Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

He closed and sealed the vault containing the coffins. Evelyn followed him further down the corridor of doors and watched him unlock a second vault. Lights came on inside and revealed a chamber as large as the one they had just left. This room contained only a single upright coffin, like those standing in the last vault. It too drew power through cables that dropped from the ceiling.

  Doctor Hargrave pulled a small lever on the side of the coffin. The gauge’s needle swung up from time-zero to one second per second as it unsealed. The coffin, unlike the others, was not a prison and so not locked.

  The thing that stepped out of the coffin was humanoid, but at first not a man. His head was a white dome. The bones of his jaw, cheeks and brow came to blade-like ridges. His ears were pointed and the size of a human hand. He had the shining amber eyes of the rarest breed of vampire and when he opened his mouth to taste the air, Evelyn glimpsed a vampire’s fangs as well.

  But then his features shifted, like cloth pulled to smooth out the folds. He was a man in his late forties with a fleshy mouth, wearing the kind of suit worn by millions of London office workers every day.

  The thing that looked like a man drew an antique pocket watch from inside his jacket, flicked it open and examined the face within.

  “It has been two years, Mr Yadrim,” Doctor Hargrave said.

  “Thank you, Doctor, I know.” The thing snapped his watch shut and put it away. At first his accent was clipped and hard on the consonants, but as he spoke it eased into the kind of near-anonymous Western accent that took a careful ear to place. “We have a sighting?”

  He was like men she had known when she was young, when Britain still styled itself an empire. A gentleman and a soldier, he had the urbane charm to be at home at a dinner party, as well as the inner steel needed to lead a charge on a battlefield. But unlike those long-dead men Evelyn remembered, Yadrim’s steel had a cruel edge.

  Evelyn had to speak. “You were in zero time. Time did not pass for your watch any more than it did for you.”

  Yadrim listened to her politely. “That is true.” He turned to her father again. “A sighting?”

  Doctor Hargrave nodded to Evelyn, who said, “A single moment’s signal only. It was close and we can narrow it down to within a city block. It isn’t much to go on, but you insisted on being returned if even a trace was found.”

  “I did,” Yadrim said. “Shall we proceed?”

  On the lift ride back to the upper levels of the complex, Doctor Hargrave said, “Why supply us with the means to knot time? I have the strong suspicion, Mr Yadrim, that you do not age.”

  Yadrim had his hands folded behind his back. “I have been following this girl for a long time. I wanted a shortcut.”

  “You mean to kill her?” Evelyn asked. Her father frowned, but she didn’t withdraw the question.

  Yadrim pursed his heavy lips. “Did you think I had something else in mind?”

  Chapter 6 – Fiona, Tuesday Night

  Fiona sat on her bed and turned the invitation over and over in her hands. She was dressed and ready. It was time to leave, if she wanted to arrive within the bounds of politely late.

  Why did you get dressed, she asked herself, if you don’t mean to go?

  The invitation had come in an envelope. There was no postage stamp. A South Kensington address was written on the front of the card and a time written on the back, both in the kind of hand they had stopped trying to teach in schools decades ago. The note said Bring your monster, A.

  What her monster might be and how she was supposed to bring it she had no idea.

  She didn’t know anyone in South Kensington. She looked around her small room with its unmade bed, its shelves of paperback books and its cupboard of affordable black clothes. She assessed herself as being about three worlds away from anyone who lived in a place as wealthy as South Kensington.

  Her life since school had felt like waiting on a platform for the next train to arrive. She had done the expected things, like travel and further education, but nothing had fulfilled that sense of expectation.

  The invitation in her hand was strange and strange offered possibilities. It could be nothing much – perhaps an invitation from an old school friend whose handwriting she’d forgotten, who had made it big already and wanted to show off. But it could be something too, something to meet that sense of expectation head-on.

  Downstairs, she poked her head round the living room door. “I’m going out.”

