Ghost Electricity

by Sean Cunningham

  “Rob’s given me the tour and the sell,” Julian said. “I really just need to know the lease terms.”

  They sat in the living room, which had received a quick tidy from Rob half an hour earlier, insofar as making space to sit on the couches counted as tidying. Craig put the lease agreement in front of Julian.

  “The place has been around since I don’t know when,” Craig said, “but it’s in good condition. Mr Hawthorn likes his rental properties to be in the same state as his personal residence. He takes pride in it. We’ve never had any complaints about the neighbours. You’ve got a lady and her two daughters next door in Flat 2.”

  He ran his eye down the lease form. “Do you have a pen?”

  Julian printed and signed his name. Craig wrote him a receipt for the deposit and the first month’s rent. Julian looked at the piece of paper in his hand and it struck him that it was the most normal thing that had happened to him since he arrived in London.

  Craig tucked the paperwork back into his folder. “I hope you like the place. Don’t hesitate to call if there’s a problem. Like I said, Mr Hawthorn takes pride in the state of his rentals.”

  They saw Craig to the door. When it was closed and they heard the iron gate swinging shut, Rob said, “I’ve eaten almost everything there was in the kitchen that was edible, plus a few things that were marginal. Want to head down to the shops?”

  Cars were still pulling into parking spaces as workers returned home. They prowled the street looking for empty spaces and when they found one, they wedged themselves in as close to the gutter as possible. They left a space in the middle only wide enough for a single car to drive through. Ahead, Julian saw a car turn into the street and stop. Back down the way they’d come, he saw the headlights of another car, motionless.

  “Not a bad chap, that Craig,” Rob said as they walked. “Had a problem with the boiler last winter and he had a bloke out here half an hour later, never mind the extra expense of an evening call. Quality plumber too, the guy he got.” Rob wrinkled his nose. “Personally though, I think those cigarettes he smokes are made from camel shit.”

  “Why does he call his uncle mister?”

  “I spoke to him on the phone once. Believe me, he’s a mister. You might not have called anyone mister in your life before, but you do it the first time he speaks to you. So where’s your stuff at the moment?”

  Julian patted the satchel slung over his shoulder.

  “Hang on, how have you managed a full set of clean and ironed clothes? It looks like there’s hardly anything in there.”

  “It’s bigger on the inside,” Julian said.

  “Some magician thing, right? Is that what guys like you call yourselves then? Got to admit I don’t know anything about your –”

  Rob’s head snapped around. Julian went straight to full alert. He nearly succumbed to reflex and ducked.

  Dean melted out of the night shadows in front of them. His eyes gleamed bright blue and hungry. One of his hands was behind his back.

  “Great,” Rob said. “What do you want? Aren’t there rules against you leeches bugging us?”

  “There are laws for when one of you dog-fuckers kills one of our kind, Robbie-boy,” Dean said. “Laws of blood justice that give the sire the right to vengeance on the murderer. Do I have to explain which of us is which in this little situation, or have I used simple enough words?”

  Rob’s lip curled. “Laws? You lot have laws?”

  “We even follow them sometimes.”

  Dean’s arm swung around from behind his back. Julian saw a gun in his hand.

  Then he lay sprawled in the middle of the street with no memory of getting there. His head spun. He lost his grip on time for a heartbeat and he lay in blood-churned mud again beneath a black, lightning-shattered sky. Balls of fire drew arcs through the air and horns brayed battle signals.

  But the ground beneath him was the hard asphalt of London. Shock gave way to pain and a will to survive rolled him into a crouch.

  He saw Rob lying on the pavement with one hand clutching his chest. He saw Dean stepping closer to Rob with the gun still pointed directly at him.

  There wasn’t time to pull in power from the city’s electrical grid. He would have to use what was inside him. He focused his mind in a pulse of will, grabbed the gun and jammed it up under Dean’s jaw.

