Chapter 4.27 – A Spooky Story

Note: my game has the ‘occults keep losing their facial markings and eyes’ bug and I couldn’t be bothered to keep drawing them on manually, so there are inconsistencies in their pictures.

Kitty’s second vermouth and her rendition of Flangeslap’s 5th piano concerto were rudely interrupted by the sound of Seth falling from the parapet. She knew it was he; she could even tell which battlement had tripped him – the third from the left, the one that had lost the very tip of its corner long ago when her vampire brothers had been horseplaying with a crossbow.

She had, naturally, anticipated his arrival. She knew him too well. She might have been the cat, but he was the one most curious. She checked the clock in the hallway; well, darn it! She had mis-guessed his appearance by a whole two hours.

She had prepared for this moment. The moment when her baby would come home, where he belonged, to serve by her side. But finding him sprawled in the unkempt fauna at her doorstep tickled her nonetheless.

“Kitty.” Seth calmly got to his feet and glared at her as she hummed a laugh. “I was simply—-”

“Gardening?”

The two vampires sized each other up for a moment before Kitty stepped aside and beckoned him to the door.

“Welcome home,” she whispered as he passed. His response: another glare.

Oh! How she had missed her miserable little reprobate. At long last. Everything was falling neatly into place.

Seth’s posterior still ached from his fall, and the lumpy old couch in Kitty’s music room did nothing to soothe it.

Kitty had offered him a drink, “Liquor, naturally, neither of us are animals.” But Seth had no desire to lose any of his faculties in her presence. Despite her general appearance of alcohol-softened mellowness, her mewling voice and the coquettish looks she kept throwing his way, Seth knew better than to let his guard down, even for a second.

“Is Faith in?” he asked, getting straight to the point.

Kitty sighed softly and began to prepare herself a fresh drink. “She is; however, she is occupied.”

“Occupied?”

“Taking her fill,” Kitty clarified. “Got herself a real dish.”

Seth knew that Faith had no qualms about drinking fresh blood but this simple sentence from Kitty felt like a punch in the gut. He knew what Faith liked to do to her prey while she drank. Months had passed since he’d last seen her, longer since he’d last held her and yet the thought of her tangled around another man still cut like a knife.

“Are you sure you do not want a drink?” Kitty smiled sweetly, gently shaking the decanter at him. “You look like you need one. Or a few.”

“I don’t want a drink,” Seth reaffirmed. “I like to keep a clear head.”

“How very dreary you are.” She muttered to herself and poured herself another drink, swirling the amber liquid in her glass, thoughtfully. “Although, I suppose, you were never one to indulge back in the day, either. Always far too preoccupied for the pleasures of the unlife—“

Seth was in no mood for waxing lyrical about his and Kitty’s prior relationship. He had questions and he wanted answers. “You were the cat?” Seth asked, interrupting. “You can turn into a cat?”

Kitty blew a curl from her cheek and glanced sideways at him. “I was talking. Yes, I can morph and let me tell you it is a terribly unpleasant transition, akin to squeezing into a dress three sizes too small! That ever-present feeling that the seams may split.”

Seth nodded, his mind already buzzing. He’d never met a vampire than could morph, at least, he thought he hadn’t. He supposed Kitty wouldn’t have had much cause to change into a cat back in the golden heyday of the Reprobates. And, if she had known what his power was, perhaps she had deliberately withheld that particular piece of information.

“Do not even think about it,” she purred. “The transition may be dire, but the convenience of becoming a cat is clear. I will not give that up readily.” She chuckled. “I know you, sly. Pray, tell me, how many unsuspecting ones have you siphoned from?”

Seth lifted his chin; his answer drawn out like a breath. “A few.”

“A few,” Kitty repeated. “When did you become one of such few words? Elaborate for me; who did you take from and what did you take?”

Damn her and her questioning. He ran his hand down his face but couldn’t stop the answer leaking from between his gloved fingers. “Lilith,” he muttered. “I took her ability to erase memories.”

“Hm, yes, that is a satisfying one. Colour me surprised that she gave that up willingly.”

Seth bit his tongue, and Kitty smiled.

“Say no more on the matter. I fathom that with your charm and her naivety she was prime for manipulation. Bravo! How about Caleb? The boy is over three centuries matured and yet is woefully devoid of power. Does that have anything to do with you?”

“Partially, yes,” Seth muttered with unease. “I took his mind control.”

Divulging his secrets to his mistress’s pull was not what he had had planned for their first civil reencounter. Luckily, Kitty seemed to be pleased at this news rather than dismayed that he’d left her newest toy with nothing but his allure and a head full of holes.

