Burns Lucille and the Healers

1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84319-396-8
Verlag: Mushroom eBooks
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

London, 1929 - It isn't easy being a fashionable flapper and emulating your silver screen heroines when you live in a poky East End terrace with your poor, widowed mother, your over-achieving sister, and such disreputable and drunken lodgers as you can find to help pay the bills, as sixteen-year-old Lucy 'Lucille' Kitson can testify. However, their newest lodger - a young writer from the jazzy metropolis of New York - is far more to her liking, and his only shortcoming is that he is concealing a secret that makes him a marked man, and endangers all who befriend him.
Pulled inexorably into a dark supernatural world, and into an even darker scientific one, Lucy Kitson finds her priorities and her life challenged equally. She must endure hard lessons if she is to help put an end to the 'Healers', their murderous nocturnal predations, and their sinister designs that threaten the lives and souls of thousands.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Burns, Anthony

Leseproben

CHAPTER II
The Lodger
At about one-thirty in the morning — certainly no later than two, Lucille hoped — the bus pulled up on Stepney Green and she alighted. This was not the closest stop to her home in Peony Place, but it enabled her to pay a quick call on a dear old friend, a cast-iron Victorian hand-pump on the street corner, that had long been Lucille’s trusty ally on these occasions, helping her to wash off all traces of eyeliner, lipstick, and other offending cosmetics before she had to risk facing her loved ones. This would help to smooth things a little, even if painful scenes were a certainty. After about a minute of vigorous scrubbing in the bitterly cold water, she took her hand mirror from her horribly depleted purse and examined the results. As far as she could tell by the wavering light of a gas lamppost, her skin was now purified of all illicit substances, and she was as well prepared to face the music as she would ever be. Although she dreaded what the morning would bring, she did not harbour too many regrets about the evening. There had been some small unpleasantness when Vera’s intoxicated male chum had become a little too friendly, dancing, or at least rhythmically staggering far closer to Lucille than she had felt comfortable with, and whispering unwanted compliments to her between songs. Fortunately, he had soon drunk himself into a horizontal state, and after the bouncers had deposited his semi-conscious form in the street, Lucille quickly recovered her enjoyment. Even though the atmosphere of the club was not so much elegant and sophisticated as it was desperate to be thought of as elegant and sophisticated, it still came a lot closer to her personal heaven than the mean little pubs and coffee-houses where most of the population of Stepney did their socialising. The jazz music, at least, had been truly sublime, lifting her soul on heavenly strains of saxophone, clarinet, and trombone, beyond time and space to mystical realms of beauty, romance, and youth eternal. Back in the real world, alas, time had ticked on regardless, and might even, she suspected, have spitefully accelerated. Since she had no wish to increase her family’s inevitable disappointment in her by missing church tomorrow morning... or this morning, in fact, it seemed that her only option would be to spend the entire day half-asleep. That did not bode well for her homework, but at least she would have the opportunity to make it up to everyone the following weekend. Like it or not, she reflected gloomily, while attempting to calculate how long it would take her to save up enough money for another evening on the town. At the next street corner she turned off Stepney Green, and after a short walk and another turning she arrived in Peony Place. Anyone else would have been hard-pressed to tell that little street apart from most of the others in the vicinity, flanked by terraces of grim, narrow, grey-brick houses, identical except for their door numbers. Number 14 was no different from the rest, with two bedrooms upstairs, the living room and the kitchen downstairs, the toilet in a poky shed in the tiny, concrete-covered back yard, and a single-roomed basement flat, accessible by a flight of stairs leading from the pavement. To see the window of this basement flat illuminated at this unholy hour was rather unusual, although Lucille counted it as a good omen, for it suggested that Mr. Sheridan — their current lodger — had not made good on his threat to leave that evening, on account of the rat he had supposedly seen. That ought to improve her mother’s mood, hopefully cancelling out, or at least softening the impact of Lucille’s impromptu night on the tiles. And so, with slightly revived hope, she let herself indoors as quietly as possible. The front door led directly into the tiny living room, most of the space cluttered with furniture. Bitter experience had taught Lucille how easy it was to have a clumsy and noisy accident in such a situation as this, so before she even tried to remove her coat and shoes she took a match from her purse and lit a small gas lamp standing on the table beside the door. As it hissed and flared into life, her attention was suddenly seized by a letter that lay open upon the dresser, or more particularly by its address. Could she have read it correctly? She moved in for a closer inspection, and there were those legendary words, conveying an almost otherworldly allure: New York City. The words that came before this were not so interesting, except by their association with that glorious metropolitan Mecca: Van Sloan Apartment Building,
