Pretty Young Things

by Dominic McDonagh

  When Chelsea finally stirred herself, she found Leonard in an odd mood. Her broken hand still hurt, with a dull throbbing ache, but her head seemed a lot clearer than it had the previous night. Maybe she had given herself a concussion. She was surprised, and pleased, that Leonard had been around to Jay’s and retrieved her bag for her. ‘I thought you’d want a change of clothes,’ he told her. Chelsea agreed with that: she’d been tortured in the t-shirt she was wearing, and then slept in it, and it felt like it had been spot-welded to her spine. A change of underwear would be even more welcome. ‘The bathroom’s the first on the left,’ Leonard added.

  Chelsea held up her hand, still bound in a web of bandages and steel splints holding her fingers straight out like a fan. ‘Should I try to avoid getting this wet?’ she asked.

  ‘It isn’t in plaster,’ Leonard said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I want to take another look at how it’s doing, anyway. I take it you still don’t want to go to hospital and let somebody cut your knuckles? Getting some pins put into your hand would do a lot more good than those braces are likely to.’

  ‘No way,’ Chelsea said. ‘No way in hell. I am not risking having one of your bloody colleagues dissecting me to find out what’s up with my body chemistry.’

  Leonard could see her point. He was finding the fact that he hadn’t been able to investigate her friends’ blood chemistry very frustrating. ‘I suppose we can break it again and reset it if we have to,’ he said. ‘Is it still painful?’

  ‘Some,’ Chelsea said.

  Leonard had been hoping as much. ‘I’ll give you another shot,’ he said. ‘Do you need to eat first?’

  ‘No,’ Chelsea said, ‘probably not for a day or two. Last night took a lot out of me, but I’m not drained yet.’

  ‘I know. The police are looking for you.’

  That gave Chelsea pause for thought. Her face didn’t so much fall as plummet. ‘Oh hell.’

  ‘Go and get cleaned up,’ Leonard said. ‘I’ll get the morphine ready.’ There were a couple of other things he wanted to try injecting Chelsea with, but there was no point in mentioning that to her.

  Chelsea locked the bathroom door behind her. She sighed and stripped off, shoved what she’d been wearing into a corner, stepped into the shower and lathered up. The hot water soothed the ache in her fingers. She washed her hair as well and wrapped it in a towel. Then she dressed in some of the clean clothes out of her bag.

  Leonard was waiting for her in the kitchen. ‘Let’s look at that hand,’ he said. Chelsea shrugged and sat down as he unwrapped the wet bandages and splints. The hand was a dark, glistening purple, wrapped in a single huge bruise, and swollen dreadfully. It looked like a cartoon character had hit it with a sledgehammer. Leonard sucked in air through his teeth: if he’d been a mechanic, his next line would have been, ‘That’s going to cost you.’

  ‘I’m not surprised it’s still painful,’ he said. ‘The bruising means that the muscles are repairing themselves, but with your hand in that state, there’s no telling what kind of state your tendons and bones are in. Or the nerves.’

  ‘They did take an x-ray while I was at the hospital,’ Chelsea said. ‘Could you tell how bad it is from that? Jay said you know people there.’

  ‘I do, but I couldn’t get hold of the x-ray. The radiology department is full of self-righteous idiots. I’ll splint this again and give you another shot.’

  Leonard was as good as his word, but the injection hit Chelsea a lot harder than the last one had. The room swayed and then span and her legs melted. Chelsea felt her body dissolve. She didn’t even register that she’d fallen, let alone the back of her head cracking on the floor. Leonard’s voice seemed to be coming from the other side of creation.

  ‘I thought that would have more impact than the morphine.’

  Chelsea tried to speak. She didn’t think she’d succeeded in making any sound with her mouth stuffed full of pillows, but it seemed Leonard had heard something.

  ‘Hush. You’ll go under in a second. We can talk more when you come out of it. It shouldn’t have hit you so hard so quickly, but I’m not complaining.’

  The floor undulated beneath Chelsea’s back, then swallowed her whole.

