Sinister Sentiments

by K. C. Finn

  He went over my head as easily as if I were flipping a tennis ball over the shoulder, though he landed without the bounce. I heard the vamp cry out as I turned, wobbling on my huge, unsteady feet as I so often did. I was facing the kid in the corner now, with Drac between us, and I relished in the sensation of trapping the bastard who had so often mocked me because of his fierce popularity. If only his legions of fans could see him now. His stealth and speed did him no good in a confined space, and cornering victims in locked chambers was one of my old specialities.

  My foot came down on his forearm with a crack. Without even thinking about it, a huge, echoing groan escaped my now-smiling lips. Drac scrambled to his feet to try and escape, but I took him by the scruff of his stupid velvet cloak and held him a clear foot off the ground. His shiny-shoed feet dangled pointlessly as he reached out to try and claw me again, teeth bared and gnashing. What use were teeth, when I had arms that could keep him several feet from my neck?

  I laughed. It was a true laugh, the mania of rage driving me into a wild kind of happiness that I hadn’t felt in so many years. The laughter was not pleasant; it was the deep cackle of madness that ought to lie at every monster’s heart. The power of it reverberated around the frosted-glass that separated us from Meredith’s office; I could hear the hum of it as I waggled Drac back and forth, like a lioness might with a disobedient cub. He wailed in a high, terrified pitch that sent a new ripple of laughter through my body, this time greater than before. The glass hummed all the louder.

  “WHO’S THE MONSTER NOW?” I bellowed with mirth.

  The office glass shattered. Shards of it flew everywhere at once, though most bounced clean off my thick, dead hide as I stood still amid the wreckage. I dropped Drac into the pile of shiny, broken pieces where he immediately began to flail. Every move he made only seemed to cause him further injury as he tried to escape the biting sting of the debris. I looked triumphantly to the chair in the corner, hoping to see Nerd Boy wetting his pants for fear that it was his turn next.

  The phone was still pointed at me.

  Was he serious? All this carnage and the kid was still glued to his phone, even in hiding? Perhaps he should be my next victim, since the first storm of rage was clearly not enough to get the brat’s attention. I stepped over Drac in one magnificent, thumping stride, ready to upend the chair behind which the kid was hiding, when a sudden voice interrupted my grunts.

  “Uh… Frank,” Meredith said with a little cough.

  Shame overwhelmed me in that moment. My massive shoulders drooped, one thick green-grey hand rising to my forehead as I lurched my body back towards Meredith’s office. She was still sitting in her fancy chair with the little Weenie dog opposite her, but now that there was no wall to separate us, I could see her scrolling through something on a tablet computer. She kept looking up at me, then back to her scrolling page, then at me again, her mouth gaping with astonishment.

  “I know, I know,” I griped. “I’m sorry. I’ll pay for the damages. Assuming you ever find me a job again, that is.”

  Meredith’s plucked brows rose to form a wide arch.

  “I don’t think that’s going to be an issue, sweetie,” she breathed.

  She showed me her tablet screen. Her emails were open and several more were flooding in with every ten second refresh of the inbox. My beady eyes narrowed, brow drooping hard with concentration as I tried to take in the ever-changing screen. So many emails. And every one with the same subject.

  Booking Query: Frankenstein

  “Are you online or something?” Meredith asked, snatching back the tablet with miserly talons, “because these booking are all talking about some viral YouTube video that’s just hit the web. You’re bigger than Nyan Cat!”

  I didn’t know what that was, but I knew enough about YouTube to turn my head back to the corner. The teen with the phone was slowly crawling out of his hiding place, still holding his camera up to the back of Drac as the figure made his clumsy escape. The old vamp was limping and covered in broken glass, but when he turned and saw Nerd Boy filming him, he gasped in horror and tried to cover his cut-up, terrified face. The kid was enthused by this, chasing him out of the room altogether with his camera still broadcasting to the waiting world.

  I looked back to Meredith and her emails with a proud little smile. Perhaps there was something to be said for this new world, after all.

