Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (5 page)

There was no hot water and there were probably other
problems in the apartment. He’d been assaulted and threatened with further
assault. But this Christmas card mountain view made him feel better. Much
better.

Living here may not be quite so bad after all.

----- X -----

Ildico
had left shortly afterwards but not before taking him to a local convenience
store a hundred yards or so from the apartment. It was a frightening errand,
checking around corners to avoid a repeat confrontation with bad men, but the
route was clear. Even for violent lunatics it was too cold to be loitering in
the street.

The shop was an odd place where everything was on
shelves behind a counter. It sold canned food, bottled water, unsliced bloomers
of bread, toilet paper and precious little else. He would have liked to have
treated himself to a restaurant but as Ildico explained, such things existed
only in the city of Brasov. The best treat the shop offered was a processed
sponge cake, the sort of cake in a packet where the cream stays fresh for three
months. Noua was devoid of bars, pubs, clubs or restaurants of any kind. She
had pointed out that he could get a bus outside the shop that would take him to
the centre of Brasov and that there was a payphone another hundred yards or so
along the main road; and that was the sum total of amenities in Noua.

Ildico was nice. She was really nice; and thoughtful.

She was nice for leaving her phone number, for
offering to help with contracts and for offering to take him to Bran which
could help with story research. She was kind of odd but adorable with it; a
kind of offbeat gawky innocence.

Once she’d said goodbye and the door clicked closed
the warmth of the apartment seemed to dissipate leaving him in a soulless empty
shell. Within minutes he found himself wishing she would return. There was, of
course, the hidden taxation of Nealla. That piece of trouble was so toxic he
sensed he was holding himself back. He should be flattered that a pretty girl
wanted to talk to him but at the same time had to reconcile that a very violent
man was best avoided. Common sense and logic was telling him to say ‘no’, to
not see her again and to focus on the task at hand. He was here to work. He
should say ‘no’ to the girl.

He didn’t want to say no. He’d had girlfriends and
relationships and he was averagely handsome, but around girls, especially party
girls, he suffered from the unattractive qualities of shyness and of being dull
and bookish. He had no charm and was lousy entertainment in company. Yet
speaking with Ildico had felt easy and without pressure. Given the choice he
would like to see her again even if it did mean accepting the baggage that came
with her.

Alone in the kitchen he had the laptop open to play
solitaire and was simultaneously reading Shadowbeast and eating the processed
cake. Occasionally he fingered the razor slice in the crotch of his jeans. It
would need sewing up. Luckily it was only the fabric that needed stitches.
Fuck. That was too close; that was seriously stupid. What a fucking asshole
that guy was. Another inch deeper, a half pound per square inch more in
pressure and it could have killed him. That guy was a cunt. An idiotic cunt.
Violent with a five inch straight razor.

...and still he would like to see Ildico again.

Outside of the kitchen window was the blackest of
nights. It was only eight in the evening but Noua seemed to have no
streetlights at all, not a single one. He’d watched the sun disappear behind
the mountain from the balcony and noticed how quickly the sky faded to black
and the air plummeted to a painful and bone chilling low temperature. Once the
night had fallen he was at a loss for something to do. It had taken no more
than fifteen minutes to unpack his clothes into the wardrobe. He’d love to heat
some water on the stove and get washed but had no matches to light the gas and
the thought of washing in cold water was resistible. There was nothing to do
but wind down until bedtime. He tried reading Shadowbeast and playing cards on
the computer but was too fatigued from travelling to pay either of them much
attention.

From outside he could hear the sound of dogs barking,
lots of them. He’d read that Romania had lots of stray dogs but never imagined
then running in large packs. At one point they became so loud he opened the
kitchen window to listen. The window was tall and wide, so much so that it was
possible to sit on the ledge like it was a chair and look out into the
courtyard.

He could see nothing but the lighted windows of other
tower blocks.

The outside air was deathly cold. It felt very dry,
crispy, almost too dry to breathe comfortably and it made him realise how
adequate the apartment was. Despite its severe lack of resources, the outside
world had become savage with nightfall. Non survivable. The apartment may be
sparse but it was life supporting, whereas the winter beyond the front door was
like something from the arctic.

It made him wonder how the barking dogs survived. From
the window their barks sounded out in the most ungodly cacophony; there had to
be two or three dozen of them out there, running as a nocturnal pack, keeping
together by the sound of their barks.

“Ah yes. Ze children of ze night,” Paul said donning
his best Dracula impersonation. “Vhat sveet muzic zay make. Veelcome to Romania. Veelcomen to Transylvania. Ha-Ha-Ha.”

Then the lights cut out, all of them. The kitchen was
plunged into darkness and so were the windows of the other blocks. The only
light left running was the laptop screen. He closed the window and went to the
computer. It was now running on battery power. The whole of Noua had gone dark
in a power cut.

“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me!” Paul exclaimed.
“This place is shit!”

----- X -----

In
a children’s book of farmyard animals, the cockerel calls ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’
at sunrise. It was 4:50am, still dark outside, and some crazy bird below the
bedroom window was screeching the loudest, most fucking teeth-grating torture
sound imaginable. Craaaaaaaaaaaaak-a-cak-cak-cak-caaaaaaaaaaaa.

Paul sat on the side of the bed massaging his eyes
with fingertips. The one redeeming feature of this apartment is it wasn’t cold,
or rather, it wasn’t as cold as it could be. “Forever the optimist,” Paul
mumbled. “At least it’s not cold. It’s miserable, it’s threatening, it’s noisy,
there’s no hot water and barely any power, but at least I won’t freeze to death.”

