Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (2 page)

It was dark and derelict. Concrete walls and floor. He
could just about make out a staircase in the darkness. To his right he could
see a timed light button. As he went for the switch the door slammed closed on
the heavy spring throwing him into darkness. The smash of the door made a
suspended echo that reverberated up and down the staircase. It was a sound
effect from a horror movie, locked in, trapped, the sound was one hundred
percent oppression.

His hand fished through the air, searching for the
light switch. Although he was only in darkness for a second or two, it was the
most ominous darkness. He was cold and alone.

“You’re just suffering from a real bad case of
self-sabotage.” Paul whispered to himself as his hands made contact with the
switch.

Bzzzzzzzzzzz – a green tinted fluorescent light
flickered into life sounding like a wasp was trapped in the tube. The floor had
a wide and deep puddle. The wall held mailboxes; a woodwork lattice once
painted a light blue colour but now faded and broken. Some boxes were missing
doors, others had been patched up and made secure with metal plates. It seemed
as though some people took the security of their mail very seriously whilst
others had simply given up and no longer cared.

“So this is home. I hope?”

The arrangement was that the landlady would be waiting
in the apartment to greet him. That arrangement was made by a stoned,
broken-English speaking Romanian back in London over a week ago. Throughout the
taxi ride he’d worried that nobody would be here and he’d mentally planned
contingencies of finding a cheap hotel and either finding new accommodation or
flying home in short order.

Would the landlady be there? It was time to find out.

He began on the stairs looking for apartment number
19, sliding his hand along the blue Formica banister until a crack in the
plastic nicked his skin with the sharpness of a splinter. He winced and put the
skin to his mouth. A moment later he wondered what strange and foreign bacteria
lived on that sharp edge.

He could see up between the banisters all the way to
the top of the building. It felt like an abandoned prison. Functional. Austere.
Grey. From the outside the building looked blocky, but seeing the inside gave
him the sense that it was all prefabricated. The stairs rose on the left then a
landing on the right gave access to the apartments. Floors upon floors,
staircases on the left, apartments on the right. There was no style or
architectural flair. This building was manufactured in concrete slabs then each
floor was stacked one atop the other. At no point had the designers factored in
quality of living. They didn’t think to put a window or atrium into the
stairwell or do anything to make it liveable, yet hidden in the misery was a
cold beauty of efficiency. He thought on that for a moment as he sucked his
splinter pricked hand, then absorbed the reality.

This place was shit!

----- X -----

The
door opened with the slow, ominous creeping of a worn horror trope. He could
easily imagine Lugosi standing on the other side as Dracula, or Karloff as the
crazy mute butler in The Old Dark House, ready to welcome him into a place of
horrors. Instead he was greeted by a fifty year old woman of barely five feet
tall; she had orange hair beneath a cream beret and magenta lipstick which,
when she grinned to greet him, had smeared a little onto her front teeth.

“Esti Powl? Powl England?”

“I’m Paul.” he replied pointing to his breastbone.
“Paul.”

“Da. Bine.”

She beckoned him inside and from the instant he
crossed the threshold she was talking in rapid fire Romanian. He set down his
laptop bag and barely had his backpack off his shoulders before she was leading
him by the elbow to an open door to point out a bedroom that felt like it
hadn’t been heated in a long time. The next door was a bathroom replete with a
constant explanation of something or other in Romanian. No chance to examine,
it was on to another room, small and without furniture. The tour was lightening
fast. She pulled him towards a main room that at least had furniture. A sofa,
an armchair, some nested tables, but what she wanted to show him was the
picture of Jesus on the wall. A sacred heart picture. The landlady pointed it
out and spent more time on the picture than anything else, talking, chattering,
pointing out details as though she was giving a tour in an art gallery, her
hands moving in sweeps across the image as though discussing the brush
technique of the artist. At what seemed to be the point where she finished
talking about the painting she crossed herself. Paul smiled. The landlady
crossed herself again and tipped her head towards Jesus.

“Oh, I see.” Paul genuflected as best he could. He’d
always found religion pretty pointless but he didn’t want to be rude. The
moment he crossed himself the landlady beamed a huge smile to show him just how
much lipstick she’d managed to get on her teeth then led him to the kitchen.

On the table, Romanian language documents were already
laid out in preparation. She handed him a pen. There was wood cladding on the
kitchen wall from the floor to waist height, the slats stained the darkest
brown, the top of the walls was white plaster. The kitchen had a...

The landlady coughed to get his attention. She pointed
at the dotted line on a document and said, “Aici.” It was that word again,
‘aici’, the taxi driver used it pointing at the building, it must mean ‘here’,
Paul thought.

He scanned the contract. Many tiny lines of small
print in a language he couldn’t understand. The top of the form had dates
marked for today and six months hence, a tenancy agreement with rent paid in
full. He didn’t like contracts at the best of times and was anxious not to make
a mistake. What choice did he have? He could sign or he could have nowhere to
live.

He signed the form and for what it was worth wrote in
the margin, ‘I do not fully understand this document.’

Another contract appeared.

“What’s this for… for what?” he asked shrugging his
shoulders, trying to demonstrate confusion.

“Electricitate.” She said flicking the light switch.
Again he signed and again he made a protective excuse in the margin, hoping it
would afford a modicum of protection should things go legally tits-up.

After what seemed an endless stream of contracts he
couldn’t read, and paying six months rent and utilities in cash to a landlady
he couldn’t understand, she said her goodbyes and left without giving a
receipt.

It was too fast. He had questions, or rather he would
have had questions if he’d been given time to think about it; but the magenta
lipped landlady was out of the door, literally drooling over the wad of cash in
her hands.

