It was because the girl’s eyes had flared as red as her earrings, just for a second, and her teeth had looked as sharp as ice beneath her crimson lips. It was because, just for a second, he had been afraid.
The girl’s name was Ardeth. Rick said it over, once or twice, as Mickey stomped away up the street, carrying both guitars. “Ardeth. That’s pretty.” She smiled, lashes ghosting over her eyes for a moment.
“Thanks. You were very good.”
“Thank you. It pays the rent, most of the time. Of course, we really want to get a band together and start playing the clubs. Then again, doesn’t everybody?”
“Yes, doesn’t everybody.” Her voice was remote and a faint frown etched between her pale brows.
“You new around here? I’ve never seen you before.”
“Maybe you just never noticed me before.” Her smile was flirtatious but there was a bitter edge to her voice.
“Oh no, you I’d have noticed,” Rick assured her and she smiled again. Her eyes were, incongruously, a soft hazel. She looked suddenly very fragile. “So, would you like to get a drink?”
“Yes. I would. Come on, I know just the place.” She took his hand.
“Jesus, you’re freezing.”
“You know what they always say—cold hands, warm heart.” She was tugging him along the street and he had to take a few quick steps to catch up to her.
“Do they?”
“Always.” Her voice sounded weary but the smile she gave him was dazzling. “Just around here.” She pulled him around the corner into one of the side streets.
“Is there a bar down here? I never noticed it. . . .” Rick began, then stopped as she turned into an alleyway. “Wait a minute, what’s going on?”
She let go of his hand and turned to look at him. In the faint light from the street, her face was all shadows and angles, alien. “Don’t you want to?” she asked quietly. Rick looked around at the four-storey walls bleeding moisture in the heat, at the long shadow of the dumpster touching the edge of his boots. Someone had sprayed the slogan “Scary World” on the container’s metal side. In the silence, he could hear the faint echo of the Holy Roller’s voice coming down the far end of the alley.
“Don’t I want to what?”
She took a step backward, shrugged. The trench coat fell to the ground. The black T-shirt was emblazoned with a faded sun symbol. Then it was gone too and he had a quick glimpse of her gleaming bare breasts before she disappeared behind the dumpster. “Don’t you want to?” her whisper came to him, half-taunting, half-promising.
Games. All right, if she wanted to play games, Rick thought with sudden anger, and followed her, seizing the cool, bare arms and pulling her against him.
It was easier than he had thought it would be. For all his boasts to Mickey, he didn’t get that many girls, and had never simply fucked a girl in a dark alley after exchanging five sentences. Even now, part of him was afraid, afraid of the diseases you could get, afraid of the possibility of failure, afraid even of the dark. It didn’t help that he could hear the Holy Roller and the echoes of a long-forgotten religious past. “I am the resurrection and the life,” he heard the Holy Roller cry as the girl fumbled with the zipper on his jeans. “Whosoever believeth in me, shall not die, but shall rise again!” He wondered distantly why the girl was laughing, but then he was inside her, and she was wrapping her legs around him as he pushed her back against the wall, and he didn’t care at all.
The triumph, the pleasure was so intense that he barely even noticed when she started to kiss his throat. By the time he felt her teeth, he couldn’t have stopped even if he had wanted to.
The first thing he saw when he came to was a rat the size of a small cat. It stared at him from across the alley, red eyes gleaming. When he moaned and started to sit up, it vanished with a whip of its snakelike tail. Holy fucking Christ, what happened? His head felt as heavy as a lead weight on his shoulders, and when he tried to lift his hand, it moved as slowly as if through water. Dizzily, he tried to remember.
The girl . . . Ardeth . . . he recalled meeting her, remembered fucking her in the darkness, even vaguely remembered the orgasm that buckled his knees and tumbled them both to the littered ground. After that . . . ? After that, there was only darkness.
He opened his mouth to call out to her, to anyone, but only a rasping croak came out. How long had he been here? Mickey must have left . . . Jesus, Mickey’d be furious. He had to get up and find Mickey, tell him what had happened.
Rick pushed himself to his hands and knees and swayed there, breathing deeply. His knees hurt, and his back, and his throat. At the thought of the pain in his throat, a vague memory stirred inside him, but it only confused him and he pushed it away. Clinging to the side of the dumpster, he hauled himself to his feet and started down the alley.
Twice, he had to stop while the world spun around him, but at last he made it to the street and staggered onto the sidewalk. The streetlights flared and unfocused suddenly and he took a step towards the street, struggling to maintain his balance. When his vision cleared and he looked up, he saw a slender figure in a khaki trench coat standing on the other side of the street, farther up towards Queen. Red glittered in her black hair.
“Ardeth,” he croaked, stumbling forward. “Ardeth.” The curb came too suddenly and pitched him out onto the street. She turned her head just as the cab’s brakes squealed. Rick saw her eyes widen, spark red beneath the headlights, and then the impact threw him headlong into the gutter.
Chapter 21
The people crowding the Yorkville sidewalks were as sleek and well-kept as the Mercedes and jaguars lining the streets. Ardeth slid like a shadow among them, black leather jacket over short black dress, hair tucked up under a battered fedora. She kept her sunglasses on, to hide the hunger in her eyes. Her back teeth worried unconsciously at the flesh inside her lower lip. She was now able to feed only every third night. It had been four since her last meal.