He spent the dawn reading Shadowbeast and dozing in
the kitchen, desperately wishing he could make coffee. That was the first item
on the shopping list. Coffee and matches to light the gas. Tea, coffee, real
food, candles or a torch to survive a blackout, a big sharp knife to cut bread,
and most importantly, alcohol.

At eight o’clock he decided it was time to get things
moving and left the building for the bus stop. It snowed in flurries. He’d
noticed there seemed to be perpetual snowflakes in the air so that even when
there wasn’t a real snowfall, there were always a few flakes floating around.

There were a few people queuing for service at a small
cabin that, if he hadn’t seen the old lady sitting inside, he would have
assumed was a telephone kiosk. He’d researched the basics of Romanian city life
before travelling and recognised what he saw now as the place to buy bus
tickets. He joined the queue and watched carefully as the lady ahead of him
bought ten tickets, carefully scrutinising what sized note she handed over and
roughly how much change she received back. He copied her by holding up ten
fingers and saying “ten” in English. The lady in the kiosk handed him five
small rectangles of paper.

He had to wonder why there were no coffee shops here.
Why had nobody invented a business to serve the two dozen or so people hot
drinks whilst they stood waiting in the snow?

When the bus arrived it looked like something from a
post-apocalyptic action movie; it was boxy, with huge wheels that were far
bigger than a regular bus and covered in giant treads to handle the snow and
ice. The whole bus seemed to judder to a halt with a growling engine that
spewed an inordinate amount of black smoke and tar. It seemed there was only
one bus and one route, the destination painted by hand on a piece of wood that
hung above the driver. It read ‘Noua,’ until the driver unhooked the wooden
sign and reversed it to show the destination ‘Brasov.’

Paul followed the others onto the vehicle and watched
them place their tickets into little clipping mechanisms along the edge of the
seats. He did likewise and saw that the clipper punched a series of holes
through one end of the ticket.

No sooner had the bus made its first turn he saw
something remarkable. Everybody simultaneously began crossing themselves in
religious servitude. It was synchronised between almost thirty people and had
begun by some invisible cue. He couldn’t see if the driver was also
participating rather than concentrating on driving but one would assume so.
Paul scanned both the passengers and the surroundings to try and spot the
trigger for the action and realised they were passing a church. It was newly
built and rather beautiful but looked like an indefensible waste of money
considering the dilapidated homes surrounding it. A questionable display of
excess in the presence of poverty; but why couldn’t these people see it, why
were they behaving like brainwashed zombies, crossing themselves in subjugation
just for passing in its shadow? The church was a modern building with crisp
white render, stripped timber doors and window frames and a giant gold cross on
the steeple. It seemed such a blatant and shameless display of aggrandisement
that any thinking person would consider it an outrage, yet here they were,
heads bowed, eyes closed, and their hands passing repeatedly over their breasts
until the church was far behind.

Paul whispered the words in his head, “These people
are brainwashed.”

----- X -----

The
bus had drawn alongside an out of town supermarket before it even reached Brasov. The task of establishing a home seemed more pressing than exploring the city and
Paul had leapt from the bus to pick up supplies. It was surprising how much the
apartment, especially the kitchen, changed once he’d added a few homely details.
His refrigerator was packed with everything from frozen pizzas to fresh
vegetables and all those little essentials from tin-openers to candles and
cleaning products were in place. There were a few bottles of wine in there too.
Everybody needs a nest in which to bed down and feel safe, a home, a place of
rest. Those simple details had transformed it from a shelter into a place to
live. It felt like a job well done and it was all finished before lunch.

There was a downside to the trip in that on his way back
to the apartment from the bus stop he thought he’d seen Nealla and Big Man in
the courtyard behind the building. They were distant, not in any way
threatening, but seeing them had made his heart sink. It was a cruel reminder.

Although he made the choice not to get unduly
concerned, he didn’t have the self confidence to truly ignore them. It was
needling him. What he wanted to do next was explore the forests and whilst
driving past them on the bus he had felt as excited by that prospect as a child
finding out they were going to the beach. He knew he was going to set his story
in those forests, that was a foregone conclusion and until he’d seen Nealla he
couldn’t wait to get in there. That enthusiasm had drained once he saw the bad
men outside. Kids don’t get as excited about going to the beach once they’ve
stepped on a jellyfish.

He was going out regardless, he had to. He put on an
extra layer of clothes and collected his cheap but adequate digital camera. He
would make an effort to turn today into the day it would all begin. Today was
the day when the adventure started.

He was still telling himself that as he walked down
the stairs towards the lobby, but he could already feel the cold from outside
and the ambient sounds and echoes of the stairwell reminding him of the
experience yesterday.

“Pay it no mind,” he said to himself. He was
consciously steeling his nerves, doing what he could to ignore the negative,
but it didn’t really work. It wasn’t as if he could just forget the whole thing
ever happened. It had happened, he was attacked, right outside the front door,
but he couldn’t and mustn’t let that spoil everything now. That was yesterday.
Don’t let it spoil today.

As he approached the lobby he paused. A moment of
trepidation to decide whether to throw the door wide open or do it slowly and
peek to make sure the coast was clear first.

“Don’t be stupid. They’re not going to be there.”

Then from behind came a slow hissing of air that
caught his attention. It was a throaty exhalation as though an old man was
breathing in the shadows, just out of sight. There was nobody there that he
could see, but the sound was real and he followed it part from curiosity and
part cowardice to avoid going out. It wasn’t really cowardice, he just wanted a
moment to prepare himself.

 The breathing noise led back to a door under the
stairs, made from thin steel and rusted at the corners. It hung open a few
inches and swayed in the most delicate breeze. It was the breeze that was
making the breathing sound and on each breath it moved the door just a fraction
of an inch.