Walking Shadows

by Narrelle M. Harris

  It would be a lie to say I slept well. I had nightmares and woke up hyperventilating and with leg cramps. I kept dreaming I was running up a vertical hill with a pack of rabid dogs behind me and a fire up ahead and, really, I was happy to pack it in when I woke for the third time, before dawn.

  At least it is never too early for the internet, even on a Sunday. One of the academics had, in her part of the world, found time to answer my questions. More to the point, she'd sent scans of the original English texts along with notes about the source, bless her perfectionist archival heart. The document, a diary found in a monastery in northern England, had been dated and authenticated, although the author had not been identified. The message drew my attention to passages near the end of the diary and included a polite request to see the final essay. Yes. Well. Maybe I would write it next semester.

  The image files were huge and amazing, photographs of the pages of a 200-year-old diary. The handwriting, in faded black ink, shifted from large looping script to a tight, cramped scrawl, depending both on whether the diarist was trying to cram a few more words onto the bottom of the page and how frenetic the entry had become.

  This, I thought, is someone else who knows. Someone else who discovered these impossible embodiments of things beyond the scientific and quantifiable; whose world had been gutted and reformatted in a way that few others would ever see or understand. My fingertips brushed the computer screen, as though by doing so they would brush against the paper and ink on the other side of the world, and through them the hand of the man who had written it.

  Miriam has suffered much, or would if her small body still experienced suffering in the way that God's children do. Yet it cannot be comfortable, and I can see her exposed bone and flesh. Truly, as a medical man, I am inclined to make sketches of the movement I see within. If only the heart I glimpse through her wounds was still beating, I am sure I could learn much. I am not a good man, to think such things of the sister that I loved. I struggle to believe in a merciful God, now that our lives have come to this.

  Miriam assures me the pain is not so great, except where the flames have ruined her flesh. She cries for her lost hair, about which she was always so vain, though not a tear is shed. I imagine worse is in store for her in the eternal fires to which she is surely to be consigned, yet I feel pity. Surely God will not censure me. She is still my sister, after all, for it is her voice that speaks to me, that reminds me of our shared lives. I hear my little Miriam beg me for release from an eternity in this maimed and undying body.

  The men that did this to her are doing God's work, I know, but I cannot thank them for it. Joshua Williams has the eye of a fanatic, a man who may have moved in high circles had he lived at the time of Torquemada. I can believe his declarations that he has burned his way across Germany and Spain, purging this evil. His young companion was quieter and more frightening to me. Still as death, speaking only to praise God in the highest of exhortations. It is he, I am sure, who, with his youth and strength, has found the power to defeat and kill that which cannot die. I would not for the wealth of all Europe's crowns, nor that of the orient, be counted an enemy of God by that boy. How I wish I had not told him of my sister's lodgings.

  The next entry was some days later.

  Miriam is dead. I cannot sleep for nightmares of her ending and the difficulties in removing the heart and head. It is done and she is, if not at peace, then at least still. The sheriff is coming to call me to account for her murder, though she has been dead these long years. God will not banish me from His sight for my compassion. I believe this, and I pray for Miriam's soul along with my own.

  After this, there were entries from the doctor's brief time in prison. Lots of entreaties for God's forgiveness and compassion; hopes that the local authorities would see he had acted as a good Christian and a loving brother. A modern court would never see it that way, but in 1816 there was leeway, apparently. The final entry noted simply that:

  I am banished, for fear that others of my sister's ilk will seek their revenge upon me and so my neighbours. I do not believe there is any such danger, but I will go. The grief and betrayal in our mother's eyes is worse than the vengeance of all hell.

  The Bishop has demanded I leave my writings here, no doubt to burn, and I would have it so. A new beginning, perhaps in the Americas, is all that is left to me.

  The original article had quoted selectively from these passages, talking about how a genuine belief in vampirism had led to murder, or at least euthanasia, and the lenience of both church and state.

  For my part, I wished there were a way to send a message to the long-dead doctor. I understand.

