by Mauro, Laura
“Mhm. S’okay. Not like you did it on purpose. I’d consider showering too, if I were you. You smell like a tramp. As for the wine, I have to apologise. I was a bit on edge. Usually I’d go for gin but you take what you can find, right?”
“How did I get here?”
“This is not my beautiful house,” Casey intoned. “This is not my beautiful wife.” She got up, dragging the blanket with her. Tiny feet poked out from beneath her toga, fragile as porcelain. Her toenails were coated in chipped turquoise paint. “Well, you sort of dipped in and out of consciousness for a bit. I managed to get a taxi on Walworth Road. I explained that we’d been at a hen do and you’d gone a bit overboard on the mojitos. Said you’d been in a scrap. He seemed to buy it. Probably sees it all the time, innit?” She gave a dry little snort of laughter as she searched the cupboards. She pulled out a mug and set it on the sideboard. “He wasn’t going to take us initially, not with the state you were in. You were mumbling crazy shit and swaying and I think he thought you were going to puke.”
“Didn’t I?”
“That was afterwards. When we got out. I convinced him to take us on the grounds that it was a ten minute journey tops, and he agreed on the condition that I keep a plastic bag handy, you know, just in case. I gave him a hefty tip too. I think that swung the deal.”
Alessa pulled the blankets up to her chin. “Shit. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s my fault you were there. That’s why I’m here now. Wanted to be sure you were okay.” Her tone was strangely clipped. She focused entirely on the task of making tea nobody asked for. It was then that Alessa remembered Tom.
She reached beneath the blankets to the place where her wounds ought to be. Her jeans had been replaced with pyjama shorts, leaving her calves bare. The tissue there was gnarled and torn, sticky with clotted blood, but as she pried gently at the ridges with her fingernails she felt no pain. Just a dull, curious numbness, like running her finger over a prosthetic. She lifted her hands back up to her face, examining the powdered crust of blood beneath her fingernails, so dark it looked black.
“We left Tom behind,” Alessa said.
Casey said nothing. There was the clink of metal on porcelain as she stirred sugar into the cup. It went on for a long time. Eventually, she brought over the mug and set it on the coffee table. There was a pensiveness in the set of her brow, the hard lines of her face. In the glow of the lamplight it occurred to Alessa that Casey was the kind of ugly that, in the right light, becomes a strange kind of beautiful. Like a piece of modern art, all acute angles and flat planes. An acquired taste, and even with Casey’s grey, sleepless pallor Alessa thought she could understand what Tom saw in the spiteful curve of her mouth, the harsh jut of her nose.
Saw. Past tense.
“Are we just not going to talk about what happened?”
“Drink your tea,” Casey said, sinking into the armchair. Her tone did not invite argument. Alessa reached out and grabbed the mug from the table. Her arm trembled as she lifted it up. It was disgusting how little strength she had. It reminded her of her father in the weeks before he died, too weak to hold a book, or spoon food into his own mouth. She steeled herself as she brought the drink to her lips, channelled all of her meagre energy into keeping it steady. It was only a bite, she told herself, as the muscles in her arm strained under the mug’s scant weight. I’m not that weak. It’s not going to kill me.
How had her dad done this with so much dignity?
The tea was too hot. Her cracked lips stung, her throat contracting painfully as she swallowed. It tasted horribly bitter despite all the sugar, and she must have grimaced because Casey offered her a humourless little smile and held up her glass.
“I crushed a few paracetamol in there,” she said, holding the glass to her lips. “It’s not exactly a hangover but I have no idea how to treat…” she waved a hand vaguely in Alessa’s direction. “Whatever it is that’s going on here. I don’t think altered consciousness and projectile vomiting are symptoms of shock. My best guess is there’s some kind of toxin in the Shade’s bite, and you’re reacting to it. Are you still running a temperature?”
“I’m freezing.”
“You’re sweating.” Casey shook her head. “You really need go to A&E, but how the hell would we explain it? ‘I’m sorry, doctor, I got bitten by a semi-solid creature which doesn’t officially exist and now I’m feeling a bit dodgy.’ I can’t imagine that’s going to fly.”