  Her mother, Amelia, lifted her head from the pillow on the couch. She was a well-meaning but worn-down woman and on the two nights per week she didn’t work late she relaxed in front of the TV watching utter rubbish.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I’ll get something while I’m out,” Fiona said as she wrapped her scarf around her neck.

  “There’s some pie in the fridge if you’re hungry when you get back.” Amelia already had her head back on the pillow. Her tired eyes had returned to the TV. “Have a nice night, honey.”

  Forty minutes and a Tube ride later Fiona was standing on a quiet street, looking at a row of up-market townhouses. Like its neighbours it was four stories up, plus a loft and a basement level and all much cleaner than the customary London grime, as if exempted from it by council law.

  There was no plate beside it to indicate it was a place of business. It looked like a residence.

  You could be about to walk into the den of a serial killer, she said to herself. The A could stand for Axe Murderer.

  No one knew she was here. She hadn’t told her mother or her annoyingly smart little sister. Her only weapon was a rather mediocre paperback novel in her pocket.

  But that sense that she was waiting wouldn’t go away. She walked up to the door and pressed the doorbell.

  The man who answered the door was the same height as Fiona, though he tilted his head back to stare down at her anyway. He had a neat round belly, a polished head and wore a black suit. They each waited for the other to make the first move.

  Fiona offered the card.

  The balding man smiled a tidy little smile. “Please come in, Miss. May I take your coat?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “The other guests are upstairs,” the balding man said. “Refreshments have been served and if you prefer something more specialised, please ask one of the staff.”

  A the Axe Murderer has staff, she said to herself.

  The décor in the entry room was inspired by a nautical and exploration theme. A polished brass instrument sat in a glass case on a dresser, the kind of device that looked like a cross between a tiny telescope and a rocking chair. On all available walls pictures of ships were hung, from an old black and white sailing ship to a modern, full-coloured vessel with a helicopter lashed to the stern.

  She followed the balding man upstairs. A painting met her at the top, three men on thrones above a dark hell of people strung up on dead trees. The contrast with the inoffensive pictures below made Fiona feel like she had entered someone’s inner sanctum.

  Strange taste in art is not a good reason to leave, the voice in the back of her mind said. She thought it could be, but she didn’t turn back.

  The balding man showed her through to a parlour on the first floor. More works of art elbowed each other for space on the walls and several sculptures stood on pedestals, but Fiona could not look at them at first, because the room also contained a small crowd of people and they were startling.

  Two of them, a man and a woman, were beautiful. Even the man was beautiful. They were tall and lean and every tiny movement contained such grace that she became far too conscious of her big black boots. The man wore a long coat with tails and a shirt with a wide collar. The woman wore a slinky black number, low cut and slit up the sides to the hip, to reveal extraordinary expanses of perfect black skin.

  They inspected her in turn. His eyes were bright blue eyes, hers were a striking amber colour. She felt like the only person in the world while their attention touched her, but a small part of he
r mind noted the impersonal way they sized her up.

  It was one of the more ordinary people in the room who spoke to her. “Fiona,” he said, after the balding man had shown him Fiona’s invitation. He offered his hand. “My name is Akin Tonno. Welcome to my home.”

  “Thank you.” Akin Tonno was a stocky man with a ring on the middle finger of his right hand, set with a gem that caught the light in a strange way. He had a pair of glasses perched on his forehead as though he’d lifted them up from his nose and forgotten them. After the strange attention of the man with the wide collar and the woman in the slinky dress, Akin’s more natural pleasantness was welcome and reassuring. “I don’t know what I did to merit an invitation to your, um, art show?”

  “A private collection, brought out for the pleasure of our guests.” Akin winked at her. “And I’m sure the invitation was aimed appropriately, knowing the one who asked me to invite you. Please, have a look around. There are many pieces of great interest gathered from many places and times, each with a long and rich history, and some with a terribly boring story of how I acquired them.” He looked behind Fiona. “But here is the lady who might enlighten us both. Will you do us the privilege, Alice?”

