Dracula Cha Cha Cha (Anno Dracula #3) 6

DEAD SOULS

More people were in Piazza di Trevi tonight. It wasn't yet midnight. Couples  -  other couples, Kate corrected herself  -  looked at the fountain, tossed in coins, made wishes. There was a policeman on guard.

'The little girl was standing there,' Kate said, pointing across the piazza. 'Where that woman is.'

Marcello tried to brush her hand down, but came up against her vampire strength of wrist.

'Be careful, Signorina Reed...'

'Kate,' she insisted.

'Kate. It does not do to attract attention. Especially with such creatures.'

The woman sat alone on the rim of the fountain, sucking at a cigarette, legs dangling like a kid's. Her tiny face reminded Kate of the little girl's, her blonde hair was cropped short. She wore a ratty fur cardigan, a sweater with horizontal stripes, and a tight, short skirt.

By gesture and ellipsis, Marcello tried to imply wordlessly that this woman was a prostitute.

'Marcello, don't be silly. Do you think I don't know a tart when I see one?'

On the whole, Kate got on well with prostitutes. She'd interviewed dozens, dating back to the Whitechapel of Jack the Ripper. Sometimes, when animals weren't enough, she had bought their blood. Just now, she didn't want to think about that.

She concentrated on Marcello. He was annoyed.

The little whore noticed them. She stubbed out her ciggy and dutifully sashayed over, calculatedly manufacturing a smile that didn't go with the puppyish openness of her big eyes. She was warm, with extensive scabbing around her neckline. Her pallor suggested she made herself available to too many vampires.

'Ciao,' she squeaked. 'I am Cabiria. It means "born from fire".'

She spoke accented English. Cabiria was the name of the heroine of an Italian film spectacle Kate had seen before the First World War. Obviously, its memory lingered. Since then, Italy had produced fire enough to birth many heroines.

Marcello tried to shoo off the whore, but Kate shushed him.

'Do you come here often?' she asked.

Cabiria was astonished by the question.

Kate laughed. 'I'm sorry. I really mean that. Are you often in Piazza di Trevi?'

'Sometimes,' Cabiria said. 'It is good place. Many tourists come here. Nice men, generous. How you say, big spenders?'

'I'm after a little girl. Ragazza. I saw her here.'

The whore looked shocked and drew away. Kate realised Cabiria thought her a bloodthirsty child molester. Sometimes being a vampire gave the wrong impression.

'I think I can help you not.'

'No,' said Kate, touching the woman's arm. 'I didn't mean it like that. She was lost, I think. I want to talk with her. She saw something. You've heard of the murders, of the Crimson Executioner?'

Cabiria crossed herself and spat.

Kate had thought the whore little more than a girl. She was tiny and frail. Her face was unlined and open, almost clownish. But she must have been in her thirties. She was frayed a bit, like her clothes. Kate guessed she'd often been bruised.

'Perhaps you should see fortune-teller,' Cabiria suggested.

Marcello snorted. He was trying to move off, to pull Kate away. Kate held still. She was interested.

'I can take you. It is not far. Near my home.'

'We have a car,' Kate said.

Marcello was coldly angry. He didn't want a whore in his car, the precious red Ferrari (which wasn't actually his  -  Penny let him have the use of it for reasons Kate couldn't understand and was worried about). That decided Kate. The Italian must learn his lesson.

'Signora Santona is the great fortune-teller of my district.'

'Where do you live?'

'I Cessati Spiriti,' Cabiria said.

Dead Souls. Kate sensed Marcello's rush of fear.

'It is impossible,' he said. 'Kate, you do not know what such a place is like.'

For most of her life, men had been telling Kate things were impossible, that places were terrible and off-limits. They usually meant that poor people lived there. Or there were shameful circumstances it would be distressing to read about in the papers. If Marcello had known her better, he'd have understood that telling her a place was impossible was the best way of making her want to go there.

'I've been in bad places, Marcello,' she said. 'Worse than you can imagine.'

'Perhaps. But you have never been in I Cessati Spiriti.'

'It sounds fabulous.'

'It is not so bad,' Cabiria said. 'The dead there are not swift like you, vampiro. They are morti viventi, slow. You have to watch over your shoulder.'