It had gotten . . . simpler . . . since that first night two months ago. Then, she had learned how easy it was to drown in the pleasure of the blood. It had taken two more deaths to teach her not to kill. Her mental powers had increased and now she could blot the memory of her sharp kiss from her victim’s mind, though only if they were distracted by alcohol, drugs, sleep or sexual pleasure.
The street kid’s body had just been found by a sanitation worker, but by this time the rats hadn’t left much. The other two hadn’t been discovered. She scanned the newspaper carefully each day, just to be sure. The only slip had been that musician two weeks ago . . . but surely it wasn’t her fault he’d stepped in front of that cab? And that one had never made the news at all.
The articles about a missing twenty-eight-year-old graduate student had gradually stopped as well, resurfacing when another woman disappeared. Then her name would join the recitation of mysterious disappearances: Susan B., who drove home after a party, made a cup of coffee and vanished; Lila S., who disappeared between the shopping mall exit and her car; Ardeth A., who walked down the street, around the corner and onto the lists of the lost.
She spent most of her nights prowling Queen Street; or Yonge, with its steady stream of cars and people cruising up and down the street on an endless treadmill; or the parks off Carlton and Jarvis, where the bums and the gays searched for their own satisfactions. She had been to Yorkville only once or twice before.
Like Queen Street, this place had once intimidated her, with its rows of expensive shops, the lines of BMWs and Ferraris that prowled beside the sidewalk, the throngs of exquisitely dressed, exquisitely coiffed and exquisitely funded inhabitants. “Flaming shitheels” a friend had once called them, contempt and envy mingled. Now she felt like a shark in a school of neon-coloured fish who flitted and flared in the shifting light, blissfully ignorant of the dark shadow gliding among them.
The street vendors were out on this hot summer night as well, hawking everyth
ing from silk scarves to knock-off Rolex watches. There had been an influx of fortune-tellers since the last time she’d prowled these streets—plump, middle-aged European-looking women who wore print dresses and called themselves Madame Marisa, Madame Elana.
One didn’t fit the stereotype, Ardeth noticed. She could be no more than seventeen or eighteen, still slender, still beautiful. She had the long oval face of a Renaissance Madonna, framed with wings of black hair. Wearing a sleeveless white T-shirt dress, she sat behind a table labelled with a crudely handmade sign promising “excellent, true fortunes.” Ardeth doubted she was really the “Madame Adela” the sign mentioned. She was probably a daughter, granddaughter or niece, an apprentice in the trade of fleecing the gullible, temporarily abandoned by her tutor.
She didn’t, however, lack for customers. Her darkly innocent beauty attracted a group of young men, who were watching as she turned the cards up on their friend’s future. Intrigued, Ardeth skirted around them to edge up onto the steps of the building behind and to the left of the girl’s table. She settled onto the top step and watched through her dark glasses.
The fortune the cards foretold seemed standard—wealth, love, happiness, health. But the patrons in this part of town expected only entertainment value and it would take a braver or more foolish novice than the Madonna to try any more elaborate con here. After a few moments of fruitless flirting the men wandered off, well satisfied that their own expectations of high-paying jobs, beautiful women and long lives had been confirmed.
Ardeth remained where she was, elbow propped on knee, chin resting on the heel of her hand, watching the crowd. A young man wandering up the street caught her attention. He had the slightly unsteady air of someone who had spent too long celebrating, or too long drowning his sorrows, in the warm haze of the street’s bars. He was handsome, in a bright, blond way that was so different from the pale, dark-haired intensity of the crowd she usually moved in. His hair was the colour of butterscotch, or honey turning crystalline. He was younger than she was, Ardeth realized suddenly, despite the expensive suit, the champagne stagger.
He almost walked past the girl’s stall, then seemed to see it for the first time. He wavered a moment, then Ardeth saw his “why the hell not?” shrug and he approached the table. He squinted at the name on the placard, then at the smooth face in front of him. “You’re not Madame Adela,” he announced.
“No. I am her granddaughter, Marisa. But I know the old ways. I can tell your fortune,” the girl said softly, her voice full of demure promise. The man laughed and hunted around in his pocket until he drew out a battered five-dollar bill. He tossed it onto the table.
“OK. Go for it.”
Ardeth saw Marisa’s eyes flicker up and down for a moment. Checking the suit, the left ring finger, the eyes, she thought. Looking for clues to say whether the drunkenness was celebratory or despairing. The girl shuffled the cards and then placed them in front of him. “Touch them once,” she instructed and he did. She cut them once, twice, then began to lay them out along the table. When there were six cards lying there, patterned backs upward, she crossed her hands in her lap and closed her eyes for a moment, lips moving. Praying she does it right, Ardeth thought with a smile. From her vantage point, with her heightened vision, she’d be able to see the cards before the girl revealed them to her customer.