“The wound’s dry,” Alessa said. She pulled up the blanket, revealing her bare calf. Her skin was streaked with dried, crusting rivulets of brownish blood. Her wounds had formed six symmetrical scabs, thick as hide and glossy, as if there were black fluid boiling beneath the surface. There was a clean ring of pale olive skin where the blood had soaked into her sock. Already the angry, swollen flesh abutting the lacerations had begun to subside, faded now to a dark, puffy pink. Despite her fever, she still felt the heat radiating from each individual wound. “How long ago was I bitten?”
“Not long. Maybe two, three hours?”
Alessa blinked. It felt like she’d been sleeping for days; her joints were stiff as old hinges. She glanced at the window and found the curtains drawn, contrary to Casey’s earlier advice. Still, the narrow strip of sky peeking through the gap was a dark enough purple to suggest that dawn was not yet approaching.
“They don’t hurt.” Alessa gently poked at the nearest scab with her forefinger in demonstration. She felt only a faint buzz, like fading pins and needles. She poked again, harder this time; there was sudden shift beneath the skin, the outward ripple of disturbed water from a single, central point. She pulled her hand back sharply. The sensation subsided almost immediately, as if responding to her withdrawal.
“You should probably not do that,” Casey said. Her eyes were fixed upon Alessa’s leg, wary and more than a little bit alarmed. Her lips were parted just enough so that Alessa could see the yellowish gleam of her teeth. It was obvious that Casey had never before witnessed a Shade attack, let alone the physical fallout. But Alessa thought she could smell the excitement on her, a sour electricity like the air before a thunderstorm. She came here to assuage her own guilt, yes, to make sure Alessa didn’t drop spontaneously dead or choke on her own vomit. But she also came here to watch. To observe. To fill the gaps in her own mental notebook.
Alessa’s muscles spasmed so suddenly that she almost dropped her mug. She fumbled, slopping hot tea onto the sofa as she searched frantically for an empty surface. Her fingers stung with the heat, but it was a good pain, somehow. A meaningful pain. It brought clarity, certainty. She’d been wrong about Casey, but she understood now. She understood everything.
Casey swept in, grabbed the mug from her, lowering it gently onto the coffee table. “What’s wrong?” she asked, staring up into Alessa’s eyes, and the greed of her interest had never been so apparent. Casey was like the medical students who came to observe her dad in his last weeks, drinking in his decline and excreting endless notes, scribbling furiously into their little notebooks; his suffering was an academic exercise, the study of the terminal stages of pancreatic cancer, not the loss of a human being.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” A fresh wave of spasms ran through Alessa’s arms, up her neck and down her sides, her intercostal muscles pulling taut; her spine arched inwards, a sharp, sudden motion driving the breath from her lungs in one short gasp. She gritted her teeth, forcing the words out between them. “You and him. Were you in this together? Got tired of studying each other so you threw me in too?”
Casey’s frown deepened. “Alessa, are you okay?”
“Do I look okay?” She wasn’t certain whether it was anger or another spasm which drew her high in her seat, clutching the arm of the sofa, but the way Casey shrank away into the armchair suggested the former. The spasms receded, an outward tide, but a deep ache remained, a slow burn, as though her muscles were full of embers. Her fingers were clenched so tightly she couldn’
t seem to straighten them.
“You’re acting proper weird,” Casey said. Not timidly – she could never be timid, not with that face, those eyes, but she was alarmed, as if she’d never considered Alessa capable of anger. Her pupils flickered back and forth, assessing, perhaps measuring the likelihood of violence.
Alessa’s body slackened. She slumped against the back of the sofa, holding herself up with one trembling arm. Sweat beaded on her forehead, catching in her eyelashes like meltwater. Her hair was stuck to the back of her neck. I’m disgusting, she thought, catching the animal scent of her unwashed skin. Disgusting and pathetic.
“Put that in your notes. ‘Subject was pissed off after being savaged by monster, suggest use of restraints in further experiments?’”
“I’m not making notes, Alessa, Christ almighty. I didn’t plan this. I didn’t tell Tom to run out there like a fucking lunatic. You think I wanted you to get bitten? What kind of mental case do you think I am?”