Kate led them to the sports car. Cabiria was struck with wonder at the machine, and treated it with the reverence due a religious object. 'Ferrari,' she repeated, over and over, eyes brimful, relishing the 'r'-sounds, stroking the mirror-finish of the body. It was a nice car, but Kate couldn't see what the fuss was about.

Getting three of them into the two-seater was a squeeze, but Kate and Cabiria were smaller than average. Cabiria put on a cloche hat. Kate feared a little for her Dior. Marcello let off the brakes and freed the beast under the bonnet. For the first time since Kate had met him, he smiled genuinely rather than to punctuate boredom with politeness. At the wheel, he was a little boy with a new toy, going 'broom broom' under his breath as he drove the Ferrari through the narrow streets at inadvisable speeds.

On the drive across the city, Cabiria told her a little about I Cessati Spiriti, with Marcello adding ominous footnotes. Then a site of fighting between the partisans and the Germans, the once-prosperous district was bombed heavily by the Allies. A famous priest had been executed by the Nazis when Rome was an open city, prompting a minor uprising. After the war, I Cessati Spiriti became a shanty-town, home to the dispossessed, a dozen varieties of refugee, many who wished to avoid the peacetime authorities, and the traditional poor. The unplanned community expanded and collapsed in on itself many times.

Ten years ago, the De Gaspero government initiated a massive public works programme to clear the slums and rebuild I Cessati Spiriti, but the funds allocated were diverted to the mafia. Much of the building work that got done was so shoddy it fell down at once. The population of the district still swelled, flooded by escapees from the drought-ridden South. With them came a new bloodline. An epidemic cluster of the risen dead, brains burned out by fever, prompted much of the warm population to evacuate. A hardy minority stayed behind in the ruins, learning to live alongside shambling morti viventi. Cabiria had lived here ever since the War. She seemed quite fond of the place. Marcello, it turned out, had never been here.

As it slid over trackless wasteland, cruising between huddles of patchwork shacks and piles of festering rubbish, the Ferrari must have looked like a spaceship. Kate was reminded of the trenches of France during the German onslaught of 1918. Open fires burned on the wastes like tribal beacons.

Nearby, a knot of morti viventi was encircled by warm feral children who tormented them with flaming torches. From a distance, the walking dead seemed like crippled tramps, easily bested by the fast, vicious kids. One creature got too close to fire and went up like a screeching roman candle. It fell in flames, and two youths battered its head with crowbars.

Cabiria directed them to a street lined by the hulks of bombed-out and patched-up buildings. There were no streetlamps but braziers burned, casting flamelight on bullet-pocked walls. It was hard to believe this was in the same city as Via Veneto, but it was hard to believe Whitechapel was in the same city as Kensington.

It annoyed her that so much of the world was still like I Cessati Spiriti when it didn't have to be.

'I live there,' ventured Cabiria, pointing to a shattered apartment block, obviously hoping one or other of them would suggest dropping by for a 'visit'. Kate intended to pay the whore for her troubles but didn't want to take advantage of her services. 'And Signora Santona lives here.'

Marcello parked by another ramshackle building. It had once been a church. The roof was gone, replaced with polythene sheets. Some windows had patches of stained glass between the beaten tin cans and taped-in cardboard.

'I shall stay with the car,' Marcello announced.

Kate couldn't argue that wasn't a sensible idea.

Perhaps he'd be attacked by monsters and she'd have to rescue him. That might impress him. Then again, he might blame her for getting him into an attackable situation in the first place. Men were always unreasonable.

Marcello sat in the car, angling the wing mirror so he could look in as many directions as possible.

Kate and Cabiria got out. Standing on the pavement for a moment, Cabiria listened to the wind. There were faint cries. She shook her head and ventured on.

The front door of the former church was boarded up, but a little door at the side led to a staircase that went down into the basements.

'It is all underground,' she said. 'Watch your shoes.'

At the bottom of the staircase was a long, wide corridor. The only light came from an oil lamp somewhere. An inch of stagnant water lay on top of a furry carpet. Rough planks propped on bricks made a walkway, with tributary planks leading into rooms. Nailed-up blankets hung from lintels, edges trailing in the water.

Business was being transacted in some of the rooms.

A scratchy gramophone record was slowing down. A waltz ground to a halt.