  A vivid image of Kate lying mutilated and undead-yet-dying and begging me to release her, gripped me. I had to take great, gulping breaths of air to clear my head. Kate, I reminded myself sternly, was having a fabulous and hopefully deliciously wicked weekend with Anthony.

  Maudlin-cum-horrifying mornings are so not my thing. I needed to get out and away from all this…everything. I needed sunshine, happy noises and, if at all possible, no dead people.

  St Kilda. Whatever else you could say about it, it was noisy, sunny and as lively as a bucketful of eels.

  My thanks to the professor were emailed away before I leapt into the shower. I slurped down plunger coffee between dressing and throwing things into my satchel. Breakfast would be at Acland Street, I decided. Maybe at a proper café, maybe at a cake shop. Rum baba for breakfast sounded perfectly reasonable. Positively necessary, even.

  With my bag slung over my shoulder, I left.

  While I was waiting to cross Swanston Street for the tram stop, a glimpse of a woman walking alongside the Yarra made me catch my breath. I only saw her from behind, dressed in Toorak-matron glam - designer skirt, matching jacket, chunky jewellery, black high heeled shoes with gold trim. She had my mother's walk and that sweeping gesture of her hand as she makes a point, her hair coiffed just so. Not her, surely. My mother knew better than to ever come back here.

  The weirdest thing about seeing this doppelganger was the double lurch of emotion, so close to one another that I hardly knew which had come first. The fear, or the sorrow. That a bit of my heart still missed my mother was impossible to believe. I want her back the way she used to be, before Belinda died.

  Stupid heart. My mother could never be like she used to be. She'd made her choice, and I'd made mine, and we were never ever going to be able to fix it.

  The woman turned abruptly and waved to some nearby friend. Even with the giant sunglasses, I could see she wasn't my mother. Relief and disappointment collided briefly. Relief emerged the victor. That made me feel sad too.

  Despite knowing there was not enough sunshine and cake in the world to make any of it better, I boarded the tram. Those are the only choices. Stagnate or move forward.

  In St Kilda, dark clouds were gathering across the bay, promising one of Melbourne's periodic summer squalls. I'm not one for portents and symbolism. This is Melbourne. It rains sometimes. I would simply avail myself of the open-air craft markets while the weather was warm, and take refuge in a bookshop or a café when it got wet, along with everybody else. So deciding, I jumped off the tram along the Esplanade and beelined for the row of temporary white tents along the broad pavement. Maybe I could find welcome home presents for Kate and Oscar.

  The weather held. I found a couple of little treasures for my sister, a farcically butch collar for little Oscar and, for Gary, a notepad of thick hand-made paper, bound within the hardcover of an old 1940s maths textbook.

  It would be fun to see Gary's reaction to an unbirthday present, after the astonishment generated by my buying him a new T-shirt for his birthday last September. That reaction was undiminished when I got him a Christmas present as well.

  The weekend before Christmas I'd been to visit him and he'd plunked a box in my hand like it didn't matter, and then hovered, anxiously asking if I was going to open it now. I'd never had anyone wait so eagerly for a reaction, and
be so nonplussed at getting it.

  The enthusiastic embrace was well warranted. He'd given me a beautiful brooch: an elegant, art deco nautilus design of black Bakelite and coral which had belonged to his mother. I often wore it on our film nights to demonstrate how much I appreciated it.

  The discovery of a new stall at the market near the Acland Street end of the tent parade simultaneously fascinated and bothered me. Rows of shadowy charcoal-and-pastel drawings looked out of place in this bright, bayside suburb. Old buildings, some of them recognisably Melburnian, populated with hazy figures, loomed out of the thick paper: figures with mesmerised eyes and mouths open in lust-or-fear, others with hints of sharpness and darkness and dead white skin.