“The kind who watches her friend being eviscerated and leaves him to die?”
Casey’s face darkened. “I didn’t see you running in there to help either.” She shifted ceaselessly in her seat. “What could I do? Dive in and get myself bitten? Face it, we were helpless. Even at three against one we’d have been slaughtered. That thing was powerful, Alessa, it was…” A gush of wine-dark blood spurted suddenly from Casey’s nose, dripping down her chin and onto the collar of her t-shirt, but she just kept talking. “…Maybe he got away. Maybe somebody found him. We don’t know that he’s dead…”
“Casey,” Alessa blurted. “Your nose is bleeding.”
“Is it?” She raised two fingers to her lips, tentatively exploring. Her ministrations smeared thick, tacky fluid up to the tip of her nose, around the outer edges of her mouth. It was almost too viscous to be blood, too dark, like motor oil. She lifted her fingers away and stared impassively at the mess dripping down her knuckles. And then she was talking again, as if there was nothing wrong, as if there wasn’t blood oozing down her face and pooling in the hollow between her collarbones, forming strings between her parted lips. The words emanating from her mouth were English but somehow Alessa couldn’t recognise them; they swirled and eddied in her brain, a whirlpool of vowels and consonants and hard glottal stops.
“Casey, stop,” she gasped. She felt her lungs dissolving, flaking away like dry leaves.
Casey looked up at her. Her entire chin had turned black now, gleaming like fresh resin. She opened her mouth to speak but her lips were sealed tightly shut. As Alessa watched, breathing fast and shallow, Casey’s features seemed to recede, sinking into the pale, hard flesh of her face; her cheekbones protruded, driftwood jutting out from wet sand. Her lips peeled back until there was only the black rim of her gums and tiny icepick teeth, rose-gold in the yellow lamplight.
“It was you.” The words emerged in a breathless whisper; she was barely aware she’d spoken at all. “It was always you.”
“What do you mean?” the Shade asked. It regarded her indifferently as it reached out a thin hand, ignoring the way Alessa shrank into the sofa, her whispered pleas for it to stop little more than a gasp. Its fingers splayed gracefully across her forehead and she found herself drawn to the delicious chill of its skin, disgusted with herself even as she shuddered in pleasure. “Shit,” the Shade said, caressing Alessa’s forehead with corpse-cold fingertips. “I think your brain is on fire. Oh shit, shitty fuck, what the bloody hell am I supposed to do?”
“Get away,” Alessa murmured, but the world was waning, and the Shade was beginning to dissolve. She pressed her forehead into its cool palm. “Don’t touch…don’t…”
As her eyes rolled back into her skull, she thought she heard Casey calling her name.
SEVEN
S he felt the soothing sensation of hands smoothing back her hair. Something cool and damp sat atop her forehead, trailing droplets of water down her face, settling in the creases of her nose. It tickled a little. She raised a hand, feeling along the contours of her face until she found the flannel.
“You leave that right where it is.”
She peeled her eyelids apart, searching blearily for the source of the familiar voice. There, perched on the edge of the armchair, was Shannon. Her face was tightly drawn, hands tucked between her knees. She looked pale and exhausted. Behind her, a sliver of silvery, overcast sky was visible between the drawn curtains. Morning had finally come.
“You smell atrocious,” Shannon said, without humour.
“Thanks,” Alessa croaked. She shifted her limbs. They creaked audibly in complaint. The blankets were gone, she noticed, piled up on the floor beside the coffee table. She was suddenly aware of the presence of an ancient oscillating fan standing at the other end of the sofa. “Where’s Casey?”
Shannon’s lips pressed together so tightly they blanched white. “If it wasn’t for her calling me, you’d probably be in a much worse state right now. Why didn’t you tell me you were ill?”
Alessa’s mouth tasted like stale vomit, her limbs uncooperative; her bones ached with a sick, throbbing persistence. She couldn’t begin to imagine what a ‘much worse state’ would feel like. Suddenly, she was glad to have been unconscious all this time.
“Is she still here?” A distant memory pricked the back of her mind: Casey, black blood streaming from her nose, coating her face, and those icepick teeth emerging from behind resin-shiny lips. Her eyes collapsing into her skull, irises dissipating into the whites. Hallucinations were not usually a good sign.