Cabiria balanced like a tightrope walker on the planks, arms out. Kate, wearing heels, tottered a little as she followed.

From one room came a growling and chewing. Behind the thin blanket burned a fire that made a fine crosshatch of the weave. Something spurted and splattered against the blanket, and dribbled down. There were swirls of red in the water.

Cabiria pulled Kate on, past that room.

'Here is the signora's apartment,' she said.

This doorway had an actual door. It was bright blue, with gold crescents and silver stars. Cabiria knocked on the door and a hole opened in the centre of a painted eye.

'To see the fortune-teller,' Cabiria explained.

The door was opened and the women allowed in.

The fortune-teller's servant was morti viventi, the first Kate had seen up close. A cage-muzzle was nailed to his cheekbones, over the constantly grinding jaw. Facemeat was flaking away. Staring eyes betokened no intellect. Kate understood this was a breed of vampire, given to chewing blood out of flesh rather than drinking from the vein. Most people thought of them as zombies. Maybe classing someone as a reanimated automaton, entirely vacated by its former personality, was an excuse not to treat them as human. On this brief acquaintance, she wasn't ready to argue the assumption.

The servant was dressed in shabby genteel style, a good suit gone to the bad. He had no shoes or socks. His feet were black and ragged.

He didn't try to eat Kate or Cabiria, but led them into a labyrinth. The fortune-teller's apartment was large, and full of items perhaps accepted in payment. Stacks of furniture, bundles of books, a pile of broken bicycles, jars of specimens floating in brine, several bedsteads, a surprising amount of scientific equipment, empty gilt picture frames, a rack of rifles. Off in curtained rooms, morti viventi performed chores Kate didn't understand.

Santona sat cross-legged on a canopied palanquin, her barrel-body swaddled in many-coloured shawls, neck and wrists heavy with jewellery. She was an old woman, though her face was unlined and her oiled ringlets were youthfully dark.

Two more morti viventi attended the fortune-teller.

'They were 'ndrangheta,' Santona explained. 'From Calabria. Criminals. They tried to move North, but brought this taint with them. Most don't last long, but I have trained these and make use of them.'

'I'm Katharine Reed. From Ireland.'

She extended her hand, but Santona didn't shake it.

'I know,' she said. 'You are in this city for the dying.'

Cabiria crossed herself.

'That's as may be,' Kate said. 'Just now, I'm looking for a little girl I saw in Piazza di Trevi. A witness to a crime.'

'The man in the red hood. He is like these 'ndrangheta, only a servant. A tool. There was no little girl.'

'I didn't imagine her.'

'You didn't see her. You saw a reflection.'

The fortune-teller must have been skimming her mind. Some warm wise women had a little of that vampire sense.

'Reflections can mislead.'

Kate had thought that. Something still bothered her about the scene. Had she misunderstood what she saw?

'Was she a dwarf?' she asked.

The ripples in the water could have made a child's face of a withered mask of age.

Santona laughed and shook her head. She held out a hand.

Kate produced five hundred lire, which disappeared. The fortuneteller had snatched it.

'Not everything can be revealed.'

This was what she expected from a proper con woman. Pointless mystification and disappearing money.

'You shouldn't look for this girl. She will find you.'

'She's looking for me?'

'You have shared something.'

Kate shuddered.

'You have troubled the Mother. This is important.'

'The girl's mother?'

Santona shook her head, insistently. 'No, Rome's. Mater Lachrymarum. She has always been here, under and around us.'

'The Mother of Tears?' Kate remembered her Latin.

The 'ndrangheta were disturbed. Red-orange trickles slipped through their muzzles onto much-stained lapels.

'There are tears everywhere,' the fortune-teller said. 'The stones of the city pour forth tears.'

'What does that mean?'

'Enough. This is all. You have been warned.'

More money was required to end the interview. Kate handed it over. She wondered if Cabiria would get a cut.

Santona shut her eyes and lay back on cushions. One of the 'ndrangheta massaged her forehead, pickled fingers working away at her temples.

Cabiria tugged Kate's arm. They were required to leave.

A small crowd of the walking dead had gathered around the Ferrari. Marcello kept them back with pages of Osservatore Romano, rolled into torches and set alight. When one burned down, he'd shoo the ash away from the car and light another.