  When Chelsea started coming to, she felt like somebody had cut open the back of her head, scraped her skull clean of its contents, then stuffed it full of razor-wire and hedgehogs. Her eyes were blurry, although she could just make out that she seemed to be lying on a cellar floor, and her attempt to speak emerged as a rasping croak.

  ‘Don’t bother trying to talk yet,’ Leonard’s voice said. ‘We’ll have plenty of time for that later.’

  Something was constricting Chelsea’s chest, and digging painfully into her crotch. Something else dug into her ankles when she moved her legs. She couldn’t feel her arms, or move them.

  ‘Stop twitching,’ Leonard said. ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ He loomed over Chelsea and pinched her nostrils shut. When she opened her mouth to suck in air, something soft and bulging was forced into it. She couldn’t quite recognise the taste of the dried spit that coated it. A set of straps were pulled tight around her head, forcing the object deeper into her mouth.

  ‘There’s no way you’re getting out of that straitjacket,’ Leonard said. ‘Don’t bother trying to chew on the gag. It won’t do any good. Once I’ve found somewhere safe to put you, I can let you out, but you’ll just have to put up with it in the meantime.’ An edge that could slice somebody into slivers crept into his voice. ‘You like bondage, don’t you? I’ve looked at your cellar. Cute set up. You girls go out and shake your booty in the clubs, then bleed whoever follows you home whenever you feel thirsty. One of those poor bastards was still alive, do you know that? Brain dead, but he was still breathing under his own steam. You could at least have put him out of his misery before leaving.’

  Chelsea shook her head. It was swelling up, she thought. There was a bump on the back of it that was throbbing hard enough to penetrate whatever he’d doped her with.

  ‘You’re the only control group I have to hand. I’ve found some of your den mother’s papers, and they’ll tell me more than you ever could, given time, but it’ll take a while to sift through them. Somebody was a style over substance type. Beautiful penmanship, but you can hardly make out a word. Old fashioned values, no doubt. Still, I have time to puzzle it out. All the time in the world. Do you know how old she was?’

  Chelsea concentrated as hard as she could on not moving. She wasn’t even going to blink or twitch if she could help it. The older girls, Coral and Sophie in particular, could outstare statues if they put their minds to it. Even Nicola, who hadn’t been more than a year or two older than Chelsea, had once outstared a Persian cat that she’d picked up along with its owner.

  ‘I don’t necessarily need you,’ Leonard hissed. ‘But even if I do need you, I don’t need you intact. I’m going to ask you again, and if you don’t make an effort to reply this time, I’m going to start hurting you in ways you can’t imagine.’

  Chelsea closed her eyes.

  ‘Good. Do you know how old your owner was?’

  Chelsea shook her head.

  ‘She was engaged to somebody who was blown up during the Indian mutiny. Not the Crimea, and he wasn’t shot through the head, it seems, but a fragment of shrapnel did remove most of one of his frontal lobes, over 100 years ago. She met Louise Brooks while he was in a vegetative state, and seems to have been very angry indeed that she couldn’t convince her that they should sleep together. Everyone expected that her fiancé would recover, given time, but she decided that she didn’t want to stick around, and left after 30 years. She was at least 110 years old when Jay killed her, and she knew people who had been alive since the Monmouth rebellion. Centuries.’

  Leonard paused a moment. ‘I’m going to show you something,’ he said, and pulled a sheet off
the table nearby. Chelsea saw what had been done to Rowena and felt her gorge rise. She wondered if she’d choke if she vomited with this gag blocking her mouth.

  ‘Dissecting her arm didn’t kill her,’ Leonard said. ‘It had started to heal by the time I had worked out how to exsanguinate her, though it wasn’t healing properly. You’re a clever girl. Think about that for a while.’

  Leonard was about to say something else, but was interrupted by the doorbell ringing upstairs. That suited Chelsea fine, as she was getting fed up with his evil-genius routine. Leonard looked at his watch.

  ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Marvin’s early. Wait here and think about your position.’

  Chelsea closed her eyes as he left the cellar.

