Christmas Storytime
Got Up. Did the last of the shopping. Bought entirely the wrong present for Prof Woody and am kicking myself. Knocked this out. It is not short, I am afraid to say, but my muse was with me touching me gently with his little soft blue paws and would not let me stop until it was done. I'm not sure the theme comes through, but I was trying not to be to obvious about it, and I might eventually cut out the "mad insight" paragraph at the end. I've cross-posted it to just_writing. I'd apprecaite feedback, be as harsh as you like.I'm not convinced by some of it but it will do for now. I am off to wrap presents.
Lean Season
I don’t like to come down to the city.
At least this year the snow and the winter has made it a little newer. I stand on the balcony at thehotel, smoking a cigarette and looking out. Time and traffic have stolen the snow from the roads, but it still flavours the roofs and the window sills, and the barely visible black-and-white starkness of the park. Burst pipes and snowmelt have ringed the rooftops with icy spears, and I’m watching a particularly large next of icicles as I smoke. A young woman dressed as the Christmas Coke Icon is ringing a bell and collecting shrapnel outside the department store across the road, and I’m wondering if she knows about the mass of murderous ice tht is separated from her soft blond head by only a few dozen metres of open air. The front desk rings to tell me the car has arrived, and I flick the burning ember of my cigarette towards the far side of the street and turn to go.
Terry is insisting on dinner. I’m due at the offices on the 27th to look at cover illustrations. It’s a waste of my time, and a bad reason to be in the city. Anything I can do in the office I could have done over the internet. Terry has been insistent. There’s something else going on, he can barely contain his smugness when I talk to him from the car. I turn the intercom off as soon as I get into my seat, and the driver takes the hint and doesn’t try to bother with small talk. The windows are dark and nobody on the street can see in, and I have little interest in looking out, so apart from the back of the driver’s head there’s just me and the winter.
*
It’s early evening on the 24th of December, and crossing the pavement to the restaurant I keep my head down and my hands in my pockets. I’ve no interest in looking into the eyes of and of these people. I have to dodge twice in the short distance between the car door and the restaurant door, both times to avoid sweat-shiny shoppers with armfuls of plastic, lost in their own little world of Christmas cheer. The glass walls are tasteless with explosions of red and green and gold and white, each an Aladin’s cave of trinkets and distractions for little minds. I’m just glad none of them are made up with animatronic animals, or I might be driven to violence.
The restaurant is called Vuờn Con Voi. It is warm inside. I lose my coat to the cloakroom, and there’s drinks at the bar. The restaurant is bright, and a little too warm, but at least there is no Christmas music. Terry is ebullient and well he might me - the latest book is apparently climbing the mainstream charts with an enthusiasm to warm even the most plutocratic heart. I don’t understand it, but he shakes his head sagely and suggests that I owe a debt of gratitude to a popular vampire franchise, well into its twelfth “novel”. I feel slightly nauseous. As I sip my drink I wonder what the teen fans of that particular travesty would make of an encounter with a real blood-drinking parasite of supernatural evil. Terry continues to try and engage me in conversation, and I do my best, but all I really want to do is get out of here and back to the hotel. There are too many people here, celebrating with a desperate intensity that makes the air feel too brittle, too much like chewing tinsel.
Our window table is ready, and we take out seats. White table-cloth, delightful art-deco tannenbaum, spotless silver cutlery, red serviette rings. As I sit down at the table I can’t help but notice that there are two empty chairs, one to either side. Given how busy this restaurant is, how cutting edge I am assured the cuisine is, I understand with a stab of irritation that we are not dining alone. Terry puts his new phone on the table as he sits down, a soulless slip of plastic and metal that is almost slim enough to be mistaken for a bulky credit card. He is busy bemoaning the fact that he can’t smoke one of his foul imported cigars, ostentatiously trying to draw my attention to his diamond cufflinks, and occasionally greeting people who pass us by name with a smile and a wave before turning to tell me some dark secret or embarrassing fact about each of them. He is going out of his way to appear at ease here, as if he hobnobs with these people every day. They are not my crowd, and nor are they his really, and I doubt they are any more taken in by him than I am.
I stare out of the window at the street. It’s snowing a little, the fat flakes disappearing into the mush when they hit the ground. The shoppers hunch over, mummified in wool and plastic bags. None of them glance in the windows of the restaurant which in any event are tinted. I can look out but none of them can look in. They’re also double-glazed, so we don’t have to worry about the sounds of traffic or the tinny explosions of seasonal tunes.
Our waiter, a young Asian man with an impassive face, brings us the wine list and Terry orders something that does not sound especially cheap - though I doubt such a thing exists anywhere on the menu here. He’s doing well out of me, and out of some of the other writers he represents, and I wonder if it is really a good idea for him to be splashing so much money around in front of a client. I suspect it’s meant to remind me how rich he is helping to make me, but all it does is make me wonder whether I’m paying him too much. I smile as I think this, which happens to coincide with some bon mot I’m half listening to, and he takes it for approval.
As the wine arrives, Terry smiles over my shoulder, half stands and waves at someone. Two women are approaching our table, and he stands up to pull a chair out in a clumsy display of chauvinistic chivalry. For one awful moment I wonder if he has hired prostitutes or - worse - escorts. Luckily, before I can make any social error, I recognise one of our guests, and I’m impressed in spite of myself.