  Fiona turned round. Alice looked like a seventeen year old girl but though she wore the kind of skirt a girl her age would wear, she had a self-possession well beyond her years. Her hair was a white-blonde mane. The man on her arm was in his early thirties, had cultivated a goatee that didn’t suit the rest of his features and from the look on his face had already decided Fiona could not possibly be worth his attention.

  “The invitation was from me,” Alice said. She held out her hand to Fiona. “I hope you don’t mind invitations from random strangers. I wanted to meet you as soon as possible, so Akin kindly let me bring you along to his little showing.”

  Fiona said, “Mmm.” It seemed like the only real thing to say, because Alice gave off a mixture of signals Fiona couldn’t figure out.

  Alice fixed her with a piercing blue stare, one that reminded her too much of the assessing looks of those in the room behind her. Then she laughed.

  “You’re not fooled, are you?” Much of the girlishness dropped from her manner. “You can tell I’m older than I look.”

  “Oh Alice, not slipping are you?” Akin asked.

  She laid a hand on Fiona’s arm. “Men are always fooled by my little act, but women rarely so. Come along, Fiona. Let’s have a look around.”

  “Your boyfriend doesn’t look too happy you ditched him,” Fiona said as they strolled back the way Fiona had come. She still had no idea what Alice was talking about.

  Alice shrugged. “Damon has a very high opinion of himself, which is not uncommon in his line of work. I ignore it when I find it convenient to do so.” She stopped them in front of the picture at the top of the stairs. “What do you think?”

  “I can see why you keep it upstairs,” Fiona said.

  “It’s called the Kings of Teleoch. I met the artist once. He says he dreams of places beneath other skies. See how one of the enthroned figures is in colour and the others are in shades of grey? One living king to rule the people of Teleoch when they’re awake, two dead kings to rule them when they’re asleep, he said.”

  “He has quite an imagination,” Fiona said.

  “He thought it was a real place,” Alice said. “He thought all other skies he saw were real.” She tapped her fingers on Fiona’s arm. “He did rather a lot of acid, as I recall.”

  “Is there a reason why you keep looking at my feet?” Fiona asked.

  “Just looking for your monster. Is it there now?”

  “I really wouldn’t know.” The staircase was right behind them. She recalled that the front door looked like it opened easily from the inside. For the first time since arriving Fiona really considered leaving.

  “I like your boots,” Alice said. “I have an old pair like that I used to wear a lot in the early 1980s, but since then it’s mostly just the new ones who dress like that, while they try to figure out who they are now.”

  “Mmm,” Fiona said.

  Alice led her into another room as large as the parlour in which they’d met. At one end of the room there were four large pictures, three paintings and one engraving, each done in a completely different style but each of the same thing. They showed a walled city climbing a broken, jagged hillside. One was a detailed sketch done in black pen. The second, the engraving, was carved into stone. The third was an oil painting, rich in lush detail. The fourth was uneven, twisted, and scribbled across with spirals and random geometric shapes

  “Remarkable, aren’t they?” Alice asked. “No city ever known to have existed matches their description. See the temple there at the top of the city? We think those arcs of metal or stone that come together at the central spire form an array for transmitting the will of the wizard-priests inside.”

  “I see,” Fiona said.

  “The one in pen was done by a German architecture student in 1891 or 1892. The story goes that he woke up to find he’d drawn it in his sleep. The engraving is in granite and was found in a cave in Peru about forty years ago. It is thought to be a thousand years old. The oil painting is by an unknown Renaissance artist, and how it escaped being destroyed is a wonderful mystery. The fourth one was created by the same artist who did the Kings of Teleoch, though he was in a mental hospital by then. Akin tells me he painted several even more, shall we say, abstract pictures before devolving into random splashes of colour.”

  “Different people created them in different times?” Fiona asked. “Were they all crazy or just on drugs?”