  Even with a vampire’s strength and reflexes, Dean was too surprised to do more than begin to jerk the gun away before Julian pulled the trigger with his mind. Instead of blasting through Dean’s brain, the bullet tore his face off.

  Dean crashed on his back and thrashed about in a near-silent fury. He hit the nearest car with a loud metal bang, bounced off and crunched against a brick fence. He stumbled into the base of a tree trunk and used his talons to lunge up into the tree’s branches, only to fall out a moment later onto the roof of another car.

  Julian got to his feet. To his relief, he saw Rob struggle up to his knees. Julian ran over and knelt beside him. “How bad is it?”

  Rob’s entire body shook. His hand was pressed against his upper chest on the left side and blood spread across his white business shirt. “It’s fucking silver.” His teeth chattered as he spoke.

  “We need to move. Those shots will have the police here in minutes. Can you walk?”

  “I can probably stagger a bit.”

  Julian pulled him upright and ducked under Rob’s shoulder to support him. He reached out and pulled the night shadows close. A quick look around revealed he’d lost track of Dean. Nothing he could do about that just now except go the other way.

  “How did I get into the middle of the street?” Julian asked.

  “Pushed you,” Rob said. His breath came in short gasps. “Didn’t think you could take a bullet.”

  They made it a full two blocks before Julian set Rob down against a tree trunk. He checked Rob’s wound and saw it wasn’t closing. “Is this fatal?”

  “If we don’t get the bullet out, I think so yeah,” Rob said.

  He reached into his bag and pulled out a rolled bandage, ripped it out of its plastic wrapper and set it on his lap. “I can get it out. It’s going to hurt a lot.”

  “It already hurts a lot,” Rob said. He started shaking again.

  Julian took Rob’s hand away from the bullet hole, drew in a deep breath and pressed his own hand flat against Rob’s chest. His blood was warm and unpleasantly sticky, but there was no helping that.

  The nearest streetlights flickered and blinked as he drew their power in to bolster both himself and Rob. He reached in and gripped the bullet with his mind.

  Silver. Around the bullet, Rob’s flesh was turning black with rot. The metal rode his blood and Julian could feel growing tendrils of putrefying flesh spreading outwards from the wound.

  He pulled the bullet out.

  Rob bucked, arched his back, tried not to scream. Julian felt the pain but the magic devoured most of it. Sweat popped out across his brow.

  Julian drew his bloody hand back and the bullet floated in the air.

  Rob slumped, breathing heavily. Julian swallowed and pressed the bandage against Rob’s wound with his clean hand. “Hold it. Keep pressure on it.”

  “Got it,” Rob breathed. His eyes were glazed with pain.

  Julian sat back with the silver bullet floating above his palm. Rob’s blood steamed off it. He heard sirens in the distance, so he made sure the night shadows were still close around them. They were not invisible, but they were hard to notice.

  “Dean isn’t dead, is he?” Rob asked. “We’re going to have more vampire trouble.”

  “I think we will.”

  “Fuck I’m having a bad week,” Rob said.

  Chapter 10 – Fiona, Wednesday Night

  Fiona sat on the bank of a river wreathed in mist, surrounded by wetlands she sensed rather than saw. The sky was like a grey London sky and it lacked the brighter patch of the sun, so there were no shadows. She smelled damp earth and heard water plipping and plopp
ing to itself.

  A piece of flint was half buried in the mud beside her. It had been chipped into the shape of an axe head. She touched it with her fingertips and thought of the chalk downs in which the stone had once been buried.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  She looked up to see a boy her own age standing a few metres out on the river surface in a gap in the mist. If he was lost, he did not seem concerned about it. His bare feet were braced apart and he leaned towards her. He was dark-haired and tanned by the sun. His white sleeveless tunic came down to his knees and had square brown patterns around the edges.

  “Not really,” Fiona said. “How are you standing on the water? Magic?”

  “This is a dream,” the boy said. “We can do anything here. Come, won’t you join me? You only have to want to.”