“Oh! Yes,” Kitty mused. “I could see why he would be happy to part with that; Heaven knows that he does enough damage without it. And he tries so hard to be good,” she scoffed. “So, dearest baby, you can now control minds and meddle with them. How fascinating.”

Seth looked to her with an expression of defiance, waiting for the third name to leave her scarlet lips. Waiting for her to ask what else he may have pilfered in the centuries that had passed between them from the ‘few’ he had admitted to. But surprisingly, she smiled and didn’t ask about Faith at all.

Perhaps she didn’t know. Perhaps she simply assumed that Faith was a late bloomer in the power department. Or perhaps whatever Seth had taken from Faith was not her only gift.

Hell, he hoped not. He regretted taking whatever-it-was from her every single day of his empty existence, and not just because he had no idea how to control it. He hoped he had left her with something – he couldn’t imagine Kitty wanting to keep her around if he hadn’t…

“So… Faith has a ‘dish’,” he returned to their previous conversation and tried to act as unbothered as he could. “Is he resident?”

“Oh he’s resident,” Kitty replied. “He has his own chambers.”

Seth’s confusion must have been evident as he tried to fathom why her human prey would be given his own chambers. Then it struck him like a bullet train, knocking out any air and chance he thought he had at winning her back. “It’s Caleb. She’s with Caleb now.”

“She is! Oh! Is it not the sweetest love story? The cast out vampire boy and the world-weary vampire girl. Their eyes met across a long-passed hallway, their lust palpable in the stale air, their fate prewritten and their love surely to bloom. I have barely seen them since she arrived.”

“Cast out?” Seth asked, choosing to focus on the only part of Kitty’s musings that didn’t sting.

“Like last night’s supper carcass,” Kitty confirmed sadly. “Poor boy! He only wanted to be loved and woe! He selected the wrong target. But now, at last, he has the right one. Is that not wonderful?”

If Seth had set his jaw any firmer, his teeth would’ve fused together. “Great. Good for them,” he hissed. “So April isn’t here? You told me you had Caleb’s girls.”

“I do,” Kitty smiled sweetly. “Seven of them, one for each cell.”

Seth’s mind flashed back to the long dank corridors of the catacombs beneath the mansion, the heavily barred doors and the cold chafe of shackles. He couldn’t stand to imagine seven young females, trapped down there, waiting in the dark to be used until they were too aged to be fruitful to their parasitic master.

“Oh, no. No,” Kitty’s soft voice cut through his trance. “They are in a permanent happy haze; they are surrounded by books, games, soft furnishings. They have fresh food twice daily, herbal teas, perfume. They want for nothing. Baby,” she whispered, “We don’t have to abide by the rules Layne set now. Our prey can be almost as comfortable as we are.”

Seth nodded robotically and held out his hand. “I’ll take that drink.”

Kitty shook her curls and clicked the globe shut. “Drink for joy; rest for woe.”

“I’m not here to sleep.”

“Then do as you always did. Retire to your chambers and read.”

Her purred words evoked a flashback of a room full of precariously stacked books the scent of ink and the glow of a dozen candles. Long nights trawling through text, scribbling notes, learning, growing, evolving.

“It still exists? As it was?”

“It is exactly as you left it. First floor, second—”

“Door on the right,” Seth finished. “I remember.”

I remember.

They had been too afraid and excited to sleep at Marjorie’s on arrival, not to mention that it had felt quite rude to arrive and go straight to sleep, so Jessica and her fellow GliTS had settled into a conversation with the former homeowner. It turned out that Marjorie had been a writer during her lifetime and the elderly ghost was more than happy to weave a tale to entertain her overnight guests. Via Jessica, of course.

Rose and Paul had managed to access the far corner of the house to listen in as Jessica retold Marjorie’s tale of a vampire burglar. Yibbo, Morag, Pixie and the younger ghosts listened intently as Jessica paused for effect as instructed and waited for Marjorie’s next paragraph.

“Through the darkness, Annabelle could see a shifting form at the foot of her bed, growing and pulsing and drawing ever nearer to the shivering young woman.

“She gripped her sheets, fear clawing at her as her long nails did to her bare… um…”

“Breast, dear,” Marjorie repeated.

Jessica licked her lips and glanced towards Rose. This wasn’t the first time in the story that Jessica had wondered exactly what kind of writer Marjorie had been. “Bare breast,” Jessica repeated with a slight eye twitch and continued under Marjorie’s dictation.

“The figure paused in his approach. In the pale wash of the moonlight from her open window, Annabelle saw the topless man extend his arm; his hand unfurled, his finger beckoned her closer. She heard his voice in her mind, whispering her name. Rising from her bed at his unspoken command, her bedsheet slipped smoothly over her naked skin, discarded on the floor as she padded lightly over the floorboards towards him. Her heart caught in her throat as his outreached finger contacted her face and traced a slow line down her exposed neck.

