something,” he smiled apologetically at the bemused, stupid faces arranged before him. “So sorry. I am Pierre – a friend of Graham’s from university.”
Most of the faces cleared at the news they were addressing a tertiary education in an expensive suit. And even if they weren’t as consciously aware of it as he was, they recognised the comfort with which he wore it. It was funny nearly to the point of hysteria to Canon. If he’d arrived and informed these people that he’d spent five years playing marbles with eyeballs in autopsy rooms, taking drugs that didn’t even have names on the street, and having the worst kinds of manipulative sex with underage girls from the nearby Ladies’ Boarding School – often all three of the above, at the same time – he’d have been escorted to the door and most likely subjected to police attention. But telling them exactly that, all in the single word university, was enough to set the apprehensions of most of them to rest. Canon was willing to bet that every person in this circle had been to university, just as he had been certain that Graham had as well, and reasonably certain it had been a postgraduate medical degree of some stripe. He was also sure that none of them thought about what university had really been like – not anymore, and not in situations like this. It was like a sort of hypnosis. University was a Good Thing. People who went to university were progressive, intelligent, and worth knowing.
One or two faces still had mild frowns, though.
“That was … rather a long…” one grey-templed but still hale and suntanned fellow hinted in a puzzled voice. Canon decided this was probably Graham’s older brother, or some other fairly close relative. Close enough that he knew when Graham had gone to university. The fact that Canon must have looked at least ten years too young to be a university colleague of the thirty-something Graham was not a problem the Vampire considered important.
“Oh, of course – I don’t like to think how long,” Canon laughed merrily and took a long drink. It was
some sort of crass, sour, ghastly attempt at spiced rum. He thought it might be that appalling Australian stuff that even halfway-decent alcoholics wouldn’t touch, but he couldn’t imagine they would be serving that here. “I finished university and went to work in France – you may have noticed I have just a hint of an accent.”
Canon had been exaggerating his accent so outrageously ever since arriving that, if any of the people at the reception had failed to notice it, he would have had to kill them on general principle. As it was, everybody in the circle laughed indulgently, nodded and assured him it wasn’t all that noticeable, not really.
As was usual in such situations, attention drifted from his identity and back onto the proper rails of the conversation. Canon had given them something to notice, a little detective work to feel clever about, and now they felt there was no mystery about him whatsoever. A university chum of Graham’s, who had gone to France and picked up a real Pepe le Pew of an accent, the poor devil, and who was as upset as the rest of them about the sudden marriage and his exclusion from the whole decision.
The chatter went on, and Canon more or less stayed quiet, listening and watching. The older relative, who had called him on the university claim, seemed to be the dominant talker in the group. Of course he was – he was closer to the groom than anybody else, and … yes, Canon saw it in his eyes as he watched two or three of the waitresses crossing the room, and the way one or two of the women in the circle watched him … the man was also an eligible bachelor. As Graham should have stayed, presumably, until he also had grey temples.
Taking what he had learned from that circle, Canon bade his good-evenings and moved on, leaving nothing behind in the human minds but what had been there from the start. He placed his unfinished drink on another passing tray, offering an apologetic smile to the harried-looking waitress, and took a more pleasant-looking glass of liquid before joining another circle. This time, however, his enjoyment was to be cut rudely short. Rudely, and more than a little embarrassingly.
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