I miss the name of the older woman, because I am busy paying attention to her companion. Kirstin Orison is an artist, one whose work I am quite a fan of. While she’s probably best known in my circles for her collaborative work on a number of graphic novels, I favour her other work. Her pencil sketches and line drawings have a haunting quality that I find appealing, and I own a set of prints that I know Terry has seen when he’s visited me at home. There is some hand-shaking and the two agents indulge in a certain amount of face kissing as we all sit back down again. I tell her I like her work, and she gives me a tiny smile and returns the compliment. She speaks quietly, her New England accents seems an odd contrast to her Arabic darkness.
Conversation is a little stilted after that. Terry tells me that Miss Orison has expressed a possible interest in collaborating with a graphic novel adaptation of one of my books once she has finished her current project. Seeing my questioning look, she tells me she’s working on a series of paintings for a version of The Hobb’s End Horror with a fairly well known comic and novel writer. I make a noncommittal noise. While I like the writer she is working with, I don’t care much for the author whose work they are adapting. His stories are full of sinister villages and unexpected onion-domed cathedrals that might have worked in the 1920s, but just seems irrelevant a hundred years on. There’s horror out there in the villages, sure enough, but much as I hate coming down to the city I recognise that this is where the people are, and this is where the horror really is.
It doesn’t help that he’s also prone to ridiculous attention-getting publicity stunts. He may be more popular than Stephen King, but he’s always reminded me more of L. Ron Hubbard.
Obviously, I do not say any of this. I don’t want to offend Miss Orison, but her agent picks something up, and asks me if I read the author. I say that I do not, but before there can be any unpleasantness, the waiter brings menus and we order.
Given most of the waiters appear to be Asian, I’m not surprised to discover that at Vuờn Con Voi serves mostly eastern dishes, primarily Vietnamese. I’m not sure what most of the stuff on the menu is, but I don’t want to appear ignorant. I ask for bak bon dzhow, white with bamboo shoots. There are no prices on the menu, and I am reminded of the adage that says that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. I wonder briefly how much rice I could buy in Hanoi for the price of my dish, and then I realize I am being a dick.
While we wait for the food, we continue our discussion. I’m definitely interested, and enquire as to which of my books she thinks would make a good comic-book adaptation. Her representation breaks in to remind me that we still need to work out all sorts of things before we worry about that - contracts, distribution of royalties, tie down the publishers, decide if it will be a one-off or a series, discuss a publicist and so on and so forth. It seems that Miss Orison and I are not really artists, we are corporate entities. Terry takes over my part of the conversation. Miss Orison and I exchange a look.
She leans closer to me for a moment, placing her dark hand on my pale one, and I can smell the dark, spicy scent she is wearing. I wonder how her skin tastes, and I feel my cheeks redden a little.
“I enjoyed Shrapnel Addicts,” she says quietly. “It was very sad.”
“Thank you,” I reply. “I really liked your study of commuters on New York train stations. I’ve got the prints on my wall.”
That’s about all we manage in terms of real conversation for the rest of the meal.
While it is a mercy there is no Christmas music here, it is a pity that there is practically no food, either. We are served white china oblongs, with delicately positioned food, and slim wooden chopsticks to eat it with - although Terry favours a knife and fork for whatever red dish it is that he has ordered. My bak bon dzhow, white with bamboo shoots is the same colour as the serving plate, which makes it look as if there is even less on the plate than there appears to be. I have perhaps half a dozen bamboo shoots, three strips of pale white meat, and a dollop of white paste placed to complement the other two ingredients, which the waiter tells me in his thick accent is the bak bon dhow. It takes me perhaps a minute and a half to eat it.
At least it’s tasty, I just wish there was more of it.
I feel eyes on me as I finish, and staring in through the window in a manner that would make even a Christmas film director blanch at the cliché is what I can only assume is a homeless man. He’s wearing a filthy red Christmas hat. He’s bulky in a dirty gray-white jacket over at least two jumpers. He has a plastic bag with him that looks like it contains a sleeping bag. He’s got a wet-looking cardboard sign under his arm and a piece of string, but I can’t see a dog. He can’t really be looking at us - as I said the windows are tinted - but he gives every impression of being able to see us. He’s unshaven, and his pale skin is dirty with spots. He has his hood up, under his hat. He’s probably in his early twenties, but the streets have made him look much older.
I watch one of the waiters go outside to move him on and I look down at my empty plate and for just a moment I feel guilty. I push the feeling down, and turn back to the conversation where Terry and Miss Orison’s agent are arguing about possible film rights. Miss Orision herself is watching me and eating her red-peppers and green sauce. She doesn’t say anything.
Terry handles the bill when it is brought to him, won’t even let me see it. He produces his credit card with a self conscious twist of the wrist, hoping everyone gets a good look at it. I’m not sure anyone at the table is interested, with the possible exception of the waiter. He leaves a generous tip, which I assume will actually be paid for as part of his business expenses. Miss Orison and her agent say their goodbyes, and I blurt out that I look forward to working together. She smiles. I smile, and quietly hope that our mutual representation can be somehow kept out of any artistic decisions.
Our waiter stares after us impassively as we leave. I’m more hungry that I was before we ate, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the hotel for some room service. Terry has other ideas however. As we collect our coats, he’s checking his phone and insists that we go one somewhere else. It’s Christmas eve, he says. It’s not right to be cooped up in a hotel room alone. It’s the suicide season, after all. He laughs. I want to say no but I can’t muster the enthusiasm to be rude.
The snow is continuing outside. I suggest getting a cab, but Terry laughs it off. He’s full of good spirits, and I gather that the discussion he was having over dinner went well. He can’t wait to tell me all about it. He suggests a club, after drinks. My skin crawls. I don’t go to nightclubs, not since I was at University. The idea makes the white pork sauce in my belly turn over.