  It wasn’t Marvin. Marvin was an acquaintance of Leonard’s who owned a chicken farm in the Pennines. Chickens aren’t what you’d call picky eaters, so Marvin was useful for getting rid of certain sorts of evidence, such as dead vampires. Disposing of the bodies was going to have to wait. Leonard saw that as soon as he opened the door.

  Leonard had left the chain on the door, and started pushing it back shut when he saw it was a couple of girls standing on the doorstep. They both looked young, but either could have been old when Saigon fell. Vampires. The door slammed shut and Leonard backed away from it. He sprinted into the front room and grabbed the phone. Calling the police wouldn’t be a good idea under the circumstances, but he was owed a few favours that he could call in. Some of the people who owed him those favours would be quite pleased with the notion of dealing with a couple of attractive young women. Leonard punched a number into the phone, then heard the line go dead after it rang a couple of times. The telephone mast was on the corner next to his house. Somebody had cut the line or, Leonard realised with a mounting sense of horror, had torn it free with their bare hands. He heard something tap the window, and then fled the room. Glass shattered behind him. The window was divided up into small panes, none big enough to let somebody crawl through. Breaking the framework up or forcing the lock on the latch would slow down his attackers a little.

  The climax of Night Of The Living Dead flitted through Leonard’s head. There was another phone line in his study, but the gun he kept in the house was in the cellar. The cellar was a lot nearer, had a very solid door and no windows, and the coal chute had been bricked up. Leonard bolted for the kitchen, and the flight of steps leading to the cellar.

  Chelsea looked up as Leonard came hurtling back into the cellar. He seemed quite a bit less assured than he had during the one-sided conversation a minute or two earlier, and was all but gibbering as he slammed home a brace of deadbolts at the top and bottom of the cellar door and fastened the lock. Chelsea was even more surprised when he sprang across the room to a filing cabinet and hauled a pistol out of the back of its bottom drawer. It was a small, snub nosed revolver of some sort; a dull black, ugly lump of metal. His hands were shaking as he drew back the hammer on the gun to cock it. She heard a footstep creak on the steps leading down to the cellar. Leonard filled his free hand with her hair and pressed the gun’s barrel into the side of her temple. She could feel him trembling and smell terror in his sweat. This wasn’t the state of mind she wanted in somebody aiming a gun at her head.

  ‘He’s down there?’ Lucinda said.

  Hayley nodded. ‘I heard the door slam. Just got in here that little bit too slow. That bloody window.’

  ‘I wonder why he bolted like that? We just want to talk to him.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what Rachael told his friend,’ Hayley suggested. Lucinda sighed.

  ‘I don’t care how paranoid he is, we need to talk to him about Chelsea.’

  ‘Maybe he’d feel a bit more secure shouting through a door than he would face to face,’ Hayley suggested, and started descending the steps.

  Lucinda paused to take a look at the stacks of books on the kitchen table before following, and her mouth dropped open with shock. ‘Hayles,’ she said. ‘Come and look at this.’

  Hayley had another look at the table, and grimaced. ‘Coral’s stash of papers. Keep an eye on the cellar while I have a quick look upstairs. We should probably double check before breaking anything else.’

  ‘We should also leave before the police arrive. This isn’t the poshest area, but people probably phone the pigs when they hear someone jumping through their neighbour’s window. We don’t have the time to fuck around, Hayles.’

  ‘60 seconds,’ Hayley said, and then grinned. ‘I told you you should have just shot him as soon as he opened the door, didn’t I?’

  Something banged on the cellar door, more a very firm knock than an attempt to break it down. Hayley’s voice called out in a calm, measured tone.

  ‘Can we talk?’ she said. ‘We’d like to check how our friend’s doing.’

  Chelsea recalled that Hayley hadn’t been a party to mutilating her hand. Maybe there’d been a change in the others’ attitude since Jay had killed Coral. Besides Hayley and Chelsea herself, there were only another couple of them left alive now. Rachael would probably still want to do something ghastly to her, but was outnumbered. It sounded like Hayley had a quorum.

  ‘She’s fine!’ Leonard shouted. ‘Piss off!’

  ‘Can’t she talk for herself?’ Hayley asked.

