The Mammoth Book of Dracula (68 page)

The rapid, scratching guitar caught him by surprise; then he recognised it. Lou Reed snarling
You killed your European son
/
You spit on those under 21,
then a glass breaking, then five minutes of tense, atonal noise. He’d heard it before, of course; but never at this volume, or in such an appropriate context. The sound of a tune broken down painfully into its elements. Wren shut his eyes and wondered about the future. The clean, computerized life wasn’t going to happen. But what would take its place? Barbarism? Terror? What instincts had to be accepted before humanity was real again? The Velvet Underground track was more than thirty years old, but it was still shocking. Schreck was right about the eighties, he realized. That era had taken everything that was disturbing and turned it into a lifestyle option, a product. Now society was discovering how real it all was.
You better say so long.

Later, the music became more plaintive and the floor stickier. Couples folded into the shadows, joined inseparably at the mouth. There were fewer people dancing. The toilets were a no-man’s-land, splattered with piss and vomit. In a small side room where the bar only served Budweiser, Wren successfully chatted up a pale young woman with spiky black hair and a non-human skull tattooed on her left shoulder. Her name was Lucy. They danced together, embracing awkwardly, before stumbling around various bits of human wreckage to the exit. Outside, the night was starry and relatively cool. They caught the night bus rather than wait for a taxi. Someone behind them vomited onto the floor. Wren and Lucy kissed, filling their mouths and nostrils with each other.

They hardly slept that night. Wren was feverish, hungry for something he couldn’t define. Lucy was kind, affectionate, caring. He wanted none of it. The first time they made love, it took him a long while to come. The second time, near dawn, he asked her to bite him. She nibbled his tense shoulder. “Harder.
Bite.”
He dug his nails into her spine. Angrily, she bit down hard. When he saw the blood smeared across her mouth, Wren came at once. His entire body ached from the effort. Lucy seemed a bit nauseated. She dabbed at the wounded shoulder with a handkerchief, wincing at her own teethmarks.

In the morning, she left before Wren was properly awake. He washed the bite, put two plasters over it and went back to bed. Having slept through half the day, he felt restless and disorientated in the evening. Towards midnight, he caught a late bus into Tyseley. The inert husks of derailed trains crowded the railway depot, like abandoned chrysalids. Asset-stripping in a crudely literal sense, two years after the sell-off. The whitewashed exteriors of old factories and workshops glowed faintly, picked out by the streetlamps. A stray dog foraged patiently in a litter bin. Here and there, lights behind closed shutters indicated night work—some of it, perhaps, the same kind of night work that Wren and his colleagues were involved in. There were no exposed windows, anywhere. Cars and vans drove along the Warwick Road, none of them ever turning off or stopping.

Wren knew his way around here by night better than in daylight. He walked down a side street between a Catholic church and a disused canal, the water glinting through battered railings. Where a flattened stone bridge crossed the canal, he could see a patch of wasteground with a boarded-up house and a weeping willow tree. A pigeon groaned from somewhere behind the tree. Wren thought suddenly of the Chinese willow pattern on bowls he’d eaten from as a child. It was colder than the previous night. He could smell burning wood. Was that a fire in the distance, or just a red security light in a factory yard? He stepped forward until he was under the tree, its long yellowish leaves touching him. Their ends were dry. The sound of machinery, like guitar chords, rose from the bassline of the distant traffic. And then, quite abruptly, the gentle movement of the willow leaves stopped. Wren felt a white breath pass over him, as if he were an image on a screen. There was a faint sound of cracking and tearing; then silence and a cascade of dry filaments, as the tree shed all its leaves at once.

~ * ~

When he told Schreck about his experience with the Velvet Underground song in the nightclub, the landlord smiled gently. “Oh yes. Lou Reed ... such a gifted boy. In those days. He was so real. David Bowie stole his thunder, of course—but it wasn’t the same. Bowie could change his image at the drop of an eyelash, but Reed could change his
soul.
You can hear it in those songs, the danger.” Wren didn’t tell him about Lucy or the dying tree. In any case, Schreck was away on business a lot of the time now, so Wren saw much less of him. It gave the tenant a chance to sort himself out. The inability to sleep normal hours was messing him up, and the dreams were starting to undermine his waking life. His GP referred him to a counsellor, who kept asking him about his parents.
No,
he thought angrily,
I
wasn’t abused. I wasn’t even scared of them.
But when he thought back to how his parents had seemed—their heavy bodies, their violence towards each other, their nocturnal outcries of love or fury—it was hard not to think of Schreck, because Schreck made him feel like a child. A silent witness.