As the door closed behind her it left a small oasis of
silence in the apartment. It was done. The journey was over. Paul slipped off
his coat and immediately smelled the stale sweat from his clothes. End to end
he’d been travelling for sixteen hours in winter clothes in unheated cars and
overheated aircraft. Trains, planes and smelly taxi cabs. He popped open his
backpack and grabbed his towel and wash bag.

The bathroom was functional. Toilet, sink, mirror, a
worn tub with rough looking enamel, white tiles and a bare concrete floor.
There was a hole in the floor close to the wall he assumed was a drain. He
imagined the floor would get very cold.

“As cosy as camping,” he mumbled as he turned the taps
to the bathtub. The cold water spurted, brown at first, then clear with coughs
and hiccups; the hot tap only hissed.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me?”

Paul squeezed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. The
landlady. She’d been gone only a minute or two.

He grabbed the keys from the kitchen and ran straight
down the stairs. Six floors, jumping the last three or four steps from each
flight and holding the banister with one hand to swing around the corners until
he reached the big steel door into the street.

He pushed his way out into the cold. There was a
gentle wind and a few snowflakes in the air. It was icy cold, especially
without his coat and with his skin sweating beneath his shirt. He looked up and
down the street. He could see a row of tower blocks and a few parked cars
dusted in snow, but the landlady was gone.

“Oh, fuck... Oh fucking hell.”

Keep looking, where could she have gone?

He ran down the few steps from the front door and
realised that the building backed onto a huge courtyard. She was there, walking
away.

Paul jogged to catch up then dropped to a brisk walk
when ten yards behind her.

“Hi, hello, hello,” he wasn’t calling loudly enough
but was reticent to shout. “Hello!”

She heard, she turned.

“Hi...” Paul stopped for a second and grabbed his
knees to catch his breath. The landlady stood patiently. “Hi. Yes... erm? In
the apartment… there’s no hot water.”

The stare of blankness answered. A cartoon thought balloon
seemed to hover over her head and it was completely empty.

“There’s no hot water… no… no… shhhhhhhhh,” Paul
mimicked the sound of water and mimed washing his hands. “water… there’s no,
none, none, nothing hot water!”

Then from nowhere, “Nu este apă caldă!”

There was a young girl, teenaged, emptying rubbish
from a pink plastic bucket into a communal trash bin. The landlady and the girl
spoke a fast exchange in Romanian which the girl translated.

“She says there is no hot water in building at this
time.”

“Oh…” Paul said. “Thank you.” Then almost as an
afterthought, “Could you ask her when the water will be working?”

The two women spoke again, the landlady was giving a
long explanation that the girl translated almost simultaneously. “She says it
comes back when they pay the water. This building is, how you say community,
one bill for all building, but some people are no money and don’t pay so they
don’t get hot water this building. When they pay they get hot water.”

The landlady added something else. “She say there is
no hot water here in five years.”

This time, it was Paul’s turn to have the empty
thought bubble over his head. All he could think of to say was,
“Mulţumesc,” one of the few words he’d learned before travelling. Thank
you.

“Cu plăcere,” the landlady grinned. You’re
welcome.

‘Fuck you,’ he thought as she walked away.

He couldn’t help but feel he had been ripped off but
didn’t yet know how badly. What other problems would he discover with the
apartment? Did the gas work? The heating?

Paul sighed audibly and rubbed his brow. The girl was
looking at him, smiling brightly and with an air of expectancy. She was a
little younger than him, seventeen or eighteen years old perhaps. Long dark
straight hair pulled back in a ponytail. Thin. Very thin, with skin that was so
milky and translucent it made her dark eyes and eyebrows seem to stand out from
her face. Despite being undernourished and anaemic looking she was certainly
pretty. Cheekbones and cuteness. All she needed was a few good meals and she’d
be gorgeous.

Snowflakes began falling faster and suddenly Paul
began to shiver. “Thank you,” he said, “Thank you very much.”

He spent just a few seconds too long to look at her.

And she at him.

If he’d been paying attention, he would have noticed
three men on the far side of the courtyard making a straight line for them. He
would have noticed that they were walking in powerful strides. He would have
noticed that they epitomised determination and purpose. Most of all, he would
have noticed that they meant trouble.

But Paul was completely oblivious to those three men
coming to start a fight. He was too occupied trying to find something to say to
this pretty girl who had helped him.

“My name is Paul. Paul McGovern.” He extended his
hand, blissfully unaware of the three men closing in.

“Ildico,” she replied, shaking his hand. Her skin felt
warm, very warm against his. “You are English, or American?” she asked as he
still held her hand.

“I’m both, I was born in Seattle but I grew up in London.”

If there was a time to notice the men and walk away so
as to negate any contact. The time was now…

Then that time passed.

“You are living here?” she asked pointing at the
building and beginning to walk that way. Paul nodded. “So why do you come
here?”

“I have a project. I’m a journalist, a feature writer
for magazines, but I have something special to work on for a few months. I’m
going to write a book.”

Ildico’s eyes lit up with dollar signs. “You are a
writer!”

“Yes… Not yet... Well, kind of.”

“So why do you come in Noua, nobody comes to Noua.”

“I was told Brasov is a very nice place.” Paul
replied.

“Brasov is nice, but this is Noua.”

Paul stopped walking. “This is Brasov?”

“It is Brasov, yes, but not city of Brasov. This is
Noua, outside, how you say... Noua is a district of Brasov. City of Brasov is about fifteen minutes on bus, but you are very close.”