  The seller didn't look familiar. While I waited, a tiny, white-haired, bright-eyed woman with an age-seamed face returned with paper cups of coffee. She caught my eye and smiled, an expression both conspiratorial and challenging. Hell, we didn't need a code word. Those of us who knew could recognise each other by scent, just about. The drawings were hers, no doubt about it. I had never seen her at the Club, but I wasn't that frequent a caller. I wanted to talk to her. Someone slipped in ahead of me, so I took my time looking at the pictures instead.

  The glass-framed pictures were priced beyond what was sensible to pay for a for-the-hell-of-it present for Gary. There was also the risk that I would kick start a whole new subset of collectormania. Though maybe that was a good idea. A man who doesn't sleep needs to find ways of filling the time. Then I thought that hauling an A3 framed picture around for the rest of the day wasn't going to be fun either. I settled on a much smaller card-framed charcoal drawing of a figure lurking near Flinders Street Station. The hint of watchful eyes and sharp teeth were unmistakable. I had no doubt that Gary would like it. It would be, after all, one of the few things in his collection that reflected reality.

  The artist had finished talking so I handed the cash over. She wrapped the picture carefully in bubble wrap and newspaper. She leaned close as she handed it to me, so that I could just hear her murmur "Be careful with them, dear."

  "Always," I murmured back, aware that we were not talking about the art.

  "Extraordinary, aren't they?"

  The voice startled me and I looked up. And up. He was tall with a beaky nose and prominent cheekbones - the guy who had just been talking to the artist. He was examining the drawings with the same intensity I felt. Even some of the same circumspection. He knew, too.

  "Ahh. Different. Yeah," I semi-agreed.

  "Disturbing too, don't you think? The smaller figures look like birds hypnotised by snakes."

  "That doesn't really happen you know," I felt honour-bound to point out, "Outside of The Jungle Book anyway." Then I wondered if I was being rude. "They do have a kind of bunny-in-the-headlights thing there. Well, if the bunny in question has a suicidal devotion to six cylinders and really sweet paint jobs."

  A woof of laughter greeted my analysis and he grinned down at me. His eyes were green, I noted, and it made me suddenly sad. Daniel's eyes. If he'd lived, Daniel might have grown old to look like this lanky stranger.

  "Oh," he offered a chastened, apologetic syllable at my change of mood, "I…"

  "No. It's me. I'm having a weird weekend." My pitch for 'understatement of the year'. I smiled to show all was well. He smiled back. He had a nice smile. Tentative, like he wasn't sure smiling was allowed, or he was out of the habit. He was kind of good looking. Tall and skinny, the way I like 'em, with close-cropped dark hair, greying slightly at the temples. His ears were large and stuck out so that they softened the general serious-sad of his expression with their comical air of being too alert. His green eyes looked like he'd seen too much of the world, and that made me feel like we had something else in common. There were crows' feet around his eyes that crinkled pleasingly when he smiled. Older than me, but not really old. Thirty-five, maybe.

  His smile was faltering self-consciously and I realised I was staring. "Hey. Do you want coffee or something?" Well, it covered the embarrassing silence.

  "That would be lovely," he said, gracious as anything, "Where do you recommend?"

  I added his deep voice and elegant, hard-to-place accent to the checklist of his immediately fine qualities. The strong 'r's might have been North American or even Irish. The rounded vowels were more British but for the occasional twang. Was this what the mysterious 'trans-Atlantic' accent sounded like? I longed to listen to him talk some more.

  "Depends on whether you want a view of the sea or the park."

  "The sea, I think," he said, his smile growing warm, and it made me feel warm too.

  "I'm Lissa," I said as I led him down the steps.

  "Evan," he replied, managing to shake my hand as we walked, "It's a pleasure to meet you. I hope I haven't taken you away from anything important."

  "Not really. I came down here looking for distractions."

  He laughed again, that woof of surprise, and I belatedly realised I'd possibly been rude again, but he said: "I will endeavour to be distracting, then."

  I had the nous not to comment that between his height, his eyes, his voice, his smile and his use of words like 'endeavour', that was pretty much guaranteed.