In October, his contract with the magazine publisher ended. He invited Alison round to his flat for a valedictory meal. Rather to his surprise, she accepted. That weekend turned out to be a slightly inconvenient one for Wren. Schreck and Matthews were both away, sorting out an urgent problem somewhere in North Yorkshire. Wren had been warned to expect a large consignment of hash at some point over the weekend. Schreck had given him the money and the key to the basement. In all probability, the deal had been engineered to test Wren’s reliability. It was petty stuff, in all respects: the cash, the weed and the arrangement. Taking the mediocre seriously was what life in the West Midlands was all about. He hoped it wouldn’t clash with Alison’s visit. Then again, maybe it would give him a chance to impress her—and even an excuse to get her stoned.

Wren spent hours cleaning the flat beforehand. His eyes had become used to a certain level of dirt and rubbish, and the flat seemed unfamiliar without it. He was surprised to discover some rusty stains inside the bathroom door, where the towel normally hung. He must have cut himself one night, probably when drunk, and forgotten about it. Alison turned up punctually at eight, wearing a blue-black coat he’d not seen before. The night behind her was still and clear, stars and streetlamps glowing as if painted in the doorway.

They shared a bottle of white wine and some mushroom pate, followed by grilled mackerel in garlic sauce. The Velvet Underground’s third album, the quiet one, unwound strands of melody from the black speakers at either end of the room. Alison glanced appreciatively round the flat. “This is a really nice place. Bit gloomy though. Like you spend all your time in here with the curtains drawn. All these records, posters, books. Most people, you see their flats and there are no books at all.” She smiled, her mouth resting a little tensely on her knuckles. Then her eyes narrowed. “The house is a bit creepy, don’t you think? It’s so featureless. Like a hostel or something. And there’s not enough light.”

“The landlord’s a vampire,” Wren said. “That’s why I put garlic in the sauce. To protect you.” Alison’s eyes widened in an expression of dawning terror. Then she cracked up, giggling hard, and almost choked on a fishbone. Wren jumped to his feet, but she waved him back down and coughed into her hand. “Are you okay?” he asked. She nodded. Her face was flushed; her pale blue eyes glittered with moisture. She ran a hand through her blonde fringe, pulling it back. They stared at each other. Feeling more scared than he could have imagined possible, Wren reached out and touched the back of her hand. She gripped his fingers. Lou Reed sang gently, bitterly, about loss and sin.
Thought of you as everything I’ve had but couldn’t keep.
As Wren stood up and came round the small table towards her, she lifted her face to kiss him.

They progressed from wine to cognac and mint chocolate-chip ice cream. The stereo fell silent. Wren felt somewhat at a loss for words. He’d anticipated making some convoluted verbal pass; but it had happened almost too easily. As if trying to regain control, Alison started to run through her past impressions of him. “At first I thought you were really cute. Kind of naive and impressionable. Then I got a bit scared. You were too intense, and I thought maybe you were a bit strange. The morbid things you used to come out with. Sometimes you’d come in looking really tired, and then be secretive about where you’d been. Like you were in trouble.” She laughed gently and kissed him. “But now, I think I’ve worked you out. This flat... it’s like a middle-class facsimile of a Gothic artist’s garret. You just want people to think you’re tortured and strange. It’s an image. Really you’re cute and naive. You don’t know anything about the dark side of life, except what it’s meant to look like. Do you?” She drained her brandy glass and gazed at him affectionately.

“You don’t know that,” Wren said. “You don’t know what I feel. You don’t always have to experience something to feel it. And maybe I
have
experienced things you don’t know about. What I’ve seen. Been part of. Crimes.”
Shut up,
he told himself. Maybe she wouldn’t take him literally. But why did women trying to mother him always make him feel violent?