Morti viventi had stumbled out of their holes. These weren't under Santona's spell or muzzled. Some were red-mouthed, others hollowchested and hungry. Many were feeble and fell apart with a kick, but some had prospered, perhaps through cunning, and retained strength in their limbs and jaws. They were dangerous.

Marcello was relieved to see her.

'They took a little boy last night,' Cabiria said. 'An orphan. He said his father was an American. He was fast but he got tired. They ate his stomach out.'

Kate wondered why Cabiria was telling her this.

'He has risen tonight. That is him. Dondi.'

Among the morti viventi was a child in baggy shorts, with an oversized American soldier's cap. As if he'd heard his name, he turned to look. Olive eyes glittered, but only with wetness. His t-shirt was torn away from his scooped-out belly, and his mouth was chewing.

'They first try to eat themselves,' Cabiria said.

Kate felt sick.

As she walked through the loose crowd, morti viventi backed away from her. Whatever they craved didn't run in her veins.

A woman-creature sniffed at Cabiria, who squealed. Kate took the morta viventa by the chin, which detached with a snap. A long dog-tongue dangled. Embarrassed at what she had done, Kate gave her back her jawbone.

Nothing could be done for these revenants.

Were they indeed dead souls, all reason and person fled from reanimated carcasses? Or should she feel pity for the spark that might be left behind?

Perhaps, in the end, all undead became like this.

Was she the same person she'd been when alive? Or did she just mislead herself that she was? Had Katharine Reed flown off to Heaven or elsewhere, leaving behind a shell that could deceive itself into pretending to live out her life?

No.

She looked into the empty angel eyes of the newly risen Dondi and knew she was different from him. Kate still felt, still fought. If there was a kinship, it was more tragic. The morti viventi might have a distant awareness of their situation. Kate was weak-kneed with useless love, empathy with something that felt only hunger and pain.

'You can kill them easily,' Marcello said. 'Smash their heads. If their brains are broken, they stop moving.'

'That's not the same as being dead.'

He shrugged and lit up the sports pages.

'Please,' said Cabiria. 'He was my friend. When I was ill, he... he stole for me.'

'She wants you to kill it,' Marcello said.

'Like a sick dog. To be put out of his misery.'

Kate was crying. She hoped her tears were not bloody.

Cabiria hugged Dondi, who was only just shorter than her, and tried to cradle his head. He opened his mouth wide, to bite into her tiny breast.

Kate took him away from Cabiria and twisted his head around. The spine snapped, but it wasn't enough. Head on back-to-front, Dondi crawled toward them, jaws working like mandibles. He was drawn to living flesh, like a bee to pollen. His brain was purged of all that made him human, but there were still instincts.

Sobbing now, Kate found a stone and battered the dead boy's head to paste. The body twitched, but ran down. Whatever had remained seeped away.

It took her a moment to compose herself.

'We must go, Cabiria,' Kate said. 'Will you be safe?'

Cabiria smiled a one-sided smile and hitched up her shoulders, pulling her cardigan around her thin body.

'It's not far from here,' she said. 'My place.'

Kate gave her more money than was sensible. Cabiria looked at it sadly.

'Make me like you,' she asked. 'When I turn, I don't want to be a zombie. I want still to feel. To be Cabiria, not a woman-shaped dog. Not to be Dondi.'

Kate bit her lip.

'I can't,' she said.

What was she saving herself for? She'd found virginity a ridiculous 'inconvenience', and had lost hers twice (when she turned, her hymen had grown back again). She'd drunk the blood of children, had killed when she'd had to (and perhaps when she hadn't), had loved many.

Why had she not given the Dark Kiss? Why had she not turned any children-in-darkness?

She would have given Charles her blood, had offered to open her veins for him. Why not this warm orphan?

It wasn't a curse. It was an opportunity. She wasn't lost to God. She wasn't lost to herself. It wasn't death, it was life.

It would be simple.

But she couldn't.

And she couldn't explain.

Cabiria smiled sadly again and rubbed her fur collar against her bites.

'It doesn't matter.'

'Ciao, Cabiria.'

'Goodbye, Kate.'

Kate kissed Cabiria and got back into the Ferrari. Marcello drove away. Kate didn't want to look back at the bowed figure trudging away from the morti viventi, searching for the warmth of a fire. She didn't want to, but she did.