  Chelsea felt the gun’s nozzle leave her head and realised what was about to happen. She wanted to scream a warning, but couldn’t. Instead, she shifted her legs as much as the fetters let her and jack-knifed herself, slamming her weight into Leonard as hard as she could in a bid to throw him off balance and spoil his aim. She couldn’t see whether or not she’d succeeded from where she was lying, but she heard Leonard curse as the noise from the shot died away and he slammed her head back against the cellar floor viciously. The blow made Chelsea’s already sore head felt like it was splitting open.

  Hayley and Lucinda looked at the hole the bullet had punched through the cellar door an inch from Hayley’s head and flattened themselves against the walls. The time for conversation had obviously been and gone.

  ‘At least we tried,’ Hayley said, ruefully.

  Lucinda hauled Superfly’s magnum out from under her coat and put a bullet through the lock. Annoyingly, the door refused to open when she kicked it. Something was holding the top and the bottom shut. She ducked back as another shot came through the door, then pumped a couple of rounds into each of the hinges. She hoped that, as she was firing at an angle, she wouldn’t accidentally hit Chelsea in the room below. The door lurched when she pressed it this time.

  ‘Let’s count to three,’ she said. Hayley sniggered.

  The door burst open. Leonard retreated behind Chelsea, his back flat against the wall, and his free arm twisted round her neck. The gun barrel pressed into her ear felt uncomfortably hot.

  ‘One step closer,’ he said, ‘and I’ll shoot her.’ He could probably have taken a shot at Hayley and Lucinda while they were getting to their feet after knocking the door in, but he’d been too busy grabbing his hostage. It wasn’t a role Chelsea was happy playing.

  Lucinda had a gun in one hand herself, but it didn’t look like she was going to risk using it in case she killed the wrong person.

  Leonard eyed the gatecrashers warily. One of them looked like she was about 15. She was short and slightly plump, had pink highlights in her peroxide blonde chignon, and wore a pair of big trainers, a leather biker jacket, a white shirt and the navy pullover and pleated skirt from a school uniform. The other girl was taller and older-looking, probably in her mid 20s, wrapped up in a cream leather reefer jacket over a fluffy orange angora sweater and a pair of PVC leggings that coated her legs in a layer of shiny black wrinkles. Her white cowboy boots had pointed toes and high heels. She had long, raven-black hair, and a warm smile framing flawless American teeth.

  ‘There’s no need for this,’ the older girl said. Her accent was far mellower than
the abrasive nasal twang that Leonard had been expecting. Maybe she’d been in the UK long enough to lose most of it. ‘Just take that gun out of Chelsea’s ear and we’ll leave, taking her with us. I’d say it looks like you want her out of your hair.’

  ‘We’ve had a trying few days,’ the schoolgirl added. Her costume had a stronger whiff of manga and corporal punishment videos to it than of the local comprehensive, Leonard thought. Her bare legs were smooth and shiny, without a hint of goose bumps or cellulite.

  ‘How do I know you’ll do as you say?’ he asked.

  The American vampire smiled. ‘You don’t know that we won’t,’ she replied. ‘But what are you going to threaten us with if you do kill her? She’s the only chip you have to bargain with, isn’t she? If you kill her, you’re fucked. She’s the only reason we have not to do something terrible to you, so think about what we might do if you hurt her.’

  Leonard thought about this, then realised that the schoolgirl was looking at the dissecting table. Her breath hissed as she exhaled. Leonard felt his stomach flip over as she took a step forwards. He pulled the gun out of Chelsea’s ear. Maybe if he shot them both quickly he’d get out of this alive.

  Hayley looked back from the table with Rowena’s ruined body lying on top of it, to Chelsea’s captor. The man blanched as he saw her expression.

  Lucinda took a step towards Hayley as her friend lunged forwards, but realised that there wasn’t any point in even trying to defuse the situation. Hayley’s face was a mask of rage and hatred, and Lucinda didn’t want to risk getting between her and the vivisectionist. If Hayley wanted to dismantle the guy with her bare hands, Lucinda didn’t have any objection to that. She knew that Hayley and Rowena had been close.