The streets are still busy. My head is muzzy with wine on an empty stomach. There’s more desperation in the air now. Many of the shops will close soon. It’ll be too late to pick up that something special for the mistress, that guilt gift for the missus, that desperate love-substitute for the offspring or the parent. There’s too much traffic in the streets, especially for a city that grinds to a halt at the slightest provocation. Too many shop doorways blare enthusiastic and chopped-off renditions of songs that might once have been ironic but whose meaning has been lost with repetition so now they’re only fit to serve as accompaniments to chocolate advertisements. The lights are too bright, but at the same time not bright enough to illuminate anything except themselves, and the snow. It’s cold, and in between talking on his phone Terry is complaining that his new coat isn’t warm enough. I’m wrapped up. I take the winter seriously, these days.
I’m on the verge of asking Terry if it’s much further, like a car-bound brat, when there’s a sudden movement. Something knocks into me, sending me sprawling against a window, staring for a moment into the dead eyes of a slimline manikin in a flimsy red nightdress and a festive red hat. She’s surrounded by empty boxes in gold-and-green wrapping paper, and by cheerful paper snowflakes and I can see in her empty face that if she could, she would kill herself.
Terry is cursing a blue streak as he picks himself up out of the slush and he runs away from me through the crowd shouting back to me to “call the fucking police.” I register that he no longer has his beautiful, expensive, stylish new phone. I don’t phone the police straight away. He’s chasing a stumbling figure in a grey-white anorak, who doesn’t seem to be running all that fast actually. Shoppers turn to look at him. A fat woman in a white woollen hat weighed down with plastic fails to get out of his way and is knocked to the ground. She begins shrieking. Terry hurdles her and keeps on going. I don’t want to follow him, but I have to. I get my phone out as I run and as soon as we stop running I’ll contact the authorities. I skip round the prone woman. She’s still shrieking - it’s not safe to walk the streets and that someone should do something - she’s scrabbling for her bags and peering suspiciously up at the good Samaritans who are lending her aid, clearly suspecting that they want to steal her precious things. Perhaps they do.
The freezing air is already starting to give me a stitch. I’m surprised Terry can keep running, but I recollect that he’s the member of some up-market gym or other, and I’m surprised at the new idea that he might actually attend it rather than just mention it to people in conversations. We turn abruptly left, and part of my brain starts shrieking at me, but I can’t hear it over the adrenaline and the wine and the traffic.
Terry has chased the phone thief into an alleyway between two massive grey-slab buildings and abruptly we are in another world. There’s snow here, for a start. In the middle of the alley its scuffed and dark, but it mounds up next to the walls, on the fire escapes, on the rubbish bags and the wheelie-bins. It’s still falling slowly, settling on my hot skin and melting almost immediately. It’s quieter here, and I can suddenly hear what my brain is trying to tell me. It’s trying to tell me to get the fuck out of here right now. I call Terry’s name, tell him to leave it, and he looks back over his shoulder for a moment, his face red and twisted with rage. He sees me behind him, and he thinks I’ve got his back. He turns right, and I lose sight of him round a skip where a shell of fresh snow covers a mound of filth. I jog after him, slowing as I reach the corner. I look back at the street, its no more than a dozen paces behind me. I walk to the skip and look round the corner.
There’s no sign of the lad in the anorak, and Terry is leaning down at a junction where another alley cuts across this one. Theres more snow here, and it’s deeper. I can see the footprints of Terry and the lad in the anorak plainly in front of me, and some other tracks that look recent. I’d swear one of them is bare-footed, but before I can say anything Terry is hailing me and swearing. He’s picked up his phone from where the lad dropped - or threw - it, and he is threatening dire consequences if the phone has been damaged. I can see him easily in the muttering orange glow of an emergency light above the metal-and-chains door of whatever building it is he is at the back of. He looks left and right down the alleyway, and frowns, and asks me if I phoned the police yet as he starts to walk toward me. “Fucking dossers,” he says, still enraged. “They’re not fucking human.”
I see movement above him but not in time to warn him. Something small drops onto his back from a fire escape. It’s a dark shape, maybe five feet high, wrapping its legs around Terry’s chest as it scrabbles to get a good grip on him. It’s a kid, barely in her teens, wearing a filthy grey hoodie and torn and spattered blue jeans. She’s actually wearing a black plastic bag like a tabard, with head and arm holes cut in it, tied round her waist with a length of white plastic. Terry spins, trying to dislodge her, shouting a chorus of cunt. He shouts my name.
She’s not alone. More shapes move from the left and right, with frightening speed. I can’t see them properly. Theres maybe half a dozen of them, including the guy in the anorak. Theres an older woman with pendulous breasts bouncing inside a tipped brown jumper, who grabs one of Terry’s arms and yanks him round with it. A man wearing nothing more than a white t-shirt and jeans, oblivious to the cold, smacks Terry across the back of the legs with a length of scaffolding pole clenched in tattooed knuckles. He has a long brown scarf wrapped around his lower face, trailing behind him as he moves.
The girl on Terry’s shoulders puts her hands on either side of his head and his shouts turn to gurgles. She has a length of wire taut in her hands, and she’s just settled it over his throat. He spins, but it’s futile. He goes down.
I want to move. I want to run away, and I’m paralysed with shame and maybe something else. I’m miles away from all this, it’s happening far away from me. I can hear it and see it and I marvel at how real it looks. Too real, maybe, too orange. He’s down in the snow, and the man with the scaffolding pole kicks him in the side. They’re paying me no attention and I like it that way.