Conover Street,
Red Hook,
Brooklyn. The following words, on the other hand, were sheer manna from Heaven: To whomever it may concern, I confirm that Mr. Joseph Ward was one of the best tenants ever to have stayed in this building. No complaints were ever received from any of the other tenants regarding him, and his room was kept in a clean and orderly condition. His rent was always paid in a timely fashion, and the young man’s personal conduct struck me as unfailingly polite. I am sorry to see him go. Yours faithfully,
Peter Van Sloan. It seemed that surly old Mr. Sheridan had left them after all, only to be replaced by, of all people, a native of New York: Lucille’s Celestial City. Although she had heard the term “young man” used to refer to males of ages downwards from forty-five to a very sarcastically-meant seven, she was content to imagine better things. Perhaps he was some bright young bohemian, of her age or possibly a little older, though she did not want to get carried away in that direction. Someone who had breathed the air of Fifth Avenue and Times Square, danced in the Cotton Club, seen live shows on Broadway instead of silent, jerky film-reels of them and, for all she knew, have rubbed shoulders with the likes of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, and — God willing — even Louise Brooks. The fact that Mr. Joseph Ward had chosen to rent cheap digs in the dingy domains of the East End did not lend much weight to these hopes, but Lucille was never one to let a little thing like reality pour cold water on her dreams. With a lightened heart, she hung up her coat, put her shoes away, extinguished the light, and tiptoed upstairs. She and her sister shared a double bed, which helped to free up a bit of space in their cramped quarters. Not enough, sadly, to prevent Lucille from suffering a few blunders and bumps in the process of getting undressed, but she was fairly satisfied with her efforts at preserving silence as she slipped beneath the quilt. She was cruelly disillusioned when Eleanor — somewhat less asleep than she had seemed — said the following: “I wish you’d stick your whole head under that wretched hand-pump. Your hair stinks of cigarette smoke.” This did not seem to need a reply, which was just as well since Lucille had little enough to say in her defence. She was, however, only permitted a few seconds until the cold voice again intruded upon her peace: “You might at least have called home. Mother was worried sick, though I told her she needn’t have been. I’d have thought with all the money you waste, that a shilling for a telephone call—” “And since when have we had a telephone?” asked Lucille, with rather half-hearted defiance. “Father Morris has one. You could have called him, then he could have let us know you hadn’t been run over, or fallen in the Thames, or whatever.” Father Morris was the vicar of St Dunstan’s Church, and Lucille was strongly inclined to find this suggestion — that she ought to have called him, of all people, to pass on the news of her reckless pleasure seeking — beneath contempt. Part of her mind, however — the guiltier part — had to admit that it was a workable, if unappealing plan, though she was at least consoled by the knowledge that it had never occurred to her anyway, and such absent-mindedness was easily forgiven. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think to.” “Why doesn’t that surprise me? And I don’t suppose you thought to drop by Mr. Gibson’s to pick up the rat poison, like you said you would?” The more it mounted up, the less forgivable her absent-mindedness seemed to her, and the compulsion to make some amends became almost as strong as the compulsion to end this depressing conversation and get some sleep. “I’ll pick it up tomorrow.” “Today, you mean. And you won’t, unless he’s started opening on Sundays. We'll just have to hope that poor Mr. Ward can cope with the rat for a day.” “The new lodger? What’s he like?” she asked, brightening up a little. “Oh, so you had time to read his reference letter, then? Well, he seemed a quiet, respectable sort. You wouldn’t like him.” “How old...?” she persisted, immune to all sarcasm. “For pity’s sake... I don’t know. Nineteen or twenty, I suppose. Now can we please get some sleep? Some of us aren’t lucky enough to be nocturnal.” * * * * It was an opinion shared by all, Lucille included, that there had been little point in her bothering to attend church that morning. She could barely keep her eyes open, never mind achieve a state of anything even vaguely like concentration. Besides which, she had only seen the familiar faces of her neighbours there, when she had been hoping to catch her first sight of Mr. Ward. There was, however, one thing to be grateful for: the dreaded confrontation with her mother had been far easier than she had dared to hope for. During breakfast, she had broken the uncomfortable silence with a tentative...