The Howling Twenties

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The Howling Twenties Page 7

by Fennel Steuert


  “What is it now?” said Simon.

  Argall continued looking at his hand, or the thought of his hand. “Why do you think I have any interest in whatever this is?”

  “Hiking?” said Simon. He shrugged. “I guess it doesn’t beat fully feeling like your hundreds of feet underground. Don’t vampires like being covered in dirt?”

  “Nothing with a mind really does,” said the custodian. “I suppose there are a few creatures of slight thought that prefer it, but that’s only to avoid all the things up there that already trample everything beneath their feet. Beyond that, groundhogs don’t think about much but food. Come on, Argall. Let’s see what we’ve been missing.”

  Argall stepped forward, following Simon and the custodian as they moved upward along a bunch of mossy rocks.

  “I used to climb this thing,” said Simon, “back when they had this train line out to the boonies. That’s mostly where they keep nature these days. That and on certain rooftops. Anyway, they ended it for some reason – the train line. That’s the world my great nephew grew up in …. One they walled off a view of the horizon in.”

  Argall figured he was talking about Doris’ new companion/friend/whatever he was. “Horizons … they had plenty of those where I grew up. Plenty of piled rocks and nature, too. I don’t remember if that made all the servitude and the mocking any more bearable, though.”

  “You’ve been able to mold the world to your liking for a long time,” said the custodian. “Most of the people that are closer enough for me to know they exist … The ones whose lives weren’t all hopelessness like your friend Doris’, they take comfort in things like that … little green spaces.”

  Argall absentmindedly took his hand when the custodian reached out to help him. “Hopelessness?”

  “Yes,” said the custodian. “I suppose she was actually hopeful about one thing.”

  “What was that?”

  “This,” said the custodian. “Talking about the mysteries of the universe. Trying to understand why it all seemed so hopeless.”

  Up at the top of the hill, they had a view of nothing but fog.

  “So,” said “Simon. “How does it feel to be the vampire with the magic bite? Do you still think it’d be all chosen ones up there?”

  Argall shrugged. “So what if it wasn’t? Most people would want to be stronger and stay that way.”

  “Yeah,” said Simon, “and they’re making the world a real paradise.”

  The custodian looked upward. “The air … it’s all so very strange compared to what it used to be.”

  Yes, thought Argall. I know what you mean.

  “Do you see what’s below?” said the custodian.

  Argall peered into the fog and saw dozens of them – ghouls – writhing and swiping at nothing in particular.

  “They may not have had a whole lot of spark,” said the custodian, “but by you’re dimming even that, they’re in hell.”

  Argall sighed. “Well, I suppose I know how they feel, then.”

  Simon threw a pebble at Argall’s head.

  “Not exactly like this,” said Argall. “I meant when I’m awake enough to feel how …” He scoffed a little. “No, I guess it’s not quite the same, is it?”

  10

  The Gnawing Twenties

  1920s

  Doris wasn’t sure that Gesine would ever really connect with Mab – not since Mab had cut her hair. She used to think that, while it might take a few centuries, it would happen eventually. And sooner than that, Doris thought Gesine would one day look at Argall and see that his back was bent again. And maybe she would be able to see beyond the way he sometimes relished his pale skin and vampirism.

  Gesine’s hair was important to her. But the hurt that came from Mab cutting it so casually was only part of it. They’d been through a lot in the south. It almost made her wish she could get drunk. Sometimes she would mix blood with one of the stronger moonshine concoctions, but it didn’t feel like anything but a lesser nourishment that tried to burn away her throat.

  Mab had spent nights showing Robin around the building, which Doris sometimes joined them for. Mostly because she was already wandering the place at night, occasionally following Gesine’s scent or going through the desks of people’s offices.

  “I really didn’t know it was so important to her,” Mab told Robin as they toured a room with several different models of radios. Her original accent had sort of returned, but it had also morphed into something that sounded a bit closer to Robin’s – which was a tiny bit more upper-crust.