The girl has fallen free, but she jumps up with a grace that niggles at my cold distance. Three of them are holding Terry down - one on each arm, one lying across his legs. His throat is damaged, I can hear him trying to swear and shout. One of his attackers, a woman with a sallow pinched face, hunkers down over his chest, and slashes across his throat with a length of broken plastic. His heels drum the snow. Brown spurts into the air, begins to pool around him. They hold him still as he twitches, but he doesn’t twitch for long. I know when he dies because he shits himself.
I’m too much of a coward to run away.
They haven’t finished. The lad in the anorak has a dirty plastic bag with blades in it. Some of them look like lengths of metal that have been sharpened, others are actual knives. One of them is a hacksaw. They each grab one - even the girl, and with frightening speed and dedication they set to the job of turning him from the corpse of a man into lumps of meat and bone, which they wrap in plastic bags and tie with plastic packing strips and gaffa tape.
It’s been at most a couple of minutes since we ran into the alley, and I’m still paralysed. The man in the t-shirt stops what he’s doing and looks at me. He’s maybe five metres away but he could just as easily be on another planet. His eyes are black, with a thin rim of white sclera visible around the edges. He cocks his head and stands up. Staring at me. He’s soaked in blood up his forearms, over his chest. He frowns. His voice is muffled under the brown scarf he wears, but his Geordie accent is unmistakable.
“Come on man.” He says, “We’ve gorra be quick.”
I don’t answer him and he frowns again. The lad in the anorak steps next to him. He has the same strange eyes, and I realize that the black eye is caused by the pupil opening unnaturally wide, catching every glimmer of light in the dark alleyway. I hear a noise like a knife being sharpened, and I realize that he is sniffing the air, turning his head left and right as he does so. His face twists into a snarl, his blood-rimmed lips drawing back from broken teeth. No, not broken teeth. Sharpened teeth.
I piss myself, and the warmth against my leg breaks my paralysis at last.
I sob as I turn, already too late, as the two men are already moving towards me sure-footed through the snow, bursting from standing still to sprinting in the time it takes me to turn and stumble into the man behind me. He catches me in a rough embrace, pinning my arms against my sides and wedging my face against the rough wool jumper he wears. He stinks sweat and shit and blood, like an abattoir. He is crushingly strong. Then his hands are on my shoulders and he is holding me at arms length, my feet dangling a few inches off the snowy ground. I see that his feet beneath his black combat trousers are bare.
He’s older than the others I have seen, his face is creased and marked with care and privation. His black eyes stare into mine. There is nothing in them that I recognize. Maybe I’d describe them as shark-like, but that wouldn’t be right. A shark is an animal, and these eyes are intelligent, cunning, appraising me, weighing me up, looking through me. He pulls me closer again, moving me easily as if I were a child even though I am only a few inches shorter than he is. He sniffs me, filling his nostrils with my weak scent. Then he licks me, his thick saliva freezing against my face. He grins widely, his mouth inches from my face, and I see close up the ruin of his mouth. His front teeth are sharp, his back teeth tougher like millstones ready to grind my bones and crack them open to get at the marrow within. I want to pass out but I can’t.
He leans in close to me, lowering me gently to the ground, and smiles through thin lips that conceal his teeth. His voice is quiet, his accent educated, his words carefully chosen.
“This is the lean season,” he says. “You’ll understand soon enough.”
Then he steps aside and sends me staggering and sobbing out of the alleyway. I look back over my shoulder for a moment as I crash out into the street, and in the moments before the car hits me I can see three of them watching me from the shadows by the skip. Then as one creature, they spin and dash out of sight, sinuous and terrifying and predatory.
Then I’m hit by one car, thrown against another, and then against the tarmac. Horns blare like trumpets and I am unconscious.
*
I spend Christmas Day in hospital. But my injuries are fairly minor. I talk to the police, to a pair of bored detectives who cannot quite conceal their irritation at working during the festive season. I talk to Terry’s family, to his ex-wife. She gives me the strong impression that she suspects this is all an elaborate scam, a way for Terry to get out of alimony and child support payments. I talk to the police again, and they make it clear that they think I am mistaken in the particulars of what happened. They try and catch me in a lie, but I stick to my story. I’m released from hospital, I’m not taken into custody. There’s an effort to interview me by a reporter, but she’s not really interested in what I have to say, and Terry’s disappearance is simply used as another excuse to rail against the homeless and the schizophrenics and the gangs.
The bleak Christmas period gives way to a bleak New Year. It snows some more, and the city shuts down for a week. I smoke on my balcony, shaking fingers barely feeling the cold. I have bad dreams, red dreams. I wonder if I might have hallucinated what happened to Terry, but I know that I didn’t. There’s too much clarity.
“You’ll understand soon enough” he said, and I do understand. I turn it into a story. I know what some of my contemporaries would say. They’d talk about degeneration and ancient creatures living in the catacombs beneath the cities coming up to hunt ignorant mortals. I see it a little differently. The creatures in the alleyway weren’t aliens, not in the sense that they were from outside. They were people. And they weren’t devolving, they were evolving. Adapting to fit a niche, changing to make the most of the situation.
I wondered how long we had expected the dispossessed to be satisfied with grubbing through bins and accepting the grudging disdain of the charitable, when they were surrounded by so many meek, corn-fed animals?
I wondered how much fresh meat there was on Terry, and how long they could live on it before they had to hunt again. I wondered what they would do between then and now.
I wondered how many of them there were, and why I was still alive.
I wondered if I should invite Miss Orison to dine with me again at Vuờn Con Voi, and I wondered again how she might taste.