  “The German architect certainly wasn’t. He didn’t even drink. He said it interfered with his work.” She swept her gaze across the three pictures. “Fascinating, isn’t it? They lived in different times on different continents and never saw the others. They dreamed their way to this place, we can only suppose, as the fellow who ended up in the mental hospital said. They each found their way to the dream of the city.”

  “I should probably tell you at this point that I’m not into the supernatural stuff,” Fiona said.

  Alice glanced down at Fiona’s feet again. For the first time, she appeared uncertain. “Tell me, do you realise what I am?”

  “You seem very nice and I’m grateful for your invitation, but I don’t have the slightest idea what you are,” Fiona said. “No, that’s not true. You’re strange. You’re certainly that.”

  “This is unexpected. You mean you don’t know there’s a monster in your shadow?”

  Fiona looked down at the weak shadow the room’s lights cast at her feet. “That sounds like the supernatural stuff I just mentioned not being into.”

  Alice took a step back. “We can’t continue this way.”

  She grimaced. Then she spread her mouth in a wide grin and made hooks of her fingers. Her eyes seemed a little more brightly blue than before.

  “What are you doing?” Fiona asked.

  Alice’s strange grin faltered. “What do you see?”

  “You pulling a face like my ten year old sister,” Fiona said. She had just about run out of patience. “This has been very entertaining but –”

  Alice was suddenly close to her, deep in her personal space. Fiona gasped and pulled back, but Alice grabbed her wrist in a grip that, while not tight, promised it could turn to marble if the owner wanted it to.

  “There’s something wrong with you,” Alice said.

  “Oh thank you very much. If you’ll just let go of me, I’m going to head home now.”

  Instead Alice dragged her back into the first parlour, moving at such a pace Fiona could barely keep her feet.

  Their entrance ended the various conversations. The beautiful man, tall and with long dark hair, said in a French accent, “Alice, why are you trying to pull that girl’s arm off?”

  “Vivien, she can’t see me.” Alice pulled Fiona forward into the room. “She thinks I’m pulling silly faces.”

  “You are
, darling,” the woman in the slinky dress said.

  “Hush, Zarina,” Alice said. “Damon, look at her. What do you see?”

  “I’m right here, you know.” Fiona tried to tug her arm out of Alice’s grip, but her hand was as strong as a manacle.

  Alice’s boyfriend stroked his ridiculous goatee and ran his eyes up and down Fiona. “What am I supposed to see?”

  “Yes,” Fiona said, “what am I supposed to see?”

  Alice spread her free arm wide. “You’re supposed to see that I’m a vampire.”

  Fiona pressed her mouth into a thin line, then said, “Let go of me. I’m leaving.”

  Akin touched the glasses on his forehead as he came forward. “Why, this is remarkable.” He took Fiona’s free hand in both of his. “Simply remarkable. Damon, you sense nothing?”

  Damon had begun to look put out, which Fiona found she could understand. “She’s just a girl.” She did not, however, find herself sympathising.

  “I know just the thing,” Akin said. “I have a mirror.” Letting go of Fiona’s hand, he clapped his own together. “Gerald!” The balding man smoothly materialised from somewhere. “Fetch the silver mirror from the sun room.”

  “Vampires don’t show up in mirrors,” Fiona said. “You’re giving yourself away.”

  Alice stood on the balls of her feet, as though she planned to pounce on the mirror when it arrived. “Vampires have reflections. They just … don’t always match.”

  Fiona tested Alice’s grip again and found it still much stronger than she’d expect from a girl her size. “I’m trying to be understanding here,” she said, “but honestly, I’ve had enough. This isn’t funny, whatever nonsense you have in mind.”

  I wonder why I’m not afraid? Fiona thought. They won’t let me go and I’m just angry.

  Alice put her free hand on Fiona’s shoulder. “Bear with us, Fiona. A look in the mirror might be just the trick.”

  Gerald and another man returned, carrying a mirror between them. It was an oval easily two metres in height, connected at its sides to a stand that let it tilt back and forth. Akin fluttered his hands as he directed them to put the mirror in the centre of the room, then waved both men away.