Alison gripped his shoulders and pulled him against her. “I don’t believe you’ve even nicked bubble-gum from a corner shop,” she said. “You’re just turning ordinary guilt into a fantasy. Confess what you like, I won’t believe you.” They sat down on the bed together. He slipped a hand under the collar of her shirt. Then the doorbell rang.

A black van was parked outside. A small man in a leather jacket, with the makings of a beard, was reaching up to press the bell a second time as Wren opened the front door. “Mr Robin?” he said. “Wren, that’s it. Got some videos for Mr Schreck here. You gonna let me in or what?” Wren stepped back into the hallway. “Never do business in the hall,” the visitor said. “You really haven’t got a clue, have you?” Blushing, and thinking uneasily of Alison, Wren led the dealer upstairs to his flat. The man’s carrier bag contained three video cases. Two of these contained films. The third was packed full of brown fibres that looked like soil. It was labelled AIRPLANE. Brummie humour, you couldn’t beat it. Wren took the envelope full of banknotes from his own locked briefcase and handed it to the dealer. Alison looked on impassively from the bed. Wren had to go back down to unlock the front door. “Make sure the bitch keeps her mouth shut,” the man said on his way out.

Wren took a deep breath and returned to his flat, where Alison was cautiously examining the video case. “What do you do with this?” she asked, then laughed at the expression on his face. “I don’t mean what do you
do
with it, Richard. I mean what are
you
going to do with it, now. I assume you don’t own it.” They’d underestimated each other. Wren explained about his landlord and the basement. “Come with me,” he said. “You might learn something.” His need to make an impression was stronger than his instinct for secrecy. It was past midnight; no one would bother them.

The basement was actually a nuclear fallout shelter, adapted by a previous tenant from a more traditional cellar. There was a concealed entrance in Schreck’s flat, and another—which Wren had access to -in a shed behind the house. The interior of the shelter was lined with concrete and had about thirty yards of shelving, designed for storage of provisions against Doomsday. There was no food or water there now; but Wren supposed that, if Yeltsin’s successor decided to press the button, he and Schreck could spend their last few days smoking wacky baccy, watching porn videos and playing computer games. He led Alison downstairs in the darkness, walking quietly through the hallway to the back door.

Outside, the cold sobered him up rapidly. The shapes of discarded rubbish crowded the garden like a frozen menagerie. There were no herbaceous borders here. The shed was full of old newspapers and bits of damaged pottery. He cleared the tiny entrance to the bunker and keyed in the numbers Schreck had given him on the lock panel. Alison followed him down the steps. He flicked on the dim red light and looked around. Unmarked boxes and packages crowded the narrow shelves. The air was cold and still, more dusty than he remembered. On a low shelf, near the door, there was a row of video boxes. He added the box of cannabis to the end. A small, flattish cardboard box sat alone at the end of the shelf. It was unsealed. He flicked it open, prompted by the same bitter curiosity that had made him search through his parents’ bedroom as a child. What he touched, without seeing it, was some kind of mask, like the face of a baby or a cat. It crumbled at once. He shivered violently. “What’s up?” Alison said.

“Nothing.” He closed the box and turned, putting his arms round her. As they kissed, he saw a tiny red light winking above her shoulder. A hidden camera? Was Schreck recording this? Before he could react, Alison pointed to the far end of the room. “Look. What’s there?” A small door in the concrete wall, not quite shut. No handle; not even a keyhole. “Can we get through?” Despite all his recent experience, despite being nine years on from puberty, Wren felt a wheel turning within himself at the thought
It was her idea.
He stepped to the far wall and gripped the edge of the door. It was heavy, but it opened easily. There couldn’t be a room beyond it, he realized from the smell of fresh soil.

But there was. It was smaller than the first room, and had no light. In the vague red glow from behind him, Wren could see that all four walls were lined with shelves. On each shelf, there was a coffin. Wren felt Alison step past him. “What the fuck?”The light seemed to pull back, as if it were being repelled or absorbed by the darkness in the room. “Oh, my God. Who are they?” The air was crowded with translucent faces, or many copies of the same face. All mounted like paper masks on impossibly thin bodies. All staring.