  The Demon’s In The Details

  Being on the topmost walkways of the Sagrada Familia cathedral always gave me the bizarre urge to jump. It wasn’t like I was suicidal or anything - although my week-late photography assignment for Professor Hernandez was freaking me out a little - it was just the simple fact of who I am. Where the tourists were backing away from the edge of the sandy walls, saying things like “Ooh Mary, I can’t. It’s too high!”, I was inclined to lean over the parapet and look straight down. Every time I came to the great cathedral, Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, it left me dreaming of what it would feel like to take that big leap and fly towards the city below.

  The heat of the demonic Barcelona sun was bearing down on me, and I could hear my father’s voice in my head as I snapped a few shots of the city on high. “You need someone to keep an eye on you, Ezra. It isn’t fit for a girl to get into so much trouble.” I felt my new Doc Martens squeaking as I jostled past some old grannies that were green with vertigo. I’d got the boots for ten euros on the ramblas this morning, and I was pretty sure they’d ‘fallen’ of the back of a lorry somewhere, but I wasn’t going to pass up the genuine article. So far, that was the only semi-criminal thing I’d done today, but in fairness, it was only ten a.m.

  When I leaned my body off a rather low ledge to get a good shot, one of the security men spotted me, hurling a load of abuse in Spanish. Though I understood every word he’d said, I feigned ignorance, tourist-style. My white skin and Oasis t-shirt would pass me off as English until the guard let up with his shouts. After that, he kept watching me walk the high walls, so I decided to follow the throng of visitors back down the tight stairs, ready to snap some interiors for a while. The assignment had called for ‘transformation of tourism’. We had to capture something that everyone in the world likes to snap pictures of, and find a new perspective with the lens. So far, I didn’t feel like I was really getting anywhere.

  Until I saw the boy.

  He must have been in his late teens, like me, but he was tall, with darker skin in the natural Spanish colouring. He was good looking and dressed in thick clothes that didn’t match with the scorching heat outside, but it wasn’t those things that drew my gaze to him. He looked bored. He was standing amid a mass of bustling tourists, beneath the massive stained glass window that no visitor ever passed by without photographing. He wasn’t with anybody, because no girlfriend or family member stopped to talk to him or try to drag him along to see the Sagrada’s next wonder. He was just there. Alone, and apparently purposeless, in one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. And bored out of his tree.

  I snapped a shot of him, imagining how different he would look in the sea of impressed faces all around us. Professor Hernandez wanted a converse opinion on tourism, and this boy was it, the very opposite of your typical human being. I couldn’t resist checking the back screen of the camera to see how the shot had turned out. When I clicked on the photo thumbnail, however, I found the stained glass window, but the boy wasn’t there. I looked up, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined him, but he was still in his place, huffing out a tired little sigh. I raised my camera again, taking my time to specifically frame him right in the centre of the shot.

  Another no-show. The scene around him was there, but the boy just wasn’t showing up. He didn’t have time to duck out of the way of the picture. In fact, I was pretty sure he hadn’t even noticed me trying to capture him yet. My hands were growing clammy on the camera’s buttons as I raised it one last time, zooming so close that his face filled the whole of the viewfinder. I heard the beep that registered the pictur
e being taken. My fingers tapped over the buttons to find the thumbnails again, hands quaking at the sheer impossibility of what I was seeing. Or rather, what I wasn’t seeing. The picture held nothing but the block of wall behind where the boy was standing.

  He was impervious to film. My growing agitation with my camera hadn’t gone unnoticed; I had got the boy’s attention at last. When I glanced at him next, his eyes widened on me for just a moment, then he took off with sudden, swift strides. I’d made barely a step to follow him when I paused. My father’s voice was in my head again, and this time I could imagine him shaking a withered finger at me. “Ezra, you need guidance,” he would say. “You need someone on your shoulder to stop you doing these crazy things.” It would be totally crazy to follow the impossible boy who didn’t show up on pictures. It was something that I definitely shouldn’t do.

  My new Docs squealed like Hell as I raced on, speeding so that I wouldn’t lose sight of him in the crowd.