  Robin’s eyes narrowed as he looked at one of the radios on the other side of the room. He held up an imaginary bow, strung it with an arrow, and let it go. “Do you think you might think less of her, Mab?”

  “Hardly,” said Mab. “Well … sometimes maybe. But she’s such a challenging one Gesine.”

  “I’m sure people said the same thing about you,” said Robin. “They did me as well, and I was an absolute picnic.”

  Mab grabbed some strands of her hair and held them above her mouth. “I’m sure you had more of a leg to stand on that I did.”

  Robin nodded. “And so it is with you to Gesine.”

  Mab went to a radio and turned one of its dials. “Doris, have you ever noticed she can’t stand the sounds some of these things make?”

  “Yes,” said Doris, edging around the room’s walls and its paintings of noblewomen in the night. “Which is why I never go around them with her, and why I’ve asked that you limit them to one floor.”

  “Which we have,” said Mab, “even if they’re a cornerstone of the modern world.”

  “Her hearing is as good as ours. Maybe better. She just isn’t good as filtering out the static.”

  Robin put his hand on a particularly large radio that was about five feet tall. He pressed down on the top, seemingly testing whether or not it could support his weight. Finally satisfied that it wouldn’t, he shook his head. “I don’t quite see it – an aversion to them being a bad thing.”

  Mab sighed. “It probably is some weakness of those with her condition.”

  “I think you should change the subject,” said Doris with her back to them.

  As they began to talk about places in Old England, Robin tried to include Doris but she wasn’t particularly interested. She left the building altogether and wandered the city’s cobblestone roads under streetlight. It was summertime. The world reeked of the smoke from pipes and cigarettes, along with the lingering smell from fish- and fruit-stands. And feces. Always feces.

  Doris went by the fruit-stands because Gesine sometimes did. She lingered absentmindedly, and as she did, she sensed that someone was going to bump into her. A woman soon did so, and then erupted in a huff as she realized that Doris would not give way. Doris was a bit too sturdy.

  “Watch where you’re going, girl,” the woman told her.

  Doris watched her walk away. Did the woman chalk up her musculature with her blackness? Doris wondered. Mab was just as sturdy as she was – their musculature built up by decades upon decades of their bodies refusing to break down. Argall was stronger than any human, but his upper body musculature, already a bit limited by his physicality, was limited even more by his inability to work with his curvature.

  On a nearby corner, a man was yelling in an attempt to entice patrons to some new music club.

  “Negro ragtime music! Genu-wine, authentic ragtime by some of the best Negro musicians around. Know your onions, folks!”

  When Doris passed him, he started following her.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said behind her. “You should come to Elmore’s. Every night’s a real sockdollager.”

  “I’m sure it is,” said Doris.

  He kept following her. “I’m serious. It’s a real swell place. Negros are appreciated there. We could even go together.”

  They were approaching an alleyway. No one else was around. Doris stopped abruptly and got really close to the man’s face. She pointed behind him, and
when he turned around, for a split second, she considered tearing into his neck. She wouldn’t have taken too much blood. She would have let him live. She didn’t particularly like what he was selling – she’d seen many clubs with blindingly enlightened bohemians – but it was an ocean apart from burning crosses and burning heaps of garlic. Instead, Doris hopped up into the alley, digging her claws into a building’s wall, and then she went swiftly up a fire escape.

  She kept to the rooftops and soon spotted Gesine on one just off main street with a nice view of a cemetery. Her short-haired friend was looking down at a horse and buggy. There was already a bit of blood around Gesine's mouth, and she vaguely smelled of vermin and something dog-like Doris couldn’t quite place.

  “Gesine,” said Doris. “You can’t just … neither of us. Not even your least favorite redhead in the world can wander for hours without some weak fool trying to bother us.”

  Gesine didn’t look up. “Is this not supposed to be the era of lights and human candle flies? Can we not be so pathetic as well?”