“This is your past,” Marisa began, turning up the first card. “The coins mean wealth. You come from a rich family.” How’d you tell? Ardeth asked the girl silently. Must have been the way he wears that suit. No nouveau riche yuppie here. More cards turned over, to lie like patterned jewels on the white cloth. “You have recently been rewarded, a job promotion.” The man nodded almost absently, eyes fixed on the cards. “This has brought you joy, but also concern. Do not be concerned. The cards indicate great success, great power.” He grinned self-consciously, as if to indicate that he did not believe her but that her prediction would undoubtedly come true. “This is the card that shows your health. It means you must guard against illness of the heart. There have been some in your family, so you must be careful.” Not so hard to have guessed that, Ardeth thought. Rich family, probably classic type-A personalities. Bound to be some history of heart attacks there. But the man was nodding again, the doubt in his eyes beginning to waver.
“Next is your heart card,” Marisa said, her voice taking on the sing-song intonation of a chant. “The Queen of Swords. She is a card of the future, for there is no one with you now. This card represents a woman of great beauty and power.”
“How far in the future?” the man asked suddenly, finishing the question with a self-mocking chuckle.
“This last card will say.” She lifted it up and froze, the card still turned to her. Ardeth squinted through her sunglasses at the card in the girl’s hand. Oh dear, she thought with sudden sympathy. You weren’t supposed to show him that, were you? You weren’t even supposed to have that card in your deck.
“Well?” the man demanded, and Marisa turned the card over slowly, revealing the scythe-bearing skeleton.
“This card means that your love will last until death. And that your future is very close to you.” He stared at the card, blinking, as uneasiness warred with the warm glow of alcohol. “The cards have shown you a good fortune, sir.”
“Right, yeah, thanks.” He backed away from the table, uneasiness winning. Ardeth stood up and stepped down onto the street. When he turned her way, she took off her sunglasses.
It turned out that he was celebrating. His name was Philip. Son of an industry scion and newly appointed Vice-President of Public Relations for one of his daddy’s companies. Ardeth let him buy her a glass of wine at one of the outdoor cafes, let him tell her his life story with the unselfconscious confidence of someone who believed his life story would matter to the world.
She told him her name was Carmilla and, when he finally asked, that she was a writer. It was not her favourite story, but she had to vary them. “Really? What do you write?”
“Gothic romances. Under another name, of course. You probably haven’t read any.”
“Probably not. That’s funny, I always thought that romance writers were middle-aged and sort of . . .” he groped for the word, then announced it triumphantly, “fluffy.”
“Some are.”
“You’re not fluffy at all.” He grinned. “Is Carmilla your real name?” Ardeth laughed.
“Unfortunately, yes. My mother was a big Le Fanu fan.” He didn’t understand the reference but shrugged it off, either not caring to reveal his ignorance or not caring at all.
“So what are you doing here, all alone?”
“Research,” she replied, and let herself savour the irony of it for a moment. “A little people-watching.”
“Seen any interesting ones?”
“A few.” She smiled and allowed her gaze to linger on his for a moment, before glancing at the street. “I saw several men trying to impress the world by talking on cellular phones while walking down the street. I saw far too many women wearing clothes far too tight. I saw two kids trying to figure out if they could hot-wire a Porsche parked behind that building without getting caught.” Philip laughed.
“Did they do it?”
“No.”
“You’ve got to give them credit for taste, anyway.”
“I suppose so. Did you steal cars as a boy?”
“No. But when I was fourteen, some friends and I broke into almost all the houses on our street.”
“Why? For money?”
“No, our mommies and daddies had lots of that. For kicks, mostly. To prove we could do it. To see what would happen if we got caught.”
“Did you?”
“Of course. One of the guys told his parents.”
“What happened to you?”
“I got sent to boarding school in Europe,” he said with a triumphant grin.
“Must have been terrible for you.” Ard
eth swirled her drink in her glass, while an idea drifted into her mind. A way to get him alone, without risking his place, or a hotel, or the alleys that were far less numerous and far more brightly lit up here in the “platinum mile.” She took a sudden gulp of her wine, hoping the motion had the right edge of recklessness. “I’ve always wanted to do something like that.”
“What? Break into houses?”
“Yeah. Something daring . . .” Ardeth’s voice trailed off and she leaned forward, her eyes holding his. “Come with me.”
“You mean break into a house? Now?”
“A deserted one. Why not? It’s nearly midnight. No one would see us. No one would care. We could just go in for a minute.”
He glanced around, guilty in advance. “We’re not exactly dressed for breaking into buildings.”
“It’ll be easy. I walk by one all the time and I know there’s a window loose.”
“Yeah but . . . aren’t there often squatters, you know, skinhead kids and drunks, in those places?”
“In Yorkville? Come on—what’s the worst that can happen?” He couldn’t think of an answer to that one. Ardeth didn’t offer him one.
Ten minutes later, she led him behind the darkened shop on the corner to clamber through a gap in the wooden fence. He came through behind her, brushing worriedly at his jacket. “Carmilla, I don’t think this is such a good idea.” She held her fingers to his lips, then gestured to the house.
“You can see the window, up on the second floor. We just have to climb up on the porch roof and we’re in,” she whispered. He squinted up at the boarded window.
The Night Inside Page 18