  Fiona stood up and frowned at the surface of the river. She stretched one booted foot out over the water’s edge and found it to be solid enough.

  “Be careful though, it can be slippery,” the boy said.

  “Why am I doing this? This is a dream.” She pushed downwards with her palms and rose half a metre off the ground.

  The boy laughed. “We shall walk on the sky then.” He kicked off with his feet and rose to her level. “Are you my guide?”

  “Guide?” Fiona said.

  “I fell asleep after breathing oneiric incense,” the boy said. “I came to find what can be learned in dreams.”

  “Sorry, I don’t think so. I’m in no state to guide anyone.”

  “Oh,” the boy said. He brightened. “Perhaps I am here to be your guide.”

  Fiona said, “Mm.”

  “I see such doubt in you, strange girl,” the boy said. “Let me prove myself.” She felt him open himself to the river and the land around it, as if he’d opened his eyes twice.

  “The place where the river floods,” he said.

  “Anyone can tell that, just from looking around.”

  He raised his chin and clasped his hands behind his back. “There will be a grand city here one day that will stand for thousands of years. We are on the Albion Highlands. Ah, I see the glaciers will cleave it from the rest of the continent in a few millennia.” His brow furrowed. “What a strange place this is. It is so dead.”

  Fiona looked around at the mist-shrouded river. “Dead? It’s full of very smelly life. You can see what I see, can’t you?”

  “I’m seeing more than you’re seeing,” he said. “Can you not feel it? There’s almost no magic here.” His expression grew pensive. “And we are after my time, long after. What could have happened to the world?” In a quieter voice he asked, “What did we do?”

  “As guides go, you’re awfully obscure.”

  His eyes flashed. “Why can’t you see what I see? You have obviously been trained in dreaming.”

  She began to lose patience with his attitude. “I’m sure I haven’t.”

  “You must have been,” he said. “Your control is too strong. No images flickering around you from stray thoughts and you’re holding yourself in the air without even a dip. It took my master years to train me to this point.”

  In a sharp tone she said, “Sorry. I don’t remember.”

  “Why not?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Why don’t you remember? My master worked me like a team of aurochs. I could not forget if I wanted to.” He dropped, struck the surface of the river with a little splash and bounced away. “Come on then.”

  Fiona shook her head, pushed down with her hands again and swooped after him. “Come on where? What are you doing?”

  They flew along the river to a little headland. It was a rise of soft, grassy earth to which a few damp bushes clung. The boy landed there and waited for Fiona to land beside him. “Watch,” he said.

  He swept his arms in a circle and the mist rolled back. It revealed a river dotted with islets and thick with reeds. Fiona felt the pull of the moon, the ebb and flow of tides, draining water out of this estuary and drawing it back in. The sensation was one of vertigo and she almost stumbled.

  The boy grabbed her arm. “Careful.”

  “What was that?” Fiona asked. “How can I have felt that?” The memory of Alice and her friends burned bright in her mind. Their presences had been so intense once the thing on her head was gone. She shuddered and crushed the memory down.

  “This is one of the big dreams,” the boy said. “Old cities often have them. So many people dream of it that it never fades away. Big dreams like this can last for thousands of years. We are here before it began, or at least, very nearly before it began.”

  Fiona saw a group of men and women clad in animal skins down by the water’s edge. They spoke words in a prehistoric tongue and threw offerings of stone tools and carved animal bones into the river.

  She felt herself sway forward. The people in skins were gone. A bridge crossed the much narrower river, a bridge of stone with wooden houses on top of it that reminded Fiona of something she’d seen in a museum. On either bank of the river, more houses clustered together. The ones on the far bank stood within high stone walls.

  She swayed back. The wide river banks were bare and the land was empty in every direction. A woolly mammoth and her calf lowered their trunks and drank from the river. To the north, a mantle of ice eased away, year by year.

  “What’s happening?” Fiona asked.