Most of all, I wondered who it is that keeps phoning me from Terry’s phone. I sit in my hotel room, staring at my phone as it rings on the table, Terry’s name clear in the little window, and I wonder what would happen if I answered it.
Lean Season
I don’t like to come down to the city.
At least this year the snow and the winter has made it a little newer. I stand on the balcony at thehotel, smoking a cigarette and looking out. Time and traffic have stolen the snow from the roads, but it still flavours the roofs and the window sills, and the barely visible black-and-white starkness of the park. Burst pipes and snowmelt have ringed the rooftops with icy spears, and I’m watching a particularly large next of icicles as I smoke. A young woman dressed as the Christmas Coke Icon is ringing a bell and collecting shrapnel outside the department store across the road, and I’m wondering if she knows about the mass of murderous ice tht is separated from her soft blond head by only a few dozen metres of open air. The front desk rings to tell me the car has arrived, and I flick the burning ember of my cigarette towards the far side of the street and turn to go.
Terry is insisting on dinner. I’m due at the offices on the 27th to look at cover illustrations. It’s a waste of my time, and a bad reason to be in the city. Anything I can do in the office I could have done over the internet. Terry has been insistent. There’s something else going on, he can barely contain his smugness when I talk to him from the car. I turn the intercom off as soon as I get into my seat, and the driver takes the hint and doesn’t try to bother with small talk. The windows are dark and nobody on the street can see in, and I have little interest in looking out, so apart from the back of the driver’s head there’s just me and the winter.
*
It’s early evening on the 24th of December, and crossing the pavement to the restaurant I keep my head down and my hands in my pockets. I’ve no interest in looking into the eyes of and of these people. I have to dodge twice in the short distance between the car door and the restaurant door, both times to avoid sweat-shiny shoppers with armfuls of plastic, lost in their own little world of Christmas cheer. The glass walls are tasteless with explosions of red and green and gold and white, each an Aladin’s cave of trinkets and distractions for little minds. I’m just glad none of them are made up with animatronic animals, or I might be driven to violence.
The restaurant is called Vuờn Con Voi. It is warm inside. I lose my coat to the cloakroom, and there’s drinks at the bar. The restaurant is bright, and a little too warm, but at least there is no Christmas music. Terry is ebullient and well he might me - the latest book is apparently climbing the mainstream charts with an enthusiasm to warm even the most plutocratic heart. I don’t understand it, but he shakes his head sagely and suggests that I owe a debt of gratitude to a popular vampire franchise, well into its twelfth “novel”. I feel slightly nauseous. As I sip my drink I wonder what the teen fans of that particular travesty would make of an encounter with a real blood-drinking parasite of supernatural evil. Terry continues to try and engage me in conversation, and I do my best, but all I really want to do is get out of here and back to the hotel. There are too many people here, celebrating with a desperate intensity that makes the air feel too brittle, too much like chewing tinsel.
Our window table is ready, and we take out seats. White table-cloth, delightful art-deco tannenbaum, spotless silver cutlery, red serviette rings. As I sit down at the table I can’t help but notice that there are two empty chairs, one to either side. Given how busy this restaurant is, how cutting edge I am assured the cuisine is, I understand with a stab of irritation that we are not dining alone. Terry puts his new phone on the table as he sits down, a soulless slip of plastic and metal that is almost slim enough to be mistaken for a bulky credit card. He is busy bemoaning the fact that he can’t smoke one of his foul imported cigars, ostentatiously trying to draw my attention to his diamond cufflinks, and occasionally greeting people who pass us by name with a smile and a wave before turning to tell me some dark secret or embarrassing fact about each of them. He is going out of his way to appear at ease here, as if he hobnobs with these people every day. They are not my crowd, and nor are they his really, and I doubt they are any more taken in by him than I am.
I stare out of the window at the street. It’s snowing a little, the fat flakes disappearing into the mush when they hit the ground. The shoppers hunch over, mummified in wool and plastic bags. None of them glance in the windows of the restaurant which in any event are tinted. I can look out but none of them can look in. They’re also double-glazed, so we don’t have to worry about the sounds of traffic or the tinny explosions of seasonal tunes.
Our waiter, a young Asian man with an impassive face, brings us the wine list and Terry orders something that does not sound especially cheap - though I doubt such a thing exists anywhere on the menu here. He’s doing well out of me, and out of some of the other writers he represents, and I wonder if it is really a good idea for him to be splashing so much money around in front of a client. I suspect it’s meant to remind me how rich he is helping to make me, but all it does is make me wonder whether I’m paying him too much. I smile as I think this, which happens to coincide with some bon mot I’m half listening to, and he takes it for approval.
As the wine arrives, Terry smiles over my shoulder, half stands and waves at someone. Two women are approaching our table, and he stands up to pull a chair out in a clumsy display of chauvinistic chivalry. For one awful moment I wonder if he has hired prostitutes or - worse - escorts. Luckily, before I can make any social error, I recognise one of our guests, and I’m impressed in spite of myself.
I miss the name of the older woman, because I am busy paying attention to her companion. Kirstin Orison is an artist, one whose work I am quite a fan of. While she’s probably best known in my circles for her collaborative work on a number of graphic novels, I favour her other work. Her pencil sketches and line drawings have a haunting quality that I find appealing, and I own a set of prints that I know Terry has seen when he’s visited me at home. There is some hand-shaking and the two agents indulge in a certain amount of face kissing as we all sit back down again. I tell her I like her work, and she gives me a tiny smile and returns the compliment. She speaks quietly, her New England accents seems an odd contrast to her Arabic darkness.