  CHAPTER 11

  Chatting about the weather and how it compared with the Melbourne summer norm, we crossed the road to the St Kilda baths. The sea baths, all gussied up since the old days, looked like someone had made a giant sandcastle based on the Arabian Nights and then corporatised it. We strolled around the front of it, past people walking their dogs, ambling with their kids, or zipping past on roller blades and bicycles, and found a seat under the giant umbrellas at the outdoor café.

  Cake and coffee were duly delivered. Evan started heaping in the sugar and paused, mid-scoop, to watch me watching him with an expression of awe at his capacity for the stuff. His sheepish shrug made me laugh out loud, at which he stirred his sugar-with-coffee with an air of cocky defiance.

  Squeals and laughter in the water a few metres away commandeered my attention. St Kilda Beach isn't a surf beach, lying as it does on the bay, but people have plenty of fun in the sand and saltwater nonetheless. A group of little kids were running at the low swell and then fleeing, screaming in exhilarated glee-fear back to mum and dad on the shore. The eldest of them was practising being brave by being the last back to his laughing parents.

  Further along in the water a stocky guy, dressed in long blue boardshorts and a black T-shirt, was mock-wrestling with a young woman in a purple one-piece. His physique reminded me of Gary - broad shouldered, slightly overweight in a huggable way. The T-shirt, wet and plastered to his body, spoke of physical self-consciousness, all momentarily forgotten in the way he romped with his girl in the surf. He scooped her up easily in his arms and dumped her in the crest of an oncoming wave, sliding under the water with her. They resurfaced, laughing madly, her arms wrapped around his neck. A brief, salty kiss and she was diving away from him, he splashing after her, snagging her feet and coaxing her back for a kiss.

  They were - there was no other word for it - frolicking in the waves. I don't imagine Gary had ever frolicked in his life. Come to that, nor had I. We were not, it had to be said, the frolicsome type.

  "Euro for them?"

  "A eurocent is about all they're worth," I countered with a rueful smile.

  "It's these indecent modern times devaluing the intangible," Evan assured me.

  I laughed sheepishly. "I was thinking of a friend of mine."

  "They seem like pensive thoughts."

  "A little."

  "More of your weird week, I take it?"

  "Part of a whole weird year, actually." I didn't really want to start getting into that whole bizarre part of my history.

  Perhaps he sensed my reluctance to talk about the past. He regarded me thoughtfully. "I'll stop asking about it," he said after a moment, "if you will allow us to get to know each other somewhat better."

  The offer of an exchange of details was appea
ling. "Deal." I reached across to shake on it, and he shook my hand firmly and then failed to let go for several seconds. We blushed, sipped coffee, then caught each other's eye and burst out laughing.

  This was going to take some serious editing. "I'm a librarian," I started. "I live in the city with my sister and my dog. You?"

  "I'm a chemist."

  "What kind?"

  He looked surprised. "Most people don't think to ask. I'm a pharmaceutical chemist, mainly. It's sort of a family calling."

  "Where are you from, Evan-from-a-long-line-of-chemists?"

  I played with strips of torn sugar-packets, trying to find an excuse to brush against his fingers again.

  "Oh, here and there. Mostly there." And never mind my unsubtle attempts at contact - he stretched his own fingers out to press against mine to stop their fidgeting. I turned my hand up so our fingertips met. His grin widened, and my sudden infatuation got more…infatuous. His proper smile was unexpectedly goofy and delightful. "I was born in Boston. USA. I was schooled fairly equally between the UK and the Americas."

  "Is this your first trip to Australia?"

  "Yes. I've travelled the northern hemisphere and the Americas extensively. This is my first time in the Antipodes." Evan's eyes never left mine, but his long, knobbly-jointed fingers slid across my own, into my palm and along it to my wrist where they paused, delicately brushing across my rapidly increasing pulse, then back to the well of my hand. My own fingers curled up so that they brushed against his. Neither of us drew away.

  Part of my brain wondered very loudly what I was doing, reminding me stridently that I had never been very good at picking up guys, and certainly never before I'd known them at least tangentially for a one month minimum.