  “I have unlocked time and set it swinging back and forth,” the boy said. “These are the memories of a city.”

  “Cities don’t have memories,” Fiona said. “Cities are things.”

  Forward. Big Ben struck the hour. Barges with cargoes of coal belched black smoke as they moved up and down the river. The river itself was fouled by human waste and festering disease.

  “This dream is the city’s memory,” the boy said. “Our kind can use them as meeting places when we wish to speak with others separated from us by time. Stick to human cities, though. The cities of the others in the aeons before humanity, those you would not enjoy visiting.” He grinned. “No one will want to meet you there, either.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Fiona asked. She had clenched her hands into fists at her side. She was afraid if she didn’t, she’d clap her hands to her ears and close her eyes and she refused to do that in front of the boy.

  Backwards. Down by the shore, on a boat made of stretched hides, a king in bronze jewellery raised a leaf-shaped bronze sword in salute to the river. Forwards and he was gone. The wooden city returned and lit the sky red as it burned from wall to wall.

  “I’m doing this to show you what can be done here,” the boy said. “To prepare you for what we shall now do. If I were to say there was a door within you behind which a secret was locked, what would it look like?”

  “What?”

  But a door appeared on the hill beside them. It was heavy wood, so old it was almost stone, and it was bound in black iron. The boy raised a hand to the door and the lock released with a loud metal clack.

  Fiona stepped in front of the door as it swung open. On the other side, through the doorway, was a girl three or four years her junior. She wore jeans and trainers and a brightly coloured t-shirt. She had bound her hair back in a loose ponytail.

  The girl held herself with less self-assurance than Fiona and less confidence in her growing body, but Fiona recognised her without a shadow of doubt. The girl was her.

  But her name was Lucy.

  Chapter 11 – Fiona and Jessica, Thursday

  Fiona woke up sitting at her desk in her nightie, with her head down and a piece of paper stuck to her cheek.

  She peeled the paper off her face, tossed it on the desk and tried to work some moisture into her mouth. Her hair fell around her face in two black curtains as she rested her throbbing head in her hands. All that had happened to her the night before had left her feeling wrung out and the strangeness of waking in the afternoon had dislocated her from any natural rhythm.

  Grey autumn light fell in through t
he window, though she remembered shutting the curtains. She remembered lying in her bed, for that matter, wondering how she could possibly fall asleep after everything that had happened. She had felt so awake when she finally made it home.

  Her eye fell on the piece of paper she’d thrown down on the desk. She had to turn it around a few times before she could understand what was drawn on it. It looked like a funeral barge. Its curved hull rose to a square bow, with the heads of two beasts she didn’t recognise at either corner. Ragged black pennants snapped in the wind. The entire vessel floated some distance off the ground amidst a blasted and lifeless land. Cruel mountains jutted against the horizon.

  A pencil sat on the desk where her hand had been when she woke up.

  Fiona’s mouth twisted. I can’t even draw.

  But maybe Lucy could, a traitorous voice in her head whispered.

  She scrunched the drawing up and threw it in the bin, then stood with her back to the window. Her shadow was a faint blur on the carpet in front of her. She could feel the thing within it watching her.

  “Um, hello? Can you hear me? Would you like to come out and, um, talk?”

  If the monster in her shadow could speak, it chose not to.

  Fiona made a gesture with her hands, like a conductor in front of an orchestra. “I order you to come out.”

  The monster remained in her shadow.

  Worth a try, Fiona thought, feeling both disgusted and silly. Grabbing her dressing gown from the back of her chair, she wrapped it around herself and went downstairs to look for something for her headache.

  She brewed tea to try and wake herself up and swallowed a couple of tablets for the headache, then sat at the table in the flat’s tiny dining room to wait for the former to cool down and the latter to kick in.

  A glass jingling sound made her look up at the window. A raven perched on the window sill and peered at her with a single beady eye. It took off as soon as she saw it. She decided right then she didn’t care whether or not it really was made of black glass.