Conversation is a little stilted after that. Terry tells me that Miss Orison has expressed a possible interest in collaborating with a graphic novel adaptation of one of my books once she has finished her current project. Seeing my questioning look, she tells me she’s working on a series of paintings for a version of The Hobb’s End Horror with a fairly well known comic and novel writer. I make a noncommittal noise. While I like the writer she is working with, I don’t care much for the author whose work they are adapting. His stories are full of sinister villages and unexpected onion-domed cathedrals that might have worked in the 1920s, but just seems irrelevant a hundred years on. There’s horror out there in the villages, sure enough, but much as I hate coming down to the city I recognise that this is where the people are, and this is where the horror really is.
It doesn’t help that he’s also prone to ridiculous attention-getting publicity stunts. He may be more popular than Stephen King, but he’s always reminded me more of L. Ron Hubbard.
Obviously, I do not say any of this. I don’t want to offend Miss Orison, but her agent picks something up, and asks me if I read the author. I say that I do not, but before there can be any unpleasantness, the waiter brings menus and we order.
Given most of the waiters appear to be Asian, I’m not surprised to discover that at Vuờn Con Voi serves mostly eastern dishes, primarily Vietnamese. I’m not sure what most of the stuff on the menu is, but I don’t want to appear ignorant. I ask for bak bon dzhow, white with bamboo shoots. There are no prices on the menu, and I am reminded of the adage that says that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. I wonder briefly how much rice I could buy in Hanoi for the price of my dish, and then I realize I am being a dick.
While we wait for the food, we continue our discussion. I’m definitely interested, and enquire as to which of my books she thinks would make a good comic-book adaptation. Her representation breaks in to remind me that we still need to work out all sorts of things before we worry about that - contracts, distribution of royalties, tie down the publishers, decide if it will be a one-off or a series, discuss a publicist and so on and so forth. It seems that Miss Orison and I are not really artists, we are corporate entities. Terry takes over my part of the conversation. Miss Orison and I exchange a look.
She leans closer to me for a moment, placing her dark hand on my pale one, and I can smell the dark, spicy scent she is wearing. I wonder how her skin tastes, and I feel my cheeks redden a little.
“I enjoyed Shrapnel Addicts,” she says quietly. “It was very sad.”
“Thank you,” I reply. “I really liked your study of commuters on New York train stations. I’ve got the prints on my wall.”
That’s about all we manage in terms of real conversation for the rest of the meal.
While it is a mercy there is no Christmas music here, it is a pity that there is practically no food, either. We are served white china oblongs, with delicately positioned food, and slim wooden chopsticks to eat it with - although Terry favours a knife and fork for whatever red dish it is that he has ordered. My bak bon dzhow, white with bamboo shoots is the same colour as the serving plate, which makes it look as if there is even less on the plate than there appears to be. I have perhaps half a dozen bamboo shoots, three strips of pale white meat, and a dollop of white paste placed to complement the other two ingredients, which the waiter tells me in his thick accent is the bak bon dhow. It takes me perhaps a minute and a half to eat it.
At least it’s tasty, I just wish there was more of it.
I feel eyes on me as I finish, and staring in through the window in a manner that would make even a Christmas film director blanch at the cliché is what I can only assume is a homeless man. He’s wearing a filthy red Christmas hat. He’s bulky in a dirty gray-white jacket over at least two jumpers. He has a plastic bag with him that looks like it contains a sleeping bag. He’s got a wet-looking cardboard sign under his arm and a piece of string, but I can’t see a dog. He can’t really be looking at us - as I said the windows are tinted - but he gives every impression of being able to see us. He’s unshaven, and his pale skin is dirty with spots. He has his hood up, under his hat. He’s probably in his early twenties, but the streets have made him look much older.
I watch one of the waiters go outside to move him on and I look down at my empty plate and for just a moment I feel guilty. I push the feeling down, and turn back to the conversation where Terry and Miss Orison’s agent are arguing about possible film rights. Miss Orision herself is watching me and eating her red-peppers and green sauce. She doesn’t say anything.
Terry handles the bill when it is brought to him, won’t even let me see it. He produces his credit card with a self conscious twist of the wrist, hoping everyone gets a good look at it. I’m not sure anyone at the table is interested, with the possible exception of the waiter. He leaves a generous tip, which I assume will actually be paid for as part of his business expenses. Miss Orison and her agent say their goodbyes, and I blurt out that I look forward to working together. She smiles. I smile, and quietly hope that our mutual representation can be somehow kept out of any artistic decisions.
Our waiter stares after us impassively as we leave. I’m more hungry that I was before we ate, and I’m looking forward to getting back to the hotel for some room service. Terry has other ideas however. As we collect our coats, he’s checking his phone and insists that we go one somewhere else. It’s Christmas eve, he says. It’s not right to be cooped up in a hotel room alone. It’s the suicide season, after all. He laughs. I want to say no but I can’t muster the enthusiasm to be rude.
The snow is continuing outside. I suggest getting a cab, but Terry laughs it off. He’s full of good spirits, and I gather that the discussion he was having over dinner went well. He can’t wait to tell me all about it. He suggests a club, after drinks. My skin crawls. I don’t go to nightclubs, not since I was at University. The idea makes the white pork sauce in my belly turn over.