  Doris looked down. “I think that man would have a hard time pulling that buggy without his horse.”

  “Look to the right,” said Gesine.

  Doris did so, to a store with an assortment of wigs in the window. She slowly nodded. “I’d give you some of my hair. It’s not supposed to be worth very much, though.”

  Gesine looked up at Doris’ head. “Your hair could be longer.” She slunk down along the border of the roof, staring into the center of the roof. “Even when it was, I wouldn’t want your scalp.” She blinked. “That’s how they make those, right? That was something that we used to do in my tribe. Sometimes. Take the scalps of the enemy. Some tribes did so because the pale-faces used to pay a lot for our scalps. Some of us were already enemies.”

  Doris slunk down next to Gesine. She put her arms around Gesine’s far shoulder and her head on the close shoulder. They stayed that way until Doris could feel dawn encroaching.

  A week or so later, Doris was sitting with Argall, Mab and Robin in the head office eccentrically situated in the basement of the building. The rest of the building only had access to this part of the basement. Not the subterranean complex her associates were slowly building.

  “It’s a pity,” said Robin.

  “What?”

  Argall struggled to not seem stiff in the small iron lung he wore beneath a shirt and suit jacket; it was the latest of many crafted to fight the curve in his spine.

  “That you have all these floors above you,” said Robin.

  Mab sighed. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be closer to the sun when it’s up, instead of the moon. Doris and I used to spend a lot of times on roofs here, back when they were little more than a single story.”

  Doris thumbed the pages of a book of Native American lore on giants.

  “What’s above you depends on your perspective,” said Argall. “A lot of people already have skies that are essentially dirt, after all.”

  Robin shrugged. “Well, anyway, back in London, all my ….”

  “You’re what?” said Argall. “Your masters?” He looked at Doris, which irked her something awful.

  “They’re old,” said Robin. “But they don’t really want to be the master of anything … in particular. I suppose humanity has been quite the lesson for them. And what you’re doing here is a bit human.”

  Argall tapped the desk to the tune of a popular ragtime tune. “Tell me something, Robin, that Doris’ books can’t tell me. Can your old European friends tell me why vampirism has my back twist again and again ... to the shape it was when I died?”

  Robin shook his head. “We’re just kind of locked into place that way. Some might say it’s some creator’s way of mocking us.”

  “Well, not really you,” said Argall. “You were never seen as deficient.”

  Robin slowly nodded. “Not to the degree that you may have been.”

  “Come now,” said Mab. “You were never deficient. None of us were.”

  Doris put her book down. “‘Robin,’ was it? What exactly do your associates want from us?”

  “They want to see us evolve beyond humanity, which isn’t to say they want to do away with humanity. They just don’t want us to be the same as them.”

  Argall slowly nodded. “What about ghouls? Or the beast lulled by jazz at The Heretic.”

  Was that the scent she smelled on Gesine lately? Doris had meant to go back there to talk to the man in a cage; she just couldn’t fathom why anyone would want to be near a cage. Even as a gimmick.

  Doris listened to them bicker for a few moments, before she sprang up and said, “Are any of you hungry? We should go there. A heads up, though. Gesine may be ahead of us.”

  Mab tried very hard, unsuccessfully, to not roll her eyes.

  “Doris,” said Argall. “Do you really think that’s a good idea? Can’t we evolve this night just the three of us, with Robin here in the vicinity?”’

  “You tell me,” said Doris. “He treats Gesine better than others I know.”

  “All right!” said Mab. “A night out on the town it is. But let’s take the long way.

  Argall picked a wine bottle from the bucket of ice on the table. “It’s a hundred feet away. Everything we need is so close, or will be that way.”

  “Hush,” said Mab. “I want to show Doris and our new friend what I’ve been practicing while she was on her adventure in the south.”

  Adventure? thought Doris. Sure ….