  He must have known I was following him, but he didn’t seem keen to stop and address that fact. A tourist bus pulled up on the busy corner where people were queuing to get into the cathedral, and the boy hopped onto the vehicle with me only three steps behind him. The bus was overcrowded, and the boy had managed to squeeze into a spot that put us several people apart. The bus conductor demanded to see my ticket, eventually getting a reluctant twelve euros out of me for a day’s pass, but he didn’t ask the boy for a single cent. Had the conductor not seen him get on?

  I thought about the boy’s lack of appearance on my camera. Perhaps the conductor had not seen him at all.

  The city of Barcelona is made up of thirty-two towns, and it mixes a fiercely modern, progressive side with some of the most ancient traditions of the Spanish people. It was in this strange dichotomy that I had spent the last four years of my life, growing up in a place where teenagers laughed at Casper the Friendly Ghost on TV, but still believed that their dead grandmothers were keeping an eye on them when they went to mass on Sundays. Before Spain, Dad and I were in England, and in South Africa before that. In these vastly different places, I’d spent so much time learning about the beliefs of others that I’d never given much thought to what I believed in.

  This boy wasn’t holding on to anything, even though the bus was thundering round the busy bends in the roads. Everyone else swayed with the curves and jumped with the bumps. I crashed into the Japanese couple beside me several times in the same stretch of minutes, but nobody crashed into the boy. Nobody so much as breathed in his direction. If I had to tell this story to anyone else, they’d surely think that I was going mad. But the more I looked at that boy on the bus, the less I was convinced that he was real.

  If pop culture had anything to offer my analysis, then he was either a ghost or a vampire. I craned my neck hard, trying to see if his reflection was visible in the bus’s windows, but the bustling metropolis outside kept the shapes and shadows shifting on the glass. Ghost seemed more likely, since nobody else on the bus could see him, but that didn’t explain why I could, or why he didn’t show up on my camera. Hadn’t people captured ghosts on film before? Didn’t there have to be something in the shot, even if it was just a glimmer of a spectre? He didn’t look like a ghost either; the boy was solid and vividly coloured in. His angular features would have made him a great model, had he bothered to show up in my shots.

  The bus came to a lurching halt near the Museu Picasso, the stop where I should have been getting off if I was ever going to get back to photography class. Professor Hernandez held his sessions in a tall warehouse building that was a stone’s throw from the museum; a busy place where tons of tourists passed by, ready to be snapped unawares. Said tourists were now unloading from the packed bus, and my non-existent boy was moving amongst them. He was getting off. At my stop. It seemed stupid to suggest that this was more than just coincidence, but I could do nothing other than follow him out onto the street in fascination.

  The Museu was tucked away on a pedestrian side street, so I had to fight through a scramble of lost and confused holidaymakers to keep up with the ghost-boy’s pace. His tall, dark-haired head was my guide, leading me straight to the building where my professor would be waiting, expecting my late portfolio for hand-in. It wasn’t a place I’d intending on going to yet, but I couldn’t stop my feet from following the boy who had chosen to guide me there.

  “Ah! Ezra! There you are.”

  I cringed at the serious tone of Professor Hernandez, who had spotted me impossibly quickly as I turned into the block. It was quite usual for him to be nursing a cigar at the front shutters of the establishment. It was quite usual for him to scowl at him and snap his fingers to beckon me closer. What was not quite usual was the sight of the man beside him.

  “Mr Austin?” I asked, surveying the other gent. “What are you doing here?”

  You’d have known that Mr Austin was a lawyer without anyone telling you. He had a sallow complexion with a greedy, sharp jaw, and long, spindly fingers that he always pressed together at the tips. He was a man of great opportunity, and whenever he saw the chance to turn a profit, his dark eyes gleamed with a sheen of avarice unmatched by any human I had ever known. My father was an exceedingly rich man, and Mr Austin had been adding to his wealth since long before I was born.

  “You must come in, child,” Mr Austin crooned. “I have news for you.”