“She popped out to the shops about ten minutes ago,” Shannon said. “Honestly, I wanted to take you straight to A&E but you fought like a demon. I didn’t think you were capable of it in the state you were in but even between me and Casey, it was impossible to get you off the sofa. If your temperature hadn’t started to subside, I’d have hogtied you just to get you in the back of an ambulance.”
“Was I that bad?”
“I made the grievous error of trying to open a window and you almost flew at me. You were out of it, Ali. Under other circumstances it probably would’ve been hilarious.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“I’m not surprised,” Shannon replied. “You were talking total rubbish. Actually, my first thought was that you were high on something. It wasn’t until I felt your forehead that I realised there was something really wrong with you.”
“I haven’t been high on anything since I was nineteen years old, and I’m pretty sure that was dried parsley in a roll-up.”
Shannon smiled. “I know, it’s stupid. But you’ve been delicate lately,” she said, casting her eyes down into her lap. “I know it’s been hard for you, this past six months or so. It’s been this sort of…horrible conga line of bad luck. And I just want to cocoon you in bubble-wrap and keep the whole world away from you until you’re done healing, but I also know you’d hate me for it if I did. So I’ve tried to just let you do your thing, and I guess it’s been working, hasn’t it? You’ve not thrown yourself off a bridge, or turned to crack cocaine, or run off to Vegas to marry the pizza man.”
“I’m glad I’ve exceeded your expectations,” Alessa said dryly.
“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Shannon said. “I mean, the last time I was here you were basically living in squalor. This flat was filthy. Entire ecosystems were springing up in the back of your fridge. And look, you’ve got washing on the line and I can actually see the floor, and…this is an improvement, Alessa. I don’t know if it’s the counselling or Casey, or just time healing all wounds like they say it does, but…”
“My ears were burning,” Casey announced, entering the room with a plastic shopping bag and a cardboard tray containing two Costa cups. She smiled when she saw Alessa, a smile which reached all the way up into the creases at the corners of her eyes. “Hey, look who’s back in the land of the living,” she said, lowering the bags and the tray cautiously onto the coffee table. Alessa got a strong whiff of coffee. S
hannon rarely touched the stuff, which suggested she hadn’t slept since leaving her night shift. Guilt soured her stomach.
“You look a little less on the verge of death,” Casey said. “I’m going to take that as a good sign.”
“Her fever’s down,” Shannon said.
“That’s good,” Casey settled on the edge of the sofa. She was wearing her own clothes again. They must have dried while Alessa slept. “I swear to God, it was like you were fresh out of the oven or something. I could practically see the heat rising off you. I grabbed your phone to see if there was anyone I could contact and you had like nine missed calls from your sister, so I called her back and told her what happened. She came straight over.” Casey shot Shannon a grateful smile.
“You told her everything?”
“Well, yeah,” Casey shrugged, as if ‘everything’ were just a normal series of events.
Alessa turned her expectant gaze towards Shannon, who sighed, shifting in her seat. The springs creaked noisily beneath her. Alessa’s heart thundered in her chest as Shannon’s eyes met her own. This is it, she thought. She’ll have to believe me.
“You met with Casey and someone named Tom at a coffee shop off the Elephant and Castle,” Shannon said. She pulled the lid of her coffee, giving it an experimental sniff. “You seemed normal right up until you went outside. Casey says you complained of a headache, but didn’t think anything of it. Maybe ten minutes later, after leaving the coffee shop, you passed out on Walworth Road. Casey tried to call an ambulance but you insisted you’d be fine.”
Alessa’s heart lurched.
“That was around about the time you vomited all over me,” Casey added, sipping daintily at her own coffee. “Don’t worry about it though. Tom can’t hold his drink, so I’m sort of used to it. Getting you in a cab was hell, though. Have you ever tried to flag down a taxi covered in someone else’s stomach juice?”
“She brought you back here, and you seemed to be doing okay right up until you had what Casey describes as a seizure - I’m assuming probably a febrile convulsion, considering your temperature was forty degrees when I got here. That’s when she called me.”