The streets are still busy. My head is muzzy with wine on an empty stomach. There’s more desperation in the air now. Many of the shops will close soon. It’ll be too late to pick up that something special for the mistress, that guilt gift for the missus, that desperate love-substitute for the offspring or the parent. There’s too much traffic in the streets, especially for a city that grinds to a halt at the slightest provocation. Too many shop doorways blare enthusiastic and chopped-off renditions of songs that might once have been ironic but whose meaning has been lost with repetition so now they’re only fit to serve as accompaniments to chocolate advertisements. The lights are too bright, but at the same time not bright enough to illuminate anything except themselves, and the snow. It’s cold, and in between talking on his phone Terry is complaining that his new coat isn’t warm enough. I’m wrapped up. I take the winter seriously, these days.
I’m on the verge of asking Terry if it’s much further, like a car-bound brat, when there’s a sudden movement. Something knocks into me, sending me sprawling against a window, staring for a moment into the dead eyes of a slimline manikin in a flimsy red nightdress and a festive red hat. She’s surrounded by empty boxes in gold-and-green wrapping paper, and by cheerful paper snowflakes and I can see in her empty face that if she could, she would kill herself.
Terry is cursing a blue streak as he picks himself up out of the slush and he runs away from me through the crowd shouting back to me to “call the fucking police.” I register that he no longer has his beautiful, expensive, stylish new phone. I don’t phone the police straight away. He’s chasing a stumbling figure in a grey-white anorak, who doesn’t seem to be running all that fast actually. Shoppers turn to look at him. A fat woman in a white woollen hat weighed down with plastic fails to get out of his way and is knocked to the ground. She begins shrieking. Terry hurdles her and keeps on going. I don’t want to follow him, but I have to. I get my phone out as I run and as soon as we stop running I’ll contact the authorities. I skip round the prone woman. She’s still shrieking - it’s not safe to walk the streets and that someone should do something - she’s scrabbling for her bags and peering suspiciously up at the good Samaritans who are lending her aid, clearly suspecting that they want to steal her precious things. Perhaps they do.
The freezing air is already starting to give me a stitch. I’m surprised Terry can keep running, but I recollect that he’s the member of some up-market gym or other, and I’m surprised at the new idea that he might actually attend it rather than just mention it to people in conversations. We turn abruptly left, and part of my brain starts shrieking at me, but I can’t hear it over the adrenaline and the wine and the traffic.
Terry has chased the phone thief into an alleyway between two massive grey-slab buildings and abruptly we are in another world. There’s snow here, for a start. In the middle of the alley its scuffed and dark, but it mounds up next to the walls, on the fire escapes, on the rubbish bags and the wheelie-bins. It’s still falling slowly, settling on my hot skin and melting almost immediately. It’s quieter here, and I can suddenly hear what my brain is trying to tell me. It’s trying to tell me to get the fuck out of here right now. I call Terry’s name, tell him to leave it, and he looks back over his shoulder for a moment, his face red and twisted with rage. He sees me behind him, and he thinks I’ve got his back. He turns right, and I lose sight of him round a skip where a shell of fresh snow covers a mound of filth. I jog after him, slowing as I reach the corner. I look back at the street, its no more than a dozen paces behind me. I walk to the skip and look round the corner.
There’s no sign of the lad in the anorak, and Terry is leaning down at a junction where another alley cuts across this one. Theres more snow here, and it’s deeper. I can see the footprints of Terry and the lad in the anorak plainly in front of me, and some other tracks that look recent. I’d swear one of them is bare-footed, but before I can say anything Terry is hailing me and swearing. He’s picked up his phone from where the lad dropped - or threw - it, and he is threatening dire consequences if the phone has been damaged. I can see him easily in the muttering orange glow of an emergency light above the metal-and-chains door of whatever building it is he is at the back of. He looks left and right down the alleyway, and frowns, and asks me if I phoned the police yet as he starts to walk toward me. “Fucking dossers,” he says, still enraged. “They’re not fucking human.”
I see movement above him but not in time to warn him. Something small drops onto his back from a fire escape. It’s a dark shape, maybe five feet high, wrapping its legs around Terry’s chest as it scrabbles to get a good grip on him. It’s a kid, barely in her teens, wearing a filthy grey hoodie and torn and spattered blue jeans. She’s actually wearing a black plastic bag like a tabard, with head and arm holes cut in it, tied round her waist with a length of white plastic. Terry spins, trying to dislodge her, shouting a chorus of cunt. He shouts my name.
She’s not alone. More shapes move from the left and right, with frightening speed. I can’t see them properly. Theres maybe half a dozen of them, including the guy in the anorak. Theres an older woman with pendulous breasts bouncing inside a tipped brown jumper, who grabs one of Terry’s arms and yanks him round with it. A man wearing nothing more than a white t-shirt and jeans, oblivious to the cold, smacks Terry across the back of the legs with a length of scaffolding pole clenched in tattooed knuckles. He has a long brown scarf wrapped around his lower face, trailing behind him as he moves.
The girl on Terry’s shoulders puts her hands on either side of his head and his shouts turn to gurgles. She has a length of wire taut in her hands, and she’s just settled it over his throat. He spins, but it’s futile. He goes down.
I want to move. I want to run away, and I’m paralysed with shame and maybe something else. I’m miles away from all this, it’s happening far away from me. I can hear it and see it and I marvel at how real it looks. Too real, maybe, too orange. He’s down in the snow, and the man with the scaffolding pole kicks him in the side. They’re paying me no attention and I like it that way.
The girl has fallen free, but she jumps up with a grace that niggles at my cold distance. Three of them are holding Terry down - one on each arm, one lying across his legs. His throat is damaged, I can hear him trying to swear and shout. One of his attackers, a woman with a sallow pinched face, hunkers down over his chest, and slashes across his throat with a length of broken plastic. His heels drum the snow. Brown spurts into the air, begins to pool around him. They hold him still as he twitches, but he doesn’t twitch for long. I know when he dies because he shits himself.