“She wanted to run, but she daren’t, fixed in place before him, disrobed and—”

“Truly aroused for the first time in her life,” Marjorie prompted as Rose cringed.

Jessica bit her lip, looking between her fellow GliTS who were hanging on her every word, Paul who had suddenly become more interested, and Rose who Jessica deemed too young to hear where she knew this story was going.

“I can’t, I’m sorry Marjorie but I’m not comfortable telling this kind of tale, especially not to Rose.”

“Pooh-pooh,” Marjorie said dismissively. “She’s not a child. In fact she has a child and you don’t end up with one of those from hand-holding and braiding daisies. Oh my.”

“Marjorie… I… you…” Rose began, her eyes filling with tears.

“I wasn’t supposed to share that, was I?”

“You have a daughter?” Paul asked. “Bloody hell, Rose, aren’t you, like, seventeen?”

Rose made a distressed noise and disappeared in her trademark wisp of smoke.

“Oh dear,” Marjorie said softly. “It wasn’t my place to share that. I’d better go after her. Sorry, dear.”

Jessica rounded on Paul who was still shaking his head. “Don’t judge her.”

“Uh… okay?” Pixie said, reminding Jessica that her fellow GliTS were only hearing half of the conversation.

“Oh, sorry. The story is over,” Jessica said. “Ghost drama.”

Over the collective sighs around the table, Jessica rounded on Paul.

“You don’t know her circumstances. You need to apologise.”

Paul lost his grin and slumped on the cushion that Jessica still wasn’t sure how he was sitting on. “You’re right. I’d best go follow her too.”

“Wait, follow her where?” Jessica asked. “Where do you go when you’re not here?”

Paul shrugged. “There.”

“But where is ‘there’?”

“I’ll be damned if I know. Just not here.”

“What’s it like ‘there’?” Morag asked generally to the room. “Is there a white light? Spectral apparitions? Do we seem like ghosts to you over there? Do you stay because of unfinished business? Is there a heaven or a hell? Is it relaxing? Terrifying? Cosy? Hot? Cold? Does it smell of sulphur? Are there mushrooms?”

Paul tapped his chin as if thinking hard for a while. “No… it’s not really anything. I guess it’s… very cluttered.”

“Cluttered? With what?” Jessica asked.

“Everything,” Paul replied. “All the things. It’s hard to explain and I’m not sure I’m supposed to? Look, I’d better go or I’ll never find her. Later, Sweetcheeks.”

“They’re all gone to somewhere cluttered,” Jessica informed her fellow living beings when the room was empty of ghosts. “But probably for the best because I am exhausted. What time is it, three? Four?”

“Almost five,” Pixie said and Morag yawned. “Let’s get a couple of hours sleep in before the sun is fully up or before any more horny ghosts arrive, shall we?”

“Yeah,” Morag agreed. “We’ll need all the energy we’ve got today to open that crypt at the vampire house. Who knows what we might find inside!”

There it was, the door to his past.

The old key that Seth had kept in his pocket despite not knowing its purpose fit perfectly, sliding into the old lock with a heavy click. The door yielded as laboriously as one would expect from one that had been sealed for centuries; the heady must and cold damp escaping the confines of the four walls.

And yet, the candles were lit, the plants watered.

“Almost as you left it,” Kitty said quietly as his shoulder. “I admit to sprucing it up a bit.”

“Our fresh start,” she purred. “Welcome home, baby.”

“No,” Seth said sternly. “If this is a fresh start, we need some ground rules. Firstly, this isn’t my home, these are my temporary lodgings while I read and learn and you do not come in here, uninvited, again. Second, I am not your baby, you don’t call me baby, you don’t treat me like a baby. You treat me like an equal, or I go. Agreed?”

“…Agreed, bab– ahem, Seth.”

“Good. So, as we are equals, kindly sod off and leave me to it.”

“Very well. If you need me, I will be in the music room. Adieu, Seth.”

“Good night, Kathryn.” Seth replied to Kitty’s grimace, ushering the blonde vampire to the door and closing it in her face.

Seth looked around the room at the almost endless catalogue of tomes, manuals, notebooks and scrolls that littered the floor and filled every shelf. In here, he was certain he would’ve recorded his life, his works, everything. He knew that in here he’d be able to fill in some gaps, maybe all of them.

But now he was here, that didn’t seem so important. Now he was here, he just wanted to find Faith. How would she react? Would she even entertain him?

Would she care at all that he was there?

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