  Outside, under a full moon that felt dwarfed by the names of enterprises in big, bright lights, Doris waited awkwardly at the rear of her two male companions as Mab pulled up in a car. The three of them got into it. Passers-by stopped and stared at Doris among them. She supposed two men and two women seemed like they must have been couples, and the passers-by seemed to wait for an explanation that such wasn’t the case.

  Argall swung the door open, and he and Robin bowed as Doris got into the car.

  “Maybe we should all go to the pictures,” said Mab.

  “Pass,” said Doris. She got a kick out of watching the odd silver screen now and then, but even more so than in books, she had yet to see anything she could pretend to be in without cutting herself down to size.

  Mab put the car in drive and took off. Four blocks away, as Mab swung the wheel into a wild turn, the car tipped over onto its side. Doris tried to shift her weight to the other side, but the car’s passengers weren’t in sync enough for that to work.

  As the car skidded on its side, along the pavement, all four of them managed to scramble to the side that became the car’s top.

  Ahead, an old couple was crossing the street.

  Both Doris and Argall slipped behind the vehicle. The soles of their shoes were halved as they made sure the vehicle stopped sooner than it might have.

  Then they looked at each other, both feeling sad and wistful about Argall’s last moments before he was trampled on by horses.

  Mab and Robin each stepped around the vehicle from a respective side, beckoning one but not both of them.

  Maybe a few people had seen what happened, but no one got hurt. They were all in nondescript black clothing. It was rare that three people who appeared white were with someone who didn’t.

  They left the vehicle there, scattering quickly for an alleyway where they each climbed onto the nearest roof. From there, Mab led the way. They dropped down into another alleyway. The sound of sirens in the distance made Mab beam.

  “Really,” said Robin. “You should practice that more, some place where there’s much less people.”

  “Much less people?” said Argall. “Maybe some day.” With an exasperated smile, he knocked three times on a door then dragged his knuckles down it. A metallic slot pulled back and a pair of red eyes appeared.

  “Two of you smell like sponsorship,” said a man behind the door. “The other two smell like they might scare some of the customers away ... Again.”

  Argall shook his h
ead. “Only if they’re human. Isn’t that what they’re paying for?”

  The red eyes lingered for a moment. Soon the woman they belong to closed the slot. The door opened, and a black man mockingly flicked his .

  Doris almost smiled, but the world beneath their feet shook a little.

  They went down a stairway lit by torches, Doris realized Gesine would have a hard time coming in this way. Fire scared ghouls. Perhaps that was the point. They rarely wandered off on their own, instead of lingering with others like in graveyards or where there was lots of death. Since the world’s ongoing wars’ casualties presently came in sporadic massacres, ghouls sometimes wandered into vampire territory. Places where there were might be more outbreaks of some horrid disease amid life in general.

  As a trumpet played, a piano’s keys were being hit with verve and energy. At the bottom floor, they smelled blood. In the corner of the landing, a woman’s red eyes were glowing in the shadows as she voraciously drank someone’s blood. Doris could smell the man’s cheap cologne; he had splashed a lot of it on, hoping to impress someone.

  “Some of us hate the smell of desperation,” said Argall. “I don’t suppose you can really blame them.”

  “The more expensive brands are nice and all,” said Mab, “but they make me want to rip into their owner’s throats, personally. Present company excluded.”

  Doris could feel Robin looking at her. She closed her eyes and went into the club, pushing past a new vampire’s relatively flimsy arm. Both humans and vampires in the audience seemed enraptured by the sites on stage – the black band playing their hearts out, ragtime turning into something new, something with less syncopation and a wielding of chaos. In the cage, a large black wolf turned around, struggling to get out of the cage at every chaotic shift. The ground would shake a bit as it charged the cage. Humans in the audience flinched, but the cave did not give way. Nor did Gesine, sitting “Indian-style” next to it, under the stage’s pale blue lights.

  She must have been coming in through the hole in the back of the stage, thought Doris.

 

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