I’m too much of a coward to run away.
They haven’t finished. The lad in the anorak has a dirty plastic bag with blades in it. Some of them look like lengths of metal that have been sharpened, others are actual knives. One of them is a hacksaw. They each grab one - even the girl, and with frightening speed and dedication they set to the job of turning him from the corpse of a man into lumps of meat and bone, which they wrap in plastic bags and tie with plastic packing strips and gaffa tape.
It’s been at most a couple of minutes since we ran into the alley, and I’m still paralysed. The man in the t-shirt stops what he’s doing and looks at me. He’s maybe five metres away but he could just as easily be on another planet. His eyes are black, with a thin rim of white sclera visible around the edges. He cocks his head and stands up. Staring at me. He’s soaked in blood up his forearms, over his chest. He frowns. His voice is muffled under the brown scarf he wears, but his Geordie accent is unmistakable.
“Come on man.” He says, “We’ve gorra be quick.”
I don’t answer him and he frowns again. The lad in the anorak steps next to him. He has the same strange eyes, and I realize that the black eye is caused by the pupil opening unnaturally wide, catching every glimmer of light in the dark alleyway. I hear a noise like a knife being sharpened, and I realize that he is sniffing the air, turning his head left and right as he does so. His face twists into a snarl, his blood-rimmed lips drawing back from broken teeth. No, not broken teeth. Sharpened teeth.
I piss myself, and the warmth against my leg breaks my paralysis at last.
I sob as I turn, already too late, as the two men are already moving towards me sure-footed through the snow, bursting from standing still to sprinting in the time it takes me to turn and stumble into the man behind me. He catches me in a rough embrace, pinning my arms against my sides and wedging my face against the rough wool jumper he wears. He stinks sweat and shit and blood, like an abattoir. He is crushingly strong. Then his hands are on my shoulders and he is holding me at arms length, my feet dangling a few inches off the snowy ground. I see that his feet beneath his black combat trousers are bare.
He’s older than the others I have seen, his face is creased and marked with care and privation. His black eyes stare into mine. There is nothing in them that I recognize. Maybe I’d describe them as shark-like, but that wouldn’t be right. A shark is an animal, and these eyes are intelligent, cunning, appraising me, weighing me up, looking through me. He pulls me closer again, moving me easily as if I were a child even though I am only a few inches shorter than he is. He sniffs me, filling his nostrils with my weak scent. Then he licks me, his thick saliva freezing against my face. He grins widely, his mouth inches from my face, and I see close up the ruin of his mouth. His front teeth are sharp, his back teeth tougher like millstones ready to grind my bones and crack them open to get at the marrow within. I want to pass out but I can’t.
He leans in close to me, lowering me gently to the ground, and smiles through thin lips that conceal his teeth. His voice is quiet, his accent educated, his words carefully chosen.
“This is the lean season,” he says. “You’ll understand soon enough.”
Then he steps aside and sends me staggering and sobbing out of the alleyway. I look back over my shoulder for a moment as I crash out into the street, and in the moments before the car hits me I can see three of them watching me from the shadows by the skip. Then as one creature, they spin and dash out of sight, sinuous and terrifying and predatory.
Then I’m hit by one car, thrown against another, and then against the tarmac. Horns blare like trumpets and I am unconscious.
*
I spend Christmas Day in hospital. But my injuries are fairly minor. I talk to the police, to a pair of bored detectives who cannot quite conceal their irritation at working during the festive season. I talk to Terry’s family, to his ex-wife. She gives me the strong impression that she suspects this is all an elaborate scam, a way for Terry to get out of alimony and child support payments. I talk to the police again, and they make it clear that they think I am mistaken in the particulars of what happened. They try and catch me in a lie, but I stick to my story. I’m released from hospital, I’m not taken into custody. There’s an effort to interview me by a reporter, but she’s not really interested in what I have to say, and Terry’s disappearance is simply used as another excuse to rail against the homeless and the schizophrenics and the gangs.
The bleak Christmas period gives way to a bleak New Year. It snows some more, and the city shuts down for a week. I smoke on my balcony, shaking fingers barely feeling the cold. I have bad dreams, red dreams. I wonder if I might have hallucinated what happened to Terry, but I know that I didn’t. There’s too much clarity.
“You’ll understand soon enough” he said, and I do understand. I turn it into a story. I know what some of my contemporaries would say. They’d talk about degeneration and ancient creatures living in the catacombs beneath the cities coming up to hunt ignorant mortals. I see it a little differently. The creatures in the alleyway weren’t aliens, not in the sense that they were from outside. They were people. And they weren’t devolving, they were evolving. Adapting to fit a niche, changing to make the most of the situation.
I wondered how long we had expected the dispossessed to be satisfied with grubbing through bins and accepting the grudging disdain of the charitable, when they were surrounded by so many meek, corn-fed animals?
I wondered how much fresh meat there was on Terry, and how long they could live on it before they had to hunt again. I wondered what they would do between then and now.
I wondered how many of them there were, and why I was still alive.
I wondered if I should invite Miss Orison to dine with me again at Vuờn Con Voi, and I wondered again how she might taste.
Most of all, I wondered who it is that keeps phoning me from Terry’s phone. I sit in my hotel room, staring at my phone as it rings on the table, Terry’s name clear in the little window, and I wonder what would happen if I answered it.