  He beckoned me with talon-like fingers. Instinctively, I looked around for the ghost-boy, surprised to find him standing right beside Professor Hernandez. My teacher casually stubbed his cigar out against the wall beside the shutters, but to do so, he had to put his hand straight through the boy’s chest. He did this with no problem at all, his arm sliding right through the flesh, as though ghost-boy was nothing but a shadow. I was right. He wasn’t real, except to me.

  “Come along Ezra,” Mr Austin pressed. “Time is ticking.”

  “It’s all right,” said another voice. “I’ll be waiting.”

  I spun on the spot, looking for the cool male tone that had spoken beside me. There was no-one close enough to have spoken at such a volume, and the lawyer and the teacher were staring at me like I’d lost my mind. Eventually, my eyes fell back to the ghost-boy, and he didn’t look bored any more. He was smiling. Was it him that had spoken? Could I hear him now, as well as see him? When he nodded, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I hoped that he couldn’t hear me thinking too.

  “Ezra, do come along,” Mr Austin insisted.

  I went, grateful to enter the familiar stairwell of the photography building, and to get away from the strange apparition on the street. Perhaps the Hellish Barcelona sun was just getting to me. Perhaps, later on, the boy would no longer be there.

  *

  My father was dead.

  Mr Austin had travelled into the city to let me know. Apparently, he had been at the hospital that morning, just before my father went in for another operation to tackle the mass of tumours pressing against his skull. On the phone, Dad had told me not to worry, and to get on with my assignment. “Ezra,” he had said, “just go about your life. Keep someone on your shoulder to tell you that things will be all right.” But things were not all right, and now I felt as though they might never be all right again.

  “Do you need a moment, or may I proceed with the matters of inheritance?”

  Mr Austin was not famed for his tact. I couldn’t bear the idea of being alone with my thoughts, so I nodded, letting him open up a shiny briefcase full of papers.

  “You are the sole beneficiary to the Kane estate,” he told me. “After a brief estimate of funeral expenses, which your father has requested that I manage, you will stand to inherit the following.”

  I was only half-listening as the emotionless man began his list.

  “Approximately three-point-two million pounds sterling in a bank in Glasgow, forty-four million yen in a vault in Beijing, six-point-one million euros in a trust holding in Switzerland, six homes across five continents - which I’m sure you kno
w the addresses to?”

  I nodded at that.

  “Oh, and one demon by the name of Balthazar.”

  Something was wrong. It took me a moment to work out what.

  “Sorry, hang on,” I said, blinking rapidly. “I think I drifted off there. What was that last thing?”

  “Your father’s demon,” Mr Austin repeated clearly. “Surely he told you about Balthazar?”

  “Sorry,” I said again, “but when you say ‘demon’, you mean a statue, or a painting or something?”

  Mr Austin shook his head.

  “Demon,” the lawyer stated simply. “A supernatural being of sizeable power. A protector, a burden, a voice on your shoulder? You didn’t think that your father could have amassed such wealth on his own, did you? A deal was cut many years ago. Balthazar was sent to guide your father into prosperity and, upon Mr Kane’s death, the demon now belongs to you.”

  It was at this point that I considered the possibility that I really had leapt from the top of the Sagrada Familia that morning, but I rather thought that I would have remembered being dead. Perhaps it was possible that all this strangeness was some lucid dream, and I was lying in a coma, in hospital beside my still-living father. It would take me a long time to let that dream go, before I could accept that everything Mr Austin had told me was the truth.

  “I have something I need you to sign,” the lawyer said.

  It was some sort of acceptance form, which listed the things that the stone-faced attorney had read out to me. With my signature, they would all become mine. Without it, I’d be destitute and totally abandoned. I scanned the document carefully.

  “Balthazar isn’t on here,” I said, hardly believing that the ridiculous words were exiting my mouth.

  “Fine print,” Mr Austin guided, pointing a bony finger downwards.

  Sure enough, a small line had been written in by hand, just above the usual minutiae: THE KANE FAMILY BURDEN SHALL PASS TO THE INHERITOR AS NAMED ABOVE, HEREAFTER KNOWN AS THE BURDEN-BEARER.